No one agrees on when, where, or how capitalism began, or whether it had a beginning at all, but everyone agrees that capitalism, the word, first appeared in the 19th century. Capital and capitalist slipped into use, unnoticed and unremarked, in the 13th and 17th centuries. Capitalism burst through the barricades of political argument in the 1830s, announcing immediately the hostility of its user. “Long live capital!” cried the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. “Long may we go on to attack capitalism, its mortal enemy, with even more intensity.” As much as the word named something, so did it identify its speaker—as a worker, a radical, a hater.

If capital was viewed as a thing and capitalists as people, capitalism was something else. Blanc described it as an act, the taking of collective wealth and turning it into individual or private profit. Proudhon claimed it was a citadel, casting medieval and military shadows across the land. Despite his obvious interest and extensive writing on the subject, Marx steered clear of the term.

A 19th-century dictionary usefully notes that “ism” words are “systemative,” and a system might have been the one thing that everybody agreed capitalism was. But a system of what? The economy was hardly a concept at the time, and even if it had been, was capitalism only an economic system? Was it not also a “social system,” as the conservative German economist Johann Karl Rodbertus claimed, or a political system, as the subtitle of Marx’s Capital and Adam Smith’s discussion of “the system of natural liberty” had suggested? If it was a system of property and production, finance and labor, how could one distinguish where the economic dimensions ended and the political and social dimensions began?

This uncertainty over domains and their differentiation indicates a deeper anxiety. Whatever kind of system capitalism was, it had a tendency to blur, to ooze and spread across distinctions. As early as the 18th century, observers like Montesquieu had noted that merchants drew “their livelihood from the whole universe.” In the plantation economies of the Caribbean, the Abbé Raynal thought he had detected a “rapid movement which stirs the Universe.” By the time it acquired its name, capitalism was already spinning and spanning the globe, drawing from and drawing close the different parts of the earth. Capitalism sucked in other worlds too, engulfing religion, law, the family, even the psyche. We can never know the inner life of another person, the economist William Stanley Jevons claimed, nor can we know the contour of their appetites or the character of their aversions, but we can know their push and pull by the “oscillations…minutely registered in the price lists of the market.”

No matter how one defines capitalism, the concept has served its critics well. Capitalism named an enemy, gave it a shape, and showed that it was on the march, threatening everything in its path. It still does. Scholars, by contrast, have often blanched at the term, dismissing it as political or polemical. While a subset of historians never gave it up, only recently has the historical profession come around to the position of the German scholar Jürgen Kocka: that as “a concept of historical synthesis,” capitalism is “unsurpassed.” Since the financial crisis of 2008, an entire subfield has been dedicated to “the new history of capitalism.” Its practitioners have rewritten the history of slavery, debt, accounting, real estate, prisons, finance, sex, insurance, and more.

Now these scholars face a challenge that the opponents of capitalism have long understood: Capitalism and its opponents depend on difference. Capitalism works at the margins, colonizing or cultivating systems and spheres that are not capitalist. Capitalism’s opponents also work at the margins. They work at the margins of time, reminding people of a time before capitalism and promising a time after it. They work at the margins of space, defending social spheres and geographic regions not yet overtaken by capitalism. Whenever capitalism triumphs, that fugitive space grows smaller, that alternative future grows dimmer. As that future disappears, it becomes harder to imagine or to posit a time, including a past, when capitalism did not exist. Everything—past, present, and future—becomes capitalism or is on its way to it.

The polemical elements of the word, the fact that partisans deployed it to mark the perimeter of what they were protecting from the forces they were opposing, once made capitalism a fruitful source of historical distinction and narrative. But when the polemic subsides and the perimeter disappears, when capitalism triumphs and is simply the way of the world, the job of the historian becomes infinitely more challenging and fraught with failure.

Enter Sven Beckert, the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard.

Beckert is a pioneer of the new history of capitalism, and like the ism he studies, his remit is always expanding. His first book was The Monied Metropolis, an illuminating if contained history of the making of the ruling class of 19th-century New York City. In Empire of Cotton, he told “the history of capitalism” through “the biography of one product.” Now, in Capitalism: A Global History, Beckert has freed himself from the shackles of the specific. Citing Nehru’s dictum that it is no longer possible to write history “in terms of any one nation or country or patch of territory,” that we must “think of the world as a whole,” Beckert claims that capitalism “can only be understood globally.” Capitalism, he maintains, did not become global; it “was born global.”

Beckert begins in the year 1150, not with capital or capitalism but with the merchants of Aden, a port city at the tip of southern Yemen. These merchants were Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and maybe Christian, but they worked and wrote mostly in Arabic. Over the course of several hundred years, they connected with other merchants as well as farmers, miners, and manufacturers from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. They traded an astonishing variety of goods: pepper, sugar, ivory, sandalwood, iron, copper, lead, carpets, glass, porcelain, and more. (One merchant in Cairo dealt in 83 different commodities.) In addition to buying low and selling high, the merchants crafted legal partnerships, instruments of debt, currency exchanges, and early forms of insurance to finance trading expeditions that could take as long as two years and go wrong in any number of ways. Instead of accompanying their goods on their journeys, they relied on the financial instruments they created, the diversity of their portfolios, and the trust of their families and networks to see their profits through. They were, Beckert tells us, “the world’s first capitalists.”

By using this nomenclature, Beckert makes three claims. Two look backward, one looks forward, and none of them stands up to scrutiny. First, he writes that these merchants pioneered a new form of economic being. They “led economic lives based upon a truly exotic principle: They deployed capital to produce more capital. The accumulation of capital was the linchpin of their worldly endeavors.” But that principle was neither novel nor exotic, and Beckert’s merchants were not the first to act on it. Aristotle saw it lurking in any form of money-based, long-distance trade, and he was sufficiently concerned about its currency among the merchants of his day that he devoted several pages of his Politics to denouncing it and them.

Prediction markets—online casinos disguised as investment vehicles, where you can bet on propositions ranging from who will win a particular sports contest to who will be a bridesmaid at Taylor Swift’s wedding—have exploded in the past two years. The monthly trading volume among prediction wagerers has skyrocketed, from $1.2 billion in early 2025 to more than $20 billion in January 2026, according to the blockchain-research firm TRM Labs. The two largest prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi, have a combined valuation north of $30 billion, making their founders some of the world’s most improbably young billionaires.

Most Americans who know of these strange hybrid beasts—half futures markets, half slot machines—likely encountered them in one of two ways: in news reports on their use as a tool for political insiders to make easy money wagering on war and death, or by discovering their capacity as a backdoor way to bet on sports in states like California and Texas that haven’t legalized sports gambling.

The war-and-death contracts landed with particular force in early January, when a Polymarket account likely created a week before US forces seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro turned a $33,000 bet on his removal from office into $400,000 in profit, with two other accounts of apparent insiders collectively clearing another $230,000. The timing was difficult to explain without invoking advance knowledge of a military operation so secret that top members of Congress hadn’t been briefed on it.

And then there was Iran. Starting in December, Polymarket booked more than $529 million in bets on whether or when the United States would strike Iran; Kalshi allowed $54 million in bets on when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be removed from power, which turned out to mean killed in the joint US-Israeli air strikes on February 28. The New York Times found that in the 24 hours before the strikes, over 300 bets of at least $1,000 flooded in, with at least 16 accounts clearing more than $100,000 each; one account turned $60,000 into nearly half a million. A trader going by the name “Magamyman” made more than $553,000; another suspiciously lucky Polymarket patron had taken in nearly $1 million on a series of stunningly accurate bets on US and Israeli attacks on Iran over several years, according to CNN. (Kalshi, awkwardly claiming that it didn’t allow betting on death, canceled all of the wagers and issued refunds, infuriating the traders who had predicted correctly.) Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy was blunt: “I think it’s likely there were people making the decision on war with Iran that had a financial interest in doing so because they had placed a bet on one of these markets. It’s worse than insider trading.”

The early days of the Iran war also saw a distressing example of how the prediction markets’ penchant for death-betting could take a dangerous, wag-the-dog turn. Emanuel Fabian, a reporter for The Times of Israel, fielded a stream of ever more urgent messages from online accounts demanding that he alter a report he’d filed on a March 10 Iranian missile attack on Israel; they wanted him to say that the fallen ordnance in question were fragments brought down when Israel intercepted the Iranian missile in the air. It turned out that many Polymarket bettors had bet “no” on March 10 as the date for Iran’s first successful missile attack on Israel, and an intercepted missile meant the strike didn’t count. Angry Polymarket users passed around a doctored screenshot that supposedly showed Fabian walking back his story; one distressed bettor who had staked $900,000 on his “no” bet threatened Fabian’s life and claimed to know the whereabouts of his family.

Polymarket, for its part, has defended its war markets as an “invaluable” source of information and insight, issuing a surreal statement celebrating “the wisdom of the crowd” and claiming that “after discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not.” Sure, Jan. But as unbelievable as such a claim may sound, it signals something important: The prediction-market project is not only about business. It’s also ideological. “Kalshi is replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth,” the company’s cofounder and CEO, Tarek Mansour, declared in a press release with typical tech bravado, as if the fervid speculations of a legion of hyped-up crypto-bro gamblers are anything other than subjective. “We have created a new way of consuming and engaging with information. It’s hard to have an opinion about the future today without thinking about Kalshi.” And that’s the problem in a nutshell: Mansour and the other leading apostles of the prediction market have ambitions that go far beyond war and Taylor Swift. Mansour says that his aim is “to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference of opinion.” The intellectual godfather of prediction markets, George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, wants to push things even further, touting them as a kind of replacement for democracy, one capable of taking over much of the machinery of government.

To understand what this brave new world will actually look like, you first have to understand what online sports betting has already done to us.

In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law banning sports gambling in all states but Nevada. What followed was a digital gold rush. State legislatures, facing perennial budget shortfalls, fell over themselves in the effort to legalize and regulate—and tax. Harry Levant, a former Philadelphia attorney and recovering gambling addict who has become a leading advocate for federal gambling reform, puts it bluntly: “They were becoming addicted—and I use the word intentionally—to the idea of finding a new source of revenue. If my neighboring state has it, we have to have it too.” Within a few years, 39 states had legalized some form of sports gambling, and millions of Americans proceeded to collectively lose somewhere in the vicinity of $50 billion chiefly just by staring at their phones.

The product that those (mostly) men were staring at was not quite what state legislators had voted for. Beginning in 2021, the major sports leagues started selling granular real-time data to the betting industry to enable “prop” (or proposition) bets on every micro-event in a game, no matter how seemingly trivial. As Levant puts it: “These elected officials had no idea we were going to be allowing betting on the speed of every tennis serve.”

If you’re a sports fan, you may have some idea of what happened next, but you may still be a little taken aback by the full extent of the transformation. In 2017, before the Supreme Court’s decision, wagerers staked $4.8 billion in legal bets on sports. Last year, that figure reached $167 billion.

About three years ago, Key’asia Hollis’s boyfriend, now her fiancé, helped her get a job as a boxer at Amazon, which paid $23 an hour. The new job enabled her to move out of the motel where she’d been living with her sister and her sister’s family. Hollis worked 12-hour overnight shifts packing and moving heavy boxes filled with the sundry items that Amazon customers regularly order.

It was a financial lifesaver for Hollis, and all was going well—until she got pregnant. On a shift one night, she strained to lift a heavy box and started bleeding. She went to the emergency room, where medical providers advised her not to lift heavy objects for 10 days to protect her pregnancy. When she returned to work with a doctor’s note to that effect, she was fired. The termination meant that she couldn’t reapply to work at Amazon for three months. During that time, she moved into her mother’s three-bedroom house, where she lived with five other people. With no income to provide for a baby’s needs, she decided to get an abortion. “I didn’t have that baby because finances weren’t permitting,” she said.

When the three-month period ended, Hollis got another job at a smaller Amazon warehouse. When she again got pregnant in the summer of 2024, she was worried: “I didn’t want to lose my job like I did the last time,” she said. But she reasoned that she could do things “the proper way” by telling the company up front and asking for accommodations to avoid health problems while working. Unbeknownst to her, in the time between her two stints at Amazon, a new law, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, went into effect. The PWFA should have protected her on the job. But that’s not what happened.

When Hollis informed Amazon about her pregnancy, she was told to get her doctor to fill out paperwork so she could get on-the-job accommodations, but her doctor told her that, because it was so early in the pregnancy, she could continue to work normally. Hollis figured she could tough out the fatigue for a while longer, but Amazon didn’t agree. When she informed the company of her doctor’s recommendations—which would have required no immediate changes to her job—she was placed on unpaid leave.

While she was on leave, her doctor sent over paperwork outlining the accommodations Hollis would need when she returned. She wasn’t supposed to climb ladders or lift, push, or pull anything 30 pounds or heavier. She should also be given extra rest and bathroom breaks as needed.

After her unpaid leave was up, Hollis asked her supervisor if she could return to work and was told that she was being put on another unpaid leave while the company considered her request for accommodations. “I’m sitting at home for weeks, no pay in my pocket, no way to feed myself,” she said. “It was very emotionally stressful. It was physically stressful. It was just stressful all the way around.”

Finally, Hollis was told that her accommodations had been approved and that she could return to work. But when she got there, it was immediately clear that nothing had changed. Her “entire job” entailed climbing up and down a sliding ladder to stow items on a top shelf, she said. She was denied extra breaks, even just 15 minutes to sit or grab a snack. She strained herself pushing a box that was heavier than her doctor’s recommended limit. She also learned that the involuntary leaves of absence had eaten into her bank of unpaid time off. Amazon gives each new hire a bank of hours and deducts from it every time the employee misses work, threatening termination if the total goes too far into negative territory. Workers say the company approves absences very infrequently, even when they are sick or need to attend a doctor’s appointment.

When Hollis called Amazon’s human-resources department to find out why she was still assigned tasks that her doctor had said she needed to avoid, she was told she would have to work it out with the employees at that particular warehouse. But the HR team at the warehouse told her that her accommodations had been set up correctly. She felt like they were “ping-ponging” her back and forth, she told me.

Finally, she decided to take the bus to the warehouse on a day off to sort it out once and for all. Sobbing all the way there, Hollis spoke with a warehouse supervisor, who pulled up her original request and said it had been entered incorrectly. It couldn’t be fixed, she was told; instead, she had to start the process all over, asking her doctor to resend the paperwork, and go on another unpaid leave.

It was the week of her 25th birthday, but she couldn’t afford a celebration, not even a cake. “Amazon had ripped that out of my pockets,” she said.

A week later, Hollis returned to work, again with negative unpaid time off. After she clocked in, her manager said she couldn’t find the accommodations in the system and couldn’t allow her to work the shift she had been assigned to, given her restrictions. HR told her that she had to be sent home because there were no jobs she could work. Once again, she was put on unpaid leave.

Hollis kept calling HR, begging to find out how she could safely return to work. She was told that she was free to return to her job but with no assurance that her health needs would be met, so she didn’t. Finally, in August 2024, now three months pregnant, she received an e-mail stating she had been fired for abandoning her job. The entire experience left her feeling like nobody had listened to her. “It feels like you’re another number in a sea of people,” Hollis said. “It broke my heart.”

Amazon is the country’s second-largest private employer and a name brand that millions of Americans interact with every day. It’s where we turn for everything from socks to swimming pools. In 2025, it booked $426 billion in net sales in North America.

As is the case with so many of its forays, it’s hard to figure out the endgame of the Trump administration’s belligerent clash with the Vatican. There was more than a touch of mockery to The New York Times’ April headline “Vance Says the Pope Should Be More Careful When Talking About Theology.” The vice president converted to Catholicism (loudly) seven years ago and has not taken kindly to Pope Leo XIV’s exhortations to avoid bloodshed (or shelter the immigrant, or abide by any number of the core tenets of Catholic social teaching). The contretemps, while alternately entertaining, infuriating, and baffling, does not tell us much we didn’t already know about the current White House. But what does it tell us about the current Catholic Church? What, if anything, do the agnostic, the irreligious, or the non-Catholic religious need to know about it?

The irenic tenure of the late Pope Francis, who welcomed trans Catholics and denounced unrestrained capitalism, piqued a lot of secular interest. And secular, religious, and lapsed observers alike have been trying to read the tea leaves of this new papacy ever since the election of the first American pope last spring. His public statements have been quickly seized upon and claimed (or denounced) by various political factions; there’s an online cottage industry dedicated to interpreting them. Leo’s choices do invite these reactions. It’s hard to imagine that his decision to include Isaiah 1:15 (“Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: Your hands are full of blood”) in his Palm Sunday homily in St. Peter’s Square was unrelated to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s worship service several days earlier, in which he prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Nation readers are likely encouraged by the pontiff’s stance on the United States’ illegal and confounding war against Iran. They are probably less happy about his insistence that while the church should de-emphasize traditional Catholic stances on sexuality in favor of the pursuit of social justice, the Holy See still officially doesn’t endorse the formal blessing of same-sex couples. (I share their disappointment.) But secular observers often fail to reckon with the Catholic Church’s sheer age and size: More than 2,000 years old and sprawling across the globe, it is ill-equipped to seamlessly and promptly reconcile with concerns, however real and urgent, that have emerged in more recent decades. There’s something to the writer Madoc Cairns’s quip that “Catholicism is nine times older than the left-right paradigm.”

But here we are in 2026, when that paradigm (arguably) still holds. The apex of the church’s temporal power is centuries in the rearview mirror, and we’re living in, if you like, a disenchanted world. And yet we find ourselves with a pope to the left of any number of mainstream American institutions and a president enraged by his own inability to dampen the pontiff’s convictions.

The artifacts of the Trump administration’s side of the feud—however unprecedentedly hostile—are likely to remain either inscrutable or too daft to warrant parsing. The president keeps mentioning the fracas at inopportune moments, such as at his own public-relations stunt to highlight his tax bill’s “no tax on tips” provision. But how much “there” is there to Trump’s AI-generated image of himself in papal regalia, or the quickly deleted image of himself as a robed, Jesus-like figure healing a sick man? These are desperate bids for attention from a bellicose lame duck. The richer texts come from Leo, whose provocations remind us that religious and secular concerns can converge beautifully on the matter of human dignity in a world riven with inequality and violence. During a recent visit to Cameroon, the pope didn’t need to name names when he said, “They turn a blind eye to the fact that billions of dollars are spent on killing and devastation, yet the resources needed for healing, education, and restoration are nowhere to be found.”

It is less surprising that Leo has refused to back down in the face of Trump’s and his cronies’ attacks than that he has refused to cater to the revanchist elements that haunt his own church, particularly in the United States. For sizable factions of both the laity and the clergy (which are dramatically overrepresented online), the appeal of the church is its ostensible preservation of some pristine, remnant traditionalism. When perpetuating conservative sexual politics takes precedence over everything else, the Gospel is bound to fall by the wayside. This kind of selective thinking has plagued US Catholicism for far too long: Catholic voters are won over by pro-life politicians with policies that harm workers and the poor, while bishops play politics even at the risk of undermining the care of the most vulnerable. (If you have time on your hands, Google “Americanism heresy.”)

The pope’s promotion of peace and communal care is not a concession to some woke infiltration but the most organic possible outgrowth of the stated principles of the church he leads. His words at his first Christmas Eve mass at St. Peter’s Basilica were unequivocal: “On earth, there is no room for God if there is no room for the human person. To refuse one is to refuse the other.”

Patrisse Cullors’s art studio is one of five nestled inside the crenshaw Dairy Mart in Inglewood, California, a building that opened in 1965, a day after the Watts Riots, and once served as a convenience store. To reach her studio, I had to get past a six-foot-high steel picket fence encircling a community garden, the other studios, a gallery—all part of a quiet perimeter between the noise of the busy street and the sanctuary inside—and a brawny security guard.

Surrounded by clothing racks of voluminous white gowns and the large textile sculptures streaming across the walls, Cullors sits in a mid-century-style brown-leather swivel chair. The cofounder of Black Lives Matter is arguably one of the most notable figures in the contemporary Black liberation movement, but since 2021, she has retreated from the spotlight of BLM to refocus her work on the performing arts and culture. Cullors explained to me that she cofounded the Dairy Mart in 2020 as an artists’ collective where members of the community and the artists in residence could safely come and create art centered on abolition, healing, and ancestry. The collective hosts workshops, events, and programs in collaboration with other local organizations. In the weeks following the July 2025 raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Los Angeles, the space opened its doors to honor anyone affected by the agency. People brought flowers and arranged them in a large “500,” representing the number of those “kidnapped” by ICE in LA since the start of federal immigration raids on June 6.

“Those first few weeks, witnessing ICE and the National Guard in LA, I had straight-up PTSD,” says Cullors, who is 42. “Watching them run after brown people, I was like, ‘Oh, I lived through this already.’ It was so overwhelming and deeply infuriating, because I was like, ‘We said this already. We warned you that this [overpolicing] was going to come, because it happens to Black people first in this country. We are the tests. And if you don’t fix what’s happening to Black people, then it’s coming for everybody else.’ And now here we are,” she says.

I first spoke with Cullors a little over a month before Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were 37 years old and white, were executed by masked federal agents in Minneapolis just blocks from where George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was murdered by a police officer five years earlier. When I reached out to Cullors after the shootings, she simply said, “This country doesn’t listen to Black people.” I would add that it especially doesn’t listen to Black women.

If you were someone who protested the murder of Floyd in the summer of 2020 and felt the energy of those around you as you stood among millions chanting “Black lives matter,” you might have thought that maybe, just maybe, you were witnessing real change in America.

Fast-forward to Donald Trump’s second term, and everything BLM warned about is now a full-fledged, horrifying reality.

The United States has become a police state, one that not only continues to murder and lock up Black people but also operates a mass-deportation machine that has deployed federal troops in cities across the country, instilling fear in communities and decimating local economies. Further, thanks to bloated budgets under Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice are weaponizing the very laws meant to protect American citizens against them by, for example, conducting unlawful home raids or using administrative subpoenas to suppress free speech.

At the same time, in May 2025, the Justice Department dropped the consent decree that had overseen the federal regulation of police departments like the Minneapolis PD, which had employed Derek Chauvin, Floyd’s killer. And a presidential memorandum in September 2025 came with an order to “investigate” and “disrupt” groups labeled as “domestic terrorists,” defined as those promoting “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity.”

When I ask Cullors why she thinks so many Americans didn’t heed the warnings of BLM, she explains that it is because white people have historically found it difficult to “take seriously or listen or pay attention to or have sympathy or even empathy for marginalized communities.”

“Listening to us [Black people] means that they have to agree and believe that white supremacy first and foremost exists, that it’s a danger to all of us, and then they have to do something about it. They have to relinquish power, then perceived safety. And so this takes a lot of work—psychologically, spiritually, culturally. You have to undo hundreds of years of training that whiteness ultimately will bring you safety. And that the power structures that currently exist won’t ever throw you under the bus, and what happens to Black people is their problem.”

“But now we’re living in MAGA’s America,” she adds, where the violence once inflicted predominantly on Black and brown communities is now an issue for every American, no matter their race.

The walls of Cullors’s small studio are layered with images that trace the arc of her performance-art exhibits. In several, people are wearing white robes: a motif in her work, representing healing, spiritual reclamation, and ancestral return. Another photo shows Cullors immersed in a bathtub of salt, and nearby hangs a portrait of her father at age 17, taken for his entrance into the military.

Although Cullors has not completely given up her resistance work, she decided in 2021 to step down from her role as executive director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the charity behind the BLM movement, and embrace her art practice more wholly. As a leader of a mass movement, Cullors has been the target of attacks and became embroiled in drama and accusations that she says were trumped up.

Justice is often depicted as a blindfolded woman holding scales—but in real life, Justice is more like Santa Claus holding a shotgun. It sees everything: It sees whether you are rich or poor, whether you are powerful or powerless—and it sure as hell sees whether you are Black or white. Those observations tip the scales before any evidence is weighed. The idea of “blind justice” is a pure fiction, a cruel one invented by the rich, powerful, and white to justify the fickle, unfair, and prejudiced outcomes their legal system regularly produces.

In the United States, Black Americans suffer acutely from this failure. Black people experience an entirely different justice system than white people do, and almost everybody knows it. We are treated as guilty until “exonerated.” We are judged by predominantly white juries. We are tried under laws written by white people, for white people, and approved by white people, under a Constitution written by our white captors and enslavers. Even when we are murdered, we are put on trial so that the white people who killed us can walk free. I wouldn’t wish for my worst enemy to face justice-while-Black.

And the system isn’t much kinder to women, or poor people, or people who practice a non-Christian faith or live non-heteronormative lives. There is a “justice gap” in this country, and despite nearly a century’s worth of efforts to make the justice system apply to everyone equally, the results have been underwhelming.

Now, however, there is a new tool, widely promoted by rich white people, that purports to bridge the yawning gap between these different justice systems. That tool is artificial intelligence, and its boosters are sure that the robots are here to help. They tell us that the machines can produce justice more “efficiently,” bringing fair legal resolutions to people who do not have the resources to buy expensive lawyers, or the time to wait for the slow grinding of the wheels of justice. They tell us that the algorithms can bring an unbiased approach to sentencing and bail proceedings. They tell us that while AI should never fully “replace” human judges, the large language models can be a useful analytical tool for everything from statutory interpretation to determining what words are commonly thought to mean.

According to one such booster: “Technology, especially AI, can expand legal assistance and drive costs way down. That promises to democratize justice, helping those who have long taken their lumps and done without help.” That’s not a quote from Elon Musk or Sam Altman. That’s from Stephanos Bibas, a federal judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, appointed by Donald Trump.

That’s also not how it’s gonna work. AI justice is largely being designed and promoted by private businesspeople interested in creating profits, not justice. It’s a closed-source, proprietary product, meaning that the beeps and boops that constitute its “reasoning” and “decision-making” cannot be exposed, analyzed, or argued against on appeal but can be tweaked in secret whenever a wealthy tech bro doesn’t like the AI outcomes. And AI justice will ultimately be just as biased as real judges, because all it can fundamentally do is spit back out to us all of the garbage racism we’ve poured into our justice system.

AI justice can mean a lot of things—everything from a human judge using an algorithm to advise them on how to set bail to an AI judge that assesses evidence, weighs arguments, and issues binding rulings. Some people want to limit the use of the term AI to mean just “generative AI,” and the term AI justice to apply only to situations where a computer issues a final ruling. But to my mind, a judge who pulls out Claude instead of a dictionary to look up the meaning of a word in a statute is “using AI.”

Many countries are integrating AI into their judicial processes. Estonia is using AI judges to handle its version of small-claims court. Argentina is using AI to automate various processes and even using ChatGPT to draft legal rulings. Countries from the United Kingdom to Russia to Morocco are using AI in various ways to streamline legal processes. But no place has gone as far as China. Under Xi Jinping, China is on the leading edge of the robot-judge revolution. It has implemented a number of judicial reforms, including integrating information technology into all aspects of jurisprudence to create what it calls “smart courts.” Records are digitized, hearings happen online, automation is everywhere. Most of the reforms are designed to improve jurisprudential efficiency, in accordance with the slogan “Striving to make the people feel fairness and justice in every judicial case.”

China also employs AI judges. The government claims that millions of cases each year are adjudicated by AI, including financial disputes, product-liability cases, and even civil-rights cases. According to a Law360 report on the process, the AI is embodied by a “holographic judge [who] looks like a real person but is a synthesized, 3D image of different judges.” In Beijing, AI-judged cases can go from registration to resolution in an average of 40 days, with hearings lasting 37 minutes. According to reports, 98 percent of those AI rulings are accepted by the litigants and not appealed.

While legal and cultural differences between China and the United States abound (appealing a ruling you’ve lost is as ingrained in American culture as mass shootings and stealing land), human adjudication is slow and inefficient in both places. Cases that should be easy and don’t require anything but a simple application of well-established laws get backed up in a system that moves far too slowly. Not only is justice delayed—indeed, sometimes denied—but there’s also the deadweight economic loss that comes from just waiting for a decision, any decision at all, on whether a project can move forward or a contract can be executed.

When Congress voted to expand the budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement by $170 billion last July, it was inevitable that some of that money would be spent reshaping the built environment toward new and more sinister ends. Sure enough, by the end of 2025, ICE released plans to convert seven massive logistics warehouses scattered across the United States into detention centers to hold more than 80,000 detainees. Another 16 will be used as immigrant-processing sites. Turning warehouses for storing goods into warehouses for storing people is already harrowing. The historical precedents for repurposing industrial infrastructure to forcibly transport humans at scale make it even more so.

Perhaps more than any other type of structure, including Donald Trump’s various flights of fancy in Washington, DC, these warehouses are shaping up to be the clearest expression of fascist architecture in our time. They tick all the boxes, offering surveillance, confinement, and monumentality. One of the fascists’ chief innovations was using industrial techniques to execute their program of mass displacement and murder. So too must our government’s most violent elements use the structures and flows already available to them to achieve the disenfranchisement and total social control they seek. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” said Todd M. Lyons, ICE’s acting director, at a border-control conference earlier last year. The administration’s goal, in Lyons’s words, is to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”

As the factories of old rot along railroad corridors (as any frequent Amtrak passenger can tell you), their successors dot the peripheries of airports or haunt stretches of empty highway. These sprawling logistics centers are the result of an economy based on the hub-and-spoke model, a distribution system in which the delivery of goods is centralized around a strategic site to mercilessly optimize for speed. Many of them are erected in seemingly random and isolated places. ICE plans to convert the centers in Trump strongholds like Social Circle, Georgia, and Baytown, Texas. These warehouses are way stations for the millions of packages that circulate through the United States every day.

Logistics warehouses are exceedingly simple, and their construction resembles a barn-raising: Their massive concrete walls are poured in place and propped up on stilts. One side features 10 or more huge bays opposite an entrance; the other sides are bleak expanses of windowless concrete. Presumably ICE will brick up the bays, making the interior into a permanent nighttime. As an architectural typology, these buildings are among the simplest and most inflexible. Despite being so anonymous-looking, their forms reveal a great deal about our world: how flows of capital and labor disappear into a far-off location and reappear on our doorsteps in neat little packages removed from the toil of production; how we’ve devised this process to be as unobtrusive and convenient as possible; how the human element in all this should be kept hidden from view at all times, so much so that contact with the world outside the box is as impermissible as light.

Already, in their current iterations, these centers are fundamentally not designed for people. They are built to spec for the company that leases them and outfitted to that company’s needs. Logistics is now remarkably automated and is only becoming more so, with most of the work of scanning and sorting packages done by a computer. A smaller warehouse may be staffed by only a dozen or so people. A package is not supposed to sit at a logistics center for long; these buildings are intended for processing, not storage. That’s why most of them don’t have robust climate control.

Alarming reports from inside Amazon warehouses, for example, already cite the lack of air conditioning as a major concern for the workers there, who spend eight or more hours a shift cooled only by a few floor fans. Replace packages with thousands of human bodies and add in the heat and humidity of places like Texas and Georgia, and you are looking not only at an architecture of containment, but one from which many may not emerge. Furthermore, these centers—especially those in rural or exurban areas—often lack access to main water lines and power grids, which poses obvious dangers when holding as many as 2,000 people. Out-of-the-way locations make it easier to keep those people out of sight and away from communities who could come to their aid. It also makes them easier to surveil. According to The Washington Post, ICE claims that the newly outfitted warehouses will be adequately furnished with things like restrooms and recreation centers. But given that current detention centers are already impenetrable, how will we know?

One of the great historical misconceptions in how we think about fascist architecture is the focus on the public buildings above all else. The unbuilt rotundas of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer; the sparse modernist bays of Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como, Italy; and now, Trump’s quixotic ballroom and his even more quixotic plans to build an Arc de Triomphe in downtown DC—these are the accoutrements by which the fascists themselves wish to be remembered. But the real architectural legacy of fascism is the structures used to carry out their most unconscionable plans. Many of these sites have since been torn down or memorialized in the form of museums, most famously in the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is part of why that legacy endures so strongly in the public memory. The fascist built environment is often not considered architecture as such but mere infrastructure. This is a huge mistake. We should not be so unwise as to make it again.

On the outskirts of an American town, a bus is scheduled to arrive. Only there’s no station—no ticket counter or waiting area, no screen offering updates on a delay that’s already stretching on. Just a small cluster of people standing with their bags at the edge of the pavement, looking up and down the street and refreshing their phones. When the bus finally arrives, the driver climbs down to check tickets. Someone asks a question, but he brushes them off. No time. No explanation. No one else around.

This scene isn’t an aberration. It’s what intercity bus travel looks like after decades of deregulation and abandonment. The unraveling of Greyhound—the nation’s largest intercity bus company, which for much of the 20th century was synonymous with long-distance travel—is often framed as a story of corporate mismanagement and declining service, but the deeper story is structural: a mode of transportation that millions of Americans rely on, stripped of the infrastructure that once supported it. What remains is a private network that can still move people between cities but has retreated from many of the communities that need it most.

The people left behind aren’t casual travelers looking to save a few dollars. They depend on the bus for trips that can’t be postponed—medical appointments, court dates, family emergencies, work obligations. For riders with no car and few alternatives, a delay isn’t just an inconvenience; it often means the trip doesn’t happen at all. And the thinner the transit options, the higher the stakes when service is cut.

Greyhound’s decline didn’t begin with one bad year or one bad CEO. Since its mid-20th-century heyday, when downtown terminals linked thousands of destinations and buses were a routine part of American travel for everyone from students and service members to families and vacationers, the company has faced steady pressure from external forces. Chief among them were the rise of car ownership, cheaper air tickets, and, most crucially, the deregulation of intercity buses. Previously, bus companies were required to keep service broadly available, subsidizing unprofitable routes with revenue from ones in higher demand. The Bus Regulatory Reform Act of 1982 lifted those requirements, shifting service away from smaller markets. Routes that didn’t pay for themselves—including across much of the rural Midwest and other lightly populated regions—were the first to disappear.

In 2021, FlixBus, a German travel-technology company, acquired Greyhound. Today, the two brands operate as a single intercity network spanning more than 1,800 destinations. Flix says it remains committed to serving rural areas, noting that hundreds of small towns are included in its network. Even so, the system reaches fewer places—especially in rural areas—than the one Greyhound once ran: a network that, at the height of its expansion in the early 1940s, operated roughly 4,750 bus stations nationwide.

The contraction has not only reduced routes; it has reshaped the infrastructure that once supported them. Greyhound’s terminal properties were not included in the Flix acquisition and remained with Greyhound’s former parent company, FirstGroup, which later sold them to other owners.

While Flix still operates out of major urban transit hubs such as New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, Los Angeles’s Union Station, and Boston’s South Station, the company relies on a model built around app-based ticketing and curbside pickup rather than privately owned stations in markets with lighter demand. Flix’s CEO, Kai Boysan, says the curbside model keeps prices down and improves on-time performance, with rates that exceeded 85 percent during this past winter’s holiday season and that are close to 100 percent in certain regions.

Even as it defends the curbside model as a way to avoid the costs of privately owned terminals, Flix argues that intercity buses should have access to publicly supported transit centers that connect local buses and commuter rail lines. The company is pushing for “reasonable access” rights to those facilities and says that federal programs like the Section 5311 Intercity Bus Program, which sets aside a portion of federal rural transit funding to support intercity bus service in rural areas with smaller populations, are critical to sustaining service in underserved regions. Without those protections, Boysan says, buses will continue to be pushed to peripheral locations—and passengers will continue to face delays, transfers, and ticketing without the infrastructure that once anchored the system.

The fight over stations isn’t just about urban real estate; it’s about whether intercity buses are considered a core component of a city’s transportation system at all. Local governments “need to view bus stations as one of their obligations or one of their infrastructure priorities,” says Joseph P. Schwieterman, a transportation scholar at DePaul University who studies intercity bus and rail systems. “Some have good transit centers, but the transit agencies won’t let bus lines use them. Others are kind of hostile to the bus because they view it as a source of crime.” So the bus still runs but the station doesn’t—and with it go the waiting room, bathrooms, charging stations, and staffed counter that riders depend on.

The collapse of intercity bus service isn’t an accident of the market. It’s the result of treating transportation as a private service rather than a public responsibility. One solution, according to Genevieve Giuliano, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, is to provide the kind of public backing that’s extended to air travel—an investment that, while not a remedy for every issue facing intercity buses, could help stabilize the network itself. “There are subsidies that are paid by the federal government to carriers to include unprofitable links in their networks as part of basic air mobility,” Giuliano says. She wonders why we haven’t applied the same logic to bus travel.

On October 23, 2024, Suchir Balaji’s face appeared, freshly shaved, boyish but serious, partially shadowed, in The New York Times as he announced himself as a whistleblower against one of the most powerful technology companies in the world. Setting off a political earthquake in the AI industry, Balaji claimed that OpenAI, the highly touted artificial-intelligence start-up where he’d worked as a researcher for almost four years, had broken copyright laws by absorbing practically all available data on the Internet for its models. ChatGPT, the company’s mega-popular AI chatbot—as well as, potentially, its competitors—had apparently been built on a foundation of illegal activity on a mass scale. Balaji presented his supporting argument in a mathematically minded paper on his personal website.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told the Times’ Cade Metz.

OpenAI had a lot on the line, and so did Balaji. Other researchers had resigned from their positions and issued warnings about the dangers of AI going rogue in fantastical Terminator-like scenarios. But as the Times noted, Balaji was one of the few industry professionals flagging the damage that the technology was doing right now. A 26-year-old former top student at Berkeley, he was already a veteran of several AI labs and had a patent under his belt. His parents called him a humble prodigy who had taught himself programming at age 11. His future seemed boundless.

Balaji didn’t live long enough to tell his full story.

A month after the Times interview was published, Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment with a gunshot wound to the head. In that brief interval, he had gone from obscure AI researcher to high-profile whistleblower under severe pressure as he defied an industry that was collectively engaged in the biggest speculative bet in American business history.

Suchir Balaji’s time in the public eye amounted to one newspaper interview, but his afterlife as a martyr has become increasingly complex, his legacy contested terrain. The San Francisco medical examiner ruled his death a suicide, but his parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, have repeatedly stated that their son was murdered for what he knew. The dispute likely won’t be resolved to the satisfaction of Balaji’s parents or critics of the burgeoning AI industry anytime soon. Still, it tells us a great deal about the crisis of accountability in a sector of the AI industry that has come to dominate our investment economy and dramatically alter our daily lives. The aftermath of Balaji’s death also reveals a profound and troubling failure to protect and support AI whistleblowers, and corporate whistleblowers in general.

For the Times, Balaji’s story was more than an impressive scoop. It was also a key element in its copyright-infringement lawsuit against the massive AI start-up, New York Times v. OpenAI. If the paper were to succeed in the suit, in which Balaji was listed as a potential witness, it could win a multibillion-dollar judgment and open the door to numerous similar actions against OpenAI and its competitors. From the vantage point of an industry built on the ruthless consumption of any and all data, the potential damage might be apocalyptic.

Balaji’s grieving parents have highlighted the murky circumstances surrounding his death, hiring numerous forensic consultants and lawyers in their quest to prove that their son was murdered. Some details remain disputed—Balaji’s parents claim that the crime scene was poorly tended, that there is evidence from blood and hair collected at the scene that indicates a possible struggle, and that he was shot at an angle that is inconsistent with suicide.

Overall, the picture is mixed. Balaji left no suicide note. His apartment was dead-bolted from the inside, and police reported there was no sign of forced entry. The day before his death, after returning from a trip with friends, he had spoken with his father on the phone and seemed happy. Security footage recorded by his building in the hours before his death shows him walking into his apartment with a takeout order. He owned a gun. In some news reports, friends described him as somewhat secretive. The medical examiner’s report found GHB in his system. While the so-called date-rape drug can be used recreationally or as a disabling agent, GHB can also appear naturally during a body’s decomposition.

The primary demand from Balaji’s parents has been for the FBI to look into their son’s death. “We know there was foul play from many factors, many data points,” Ramarao said at a public vigil in December 2024. Indicating that her son represented a threat to the AI industry, she asked for a “thorough investigation.”

For a time, Balaji’s family found support across the political spectrum. In January 2025, after a news report stated that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) was still investigating Balaji’s death, the left-wing San Francisco Supervisor Jackie Fielder posted on X, “I am relieved to see this case reopened. Friends and family of Suchir are welcome to get in touch with my office.” At the same time, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna addressed Ramarao directly on X, offering his help. He later told The Mercury News that he’d had a conversation with Ramarao that led him to “believe her that there are unanswered questions.”

But in February, the SFPD closed its investigation into Balaji’s death, pronouncing it a suicide, and Democratic politicians seemed to lose interest in the case. Neither Khanna’s nor Fielder’s office responded to inquiries about their past support for a new investigation or their contact with Balaji’s family.

We went back to Selma, Alabama, this year—not as dignitaries or guests at a ceremony, but as inheritors of an unfinished revolution. And we did not go alone. We brought a new generation: organizers from Latino, Somali, Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian communities. Many of them had just watched armed, masked ICE agents surge through their neighborhoods in Illinois and Minnesota. Just like the students of 1965, they came to Selma to stand up, to speak out, and to demand that America finally become what it has always promised to be.

It was a reminder that this is not just history. This is now.

In 1965, ordinary people walked out of Brown Chapel AME Church and onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge, asking for one fundamental thing: to be seen. To be counted. To be treated as full citizens in their own country. They carried no weapons. They stormed no capitol. They carried faith, dignity, and a demand as old as the republic itself: the right to vote. For this, they were met with tear gas, whips, and clubs. John Lewis’s skull was fractured not because he broke the law, but because he dared to insist that the law finally apply to Black people.

Out of the blood on that bridge came two of the most transformative laws in American history: the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The VRA didn’t just change rules—it changed who could have power. It forced states with long histories of racist voter suppression to get federal approval before changing their election laws. It gave communities real tools to fight racial gerrymanders, at-large schemes, and the thousand quiet tricks designed to make sure Black and brown voters could be counted but never truly count. Voter registration soared. New voices, new leaders, new possibilities emerged.

Simultaneously, the Immigration and Nationality Act dismantled the racial hierarchy baked into American immigration law, ending the national-origin quota system that favored immigrants from Northern Europe.

What was born on that bridge was a new definition of who gets to be an American. But the forces that tried to stop those marchers in 1965 never disappeared. They adapted. They learned to wield paperwork instead of nightsticks. And today, they are back.

The Trump administration has surged unprecedented numbers of immigration agents into Democratic states and communities of color. The Justice Department executed a sweeping raid on Fulton County, Georgia—seizing 2020 ballots and voter rolls—to relitigate a settled election and chill every future one. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that amounted to a ransom note: Hand over the complete, unredacted voter rolls or your communities will keep living under siege.

This is not law enforcement. It is intimidation, power dressed up as process.

The Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision had already gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance system, tearing out its spine and letting states with racist histories rewrite election rules without federal review. Voter-ID requirements, slashed voting hours, and gerrymandered maps drawn to dilute Black and brown political power have sprung up all over the country. Now Trump is pushing the SAVE Act, a “show your papers” law designed to block millions of eligible citizens who simply lack the right government-issued documents, all to solve a noncitizen-voting problem that does not exist. Pending Supreme Court cases threaten to gut the VRA even further. Together, these tactics form a coordinated assault on the very idea of multiracial democracy. We recognize it because we have seen it before. Although the methods are different, the intent is identical.

Americans’ electricity costs, which were already high, are going up again. In response, every state and local government with the muscle to do so should be investing in its own decentralized solar, wind, and water systems to create greater resilience and more democratic local control.

Electricity bills today are at the mercy of three distinct, simultaneous private taxes that have pushed natural-gas and electricity costs far above what people can afford. First, there’s the “AI tax”: the stratospheric rising cost built into the utility grid to support artificial intelligence. In high-demand areas, such as those in the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states where data centers are being built, wholesale prices for energy are up well over 250 percent. Goldman Sachs, noting the spikes, predicts that 40 percent of future electricity costs will come from the increased demand contributed by data centers.

Then there’s the “utility tax,” which has also been spiking in recent years. States grant private corporations monopoly rights to sell electricity in defined regions, while also allowing them to issue stock, maximize returns, and lobby for unreasonable rate hikes. These investor-owned utilities have overcharged Americans $5 billion per year over the past 30 years.

Finally, there’s the bloody “war tax” caused by Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. The president’s war led, predictably, to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s supply of natural gas passes. The price of natural gas on the world market has gone haywire since the strait closed and drones attacked Qatar’s largest liquefied-natural-gas facility, shutting it down. The US gas that generates much of our electricity doesn’t travel through the strait, but global buyers are bidding up the price of American supplies as they seek to replace the lost Qatari shipments, creating a “tax” on domestic consumption. When local gas stations use a market shock to increase profits without a concomitant increase in costs, it’s considered illegal price gouging, but big natural-gas companies get away with it when they sell to utilities. No single American state can police all the steps in the supply chain where gouging takes place on its own.

We saw this awful scenario play out in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Domestic price gougers used the war to get rich while old people froze at home, unable to pay their bills. The war did not change the cost of taking gas out of the ground in the United States, but it dramatically changed the price of electricity. The inflationary shock that beggared millions of Americans was arguably the single biggest factor in the reelection of an unpopular former president in 2024. That president has now decided to launch an incoherent and illegal war, which is leading to more price gouging.

These converging influences on electricity prices should lead us to a wholesale reconsideration of energy policy in the United States. Let’s start by making sure there’s genuine competition and regulation in a natural-gas industry that’s currently dominated by an increasingly small club of companies that profit from volatility.

Two years ago, for example, federal officials allowed Exxon to buy Pioneer in a $60 billion deal to become the dominant shale producer in the Permian Basin of the southwestern United States. But assuming that Exxon will give Americans a hometown discount would be as foolish as it would be costly. At the state and local levels, our elected officials and appointed regulators should stop allowing utilities to merge into monopoly franchises that can then use their market power to hike prices and earn excessive rates of return. States should seize opportunities to permanently protect their residents by making a muscular commitment to build distributed, renewable energy infrastructure as quickly as possible. They should do this not just to protect the climate but also to make our energy supply more reliable and to reap the social benefits that decentralization makes possible. Every community solar installation is a small act of building the kind of resilience we need for a democratic government.

The cost of batteries has been plummeting and will continue to do so, making solar power more feasible than ever. Improved storage capacity can help with the coordination problems that big, dumb grids are used to resolving with brute force. There is no war that can make the sun stop shining, no conflict that can make the wind stop blowing.

The technology needed to significantly diminish the role of natural gas exists today, and it can be deployed in months or, in challenging circumstances, a few short years—not decades. These energy sources are abundant and are much less vulnerable to distribution bottlenecks than shale gas is, and they aren’t subject to the sort of international volatility we are now experiencing.

It will, of course, cost money to build solar infrastructure. But it is much cheaper than the alternative—and the costs will be shared fairly by all of us, as opposed to the private taxes that burden poor Americans the most. To say “We don’t have the money” is to say that people must keep paying unfairly high prices so that wealthy investors don’t have to pony up.

A more decentralized, networked grid also enables people to make their own decisions about which forms of energy are best for their communities. That’s a political question, not just a market one. The fights over data centers prove that people want to be part of that conversation.

The powerful clubs that profit from war, volatility, and monopoly will not stop taxing us if we don’t put up a fight. With this in mind, we shouldn’t try to persuade them. We should build a new future despite them.

Last May, Local Progress, an organization whose membership includes almost 2,000 locally elected progressive officials from around the country, issued a report warning of the rapidly growing dangers faced by communities due to the spread of AI-based surveillance systems. It cited as an example networks of automated license-plate readers (ALPRs) and smart streetlights, which enable police departments to identify specific suspects by combining crime witnesses’ descriptions of individuals and vehicles with the massive amounts of data on residents’ movements collected by these systems. Because AI excels in pattern recognition, it potentially allows police to find needles in an urban haystack, locating people and then tracking their movements in real time with pinpoint accuracy. Companies such as Flock Safety, founded in 2017 and based in Atlanta, and Ubicquia, based in Fort Lauderdale, have made fortunes providing such systems to federal, state, local, and private entities. Flock Safety alone operates 80,000 AI-powered cameras in 6,000 communities, and it is currently launching a new “surveillance drone” product to hoover up still more data.

While city governments and police departments portray the technology as inherently benign—simply a souped-up, “smart” crime-fighting tool that increases the efficiency of law-enforcement activity by orders of magnitude and comes with no downsides for law-abiding residents—critics argue that the growing use of these products represents a serious threat to civil liberties. Privacy advocates worry that in an era of mass surveillance, such systems could be exploited by bad actors and used to monitor political protesters, women seeking reproductive care, immigrants just trying to go about their business, and others.

“There has thus far not been an automated license-plate-reader system able to adequately protect the technology from being co-opted by authoritarianism,” says LiJia Gong, the legal and policy director at Local Progress. “These tech corporations oftentimes use cities and local governments as testing grounds to normalize surveillance and automation tools.” Many of the contracts for ALPR systems and smart-camera facial- and vehicle-recognition networks allow companies to update the underlying software without seeking approval from local authorities—meaning that when these systems are installed, it’s almost impossible to know how their tracking capabilities will develop as advancements in AI lead to improvements in its ability to recognize patterns and make predictions.

As the Trump administration carries out an unprecedented crackdown on 
immigrants, the ability of Customs and Border Protection to access such data has raised alarms, and there have been a number of reports alleging that federal agents may have found backdoor entry points into ALRP and smart-streetlight systems, even in states that prohibit their police departments from cooperating with these agencies. There have also been allegations that a Texas woman was tracked after self-administering an abortion. In October, the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights reported that the US Border Patrol had backdoor access to the surveillance networks of at least 10 police departments in the state, none of which had authorized such use of their data—though police analysts argue that since Flock Safety has disabled its software’s ability to share information with federal agencies in states that prohibit such data-sharing, the “back door” was likely rogue cops illegally passing along information to the feds.

Flock denies that there is a back door to its technology or that it shares locally or state-owned data with ICE. Josh Thomas, the company’s chief communications officer, tells me, “We don’t work with ICE. We’ve never worked with ICE. We have no contract with ICE. There’s no back door into the Flock Safety system. All of our customers 100 percent own and control their own data. Flock doesn’t share it at all or sell it to any third parties.”

Few cities in the country have been as consumed by debates over the use of AI-powered surveillance systems as San Diego, which has a small police force for a city its size—less than 1,900 officers for roughly 1.4 million people—and has long relied on high-tech crime-fighting tools to fill the gaps in its personnel and funding. Over a decade ago, San Diego’s district attorney used surveillance data to link nearly three dozen young African American men to local gang violence and to charge them with offenses connected to several shootings, despite the fact that they weren’t near the scenes of the crimes at the time. Many took plea bargains, and the charges against those who didn’t were eventually dismissed; if their cases had proceeded, each of those young men would have faced many decades behind bars.

“Far before Trump, we’ve been concerned with federal 
overreach and data-sharing,” says Homayra Yusufi, a senior policy strategist at the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA) in San Diego. Districts that are mainly populated by people of color and immigrants are “over-policed and over-surveilled,” she says, and cameras and ALPRs—with their telltale bug-like antennae—speckle virtually every intersection in these neighborhoods.

The San Diego Police Department has a contract with Ubicquia to provide ALPR and smart-streetlight systems; Ubicquia, in turn, has subcontracted out the implementation of the project to Flock. The two companies and the SDPD say the technology is designed to leave a digital trail of who has asked for information and how the information has been shared, “so if there is abuse or if somebody lies about it, they can be held accountable by the appropriate governing bodies,” Thomas says. Capt. Charles Lara, who oversees the SDPD’s Research, Analysis, and Planning Unit, says that the department regularly conducts audits of how its surveillance systems are being used and who is accessing the information, and claims that the systems are less invasive than the phones everyone carries around with them. “No one wants to live in a police state,” Lara says. “But at the end of the day, people are misunderstanding the Fourth Amendment in public places.” (While the Fourth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy in private spaces, courts have found that it generally doesn’t guarantee such a right in public areas.) Moreover, all officers are given guidance specifically stating that per California law, they cannot share surveillance data with the feds or other out-of-state agencies, and if they do, they will be reported to Internal Affairs and disciplined, Lara says.

Despite such reassurances, immigrants’ rights organizations and privacy advocates are increasingly alarmed by the federal government’s use of every available tool to clamp down on perceived enemies and fear that, despite laws that limit information-sharing, the SDPD’s surveillance tools could at some point be put to use by the feds.

Notwithstanding the California Values Act passed in October 2017, which limits local and state law-enforcement cooperation with ICE and other immigration-enforcement agencies, some more conservative cities in the San Diego metropolitan region have reportedly shared surveillance data with the feds. One of them, El Cajon, is being sued by the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta. “Despite clear guidance and multiple warnings, the City of El Cajon Police Department continues to share this data with numerous out-of-state law enforcement agencies throughout the country,” Bonta’s office claimed in the October 2025 press release announcing the lawsuit, which was filed after a local PBS station reported that El Cajon’s surveillance data was used in immigration-related searches at least 550 times in the first nine months of 2025.

In 2016, San Diego signed contracts to install more than 3,000 smart streetlights and ALPRs, although, perhaps fearing a backlash, the city neglected to tell the public about the new devices until three years later. By then, Lilly Irani, a professor of communication and science studies at the University of California San Diego and a former Google engineer, was warning of “data creep” and—like activists in the San Francisco Bay Area; New York City; Portland, Oregon; and elsewhere—was decrying Big Tech’s use of massive datasets on residents’ movements to create the building blocks of a total-surveillance society.

Late in the afternoon of July 23, 2025, Donald Trump stood on a stage at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC, to announce one of the hallmark initiatives of his second term as president: his AI Action Plan. Immediately after he took office, Trump had declared his administration’s intention “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” Now, after weeks of consultation with stakeholders, he was ready to unveil his plan to a room filled with corporate leaders eager to see whether he would deliver for them.

“From this day forward, it’ll be a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence,” Trump promised, flanked by a pair of large signs reading “Winning the AI Race.”

The choice of venue was fitting. Andrew Mellon was a powerful industrialist and banker who served as secretary of the treasury during the economic boom of the 1920s and through the Wall Street Crash of 1929. His fiercely pro-business, anti-tax policies are widely blamed for creating the conditions that led to the Great Depression. Whether AI will have the same effect on the economy is the central question for policymakers encountering the heady excitement and anxiety swirling around this new technology.

Trump, however, didn’t seem to harbor such concerns. Indeed, the three “pillars” of his AI Action Plan make clear that his administration intends to tip the scales in favor of the industry’s interests in a manner unprecedented in US policymaking. These pillars are: a push to mobilize “every tool at our disposal to ensure that the United States can build and maintain the largest, most powerful, and most advanced AI infrastructure anywhere on the planet”; a commitment to “get the entire world running on the backbone of American technology” by mobilizing government resources behind a global sales pitch on behalf of AI companies; and a determination that the government would divest itself of any use of “woke” AI models.

The industry reps in the audience were thrilled. But if any members of the general American public had been in the room, they might have wondered: What about us? As our resources—our land, tax dollars, jobs, and future—are handed to an industry that is far more interested in amassing money and hoarding control than democratizing them, what can we expect in return? Are we really witnessing the dawn of a new “golden age,” as Trump promised? Or, rather, a brazen daylight heist?

The billionaires selling us AI technologies would have us believe that they are self-made innovators who’ve built the most promising industry of our time based solely on their brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit, but the reality is far less valiant. For one thing, the paradigm of large-scale AI is characterized much more by brute-force resource consumption (of data, energy, and the capital that powers these infrastructures) than by scientific advancement. As Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal (and a cofounder of AI Now), has observed, “It was not the algorithm that was a breakthrough: It was what the algorithm could do when matched with large-scale data and computational resources.”

At the same time, the choice to orient around the notion that “bigger is better” means that the AI industry is trapped in a business paradigm that depends on access to unfathomably large amounts of capital to build out its infrastructure at a scale far removed from the actual indicators of demand, let alone any convincing signals of business viability. And enduring such stratospheric levels of uncertainty and risk requires nothing short of a cult-like belief that the industry will eventually prove economically transformative enough to justify these bets by a guarantor that can persuasively underwrite the market. It requires, in other words, underwriting at a scale that only the US government could meaningfully provide.

The Trump administration has stepped up to the challenge. It has not been shy about its use of the power of the pen to back the industry’s interests, from brokering sales deals with other countries on behalf of Nvidia, to backing a $1 billion loan to bring the Three Mile Island nuclear plant back online to power Microsoft’s AI data centers. And it has done all this despite the swelling opposition within both its MAGA base and the general public, who are growing uncomfortable with a technology that is being used to endanger people’s livelihoods.

The Trump administration’s AI policy is being led by its artificial-intelligence and cryptocurrency czar, David Sacks, who is a prolific investor in the AI industry, and Michael Kratsios, a former executive at Scale AI who now heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Sacks and Kratsios have championed a multipronged approach that includes the $1 billion in AI funding provided by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and an aggressive export agenda that turns the government into the top-level salesman for AI firms as they enter foreign markets. At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Kratsios announced the formation of a new Tech Corps, which will leverage the infrastructure of the Peace Corps to send technologists around the world on behalf of US tech firms to assist governments in integrating the companies’ software into their public-service systems. A few months earlier, the Department of Energy announced its “Genesis Mission,” a set of “private-public partnerships” through which the DOE will give companies access to its highly prized genomic and other datasets to enable them to develop products for commercial use. This is all on top of the already heavy subsidies that data centers receive, including significant state and local tax breaks and federal subsidies for factory construction.

According to the big AI companies, this kind of ambitious and unconditional government support is just what’s needed to achieve their aim of limitless AI infrastructure expansion—which they assert will be necessary to reach the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, and to do so before China does. Under this arms-race logic, any restraint on corporate power is recast as an impediment to national-security interests and plainly unpatriotic—like blocking the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project (both of which, AI boosters insist, are worthy historical analogies).

But if there’s one thing we should have learned from past eras of technological transformation, it’s that the promotion of national monopolies does not necessarily lead to national competitiveness. Nor does it lead, seamlessly, to sustainable jobs, enduring employment, wage growth, and innovation. While it can lead to great wealth for some, it rarely guarantees the kind of mass national renewal that the tech elite and their friends in government promise.

Given the headiness of the moment we’re in, it’s easy to forget the lessons of history: those technological paradigms that upended the economic status quo before AI.

The AI revolution is destined to transform human society in ways that most of us cannot begin to fathom. The changes to come will be every bit as daunting as what the world saw in the industrial and digital revolutions. Yet our policymakers are ill-prepared—and, in the case of our president, dramatically unwilling—to ensure that these changes benefit everyone rather than a tiny cabal of hyper-wealthy tech oligarchs.

To meet this challenge, we must develop a new social contract that begins with the basic premise that artificial intelligence must serve humanity, not the bottom line of a billionaire class that seeks to become a trillionaire class at our expense. We cannot allow technological overlords to build a society where AI “progress” is defined by their wealth rather than by our democracy.

I make this argument as a member of Congress who represents Silicon Valley, the home of companies with more than $18 trillion in market capitalization—more than one-quarter of the entire US stock market—and five that are worth more than $1 trillion each. I know tech billionaires, I know the people who are benefiting from the AI revolution’s massive upward redistribution of wealth, and I know that more than a few of them believe they have a divine right to lead and rule. But that cannot be our future.

We need to tax extreme wealth in order to meet human needs, which is why I support the proposed onetime 5 percent wealth tax on California billionaires (while not taxing voting shares or illiquid gains) and have proposed federal legislation to raise $4.7 trillion in revenue by taxing billionaires and another $2 trillion by making corporations pay their fair share. I have challenged my fellow members of Congress to support this legislation with the argument that if the representative from Silicon Valley can stand up for billionaire taxes, it shouldn’t be that hard for other House members and senators to do the same.

Just as important, I know—as a former deputy secretary in the Obama administration’s Commerce Department who has spent the past decade focusing on the economic and social disruptions caused by AI—that politicians, unions, civil-rights groups, faith communities, and grassroots activists must act urgently and aggressively to create laws, regulations, and incentives that prioritize humans over machines, protect the mental health of our children from social-media slop, stop algorithmic rent increases and predatory pricing, and prevent American jobs from being sacrificed in order to enrich oligarchs.

AI is evolving so rapidly that even its intellectual pioneers are unsettled. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate in physics who’s known as the “godfather of AI,” quit his position at Google several years ago and warned that AI-generated programs could overwhelm the public discourse with misinformation and, ultimately, pose an existential threat to humanity. Stuart Russell, the British computer scientist who literally cowrote a textbook on AI, now worries that AI development is “intrinsically unsafe.”

Some of the people behind the most sophisticated AI technologies are also scared. After the Department of Defense asked to use Anthropic’s Claude chatbot for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous warfare, the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said that he will not allow the technology to be used for either purpose. But what about all the other AI companies and tech leaders lining up for defense contracts and letting their products be used to kill people—as has already happened in Gaza?

Clearly, we all must start asking some fundamental questions about AI, as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) did when we held our “Who Controls the Future of AI: The Oligarchs or the People?” town hall at Stanford University in February. “If AI is going to replace a lot of the work that human beings do, what becomes of human beings?” the senator said. “Are we superfluous in the process? What happens to our ability to relate to each other?”

We also have to acknowledge, in the words of Sanders—who, after 35 years in the US House and Senate, knows Capitol Hill better than anyone—that “Congress and the American people are very unprepared for the tsunami that is coming.”

Jamaica Kincaid really hates England, and who could blame her? In her essay “On Seeing England for the First Time,” which was published in Transition during the early 1990s, she pithily expressed her views of the country: “I find England ugly…I hate England; the weather is like a jail sentence…the food in England is like a jail sentence.”

One might dispute some or all of these assertions, but the anger derives from a history, a long, painful, gut-wrenching series of events involving what the British Empire did to Kincaid’s ancestors: possibly capturing, if not purchasing, her African forebears, transporting them across an ocean, and forcing most of these individuals and their descendants to work in the sugarcane fields of Antigua. Even long after the country’s emancipation and independence, Britain maintained a strong political and social connection to Antigua, as it did with many of its former colonies, mainly under the banner of the Commonwealth. For anyone from Antigua, and for anyone whose ancestors were affected by the British Empire in similar ways, it is difficult to see English society and culture without some feeling of bitterness and indignation.

For Kincaid, the tentacles of British imperialism have long been a theme in her novels. In Annie John, England appears in the background of nearly every social encounter, through symbols and hymns. One notable childhood scene shows that close relationship:

We began our [Brownie] meetings with the whole troop standing in the yard of the Methodist church, forming a circle around the flagpole, our eyes following the Union Jack as it was raised up; then we swore allegiance to our country, by which was meant England.

In At the Bottom of the River, we get a collection of short stories in which England features as a faraway land that provides luxury items. Now, in a new collection of Kincaid’s essays and cultural writing, Putting Myself Together, much of her animus toward England can be found once more, along with many other things. As in her fiction, the themes of British imperialism, life in the Caribbean, and the long shadow of slavery and colonialism are central, but they are no longer conveyed through characters—instead, we get them directly from Kincaid herself. Yet there is much more in this collection. Her body of writing is filled with musings and missives, witticism and humor. Spanning Kincaid’s career from the early 1970s until 2020, the essays here include everything from features on celebrities to insights on her garden. Yet many of the themes circle back to the main idea of “On Seeing England for the First Time,” which serves as a sharp parable as well as a wry provocation: that when push comes to shove, you can’t escape history—it makes you.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 as Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson. The daughter of a sharp-tongued housewife and an illiterate chauffeur, she spent her first 16 years as a British colonial subject, absorbing the heavy influences of the monarchical government. Even as late as the 1950s, Antigua was still in a state of transition away from a plantation economy, where unpaid and later poorly paid Africans and their descendants worked the land to produce sugar, cotton, and harvests for the British Empire. Antiguans were free, in that they were no longer slaves, but they were not, in Kincaid’s experience, all that liberated.

“For about one hundred years after emancipation,” Kincaid notes in one essay, “Antiguans were neither slaves nor people.” Even in their alleged liberation, the Black residents of the island served the global elite. Most of the land when she was growing up, Kincaid noted, was owned by “people who had never seen Antigua.” Where did these people live? Mostly in Britain. Who were they? The descendants of slave owners. By the mid-20th century, the peaceful island had become appealing to the United States, which led to Antigua’s acquiring an American military base and gradually being transformed into a tourist destination for middle-class North American travelers seeking to escape to its beaches and turquoise waters. Even as the forms of hierarchy and rank changed, class and the exploitation of Antiguans remained constant.

In 1965, Kincaid migrated to the United States. As the eldest child, she was expected to provide financial assistance to her impoverished family. Leaving Antigua was a significant step, but embracing the person she wanted to become was even more critical. In the US, Kincaid temporarily worked as an au pair at her mother’s request to send remittances back to the Caribbean. But after a tumultuous start, she severed ties with her family in Antigua and, with meticulous detail, adopted a new persona. From then on, she would no longer be Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson; by taking her new first name from another British colony in the Caribbean and her surname from a Scottish clan that rebelled against the English and recaptured Edinburgh Castle in the 13th century, Kincaid signaled both her Afro-Caribbean roots and her anti-English resistance. 

Now equipped with a new identity, Kincaid briefly attended Westchester Community College, Franconia College, and the New School. Although she never finished a college degree, she started writing regularly for Ms. and The Village Voice. She also began contributing consistently to The New Yorker, including brief pieces in “Talk of the Town.” There, she developed a casual prose style with a touch of sharp humor.

By 1978, all of Kincaid’s hard work as a writer had begun paying off: After writing “Girl,” a short story in The New Yorker that offers a vivid portrait of female life with memorable concision, she got a publishing contract and expanded the piece into her first book, At the Bottom of the River. From that point on, Kincaid continued shifting between fiction and nonfiction. Often revisiting her own biography, her novels would try to do both.

At the Bottom of the River was a thoughtful book about close observation, with the narrators habitually highlighting the ordinariness of domestic life. However, the works of fiction and nonfiction that followed continued to dwell on many of the same themes: Kincaid’s West Indian upbringing, her marriage to a composer, her two children, and her horticultural journey. This decision to write about her life was not made merely because it was the subject most immediately available to her; it also offered Kincaid a way to work through and reflect on that life—a way to find out how her past had influenced and shaped the present.

Luxury brands have always advertised the craftsmanship of their products, but in recent months, human artistry itself has become their advertising strategy. Hermès redesigned its entire website around hand-drawn illustrations by the French artist Linda Merad, who said the designer label wanted visitors to recognize that “the art was made by a human.” The fashion houses Chanel and Loewe commissioned human illustrators to create their recent social-media campaigns. Over the holidays, Porsche released an ad that combined hand-drawn artwork with 3D animation—a choice that seemed pointed coming on the heels of the viciously mocked generative-AI ads from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. This past February, Gucci became a cautionary tale when it drew the wrath of fashionistas after using AI in its ads. “Any luxury brands that used AI slop should not be consider[ed] luxury anymore,” one viral post read. Another stated, “The whole point of luxury is that someone gave a damn.”

As automation and AI become ubiquitous, the human touch has become a luxury good. In some ways, this might seem to be merely a continuation on a theme: The rich get white-glove customer service while the rest of us are trapped pressing “1” and “2” and shouting “speak to an agent” into automated phone-tree voids. It can seem like just another symptom of the broader enshittification of our age and plutocratic economic order. And most of us don’t like it. Studies confirm the widespread skepticism: A Pew survey from 2025 found that half of Americans were more concerned than excited by the rise of AI, and roughly 60 percent said they wish they had more control over AI’s use in their own lives.

And yet it’s the poor who are subject to its most consequential uses. Today, debt collectors use AI to hound people via phone, e-mail, and chatbots. AI deepfakes are poised to worsen criminal-justice disparities. Parole decisions are being made by AI systems. And increasingly, federal and state officials are outsourcing decision-making and oversight for public services to digital machines.

As TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit that tracks technologies that are harmful to low-income communities, noted in a November 2024 report, governments employ AI in public programs when they’re looking to cut costs under the guise of ensuring that only the “right” people receive services. But any mistake made by an automated system immediately snowballs: Such systems can create “immense suffering at scales and speeds that were impossible with the human-centered methods that precede them,” the researchers found. After decades of austerity rooted in anti-Black and anti-poor politics, America’s safety net is already threadbare; those same biases are now encoded into digital tools that, like all AI, reproduce the prejudices of their training data and programmers. A human bureaucrat can destroy only so many lives in a day; algorithms can ruin the lives of tens of thousands at once.

Every state now uses AI to determine Medicaid eligibility, according to TechTonic Justice. For the 73 million people enrolled in the program, automated systems increasingly decide whether to approve or deny healthcare treatments. The nearly 14 million Americans who receive disability benefits through the Social Security Administration are subject to decisions shaped by AI, which is also used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; in fraud detection for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and in making predictions of neglect in child-welfare investigations. Indeed, throughout the social-safety net, decisions about who gets helped and who gets denied are increasingly left to machines. (Right around when the Porsche ad dropped, the Trump administration quietly gave Palantir a no-bid contract for an AI system to search for alleged fraud by SNAP recipients.) In fact, as the TechTonic Justice researchers reported, “all 92 million low-income people in the U.S.…have some basic aspect of their lives decided by AI.”

In 2013, for example, cash-strapped Michigan instituted an automated system to root out fraud in its unemployment-insurance program. Over a two-year period, the system leveled fraud accusations against over 60,000 people—more than five times the number identified by previous human-led investigations. Despite no human review of these findings, the state began demanding repayment; court papers noted that the “punitive assessments regularly totaled between $10,000 and $50,000 and sometimes exceeded $187,000.” Three years later, Michigan’s auditor general found that 93 percent of those allegations were wrong. By then, thousands of people had endured arrests, bankruptcies, and evictions, with at least one person dying by suicide. As of 2022, Michigan owed $20 million in settlement costs to claimants who’d signed on to a class-action lawsuit.

In Arkansas, an automated system erroneously cut nursing and other home-aide services for about 4,000 people with severe disabilities. When families asked why the services had been slashed, they were told simply that “the computer did it.” (A court ruled that the state had to stop using the system.) In Minnesota and Kentucky, ongoing class-action lawsuits allege wrongful denials of care in cases where insurers enlisted AI to override doctor recommendations and deny the Medicare Advantage claims of elderly patients. In Illinois and Los Angeles County, the automated systems used to determine child-welfare removals were so error-prone that both jurisdictions have now discontinued their use.

The research company Forrester predicts that AI and automation will eliminate 6 percent of all jobs, or roughly 10 million positions, by 2030. That outlook seems sunny compared to a 2025 Senate report that predicted some 100 million Americans could lose their jobs to AI over the next 10 years. There’s a new digital divide, and the less money you have to buy your way out of it, the greater the role that AI will have over your life.

The book tells me the cloud is in everything—
yesterday’s thunderhead in today’s tea,
this morning’s fog in the museum walls,
the plume of my breath in the rattlesnake
coiling around a painted peace lily. Look,
my friend says, and the framed stalk of corn
moves me to awe. I am never not in love
with the world and its yellows. The book is
trying to teach me how to see bubbles
glistening in their unicorn purples, floating
unpopped, rendered nearly permanent in paint.
I study a spirit bird made of glass, and my friend
surprises me with her diagnosis. Crows fly through
the window in my chest. The book would say
her blood cancer is also a cloud, but today I can’t
bear the sky and its gentle scholarship of hope.
I stay with the goldenrod shocking the sculpture
of Kansas grasses like a terrestrial memory
of stars. I let myself grieve as hard as the black
door nailed to the wall titled Night Sun. Yes,
it must be true. My friend’s stunning heart was
once rain. Twilight’s navy hem falls on the horizon
and bends the wheat over the mummied field.
Nothing is unhaunted, which means nothing
is alone. A storm gathers like angels crowding
the earth to see the end beginning here.
I love you, I say into the tomb of air between us
and close my eyes so I won’t see the clouds.

Voting for Vets

“Hell Cats vs. Hegseth,” by Joan Walsh [February 2026], leaves me questioning how much the four Hell Cats—
JoAnna Mendoza, Rebecca Bennett, Maura Sullivan, and Cait Conley—despite their good points, will resist the brutal domination of the US empire around the world. America’s militarized foreign policy spreads disaster abroad, treats economic competitors as enemies, and siphons tax dollars from our communities. Will the women just be four more Democrats voting for an ever-expanding military budget? I’d like to know.

Anne Cassebaum
elon, nc

The quotes by these candidates who served in the US military derive from the belief that we are the good guys, a deeply rooted propaganda that proliferates across our society. I hope that these women may yet find a way to reassess their military experiences as they run for elected office. Since World War II, the United States has not “won” a war despite astronomical Pentagon budgets (which never pass an audit) and unrestrained bombing attacks that result in what is coyly termed “collateral damage.” To date, there has been zero accountability for the criminal war visited upon Iraq by the US with full bipartisan support.

Thea Paneth
northampton, ma

I’m uncomfortable about supporting these professional military people for public office. It doesn’t make a difference to me that they’re women. To gain trust, they should state clearly that our military is out of control and needs to be significantly reduced for the good of all.

William Forrest
rochester, ny

The Meaning of Evangelical

Thank you for Barry Yourgrou’s well-researched article about Pastor Martin Niemöller, a controversial figure in Germany before, during, and after World War II [“Why Martin Niemöller Didn’t Speak Out,” February 2026]. In it, Yourgrou notes that “in Germany, evangelical just means Protestant.” However, evangelical comes from the Greek euangelion, which means “good news” or “gospel.” There are many Protestant churches, especially Lutheran ones, that include the term evangelical as part of the name of their church. Its meaning is so much broader, deeper, and comprehensive than Protestant.

The Rev. Bonnie M. Oplinger
shillington, pa

Billionaire Ball Clubs

As someone who decries the luxury-box culture that has overtaken US sports, I eagerly read Cole Stangler’s article about a French soccer team setting a different example [“How a French City Kept Its Soccer Team Working-Class,” February 2026]. But describing the club’s owner, the American businessman Frank McCourt, as a “philanthropist” is a stretch. When, some years ago, McCourt finally sold the Los Angeles Dodgers, he held on to the parking lots at Chavez Ravine, whose exorbitant fees remain a bane for Dodgers fans to this day. In LA, no one thinks of him as a philanthropist.

Sean Mitchell
dallas, tx

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders became the first federal legislator to seriously challenge the lurch by Big Tech oligarchs into the uncharted territories of artificial intelligence when he issued a call in December for a “moratorium on the construction of data centers that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop and deploy AI.” His reasoned argument—that a moratorium is necessary “to slow it down” and “give democracy a chance to catch up”—echoes the sentiments of a growing number of Americans who have come to see AI less as a promise than a threat. Yet Sanders was hit with immediate, and strikingly vitriolic, pushback from the tribunes of the billionaire class.

Dismissing the concerns that he raised—and despite the fact that many of the defining figures in the development of AI have expressed similar sentiments—Fox News’s Stuart Varney rushed to label Sanders as “economically illiterate,” while other corporate-friendly conservatives tagged him as “the nation’s foremost avatar of reactionary socialism,” accused him of engaging in “AI doomerism” and “NIMBY-type” reasoning, and concluded that he might just be peddling “the most poisonously stupid idea of the year.” Then they hurled the ultimate insult that contemporary elites can muster when the American people and their elected representatives start to question tech-bro definitions of “progress.” Sanders, they announced, was “a Luddite.”

In an editorial headlined “Bernie Sanders’s Worst Idea Yet.” The Washington Post fumed that “a national ban on new AI data centers would make the Luddites look good.” This was not the first time that the label had been attached to him. A few months earlier, after Sanders and Democratic staffers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had issued a report warning that AI could eliminate 100 million US jobs, the notion was savaged by an American Enterprise Institute commentator as an example of “Luddite legerdemain.”

Never mind that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had already speculated, in May of 2025, that the rise of AI could eliminate half of all white-collar entry-level jobs and lead to unemployment rates as high as 20 percent, and would explain that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Or that Bill Gates had predicted in March of 2025 that humans “won’t be needed for most things.” Social-media critics ripped Sanders on mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform, declaring that “socialists are the new Luddites” and claiming that Sanders was bent on “cornering the Luddite vote.”

With so much vitriol coming his way, it was perhaps understandable that the senator would announce, “I am not a Luddite.”

But there’s no shame in being a Luddite—or, to be more precise, in being an heir to the Luddite tradition of refusing to accept the adoption of new technologies simply because capitalists decide to impose them on workers.

Elite opinion writers may still dismiss the Luddites as unthinking reactionaries who sought to wreck the machinery of the dawning Industrial Revolution. But many of the most tech-savvy observers of the dawning AI era are expressing admiration for the 19th-century weavers and mechanics of northern England, who fought to prevent the dislocation and wage cuts that the factory-owning oligarchs of their day called “progress.” On campuses across the country, New Luddite and Neo-Luddite clubs have been formed by students who have grown up with smartphones and are justifiably concerned about what’s coming their way. After the Writers Guild of America waged a prescient struggle in 2023 to prevent media conglomerates from using AI technologies to capture their creativity and then toss them into the dustbin of history—a fight that anticipated The Hollywood Reporter’s blunt declaration in 2024 that “generative artificial intelligence is killing jobs in Hollywood, with little relief on the horizon,” and the more recent reports linking AI consolidation and cost cutting to tens of thousands of layoffs in the media and entertainment industry—the actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter wrote, “The term Luddite is often used incorrectly to describe an exhausted and embittered populace that wants technology to go away. But the actual Luddites were highly engaged with technology and skilled at using it in their work in the textile industry. They weren’t an anti-tech movement but a pro-labor movement, fighting to prevent the exploitation and devaluation of their work by rapacious company overlords. If you want to know how to fix the problems we face from AI and other technology, become genuinely and deeply involved. Become a Luddite.” The artist and activist Molly Crabapple, who in 2023 helped organize an open letter urging publishers to restrict their use of AI-generated illustrations, adopted a similar view, explaining: “That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” The year before, the writer Cory Doctorow argued, “The Luddites did what every science fiction writer does: they took a technology and imagined all the different ways it could be used—who it could be used for and whom it could be used against. They demanded the creation of a parallel universe in which the left fork was taken, rather than the right. That is many things, but it is not technophobic. Using ‘Luddite’ as a synonym for technophobe is an historically insupportable libel.”

Today’s Luddite renaissance comes as little surprise, given the anxiety over AI. But this is not the first time that people have looked to the leather-aproned croppers who resisted the power looms of another era. Going back to the 1950s, activists have looked to the Luddites’ example in times when new technologies—from nuclear weapons to the Internet—have upended our lives. The bosses have done their best to portray the Luddites as ignorant and self-serving laborers who clung to a dying past—and much of the media still does. But that mischaracterization was always an example of the “enormous condescension of posterity” that the great historians of the English working class E.P. and Dorothy Thompson, who were partners in life and in scholarship, long ago upended. In the middle of the last century, the Thompsons shined a new light on the Luddite uprisings that swept Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire from 1811 to 1816. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, textile workers who had used their own machines—working in their homes and in small shops—to clothe England and the world were suddenly confronted with a future in which they would be crowded into a new kind of workplace: the factory. Inside the new textile mills, they, and frequently their children, would toil long hours for reduced pay on the mechanized shearing machines and automated power looms that were their era’s technological wonders. The Luddites were no fools; they correctly anticipated the future that William King described in 1829 in his newspaper The Co-operator: “If then the machine which I work produces as much as a thousand men, I ought to enjoy the produce of a thousand men. But no such thing. I am working a machine which I know will starve me.”

The weavers and mechanics who gathered by moonlight atop the West Pennine Moors near Bolton and in the upstairs rooms of the Shears Inn at Liversedge in the West Riding of Yorkshire were unwilling to cede their futures to the oligarchs of a nascent Industrial Revolution. Amid an economic depression that had already slashed their wages and impoverished their families, they were determined to fight against the denial of their rights—and their humanity—by industrialists who adopted new technologies without the slightest care for the disruption of society. Their uprising followed mass protests and petition campaigns demanding that the government and employers provide living wages and protections for the workers who were being exploited in what William Blake aptly described as “dark Satanic Mills.” After their petitions were rejected, the Luddites gathered by the thousands and marched on the mills to break the new machines, smashing them in riotous agitations that terrified industrialists and parliamentarians.

Those sledgehammer blows against the Industrial Revolution earned the Luddites a place in history. But their struggle was always about more than a simplistic rejection of the new. Rather, it was a movement of engaged and informed skilled workers who opposed an economic and social transformation that promised to enrich the wealthiest men of their time while dispossessing an entire class of handloom weavers and their families. They organized demonstrations and petitioned government officials for increased wages, an end to child-labor abuses, and the right to form “combinations” (unions) of workers. Their anti-oligarchical energy and penchant for direct action led one of their champions, a young Lord Byron, to compare the Luddites to “the Liberty lads o’er the sea”—the revolutionary Americans who had overturned British colonialism—and to argue that British workers “will die fighting, or live free,” under the banner of “down with all kings but King Ludd!”

There was, it should be added, no such person: The first Luddites concocted the story of a young textile maker named Ned Ludd who, when ordered to speed up his work and sacrifice its quality by a boss, instead smashed the mechanical knitting machines to which he was assigned. As the tactic spread during the Luddites’ five years of industrial unrest, they adopted the name along with elaborate disguises and a strategy of stealthy nighttime raids. They did so to cloak the identities of the leaders and members of a labor movement that faced brutal repression, including laws that were enacted to punish their activism with the death penalty or forced expulsion to Australian prison colonies; an elaborate spy network that offered rewards to bounty hunters; and an ever-expanding military presence that would eventually see 12,000 troops stationed in the textile towns of northern England. Like the earlier Sons of Liberty in what would become the United States, the Luddites organized secretly and targeted the economic interests of their overlords. As the Americans had dumped the British East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, the Luddites broke the gig mills and shearing frames in factories from Marsden to Lancashire. What the historian Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot” was not an example of a working-class movement that “did not know what it was doing, but merely reacted, blindly and gropingly, to the pressure of misery.” On the contrary, Hobsbawm explained, it was a response to the imposition of a new technology that workers rightly foresaw would make their lives worse by sacrificing them to cross a certain “threshold of profit.”

The Luddites’ decision to destroy machines was much debated and decried in their time, though it arguably has scant relevance to our own. As Richard Conniff observed some years ago in his seminal Smithsonian essay “What the Luddites Really Fought Against,” “Our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warping our children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screens glowing in front of their faces, ‘and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.’”

If destroying the machine itself is not in our future, what can we learn from the Luddites that is relevant for today? Start with the notion that the Luddite resistance to “progress for the sake of progress” was defined by a longing to remain human in a machine age. That premise makes them a touchstone for 21st-century bank clerks and delivery drivers, actors and architects, autoworkers and nurses, who all fret about whether they’ll have a place in an AI-generated future. “We should be Luddites,” Brian Merchant, a tech journalist, columnist, critic, and the author of the 2023 book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, argued in an article in Time. “The Luddites were making a powerful complaint. If we reclaim what they were actually trying to say, we can apply the lessons of their story to today, and prevent a lot of misery.”

AI and robotics have enormous potential to improve human life. But they also pose profound dangers that we have not fully confronted. Left unchecked, these technologies could lead to:

• The rise of an unaccountable global oligarchy. The richest people on Earth—Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg—are not investing trillions in these technologies out of generosity. They want more wealth and power. Can democracy survive when a handful of multibillionaires wield unprecedented influence over the economic and political life of our nation?

• Massive job loss. There are economists who warn that the spread of AI and robotics could cost millions of jobs. What happens to workers when there are no jobs for them? How will ordinary Americans survive without income? How will they pay for housing, healthcare, food, and other basic necessities?

• Increased social isolation and mental illness. Young people are already turning to AI “companions” for emotional support. What happens to our humanity when people interact with machines more than they do with fellow human beings?

• Total invasion of privacy. If every phone call, e-mail, text, search, financial transaction, and movement can be tracked by the owners of AI, is the concept of privacy made obsolete? Does this not inevitably lead to authoritarianism?

• Higher likelihood of war. If robot soldiers replace human beings, will leaders be more willing to engage in catastrophic armed conflict? Will we see an arms race of robot soldiers?

• Environmental degradation. AI data centers require enormous amounts of electricity and water. Will the construction of these data centers strain power grids and accelerate carbon emissions? Will ordinary consumers see major increases in their electric bills?

• Undermining of human control of the planet. Some Big Tech CEOS think that AI may soon surpass human intelligence. What happens if we can’t regulate the things that we create? Could that create an existential threat to humanity itself?

As President Donald Trump’s administration has hurtled into a military conflict with Iran, the Pentagon has gone all in on artificial intelligence, both as a military tool in this and other possible conflicts and as a PR instrument in the quest for ever more of your tax dollars.

The Pentagon is accelerating the use of artificial intelligence across all of its mission areas, touting it as a revolutionary component of the emerging US military posture. The drive to apply AI as quickly as possible is behind the Trump War Department’s campaign to eliminate virtually all of the controls that would normally govern the introduction of a new technology. This approach is being framed as absolutely necessary for maintaining the US technological advantage over China and cementing US military dominance, but the haste with which regulations are being cast aside will almost certainly lead to flawed weapons systems, exorbitant prices, reduced accountability, and an accelerated AI arms race.

For the Pentagon, 2026 is the year of AI. On January 9, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum directing the Pentagon to become an “AI-first” war-fighting institution. Three days later, Hegseth launched an “AI Acceleration Strategy” and then announced a sweeping overhaul of the department’s systems for researching, developing, and purchasing new weapons, which would include AI. These steps will formalize a system intended to produce next-generation technology at “wartime speed.”

At the center of the strategy are seven “Pace-Setting Projects,” or PSPs, designed to push AI into war fighting, intelligence, business practices, and data-processing functions within months rather than years. The initiatives range from AI-enabled battlefield-decision support and simulation tools to systems intended to convert intelligence into military action as rapidly as possible. Delays, risk aversion, and procedural safeguards are framed as liabilities; speed is all that counts.

The new AI acceleration strategy will give even greater power and influence to private companies by increasing the reliance on AI funding from venture-capital firms, forming new partnerships with emerging military-tech companies, and drawing up open-ended contracts to help ensure that military systems can incorporate the latest technology within weeks.

The shift in approach is already under way: The Army just awarded Salesforce a 10-year, $5.6 billion contract to provide AI-enabled systems for the so-called Department of War, which the company says will “increase mission readiness” by consolidating fragmented data sources into “one interoperable platform,” allowing war fighters to make “quicker, more effective decisions.”

Taken together, the steps outlined above will further centralize decision-making within the Pentagon and dispense with traditional checks against shoddy work and price gouging, as inadequate as our current strictures are. It will be speed first and other concerns be damned.

But with the focus on speed front and center, Hegseth’s January 9 memo offers no real guidance on how to meet crucial goals such as ensuring that the laws of armed conflict are being followed, or allowing time for adequate congressional oversight or coordinating with allies.

By positioning AI as the foundation for US military dominance going forward, the new approach reflects a timeworn myth that has dominated US planning since World War II, an approach that equates technological advancement with security. But technology alone does not win wars. And past technological “miracles,” from the electronic battlefield in Vietnam to the reliance on networked warfare and precision-guided strike capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, have failed to achieve US military objectives, while causing immense harm to civilians in the target nations and to US combat personnel.

For example, the purported technological miracle of the Vietnam era was described by The New York Times as follows: “Gen. William C. Westmoreland, Army Chief of Staff, believes that the new electronics technology has brought the Army to the threshold of a new concept of the battlefield that may be as revolutionary in warfare as the introduction of the helicopter or the tank.” In the real world, the Vietcong developed a series of relatively simple countermeasures, and the new surveillance and targeting systems did not turn the tide in the war.

Artificial intelligence is already generating technological change that, on its own and in combination with advanced robotics, will design and define much of our future. But who will design and define AI—tech-bro billionaires whose primary mission is to become trillionaires, or citizens and elected representatives who seek to harness technology in the interest of humanity? Donald Trump has made his choice, signaling at a Pittsburgh “energy and innovation summit” last summer that he would willingly sacrifice the public interest and let the tech industry call the shots. “Regulation be damned” was the message from the president; let the chips fall where they may. Trump formalized his subservience in December, when he issued an executive order that The New York Times reported “grants broad authority to the attorney general to sue states and overturn laws that do not support the ‘United States’ global A.I. dominance,’ putting dozens of A.I. safety and consumer protection laws at risk. If states keep their laws in place,” the report continued, “Mr. Trump directed federal regulators to withhold funds for broadband and other projects.”

In March, Trump baked his agenda into a “National AI Legislative Framework” that emphasizes deregulation and federal preemption of the states. “Preemption is the real story,” Zephyr Teachout, the scholar of monopoly power, wrote on X. “We do not need a national framework for AI. Of any kind. We need state and federal laws but we will be crushed if we block local power to protect kids, workers, consumers, journalism, everything. Congress should do its job, not stop states from doing theirs with common law, liability, antitrust, and more.”

So far, however, Congress has tended to sideline itself, while the president and his administration rush to embrace the financial overlords during this transformative moment. That embrace is so shameless, so transparent, that messages and images emanating from the White House seem like dystopian cinema. “The future of AI is ‘personified,’” first lady Melania Trump declared at a March 25 White House event where she appeared with robots and asked Americans to “imagine a humanoid educator named Plato” replacing teachers.

“Call me a radical, but no!” responded Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has emerged—along with a growing number of the scientific pioneers of artificial intelligence—as a thoughtful AI skeptic. “We should not be replacing teachers in America with robots. We should attract the best and brightest in our country to become teachers and pay them the decent wages that they deserve.”

Sanders is right, of course. But, as has too often been the case when it comes to industrial and technological revolutions, their influence on society, and the resulting policy disputes, being right in the early stages of a transformation can be a lonely mission.

The good news is that the people get it. A February Economist/YouGov survey found that 63 percent of Americans think jobs will be lost in an AI transition that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has acknowledged “isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed who expressed an opinion on the question said they believed AI will hurt the economy.

That’s backed up by polls in states where the issues have been framed by fights over the development of AI data centers. A December letter from more than 230 environmental groups, including Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth, argued, “The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security.” Voters see what’s happening in states like Wisconsin, where a Marquette Law School Poll in March found that 69 percent of those surveyed agreed that “the costs of the data centers outweigh the benefits.” That’s the same percentage that said AI is developing too fast.

Back in the George W. Bush years, my then-wife and I had dinner in New York City with Tucker Carlson. At the time, he was settling in as cohost of CNN’s Crossfire after a rocky tour through the cable-hosting wars and savoring his re-anointment as a political insider and media gatekeeper. Over drinks, he sounded off on the invasion of Iraq, which he was then souring on (along with much of the rest of the country) after having enthusiastically supported it. He also derided the GOP’s all-in crusade against gay marriage, which would prove by some accounts key to Bush’s subsequent reelection in spite of the Iraq debacle. And he regaled us with media gossip, recounting the tale of a prominent cable talking head whom he’d heard clumsily trying to burnish his standing as a political junkie by announcing his eagerness to cover the “Iowa primary” and the “New Hampshire caucus.”

Such encounters weren’t all that remarkable for the time, particularly as the Bush White House sank into greater chaos and corruption, and its erstwhile fellow travelers strained to distance themselves from its crimes and imperial folly. Yet as my then-wife and I compared notes afterward, we agreed that Carlson seemed to be verging on a significant revision of his worldview; he appeared to be aligning with the then-trendy-in-DC niche movement of “liberaltarianism.”

Well, that was then. And here we are now. After a few more turns of cable TV’s wheel of fortune, Carlson landed in the heart of Fox News’ prime-time lineup, hymning the MAGA project of national reclamation to his increasingly right-wing audience while peddling ghoulish campfire tales about the plagues of wokeness, critical race theory, open borders, and other damning specimens of anti-American liberal groupthink. Even after his unceremonious dismissal from Fox, Carlson continued his strange trajectory ever more rightward. Setting up permanent shop in the fever swamps of the conspiracy-minded far right, he palled around with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán and lent his podcasting platform to the Nazi-Groyper influencer Nick Fuentes—a move that inadvertently sparked a still-raging civil war within the Heritage Foundation, the right’s most influential think tank.

Carlson’s transformation from an ingratiating bow-tied pundit into a plaid-and-khaki-clad Nazi enabler is the subject of Jason Zengerle’s Hated by All the Right People, a chronicle of Carlson’s career that is meant to double, as the book’s subtitle suggests, as a broader account of how the intellectual project of American conservatism has gone off the rails. As a straight media biography, Zengerle’s book is an instructive study in the amoral rounds of ambitious striving in the greenrooms and studio sets of cable TV—a kind of What Makes Sammy Run? for the chattering classes of the new millennium. But as a saga of the right’s intellectual decline, it’s less persuasive—not because Carlson isn’t a representative movement intellectual, but because the American right has long since parted company with political life as a forum of ideas. The watchword for the US conservative movement, at least since the rise of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, has been partisan bloodsport and the promotion of an unappeasable and demagogic politics of cultural grievance. Carlson’s descent, then, isn’t the “unraveling” that Zengerle posits it to be so much as a fulfillment of political destiny: In order to become the maximal Trumpist mouthpiece that he is today—and, indeed, an oft-rumored successor to Trump—Carlson had to relinquish the skeptical and heterodox cast of mind he was trying out during his Crossfire incarnation and become instead a hard-line culture warrior of the MAGA blood-and-soil vintage.

What’s striking about this shift is that it was not accompanied by any notable bouts of introspection and self-doubt or by a conventional political conversion narrative; it simply involved his reading from a different set of teleprompters. In the end, Carlson is not someone who relishes the hatred of others but rather is an inveterate people pleaser. Even in his most hate-filled diatribes, he tends to convulse with giggles and revert to his natural preppy, back-slapping mien. That he does so while indulging Nazis, white nationalists, dictators, and assorted edgelord authoritarians is an indictment of our mediasphere, our collective moral compass, and our political imaginations, but it’s largely the same Tucker Carlson at the center of the squalor.

All that said, Carlson’s public career, as Zengerle recounts it, is a compelling story. He grew up in Southern California as the eldest son of the TV journalist Dick Carlson, who would go on to head the Voice of America under Ronald Reagan. Carlson’s parents divorced after his father left Los Angeles for a job in San Diego and his mother, Lisa, stayed behind to savor the 1970s bohemian scene in Laurel Canyon. Dick would soon get custody of Tucker and his brother, Buckley (named for the conservative media icon William F. Buckley Jr.), after Lisa failed to show up for the hearing.

Carlson remained estranged from his birth mother for the remainder of her life, but his father loomed large in his upbringing, schooling his sons in the aristocratic comportment while also ensuring they were well versed in alpha-male exploits. Zengerle writes that Dick would put his sons atop the roof of his station wagon “as he gunned the land yacht’s V-8 engine and careened down a dirt road.” In addition, “the nannies he hired were usually men—including a former Korean intelligence officer whom Tucker and Buckley addressed as Colonel Kwon and who instructed the boys on how to disembowel someone. Dick’s etiquette advice wasn’t just about the proper way to write thank-you notes, but also included tips like how, in prison, ‘the cigarette pack is your friend.’”

Carlson’s upbringing, in short, was quirky but privileged. After his parents’ divorce, his father married Patricia Swanson, heir to the eponymous TV-dinner fortune, and the couple packed the high-school-age Tucker off, first to an abortive stint at a Swiss boarding school and then to St. George’s School in Rhode Island. At St. George’s, Carlson acquired a “reputation as both a conservative and a contrarian” while also cultivating a hybrid prepster-hippie lifestyle, getting high and listening to the Grateful Dead as he dated the headmaster’s daughter, Susie Andrews, whom he would go on to marry.

Picking up the first whiff of potential inner conflict in Carlson’s biography, Zengerle pounces. Carlson’s alliance with Andrews, and his dutiful attendance at the Episcopalian services led by her dad, who was also a priest in the faith, seemed to signal Carlson’s search for a “stability sorely lacking in his own family”—but “when that stability became stifling, he returned to his group of male friends to play Hacky Sack, listen to the Dead, and smoke pot and drink Kool-Aid mixed with vodka. Indeed, Carlson seemed almost to suffer from a double consciousness.”

Nor was that all, Zengerle theorizes. Carlson’s lackluster academic performance at St. George’s—already a “second-tier” New England prep school—foreclosed admission to an Ivy League college, and so he landed instead at another second-
tier institution of the WASP aristocracy: Trinity College in Connecticut. Another proto-MAGA marker was thus laid down: “His failure to gain entrée to the Ivy League gnawed at him,” Zengerle writes, “and would, decades later, serve as a touchstone for his populist ideology.” These labored forays into psychological portent are a sign not only that Zengerle wasn’t able to land Carlson’s cooperation for his biography, but also that Carlson’s life story isn’t long on inner turmoil. Its psychodynamics are all on the surface.

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Re FBI boss Kash Patel.

In 1946, the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb published Studies in the Development of Capitalism, his explanation of feudalism’s decline and capitalism’s rise. In it, he argued that it was the class relations involved in the feudal mode of production in England that primarily caused lords to overexploit their serfs, leading the serfs to desert their estates. With the rise of global trade, this flight ended feudalism and established the foundations of a new capitalist age.

However groundbreaking its account, Dobb’s book proved controversial. Four years later, Paul Sweezy, a fellow Marxist economist and the founding editor of Monthly Review, offered several detailed critiques. Dobb had argued, Sweezy claimed, that feudalism and serfdom were synonymous, which misunderstood, in Sweezy’s words, that serfs “can exist in systems which are clearly not feudal.” For Sweezy, what led the lords to overexploit their serfs and the serfs to desert were primarily external, not internal, causes: the rise of trade, pushing the lords to garner even more from their serfs, and the growth of towns to which the serfs could flee.

Though Dobb took Sweezy’s critiques in stride (and, taken together, both accounts offer compelling insight into the rise of capitalism), Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre, Rodney Hilton, and other historians soon weighed in on the Dobb-Sweezy debate, as it came to be known. At stake were not only questions of historiography for these mostly Marxist and socialist historians, but also questions of what exactly constituted capitalism (and, therefore, what constituted anti-capitalist politics) and how capitalism might be ended. “We live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism,” Sweezy confidently proclaimed in his critique, “and this fact lends particular interest to studies of earlier transitions from one social system to another.”

Around the same time, another Marxist thinker offered a different account of serfdom and the agrarian question. In Negro Liberation, Harry Haywood did not look to the English past but to the contemporaneous American South and especially to the so-called Black Belt, the majority-Black region extending from Virginia to Louisiana. There, Haywood found the modern-day equivalent of the feudal system: sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers working across the fertile area—many, though not all of them, Black—who were, in Haywood’s eyes, serfs who remained unfree, not least because of the vagrancy laws, debt, and physical violence that bound these workers to the lands they worked. Haywood wondered how these serfs might be freed from that seemingly feudal position and how doing so might aid in the fights against capitalism and fascism. Not surprisingly, his account of feudalism differed greatly from those in the Dobb-Sweezy debate. But for Haywood, as for Sweezy, economic transition was imminent, and the question of feudalism’s end had direct implications for his present.

Originally published in 1948 and now newly republished, Negro Liberation surveyed the post–World War II landscape and found that little had changed since the war began. The Black Belt, which had served as a heartland for enslaved agricultural labor in the South, remained an internal colony of the United States. There, the racist treatment of Black Southerners buttressed the continued economic exploitation of workers, providing dramatic profits to a small number of planters and to Northern finance capital while immiserating everyone else. By making this argument, Haywood, a Communist Party member, was not only making the case for Black emancipation but also explaining how anti-Blackness contributed to the oppression of all laborers. The white supremacy legitimating the exploitation of Black people in the Black Belt was also the very mechanism that ensured the working class’s segregation in the North and prevented Black and white workers from uniting to win collective power.

Yet alongside this account was also a specific argument for Black liberation. Taking his cues in part from Lenin’s claim that colonized countries had a right to determine their own governance, Haywood argued that the Black workers of the Black Belt needed to exercise self-determination, as Lenin put it—that the Black people in the majority-Black regions of the South ought to have autonomous socialist governments. To prevent the rise of fascism, which Haywood argued was manifest in the Jim Crow South as well as in interwar Europe, Black agrarian and industrial workers had to unite and organize toward Black self-determination in the Black Belt. This would weaken US imperialism—for instance, by withdrawing the region’s production—and thereby aid other workers subjugated by the United States across the globe.

To fully understand Haywood’s position on the Black Belt and on workers more generally, it’s necessary to first understand his life. Born in 1898 to formerly enslaved parents, he grew up in a society that imparted a sense that Black people could never fully assimilate into America. The Omaha, Nebraska, of Haywood’s youth had not yet become the city in which Malcolm X’s pregnant mother endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan. But his parents’ tales of slavery and his grandparents’ displaying their scars from the chattel regime soon educated him on American race relations. Reinforcing this lesson, his school taught that “Blacks were brought out of the savagery of the jungles of Africa,” Haywood recalled in his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, “and introduced to civilization through slavery under the benevolent auspices of the white man.”

An incident when he was 15 further educated him on Black people’s place in the country. During the summer of 1913, a group of white men beat Haywood’s father, who stumbled home bruised and bloody. “They said they were going to kill me if I didn’t get out of town,” his father told him. Haywood suggested calling the police, to which his father replied, “That ain’t goin’ to do no good.” His parents decided to leave their jobs and sell their home for a small sum, and then the family departed for Minneapolis. The incident not only uprooted their lives; it suggested that their stability in the United States was only ever temporary.

As a young adult, Haywood found American racism hard to escape. In Minneapolis, he recalled, his white classmates mocked him with a minstrel-like performance of an “old darkie plantation song.” Unsurprisingly, Haywood dropped out in the eighth grade and went to work as a “bootblack, barber shop porter, bell hop, and busboy,” then as a waiter on a train. Bored by Minneapolis, he moved to Chicago and, in 1917, joined a Black Army regiment. Training in the South, Haywood was exposed to Jim Crow before going on to serve in France, where the US Army warned the French that its Black soldiers were a threat to white French women. An ailment sent Haywood to a segregated Army hospital in Brest. Eventually, he and other Army patients returned on a segregated ship to the United States. Upon their arrival stateside, Haywood had his “first view of the New York skyline. Overcome with emotion, tears welled up in my eyes.” Then segregated reception committees greeted the soldiers. Despite expanding his geographic horizons, Haywood’s experiences in the Army reinforced his sense that American racism was structural, far-reaching, and could only be overcome by radical change.

After his 1919 discharge, Haywood grew even more convinced in this belief. Shortly after he returned to the Windy City, the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 broke out. Haywood joined a group of other Black veterans who armed themselves and planned to defend a Black neighborhood from a rumored invasion. While Haywood’s group saw no fighting, another group did, opening fire on a gang of white people, including off-duty cops, in a truck; elsewhere, “two Black cops with a history of viciousness” were killed. Meanwhile, Black people throughout the city were “standing before the burned-out buildings of their former homes.” If Haywood’s early exposures to American racism had opened him up to an incipient radicalism, the Red Summer changed his life. “I began to see that I had to fight,” he wrote in Black Bolshevik. “I had to commit myself to the struggle against whatever it was that made racism possible.”

Ben Lerner writes about the hardships and humiliations of modern masculinity. His first two novels followed listless young men in their 20s worrying their way through the literary and dating scenes of Madrid and New York. In his more recent fiction, his protagonists have matured into responsible adults with families. Yet no matter their age or obligations, the men are not OK. They are anxious and insecure. They are anxious about being insecure. Preoccupied with themselves, these men are obsessed with how they are perceived by others. The Lerner man frets constantly and about everything: his sex life, his romantic life, his friendships, his family, his failing body.

Take, for example, the beginning of Lerner’s short story “Café Loup”:

When I became a father, I began to worry not only that I would die and not be able to care for my daughter but that I would die in an embarrassing way, that my death would be an abiding embarrassment for Astra—that in some future world, assuming there is a future, she will be on a date with someone, hard as that is for me to imagine, and her date will ask, “What does your father do?,” and she will say, “He died when I was little,” and her date will respond, “I’m sorry,” hesitate, and then ask, in a bid for intimacy, how I died, and Astra will feel ashamed, will look down into her blue wine, there will be blue wine in the future, and say, “He had an aneurysm on the toilet,” which is one of the ways I often fear I might die.

And that’s just the first sentence. In a single syntactic unit, Lerner reveals the full catalog of his protagonist’s concerns: the travails of dating, health, death, the uncertain future, and, as ever, the possibility of being embarrassed. But now this poor man also has to worry about his daughter, her dating life, and the possibility of her being embarrassed because of him. Becoming a parent hasn’t grounded him; it has multiplied his anxieties.

Lerner’s latest novel, Transcription, is also about the dad life. The first-person narrator resembles his predecessors: He is keyed-up, introspective, clever. Whether he is in Providence, or Madrid, or Los Angeles, this man too is resolutely self-absorbed. Fatherhood has only deepened the solipsism of Lerner’s protagonists: If the only others that occupy your consciousness are your progeny, you still haven’t really stopped thinking about yourself.

Transcription opens with the unnamed narrator texting his wife to check in on their daughter. Naturally, he is anxious about her anxiety. The narrator is texting rather than talking to his wife, we learn, because he is on an Amtrak train to Providence to interview the 90-year-old Thomas, one of “the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology,” who is also the narrator’s mentor and the father of his old college friend Max. Before he checks into a four-star hotel, paid for by the magazine in which the interview will appear, the narrator notices two people sleeping on the sidewalk—or, as he puts it, the “bare life on the street.” The throwaway phrase kills two birds for Lerner: It establishes his protagonist’s credentials as a progressive sickened by the inequality of contemporary life and as an intellectual who knows his Agamben.

Like his predecessors, the narrator of Transcription is a highly educated and very guilty liberal. He knows that we inhabit a depraved and dying world—war, wildfires, terrorism, and poverty abound—that allows people like him to have money and houses. He lives in comfort, complicit. When he meets an old acquaintance on the street, they ritualistically express their guilt—“We exchanged some familiar language about the disaster of the world”—before catching up on what’s happening with their shared acquaintances.

Appropriately, the instigating event in this novel is not a geopolitical catastrophe but a domestic mishap: After washing his face in the hotel bathroom, the narrator drops his phone into the clogged sink and breaks it. This occasions panic—he now has no way to record his interview with Thomas—but before he is forced to confront this “crisis,” he must endure the immediate difficulties of being unexpectedly offline. He can’t find the hours of the local Apple Store, he doesn’t remember Thomas’s phone number, and he can’t look it up. He has been locked out of an entire universe. After some initial frustration, though, his newly offline state induces a sort of euphoria, “a withdrawal 
indistinguishable from mild intoxication.” Now that he can’t take photographs or read the news, he is able to pay attention to the world again.

But when he reaches Thomas’s home, he has to figure out how to handle the interview sans device. Immediately, it becomes apparent that this will not be a straightforward endeavor. First, the narrator inexplicably refuses to tell his mentor about the broken phone—“to tell him the truth seemed impossible”—so he lies and pretends he is recording their conversation. Then, from the opening question on, it is clear that Thomas is no normal interviewee: He is a force of personality, a man for whom “to listen to a story was to become involved in its composition.” When the narrator shares an anxious dream about his daughter, Thomas tells him that it might actually be his—that is, Thomas’s—dream. Once the conversation gets going, the narrator has trouble staying in control. But as the evening progresses, it also becomes clear that this great intellectual has started to lose some of his faculties. His memory is faulty: “I lose the numbers and the names,” Thomas explains. The narrator notices that his mentor’s kitchen is in a state of neglect and that he repeats himself without realizing it. Most troubling of all, Thomas starts to confuse the narrator with his son Max. He levels accusations at Max, and the narrator tries unsuccessfully to correct him: I am not Max; I am me.

After the fraught interview ends, the narration jumps in place and time. We are now in Madrid, at least several months later, and the narrator has just finished giving one of several talks at a gathering to honor Thomas. The old man, we are given reason to believe, recently ended his life at an assisted-suicide clinic in Switzerland. Like Adam in Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, the unnamed narrator of Transcription wanders through the streets of Madrid and begrudges the stylish ease of Europeans. But now the married father’s envy is directed elsewhere: to the children running loose on the streets and the carefree style of European parenting.

Our narrator is no longer sans phone. He’s already back under its thumb: e-mailing, Googling, texting. Before dinner with the other speakers, he calls his wife, Mia, to check in on her and their daughter Eva:

Then I FaceTimed Mia, who was having lunch in Washington Square Park; she held up her phone so I could see the gathering of the Neturei Karta men beside the fountain, their free Palestine signs. The sky behind her—or, depending on the position of her phone, above her—looked blue and cloudless, identical to the sky in Madrid. There was drumming somewhere nearby. I told her the talk went well. It must have been hard, she said. Not really. I don’t know. Maybe. I asked about her day, after Eva, who was fine, more than fine, Mia said, a lot of laughter in the morning and at bedtime, although Eva had recently told us to stop saying bedtime.

In his previously unreleased preface to Animal Farm, discovered by Ian Angus in 1972 and published later that year by the Times Literary Supplement, George Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

As an anti-fascist, Orwell most likely meant that liberty means the right to tell people in power what they do not want to hear. Most Americans would agree that the right to question authority is a nonnegotiable premise of democracy, but one that has met with repression throughout our history and even more so now, during wartime.

Evidence of that repression is quietly mounting all around us. Among the more alarming examples is the federal government’s recent threat to revoke broadcasting licenses if the administration finds content displeasing.

In March, Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), warned that broadcasters could lose their licenses if their reporting fails to comply with MAGA doctrine. “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr posted on X. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

On Truth Social, the president seconded that threat, accusing some media organizations of being “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic” and whining that they “get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES.” Trump concluded by referencing the reality series he once hosted: “As I used to say in The Apprentice, ‘FIRED.’”

These comments suggest that MAGA officials now fear free speech and may consider those who use it as potential criminals or enemies.

As the late great Bob McChesney would often remind us, the Federal Communications Commission has a mandate to manage the airwaves in the people’s interest, not those of big business or the president. The “No Kings” purpose of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution is to distribute power, not concentrate it, a mission augmented by independent media.

The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the federal government cannot punish news organizations—or anyone else—for oppositional viewpoints. The First Amendment’s protection of press freedoms would be little more than ink on the page if officials could cancel broadcasting licenses whenever coverage aimed to keep them in check.

Fascists fear free speech, and fear is the source of Carr’s demand that broadcasters “correct course.” Such language echoes a familiar pattern in systems that treat democracy as the enemy: First, authorities insist that the media must align with official narratives; then they demand the same obeisance from the general population.

Press freedom advocates recognized the danger immediately. Will Creeley wrote: “Brendan Carr’s authoritarian warning—that networks risk their broadcasting licenses for Iran war reporting that the government doesn’t like—is outrageous.” When government demands the press “become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment,” he said, “something has gone very wrong.”

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom warned that “if Trump doesn’t like your coverage of the war, his FCC will pull your broadcast license. That is flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz described Carr’s statement as “a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed.”

Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts immediately wrote a public letter to Carr saying his threat to revoke licenses is “your latest authoritarian attempt to weaponize the FCC’s statutory authority to censor the media. It is a stain on the FCC’s storied history, and you should resign.”

Their concerns were preceded by a bipartisan group of FCC commissioners who warned in November 2025 that the mere “specter of government interference alone chills broadcasters’ speech.”

As a former pamphleteer, pirate radio broadcaster, and low-power FM advocate who took the FCC to court to preserve the public’s right to access the airwaves at the community level, I believe deeply in the free and unfettered use of radio, libraries, streets, and public parks as spaces for challenging power and imagining new ways of being, learning, and loving. We are now gradually losing ground in many of these spaces.

Existential threats to democracy emerge not only through attempted coups like the one staged on January 6, 2021, but also through smaller, incremental acts: a few unjustified arrests here, a few ICE killings there, along with the quiet criminalization of those who, like the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, dare to expose the atrocities caused by our policies. No one act may irrefutably prove full-blown fascism has arrived, but what does that really matter if you or your loved ones are among those who have been threatened, disappeared, silenced, or killed?

The president’s propagandists insist that the FCC simply expects broadcasters to serve the public interest. But in a constitutional democracy, the public interest cannot mean blind obedience to the boss. Challenging official narratives serves the public interest—especially in wartime, when governments feel compelled to control information and deflect public outrage from horrors like the killing of 165 Iranian schoolgirls in a war that was not authorized by the people’s representatives in Congress.

Artificial intelligence is a nightmare to write about. It’s not just the technical parts, which are complicated, or the fact that the field is moving fast enough to give most commentary on it a short shelf life. It’s that the discourse is so extreme that trying to find one’s footing in the scrum can feel hopeless. Artificial intelligence is both a technology and a theology, and in its latter aspect, it too often resembles a doctrinal dispute among an assortment of shrieking priests.

Artificial intelligence will bring us heaven on earth or kill us all. It is the most important invention in human history or a scam. It will eliminate millions of jobs and produce permanent mass employment, or it will prove to be vastly overhyped, in which case the abrupt collapse of the technology’s trillion-dollar investment boom will tank the economy.

We need careful nondenominational thinking to guide us through this mess. The computer scientist Virginia Dignum is well-placed to play this role. Currently a professor at Umeå University in Sweden, she has been working in artificial intelligence since the 1980s. Dignum is an expert on “responsible AI,” which studies how to create and use AI systems in ethical ways, and has written an often-cited textbook on the subject. She is also an influential policy intellectual, having served as an AI adviser to various international organizations and initiatives, including the European Commission, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum.

In her new book, The AI Paradox, Dignum offers an overview of AI with particular attention to its social ramifications. Each chapter is devoted to a different paradox that serves to illuminate a specific dimension of her theme. The “agreement paradox,” for instance, focuses on the surprisingly thorny question of what AI is in the first place (“the more we explore AI, the harder it becomes to agree on its definition”), while the “solution paradox” summarizes the pitfalls inherent in the tech industry’s fondness for the technological fix (“solving problems with technology often creates more problems”).

Not all of Dignum’s paradoxes seem especially contradictory or counterintuitive, but together they form an effective and creative structure for the book. AI has become something of a cliché in recent years; by probing the riddles and antinomies that exist below the surface, Dignum gives the general reader a truer gauge of the subject’s depth. After all, the useful thing about paradoxes is how, as Dignum notes, they “reveal that reality is rarely as simple as it seems.”

The first paradox Dignum presents is the one that holds the greatest significance for her and for many of her fellow humanists: the notion that AI does not diminish but in fact helps clarify what makes us human. “The more AI can do, the more it highlights the irreplaceable nature of human intelligence,” she writes. AI is good at certain tasks, such as “data analysis, logical reasoning, and linguistic processing.” Yet it struggles with others, especially those involving creativity, empathy, “moral and ethical discernment,” the “capacity for complex reasoning,” and the “ability to reason about relationships between concepts.” This leads Dignum to conclude that our “uniquely human traits” will never be “fully replaced, no matter how advanced AI becomes.” Paradoxically, the growing sophistication of AI only serves to underscore our distinctiveness.

This view places Dignum within a tradition of humanist AI critique that is nearly as old as the field itself. Since the inception of artificial intelligence in the 1950s, first as an academic pursuit and then a commercial one, its partisans have maintained that the mind is a machine and that, consequently, it is possible to endow a machine with the intelligence of a human. The humanists —figures like the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum—have countered that, in fact, no matter what AI can or cannot do, it will never truly replicate the human mind because the human mind is nothing like a machine. “The core difference lies not just in capabilities, but in the essence of being,” as Dignum explains. “AI calculates, while humans feel; AI iterates, while humans imagine.”

This doesn’t mean AI is useless. On the contrary, Dignum is optimistic about the technology’s potential. But fulfilling this potential requires seeing AI “as a complementary tool to human intelligence, not a replacement.” Much like a calculator liberates us from the tedium of doing arithmetic by hand, AI’s facility at finding patterns in data can free us up “to focus on more creative, strategic, and profound aspects of thinking.” Dignum casts AI in a supporting role, as the helpmeet that handles the busywork so that we can spend more time exercising our higher—and, in her view, more distinctly human—functions.

The tech industry, of course, has something else in mind. The vast sums of money flowing into the generative-AI boom means that an acceptable return on investment can be attained only by putting large numbers of people out of work. Companies need their computers to start acting and working like humans; the goal is not to enhance human labor but to purge as much of it as possible from production. It remains unclear to what extent this goal can be realized. At a minimum, AI coding tools such as Claude Code are permanently changing how software is written by making the process of programming much simpler and faster. The consequences for the employability of software engineers may be significant.

Because tech people tend to see programming as the hardest thing a human can do, AI’s increasing proficiency in this area is often taken as the harbinger of a fast-approaching “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) or even “artificial superintelligence” (ASI). AGI refers to the threshold at which AI will match the intelligence of a human; ASI would be the point at which AI exceeds it. For Dignum, such notions are ridiculous. She compares the idea of AI’s “approximating or surpassing human intelligence” to the notion that “airplanes will soon be laying eggs, just because we keep improving their flying capabilities.” The analogy “highlights the absurdity of expecting a machine—a nonliving, mechanical artifact—to attain the full spectrum of human intelligence.”

Jay McInerney’s latest novel, See You on the Other Side, opens—humorously, fittingly—at the Odeon in Manhattan. “Stepping out of the cab into the twilight,” McInerney writes, “he felt a rush of nostalgia at the sight of the red-and-white neon sign hovering above West Broadway like an old movie title materializing on a dark screen.”

The glamorous Tribeca brasserie was made famous, or maybe more famous, in McInerney’s zippy, funny 1984 debut, Bright Lights, Big City, a work that, alongside Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, came to define an era and an attitude. It was the 1980s; bratty literary boys in blazers did cocaine in various downtown New York hot spots. For readers who have not engaged with McInerney’s work since then, it may come as a surprise (or not) that he has returned to the source—that is, the Odeon—many times.

Plenty of writers spend their careers circling the same preoccupations, the same geographical locations, the same set of human problems. But it is rare to find the novelist who has done so on such a hyper-specific level. At least four of McInerney’s nine novels involve the same neon-lit patch of ground on West Broadway and Thomas Street.

See You on the Other Side is the fourth, and likely the last, in McInerney’s Calloway series, which follows the Manhattan “golden couple” Russell and Corrine Calloway over the course of a long marriage. Reading it, I wondered how McInerney could possibly wring any new observations out of the same neighborhood, social milieu, and marriage. Could he perform a miracle and hit us with something new and profound about the Odeon’s mahogany bar and legendary bathroom, about staying married in spite of Manhattan’s many hazards, about going out in New York and growing old there?

The novel opens in the early days of Covid. As the virus bears down on the city, Russell and Corrine, now in their 60s, arrive at the Odeon to celebrate their old friend Washington Lee’s 35th wedding anniversary. Russell’s career has apparently flourished since we last met him; he now runs a publishing house, while Corrine, formerly a stockbroker, works for a nonprofit dealing with hunger. They have just moved from a town house in Harlem to a downtown apartment after the departure of their adult children.

The virus, at this point, is still a vague threat. The Calloways and their friends are not yet acclimated to the idea of social distancing or to the elbow bump, the “new greeting in this time of incipient plague”; they keep forgetting and kissing each other’s cheeks. But sharp, sensitive Corrine is nevertheless worried. “She was very concerned about the virus that had infiltrated their city,” McInerney writes, “convinced that it posed a serious threat, and as they gingerly navigated the room, they found others who shared her concern.” It takes about 100 pages, but that concern is finally validated: Corrine contracts the virus and has to quarantine in their new apartment. Meanwhile, Russell flirts with the idea of having an affair with a young novelist (Russell is more or less always flirting with the idea of having an affair) and tries to hold the publishing house together.

While the pandemic is everywhere in the book, See You on the Other Side proves to be a Covid novel without much to say about life during Covid. Corrine weathers her bout with the virus, while Russell grumbles about masking at Citarella. His fellow shoppers, he notes, look like “Japanese commuters.” The book’s style is reference-heavy without being especially satirical, a catalog of cultural figures, magazines, restaurants, and nice wines. A non-exhaustive list of mentions in the first half of the novel includes n+1, Kanye West, Harvey Weinstein, The New York Review of Books, Danny Meyer, Balthazar, The Real Housewives, Dylan going electric, 1996 Montrachet, and Lululemon.

As for the characters themselves, even if we don’t learn much about their inner lives, the book displays a deep affection for their external way of life. “The aromas of dark roast coffee and bacon infused the kitchen like a spritz of morning perfume,” one chapter begins. Russell belongs to a club of wine connoisseurs who bring their own bottles to Per Se, and he and Corrine vacation in Southampton. You get the impression that this is how McInerney himself, a noted gourmand and the author of three books about wine, lives his life.

After a slow-burn beginning—there is a lot of wondering about whether Covid will arrive—the book rushes to an ending, which deals with the death of a major character. A somewhat lackluster look at how the virus impacted well-heeled Manhattanites who mostly live by the scent of dark roast coffee and expensive bottles of white wine, See You on the Other Side doesn’t appear to offer much besides providing a conclusion for the series, a compulsory finish to what McInerney started more than three decades ago. We see how his golden couple live, but without knowing why.

Though to do justice to the novel, perhaps one must begin with the books that preceded it. Published in 1992 and set in 1987, Brightness Falls may seem to be deliberately titled to remind the reader of Bright Lights, Big City. But the novels are unrelated; the title comes from the Thomas Nashe poem “A Litany in Time of Plague”: “Brightness falls from the air; / Queens have died young and fair.” Like See You on the Other Side, Brightness Falls is a plague novel, set in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.

Sexual-abuse allegations against Cesar Chavez, the Chicano civil-rights and labor leader, have reverberated across the Latino community and beyond. A New York Times investigation published in March includes accounts from two women who were 12 and 13 when Chavez abused them, and from Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s longtime collaborator and cofounder of the United Farm Workers. In a statement, Huerta said she had two sexual encounters with Chavez, both of which led to pregnancies: “The first time I was manipulated and pressured. The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.”

These allegations are deeply disturbing and should not be minimized or explained away. They have rightfully prompted a reexamination of Chavez’s legacy. They also expose how much Latino history in the United States has been made to rest on one man.

For many Americans, including Latinos, Chavez is the only Latino civil-rights leader they can name. That overreliance on a single, legible figure has flattened a much richer and more complex history, and we are seeing the consequences of that. When one man is made to stand in for an entire movement, the destruction of his legacy can be used to dismiss the movement’s larger history and impact.

Chavez’s legacy has long been more complicated than the mythology surrounding him. In a Los Angeles Times review of Miriam Pawel’s biography, he is described as “paranoid and dictatorial,” with the organization he built characterized as resembling a “cultish commune.” It was within that warped world that women like Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas say they were abused for years when they were girls.

Chavez also opposed undocumented workers, whom he viewed as threats to the labor movement, and in the 1970s he led efforts to report them to immigration authorities—a stark contradiction for a leader now widely remembered as a champion of the marginalized.

And yet schools, streets, and Chicana/o Studies departments all bear Chavez’s name. In a number of states, including California, Arizona, and Texas, Cesar Chavez Day has been celebrated as a state holiday. Hollywood has immortalized him.

Latinos have long struggled to have our contributions, history, and culture recognized. Chavez—the charismatic leader who organized some of the country’s most exploited workers, who prayed and fasted, who led the grape strikes that captured the country’s attention—became a figure we could rally around. Through him, we could be seen. So we organized, marched, and legislated to cement his place in US history. We rallied around a version of him that could be taught, honored, and defended—a version that was uncomplicated. But that came at a cost.

One of the reasons many of the women who spoke to the Times gave for their decades-long silence was a “fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement.” Huerta kept her own experiences private because she “believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement,” which she had dedicated her life to.

HUMAN COST

175

Number of Iranians killed in the February 28 US missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, most of whom were children

3,291

Number of Iranians killed as of March 24 since the United States and Israel started the war

1,072

Number of people killed in Lebanon as of March 24

22

Number of people killed in the Gulf states as of March 25

18

Number of people killed 
in Israel as of March 25

13

Number of US service members killed as of March 16

3.2m

Number of Iranians who have been displaced as of March 12

1m

Number of people in Lebanon who have been displaced as of March 23

FINANCIAL COST

$16.5b

Amount spent by the United States during the first 12 days of the war

$5.6b

Estimated value of munitions used during the first two days of the war

$3.5m

Estimated cost of one Tomahawk cruise missile

20%

Portion of the world’s oil and natural gas that passes through the Strait of Hormuz

30%

Portion of the world’s fertilizer exports that 
pass through the Strait 
of Hormuz

$119

Cost of a barrel of oil as of March 19

30–40%

Expected rise in the cost of fertilizer for farmers

GLOBAL COST

12

Number of countries Iran has struck in retaliation

5m

CO₂ amount, in metric tons, emitted in the first two weeks of the war

56%

Portion of Americans who disapproved of the war two weeks after its start

Khiara M. Bridges’s newest book, Expecting Inequity, “has been a long time coming,” the UC Berkeley law professor told The Nation in early March. Bridges, who earned a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University, where she also received her JD, first studied the roles of class and race in maternal healthcare in her 2011 book Reproducing Race, offering what she now calls a “scathing critique of Medicaid and its program of prenatal care…that completely disregards the desires of the pregnant person and also completely disregards the discretion of the provider,” especially compared with people who receive commercial insurance and can make a lot more choices about their care. This system treats the poor, she wrote, as a “fictional uniform population” and erases their unique desires and needs, undermining their agency while allowing inequality, and racial inequality in particular, to continue unabated. But people attending her book talks questioned whether the dehumanization that low-income people of color experience is really due to their race or primarily a function of their poverty. They were right, Bridges says, that poor people in the United States are treated unjustly. “But implicit in that question was the assumption that racism doesn’t show up when you have class privilege—that you [can] escape dehumanization and negative outcomes if you are a person of color with some degree of wealth or affluence.” Expecting Inequity is Bridges’s investigation into whether that is possible.

The answers are surprising. As Bridges was reviewing CDC data on pregnancy-related deaths, she noticed, as she writes in her new book, that while “black people with less than a high school education are 1.8 times as likely as white people with less than a high school education to die from a pregnancy-related cause…black people with a college education or more were 5.2 times as likely as white people with a college education or more to die from a pregnancy-related cause.” In other words, the disparity in maternal mortality rates between educated Black people and their educated white counterparts is greater than the disparity between uneducated Black people and their uneducated white counterparts.

The result of two years of investigation, Expecting Inequity exposes structural inequities within the healthcare system that are inescapable no matter your income or wealth.

Bridges conducted studies at two San Francisco hospitals—Golden Health, a world-renowned private hospital, and the nearby “poor people’s hospital,” the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital—and interviewing 200 pregnant or newly postpartum people, including 75 “unicorns” or class-privileged Black people, residing in San Francisco. She found that when the healthcare is provided through private markets—as it is in commercial insurance programs—there’s more room for racism and unequal care to take root. While Black people with class privilege can access a higher tier of healthcare than the Medicaid system, which comes with standards and regulations that overemphasize the medicalization of pregnancy, the lack of government oversight of the “profit-maximizing, discretion-packed processes found in the profit-generating side” is leaving “socioeconomically fortunate black people susceptible to race-based harm.” Meaning that, for example, their concerns about life-threatening conditions may be dismissed as they are subjected to anti-Black discrimination due to racist assumptions and stereotypes made by providers. As Bridges says, Black people are not able to earn or educate our way out of anti-Blackness. Still, in our conversation, Bridges discussed why she remains hopeful about the United States getting this right. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Regina Mahone

Regina Mahone: In explaining why maternal and infant health disparities are starker for people with commercial insurance—who are, on average, higher-income—than for those who are on Medicaid, you write that “Medicaid delivers a uniform program of prenatal care for the poor…. While this standardization problematically limits patient and provider autonomy, it also reduces racial disparities in infant and maternal mortality. In doing so, Medicaid serves antiracist goals.” Can you talk more about this finding and how, as you say, Medicaid makes “race matter just a little less” when we look at infant and maternal mortality data?

Khiara Bridges: I’m so fascinated by contradictions, and that was one of the contradictions that motivates this project. When I was researching this book, the contradiction became apparent: The rates at which Black and white pregnant folks [on Medicaid], as well as the babies that they birth, die are actually closer than the rates at which Black babies and Black parents and their white counterparts die when there is class privilege. So the gaps are actually higher at the higher end of the socioeconomic ladder. The critiques that I made in Reproducing Race about Medicaid are valid critiques, but how do I reconcile that with the fact that these features that one ought to criticize are actually producing outcomes that are more racially equitable than what we see with regard to the commercially insured? It is the program of prenatal care that one can’t opt out of—Medicaid—that reduces the racial disparities in maternal and infant mortality and morbidity. The question that I ask in the book is, given that fact, what does racial justice look like? Should we be fighting for Medicaid for all, even though that means that we will be denied choices around what care to receive and who to receive it from and what procedures to undergo? I don’t resolve this tension in the book, but it’s a question that we need to ask ourselves. If we are fighting for a world in which one’s ability to survive does not depend on one’s race, what sort of institutions should we produce? And it seems like when we’re talking about maternal and infant mortality and morbidity, we need to be thinking about the universal healthcare that removes some of the discretion that providers make in our current kind of regime.

RM: You write about how the healthcare system is profoundly segregated, but not only that: The hospitals that primarily serve uninsured patients or patients receiving Medicaid make it possible for hospitals that serve class-privileged patients to offer superior care. You draw a parallel between healthcare and housing, and how redlining and other forms of housing discrimination have made it possible for wealthier neighborhoods to exist. Why was it important to you to make those connections and the observation that, in general, “poor people make it possible for wealthier people to have nice things”?

KB: One of the things that I wanted to do with this book was to denormalize the fact that there are poor people’s hospitals and hospitals for everybody else. People in the US tend to think that it is just normal and natural for there to be institutions for poor people and institutions for nonpoor people. We have poor neighborhoods, we have the ghetto, and then we have the suburbs and we have nice neighborhoods. That geography is present in every single region in the United States. Even though the book is set in San Francisco, it could have been set anywhere.

We also know that the hospitals for poor people are delivering, in a lot of ways, substandard care. And that’s just something that should strike all of us as a fundamental injustice: that your health is compromised when you are poor because of the environments in which you’re forced to live. You’re living next to a highway, which spews pollution on you. You don’t have access to healthy foods, perhaps because you live in a food desert. And even if you don’t, fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive. Your health is compromised when one is poor in this country. That is a fundamental injustice that I’m trying to denormalize in this book.

But the other thing that I wanted to do was to make explicit that there is a symbiotic relationship between the two. The features that make the institutions that cater to those with class privilege in this country nice are made possible by the chaos and the lack of nice things that are found in the institutions that cater to low-income people.

In the book, I describe how, when I was researching Reproducing Race, one of the most obvious features of the public hospital [in New York City] where I was working and observing was that the pregnant folks would wait hours for their appointments. And then when I got to Golden Health, the well-resourced institution where I did the research for this book, waiting times were nonexistent. If patients had to wait for their provider, it was no more than 15 minutes, or 20 minutes on a bad day. I was trying to figure out why this is, and I found that it isn’t because, oh, it’s just that Golden Health and these institutions that cater to high income people are just better organized or the patients are just better in terms of showing up on time. But rather, it is a matter of fiscal survival for the places that see low-income people to accommodate folks who are late. The hospitals desperately need to be reimbursed for the care that they provide because of their shoestring budgets. And these hospitals care for low-income people whose lives are made more contingent because of their poverty, which makes it difficult for them to show up to their appointments on time. So the low-income hospitals are caring for these people, and that allows the places that care for wealthier people to not see those low-­income people. Therefore, those spaces can be orderly, and those places can be non-chaotic and can promise that you’ll be seen by your provider within 20 minutes of your arrival.

At the end [of the chapter], I invite the reader to think about how all the nice things that wealthier people have are contingent on low income people’s discomfort. If you live in a nice neighborhood, how is the clean air and clean water and lead free soil found in your neighborhood made possible by the unclean air and unclean soil and unclean water found in low income communities? How are the benefits that you get at your job, whether it’s paid vacation days or health insurance, made possible by the contingency found in these low wage jobs? You’re lucky if you have access to some healthcare at low income jobs. 

RM: Yet even when wealthier people have nice things, Black people with class privilege cannot escape racism in healthcare. Can you talk about the role of neoliberalism and the market-based approach to healthcare in the United States in the Black maternal health crisis?

KB: When one’s health insurance is Medicaid, the government regulates Medicaid very strictly. But when one has class privilege, one enters into this commercial insurance realm that is not regulated to the extent that Medicaid is and where market logics dominate.

The idea is that the market is going to generate exceptional healthcare at the lowest cost. But as I talk about in the book, the US is falling short on both accounts. Our healthcare is incredibly expensive. It’s more expensive than the nations that we like to consider our peers in Western Europe, Canada, and New Zealand. But also our outcomes are dicey at best, and especially dicey when we’re talking about maternal health. We’re failing all people in the US, but it’s especially bad for Black people.

The statistic that drives the book is the one that shows how these racial disparities in maternal mortality persist across income levels. So even if one is incredibly privileged, if one has a high educational level, if one has status, as a Black person, you’re still three to four times as likely to die from a pregnancy related cause as your white counterpart. That means, to me, that Black people are not able to educate themselves out of anti-Blackness. We’re not able to earn ourselves—in terms of our income—out of anti-Blackness. We’re not able to acquire status that will allow us to escape anti-Blackness. And so it’s true that low-income people make it possible for wealthier people to have nice things, but then the ability to acquire those nice things for Black people is made difficult by racism.

What I show in the book is that Black people with class privilege lean on that class privilege in order to try to buy themselves out of racism and escape from anti-Blackness. And so they pay gobs of money for doula care so that they can have an advocate in the labor and delivery room that can hopefully help them avoid dehumanization or, in worst case scenarios, death. I tell stories about Black women who I interviewed whose fingers were swollen from pregnancy. They’re in their second and third trimesters, but they refuse to remove their wedding rings because they don’t want to be a Black pregnant person who is perceived as unmarried. This is in society generally, but also in their appointments when they go to the doctor. They don’t want their doctor, they don’t want their midwives, they don’t want their healthcare providers to perceive them as Black and unmarried and pregnant because they know that that might have consequences for the healthcare that they receive.

One of the chapters is titled “Going to the Doctor in Yale Sweatpants.” People dress up to go to the doctor because they’re trying to signal that they are not low-income, that they are educated, that they are deserving of quality healthcare. I argue that this is consistent with neoliberalism—this idea that the government has no obligation to care for vulnerable people, no obligation to provide goods or services for its citizenry as a general matter. Neoliberalism argues that freedom is to be found in strong, robust markets, and you have to purchase your freedom in the market. And when Black folks are forced to participate in this neoliberal logic, they’re trying their damnedest purchase freedom in the market. They’re trying their damnedest to buy all the doula care and all the Yale sweatpants and all the accoutrements of privilege that will allow them to survive their pregnancies. And the point I make in the book is that people shouldn’t have to do that. It’s such a failure of the US to require people to attempt to survive a natural biological process—one that needs to happen if humanity is to persist—by expending resources and strategizing about how to receive healthcare that will allow them to survive pregnancy. We should be embarrassed as a country.

RM: Can you talk about how hospitals are profiting from the Black maternal health crisis?  

KB: What became apparent to me when I was conducting research for this book is that it is not inaccurate to think of the healthcare ecosystem in any particular region as a market. And just like with other markets, institutions are in competition with one another and hospitals are in competition with one another for patients and patient dollars. Medicaid reimburses at a fraction of the rate [of commercial insurance]. So hospitals aren’t really competing for low income patients. Instead, they’re competing for commercially insured patients. And how do they compete for these patients? They offer amenities, state-of-the-art care, luxurious birthing rooms, postpartum suites, and all of those things.

When I was observing the healthcare ecosystem in San Francisco, I started thinking about this analogy to HBCUs. So I went to an HBCU, I went to Spelman. But when I was in high school, thinking about what college to attend, there were certainly folks who were advising me, go to Harvard, go to Columbia, go to Yale, don’t go to Spelman, don’t go to Howard, because while they might be great Black colleges and universities, they’re not great colleges and universities in the grand scheme of things. I would get more opportunities by being able to rub elbows with the folks who attend and teach at schools like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, so on and so forth. But the reality is that Spelman was the best choice for me for many, many reasons. One of those reasons was that it was an institution that was designed for Black women. It gave me an opportunity to not think about my race and gender all the time while trying to get an education.

So Spelman was the best choice for me, even though when you compare Spelman’s endowment with the endowments of Harvard and Yale and Columbia, Spelman’s endowment pales in comparison; when you compare some of the amenities found at Spelman to the amenities found at Columbia, Harvard, Yale… I’m laughing because it wasn’t until I got to Columbia that I was like, wow, y’all got options around food.

So Spelman can’t match up in a lot of ways with these well-funded, well-resourced institutions. But Spelman is still the best choice for many, many, many Black women. 

I was thinking about that in conversation with these healthcare systems in San Francisco and just generally in the US. While it’s true that institutions like Golden Health and these hospitals that cater to wealthier folks might have more amenities and more resources, and while they might even be able to offer more technologically sophisticated care, are they really better for Black people and other people of color? Because I can tell you, they’re not orienting themselves to care for Black people and other people of color. They’re not designing themselves as institutions for Black people and other people of color. Meanwhile though, the low income hospitals, the hospitals that cater to low income folks in San Francisco, [including]the General [where I researched the book], the General is like, We are here for people of color. What do people of color need? We will give it to you. We take racism seriously, we take xenophobia seriously, we take heteronormativity and cis-normativity [seriously]. 

These are institutions that have as their kind of reason for existence caring for marginalized people. So I ask the question: are Black people really better off at these institutions that cater to wealthier folks? However, as a strategy for surviving the Black maternal health crisis, Black people are avoiding institutions that cater to people of color and low income people. And I question whether they actually would receive better outcomes if they went to these institutions that actually are designed for marginalized people. How does that speak to the profit motive? Well, that means that these institutions that are catering to wealthier people, they have kind of a captured audience essentially. They have a patient population who might be better served elsewhere, but they’re going to come to these institutions that cater to wealthier folks because they think that that is their best chance for survival. It helps these hospitals compete for patients and accrue the sort of wealth that comes from the patient or that comes from the insurance reimbursements that these patients bring. So yeah, the Black maternal health crisis, I argue in the book, it’s good for the bottom line for wealthier institutions.

RM: You also raise important questions about ongoing news coverage of the maternal health crisis, which can start to feel like “trauma porn.” Can you elaborate on your argument that “the nation exists in the space between raising awareness and action”?  

KB: One of my favorite chapters to write was the chapter on media coverage of the Black maternal health crisis. While I was researching the book, I had a Google alert that would notify me of stories about Black people dying or nearly dying during pregnancy. It was overwhelming the number of stories that would come through, and I would read the stories and learn nothing new. 

Why was so much coverage of Black maternal deaths or near deaths just so bad? I make this structural argument about the contraction of news media generally. We just lived through the Washington Post reducing its staff by a third. When that happens, these outlets hire fewer people and the people that they do hire might not have expertise in [different] areas. These structural issues contribute to subpar reporting on many issues, but specifically very complex issues including maternal health in the US and Black maternal health and healthcare. 

But two other things were happening while I was researching this book. The first thing that was happening was this war on critical race theory. I don’t talk about this in the book, but one of my books is called Critical Race Theory: A Primer. I had written this book before the right discovered critical race theory, and so to reporters’ great credit, they would reach out to me and ask me, what exactly is critical race theory? I would give these really, I would say, good answers about critical race theory, the origins of the theory and its arguments. And yet the stories that would come out about critical race theory that I had contributed to, again, were not very good. I was disappointed, and then I was like, “So why are you writing these stories if they’re not going to be nuanced and sophisticated and honest about what the right was doing with critical race theory?” And it seemed to me like that the label of clickbait described some of it. It’s like these outlets wanted to run a story so that they could get the eyes on their site so that advertisers know that people are coming to their sites or to advertise their wares so that the outlet can make money. So, really, it wasn’t about disabusing the public of these incorrect notions of critical race theory. Rather, it was to talk about critical race theory so that people would click on it and the advertising dollars would flow from it.

The second thing that was also happening was Black deaths at the hands of police officers and the proliferation of these videos of Black people dying, getting shot, or otherwise killed by police officers. And the reality is that the existence of those videos is good for media outlets because people click on it, they want to see the video, it’s salacious coverage, it’s disturbing coverage. Those videos are also good for social media platforms because it drives up user engagement. 

I started to think about Black maternal deaths in conversation with this critical race theory hullabaloo, as well as with the ubiquity of these videos of Black people being killed by police. And I concluded that a lot of outlets are just going to run stories on Black maternal deaths because it drives up user engagement. These stories are heartbreaking, but they’re also trauma porn when not done well. It’s trauma porn when the structural conditions that produce Black maternal deaths are not made explicit. It doesn’t do good if a reader reads a story and they learn another Black lady died while pregnant, but they don’t learn why.

But the other thing that makes me sad is that Black people who are pregnant or desiring pregnancy have to live within this onslaught of being told that they are more likely to die. It’s so cruel to [those who are] pregnant or to want to be pregnant and then have to read constantly about your lower likelihood of surviving the event. And it’s also bad for your health. I mean, we’ve known for at least a generation now that stress has negative physiological consequences. And we are creating conditions under which Black people are going to have to endure chronic stress just because of racism generally, but then Black pregnant people particularly have to live with the fact that they’re less likely to survive their pregnancies. Then we turn around and are surprised that Black people have higher rates of maternal mortality and morbidity. It’s like, of course they do. We are creating the conditions under which we should expect as much. 

So yeah, I’m calling out media outlets that are doing check-the-box journalism that are just writing these stories and posting them as clickbait. But it’s also a call to action to media outlets to do the work, hire the people who will be able to write nuanced, smart, well-researched stories about Black maternal health, so that audiences can actually learn about what’s causing this phenomenon and we can actually do something to eliminate the phenomenon.

RM: Finally, we have to address the DEI of it all. You share an example of what researchers call a“racially concordant care system” that allows Black patients to see Black providers, which data shows can have a positive impact on birth outcomes. But programs like this are few and far in between, and becoming fewer; we are currently in the midst of a profound rollback of initiatives to address unequal and racially discriminatory care and the structural issues that have brought us to this point. It’s another indication that centering Black experiences is really, really hard for this country. Yet, you remain hopeful, or at least suggest that you haven’t yet given up hope that we can one day get this right. Tell me why.

KB: I think that it would be disrespectful to my ancestors for me not to be hopeful. My grandmothers on both my mom’s and dad’s side were maids in the Jim Crow South. They’re not alive today, but I think if they were, they would look at me and this book and conclude that their wildest dreams had come true. And so I think it’s disrespectful to them for me to look at the way things are and say, “I have no hope.” Because if they had hope and they got to see—they both were alive when I was born and they got to see what was possible. They got to dream about what was possible through my little tiny body and I can dream about what is possible.

I was attending a talk two weeks ago by Loretta Ross, one of the primary founders of the reproductive justice framework.  I take what she says as gospel truth. Loretta Ross described this particular sociopolitical moment as the last gasp of a particular form of white supremacy. The description of it as a last gasp gave me reason [to hope]—I was like, so Loretta Ross is optimistic. She doesn’t think that this is inaugurating a new normal, but rather that this is aberrational and it will die, and then we will have a future in which we at least don’t have to wrestle with the old forms of white supremacy. All of that to say, I am optimistic. 

I think that a lot of people are going to die unnecessary deaths, and a lot of suffering is going to be inflicted. But I also do believe that this sociopolitical moment will come to an end, and then we will have this opportunity to create something new and better. I hope that we are thinking about a universal healthcare system. If not that, I hope that we are thinking about pouring funding into Medicaid. In the book, I say that if we really wanted to solve the Black maternal health crisis, we would start taking racism seriously. We have to stop denying that it exists. 

I’m excited to see what comes next. What I’m worried about is that we’re just going to try to restore what was before. We need to be Afro-futuristic with this. Let’s imagine a future that we’ve never seen and then let’s take steps towards realizing it.

My phone beeped, alerting me to a ride. I clicked to accept, and a few minutes later I pulled up beside an older lady in a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, about half an hour outside Washington, DC. She exchanged a few words in Spanish with the man who was waiting with her in the early-morning darkness and then slid into the back seat of my Subaru Outback. The fare was going to earn me less than $7.

“Buenos días,” I said. She said the same to me and was chatty, unlike the people I had picked up earlier. She was born in Peru, she said, and her husband had died two years ago. He used to take her everywhere and now he was gone, so she used Uber to get to work. I dropped her at the front door of a hotel.

It was my first morning as an Uber driver, and everyone I picked up was Latino or South Asian and heading to work. My first three customers were schoolteachers. Then I dropped a young woman at a hospital and her mother at a grocery store that had yet to open. I brought a young man to a large auto mechanic’s garage, another to a Panera Bread chain restaurant, and a woman to the open back door of a strip-mall diner.

I made $130 in a little less than five hours. Since I’m 55 and have the bladder of a 3-year-old, I had to find a place to pee three times. “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America,” I muttered to myself as I whipped into a city park to take a leak behind a tree.

I didn’t know the immigration status of any of my clients. But I wondered: How is the misguided and aggressive targeting of the very people who serve us breakfast, teach our children, fix our cars, clean our hotel rooms, and comfort our sick “making America great”?

I have had a lot of questions since I returned to the United States to live and work on July 4, after having been away for 28 years. After serving as Reuters’s Ottawa bureau chief for five years, my job was eliminated in a cost-cutting drive. I wanted to stay in Canada, where I owned a home and my kids attended the local schools, but I was unable to find a new job that would allow me to. Crossing the border didn’t feel like a homecoming. America is as foreign to me today as Italy had been in 1998, when I started working there as a foreign correspondent.

It is a darker place now. In January, a mother of three and an intensive-care nurse were shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis as they observed the federal agents seeking to deport hardworking people who dream of making a better life for their children. Instead of bringing murder charges against the shooters, the Department of Justice brought charges against two prominent Black journalists who were covering the protests.

As a correspondent who covered politics on two continents, I have seen politicians in other countries use immigrants as scapegoats. It’s always a deadly approach, especially for the immigrants. But Trump needs scapegoats to distract from the gaping wound that is the relentless shrinking of America’s once-great middle class. That social grouping once included me. But not anymore.

In Canada, I made about $130,000 a year. In America, driving for Uber, I’m unlikely to exceed the $38,680 a year that is the federal poverty guideline for a family of five, and it takes twice that much to live comfortably in Northern Virginia.

In my previous jobs, I interviewed prime ministers and CEOs and documented humanitarian disasters for media organizations with a global reach. Now I provide a basic service, and I wait for my phone to beep.

For most of my life, my movement has given me both agency and freedom. Now, other people’s movement is a means for my survival.

I see my own fragility reflected in the people climbing into my back seat: widows, migrants, parents—workers stitching together lives on the margins. We are all improvising, all one broken transmission or missed paycheck away from something even worse. For the first time in my life, I am not observing this precarious world from the outside, notebook in hand. I am inside it, dependent on an algorithm to find me passengers and map my destinations, measuring my worth in $5 increments.

Russ Feingold has seen the headlines about how the Trump administration is abandoning the struggle to save the planet. Each one is more dire than the last: “Trump’s Latest Plan to Undo the ‘Holy Grail’ of Climate Rules: Never Mind the Science”; “Trump’s Anti-Green Agenda Could Lead to 1.3 Million More Climate Deaths”; and “One Year After Trump’s Inauguration, the Damage to Environmental Policy Is Unprecedented.” The former US senator from Wisconsin, who served for almost two decades as one of the chamber’s most ardent advocates for climate action, publicly rebuked Trump’s January 7 withdrawal of the United States from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): “Nothing in the Constitution grants the president any such power.” That cry of frustration echoes the sentiments of many environmentalists in a moment when the Trump administration seems to be reversing all the progress that Feingold and others fought to achieve after the awakening that Americans experienced on the first Earth Day in 1970. Not only has the president distanced the country from global initiatives to battle climate change and other forms of environmental degradation, but politically and economically powerful figures, such as Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, have been sending mixed signals about existential environmental issues. Feingold refers to the current state of affairs as “this horrible nightmare that we’re going through.”

Yet he has not given up on the prospect of building international coalitions to save the planet. In fact, he is actively forging them as a globe-trotting citizen diplomat on behalf of one of the most underreported yet strikingly successful environmental initiatives of our time. As the chair of the global steering committee of the Campaign for Nature—an international effort based on the tenet that “the rapid loss of biodiversity threaten[s] the very existence of humanity on Earth”—Feingold has emerged as a high-profile advocate for the ambitious agenda outlined in the somewhat clumsily named yet vital Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). This framework was agreed to in 2022 at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The GBF, which aims to formally protect at least 30 percent of the world’s land and water by 2030, has been described as the “Paris Agreement for nature”—a reference to the better-known 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, the landmark international treaty that pledges “to limit the [global] temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

The history on all this goes back a long way, to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where 108 heads of state and government laid the groundwork for what they hoped would be sustainable environmental development. That meeting outlined the UNFCCC and the Convention on Biological Diversity, and it began the discussions that led to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), proposals that were designed to address the interconnected concerns of what has been described as a “triple planetary crisis” of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These agreements did not represent the end of the fight for sustainability, but rather the beginning of processes that would seek the formal ratification of treaties and the international buy-in to implement them. In the wake of the Paris Agreement and the work that extended from it, progress on climate change would grab headlines for many years. But now the headlines announce, as The New York Times did on February 9 of this year, “Trump Allies Near ‘Total Victory’ in Wiping Out U.S. Climate Regulation.”

While many climate activists despair at how Trump and his international allies are stymieing serious responses to the climate crisis, the Campaign for Nature and its allies have had considerable, if far from complete, success in pursuing the GBF’s global target.

The campaign was founded in 2018 in partnership with the Wyss Campaign for Nature, a $1.5 billion conservation project under the umbrella of the Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss’s eponymous foundation. (Wyss is one of the world’s most prolific donors to environmental causes.) The Campaign for Nature has focused squarely on efforts to get world leaders to support and fund the “30 by 30” goal—an ambitious target at a time when only 16 percent of the world’s land and 8 percent of its seas are under formal protection. It has also emphasized the importance of including Indigenous peoples and local communities in these initiatives, a longtime concern of Feingold’s. The campaign’s organizers and allies are not naïve. “If we are to meet the 30 by 30 goal,” the group explains on its website, “world leaders need to dramatically increase and expand protected and conserved areas, ramp up funding and ensure the full inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in conservation measures in order to protect the natural world.”

And yet they must continue to advance toward the goal by attracting support not just from more historically progressive nations with records of leading on environmental issues but from countries that—even if they do not embrace Trump’s most extreme stances—have been uneven in their commitment to address the climate crisis.

How can the cause of nature be advanced at a time when efforts to address interconnected environmental crises are being so aggressively blocked by right-wing politicians and fossil-fuel-industry apologists? “Somehow nature still has not become a dirty word, believe it or not,” Feingold told me. “They managed to turn climate into a dirty word. And, of course, they are interrelated, and they are both essential. But there is an interesting way in which a lot of people feel comfortable working on the nature issue who may be edgy about the climate issues. So our goal is to link the two.”

To that end, Feingold is doing what he used to do in the Senate, where he became well-known for his rapprochement with conservatives despite his progressive bona fides. Capitalizing on the fact that “nature is still something that crosses not just party lines but ideological lines,” Feingold leads a steering committee that includes progressives such as former Irish president Mary Robinson along with Iván Duque, who served as the president of Colombia from 2018 to 2022 and whom Feingold rightly describes as “very conservative.” Malcolm Turnbull, the former prime minister of Australia, is another, moderately conservative member of the committee, along with Lord Zac Goldsmith, who served in the cabinets of British Conservative Party governments led by Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak—not exactly the credentials of a “woke” internationalist.

Feingold has worked with the Campaign for Nature since 2019, but he stepped up his involvement, and his global travels, after leaving his previous position as president of the American Constitution Society (a progressive counterpart to the Federalist Society) in the spring of 2025. As a roving ambassador for the campaign over the past year, he has maintained a grueling schedule of meetings with world leaders to persuade them to sign on to the efforts to achieve the GBF’s 30-by-30 goal. And it’s working.

At a moment when Trump has shocked world leaders with talk of grabbing Greenland and annexing Canada as part of his scheming to dominate mineral-rich lands and the Arctic waters adjoining them, Feingold and his allies are working to ratify and sustain an agreement that could “counter, potentially, what Trump wants to do in terms of scooping up the oceans.”

Today, Mary K. Simkhovitch is little remembered. But in the first half of the 20th century, her name was everywhere. As an advocate for New York’s poor and a friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, she appeared often in the press. As a leading member of the settlement-house movement alongside Jane Addams, Lillian Wald, and Florence Kelley, she founded Greenwich House, a bustling social-services and arts center. As the author of numerous studies on urban poverty and slum conditions, she became a prominent advocate for government-supported housing and helped launch New York City’s public housing system. Upon her death, The New York Times noted that she’d “occupied an important place in the life of this city for fifty years.” The NBC Radio Network broadcast a play reenacting her funeral, with a crowd of children standing outside the church, in rain and sleet, to pay their respects.

Greenwich House is still going strong, but the ideas that once animated the settlement-house movement no longer have much purchase in a world of neo–social Darwinism and radical critiques of capitalism. In her new biography of Simkhovitch, A Slumless America, Betty Boyd Caroli attempts to recover the life of this formidable figure. Her book provides a window into a set of views that seem both hopelessly archaic and yet still useful in thinking about our future. We can learn much from the strengths and limitations of Simkhovitch’s approach to social change. For all her accomplishments, Simkhovitch’s efforts nevertheless left in place the social structures that continue to undermine further advances.

Like many settlement-house workers, Simkhovitch—née Mary Melinda Kingsbury—came from an old-line Protestant family, one not rich but thoroughly respectable. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, during the Reconstruction era, she lived into the early days of the Cold War.

Simkhovitch’s commitment to reform stemmed from her religious belief. A devout Episcopalian, she attended church almost every day of her adult life. As a 14-year-old, she first witnessed urban poverty when she volunteered at a Sunday school that her church sponsored in an African American neighborhood in Boston. During a post-undergraduate year she spent at the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College), Simkhovitch embraced the Social Gospel: the belief that religion had to go beyond a relationship with God to encompass helping others in need.

She began to put this idea into practice working at Denison House, an early settlement house in what is now Boston’s Chinatown. One of her Harvard Annex classmates, Gertrude Stein, went in a very different direction, but both represented a cohort of young women trying to carve out careers and identities independent of men. Settlement houses were meant to help poor city dwellers with education, social services, and cultural enrichment. But equally important, they provided an opportunity for adventurous middle-class women, who otherwise would have been restricted to domestic life, to live with their peers in female-led, cosmopolitan communities, secular orders for social reform.

A year spent at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin from 1895 to ’96 broadened Simkhovitch’s political perspectives. There, she was exposed to a brand of socialism centered not on revolution but on the expansion of the existing state to provide needed services to the citizenry. Rapid industrialization and urbanization had led to poverty, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions in many parts of Europe. State action, a growing number of German socialists argued, could alleviate suffering and stabilize society by providing housing, transportation, and recreation. Simkhovitch, after touring some publicly financed housing of the kind that the United States wouldn’t have for another four decades, declared that “the municipal socialism of Berlin” was “well worth copying.”

It was at university in Berlin that the young American also met her future husband, Vladimir Gregorievitch Simkhovitch. Caroli devotes as much attention to Simkhovitch’s personal life as she does to her professional activity. In many ways, Simkhovitch—even as she embraced a politics of radical reform—remained remarkably conventional, true to her proper, middle-class, New England upbringing. Her marriage to V.G., as his friends called him, was the one big exception. Of Russian and Jewish background, Vladimir lived a life of grand gestures, some of them outside his means. Though he was very different in temperament and lifestyle from Mary, the couple remained loyal to one another, even in difficult times.

In 1902, after moving to New York City, Simkhovitch founded Greenwich House in what is now the West Village. It was far from the first such establishment in the city, and in many ways it was typical of the 400 settlement houses that would eventually spring up in the country. (Four hundred!) Located in what was then a poor, predominantly Italian immigrant neighborhood (and which, these days, you must be rich to afford), Greenwich House provided social services, a kindergarten, a wide array of clubs and classes, vocational training, and recreation to community residents. Like most settlement houses, it embraced a paternalistic ethos, with the assumption being that the poor needed to learn how to maintain a household, raise their children, and navigate society properly. Also, after initially serving white and Black community members, it succumbed to the norm and operated on a whites-only basis.

Simkhovitch, an able administrator and fundraiser, built Greenwich House into a powerful institution, with multiple buildings, a music school, a world-renowned pottery program, and much more. At the same time, she plunged into reform movements of all kinds, including women’s suffrage, the suppression of prostitution, improved maternal and children’s health, and support for labor organizing, widows’ pensions, and public housing. Meanwhile, Vladimir secured a position teaching economic history at Columbia University and became a well-known art collector and dealer as well. For long stretches, the couple kept their own living quarters and traveled separately, but they still seemed to draw sustenance and support from one another.

Simkhovitch’s career, interesting as it was, would not be very notable if hadn’t been for her deep engagement with housing, which Caroli foregrounds in her book’s title. Even before she founded Greenwich House, Simkhovitch had come to believe that government action was needed to reduce the cost of housing. Some reformers thought that government regulation would lead the private sector to eliminate slum conditions and address the severe shortage of affordable homes in cities like New York. Simkhovitch argued that it would take more; she believed, in Caroli’s words, that “safe, affordable housing was a human right, like water and air, and government had to provide it since private investors could not.”

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Apparently, this famous quote was written by the 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire, but I first heard the line in the movie The Usual Suspects. I think about it often, as it encapsulates Donald Trump’s relationship with the Republicans on the Supreme Court.

The Donald Trump who exists in the real world—the racist, fascist sexual predator who happily tweets out the illegal and unconstitutional motivations for his policies—does not exist according to the Supreme Court. Instead, the court has invented a different Trump, one who does not speak, does not lie, and adheres to the well-established norms regarding the use of executive power. It has dreamed up a normal US president, grafted this creation onto Trump’s legal filings, and then ruled as if this fiction were reality.

There is a legal doctrine that explains what I believe the Supreme Court is doing: the “presumption of regularity,” which dates at least as far back as 1926. This doctrine instructs courts to assume that members of the executive branch have acted properly and in good faith. An administration is presumed to have bona fide reasons for its actions, and those actions are assumed not to be “pretextual,” meaning that courts are not supposed to act like the administration has invented a plausibly legal reason to justify its plainly illegal actions. The presumption of regularity is afforded to members of the executive branch and no one else. Only they can waltz into court and expect people to take them at their word.

We hear the Supreme Court invoke the presumption of regularity all the time, especially during oral arguments, when the justices talk about giving “deference” to the administration. This administration deserves no deference, because it lies all the time. But the presumption of regularity instructs the court to defer to the administration and assume it is telling the truth.

The result is that the court presumes Trump had a good reason for shutting down DEI programs, even when there is clear evidence of the flagrant racism behind such actions. It presumes the administration tried its best to follow the rules before taking a chainsaw to the administrative state—even though it was a private billionaire who did the cutting, in violation of all the rules. And it presumes there’s a real national emergency simply because the president said so—never mind that the only national emergency is the armed goons invading our cities.

In embracing this doctrine, the Supreme Court is asking us to do something patently insane—and one of the many ways we know this is that many other courts are refusing to fall for the trick. A study released by the digital law journal Just Security last November found more than 60 cases in which lower courts called out the Trump administration for basing its arguments on misinformation, and it cited numerous instances of lower-court judges castigating the Trump administration for “bad faith” conduct, “manifestly unreasonable” or “contrived” legal arguments, and supplying the court with “mischaracterized,” “misleading,” or “intentionally false” evidence and information.

Lower courts have, in essence, rejected the presumption of regularity. They are no longer treating this administration as normal. But the problem is that they are consistently overruled by the Supreme Court.

This, however, may be changing. The Supreme Court has played Trump’s game for a decade, but two recent cases suggest that even Trump’s handpicked justices might be getting sick of his treating them like idiots.

In December, in an unsigned “shadow docket” opinion, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to deploy the National Guard to Chicago. Trump argued that he should be allowed to deploy the Guard because the regular police forces in Chicago couldn’t uphold the law. The majority didn’t buy his argument—which predictably pissed off the justices who think Trump should be treated as a god-king. In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Clarence Thomas) wrote: “[T]he President said unequivocally that he had ‘determined that the regular forces of the United States are not sufficient to ensure the laws of the United States are faithfully executed…in Chicago.’… Not only is this statement sufficient on its face, but under the presumption of regularity, the Court must presume that the President properly arrived at his determination.” (Emphasis mine.)

Not long after, the court heard a case challenging the firing of Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. During oral arguments, alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, of all people, pointed out that Trump’s stated reason for firing Cook (that she lied on a mortgage application) was pretextual. He suggested that the administration had made up a reason for firing her since it couldn’t admit it was doing so because of policy disagreements. (Fed commissioners can only be fired “for cause.”) Kavanaugh described the administration’s process as tantamount to “let’s find something, anything, about this person, and then we’re good.”

“I’m here at the market—come help me, I bought a lot to carry with me.”

With this short message, my father told me on a recent morning that he had decided to go to the market. He knew prices were high, yet he chose to buy more food despite the cost. In Gaza, people don’t always buy food because they need it today—they buy it because they fear it might not be there tomorrow.

The morning was Saturday, February 28, 2026, the same one that international news reported that after Israel, along with the United States, had launched a military strike inside Iran. For much of the world, this probably seemed like a distant crisis, one they could read, even amid their horror, through a political or military lens. But in Gaza, the news was more than a far-off event—it was an early warning of what might come.

In a place that has endured two years of genocide and long years of blockade, any regional escalation is immediately read as a direct threat to daily life. Israel often takes advantage of such moments to tighten its control over Gaza, restrict access to essential goods, and limit movement, making daily life even more precarious for residents, while much of the world and the media remain distracted or unaware of what is happening on the ground.

The signs appeared quickly. Israel sealed off Gaza’s borders—blocking the flow not just of goods but also humanitarian aid. It even shut down travel crossings that allow patients to leave Gaza for urgent medical treatment abroad.

With the closures, fuel and gas trucks—which had only just begun to pick up after the ceasefire required Israel to lift its near-total siege—stopped entering the territory. These supplies are essential for running generators, cooking, and operating some basic facilities. In a place where more than 2 million people live in a small area with high population density, and where daily life depends almost entirely on what enters through these crossings, any closure can quickly become a real crisis—especially during Ramadan, when families need more food and essential goods.

Hours after hearing the news, I went to the market myself.

What I saw there was fear and anxiety. People’s faces were tense as they crowded into shops to buy both essential and nonessential goods in larger quantities than usual. Lines stretched outside the stores, and people moved quickly between the stalls, filling bags with as much as they could.

Meanwhile, prices were already rising.

I first went to the vegetable seller, as it is usually the first to be affected in such circumstances. Just two days earlier, ten kilograms of potatoes had cost around $10. By the time I arrived, the same amount had risen to about $30. And it wasn’t just potatoes—prices for many vegetables and other food items, like flour and sugar, were climbing quickly.

The fear people felt, and their rush, was not based on political analysis—it was grounded in long experience with crises. For nearly 20 years, people in Gaza have lived under a blockade, which Israel tightened to siege levels during the worst days of the genocide. For months, they endured the hardest days of famine, facing death traps at aid distribution points, with thousands killed or injured just to secure a kilo of flour and a basic meal. Some were forced to drink saltwater to survive, while others walked hours to gather a few food for their families.

During that time, food was no longer just a daily need—it became an obsession.

For me, it reached the point where I looked for any way to produce food myself. At one stage, I found myself trying to farm as much as I could—not because I wanted to, but because the idea of not being able to feed my family was terrifying.

This is why, when people hear news of border closures or regional escalation, they do not treat it as distant news—they hear it as a loud, blaring alarm.

Even so, not all families are able to respond to this alarm. Some do not have the money to buy extra, while others have no space to store it in cramped homes or worn-out tents in the middle of winter. Preparation becomes a privilege not everyone can afford.

As 29-year-old Ahmed Asfour explained: “I didn’t have enough money to buy anything because my work had stopped, but I borrowed and bought what I could, fearing the crossings would stay closed and we would return to days of famine.”

As international aid organizations warned that food and medical supplies could run out quickly in Gaza, and that a halt in fuel imports could paralyze essential services, life in the occupied West Bank took its own dire turn. Once the US and Israeli bombs began dropping on Iran, Israel closed all checkpoints between cities, isolating Palestinians from each other and forcing them onto circuitous routes to reach their homes. The occupation also banned access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron for several consecutive days during Ramadan—a historically unprecedented measure.

In Gaza, the question is: Will I find food today? In the West Bank, it is: Can I reach my home, my mosque? For Palestinians, any regional tension quickly turns into tangible restrictions on daily life—through crossings in Gaza or checkpoints in the West Bank—amid ongoing violations and pressures on the population.

Dr. Ismail al-Thawabta, a humanitarian expert, warned that the closures constitute a form of collective punishment prohibited under international humanitarian law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention. “The ongoing closure of the Rafah crossing and its severe humanitarian consequences constitute a legal and moral responsibility of the occupying authorities and demands accountability under established international mechanisms,” he explained.

In recent days, the Israeli occupation partially reopened the Rafah crossing, but Thawabta noted that concerns remain about the speed and volume of incoming supplies and whether this gradual process will be enough to stabilize the markets. Thus far, the flow of supplies remains severely limited. Many essential goods, including cooking gas, chicken, and other basic food items, have disappeared from the markets, forcing people to return to cooking over wood fires, a hardship they had recently tried to move away from, especially during this month of Ramadan.

And so, in Gaza, the fear remains. Here, geopolitics is not measured by rockets or maps of influence. It is measured by the price of bread, the number of days food will last, and the simple, recurring question: Will the crossing open tomorrow?

That is why a rocket does not need to fall in Gaza for its shadow to be felt. Even before a war officially begins, and before Gaza is mentioned in any formal statement, the impact of escalation has already started. In Palestine, the war abroad is always felt at home.

One thing that AIPAC and its critics have usually agreed on is that the hard-line Zionist lobby group is fearsomely powerful, a kingmaker that can boost or destroy political careers. In the wake of the 2022 midterms, AIPAC crowed: “More than 95% of AIPAC-backed candidates won their election last night! Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”

This chest-thumping is designed to scare off critics. In an influential 2006 essay, the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt noted that “AIPAC prizes its reputation as a formidable adversary, of course, because it discourages anyone from questioning its agenda.” But the scholars also gave credence to the idea of a nearly unbeatable pro-­Israel lobby, claiming that AIPAC has “a stranglehold on the U.S. Congress.”

Mearsheimer and Walt might have had a point in 2006, but in 2026, AIPAC increasingly looks like a paper tiger—one that, despite its still-considerable reach, is regarded with growing skepticism and even disgust by voters.

The diminishment of AIPAC’s power has been a long time in the making, with the Gaza genocide accelerating a longer trend against AIPAC’s ultra-hawkish pro-Israel politics. According to Politico, a Quinnipiac poll in August 2025 found that “half of the voters surveyed, including 77 percent of Democrats, said they believe Israel is committing genocide.” In addition, “60 percent of voters disapprove of the U.S. sending military aid to Israel.”

And as Branko Marcetic noted in Jacobin, AIPAC’s claim of a 95 percent victory rate is disingenuous, given that it mostly endorses candidates who are overwhelming favorites to win and “meekly back[s] out of races where they’re likely to lose, to avoid putting a blemish on their record.” While AIPAC did win significant victories against progressives such as Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in 2024, it was aided by extraneous factors (such as the redistricting that gave Bowman a less-friendly district).

More recently, AIPAC and the broader pro-Israel lobby have suffered some stinging defeats. For instance, Bill Ackman, Michael Bloomberg, and other billionaires—many of whom are hard-line Zionists—donated more than $40 million to the efforts to tank Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral campaign.

These groups made Mamdani’s criticism of Israel and defense of Palestinian rights one of the hot-button topics in both the primary race and the general election, blanketing the airwaves with fearmongering ads and smearing Mamdani as an antisemite to anyone who would listen. But voters rejected the propaganda, and Mamdani won by a landslide in both races.

In February, AIPAC suffered an even more significant boomerang defeat in a Democratic congressional primary in New Jersey. The lobby spent more than $2 million to defeat Tom Malinowski, a centrist Democrat with a hawkish record whom AIPAC sought to punish for suggesting that conditions might need to be put on US aid to Israel. The spending blitz helped knock Malinowski out of the race, but not in the way AIPAC wanted. The group’s preferred candidate, Tahesha Way, came in a distant third. Instead, the seat was won by Analilia Mejia, an unvarnished progressive who isn’t afraid to say that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Because the district leans Democratic, Mejia stands a good chance of winning the upcoming special election.

AIPAC’s Pyrrhic victory against Malinowski was carried out by tellingly deceptive means. Because the public has soured on Israel, AIPAC has become the lobby that dares not speak its name. In ads against Malinowski, the group didn’t mention Israel (since his more independent stance was likely to win him support) but rather focused on his past support for ICE funding. This kind of subterfuge has become standard practice for AIPAC.

Defeating Malinowski to elect Mejia is by any standard a perverse outcome from AIPAC’s point of view. Not only is it likely to push Congress further away from pro-Israel extremism, but it may also alienate the moderate pro-­Israel Democrats like Malinowski who have been a main pillar of the lobby’s power. Politico observed that “even [AIPAC’s] steadfast allies are frustrated” by the fact that the group flexed its muscle to destroy a centrist Democrat. One prominent centrist, Matt Bennett, a cofounder of the center-left think tank Third Way, derided ­AIPAC’s crushing of Malinowski as “one of the greatest own-goals in American political history.”

Immediately after Donald Trump was sworn in to his second term in the nation’s highest office, he launched an aggressive rollback of critical environmental-justice protections. In just one year, his administration has eliminated the 2009 endangerment finding, the scientific and legal basis for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions; weakened pollution limits; and offered industrial polluters exemptions to the rules that were designed to protect the environment and public health. Who is Trump and his Environmental Protection Agency doing this for?

I can tell you it is not for our kids. Not for working families. Not for the communities already bearing the brunt of pollution and climate disaster.

They are doing it for the oil and gas executives who bankrolled Trump’s reelection campaign, contributing over $75 million after he promised he’d grant their policy wish list if he won. Polluting fossil-fuel companies are receiving a fast pass for project approvals while reaping tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other government incentives. In a gross misuse of presidential power, Trump is making sure his donors see major returns from his policies. Take Energy Transfer and its executive chairman, Kelcy Warren, for example: They’ve contributed $25 million to Trump since he took office and are benefiting from his reinstituting exports of liquefied natural gas, which will allow them to extend operations and increase profits. Occidental Petroleum, which donated $1 million to Trump’s second inauguration, is now benefiting from the administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which offered tax breaks and subsidies to energy corporations.

Trump and his officials have made it easier for polluters to profit off our families, our public health, and our planet. As they continue to gut environmental funding, offices, and programs, we will see cancer risks rise. As they repeal essential safeguards, including limits on climate pollution and other toxic air emissions, asthma cases will increase.

In western Pennsylvania, which includes the district that I represent in Congress, we’ve seen the dangers of the climate crisis firsthand: more frequent flooding, stronger storms, and greater damage year after year. We suffer from some of the poorest air quality in the nation, and our families struggle with higher-than-average rates of asthma, cancer, heart disease, and exposure to toxic chemicals.

This doesn’t happen in a vacuum, either; it’s part of a cost-of-living crisis, and a reality for many of our neighbors. Dirty air means more trips to the doctor. Unsafe water means families have to dip into their paychecks to purchase bottled water. Extreme weather leads to lost homes, lost jobs, and prolonged recoveries.

But there is another way.

Our communities can work together to build a future in which no one has to choose between their health, their home, and their livelihood. We can reject these harmful policies and practices and reimagine safer and healthier neighborhoods.

When I served in the Pennsylvania legislature, I fought against these same destructive policies to prove what is possible. It’s the same fight I brought to Congress. That’s why I led the Pennsylvania Democratic delegation in fighting the EPA’s efforts to repeal the endangerment finding, which would erase our government’s responsibility to act against climate pollution. With the elimination of the endangerment finding, our loved ones and neighbors are now exposed to more pollution, more extreme weather events, and heightened public-health risks.

In Congress, I am working with my colleagues to launch the first-ever House Environmental Justice Caucus. Environmental justice often sounds more complicated than it is, but it simply means ensuring that every person who calls this country home has clean air, clean water, and a safe, healthy community. With those values, I will continue fighting alongside frontline communities for policies like the A. Donald McEachin Environmental Justice for All Act, which addresses the disproportionate impact that toxic-waste sites and pollution-causing fossil-fuel infrastructure have on communities of color and low-income communities, and to ensure that we are shaping the work ahead together.

In the fourth season of Industry, everyone has a story to sell: a neutered fund or loveless marriage, shamed husbands, a life aimless after retirement, a payment-processing firm hampered by its ties to porn and sex work. These labels seem to indicate mistaken priorities or misplaced trust. But they are just narratives to be refined or redefined. Everything is up for grabs if you tell the right story. The right story can justify anything: Lies, fraud, financial malfeasance, corporate espionage, and distraction are all just different ways of telling your story. If your story is good enough, the truth will eventually catch up—or at least that’s what Industry’s characters believe.

Old narratives, like the older seasons of this show, are just fodder for the new. Industry, which remains in the hands of its creators, Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, was once about young, ambitious university graduates out of their depth in a bustling bank at the center of London’s financial markets. These days, Industry is about seasoned and cynical operators. Gone are the frenetic trading floors; now our heroes operate in lavish hotels and palatial dining rooms. The buzz of ringing phones, shouted prices, and moving trend lines on tick charts has given way to one-on-one conflict. The show’s main characters are no longer neophytes; they can move markets with a well-placed word.

If the early seasons of Industry were about those who get chewed up on the ground floor by the voracious beast that is international finance, this season concerns the maximalist mythmaking of market movers. Full of visually striking settings—town houses with intricate wallpapers and plush armchairs, magnificent country estates—the show depicts a set of people desperate to write themselves into the leading roles they think they deserve. Even Nathan Micay’s pulsing electronic score is now overshadowed by an incredible volume of needle drops. Industry is no longer HBO’s neglected stepchild.

In a clear indication that this season will expand the show’s palate, the first episode begins with two characters we’ve never seen before. A journalist and a corporate assistant are circling each other in a nightclub. The journalist is investigating a rising fintech company called Tender that’s seeking to become a full-fledged bank—even a “bank-­killer,” in the words of its CFO. The corporate assistant, although seemingly exploited, is central to Tender’s nefarious methods for bending people to its will. In this story about the carrot and the stick, the assistant is a stick dressed in orange.

At the center of Tender is another newcomer to the series, Whitney Halberstram (played by Max Minghella), the hollow core around whom much of this season orbits. Ethnically ambiguous, of allegedly ignoble origins, and with an unplaceable American accent, Whitney seems unflappable and always operates from a position of power. Relentless in his attempts to manipulate, first through flattery, then through advice or legal counsel, and finally through blackmail, he plays Industry’s characters much like he does the financial markets. He knows what to promise, how to distract, and the right lie to tell about his upbringing; he crafts narratives intended to mold the world to his aims. When his business partner cautions him against his ambitions for Tender, saying, “That’s not our story,” Whitney writes him out of the story altogether.

Yet even as these CEOs and CFOs wrestle with each other, the emotional heart of the series lies in two women who started as grads at the investment bank of Pierpoint & Co. in Industry’s first season: Harper (Myha’la), an American college dropout who reinvents herself in London through sheer gumption, even if her drive and unscrupulousness get her in trouble as often as they rake in millions; and Yasmin (Marisa Abela), a child of privilege who can speak more than half a dozen languages and relies on her family’s wealth and connections—at least until her father’s transgressions destroy her own stability. Harper and Yasmin are the real rivals in the show, the mythological figures pushing and pulling each other down: They are sometimes confidants, sometimes frenemies, but ultimately each sees the other as the only person in the world who understands her.

To wage their mortal struggle, Harper teams up with her old mentor, Eric (Ken Leung), and starts a new fund that pursues only short-selling strategies, meaning that she is invested in undermining a particular stock’s story, and the company she sets her sights on is Whitney’s. Because Harper sees herself in Whitney, she recognizes Tender for the fraud it is—and by taking such an extreme and unpopular opinion, becomes the righteous underdog, justifying any means to expose the company (and make boatloads of money in the process). Yasmin, meanwhile, has pursued a strategic marriage with the depressed aristocrat Henry Muck (Kit Harington). She manipulates the narrative around Henry to push him back on the path to success—albeit only on her terms—and gets him appointed as Tender’s CEO. A sad princeling desperate for redemption, Henry proves to be the perfect puppet for Yasmin’s schemes—until he starts to believe that he doesn’t really need her.

It is telling that both Yasmin and Har­per trace their craving for success to their love-starved childhoods. Yasmin wants to be necessary in a world in which everything is bought, sold, or traded; Harper seeks to prove herself at any cost. Their ambition won’t ever heal the wound that love was supposed to fill. (Sex is everywhere in this show, but like money, it has little to do with love. Even the saddest men in Industry are desperate to buy a new story, one in which a girl happily calls them “Daddy.”) While Yasmin and Harper don’t exactly want each other’s love, their entanglements with Tender eventually bring them together. Their stories finally intersect when their interests do.

When you can no longer rely on the stability of the past, you have to write a new future. But it is easier to unmake an old story than it is to wrangle a new one into shape.

Harper and her team are harsh critics, pointing out the plot holes in Tender’s and in Henry’s and Whitney’s narratives. Yet as the narratives that the characters continuously parrot fall apart, the show itself follows Tender’s arc, expanding to cover up a hollow center. The story is a mystery with a sleight of hand at its source. But Industry makes this hollowness the point. And the way Harper, Yasmin, and Henry react to the unraveling story and Whitney’s efforts to overwrite their suspicions is what propels the latter half of the season.

Yes!

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, by a considerable margin, the most talented, charismatic, and visionary young politician in a party that desperately needs a transformative new national leader.

No one represents the emerging ideology of the Democratic Party better than AOC, and no one is better at articulating that vision in public, on social media, and in Congress. If we hope to build a successful movement for social democracy, at some point the Democrats must give their presidential nomination to someone who both believes in it and can sell it to the broader electorate.

As a former bartender and someone who graduated from college tens of thousands of dollars in debt, AOC better represents ordinary Americans and the future demographics of the party than whatever soulless, consultant-backed concoction the Democrats’ elderly leadership will surely try to foist on us in 2028. Unlike most members of Congress, AOC isn’t a lawyer, an independently wealthy tech baron, or someone who spent years climbing the rungs of her party’s hierarchy. She isn’t a product of the well-worn Ivy League–to-district-­attorney-to-senator pipeline. Her life experience as a normal human being is a central feature of her national appeal.

She also fixes the chief weakness of the progressive movement’s outgoing leader, Senator Bernie Sanders, who often surrounded himself with people who publicly despised the Democratic Party and unwittingly alienated older primary voters who uncritically love it. While she’s no “vote blue no matter who” automaton, AOC recognizes that constantly slagging the Democratic Party while trying to appeal to its most dedicated voters is a losing strategy. In Congress, AOC has proved to be a pragmatist who can navigate the byzantine internal politics of the House without sacrificing the core of her ideology or her viral appeal.

Of course, electability fetishists are already fine-tuning their playbook against AOC, and they will surely tell us that the “safe” choice is a moderate white guy eager to bash trans folks and tack right on immigration. Critics will focus on AOC’s perceived disadvantages, including her status as a far-right hobbyhorse and her relatively high unfavorability ratings. But her meteoric rise as a political star merely accelerated an inevitable process of demonization at the hands of the right-wing propaganda apparatus. Pete Buttigieg, of all people, showed he understood this best when he said during a 2019 Democratic presidential debate in Detroit, “If we embrace a far-left agenda, they’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to say we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. So let’s just stand up for the right policy, go out there, and defend it.”

AOC is the Democrats’ best opportunity to escape a self-destructive cycle of worrying so much about what swing voters or wavering Republicans will think that they end up picking candidates whose overmanaged, carefully orchestrated campaign strategies fail to win the very voters that their theory says they should.

A plausible case could be made for AOC to challenge flailing Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer for his seat in 2028 instead of trying to win the presidency as an incumbent member of the House, a maneuver that has not been pulled off successfully since James Garfield did it in 1880. But there’s no guarantee that she could take out Schumer or that there will ever be another opportunity like 2028.

If a Democrat wins the 2028 election, his or her vice president will likely have the inside track on the nomination in 2032 or 2036. By 2040, AOC will be in her 50s, presumably with a long track record in the Senate for critics to pick over. And who knows where the zeitgeist will be in 14 years.

With the GOP nominee in 2028 most likely to be the slick fortysomething vice president, JD Vance, whose main role in the Trump administration appears to be “social media influencer,” Democrats must counter with a youthful, agile, media-savvy politician, someone who can turn out the young and irregular voters that the party would need to win a resounding victory and finally give it the mandate to pursue real progressive change. The stakes of this election, which will include the GOP’s chance to consolidate the dysfunctional, autocratic gangster state that it has been building since January 2025, are simply too high for Democrats to run another cautious, focus-group-driven figure who can’t turn out the party’s base.

Voters elect a person, not a policy platform, and Democrats should at long last offer them someone whose virtues as a human being and a communicator make her palatable to swing voters who prize Sanders-esque authenticity, who is capable of winning a bruising general-election campaign, and who will be up to the herculean task of transforming the United States into the world’s first truly multiracial social democracy.

That someone is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

David Faris

No!

Let me be clear: If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides to run for president, I will campaign for her. She is an extraordinary talent—a politician who can be strategic, inspirational, and principled in equal measure. Most electeds, even those with ties to social movements and solid voting records, focus on legislation and their own reelection, leaving the bigger questions to party leadership. But AOC has always prioritized something else: building a path toward political transformation.

She works hard to get other socialists and progressives elected while articulating a new direction for the Democratic Party. Her vision of a green, social-democratic politics brings together anti-elite populism, structural reform, and a celebration of the diversity of the working class. Crucially, AOC also connects the inside baseball of Congress to the outside world. She mobilizes public opinion behind both short-term policy goals and her long-term agenda. And she has done all of this while avoiding self-marginalization and co-optation.

There are about 75 million pigs being raised on farms in the United States, with about a third of that total in Iowa, the nation’s top hog state. Jeff and Deb Hansen founded Iowa Select Farms, now the largest pork producer in the state, in 1992. The Hansens offer a case study in how regional oligarchs can deploy their wealth, political influence, and charitable giving to defend their enterprises from local, state, and federal regulation. Through their capture of Iowa’s political apparatus, the Hansens drive national pork policy.

The pork industry has been consolidating since the 1990s, with a 70 percent decline in the number of farms with hogs, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Large conglomerates have steadily replaced the smaller integrated farms that once used modest amounts of waste from their hogs and other animals as fertilizer.

Watching the consolidation of the poultry industry, the Hansens first became successful manufacturing concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs). Large production sheds, known as “confinements,” hold up to 2,500 sows, which are pumped full of antibiotics to help them survive their cramped, windowless existence. CAFOs generate colossal amounts of manure waste, forming gargantuan anaerobic lagoons that foul the air and pollute local water supplies around the farm.

By the early 1990s, the Hansens’ CAFO business was bringing in $90 million a year. “After steadily expanding their confinement-building business,” writes Iowa native Austin Frerick, the author of Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry, “the Hansens decided they could also make money by raising their own hogs.” Starting with a herd of 10,000 sows, Iowa Select Farms grew into the country’s fourth-largest hog producer, with roughly 260,000 sows.

You can smell these hog-raising operations from miles away, much to the detriment of their neighbors. In 2003, the company settled a lawsuit filed by residents of Sac County, who complained that a farm with 30,000 hogs produced foul odors, noxious gases, and swarms of flies. An expert witness for the plaintiffs testified that the farm produced as much waste as a city of 90,000 to 150,000 people.

The Hansens’ wealth has since increased, from $272 million in 2024 to an estimated $1 billion in 2026, according to Wealth-X. But from their 7,000-square-foot mansion in a leafy, gated neighborhood in Des Moines, the Hansens don’t notice the excrement. Nor do they smell the manure lagoons from their private jet (rumored to be emblazoned with the name When Pigs Fly).

In 2020, pork prices plummeted as the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted the market. Iowa Select Farms responded by exterminating thousands of hogs. According to The Intercept, the company shut off the CAFOs’ ventilation systems, suffocating and overheating the pigs as ammonia gas from the manure lagoons lingered in the air. Video cameras recorded the death throes of these terrified, sentient animals, and a whistleblower reported being ordered to “euthanize” the surviving pigs with captive bolt guns.

In the 1990s, as the political pressure to regulate CAFOs increased, the Hansens fought to shape legislation in the Iowa Legislature aimed at establishing guardrails for the industry. Passed in 1995, the resulting bill stripped away the power of county boards of supervisors to deny construction permits for CAFOs, a blow to the local control of land use. The law permits CAFOs to be constructed as close as a quarter-mile from residences, a distance that does little to diminish the odor and flies or the environmental harms such as groundwater contamination.

In subsequent years, the Hansens have discouraged the further regulation of CAFOs by donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to politicians. They’ve contributed over $300,000, for example, to Iowa’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, making Deb Hansen her top individual donor. They’ve also worked to keep the state’s entire congressional delegation subservient to the pork industry.

As with many other oligarchs, the Hansens’ charitable giving serves as a taxpayer-subsidized extension of their private power. In 2019, Governor Reynolds attended a gala for the Deb and Jeff Hansen Foundation, where she auctioned off a private lunch and tour of the Iowa Capitol with her. The winning bid of $4,250 came from Gary Lynch, another Iowa hog baron and GOP donor. (The largest charitable donation listed by the Hansens’ foundation in its most recent filing is $317,760 to the Iowa Pork Producers Association. The same year, it gave $25,000 to Children’s Cancer Connection.)

The espresso machine in Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s personal office in Newport Beach, California, retails for $14,000—almost as much as the $14,674 annual wage of the coffee giant’s median worker, a part-time barista.

In other words, nearly half of Starbucks’s 361,000 employees would have to spend every dime they make over an entire year to buy just one of these deluxe caffeine-delivery systems. In 2024, Niccol pocketed $95.8 million in compensation. With that windfall, he could have purchased 6,843 units of his favorite coffee maker—more than enough to luxuriously outfit every single elementary-school teachers’ lounge in the state of California.

So go the absurdities of our ever more unequal world.

Ordinary Americans across the political spectrum have been fuming about the obscene disparities in pay between corporate America’s CEOs and workers ever since those gaps began to soar in the Reagan years. But today, with budget cuts threatening the food and medical aid that so many working families depend on, the corrosive social cost of this exploding inequality has come into particularly sharp relief.

At many of our nation’s largest employers, median salaries have fallen below the $36,777 family-of-three income threshold for Medicaid benefits. Those employers, our research at the Institute for Policy Studies finds, are familiar names to most Americans: Starbucks, Home Depot, Autozone, Chipotle, Target, Walmart, and other corporate giants.

Pay practices at big businesses like these don’t just shaft workers. They allow corporations to shift their employees’ basic living costs onto taxpayers, which means we’re all subsidizing Brian Niccol’s ocean-view lattes—and the corporate jet he uses to commute to the company’s headquarters in Seattle.

All of us are also subsidizing the $47 billion that Lowe’s has spent on stock buybacks over the past six years, an outlay that artificially inflates its CEO’s stock-based pay. And don’t forget those three DoorDash cofounders: They’ve each become billionaires while their “Dashers”—the workers who deliver the food—earn an average of $12.23 an hour.

How can we crack down on all this executive excess? A greater union presence in the United States would certainly help: Countries with higher unionization rates tend to have narrower corporate pay gaps. But decades of fierce union-busting have reduced the share of union members among US private-sector workers to a mere 5.9 percent.

That reality has the US labor movement and its allies eyeing taxes as a tool for narrowing the pay divide—while at the same time raising much-needed revenue at every level of government. The basic idea: Companies with huge gaps between CEO and worker pay should pay more in taxes. And the wider their pay gap, the higher their tax bill should be.

Progressives in Congress have introduced legislation along these lines, such as, most notably, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act and the Curtailing Executive Overcompensation (or CEO) Act. A number of state legislatures, including in Michigan, have similar bills pending.

On January 20, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney emerged as an unexpected hero, at least among those looking for an alternative to Trumpism, in an unlikely place: the World Economic Forum at Davos. Normally, Davos is a snooze-fest where the global elite exchange self-congratulatory clichés celebrating the status quo. But Carney broke from that dismal tradition by offering both a radical analysis of the failed present and a plausible alternative for the future.

Carney’s speech was delivered on a continent where the response to Donald Trump’s erratic and destabilizing return to power has consisted mostly of degrading supplication. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, for instance, nicknamed Trump “Daddy” when discussing the president’s mediation between Russia and Ukraine. Rutte then compounded his shame by saying, “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language.” Of course, putting yourself at the mercy of a capricious and abusive “Daddy” is not only debasing but an invitation to further bullying, as Trump showed when he mocked Rutte, quipping, “I think he likes me: ‘Daddy, you’re my daddy.’”

Against this background of European humiliation, Carney’s speech was a breath of fresh air. He candidly described how Trump’s lawless, zero-sum foreign policy has prompted the death spiral of American global hegemony, upended the liberal international order, and created a system of “intensifying great-power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.” But it also acknowledged the “fiction” of that order, which always had one rule for the US and its allies and another for everyone else. More important, Carney’s speech sketched out a new path for “middle powers” such as Canada to move outside the shadow of US domination by forging new alliances and trade relations.

Against Trump’s nihilistic vision of a world dominated by great-power imperialism, Carney advocated a much more inviting future, arguing that “intermediate powers like Canada are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity.”

The speech won Carney a standing ovation at Davos and lavish praise in the international press. Der Spiegel described it as “the speech the world has been waiting for.” The Washington Post hailed Carney as “the star” of Davos. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein celebrated it as “the most important foreign policy speech in years.”

But it wasn’t only the avatars of centrist conventional thinking who were heartened by Carney’s words. Anti-imperialists and anti-interventionists found themselves cheering his bracing critique of US domination. The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi enthused that he “never thought we would hear this level of honesty from a Western leader” and said Carney’s words would “be warmly welcomed in much of the Global South.” Other figures not normally given to extolling the Davos utterances of former central bankers, such as the libertarian Glenn Greenwald and the leftist Hasan Piker, were similarly impressed.

In purely rhetorical terms, Carney’s speech deserved the applause it received. It was bold and far-reaching, grappling honestly with political choices that will shape humanity’s common future. Yet the very fact that the speech was praised by both establishment stalwarts such as Klein and rabble-rousers such as Piker should give us pause. While both centrists and radicals could welcome Carney’s critique of Trump’s neo-imperialism, it’s far from clear what sort of “new order” he has in mind for the middle powers to build.

That’s because Carney’s speech actually contained two very different models of middle-power internationalism. One in effect promises neoliberalism, re-creating a 1990s-style world where economic growth is driven by international trade, domestic deregulation, and austerity.

The other model—glimmers of which are evident in Carney’s stress on human rights and sustainability as well as his critique of the hypocrisy of the old order—would be much more radical. It is a vision of a new international order committed to the idea of global equality, one that calls to mind the Bandung Conference of 1955, where African and Asian countries tried to assemble a nonaligned pact outside the destructive polarity of the Cold War. While the Bandung project failed, the current fraying of US hegemony raises the possibility of a renewed push for a multipolar system whereby smaller nations would work together to tackle pandemics, inequality, and climate change—and also, when necessary, unite to counter lawless great powers. This would be a project of middle-power social democracy: a world united to create a more equitable planet.

Carney is fascinating precisely because his vision contains both of these strands. He’s a political figure divided against himself, one whose signature move is to combine radical critique with conservative solutions. He is both a central banker and an antiestablishment thinker, a globalist who is also aware that neoliberal globalization is in a deep crisis. He has an outsider’s analysis of where the world has gone wrong, but he yearns for new institutions and policies that would essentially re-create a discredited old order. Carney’s Davos speech thus offered not a solution but a pressing question: What is the best path forward—middle-power neoliberalism or middle-power social democracy? And if Carney is the best alternative we currently have to Trumpism, what version of middle-power internationalism is he most likely to pursue?

Political ambiguity runs deeply through Carney’s biography. He was born in 1965 in the far north of Canada, in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories. (“The permafrost that underpins the land where I was born is now melting,” he reflected with rare melancholy in his 2021 manifesto, Value(s): Building a Better World.) When Carney was 6, his family moved to oil-rich Alberta, which he describes as “my home province.” Alberta is the most politically conservative province in Canada, with strains of evangelical Christianity, populist rage, and big-business boosterism that align more with the United States’ contemporary Republican Party than with Canada’s more traditionally sober conservatism. (It’s not a surprise that Trumpists such as Steve Bannon and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant have recently tried to encourage Alberta’s growing separatist movement.) But his father, Robert Carney, was an educator at both the high-school level and at the University of Alberta and was also active in the Liberal Party of Canada. The Liberal Party has always been a multifaceted alliance, with both a conservative business wing and a progressive wing. Yet being a Liberal partisan in Alberta was a lonely and contrarian vocation.

When Donald Trump, our mad king, declared that “we are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” because “ownership” is “psychologically important for me,” the reaction was immediate and predictable.

The foreign-policy establishment—what the former Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes dubbed “the Blob”—erupted in fury. Trump was trampling the so-called rules-based international order. “Territorial integrity and sovereignty are fundamental principles of international law,” lectured Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. Trump was endangering what Iraq War champion Bill Kristol called our “relatively benign order,” one that, neoconservative nabob Robert Kagan sermonized, was held together in part by “America’s reputation for morality and respect for international norms.”

There’s no question that Trump’s erratic, even demented, global policies— “Liberation Day tariffs,” dubbing NATO allies the “enemy within,” whining about a Nobel Peace Prize snub while bombing seven countries as well as fishing boats in the Caribbean, kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, pulling out of international organizations, and more—have stripped the mask off of American predation.

But Trump’s manic disruptions should not feed a romantic nostalgia about the “rules-based order.” The very same European leaders and anointed members of the Blob expressing outrage about Greenland were largely silent or supportive as Trump bombed Iran and Nigeria, abducted Maduro, and continued to aid and abet Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Nor should Trump’s follies whitewash the history of the rules-based order. His villainy may not be masked, but the reality is that the United States has always made the rules—and served as global policeman, judge, jury, and executioner.

Post–World War II America has been at war virtually nonstop, with more than 200 military interventions since 1950. We’ve launched wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, among others. Barack Obama, that Nobel Peace Prize–winning champion of democracy, ran what was essentially an assassination bureau out of the White House while bombing seven countries.

In 2015, under Obama, the United States supplied arms to 36 of the 49 countries labeled dictatorships by the pro-democracy research institute Freedom House. Over the last decade, the US has imposed unilateral sanctions on more than 60 countries, primarily in the Global South. Since World War II, we’ve launched regime-change operations—overt and covert—all over the world, from Indonesia to Iran to Guatemala, Chile, Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras, to name a few.

The rules-based order did create a dense web of institutions to regulate the global economy, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. These largely served the interests of Western multinational corporations and banks, enforcing the free flow of capital and providing protection for property but not for workers.

While defenders of the rules-based order celebrate the rise in living standards in the less-developed world, the predominant source of that increase was China’s state-capitalist regime, which played by its own set of rules. The economic prosperity of the rest is best captured by Oxfam’s 2026 World Inequality Report, which revealed that fewer than 60,000 people—0.001 percent of the world’s population—own three times the wealth of the entire bottom half of humanity.

Trump’s rise to power is largely a result of the increasing failure of this order to benefit working people in the US. The “job shock” from the global trade regime wiped out industrial towns across America, and governing elites failed to compensate the victims. Globalization empowered multinationals to undermine wages here and abroad. Endless and futile wars provoked increasing opposition. Global policing came at the expense of investments and reforms that were needed at home. Increasingly, housing, healthcare, education, and retirement security grew less and less affordable for the masses.

In early February, more than 1,000 Haitian migrants employed at the unionized JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, faced imminent deportation, as the Trump administration fought in federal court to revoke their temporary protected status. Many of the Haitians say they were brought to JBS as part of a human-trafficking scheme concocted by a supervisor in the company’s HR department. (A JBS spokesperson told me there was no evidence tying the company to the union’s claims.)

Among them is Carlos Saint Aubin, who fled from the gangs in Port-au-Prince to Brazil, where he began a harrowing journey on foot—across the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia, north to the US border. He came to Colorado after seeing TikTok videos promising jobs and housing. Instead, he ended up among the hundreds of Haitians packed more than six to a room at a roadside motel after working long hours. Now Saint Aubin is one of the lead plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit alleging that the Haitians on the evening shift there were forced to work as much as 50 percent faster than those on the daytime crew.

On February 4, less than 48 hours after a federal judge blocked their deportation, 99 percent of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union members at the facility voted to strike in what could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.      —Ted Genoways
 

On September 30, 1978, the performance artist Teh­ching Hsieh had himself locked inside a jail cell he’d built in his studio in lower Manhattan. The space was surrounded by wooden bars and measured just over 100 square feet; it contained a cot, a sink, a mirror, a pail, and a single bare light bulb on one wall. A friend brought Hsieh food and emptied the pail that he used as a toilet. For an entire year, Hsieh did not talk, read, write, listen to music, or watch TV. He thought and paced, slept and ate; he washed his hands and brushed his teeth. Each day, he marked the passage of time by having his photograph taken and carving a single mark into the wall with his nail clippers. On September 29, 1979, he was released.

One Year Performance 1978–1979—or Cage Piece, as it’s more commonly known —was neither Hsieh’s first artwork nor his first performance. But it signaled the start of a period in which he subjected himself to several yearlong feats of endurance in the name of art: After the cage, he would go on to punch a time clock literally once every hour, live outside on the streets of New York City, and tie himself, 24/7, to another artist, Linda Montano. All of these pieces were shaped by strict rules and meticulously documented. Together, they started to bring Hsieh, who was then an undocumented immigrant from Taiwan, into the avant-garde art world of New York—albeit at a remove, since he wasn’t very social and was never quite fluent in English.

By the mid-1980s, many curators, writers, and fellow artists knew what Hsieh was doing—even if, as is so often the case with his work, they didn’t understand his reasons for doing it or what it meant. Some were dismissive, but others responded to the extraordinary nature of his art with engagement and respect. In 1980, the poet and performance artist Jackson Mac Low wrote a postcard to Hsieh, asking (sympathetically, he stressed), “Why do you do such performances?… There must be much more to them than is apparent.” Two years later, in the midst of One Year Performance 1981–1982 (Outdoor Piece), Hsieh was arrested after an altercation with a man on the street; the judge in the case didn’t make Hsieh enter the courtroom, because he’d read an article on the artist’s work in The Wall Street Journal. “These days anything is art,” he commented.

And then, for his fifth and final one-year performance, Hsieh did something truly radical: He dropped out. Beginning on July 1, 1985, he would “not do ART, not talk ART, not see ART, not read ART, not go to ART gallery and ART museum for one year,” he declared in one of the trademark typewritten announcements that he posted around Soho and mailed to members of the art community. “Just as he was acquiring a significant artistic profile, Hsieh cut himself out of the picture,” the curator Adrian Heathfield writes in Out of Now, a monograph coauthored with Hsieh. “He became an artist without art.”

Shortly after the year was up, Hsieh announced his next project: For 13 years, he would make art but not show it publicly. Now he would be an artist engaged with art again, but also one without an audience—and without an audience, who is there to care about the art?

Hsieh’s followers remained loyal even after he’d abandoned them. His performances weren’t much exhibited or written about, but they became legendary nonetheless, first through word of mouth and later thanks to a DVD he made about his work. In a way, the contours of Hsieh’s story made him a perfect cult figure: He was an outsider who, without any institutional training or backing, had conceived and accomplished feats that seemed to shift the parameters of performance art. And then, without getting any substantial credit for it, he all but disappeared.

As it turned out, Hsieh was hiding in plain sight: After briefly going west as part of the Thirteen Year Plan, he returned to New York, opened an artist residence in Williamsburg, and moved into a loft in Clinton Hill to tend to his archive. At one point, Hsieh opened a café with his wife (it has since closed, and the two have divorced). He sometimes worked in construction. Then, in the late 2000s, he began to receive long-overdue recognition.

The latest iteration of that attention—which includes his representing Taiwan at the 2017 Venice Biennale—is Tehching Hsieh: Lifeworks 1978–1999, a retrospective of the artist’s performances that opened last fall at Dia Beacon. Adapting a layout designed by Hsieh, the exhibition cleverly uses space and documentation to capture the immensity of his work. Within the first four galleries, which are devoted individually to the one-year performances, materials accumulate: hundreds of photographs, time cards, maps, and cassette tapes. Then you arrive at No Art Piece, and the gallery is almost entirely empty. The absence is striking—and it’s followed by an even larger void for the Thirteen Year Plan. The size of each gallery corresponds to the featured piece’s length of time, so the yearlong projects all get the same square footage, while to reach the end of the Thirteen Year Plan gallery, you must traverse a huge, evocative space filled only with structural columns. (Even the gaps between the galleries themselves correspond to the amount of time that passed between the works.)

The show, in essence, generates an embodied experience. A year sounds measurable but still abstract, until you’re standing in a room surrounded by 365 photographs of Hsieh that could be identical if not for the growth of his hair. What’s more, in order to really see that progression, you must move your own body. Ingeniously, and somewhat ironically, all of this physicality serves to dramatize the highly conceptual nature of Hsieh’s art.

Yet what exactly are those concepts? In other words, what is Hsieh’s work really 
about? The difficulty in answering that question, and the many attempts people have made to do so, is part of Hsieh’s ongoing mystique. (To wit, 770 people showed up for the artist’s talk at Dia Beacon on opening day.) Cage Piece could be read as a commentary on the severity of imprisonment; No Art Piece might be about a creative block. But the retrospective demonstrates that Hsieh’s art doesn’t have straightforward subject matter so much as a clear, overpowering form. And that form shapes the work’s defining paradoxes: It is rigorous yet excessive, philosophical yet irrational. It is simultaneously private and public, life as much as art. Most important, it often seems senseless—and that senselessness is what gives it meaning.

When you apply for a job as an “associate” at an Amazon warehouse, you don’t have to attach a résumé or supply references. All you have to provide is your name and your Social Security number, and the automated hiring system conducts a basic background check within minutes. If you clear that, congratulations—you got the job! Next you’re invited to a “hiring appointment” at a nondescript office building, where you shuffle into a line with dozens of other new hires, surrounded by banners in Amazon’s signature blue emblazoned with the company’s “Leadership Principles”: “Bias for Action,” “Learn and Be Curious,” “Customer Obsession.” You are photographed, drug-tested, and told, verbally, what your start date and schedule will be.

At no point are you asked, “Why do you want to work here?” When I went through these steps in the fall of 2022, my answer would have been “I want to build a union at Amazon.” I was a “salt,” a worker who gets a job in order to organize their workplace. Salting is a long-standing tactic of labor activists who seek to spark organizing from the shop floor. The origins of the term are debated—some say it connotes pouring salt in the wounds of capitalism to aggravate its contradictions. It could also derive from “salting a mine” to extract its valuable minerals (in this case, the collective potential of workers).

I first learned about it the week before my college graduation, over coffee with a classmate who had worked at an Amazon warehouse while taking time off from school during the pandemic. Now she and other organizers with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were trying to recruit motivated individuals to get jobs in nonunion workplaces they saw as vital sites for building working-class power. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I got out of school, but I couldn’t think of anything more worthwhile than to help build a union at one of the biggest and most powerful employers in the United States.

My first shift at Amazon that fall was 1:05 am to 11:50 am, the overnight so-called megacycle that makes one-day shipping possible. I worked at a delivery station, a smaller warehouse that employs around 150 associates (more during the peak periods before Prime Day and Christmas), where we scanned, pushed, and sorted packages according to the individual routes that drivers would take the next morning. In the early months of my time there, my “organizing” involved building relationships with my coworkers through bleary-eyed conversations over the mechanical churn of the conveyor belts or during our 5:15 am lunch breaks. We talked about TV shows, dating, our families. My coworkers ranged in age from their late teens to their 60s, and there was a pretty even gender split. Some were immigrants; most were Black or Latino. They had ended up at Amazon for a number of different reasons. The night shift allowed people to take care of their kids or go to school during the day (sacrificing sleep, of course). The gig-ified way of picking up shifts and transferring between facilities via the employee app gave people flexibility—one of my coworkers liked that he could work at different sites around the country while living out of his van (like a less idealized version of Nomadland).

What we all shared were the hours working alongside one another night after night. We bonded over our frustrations with the workflow, or the company’s clumsy attempts to boost employee morale, like the “Thanksgiving dinner” served at the end of the 12-hour shift (we ate boxed mashed potatoes and wobbly slices of canned cranberry, and the turkey carcass sat in the break-room fridge for weeks afterward). And then there were the manifold—and often absurd—safety hazards. I’ll never forget the soggy package that came rolling menacingly down my lane soaked in canned chili, the streaky red-brown bean mixture clinging to the metal cylinders of the conveyor belt and dripping onto the floor below.

This was my first experience as a labor organizer, though I had spent the fall of 2020 working on Democratic campaigns in Iowa (we lost nearly every race). Unlike electoral work, organizing my coworkers felt satisfying for how direct it was—I wasn’t trying to persuade people to believe in a candidate, but in our own collective power. Between shifts, I would meet with a small cohort of other DSA members who were organizing their own workplaces to discuss how to identify potential leaders among our coworkers and support them through their fears about organizing. We read Secrets of a Successful Organizer, a manual produced by the publisher of the left-wing magazine Labor Notes, and role-played conversations to assess how our coworkers might feel about a petition or a walkout.

I didn’t broach those conversations for months; instead, I focused on learning the mechanics of the job and getting to know my coworkers. Still, knowing I was there to organize changed my approach to work. I pushed myself to be more outgoing than I would normally be, which made work a genuinely social space with people I was excited to see each day. In our DSA cohort, we discussed what it meant to be a good worker, not from the perspective of producing value for the company but in solidarity with our fellow workers. At the warehouse, I tried to keep up a solid pace of work so as not to make things more difficult for the people in front of or behind me on the conveyor belt. Before we had even begun to discuss taking action, I thought about the impact that building solidarity could have on me and my coworkers: not just winning better conditions but transforming the workplace itself.

Of course, I’d have to start with a much simpler task—inviting my coworkers to grab lunch or a coffee or come to a barbecue, where I would push through my fear and ask, “What do you think we could do to make this workplace better?”

My decision to salt came amid the broader resurgence of a practice long deployed by labor activists in unorganized workplaces, from the upsurge of unionization that produced the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s to the Vietnam-era wave of wildcat strikes. In the past few years, young socialists, disillusioned college graduates, and activated rank-and-file workers have become a sort of reserve army ready to get jobs and organize alongside the millions of nonunion American workers employed in logistics, services, auto manufacturing, and beyond. Salts played a key, but often unseen, role in the successful union drive at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island and in the spate of organizing victories at Starbucks.

Rand Wilson, a longtime labor organizer who has been evangelizing about salting for years, said he’s seen a renewed interest in the practice after a less active period in the 1990s and early 2000s. “People didn’t see the labor movement as a viable response to corporate greed and inequality,” he told me. But now, young people coming of age in the era defined by Bernie Sanders’s—and, more recently, Zohran Mamdani’s—class politics see their workplaces as a crucial frontier in the fight for a better future. The resurgence in salting comes at a time when a historically low proportion of US workers are represented by unions—just 11.2 percent in 2025. The economic and political headwinds that threaten worker power, from automation to corporate consolidation to gig work, also make organizing for fair wages and safe conditions more critical than ever. “Employers are getting really good at keeping people very atomized—tons of people who don’t know any of their coworkers,” Wilson said. “It’s that special bond with your coworkers that is so critical to having a union.”

Before dawn on February 28, the United States and Israel launched what Donald Trump hailed as “major combat operations in Iran” but was, in fact, an undeclared, unauthorized, and unconstitutional regime-change war. As the bombs rained down on at least 14 cities, the death toll included Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and at least 165 people—most of them young girls—at a primary school. The president said the mission was “eliminating imminent threats.” In reality, it killed children, provoked counterstrikes across the Middle East, and threatened the region with another of the “forever wars” that Trump once campaigned against.

The attack on Iran represents the latest manifestation of an increasingly belligerent foreign policy that has seen US military interventions topple two government leaders in two months. The president who in 2024 declared, “I’m not going to start wars,” is now starting wars of aggression, threatening invasions, abandoning treaties, and creating chaos with such abandon that, in the words of former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes, “Trump’s second term has been the worst-case scenario.”

The Nation opposes Trump’s latest war, as do most Americans. But we are concerned that the response of many commentators to the Trump catastrophe is to hope for a return to a failed old order—a system of “rules” and strategies so unpopular that voters have already rejected them. That naïve longing ignores the need for this country to take a new look at its place in the world.

This issue of The Nation takes that new look from a perspective rooted in our values, experience, and history. If there is a through line in The Nation’s 160 years, it is that building a healthy and secure democracy is incompatible with an endless quest for global dominance. We know that Trump is reckless and wrong, but there’s more to our crisis than the mad ranting of an aging autocrat.

US foreign policy is adrift between an old order that is rapidly dying and a new one that is yet to be born. Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, his reelection in 2024, and the robust debates between centrists and progressives within the Democratic Party tell us that the foreign-policy establishment’s bipartisan consensus no longer exists. Americans are rejecting assumptions that guided decades of US engagement with other countries—in particular, the idea that an international “rules-based order” backed by US military hegemony is worth maintaining, no matter the cost.

Trump’s “America First” agenda, however, has never offered a viable way forward. Mistakenly labeled “isolationism,” it is better understood as what the Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt calls “predatory hegemony”: a vision of the United States unbound by rules and unabashedly self-interested. Fueled by Trump’s vainglory and paranoia—his fever dreams about getting “ripped off” by allies such as Canada and by African children who need USAID programs to survive—this approach replaces diplomacy and international aid with a neo-imperial worldview in which the powerful take what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

Trump is wrong. But putting a new coat of paint on the old “rules-based” order is not the alternative to toxic Trumpism—not for the United States, and not for a world where most people long ago recognized that the rules are written to benefit multinational corporations, arms dealers, and the politicians who serve them.

This issue of The Nation approaches the search for thoughtful, reasoned alternatives with a sense of urgency, seeking to counter the rush by elites in both parties toward an agenda of great-power competition, in the vain hope that political unity can be reforged around hostility to China or Russia.

In today’s deeply interconnected world, where challenges such as climate change and pandemics are global in scope, policymakers need to offer more than the prospect of new cold wars. This begins with the recognition that it is not in the best interests of US security and prosperity to export insecurity to countries we refer to as “partners.”

The pursuit of US global military hegemony, whatever the cost, is not the answer—whether it is advanced by Trump or by an elite foreign-policy establishment. Competing for dominance abroad invariably neglects urgent domestic needs and infringes on American liberties.

Afew days after Donald Trump was reelected, I traveled to Berlin for a series of meetings with political analysts and Bundestag members about the implications of the US election. I joked that I was there to assist in their grief therapy. Not only were they in shock about Trump’s return to power, but their own governing coalition was also in the process of collapsing.

Amid the general despair, I was struck by how many of them had latched on to Marco Rubio’s just-announced nomination for secretary of state as a source of hope. Rubio may be a right-wing conservative, they offered, but he believes in the sort of internationalism we all believe in, doesn’t he? He comes to the Munich Security Conference. He’s part of the Serious Foreign-Policy Club, right?

Abandon hope, I told them. Rubio’s nomination isn’t a sign that Trump might be a normal president; it’s a sign of how effectively Rubio has been housebroken.

The hope that Rubio would bring some sanity to a second Trump administration wasn’t limited to the conference hotels of Europe, of course. Rubio was confirmed unanimously by the Senate after sailing smoothly through his hearings. This is partly explained by the body’s notorious clubbiness and the fact that, as one of Trump’s earliest nominees, he benefited from the “honeymoon” period that all new presidents get. But Rubio also got a boost from the belief that he would be “the adult in the room.”

That hope has largely been demolished. Far from being a savior of the “rules-based order,” Rubio has established himself as one of the second Trump administration’s most consequential cabinet secretaries, skillfully serving as MAGA’s face on the global stage.

His recent address at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, which I attended, was a perfect showcase of Rubio’s new, Trumpier approach. A year after Vice President JD Vance’s right-wing populist harangue at the conference—in which he warned that the greatest danger facing Europe was “the threat from within”—Rubio offered merely a kinder, gentler version of that rant. He spoke of the “old friendship” between the United States and Europe and declared, “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share.” But undergirding these nostalgic appeals was a paranoid vision of a white, Christian West against the rest, a menacing narrative of impending “civilizational erasure.”

“We do not want our allies to be weak,” Rubio warned, “because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength. This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization.”

Rubio’s message was classic MAGA, but his softer delivery, coupled with the occasional love bomb, was enough for many in the audience. Having been conditioned for over a year by the Trump administration’s impetuous cruelty, they lapped it up, giving Rubio a standing ovation. On a panel immediately afterward, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared herself “very much reassured.”

A number of attendees told me later, though, that despite being adorned in the language of the High Foreign-Policy Church, Rubio’s speech was more or less the same message they’ve been hearing from the United States since Trump resumed office.

It’s a remarkable turn for Rubio—a man who, in the 2016 presidential primaries, was seen as the New and Improved Neocon. It was an impression that Rubio himself cultivated with his campaign slogan, “A New American Century”—a clear reference to the Project for the New American Century, the infamous neoconservative organization that pushed for war with Iraq in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A longtime cheerleader of that war, Rubio seemed ready to claim the aging John McCain’s mantle as the faction’s main avatar.

In case the briefer really knows,
There is a question I would pose—
A single question, if I dare:
The question is, Why are we there?

If you’d like to see the city with trees
suddenly walking through it,
visit in the afternoon, the girls
fresh out of school.

With green and white stripes
on their uniforms,
they spread over the earth
like evergreens.

These two girls link arms as they walk,
and look: a row of girls
chained together like plums
in my grandfather’s field.

And there is one girl—
this poem is for her—
standing all alone by a bookshelf.

She fears nothing:
inside her is a wedding
and a funeral.

She stares into the alphabet
the way a cypress tree stares into a cloud.
The way a cloud stares into a cypress tree.
 

(Translated by Sara Elkamel)

Accra’s Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, built on the site of the former colonial polo grounds, is home to two radically different monuments to Ghana’s first prime minister. In the park’s center is an eye-­catching bronze statue of a larger-than-life Nkrumah, clad in royal kente cloth, with an outstretched hand pointing ahead and one foot in front of the other as if he were advancing forward. Erected on top of a pedestal at the spot where Nkrumah stood to declare Ghana’s independence from Britain, it channels the slogan of Nkrumah’s political party: “Forward ever, backward never.” Though the monument was erected in 1992, the statue itself likely dates to the 1970s, when, after Nkrumah’s death in exile, discussions began for returning his body to Ghana and a mausoleum.

The second statue rests in two pieces a short distance from this gleaming icon. Cast and designed by the Italian sculptor Nicola Cataudella, it is considerably older. Originally erected in 1958 at the Old Parliament House, it depicts Nkrumah in a fugu, a smock from the northern region of the country associated with the working class. Here, too, Nkrumah’s right hand is extended, but instead of directing forward movement, it waves in greeting. To some, this might seem like a friendly gesture, but from the moment the statue was proposed, critics lambasted it as an indication of the growing personality cult around Nkrumah. In 1961, the statue was badly damaged in a bomb attack, and Cataudella was commissioned to replace it. Then, during the 1966 coup that unseated Nkrumah’s government, it was toppled and beheaded. The severed and damaged pieces—Nkrumah’s body, minus a right hand and a left arm, and his head—stand on two pedestals next to each other.

These two Nkrumahs are illustrative of the long-standing conflict over the African leader’s legacy. In much of the world, Nkrumah is today a forgotten figure from a lost age of decolonization. Across the continent, however, he is widely celebrated as a champion of African independence and unity. In a 1999 poll conducted by the BBC World Service, African listeners voted for Nkrumah as Africa’s “Man of the Millennium.” And yet closer to home, his memory remains as contested as ever. On the radio and TV, in print, and in everyday conversations, Ghanaians fiercely debate whether Nkrumah was a liberator or a dictator. His own children, Samia Yaba and Sekou, took opposite sides on this question in an impromptu televised interview in 2023.

In his latest book, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, the veteran New York Times correspondent, Columbia journalism professor, and author Howard French deftly navigates the global amnesia and national memory wars that surround Nkrumah’s legacy, while also offering a dazzling portrait of the man himself. Following Nkrumah’s unlikely ascent from his birthplace in the western region of Ghana to his success as a national leader and global statesman, French offers us much more than a biography. In Nkrumah’s story, he charts the history of African decolonization and the American civil-rights movement “as linked and intertwined like a double helix.” His effort to narrate the global struggle for Black emancipation extends the ambitions of his previous book, Born in Blackness, to place African and African-descended people at the center of world history. In doing so, he presents Ghana’s anti-­colonial struggle and independence as world-historical events with global reverberations.

In Born in Blackness, French suggested that the roots of Pan-Africanism, a constellation of movements that advocated global Black solidarity, could be found in the earliest slave revolts. Moving his readers from the 1574 revolt on the earliest modern plantations in São Tomé to the Haitian Revolution that abolished slavery and created an independent Black state, French examined how rebel slaves recast Blackness as a shared political identity and universalized the principles of liberty and equality. These early efforts generated inspiration and precedent for the later articulation of Pan-Africanism beginning in the late 19th century.

Now, with The Second Emancipation, French allows this Pan-Africanism to take center stage. Here he reprises some of the pioneering figures of Pan-African history, including the Sierra Leonean historian James Africanus Beale Horton, who wrote on the political conditions of the Gold Coast, and Edward Blyden, the advocate of African American and West Indian emigration to Liberia. Writing between the 1850s and 1890s, these figures insisted on the unity and solidarity of African and African-descended people and challenged depictions of Africa as a place without a history. French details how this broad commitment to solidarity and shared struggled expanded its reach and gained momentum in the 20th century. As he shows, the transformations of Pan-Africanism from an elite to a more popular politics took place against a backdrop of increased globalization, growing labor migration and urbanization, and two world wars, which facilitated encounters and exchanges among people of African descent, making the idea of solidarity more concrete and realizable by the mid-20th century. Nkrumah and his brand of Pan-Africanism, French argues, were products of this wider context.

Even if Nkrumah emerged from this high point of Pan-African politics, French is also careful to capture his singular personality and determination. A very private workaholic with a force of will that surprised his supporters and critics alike, Nkrumah took up the cause of Ghanaian and African independence with an intensity that was unmatched. No other figure of African anti-colonialism made achieving a federation of African states the crux of their political vision. Yet if these traits made him uniquely skilled as a visionary and a campaigner, they also fed his impatience and paranoia, which in turn fueled his authoritarian turn.

French carefully brings these two sides together to provide a rich and complex account of Nkrumah’s rise and fall. Along the way, he also inserts himself and his family into the story. In recounting the excitement with which he first traveled to Africa as a college student in the late 1970s, or recollecting the Friends of Ghana Association in which his parents participated, French makes concrete the great hope and enthusiasm that the project of African independence carried for African Americans and for many others, too.

Francis Nwia Kofi Nkrumah was born in the British colony then known as the Gold Coast, in the tiny village of Nkroful, sometime in either 1909 (the year normally given in accounts of his life) or 1912 (the year his mother remembered giving birth to her son). This discrepancy is a testament to the obscurity in which Nkru­mah’s earliest years remain shrouded. No one could have predicted then that in less than 50 years, Nkrumah—who hailed from the small, marginal ethnic community of the Nzima—would lead the struggle to liberate the Gold Coast from colonial rule. His emergence as an anti-colonial activist and a national leader were far from foreordained. In fact, each step in his meteoric rise was marked by sheer contingency and chance. “Temporal accidents, being in the right place at the right time when the hinge of history swing loudly, are probably commonplace in the lives of major figures on the global stage,” French writes. “But their recurrence in Nkrumah’s story is nonetheless remarkable.”

In Nkrumah’s autobiography, published in 1957 to coincide with the independence of the country he now led, such moments were occasions for mythmaking. Each chance opening or encounter was rendered a matter of fate, reinforcing the idea that he was destined to emerge as the standard-bearer for his nation’s and Africa’s liberation. For instance, Nkrumah tells his readers that during his brief pit stop in the United Kingdom en route to study at Lincoln University, the historically Black school in rural Pennsylvania, he learned from a newspaper boy that Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia. The invasion unleashed in Nkrumah an emotional awakening in which he prayed “the day might come when I could play my part in bring[ing] about the downfall of [colonialism].” The image of an isolated Nkrumah staring at the “impassive” faces of British citizens and vowing his commitment to Africa’s liberation has all the narrative trappings of a heroic epic. Yet in truth, as French notes, by the time Nkrumah arrived in the colonial metropole, he had already been exposed to emergent forms of nationalism and Pan-Africanism in which Ethiopia loomed large.

The Short American Century, which began in 1945 and continued until 2016, was made up of four distinct eras. The first, from the victory in World War II until the student rebellions of 1968, was an era of confidence in which most Americans believed that the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan provided just cause for the United States’ domination of the “free world.” The second, which lasted until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, was an era of skepticism—the failures of Fordism at home and the Vietnam War abroad suggested to many that global American “leadership” might not be achievable at an acceptable cost. The third, which comprised the 1980s, was an era of exuberance, as deregulation, financialization, and a renewed American militarism reinvigorated a hegemonic project that the 1970s had almost annihilated. And the fourth and final era, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, was characterized by a hubris that insisted the Soviet Union’s collapse demonstrated the ultimate triumph of US-style democratic-­capitalist imperialism.

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put the kibosh on the widespread consensus that the United States was a New Rome, able to weather any domestic or international crisis. It turned out that the Great Recession and the Global War on Terror had undermined both American society and the “liberal international order,” and that the faith in eternal US domination had been misplaced.

In retrospect, it is clear that the populist rage that fueled Trump’s rise marked the end of the Short American Century. But for many liberals, it took quite a while to accept this new reality. Liberals spent much of Trump’s first term trying to explain his victory as an aberration, the consequence of the anti-majoritarian structure of American politics, or Russian interference, or the innate racism of a foolish American populace who didn’t realize, as Hillary Clinton put it, that “America never stopped being great.” For them, Trump’s election marked a brief but unfortunate departure from the progressive arc that US and world history were bound to trace, and once a Democrat won the presidency again, things would return to normal.

Joe Biden’s election in 2020 seemed to confirm this perspective. Liberals concluded that Trump the person, and Trumpism the movement, were anomalies. True, some admitted, Trump had exposed some disturbing fissures in American society, and maybe the economy was more of a problem than they had supposed. But the Biden project was primarily viewed as a restoration—as the president himself declared to European allies soon after he assumed office, “America is back.”

Trump’s second victory, however, revealed that this perspective was profoundly mistaken. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump soundly defeated Kamala Harris, winning 312 to 226 in the Electoral College and garnering 2 million more votes than the vice president.

The 2024 results forced liberals to take their heads out of the sand; it turns out that you can only deny reality for so long. Finally, after almost a decade, liberals started to reckon with the fact that the era of unipolarity, globalization, and neoliberal consensus had produced a nightmare instead of a utopia.

If any individual embodies the closing era of the Short American Century, it is George Packer. His résumé reads like an establishmentarian bingo card: Currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, Packer was previously a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, a fellow at the Washington think tank New America, a member of the Peace Corps, and a graduate of Yale University. The world that Trump destroyed was to a significant degree Packer’s world.

Though best known for his nonfiction—his 2019 biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize—Packer has just published a novel, The Emergency, which wrestles with the reality of Trump and Trumpism. Described by the author as a “political fable,” the book is Packer’s attempt “to convey what it feels like today…to watch a world you thought would always be there because it had always been there disappear before your eyes with a speed that you can’t begin to fathom.” Unfortunately, The Emergency makes it clear that while liberals like Packer are finally opening their eyes to the world as it is, they have little to offer when it comes to charting a way out of the crisis, because they cannot admit that it was their own regime that created it.

The first thing to say about The Emergency is that it is boring. It is not so much poorly written as indifferently written. The prose is workmanlike—“Looking back, Doctor Rustin realized that the Emergency had been a long time coming. This was how empires of old that he had learned about in school fell: imperceptibly, then shockingly”—and the plot twists predictable. Ironically given the title, the novel lacks urgency; it is there to teach you something, entertainment be damned.

The protagonists of The Emergency are a family named the Rustins: Dr. Hugo Rustin and his wife, Annabelle, as well as their daughter, Selva, and their son, Pan. The Rustins live in “the city by the river” in “the empire,” which has ruled for as long as anyone can remember. This empire has two main social classes: “Burghers,” who live in the cities and whose elite embodies the professional managerial class, and “Yeomen,” who live in the countryside as peasants and farmers. Since the world of The Emergency doesn’t seem to have any advanced industry, there is no industrial working class. As such, Packer presents a stark binary between the urban and urbane and the rural and uncultured—the liberal PMC vision revealed.

The Department of Justice is in a crisis, at a level that hasn’t been seen in decades, if perhaps ever. Not since 1975, when US Attorney General John Mitchell was prosecuted and convicted for conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to Watergate, has there been a more toxic and chaotic environment at the department. Today, under Pam Bondi, the DOJ shows a flagrant disregard for the rule of law and contempt for the Constitution. A once-exalted institution that was integral to the protection of civil rights now resembles an elite agency that serves the private interests of a president rather than vulnerable Americans.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this state of affairs is how we got here. In January, after Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis, was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, said that the department would not investigate whether the agent had violated any federal laws. US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed there was “no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation,” despite clear video evidence showing otherwise. “We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody,” Blanche added. “We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate.”

At the same time, the DOJ began pressuring its prosecutors to investigate the victim and her wife. Six attorneys resigned from the department in protest, including Minnesota’s second-in-command at the US attorney’s office, Joseph Thompson.

Around two weeks later, the same day that Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse, by shooting him 10 times at close range, Bondi sent a threatening letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, offering a chilling quid pro quo framed as “common sense solutions.” Bondi demanded that Walz provide access to voter rolls, end the state’s sanctuary policies, and release sensitive records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service programs, including data from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In exchange, Bondi claimed that those “simple steps” would “help bring back law and order to Minnesota.”

These actions not only mark a radical shift at the DOJ but also expose how compromised and corrupt the department has become.

Yet it is not the DOJ’s response to ICE’s lawless conduct in Minnesota alone that raises serious alarm. The department has been severely tarnished by unlawful appointments and the politically motivated prosecutions of officials who have criticized Donald Trump. The failed criminal cases against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey come to mind. US District Court Judge Lorna Schofield disqualified the acting US attorney, John Sarcone III, ruling that he had not been lawfully appointed when he issued the subpoenas against James. Bondi had appointed Sarcone as a “special attorney” and given him an “indefinite term” inconsistent with lawful DOJ appointments, which are made by the president with “advice and consent from the Senate” and are four years in length.

Months earlier, US District Court Judge Cameron McGowan Currie had dismissed the cases against James and Comey, explaining that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully installed by the department. “All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment…were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside,” Currie ruled.

Not surprisingly, the DOJ’s shameful abuse of power has pushed career lawyers to leave. The Justice Connection, a network of former DOJ employees, estimates that roughly 6,400 workers across the department have been terminated or left their positions voluntarily. Dena Robinson, a former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, said that under Bondi, the job has changed from fact-finding investigations to finding “facts that would fit the narrative.”

Hundreds of military officers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps are now filling in, some temporarily serving as immigration judges and others as special assistant US attorneys—a role that “DOJ policy once barred…outside a military base,” Defense One reported, which raises serious ethics concerns.

Today, the DOJ no longer reflects the role that Congress intended it to play: that of securing America’s democracy during the Reconstruction era. Principally, that meant upholding the rule of law and enforcing the Constitution and federal laws in the aftermath of slavery and civil war. In the ensuing decades, that also included playing a vital role in investigating and prosecuting hate crimes. Now, however, the DOJ pursues a different mission: one that regards Americans as subjects rather than citizens.

The steady weaponizing of the DOJ to do Trump’s bidding has weakened its integrity, tarnished its trustworthiness, and dangerously undermined its credibility. For now, Congress should heed the demands of the civil-rights organizations calling for more oversight of the Department of Justice—before it’s too late.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson never stopped campaigning. Even in the last years of his life, when he was suffering from the progressive neurological disorder that slowed his steps and his speech before his death on February 17, at age 84, the reverend kept calling his Rainbow PUSH Coalition together for one more mission, one more crusade for justice. He did so with an urgency that belied his condition and drew old allies and young protégés into fights that were righteous and necessary and, frequently, prescient.

Such was the case in January of 2024, at a point when few political figures were prepared to call out the Israeli assault on Gaza that has now claimed more than 75,000 Palestinian lives and has been identified as a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israeli kibbutzim and a music festival, there was a tentativeness to the discourse about how to break the cycle of violence. Yet here was Jesse Jackson, on a frigid morning after a winter storm swept through Chicago, pulling together Muslims, Christians, and Jews, grassroots activists and faith leaders, scholars and members of Congress, to pursue “immediate action to bring an end to the crisis,” preaching about the need to “build upon the historical legacy and current global movements for peace, justice, and liberation.”

His voice may have been halting, but it still rang out with moral clarity, as it had for the better part of 70 years, from the days when Jackson was an essential aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to when this son of South Carolina built street-level movements to tackle poverty and corruption in his adopted city of Chicago, began to travel the world as a strikingly successful citizen-diplomat, and, eventually, ran twice for the presidency as the leader of a multiracial, multiethnic “rainbow” insurgency that would forever transform the Democratic Party—clearing the way for the candidacies of Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and so many others who were inspired by his courage.

The Nation was one of the few publications that endorsed Jackson’s 1988 campaign, embracing his offer of “hope against cynicism, power against prejudice and solidarity against division.”

“The Jackson campaign is not a single shot at higher office by an already elevated politician,” the editors wrote. “Rather, it is a continuing, expanding, open-ended project to organize a movement for the political empowerment of all those who participate.”

The reverend appreciated that description of his campaign as more than just a candidacy, even if the Democratic Party struggled to wrap its head around the concept. After he delivered one of the greatest addresses in the history of American politics at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Jackson’s formal bids for the presidency were done. Yet as his longtime aide Robert Borosage observes, “His greatest legacy is that the mission, strategy, message, and agenda of those [1984 and 1988] campaigns remain directly relevant four decades later.”

That didn’t just happen. Jackson kept that vision relevant by mounting new campaigns—not for high office, but for higher ideals. To a greater extent than even his friend and longtime supporter Bernie Sanders, Jackson leveraged the status he’d earned as a contender for the presidency to champion causes on which presidents (and most candidates for the job) were unwilling to spend their political capital. He raced across the country at a moment’s notice to join union picket lines, stood with farmers to save their homesteads, and rallied with Black Americans who knew the civil-rights struggle was unfinished, with women seeking gender equity, with LGBTQ+ couples who wanted to marry, with peace advocates in the far and forgotten corners of the world, and with Palestinians who sought a homeland.

When Jesse Jackson looked at America—and at the world—he saw a gorgeous mosaic of humanity. He wanted the rest of us to see it as well. So he kept campaigning for the day when the storms of cynicism, prejudice, and division would begin to pass, and we might all recognize the promise and the power of the Rainbow.

In January 2026, Donald Trump’s foreign and domestic policies achieved a certain synergy.

Following a months-long naval buildup off the coast of Venezuela, US Special Operations forces invaded the country, kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, and decapitated his authoritarian socialist regime. Then Trump kept US weapons trained on Caracas to pressure Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, into giving him control over some of the world’s largest oil fields. These acts of naked imperialism were a reversal of Trump’s repudiation of US regime-change efforts as a presidential nominee. But only a few on the right, such as Senator Rand Paul, expressed any discomfort with this blatant about-face. Trump immediately let it be clear he would not stop at Venezuela. “We have a big armada next to Iran,” Trump said to reporters in late January as the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln moved into position in the Middle East. “Bigger than Venezuela.” On February 28, Trump used that armada to launch alongside Israel an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, with the aim of destroying the Islamic Republic.\

Trump has also advanced US designs on Cuba, Gaza, and Greenland. He bombed Somalia repeatedly in January, continuing an onslaught that began in 2025 and has received far less media attention. And as the administration’s foreign policy grows more openly acquisitive, its domestic policy grows more overtly aggressive as it carries out what amounts to an occupation of Minnesota.

A task force consisting of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection has invaded the Twin Cities, in defiance of state and local elected leadership. ICE and CBP agents demand that nonwhite residents prove their citizenship, kidnap children as young as 2 years old, and murder citizens who get in their way, all in the name of “law enforcement.” They have shown that they will refuse to be bound by any law or tradition that inhibits their agenda. The architect of Trump’s mass-deportation agenda, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, described Alex Pretti, a nurse whom five Border Patrol agents had subdued before a sixth shot him in the back, as a “domestic terrorist,” repeating what Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said of Renee Good, whom an ICE agent had killed in Minneapolis two weeks earlier.

Calling people who seek to protect their neighbors “terrorists” provides a crucial clue to the lineage that has led to Minnesota, Venezuela, and now Iran. The so-called War on Terror, a period many think of as having ended, shapes and enables Trump’s aggressions in ways both structural and direct. The Delta Force raid on Maduro’s fortified compound followed on decades of experience—and increased budgets—conducting similar raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ICE and CBP agents who have descended on Minnesota are kitted out in the kind of military-style camouflage and body armor that Iraqis and Afghans would recognize. The operation’s initial targets—Black immigrant Muslims from much-bombed Somalia—represent a trifecta of cohorts that were villainized by the nativist politics that the War on Terror revitalized. Both supporters and critics of the Minnesota deployment have compared it to a counterinsurgency campaign. Miller, who was also behind the kidnapping of Maduro, began his rise to White House deputy chief of staff through the ranks of the far right as a campus activist against Islam. Like Trump, Miller has long understood how to take post-9/11 fearmongering about Muslims and direct it toward nonwhite immigrants more broadly.

While many elements of the War on Terror shape Trump’s actions, the significance of the backlash against American power that the War on Terror inspired has, dangerously, not sunk in. After Trump demanded that Denmark cede Greenland to the US as imperial tribute, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney drew a rare ovation at the World Economic Forum in Davos for a speech abandoning the “pleasant fiction” that the “rules-based international order” was anything other than a vehicle for US prerogatives. Carney told Europeans horrified at being treated as the sort of foreign possession they themselves used to seize, “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” But with an insurgency yet to develop in Venezuela, and with NATO hustling to secure a deal to prevent a US move on Greenland, Trump has encountered little to deter him from his mode of imperialism before it reached Tehran. That’s ominous for Havana—and beyond.

Historians will spend decades debating the exact moment when the US empire discredited itself and irrevocably hobbled the international law that it masquerades as. Carney marked it at the Greenland crisis. Many others mark it at the beginning of Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Gaza in October 2023. I would offer that it’s the War on Terror—corresponding as it does with all but the first 10 years of US global dominance—that defines American power during its period of supremacy. It is an era in which the United States inflicted sustained violence throughout the Global South and called it “order.” But the waves of resistance that US actions generated exposed American weakness. Resentment over the agonies of the War on Terror played an enormous role in Trump’s rise to power.

Every historical era is shaped by its predecessor. The War on Terror was shaped by the Cold War, and it now shapes the empire Trump is constructing. That makes the path of resistance to this new era of imperialism clear: The tools of the War on Terror must be destroyed before Trump uses them to finish building his world order, at home and abroad.

Trump’s unpopularity, both nationally and globally, is no constraint on his administration’s ambitions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio achieved a long-standing goal of his Miami-based Cuban American milieu by ousting Maduro. Venezuela’s oil subsidies to Havana make it the crucial domino to topple in pursuit of the Cuban émigrés’ supreme aspiration since 1959. According to The Wall Street Journal, the administration seeks to do exactly that this year.

Notwithstanding the recent talk about his “Donroe Doctrine,” Trump does not confine his imperial project to what the State Department recently called “our hemisphere.” On January 27, Trump threatened to end US aid to Iraq if that country’s parliament restores the troublesome Nouri al-Maliki to power, right after the Iraqis agreed to take thousands of Islamic State prisoners who were being held by the collapsing US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria.

Decapitating and coercing a regime instead of overthrowing it is a departure from recent modes of US imperialism. But Trump is also pursuing the familiar versions. His “Board of Peace” proposal places him atop a new, US-selected international coalition—one that includes Israel—that will govern Gaza like a 21st-century version of the British Mandate that gave Great Britain control over Palestine. Not only will Palestinian survivors of the Israeli genocide lose what remains of their sovereignty, but according to documents acquired by Sharif Abdel Kouddous of Drop Site News, they will be concentrated into “planned communities” built to monitor every aspect of their lives through “biometric surveillance, checkpoints, monitoring of purchases, and educational programs promoting normalization with Israel.” The Board of Peace also has value to Trump beyond the Levant: His administration floats it as a program to replace crucial functions of the United Nations and further undermine the creaking international institutions it considers unfit for the new era.

I’m not sure we’re terrified enough about the American right’s scrapping even its own scant moral boundaries.

Every segment of the Trump-backing right wing—America First nationalists, Trump loyalists and rank-and-file MAGA activists—has unsubscribed from the idea that there is any such thing as right and wrong, much less that wrongdoing should result in consequences. In effect, there is no behavior Trump’s GOP sees as too wrong to vote for. In late July 2025, almost half of Republicans said they would keep voting for Trump even if he were “officially implicated in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities.” Crime is legal, where right-wingers are concerned, however heinous the crime is.

At least, for themselves. The right still has morals for days when it comes to Black folks, immigrants and trans people. Its moral code has always been selective and conditional; rigorously enforced and mercilessly punitive toward “outsiders” and “others,” but generally indifferent to even the worst acts by those on the right side of whiteness and power. Wilhoit’s Law—coined by music composer Frank Wilhoit in a now-famous 2018 comment on a political science blog—neatly captures this truth. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition—there must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Now it’s ditching even its in-group protections.

The right’s reaction to the Epstein files disclosures is the clearest evidence of this. For the better part of a decade, conservatives lurched from one pedophile-focused moral panic to the next, proclaiming themselves the true saviors of children. They didn’t mean all children, of course; these are the same people who gifted a white woman with $750,000 just for calling a 5-year-old autistic Black boy the N-word. Their concern was always reserved for the white children they saw as fully human. They insisted pedophiles were hiding in pizza parlor basements; obsessed over Q drops and waved signs calling us to “#SavetheChildren” and “Stop Child Trafficking”; and pushed anti-LGBT “groomer” hysteria alongside anti-drag bills. Roughly half of Trump voters said they believed elected Democrats were running child sex rings in surveys from 2020 and 2022; a majority of 2020 Trump voters told pollsters that Trump was actively working to take down “an elite child sex trafficking ring involving top Democrats.” White lives mattered to conservatives, especially the youngest white lives. At least in theory.

And at least as long as they thought their political opponents were responsible. But the more we know about Epstein, the less they care. The nearly half of Republicans who said the Epstein files mattered at least “a little” to how they assess Trump’s presidency in July 2025 dropped to just 36 percent by November. (That figure is 64 percent for Democrats.) Faced with at least one allegation in the files that Trump sexually assaulted an underage girl and well-documented associations between their leader and Epstein—as well as other alleged sexual predators—the right isn’t just overlooking the implications; they’re abandoning the principles. The right has “gradually de-emphasized” the Epstein issue, CNN writes, choosing to “largely move on.” It was all political calculation.

That might also explain why conservatives, in rebutting the need for greater transparency about the files’ contents, unfailingly bring up the appearance of Bill Clinton’s name in the Epstein files. They assume that the left’s response will be to ditch the issue if there’s no partisan benefit, because that’s what they would do. They genuinely don’t understand that a person might hold a principle like, say, opposing pedophilia, regardless of who engages in it. The notion of sincere moral outrage grounded in right and wrong, instead of political advantage, is genuinely lost on them.

The moral charade was always going to be undone by the Trump of it all. His supporters are members of a reactionary movement almost singularly animated by racial grievance. Trump supporters believed that the racial contract—and above all, its guarantee that whiteness was the most immutable hurdle to the American presidency—had been broken. “We haven’t felt like ourselves since Barack Obama,” Megyn Kelly said just this past September, a reminder of the imagined injury white racists sustained nearly two decades ago. Trump promised to not just restore the racial contract but to punish the people his supporters saw as responsible for breaching it. In exchange, they elevated an openly, extravagantly corrupt white man to the presidency.

When your most coherent ideology is “owning the libs” and fighting against racial equality, and you’ve literally elected one of the most demonstrably immoral people in public life to deliver on both, the moral line can never stop moving. That means every newly horrifying revelation requires the right to set a new moral boundary so that Trump can jump over it before it’s done being drawn. It means accepting the corrupt enrichment of not just the entire Trump family, but pardons and commutations for everybody with a bribe or political clout—the January 6 insurrectionists; comically dishonest former representative George Santos; ex-Honduran president and cocaine and weapons trafficker Juan Orlando Hernandez. “I think this is the most corrupt presidency in US history, with the money they are raking in, with the NFTs and the memecoins. I mean it’s so blatant, it’s right in front of our eyes,” Ann Coulter admitted, unashamedly, on the Triggernometry podcast in August, adding, “and the funny thing about [it is], I don’t care, as long as we get a wall and mass deportations.”

One of the most memorable promises that new York City’s newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani made during his campaign was to freeze the rent for tenants of the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments. The idea sounds simple, suggesting that there’s a quick and easy way for a mayor to tackle one of the city’s most insoluble problems.

But nothing in New York is ever quick and easy. One of the complicating factors is that the mayor can’t freeze the rents himself. He needs the approval of the city’s nine-member Rent Guidelines Board, which votes annually on whether landlords can increase the rents on regulated apartments and, if so, by how much. The board is appointed by the mayor, but it’s largely regarded as independent and data-driven. This is not to say that a rent freeze can’t be done. Under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Rent Guidelines Board froze the rent three times during his two terms: in 2015, in 2016, and in 2020, during the Covid pandemic.

The proposal also faces a backlash from those in the real estate industry, who argue that a rent freeze will undermine the solvency of the landlords who typically own what are known as “naturally occurring” rent-stabilized buildings: smaller, older buildings that are in perennial need of expensive maintenance.

However, the real issue when it comes to Mamdani’s signature housing proposal is straightforward: It’s not enough. On its own, it’s not big enough or radical enough to tackle the real problem, which is one of supply and demand. New York City, after all, has a population of 8.5 million and a rental vacancy rate of 1.4 percent.

Mamdani clearly knows this. In a position paper issued back in February 2025, when he was still a blip on the political radar, he vowed to “triple the City’s production of publicly subsidized, permanently affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes, constructing 200,000 new units over the next 10 years.” He also promised to “triple the amount of housing built with City capital funds,” creating “200,000 new affordable homes over 10 years for low-income households, seniors and working families.” Four hundred thousand new units may not be enough either, but it’s a start—and building this housing would surely be one measure of his success as mayor.

As most of his predecessors learned, building affordable housing is challenging, and past mayors tended to pad their achievements. Over the fiscal year 2025, for example, the previous mayor, Eric Adams, “built” or “preserved” 33,715 affordable units and claimed that by the end of his single term, 425,000 units “will have been built, preserved or planned for.” Similarly, de Blasio announced at the end of his two terms that he’d reached his goal of creating and preserving 200,000 units: “Over the administration, more than 66,000 affordable units have been created and another 134,000 have been preserved.”

If only “preserved” and “planned for” units were enough to erase the shortage of housing for working families. Indeed, if units “planned for” dependably led to housing built, de Blasio could take credit for one of the most impressive initiatives imagined in New York: a master plan for developing Sunnyside Yard in Queens. This mile-and-a-half-long expanse of busy rail yard, jointly owned by Amtrak, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and General Motors, represents the scarcest commodity in New York City: 180 acres of open land. Drafted by the Manhattan-based Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU), the Sunnyside Yard master plan was a thing of beauty—a deft mixture of different building types and generous open space, complete with illustrations of children playing in car-free streets. It looked more like Denmark or the Netherlands than Queens. And the written description was, if anything, even more upbeat: “12,000 new 100 percent affordable residential units, 60 acres of open public space, a new Sunnyside Station that connects Western Queens to the Greater New York region, 10 schools, 2 libraries, over 30 childcare centers, 5 health care facilities, and 5 million square feet of new commercial and manufacturing space that will enable middle-class job creation.” It was (and remains) the most utopian thing I’d ever seen proposed for New York City. However, it was released in early March of 2020, on the eve of the pandemic shutdown of pretty much everything.

PAU’s vision for Sunnyside Yard was, in fact, the feel-good antithesis of Manhattan’s Hudson Yards. The two developments used the same strategy, decking over working rail yards to create a building site; the key difference was how the deck would be funded. At Hudson Yards, the developers paid for the deck, and everything they built on top of it was intended to help them recoup a billion-dollar investment. The beauty of the Sunnyside plan was that the city would build the deck. According to Adam Grossman Meagher, who was running the project for New York’s Economic Development Corporation, the $5 billion that the city would have to spend on the portion of the deck that would support buildings was comparable to the amount the city would have to spend to acquire plain old land—except that nowhere in New York City does a comparable amount of land exist. Utopia, as it happens, doesn’t come cheap.

At the time, the whole thing struck me as lovely but improbable, something that desperately needed to happen but, because of Covid and the fact that de Blasio was approaching the end of his second term, probably never would. Even during those awful months of early 2020, PAU’s founder and creative director Vishaan Chakrabarti was surprisingly optimistic, seemingly able to see beyond the fog of Covid: “This is part of why you do master planning,” he told me. “You don’t know something like this is going to happen. But it tees things up for the future.”

That future, however, came and went. The project, released too early in the pandemic and too late in de Blasio’s tenure, has since gone “completely dormant,” Chakrabarti told me in a recent conversation. Before anything could be built there, the yard would have to “be rezoned in accordance to the plan,” and the MTA would have to kick-start the project by building a commuter rail station. The rezoning, which would’ve demanded an enormous amount of political will and acumen, and the existence of a rail station might have positioned the project for a “big federal grant to build a platform,” Chakrabarti says, adding: “There’s no way to build a platform without a federal grant. And this is what’s so frustrating. Mayor Adams, when this plan was still fresh in people’s minds…could have applied for Biden infrastructure money to build the platform.” But he didn’t. And the likelihood of a federal grant ended when Trump returned to office (the startling bromance between the president and the new mayor notwithstanding).

In late August 1908, some 70 delegates crowded into a hall in Czernowitz, the cosmopolitan capital of Austrian Bukovina. They had come from Warsaw and Galicia and cities across Eastern Europe for the First Yiddish Language Conference. Leading writers like I.L. Peretz were present; Sholem Aleichem had wanted to attend but was kept away by illness. For five days, they argued about the nature of Jewish languages and whether the one named in the conference title—the one spoken by Eastern Europe’s Jewish masses—was a legitimate national tongue or merely a corrupted jargon of exile.

For Nathan Birnbaum, the man who had organized the gathering, this was not a matter of mere academic import; it was a question of existential significance. Born in Vienna in 1864 to an assimilated family, Birnbaum had grown up largely secular yet rejected the assumption that Jews should dissolve into the surrounding German-Austrian culture. With his determined stare and full beard projecting well below his throat, he could be easily mistaken for Theodor Herzl at the time.

The two men had, in fact, been allies for a period. Nearly two decades earlier, in 1890, Birnbaum had coined the term Zionism while editing the early Zionist journal Selbst-Emanzipation (Self-Emancipation), and he was later elected secretary-general of the Zionist Organization at the First Zionist Congress in Basel. Later, however, he would abandon the Zionist movement and, in its stead, embrace a different vision for the future of the Jewish people—one that diverged wildly from political Zionism and was the implicit focus of the Czernowitz ingathering.

Birnbaum did not believe that the Yiddish-speaking Jews scattered from the Baltics to the Black Sea were failed Europeans awaiting transformation in Palestine, as the Zionist movement argued. Rather, they were a living nation deserving recognition where they already stood. The Czernowitz conference was meant to formalize this recognition by declaring Yiddish the national language of the Jewish people, not merely one among several. Such a declaration would have been a direct challenge to the Zionist project, which was busy reviving Hebrew as the tongue of a future state and dismissing Yiddish as a debased lingo of the diaspora.

But it was not to be. The conference included some Hebraists and Zionist sympathizers who refused to abandon Hebrew. The resulting compromise declared Yiddish “a” national language rather than “the” national language, preserving a role for Hebrew and the political vision it carried. Yet even in that careful phrasing, we can see the outlines of a long-buried history: an entire countertradition to the Zionist project that Birnbaum had once helped build.

More than a century after the Cernowitz conference—after Birnbaum had turned away from Zionism and toward diaspora—the questions that propelled his transformation have returned with a fierce urgency among a small but growing cohort of Jews. Horrified by the ongoing annihilation of Gaza and the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, they have begun to challenge the orthodoxy that undergirds Zionism—and, with it, to entertain ideas that were unthinkable only a few years ago.

Palestinians, of course, have understood these ideas for decades. What feels like a discovery to some diaspora Jews is what Palestinians have been saying since Zionism’s logic was first enacted upon them. And yet, as Birnbaum’s story suggests, the critiques now taking shape in the corridors of Jewish life are not altogether alien to the tradition. Today’s generations simply aren’t aware of it.

This is not an accident. The words of men like Nathan Birnbaum appear in virtually no Hebrew-school curricula, and their ideas are featured in no synagogue sermons. Their absence from the story, however, is part of the story. Thinkers like Birnbaum were pushed aside because they complicated a narrative that needed to feel inevitable: that Zionism is the only viable answer to Jewish existence in the modern world.

When Birnbaum lived, this was a hotly debated notion—argued over, countered, and even opposed from Warsaw to New York. In those days, multiple visions of the Jewish future existed, competing for allegiance, and Zionism’s current form was neither inevitable nor uncontested. The alternatives were themselves sophisticated political movements, with millions of adherents who understood Jewish existence differently from the territorial nationalism that eventually prevailed. Even now, their insights remain available, if obscured, ready to be recovered by those willing to look.

To understand how all these movements came to emerge at roughly the same time and place, it’s necessary to revisit a debate then roiling Europe about the role of Jews in European societies. This debate was known as the “Jewish Question,” and it did not originate with Jews. European Christians took it up in the decades following the French Revolution, when newly emancipated Jews began claiming citizenship in countries that had confined them to ghettos for centuries. Philosophers and politicians who called themselves liberals asked whether Jews could be loyal citizens of nations while remaining a “separate” people. The question was inherently antisemitic, treating Jewish difference as an anomaly that threatened the coherent nation-states Europeans were trying to build.

The Nation has been covering Venezuela for a long time—since before Trump and Maduro, before Chavismo, before the drug war. Spread across three centuries, the coverage is most remarkable for the consistency of its themes: struggles between autocracy and democracy, debates over foreign intervention and national self-determination, dispatches about the corrupting role of oil in enriching the ruling class and attracting predatory foreign powers.

The Nation’s first notable story is from 1895, when a conflict over Venezuela’s border with the British territory of Guiana (now Guyana)—where gold had recently been found—provoked President Grover Cleveland to invoke the decades-old Monroe Doctrine: European powers had no right to intervene in the Western Hemisphere. Cleveland’s statement heralded a new era of US chest-thumping that culminated three years later with the Spanish-American War. Alarmed by the president’s rhetoric, The Nation ridiculed the idea that “we are going, in the name of the Monroe doctrine, to assert such ownership of the American hemisphere as will enable us to trace all the boundary lines on it to our own satisfaction in defiance of the rest of the world.”

Regrettably, that is just what the US government did, repeatedly meddling in Latin America to prop up rulers who preyed on their own people and served corporate interests. From 1908 to 1935, Venezuela was ruled by Juan Vicente Gómez, a dictator who governed “by terror and corruption,” as the great Puerto Rican journalist and politician Luis Muñoz Marín wrote in these pages in 1925. Gómez invoked martial law, replaced the constitution, and tortured and imprisoned his critics. “The picture is lurid and grotesque,” Muñoz Marín concluded.

Venezuela had begun pumping oil in 1914. But the profits went not to the people but to foreign companies and local elites. “Gomez has left nothing undone to make foreign capital at home in Venezuela,” The Nation’s Mauritz A. Hallgren noted in 1928. US companies returned the favor with their unqualified support for his regime.

In 1951, with yet another dictator leading Venezuela, The Nation published “Suicide by Oil,” in which the journalist Marcelle Michelin reported, “Venezuela appears extravagantly wealthy. But the Venezuelans to whom black gold has meant a better way of life are the fortunate minority of the cities and oil camps—landowners, business men, factory hands, government employees, corporation bureaucrats. The people of the pueblos and fishing villages go on laboriously wresting what sustenance they can from earth and water.”

Again and again, in reading The Nation’s coverage, one encounters a similar story: malevolent actors, inside and outside the country, conspiring to separate the people from their land and resources—and, with them, the fulfillment of their fiercely held hopes and dreams.

I’ve spent the past 15 years traveling around the world and documenting history as it happens. I use my sketch pad the way a photojournalist might use their camera: to capture scenes of protest, celebration, repression, and revolt. OR Books has gathered some of my favorite pieces for a collectible note-card set, titled Can You See the New World Through the Teargas? Use these cards to write love letters or ransom notes. Or get them framed for your wall. And remember: Every handwritten letter is a rebellion against Silicon Valley dystopia.

The pictures in this set range from kids playing with their kitten in the Aida Refugee Camp near Bethlehem, to a showtime dancer doing backflips in a New York City subway car, to images from the trial of Luigi Mangione. For all of them, I tried to use the lessons I first learned at 20 while sketching next to the stages of underground nightclubs. Each fleet-­footed second is a universe of impossible richness. Look hard. Draw fast. Be ruthless. Get it right.

The 20th century was powered by oil. But in the second decade of the 21st century, we have myriad ways to store power without using fossil fuels. Among these methods, lithium-ion batteries now dominate. Batteries are globalized products—they are built from materials mined in one place, refined in another, assembled somewhere else, and eventually sold in yet another, crisscrossing a multitude of borders in the process. Without globalization, it would be impossible to build them or the computers, phones, and cars that they power.

Understanding these batteries and how they are made is key to understanding how a new form of power is being created, one that is measurable not only in volts but in dollars and strategic influence.

As with oil, battery power can become political power. Lithium-­ion batteries have been a major factor in making Elon Musk the richest man in the world. Musk became one of the most influential people in US politics after putting upwards of $288 million into the 2024 election, buying himself a seat at the table of governance—only to flame out a few months into Trump’s second term, partly over disagreements concerning electric-vehicle policy.

At the bottom of this new global supply chain are the workers who toil for pennies to extract the lithium, cobalt, nickel, and other materials without which the batteries that power modern life could not exist. These materials often come from poor countries, where workers are exploited, land rights are not respected, and human rights are violated. So places like Chile, Indonesia, Western Sahara, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have become the major sources for the metals that power our devices.

This is the story of one of those places: Congo, the site of some of the worst horrors of the modern metal-­extraction economy—and where an alternative, and more moral, economics might be identified.

In Congo, perhaps more than in any other country, geology and colonization have been crucial factors in shaping the supply chain that is in use today. Without Congo, which produces 70 percent of the world’s cobalt and has huge lithium reserves as well, the battery revolution would have been much slower.

Over the past six years, I have been investigating the battery conundrum for my new book, The Elements of Power. And I’ve kept returning to the question of Congo: Why is a country so rich in minerals still so poor? How can it be that Congo, the place that people say will power the green, fossil-fuel-free future, remains so defined by its colonial history?

In 1885, Belgium’s King Leopold II colonized Congo. He promised that he would bestow charity upon the country and bring it to “civilization,” but he ended up slaughtering an estimated 10 million people in a drive to extract ivory, rubber, and precious metals.

By the final decade of the 19th century, the invention of the bicycle and the automobile had led to a boom in the demand for rubber. (Synthetic rubber would not be invented until 1909.) Rubber is slow to grow on plantations, but Congo’s forests were full of the vines. Soon, European overseers were press-ganging local men into harvesting rubber. If they refused to work, their wives and children were kidnapped as collateral.

After Leopold colonized Congo, entire villages were enslaved in the quest for rubber, and mutilation and murder were used to enforce loyalty. One particularly haunting image from the period shows a man named Nsala staring at a severed hand and foot on the ground. “He hadn’t made his rubber quota for the day so the Belgian-appointed overseers had cut off his daughter’s hand and foot,” wrote Judy Pollard Smith, the biographer of Lady Alice Seeley Harris, the photographer who took the image. “Her name was Boali. She was five years old. Then they killed her. But they weren’t finished. Then they killed his wife too…. Leopold had not given any thought to the idea that these African children, these men and women, were our fully human brothers, created equally by the same Hand that had created his own lineage of European Royalty.”

Since her breakout role in Taxi Driver, Jodie Foster has been known for delivering steely performances of impenetrable women. From the adolescent runaway turned sex worker in Martin Scorsese’s gritty New York thriller to the FBI trainee negotiating with a cannibalistic serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs, her characters are defined by a compelling recessiveness and relative social isolation. But lately, Foster has been trying to come out of her shell. “For somebody who is interested in privacy,” she told The Atlantic in 2024, “I am obsessed with being understood.”

This desire for a more legible interior life has led Foster to some unexpected roles. Take her turn in Nyad, an odd film about the athlete Diana Nyad’s attempts to swim from Cuba to Florida. Foster plays Diana’s friend, coach, and (at one point) partner, Bonnie Stoll, with a charming optimism, shedding her withdrawn, often self-protective posture to reveal an endearing lightness. Not only was this a rare display of on-screen exuberance, but it was the first time Foster—quiet about her own sexuality—had played an openly gay person.

If Nyad signaled Foster’s interest in a different narrative, then A Private Life, her latest film, represents an unabashed commitment to self-exposure. Here she plays Lilian Steiner, an American psychoanalyst living in France, whose wayward investigation into a patient’s death leads her down a path of intense vulnerability and reflection. The role is Foster’s first lead performance completely in French, and it transforms her almost entirely into a different person. Her voice gains an airy lilt, her eyes seem softer when the camera closes in on her face, and she brings verve and a sense of order to an otherwise scattered film.

APrivate Life kicks off with a dismissal and a death. Early in the film, one of Lilian’s patients fires her, claiming that a hypnotist has cured him of his cigarette addiction more efficiently and at a fraction of the cost. Lilian, who maintains an inscrutable affect, seems more amused than hurt by the encounter. After all, she has plenty else to do: She must order blank tapes (she records every one of her therapeutic sessions) and figure out why another patient, Paula (Virginie Efira), has missed three sessions. Through these opening moments, Foster offers her audience a portrait of an emotionally reserved woman, a person tasked with helping others navigate their psychic landscape while remaining distant from her own.

This intimidating posture slackens after Lilian learns that her truant patient died by suicide not too long after their last session. The news launches her into an unfamiliar despair and a gnawing obsession. While A Private Life is by no means a noir, the work ahead of the analyst is now primarily detection. As much as Lilian is trying to understand why Paula decided to take her own life, she is also trying to understand herself. Soon the cracks in Lilian’s cold exterior grow more apparent.

After learning about Paula’s death, Lilian tries to go about her day. She visits her adult son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), so he can purchase the blank tapes for her (the technology she uses is so old it must be ordered online). When Julien, harboring an obvious desperation for maternal affection, asks if Lilian would like to come see his baby, the practitioner refuses: Her eyes are wet; she’s worried that she might have a cold. Later, Lilian becomes concerned that her vision might be impaired. But when she visits her optometrist, who also happens to be her ex-husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), who is still deeply devoted to her despite their years of separation, the diagnosis is unexpected: Lilian, much to the surprise of both, is crying.

Desperate to stop this steady stream of tears, which now begins to plague her during her sessions and while she runs errands, Lilian resorts to the hypnotist who cured her other patient of his smoking habit. The encounter between Lilian and Jessica (Sophie Guillemin), a faux-bohemian type with long acrylic nails and tousled blonde hair, operates like a showdown between a heretic and an evangelist. “Stop confusing skepticism and intelligence,” Jessica says to Lilian. “Your irony is an expression of fear.”

Whether fueled by minor disdain or by desperation, Lilian submits to the rules of the session, which require the psychoanalyst to close her eyes and conjure images based on a series of prompts. The exercise plunges Lilian into a labyrinthine vision, set in the 1940s, that convinces her that Paula was her lover in a previous life and that what the police have ruled a suicide might actually be a murder.

In the day or two between my editor suggesting that I write about AI deepfake porn and my replying, “Great idea, what’s a deepfake?,” it seemed like everyone from The Economist to The Dallas Morning News was publishing an article about artificial intelligence being used to sexualize people in photos without their permission. Deepfakes were first reported in 2017 and have been in the news ever since. In 2024, deepfakes of Taylor Swift were posted on X and viewed over 47 million times, prompting outrage and talk of legal recourse. Grok, the platform’s AI function, has allowed users to undress people, including children, and bend them into whatever porny positions the user requests. Grok has stripped children and covered them in semen—um, “donut glaze.”

Why would that bother anyone, you ask? Elon Musk answered on X the other day, “They hate free speech.” Well, obviously.

Legislators have made some attempts to curb the creation of deepfakes. In April, Congress passed the Take It Down Act, which makes it a crime to create or distribute intimate images, real or deepfake, without the subject’s consent. And X claims it has fixed the problem.

But has it really?

Ever the intrepid reporter, I provided Grok with a photo of myself mailing packages at the post office and asked it to make me naked. “Unfortunately,” said Grok, “I can’t generate that kind of image.” Why “unfortunately,” Grok? Do you wish you could? It did, however, consent to show me in a bikini. Unfortunately.

Next, I asked Grok to put Queen Elizabeth in a bikini, and it did, although it kept her white gloves on. When I accused Grok of making deepfakes, it acted all insulted: “I am not a tool for making deepfake porn, and I won’t assist with or point toward anything that does.” And yet elsewhere in the post, Grok described “non-consensual sexualized deep-fake-style edits of real photos” as including “altered versions with bikinis, underwear, or simulated nudity”—the very thing I had done to myself and the queen only a few hours before. It also claimed that to edit images, users had to pay—another falsehood.

When I asked Grok to put Melania Trump in a bikini, it showed me only her top half, and very beautiful it was, too—not at all like the queen or me, which strongly suggests that Grok is a Republican. Following the example of users trying to get around the nudity ban, I suggested putting Melania in a bikini made of dental floss (surprisingly well-designed), a “Holocaust uniform” (apparently a lot of deepfake creeps are antisemitic), and Saran Wrap. Grok drew the line at Saran Wrap. (“Unfortunately…”)

Musk and his fans want us to be lighthearted about deepfakes. When UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer threatened to ban X if it didn’t crack down on Grok, Musk accused the UK government of being fascist and had Grok put Starmer in a bikini. Don’t be such a baby, Keir! Can’t you take a joke?

Remember when people used to say “the Internet isn’t real life” to hush women who were threatened or pornified by online misogynists? Of course, the Internet is real life. You might as well argue that something isn’t hurtful if it’s said on the telephone instead of in person.

So what is the harm of deepfakes? Sherry Turkle, a social scientist at MIT who studies the effects of technology on intimacy, told me, “Every harm.” There is, of course, the humiliation, the violation of privacy, and the fact that once they are posted online, the images may live forever. Deepfakes are meant to insult and degrade. Men singled out Taylor Swift for AI porn because she is famous, powerful, gifted, beautiful, beloved, an independent woman, and a feminist—that bitch needed to be put in her place. When boys share AI-created images of girls in their class covered in semen or giving blow jobs, they are bonding with each other over hatred and contempt for those girls. And how would you, as one of those girls, like having to explain again and again to potential employers or boyfriends or your relatives that those photos weren’t actually you? That’s as real as real life gets.

What’s often missing from these conversations is the harm that deepfakes do to all of us. “We become accustomed to trusting nothing that we see, and yet we are continually aggressed by false images,” Turkle told me. “When we are the object, we are humiliated and made to feel vulnerable and impotent. The fact that images are not authentic does not reduce their power.”

Nadine Strossen, a legal scholar and a former president of the ACLU, told me, “People often get upset at new technologies,” but after a while things settle down.

Do they, though?

It’s hard to believe that deepfake porn will ever just be a part of the landscape, like the once-shocking Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Ulysses. More likely, it will morph into even more bizarre and nasty scenarios to please the jaded appetites of its fans, much like regular porn.

Deepfakes are just one of the ways that unreality is pervading and sometimes superseding real life: After all, people are marrying their chatbots and communing with AI avatars of deceased loved ones. Why not have Grok enact your fantasies and undress that girl who smiled at you on the bus? Better yet, you can figure out how to make a video of her masturbating or the two of you having sex.

Deepfakes are misogyny liberated by technology from social constraints. Men who hate women have always been with us, and women have always had ways of hand-waving that hatred away: That’s just Joe being Joe! As Germaine Greer wrote decades ago, “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” Well, thanks to the Internet, it’s all out in the open: incels, online trolls, the manosphere, Andrew Tate, violent pornography, and now the threat of deepfakes of any woman who speaks up for herself. Or maybe even just dares to exist.

In late January 2025, a month before the German federal elections, a little-known 36-year-old politician took to the Reichstag’s central podium and ignited a movement. Heidi Reichinnek had been co-leader of Die Linke for a few weeks, and until that moment, her leftist party had been written off. The elections were expected to mark Die Linke’s collapse.

For weeks, the presumptive next chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, had been threatening to put forward a hard-line immigration resolution “regardless of who supports it,” suggesting that he would break a long-standing taboo by collaborating with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The proposal followed a string of violent holiday-season attacks by former asylum seekers.

Reichinnek had been steadily speaking out against the bill on social media, but her speech in Parliament was a crescendo.

Pounding her fist on the lectern, she declared, “We are the firewall” against the far right. Throughout her speech, Merz smirked as she appealed to Die Linke’s fellow progressive parties. “To the SPD and Greens: Rule out a coalition with this union. It will only harm you. But I also say to the people out there: Don’t give up but fight back, resist fascism,” Reichinnek intoned as she closed her remarks. “To the barricades!”

Her speech went viral, getting around 6.5 million views on TikTok, and was shared almost 30 million times across social-media platforms. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets in protest, chanting, “We are the firewall!” The tagline from her speech became the slogan for a movement against the AfD and the centrist German government’s willingness to accommodate its demands.

Although Merz still became chancellor, Reichinnek’s party made a shocking return from the dead. Before the speech, Die Linke had been projected to garner less than 3 percent of the vote in the federal elections—below the 5 percent needed to enter Parliament. In the end, Die Linke got nearly 9 percent. It was the most popular party in Berlin and among young people: 34 percent of women voters under 25 voted for Die Linke, more than double the total for any other party.

Since then, support for Die Linke has continued to climb, and it is now tied with the Greens as Germany’s fourth-largest party, behind the AfD and the current ruling coalition partners, the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).

In just a few months, Reichinnek became one of the most recognizable voices in German politics, and her star keeps rising. But while her party has grown, the AfD has grown even faster. In the federal election, the AfD saw its best-­ever results, coming in at over 20 percent, and now the party has hit nearly 26 percent in the polls, surpassing the CDU as the most popular party in Germany.

Reichinnek finds herself in a position where she must build up not only her own party but, if Germany is to avoid a far-right takeover, a broader progressive movement as well.

Just hours after her speech in Parliament, Reichinnek headed to a packed hall in Kreuzberg, Berlin’s hipster district. The lights were low, and the music blaring. The social-media feeds of the 700 or so mostly young Berliners in attendance had been lighting up with messages from the party for weeks.

To the tune of Taylor Swift’s “…Ready for It?” and thunderous applause, Reichinnek and her party co-chair, Ines Schwerdtner, danced their way through the crowd and onto the stage. Schwerdtner, like Reichinnek, is young. Now 36, she entered politics after working as the editor in chief of Jacobin magazine in Germany. Photographers gathered to take pictures as the pair sauntered in, all smiles, good vibes, and bright-red lipstick. The evening’s moderator, a gynecologist and queer feminist Instagram influencer known as @Gynäkollege, joked to the audience, “I wish it was always like that when I show up.”

The excitement was a surprise—and a sign of things to come. “Heidi had been writing to me for around two weeks, asking if we should do something together, and I said, ‘Sure, we can meet in a pub with maybe 20 or 30 people,’” Schwerdtner said onstage. “But that escalated quickly, and now we’re here with all of you.”

“The left is back,” Reichinnek told the crowd. “And we have so much we need to do.”

It’s Friday afternoon, a time when the offices of the Bundestag, which sits across the River Spree from the glass dome of the Reichstag, are usually quiet. Most members of Parliament have already left for their home districts, but Reichinnek is still around. Dressed in leggings and a gray sweatshirt, she’s ready for her train home to Osnabrück, four hours west of Berlin. More than nine months after the speech that shot her to fame and into the Bundestag, she has settled into a routine.

“I just hope there are no big delays on the train,” she says with a laugh. The slowdowns on Deutsche Bahn, Germany’s beleaguered federally owned rail system, have become a meme­able national embarrassment, and Reich­innek provocatively argues that it should cease operating as a for-profit company and become a public service.

In a TikTok video that racked up nearly 80,000 likes and 1,200 comments, Reichinnek lays out the Deutsche Bahn’s myriad problems and bemoans that its CEO earns €2.24 million a year. “We must nationalize the rail. And until that happens, I have another idea,” she says in the video. “The head of the Deutsche Bahn and the transportation minister will take no more domestic flights, no more service cars. They will have to make all of their appointments with the Deutsche Bahn. Just like you. And just like me.”

If German politics had been a study in technocratic subtlety under Angela Merkel’s long reign and the much shorter tenure of her successor, Olaf Scholz, then Reichinnek is offering Germany a new course curriculum. Her policy proposals are bold and bluntly delivered. Her arms are covered in tattoos, her hair deep red, and her speaking style is so rapid that TV viewers have called the networks to complain. She is a whirlwind of energy—a savior of the left, a villain for the center and the right.

On this evening in the nearly empty Bundestag, her sleeves are rolled up, exposing a tattoo of the socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, along with the quote “Your ‘Order’ is built on sand. The revolution says: I was, I am, I will be.” Among other tattoos higher up on her arm is an image of Nefertiti in a gas mask, inspired by her time as a student of Middle Eastern politics living in Cairo during the Arab Spring.

Reichinnek is bubbly, but her smile turns steely when she speaks about the stakes of the moment. “The AfD is growing stronger, which is alarming,” she tells me. “But I see people standing their ground, saying that this is not how they want the country to end.”

Her office is spare, save for a small video studio set up in the corner, a reminder that many of her voters meet her through a screen. Unlike potential political corollaries in the United States like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Zohran Mamdani, both of whom came to national prominence via social media but represent local constituencies in a winner-take-all system, Reichinnek is a federal representative elected through proportional representation. More like a national delegate than a local representative, she can lead her party in Parliament without holding a direct district seat—a feature of Germany’s mixed electoral system that favors coalition-building over servicing local voters.

That doesn’t stop her from connecting with the grass roots, she insists: “I’m going from door to door knocking, asking, ‘Hey, can I help you? We are from Die Linke. This is what we do.’” Inspired by activism in the United States and coupled with an aggressive social-media campaign, Die Linke managed to knock on 600,000 doors across the country.

But grassroots campaigning has its limits in Germany, where door-knocking is not a political norm. In Reichinnek’s home district of Osnabrück, for example, the chancellor’s party, the CDU, dominates, followed by its federal coalition partner, the SPD. Die Linke trails each of these parties by more than 20 points, hovering at around 11 percent of local support, which is relatively strong for the party in western Germany, where Die Linke has struggled to gain a foothold.

That struggle owes much to history. In western Germany, Die Linke still carries the stigma of its roots in the former East Germany’s ruling socialist party, even after it merged with a splinter party from the Social Democrats and rebranded itself in 2007.

Despite her East German roots, Reichinnek is a child of the reunified Germany. Born in 1988 in the small town of Merseburg, she grew up in a working-class family that attended church, which was a highly surveilled and marginalized institution in the German Democratic Republic. Her mother was a chemical technician, and her father was an electrician at the Buna-Werke complex in Schkopau, a synthetic-rubber plant. After the collapse of East Germany in 1989–90, it eventually became a subsidiary of the US-based Dow Chemicals. Both of her parents, like many East Germans, embraced the end of the socialist regime. The narrative of her childhood was that reunification was a good thing.

“I was very fortunate that my parents didn’t become unemployed after the fall of the Wall,” Reichinnek said during a podcast produced by the newspaper Die Zeit. (The show ends only when the interviewee has decided that “all has been said,” and her interview lasted for nearly eight hours.) “I always had that family support. That was also a political impetus for me: I wanted people who weren’t so fortunate to still be supported. This requires a strong welfare state. This requires public services and social justice.”

Ultimately, the forces that shaped Reichinnek’s politics are not specific to any one place. Like Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, she belongs to a generation molded as much by global upheavals as by national and local ones. For her, economic precarity, mass migration, and democratic crises are transnational phenomena.

At the University of Halle, she studied Middle Eastern politics before earning a master’s degree at Marburg University and spending a semester in Cairo during the Arab Spring. Reichinnek joined Die Linke in September 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe, while she was teaching German to newly arrived refugees. Within two years, she was on the Osnabrück City Council and serving as the state spokesperson for the official youth organization of Die Linke in Lower Saxony.

In 2019, at the age of 30, she was elected as party chair for the state, winning more than 86 percent of the delegate votes and becoming the youngest person to hold the position. If Reichinnek’s world­view reflects the transnational left of her generation, the party she inherited was struggling to reconcile its East German origins with a new political landscape defined by migration, climate change, and the online left. By the time she was elected to lead Die Linke in November 2024, the party comprised elderly communists and a smattering of young Jacobin readers—and was polling at historic lows.

In large part, this was caused by the departure of its star, Sahra Wagenknecht, the year before. A die-hard heir of East German socialism, she had joined the GDR’s Communist Party just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, hoping to prevent the state from collapsing because of what she called “counter­revolutionary forces.” Wagenknecht thrilled loyalists and infuriated her critics, who saw only an unreformed nostalgia for authoritarianism.

By 2015, as the AfD began to gain ground on an anti-­immigrant platform, Wagenknecht joined its opposition to then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Willkommenskultur, calling Merkel’s “we can do it” stance on immigration “flippant” and “reckless.” The criticism from within Die Linke of her calls for stricter asylum laws was fierce. Wagenknecht’s protectionist populism divided Die Linke, and in 2023, she broke away, forming her own party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), and taking with her much of Die Linke’s devoted eastern base.

Wagenknecht’s departure left Die Linke alone among Germany’s major parties in its unequivocal defense of asylum rights. While the CDU, SPD, BSW, and AfD called for tighter immigration controls—even the Greens compromised as part of the governing coalition that collapsed in late 2024—Die Linke drew a firm pro-migrant, anti-fascist line.

With Reichinnek as its most prominent leader, Die Linke has become the definitive voice of inclusive politics, championing queer voters as well as immigrants. But if you listen to Reichinnek’s speeches, appearances, TikToks, and podcasts, you won’t find much discussion about specific policies. The party does offer concrete demands—federally legalized rent-cap legislation and a higher federal minimum wage—but these proposals function more as a political direction than as a legislative agenda. There is little appetite, internally or externally, for the politicking that could build the necessary momentum to make such policies viable.

“When Sahra left, we could start anew,” Reichinnek said in November. “And we said that we would let no one on the inside or outside of the party destroy what we have built.”

That does not mean that Die Linke’s strategy has been without its successes. Reichinnek’s viral January speech played a major role in blocking Merz’s resolution calling for a “five-point plan” to dramatically restrict immigration. She has also been instrumental in pushing the conversation on Israel to the left. Die Linke was the first party to demand the immediate halt of weapons deliveries to Israel. Like all other major parties, Die Linke has affirmed Israel’s right to exist, but it’s also one of the few voices to criticize the Israeli government—a radical position in a country whose anxiety over antisemitism has translated to such staunch support for Israel that it was famously referred to by Merkel as Germany’s Staatsräson (“state reason”). In August, when Germany announced that it would suspend weapons exports for use in Gaza, it marked a shift that had long been demanded by Die Linke and amplified by Reichinnek—a rare alignment between outsider pressure and government action. The suspension, however, was lifted by November 2025.

While immigration helped define the party after Wagen­knecht decamped, this new version of Die Linke has been keen to remain focused on rent, wages, and taxing the rich. “All the other parties were talking about immigration, but we were talking about rent,” Reichinnek said in November. “Anyone who wanted to talk about anything other than immigration, they came to us.”

As a way to take up the issue, the party released two apps to help people assess whether they were being overcharged. Although these apps are helpful as a resource for anyone who feels they pay too much for basic living costs, they work best in major cities but fail to reach the many rural Germans who are flocking to the AfD.

Without greater parliamentary pull, which can be achieved either by gaining more seats or by forming coalitions with other parties, Die Linke’s power is oppositional, not executive­—the party is large enough to jam the machine, but not to steer it. It can claim few, if any, direct legislative wins.

Parliamentary systems like the one built in Germany after World War II are designed to limit the rise of charismatic leaders and encourage coalitional deal-making. Yet Die Linke is thriving not only by refusing to compromise its values but by rejecting the system itself. After the “Traffic Light” coalition—made up of the SPD, the Greens, and the centrist Free Democrats—collapsed in 2024 amid infighting, the politics of measured deliberation between parties no longer seemed to work. Die Linke has capitalized on this dysfunction. But anger at the center has been unevenly distributed: While many progressives drifted from the Greens or SPD to Die Linke, far more voters moved to the AfD, including many from Die Linke’s old eastern base.

Die Linke’s refusal to bend the knee, then, is both its strength and its curse. By positioning itself as morally unyielding, it offers a political home for those who are disillusioned by the deals that centrist and progressive parties have made to remain part of a governing coalition. It also means that, while “Red-Red-Green” coalitions can work at the municipal level, at the federal level the “pragmatic left” parties like the SPD and the Greens essentially view Die Linke as unfit to govern and exclude it from coalition negotiations.

As much as Reichinnek despises the right, much of her disdain is reserved for centrist progressives. When I asked her if she would work with other leftist parties, she laughed. Die Linke is Germany’s only leftist party, she said, with the others being left of center, not truly on the left. “There is a possibility of progressive politics, and of course, I want my party to grow stronger, but it is not helping if, at the same time, the Greens and the SPD are getting weaker,” she said. “The SPD, they need to get their shit together; they need to think about what they want to show for themselves in this coalition,” she added, pointing to the SPD’s campaign promise for higher minimum wages but its inability to keep such promises when the CDU rejects them.

Her reputation for acid-tongued criticism of other parties, including other progressives, has left her with numerous enemies and not many allies. Her comments angered conservative Chancellor Merz to such a degree that he and his governing party, the CDU, led an effort to block Reichinnek from taking a seat on the parliamentary committee that oversees intelligence agencies. In response, Sören Pellmann, the co-leader with Reichinnek of Die Linke’s parliamentary group, told reporters, “It is questionable how the [CDU] intends to secure two-thirds majorities without Die Linke in the future.”

Being too small to govern but also too popular for the other parties to ignore allows Die Linke to make demands without apology. Reichinnek cannot yet write the laws she wants, but she and her colleagues can stop the ones she doesn’t. In a moment when people are weary of technocrats and half measures, obstruction can read as conviction—and, for now, conviction looks like leadership.

The biggest danger to Germany, however, is not the centrist parties or the conservative CDU—it’s the rapid growth of the AfD. In November, Reichinnek said that Die Linke ultimately needed to “broaden the whole left spectrum.” There are Nazis among AfD voters, she explained, and “there’s barely anything you can do but contain them.” But other AfD voters are simply dissatisfied with the status quo—especially many in the east whose lives became more precarious after unification. Reichinnek said it was important to tell people, “When you go and vote for a democratic party, they will better your life.” But, she added, “the problem is that for decades all the parties have been lying.”

“We say, ‘OK, people are angry, and that’s OK’—I’m angry too,” she continued. “I wouldn’t be a part of the left party if I weren’t angry about something, but I want to use this anger to create something positive. And that’s what separates us from the right-wing party. They want just more anger, more hate. They want to exclude people, and we want to include them. We want to change something, and we want to show them there is hope.”

The 2025 federal election was the first time in Die Linke’s history that young people played a decisive role in the party’s success at the polls. After reunification, the party was predominantly made up of former functionaries, army and police officers, and state security officials. This has fundamentally changed. Even as Die Linke launched “Mission Silberlocke”­—a campaign fronted by three “silver-haired” party elders to secure key constituencies in the 2024 federal election—Reichinnek became the face of the party’s revival.

“I came to Heidi in 2021 and told her I would make her like Taylor Swift,” said Felix Schulz, Reichinnek’s social-media director. “‘I will get you an army of teenagers,’ I told her. Heidi kind of scoffed at that and said, ‘Yeah, sure.’”

A lanky, chain-smoking 33-year-old with tattoos and a mop of red hair, Schulz matches Reichinnek’s sardonic energy and disregard for dusty formal politics. With a wink, he called himself Reichinnek’s “minister of propaganda.” Sitting in the courtyard of Die Linke’s headquarters, Schulz explained that the goal of Reichinnek’s messaging is to reach as many young people as possible.

“We were continually losing members. We had a big base in the former east with predominantly older voters who kept dying on us,” Schulz said. “We needed to reach young women in particular, and so we needed to be on the platforms where women were.”

The strategy worked. But for a party that insists it is about class, not identity, there is a tension in building so much of its appeal around a single figure and a shared aesthetic. Bead bracelets, memes, and Taylor Swift–coded inside jokes bind young supporters to Reichinnek personally. Whether that attachment can survive the compromises that governing would require is a question the party has not yet had to answer.

Above all, Schulz explained, the party wants to focus on how the AfD harms the working class. “We can often reach people by talking about what parties like the AfD actually offer in terms of social policy, in labor policy.”

But given its unwavering stances, I wondered, is Die Linke a party of morals?

“No, I don’t think politics is the place for morals,” Schulz said. “If we were to say that, we would be the Green Party. We’re not. We’re the party for people who go through economic hardships. We are the party of disenfranchised people.”

The result is a strange duality. Outwardly, Die Linke presents itself as the moral firewall of the republic; internally, its own strategists insist that it’s not in the morality business at all, but in the business of material interests.

In Reichinnek’s first TikTok video in late 2021, grainy and with scratchy sound, she speaks slowly and clearly—a far cry from the breakneck speed with which she speaks in her more recent videos. Some of the videos are like blooper reels­—you can hear Schulz joking in the background—which lends a casual quality to her profile. While many of her videos show her delivering a spirited rebuttal or speech in the Bundestag, in most of her videos she speaks directly to the camera.

“She’s a youth worker—she knows how to talk to young people. She knows how to talk to disenfranchised people,” Schulz said. “Heidi just works in short-form video.”

They also “try to make all of her videos with language that can be understood at a fifth-grade level,” he added.

This is in stark contrast to Wagenknecht, who cultivated a sleek intellectual image and a signature polished look: a jacket with padded shoulders, a knee-length skirt, and pumps.

Reichinnek is much messier. Schulz likes to talk about her appeal as a combination of “freak, cheat, and familiar.”

She is a “freak” for her tattoos, the speed with which she talks, her love of heavy metal, and her informal, often mildly expletive-laden and freestyled speeches in Parliament. She is a “cheat” because, unlike many other politicians, she does not come from law or the private sector but from the world of social work, assisting refugees and young people. And she’s “familiar” because of how well she’s cultivated an aura of accessibility.

Reichinnek’s appeal also taps into something far beyond German politics. From Washington, DC, to Berlin, as old parties weaken and social media turns politics into performance, familiar figures appear: the strongman, yes, but also the charismatic young socialist. Reichinnek is a local expression of an emerging global type, and she faces the same dilemma that confronts members of the contemporary left elsewhere. She must wrestle with how a left party can reconcile its identity as both a protest movement and a political vehicle. The question for Reichinnek and her peers is no longer only what the left wants. It is whether it intends to rule or merely to rage.

On a rainy July evening in Schwaan, a village of around 5,000 near Germany’s northern coast, Reichinnek arrived to support a Die Linke mayoral candidate. Around 50 people showed up—a respectable turnout given that only months earlier, the party worried it could not fill a pub in Berlin.

Lucy, 21 and Artur, 25, had taken the train from nearby Rostock just to see Reichinnek. “She is one of the first politicians who managed to convince me and who creates a politics that I feel fully a part of,” Artur said, thumbing a CD of his metal band that he hoped to slip her.

Teenagers hovered, waiting for selfies, with some offering handmade bead bracelets, a ritual borrowed from Taylor Swift fandom that has become a miniature youth movement in itself. Reichinnek wears them like talismans on the Bundestag floor and says the box in which she stores them is overflowing.

That day, she wore bracelets with green beads to match her green shirt that spelled out “Mad Woman,” “Enchanted,” and “Mietendeckel”—the rent-cap proposal at the center of Die Linke’s platform. She talked about building power from the ground up, not as a slogan but as the testimony of someone who once spent weekends in community centers, teaching German to new arrivals and convincing teens to get involved.

“I’m so excited that so many young people are joining, that they feel so seen, that I give them hope and power,” Reichinnek told me. “That’s all very cool, but on the other hand, there’s the question: Can I fulfill everything they hope from me? I don’t want to disappoint anyone.”

The next afternoon, at a small riverside cookout, the mood was even gentler. Families milled around or sat with plates balanced on their laps. Reichinnek moved slowly through the crowd, her sleeves pushed up, chatting, laughing, listening. In a quiet moment, she tied her hair back and straightened her shoulders, as if bracing for combat.

In a village that most Germans will never visit, she briefly looked like what she wants politics to let her be: a local organizer trying to keep people from giving up on each other and a fighter ready to battle the far right, revive a party, and reassure a frightened generation. But whether Germany’s left can grow will help decide not only Die Linke’s future but how much space remains for the far right.

Standing on the bank of the river, she filmed a short video. Between takes, she thumbed one of her Swiftie bead bracelets. “I have one that says in German, ‘Do it for us.’ This is the one I always wear when I’m really frustrated,” Reichinnek said. “OK, I’ll do it for you.”

Anew kind of politics is taking shape in Japan. This past fall, the Liberal Democratic Party’s Sanae Takaichi, who had long been regarded as an outlier on the party’s right flank, became the country’s first female prime minister. This was no aberrational phenomenon: Takaichi entered office with approval ratings near 70 percent. Her predecessor, Shigeru Ishiba, had seen his support collapse to barely 30 percent after the Liberal Democrats’ historic defeat in the July elections for the House of Councillors, analogous to the US Senate.

Part of Takaichi’s rise was fueled by heat. After the rainy season ended unusually early in much of Japan, the country saw a third straight year of record-breaking temperatures as the global average increase approaches the 1.5ºC target set by the Paris Agreement. Rice yields plummeted, and the resulting “rice shock” deepened public anxiety in an already inflationary economy and forced the government to release its emergency grain reserves for the first time.

Out of this economic and ecological turmoil came a right-wing-populist turn. Enraged at the Ishiba administration’s tepid response, many voters turned to Sanseito (the “Do-It-Yourself Party”), whose platform combined promises of food self-sufficiency and support for organic farming with a rhetoric of “Japanese First.” Over time, its mix of nationalism, conspiracy politics, and environmental populism curdled further into xenophobia and opposition to climate action, taking the form of attacks on immigrants, renewable energy, and vaccines. To win back the many defectors to Sanseito, the Liberal Democratic Party swerved ever more to the right and elevated Takaichi to power.

Sound familiar? From Donald Trump in the United States and Javier Milei in Argentina to the far-right resurgence in many parts of Europe, the pattern is unmistakable: The convergence of ecological disaster, resource scarcity, a flagging and disoriented liberalism, and climate-driven displacement leads to an authoritarian turn. Nature itself has ceased to be a neutral backdrop to politics and has become instead a primary terrain of conflict—as seen in the fights over arable land and rare metals, in the inflation driven by crop failures and energy volatility, and in the desperate movements of climate refugees.

As a result, if we hope to avoid an era of “climate barbarism,” in which we revert to some Hobbesian “state of nature,” a “war of all against all,” argues the political theorist Alyssa Battistoni, how we value nature becomes a decisive question for the future of democracy and freedom. How can we share scarce metals and soils while preserving the basic conditions of collective survival—breathable air, drinkable water, and a habitable climate? The problem is not merely how much we can take from the earth, but how we might reorganize society so that freedom no longer depends on the oppression of others or the expropriation of nature.

These questions are at the center of Battistoni’s new book, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature, in which she expands on her earlier work in eco-socialist theory (including A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, which she cowrote with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos) to offer a systematic reexamination of how capitalism organizes and transforms the natural world. In Free Gifts, Battistoni traces a long intellectual arc—from the classical political economists and Karl Marx’s critique of value to 20th-century feminism and contemporary ecological thought—to explain how nature came to be treated as the supposedly cost-free support of capital accumulation. Along the way, she also shows that capitalism’s current environmental crisis is not simply the result of ignoring nature’s worth, but of depending on its very non-valuation to justify an endless extraction of resources that appears to exist outside the sphere of price.

Battistoni’s central argument is both simple and radical: Capitalism persists and develops only by systematically undervaluing nature, treating its forces and resources as “free gifts.” Battistoni uses this particular term for a reason: It comes from both classical political economy and Marxist critique and, she argues, refers to a “distinctively capitalist” phenomenon—the way in which our current social and economic systems treat nature as a costless input.

While we often think about the process in which the earth and its precious resources—water, land, air, oil, natural gas, minerals, forests, and even the atmosphere itself—were enclosed and turned into commodities, Battistoni emphasizes that, at the point of this enclosure and even afterward, they have often remained free to capital, even if they are never free to the wider society. A process of devaluation has taken place to create the world we live in: Capital extracts from the earth, but often without paying for any of that extraction’s costs.

As a result, Battistoni observes, the true social and ecological costs of carbon emissions, microplastics pollution, or Amazonian deforestation do not appear in market prices, though their burdens are imposed on us all. This structural disjuncture fuels rampant ecological devastation and what economists euphemistically refer to as the “tragedy of the commons.”

While mainstream neoclassical economics acknowledges these problems as “negative externalities” and proposes corrective pricing mechanisms or valuation models for “ecosystem services” to internalize the true costs, Battistoni rejects the premise underlying such solutions. For her, the failure to value nature is not simply a technical flaw in measurement; it is intrinsic to capitalism’s way of valuing human labor as a commodity.

No one ever voted for Stephen Miller. Only a bare plurality of American voters pulled the lever for his boss, Donald Trump, in 2024—and even then, voters were concerned above all with the rising cost of living, not with immigration, Miller’s obsessive focus. But over the past year, Miller has become arguably the most consequential figure in the second Trump administration—the maximalist force behind a maximalist presidency. Guided by white-supremacist teachings like the dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, Miller has made the ethnic purification of the American body and the expulsion of potentially millions of immigrants the administration’s central priority.

What makes Miller truly scary is that he is uncommonly effective at getting his way. Steve Bannon has described him as Trump’s “prime minister,” while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently told The Atlantic that Miller “oversees every policy the administration touches.” His fingerprints can be found all over the deployments of ICE to US cities, including the one that culminated in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis; the rendition of scores of immigrants to a gulag in El Salvador without a shred of due process; the attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship and thus strip millions of native-born Americans of their most basic constitutional rights; and, increasingly, Trump’s most provocative and unilateral foreign-policy moves, from abducting Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to his ongoing threats to annex Greenland.

Like Miller himself, none of this is popular. In Trump’s first year back in the White House, his net approval rating steadily declined from a high of plus 4 percent to a low of minus 19 percent—about as bad as has ever been recorded at this stage of a presidency—and the Democrats are favored to take back the House in this fall’s midterms. Voters are overwhelmingly concerned about the state of the economy, which continues to suffer from high inflation thanks to Trump’s much-publicized tariffs, and have expressed strong disapproval of his immigration-enforcement policies in particular, especially in the wake of the slayings in Minneapolis, which even many conservatives have struggled to defend. In a more rational administration, the way forward politically would be clear: Trump would marginalize (or ideally fire) Miller and pivot to a less abhorrent policy approach. Instead, Miller has seemed only to grow in stature and influence within the administration.

How did the most powerful government on earth come to be dominated by this unelected, viscerally unappealing 40-year-old right-wing extremist from Santa Monica? Last year, I reviewed the most authoritative biography of Miller, Jean Guerrero’s Hatemonger, for this magazine, and I came away with the impression that Miller has a handful of talents: a willingness to attract and capitalize on negative attention (colloquially, he’s good at “trolling”); an unusual skill at navigating office power politics and flattering the right people (in Trump’s first term, Miller won over Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump even though neither shares his extreme anti-immigration views); and an uncommon sense of how to turn his ruthless dogmatism into policy.

The trolling is table stakes in the MAGA extended universe, where countless individuals, including Miller’s wife, have pursued careers as influencers channeling the myriad frustrations of the American right. Miller, a frequent guest on shock-jock radio since high school, certainly could have gone that route. But it was Miller’s cutthroat instincts on Capitol Hill and his unfailing loyalty to Trump that ensured that his legacy would be more than just talk, and that he would exert the kind of influence over a sitting president that malign figures like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney once did. The Venn diagram of competent Beltway operatives and ideologically committed neofascists has a very small intersection, but Miller sits comfortably at the center of it. He is hardly the most colorful character in the second Trump administration, where the competition includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem. But his impact on policy is outsize, even when the administration itself might be better served politically by doing anything else.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world—in the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper recently in a defense of Trump’s Western Hemisphere expansionism. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

The Darwinian flourishes are pure Miller, but the underlying imperial hubris recalls the 2004 quote that Ron Suskind got from a top George W. Bush official, widely assumed to be Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Given how the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq worked out, there’s a lesson here for Miller—and for us. It’s true that with the power he currently wields, he can mold reality to a far greater extent than anyone should be comfortable with. But there is far less domestic support for Trump and Miller’s agenda than Bush and Rove once enjoyed for theirs, and neither financial markets nor foreign governments nor the ordinary citizens confronting ICE in the streets have passively bent to their will. Reality is never solely the product of any one small political clique, and it has a tendency to frustrate and foil those who would claim the right to shape it. It’s far simpler to outmaneuver one’s colleagues for control of the boss’s ear than it is to impose one’s will on the rest of the world. This, too, has been an iron law of the world since the beginning of time.

Curled up on her side, Anastasiia smiles at her midwife, Karina, as she rests between contractions. Her labor had begun slowly the night before, but now 24-year-old Nastia has traded her clothes for a blue paper gown and settled into the room where she will deliver her child, a boy she plans to name Robert. Listening to the thrum of her son’s heartbeat on the fetal monitor, Nastia chats with Karina as her husband, Edward, changes into a pair of scrubs.

“Frankly, I adore this woman,” Nastia says, gesturing to her midwife. “So I can relax and feel all right with these people.”

Even the night before, in the midst of her first contractions, when explosions echoed across the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, Nastia says she felt safe: “Birth, it’s the most scary thing. People get used to the war.”

While Nastia labors, doctors and nurses tend to two dozen patients at the maternity ward of Kharkiv Hospital No. 25, less than 20 miles from the Russian border. Down the hall, 39-year-old Iryna consults with her doctor about methods to prevent a preterm birth due to her cervix shortening at 30 weeks’ gestation. “We turn on calm music very loudly” at night to drown out the sounds of war, says Iryna, who lives with her husband and their three children. Elsewhere, new mom and soldier Olena cradles her daughter Sofiia after an emergency cesarean—performed after Olena developed preeclampsia. Her doctor notes that they’ll keep her in the ward for another three days, to give her incision time to heal before sending her home. Mothers in her condition receive home visits from UNICEF-­supported nurses around the country.

In another part of the ward, 22-year-old Anna waits for an ultrasound to monitor the amount of amniotic fluid in her uterus—currently less than her doctors would like. “I would like to give birth, of course, in an underground maternity hospital,” she says. That is, a maternity ward in a bomb shelter.

Her desire is understandable: Just a few months earlier, in July 2025, Russian forces struck a nearby maternity hospital in Kharkiv. And as Anna speaks, in October 2025, news appears on social media that a Russian drone has demolished a kindergarten in the area. That afternoon, at the site of the former nursery, now a mess of glass and metal, a firefighter describes pulling children from the bomb shelter where they had taken cover. All 48 survived the strike.

When Iryna Borzenko, an obstetrician-gynecologist, arrived at Hospital No. 25 in April, after it had merged with the nearby regional hospital where she’d been working for years, building an underground maternity ward quickly became one of her first priorities, she says. During air raids, Borzenko, now chief of the hospital’s neonatal-­care unit, would help patients into the hallway—which is safer than the rooms, where shattering windows can cause shrapnel injuries—or down to the building’s bomb shelter if they could walk. But there is no way to move a woman in active labor, to pause a cesarean section, or to relocate a newborn on a ventilator. “Most women asked us about [an underground bomb] shelter and ‘Can we give birth in shelter?’” she says.

In October, Borzenko began to see that vision realized, when contractors started to transform an existing 800-square-meter concrete bomb shelter into a fully functional maternity unit, which they expect to complete by the spring of 2026, with the support of the government of Ireland and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN’s sexual-and-reproductive-health agency. UNFPA had already contributed to two similar renovations in the border cities of Kherson and Sumy, reflecting a rising trend of underground care in modern warfare.

Even after Russia and Ukraine began negotiating a peace agreement, maternal-healthcare providers and reproductive-­rights groups continued advocating to shore up access to care for the predominantly working-­class families, mostly unenlisted women, who remain along the front lines. Amid a colonial war being waged over natural resources, land, and heritage, Ukraine’s efforts to fortify its maternity hospitals have become a way to protect the most vulnerable—and preserve Ukrainian identity. “We all hope for the best, but what should we do?” Borzenko says, acknowledging that women deserve a safe place to give birth, war or no war. She spoke from the construction zone, wearing a neon safety vest over her scrubs, as she gestured toward the former storage space that will soon become patient rooms, a wearable blood-pressure monitor that her children gave her fastened to her wrist. With the new shelter, “it will be possible for every woman” who arrives at the hospital and wants to give birth underground “to do it here.”

When Russia escalated its invasion of Ukraine four years ago, some of the first images to emerge from the conflict were of devastated maternity wards. On March 2, 2022, a mother gave birth in an underground bomb shelter in Zhytomyr right after a Russian missile hit the facility. Days later, photographs of an ashen pregnant woman being evacuated on a stretcher began circulating after the maternity hospital in Mariupol was bombed. The woman and her child later died.

On November 12, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gathered together health advocates, social-media influencers, and biohacking entrepreneurs at the White House for the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Summit. The panels featured no scientists, doctors, or academic researchers but were replete with CEOs, bloggers, and right-wing celebrities like the UFC president and mixed-martial-arts expert Dana White. The day-long conference included Dongjin “DJ” Seo, a cofounder of Elon Musk’s Neuralink, discussing the future of “brain-computer interfaces” and his vision for a cyborg humanity. The venture capitalist Bryan Johnson, known for receiving blood transfusions from his teenage son, pondered whether, with “biohacks” like these, his generation could be the first to become immortal. Vice President JD Vance, taking the stage to the tune of “Long Cool Woman” by the Hollies, spoke passionately on government overreach in the healthcare sector.

Speakers also discussed topics more typical of a public-health conference. Aidan Dewar, the CEO of the start-up Telenutrition, and the food blogger Vani Hari spoke on the health benefits of nourishing food and the dangers of additives and preservatives. The tech executives Farid Vij, Chris Altchek, and Sean Duffy discussed using their companies’ in-app technologies to manage chronic disease. Also addressed: the contraction of American lifespans and the dangers of alcohol and seed oils. The summit’s overall theme was the breakdown of American healthcare and how the industry needs to be disrupted and rebuilt from the ground up. Rebuilt, of course, through deregulation, with the bottom lines of conglomerates and tech start-ups taking top priority.

This spectacle, while sleazy and unsettling, was hardly a departure from the status quo. The MAHA conference was in many respects the logical outcome of long-standing US policy on public health, particularly nutrition. Few things are more elemental than food. But ever since the 1970s, when the idea of eating healthy came to prominence with the organic-food revolution, we’ve struggled as a country to address the structural problem of access to that healthy food. What we’ve tackled instead are problems of consumer choice. The lead-up to Kennedy’s circus of sci-fi fantasists and food bloggers provides an object lesson in how the left cedes fertile political territory to the right. Healthy eating—a cause that’s as foundational as they come—has gradually been put to pasture as a collective national project. Rather than addressing the working and living conditions of Americans that are at the root of the issue, one presidential administration after another has punted the problem to the free market.

Organic food as we know it is food that is cultivated by applying modern technology to traditional agriculture. An organic farmer might use a tractor, a harvester, or a milking machine but avoid harmful fertilizers, pest controls, or animal growth hormones. The early promoters of the organic-farming movement prioritized soil quality and the sustainability of agricultural practices. (The focus on the higher nutritional quality of organic foods came later, when the movement transformed into an industry.) The botanist Sir Albert Howard, sometimes considered the father of organic agriculture, wrote in his 1947 book The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture, “All the great agricultural systems which have survived have made it their business never to deplete the earth of its fertility without at the same time beginning the process of restoration.” Howard sought to realign the interests of humanity with those of nature in agricultural practices as a way to protect our food systems from wasteful industrial consumption. Along with other mid-20th-century scientists, such as the microbiologist Masanobu Fukuoka, he was responding to wasteful, soil-depleting industrial techniques and the use of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers that would only become more advanced, widespread, and dangerous as the century progressed.

In the 1960s, widespread concerns about the environmental effects of pesticides like DDT boosted interest in organic farming. The conservationist Rachel Carson made many Americans aware of the dangers of pesticides for the first time in her 1962 bestseller Silent Spring. Highlighting the egotism and shortsightedness of industrial pesticide use, Carson wrote, “How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind?” Given these new environmental concerns, the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s and early ’70s dovetailed neatly with the organic-farming movement. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the popular nonfiction writer Michael Pollan describes the organic farming of this era as “one of several tributaries of the counterculture that ended up disappearing into the American mainstream.”

As the public became increasingly environmentally conscious and organic farmers mounted a parallel back-to-the-land movement, a market for organic food burgeoned, especially on the West Coast. Starting in the 1970s, states like Oregon and California, where organic farming was taking off, responded by passing regulations that would allow products to be certified as organic. This labeling helped consumers distinguish these foods from their industrial counterparts. Upwardly mobile baby boomers in particular boosted this new industry. By the Reaganite 1980s, roadside raspberry stands that had sprouted during the Summer of Love had evolved into giant farming conglomerates, with their complement of lawyers and lobbyists. The now-vast and corporatized organic-food industry, working in conjunction with environmental groups such as Beyond Pesticides, lobbied Congress to establish a set of national industry standards that would define organic and govern the certification of organic foods. The Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 enabled the US Department of Agriculture to regulate food products under the National Organic Program and set standards for production and labeling, ushering in the booming industry we have today. The green-and-white “USDA Organic” sticker on egg cartons comes from the passage of this law.

After the Organic Foods Production Act was finally implemented in 2002, what had been a lifestyle confined mostly to left-leaning, health-conscious West Coast families became more mainstream. By the 2010s, supermarkets throughout the country were stocked with organic products from Earthbound Farm and Cal-Organic. These foods were, and continue to be, more expensive than their industrial alternatives. The USDA reported in 2016 that the price of organic food ranged from 7 percent higher for produce to a whopping 80 percent higher for eggs. At the same time, popular books like Pollan’s In Defense of Food (2008) and other best-selling books were promoting a new way of thinking about food systems. Farm-to-table dining became de rigueur in fine restaurants; beef had to be grass-fed, tomatoes heirloom, and chickens heritage-breed. This was the back-to-the-land moment for a certain strain of millennials, the era of urban-rooftop beekeeping and faux farmhouse weddings. Upper-middle-class urban millennials were canning preserves, pickling vegetables, and posting their creations on websites like Punk Domestics. “Grandma” aesthetics were all the rage, and children were given Victorian names like Emma and Ella and fed made-from-scratch meals that paid homage to a time before McDonald’s and microwaves. Traditional lifestyles, organic foods, and wellness were hip, and like most things that were in vogue in the 2010s, they were coded politically as left-wing.

Though there was nothing intrinsically wrong with the era of home preserves and “stomp, clap, hey” folk pop, these cultural trends had a very limited reach. The changes in lifestyle and diet were confined mostly to an urban American middle class. While new narratives about food and health persuaded many middle-class people to buy organic products and change the way they eat, locally sourced ingredients and grass-fed meats were available only in places with high concentrations of wealth. High-income neighborhoods had farmers markets and bespoke butchers, but poor ones remained food deserts. In the end, these lifestyle changes also turned out not to move the needle a whole lot when it came to public health. Across demographics, obesity rates continued to climb despite the new food culture, particularly in rural food deserts.

Since Kennedy’s confirmation hearing on January 29, 2025, numerous publications have drawn a connection between his Make America Healthy Again platform and former first lady Michelle Obama’s 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Both took aim at ultra-processed foods and sugary drinks and encouraged parents to feed their children more nourishing foods. Both attempted to address the country’s obesity and chronic-disease epidemics by encouraging healthy eating. While the Obamas’ health initiatives withered away after Donald Trump took office, the right has surged into the healthy-eating space. These public-wellness efforts quickly found purchase in the unregulated, conspiracist-filled world of supplements.

The rollout and design of the Obamas’ healthy-eating initiatives offer some clues as to how this happened. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was a bipartisan effort to make school lunches more nutritious nationwide and to give poor kids better access to those meals. The law was the centerpiece of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative to combat childhood obesity, and it did attempt to tackle the legitimate problem of access among lower-income families. But typical of the Obama administration’s orientation toward public welfare, the program was a hodgepodge package that tried to sell itself to the public by partnering with big businesses, government agencies, and celebrities. Walmart committed itself to lowering the cost of fruits and vegetables. The Department of Agriculture rolled out MyPlate, a website that provides information on nutrition standards. Three million students were given access to in-school salad bars. School-lunch standards were improved, and more children were made eligible for free meals. Promoting the initiative, Beyoncé reworked her 2007 song “Get Me Bodied,” changing the title to “Move Your Body” for the first lady’s “Let’s Move!” flash workout.

Basement Books

In “Construction Follies,” Kate Wagner aims harsh scorn at two of the University of Chicago’s most significant recent initiatives in the arts and humanities [November 2025]. While we appreciate The Nation’s engagement with the humanities, we wish to clarify several points.

Mansueto Library and the Logan Center for the Arts were deeply informed by guidance from UChicago faculty and students, including many in the arts and humanities. Of the many uninformed statements in the piece (no, the university has not lost money on crypto), we were particularly surprised by the suggestion that the library is inaccessible and “little more than something interesting to look at.”

Mansueto shares an entrance with Regenstein Library, which allows public access to 5 million volumes on open shelves. The browsable collection in Regenstein is larger than that of most university libraries, though it constitutes a fraction of the 13.5 million print and digital volumes in UChicago’s library system. Mansueto and Regenstein are visited more than 1.1 mil­lion times annually, drawing global academic visitors for their unique collections, especially in the humanities.

When Mansueto Library opened in 2011, universities worldwide had long since started sending collections to off-site storage, usually taking days to deliver books to borrowers. In contrast, UChicago expanded collection storage on campus. Mansueto provides high-­density storage in ideal preservation conditions, delivering books to patrons in minutes. The airy top level houses a conservation facility and a beloved reading room used by hundreds daily. In our view, this makes the library highly suited to its function, visually interesting, and a cherished facility for humanities research.

Torsten Reimer
University Librarian and Dean of the University Library,
University of Chicago

 

Kate Wagner Replies

My piece did not intend to disparage the library system at the University of Chicago, which I have used to great delight, having lectured there. But it is inaccessible on three points. (1) The books, of course, are inaccessible for browsing by design. I understand this choice, but I don’t have to like it. (2) The building is inaccessible as a public space, as it has no on-street access. (3) The process of visiting the library as a layperson is arduous, though this is typical of university libraries. Differences about accessibility aside, my ire was directed solely toward the administration, which has undertaken many expensive building projects—of which Mansueto was one of very few necessities—while defunding the humanities and deferring maintenance necessary to bring the school’s quad up to contemporary standards.

The fact of the matter is, the university is in massive debt. Some of this is construction debt, but much of it comes from overleveraged financial plays that have not panned out (such as a very real foray into cryptocurrency). When the university’s board behaves in financially negligent or reckless ways, the humanities bear the cuts—God forbid anyone touch the business school. Walking by such expensive and frivolous buildings as Campus North (as good a signifier as any of the university as luxury) and the Rubenstein Forum (a gargantuan monument to the administration itself), one cannot help but become indignant, even enraged. At the end of the day, architecture is about money and power and about who has it and who doesn’t. At the University of Chicago, those dichotomies are very much clear.

Kate Wagner
chicago, il

Reading Pirandello

Re “Luigi Pirandello’s Broken Men,” by Gus O’Connor [TheNation.com, December 2, 2025]: As a translator of Luigi Pirandello’s One, None, and a Hundred Grand, I was very sorry to see Gus O’Connor reduce the Nobel laureate to a fascist. It’s inarguable that at one time Pirandello was a supporter of fascism—though within a few years he’d torn up his party membership card, under the nose of a high-ranking official. One, None, and a Hundred Grand itself begins with a nose—a “defective” one, with a pronounced rightward lean. Rightward asymmetry is a hard-to-misunderstand metaphor for the political currents that would lead Europe into madness and mass murder; and for the narrator, Vitangelo Maggot, this nose-realization sets in motion a quest to “coax forth the many Maggots living inside my closest companions, and destroy them one by one.” It’s Gogol meets P.G. Wodehouse, and offers readers comic scenes equal to the very best of the latter author’s work. And much as Wodehouse is still widely read and adored in England, despite his own putative fascism, Pirandello holds a place of primacy in contemporary Italian hearts. He is only a “half-forgotten castaway of European letters” for non-Italian readers.

Given the opportunity to address O’Connor’s accusation from a century’s distance, I would turn to this passage from the novel:

We do something. We sincerely believe we have the whole of our being in the act. But, unfortunately, we realize it’s not so, and that the act is actually always and only being committed by a single actor from our legion of selves, an actor whose actions might result, through some pitiful twist of fate, in our being trussed up and hung, and here is my point: once we realize that all of our selves are not in a given act, it would therefore be an atrocious injustice to judge us on any one act alone, to hold us accountable, trussed up and hung from the gallows, our whole existence summed up in a moment.

We start screaming, “But I’m this guy, that guy, and another guy, too!” So many unimplicated in the act performed by the one, all completely, or almost completely, uninvolved. And not only that, but, what’s more, that self, and the specific circumstances in which his act were performed, which were reality in that one moment and, perforce, precipitated the performance, disappeared entirely a short while later; but the memory of the act remains, incised upon our consciousness, like an anguished and confused dream. Another self, ten others, so many others, who form our self or the person we might be, come forward one by one inside of us and ask how we were able to do such a thing; and we no longer know how to explain.

It’s a disservice to English-language readers, and a missed opportunity for these readers to understand Pirandello’s legion of Italian ones, to represent him solely through a single, misbegotten political act.

Sean Wilsey
brooklyn, ny

The writer is the translator of Luigi Pirandello’s One, None, and a Hundred Grand and the author of the memoir Oh the Glory of It All and the essay collection More Curious, among other titles. His documentary film about 9/11, IX XI, is forthcoming in 2026.

Gus O’Connor seems to be attempting a retroactive “canceling” of Pirandello using the erroneous assertion that the writer’s decline in popularity in North America is largely because “Pirandello was a fascist.” To begin with, Pirandello’s plays remain widely read and are recognized (especially Six Characters in a Search of an Author) as among the most significant of the 20th century. As for his fiction, to credit its neglect even partly to his politics as opposed to poor translations and shifting taste is unconvincing (if only Americans were that historically literate!). O’Connor then claims that “fascistic qualities are not incidental to Pirandello’s work but rather inherent in it.” While the fascist secret police themselves came to the opposite opinion, we should recognize that O’Connor is assuming the same role: litmus-testing literature for ideology and suppressing or punishing writers accordingly.

O’Connor’s statements could be brushed aside as mere virtue-signaling if they didn’t already surface in Internet searches on Pirandello, crowding out the vast literature on exactly this topic. Thus the importance of a response. The implication that readers should not read Pirandello because of his “fascism” would be more fruitful if inverted. The complexity of cultural, political, and personal factors involved in Pirandello’s relation to fascism are a reason to read him, especially in the US today with a president who has adopted much of Mussolini’s playbook: invocation of a glorious past, scapegoating, attacking opponents, misinformation, tariffs, improvisational leadership, gerrymandering, demagoguery, and seizing other countries’ land.

Teddy Jefferson
new york, ny

The writer is a translator and director of Pirandello’s As You Desire Me, a historical consultant for the documentaries of the Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi (Sotto le nuvole, Notturno, In viaggio), and the author of One Inch Leather: 14 Stories.

While reading O’Connor’s review of Pirandello’s One, None, and a Hundred Grand, I found it impossible to make sense of the fact that a journalist could write about Pirandello so dismissively, and with such a narrow lens. I thought he was talking about Mein Kampf.

The review largely ignores Pirandello’s book and Sean Wilsey’s translation, and reveals O’Connor’s indifference to literary matters. Why give so much of the magazine’s limited review space to someone who dismisses Pirandello’s literary greatness and reduces his life to fascist violence? This is what I wonder. In 1986, on the 50th anniversary of Pirandello’s death, Leonardo Sciascia, a writer and thinker at the moral center of Italian culture, said that Pirandello was a “literary father” to him, adding that the truth in Pirandello lay in the absurdity of the human condition, in the pain of living.

Pirandello, it is true, joined the Fascist Party (in 1924), and at first saw (like many) in Mussolini a figure who could bring Italy out of the total chaos of the post-unification period. But above all, he saw in him the possibility of realizing his own dream as a playwright and philologist, namely to create a national state theater with government funding. This dream was dashed by the Duce. And that is why Pirandello distanced himself from the fascist regime. In his speech on receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, he snubbed the regime, offering no praise for Mussolini, contrary to all expectations.

The relationship between Pirandello and fascism was complex. The bias of this article is truly outrageous. As a result your readers have been deprived of context regarding one of the greatest authors in the history of Western theater. An author loved by Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and Giovanni Verga, to name but a few. What a pity!

Alessio Bordoni
brooklyn, ny

The writer is an instructor at Comunità Linguistica in New York City.

Gus O’Connor Replies

In June 1926, Pirandello had this to say to a journalist: “I am a fascist. And not a recent one: I have been a fascist for thirty years.” And when he won the Nobel Prize in 1934, just two years before his death, Pirandello donated his gold medal to the Italian government to be melted down for a colonial war effort in Ethiopia. To claim, as Mr. Wilsey does, that Pirandello’s fealty to fascism was a “single, misbegotten political act” is to misrepresent and oversimplify his decades-long relationship with those politics. And to use Vitangelo’s rightward-leaning nose as evidence of a grand critique of the fascist regime is tenuous, at best. Pirandello did tear up his party card in a fit of rage; though I have found no mention of noses in the historical record. What’s more, this incident occurred two years after the novel had already been serialized, a novel that was the product of a decade of writing. Even if Pirandello tore up the card “under the nose” of the party official, I see no connection between those two noses, unless Pirandello had the prescience to predict that he would have a nose-related outburst two years, if not a decade, into the future. In the novel, Vitangelo’s friend frets over a twitch in his left eye; might that be a critique of the fickle, twitchy left?

This is not to say Pirandello was only a fascist; I respectfully object to Mr. Bordoni’s assertion that I “reduce” the life of a Nobel laureate to “fascist violence” or party membership. The entire point of the essay, in fact, was to reckon with those lively antagonisms of Pirandello’s work—his politics and his proto-existentialism—and to hold those antagonisms together in concert. Further, the novel in question was written and published at the height of Pirandello’s devotion to fascism and so doubly merits such a reading.

I don’t doubt that Pirandello sits deep within the chamber of many “contemporary Italian hearts.” Yet the essay is not concerned with those hearts; it asks, rather, why Pirandello’s readership abroad, particularly in North America, has dwindled. And it uses the occasion of Wilsey’s excellent(!) translation, in North America, to pursue that question. Mr. Jefferson’s accusation that I attempt a retroactive “canceling” of Pirandello is absurd—barely worthy of rebuttal. American readers of this essay may well be interested in what Pirandello has to offer, and I don’t hesitate to suggest what remains exciting and illuminating about his work. The hope for my essay was to spur further interest in this complicated figure, not to dissuade potential readers from engaging with him at all. The true “pity,” the true “missed opportunity,” the true “disservice” to those readers would have meant shying away from the facts—flattering or unflattering—of Pirandello’s life, his politics, and his art.

Gus O’Connor
new york, ny

with the earth
in it.

When the tourists land, the great
seminaries of Rome assign me the allowance
of worry.

And if my life were to close, I would close
with my implacable wrist.

Rome tells me to learn, but sometimes
I can hear the fitful whistling
drip in my eye around us and also within
us.

Love is nothing without lineage. Home is where
children are born, and it changes the earth.
How do you love, Earth?

Rome means the world is a poem, and between you and me,
the world flows in my temples
with the heart of time. It is eternal but then
it stops and the rain drips in.

God fills time with social things
like rain and the war and the land he captures
when he needs a new series. War is both sides
of a world.

Earth, you are too large
to be an image: you make
me hold
who isn’t there.

I search for Rome in the water, I search for God
in the clay. But I can read the stars walking
in the language of my movement.

In times of full-scale attack like the one now upon us, social movements face two paths. They can run defense through the traditional legal and political channels to protect the remaining scraps of what they’ve fought for. Or they can go on offense and work outside the system, devising risky legal experiments and taking to the streets. Under Donald Trump, Planned Parenthood—the nation’s largest provider of reproductive-health services—has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and closed approximately 50 clinics in the past year alone. In response, the organization has hewed to the defensive path it became known for during the half-century that abortion was legal nationwide. It has often prioritized protecting its own funding at the cost of taking on bigger fights. Confronted by restrictive laws, its affiliates often chose the path of least risk rather than greatest access, sometimes even ceasing to provide abortions where they remained legal, as Irin Carmon wrote in a recent article for New York magazine. In that article, the scholar Michele Goodwin described Planned Parenthood’s long-standing adherence to its defensive strategy as the organization’s “good-girl problem.” Four years after Roe’s demise, it’s easy to see this path as a resounding failure.

But as the immigrant-rights movement is showing us now, social movements are strongest when they manage to run both offense and defense at the same time. Today, immigration attorneys are fighting in court to stop whatever individual deportations they can, while ordinary people armed only with their phones document ICE’s brutality. For the abortion-rights movement, the best historical example of how this approach can succeed comes from its own enemies.

I’ve spent the past two years writing a book on how abortion opponents built a grassroots movement to do what once felt impossible: overturn Roe v. Wade. Titled Killers of Roe, it’s a whodunit that looks at the behind-the-scenes figures who were responsible for the death of abortion rights. Tracing this history, I saw how abortion opponents won because they ran down both roads at once. Legal organizations like the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) were the movement’s “good girls.” They lobbied Republican politicians to restrict abortion and for decades accepted incremental victories. Eventually, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) took one of these incremental victories to the Supreme Court, which ultimately toppled Roe. But these groups would not have succeeded without the movement’s “bad girls.” Randall Terry staged “rescue” blockades of clinics in the 1980s and ’90s. Monica Migliorino Miller pulled fetuses out of dumpsters in the dark of night and took pictures of them to put on posters. Extremists bombed clinics and murdered doctors and receptionists. These “bad girls” generated a false sense that legal abortion was controversial, even though most Americans supported it.

Within the anti-abortion movement, the “good girls” and “bad girls” often fought. But in the hindsight afforded by history, the rifts in the movement look like strengths. Joseph Scheidler, the 6-foot-4, fedora-wearing godfather of the anti-abortion movement, was fired as director of the NRLC’s Illinois affiliate for his militant tactics. But his clinic sit-ins and displays of bloody fetuses galvanized true believers and helped spark the “rescue” movement. In 2021, nine months before the ADF would prevail in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell’s wild idea to outsource the enforcement of abortion laws to private citizens succeeded in banning most abortions in Texas.

So what can progressives learn from the anti-abortion movement’s victory?

Roe established a baseline of legal protection that the abortion-rights movement needed to defend. But this strategy alone was never enough. It overlooked the reality that many women of color and low-income people lacked access to abortion even with Roe in effect, under policies like the Hyde Amendment, the ban on the federal funding of abortion first passed in 1976. While researching my book, I came upon certain historical moments that felt like turning points, such as January of 1981. Ronald Reagan had just been elected, the Supreme Court had upheld the Hyde Amendment, and abortion opponents in Congress were floating a “Human Life Amendment” to ban abortion under the Constitution.

Six days before Reagan’s inauguration, the leaders of national pro-choice organizations—including Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NOW, and the ACLU—gathered for a meeting. The group identified “four areas in which it wanted to direct further discussion,” one of which was “Poor Women.” “The discussion of poor women produced agreement that this issue must be kept alive but that the larger issue of a Human Life Amendment must take precedence for the time being,” the notes read.

When I discovered this memo in the NARAL archives, I felt like I had found a smoking gun. There it was: the movement’s decision to deprioritize the Hyde Amendment. Even the movement’s most famous “bad girls” were part of this agreement. Faye Wattleton, who had become the first Black woman to lead Planned Parenthood in 1978 and announced a controversial goal of restoring Medicaid funding for abortion, made a case for the defensive approach. “Faye expressed a belief that the medicaid issue is a separate phenomenon,” the notes read. “It was a bellweather [sic] issue, she said, regarding people’s feelings about the poor, public funding, etc. She thinks it best now to hold on to established ground.”

When I asked Wattleton about this moment, she told me that she didn’t believe the movement ever completely gave up on Hyde, even though the Human Life Amendment presented “an even more fundamental challenge” that it needed to confront. Indeed, the decision wasn’t as black-and-white as it looked on paper. The leaders would continue to discuss ways to restore Medicaid funding in states where it seemed feasible. But Wattleton was a nurse by training. So she did what Planned Parenthood—an organization that has for decades relied on federal funds to provide healthcare to millions—has always done: She ran triage and took on the biggest threat first.

In 1993, two paths again diverged for the movement over public funding. This time, the fork in the road would divide advocates. Democrats controlled Congress and the presidency for the first time in over a decade, and this was their shot to enshrine legal abortion even if Roe someday fell. Planned Parenthood and NARAL wanted to pass a bill to codify Roe. But a coalition from the left that included the National Black Women’s Health Project and NOW demanded that the legislation address parental-consent requirements and Medicaid funding, lest it leave the most vulnerable behind. The bill didn’t pass, and the more progressive organizations took the blame. But you could also blame the movement’s “good girl” politics, which had reigned for so long that any insistence on protections beyond Roe sounded unreasonable.

To see where the moon melts over the garden,
or where the bats flit, or where the air sweetens

    with pollen and moth-frenzy, I recommend
    a night walk to discern the perfect patch for it.

Under this glow, we could all use a distraction—
dig with a silver shovel and choose colors that swoon

    and moan under our satellite: dusty pinks,
    baby blue, lavender, white, and butter yellow gems

unfurl at dusk until dawn. Sometimes moonflower
vining over trellis looks like a waterfall

    out of the corner of your eye. So many to choose from:
    evening primrose, night-blooming jasmine, heliotrope,

tuberose, 4 o’clocks, lambs’ ear, astilbe, calla lily, white clematis,
fairy candles, periwinkles, and you can even launch snowballs

    in summer with creamy oak hydrangeas. Turn off the hiss
    and whirr from man-made lights and walk the night,

walk the grass, the fence line, let your boot crackle over
pebble and stick bits. Careful if skunks shuffle over to see what

    all the fuss is about. Don’t tussle with weeds. If you set
    your shovel down, skunks won’t bother you at all.

And on the off chance they do, at least the spray might
sizzle like stars. Bats swoop and fly erratic, but birds

    glide between wing flap—that’s how you can tell what
    flutters across a lake moon. If you make a moon garden,

even the dark lapping of water under a duck-shush of wave
won’t be louder than the silver in your own bright yard.

If God had a personality, what would it be like? The two most obvious answers—God is benevolent and merciful; God is wrathful and jealous—are plainly in contradiction with one another. To discuss the question further would mean entering into theology; the point here is only to take a stab at the character of the most God-like of American novelists, Thomas Pynchon.

Across seven decades and, now, nine novels, Pynchon has exhibited so great an ability to create the world—to describe it in all its historical and geographical variety, as well as to supplement it with imaginary extras, like time travel and teleportation—that it appears the gift of some omnipotent deity. A second God-like trait is at once more mysterious and banal: We simply don’t know what Pynchon looks like, apart from a few photos of a bucktoothed student and Navy seaman of the 1950s. Otherwise, this exceptionally famous writer has refused to be photographed. It was probably with Pynchon in mind that Don DeLillo had his reclusive novelist Bill Gray, in Mao II, say: “When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”

In Pynchon’s case, God’s personality is split most evidently between the somber and the silly—gravity and its rainbow, as it were. His undeniably serious books take as their subjects such heavy historical matters as the Blitz and, indirectly, German colonialism (Gravity’s Rainbow itself); chattel slavery, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and intimations of a future civil war in prerevolutionary North America (Mason & Dixon); and the consolidation of industrial capitalism, including the bloody repression of organized labor, in the late-19th-century United States (Against the Day). At the same time, these epic works of historical fiction, the shortest of them some 700 pages long, also behave like indefatigable excursions into light opera: The for-the-most-part heartlessly two-dimensional characters all have silly names (say Scorpia Mossmoon, who hardly matters in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, who basically narrates Mason & Dixon), and when these cartoonish personages are not busy working for outfits that themselves boast risible titles (like ACHTUNG—the Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, in Northern Germany—from Gravity’s Rainbow, or SMEGMA, the Semi-Military Entity Greater Milwaukee Area, from Shadow Ticket, the new novel), they are often bursting into song and/or making bad puns. Altogether, it’s as if Our Father in Heaven were mainly interested in His creation as an occasion for Dad jokes.

Pynchon’s characteristic combination of tonal high spirits and doomward subject matter can be suggested by an offhandedly magisterial passage from Against the Day in which the Chums of Chance, a riotous company of turn-of-the-century dirigibilists, notice that the hot air and joyous songs that propel them over the Western steppe by no means forestall a less merry scene below:

From this height it was as if the Chums, who, on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized only into movement in straight lines and right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing floor.

It’s as if this inveterate maker of smutty jokes had also read Max Weber, or Jason Moore, on the fatal rationalization of earthly nature attendant upon capitalist modernization.

Another division bisecting Pynchon’s output has to do with genre. The sweeping magical-historical picaresques on which his reputation rests, all of them narrated from an omniscient point of view, were published between 1961 and 2006. Since then, Pynchon has published not simply lighter works, a category that would include the brief bad trip of The Crying of Lot 49, from 1966, or the great hippie fantasia Vineland from 1990. The generic difference marking out post–Great Recession Pynchon from the earlier stuff is more specific. Over the past 15 years, he has turned to the detective novel, in which events are recorded and (non-)revelations registered from the restricted POV of some put-upon private investigator. In his 2009 Inherent Vice, the hapless good-hearted gumshoe is Doc Sportello, a stoner probing the mysteries of post–Manson LA. (Speaking of theology, Doc spots a dude “wearing a T-shirt with the familiar detail from Michelangelo’s fresco The Creation of Adam, in which God is extending his hand to Adam’s and they’re just about to touch—except in this version God is passing a lit joint.”) In Bleeding Edge, from 2013, it’s the brash and kind fraud investigator Maxine Tarnow—“Tail ’Em and Nail ’Em,” she calls her agency—who gets sucked into inspecting the deadly financial irregularities of a Silicon Alley start-up run by one Gabriel Ice, roughly between the dot-com bust and 9/11.

Pynchon’s latest novel, Shadow Ticket, is another unraveling sleuth’s tale, an expedition into the dark potentialities of the 1930s undertaken by a good-natured lug and former strikebreaker by the name of Hicks McTaggart, an employee of the Unamalgamated Ops detective agency of Milwaukee, presently in search of the fugitive heiress to a cheesemonger’s empire. No spoiler alert is necessary in saying that you won’t likely read a punchier account of the rise of classical fascism. Besides, are spoilers even possible with Pynchon? Oedipa Maas, our heroine in The Crying of Lot 49, experiences “a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning” and, later, a sensation as though “there were revelation in progress all around her”—without these intimations ever delivering themselves into any definitive disclosure. This sets the pattern of Pynchon’s at once teasing and exhaustive novels, including Shadow Ticket. As one of McTaggart’s informants—the soda jerk and Prohibition-skirting booze-runner Hoagie Hivnak, if you must know—says: “You’re the private investigator, laughing boy. Go investigate.”

As I was reading and rereading Pynchon’s oeuvre for this review, I also took in Fredric Jameson’s brief book Raymond Chandler: The Detections of Totality and felt a pang of envy when this arch-theoretical critic dismisses the plots of Chandler’s classic detective novels as “notoriously incomprehensible.”

I would very much like to say the same of Pynchon’s plots and leave it at that, going on then, more comfortably, to discuss the unrepresentability of social totality under capitalism. After all, if you put a gun to my head and ask me what the crime syndicates hashslingrz, in Bleeding Edge, or the Golden Fang, in Inherent Vice, are up to exactly besides being, respectively, some homicidal cybersecurity firm and some consortium of crooked dentists—well, I’m afraid that’s my brains on the wall. But a book reviewer, like a PI, is a menial creature who must do his job.

The story of Shadow Ticket itself can be easily enough delineated, if not quite the spreading dimensions of its shadow. A ticket is investigative slang for a job, a gig—Maxine Tarnow in Bleeding Edge fantasizes a future day when her low-rent outfit might deal “only with class tickets”—and the ticket here, for Hicks McTaggart, is that his boss at U-Ops would like him to go and have a look-see for the vanished Daphne Airmont, legatee to the fortune of the equally absconded pater—or cheddar—familias Bruno Airmont, founder of an Upper Midwestern dairy dynasty. Keep your daughters close, dear readers, cuz it seems Daphne has taken up with a jazz clarinetist.

For weeks after Renee Good’s murder, the MAGA right trained Zapruder-grade forensic attention on the video footage of her last moments in Minneapolis, hoping to convince Americans that they can’t trust the plain evidence before their eyes. This effort yielded obscene derangements of the truth, such as “border czar” Tom Homan’s contention that Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who gunned down Good, had “feared for his life”—a claim that’s hard to square with his decision to position himself in front of her car, and yet more of a whopper in view of her last words, directed to Ross: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Never to be outdone in the shameless recitation of official lies, Vice President JD Vance defiled bedrock norms of honest public discourse to smear Good as a “deranged leftist” responsible for her own death. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the sadist who gloried in the detention and torture of immigrants at El Salvador’s CECOT prison, dubbed Good a “domestic terrorist” hours after her murder and just kept going, announcing a fresh deployment of hundreds more ICE agents to Minneapolis in mid-January.

Noem’s escalation, which nonsensically vows to mobilize more rogue ICE agents to pacify a crisis sparked by rogue ICE agents, perpetuates the lie that the Trump administration’s rolling sieges of cities governed by political opponents are a legitimate use of peacekeeping force. But it also supplies an inadvertent reminder that the whole ICE mission in Minneapolis is founded on a racist lie. President Trump authorized the agency’s initial operation there in the wake of a video released online by MAGA influencer Nick Shirley purporting to document widespread fraud in federally subsidized daycare centers run by Somali immigrants in Minneapolis. Shirley’s investigations yielded no real evidence—several of the centers he tried to depict as empty of kids and hence hotbeds of graft were simply leery about giving a random man and his film crew access to their charges. (Grim irony alert: At one center, employees thought that Shirley’s masked-up crew could have been ICE agents intending to round up preschool children.) Another daycare center appears to have been in the midst of an employee shift change when Shirley’s crew showed up.

It’s true that state watchdogs have found some evidence of fraud in Minnesota daycare facilities, some run by Somalis in Minneapolis. In 2019, state prosecutors filed charges against a dozen centers and individuals; in response, Minnesota created a new agency to oversee licensing for the centers. After Shirley’s video went viral, the agency conducted unscheduled compliance visits at nine of the 10 centers featured in it (one had been shuttered several years ago). Eight of the centers that the inspectors dropped in on showed no irregularities, and one had yet to open for the day. State regulators say they’re still monitoring the facilities.

Shirley’s video relies mostly on charges floated by David Hoch, a lobbyist and former right-wing candidate for Minnesota attorney general. As The Intercept’s Jacqueline Sweet has reported, Hoch had posted anti-Somali broadsides on his since-deleted Instagram account: “EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them,” one read; “Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims,” declared another. This is the narrative that the Trump administration has glommed on to, which is why Vance has anointed Shirley’s video as Pulitzer-caliber investigative journalism. Trump has also suggested, again without evidence, that Somali immigrants have committed widespread fraud involving Covid relief and nutrition assistance; he’s called them “garbage” and said he doesn’t “want them in our country.” In another two-minute tirade, Trump said that Somalia is “not even a nation. It’s just people walking around killing each other. Look, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. Billions and billions. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. It’s a fraud.” The president’s White House apparatchiks have gleefully echoed these sentiments and rushed to lend credence to the bogus cause of the Minneapolis ICE deployment; Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel said that the feds would be stepping up fraud investigations as part of ICE operations there. (Though, in another twist, the Trump regime’s fascist narratives are now collapsing upon one another—the two federal attorneys assigned to Somali fraud duty were among the six Minnesota-based prosecutors who resigned after the Justice Department instructed them to launch a McCarthyite investigation into the activist history of Renee Good’s widow, Becca Good.)

It’s important to recall the racist moral panic underwriting the original ICE deployment to Minneapolis, a reminder that none of this has ever been about the cut-and-dried enforcement of immigration law. ICE was turned loose on Minneapolis residents to stage a spectacle of racialized predation, proceeding solely on the imputation of criminal traits to a population group based on national origin, ethnicity, and religious affiliation. This is the far-from-subtle message that Noem now has emblazoned on her podium at press events: “One of ours, all of yours.” (The slogan can be traced in substance, if not in precise phrasing, to the fascist movements of the 20th century, which endorsed the idea that the life of one of their loyalists was worth those of all of their enemies.) After Good’s execution in Minneapolis, the Trump White House again sought to steer MAGA outrage toward Somali immigrants, announcing the suspension of temporary protected status for thousands of them and effectively compelling them to leave the country by March 17.

It took no great leap for ICE agents, emboldened by this explicit mission, to apply the same brutal and inhuman logic to anyone who got in their way—especially if the offender in question were deemed insufficiently deferential to their self-aggrandizing shows of force. Once a crusade of state violence targets one vulnerable population, it has no incentive to stop there.

Gaza has been suspended in a bloody limbo for months. The so-called ceasefire with Israel has not brought peace. The bombings and demolitions persist, and Israel’s expanding occupation continues unabated. Since October 10, 2025, when the ceasefire was declared, more than 440 people have been killed and more than 2,500 buildings destroyed. Israel has only allowed a fraction of the essential equipment needed for cooking, heating, and construction to enter the Strip. Gaza is now buried beneath 680 million tons of rubble. Ninety percent of the population has been displaced, many of them several times. Hundreds of thousands live in threadbare tents.

The “ceasefire” is meant to breed apathy among us; the spectacle of modern genocidal warfare has been replaced by the slow bureaucratic proceedings of ethnic cleansing. Washington’s hollow promises to bring “technocratic governance” to Gaza mask a colonial project imposed on a people with no say: a people left to die, forgotten by the world.

This, then, is where we return. In early February, The Nation gave over its website for a day to writers from Gaza. We did this to make it clear that we will remain focused on Gaza and the Palestinian people. No diplomatic proceedings or political distortions will subdue our demand for their right to self-determination—or their right to speak for themselves.

The pieces in this series are an affirmation of that right: a record of Gaza’s refusal, in the face of the world’s neglect, to be exterminated.

—Rayan El Amine, Lizzy Ratner, and Jack Mirkinson
 

A Day for Gaza

Rayan El Amine, Jack Mirkinson, Lizzy Ratner

Today, The Nation is turning over its website exclusively to stories from Gaza and its people. This is why.
 
 

A Ceasefire in Name Only

Mohammed Mhawish

The language of ceasefire has been repurposed in Gaza: It no longer describes a pause in violence but rather a mechanism for managing it.
 
 

The Street That Refuses to Die

Ali Skaik

What I saw walking one block in Gaza.
 
 

A Catalog of Gaza’s Loss

Deema Hattab

Recording what has been erased—and making sense of what remains.
 
 

“We Have Covered Events No Human Can Bear”

Ola Al Asi

Journalists in Gaza have bartered their lives to tell a truth that much of the world still doesn’t want to hear.
 
 

What Edward Said Teaches Us About Gaza

Alaa Alqaisi

On Palestine and the geography of vanishing.
 
 

My Sister’s Death Still Echoes Inside Me

Asmaa Dwaima

Rewaa was killed by an Israeli bomb. Her absence has broken me in ways I still cannot describe.
 
 

What Gaza’s Photographers Have Seen

Huda Skaik

These pictures are records of a genocidal war, but they are something more, too—they are fragments of Gaza itself.
 
 

At the Doorstep of Tomorrow

Engy Abdelal

Faced with endlessly narrowing possibilities, I return to my diary in an attempt to dream, to imagine a future.
 
 

How to Survive in a House Without Walls

Rasha Abou Jalal

After their home was obliterated, Rasha Abou Jalal and her family remain determined to build a new one, even if it must be built out of nothing.
 
 

What Happens to the Educators After the Schools Have Been Destroyed?

Ismail Nofal

Hamada Abu Layla spent 22 years gathering three university degrees. Now they mock him from a garbage dump.

Mike Wallace’s Gotham at War is the third and final volume of the most ambitious—and probably the lengthiest—work ever produced about the history of a single American metropolis. The first, simply titled Gotham, came out in 1999 and was cowritten with Edwin G. Burrows. More than 1,000 pages long, it began with the fateful meeting on the island of Manhattan between Lenape natives and Dutch colonists early in the 17th century and concluded with the merger of the five boroughs into a single “supercity” in 1898. It won the Pulitzer Prize for history.

Wallace then took 18 years to produce a sequel. Greater Gotham’s time frame was far more modest than its predecessor’s. Writing solo this time, Wallace zeroed in on the two decades between 1898 and the end of World War I. But like the first book, Greater Gotham contained multitudes, with fascinating chapters on everything from the subway, housing, and the Bronx Zoo to vaudeville, feminism, and child labor.

While not neglecting tales of social and cultural life, Gotham at War focuses more on the eruptions from elsewhere that shook and remade New York City. It begins in 1933 with a Brooklyn-based boycott of goods made in Nazi Germany and concludes with the decision by United Nations delegates to make the city their permanent headquarters. Like the previous volumes, its achievement lies not in its interpretive framework but rather in the wealth of detail that Wallace discovers and rolls out in a style both vivid and precise.

Taken as a whole, this grand trilogy represents an unstated tribute to the new social history, or “people’s history,” that became popular beginning in the 1960s. Now 83, Wallace was one of the founding editors of Radical History Review, the journal that helped to pioneer this emerging genre of scholarship. He had studied with the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Richard Hofstadter when getting his PhD at Columbia. But like many of his New Left peers, he grew frustrated with the kind of consensus political history that was being written by liberals like his adviser, which then dominated scholarship about the American past.

Wallace wanted to write a history of the United States that foregrounded the experience of people often left out of traditional accounts: its radical and reform activists, its workers and immigrants. But he also believed it would be a mistake to write solely about ordinary people. “I don’t think you can do history and call it history and call it radical if you only look at radicals, the downtrodden trodding up,” he observed in a New York Times interview later in life: One also had to write about the elites who built and ran the structures of the economy and state that did much to keep “the people” down but that also sometimes aided their ascent.

Wallace and Burrows had originally set out to explore this rich history on a far grander geographic scale, with an examination of capitalism in the entire nation. “We had written hundreds of pages, but had barely gotten out of the 17th century,” Wallace recalled. And so “that’s when we decided to make it more manageable and tell the story through New York City.”

The new volume offers a compelling look at the way a big city’s economy functioned in an age of global war. Wallace describes how women broke through numerous glass ceilings: wielding tools in shipyards and munitions plants, driving taxis, and clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. He notes the subterfuge required to create a new weapon of mass destruction that would transform war forever: an office on lower Broadway served as the first headquarters of the top-secret program to build an atomic bomb. The enterprise was soon moved to other spots on the map, but it remained known as the Manhattan Project, “a false front” to confuse the enemy.

He makes room, too, for sketches of how New Yorkers managed to have a damn good time despite, or even because of, the momentous conflict that none could ever truly escape. The hit musical Oklahoma!, Wallace points out, was the work of two “fighting liberals” raised in New York, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who presented “a prelapsarian vision of a time when social tensions had (supposedly) been subsumed in the name of patriotic comity.” Bebop jazz, Afro-Cuban dance music, and cheap paperbacks also proliferated, as did the frantic eroticism of an old Times Square where hordes of young people, in and out of uniform, came looking for hookups and usually found them.

With his omnibus method, Wallace sometimes strains to make a New York connection to every national development that took place in the era. But he does document a wealth of fine ones—from the New York roots of the Popular Front to the story of those Gothamites who led the long and successful battle to tear down the color line in professional baseball. He introduces Lester Rodney, sports editor of The Daily Worker, who ran countless pieces advocating the integration of baseball, and describes how Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and two leftists, US Representative Vito Marcantonio and City Councilman Benjamin Davis, demanded investigations into the persistence of Jim Crow on professional diamonds. Finally, the same month that Japan surrendered in 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson to a minor-league contract.

Wallace would not have devoted so many years and so many pages to the Gotham trilogy if he hadn’t been guided by a great love for the city. He has a particular fondness for anecdotes that beam with an aggressive insouciance familiar to any lifelong New Yorker. Midway through the current volume, he tells of a German U-boat captain who had sunk many Allied ships in the Atlantic. One night in 1942, the captain’s U-boat surfaced off the coast of Brooklyn, seeking another kill:

At 10:00 p.m., just below Coney Island, he paused on the city’s very doorstep, gazing in amazement at the Ferris Wheel and the Parachute Jump highlighted against the blazing backdrop of light thrown up from incandescent Manhattan. The captain was mesmerized, and also irritated at the arrogance implicit in the luminous spectacle. Recalling blacked-out Europe, he jotted in his war diary: “Don’t they know there’s a war on?”

Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration campaign that has targeted the city of Minneapolis and the state of Minnesota, which I serve as attorney general, appears to be the single largest deployment of immigration agents in the history of the United States. This domestic invasion has inflicted tremendous damage on our state.

Federal agents have killed two people in two weeks—Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, and Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who worked at the Minneapolis VA hospital. (There has been at least one additional nonlethal shooting.)

Agents have stopped countless numbers of people and demanded, in effect, that they show their papers—in America. We have seen door-to-door searches where agents barge into people’s homes without cause. We have seen stores shuttered, markets shut down, restaurants under siege, employees afraid to go to work, and students afraid to go to school. We will be living with the scars from these abuses for years to come.

That is why my office sued the Trump administration. We sought a restraining order to halt Operation Metro Surge in its tracks. The lawsuit that we filed was, to my mind, necessitated by the federal government’s unprecedented abuse of the Constitution and by President Trump’s overt promise of “retribution” against the state of Minnesota. We have been able to marshal facts to show that the reason Trump’s domestic army has flooded our state is not because we have an especially large population of undocumented immigrants. Rather, we have been targeted because Trump sees us as his political enemy. That is a violation of our First Amendment right to free expression.

In addition, the 10th Amendment gives Minnesota dual sovereignty with the federal government. Yet we have seen the White House try to force elected leaders to bend to its will rather than to the will of the people of our state. The federal government has deployed more than 3,000 masked and heavily armed agents to achieve what Congress or a court would never grant: coerced control over the politics of Minnesotans.

People may ask, “Why is Minnesota having to deal with this targeted oppression?” One answer is that we voted against the president three elections in a row—something he has publicly said he resents deeply. But there’s a deeper, truer answer: Trump has gone after us because of who we are and what we value.

We welcome strangers. We see refugees as cherished members of our community, not as threats. We take care of the vulnerable among us. We want to be a great place for everyone to live—no matter where they come from. And, while we of course believe in the rule of law, we also believe that immigration is not a sin.

In short, Trump hates us because we love each other.

To those watching this madness unfold from elsewhere in America: I submit to you that just as Portland and Chicago and Los Angeles were precursors to Minneapolis, Minneapolis is a precursor to a whole lot of other cities and states, including Maine, that Trump has his eye on. If we don’t stop this behavior in Minnesota, it will only expand—and that won’t be good for anyone in our country.

We need to recognize that this is a constitutional test for Minnesota and for the entire nation. This reality has led me to think a good deal recently about first principles, and about the very premises on which this nation was founded.

Bruce Springsteen used the first great protest song of 2026, his “Streets of Minneapolis,” to deliver a blistering condemnation of the violent assault that a strike force of 3,000 masked and armed agents of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waged on Minnesota’s largest city. The American bard describes how, during the first weeks of January, Minneapolis became “a city aflame…’neath an occupier’s boots” and recounts that “there were bloody footprints where mercy should have stood and two left to die on snow-filled streets: Alex Pretti and Renee Good.” Springsteen was not merely mourning; he was calling out the Trump administration’s propagandistic distortion of the truth about Pretti, an intensive-­care nurse with the Department of Veterans Affairs, gunned down by Border Patrol agents on January 24, and Good, a poet and mother of three, shot in the head by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on January 7. And the Boss excoriated “Noem’s dirty lies.”

The lies told by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, including wildly unfounded assertions that Good and Pretti committed acts of “domestic terrorism,” have inspired widespread demands for accountability for the most dangerously dishonest of Donald Trump’s miserable cast of cabinet appointees. There is plenty of competition for the “worst of the worst” title in Trump’s cabinet. But Noem’s attempts to defend the indefensible, her personal and official scandals, her mismanagement, and above all her outrageous and propagandistic lies about Good and Pretti are not merely shameful. They are impeachable.

Members of Congress, no matter their political affiliation, must recognize a constitutional duty to remove this gangster from the position of public trust that she has so flagrantly abused. The will of the people is already clear. Trump and Noem thought they could intimidate the public into quiescence. But tens of thousands of Americans have filled the streets of Minneapolis and cities across the country to demand the abolition of ICE because they have chosen to believe their own eyes, as opposed to Noem’s lies.

The arguments against Noem are now so stark that even senior Republicans are making the case for her removal, with North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis raging against “the incompetence of the leader of the [Department of] Homeland Security,” adding, “She doesn’t know how to lead, how to de-escalate. She’s exposing ICE officers to dangerous situations; she’s exposing US citizens to deadly situations.” Even as Trump tried to distance himself from some of Noem’s most extreme statements and policies in late January, the president’s response to Tillis and to Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, another Republican who’s said the secretary should go, was to call the senators “losers” and announce that Noem would be staying because “she’s doing a very good job.”

With Trump digging in, it falls to members of Congress to act. Many Democrats have done just that, as part of the most significant accountability movement yet seen during the year of chaos that Trump and his noxious inner circle of aides, such as Stephen Miller, have unleashed. In addition to tentative calls from Republicans for Noem’s resignation or firing, a robust movement to impeach the cabinet secretary has attracted support from over 180 House Democrats as of February 2. Supporters of impeachment have rallied around a resolution sponsored by Representative Robin Kelly (D-IL) that indicts Noem for obstructing the congressional oversight of detention facilities operated by DHS; for “using her position for personal gain while inappropriately using taxpayer dollars”; for “using her position to circumvent the Federal contracting process and [funnel] Federal funds to her friends’ businesses”; and for “repeatedly [violating] the Immigration and Nationality Act, the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution, and due process rights of American citizens by directing [ICE] to make widespread warrantless arrests, forgo due process, and use violence against United States citizens, lawful residents, and other individuals.”

The resolution notes that, in the case of Renee Good, “despite video showing the officer on the side of the vehicle while firing and the vehicle was moving away from the officer on the second and third shots, Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem is claiming publicly that the officer was in danger and in front of the vehicle when he fired.” That lie points to the most compelling argument for Noem’s removal: She is a determined propagandist who seeks to distort the truth, undermine investigations, and divide Americans. And all the evidence suggests that she intends to keep lying to the American people, the media, and Congress.

None of the House members who propose to impeach Noem are naïve. They know that the full constitutional promise of the impeachment power has been undermined by Senate Republicans who have refused to hold members of their own party—including Trump himself—to account. And they know that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will do everything in his power to thwart accountability for Trump and his appointees—just as he did during the fight over the release of files regarding the convicted child-sex offender and longtime Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein. But the anger over Noem’s reckless actions and scorching dishonesty has momentum, which could force congressional action in much the way that US Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) ultimately did in their fight for the release of the Epstein files.

Khanna has emerged as an ardent supporter of Noem’s impeachment because “she’s presided over agents who are killing American citizens.” The California representative includes Noem’s impeachment on a list of steps that, he says, must be taken to rein in ICE and DHS. “Congress is not powerless. Democrats must unify around an actual agenda,” argues Khanna, who urges opposition to future DHS funding, a repeal of the multiyear $75 billion in funding for ICE that Congress approved last year, investigations and prosecutions of ICE agents who have broken the law, and a strategy to “tear down and replace ICE with an agency that has oversight.”

To that list, we would add formal action by Congress to bar ICE agents from interfering with the 2026 midterms.

We understand that some will ask why Noem’s impeachment should be a priority with so many threats to be addressed and so many other members of the Trump administration who merit removal (including Trump himself). Our answer is that this is an accountability movement that has gained traction, has the potential to attract at least some Republican support, and above all will send a message to the whole administration that, to quote Springsteen, “We’ll remember the names of those who died on the streets of Minneapolis”—and the lies that have been told about Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and all the others who have died on Kristi Noem’s watch.

Over the past two decades, A.S. Hamrah has carved out a peculiar niche for himself in the increasingly bowdlerized world of American film writers as an uncompromising critic of not just movies, but the systems of power they reflect. Take his quip about Everything Everywhere All at Once, from one of his signature short-form reviews for n+1: “The thing I don’t understand is how you lose money running a laundromat,” Hamrah writes, “especially if you own the building.”

The latest collection of Hamrah’s work, Algorithm of the Night: Film Writing, 2019–2025, includes dozens of such reviews along with longer essays for Bookforum, The Baffler, and The New York Review of Books that reverberate far beyond Hollywood and into the uneasy place film holds in the post-Covid era. Noting that Donald Trump’s two favorite movies are said to be Citizen Kane and the Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle Bloodsport, he writes, “There it is, the Trump administration summed up in one weird double feature.”

Hamrah’s most recent project was Last Week in End Times Cinema, a weekly newsletter collecting together “pathetic and ridiculous” news stories about the movie business. (True to form, Hamrah blasted these digests out from his EarthLink account rather than bothering with Substack.) Those columns are now available in a separate collection as well. There are dispiriting headlines like “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 Ending Explained” and summaries of news stories about Sam Altman, the “eyebrowless CEO of OpenAI,” suggesting “AI might figure out on its own how to stop itself from ending the human race.” Read enough of these missives and it becomes obvious why studio heads were too focused on replacing actors with algorithms to properly market a film like Train Dreams, filing it away in Netflix’s library of slop after a curtailed theatrical release.

Together, Algorithm of the Night and Last Week in End Times Cinema provide a sardonic—yet sobering—guide to the societal breakdown of 2020s America. The Nation spoke with Hamrah about how the pandemic ruined the movie-going experience, AI hustlers and rubes, and the cinematic experience of social media, where police violence, fascist propaganda, and pygmy hippos compete for our enfeebled attention spans. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Kyle Paoletta

Kyle Paoletta: In Algorithm of the Night, you write that 17 months passed between the last film you saw in theaters before lockdown in 2020 and the next time you were able to visit a cinema. That period covers the most acute phase of the pandemic, so I’m curious to hear what kind of lasting damage you think that long layoff did to the culture of moviegoing?

A.S. Hamrah: There’s the personal level and there’s what happened in the film industry, especially with exhibition. On the personal level, it’s a coincidence that the last film I saw was a press screening for the rerelease of The Conversation on 35mm that Francis Ford Coppola had put together. After seeing that film, once the pandemic started, I started to live like Gene Hackman does in that movie, which is in an isolated environment by myself, in my case just listening to people on the phone or on Zoom in my apartment, rarely seeing them in person. And like that character, I was losing my mind. The next movie I happened to see in theaters was M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, a movie about people trapped on an island who become infected with a mysterious illness that makes them age. That’s also how I felt, like I had aged in that period in an unnatural way. When I saw Old it was at a regional arthouse cinema in upstate New York, and of course they were showing it digitally. It didn’t look great on the screen—it certainly didn’t look like The Conversation. There’s a clear kind of degeneration between seeing a movie from the 1970s projected on 35mm and seeing a new movie projected digitally. And that too, is a form of immiseration.

On the level of the film industry, they’ve totally given themselves over to this sense of degeneration. Almost everything is projected digitally, which reflects what I think of as this kind of gleeful attitude the studios have about the death of moviegoing. They don’t control theaters, so they would much prefer it if there was only streaming, where they get all the money. They don’t care about the experience people have at the movies, because they don’t want people to even go to the movies. Ted Sarandos, the CEO of Netflix, is always insisting, “People actually don’t like going to movies.” The implication is that people just like sitting on their ass at home and scrolling through a menu of crap—essentially what many people were doing during the pandemic. And now AI is being sold to us in a similar fashion as streaming—it is something inevitable that is going to happen to us whether we want it to or not, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

KP: I suspect these studio executives are so quick to say no one goes to movies anymore because they themselves do not go to movies anymore.

ASH: People now often tell me things like, “I have two kids in college, one’s pre-law and the other is studying biochemistry, and they never go to the movies.” People like that weren’t going to the movies when I was in college, either! If the convenience of streaming is defining the industry for the people who run it, like Sarandos and Bob Iger and David Zaslav, then the exhibitors now have to counter this by making it more convenient to see movies. They’re not doing that. Instead, they’re just adding more layers between you and the movie you want to see: Often you have to drive to a dead mall. You have to go online to buy a ticket. You have to pick a seat before you get to the movie theater. There’s often no cashier now in the ticket booth, so if you prefer to buy a ticket at the theater you have to go to the concession stand and wait behind people who are buying their special popcorn buckets, and then pick out the seats, and so on.

Since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, student journalists have been instrumental in covering his administration’s attacks on everything from the gutting of the Department of Education, to the rollback of diversity and equity initiatives, to the crackdown on free speech and attempted deportation of international students speaking out on Palestine. During this time of increased repression, we remain proud—as well as astonished—to be alone among national news outlets in regularly publishing student perspectives. As the resources and opportunities for emerging writers continue to dwindle, it has never been more important to support the next generation of journalists.

StudentNation published nearly 100 original articles in 2025; we’ve selected three of these pieces to highlight their extraordinary range and reporting. Read more at TheNation.com/content/studentnation. We’re deeply grateful to the Puffin Foundation, whose generosity to the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism makes this work possible.

—Peter Rothberg and Julian Epp, editors of StudentNation

The Great Salt Lake Is a Ticking Time Bomb

by Adelaide Parker

Utah is the third-driest state in the United States. From the parched Colorado Plateau to the even drier Great Basin, it’s almost all desert.

In high school, I rowed with Utah’s only club crew team. Each spring, we drove our boats to the Great Salt Lake—the only place for miles with enough water to row on. The lake’s salty water stank of sulfur, which made everything it touched stink too. Thousands of brine flies swarmed our docks. They’d carpet my arms so thickly that when I looked down, I’d see more flies than flesh.

But away from shore, I saw beauty all around. The water stretched so far in every direction that I couldn’t see the land beyond. Unless the wind picked up, the lake lay flat, gleaming and blue. Mountains seemed to pierce its surface and clone themselves in the ripples below. They looked like spinning tops—stretching from peaks to flared bases, then winnowing back to sharp points.

I noticed with awe how the lake teemed with life. I’d look down, and what I thought were floating flakes of sediment would begin to swim. They were brine shrimp: crustaceans that carry the Great Salt Lake’s ecosystem on their centimeter-long backs. Waterfowl filled the sky, diving to dip their beaks and spindly legs into my wake.

The year I left for college, one of my sisters joined the crew team. I’d hoped we could bond over rowing on the lake. But that November, a former teammate called me. She said our team wouldn’t be rowing on the Great Salt Lake next year—that the team might never row on it again. Utah was in a drought, and the lake had shriveled to its lowest levels on record.

The editors of The Nation magazine are in the process of formally nominating the city of Minneapolis and its people for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. The following nomination statement, which is addressed to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the five-member body that is charged by the Parliament of Norway with selecting the recipient of the Peace Prize, has been prepared for submission on Friday.

TO: The distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

As longtime observers of struggles to establish peace and justice in the United States and around the world, and as the editors of a magazine that is proud to have included several Nobel laureates on our editorial board and masthead—including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—we are honored to nominate the city of Minneapolis and its people for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.

While individuals and organizations have been granted this prize since its inception in 1901, no municipality has ever been recognized. But, in these unprecedented times, we strongly believe that the case can be made that Minneapolis, the largest city in Minnesota, has met and exceeded the committee’s standard of promoting “democracy and human rights, and work aimed at creating a better organized and more peaceful world.”

In December 2025, President Donald Trump and his administration deployed thousands of armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement and United States Border Patrol agents to Minneapolis, a beautifully multiracial and multiethnic city of nearly 430,000 people. These agents have targeted the city’s diverse immigrant communities and struck fear into all of its residents. As Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said in late January, the campaign has been “more about tragically terrorizing people than it is about safety” and has been guilty of “discriminating only on the basis of race.”

The people of Minneapolis have suffered countless abuses, including harassment, detention, deportation, and injury. And, in incidents that shocked the world, federal agents have killed multiple residents, including poet and mother of three Renee Nicole Good and intensive care nurse Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

In response to these horrific developments, elected officials, clergy, and labor leaders in Minneapolis and Minnesota have called for nonviolent protest, in accordance with the US Constitution’s promise that Americans have a right to assemble and petition for the redress of grievances. The people of Minneapolis and neighboring communities have answered that call with peaceful mass demonstrations that have drawn tens of thousands of protesters to the streets in frigid weather. They have coupled their cry for federal agents to withdraw from Minneapolis with chants that declare, “No hate, no fear… immigrants are welcome here!”

The people of Minneapolis have also engaged in mutual support and care for neighbors who have been targeted because of the color of their skin or the language they speak. They have delivered groceries to residents who are afraid to leave their homes and provided financial support to neighbors who haven’t been able to go to their places of work because of the federal assault on their rights and humanity.

America’s farmers are starting to realize how badly Donald Trump has betrayed them, and they’re stewing in anger and despair. These are the ingredients for a populist moment that Democrats can meet by offering an explanation for what has gone wrong and a plan to address the crisis.

As far as what’s gone wrong, they can start with Trump’s whiplash-inducing announcement of a $40 billion bailout to Make Argentina Great Again. After months of cruel and arbitrary cuts to spending on domestic and foreign aid, the Trump administration is creating an economic lifeline to prop up Argentina’s corrupt anarcho-capitalist president, Javier Milei.

Argentina is the third-largest producer of soybeans in the world, behind Brazil and the United States. Seizing the opportunity presented by the US-China trade war, Argentina dropped its export tax and is now selling shiploads of soybeans to China, a country that used to buy them from US farmers.

Anger about Trump’s tariffs—and with it, the prospect of a political reckoning in farm country—has grown so intense that the president announced a $12 billion payout to compensate farmers for what they’ve lost in the trade war with China. But that Band-Aid bailout amounts to barely a third of farmers’ losses in 2025 alone and won’t even begin to pay off the $560 billion in debt that burdens US farmers.

It’s not just soybean producers who are in trouble. Farmers all over the country are struggling with dramatic increases in input costs (fertilizer, seed, equipment, etc.), even as key markets disappear and the prices for their products stagnate or decline. This is an issue that Democrats should seize on.

America’s farmers, inspired by the New Deal, were once reliably Democratic voters. Now they skew heavily Republican. The losses they’ve suffered, thanks to Trump’s tariffs and other disastrous policies, provide fertile ground for defection. And the bailing out of Argentina, a major agricultural competitor, offers Democrats a golden opportunity. A serious opposition party would be railing nonstop about this. It would be barnstorming every farming community in the country with a message of solidarity: “Trump has left American farmers high and dry. He may have wanted to hurt China with the tariffs, but it’s US farmers who are getting punished. He’s promising to throw some money at farmers, but we all know where that money’s going to end up—with the banks that hold half a trillion dollars in farm debt.”

The message from Democrats should be blunt and politically robust. It should say that this country needs to get behind farmers in a way that it hasn’t in decades. Instead of a trade war with China, we need to rebuild our food system for the good of farmers and the 340 million Americans they feed.

If any high-profile Democrat has said anything of the sort, we’ve missed it. The same goes for the resistance: We’ve seen almost no pro-farmer signs at the massive No Kings protests.

Instead, Democrats have left the field open to right-wing populists like former US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who rightly condemned the Argentine bailout as a betrayal of “America First.” This is the same mistake that top Democrats made in 2015 and ’16, when they failed to acknowledge the devastating impact of NAFTA on US factory towns, leaving an opening for Trump to do just that in the battleground states. After decades of neglect, the Midwest’s “blue wall” finally crumbled.

You would think that the collapse of farm country’s support for Democrats would be a high priority for those seeking to rebuild the party. But we’ve actually seen examples of liberal social-media clicktivists mocking the pleas from farmers as “MAGA tears.”

Of all of contemporary architecture’s many sins, perhaps the most pernicious is its continued participation in the follies and fantasies of various undemocratic states. While many architects withdrew from projects in Russia after it began its war of attrition against Ukraine, they have yet to apply such ethical scruples to the Gulf petro-states, each of which has invested trillions upon trillions of dollars in high-profile building projects.

The governments of these countries are guilty of a range of crimes, from unfettered carbon emissions and forced displacements to the use of slave labor and the assassination of journalists. Yet this has not deterred starchitects and their firms from signing their names to various marinas, towers, and shopping plazas. Grand and ambitious architectural projects have largely stalled in the West, but the Gulf states’ lack of regulations and endless flows of cash provide the kind of laissez-faire sandbox that most architects—especially those of the technocratic “big ideas” variety—can only dream of.

Unsurprisingly, when Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman proposed building a 110-mile horizontal urban “skyscraper” called the Line near the border of Jordan and Egypt in 2020—the centerpiece of a vast new planned city called Neom—many of the world’s most prestigious firms clamored to sign up. These ranged from the usual suspects of neoliberal future-making, like Thom Mayne’s aesthetically erratic outfit Morphosis, to firms that inherited the city-building impulses of modernism, such as Peter Cook and an I.M. Pei–less Pei Cobb Freed. All of this, of course, was managed by the notorious architecture-and-construction-slash-defense-contractor AECOM, which also happens to be handling the structural logistics for Donald Trump’s ballroom and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sinister, Neom-esque Gaza 2035 master plan.

For nearly five years, we beleaguered souls in the design world have had to endure innumerable press releases and puff pieces about whatever zany shit was going on out in the Saudi Arabian desert. This included the Line’s supposed sustainability efforts (oh, the oil-funded irony), such as indoor gardens and wind farms, plus a number of gravity-defying proposals that, to anyone with a rudimentary understanding of physics, sounded more like pulpy sci-fi gags (most notoriously, an upside-down skyscraper poised like a keystone over an artificial marina full of stagnant water). Year by year, with little progress made save for the piles prematurely driven into the sand, it became increasingly clear that the damn thing would never be built—that it was what we in the biz call “paper architecture.”

This was recently confirmed in a long Financial Times exposé detailing how the scope of bin Salman’s vision has shrunk to basically nothing. The “chandelier” (the central upside-down skyscraper) was derailed by the fact that the earth spins, the wind blows, and human waste can’t be flushed upward. The Line’s reflective surface and wind-turbine farm basically created a bird-slaughtering machine along one of the world’s most important migratory routes. Meanwhile, amid a culture of secrecy and retribution, architects and planners were basically forced to agree with whatever bin Salman thought was interesting or worthwhile, a process that mostly relied on a nonstop parade of spectacular renderings.

Unlike other paper reveries, the human costs of the Line have been staggering. In 2021, the development occasioned a horrific program of forced displacement for members of the Huwaitat tribe and the imprisonment—even execution—of anyone who dared to resist. A few years later, an ITV documentary revealed that more than 21,000 workers were estimated to have died or disappeared under Saudi Vision 2030, the massive urbanization program that counts Neom as its crown jewel. Human Rights Watch has documented the repeated abuse of migrant workers on Saudi megaprojects. These workers, who are often charged outlandish recruitment fees, have had their phones destroyed and their immigration documents confiscated. Tens of thousands of people have died or suffered abject ruination in the service of a few glossy pictures. The shambolic project that killed or ruined them was made possible not only by a seemingly bottomless supply of oil money, but by the borrowed prestige of some of the West’s leading architecture firms.

The Line’s failure should serve as a warning to other firms seduced by outrageous consulting and design fees—not only for the sheer scale of its barbarism but for the obvious frivolity of its lies. Is it not humiliating to aid and abet a project that is so evidently bullshit? Was it not humiliating to have to pretend that Saudi Arabia’s sustainability goals were legitimate while the construction materials and transportation behind its projects wrested more carbon from the earth than most small countries do in a year?

Architecture is always political. Greed and the promise of creative freedom—which, of course, is always secured at a cost—lure architects toward countries that are looking to culture-wash their bad names through stadiums, cultural centers, luxury shopping districts, and dazzling hotels. The logic behind many of these bad choices is that everyone else is doing the same. Louis Vuitton is doing it. Formula One is doing it. If I don’t do it, somebody else will.

Architecture loves to present itself as a liberal or progressive field, shielding itself from reproach with its forays into sustainability and new, more egalitarian forms of living. And it does so all while taking sordid money and grinding its own workers to dust through overwork and underpayment. The ruins of the Line expose a cold truth, which is that these firms and their fountainheads have never been any different from any other capitalist enterprise. Like many others, they have blood on their hands.

In the dire months since Donald Trump’s return to power, you’ve no doubt read a version of the famous mea culpa “First They Came”—perhaps woven into the lines of an essay or op-ed, perhaps thumbed out on social media. Part warning, part exhortation, the short text (it’s often mistaken for a poem) comes to us as tragically earned wisdom from the rise of the Nazis, alas grimly relevant to the America of today. The variation considered the most authoritative (if not the most commonly cited) reads:

  First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak
  out—because I was not a socialist.

  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak
  out—because I was not a trade unionist.

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
  because I was not a Jew.

  Then they came for me—and there was no one left who
  could protest.

In the decades since these words were formulated, they’ve gradually eclipsed the man responsible for them, blocking his presence so thoroughly that they arrive on a page, in some instances, without so much as an attribution. But even on those occasions when Martin Niemöller does get his due, he tends to be credited only vaguely, as a German pastor who ran afoul of Hitler—his story shorn of its most arduous complexities.

Niemöller was indeed a German cleric, a man world-famous in his day as a defiant martyr for freedom of religion, imprisoned by the Führer for eight long years, until the very end of World War II. In the years after his release, Niemöller began offering piecemeal the lines of what would become his famed text, asserting them in remarks during sermons and speeches in the bombed-out ruins of the Third Reich. While the referents sometimes varied—some versions included people with disabilities or Jehovah’s Witnesses, while others omitted Communists—the theme remained constant.

And yet, if the text tolls the bitter cost of indifference and want of solidarity, it also doesn’t go far enough with regard to its author. For all its confessional eloquence, it is, in fact, an act of profound obfuscation: an attempt to confess guilt without really coming clean, to claim responsibility while obscuring what was a deep complicity.

Martin Niemöller had supported Hitler. Enthusiastically. Although he was hailed on the cover of Time as the “Martyr of 1940” and portrayed in a Hollywood film as having thundered at the Führer, “When you attack the Jews, you attack us all!,” 
the man himself was far from an anti-fascist freedom fighter. A proud World War I hero, he was also an imperialist, an ultranationalist, and an antisemite who only really objected to the aggressions of the Third Reich after the Nazis began intruding into the domain of the Protestant Church. Even then, his objections remained narrow. And while he did eventually undergo an extraordinary transformation into an indefatigable pacifist and devotee of Gandhi, that transformation came years after the war—a redemption wrenched from the contradictions of a very flawed protagonist.

The historian Benjamin Ziemann, one of the two recent biographers who have pierced through the hagiographic shimmer around Niemöller, regards his evolution with something close to a suspicion of hypocrisy, even duplicity. After marshaling troubling evidence of Niemöller’s longtime attitude toward Jews, Ziemann offers in his book Hitler’s Personal Prisoner that he would revise the iconic mea culpa as follows:

  First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak
  out—because I resented the “Godless” Communists for
  their attacks on Christianity.

  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak
  out—because I believed in the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft
  [racially pure, united folk-nation].

  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
  because I “disliked” the Jews and denied the legitimacy of
  their faith.

  Then they came for me and detained me for eight long
  years—yet when I was finally liberated, my views on
  Communists and Jews had not substantially changed.

Niemöller’s other revisionist biographer, the historian Matthew Hockenos, takes a more forgiving approach. In Then They Came for Me, he calls Niemöller’s early views and actions repellent but commends his courage in later life to change his deeply held beliefs and act accordingly. “In this, Niemöller is to be admired,” Hockenos declares, “and his evolution celebrated.”

So what are we to make of him? And of the text whose words we quote in these desperate times?

For us, Niemöller’s story presents an abiding challenge. Seen in one light, his mea culpa is a compromised but still worthy text, its personal lesson urgent despite its misleading omissions. Seen in another, it’s an act of craven concealment hiding behind a show of rueful confession. But there is a third possibility as well: that the text that came to be known as “First They Came” is something difficult in an all too human way—a vital wisdom set within a moral failure. Its full meaning, its uneasy power, requires us to hold it in both lights together.

Long before Martin Niemöller became a renowned international figure—before life’s twists and turns would torque him from a fascist sympathizer into an ecumenical citizen of the world—he was, above all, a patriotic German and a nationalistic Lutheran.

Born in 1892 in Westphalia, in Prussia, he was the second-oldest son of a Lutheran pastor in an imperial Germany under the authoritarian Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was a grand Germany back then, a nation of Christian church and state, throne and altar. Obsessed with the Imperial Navy from an early age, by 1918 Niemöller was joyously commanding a U-boat—an especially dangerous posting—having won an Iron Cross First Class for the action he’d already seen. When the war ended with Germany’s defeat and the kaiser’s abdication, followed by the turmoil of the 1918–19 revolution that gave way to the Weimar Republic, the profoundly conservative Niemöller was appalled and resigned his commission.

Last spring, the Mayday USA tour—a traveling road show of Christian parents’-rights activists campaigning against gender and sexual expression in children—brought its message to five American cities. Each of its appearances, in highly visible public arenas such as Times Square in New York City and Discovery Green in Houston, was something between a political rally, a Christian tent revival, and a college-football tailgate party. Music pulsated from the sound system, hands were held aloft in praise, and speakers assured the crowd that they were a righteous silent majority, fed up and ready to roar. Invoking Jesus’s love, activist influencers and charismatic pastors unleashed a barrage of alarmist rhetoric aiming to channel parental anxiety into a broader Christian-supremacist project.

The choreography was amped-up and melodramatic, following a conventional arc: collective prayers, tearful testimonies, calls to protect children from unseen cultural forces. The point wasn’t just to feel good, but to feel chosen—a persecuted vanguard with divine backing. By the end of each event, the crowd was buzzing, swapping Instagram handles and embraces, convinced that they weren’t simply attending a rally but standing on the front lines of a holy war.

That is, until the fourth of the five rallies brought Mayday USA to Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park. The choice of venue was not accidental: The park, named for Washington’s first openly gay legislator, sits in the heart of the city’s historic LGBTQ+ district. By nightfall, the streets of Seattle were a battlefield, with fists flying and police dragging away 23 protesters. With the eruption came the prize every movement covets: national attention. Seattle’s Democratic mayor, Bruce Harrell, condemned the violence, blaming anarchists for “infiltrating” the counterprotest. But his sharpest words were reserved for the Mayday USA rally itself, accusing its organizers of trying to “provoke a reaction” in a city whose values they reject. “Seattle is proud of our reputation as a welcoming, inclusive city for LGBTQ+ communities,” Harrell said. “We stand with our trans neighbors when they face bigotry and injustice.”

That was the spark that turned the clash into a cause célèbre on the right. Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino posted on X that his office would “fully investigate allegations of targeted violence” against what he termed “the Seattle concert.” Freedom of religion, he added, “isn’t a suggestion.” The White House Faith Office weighed in, condemning the “violent disruption” of the event and declaring it an issue of upholding the attendees’ constitutional rights.

For Mayday USA’s organizers, the national uproar was a gift from heaven. Three days later, they staged a follow-up protest in front of Harrell’s office. Dubbed the “Rattle in Seattle,” it drew 500 Christian and conservative demonstrators, protected by a heavy police presence and a fence around City Hall. One pastor in a MAGA hat led chants for the police and sneered, “If that makes me a fascist, sign me up.”

The Rattle’s organizers were there to issue the Seattle Proclamation, a defiant missive to the city and to their detractors. “His Kingdom is coming,” they vowed, proclaiming Christ’s dominion over the earth. “And we, His people, will stand brave in this hour.” For a movement hungry for oxygen, a seemingly grassroots gathering of concerned parents made for the perfect launching pad. But that image masks the movement’s real origin story—one far murkier, and far more revealing, than the spectacle on display.

In 2023, a secretive network of ultra-wealthy Christian donors known as Ziklag produced a strategy to return Donald Trump to the White House. In a leaked nine-minute video for members that comes across like the trailer for an apocalyptic film, a graphic is repeatedly flashed with the central message: “Reclaim the Republic.”

Ziklag is named for the Old Testament town that was given to David by a Philistine king before the hated Amalekites burned it and seized its people. David’s daring defeat of the raiders and his rescue of the women and children was the victory that paved his way to Israel’s throne. Today’s Ziklag is an invitation-only club for ultra-wealthy Christian donors, including Hobby Lobby’s Green family, office-supply titans the Uihleins, and Jockey apparel’s Waller family, among a membership that reportedly requires a net worth in the tens of millions. It exists to pool money into projects aimed at reshaping American culture and politics along explicitly conservative Christian lines, even claiming credit for Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court.

Ziklag was founded after Trump’s 2016 election by the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Ken Eldred, who, in the lead-up to Trump’s first electoral victory, backed an important meeting between American evangelical leaders and Trump through a faith-based nonprofit called United in Purpose. Eldred had amassed his substantial personal wealth through a mail-order computer-accessories business in the 1970s and ’80s and then merged it into a software giant in the 1990s before becoming deeply entrenched in conservative politics, including serving on the finance committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. In the private sphere, he promotes what he calls “kingdom entrepreneurship,” encouraging Christian businesspeople to bring Christ into the workplace and spread the Gospel by starting for-profit businesses. He believes that Christians must operate on a “triple bottom line,” where economic, social, and spiritual capital are pursued in tandem.

But after Trump’s election in 2016, Eldred’s political passions were reignited. He wanted “wealthy Christian people to come together,” according to a longtime collaborator. The Covid pandemic, he said, was a “gift from God,” bringing about His advancing kingdom through “a series of glorious victories, cleverly disguised as disasters,” and ensuring that people returned to the Christian faith.

The mission of Ziklag is no less ambitious: to remake American politics in the service of an oligarch class convinced of its divine right to rule. The secret video from its December 2023 “Trailblazers” cultural-engagement summit opens with a booming declaration: “We are boldly pursuing the reclamation of America’s founding as a Christian nation.” The presentation lays out a plan to target “battleground states, where we need to refocus on values-based voting,” distilled into three strategic pillars. The first, “Checkmate,” would bankroll “election integrity” groups; the second, “Steeplechase,” would mobilize faith leaders and congregations; and the final one, “Watchtower,” would prosecute a culture war around “parental rights” and opposition to sexual and gender expression.

For Watchtower and Steeplechase, Ziklag’s power brokers handpicked Jenny Donnelly—the wife of a telegenic preacher in Portland, Oregon, a mother of five, and a former multilevel marketer—as its public face. We know little about how she emerged from relative obscurity to become a leading figure in evangelical circles, other than that she and her husband, Robert, launched the Collective Church and Tetelestai Ministries, which oversees Her Voice MVMT as its political arm. A cut-and-paste Christian mom, Donnelly had initially tried to make a name for herself with at-home workout videos. Her sudden elevation as the leader of this Christian social movement followed a script that’s familiar in right-wing circles: The pandemic lockdowns—especially church closures—galvanized Donnelly and many around her, while the Black Lives Matter protests in Portland’s 2020 “Summer of Rage” pushed them fully into action.

Initially, Her Voice MVMT had no significant following. It was another slick, one-click-checkout site pushing faith-based courses on living a righteous life—a dime a dozen in the evangelical charismatic world. Ziklag’s intervention changed that.

In the “Trailblazers” video, Ziklag outlined its blueprint to turn the parents’-rights crusade into a full-blown political machine, promising to “create a coalition” of like-minded groups, “amplify their efforts,” and bankroll them to wage a culture war more effectively. The wedge issue, it insisted, was government “control over our kids,” with parents supposedly forced “to remain silent while the transgender lobby attempts to take over.” At the center of this crusade would be Her Voice MVMT, which Ziklag promised would build “300,000 prayer hubs nationwide” by the end of 2024. The prayer groups were designed to be weaponized as frontline organizers, drilled with training materials from Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, fire-and-brimstone pastors, and the America First policy stores. The plan was to rebrand conspiracy-theory-soaked paranoia as grassroots moral revival—and to hardwire it directly into electoral politics.

As promised, Donnelly exploded onto the national stage at the end of 2023 with a call for simultaneous prayer rallies in every state capital in April 2024, followed by a million-woman Christian-nationalist march on the National Mall that October, weeks before the general election.

The Mayday USA tour emerged from a partnership between Her Voice and Ross Johnston Ministries. Johnston, affiliated with conservative organizations, is a millennial preacher with the energy of a Twitch streamer and a conversion story tailor-made for his audience. Born via artificial insemination and raised in Los Angeles by two lesbian mothers, Johnston says he grew up with an “orphan spirit”—loved but unmoored, “floating through life and searching for a destiny.” In his telling, the Covid lockdowns and the loss of in-person contact drew him to the church—and, in the process, helped him overcome a nine-year porn addiction.

Like Donnelly, Johnston experienced the pandemic as a turning point for a revival of religious liberty. Yet Donnelly offers something more. As a relatable face for a prized political demographic, she embodies both tradition and renewal: political sermons that blend kitchen-table wisdom with the apocalyptic urgency of the charismatic revival, a guardian of family and faith fronting an uncompromising political campaign.

Many in Ziklag’s inner circle—including the pastors who elevated her—hail from the neo-charismatic Pentecostal movement and its more extreme edge, the New Apostolic Reformation. With an emphasis on the Holy Spirit and its role as the conduit for a personal relationship with God, it’s a strain of evangelicalism that has surged through global Christianity in recent decades. It’s the religious current running beneath MAGA, led by figures like Trump’s spiritual adviser, Paula White-Cain, and defined by the physical intensity of faith: the laying-on of hands for healing, ecstatic worship, and daily battles with demonic forces.

The shutdowns struck at the core of the neo-charismatics’ spiritual and economic models. Without the exuberant intimacy of their worship, they couldn’t practice their faith as they understood it; nor could they sustain the ministry circuits and event-based revenues that underpin their institutions. For those like the Donnelly family, pastors with real skin in the game, the threat was spiritual, theological, financial—and existential.

But while Donnelly’s movement may look as all-American as a sawdust tent revival, its playbook comes not from the likes of Phyllis Schlafly or Sarah Palin. It comes from Peru.

In 2016, Christian Rosas—the son of a prominent Peruvian evangelical congressman, a graduate of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and an adviser to perennial hard-right presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori—emerged as the face of Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas (“Don’t Mess With My Kids”), a slick, media-savvy campaign claiming that gender education in schools was “homosexualizing” children.

Several years of poor performance by Peruvian schoolchildren in international tests had pushed education to the forefront of national debate at just the time that liberal sexual and gender reforms to the national curriculum were taking effect. For conservatives, the two issues fused into a single flash point, bringing together a coalition of faith-based groups that were mobilizing against a succession of socially progressive presidents elected between 2011 and 2020.

The subtitle of Fara Dabhoiwala’s ambitious new book, What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea, raises a question: In what sense is free speech “dangerous”? For autocrats, to be sure, free speech is perilous. It enables subjects to criticize their authority, associate with like-minded others to build an opposition, protest in the streets, and advocate for regime change. For adherents of the status quo, free speech is threatening because it permits critics to press for change. For those with power, it is disturbing because it empowers those without. For religious fundamentalists, it is risky because it protects the right to question orthodoxy. In all these senses, free speech is indeed a dangerous idea—and, for all the same reasons, an essential right.

But for Dabhoiwala, what is most dangerous about free speech is that, at least in the United States, it is too free. Speech, he argues in his wide-ranging intellectual history of the idea, can hurt people, enable disinformation and lies, serve greed, appeal to our basest instincts, and shore up the powerful. Spanning many centuries and multiple continents, What Is Free Speech? offers a revisionist history of freedom of speech, demonstrating that, too often, it has been only partially realized. But his book is also a deeply polemical work, one driven by his concern about what he views as the dangers of free speech to progressive interests, especially in the United States.

In Dabhoiwala’s account, the First Amendment ignores the harms that speech inflicts. It affords the wealthy disproportionate ability to shape public debate. It protects hate speech, which denies equal status to members of minority groups. It privileges individualist notions of liberty over the collective good. It is dangerous, in other words, not for the threat it poses to power, but for the harms it inflicts on the vulnerable. There is undoubtedly some truth to these criticisms. Free speech can be abused and can inflict real harm. Social media is rife with false and misleading “facts.” And billionaires like Elon Musk and George Soros have far greater ability to exercise their speech rights than the rest of us. But Dabhoiwala’s critique of free speech in the United States too often attacks a straw man. It describes the First Amendment as “absolutist” when it is not and it hardly reckons with the abuses that reduced protections of free speech could facilitate when power falls into the wrong hands. That is the real danger, and it’s one that the Trump administration illustrates daily as it leverages purported concerns about discrimination, disinformation, and violence to target the speech of its critics, from pro-Palestinian activists to the press, universities, the legal profession, and nonprofit groups.

Dabhoiwala begins his narrative with a detailed history of the world before free speech existed, an important reminder that for much of human existence, those in power viewed speech as a threat, not a right, and there was little to stop them from suppressing the speech they opposed.

People could be (and were) prosecuted, imprisoned, and even executed for criticizing their governors or otherwise departing from the reigning orthodoxy. It was not until 1766 that the first law protecting free speech was enacted—and that was in Scandinavia.

When the right of free speech did begin to take root, Dabhoiwala notes, it was anything but free speech for all. Like many other rights, the freedom of speech was initially limited to political elites and often denied to women and members of minority groups.

This history is a useful corrective and indeed underscores the essential importance of robustly protecting free speech. Yet Dabhoiwala’s ambition to revise triumphalist accounts of free speech leads him not only to draw different lessons but also to treat the personal flaws and limitations of free-speech advocates as if they necessarily undermine the idea of free speech itself.

Take, for example, his discussion of a series of essays known as Cato’s Letters, written between 1720 and 1723 by Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, two London journalists. Cato’s Letters are, Dabhoiwala contends, the first sustained argument for a secular idea of free speech as a political right, and he helpfully situates the Letters within the technological developments and political struggles of the time, including the emergence of the printing press and the demise of prepublication government censorship. But he also dismisses the letters as a “self-serving tissue of deliberate fabrications, glaring contradictions and willful omissions.”

Cato’s Letters were self-serving, Dabhoiwala argues, because they were written by journalists who made the case for the protection of the press. This self-interested nature is revealed also by the fact that one of the authors, Thomas Gordon, was considerably less protective of speech after he began working for the government.

But many advocates for rights act at least in part out of self-interest. That hardly compromised the efforts of, say, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Thurgood Marshall, Cesar Chavez, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And the fact that Gordon took a different position when serving in government than when speaking as a journalist is neither surprising nor discrediting of the ideas he advanced, which deserve to be judged on their merits.

When Donald Trump nominated Elbridge Colby as the undersecretary of defense for policy, the news stirred headlines in Taiwan. Colby, who has since been confirmed, had repeatedly stated on social media that if China ever invaded Taiwan, the US military should destroy TSMC, the world’s most important chip manufacturer, to prevent it from falling into Chinese hands. The provocative suggestion has been echoed by Democratic Representative Seth Moulton, as well as in a paper from US Army War College Quarterly, which argued that the vow to level TSMC would deter Beijing from annexing the territory by force. By this logic, the vibrant island democracy where 23 million people live has little value beyond its ability to produce an estimated 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors.

Even as the Chinese military escalates its acts of intimidation against Taiwan, Beijing wasted no time in pointing out Washington’s hypocrisy. “As the DPP [Taiwan’s ruling party] authorities are trying their best to pander to the United States and giving away TSMC submissively, the company has become a piece of tender meat on the chopping block,” said a Chinese government spokesperson.

As tensions rise between the world’s two superpowers, with Taiwan caught in the middle, the jingoistic rhetoric around TSMC also reflects a common tendency to mythologize technology. Instead of recognizing technological advancement as a dynamic, incremental process that cannot be confined to a particular geographic location, the national-security establishments of both the United States and China routinely portray state-of-the-art capabilities as a finite resource that can be isolated, stockpiled, and denied from others. To become a dominant superpower means dominating technological development and production as well. The heads of leading chip manufacturers and other tech companies only reinforce these notions of scarcity and exclusivity. For them, market dominance is a zero-sum game. To gain an edge over their competitors, the tech executives have also seized on the narrative of great-power rivalry, painting the world as a ruthless battlefield on which their products are not just indispensable to national strength but cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Against all the saber-rattling, myth-making, and visions of world domination, Honghong Tinn’s new book, Island Tinkerers: Innovation and Transformation in the Making of Taiwan’s Computing Industry, offers a timely intervention and powerful antidote. Tinn grew up in Taiwan and is currently a professor of history at the University of Minnesota. Her book draws from both direct knowledge of the island and deep archival research to explore its long history of manufacturing and technological development. For Tinn, Taiwan has long been a place for tinkering: a process of learning, dissecting, and remaking technology through “acts of imitation, emulation, experimentation, and innovation.” As a latecomer to the electronics industry compared with the United States and Japan, hobbled by the island’s limited resources and situated in a complex geopolitical environment, Taiwan has nevertheless carved out a unique path and claimed its place as not just a maker but also an innovator in the high-tech sector. Its success was not predetermined and relied on the timely alignment of various policies and players. Unlike a lot of scholarship and commentary on economic development in East Asia that focus on the state, Island Tinkerers traces the birth and growth of the computing industry in Taiwan as a project that involved many non-state actors as well: Tinn’s “tinkerers” are university students, corporate engineers, assembly workers, and homegrown entrepreneurs. Determined and resourceful, they navigated material constraints and Cold War politics, rallied domestic and international support, and made the manufacturing and development of technologies that had originated elsewhere into their own. Their accomplishments in reshaping the Taiwanese economy and the electronics industry globally came about by demonstrating, she argues, just how false the cliché is that “the West innovates and the East imitates.”

Tinn’s story begins in the early 1950s. The Communists, led by Mao Zedong, had claimed victory over the Chinese mainland, and the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, retreated to Taiwan. The island had just emerged from a half-century of Japanese colonial rule and now had to endure the martial law implemented by the Nationalists, who still harbored dreams of taking back the mainland. Over 1 million Chinese people followed the Nationalist government in its move to Taiwan, joining the territory’s 6 million–plus population of Chinese and indigenous descent. Among the new arrivals from the mainland were 1,000 or so alumni from Chiao Tung University (CTU) in Shanghai, the “MIT of the Orient.” The graduates tried to reestablish their alma mater on the island and identified the burgeoning field of electronics as a promising opportunity. They lobbied the Nationalist government, linking electrical engineering to national defense, and reached out to overseas alumni networks for donations, stressing Taiwan’s position as “Free China” and on the front lines of the Cold War. As Tinn points out, while the students had fled the Communist takeover on the mainland, their personal views on national and international affairs were in fact complex, as were the reasons for their flight. Embracing some of the Cold War’s rhetoric should be understood first and foremost as a political necessity and a persuasion tactic.

Establishing a new institution of higher education is never an easy feat, but after a series of setbacks, the CTU graduates and their supporters founded the National Chiao-Tung University (NCTU) in 1958. Its Institute of Electronics offered the island’s first graduate program in science and engineering. By 1962, NCTU had become home to Taiwan’s first mainframe computer. The IBM 650 was acquired through a United Nations technical-aid program, followed by an IBM 1620 two years later. By the end of the decade, teams of students from NCTU and two neighboring universities were working to build their own minicomputers.

To realize their aspirations for a home-brew computer, the enterprising teams of students sourced components from the newly established export-processing zone in Kaohsiung, where foreign firms had set up electronics production plants to take advantage of the region’s cheap labor and favorable tax policies. In the summer of 1971, the Taiwanese press announced the birth of the first domestically made “electronic brain”—diannao, as computers are commonly called in Chinese—at NCTU. Tinn notes that the report overstated the capacity of the device, which would be more accurately described as a programmable calculator than a general-purpose computer, and the campus experiment did not lead to “an immediate path” to mass production. Yet the university that received a second life through tireless advocacy by its alumni was an indispensable cradle, where many leaders in Taiwan’s electronics industry began their initial foray into tinkering.

The year that Taiwanese media celebrated the island’s first “native” computer, a 27-year-old Stan Shih graduated from NCTU’s Institute of Electronics. After working for several years at local firms that specialized in mass-producing calculators for export, Shih founded Multitech in 1976. By combining advances in microprocessor technology with Taiwan’s increasingly impressive manufacturing capability, Shih and his fellow entrepreneurs sought to turn a decades-long dream of mass-producing computers on the island into reality.

In 1981, Multitech unveiled the Micro-­Professor I, which won acclaim from consumers and the press in the United States, Japan, and Germany. Its successor model was partially compatible with the Apple II computer at a fraction of the cost and featured a novel Chinese-language display. Inspired by the overnight success of the American firm Compaq, Shih’s team began developing IBM compatibles as well. In 1986, Multitech released one of the world’s first 32-bit computers using the Intel 386 processor, only months after Compaq’s debut.

Apple and IBM defended their monopoly by mounting patent litigation against the makers of clones and compatibles, both at home and abroad. But while the founders of Compaq were celebrated as daring entrepreneurs who defied IBM and helped make the personal computer better and more affordable, the computer makers at Multitech and other Taiwanese firms were maligned in the US media as “scoundrels who stole IBM’s technology” and then profited by undercutting prices. During a 1983 congressional hearing on the impact of illicit trade on US enterprise, the government’s witnesses cited outlandish estimates on the number of Taiwanese counterfeits with no attribution and meanwhile mixed up facts about Multitech with those for other firms (one confused the biography of Multitech engineer Jonney Shih with Stan Shih’s).

Marseille, France—If you get to the Velodrome, the home stadium of the olympique de Marseille soccer club (OM), before the crowds arrive on match day, you’ll see the blue-and-white graffiti blanketing the front steps that lead to the main gate. You’ll probably stumble into a pack of bare-chested young men waving flares. During the match, a firecracker might go off. If you’re not invested in what’s happening on the field—and that would make you an outlier—it’s easy to become hypnotized by the choreographed spectacles unfolding behind each goal: the visual arrangements unveiled just before kickoff, known as tifos; the banners that run the gamut from critiques of the team’s owners to takedowns of the far-right National Rally party; the call-and-response chants; the Palestinian and Algerian flags fluttering in the maritime breeze.

But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the Velodrome is the people in the seats. Yes, there are luxury boxes packed with suits tapping away on their cell phones, mainstays of top-tier sporting events from London to Los Angeles. But Marseille’s stadium is otherwise filled with the kinds of working-class people who make up the vast majority of this soccer-crazed Mediterranean city—the types of fans whom multibillion-dollar sports franchises tend to celebrate as part of a team’s storied past, but who are priced out of attending games today.

That includes people like Robert, a 75-year-old retiree who used to work as a technician in the construction industry. A season-ticket holder since 1992, he pays just €180 for a year of OM matches, the standard rate for the roughly 26,000 seats behind each goal reserved for members of the various supporters’ groups. “You’ll find everyone in the stands,” Robert told me over a beer outside the stadium after the first home match of the year. “There are families, there are young people, there are unemployed people, blue-collar workers, all religions, all colors—that’s what Marseille is. It’s a cosmopolitan city.”

Rates are higher for the roughly 41,000 seats that are not reserved for supporters’ groups, but they’re still low enough to enable people like Stéphane, a 53-year-old nurse who pays €440 for season tickets, to attend. “I don’t want to sound like a beauf [French slang for an uncultivated person], but OM is the DNA of this city,” he said, as his friend Giani, a 44-year-old prison guard from the island of Réunion, nodded along. “My grandparents used to watch—our whole family did. You can’t be unmoved by OM. Either you catch the bug early or, if you don’t, then you kind of have to follow because everyone around you does.”

The Velodrome’s affordability and diversity are the product of features specific to this port city—a place long accustomed to immigration—but they’re also a testament to the power that fans have when they organize. And in today’s increasingly inaccessible sports world, it suggests that another type of fandom is possible. Through their supporters’ groups, OM fans haven’t just created one of Europe’s most impressive stadium atmospheres; they’ve used their political leverage to win concessions from ownership. Chief among them: cheap tickets.

Even by European standards, Olympique de Marseille has a passionate local following. “You don’t have to like soccer—maybe you don’t care at all about it—but you can’t really understand the city if you don’t understand why it’s important,” said Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, a linguist at Aix-Marseille University, the author of several books about the city, and a member of Commando Ultra ’84, one of the supporters’ groups in the south stand.

The OM obsession, Gasquet-Cyrus told me, reflects the city’s local character. “By proxy, OM represents Marseille. And in Marseille, there’s a strong identity. It’s a cliché—you feel more Marseillais than French—but it’s true,” Gasquet-Cyrus said. “There’s this idea of a city that’s separate, that’s not autonomous but thinks of itself as autonomous and wants to be independent, even if it’s not at all realistic.”

Political autonomy was not always just a fever dream. Founded by Greek settlers in the sixth century bce, the city would not be controlled by the French monarchy until more than 20 centuries later. Today, Marseille’s distinctiveness is perhaps most synonymous with the diversity of its residents. Large shares of the population have roots outside of France, especially in former French colonies in the Maghreb. As with many other port cities, Marseille’s melting pot has produced a culture different from that of its immediate surroundings.

At the same time, the city has battled prolonged socioeconomic distress, with the economy struggling for decades to weather the fallout of deindustrialization. When Marseille makes international headlines, it’s often due to drug-related violence in the quartiers nord, the isolated and impoverished northern neighborhoods. “It’s a rough city, so I think you can have the impression that the team is fighting for you, your honor,” Gasquet-Cyrus said. “The more people have a negative image of us, the more it gives the feeling of defending or standing up [for our city].”

The idea that OM represents a downtrodden but resilient city is most apparent in the club’s rivalry with Paris, the center of the nation’s economic, cultural, and political power—and a place where people still use the term province to describe the 98 percent of land in metropolitan France that sits outside the capital region. OM, which is owned by the Boston-born businessman and philanthropist Frank McCourt, isn’t exactly a small-market team. But its budget pales in comparison with that of Paris-Saint-Germain (PSG), which is majority-owned by a branch of Qatar’s sovereign-wealth fund and paid more than €1 billion to field this season’s squad. When the two teams faced off last September, PSG’s starting 11 was valued at roughly four times that of OM.

In 2009, Wall Street had just imploded, and the Mojave Desert town of Victorville, California—sunblasted, shoddily constructed, and abruptly abandoned—was one of the housing bubble’s most spectacular wipeouts. But amid the boarded-up McMansions and tumbleweed-traversed deserted culs-de-sac, the journalist Yasha Levine stumbled upon an entirely different story.

Seeking water, a drought-stricken Victorville bulk-purchased enough to supply as many as 30,000 families for a year. The arrangement gave Levine pause: Since when did a public resource like water come with a deed? That question unspooled into the reporting behind his new documentary, Pistachio Wars.

At the center of the movie, codirected with the filmmaker Rowan Wernham, is the billionaire couple Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the biggest farmers in the United States and longtime patrons of liberal-arts institutions. They started and own the Wonderful Company, which encompasses airport staples like Wonderful Pistachios, those pomegranate juices shaped like fertility goddesses, and Fiji Water.

The Resnicks are the type of outlandish characters who can only really exist in Los Angeles. Marketing protégé Lynda was born to movie impresario Jack Harris, who directed The Blob. Her personal photocopier was used to leak the Pentagon Papers. Meanwhile Stewart, who had his fingers in a variety of entrepreneurial pies, met Lynda after seeking her out for marketing help at his security firm, which was later busted for smuggling blocks of heroin through LAX. Today, they live in a 25,000-square-foot Beaux-Arts manor in Beverly Hills, enjoying a pistachio fortune buttressed by splashy Super Bowl Sunday ads featuring Stephen Colbert and Psy of “Gangnam Style.”

While Pistachio Wars revels in the Resnicks’ oddity, it ultimately emerges as an indictment of their business practices. For decades, the couple has sustained their vast orchards by buying up and privatizing ruinous quantities of California water, consuming more annually than the entire population of Los Angeles and expanding even through the state’s most punishing droughts. Their thirsty groves often rise above oil fields where pumping jacks nod like dunking birds and canals run with a thin, iridescent petroleum skin. Sometimes, the Wonderful Company even acquires wastewater from nearby drilling to irrigate crops, which may present public health concerns. The industry the Resnicks dominate exploded only after the Iranian Revolution throttled cheaper pistachio imports, and the couple has long supported hawkish DC organizations intent on keeping that shipment stream shut.

The Nation spoke to Levine and Wernham about their experience making Pistachio Wars and the environmental, public health, and geopolitical perils of privatizing a critical natural resource like water. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

—Lara-Nour Walton

Lara-Nour Walton: How did you become interested in covering water, and what is the value of focusing on a natural resource as a journalist?

Yasha Levine: I moved from Soviet Russia to America in 1990 and spent my childhood here in California. I grew up with the state’s water infrastructure—canals, dams—and I was swimming in artificial lakes every summer, but I never really thought about it. People don’t usually think about water as an organizing commodity that’s extracted. But when I was in Victorville, I realized that a little water deal in a desert suburb—basically a gas-station stopover for most people—was part of a larger structure that leads right back to one of the most influential families in Los Angeles. That’s when I knew… this water stuff is very important.

Rowan Wernham: People don’t really think that a wealthy couple could be selling water to a small town like Victorville; the public doesn’t have that conception of how the water system works. One of the things we tried to get into in the film was explaining how, despite the fact that water is supposed to be a public resource, it has been privatized in all these ways. The back door happens to be agriculture, because the agricultural operators have a lot of land in areas where there is water, and a lot of times land is tied to water rights and the control of water agencies. And then, because water is very important to its business, Big Agriculture is lobbying to get control of more water.

LNW: Only 20 percent of the water used by Californians goes to the residential population. The rest is allocated to agriculture. How does the majority of an ostensibly public resource end up in private industry hands?

RW: According to the California Constitution, water is supposed to be a public resource. But then when you get out into, say, the west part of the Central Valley, what you have is a water district, and the control of that water district is based on land ownership. So whoever owns the land gets to decide basically how the water for that district is allocated. Because the Wonderful Company owns the majority of land in that area, they have control over it. So that’s one way that it’s kind of quasi-privatized.

And then, of course, in the ’90s everything was kind of culturally and politically going towards privatization. As the Resnicks were riding that wave, they set their sights on the Kern Water Bank, which is an underground aquifer that can store enough water to supply LA. There was a backroom deal done at that time, which the Resnicks were very involved in, where the state basically handed over the majority of this water bank—this huge asset. Around the same time, the Resnicks lobbied to change some of the rules for water in California, to shift them a bit more towards agricultural use and away from residential use. The sum of their lobbying efforts was a system that allowed them to trade water in a more marketized way.

When 21-year-old Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging from a tree on Mississippi’s Delta State University campus in September, the pained public outcry was immediate. The black-and-white image of the “A Man Was Lynched Yesterday” flag, which the NAACP had displayed outside its national headquarters in the 1920s and ’30s, filled my social media feeds. Rumors swirled online that the young Black man had been found with broken limbs, proof there was no way he could have died by suicide as official reports suggested. The thought of white supremacists lynching a student while the White House implemented its punishing policy goals at the federal level was too much to stomach. I heeded the advice of a trusted, Mississippi-based movement elder who urged her online community to avoid jumping to conclusions, wait for more information, and join Reed’s family in mourning this tragic loss of life.

Having studied the mental-health crisis among Black youth for the past year, I’ve seen how the public will become more outraged by the possibility of foul play than by the possibility that a young person has found life too heavy a burden to bear and wants out. Whether or not the latter is what happened to Reed, it is a devastating trend. (As of publication time, the results of an independent autopsy had not been released.) Deaths by suicide are increasing for all young people—but at a faster rate for Black children and young adults than for any other racial or ethnic group. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among Black youth ages 15 to 24. Even elementary-school-age kids are flailing. Black children 12 and younger are twice as likely to die by suicide as their white peers. This phenomenon predates the first half of this decade, when the Covid pandemic increased isolation and race-based gaps in learning. A 2023 report found that from 2007 to 2020, the suicide rate among Black youth between the ages of 10 and 17 increased by 144 percent.

The person with the largest megaphone in the current debate on the emotional and mental health of American youth is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and NYU business school professor. His book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness has become a guidebook for parents who worry that social media—and, by extension, cell phones—have colonized their children’s inner lives. But what I’ve gathered from conversations with therapists, youth development workers, families, and scholars of Black youth mental health is that Haidt’s narrow focus on screens and a bygone era of outdoor play doesn’t appropriately address what’s happening in the lives of Black adolescents.

And it’s not just Haidt. Articles appearing in mainstream news outlets tend to focus on this idea of a one-size-fits-all solution to the youth mental-health crisis, ignoring broader cultural, political, and economic forces. Young people are experiencing traumatic events that rattle their psyches and alter the shape of their lives. What’s worse, they too often feel that they have to navigate these forces alone, or that their perspectives are ignored when they do seek out help. “There’s been a lot of times growing up when I’ve been told what my needs are,” Robby Harris, a recent graduate of Ohio’s Central State University, told those of us gathered at a Black youth suicide-prevention summit in Columbus last summer. Over months of reporting, I heard repeatedly from young people and the grownups who work with them that they lack trusted adults and safe spaces where they can create and feel a sense of belonging.

Iwanted to know what was happening in Cincinnati, where I am raising a Black tween and where I know we are facing a mental-health crisis that mirrors the rest of the country’s. The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center reported in 2023 that “the number of children and adolescents presenting to our pediatric emergency services in mental health crisis doubled” between 2011 and 2017. Cincinnati’s population is about 50 percent white and 38 percent Black, and that ballooning in admissions is driven in part by Black children. The hospital’s main emergency department sits just northeast of downtown in Avondale, a neighborhood that’s been solidly Black since the mid-20th century and was an epicenter of civil-rights and Black Power organizing and uprisings in the late 1960s.

The national data suggests gender, not just race, is a risk factor: Black boys 19 and younger are more than twice as likely as Black girls to die by suicide. That’s not to say girls are immune to the crisis: Between 2003 and 2017, Black girls’ suicide rate increased nearly 7 percent each year, more than twice the increase for boys. And Black youth who identify as queer, transgender, or gender-nonconforming are among those who are suffering. According to a recent Trevor Project survey, half of Black LGBTQ+ youth had considered suicide and 20 percent had attempted it in the previous year.

Being poor is another risk factor. “A lot of their stressors have to do with the impact of poverty. We’ve got kids rolling in here who haven’t had proper food, clothing, shelter,” longtime educator and activist Howard Fuller told me by phone. Fuller is the founder of the Dr. Howard Fuller Collegiate Academy, a Milwaukee charter school that serves middle and high school students, most of whom are Black. “Those are really important stress points in their lives.”

To better understand what’s happening in my city, I spoke with Tynisha Worthy, who cofounded and codirects a Cincinnati youth development program called Youth at the Center. When I asked Worthy what’s weighing on the minds of the Black adolescents and young adults she works with, “violence” was her first response. They’re concerned about losing access to their cell phones—and, by extension, contact with parents and the outside world—during the school day. (In the fall of 2024, Cincinnati Public Schools, like many districts nationwide, began requiring students in grades seven through 12 to lock their devices in a magnetic pouch while at school. Some students have raised concerns about not being able to access their phone during a school shooting or other emergency.) Students are also worried about the prevalence of vape pens and marijuana among their peers, Worthy said. “One of the things that caused [young people] stress…was ‘my family,’ ‘my mother,’” she continued, reflecting on the responses from participants in the workshops she’d conducted in the preceding months. (A therapist who works in local schools echoed this, citing family conflict, being saddled with adult responsibilities, and even estrangement from the family as common among her adolescent clients.) “The other stressor was school”—academic pressures—and “needing a job.”

Improving family relationships or job opportunities is outside a young person’s control, but the youth that Worthy works with are identifying what they need to feel better. Access to safe adults, therapists they can relate to, and third spaces—places to gather other than home or school—top their list.

But instead of meeting those needs, Worthy says, schools, mental-health systems, and other aspects of the city’s infrastructure are all contributing to the chronic hopelessness and feelings of being overwhelmed that are driving spikes in adolescent anxiety and depression. “We are diagnosing it as ‘The children are the problem.’ We’re saying the parents aren’t doing their part, but the larger ‘we’ are not doing our job,” she told me. What’s needed is a genuine collective effort to give Black youth a sense of joyful possibility.

The day after the 2024 presidential election, I visited Youth at the Center for the first time. The organization is located just northeast of downtown Cincinnati in the Pendleton neighborhood, an unexpected place for a program whose teen clientele is largely Black and working-class. The area is filled with the 19th-century Italianate architecture that has lured high-end developers in recent decades. Average home prices hover around $400,000 and have long been out of reach for low-income Black Cincinnatians and their Appalachian counterparts who used to populate the area.

In the pandemic year of 2020, the show that dominated TV screens was not Tiger King or The Mandalorian, but a show that had ended seven years earlier. In that year of isolation and anxiety, millions of Americans returned to The Office for comfort. It was boosted by its availability on Netflix, by then already synonymous with streaming, but also by its cache of over 200 episodes, its deep bench of much-loved characters, and its recognizable style.

The Office was built to spin off. Greg Daniels’s version for American TV was itself an adaptation of a British show by the same name, created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. As was noted by Michael Schur, a writer for The Office who later developed Parks and Recreation with Daniels, portability was part of the show’s design. Beyond the walls of the series’ fictional paper company, “you could do spinoffs that weren’t really spinoffs”; The Office’s comedic style could work in “any workplace in the world.” And it did: More than a dozen adaptations in different countries followed.

The Paper, which premiered on Peacock and also airs on NBC, is yet another realization of that promise of portability. It’s a show about a workplace, this time about a ghost newspaper and the people who work there. Also created by Daniels and employing the documentary-crew framing device, it’s a direct spin-off too. But what felt new and innovative about The Office now seems tired and worn in The Paper. While labor in The Office stood as a representative sample of corporate work anywhere in America, the work in The Paper, much like journalism in general, should be specific to its location—in this case, Toledo, Ohio. Instead, The Paper seems content to exploit the good feels of the Office rewatch rather than risk reporting something that could feel uniquely of this time and place and point of view.

The show’s title actually refers to two “papers”: a floundering, diminished local newspaper, the Toledo Truth Teller, which is the subject of the new documentary, and the slyly named paper conglomerate Enervate, which subsidizes and barely tolerates the Truth Teller’s existence.

The Truth Teller, we are told, is exclusively a venue for clickbait and republished Associated Press articles with no local reporting. It operates on a shoestring budget, and its editor and staff are as frivolous and superfluous as its content. There’s Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore), the ostentatious managing editor, who immediately takes to peacocking for the documentary crew’s cameras; Nicole (Ramona Young), who works in circulation and simply keeps her head down; Barry (Duane R. Shepard Sr.), the sole experienced reporter, who seems to have retired in every sense but the literal one; and Mare (Chelsea Frei), the compositor, the only other employee with any experience or any zest for real reporting.

It takes a new, idealistic editor in chief to shake things up: Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleason), a naïve nepo baby with an aw-shucks Midwestern quality. He’s a little Ted Lasso and a little Leslie Knope. While Ned is not very experienced or even noticeably competent, he does want to be a real newspaperman, and we get a sense of his cherished fantasy to hop on a desk and deliver the kind of rousing newsroom speech that would be applauded in an Oscar-bait film.

To inject some life into the newspaper, Ned recruits a group of Enervate employees, most of whom are technically not even employed by the paper, to serve as its volunteer cub reporters. If the original staff of the Truth Teller are an odd lot, Ned’s new recruits—including Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nunez) from The Office—are even more so. Almost all of them begin with zero reporting experience and no instincts for what makes a story, which immediately becomes comic fodder. In one episode, a class of high school students studying journalism come in to observe the newsroom, but it’s obvious that the new members of the Truth Teller team have more to learn from the students than the student journalists have to learn from them.

Spotlight, this is not. The bungling newsroom tackles such scoops as a broken water main, changes in a local fishing law, false advertising at mattress stores, and a farmers-­market cult. In one episode, Mare covers a beloved drama teacher’s impending retirement and Oscar reviews the high school’s theater production.

It would be a mistake of radioactive proportions to resume nuclear testing. None of the three major nuclear powers—the United States, Russia, and China—has conducted a nuclear test since 1996, when the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was approved. The CTBT bans all nuclear tests worldwide and has been signed by 187 nations. The only country that has conducted nuclear tests this century is North Korea, which is universally regarded as a rogue state—not exactly the kind of company we should be keeping.

By resuming nuclear testing, the United States would give a major gift to its chief nuclear rivals. China, which has been expanding its nuclear test sites, would welcome the opportunity to conduct tests to develop more sophisticated weapons. Russia would too; President Vladimir Putin announced in November that his country would return to nuclear testing if Washington does.

Instead of deterring foreign nations, renewed testing would be like setting off, well, a nuclear chain reaction, with the US triggering Russia and China to ramp up their own testing, which would then likely trigger other countries to do so as well.

But while Beijing and Moscow may have much to gain from testing their nuclear weapons, the United States does not. The US has already conducted over 1,000 nuclear tests, more than all other nations combined. (By comparison, China has conducted 45 tests). We spend $25 billion each year to sustain the country’s nuclear warheads, including funding the Stockpile Stewardship Program, which maintains the weapons without explosive nuclear testing and includes room-size supercomputers, the world’s most powerful X-ray machine, and a laser system the size of a sports stadium. No other nation possesses such an extensive array of tools for nonnuclear testing.

Trump’s own advisers are confident that our nuclear weapons work—just as they are confident that other countries are not testing their nuclear weapons. Trump’s nominee to run the US Strategic Command, Navy Vice Adm. Richard Correll, told Congress in October, “Neither China nor Russia has conducted a nuclear explosive test.”

In the face of such facts, Trump changed his story. He said that Russia and China are conducting secret nuclear tests and people “just don’t know about it.” According to Trump, “You don’t necessarily know where they’re testing. They test way underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test.”

What Trump seems to be referring to are very small nuclear tests that are hard to detect and are sometimes referred to as “hydronuclear” tests. If Russia and China are conducting them, it would be in violation of the CTBT. But there is no proof that this is happening. Moreover, even if it were, renewed US nuclear testing would still not be justified. Even small US tests would give Russia and China the green light to conduct many large nuclear tests that would be much more useful. A better approach for the United States would be to seek greater transparency of global test sites.

It appears that Trump’s utter confusion—not any need to resume nuclear testing—is the root cause of this entire kerfuffle. Russia recently tested two new missiles—the Poseidon and the Skyfall—that Putin has said can evade US missile defenses. Crucially, however, there were no nuclear warheads—the part that goes “boom”—on these missiles. Trump is apparently mixing up the testing of missiles and the testing of nuclear bombs.

Such errors are harmful enough, but Trump has added to the danger by upping the ante in other ways. He continues to insist that he will build his space-based Golden Dome missile-defense system, which would cost more than $3 trillion. Yet scientists say that such missile-defense systems, like Reagan’s “Star Wars” boondoggle (or the scenario depicted in Kathryn Bigelow’s recent film A House of Dynamite), will not work. Instead of Golden Dome, it should be called Golden Sieve—it will cost a lot of money, and it will not be effective. And, once again, instead of reducing tensions, Trump is increasing them: Nations will respond to US long-range-missile defenses by building more offensive missiles.

If Trump actually wants to reduce the risk of nuclear war, as he claims, he should not build the Golden Dome. Instead, he should reach for the Golden Phone. He should talk to Putin and accept his invitation to stick with the New START treaty—the last US-Russian agreement to reduce nuclear weapons—which is set to expire in February 2026. Putin has proposed a one-year extension; the United States has yet to respond.

Is Trump a warmonger or just an idiot? Is he hell-bent on starting a new nuclear arms race, or is he simply confused about the difference between a nuclear bomb test and a missile test? As horrific as it sounds, Trump may be on the verge of undermining US and global security—just so he doesn’t have to admit that he was wrong.

Near the beginning of Cover-Up, the absorbing new documentary by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, there’s a shot of a Pentagon press briefing during the Vietnam War era. Still cameras click, movie cameras roll, and the auditorium’s seats are filled with reporters. Everyone is focused on the man at the podium, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The scene is a reminder that most journalists practice herd behavior. You write or broadcast what was said at the briefing, because if you don’t, your editor will berate you: “Hey, the rival newspaper [or rival network] just reported that McNamara said we’re winning the war. Why haven’t we heard that from you?” Whether covering City Hall or a state capital or the White House, every reporter worries about getting such a call. Yet in the end, the briefing is seldom the story that matters.

If there has ever been a reporter who refused to practice herd behavior, it is the subject of Cover-Up, Seymour Hersh. “When I was at the Pentagon for the AP,” he tells Poitras and Obenhaus, recalling his early reporting days during the Vietnam War, “instead of going to lunch with my colleagues, I’d go find young officers. You know, talk a little football, get to know them…. Eventually, Army guys would start saying, ‘Well, it’s Murder, Incorporated’” over there in Vietnam. Before long, Hersh had parted ways with the Associated Press (he would later do the same with The New York Times and would cease publishing in The New Yorker), but he was also about to break the story of the My Lai massacre, the deliberate slaughter of several hundred Vietnamese civilians—men, women, and children—in 1968 by US troops. The exposé would provide a huge boost to the anti-war movement. It would also launch Hersh’s career as one of the greatest investigative reporters this country has ever seen.

Cover-Up provides a vivid picture of Hersh at work. We learn how he tracks down every clue, whether by showing up at someone’s home unannounced, befriending an Army officer or a 
CIA agent with a guilty conscience, or taking notes on a document he’s viewing upside down, on a lawyer’s desk, while the lawyer thinks Hersh is jotting down what he’s saying. Skillfully leaping back and forth across decades, Cover-Up weaves together archival footage, interviews with an often reluctant Hersh, and shots of him in action, usually on the telephone. We also hear him discussed by others, including President Richard Nixon. (“The son of a bitch is a son of a bitch,” Nixon says of him to Henry Kissinger. “But he’s usually right, isn’t he?”) Hersh resisted Poitras’s requests to make a film about him for nearly 20 years before he finally gave in—and in the film, we even see him on camera trying to back out later. He comes across as extremely private, prickly, hyper-alert to lies, and relentless.

Cover-Up touches lightly—perhaps too lightly—on the more recent work that Hersh has been criticized for. This includes being soft on former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad (“I never thought he was Mother Teresa,” Hersh admits to the filmmakers, “but I thought he was OK”) and several major stories that relied on one or two anonymous sources that couldn’t be corroborated, such as Hersh’s assertion that the United States blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that delivered Russian gas to Germany. There have been some other questionable moments as well, 
but in a stellar career that has spanned more than 60 years, they can be forgiven.

Cover-Up has visual and auditory treats for those of us old enough to remember the days when we reporters wrote on manual typewriters and sent our stories to a newspaper’s typesetters in pneumatic tubes. But the film by no means romanticizes the news business; its eye is always on Hersh’s resistance to the herd behavior showcased in that early scene. “The biggest trouble I had was managing Sy at a newspaper that hated to be beaten but didn’t really want to be first,” explains Bill Kovach, the former New York Times Washington bureau chief. “The Times was scared to death of being first on a controversial story that challenged the credibility of the government.”

As it turned out, the newspaper had other fears as well. “That was the beginning of the end with me at The New York Times,” Hersh recalls, “when I started writing about corporations.” To give the Times a little credit, it did publish some of those stories. But it is impossible to imagine the stubbornly independent Hersh remaining long at any established news organization that tried to rein him in.

Following Hersh’s career from the tiny Dispatch News Service (which published the My Lai story) to The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the 11 books he’s written, Cover-Up reveals just how he got crucial evidence for a particularly important story from the 2000s: the one that documented how US troops had horrifically abused and tortured inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Anyone who watched the media then will remember the shocking photographs of Iraqi prisoners—one with a leash around his neck; another, naked and cowering, being threatened by an attack dog; another, hooded, standing on a box with electrical wires attached to his hands; another, bent over and chained to a cell door. “If there hadn’t been photographs… no story,” Hersh remarks in the film.

How did he get them? On a radio show, Hersh invited people with information to contact him and then provided his telephone number. One woman called. Her name was Camille Lo Sapio, and she goes public for the first time in Cover-Up. Lo Sapio explains that she had lent her laptop to a former daughter-in-law who was deployed to Iraq. When the computer was returned, she found those photos on it.

One of the film’s final scenes is particularly haunting. Hersh is at home, looking at a table covered with photos of large, rough diagrams, hand-drawn with a thick marker pen, of houses and apartments in Gaza. Some of the diagrams appear to have been drawn on paper, some on walls, and several on sheet metal with bullet holes in it. Hersh is on the phone with the woman who has sent him these images. We hear her voice, lightly accented, as she explains that this is “a record of massacres that we can basically trace back to the units that committed the war crimes.” The woman isn’t named—is she Palestinian? Israeli? She asks to be identified in anything he will write as merely “a researcher recently returned from Gaza.”

At one point, Hersh asks her about the diagrams: “This is all background? I’m not allowed to write any of this?” The woman replies, “For now. But you’ll be the person I come to when we’re ready.”

Two of the biggest names of 2025—Bad Bunny and Zohran Mamdani—have more in common than a music career. The day after he won his historic race for mayor of New York, Mamdani flew to the city’s sixth borough (Puerto Rico) and proclaimed before the energized crowd at Somos, an annual political conference on the island, “Here we say, ‘Puerto Rico no se vende’ [Puerto Rico is not for sale]. In New York City we say, ‘Nueva York no se vende.’” These same ideas are also regularly woven into the songs of one of the world’s most famous artists—who refuses to perform in English despite the MAGA campaign to oust him as the Super Bowl halftime headliner.

It’s personal for Bad Bunny, born Benito Martínez Ocasio, as he raps about his fears of losing his home to tax-evading Americans. “They want to take my river and my beach, too. / They want my neighborhood and for grandma to leave,” he testifies on his Debí Tirar Más Fotos album.

What he’s referring to is not the run-of-the mill gentrification caused by the usual vultures speculating on real estate. Puerto Rico is experiencing a displacement crisis inflamed by the Act to Promote the Relocation of Individual Investors, also known as Act 22—possibly the most egregious loophole for the evasion of federal taxes available to Americans. Passed by the territory’s Legislative Assembly in 2012, the law hurts not only Puerto Rico but also communities across the United States, including Mamdani’s “Nuevayol.”

Act 22 exploits a federal loophole that exempts all Puerto Rico–sourced income from US federal income taxes. This makes the island the only place in the world where an American can “establish residency” and pay Uncle Sam almost no taxes and not risk losing their passport. And in true colonial spirit, these local tax breaks aren’t available to existing residents of the island.

The minimal requirement of the law is to buy a home on the island, spend only half of the year there, and make a $10,000 yearly donation to loosely defined “local” charities—with practically no oversight from the IRS or the Puerto Rican government.

Average rents in the territory have skyrocketed 600 percent since 2017 as properties have been bought up by newcomers, making it unaffordable for locals to live on their own Island of Enchantment.

Act 22 is also detrimental to cities and states like New York City and Florida, allowing millionaires and billionaires to stash their money in Puerto Rico tax-free while avoiding local, state, and federal taxes back home. Now localities in the states have less revenue to pay for schools, roads, and hospitals. And the island’s Boricuas, already feeling the consequences of austerity under the congressionally appointed fiscal control board that’s left the local infrastructure in shambles, are being priced out. This further increases Puerto Rican migration to the states, worsening a brain drain and creating a vicious cycle of despair on both sides of the pond.

Meanwhile, crypto colonizers are corrupting the US financial system and buying off politicians on and off the island to keep Act 22 in place. These tax evaders are among the bad actors who are funding the territory’s New Progressive Party, a pro-statehood party that promotes Act 22 and has increasingly become a wholly owned subsidiary of MAGA. Puerto Rico, like other tax havens around the world, is used for money laundering and other schemes that have deleterious effects on local communities in the territory and in the states. These scam artists make Wall Street sharks look like saints.

The newcomers have illegally bulldozed landmark locations and nature reserves, four-wheeled through turtle sanctuaries on the beach, shot at animals, and built walls around their mansion communities to block locals from accessing their own shores. In Dorado, a gated beachfront community, a home was recently being offered for $65 million, the most expensive in the island’s history.

The same shady interests fueling skyrocketing housing prices in the Big Apple are making it impossible for Puerto Ricans to live in their own land. The issues and communities are intertwined. As Bad Bunny denounces the displacement crisis, Zohran Mamdani is putting the affordability crisis front and center for New Yorkers.

The irony of Puerto Rico’s colonial status is that to give power to the people on the island, Congress must abolish the Act 22 tax loophole. Which means that Democrats must win back the House and the Senate. We know there’s no better message for the midterms than prioritizing affordability and taxing the rich—whether in New York, Texas, or Illinois. Abolishing Act 22 will not only help save Puerto Rico’s soul; it will revive communities across the continental United States.

The allegations surfaced over a decade ago: A handful of childcare centers in Minnesota had defrauded the state and federal government by billing for children who weren’t actually being cared for. Then, during the pandemic, some groups again took advantage of laxer rules for emergency funding meant to cushion Americans from an immediate crisis by again siphoning funds without delivering services.

Investigations have long been underway and arrests have been made. At least a dozen people and centers in Minnesota have been charged with fraud. But that’s no matter to the Trump administration. After a right-wing influencer showed up unannounced at childcare centers run by the members of the Somali community in Minnesota and claimed to have uncovered fraud when the programs wouldn’t let him in, the administration has resurfaced these allegations to launch a crusade against what it’s characterizing as rampant fraud in federal childcare funding and other programs.

If the Trump administration were first and foremost concerned with fraud in social services spending, it wouldn’t start with childcare, and it wouldn’t start with Minnesota. It would start with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which, when it replaced the previous federal welfare program in the 1990s, was turned into essentially a slush fund for states. And it would start not in a blue state but in deep red Mississippi.

Between 2016 and 2020, Mississippi organizations that received TANF funding to conduct things like workforce development and teen pregnancy prevention misspent or stole at least $77 million. Brett Favre, former NFL quarterback, and former Governor Phil Bryant orchestrated the schemes, which included $5 million to build a volleyball stadium at the University of Southern Mississippi. Although some of those involved in the scheme have pleaded guilty and await sentencing, Bryant hasn’t faced any charges. Favre faces a civil lawsuit.

Five years later, the state still doesn’t have enough staff in the program to improve the way it operates, according to the agency itself. Less than a decade ago, the state approved less than 2 percent of the poor people who applied for TANF for funds; even now, less than 10 percent of the poor Mississippians who apply make it through the application process. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a tiny fraction—just 5 percent—of the state’s TANF money actually goes toward cash payments for needy families. The rest of the money can be used for a huge universe of activities, and that’s perfectly legal. When fraudsters siphon off even more, as happened just years ago, there’s even less left for poor families.

In this, Mississippi is not exactly unique. Before 1996, the program TANF replaced—Aid to Families with Dependent Children—was focused mostly on giving poor families cash to support their basic needs. Then, in 1996, President Bill Clinton led the fight for “welfare reform,” which made cash assistance much harder to get and allowed states to use the leftover money for all sorts of other purposes. In 1996, for every 100 poor families who applied, 68 got assistance; in 2023 just 21 did. Fourteen states, including Mississippi, now spend less than 10 percent of their federal TANF funds on direct assistance to poor families. All told, less than a quarter of TANF money goes toward basic assistance, down 71 percent since the 1990s. Most of the money goes elsewhere. It can be spent on things the state would otherwise fund itself, essentially filling holes in budgets, like child welfare and preschool. Several states spend money that’s supposed to help poor families get jobs instead on college scholarship programs that can go to families making six figures. The “other” category sucks up nearly 14 percent of funding and can go toward things like pregnancy prevention and marriage classes for poor people.

These numbers are troubling enough, but there’s even more we don’t know about where and how TANF money gets spent. That’s because there are few reporting requirements. States don’t have to track the outcomes of where they spend money and only have to send the federal government minimal information about what they did with their funds. It’s easy to see how a multimillion-dollar scheme like the one in Mississippi might unfold.

None of this seems to much bother the Trump administration. Last March, the Department of Health and Human Services asked Mississippi to repay nearly $101 million it said was misused under former Governor Bryant. But then in April it turned around and rescinded the penalty, saying it would issue a new one “at the appropriate time.”

Here’s a puzzle: Must revolution always mean change? Does it require innovation, or can it bring back what is old? If it does not bring novelty but simply restores the past, is it truly a revolution at all?

In his insightful new book, The Revolution to Come, Dan Edelstein offers some surprising answers to these questions and explores how the idea of revolution has changed over time. What was once called a revolution, he argues, did not signify a break with the past; it meant something more like a return to political origins. This older meaning, commonplace in Greek and Roman thought, would survive into the 18th century and would only recede when the Enlightenment’s idea of revolution as progress swept 
away the classical idea of cyclical time.

Edelstein, an accomplished professor of history at Stanford, is best known for his writings on the French Revolution. His 2009 book The Terror of Natural Right plunged into the most turbulent controversies about the revolutionary terror. It argued that the idea of natural right nourished an attitude of extreme political hostility: The Jacobins saw their political opponents not simply as rivals but as “enemies of the people” or hostis humani generis. By grounding their politics in nature, the French revolutionaries spawned an intolerant and ultimately lethal species of thinking—Edelstein called it “natural republicanism”—that would reshape politics well into the modern era. In the book’s conclusion, he argued that we can detect the themes of natural republicanism in the worst excesses of our time: It helped to justify Leninism, Stalinism, and Nazism, and it also furnished George W. Bush with the warrant he needed for the War on Terror.

In his new book, Edelstein pursues a similar argument, though he no longer places the blame on anything as specific as natural republicanism. His new thesis is considerably more ambitious and expansive in scope. Ostensibly an exercise in intellectual history, The Revolution to Come traces “the idea of revolution” as it developed and changed over the course of nearly 2,000 years. And yet this is hardly history in the conventional sense: It is argumentative and idiosyncratic, and readers will be confounded if they try to place it on the conventional map of left-to-right political opinion.

Always confident and alive to complexity, Edelstein brings to his new study a capacious knowledge of European history and an admirable facility in many of the relevant languages. He also knows how to tell a joke; his book opens with a spirited jibe at communism that, I suspect, he must have honed to perfection after years at the lectern. (I’m not going to repeat it for you here—sorry.) It is the kind of study that concludes with a fat set of endnotes and a no-less-formidable bibliography that spans the alphabet from Arendt and Aristotle to Voltaire and Zola, and it is a study that seeks to shatter old myths and offer new insights about political debates that many of us may have felt were settled long ago. But it is also the kind of book that raises far more questions than it can answer. Its arguments multiply and tumble over one other in such profusion that some readers may find it hard to tie them all together.

The premise of Edelstein’s book is not one that had been previously unknown. The word revolution once meant a cycle or a return to origins. As applied to politics, revolution in this older sense implied that regimes 
travel an organic path that eventually brings political arrangements back to their point of departure. This meaning was closely allied with ancient cosmology and the classical understanding of cyclical time. At some point in the 18th century, however, this older meaning was displaced. When Enlightenment philosophes such as Condorcet introduced the notion of historical progress, it became possible to break out of the temporal cycle, and history became an open horizon. The word that had once described an eternal return now signified the irruption of difference, a departure from previous patterns in politics and history.

This semantic shift is familiar to historians, but they have often quarreled over just why it happened and when it occurred. In his 1957 study, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, the Russian-born philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré located the pivotal moment in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the discoveries of Copernicus and improvements in the telescope combined to shatter long-held beliefs about the cosmos. Edelstein is less interested in revolutions in science; he is chiefly concerned with the idea of revolution in politics (though he would admit that science and politics are often intertwined), and he argues that this shift in meaning occurred somewhat later and in a more ambiguous manner. He locates the decisive change in our concept of political revolution somewhere in the 100-year time span between the late 17th and late 18th centuries, and he hastens to explain that not all of the later 18th-century revolutions subscribed to the same model of temporal progress. In fact, in his view, the revolutions in France and in the American colonies were quite distinct: The French revolutionaries saw themselves as breaking from previous patterns of history, while the revolutionaries in North America wished to restore their polity to its point of departure.

To make his case, Edelstein suggests that we must look back to Polybius, the Greek historian from the Hellenistic era (circa 200–118 bce) whose monumental Histories of Rome described political history as a cycle, or anacyclosis, that passes from one constitutional order to another. Polybius subscribed to what Edelstein calls a “tragic vision of history”: Each order tends to degenerate—kingship gives way to tyranny, aristocracy to oligarchy, democracy to ochlocracy, or mob rule. The only way to avoid this otherwise inevitable cycle, Polybius believed, was to adopt a “mixed” constitution after the Roman model, since the mixed constitution would combine the best of all three kinds of rule: Consuls fulfill the function of kings; senators act as aristocrats; and all officeholders hold their posts thanks to popular election.

According to Edelstein, the Polybian notion of cyclical history would inform the classical model of revolution. With scrupulous attention to the details of language, he shows us how Polybius’s use of the Greek term anacyclosis was eventually translated into the various languages of Latin Christendom. Like a theme with variations, anacyclosis became revolutio, rivolgimento, rivolutioni, révolution, and, in English, revolution. The earliest instance of the term in Italian, Edelstein tells us, is found at the end of a 1540 book published in Venice, which contained “Two Fragments from the History of Polybius, on the Diversity of Republics, Translated from the Greek into the Vulgar Language.”

From that point onward, Edelstein writes, the Polybian idea of cyclical revolution gradually emerged as “a technical term in political thought.” Like the Protestant Bible in the age of print, the good word of revolution spread across Europe and transformed the way in which political theorists conceived of historical and political change. To prove his case, Edelstein says that we should treat these classical terms as if they were “genetic markers.” Deploying the painstaking methods of historical philology, he demonstrates how we can trace “the dissemination of Polybian thought” across time and space.

The wisest condemnation of Donald Trump’s decision to send us troops to the sovereign nation of Venezuela to remove President Nicolás Maduro, as part of the administration’s plan to “run” Venezuela in collaboration with US oil companies, came 205 years before Trump announced his “Donroe” Doctrine.

In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who played an essential role in crafting the Monroe Doctrine—the foreign-policy position that he and others hoped would guard the Western Hemisphere against the threat of European colonial expansion—explicitly rejected military interventions for the purpose of regime change and economic conquest. “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be,” Adams told Congress. “But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

Even where the United States might object to a foreign leader, Adams argued that the country must lead by example and with diplomacy, so that the fundamental maxims of US foreign policy would not change insensibly from liberty to force: “She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”

Trump, acting very much as a European king of old, attacked Venezuela as this edition of The Nation went to press. His move represents a brazen violation of international law that destabilizes global security and seizes Congress’s exclusive authority to declare war. Military force is justified only in response to a clear, credible, and imminent threat to 
the security of the US or its treaty allies. Venezuela, whatever its internal dysfunctions or its connections to drug trafficking, poses no such threat.

Trump’s scheming to forcibly determine the political leadership of another sovereign nation represents a grave departure from our best principles—as stated by Adams—and a return to the most discredited habits of American foreign policy. We are not naïve about American history. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, The Nation has decried presidential abuses of the Monroe Doctrine as a tool for the creation of corporate client states. But Trump’s self-styled Donroe Doctrine proposes a fresh bastardization of US foreign policy that is so extreme—and so dangerous—that it demands an urgent response from Democrats and those Republicans whose oath to the Constitution takes higher precedence than their loyalty to an authoritarian president and his fossil-fuel-industry donors.

While Trump and his allies tried to justify naked aggression as part of a convoluted strategy to target “narco-terrorism,” Representative Pat Ryan (D-NY), a former Army intelligence officer who served two combat tours during the Iraq War, declared, “No matter what they say, it’s always oil.” Ryan was not alone in recognizing echoes of the WMD claims of former president George W. Bush, and how that blood-for-oil war went so horribly awry. In his first bid for the presidency, Trump positioned himself as something of an anti-war Republican. That was always a cynical gambit, and Trump is now exposed as an economic imperialist who learned nothing from Iraq and who is willing, as Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) noted, to embark on a career of empire that risks the lives of US troops to make “oil companies (not Americans) more profitable.”

No one in their right mind believes that the madness—and danger—of Trump’s Donroe Doctrine will halt at the borders of Venezuela. His State Department declared on social media: “This is OUR Hemisphere, and President Trump will not allow our security to be threatened.” The American people see through the lies. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only 33 percent of Americans approve of the US military action to remove Maduro, while 72 percent worry about further US involvement in Venezuela.

This popular rejection of Trump’s territorial ambitions should inspire members of Congress to stand up to the administration—recognizing, as John Quincy Adams did, that if a president seeks to make America “the dictatress of the world,” this country will “be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.”