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Most of Donald Trump’s efforts to control the nation’s largest museum complex have been loud. He tried to fire a Smithsonian museum director on social media, ordered the placement of warning signs outside its American-history museum, and demanded that the museum take down a modernist sculpture he dislikes. But while this political theater plays out publicly, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget is quietly using an obscure funding power as part of its campaign to influence how the Smithsonian tells the American story.

Late last month, according to previously unreported public records, OMB included a footnote in two recent apportionments of federal funds that conditions nearly $190 million for the Smithsonian on the institution’s compliance with Trump’s March 2025 executive order accusing it of spreading “divisive narratives.” Essentially, the White House is trying to force adherence to its preferred version of history through a little-known but legally binding budget mechanism.

The fiscal-year-2027 footnote, which applies to funds carried over from last year in two of the Smithsonian’s main salaries and expenses accounts, reads:

To the extent permitted by law, amounts apportioned shall be available for obligation in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 (March 27, 2025), “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

That executive order marked the beginning of the Trump administration’s campaign to change the Smithsonian, alleging that the institution had come “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” and prohibiting “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.” The footnote does not specify how the Smithsonian should apply the order’s vague prohibition. But it is more than simply a threat: Apportionment footnotes are enforceable under the Antideficiency Act, the violation of which can carry criminal penalties. Such footnotes are one of several tactics that the Trump administration has used to try to supplant Congress’s spending power. In this case, the footnote suggests that the fight over the Smithsonian’s purpose goes much deeper than Trump’s most visible attacks.

Today, the Smithsonian is nearly two-thirds federally funded and receives an annual total appropriation of about $1 billion—a reality that would have agonized some of its earliest supporters. In a way, John Quincy Adams could be said to have foreseen what Trump is trying to do to the Smithsonian: In 1842, the former president, then serving in Congress, opposed a bill providing federal funds to the Smithsonian, writing that the new institution in Washington, D.C., should be “exclusively confined to itself and not entangled or commingled with any national establishment requiring appropriations of public money.” Even Joseph Henry, the first Smithsonian secretary, under whom the institution began receiving regular federal funding to support a museum, worried about it, writing in an 1877 letter that the museum was “liable to be brought under direct political influence.” If there is any constant in American life, Adams and Henry knew it then and Trump knows it now: Money is control.

Although the Trump administration has notched only small wins against the Smithsonian, it’s been playing money games since last year with an institution that is meant to operate independently. Starting in September of last year, OMB began adding footnotes demanding that the Smithsonian comply with two documents: the March executive order and an August letter to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch insisting that exhibition materials and other documents be turned over for a content review. Then, starting in April of this year, the footnote was revised to require the Smithsonian to follow Trump’s budget request rather than the 2026 appropriations bill Congress had passed—essentially telling the Smithsonian to operate at a $89 million deficit from what lawmakers had legislated. After several iterations, that footnote was ultimately removed on July 2. Two days later, the White House issued a scathing report on the National Museum of American History. At that point, the footnotes tactic seemed to have gone dormant. Until late last month.

It is unclear whether the footnotes have had any concrete impacts on the Smithsonian’s operations. The Smithsonian declined a request for an interview about the footnotes and the White House did not answer questions about the matter.

Representative Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat who is the ranking member on the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Smithsonian, told me she spoke with Bunch this summer about the funding issues and got the sense that the institution was waiting to push back until the footnotes really interfered with its work. The footnotes were never challenged, she said. “I think they caused enormous heartburn for the Smithsonian. Eventually, the funds were released, and so now my worry has turned to what will happen on the next round.” Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who is also the minority leader on a subcommittee tasked with Smithsonian oversight, condemned what he described as the refusal to release tens of millions of dollars earlier this year. “OMB used small footnotes to make a huge, absurd assertion that holding funding to the President’s budget level—just a number on a piece of paper—overrode the actual law,” he wrote to me. “In fact, it is illegal to withhold such funding.”

Multiple budget experts told me these footnotes are very strange. Cerin Lindgrensavage, a lawyer at the nonpartisan watchdog group Protect Democracy, has been following apportionments closely and told me that the Smithsonian footnotes were so bespoke that a tracker that her organization had made did not flag them. “It never occurred to us that somebody would put something so egregious in text,” she said. In particular, “the idea that you would resurrect the president’s request that has zero force of law from an earlier part of the appropriations process and impose it at the very end is abhorrent to the rule of law and the constitutional order as we know it,” she said.

[Read: The next change Trump has planned for the Smithsonian]

This context makes Trump’s 2027 budget request even more ominous for the Smithsonian, because it’s the lowest for the institution in years. At $961.3 million, Trump’s proposal cuts spending by about 11 percent from the previous year. The request also stresses the importance of maintaining and protecting museums on the National Mall, which is home to about half of the Smithsonian’s museums and ground zero for Trump’s pet projects in Washington.

The White House has used footnotes against other federal entities, including the National Science Foundation. Last month, a judge ruled against the Trump administration in a case about Education Department apportionments, writing that the government’s use of restrictive footnotes to force compliance with executive orders in this situation was unlawful. Remaining claims in the case, including those related to OMB using apportionments to withhold money from specific programs the administration doesn’t like, are pending. (Lindgrensavage is one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers.)

Little attention has been paid to these behind-the-scenes tensions at the Smithsonian, except for when The Washington Sun reported on some of the footnotes earlier this year. The White House has justified its broader campaign by claiming that the Smithsonian presents an overly negative version of U.S. history and that its leadership has a political agenda. Historians have decried the Trump administration’s attempt to influence the institution, and Democratic lawmakers have introduced legislation to protect the Smithsonian’s independence. Smithsonian leadership has occasionally pushed back against the administration’s wider claims, saying its work is nonpartisan and rooted in scholarship. But the face-off coincides with an ongoing debate over how to tell American history. Should it be one overarching narrative or comprise many smaller, varied perspectives? Should it focus on national unity or diversity? These questions are especially top of mind at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which is widely seen as measured in its work and has followed larger curatorial and academic trends of widening the historical narrative to include more groups while emphasizing the complexities of the American story.

Whatever the approach, history at the Smithsonian has been the responsibility of curators, not presidents. But the Smithsonian is in a particularly vulnerable period. Bunch will retire from his post at the end of the year. Citizen members keep dropping off the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents when their terms expire, and their seats are going unfilled, reportedly because the White House is trying to influence the new picks, The New York Times wrote this summer. Museum-director positions are open across the institution too—last week, the director of the National Museum of Natural History announced that he is stepping down—adding to a number of major vacancies. For a president seeking control, a power vacuum and a fraying institution could represent an opportunity.

One staffer who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak on the record told me after Bunch’s retirement announcement that some employees worried that the president might attempt to appoint a secretary, just as he “fired” National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet in a Truth Social post last year. (The Smithsonian said Trump did not have the authority to do that, but she ultimately stepped down anyway). “I think you’d have to really stick your head in the sand to not feel some level of anxiety around this,” the staffer said. In a sense, the White House’s efforts have already worked simply by placing an entire museum system on edge.

It has a lot to lose. At the Smithsonian, private money goes toward the glossier endeavors, such as groundbreaking exhibitions and new facilities, while public money is typically used for basic needs, such as operations, conservation of national collections, and maintenance. Public funding keeps the doors open, which is why the institution’s unusual status as a private-public entity is most visible when it has to close during a government shutdown, as happened last year.

The footnote tactic exploits that vulnerability. Although the apportionment process was designed to help prevent entities receiving federal dollars from overspending, it is “not an invitation to the Office of Management and Budget to micromanage the federal government,” Lindgrensavage said. The Trump administration has tested the limits of its apportionment authority. More recently, the president has called for a sweeping cancellation of about $810 million in federal dollars, much of it coming out of resources for “refugees, asylees, and other non-citizens,” according to a White House memo. Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, posted on X that OMB was trying “to undermine Congress’s Constitutional power of the purse.”

Budgeting experts stressed to me that every line of a footnote is intentional and has a story behind it. In the Smithsonian’s case, the footnotes go into very specific detail. In the version of the footnote that OMB added this spring, the office proposed imposing travel restrictions on the Smithsonian, with exceptions for two projects that Trump is fond of: the semiquincentennial festivities and the Arabian leopards at the National Zoo (which are supported by a gift from Saudi Arabia). In 1839, Adams wrote that he feared a Smithsonian bequest might be “squandered upon cormorants,” referring to voracious birds. Adams was prescient in his anxieties about the Smithsonian’s financial entanglements; he just had the wrong animal. Instead, the Smithsonian’s main antagonist is a devotee of big cats.

In a world on edge still from the last pandemic, rumors of a deadly disease that could have escaped from a lab can cause some understandable distress—however speculative they might be. Late last week, reports emerged that a woman who died in a Siberian hospital may have contracted plague, or even that she had seeded a plague outbreak. The case almost immediately set off rounds of hurried speculation within Russia and abroad; officials have shared few details, inspiring elaborate theories about what killed the woman, who worked in a plague-research facility. The fervor around the case escalated on Sunday, when Axios reported that the State Department was monitoring a “suspected plague outbreak” in Russia.

So far, the evidence that the death was caused by plague or something worse is thin, in part because Russian authorities—who have a poor reputation for transparency about biosecurity—have shared few clarifications. But scientists have a good understanding of how plague works. And if the lab worker did contract plague, that is no cause for international panic.

Here’s what is actually known. Sometime in the past week, a woman who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, not far from the Mongolian border, died of “pneumonia of an unknown cause,” Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s agency for consumer protection and public health, said Sunday. Government officials have not confirmed her identity, but Russian media have reported that the woman was Daria Shipilova, a 27- or 28-year-old technician at the lab. A local official said that the hospital where she was treated has been placed under quarantine; local media, meanwhile, reported that several hospitals were under quarantine. And Igor Kobzev, the governor of the Irkutsk region, said in a statement on Friday that other people—local media later reported the number as 200—may have been in contact with a resident who contracted an “especially dangerous infection,” and were placed under medical observation. He did not identify the resident as Shipilova or say that the person had died. The public-health agency told state media that “no micro-organisms linked to her professional activity were identified in the patient’s samples” and that no contacts have experienced “health changes related to infectious pathology.” Meanwhile, an aluminum factory in the same town as the laboratory imposed a mask mandate for its more than 2,000 employees, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Plague might sound medieval, but it’s endemic among animals in many parts of the world today. Although Russia hasn’t reported any plague cases to the WHO since at least 2018, Mongolia has. An average of seven cases are recorded in the United States every year, typically from a flea bite or handling infected animals. More than 80 percent of U.S. cases are the bubonic form of the disease, which presents with swollen, pus-filled lymph nodes. Two other main forms of plague, all caused by the same bacterium, are also occasionally reported around the world: septicemic, which infects the blood, and pneumonic, which infects the lungs. Because the lab worker died of pneumonia, speculation that she’d died from plague centered on this last form.

Pneumonic plague is the sole form of the disease that can transmit between humans, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly likely to spread. David Wagner, the executive director of Northern Arizona University’s Pathogen and Microbiome Institute, told me that the respiratory droplets that can spread pneumonic plague—not to be confused with the tinier aerosols that can spread diseases such as flu and COVID—are only released during a cough or sneeze and only travel about three to six feet. “You have to be in very close proximity to someone with pneumonic plague to contract it from them,” he said.

Because transmission between humans is relatively difficult, the Russian government’s response to the mystery death from pneumonia—placing 200 people under medical observation—is “really incongruent with what you would expect for plague,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Daniel Jernigan, the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told me that response was “above and beyond” what is typically required for plague cases. Perhaps, he said, the Russian authorities acted out of an abundance of caution; per Reuters, a local official recently said that most of the hospital workers who had been placed under quarantine have already been released.

Even if Shipilova did die of plague, fears of a larger outbreak are probably moot by now. Plague has an incubation period of only one to seven days, so anyone Shipilova might have exposed would have come down with symptoms by now, Jernigan said. Russian authorities have said that no one under medical observation has tested positive for plague. Generally speaking, the chances of a large outbreak of plague are slim. “Once you have an accurate diagnosis, it’s readily treated with multiple types of antibiotics, which is why we don’t have massive plague outbreaks and pandemics anymore,” Wagner said.

Very quickly, though, some scientists, security experts, and media outlets began speculating that whatever killed Shipilova was not traditional pneumonic plague, but a dangerous pathogen that had been somehow altered in the lab. The fear is that the pathogen could be resistant to antibiotics or other treatments, making it harder to prevent an outbreak. No evidence so far suggests that’s true or that the Irkutsk lab was modifying plague bacteria to make it more dangerous. Still, the host of unanswered questions surrounding this case has paved the way for conjectures about links to biological weapons and for conspiracy thinking about government collusion and vaccine companies set to profit off a plague pandemic.

Some Russian media outlets reported—and international outlets repeated—that the woman contracted plague after she broke a test tube containing a sample of the disease. (If that was the case, Adalja said, the lab should have followed the standard procedure of prescribing antibiotics immediately after exposure, which has not been reported.) And in the past, the Russian government has worked on bioterrorist agents and hidden the true cause of disease outbreaks. For example, Soviet officials attributed a 1979 anthrax outbreak that killed at least 64 people to contaminated meat. More than a decade later, President Boris Yeltsin admitted that the anthrax had come from a military biological-weapons facility.

The war in Ukraine has increased speculation about planned biological threats. In 2022, the Russian military began refurbishing a Soviet-era laboratory to handle deadly pathogens such as Ebola viruses, The Washington Post reported. “There’s just a standard lack of transparency from the Russian government that adds to the vacuum of information,” Adalja said.

The U.S. government, for its part, has given inconsistent signals about whether it believes that the incident has wider implications. Along with the State Department, the CDC and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response are reportedly working to learn more about the death. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio downplayed the possibility of danger to reporters yesterday, saying, “I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on it.” Today, he called on Russia to be more transparent and share more information. President Trump has offered his sympathies to Russia and said that the U.S. will offer help, though he didn’t specify what form that would take. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)

The strong public reaction to the death in Siberia can likely be attributed to some surface-level similarities to the early days of the coronavirus pandemic—a mysterious respiratory disease, rumors of a lab leak, an initial response being handled by a secretive government. Still, the experts I spoke with were adamant that pneumonic plague would not be another COVID-19. Plague may not be totally relegated to the history books, but a major outbreak is low on the list of real threats.

At a dive bar deep in coal country, Derek Zoolander, male model, sits with his father and brothers after they’ve spent a long day in the mines. An ad for the beauty company Aveda comes on the TV—a spot that, as luck would have it, features Derek at his male-modeliest: hair gelled, torso nude, skin shimmering with body glitter. He also has a tail, a fishy pastel-green appendage that has been grafted onto his lower extremities via a protean form of CGI. “Moisture is the essence of wetness,” the ad’s narrator intones, as Derek (played by Ben Stiller) flaps around in an unconvincing ocean. “And wetness is the essence of beauty.”

Surf and turf, but make it fashion: The joke pretty much delivers itself. But it also functions, in Zoolander, as a plot device. As the ad plays, Derek seems thrilled: Finally, his family will see him. Finally, maybe, they’ll be proud.

Instead, they’re ashamed. Derek’s father (a steely Jon Voight) professes his relief that his wife, having died, never had to “see her son as a mermaid.”

The line is harsh—it might be the most piercing in the film—but if there’s one thing viewers learn about Derek Zoolander, it’s that he will, like a phoenix with a fish tail, persevere. Out of the awkward silence, inspirational music begins to swell. “Mer-man,” Derek corrects his father, the music growing louder around him. “Mer-MAN!”

If Zoolander is a bit like its namesake—absurdly farcical, endlessly watchable—Stiller’s chimeric turn helps explain why. When the film premiered 25 years ago, it had everything: an all-star cast (Owen Wilson as Derek’s nemesis, Hansel; Will Ferrell as the arch-villain; David Duchovny as the most celebrated hand model of all time), a gonzo plot (male models brainwashed to serve as assassins!), and a warm human heart. But it also had terrible timing. It debuted in theaters in late September of 2001. Its early earnings, in that grim moment, were tepid, its reviews decidedly bad. (Roger Ebert, so often a champion of cinematic absurdity, met Derek’s assorted contortions with a signature pose of his own: a thumb turned emphatically down.)

But Zoolander, in the years afterward, gradually ascended to filmdom’s version of haute couture: It became a cult classic, beloved for both its ostentatious idiocy and its insistence that dim-wittedness, seen from the right angle, can be wise. The film does more than merely hold up. Today—with its hero’s insistence that he can vamp to the camera, covered in body glitter, and still be a (mer)man—it looks downright prescient.

[Adam Serwer: The masculinity scam]

Zoolander arrived on the scene as the gender swap, that old cinematic trope, was losing its last traces of subversion. The film did not, on its face, deploy the gimmick; Derek is no Tootsie and certainly no Mrs. Doubtfire. But he gender-bends all the same. Derek is two things at once. As a model, he is a man doing work traditionally done by a woman—a guy whose job is to be gazed at and otherwise lucratively objectified. As a male model, though, he is doing a version of what his father and brothers do every day in the coal mines: asserting, and then typifying, an extremely legible version of manliness. The gender-bending is in one way Zoolander’s most basic joke. But it is also a provocation. Derek takes an insult traditionally lobbed at women—bimbo—and twists it around into a cherished and revealing archetype: the himbo.

The bimbo, from her earliest days, was most directly an answer to the vixen and the femme fatale. She enticed, yes, but she never threatened. She may have been voluptuous (she almost definitely was) but she was also fundamentally flat. The bimbo’s vacuity functions as an invitation, effectively, to the people who see her: Go ahead and look. Go ahead and fantasize. Go ahead and laugh. It turns a three-dimensional person into a two-dimensional image and then, in an elegant little trick, insists that she, herself, is responsible for the flattening. The bimbo is silly and empty and treated accordingly. Why consider the person behind the appearance when, the stereotype insists, there is none?

The himbo operates similarly. His attractiveness—his never-misses-leg-day show of masculinity—is his blessing and his curse. It elevates him as someone to be looked at, and it demeans him as something to be looked at. And Derek is a himbo in Platonic form. He is demeaned in terms usually reserved for women. He is a male model caught in the male gaze. Gender swapping can be a gimmick, but it can also offer insights. And as Derek tries bimbohood on for size, he demonstrates how silly the idea has always been.

Himbohood makes Derek mockable. But it also makes him relatable. It is one of the primary sources of his appeal. Derek is not, on the face of things, an obvious hero. He can be superficial (learning that his love interest was heavy in her youth, he responds with a knee-jerk “ew”). He can be vain (at the VH1 Fashion Awards, unable to fathom not being named Male Model of the Year, he barrels to the stage, so self-absorbed that he didn’t hear Hansel’s name being called). He is the kind of guy who will wear white to a funeral and use the eulogy as an opportunity to talk about himself—and then insist that eulogy is pronounced “you-goog-ly.”

But his himbohood redeems him. It is what allows him to work as Zoolander’s protagonist—and to be seen, in his lighthearted way, as worthy of celebration. A himbo’s charm lies in the discrepancy between what he might be and what he is: Big and burly, he could treat manliness as something to be wielded. But he is too gentle for that, too dim-witted, too pure. He is a hold-harmless clause in human form. And Derek, being exceptionally burly and exceptionally dim, is more reassuring than most. Even when he is brainwashed into violence, he is incapable of carrying it out.

That may be, for many of the men in Derek’s orbit—including his coal-miner father—a profound failing. But those men, in the end, are Zoolander’s true villains. And the tensions Derek lives out, as he makes his journey from successful model to failed model to brainwashed model, bring an avant-garde edge to the film’s absurdities.

Zoolander is, like its star, always more than it seems. It is a comedy that’s also a spy drama and a political thriller and a fast-paced action-adventure. (Its plot, Stiller has said, was inspired by The Manchurian Candidate; he filled it with cheeky callbacks to James Bond.) It throws on different genres like interchangeable outerwear. When Derek returns to his hill-country hometown, Zoolander briefly becomes a gritty—and exaggeratedly sooty—portrait of working-class life. A famous sequence pitting Derek and Hansel against each other in a “walk-off” becomes a boxing drama complete with a climactic prizefight, its two champions battling before a rabid crowd.

Fighter, killer, miner, spy: You might notice that each figure is distinctly, and stereotypically, masculine. Each identity is an option for Derek. And each is one he rejects. Maybe he’ll join his father and brothers in the mines. Maybe he’ll become an assassin. Maybe he’ll be conscripted into someone else’s war. None of that happens, of course, and only partly because Derek is the kind of guy who shows up to the mines clad in a snakeskin leisure suit. Those traditional ways of being manly are not his way of being manly. His version of masculinity is louder, and quieter. It is softer. It is inflected with femininity. It is a hybrid beast frolicking in the water with liquid ease—a mer-man.

[Conor Friedersdorf: What do ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ even mean now?]

The gender swap, in its Y2K format, considered the moment’s anxieties—the sexual revolution, its battles prolonged into cold war—but also its possibilities. The man as the nurturing nanny, the woman as the steely commando (think G.I. Jane) were gimmicks, but ones that invited people to imagine old binaries in new ways. Zoolander did the same but, amid all the farce, remarkably subtly. The film gave us a man who moved through the world like a woman: watched, judged, underestimated, misunderstood.

That Derek himself is too clueless to see those ironies makes him only more endearing.  He is a male model worth emulating precisely because he would never see “male” as superior to anything else. His vacuity amounts to innocence—and his innocence amounts to enlightenment. Little wonder, then, that pop culture now teems with himbos: guys whose looks say “leading man” and whose actions say “useful idiot.” Andy in Parks and Recreation, Jason in The Good Place, the assorted magicians of Magic Mike—they and their many counterparts are also, in their own way, male models: men who, at a time when masculinity is so often talked about as a problem to be solved, hint at some kind of solution. They aren’t anxious about their masculinity. They aren’t scared of women. They are men who offer comic relief—and relief of a much broader sort.

One of the puzzling things about the online sports-betting boom that has swept through American culture over the past decade is the relative slowness of religious leaders to articulate a moral case against the vice.

In the past, churches were among the leading voices warning against gambling. Jerry Falwell denounced it as a sinful habit that preyed on the poor and left “little children” to pay the price. In The Atlantic’s December 1907 issue, a Unitarian minister made the case against “speculation.” “The long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling,” Charles F. Dole wrote. “It is a dangerous or unsocial form of excitement; it hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels, tempts men to self-destruction.”

But in recent years, as state legislatures have raced to legalize sports betting and gambling ads have flooded the airwaves and millions of young men have begun walking around with a casino in their pocket, spiritual leaders have been relatively muted.

Jonathan D. Cohen, a researcher who studies gambling policy, noted recently that the National Association of Evangelicals, which in 1985 called gambling and lotteries “socially, morally and economically destructive,” has barely addressed the new betting boom. Since 2018, the group’s official statements have mentioned gambling only once, as one item in a long list of “social evils” threatening the American family.

Why the silence? Perhaps the speed at which online gambling has spread simply caught religious leaders flat-footed. And perhaps some are wary of alienating their flock, among whom gambling has become normalized.

[Read: A technology for a low-trust society]

Whatever the reason, the result was predictable. In 2022, 71 percent of Americans said gambling was morally acceptable, the highest share Gallup had recorded since it began regularly asking the question in 2003.

I’ve noticed this anecdotally in my own faith tradition. While speaking on Utah’s college campuses about the explosion of online sports betting, I’ve been struck by how many young Mormon men have followed their peers onto DraftKings and PolyMarket with little consideration of the ethical or spiritual implications. Many of the students I met don’t think about gambling in moral terms at all; some don’t even consider sports betting or prediction markets to be gambling.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has officially condemned gambling since its earliest years. Throughout the 20th century, prophets and apostles preached against the spiritually corrosive vice, and the Church encouraged members to oppose pro-gambling ballot initiatives. But the last time a senior Church leader addressed gambling at its General Conference—the Church’s semiannual global broadcast and most prominent pulpit—was in 2005. The long silence from the conference pulpit may have allowed some members to convince themselves that the Church had softened its stance—or that their Kalshi habit was not a religious issue at all.

The silence ended this past Saturday, when President D. Todd Christofferson, a senior leader in the Church’s highest governing body, used his General Conference address to condemn gambling. His remarks were well researched: He recited various statistics about the industry’s expansion, and spelled out the ruinous social consequences. He detailed the popular forms of online gambling and even offered a quick survey of the bets you can make on prediction markets—including the timing of the Second Coming. (“Where do you go to collect on that bet?” he wondered.)

But then Christofferson arrived at the real point of his talk.

“For us as Latter-day Saints, overarching all other concerns is the fact that gambling is morally wrong,” he said. “Gambling is built on the desire to obtain something for nothing. Its structure requires that any gain comes at others’ expense. It’s hard to reconcile that with the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.” He went on to say that Christians should be wise stewards of their God-given resources, and that “gambling produces nothing of value and enriches only its purveyors.”

He also addressed those in his audience who believe that they can gamble casually without becoming addicted. “Since your recreational gambling may lead a weaker brother or sister into temptation, just don’t do it,” Christofferson said. “Every soul is precious.”

Other Christian leaders have also recently become more outspoken about the issue. Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention formally condemned sports betting, and in February, leaders in the Assemblies of God, a large Pentecostal denomination with nearly 3 million adherents in the United States, warned that sports betting “erodes Christian character.”

[Read: An inflection point for prediction markets]

The sports-betting industry has begun to draw more scrutiny in the mainstream media too. Last month, The New York Times reported that DraftKings had developed an AI model to identify users most likely to lose money so that it could target them with promotions. When employees then developed a model that would have assigned “risk scores” based on users’ likelihood to develop compulsive behaviors, the company reportedly sidelined it. Meanwhile, an investigative reporter at ProPublica posed as a problem gambler on DraftKings to see how the company—which likes to boast about its “responsible gaming” safeguards—would react. He was barraged with promotions and invited to a VIP program.

Journalism like that can raise public awareness, shape legislation, and even inform sermons. (My own contribution to the genre—The Atlantic’s April cover story—was quoted in Christofferson’s talk, though he graciously referred to me as a “prominent journalist” instead of a “degenerate gambler,” my editors’ preferred descriptor.)

But journalists are not moral leaders. Neither are legislators or regulators. Those who are alarmed by the runaway gambling industry, and the way that it’s preying on America’s young men, should welcome an explicitly moral case against gambling, whether or not they share the religious beliefs of those articulating it. Until Congress decides to get involved, sermons like Christofferson’s might be among the few things that can move the needle.

On Saturday afternoon, several friends sent me the same Instagram video. It showed a pair of young Mormon men comically collapsing to the ground in devastation as they watched Christofferson’s talk on TV. The caption implied grudging repentance: “We had a good run, boys.”

Less than 50 years ago, the first child conceived by in vitro fertilization was delivered in Oldham, England. Louise Brown was heralded as a medical marvel—not only for her parents, who had struggled to conceive for a decade, but also for the world. “At 11:47 pm, on July 25th 1978,” the British paper The Observer declared, “hope was born.”

Thirteen million “test-tube babies” later, Brown is still too young to qualify for social-security benefits, and IVF has gone from science fiction to a household acronym. It accounts for almost one in 36 births in the United States, according to some estimates. In the meantime, another fertility treatment has become much more common: From 2014 to 2024, the number of egg-freezing procedures per year went from 6,000 to 39,000, a sixfold increase. By most obvious standards, the assisted-reproduction industry is thriving. It has allowed countless single people, same-sex partners, and couples dealing with infertility to become parents. It also happens to be worth tens of billions of dollars.

So I was particularly struck by a couple of statistics from this year’s “Singles in America” study, an annual survey of roughly 5,000 people conducted by the Kinsey Institute, in partnership with the dating company Match: From 2017 to this year, the share of respondents who said they would be willing to consider IVF fell by more than half, from 44 to 18 percent. Openness to egg freezing dropped from 33 to 17 percent. Those are steep declines, especially in a time when more people are choosing to become single parents, celebrities have shared their own IVF or egg-freezing stories, and use among the general public keeps increasing. (Singles’ interest in adoption also plummeted, the Kinsey researchers found—but actual adoption rates, too, have declined.)

The reasons are impossible to name with certainty. But while thousands of Americans are relying on fertility treatments, it may be that millions of others simply want to believe that they’ll never have to.

That participants have cooled on alternative ways to have children could reflect that Americans have, in fact, cooled on having children in general. In the 2017 “Singles in America” poll, 80 percent of respondents younger than 40 said they felt it was important to find a partner who wanted to have kids; this year, only about 38 percent of singles ages 18 to 49 reported wanting children. Half of all participants said financial stability (or lack thereof) is a major factor in that decision. If you’re unsure about parenthood—whether you desire it or whether you can afford it—arduous and expensive fertility treatments might not seem worthwhile. In the United States, a single cycle of egg freezing typically costs about $10,000 to $20,000, including necessary medications; the average cost of IVF is commonly more than $20,000 per cycle. Both processes require the patient to inject hormones, which can cause bloating, bruising, and mood swings, and then to undergo sedation for egg retrieval. They require a life-disrupting amount of time, with no guarantee that they’ll work.

Recent revelations about the fertility industry might be discouraging even to people who do feel sure they want kids. When I spoke with Justin Garcia, the Kinsey Institute’s executive director and the author of the book The Intimate Animal, he mentioned some high-profile cases of “fertility fraud”—including a doctor in Indiana, the home state of the Kinsey Institute, who secretly used his own sperm to father more than 90 kids. “People locally are just totally, totally freaked out by the idea,” he said. And more routine risks and limitations can spook potential customers too. One buzzy 2025 UCLA study found that less than 6 percent of women who froze their eggs from 2014 to 2016 had used them five to seven years later. (“That’s not a reason to not do it,” Garcia said. “It’s an insurance policy.”)

Stark figures have also been reported for IVF and intrauterine insemination, or IUI, a similar procedure; according to a 2022 CDC report, only about 40 percent of embryo transfers result in live births for women ages 35 to 37, and the chances drop precipitously at older ages. My Instagram feed is filled with women posting about their harrowing fertility sagas: years of doctor’s appointments, needles, aches, getting excited about embryos only to grieve when yet another ceases to develop. For viewers muddling through similar experiences, I’m sure, those videos could be comforting. For people like me, imagining someday being in that position, they’re terrifying.

[Read: America’s IVF failure]

Skepticism toward fertility treatments is creeping in at a time when many Americans, on the left and the right, are already suspicious of medicine and science—and particularly wary about taking hormones. The New York Times reported last year that some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA adherents in the White House are exploring ways to fund “fertility awareness” education: a strategy that involves abstinence from sex during fertile windows, rather than using hormonal methods such as the pill or an IUD, both of which they claim (without solid evidence) can harm one’s health and alter their personality. Alex Clark, who hosts the popular show Culture Apothecary (what she calls a “wellness podcast for cuteservatives”), has referred to hormonal birth control as “poison.” The 2021 documentary The Business of Birth Control, produced by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein, “traces the feminist movement to investigate and expose the pill’s risks alongside the racist legacy of hormonal contraception,” according to its website. (Critics accused it of making dubious claims, including one talking head’s plea to “kill the pill before it kills you.” Lake and Epstein told Rolling Stone that they’re simply trying to “empower people to make informed decisions.”) In 2025, when La Trobe University public-health researchers analyzed 100 TikTok videos about contraception, they found that more than half rejected hormonal methods outright. The videos were riddled with misinformation.

Part of what makes such content alluring can be the idea of returning to what’s “natural”—and fertility treatments clash with that value in every possible way. They’re technologies that allow people to extend childbearing years, or to have biological children when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. But perhaps just as important: They can lead to nontraditional families, which aren’t exactly romanticized by young people at the moment.

On the contrary, Gen Z survey respondents report relatively high levels of support for strict gender roles and old conventions: women staying home and caregiving, for instance, while men work. Garcia has observed this “nostalgia trap,” as he called it, among students where he teaches at Indiana University. Many of them are planning to find a straight relationship and marry young. They tell him that they want to have kids while they’re “still fertile,” he said, “the quote-unquote natural way.” He doesn’t think they realize how impossible a life course is to control. Maybe they’ll marry their college sweetheart and try for kids right after graduating, only to find that they can’t get pregnant. Or maybe they’ll find themselves single at 35, afraid they’ll miss the chance to become a parent. IVF and egg freezing might seem worth considering after all.

[Read: America’s biggest dating company is betting on trad values]

I wondered whether this attitude shift might foreshadow a dramatic drop in assisted-reproduction rates—but Garcia said that would surprise him. Prominent Republican leaders have criticized both IVF and egg freezing, and IVF in particular has been targeted by anti-abortion activists who oppose the discarding of embryos (which they argue are living beings). And yet, most Americans seem to support those procedures in theory. In a 2024 Pew Research Center poll, only 8 percent of participants said they were against IVF. The popular sentiment is less wrong for you and more not right for me. But ultimately, “you don’t know until you know,” Garcia said. “Until you’re in a situation where you’re in a doctor’s office and saying, We’ve been trying for a year. And what’s the next step?”

Perhaps the “Singles in America” result never showed a true rejection of any treatment or type of family. More than anything, it might just reveal a failure of imagination.

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The scenario is right out of a Stephen King novel: At a medical lab stashed away in a remote Siberian city, a pretty young technician was exposed to a deadly pathogen. She died, the lab went into lockdown, and soon rumors emerged that the Russian security services were on the scene. Now the world waits to see whether some monstrous microbe is going to make its way out of Russia’s forests.

What’s going on in Russia is bad, but—at least so far—not that bad. We know that someone working at a research institute that studies various forms of plague has died of pneumonia, which suggests that she mishandled a sample of pneumonic plague. That’s about it. Medical observers are rightly concerned: Pneumonic plague is nasty stuff. But it’s also not some unknown bug; a few hundred cases appear every year, and it is easily cured with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly enough. Counterintuitively, the pathogen’s deadliness limits the disease’s ability to spread: It kills its victims before they can infect too many other people. (ln this case, the remote location of the Russian facility might also help to contain any outbreak.)

Nevertheless, the situation in Siberia raises unsettling questions, and international experts, along with U.S. diplomats, are asking for more transparency. What kind of experiments are being conducted at this lab—the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East—and are they possibly related to biological warfare? Did the researcher die of a known variant of the pneumonic plague, or some new, deadlier strain? Why are the Russian authorities reportedly quarantining hundreds of people?

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

Don’t expect honest answers from the Russians about any of this. The main source of information about this incident has been Russia’s Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare, known by an abbreviation, Rospotrebnadzor (“ras-pah-treb-nah-dzor”). The name is rather anodyne, but the many duties of this organization include supervision of some of Russia’s biological-research institutes. For years it was part of the Russian Ministry of Health, but in 2012 it was reassigned and now reports directly to the Russian central government, elevating its importance and its broader mandate to act as Russia’s main overseer of epidemiological research.

Not that Rospotrebnadzor has been all that helpful in making sense of the crisis in Irkutsk. Regarding the death of Darya Shipilova, the lab worker, for example, it said: “No micro-organisms associated with the employee’s professional duties were detected in samples taken from the patient,” a careful construction that says almost nothing. What were the employee’s professional duties? What organisms were detected? Shipilova died of something; what was it?

Rospotrebnadzor said in an official statement that the woman died of “pneumonia of unknown cause,” but the region’s governor, Igor Kobzev, might have let the cat out of the bag when he revealed that Anna Popova, the head of Rospotrebnadzor, traveled to Irkutsk last week. CNN reports that Kobzev posted on Telegram that she came to town for an “extraordinary meeting of the regional sanitary and anti-epidemic commission,” in connection with “a suspected case of a regional resident with a particularly dangerous infection.”

A U.S. State Department spokesperson over the weekend encouraged “Russian authorities to share accurate information quickly and openly.” Good luck with that. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov closed the noninformation loop with this helpful advice: “The lead agency with expertise in this area is Rospotrebnadzor. People should rely on its official statements and disregard rumors, speculation, and so on.”

One innocent explanation is that the Irkutsk institute is trying to come up with better ways to prevent plague, and someone mishandled dangerous material—and the Russians, with their mania for secrecy, are making it all seem more ominous than necessary by clamping down on any further information. But maybe something more ominous is, in fact, going on. Dr. Ashish Jha, the former dean of Brown University’s school of public health and a former member of the Biden administration’s COVID-response team, pointed out in a thread on X on Sunday that “Russia is well known to have an active military biological weapons program.” He additionally noted reports (so far unconfirmed) that units of the Russian security services have been escorting vehicles to local hospitals.

Moscow has a long history with biological-weapons research going back to the Cold War. The United States unilaterally renounced research into biological-warfare agents back in 1969; the Soviets signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, but in reality they never abandoned such programs. The Russians claimed in 1992 to have ended those efforts, but they are currently expanding a sizable facility that had once been used for biological-warfare research. (The Russian Ministry of Defense, predictably, has no comment on these construction activities.)

If the Irkutsk incident turns out to be the result of an accident in a Russian biological-warfare lab, it won’t be the first time. Back in 1979, the Soviet Union tried desperately to cover up an outbreak of anthrax in a city near the Ural Mountains, Sverdlovsk (now called Yekaterinburg). They nearly got away with it.

In the fall of 1979 and early 1980, a Russian-language émigré newspaper based in what was then West Germany ran reports about some kind of germ-related disaster in the Urals after an explosion at a lab. Evidence that dribbled in from Sverdlovsk over time, including the fact that the Soviet minister of defense personally visited the city, suggested that something big had indeed gone down. Descriptions of the illness spreading through the area pointed to anthrax, and in the early ’80s, the Americans—this was during the Cold War, after all—loudly accused the Soviets of working on an anthrax weapon.

[Read: How DNA evidence confirmed a Soviet cover-up of an anthrax accident]

The Soviets pretended to be deeply offended at such an accusation, and explained that the deaths and illnesses were the result of people eating tainted meat—it was all just a simple case of food poisoning. (After all, what nation doesn’t blockade roads in a major city and send their military chief to check on some locals eating bad beef?) The Soviet explanation was hooey, of course; a defector who worked in Soviet bioweapons programs, Ken Alibek, later theorized that the lab in Sverdlovsk making the anthrax had neglected to replace a filter and had ended up venting spores into the area.

Thirteen years would pass after the outbreak before anyone in Moscow admitted the truth. In 1992, then–Russian President Boris Yeltsin told the Americans that Soviet biowarfare experts had indeed been doing anthrax research, and that these experts had repeatedly lied to him about the 1979 event. The official death toll from the Sverdlovsk accident stands at 68, but no one will ever know the true numbers: The KGB at the time immediately seized and destroyed important evidence, including medical records. One might think the Soviets were chastened by this experience, but one would be wrong: After the Sverdlovsk facility was closed, the Soviets built another one in Kazakhstan, where they reportedly worked on strains of anthrax even more virulent than the stuff released in Sverdlovsk.

If something terrible has happened in Irkutsk, don’t count on the Russians coming clean about it anytime soon. Russia is led by an aggressive dictator who has been making war in Europe for four years, and Moscow’s incomplete explanations about what’s happening in Siberia cannot be trusted. The possibility that the Russians are working on existentially dangerous biological weapons is one more challenge to American—and global—security.

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By now, people who have been paying close attention to this year’s midterm elections have a pretty good idea of the state of play: Democrats hope to gain four seats in the Senate and three seats in the House to flip both chambers and have more power to check President Trump’s policy agenda. Republicans, fearing a rout amid the Iran war and its impact on Americans’ lives back home, are hoping to hold on where they can.

But the national picture tells only part of the story. When reporters talk about “what voters want,” they are really talking about individuals living lives in different contexts. Every House and Senate race has a unique flavor depending on local problems and which candidate voters believe can help solve them.

This week on Radio Atlantic, my colleagues Russell Berman and David Graham join me to zoom in on the races they are paying special attention to as November approaches—for their national implications this time around, and for 2028 and beyond.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Russell Berman: The map has become so wide for Democrats, and this is the big surprise of the year right now, as we’re talking in early October. It’s possible that Democrats could lose Michigan and still win the Senate. They have a chance in other red states—Texas, Alaska, even Kansas seems to be very close and competitive right now.

Adam Harris: Control over the House and Senate hangs in the balance of this upcoming midterm election. Republicans hope to retain thin majorities in both chambers. But Democrats are hoping to gain four seats in the Senate and three in the House of Representatives, control Congress, and curb President Trump’s power in his final two years. That’s the big picture, but it doesn’t necessarily offer the texture of why Democrats believe they can win back power. The national trends give some indication; Democrats are focusing their message on salient issues: the price of gasoline and household items—often boiled down to the catchall of affordability—and the president’s sinking approval ratings in the shadow of the war in Iran. But national trends can only explain so much.

This is Radio Atlantic, I’m Adam Harris, and this week, my colleagues, Atlantic staff writers Russell Berman and David Graham, join me to share the five races they are following most closely this midterm cycle. We’ll discuss why they’re following these contests—beyond the fact that the polls say the races are close—and what they’ll be looking out for in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Let’s get to questions. David, Russell, thank you so much for joining me today.

Russell Berman: Great to be here.

David Graham: My pleasure.

Harris: So over the weekend we asked you to think about the five most interesting races to you, and we appreciate your doing so. And today, we’re gonna work through those lists together. We asked you not to share your lists with each other, so everybody’s coming to this fresh. David, I’m going to go to you first. What’s the first race that you want to talk about that you think is important and why?

Graham: Let’s talk about the Maine Senate race, which is maybe one that people will be familiar with, but I think one that is just really important and worth talking about. This is where Susan Collins, the longtime Republican incumbent, is running for another term. And she is, after a raucous primary and then withdrawal by Graham Platner, facing off against Troy Jackson, who is another sort of populist Democrat in, I think, an interesting test of both national currents. And also, Maine is a weird state politically, and I think we’re gonna see how that plays out in this race.

Harris: Yeah, Russell, I saw you nodding as well. It seems that Maine was on your list too.

Berman: Bingo! That was my first one as well. This one should be one—on paper, it should be an easy one, or maybe the easiest, for the Democrats to flip. It is by far the bluest state of the Senate seats where Republicans have an incumbent on the ballot.

But as David mentioned, Susan Collins has become a white whale for Democrats over the course of her career. In 2020, she won the state; she beat the polls; she won the state by nine points on the same day that Joe Biden won the state by about the same amount. And that was a huge shocker. And we don’t see as much split-ticket voting as we used to. And so she’s certainly not only one of the more moderate Republican senators, but perhaps the most resilient.

And Jackson is more authentically working-class than the last candidate that the Democrats had, Graham Platner. He’s less flawed, as far as we know, but he’s also less charismatic. And so I think that’s one reason why we’re seeing the race go down to the wire, even though the environment is so favorable to Democrats.

It was unthinkable that the Democrats could win back the Senate without Maine. And now it’s possible that even if the Democrats win the Senate, as we’ll talk about in other races, they still might have trouble beating Susan Collins.

Harris: Why is Susan Collins so strong politically in Maine? Why does she have such staying power?

Graham: You have this kind of politician that just sticks around forever, and I think she is one of the few remaining of that type. And to the questions about how Maine is an unusual state—from a national perspective, she does look like a flip-flopper and she has these weird views and she expresses concern about things like Roe v. Wade, but then votes for justices who most people believed correctly would vote to overturn Roe. So she’s in this strange place. But I think maybe that represents some Mainers accurately. And I also think that Maine is a small enough state that she is somebody who people feel like they know. And so she has a credibility with voters that extends past the brand of the Republican Party and extends well before the Trump era as well.

Berman: I would add that Democrats in New England in particular—it’s a little bit of a weird thing, which is such a blue area—they like voting for Republicans or moderate Republicans occasionally. So you see this in Vermont, where they’ve elected and reelected a moderate Republican, Phil Scott, as governor, even though they elect and love Bernie Sanders, the most progressive, as of now, senator in the country.

And then in Massachusetts, fairly recently, they elected a moderate Republican governor, Charlie Baker, as well. We’re seeing that less in Congress and on the federal level, but Collins is sort of the last of this breed of Republican in New England—or one of the last. And her approval ratings are lower now than they were six years ago, so that’s giving Democrats some hope that this will be different. But Republicans say that the Democrats are basically running the same campaign they’ve run in the past against her and just hoping it’ll work this time.

Harris: And does Troy Jackson’s late entry into the race actually change the context of anything? Does it put him in a disadvantage against Collins?

Berman: I think it does because Platner was such a lightning rod, obviously, but he had such deep support among people, and it seemed like people who weren’t regular voters and the type of low-propensity voters that Democrats need to get. And Jackson is not as well known—he was a logger before he entered politics up in the northern, more rural part of Maine. He talks like he’s from northern Maine. So that can be compelling but, of course, people have to get to know him, and he hasn’t had as much time. It’s a little bit of the Kamala Harris effect that we might see from two years ago.

Harris: So Russell, we’re gonna move out of Maine into your next pick. What’s the next one on your list?

Berman: Well, I’ve got one that, Adam, you and I have talked about before—the Michigan Senate race. As we’ve talked about, Democrats need to flip four Republican seats, but that’s only if they hold all of their own seats. And Michigan is the one seat that they currently hold—where the incumbent, Gary Peters, is retiring—that Republicans have a decent chance to flip. And of course, the candidates are Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers.

And the big question is whether Abdul El-Sayed, somebody as progressive as he is—he’s another Bernie Sanders type of Democrat. He’s running on Medicare for All. He’s a harsh critic of Israel. He would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. And can he win in not a blue state like Vermont, but in a purple state like Michigan?

And Rogers, of all the Republican candidates—aside from maybe Susan Collins—in the races that we’re watching, is a really strong recruit for Republicans. He is supportive of President Trump, but not super MAGA. He doesn’t have a ton of scandals in his past. He’s a former longtime member of the House with national-security experience, and most importantly, nearly won the state’s other Senate seat just two years ago; he lost narrowly to Elissa Slotkin. And so he’s a middle-of-the-road in this modern era of Republicanism. The polls have El-Sayed up, and I think that’s partially because the national environment is so favorable for Democrats. So this is one that, even though he has a lead, is worth watching until the end.

Harris: David, it seemed that Michigan was also on your list.

Graham: It was also on my list. And I think it’s interesting—to Russell’s point, I think Mike Rogers is maybe about as close as you can get to a generic Republican in a race. He is a conservative, but he’s not wildly out-there. He is supportive of Trump, but he is not a very clear MAGA candidate. And so you have this almost generic Republican, albeit one with a long reputation in Michigan politics, running against a Democrat who is very much atypical. In his background, he is a medical doctor. He’s atypical in his politics. He’s run for positions before but hasn’t won a statewide race. And so I think it’s a very interesting clash of different styles in that race.

Harris: If Democrats lose the seat in Michigan, is there another likely pickup for them? Is there somewhere else that they would be looking if they don’t feel that the seat is as secure?

Berman: Well, the map has become so wide for Democrats. And this is the big surprise of the year right now, as we’re talking in early October, is that the answer is yes. Like with Maine, it’s possible that Democrats could lose Michigan and still win the Senate. Now, could they lose Michigan and Maine and win the Senate? Probably not. But they have a chance in other red states—Texas, Alaska, even Kansas seems to be very close and competitive right now. North Carolina is one that they’re probably going to win if the polls are close to right. So it’s possible that they might not need Michigan, but they certainly don’t want to take that risk.

Harris: So David, what’s the next one on your list? We’ve got Maine and we’ve got Michigan.

Graham: That’s actually a good segue to my next one. I have flagged the Ohio Senate race. And part of this is just home cooking; I grew up in Ohio, so I feel a little bit parochial about this one. But I think this is a really interesting race.

We have former Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, running against current Senator Jon Husted, a Republican. Polls have been close. They suggest that maybe Brown is up a little bit in some polls, but it’s fairly close.

I think this is interesting. Brown has been such a dominant figure in Ohio politics for a long time. There was a story recently about how voters think of him as the incumbent and don’t really realize that Husted is the incumbent.

Berman: That was fascinating; I remember that.

Harris: Is it because of the name ID, or?

Graham: Yeah. Husted has been in state politics for a long time, but doesn’t have the same sort of name ID and has just been in the Senate for a short time. The last Democrat to win a statewide race in Ohio was one Sherrod Brown. That was in 2018, when he won a Senate seat that he then lost six years later, two years ago.

And so to see someone from the Democratic Party win, even one as unusual as Sherrod Brown, I think would be a remarkable moment. I don’t know if it would be a turning point for Ohio politics or just another weird outlier. But I would note that Amy Acton, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, has also been leading in some polls against former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which is not something I would have predicted six, eight, 12 months ago, certainly.

Harris: Russell, did you have Ohio?

Berman: I didn’t, but only because I was pretty sure David would, given his pedigree in Ohio. But no, it’s a very important race. This part of the country is where Democrats are trying to win back. Iowa is another place where Trump has won after Obama won twice that Democrats might be on the comeback trail.

I think the governor’s race, as David mentioned, is fascinating. The other thing for Republicans is that they don’t seem to love any of their candidates, or a lot of their candidates in Ohio. There’s Ramaswamy, and Ramaswamy has other issues in that he can come off kind of arrogant, and he was flying out to the U.S. Open in the middle of the campaign to have a prominent seat there, which wasn’t a good look.

And so there’s a question of whether the Republican base, the turnout in Ohio, is worth watching. And so that you might have an interplay up and down the ballot for some of these races.

Harris: So what was the third one on your list then?

Berman: For me, we have to talk about Texas, right? Is this the year that Texas goes blue? And Democrats, in politics we’ve been watching this for the better part of a decade now, with demographic trends and watching the Hispanic vote, which is obviously huge in Texas. And Democrats have kind of needed a perfect storm, and they might actually have it this year.

They have a strong candidate in James Talarico, who’s young and charismatic. They have a ridiculously flawed Republican opponent in Ken Paxton, the attorney general, who had a messy divorce, where his wife is now actually on camera in an ad telling Republicans to vote for the Republican ticket without mentioning the fact that she sued her ex-husband for divorce and he’s the Senate candidate. And then, of course, the Democrats need a strong national environment, and that’s what it looks like they have here.

The Hispanic vote is gonna be key. We’re seeing polling out of some House races in southern Texas that looks like the Hispanic vote is swinging back pretty hard toward Democrats after trending toward Republicans in the last couple of elections. And it would just be a huge—to use the cliché—a huge tsunami politically if Democrats did win this Senate seat. We’ve talked about the importance of each of these races for the balance of power, and of course that’s important, but more the symbolic significance of Democrats winning Texas. Then we’d immediately start talking about whether Texas is in play on the presidential level in 2028, which would change the entire political map for both parties. And then, of course, Talarico, if he were to win, would immediately go into the conversation for future national office—because that’s how things work these days—whether it’s in 2028 or later. But Texas is big for a reason, and the Senate seat is fascinating.

Harris: David, it seems like Texas was in yours as well.

Graham: I did not have the Texas Senate race, partly because I suspected Russell might, but I have a third race that is also in Texas, which is the Fifteenth House District. And Russell is sort of touching on this. This is where Monica De La Cruz, a Republican incumbent, is running for reelection. She won, I believe by 14 points, two years ago; Trump won this direct district by 18 points. And it’s in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that non-Texans got to learn about after the 2024 election as a place where there’s a huge swing from a historically Democratic area toward Republicans and toward Trump, and we were talking a lot about Hispanic shifts in the vote and how enduring this would be.

If this race is an indication, it may not be all that enduring. Democrats have a really strong candidate, they believe: a guy named Bobby Pulido, who is a well-known Tejano singer; he has a couple Latin Grammys. He’s a moderate Democrat. I think he’s a really compelling individual, and he seems to be a relatively compelling candidate also. This race looks really close. I think a Pulido win would be a huge moral victory for Democrats and contribute to a potential House majority. I think even if he loses, seeing where the vote comes out in that district will be a really interesting indicator of the Hispanic vote and of the Rio Grande Valley and maybe of the future of Texas as well.

Berman: The Democrats actually put out an internal poll—so take it with a grain of salt—that had Pulido winning by 13 points in this race. And this is not, was not seen as like a toss-up race, like one of those dozen or so races that we knew were gonna be close. This is a race that started pretty favorably for Republicans, in part because I’m pretty sure it was made even redder in their gerrymander that they did last year.

But of course, when Republicans did all that gerrymandering in Texas, they were basically betting that the Hispanic shift that we saw in the last couple of elections would hold. But if it doesn’t hold, then they could be up the creek, so to speak. This could be a big problem. There’s a couple of other house races in Texas where we could see Democrats win that Republicans kind of thought that they had put in the bag.

Harris: When we come back, we work through the rest of David and Russell’s lists.

[Music]

Harris: So David, we have Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Texas House. Russell, so far we have Maine, Michigan, Texas Senate. Russell, what’s your fourth?

Berman: My fourth is another red state where Democrats have a decent chance to win for the first time in a while, and that’s all the way out in Alaska. They have a pretty strong centrist type of candidate in Mary Peltola. She has won statewide in Alaska before. She briefly held the at-large House seat there. She lost narrowly in her reelection bid in 2024. And she’s going up against the incumbent, Dan Sullivan, who’s a fairly standard-issue Republican, similar to Mike Rogers in Michigan. But the crazy thing about this race—one of them—is that he’s not the only Dan Sullivan on the ballot. There is another Dan Sullivan who, much to the chagrin of Republicans in Alaska and nationally, was able to get on the ballot. And he could siphon away votes from the senator Dan Sullivan in a close race.

The other wrinkle with Alaska is that they use ranked-choice voting. And so it’s possible—we’ve seen ranked-choice voting, as a system, does not advantage either party. But in Alaska, it has seemed to help the more moderate candidate, which tends to be the Democratic candidate, or the other one example there is Lisa Murkowski, who is another moderate survivor among Republicans in the Senate.

And so Alaska is one of these states—because the population is so small, it doesn’t take a big shift of voters for it to go the other way. And that’s what Democrats have seen here. On the presidential level, it hasn’t looked completely out of reach. Democrats, some of them joke that they really just need to take, like, 50,000 Democrats from Brooklyn or Washington, D.C., and have them move to Alaska and it could really change the entire equation for them.

So this one is interesting. And the Democrats did—unlike in Texas, more recently at least than in Texas—they won a Senate seat in Alaska during a good Democratic year. I believe that was in 2008 with Mark Begich, and he served for a term before losing his reelection bid. So those are the dynamics there. And again, this is one of those races that either could pad—if the Democrats have a really good night—their majority or make their majority. Or it could save their majority if they end up losing in one of these other races that we talked about, like in Maine or Michigan.

Harris: All right, we are down to our final race for each of you. David, I’m gonna go to you first. Where are we on the map?

Graham: I am once again doing some home cooking, and I’m hoping I can keep Russell on his toes a little bit with this one. I’ve picked out North Carolina’s First District. He saw this coming, probably.

Berman: Not exactly, not exactly, but I was like, There’s one of those House races. He’s going against the grain here. (Laughs.)

Graham: So in this race you’ve got Don Davis, who is a moderate Democrat who is running for reelection against Laurie Buckhout, who is a Republican. And he’s running for reelection, but it’s not really in the same district. So this is a race that was—we talked about this a little bit with Texas. This is a map that was redrawn by North Carolina Republicans when President Trump was pushing a lot of Republican legislatures and Republican states to redraw their maps.

North Carolina has seen a lot of gerrymandering already, and so there was only so much squeeze left in this map. But they thought they had drawn a map that would be very hard for Don Davis to win. Davis decided to run anyway, which not everyone was sure he would do. And he seems to be running a pretty close race. The polling on this—House polling can be really unreliable; most of the polls are partisan. The Republican polls show Laurie Buckhout up; their Democratic polls show Don Davis up. So it’s hard to know. But I think it’s a really interesting test of this Republican gerrymandering and whether we might be pushing into what they call dummy-mander territory, where you just stretch your voters out so much that you end up not being able to win these districts.

I was out in this district a couple months ago, and there were billboards up that said Don Davis, he’s one of us. Not Don Davis, he’s a Democrat, notably. And so I’ll be curious to see also, regardless of who wins this race, where it comes down and what that tells us about the gerrymandering push that we saw around the country.

Harris: And Russell, what’s your big five?

Berman: Well, we’re staying in the same region and we’re going down to South Carolina. And that’s the First District there. This is in and around Charleston; the Low Country, around Charleston, includes Hilton Head.

And so this is the race that is the seat that is currently held by Nancy Mace. She is a social-media star, if you will, but she is not very popular anymore in her district. And she’s not running for reelection—she ran for governor and she lost pretty badly. And the fact that she’s unpopular in her district is one of the factors that’s helping Democrats. And the Democrats have a very interesting candidate in Nancy—another Nancy—a Nancy Lacore, who is a former Republican and she was the chief of the Navy Reserve until Pete Hegseth fired her last year. She was among many military leaders that he fired and continues to fire; many of them are women or people of color.

And this is a seat that’s not a toss-up. This is one where if the Democratic wave is pretty big, it’s going to continue—again the metaphor and the cliché—to wash over places like South Carolina’s First District. Because this is a district that does still lean Republican. Democrats actually won the seat in their last wave year, in the Trump midterm in 2018. A moderate named Joe Cunningham, in pretty big surprise, won this seat, and then he lost two years later to Nancy Mace. And then the Republicans gerrymandered the seat to make it a little bit more Republican and help them hold it. And so that’s making it still a pretty tough seat for Democrats to win.

But the Democrats—as David mentioned, these polls are partisan, but they have a poll showing that it’s very close. They seem cautiously optimistic, in part because of Mace’s unpopularity there. The Republican candidate is a woman named Jenny Costa Honeycutt, who seems to be a perfectly fine candidate, but it’s telling that she’s running a campaign where she is running against what she calls clickbait politics, which seems to be a not-so-veiled reference to, I am not Nancy Mace; I will be a different type of member of Congress. So this is one that I’m actually heading down to report on and I’ll be watching closely.

Harris: We’ve zoomed in a lot, y’all. I wanna broaden us back out to bring it to a close. If you had to draw a through line out from your list heading into the midterms, what is the through line to your list?

Berman: Well, it’s not on all of them, but on a lot of them it’s Democrats trying to make inroads in red areas in a way that can really unlock a lot of new territory for them in future elections. If they’re able to make these connections with voters, if they actually win these races and then govern in a way that the voters like, it could change the political map going forward in a way that we haven’t seen on the Democratic side since really the Obama era in their first midterm win, during the Bush years in 2006 and 2008, with Obama. And so I think that is a through line. And then of course, the obvious one is just how unpopular President Trump is and the impact that’s having on Republican candidates in, again, these states that they usually win pretty easily.

Harris: And David, for yours?

Graham: One other thing that I note going through my list, through most of these races, is just these candidates who have particular connections or routes to electorates. You look at a guy like Bobby Pulido, you look at a guy like Sherrod Brown, who seems to be the only Democrat, maybe, who can win a statewide in Ohio. You look at Don Davis, somebody who’s saying he’s one of us. You look at Troy Jackson, who’s a logger, but also Susan Collins, who’s had that race for a long time.

And so, although there are big national waves and big national currents, and I think the economy and Trump’s unpopularity are so dominant, what does make a lot of difference in these races are the way voters connect with individual candidates and the way candidates can connect with the voters.

Harris: Well, David, Russell, thank you so much for helping us process the big national picture and understand it at a more local, granular level as we head towards the midterm elections. You’ve given a lot for us to think about. And thank you so much for joining me this morning.

Berman: It was great, thanks.

Graham: Thank you.

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Proponents of the war with Iran have taken recent increases in crude-oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz as proof that the U.S. strategy is finally working. President Trump is so confident in this that he recently rejected a seven-day plan, set forward by Iran’s foreign ministry, to end the war and open the strait. The United States is “winning tremendously,” Trump boasted.

A confused administration is conflating tactical dominance with strategic success. Seven months into a war that its planners suggested would last four to five weeks, the Trump administration’s understanding of Iran remains deeply flawed, and increases in oil exported through the strait don’t mean that the U.S. is close to ending the conflict on its terms.  

The president’s self-assurance doubtless derives in part from his reported belief that this conflict will come down to which side is able to endure economic pain the longest. The countdown clock on Iran’s economy appears to be ticking ever faster: The U.S. Navy’s blockade on Iranian ports has been ruthlessly effective, as, to a lesser extent, has the Treasury Department’s Operation Economic Outcast, announced in August as “an unprecedented campaign to sever every remaining economic lifeline sustaining the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

[Read: Trump could leave the Iran mess to his successor]

Iran’s economy was in bad shape before the war. Now it is in deep crisis. The Iranian rial is trading at a record rate of more than 2.5 million to a dollar, versus a prewar exchange rate closer to 1.2 million. Year-over-year food inflation was more than 125 percent in late August, according to Iranian-government statistics. A country accustomed to cheap, plentiful gasoline now has severe shortages, and its government is progressively scaling back subsidies. The International Monetary Fund projects that the Iranian economy will contract by 5.4 percent in 2026, and the U.S. administration has assessed, as Treasury Secretary Bessent said early last month, that Iran is in a “death spiral,” desperate to make a deal.

The administration appears to believe that the clock on American economic pain, meanwhile, has been slowed by Iran’s decreased ability to close or even significantly constrain maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s grip on that choke point, through sea mines and attacks on tankers, had reduced the daily transit of oil from 20 million barrels a day before the war to fewer than 3 million a day by March. But in late August, the U.S. military claimed a “major milestone”: It had cleared the strait’s transit routes of mines. A mid-September Centcom press statement said that the strait was “open for transit.”

Regional oil exports rose significantly in September. According to a JP Morgan assessment that circulated on social media late last month, regional exports rebounded to just 11 percent below prewar levels. The maritime intelligence company Kpler reported the September daily average of oil through the strait at 10 million barrels; an additional 6 million barrels left the area by means of ports and pipelines that avoided the strait. A late-September headline on CNN seemed to capture the general assessment: “Iran has lost considerable leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. It can’t go on like this forever.”  

One reason for the resumption of oil flows is that Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, and Kuwaiti oil companies, working with the U.S. Navy, have started pulling off risky transfers that evade the Iranian anti-ship missiles and drones threatening the strait. Shuttle tankers inside the waterway turn off their transponders, load up with oil, and, watched over by U.S. Navy fighter jets and attack helicopters, leave the strait by hugging the Omani coast. Once in safe waters, they transfer their crude cargo to larger supertankers for onward transport.

But the new status quo in the strait is neither sustainable nor scalable. Ship-to-ship transfers are dangerous and expensive, and they rely on active U.S. military operations, which currently involve two Navy aircraft-carrier strike groups already in the region and a third on its way.

Meanwhile, transit through the strait remains dangerous. At least eight tankers have been attacked in the week ending October 5, and the multinational Joint Maritime Information Center, based in Bahrain, still assesses the threat for strait passage as “severe.” According to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Organization, strait traffic remains 75 percent below pre-conflict levels. The global supply of crude and refined products trails demand, and regional exports of refined products are at only 58 percent of prewar norms. As the Kpler trade-risk analyst Ana Subasic recently told The New York Times, the passage of more ships and oil through the region than earlier in the war “doesn’t mean we’re seeing a normalization of flows.”

Trump could well be right in believing that Iran’s economic pain is increasing faster than America’s. But the Iranian regime, engaged in a fight it believes to be existential, will tolerate pain levels much higher than those acceptable to a U.S. administration mired in an unpopular war. The soaring price of gasoline and diesel could be a problem for Republicans in the midterm elections next month. By contrast, the Iranian regime, with its extensive and tested infrastructure of popular repression, has shown its willingness to slaughter its citizens en masse and is not calibrating its policies to the ballot box.  

[Read: Gas prices could cost the Republicans the midterms]

The Trump administration seems not to realize that Iran’s leaders—more militarized and hard-line than those the U.S. and Israel killed at the start of the war—are operating on the assumption the United States is dead set on toppling the Islamic Republic.  They see compromise under pressure as hastening, not delaying, their own destruction. In response to intensifying U.S. economic pressure and a worsening strategic situation, they are far likelier to escalate militarily than to capitulate.

Shortly after the Vietnam War ended, an American colonel talking with his Vietnamese counterpart is reported to have asserted, “You never defeated us on the battlefield.” The Vietnamese colonel allegedly thought about it, then replied, “That may be so, but it’s also irrelevant.” The same could be true with Iran. Yes, the U.S. has destroyed huge swaths of Iran’s military. Yes, it is crippling Iran’s economy and immiserating ever more of its citizens. And yes, it is getting more oil out of the region than earlier in the war. But none of that is getting America much closer to a win.

Samuel Alito is, with Clarence Thomas, one of the two most conservative sitting Supreme Court justices. In his 20 years on the highest bench, he has reliably voted for conservative positions—especially on social issues, criminal procedure, voting rights, discrimination, and religious liberty. He wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. During the second Trump administration, he has so far voted more often than any other justice to uphold its initiatives. And in speeches, Alito has taken an unusual step for a sitting justice: He has become an active participant in the culture wars, opposing affirmative action, progressive campus orthodoxy, attacks on religious freedom, and hostility toward Judeo-Christian values.

Alito has now collected adaptations of 19 talks (all but six of them from the past decade) in So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country. Many of the wide-ranging essays are charming and genial, which will perhaps surprise those primed to expect an acerbic, embattled style. He includes an ardent fan’s primer on baseball’s lessons for life and law, a tribute to the “long-term vision of national greatness” in the Gettysburg Address, and an appreciation of the “long, deep, and sometimes scarring experience” of religious liberty’s great defender Karol Wojtyla, before he became Pope John Paul II.

As the subtitle suggests, the most important talks concern “originalism”—the view that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning at ratification. Originalism is the credo of the conservative legal movement that since the 1980s has traveled from obscurity to triumph, marked by the arrival of a Supreme Court supermajority that is dismantling the revolutionary progressivism of the Warren (1953–69) and Burger (1969–86) Courts. Yet Alito’s embrace of the originalist label is also likely to come as a surprise to people on the left and the right.

[From the October 2025 issue: Jill Lepore on how originalism killed the Constitution]

Close observers of the Court have long seen Alito as a skeptic of orthodox originalism, and So Ordered, far from a paean to the philosophy, delivers a vigorous critique. In its place, Alito offers an approach that at times sounds like a conservative version of the judicial activism that originalism aimed to combat when liberals held sway on the Court. And the style of judging he defends, which he has practiced for decades, has now acquired currency: It dovetails with a Trump-era New Right conception of law that is unshackled by restraint and focused solely on conservative victory.

Alito joined the Reagan Justice Department in 1981 at age 31, just as the conservative legal counterrevolution against the Warren and Burger Courts was getting under way. There he argued cases before the Supreme Court and advised the White House and attorney general. He also became an active participant in the Federalist Society, founded in 1982, which quickly emerged as the intellectual home of conservative and libertarian legal thinking. In the government and out, Alito made plain his conservative bona fides and was immersed in formative discussions of originalism.

The doctrine was fashioned as a response to a liberal conception of judging called “living constitutionalism,” which celebrated the ability of the document’s “great principles to cope with current problems and current needs,” in the words of Justice William Brennan. Conservatives hoped that originalism would limit or reverse the progressive transformation of American society set in motion by Supreme Court decisions that had expanded criminal-defense rights, ended prayer in public school, recognized the rights to contraception and abortion, strengthened voting equality, and supported affirmative action and busing. Originalists also claimed the mantle of democratic legitimacy. The doctrine elevated what the American people had ratified in the past over unelected judges’ revisions to the Constitution based on modern values and personal preference.

Alito watched as Antonin Scalia, who joined the Supreme Court in 1986, became originalism’s greatest champion. Scalia, a former law professor, was a theorist who worked out originalism in academic lectures. His brilliant judicial opinions went on to make the theory and methods a creditable enterprise and, eventually, the defining conservative legal dogma. But when President George H. W. Bush made Alito an appellate judge in 1990, originalism had not yet achieved its central place in the movement. During a decade and a half on the court of appeals, Alito established a reputation as a careful jurist who wrote tightly reasoned opinions that were as conservative as the law would permit. Originalist argument played no significant role in his decision making.

In 2005, Bush’s son nominated Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court after his initial nominee, the White House counsel, Harriet Miers, withdrew amid bipartisan questions about her fitness. Alito was the credentialed, establishment legal conservative she wasn’t, a judge with a Federalist Society pedigree and a long record of case outcomes that proved he wouldn’t stray. During his confirmation hearings, critics dubbed him “Scalito” due to his conservative affinity with Scalia (and their Italian heritage). But originalism was barely mentioned in those hearings, and Alito made no concrete jurisprudential commitment to it.

When Alito joined Scalia on the Court, he maintained his traditionalist, lawyerly bent; eschewed theorizing; and paid close attention to case particularities. He continued to arrive at consistently conservative results, more forcefully articulated now without the constraint of possible Supreme Court reversal. He often broke with Scalia’s originalist decisions, especially when they aided criminal defendants, and he rarely dove deeply into original meaning. Alito famously poked fun when Scalia asked about the views of the Constitution’s ratifiers in a 2011 case about California’s regulation of minors’ access to violent video games. “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games,” Alito said, to laughter in the courtroom. “Did he enjoy them?” More often, however, his skepticism remained muted.

A low point for the Court’s conservative wing came half a decade later. The 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision announced a constitutional right to same-sex marriage based on what Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the bench, called the Court’s “reasoned judgment in identifying interests of the person so fundamental that the State must accord them its respect.” Scalia’s dissent condemned this logic as a “judicial Putsch” that lacked “even a thin veneer of law” and rested solely on the preferences of “a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine.” Alito joined neither Scalia’s dissent nor Thomas’s lengthy orthodox-originalist one. His own dissent emphasized same-sex marriage’s defiance of tradition and expressed concern that “those who cling to old beliefs” would, in the decision’s aftermath, “risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”

When Scalia died seven months after Obergefell, the conservative legal movement seemed near failure. Republican presidents had appointed three-quarters of the justices since Earl Warren had retired in 1969. The Federalist Society had trained two generations of lawyers and developed a formidable network that dominated federal judgeship hiring. Yet the Supreme Court still practiced living constitutionalism. When President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Scalia, the Court seemed likely to tip decidedly progressive.

But then Senate Republicans denied Garland a hearing and Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. By the end of 2020, Trump had put three young conservatives—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—on the Court, which promptly veered to the right. With Scalia gone and a conservative supermajority on the Court, Alito grew more confident in expressing impatience with orthodox originalism and in charting a new course for legal conservatism, especially in his extrajudicial writings and talks.

So Ordered decries judges who aim to be theorists and lays out a “working judicial” brand of originalism that reflects Alito’s decades of “hands-on experience.” In many respects, his approach inverts the orthodox view. He jettisons “restraint” as a goal and counsels that originalism “sometimes calls for bold action.” In marked contrast with Scalia, who believed that a judge who “always likes the results he reaches is a bad judge,” Alito tells jurists “who welcome occasions when their originalist analysis leads to results they dislike” to “shed this insecure mindset.” He also thinks that originalists should call attention to the value of the outcomes that their decisions produce. Unless the theory “is widely viewed as generally producing good results,” he argues, it won’t survive. He never explains what makes a result good and never considers that he and his colleagues—and the American people—disagree on that question.

Alito usefully highlights important theoretical conundrums for originalism. A central one is how to tell whether the invariably fuzzy meaning of an old term (equal protection, for example) should be applied in specific contexts that the Framers never imagined. Scholars offer an array of complex and clashing solutions to this and related difficulties. Alito invokes judicial “judgment” as the global solution. “Broadly worded constitutional provisions can be regarded as delegating a degree of authority to apply those provisions to new situations that could not be anticipated at the time of adoption,” he maintains. “Identifying just how far this delegation of authority extends calls for the exercise of judgment.”

The obvious problem is that this sounds suspiciously like the judge-specific, discretion-laden “reasoned judgment” that Kennedy invoked in the gay-marriage case—precisely what orthodox originalism aimed to eradicate. Many important constitutional clauses—not just equal protection but due process, freedom of speech, executive power—are broadly worded. And many issues that arise in connection with these terms could not have been anticipated in 1791 or 1868. To escape Scalia’s “judicial Putsch” verdict, Alito must explain why the judgment that he believes his kind of originalist justice often must exercise won’t be guided by ideological or other personal factors. But his explanations are thin and slippery.

Alito holds up Edmund Burke’s teachings about prudence and tradition as “invaluable” guides for the “many times when originalist jurists must exercise judgment.” But he otherwise defends Burke’s relevance to American judging only by noting that he and many other conservatives esteem him. Unexpectedly, Alito also voices great respect for the work of the Harvard Law professor and fellow Catholic Adrian Vermeule, an arch critic of originalism. Vermeule argues that the theory’s moral skepticism, “defensive crouch,” and allergy to considering outcomes render it “an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law.” He favors interpretation aimed at “the common good,” a concept associated with Catholic social teaching.

Although Alito resists some elements of the theory, his account of proper judging seeks to accommodate Vermeule’s criticisms—a contrast with the response of his Catholic and orthodox-originalist colleague Amy Coney Barrett, who dismisses it as marred by “all of the defects that originalists critiqued” in the 1980s. Alito also says his own version of originalism “furthers the common good,” and he even asks whether “an assessment of what the common good requires” might inform the Court’s judgment when original meaning cannot resolve an issue. It’s a question he refrains from answering.

Like Alito’s dissatisfaction with restraint and his insistence that originalists attend to outcomes, his reliance on ill-defined principles to steer judicial judgment when originalism is stymied will fuel the widespread view that he reads his conservative views into the Constitution. Nor do Alito’s several insightful essays on the art of good judging as a practical task grounded in “personal observation and experience” help much. He has a deserved reputation as a fine judicial craftsman, but his judging is filtered through a deeply traditional conservative outlook evident in almost every essay. This is the ideological element that invariably informs judicial judgment—left, right, and center—however much both orthodox originalists and Alito may purport to shun it.

Alito’s nominal adherence to originalism even as he struggles to revamp it is but one indication that the doctrine is becoming a zombie creed that functions more as a shibboleth than as an actual guide to conservative constitutional decision making.

Originalism certainly does not explain the Court’s sharp rightward turn since Barrett joined the bench in 2020. Only Thomas, Gorsuch, and Barrett regularly try to practice originalism, and they do so very unevenly. Most of the important recent conservative victories—including overturning Roe v. Wade, ending affirmative action in higher education, and giving Trump criminal immunity—were not resolved on the basis of original constitutional meaning. And countless non-originalist precedents remain untouched. The Roberts Court is becoming the “Conservative Warren Court,” as Richard Re of Harvard Law School has argued, because it has a “strong majority ideological alignment” that “wields its power in pursuit of its ideological goals” and has soft-pedaled many of the limiting principles, including orthodox originalism, that once defined the movement.

Yet even as the conservative Court has moved right, it has managed to anger the much more right-wing second Trump administration. It has upheld many aspects of Trump’s program, most notably his “unitary executive” power to fire heads of independent agencies. But the Roberts Court was trending toward this ruling before Trump came on the scene. More remarkable than how many Trump 2.0 initiatives the Court has validated is how often the moderate conservatives on the Court (some combination of Roberts and the three Trump-appointed justices) have joined liberals to block initiatives—on tariffs, birthright citizenship, National Guard deployment, deportations under the Alien Enemy Act, Federal Reserve independence, mail-in ballots, and more. These decisions have enraged the president and his supporters, who have excoriated the orthodox-originalist Barrett, Scalia’s former clerk, in especially vicious terms.

Their fury is more encompassing. Federalist Society lawyers and “originalist judges” are blamed for tying the president’s hands during his first term, for inadequately unwinding progressive constitutionalism, and for disloyalty in not backing Trump when he challenged the 2020 presidential-election results. The president himself has denounced the Federalist Society and hired personally loyal lawyers unburdened by jurisprudential niceties who are eager to implement the administration’s self-described “radical” constitutional agenda.

In their attacks on the Court and its moderate conservatives, the Trump administration and its allies are articulating a New Right idea of conservative judging. That view despises originalism’s value-neutrality, prizes conservative results, admires judges with the “courage” and “loyalty” to uphold Trump’s program, and views adverse decisions as evidence of timidity, establishment capture, or betrayal.

This New Right has its own think tanks and advocacy groups. It has made inroads in Federalist Society chapters on campuses, including my own. The administration is grooming dozens of conservative lawyers to share its view of the law, and has placed at least one New Right stalwart, Emil Bove, on the federal bench. The old conservative legal movement is very far from dead. But its centrality has waned and its originalist commitments are no longer sacrosanct among conservatives.

Alito claims no association with the New Right, but his essays and work on the Court make plain why its legal camp venerates him. Alito, along with Thomas, has supported the Trump administration in every second-term case of importance, including with dissents in every major Trump loss. His results-focused jurisprudence, his culture-warrior profile, and his scorn for fainthearted conservative jurists mesh with the Trump-inspired movement.

Yet it would be a mistake to read Alito’s attempts to articulate a judicial philosophy as mere camouflage for a hard-right jurisprudence. So Ordered leaves the clear impression that he sees himself as a serious lawyer adhering to principles. If the principles are not as coherent as they might be, that does not distinguish him from most justices, now or in the past. What is curious is that Alito has articulated a semblance of a judicial philosophy at all, given his wariness about theory as a guide to judging. In the end, his essays serve as a marker of our bitterly fractured constitutional moment. And Alito himself remains an elusive yet powerful presence—the face on the Court, however unintended, of the Trumpian legal agenda.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Zombie Originalism.”