Asked to list 10 things I’ve lost, I faltered.
A blue feather, favorite glove, newly cut
keys. Love and flexibility. You

asked me once if you had death inside
you and I lied. After the wake, I waded
through tall grasses—skin electric.

I felt guilty for happiness, that I was
able to undertake simple pleasures
like putting my face in the lilacs or

breathing in earth, after rain. I
listened to your last voice message
and when I looked on the screen

there were violets. I couldn’t list
10 things. Inside me, a sonata.
Outside, a day moon.

This is the moment I knew that the whole vibrator thing had gone too far: It was about a year ago, and I’d ordered a replacement rabbit, the model I’d fallen for around 2007, amid the vibrator renaissance brought about by Sex and the City. An early episode of that zeitgeist show features the prudish Charlotte, having reluctantly bought a “Rabbit Pearl” on the advice of her friend Miranda, becoming so addicted to her new toy that she stops leaving her apartment, thus turning the rabbit into a cultural icon for female pleasure.

More than a quarter century had passed since that innocent moment, and the rabbit—once a battery-operated device with a clunky rotating shaft and dainty bunny ears that shivered with astonishing proficiency—had turned sleek and space-age. The rabbits I ordered had USB chargers and a variety of speeds. They had safety locks and silencers, like guns.

I didn’t want all these added features—22 speeds was about 20 too many—but I could never remember the name of the most recent one I’d ordered, so I had to Google best rabbit vibrators, a quest that once upon a time had taken me to niche women’s websites but now took me to The New York Times’ Wirecutter.

It’s not that the newer rabbit models don’t work; it’s that they do too much. I mean, I wouldn’t buy a spatula that also dusted the floor. My latest model was so fancy and complicated that it took me a while to figure out how to switch it on, but the real problem was that, once it was on, I could not figure out how to turn the thing off.

The day I received it, I was about to record a podcast, a detail that sounds irrelevant until you realize what I was up against: I could not have a vibrator droning on in the background of an hour-long audio conversation. I spent minutes that felt like hours desperately pushing three buttons in alternating sequences only to be thwarted—the rabbit would not turn off. It thumped, it jittered, it whirred round and round. I determined that the only way to shut the damn thing up would be to run down its battery. Racing to beat the clock before the podcast began, I bolted to my front door to place the infernal device outside, where its insistent whirring wouldn’t be picked up by the mic. Just before I got there, I somehow hit the right sequence, and the vibrator finally shut down.

What a sad modern portrait: a single woman, living alone, with a rabbit vibrator jackhammering haplessly against her door.

Around that time, I happened to be listening to Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast when I heard a sex therapist say, “Turn down the speed on your vibrators.” Shepard—a modern man in the sex-positive mold—sounded confused; he seemed to be under the impression that vibrators were good for women.

Weren’t we all?

I’d been thinking about turning down the speed on my vibrator for a long time, but I’d considered my affliction personal, not society-wide. Now it was dawning on me that the problem wasn’t simply mine. Women are being sold egg-shaped suction devices in the pages of New York magazine, and BookTok influencers pair with sex-toy companies for promotional collabs. Yes, there is a bookmark that doubles as a vibrator. (“Building a world where women choose their pleasure + their power,” reads the Instagram bio for Her Little Bookmark.)

Does this consumer game of one-upmanship amid the mainstreaming of vibrators even matter? There are too many varieties of women’s razors, too, and I don’t care. But what worries me is how this points in the direction in which so much of modern life has been barreling: self-pleasure, self-love, self-care, self, self, self.

This is where my mind goes when I read or hear a certain type of brittle “Don’t need a man, I have a vibrator” argument, a flex that’s been prevalent on social media for at least a decade. I’d love to see a chart of the well-documented sex recession laid across a chart of vibrator sales. A vibrator may get you off better than a man (or a woman, for that matter), but will it clean the gutters? Hold you in the dark? Kill the rat skittering around the attic? I write these words, and then I think: But wait, what if one day it can?

I arrived late to vibrators, or perhaps I should say masturbation, in the relatively vibrator-shy ’90s. I was a few years out of college, sharing pitchers of beer with my buddy Aaron, and we were about halfway through the second pitcher when I shared a very personal detail: I’d never had an orgasm.

Not ever? Aaron was fascinated but not judgmental; in fact, another female friend had recently confessed something similar, and he’d researched the problem late one night (he was in law school, and miserable) and discovered that her predicament was both common and easy to solve.

“You need the Cadillac of vibrators,” he said, referring to the Hitachi Magic Wand, a personal massager that resembled a large white microphone. The Hitachi, he’d learned, launched women into such paroxysms of pleasure that it had acquired cult status. And he’d heard that you could buy it at Walmart.

Walmart? I was incredulous. Walmart had famously eighty-sixed popular albums by Marilyn Manson and (of all people) Sheryl Crow, but Aaron explained that this was part of the ruse. All of those “personal massagers” I’d seen in Sharper Image catalogs? Those were vibrators. Why else were they waterproof? I had to admit that he had a point.

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

We drove to Walmart but it didn’t have the Cadillac of vibrators. Unwilling to end our adventure, Aaron picked up an alternate model he declared the “Ford Taurus of vibrators.” The picture on the front resembled a plug-in hand mixer. Whatever, I’d come this far.

That night, alone in my garage apartment, I unwrapped the box, drank some red wine to set the mood, and plugged the Ford Taurus of vibrators into an outlet, only to discover that the cord didn’t reach the bed. Was there an extension cord around? Never mind. I lay down nervously on a small braided rug, staring at the slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan, and turned on the power, only to discover that hell no. It felt like industrial turbines were juddering against my most sensitive spot. Hard pass.

But a few nights later, I got an idea. Back in high school, my mother had given me a Brookstone mini-massager she’d bought at the mall, a stocking stuffer for a teen daughter with D cups and upper-back pain. I’d been lugging it from apartment to apartment like a kitchen utensil I never used. It was demure and beige, the size of a small flashlight, and it was waterproof. Huh, never noticed that. Drumming up my courage, I closed the curtains, lit votive candles, uncorked a bottle of wine, and settled under the covers with a device I would eventually know as the “pocket rocket.”

And that name fit. I felt like I was being shot into space.

The history of vibrators is a bit murky. In the Next Room (Or The Vibrator Play) is a 2009 Broadway production dramatizing the idea that Victorian doctors used early vibrators on women deemed “hysterical,” a term derived from the Greek word hystera, for “womb,” the supposed origin of women’s madness.

Did this happen? I like to think so. Evidence suggests that even the ancient Romans applied this approach to treating female mental illness. The second-century physician Galen wrote of treating a woman whose brain he believed to be dangerously bathed in her unreleased sexual fluids. He applied “manual stimulation,” and ta-da, “she was cured.” (The patient “took great pleasure from this,” Galen noted.)

Of course, the technology that transformed society, according to most accounts of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, was birth control. The pill came out in the ’60s, but in many states only married women could get a prescription. It wasn’t until the ’70s that the pill went mainstream, allowing women to set a course for their own reproduction, a power they’d never had, at least in such potent and efficient form. But the sexual revolution and women’s liberation could also be at odds with each other. On one hand were Our Bodies, Ourselves, consciousness-raising sessions, hand mirrors held between the thighs. On the other hand were the normalization of casual sex without consequence, the “zipless fuck,” the rise of Penthouse and skirt hems—all seeming to serve men’s pleasure more than women’s. Or did they? Helen Gurley Brown and Erica Jong argued otherwise.

But then, in 1976, a sex educator named Shere Hite published The Hite Report, possibly the most revealing document ever produced about women’s sexual proclivities (more revealing, I’d say, than the more famous studies from Alfred Kinsey). To read The Hite Report now is to be gobsmacked by the sheer industriousness of women in the pre-vibrator era. Everyday items such as carrots and candles became ersatz phalluses; women sought climax under running bathwater or against the flat, vibrating side of an electric shaver. One woman even made creative use of an ashtray. The raw-liver scene in Philip Roth’s 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, may be the most famous over-the-top depiction of masturbation in American literature, but The Hite Report may be Portnoy’s feminine counterpart, with its robust chronicle of women’s sometimes Byzantine pursuit of pleasure.

For all The Hite Report’s descriptions of private erotic delight, though, the book’s strongest running theme is the deep and shameful fear expressed by women who were not getting themselves off, and didn’t know how. “I finally had an orgasm,” a woman tells people at a swanky party in 1979’s Manhattan, “and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind.”

By the ’70s and ’80s, bored grocery shoppers could flip through Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan to find new blow-job techniques while in the checkout line. But in the 1989 film Parenthood, a family dinner is interrupted by a power outage, and the everyman played by Steve Martin searches for a flashlight only to find his divorced sister’s big dildo buzzing in his hand as the lights flicker back on. She’s mortified.

I got the message: As a woman, giving pleasure to your partner was good; seeking pleasure for yourself was embarrassing. As a teen, I had Parenthood and Fast Times on VHS, and I studied them to become a more sophisticated version of myself. Believe it or not, the idea of masturbation never occurred to me. Put my hands down there? That was my boyfriend’s business. Not long after he and I broke up, he started hanging out with a cool college girl who drew a map of the clitoris. When he told me this over the phone, I was furious and humiliated. And also: Could I borrow that drawing?

For women of my generation, messages about sexual pleasure were mixed at best. Dr. Ruth was on the airwaves, adorably chirping about the joys of sexual freedom and toys that could assist women in their quest. But when I was in college, Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign as Bill Clinton’s surgeon general. Her alleged crime? She talked about the benefits of masturbation.

Self-pleasure is the foundation of all human sexuality, the late Betty Dodson used to say. Dodson was a pioneer of sex-positive feminism who taught workshops for women with the same body hang-ups she’d once had. Dodson died in 2020, but her legacy is etched across the early 21st century, in shows such as Girls and stores including Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, which infamously sold a jade egg for insertion into the vagina.

By the 2010s, sex toys were everywhere. Posters for Grace and Frankie, a Netflix comedy starring 70-something Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, featured the silver-haired heroines holding purple vibrating-wand massagers like light sabers. A charming 2016 Netflix series called Love, about dating in Los Angeles, features a scene wherein the beautiful but troubled protagonist tumbles into bed with her suitor only to reach into her bedside drawer, pull out her vibrator, and go to town on herself as he waits, awkwardly, for her to finish.

I took the point—self-pleasure could go too far; moderation was the prudent path—but I was about 40 when I saw that Netflix show. I was chronically single and trying to date sober (another story entirely), and I was not ready to slow down the odyssey of delights kicked off by my Brookstone pocket rocket. My bedside drawer was filled with items bought on a whim (a tongue-shaped pink vibe, a pocket rocket shaped like lipstick to sneak past airport security). I collected vibrators from online depots that sent the products in discreet packaging.

The idea that vibrators, touted as a way to encourage women’s sexual exploration, might be keeping them from experiences they craved—intimacy, physical touch, actual relationships—was something of a taboo subject in those years. I doubt many sex therapists wanted to be on record telling women to masturbate less when many women didn’t masturbate at all. The arrival of the MeToo movement in 2017 pushed the battle of the sexes closer to a full-scale war; shocking reports about “good guys” such as Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer (Matt Lauer?!) left women I knew wondering whether it was simply safest and best to opt out of dating entirely.

But I was dismayed to find women on social media braying that they didn’t need a man if they had a vibrator. Because … was it possible that part of the reason I hadn’t found the long-term partner I wanted so badly was that I had too many vibrators? I’m not saying vibrators kept me from dating. I dated a ton. I’m saying that when the dating market proved challenging and the men not quite right, it was all too easy to return to my empty house at the end of a less than stellar evening, pluck out a buzzing rocket ship from my nightstand drawer, and find release.

[Read: Are we in an intimacy crisis?]

I think it was 2022, late in the pandemic era, when I started wondering whether that drawer, so clogged with toys that it was becoming hard to shut, had turned into a paltry substitute for the beauty I had assumed life would deliver, to love and be loved by another. I noticed that sex with a man I cared about left me feeling saturated and soul-satisfied, whereas getting off with a mechanical device left me sleepy and only lightly relieved, like I’d managed to scratch a stubborn itch.

I dated a man who stroked the pale skin of my inner elbow in the most electric way, and when he was gone, I tried replicating this in my bed, but it never worked. I needed the surprise of his touch. I have spent most of my adulthood alone, at least from a relationship standpoint, and it’s not a bad way to be, but therapists and dating experts will tell you it’s only in relationship to others that we truly know ourselves.

“You’re too picky.” I’ve heard it a million times, and I’m guilty as charged. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve fought too hard for this odd, beautiful life to share it with a man who doesn’t fit. And yet I know from my closest friendships and creative partnerships that living side by side requires work. Conflict, civil disagreements, crossed wires that leave me feeling rattled and badly misunderstood—that’s how I learn. That’s how I grow.

I worry that technology-induced orgasms on demand made it too easy for me—and made it too easy for society at large—to stay cocooned in a little pod of self-gratification: Netflix, DoorDash, Amazon Prime, conversations that weren’t real conversations, mediated through the flat screens of text and social media. It feels good in the instant, and it can feel awfully empty as the years pass. If you keep scratching that stubborn itch, do you ever address the reason you’re itching in the first place?

When Gloria Steinem died last month, I thought about the line she made famous in the ’70s heyday of second-wave feminism: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Was it a joke? A slogan more than a commandment? In 2000, Steinem married the entrepreneur David Bale, and after he died, she was grief-stricken. I doubt that line, clever and quotable, was ever meant to be taken literally, but the glib notion that women don’t need romantic love remains one of the most pernicious strains of the female-empowerment age.

I am now 52. I’ve never been married, and I’ve never had kids, and although I’ve come to terms with that, I wonder how the combination of certain early-21st-century ideas about women’s independence and certain vibrator technologies shaped the trajectory of my romantic life.

I don’t plan to give up masturbation, or vibrators, though I’ve tossed several, including the jackhammering rabbit of doorstep-thumping fame. A technological assist can be helpful—and fun—but when it becomes a crutch, or even a solitary delivery system, maybe it’s time to rethink how we’ve valorized the vibrator, or at least the notion of vibrators everywhere all the time, every day of the week. I’ve started to see vibrators as proto–sex robots that have been Trojan horsed into the culture under the guise of female pleasure only to acquire Bluetooth capabilities and talismanic status among the women who swear by them. How long before these things start talking with us? Answering our emails? Doing our taxes?

We live in a convenience culture whose engine runs on the tantalizing promise that we can skip the hard parts—the cooking, the cleaning, the infinite search for a better half—but I have learned that the hard part is also, in many instances, the best part. Pushing past those frustrating challenges into discovery can be a source of such pleasure.  

The great lie of modern culture is that we don’t need one another. Maybe not all women need men, but I’ve come to realize that this one does. Of course, men need women too. Men need men, and women need women, and so on. The salesmen of the 21st century will keep slinging their wares: DIY! AI companion! Chatbot boyfriend! Like so much of our day-to-day lives, getting off is becoming more efficient, easier, faster.

But has it gotten better?  

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One of the paradoxes of our moment is that the excesses of Donald Trump’s presidency seem to demand our obsessive attention, while Trump himself obviously thrives on that attention—and all of the social division that comes with it. What if the clearest way out of our political crisis is taking politics less seriously? In this episode of The Permanent Questions, David Brooks speaks with his old friend (and new boss), Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, about the pleasures and pitfalls of a life spent covering politicians, the limits of partisanship, and the need to see life from the redwood’s perspective.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Brooks: Our topic today is politics. What role should politics play in your life? How much of your spiritual, emotional, and mental energy should you devote to politics?

Now, I am something of a political junkie. I grew up as a political correspondent covering people, and I can say there’s nothing more fun in journalism than going to a rally in Iowa or New Hampshire or anywhere people are campaigning, talking with the folks, watching them scream, watching the passion. It’s just Americana in all its glory, both good and bad.

So I really care about politics. I really care about politicians. I admire them in general. They’re good people in rotten circumstances. And yet I also feel that we’ve over-politicized our society. Everything is red or blue. Where you live is red or blue. What car you drive is determined by red or blue. The TV shows you watch are determined by red or blue. Who you marry and befriend, how you think about the WNBA.

When you make politics your religion, you think you have a sense of belonging, but you really don’t. You’re not sitting with your community members; you’re just hating the same people. You have the illusion of righteous action. You’re doing something good for the country. But you’re not feeding the poor or sitting with the widow; you’re just hating people on social media. It gives you the illusion of all the things that you get in a real community or a real faith or a real philosophy, but you just end up in a cultural war.

I’m trying to figure out: How do I care about politics without over-caring?

My guest today is Jeffrey Goldberg. You probably know him as the editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine. As you watch or listen to this conversation, you will notice that Jeff and I know each other. We’ve known each other for 25 years. You’ll see that we have, as all old friends do, a certain way of talking to each other. We have a certain banter, which involves a lot of interruption. That’s our conversational style.

What you are about to witness is us at our most slow paced, our most earnest, our most serious. Jeff and I will be talking about what role politics should play in our lives. But in order to get there, I thought we’d compare notes about our careers, the politicians we’ve covered, what we’ve thought about them, what’s been important, what’s been unimportant.

Jeffrey Goldberg, welcome to The Permanent Questions.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you.

Brooks: This must be—

Goldberg: I’m very wary.

Brooks: —a thrill for you. You do edit a magazine, you’ve won some prizes, but this really is pretty much the pinnacle of your career.

Goldberg: You know, I applied to Yale, and I got rejected. I didn’t even get wait-listed. They were just like, “What, are you joking?” So I consider this getting into Yale. Aren’t you a professor at Yale?

Brooks: I’m a faculty member at Yale.

Goldberg: What does that mean? What’s the difference between a professor and a faculty member?

Brooks: Professors know what they’re talking about.

Goldberg: Good one.

Brooks: We’re going to talk politics, if we can get on track here, which is highly unlikely.

Goldberg: It’s really deeply unlikely.

Brooks: We’ve spent our lives covering this stuff.

Goldberg: Isn’t that sad?

Brooks: I know. So I’m gonna ask you, I want to get your political origin story.

Goldberg: My political origin story?

Brooks: When did you first have a brush with politics?

Goldberg: My first brush with politics was when, as a 2-year-old, I urinated on Al Shanker’s lap.

Do you remember Al Shanker?

Brooks: Of course. He was head of the American Federation of Teachers.

Goldberg: He led the 1968 teachers’ strike. My father was one of the leaders of the teachers’ strike. And the story is told that they were having a meeting in their Brooklyn apartment, and I was seated on Al Shanker’s lap, and I pissed all over him.

Brooks: Really?

Goldberg: I grew up in that kind of household with posters on the wall with quotes: “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards out of men.” That was by the bathroom, I remember.

Brooks: I had a similar upbringing, weirdly.

Goldberg: It’s not that weird, actually.

Brooks: My parents volunteered for Ed Koch back when he was a liberal member of Congress.

Goldberg: He was a liberal reformer. He was fighting Carmine DeSapio and the remnants of the Tammany machine.

Brooks: I think also Watergate—I don’t know, I’m slightly older than you, but when I saw the Watergate hearings, I thought, That is so cool., I wanted to be—I was on the side of G. Gordon Liddy and the Watergate co-conspirators.

Goldberg: I have recollections of it being on constantly in the house. And just a general and deep loathing of Nixon in the cohort of my parents and their friends, which later on I realized was overdone. I don’t take the Lynyrd Skynyrd position on Watergate. But—

Brooks: Wait, what is the Lynyrd Skynyrd position?

Goldberg: “Watergate does not bother me. Does your conscience bother you?” But I just think Nixon is much more interesting. In the full light of what we know now about the possibilities in American politics, I think Nixon is a very interesting character. But at the time, he was Satan incarnate, which is kind of funny in retrospect.

Brooks: Now, did you have heroes? I remember when I got a little older, and I became more politically aware, when I was in high school—this is the kind of kid I was—I had a Hubert Humphrey poster on my wall. It was not Joe Namath or Tom Seaver.

Goldberg: You’re such a loser.

Brooks: It was Hubert Humphrey. But it had the saying: “Some people talk change. Others cause it.” And I knew even then I wanted to be the kind of person who only talks.

Goldberg: Some people just don’t even open their mouths. They just think about it.

Brooks: I was like a mainstream Democrat. Scoop Jackson was big in our household, and Birch Bayh.

Goldberg: Scoop Jackson became a hero of mine later, in college, but not then.

I think I was just very, very influenced by what was hanging on the walls of the house. There was a famous, very moody photo of JFK and RFK consulting with each other.

Brooks: One difference between us: I’ve always had a political ideology. I’ve always had a label that I’ve labeled myself. When I was a kid—or in college, even, I was a socialist. I had read John Reed.

Goldberg: Who wasn’t, though? You read John Reed?

Brooks: Yeah, he wrote a book called Ten Days That Shook the World.

Goldberg: I just waited for the movie. I watched the Warren Beatty movie.

Brooks: Yeah, there’s a movie called Reds—Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton—which was one of my favorite movies. I was like, “Yeah, revolution.” And I loved The Communist Manifesto.

Goldberg: Wait, how could a Hubert Humphrey poster and The Communist Manifesto coexist?

Brooks: Because I swung left in college. I just hung out in the library. I didn’t go to classes. I just hung out. And I read a magazine called the New Masses, which was a communist magazine from the 1920s and ’30s. I became in love with magazines.

There was a historian named Richard Pells, who basically argued that all of human history is controlled by The New Republic, and he covered American history as if it was The New Republic. So it gave me the conviction, which I have to this day, that ideas matter more than anything else in politics, and that small magazines in particular drive the intellectual debate.

Goldberg: It’s funny, I read the Old Masses, which was a pro-Cossack magazine, at the same time.

Brooks: Lessons on how to chase down Jews. (Laughs.)

Goldberg:  I’m a reporter. I’m not like you. I didn’t read the New Masses.

Although I did go to the library and read a lot of magazines. I read The New Republic, definitely. I wasn’t really a New Yorker guy or an Atlantic guy. More Atlantic in high school than New Yorker. But I was definitely—when I started reading The New Republic, and I guess this was the Kinsley era, so after college, I really had this kind of feeling. I was like, “Who are these people? How do they know so much? Why do these words shine off the page?”

Brooks: Was it my writing that caused this a lot?

Goldberg: I didn’t remember your pieces personally. I’m sure someone read them, but it wasn’t me. You wrote for The New Republic in that period?

Brooks: Occasional freelance. I was more a National Review guy.

Goldberg: I read the National Review just because I just went for—this is sort of the way I am, I guess, why I fell into magazines—I would privilege in my mind good writing over almost anything.

That’s why George Will’s my favorite columnist. I don’t agree with him on everything, but the man can write. I mean, next to you, he’s my favorite. But you’re not a columnist anymore; you’re more of a video personality.

Brooks: I’m a talk show host. I’m a game show host. Bob Barker.

Goldberg: You’re like Phil Donahue. You’re not going to ask me about my feelings in this session?

Brooks: No, don’t worry. I’m going to your intellectual life. That void is big enough.

Goldberg: Yes, it is. (Laughs.)

I’ve written about this; it’s no secret. I was a self-identified socialist Zionist at 15. Actually, this is true: With a group of friends, we once marched in St. Mark’s Place, in the village. We once were at a rally carrying the banner “Socialist Zionists for Animal Rights.” Huge constituency.

Brooks: Now did you ever have a book or an event that shifted your political view?

Goldberg: Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. I’m serious.

Brooks: Is that true, really?

Goldberg: Yeah, I became a vegetarian out of that, until I realized that I really like hamburgers too much.

I read deeply in socialist theory and Zionist theory, and there was a kind of almost Bolshevik inevitability to my early path. I ended up living on a kibbutz that was still organized like a kibbutz in the kind of collectivized sense. And then I realized that socialism is ridiculous.

Brooks: For what reason?

Irving Kristol went to the army and decided if we became socialists, the people he was serving with would turn it into a racket. So he said, “Oh, I can’t be for socialism.”

Goldberg: It just seemed to go against—I mean, I’m making a very broad statement here—human nature. People like things. They like to acquire things, like to acquire status. You can tell them, “That’s wrong. Don't be like that.” But I’m also like that. I like to have acquisitions. I like to collect things. I like the material world also. And I like to see people being rewarded for working harder than other people. I believe in equality, but I don’t believe in equity in the sense that I don’t think that people are born with the same level of skill.

Maybe I’m straying too far away from the point of this. What is the point of this session?

Brooks: The role politics plays in your life. But we’re starting out with the ideas of politics.

Goldberg: There just seems something unnatural about socialism, this overwhelming desire. It seemed resentment based a little bit too much for me. “There should be no such thing as a billionaire”—I’m not in that camp. I’m in the camp that there should be a lot of millionaires. I don’t want to cap anybody’s success. I would bring the floor up.

I don’t think that makes me a socialist or a Democratic socialist. I think this makes me a common-sense, non-cruel believer in some kind of meritocratic possibility.

Brooks: It’s somewhat similar. I read Edmund Burke in college, and that was a shock. He just said: The world’s really complicated. If you think you socialists can plan reality, good luck with that.

Goldberg: Socialism doesn’t survive first contact with humans and all of their ridiculous complexity.

Brooks: And a lot of my heroes became the neoconservatives, like Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. They were lefties who grew up in Brooklyn, but they also grew up immigrant kids, and they looked at their parents and how they had made it in America, and it was hard work. It was bourgeois values. It was education. And they looked at the hippies and think, What are you guys doing?

Goldberg: They’re destroying, because they could either make or destroy, and so they were in the destruction phase.

Brooks: We both, early in our careers—you way more than me—reported from abroad. I was abroad basically the first six years of the ’90s.

Goldberg: And you count Belgium as abroad, don’t you?

Brooks: I was covering the Soviet Union—that’s abroad. I was covering South Africa—that's abroad. I was covering the Middle East.

Goldberg: Yeah, that’s true.

Brooks: These are abroad places.

Goldberg: Those are abroad.

Brooks: As far as I know. I wasn’t in Greenland, like most parts of America.

Goldberg: I mean, I’m just saying that, you know, Brussels is not—

Brooks: Okay, Mr. Obscure Foreign Correspondent.

Goldberg: I’m just saying, it’s a direct flight. Anything with a direct flight …

Brooks: That’s fine.

Goldberg: And a wide selection of cheese ...

Brooks: To me it was the daring adventures with waffles. That’s what I had in Brussels.

Did you have your worldview shaped by events—as you call them—abroad, where there’s no direct flights?

Goldberg: The first thing I think of is coming home from Pakistan. I spent part of the late ’90s, early 2000, up to 9/11, going in and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I don’t think I’ve ever really articulated this before, but part of my belief system is that America is better than any other place.

I’m American. I love America. I recognize all the flaws, especially right now, but I’m American. Another observation I would make—these all kind of marry up—is that there’s too many journalists in America, or commentators or whatever you wanna call them, who see America as the locus of evil in the world, and that everything that happens in the world that’s bad is somehow caused, directly or indirectly, by the United States. And I just don’t buy that.

Does that send me down a more conservative pathway? In one superficial sense. But I think that the broadening experience of seeing how tens of millions of people live and realizing that we built something pretty good for ourselves gave me some perspective and some appreciation that sometimes, let’s say, people who come out of the Ivy League don’t really have.

They think that America is the locus of all bad in the world, and I have no patience for that anymore.

Brooks: You had a much more—

Goldberg: I’m not saying things are going so great, by the way.

Brooks: I just want to establish that, just to show that we’ve spent our lives on the importance of politics, both foreign and domestic. And I really care about politics.

I think that my favorite person I ever covered was John McCain.

Goldberg: Yeah, probably me too. Just to be around him.

Brooks: He was just so much fun. People forget that. He took me to casinos to teach me how to play craps.

Goldberg: He once introduced me to a group of Hungarian right-wingers as, “This is Jeff Goldberg. He’s a communist reporter.” You know? Whatever happens, happens. And I was like, “Jesus, man. Will you just stop?”

Brooks: But I ask you all this because we’ve spent a lot of our life in politics. And obviously politics matters a lot, both foreign and domestic.

Goldberg: Or does it?

Brooks: I’m now of a mood that we’re over-politicized as a country.  I have this line: “We’re over-politicized and under-moralized.” We spend too much time paying attention to whatever cable TV is covering that particular hour and less about the things that really matter.

Goldberg: When you say “we,” what do you mean?

Brooks: We as a national society.

Goldberg: I don’t know about that. If you add up all the people who watch cable news, it adds up to a very, very small percentage of the American population.

I think most people aren’t, and most people are probably healthier than the people who do pay inordinate attention to politics or are involved in politics. Is the reality the general perception of reality, or is the reality something deeper? I do think that most people in America don’t pay day-to-day attention to it. We’re just around people who do.

If you’re asking in my own life, I’ve come to realize—here’s where everybody quotes the late Breitbart: We all understand now that “politics is downstream from culture.” But I would say that, especially now, culture is downstream from psychiatry and theology and tribalism and anxiety and resentment and a whole basket of sometimes inchoate human impulses and emotions that are buried deep in our lizard brains. You know what I mean?

To go upstream, you’ve got to be a salmon now in politics, if you’re writing about politics, and go as far upstream as you can go. That’s where you’re going to find out some possibly meaningful truths.

Brooks: I agree with Breitbart, though I should say Gramsci got there first, and a lot of people wrote about culture first.

Goldberg: Your old socialist roots coming out.

Brooks: My theory is that people are emotionally and spiritually quite disturbed right now, and they don’t go to church, and so politics has become the religion for a lot of people.

Goldberg: That’s why I stopped a long time ago falling in love with politicians. Because falling in love with anything human—any movement or anything that’s human created—is going to lead to disappointment.

I don’t mean falling in love with a human. You know my wife. She’s perfect.

Brooks: She’s now throwing her shoes at you, metaphorically.

Goldberg: I don’t know if she listens to your podcast.

Brooks: I’ll send her this part.

Goldberg: She knows you. She can just call you if she has to find out what you’re thinking at any given moment.

There are humans I love. But humans involved in public life who you fall in love with—that’s bad.

Brooks: I don’t know if I agree with that. I was deep into McCain and Obama.

Goldberg: Is there any politician who hasn’t disappointed you in some way in your 80 years in politics?

Brooks: All people except my kids and my wife have disappointed me, except my boss has never disappointed me.

Goldberg: Your new boss, not the old boss. The old bosses were terrible.

Brooks: But I’ve still gotten enthusiastic about various campaigns. It really mattered to me that Obama, McCain—the 2008 election was really tough on me, because I admire these two guys the most.

Goldberg: I wish they could’ve run the country together. If you melded some of McCain’s instincts and impulses with Obama’s thoughtfulness and analytical heft, you would’ve had a really interesting president.

Brooks: They would’ve killed each other.

Goldberg: No, I mean, in the one person, if you could just combine that.

David Brooks: I still want to believe in politics, and I still do believe in it. And I think most politicians are in it for the right reasons. The problem comes to me when people say they wouldn’t marry somebody from the other party, and that’s a very high percentage right now.

Goldberg: This is why religion is important. One of the many reasons religion is important. It says that humans are limited. Humans are broken, and humans are deeply imperfect. Any system of thought that demands some level of humility …

This is what I can’t stand about politics—the certainty of everybody. Because everybody needs religion. Human beings need religion. Some people just make politics their religion.

Brooks: My argument is that it gives you the simulation of religion without the actual religion. It gives you a simulation that you belong to a group, but you’re not really in a community. You’re just hating the same people.

Goldberg: You’re not in a community, and you’re accepting only half of what religion has to offer. You engage in judgment, but you don't really engage in mercy. That’s what our politics is like. It’s judgment without mercy.

It matters to me so little now what a person’s positions are on a set of issues compared to their character and to their core beliefs about themselves, their family, their community, their country, the world system that we have.

I don’t care that much if someone believes X about Y bill.

Brooks: This is why I think being over-politicized is not just a small group of people. I think what you just expressed—another way to say it is when you're looking at a candidate, the first lens is: Are they a good person? Are they a trustworthy human being?

Goldberg: Are they mentally stable?

Brooks: That would be nice.

Goldberg: I like to look at someone who’s committed to his or her family.

Brooks: And also, do they have good judgment? A lot of politics is just looking at the world, seeing what matters here. The third lens should be: Do they agree with me? Are they on my team?

But if you look at, say, the Texas primary race, where Ken Paxton beat John Cornyn, I don’t think people are applying the character frame or the judgment frame. They’re applying the partisanship lens.

Then for the Democrats, Graham Platner up in Maine. Even after a lot of his scandals got out, a lot of Democrats were willing to stay because he’s on the team.

Goldberg: This is a cliche already, but partisanship does make you stupid. Partisanship, excessive partisanship especially, turns you into a robot. Or, put it this way: It turns you tribal. What’s amusing, leftists who believe in universal principles and universalism get pretty tribal as well. Tribalism makes you kind of dumb.

Brooks: Have you lost friends over Trump?

Goldberg: Have I lost friends over Trump?

You’re assuming that I have friends and not a series of shifting alliances.

Brooks: Well, we’re momentarily friends.

Goldberg: Again, shifting alliances.

Have I lost friends over Trump? No.

I have more Republican friends than the average Washington-based “mainstream” journalist, but my Republican friends are disproportionately anti-Trumpers who’ve become so committed to it. It’s like, all right already with Trump. You know what I mean?

It’s funny. This is a possible insight into The Atlantic. The Atlantic is meant to be the magazine of the American idea. The American idea posits that you have a strong liberal group and a strong conservative group battling it out in public for primacy of their ideas, and you have to convince the public that your ideas are right.

I think it’s very important to have conservatives and liberals writing and arguing in the pages of The Atlantic. So I try to get as many conservatives as we can. Unfortunately, all they want to do is write about Trump. Every so often I have to remind a conservative writer, “Can you just come out against abortion randomly or something to remind our readers that you have positions?”

I understand how personal it is for them. I understand what it must be like to see the party that they believed in become a cult of personality around an individual, rather than a place for the ventilation of conservative ideas.

Anyway, I’m going off on a tangent, but that’s a long way of saying: I can’t say I lost friends over that.

Brooks: I don’t believe in losing friends over politics. I just think that’s a misalignment.

Goldberg: Well, it doesn’t really matter what you believe. It matters what your friends believe.

Brooks: I grew up in the conservative movement, so I have a lot of conservative friends. I have conservative family members—MAGA conservative types. And they’ll occasionally say, “How much do I have to pay you to stop writing?” They don’t like what I write, but we have fun with it, and we argue all the time about it.

Goldberg: Here’s the thing. This is what makes me most nervous about America. The thing that will keep the United States united is nothing more and nothing less than the ability, the willingness, of Americans to consciously impose restraints on themselves. Restraints on how far they will go, rhetorically and otherwise, to express their differences with their fellow Americans.

You have to start from a position: No American is my enemy. I don’t have to like him, I don’t have to agree with him, but no American is my—I mean, the way Trump talks about enemies of the people is obviously horrible—enemy. And I will impose restraints on myself. I have the First Amendment right to say whatever I want, but I don’t need to exercise that right to the detriment of the American project.

That’s how we get out of this. We don’t get out of it through legislation, we don’t get out of it through constitutional amendment, we don’t get out of it through demography. We get out of it because people decide that more unites us than divides us.

Brooks: I used to think we needed a war against Canada, but now we may actually get a war against Canada.

Goldberg: I think that the liberals, for good reason, would be like, “Why are we having a war against”—I mean if Canada, like, sucker punched us. Martians maybe.

Brooks: I just mean some common foe. Martians would be a good one.

Goldberg: But I think it’s almost deeper than that. In the Middle East, there’s very obvious existential wars. We don’t have—there’s very little chance that China just attacks the United States in a Pearl Harbor–style way.

China might very well attack Taiwan, and that causes a huge discussion in the American public about: Do we defend or do we not defend? But I don’t see an outside party coming in and unifying the American people in the way that the shock of Pearl Harbor unified the American people.

Brooks: I would go back to what we talked about earlier. My experience in the ’90s abroad made me so pro-American. I just love all Americans. You can’t love America and hate half the country. I love going to Trump areas, I love going to—Brooklyn I have problems with, but—

Goldberg: Depends on what part of Brooklyn. Brooklyn is wildly diverse.

Brooks: But my fear is not only that there are no limits to how we exercise our partisanship, but that we’ve lost faith in the art of persuasion.

I have this weird pet peeve when politicians say we’re going to fight. When they use that word fight, which is now omnipresent, I want to say, “Fighting is for fascists. Democracy is about persuasion.”

But I know a lot of journalists, opinion journalists, who don’t believe in persuasion.

Goldberg: You’re going to make a lot of money as a political consultant, by the way.

Brooks: It is about persuasion.

Goldberg: Of course. Persuasion is the coin of the realm in democracies, and coercion is the coin of the realm in autocracies.

I don’t like coercion. I would love to be persuaded. I think it’s actually healthy for your brain to allow it to be persuaded by evidence. It means that the pistons are functioning.

Brooks: But there’s a lot of people in our business—and there are economic incentives to be—in the mobilization business, not in the persuasion business.

Goldberg: Huge. And yet it’s not as if 350 million Americans have to wake up tomorrow morning and say, “Persuasion, not coercion. No American is my enemy. I will impose restraint on the way I talk in order to make sure that my fellow Americans understand that I do not consider them enemies.” I understand that’s a hard one. There are structural ways, there are algorithmic ways, of lowering the temperature.

If we had non-sociopaths running social media companies, they might program for unity or fact as opposed to programming for anger. But here we are.

Brooks: Tell me if I’m being an old fogey.

Goldberg: You’re an old fogey.

Brooks: Thank you. I appreciate that. That was a bit of emotional bath that I needed.

I used to admire politicians more as people, and I don't know if the politicians are getting lesser or if the system is getting lesser, or some of the people I admired—I was just down in Georgia and I met Sam Nunn’s daughter. Sam Nunn was a senator, and he knew so much about defense policy. He was a deeply knowledgeable guy, as much as any policy wonk.

We talked about McCain and Obama. They struck me as bigger. Ted Kennedy was just a great, great legislator. I think the two best legislators of my lifetime have been Ted Kennedy, who really knew what everybody in the room needed, and Nancy Pelosi.

Goldberg: Seemingly every Republican in the Senate in Ted Kennedy’s long tenure there had a bill with Ted Kennedy.

Kennedy would always find something to agree with someone on and then legislate to their mutual advantage. It was an amazing thing to watch.

It’s funny, when you talk to old senators who are like, “I co-sponsored that with Ted Kennedy.” And then they’re like, “And I know you’re surprised by this.” No, it’s not surprising.

He was also so secure as a liberal icon. If Ted Kennedy said, “I’m doing something with Orrin Hatch,” the liberals of Massachusetts would say, “Oh, wow, you’re a great legislator,” not, “What are you doing with Orrin Hatch?”

Brooks: But there was a skill to being a legislator, which they really worked on. Now, it’s a skill that’s getting on TV, but the skill of politics—

Goldberg: It’s just performance now. I think it’s the social media temptation. The ability to express your feelings 24 hours a day instantaneously is not a good thing. You could spend all day long trying to maintain your filters, and you can’t. Even people of dignity succumb.

I would really like the next president to be just a dignified person who doesn’t rise to the bait all the time and just explains to the American people over and over again, “This is what a president does; this is what a president doesn’t do. I’m not gonna do the things that presidents don’t do.”

Brooks: Okay, let’s talk about the future. I’m going to tell you why I’m optimistic about America, and you can tell me why my theory is ridiculous.

Goldberg: What’s second prize? (Laughs.)

Brooks: We decline the fall of the Roman Empire. In 2020, I’m reading a book, I’m sitting at home, during COVID, and I’m reading a book by Samuel Huntington, The Promise of Disharmony.

The Promise of Disharmony is the subtitle. The title was American Politics. And he says every couple of generations, America goes through a moral convulsion. People get disgusted with established power, high distrust, they want to burn everything down. There’s a new passionate generation comes on the scene, new form of communications technology.

He says this happened in the 1770s, the revolutionary period; 1830s, Andrew Jackson populist era; 1890s, the Industrial Revolution, which leads to the progressive era; and the 1960s. And these periods, he says, are brutal to live through.

So he’s writing this in 1982, and he says, “If the pattern holds sometime around the second decade of the 21st century, America will go through another moral convulsion.” And I’m like, “Well done, Professor Huntington.”

But the good news is you come out of them. We’ve been through this six or seven times before.

Goldberg: The question is: How do we come out?

Brooks: I think we come out of them the way we’re coming out of them right now, which is you have a cultural shift, a value shift, and then that leads to a politics shift. And we’ve gone through a period of brutal nihilism.

And I think—I look at the Fred Rogers movies, where people are weeping in the theater because they want to see a good person. Or you go to Ted Lasso. People loved it because they wanted to see a good person, upbeat. I just saw Devil Wears Prada 2. The Anne Hathaway character’s a good person.

I think most of Zohran Mamdani’s policies are horrific, but he smiles when he talks. He’s a happy guy, and I think he’s a brilliant politician.

To me, this is all part of a buildup of a cultural-value shift, a vibe shift as big as we’ve seen in any of these other moral convulsions. It makes total sense to me that that’s what’s about to happen, and we’re seeing the early days of it.

Goldberg: It’s funny, because my perfect president would combine the best qualities of Anne Hathaway and Zohran Mamdani. How did you know that?

How do you read my mind like that? How do you do that? I’m perfectly open to the idea that this is a midlife crisis, or whatever you want to call it, and that we’re coming out. I’d prefer not to think that it’s a terminal illness.

I think that there’s one huge—Put aside AI, which I don’t know how that ball bounces, right? But social media generally, I don’t know what you can do contemplatively in an age of social media.

All that being said, if people on the right accept the basic undergirding principles of creedal nationalism, which is: We all swear allegiance to a constitution, and we love the flag, and everybody lives here together, and we’re a big multicultural democracy, and the American idea is that no one is better than me, and I’m not better than anyone. And people on the left have to not talk about identity and division all the time and try to divide based on resentment categories, right?

On the right, downplay the nativist impulses that are universal. And on the left, downplay the things that divide and up play the things that unite.

Because—you and I both know this, because we’ve traveled around the world—when you meet an American outside America, it’s the greatest thing in the world. Doesn’t matter where you’re from, you're just so ineluctably American, and you’re so excited. Doesn’t matter that you’re from Brooklyn, and this one is from Montana—you’re American.

That’s what I love about America. It’s a shame that sometimes you have to go outside of America to get that feeling among Americans. I don’t have a prescription for how to make people understand these things, and I hope that we can find our way to these things the easy way and not the hard way.

But at the end of an easy way or a hard way is this renewed understanding, I think.

Brooks: I think nations decline not when they go through turmoil but when they run out of energy. And we have not. We have all this mishigas around us, but we haven’t run out of energy, that’s for sure.

Goldberg: No, we haven’t run out of energy for the mishigas. But at a certain point, these things, you forget. I was in Cyprus once, and you cross the DMZ, and you talk to people on both sides, and they’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” Like, “What’s the last crazy thing that happened here?” “I don’t know.” And you’re like, “If it went back to Greece, would you care?” “No.”

Things burn out. You know? But we’re not at that burn stage yet.

Brooks: I want to bring us home here with this question—

Goldberg: Did we accomplish anything in this podcast?

Brooks: We did.

Goldberg: Is this a podcast?

Brooks: This is a pointillist painting by Seurat. And we have had so many points that all add up to one beautiful picture. And that picture is to me—

Goldberg: The Atlantic magazine.

Brooks: The Atlantic magazine, embodied truth.

There was a guy, Abraham Kuyper, and he had a theory of the spheres, that there are a lot of different spheres in society. There’s a political sphere, there’s a religious sphere, there’s a capitalist sphere, there’s a family sphere. And it’s really important to keep them apart, and to know that the logic of one sphere does not pertain to the logic of other spheres.

His argument was that we’ve collapsed all the spheres, and we’ve taken the logic of politics and applied it to the logic of education. Our higher ed, at least, is super politicized. Our logic of popular culture, that’s super politicized.

Every scandal that breaks up, it breaks down immediately on partisan lines. Everything is seen through that lens, and so we’ve broken down the spheres, and that’s a problem for all of us.

Goldberg: I think we have to segregate the impulses of politics away from the other parts of life that are more complicated and more—you know, politics can make you inhuman.

Brooks: And you know, to get down to your daily life—

Goldberg: I’m getting older, so I attribute this to chronology, but I’m more in the nature, spiritual religion. I think part of it is—and this has been a theme of this conversation, I will try to organize a coherence to this conversation—I think that the older you get in journalism, and maybe politics too, I think now I’ve seen most things.

Many of the things that I’ve seen in politics and journalism I’ve seen three or four or five times. Nothing’s new under the sun, to borrow from Ecclesiastes. Nothing is new, and that makes it a little bit more boring, so you’re trying to find the thing that’s actually transcendent out of this.

On one hand, it leads to what our friend Ruth Marcus calls “calm mastery.” It’s like, Okay, I’ve been through that crisis already. I did that. I know what happens. But on the other hand, you’re looking for something more.

I read more Emerson than I used to. I read more Bible than I used to. I read Psalms more than I used to. I try very deliberately to go into nature more than I used to. I was just last week out in the redwoods, and there’s nothing like it: Go right up to a redwood and look up.

You’re really going to think that some fight on MS Now or Fox is important? Standing next to a 1,400-year-old redwood? It’s just putting things into perspective and understanding that not much matters. The things that matter, matter hugely, but not much actually matters.

I’m sorry, I’m getting on a—

Brooks: No, this is why The Permanent Questions is here for you.

Goldberg: Oh, that’s good.

Brooks: That’s what we’re doing. This is what—

Goldberg: So if I listen every week, I will understand?

Brooks: We are the verbal equivalent of a redwood. And I just wanted to express—so the point of this podcast—

Goldberg: You’re one of the shorter redwoods I’ve ever met, by the way.

Brooks: Spiritually tall.

Goldberg: But spiritually your canopy shades us all.

Brooks: Ultimately, your decision to hire me was a wise one. I think that’s why we’re here.

Goldberg: As wise as a redwood.

Brooks: Jeffrey Goldberg, thank you for being on The Permanent Questions.

Goldberg: Thank you.

Brooks: There were times when I was covering political campaigns and I would be deep in political everything, and I would take time off to read an essay written by the essayist C.S. Lewis. He talked about how medieval people looked at the night sky. We see the night sky, and we see balls of gas. They looked at the night sky, and they just saw enchantment. His description of the way they saw the world as enchanted always used to lift my spirit. In the midst of a political season, I needed something to lift my spirit.

So I resonated when Jeff talked about the redwoods—that maybe as you get older, or maybe we just are exhausted by the politics of the last 10 years, when Jeff talked about going out to the redwoods, sitting under a redwood and looking up, suddenly the world is enchanted again. Or he talked about reading the Bible, reading spiritual books, reading deeper literature. Suddenly, in the midst of the random flux of political debate, it’s important to care about the permanent things.

That’s one of the reasons that motivated me to do this podcast, frankly. I was tired of the daily bounce of politics. I wanted to step back at what really mattered. And I think with Jeff’s conversation, we saw how important that is.

Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg.

The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe at The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, on Spotify, on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to support this work or the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. See you next week.

Apes don’t develop Alzheimer’s—at least, not like we do. Although we share a hefty amount of our DNA with our closest primate relatives, humans are uniquely at risk of developing the disease that can erode our sense of who we are.

When I make the diagnosis in my neurology clinic, I tell patients and family members that in most cases, doctors can’t point to a single, definitive cause of the illness. Age, genetics, health, lifestyle factors, and environmental triggers all play a role. But a growing body of research offers another dimension: We can lose our sense of self precisely because our species evolved to have one. In recent years, scientists have been comparing the brains of humans with those of other, closely related species, and teasing out how the genetics, structure, and molecular mechanisms differ. What they’re finding is that the same characteristics that support our unparalleled cognitive abilities make us susceptible to Alzheimer’s disease.

Certainly, the biological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s look different inside the human brain than in the brains of other species. Melissa Edler, a comparative neurobiologist at Kent State University, and her team have identified distinct patterns in how humans and chimpanzees accumulate amyloid plaques and tau tangles, the toxic proteins that build up in brains with Alzheimer’s. She believes that looking at multiple species is going to be crucial to understanding how this disease develops. If nonhuman primates aren’t developing Alzheimer’s, “why aren’t they?” she asked, when we spoke about her work. “What’s different about their brains?”

One answer dates back to the early 2000s, when the Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo (who went on to win the Nobel Prize for sequencing the Neanderthal genome) wondered what might account for the profound behavioral differences between humans and other apes—after all, we build civilizations while nonhuman primates cannot, without assistance, start a fire. Pääbo and his team of international researchers collected brain, blood, and liver tissue from humans, chimpanzees, orangutans, and macaques. But instead of comparing the genes themselves, they measured the genes’ activity—effectively, how hard each gene was working to make messenger RNA, which carries instructions from DNA on how to make proteins. Gene activity in the liver and blood, they found, was roughly equivalent across the species they tested. But activity in the human brain had ramped up.

Pääbo hadn’t set out to study Alzheimer’s specifically, but his findings hinted at a link between evolution and brain disease that others have pursued more directly. In a study published in 2020, for instance, Thomas Arendt, a neuroscientist at Leipzig University, and his team looked at autopsied brain samples from people with and without Alzheimer’s disease and found nearly 300 genes whose level of activity was different in the Alzheimer’s brains. When they looked at those particular genes more closely, they found that their genetic sequences had undergone a lot of change in a short amount of time—an indication that those genes played an important role in the human brain’s rapid and distinctive evolution. “In other words,” Arendt told me recently, “Alzheimer’s disease is based on changes in the genome that are typically human.”

Other researchers, too, have gathered evidence that supports the idea that evolution and Alzheimer’s are integrally related. A group at Duke University discovered that human evolution had influenced genes involved in the production of amyloid—the main protein that forms Alzheimer’s plaques. Scientists in China and the United Kingdom found that stretches of regulatory DNA that quickly morphed as the brain was evolving are associated with Alzheimer’s risk. Researchers from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, based in Houston, found uniquely human genes that get in the way of a protein called REST, which may guard against Alzheimer’s when working properly. Other studies have presented findings along similar lines. Collectively, these results only add to Arendt’s argument—that the genetic changes that made the human brain may be the same ones that left it imperiled.

The cognitive leap that set us apart also required the human brain to grow. The parietal lobes, which rise toward the crown of the head before sloping down the rear of the brain, are conspicuously larger in humans than in nonhuman primates, as Emiliano Bruner, a senior researcher in hominid paleoneurology at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, has demonstrated. A structure called the precuneus, tucked along the inner wall of those lobes, is larger too. The parietal lobes help the brain stitch sight, sound, and touch together into a cohesive model of the external world. They also play a central role in our advanced, abstract cognition, allowing for self-awareness, autobiographical memory, and our sense of being the same person across time.

Bruner had been mapping out these areas when he was contacted by Heidi Jacobs, now an associate professor of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who had been studying the same anatomy. For decades, Alzheimer’s research had focused almost exclusively on a different area of the brain—the temporal lobes, its de facto memory hubs. But Jacobs’s work suggested that the parietal lobes were also implicated in the disease’s earliest stages. Bruner and Jacobs began discussing whether the enlargement of these regions could have increased their vulnerability. Soon, they came up with a theory: The parts of the brain that had expanded most dramatically during human evolution were also among the first to be assailed by Alzheimer’s.

This was no coincidence, they argued. The precuneus consumes enormous amounts of energy and generates heat that has to be carefully dissipated to keep the brain functioning at its best. It also sits in a zone where the brain’s blood supply is thinnest, which makes it vulnerable to certain conditions, some of them age-related, that impact blood flow. Myelin, the fatty coating that is crucial for fast signaling between neurons, is also particularly fragile in this area. Essentially, Bruner and Jacobs reasoned, because of the rapid and imperfect reorganization that the parietal lobes underwent during human evolution, the region doing much of the brain’s hardest cognitive work has some of the most precarious infrastructure.

“It is like putting the engine of a Ferrari into a Fiat 500,” Bruner said. “That small car will go really fast, but it’s going to get hot. And braking will be an issue.”

What Bruner calls “braking,” the Yale neuroscientist Amy Arnsten calls “regulation”—specifically, calcium regulation, which supports learning and memory. The failure of that system, Arnsten argues, may be tied to how Alzheimer’s begins.

Most neurons fire because something in the outside world activates them: a flash of light, a sound. Neurons in our most recently evolved brain regions, which help us hold an idea in our minds, or conjure a detailed plan, keep firing even after the initial stimulus is gone. Although competing theories exist, Arnsten and others consider this persistent firing to be the cellular foundation of working memory. These “delay cells” depend on calcium to keep them active, but as we age and the cells’ system falters, calcium can rise to harmful levels, triggering a chain reaction that can cause tau proteins to clump. Over time, those clumps can contribute to the tangles of fibers that are seen in patients with Alzheimer’s.

Arnsten has shown that this apparatus, as well as the damage it causes when it breaks down, increases in lockstep with hominid evolution. Marmosets have the least of it. Macaques more. Chimpanzees, more still. Humans, by far, the most. “The closer to human,” Arnsten said, “the more the Alzheimer’s pathology.”

Our bodies are no strangers to evolutionary trade-offs. Homo sapiens’ vertical spine leaves us vulnerable to herniated discs; our pelvis, narrowed by bipedalism, makes childbirth difficult. We manage these compromises as best we can. But if an evolutionary give-and-take implicates our organ of thought and reason, accepting the compromise is harder.

The suggestion that neurological fragility is the price of a highly evolved mind is not novel, the historian Michael Hagner, who’s studied our understanding of the brain as the locus of personhood, told me. In the 19th century, some physicians and social theorists believed that the overwhelming demands of modern life were overtaxing the nervous system. That inclination, to interpret our cognitive vulnerabilities as the price of progress, has persisted even as more specific diagnoses have emerged to explain our brains’ instabilities.

Therapeutic options for Alzheimer’s remain both scarce and disputed, and understanding the disease’s ties to our brain’s evolution could open new avenues toward prevention and treatment. Amy Arnsten and her colleagues, for instance, are currently developing drugs that target calcium dysregulation, aiming to intervene before the system begins to break down. For now, the notion that human cognition and Alzheimer’s susceptibility share an evolutionary origin remains theoretical, and every time I deliver an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, I am acutely aware that I can offer little to change my patient’s fate. But if losing the sense of self is uniquely human, so is the ability to consider what having one allows us to gain.

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It’s July 2023. The chief of police of the city of Los Angeles, Michel Moore, addresses the monthly graduating class of the Los Angeles Police Department’s training academy. “This is a profession that many will say, and I will say, is the hardest profession in America,” Moore says.

Moore is the picture of modern American law enforcement: close‑cropped hair, immaculate black uniform, commanding voice, an air of quiet professionalism.

In front of him are the recruits, fresh‑faced and eager, sitting on rows of white folding chairs in the academy courtyard. Behind them are their families, ready to celebrate. A bagpiper serenades the crowd. The police band plays. The sun shines. It is a perfect Los Angeles day.

“Far too many believe they know how to do it,” Moore continues. “But few actually step forward. And [of] those few that do step forward, even fewer have the qualifications to meet the demands of what it means to be a police officer.”

[Reihan Salam and Charles Fain Lehman: We’re underfunding the police]

At that, the young men and women in the graduating class leap to their feet and throw their caps into the air.

But there is something profoundly strange about this and all the other graduation ceremonies that happen every month in the academy courtyard—something that would leave almost any police officer in the developed world shaking their head in bafflement. And that peculiarity is a clue to one way in which Americans misunderstand their lethal-violence problem.

Los Angeles is a city of 3.9 million people. The Western city most comparable to it is probably the German capital of Berlin. Los Angeles covers a much larger area, but the populations of the two cities are virtually identical. Both are centers of government, culture, and industry—wealthy, world‑class cities at the heart of vibrant metropolitan regions. To patrol the 469 square miles of Los Angeles, the city’s police department employs roughly 8,500 police officers. How many police officers do you think Berlin has?

As I was writing this chapter, I asked dozens of well‑educated people that question. Almost every answer I got put the Berlin police force somewhere between a quarter and a half the size of the LAPD.

I suspect that if I conducted an opinion poll of many millions of Americans, most would answer the same. Americans believe themselves to be ­overpoliced. Many conservatives believe that to be a good thing. Many liberals believe it to be a troubling fact. But few question that America is a place that spends more money on law enforcement than do its peers around the world.

And that belief is completely and totally wrong: Berlin has about 18,000 police officers, making its police department twice the size of Los Angeles’s.

American police departments, compared with their counterparts around the developed world, are tiny. Phoenix has 2,500 police officers. Munich—which has a population of roughly the same size—has nearly two and a half times as many. Dallas has 3,100 officers. The Brussels metro area, comparable to Dallas in population, has 6,700.

Had anyone from Europe happened upon the graduation ceremony that day in July, their first thought would have been, Where is everyone?

Aurora, Colorado, sits half an hour east of Denver, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It’s the third-largest city in the state, with more than 400,000 residents, and is more diverse, economically and culturally, than its larger neighbor. It’s a very typical modern American city, and for close to a decade its police chief was Daniel Oates, a longtime veteran of the New York City Police Department. Oates is part of the most recent generation of law-enforcement leadership: better educated than his predecessors, more comfortable with data and analytics, and more aware of the importance of the police department’s relationship to the public.

I called him and asked a simple question. Aurora is the same size as Zurich, but Zurich has 1,700 police officers and Aurora had 650 when Oates was running the police department. What would have happened, I asked, if I could have given you another 650 officers, putting you in the same range as Zurich? He burst out laughing at the thought. “It would’ve been glorious,” Oates replied.

He had clearly never been asked this question in an interview before. But he had certainly thought about the subject long and hard, because he then launched into a compelling, granular ­30-minute description of exactly what he would have done in Aurora with twice as many officers.

Half of those extra officers, he began, would be assigned immediately to patrol—that is, responding to radio calls. He continued:

You’re always looking at response times. You’re looking at the 24 hours of the day; you’re looking at the seven days of the week. You’re looking at calls for service, and your ability to get to the higher‑priority calls as quickly as possible.

So if you gave me, in Aurora, another 600 cops, all right, probably around 250 or 300 of them, I’d put [them] right on patrol. And half of those would go to filling in the holes in the 24‑hour, seven‑day‑a‑week chart where I felt the response times were not sufficient, because you can really, really protect people, reduce victimization, if you can get there faster. Period.

Police departments keep careful records of exactly how long it takes a squad car to respond to a radio call, so Oates could identify exactly when and why response times got unacceptably long. Suppose you noticed that week in, week out, people in a certain part of the city were waiting 45 minutes for an officer to arrive between 10 p.m. and midnight. In Aurora, Oates had lots of those holes in the schedule—so many, in fact, that he was hundreds of officers short of a fully staffed patrol team. With more officers, he could have plugged those holes.

Then he began to talk about what he would do with the other 300 new officers. He had a long list. At the top was a greatly beefed‑up community-policing division:

The person who doesn’t answer the radio, but builds relationships in the community and is the day‑to‑day representative of the organization dealing with, you know, not urgent crime problems, but problems in a community for which police intervention could make a difference. Okay, so things like graffiti or kids hanging out in the park at night and doing stupid stuff.

A police department relies on the goodwill of the population it is serving in order to be effective. And Oates’s point was that if your force is composed mostly of a small number of overworked officers rushing from one crime scene to the next, you never get the chance to build that goodwill. With more officers, the department could do that. As he told me:

If the relationships are close, where someone trusts the cop and the cops trust the community and they’re welcome into their home, they’re welcome into their meetings. They’re being invited to barbecues, whatever, and christenings and all that kind of stuff.

If that’s the relationship that the cop is having with the community and the community leaders, then when a problem emerges for which the police or government intervention could make a difference, it emerges early. We hear about it before it’s a big problem, and not only do we hear about it from the community when it’s a little problem, we hear about it in a form of dialogue and a relationship, where ideas about how to address the problem also emerge from the community because there’s a level of trust.

As Oates was talking about his experiences in Aurora, I was reminded of something the criminologist Jens Ludwig said about what he learned from riding around at night with Chicago police officers: Once you realize that most murder is expressive, you understand the value of having lots of police officers. An officer cannot easily disrupt a carefully planned act of instrumental violence. But they can interrupt the kind of argument that builds into a lethal encounter. As Ludwig put it:

So let me give you, like, the clearest-cut example, right? So I’m driving around one night. Super late at night on the South Side of Chicago with a sergeant at the time on the Chicago police force. We’re in an unmarked car. We turn the corner, and there’s this gigantic guy. He’s got this woman pinned against the fence, a chain‑link fence on the South Side. She’s holding a little kid’s hand standing next to her, and he is right in her face, screaming, swearing. Like, you can’t imagine how heated this thing is.

The overwhelming majority of female murder victims are killed by someone they know, and this had all the hallmarks of something that could spiral into exactly that situation. Who knows what trivial matter had set the man off? But he was angry. Ludwig continued:

And she’s just, like, cowering, pushed all the way up against the fence, nowhere to go. So the cop pulls [the] car over and says, “What’s going on here?” And the guy says, “Everything’s fine.” And the sergeant says, “Buddy, I think you should go take a walk.” And the guy says, “I think everything’s fine.” And the cop says, “Go take a fucking walk.”

And then the guy, like, very grudgingly walks away, and we then wind up giving the lady and her kid a drive home.

The gigantic guy didn’t commit a crime. And the officer didn’t make an arrest. What the officer did do, however, was change the chemistry of the situation—interrupt the kind of encounter that could lead to an act of real violence.

When I told Daniel Oates that story, he agreed completely. He said that for every arrest an officer makes, he does 10 or 15 or even 20 of those spontaneous interruptions. And if Oates had had twice as many officers, they could have interrupted twice as many of those arguments, and defused them before they turned into something far worse.

This is what is happening in Western European countries. They have much bigger police departments because they understand exactly what all those extra police officers can do. They believe in police. And that is the other thing that would have baffled any visitor from Europe who happened upon graduation at the LAPD academy. You Americans write best-selling novels about cops. You glorify them in movies and television shows. So why don’t you believe in them?

I asked Oates whether a meaningful expansion could ever happen. “If you went before the town council or a community meeting in any city, and you were like, I’m here to argue for doubling the size of your police force, and you gave the exact same speech you just gave me, what are the odds they give you what you wanted?” Oates’s answer: “Zero. Zero. Zero. It’s not gonna happen.”

In 2020, an African American man in Minneapolis named George Floyd was killed by a rogue police officer, setting off an extraordinary wave of protests around the country. The motto of many of the protesters was “Defund the police.”

If the police were badly behaved, the thinking went, it was because there were too many of them.

As the prominent criminal-justice reformer Mariame Kaba wrote in The New York Times at the height of the protests:

Regardless of your view on police power—whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent—here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people.

Following the protests, city after city saw their police force shrink. Of the 15 largest police departments in the United States, 12 had a markedly smaller police force in 2025 than in 2019. Philadelphia lost 23.1 percent of its police force during that period; Washington, D.C., lost 21.4 percent; San Francisco, 17.5 percent; Phoenix, 15 percent; and on and on. The reformers won the day. But what they did not understand is that there is a trade-off between certainty and severity: When criminals think they can get away with crimes, policing and punishments need to be more severe to achieve the same deterrent effect. Severity is not something that comes from lots of police. It’s something that comes from having too few police.

In a brilliant study titled “The Injustice of Under-Policing in America,” the scholars Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani show that this trade‑off can be found in police departments across the globe. They took a broad sample of countries and ranked them by their levels of police violence: How many civilians, in the course of a given year, were killed by law enforcement? Then they compared that number with the capacity of a country’s police department. (The statistic they used was police per homicide, which is a more accurate indicator of the amount of resources available to a law-enforcement community than the standard measure of police per capita.)

[Listen: The evidence on policing and crime]

Lewis and Usmani found that in the countries with the most police capacity—such as Switzerland, Norway, and Japan—it’s almost unheard of for a civilian to die in an encounter with law enforcement. But the fewer police per homicide a country has, the more violent the police are in their dealings with the public. As Usmani told me:

If you think about a country like Brazil or a country like South Africa or a country where I’m from, Pakistan, these are countries where, actually, the police are quite scarce. Everyone knows they’re quite scarce, and they also know that they behave incredibly heavy—heavily handedly there.

If a government doesn’t have lots of police, then it has only one way to demonstrate its authority: with spectacular shows of force.

Where is the United States in Usmani and Lewis’s chart? Right next to Pakistan, Iran, and Brazil.

“There’s a Netflix show, Flint Town, which follows the Flint, Michigan, police department before and after the election of Trump,” Usmani said. Flint is a city of 80,000 people—with a police force, at the time, of 93 full‑time officers. Usmani continued:

What you see the Flint Police Department struggle with is precisely the fact that they only have a few officers to police a place that’s very violent, and so they invent counterinsurgency. You observe them inventing counterinsurgency, where they’ll go out in a few heavily armed jeeps and basically break some knees and return to base. And that’s a very different style of policing than the developed world, but very familiar in a country like Brazil.

In recent years, many Americans have decided that their country’s problem was that it had too many police officers, when in fact its problem was that it had too few.

This article has been adapted from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic.

Perhaps Elizabeth Holmes was simply ahead of her time: Today, the Theranos founder’s crimes look less notorious amid a pervasive culture of grift and graft.

Her biotechnology company infamously promised to revolutionize medicine by conducting hundreds of tests on mere pinpricks of blood. A decade after it fell into disgrace, and three years after she began serving her 11-year federal-prison sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars, Holmes is the subject of a new documentary. You Can See Everything, directed by Lance Oppenheim and Nathan Fielder, came about because Holmes and her partner, the hotel heir Billy Evans, invited Fielder, a surrealist sketch comedian, to live with them just before she went to prison. They allowed him to film whatever he saw. The result is unsettling, because Holmes’s placid indifference toward the truth has become more familiar than it was when Theranos unraveled.

Holmes, who insists that she wants to be transparent with Fielder, implacably maintains that she did nothing wrong and that Theranos was capable of meeting its promise of technological breakthroughs. In reality, the company never had a device that could deliver the promised number of tests on tiny blood samples; its machine could run only a handful of basic tests, sometimes inaccurately, and had to secretly rely on conventional analyzers. Yet the film shows that even in the dwindling days before her sentence began, she and Evans were talking about creating Theranos 2.0. (Evans’s new company, unlike Theranos, involves lasers.)

[Read: Manipulator vs. manipulator]

Fielder, who previously played a cringingly anti-social business consultant in his show Nathan for You and a man who obsessively practices for difficult social interactions in The Rehearsal, is known for inhabiting an absurd persona for awkwardly long periods of time. He seems shaken from his encounter with someone capable of doing so for longer. Holmes is one of those people so entangled with the avatars and projections they create—a woman who maintains, despite her conviction on fraud charges, that she has never lied in her life—that the authentic self cannot be found. Fielder earnestly attempts to learn the truth, but is never able to do so satisfactorily.

To a moviegoer, the effect is exhilarating—like encountering the nested realities of Christopher Nolan’s Inception or the superposition of documentary and fiction in Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (about the real-life case of a downtrodden Iranian cinephile on trial for impersonating a famous movie director). To a writer who covers American politics, Holmes’s hall of mirrors is uncomfortably familiar. Politics is dominated more by avatars and projections than by authentic actors. You empathize with Fielder’s agony: a maddening drive to get to the truth, a shared skepticism that he will ever get there, the sneaking suspicion that people might not care even if he did.

Another nihilistic thought gnaws at me: Would a Theranos-style implosion be as newsworthy today? Americans love an Icarus story, and Holmes fell from quite a height: She was, for a time, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Theranos’s ascent was made possible by the imprimatur of what one reporter called “the most illustrious board in U.S. corporate history”—with former and future Cabinet members such as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Mattis. Prominent billionaires—Rupert Murdoch, Carlos Slim, the Walton family, Betsy DeVos—invested huge sums of money in the company. She demonstrated that even people advising the president or running some of the world’s most powerful companies were painfully easy to dupe. “I only have myself to blame for not asking a lot more questions,” Murdoch later told The Wall Street Journal. (His family owns the newspaper, whose investigation into Theranos began the start-up’s demise.) “One of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.”

The rise and fall of Theranos happened at a time of great optimism for Silicon Valley, under a president who promised hope and change. Back in the mid-2010s, you could more easily believe that technological disruption was not just making Americans rich but also connecting humanity, freeing expression, and enabling democracy. Conventional wisdom had not yet concluded that social media atomized people and made them anxious, or that tech titans, who sounded so libertarian then, were ultimately businessmen above all else. Cryptocurrency was only beginning to attract its own raft of charlatans and criminals.

A decade ago, the association of the highest echelons of the power elite with an ultimately fraudulent business was a scandal. Today, it might seem mundane. Donald Trump has unashamedly profited from the presidency, earning more than $1.4 billion in 2025 from cryptocurrency deals. The Trump family has received significant money coming from countries that wish to bend the president’s ear on foreign policy. Donald Trump Jr. has benefited from the sudden interest in his business acumen. Months after the younger Trump’s venture-capital firm took an ownership stake in a rare-earth-magnet start-up, it was awarded a $620 million government loan. (Despite this run of self-made luck, part of his wedding celebration was paid for by a Kremlin-linked Russian oligarch.) The Republican operatives who were supposed to be busy running advertising for the midterm elections—James Blair and Chris LaCivita—were instead found to be playing hooky in the Balkans, where they have been moonlighting as advisers for the self-governing ethnic-Serbian section of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You seldom hear the phrase drain the swamp anymore.

[Tom Nichols: Kimberly Guilfoyle broke Trump’s most important rule]

Amid this spectacle of self-dealing at the center of American political life, what kind of fraud still has the capacity to shock? Consider the implosion of Nikola Corporation, an electric-vehicle company once valued at $30 billion, triple Theranos’s peak valuation. A 2018 video purporting to show a truck being powered by a hydrogen fuel cell turned out two years later to just be a showcase of gravity: The truck was rolling downhill. Trevor Milton, the CEO, was convicted of securities fraud in 2022. Trump pardoned him in March 2025, after Milton and his wife had—unrelatedly, Milton said—donated more than $3 million to Trump and his allies. Though arguably more sordid than the Theranos affair, this episode garnered only a fraction of the attention. The president has an unmistakable affection for fraudsters. Since he returned to office, Trump has pardoned nearly 50 people convicted of financial crimes.

Holmes would very much like to join their ranks. Last year she applied for clemency, and some in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement are rehabilitating her into a martyr. Jessica Reed Kraus, a famous MAHA influencer, explained Holmes’s downfall by saying that she posed a “catastrophic threat to a trillion-dollar industry controlled by conglomerates.” Her crime was not being too deceitful, but being too visionary. “My crew joked that if Holmes emerged today, she would be counted among the innovators MAHA endorses,” Kraus wrote.

If Holmes had peaked during the Trump era, and had sought the right political protection, perhaps she could have escaped prosecution altogether. The number of federal prosecutions of white-collar crimes in 2025 hit a 39-year low. Amid all the chicanery of the second Trump administration, another Holmes-level deception is easy to imagine. It just wouldn’t register as anything remarkable.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Early voting begins in Texas on Monday, and the outcome of the Senate race could determine which party controls the chamber. In a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic in Austin, Texas, panelists discuss the midterms, the future of the GOP, and more.

Joining Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, in Austin: the Atlantic staff writers Mark Leibovich, Ashley Parker, and Vivian Salama; and The Atlantic’s managing director for events, Evan Smith.

Watch the full episode here.

For the first time in her career, Cynthia Short let a folder of crime-scene photographs lie untouched on the corner of her desk, because she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Short had been a criminal-defense attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, for 12 years, and on the payroll of the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office for the past decade. She had spent much of that time immersed in graphic records of the worst human conduct. Even so, the case of Richard DeLong had shocked her.

DeLong, 34, was facing capital punishment for five counts of murder. In January 1999, he had killed his ex-girlfriend Erin Vanderhoef—who was shortly due to deliver their child, a daughter they had named Hannah—as well as the three school-age children she’d had with two other men. DeLong had entered their decaying clapboard house in Springfield, Missouri, on the morning of January 19 and strangled each member of the family using scarves and cords, hog-tying Erin and gagging two of the children. When he was arrested several days later, he promptly confessed to each of the murders and immediately became the most hated man in Springfield. Short wished she didn’t have to take the case, but it was her duty as a public defender.

When, after several weeks, she finally forced herself to look at the crime-scene photos, she saw that the bodies of the children were partly hidden by debris—clothes, a plastic lawn chair, an overturned lamp. One of the boys, 10-year-old Chris, was still in bed; the other boy, 11-year-old Jimmy, had been left on the floor. Vanderhoef herself lay on her side on a rug in the living room, her blue top riding up over her pregnant belly. The youngest of the children, 8-year-old Darlene, was found in her sky-blue pajamas, tossed upside down onto a heap of garbage in the corner of her room, a jacket thrown over her face.

Short was then raising two young children of her own, and she wasn’t sure she would be able to hide her revulsion from a jury. “As a public defender, I’d seen all sorts of things, but it was the first time where I thought, I don’t know that I can stand in the courtroom next to him,” she told me when we first spoke by phone, in January. She also doubted that she could do much to help DeLong. He had committed a horrific crime and then admitted to it in a hateful taped confession.

In capital trials in the United States, proceedings are typically split into two phases: The first phase establishes a defendant’s guilt or innocence; if a jury returns a guilty verdict, it then determines in the second phase whether the defendant is sentenced to death or to life in prison. Prosecutors sometimes agree not to pursue capital punishment in exchange for a guilty plea, and on Short’s advice, DeLong did offer to plead guilty and waive all appeals in exchange for life without parole. But the prosecutors had no interest in a deal.

Because DeLong’s guilt was not in question, Short would focus on the sentencing phase. In capital cases, juries are instructed to consider statutorily defined aggravating factors cited by the prosecution—including, for instance, the death of multiple victims or of children, or the use of particularly sadistic methods of killing, all of which applied in DeLong’s case. Juries are told to weigh these aggravating factors against a much broader category of mitigating factors presented by the defense. These may include mental illness, intellectual disability, and a history of significant trauma or abuse. If the jury finds that the aggravators outweigh the mitigators, then it will likely hand down a penalty of death; if the mitigators prevail, then the jury will likely elect a lesser sentence, usually life in prison without parole. DeLong’s fate depended on Short’s ability to investigate his background and determine whether any possible mitigating evidence could be found that might persuade a jury to spare his life.

Despite deep misgivings, Short threw herself into the case. She had inherited her work ethic from her father, who helped manage the Apollo program as NASA’s vice president of space operations. His job took the family all around the country, from New Jersey to California, Virginia to Texas. Both she and her husband were attorneys; she’d earned her degree at Saint Louis University School of Law. Short worked grueling hours, spending six days a week at the office and traveling so often that her children became accustomed to her absence. Once, Short startled her 5-year-old son when she arrived home early from a long work trip. Assuming that she had lost her case, he asked, “Is the man dead?”

Short wasn’t opposed to the death penalty when she first started practicing law, but as she gained experience in capital cases, she came to doubt that the criminal legal system was capable of consistently producing fair and equal outcomes. Capital punishment is inherently arbitrary. Some defendants have money and seasoned legal teams at trial; others do not. Some prosecutors favor the death penalty and others don’t, meaning defendants might be executed not strictly because of the nature of their offense but because of the side of a state or county line on which they happened to commit it. As she came to understand the capriciousness of criminal justice, Short changed her mind about capital punishment. The experience of representing several defendants whom she believed had been wrongly accused strengthened her opposition.

To defend Rick DeLong, Short knew, she didn’t need to make the jury believe that he was a good man or that he shouldn’t receive a terrible punishment. In capital trials in Missouri, as in most states, juries must return a unanimous verdict for a death sentence to be handed down, so Short needed only to introduce a shred of doubt in a single juror’s mind that her client had forfeited his right to live.

But even that seemed daunting, given the repugnance that she, DeLong’s own lawyer, could not suppress. Short may have wished that she didn’t have to take this case, but it would ultimately change her perspective on criminal behavior and set her career on a new path, taking her from the public defender’s office to a field known as mitigation, then still developing but now a central feature of every legal defense in capital cases. Mitigators are investigators whose mission, now mandated by law and precedent, is the granular search for circumstances that might convince a jury that their clients deserve a lesser sentence; in their most crucial cases, these specialists are the final advocates for a defendant’s life. Short would help pioneer the field and become one of its foremost practitioners. But in January 1999, all she had was a guilty client and bad odds.

Doubt is central to mitigation: creating doubt that a person is wholly given over to evil, or doubt that there is no universe—no set of terrible circumstances—in which you yourself might commit a horrific crime. I do believe that there are people who commit acts of perfect evil; a frank appraisal of human nature suggests as much. But those who oppose capital punishment, as I do, oppose the death penalty even for the worst criminals in the worst cases. The reason to stay the executioner’s hand has less to do with the nature of the defendant than it does with the nature of society: Showing mercy is morally beneficial to everyone. The legal system, of course, does not think this way; it needs a solid rationale to hang decisions on, and it must establish that what appears to be abject wickedness, and nothing else, may in fact be more complicated and tragic.

The work of mitigation—searching for reasons a defendant’s life should be spared—is, unsurprisingly, not always well received in the legal community or by the public. As a society, we like to believe that our choices and actions are entirely within our control. Mitigators introduce an element of uncertainty. Their investigations routinely produce information that calls into question whether defendants would have, in better circumstances, committed their crimes at all. To some, this seems like making excuses for criminals.

For Short, now 65, mitigation isn’t about rationalizing crimes. “It is about telling the truth,” she told me. “The crime is real. The harm is real. Nothing I do changes that.” She does not wish to downplay suffering or to pretend that something awful did not happen. The goal of a mitigator, she said, is to understand how a person becomes a criminal. “Every life leaves a trail. Abuse, neglect, poverty, brain injury, trauma, addiction, resilience, acts of kindness, moments of courage—all become a part of that person’s story,” Short told me over email. “Mitigation is not the art of making people less guilty. It is the discipline of making sure we judge them as a whole human being.”

When Short was preparing for the DeLong case, mitigation had only just begun to emerge as a routine component of a legal defense in capital cases. It became formalized not long afterward, with the case of Kevin Wiggins. In September 1988, Wiggins, a Maryland construction worker, was charged with the murder of 77-year-old Florence Lacs. He had been arrested while driving her car and had already used her credit cards and pawned her jewelry. A jury convicted him of murder and sentenced him to death. But Wiggins, who was intellectually disabled and had been sexually abused as a child, appealed the sentence on the grounds that his attorneys had not presented sufficient evidence of extenuating circumstances in his defense. His case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor in Wiggins v. Smith in 2003.

The Wiggins decision held that capital defendants have a right to an effective defense, including an investigation into circumstances that might explain their crimes—a ruling that fueled the rise of mitigation work. In 2008, the American Bar Association revised its guidelines to direct defense teams in capital cases to include both an investigator, who conducts an independent inquiry into the crime itself, and a mitigation specialist, who is responsible for producing information that might convince a jury that there is something more to a client than their crime suggests.

Mitigators sift through the past and familiarize themselves with all elements of a defendant’s personal history. Fragments of clients’ lives may be strewn across the country or around the world, hidden among scattered documents and scattered memories. Mitigation specialists conduct scores of in-person interviews for each case—with extended family, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, co-workers—to put the pieces together. The Marshall Project estimates that there may be fewer than 1,000 mitigation specialists nationwide; the majority of them deal with capital cases. About twice that number of people are currently on death row.  

Because mitigation specialists often have little time to prepare their cases for trial, they frequently continue their investigations during the long death-penalty appeals process. Legal teams involved in capital cases are typically reluctant to discuss their findings if judicial processes remain ongoing, but at the Mwalimu Center for Justice, a law office in New Orleans that handles capital appeals, mitigation specialists on staff agreed to share information they had uncovered about some of their clients. Benjamin Cole, an Oklahoma man who murdered his infant daughter a few days before Christmas 2002, was found by specialists on his defense team to be schizophrenic; a brain scan revealed a severe lesion. Cole spoke in riddles and frequently broke into song while interacting with his defense team, until his disease became so advanced that he chose to sit in his dark prison cell hoarding religious pamphlets and rotting food while his hair grew matted and his mind decomposed. The mitigators argued that he was too sick to be subject to execution under the Supreme Court’s 1986 decision in Ford v. Wainwright, but state authorities were undeterred. Oklahoma executed Cole in 2022.

Sometimes mitigation, no matter how legitimate, cannot overcome people’s inherent disgust with horrific crimes. Cynthia Short was facing that very possibility.  

Short still hadn’t looked at the crime-scene photographs when she first met Rick DeLong, a few days after he was taken into custody in January 1999. But she had watched his maniacal taped confession, which would later be played at trial and shared with the Springfield News-Leader. “Now laugh,” he had reportedly said to 8-year-old Darlene Vanderhoef’s lifeless body as she lay thrown over a piece of bedroom furniture with an electrical cord around her neck. Even so, Short insisted on speaking with DeLong in person, with no partition between them and no shackles to hold him in place. He was much smaller than she had expected, thin and balding, and had a scraggly mullet and a dirty-blond beard.

In Short’s experience, clients facing capital charges sometimes open a first conversation by declaring suicidal intent: The path ahead otherwise leads to either death in a prison cell or death in an execution chamber. But DeLong clearly wanted to live. And surprisingly, he was obsessed with the well-being of another person: Stacie Leffingwell, his long-term partner and the mother of his youngest child. Leffingwell had helped him kill Erin Vanderhoef and her children. And she was dying from AIDS. “Everything in that first conversation was what could I do for Stacie?” Short recalled. “How could I help Stacie?”

In a photograph Short has seen, Leffingwell kneels next to DeLong and their infant son on a sunlit lawn, a mischievous smile flashing across her face. They had met in the early 1990s when DeLong was barbecuing in a friend’s backyard in Springfield and Leffingwell, a neighbor, dropped by and struck up a conversation.

Leffingwell was dark-haired, petite, and funny. Born in California in 1967 to a teenage heroin addict, she had dropped out of high school and never learned to read. DeLong and Leffingwell both used drugs, especially methamphetamines. When they met, Leffingwell was HIV-positive, but she didn’t tell DeLong. He himself was the child of a teenage mother. Born in Springfield in 1964, he grew up in poverty and was subjected to vicious assaults by his stepfather. He began using drugs at the age of 15 and was eventually snorting or smoking meth several times a week. He got by on intermittent jobs as a mechanic and manual laborer.

These details and more were revealed as Short worked with a mitigation specialist and former welfare caseworker named Kathy Schneider. The pair traveled six hours from Kansas City to Springfield and back each week to interview everyone they could find who knew DeLong. They interviewed people in parks and churches, and once went into a drug house in the middle of a snowstorm. Every month, Schneider went to see DeLong in jail, where she also interviewed his mother and sisters. Schneider created a history of DeLong’s family going back three generations, documenting the life of his biological father, a man known as Howard Littles, and his stepfather, Buzz, who had been diagnosed as mentally ill and institutionalized.

DeLong was a twice-divorced father of four when, in 1996, he was introduced to Erin Vanderhoef, who worked at a McDonald’s in Springfield. Vanderhoef had also suffered a life marked by poverty and loss, and she took a liking to DeLong right away, confiding in others that she was interested in him romantically, even though he was already involved with Leffingwell. They formed a close friendship.

DeLong had a child with Leffingwell, a son born in 1997 whom they named Lyle. Leffingwell had tried to stay clean during her pregnancy, but she resumed using drugs after the baby was born. She disappeared for a time, leaving DeLong alone to care for their newborn. Vanderhoef stepped in to help. When Leffingwell came home, she was in treatment for depression. DeLong and Vanderhoef by then were sleeping together. DeLong’s place was often in a state of chaos and frequented by drug users. Despite the infidelity and the strangeness of the arrangement, Leffingwell and Lyle moved in with Vanderhoef and her three children. A volatile love triangle developed.

In February 1998, DeLong and Leffingwell abruptly moved into a motel in Joplin, roughly 70 miles west of Springfield, near the Kansas border. But DeLong still saw Vanderhoef, and by summer she knew she was pregnant. The news sent Leffingwell into a bout of jealousy and deeper into addiction. That July, she was admitted to a hospital for pancreatitis and stayed for three weeks. She weighed less than 90 pounds. Leffingwell and DeLong told family and friends that she had stomach cancer. In fact, she was dying of AIDS. In September, DeLong himself was diagnosed with HIV. He began using meth every day.

In the days leading up to the murders, DeLong and Leffingwell went on a meth binge. On the night of January 18, 1999, Leffingwell was high and distraught, racked with fear that Vanderhoef was going to replace her. DeLong, for his part, was furious with Vanderhoef for messing up his relationship with Leffingwell. The couple came to the shared belief that Vanderhoef presented a problem, and Leffingwell demanded that DeLong fix it—permanently. Early the following morning, DeLong drove from Joplin to Springfield to kill Vanderhoef. Leffingwell rode with him, as did Harold “Bobby” Lingle, a friend and neighbor who had agreed to help carry out DeLong’s plan in exchange for an eight ball of meth.

At around eight that morning, they pulled up to Vanderhoef’s three-bedroom house. Lingle, who had met Vanderhoef before, lured her out of the house on the pretext of a grocery errand so that DeLong and Leffingwell could wait and catch her by surprise when she returned. Then DeLong slipped inside, where he found Vanderhoef’s three children getting ready for school. Wired on meth, DeLong killed them one by one. When Vanderhoef came back, Lingle told her that the children had been sent to their rooms. Then he and Leffingwell helped DeLong subdue and murder Vanderhoef. It was a cold mercy that she died thinking her children were still alive.

DeLong, Leffingwell, and Lingle were quickly apprehended. Leffingwell died of AIDS before the year was out. The lead Greene County prosecutor, Darrell Moore, decided not to seek the death penalty against Lingle, who was said to have an IQ of 72; he was eventually sentenced to life in prison without parole. But Moore was adamant about bringing capital charges against DeLong.

A series of delays pushed DeLong’s trial to June 2001. Public furor in Springfield ran hot, and press coverage was intense. When Short stood before the jurors, the first thing she said was that DeLong was unquestionably guilty. She acknowledged the horror and disgust that they were surely feeling. “There are things that we need to do in this courtroom,” she recalled telling the jury. “And one of those things that you’re going to need to do is, you’re going to need to really look closely at his mental state. That will be your job.”

But it would have to be a job mainly for phase two—the sentencing phase—rather than phase one, the guilt-or-innocence phase. No one was surprised when, on June 28, after a week and a half of testimony and less than four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Rick DeLong on all five counts of murder.

Short knew that the sentencing phase would be difficult. She knew this in part because she had used her own extended family and friends—some of whom were highly conservative and generally skeptical of the defendants she represented—as test subjects, a kind of informal focus group.

When Short and her team had finished their mitigation work, well before DeLong’s trial was scheduled to begin, they collated the findings into spiral-bound books, each more than 100 pages long. Inside were detailed descriptions of DeLong’s crimes, a DVD of his confession, photographs of the crime scene, and a photograph of Vanderhoef and her three children, young and bright and beautiful, posed on a bench in front of their mother, who is holding Lyle in her arms. The books also contained a detailed account of the mitigating factors in DeLong’s case, including his abusive stepfather, his drug addiction, and his HIV status. Scattered throughout were questionnaires asking readers for their reactions at various stages. The prompts had a clinical feel, as though Short were asking for opinions on a company’s new logo or a politician’s campaign slogan, not the killing of three children and a pregnant woman. If you did choose to look at the photographs, please describe what you learned from them. But it was the best simulation of a jury’s deliberation that Short could create.

The responses from her family and friends were not encouraging. At the beginning of the book, readers were asked to gauge their support for capital punishment in general. One reader put her support at a 5 on a scale of 1 to 7, but after reading through the mitigation evidence, this same woman put her support for executing DeLong specifically at a 6. Her views were aligned with those of the prosecutor, Darrell Moore, who told reporters in advance of the sentencing phase that he and the judge had received numerous phone calls from angry citizens who wanted DeLong to die for his crimes. In front of the jury, Moore read a letter written by Vanderhoef’s brother in which he told DeLong, “You do not deserve the right to live, in a prison or any other place. You are not a man, you are a coward and an animal.”

On DeLong’s behalf, Short introduced the array of mitigating information that she and Kathy Schneider had compiled. Some of the material had been presented in phase one—a tactic known as front-loading. The idea was not to try to sway jurors on the question of guilt or innocence—in this instance, there was nothing to be done—but to prepare the jury for arguments that would be presented again, and enhanced, later on. Short was aware that much of the information could be seen as all too familiar: When it comes to defendants facing the death penalty, a life like DeLong’s is normal; very few people guilty of aggravated first-degree murder have peaceful, healthy backgrounds. But two aspects of his story had taken Short by surprise. First, as she combed through the police files, Short had noticed a coincidence: Mark Deeds, the officer who had coaxed the confession out of DeLong and emerged as the hero of the investigation, had encountered her client before.

In 1991, when DeLong was 27, he was arrested for selling cocaine and marijuana to Deeds, who was then working undercover for the Springfield Police Department. DeLong was so deeply enmeshed in the local drug culture that Deeds saw an opportunity. According to the testimony of DeLong’s former defense attorney, who negotiated a plea deal, Deeds threatened DeLong with decades in prison unless he began working as an informant. DeLong agreed. Police and prosecutors paid DeLong for information and granted him leniency on subsequent drug-related charges. At one point, his bond on arrest was reduced from $75,000 to $2,500. At another point, he received a sentence of five years’ probation for charges that ought to have resulted in prison time.

The policies of the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole specifically prohibited offenders on probation from serving as police informants, but the department kept working with him anyway. Because of his protected status, DeLong continued to get little to no prison time when he was caught using. His addiction deepened. By the time of the murders, DeLong had helped Deeds and the Springfield Police Department clear a number of high-profile narcotics cases, even as he himself disintegrated from years of dependence. His career as a police informant came at the expense of any attempt at rehab—the one had simply precluded the other. Given all of this, Short asked, did the police bear any responsibility for DeLong’s condition?

The second discovery that Short and her team made came while going through DeLong’s medical records. A week before the murders, he had begun taking Sustiva, an experimental drug that can help slow the progression of HIV but whose side effects include dizziness, insomnia, confusion, abnormal thinking, amnesia, agitation, and hallucinations. Patients abusing drugs or who have preexisting mental illness are at increased risk of developing neurological symptoms. And the drug’s side effects tend to be most severe when a patient is just starting to use the drug, as DeLong had been.

The witnesses for the defense included an addiction specialist who testified that DeLong’s meth use easily could have contributed to a shattered mental state; a medical specialist who confirmed that Sustiva is known to induce delusions, hallucinations, and psychosis, and that the drug combined with meth could have disastrous results; and a psychiatrist who testified that DeLong had likely been in the grip of a psychotic episode when he carried out the murders.

Short did not know what to expect when the jury began to deliberate. The new information had raised provocative questions about a case whose conclusion had once seemed preordained. In the end, the jury declined to impose the death penalty. It instead sentenced DeLong to life without parole.

In 2003, Short left her job with the Public Defender’s Office due to a round of funding cuts, and decided to become a full-time mitigation specialist. In the 23 years since then, she says that she has worked with approximately 200 clients, none of whom has received the death penalty. Her attitude toward the field, as a practical matter, can be simply put: If mitigators are able to present a full picture of a defendant’s life, then no reasonable jury will return a verdict of death, not even for the most brutal killer. Her job is to persuade jurors to bestow something that she feels everyone deserves. “Mercy is not something that is earned,” she said to the jury during DeLong’s trial. “Mercy is something that is given.” Her words were printed in large display type in the Springfield News-Leader’s front-page story about DeLong’s sentencing.

Short is well aware that much of the public—including thoughtful citizens and community leaders—finds mitigation not only unjustifiable but incomprehensible. Still, she cannot set aside her principles or her obligations: Every defendant deserves a full measure of effort, even if onlookers deem it a waste of time and money for people who deserve nothing. She is sustained by some of those she encounters along the way. Several weeks after DeLong’s sentencing, Short received a note from James Spindler, the Greene County medical examiner. She had cross-examined him on the stand, and had probed him about his own struggles with drugs. Addiction, she suggested, was not something that happens strictly to evil and hopeless people. That resonated with Spindler, who wrote that although he had come across a number of dangerously antisocial defendants in his career whose executions he would by no means oppose, Short had convinced him that DeLong was not a “sociopath beyond redemption.”

The past few years have been among the busiest in Short’s career as a mitigator. After a federal moratorium on new death sentences during the Biden administration—and the mass commutation of most federal death sentences already handed down—the Trump administration has reinstated the federal death penalty. Trump’s former attorney general Pam Bondi encouraged states to aggressively pursue capital punishment and take advantage of foreshortened appeals processes that would fast-track executions. Mitigation specialists have seen their workload increase in volume and urgency.

Short’s determination to try to see beyond the worst of what her clients have done struck me as rare and admirable, and I kept it in mind when I picked up the phone to call the Missouri prison where Rick DeLong is incarcerated. I have spoken with many people who have committed murder, and many people on death row. Capital punishment, and the victims and perpetrators of capital crimes, have long been a focus of my reporting. But I had never spoken with a child killer before.

A prison receptionist answered, and after a pause put DeLong on the phone. His voice was both hoarse and soft; his disease is advanced now, and he has had several heart attacks. He told me what his life had been like before he committed the murders, how he loved working as a mechanic—“There was nothing I couldn’t do to a car,” he said. He recalled his stepfather, and how abusive he was, and how the meth had made the bad moments more bearable. Meeting Leffingwell had made things better, too, because she came from the same world, and for once he felt understood. They had loved going to rodeos and carnivals together, a kind of fantastic escape.

DeLong talked about his five children, only three of whom will speak with him. He also talked about his grandchildren, though he has seen them only in photos. His son Lyle is in prison, convicted of murder in 2022 and now serving a 32-year sentence. DeLong told me he had loved being a father to Lyle—“That’s my joy,” he said. “I took him everywhere.” He recalled bringing him on fishing trips, and once, in a misguided display of devotion, buying a heavy-duty backpack, cutting holes in it for arms and legs—a makeshift infant carrier—and taking him for rides on his motorcycle. Now the boy was a man, and had followed his father behind bars.

As for his own crimes, DeLong told me that he was glad he’d been caught, and that he knows he deserves the sentence he received. I could not forget that the thin voice on the other end of the line belonged to a man who had taken five lives. It was also the voice of a frail 61-year-old slowly dying in prison. DeLong remembered Cynthia Short fondly, though he told me that he had initially doubted that a woman would be able to see past what he had done to a mother and her children. But Short, he admitted, had understood everything: the crime, his life, how he might appear in the eyes of a jury. And she knew what it would take to save him. He didn’t have much of a life anymore, but thanks to this woman, he was alive. “You couldn’t ask for better,” he told me. “There’s no way.”

Several winters ago, a few weeks before Christmas, I went to confession. The parish close to work was hosting a reconciliation service, meant to prepare the faithful to celebrate the birth of Christ. A dozen or so priests were scattered across the cathedral. Penitents lined the aisles. Whispers of contrition and pardon filled the air.

The Catholic Church counsels believers to seek confession regularly—at the very least, once a year. I hadn’t been back in a few. So in addition to feeling spiritually unmoored, I was worried about how the priest would react to hearing about my hiatus. But when I told him, he simply smiled and said, “Welcome back.” His response put me at ease then, and it helped change how I approach the sacrament now: less as a nerve-racking ordeal, more as a moment of mercy.

Sacraments such as confession are central to Catholicism. Through them, the Church teaches that simple actions—having a conversation with a priest, eating bread and drinking wine—are, with grace, tangible encounters with God. For the past year, the Trump administration has been making it harder for Catholics at migrant-detention centers to have those encounters.

The most recent example came to light this month, when the Archdiocese of St. Louis filed a federal lawsuit over the visitation policy at Saint Genevieve County Jail in eastern Missouri. According to the claim, the 10 priests who minister at the jail aren’t allowed to celebrate Mass. The suit also alleges that priests are permitted to visit migrant detainees just once a week, during a four-hour period, and that the jail’s “no contact” security policy lets the clergy speak with detainees only over the phone, through a glass partition. As a result, the approximately 150 migrants at the jail at a given time—most of whom are Catholic, according to the archdiocese—have been going without their religious needs for weeks. Since the middle of 2025, according to the lawsuit, Saint Genevieve has housed approximately 3,000 people.

[Read: The Catholic Church’s new schism]

This isn’t the first time that Catholic clergy have complained that the government is preventing them from ministering to detained migrants. Last year, the Florida detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz” kept priests from visiting or offering Mass to detainees for a month, until an agreement was reached between the Archdiocese of Miami and state authorities. In May, after a six-month legal fight, a Catholic nonprofit won a preliminary injunction to let Catholic priests celebrate Mass and administer sacraments at the Broadview ICE processing center outside Chicago. And the administration’s immigration crackdowns seem to be hurting the Church more broadly. Dioceses across the country have reported decreased Mass attendance among Spanish-speaking parishioners who fear detention. ICE has reportedly conducted raids near Catholic churches during Mass hours.

The Department of Homeland Security has denied allegations of wrongdoing at Saint Genevieve. In a statement to multiple outlets, the agency said that the jail is not an ICE facility—although Saint Genevieve is listed as a detention facility on ICE’s website—and that it “ensures detainees are accommodated with religious services.” As described in the lawsuit, however, those accommodations disregard the religious significance of the Catholic sacraments.

Consider confession. The suit claims that at Saint Genevieve, conversations between detainees and priests are not private, and the phone lines that they use to talk may be monitored. These policies may be in place for security reasons, but confession is meant to be a private exchange between penitent and priest, who acts in persona Christi—in the person of Christ. Confession is “one of the most intimate, profound acts that someone can do,” David Inczauskis, a Jesuit priest who ministers at the Broadview ICE facility, told me. He added, “To state very specifically the sins that they have committed and to ask humbly for pardon and for peace” requires a “level of vulnerability” that is “very high.”

An even bigger problem comes up with the sacrament of the Eucharist, or Communion. The complaint includes an email from a deputy at the local sheriff’s office suggesting that priests “provide an unopened, individually wrapped Communion wafer” to a member of the detention center staff, who could then hand it to a detainee. This way of distributing the Eucharist would be “sacrilegious,” as Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis recently told Reuters. The Church teaches that the Eucharist is the “Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity” of Christ—not a symbol, but God’s real presence. For that reason, Inczauskis said, the Church distributes the Eucharist through either ordained ministers or specially trained laypeople.

[Read: The Catholic Church and the Trump administration are not getting along]

For much of the past quarter century, many conservative figures have taken up religious liberty as an essential cause. The Trump administration purported to continue these efforts when it established a commission last year meant to identify “emerging threats” to the exercise of faith. In June, the commission released a draft report claiming that “in recent years, Americans from all religious backgrounds have faced increasing persecution for their religious beliefs.” Some of the issues discussed in the report include rising anti-Semitism, how gender and sexuality is taught in schools, and conscience protections for health-care workers who object to participating in abortions or assisted suicides. The report said nothing about the administration’s migrant-detention practices.

When the commission was announced, my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote that “Christians shouldn’t conclude” that it would “necessarily defend their interests.” That warning seems prescient a year and a half later. At Alligator Alcatraz, Broadview, and Saint Genevieve, the Catholic Church has shown that it believes that detainee access to the sacraments matters deeply. Given the choice between restricting immigration and protecting the religious liberty of migrants, the administration, too, has demonstrated where its values lie.

Elon Musk revealed, in a dramatic demonstration on Thursday night at SpaceX’s rocket-testing facility near Waco, Texas, a new “flying” Tesla Roadster prototype. The car hung upside down on a curved track, then performed aerial stunts—including jumping over a Tesla semi, Evel Knievel–style—using air-powered thrusters designed in collaboration with SpaceX. The demo was impressive despite Musk’s awkward manner, which in the context of a supposed literal flying car came off as nerdy charm.

After revealing the car, Musk paraphrased a quote from Peter Thiel, his former PayPal partner: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The line, which was part of a 2011 “manifesto” published by Thiel’s venture-capital firm Founders Fund, was intended to indict the feeble ambition of the technology industry. Instead of solving big, important challenges, the world’s smarts—and money—had been devoted to small-potatoes social-internet start-ups such as Twitter.

One obvious oddity of the line—which has since been removed from the manifesto—is that Founders Fund’s most important investment at the time was Facebook, a social-network platform. But another is the idea that anyone actually wanted a flying car for real. That ambition may never have represented an actual dream. Like a jet pack, a flying car represents not just the future but the idea of individual freedom delivered through technological conquest.

Taken at face value, a flying car is not an impressive dream—or at least it hasn’t been since the Wright brothers more or less attained it. Automobiles have always moved on the ground by rolling via motor. The earliest practical airplanes also rolled until they flew (and hopefully landed again). An airplane is, in a way, merely a car with wings.

[Derek Thompson: Why flying cars are an impossible dream]

In 1917, Glenn Curtiss built literally that: His Curtiss Autoplane was an automobile with detachable wings and a propeller. It never really flew effectively, but the idea persisted. Waldo Waterman’s 1937 Arrowbile was more successful at flying, though it wasn’t commercially viable. Many more actual realizations of the supposed dream of flying cars appeared in the ensuing decades. The most famous might be the Taylor Aerocar, which was certified by the federal government in 1956 but was never mass-produced.

Around that time, future-oriented science-factual magazines such as Popular Mechanics frequently rehearsed the vision of the personal aircraft. By then, cars were ordinary and mainstream in America, having displaced collective transportation such as trains and streetcars. The automobile had become a more abstract kind of vehicle, one that embraced and extended personal autonomy through the power to move, without effort, anywhere else—and to do it alone.

But one thing still cramped the automobile’s capacity to deliver that freedom in full: roads. Cars needed them. The open road, of which America had a seemingly endless frontier, somehow was never enough. The best way around those roads was through the air above them; as Emmett Brown told Marty McFly inside one of fiction’s most memorable flying cars, “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”

The stifling oppression of the ground, traversed at any speed, was also an old vexation. In 1923, Hugo Gernsback—sometimes called the father of science fiction thanks to his founding Amazing Stories, an early magazine devoted to the genre—imagined a gyroscopic Helicar that would release travelers from the tyranny of New York City’s newly car-congested streets. A few years later, in 1927, Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis colonized the city’s airspace with small flying vehicles. By 1962, the children’s cartoon The Jetsons had fused those precursors with mid-century Popular Mechanics populism, making the flying car a ubiquitous commuter vehicle.

Over the decades, many attempts to engineer, manufacture, and market a flying car have been undertaken, though none has succeeded. In 1973, Henry Smolinski created the AVE Mizar by attaching Cessna wings to a Ford Pinto; it killed Smolinski during a failed test flight. From the 1960s until the company went dormant in the mid-2010s, Paul Moller made numerous attempts to develop the Skycar, a personal airplane that took off and landed vertically. Around that time, Terrafugia began promising a flying car called the Transition, which remained only a few years away for years—until the company shut down in 2021. “We enter production in 2028,” Musk said of the Tesla Roadster in this week’s Texas demo, before adding, “Actually.”

By all appearances, the Roadster is not a flying car of the same sort as its real and fictional precursors. The vehicle’s air-fan system seems first and principally designed to give the car’s wheels better traction on the ground, which is part of why it can go so fast—it went from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than a second during the unveiling. (Rocket thrusters attached to the back of the thing also help.) The car does not fly so much as it performs aerial acrobatics such as barrel rolls and standing jumps.

Those deeds were impressive as heck. The car certainly appeared to fly, if only for a moment, in the manner of a daredevil. Whether or not it can or is intended to fly in the manner of a traveler or commuter is not yet clear. Watching the Roadster do its thing—unpiloted, to make sure the demonstration didn’t “kill anyone,” as Musk put it—I imagined wealthy gearheads wreaking havoc via ill-fated jumps and spins on suburban blocks instead of salarymen conveying themselves to work and back.

[From the November 2026 issue: Choose your overlord]

Subdued by decades of failed automobile-airplane hybrids, and perhaps exhausted by Musk’s dubious intentions, some coverage of the Tesla demo has observed, rightly, that substantial regulatory hurdles await any vehicle that leaves the road and enters airspace. But bureaucratic red tape isn’t the main reason the flying-car dream hasn’t come to pass.

Rather, it’s because the dream works better as fantasy than reality. When urban modernism began to feel cramped, the skies rising above it offered the possibility of new freedom. After the continent was settled, the roads that traversed it became new prisons from which airspace might allow escape. Once the individual freedom of the automobile became universal, and the roads clogged with thousands of varmints in the rat race, the blue sky above looked like liberty. George Jetson is a cog in the proverbial machine who rises above insignificance by flying to work unfazed, where he revels in the meaninglessness of his job pressing a button to make actual machine cogs. Even Thiel’s mention of the flying car was symbolic, a paradigmatic example of the kind of dream worth dreaming, not an actual one worth waking up to.

Despite the Tesla Roadster’s truly spectacular capabilities, at least as a one-off demo, it fulfills the century-old flying-car ambition on a technicality—as a vehicle for a trick driver rather than a motorist aviator. Perhaps the dream this car truly realizes is not yours or mine, but Elon Musk’s: to claim to have delivered what a century of his forebears could not.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

There’s a lot to love about fall: the changing leaves, the crisp air, the return of cozy sweaters, and, of course, pumpkin-spice everything. As the days grow shorter and the weather cools, the season offers plenty of reasons to slow down and indulge in life’s little comforts.

Although fall has its familiar rituals, there are always new ways to enjoy it. Maybe you’re looking for your next great read, a recipe to try on a chilly afternoon, or an excuse to spend more time outdoors before winter arrives. To help you get into the autumn spirit, explore some of our favorite Atlantic stories and recommendations for the season.

Fall Favorites

Six Books to Read by the Fire

Each of these titles is a perfect companion while the days grow imperceptibly longer.

By Amanda Parrish Morgan

Read the article.

Six Movies to Get You in the Fall Mood

From cozy classics to unlikely favorites, The Atlantic’s writers and editors share their seasonal picks.

By Rafaela Jinich

Read the article.

How Starbucks Perfected Autumn

The pumpkin spice latte has defined fall for 20 years. (From 2023)

By Ian Bogost

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• What the falling leaves taught Thoreau: His autumnal observations held a lesson for him in his final years, Jake Lundberg writes.
• No one knows how big pumpkins can get. A decade ago, the world’s heaviest pumpkin weighed 2,000 pounds. Now the 3,000-pound mark is within sight, Yasmin Tayag wrote in 2024.

Other Diversions

• Can Elizabeth Holmes drop the act?
• The rise of the IRL influencer
• What three gene-therapy deaths have in common

PS

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “We were lucky to head East before the storm because the foliage is incredibly colorful,” Lynn D. from Moretown, Vermont, shared. “This photo was taken from the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire.”   

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

— Rafaela

What has the Islamic Republic done for Iranians? Under its rule, citizens have suffered decades of economic decline, sociopolitical repression, and international isolation. Now the country is engaged in an open-ended war. In almost every way, Iranians are doing much worse than they were 20 years ago.

Not even the regime’s propagandists can deny these realities. Many of them therefore insist that the Islamic Republic’s failures are justified by its unbending resistance to American imperialism. Nearly all of Iran’s economic suffering, defenders say, can be explained as the price of this heroic stance, to which the West has responded with sanctions that have crushed Iran’s standard of living.

But the story of the Islamic Republic’s relationship to American power, and of how that relationship has and has not served the cause of Iranian sovereignty, is more complicated.

Iran’s prerevolutionary ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was an anti-communist autocrat who prized ties with the United States. His successors condemned him as an American stooge and claimed to have freed Iran from its slavish dependence on the “Great Satan.” In its early days, the Islamic Republic signaled independence from both the Soviet Union and the United States with the slogan “Neither East nor West,” which still adorns the facade of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headquarters in Tehran. The foundational anti-imperialism of the new regime was also a promise that Iran would fight for the “oppressed of the world,” as well as a call to resist cultural absorption by the West—a fate one revolutionary intellectual decried as “Westoxification.”   

[Read: The battle for Hormuz is not the war]

The Islamic Republic has failed in its anti-imperialism by all of these measures, especially as compared with the monarchy. Pahlavi was an American ally who owed his throne in part to a CIA-abetted coup that elevated him over a popular prime minister in 1953. But he sustained Iran’s independence by skillfully playing the United States and its rivals, the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, off of each other when doing so suited Iranian interests. The Soviets helped build Iran’s ironworks and welcomed the shah as a rare royal to pay a state visit to Communist Moscow. Pahlavi’s slogan could well have been “Both East and West.”

The shah backed the United States in some Cold War battles, but he also threatened to sign security deals with Moscow when he wanted better terms from Washington, and he offered to mediate the conflicts in the Middle East and in Vietnam. In most ways, Pahlavi’s foreign policy was closer to that of the Non-Aligned Movement countries than to that of either Cold War bloc. In the ’70s, scholars of Iranian foreign policy described Tehran as following “defacto non-alignment.” By the end of the shah’s rule, Iran had considerable international influence and was respected by both superpowers, not only as a sovereign country, but also as a regional power. You might even say that Pahlavi was a successful anti-imperialist—not in the sense of having stuck a finger in the eye of the great powers, but in the sense of having effectively secured Iran’s sovereign interests rather than being forced to capitulate to those he cooperated with.

The revolutionaries who toppled the shah accused him of servility to Washington. They pointed to the coup that had cemented his power in 1953 and halted the nationalization of Iran’s oil resources. But in fact the monarchy had restored Iran’s sovereignty over its oil industry in 1973. They pointed to a 1964 agreement with the United States, ratified by the Iranian Parliament, that gave U.S. military personnel immunity from local prosecution. But such agreements were common around the world and hardly represented Iran’s “capitulation,” as its critics claimed. The shah was in any case far from passive in his relationship with Washington and worked to improve his position.     

The monarchy’s foreign policy belonged to a long tradition of efforts to extend Iran’s independence. Well before 1979, Iran had spent centuries fending off the designs of the British and Russian empires. Standing up for the country’s sovereignty was the work of generations of Iranian statesmen, just as it was for their counterparts in other countries of the global South. But not every Iranian government has been equally successful at it. The one that came to power in 1979—the Islamic Republic—has been manifestly terrible.

The Islamic Republic has not prioritized classic anti-imperialist goals. Among these is improving the economic position of postcolonial states, as set forth in the New International Economic Order that the United Nations General Assembly adopted in 1974 (and that Iran voted for). The Iranian government since 1979 has rarely prioritized such goals. The former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reportedly boasted that he didn’t care about his people’s welfare, just about how religious they were. (His office has denied this.) He thus preferred to fight the West rather than attend to his people’s needs—even basic ones, as, for example, in 2021, when he refused to import COVID-19 vaccines from the United States, a decision that likely cost thousands of Iranian lives.

The Islamic Republic has pursued an ideological campaign against the United States and other Western countries, not just for being imperialist, but also for being, according to Iran’s Islamist standards, licentious and morally depraved. Iran’s rulers frame these objections as opposition to cultural imperialism, but in practice they have become a pretext for domestic repression. The regime’s austere, draconian version of Islam is less a celebration of Iran’s endogenous culture than a suppression of its traditional creativity.

In the name of anti-imperialism, Iran has quixotically attacked the international order without making it any fairer for itself or others. In fact, Iran’s actions have put the country at the mercy of foreign powers. The Islamic Republic committed itself to the pursuit of a nuclear program, on the grounds that this would buttress its sovereignty and demonstrate its independence from imperial diktats. Instead, its nuclear intransigence incurred sanctions from the United States and Europe as well as the UN Security Council, with support from Russia and China. Iran’s involvement in terrorism and international crime (including drug running and counterfeiting) has made it one of only three countries, alongside Myanmar and North Korea, on the blacklist of the Paris-based anti-money-laundering outfit Financial Action Task Force. These measures have interfered with Iran’s ability to collect payments for its energy exports, even from friendly countries, such as neighboring Iraq. Sanctions have so weakened Iran’s position in trade that it is selling its oil at a discount to China.

The regime’s proponents will argue that the country is a victim of foreign-imposed sanctions. But the sanctions are the result of Tehran’s choices, which have prized refusal and defiance over actually improving Iran’s stake in the international order vis-à-vis the great powers that might seek to dominate it. The world abounds in examples of better strategies. Many of those involve sustaining ties with competing superpowers as a hedge against domination by any one of them. Nonaligned countries such as India, heir to a proud tradition of opposing colonial dominance, have pursued this course. Turkey remains a key NATO ally, but it has managed to play an independent role in Ukraine while maintaining relations with Russia and the United States. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have aligned with the West on many issues while nurturing significant trade ties with China. Even Argentina’s right-wing president has toned down his anti-China rhetoric for economic reasons.

[Read: Fighting Israel to the last Palestinian]

In contrast, Iran’s foreign policy remains ideologically defined, and the country suffers from what the political scientist Mohiaddin Mesbahi has called “strategic loneliness.” At the outset, the revolutionary regime rejected both East and West. But in recent years, it has tried to draw closer to Beijing, only to discover that China sees Western allies, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and even Israel, as better investment prospects. Until this year, Iran’s closest partner was the socialist government of Venezuela—but that was an alliance of desperation, born of both regimes’ isolation. Then the Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro was overthrown by the United States.

Iran has failed to secure effective sovereignty for itself and to deliver on its promise of reducing imperial dominance globally. Instead of helping the “oppressed,” it has become a scourge to the sovereignty of other countries. Throwing away Iran’s traditional policy of neutrality in foreign conflicts, Khamenei robustly backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and equipped Moscow with Iranian drones. Iran has also played an imperialist role in its own region by funding and arming militias in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, and Syria, and by intervening in several Arab civil wars.

The Islamic Republic still claims to stand in principled opposition to imperialism, now on the grounds that it has withstood an American and Israeli assault without capitulating. But the claim rings hollow for Iranians, who have reaped no dividends from this great resistance and now must endure a devastating war with no end in sight. That’s hardly a win for Iranian sovereignty.

For the past 24 hours, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with a 26,000-word blog post by the AI researcher Nick Cammarata. The document has been called the “the most important essay,” “the most important result,” and “the single best piece of news” of the year, or in the history of AI research—or, perhaps, ever. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lauded it. Cammarata makes a series of bold, almost astonishing claims about the nature of AI that, if true, would upend some of his industry’s basic assumptions about the very thing it is building. And after months of AI-hacking sprees and mounting public backlash against the industry, many people see Cammarata as offering a glimmer of hope when it comes to not just understanding but also controlling the technology being unleashed on the world.

Boiled down, Cammarata’s main contention is that generative-AI models are not actually black boxes, contrary to the common perception that these systems are so big and labyrinthine as to be nearly impenetrable. In fact, Cammarata argues, there is a relatively clear path toward understanding them. If that’s the case, the material significance could be tremendous: It would provide a way to map AI models’ inner workings and, in turn, perhaps prevent them from wreaking all sorts of harm—autonomously hacking companies and sovereign nations, encouraging users’ delusions, appearing to deceive AI researchers themselves. There is an entire field of research, called “mechanistic interpretability,” devoted to the study of just this.

The argument is just as important as the person making it. Cammarata, a former OpenAI employee, is a respected figure in his field. Years ago, he played a key role in establishing the opposite claim, which is now common wisdom: that neural networks, the software architecture that generative AI is built on, are impossible, or at least very difficult, to understand. In this new essay, Cammarata, who now works at the AI-research company Goodfire, essentially says that he and his entire field have been wrong ever since. “The claims here are viscerally shocking,” one observer wrote. Or, as another wrote on X, they are “big big big big.”

[Read: Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels]

Neural networks, inspired by the human brain, consist of layered connections among individual nodes, or “neurons,” that activate and send information to one another when responding to a query. Earlier research, including Cammarata’s, established that individual machine neurons can activate in response to many different, unrelated topics—for instance, one neuron can correspond to images of cat faces, cat legs, and the front of cars. Nobody was sure why this happened, but one explanation was that, because AI models contain far more information than they have neurons, they have to repurpose these nodes. Regardless, the basic units of an AI model having seemingly arbitrary, multitudinous functions would make it very difficult to understand what is going on under the hood.

Cammarata now thinks that individual neurons can be understood and that each has a self-consistent function. Neural networks are not “tangled knots,” he wrote, but “clean.” He found that the cat-face and car-face neuron, for instance, was actually responding to things with a V-shape—including V-shaped flames and jets of water. This would make AI’s internal mechanisms relatively straightforward and predictable rather than mysterious and nebulous. And if we can harness that understanding, some people in the industry believe, AI will be much less likely to go haywire and, say, kill us all. “This is truly one of the greatest cases for optimism in years!” the OpenAI researcher Adam Majmudar wrote on X.

Not everyone agrees with Cammarata. For one, his 26,000 words were merely a “working hypothesis” for a “forthcoming technical paper” and were thus hard, on a technical level, to evaluate. And the neural networks he studied most closely were vision models, which are generally simpler and better understood than the language models underlying ChatGPT and Claude. Cammarata could be mistaken, or he could be overstating his case. The blog post isn’t peer-reviewed, and the forthcoming paper probably won’t be, either, as is typical in the field. The research itself is something of a black box. (Cammarata, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, wrote on X earlier today that he appreciates all of the discussion and that his approach “seems promising so far” for “bigger modern language models.”)

Discussions of Cammarata’s essay have revealed philosophical rifts. “This is interesting work, but I don’t think it’s a significant update to the big picture,” Neel Nanda, who leads mechanistic interpretability at Google DeepMind, wrote in his appraisal of Cammarata’s findings. Even if researchers could approximate the function of every neuron in Claude Mythos 5.1 or GPT-6 Astra, that’s not the same as understanding how they connect and how the network works as a whole. Physicists have good models of atoms and interatomic interactions, but they cannot from first principles explain or predict every physical event (hence unpredictable extreme weather or, for that matter, the notion of free will). You know all of your friends from school, various workplaces, and the local softball league, but you can’t always know whether they’ll get along at your birthday party. More to the point, insights into the inner workings of an AI model will not necessarily produce insights into how to make the technology more reliable. Interpretability may be necessary to build safer AI models, but it is by no means sufficient.

If generative-AI models are actually legible under the hood, that would undoubtedly help make the technology safer. But many people in Silicon Valley, and especially employees at OpenAI, are discussing Cammarata’s blog post with a breathless enthusiasm that echoes Silicon Valley’s long track record of easy technical solutions and grand promises—an attitude that belies its mixed record on following through.

Any research finding that pertains to AI safety will require an industry chasing multitrillion-dollar public offerings to slow down and take a long, hard look at itself. Perhaps even more concerning than an unintelligible superintelligence is the fact that a group of companies openly state that they don’t really know what they are building—and then continue to push that technology to extremes anyway. If Cammarata is correct, AI companies will have to work with one another, outside auditors, and governments to figure out how to translate such a breakthrough into safe and reliable products. And right now, absent any serious regulation, nobody can decide to take such action other than the companies themselves. All of which suggests that the real black boxes are OpenAI and Anthropic themselves.

The world will little note, nor long remember, the Katie Zacharia era. Indeed, the tenure of the second White House press secretary of Donald Trump’s second term, which ended after five days and a single, 14-minute press conference, is already receding into memory.

Yet what matters more than her press-secretarial contributions, or the ideas she stood for, is the period Zacharia represents: the Trump administration’s reversion to the hapless chaos of the president’s first term.

Trump’s initial go-round was primarily a farce, setting bumbling aides against challenges such as finding the light switches in the Cabinet room, hurling burgers against the White House wall, and booking the wrong Four Seasons. Trump cycled through personnel like Spinal Tap drummers, as one hired helper after the next left in frustration or shame.

The second term has operated with, if not normality, at least comparative efficiency. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles turned the executive branch from an exploding fireworks factory into a machine relentlessly processing the president’s whims into law.

[Read: Trump’s secret points system for Cabinet members ]

Yet as the midterm elections draw near, the machine has begun to sputter. In the span of days, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced he would livestream a public execution, only for Trump to overrule him; the administration fired Kimberly Guilfoyle, its ambassador to Greece, for engaging in corruption so overt, it embarrassed even the most corrupt administration in history; and Politico reported that Trump is asking his friends what they think of Wiles, which is historically the prelude to his turning on an underling.

In the midst of this multicar pileup, Zacharia briefly stepped forward as the administration’s stammering face.

If you have ever felt awkward in a public setting, her single press conference was the stuff of recurrent nightmares. Zacharia read from the podium, head down, in the tone of a third-grade book report delivered verbally in front of the entire school by a child with crippling anxiety. She had to pause multiple times to take gulps of air. Trump, she said in one typical segment, “had a historic one-day war, and now we are, have a booming economy, and a great relationship”—here she stopped to catch herself—“with Venezuela. The U.S. achieved record domestic oil and gas production in 2025 and record crude and petroleum product exports in 2026.”

At another point, attempting to discuss nuclear-power plants, she called them “something President Trump is delivering on, just like he delivers on every promise.” (Pause, gasp for breath.) “In addition to that, it, we will be, it, we will be, there is $54 billion tied to the Alaska LNG pipeline.”

Then she told the assembled reporters, “My goal is to be able to communicate that in complete tandem with the president, as he is his own best spokesperson, and will absolutely be leading the way as—with that.” It was as if the notion that Trump could do her job much better than she could had intruded into her thoughts and made its way out of her mouth. She wrapped up the press conference after answering only three questions.

[Tom Nichols: Kimberly Guilfoyle broke Trump’s most important rule ]

Shortly after, she appeared with the president on the White House lawn, and when a reporter asked which state’s bar exam she had passed—Zacharia has described herself as an attorney—she replied, mysteriously, “When I moved to China.”

Matters fell apart quickly. She appeared on Sean Hannity’s show, perhaps expecting the tender treatment for which Hannity is so synonymous that his last name has become a portmanteau, hannitize, for friendly damage control. Instead he subjected her to an interrogation for which she was predictably unprepared. Indeed, her defense consisted of describing herself as unprepared. “What I feel is I really stepped up to the plate with very little prep time. Given the fact that I’d been on the job less than maybe eight hours and had a briefing book in the morning, I feel like I did my very best, Sean, to deliver for the American people that day.”

Sometimes, your best just isn’t good enough. So it was with Zacharia. So it is with the whole administration—mired in a losing war and persistent inflation, and flailing about for people to blame for the debacle. People who aren’t Donald Trump.

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.

The botched execution of Christa Pike, who survived two injections of what was intended to be a lethal dose of pentobarbital on September 30, is—horrifically—not unique: As my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote, it wasn’t even the first botched execution in Tennessee this year. The fact that officials tried twice to kill her is somewhat more unusual, but not without precedent.

Consider the case of Margaret Dickson, a Scottish woman of the early 1700s. Estranged from her husband, Dickson took up work as a domestic in the town of Kelso, where she conceived a child out of wedlock but hid the pregnancy for fear of being shunned. She testified that she’d disposed of the baby after it was stillborn, but the body was found, and she was arrested. Under Scottish law at the time, concealment of a pregnancy was considered evidence of intent to commit infanticide. Dickson was convicted and sentenced to hang in Edinburgh in 1724.

Following what was then the practice, Dickson’s execution was public. She was hanged; her body was placed in a coffin and carted away for burial (by some accounts following a tussle with body snatchers who hoped to procure the corpse for dissection by medical students). Along the way, the burial party stopped for a beer, at which point noise was heard from inside the coffin. The lid was pried off, and Dickson was found alive, though confused. Dickson’s survival became an object of fascination and Dickson herself a sort of folk hero, the historian Mikki Brock, the author of a forthcoming book about Dickson, told me. Authorities in Edinburgh initially sought to rehang her, but they were never able to marshal enough support to do so. Dickson, who came to be nicknamed “Half-Hangit Maggie” (that is, half-hanged), lived into the 1750s.

Or take Joseph Samuel, a criminal who was sent from England to a penal colony in Australia. Once there, he was implicated in the murder of a police officer investigating a robbery. Samuel was convicted and sentenced to hang in September 1803, also publicly. It didn’t go well. On the first try, the rope around Samuel’s neck snapped. On the second, the noose unraveled. By then, the crowd was growing restive; a hasty third attempt also ended with a broken rope. Observers at the scene concluded that the mishaps were a sign from God that Samuel should not be killed, and the governor apparently concurred, commuting Samuel’s sentence to life imprisonment. (Three years later, Samuel disappeared at sea during an escape attempt with other convicts and was presumed drowned; perhaps God’s view was not as clear as it seemed at the gallows.)

A third celebrated case was that of John “Babbacombe” Lee, who was convicted of the 1884 murder of his employer and sentenced to die. (By that point, executions in Britain had moved out of the public and into prison yards.) Just like Samuel, Lee was spared by malfunctioning equipment: A trapdoor under the gallows, meant to release the condemned and snap his neck, had been tested, yet it failed three times to open. Lee’s sentence was commuted to life by the British home secretary, Sir William Harcourt, who said, “It would shock the feelings of anyone if a man had twice to pay the pangs of imminent death.” Lee was eventually paroled in 1907. Now infamous as “the man they couldn’t hang,” he wrote an autobiography and was the subject of a 1912 silent film, but he then faded from the historical record. He appears to have died in the 1940s, perhaps in Milwaukee.

When I first heard the stories of Half-Hangit Maggie and Babbacombe Lee as a child, I knew they were historical, but they seemed to belong more to the realm of myth or fairy tale. Hangings, mysterious mechanical failures, assertions of divine intervention—all of these seemed like things out of fiction. It was easy to chuckle at quaint details, such as the apocryphal tale that Dickson was required to remarry her husband because she’d been declared dead. And though I’d read about the beheadings of Charles I and Louis XVI, the specter of public execution felt distant enough from modern civilization to be faintly unreal.

Now all of these things seem much less remote. Until President Trump reversed course yesterday, the Defense Department planned to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, who massacred comrades at Fort Hood in 2009. Pike’s fate is up in the air after her twice-failed execution. Pike, who was convicted of a brutal murder in 1995, has returned from a hospital to prison. The state official who oversaw capital punishment has resigned, and the governor has temporarily paused all executions in Tennessee. Her lawyers have requested that her sentence be commuted to life in prison.

The doctor and ethicist Lydia Dugdale writes in The Dispatch that U.S. history offers a grim precedent. In 1946, a 16-year-old boy confessed to killing his employer and was sentenced to die via electrocution. A first attempt failed, and his lawyers sought to block a second. The Supreme Court ruled against them, and he was killed that year. But Dugdale argues that this precedent should not apply here. “From Pike’s markedly swollen and chemically burned arms, to her profound cognitive impairment (the severity of which remains unknown), the state has already inflicted a cruel and unusual punishment on Christa,” she writes. Setting aside the law, “as a matter of sheer ethics, if the state has vowed not to punish prisoners cruelly but has inadvertently done so, the state ought not attempt the same method of execution again.” (In this year’s other botched Tennessee case, Tony Carruthers’s failed execution left him partially paralyzed. He received a one-year reprieve, and advocates have called for his sentence to be commuted.)

The historical cases of the men and women they couldn’t hang feel much closer to the present day than they once did. And although some of the visceral details still sound like the stuff of myth, the pragmatic and humane outcomes of these situations stand out more against the backdrop of the recent news. Support for the death penalty has dropped since the 1990s, barely topping 50 percent today. Views are closely correlated with religion—white Protestants are far more likely to back it than any other group, according to polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. For religious supporters of capital punishment, the idea that a failed execution is a sign from above might not be so far-fetched. Among the nonreligious, many people may flatter themselves to believe that contemporary society possesses greater reason and logic than our forebears. Just as we try to understand our ancestors by how they handled cases such as those of Dickson, Samuel, and Lee, future generations will judge our society by its actions.

Related:

• A terrible way to die, a terrifying way to survive
• The real harm of a public execution

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• Jonathan Chait: Five fabulous days of Katie Zacharia
• Exclusive: He joined the military. They reported his wife to ICE.
• How Pete Hegseth’s plan for a reality-TV execution imploded
• Imagine every AI agent on Earth buying the same cheap paper towels.

Today’s News

1. President Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired after less than a week in the role, according to three people familiar with the matter. Her dismissal followed criticism of her first press briefing on Tuesday and questions about her legal credentials.
2. Three children and a teacher were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in Bend, Oregon, yesterday. Police said that a bystander pursued the 16-year-old shooter into the school and fatally shot him; another child and a teacher were critically injured.
3. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez donated $1 million to support Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in Michigan. El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers in a race that could determine control of the Senate in November.

Dispatches

• Over/Under: Gamblers are more likely to lose money than make it—yet they keep coming back, Will Gottsegen writes. In the first edition of Over/Under, he explores why bettors return to casinos and prediction apps even when it’s not in their financial interest.
• The Books Briefing: Don’t listen to the romantasy haters, Talya Zax writes. The best-selling genre is more than just smut.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Big Tech Oligarchs Have a Terrible Plan for Humanity

By Bernie Sanders

Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species? As absurd as these questions may sound, and as obvious as the answers may seem, the Big Tech oligarchs funding the artificial-intelligence revolution have responded in ways that should alarm all of us.

In Silicon Valley, some of the wealthiest people on Earth believe that they have the power to create a superior species. Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wrote in 2017 that AI would allow humans to become “the first species ever to design our own descendants.” What this means for humans, however, remains unclear. According to Altman, we will either jump-start digital intelligence “and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” In other words, humans have a choice: face extinction or merge with machines. “I believe the merge has already started,” Altman added, and is “probably our best-case scenario.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Watching for a blue wave in South Carolina
• What the loss of Starshield revealed
• How the Catholic Church is rethinking war
• What three gene-therapy deaths have in common
• The cutest target of Trump’s D.C. makeover

Culture Break

Watch. Nathan Fielder’s documentary about Elizabeth Holmes (out now in theaters) is a captivating study of self-perception, David Sims writes.

Read. Stephanie Bai asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to share some of the best first lines in modern literature.

Play our daily crossword.

PS

A great folk hero needs a good nickname, which is why Billy the Kid and “Pretty Boy” Floyd endure. Babbacombe Lee—the name comes from the site of the murder—belongs to that tier. I first encountered it on the strange, entrancing cover of an album, a 1971 “folk-rock opera” by the English band Fairport Convention. I wouldn’t rank “Babbacombe” Lee as prime Fairport, but it’s an entertaining listen. As for Half-Hangit Maggie, anyone visiting the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, the site of her execution, can have a pint at her namesake pub, Maggie Dickson’s. Just don’t expect it to produce any miraculous resuscitations.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

Romantasy—the category of fiction in which the supernaturally gifted soar on the wings of love, and also sometimes of dragons—is incredibly successful. Its reigning queen, Sarah J. Maas, has sold about 75 million copies of her novels, my colleague Honor Jones reported in a recent Atlantic essay. The appeal of the genre, Jones found, isn’t just chiseled abs, smoldering gazes, and faerie frippery. Yes, there are hyper-athletic magical trysts, but “far more significant are feelings and friendships between the heroes: enchanted beings with relatable self-esteem issues who don’t just seek and fight but also yearn and banter as they face down enemies,” Jones writes. Readers stay for engaging and emotionally effective stories featuring characters they love.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

• Good villains are hard to come by. This one’s great.
• The journalist and the manipulator
• Immigration is a poorly oiled machine.
• The man who wanted to understand every aspect of Jewish life

Romantasy fans generally know that books like those in Maas’s mega-best-selling A Court of Thorns and Roses series—popularly known by the acronym ACOTAR—aren’t going to win the Pulitzer Prize. And they know that fantasy isn’t real life. “But if they’re snowed in—­or trapped by a pandemic, or up with a nursing newborn, or stuck in any of the ways humans tend to get stuck—­it can help to imagine” the possibility of magic, Jones writes.

This reading experience doesn’t require the emotional tumult of picturing oneself in, say, Oliver Twist’s tiny 19th-century orphan shoes—or, more challenging, Fagin’s villainous boots. Instead, ACOTAR and its ilk make imagining easy: You may not know what it’s like to kiss a shape-shifter, but it’s exciting—seductive, even—to picture giving in to an attraction tinged with intrigue and mystery. And doing so is not necessarily less fulfilling than reading literary fare, because practicing this kind of creativity is good for us. It makes life’s hardships more bearable, as Jones indicates, and it also makes reality more interesting. If all we did was describe the mundane to one another, it would be difficult for any of us to have the kind of life worth writing stories about.

Every queen-bee genre has its haters. Jones notes that plenty of people in the literary world “lament that the only books that sell now are faerie or dragon or elfpunk porn.” But a better approach would be to learn from romantasy’s success: We sometimes need a reminder that reading can simply be entertaining. And if entertainment comes from imagining what it might be like to have a hunky elf-king hanging around, well, where’s the harm in that?

Those Books of Smut and Wonder

By Honor Jones

How Sarah J. Maas became the queen of romantasy

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Fox Wife, by Yangsze Choo

Choo’s novel, set in Manchuria in 1908, blends folklore and classic detective fiction, and adds a dash of fantasy—half of its characters are shape-shifting spirits who transform from foxes to humans and back again. These creatures are as clever and crafty as you might expect, and the narrative twists keep the reader in a state of high alert. What starts as a police procedural about the death of a high-class courtesan soon blossoms into a fantastical quest to break curses, rekindle lost love, and catch a murderer. Although it’s not overly long, the book has a mythic feeling, moving through time and space like an epic poem. Choo seamlessly combines narrative momentum and lush world-building, so the reader discovers the setting and uncovers the mystery alongside the novel’s endearing detective.  — M. L. Rio

From our list: Eight plot-heavy books that will keep you turning pages

Out Next Week

📚 Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row, by Lawrence Wright

📚 Crooked Cross, by Sally Carson

📚 I Only Shout So You Can Hear Me, by Lil Jon with Paul Cantor

Your Weekend Read

Megyn Kelly’s Extreme Makeover

By Sophie Gilbert

Do you remember Megyn Kelly? I once walked past her in a Chicago O’Hare bathroom in 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had won his first presidential election, and was momentarily stopped in my tracks by both her nuclear-grade charisma and her pixie cut. For a woman to have short hair on Fox News, where Kelly was a star anchor at the time, seemed as seditious to the network’s established order as reading Judith Butler or Karl Marx live on air. But this was a moment during which Kelly seemed to be leaning into the role of crusader for women—speaking out about being sexually harassed by the former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and so inflaming Trump with her rigorous questioning during one debate that he later insinuated on CNN that she must have had her period.

Read the full article.

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As a newsroom executive, I have long tried to resist appeals to vet donors to nonprofit journalism for their politics or even the savoriness of their business practices. When you do that, you raise questions about whether you could fairly cover any potential donors on your banned list, and you also run the risk of offering some sort of implicit endorsement to the rest. Both of those perceptions are antithetical to the independent stance that good journalism requires. To take one notorious example, we never received a check from the Koch family’s interests when I was running the business side of ProPublica, but I would have been happy to take it if we had. Nor am I one of those people who think that it makes sense to refuse corporate contributions. Almost all major donors derive the money they are offering from a successful corporation.

With that said, I want to offer some cautionary thoughts on the largesse from the company that has become the leading corporate supporter of American journalism, OpenAI. In gifts through its People-First AI Fund, and in large grants disbursed through the American Journalism Project and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism (both occasional consulting clients of mine), OpenAI has distributed $25 million in cash to U.S. newsrooms in the past few years, a large multiple of the journalism grants from Microsoft and Google. OpenAI has also made a number of significant one-off gifts, so its total is considerably larger. Anthropic has not yet joined this party. (The Atlantic has a content-licensing agreement with OpenAI, although it does not receive grant funding from the company.)

I know that the money is needed, and I am not questioning the uses to which it is currently being put. I think newsrooms need to be more creative in the use of AI, not less; more innovative; and less afraid of the implications for particular kinds of work that may become outmoded.

Here’s what I think the recipients need to bear in mind.

The company’s motivation here is not altruistic. OpenAI says that its intent is “to benefit all of humanity,” but we know that some people there and elsewhere worry that it is, in fact, going to end up snuffing out humanity. We also see that, in the face of such warnings, the company races along, its CEO announcing that “the world should accept some bad things happening.” More narrowly, the firm’s spending on supporting news is almost certainly seen internally as a form of marketing and public relations, helping to spur product adoption and perhaps blunt any impulses toward regulation or taxation, both of which seem to be crucially and urgently necessary.

The money may be material to us, but it isn’t to them. It should be sobering, for instance, that OpenAI spent roughly the same amount of money trying to intervene in a single Manhattan congressional primary this past spring as it has in newsroom funding over the years through Lenfest.

[Matteo Wong: OpenAI has gone rogue]

Our worldviews are at fundamental variance. The core principles of journalism focus on the search for accuracy with fairness and the discovery of truth. The essence of the business of generative artificial intelligence seems to be the maximization of profit, whether or not other goals are achieved.

The spigot could shut off at any time, and likely eventually will. We have been down this road before with tech firms, and need to assume that this funding won’t be sustained, and shouldn’t be part of any plan for sustainability. Facebook was a significant funder of news until it not only wasn’t, but then took steps to choke off the flow of news to its users. Google purported to be especially solicitous of news until, in my view, it detected insufficient gratitude and greater support for regulation (especially in Canada) and largely reversed course. (The Atlantic has received grant funding in the past from Facebook and Google but no longer accepts such grants to fund its journalism.)

Inside the velvet glove is a mailed fist. Journalists should never forget that there is significant evidence that OpenAI has built its enormous machine in small but significant (at least to us) part by appropriating our intellectual property without compensation. That’s a nice way of saying that the company is arguing in court that it has the right to take our lifeblood while laying waste to important parts of our business. This is ultimately a legal question, but one in which the company—and, to be sure, its competitors at Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—is our adversary. The stakes in those fights may be existential for newsrooms; they will not be for the platforms.

Transparency is always a good idea. When creating new AI tools or devising new methods or products using AI that are ultimately funded by an AI company, journalists owe it to their readers, listeners, and viewers to let them know about that funding. Don’t limit the disclosure to an intermediary source through which the money passed.

Innovation needs to be coupled with accountability. Even as OpenAI and, to a lesser extent, some of its competitors are paying newsrooms for more rapid and clever adoption of their products and services, it’s very important that anyone taking this funding also invest commensurately in increased accountability for these behemoths and the havoc they are wreaking in some local communities, many funding streams, and, moving forward, job markets. I do have faith in the ability of editors and publishers to maintain editorial independence from funders; I have seen it in action many times. But the larger the portions of food on offer, the greater the temptation not to bite the hand offering it. We need to help one another to resist this, including by pointing out compromises among colleagues if and when we see them.

[Jessica Lessin: Media companies are making a huge mistake with AI]

One important caveat: I am far less concerned about the explosion almost certainly ahead in individual philanthropy derived from AI than I am about the direct provision of corporate funds. There may be issues with some individuals, of course. But the multiplicity of likely funders will help, as will their varying motivations.

The truth is that corporate philanthropy has always been something of an oxymoron. The duty of corporations is to their shareholders, and specifically to the maximizing of shareholder value. Journalists can take some comfort that, in companies with more enlightened management, this objective is sought over the long run, which may more closely align with societal interests. Managers with more limited vision, as well as those so enamored of their own capabilities as to conflate society’s objectives with their own, present a less happy case. All of us in the news business would do well to look hard at which of these types we believe are leading the AI revolution today.

This article was adapted from a post on Richard J. Tofel’s Substack, Second Rough Draft.

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In the newest Grand Theft Auto installment—13 years and estimated billions of dollars in the making—people in a fictionalized version of Florida can exercise, drink smoothies, pet their dog, go to the club, and so much more. The main characters are in a relationship, and players will have to tend to that too. Galaxy Brain host Charlie Warzel talks with the gaming journalist Chris Plante about why the details of this game matter, the controversies it may unleash, the weirdest things he’s seen happen in the game, and what Grand Theft Auto tells us about America in 2026.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Charlie Warzel: Is there a possibility that you can’t make a game for everyone in 2026?

Chris Plante: I think it’s like saying the NFL season might not land this year because people are worried about CTE, or people are worried about people kneeling in the end zone. Like there’s always those things that people say, like: This is it; this is the year that I don’t watch it. And then it’s the biggest season ever for the NFL.

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where, today, we’re gonna be talking about what is poised to be the biggest, most expensive, and arguably most controversial piece of culture and entertainment in recent memory. It is an event that is 13 years in the making. Yes, we’re talking about Grand Theft Auto VI.

Now, you might not be a video-game person, but chances are you know about Grand Theft Auto. And maybe that’s because you’ve played some version since 2001, when Rockstar, the studio that makes the franchise, released GTA 3, which was the first version of the game to turn what was a small-budget carjacking game into a cinematic, 3-D, open-world experience.

Or maybe you’ve sat on the couch and you’ve watched with either glee or horror as somebody else—your partner, your child, your friend—went on a brutal crime spree, getting chased around the city by fleets of police cars and helicopters. Or maybe you know the game through its controversies. To list a few: There’s been outrage over cop killing; the way that the game has depicted sex workers; the fact that sex workers are in the game at all; depictions of torture; celebrities claiming their likenesses have been used; and, of course, the concerns that the game could lead to real-world violence.

But no matter what your experience, Grand Theft Auto is something else, too. For 25 years now, the franchise has been more than a video game. It is one of the most ambitious works of digital art and storytelling that we have. The series has inspired copycats, but it’s also expanded the bounds of what is possible in the gaming format. Each iteration has not only expanded the length of the game, but the size of the world and the scope of the story. Rockstar’s attention to detail in the game—stuff like, after being discharged from the hospital, characters will have cuts and bruises. That’s become a meme unto itself. The series actually seems locked in its own cycle of one-upsmanship, which has moved beyond a video game and into something that feels like its own metaverse.

This game, which will take place in a fictional version of Florida, will supposedly allow people to play in a vast portion of the state, all the way from the quays up into the swamps. Now the GTA phenomenon is also borne out in the economics. GTA 5, which came out in 2013, is still selling like crazy. And it is, depending on which ranking you’re reading, it’s in the top three best-selling games of all time, next to huge online games like Minecraft or Tetris. GTA 6, which is slated to come out November 19th, is estimated to have cost Rockstar in the billions of dollars to make, and it will be the most anticipated game of all time.

And so my guest today is someone who can put all of this into perspective. Chris Plante is the co-founder of Polygon, the gaming website. He’s the host of The Besties and Post Games, two excellent and different podcasts about video games and gaming. Chris has been writing and covering this industry for 20 years, but what I appreciate about his work is that he has this keen eye for the way that this industry interacts with, but also drives, popular culture. So is the world ready for GTA 6? In a world that is almost devoid of monocultural events, can Grand Theft Auto deliver on that promise? Can a series that has satirized America, often pretty savagely, take on [Donald] Trump’s America and Florida without making everyone mad or insane? GTA is now an American institution. But the question remains: Can any institution really survive in 2026?

Chris Plante joins me now to talk about all of it. Chris, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Chris Plante: I’m so happy to be here. This is wonderful.

Warzel: I’m glad. That’s the energy we want to bring here. Okay. So we’re here because Grand Theft Auto VI is coming out soon. And you know, it feels like there are so many things, serious things, happening in the world right now, such that I think the release of this game is gonna sneak up on people. Which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say about a game that people have been anticipating for about a decade, but like seriously for about like four years. And yet I still think it’s going to sneak up on people. But my working theory is that Grand Theft Auto VI is going to be one of the biggest cultural events of the decade. Am I right? Am I wrong? Am I crazy? Talk to me.

Plante: It’s the closest thing we have to a guarantee in popular mainstream media, outside of when Avengers: Endgame came out that first time. But this game will be huge, because the one that came out right before this—you know, over a decade ago—it’s still selling about 5 million copies a quarter.

Warzel: Wow.

Plante: So if that’s where it’s at right now, you can count on this one being—I mean, there’s nothing else like it.

Warzel: So you’ve written that Grand Theft Auto is the biggest franchise in the world because of the tiny details. Unpack that broader theory there for me.

Plante: This game kind of began, and in some ways launched, this era of video games as big open worlds. There are things that came before it, but it really established that idea of a video game that you could get lost in. That it’s not just levels anymore; that when you go to New York City, it looks and feels like New York City. When you go to—in the version of New York City from Grand Theft Auto, nearly 15 or however many years ago, you can go to Brooklyn. Like, there are not walls around this. And over the years, they have put all the money from all their success into making those worlds feel more and more realistic, to the point that you can get drunk and go driving in the video game.

It’s not just stealing cars; you can commit all sorts of horrible crimes. But you can also do things that aren’t crimes at all. You can do yoga; you can go play tennis; you can call people on your cellphone or just flip around through its various apps. It is all about this sense of immersion. So I think when people who don’t play these games think about Grand Theft Auto, they think of the immediate—you steal cars, you shoot innocent people, you fight the police, that’s the game. When, in reality, what people like about these games—over the course of the dozens, if not hundreds of hours, if not thousands of hours they play them—is just getting lost in these worlds.

Warzel: Take me back, just for a second, to: Grand Theft Auto III comes out in 2001. I was just looking this up. I was actually kind of blown away by the fact that it was like a couple of weeks after 9/11. So that’s just like a—

Plante: Yeah, it actually got delayed because of 9/11. And they removed things from it because of that.  

Warzel: What did they remove?

Plante: They changed the look of the police cars, because they looked too much like New York cop cars. They changed the flight patterns of the planes in the game. It’s been kind of this generator of its own little controversies, its proximity to that event.

Warzel: Yeah, and I want to get to some of those controversies in a second. But going back to, okay: So this thing comes out. GTA, there’s 1 and 2. But then 3 comes out, and it is 3-D, and it’s this immersive-world thing that you’re talking about. And I think that this is just important context to set us up here for the rest of the discussion, but: What do you remember, just as a person, as a person interested in video games, when this came out?

Like, was this orders of magnitude different than the other open worlds that you’d experience? Was it just different in terms of what you could do, or the presentation, or the sort of aggressive violence? What was it that sort of broke your mind open when this launched way back then?

Plante: Yeah. It’s okay, what everybody has to do if you’re thinking about this game launching is forget everything that you know about what a video game does now. Because the things that were amazing then and were really amazing seem so quaint right now. So this is—you could drive around a 3-D version of New York. The previous versions were 2-D, bird’s-eye views of a car.

You could go around, and your car could go up and down hills. And I know that sounds so boring. But a lot, if not all, of 3-D open-world games at this time were on these flat surfaces. And it made the worlds feel fake. They felt very artificial. And here is a world where the buildings broadly looked different from one another. It wasn’t just like a cookie cutter. You could go up and down. You saw a moon give way to a sun. There was a day-night cycle. There was a radio where each car might be listening to a different radio station. So when you stole a luxury car and it was playing opera, you felt like you were stealing it from a person and not just that yet another copy of the same thing, right? All of those little details. Plus, they actually had some celebrity actors; it didn’t feel like anything that you would have seen to that point. And you could see it in the previews at the time. People thought: This is, like, borderline reality. They’ve done it.

Warzel: I remember. I mean, I did actually play some of the 2-D games. And, like, the series always had those radio stations—but I remember when I first played it, that thing with the radio stations is so very visceral and real. Like there was personality behind all of these things that before were just completely formulaic or one note. And this game, GTA 6, is going to be orders of magnitude bigger than the others. What can we expect here?

Plante: It’s everything. I mean, that’s how it’s gonna feel at first. It is what you will have to find over the course of time playing this game is, like, what’s not here, right? And we actually know some things that will not be there. We know that references to Donald Trump will not be there. We know that references to the pandemic will not be there. They’ve said this much. Which is deeply strange, because this is a game set in Florida. What you’re gonna find in it is a story of a Bonnie and Clyde who are, you know, avoiding the cops, committing a heist, and then.

Warzel: Yeah.

Plante: Also just like living their life. Like going to the club, going exercising, getting food. I believe in this game you’re going to be able to exercise and your body will actually show muscle. Or you’ll eat at meals, and you might gain or lose weight. These are obviously quite artificial. It’s not as realistic as that sounds. But it’s—they want you to have that experience of being the person who commits highest.

Warzel: Yeah.

Plante: Yeah. The 99 percent of the time that they’re not actually committing a heist.

Warzel: Yeah, there’s a quote from this long New York Times preview about the game that has this immersiveness. I’m just gonna read it here for people, which is: “Here I am, eating an apple, opening the fridge, and drinking a smoothie. So this will increase my health temporarily for a while, allowing people to sort of role-play. And then, exiting the apartment, the character steps down to pet a pedestrian’s dog.”

The person from Rockstar who makes the game, who’s talking to the writer of the piece, says that you could buy pet snacks from the convenience stores and dole them out if you wish to the dog. There’s been a lot of online fascination with the ability to like, to have a pet, a canine companion. I mean, this level of granularity—talk to me about this.

Plante: Yeah. What’s weird about that thing you just said, though, is like all of that stuff exists in tons of games. Like the idea that you can pet a dog; there’s a Twitter account that’s dedicated to games you can pet a dog in. The idea of eating food, and then you get a health increase—I mean that’s like Mario. What’s so unusual about this game is that they have put so much money and so much resource into animating it so that you see all of it seamlessly. Where in a lot of games, you know, like you pick up a health item and maybe like a little sparkle happens over your head and you see the bar rays at the top. Where here, it’s like: Okay, you pick up the item and then they unwrap it. And then they put it in their mouth, and we actually see the food get masticated and get swallowed and their stomachs adjust. And all of that time and resources it gets back to what you said of the little details. That you’re doing things that you do in tons of video games—you’re just doing it in a way that it looks like a movie, that it looks consistent perpetually. And it’s not stopping to just say a little number goes up.

Warzel: And it also feels like—inside this world, aside of just the options for things that you’re going to be able to do, there’s a like what you’re speaking to. Like the animations; there are, I think, like over 600,000 non-playable character animations. I think, to people who don’t play video games, there’s a little—like I mean, people know now, “NPC” has become like a thing people say. Derogatorily. But like, what does it mean to have, you know, 600,000 non-playable character animations?

Plante: Yeah, it’s a little unhinged. Like, it’s detached from reality. And it’s certainly detached from the rest of video-game reality. Nobody can afford to do this but Rockstar, the people who are making this game. Nobody has another, the previous game continuing to bring in, you know, 5 million copies a quarter, to just inflate your pool of cash. They also have an online mode that is also bringing in money constantly.

So because of that—and because they know that’s what people expect from their games—they can put money into these animations. That a single animation could take somebody who knows how long. These are not things that you just do in an afternoon. And you can have people who are dedicated just to, let’s say, walking animations for these pedestrians. You could have people who are dedicated to just trees and shrubbery and nature. All of these individual details can have people assigned to them. And the staffing, it’s in the thousands. I mean it’s about as many people who work on a Marvel movie. I believe it was 4,000 people for GTA 6. Like, that is so many people working so long over such tiny details.

Warzel: Mm-hmm. So is this going too far? Do people want this? Like, do they actually want this? I know, as a thought experiment, if you’re Rockstar, you’re one-upping yourself every time. There’s a lot of expectations that this has to be amazing. Do people really want to be walking their dogs or exercising to avoid gaining weight, doing the things that we do here in the world and grumble about? Like, is this gonna be too onerous for people?

Plante: I don’t think it will be for this game. I think the problem is bigger than this game. It’s the video-game market, which thinks, Well, this is a success, so we should have 50 more of these. And the answer is in fact no. We should not have 50 more of these. It’s, again, the Marvel comparison—that you see Endgame and you’re like, You know what we need? We need an Endgame. And it’s like, Well, there’s only so many of those, ’cause they take up so much time.

So yeah, there are a lot of people, who maybe play one or two games a year, who are going to love that this game does all of the stuff that we’re talking about, and more. And they’re gonna love it so much that it’s gonna be the only thing they play. And that’ll be a large percentage of the audience. Like, I guess more than half of people who play video games are not playing games that came out this year. You kind of lock into what you love.

And I think this serves that very mainstream portion of the video-game audience. Do I think every game should be this? Absolutely not. That would be such a colossal waste of artistry and human resources and time.

Warzel: I imagine the people who are listening to this are much more generalist in terms of this, in terms of like the specifics of gaming. And I think there’s probably a large portion of people out there who just see the Grand Theft Auto series as these static releases, right? Who don’t understand that there is this constant—both economy but also culture—that is being created and tended to throughout the years. I saw, you know, the report a while back that there was a production of Hamlet being staged in an online version of GTA.

What happens—like, what cultures are being built inside the online version of this game? And how has that sort of changed the franchise?

Plante: Yeah, it’s kind of: How many layers deep do you want to go? Because the first layer is this online mode. With Grand Theft Auto V, they also released Grand Theft Auto online. It lets you go around that game’s version of L.A. and Southern California, but do it with friends and complete different quests, and they kept updating it with stuff that, hey, if you wanted, you could pay a little bit more money for each month and just keep giving Rockstar money over and over and over again. That was a tremendous success for them. A lot of people loved it after a rocky launch. Then players started role-playing in the virtual world. And if any of your listeners are familiar with LARPing—I’m really feeling like I’m the dorkiest person somehow to be on an already somewhat-dorky show.

Warzel: No, lean in. Lean in, Chris.

Plante: When you think of LARPing, it’s live-action role-playing. It’s, you know, Ren Fest type of stuff. This is people going into the world of Grand Theft Auto and creating their own rules and their own modifications to the game’s, like, actual code to make it a place where you can do the things that are not what you do in Grand Theft Auto. You could be a police officer, which is the opposite. You could be somebody who just runs a restaurant. You could be a journalist in it and actually write up stories about what is happening in Grand Theft Auto? You can get arrested in this version and then have to wait out your time in jail, or maybe somebody breaks you out.

It is very much a true role-play—not like a role-playing game, just a role-play experience. And it has become so popular that Rockstar itself is partnered with one of these. They recognize this and want to foster this community.

Warzel: You’ve listed off a few things, but is there anything that comes to mind as like the weirdest stuff you’ve heard of happening?

Plante: The weirdest stuff for me is more that people modify the game to just do all sorts of things it’s not meant to do. And then people will try to play through the game in these completely broken ways. And by that I mean they have made versions of the game where every car in the world is going, I think it’s like 400 miles per hour, no matter what, at all times. And then you see somebody trying to get through just a single mission when the roads are filled with 400-mile-per hour cars. They made a version where there are hundreds of airplanes that fall out of the sky every 30 seconds. They made another version where you teleport every 50 seconds. So teleporting in this, I would be like teleporting from Vegas to Santa Ana. Like, a real inconvenience.

And people love this stuff. They love taking this world and breaking it. And I think that, for me, is really why these games last. Because you create this hyper-real world, and then you let people be gods with it and set their own rules to the physics and to the logic. And that’s where like the internet memes come; that’s where the Twitch streams come, that’s where the YouTube stuff comes. And that is like—that’s why the game lasts.

Warzel: And not to be all like, you know, galaxy-brained about it, but a problem with a lot of technology is that people build these things painstakingly, whether it’s a platform or whatever, and feel like they have an understanding of how the world is going to receive it. There’s an idealized way that the world must experience this. And I think a little of what is great, if we’re gonna give Rockstar a little bit of credit for this, is their understanding that the world is going to come into this thing and receive it completely differently and break it.

Plante: Absolutely.

Warzel: Like, that’s what people do with technology, right? They use it in unexpected ways. And so I think that this is a really fascinating example of this. The other thing that I think about is, you know, Facebook changed its company name and hard-pivoted and spent billions and billions of dollars on a metaverse that no one wanted. And yet there’s just, like, all these people, you know, running restaurants and being journalists in Grand Theft Auto V online. It’s like there is a metaverse. Metaverses do exist, and there are people in them. It’s just not the ones where you’re gonna have a meeting and, you know, not have legs.

I want to talk a little bit about controversies in this game. Because Grand Theft Auto is a series that has always been very controversial. There’s a few that have percolated. There’s gonna be more specifically surrounding the fact that you said there’s this Bonnie-and-Clyde style of protagonists. They’re a couple, and you have to ideally attend to their relationship and keep each side happy. Some of the articles that I’ve seen have shared these social-media posts from people who are arguing that simply playing the game is cheating on your spouse, if you have a spouse. What do you make of a controversy like that?

Plante: Yeah. I think it’s incredible how we’ve gotten to real controversies meaning so little and fake controversies meaning so much. And by that I mean—when the original Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels came out, right, these games would be trotted out before Congress. I mean, these were really serious issues. There were Supreme Court cases that decided the future of games as a medium, in part reacting to these video games. And then after that—and it’s gotten more and more and more—the controversies around this game become meaningless. Like, you can do some truly heinous things in this game. And I’m happy to list them out.

Warzel: Yeah. List a few out.

Plante: And yet the thing that people are worried about is like this, right? It’s like there is leaked footage of this game that came out, where you saw someone just slaughter multiple police officers, and then also stab to death many unhoused people living under a highway. And it was just a normal sequence in this game. And it’s almost old hat. At this point people are like: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been, you know, killing people like that forever in these video games. Now, you having a relationship—that seems pretty naughty. I don’t know. It’s like, everybody wants a piece of it for their SEO or to be part of a conversation. And so we get these very bizarre controversies that feel half-hearted, like from the drop.

Warzel: Well, what I think is interesting, though, is the way that this kind of mundane, “you have to manage a relationship” controversy. The way it’s come into the culture, though, I think speaks more to the culture, right? I don’t know if I fully agree that it’s, like, just people trying to grab a little SEO. Because I think it’s actual anxieties about what has happened both to gaming and to men and to online life and alienation and whatever, in between the time that something like GTA 3 came out in 2001 and 2026, right? Like this idea of people being worried about a digital relationship usurping another one—it seems to speak more to me about cultural anxieties of, like, what this game is going to give to an either disaffected or introverted kind of style of dude, or woman, or whomever, right?

Plante: Yes. That’s so interesting to me. Because I would’ve put it as—this speaks to our general prudishness, of the fact that someone kissing in a movie is now seen as kind of shocking if it’s like a romantic or sensual kiss, versus even in like the ’90s. But what you’re saying sounds right. I guess I wasn’t seeing that, because we’ve already started to see the hard-right reaction to the game, which is: It might be woke. I need to assert my anti-woke bona fides right now and let you know that, like, this has bisexual lighting on its cover art, and therefore I won’t be playing it.

I think that we might—and maybe already are starting to—see a bit of what happened around The Odyssey. That the really hard-right part of the internet only has one way of reacting to mass-cultural things, which is: It must be woke. It’s big, it’s mainstream. And then they push against it. So I agree with what you’re saying.

At the same time, I also feel like there will be a part of the kind of, like—the saddest men on the internet, who will turn against this game simply because it is part of pop culture. And because you play as a woman of color in it. And like, that has been enough for people to get very mad on the internet, when it comes to their video games.

Warzel: If you had to predict a couple of these outrages, what do we think? I mean, we’ve got, right—this takes place in a facsimile of Florida. Not veiled at all, but there’s a lot of Florida Man in there, right? Like the meme stereotype of the Florida Man—you know, kind of rednecky, “doing crazy things” stereotype. So I gotta imagine there’s something there. Like you said, the person of color. How do you think, practically, this is gonna slot into the culture wars?

Plante: Yo, every which way. Every group will have an opportunity to be mad about this game if they so want it. And so it will be on you, dear listener, to decide whether you want to be riled up. By that I mean, like—there is the violence against police officers. There is the depiction of Miami as a dangerous place full of criminals, which the local leadership of every city that a GTA is in gets very upset about. There is going to be questions about naked bodies. There is a lot of nudity, we believe, in this video game. Both male and female, something that is not super common in video games and certainly not common in mainstream media. And those bodies are not just like “sexy bodies.” They are very natural bodies. And I think that will cause some issues.

Warzel: Let’s talk a little bit about how this game is influenced, right? There’s a quote from that Times article that says the players will be able to learn about the world of Grand Theft Auto VI through an in-game feed known as Snapmatic, on which influencers, celebrities, friends of [the main characters] Jason and Lucia will share photos and videos. Now it’s early, clearly. But what are you seeing in terms of how social media and the internet have imprinted on this game’s development?

Plante: I think each one of these Grand Theft Auto games, if you’ll find a very quick trip to the past, is influenced by whatever the culture is at that time. Or at least what its creators see as the dominant culture. The Houser brothers—who didn’t create Grand Theft Auto but have led it, especially since Grand Theft Auto III—they came up in the music scene. They wanted to run Rockstar like a record label. And the first GTA 3, we talked about music; it is a game very much influenced by music. Grand Theft Auto IV is a game very much influenced by the mob movies of the ’80s and the ’90s; of film, of cinema. Grand Theft Auto V is a game very much about the internet and kind of the beginning of smartphones. It is a game where you finally have apps. You can pull out your phone; you can take pictures.

And I think that this game is going to be one very much influenced by short-form media and social media. That is where they are pulling a lot of their anxiety, a lot of their humor. These are ultimately games about the American experience through the eyes of two brothers who were born in London and kind of born into artistic royalty in London. But they have a lot of thoughts about America, and so do their writing teams. And I think because of that, yes. But we are going to look through it through the lens of our time—or at least of 2018 to 2020, when this game really began development.

Warzel: You talking about the Houser brothers being, you know, not from the States and this idea of wanting to tell the American story. But through the lens of kind of “an outsider telling the insider story.” And at the same time, it seems like every time we get that reflection, like Americans are kinda giddy for that—to be perceived by somebody else in this satirical way. Why do you think we love these portrayals? Which I have to say, in all the Grand Theft Auto elements—they’re not that flattering.

Plante: No, they’re not at all. This game will be a little different. We can get to that. But I think people like to see their enemies bullied. I think that is a sad reality of the United States. And I think that this game is happy to oblige in the way that South Park is, too, right? Like, we’re going to say it. And there are gonna be things that you will hear in these games that you don’t like, and there are gonna be things that you’re like, That’s pretty funny. Like, that is the type of person that I despise, and look at them being portrayed in the worst way possible. I think that’s part of it.

But I think the other part of it is: The story does disappear. Like, you play this game for the 30 or 40 or however many hours that you’re gonna play it, and you see all the silly billboards that are like weird puns about how shitty America is, and that’s all there.

And then you play for another 40 hours over the next, I don’t know, decade. And that all fades. And suddenly what you’re left with is actually an exceptionally beautiful ode to America as like a space. And its natural beauty is portrayed in these games. The architecture is so lovingly made. The people in the games that are not in these stories are so human. Like I said, you’re gonna see naked bodies in a video game that look like people, and are just out in the world having a nice time. And for all of its cynicism, I think ultimately what really sticks people around these is the rest of the stuff. The stuff that would keep you in a role-play, right? You’re not gonna stick around in a role-play of these games, or an online world, because you hate it there. Maybe that brings you in, but it’s certainly not what locks you in.

Warzel: You mentioned that there’s a part that like we’re not gonna get. Were you alluding to the fact that the politics is a little bit diluted? Or you know, purposefully so?

Plante: So I think two things. The one, the Houser brothers; this will be the first game without, I believe, Dan Houser working on it. I believe he left at some stage of the development. And I think that they have shifted over control in some of the narrative ambition to fresh talent. And I think also, maybe they’ve finally caught on that their Gen X humor has worn out its welcome. I think, you know, once you get two generations removed, you are able to look into the mirror and be like, yeah: Gen Z kids are not gonna wanna hear me, you know, make jokes about Pearl Jam and make shitty jokes about pronouns.

And I think that they had not caught that yet with GTA 5. I think that was a game it almost felt, at times, like where they maybe started to realize it halfway through, and it was too late to pull back some of the stuff that they were doing. And now the question that I have for the series is, what are you? Like if you aren’t South Park anymore, and you aren’t going to make this? And they’ve said as much. They said, you won’t be seeing— like, not every brand label is gonna be some crummy joke. Not everything you hear on the radio station is going to be, like, a parody about America. There is more going on here. Well then, what is it? Because ultimately they do have a story that they want to tell. They do have feelings that they want you to feel. And I think that they want to make something honestly more hopeful, which we’ll see. I mean, this is still a game that, like, I think the opening of the Netflix preview was somebody yelling, Crackheads are here. So like they’re still doing their thing. But I don’t know.

Warzel: What this makes me wonder is: So much has changed since in the media environment. In politics—but just in the world in general—in the space between the last Grand Theft Auto and this one, right? It’s not just the amount of time that’s lapsed. It’s like the acceleration of culture. It’s the difference between different generations, right? And their experiences. And I just am wondering—do you think that there’s a chance that this could just not land? Like, all of these have landed in part because it’s felt like the world has been just, like, a little bit more monocultural in each one of these. And maybe getting less and less and less as the internet accelerates and everything.

But now we’re in this place where everyone’s experience of the world is so completely different. It is so—whatever your information bubble is, or whatever your politics are, whatever your niche thing. Or, you know, the experience of someone in Gen Z is so much different than someone who’s coming in Gen X. Or you know, a Boomer or whatever.

Like—is there a possibility that you can’t make a game for everyone in 2026?

Plante: I think it’s like saying the NFL season might not land this year, because people are worried about CTE. Or people are worried about people kneeling in the endzone. Like there’s always those things that people say. Like: This is it; this is the year that I don’t watch it. And then it’s the biggest season ever for the NFL. I think this is just one of those truly weird cultural forces that is so big that it’s genuinely hard for me to imagine it failing in any significant way, barring I don’t even know what. Like, it would truly have to have something, I think, very explicit politically for it to be that big of a disaster, right?

Like, if there was a mission about Donald Trump. If there was a mission about Charlie Kirk. Like, those are the things where I think you could maybe start to see it. But this is again—when it’s making this much money, I’m sure that they have dotted every I and crossed every T. To make this feel like it has teeth, but also to make sure that there’s nothing in here that is going to even remotely run the risk of kicking the real hornets’ nest.

Warzel: As the game then comes out in the real world, let’s say it kind of is failure proof in some ways. We do need metrics to judge its success, right? Like, what are the things you’ll be looking at in terms of judging that? People are obviously gonna play it, but what does success mean for a game that is this big? How do we really evaluate it?

Plante: So they’re going to be very careful with how they roll this out, and how they continue to have those numbers go up. They’ve already laid the groundwork for that here. So this game is going to come out on PlayStation 5, an Xbox—Series X, S, whatever—this fall. And then a PC version is going to come out sometime next year. And presumably, and then an online mode is going to come out. And by the time we get past that, the new Xbox and PlayStation will probably be out. So then they’ll release it again for that. And it’ll have all the graphical upgrades everybody wanted to run on PC.

This thing, to be clear, I don’t know how it’s even gonna run on modern hardware. I feel like you’re gonna have to play with your headphones on, with the volume up, because your machine’s gonna be overheating. But each of those opportunities, right, is just another opportunity to get a sale. So when you see that GTA 5 has 230 million copies sold, that’s not 230 million people who went and bought the game. That is many people who have bought that game multiple times. That is that game being offered as a bonus as part of maybe a Netflix subscription, or something like that. I don’t know if it’s Netflix that did that, but I think Sony or Xbox did at certain points. There are ways to just continue to get this game in front of people over the course of a decade, really.

Warzel: It feels like there’s actually been some backlash that I have seen about that. People are already frustrated with Rockstar with this. There is the sort of like: Why don’t you just release it for everything right away, right? Like, why are you not allowing certain people to do that?

There’s also—I don’t believe there’s a physical copy of the game. It’s all gonna be digital, to which people are saying, Of course, here we go. This is how you charge me 12 times for this thing, right?

Plante: I mean, this is a fair thing to be concerned about. But it’s a much bigger issue than this game and I think, weirdly, Rockstar got lucky in a grim way. Because Sony PlayStation came out shortly after this saying: Actually, we’re not planning to do discs for any of our games in the future. And suddenly that conversation shifted.

Warzel: But you know, in general, I think the top line here is that there are people who are frustrated with Rockstar right now. There’s also been some issues with Rockstar of alleged union busting. They sort of strenuously deny this, but there were I think it was like 30 or more employees who were fired; I think they were participating in a Slack that may have had something to do with unionizing. Rockstar did strenuously deny this.

Plante: Yeah.

Warzel: What’s going on right now though, in terms of the perception of the company with all of this stuff swirling around in advance of obviously their biggest release ever?

Plante: So this is what I’m curious about when the release actually hits. Because I don’t think this stuff has hit the kind of mainstream conversation yet. And you’re right. I think it was 31 people dismissed in October 2025; claims of gross misconduct for sharing information in places that were not approved by the company. That was a Discord that was being used, too, and I think the team was hoping to create a union—very much still getting processed through the U.K. system, right? It seems not great.

I don’t think those stories happen on the mainstream spaces until the game is out, and suddenly CNBC needs something to talk about. What’s their angle? Fox Business needs something to talk about; what’s their angle? And suddenly every angle gets brought in, and all these controversies that are largely living right now in forums and on video-game websites are gonna become fodder for the larger media ecosystem. And I think that is what we might see around this game at its launch. I think some of these controversies around: Hey, wait; you don’t even get to own the game, as I understood it? What’s up with that? Hey, you maybe busted a union, or at least that’s what people are claiming. What is up with that?

And those things also tie into these much bigger stories of what’s happening in games in general. Unions is the anxiety around an industry in which layoffs happen seemingly every day. And they are massive amounts of layoffs. And those things are about—I don’t know. It feels like they’re just about to hammer together in a way that games culture just has not had the opportunity to be in front of the microphone within a very long time.

Warzel: Well, and then add to that the avalanche of the cultural, political, whatever controversies that are coming in the game, right? The culture-war thing. I mean, it seems to me like that will also hit and create this kind of perfect storm. If you had to guess, what are your odds that either via Truth Social, or in some other format, that Donald Trump mentions GTA VI?

Plante: Yeah. There’s again—I wouldn’t even. There’s no bet.

Warzel: There’s no bet.

Plante: He will. Like, there will be an AI-generated Grand Theft Auto VI post on Truth Social at least shared by the president before the end of November. I would liquidate everything I have if you gave me that bet.

Warzel: Don’t do that.

Plante: It would be the easiest bet there will be. Because that’s the other thing. Is—this administration loves using video games as part of their kind of, I don’t know, propaganda cudgel. They have been doing this with everything from Halo to Tetris. And nobody’s really in a position to hold them accountable for it, because people know what happens if you try.

Warzel: I am curious if Donald Trump will actually clock this. I personally, I do think you’re right that this administration loves to use games and also just anything that’s in popular culture. I think as I’m talking about this, I’m genuinely not prepared for the amount of reenactment-style things that are going to happen. We’re kinda coming off the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the stuff—like the sort of cynical, awful memes that even people on the right make around this. Like I’m just thinking of like reenactments of all these awful things that have happened in the past 13 years since the last game, and just the ability to do that in a higher-definition thing. I’m not ready.

Plante: Yeah. Can I give you my, like—this is like the bet I wouldn’t make, but a bet that I have stuck in my head.

Warzel: Please.

Plante: Which is: All of this might happen, and probably will happen. Almost certainly, people are gonna use the game to make all these awful things. And it’s gonna be a political minefield, and yada. But, what if—because the election happens like two or three weeks before this game comes out—I think there’s a release that can happen after these things. Where everybody’s like: You know what? Thanksgiving’s coming. Christmas is here. We got through yet another election cycle in America. I just want to play my video games. I don’t wanna see another ad for a politician ever again. I don’t wanna hear about any of this. I don’t wanna talk to my family about it. I don’t want any of it.

And I think that there are a lot of people whom that is going to fall onto right when this game comes out.

And I think that there’s this weird scenario where this game launches, and—let me be clear. I’m not talking about, like, Hands Across America. Like it’s not that, but like where it launches and weirdly it lands kind of softly. That it isn’t seen as all of this, all these controversies. Because people are so burnt out by the time that the election ends that they just want to like, I don’t know, play a cool video game.

Warzel: That’s a really interesting theory. I believe the game comes out November 19.

Plante: Something like that, yeah.

Warzel: There it is coming up—that’s very strategic to put it after an election cycle. It’s also very strategic to put it right before everyone, you know, takes a couple of days off and eats a bunch of turkey and the holiday season. I just saw a thing with the NBA player Steven Adams predicts that the level of play across all sports is gonna plummet after November 19. Just like: No, guys, like we’re gonna be in our hotel room, staying up too late, playing this game. We’re not gonna go to the gym. We’re not gonna practice as much. Obviously tongue-in-cheek, but I think also speaking to the idea that there is this way that it’s gonna—it may be that societal lull if people really are getting sucked into this at the kind of unprecedented level that people are expecting.

Okay, so last question here. You wrote this post on your Substack, the title of which I really like. It’s titled “How to See the Profound Beauty in Gaming’s Tiniest Details.” And in the post you talk about—it’s not just about GTA, clearly. But you talk about getting really mired in the obsessiveness of these very elaborately constructed worlds. And also just kind of delightfully fixating on some of these questions.

One of the two questions that you listed was: Do GTA 5 street signs comply with California law? And what is the oldest building in Grand Theft Auto V? I love this. I love the idea of treating these big worlds with the seriousness of the real world, and thinking about especially the in-game bureaucracy. And so, what questions are you planning to investigate in GTA 6?

Plante: That is such a great question. I should give a shout-out where it’s due. That was an interview with this YouTube creator named Any Austin, who actually goes and figures these things out. Like, What’s the oldest building in Liberty City? And then uses the design of the architecture versus real architecture books and historians to find out the answer. For me, I’m not that patient or that smart.

Ha. But the thing that I love is: How long will it take me to walk from one end of a map to the other? And that is such a great way to see the artistry of a video game like this and actually see all the stuff that is not the, like, shooting people, and the quests, and all the obligations and all the little things that they put in the game to make all the chemicals released in your brain. If you start as far as you can one end of the map of South Florida, I think maybe like in the Keys—whatever they call it in this video game—and you try to get as far north as you can, the sheer amount of stuff that you will see.

You will see obvious things that you will find in Miami. You’ll find clubs and strip clubs and more clubs and high rises and also more clubs. You’ll see all of that, right? But then you’ll also go through a bayou and be able to see crocodiles and people fishing and people jumping off of diving boards and all sorts of bonkers animations. And then you’ll get even further north, and you’ll see versions of the American South. And you’ll see kind of, this almost desiccated sun-scorched landscape from global warming. You’ll see all of this, and all the attention to detail in it, down to the plumbing that is pushing the water through these fake environments. That is what I love.

Because, again, 4,000 people worked on this for nearly a decade. When you think about how much stuff that they made, there’s a very real chance that we will not be seeing some little detail until 10, 15 years from now. If you go and watch the videos by that creator that I mentioned, there are things that he’s seeing that I don’t think anybody has ever bothered to notice because they were simply in a part of the game that there’s no reason to go to. And yet they made it anyway. And that is what I’m really looking forward to.

Warzel: What I love about that is that’s a reminder of the artistry of all this, right? And there’s gonna be this long series of—as we just detailed—controversies and takes about all of it. But at the end of the day, too, it’s a strangely living, breathing work of art and culture.

Chris, hopefully once this thing’s out in the world we could send you out there to go LARP, do some journalism in Grand Theft Auto VI and report back to us to tell us what the oldest building is. Or, I don’t know, uncover a corrupt gambling ring or something. I don’t know what, but we’re gonna put you on the case and have you back to talk about this once it’s entered the world. But thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain. I really appreciate it.

Plante: Thank you so much for having me.

Warzel: So that’s it for us here. A quick reminder: We are doing an “ask me anything” episode with me, Charlie, the host. You can ask me anything, truly. Stuff about the show, stuff about my reporting process, any burning questions about tech, social media, what I’m reading, what I’m listening to. Everything is on the table. I can’t wait to get your questions. You can shoot me an email at charlie at theatlantic.com. Put “Galaxy Brain AMA” in your subject line.

And if you liked what you saw here, it’s a reminder: New episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get in your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of all my colleagues here at The Atlantic, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That is TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

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Sign up for Over/Under, a new newsletter on the latest in prediction markets, gambling, and the evolution of everyday risk.

More than a decade ago, the anthropologist Natasha Schüll set out to describe the mindset of a certain kind of Las Vegas gambler—the type whose penchant for video poker, slots, and other solitary casino games would likely register to most people as extreme. What she found was that their pursuit wasn’t always about the money. For many of them, it was about the experience itself, which would consistently produce a strange sort of trancelike state. Drawing on her subjects’ own descriptions, Schüll called this “the zone”: a psychic frame in which “time, space, and social identity are suspended,” and risk is replaced by a temporary feeling of safety.

Many people experience something similar on today’s internet, even outside the financial realm. You might find yourself swiping on a dating app, seeking the thrill of the next match (and the next, and the next) without necessarily pursuing a real-life relationship. You might flick past a dozen Instagram Reels without really knowing why you did so. There’s a reason the concept of “endless scroll” has become a cliché. This is a tempting rubric for understanding the explosive growth of online betting too. But when I spoke with Schüll last month, she explained that for the mostly young, mostly male users of modern sportsbooks and exchanges, the pleasure of the zone is just one among many.

Online betting happens today in a few major forums. On prediction markets, users can buy contracts tied to real-world outcomes, which can then be sold and resold. Polymarket and Kalshi, recently valued at $21 billion and $22 billion respectively, are leading an industry that could see $10 trillion in annual trading volumes by 2035. Partly for regulatory reasons, these firms are adamant that the services they provide are distinct from “gambling” as it’s been traditionally understood. This is up for debate, and the classification question remains legally ambiguous in some states. (Earlier this week, The Washington Sun reported that the Federal Trade Commission has begun probing the sports-gambling industry, and that the agency’s review isn’t expected to target prediction markets.)

But conventional gambling is alive and well too. In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a decades-old law preventing most states from authorizing sports betting, paving the way for all kinds of new corporate ventures and partnerships between the world of gambling and the world of professional sports. And it was the legalization of mobile sports betting, which happened on a state-by-state basis in the aftermath of the Court’s ruling, that really popularized the practice.

Although most of the money flowing through prediction markets is being placed on sporting events, these platforms also allow bets on a huge range of other topics. (A market on the number of X posts that Elon Musk will make this month has already seen more than $350,000 in trading volume.) And these markets are constantly introducing new offerings to expand their user base. Bettors can attempt massive, multi-leg parlays, compounding both the risk and the potential rewards. On Kalshi in particular, this feature can lead to setups with absurdly low odds. The people spending time on these apps are more likely to lose money than to make money. (That’s true of both prediction markets and sports-betting platforms.) So why do they keep coming back?

About a quarter of Gen Z investors say that they treat sports betting as a viable investment strategy, rather than a sometime habit, yet the average bet placed on these platforms is typically small. New York State reported that in 2025, the average mobile sports bet was $42. Users don’t necessarily feel compelled to bet, either. Research has shown that people who live near physical casinos are more likely to become problem gamblers, and rates of addiction have climbed in the states that legalized sports betting. But the majority of sports bettors don’t report what the National Council on Problem Gambling describes as “problematic behavior.”

For young people, the rise of mobile betting has been happening against a backdrop of elevated financial risk more broadly. The number of households that invest in stocks and bonds has increased dramatically in recent decades, in part thanks to a legislative and technical evolution. IRAs didn’t exist until 1974; today, low-fee exchange-traded funds and automated brokerage apps make it easy to invest aggressively and often. Scott Baker, a finance professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies betting, told me that because young people have grown up in an environment of normalized risk, they can sometimes “misperceive” the boundaries between healthy and unhealthy risks. Putting your money in a stock-market index fund carries the expectation of some kind of return; sports betting and prediction markets tend to be much more volatile.

The economist and author Allison Schrager, who recently wrote a book about risk, put it to me another way. It’s only by taking some risks, she explained, that young men learn to distinguish between the good kinds and the bad kinds. Yet each generation seems to become more risk-averse; younger people get married later, are less inclined to change where they live, and drink and socialize at lower rates. Without the training that experience provides, young people can end up making all kinds of uninformed choices, such as turning to sports gambling and prediction markets as a long-term investment strategy.

Some commentators have attempted to marry those two trends—a profound aversion to social risk among young people, and an increased appetite for betting—under the heading of “financial nihilism.” The theory is that, as young people come to grips with the fact that many of them may never own a home, or may never escape the so-called permanent underclass of a stratified society, they figure that online betting could be their only ticket to wealth. In this telling, there’s no misperception of good and bad risk; instead, people are making impractical bets because they’re resigned to an uncertain future.

When I raised this to Schüll, she seemed skeptical of the idea that all young bettors are experiencing that kind of resignation. At least, that may not be why they start making wagers. For prediction-market “sharps”—industry lingo for traders who consider themselves savvy enough to make a consistent profit—it has to do with a literal “sense of being sharp, hoping to win and get that money,” she said. And the connection to sports can make betting a social activity. Some young bettors get involved because they want to be a “big man on campus.”

The race is on to bring more and more users into the fold. Athletes, musicians, and influencers are now being paid huge sums to give this industry a human face. In recent weeks, anyone passing through Times Square could look up to see Sydney Sweeney, nearly nude and eight stories tall, shilling for the sports-betting app Novig on a digital billboard. After the ad went up, the start-up’s valuation quadrupled. These companies know their audience, and they’re hard at work making sure that it’s impossible to look away.

Possible Futures

In every edition, I’ll share my thoughts on a few news stories I’m watching.

• The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved Cboe’s pitch for prediction-market options tied to companies’ performance metrics. Per Bloomberg, traders will be able to “wager on whether companies will exceed or fall short on specific metrics, such as how many cars Tesla Inc. might deliver or how many new iPhones Apple Inc. might sell during a quarter.” It’s part of an industry-wide effort to expand these markets in ever more granular ways.
• Most professional sports leagues are all in on prediction markets. In a twist, the NFL filed an amicus brief earlier this month in support of New Jersey regulators’ legal battle against Kalshi, asserting that states, not the federal government, should have the last word on how to regulate these companies. (This is the opposite of what most prediction-market executives seem to want.) My read is that this could be a sign that the league thinks the regulators will prevail. If the case ends up in the Supreme Court, the NFL may want to be on the winning team.
• A bipartisan majority of Americans oppose making prediction-market bets on elections, per a Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week. And three-quarters of Americans agree that using these platforms to trade on real-world outcomes counts as gambling. It’s not clear whether the courts will ultimately feel the same, but these results are a sign that the industry could be doing a better job of making its case.

When he was in charge of Apple, Steve Jobs was notorious for projecting a “reality distortion field.” That was the jokey way his employees described Jobs’s mix of charisma and bravado and his demanding management style—which would lead people to accept seemingly impossible deadlines, or to promise that they could fix unfixable problems. A malfunctioning version of the same phenomenon once surrounded Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of the failed medical start-up Theranos. She worshipped Jobs, imitating his style and unnerving confidence, even while presiding over an imploding enterprise. Her promises of a device that could affordably perform rapid medical tests with only a drop of blood were, at best, fantastical; once valued at $9 billion, Theranos collapsed into nothing. In 2022, Holmes was sentenced to 11 years in prison for defrauding her investors.

In the new documentary You Can See Everything, the comedian and television auteur Nathan Fielder steps into Holmes’s reality-distortion field. Fielder, accompanied by his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, and a small camera crew, essentially moved into Holmes’s abode for the 34 days before she reported to federal prison. The team received fairly unfettered access to her, her two small children, and her partner, the entrepreneur Billy Evans, who professes obsessional devotion to Holmes. What Fielder was expecting to find while staying at the family’s Del Mar, California, rental is unclear, but he ends up in an odd and unsettling game of cat and mouse: He’s trying to suss out whether Holmes is a master manipulator or someone so deeply convinced of her own genius that she can’t distinguish fiction from fact.

The film capturing that experience is an odyssey of human perception. Fielder knows that no matter how intimate his time with Holmes is, the minute the camera is trained on her, both he and the audience will be consumed by the question of whether she’s giving yet another performance. The movie unfolds and evolves over nearly three hours, spanning both the month ahead of Holmes’s May 2023 incarceration and the years following; throughout, Fielder pores over his interactions with not just Holmes but also the people around her, sifting for kernels of authenticity. What emerges is a transfixing portrait of a phenomenon most viewers will understand—a deep desire to empathize, even as we are horrified by what’s occurring or suspect we’re being lied to.

[Read: Manipulator vs. manipulator]

Holmes would disagree about that last part. Early on, she plainly states to Fielder that she has never told a lie, a statement so bewildering that it cracks his reliably deadpan expression. Watching him work to make sense of what she could mean by that, I thought of Jobs’s strange force of personality. Holmes has saucer-shaped, striking blue eyes, and she repeatedly meets Fielder’s squinty gaze with an unblinking stare and gauzy smile. Holmes may indeed be flatly misleading her interviewer, but she comes off as unnervingly sure that she’s being honest; she’s perhaps deceiving herself alongside the people in her orbit.

Evans is a vital part of her new facade, which has morphed from the elite-businesswoman persona of her CEO days to that of a loving mother and partner. Holmes often has a child draped over her, and she seems profoundly attached to her worshipful partner. Yet at other times, Evans gives off a controlling air. He plucks a bowl from her because she’s not stirring eggs quickly enough. When Fielder’s questions probe too close to an uncomfortable topic, Evans will show up, put his hands on Holmes’s shoulders, and softly try to shut down the conversation. The claustrophobic proximity between Fielder and his subjects comes across visually: Oppenheim shoots them all with zoom lenses, holding on their faces for a discomfitingly long time as they wince, frown, and grin. Like his co-director, he’s searching for the truth by getting as physically close as he can. Given Holmes’s past, however, the task of uncovering anything feels impossible.

Fielder is obviously uninterested in relitigating the details of Holmes’s case; she appears firmly assured that she did nothing wrong, and he knows there’s nothing he can do to tell her otherwise. Instead, he pokes at how she takes in the world, and how Evans is helping to feed her surreal self-image. It also becomes apparent that the pair are working on a new version of Theranos, chatting to investors and patent lawyers on the phone with abandon. When the harsh reality facing her—that she’ll soon have to leave her children behind—peeks through, her devastation seems genuine. But those moments then flit by as Holmes and Evans try to ponder a brighter future.

[Read: The comic who’s his own worst enemy]

The first half of the movie consists of captivating fly-on-the-wall footage. The second half, which Fielder and Oppenheim have begged critics not to spoil (and I do think it’s fun to experience it cold), establishes You Can See Everything as one of the best films of the year. That portion finds Fielder fixating on his brief time with Holmes and the untoward influence Evans had over it: He brings in other perspectives to consult, re-creates scenes to better understand them (something he’s wont to do, especially on his fascinating HBO show, The Rehearsal), and, most important, reckons with his role in telling this chapter of Holmes’s life story.

Fielder is smart enough to know that his celebrity presence further pierces the bubble around how we perceive ourselves and one another. But he quickly developed a sort of emotional intimacy with Holmes, even as he sought to remain objective. You Can See Everything is a bold title, an invitation from Holmes that she is unlikely to follow through on. Can Fielder see everything that’s going on in her head? Beyond that, can he be an effective audience surrogate so viewers can see what he sees? The true question of this documentary isn’t just whether Holmes—who has been a figure of societal fascination for more than a decade—is putting on another performance, but also whether that’s all we, the viewers, crave from Holmes anyway.