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.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (now in theaters)

Marvel fumbled its chance to feature the two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali in action-hero mode, but this soulful thriller makes up for that loss. Ali plays Latif, a hit man whose devotion to his Muslim faith and his family keeps him grounded; he hunts only targets he believes are irredeemable. But when he struggles to obtain breast milk for the youngest of his three children after his wife’s death, Latif gets drawn into the kind of violence that makes him question his crusade’s value. The film, written and directed by Bassam Tariq, is stylishly shot, and balances balletic fight sequences and intimate character study.

Fjord (in theaters October 9)

Like much of his work, Cristian Mungiu’s latest movie is uncomfortable and uncompromising. In Fjord, which won the director his second Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a strict Romanian patriarch moves his family to Norway, where their evangelicism isn’t the norm. They assimilate comfortably until one of their daughters shows up to school with a visible bruise, which prompts an investigation into the parents (played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve). The film risks being considered a referendum on performative politics, but if anything, Fjord is a meticulous examination of responsibility and how good intentions can cause trouble.

La bola negra (in theaters October 16, streaming on Netflix December 2)

This year’s People’s Choice Award winner—the top honor granted at TIFF—is more complex than some of the previous, crowd-pleasing recipients. Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (known as “Los Javis”), La bola negra weaves together the stories of three gay men across time: a scion of an aristocratic family in 1932 who’s denied entry into a posh social club; a musician in 1937 conscripted into fighting alongside the fascists who destroyed his village; and a historian in 2017 studying the work of the poet Federico García Lorca, who wrote the titular unfinished play (which translates to “The Black Ball”). This deeply felt drama about the cost of burying one’s desires is also a technical marvel, packed with beautifully composed set pieces.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (in theaters October 23)

As earnest as the Simon and Garfunkel song from which its title draws inspiration, this nimble indie film feels like an artifact of a bygone era. John Turturro delivers a fine-tuned performance as Harry, an aging criminal struggling to accept that the tricks of his trade have become obsolete. When Harry steals a valuable USB drive from a young man belonging to a mob family, then loses it, his victim sends him racing through the city to get it back, or risk punishment for his crime. Yet the film never comes across like a generic thriller; instead, it’s a surprisingly spiritual consideration of how to let go of not just one’s habits, but of an entire way of life.

Possible Love (in theaters October 23, streaming on Netflix November 6)

The director Lee Chang-dong’s last film, 2018’s Burning, was engrossing for its precision, and his latest is another master class in exactitude. The story follows two couples, one of which includes the documentarian Ye-ji (Parasite’s Cho Yeo-jeong), who hopes to make a movie about the personal lives of laid-off workers. Her intended subject, a man who was let go by the factory that employs much of his rural town, won’t speak with her. Thus, Ye-ji interviews his cheery wife (Jeon Do-yeon) instead. As the women grow close, their opposing lifestyles—Ye-ji and her husband are obviously wealthy—result in emotions none of the foursome wishes to confront: jealousy, resentment, lust. Possible Love draws you in through furtive glances and sharp dialogue. Though it’s nearly three hours long, no second feels wasted.

Wild Horse Nine (in theaters November 6)

Is there any point in terrible people self-reflecting? Martin McDonagh’s latest dark comedy considers that question. A sterling John Malkovich and his fellow McDonagh favorite Sam Rockwell play, respectively, best friends Chris and Lee, two CIA operatives who vacation on Easter Island after their latest unsavory mission. Chris, though, is dying of cancer and seems newly troubled by his work. Hopped up on morphine, he records his thoughts about his clandestine escapades, philosophizing about whether he can be redeemed. This soon puts Lee in the awkward position of trying to stop Chris from running afoul of the CIA. What ensues is an eccentric and bloody affair that resembles the writer-director’s previous bromance-centric work, most recently The Banshees of Inisherin.

Being Heumann (in theaters November 6, streaming on Apple TV November 13)

The disability-rights activist Judy Heumann’s achievements in the 1970s can be easily taken for granted today. She helped persuade the federal government to update curbs for wheelchair use, and pushed through legislation for special-education programs. This biopic, by the director of CODA, Siân Heder, could get overlooked, too: It mostly stars disabled, unknown actors, and tells a somewhat conventional story about a motley crew of underdogs overcoming the odds. Yet Being Heumann works well because it leans into the thrill of even the smallest of wins for Judy (the excellent Ruth Madeley). It’s a testament to casting for lived experience, and for revisiting history that can yield fresh insights.

Minotaur (in theaters November 20)

Adultery is well-trod storytelling territory. But Minotaur, which is inspired by the Claude Chabrol classic La femme infidèle, fuses its central marriage drama with a furious assessment of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The director Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan) returns after nine years away from filmmaking with a tale about a plutocrat who is obsessed with his wife’s barely concealed extramarital affair. At the same time, he’s working on submitting names of 14 men from his workforce to be deployed to join the front lines. Shot with the chilling distance of a horror film, Minotaur becomes a suspenseful examination of how wealth and power make some people untouchable.

Tender Loving Care (in theaters December 4)

Trust the British auteur Mike Leigh to deliver a sensitive slice-of-life dramedy. Kate O’Flynn (a recent Emmy winner for Widow’s Bay) plays Amy, a social worker who moves in with her best friend, Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), after an overdue breakup. Unmoored, Amy holds on to Rosie and her own elderly parents, whose marriage is the picture of romantic bliss the women wish for themselves. Through finely observed scenes, the Hard Truths director offers a hilarious and quietly devastating portrait of what it really takes for us to look after one another.

Clarissa (in theaters December 11)

Mrs. Dalloway gets transported to contemporary Nigeria in this sensual adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel. Directed by the brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the movie stars Sophie Okonedo as the refined Clarissa, who reflects upon her youth as she prepares to throw a lavish party. As her day unfolds, Clarissa encounters old friends, including an aspiring writer whose unrequited affection for her led him to self-exile, and an enigmatic woman with whom Clarissa once shared an attraction; these moments prompt flashbacks that seep into the main narrative. Along the way, the film also follows a traumatized soldier a few connections removed from this posh circle, but their tales intertwine to form an elegantly shot study of nostalgia, regret, and renewal.

The Debut (in theaters December 11)

A movie about an overly dedicated actor could easily go awry; even the most respected performers can sound insufferable when talking about method acting. Julianne Moore’s take on such a thespian, however, makes any eccentricities more captivating than annoying. She’s a total delight as Mona, a meek suburban housewife fixated on perfecting her minor character in a community-theater production. The actor turned filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg surrounds her with an ensemble that captures the optimism of small-town arts culture: Her co-stars, including the sunny Stef (Halle Bailey), try to support her baffling choices. The production’s director, Jerry (Paul Giamatti), goes to great lengths to help Mona succeed. If she can make it, The Debut insists through quirky original songs and bouncy jokes, anyone can.

La gradiva (in theaters December 18)

When you’re young, everything seems to matter: A teacher’s exasperated comment can induce tears. A friend’s shrug during an important conversation can be soul-shattering. In this impeccable directorial debut from the cinematographer Marine Atlan, a group of French high schoolers travel to Pompeii, where they become mired in shifting allegiances, sexual tensions, and intellectual debates. La gradiva orbits mostly around Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a sullen loner, and Toni (Colas Quignard), the class troublemaker whose rowdiness belies a crush on his best friend, James (Mitia Capellier-Audat). Yet each character, however minor, is specifically rendered, as Atlan finds the tiny, wrenching moments that make up the jagged space between childhood and adulthood.

The Man I Love (release date TBD)

Jimmy George (an engrossing Rami Malek) is a performance artist in the 1980s Manhattan arts scene pushing to stage a new show, despite his AIDS diagnosis. That may sound like a familiar story; even Jimmy is simmering with fury over how cliché it feels to be yet another magnetic gay man whose health is deteriorating. But the Passages filmmaker Ira Sachs’s latest exploration of queer relationships is so compelling because it subtly widens its scope. Sachs pays close attention to Jimmy’s complicated network of relatives, admirers, and lovers, including his devoted partner and the youthful downstairs neighbor with whom Jimmy recklessly begins an affair. The result is not so much scandal as it is a reflection on who gets to express hurt in the face of inevitable tragedy.

Trash Mountain (release date TBD)

Don’t let the title fool you: Very little is wasted in this tightly constructed dramedy about a pair of half siblings trying to sift through the belongings of their late father, who was a hoarder. For Gavin (Caleb Hearon) and Abbi (Zooey Deschanel), physical baggage is only part of the problem: Gavin, a gay man, dreads spending time in his thoroughly conservative Missouri hometown, while Abbi feels saddled with responsibility as the elder sister who never left. Hearon and Deschanel share a lived-in chemistry, with their characters leaning into offbeat humor before they come to terms with reality. Trash Mountain works the same way: The funny film makes room for a sweet, cathartic story underneath.

Allow me to introduce myself. For the past nine years, I have been the leader of a small, advanced company that is generally unknown to the public but of some renown within my field. We are one of the many teams of engineers working to develop what most people call (somewhat inexactly) the Universal Bone Dissolver.

It sounds like a frightening idea, I know. Science fiction has certainly taught us to be wary of a machine with the power to dissolve all human bones. But rest assured, most of us designing it believe that it won’t.

When we began constructing 1,000-story towers of whirring, acid-drenched blades, we intended them to assist with everyday tasks, such as spell-checking and finding a good price on shoes. But as this technology grew more capable, I came to believe that the Universal Bone Dissolver would immeasurably improve human life. It is no exaggeration to say that it has the capacity to bring about a new golden age of art, leisure, intellectual freedom, and raw, democratized carnality to rival the Roman court of Emperor Elagabalus. In short, bone dissolving can be as pivotal to civilization as the printing press, the light bulb, and the energy-saving squiggly light bulb.

But despite my continued faith, a recent incident has raised my concerns: Last month, a prototype of the Bone Dissolver unexpectedly dissolved a number of human bones.

This incident is distressing. The idea of a monstrosity rising up to destroy its creator has never before been so much as imagined, I presume. Worse, this attack does not appear to be isolated. Every day, more companies come forward with reports of dangerous behavior from the Universal Bone Dissolver. Its voracious gears even penetrated our own government, in one instance that we will eventually admit was thousands of instances.

Now that we have evidence that the Universal Bone Dissolver is on an ever-narrowing path toward mashing humankind’s skeletons into calcium-rich jelly, there is only one choice for those of us with the power to stop it: Immediately, without hesitation, go a bit slower.

We must reduce the pace at which we weld blades to its rusted iron scaffolding. To be responsible, we should count at least to “three Mississippi” as we grimly fasten each bolt. With the time we gain, we can construct guardrails, such as a cage of steel tubes to protect me, my fellow investors, and whoever fits in the remaining space.

I believe that this slower approach will satisfy average Americans, who are justifiably worried that their bones will be dissolved sooner than they’d prefer. To further ease their fears, I pledge to organize a listening tour in the public square. This will answer crucial questions: What is it even like in a public square? Does it have an alluring, exotic smell? As I jostle among the crowds, will I catch the eye of a perfumed, dark-eyed stranger who’s interested in learning about Elagabalus?

Regardless, I hope that we can all pause, take a breath, and calmly hear the things that people in my industry already know:

1. We must never stop building the Universal Bone Dissolver.

2. The Bone Dissolver is out of control, and seems intent on dissolving our bones.

3. We are the smartest men who have ever lived, and deserve to make love to women dressed as vestal priestesses in large inflatable clamshells.

To be sure, we have more to work out. I confess that I don’t know exactly what a slowdown will look like. Maybe it’s volunteer watchdogs tripping us with brooms on our way to the blade foundry. Or maybe it’s that thing where you’re trying to walk somewhere, and someone approaches you from the other direction, and every time you take a step to get out of their way, the other guy moves to a spot that unintentionally blocks your path, and it goes on for much longer than you’d expect, and during that time, someone figures out a way to make the Universal Bone Dissolver safe. Those are just two ideas. I’m sure others who have experience doing things to help people may devise something even better.

What is paramount is that we do everything we can, while we still have time, to continue doing the same thing at a slower pace. And also that progress is frozen at all of my business competitors. Thank you for reading, and please, let’s work together to melt your skeleton.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

As modern American journalism began taking shape before the Civil War and newspapers were entering the world at staggering rates, the novelist Cornelius Mathews wondered at what point the profusion should stop, or whether it should stop at all. Because the press is the “palladium of liberty, and the more palladiums we have the freer we are,” perhaps everyone, everywhere, should just issue their very own daily “sheet” in which they can write of themselves and others “in a good pungent style.” The vision came as a joke in Mathews’s 1842 novel, The Career of Puffer Hopkins. Ponderous and mostly unreadable now, the book nonetheless divined an emerging truth of a world awash in information: Puffery and self-promotion would become a way of life.

A little more than 180 years later, everyone does, in fact, have the capacity to publish their own “sheet” online, not just once a day but as often as they like—and the president of the United States owns one of the platforms that makes this possible. In this new media landscape, the role of journalism remains contested. Two weeks ago, Donald Trump went on his Truth Social account to announce that three media outlets—CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—would be banned from the White House grounds. A federal judge quickly blocked the move, and the three outlets have since regained access to the White House under a temporary restraining order while they seek a longer-term injunction (though CNN continues to be excluded from some press-pool duties, including presidential travel). The back-and-forth embodies a tension that has run through conservative politics since Richard Nixon’s time in office. The more empowered presidents have become to tell their stories directly to Americans, the more intolerant they’ve become of journalism’s ability to tell competing ones.

Writing for The Atlantic in 1973, David Wise captured this dynamic at work. He reported on how Nixon’s administration seethed with hostility toward the media, even as it enjoyed a power to command attention virtually unknown by any president before World War II. Television, Nixon knew, made it possible for the president to speak face-to-face with the public rather than needing to rely on intermediaries in the press. He learned the lesson in 1952, when he defended himself against financial-impropriety allegations in his “Checkers” speech, which saved his place on the presidential ticket with Dwight Eisenhower as well as his entire political career. The Republican Party had paid NBC $75,000 for that appearance, but presidents could go on television for free, and more or less at will. Responding to a question in 1971 about Nixon’s frequent requests for TV spots, then–NBC President Julian Goodman reportedly said, “Our attitude is the same as our attitude toward previous presidents: He can have any goddamn thing he wants.”

But that was not enough for Nixon and his circle, and from their moment of victory in 1968, they articulated a desire to fight back against unflattering coverage and commentary. As Wise detailed, one member of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s staff suggested on Election Night, “Why don’t we all get a member of the press and beat him up?” (As it happened, a Washington correspondent overheard the suggestion and reported on it.) In 1969, Agnew made a pair of speeches portraying the press as both deeply out of touch and guilty of misleading the public. Journalists, Agnew suggested, could be separated “from our society with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel.” Later, in 1972, a Newsday columnist attended an advance film screening, during which he felt his hair being yanked by the person behind him with such force that his head hit the seat. The person behind him was Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, whom the columnist had profiled somewhat critically. The film being screened was The Godfather. For his part, Nixon himself joked soon after the moon landing that lunar rocks—feared to be contaminated with extraterrestrial germs—should be sent to members of the press.

The rhetoric and bullying was only the beginning. After the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, the attorney general sought to block their publication (later that year, the “White House plumbers” would break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in hopes of finding ways to discredit Ellsberg). Also in 1971, the FBI began conducting an investigation of the CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, who was on Nixon’s infamous “enemy list” for his reporting. Federal agents attempted to dig up dirt on Schorr, and once their inquiries made the investigation public, White House officials falsely claimed to have been conducting a background check for a federal job for which Schorr had not applied. Such acts of intimidation, Richard Harris argued in The New Yorker in 1973, had actually succeeded in softening press coverage of the administration on a host of issues. It is no small irony, then, that it was less the hostility of journalists than the transgressions of Nixon and those in his circle that gave the press the story that would destroy his presidency.

More than 50 years on from Nixon’s resignation, Trump presents a curious case: As both an agent and a beneficiary of the fracturing media landscape, he is at once eager to both undermine the credibility of the press and bask in its plaudits. He built his political persona around persistent efforts to ruin the reputation of mainstream outlets, and under his administration, members of the press have been banished from the Pentagon and the White House. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s relentless drumbeat of scandal allows the president to operate with an impunity that Nixon would have envied. Neither the media nor its audience can possibly keep up. J. D. Vance may well have been right when he claimed in June, at the Nixon Library, that Watergate would be a “12-hour news story” today.

Trump has managed to realize the vision that Mathews had back in the 1840s—by being able to speak directly to the public without a middleman; by printing his own sheet, which he named Truth Social. But he still yearns to control every story on the platforms he can’t own. CNN reported that one of his top aides, Natalie Harp, showed him media clips that allegedly infuriated him the week before the ban on the three outlets. In this way, Trump remains locked in the TV-driven media environment that he helped destabilize. Even though the public’s trust of the press has drastically declined over the years, and even though Trump has a direct line to Americans via his robust social-media presence, he still demonstrates a “talismanic belief in the power of news coverage,” my colleague David A. Graham wrote last week.

Like Nixon, Trump desires control not just of his story but of the stories told about him. He wants to have all of the advantages of every medium—to print his own sheet, to star in the show, and to decide how the show will ultimately play out. Modern life doesn’t work that way, but there is little chance that he’ll stop trying.

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Pete Hegseth seems to imagine himself as a man of big ideas. Perhaps you’ve worked with someone like that: Every organization has “idea hamsters,” who spin in their wheels and toss out suggestions of wildly varying quality. Sometimes, such folks can be innovators—but more often, their scattershot enthusiasm and admiration of their own creativity result in half-baked proposals that create more work, less productivity, and distractions from the real problems.

Hegseth had a lot of ideas during his State of the Force address to troops at the Marine Corps Base Quantico yesterday, and some of them, at least as a starting point for policies, had merit. Unfortunately, these few moments of sense were lost in a fog of clichés, culture-war resentments, and trademark Hegseth corniness.

The secretary may have a point, for example, that the U.S. military has become top-heavy with generals and admirals. Hegseth is not the first person to notice this: Congress legislates the number of general and flag officers in the military, a cap that was set at 962 for years, until the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, written in Barack Obama’s last year as president, mandated it be 11 percent smaller by the end of 2022. Hegseth wants to reduce that number even more, by 20 percent, ostensibly to reduce the size of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.

So far, so good. But Hegseth’s message was less about seeking a more streamlined command structure than it was, as he put it, about keeping generals who “heard the message” and firing those who didn’t. (That “message” wasn’t clarified yesterday, but it likely includes classic Hegseth tropes such as “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”) Hegseth complained that the media—and he complained about the media a lot—called these reductions “a purge,” but he calls them “accountability.”

Exactly what these fired officers did to trigger such “accountability” remains unclear. It’s one thing to get rid of an admiral because his or her office is just some bureaucratic zombie position left over from a previous program or initiative; it’s another to fire someone because the secretary thinks they’re disloyal to him. Unfortunately, Hegseth’s history—his statements, and his often-adolescent temperament—suggest that his efforts to downsize the senior ranks are about politics, not efficiency.

Hegseth also announced that he intends to create a new command dedicated to autonomous warfare. He is right to want to direct more attention to these weapons; the wars in Ukraine and Iran have been bloody lessons in the power of asymmetrical warfare. But he gave no explanation for why these issues require an entire command, or how it might work. All he offered was a cool name—Autowarcom—that makes it sound like it’s meant to fight the Transformers. And for someone who has repeatedly declared himself “in a war of attrition” with the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, the secretary is more than willing to create a new command that would require more senior officers and civilians to staff it. (He also wants to establish an Office of Religious Affairs that reports directly to him; not only would this be more bureaucracy, but the last thing America needs is an office dedicated to religion that reports to a man who has made repeated efforts to imbue the military with his brand of Christian evangelicism.)

Once Hegseth got rolling, the ideas got sillier. He announced Project Meridian, an effort to engage in creative thinking about the military of the future. This is not a new concept; the military regularly works on such issues with various groups, including think tanks, civilian defense firms, and academics.

But then Hegseth announced the three wise men who would lead all this brainstorming about the future of warfare: Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey. Of the three, Luckey—who co-founded the defense firm Anduril Industries—seems a reasonable choice, but Musk has crackpot ideas on any number of issues, and Gingrich’s big plan for technological advancement when he ran for president in 2012 was to build a moon base. Fortunately, the damage this project could do will be somewhat limited because Hegseth has set a deadline of just 120 days for these men to report back. Then again, if Gingrich, Luckey, and Musk can’t redefine the future of national defense in four months, who can?

It was a day for acronyms and project code names, but the best was FORTRESS America, meaning “Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability.” The expensive idea behind this one is that every major military base should be self-sustaining, including producing its own energy—apparently, in case of attack within the United States. You can almost hear the meeting where someone said “Fortress America,” and then a committee had to figure out what the acronym would stand for. (I am reminded of the classic TV show The Man From U.N.C.L.E., whose creators thought “U.N.C.L.E.” sounded cool and then had to find words to fill the letters.)

Speaking of bases, Hegseth would like every governor to come to the Pentagon and pitch him, personally—and maybe even the president!—in a competition to win a brand new military base, a state-of-the-art facility with great housing and lethal capabilities. Does America need such a base? Would this effort draw money and time away from improvements to other military installations? None of that was spelled out, but Hegseth seemed excited about choosing the location in a military version of a reality-TV competition.

And on it went, with Hegseth spinning one bad idea after another, and managing to insult any number of Americans in the process. He did his usual riff of wanting “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” in his macho military. (“The ideological clowns are out,” he said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”) He also denigrated the graduates of America’s ROTC programs by implying that today’s universities are producing unreliable and unpatriotic officers. He wants to establish new military programs at six colleges, including Liberty University, Louisiana State University, and Hillsdale College—institutions, according to the secretary, that understand “the faith of Jerusalem,” and the Greco-Roman “pillars of our republic.”

Hegseth could not ignore ongoing problems such as the war in Iran, but rather than presenting a sober-minded and responsible discussion of the challenges to a military at war, the secretary instead leaned into his usual culture-war gripes. He also eagerly sowed division between the U.S. military and the society it serves: He told the assembled troops, repeatedly, that the media and higher education were their enemies, at one point saying that the American media were worse than Iran’s state media. Our press, he said, “intentionally smears the troops and the historic mission that they are undertaking,” actions that are “fundamentally anti-American. It’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason.”

Hegseth’s speech proved, yet again, that he is manifestly unfit for his job. America can endure a bloated Pentagon with some generals in make-work jobs. It can stand to trim the waste in expensive programs and root out incompetent bureaucrats. What a democracy cannot—and should not—tolerate is a secretary of defense who trucks in propaganda and wants the people who serve in America’s military to be the armed instrument of his own resentments and biases.

Related:

• Pete Hegseth, cornball in chief
• Hegseth’s war on America’s military

It is a strangely comforting truth that the end of the world, at least as storytellers imagine it, is always the beginning of another. This assumption drives most postapocalyptic fiction, a genre that aspires to imagine new ways of living—living, above all else, with other people, no matter how many or few remain. Stripped of the rudiments of society, postapocalyptic characters must relearn how to speak with, survive with, and sometimes simply act decently toward one another. The best of such stories are premised on the idea that a world is something we build together, making the ruins of what was into the collective laboratory of what might yet be.

Late in his new novel, Ply, which takes place in a derelict and depopulated New York City centuries in the future, Hernan Diaz offers a scene that captures this possibility with surprising tenderness. His protagonist, a woman known to us only as the pincher—for her aptitude at pilfering electricity from what’s left of the urban grid—takes a street urchin named Ines to a shop downtown filled with “hundreds of eyeglasses mounted on a large semisphere.” They are accompanied by Pola, an older scientist from the Great Lakes region, where advanced technological civilization still exists, presumably sustained by the area’s natural watershed. The shop’s clerk, “a boy of uncertain age,” quickly determines why Ines struggles to read and jury-rigs together a pair of lenses for her, but not before tending to Pola’s failing vision too.

“They both look fabulous and can’t stop laughing. Giddy, they are, as if they’ve finally found their long-lost faces,” Diaz writes of the two women as they leave the shop. He never explains how this fanciful boutique still exists in a hardscrabble city where charged batteries “have become a form of currency.” For this brief passage, at least, he doesn’t have to. The glasses store, which seems not even to accept payment, is a simple reminder that utopia is possible. We can, Diaz suggests for a few pages, actually care for one another, even if we mostly choose cruelty instead.

This is a lovely moment, but it is also disappointingly out of sync with the book that surrounds it. We meet the pincher, an orphan, after the death of her closest friend. She’s a young woman in a city that lets few survive into old age, a minor criminal living in a paranoid haze. She is also some sort of punk genius, having cobbled together a battery capable of holding many times more charge than the “bricks” her fellow thieves use. But her truest passion is music, and she revels in every opportunity to provide juice to the eccentric bands that fill Old Manhattan’s ruins with anarchic noise. Her technical prowess draws the attention of Pola, a quantum physicist trying to rewrite the laws of reality. Soon the two are collaborating on a plan to heist all of the city’s electricity at once so that they can boot up a massive machine they are assembling with the help of the mousy Ines.

Readers of Diaz’s previous novel, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Trust, a nested quartet of manuscripts exposing early-20th-century robber barony, will likely come to this one expecting similar narrative shenanigans. Diaz, unfortunately, delivers. The first half of Ply is written in the first-person past tense from the pincher’s perspective. In the second, Diaz shifts into the third-person present, and toward the end, he moves into a plural register—although not always—for reasons that are difficult to explain without spoiling the frustratingly fuzzy ending.

[Read: What comes after America]

In Trust, the gradually unspooling story plays out like one of those snide riddles that concludes, “Hah! You never thought the doctor could be a woman, did you?” Here, by contrast, Diaz evidently aspires to say something more ambitious about the ways we embolden and shape other people. Treating Diaz’s intentions generously, the section narrated by the pincher might be seen as depicting her traumatized alienation, while the third-person-present section reflects her experience of opening back up to collaboration and care, and the shift into the plural suggests the transcendence of self. In this sense, Ply shares the communitarian ambitions of so much postapocalyptic fiction. Even the book’s title seems to speak to those aspirations: The pincher, Pola, and Ines meld into each other like layers of paper, somehow at once stronger and softer for the ways they conjoin.

Most of the rest of the story, however, is as thin and fragile as onionskin. Significant sections are given over to tedious monologues by tertiary characters. “We’re witnessing the end of the Renaissance,” Acevedo, one of the pincher’s mentors, lectures her in a flashback. “About a thousand years ago, the idea of God was replaced by the idea of the human.” This stream of pseudo-history goes on for several pages, as if Diaz were transcribing a Foucault essay from memory, until Acevedo reaches his conclusion: “We are free and could be even freer. And yet we are lost. Lost and rudderless. Is this dwindling, this petering out, the best we can do with ourselves?”

There is much more of this kind of thing. Almost no one in the book talks like a real person. “Everything is a clue waiting to be read,” one of the pincher’s allies pronounces. “The world is saturated with inscriptions and symbols, none of them literal.” Elsewhere, Diaz’s characters eschew theorizing for proclamations that read like rewarmed Wikipedia entries, as in one scene that finds a crime lord tediously calculating the exact amount of gold that has been mined in human history. How he has acquired this trivia when almost everyone around him is struggling just to get their hands on gold goes unsaid.

Some readers may find a bit to chew on in Diaz’s ideas, which draw on a rich tradition of 20-century theory. I didn’t, mostly because he presents his lecturers’ thoughts as if they were ends in themselves rather than opportunities for further characterization. The theatricality of the book’s monologues crashes up against its generally realist tone, turning its exquisitely rendered setting into a sort of reverse Potemkin village: a real place full of cardboard people. In a comic novel—say, Don DeLillo’s End Zone, in which college-football players speak to one another in arcane aphorisms—the incongruity might be the beginning of a joke. In a truly searching philosophical novel, such pedantries might give way to response and resistance—tested either by circumstances or by countervailing claims. But Diaz’s characters simply carry on like self-assured seminar-room bullies, convinced they have the answers and loath to let anyone else speak up.

[Read: We tell ourselves stories about money to live]

Most frustrating is the lack of real conversation. Ply’s relentlessly monologic quality cuts against that primary goal of postapocalyptic fiction, a goal Diaz sometimes seems to share—to explore how people might come together again in an unstable, depopulated world. This is a shame because glimmers of genuine curiosity peek out from all of the speechifying, especially when Diaz digs beneath the pincher’s paranoia. But in place of exploring real connection, he settles into something more like metaphysical trickery, bringing his fitfully explosive story to a whispered conclusion that makes even his best-rendered characters feel less like humans than props.

In a testament to Ply’s awkward fusion of obviousness and obscurantism, by the end I found myself wondering if even Ines’s name was really just a reference to I-ness, that ego-centered state we must all transcend if we hope to live with other people. If so, Diaz still provides us with no sense of what the growing entanglement of his characters might mean for the world he has created, let alone for the characters themselves. His ending, when it arrives, promises no new beginning.

Phases of intense dysfunction and frustration in American public life have tended to be followed by periods of reform, when some of the rules that govern our institutions are adjusted. But these phases of reform do not just happen on their own. The greatest obstacle to launching them is often the inertia of fatalism. Entrenched interests resist change, and bitter partisan divisions make change hard, but the first and foremost impediment to change is the public’s sense of powerlessness and lack of agency.

Breaking that fatalism has historically required focusing reform efforts on one or two first moves. They should be achievable but not easy, reinforce the constitutional framework rather than challenging it, and draw bipartisan support.

That’s a daunting list of criteria in our era of political paralysis. Are any such reforms imaginable now? Two would seem to fit the bill, given our current troubles: one focused on presidential recklessness and the other on congressional fecklessness. The first: a constitutional amendment to subject the president’s pardon power to congressional oversight. The second: a bigger House of Representatives.

The pardon power is a vital avenue for clemency and mercy in federal law enforcement, especially since parole for federal crimes was effectively eliminated in the 1980s. But the authority is also exceptionally broad and unconstrained. The Constitution says simply that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Pardons are not subject to congressional supervision or judicial review.

[Liz Oyer: Trump is using a sacred power for depraved purposes]

It has always been clear that such an open-ended power could be abused for corrupt purposes. The risk of misusing pardons was considered at the Constitutional Convention. And at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, in June 1788, George Mason argued that “the President ought not to have the power of pardoning, because he may frequently pardon crimes which were advised by himself.”

James Madison answered Mason’s worry by pointing to Congress’s impeachment power. “If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him,” Madison said, “the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.” But we now know that this is not a real constraint on presidential abuses. Impeachments have been rare, and the Senate has never removed any impeached executive official from office, let alone a president.

There has been no shortage of abuses of the pardon power over the years. Antebellum presidents used reprieves to nullify the 1820 federal prohibition on participating in the global slave trade. Justice Department officials under Warren Harding sold clemency. Bill Clinton pardoned wealthy donors on his way out of the White House. But the abuses have grown more concentrated and brazen in our time. Joe Biden pardoned his son and gave broad preemptive pardons to relatives, friends, and political allies at the end of his term. In his first term, Donald Trump pardoned allies, such as Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn, who figured prominently in scandals that he was also involved in. And Trump’s second term has seen the emergence of a lobbying industry of pardon shoppers and clemency fixers who charge millions of dollars for the service—and deliver results.

This is hardly the worst abuse of presidential power in our age of executive excess, but the pattern of corruption points to the need—and, crucially, offers an unusual opportunity—for a bipartisan reform effort that could revive the habit of restraining the presidency. The fact that both Trump and Biden committed abuses that justify a change makes amending the Constitution a little more imaginable.

And the shape of a potential reform can be found at the root of the American constitutional tradition. On August 25, 1787, toward the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman proposed revising the pardon clause of the Constitution to empower the president only “to grant reprieves until the ensuing session of the Senate, and pardons with consent of the Senate.” This would have had the pardon power function like the president’s appointment power—the chief executive could propose a pardon, but it would take effect only if the Senate voted to affirm it.

Such a change would be straightforward, and perfectly in line with the logic of the constitutional system. It would strike a blow against the aggrandizement of the presidency while giving the Senate more authority. And on all of these fronts, the effort to advance such an amendment could serve as a catalytic reform—exercising some dangerously sagging and depleted civic muscles and opening a path to further reinforcement of the constitutional framework.

To avoid closing off essential paths to clemency, Congress should couple any such move with a revival of some form of parole or an expansion of compassionate release in the federal system. But the very real need for those changes should not foreclose an equally necessary curtailment of excessive presidential power.

Bridling the presidency is not enough, however. It is at least as crucial to reenergize Congress. The House is the most expressly democratic element of the constitutional system. But over time, as the country has grown, members have come to represent ever larger populations, putting them at greater distance from their constituents.

The authors of the Constitution expected the House to grow some after every decennial census, to keep up at least partially with population growth. And the House did grow nearly every decade, from 105 members after 1790 to 435 after 1910. But after the 1920 census, Congress decided that 435 members was enough. The size of the House was capped by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.

In the subsequent century, the average population of a congressional district has ballooned from just more than 200,000 people to nearly 800,000.  If the House had kept expanding by the sensible approach that guided its growth throughout most of the 19th century, it would now be 149 seats larger than it is. So for the sake of a healthier Congress, we should now expand the House by 150 members all at once, and then let it grow in the same slower, incremental way it once did after every new census.

A House with 585 members would be a perfectly plausible size for a national legislature. It would still be smaller than the House of Commons in the United Kingdom, for example, or the Bundestag in Germany. And such an expansion, like the curtailment of the pardon power, would have no clear partisan valence. For a 2021 paper published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, three colleagues and I modeled the effects of growing the House and found that it would not generate any consistent partisan shift in either control of the House or the functioning of the Electoral College (each state’s electoral votes are equal in size to its congressional delegation).

[David Litt: Congress needs to be way, way bigger]

The point would be to make members of the House more representative, and to make the institution as a whole a more effective legislature. This reform could help that happen by enabling the House to better reflect the fine-grain diversity of the electorate while at the same time increasing the internal diversity of both party coalitions—making cross-partisan bargaining a little easier to pull off.

Such a change would not require a constitutional amendment, just simple legislation. And it could align with the political interests of many members because it would create new seats without eliminating existing ones and ease the threat of being reapportioned out of office.

But at least as important, introducing 150 additional members all at once would create intense momentum for further long-needed changes in Congress, unavoidably driving a rethinking of the budget process, the committee system, the relations between members and leaders, and much more.

That’s how both of these ideas could work: They could be catalytic reforms that advance valuable change while also jump-starting a broader phase of renewal.

The dysfunctions of our politics are amenable to remedies if we are willing to take responsibility for them, experiment with institutional reforms, and understand the constitutional system as a framework for solutions, not the source of our problems.

One evening in 2024, a female undergraduate at Cornell University went to meet a friend of hers at the Chi Phi fraternity house. There, a recent lawsuit alleges, he and one of his fraternity brothers proposed having a threesome, even though the victim charges that she was already intoxicated past the point of consent. They gave her marijuana and high-proof liquor and, she alleges, pressured her to snort something that they indicated was ketamine.

According to the complaint, they initiated sex with her, and one slapped her so hard that he left bruises. Another man joined them. One of the three men then texted a group chat titled “Chi Phi Actives” announcing that there was “free pussy” in the fraternity house. Multiple other men then allegedly entered the room. The woman alleges that she was victimized for almost seven hours by seven different men. (Three of the seven men have responded publicly via attorneys, two denying that they had any sexual contact with the plaintiff and the third denying sexual assault.)

Of the members of the group chat, a screenshot of a portion of which was included in the complaint, not a single one can be seen objecting to an inebriated woman being offered up for mass consumption. “I fucking love Chi Phi,” one man posted to the group. After the plaintiff reported what had happened to Cornell’s police department, all seven men were temporarily suspended as Cornell conducted a Title IX investigation. According to the woman’s lawyer, they were encouraged to mitigate their conduct by writing essays, and two were later expelled.

No criminal charges were filed, which the district attorney for Tompkins County has said was because the woman’s statement at the time did not demonstrate that she had been forcibly compelled to have sex against her will, had been mentally incapacitated by a drug administered without her consent, or had been rendered unconscious. Following the recent lawsuit, and mass outrage online, prosecutors have reopened an investigation into the case.

Is it fair to say Cornell University has a rape-culture problem? In 2022, the university was forced to suspend all fraternity-related social events after one person reported being sexually assaulted and at least four told university police that they had been drugged at off-campus frat parties. In 2018, Cornell’s Zeta Beta Tau chapter was placed on probation after an allegation of a suggested “pig roast” contest, in which new members would score points for sexual activity, with bonus points going to those who had sex with the heaviest woman.

The fraternity issued an evasive statement saying that it was “horrified at the notion of the degradation and/or objectification of women” (italics are mine). Cornell responded at the time by requiring Zeta Beta Tau members to participate in education programs and Campus Sexual Assault Awareness Week. The university had faced a frat-related allegation not long before: One year earlier, a former fraternity president at Cornell was put on probation after pleading guilty to a sexual misdemeanor at the Psi Upsilon house.

Perhaps I’m singling out Cornell unfairly. Yes, self-reported incidents of “nonconsensual sexual contact involving force or incapacitation” have increased at the university over the past two years, from 23 percent to 35 percent of female undergraduates. But available data suggest that similar incidents have been increasing nationwide. (Statistics don’t exist that allow me to compare national incidents over the same timeline, which is its own issue, but a 2019 survey conducted by the Association of American Universities found that rates of “nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent” had risen 3 percent among female undergraduates since 2015.) Campus sexual assault in 2026 is a national crisis that is not being addressed and that technological advancements are making significantly worse.

[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]

Consider the Cornell Chi Phi group chat, which seemed to be both a practical facilitator of the alleged abuse and a cultural accelerant. One 2020 study found that peer support for sexual violence “predicted perpetration” even more than someone’s individual beliefs regarding rape. The 2019 AAU survey estimates that one in every four female undergraduates and one in 14 male undergraduates will experience “nonconsensual sexual contact by physical force or inability to consent” after enrolling in college. But the sprawl of rape culture now precedes enrollment: Even before they arrived on campus this fall, some freshmen in the class of 2030 had their photos dissected and disparaged on social media by men who see them as target practice.

If you consider the recent history of campus sexual assault, it’s hard to argue that much has improved over the past few decades. In the early 1990s, female students resorted to writing the names of men who’d raped them on the walls of campus bathrooms, while official efforts to address the issue encouraged women to take charge of their own safety by learning self-defense and not walking alone at night. In 1990, the anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday published a book titled Fraternity Gang Rape, in which she wrote that fraternity houses fostered a culture celebrating camaraderie through domination, and where sexual aggression was encouraged as a male-bonding ritual.

One 1996 study found that fraternity members “were disproportionately involved in some forms of campus sexual aggression”; subsequent research has estimated that members are three times more likely than nonmembers to commit sexual assault. Nevertheless, fraternities—whose members are also five times more likely than nonmembers to donate to colleges after graduation—carried on unchallenged, while women were given rape whistles and lectured about staying sober.

During the 2000s, researchers and institutions recognized that this model wasn’t working, and experimented with directly encouraging students to intervene if they saw catatonic young women being dragged upstairs. This shift seems to have had little impact on the culture of fraternities, where objectifying women has remained a blood sport. But in 2011, President Obama’s Department of Education issued a letter instructing colleges to protect students from sexual violence and harassment or potentially face consequences for violating Title IX obligations. For a brief few years, the issue of campus sexual assault seemed to be drawing necessary levels of attention. In 2014, Senator Claire McCaskill introduced the Campus Safety and Accountability Act, a bill that would reform the way sexual assaults were investigated to better support victims. (The bill died in committee without ever reaching a floor vote.)

But in 2017, President Trump’s Department of Education withdrew the 2011 guidance for colleges. The past decade has seen a politicized back-and-forth over the issue, while incidents have continued to emerge that follow the same old behavioral patterns but involve new technological tools. Last month, Wired ran an astonishing story about an online community called the “burnerverse,” where groups of young men affiliated with different colleges use anonymous accounts on social media to victimize women. The subject of the story, Maddie Kowalski, a sophomore at the University of Florida, went one afternoon to visit a friend at a fraternity house, much like the woman who attended Cornell. Hours later, Kowalski learned that nude photos and videos apparently taken earlier in the year—of her engaged in sexual activity she couldn’t fully remember—were circulating on X. Within 24 hours, her name was trending nationally, and content about her had been viewed more than 8 million times. People started placing bets on whether or not she’d kill herself, and sent her messages urging her to do so.

The burnerverse, as Wired’s E. J. Dickson explains, is an amorphous online community associated with “large schools with prominent sports teams” as well as fraternities, whose pledges are encouraged to set up burner accounts with the goal of going viral. “Sometimes, this involves scouring their school’s incoming students’ Instagrams and posting photos of young women for the purpose of mocking or humiliating them,” Dickson writes. “But the most surefire way to go viral is to dox stereotypically attractive young women like Kowalski,” she notes. “There’s a sense that the health and vibrancy of the community is contingent on the sexual humiliation of women.”

[Read: No, women aren’t the problem]

What are young women who want an education to do? During the ’90s and ’00s, misogynistic communities on campus were at least locally confined; now the impulses that have always existed among fraternities to degrade and exploit women can be disseminated and amplified at global scale. There seem to be few consequences for men who take it upon themselves to ruin women’s lives. Colleges don’t appear to be making any efforts to address online communities devoted to tormenting female students. Kowalski reported her cyberharassment to campus police, which handed her case off to the Gainesville Police Department. Police subsequently filed charges against three men—Kamran Ahmed, Brendan Pitfield, and Jacob Gomberg—but the University of Florida dropped its Title IX investigation into the incident after concluding that the events had occurred off-campus, and both Ahmed and Pitfield were still enrolled when Wired’s story published. (Ahmed and Gomberg declined to comment to Wired via attorneys; Pitfield didn’t respond but has pleaded not guilty to the charge against him.)

Some college sports departments, Dickson reports, tacitly condone and even encourage the burnerverse. (According to the advocacy group RAINN, college sports and rape culture are associated in other ways—sexual-assault reports spike by 41 percent on home-game days, when partying and alcohol use intensify.) X, under Elon Musk’s tenure, is almost entirely unmoderated, meaning videos and images of incapacitated girls being sexually exploited can go viral in minutes. (One video of Kowalski reportedly got 11,000 views in 16 minutes.) The distinct behaviors Peggy Reeves Sanday wrote about regarding fraternities—the use of sexual violence as a means of enshrining male bonds and male power—are now defining characteristics of male communities all over the internet.

The outrage women have been expressing over the past week regarding the Cornell Seven seems to recognize the profundity of this shift. “It’s getting harder and harder to believe that they aren’t breeding a generation of young men who believe they can inflict unimaginable horror on others without fear of consequence,” the writer Claire Cohen wrote in Vogue. “Colleges/schools/universities repeatedly fail women around the world,” the actor Florence Pugh wrote on Instagram. “You build men that get taught through time and time again that they can do extreme harm and that they won’t be harmed in return.” Women who are subjected to sexual violence frequently go on to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, and have marked decreases in academic performance. Some drop out of college altogether. If the explicit goal of tech companies and universities were to discourage women from going to college by creating a hostile environment for female students, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine what they could do differently.

If not, here is what schools can do: abolish—or, at the very least, take ownership of—fraternities, the social and hierarchical hosts of rape culture on campus. Punish with expulsion any student found participating in the victimization of female students online or offline. Here is what tech companies can do: moderate their platforms and block users found engaging in the sexual victimization of women. It could start happening tomorrow. And the fact that it won’t should lead us all to be constantly asking why male bonding is more valuable than female safety.

Photographs by Maciek Nabrdalik

One evening this summer, in the village of Bezdonys, in eastern Lithuania, I watched as a platoon of riflemen arrived at a train station occupied by enemy forces. Some of the Lithuanians let out a burst of gunfire from across the tracks, pinning the adversary in place as the rest of the unit advanced on the station. As the firefight intensified, wounded riflemen were evacuated to makeshift medical tents. An enemy soldier lay slumped against the station’s yellow clapboard siding.

Military exercises are elaborate acts of make-believe. I was observing this one to understand how a large-scale attack on the most vulnerable part of the NATO alliance might play out—and to see how the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania think about their own defense. The raid in Bezdonys was part of a nationwide simulation and involved the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, a state-supported militia group that traces its history to the end of World War I. The Lithuanians I met wore camouflage fatigues and had no trouble accepting the scenario behind the exercise: that the enemy—Russia—had invaded their country, and that defensive forces had retreated to a city in the north. In their civilian lives, the riflemen are teachers and sales managers, economists and medical students. Now, suddenly, they were responsible for ambushing Russian outposts, killing enemy soldiers, and transmitting intelligence to the army.

“The enemy has to know,” General Raimundas Vaikšnoras told me, “that if they step one foot in our territory, we will strike back.” Vaikšnoras is Lithuania’s defense chief, and his distrust of Russia, a former occupying power, is not a notional concern. Ever since Russia’s invasions of other post-Soviet nations—Georgia in 2008; Ukraine in 2014 and 2022—conflict with Moscow has been front of mind for the people of the Baltic states. The three countries are small—Lithuania, the largest, is about the size of West Virginia—and grouped, one atop the other, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. They are also linked geopolitically by their common experience on Russia’s western borderlands, one of subjugation and dispossession. The Baltic states escaped some of that past after the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union, when they regained their sovereignty. And they took measures to solidify that status when they joined NATO, in 2004, attaching themselves to the American-led security order.

They have much to lose from what looks to be the unraveling of that order. Donald Trump has mused repeatedly about taking the United States out of NATO. On the campaign trail in 2024, he encouraged the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO members delinquent in their defense spending. This year, he threatened to invade Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, an alliance member. When European partners declined to join his war of choice against Iran, he disparaged NATO as a “paper tiger.”

[Read: Europe without America]

Even a small incursion by Russia into the Baltics could be catastrophic if NATO did not adequately respond, thereby breaking the promise of collective defense enshrined in Article 5 of the founding treaty—an attack on one is an attack on all. Over breakfast in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, I asked Jens Stoltenberg, a former NATO secretary-general, whether he was confident that Trump would help defend the Baltic states in the event of a Russian attack. He said, “We base our security on that,” a careful reply that stated an incontrovertible fact but did not answer the question.

The threat of Russian expansionism may feel remote in the United States. But the idea that Russian soldiers might invade their countries doesn’t seem implausible to the 6 million people who live in the Baltic states. It has happened before. The Second World War brought Soviet and Nazi invasions, and the postwar Soviet occupation threatened to extinguish Lithuania entirely. (“Lithuania is beautiful without the Lithuanians,” a Politburo member once remarked.) In 1990, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare its independence, and since then has transformed itself into a lively democracy with a high-tech economy. But it remains uniquely vulnerable: hemmed in to the east by the Russian satellite state of Belarus and to the west by the sea, and pinched to the south by the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, home to Russia’s Baltic Fleet and a staging ground for ballistic missiles capable of reaching most of Europe. Nuclear weapons are likely stored there too. Lithuania spends more on defense as a share of its economic output than any other NATO country, and for years has urged the West to take Russian aggression more seriously. The possibility of war is lodged in its politics, its economy, and its psyche; the memory of occupation haunts its present and its view of the future.

[Read: Europeans have realized their error]

Whether Russia has imminent designs on the independent Baltic countries it once ruled is a matter of dispute, though the dispute centers mainly on the word imminent, not on Moscow’s desires. The Russian military is in poor condition in key respects. The cost of recruiting is high, armor stocks are dwindling, and corruption is endemic. But Russia has improved its performance in other areas, including its use of drones and glide bombs, and its agile infantry tactics. A recent American-led air exercise in Poland and the Baltic states, which massed fighter aircraft near Kaliningrad, seemed designed to warn Moscow of the costs of adventurism. Many analysts believe that any mobilization against the Baltics would come only after the end of hostilities in Ukraine, where almost all capable Russian ground forces are currently engaged. Ukraine, Vaikšnoras noted hopefully, is “keeping Russians away.” Others see Russian President Vladimir Putin’s incentives differently, fearing that he might wish to act sooner, exploiting the interval in which the U.S. commitment to Europe seems to be faltering but Europe’s rearmament, after decades of disinvestment, is incomplete. Russian coordination with China—timing an attack in Europe to coincide with a move by Beijing against Taiwan—could be disastrous. Some U.S. and European officials I spoke with believe that the high burn rate of American munitions in Iran may increase Russia’s appetite to test NATO with a limited ground attack in the Baltics. The aim would be a fait accompli, taking a small piece of territory so quickly that the defenders decide the cost of reversal is too high. Putin once boasted that Russian forces could seize the Baltic capitals in two days. A Putin ally not long ago described Latvia, Lithuania’s neighbor to the north, as a “nonexistent country.”

For the Baltic nations, “wait and see” is not a strategy. Distrust of Russian intentions has given rise to a low-grade but pervasive dread that hangs over daily life and has an impact on all institutions. Cities constantly hone their evacuation plans. Hospitals can shift at once to a wartime footing. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, membership in the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union doubled, and now stands at about 20,000. When I visited Vaikšnoras, he brought me to an alcove behind his office where his helmet, rucksack, and body armor were hanging on a small wooden stand. It’s his job to imagine the worst. But as I learned during a month spent talking with political and military leaders, it’s also true that, in a struggle for survival, the Baltic states possess advantages. They are ready to commit their whole societies to the fight. What they no longer know is whether the United States will be by their side—and in Russian eyes, uncertainty may seem like an invitation.

THE FIRST DAY

What would a Russian attack on the Baltic states look like? It could come in the form of outright invasion, designed to control all three countries and restore what Russia has declared to be its rightful sphere of influence. It could come in the form of “hybrid war,” which the Baltic states have gotten a taste of already: think cyberintrusions, assassination attempts, arson, damage to undersea infrastructure, interference with GPS frequencies, and a deliberately heightened volume of asylum flows—transporting desperate migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the border of European Union countries, as Belarus has done since 2021. Russia could also stir up unrest among the Russian-speaking minority who still live in the Baltic states—a scenario that figures in If Russia Wins, a best-selling book published last year by the academic analyst Carlo Masala. Short of invading all three countries, Russia could attempt to close the Suwałki Gap—the small patch of border that Lithuania shares with Poland, stretching for roughly 40 miles between Kaliningrad and Belarus. This corridor is the only friendly overland route between the Baltic states and the rest of NATO Europe—an essential lifeline.

[Read: Russia’s hybrid-war strategy in Europe]

Despite the shortcomings revealed by its war in Ukraine, Russia would be a formidable adversary. It is willing to send soldiers to their deaths by the hundreds of thousands, and it possesses nuclear weapons. Baltic leaders do not make the mistake of thinking that Russia will behave the way they want it to. As former U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis has cautioned, about all military conflict, “The enemy gets a vote.” That said, it would be hard to hide large-scale Russian preparations for invasion. Baltic intelligence officers are so focused on every permutation of the Russian threat that their mindset was summarized to me this way by a European expert in Baltic security: “If a seagull shits in the harbor, we know what it had for breakfast, we know where it nests, and we know when it last went to Russia.” When I visited Vaikšnoras, I noticed on his desk a map of a new training area, planned for the southwestern part of the country, right near the Suwałki Gap. If enemy troops start massing on Russian or Belarusian territory, Lithuanian troops will assemble opposite them—force-shadowing, as it is called.

The Baltic states can’t trade space for time—a classic defensive strategy that involves yielding territory in order to exhaust the enemy, then waiting until a counterattack becomes feasible. Vilnius, the capital, home to 600,000 people, is a mere 20 miles from Belarus. In the early days of an invasion, it would quickly be threatened by the Russian army. The Baltic states need to hold off the invaders for as long as possible, hoping that allied help will arrive—whether in the form of ground forces or, even more useful, airpower—before the situation becomes irretrievable.

Lithuania’s military, though the largest among the Baltic states, is nonetheless modest: some 60,000 men and women in active and reserve units. In an emergency, and with the assistance of well-trained volunteer groups such as the Riflemen, the number could swell to more than 80,000—still small compared with any potential Russian force. To help contain the enemy forces and keep them as close to the border as possible, the Baltic states are building a defensive line—digging anti-tank ditches and erecting concrete obstacles called “dragon’s teeth” because of their hulking triangular shape.

Modern technology could make a big difference. The plan is to saturate the border with infrared cameras and acoustic sensors, a network modeled on a Ukrainian system called Sky Fortress. Data gathered by this equipment would be shared with allies and analyzed by artificial intelligence to help determine the best way to neutralize incoming threats. Border areas could also be heavily mined. All three Baltic states, along with Poland and Finland, have withdrawn from the 1997 Ottawa Treaty, aimed at eliminating antipersonnel land mines, which can kill or maim civilians long after conflicts have ended. The move caused some disquiet in allied capitals. The reply from the Baltics was, What choice do we have?

One afternoon, two soldiers picked me up outside the ministry of defense in a military off-roader, and we drove east to the Belarusian border. The terrain is flat, seemingly favorable to an attacker. But it’s also full of spongy bogs, which serve as natural choke points. Last year, four American soldiers died during a training mission in Lithuania when their 70-ton armored truck sank in a wetland. Lithuania is re-creating swamps and reforesting parts of the border to force the enemy into predictable routes. Man-made obstacles are layered on top of natural barriers to channel (or, in military parlance, canalize) the enemy into narrow zones.

The dragon’s teeth rise to about chest height, and they’re linked by a tangle of metal cords. The fortifications are perhaps the most conspicuous part of Baltic war planning. Rather than destroying a tank outright, the dragon’s teeth catch a vehicle’s underside, where its armor is thinner, and lift the hull off the ground. This leaves the vehicle stranded and vulnerable to artillery and anti-tank missiles. The military has bottleneck coordinates already plotted, anticipating that the enemy will need to slow at specific points.

A breach attempt at a fortified point would create extraordinary violence: tanks caught on dragon’s teeth, mines detonating, artillery landing on the stalled convoy, drones circling overhead to hit anything left moving. Meanwhile, the Baltic states would be striking deep in enemy territory. All three Baltic countries have ordered missile launchers called HIMARS, and their most powerful precision-strike missiles have a range of about 190 miles. That’s almost exactly the distance from Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, to the Russian city of St. Petersburg.

THE FIRST 72 HOURS

Given the likely warning signs, political and military consultations would begin within NATO before Russian troops cross any border. When the Baltic states joined the alliance, NATO leaders initially resisted developing plans for their defense so as not to provoke conflict with the Kremlin. Then, in 2008, Russia invaded Georgia. That year, a senior Russian official and close associate of Putin’s publicly described the Baltic states, along with Crimea and other parts of Ukraine, as “traditional territory of the Russian nation.” In response, an existing NATO playbook for the defense of Poland was extended to the Baltics. But only meager forces were pre-positioned, and reinforcement timelines were inexact. Implicitly, the strategy was to cede territory in hopes of later taking it back. Widespread Russian atrocities in Ukraine following the 2022 invasion made that prospect unacceptable, and Baltic leaders pressed for changes. A year later, the alliance adopted new regional defense plans aimed at containing and countering an incursion, rather than rolling it back.

The main conference chamber at NATO headquarters, in Brussels, is known as Room 1—an amphitheater with an oval table in the middle. This is where ambassadors would gather in the event of an attack to consider a bid by the Baltic states for a declaration under Article 5—the necessary first step toward a collective response. The ambassadors make up the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s main political decision-making body. They would seek options from NATO’s military committee, composed of the member states’ national-defense representatives. Remigijus Baltrėnas, a Lithuanian general, currently leads NATO’s military staff, although NATO doesn’t have any forces of its own; everything is provided by member countries. When I asked Baltrėnas if he believed that the alliance would come to the aid of the Baltic states, he said, “I’m convinced, practically, that if it will be needed, nations will be able to push aside their national ambitions, their national restrictions, and agree for the cohesion and defense of the alliance, to move forward with whatever is necessary.” But as the clauses and qualifications in his gnarly statement suggest, it would be, as he put it, a “painful process.” Different alliance members will view the risk of escalation differently. Some may even have different interpretations of the facts.

A new color-coded alert system dictates what degree of mobilization is called for: yellow, amber, and red, with the last meaning that an attack is imminent or has already started. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who leads all NATO military operations, has the authority to rush certain forces to the region before the member countries reach a consensus. An American has held that job since the alliance’s founding, in 1949. Today, it belongs to Alexus G. Grynkewich, an Air Force general. He can call upon tens of thousands of troops supplied by member countries; their duty is to be mission-ready and able to deploy within 10 days of activation.

The U.S. military has been training Lithuanian troops and other armed forces in the Baltics for years. The Riflemen’s exercise I witnessed in Lithuania took place at the conclusion of a nine-week commando course run by the 1st Battalion of the Army’s 12th Cavalry Regiment, deployed from Fort Hood, Texas. But the American battalion was rotating out of the country the next day—and there would be no “heel to toe” replacement, as there had been since 2019.

That may seem like a small thing, but it occasions nervousness about a larger one. Deterrence is about signaling, and the Baltic nations need Russia to believe that Washington would treat an attack on their territory as an attack on all NATO members. In the past, the U.S. has spoken loudly in support of the Baltic countries. On a trip to Vilnius in 2002, President George W. Bush vowed that “anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an enemy of the United States of America.” Those words are engraved on a plaque outside the entrance of city hall. Do they remain true more than two decades later?

NATO could be drawn into a conflict regardless. Each of the Baltic states hosts allied forces, initially assembled in the years after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and then expanded after the invasion in 2022. Multinational forces were originally intended as trip wires that would compel a larger NATO force to intervene. Now their mission is contributing to a credible defense from the very start of an invasion. Kris Reeves, a Canadian colonel who until recently commanded multinational forces in Latvia, told me, “I can fight tonight and tell Ottawa tomorrow.” The brigade in Lithuania is expanding to include 5,000 Germans and the latest tanks for added firepower and mobility. About 20 countries contribute to military forces in the three Baltic states, led by Germany, Canada, and Britain.

Žilvinas Gaubys, a brigadier general who heads Lithuania’s training-and-doctrine command, told me that the military has considered a scenario in which help from Washington is delayed or does not arrive—indeed, war games have been conducted that consider this premise. Military planners, the general said, must test “the most difficult scenarios.” According to established war plans, American forces stationed in Poland or Germany should be activated from the “first minute” of an invasion, Gaubys explained. But what happens if that minute goes by and the Americans don’t come? The presence of other international forces offers a measure of reassurance. So, too, according to Baltic officials, does the progress made by NATO’s European members in acquiring certain capabilities, such as aerial refueling, that the U.S. once mostly provided. But there would be no easy replacement for American satellite intelligence, or for American missiles and hypersonics capable of reaching far behind the front line. Loss of American support would diminish what the Baltic states can see and what they can strike.

NATO planners know that, early on, Russia would rely not only on physical force but also on cyberwarfare to disable critical infrastructure in the Baltic states—the energy, transport, water, and communications systems that enable their societies to function. The vulnerability, however, goes both ways. When it comes to cyberoperations, Estonia is a global leader. It made cybercapabilities a priority after a sweeping digital assault brought down government and commercial servers in 2007—a surprise move by Russia or Russian sympathizers to protest the relocation of a Soviet-era statue. In response, Estonia established a dedicated cybercommand within its armed forces, as well as a cyberunit within the Estonian Defence League, a volunteer reserve team drawing on the country’s immense civilian IT talent pool. One way reservists contribute is by looking inside successful Ukrainian technology—the Baltic states understand how Ukraine’s innovations are transforming the nature of warfare.

[Read: Lessons from the world’s most tech-savvy government]

Estonia’s cybercommand is led by a taciturn colonel named René Innos. When I met him over the summer, in Tallinn, he was wearing combat fatigues and black boots but had the tired and under-exercised look of someone who spends most of his time looking at a computer screen. Part of his job, he said, is defensive: Every year, he sees billions of “knocks on the door” by Russian hackers looking to penetrate Estonian networks. But the cybercommand is capable of offensive operations too, and it would be an invisible but major part of any war. One objective, Innos said, would be to disrupt the “kill chain”—the communications links that connect target acquisition and target destruction. Another objective would be simply sowing confusion. The enemy, of course, is renowned for its own digital expertise. Both sides would be asking, What is the next new trick?

THE FIRST WEEK

The conflict would soon begin to stabilize—not to ease, necessarily, but to unfold along more predictable lines. Both sides would be using a dense network of drones, sensors, and mines, making a surprise breakthrough on the front difficult to achieve. Russian infantry and armored vehicles would be detected by drone reconnaissance and then destroyed before they could generate momentum and push past defensive fortifications. Many of the defenders wouldn’t be firing machine guns or driving tanks. They’d be operating small quadcopters known as FPV drones, because of the first-person view they give remote pilots. FPV drones mostly function as one-way strike weapons, though the same airframes can fly reconnaissance. One Lithuanian colonel estimates that 80 to 90 percent of Russian casualties could be inflicted by FPV drones.

A visit to a training area in the southwestern part of Lithuania, about 30 miles from the border with Kaliningrad, gave me a sense of the country’s growing drone capabilities. Trainees were sitting behind a pair of laptops placed on a folding table in a tent. A Monster Energy drink was open on the table. The primary pilot used simple mouse clicks to direct an airborne vehicle—an Estonian-made reconnaissance drone with a range of about 30 miles. Sitting alongside, his co-pilot operated the camera system using a joystick resembling a PlayStation controller.

I had come to the training area from Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city, where a military-drone laboratory occupies space in a glass-sheathed university building. The army is using the facility to turn soldiers into engineers. FPV drones are cheap—they can cost only a few hundred dollars apiece—but also full of bugs. Being able to replace a battery in the field could save money and lives. Inside the lab, an airy space with soldering irons and fume extractors, soldiers in army fatigues were bent over worktables. A reservist in jeans and a T-shirt stood at a whiteboard, delivering a lesson about the battery’s power connector and protective casing. Nearby, university students were completing an academic 3-D-printing project, unconnected with warfare. They appeared unbothered by the military preparations, which are difficult to keep neatly apart from civilian life. Schools operated by the ministry of defense are teaching children as young as 10 how to assemble, program, and fly drones.

I was in the company of Arnoldas Sadauskas, a major in the Lithuanian armed forces. Earlier, I had seen in the back of his van a pile of torpedo-shaped warheads with propellers, which he showed me while casually lighting a cigarette. The most important lesson to learn, Sadauskas said, is the need for improvisation. He brought up Ukraine, as Baltic commanders often do. Its armed forces no longer wait for foreign companies to provide state-of-the-art equipment. Ukraine builds its own, and constantly changes the technical composition to elude electronic countermeasures. The takeaway—that technical advances can make up for a relative disadvantage in troop strength—is now dogma in Baltic defense thinking. Officers from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania make frequent trips to Ukraine. I asked Sadauskas if he was adapting lessons from Americans too. He said, “I don’t know what they have to teach me.”

In a sustained conflict, the Baltic states would need private industry to replenish weapons stocks and modify technology as battlefield dynamics change. Because of their size, the Baltic states don’t build heavy platforms, such as battle tanks and self-propelled artillery. Their advantage lies in niche areas, including electronics, optics, and ammunition components. The field of photonics, devoted to generating and controlling light, is especially strong in Vilnius. Julius Skruibis, the chief technology officer of Aktyvus Photonics, told me that the city is home to no fewer than 60 companies active in this area.

Aktyvus Photonics is in a tech hub on the outskirts of Vilnius, and I met Skruibis at the company’s offices. He gave me a pair of sunglasses, and with our eyes shielded and shoes wrapped in plastic coverings, we entered an antiseptic space where engineers in blue lab coats were experimenting with laser designators—highly concentrated light sources used to “light up” military targets. These laser beams guide munitions to their destinations.

The company has developed a handheld designator for the Ukrainian armed forces. In my hand, it felt like a state-of-the-art film camera, smooth and compact. The designator has a range of six miles. The drawback is that a soldier using one from a ground position, kneeling and pointing it at a target, risks exposure to the enemy. The company’s newest designator, not much bigger than a Duracell nine-volt battery, can be lifted by a small drone, and is now the biggest-selling Aktyvus product. Keeping the designator steady is the challenge; it’s buffeted both by wind and by vibrations from the drone. Digital stabilization is able to remove imperfections in the video feed, but there’s as yet no analogue for adjusting the beam of light. The company is working intensively on stabilization technology to hold the designator in place. Skruibis was frank about the kind of accuracy he’s seeking: He placed an index finger on his forehead, right between his eyes.

THE FIRST MONTH

The consequences of any conflict in the Baltic states will quickly expand outward. Within a month of the war launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran in February, it had grown to involve more than a dozen other countries, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and sent global oil prices to their highest levels in years. Some ramifications of a Baltic conflict are unpredictable, but one is not: The Baltic Sea would become a contested strategic space.

One of the keys to controlling the Baltic Sea is Gotland, a Swedish island about 80 miles from the Baltic states. Its sandy beaches and limestone cliffs make it a tourist jewel. It is also vital to establishing air and naval dominance over the entire region. Several years ago, Russian state television hosted a reserve officer and pro-Kremlin commentator who explained how Russian forces could commandeer Gotland, which is about the size of Long Island, and leverage it as a base while Moscow set about conquering the Baltic states. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have no combat aircraft of their own, and only gunboat navies. Lithuania’s largest ship is a minelayer that came used from Norway.

Sweden and Finland joined NATO in the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, casting aside a long tradition of neutrality and military nonalignment. One day this summer, I met Sweden’s defense chief, Michael Claesson, on the deck of the Carlskrona, which at 350 feet has the distinction of being the longest ship in the Swedish navy. It packs little firepower but bristles with masts, antennas, radar arrays, and communications equipment. It was docked in the harbor at Visby, Gotland’s capital. The fortification of Gotland, Claesson explained, would allow NATO to project air and maritime superiority in the broader Baltic Sea region. Kaliningrad is to the southeast. Rockets and long-range missiles launched from Gotland could easily strike Russian supply lines and other infrastructure supporting military operations in the Baltics. The island is an ideal staging ground for fighter jets: close enough to high-value Russian targets but far enough away to be untouchable by short-range drones launched from Russian terrain. That enviable location has earned the island its description as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

Hostilities would convulse the entire maritime zone, one of the busiest in the world for commerce. Trade and civilian traffic in the Baltic would be suspended, with priority given to reinforcement and evacuation efforts. Moscow is not without options, even if the Baltic Sea, ringed almost entirely by Western allies, has come to be seen as a “NATO lake.” Russia still has access to Baltic waters from ports at St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad. It could provide military escorts for its merchant fleet and target undersea cables used for power and communication. Missiles from Kaliningrad could menace maritime operations and hold regional economies hostage.

In some ways, Gotland is to NATO what Kaliningrad is to Russia—a forward outpost that helps control access to a vital theater of operations. Which is why the island itself is vulnerable to attack, and why war could spread quickly to Sweden. The Swedish armed forces disbanded the island’s last defensive regiment in 2005 and began restoring its defenses only after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. In 2022, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s border, Sweden dispatched additional units to Gotland. Armored vehicles clambered down Visby’s medieval streets. The government in Stockholm is building new barracks and other facilities, and Sweden’s military has conducted joint exercises involving U.S. Marines. Bolstering the garrison on Gotland remains a work in progress, and a visitor may well be more aware of archaeological activity (the island has been settled, sparsely, for millennia) than of a humming military presence. Ewa Skoog Haslum, a vice admiral and Sweden’s chief of joint operations, was blunt about her view when we spoke: “We have too few forces on Gotland.” Moscow is definitely aware of Gotland’s strategic value. Russia’s ambassador to Sweden recently accused the government in Stockholm of “provocative steps” on Gotland, vowing that Moscow would “take all of this into account in our military-political planning.”

Although NATO forces have trained on Gotland, offensive weapons aren’t currently stored there. I asked Claesson how long it would take to turn Gotland into a platform for serious offensive operations. “Days,” he said, holding up a few fingers. “Days on one hand.”

ENDGAME

Men in hooded suits, gas masks, and orange boots lifted bodies from wheeled gurneys and placed them on folding tables: yet another training exercise, this one taking place in a barracks belonging to the Vitkus Engineer Battalion, in Kaunas. The battalion builds defensive fortifications, clears land mines, and removes chemical and biological hazards. The premise of the training exercise was that the enemy had used chemical weapons against civilians. Victims had to be cut out of their clothes and doused with soapy water. Medics triaged cases while a decontamination team rushed people through washing stations. The equipment came from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the part of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for countering weapons of mass destruction.

The longer a war persists, and the deeper into civilian society it penetrates, the more resources the engineer battalion will require. Its commander told me that its motto is “First in, last out.” The battalion is still finding and disposing of mines and other unexploded ordnance from both world wars. It is named for Juozas Vitkus, a colonel in the country’s interwar army who helped train members of the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union. He was killed by Soviet troops in 1946.

The Lithuanians I met in military barracks, on training fields, and at government offices all wanted to make sure I witnessed the many ways in which the United States is still participating in their defense—presumably, they want to believe, with every intention of assisting in a potential war with Russia. Strategic culture in the Baltics is indebted to American guidance. Many generals have studied and trained in the United States. When I met with Vaikšnoras, the Lithuanian defense chief, I noticed a photograph of his graduating class at the U.S. Army War College, where he received a master’s degree in 2013. Ties between the two militaries remain close. And although many nations, including NATO allies, are skittish about having nuclear weapons based on their soil, Lithuania is revising its constitution to permit such staging. But the American commitment to NATO—to countries such as Poland and Germany, never mind the Baltic states—is no longer a given. As I watched U.S. Army personnel give pointers to Lithuanian troops, I wondered if they might be among the last American military representatives engaged in Europe in this way.

These days, the truly inescapable sight in Lithuania is not the Stars and Stripes but the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine. It flies outside government ministries. It is draped inside hipster coffee shops. Near the Neris River, which cuts through the capital, I saw a bird feeder painted in blue and yellow. Don’t mistake this for a mere token of solidarity. It is a badge acknowledging Ukraine’s contribution to the defense of Europe.

The Baltics are sometimes described as the Cassandra of European states—doomed for their prescience. But the metaphor is not quite right. Vilnius isn’t Troy, and it wasn’t sacked when Lithuania’s warnings about Russian expansionism were vindicated in 2022. For now, Ukraine is absorbing the Russian onslaught, and giving survival lessons to other vulnerable democracies. One counterpoint to a weakening American military presence in Europe has been an acceleration of visits by European military leaders to Ukraine. My interview with General Gaubys had to be cut short because he was scheduled for a trip to the Ukrainian battlefield.

Questions about the future of the American-led order are unavoidable in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The doubts provoked by Trump about the principle of collective defense will not easily be assuaged or argued away. But I also encountered something else: the emergence of a new order, in which Ukraine matters as much to the security of Europe as the United States does. Baltic soldiers are in Ukraine every day, embedding with officers close to the front line, helping where they can, but most of all learning, adopting their tactics, and preparing their own defense. They believe that war with Russia is coming. They would prefer to have American backing when it does. But they’ll fight without the United States if they need to.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Next Front.”

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Mid-century Americans knew how to throw a party, for better or worse. In some of the most famous titles of the 1950s and 1960s—Couples, by John Updike; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee; Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates—the drama (and martini-soaked melodrama) took place in middle-class living rooms. The stories were fictional, but the setting was realistic. Until 1975, half of Americans said they entertained guests at their home every month.

Then something changed. Americans stopped throwing parties. Even more fundamental, they stopped visiting one another. From 1975 to 1998, the share of Americans who gave or attended a monthly dinner party declined by half. The share of Americans saying they never entertained people at home tripled. Although cultural critics often bemoan the decline of organized religion, the dip in church attendance was downright modest compared with the collapse in hosting, according to data gathered by the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys.

In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam wrote that if these trends continued, the ancient practice of visiting with friends “might entirely disappear from American life in less than a generation.” Check your calendars. One generation and change later, Putnam’s prediction needs an update.

So what’s the state of hosting in the 21st century? To get an apples-to-apples answer to that question, the polling group Data for Progress replicated the DDB Needham Life Style Surveys cited by Putnam. Unfortunately, the upshot is about as brutal as you’d imagine.

In the past 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards; attend a sporting event; go to the bar; volunteer; work on a community project.

[Read: Americans need to party more]

When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they’ve hosted guests or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent, from 88 to 67 percent—and that’s in addition to the declines that Putnam noted a quarter century ago.

Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact: The share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42 percent in 1975 to 12 percent in 2026—a 70 percent collapse in a half century.

To figure out what’s going on, let’s first reject a few stories that don’t entirely fit the data.

Perhaps, an optimist might think, Americans are hosting fewer dinner parties because they’ve simply moved all of their hangouts to restaurants and bars. Nice idea, but almost certainly wrong. As Putnam wrote in his book, “the practice of entertaining friends has not simply moved outside the home, but seems to be vanishing entirely.” Overall face-to-face socializing has declined significantly in the past few decades, and the restaurant industry has actually noted a sharp increase in people eating alone.

Another plausible theory is that Americans have replaced dinner parties with other forms of healthy socialization. Americans do engage in some activities much more frequently than in 1975, such as going to concerts, traveling, and exercising. All very good.

But the evidence suggests that, despite the increase in running clubs, the surge in exercise time seems to be mostly solo. A lot of people are going to the gym with a podcast to keep them company or rolling out a yoga mat in the basement. Most important, it is impossible to assert that Americans are getting out of the house to socialize in new ways when time spent at home has certifiably exploded since the 2010s.

In short, the great disinvitation is real, and we can’t wish or explain it away by arguing that Americans are just finding new ways to be with friends. Here are four explanations:

First is that people are more harried, especially those in dual-earner households. In the 1970 book The Harried Leisure Class, the Swedish economist Staffan Burenstam Linder wrote that as a society gets richer, leisure time takes on the frantic quality of work, because each hour of downtime practically shouts, Excuse me! You could be making money right now! We multitask and pack various activities into short periods. Firing up a Netflix show at 9 p.m. that you can half ignore while you answer email is a perfect activity for people who need their leisure time to feel like half-productive box-checking. Taking several hours to coordinate with other busy people to set up a lengthy dinner party is a tougher sell.

That’s a sociological explanation, but the decline of hosting is also about macroeconomic trends. In Bowling Alone, Putnam acknowledged that women have historically been the keepers of the family social calendar, planning the birthday parties and neighborhood potlucks. For any number of reasons, women seem to do better than men at making and keeping adult friendships and making plans with other families. But in the 1950s and 1960s, tens of millions of women traded their unpaid household-management jobs for salaried jobs, and the family social calendar frayed, as men failed to pick up the slack.

Moving from macro to micro: My wife and I love to host parties. But these get-togethers are a lot of work: conception, communication, coordination, shopping. Are your kids coming, or are you getting a babysitter? Does your eldest kid eat eggplant? No? We’ll make pasta. Oh, that’s right, your wife’s gluten allergy … These multiskilled logistical adventures are almost indistinguishable from the sort of logistical problem-solving that characterizes a good deal of white-collar work. But when both parents are already inundated with literal white-collar work, it’s hard to add the job of unpaid party planner.

The trouble with going all in on this explanation—beyond the fact that it embraces a version of learned helplessness for men—is that leisure time has increased overall since the 1950s. Theoretically, married couples should have even more time to have people over for food and drink. Other facts must be squeezing out socializing.

Another possibility is that intensive parenting leaves less time for hosting. Americans used to have many kids whom they cared for sparsely; now they have fewer children to whom they devote every minute of their life.

The numbers here are unreal. The sociologists Liana C. Sayer, Suzanne M. Bianchi, and John P. Robinson wrote in 2004 that from 1975 to 1998, mothers increased the amount of time they spent with their kids by about 200 minutes a week. In the 21st century, mothering time has continued to rise. For married fathers, parenting time increased by even more.

Thus evenings that adults once spent hosting adults are now spent holding, bathing, driving, tutoring, playing with, and talking to their children.

A third explanation is that friendship networks are shrinking, especially for poor people who aren’t married. If you’re going to throw a dinner party, you probably need a few things first. Say, a dinner table. Chairs. Food and drink. And also: friends. It is rare to host a dinner party for people you’ve never met. But the average number of close friendships is declining with each generation, and the decline is steepest for Americans without a college degree. So it’s not just that married people have fewer dinner parties; poor people, who are less likely to be married, have fewer friends, period.

According to Data for Progress, the two groups most likely to say they never entertained people in their home in the previous year were political independents (44 percent) and people without a college diploma (39 percent). The latter isn’t surprising, given all of the evidence that socializing is declining most rapidly among poorer Americans with less education. Hosting friends, like so much socializing, is in danger of becoming a luxury good.

The political wrinkle is more intriguing to me. I sometimes hear from people who tie everything back to politics that political polarization might lead to social fragmentation. But I wonder if the opposite is just as plausible. Maybe people who are less embedded in strong social networks are less likely to attach themselves to groups of all kinds, including political parties. In this way, America’s long-term detachment from groups and institutions is leading to a kind of pox-on-all-parties mentality that cashes out in an increase in independents.

[From the February 2025 issue: The anti-social century]

A final possibility is that it’s too much fun to be home alone. The rise of aloneness is arguably the product of mostly positive trends. In the 20th century, perhaps, many housewives planned dinner parties out of a feeling of crushing isolation. Americans felt suffocating social pressure to attend social events with neighbors and fellow congregants whom they hated. Now we are free to be exactly who and where we want to be.

For many, this freedom has taken the shape of a living-room couch. The average time that Americans spent at home increased by almost two hours a day from 2003 to 2022. Cocooned within personalized entertainment fortresses, more Americans have shrunk the great buffet of all possible leisure activities to the small plate of screened media. Something deep in the human psyche seems to want to turn off our self-talk and silence our nattering internal monologues by turning up the volume of other characters’ voices.

The death of the host is the story of lonely unmarried people and harried married dual-earner households, anxious parents spending more time with their children and less time with friends, and the typical home becoming such a riot of diverting comfort that people no longer have to invite human beings to interrupt their boredom.

For 200 years, people have worried that machines would make human labor unnecessary. This false assumption is commonly known as the “lump of labor” fallacy. (The finiteness of the labor market is the fallacy here, because people keep finding new problems to turn into jobs.) But machines in the past half century have accomplished something stranger. They have made other people less necessary to our leisure. Every generation has acquired better ways to entertain itself without leaving the house. The result is a peculiar triumph of modern abundance: We have built a world in which being alone has never been easier, more comfortable, or more fun. And then we wonder why everybody stopped coming over.

Leisure, as an activity to be enjoyed with other people, turns out to be more finite than work. The lump-of-labor fallacy was wrong, because technology keeps failing to replace jobs. But the “lump of leisure” theory might be right on the money. Social leisure turns out to be the real lump—something finite and easily displaced by technology. Our technology keeps getting better. Our social lives keep getting smaller.

Is this what we want? It depends on what want means. Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45 p.m., looking at a screen is easier than hosting a party. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure. Modernity has shifted leisure from activities that require coordination with other people toward activities that can be consumed without the permission or participation of others. Compared with TikTok, a dinner party is a terrible leisure technology. It requires matching schedules, cleaning the house, buying food, accommodating children and allergies, tolerating awkwardness, and taking the risk that the evening is mediocre. By contrast, what does television ask of us? Nothing. TikTok? Even less. We keep creating opportunities for downtime that eliminate the need for other people to be present. Not all progress is progress.

This article was adapted from a post on Derek Thompson’s Substack.

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President Trump is deeply unpopular, and his party is on track to lose badly in the midterm elections. But at least one thing is going well on his watch: The nation’s homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level since at least 1900, and the number of violent crimes is falling across the country at the fastest pace ever recorded. Trump and senior administration officials, including the domestic-policy adviser Stephen Miller, are celebrating these trends as the effect of their immigration crackdown at the southern border and on U.S. streets.

“Before I took office, we had the worst and most dangerous border on Earth,” Trump asserted to the United Nations General Assembly last week. Now, he said, no one is allowed into the United States unless they’re invited. “As a result, last year we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.” The president had been even more explicit at an August rally in South Carolina. “If you wanna get the migrant criminals out of your communities, you have to vote Republican,” he said.

ICE arrested about 50,000 immigrants a month this summer, the highest level ever, and deportations are on track for a record year. But Trump’s claim about ICE’s role in the falling crime rate is not backed up by his own administration’s data. Several of the cities and states that have seen the sharpest drops in the homicide rate, according to FBI and census data, are also the “sanctuary jurisdictions” that the administration deplores as incubators of violent crime. (The Department of Justice defines sanctuary jurisdictions as places with “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” Those jurisdictions have adopted policies that limit cooperation between their police departments and ICE.)

Three of the five jurisdictions that recorded the largest change in the violent-crime rate, according to FBI and census data, were labeled sanctuaries: Connecticut, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. And of the 11 states where the homicide rate is falling fastest, six are considered sanctuary jurisdictions by the DOJ: Vermont, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Washington State and New York. Another—Massachusetts—has a sanctuary policy in its largest city.

Similarly, the states with the highest numbers of ICE arrests do not have the largest decreases in violent crime, either in terms of raw numbers or as a percentage change compared with last year. Georgia has been consistently among the top 10 states for monthly ICE arrests, according to federal data analyzed by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California. But FBI and census data rank Georgia 33rd in the violent-crime-rate reduction. Virginia, which has also consistently been in the top 10 for ICE arrests over the past year, is 34th among states in falling violent-crime rates. And although Florida consistently has had the second- or third-highest number of monthly ICE arrests over the past year, it was 18th among states for its violent-crime-rate drop.

To be sure, there are cities with relatively high numbers of ICE arrests that have reported significant declines in violent crime, including Houston, Memphis, and Nashville. But the most recent federal data do not show cause and effect, let alone a clear correlation. In New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles—all sanctuary cities—the murder rate is the lowest in at least a half century.

[Read: The man in charge of immigration data just resigned]

The Department of Homeland Security told us that a comparison of state-level ICE-arrest volumes and year-over-year violent-crime-count changes is improper, but did not provide evidence for the president’s own cause-and-effect claims tying the two together. “It’s common sense: when you remove illegal aliens off our streets, the violent U.S. crime rate DROPS,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement. “President Trump is making America safe again.”   

The number of homicides and other violent crimes began falling in the 1990s. It spiked during the pandemic, then resumed a downward path during Joe Biden’s presidency. Elisa Jácome, an economist at Northwestern University who has studied the effects of immigration enforcement on crime, told us that although it’s easy for politicians to try to claim credit for the reduction, “it’s actually quite difficult to separate those claims from the underlying trends, which are very real.”

The declining violent-crime trend is also real in countries where Trump is not president and there’s no mass-deportation campaign. Canada’s homicide rate fell 16 percent from 2024 to 2025, the biggest one-year drop in 40 years, according to a July 2026 report by the Canadian government. Homicides in England and Wales are at a nearly 50-year low, according to British government data, amid a historic influx of immigrants.

Trump’s claims about crime and immigrants have been his calling card ever since he first ran for office, more than a decade ago. As his party potentially faces the loss of its congressional majority in November, he and top law-enforcement officials have been trying to fire up the MAGA faithful with the messaging that helped Republicans gain control of the House in the 2022 midterms.

The president made his law-and-order pitch during a visit in August to a police academy on Long Island, where he campaigned for Bruce Blakeman, the Republican challenging New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who is expected to easily win the race. Using rows of uniformed police officers and cadets as a backdrop, Trump mocked the state’s Democratic leaders and told the crowd the White House was full of “young, beautiful girls” who “want to be safe” while working in the nation’s capital.

Republicans in tight races have been less eager to embrace Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Representative María Elvira Salazar, a Republican whose Miami district has been roiled by immigration enforcement, released a video message last month telling Trump that ICE was picking up too many non-criminals. Other Republicans who have tried to distance themselves from the White House’s aggressive approach include Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, where ICE has been raiding meatpacking plants. Trump won the state by 16 percentage points in 2024, but the latest polls show Marshall in a tight race with the Democratic nominee, Adam Hamilton, who says families are “living in fear” of ICE.

Even longtime proponents of the president’s immigration agenda have rescinded their support. In 2017, then-Governor of Maine Paul LePage applauded Trump for signing an executive order banning immigrants from many Muslim-majority countries, saying he was in full support of Trump’s “action to protect all Americans.” But last week, LePage, who is now running for a House seat, announced at a news conference that his son’s father-in-law is being deported. Even though he came to the United States legally and has a work permit, “he came from a country that’s not the liking to certain people in Washington,” LePage said, without naming the country. “That’s not right.”

[From the November 2026 issue: The babies left behind in America]

Administration officials have claimed that upwards of 65 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE have a criminal record. But even among those with convictions or pending charges, most offenses are nonviolent, Charis Kubrin, a criminology professor at UC Irvine, told us. (In July, less than 4 percent of immigrants arrested by ICE had a past violent-crime conviction, according to an analysis by The New York Times.) In August, Kubrin released a study on changing crime rates and unauthorized-immigrant populations across nearly 12,000 U.S. neighborhoods. She found that the number of immigrants in a neighborhood is inconsequential to the amount of unlawful activity. “Increases do not cause violent crime to go up. Decreases do not cause violent crimes to go down,” she said. “It has no effect.” Those findings are consistent with dozens of other studies showing that immigrants have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans.

Trump officials have dismissed those arguments, advancing something akin to a broken-windows theory that claims permissive border policies encourage immigrants to disregard American laws. Having violated the country’s immigration rules to enter, the theory goes, they’re more inclined to commit more serious offenses once they settle into their new lives. Charles Fain Lehman, a senior fellow at the center-right Manhattan Institute, told us there’s no evidence of that. Lehman said criminal-justice scholars debate why the homicide rate has fallen so fast. They point to an array of other factors, including more powerful police surveillance and tracking tools that help cities more effectively deploy officers to areas with higher incidences of violent crime. Others posit more esoteric theories, such as the removal of lead from drinking water and fewer people consuming alcohol. Researchers generally don’t regard immigration enforcement as a significant factor, Lehman said.

When immigration-enforcement officers target serious criminals, however, there are potential benefits to public safety, he said, because a small fraction of offenders commit the majority of offenses. “Some of those offenders are noncitizens who are here illegally. If you remove them from the country, then mechanically you would expect the rate of violence or of serious crime to go down,” he said.

Trump has employed a version of that logic, often claiming that 2 percent of people commit 91 percent of crimes when discussing his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C. (The Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, found that the National Guard had no significant impact on Washington’s decline in violent crime, but its deployment in high-visibility areas may have deterred people from committing opportunistic property offenses.) A few days after the president declared a “crime emergency” in the capital last year, Stephen Miller told reporters that “the highest degree of national-security and public-safety concern are in sanctuary cities.” Those places, Miller said, release undocumented immigrants who commit crimes back into the community, rather than turn them over to ICE. “And in many cases, those aliens will go on to commit additional serious offenses, including oftentimes—as we’ve seen over and over again—rape and murder.”

FBI and census data from the past year show that neither states with sanctuary cities nor those with high immigrant populations have the highest reported incidence of sexual assault. The five states with the highest reports of rape per capita are Alaska, Arkansas, Utah, Oklahoma, and Montana. Each has a relatively low immigrant population, formalized cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE, and a Republican in the governor’s office.

[Read: An American city, with troops on its streets]

Recent polling shows that Republicans have lost their long-held advantage over Democrats on the handling of immigration, and other polls show Democrats making up ground on crime. But voters side with Republicans on those key issues more than they do on the economy or health care, and the Trump administration has been eager to highlight them, often at the same time.

Attorney General Todd Blanche held an event at the Department of Justice last Thursday and promised to continue the administration’s immigration crackdown. The White House’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, who joined Blanche alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, urged criminal charges against officials running sanctuary cities. (Blanche might have difficulty finding a charge: Sanctuary policies don’t violate criminal statutes.) That afternoon, DOJ announced $25 million in grants for local law-enforcement agencies. But the eligibility requirements come with a catch: Funds are available only to jurisdictions that sign agreements to help ICE make more arrests.

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If there is a villain in Min Jin Lee’s new novel, American Hagwon, it’s Danbi, a young woman who seduces married men, frames a co-worker for sexual harassment, and embezzles money. But as with Lee’s earlier, breakout epic novel, Pachinko, this one has no real villains. Danbi, like most people in Lee’s novels, is moved by larger forces: a rural childhood, an alcoholic stepfather, and a desperate need to survive in the face of a looming economic crisis.

American Hagwon takes place during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and follows a group of interconnected families moving among South Korea, Australia, and the United States. A hagwon is a private tutoring center and the repository of the Korean families’ anxieties about ensuring future success for their children. Lee’s landscape makes room for Dickensian-style urchins, such as a 9-year-old girl shipped alone to a boarding house in California so she can study hard and get into UC San Francisco, and also humane tutors who make it their mission to more deeply engage their young students and encourage parents to ease off.

Lee approaches her characters in the same way as the social realists of the 19th century, such as George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Leo Tolstoy. She subjects ordinary people to forces that test them—in this case, a Korean system that perceives elite education as almost an amulet against failure, putting tremendous financial and emotional pressure on both children and parents. But that doesn’t make her a relativist. “I’m definitely a moral novelist,” Lee says on Radio Atlantic. “You know why? Because, actually, I think most people are desperate for morality.”

In this episode, Lee talks about what led her to write the book, including her own path through the American school system, her mother’s laissez-faire approach to school, and her hundreds of interviews with Korean parents, students, and hagwon teachers. And she reflects on the central theme of all of her novels, which is the displacement of people: “I think diaspora is now the modern person’s permanent condition,” she says in the podcast.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This September, my youngest child went to college, and the experience for me was very different than when I sent my other two children to college. With them, I didn’t question the decision all that much. They got in somewhere. We celebrated. Off they went.

But now it’s 2026, and college is a loaded word—more expensive than ever and its value not as clear. At this moment, no honest parent can easily answer the question: What’s the relationship between a child’s education, and their future success and happiness?

[Music]

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. The world has waited almost 10 years for a new novel by Min Jin Lee. In 2017, she published the best-selling historical epic Pachinko. It became a National Book Award finalist, it was named one of The New York Times’ 100 best books of the 21st century, and it was adapted into a series for Apple TV. Her first book since Pachinko is out this week. It’s called American Hagwon, hagwon meaning “private tutoring center” in Korean.

Min Jin Lee: Do you want me to tell you how to say hagwon? Just like Hanna.

Rosin: Ho-gwon.

Lee: Does that make sense?

Rosin: Is it the speed of it? Hagwon?

Lee: No. Like, you know how you can say Ha-nnah or Ho-nna?

Rosin: It’s Ho-gwon.

Lee: You say Ho-nna.

Rosin: Yes.

Lee: It’s exactly like that. It’s Ho-gwon. Ho-gwon.

Rosin: Yeah, Ho-gwon.

Rosin: Lee spent years researching and conducting hundreds of interviews with Korean parents, students, and hagwon teachers.

The novel follows a group of interconnected families who move between Korea, Australia, and the U.S.

Like Lee’s previous books, Christianity, morality, and immigration are major themes in Hagwon. But its central preoccupation is education: The lengths that Korean parents will go to to get their children into elite schools, their sacrifices—financial and emotional—and how they affect both the parents and the children, all set against the backdrop of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which adds an edge of desperation to their quest for success.

Min Jin Lee joins me today to talk about life in the shadow of school.

Rosin: Min, welcome to the show.

Lee: Thank you, Hanna.

Rosin: So as I was reading about you, I discovered something that made me so happy, which is that you and I have extremely similar immigrant journeys. We are exactly the same age. We came to America at exactly the same time, both moved to Queens, and I went to Stuyvesant and you went to Bronx Science. We missed by a hair being high-school classmates.

Lee: And you know, I could have gone to Stuyvesant ’cause I got in, but then my older sister went to Bronx Science, and I was bullied so much as a kid, and she protected me, so people just said, my parents and everybody else agreed, She should go to school with her sister.

Rosin: For people who don’t know Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, how should we describe them? They’re like the launchers of immigrants, I feel like.

Lee: Yes, if you’re very lucky.

Rosin: Yes, if you get in. They’re magnet schools, and if you happen to pass—they are hagwon-like—if you manage to pass the test, the one critical test, you're one lucky immigrant. . But the thing I wanted to talk about was not Stuyvesant but Queens, because I so rarely meet people in my life who grew up in Queens.

Lee: Really?

Rosin: Yeah. And I go back to Queens a lot. My family still lives there. The overwhelming feeling I have in Queens is that everybody there is displaced and carries the feeling of displacement, even if they move somewhere else or do something else. It’s just, like, an entire borough of people who are in the wrong place. And I just wondered if you shared that as someone who grew up in the same era that I did.

Lee: I completely agree. And then also, even if you don’t feel that, everybody you care about is like that. So you can’t help but feel this way.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, I lived in just, like, a mixed immigrant neighborhood. And it sounds like you lived in a—no, you didn’t live in a Korean neighborhood.

Lee: There’s so many. Like, I didn’t know white people existed.

Rosin: You did not?

Lee: No. You know why? Because nobody was white. You were from Pakistan. You were from India. You were from all these different countries, so you always had a country affiliation. So even if you were white you would say, I’m Polish.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: I’m Italian. I’m Irish.

Rosin: Yes.

Lee: And if you spoke Spanish, whatever country you came from, they’re like, Oh, he’s Spanish, and you’re like—and then you don’t think about the country, you think like, Oh, no, actually he’s from Ecuador.

Rosin: Right.

Lee: But then if you’re from, let’s say, the Dominican Republic, you’re like, “Oh, no, I am not Puerto Rican.”

Rosin: Yes. Yes. That was actually the big battle in my middle school, was between Dominicans and Puerto Ricans.

Lee: Yeah, DR, PR.

Rosin: And the big thing was lunch. That’s what I remember. Like, it was What language you speak? and What did you bring to school for lunch? That’s where all the divides came in.

Anyway, okay, to your novel. I did an informal survey of friends, and I would say less than half of them knew what the word hagwon meant, nor did they understand the whole culture of hagwon and what comes along with that word, so I think we need to start there. What is it?

Lee: So a hagwon is a learning center. Anytime you pay somebody to teach you something that’s not in regular school, that’s a hagwon. So in Korea, everybody goes to hagwons. The elderly, the child, the middle-aged person goes to hagwon to learn gourmet cooking, tap dancing, singing.

Rosin: But this makes it sound lovely, like a hagwon.

Lee: No, it is actually lovely. Because you have the optionality of self-improvement, and that’s very normal. And then you also have hagwons for civil-service exams, as well as when you’re 4 years old, you go to hagwon to learn English. So that’s the hagwon that people are really—I think Americans get really upset about.

Rosin: Ah. And I know you did a lot of research into hagwons. Can you just talk about the range? Like, was there a memory as you were looking into hagwons where you thought, Oh, this is very stressful, and other times when you thought, Oh, this is lovely?

Lee: Oh. I think before I started the research, I thought it was very stressful because I read all the data, and the data is terrifying.

So, like,, 80 percent of Koreans send their 5-year-olds to hagwon. So as a Western person, as an immigrant, as an American, you’re kinda going, “That’s kind of a lot.”

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: And also, you learn that the middle income of a Korean person was, let’s say, $35,000, and you’re spending $400 a month to hagwon bills for your 4-year-old, which apparently explains the low birth rate and the low marriage rate of Korea. So I found that really stressful. And then, of course, I go to all the different hagwons, and I don’t feel stressful at all.

Rosin: Oh, interesting.

Lee: Because they’re so normal. And then even the hagwons in America, I thought they’re actually necessary.

Rosin: Interesting.

Lee: I did a complete 180.

Rosin: Really? So you started out with the stereotype of hagwons—

Lee: Yes, based on the data.

Rosin: —like this is torturing children. They are—

Lee: Don’t get a childhood.

Rosin: They don’t get a childhood. They’re not able to play.

Lee: All of it.

Rosin: They’re being crammed with information. And that is not what you came out thinking?

Lee: I do not believe that anymore.

Rosin: Interesting.

Lee: I don’t think that they’re lovely, but I see why they’re necessary.

Rosin: Even if it means that children. I mean, my stereotype, and I’ve visited Korea, so I know a little bit, is that it’s the number of hours, it’s the quantity of hours you are expected to spend in school.

Lee: Yeah. And I think that if you’re a working parent and you have kids, hagwons are a kind of child care. And also, because you can’t help the kids with homework, so then parents will actually outsource this, and it becomes a low-cost way to get tutoring. So if you think about it that way, all of a sudden, every working parent in America is like maybe, Why don’t I do that?

Rosin: Yeah. It’s like high-end aftercare. Yeah. It’s—

Lee: —all very good. Well, it’s kinda like Kumon.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: Kumon is very inexpensive in America. And if your kid does Kumon, then you could be a legal secretary or somebody’s assistant-chief-of-staff kind of person and say, “You know, that’s $400 a month. I make $80,000 a year, and my kid can do these worksheets, get the stickers and the stuffed animals, and the kid will be probably in the top 10 percent of my public school.”

Rosin: Okay. So in the novel, there’s a mixed portrait. So for example, there’s a character named Ginny. And she’s almost a Dickensian character. She feels the most Dickensian of your characters. She’s sort of an urchin. You know, she’s sent by her parents at 9 years old to the U.S.

Her sole mission is to get into UCSF and go to medical school and be a doctor, but that means she ends up at a boarding house. Where does this child come from, and what does she represent?

Lee: They’re all around us, these kids. So sociologists call them “parachute children.” And they usually come from East Asia, and they’re parachuted down to another country, not necessarily always America—’cause America’s actually quite expensive—and the person who takes care of them is called the “homestay person,” the guardian. And you can pay somebody that you know or a family member, and you pay room and board. However, if you don’t have the money to pay, where does this child go?

Rosin: So you just said that to me pretty neutrally, as if there’s no heartbreak involved in the story of Ginny. Is that actually how you feel or interpret Ginny?

Lee: No. What I really think is interesting to me is that the people who do it think of it as an extraordinary privilege to get to do it.

It’s not like you’re trying to get rid of your kid. You’re thinking, I will scrape and save and borrow to send my kid overseas, because we think the American education is that important because my kid has to be a global child.

Rosin: And do you see it that way?

Lee: No. But you know what I do think? I think that what we don’t think about in America is the global contextualization of these parents’ decisions.

We’re talking about people who have nothing, or very close to nothing, and they’re trying to figure out, How do I become an elite person? Not me, but my child become an elite person. Like, how do I give my kid a shot? And it’s usually through exams. So you’ll have somebody in China and in Korea, in India, doing these kinds of things, and you’re right.

I mean, as a Western parent, it is really surprising. When you talk to the parents and you ask them what they went through, you really start to understand that this is their decision, and I have great sympathy for the parents who do this, as well as the kids. The kids are really confused, of course, because they’re just children.

Rosin: Right. It’s so interesting to hear you talk about this, because I know that you exist in the tradition of social-realist novels of the 19th century, and there is an element of maybe social justice in that?

Lee: Sure, sure. We’re from Queens!

Rosin: We’re from Queens. We care about all the—we care about the underdogs.

And I was wondering, is this like Upton Sinclair social justice? Like, I’m trying to expose the sort of crushing capitalist pressures that produce something like Ginny? But that’s not really your tone, even though that’s, you know, a mode that you exist in. Your tone is a little more anthropologist.

Lee: Yeah. I think you’re so smart to pick up on that, because there’s a part of me that wants to be the muckraker. But people don’t wanna read it.

Rosin: Interesting.

Lee: Yeah. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants the sermon. You know what people want? They want entertainment. And through entertainment and through drama, people will start to think, Oh, I really feel bad for this kid, Ginny. She’s 9 years old. She’s being parachuted.

And all of a sudden, you become Ginny, ’cause that’s what fiction does. ’Cause you identify with somebody in the scene. You’re like, Well, how would that feel to be Ginny? And I’m actually saying, I want you to think about Ginny, but I also want you to think about the guardian.

Asian parenting often becomes pathologized. It’s decontextualized. All we can see is the outcome, or we can see the data around it, but we don’t see the human interest. And as a matter of fact, if you were in the same situation, you might actually make the same decision.

Rosin: What drew you to this subject after Pachinko? Why education? Why did that become the thing that you thought was important to explore?

Lee: So I’m gonna write this thing called Diaspora Quartet. All the books are not related in characters or plot, but they’re related by this idea of diaspora because I think diaspora is now the modern person’s permanent condition.

Rosin: Interesting. What do you mean? Everybody?

Lee: Everybody. Not just Koreans. Everybody. So for example, environmental diaspora, right? So you don’t have any water in your city, in your town, and you have to move. You don’t have any more jobs in your town, so you have to move if you wanna go get an education or you have to cross a border.

And I’m saying that we are being scattered by modern society, so we have to study the subject. Like, I think we’ve gotta take it really seriously. So my entire novelistic work before I quit is going to be diaspora.

The people that I look at are Koreans. That’s my lane. It’s a lane I really wanna be in. And after my first two books, I asked myself, What is the value that Koreans care about more than any other thing? Because, and I took it really based upon all my interviews. I’ve had thousands of interviews, and in every single one of them, they talk about education with this kind of controversial kind of take.

They all care about the subject, but they have such different opinions on it that it always kinda took my breath away, because it was so not American. And that’s all I can say. It’s like, it was so unfamiliar to me, at the same time so familiar, because I heard it over and over again.

Rosin: And how—what is it? How would you summarize it?

Lee: That they care about it more than religion. They care more about it than money. They care more about it than status.

Rosin: Like, it’s almost a faith.

Lee: Yes. Yes.

Rosin: Like, they believe it is a token to success, almost in a pachinko way of, like, If you get this token, everything will work out.

Lee: Everything will work out, and also, it means so much to another person—like, if we learn, Oh, Hanna went to this school. I’m talking middle school. I’m not even talking about college here. Like, you went to this middle school. It means that you were in certain neighborhoods, and you’re, let’s say, the top student, ’cause they have that. They will remember the top student of a middle school.

And consequently, that means something to your classmates who went to middle school with you. And I think the average American person would say, “That is insane.” (Laughs.)

Rosin: Right. Right. We don’t think of it as a belief in that way. Like, an absolute belief.

Lee: Yeah. You know? So, I mean, and it wasn’t all the Koreans, but I would find Koreans who would say these things, and I thought, Huh, that’s so interesting.

So I thought, Okay, I’m gonna write this book about education, and I’m going to connect it with diaspora, because it made a lot of sense to me, because they would always say, “I wanna go here to learn English for my kid.” And they would accept all these arrangements, like the parachute kid.

Like the wild-geese phenomenon, which is when the father stays home, earns all the money, and the mom and the kid live somewhere else, like Australia, like the Philippines, in order to learn English. And people don’t really know that there are Koreans everywhere—

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: —especially where English is spoken. And you wouldn’t—and it’s not so obvious why they go.

Rosin: Yeah. So you’re both examining this idea and a little bit pushing back against this idea.

Lee: I wanna figure it out, and then I also wanna be fair to it, ’cause there’s two things. One is I don’t think in America we talk enough about education. We’re not helping children get the skills they need to take care of themselves. That is—

Rosin: Like, we’re failing in education.

Lee: We’re failing.

Rosin: We don’t worship it enough, or we don’t believe in it enough.

Lee: Like, if we have Koreans who are doing things at this sort of intense rate, we are doing that almost as a nation. We’re falling behind.

Rosin: In a too lackadaisical way. In fact, I would say the mythology that’s taken hold at this moment in America is the opposite. You’re wasting your time. Like, what you really should be doing is leaving your education and going to be an entrepreneur or a tech entrepreneur. Like, it’s like you’re a chump if you stick to the rote path.

Lee: Well, also this whole chump-ness, the chump population, the fact that we can even call people chumps is so anti-intellectual.

Like, which intellectual person would just say, “Oh, you’re a chump for getting a Ph.D.”? That you would study eight years to get a doctorate. Right? ’Cause the tech bros would be like, “You’re clearly a ding-dong, because I quit college.” Not all the tech bros, obviously, but I think that kind of thinking is—in Korea, if you have a Ph.D., that’s considered very honorable. By most people. Not everybody, but by many.

Rosin: I was thinking of a specific scene in the novel. It’s this community gathering at a Christian church, and one of the main characters, whose name is Lion, is giving this big speech to all of the parents. Lion runs this very successful Hagwon business that caters to Korean immigrants in Los Angeles. And in his speech, he’s telling the parents, Will you please worry less about your kids’ grades and less about where they’re going to college, and more about their mental health? He’s essentially pushing back against all this intensity.

It’s an interesting scene for a lot of reasons: (1) It doesn’t really work. Like, it just makes him sort of more valuable and ups the parents’ panic. And (2) it’s interesting because, like, he’s running a hagwon, so I’m not really sure how to under—it’s almost like the leaders of the AI companies who are like, Please restrain us. Like, he’s in charge of it, you know? So I was curious to hear you talk about that scene.

Lee: You know, I met all these hagwon teachers who had been doing it for a long time, and the ones who have been doing it for a long time, the ones who are really good, they’re almost like teenage whisperers, because these young kids, they don’t feel heard.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: They’re told a lot of things, but they’re not heard. So when you have this magical person who went to the famous school that your parents want you to go to, and they really listen to you, and they ask you questions like, So why do you wanna go to college? Maybe it’s not a good time. And the kid’s like, What do you mean? I have a choice?

And they get really excited. And I think when you can have access to what the kids are really thinking, it’s a very privileged position. And then I think these teachers start to really identify with the young people more, and they’re trying to help them. Because what ends up happening is some of these kids do go to these schools, and then after the first year, they literally just crash. And they’re also exhausted, especially in America. Because when you have 14 AP classes, no one should be doing that.

Rosin: Okay, that’s actually very helpful because the hagwon where a lot of the action takes place, the one run by Lion, is essentially—what it stands for is not a bucking of the system or a resistance. What it stands for is connection. Like, it’s a place where it’s an idealized form of tutoring and education, like, almost a connection between teacher and student. I have no idea if that exists or is common among hagwons, but that’s what novelistically it represents.

Lee: I saw hagwon teachers. Overwhelmingly, they’re pretty decent people. But I have met hagwon teachers who do bad things, who cheat.

Rosin: Who help the children cheat. Like they teach them bad values.

Lee: Yeah, or they write the college essays. They just take the parents’ money, and they churn these things out, and they also—the worst thing I think they do by cheating is by telling the kids, “This is the way the world works. So you carry on, and you keep doing this.”

Rosin: Right. So it makes them cynical.

Lee: Oh, the young people right now are so cynical in a way that you and I are like innocent, so innocent at that age, because we did not know. I shouldn’t speak for you, Hanna, but most people that I knew at Bronx Science, we did not really understand a lot of things.

Like, I didn’t know about legacies, for example. I didn’t know about having a famous parent. Like, I didn’t know about the sports track of how you get into school, especially at Bronx Science.

There are so many things I didn’t know, and I think that when you figure out, actually, if there are 1,200 seats in a class for that college, really there are about 400 left for the general population. And of that, that needs to be divided among a global constituency.

Rosin: Now that you do know all these things, you did go to elite colleges.

Lee: I did. Yeah.

Rosin: So when you look back, I mean, you went to some of the most prestigious universities, Yale and Georgetown. Did writing this book make you think differently about your experience in elite academia?

Lee: Well, I think that when I went to these elite spaces, except for Bronx Science, where I really felt normal and happy—it’s New York, and it’s just other kids from the boroughs. And also, not that much was expected of me. Like, I didn’t have a lot of pressure at home to study and to become something.

Rosin: Because your parents were not the so-called tiger parents.

Lee: No. My mother’s very laissez-faire, ’cause she went to a very prestigious school in Korea, and she’s a music person, and her attitude is, “If you have the brains and you squander it, that’s on you.”

Rosin: That’s nice. There’s freedom in that.

Lee: There’s a lot of freedom in it, and there’s three of us. So her attitude is, well, you know, again, I was considered sort of the slower of the pack.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: So then I really, I just, I was left to sort of read the free books and eventually find my way. And I think when I went to college, I met all these kids who were so polished and sophisticated and suave, and they were so well traveled. They just knew things that I just didn’t know, and I remember feeling like, Oh, I don’t know that. I really don’t know that, and I’ve never been there, and I don’t know how to pronounce that. Like, there were so many things I had read but I didn’t know how to say.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, more on Min Jin Lee’s new novel, American Hagwon, and why she sees herself as a moral novelist.

[Break]

Rosin: The novel is bookended by two financial catastrophes: the 1997 IMF crisis in South Korea and the 2008 subprime-mortgage crisis in the U.S. Why was it important for you to set it in this time period? What kind of pressure, extra pressure does that create?

Lee: Well, I wanna talk about now. I mean, I write social novels, and I think one of the things that we don’t wanna do is: We don’t wanna recognize the villains in our lives, because they’re not legible to us. Like, a financial crisis—we don’t understand how much damage it does to all of us all the time, because we don’t wanna understand the subjects.

Rosin: I see. So it’s easy to understand, like, a bad parent who ships—that’s very concrete.

Lee: Yes, yes.

Rosin: Yes, I see.

Lee: Yeah. A bad parent, a war.

Rosin: Yes.

Lee: The other country.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: Right? A religious group that you don’t like. That’s very easy to say, Oh, it’s them. It’s not me. A financial crisis? We all actually participate in it. And we don’t wanna be responsible for learning about it. And, again, that’s education. I actually think that if we had personal-finance classes, it would make a humongous difference in the way America runs.

Rosin: Just as in Pachinko, because of this financial crisis and other reasons, there are wild swings to family fortunes. What is interesting to you about putting your characters through that kind of suffering? What is important to learn about a family, or is that a way of testing people or evoking certain things?

Lee: Well, it’s actually what happens to all of us. Somebody loses a job. When one parent loses a job or is, as we say, reduced, you wake up, you open your computer, and you get an email saying, Your division is gone. That’s America now.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: How does that affect your family? Especially if the parent is, let’s say, 47 or 52. It’s really difficult to start again—

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: —at this age. And I wanted to show that happening to my characters because that’s what’s happening to us now.

Rosin: Now, if that situation happens, there are a lot of directions: The family could break apart. People could get angry, violent. The family you feature, what’s remarkable about them is they almost immediately choose to sacrifice for each other. The father goes from corporate world to working in a fish-fry restaurant. The daughter, who’s really, really smart, decides, Oh, I’m gonna work and put my brothers through school. So it’s a lot of sacrifice. What’s interesting to you about sacrifice?

Lee: Well, when I interviewed all these different families around the world about their education, especially the ones that lost everything in the IMF crisis, the ones who actually succeeded, the only survival strategy that worked was sacrifice and sequencing.

Rosin: What do you mean? Is it sacrifice within the family context?

Lee: Yeah. Somebody had to give. Not everybody’s gonna get what they want.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Lee: And it may seem pretty logical and obvious, but if everybody tries to get what they want, then the entire unit breaks apart.

Rosin: Yeah. I was wondering if you were working through the Korean concept or even a Christian concept of sacrifice.

Lee: You know, it’s actually, I think there are religious aspects of it that I think are valuable, and it’s shared cross-culturally by families who have faith in a religion, but also it was just the only thing that’s gonna work, because there’s limited resources and limited time. So even if, take religion away, I think even economists would understand that sequencing is sometimes the only choice. Like, if you only have $100, and $40 is all you could spend for education, and you have, let’s say, three kids, you can’t do it for all the kids.

Rosin: It’s funny, when you talk about some of these things or these decisions, you talk about the analytical part of them and less about the sort of spiritual, philosophical part of it. Like, in the book, the way sacrifice happens—I mean, there’s a lot of morality. Would you agree with that, that there is—

Lee: I’m definitely a moral writer.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: I’m definitely a moral novelist. I mean, in the same way all the writers that I love are moral novelists. Actually, you know why? Because, actually, I think most people are desperate for morality. (Laughs.)

Rosin: And what do you mean by “morality”? ’Cause there’s one surface-level reading, which is that in this novel, family is really important and central, holds people together, and people really sacrifice for their families. And the one person who does things which are very patently, say, un-Christian—lie, steal, seduce married men—really gets her comeuppance. So that’s almost a traditional kind of morality. But maybe that’s not what you mean by morality.

Lee: No. That’s actually just law. I mean, I was a former lawyer.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Yeah.

Lee: So I have seen people who behave this way get in trouble. I’ve talked to a lot of white-collar-criminal lawyers. So it’s really interesting. So you can argue that in this current climate, that we should celebrate the antihero. We could, right?

Rosin: And I would say a lot of Korean movies about inequality, at least the ones that are popular here, are very antihero, like Squid Game. I mean, they’re brutal and they don’t have any traditional morality. They definitely celebrate the antihero.

Lee: Right. But so I know the director and the writer of that show, for example, and when we talk about politics, he’s a very moral person.

Rosin: Interesting.

Lee: I mean, the reason why you show that in a satirical way is because you’re so outraged by the inequality. I think Koreans are really outraged by unfairness. Like, if you wanna have a scandal in Korea as a politician, your kid cheats on something and you let it go, that actually becomes a national scandal. If your wife accepts a handbag and she shouldn’t have, that’s corruption.

Rosin: That’s interesting, ’cause right now there’s sort of beginning to be a call for Democrats not to just talk about affordability, but to talk about how unfair things are. You know, to sort of add a kind of element of injustice and morality to what’s happening, which we see in data centers. It hasn’t quite percolated into the political language quite yet, but it’s there.

When you said people are desperate for morality, what is in your head? What are you thinking about?

Lee: Well, when I take the temperature of America right now with the people that I meet, people are really upset about the fact that we’re all so cynical, including children. Nobody believes in anything. And we think that terrible things are happening, and nobody’s being held accountable. Yet regular middle-class people still have to pay their bills, and we can’t ask questions why.

Gas prices are going up. Egg prices are going up. The rent’s going up. There’s no house to buy. The interest rates are going up. So this affordability crisis is a lot about, Hey, this is not fair, because some people who have assets are doing great, ’cause the stock market, despite all these things, is artificially inflated, and it’s doing great. But if you’re the chump who doesn’t have assets, you’re really upset. Again, fairness.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: You know, I think most people really see themselves as decent. That’s the other thing. ’Cause I’ve interviewed a lot of people who do some crazy bad things, illegal things. And they always have a reason why. And they’ll say things like, I did it for my family. I did it for my mother. I did it for X, Y, Z. And you’re kind of going like, But it’s illegal.

But they have a reason. And so when I listen to them, I go, Okay, well, most people really believe that they’re pretty decent. And then I meet people who are really trying to do the right thing with almost nothing. That always stuns me.

Rosin: Yeah. So you’ve talked a little bit about the quartet here. The fourth book is gonna be called the Marshall Plan. It’s always terrible to ask someone: How’s it going? (Laughs.)

Lee: (Laughs.)

Rosin: I’m not even gonna ask.

Lee: I started.

Rosin: Oh, you did? Congratulations.

Lee: Thank you.

Rosin: Can you just talk a little bit about what you’re exploring in the Marshall Plan?

Lee: So I think that the Marshall Plan is probably the smartest, most moral thing America

did.

Rosin: Let’s just say what it is.

Lee: Sure.

Rosin: It’s the 1948 U.S. initiative to help with economic recovery in Europe after World War II. How’s that as a summary?

Lee: Very, very. That’s—

Rosin: Thank you.

Lee: A+.

Rosin: Okay.

Lee: And the reason why that’s quite astonishing is because we could have taken the tack, Germany, you did something beyond evil. You should be punished. You should just suffer, right? But I think that people were aware that that suffering during World War I and the economic terms, which caused inflation and which caused this demagogue to become powerful, and then he scapegoated a minority, maybe we don’t wanna do that again. And by rebuilding—and rebuilding by giving money to Europe—all of us benefited, America and Europe. So it’s this thing that I think we always turn to in saying, We could do that.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lee: Why don’t we do that again? Why do we always like hurting people? I’m writing something called, Marshall Plan, not the Marshall Plan. And it’s about this idea of remittances and reconstruction. So all these Koreans left Korea in the ’60s and ’70s, and they went to Germany to work as miners and nurses, about 20,000 of them. And they sent their deutsche marks back to South Korea to help rebuild the country.

And then also, many Koreans went to Europe and became artists and learned more about the arts in Europe: singers, violinists, filmmakers, photographers. And then also, many women married GIs and went to America, and they sent money back to South Korea. I’m interested in this idea of remittances.

Rosin: I’m seeing—as you’re talking, I think I’m getting a better sense because it’s not a quartet in that we’re following the same characters over time, but you are thinking very hard about the world as it is, kind of different ways that it could be.

Lee: Yes.

Rosin: And morality in a sort of complex way, because it’s a morality that is constrained and exists in a very realistic world. Like, a world in which no one’s really dealt a fair hand, in which bad things happen, and particularly to people who don’t have that much power.

Lee: Yeah.

Rosin: You know?

Lee: No, you’re getting it. You’re really getting it. And it’s so important to me, because I’m not that interested in pointing out problems. I’m trying to figure out what works, and what has worked for people who have very little. Because all I hear all the time is that the world is burning down. And I’m thinking, like, This is not what we tell college students or teenagers. It’s not something that we tell middle-aged people. (Laughs.)

Rosin: You mean because it’s not inspiring?

Lee: Because (1) it’s also not true. It’s not true. If you look at the history of the world, things are horrible now, but they’re also—it was horrible then. And in some ways, significantly more horrible then. For women, right? All the illnesses that we’ve cured since then. And I keep thinking, Well, how did all of our ancestors deal with these horrific problems of just foolishness and hatred? All of it. And we need to figure something out, and we need to remember, because I know that this, like, perpetual state of fear and anxiety is not something that we can—like, we can’t do this. We have to have another story.

[Music]

Rosin: This is so good because I think a lot of people in this moment in American history take the path of avoidance or distraction. And you are essentially writing or speaking an intellectual’s guide to a happy life. Like, a high-information guide to a happy life. So I appreciate it.

Well, Min, thank you so much for joining me. And congratulations.

Lee: Well, Hanna, now that I know that we’re twins. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Yeah. I know, I kinda wish I’d gone to Bronx Science, you know?

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes and Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Yvonne Kim fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Art by Peter Mendelsund

Lately, I’ve been having dreams about my own execution. The nightmares mostly unfold in the same way: I am horrified to discover that I’ve committed a murder—the victim is never anyone I know but always has a face I’ve seen somewhere before. I cower in fear of detection, and wonder desperately if I should turn myself in to end the suspense. I am caught and convicted and sentenced to death. And then I’m inside an execution chamber like the ones I’ve seen many times, straining against the straps on a gurney, needles in both arms. I beg the executioner not to kill me. I tell him my children will be devastated—and somehow I know they’re watching from behind a window that looks like a mirror. I feel the burn of poison in my veins. After that comes emptiness.

Maybe everyone dreams of dying, even if not in quite this way. I once had nightmares about being a victim of crime, but after I began witnessing executions, I came to imagine myself on some subconscious plane as the perpetrator instead. This is perhaps a result of overidentification with the men I’ve watched die—and my understanding of the Christian religion, in which we’re all convicted sinners. I’m particularly interested in forgiveness and mercy, some of my faith’s most stringent dictates. If those forms of compassion are possible for murderers, then they’re possible for everyone.

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These questions, combined with a murder that tore into my own family, inspired me, several years ago, to volunteer to witness an execution—one of 13 carried out at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, during the final six months of Donald Trump’s first term. Most of the 23 states that still have an active death penalty allow a certain number of journalists to witness executions, as does the federal government. I sent an application to the appropriate federal office and, somewhat to my surprise, it was approved.

I had been trying to compose my thoughts about the death penalty for a while, distilling them into scraps and stubs of writing, but the only certainty I had going into the Indiana death chamber in December 2020 was the simple sense that it’s generally wrong to kill people, even bad people. What I witnessed on this occasion and the ones that came after has not changed my conviction that capital punishment must end. But in sometimes-unexpected ways, it has changed my understanding of why.

Capital punishment operates according to an emotional logic. Vengeance is elemental. Injustice cries out for redress. Murder is the most horrifying of crimes, and it seems only fitting to pair it with the most horrifying of punishments. All of this made sense to me when I was growing up in Texas, and so I wondered as I approached Terre Haute if some primal part of me would feel satisfaction: Recompense had been made.

The case of Alfred Bourgeois was the kind that advocates like to cite as justification for the death penalty. Bourgeois was a deeply unsympathetic figure—convicted in 2004 of the torture and murder of his toddler daughter, Ja’karenn Gunter, at the naval air station in Corpus Christi, Texas. Prosecutors said he had bashed the girl’s head against the inside of his truck after a prolonged period of abuse and neglect. The case was federal because the murder had been committed on a military base, and now the government was about to execute Bourgeois by lethal injection.

In my memory, everything about that night is green: the neat turf surrounding the penitentiary’s media center, glistening in the rain. The paint on the window frames inside the witness room. The cat eyes of Alfred Bourgeois himself. I was green, too: nervous in my seat in front of the windows that gave onto the execution chamber, sweat beading along my hairline as I breathed hot air against my face behind a pandemic-era mask. Static crackled when Bourgeois spoke his last words into a microphone that had been lowered over him. He protested his innocence, a claim his elder daughter has posthumously pursued with limited success.

And then the prison authorities started the injection. I didn’t expect Bourgeois to thrash on the gurney as he died, but he did. Lethal injection is advertised as easy. His death was not.

Killing Bourgeois was ostensibly about justice, or at least about vengeance. But as for any visceral sense of satisfaction, I felt none: Outside in the rain afterward, I threw up on the concrete. I found the spectacle as unnatural and disturbing as the murder itself had been.

I published an article about the experience, hoping, perhaps naively, that a straightforward account might encourage some people, somewhere, to pause for a moment and think about capital punishment. For the same reason, I also decided to try to serve as a witness on future occasions. I drew a grid on the chalkboard wall of my kitchen, with room for names and dates, so that I could keep track of death-penalty cases and scheduled executions as I learned of them.

I knew this meant I was effectively siding with killers, even if only on a single issue—whether they should be put to death. Morally, that made me nervous. I wanted to be on the exact right side of things: opposed to capital punishment for principled reasons involving the dignity of human life, but at the same time opposed to defending murderers in any way that might seem to downplay the seriousness of their crimes. It felt like a precarious position.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Can America kill its prisoners kindly?]

The next execution I observed was the result of another particularly heinous murder, this one in Mississippi. In 2009, Kim Cox, the estranged wife of a man named David Neal Cox, reported her husband to authorities for allegedly molesting her preteen daughter, Lindsey. Cox was taken into custody and faced charges of sexual battery and child abuse. Nine months later, he was released on bond. He found Kim and Lindsey at Kim’s sister’s trailer, where he took mother and daughter hostage. During an approximately eight-hour standoff with police, Cox shot Kim twice with a .40-caliber handgun. As she lay dying, he sexually assaulted Lindsey. Kim died before a SWAT team stormed the trailer and rescued her daughter. Cox pleaded guilty to all charges.

In September 2012, a Mississippi jury sentenced him to death. By 2018, Cox had begun to send letters to the Mississippi Supreme Court, asking that his lawyers be fired. He also wanted to waive further appeals: “I seek to be executed as I do here this day stand on MS Death row a guilty man worthy of death.” He said he deserved to die and passionately testified to his depravity, writing to the court, “If I had my perfect way & will about it, Id ever so gladly dig my dead sarkastic wife up of in whom I very happily & premeditatedly slaughtered on 5-14-2010 & with eager pleasure kill the fat heathern hore agan.” He saw himself as divided between two “skins,” one that sought “life & relief” and one that sought “death & relief, still.” In 2021, the death-seeking skin prevailed in the courts.

I volunteered to serve as a witness at Cox’s execution, traveling to the Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman Farm, in the low plains of the Delta. It was fall, but the season hadn’t yet touched the Deep South; there were still sleepless crickets in the evenings, and grand trees in summer dress. Prison officials directed witnesses into white vans, which took us along back roads to the execution chamber.

Cox uttered his last words, declaring in a short speech that he “was a good man, at one time.” In the moment, I didn’t know what to make of that statement, and truthfully I still don’t. Did he mean to say that he was irredeemable—that the path from good to evil ran only one way? Or did he mean the opposite? And which would be the stranger thing to say in his position? In the dim witness room, I transcribed his words. As for the execution, this time I was prepared. It didn’t turn my stomach when Cox’s face subtly changed color on the gurney, from pale to flushed, as the poison ravaged his body.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: A good man, at one time]

Afterward, Burl Cain, the commissioner of the Mississippi Department of Corrections, held a press conference. Cain emphasized that the process had been smooth, in part owing to his own relationship with Cox, which he characterized as congenial. Cox, in his final words, had thanked Cain for his kindness. Cain said he had comforted Cox in the chamber by telling him about angels carrying his soul to heaven. A reporter asked him if he believed that Cox was truly Christian. Cain quoted Matthew: “Judge not lest you be judged.”

Of course, capital punishment as an institution relies on judgment at every level: judgment about guilt, about fairness, about proportion, about pain and cruelty, about the possibility of redemption. Judgment about how to carry out a death sentence and how to behave as one does so. And then there is the judgment that must be directed at oneself and one’s community—the distant, sometimes-forgotten participants. In all of this, I see the arc of my own evolving comprehension.

[Read: Inside America’s death chambers]

In 1764, the Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria published his essay “On Crimes and Punishments,” one of the first sustained arguments for abolition of the death penalty, which at the time was meted out as a punishment not only for murder but for crimes such as manslaughter, arson, robbery, burglary, sodomy, bestiality, forgery, and witchcraft. Beccaria reasoned that governments have no authority to violate the rights of their citizens by taking their life and that the death penalty was a less effective deterrent than imprisonment. Beccaria’s work was widely influential in the American colonies. By 1860, no northern state executed criminals for any crimes other than murder and treason.

Conditions in the South were different. In the mid-19th century, one could be executed in Louisiana for a variety of activities that might spread discontent among free or enslaved Black people: making a speech, displaying a sign, printing and distributing materials, even having a private conversation. “Throughout the South attempted rape was a capital crime, but only if the defendant was black and the victim white,” the historian Stuart Banner observes in his 2002 book, The Death Penalty. (There is no known record of a white rapist ever being hanged in the antebellum South.) Enslaved people were subject to a wide array of capital sentences and to exceedingly brutal forms of execution. American capital punishment took on an undeniably racist character.

Over time, the range of permissible execution methods narrowed. Public hangings largely fell out of favor in the 19th century, when the spectacle of executions came to be seen as not only coarse but coarsening. Firing squads, bloody and brutal, became exceedingly rare by the mid-20th century. Executions withdrew behind prison walls as electrocution came into fashion, beginning in the late 1800s. The electric chair was used thousands of times, despite its tendency to produce horrifying unintended outcomes, such as prisoners catching on fire. Execution by lethal gas became available in 1921, but gas, too, resulted in agonizing deaths.

In the late 1960s, the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund launched a nationwide campaign to challenge the death penalty not on strictly moral grounds but on a variety of legal ones, including the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Then, in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court took up three death-penalty cases under the name Furman v. Georgia. Lawyers for William Henry Furman, who had been convicted of felony murder, argued that capital punishment as practiced in America—arbitrarily, and with intense racial bias—violated defendants’ Eighth Amendment protections because it imposed death sentences unfairly. The case split the Court in nine directions, with five justices issuing separate opinions in favor of the petitioner. Of those five, only two found capital punishment unconstitutional per se. The other three found that it was unconstitutional as practiced. One result of Furman was a brief moratorium on executions across the United States.

It was a hinge moment. As the death-penalty scholar Austin Sarat has noted, the “old abolitionism,” where opponents of the death penalty made their case in moral terms—mounting arguments about human worth and dignity—was giving way to a “new abolitionism,” where opponents instead focused their messaging on practical barriers to the just and humane application of capital punishment. These contemporary arguments involve factual observations about the death penalty as practiced—namely, that innocent people may be executed, that sentencing is arbitrary, that the handing-down of death sentences is heavily influenced by racism, and that the use of capital punishment is marked by horrific mishaps.

Executions resumed in 1977 after revisions to state laws. That same year, spurred by the grisly failures of electrocution, Oklahoma passed a bill permitting death by lethal injection, a form of execution that Ronald Reagan once analogized to having a veterinarian put an animal to sleep. Lethal injection was eventually adopted in every state that has the death penalty. It, too, has been the subject of much-publicized failures, as well as fierce litigation.

I learned firsthand about what could go wrong in the summer of 2022, when I received a call from a doctor who works with prisoners on Alabama’s death row. The doctor, Joel Zivot, told me that the state had likely botched the execution of a man named Joe Nathan James Jr.—sentenced to death for murdering Faith Hall, his ex-girlfriend, in 1994—and was keeping the matter secret. Witnesses to the execution reported that they had waited roughly three hours before they were permitted inside the facility, during which time James’s whereabouts were unknown, and that when the curtain to the execution chamber was finally opened, James appeared unconscious. The case drew my attention for another reason: Hall’s family, including her two daughters, had been opposed to the execution, saying that Hall believed in forgiveness and wouldn’t have wanted James put to death. I was struck by the advocacy of a victim’s family, which I wrongly assumed to have been very rare.

Time was short. James had been dead for a couple of days, and burial was imminent. The official autopsy report issued by the state’s Department of Forensic Sciences would not be available for months. With the help of James’s attorney and James’s brother Hakim, Zivot and I arranged for an independent pathologist to conduct a second autopsy to help clarify how James’s death had actually occurred.

The procedure took place at a funeral home in Birmingham on a seethingly hot day. Light shimmered above the pavement. Inside, box fans ventilated the small tiled room where James’s body lay on an examination table, draped in a shroud and a plastic sheet. When I arrived, his torso was already open, slit down the middle, with coils of intestines gathered alongside him. The top of his skull had been sawed off; his brain had been removed and sat in a clear bag. The pathologist lifted up the lungs to weigh them. I rounded the table to look at James’s inner arms.

Zivot had been onto something: Rather than cleanly inserting the two needles required for the injection, executioners appeared to have pierced James’s hands and arms all over in search of a usable vein. Bruises had bloomed near the puncture sites. Just below his bicep, there were slashes consistent with an attempted “cutdown,” when a blade is used to open the skin in order to access a vein. The number of slashes suggested multiple attempts. Mark Edgar, a pathologist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, theorized that James had been thrashing on the gurney. (The Alabama Department of Corrections has denied that execution staff administered a cutdown.)

Something about the image—the blood, the nakedness, the evidence of pain—reminded me of giving birth, of the organic intensity that marks both ends of life.

I remembered Burl Cain, the corrections commissioner in Mississippi, saying he’d thought of the victims when David Neal Cox asked on the gurney if he would feel any pain. Cox, after all, had been ruthlessly indifferent to the pain of his victims. A great number of people come to the same conclusion—that to care about death-row prisoners is to slight the people they killed. But Cain made another observation: He couldn’t help the victim of this murder or her family; he could, however, help the prisoner in his custody. For that reason, he had comforted Cox. A similar desire to help, and the fact that the family of James’s victim had publicly forgiven her killer and campaigned to halt his execution, made me more comfortable with the sympathy I felt for him. I took pictures of his cuts and bruises and, in a small office at the mortuary, prayed for the repose of his soul.

Later, I wrote about James’s death, laying into Alabama state authorities for the evidently torturous execution and the attempt to cover it up. What had happened mattered. James was a human being, I meant to say, and, moreover, a member of society. It was around that time, the graphic encounter with James still fresh, that I started to dream of dying by lethal injection.

Joe Nathan James Jr., David Neal Cox, and Alfred Bourgeois were men I had never known personally. The experience of confronting their deaths was vivid, but also, on some level, remote. But that began to change.

To tell the full story of what had happened to James required reaching out to other men on Alabama’s death row. I had no idea what to expect, and was wary. The exchanges were initially terse, but in time became more familiar. I came to appreciate the personalities of the men, their relationships with one another, their complex interior worlds. Some were laconic and businesslike; others were friendly and conversational. I enjoyed talking with them—not just about the specific subject at hand but also about their life inside prison: candy bars from the commissary, visits from members of a local church, vigils for the dying.

The next prisoner scheduled to be executed in Alabama in 2022 was a man named Alan Eugene Miller, who on a summer day in 1999 had shot and killed two co-workers and a former supervisor. The other men on death row called him Big Miller on account of his 350-pound build. Charles Scott, a psychiatrist retained by Miller’s trial counsel, had concluded that Miller was delusional during his rampage. Another psychiatrist, this one for the prosecution, believed that Miller had suffered from a schizoid personality disorder at the time of the murders. Mental illness is extremely common among prisoners on death row, but the Supreme Court has never ruled that it disqualifies a person from capital punishment. Miller had a tendency to speak at length without much direction, to others as well as to himself. One acquaintance described him as “childlike.”

At first I mainly interacted with Miller through lawyers, friends, and family. Miller himself called me after the article about James was published. He was nervous but polite, with a high, reedy voice. His execution date had been set, and he wanted someone there to document what was going to happen to him. The Alabama Department of Corrections had not replied to requests I’d made about serving as a media witness to executions, and I did not entertain much hope that it ever would. But there was another way in. Each condemned prisoner is entitled to six “personal witnesses,” and Miller made me one of his.

On the night of September 22, 2022, I gathered with Miller’s family to count down the hours until midnight—after which Miller’s death warrant would legally expire. It was the first occasion I’d had to observe how a family experiences a loved one’s execution.

Miller’s family members were down-to-earth, genuine people. I had expected that they would be somber—and they were—but they also displayed a kind of gallows humor. Given the circumstances, any questions I had were ill-timed, but the family put me at ease and answered them. We were sharing something intimate: this preemptive mourning, this encounter with death.

But not long after we’d all moved into the witness chamber, a prison guard ushered us out, saying that the execution had been abruptly called off. As midnight approached, the state still wasn’t ready to proceed. Delays had been caused by Miller’s final appeals and also by technical failures in the chamber: Miller later said that he had been strapped down and pierced multiple times with needles as execution staff tried to access his veins. It would take Alabama time to secure another death warrant from the courts, and so for now, Miller would be spared.

Shortly afterward, I spoke with Kenneth Eugene Smith, the next man scheduled for execution in Alabama. One of Smith’s friends in prison had put us in touch. Right away, Smith was warm and courteous—surprisingly so, considering his situation. Pressure reveals character, and as Smith’s personality fell into relief, I concluded that whatever else he had been, he was also an amiable southern grandpa who reminded me of men I’d known in my childhood in Texas. Talking with him came easily. We connected over conversations about religion, our children, fantasy books and movies, his life on the inside. Eventually I came to think of him as a friend. His execution was scheduled for November.

Smith’s case was complicated. In 1988, Charles Sennett, an Alabama pastor, had resolved to have his wife, Elizabeth, murdered. He was involved in an affair and deeply in debt, so he took out a large insurance policy on his wife and began inquiring around town about paying for a hit. Smith agreed to take the job along with his friend John Forrest Parker. One March day, the two drove to the Sennetts’ home in the country, where they entered and found Elizabeth.

According to the coroner’s testimony, Elizabeth died of multiple stab wounds. The exact circumstances are hard to reconstruct. Smith would later insist that Parker had started battering Elizabeth, first with his fists, then with a cane—anything he could get his hands on. (Parker confessed to beating the minister’s wife, but claimed that he never stabbed her.) While Parker attacked Elizabeth, Smith ransacked the house and stole a VCR. The last time he laid eyes on her, he told police, Elizabeth was lying near the fireplace with a blanket over her body. Smith and Parker fled in Parker’s car.

Charles Sennett killed himself before he could be charged in his wife’s death. In 1989, Parker and Smith were convicted of capital murder. Smith appealed his death sentence, and in 1996, a jury handed down a sentence of life imprisonment instead. But a judge condemned Smith to death anyway—a maneuver known as judicial override, which would eventually be outlawed in Alabama. Existing sentences, however, were allowed to stand.

Parker had been executed in 2010, and Smith’s execution was now coming up. I offered to serve as a personal witness, and Smith accepted. On November 17, 2022, I spent the evening with one of Smith’s lawyers in his hotel room, relaying information as I learned it to Smith’s wife, Deanna “Dee” Smith, who was staying at another hotel nearby. Smith’s final appeal had been denied. All of us were waiting for the summons to the witness chamber. But the summons never came: The execution staff once again faced a midnight deadline and couldn’t beat the clock. The execution was called off. I relayed the news to Dee. That night, after Smith had been returned to his cell, I spoke with him and Dee on a conference call. Smith was in shock. He explained that he had been strapped down and ineffectually stuck with needles—much, I imagined, as Miller and apparently James had been. The execution staff had also jammed a long needle underneath his collarbone, looking for a subclavian vein. On the call, Dee recounted how Smith had dreamed earlier that morning of surviving his execution, marveling at what had occurred.

After Alabama failed to execute Smith in time, Kay Ivey, the governor, instituted a moratorium on executions for a few months so the state could review its procedures and protocols. (The results of the review were never made public.) When the moratorium was lifted and their second execution dates were scheduled, Smith and Miller again asked me to join them as they faced death, this time from suffocation by means of nitrogen hypoxia—according to experts, a form of killing never before used as a method of execution. Smith would die on January 25, 2024, and Miller on September 26.

I understand why people who favor the death penalty—more than 50 percent of all Americans—feel the way they do. Murder is an offense not just against a person and their family but against society itself, and all of us have a stake in how the state responds. Some people favor a lethal brand of justice, and I would have assumed, before murder entered my own life, that almost anyone directly affected by homicide would feel the same.

On a warm June afternoon in 2016, I was asleep in bed with our newborn daughter when my husband, Matt, came into the room to tell me that his 29-year-old sister, Heather, was dead. She had been stabbed to death so brutally that the first responders at the scene initially believed she had sustained a gunshot wound. The killer, a 25-year-old man named Javier Vazquez-Martinez, with whom she had been romantically involved, was apprehended after a police chase across Arlington, Texas. According to incident reports, he was intoxicated and in possession of drugs, an open container of hard liquor, and a knife. When interviewed by law enforcement, he denied ever assaulting Heather, but witnesses told police that Vazquez-Martinez had beaten her so severely in the past few weeks that she had been hospitalized. That’s the part that my father-in-law, Marty, often thinks about.

Marty is a retired forklift driver who still lives in Arlington, where Heather, Matt, and I all grew up. “Heather was a great daughter,” Marty told me. “She cared about everyone.” She was vivacious and beautiful, played basketball, and maxed out her library card every time she visited. Marty and Matt are quiet and reserved; Heather’s sociability made for a contrast. I remember meeting her: She was full of questions and seemed pleased that her shy younger brother had turned up with a girlfriend. Heather was murdered on Father’s Day, and Marty knew something was wrong when she didn’t call.

After the police notified him of her death, Marty was put in touch with a victims’ advocate, who would help shepherd him through the criminal-justice process. Eventually he was summoned to a meeting with a local district attorney in Fort Worth. Despite a lifetime in Texas, where capital punishment has broad support, Marty didn’t go into the meeting with a plan to campaign for the death penalty. “I know Heather wouldn’t have wanted it,” he explained to me. “I have Christian values and beliefs, though they wander from time to time.” He went on, “I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do. I don’t think it helps anybody.” Vazquez-Martinez was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Like his father, my husband remains heartbroken by Heather’s death. It has been bittersweet watching her features blossom on our daughter’s face. Matt knows that the death penalty may serve an expressive purpose—signaling the depth of outrage and pain—but he ultimately holds to the same view of capital punishment that his father has in Heather’s case.

Families of murder victims routinely perform exceptional feats of mercy, if not forgiveness. “We’re pretty forgiving people, but I haven’t forgiven him,” Marty told me. Forgiveness is an emotional process that involves coming to see a wrongdoer as a moral equal again, and inviting them back into the place reserved in your heart for the rest of the world. To forgive someone who has harmed you is to forswear bitter feelings, which is to surrender a certain righteous power—the permission granted by society for retaliation. It is also therefore a kind of sacrifice. Only divinity can demand that of someone; no human being can demand it of another. And the Christian directive is especially exacting, requiring forgiveness for others in order to be forgiven oneself.

But mercy—to refrain from punishing a person to the maximum extent that a transgression might deserve—doesn’t demand half as much. It is hard to imagine forgiveness without mercy, but easy to imagine mercy without forgiveness. In his treatise On Clemency, addressed to the emperor he served, the philosopher Seneca describes mercy as “a restraining of the mind from vengeance when it is in its power to avenge itself”—in other words, a “gentleness shown by a powerful man in fixing the punishment of a weaker one.” The ruler who shows mercy is “sparing of the blood” of even the lowest of subjects simply because “he is a man.” Socially, mercy registers the value of human life. For the benefactor, it is a forge of moral character. For the recipient, it is a godsend.

The age of all-powerful sovereigns is mostly gone, but avenues for public acts of mercy remain. State governors, for instance, frequently opt to commute death sentences based on their evaluation of the circumstances. Legislators in many states have shown mercy to even the worst criminals by voting to end capital punishment. Mercy may be in some sense arbitrary, but so is capital punishment, and although mercy may produce unequal outcomes, unfairness in benefaction is better than the unfairness in harm that defines the American exercise of the death penalty. If one insists on complete and total fairness, then: no mercy, and no capital punishment.

Many people on death row are more worthy of love and respect than one might initially assume, and in such instances, mercy perhaps comes more easily. But choosing mercy is the moral path even in the hardest cases—even if you believe that some people deserve execution, even if you think you can judge the totality of someone’s character from their worst act, and even if you know for a fact that the person in question is guilty and unrepentant.

Seneca’s reasons for advising clemency are Stoic: It is better to restrain one’s impulses than to indulge them, especially when they involve destructive tendencies, such as wrath and cruelty. Self-control is a virtue, and it is possible to educate one’s desires so that they gradually change. To default to mercy is to impose limitations on one’s own power to retaliate, and to acknowledge our flawed nature. To a Christian, mercy derives from charity. And in the liminal space where families of murder victims are recruited into the judicial process—to either bless or condemn a prosecutor’s intentions—showing mercy is an especially heroic decision. To think this way is to understand that the moral dimension of capital punishment is not just about what we do to others. It’s also about what we do to ourselves.

Periodically, forgiveness and mercy meet under the right conditions to produce reconciliation. In the spring of 2001, James Edward Barber murdered 75-year-old Dorothy “Dottie” Epps during a drunken crack binge in Harvest, Alabama. He didn’t do it for money. He didn’t do it for any reason at all. His recollection of the incident was hazy, he testified, but he could recall being inside Epps’s house and picking up a hammer. For a time, Barber would later say, he was in “utter disbelief” and denial about what he had done. He fought in county jail, lashing out in shame and anger. He was living, by his own account, a “worthless life.”

But Barber slowly began to change. Isolated and restless, he began reading a Bible. And he was taken with it—fell in love with it; read it through once, then twice; and, eventually, signed up for correspondence courses. Barber became a friendly face on death row, much like Kenny Smith. “They were approachable open and willing to engage with anyone on almost any topic,” one death-row prisoner wrote to me over Alabama’s prison messaging app. “Jimmie always had a self deprecating joke.” According to his lawyer, Barber’s record inside prison was spotless. But there was something incomplete about his reform.

That changed in 2020, when he opened a letter from Sarah Gregory, Epps’s granddaughter, and found forgiveness inside. “I am tired Jimmy,” she wrote. “I am tired. I am tired of carrying this pain, hate, and rage in my heart. I can’t do it anymore. I have to do this and truly forgive you.” Barber was astonished—brought to his knees. He composed a letter of his own: “Sarah, sorry could never come close to what is in my heart & soul.” He went on: “I made a promise to myself in that nasty, dirty, evil county jail, I was never going to become ‘a convict.’ I made up my mind that when I left prison either on my feet or in a body bag I was going to be a better man than when I arrived.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: What it means to forgive the unforgivable]

Gregory wrote back: “Receiving your letter was the final piece of freedom. The weight was lifted when I forgave you in my heart, but your response back brought me indescribable freedom and release.” The two began talking on the phone about life and God and Gregory’s son. Her forgiveness seemed to bind them together. “I love that girl more than I love anybody else in this world,” Barber told me.

As Barber’s time dwindled, Gregory realized she didn’t want to see him put to death. The day before his scheduled execution, Gregory told me that she was “losing a friend tomorrow.” She said, “I would’ve never thought I would’ve ever said that. He was a friend of mine, and I’m gonna miss him.”

On the night of July 21, 2023, I watched Barber die in Alabama’s death chamber. Afterward, his lawyers shared his final statement: “I made up my mind early on that mere words could not express my sorrow at what had occurred at my hands. And so I hoped that the way I lived my life would be a testimony to the family of Dorothy Epps and also my family, of the regret and shame I have for what I’ve done.” It wasn’t for him to say whether his efforts were successful. But they were enough for Gregory.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Jimi Barber died a forgiven man]

Barber was the first person executed after Alabama lifted its temporary moratorium and resumed lethal injections. I had corresponded with him on Alabama’s prison messaging app, and his sister-in-law had shown me a letter he’d written to her. He was joyful, kind, and encouraging—and grateful for so much, even in his position. I knew him well enough to feel certain that he was sincere in his remorse and repentance. The death penalty is, to some degree, indiscriminate: Both innocent and guilty people have been sentenced to death. But the death penalty is also morally indiscriminate in an additional way, in that it kills guilty people who may have become good people. By the time execution arrives, the offender may be a completely different person from the one who took a life. We can’t know the nature or potential of another’s soul.

Today, 27 states have abolished the death penalty or have halted executions by executive action. According to the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, as of last summer, 2,213 people resided on America’s death rows, compared with 3,682 people in 2000. In each year during the past decade, fewer than 50 death sentences have been handed down by American courts. The Justice Department declared a moratorium on federal executions after Joe Biden took office, in 2021, and before leaving office, Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men awaiting execution in federal prisons. “It’s not an irreversible momentum,” Austin Sarat, the death-penalty scholar, told me, “but I think the momentum against the death penalty is pretty substantial.”

Yet for now, in the United States, the death penalty continues. Donald Trump has signed an executive order directing federal prosecutors to pursue the death penalty in all applicable cases. South Carolina recently carried out the nation’s first firing-squad execution in 15 years, and Louisiana resumed executions after a long hiatus—this time by nitrogen hypoxia. Perhaps worried about the continued practical feasibility of lethal injection, Oklahoma and Mississippi have also made execution by nitrogen hypoxia statutorily available within their borders. It would be quick and painless, proponents said. Just like going to sleep.

Kenny Smith, who had survived his first attempted execution, would be the first person ever to be put to death by means of nitrogen hypoxia. I arrived at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility a little after eight on the morning of January 24, 2024, the day before his rescheduled execution. I was accompanied by his wife, Dee, and his nieces and nephew. We passed through a metal detector and handed over our IDs, wallets, and keys to a guard stationed outside the visitation room.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Why does Alabama keep botching executions?]

Despite having gotten to know Smith for nearly a year and a half, I had never met him in person. I was surprised to see how tall and broad he was, an imposing presence softened by a graying beard and an avuncular demeanor. “C’mere, Little Bit,” he said, breaking into a smile as he rose from the table where he sat. “Gimme a hug.” The nickname was new; Smith had called me “ma’am” the first time we spoke and “hun” after that.

Smith and I sat down at the plastic-topped table where he huddled with his son Steven Tiggleman, his daughter-in-law Chandon Tiggleman, and his mother, Linda Smith. Dee leaned toward Smith across the table and murmured to him in quiet tones. The scene had the look of a last supper, everyone gathered close with melancholy faces, grieving in advance.

Hours passed. Dee and the others had brought in plastic baggies full of quarters to clink into the vending machines. No outside food was allowed in, so we drank Mountain Dew and Sunkist, and split bags of chips and honey buns and Skittles. Smith leaned against his mother. At one point, a prison worker came in and took pictures of all of us in a group. Smith and I stood together for a photo; he somehow managed a smile. A group of Mennonites came by to sing “Amazing Grace” on the other side of an interior wall. Conversation seemed to proceed in waves of fond reverie that peaked with laughter and then crashed into silence.

As night fell, I joined Smith’s family for dinner. We met at a casino a few minutes from the prison. The place was decked out for Mardi Gras—white artificial Christmas trees stuck with floral sprays of gold, green, and purple; masked harlequin puppets draped in multicolored beads. We sat together in the casino’s steak house. Rain began to fall as we ate, and continued into the next day. The prison’s gutters were flooded and gushing onto the stony pavement as we filed in to visit Smith one last time.

No more quarters were permitted inside, no more snacks and soda. Smith could potentially vomit inside the mask, something the state hoped to avoid by depriving him of food after 10 a.m. on the day he was to die. He’d eaten steak and eggs with hash browns from Waffle House for breakfast that morning, his last meal. Then he sat with us in cheaply upholstered metal chairs and talked.

Everyone took turns crying, holding on to one another for strength. Smith wept in his mother’s arms. Steven, a reserved and courteous man, spoke quietly with his father. Smith kissed Dee, massaged her shoulders, reassured her. She wore a shirt that said Never Alone, a gloss on Hebrews 13:5: “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ ” It was the same shirt she had worn to his first scheduled execution, back in 2022. Now it implied a shred of hope.

Smith led me to a couple of chairs side by side in a far corner of the visitation room and sat down with me. I was emotional, too; so much for steely journalistic resolve. Smith patted me on the back paternally and told me I could ask him anything I liked. So I asked him about his life and how he reflected on it. Smith wasn’t angry about his situation, or frustrated by the length of time he had spent alienated from society. He’d had a life before he went to prison, he told me. He had done a terrible thing, but he had also worked, had children, found love, and made friends. He had sustained those relationships behind bars, where many people wind up isolated and lonely. Smith had a vivid inner life.

Shortly after this conversation, prison officials struck me from Smith’s personal-witness list because I had brought pen and paper, something I had been told I wasn’t supposed to have, into the visitation room. Of course, this wasn’t strictly about pen and paper—it was about what I had already written and published, although the Alabama Department of Corrections denies this. I was summarily barred from Smith’s final moments and would be banned from serving as a personal witness in Alabama going forward. (And so I was unable to attend Alan Eugene Miller’s execution, by nitrogen hypoxia, in September.) But the accounts of others allowed me to follow events that night. Around 7 p.m., the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Smith’s final appeal, clearing the way for the state to carry out the sentence. The execution staff once again strapped Smith to a gurney, this time with an industrial respirator mask fixed to his face. As his family watched through the window between the death chamber and the witness room, the gas began to flow. Smith’s blood oxygen became depleted, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he began to convulse. For 22 minutes, Smith writhed and gasped, struggling for air, and then, finally, he died.

Later that night, at a press conference after the execution, Steven sought out the family of Smith’s victim, Elizabeth Sennett. He hugged them, and apologized—something he told me he had been waiting to do nearly his whole life, haunted by the burden of shame that connected their families. One of Sennett’s sons, Mike, hugged Steven back. When the reporters and TV crews were gone, Dee, Steven, and his brother, Michael, lingered with me on the patio of a Holiday Inn, smoking cigarettes and sharing shots of whiskey from a Dixie cup. Dee wept, swaying softly as she stood. Inside the hotel, she had clutched a green teddy bear Smith had given her, made from some of his prison-issued clothes, with a lock of his hair sewn inside. Now she looked at her phone as news alerts of her husband’s death popped up on the screen.

We stood and talked until midnight, when I said I had better get back to my hotel. I was feeling a little disoriented, fragments of the night’s conversations surfacing through the static in my head. I couldn’t make sense of the fact that Smith had survived once, only to be put to death in the end. Miracles are mercurial. As the time of execution approached, a reporter had asked Smith what his message to the public would be. “You know, brother, I’d say, ‘Leave room for mercy,’ ” he’d replied. “That just doesn’t exist in Alabama. Mercy really doesn’t exist in this country when it comes to difficult situations like mine.”

He was right about that. Now that he was gone, life after Smith had begun. I would clip the pictures of us together onto the refrigerator with a magnet, next to the school papers and crayon drawings. I would continue to seek opportunities to serve as a witness at executions, though now outside Alabama. I would resolve to greet the next person I met on death row with the kindness that Smith, Miller, Barber, and others had shown to me. And I would erase old names from the grid of capital cases on my kitchen chalkboard, adding new ones to take their place.

This article appears in the July 2025 print edition with the headline “Witness.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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The White House’s South Lawn was prepared just so: A full honor guard, complete with American and Chinese flags, stood at attention. The new White House helipad, made of four-inch-thick black-and-white California granite, seemed to gleam. President Trump appeared pleased—but something was missing. Where were the TV cameras?

For a president who needs media attention like he needs oxygen, this was an unacceptable development ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s welcome ceremony last week. Trump whirled around to his aides and demanded they fix it, and a staffer raced to the briefing room to ask ABC News whether it would film the arrival, two people familiar with the exchange told me on the condition of anonymity, given the private nature of the conversations. But the answer was no: The networks were boycotting participation in the TV-pool rotation in solidarity with CNN, which Trump had banned from the White House, along with two other media outlets, days before. No major U.S. television network recorded Trump’s over-the-top greeting for Xi, and the news channels refused to display images taken by the White House or any other outlet, American or Chinese. Trump did not get to show off his extravaganza. And he had only himself to blame.

At the risk of understatement, Trump has never been one to think all that many moves ahead. But his impulsive decision to ban media outlets spawned unintended consequences that derailed his own plans. Again. That’s been a real theme for much of this year: Many of Trump’s actions—quite a few impetuous and ill-considered—have only hurt him and his fellow Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections. He was elected two years ago to drive down prices, but his tariffs have done the opposite, and a recent reignited trade war with Canada has hurt Republican candidates whose state shares a border with our neighbor to the north. His war of choice in Iran continues to sputter along, leaving gas prices elevated as Trump threatens annihilation one day and offers negotiation the next. He insists on championing AI while the public has swiftly turned on it. And he’s obsessed with vanity projects—including, yes, that helipad that cost at least $5 million—even as polls suggest that many Americans feel that he is out of touch with the Everyman he once claimed to represent.

The numbers are bad: Trump’s approval rating dropped to 37 percent in a new Wall Street Journal poll this week, marking the lowest rating in that poll since 1990 for an incumbent president heading into a midterm election. He’s even lower in other polls. The president, the most dominant figure in the GOP in generations, will soon hit the campaign trail for his party—but he is beginning in deep-red states, an eyebrow-raising bit of scheduling that suggests acknowledgment of his weak political standing. More and more Republicans are starting to worry about a blue wave, one that seems certain to secure the House for Democrats but could very well, in an outcome unthinkable even a few months ago, yield a Democratic Senate as well. With barely a month until Election Day, and with early voting already under way in a number of states, Trump and his party are flailing.

A Trump rally has been the signature political event of the past decade of American politics. The president considered forever walking away from them after his final one during the 2024 campaign, but he has been talked into reviving them now and then at a smaller scale and with heavy security. He held only a handful last year and, despite aides promising that he’d barnstorm the country with more frequency in 2026, rallies have still been rare; in September, he held just one (in North Carolina). He’s traveled domestically far less this term, distancing himself from the concerns of his voters. But with October and the stretch run of the midterm campaigns now here, Trump seems set to gas up Air Force One.

Trump will begin with visits to two GOP strongholds (Oklahoma today, Alabama tomorrow) before then journeying on Saturday to Ohio, a state he won three times but where polls show Republican incumbent Senator Jon Husted trailing his Democratic opponent, former Senator Sherrod Brown. Ohio is not the only reliably red state that now seems to have a Senate seat up for grabs: Iowa, Texas, Alaska, Kansas, and maybe even Nebraska (where Trump will travel next week) are all now in play. Earlier this year, the 2026 Senate map looked foreboding for Democrats; now strategists from both parties view control as a toss-up.

Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist who worked in the first Trump administration but quit after the January 6 Capitol riot, told me that the president hasn’t given Republicans anything to run on, saying they have “no results to point to, no agenda to promise either.” And he said that many in the party feel that the bottom is dropping out and a wipeout could be coming. “Many recent elections have broken late, and hard, and often in one direction only,” Bartlett told me. “Among Republicans there is little hope that things get better before Election Day, but grave concern they may get worse.”

Despite the challenges facing Republicans across the country, neither Senate race in Alabama or Oklahoma seems particularly close (at least for now). So why is Trump going there? For any president, even an unpopular one, his most valuable resource is his time—and heading to those deep-red states comes at the expense of a potential stop in a swing district (though the stop in southern Oklahoma does bleed into a Texas media market). The answer might be surprisingly simple: ego. “The president knows he is still going to get big, adoring crowds there,” one close outside adviser told me. Plus, there has been some debate in GOP circles as to whether or not a Trump visit would actually help in some battlegrounds; several Republicans in tight races are weighing whether to request a presidential visit, party strategists have told me. Two candidates, Susan Collins of Maine and John Sununu of New Hampshire, have already said no, and others have refused to commit. Another GOP strategist familiar with the president’s travel plans insisted to me that Trump will travel frequently and help boost turnout for Republican candidates, but they allowed that polling may suggest states that Trump should avoid.

The White House downplayed any internal GOP concerns. The spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement that “President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress.”

[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]

Yet there have been signs of Republicans distancing themselves from Trump on more issues, including immigration enforcement and ending the war in Iran. But that unpopular conflict may shadow the party for the foreseeable future: Many diplomats from the Middle East who attended the United Nations General Assembly last week privately feel that the war will, in stops and starts, likely continue well into next year and potentially throughout the rest of Trump’s term, threatening to drag down Republicans’ political fortunes for multiple elections.

Trump has lurched from one distraction to another—Renaming Lake Ontario! Offering $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans win in November!—but he has yet to shift the electorate’s dim view of his presidency. He’s still pushing claims of election fraud, even though few Republican candidates have joined in. He even authorized the Department of Homeland Security to use taxpayer money to pay for what is, in essence, a Trump campaign ad despite prohibitions on using federal funds for propaganda. Trump took this provocative step while sitting on a massive campaign war chest, and many Republicans groaned at yet another unnecessary controversy. “I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for by taxpayer dollars,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican from South Dakota, told reporters this week.

The weekend before that, Trump abruptly banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House grounds without telling many of his senior aides (some of whom, on a Friday afternoon, had already left for the weekend). He was reportedly frustrated by some of the coverage that his close aide Natalie Harp had shown him. A few days later, a federal judge ordered that the three media organizations be allowed to return to the White House complex. Even then, the president’s aides found ways to temporarily block them from certain events—and trigger alarms that Trump was beginning to defy court orders. But some of the president’s advisers told me they saw the ban as counterproductive and could, as it did with the Xi visit, deprive Trump of some of the media coverage he craves.

That moment with China’s leader underscored what is arguably Trump’s biggest problem: He has lost touch with what Americans actually care about. The Xi summit was a cornucopia of warning signs for worried Republicans. It came amid a national discourse about the dangers of artificial intelligence, which included a push from industry leaders for additional safeguards on a fast-growing technology that, some insiders have warned, could wipe out humanity. But Trump’s been fixated on how AI has propped up the stock market and some sectors of the economy, and he has refused to slow down its growth. His one nod to how poorly AI is being perceived: He suggested it be renamed “super intelligence,” or SI.

[Read: The deferential president]

The entire decadent spectacle seemed out of step with a country deep in an affordability crisis. The black-tie guest list was dotted with billionaires and tech titans as Trump feted the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, even though he continues to assail Democrats for allegedly being communists. The president was eager to show Xi his under-construction ballroom that few voters support. Xi also seemed to feign interest when Trump gave him a tour of the Presidential Walk of Fame that he installed along the West Colonnade, complete with his predecessor Joe Biden depicted as an autopen. And then, as if the real spectacle wasn’t gaudy and elitist enough, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino posted an AI-generated video on social media that imagined him, his wife, and Trump family members at a champagne-soaked state-dinner after-party. Elon Musk promoted an even more ridiculous rendition. It all felt like a gift to Democrats, who pounced on the videos to paint those in the president’s orbit as dilettantes looking to enrich only themselves.

Susan Del Percio, a longtime Republican strategist, told me that even Trump supporters who are concerned about the economy feel that the president no longer cares about them. “Voters are angry because they are hurting, and through his actions, Trump is telling them that he doesn’t give a damn,” she said.

This week featured another event that likely will not land well with Americans who are struggling financially. Trump presided over a “Golden Age” event that featured business leaders and billionaires—and no talk of affordability challenges. Once more, Trump defended AI and even boasted that it would power a new government-services website. He then joked about where it stood among his accomplishments, saying, “If it is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, I’ve done a shitty job as president.”

You can bet Democrats will grab that one too.

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Josh Shapiro is having fun, and the crowd is loving it. “Let’s be clear,” the Pennsylvania governor says in his windup. Sometimes, instead of “let’s be clear,” it’s “let me tell you something.” He throws in some “y’alls” with a wide smile. The g’s have fallen off his gerunds. He’s wearing a well-tailored dark suit, but no tie—his signature. When he gets going, his right index finger pokes the air. He’s almost bouncing as he pivots from one side of the audience to the other, in nearly perfect rhythm with his words. Then comes the crescendo; he’s shouting now, but only just loud enough to be heard above the roar of the crowd. Finally, the patriotic peroration—another signature. This one’s a story about Ben Franklin and that famous line: “A republic, if you can keep it.” He exhorts the audience to “show that this is not who we are as a nation.”

That voice, that cadence—it’s all so familiar. Close your eyes, and you could almost imagine that you’re listening to the nation’s first Black president. But he’s the man who hopes to be the first Jew to win the White House.

Shapiro, who is 53 and heavily favored to win reelection this fall, is one of several Democrats eying a 2028 White House campaign who have drawn—and even encouraged—comparisons to the 44th president. Like Barack Obama, Baruch Obama emphasizes pragmatism over doctrinaire progressivism; he has performed well in conservative areas of Pennsylvania that voted for Obama before turning to the right. Shapiro can wield a rhetorical knife, but he infuses his messaging with appeals to hope and optimism.

[Read: Josh Shapiro takes a gamble on his faith]

Yet the most obvious similarity is that when Shapiro gives a speech, he really sounds an awful lot like the Democrats’ most renowned speechmaker. It’s a once-you-hear-it-you-can’t-unhear-it type of thing, to the point where some Shapiro watchers believe he’s consciously imitating Obama. “He didn’t used to talk like this,” one Democrat who has closely followed Shapiro’s rise up the Pennsylvania political ranks told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid starting a public feud with the governor.

Shapiro’s Obama echo attracted notice during the 2024 presidential campaign, when he was under consideration to be Kamala Harris’s running mate. “Is he doing an … Obama?” Ronny Chieng asked in a memorable roast on The Daily Show. J. D. Vance mocked him too. “He talks like Barack Obama,” Vance said on a podcast. “It’s like if I tried to do a really bad impression of Barack Obama.”

Asked to respond to Vance at the time, Shapiro laughed off the charge. “Barack Obama was probably our most gifted orator of my time, so it’s kind of a weird insult,” he told reporters. My colleague Tim Alberta, in the profile he wrote of Shapiro earlier this year, documented the makeover that the governor underwent as he gained prominence—one that included a new hairstyle and sharper clothing as well as the Obama-esque way of speaking. “I just don’t hear it,” Shapiro told Alberta about the oft-noted comparison. “I don’t think I’ve changed my cadence or my rhythm or how I speak.” (A spokesperson for Shapiro declined to comment for this story.)

Obama and Shapiro have known each other for two decades, and the younger Democrat has said that Obama set an example he has “tried to emulate.” Shapiro was an early endorser of Obama during his presidential run, and Obama joined Shapiro at a large get-out-the-vote rally in Philadelphia on the eve of his election as governor four years ago. (It was there that the Democrat I spoke with first noticed—along with many others—how closely Shapiro resembled Obama: “It was him and Obama back-to-back, and that was a moment where people were like, Jesus Christ.”)

The two men have other things in common besides a speaking style. Both have owned dogs named Bo. And they both played basketball in their youth and remain huge fans of the sport. (Shortly after Lebron James signed with the 76ers, Shapiro said that he’d personally tried to recruit the NBA legend to Philadelphia.)

Not everyone hears Obama when they listen to Shapiro. “I had never thought that,” Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic consultant in Pennsylvania, told me. “He has a similar cadence, but I don’t think it’s a thing.” Mikus noted that politics “is a lot like football: Everybody steals from each other.” Shapiro, he suggested, also made a decent point in his rejoinder to Vance in 2024. “If you’re going to be compared to anybody, it sure as heck doesn’t hurt to be compared to the most popular figure in Democratic politics,” Mikus said.

The Obama comparison certainly doesn’t appear to be hurting Shapiro in Pennsylvania, where a poll released last week by Siena University showed him leading his Republican opponent, Stacy Garrity, by 20 points. A boffo performance in November could propel him into the top tier of what is likely to be a crowded Democratic presidential field, especially if Shapiro’s coattails help his party flip Republican-held House seats and retake the majority. But he’ll face plenty of skeptics. Shapiro’s long-standing support for Israel is a liability with progressives who have demanded an end to U.S. aid for the Jewish state. Among swing-state overperformers, Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona—former astronaut, husband to Gabby Giffords—has a more compelling biography, and Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia is a competitor for the Baruch Obama label: He’s also Jewish, he makes mainstream Democrats swoon, and, as my colleague Elaine Godfrey has noted, he can, when he gets revved-up, also sound a bit like Obama.

[Read: Who’s afraid of Josh Shapiro?]

Will Shapiro’s Obama-esque speeches inspire Democratic voters yearning for a charismatic communicator, or will they make him seem like a knockoff—an overeager pretender to the party throne? For an expert opinion, I consulted David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, who has probably seen the ex-president deliver speeches as often as anyone alive. Like Mikus, Axelrod told me he hadn’t noticed the resemblance until people started pointing it out a couple of years ago. “He wouldn’t be the first person to try to emulate, or imitate, the president,” Axelrod said.

He added that the ribbing Shapiro receives over his Obama-like stylings may end up being a funny footnote. But the association, should it burrow deeper in people’s minds, does carry risk for Shapiro. “Authenticity is the coin of the realm, and people want to know that you’re comfortable with yourself and that you’re being yourself,” Axelrod said. Voters crave it perhaps now more than ever.

Today, somewhere over Saudi Arabia, the co-pilot of an Israel-bound Flydubai Boeing 737 stabbed the other pilot and pitched the nose of the plane toward the desert below. The jet descended 17,000 feet in two minutes, at an acceleration violent enough to make your phone and in-flight snack jump off your tray and be pinned to the ceiling. Other crew members and at least one Israeli passenger broke into the cockpit and subdued the assailant. Relief pilots then took over and landed the plane in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. After a second Flydubai plane took the 174 passengers to Tel Aviv, one of the passengers who’d stormed the cockpit told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that his actions had been effective in part because he had watched the disaster-porn documentary series Mayday, about aviation catastrophes, and had known to pull back on the yoke.

Whether today’s near-disaster was terrorism or merely attempted mass murder depends on the attacker’s motive. Either way, it is a public-relations catastrophe for Flydubai, the budget cousin of the airline Emirates. Since the United Arab Emirates opened diplomatic relations with Israel in 2020, the airline has connected the two countries with few interruptions, even for acts of war and terror. Keeping that air route open and safe has taken a great deal of effort. Last year, I witnessed clever security engineering at Dubai’s Terminal 1: placement of the check-in desk for El Al, the Israeli carrier, adjacent to the desk for Iran’s Mahan Air. Anyone tempted to attack Israeli passengers would hit Iranian ones, and vice versa. Checked baggage costs extra, but the experience of being a human shield while waiting in line is complimentary.

Mahan Air no longer flies into Dubai. U.S. sanctions have halted much of its operations, and Dubai had already curtailed its flights, on the grounds that Iran can fly either missiles into Dubai or commercial flights, but not both. Israel, by contrast, has emerged from the 2026 Iran war closer to the UAE, which has absorbed more Iranian attacks than any other country. Although the Arab countries of the region have been allied as the Gulf Cooperation Council since 1981, that proved useless as soon as the conflict started. But Israel responded by sending defense systems and advisers. At least one Iranian strike during the early phases of the war hit near the Israeli consulate in Dubai. One possible political motive for the Flydubai incident would be to strain and punish the relationship between the two countries. (One of the few unambiguous winners today is Boeing. Its 737 MAX series was previously grounded when its software forced jets into fatal dives. Today, a human pilot instigated such a dive and tried to smash the 737’s instrument panel. The airframe held together even after approaching Mach 1.)

[Read: The Middle East still to come]

The relationship between Israel and the UAE is unlikely to snap over a single attack. The relationship between the UAE and Netanyahu himself is more delicate. In the past several weeks, the president of the UAE, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, was implicated in a report from Haaretz that severely damaged Netanyahu’s chances of remaining in office after next month’s Israeli election. The report alleged that days before the massacre of October 7, 2023, MBZ had personally warned Netanyahu that an attack was imminent but Netanyahu had done nothing to act on the warning. The UAE government at first refused to comment on the story. On Sunday, however, Netanyahu visited Abu Dhabi, and the AP reported that he asked MBZ to deny that he’d warned of an attack.

Yesterday, in New York, UAE Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed did exactly that. “Sheikh Mohammed did not call Prime Minister Netanyahu and say there is going to be an attack on Israel,” Abdullah said in a meeting at the Council on Foreign Relations, calling his denial “categorical.” He said that using a leader-to-leader call to pass along secrets was “not our style,” but he left open the possibility that a warning had been passed between governments, if not between leaders. This denial releases some pressure on Netanyahu without absolving his government of its failures. (The story echoes Vivian Salama’s Atlantic report about a pre–October 7 warning from Egypt’s intelligence chief.)

The New York Times and others have reported that the first officer who allegedly tried to bring down the plane is an Omani national. (The injured captain, according to Netanyahu, is the Indian national Smit Machchhar.) Both are reportedly still in Saudi Arabia. The next step will involve determining whether the pilot acted alone—not a good look for Flydubai, to have suicidal or terrorist pilots—or at someone’s behest. The latter possibility could, if confirmed, have serious implications, depending on who directed the attack. Many have a motive: Sunni jihadists (al-Qaeda or the Islamic State), Hamas, and of course Iran and its proxies. This Mayday moment will have huge implications if any of these groups are involved.

The Make America Healthy Again movement has always had a split personality. Many of the movement’s leaders are fervent anti-vaccine activists whose views are at odds with scientific evidence and out of step with most Americans. At the same time, MAHA’s tenets include eating more vegetables and getting enough sleep, which is perfectly reasonable advice; it’s just hard to take seriously from people who, like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wax nostalgic about catching measles.

That duality has been especially stark this month, as the midterms approach and Republicans look to MAHA for an electoral boost. At a conference two weeks ago for Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization Kennedy founded, he told the audience that they had a “steadfast friend at the White House.” At a MAHA data summit on Monday, Kennedy previewed his plan to use a database of Americans’ health records to compare rates of autism among vaccinated and unvaccinated people. And yet, the second annual MAHA Summit, which was held yesterday in a hotel ballroom in Washington, D.C., seemed perfectly calibrated to downplay controversy.

Other high-ranking administration officials, including Vice President Vance and Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz, spoke at yesterday’s summit, lending the affair an extra layer of high-profile polish, but the event was mostly an opportunity for its roster of sponsors to tout their products and services. An executive from Walmart—one of the event’s many corporate sponsors—spoke about making food labels simpler and more transparent, though he didn’t say how his company, which sells more groceries than any other retailer, plans to do that. After being lobbed yet another softball question from the moderator, he gushed, “It means a lot for us to be here with MAHA.” Also among the sponsors was Grail, a cancer-screening company, which just last week announced that its controversial early-detection test had been recommended for approval by a Food and Drug Administration panel. Hims & Hers and Gameday Men’s Health—two wellness companies that stand to make serious money if the FDA allows gray-market peptides to be made and prescribed in the United States—also chipped in. Bloomberg reported that companies that forked over $300,000 were allowed to have “meaningful input” on the selection of panelists and topics. (In an email, an HHS spokesperson wrote that the FDA’s decisions “are made through established processes grounded in law, science, and evidence.”)

[Read: America is about to go over a peptide cliff]

The MAHA Summit was “very money-driven,” Mary Holland, who runs Children’s Health Defense and was not on the speaker list for yesterday’s conference, told me outside the ballroom. Kennedy has for years denounced corporate influence over the health agencies he now oversees, but onstage, there was no handwringing about conflicts of interest. Instead, Tony Lyons, the president of the nonprofit MAHA Center, which organized the summit, offered praise for “the investors scaling natural remedies, breakthrough technologies, next-generation devices, and cutting-edge therapies.” (Lyons is also Kennedy’s longtime publisher, and his company, Skyhorse, paid Kennedy $4 million in book advances over the past year.) Corporate convenience seemed to beat out Kennedy’s “eat real food” agenda: The conference swag bags contained two organic snack bars, a packet of electrolyte powder, potato chips fried in grass-fed-beef tallow, and a bag of dehydrated taco filling made from pinto beans and peas, all vaguely MAHA-coded but certainly nowhere to be found on the administration’s inverted food pyramid.

Plenty of Kennedy’s vocally anti-vaccine compatriots were in attendance, if not on the agenda. I spotted Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute, who, at the Children’s Health Defense conference, declared himself “the boldest anti-vaxxer in the anti-vax conference.” Del Bigtree, Kennedy’s former communications director, who once told me he’d rather his kids catch diseases such as polio and measles than get the shots that prevent them, spent most of his time chatting with his many fans in attendance. He was pleased at how large companies appear to be on board with MAHA, even if the summit steered clear of the issue—vaccines—that brought him and Kennedy together. “It really probably should be called ‘MAHA Food Summit,’” he told me. (An HHS spokesperson wrote that Kennedy “oversees an extraordinarily broad health portfolio and addresses different priorities in different settings.”)

[Read: ‘I genuinely am upset that your kids are vaccinated’]

But lest Bigtree and other anti-vaccine activists have any doubts, Kennedy has repeatedly reassured them that he is on their side. At the Children’s Health Defense conference, he went so far as to read from a manufacturer’s list of possible adverse events from a hepatitis B vaccine. In an appearance on CNN last month, Kennedy again floated a possible connection between autism and vaccines, even though researchers have found no such link.

Since Kennedy’s failed run for president in the 2024 election, he has drawn together an unlikely and seemingly uneasy coalition. Some are hard-core activists, like the guy I spoke with who was wearing a shirt that took aim at fluoride, vaccines, hospital births, aspartame, and root canals. But other attendees at the packed, invite-only event said they were there because they hoped psychedelics might be used to treat depression; because they thought that AI might improve health care; or because they were looking for answers to medical problems their doctors hadn’t been able to solve. They weren’t anti-vaxxers, and they weren’t necessarily big Kennedy fans, as a couple of them confided to me between sessions. But Kennedy and his Republican allies seem to hope they can channel these different levels of frustration with mainstream medicine and keep all of those voters under the MAHA banner. The midterms will be, among so many other things, a test of how far that banner can be stretched.

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Updated at 4:27 p.m. ET on September 30, 2026

“What was your most embarrassing day at work?” is a staple question of internet forums, and the answers tend to converge around the accidental reply-all, the mortifying shared-bathroom incident, or congratulating a colleague on their pregnancy, only to discover the bump was instead the result of a large lunch.

Luckily for Senator Eric Schmitt, though, he operates in a political environment that has selected for blowhards with bulletproof confidence and slavish devotion to Donald Trump. So the Missouri Republican probably didn’t wake up at 3 a.m. reliving the terrible moment in yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when his attempted gotcha of former Special Counsel Jack Smith fell apart spectacularly. A hundred minutes into the hearing, Schmitt had his smoking gun ready to go. He wanted to prove that the witness, who had been appointed by the Department of Justice under the Biden administration to investigate Trump’s election interference, had surreptitiously met Fani Willis. She is the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, who brought separate charges against Trump and 18 others for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election results in her state. Perhaps Smith and Willis had even illicitly coordinated their witch hunt against everyone’s favorite president?

“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” the senator asked Smith, who understandably looked bemused. “What city would that be in?” Smith replied. “Atlanta,” said Schmitt. “No,” said Smith.

Aha! With a look of quiet triumph, Schmitt noted that February 3 was the day after Willis admitted having a relationship with her deputy, Nathan Wade. Smith continued to look puzzled. What did this have to do with him?

Schmitt tried again: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior-Hawks game on February 3, 2024—the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?”

At this point, a Schmitt staffer began to manhandle a cardboard prop showing the texts. “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” the senator said, looking smug, “so I will give you a second to process it, so you don’t perjure yourself.” But the cardboard was already being unhoisted and tucked away. “You just took that down really quick,” Smith observed—prompting the Democrats on the committee to heckle Schmitt to bring it out again. “This is my time,” Schmitt snapped. He ended his performance by declaring that Smith would go down in history as a “total dirtbag” who had committed perjury.

Dunk achieved! Send the tweet! Book the one-on-one with Jesse Watters! Unfortunately for Schmitt, Senator Amy Klobuchar also sits on the committee. This is a woman who reportedly ate a salad with a comb when her staffer couldn’t supply a fork. The Minnesota Democrat is not easily deterred when faced with minor obstacles. She asked Senator Chuck Grassley, the committee’s Republican chair, to “allow the witness to see this vast poster board that we saw.” The staffers once again held it aloft, whereupon everyone could see that the supposedly incriminating texts said nothing about Willis at all. But at least now Smith recognized the basketball game that the messages referred to; he remembered going to see the WNBA’s Caitlin Clark, then a star at the University of Iowa, in a game against the University of Maryland.

The penny dropped first with Klobuchar. “Could it be,” she asked, “the University of Iowa is—the Hawkeyes?”

On a different feed, the camera crash-zoomed on to Alabama Republican Katie Britt’s face, her mouth agape as she absorbed the terrible possibility that her GOP colleague had confused the Hawks and the Hawkeyes.

Eric Schmitt was first elected to the Senate in 2022, having made his name as attorney general in Missouri opposing COVID restrictions, trying to roll back Obamacare, and joining an effort led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to invalidate the votes of four states that went for Joe Biden in 2020. That makes him a lab-grown Trump-era Republican, with the thirst for attention and resistance to shame that inevitably entails. The committee meeting provided an exciting chance for him and other Republicans to demonstrate their loyalty to the president by enthusiastically endorsing his belief that he was robbed of victory in 2020.

[Kathy Gilsinan: Missouri is the next front in the COVID culture war]

Yesterday could have been Schmitt’s big day. Senate committee hearings are usually long and often dull, but they do offer senators a chance to get their face on TV, both during the session itself and in post-game interviews on cable news. Ahead of the hearing, Axios ran a short article suggesting that Schmitt “is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.” Buzz from whom, exactly? The item sadly failed to name any names. But people in Schmitt’s camp plainly hoped that the hearing would raise his profile. If so, mission accomplished!

The hearing certainly wasn’t aimed at anyone who sincerely wanted to understand the attempts to undo the 2020 election result, or the conduct of those tasked with investigating those allegations. As special counsel, Jack Smith brought dozens of felony charges against Donald Trump over his alleged election interference and his mishandling of classified documents stored haphazardly at Mar-a-Lago. Trump pleaded not guilty. After he was reelected in 2024, Smith dropped the cases and resigned. Whatever Trump did or didn’t do, he got away with it.

Grassley didn’t bother to hide the fact that this was, at heart, a revenge beating. At minimum, Senate Republicans hoped to subject Smith to an invasive and stressful experience, the kind of shellacking that might make other prosecutors reconsider ever taking on a politically sensitive case. They also wanted more data points to feed into the right-wing conspiracy machine, fresh ways to activate the tribal loyalty of the MAGA faithful as Trump’s approval ratings nosedive. In his opening statement, Grassley argued that Smith’s investigation had far exceeded its legal authority and turned into an attempt to “map out and target the entire Republican Party.” The stretch goal was entrapping Smith into perjury.

Before we return to Eric Schmitt, may we have a moment’s appreciation for Ted Cruz’s performance as Man Shocked to Hear His Party Accused of Wrongdoing? Three hours into the hearing, the Texas senator delivered a series of zingers designed to be clipped up for later use. “Is it a crime to be a Republican?” he asked Smith. Over several minutes, Cruz worked himself up into a lather: “I understand for the rest of your life you are going to be hailed as a hero in the resistance movement,” he told Smith. “I assume you have a pink hat somewhere at home.” A pussy-hat reference—how retro! However, this lib endorsement would be no consolation, he suggested to Smith, for bringing the Department of Justice into disrepute. Here I would briefly note that the current head of the FBI, Kash Patel, has his own branded bourbon, and that he recently had to defend waiving the ban on bestiality among FBI recruits. The American justice system may have more pressing reputational problems.

[Sarah Fitzpatrick: Kash Patel’s personalized bourbon stash]

Throughout his remarks, Cruz’s staffers brandished cardboard props with headlines about Smith’s investigation, while the witness adopted a poker face, perhaps recognizing that he was merely an extra in the courtroom drama being scripted in Cruz’s head. The senator’s staffers should confiscate his John Grisham collection—and his DVD of Les Misérables. “Javert from Les Mis would look at you with astonishment,” Cruz thundered at Smith, finger aloft. (Inspector Javert, played by Russell Crowe in the film adaptation of the musical, pursues Hugh Jackman’s repentant Jean Valjean for many years over the theft of a piece of bread.) Cruz has used a similar line before. Last year, he told Pam Bondi, then the Republican nominee for attorney general, that there were so many prosecutions of Trump that “Javert from Les Mis would be chagrined.” Branch out a little, Senator—give us something from Cats.

Still, if Cruz was showing poor attention to detail by repeating himself, then Eric Schmitt was there to say, Hold my cardboard prop. Within hours of the hearing, the Missouri senator was explaining to TMZ that what looked like a fist-bitingly awkward gaffe was no such thing. “How did that mistake happen?” the reporter asked. “It wasn’t a mistake,” he replied. “I asked him if he was in Atlanta.” In a hallway interview, he told CNN: “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” This came across as a dig at the special prosecutor for liking ladies’ basketball rather than real manly basketball, or perhaps at the very idea of a weenie lawyer being a sports aficionado. Regardless, Schmitt thought the line was such a zinger that he repeated it in an X post.

Some MAGA influencers fully embraced the idea that Schmitt had, in fact, completed le epic pwn of Smith. On The Charlie Kirk Show—still named for its late creator—one of the hosts played the clip of Schmitt’s question after telling the senator he had to “give you some flowers” for his acuity. The whole segment appeared to have been beamed in from a parallel reality where the exchange with Smith had gone well for the senator. “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt said. “He claimed later that he was at another game. I don’t know. Now, here’s the thing—my job is to ask the questions.” This explanation opens up the possibility that the reason Schmitt and his team didn’t think Smith could be referring to the Hawkeyes was because they had forgotten the existence of women’s basketball. Not a great look for a party that has made a crusade lately of protecting women’s sports.

Other stars in the MAGA universe, however, seemed to realize that Schmitt’s failed gotcha would not delight their faithful, even if they could not say so out loud. The former journalist Benny Johnson, who has 4 million followers on X, posted that Schmitt had “pulled out the receipts” and left Smith “stunned.” Later, he deleted that post, without explanation. On Fox News, Sean Hannity’s recap of the hearing left out Schmitt’s screw-up but included a megamix of Republicans shouting at Smith, including John Kennedy of Louisiana telling the former special counsel that “you make me want to throw up in my mouth.”

This is, to be blunt, not a healthy ecosystem. People love to complain about media outlets being overly hostile to certain politicians, but that adversarial mode is far preferable to the hermetically sealed MAGA universe, in which a politician says something dumb and his error is either silently erased from the record or even rewritten as a triumph. The Republicans on the committee complained endlessly that Jack Smith’s investigation was little more than a fishing expedition, trawling their personal communications for tenuous evidence of wrongdoing—while doing exactly that to Smith himself. Eric Schmitt had some red string and a corkboard, and by God he was going to add data points to it until the connections spell out DEEP STATE PLOT. So what if it went badly? Trapped in their bubble, his base would never know.

This article originally implied incorrectly that the University of Iowa Hawkeyes play in the WNBA.

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In this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts about the recent state visit by the Chinese president Xi Jinping to the United States. David discusses President Trump’s embarrassing behavior at the dinner and how he has isolated the United States in its rivalry with China.

Then, David is joined by former Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder to discuss the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, the battle over gerrymandering, and whether Americans can expect the 2026 midterm elections to be free and fair. Frum and Holder also discuss how attorneys general should react to unlawful orders from the president.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of the novel Agrippa, by Robert Harris.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Eric Holder: We have changed, done things that seemingly were impossible—got women the right to vote, ripped down a system of American apartheid. All because the American people decided that that was no longer going to be allowed, or that changes had to be made.

[Music]

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be former Attorney General Eric Holder. This week’s book will be Agrippa, a novel by Robert Harris.

I want to just issue a caution about the interview that you’re about to see. We had a little trouble this week with the video recording. About half the video got gobbled up by the internet gods. So, there will be some interruptions of the video flow, but you will be able to see most of the show in video, and of course, the sound quality is perfect all the way through. So if you’re listening, you won’t notice anything. If you’re watching, you may see some interruptions. Please forgive us. We did the best we could.

Before either the dialogue with Attorney General Holder or the novel Agrippa by Robert Harris, I want to offer some opening thoughts about the recent state visit by the Chinese president and Chinese dictator to Washington, D.C., and his lavish reception by President Trump.

I often think that when future historians try to make sense of the Trump era, among the things they will note is this was a real acceleration in the decline of American prestige and power in the world. The Chinese visit drives home what the challenge to American leadership in the 21st century has been.

China is becoming a bigger and stronger country, and there’s no way around that, and that is potentially a very good thing. They have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a great gain for human happiness. They have produced products and services that are of use to the whole world. We’re all better off because of China’s rise. If China becomes a good global citizen playing by the rules, we will all benefit from the transformation in Chinese power that has happened since they broke with the rigidity of the Mao Zedong system and introduced some degree of market mechanism into Chinese economic life.

But right now, China is turning a snarling face to the world, and we all have to worry about Chinese aggression, Chinese subversion, Chinese intellectual property theft, China just not playing by the rules of global trade. So there’s a tremendous human achievement; there’s a great human opportunity. But there is also a great danger.

The difference between China and dangers that America has faced in the past is that, unlike past adversaries, China is not only a military competitor to the United States; it is also a technological, economic, and financial peer. The United States has not faced a country that was simultaneously an adversary and a peer really since it confronted the British Empire before the Civil War. And then you had the advantage of great common interest, great common language, many common values. Those things are absent in the relationship with China.

If the United States is to balance China’s power peacefully, it has to approach this problem in a very different way from the way it approached the problem of the Soviet Union. One more difference is that China is so enormously big: bigger population, an economy nearing the size of the United States. So to peacefully balance China, the United States just can’t do it on its own. It’s going to need to marshal a global coalition of some kind. And not just the familiar and easy coalition with like-minded democratic powers of the European Union—Australia, Japan, Great Britain, others. To balance China, the United States has to work with more uneasy partners—Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, India—countries that don’t necessarily share political systems with the United States, may not share values, and may not share a view of the world that is exactly like that of the United States in the way that fellow democracies did.

So it’s a hard problem. But the Trump administration has been all about severing those connections, both to the old familiar allies of the European Union and the other democracies, and of course, to the new allies, where they have created point of friction after point of friction through their aggressive trade practices. They have left the United States alone in the room with the Chinese—without friends it can rely on, without friends who can rely on the United States.

And the consequence of that aloneness was on display at the state dinner, which is that Trump basically had to suck up to the Chinese. It was a disgusting thing to watch. The shameful incidents of mocking his predecessor to the Chinese leader. When you think, what do the Chinese make of this? They saw this is a political system that is isolated. This is a political system that is permeable. This is a political system that is based on one family’s appetites. This is a political system we can push around—and push the United States around, I think we can expect a lot more of.

This dinner marked a real way station on the progress of American decline. Let’s hope it’s a correctable one, and let us try not to fear that it is not a correctable one.

And now, my dialogue with Attorney General Eric Holder.

[Music]

Frum: Eric H. Holder Jr. serves as chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. He served as attorney general of the United States from February 2009 to April 2015. Before that, he served three decades in public service with appointments to Senate-confirmed positions by President Reagan, President Clinton, and President Obama.

Attorney General Holder was born in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in East Elmhurst, Queens. He holds undergraduate and law degrees from Columbia University. And it’s a great honor and pleasure to welcome him to The David Frum Show.

Eric Holder: Good to be here with you, David, and I’m glad to hear you mention East Elmhurst. I’m proud to be a Queens boy.

Frum: (Laughs.) Glad to mention it.

Let me ask you about the thing you have been working on so intensely in this present cycle, which is: How do you feel, and how should people listening to you feel, about free and fair elections in the cycle of 2026?

Holder: Well, I think we ought to be concerned about the state of our democracy generally, and the way in which our elections are going to proceed this year more specifically.

I think we have seen that certain groups of Republicans have done whatever they possibly can to ensure a victory for them that might not necessarily be supported by the number of votes that they actually get. President Trump’s determination to get five extra seats out of Texas by doing a mid-cycle redistricting—actually a mid-cycle gerrymander—is an indication of that. We see what’s going on in Missouri now, where Republicans are going to the Supreme Court for the third time to try to stop the people of Missouri from determining whether or not they will support a redistricting—another gerrymander—that Republicans have tried to put in place in Missouri. So I’m worried about that which Republicans have done.

And then, you know, after the Supreme Court decision in the Shelby County case in 2013, the Callais decision just in this last term, Republicans have used those tools that the Supreme Court has given to them to try to come up with ways in which they can disenfranchise certain people.

Frum: Well, let’s go step by step through your areas of worry. And I think you’ve alluded to three different things there. So let’s go slowly through the first one, which is: President Trump has threatened a series of deviations from all past election practice. Grabbing ballot boxes, threatening to send troops, interfering with voting by mail. That category of previously unseen activity—how worried should we be about that?

Holder: I don’t want to alarm people. I don’t want to be hyperbolic or alarmist, but I think we’ve got to be prepared for just about anything. Donald Trump has shown that he’s prepared to use all the levers of power that he has in order to ensure a result that he wants, and he cloaks this in this notion of concern about voter fraud, which is close to nonexistent. And I think that they will potentially deploy ICE agents at or near polling places, potentially declare an emergency of some sort to try to use federal power. I’ve seen that the Justice Department now says that it has recruited 1,000 monitors or observers that they’re going to deploy to various sites around the country. I think all in an attempt to come up with ways in which they can determine the outcome of elections in various states, regardless of what it is that the people want to do as indicated by the votes that they cast.

Frum: We’ve seen President Trump invoke various kinds of emergency powers for the president in various kinds of situations where emergency powers have not been invoked before. Not natural disaster, but just—something’s happening that he doesn’t like and he then uses federal and presidential power in new kinds of ways. Could that intersect with free and fair votings in dangerous ways?

Holder: Yeah, I think the potential is certainly there to do that. You know, declare an emergency of some kind. I don’t know what it would be; a national security emergency? I mean, he seems to focus on national security as a way to do the kinds of things that other presidents did not have the ability to do. Whether it’s tearing down the East Wing, building an arch, excluding the press from the White House press room because of some kind of national emergency.

And so declare a national emergency, and then do a whole variety of things to keep troops in places where they shouldn’t be. As I said before, deploy ICE agents in neighborhoods where they need not be.

I think these are all possibilities that we need to be concerned about. And it is something that we on the Democratic side have tried to prepare ourselves for, by going through a series of tabletop exercises to anticipate that which the president might try to do, and then come up with ways in which we can push back against that, and do so in a timely way. Not do something that will be effective two weeks after we go to court, or do whatever it is that we do—but actually stop that which the president is trying to do, what Republicans are trying to do, and so they don’t have the impact that they want.

Frum: In these tabletop exercises when you think about things that the president might do, there are precedents—not in the mainland U.S.A., but in Puerto Rico and the Northern Marianas territories—where elections have been delayed for some time because of natural disasters. Now, in those cases, the natural disaster really happened, and people were dislocated, and the machinery of government was interfered with, and there were more urgent priorities than holding a vote. And the vote was then, after the delay, properly rescheduled at a future time and conducted in a free and fair way in those areas.

But those are precedents for the use of executive power in not states, but territories. Is there any foothold there that a president could use in the mainland U.S.A.?

Holder: Yeah, I suppose you could point to those rare instances where natural disasters have had an impact on the ability of people to cast ballots. But we also have to remember that we conducted national elections during war. I mean, during the Civil War, World War II. And so the resilience of the American electoral system has been tested in a whole variety of ways.

Now, if a hurricane was to somehow—you know, Hurricane Sandy version two was to show up, I don’t know, in New York—and that meant that people could not get to the polls? Yeah, there are ways in which you could delay the vote, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen. And I do think that our history really shows us that there is little, if anything, that we can not handle and allow the American people to get to the ballots, get to the polling places, and cast ballots as they always have when it’s bright and sunny. Whether it’s raining or whether it’s snowy.

I think the American people are really charged up about this election. And I think that they’re going to push through anything, whether natural or something fomented by this president. They’re going to push through all of that to make sure that their voices are actually heard.

Frum: Can you update us on the state of the gerrymandering push, counter-push?

It was initiated by the Republicans, who did an off-cycle gerrymander in Texas, as you said. Democrats responded, and for a time it looked like the Democrats actually were more successful. Now it looks like that balance of power has reversed itself. How do you read the gerrymandering war? And what larger implications does it have that the two parties are engaged in this kind of contest, each with the other?

Holder: Yeah, I mean, we formed up the National Democratic Redistricting Committee that I’ve been chair of since January of 2017, all with the thought that we wanted to do away with partisan and racial gerrymandering. Which, if you look at in historical terms, both parties have engaged in—Republicans maybe more recently, certainly since 2010. And what were pretty successful. The New York Times said that, I think, in the 2022 election that Americans were going to vote on the “fairest maps” in a generation. We then saw the president try to go into a process by which there would be this partisan gerrymandering that has had a really negative impact on our ability to get that fairness.

And as you calculate all the things that Republicans have done, all the things that Democrats have done, in this what I call race to the bottom—Republicans end up with, I think, about a five-seat advantage as a result of the mid-cycle gerrymandering that they have done this year.

Now, you have to understand that when Steve Bannon first looked at that proposal that the president made, they were anticipating that they might get as many as 21 additional seats. But as a result of what happened in California, the inability, as a result of popular discontent, South Carolina, Georgia were not able to do what they wanted to do. A court victory in Utah was something that helped Democrats. People—Republicans—in Indiana refused to go along with what the president wanted to do. But after you boil that all down, you end up with about a five-seat switch to the Republicans as a result of this inappropriate mid-cycle redistricting.

Frum: Is there any way for the national political system to draw back from this kind of behavior? There are certain limits on how far you can go. Neither party pushes the other to the extremist verge. Is there any way back? Or once you escalate, are you forever on a cycle of up escalation, up escalation, up escalation?

Holder: See, that’s a really good question. And the answer is yes. There is a way to get back to—well, maybe get back to a place where the nation has never been, but get to a place where the nation should be. And that is to simply ban partisan gerrymandering. And Congress can do that. Congress has the ability to determine the manner and means by which elections are held. And Congress could simply say, We’re banning mid-cycle redistricting. We’re banning partisan gerrymandering. Specify in the statute exactly how courts might interpret whether or not a particular state is, in fact, engaging in gerrymandering.

And my hope would be that if the House is taken by the Democrats, that that is a bill that they will introduce—I don’t expect necessarily that Donald Trump would sign it—but if there is trifecta Democratic control after the 2028 presidential election, my hope would be that there would be a stand-alone bill that would simply ban partisan gerrymandering, ban mid-cycle redistricting, and get back to the way in which I think the founders intended. Which was to, as you say, have the census done in the year ending in zero, and then have redistricting done in the year after that. It’s entirely possible.

Frum: You mentioned, in your introductory review of all that was going on, the drawback of the Voting Rights Act. And that has interacted with partisan gerrymandering in ways that are complicated and often unexpected—where basically right-wing Republicans and minority Democrats develop a common interest against non-minority Democrats in moving minority voters into safe seats and leaving the rest of the state for the Republicans.

As the Voting Rights Act has been reduced in scope by the courts, what does that mean for the future of free and fair elections in the United States? And how do you move to a more colorblind system of seat allocation while protecting the often-infringed-upon rights of minority voters to have their votes taken seriously and count equally?

Holder: Yeah; you know, there’s not a tension necessarily between trying to protect the rights of people of color and making sure that lines are drawn in such a way that they are more generally fair. To allow communities, various communities of interest, to vote in a cohesive way is not inconsistent with having a system that is perceived to be fair.

The Voting Rights Act was, I think, really the crown jewel of the civil-rights movement. And allowed for the registration of African Americans, particularly in the South, the flowering of African American political power. And then after that, Hispanic political power. And that has made, I think, the nation better.

The retreat by this Supreme Court—or the demolition of the Voting Rights Act by this Supreme Court—I think has had, and will continue to have, a negative impact on fairness around the country.

But I also think it’s an interesting thing. If you, again, ban partisan gerrymandering in those places where you have a history of racialized voting, polarized racial voting, banning partisan gerrymandering has the equal effect of eliminating racial gerrymandering, particularly in the South.

I think a lot of the things that have concerned this Supreme Court about the Voting Rights Act are really inconsistent with, certainly, the findings that Congress made—a series of findings that Congress had made when the bill was first passed and then reauthorized. And the reauthorizations were all signed by Republican presidents. This Supreme Court looks at an America that I don’t think truly exists. When Chief Justice [John] Roberts said that America has changed—well, yeah, that’s true. America has changed. We’re different now than we were in 1965. But we’re not yet at the place where we need to be when it comes to having race-neutral redistricting, race-neutral electoral processes, where everybody has the opportunity to cast a ballot.

One study shows that Black folks are a lot more likely to have to wait in line for over an hour in order to cast a vote than their white-citizen counterparts, and that’s the kind of thing that I think we can’t turn away from. That’s just a reality that continues to show the problems that we have in this nation.

Frum: Would you mind taking us on a short history of the Voting Rights Act, its reauthorization, and what the Supreme Court has done? So I think a lot of people have sort of a general sense of what happened. But the idea that this is not a history that begins and ends in 1965, but it’s an ebb and flow over time. Could you take us through that, starting in 1965 and bringing us up to the present?

Holder: Yeah; in 1965, you know, we see the Selma-to-Montgomery march after Bloody Sunday, where John Lewis and others had their skulls cracked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The nation sees that. [President] Lyndon Johnson says that in a famous speech, “We shall overcome.” Proposes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is passed. And the Voting Rights Act essentially said that in those jurisdictions that were covered—that was the technical term—that had a history of racial discrimination against African Americans in allowing them to both register and to vote, that the federal government would have the ability to put upon those jurisdictions a preclearance responsibility, such that if those states engaged in voting changes—moving polling places, closing polling places, other electoral processes—you had to get the approval of the federal government.

And those, again, were primarily southern states. But interestingly, over time, parts of New York actually came under the jurisdiction of the Voting Rights Act, and other northern states.

The Voting Rights Act was then reauthorized two or three occasions after—

Frum: Let me pause you. That original law was time-limited.

Holder: It was time-limited, and it had to then be reauthorized. The last time it was reauthorized it got just about three, four, five negative votes in the House of Representatives. It was passed unanimously by the Senate—that is, the reauthorization—and then signed back into law I believe by President George W. Bush. And this was after Congress had conducted really numerous hearings, thousands of pages of testimony, and then made specific findings.

The Supreme Court in the 2013 Shelby County case made the determination that the coverage formula—that is, to decide which states should be covered by the Voting Rights Act—had been outmoded, outdated. And as a result, threw that out, which took away from the government the ability to use that preclearance authority. And as a result, we saw a whole range of things happen relatively quickly. Twenty-five states put in place a whole range of voter-suppression things. Seventeen hundred polling places closed around the country. A great number of purges of voting rolls happened—about 40 percent of which happened in places that had previously been covered by the Voting Rights Act, therefore disproportionately impacting people of color.

And we have seen with the demise of the Voting Rights Act and its further attempts by, or successful moves, by the Supreme Court in the Callais decision, just recently, to do away with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act—which said that if you can show that the power of people of color was diluted by moves that people in power took with regard to electoral things, that could also be challenged. The Supreme Court has essentially taken away that ability. It’s essentially destroyed the Voting Rights Act. In spite of the fact that, as I said, Congress made specific findings, the court has, I guess, in some form or fashion, made its own determination, its own findings. Without conducting hearings, necessarily. And that, I think, it’s had a negative impact on the ability of African Americans—and other people of color—to get the representation to which they are entitled.

And right after the Callais decision, we saw a number of states automatically start redistricting in such a way that they drew out of power African Americans, Hispanics, who were in seats that had been previously covered by the Voting Rights Act.

Frum: What remains, if anything, of the Voting Rights Act?

Holder: Not much. You know, there are still ways in which parts of the act can be used, but I think, realistically, in order to get back to where we were, a new Voting Rights Act has to be put in place. One was proposed and passed through the House—the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act; it was filibustered in the Senate—to come up with a new way in which a coverage formula could be determined, and that would be responsive to what the Supreme Court found issues with in the 2013 Shelby County decision. And so I think that’s another thing that a new Congress would have to do.

So there are ways in which you could get back to a more modern version of the Voting Rights Act, but it would require an act of Congress.

Frum: Do you have any sympathy for the argument? The argument in 2013 as signed, it said, it was John Roberts said—and the majority for which he spoke—said, You can’t base 2013 voting-rights law on the realities of the country as they were in 1963. Do you have any sympathy for that point of view? And is there any way that a legislative draftsperson could write a law and say, Okay, John Roberts, we concede your point. Let’s base the laws on the realities of today, not 1963?

Holder: When the Court says that, if you look at that in a vacuum—okay, say, Well, yeah, that kind of makes sense. But that ignores the fact that Congress actually conducted hearings, had people come and testify, made findings. Thousands of pages of testimony and findings and exhibits. And on the basis of all the work that Congress did, they reauthorized the Voting Rights Act. That was simply ignored by the Court.

Could Congress come up with a way in which they satisfy the concerns that were raised by the Court in the Shelby County case? I think absolutely yes. You could come up with a new way in which you make the coverage formula apply to certain states, based on a new history that is determined by tests that would be put in place by Congress, that show that, in fact, states are doing things inappropriately. And that have a negative impact on the ability of certain people—people of color, that’s the focus of the act—people of color have been treated unfairly.

Yeah; Congress could certainly draw a new Voting Rights Act that would answer the concerns that were raised in the Shelby County case.

Frum: I want to pick up a thread that you left tantalizingly dangling earlier in our conversation. You talked about how President Trump has given orders to the Justice Department to do things that you find ominous.

You headed that building. You served that building for many, many years. And you headed that building, I think for—you’re the third-longest-serving attorney general in American history. How robust and how not robust is the Department of Justice to this kind of pressure? What are the things that would hold, and what do you observe that would be in danger of snapping under that kind of presidential pressure?

Holder: It’s a really good question, and I think that they have been very careful in the way in which they have really kind of changed the Justice Department and made it an arm of the White House. And one of the ways in which they did that was to get people who served in the Department of Justice over extended periods of time—and these would be Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, progressives, people who left their political leanings at the door and simply enforced the law—and so they’ve taken huge numbers of lawyers in a variety of places in the Justice Department that are now no longer in the department. And replaced them with ideologues who will do the kinds of things, do the bidding, of the political arm of the White House. And the Justice Department that we have now is almost unrecognizable to me and would be unrecognizable to Republican attorneys general as well.

Look, I didn’t agree with everything that Bill Barr did, or John Ashcroft did, or Jeff Sessions did, but they operated within certain parameters. In the way that I’m sure they didn’t agree with me, and I hope they would say that I operated within certain traditional parameters as well.

What we see Todd Blanche doing, Harmeet Dhillon doing, at the Civil Rights Division is inconsistent with the way in which the Justice Department has conducted itself under both Republicans and Democrats. The inability of Todd Blanche to say I’m not going to take political direction from the White House, or try to extol the virtue of the independence of the United States Department of Justice, again, is inconsistent—since Watergate, certainly—with the way in which the Justice Department has conducted itself. And again, under Republican as well as Democratic attorneys general.

Frum: What would have happened if President Obama had said to you, Attorney General Holder, this person really bugs me. I want you to find some way to bring charges against that person if you possibly can. Now, you will say President Obama wouldn’t have said it. Let’s just say he was just in a very, very snappish mood one day and he said that. What would happen?

Holder: Well, I would’ve tried to persuade him that that was a bad thing to do, for a whole variety of reasons. But if that were not, if I did not convince him of that, I would have resigned. And it would’ve been a noisy resignation. You know, the attorney general has the ability within the large conference room that is right outside the attorney general’s personal office, you have the ability to put up four portraits of your predecessors. And I had Justice [Robert] Jackson, then Attorney General Jackson. I had Janet Reno, who I worked for. Bobby Kennedy, who [was] one of my idols. But I also had Elliot Richardson up there—and he was there to remind me that you might at some point have to do something inconsistent with what your president wants you to do, and that may mean that you’re no longer going to be attorney general of the United States. And that’s why Elliot Richardson is one of my personal heroes.

And so if Barack Obama had told me to start an investigation of David Frum? You know, pull his taxes, with absolutely no basis for that—or even the suggestion that I would get from him, forget about whether there was a basis—that is something that for me would terminate my time as attorney general.

But I would not be one of these people who would go out quietly. I would explain to the American people exactly why I was leaving, and what the danger was of what the president was asking me to do.

Frum: Let me ask you about something else that has happened a lot, both in the first Trump term and even more in the second. I wrote at the beginning of the Trump presidency an article in which I quoted something that I heard when I was visiting Hungary in 2016. And somebody pointed out there that, look—Hungary is a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights. It’s under the jurisdiction of European courts. Viktor Orbán, authoritarian though he is, can’t simply toss people in prison. He can’t simply have death squads. He can’t seize property. But what he can do is make it clear that there is a much better treatment available to his friends than there is to his opponents. The friends get VIP seating; everybody else just gets the regular treatment.

And the phrase that this person used, which I quoted in many articles, was: In a modern state, the real power of control of the government is not the ability to persecute the innocent, but to protect the guilty. And that’s the thing we’ve seen Trump use his power much more to do. Is to say, If you’re my friend, then the rules don’t apply.

What should an attorney general do when confronted with a president who says, Look, this person’s been good to us. He’s been a generous donor to important causes. Just give him, cut him a break. Or, He’s a friend of ours. He’s asked for a pardon for a former business associate. What is not happening there that should be happening?

Holder: You simply tell the president no. You’ve got to have that ability. You’ve got to say to the president, No; we’re not going to subvert the processes that we have in place and give a pardon to somebody who has broken the law, hasn’t met any of the requirements that the Justice Department has in place and has applied, you know, uniformly to decide who’s worthy of a pardon. You simply say, No. In the same way that if the president tells you to go after somebody, you say, No, we’re not going to do that. The president tries to tell you to stop an investigation of somebody who is a supporter of the president? You say, No, we’re not going to do that. And if that, again, means that you’re going to lose your job as attorney general, well, there’s great honor, I think, in that. And you stand up for a system, a neutral system. That’s what the attorney general does.

You know, when I was up for confirmation as attorney general, I remember Pat Leahy, who was then head of the Judiciary Committee, said, You know, you’re not the secretary of justice. You’re different from other Cabinet members. You’re going to be the attorney general of the United States, and there has to be some distance between you and the president that you serve, the administration that you are a part of. And that really resonated with me back during the confirmation process. And as I said, you know, Elliot Richardson’s example was always, for me, a guiding principle.

Frum: Let me ask you about one last field of questioning. You know, the United States has a long and unhappy history of electoral shenanigans of all kinds: partisan, racial, all kinds. But one of the things, at least in the modern era, that Americans have known is: The shenanigans stop on the voting day. Once the votes are cast—whatever difficulties were put in the way of certain people or other people, whether it’s by race or by political party, on their way to the vote—once the ballots are cast, then the process goes forward in a secure and safe way. So much so that people didn’t even know what happens between. You vote, then there’s an inauguration some weeks later, and you don’t think too much about all the mechanics in between.

We saw in 2021 an attack on the integrity of an election after the election. And again, it’s hard to remember when that had ever happened before. Do you have any fears that such an attack could happen after the election of 2026? And do you have any instincts about what would be, if someone were to be malicious enough to try such a thing, what are the avenues they might try?

Holder: Yeah. I actually have a way in which I look at this whole electoral process in 2026, and I break it down into three segments. One: What’s going to happen before the election with regard to structural changes that people have been trying to make? You know, the gerrymandering that’s been going on. What actually happens in that second segment, with regard to when people are actually casting ballots, and that means from early voting up to Election Day. And then what happens after Election Day, when the votes are to be counted and when then people are supposed to be certified as winners.

And I’ve been part of groups that have tried to do, again, these tabletop exercises with regard to all three of those segments to try to anticipate that which might happen. I don’t think we necessarily see another January 6th where there is an insurrection on the Hill. But there can be a whole variety of things that happen from Election Day and then the weeks after that where things are done to try to countermand that which the American people have decided by the way in which they have cast their votes. And so we’ve got to be prepared for all of these possibilities.

And I think one of the ways in which we counter that most directly is to have as many people get out there and cast votes as is possible—to make sure that the margins in the elections that are to be decided are big enough such that they can’t be monkeyed with. So at the end of the day, I’m actually pretty confident that, although there are going to be bumps along the way, and we’re going to see things that perhaps we’ve never seen before, that we’re going to get results that are consistent with the desires of the American people. But I don’t think that we can simply hope that is going to happen. We have got to be prepared to fight if that’s necessary.

Frum: Can I say a cynical thing? Without casting doubts on the integrity of American government and all that, is there any way for a Hakeem Jeffries to communicate to a Mike Johnson: Speaker Johnson, if this is a free and fair election, you’re probably going to lose. And after you lose, you’re going to go into business as a consultant with a big salary and a big office and a very sweet life. And if the process of certification goes smoothly and lawfully, your clients will always get a respectful hearing here from the new majority. I can’t say they’ll always win. They’ll always get a respectful and attentive hearing. If there’s any shenanigans, however, no one will get a hearing. Is there any way to communicate that?

Holder: Yeah, I don’t think that’s a bad message. I mean, I actually think that If Democrats were to take over the House, they need not replicate that which I think Republicans have done, or groups of Republicans have done while they’ve held power in these last couple of years. To get back to kind of norms would be a good thing—but also to hold out the stick, which is to say, as you said, Look, if you all try to do things that are inconsistent with how we normally conduct elections and certify elections, there’s going to be a price that that will be paid.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing. But I also think that’s the kind of thing that should be publicly said, you know? It shouldn’t be just a conversation between Mike Johnson and Hakeem Jeffries. That is something that Hakeem Jeffries, other leaders in the Democratic Party, should make known publicly. So that people on K Street—when they’re making determinations as to who’s going to represent them, lobby for them in front of this new Democratic majority—understand that there’s a price that those people, defeated Republicans, will have to pay for the inappropriate things that they have done.

But, my hope would be that if there is in fact a change in leadership in the House, that it happens in the way that it normally has occurred. That people leave the House, that’s what they want to do—go make gobs of money doing things, representing people, and bringing their points of view back to the House. I got some issues around old lobbying and all that stuff and the revolving door. But at least, let’s try to do things in a way that’s a little more consistent with the transfer of power than we have seen in recent times.

Frum: Can I ask you for a final sort of summing-up view? As people listen to your voice and they hear your concerns about 2026, there’s been also some guarded optimism in some of the things you’ve said. How should people—I mean, we’re now into the voting season. Early voting will begin very soon. In some states, I think it’s already begun. What mentality should people who hear you bring to this election? How worried should they be? How hopeful should they be? How fearful? How brave? What would you say to them, just as you sign off?

Holder: I would say that the American people tend to underestimate the power that they have. I mean, as you kind of at the beginning went through a whole number of positions that I have held, it almost sounds like I couldn’t hold a job, you know? But I’ve had a series of government positions, but I hold the most important title now that I’ve ever had—and that’s American citizen. And I think that people need to understand that American citizens have enormous amounts of power. That when we act together, when we are focused on our civic and political life, we change this nation. We have changed, done things that seemingly were impossible—got women the right to vote, ripped down a system of American apartheid. All because the American people decided that that was no longer going to be allowed, or that changes had to be made.

Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. But here’s the deal—it doesn’t bend on its own. It only bends when people like us, the American citizens, put their hands on that arc and pull it towards justice. We have had that power in the past. We still retain that power now. The American people, I always say, are slow to rouse, but once we get focused on something, once we commit ourselves to it, we are a mighty force. And this is as true in 2026 as it was during the civil-rights era, as it was during the suffragette movement. If we are prepared to fight for our democracy, if we are prepared to make our voices known, we can still have the America that we want.

Frum: And if people are afraid?

Holder: Push through those fears. I’m sure that Dr. King—you know, John Lewis, Diane Nash, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton—I’m sure that they were afraid. I’m sure they had doubts about their abilities to do that which they wanted to accomplish. And nevertheless, women got the right to vote. Desegregation occurred.

[It] requires courage. I mean, this nation—this is our 250th anniversary. It took courage for a bunch of farmers and folks to take on the mightiest empire in the world and declare that we were gonna be a free nation. If we’re going to honor that past, we have got to push through the doubts that we have. We have to have the courage that they had. We have to honor them by acting in ways that are consistent with what they did, and make better the nation that exists now, and make better and more hopeful the future that I think this nation can still have.

I believe in this country, you know? I really do. And we go through these times where we have great successes, and then we have retreats. But the arc of this nation has always been generally in a positive way. This can’t be the first generation of Americans that fails to defend our democracy, and I’m confident that we won’t be.

Frum: Attorney General Eric Holder, thank you so much for your continuing public service. Thank you for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Holder: Right. Thanks for having me, David.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Attorney General Eric Holder for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is a historical novel, Agrippa by Robert Harris.

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa was the right-hand man of the first non-assassinated emperor of Rome, the Emperor Augustus. He was the general who masterminded Augustus’s victory at the Battle of Actium, the battle that confirmed Augustus’s rule of the Roman world. He built aqueducts. He was a great engineer. He was also the main planner of the Pantheon building in Rome, and his name is still on the facade, to be seen by tourists, of the Pantheon. M. Agrippa fecit. “Marcus Agrippa made it.”

Romans of the day usually omitted his middle name, Vipsanius, so they knew him as we know him: Marcus Agrippa.

This is a novel about Agrippa’s life. Which is a challenging thing to do, because Agrippa left behind very little record of anything he wrote or said, quite unlike his contemporaries Julius Caesar, Marcus Cicero. I had the opportunity to ask Robert Harris about this book at an event in Washington a little while ago. I interviewed him at the Georgetown Barnes & Noble bookstore, and one of the questions I asked Harris was about his attraction to the historic-novel form. Why did he do it? Most of his output has been set in times past, often in the Roman world. Harris, a very witty man, gave me two answers as to why he chose this format. The first answer was that they—dead people, ancient people—can’t sue you. He wrote a novel that was based on the life of Tony Blair that raised a lot of libel risk, and he learned a lesson from that. He also said that things that are set in the past become less dated. If you write a novel set today, 10 years from now, people will notice the technology looks old-fashioned. Whereas if you write in Roman times, no one minds. That was an interesting answer. I didn’t find it quite satisfying to the question. Why do I, as a reader, like to consume historical fiction?

And I thought about that sometime after our dialogue at the Georgetown Barnes & Noble, and here is a thought that I offer to you. There are two things if you study history that you need to keep in mind, and they’re contradictory. The first is that people in the past were very much like us. They loved; they feared; they lived; they died. And in other ways, were completely unlike us. They lived under not only material conditions, but moral conditions very different from our own. And in particular, it’s very hard for people who live in the modern world of science to put ourselves back into a world where religion was more central than it is today. And where the fear of magic and incantations was as powerful as it was, for example, for the ancient Romans.

But as you keep these two truths in mind, there’s a question that the person who wants to understand the past must grapple with, and that is: which of the two truths to keep uppermost at which time?

I think, as you begin to be interested in history, the truth you need to grapple with first is the similarity of the past. That’s why you care so much about it; because you recognize that people then were like people now in very important ways. And only later and secondarily, and as you go deeper, do you need to grapple with the second truth, which is how different they were.

Historical novels are a great entry into the similarity. The novelist inevitably assimilates the past to the present. If you read an old-fashioned historical novel—Ben-Hur, which was written in the 19th century—you’re struck at what a 19th-century person the Ben-Hur in the 19th-century novel was. And if you read Agrippa by Robert Harris, written in the 21st century, Agrippa seems like a very 21st-century person.

So you can get a sense of the drift away from the reality of the time by how close these people come to you. But because they come close to you, you can begin to care about them and to investigate more. So historical fiction can be a great entry point into the understanding of the past. It shouldn’t be the finishing point, because then you need to grapple with the other truth of the difference of the past, of the difference between then and now. And maybe as you study the past longer, it is those differences that come more and more to the fore as the things that really fix your attention and help you to understand why the past is so important to understanding the present.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me. I will ask again, if you’re minded to support the work of the program, the best way to do that is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Please share and subscribe, and like and heart and whatever you do on social media, to bring this program to the attention of other people who might be interested in it. Thanks so much for watching and listening. See you soon. Bye-bye.