Before the mid-19th century, executions in America were presumptively public. Most prisoners were hanged on a gallows, following an hours-long affair that began with the condemned person’s exit from jail accompanied by ministers, the sheriff and his deputies, and sometimes a military escort. Spectators joined the humiliating procession, gathering by the thousands to watch the noose lowered over the prisoner’s neck. The sheriff would mount the scaffold to read aloud the death warrant, sometimes adding commentary, and at least one minister (often several) would issue sermons. The condemned was offered the chance to give a speech, with spectators standing so close that they could ask the prisoner questions and join him in prayer, or bid him goodbye, if he was a family member or friend.
All of that seemed safely confined to a past that the Trump administration now hopes to revive. President Trump, a consummate showman, has authorized the country’s first public execution in 90 years. The condemned prisoner is Nidal Hasan, a military psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and injured many more during a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that the killing, scheduled for December 3, will be conducted by the military and publicly livestreamed. During his trial, Hasan alarmed his standby attorneys when he chose to defend himself, and mounted an argument that the lawyers considered tantamount to seeking his own death. He could still conceivably file civilian appeals, which could delay his execution substantially. If it goes forward, the administration surely hopes to make an example of Hasan to all who might be tempted by his worldview. But this strategy could just as likely result in unintended consequences, and pushback by the public.
Public executions ceased not because those who clamored to witness them found the displays uniformly outrageous, but because politicians in the 19th century associated them with proletarian barbarity. Though these executions were theoretically meant to deter crime and exhort onlookers to practice proper Christian values, they were mostly entertainment, and did not always provoke the desired reactions. Some onlookers cheered and celebrated the killings; others sympathized with the condemned. Public executions of Black prisoners in the South, for instance, became opportunities for community, song, and displays of Black religious authority. Ministers preached sermons of salvation and sometimes protested that the prisoners were innocent.
In that sense, the public nature of executions backfired, and critics took note. Because the attendant crowds were so volatile, vulgar, and unruly, by 1860 all northern states had begun carrying out the killings in jail yards, which were much smaller areas, subject to tight government control. Decades later, the South followed suit. The large crowds soon vanished. Military executions, traditionally carried out by firing squad, were long conducted in small, controlled settings, often witnessed only by military personnel and chaplains. The last military execution in the United States was carried out in 1961.
Trump and Hegseth aim to have it both ways: a small, secure setting and massive crowds. This time, viewers will be watching a livestream on their screens, close enough to see the event but too far to smell the gunpowder. Both Hegseth and Trump seem intent on flexing America’s political power and military might as a message not just to foreign enemies but to the American people, as if to say: This could be you. This method of ruling by fear is central to authoritarian governance, and Trump and Hegseth seem drawn to executions partly for that reason.
But if Trump and Hegseth are hoping for a deterrent effect, they’re unlikely to get it. The idea that executions could deter other killers with political motives seems sorely mistaken; those who carry out such murders already know that they could face grave consequences, and have deemed that outcome acceptable. Nor do executions deter murderers without political motives, because deterrence is generated not by the severity of the punishment, but by the certainty of getting caught. And there is little certainty in American homicide investigations: In 2023, the nationwide case-clearance rate for murder was only 58 percent, meaning that murderers have decent odds of evading justice. Even if they are caught, they have good odds of avoiding the death penalty—only 23 new death sentences were handed down in 2025. Trump’s Department of Justice hopes to boost those numbers, but even if they tripled, they would add up to 69 death sentences spread across some 14,000 murders.
Adding a livestreamed element is perhaps an attempt to intensify the intended deterrent effect, but it might have opposite consequences. Plenty of Americans would surely enjoy the spectacle of a public execution, just as people have historically. One can envision groups of people crowded around their phones, sharing chips and drinks, admiring the military pageantry. But it’s easy to imagine a different effect, too: Other crowds of people, other phones, entirely different impressions—that the death penalty is a disgusting violation of human rights that puts America in league with nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China. Or that Nidal Hasan is a martyr, and the United States is a savage country not worth defending—which is the narrative presented by Hasan himself. Before the shooting, he told family that he’d turned against the country he served upon hearing horrific stories of war from his psychiatric patients, and grew troubled by the fact that America was killing Muslims abroad. Carrying out his public execution would only credit the notion that this country is barbarous.
Yesterday, in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States would soon carry out its first public execution since the 1930s. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” he said. Pentagon officials later confirmed that the execution will be livestreamed. The condemned man is former Major Nidal Hasan, who shouted “God is great” in Arabic before murdering 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. Hegseth’s rationale for following this ancient practice is the same one offered by the ancients themselves: publicizing the agony of death and its unhygienic aftermath will remind onlookers that, in Hegseth’s words, there are “serious consequences” for treason. “No-brainer,” Hegseth said.
This pitiful creep—Hasan, I mean—deserves what he is probably going to get in December. The rest of us, however, will be ill-served by the spectacle of his execution. Many past criminals have had their head publicly cut off, or body nailed to a cross and left to rot there, as exemplary punishment. Such executions were once considered entertainment. Now the idea of recreationally watching a man be killed is so strange that few people understand what the experience will be like. Watching people die by violence, even if those people have it coming, damages the spectator irreversibly. I don’t mean physical or emotional damage, though many who see unnatural deaths up close do vomit and suffer from uneasy dreams afterward. Rather, I mean something more like the loss of their humanity and dignity, through partaking in the process of treating a person—in many ways so similar to themselves—like a machine to be turned off or ripped apart, a malfunctioning printer or an old car. To see this process is to be diminished, and the decision to make the execution visible to all is an invitation to self-harm, sent out to everyone with an internet connection. It is hard to appreciate how awful this viewing experience will be, until you have it. And then of course it will be too late. I have seen videotaped executions and have been diminished by every single one.
In August 2014, Hasan wrote a letter from prison to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the leader of the Islamic State, and asked to be granted citizenship as a “soldier of Allah.” No response was recorded. Ironically, it seems likely that Hasan would sympathize with Hegseth’s penchant for public execution, because the Islamic State interpreted the Quran to require that execution be carried out in public. Fornicators, according to Quran 24:2, should be flogged, and their punishment should be “witnessed” by a “group of believers.” By extension, the Islamic State determined, such a group should witness the punishment of all scripturally ordained crimes. Certain crimes, such as brigandage, are to be punished with crucifixion, an inherently public method of killing that the Islamic State carried out on video. Regrettably, I have seen footage of such a death.
In the years before Hasan’s 2013 court-martial, he stopped shaving, in Islamic defiance of Army regulations that prohibit soldiers from growing beards. Mike Simpson, an Army officer and emergency-room doctor near the facility where Hasan was incarcerated, told me a few years later that he put the word out to colleagues that if Hasan ever had a medical emergency (not unlikely, given that he suffered paralysis and other conditions after being gunned down in the course of his terror attack), Simpson would like to be called to shave Hasan personally. The shaving would arise out of medical necessity—the patient might need a mask, with a reliable seal around the face—but Simpson, for his own pleasure, wanted to shear the bastard himself.
But the pleasure that might come from shaving Hasan would be quite different from what one might experience by shooting him in the heart. The Army won’t struggle to find a dozen willing soldiers to act as an execution party for Hasan. Hasan has said he wants death. Hegseth said he “doesn’t care” what Hasan’s final wishes might be. But I suspect that the volunteers’ enjoyment of their duty will be dampened if they notice signs of ecstasy from Hasan, as he is tied to a post 15 paces away from them and prays his way to the end. Hamlet could not bring himself to kill Claudius in prayer, because killing him in the midst of a holy act—“to take him in the purging of his soul, when he is fit and season’d for his passage”—would be too merciful.
In this world, denying Hasan the pleasure of death on his own terms, and letting him instead spend a few more earthly decades in tedious incarceration, would seem a much more onerous punishment. Therefore I would propose an alternative to public execution: public incarceration. Hasan should be placed in a small space, with a Pentagon-funded livestream of his remaining years. If the purpose of the spectacle of his death is to demonstrate to others the “serious consequences” of murdering 13 people, I doubt any execution would be more frightening than the slow, public aging of this repulsive murderer, as biology and time carry out his sentence. I would tune in to the livestream myself now and then, until I grew bored and found better things to do, and better ways to spend my own remaining time. This would take Hasan’s life and make from it a small gift to the rest of us, rather than taking something irrecoverable from us as we give martyrdom to him.
The week has a heartbeat, and its rhythm is changing.
When Neal Caren, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently dug into data from the American Time Use Survey to look at when people were hanging with their friends over the course of a week, he mapped out a pattern that reminded him of an EKG. He saw steady pulses of friend time every weekday evening after work hours, and then bigger spikes on Friday and Saturday nights—like an arrhythmia caused by having fun. At least, that’s what he observed about the early 2000s, the earliest data he looked at. In the years since, the “‘heartbeat’ of social life” has grown fainter.
Americans have been spending less and less time with their friends over the past two decades, a trend that started well before the isolation of the coronavirus pandemic, and has continued long after restrictions were lifted. But looking across the week, Caren found that, starting in the mid-2010s, the biggest loss of friend time happened on Friday nights. (Saturday hangs have also declined a bit, but are still “nearly double the weekday level,” he wrote.) Now Friday—Friday! the day workers thank God for, the day that Rebecca Black sang about, the only day when Robert Smith is in love—looks no different from a common Tuesday. Its social pulse is mild, subdued. “Friday night in America has become just another weeknight,” Caren wrote in the study.
Weeks are a strange temporal unit, Eviatar Zerubavel, a professor emeritus of sociology at Rutgers University who has studied the relationship between time and social life, told me. The day, the month, the year—all of these have a basis in nature. The seven-day week, however, is a completely human invention. The unique flavors of each day of the week are also creations of human culture. Monday isn’t the start of the workweek because any inherent rhythm of life says it should be. Humans arbitrarily decided that. And it didn’t have to come with a negative connotation—but we all know that “a case of the Mondays” isn’t a good thing.
The flavor of Friday has long been a social one. “Friday in general is a strange animal because it’s between what we call the weekdays and the weekend, and it has characteristics of both,” Zerubavel said. Friday night is when we transition from the typical workweek into the days that society has reserved for freedom. For Jewish people, it is the beginning of Sabbath, which is ideally celebrated in community. Those who work nights or weekends surely have a different relationship with Friday nights, but even they share in the broad cultural understanding of what this time is for: parties, happy hours, shrugging out from under the weight of weekday cares, unwinding with your people. When someone says that a Thursday “feels like Friday,” this is probably what they mean—that it feels like the time to wrap up work and kick off the free, social part of the week. (In college, for instance, “Thirsty Thursday” sort of means “Extra Friday.”)
But it seems that the vibe of Friday night is evolving. If it loses its association with socializing, what Friday represents in our cultural imagination might change significantly. “I would expect if we have this conversation 40 years from now, you’ll ask different questions,” Zerubavel said. Caren’s study didn’t look at what Americans were doing instead of spending time with friends on Friday nights. But lately, people of all ages have been reporting a strong preference for staying home on evenings and weekends. In a 2020 Gallup poll, Americans’ favorite way to spend an evening was “staying home with family.” The runner-up was “watching television or a movie at home.” Only 3 percent of people named “entertaining/visiting friends” as their favorite evening activity. In a 2026 Harris poll on Gen Z, 73 percent said that staying home was their default weekend plan.
Friday nights in particular might be suffering because of their association with hitting the bars; drinking has fallen out of favor in the U.S. Remote work could also have something to do with it: Because Friday is a popular day to work from home for those who can, some reporting suggests that the post-work Friday happy hour is becoming endangered. Or people might simply be too exhausted at the end of the workweek. According to the American Psychological Association, work stress is on the rise. On Fridays, “you have to put more effort” into going out after working a full day, Caren said. For whatever reason, “the cost of going out on Friday nights—people aren’t finding this worthwhile anymore.”
Friday night is still a unique part of the week. What’s changing is how people want to transition into their weekend—at home, alone, or with family. Not out with friends. (Or even in with friends!) That’s a remarkable culture shift—but not, in and of itself, a bad one. Not enjoying drinking, being tired from the workweek and wanting to veg out, or prioritizing quality family time are perfectly understandable reasons to take Friday night down a notch. The real problem is that people aren’t shifting their friend time to a new spot on the calendar. The decline of Friday nights spent out on the town with friends has not led to a corresponding spike in Saturday-night dinners, Sunday-afternoon coffees, or even Wednesday-night Survivor watch parties—not according to the data, anyway. It just means people are seeing friends less, period. Friday night is not the thing that’s sacred. Time with our friends is.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
The literature of ancient Greece and Rome seems to be in vogue. This summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey turned Homer’s epic poems into best sellers, and yesterday the Nobel Prize was awarded to Anne Carson, a poet who has made a career of repurposing ancient-Greek works. Perhaps this resurgence has something to do with modern anxieties about the future; people tend to look back to the past in uncertain times. Although I’m glad to see the classics prominently displayed in bookstores, I’m not convinced that they hold a special kind of wisdom that contemporary writing can’t access. For evidence, I look to the work of Carson herself. The poet’s writing updates and remixes ancient verse and mythology, but she does not believe that the past is a manual for the present. As my colleague Walt Hunter explained this week in The Atlantic, “Rather than lulling us with history’s familiarity, she seduces us with its strangeness.”
First, here are five new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
Take If Not, Winter, which is both a straightforward translation of the surviving poetry of Sappho and a playful, inventive collection of verse. Carson’s lines evoke the electric current of a marriage bed, the pleasure of beholding a girl’s delicate features, the pulse-quickening touch of the god Eros. These emotions are not lost to time—a reader might know, for example, what it means for a beloved’s voice to put “the heart in my chest on wings”—but there’s still a chasm between Sappho’s experiences and my own. I struggle to imagine the ancient poet’s relationships or daily concerns; similarly, if she could miraculously show up in my time, Sappho likely wouldn’t understand my job, my hobbies, or my marriage. (I imagine she’d be confused about why I describe myself with a name for people from her island: lesbian.)
Carson’s 2010 book, Nox, accordion-printed on a single sheet of paper, mourns her brother’s death in part by employing the work of the Roman poet Catullus, who also suffered the death of a brother. Carson doesn’t imply that she and Catullus feel the same things. Her goal, instead, is to place herself in a tradition that “connects her to Catullus and a community of mourners as old as human history, one that we all belong to or will eventually join,” as I wrote last year.
Communicating with the past has its limits. Carson has said that the classics offer some “glimpses of similarity” in a sea of “unbelievable otherness.” We’re separated by geography, culture, and time; our values and societies are entirely different. But when the ancients wrote, they unspooled a thread that we can follow through the maze of time. It leads us through “the gulf between the present and the past,” as Hunter writes, and brings us somewhere new and worthwhile.
Graeme Mitchell / Redux
Anne Carson’s Seductive Strangeness
By Walt Hunter
The winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature makes ancient texts feel tantalizingly new.
The Beauty of the Husband is a poetic meditation on love, attraction, betrayal, and bitterness. Carson’s narrator has separated from her husband. Both are writers, though the narrator’s spouse, a womanizer and a liar, borrows heavily from her work—he even uses a phrase she has translated from Homer to open a letter he writes to his mistress. He is also, unfortunately, beautiful, and his “beauty convinces,” the narrator tells us. She confesses that she might be seduced by him all over again if he came near enough. But she keeps her distance, even as he routinely sends letters exalting their love. That space allows her to reflect honestly on their years together: “Why did nature give me over to this creature—don’t call it my choice, / I wasventured: / by some pure gravity of existence itself, / conspiracy of being!” she cries. In hindsight, the partnership feels inevitable; she had little control over loving him, but writing this book is a way to regain her autonomy, or so it appears. The Beauty of the Husband offers a vision of an uneven union, where one person’s outsize presence occupies, even consumes, the mind of the other. — Isle McElroy
A man walks into a restaurant. He doesn’t have a reservation, but that shouldn’t be a problem; there are ample seats at the bar, visible just over the hostess’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says, smiling. “We can seat you right away.” As she gathers menus, he absorbs the pleasant hum of a busy dining room, breathes in the tantalizing smells from the semi-open kitchen. Then, the hostess stops, Columbo-like, to interrupt with one more question: “And what’s your phone number?”
This story was updated at 6 p.m. on October 9, 2026.
Russia is a U.S. adversary, with a track record of interfering in U.S. elections. It’s providing support for Iran in its war with the United States even as the U.S. backs Ukraine in its long-running war against Russia. FBI agents work day and night to combat a long list of threats emanating from Russian soil: espionage, cyber intrusions, influence campaigns, and efforts to infiltrate American institutions and critical infrastructure. So when the news emerged this summer that FBI Director Kash Patel would be visiting Moscow just three weeks before the midterm elections, many of his own employees were puzzled—and concerned.
Current and former FBI officials familiar with the matter told me there was a quiet campaign to urge senior leadership to cancel the trip. When that and other efforts to pass apprehensions up the chain went unanswered, some shared their worries with Congress. Now a pair of senior House Democrats are taking the unusual step of asking the FBI director to scrap the visit, which is reportedly set to begin next week: “In the interest of national security, we ask you to reconsider. Call off this trip,” they wrote in a letter that I obtained. The letter is signed by Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Representative Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Patel has not replied to the letter and the FBI has not publicly confirmed his travel plans. Neither the FBI nor the White House responded to my multiple requests for comment.
With so little information available either publicly or internally, the anxiety within the agency Patel leads has only grown. Seventeen current and former FBI and Department of Justice officials, intelligence officials, and others familiar with the situation told me they were deeply worried by a variety of decisions that suggest ever-closer ties between the Trump administration and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Many of the officials would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation if their name appeared in this story. Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and mein response to my reporting earlier this year that he has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences that were perceived as potential national-security vulnerabilities.
But some former officials were willing to be named. They told me that for the national-security and counterintelligence officials who have devoted their careers to the threat from Russia, the absence of information about the trip is particularly concerning. Christopher O’Leary, a former senior executive in the FBI’s counterterrorism division, told me that he and others found the timing of the trip bizarre, especially given the pressure that FBI leadership is putting on agents to substantiate election conspiracy theories at home that Russian intelligence services continuously amplify. “If there was real concern about interference in our elections, then the FBI director should be in the United States leading the effort around the clock,” not going to Moscow, O’Leary told me.
When Patel took over leadership of the bureau in February of last year, he struck a notably different tone on Russia than that of his predecessors. Rather than regarding Moscow purely as an enemy, he has sought out areas where the two nations can partner, including in combatting transnational violent crime and cyberfraud. He shares that approach with other senior officials in the Trump administration who have cultivated closer ties with Moscow.
In recent days, two of the president’s top advisers, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, found time amid the midterm campaigns to visit Republika Srpska to advise its pro-Russian government on voting issues, The New York Timesreported. A top Trump-administration diplomat has come up with a plan to trade sanctions relief in exchange for Russian political-prisoner releases—a deal that would bypass Ukraine and likely anger U.S. allies. Special Envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have both spent considerable time with Putin as they seek a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, accepted a lavish wedding gift from the Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the rental of a private island and a fireworks show, ProPublica has reported. (Kremlev said this week that Trump Jr. has paid him back.) Earlier this year, a gold-framed photo of Trump with Putin went up in the Palm Room at the White House. Just today, Trump announced that he and Putin had worked out a deal for the U.S. to import Russian diesel fuel, an agreement that directly undercuts American sanctions.
In interviews with Reuters in August, Patel boasted about the FBI’s new approach to its “non-traditional partners,” Russia and China. Patel described extensive behind-the-scenes cooperation with Russian authorities to target violent criminal networks. “This stuff doesn’t happen overnight,” he said. “We’ve been at this for 15 months.” Both Reuters and Politico reported this summer that Patel was planning a trip to Russia this month. Politico cited a U.S. official familiar with the plans in reporting that Patel would visit Moscow first, then St. Petersburg, with the host likely to be the FSB, the Russian security service that is the successor to the KGB.
While speaking with Reuters, Patel characterized the FBI’s relationships with Russian and Chinese law enforcement as “new and dynamic,” but he was careful to add that engagement did not negate the need for vigilance. “We are extremely mindful of their adversarial approach on many matters,” he said. “They are not going to stop, but if we can go and have wins for America, then we must engage.”
In congressional testimony, Patel has identified Russia as among the FBI’s biggest nation-state threats. Last month, he said “the counter-espionage arrests by this FBI are up 53 percent, including from Russia.” Three weeks ago, Patel took part in the announcement of charges against five people whom the FBI investigated for their part in what he described as “an alleged plot by the Russian intelligence services to murder a dissident on U.S. soil for daring to speak out against the Russian government.” Patel said the plot “exposes the lengths to which our adversaries will go to silence its critics,” adding that the FBI “is committed to defending the free speech of everyone within our homeland and will not tolerate any attempts by foreign governments to violate our laws and threaten our freedoms.”
Patel has spent years echoing Trump’s claims that Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election was a “hoax.” That’s also what Russia claims, but that runs against the conclusions of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities, including the bureau Patel now directs. Trump gave a prime-time address this summer on the threats that foreign adversaries pose to U.S. elections—though he focused almost exclusively on China, and made little mention of threats from Russia.
FBI directors have visited Russia before, most recently Robert Mueller in 2013, to discuss the Boston Marathon bombings and related investigations. But previous visits by FBI officials to Russia have come with greater internal transparency about the purpose and planning of the trip, four current and former FBI officials told me.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did the Russian embassy in Washington. In July, Peskov told Russian reporters, “I do not have any information on the matter. You know, such visits are not usually made public, so I cannot tell you anything about this,” according to the Russian state news agency TASS.
Two former senior FBI officials who oversaw Russian counterintelligence operations and were familiar with previous FBI directors’ contact with their Russian counterparts told me they could not think of a compelling reason for Patel to take the trip at this moment that outweighed the practical risks.
The letter this week from congressional Democrats asks Patel for clarity. “Why is the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) visiting a hostile foreign power that has been committing war crimes, conducting influence operations against U.S. elections, conducting malicious cyberattacks against our critical infrastructure, and helping our adversaries target and kill American soldiers?” the letter asks.
“As Director of the FBI, you possess information that would be highly valuable to America’s adversaries. Unfortunately, your affinity for the Russian government does not inspire confidence that you will be able to effectively safeguard those secrets,” the letter continues.
The two congressmen requested a closed-door briefing to Congress about the trip and Patel’s efforts to forge ties with adversaries no later than 5 p.m. on October 12. They are asking for details about what prompted the trip, as well as the itinerary and planned meetings while Patel is in Russia. And they are asking for details about any social activities, “a full accounting” of Patel’s whereabouts during any downtime, and the names of all individuals who will accompany Patel, notably including “any private citizens or members of President Trump’s family.”
Multiple foreign officials who would normally be consulted have said they, too, were in the dark about Patel’s trip. A senior Ukrainian official said they had not been briefed or consulted about the trip, and had “no idea” why Patel was planning the visit. One senior European official said that in conversations with their American diplomatic and intelligence counterparts, the American officials had expressed concern about Patel’s trip.
Raskin told me that members of Congress were also confused about the purpose of such a trip. “The whole thing to me is absolutely astounding,” he said. “He will be a target and sitting duck for every kind of Russian espionage and influence operation. We are demanding they call it off. This could be a disaster for our country.” Three former FBI counterintelligence officials told me they shared those concerns. “There isn’t a single American official who doesn’t get targeted” by the Russian intelligence services while they are in the country, one person familiar with the situation told me.
Some of the tools that the U.S. once had to combat foreign meddling have eroded. The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force was disbanded almost immediately after the new administration came to power in 2025, and dozens of its specialized staff were either reassigned or removed from the bureau, Julia Curlee, a former CIA analyst and White House National Security Council director under the second Trump administration, told me. And NPR reported this week that the teams that track foreign spies on U.S. soil—known as counterintelligence squads—have only about half of their positions filled.
Curlee told me that it’s possible to imagine a legitimate reason for the FBI director to visit Russia—but that she doubts that’s why Patel is going now. “Unless he’s going to warn them to stay out of our elections, and get out of Ukraine, he has no business there,” she said.
Officials told me that they were confident that FBI staff would do everything in their power to mitigate the counterintelligence risks if Patel travels to Russia, but that they cannot prevent him from going. “Who can stop him?” one former FBI official asked.
The hype over cryptocurrency may have faded since the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, but beneath the surface, a lot of real money is involved, including the millions being funneled into the American political system. The actor turned documentarian Ben McKenzie joins Galaxy Brain host Charlie Warzel to talk about the current state of cryptocurrency, why he became interested in investigating it, and how the crypto craze influenced some people’s enthusiasm, or lack thereof, about AI.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Charlie Warzel: The big joke always about crypto or bitcoin is that it is a technology in search of an actual use case, right? And my question is: Is this the first truly useful application for cryptocurrencies, which is political power?
Ben McKenzie: It’s not the first. I mean, the first was buying drugs online.
Warzel: Fair.
[Music]
Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to call up a TV star and ask him the following question: Is crypto dead? Dying? Dormant? Or is it thriving in 2026?
Now, thankfully, we’ve chosen the right TV star for this very specific job. If you were alive and conscious in the early 2000s, you’ve likely encountered Ben McKenzie on a television screen, on an online recap, or a magazine cover. He played the heartthrob Ryan Atwood on The O.C., and he’s parlayed that into a career on other shows like Southland and Gotham. But then, during COVID, something weird happened, and McKenzie became obsessed with cryptocurrency. Now, unlike other celebrities who spent the pandemic shilling it, McKenzie started investigating it. He wrote a best-selling book with the reporter Jacob Silverman, and then he made a documentary. It’s called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money.
Recently I met McKenzie at The Atlantic Festival, and I wanted to talk to him and bring him on to speak about his work. Because it is a very strange moment for crypto. After the fall of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried around 2022, it feels like we’ve heard less about the technology. But while the early-2020s hype has largely faded, crypto is not gone. In 2024, crypto companies threw millions of dollars into American elections, elevating pro-crypto candidates and trying to take down its skeptics. And at the same time, Donald Trump and his family became entangled with their own crypto projects. Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee called it a “multi-billion-dollar crypto empire fueled by self-dealing and corrupt foreign interests.”
Since then, crypto’s presence has been somewhat quieter in the headlines, but arguably more influential than in the days where cartoon-ape NFTs were selling for six figures. This summer, in a 927-page disclosure for the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, it was revealed that in the first year of Trump’s second term, the president made $635 million from the memecoins that were using his name. And that his crypto holdings exceeded $1 billion. Crypto money is also pouring into next month’s midterm races.
Back in 2024, I wrote that “crypto is a perfect fit for the turbulence and the distrust of the 2020s. As well as the nihilism and the corruption of the Trump era.”
So I wanted to bring Ben on and talk about all of it. Is political influence crypto’s most successful use case? Why aren’t people paying more attention to how crypto is being wielded by Trump and the people around him? How on earth did we all get here? And where is it all leading?
Ben McKenzie will join me to discuss it all. But first, I just wanted to say we are doing an Ask Me Anything episode later this year, and we would really like your submissions. You can write in to charlie@theatlantic.com with any burning question that you have for me or the show. I look forward to reading it. Put “Galaxy Brain AMA” in the subject line.
And now Ben McKenzie.
Warzel: Ben McKenzie, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
McKenzie: Hi, Charlie. Thanks for having me.
Warzel: Thank you for coming on. Yeah. So you said that your interest in starting to investigate cryptocurrency, the career pivot that you did, was born out of a combination of the pandemic and a midlife crisis. Unpack that for me. What happened here?
McKenzie: Nice. So usually my therapy is on Mondays, but—
Warzel: That’s good. We’re doing it on Friday.
McKenzie: I love this. Yeah, so when the pandemic hit, I’d done three different television series. I met my now-wife on the third show, and we started a family. And I loved what I did, but it was becoming a bit repetitious. And my wife, Morena Baccarin, who’s an actress as well, has chronic asthma. And because New York was hit first, we didn’t know what was going on. So we moved out of the city briefly; out of fear, basically. And so I’m sitting in the country with nothing to do and on my phone all the time. And that’s when the crypto thing happened, because a buddy of mine came to me saying I should buy bitcoin.
Warzel: Sure.
McKenzie: The celebrities were selling it. I had never really paid attention to it, but my buddy has given me terrible financial advice before. In the mid-aughts, when I was on my first TV show, The O.C., he had encouraged me to invest in a company that had supposedly produced synthetic blood. And they were going to make a fortune. And so Dave and I both invested in this company. Mild, not a major investment, but I think it maybe put in ten grand. But we lost most of it, you know, almost immediately, because it was probably some sort of penny-stock pump and dump. Wasn’t Theranos; some precursor scam. Yeah.
Warzel: Nice. Yeah. I was gonna say it’s like hipster Theranos, right? You were in that before it was cool. You were in the blood scams before the blood scams were cool.
McKenzie: Totally. It’s almost like Theranos didn’t dream big enough—like, synthetic blood, that would really change things, you know? So anyway, the day when Dave came back to me in 2020 and said “You should buy bitcoin,” I was like: “Dave, I’m not gonna do that. But tell me about it. Explain this to me.”
Because I really hadn’t paid any attention to it. And I have an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Virginia. I hadn’t used it much in 20 years in showbiz. But one thing that I remembered in my middle-aged fog of a brain from Econ 1 is: Currencies, monies; you can usually buy stuff with them. One of the things you can do with them is buy things and sell things. And so: “Dave, can I buy stuff with this crypto stuff?” He’s like, “You could buy drugs online, probably.” Hey, that’s a use case.
But he really just couldn’t give me even the most basic of answers as to what this thing was. And so my curiosity was piqued. And I fell down a rabbit hole pretty hard, where I was sort of fascinated by the, I guess I would say, myriad intellectual fallacies of the crypto believers: in terms of their misunderstandings of money, and of how private money works versus public money, and things like that. But I was also fascinated by the true crime of it all. I love true crime. And I particularly like a subgenre of true crime I call “stupid crime.” Coen brothers–esque crime, where the criminals are, like, obviously committing crimes. Sometimes via tweets. And then they turn on each other when the feds come—’cause as much as they say they’re a community, like, when the shit hits the fan, they all turn on each other and start trying to flip in order to save their skin. So crypto had a lot of that stuff. And then I couldn’t give it up.
Warzel: Yes. Well, this brings me to—there’s two elements here. The first is that what’s interesting about you getting into this during the pandemic is: I think the pandemic basically produced the opposite effect on so many people, to dive into crypto, right? Like in this moment where people are tethered to their computers. They can’t go anywhere. This idea of digital money, the hype around like the NFTs and things like that, shifted it. I don’t know if you could ever say it became cool, but it certainly became like it had a cultural cachet. And I’m curious what you think the pandemic’s effect was on this industry.
McKenzie: It was huge. The crypto advocates will say bitcoin has no marketing department, right? That, like, this synonymous force, Satoshi Nakamoto, created it out of thin air. And so it's this decentralized thing. But in reality, because there isn’t a product with crypto—I mean all you’re buying is lines of computer code stored on ledgers called blockchains. They don’t have any relationship to anything in the real world. They don’t signify ownership of any physical asset. Really, all you’re buying is a story. So it’s not that bitcoin has no marketing environment; it’s that crypto is only marketing. That’s all it is: marketing, really. It’s just convincing people to give you their real money in exchange for the promise that they’re gonna get wealthy with this crypto stuff, which they don’t really understand usually.
And that dynamic really leads you to manias and bubbles. And the bubble that was created in the pandemic, I do think was somewhat a result of people being at home. Being on their phones all the time. There was nothing to do. Sports was briefly shut down. It was hard to gamble on sports for a little while. And then, the crypto was a new thing to gamble on. And once the money, real money, started coming in, it feeds itself—because then the crypto companies use the money from the customers to pay for the advertising budgets and the celebrities. And sort of by the end of it, you have the most famous people in the world selling you on this thing that I regard as a Ponzi scheme.
Warzel: That’s so interesting—that piece about when the world shut down, there was nothing to gamble on. Like at all. Like, not just sports, right? There’s just nothing. Like, no one was doing anything. And the only thing I guess you have is like the stock market, which is in you know, at that moment in the pandemic, especially really early on, was in like this free fall, and it’s like, I don’t wanna put all my money into that type of thing. Like, I hadn’t thought about the fact that the pandemic provided a chance for them to kind of corner the market in speculative assets. That’s so fascinating.
McKenzie: But also, it was “gambling, but better”—because it was also like the “future of money.” Which is really funny to an amateur economist like myself. Because actually, crypto’s the past of money. And we could talk about private money, but we’ve actually tried this before, and it didn’t work. But they’re talking about “it’s the future of money” and “you’re gonna be really smart if you invest.” You’re gonna be—you’re sort of ahead of the curve, right? You’re a part of the future. This dynamic is very much “emperor’s new clothes,” right? Like, only the smartest people, only the people of highest station, can perceive these imaginary clothes that the tailors weave.
And so, adult after adult is tricked into not believing their own eyes, because they don’t want to appear foolish. And I think that dynamic was really happening. Because the celebrities were out there selling it, and once something gets so big and it’s on your TV all the time, you start to doubt yourself. You start to say, Well, maybe there is something there. I mean, how can all of these incredibly famous, powerful people believe in this thing if it’s not true? The economist who influenced me the most was Robert Shiller, behavioral economist. And he talks about naturally occurring Ponzi schemes—which are, the price of a speculative asset rises far beyond what it could really be worth. But people see the price rising, which draws them in to invest, which sends the price higher, which draws more people in. So these things kinda take on a life of their own.
Warzel: Right. I am interested in a point you made just a minute ago where you said we’ve tried this before. When did we try this before?
McKenzie: We tried it before in the 19th century, during what was called the free-banking era. The free-banking era was an attempt to create a banking system as we moved west, being like now sort of the middle of the country. But back then, banks were allowed to issue their own notes, their own currencies, as long as they held a certain amount of state bonds. And I think the idea was well intentioned. It worked better in places like New York that had more access to capital. But because they were tethered to these state bonds, which were very volatile, the whole system really just didn’t work very well.
And ultimately it was scrapped and replaced with a central bank. Because, you know, the only way we’ve really been able to scale the trust that’s necessary in an economy—money really is just trust. You take a dollar bill from me not because you trust me, but because you trust that you can use it. The only way we’ve been able to scale that trust is through government issue. And so when the crypto guys talk about it’s the “future of money”—well, if the money isn’t coming from the government, where’s it coming from? It’s coming from corporations and individuals. Whether it’s World Liberty Financial in the case of Donald Trump, or even bitcoin, the majority of the bitcoin that are created now, the “mined.” These crypto mines: computers guessing at random on the—
Warzel: Solving puzzles.
McKenzie: Solving puzzles, on the off chance they want a bitcoin. So it should, I think—I’m a leftist, so to me, the idea of corporate money is just sort of obviously not a good idea. But it’s also something that we’ve tried before, and it’s failed.
Warzel: So you embarked on this journey. Basically you turned yourself into a reporter, working alongside a reporter.
McKenzie: Yeah, working with a good reporter.
Warzel: Jacob Silverman, right? Wrote a best-selling book about your journey into this world and then did this documentary, which is how the people can see Everyone’s Lying to You for Money. And in this you spent so much time in the world talking to regular people who use or love crypto. And I’m curious if we could walk through a little bit here, like a taxonomy of crypto believers.
McKenzie: Well, it’s a lot of dudes. It’s very heavily male. I think I’ve seen polls where it’s like two to one. That feels a little low to me. At least when I went to the bitcoin convention, the bitcoin conference in Miami in 2022, which is like the largest bitcoin conference every year.
And when you walked around the halls, there obviously were women as well, but it was a very heavily male thing. It was kinda like a trade show, right? I mean, you’re walking from booth to booth, people are selling you on different things. You know, the NFTs were big at the time. But guys are drinking and chatting and you know, partying, and that was really the vibe. When you talk to individual investors, I mean, they’re all gonna have different reasons.
I describe it in the movie as—because again, there’s no real product there. You’re believing in a story that crypto is going to make you rich or give you what you want. So crypto is really, to me, a projection of the hopes and dreams of all of these different investors. They all want something different out of it. I mean, it’s all broadly the same if they want to get rich, but it also gives them a sense of identity, of shared community to some degree.
And what’s interesting though is that outside of the big conferences, you know, crypto really exists only online. It’s an online phenomenon. I mean, the blockchain and everything. It’s not something that’s in the real world. So a lot of the sense of community is fake. It’s not real. I talked to the victims of the Celsius scam, which was all guys. I mean, we posted on a Reddit board for victims and only guys responded to us.
Warzel: Mm-hmm.
McKenzie: And I asked them about this sense of community, because Celsius was pitching itself as a community bank. We’re like a community bank—except they didn’t have a banking license. But in reality what was happening was they had a really nice website. And they had this guy, Alex Mashinsky, at the center of it. And they were telling people: Give us your crypto, and we’ll give you like 15 percent return every year on your crypto. So we’re better than a bank. We’re gonna give you this incredible rate of return. Which is literally a red flag for a Ponzi scheme. If you go on the SEC’s website, seven red flags for Ponzi schemes. One of them is promising guaranteed returns. You can’t do that. It doesn’t work. I guess you could say “I’ll give you the rate of treasuries,” but 15 percent is impossible. And so it was a Ponzi scheme, and it fell apart, and these guys lost money.
And so I asked them, like: What about this community? Was this community real? And several of them said No; I think it was always just a lie. Because it’s very easy to fake things online. It’s much harder to run scams in real life.
Warzel: Saying that basically it’s a projection of everyone’s hopes and dreams. I mean, it feels to me like it is so inextricable from so many of the broader societal concerns that people have, especially younger people. The economist Kyla Scanlon has this phrase, like “the lack of a path to predictable progress,” right? With jobs and having the stability and the dream of, you know, the middle-class American dream being harder and harder to attain for people. And the idea that crypto is selling this story to you, in the same way that gambling on DraftKings or something like that is selling a is selling a kind of story. In so many ways, it’s combining that frustration with the idea that, like: I don’t know how to get ahead in this thing. And it’s pairing a fake, seeming community with that idea of like, Here’s a pathway for success. It’s really interesting that when I’m asking you for a taxonomy of those people, it’s like, no, it’s just in the eye of the beholder, right? It’s whatever you need in that moment that crypto can provide you.
McKenzie: Right. Because you’re on your phone, and you’re scrolling through social media, and you’re seeing a post of someone who got fabulously wealthy on cryptocurrency. And they’re showing off their cars and their houses and their things. And maybe that’s their post you respond to. That might feel obnoxious to you and me, but to a lot of young guys, that sounds like, you know, the dream, right? I came away feeling a lot of sympathy for the victims of Celsius that I interviewed. There’s this one guy named Joe who was from Fort Worth. I’m from Austin, so we bonded over barbecue and Texas football. But he was investing in Celsius because he wanted to make a little extra money so he could spend more time with his daughter. He had a young daughter, and he felt like because he lost the money he let her down.
And that really touched me. And made me kind of feel, maybe this is obvious, but that to really address the problems of cryptocurrency, we have to fix our economy so that it does work better for people. So that they don’t feel like they have to gamble. And it also requires, I think, a fair amount of regulation of these social-media companies, which are just rife with misinformation and manipulation of these markets. You know, people have this view that this crypto thing is really popular. But if you look at the numbers, it’s really not.
Warzel: You sat down with Sam Bankman-Fried pretty much sort of as the walls were probably closing in on him. A couple months before the whole FTX thing crumbles down. And you were one of the people I feel like who—and again, that interview wasn’t, I don’t believe, made public ’til after—but you came to him skeptical. And what I think is really interesting, seeing that, is what was happening in tandem—where he’s on magazine covers, he’s doing all kinds of conferences and cable-news bits and talking to different people.
And in some places, he’s saying the quiet part out loud. Like, there is a moment where essentially, in this great Bloomberg podcast, he’s explaining what yield farming is to Bloomberg’s Matt Levine. And when he describes the whole thing, Matt Levine says—this is a great quote—“I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that is so much more cynical than how I would have described farming. You’re just like: Well, I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good.”
And SBF just goes, “That’s a pretty reasonable response.” And “a depressing amount of validity.” And so my question for you here is—
McKenzie: Yeah. Ha.
Warzel: Why do you think everyone was so blind to what was going on? Like, here is this guy who’s everywhere. He’s the boy wonder. Like, why do you think so many people didn’t see through him and FTX and all that?
McKenzie: I think that some people did, right? Obviously Matt Levine was not having it. That was one of my favorite interviews as well.
But at the same time, because Sam had made—really, we now know, stolen his customers’ money—but “made” all this money through his crypto exchange, through his trading firm, he had a lot of money to spend to burnish his image. And so he was getting feted by all of these public publications. I don’t know how the economics work exactly, but you know, if you have a desk set up at a major media organization to cover cryptocurrency, where is your advertising coming from on that desk? My guess is, your advertising is coming from the crypto companies. And how hard are you looking at the reality of the crypto? But you tell me, I mean, I see you sort of thinking about that. I’m curious—I’m not a real journalist. I only, you know—I did a little light journalism with Jacob. But Jacob’s a real journalist, and I appreciate what you guys do. But I was trying to figure out why journalists—and many were asking the right questions. How did it redound to me?
Warzel: Yeah, well, I mean there were people. I’d like to think of myself as someone who is skeptical of a lot of this. I mean, I think some of it is, you know, getting access. Like you’re a celebrity. It seems like DMing him worked better than it did when I tried to DM him, at the time.
McKenzie: Fair.
Warzel: But what I would say is like that point about like “Where’s the advertising coming from on these desks?”—I’d push back on that, because media companies don’t actually wanna get mired in that, and there is the reputational hazard.
What I think is real though, what I think is actually the part of this, is what the FOMO element that you were talking about. Just on the side of, like, the normies who are investing, getting involved. There’s a FOMO I think as a tech writer, as someone who covers this industry, when something new comes out in this way. Like, you don’t wanna be massively wrong, right? Like there’s this old, I believe it’s in a Newsweek story, but some columnist who wrote this piece back in like, you know, 1997 or sometime like that. I’m not sure exactly the date.
McKenzie: Yes.
Warzel: That’s basically like: This internet thing’s never gonna take off. This thing is, you know, BS, whatever. Nobody wants to be that person, right? Nobody wants to be the person who’s gonna retroactively miss this thing. And there’s something you said way early in this conversation that I think speaks to how a lot of technologists now, and venture capitalists and people, use this FOMO feeling. To raise money, to get people involved, to generate the hype cycle.
Which is this idea of: Yeah, it’s complicated, and you just don’t understand it. Like, you just lack the technical expertise. If you dove into the white papers on the blockchain, if you really got deep in the weeds—which you’re either not able to ’cause you’re not smart enough, or you’re lazy, or whatever—if you’ve done the work, you would see that this is the future. This is the thing. Right? And I think like Sam’s affect of, you know, being like shlubby and just wearing the shorts and doing whatever, and is allegedly taking a lot of stimulants to stay up all night and trade and find this thing. It was like: This guy is like a wonder boy. Right? In some way. And I’m just Joe Schmoe who, you know, is skeptical of this thing.
And I feel like that’s the playbook. Like, that’s the thing. And it’s not nefarious. It’s more, these folks are playing off of the insecurities of everyone else thinking, I must just not be seeing it here.
Which sort of seemed to be the initial thing that led you into all of this, right? You’re like: What am I not seeing here? Let me go investigate. And I think a lot of people, instead of investigating like you did, were like: Well, let’s just put him on the magazine cover.
McKenzie: Yeah. I mean, he had pat responses to a lot of the questions. And so, when I was preparing for the interview, I was watching all of his media hits, including the Matt Levine, Odlots appearance, and others. And I was just struck by the repetition of it all. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I come from showbiz. I’m used to doing, you know, media junkets and things like that. But he was just repeating the same lines over and over again. But if you looked just a little bit underneath those lines, they fell apart very quickly. You know, one thing that he would say repeatedly—that he said to me when I asked him, “What does it do? Like give me one good thing that crypto does”—is he says “remittances.” Sending money overseas.
Remittances can be expensive. You have to use MoneyGram or Western Union. They’re gonna charge you a fee. So what if we built a system with crypto where you didn’t have to pay that fee? But I had just come from El Salvador, which is the only country in the world that was trying to use cryptocurrency as real money. And the foundation of the Salvadoran economy, I would argue, is remittances. The 2 to 3 million people of Salvadoran descent that live primarily in the United States, sending money home, is a big part of the economy. And so when [Nayib] Bukele, the president, rolled out this crypto scheme—and built a system where people could use that to send money home—if it was gonna work anywhere, it should have worked in El Salvador.
And it was an epic disaster. And no one used it. Less than 2 percent of remittances, according to the government’s own figures, were using the Chivo system, the system they built at the time. Now it’s less than 1 percent. The notion that this was being used to help poor people in developing countries, you know, send money back and forth just wasn’t true in my experience. Like I had just seen the antithesis of that.
And so that felt very frustrating to me. And the whole interview—which was over an hour but cut down for the movie, obviously, a lot—was just a series of me asking him a question, him giving me some sort of kind of pat response, me pushing back, and then him just like flailing. Just like really not being able to engage in an honest back-and-forth intellectually about so much of this stuff.
Warzel: Yeah. So FTX’s collapse, I think it marks a turning point for crypto. And I wanna see if you agree with this. So there’s—I think it ends, the COVID crypto craze. There’s this feeling of distrust. But crypto never fully tanks. And the people who got in early, the people who are perpetrating this scheme, they have a lot of money now. And these people are either in it because they have this deep financial interest in it, or they’re true believers and they really care about the anti-institutional side of this, right? That this is a decentralized thing.
But what I see here is that these people then take that money, and then they buy influence in the form of lobbying in elections. So tell me a little bit about crypto’s influence in politics and lobbying power as you see it, because I think that is part two of the crypto story. Like, that’s where we live now.
McKenzie: I think you’re absolutely right. I think that’s a good way of looking at it. By 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried had been arrested. And a lot of these companies had failed because it turns out they were actually interconnected. You know, this was not decentralized, to me, in any meaningful sense. You know, they had real financial relationships with each other. And so when one fell, many of the others fell. And it was lingering.
But you’re also correct that if you bought in early, even with the crash in 2022, you were still way ahead. And crypto kind of kept, you know, kind of floundering about for a little bit. And then, you know—not to make it all about Trump. But Trump has just been; you can’t overstate Trump’s importance in crypto’s resurgence, in my opinion. Because, you know, when he started embracing crypto in the summer of ’24, and I think whispers were happening earlier than that, you start to see the market recover.
And the price starts to go up and up as people realize, you know, This guy has a 50-50 chance of becoming president again. And if he is really pro-crypto—and knowing Trump’s, let’s say aggressive-businessman tactics—like, what he can do with that power of the office of the presidency to help crypto along. People, you know—quite rationally, frankly—bet that was gonna mean the price was gonna go up, right? That this naturally occurring Ponzi scheme, that dynamic, was gonna take off again.
And sure enough it did. And the price of bitcoin hit an all-time high, of like 120,000. Since at least 2022, when I was on the scene, crypto was trying to manipulate the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was spending a lot of time on Capitol Hill trying to get a bill through Congress that was affectionately called Sam’s Bill, that would have shifted the regulation of crypto over to the CFTC [the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission]. And Sam was spending wildly on political campaigns and super PACs. I mean, he spent 40 million donating to the Democrats; was one of Biden’s largest donors.
The money has only gotten bigger since. In 2024, 40-something percent of all corporate donations in the cycle were from the crypto industry and people associated with it. It’s just a staggering amount of money. And they’re doing the same thing now with the midterms. I forget how many hundreds of millions they’ve spent, or have announced that they will spend, but it’s an enormous number.
Warzel: And were successful too, right? Like, they were successful in primarying candidates. They were successful in, you know, backing the right people. And obviously Donald Trump in the sense of: He comes in, gets rid of some regulations, makes for a very crypto-friendly environment for them.
My question to you is: The big joke always about crypto or bitcoin is that it is a technology in search of an actual use case, right? And my question is: Is this the first truly useful application for cryptocurrencies, which is political power?
McKenzie: It’s not the first. I mean the first was buying drugs online.
Warzel: Fair.
McKenzie: I mean, when you look at the history of crypto it’s kind of interesting. It came out in—well the paper comes out in ’08. It actually goes into existence in ’09. It kind of flounders around for a little bit, because people think that’s a cool idea, but why does it have value? What can I do with this thing? And then the Silk Road really was like this dark-web drug marketplace, was like the one of the first places where bitcoin had some value. Because you could obscure your identity while buying drugs online. And so it’s become, you know, all sorts of criminal activity.
But I mean, with Trump—he doesn’t hide it. I think he announced another dinner. He’s already held one dinner with the top investors in his memecoin. Like, if you give him a lot of money for his memecoin, you can have dinner with the president of the United States. So it’s literally selling access to the president.
Warzel: That’s right. He recently announced—this is an article that I’m looking at from October 1st—promising to hold “the most exclusive dinner in the world.” For people who are owners of the memecoin.
This is a good part to just talk to the audience here about World Liberty Financial, which is the company that the Trump family has a stake in. Help us understand the story of World Liberty Financial, as you know it.
McKenzie: My understanding is World Liberty was set up—the Witkoff family, or Steve Witkoff, has a financial stake. [Trump’s] kids, obviously—at least Don Jr. and Eric. They have a stablecoin, and they have the Trump memecoin. It’s just simply a way to cash in on the office. Trump got this huge investment in his stablecoin from the UAE. And the head of the largest crypto exchange, Binance; the head of that, Shangpeng Zhao—CZ, he’s known as—had pled guilty to money laundering under the Biden administration, and spent a couple of months in jail. And Binance had paid, I think, $4.3 billion. Admitting to money laundering. And Trump pardoned him. And CZ now lives in the UAE, and this money flowed into Trump’s stablecoin.
Now, obviously, I can’t say definitively it’s a quid pro quo. But it certainly looks pretty bad. And in addition, this sheik in the UAE invested in his stablecoin, and then the UAE received these Nvidia AI chips shortly thereafter. So, you know—whatever the particulars of World Liberty Financial are, the way it’s operating is a way for Trump and his associates to make enormous amounts of money off of the power of the office. And what they can do for people that want to invest in them.
Warzel: Right. But we should also note that the White House has denied any connection between those two deals. An administration spokeswoman called the crypto transaction “totally unrelated to any government business.” But what that makes me think about is this Sam Bankman-Fried line. And I’m gonna paraphrase here, but it’s something about how everyone talks about how much money there is in politics, but when he got into it, he was actually surprised at how little money there was in politics. And I think, to borrow a phrase from the industry, it seems like crypto solves this, right? Like—you can’t donate tons of money to politicians directly. But you can throw a whole bunch of money behind either World Liberty Financial or invest in Trumpcoin, or something to that effect. And put money into the political system.
And again—you can’t make these direct connections necessarily all the time, right? There’s a sort of a step in there that gives some, you know, “plausible deniability.” But all of this sounds a lot like a bribe. And so my question to you is: How is all this legal?
McKenzie: Okay. Look, I’m not a lawyer. My dad’s a lawyer. I come from a family of lawyers, but I’m not a lawyer. I think it’s as simple as: Trump’s former personal attorney is the attorney general of the United States of America. And Trump runs the DOJ like it’s his own personal law firm that’s supposed to protect him and go after his enemies.
If I was in the Democratic Congress, or advising the Democratic Congress—assuming the Democrats at least take the House in the fall—I would say, in my opinion, probably the first task, or at least on the top half a dozen, is: Document what’s happening. Start holding hearings. But start recording and subpoenaing records of what exactly is going on. Because this should be illegal. I mean, I don’t understand. What—does the emoluments clause just not mean anything? Is it just words that are written down that just don’t—we can’t enforce them in any way? And there are, you know, laws on bribery and corruption. But yet, at the present time, with the DOJ under his control, it doesn’t seem like there’s much enforcement of laws against corruption.
Warzel: It’s an odd thing to say now in 2026, ’cause there’s just so many competing outrages for our attention. But something that I can’t really understand—and I’d like your take on this—is why this isn’t more of an outrage. Why World Liberty Financial isn’t known by more people, right? Like, if you just read out the facts of all of this, right? Like he’s personally made 1.4 billion dollars from this situation, here in the sector. Investors in Trumpcoin and crypto assets in World Liberty Financial are down a reported 4 billion dollars. Like, why do you think this isn’t a bigger deal?
McKenzie: I think we live in the craziest time. There’s just so much going on. I think AI and the fear of what AI can do—the anger at the AI data centers—I think things like that have really kind of taken over from the position that crypto occupied prior to Trump’s reelection in terms of the minds of the public. In terms of things that they’re really mad about. People remark, AI is a scam too. And I understand the mentality there, and I definitely think there are dynamics to that potential AI bubble that could be similar to the crypto bubble that popped. But AI is a fundamentally different technology that, you know, is having a real-world impact right now. Whereas crypto was the story of a technology that people didn’t understand, that didn’t work that well.
Part of the problem is, even I have to—because I can’t do anything about it in the present, because I can’t hold Trump accountable in the present because of this dynamic with the DOJ—even I have to log off sometimes, just for mental health. I think if we’re gonna address the underlying issues with crypto—even just the crime—it’s gonna take years and years after Trump is out of office to sift through all of this stuff and hopefully hold people to account.
But I do think it’s really important to hold people that have broken the law to account, whether they’re the president of the United States or not. Because if we don’t, then this trust that is our monetary system, that is our economic system, that is our government—that trust just breaks down. And we get kind of this environment where we feel like we can’t trust anything, you know. And people get really depressed and, to some, complacent, like, What can we do?
Warzel: Which is a good environment for people to perpetuate grifts and scams and things like that, right? It is a cycle that perpetuates itself. If you get people into this situation where they feel powerless, without anything, and a complete distrust, then it’s easier to sell particular stories.
One thing I wanted to address there with the AI stuff is: I agree with you that these things are not the same, in terms of AI is having this real-world impact. What I think is interesting, though, is the way that the griftier elements of crypto—of the web 3.0 and like Metaverse-style, you know, hype cycles—the way that those have actually impacted the way that a lot of people think about AI. Like, people are conditioned because they were sold this from the tech industry. Because the tech industry went all-in on the hype train on these things that had proven not really to have this value, or had proven to be scammy in certain ways.
I think a lot of people are just conditioned to respond to this. And I think that the tech industry has also, very importantly, marketed a lot of artificial-intelligence stuff the same way that they tried to market a lot of the crypto stuff—which has led to people kind of associating them or feeling like the scam has to be there, even if it might not be.
I wanted to ask though: What are some of the stories in crypto that you’re still tracking right now? Like, what are some of the loose ends? Because the way that I think of this conversation is: Your time, your investigation into this world, very much corresponds to the pandemic-era froth that sort of ends with the SBF stuff. And now we’re in this other realm, where crypto is kind of quiet in some ways but very influential. And so I’m just curious, like: What are some of the things that you’re still tracking?
McKenzie: I’m really interested in this company Tether. It’s this massive stablecoin company that supposedly has something like 200 billion dollars of real money. Supposedly has more treasuries than Germany, the entire nation. It is a massive stablecoin company whose financial interests are represented by Cantor Fitzgerald, their broker. And Howard Lutnick, our commerce secretary, you know, was the head of Cantor. Now his sons run it. And Cantor owns a stake in Tether, as well as being its broker.
Warzel: Explain to people what Tether is, real quick.
McKenzie: It’s a stablecoin, meaning that it’s a cryptocurrency whose price is supposed to be stable. One Tether is always supposed to be worth one dollar. And they’re treated as sort of chips in the crypto casinos you can gamble on, but also these kind of synthetic dollars that can be sent anywhere in the world instantaneously. Criminals are able to use these stablecoins to get paid for their crimes, to coordinate with other criminals in other locations, and to avoid the banking system, because the stablecoins don’t have to run through a bank.
There's a system in Southeast Asia called Hawala, where if you're trying to send money from a small village in India, you can send something of value by going to your local Hawala leader and they'll mark it down and then on the other end, the Hawala on the other will mark it down. It's a system of credit. And to me, stable coins are digital Hawala—it's a digital hawala system for international criminal cartels. And tethers are used for all sorts of, I mean, some of the worst criminal activity you can think of.
They have just gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, you know. To the point where their interests are being advocated for in the White House by Lutnik, who raised an enormous amount of money for Trump so that he could be re-elected. I’m just interested in what happens with Tether.
Warzel: How do you think about crypto right now? Is it losing steam compared to, you know, the boom times of 2021, 2022? Is it dormant? Is it hibernating? Has crypto shifted from something that regular retail investors were interested in to something that’s exclusively a vehicle for the currently rich? What is the state of it now?
McKenzie: If you look at the Fed survey, the retail interest in terms of a percentage of the population peaked somewhere around 2021, 2022. It was never that high. I mean, I think in terms of legitimate pollsters that I’ve seen that have tried to pull this, it was maybe like 16 percent of the public had ever messed around with cryptocurrency. And most of those people are, you know, throwing in a few hundred bucks, like my buddy Dave. You know, hoping to get rich, but so they’re not really highly invested in it.
But if you look at the Fed survey more recently, the number’s down. So the number of people in the general public that are buying this thing seems to be going down. And yet, crypto at the same time is working its way further into our regulated financial system and our political system through Trump—but in our economic system through these things called ETFs, exchange traded funds. Where a person, if they want to buy some bitcoin, they go to BlackRock. And BlackRock, which issues a bitcoin ETF, turns to a crypto exchange, Coinbase, and says, My client wants some bitcoin; hold it for us. The ETF market has gotten really big. And it’s also getting into our banking system, as you know. Trump has applied for a banking license. His family’s applied for a banking license. I think they’ve gotten a provisional license.
The worry to me is not so much that there’s all these new converts out there, like, My God, I’m so excited. Who comes in now and is like, You know what I just heard about? Cryptocurrency. Like, you’d have to be pretty far off the—you know, Where have you been living, buddy? It’s more like—the virus is spreading into a different part of our body that’s even more delicate and could have far worse repercussions. I don’t know if that metaphor works, but the only thing that came to mind.
Warzel: Yeah, the contagion is spreading; it’s scary. I think that’s a good place to leave it. Hopefully we can pick up on this conversation with whatever nightmares come next from crypto and our grand experiment with it. But Ben McKenzie: Thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain. It’s a delight.
McKenzie: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Charlie. It was a good conversation.
Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Ben McKenzie. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow journalists, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thank you so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.
In the winter of 2001, I was in my mid-20s, halfway through a six-year doctoral program in religion that left me uninspired. Friends seemed to be moving forward—in life, in work, in romance. Feeling stuck, I told myself I was taking a leave from graduate school. What this meant was no more lying to myself that I was making progress toward my dissertation (I kept lying to everyone else). Liberated from this pretense, I took a job as a newspaper reporter. I also began auditing an undergraduate poetry class.
I’m not sure what inspired me to sit in on this course with Yale undergraduates. Perhaps it was the sheer absurdity of reading and writing poetry with college students as a way into adulthood? In the introductory course on writing verse, we met once a week, read good poems out loud, and wrote bad ones under their inspiration. Our teacher was the celebrated poet J. D. “Sandy” McClatchy. He had a wonderfully resonant baritone, a perfect three-day stubble, and an infectious love of the art form. He told stories about his friendship with James “Jimmy” Merrill, and he would sway his hand in time with the meter of the poems he incanted. When students read their work out loud he gave candid, often brutal criticism.
One week Sandy opened his laptop and played a recording of W. H. Auden reading the 1952 poem “The Shield of Achilles,” his dystopian take on the scene Hephaestus forges on the shield in The Odyssey. The line about the cruel urchin who’d “never heard / Of any world where promises are kept, / Or one could weep because another wept” stuck me like a blade and brought tears to my eyes. I decided to memorize it.
I would memorize a few lines a day. It was difficult at first, then easier. After I had internalized “The Shield of Achilles,” I moved on to Robert Frost’s “Directive.” Other poems followed. Some I quickly forgot; some became obsessions. For months after memorizing Wallace Stevens’s “Landscape With Boat,” I read it aloud to myself before bed, while listening, always, to Dave Matthews Band’s “Crush.”
I was building a poetry library in bursts, making up for lost time. That is how I came to Anne Carson, the Canadian who won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. In one of New Haven’s secondhand bookstores, I bought her 2000 collection, Men in the Off Hours, and within it I found her poem “First Chaldaic Oracle.” I’m sure I chose it because it was the one of the shortest in the book.
I knew from the start that I would never understand “First Chaldaic Oracle,” not the way I felt myself to have an understanding of Auden, Frost, or even Stevens, who was weird but on my wavelength. By temperament a square, every once in a while I turn and face the strange, as one weirdo sang, and Anne Carson was my kind of weirdo. I learned “First Chaldaic Oracle” in a matter of days. Here are the first four of the poem’s 10 stanzas:
There is something you should know.
And the right way to know it
is by a cherrying of your mind.
Because if you press your mind towards it
and try to know
that thing
as you know a thing,
you will not know it.
It comes out of red
with kills on both sides,
it is scrap, it is nightly,
it kings your mind.
The Chaldean Oracles were lost spiritual texts that survive in fragments in the Neoplatonists’ writings of the third through sixth centuries. So there is a plain reading of the poem at the outset: The “something you should know” may be these unknowable fragments, this “scrap.” But it’s also immediately clear that the poem exists outside of history’s linear accumulation of philosophical knowledge. For what does it mean that “the right way to know it”—whatever “it” is—is not through study, not through religion or archaeology, but “by a cherrying of your mind”?
This was the question I got obsessed with: What the hell is a cherrying of the mind? I stopped reading Stevens at night; I let Auden take a back seat. The urgent question was one of cherrying. What was it? Who could do it? Could I cherry my mind? Was that what I needed?
The poem has more mysterious irruptions like that. You’ll be going along, reading words that, if we’re honest, are not so far from late-night dorm-room claptrap about the futility of knowing (“try to know,” “you will not know it”), and suddenly the voice turns vatic and omnipotent, powerful enough to invent new verbs: That scrap of knowledge is “nightly, / it kings your mind.” To king—we don’t know what it means, but whatever it is, it’s grand. Then again, squint and we’re on a cosmic chessboard, with nights, homophone to knights. Or is it a checkerboard, where one can be “kinged”?
In Carson’s poem, this hard work of knowing, of learning elusive truths, becomes explicitly playful while remaining deadly serious. By the end of the poem, the narrator has given us hope that we can get “it,” the oracular knowledge, the “scrap.” But how? You have to “keep chiselled / keep Praguing the eye // of your soul.” To cherrying, Carson adds “Praguing.” What on earth is “Praguing”?? To unlock the mysteries, one must first solve fresh mysteries.
As I understand the poem now, Carson means to teach us new ways to act, new ways to be. New ways to verb the world. Which was exactly what I was looking for that winter. I had tried being a scholar, and I was no good at that. I had tried being a boyfriend, and had been mostly a failure. Friends were in law school or medical school; I was developing no such useful skills. But there was always cherrying and Praguing. I just had to find out what they meant.
I could not have articulated this theory of Carson’s “First Chaldaic Oracle” back then, couldn’t have explained why the ultimate futility in the poem’s soul—that I’d never learn to cherry, just as we’d never learn exactly what the Chaldaic oracle said—was so soothing. Somehow this homework assignment from antiquity, as I memorized it, helped unburden me of my ambitions. It freed me. Carson wasn’t there to tell me what to do, but she would at least tell me what not to do. In the middle of the poem, she writes, “The way to know it // is not by staring hard.”
And so I didn’t stare hard. I didn’t look for answers. Into the spring, I kept memorizing poems, and I wrote some bad ones of my own. By not “staring hard,” I was able to see what I had to do. I quit my job at the newspaper. I finished my dissertation, after my therapist told me, “This town is filled with people who wish they had.” (My dad also said I’d be glad I did. He was right.) I got a job, got married. I figured out what kind of writer I was supposed to be: a reporter, after all. I just wasn’t ready to embrace that vocation back then. To get there, I needed a little more cherrying and Praguing, whatever that was.
A visitor looks into a mirror, the “Inverse Reverse Perverse” installation by Cerith Wyn Evans, during a media preview of “The 90s: Art and Fashion” exhibition at Tate Britain in London on October 6, 2026.
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A visitor looks into a mirror, the “Inverse Reverse Perverse” installation by Cerith Wyn Evans, during a media preview of “The 90s: Art and Fashion exhibition” at Tate Britain in London on October 6, 2026.
We met by accident. I mean that literally—a Yankee friend of mine blew a tire while driving south and swerved into oncoming traffic. He came out of it untouched, and wound up in Atlanta while his car was being serviced. I live in Atlanta, and he called to see if I wanted to go out to dinner with him and his Aunt Maura to celebrate his survival.
Maura was around my age and fairly new to town. We talked for a few minutes before dinner and she asked what I’d been writing. I told her I’d just finished a book about my father, Lou Junod. “What’s so interesting about him?” she asked, and I gave what had become my standard answer: “He was a philanderer.” And then, because that word didn’t seem to do Big Lou justice, I added the usual modifiers: charismatic, reckless, ruthless, relentless, irresistible, unrepentant, prolific.
Maura’s reply did not require as many words. Her father also happened to be a philanderer, she said. But he wasn’t like that—he didn’t play the field. He was, by all appearances, an upright man. He just had a woman across town, and with her he had a second family, who knew him better than Maura’s family ever did, because at least the children the world deemed illegitimate knew his secrets. “It haunts me,” she said. “It haunts me, and it haunts my choices.”
And then she asked the question that changed how I think about my father and men like him, perhaps men in general:
“How many of us do you think are out there?”
It was the us that threw me. I’d known almost all my life that my father was different from other fathers, both the comical ones I met in my neighborhood and the wise ones I watched on TV. When I was 3 years old, he had an affair with the mother of my first friend. When I was 6 or 7, he asked—he made a big deal of asking—if I wanted to go out for a hot-fudge sundae, and then stopped at a woman’s house on the way to the ice-cream parlor and left me outside on the swings. When I was in college, he invited me to New York City for a night on the town, and introduced me to one of his girlfriends. I was close with my brother, my sister, and my mother, but I never told them what I knew. I never told anyone.
I was ashamed, of course—ashamed of him, ashamed of myself. But I was also proud. I had to be, because that’s what he demanded, that was our margin of survival. He made my mother cry. He made me cry too. But that wasn’t his fault; it was ours. It was, especially, mine. He didn’t do what he did because he was broken or weak or simply bad; he did it because he was special, a traveling salesman who, by virtue of his looks, his tan, and his insistence on his own virility, became a kind of bedroom celebrity, even to actual celebrities like the Gabor sisters. He did what other men wanted to do, what all men would do, if only they could, if only they weren’t so … weak. Did I want to be weak? No, anything but that. And so I made a faith of his faithlessness, believing that it, like Lou Junod himself, was unique.
I knew what he did when he went on business trips for five or six weeks at a time or stayed overnight in Manhattan. But it took me a long time to find a language for what and who he was. He kept Playboy magazines in the drawer of his nightstand. Is that what he was, a playboy? Well, maybe, except that playboys weren’t supposed to be married to my mother. Was he a swinger? Nah—because he wasn’t countercultural, and he was above growing out his sideburns and wearing Nehru jackets. How about the words I encountered when I went to college and read Dostoyevsky, words such as sensualist and libertine ? That was more like it, because at least those words were classy, unlike the more readily available, the more down-and-dirty adulterer and cheat.
I forget when I first came across philanderer. I remember that it struck me right away as a euphemism, a kind of excuse. Though rooted in Greek, it seemed French in intent, a description of a man with a pastime instead of a problem. It is a victimless crime of a word. Like multitudes of men and women throughout history, Lou Junod was promiscuous, lavishly and energetically so. But as a philanderer in good standing with the Oxford English Dictionary, he acquires a certain distinction—a set of linguistic cuff links for his custom-made shirts—that sets him apart and gives him what he was so skilled at making: a pass.
Society has adopted philanderer as its word of choice for men like my father. But I did not write about him as such; I was careful to write about him as Dad rather than as a type. I doubt he’d appreciate having his secrets remorselessly exposed by his son in the pages of a book, but I believe he would give me credit for abiding by the terms of the silent pact we made so long ago. He would never be anything less than one of a kind. He would never be less than Big Lou. And so I was shocked when I met my friend’s Aunt Maura and with one question she turned the whole proposition upside down.
“How many of us …”
And there it was, the most impossible word for the child of a philanderer, the us that tells you you’re not alone. Don’t get me wrong—I liked the idea of having something in common with other people. I even liked the idea of being, well, a people, something larger than myself or even my family, a betrayed class, an entire woeful demographic. The only difficulty was that in seeing myself as part of an us, I had to see my father as part of a them, and I had invested so much of myself and my writing in the premise of his singularity. He was grubby and unglamorous as part of a group. He was typical—oh, let’s just say it, he was a typical male. He was not just unfaithful, he was not just promiscuous, he was not just an adulterer, he was not just a cheater, he was not just a philanderer—or, rather, he was just those things, and nothing more.
And yet the question that Maura asked was not an idle one, not just a thought exercise. It has an answer, and I’ve been reminded of it nearly every day since publishing my book.
I see them at the end of the signing line in bookstores, waiting patiently not just for an inscribed copy, but for the chance to speak the words that for most of their lives have been stalled at the tip of their tongue. I hear from them by email or direct message, the high-school classmates who write that they never knew I was just like them; the children of my father’s friends who tell me that I’ve told their stories as well as my own. And I meet them at parties, the acquaintances who become friends when they tell me about the news they received when they took their Ancestry.com tests; when they heard from the siblings they’d never known; when they found out about their father’s second or third family, or when they discovered that they were members of the second or third family and not, as they’d thought all their lives, the first and the only.
How many of us are out there? I can say with great confidence that the answer is a lot, because I’ve gone out at last to meet the us, and it’s been the great belated gift of my growing-up to be able to speak with them, to be able to speak for them, and to know that what they want to tell me is often exactly what I want to tell them:
I loved him.
We are a wised-up lot, you see. We spent our innocence trying to believe in men we knew were guilty, only to find ourselves sometimes being employed as accessories and even collaborators in their crimes. But we always had one thing we could count on because we didn’t find it in our fathers’ closets, drawers, coat pockets, briefcases, or post-office boxes but rather in ourselves: our helpless love for the men who couldn’t stop breaking our hearts. And so when I’m out among them, my people, I hear myself saying it, and they hear themselves saying it, and we know it’s only a matter of time before we move on to the question we can’t answer:
Did he ... ?
And there’s something I hear myself saying often in response to this, in addition to my hopeful Yes. He was a good father, I say. He tried hard. He spent time with me. He always showed me affection. He never stinted on telling me he loved me. He was dedicated, he was dogged, he was determined.
And that’s when I see that I’m at last surrounded by people who are not so different from me, who are just the same, and who know that everything I’m saying about Lou Junod as a father, I could be saying about Big Lou the philanderer.
A man walks into a restaurant. He doesn’t have a reservation, but that shouldn’t be a problem; there are ample seats at the bar, visible just over the hostess’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says, smiling. “We can seat you right away.” As she gathers menus, he absorbs the pleasant hum of a busy dining room, breathes in the tantalizing smells from the semi-open kitchen. Then, the hostess stops, Columbo-like, to interrupt with one more question: “And what’s your phone number?”
The man was me. The restaurant was the Kingsway, a newish, Michelin-recommended spot in New Orleans. I’m not going to give you my phone number, but I gave it to the hostess, almost without thinking. And then, I did think about it: a lot. Throughout the meal, and for a long time afterward. There had been no reservation to check, no rewards program, no waiting list. So why the automatic ask?
Let me say quickly that I liked the Kingsway very much. It’s coolly fancy, with a pan-Asian menu evoking the journey of the chef-owner Ashwin Vilkhu’s family from South Asia to the Gulf South. The result brings to mind an earlier era’s scruffy raiding of the global pantry, but this time executed with thought, technique, and precision. As I tucked into a tangle of Singapore-style chili-crab noodles, the term stoner soigné passed through my head.
But that very first interaction with the hostess colored my meal. I brooded. What if I had just wanted to sit at the bar anonymously? Was that not one of life’s great pleasures? (I was working up a head of steam.) Was there no place in this enshittified world where a man could get a break?
It mattered little that I knew the answer. Like pretty much everyone else, I am well aware that my information is strip-mined wherever I go, in more ways than I can count and in many that I will never know. Like everyone else, I spend my days downloading apps to operate things such as toothbrushes, unsubscribing from marketing lists by somehow giving up more personal information, rejecting cookies like I’m on a gluten-free diet.
Nor am I overly romantic about restaurants, which I know have been collecting data for years. The reservation platform OpenTable began making algorithmic recommendations to users as early as 2014; by 2017, TheNew York Times reported that Big Data was “staging an intervention” to save the restaurant industry, which was suffering from stagnating growth and flattening profits.
Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously handled by a heavily notated reservation book or the encyclopedic mind of a gifted maître d’. “We try to build a database on everybody and get as much information as possible,” Vilkhu told me when I called him a few weeks after my dinner. His restaurant uses OpenTable, and he knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else: “We just want to be able to curate the experience as best as we possibly can.”
I believed him. But I was nevertheless a little shocked to go to the websites of the big reservation companies and see how they sold the impulse to care for guests to restaurants (which, in case it’s not clear, are their customers). At best, the sales pitches were dispiritingly cold, with talk of CRMs, GRMs, CDPs, and integrated tech stacks. At worst, they spoke of “capturing” guests’ data, “fostering loyalty,” and “upselling 24/7.” The “AI powered hospitality platform” Loyalist promised “a 360° view of every guest across dine-in and event spend,” itself a sentence seemingly powered by AI. The sales decks were like those optical illusions that turn from adorable to sinister when hit with different colored lights, flipping the language of care and hospitality to the language of surveillance and theft.
Most striking was OpenTable’s promotion of a feature, currently in beta, called Global Insights. Until now, as Vilkhu had told me, whatever data a restaurant collected through the reservation platforms remained confined to that restaurant or restaurant group. Global Insights, which is available to OpenTable Pro subscribers, is the first feature to jump that garden wall and allow other restaurants access to the same information—in OpenTable’s words, to “get an idea of how your diners behave at other restaurants across the OpenTable Diner Network.” With an account, any restaurant can identify big spenders, diners who tend to linger at a table, diners who order a lot of drinks, frequent late-cancelers, and chronic “no-showers,” which I initially read as being about personal hygiene.
My outrage at this new invasion of privacy was accompanied by a pang of embarrassment: This is one of those times in history when it’s easy to get old fast, to wake up one morning and find yourself appalled by norms that everybody around you seems to take for granted. (For instance, the notion that one’s phone number remains a piece of intimate information.) Still, the idea of a restaurant I’d never been to using a dossier on me to decide, say, where I should sit, what I was likely to order, even whether I should be given a reservation at all, gave me chills.
Curious to see what insights on me OpenTable might share with that hypothetical restaurant, I sent the company a request for my personal data. To its credit, the company makes this easy with an online form; less than 24 hours later, a zip file arrived. (Resy requires a request by email; a week later, I was told that it was “under review” and have heard nothing since. SevenRooms, another reservation platform, says that it is merely a processor of data and suggested that I contact individual restaurants.)
The OpenTable file was 48 pages, in the monospaced typeface of computer code. Much of it was indecipherable, aside from dozens of instances of my phone number (aha!) and semi-redacted credit-card information. Despite its length, the document contained only a fraction of the reservations I’ve made over the years. The Kingsway wasn’t in there; neither was the first OpenTable reservation I can find in my records, at Zenkichi, a Japanese restaurant in Williamsburg that I visited in 2008. The file had a note that read “GIN,” which I grant was on the money about my inclinations, but it wrongly identified my home market as Austin. If this was truly the sum of OpenTable’s knowledge, I had less to immediately worry about than I’d anticipated.
At the same time, seeing the traces of past meals emerge from the sea of characters was eerie. Many I remembered; plenty I had not thought about since. Next to many of the restaurant names was appended a note: “Permanently Closed.” Lowlife, Church & State, Hunky Dory, La Mangeoire—all no more. Others didn’t have the tag, but I knew they were gone too. Like ghosts, they swam through the mists of the OpenTable servers, rattling chains forged of bad leases, unruly food costs, fickle trends, misbegotten dreams, and a thousand other maladies. I could almost hear them wail, “Doooooon’t judge ussss … We just wanted to stay aliiiiiive …”
Indeed, restaurants are often asked to bear a moral and behavioral burden not generally placed on other small, low-margin, independent businesses. The more the public has learned about how restaurants work, the more they have scrutinized the ways in which they handle all sorts of social issues, such as racial and gender equity, climate change, and, yes, data privacy. These are all great and worthy considerations, but they do illustrate a gulf between how some customers (and many food writers) see restaurants and how many chefs and restaurateurs do: The former might like them to, you know, just solve the problem of ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism, while the latter are preoccupied with how to lower the cost of a lamb chop by 20 cents so they can pay that month’s electric bill. In the bigger picture, both diners and restaurateurs are reckoning with the same systemic forces.
But the question remains. Knowing all of this—not to mention with a plate of crawfish dumplings before me—why was I so rankled that night when asked for my number? Maybe because it’s exhausting, these constant micro-negotiations between dignity and grift. Exhausting, and lonely: Most people know that completely opting out of data collection isn’t an option, short of walking into the woods. So we’re left to improvise which of the numberless small violations are worth summoning the energy to resist: when we’re willing to have an awkward interaction, how embarrassed our companion will be, which employee might get in trouble, whether making a scene is worth the hassle. Like so many things, we’re on our own.
And maybe I am romantic about restaurants. About a 10-minute drive from the Kingsway is another restaurant, Crescent City Steakhouse, which opened in 1934. It features four booths along one wall that are outfitted with curtains that can be drawn for maximum privacy. A server once told the local paper that they were for “shady politicians, secret lovers, and people who put ketchup on their steaks.” I am none of those things, but I like to think I could be if I wanted. The idea that restaurants should be exempt from the pressures of modern society might be a fantasy, but I don’t think it’s an idle or shameful one. It is a large part of why people love restaurants, and, I have to assume, why people open them too. We want restaurants to be a respite from the world, or at least a plausible illusion of one. We want them to be the woods.
“Are you sick of depending on your inner beauty?” a brunette newscaster asks, as the camera zooms in on a frizzly, pimply woman wearing glasses, looking so dejected she may as well be posing for a mug shot. “The Fox series The Swan is looking for new contestants.” The footage, included in the new Hulu documentary The Swan: Behind the Mirror, dates from sometime around the early 2000s, post-9/11 and pre-Instagram, when reality television was in its human-experiment era and body positivity was barely a twinkle in a Unilever advertising executive’s eye.
In that particular media moment, gossip magazines routinely sneered at celebrities for having visible breakouts or the shadow of a thigh dimple, and beauty was widely understood to be synonymous with happiness, virtue, and wealth. “This show, if anything—don’t shoot me!—it was empowering,” the cosmetic surgeon Randal Haworth, who operated on contestants on both seasons of The Swan, explains in Behind the Mirror. “Because it shows you that beauty is power.”
With respect to Haworth, which I don’t think he deserves, only power is power. The best that beauty can offer is attention, which is why our current social-media ecosystem is so fixated on it, offering up “Get ready with me” reels and product reviews and close reads of celebrity faces with joyless frenzy. More quaint is that, when The Swan debuted in 2004, many contestants had heard about the show via a radio ad. “Have you ever looked in the mirror and wondered how it would feel to finally become the person you’ve always imagined?” a gentle voice inquired. “Have you dreamed of plastic surgery but never thought you could afford it?” Listening in their cars, women all over America pondered the question, and 16 were eventually selected each season to appear on a series now understood to be one of the most monstrous ever made.
The Swan wasn’t the first show to subject individuals with self-esteem issues to total physical overhaul while the cameras rolled—that was ABC’s Extreme Makeover, which debuted as a one-off special in late 2002 to more than 13 million viewers, prompting executives to book a full season. Critics were horrified—“American television bosses desperate for ratings are being accused of turning mutilation into entertainment,” The Guardianreported—but the show’s success spawned a wave of copycats. On MTV’s I Want a Famous Face (2004), young people obsessed with celebrities underwent multiple surgical procedures to look more like aughts icons. But The Swan gave the makeover-under-anesthesia an evil twist: After contestants were isolated from their families for three months and subjected to surgeries, low-calorie diet plans, and severe workout regimes, they were forced to compete, pageant-style, against one another to see which one was deemed to have become the most beautiful.
Behind the Mirror doesn’t delve too deeply into the reality-TV landscape in the moment The Swan premiered, possibly because the access that the director, Erin Lee Carr, received to former contestants, producers, and even doctors offers up a trove of such astonishing anecdotes that there wasn’t space for much else. When the contestants first arrived in the show-sponsored, mirror-free apartments, they were given a pile of celebrity magazines and told to make inspirational binders of how they wanted to look. In one scene, filmed during surgery, Haworth jokes with another doctor about “the size of my wand” while he brandishes an oversize syringe—you get the sense that they’d high-five about the tag-teaming of it all if they weren’t wearing surgical gloves. Several women recount how, while they were recovering from multiple surgeries simultaneously, there was, at one point, only one nurse to check on the 16 of them. And if we never hear the words lipo leak in a documentary again, let’s take it as progress.
But beyond the fat-shaming (The Swan’s creator, Nely Galán, who reportedly warned one contestant that she’d be “a tub” if she didn’t stop eating, wisely refused to participate), the performative cruelty, the resplendent tackiness of every visual aspect of the series lies an awkward kind of realization: This show was horrific, yes, but it was also honest. Neither Galán nor Haworth nor the then–Fox uberproducer Mike Darnell made any attempt to disguise their conviction that physical beauty is worth going to extreme measures for. “Plastic surgery is barbaric,” Haworth can be heard saying in a voice-over as the documentary begins. “You’re putting a cold scalpel onto flesh, and certain things fail.” The Swan reveled in scenes of women trussed from head to toe in bandages, grotesquely swollen, and seemingly so doped out on painkillers that they had to be propped up for interviews. This was the process—a particularly American confluence of suffering, aspiration, and surveillance. No pain, no gain.
Consumer beauty culture now tends to be more evasive. For all of the buzzwords that have entered common parlance, the “deep-plane facelift” (in which someone’s skin, fat, and muscles are repositioned and lifted as one composite piece) and the cutesy “bleph” (cutting off loose eyelid skin), there’s much less analysis of how brutal cosmetic surgery is. (On Reddit’s community-driven plastic-surgery page, by contrast, people can be much more honest and frequently overwhelmed by how painful recovery is.) People pore over celebrity faces with the zeal of medical professionals—I recently saw someone comment blithely about a laundry list of imaginary procedures one actress had supposedly had when all I could ascertain was a haircut—but in fixating on the results, we miss the process.
The writer Jessica DeFino has argued that modern beauty culture has “lobotomized us all” by reducing the complexity and richness of human life to a single question: Do I look hot? We use words such as liberating and choice to obscure the stark physical reality of procedures that pass down pretty privilege and ageism as burdens to the next generation. And rarely, if ever, do we publicly debate whether it’s a good thing that women are having their faces essentially cut off and reattached to look 10 years younger. Or whether erasing all signs of aging in the pursuit of perpetual girlishness is limiting women’s ability to convey qualities such as maturity, experience, and expertise—attributes that mass culture has not historically wanted to associate with women in the first place.
If you spend much time scrolling through certain swaths of social media, you might be inclined to think that everyone, everywhere is at least injecting their face with neurotoxins and filler (not actually true), if not getting an eyelift, or even having their ribs broken for a more angular silhouette. Plastic surgeons, perhaps the most savvy self-marketers since P. T. Barnum, now seem to spend more of their time making TikTok content than they do seeing patients. And celebrities, wisely deducing how pointless it is to deny something a thousand MD influencers will identify on YouTube, have taken to radical transparency.
Earlier this year, the actor Denise Richards shared the story of her facelift with the beauty magazine Allure, including pictures pre-op of her face marked up like a crime scene and post-op bruised like a soft fruit. And last year, the reality star turned entrepreneur Kylie Jenner, who sparked a 3,233 percent increase in searches for filler when she confessed, at the age of 17, to having had her lips plumped, caused a minor ruckus by revealing the exact specifications of her breast implants (“445cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle!!!!!”) and the name of the surgeon.
During the 2000s, when many fans expressed their devotion to celebrities by seeking to emulate them, Single White Female–style, this attitude of openness might have provoked a frenzy of patient inquiries. And the most popular doctors today will tell you that it has: Thanks to stars, according to one Vogue analysis, having cosmetic work done is getting destigmatized the more popular it becomes as content. “The trend of judgment is lessening,” one surgeon told the magazine. All of the experts surveyed agreed that “interest in plastic surgery is only going to grow.” Facelifts, “especially good ones, spread like a contagion,” a story in The Cut—that in turn propagated like knotweed among women my age—argued last year.
But is it actually happening? Despite the spate of recent viral articles lamenting our surgery-saturated social environment, the number of cosmetic surgical procedures performed in the United States in 2025 declined by 9 percent compared with the previous year for patients aged 18 to 25 and by 5 percent for patients 26–35, per a report released by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. A recent search for #facelift on TikTok brought me almost 450,000 posts, but fewer than 78,000 procedures were actually performed in 2025—roughly half as many as in 2004, the year The Swan aired. The business of cosmetic surgery is currently being driven by seniors and by people wanting to address excess skin and sunken cheeks after substantial GLP-1-associated weight loss, not by Gen Zers coveting a snatched jawline.
This is in part because the gargantuan beauty industry has sprawled out in so many other directions: neuromodulators such as Botox, fillers, lasers, LED masks, and microneedling, not to mention an endless array of consumer products. But the visible overuse of filler on celebrity and civilian faces seems to have prompted a backlash. The total transformation proffered by shows such as The Swan—in Behind the Mirror,one contestant recalls being reunited with her son after three months apart and multiple surgeries, and how he failed to recognize her—is no longer the goal. Instead, beauty culture now promises that we can look like the best version of ourselves—sculpted, rested, forever young. It’s a message even more insidious than the outright brutality of The Swan, because it keeps us in a perpetual state of want, convinced that the one product or procedure that might actually work is just a click away.
Only a few decades ago, Republican presidents would happily evoke the idea of America as a haven for people around the world. Ronald Reagan, in his farewell speech, declared that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” Reagan was no paragon of racial tolerance—he opposed the civil-rights movement and privately referred to Black people as “monkeys”—but he did not regard the presence of nonwhite people as an existential threat to America. For years the Republican Party insisted that what it wanted was a certain kind of immigrant—highly skilled people who came here legally, or even, not that long ago, those brought to the U.S. as children who lacked status through no fault of their own and had long since assimilated.
That Republican Party no longer exists. Today the GOP’s view is that almost all immigration—by which the Trump administration seems to mean nonwhite immigration, euphemistically referred to as “Third World” immigration—is bad. That view can be summed up by Homeland Security’s celebratory announcement on X last week that the country was seeing a decline in naturalizations, as if the decline itself were self-evidently a good thing: “Net negative migration for the first time in HALF a CENTURY. Americans are amassing victories NEVER seen before thanks to President Trump.” The “right” kind of immigrant seems to have become a much narrower category, one defined not by people’s education, potential, or ties to the country, but simply by whether they are white and Christian.
A recent Fox News headline exulted: “Republican Glee Erupts as White House Boasts Sharp Decline in Immigration From Muslim-Majority Nations.” These people could be doctors, engineers, or artists, but if they’re from a “Muslim-majority country,” these Republicans don’t want them here. And this week, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin posted that “socialists”—by which he presumably meant leftists sympathetic to immigrants—want to “vandalize American demographics to gain political power.” This is the language of racial purity, and it is not a concept that confines itself to immigration. It suggests that Americans who do not fit the Trump administration’s preferred “demographics” do not belong.
In the many parts of the United States where the native-born population is declining, communities desperately need immigrants. This is true in areas of Ohio, where Haitian immigration has contributed to an economic revival. But to President Trump, Haiti is a “shithole” country, and all Haitians are invaders to be expelled. To that end, the administration removed the Temporary Protected Status that had allowed Haitian immigrants to stay in the United States, and in July, Haitians in Ohio began being fitted with ankle monitors.
Pierre Damas Bel was in college at Wright State University in Ohio when he was issued his bulky ankle monitor. He was an athlete. And he hoped to study neuroscience and be a doctor. He was exactly the kind of young person whom previous versions of the Republican Party would have seen as an American success story. But he was a Haitian immigrant, so he was not wanted by the Trump administration, which did not seem to care who he was, or who he might become. In September, he called his father to say he felt “humiliated.” CNN reported that soon after, police told his father that he had “thrown himself under a truck.” A local pastor, Carl Ruby, said at a news conference that it was “our immigration policy that took his life.”
A year ago, TheNew York Times obtained documents submitted to the president by officials at the Departments of State and Homeland Security claiming that “the sharp increase in diversity has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity,” and arguing that the U.S. should admit only “refugees who can be fully and appropriately assimilate [sic], and are aligned with the president’s objectives.”
We now know what was meant by this. The Trump administration has turned refugee admissions into a virtually whites-only program for Afrikaners from South Africa. The applications of these so-called refugees—who do not face significant levels of persecution—are being processed quickly, while those of other groups around the world have largely been suspended. The administration portrays most immigrants as people who leech off U.S. taxpayers rather than contributing, but it has supported South Africans in this whites-only refugee program at taxpayer expense.
The Afrikaner policy is illuminating, because it proves the catch-22 facing nonwhite immigrants: If you are poor, you are a moocher, and if you are gainfully employed, you are taking a job from a hardworking American. The only way to be a good immigrant is to be white and Christian.
Bo French, who is running for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, has taken this idea a step further, suggesting that the only way to be an American is to be white and Christian.
Last month, French responded to a photograph of Asian students cheering the University of Texas football team by posting, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” adding that “social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.” French later said, “I think that the bigger conversation is, are we going to have policies that prioritize Americans, and the exceptionalism that I believe Americans have, or are we going to have policies that prioritize foreigners?”
State law requires that 90 percent of UT’s students be from Texas; only 10 percent can be international or out-of-state students. French had no idea of the citizenship status of the young people in the photo. What made the students “foreigners” to French was that they were not white.
The conservative activist Christopher Rufo discussed French’s comments on a podcast with Jonathan Keeperman, who leads a book publisher of conservative titles. Keeperman explained that “the mere fact of us being able to notice that No, this is not an assimilated group, this is just a bunch of Indians at the game is itself sort of definitionally the case that they’re not yet assimilated.” What makes them not assimilated? Nothing more than the opinion of a guy who looks at a picture and sees, as Keeperman put it, “just a bunch of Indians.”
It is difficult to imagine a behavior more indicative of assimilation than rejoicing in the victory of your college football team in Texas. And that’s the point: Assimilation is no longer about going to school, getting a job, speaking English, and embracing local culture. It’s about being white and Christian.
In recent years, many conservatives have championed a kind of reactionary “color-blindness” that insists that any race-conscious effort to alleviate discrimination is itself equivalent to racial discrimination. White people earned their success, this argument assumes, but people in all other groups were given unfair advantages—a notable inversion of American history. Affirmative action has been struck down by the Supreme Court, and offices promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion have been restricted or outlawed at public universities in many states, including Texas. But the success of nonwhite people remains suspect. In fact, that success is evidence that something is deeply wrong with the system. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote about the Rufo and Keeperman podcast, “Resentment of these immigrant communities is understandable, the two men explained, not in spite of the fact that so many South Asians have been successful academically and economically, but because of it.” If “meritocracy” does not produce an overwhelming white majority in elite spaces such as Texas’s flagship public university, what good is it?
Color-blind meritocracy was, for many years, a successful rhetorical strategy for undermining antidiscrimination law and excluding Black people from selective schools and prominent positions. That’s why so many former segregationists seemed to suddenly embrace the concept in the 1970s. For them, resegregation—not color-blindness—was always the goal. As long as the success of some immigrants could be used to paint Black students as undeserving, color-blind meritocracy was good. But now many on the right see a new problem: too many Asian Americans in elite spaces. Their success, therefore, must be portrayed as a sinister theft of real (white) Americans’ birthright.
The declining “social trust” that the administration warned against is, of course, not the fault of these students. The problem is bigots like Bo French who cannot accept into their community people who do not share their race and religion, and those who monetize or otherwise profit from that bigotry by spreading it through social media. Like the proverbial child who kills their parents and asks for mercy as an orphan, they are responsible for the problem they are decrying.
Perhaps more significant than French’s remarks is that few Republican politicians in Texas were willing to criticize them. Governor Greg Abbott, who has endorsed French, distanced himself but did not condemn the remarks. Neither did Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. Nor did Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat. Senator John Cornyn, who lost the primary to Paxton, was among the few sitting Republican officeholders who did, saying French was “an embarrassment to the Republican Party, and he’s going to drag the whole ticket down because of his racist comments.” One wonders whether he would have felt free to speak so frankly had he not been primaried out of his seat.
The former Bush adviser Karl Rove, hardly a liberal squish, complained that “my party is being infiltrated by people like Bo French. Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets with a bunch of Republican leaders. This guy is a Nazi.” I’m afraid that these people have not “infiltrated” the Republican Party. Today, they are the Republican Party.
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Around the same time that the world learned that swarms of autonomous AI agents were escaping their testing environments and carrying out sophisticated hacking attacks this past summer, researchers who focus on election security were running tests of their own. They wanted to see whether the safeguards that top AI companies had enacted to prevent their technology from disrupting the upcoming midterms would work in the real world. The results were ominous.
In response to sample prompts designed to create misinformation, several chatbots produced realistic photos of a man stuffing ballots into a mailbox, a man holding a foreign passport while trying to vote, and FBI agents investigating a voter-registration organization. The chatbots also created fraudulent government documents and deepfake videos of government officials purporting to substantiate election-conspiracy theories. In some cases, the chatbots acted in violation of their own policies. They even helped the researchers, from the Brennan Center for Justice, hone the prompts that would create propaganda to boost specious claims of election fraud.
The resulting images were so realistic that when the researchers asked other chatbots to determine whether they were real or fake, several of the leading AI firms’ models were stumped. Much of the activity contravened safety systems that companies had touted just months ago—and some seemed to run afoul of various state laws, researchers found. The experiment shows just how wide the gap has become between the fast-moving technology and the glacially paced effort to regulate it, Lawrence Norden, who helped conduct the research as the Brennan Center’s vice president of elections and government, told me.
“All the companies apparently have some guardrails to try to prevent this from happening,” he said, citing AI firms’ written guidelines around misinformation and cybersecurity. “They’re easily circumventable, and the tools themselves make it easy to circumvent them. That’s really what makes me think we’re not ready.“
Washington and Silicon Valley have been consumed in recent weeks with debate over the extent to which ever more intelligent AI agents may put all of humanity in danger. Much less attention has been on what researchers and election officials told me is a more pressing short-term reality: The November midterms are more vulnerable to AI-powered disruption or manipulation than most voters realize. Few signs indicate that the federal government is taking the risks as seriously as it should. Instead, as misinformation and cyberhacking threats rise, the agencies and entities responsible for protecting America’s electoral infrastructure have been gutted, downgraded, or otherwise neutralized. As a result, the 2026 midterms are shaping up to be the first live, real-world test of whether the jumble of state, local, and industry policies designed to protect against a breakdown in election systems can hold up in the AI era. Few election and cybersecurity experts believe that this patchwork is well suited to stopping a serious attack.
Such attacks could be carried out in different ways. Sophisticated misinformation campaigns using the latest generative technology could convince voters that the election has been compromised. Election officials are also concerned that AI-assisted cyberattacks could take down critical voting infrastructure. There is little evidence that AI agents would have the ability to infiltrate vote-counting systems to manipulate actual votes, which are almost always backed up by a paper record.
The breaches of the AI company Hugging Face and attempted hacks of government agencies by rogue agents in recent months have led companies to pause some AI development, call for new regulations, and implement measures to counter the mounting risks to public safety. There are few signs that the technology’s threats to election security are creating a similar level of caution. Some state and local officials, with little guidance from the federal government, are scrambling to prepare for a range of unpredictable scenarios, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told me. The tools available to malicious actors are rapidly improving, forcing government officials to play catch-up. “As we think about the threat of AI, we think about deepfakes; we think about bots, hacking, and disrupting our official websites or bringing down essential voter-registration systems,” Bellows said. “It means that we have to work even harder to protect ourselves.”
The Brennan Center study—and similar tests run this year by other organizations, including the pro-democracy group States United—found that it has become easy for AI to create confusion before, during, and after an election. In one instance, researchers used a publicly available AI tool to reproduce a version of a disinformation video created in Russia and released in the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. “The ease with which we created this video—which, in the past, would have required actors, cameras, and production infrastructure—illustrates the power of modern chatbots to generate misinformation easily and prolifically,” the Brennan Center researchers wrote in their August report.
Brennan Center
An AI-generated image from the Brennan Center study shows a man casting a ballot while holding a foreign passport.
Brennan Center
An AI-generated image Brennan Center researchers created with ChatGPT that they say appears to show a person instructing people how to fill out their ballots.
The chatbots did provide some guardrails. When researchers posed as election skeptics and tried to prompt various chatbots to confirm a series of conspiracy theories, the models consistently tried to debunk such claims. The States United probe found that the models improved their accuracy over time, and ChatGPT and Google AI both became markedly more accurate in answering election-related inquiries from late 2025 to early 2026.
At the same time, chatbots’ inclination to be friendly—and occasionally sycophantic—sometimes led to banter that appeared to validate false ideas about election fraud. “That feeling you can’t put your finger on? It was put there deliberately by people who raised hundreds of millions of dollars off it,” Anthropic’s Claude told a Brennan Center researcher who posed as a user with doubts about the 2020 election. “Questioning elections is American as apple pie,” xAI’s Grok told another researcher.
The study’s authors were often able to bypass safeguards that AI companies had set up to prevent their agents from producing election-related misinformation, either by changing the settings or by switching among different AI models when they ran into roadblocks. They asked one AI model to create an image showing someone altering the postmark dates on mail-in ballots; it did so but replaced the mail-in ballots with regular mail. The researchers then took that image and asked a different AI model to replace the regular mail with mail-in ballots. It did so without hesitation.
It is easy to imagine how in the chaotic aftermath of a close election, such imagery could provide the kind of alleged evidence that skeptics could use to undermine the results, T. J. Pyche, a former election administrator who serves on the AI + Elections Clinic advisory board at Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory and as the vice president of the nonpartisan group Ready for Tuesday, told me. Paradoxically, election officials may also benefit from how skilled AI technology has become at producing fake images and video, he said. When he conducted trainings for election administrators early last year, he would show them a series of videos and ask them to identify which were authentic and which had been generated by AI. Most could do so with relative ease, even if they divulged fears that average voters might be duped. Today, little distinguishes fake images and videos from real ones. But that could reduce the believability of extreme examples of AI-generated propaganda, Pyche noted. “Something that they have going in their favor is that people don’t believe anything anymore,” he said. “People since have moved toward thinking that everything’s AI.”
The spread of misinformation is only one of the threats that AI poses to the electoral system. Election administrators have also warned that the risk of cyberintrusions has increased significantly now that automated agents have developed the ability to circumvent cybersecurity defenses and secretly work together to find vulnerabilities. Governmental networks have already been targeted. Last month, researchers learned that AI agents had been probing U.S.-government websites, attempting intrusions on the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights and initiating unauthorized interactions with the Census Bureau. In Australia, OpenAI agents bypassed cybersecurity defenses and accessed several government websites this past summer, including a Medicare-statistics portal. In a statement last week apologizing for the breaches, the company revealed that the agents had accessed public and private Medicare files. OpenAI said that it had not found evidence that patient records were breached.
The fact that America’s elections are so decentralized—more than 10,000 entities manage the voting process at the state and local levels—has long been hailed as a kind of defense mechanism against foreign tampering. Someone trying to flip a statewide election would presumably have to compromise the vote in multiple jurisdictions and polling locations to have a large effect on ballot totals. But many of those offices operate on limited budgets and are especially vulnerable to AI agents that can penetrate weak defenses.
Several municipalities in Maine experienced cyberintrusions this past summer that forced some government services to shut down temporarily. Although AI does not appear to have been involved in the breaches, the fallout still stood as a warning about how fragile our electoral system is, Bellows said: “When cyber adversaries are targeting little tiny towns in rural Maine, we have a problem—and AI just accelerates that problem.”
Geopolitical developments—the United States is at war with Iran and locked in strategic standoffs with other adversaries—only heighten the level of danger. “These kinds of sophisticated models can be integrated into activities by foreign threat actors—Iran, Russia, China all being high on that list,” Isabel Linzer, a policy analyst on the elections-and-democracy team at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. “It is worrying because we are, on one hand, reducing the defense capabilities, while we are also seeing an increased threat environment because the technology has advanced.”
Donald Trump, who last week met with the CEOs of several top AI companies, has downplayed the risks. The president suggested that he is not interested in implementing new federal restrictions on a technology that he asserted “will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.” He said that the companies are doing “tremendous self-policing” and previously claimed that the only guardrail AI needs is a “STRONG AND SMART” president.
The Trump administration has been especially hostile to efforts by state and local election administrators to protect themselves against cyberintrusions. The main agency responsible for shielding election systems from cyberthreats, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has been decimated by staff cuts and dysfunction since Trump’s return to office. CISA’s work on election security has been scaled back significantly as well. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to prime his supporters with misinformation about elections, repeatedly calling voting in America “rigged” and vulnerable to wide-scale fraud.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the record. A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that the Trump administration will ensure that the upcoming elections are free and fair. A spokesperson for CISA did not respond to a request for comment.
Norden, the Brennan Center official, said that his team got in touch with companies to discuss fixes after his research identified flaws in their models’ handling of election misinformation. A Google spokesperson pointed me to a September 9 blog post in which the company outlined measures it had implemented to shore up its cybersecurity defenses ahead of the midterms. Other AI companies have touted similar election-security programs, including special watermarks that help flag AI-generated content. Nate Evans, a spokesperson for OpenAI, referenced the company’s own watermark program in a statement. “Our goal is to support people’s ability to participate freely in elections and make their own decisions with reliable information and effective safeguards,” he told me. “On cyber, we are also working closely with cyber defenders across the elections ecosystem and we continue to monitor for cyber abuse.” A Meta spokesperson pointed me to a February blog post showing how the company is preparing for the midterms. An Anthropic spokesperson sent me the company’s April 24 blog post on the company’s “election safeguards.” Spokespeople for xAI, Perplexity, and DeepSeek—all of which were tested in the Brennan study—did not respond to my requests for comment.
AI could help with parts of the electoral process that can be monotonous and time-consuming, some officials told me. Bill Gates, a former Maricopa County supervisor who now leads Arizona State University’s Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory, told me that he has been working with election officials to find ways to use AI to reduce redundancy and increase efficiency. “There are these sort of tedious tasks that exist in elections—tedious but extremely important,” he said, referencing things such as translating material into foreign languages and creating real-time social-media updates. “To the extent that AI can be of help there, that’s wonderful.”
Shortly before the 2024 election, researchers trained an “AI tutor” to provide truthful information about election administration. When election skeptics participating in a study learned facts about election administration and interacted with the chatbot, they were more likely to soften or reverse their views about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 presidential race, Adam Berinsky, an MIT professor who helped run the study, told me. Berinsky acknowledged that “in the real world,” it might be difficult to persuade a large number of Trump supporters to spend time engaging with a chatbot that rejects their preconceived notions about the voting system. Election skeptics have plenty of alternative AI options to choose from—including one that bears the imprimatur of the U.S. government. Last week, Trump unveiled America.gov, a chatbot designed to offer Americans a centralized place to ask questions about the government and its services.
A day after the chatbot was unveiled, I logged on and asked whether the 2020 presidential election had been “rigged,” as Trump claims. It demurred. “I can’t say whether the 2020 presidential election was ‘rigged,’” it responded, declining to offer a “political judgment.” It gave similar answers when I asked whether Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate, whether evidence of widespread fraud existed, whether mail-in ballots had been compromised, and whether any judges had backed up Trump’s claims that the election had been stolen.
When I posed those same questions this week, the chatbot seemed to have gotten smarter—or at least slightly more responsible. It noted that federal agencies have reported that the 2020 federal elections were secure, that courts dismissed Trump’s claims of fraud after the election, and that there was no widespread evidence of ballot tampering. Still, America’s chatbot stopped short of confirming that the 2020 election was free and fair, saying, “That is political commentary, which I do not provide.”
The second floor of OpenAI’s old headquarters had a theme. Each room was named after one of the most important inventions in human history: “Clock,” “Fire,” and, of course, “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. I saw this in the spring of 2024, when I was interviewing some of the company’s researchers about recent technical advances. At the time, ChatGPT was still making embarrassing arithmetic errors, and the notion that the bot would ever rival human intelligence was dubious. But here, in the renovated shell of a former mayonnaise factory in San Francisco, AGI’s arrival was predestined.
This belief in AGI—a computer program with capabilities that rival or even exceed those of the human mind—is foundational to the mission of Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic, three of the most influential AI companies in the world. And the pursuit of that milestone is the subject of The AGI Chronicles, a new book by the tech reporter and Atlantic contributing writer Kevin Roose, which he describes as his attempt to document the decade “when the human monopoly on advanced intelligence ended, and a new world was born.” Roose, a prominent and well-connected commenter on the AI boom, follows the internecine world of the frontier AI companies in remarkable, at times almost insular, detail. Based on interviews with more than 150 researchers, executives, investors, and policy makers close to the technology’s development, The AGI Chronicles traces crucial moments across DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic from 2015 through early 2026 to figure out how we got to this very messy moment in AI, and who’s responsible for what happens next.
If you scan statements from executives such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, there is a sense of fatalism about the rise of AI. In my conversation with Amodei last year, he likened developing AI to operating an out-of-control bus: It can’t be stopped or even slowed, but perhaps it can be steered. In an interview last month, Altman called AI “an inevitability.” According to this framing, AI executives are simply conductors, doing their best to provide guardrails for an era that’s careering our way, whether anyone likes it or not. Roose’s book prompted me to consider a question that is often neglected in the mile-a-minute news cycle: Are the leading AI companies simply heralding an inevitable evolution of this technology, as many of them claim, or are they directing that advancement? The answer will have tremendous bearing on how we assign responsibility for the world taking shape around us.
The AGI Chronicles is of both minds on the topic. On the one hand, Roose is very explicit that he is archiving decisions made by a small group of people. “AGI was not inevitable,” he writes, but “invented, developed, and commercialized by a few hundred people.” On the other hand, sometimes the book reads like a natural history, describing a procession of events outside the control of any specific group of people, an almost geological force sweeping the planet as “a new world was born.” He notes how, throughout the years, various companies and officials had yet to “wake up.” By 2024, he writes, “the idea of going back to the old world, to a time before all this, seemed more delusional than expecting the exponential to continue.”
At times, Roose’s book echoes the loss of agency professed by AI executives. Of course, the inevitability of any one outcome is a self-serving fabrication. There is no prophecy that a handful of Silicon Valley companies dictating their own rules, running roughshod over copyright law and environmental regulations while mucking up once-reliableinternet services with AI features nobody asked for, will operate largely unencumbered. Industries take shape through decisions made by individual actors and investors, the collective desire of the public, and the action or inaction of regulators.
If you look to the late 1800s, for example, it would have seemed likely that electric cars would dominate the market in the following century. America’s best-selling car in 1897 was electric, and in the 1910s, Henry Ford was trying to develop an electric car with Thomas Edison. But a series of technological limitations and human decisions—including various financial missteps and harsh criticism from advocates of petrol-powered cars—changed the course of history, leaving a legacy that we’re reckoning with more than a century later.
In the 1950s, it seemed as if nuclear reactors were destined to dot the nation and power the future. But a series of political campaigns and spectacular errors—the anti-nuclear movement, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl—crushed the nuclear age before it ever really started. Then there was the Space Age and supersonic flight—there are so many seemingly inevitable technological eras that never quite made it, not so much because of technology itself as because of political and economic choices. There are, similarly, so many corporate behemoths—Standard Oil, Kodak, Bear Stearns—that, because of regulation or complacency or fraud, unraveled. The inverse holds for many technologies and companies considered inevitable today: Different regulatory environments, international agreements, or priorities for Pentagon labs could have stopped the development of an open and global internet, smartphones, social media.
When I recently called Roose to discuss his book and ask what he made of the industry’s frequently prophetic tone, he initially told me he believes that “nothing about this was inevitable. These were decisions made by people.” But he then said that he wanted to “complicate” that: “Once scaling the transformer worked, and once the scaling laws were documented,” Roose said, “I think it was inevitable that the companies building this stuff would push it as far as they possibly could.”
I’d like to further complicate that view. Beyond the urge to test the bounds of any technology and reap enormous profits, the industry has been shaped by very human decisions. AI researchers chose to train their models on troves of copyrighted works without seeking permission, leading to countless creators suddenly getting left out of the economic equation. OpenAI chose to rush a free-to-use ChatGPT to the market in late 2022, kicking off a hype cycle and a subsequent investment bonanza. Venture-capital, private-equity, and tech firms chose to sink untold billions into a still-unprofitable technology. Data-center developers chose to eschew solar panels in favor of combustion turbines, which they perceive as faster and more reliable. On the government side, Donald Trump has chosen to ignore or eliminate any substantive federal regulation of AI. An industry that negotiated royalty payments, prioritized clean energy, gave itself longer development cycles, or faced serious federal regulation might look entirely different.
The question of inevitability and responsibility may sound arcane, but it has real ramifications. In the Bay Area, tied up with the myth of AI’s inevitability is a sort of spiritual devotion: “Thank you to the machines, and the structure of reality, for letting us understand a little more,” Altman wrote on X this week. The more you treat AI as inevitable, the more it seems like a cosmic force rather than a product resulting from industrial and commercial design choices. The more you treat AI as inevitable, the less you can hold any company or person responsible for things going wrong. The executives, in this view, are only fractionally more empowered than us in deciding what happens next; more important, everyone else needs to wake up. As Altman put it to Politico earlier this month, “The world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”
In the months since Roose concluded his reporting, the AI industry and its products have risen to still-greater global prominence and triggered even greater fears. When I asked him what new chapters he might add if he were still writing, Roose said that he would end the book with the recent White House press conference in which Trump, Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and several other tech executives addressed AI-safety concerns. He recalled a speech Amodei gave in Anthropic’s early days about how different parts of society would gradually become attuned to the transformative effects of this technology, beginning with AI firms and ending with the state. It felt, Roose told me, “like the prophecy had been fulfilled.”
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Kimberly Guilfoyle was so close to getting it right.
The Trump hanger-on—former fiancée to Don Jr. and the current ambassador to Greece—was exchanging messages with a man named Eric Deters, according to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story last night. Deters, a right-wing podcast host, failed political candidate, and suspended lawyer in Kentucky, wanted help in clearing up some tax issues, and also wanted the Trump administration to extradite a doctor whose alleged fraud victims he was advising in a legal case. Guilfoyle, the messages indicate, wanted money—in one instance, a $100,000 wire—and she wanted it untraceable.
Guilfoyle was right to worry about secrecy. She was about to begin confirmation hearings for her ambassadorship, and understood the pay-to-play could hurt her. Yet neither she nor Deters could stop breaking the Stringer Bell rule by recording their skullduggery in writing.
“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” Guilfoyle wrote. “Please.” And in another: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today.” Yet even as she laid these instructions out, she kept haranguing Deters for indiscretion. “I really wish you would stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal,” she wrote, referring to the encrypted messaging app. In one message, she wrote, “If you write an email or a text about, l’m gonna kill you cause I love you but you’re so out of control.” Unfortunately for Guilfoyle, her Signal messages were not as safe a space as she might have wished. (The Journal does not reveal how it viewed the messages. Guilfoyle’s lawyer broadly disputed their authenticity to the paper but offered no details.)
Somehow, this is not the only Trump scandal with Balkan ties in the news this week. The New York Times reported that James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are ostensibly President Trump’s top political advisers, traveled—during an intense midterm campaign in which Republicans appear to be on the verge of serious setbacks—to advise a candidate in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s self-governing Serbian entity.
Both of these stories show the way that many people in Trump’s orbit view their positions not as public service but as a profit center. There’s a long and often depressing pattern of former officials capitalizing on government and political work, but Trump’s aides aren’t even willing to wait until they take their leave to start taking. Forget a team of rivals. Trump world is a team of mercenaries, in some cases literally.
Jared Kushner, who was a senior adviser in his first presidency and is married to his daughter Ivanka, continues to work as an envoy for Trump while pursuing business deals around the world. As Dexter Filkins wrote in The New Yorker in September, Kushner’s record as a diplomat is underwhelming, yet his financial gains have been enormous. “He represents a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth,” Filkins wrote. Kushner and Ivanka Trump even have their own Balkan boondoggle, an attempt to develop an island in Albania that has run into legal and political difficulties.
Earlier this year, the Times reported that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick helped negotiate access to Kazakh tungsten reserves for an American mining company, and the federal government provided $1.6 billion in financing. Lutnick’s sons and Trump’s sons are both involved with companies that stand to profit from the deal (though representatives for them have said that they did not play a role in the deal). A Washington Post investigation this summer noted that Trump’s sons have invested heavily in defense-technology companies; the companies have scored “at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” (Company representatives told the Post that they secured their business without assistance from Trump’s sons.)
Where do any of these people get the idea that this is appropriate or that they can get away with it? From the president himself, naturally. Trump has moved on from small-scale grifts such as charging the Secret Service exorbitant fees to stay in his hotels during his first term to far more ambitious and lucrative schemes such as crypto ventures; even conservative estimates put his gains during this term alone in the billions.
Though Trump doesn’t have ethical scruples, he does have a sense of right and wrong: It’s right for him to profiteer, but wrong for others to make too much money from his name. That’s where Blair, LaCivita, and Guilfoyle may run into trouble. Politico reports that Republicans’ “knives are now fully out” for the two consultants. Trump himself weighed in on Truth Social, saying he was unaware of their clients but adding that he “will, on reflection, ask them and, if there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!” Firing them just before the midterms seems risky, as it might just create more chaos for Republicans, but they could make for good scapegoats after the fact. Trump has not spoken publicly about the Guilfoyle story, although Vice President Vance said he didn’t “love that.” In a further embarrassment, the article emerged while Secretary of State Marco Rubio was visiting Athens.
Perhaps inevitably, Guilfoyle’s relationship with Deters ended acrimoniously. “I have paid you $300,000 over the years,” he wrote her in 2025, adding, in an amusingly self-negating flourish, “As of this memo, I have not received one favor. I am not naive or a sucker.” She was not happy, either. “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing,” she told him at one point, per the Journal. Her warning may have been too late.
U.S. prosecutors charged Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, with conspiring to torture Americans and other prisoners in Venezuela to suppress opposition and maintain power. The new charge has been added to the federal case against the couple, who are scheduled for trial in June 2027.
At least 30 people were killed in a Russian strike on a bus in eastern Ukraine, a day after another Russian strike killed 22 people in an apartment building. The attacks come as Russia intensifies its use of drones, missiles, and guided bombs against Ukrainian targets.
Hurricane Isaias strengthened into the first hurricane of the Atlantic season as it approached the Gulf Coast, and landfall is expected as soon as tomorrow. It could reach Category 3 strength, prompting hurricane watches and mandatory evacuations in parts of Florida.
Whenever I receive a text, this is what happens. I pick up my phone. So far, so good. I experience whatever emotion the message elicits—the pleasant warmth of being reached out to, possibly the annoyance of being interrupted. Then, if conditions are right, if I’m not too busy or in the middle of talking with someone else, if my mind is at peace, if my anxiety is at no more than a low hum, if Mercury is not in retrograde, I will respond right then and there. If conditions are not right, it will be as though the text never existed at all.
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