What’s the point of playing? Games don’t provide an organism with food, water, or shelter. They distract from the pursuit of survival and reproduction. And yet play is found across the animal kingdom; the act separates creative, joyful, living creatures from “merely mechanical things,” as the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga once put it. In his famous 1938 study on games and play, Homo Ludens, Huizinga asserts that the behavior represents something fundamentally absurd: Humans “play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.”

Huizinga’s analytical understanding of leisure remains influential in the fields of philosophy and game design. Perhaps this is why the British writer Joanna Kavenna, halfway through her zany, cerebral romp of a novel, Seven, quotes at length from Huizinga. Play is necessary, she quotes him as saying, even if “we live in a demented world.” Humans aren’t robots, Kavenna seems to be reminding us. And her novel, which lands during a moment when the biggest question about robots is whether they’ll kill us all, offers a jaunty insight: When we embrace our irrationality, we deepen our understanding of what separates us from our computers.

The plot and thematic structure of Seven are guided by an invented board game, Seven, which resembles chess and involves a spiral-shaped board known as the “box.” The game involves seven movable pieces and two six-sided dice, and its rules are flexible; the novel itself is punctuated by four separate sets of instructions. (This slipperiness will become important later on.) In the same way that chess has been used by writers and artists as a metaphor for war or existential struggle, Seven becomes a symbol for how humans attempt to make sense of their world’s incoherence.

Kavenna’s characters are deadly serious about their game, but the author is willing to poke fun at them. The action begins in a university philosophy department in Oslo, where the nameless, genderless narrator works as a research assistant to an Icelandic philosopher named Alda Jónsdóttir. The professor’s area of study is called “box philosophy,” and it focuses on the problem of “Thinking Outside the Box About Thinking Outside the Box.”

What does the assistant’s job look like in practice? They spend time getting too drunk at faculty dinner parties, doing menial work for Jónsdóttir, and “asking questions,” but their first matter of serious business is “working on none of the above.” They try to clarify: “I don’t mean that I didn’t work on anything I’ve just mentioned, but that I worked on the category of None of the Above.” This deadpan joke serves a narrative function, priming the assistant—and the reader—to start thinking beyond the rules, and to enter a more expansive realm.

[Read: Open AI just carpet-bombed mathematics]

Jónsdóttir sends the narrator away on, essentially, a wild-goose chase to Greece; their mission is to hunt down a man named Theódoros Apostolakis—a poet, dentist, and Seven enthusiast who is “big in boxes.” This journey across Europe includes several professional Seven competitions, during which the rules keep changing. Everything the assistant learned in Norway seems useless except the central lesson—to think outside the box. These games abroad lead the narrator to start contemplating the role of recreation, the limits of human ingenuity, and the meaning of consciousness. Soon this will bring them face-to-face with the novel’s ultimate threat, an artificial-intelligence program that undermines everything that Jónsdóttir and the Seven players care about: creativity, curiosity, play. “How do you play a game without rules?” Kavenna writes. “Do you just make stuff up and hope for the best?”

These thoughts coalesce in the second half of the novel, when an AI bot named the Quail is introduced. Invented by a Seven player named Indrek Laar, who, Kavenna pointedly notes, believes that “AI was very clever and therefore had experiences,” the Quail is named for qualia, a term borrowed from philosophy. (It’s meant to capture a quality of consciousness, though the narrator dismisses it as “a baroque way of saying ‘experience.’”)

The bot is “designed to play Seven” and nothing else, Kavenna writes. “It couldn’t give you relationship advice or sympathise when you were feeling sad, or translate the Iliad or write your homework. It just played Seven.” And it does its job well. The Quail manages to beat the world’s reigning Seven champion, Ashok Deo, in a humiliating match that the narrator calls both the “greatest Seven game of the millennium” and “the worst game ever”—technically impressive, but absolutely demoralizing. “No one had enjoyed it,” Kavenna writes, “because the Quail couldn’t experience enjoyment and the Quail’s proxy—Indrek Laar—was horrified.”

Ashok’s loss echoes real-life incidents in which computers have won games against humans, such as the 1997 victory of IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer over the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the repeated defeats of the Go champion Lee Sedol by Google’s program AlphaGo in 2016. Culturally, these results represented a significant shift in how we understand the relationship between humans and computers. The Kasparov match “had the impact of a Greek tragedy,” one audience member told The New York Times. But its reception wasn’t all bad: Another champion commented, “Nice style!” while watching Deep Blue take another round. The machine, she admitted to the Times, “made many moves that were based on understanding chess, on feeling the position. We all thought computers couldn’t do that.” Deep Blue, and AlphaGo after it, seemed to do more than just win by brute force: They encroached on the human flair for creativity.

[Read: Yet another literary prizewinner seems to be AI]

Those machines—and the fears they inspired—can look quaint when compared with today’s technology. Some AI-safety researchers see it as an existential threat to humankind. Earlier this year, an OpenAI model not meant to have open access to the internet managed to break out of its “sandbox” and hack the databases of another tech company, Hugging Face. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and more prevalent. AI-company employees are publicly quitting, raising alarms about the safety culture inside major firms. Popular conversations are inundated by pessimism—and at the same time, companies are advertising their services by urging onlookers to “stop hiring humans,” as in one controversial San Francisco– and New York–based billboard campaign. The stakes of the conflict between human and computer capabilities can feel bleak and funereal.

Kavenna’s portrayal of the battle of man versus machine is leavened, however, by her sense of humor. Machines may be able to beat us, but has a computer ever written an effective joke? Beyond being funny, the novel also defies machines by eschewing binaries (“I was neither one thing nor another,” the genderless, nameless, race-less narrator observes of their mental state. “I was mostly in a state of / .”) But Kavenna’s pitch for human superiority really comes together in the novel’s denouement. Eventually, the narrator meets a Seven champion named Eleni Hikaru Jones. She’ll point out that when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, the latter “carried on playing the game. He accepted that Deep Blue was better than him, but he was still the best human player.”

This idea inspires the characters to one-up machine intelligence by changing the rules of the game—or, in Kavenna’s framing, thinking outside the box. While Ashok plays the Quail, Indrek, the bot’s inventor, recognizes the turmoil he’s unleashed. Human loneliness, not malice, was his motive: “He made the Quail so he would always have someone to play with.” Knowing this, Eleni persuades Indrek to join forces with her. Together, they cook up a scheme to create an AI bot that can beat the Quail, and call it the Red Fox.

As these two AIs spend an evening rapidly moving through Seven matches against each other, the humans find better things to do: In the time it takes Eleni and Ashok to play a single leisurely game of Seven, the Red Fox beats the Quail 147 times. But the new device hasn’t accomplished anything of value to either person. In the end, a human Seven champion does indeed beat the Red Fox—but not by winning a Seven match. Instead, she accomplishes something like breaking out of her sandbox: Although Eleni “hadn’t won the game, she had won the game,” the narrator tells us cryptically, as though reciting a riddle or koan. What use, after all, is winning without enjoyment, or real struggle? The iterative process of trying, failing, exploring is far more interesting than the Red Fox’s joyless plod to victory. The emotional stakes for Eleni and Ashok are real, but their true triumph exists in the region of what if—that space of possibility in which one might either win or lose, with no determined outcome: the realm of play.

At the end of the novel, the narrator is back in Greece, sitting outside where “the waves were lapping the shore and the stars were innumerable.” They realize that their quest—to study “how we box in the dots”—was really just another form of “boxing in” imaginative thinking, which is to say human creativity. In Seven, Kavenna suggests that because we fear how artificial intelligence can outmaneuver us, we have overlooked the reality of the situation: Having invented both AI and the games that AI can beat us at, humans still have the choice to knock over the table. We can walk outside; we can look away. People, so unlike Deep Blue, AlphaGo, Claude, and the Quail, can decide on a whim to care about something other than winning.

A large majority of the Republican Party, including many officials who initially viewed Donald Trump with deep skepticism, decided early in Trump’s first term that the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election were the hysterical product of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the Deep State and the media. There was no mystery to solve, no scandal to uncover, in Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin. And yet this strange alliance continues to bedevil American foreign policy.

On Friday afternoon, Trump announced that he had held another call with Putin, and came away once again depicting the Russian dictator as a cherished friend to whom he owes a great deal. “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Later that day, Trump reemphasized his debt of gratitude. “I want to thank President Putin, to be honest with you. We have massive amounts of oil coming into our country, and it’s diesel, which is what we want. So, thank you,” he told reporters outside the White House.

[Read: Why is Kash Patel planning to visit Russia?]

Many of Trump’s comments make little sense, and these were no exception. But he was using a particular kind of illogic that conflicts with his standard brand of nonsense. Trump typically depicts international trade in starkly mercantilist terms. Exports, in his mind, are a form of profit, and imports are a loss. Trump sees trade deficits as a form of theft, and conceives of a “good deal” as one in which the United States reduces its imports or increases its exports. This holds true of all goods, including oil. “We don’t need their fuel, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need their oil and gas. We don’t need anything that they have,” Trump said dismissively of Canada last year.

Yet when it comes to imports from Russia, Trump inverts his standard accounting methods. He presents Russian oil as a kind of gift, something Putin plans to “supply.” (A more accurate verb to describe this transaction would be sell.)

In reality, diesel fuel exists in a global market, and adding a small amount of Russian diesel into this enormous international supply would have a barely detectable effect upon its price. A more important effect would be on the Russian economy. Economic sanctions have hampered its ability to attract foreign currency, and the Trump-Putin plan would suspend sanctions on Russian diesel exports. Doing so would in fact appear to violate American law, which prohibits importing oil from Russia unless it makes peace with Ukraine, though illegality does not usually deter Trump.

The most immediate outcome of this plan has been to present Ukraine as the cause of economic turmoil and Russia as the innocent victim of Ukrainian warmongering. Trump almost immediately began to praise Putin and assail the Russian dictator’s adversary. Volodymyr Zelensky “could have settled this war many times—many, many times—and he chooses not to,” Trump told reporters on Friday outside the White House. “He wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Trump’s solution? “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal. Because they could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does.”

There is no universally agreed-upon explanation for why Trump has remained so consistently faithful to Putin. One theory holds that Putin masterfully strokes Trump’s ego. Although Trump does respond to flattery, the flaw in this hypothesis is that other leaders have tried, and often failed, to mimic this formula. Europeans have met Trump’s second term with obsequious displays and gifts. Ukraine floated a proposal to rename the Donbas region “Donnyland.” Poland proposed christening a base “Fort Trump.” Yet these countries have remained largely frustrated.

A second theory holds that Trump simply admires dictators. This one contains a bit more truth, as seen by Trump’s swooning over Xi Jinping and even Kim Jong Un. But the dictators running Iran and Venezuela have hardly managed to duplicate the Trump-Putin partnership.

A third theory depicts Trump as merely amoral, driven by transactions and indifferent to moral concerns. Yet he has continued to defer to Putin even as the Russian dictator has undermined Trump’s own standing by aiding Iran in its war with the United States. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s assistance against Iran seems to have bought him no goodwill whatsoever. Trump’s view of the war is moralistic—he simply blames the victim rather than the aggressor. “You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he said last year of Zelensky.

Explaining the depth of Trump’s identification with Putin may require looking at a possibility that conservatives have been dismissing out of hand for a decade: manipulation and corruption.

During the 2016 campaign, Russia dangled a lucrative deal to develop Trump-branded properties in Russia that would deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in profit with no risk. More recently, The New York Times reported that Trump advisers and Russian officials have floated deals that would enrich Trump’s inner circle as part of ending the war.

Russia has tried to bribe foreign officials, especially by handing out pieces of its resource wealth, in numerous countries. It would be strange if Putin didn’t try to replicate this tried-and-true method in the United States.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump’s message to Ukraine is now crystal clear]

Perhaps the best evidence against corruption is that Trump now has access to so many other sources of wealth that he hardly needs any financial incentive to tilt toward Russia. Yet Putin seems able to bring the American president around to his way of thinking, if not effortlessly (their most recent phone call reportedly consumed an hour and a half) then at least reliably.

There is obviously no investigation at the moment into Putin’s efforts to influence American foreign policy. Instead, incredibly, we have an investigation into the Russia investigation. The Trump administration is working to gin up criminal charges against former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, and other American officials whose crime was to explore whether something fishy was going on between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

My colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster report, “Some of Trump’s closest advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president.” Perhaps instead of dismissing the people who were trying to shed light on this mystery and then attempting to throw them into prison, these advisers should be taking their concerns seriously.

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

Donald Trump is the quantum president: simultaneously all-powerful and also a wee, innocent figurehead, blithely unaware of what his aides are doing.

The first Trump, the one who declares that he “alone can fix it,” was in the Oval Office last week, asserting his unfettered power to persecute his political opponents. “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” he said. “I can do whatever I want, if I want.” But after federal law enforcement conducted a search at the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, yesterday morning, Trump insisted he was completely uninvolved.

Without more information, the search—conducted by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE that handles complicated probes—is deeply troubling. The Trump administration has deployed a series of probes, searches, and indictments, many of which are plainly pretextual or political, against outspoken critics. (This is a crucial distinction from an August 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago, which yielded many boxes of highly sensitive material, haphazardly stored.) Black women, including Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, have been particular but not exclusive targets. The search also breaks a norm against public action in highly political cases in the 60 days before an election. Attempts to intimidate or criminalize an opposition party are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

There is much about the search that we do not know, including what evidence was used to obtain the warrant (though The New York Times reports it “was the subject of significant back and forth between prosecutors and the federal judge who eventually approved it”); what agents might have found; and what charges, if any, the government might be contemplating. Some reporting states that prosecutors are exploring whether Omar’s late father lied or made omissions on immigration applications. (The administration has focused on trying to strip citizenship from people who gave false responses on applications.) The congresswoman came to the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen at 17.

To hear Trump tell it, he also knows little about the probe. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said yesterday. “I have nothing to do with it.” (The Department of Justice told the Times that the search was part of an ongoing investigation but declined to comment further.) This is a pattern I previously identified: When faced with difficult questions or strong pushback, the president tends to insist that the lawyers are in charge and he’s not apprised of what’s going on.

But his claim is hard to believe. Trump has repeatedly said that he has a “right” to direct federal prosecutors to investigate whomever he wishes, and although he generally insists that he has not done so, evidence suggests otherwise. Last September, Trump posted on Truth Social instructing then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against critics, including James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote. Several news outlets later reported that the missive was intended as a private message. Bondi was removed this spring, reportedly because of Trump’s frustration that his attempts at retribution were moving too slowly.

In February, FBI agents searched an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, in pursuit of evidence for Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. (Their warrant was largely based on debunked claims.) The following day, Trump spoke directly to some of the agents involved, an extraordinary intervention.

Comey was ultimately charged with threatening the president, after he posted a photograph of shells he found on a beach that read 86 47, a set of numbers that supporters have said connotes wanting to remove Trump from office. DOJ has insisted the post was a threat of violence (which Comey has denied). Documents released by Comey’s lawyers this summer show that Trump was closely involved in the case, demanding briefings and notes from interviews with Comey prior to his indictment.

Adding to the impression that the Omar case is a White House effort, Katie Miller, the former Trump aide and the wife of Stephen Miller, posted about the story on X yesterday, saying, “Promise made, promise kept.” She later deleted the post.

But even if Trump is not personally engaged, he has made clear through his statements that he wants Omar investigated and punished. In 2019, he suggested that members of the progressive “Squad,” which included Omar, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few days later, after he criticized Omar at a rally, he watched as a crowd chanted, “Send her back!” In December, he called Omar “garbage” and said that Somalis should leave the U.S.: “Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.” The next month, when Omar was attacked at an event, Trump accused her of setting it up. This March, Vice President Vance told an interviewer, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” The message from the White House is clear enough to make King Henry II blush.

If Trump is as engaged in prosecutions of his political opponents as public evidence indicates, then his behavior is inappropriate and damaging to the rule of law. If, however, he truly knows nothing about what’s going on, then he’s not the heroic, powerful leader he claims to be. Which would he prefer the public conclude?

Related:

• Trump is hiding behind his lawyers.
• Trump shrugs off the Ilhan Omar attack.

Our sense that life is meaningful depends, perhaps more than we realize, on our confidence that humanity will go on after we die. If we came to believe that humanity had no future, the philosopher Samuel Scheffler argues, much of what we value would lose its meaning or motivating force. What would follow would be widespread “apathy, anomie and despair.”

That is one reason why the threat of artificial intelligence feels so different and disorienting. When some of the most knowledgeable people within an industry suggest that their work could, within a matter of years, lead to global catastrophe and even human extinction, it’s decidedly unnerving. AI-driven anxiety is now showing up in therapy offices across the country. Much of what has given people succor in the past—faith that there are good things and good people who will outlive us, and that the story will go on—feels like it might be suddenly removed.

Consider the dread, even the paralyzing fear, you might feel if you were told as you prepared to fly that your plane has a 1-in-100 chance of crashing, or perhaps even a 1-in-10 chance. You probably wouldn’t board the aircraft. With AI, though, there’s no opting out. Even worse, if the plane you boarded did crash, it would be a terrible, localized tragedy. But the world would go on; your children would outlive you. Some of the primary architects of AI, though, are talking about the permanent end of the human species. Perhaps they are wrong; other experts are less concerned with AI destroying humanity than with it being unreliable, misused, or recklessly deployed. Their warnings, though, are hard to ignore.

[Juliette Kayyem: Destroying humanity is against the law]

It is better that we name the fear honestly rather than avoid it: All of us may soon perish, and everything we have made may go with us. Then we need to separate the urgent practical questions—what do we do to prevent the worst from happening?—from the existential. How should we live in light of the possibility, however remote, of the end of all that we have known and loved and has ever been?

As the focus on the existential threats posed by AI increases, people will exhibit a range of responses. Robert Jay Lifton coined the term psychic numbing to describe what he saw among survivors of Hiroshima: a protective shutdown of emotional responses in the face of catastrophic events or potentially overwhelming trauma. It allows us to keep functioning. There can also be denial—a sense that the prospects are so awful that they can’t be true, and even if they are, there’s nothing we can individually do about it.

Still others are tempted toward “information avoidance,” in which we ignore information because we’re afraid of an unpleasant outcome. Some set the threat aside as best as they can, a bit like avoiding a visit to a doctor out of fear that the physician will confirm a serious, even life-threatening illness. Still others drift toward a nihilism that ends in despair. Our time horizons will also shift. When the future itself seems in doubt, the long-term commitments that sustain a meaningful life can start to seem pointless.

My own reaction has been to search for footholds of reasonable hope. I’ve looked to knowledgeable voices for reassurance. I don’t have certainty that things will turn out just fine, but I want to believe that there are promising paths forward and what we do still matters. I should acknowledge, too, that the idea of an extinction-level threat doesn’t yet fully register with me. Because nothing like this has ever happened before, my instinctive assumption is that it never will. And, of course, it may not. But it would be foolhardy not to contemplate the possibility.

Viktor Frankl found meaning in life amid the horror of Auschwitz. Though we cannot control external events, he believed, we can retain control over our interior world. We choose how we respond to circumstances we did not create, to cups we would prefer to let pass. This “tragic optimism” is the capacity to say yes to life despite enormous suffering. Meaning can be chiseled even out of anguish. The impermanence of things is no reason for despair; instead, it increases the urgency to make meaning of the time we have, the moments in which we live, and the things we choose to love. The question is always what life is asking of us in every situation we face. And the answer is that life asks us to live lives of integrity, honor, and devotion to things and people outside of ourselves, to celebrate truth and beauty even in dark times.

“A thought transfixed me,” Frankl wrote, in Man’s Search for Meaning. “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

He added, “For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in the perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’” Meaning is found not only in what we accomplish but also in beholding what we love.

ALBERT CAMUS’ 1947 NOVEL, THE PLAGUE, is a tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The story’s protagonist, Bernard Rieux, is a dedicated, resolute physician in the Algerian city of Oran. He embodies what Jean Tarrou, a visitor who organizes volunteer sanitary squads, calls a “true healer.” Rieux fights the plague day after day, with no expectation of winning. He does so not because of heroism or religious faith but out of common decency. He believes that the only honest response to suffering is to do what one can to relieve it. That is what gives meaning to his life. The goal of Rieux and others was, in the words of David Bellos, a scholar of French fiction, “to preserve human dignity and to last the course, and in so doing to develop and to promote those virtues which misfortune can call forth: co-operation, solidarity, and the art of small kindness.”

Rieux names the threat posed by the epidemic early and honestly, when others are in denial, and then he acts. Camus, an agnostic, didn’t look to God or a higher power for meaning; he believed that the universe is inherently indifferent. Meaning, he argued, is found in human solidarity and the alleviation of suffering. Those remain intrinsic goods even if the world were to end tomorrow.

Living under the shadow of a grave threat shouldn’t be paralyzing; it should inspire resistance to injustice, despite the knowledge that such a struggle can never be fully won. C. S. Lewis, in his 1948 essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” said that if the atomic bomb comes, it should find us doing sensible, human things: praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, chatting with our friends, and “not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”

Perhaps that quiet courage came because for Lewis, a Christian, the end of the world did not represent the end of everything that matters. We are inhabiting an irrational universe, he believed, but we aren’t derived from it. Nature is alienated from its Creator too, he wrote—“though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain.”

HOW, THEN, SHOULD WE LIVE in light of the threat posed by AI? We should name rather than ignore the danger and do everything within our power to contain it. Experts are actively debating the right way to do that. Their suggestions include a laissez-faire, do-nothing approach; voluntary compliance within the industry; bilateral and international agreements; and state and federal regulations in America. But there’s clearly an urgency to act before we lose control of events—and our future.

Beyond that, it seems to me that we should acknowledge the fear that death, especially the prospect of mass death, brings up in all of us. Frankl and Camus had their approaches; we should answer what each moment asks of us. Decency and kindness don’t require external validation, whether a catastrophe is avoided or not. The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, in his book Staring at the Sun, expressed the hope that an “awakening experience” might inspire us to rearrange our priorities, find compassionate connections, and love others and beauty more deeply.

[Ian Bogost: The thrill of wanting AI to destroy the world]

Yalom invoked Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in which the protagonist, hours from death, having experienced horrifying pain, recognizes the shallowness and emptiness of what appears to have been, on the surface, a successful life. Because of his connection with his young son, who presses Ivan’s hands to his lips and weeps, Ivan “fell through and saw a light, and it was revealed to him that his life had been wrong but that it was still possible to mend things.” In the end, he does.

He searched for his old habitual fear of death and didn’t find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear, because there was no death. Instead of death there was light. “So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud. “Such joy!”

Ivan Ilyich’s final thoughts are “Death is finished. It is no more.”

T

olstoy, through Ivan Ilyich, was echoing a verse from the New Testament Book of Revelation. Written at the end of the first century, Revelation is an apocalyptic work filled with symbolism, vivid imagery, and coded references to the Roman Empire, which was oppressing Christians.

Revelation is hardly a favorite book of mine except for this: In the 21st chapter, we read that “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” And God promises, “Behold, I make all things new.”

I have cited those words to others, and to myself, more times than I can count. It is not a promise that the current world won’t end—after all, many New Testament writers believed that they were living in the end times—but rather that the world will then be renewed. The old order will give way to a new one, where creation is healed and justice is restored and God will ultimately reconcile every creature to himself.

Skeptics of Christianity will say this is wishful thinking, and perhaps it is. But wanting something to be true doesn’t make it false. Wishful thinking, tethered to reality, is another name for hope. Sometimes hope is all we have, and sometimes hope is enough.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Back in March 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, dropped news in the dead of night. “Good work by @NASA this week,” the post said. “Eliminated their unused purchasing Cards (~80%) -Terminated ~$420M in unneeded contracts, including $45M ($15m each) to three separate consultants.”

The irony should not require explanation, but as my colleague Josh Tyrangiel details in his new cover story, Musk’s company, SpaceX, might not exist today without the $1.6 billion contract it received from NASA back in 2008, when it was days away from missing payroll, to resupply the International Space Station. “The company had gone from near death to indispensable in a single quarter,” Tyrangiel writes.

Musk’s space ambitions are no secret—and they are matched, perhaps, only by the ambitions of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. In 2018, a decade after Musk’s company became the first private one to launch a liquid-fueled rocket into space, Bezos said the only way to “deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.”

Private individuals have long been a part of America’s relationship with space, but the nation is now reliant on one or two people to ensure that they can achieve the goals they set. On Radio Atlantic, Josh joins me to talk about how the relationship between NASA and these companies developed, the competition between the two men, and what it means for all of us down here on Earth.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Josh Tyrangiel: Part of what Musk and Bezos are seeing is that right now space is an okay business. It’s not great. Satellites: better business. But down the road, if you can get satellites connected to data centers in space, and you have AI models that are super thirsty for computing power and for energy, all of a sudden you have a very virtuous loop that makes it really hard to compete with you in any part of that vertically integrated business.

[Music]

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today we need to talk about the new space race.

Public and private partnerships have defined the nation’s relationship with space for a long time. Some of the 20th century’s earliest astronomical discoveries would not have been possible without financial support from Andrew Carnegie.

Now the future of space exploration finds itself at the behest of a trillionaire and a multibillionaire, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and their companies SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Over the last two decades, the two have become indispensable to NASA. If they can put aside their intense rivalry, it could benefit America’s new frontier into space.

But what is the future of space exploration if they don’t?

Today, I’m joined by my colleague Josh Tyrangiel, whose story in this month’s issue of The Atlantic explores both companies and the men who run them.

Let’s get to questions.

Josh, thank you so much for joining me today.

Tyrangiel: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Adam.

Harris: Absolutely. Can you first just sort of lay a foundation for us, right? We have Musk and SpaceX, Bezos and Blue Origin, and both are building capacity for literal moonshots and beyond, right? But what can they actually do right now?

Tyrangiel: So where they are right now is that SpaceX is indispensable and critical infrastructure for the United States of America. It is how we get astronauts and materials to the International Space Station, which is really important. That’s how we get our—getting rides up there is really pretty, pretty great.

The other thing that SpaceX does incredibly well is launch satellites. And so when Elon Musk was beginning SpaceX, he really pursued it actually just as a, almost as a kind of lark. He had made some money from PayPal. He was always fascinated with space, and he thought he wanted to do this kind of, like, science experiment/publicity stunt where he would get a rocket, send it to Mars, put a robot on it, scoop up some soil, and plant the first interstellar plant. And what he discovered was that actually, it’s really expensive to buy a rocket. He went to the Russians. One of the Russians literally spat on his shoes. And so he built this rocket capacity, and we can talk about how he did it, but what he discovered pretty quickly is, like, it’s not a great business, launching rockets. It’s very expensive. There aren’t—there isn’t that much demand.

And so about 10 years ago he figured out that where there is a lot of demand is telecom, like, good old-fashioned telecom, and that became Starlink, which is a really incredible product. He has—most of the satellites in the world, he has launched through SpaceX. I believe the number is about, 80 percent of the mass in orbit is launched, has been launched by SpaceX, which is shocking. The next-closest competitor is the government of China. So when you say, like, What can they do now? Well, SpaceX kinda runs space, like, pretty clearly.

Now, Blue Origin, for all sorts of reasons, got off to a much slower start, and right now it is trying to get in the game as a competitor, largely around launch, largely around the ability to launch satellites both for itself—Amazon has satellites; Blue Origin has launched a satellite project—but also for other customers. And there are a lot of space-satellite customers out there. And it’s also working on a lunar lander for NASA that might get there by 2030. But they’re far behind, and even the CEO of Blue Origin would be the first to tell you, like, it’s not a close competition at the moment. But these two are pretty important players in the space ecosystem. Without SpaceX, you would notice. You would actually notice both from a government point of view and from a satellite point of view.

Harris: I thought it was interesting—earlier, you mentioned space travel is expensive at, like, a very base minimum, right? And really any piece about space exploration, I feel like I always get kind of bogged down in the numbers, because they just don’t compute. They seem fake, right? $50 billion here, $4 billion there. This is a lot of money to spend on something that’s not necessarily ever a guarantee. There’s no guarantee you make it to the moon. There’s no guarantee you make it to Mars. Why is space travel and the sort of space exploration, these space pursuits still worthy pursuits? Why are they still worthy pursuits?

Tyrangiel: It’s a great question, and if you talk to people in the scientific or the, sort of, NASA community, there’s a healthy debate about, what’s the right return on investment?

Let’s say it was your money, right? And you wanted to understand more about space. You could create vehicles. You could have an astronaut program. You could take on the tremendous risk to loss of life, which you don’t want. Or you could send drones. And one of the great programs right now that very few people know about is we have these two vehicles on Mars sending back photos every day that are just astonishing. It’s not an expensive program. We’re learning things about that planet that frankly—you know, if we were to wait for a human to get there, we’d be decades away. Not to mention, like, wouldn’t get them nearly as far. So there is a debate about that.

What I would say is that if you are a captain of industry and you can afford to take some pain, there’s nothing better than losing money early to create a moat around a business that at some point might be transformed from bad to incredible. And so part of what Musk and Bezos are seeing is that right now space is an okay business. It’s not great. Satellites: better business.

But down the road, if you can get satellites connected to data centers in space, and you have AI models that are super thirsty for computing power and for energy, all of a sudden you have a very virtuous loop that makes it really hard to compete with you in any part of that vertically integrated business.

And so, I go back to the SpaceX prospectus, which I think I referred to in the piece as, like, kind of this incredible document that, in parts, seems like a very rational plan for how to colonize space, for how to make the East India Company of space, and, in other parts, seems like a diary of a CFO’s weekend on mushrooms, right? Like, it’s crazy.

But when they say that SpaceX has a total addressable market of about $30 trillion, what they mean ultimately is creating this kind of vertically integrated loop where rockets launch satellites and data centers; data centers go through the satellites to feed compute back to Earth, running these AI models that run all of our heavy industry; and all of a sudden what looks like a lousy investment becomes an incredible investment.

And so that is how both of those men think. That’s why to people like you and me it’s like, Boy, that’s a lot of money going out the door right now. They are not worried about “right now.”

Harris: You know, and they often, sometimes they will, in order to talk about the investment, right, they will couch it in the civilizational concerns, right?

Our resources are finite here on Earth. We’re going to need to find another place. In the colonizer mind, it’s like, We are going to colonize the moon next as a sort of base to begin to look elsewhere. Do they both have that sort of civilizational concern? Is that a real concern of theirs or is it just a—

Tyrangiel: No, 100 percent sincere. I genuinely think that both men look at the state of the planet and very scientifically think, Okay, well, we need an off-ramp. In Bezos’s mind, it’s really O’Neill colonies, which is—Gerard O’Neill, in the 1970s, created this notion that you basically export all of our most polluting industries into space or onto the moon and then you kinda turn the planet into this beautiful park. And Bezos has been talking about this as long ago as his high-school-graduation speech. So he’s very sincerely focused on this notion. Musk largely thinks about Mars in the same way, which is that we need to become an interplanetary species.

That doesn’t mean they also don’t see a tremendous business opportunity. And it doesn’t mean that the rest of us, who haven’t really, um, had much say in how these resources are being allocated or whether we would prefer, in fact, that we actually just work on saving this planet—it doesn’t mean that we can’t be annoyed about it, frustrated about it. But I think all of those things are true in this case.

Harris: Could the government achieve any of the SpaceX ambitions, um, on its own? Or does it need these, sort of, mega-wealthy people in order to achieve what it’s trying to do?

Tyrangiel: You know, it’s funny. When I, um, started reporting the story and I really dove deep into the subculture of space and government and heavy industry—you know, to a person, almost everyone agrees that the Commercial Space Act, or COTS, is one of the best pieces of public policy the United States has created in the last 40 years. And that basically what it did was create competition where previously there was bureaucracy, right?

And so as a result, I think without question people would say Musk has made space move faster and farther, often at a discount to the federal government, and so that’s great, right? We actually wanna encourage that.

And by the way, as much as these are complicated and at times troubling guys, we also want people who dream this big, and we want them to be in America, right? It’s great; it’s great. We want that. The challenge of course is, where do you draw the line about authority? And so what, what I saw and what we’ve seen in the last five, 10 years, is that when you control things like Starlink, you also control things like war. That puts us in a very, very strange place.

Harris: You made this argument at the beginning, right, which is just the sort of reality of SpaceX being so far ahead of Blue Origin. What’s the best argument for hoping that Blue Origin catches up to SpaceX, and what would it look like for Blue Origin to catch up to SpaceX here?

Tyrangiel: So I’ll tell you what the CEO, who’s a guy named Dave Limp, told me. And Dave Limp worked for Bezos at Amazon for somewhere between a decade and decade and a half. Knows him extremely well, which is a very important part of making Blue Origin successful, right? Is channeling what Bezos wants, being able to challenge him when necessary.

So Dave Limp said, Look, SpaceX is ahead. But we don’t need them to fail for us to be successful. What we need is for there to be reasonable competition in the market for space launch, right?

And right now Blue Origin needs to get its act together. And what I mean by that is they’ve been at it for about 26 years. And they’re just getting to a place where they are launching, landing reusable rockets, which is the key to driving down the cost. When you’re launching a new rocket or experimenting with a new booster or a new engine, one in three is gonna fail, right? And it takes time. I think the thing that we most want to root for is for Blue Origin to get on a cadence where it is driving down cost, getting competition, right?

Getting other competitors, satellites, and other things into space beyond their own, right? What we don’t want is an environment where SpaceX controls most of the launch in the United States and most of its payloads are Starlink satellites or future AI satellites, and we don’t want that on the Blue Origin side.

Now, we have lots of ways to make sure that people don’t have that kind of monopoly. But we’re not exactly in a moment where the Department of Justice is exercising those. You know, it’d be healthy for America to have, uh, two big competitors. It’d be healthier to have four, healthier still to have eight.

Harris: When we come back, we talk to Josh about America’s ambitions in space, and whether or not they overlap with Musk and Bezos’s own ambitions.

[Music]

Harris: For the last half century, NASA has been the, sort of, benchmark for American ambition in space, and I’m often reminded of John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1962, his moonshot speech, where he says—

John F. Kennedy: But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, Why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon.

Harris: We choose to go to the moon because it was the hard thing to do. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. What is America’s ambition now in space?

Tyrangiel: So there’s a new NASA administrator named Jared Isaacman, and Isaacman had a tough time getting confirmed, in part because he’s a self-made billionaire, and he was a SpaceX pilot. He did the first commercial space walk in history, and so his ties to Musk were an issue in his confirmation hearing. But he did get confirmed. And everybody I speak to about Isaacman says, He’s young; he’s eager; he is all in on the mission. And they don’t always love his decisions, but they think he is a legit leader. And what he’s trying to organize everybody around is the moon. He wants American boots on the moon by 2028, and so he’s pressing Blue Origin, which is making a lander; he’s pressing SpaceX, which is making a lander. He wants both in competition, and ultimately, the reasons for that are sort of a, this kind of hairball, right? Some of it’s national security, the dark side of the moon. There are people in the national-security community who say, Well, we need to get there before China does. There are others who say, Not really, and, and that when they talk to China, it’s not actually that big a deal.

But there are good reasons to go back. There’s mining on the moon. There’s rare earth minerals on the moon. And there is beginning to be this kind of space economy developing around the possibility of us getting to the moon, mining it, setting up data centers. There’s lots of buzz about nuclear reactors on the moon. That seems a little scary to me, but nevertheless that buzz is there. And so Isaacman has them pointed in that direction. And, and one interesting thing—we’re at this kind of lucky moment for America. Basically, you know, Blue Origin said, Well, let’s go to the moon. Trump sees the MAGA value in the moon. It appealed to Mike Pence, who really loves spaces. But—

Harris: The creation of the Space Force.

Tyrangiel: Yeah. Most of the time what happens is a NASA mission gets created, and four or eight years later, it gets dumped.

And the Biden administration had the, kind of, unsung civil-service hero who was on the transition team, named Bhavya Lal, who’s a really a fascinating woman, and the administration came in, and Biden’s team said, Well, this, this is probably stupid, right? She’s like, No, no, no, no. It’s not stupid. Stay the course.

And so we’ve had, for the last 10 years, actual continuity, and that is incredibly rare. And so what Isaacman has been very shrewd about is staying as close to the political middle as he can because he knows space deadlines are kinda worse than New Year’s resolutions.

Like, I don’t know of anybody who looks at a space deadline as, like, Cool, let me make sure I’m there on that date. It just doesn’t happen. So knowing that it’s likely to slip, he’s been very shrewd about positioning himself in the middle so that if there is a new party in power, the moon mission might actually persevere, and that’s a hugely important thing to us getting back to the moon.

Harris: Yeah. That sort of consistent goal. And we have that—I know that they’ve had that pretty consistent goal of getting back to the moon by 2028 with the Artemis crew. What role will Musk and Bezos, sort of, play in that mission specifically?

Tyrangiel: I mean, one of them would like to win to carry those astronauts on a Blue Origin or a SpaceX lander to the moon—to the surface of the moon, which you can imagine, if you’ve been working at this for a quarter century, would be a huge personal and professional triumph. So they’re very invested in that. Whether that competition is the right thing for the United States I think is a little bit debatable. How Isaacman approaches declaring a winner—he did not speak to me for the piece, but, like, it is a subject of heated debate inside the space community. It’s like, Which one of these vehicles is actually right for this? Are either of them right for this? And how do we choose a winner here when both have tremendous political influence?

Harris: Thinking about that idea of a winner too—you write in the piece about the ways that if they just worked together, right, we, we all might be in a better place.

Is there a world in which Musk and Bezos do actually work together?

Tyrangiel: The answer is no, definitively. They’re not gonna work together voluntarily. It’s just not gonna happen. And by the way, we do want them in competition because that competition drives price down, that competition drives creativity. Like, I think that’s great.

What we also want is a federal government that can remind what are essentially—forget the billions attached to them, forget their outsize personalities and profiles. They’re vendors, right?

We want our federal government to be able to say Okay, and, and this is really where I get to, not to spoil the piece because obviously I know people have been reading it while we’re talking, but basically when you look at, um, SpaceX’s plan for how to get to the moon, and you look at Blue Origin’s plan, they’re quite complementary.

SpaceX does one thing extraordinarily well. Blue does one thing extraordinarily well. Jared Isaacman could very easily say, Okay, SpaceX, you’re gonna be the refueler. Blue, you’re gonna be the lander. Work together or do nothing. Right? That’s what we’d love to see. It’s just an exercise in reminding everybody the nation matters more than people’s egos or people’s business plans. The problem with that is that while the leverage we have is the glory of getting to the moon, the leverage each individual has is to say, Screw you! I don’t wanna go to the moon. And guess what? Then we’re not getting to the moon.

And so that’s back to the sort of original piece of this, which is, we’re in this weird moment where we have empowered the space race; we have given federal money to these companies; we’ve given them lots and lots of support, even down to the educational system, which produces so many of the engineers working at these companies. But we’re not entirely in control of their ambitions. And even with something like the moon—you know, if they decide it’s not economically feasible, if they decide they don’t wanna work together, all that leverage is gone and we’re not getting back to the moon.

Harris: Even if the government threatens to revoke their contracts, they could just say, We have more money than that. We don’t need your contract?

Tyrangiel: So, at some point, yes, right? And SpaceX is not—SpaceX gets money from the government, but SpaceX is also funneling lots of its own money in, and it also is the launch provider of choice to satellite companies. So yeah, there is a moment at which we lose control of these companies.

Now, traditionally, we have things like the Defense Production Act. You can nationalize things. I don’t think there’s any political will for that at this moment, and so we’re navigating this really awkward conversation across the table with two guys who are not used to negotiating, giving in, working together, and so it will have an impact on our national ambitions at some point. Like, I think that’s inevitable.

Harris: Yeah. And there’s no way out of it? We’re stuck with our two billionaires/occasional trillionaire?

Tyrangiel: I mean, we can continue to encourage competitors, and there are a lot of space start-ups, but they’re pretty far away from being mature enough to compete with SpaceX, let alone Blue Origin.

So for the time being, meaning the rest of my adult life, I imagine this is how we’ll be dealing with space. Yeah.

Harris: Well, Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. You’ve given us a lot to think about, and as always, it’s great to talk to you.

Tyrangiel: Great to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Harris: That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson.

It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday.

You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts.

And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

Earlier this year, a woman posted on Threads that a man she had been dating dumped her after discovering that she had a library card. She shared a screenshot of what she said was the man’s “breakup text,” in which the writer accused her of “wasting hours” like “some little kid playing pretend smart” and excoriated her for failing to satisfy him sexually: “Reading books? Really? While I’m sitting here with actual needs!!”

The internet, of course, reacted. Memes and think pieces abounded. These responses weren’t just gasps of outrage at the man’s dismissal of literacy and his base sense of entitlement. They also captured a particular kind of anxiety about a sometimes highly sensitive question related to romantic compatibility: What happens when you and your partner are on a different intellectual plane?

I didn’t always have language for this type of gap. Growing up and attending church, I heard a lot about the biblical caution to “not be unequally yoked” to a mate, invoked to warn Christians against consorting with nonbelievers. As I developed my own intellectual practice, during which I grew to believe that many sacred texts were best read figuratively, I came to understand the biblical advice differently. To be equally yoked meant to walk forward together without one pulling harder than the other. Basically, you don’t want one member of the pair to be missing the beat.

Over the years I worked on my doctoral dissertation, about the brilliant and tortured John Milton, my adviser and mentor was the acclaimed Miltonist Francis C. Blessington. In many of our conversations, he spoke fondly about the wit and wisdom of his wife, Ann Taylor, also a professor, and a writer in a completely different field. As a young person, I think I took for granted the kind of similitude this couple shared. At Blessington’s memorial service last fall, I eulogized him and met Taylor in person for the first time. She spoke about their intellectual companionship with such love and specificity that it stopped me. They didn’t work in matching fields, and they didn’t have identical minds. But they were two people whose depths met.

In reflecting on my mentor and his wife, I couldn’t help thinking that Mr. Breakup Text, in revealing what lay within his depths, at least did the woman he’d been dating a favor. Better for her to know about his disposition sooner rather than later. I also had no doubt that John Milton himself—who in 1643 nearly destroyed his reputation arguing that intellectual incompatibility should be legal grounds for divorce—would have agreed with me.

In the summer of 1642, Milton married Mary Powell. In short order, she left him.

Milton’s response was to do what many intellectuals do when their personal life implodes: He turned his crisis into theory. In 1643, he published The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce, which made a bold claim that marriage should be dissolvable when spouses are cerebrally incompatible. The backlash was immediate and severe. Divorce in 17th-century England was nearly impossible, granted only for the most extreme circumstances (abuse, for instance, or infidelity). But Milton wasn’t arguing about tangible, provable transgressions. He was arguing about loneliness—the specific, suffocating loneliness of living with someone whose mind you cannot reach. For doing so, he was effectively canceled.

His argument was anchored by a close reading of Genesis. When God created Eve as a “help meet” for Adam, Milton suggested, she was not meant to be simply a body for procreation or a servant for labor. If that were all Adam needed, God could have given him anyone. What Adam required was a person he could speak with—a source of “apt and cheerfull conversation,” someone with whom to share thoughts, to reason, to find the companionship of mind that makes solitude bearable.

And when that communion is absent? Milton had a word for it: bondage. He wrote that to couple two souls whose minds don’t meet is to join “a living soule” to “a dead corps.” Marriage devoid of intellectual intimacy isn’t merely disappointing. It is a form of living death, worse than being alone, because at least in solitude you aren’t confronted daily with the failure of connection.

[Read: The tyranny of the relationship gap]

Milton’s most radical claim was that intellectual incompatibility is a more serious problem than adultery. “He who affirms adultery to be the highest breach,” he wrote, “affirms the bed to be the highest of mariage, which is in truth a grosse and borish opinion.” Adultery within a marriage can be overcome, he believed. A mismatch of intelligences cannot. He then went further, mocking the Church of England for being more concerned with resolving a lack of conjugal relations—“the disappointing of an impetuous nerve”—than with “the ingenuous grievance of a minde unreasonably yoakt.” To him, intellectual companionship outranked sex not just as a nice feature of marriage but as its entire foundation.

That was a radical notion in 1643 (and, I would argue, it remains so). Milton’s insistence that wives be intellectual companions to their husbands was progressive for the 17th century because it implied that women were capable of rational thought and meaningful conversation. His view ran counter to prevailing beliefs, which said that, at most, a wife should be educated enough to converse with her husband but not so educated that she might challenge his authority.

Across the centuries, other writers and philosophers have considered the importance of intellectual parity between the sexes. In the mid-1700s, a group of Englishwomen known as the bluestockings created salons where serious conversation was the point, and where women’s minds were not secondary to men’s. (That the term bluestocking became a slur demonstrates how threatened broader society remained at the idea of women as intellectuals.) Nearly 250 years after Milton, Nietzsche engaged with the question of cerebral compatibility from a slightly different direction. In his 1878 book, Human, All Too Human, he argued that marriage is fundamentally a long conversation, and that when choosing a partner, you should ask whether you can talk well with that person into old age.

Like Milton, Nietzsche characterized intellectual communion as fundamental to a lasting union, not as a bonus. I align with the thinking of both. But the person who really helped me answer the question of what matters in romance, the mind or the body—or whether those distinctions are even useful—was not someone I read. It was someone I listened to: the lyrical philosopher known as Prince.

I’ve spent a good part of my career thinking about music as a form of knowledge. But Prince had me long before any of that. I was captivated by his creative fluency, the way he moved from intellect to physicality to spirituality without ever treating them as separate domains, let alone ranking them.

If I were to sketch a longer trajectory of those rankings on the way to Prince, it might go something like this: Saint Augustine built a bridge between the sacred and the profane that Western thought has been living inside ever since. In the 14th century, the Italian scholar-poet Petrarch elevated love by spiritualizing it, positioning the beloved as an untouchable muse—adored from afar, beautiful precisely because she was unreachable. Milton imagined intellectual communion as divine but didn’t connect it to the body. In the 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley argued for a fusion of souls, describing the concept of the “twin flame”: “We shall become the same, we shall be one / Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? / One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew.” Nietzsche abandoned the sacred entirely and kept only the mind. And much of 20th-century pop culture (especially in music) swung the other way, reducing attraction to the body alone.

Prince knocked all the walls down. Where Petrarch’s lover might have written “I love you so much I could die,” Prince took the conceit and made it visceral, carnal, immediate—then turned around and insisted that the mind was what he was really after.

Many people register Prince’s hypersexual image and miss the consistent thread of yearning for intellectual intimacy running through his music. In “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” he doesn’t position himself as a conqueror. He asks to be repositioned as a confidant, someone granted access to a woman’s unperformed interior world. The song isn’t seduction. It’s a plea for the kind of knowing that Milton called “meet help” and that Nietzsche called “a long conversation.” Prince just set his lines to a drum machine.

[From the September 2026 issue: The great romance slump]

Even in “Sexy M.F.,” in which the surface is pure provocation, Prince insists that what he wants is “not your body, your mind, you fool.” The argument for intellectual intimacy is embedded inside the most overtly physical song imaginable because Prince refused to separate the categories. On “Love 2 the 9’s,” you can hear him testing what some psychologists refer to as “cognitive tempo” in real time. The track is structured as rapid-fire banter with the artist’s creative collaborator and eventual wife Mayte Garcia, a back-and-forth in which wit, timing, and verbal dexterity are the point. It’s flirtation, but the flirtation is the assessment. Can she keep pace? Can she volley? Prince isn’t just charming her. He’s running Milton’s compatibility test on tape.

The artist’s 1996 three-disc album, Emancipation, released simultaneously as a declaration of freedom from Warner Bros. and a celebration of his marriage to Garcia, fuses romantic partnership with creative autonomy. The track “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife” collapses every form of intimacy—companionable, lustful, familial, marital—into one person. His vision wasn’t Milton’s hierarchy or Nietzsche’s abstraction; it was total fusion. He wasn’t asking whether his partner knew what he knew. He was asking: Can we know each other completely?

Though Prince’s vision was extraordinary, not even he could sustain it, in practice. His marriage to Garcia ended in divorce after the loss of their son; his second marriage also ended in divorce. Which brings us back to the question: What, in practice—and amid the chaos of modern life—is actually achievable? I have come to believe that what sustains intellectual intimacy is not a shared knowledge base or level of education but rather three elements operating together. When even one is missing, the whole thing may falter.

The first element is curiosity. Here, I don’t mean that people must be curious about the same things. Rather, each needs to show a willingness to care about what the other person deeply cares about. What are you reading? is a question about someone’s day. What are you enjoying about it? is a question about the person.

The second element is a shared language—the ability to pick up what the other person is putting down, without a decoder ring—meaning the shorthand that you use, the references that land, and the nuance that doesn’t need to be spelled out. In the field of rhetoric, this is described as a “discourse community,” a relationship between individuals that is solidified, in part, by their norms of communication.

The third is mental timing: having the same cadence of wit, the same processing speed, the ability to volley and return. This is what Prince showed off in “Love 2 the 9’s.” It’s what researchers studying interpersonal synchrony are now measuring at a biological level, because when people truly click, they’re literally falling into rhythm, matching heart rates and brain waves.

In musical performance, coherence doesn’t come from sameness but from attunement. Musicians listen for structure, timing, and possibility. They respond, adjust, and extend. They are, in a sense, thinking together. Relationships work the same way. What we experience as being “seen” is often a shared capacity to track and respond to each other’s signals. Two people can inhabit entirely different domains and still meet each other with immediacy, grasping nuance, appreciating enthusiasm, building on each other’s ideas rather than flattening them.

The real intellectual gap in relationships, then, isn’t between knowing ball or knowing Aristotle, to paraphrase Taylor Swift—because the issue isn’t whether your partner knows what you know. More important is the difference between disinterest and curiosity, between aloofness and care, between “You’re boring me” and “I don’t get it yet, but tell me more.”

Some people may think that worrying about intellectual compatibility is precious or elitist. But centuries of thinkers agree that minds matter, conversation matters, and being mentally alone with someone you share a life with is a particular kind of suffering worth taking seriously. My advice? Find a person who wants to hear about what you’re reading, not just someone who waits for you to close the book.

​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In The Atlantic’s November cover story, “Choose Your Overlord,” staff writer Josh Tyrangiel profiles Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who are in a race to control outer space. Tyrangiel writes that together, in fierce competition, “these two billionaires are in the early stages of a race to vertically integrate the galaxy—a process that involves rockets, moon landings, enormous satellite constellations, and space-based data centers running AI models fueled by computing power that no terrestrial supplier can match. Both say they hope to preserve human life from the specter of climate change and expand mankind’s understanding of the universe. Both would also like to dominate a market that, unlike every other market they’ve previously conquered, has no ceiling and few established rules.”

For most of human history, Tyrangiel writes, “the power to decide where a civilization went next belonged to governments, monarchs, or despots. It’s a measure of how much has changed that a retail executive from Seattle and a South African–born engineer are well positioned to exercise that power. Nobody voted for either of them. And they may be the only ones who can check the other’s power.”

But as Tyrangiel writes, one of them clearly has the upper hand. In 2025, Musk’s SpaceX launched 83 percent of the mass sent into orbit—about 10 times more than its nearest competitor, the Chinese government. His satellite company, Starlink, has 11,000-plus satellites, accounting for roughly two-thirds of all active spacecraft orbiting Earth.

Tyrangiel points out that America “needing Bezos’s extraordinary concentration of private power to mitigate Musk’s extraordinary concentration of private power is probably not what the Founders had in mind.” When Tyrangiel asked Senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, whether he trusted either man completely, Kelly replied, “Kind of a loaded question.” Kelly, Tyrangiel reports, says he wants SpaceX to “continue to be a successful company because it is in our national-security interest that that’s the case. I also want to see Blue Origin be successful.” Tyrangiel writes: “The pragmatist’s position, shared by most of the national-security community, is that one company capable of getting you to space is better than none, and two is better than one. But even if Bezos is the less mercurial billionaire, Blue Origin is not yet a reliable substitute for SpaceX. So the government can’t use Blue Origin as leverage.”

The government is not negotiating from a position of strength, but Tyrangiel writes, “Bezos and Musk have a shared vulnerability: Both say they would like to go to the moon—for their empires, for glory, and because their youthful love of space has never settled into something more rational. To put it in terms they and the president would all understand, the moon is leverage.” And in their race to the moon, Tyrangiel writes, “most people I spoke with have reached the same conclusion: On this, Blue Origin is ahead. It has completed thermal-vacuum testing on Blue Moon, and, as of August, its structure, propulsion, and avionics were fully assembled; it’s already communicating with NASA’s satellites and deep-space network … The crux of the difference is that Blue Origin—the smaller, slower company in need of a win—seems to have built a product to fit the brief, while Musk has built a giant rocket designed for his satellite business and his personal goal of deep-space travel to Mars. Making Starship work for the moon is like adapting a cargo ship to win a yacht race.”

Josh Tyrangiel’s “Choose Your Overlord” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

Press contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

At Café Soul, a semi-regular party in New York City, $30 buys you a chance to belt R&B hits, sip margaritas from commemorative glasses, try out Awkward Games’ icebreaker cards, and—as the ticket page promises—form “genuine connections.” When I arrived 45 minutes after the rooftop party started on a recent Saturday afternoon, the few 20- and 30-something guests were mostly sitting on mid-century-modern couches, looking at their phones. But Tionne Barmer, who dreamed up the event, promised me that, in two hours, the rooftop would be packed: People would be enjoying the Patrón-sponsored bar, trying the brown-sugar cold brew (underwritten by On the Way Coffee), using Awkward Games cards to skip small talk, and maybe even flirting. (The event was also sponsored by Tinder.) They’d have a chance to make genuine connections, which is what Barmer was really selling. “People will pay for the entertainment,” he said, “and, on the side, they get community.”

Barmer has always had a talent for bringing people together, and now he’s making a living out of it. Some people call this job “event curator”; others have started using the term community builder. People like Barmer are, in essence, professional scene-makers. They were student-body presidents, sorority leaders, slumber-party queens, that one guy in the friend group who threw the best parties—and now they organize knitting circles, silent reading parties, adult summer camps, run clubs, and life-story sharing sessions to help young adults find one another. They sell their guests the opportunity for friendship, and they sell brands access to the groups they’ve gathered, not on Instagram or TikTok, but in real life.

If Barmer and others like him can make this a full-time profession (he quit his finance job only when his side gig as a community builder could match that income), it’s in part because Americans are in desperate need of shindigs. As The Atlantic has reported, in the past three decades, pretty much every measure of socializing—hosting dinner parties, going on picnics, volunteering—has dropped by double digits; in 2023, only 4.1 percent of us managed to make it to a social event or host one on an average weekend or holiday. “Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them,” Ellen Cushing wrote in this magazine last year.

Planning a party is, after all, a lot of work. Umama Kibria, a co-founder of Play Social Club, grew up helping her father host picnics for their Desi community. He’d cater meals and create elaborate The Price Is Right–esque games. Although he sold tickets to cover the cost of the food, he’d spend his own money on the decor, activities, and prizes. Kibria saw how the events drained his energy and finances. When she graduated from college, she started hosting large gatherings of her own, including grown-up field days and her own Desi picnics. Unlike her dad, she charged enough to make a profit.

What really shocked her father, Kibria told me, was how she was able to find brand partners who’d contribute $10,000 sponsorships so that she could periodically host free events. Between ticket sales, affiliated codes, equity deals, and consulting gigs, she made her dad’s hobby her full-time job. If she provides her peers with the social life they crave, she realized, “people will pay.”

They really will, Joan Li, an associate principal of wellness-industry insights at the market-research firm Mintel, told me. Many Americans now see social connection as a purchasable good. Just as DoorDash offers food delivery for people who don’t have time or don’t want to cook, solo entrepreneurs and businesses offer social calendars. This so-called IRL economy is in some ways a reaction against the internet and the ills of the influencer economy: People want to get off their phones and go somewhere to make an actual friend. But the job of “community builder” is also an outgrowth of influencer culture, Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell who studies influencers, told me. Because social media is now saturated with creators monetizing their followers, anyone who can get people together offline and in-person could command a premium.

That’s part of the pitch that Pie (short for “People I Enjoy”), a new platform for hosts to advertise and monetize events, is making. “Think about the value of how much influencers get paid to make a video to, hopefully, get someone for three-to-five seconds in a feed, versus sticking someone IRL in front of a logo or a product for an hour. The value is so much higher there,” Nadya Okamoto, an influencer and a co-founder of Pie, told me. The thought of Michaels sponsoring knitting circles so that the company can stick its logo in front of people for longer might give some of us pause—it certainly bummed me out—but Pie, along with platforms such as Onbrand and Offline, which match brands with events to sponsor, is pushing to build a world in which socializing is also a marketing opportunity.

Right now, Pie offers participants in its Pie Creator Club, including Barmer, an average of $445 and up to $3,500 a month to organize gatherings. The company also co-hosted a dinner this summer at which community builders swapped best practices for “communitymaxxing.” It’s currently using venture capital to pay its creators, but long-term, Pie is wagering that businesses will pay community builders like they do online influencers, for access to their guests. And some brands are already betting on this new economy: Tinder launched an “Events” section of its app this past spring, and by the end of the year, plans to feature events in 75 cities, mainly through partnerships with party organizers like Barmer.

As I wandered around Café Soul, which was part of a series that Barmer had designed to get people off their phones, signs reminded guests to LIVE IN THE MOMENT. And as the party picked up, they were doing just that: Hundreds of people formed a dance circle, then opened it up for a man in head-to-toe stone-washed denim, who dropped it low, backed it up, and gave his new friends what may be one of the most electric performances of T-Pain’s “I’m Sprung” ever given at 3 p.m. on a Saturday. But people did also have their phones out to film themselves dancing and lip-synching; one guy in plaid culottes and tiny green sunglasses was filming on a tripod. These events still need to generate online content to be financially viable, Andrew Roth, a co-founder of Offline, told me. Most people find out about these communities through social media, and companies expect that any event they sponsor will generate posts featuring their products. Still, he said, influencers get paid millions of dollars to keep us on our phones—why not reward the hosts getting us (mostly) off them? Roth described a future in which “you already have your monthly book club, and it just so happens this one you’re going to get paid for.”

This proposition is akin to an older phenomenon—the Tupperware parties of the 1950s, Duffy said, when women hosted friends in their living room and exhibited the latest and greatest in food storage. Plenty of people have also paid to socialize at their country club or local Rotary chapter; others have found ways to turn their hobbies into a business, without a venture-backed app to help them do it. At its worst, a world in which a book club is sponsored by Barefoot Wine could make people feel like their every waking moment is a marketing opportunity, even more than they already do. When I played a round of icebreaker cards with two women—who had first met, they told me, at a makeup class at Nordstrom, hosted by another so-called IRL community called Girls That Gather—I had fun, but I felt a bit like I was inhabiting a simulacrum of “community.” Yet all the hosts I spoke with seemed like they were earnestly trying to make sure that their events did not feel that way.

Many of them asked me which communities I was a part of. I’d tell them about Sundays at church and Wednesday Bible study in my living room. A couple of them told me that they were essentially trying to build a secular community from the same template: Churches give people a physical place to repeatedly congregate in a large group setting, and also offer ways for smaller groups to gather throughout the week. Safi Aziz, another full-time community builder, told me he sees events as helping fill the gap left by the decline of public institutions. “If we’re no longer gathering as much over religion” or other organizational ties, he said, “all we really have left to gather over is common interest.” (In his case, that common interest is game nights, which he runs through his company, Joust.)

But unlike these IRL communities, church doesn’t promise a great time. Authentic communities can’t be optimized, because they’re fueled by friction: showing up when it is inconvenient; being kind to one another even when Barbara is being a pain in the neck. They build trust because they ask something of you, besides just money, as the price of admission.

So far, professional community builders mostly seem to be offering people an easy way to party—and thank God for that. Even if someone goes to an event and doesn’t connect with anyone, they’ve still gathered with a group of people that weekend. That is the first step of being part of a community, and something America certainly needs.

Villains, in 21st-century literature, are hard to come by. Very few novelists write real Bad Guys or build their books around clear struggles between good and evil—and with reason. Such storylines, when executed poorly, can easily become didactic; a villain can turn into a cartoon. Yet some of the most satisfying stories out there, the ones that people have adapted and retold for centuries, are tales of good versus evil: Paradise Lost, Le Morte d’Arthur, a decent chunk of the Brothers Grimm.

As recently as the mid-20th century, literary novelists were still writing evil characters: “Big Bads,” we might call them. Yet the gap between the sinister Cathy in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the somewhat redeemed version—the girl boss of the brothel, as The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz recently put it—in Zoe Kazan’s new Netflix adaptation indicates that writers are leery of villains now. Reading the canon suggests that this might foreclose on a rich vein of drama and meaning. So does reading the distinctly contemporary work of the Appalachian writer Madeline ffitch.

ffitch is a longtime environmental activist, and her 2019 debut novel, Stay and Fight, follows three women raising a child off the grid in eastern Ohio while battling a natural-gas company that becomes their nemesis. Still, though the company has a slimy functionary, it’s essentially an impersonal version of evil. But in her newly released follow-up, Avalon, Rise, ffitch gives her villain a face and a voice.

The novel is again set in Appalachian Ohio, in a small town where an internet-famous neo-Nazi has just moved. Its characters have to struggle against not only the extremist herself, but also her quickly spreading influence, while still dealing with their preexisting troubles, which include isolation, addiction, and one mother’s seeming compulsion to hit her child. These are serious matters—and yet some of the clearest influences in Avalon, Rise are children’s books. In fact, Pete Seeger’s Abiyoyo, the tale of a boy and his father who save their village from a giant, seems to be the book’s guiding star.

Avalon, Rise is a sophisticated novel, intellectually complex and slyly funny at every turn. Like Abiyoyo, it is also a very direct story about facing evil with courage. Avalon, Rise makes the case on nearly every page that opposing the Big Bad is necessary. But that basic principle, the book suggests, does not make standing up to those who would destroy a community easy. Indeed, the ever-shifting balance between clarity and complication is central to the novel.

ffitch is able to maintain this balance largely because she seems to have little interest in demonstrating purity—either her own or that of her characters. Avalon, Rise doesn’t care if its characters do the precisely correct thing. As a result, it achieves the rare feat of having a distinct sense of right and wrong, without ever becoming preachy or heavy-handed. It becomes an exploration of how confusing and hard it is to be good.

Abiyoyo is set in a village united, as one of Avalon, Rise’s characters puts it, by annoyance and fear. The annoyance is at the dad and son, who are such inconsiderate neighbors that the town exiles them; the fear is of Abiyoyo, a perhaps-mythical man-eating giant. But when Abiyoyo actually shows up one morning, the ostracized father-son duo comes up with a clever strategy to defeat him, saving the town and redeeming themselves in the process. All of these plot points—and really, these characters—appear in ffitch’s novel.

In Avalon, Rise, the village is Avalon, Ohio, which seems to be loosely based on the real town of Athens. Its menacing giant is white nationalism, embodied by a true believer named Stasia—the “Volk Mother” or “OdinistMama” online—who moves to Avalon and begins recruiting in its community. But rather than having one parent and a child to defeat the villain, ffitch fills Avalon, Rise with a sprawling, endearing, enraging group of characters who are, if not outcasts, distinctly at the town’s margins.

There’s Avalon’s social worker, who holds herself a bit apart from the community she serves; there’s the wishy-washy librarian who, by trying to agree with everyone she talks with, ends up going back constantly on her word; there are the anti-fascist organizers with bad attitudes and too many piercings. Over the course of the novel, which has the conviction of a manifesto but the relaxed, raucous narrative quality of a good shaggy-dog story, ffitch gets all of these characters to come together to deal not only with Stasia but also with the residents of Avalon who are willing, and in some cases eager, to enable her.

[Read: A diagnosis for social conflict that gets lost along the way]

Stasia’s leading enabler, Woody, is, perhaps counterintuitively, also Avalon, Rise’s moral center. What I mean is that he’s the character who struggles the hardest. He is a printmaker and an addict (any reader who was disappointed, as I was, by Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will get a more nuanced and less dramatic portrait of drug addiction in Appalachia here). His prized possession is a milk crate of children’s books—including, pointedly, Abiyoyo—that he refers to regularly as sources of artistic inspiration, comfort during withdrawal, entertainment for his 4- and 7-year-old nephews, and guidance for when he doesn’t know what to do.

Woody gets sucked into Stasia’s orbit after she commissions him to print flyers for her “European Heritage Rug Braiding” workshops. Stasia’s barn contains an old Vandercook, a 20th-century printing press that Woody reveres so much that he has “memorized its anatomy.” ffitch, who loves detailed terminology, luxuriates in Woody’s pleasure at just knowing “there was such thing as a half-­pica lever, a sliding knee stick, a slug cutter, a cylinder eccentric,” let alone using them. Stasia allows him access to the press, and dangles the possibility of giving it to him. In Woody’s imagination, owning it would give him a real life as an artist, which, in turn, might help him stay clean. This desire, along with his addiction itself, makes him highly susceptible to Stasia’s manipulation, even as his mother and best friend lead very different efforts to organize against her.

Woody’s mother, Eloise, is Avalon’s people-pleasing librarian, a lifelong liberal activist who believes in civil discourse above all. On Stasia’s arrival, though, her commitment to this value is immediately shaken by the more forceful resistance proposed by the novel’s ragtag group of anti-fascists, which includes Woody’s childhood best friend, Leroi—a sweet, earnest mama’s boy who dreams of getting out of Avalon and becoming a vagabond. The novel’s goals include bringing its Lerois and its Eloises together, prodding them to collaborate despite their many disagreements.

[Read: A biting satire about the idealistic left]

But the novel’s deeper effort is to use political work—an “ordinary and necessary” part of life, ffitch has written—and the dissidence and quandaries it creates, to ask that each of its characters be brave in their own way. In every case, this means dealing with Stasia. For Woody, it also means reckoning with addiction, and for Eloise, recognizing that her desire to be a nonjudgmental mother has led her to facilitating his drug abuse.

For Eloise’s older child, Emma, who has two young sons, it means admitting something even harder. ffitch is uncommonly good at writing, tenderly but without sentimentality, about people who both adore their children and make colossal errors in raising them. Emma, especially where her 7-year-old son, Martin, is concerned, falls into this category. Of their dynamic, ffitch writes, “Emma loved Martin helplessly. Yet, just as helplessly, she wanted to hit him”—and she does. It’s only toward the end of the book that Emma admits that hitting her son isn’t a maternal instinct but rather a sign that she, herself, needs significant help.

By braiding these stories, and many more, into the tale of Avalon defeating its giant, ffitch tells a layered, sophisticated story that expresses a clear, ethical point of view without hammering readers on the head. Not many novels for adults do this successfully, but in children’s literature, it is one of the standards for a great book. ffitch includes many in Avalon, Rise: Abiyoyo but also Frog and Toad, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, The Dead Bird. Each of these books demands that its characters face their situation with courage; each one takes something that seems simple—burying a bird, celebrating Hanukkah, all sorts of mundane tasks in Frog and Toad—and surrounds it with not just emotional complication but also mischief, humor, and delight.

So, too, with Avalon, Rise, as it demonstrates that white supremacists are unwelcome in town. What Avalon, Rise understands as well as the classics of children’s literature is that when you’re a small, fallible, confused person, everything is exciting but almost nothing is easy. What it understands as well as any great adult novel is how hard it is to get people to work together, no matter how high the stakes. In bringing these two clear yet complicated pieces of knowledge together, ffitch has written a remarkable book.

At one point or another, The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm construed each profession or art form she wrote about as a mug’s game. She asserted that the “crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights,” though she filled her work with Freudian tropes and paradigms. (She herself spent eight years in analysis.) The presumption of innocence underlying criminal trials had a “hollowness” that called the whole judicial system into question. Biography was a genre that Malcolm practiced and investigated, and she has now become a subject of it with the publication of Eve Sneider’s The Absent Woman. But all biography struck Malcolm as “transgressive,” an “impertinence”; its readers would be better off accepting that “if anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.” Which isn’t to say that readers should favor autobiography. The “original sin” of that undertaking is to wallow in “memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them.”

The quotations above come from five books produced over five decades, and this catalog of futility and ethical compromise does not even include Malcolm’s most famous animadversion, which she lobbed against her own craft and calling: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” These words open The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Malcolm’s account of the lawsuit brought by Jeffrey MacDonald (the murderer, an Army captain convicted of killing his wife and children) against Joe McGinniss (the journalist working on a book about him), who’d maintained MacDonald’s cooperation by writing him letters that conveyed the clear impression that McGinniss believed in his innocence. The book McGinniss finally published, Fatal Vision, squarely affirmed MacDonald’s guilt.

This literary treachery seemed to agitate Malcolm more than the slaughter of MacDonald’s family. It was all of a piece with her certainty that nonfiction writers made reality and fact as pliable as they are for attorneys facing off in a courtroom. Journalistic accounts of trials all impose falsely coherent plotlines on actuality. According to Malcolm, nonfiction is always aspiring to the authoritative “completeness” and seeming inevitability of fiction. (Notice that the notorious first line of The Journalist and the Murderer, which lays down a universal law, has a cadence similar to the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice.) In The Silent Woman (1994), her study of the ever-multiplying biographical literature about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Malcolm took things further: “The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.”

[David A. Graham: Janet Malcolm the magician]

Journalists were outraged by Malcolm’s account of MacDonald versus McGinniss not just because of what she included in the long New Yorker articles where The Journalist and the Murderer first took form, but also because of what she omitted: the fact that she herself was then embroiled in litigation launched by Jeffrey Masson, a flamboyant psychoanalyst whose professional adventures she had chronicled while massaging and repositioning interview quotations from him beyond accepted norms. She could produce tape recordings of most of the quotations in their raw form, but a handful of the more inflammatory ones were in written notes that she couldn’t locate; in the first of two trials, she was found guilty of libel.

Malcolm insisted that her adaptive techniques had once been “a commonplace of New Yorker nonfiction” composed by writers such as Joseph Mitchell, who brought his subjects to levels of articulateness they couldn’t reach by themselves. In an afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer, an appendage necessitated by the uproar over the New Yorker articles, she argued that “when a journalist undertakes to quote a subject he has interviewed on tape, he owes it to the subject, no less than to the reader, to translate his speech into prose.” This is at wild variance with all mainstream journalistic ethics. The written genre in which characters, for the reader’s convenience, speak better than they would in real life is, of course, the novel.

However much Malcolm acknowledged the queasiness she felt about her own participation in journalism, she barreled ahead. She could not have pulled off her mental acrobatics and compelling portraiture without a brilliant mind and a wickedly piercing style. During John Roberts’s Senate confirmation hearings in 2005, the “constant play of expression on his features put one in mind of nineteenth-century primers of acting in which emotions—pleasure, agreement, dismay, uncertainty, hope, fear—are illustrated on the face of a model.” The best of her observations merit something beyond Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: They’re not things oft thought but ne’er so well expressed; they’re things probably never before thought at all. Consider these remarks about having really good seats at Il Trovatore :

The inequality of audience experience is intrinsic to the performing arts and unique to them. Literature and painting and sculpture are mediums of equal opportunity. A rich reader’s experience of Anna Karenina is no more intense than a poor one’s. The hedge-fund owner and the secretary see exactly the same Raft of the Medusa. But only the hedge-fund owner gets to see the expression on Azucena’s face when she relives throwing the wrong baby into the fire.

Malcolm had an aphorist’s desire to turn anything she apprehended into an across-the-board truth. A steady snow of inclusivities—“every,” “all,” “we,” “always”—falls upon her pages:

Children are always feeling secretly ashamed or anxious.

All families of suicides are alike.

There is a law of human nature—let us call it the Confidant’s Law—that dictates that no secret is ever told to only one person; there is always at least one other person to whom we feel compelled to spill the beans.

One usually waits in vain for a single example to support these ostensibly omnipresent phenomena. And yet, Malcolm’s mordant power of tone makes a reader register and silently assent to a great deal of this ex cathedra stuff. Her style alone keeps her worthy of our attention. But the particular way she challenged assumptions of objectivity is what makes her a figure intriguing enough to merit her own biography. In her exposés of literary malpractice, she was unafraid to use some of the very manipulations she was decrying. The writs she issued to others were also blank checks made out to herself.

Sneider’s subtitle, The Genius of Janet Malcolm, makes one fear a book of fangirl gush, probably the last thing Malcolm herself would have wanted. One flinches further upon learning that Malcolm had invited Sneider to tea after she, then still a Yale undergraduate, curated an exhibition of Malcolm’s papers in the university’s Beinecke Library. But seven years after that tea, Sneider, now a contributor to The New York Review of Books, has produced a book that assembles the biographical facts about Malcolm with admirable brevity, if not always precision. As for her subject’s writing, Sneider more or less concurs with a widespread verdict: “Malcolm acolytes will tell you that she is everywhere and nowhere within her work.” If traditional literary biography seeks to illuminate the work through the life, this one mostly reverses direction. The Absent Woman is a play on the title of Malcolm’s Plath book, and a kind of challenge that Sneider issues to herself and to readers: Go find the person in the books she wrote.

Sneider’s voice is a lot breezier than Malcolm’s (whose isn’t?). The casual coarseness of her texting generation’s style (“pissing other people off,” “a little fucked up”) makes one imagine her blithely dropping crumbs on Malcolm’s carpet during that tea. Sneider does share a few basic techniques with her subject, such as taking the reader along on her research, making the work on the book part of the book itself. She also breaks into the first person (“I would be remiss not to mention”) when that seems useful.

Sneider tells us that Malcolm arrived in the United States, a Jewish Czech refugee, along with her parents in July 1939 (not a moment too soon), when she was almost 5 years old. Members of the Winn (originally Wiener) family assimilated with considerable speed and success, even as they remained closely tied to their fellow Czechs in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood; Jana, now Janet, continued to speak Czech with her parents. In 1951, she went off to the University of Michigan. The most surprisingly titled chapter in The Absent Woman is “The Humorist,” which covers Malcolm’s writing and editing for the school’s frolicsome undergraduate magazine, The Gargoyle. When Sneider mentions a later New Yorker colleague who said Malcolm “has not one drop of humor—not one,” she interprets the comment as “ironic,” but a reader of Malcolm’s work will find little to support such an interpretation. Cold wit abounds, but precious little warmth and laughter.

Before leaving Ann Arbor, Janet Winn married Donald Malcolm, her editorial predecessor at The Gargoyle. After graduation, the two moved to Washington, D.C., where both wrote for The New Republic, and a few years later to Manhattan, where each began a long association with The New Yorker. Now the mother of a young daughter, Malcolm wrote about shopping and interior design before becoming the magazine’s photography critic. Sneider observes that Malcolm’s “writing on photography could be read as a commentary on her own craft. She was fascinated by the medium’s quest for realism, by its murky relationship to truth-telling.” Donald died young, in 1975, by which time Janet had already begun an affair with Gardner Botsford, another New Yorker editor. She insisted to William Shawn, the magazine’s top editor, that Botsford continue to edit her stories even after she married him.

Sneider properly gives a great deal of attention to Malcolm’s style, characterizing it as “terrifyingly sharp,” “commanding,” and “cutting.” There is such a subzero severity to it that on the rare occasions when Malcolm uses an exclamation point, it’s as if someone else has plunked an emoji onto the page. One friend of hers noted that “the impersonality of how she writes is really the personality.” But Malcolm saw even the chilly projection of impersonality as just another self-interested construction. As she put it in The Silent Woman, “writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness. The pose of fair-mindedness, the charade of evenhandedness, the striking of an attitude of detachment can never be more than rhetorical ruses.”

Malcolm affected these postures herself, and on occasion she could be almost cruel in the pursuit of some small thematic end. In The Silent Woman, she describes a visit to the home of one source, an elderly man who decades earlier had spoken with Plath the night before she died. Her prolonged description of the house’s awful filth and hoardings is apparently justified by how it “stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing”—namely, the need to rid one’s “vastly overfilled mind” of all but the essential points before starting. One has to ask whether this famous scourge of nonfiction’s distortions didn’t sometimes use metaphor only to crush reality beneath the gallop of her own hobbyhorses.

[From the April 2004 issue: Sylvia Plath, domesticated goddess]

If Malcolm, who died in 2021, had a “late style,” it was somewhat looser, less guarded. In her 70s, widowed and living by Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, she continued to make and exhibit collages in which text and photographic images sometimes combined in a process vaguely akin to the one she uses in Still Pictures (2023), a posthumously published memoir that allowed Malcolm to approach her own memories obliquely, through family photographs. Those physical objects seem as if they should offer factuality, or at least clues that unassisted memory cannot. But like letters and trial transcripts and so many tools of the trades that Malcolm scrutinized, the pictures sometimes let her down. Examining one snapshot of her very young self, taken several years before her first conscious memory, she writes, “No feeling of identification stirs as I look at her round face and thin arms and her incongruously assertive pose.”

The profile writing that she collected in Nobody’s Looking at You (2019)—which includes portrayals of the pianist Yuja Wang, the clothing designer Eileen Fisher, and the three sisters running Manhattan’s Argosy Book Store—tended toward the gentle and appreciative and even the self-mocking. (In the Fisher portrait, she hears herself “babbling about the ethical dilemmas of journalism.”) These articles don’t always go very deep; there’s no mystery to solve or fraud to expose. They come from a writer whose incandescent energy has subsided to a more ordinary professional level.

Sneider herself admits that Malcolm “threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall” when trying to justify her tampering with Jeffrey Masson’s interview quotes. Even admirers of Malcolm will concede this and likely wish that Sneider herself were more skeptical, less tolerant, than she appears to be of some of Malcolm’s peculiar behaviors and explanations. A year after the second trial, as Sneider summarizes it, “Malcolm’s two-year-old granddaughter Sophy pulled an inconspicuous red notebook off a bookshelf in her country home that, at long last, contained the handwritten notes she had been missing throughout the lawsuit. Three of the five quotes Masson took issue with were now more solidly on the record.” She seems to accept this story at face value, and perhaps it’s true. But if you had been involved in the fight of your life for what Sneider rightly describes as “twelve long, trying, tedious years,” wouldn’t you have at least run your hand along every bookshelf in your city apartment and country house to make sure that you hadn’t inadvertently put the crucial missing notes somewhere in your library? Without any expression of unease, Sneider informs us that Malcolm “opted not to part with the little red notebook” when she sent her papers to Yale; she instead supplied “photocopies of the relevant pages.”

Sneider correctly cites “control” as a core feature of Malcolm’s presentation, because at least the appearance of control (and its resultant authority) remains even when Malcolm is engaged in small fiddlings and concealments, or in her signature overstated generalizations. (Pronouncements that Sneider calls “bold” might better and more often be labeled “bald.”) Malcolm learned to discard one persona for another not only on the page but during her great legal crisis. Long after her courtroom troubles were over, she paid tribute to Sam Chwat, the acting-and-speech coach who helped her achieve a measure of vindication at the second Masson trial, in 1994, where she was cleared of libeling the psychoanalyst. She regretted how, at the first trial, well trained in the “accustomed New Yorker manner”—reticent and remote—she “came across as arrogant, truculent, and incompetent.” For the second trial, Chwat got her to address the jury, instead of Masson’s lawyer, when she was being questioned. He also orchestrated a makeover of her wardrobe, moving her from “skirts or trousers with jackets in black or subdued colors” into “pastel-colored dresses and suits, silk stockings and high heels, and an array of pretty scarves.”

The metamorphosis didn’t just succeed legally; it appealed to Malcolm in a visceral way. Chwat’s “gentle correction of my self-presentation at trial,” she wrote in a New York Review of Books essay, “took me to unexpected places of self-knowledge.” It convinced her that she could perform the tricks whose exposure continued to be her life’s work.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Journalist and the Manipulator.”

Photographs by Lesha Berezovskiy

Updated at 5:24 p.m. ET on October 14, 2026

I. 2,087 Questions

The Pale of Settlement is teeming with ghosts, and why shouldn’t it be? At the turn of the 20th century, some 5 million Jews lived in this region between the Baltic and Black Seas, and by 1945, almost all of them had been murdered. If they slouch now like scarecrows over the tilled black earth, or float between wooden shacks, or even peer over the shoulders of the babushkas selling neat piles of used clothes in front of the bus station in Rivne, this is to be expected. What I hadn’t quite anticipated was just how many questions they had left unanswered—2,087 to be exact. A long list of queries covering nearly every particular of how they lived their lives, from circumcision to shiva, sat on my lap as I stared out the window on a 10-hour car ride from Warsaw to Kyiv, through the heartland of what was once the Pale.

31. Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman steps on the spot where a mare has rolled around, she will carry her child for 12 months?

269. With what do people frighten a child so that he will go to sleep more quickly?

1,280. Is it a custom to drink red liquor if the bride turns out to be a virgin?

1,281. Is it a custom to eat hard cheese if she is a virgin? What does this signify?

1,714. Do people ask for forgiveness from a dead child?

I was on my way to visit the archives, once thought lost, of the early-20th-century Jewish writer Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport, better known by his nom de plume, S. An‑sky. He was the author of this insanely granular questionnaire. I could have spent my car ride reading any number of other works by An‑sky, who, among his many eccentricities, had a touch of graphomania. His collected writing comprises 15 volumes. He left behind thousands of pages of diaries, essays, short stories, and plays, including his best-known work, The Dybbuk, a masterpiece of Yiddish theater. But I decided on the long list of questions because An‑sky saw them as the culmination of his life’s greatest endeavor: an ecstatic, obsessive attempt to wrap his arms around an entire people just as it was disappearing.

These 2,087 questions were the first part of his Jewish Ethnographic Program⁠—⁠and the only part that was published, in 1914, under the title Der mentsh, which simply means “The Person.” (An-sky’s introduction and questionnaire were translated into English by Nathaniel Deutsch and published in his book The Jewish Dark Continent.) “The Person” was the beginning of a survey that An-sky hoped would cover “every aspect” of Jewish life. “Death, life after death, demonology. Holidays, everyday life, abstract questions,” An‑sky wrote to a potential donor. “In short, we’ll have over 10,000 questions.” Looking out the window, I kept imagining a poor surveyor trudging through the mud of a shtetl with a clipboard, asking, Do you have a couple of months to spare?

Some of the questions are open-ended (897. How did people treat an old maid in the past, and how do they do so now?), but most are hilariously leading. Why would you ask, for example, whether children ever engaged in pranks like gluing their rabbi’s beard to the table when he fell asleep (484) if you didn’t already have intimate knowledge of such a beard gluing? In fact, An‑sky had done his research. The questionnaire was the fruit of an ambitious ethnographic expedition that he’d carried out from the summer of 1912 to the onset of World War I, two years later.

This sort of ethnography is now a mostly outdated social science, a relic of an imperial age in which certain peoples, such as the Inuit, were unthreatening and near-extinct enough to be placed behind glass in a museum. But An‑sky’s was a kind of self-ethnography, a work of salvage and redemption. He was born into the shtetl world in 1863 and grew up in the town of Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus (Marc Chagall’s hometown as well). Raised in poverty by a single mother who ran a tavern, An‑sky rebelled against tradition. In his late teens, he was expelled from a nearby shtetl for trying to persuade the young yeshiva boys he was tutoring to abandon their studies and become freethinkers. When he finally left the Pale, in his 20s, he intended never to look back. He began a peripatetic life as a revolutionary, working in salt mines in the Donbas region alongside Russian miners, living in Berlin and Paris and Bern, developing his writing and his political commitment to radical reform. This is what led him over time to ethnography, which was a way of elevating cultures that were being trampled by the Russian empire.

Only in his 40s did An‑sky realize that the insular but vibrant world of the Jews could be the subject of such ethnography as well. “There is no people that has talked about itself as much and knows itself as little as the Jews,” he wrote in his 1908 treatise “Jewish Folk Art.” He may also have been thinking about himself, and the “emptiness” he frequently described in his letters. In 1912, he secured funding for an expedition from a financier, Baron Vladimir Gintsburg, and set out with a photographer and a musicologist—a small team that would grow the following year—to explore the Pale. Slogging through mud “so deep you could die” (as the Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik put it), he gathered all he could, including songs—he brought along an Edison recording device that could capture sound on wax cylinders, making An‑sky the Alan Lomax of the shtetl.

The final tally of what the expedition managed to collect after two years—visiting more than 60 towns and villages—gives a sense of An‑sky’s intense ambition: some 1,800 folktales, 1,500 songs, 1,000 melodies, 100 historical documents, 500 manuscripts, 700 sacred objects, and 500 wax cylinders of music.

An‑sky didn’t intend for his collection to be a time capsule. He saw it as raw material that could help Jews build a secular national identity for themselves. But a time capsule is exactly what it became. Because in the years that immediately followed, the armies of Russia and Germany clashed in that mud, and each took its wrath out on the shtetl Jews, killing more than 100,000 of them; because Jews would leave the Pale after 1917 for cities such as Moscow, Berlin, and New York; because during World War II, the Nazis would bury what was left of this way of life in an archipelago of mass graves. What An‑sky ended up collecting became not the mortar for building a modern Jewish culture, but shards from a now-extinct civilization.

The archives of this expedition had essentially vanished for most of the 20th century, and were rediscovered only after the end of the Cold War—mostly in St. Petersburg institutions and Ukraine’s national library. Now the country is in the fourth year of what Ukrainians uniformly refer to as the “full-scale invasion” (“war” would imply mutual aggression). With Kyiv under bombardment, a good number of the An-sky materials are again endangered.

I was traveling there to see what remained. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a century-old organization now based in New York City that works to preserve Yiddish culture, had come to an agreement with the Ukrainian government to digitize An‑sky’s papers. Jonathan Brent, a historian and the organization’s head, had invited me to tag along with him and his chief of staff on their trip to the country to make it official.

There was a terrible feeling of continuity, heading into Ukraine right now for this purpose. An‑sky was desperate to save all that was strange and beautiful about his people; Ukrainians have been dying for four years by the tens of thousands for largely the same reason. They are fighting to preserve their autonomy, which includes the uniqueness of their national and cultural identity—a front line that An‑sky would recognize.

As he began his expedition at the end of June 1912, An‑sky wrote a letter to Gintsburg, his benefactor, in which he felt compelled to spill out his feelings: “I am very nervous, as if standing before the great unknown. How will this all turn out?” Would these villagers regard him as an interloper, or one of their own? “And yet, at the same time, I have a great feeling of joy in my soul, that the most treasured dream of my life is beginning to come to fruition.”

II. A Bird and a Cat

When I strode into the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, I assumed that the traces of An‑sky’s expedition were mine for the finding if I just asked nicely. I was wrong. What I discovered instead was the shabby attic fortress of the Judaica department and its head, Tetyana Batanova, who greeted me with pinched lips and a look of exasperation before I even opened my mouth.

I had originally thought the An‑sky archives would be housed in the main branch of the Vernadsky, which I’d ogled online before arriving in Kyiv. This giant modernist slab of a building, which opened in 1989, seems frozen in late-Communist style, with rows of card-catalog drawers and socialist realist murals depicting proletarians plowing fields. In fact, the An‑sky material, along with the rest of the Judaica collection, was located in a neoclassical relic, one of the original library buildings in the city’s center. This was a musty edifice whose interior was painted a faded sky-blue. A grandfather clock sat at the top of a grand stairway, chiming every hour, beneath portraits of the library’s elaborately bearded founders.

The Judaica department, tucked away on the top floor, was almost cozy by comparison. Houseplants crowded the windows. As I entered, along with the YIVO contingent, an air-raid siren went off. The Ukrainians in the room took out their phones, as though consulting a weather app. “There are 50 Shaheds, but not near us,” one of the librarians said, tucking her phone back into her pocket. Drones rather than missiles. The tour continued.

The reason for Batanova’s wariness of YIVO—and, by extension, me—seemed obvious. As the head of the Judaica department since 2019, she was protective of this material, which had barely survived the 20th century, and she did not seem all that excited to share it with outsiders who presumed they were its saviors. Brent saw his claim to An‑sky’s papers as part of his organization’s mission to preserve Jewish heritage. Batanova saw the same papers as integral to Ukrainian heritage. These were not easily reconcilable positions. But Batanova’s reaction was more than just defensiveness. I also picked up another, conflicting emotion as she led us through the dilapidated stacks: shame.

One look at the large water stains on the ceiling—the roof had been leaking for years, Batanova told us—made it clear that the situation for these thousands of precious books and manuscripts was not great. Century-old newspapers were stacked on top of one another, moldering on shelves that seemed about to topple over. Batanova pointed out where flimsy blue and red construction-paper folders that held the An‑sky material sat in the open. The building lacked any climate control. In the winter, the temperature inside dipped well below freezing, but that was better than the summer, Batanova said with a sigh. Humidity was the enemy of this yellowing paper. As we walked through, Brent muttered, “What a fucking shande.”

Wartime had not helped. In the fall of 2022, two cruise missiles slammed into the park across the street and a nearby intersection, killing several people and shaking the building. In early September, a missile struck within a few blocks of the archive’s many vulnerable windows. But limited resources had long been a problem. A researcher who worked there in the 1990s told me she’d been warned that she should bring her own toilet paper. I assumed she was describing a post-Soviet situation of economic hardship, but when I asked Batanova where the restroom was, she pulled a packet of Kleenex from her purse and handed it to me. As part of the deal with the Ukrainians, YIVO was going to pay the library—Brent wouldn’t tell me how much. In short, Batanova knew she needed help, but she didn’t want to need help.

Yet it was a miracle that anything had survived at all. In an academic article, Batanova’s predecessor had described (with Slavic understatement) the “misadventures” of this archive. In 1929, when nearly 30 percent of Kyiv’s population was Jewish, an Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture was established with the goal of collecting every Yiddish periodical, book of poetry, newspaper, and manuscript it could get its hands on throughout the new Soviet empire. By 1934 it had more than 100 employees and housed a quarter of a million volumes—including the contents of five suitcases and boxes that An‑sky had left in his will to be preserved. Then, in 1936, as part of the Great Purge, Stalin shut the institute down and executed its founding director. Parts of the collection were carted away by the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, or burned in the courtyard.

Not long afterward, the Nazis showed up. The occupiers looted what was left of the collection, which had been moved to the Vernadsky, stripping out valuable items to send to Berlin. After the war, the degradation continued. Stalin’s 1949 anti-cosmopolitan campaign targeted Jews and Jewish institutions, and led to the killing of most of the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish cultural figures. Around this time, almost all of the Judaica collection was taken out of the library and hidden in the dank catacombs of the medieval Vydubetsk monastery, where it remained until 1968. From there, it was moved into a private basement, languishing until it was discovered in the 1990s and eventually transferred back to the Vernadsky.

Misadventures, indeed. After the YIVO folks left, I was alone with Batanova and her staff of four. Letting their guard down slightly, they began showing me An‑sky items. In one folder were some drafts of short stories in his handwriting, including “A goyisher kop,” a 1912 tale of a Jewish man who attempts to assimilate and pass as a Christian. An‑sky’s neat Cyrillic cursive slanted across long, thin strips of paper. The folders were full of such strips, pages that seem to have been sliced in half, apparently his preferred writing material. His signature was at the bottom of one page, with its idiosyncratic hyphen. (No one knows for certain where the hyphen came from; one of the many reasons An‑sky offered throughout his life was that it was originally a printer’s typo he’d found charming.)

What I really wanted to see were notes from the expedition, but every request seemed to meet Batanova’s resistance. When I mentioned this afterward to people familiar with the library, I was told that a Soviet attitude still prevailed in such institutions; the default was to withhold information. I started throwing more darts, asking for random folders. I saw some strips on which An‑sky had jotted down legends he had heard about the Baal Shem Tov, the mystical 18th-century founder of Hasidism. These were surely from the expedition. One folder revealed a long numbered list of signs that would indicate the Messiah had arrived—including that children would spontaneously clasp hands and start to dance.

I asked to see the wax cylinders and Batanova said no, they were too delicate. At this point I started to worry that coming all the way to Kyiv had been a mistake—if there were ghosts here, they were definitely in those cylinders. When I had spoken with Lyudmila Sholokhova, the musicologist who’d helped discover the abandoned recordings in the early 1990s, she described the first time she heard them as a moment of total awe. “I still remember the shock when actually hearing the voices and laughing and coughing. It was super exciting. People would introduce themselves, saying their name and how old they are, and then they would start to sing.”

But Batanova said that every time the original cylinders were played, they degraded. The best she could do was bring me one of the canisters in which they were packaged. I gazed into the darkness of the empty beer-can-size receptacle with EDISON written on the side in large letters, next to a photo of the inventor. This was what anticlimax looked like.

What about some of the pinkassim that An‑sky had collected? These were local record books, some of which went back hundreds of years. The historians I’d talked with before I left for Ukraine told me they were probably the most precious items I could see at the library. Batanova brought out three from the town of Berdichev, part of the 109 in the collection. The pages were covered in calligraphic Hebrew script. One book was from a “Brotherly Love Society,” which a group of tailors established in the mid-19th century. It included bylaws and some fantastic illustrations, among them a drawing of a lion wrestling a snake.

The reading room was about to close for the day. As Batanova began gathering up the folders, a photograph slipped out of one of them. It was of An‑sky—a strange picture. He is standing in a street, squinting into the sun, wearing a black coat and vest. His salt-and-pepper goatee, thick swept-back hair, and dreamy look give him the appearance of a Jewish Don Quixote. But the strangest thing about the photo is that he is cradling a cat in his arms while a bird is sitting on his shoulder. Everyone, even these two enemies, looks copacetic and calm.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Judith Shulevitz on Ukraine’s “zombie history”]

III. A Severed Finger

Somehow this photo of An‑sky managed to make me forget my frustration, because it revealed something of his magic. He got people (and apparently animals) to relax in his presence. Those who traveled with him from shtetl to shtetl said he was often mistaken for a holy man. He was 48 when the expedition began but looked like he was in his 60s, which, as one of his biographers pointed out to me, was actually a benefit: Being preternaturally aged was a sign among rabbis of God’s grace.

An‑sky lived a vagabond existence from the time he was a teenager. “I have neither a wife, nor children, nor a house, nor even an apartment, nor belongings, nor even any settled habits,” he once admitted. On the expedition, he developed a method for quickly gaining trust. He would show up at synagogues and study houses to pray with the local men, disarming them. A crowd would usually gather around him after the service and then follow him to the local inn where the expedition members were staying. Abraham Rekhtman, who joined the group in its second year, recorded his memories nearly 50 years later, describing how, “over a glass of tea or, more often than not, a shot of liquor and a bagel for a snack, An‑sky would at last ask questions.” On his long strips of paper, he would jot down stories and sayings and local legends.

His most successful technique, however, was to bring out the phonograph. The shtetl folk may have heard of such machines, but most had not seen one before. An‑sky would demonstrate by recording a familiar song but coughing or laughing or making a mistake halfway through. He would then play the cylinder back and watch the mouths drop as they heard the recital, coughs and all. This was enough to break the ice, and men would then offer up wedding songs, lullabies, and wordless melodies called nigunim. I’ve now heard dozens of these digitized recordings, and they are eerie and sublime and a little sad. To take one example, Shloyme Kulish, a 24-year-old shopkeeper from Ludmir, was recorded singing on July 17, 1913. For 36 seconds, you can hear him lose himself in a song that sounds, as many of them do, halfway to a sob: Oh dey dey mama mey / Oh dey dey mama mey.

An‑sky was particularly interested in healers and exorcists, mostly older women, who seemed to hold a special power in every town and village. Rekhtman described them in his memoir as performing “magic with knives, socks and combs; they poured wax and poached eggs and knew hundreds of ways to cure a patient.” They also closely guarded the secrets of their spells, amulets, and remedies. An‑sky would often invent a tale of catastrophic bad luck, explaining that he had once been a rich man—and now look at him! He could pay to reverse the curse. The healer would usually pity him and oblige, for a fee. The incantation would then get written down and added to the collection.

Out of an intense desire to save all that he was seeing, An‑sky also started to gather artifacts, whether intricately embroidered kippahs or ritual objects such as the silver plaques used in synagogues to indicate east, the direction of prayer. The pinkassim I saw fell into this category. I also saw an album he’d made that included pages from illustrated Passover Haggadahs; some of these booklets dated back to the 16th century. No manner of ephemera was too small for him. Somewhat blasphemously, he even collected kvitlekh, the little notes left on the graves of famous Hasidic rabbis by people asking for intercession on their behalf. When young Jewish men were called up to serve in the czarist army, they sometimes tried to avoid the draft by cutting off a finger. But they usually saved these, because Jewish law demands that a body be buried intact. An‑sky met an old man in Proskurov who sold him his own finger, severed when he was a teenager. It was to be displayed in a planned ethnographic museum.

An-sky managed to persuade people to part with their songs and community records and even fingers not just because he was charming or because he could pay well—though both were true. I imagine that people felt safe with him because they sensed that he was recovering pieces of himself. There aren’t too many firsthand accounts of An‑sky doing his collecting, but I like what this little tidbit from Shmuel Shrayer, a member of the expedition, reveals: “Our phonograph stood in the corner and recorded the Hasidic melodies with all the ‘bimbumim.’ Sometimes An‑sky would get into the groove and he would sing along like one of them.”

IV. Sem Sorok

On my second morning in Ukraine, I woke up to a video of a buzzing kamikaze drone careening into the side of a building in the center of Lviv, exploding in a bloom of flames and debris. The attack had taken place the previous day and nearly destroyed the city’s historic archive. The sirens I had heard while touring the Judaica collection were part of Russia’s biggest air assault on Ukraine since the start of the invasion, involving nearly 1,000 drones and 34 missiles. Lviv’s archive, which caught fire, holds some of the oldest documents relating to Ukrainian history, including three 12th-century manuscripts composed on birch bark.

I happened to have an appointment with Anatolii Khromov, the head of the Central State Historical Archives, who showed up with his tie loosened and nervously sucking on a cigarette. The Lviv attack had left him in shock, he said. We met on the outskirts of Kyiv, where the country’s main archives are kept, and he pointed to an enormous construction site nearby, where an underground bunker was being built to safeguard the collection. “We need to build faster,” he said.

Later, in the center of the medieval Kyiv neighborhood of Podil, I noticed a small tower of wooden panels protecting a statue from shrapnel. Peeking through the cracks, I saw the bronze face of the Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. For Ukrainians, the stakes in this conflict are nothing less than their survival as an intact culture. Russia is not just a military aggressor; its invasion is premised on the idea that Ukraine doesn’t even exist.

Oksana Semenik, a young art historian, has made it her mission to “decolonize” Ukrainian art, using social media and podcasts to revive the works of forgotten Ukrainian artists, but also to reclaim cultural figures such as the painter Kazimir Malevich, who has long been considered Russian despite his Ukrainian roots. In Ukrainian House, an enormous concrete structure once known as the Lenin Museum that felt like the inside of a missile silo, she showed me around an exhibit of early-20th-century modernist paintings by Ukrainian women. Semenik seemed to apologize for the sparseness of the paintings and drawings. “We are lucky to have what we have,” she said. Most of these painters’ work was suppressed or destroyed during the Soviet period.

Her desperation to salvage Ukrainian culture is not that far off from An‑sky’s efforts to rescue his own. “With every old man who dies, with every small-town fire, with every exile, a piece of our past is lost, and the most beautiful expressions of traditional life, with its customs, traditions, and beliefs, disappear,” An‑sky wrote in the foreword to his questionnaire. When I mentioned this parallel to her, Semenik stopped walking and looked at me intensely. “When I was young, it shocked me whenever I thought about the Jews who once lived here,” she said. “The idea that a whole people could just disappear. Could a people just disappear?”

Despite a history of murderous anti-Semitism on the part of Ukrainian nationalists, the country’s current vision of national identity is a pluralistic one that includes Jews—such as Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s wartime president. Semenik told me about a new show she was curating for Ukrainian House about Chernobyl, with the goal of changing the perception that the city is defined only by the nuclear disaster that occurred there. It was also once a major spiritual center of Hasidism.

Seeing Ukrainian history through a Jewish lens means clashing with some patriotic narratives. On his expedition, An‑sky collected traumatic stories about 17th-century massacres carried out by the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which killed tens of thousands of Jews. Many shtetls preserved similar legends about a local couple about to be married who were murdered together by Khmelnytsky’s men, and whose common grave became a talisman. But for Ukrainians, Khmelnytsky is no villain. He led an uprising in 1648 that established the Cossack Hetmanate, the first independent Ukrainian state. A region of the country is named after him, and an enormous statue of him on a rearing horse stands in the center of Kyiv. My hotel was on Khmelnytsky Street.

When I returned to the Judaica reading room the next day, Batanova had warmed a bit. She even let me see the wax cylinders after I put my hands together in supplication. I went down to another, freezing room in the Vernadsky; signed a number of ledger books so that I could be granted admittance; and then saw dozens of smooth black tubes, kept in the kind of wooden crates in which you might store paint cans.

I asked Batanova whether her family and friends thought it was strange that, as an ethnic Ukrainian, she had devoted her life to Jewish culture, becoming a teacher of Yiddish and a keeper of this Judaica collection. Yes, she said, some members of her family did think it was pretty odd. An encounter with Yiddish as a student had changed her life. After years of trying to master German and failing, she took a Yiddish class. It was “like my language,” she said. “I understand the humor and the pain of this language. It’s in its structure. It’s in everything.” She smiled. She also felt a kinship between Yiddish and Ukrainian, two languages that she learned had both been dismissed by Russian imperial officials as zhargon, or “jargon”: disposable dialects.

Jewishness was part of Ukrainianness, she insisted. It shows up everywhere. In the 2000s, she traveled all over Ukraine to explore Jewish cemeteries, reading the lost histories of those towns on the tombstones. She also found artifacts with “Hebrew words or sayings incorporated in local Ukrainian.” Batanova told me about a dance that is popular at Ukrainian weddings, Sem Sorok, which sounds like traditional Jewish klezmer music—even though the people dancing in the middle of a circle holding a handkerchief between them have no idea about its origins. Sem Sorok means “7:40”; this was the name given to a commuter train that once arrived daily at that time in Odesa, bringing Jewish merchants home from all over the country. On YouTube, I found a video of a Ukrainian teenager with a blue mohawk breakdancing to the tune.

V. A Lullaby

On my third and last day in Kyiv, the archive began to satisfy my demands that it speak to me. This was not a foregone conclusion, even now that I had Batanova’s help; so much had gotten lost and scattered over time, and An‑sky’s expedition itself had been cut short by war. Rekhtman, the member of the group who later wrote a memoir, remembered all he had to leave behind when he fled rampaging Ukrainian militias in 1915. “I did not manage to take along with me the great collection of ethnographic pictures (approximately 1,500), as well as the few hundred journals containing notes on the expedition. Everything remained in my hometown Proskurov,” he wrote, and the material “vanished” during the anti-Jewish violence that convulsed Ukraine after World War I.

I was operating somewhat blindly in this huge archive, and my requests to see more and more items in the hope that An-sky’s expedition might come into view were met with some distress. “How long are you in Kyiv?” a few of the librarians asked me, anxiously. Soon I came across what appeared to be a dirty little saying jotted down in a notebook: “When I become drunk from the liquor, a pretty girl is essential” (this sounds funnier in Yiddish, because the words for “drunk,” shiker, and “essential,” iker, rhyme). Then I began opening folders that contained hundreds of pages of what appeared to be lyrics, which one of the expedition’s musicologists had neatly transcribed in small notebooks. Immediately, I encountered yearning. One song was attributed to a 24-year-old man named Dovid Keller:

Ach, there in the woods stands a tree,
The tree is bent and stooped
And there and there stands a lover
With two eyes filled with tears

Ach, there and there stands a vineyard
The vineyard has not yet been reaped
I wasted the years of my youth
Like a gambler with playing-cards

A gambler who plays, plays to win
Plays his cards with the goal of a win
I have lost the years of my youth
I will never win them again.

There were a number of lamentations like this: songs of longing, of lost love. And a few truly tragic and disturbing ballads, such as one that seemed like it could have been sung by Johnny Cash, about a boy who follows a girl he loves “one nice night on a summer’s day” and demands to know if she will marry him. Her parents forbid the match:

As soon as he heard this,
He got very upset
He took out a revolver
And shot her on the spot.

When he shot her like that
She fell like a stone
He then turned the gun around
And shot himself alone.

I also liked the lullabies, because I could picture a mother or father rocking a baby to them. This one, a lullaby within a lullaby, was attributed to a man named Hersh Perlokh Kaliker:

In the Holy Temple in a corner
The widow Bas Tzion sits alone
She rocks her only son, Yidel
And sings him a beautiful lullaby:

La la la Yidel’e, when you become a rich Yidel’e
You should remember this little song:
Raisins and almonds, that will be your trade,
Sleep, my dear Yidel’e, sleep. Sleep, dear Yidel’e, sleep.

Here was the treasure I was after, distinct voices from that lost, muddy world. (The translator Rose Waldman helped me reveal more of their color.) They should have been strange and unfamiliar, but they weren’t really. The emotions were so everyday, so known. I’m sure every culture that ever was had versions of songs carrying these sentiments—the desire to matter, to find love requited, to get a baby to fall asleep.

An‑sky didn’t focus on the universal, though. What felt exhilarating to him about his discoveries in each of these shtetls (“The happiness I feel from this work is limitless,” he wrote) were the inventive ways Jews confronted the human condition—all those ditties and amulets and dirty jokes. I looked through a collection of the photographs taken on the expedition, the originals of which are in St. Petersburg: a man transporting matzah on his back in a large wicker basket. A circle of schoolchildren during recess. A rabbi, with his long white beard, lying down for a nap. Taken by the photographer Solomon Yudovin, these images are incredible. But they don’t move me in the same way as the songs, because the photos are passive; they tell us what people wore, how they worked, and how deep that mud actually was. But folk culture is active—the record of how grief could transform into the stitch on a white burial shroud, how joy could turn into a rhyme belted out by children to accompany the skipping of stones across a lake.

When An‑sky was in his 20s, working in the mines of the Donbas, he began writing down the songs that miners invented to pass the time. Even though these men had been uprooted from their villages—“some kind of nomadic tribe, torn away from one shore but not having reached the other”—they were meeting their new reality by generating new culture, an act of adaptation. When he finally returned to the shtetls on his expedition, this was what he understood ethnography to be: capturing the product of this living process. Never given to understatement, An‑sky said that he was gathering nothing less than “another Torah, an Oral Torah,” one that was “on par with the Book, with the great Written Torah.” What Jews normally called “oral Torah” referred to the history of rabbinic interpretation and reinterpretation of the biblical laws, recorded in works such as the Talmud. An‑sky used the term to refer to something else entirely, created by “the people, themselves, especially the common folk.” This oral Torah “reflects the same beauty and purity of the Jewish soul, the gentleness and nobility of the Jewish heart, the height and depth of Jewish thought.”

What I’d finally seen at the Vernadsky were remnants of this Torah. Batanova, who wore white gloves as she carefully flipped each page, certainly would understand this. YIVO would as well, because this justified the great effort of digitizing it all. It suddenly seemed right that the transcription of a song sung more than 100 years ago and preserved in a little blue notebook should be the subject of such competing attentions. When I made my way down the linoleum hallways of the library for the last time, I had a strange, An‑sky-inspired urge: to go back and kiss the thin pages I’d just seen. Every Jew knows, after all, that when you come across a Torah, this is what you do.

VI. The Tightrope Walker

An‑sky wrote The Dybbuk while on the road, in trains and horse-drawn carts, pouring into it the same curiosities and artifacts that went into his 2,087 questions. I chose to read the play on my return trip to Warsaw, which included an eight-hour wait to cross the Ukrainian-Polish border. The alternative title of The Dybbuk is Between Two Worlds, and that is how I felt while idling in line with dozens of other cars. The eerie dialogue of the play only heightened the sense of being in-between. As the young bride, Leah, is about to be possessed by a dybbuk, a demon, she says to her old nurse, “They are here with us. A person is born to live a long life. But if he dies before his time, what happens to his unlived life, his joys and his sorrows, the ideas he did not have time to develop, the deeds he had no chance to do? What happens to the children who were to have been born to him? What are they? Where?”

The Dybbuk depicts the shtetl as a place saturated in magic, where the dead mingle with the living. A poor young student named Khonon is disturbed that Leah, the woman he loves and believes he is cosmically fated to marry, has been betrothed to another man. Khonon pursues all kinds of magic to stop the wedding. But, as he says, “they didn’t help—not the fasts, not the ablutions, not the mortifications of the flesh, not the kabbalistic spells!” He dies from the intensity of these efforts and returns as a spirit to possess Leah’s body. The last two acts of the play are an extended exorcism, a ritual that An‑sky must have observed.

The stories and customs gathered from the expedition are present in nearly every line of the play—one critic dismissed it as simply “an ethnographic museum.” I even found in it a story I’d seen on one of those thin strips in An‑sky’s own hand, one of the many legends he collected about the Baal Shem Tov. In it, the Hasidic sage joins a crowd to watch an acrobat do a tightrope act. His students wonder why the rabbi is paying attention to such silly entertainment, and he answers, “I came here to observe how a person crosses a deep abyss. And as I watched I thought: If a person were to put as much effort into developing his soul as he does into training his body, how many and what deep abysses would his soul be able to traverse on the slender thread of life.”

The Dybbuk is much more than a patchwork of archives, a way of preserving the oral Torah. It also expresses the horror of experiencing a world in collapse. When I watched the 1937 film version produced in Poland, I jumped at the moment the possessed Leah, about to be wed, shrieks in a voice that is not her own, “You are not my bridegroom!” This cry of dislocation could be An‑sky’s primal scream, addressed to modernity itself—to the waves of murder to come. “We are too late,” Reb Azriel, the exorcising rabbi, says as he rushes into the synagogue in the last moments of the play, to find Leah dead.

When the First World War broke out, in the summer of 1914, An‑sky got himself commissioned by a relief organization to embark on a new kind of expedition, working frantically to save Jews trapped in the crossfire between German and Russian forces. What he witnessed, and then recorded in a four-volume diary published with the title The Destruction of Galicia, was apocalyptic. Hundreds of thousands of hungry refugees, bodies strewn in the streets of abandoned shtetls, survivors of rape, synagogues burned to the ground—and in places where he had been just a year before, recording songs on his phonograph. In a photo from this time, he is dressed in a uniform with a fur hat on his head and a Red Cross armband over his coat. He looks ancient, and exhausted. An-sky also never stopped trying to save Jewish culture. In Lutsk, which I passed on my drive out of Ukraine, he encountered the frazzled remnants of the community, which had become a “ghost town,” he writes, and they handed him a trunk filled with objects from the synagogue, including a silver Torah crown from the 18th century and a gold-embroidered curtain for the ark. An‑sky managed to get them to St. Petersburg.

In the upheavals of 1917, he would lose track of these items from Lutsk and almost everything else he collected from his travels. He had to leave behind even his draft of The Dybbuk. The first phase of the Russian Revolution actually found An‑sky elected to the Russian Constituent Assembly as a Socialist Revolutionary, representing his hometown of Vitebsk. But when the Bolsheviks took power in the fall, he had to flee, first to Vilnius and then to Warsaw. He was already battling heart disease and diabetes, and in November 1920, just after a meeting of a new ethnographic society he was trying to form in the Polish city, he died of a heart attack. He was 57. He did not live to see the worst of it.

I can’t think of a better testament to An‑sky than his play, and I am struck by the self-awareness in that title, Between Two Worlds. He had himself traveled as deftly as a tightrope walker between two worlds—Jewish and secular, traditional and modern—but he also witnessed the passing of one world into another, and it made him determined to hold on to what he came to understand mattered most, and to avoid the abyss. I spent most of my short time in Kyiv frantically trying to put some flesh on those ghosts. As I waited for the border to open, it occurred to me that maybe this manic urgency was what brought me closest to An‑sky.

Will the Ukrainians fare better? I hope so. Struggling to keep fighting, dodging missiles, surviving, gets you only partway there. An‑sky recognized this. Writing in 1916, looking back on his travels through lands now decimated, he still held on to the truth of his expedition: “A nation lives not in suffering, but in the ecstasy of the realization of its ‘I,’ in joyful creation, in pride in its culture, in the poetry of its daily life. Only in that.”

This article has been updated to acknowledge the work of Nathaniel Deutsch, whose book The Jewish Dark Continent contains the only English translation of An-Sky’s questionnaire. The article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Ghosts of the Pale.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Updated at 7:00 a.m. ET on October 14, 2026

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

The Adriatic has been crossed by Odysseus and Caesar, by Venetian fleets and Napoleon’s navy, by countless men bent on dominating the world. It has seen its share of courage and folly. But one day in June 2025, off the island of Cres, it witnessed something genuinely new: a man worth $240 billion standing waist-deep in bubbles on the deck of a $500 million yacht, wearing a white bucket hat.

The man is Jeff Bezos, and the woman photographed in the string bikini next to him—hugging him, rubbing him with bubbles—is his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez. Bezos is shirtless, and it must be said: He is ripped. His hairless torso is so buff, his expression so amused, that he looks more like a louche cartoon character—a Club Med Ninja Turtle—than a 61-year-old corporate executive. In the foreground, an anonymous crew member, his face hidden from view and his thoughts forever unknown, mans a cannon blasting bubbles into the Croatian sky.

The foam party was a birthday celebration for Sánchez’s 19-year-old son, a prelude to the Bezos-Sánchez wedding five days later in Venice—with 200 VIP guests, hundreds of protesters, and an estimated cost of $50 million. The wedding consumed the internet for a week and was treated as a self-contained cultural event, a thing worth interrogating or gawking at on its own terms.

In fact it was the culmination of one of the weirder decades that any American billionaire has ever had. The whole republic, to be fair, has been pretty nuts, and Bezos has been both caught up in the insanity and an agent of its acceleration.

In 2013, Bezos, who founded Amazon and still owns roughly 8 percent of the company, purchased The Washington Post for $250 million. Two years later, Donald Trump accused him of using the paper as a tax shelter, to which Bezos jokingly responded that Trump should be launched into space. Trump then said at a rally, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems.” Trump became president, and the Pentagon steered a massive cloud-computing contract away from Amazon Web Services, while Trump repeatedly pressured the U.S. Postal Service to raise Amazon’s shipping rates.

In 2019, Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, announced their decision to divorce. A month later, Bezos accused the National Enquirer’s parent company of attempted extortion after he said it threatened to release intimate photos, including what its chief content officer described in an email as a “below the belt selfie—otherwise colloquially known as a ‘d*ck pick.’ ” (The company said it had “acted lawfully” but would conduct its own investigation.) This is how much of the world learned about Lauren Sánchez, which was awkward because her brother Michael, a court later determined, had spoken with the tabloid about his sister’s relationship and sold—for $200,000—information, text messages, and a number of Bezos’s “ ‘racy,’ ‘explicit’ photos.” Bezos suggested, without evidence, that the plot had been instigated by the Trump administration and the Saudi government in retaliation for the Post’s reporting on the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudis.

That’s already a lot, even by billionaire standards.

Bezos then stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021; went to space aboard a rocket built by Blue Origin, the aerospace company he’d quietly founded two decades earlier; and began devoting the majority of his time to the company. Over roughly the same period, he commissioned the world’s largest sailing yacht and worked on building a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain. By the time of his second wedding, Bezos had transformed physically and politically—killing a Post endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, attending Donald Trump’s second inauguration in a seat of honor, reorienting the paper’s Opinion section around “personal liberties and free markets,” cheerleading Amazon’s reported $40 million deal for a documentary and future docuseries about Melania Trump.

People change. And if Bezos were just another middle-aged guy using his money to become unrecognizable to his former self—God bless. Enjoy the Met Gala.

But we live in a society where trivializing the actions of our wealthiest citizens is both unbeatable fun and a form of recklessness. For most of the past decade, the changes in Bezos that attracted attention were the meme-able ones: his body, his partner, his yacht. This made the transformation that mattered harder to see. We’ve been gawking at Bezos becoming a different kind of billionaire while missing his attempt to become a different kind of historical figure. The man who once rewired how the planet buys and sells everything has been chasing an even grander project—creating the infrastructure for an off-world economy upon which human civilization might someday depend.

If this sounds implausible and potentially menacing, you will not be surprised to learn that the person standing between Bezos and his ambition is the implausible and menacing Elon Musk, who has spent the past two decades building a commanding lead in space while pursuing a different vision of where humanity should go once it gets there.

Together, in fierce competition, these two billionaires are in the early stages of a race to vertically integrate the galaxy—a process that involves rockets, moon landings, enormous satellite constellations, and space-based data centers running AI models fueled by computing power that no terrestrial supplier can match. Both say they hope to preserve human life from the specter of climate change and expand mankind’s understanding of the universe. Both would also like to dominate a market that, unlike every other market they’ve previously conquered, has no ceiling and few established rules.

Whether any of this is wise is a question the rest of us are not really being asked. For most of human history, the power to decide where a civilization went next belonged to governments, monarchs, or despots. It’s a measure of how much has changed that a retail executive from Seattle and a South African–born engineer are well positioned to exercise that power. Nobody voted for either of them. And they may be the only ones who can check the other’s power. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, described this to me as “a very weird situation.” You’ve got two men with unfathomable power and an unshakable faith that they’re destined to shape the world. But neither of them is “actually Lex Luthor,” Sullivan said.

“ … Right?”

Perhaps not. But any answer requires a deeper understanding of the two men involved. Musk, typically, has overshared. Bezos has been more secretive. To reveal his character and intent, you first have to get past the foam.

In the 1990s, when reporters began tracing the origin story of the first king of e-commerce, they made their way to Miami, where Bezos grew up, and to Ursula Werner, his high-school girlfriend. They had listened to ABBA together and he’d made her adoring flyers for her birthday, and she told those reporters something about him that, for years, seemed like just another cute bit of color: “The reason he’s earning so much money,” Werner said, “is to get to outer space.”

In his high-school-valedictorian speech, Bezos quoted Star Trek—“Space, the final frontier”—and asked his audience to imagine vast orbital colonies where humanity could relocate Earth’s most polluting industries, an idea cooked up by the Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in the 1970s. “The earth is finite,” Bezos explained to a local reporter. “And if the world economy and population is to keep expanding, space is the only way to go.”

All of this nerd enthusiasm was out in the open until 2000, when Bezos created Blue Origin Enterprises. He based the company a short commute from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters and kept its existence a secret for three years, until Newsweek discovered it. This was not the only strange thing about Blue Origin.

For a while, the company’s sole employee was the science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson, best known for Snow Crash, a 1992 novel set in a near-future America where the government has collapsed and corporations run everything. In a blog post, Stephenson wrote that his title at Blue Origin was “Member, Technical Staff,” and that he “performed operations as prosaic as punching down Ethernet cable, operating a plate grinder, and passivating rocket parts.”

But that was just part of the job. “The bulk of my efforts,” Stephenson wrote, “were devoted to investigating possible alternatives to conventional rockets.”

Bezos wanted to know if almost a century of rocket science had gotten the basic question wrong—whether there was a smarter way to get to space than attaching a tube to massive amounts of fuel and setting it all on fire. Stephenson and the handful of other employees who were eventually hired ran software simulations that would either validate the conventional approach or, Bezos hoped, find its replacement. This is a pretty wild way to spend your money.

Three years of experiments proved that Wernher von Braun and Robert Goddard hadn’t missed anything. Only then did Bezos hire the former NASA engineer Rob Meyerson and buy 165,000 acres of Texas scrub brush where rocket prototypes might someday be launched without scrutiny.

Eventually Meyerson would be promoted to president—but of what, exactly? In the early years, Blue Origin had no customers or finished product, and little of what ordinarily makes a company a business. Bezos left the CEO job vacant and imposed no conventional timetable. It did have a tortoise mascot and a motto—“Gradatim ferociter” (“Step by step, ferociously”)—that reinforced its commitment to getting to space slowly, secretly, and stubbornly. Employees were focused on whiteboarding a tourism rocket, but Bezos told Meyerson not to worry about sales or pitching government agencies; he didn’t want to be held hostage by customers. It was “a science experiment for the first 15 years,” Tom Jones, Blue Origin’s vice president of human resources from 2016 to 2019, told me.

Contrast this with the hyper-logical way that Bezos had conceived Amazon. In an early interview, Bezos explained that the internet was growing at 2,300 percent a year; to capitalize on that growth, he needed a product category with more variety than any physical store could stock. There were more than 3 million active book titles worldwide. Therefore: books.

If Amazon was the company that Mr. Spock would create, Blue Origin was where Bezos got to lead with his heart and be Captain Kirk. He’d take days off from Amazon for field trips, packing Blue Origin employees onto his private plane and dropping in on companies with cultures or engineering accomplishments that he admired. Gradually, Bezos cleared all of his Wednesday afternoons and many of his Saturdays to work at the Blue Origin office. When Bezos wanted to learn about heat-transfer codes—software that models how heat moves through a rocket engine; the difference between an engine that survives its own combustion and one that doesn’t—Meyerson hired an employee to tutor him.

I asked Meyerson, who is now the CEO of Interlune, which aims to mine the moon for helium-3, if managing Bezos’s enthusiasm ever got in the way of accelerating Blue Origin’s progress. “My job was to do both,” he said. “The time that he put into Blue was a gift to us, because the more he understood, the more he was willing to support what was needed for the long run.”

And yet, when it came to money, the accountant overruled the dreamer. Bezos was rich—Forbes’s 100th-wealthiest American—but not send-my-money-to-the-moon rich. He didn’t want “to spend the kind of money he’s spending today,” Meyerson said. Blue Origin would work through simulations, models, and small prototypes—staying within its means until Bezos was ready to scale up.

This would have been fine if Blue Origin were operating in a vacuum. But two years after Bezos founded his dream company, someone else started a company with a dream just as large. And he was not interested in moving slowly.

Impatience is part of Elon Musk’s mystique. So is an eagerness to break and remake things: the economics of car buying (Tesla), the operations of the federal government (DOGE), the last remaining norms of social media (X—now a platform for disturbing racial theories).

But Musk didn’t set out to revolutionize aerospace and become the world’s most successful rocket builder. Originally he just wanted to be a rocket buyer.

In 2001, Musk announced that he would send a robotic greenhouse into space, scoop up some Martian soil, and use it to grow a plant. This scientific publicity stunt may not go down as Musk’s best idea, but his attempt to buy refurbished intercontinental ballistic missiles for the Martian-soil gambit led him to Moscow, where, according to Ashlee Vance’s biography, Elon Musk, a Russian engineer spat on him (literally) and his PayPal millions. Flying back from a second unsuccessful trip, Musk opened a spreadsheet and realized that he could build a rocket for less than the $8 million the Russians wanted to charge him to buy one—and for less than anyone had ever built a rocket before. He founded SpaceX a month later.

It’s easy in hindsight, and with this year’s $1.8 trillion SpaceX IPO, to say that Musk had a better plan than Bezos to get to space. What’s inarguable is that Musk had a faster plan. He staffed up by cold-calling college aerospace students and handing them ludicrous deadlines—the first launch was scheduled for 15 months after the company was created. Speed gave SpaceX swagger, and that swagger gave its young employees faith. But the company’s most important virtue was thrift. Not as a means of preserving Musk’s wealth, but because lowering costs was the entire point of the business.

For decades, getting a person or a satellite into orbit was so expensive that only governments and the largest defense contractors could afford it. Musk believed that this had little to do with physics; unlike Bezos, he spent no time wondering whether there might be a fundamentally different way to get to space. Instead, he looked at launch costs the way a deregulator might have looked at long-distance telephone rates in the 1970s: not as a law of nature, but as the product of the people who had gotten there first and decided what to charge.

If SpaceX could create a reusable rocket capable of driving launch costs down far enough, it wouldn’t just swallow all the existing demand—it would transform space from a cartel into a free market. Satellite builders, scientists, start-ups, and, eventually, anyone with a payload and a business case could participate. Access to space would become as abundant as telephony. And then all sorts of innovation might happen.

Bezos had a similar vision, and both men believed that reusable rockets were the key to making space affordable. But while Blue Origin was moving step by step, SpaceX skipped every step it could. Employees were celebrated for outrageous hacks, such as figuring out that off-the-shelf car-wash valves worked just fine for rockets if you swapped their seals. All of that ingenuity led to Musk’s promise that SpaceX’s first rocket, Falcon 1, would carry a 1,400-pound payload into orbit for $6.9 million—75 percent less than any competitor.

He nearly went bankrupt doing it. The first three Falcon launches failed. By 2008, SpaceX and Tesla were burning cash. Musk was barely solvent enough to make one more launch attempt. On September 28, Falcon 1 reached orbit, making SpaceX the first privately funded company to launch a liquid-fueled rocket into space. The timing was exquisite. Three months later, as the global financial system teetered and Musk was days away from missing payroll, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. The company had gone from near death to indispensable in a single quarter.

A former senior NASA official who visited both companies in their early years described Blue Origin to me as an academic lab and SpaceX as a pirate ship. “SpaceX was scrappy,” the official said. “I went to the Blue factories in Kent, Washington, and they were these beautiful, massive buildings with the world’s best 3‑D printers. And I was like, Where are the people? Then you go to SpaceX in Hawthorne, and there’s these young people running around; everybody’s greasy.”

The differences were hardly lost on the people watching from Blue Origin. SpaceX had taken Amazon’s “get big fast” playbook and applied it to rockets⁠—staffing up, sprinting to deadlines, and treating its failures as content rather than embarrassment. The launch explosions and misfires it shared on social media didn’t make SpaceX look reckless; they made it look humble. At Blue Origin, the contrast was unmistakable: SpaceX seemed to be having more fun.

SpaceX soon proved that it could reuse rocket boosters—the bottom part where the flames shoot out. Its first reusable rocket, Falcon 9, launched and landed in 2015. By May 2016, SpaceX was on its way to becoming the UPS of low Earth orbit. Satellite customers could buy launches at published prices, and Falcon 9 was beginning to fly on something approaching a regular schedule. NASA was already relying on SpaceX to shuttle cargo to the International Space Station; the Air Force had certified Falcon 9 for national-security missions and had just awarded the company its first military-launch contract.

In West Texas, Blue Origin was completing the first takeoffs and landings of its New Shepard tourism rocket. Those missions were uncrewed and suborbital—which is to say, the rocket went to space the way a ball tossed upward in a backyard goes above the roofline: fleetingly. On Twitter, Musk pointed out how far ahead SpaceX was, beginning a series of exchanges in which two of the world’s richest men engaged in public rocket-measuring contests. Musk won most of these, which makes sense, because Musk was winning.

People who have worked closely with Bezos bring up two defining characteristics. The first is a comfort, bordering on delight, at being misunderstood. “I think he enjoys it,” a former Amazon senior executive told me. “You have no idea how stubborn he can be in defense of an idea only he believes. And of course a lot of times he’s right.” The second is that Bezos does not like multitasking. He’s told audiences that as a little kid in Montessori school, he was so resistant to leaving things undone that he had to be picked up in his chair and moved to the next activity. Bezos prefers to direct his focus, as intensely as possible, on one problem at a time. As long as he remained the CEO of Amazon, that problem was Amazon. For the first 15 years of Blue Origin’s existence, the company had to accommodate that reality.

Whether it was Musk’s taunts or the unignorable fact that SpaceX was racing ahead, Bezos finally changed course in 2016. During one of his regular Saturday meetings at Blue Origin, he asked a question that nobody in the room wanted to answer honestly: Why hadn’t Blue Origin directly bid on an Air Force contract for rocket-engine development that had just gone to SpaceX? The answer: Because you’ve always told us not to.

Bezos delivered a new mandate to Meyerson: “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”

When people in aerospace talk about SpaceX’s advantages, they nod to Musk’s maniacal expectations, his engineering instincts, and the particular quality of his attention. But Musk’s attention has at times been distributed across Tesla, X, the neurotechnology company Neuralink, the tunnel start-up the Boring Company, the federal government, and 14 children by four women.

Musk’s life is a browser with too many tabs. X is the tab that’s always open. It’s where he challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match, offered to give Taylor Swift a child and guard her cats “with my life,” and feuded with (partial list) Kanye West, the British government, the Australian government, the Brazilian supreme court, and a cave diver in Thailand he called a “pedo guy”—leading to a defamation lawsuit that Musk won after his legal team argued that the phrase was a generic insult. It’s also where he regularly posts memes and has promoted anti-Semitic content that makes him, justifiably, a pariah among people who believe society is plenty coarse enough without him. (SpaceX did not respond to interview requests for this story.)

The point is, Musk is no more focused than Bezos. The difference is that he’s never needed to be. This is because, in 2002, he had a three-minute conversation with Gwynne Shotwell. Shotwell is 62, and remarkable in several ways—a woman in a male-dominated field, a proud former high-school cheerleader with degrees in mechanical engineering and applied mathematics. But her unique gift is the ability to read her boss’s mind while ignoring his id. “I like his in-person self better than his Twitter self,” Shotwell said in a 2022 talk at Stanford.

Shotwell is self-aware and funny. Not aerospace funny—actually funny. She grew up in the “boonies” north of Chicago and was a sophomore in high school when her mother dropped her off at a Society of Women Engineers event. She decided to become a mechanical engineer that day in part because one of the presenters “had the best suit on, and she had great shoes, and her bag matched her shoes,” Shotwell told a podcast interviewer with delight.

Shotwell was in the middle of a career in traditional aerospace when she went to lunch with a former co-worker who had been poached by SpaceX. She was introduced to Musk on a tour of the office, and received a job offer to be vice president of business development that afternoon. For weeks she hesitated before pulling over on the Los Angeles freeway, calling Musk, and telling him that she was an “effing idiot” for not accepting sooner. He laughed and welcomed her to the team.

Since then, Shotwell and Musk have built one of the most drama-free partnerships in 21st-century business. He oversees engineering and technology while she takes care of everything else—sales, operations, manufacturing, workforce vibes. While Musk was supervising the 2008 do-or-die Falcon-rocket launch, Shotwell was at an industry conference in Glasgow, watching the livestream at 2 a.m. in her hotel room while writing the company’s bid to resupply the International Space Station. When the rocket reached orbit, she ran down the hallway to rouse her colleagues and broke into the hotel bar to drink warm champagne.

In 2015, having proved that SpaceX could reliably deliver payloads to space, Musk announced plans for a constellation of thousands of satellites, now known as Starlink. The pitch had a noble dimension—SpaceX would bring high-speed internet to parts of the world that fiber-optic cables had left behind. But this disguised its real purpose. SpaceX’s first act—flying rockets for hire—was not profitable enough. Getting in on boring old telecommunications would give the company a way to monetize its own launch capability. Starlink was created to be the thing that would pay for everything else.

The following year, Musk revealed the full scope of his plan: SpaceX would build a fully reusable two-stage rocket and spacecraft standing just over 400 feet tall and powered by 42 engines, with a capsule—the top part—capable of carrying 100 people to Mars (or 60 Starlink satellites into orbit). “The objective is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species,” Musk said at the time. “The main reason I’m personally accumulating assets is to fund this.”

Previous spacecraft carried only what they needed for a mission. This would be like launching a Costco.

Scale is the great paradox of rocket science. A rocket twice as large as its predecessor isn’t just twice as hard to build; as the rocket grows, so do the forces trying to tear it apart. At the size Musk envisioned, the fully fueled vehicle would weigh more than 10 million pounds, more than one and a half times the weight of the Saturn V, which carried astronauts to the moon. Lifting it would require engines more powerful than anything SpaceX had built before, with roughly three times the pressure of the engines powering its Falcon rockets—conditions so extreme that SpaceX would need to invent new manufacturing techniques simply to build the combustion chamber. And Musk intended to reuse everything: Both the giant booster and the spacecraft above it would return to Earth and fly again.

The design would change repeatedly—first landing legs, then enormous mechanical arms—but the economic premise remained the same. If full and rapid reuse worked, Musk believed that the cost of reaching orbit could eventually fall below $100 a kilogram, which would make the things that had always died on a spreadsheet—lunar bases, enormous satellite constellations, perhaps even human flights to Mars—possible. The architecture was elegant in its circularity. Starship, as the giant rocket and spaceship would come to be known, would make Starlink, the satellite array, far cheaper to deploy. Starlink would then generate revenue to pay for a fleet of Starships. And Starships, eventually, would get humans to Mars. Engineering, commerce, and Musk’s interplanetary ambition, all stacked inside the same rocket.

People at Blue Origin first noticed the woman around 2018. She was seen at the Cedarbrook Lodge near the Seattle airport, a few minutes before Bezos arrived for drinks with executives. In West Texas, she began showing up as a contractor on the helicopter video team that documented New Shepard launches.

Lauren Sánchez Bezos is impossible not to notice because her lifelong goal, exuberantly pursued, is to be noticed. Sánchez Bezos grew up in New Mexico, learned she was dyslexic in community college, hustled her way into the University of Southern California, and for several years proceeded through the carnival of gigs (local news, Extra, So You Think You Can Dance) available to attractive and relentless people who want to be on television. She had a child with the former NFL tight end Tony Gonzalez before marrying Patrick Whitesell, the Hollywood agent and power broker, with whom she had two more children. In 2016, she got her helicopter pilot’s license and started an aerial-production company.

The first public encounter between Bezos and Lauren Sánchez was at a December 2016 Amazon Studios party for the grim kids-die-in-a-fire movie Manchester by the Sea. It must have been like meeting Jayne Mansfield at a shiva. Both were married at the time, and what happened next seems clear enough, even without the benefit of any photos from the National Enquirer. “Wonderful madness” is how Barry Diller, the media mogul and Bezos’s close friend, describes the relationship.

Understanding the force and fury of the response to the couple requires some unpacking, and it starts with the woman Bezos left. MacKenzie Scott studied creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison, did Amazon’s early bookkeeping out of Bezos’s garage, and has spent the years since their 2019 divorce giving away her share of the proceeds—more than $26 billion to more than 2,000 organizations—while largely erasing any evidence of her generosity. In August, she released a complicated third novel on Substack.

“I have great respect for and fondness for MacKenzie,” Diller told me. “You can see how she’s conducting her charitable work, which is remarkable—but it’s all quiet and private. And that’s MacKenzie.”

Lauren Sánchez Bezos enjoys being photographed at parties and events, and her picture is prominent on the website for the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion investment in protecting “the best planet in this solar system,” where she’s vice chair. She’s written three children’s books—The Fly Who Flew to Space, The Fly Who Flew Under the Sea, and The Fly Who Flew to the North Pole—and if a brick wall were the only thing standing between her and the best-seller list, you wouldn’t want to be the wall.

“People assume she’s going to be Cruella, and she’s not,” a woman who’s been friends with Sánchez Bezos for a decade told me. “She’s smart and kind, and she has real accomplishments. But it’s confusing because snobby people look at her big, vulgar boobs, and she’s like, Yeah! Look at ’em! She likes being sexy. She just wants everyone to have a good time, and she doesn’t mind being the good time.”

Bezos and Sánchez Bezos make each other happy. This is not nothing, but the wonderful madness has had its costs. There was an alleged blackmail attempt to manage, a 25-year marriage to unwind, and a company that still depended on Bezos’s attention. The scandal “had a huge impact at Blue Origin,” Alexandra Abrams, the former head of employee communications, told me. (Abrams, who was fired in 2019, later went public with complaints about flight safety and criticized leadership, Bezos included, for what she described as a “toxic” culture; in response, the company said it had no tolerance for discrimination or harassment and stood by its safety record.) Abrams said that the news of Bezos’s relationship with Sánchez “started to break the goodwill of a lot of the senior employees at the company. They were shocked that Jeff would comport himself in that way.”

Only Bezos can say how much of his transformation has been driven or enabled by his new wife, and how much was always there, waiting for permission. And Bezos, who declined multiple requests for an interview, isn’t talking.

A few weeks after the Manchester by the Sea party, Trump’s NASA transition team invited Blue Origin to a meeting. With Bezos’s decree to start competing, Bretton Alexander, the director of business development and strategy, scrambled to prepare.

Mike Pence was passionate about space. Trump understood the MAGA value of rockets and astronauts. So, the transition team asked: What big idea could Blue Origin offer that would be ready by the electorally convenient date of 2020?

“I didn’t see the question coming,” Alexander told me. But he blurted out, “We’ve landed New Shepard in the desert five times in the last year. We can land something on the moon, because we have the engines and we have the technology.”

The last person to walk on the moon was the Apollo 17 commander, Gene Cernan, who let a crewmate climb the ladder before him so that he could utter the following: “We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind.” That was in 1972.

There’s no single explanation for why America hasn’t returned, but there are several timely reasons to go back. The moon is the most convenient place in the cosmos: three days away, without the communication lags that make deep-space operations so complicated. It has water-ice deposits, which theoretically could sustain human life and be split into hydrogen and oxygen, also known as rocket fuel. And because the moon’s gravity is one-sixth of Earth’s, less fuel is required to launch from its surface and explore the rest of the solar system. For 4.5 billion years, celestial objects have used the moon as target practice, enriching the lunar soil with most every rare mineral the solar system has produced. Half its face is shielded from Earth’s electromagnetic noise, which makes it valuable for radio telescopes and, as national-security officials will warn in varying degrees of specificity, potentially useful to America’s adversaries. The Chinese have committed to landing astronauts on the moon by 2030.

For all of these reasons, Alexander’s pitch appealed to the transition team. That it nudged federal space policy toward the moon—elevating Bezos’s high-school dreams while usurping Musk, who hoped the Trump administration would back a Mars mission—was, for Blue Origin, the chef’s kiss. Alexander called Rob Meyerson right away. “I said, ‘Oh shit, I just created a program.’ ”

Greg Autry, who now leads international space policy at the State Department, was on the transition team. “We knew they didn’t really have this thing in their garage,” Autry told me. The company had announced New Glenn, its first orbital rocket, earlier that year, but the new rocket had not even carried a commercial payload, let alone human beings. But Blue Origin had “what appeared to be a simple and relatively quick way to get there, with a reusable system.” NASA, perhaps, was also beginning to realize that having a single dominant space-launch provider might in itself be a risk.

Animosity continued between Trump and Bezos, who remained publicly critical of the president’s immigration policies. The Pentagon awarded a cloud-computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Microsoft when Amazon Web Services was the undisputed market leader. Amazon sued—and asked for Trump to be deposed, arguing that the president’s dislike of Bezos had corrupted the bidding process. (The Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General found no direct evidence of White House interference but noted that it could not complete its assessment, because senior officials had asserted “presidential communications privilege.” The suit was thrown out in 2021 when a new contract was awarded to both Amazon and Microsoft.)

But meaningful friction appears to have stopped at Blue Origin’s door. A few months after Alexander’s meeting, Bezos flew to Washington to personally present his company’s proposal to the transition team. “That didn’t necessarily happen with the other companies,” Autry said. “You didn’t see their CEO or funder take the time to do that.” So began a drip of white papers and study contracts that, over several years, led to $592 million in government funding. Other than a 2019 meeting where Pence’s chief of staff told a Blue Origin executive that the company had a “Washington Post problem”—a detail later reported in The Washington Post—no one I spoke with could recall an instance when the Trump administration’s hostility toward Bezos translated into prejudice against Blue Origin.

There was plenty of turbulence at Blue Origin during this period, but it was self-inflicted, and well overdue.

At a Saturday leadership-team meeting in 2017, Bezos was presented with a memo outlining Blue Origin’s annual budget request. Senior leadership wanted more than $1 billion, double the current budget. All of which would come out of Bezos’s pocket.

When Bezos finished reading the memo, “he walks out, doesn’t say a word,” Tom Jones, Blue Origin’s former vice president of human resources, told me. “About 15 minutes later, he walks in and he says, ‘Why did I not know that you were going to be making a request this large until today?’ ” Jones described Bezos as calm, even affectionate; Bezos said that he loved the people in the room but that the request was “craziness,” and wildly disproportionate to their achievements. The company had convinced Washington to take its lunar ambitions seriously, but it had yet to put anything into orbit. “It’s probably one of the things that might have led to him thinking, like, Okay, I’ve got to make a change here.”

Bezos responded by bringing in Bob Smith, a veteran of the aerospace company Honeywell, as Blue Origin’s first CEO in September 2017. Smith told me he arrived at a company with no steady revenue stream and no supply chain: “Engineers would design a part, put the order out, and then it’d show up by mail back on their desk.” It was essentially “a prototype shop.”

Blue Origin might not have had a supply chain, but it did have a cosmology. Bezos “is God at Blue Origin,” Alexandra Abrams said. “Jeff’s big message was that it’s too late for climate-change efforts on Earth, and we need to be able to leave. We need to sustainably go into space and build resources, have a base on the moon, which would act as a gas station to the rest of the solar system. At the company, everyone felt like we were saving humanity.” (After publication of this story, Bezos said, through a spokesman, that he does not believe that it is too late for Earth.)

But God remained an intermittent presence. Bezos had tried to extract himself from Amazon for years—installing deputies, restructuring leadership. COVID wrecked that project; Amazon’s logistics network buckled in the spring of 2020, and Bezos had no choice but to dive back in. Meanwhile, Blue Origin was in the middle of a significant expansion. Bezos had authorized Smith to make thousands of new hires and build new factories, a transformation that required exactly the kind of consistent attention he couldn’t provide. Bezos had made himself indispensable by being the only person who knew exactly what he wanted. He had never found his Gwynne Shotwell—or perhaps he’d never believed the job could be done by someone who wasn’t him. In his absence, Blue Origin was growing fast and bidding on everything, but it was still chronically late.

New Glenn, Blue Origin’s version of the Falcon, still wasn’t flying by the time SpaceX began developing Starship. SpaceX announced its Starlink constellation in 2015, put prototypes into orbit in 2018, and began deploying at scale in 2019—at which time Amazon had not yet launched a single prototype for Project Kuiper, its we-can-do-satellites-too Starlink competitor. Bezos wasn’t chasing Musk so much as arriving at places Musk had already left.

The pattern held as SpaceX started flying astronauts to the International Space Station. Blue Origin’s answer, when it finally came, was personal.

On July 5, 2021, Bezos vacated the CEO seat at Amazon. Two weeks later, he flew to space on New Shepard, the tourism rocket his company had spent years building, alongside his brother, Mark; the aviation pioneer Wally Funk; and an 18-year-old whose father, a Dutch financier, had bought him a ticket. Bezos stepped out of the capsule in the West Texas heat wearing a cowboy hat and declared it the best day ever.

The Bezos who returned to Blue Origin was different. He seemed determined to run the company the way he had once run Amazon—present, demanding, involved in every significant decision.

Smith’s 2023 resignation took no one by surprise. He had grown Blue Origin from roughly 850 employees to more than 10,000, accumulated billions of dollars in customer orders, and built enormous manufacturing facilities in Huntsville, Alabama, and Cape Canaveral, Florida. But New Glenn continued not to launch. And when NASA, under the Biden administration, finally awarded the contract for its Human Landing System—the moon lander that Bretton Alexander had improvised into existence—it did not go to Blue Origin. SpaceX, proposing a lunar lander based on its Starship architecture, undercut Blue Origin’s $6 billion bid by more than half.

What followed was also personal—and a little embarrassing.

Blue Origin filed a protest, prompting Musk to tweet, “Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol,” and to offer Bezos some unsolicited management advice. “I think he needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful,” Musk told The Washington Post. “Frankly, I hope he does.” Bezos offered to cover $2 billion of the lunar-lander costs, then $3 billion. When NASA ignored Bezos, Blue Origin sued. Musk, again: “You cannot sue your way to the moon.” The courts agreed. The saga ended when NASA, nudged by Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington, awarded Blue Origin a $3.4 billion contract to build a competing lander.

Bezos decided that the next person to lead Blue Origin didn’t need to understand rockets or politics; they needed to understand him. Dave Limp had run Amazon’s consumer-devices business—Kindle, Echo, Alexa—for nearly 14 years. Limp had also overseen Project Kuiper, where he pushed to spread the risk among multiple launch providers rather than depend on Blue Origin alone. He even said Amazon would be “crazy” not to consider SpaceX, given its track record.

In his final interview before accepting the job, Limp asked a single question: Was Blue Origin a hobby or a business? Because if it was a hobby, he wasn’t interested. Bezos told him, “It’s obviously a business. It has to be a business or it’s not going to work.”

During the decade when Bezos was reorganizing his life around space, he walked away from a promise he’d made on the day he bought the Post : “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.”

The killing of the Harris endorsement, the subscriber cancellations, and the cascade of staff reductions—all of this has been well chronicled, because there’s no beat that journalists swarm quite like a competitor’s newsroom. But the core questions about Bezos and the Post remain: Why does he appear to have inverted his own promise? Was this an act of betrayal or of neglect? And, in the end, is there a difference?

When Bezos first showed up in Washington, the paper’s circulation was plummeting. One former Post executive described Bezos’s 2013 arrival to me as a kind of rapture. He was a forceful presence, respectful of the wall between the editorial and business sides, but relentless about improving the customer experience. Those first two years were “absolutely fucking magical,” the former executive told me. The Post went on a sustained run of profitability, and subscriptions surged throughout the first Trump administration.

But traffic and urgency declined in the Biden years, while COVID and Bezos’s other interests made him a phantom in Washington. He surfaced to participate in hiring Sally Buzbee to succeed Marty Baron as executive editor in 2021. In 2023, the Post lost $77 million. Bezos surfaced again, to replace the paper’s longtime publisher with Will Lewis, a British-tabloid veteran.

There were other candidates—a person close to the hiring process told me that one of them found their conversation with Bezos baffling. The Post’s owner couldn’t answer basic questions about the newspaper. Bezos seemed inattentive, and said that his priorities would not change: He was focused on Blue Origin and Lauren. Bezos appeared to think that his lack of involvement would be attractive; the next publisher would have free rein.

I was a columnist at the Post for a year, and had a few conversations with Lewis early in his tenure. He’d been a journalist before entering the wolf pack of Rupert Murdoch’s executive program, and among his talents was an unusual ability to throw back pints with reporters while keeping the secrets of powerful men. I found him to be a delightful, charismatic scoundrel.

Many colleagues were charmed by Lewis. But within a few months, his fury over the newsroom’s coverage of accusations that he’d helped conceal or destroy evidence while managing a scandal at Murdoch’s News International⁠—accusations he has denied—had soured the dynamic. Equally concerning was that Lewis barely demonstrated any interest in his job. The Post lost $100 million in his first year—and an astonishing 60 million monthly visitors from November 2020 to November 2024. But Bezos wasn’t paying much attention to Lewis or the newsroom; he regularly canceled meetings with top editors.

Bezos seemed more interested in the Opinion section. He never forbade the editorial board from writing what it wanted, and seldom voiced strong feelings about politicians or parties. But his interests and ideology were evolving, and as the owner, he hoped the editorial board would move in step. Bezos seemed to enjoy speaking with the section’s editor, David Shipley, about creating a forum for pragmatic ideas and policy solutions. Wonky centrist stuff.

That hands-off approach changed with the spiking of the Harris endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election—abruptly ending a half-century-long tradition and provoking 250,000 subscription cancellations. Those sympathetic to Bezos say that the last-minute timing wasn’t his fault. Lewis had told the editorial board that he would handle getting Bezos’s approval. But as the election drew closer, it clearly had not been handled—or was not handle-able. “The timing of their refusing to endorse was too close to the election,” Barry Diller told me. “If the Post had been his only job, he would have done that much earlier.”

Lewis, who stepped aside in February 2026, did not respond to requests for comment. He certainly deserves blame for some of the destruction. But the most consequential decisions were not his. It was not Lewis who withheld the endorsement. It was not Lewis who complained to Trump about the “terrible” businesspeople at the Post shortly after Trump’s reelection, according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change. It was not Lewis who dined with the president on the very day he announced that the Opinion section would focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets” (a decision that prompted Shipley’s resignation).

Bezos has framed the changes at the Post as a matter of necessity and opportunity, writing in an op-ed that he wanted to reposition the paper for Middle America. Journalism isn’t a charity, and Bezos’s own politics have clearly shifted. He is, after all, the owner.

But Bezos plainly appears to have made a Faustian bargain. Just as Blue Origin was getting its act together, a second Trump presidency dawned, with Bezos’s chief antagonist, Elon Musk, in a position of extraordinary influence. Musk had spent $288 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans. He was a senior adviser to the president. Amazon had fought the first Trump administration for more than a year over a cloud-computing contract. The administration had been lobbied hard by Oracle, Amazon’s cloud competitor, whose co-founder had reportedly given about $45 million to a nonprofit supporting Trump’s reelection. Oracle had also produced a docket of baseless conspiracies about Amazon that found its way to the president’s desk.

Marty Baron was the executive editor of the Post from 2013 to 2021, a gilded era that produced 11 Pulitzer Prizes and vital reporting on Edward Snowden, the Trump Access Hollywood tape, and the Robert Mueller investigation. “Everything I saw in my years there was that he truly believed what he was saying about democracy and the press,” Baron told me. “But I don’t think he thinks these other businesses could survive unless he finds a way to successfully navigate through the Trump era. And if the Post is the thing that has to pay the price, then, well, that’ll have to be the thing that pays the price.”

Donald Trump is not a simple transactional figure. He gets what he wants, but he also warps reality in the process. Countless executives have learned that successfully dealing with him requires both capitulation and an insistence that no capitulation has occurred. If Bezos and Trump did come to an arrangement, it would make Bezos a hypocrite twice: once for breaking his promise to Post readers, and once for pretending he hadn’t.

Jeff Bezos also tends to get what he wants—and unlike Trump, he’s willing to wait years for it. He’s comfortable with being misunderstood. Which is another way of saying that there’s more than one way to look at a Faustian bargain: not in terms of what must be sacrificed, but in terms of what might one day be gained.

“NG‑3, baby!” whooped a man in a Titusville, Florida, 7-Eleven in April, shortly before flashing me his admittedly glorious NASA-logo calf tattoo. People who live along Florida’s 72-mile Space Coast rarely end up there by accident. Some work in aerospace; the rest seem to wish they did. They buy condos and arrange their schedules for optimal viewing of the rockets rising from the Kennedy Space Center. As subcultures go, they’re somewhere between Deadheads and bird-watchers: obsessive, migratory, and willing to wait a very long time for the thing they came to see.

I was in town at the invitation of Blue Origin to witness the third launch of New Glenn—NG‑3. This would be the first time Blue Origin reused a booster from a previous launch, a crucial step. The nonreusable upper part of NG‑3 would be carrying a large telecom satellite for AST SpaceMobile.

Dave Limp was in from Washington State to watch the launch and schmooze the satellite guys. Limp is 60, and in his sensible jeans, glasses, and Blue Origin three-quarter zip, he looks like the most reasonable man in every room he enters. When he started the job, he’d wondered if a consumer-electronics guy was the right fit for a rocket company, but he’d come around to Bezos’s diagnosis—that Blue Origin needed more disciplined decision making, more manufacturing expertise, and more Bezos. “Jeff can be annoying at times, but he’s right a lot,” Limp told me. “And he was right on this.”

The standard that Limp is being held to has a name: Gwynne Shotwell. Limp is an admirer, and has arranged his duties accordingly. “My job is to have Jeff live in the future,” Limp said. “So if he has to hear about an HR issue or a financial issue or a schedule issue, I have not done my job.”

His other job is to get rockets up, fast. The Federal Communications Commission requires satellite operators such as AST to put a certain percentage of their constellations in space by specific dates, or they risk losing authorization for the satellites they failed to deploy. Amazon was supposed to deploy half of its 3,236 satellites by July 2026. The FCC granted a waiver in June after Amazon explained that it was producing satellites faster than any of its launch providers—including Blue Origin—could get them into space.

A year earlier, the New Shepard tourism rocket had carried a team of six women, including Lauren Sánchez and Katy Perry, into space. Now Limp put it on indefinite hiatus. All focus, he told me, was on the lunar lander and getting New Glenn rockets produced with assembly-line speed: “The ‘step by step’ component of our motto—let’s fast-walk it, you know?”

At 7:25 a.m. the next morning, NG‑3 lifted off from Blue Origin’s launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It did not blast off like the rockets of old. Accelerometers and gyroscopes fed its position to the guidance system as computers continuously adjusted thrust and steering, making millions of pounds of rocket seem almost to levitate. When the rocket disappeared, it left behind a long, knobby cloud—a strangely beautiful albino Cheeto. Six minutes later, the booster landed a few hundred miles away in the Atlantic Ocean on the drone ship Jacklyn, named for Bezos’s late mother. Everyone went nuts.

I didn’t find out for a few hours that the mission had been a dud. One of NG‑3’s engines had failed to produce enough thrust and dropped AST’s satellite in the wrong orbit, too low to be useful. AST had insurance, but the customer doesn’t care if you save money by reusing your booster; it cares that you get the job done. Blue Origin had not.

At 12:12 p.m., the day got a little worse: SpaceX announced that it had just landed its Falcon 9 booster for the 600th time.

A month later, a New Glenn rocket undergoing a static-fire test caused the largest explosion in the history of Cape Canaveral, badly damaging Blue Origin’s only operational launchpad and temporarily grounding the program.

Only two people have the means and ambition to vertically integrate the galaxy, and one of them has the upper hand. In 2025, SpaceX launched 83 percent of the mass sent into orbit—about 10 times more than its nearest competitor, the Chinese government. Starlink’s 11,000-plus satellites account for roughly two-thirds of all active spacecraft orbiting Earth.

Limp, at least, knows all of this. He acknowledged that SpaceX is “by far the leader.” But, he said, “there’s so much demand for space right now that if we get to the scale and the execution of SpaceX, the world will be a happy place. And that does not mean Gwynne and Elon have to fail.”

The exact size of that demand is debatable. SpaceX and Blue Origin, along with a handful of smaller competitors, provide launch services to other companies and the federal government, but most of the demand comes from their own or affiliated satellite fleets. In finance, this is called captive demand, and it’s generally regarded with suspicion. In commercial space, it’s called vertical integration, and it’s the whole point.

This is why the SpaceX prospectus reads like both a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and a transcript of an investment banker’s weekend on mushrooms. “Our mission,” it states, “is to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” It then arrives at a number for a total addressable market that includes the light of consciousness: $28.5 trillion. It must have been fun to sit in the room as that number got calculated.

Musk’s mesmeric power over investors is well-known. Tesla earned just $3.8 billion in 2025 and is somehow one of the world’s dozen most valuable companies. (Caterpillar, which makes backhoes, earned approximately $8.9 billion.) It’s best to read the prospectus not as a ledger but as the blueprint for a future empire: the East India Company of space.

The business is a ladder that starts with rocket-launch capability. The next rung up is satellite arrays. This is a much more profitable business—Starlink really does pay for most everything at SpaceX—but it depends on launch capability. The third rung requires a leap of engineering faith: data centers in space. The fourth is the reason to build them—control over an off-world computing economy capable of training and running AI models at a scale that’s hard to achieve on Earth. In January, SpaceX filed a proposal with the FCC to operate up to 1 million data-center satellites in orbit—describing the project, in the filing itself, as the “first step towards becoming a Kardashev II–level civilization.” A Kardashev Type II civilization is one capable of harnessing the entire energy output of its star.

Does this sound crazy? If so, technology’s biggest players are eager to break into the asylum. Space offers AI companies abundant solar energy available 24 hours a day, and freedom from the NIMBYism that makes earthbound data centers and power plants so contentious. “Should I make a rocket company?” OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, asked on a podcast in 2025. OpenAI subsequently tried, unsuccessfully, to take over Stoke Space, a reusable-rocket start-up founded by former Blue Origin employees. Alphabet’s Google and the satellite operator Planet intend to launch two prototype satellites in early 2027 to test whether AI chips can operate effectively in orbit.

Google and OpenAI do not have their own ladders. Musk does, and he’s already climbed the first two rungs; in August, he posted that SpaceX would put its first satellite data center in orbit by the end of next year. Bezos is in between—he has a ladder; it’s just shorter and shakier. The question is how much the gap matters as the race moves upward, into new areas of engineering and imagination where no one—not even SpaceX—has a lead.

In late 2027, Blue Origin plans to deploy TeraWave, a constellation of 5,408 new satellites custom designed to provide data centers and governments with internet up to 6,000 times faster than Amazon’s satellites. New Glenn is expected to place TeraWave into orbit.

John Couluris leads Blue Origin’s lunar-permanence team, charged with creating the infrastructure for colonization. “Maybe seven years ago, people wouldn’t have said, ‘Well, we could do data centers on the moon,’ ” Couluris told me. Now he considers it complicated but more and more plausible. The challenges are real—chips fail, cosmic radiation is weird, and maintenance is essentially impossible. But if launch costs continue to drop, they’ll offset the expense. Couluris said Blue Origin is already working on manufacturing solar cells directly from lunar soil. The chips would come from Earth; almost everything else could be made on-site.

The destination for all of this potential computing power has only recently become clear. In 2024, I heard rumors about Prometheus, a company whose plans were inscrutable even by the standards of AI start-ups. No one associated with Prometheus would confirm its existence. Given the history of Blue Origin, this should have been a tell.

What’s now known is that Prometheus is trying to build something quite different from the generative-AI models that spit out text or code. The most complicated things that humans create—jet engines, drug molecules, semiconductors—live at the intersection of invention and engineering, where physical forces interact in ways that are expensive to model and even more expensive to test. An engineer can sketch a thousand designs; each one still has to survive contact with physics. Prometheus is intended to compress that process—to create an artificial general engineer capable not merely of proposing designs, but, it seems, of simulating, testing, refining, and, eventually, helping manufacture them. The grandest possible outcome is a machine that makes machines.

There’s an echo here for Bezos. Neal Stephenson and Blue Origin’s other early employees spent years exploring engineering possibilities in slow motion while the competition raced ahead. An artificial general engineer could compress all of that painstaking discovery into rapid computation: a Neal Stephenson bot.

This could be useful to all humankind—and particularly useful to someone trying to build dexterous warehouse robots, cheaper rockets, and data centers on the moon. Whether any of this is possible, and on what timeline, is unknown. Large language models were jump-started by the availability (or theft) of trillions of words; there’s less training data on the physical world. The models also have to understand multiple kinds of physics at once, account for uncertainty, and produce results trustworthy enough to bet hardware and human lives on. Those problems are very expensive to solve. At least for most people.

In November 2025, Prometheus’s existence became public, along with the news that it had raised $6.2 billion, the largest chunk of which came from Bezos. He was also named co-CEO, his first operational role since Amazon. Prometheus has since hired 150 people, many from OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Dave told me that Bezos spends his days bouncing between Prometheus and Blue Origin. “But he multitasks very well. Well, he single-tasks in a multitask world very well.”

Musk already has his own AI company, xAI, which he merged with SpaceX. His chatbot, Grok, has mostly distinguished itself through creepiness and anti-Semitism, but Musk used $60 billion in stock from the IPO to buy Cursor, an AI-coding assistant that’s one of the fastest-growing software companies. That leaves tens of billions more to spend on the most precious commodity in tech: margin for error.

It’s not a coincidence that, a few weeks after the SpaceX IPO, Blue Origin said it had secured $10 billion in outside funding, the first non-Bezos money in the company’s 26-year history. Limp called it a sign of confidence. It was also an acknowledgment of reality: Blue Origin is going to need more money. It has less margin, and more errors.

SpaceX is winding down Falcon 9, the workhorse rocket that’s served as the West’s space-transportation system, in order to concentrate on Starship (as of this writing, the company was preparing for its 14th test flight—the first to attempt orbit). Other satellite companies have reported trouble buying Falcon launches beyond 2028. Starship will offer significantly more capacity—but SpaceX may use much of that capacity itself: Starlink and the orbital data centers it hopes to build are potentially far more lucrative than carrying other people’s satellites. In other words, the company that solved America’s launch shortage may now be creating another one.

This is not just a business problem. It also matters to a sovereign nation that has recently discovered that one of its citizens possesses powers normally reserved for states. All of humanity may learn what it means to have its future built atop someone else’s rocket.

In 2022, Ukraine asked Musk to extend Starlink coverage over Crimea so it could carry out military operations. Musk refused. General Mark Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and National Security Adviser Sullivan spoke with him about the decision. “And there wasn’t much we could do about that, absent taking some very coercive measures,” Sullivan told me—measures no one wants to take.

Three years later, during an X fight with Trump, Musk threatened to immediately decommission SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, the only American vehicle capable of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Without it, NASA would have had to pay Russia $80 million a seat on Soyuz capsules. A few hours later, Musk backed down. “We absolutely need diversification on this,” Sullivan said. “And what’s challenging is that the most likely pathway to diversification lies through another mercurial billionaire.”

That the republic finds itself needing Bezos’s extraordinary concentration of private power to mitigate Musk’s extraordinary concentration of private power is probably not what the Founders had in mind. I asked Senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, if he trusted either man completely. He replied, “Kind of a loaded question.”

Kelly has met Bezos. His history with Musk dates back to at least 2012, when he joined SpaceX’s human-spaceflight safety-advisory panel, consulting on the Dragon capsule that would eventually make SpaceX indispensable to NASA. After Kelly, who serves on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, visited Ukraine in 2025, Musk called him a “traitor” on X. So it goes. But Kelly doesn’t begrudge SpaceX its dominance. “It’s not SpaceX’s fault, right?” Kelly said. “They got ahead. They do it well.” What he wants is for SpaceX to “continue to be a successful company because it is in our national-security interest that that’s the case. I also want to see Blue Origin be successful.”

The pragmatist’s position, shared by most of the national-security community, is that one company capable of getting you to space is better than none, and two is better than one. But even if Bezos is the less mercurial billionaire, Blue Origin is not yet a reliable substitute for SpaceX.

So the government can’t use Blue Origin as leverage. It can threaten to withhold contracts from SpaceX, but, as Trump discovered, Musk will respond by threatening to decommission the only American vehicle capable of reaching the space station. It can nationalize the companies, which would require a political consensus that doesn’t exist and a legal argument that hasn’t been made. Kelly thinks campaign-finance reform would make it harder for the next Musk to buy his way into the center of government, or the next Bezos to buy his way back into its good graces. When I asked which is more likely to happen first—campaign-finance reform or data centers on the moon—Kelly laughed. “I hope it’s campaign-finance reform.”

The government is not negotiating from a position of strength, but Bezos and Musk have a shared vulnerability: Both say they would like to go to the moon—for their empires, for glory, and because their youthful love of space has never settled into something more rational. To put it in terms they and the president would all understand, the moon is leverage. If the people trying to bargain with Charles Foster Kane had known about Rosebud, they would have dangled a sled.

For all of the stated urgency of the 2016 Trump transition meeting, what’s really happening with America’s return to the moon is only just now coming into view. In February, Musk posted on X that SpaceX had shifted focus from Mars to building a “self-growing city on the Moon.” The SpaceX prospectus has a section called “Establish the lunar economy,” which includes a base supplied by a continuous flow of people and cargo, eventually capable of producing its own water, fuel, power, and manufactured goods. Moontown sounds great, but the engineering details are a kind of truth serum—revealing the distance between what Bezos and Musk say they want and where their priorities actually lie.

SpaceX’s Starship cannot get to the moon without stopping for gas. The plan it sold NASA works roughly like this: SpaceX launches a Starship to serve as a fuel depot; then it launches a succession of tanker Starships to fill the depot; then it launches the lunar lander, which gasses up at the depot and departs for the moon. NASA’s Office of Inspector General estimates that at least 15 Starship launches will be needed to deliver all the fuel. No spacecraft has ever transferred ultracold methane and oxygen between vehicles in orbit.

In August, SpaceX committed $100 billion to build what Musk called “the biggest launch site on Earth” in Louisiana. This, along with its other facilities, should allow it, eventually, to launch multiple rockets a day. But even if SpaceX can get refueler rockets to the depot before the other rockets run out of gas, Doug Loverro, NASA’s former associate administrator for human exploration and operations, told me he’s skeptical of all the other things Starship has to prove: that it can reach orbit, keep astronauts alive, transfer fuel repeatedly in space, fly to the moon, land, and—crucially, if you’re an astronaut—take off again. His point is not that any single step is impossible. It’s the sheer number of steps that have to work in sequence. “Hurdle No. 1 is let’s get Starship to orbit,” Loverro said. “Which still hasn’t happened yet.”

Blue Origin’s route to the moon is complicated too: New Glenn first sends a transporter into low Earth orbit to be refueled. The lander, Blue Moon, launches separately, takes on fuel, and heads toward the moon, while the transporter climbs to a higher orbit for another fill. Near the moon, the two dock for one final transfer. Only then do the astronauts arrive and move into Blue Moon, which they use to descend to the surface and return to their spacecraft.

It’s an elaborate chain of rendezvous and refuelings, but the jobs are divided among purpose-built vehicles: New Glenn launches, the transporter carries fuel across deep space, and Blue Moon lands. SpaceX assigns nearly all of those jobs to variants of the same enormous Starship.

Also, as NASA’s Office of Inspector General has pointed out, Starship’s lander is 171 feet tall—roughly the equivalent of a 14-story building—and its astronauts descend in an elevator that begins 115 feet up. There’s no other way back into the vehicle if the elevator fails. Blue Moon is 52 feet, and its crew walks down a set of stairs that starts six feet off the ground.

If you’re curious why, 60 years after Apollo, getting to the moon seems harder, part of the answer is that NASA has 60 years of pent-up expectations. The original astronauts flew in tin cans atop disposable rockets. A sustained presence on the moon will require more mass and more propellant.

Most people I spoke with have reached the same conclusion: On this, Blue Origin is ahead. It has completed thermal-vacuum testing on Blue Moon, and, as of August, its structure, propulsion, and avionics were fully assembled; it’s already communicating with NASA’s satellites and deep-space network. Even with the launchpad explosion, Blue Origin still plans to deliver an uncrewed test mission to the moon by early next year. That first flight will be a chance to work out many of Blue Origin’s hardest lunar-specific tasks on a single trip.

The crux of the difference is that Blue Origin—the smaller, slower company in need of a win—seems to have built a product to fit the brief, while Musk has built a giant rocket designed for his satellite business and his personal goal of deep-space travel to Mars. Making Starship work for the moon is like adapting a cargo ship to win a yacht race.

None of this guarantees that Blue Origin gets to the moon first. “I’m the first to say never count Elon out,” Loverro told me. “He’s a clever guy.” It also doesn’t really solve the mercurial-billionaire problem as much as shift it. But Loverro had a suggestion so simple and clever that it made me laugh out loud.

The Apollo missions also sprang from private industry, but NASA divided the work among contractors—Boeing, North American Aviation, IBM, and more. Different companies, different roles, forced into collaboration by NASA. Why not make Starship the refueling station for Blue Moon? SpaceX would have to reconfigure some of its designs, but “it only takes one Starship to fill up a Blue lander. It may take 10 or 15 Starships to fill up a Starship lander. If they work together, they could both get there sooner.

“We’re individualistic in the United States,” Loverro continued. “Every man for themselves. But that’s not how we do great things. We do great things because we find the best of everything that we can bring to the table, and then we do it together. That’s what NASA’s job truly is—to organize that team. And they’re failing to do so.”

The person responsible for organizing that team is NASA’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, a self-made billionaire who twice flew to space on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and performed the first private spacewalk. His relationship with Musk complicated his confirmation. On his first day in the job, Isaacman said that whichever lander was ready first would get the mission. He declined an interview request for this story.

Isaacman may hold to his winner-take-all position. He may avoid angering two of America’s most powerful men and hope their engineering successes or failures make the decision for him. But the Solomonic solution has a certain appeal: Force Musk and Bezos to work together, and test their willingness to share a win.

One small step toward reminding them that the nation is still king.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Choose Your Overlord.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

It rained most of Sunday in Washington, as the remnants of Hurricane Isaias washed over the East Coast. Unable to golf, and stuck inside the White House, President Trump spent part of his morning on social media touting the size of his rallies and defending Christopher Columbus. He also declared that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to halt strikes against each other’s energy infrastructures. Except that he hadn’t first confirmed that with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and Russia spent the hours that followed bombarding Ukraine with missiles and drones, hitting a Kharkiv power plant.

Trump’s inability to bring the Iran war to a close has left him incensed but also oddly paralyzed, two people close to him told us. One of them, an adviser, said that Trump “is used to snapping his fingers and having the whole world—Republicans, world leaders, the media—come to attention, and he is losing his mind that Iran won’t listen.” Iran has resumed menacing oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and the average price of diesel in the United States has crossed the $6-a-gallon mark, raising the cost of goods that travel the nation’s highways on trucks.

Republicans are panicked that those high energy prices could help Democrats take control of the House and Senate in the midterm elections, which are now only three weeks away. Trump has been searching for a scapegoat, and appears to have settled on Ukraine. Although blaming a European country that’s fighting for its existence for the rise in global oil prices might seem implausible, Trump seems to prefer that to accepting responsibility for his decision to attack Iran. His broadsides against Ukraine, moreover, are consistent with his decade-long deference to Vladimir Putin. With rare exceptions, Trump has aligned with Moscow over Kyiv throughout the four-and-a-half-year war. He wants Ukraine to end the fighting—and has pressured the country to agree to terms that Zelensky finds unacceptable.

A U.S. president siding with the Kremlin is quite an October surprise. But in just the past few days, Trump appears to have fully turned against Ukraine. He announced on Friday that he had reached an agreement with Putin to import Russian diesel fuel, undercutting the new sanctions bill against Moscow’s energy industry that Trump signed into law last month. Even if the roughly 2.25 million barrels headed to the U.S. only marginally ease fuel costs, the deal allows Trump to tout efforts to help Americans while also providing Russia with additional revenue. (Another few million barrels are set to ship next month.)

Despite the opposition of European allies and some Republicans on Capitol Hill, Trump has followed up by placing even more pressure on Ukraine. He called for Zelensky to be replaced. His aides have threatened to withhold arms sales unless Kyiv stops targeting Russian diesel plants. Some in Trump’s orbit have suggested that the U.S. go further, and stop sharing intelligence with Kyiv. That was the context in which Trump announced his fictional energy cease-fire. A senior Ukrainian military officer told us that Trump’s statements are “simply beyond comprehension.”

“Things are already incredibly difficult for us here,” the officer said, speaking, like others who talked with us, on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. “But apparently, there’s always another level below rock bottom. Things can always get worse.”

Ukraine has expanded its strikes deep into Russian territory in recent months, targeting the larger nation’s oil refineries. Those attacks sparked an energy crisis in Russia and were cheered across Europe—but not in the White House. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in response, which added more pressure to global diesel markets already under strain from the war in Iran. Zelensky told Trump and his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner that he was willing to stop attacking Russian oil refineries if the Russians halted attacks on Ukrainian power plants, a White House official told us. But Trump doesn’t see the strikes as equivalent—and demanded that Ukraine first stop attacking Russian refineries, the official said. Zelensky refused.

“Zelensky is overplaying his hand and pissing the president off,” the White House official said. “The president is asking for one thing: stop hitting the refineries. Give him that.”

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

Trump’s next move against Ukraine came, as it so often does, after a phone call with Putin. Zelensky’s aides have expressed frustration that Putin has swayed Trump at crucial junctures in the conflict (once, even, while Zelensky was flying to Washington to meet with Trump in an effort to secure access to new U.S. weapons). This time, Trump spoke with Putin on Friday to wish him a belated birthday, even though some in the White House counseled against the call, the adviser told us, believing it would yield little. During the 90-minute conversation, Trump told Putin that he would lift the sanctions on Russian diesel exports. (Some in Kyiv believe that the deal was agreed to earlier, because a ship carrying Russian oil and gas is already approaching the U.S.)

That undermined sanctions applied in 2022 and undercut the tougher Russian-sanctions bill that Trump signed last month; the law was named in honor of one of its champions, the late Senator Lindsey Graham. A bipartisan group of lawmakers was infuriated by the move, and some Republicans denounced Trump for siding with Putin. Four GOP senators—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of ⁠Maine, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, and John Curtis of Utah—joined some of their Democratic colleagues to release a statement yesterday saying that lifting the sanctions “runs directly counter to that law” and that the U.S. should not provide “Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians.”

Zelensky, who was blindsided by the diesel deal, deemed it “not fair and not honest.” He had spent more than a year trying to repair his relationship with Trump, which hit its nadir in February 2025 during a shouting match in the Oval Office. Since then, Zelensky has taken to flattering the U.S. president, and he has tried to capitalize on Trump’s occasional annoyance that Putin will not end the war. Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit last year yielded little more than a photo of the two that hangs in the Palm Room at the White House. Even if Trump wouldn’t fully support Ukraine, officials in Kyiv had hoped he would not actively hurt their cause. That hope may be fading.

Recent talks between Kushner, Witkoff, and Putin have included the promise of massive business deals that Russia could strike with U.S. interests once the war concludes, according to reports. Ukrainian officials have long believed that Trump’s foreign policy focuses on opening up business deals—and the potential enrichment of the president’s family and friends—over the defense of democracy, human rights, or territorial sovereignty. Some officials in Kyiv believe that Russia’s economy, which has been remade to fuel Putin’s war machine, will not implode, despite the pressure of increased drone strikes and sanctions. A Ukrainian official close to the negotiating process told us that means “we need to change our strategy, stop fooling ourselves,” and find a way out of the war with Europe’s help. That, the official said, would likely require a new emphasis on negotiations.

During his call with Trump, Putin declined to commit to resuming peace talks, the Kremlin later told reporters. Yet Trump continues to view Zelensky as the primary impediment to peace—and the business deals it might bring—and he called for Ukraine to hold elections to select a new president. (Zelensky has said he will hold an election if Putin agrees to a 60-day cease-fire.) Trump also views Zelensky as an obstacle to his coveted, yet elusive, Nobel Peace Prize, for which he was passed over again last week. A senior European official told us that the U.S. has threatened to stop selling weapons to Ukraine via Europe if the strikes continue, and some close to Trump have suggested that the U.S. stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, as it briefly did after the 2025 Oval Office argument.

[From the November 2026 issue: The Baltic states prepare for war]

Ukraine was already bracing for a difficult winter. Moscow has escalated its attacks on Ukraine’s cities. It has grown its missile stockpiles and debuted a jet-powered drone that Ukrainian defenses have had difficulty stopping. Europe has tried to fill the gaps left by Trump’s indifference—and the U.S. being bogged down in Iran—but Zelensky’s aides believe that Putin will use the winter to pummel their cities before making another lunge at Kyiv in the spring. If, suddenly, Ukraine were left without U.S. intelligence or American-made weapons, Kyiv might be in its most vulnerable position since the first days of the war.

Trump’s admiration for Putin has been one of the most enduring geopolitical subplots of the past decade. He refused to publicly acknowledge Russia’s efforts to help elect him in 2016, infamously siding with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies during the leaders’ summit in Helsinki during his first term. More recently, he has refrained from holding Putin to account for helping Iran, even after American intelligence agencies revealed that Moscow gave Tehran targeting information to strike U.S. military assets in the region. Some of Trump’s closest outside advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president; Trump’s respect for the Russian leader appears undiminished despite the humiliating struggles Putin has faced during the Ukraine invasion.

Instead, Trump has taken steps to help Putin shed his status as an international pariah. Though Putin has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Trump welcomed him to Anchorage last summer. Trump’s move to undo the diesel sanctions could provide a boost to Russia’s faltering economy. And he has overruled the objections of some in his own party by inviting Putin to this winter’s G20 summit, which the United States is hosting at a Trump-owned golf course in Doral, just outside Miami.

If Putin accepts the invitation to that December meeting, it would be the first time he has attended a multilateral summit in a Western country since his invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky has said he’ll be there, and is hoping to meet with Putin to negotiate the end of the war. Trump has mentioned to advisers, one of them told us, that he’d like both sides to arrive to Doral ready to make a deal, so he can then preside over a peacemaking summit. Maybe then, Trump has suggested, he can finally win that Nobel.

In the past 72 hours, Donald Trump has dropped all pretense, torched a couple decades of American policy, and undermined 18 months of his own diplomacy. He lifted sanctions on the import of Russian diesel fuel, in violation of the letter and spirit of laws that he himself signed. He has threatened to stop sharing intelligence with Ukraine, unless Ukraine agrees not to target Russian refineries, thus demanding that Kyiv give up its most effective weapon while asking nothing from Russia in exchange. He has not criticized Russian attacks on Ukrainian power plants or factories, even those owned by American companies. He has offered no condolences for the recent deaths of Ukrainian children in Russian bombing raids.

He has lied repeatedly. He declared that Ukraine and Russia had agreed to an “energy cease-fire,” an announcement that surprised the Ukrainians and that in any case the Russians immediately broke, hitting a power plant in Kharkiv only hours later. He accused Ukraine of blocking negotiations, when in reality the Ukrainians have repeatedly proposed cease-fires and Russia has never agreed to a cease-fire or any meaningful negotiation at all.

He has described Ukraine’s democratically elected president as an obstacle to negotiations and told him to leave office. But on Friday, before making these new decisions, he held yet another long, friendly telephone conversation with the Russian dictator, who really could end the war today. All Vladimir Putin has to do is tell his soldiers to stop fighting, and then the war is over. The Ukrainians cannot stop fighting because, if they do, their country will be conquered and they will suffer the fate of their occupied territories: leaders murdered, children kidnapped, repression and concentration camps for everyone else. If Trump knows this, then he does not care.

[David Frum: Trump is an easy mark for Putin]

The president has implied that the point of his new policy is to lower fuel prices for Americans. Perhaps he wants to convince voters that the cause of high prices is Ukraine and not his own war of choice in Iran. But this is not a sufficient explanation or justification for these dramatic actions. The amount of fuel that Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes.

This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender and to save the Russian economy, perhaps in order to finally complete the multiple business deals that the Russians are known to have discussed with American negotiators and others in Trump’s orbit. These include deals involving the Nord Stream gas pipelines, mineral mining in the Arctic, the Russian assets frozen in European banks, and more.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, American allies in Europe and elsewhere have tried to explain to the president the significance of the war and the threat that Russia poses to peace and prosperity in Europe, in the Middle East, in Africa. Now it looks as if they have failed, and Trump has followed his oldest instincts to side with Putin. What lessons will they draw?

The first and most obvious is: Don’t rely on the United States. America is now a capricious, unpredictable power, one whose long-standing foreign policies can be impulsively reversed, from one day to the next. The U.S. has been sanctioning Russia for many years, and now suddenly, at the whim of the president, it is not. Also: Dictators receive better treatment in Trump’s Washington than elected leaders. Canada is a far more reliable energy partner for the U.S. than Russia, and yet Trump has not sought to improve relations with the Canadian government. European security will be directly at risk in the case of a Ukrainian collapse or surrender, and yet Trump listens to Moscow, not Berlin or London.

Another lesson: This administration is for sale. A few days ago, The New York Times reported that, as part of peace negotiations between the U.S. and Russia, the property of Lukoil, a Russian company, may soon be acquired by a business consortium that includes Middle Eastern partners of Trump’s two lead negotiators in Ukraine, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, as well as Trump’s daughter Ivanka and Witkoff’s son. (An administration official confirmed to the Times that Kushner and Witkoff were involved in the Lukoil discussions, though there is no evidence that they will personally benefit.) The proposed deals on pipelines, minerals, and frozen assets are also still on the table. Even if none of them is ever completed, the mere fact that Trump’s negotiators discuss them gives the Russian regime reason to believe that it can continue the war with impunity.

[Read: Trump’s latest appeal to Russia could outrage even his allies]

However, democracies can cooperate without the American president. Ukraine will continue fighting, and will probably continue striking Russian refineries, thanks to its friends in Europe and beyond. French intelligence, German weaponry, and broad packages of aid from Scandinavia, Poland, and elsewhere will help. Everyone else should take note. For the past couple years, Europeans, Canadians, and the Pacific democracies have been building deeper commercial and security links with one another, as well as with India and Latin America. They’ve just been given another reason to make those links stronger.

The Trump-Russia relationship remains intense, important, and very weird. In the end, Trump always adopts Russia’s perspective, whoever the leader. Since his first trip to Moscow in 1987, when it was still the Soviet Union, he has loudly repeated Russian propaganda and reflected Russian views. Upon returning from that trip, he took out full-page advertisements in three newspapers, attacking American alliances in Europe and Asia. For nearly 40 years, he has been saying much the same thing. He has changed his mind about abortion and crypto, he has supported different political parties at different times, but his dislike of America’s democratic allies and his preference for Russia have remained remarkably consistent.

He continues to hold these views in defiance of the American military and American intelligence, as well as majorities in the country and in Congress. Immediately after his statement on diesel and his comments about Volodymyr Zelensky, a bipartisan cohort of U.S. representatives and senators attacked the deal and vowed to reverse it. Earlier today, U.S. Air Force General Alexus Grynkewich, America’s highest-ranking soldier in Europe and the top NATO commander—a job always held by an American—delivered a very different message to Russia. Speaking at a security conference in Warsaw, Grynkewich said that any attack on NATO, something many now genuinely fear, would be met with overwhelming force: “We will stop the attack and deny them the ability to achieve their ​objectives, whatever those ​might be. We will, ⁠in short, ensure any attack, against any ally, proves utterly futile.” He implied that there would be massive retaliation targeting “anything and everything that supports, sustains, and controls” an aggressive force.

This is the kind of language that, if it also came from the White House, might deter Russia from expanding its current campaign of sabotage and cyberattacks in Europe, from continuing to aid Iran, or from committing war crimes in Ukraine. But this president absolutely refuses to use it, and at this point, we have to assume he never will.

Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO of Flock Safety, is an unlikely spokesperson for the dangers of the surveillance industry: His company says it has deployed more than 120,000 roadside cameras across 49 states. But in August, while defending his products and policies, he perhaps inadvertently showed why Americans should be alarmed by this technology.

Flock caught “a ton” of “bad cops” when it rolled out a tool to identify abuse of its data, Langley acknowledged on the All-In podcast. (While Flock will soon require the tool for all of its law-enforcement clients, just a fraction of clients were using it as of mid-August. Many bad cops likely went uncaught.) He argued that Flock will force safeguards on clients, though that may lose the company business, because he wants to “sleep at night.” His competitors, meanwhile, “run more reckless”—offering video and facial recognition with their license-plate readers, for example. If you take him at his word—and I’d argue that he overstates the strength of Flock’s safeguards––it’s clear that the way the industry works is worrying even one of its biggest boosters.

My own sleep has been troubled by the private surveillance industry for more than a decade. In 2014, three years before Flock was founded, I warned in The Atlantic that mass surveillance of all car trips was nearly upon us. I noted that private companies were deploying automatic license-plate readers, or ALPRs, at scale on America’s public roads, threatening a privacy we’ve always enjoyed, and that Congress should regulate the fast-growing surveillance industry. Today, if you drive in much of the continental United States, Flock may profit by selling others the means to reconstruct your movements.

Opposition to this form of surveillance is now a plurality position, according to an August YouGov survey, which found that more Americans oppose the technology’s use in their neighborhood than support it. Politicians in both major parties are criticizing ALPRs, whose name has become something of a misnomer: The cameras can capture detailed images of passing vehicles, not just of the license plate. And anti-Flock activists who track clients of the company list scores of past and potential clients that have canceled their contracts or deactivated cameras in recent months. “I’ve never really seen such a grassroots uprising against surveillance technology,” Jay Stanley, an ACLU senior policy analyst, told The Guardian. “On the left, there’s a historical memory of law enforcement spying on and interfering with advocates for social change … On the right, there’s a long tradition of ‘don’t tread on me’—keep the government out of my life, keep it from looking over my shoulder.”

Still, most of Flock’s network and its competitors’ cameras remain in place. And fans of the technology want to keep it that way; they argue that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on roads, and that a network of cameras that logs every passing vehicle is a vital tool for catching criminals. Most surveillance boosters don’t deny that serious abuses have happened or wholly dismiss privacy concerns. Instead, they urge the use of safeguards and the passage of regulations to address them.

But this technology is already ubiquitous. States and localities should not permit its dangers to persist in the hope that one day, our often passive legislators will act. Instead, Americans should work to ban mass surveillance of public roads in every jurisdiction where they can secure support from elected officials until strong protections are in place. The pro-surveillance coalition has significant political influence, and some of its members employ accomplished lobbyists. The only way that it will hasten privacy safeguards is if doing so is the only way to sustain the surveillance business.

Before sketching out what specific legislative protections could look like, it’s helpful to notice that popular debates about ALPRs overstate their likely benefits and understate their dangers. The primary benefit––they help catch some criminals––will grow less effective over time as knowledge of the technology and how to evade it spreads. For example, license plates are already being cloned. And as the benefits decline, the cost that law-abiding citizens pay in lost privacy will persist. It may even increase. After all, the business model––pay us and we’ll help you catch criminals––creates a powerful incentive for surveillance companies to address falling effectiveness with new privacy intrusions. Flock may eschew facial recognition today, but no federal law prevents it from changing its mind tomorrow, or requires that it alert the public before introducing a new tool.

While evidence remains limited that ALPRs reduce crime in general or violent crime in particular, there is solid evidence that they reduce car theft: A working paper, published in August by the criminologists Scott M. Mourtgos and Ian T. Adams, found that ALPR networks are associated with an 11 percent decline in such thefts and an increase in arrest clearance (though they cautioned that clearances were already rising in the weeks before camera deployment). But if vehicle owners installed their own trackers, benefits could be had for all who opt in without imposing costs on everyone’s privacy.

Some dangers of roadside cameras are well understood. The Institute for Justice maintains a database of known and alleged police abuses of the technology, including stalking and wrongful stops. And although Flock’s rollout of Audit Assistance, the tool that helps catch abuse by cops, redounds to the company’s credit, it is no cure-all: It “detects abnormal activity and flags it for Administrator review,” a Flock spokesperson clarified to me by email, which “refers to review by an authorized administrator at the customer agency—not a Flock administrator.” This leaves open the possibility that abuse will remain undisciplined by some police departments.

A less widely understood danger is what might be called the foreign-adversary problem. China, Russia, and others have real incentives for gaining access to data collected by license-plate readers. Doing so could assist hostile actors in recruiting assets, blackmail, intimidation, and more. Breaching Flock would be the biggest prize––and the public is in no position to evaluate how competently the company or its competitors secure their data. If Edward Snowden could make off with the NSA’s most sensitive secrets, a systems administrator at Flock or a competitor could theoretically attempt a large-scale theft. The company (let alone the public) may not even know about it.

That worst-case scenario aside, a hostile foreign actor could do damage to U.S. interests merely via the access that normal Flock clients enjoy. Thousands of law-enforcement agencies use Flock. That means thousands of targets for incidents such as a phishing attack, well-placed bribe, or blackmailing a corrupt county sheriff.

What specific legal safeguards would justify the use of this technology? Figuring that out requires distinguishing between two different ways road cameras might operate. Say that a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California Spyder is reported stolen by its owner when he arrives home from work to find the car missing from his garage, and the Highland Park, Illinois, police department puts its license plate, NRVOUS, on a “hot list” of missing vehicles. In one approach, Chicago-area license-plate readers could (if the local regulatory scheme allowed it) scan all passing cars for “hot” plates, and instantly delete data on all vehicles that are not a match.

Alternatively––and this is the status quo––license-plate readers could store data from all scans, enabling people with access to the data to retrospectively reconstruct the movements of many thousands of innocents who have no connection whatsoever to any crime. (In this case, neither approach would result in the return of the vehicle in usable condition.)

Defenders of the way that Flock and other mass-surveillance technologies currently function favor constantly collecting and storing data on the movements of millions of people to ensure that a tiny cohort of criminals is surveilled. But that “collect and store it all” approach is not necessary for us to benefit from ALPRs. In Germany, multiple states deploy roadside cameras. Some German states use protocols that flag “hot” license plates while deleting all scans of plates that aren’t hits. That approach offers benefits without creating a spy apparatus that captures and stores data on nearly everyone.

If a collect-and-store-it-all approach endures, equally comprehensive safeguards are justified. First, companies should be permitted to retain data for no longer than a week, on encrypted, local servers; retaining data longer than permitted should be a crime. Authorization by a city council or county board of supervisors should precede installing cameras in any jurisdiction and constrain how that data are shared. And periodic reauthorization votes should be required.

Second, the federal government and all of its agencies should be banned from deploying ALPR technology on public roads or from accessing data collected there.

Third, state and local police should be required by statute to get a warrant to query ALPR data, whether or not federal courts consider these queries Fourth Amendment searches.

Fourth, permissible reasons to query the data should be limited––for example, to investigating felonies or missing or endangered persons, or responding to imminent threats of serious injury or death. And all queries should be made by a named person whose actions can be audited.

Fifth, every camera should be registered with the DMV in the state where it is located, display a physical license number on the device itself, and appear on a publicly accessible map that shows the location of all devices that capture data on public roads.

Sixth, individuals should have a right to know that their license plate was queried, by whom, and for what reason; to obtain records stored on their plate; and to compel deletion and payment of damages if the record was collected unlawfully or retained beyond statutory limits.

Seventh, as Mike Fox of the libertarian Cato Institute suggests, Congress should pass a law that authorizes victims of automated-surveillance errors to sue technology vendors for damages.

Until Congress acts, states and localities should impose restrictions or bans, as Knox County, Tennessee, and Oconee County, South Carolina, have done. (Scores of cities have already canceled or declined to renew contracts with Flock.)

In a City Journal article that argues against banning automated license-plate readers, the Manhattan Institute scholar Rafael Mangual writes, “Banning technologies in anticipation of harms that have yet to materialize is the wrong approach to policymaking. Where a technology presents genuine risks, policymakers can act to mitigate them.” But surely some potential harms, such as foreign adversaries accessing information that harms national security, or authoritarian officials exploiting networked ALPRs to threaten democracy, should be anticipated and averted rather than addressed after the fact.

What’s more, significant harms related to ALPRs have already materialized. Mass tracking by the federal government is reality rather than speculation: Last year, the Associated Press reported that “the U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious,” and that “suddenly, drivers find themselves pulled over” and are “aggressively questioned and searched, with no inkling that the roads they drove put them on law enforcement’s radar.” And a 2015 investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that “100 ALPR cameras in Louisiana, California and Florida were connected unsecured to the internet, many with publicly accessible websites that anyone could use to manipulate the controls of the cameras or siphon off data.”

Details from a few entries in the Institute for Justice database of alleged police abuses help to convey their gravity: A Georgia police chief allegedly tracked an ex-girlfriend and her teenage daughter about 600 times. In Texas, a deputy reportedly used data from tens of thousands of Flock cameras to find a woman accused by her partner of having an abortion (the deputy later claimed that he made the search out of concern for the woman’s welfare). In Lenexa, Kansas, police reportedly tracked “a writer who wrote a column critical of them,” whom they also suspected of hanging anti-police posters on city property (which the writer has denied). In Toledo, Ohio, an innocent driver was attacked by a police dog, held at gunpoint, and jailed for hours after a Flock camera misread a digit on his license plate (the Toledo police said that they took “appropriate administrative action” after the incident, which included a “verbal reprimand” for the officer involved).

Getting a new privacy law through Congress is hard. Preventing its passage or watering down its provisions is easy. As a result, the intrusions on privacy just keep growing. But if people who favor and even profit from mass surveillance confronted state and local bans until adequate federal protections were in place, they would suddenly have a powerful reason to push for the speedy passage of new privacy rules. That change in incentives may be the best hope for Americans who see how quickly technology is changing and want to stand athwart the surveillance state, yelling Stop.

My family and I enjoy the occasional meal of delicious slow-cooked meat, but every time we visit a barbecue joint, we can’t remember whether we like the beans and slaw on offer. Some beans are sweet; others are spicy. Some slaw is vinegar based; others creamy. We should keep track of this somehow, we always say but then never bother. I should make an app, I used to joke. But that was a ridiculous idea.

Thanks to generative artificial intelligence, it became less ridiculous. By last summer, I had been making small programs with AI for some time. AI’s adeptness at programming was helping me, a busy person with a professional programming background but limited reason to program, work creatively with computing for the first time in ages. I wanted to see how far I could push AI as a solo programmer. The barbecue-sides-preference problem, I reasoned, would serve as a perfect test case: building a fully featured iPhone app—Beanslaw, I called it—with esoteric utility that nobody would have bothered commercializing.

Two days of occasional programming were sufficient to make a professional-grade version of Beanslaw—an act that would have taken weeks of full-time dedication not long ago. The app displayed smoked-meat joints on a searchable map. It implemented sophisticated intelligence to filter out Korean barbecue, Brazilian churrasco, and other (no less delectable!) cuisines that entail barbecue of a different, bean-and-slawless variety. A user can assign assessments of beans (such as vegetarian and soupy) and slaw (including chunky and mustard), and filter the map by desired side-dish traits. I even built an onboarding tutorial. I was ready to ship.

Excited, I showed a friend. “Where are everyone else’s slaw and bean ratings?” he asked, tapping at his phone. He didn’t get the point of an app that amounted to a personal journal. Almost two decades of smartphone apps had trained him to understand software as a mechanism for collective intelligence. A program that only a few people would use is now alien. App has come to refer to a type of global, leveraged software business, not a computer program.

[Josh Tyrangiel: The secret to understanding AI]

Because AI is so good at writing software, in only an hour or so, I was able to add community ratings. Now Beanslaw does what my friend would expect it to—connect potentially billions of users. But doing so also turned an idiosyncratic app meant to satisfy me alone into a candidate (a hopeless one, at that) for the software attention economy.

I never released Beanslaw to the public. But during the year since, I have written, with AI’s aid, a dozen or more programs to solve anomalous problems, seeking to understand what AI programming—a practice some people call vibe coding—means for computing culture. AI-assisted coding could revive the old dream of ordinary people making software for themselves. But so far, in practice it amounts to a new trip down an old path that software development has been traversing for decades: one where a privileged few decide what computers are for, and the rest of us fall in line.

In the early 1960s, inspired by Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Atlantic essay “As We May Think,” a recent Swarthmore College philosophy graduate named Ted Nelson began conceptualizing a computer-publishing system for all global knowledge, accessible to anyone—work for which he coined the term hypertext. A decade later, in 1974, Nelson expanded his vision of computing’s populist power in a pamphlet manifesto called Computer Lib/Dream Machines.

At the time, computers were big, expensive machines used by corporations and government offices. Before the personal computer arrived in earnest, Nelson denounced the “appalling gap between public and computer insider.” He characterized the corporate and governmental actors with access to and expertise in computing as a “priesthood.” Nelson advocated for dismantling this priesthood and putting computing in the hands of ordinary people.

Nelson, along with other figures of the personal-computer revolution, saw his work as literally revolutionary: The Lib of Computer Lib referred to liberation, like “women’s lib,” and he and his allies understood their work as a part of the counterculture movement. Seymour Papert, who co-designed the programming language Logo, envisioned programming as a way for kids to control these machines rather than submit to them. Inspired by Papert, Alan Kay imagined the tablet-style Dynabook, a “personal computer for children of all ages.” And Steve Wozniak, who designed the first Apple (and co-founded Apple Computer with Steve Jobs), valued cheap, publicly shared software skills as a way to overthrow the corporate monopoly on computing.

For a time, that liberationist vision became reality. Early personal computers such as the Apple II and Commodore 64 booted up to a command prompt where users could immediately begin programming in BASIC, an intuitive language. Early advertisements pitched them explicitly as devices people could program themselves. Computer magazines of the era published code that readers typed into their machines by hand.

I learned Papert’s Logo as a first grader in the early 1980s, because my private school had invested in personal computers, labs to house them, and teachers to guide us. That head start gave me confidence with computer programming, which was presented as a normal activity akin to making art or reading. I picked up BASIC, assembly, Pascal, C, and other languages naturally. The machines couldn’t do much yet, and I could learn new things as they evolved—which was still slow enough that an ordinary person, even a child, could keep up.

Personal though they might have become, computers remained expensive and largely inaccessible. And the relatively well-off people who bought them were more likely to buy commercial software than to write their own. Within a few years, the graphical user interface popularized by Macintosh and Windows made the machines easier to use yet also more complicated. Business tools such as spreadsheets, word processors, and layout software made new kinds of computer-based creativity possible, but the results were far removed from the visions of Kay and Nelson. Computers, once envisioned as tools of self-actualization, became appliances.

In the 1980s and 1990s, ordinary people’s ability to construct their own software ebbed and flowed. Hypercard users made databases, cookbooks, and games on their Macs; gray-cubicle office workers used Visual Basic to build Windows programs to automate tasks, often for themselves alone. The World Wide Web let ordinary people publish websites for the whole world, rather than just themselves, their friends, or their office mates.

By the mid-2000s, the Web 2.0 economy had begun to roll back the web’s openness, shepherding people into using platforms such as Blogger, YouTube, and Facebook. The priesthood was back, and the wealthy tech giants served as its bishops.

AI programming does not challenge that power. It entrenches it. I encountered a characteristic, if humdrum, example of software authority during what I thought would be a straightforward vibe-coding task last winter. I had long been dissatisfied with the countdown-timer app on the Apple Watch, with its giant list of times and tiny stop button. I mostly time things in 30-second increments: hamstring stretches, grill sears, tea brews. So with AI’s help, I made a watch app I called Taptimer. I’d tap the screen repeatedly to add half minutes; the timer would run, and then it would buzz. Tapping anywhere on the screen would turn it off again. Sounds simple, right?

Except, Apple doesn’t let third-party programs issue the type of repeated-vibration notifications that its special “native” timer program uses. I had to settle on a single-buzz notification. It works—I use Taptimer every day—but the terms of what the software is allowed to do are set by the owners of the platforms that people must use to run it.

With reason, or at least excuse. Under the guises of usability, security, or control, the oligopolistic tech industry dictates what software can be and can do. The software industry began treating a program shared among friends like a product distributed to millions—in part because it cannot imagine why anyone would bother to make a program that didn’t aspire to wealth, power, or prestige. AI programming arrives during the most intensively exclusionary version of the computer priesthood. The software business has been pushing amateurs out of software creation for two decades, forcing us to use its own wares instead.

When I first started writing Mac programs, in the early 1990s, I could compile a program, put it on a disk, and give it to a friend. Apple’s documentation for how to do so came in printed volumes you could buy at a bookstore, and that didn’t change much across an entire decade. By the time I sat down to write Beanslaw, I needed a $99-a-year subscription to the Apple Developer Program, sufficient familiarity with Apple’s development tools to understand how to use ChatGPT’s code, and enough software-publishing experience to get the resulting software off of my computer and onto phones.

I had to know enough about making software that I could reason and negotiate with the AI about how to approach certain tasks. Some of this effort was not technical at all, such as building a whitelist of known barbecue joints (Rendezvous in Memphis, Pecan Lodge in Dallas) that the app would always display. Others required a deeper bureaucratic knowledge of software development as a practice, such as how to include restaurant images via a backend service provided by Yelp without accidentally spending thousands of dollars.

[Read: How long until AI hacks everything?]

The more I programmed with AI, the more I felt this tug-of-war between my own prior programming knowledge and the exciting, new coding capacities AI unlocked for me. On my own, I could have built the community ratings that my friend who tried Beanslaw had expected. But storing data in a scalable way across an internet service is complicated, and I wouldn’t have bothered for a program that was supposed to be for a handful of people. ChatGPT introduced me to an Apple programming feature called CloudKit, which made the process easy. Then AI made the implementation easy, too, by giving me the code.

In other cases, I had known what I wanted and how to do it, but I didn’t feel like investing time in the doing. AI made minor software excursions both reasonable and delightful. For example, the Ethernet switch in my home office kept dropping to a lower throughput. To monitor it, I made, with AI, a Mac program that performs an internet-speed test and displays the results in the menu bar. Or, when I had to rebuild my personal website before preorders for my latest book opened, I relied on 30 years of web-development experience to ask AI for the features I wanted (redirecting old URLs, presenting different content by geography) but that I couldn’t quite make time for amid the duties of my actual job and life.

To call this process vibe coding—as if one just types a prompt, waves their hands, and gets a complete and working computer program—amounts to a profound misconstrual of what’s going on.

Computer scientists sometimes talk about “high level” and “low level” programming. Low-level programming involves a lot of very small-scale, specific instructions; high-level programming abstracts that effort into simpler methods that are easier and more accessible. Low-level programming is sometimes considered more technical and therefore more righteous, but high-level coding is often understood to produce faster results. The latter value has prevailed, and over the years and decades, software development has moved to higher levels of abstraction because doing so streamlines output. Low-level work is used only when necessary—and often just to build tools or infrastructure to facilitate high-level programming.

Vibe coding continues this tendency. Coding has always involved a repeated process of giving a computer instructions for an intended outcome or experience, making the machine run them, and then revising the instructions based on the result. At first, those instructions were immensely basic: Move a number or perform a mathematical operation. Over time, the instructions became more complex and abstracted: Write a file to disk, draw a circle, plot a location on a map. Under the hood, computer programs often generate and run code at a lower level as a part of their work. AI programming does not disrupt that process at all. It extends the effort.

This makes the aesthetics of vibe coding entirely familiar to programmers. The moment-to-moment experience of coding feels the same, but you do so at a greater remove. Realizing this made me understand why programmer types might find generative AI so immediately compelling, and also why they might not grasp the objections of people in other walks of life who oppose it. Using AI to create prose or illustrations seems to erase the experience of the writer or artist and their participation in the act of creation. It clobbers the process in favor of the outcome. But for a programmer, the outcome and the process improve all at once. Nothing about AI programming feels like a compromise or cheat. It just feels like programming.

Or perhaps it’s programming at its best. I could feel myself becoming a more generous and open-minded programmer when I coded with AI. Feature requests or suggestions seemed not like slights or gripes, but like opportunities worth considering. Likewise, bugs stopped bothering me. A defect no longer represented something I did wrong; it was a problem I could hurl back at the machinery to solve. Even dead ends or bad ideas felt good, both because I enjoyed carrying them out and because the prototyping experience seemed familiar, but faster and more deliberate.

For example, over a few weeks this summer, I became obsessed with a little $30 computer with a round screen and a dial, similar to a Nest thermostat. I was convinced that the thing could host a clever video game. So I bought one and tried a bunch of ideas: circular Pong, round Breakout, marble rolling, safecracking, tetherball, mini golf, driving a car, navigating a spaceship, mowing a lawn. All of them were cute, but none felt interesting enough to play more than once. I stopped trying, at least for the moment. That feeling is familiar: I’ve started and abandoned hundreds of software projects in my amateur and professional programming career. But the vibe-coded failures felt less bad, because the coding had produced instructive results without devouring my life.

All of this still relied on my accidental, if long-in-the-tooth, membership into the computing priesthood. When I first started using ChatGPT to code, the process was almost dialectical. I’d ask AI for something, it would present some code, and I would implement that code in my project. The process involved a lot of step-by-step, back-and-forth discussion and action.

And yet, during my year of AI programming, I could feel my sense of control and competence recede as the technology evolved. By this spring, something had changed. So-called agentic execution in Claude Code had made it possible to give the AI access to a directory and have it create a whole program on its own, even a complex one. This method, which seems more automatic and thus more desirable, has spread, and OpenAI has added a version of it called Codex. AI has shifted from facilitating programming—as a process of iteratively making stuff with computers—to solving a problem on its own. No programmer required.

This might seem to realize vibe coding as automation, and perhaps even defrock the coding priesthood. I doubt it, largely because industrial power has swallowed so many prior attempts to democratize coding. But automation is also the wrong goal for amateur programming. The most productive, interesting, and fulfilling AI-programming experiences I have had are the collaborative ones.

Earlier this year, I became interested in the unexplored design space in software-based reading. So I started making prototypes: an e-reader that meted out a story as if over the 15 hours of a transpacific journey; a similar one that dispensed text about a road trip gone awry as the reader moved through physical space; an aleatory story that subtly changed what happened to its characters every time the reader opened it. In each of these cases, my aesthetic, technical, and writerly goals were iterative: I hatched some plan, ChatGPT helped me implement it, and then I judged the results and repeated the process.

Unfortunately, during the year that I spent programming seriously with AI, that paradigm of creativity has been superseded. When I try to partner with ChatGPT to code, the software now urges me to use its automation tools instead. ChatGPT has made certain kinds of direct file editing, which I found particularly useful for iterative work, hard or impossible. The industry at large now seems to assume that a programmer’s end goal is known in advance, and the work just involves moving toward it: Build a game for me, or make a website, or generate an app. A lot of news coverage of the phenomenon takes this efficiency as an improvement, assuming AI programming to be a way for the software industry to become more productive. But I found AI to be most liberating when I treated it like a partner offering a feedback loop between my intention and the machine’s implementation, rather than a silicon priest delivering answers or a minion carrying out my bidding.

Reflecting on my vibe-coding journey, I now realize that I began the effort insufficiently aware of what I should have known to be true: that software had already mostly been captured by the high-tech industry long before AI-coding tools arrived, and that those tools were doomed to worsen as much as improve the situation. I fell into the ever-enlarging chasm between the small-scale, personal-software fantasy and its scaled-up, big-business reality. Even the AI services I use to write software change so frequently that the methods I used last week to make something might change next week when Claude or ChatGPT updates. The whole structure feels erected on a sheet of ice.

[David Brooks: AI is already changing what it means to be human]

Rather than fight the friction, I’ve sought out a software equivalent of crampons that can bite into it—resilient enough to resist the slide into commercial software, but sufficiently functional to persist beyond curiosity. That charge is difficult but still possible, although I still feel as if I am clinging precariously to a frosty crag when pursuing it.

As part of this clamber, I found an inexpensive, programmable e-ink display that I could hang on a wall. I have a home weather station in my yard, and I liked the idea of building a pretty, inconspicuous display for the hyperlocal data it produces. I wrestled with the new version of ChatGPT, but for the moment collaboration was still possible if I pushed the AI to converse with me as a partner. Even in the more esoteric, open-source electronics platforms I was using for the project, an accidental priesthood has arisen thanks to 20 years of chaotic, incremental work by global homebrew volunteers. AI helped me make sense of it all so that I—so that we—could get started. And then, together, we built the layout, slurped up the data from my weather station, and iterated on the appearance of the weather-condition icons. I got the idea to display the temperature from my pool heater and then the soil moisture from my lawn sensors, silly things that would have felt indulgent if a computer hadn’t made them easy. Now the little screen hangs next to the alarm panel, updating itself every 15 minutes.

When I pass by the thing on the way to the kitchen or the driveway, I feel a vibration of delight. The sensation isn’t quite pride, because I can hardly take sole credit for the accomplishment. But neither is it opportunism, as if I might package and resell weather-station displays as some kind of value-additive, hardware-accessory side hustle. Instead, I feel overcome by the modesty of the matter. A little black-and-white display is showing me the weather—one I made, if with AI help. How nice. For once, a computer doesn’t have to be connecting the world or saving it—or ruining it. Instead, it can simply hang humbly on a wall inside that world, doing something cute, and intentional, and perhaps even useful. The revolutionaries of computing’s counterculture, who mostly became its priests, once believed that would be enough.

One day not long ago, Franky, a 40-something woman who lives in the mid-Atlantic region, got an infuriating text message from her aunt. It was just the latest truth-stretching missive she had sent, and Franky’s impulse was to write back: “You’re a liar. You’ve always been a liar. All you do is lie.” Instead, she asked an AI program to write a response that was less “condescending and unnecessarily emotional.” AI-ese, Franky told me, helps make her responses more logical and neutral. Another message that she sent her aunt after running it through a chatbot read, “I respect you and I expect the same in return. I want to have a mature conversation.” The aunt appreciated it, Franky said—she called her and sounded calm.

Franky is among a number of people—we’ll never truly know how many, will we?—who secretly use AI programs such as ChatGPT and Claude when they interact with difficult family members. I interviewed several of them. Mostly, my interviewees use AI to communicate with individuals they don’t want an emotionally close relationship with—an ex they co-parent with, for example, or an in-law—but whom they nevertheless can’t escape. (Because they are describing tense personal relations, most of my interviewees requested not to be identified by their full name.)

People use AI to both interpret messages they receive and help them write their own to send. If they have to, say, call out rude behavior or express disagreement about whether the kids need a certain type of therapy, they type what they really want to say into one of these programs, ask the AI to nice it up a little, and paste the resulting verbiage into their text messages. Outsourcing correspondence to AI has enabled them to maintain harmony without spending too much time thinking about how to draft a perfect response. As Franky put it, using AI lets her have a relationship without allowing it to “live rent-free in my brain.” Franky said that in her family, it’s important for people “all to have, I don’t know, peace.” She and others have found that they can improve their relationships and at least increase the probability of peace by removing emotion from conversations. And that’s where AI truly excels.

[Read: There’s a name for the people who drain you]

Another woman I spoke with told me about how Claude had helped her revise a text to a family member who often misinterprets her words. This person, she said, sent her a message implying that he wanted her out of his life. Her impulse was to reply, “Congratulations. You got your wish,” but Claude softened that statement because it could “read as sarcasm/implication.” Then it asked, “Want it warmer, blunter, or shorter still?” Claude, she added, “leaves out the emotional part” and makes it more likely that the recipient will hear her and work toward a resolution.

People reach for Cyrano de Anthropic because during difficult text-based conversations, “it’s hard to know what to say,” Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and the author, most recently, of The Balancing Act, told me. When we’re interacting in person, mechanisms in the brain help us interpret people’s body language and facial expressions, Matthew Fishleder, a therapist in Maryland, told me. But text and email strip messages of that context. “We’re left trying to decipher, What does this text from my mom mean?” he said. “And how in the world do I respond to something like this?”

In tense situations, people generally know what they’d like to express, Tawwab said, but then they might think, “I can’t say that.” AI can phrase the message in a slightly gentler way—and it can offer the sender “less of a responsibility” for how the recipient reacts. If your mom gets mad about your AI-assisted message, you can always mentally blame Dario Amodei.

The most common use case I encountered for deploying AI in this way was to correspond calmly with an ex-spouse, whom one may now resent with the fire of a thousand billable lawyer hours but whom one must treat cordially, lest one gets threatened with changes to the custody agreement. (As one Florida woman who uses AI for this purpose told me, sending an “F you” text to your ex might feel amazing, but you have to think about the “legal ramifications.”) A father in Arizona told ChatGPT to use a “five-star-hotel-clerk tone” with his ex, and it did—to the point that, reading over his shoulder, his child was shocked by how nice their parents were being to each other. A woman who asked to go by the initial S. told me that she uses AI to negotiate co-parenting decisions with her ex-partner. When AI helps her write “in a very neutral tone so that it’s not inflaming,” she said, “we help our kids to the best degree possible.” She told me that the tool has improved her relationship with her ex-partner, and that she even sometimes recommends the same strategy to her clients in her work as a therapist.

If their exes figure out that they’re using AI, many of the people I spoke with don’t really care. S. thinks her ex may be using it too, because sometimes she’ll notice that “that’s a tone I don’t hear very often from him,” she said. The Florida woman said that her ex has accused her of using AI “many times” but that she’s not especially concerned about impressing him. “It’s like, Oh, I know. I’m terrible in every way, including that I use AI,” she said. “Add it to the list. We get it.’”

The people I spoke with had a range of other reasons for using AI. Several of my interviewees are not native English speakers, and they feel that they are frequently misunderstood when they use their own words. “Even when I do try my absolute best, it just doesn’t work,” the Arizona father told me. One of the people he has used AI to communicate with is an abusive parent; given his childhood environment, he said, he doesn’t have much experience being spoken to amiably and calmly.

Others don’t have much experience with writing, period: A woman named Ashleigh told me that she uses ChatGPT to communicate with her baby’s father’s family because she’s “not a writer at all.” She said that she types in what she wants to say, then prompts the system to “take some of the emotion out and put more of the facts in it.” “It’s great for hard conversations,” she added, “that you know you’re gonna blow up on.” Finally, many of my interviewees like how much time AI saves them. They don’t want to spend their one wild and precious life drafting heartfelt texts to their weird cousin; they want to outsource all of that to Claude. As Franky put it to me, in one of the most relatable quotes I have ever gathered, “I just don’t have time in general to do anything.”

[Read: Forgive the bad texters]

Using a robot to talk with humans has downsides, of course, even if only philosophical ones. Relying on AI for communication can mean that we are “outsourcing our inner power to a machine,” Tawwab said. The people I spoke with are well aware of that. Even though she uses it herself, S. said that her therapy clients can become overly dependent on AI, to the point where they “aren’t thinking for themselves as much.” But as far as mortal sins go, this practice seems to fall somewhere around ordering from Amazon Prime or eating at McDonald’s—you may have misgivings, but the convenience truly can’t be beat.

Fishleder, the Maryland therapist, said that although AI can be helpful in a pinch, it won’t resolve the larger relationship dynamics at issue—and it’s further evidence of what he characterized as the “movement away from relying on one another as humans.” Still, when I asked him whether he also sometimes uses AI to write tricky messages, he said, “100 percent.” Sometimes you just need to send a firm but polite text about Thanksgiving plans. It’s not cheating; it’s muddling through.

What would the U.S. immigration system look like if it were a machine, made of wheels and gears, controlled by belts and joints? In Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, illustrations by the artist Mariah Tso help readers visualize such a contraption. Its parts are etched with important names and dates, Supreme Court cases, racist proclamations, and key concepts such as eugenics, no due process, and warrantless arrests. These sketches leave the impression that immigration control functions smoothly to exclude certain people—requiring only the occasional application of oil or glue.

I would depict this machine differently, as would many historians. Its parts would be misaligned and mismatched; it would leak and spew smoke, expand and contract at random, and periodically grind to a halt.

Yet Tso’s illustrations perfectly reflect the argument made by Lytle Hernández, a history professor at UCLA whose previous books have focused on the Border Patrol, mass incarceration, and Mexican anarchists. In Racist by Design, she contends that the United States since its founding has had a “whites-only immigration system.” That system has evolved, she says, but it remains “racist by design: It always has been and it still is.”

We shouldn’t take “whites-only” literally, Lytle Hernández cautions. Instead, she writes, the term is an “interpretive device” to help us understand “racialized power.” She borrows language from the book Let This Radicalize You, in which two organizers, Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, argue for studying a machine to figure out “what blows could actually disable it.” Lytle Hernández wants Racist by Design to land as a blow propelled by the force of history, inspiring collective action that will “keep pushing” the machine “and make it tip.”

[Read: What Stephen Miller gets wrong about human nature]

It isn’t controversial to say that racism has often motivated American immigration policy. Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior aide and homeland-security adviser, is hardly the first nativist to set federal priorities. Yet Lytle Hernández’s contention that more than two centuries of immigration control boil down to a story of white supremacy is an overstatement, even if it’s an important provocation.

Lytle Hernández briefly acknowledges that “whiteness” isn’t always a simple category—that eugenicists have invented hierarchies among white people, and that racially neutral language, such as the word pauper, has been used to deport Irish people. But she doesn’t discuss how the meaning of whiteness changed over time; some white people were considered less white than others. She mentions other factors in debates over who can enter the country—sexuality, religion, public health, international diplomacy, ideology—but brushes them aside quickly so that they don’t muddy her point. These omissions and elisions make her argument vulnerable to challenges not only from historians who have studied other modes of discrimination, but also from political opponents eager to sabotage her cause.

Plenty of evidence supports Lytle Hernández’s larger case. The Naturalization Act of 1790 said that only “a free white person” could naturalize, after living in the United States for two years. The first federal immigration ban was the 1803 Immigration Act, whose main proponents were enslavers seeking to block the entry of Black Caribbeans fleeing the Haitian Revolution.

This pattern persisted for the next 150 years. In the mid-19th century, California state legislators levied a tax on foreign miners to keep nonwhite immigrants away from the gold mines. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which survived in different guises and iterations until 1943. And the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act established national-origins quotas that capped the total number of immigrants at 150,000 a year, while reserving 96 percent of those slots for European immigrants and 84 percent for those from northwestern Europe, according to Lytle Hernández. Senator David Reed, a Republican from Pennsylvania who co-authored the law, said, “We have closed the doors just in time to prevent our nordic population being overrun by lower races.”

By 1940, Lytle Hernández writes, Europeans and Canadians, who at this point were all considered equally white, accounted for 94 percent of the foreign-born population living in the United States. Even after laws were liberalized and these numbers changed, members of both political parties tried to boost the proportion of white immigrants by prioritizing what the liberal Senator Ted Kennedy called the “old seed sources of our heritage.” This was all before the Trump administration made race-based immigration de facto American policy—most pointedly by deporting mainly nonwhite immigrants while welcoming white South Africans who claimed to be victims of a Black-led government.

The author shows how the intrinsic racism of these moves is not accidental or incidental, but by design. She adds fresh insights as well by tracking the gradual concentration of immigration enforcement in the hands of the federal government, and by showing how fights over naturalization were entwined with debates over the treatment of Black people and Native Americans. And she reframes the immigration story as focusing on not only the people we let into the country, but also those we keep out. This complicates Americans’ conception of themselves as a nation of immigrants; we are also a nation that has excluded them.

[Listen: Republicans vs. the Fourteenth Amendment]

Lytle Hernández is too good a historian to skip over more permissive periods, even when they fail to serve her argument. She calls the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment the “single-largest mass naturalization action in U.S. history,” because these laws “created more than four million new African American citizens.” When white settlers in the western U.S. challenged the birthright citizenship of Chinese Americans, the Supreme Court, in its 1898 ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark, “unambiguously affirmed” that almost all children born in the United States were citizens. (The children of Native Americans, diplomats, and occupying troops in a hypothetical invasion were exceptions.) Nobody has conclusively counted the number of Americans born to undocumented immigrants who became citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment, but the Pew Research Center has calculated that it has exceeded 100,000 a year since at least 1990.

This past summer, in its Trump v. Barbara decision, the Supreme Court invalidated the president’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship and explicitly upheld the ruling in Wong Kim Ark. Trump’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer, argued that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to extend birthright citizenship only to freed slaves and their children. But a majority of the justices found that the language of the amendment was plain and applied to almost every person born in the United States, no matter their race or heritage. As alarming as it was that three justices sided with Trump, the decision, like earlier rulings from the top court, undermines Lytle Hernández’s idea of a whites-only immigration regime.

Often, the author downplays government action by the courts, Congress, or presidents that benefited nonwhite immigrants. As a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended national-origins quotas, the United States went from being 16 percent nonwhite to 40 percent nonwhite in 60 years. Lytle Hernández frames this accomplishment as the unintentional result of mistaken reassurances; President Lyndon B. Johnson, for one, announced that it was not “a revolutionary bill,” and would not change people’s daily lives. Insofar as it altered the nation’s ethnic makeup, restrictionists felt that it did change their lives—and ever since, they have considered it to be one of the worst pieces of legislation in American history.

The 1965 act contained strong, explicitly anti-racist language: “No person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of his race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence.” Lytle Hernández quotes this passage, but then immediately points out that the law left in place measures that disproportionately affected Mexican immigrants. This landmark of mid-century liberalism was another example of what the legal scholar Reva Siegel has called “preservation through transformation,” in which laws dismantling discriminatory status hierarchies could nevertheless perpetuate them. Yet the act was genuinely transformative, as were the ideas behind it. Earlier that year, Johnson had made immigration the focus of his State of the Union address. Too many people within our borders were “trapped in poverty and idleness and fear,” he said. “Let a just nation throw open to them the city of promise” by passing an immigration law that is “based on the work a man can do and not where he was born or how he spells his name.”

[Read: How the right could actually end birthright citizenship]

These ideas have animated our nation’s immigration debate as strongly as those of the restrictionists. If the 1965 law didn’t represent progress, certain conservative lawmakers and commentators would not have attempted to roll it back over the next 60 years. If there were no positive, non-racist vision of immigration law, there would have been no debate at all.

Two decades later, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act created a pathway to citizenship for close to 3 million immigrants (including more than 2 million from Mexico). Lytle Hernández says that the law, signed by President Ronald Reagan, came about because Chicana and Chicano activists “convinced” Congress to do it. In fact, support for the law came from a wide range of actors, including some conservative Latinos and Republican senators whom Lytle Hernández surely doesn’t count as immigrant-rights advocates, such as California’s Pete Wilson and South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond. The 1990 Immigration Act, passed under another Republican administration, expanded amnesty for the close relatives of immigrants whose status had been legalized in 1986, and as recently as 2007, President George W. Bush supported a comprehensive reform bill (which failed to pass).

Seen in this light, IRCA’s amnesty provision looks less like a temporary setback for white supremacy than an indicator of America’s shifting racial politics. As the alliances of the 1980s unraveled, the familiar partisan outlines came into view: a Republican Party committed to walls and deportation, and a Democratic Party that advocated for immigrant rights. But this realignment is not necessarily any more permanent than the last one.

Even Lytle Hernández’s greatest insight—the importance of federal control—cuts both ways. Washington lawyers and judges didn’t just restrict immigration rights, as she demonstrates; they also checked racist state laws, throwing sand in the gears of the whites-only machine. After Wilson left the Senate to become the governor of California, he championed Proposition 187, a law that sought to deny services and benefits to undocumented immigrants. A federal judge overturned it because national law preempted such state action. In 2012, two years after Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070, which broadened state police powers to arrest undocumented immigrants, the Supreme Court struck most of the law down for the same reason.

Lytle Hernández should have given more weight to such moments not simply to tell a more balanced story, but also to help us understand why arguments for restriction failed or succeeded. She argues that racist immigration laws were beaten back by “nonwhite migrants and their advocates”—abolitionists, Chinese and Japanese individuals and organizations fighting anti-Asian policies, NAACP lawyers, and Chicano and Chicana activists and immigration attorneys. What her resisters share is that they attacked the machine from the outside. But for well over a century, insiders, including presidents and judges, have also tried to move the machine in a non-racist direction, while outsiders, including African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans, have sometimes supported restricting immigration.

Instead of exploring all these forces—liberal progress and conservative backlash, conviction and compromise, the realities of an imperfect union—Lytle Hernández has written a largely frictionless story in which racists have created immigration policies and anti-racists have achieved limited gains, sometimes by accident. There’s plenty of truth to that story, but toppling the machine will require a broad-based movement that wrestles more fully with the messiness of our country’s history.

By glossing over liberal victories and minimizing the efforts of reformers apart from a few, mostly doomed activists, Lytle Hernández makes a stronger case for defeatism than optimism. Historians like to say that the past is contingent, not predetermined. Much of Lytle Hernández’s previous work has demonstrated that proposition brilliantly. If immigration policy has been a machine, it has been a paradoxical one: rickety yet terrifying, subject to spasms of reform, deeply racist yet unable to settle forever who is “in” and who is “out.” This machine has been abused, patched up, and manipulated to serve nefarious goals. It has also been repaired, and bent toward justice. If today’s machine is toppled, history teaches us that whatever replaces it will inevitably be forged in the fires of democracy, messy and incomplete.

The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network, is now in theaters. I, for one, think that making a whole new movie is not the best way to tell the continuing story of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Why not do instead what Zuckerberg himself is doing—take the social network we have and just make it worse? Below, please find my script for the revised The Social Network. (Aaron Sorkin, you are welcome to use any of this if you want to make a third movie!)

Sean Parker, from Napster: A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what is?

Mark Zuckerberg: A million dollars—donated to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund?

*

Mark Zuckerberg’s ex Erica: You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because of the pervert glasses.

*

The Winklevoss twins are rowing in a tank. We pan out to reveal that Mark Zuckerberg is right behind them, working out just as hard.

*

Mark Zuckerberg: Eduardo, I need the code you used for ranking chess players.

Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s co-founder: Sure.

Mark Zuckerberg: We’re ranking women. And then we’re going to build a whole network around this. And then to keep people on that network we’ve built, we’ll create a black-box algorithm that pushes rage-inducing—sorry, “borderline”—content onto users’ feeds to drive engagement, even if it fuels the rise of conspiracy theories, misogyny, and violence.

Eduardo Saverin: Can we go back to the ranking-women part?

*

Mark Zuckerberg sits at his computer, reloading the screen again and again. Yup, the policies that formerly flagged dehumanizing speech about protected characteristics have been successfully removed in time for Trump’s second term! Also, Erica has not added him as a friend yet.

Erica: Dating you is like dating a StairMaster.

Mark Zuckerberg: Sounds excellent. An experience lots of people will want to have. Actually, that’s an idea. Why shouldn’t everyone you interact with be a robot? I am writing this down.

*

(Mark Zuckerberg scribbles on a window) Buy … Vine … then … destroy … it.

*

The Justin Timberlake character: A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what is?

Mark Zuckerberg: Floating leglessly in a joyless void.

The Justin Timberlake character: Um.

Mark Zuckerberg: Having a hole in you that nothing can fill, absolutely nothing, no amount of money, no amount of power, no amount of mixed martial arts, so that when the business that has made you billions of dollars but has cost other people their lives and sanity comes under any kind of scrutiny or attempts at regulation, you feel like you’re the victim.

Sean Parker: I was going to say “a billion dollars.”

Mark Zuckerberg: (staring dead-eyed into the camera) A billion dollars won’t fix anything.