Late last night, President Trump announced a “massive” deal to buy diesel fuel from Russia. For the American truckers and farmers Trump claims to be serving, the deal means little or nothing. Trump may not know or may not care that his latest gambit will not reduce diesel prices. His poll numbers are plunging to Herbert Hoover levels. He needs a last-minute electioneering gimmick.

But while the deal will not benefit American consumers, it has immense consequences for others. For Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the deal is a potential lifesaver. For war-ravaged Ukraine, it is the most outrageous and heartless Trump betrayal to date. For Trump’s entourage, the deal promises corruption opportunities on a multibillion-dollar scale. And for people trying to understand the Trump presidency, the deal is further proof of the accusation that Nancy Pelosi flung in Trump’s face in 2019: “With you, all roads lead to Putin.”

The United States is a diesel superpower. It is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of diesel fuel. U.S. refineries produce about 5.2 million barrels of diesel a day. Americans consume about 3.7 million barrels a day. The surplus is sold abroad: In recent months exports have run above 1.5 million barrels a day.

The United States imports some diesel fuel from Canada, about 154,000 barrels a day, owing to the peculiarities of pipeline and shipping networks: It’s cheaper to supply New England from the Canadian refinery in New Brunswick than from U.S. refineries along the Gulf Coast. By comparison, Trump’s Russia deal is for 2.25 million barrels: the equivalent of about 16 hours’ worth of U.S. consumption, 10 hours’ worth of U.S. production, or 14 days’ worth of Canadian imports.

Unfortunately for U.S. diesel consumers, the price of diesel fuel is set by global markets, not North American ones. Trump’s Iran war has disrupted fuel supplies from the Middle East, including diesel supplies. Before the war, Europe imported more than half a million barrels of diesel a day from the Persian Gulf. The world’s second-biggest diesel exporter used to be Russia, which shipped about 817,000 barrels a day in 2025. When the Iran war raised energy prices, Russia was positioned to profit.

[David Frum: Why Trump didn’t predict the gas-price spike]

The United States in the past tried to help Ukraine by sanctioning Russian energy exports. Trump sometimes pretended to support this policy. In September 2025, for example, Trump proclaimed a tariff on India, ostensibly to punish India for buying Russian oil—but then lifted it in February.

So the Ukrainians took matters into their own hands. As Russia has intensified its horrific drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians, Ukraine has struck back with a devastating campaign against Russian energy infrastructure, including diesel. By late summer 2026, the Ukrainians estimated that they had shut down 43 percent of Russian refinery capacity. According to Ukrainian reports, Russian production of oil of all kinds plunged from 5.6 million barrels a day before the Iran war to 4.1 million barrels by late summer 2026. Russia imposed a ban on diesel exports in July. That ban has been extended into October.

Friends of Ukraine hailed the attacks on Russian energy infrastructure as a war-changing success. Trump saw a threat to Republican hopes in the midterms. Curbs on Russian fuel exports helped push the price of diesel fuel in the U.S. above $5 a gallon in July, then higher than $6 a gallon in September.

Since Trump’s return to power in 2025, the Putin regime has dangled lucrative deals in front of the president’s entourage.

The Wall Street Journal reported in November 2025 about secret conversations in Miami the previous month between the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev, and Trump’s negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner:

“For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”

The report noted that Dmitriev “found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.” The New York Times reported last week about an even more brazen Russian offering: a multibillion-dollar oil deal for assets owned by Russia’s Lukoil, which would directly benefit a Trump donor and two Middle Eastern groups that have done business with Kushner or Witkoff’s family. (A spokesman for Steve Witkoff said of the Times story that Witkoff “has no conflict of interest and no financial stake in this matter.” Of the Wall Street Journal story, a source described as “familiar with Witkoff’s thinking” said “the envoy is confident that any settlement with Russia would benefit America broadly, not just a handful of investors.”)

But all these apparently enticing Russian schemes come with a catch: Russian energy assets are not worth much if those assets are regularly wrecked by Ukrainian drones. This makes plain the implicit quid pro quo in these lucrative deals offered to Trump’s family and friends: If you compel Ukraine to surrender, we will enrich you beyond reckoning.

Putin is attempting to leverage Russia’s most strategic asset in his war on Ukraine: Trump’s weakness for corruption. The 2.25 million barrels of diesel Putin offered Trump will have zero net impact on world energy markets or the world price of diesel. But accepting those barrels will collapse the U.S.-led sanctions regime on Russia—and align Trump with Putin against the Ukrainian air attacks on Russian energy production.

Trump stopped providing aid to Ukraine long ago. But the U.S. still provides Ukraine with crucial intelligence information. If Putin can entice Trump to cut Ukraine off from U.S. intelligence, he can do real damage to Ukraine’s capabilities. Russian diesel fuel is the cheese in that mousetrap. Trump’s negotiators are sniffing at the bait: The Kyiv Post reported today that Witkoff and Kushner are already threatening to stop information-sharing if Ukraine continues to strike Russian energy assets. And meanwhile, FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly planning his own trip to Russia—one that members of Congress are urging him to cancel, as my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick recently reported.

There is much about Putin’s offer of diesel that remains doubtful. Does Trump have the legal authority to buy previously sanctioned Russian oil? Does Russia even possess the diesel to sell? But one thing at least remains as clear as ever: With Trump, all roads lead to Putin.

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

With less than a month until the midterm elections, Democrats and Republicans alike are trying to identify the key battleground states and districts in which to concentrate their efforts. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss what these races may mean for both parties.

“What we’re seeing right now is a referendum on the president’s policies over the past two years,” Adam Harris, a host of Radio Atlantic, said last night. “You have the war in Iran that [President Trump] can’t tether to Joe Biden,” and so now more voters are linking “the president’s policies specifically, from the war on down,” to issues such as increases in prices.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Carrie Dann, the managing editor of The Cook Political Report; Harris; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; and Annie Linskey, a White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

Watch the full episode here.

Do your heroes weep? Do they swoon with lust? Are they really confused by their new magical powers? Then you’re already a fan of romantasy. For those still waiting to discover romantasy: It’s fantasy, with strong female protagonists and fewer boring bits—the long treks over major landforms in hard weather. Sex is plentiful, but sex is not the genre’s defining feature. You can go chapters before encountering a reference to someone’s toned body. Far more significant are feelings and friendships between the heroes: enchanted beings with relatable self-esteem issues who don’t just seek and fight but also yearn and banter as they face down enemies who aren’t only evil, but super bitchy too. Then the heroes cry and have orgasms (sometimes they orgasm first and cry after).

In the kingdom of romantasy, one writer reigns supreme: Sarah J. Maas, the author of ACOTAR. It sounds like a missile-defense system or an autoimmune condition, but it’s the acronym for one of the most popular series of novels for adults written in the 21st century. A Court of Thorns and Roses is the first of many books about Feyre Archeron, a young huntress spirited into the faerie realm. Humans hate the leaders of the faerie world, called the High Fae, who once enslaved them. But as soon as one bursts through Feyre’s door, having shape-shifted into the body of a green-eyed, bearlike beast, the reader thinks, I bet some of these guys are going to be hot.

Feyre falls in love and breaks a curse and brings down a depraved fae queen, and that’s just in the first book—eventually she’ll assemble a crew of beloved sidekicks and a heap of supernatural powers. On any given week, you can see every book in the series stacked in a column on the New York Times best-seller list. If you combine ACOTAR with Maas’s two other series, Throne of Glass and Crescent City, she has sold some 75 million copies. The Lord of the Rings has likely sold more than twice that, but J. R. R. Tolkien had a 60-year head start.

After A Court of Thorns and Roses come courts of: Mist and Fury, Wings and Ruin, Frost and Starlight, and Silver Flames. Fans waited five long years for the sixth book. Would the next court have one syllable and two syllables? Would the decent faeries stop the awful ones from slaughtering and re-enslaving the humans? Then Maas announced, in a rare interview on the podcast Call Her Daddy, that she would actually be releasing three new books—one in October, one in January, and one more after that—and people lost their minds. Right away a question shot into the inboxes of America’s bookstores: Are you having a midnight release party? Tickets sold out. For one “fantasy ball” at a bookstore in El Paso, Texas, they sold out in 12 hours. A second party was announced; it sold out too. Book clubs began rereading all of the courts in preparation.

[Read: The publishing industry’s most swoon-worthy genre]

On social media, bets were made about which of Feyre’s sisters or friends the new books would focus on, and what color the covers would be (Maas hadn’t done purple yet). In August, images of the next two jackets—­for A Court of Splintered Harmony and A Court of Forgotten Melody—lit up Times Square. They were ombré!

But search The New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books for Maas, and you’ll find references to a German foreign minister, a river, the Pynchon character Oedipa Maas—and no trace of Sarah J. The New Yorker’s culture podcast summed up the low end of romantasy as “customer service wrapped in self-care wrapped in literature,” though one of the critics admitted that she’d loved A Court of Thorns and Roses. Hear enough writers lament that the only books that sell now are faerie or dragon or elfpunk porn, and you start to get the feeling that the literary establishment is committed to resenting this rare bright spot in the publishing industry.

Maas, now 40, was a teenager when she wrote an epic fairy tale about a young assassin who can slit throats as well as waltz at balls for a fiction site. That story was published by Bloomsbury, in 2012, as Throne of Glass. The novels that followed took off on #BookTok and then in real life thanks to a generation of former Harry Potter fans who now had jobs, babies, and stymied sex drives. These people (women) started reading (or listening). They started going to bookstores.

Fewer Americans are reading for pleasure every year, and yet people keep opening bookstores—romance bookstores in particular (more than 100 in the past year and a half alone, according to the American Booksellers Association). Zella Funk­houser, a high-school science teacher, runs three book clubs at the newly opened Bonfire Bookstore & Yarnery, in Shenandoah County, Virginia. She told me that she picked up A Court of Thorns and Roses in 2023, after having gone “years without really reading a whole lot.” Then back-to-back snowstorms hit, and her husband, who does road work for the state, spent days out plowing. Alone at home behind a wall of snow, Funkhouser devoured all five books. “We didn’t have internet; we didn’t have power,” she told me. “I was obsessed.”

On a Saturday night in June, her book club discussed Thorns and Roses. Erin was reading the series for the third time, Tiffani for the fourth, Abby for the fifth. “We’re not reading high literature, let’s be honest,” one of the women acknowledged. But they weren’t looking for formal innovation; they were looking to be inspired and turned on.

It’s true that you’re rarely transported by ACOTAR ’s language. Characters say things like “I admire your balls, Feyre.” Sometimes they make me laugh. “Shall we assist you, or just flap here, talking?” a leader of winged reinforcements asks, when it seems the battle has been lost. Characteristic of the genre, the books remix familiar stories. The first meal in Beauty and the Beast, minus the dancing silverware. Pride and Prejudice, if the lovers started out on even worse terms. Hades and Persephone, if the king of the underworld just really got you.

But even if you don’t read romantasy (I don’t read romantasy), the books are well crafted and very entertaining. And for its hard-core fans, ACOTAR has achieved something like a vertical integration of the imagination: the raw fiber of old myths woven into new stories, processed through the internet, refined into audiobooks for intimate delivery straight down the ear canal, which drive fans back to bookstores, where they can buy a keepsake hardcover and even, if they’re lucky, drink themed cocktails in ACOTAR-inspired ball gowns at midnight.

With this kind of power, Maas doesn’t need the literary establishment. (Bloomsbury, her publisher, declined to share advance copies of the new novels with me.) At one point, Maas puts her toughest character alone in a library. She’s full of rage and a terrible power. And—take this, haters—she’s reading a smutty romance.

In the Call Her Daddy interview, with her high cheekbones and golden hair and bare feet tucked beneath her, Maas looked a bit like one of her own characters as she talked about her “useless” creative-writing degree and recalled telling a professor, “I will never fucking write a poem.” She couldn’t understand “the meter and the rhythm” and had to ask her math-major boyfriend (now husband) for help. But when you read about a battle ending with enchanted water bubbling from “the lips of all the Hybern soldiers as Tarquin drowned them on dry land,” you suspect she knows what meter is, even if she doesn’t care what it’s called. She’s got a line of nearly perfect iambs there.

Enough about language. We’ve gone too long without talking about sex, and Maas would not approve. Sometimes she makes you wait for it (faeries, who are basically immortal, can spend centuries edging) but then, before you know it, someone’s getting a blow job in the dining room.

The books get dirtier as they go. Reading on the subway about Feyre coming so hard that she “couldn’t tell where one climax ended and the second began,” I might have been less embarrassed to be caught watching actual porn. I really wished that one crucial sex scene hadn’t involved so much wet paint. Maas’s characters are often splattered with something: mud, blood, stardust, semen (but only by Book 5). Still, there’s this one scene: Feyre—degraded, but into it—and a throne room, and a thumb moving in lazy circles … I’ll say it. I’m just going to say it. I liked it.

Smut aside, what really matters is how the charac­ters grow together. You keep reading to see if they track down the enchanted artifacts but also to find out if true romantic partnerships are possible, the kind where care is taken and respect given. In the real world, many women are profoundly disappointed by and mistrustful of men. You might assume that this is why so many women are suddenly so eager to fantasize about another species entirely. But, fundamentally, these books are stories of friendship and love. Why should the novels’ popularity suggest that women are giving up on men? It could mean they’re holding out hope.

Maybe, eventually, more than a handful of men will read these books. After all, I was raised on the paperback heroes of my father’s epics: The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time. And Harry Potter, of course. Being a girl didn’t stop me from wanting the boy to save the world. I remember listening to The Sorcerer’s Stone in the car as a child, on road trips with my family, when things were not so good, when things were sometimes pretty bad, and seeing, not the tense edge of each parent’s opposing shoulder, but the night sky across the ensorcelled ceiling of the Hogwarts dining hall.

Romantasy readers know they’re not actually going to “go out and find dragons and magic,” Funk­houser said, but if they’re snowed in—­or trapped by a pandemic, or up with a nursing newborn, or stuck in any of the ways humans tend to get stuck—­it can help to imagine they could. Some books make you want to be a better writer or thinker, some books make you want to be a better person, and some books make you glad to be reading them. There may be a ceiling on what this literature can do. But it’s an enchanted one.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Those Books of Smut and Wonder.”

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

“Forgive the bad texters,” Julie Beck wrote in a recent Atlantic essay. Beck is one of them: She routinely leaves messages unanswered for days or even weeks, not because she doesn’t care but because she gets distracted, is burned-out, or simply forgets. Yet in a world where everyone is expected to be constantly reachable, a delayed reply can easily be mistaken for indifference.

Texting has made staying in touch easier than ever, but it has also turned communication into a near-constant obligation. A third of Americans report feeling overwhelmed by the number of texts they need to respond to, Beck writes. People have felt guilty about unanswered correspondence for centuries, but technology has escalated both those expectations and the anxiety that comes with meeting them.

Being a good texter, Beck suggests, isn’t the same as being a good friend. Someone who takes days to reply might still be the first to show up when you need them. So the next time a friend leaves you on read, consider giving them the benefit of the doubt. And if you’re the one with a growing pile of unanswered messages, maybe give yourself a little grace too.

The Texting Trap

Forgive the Bad Texters

By Julie Beck

We are truly sorry for our delayed response.

Read the article.

The Agony of Texting With Men

By Matthew Schnipper

Many guys are bad at messaging their friends back—and it might be making them more lonely. (From 2025)

Read the article.

Another Symptom of Growing Isolation

By Olga Khazan

A recent study found that people spoke fewer words a day in 2019 than in 2005.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• Would you go back to a time before smartphones if you could? In this episode of How to Touch Grass, Natalie Brennan and Julie Beck explore what’s behind analog nostalgia—and what it means for our relationship with technology in the future.
• The tension that defines modern life: Most people have a smartphone. But many want to use it less, Beck writes.

Other Diversions

• “The nobel laureate who rescued me”
• The children of philanderers, by Tom Junod
• The marriage that captures a high point of American art

PS

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “About ten years ago, I saw a Joro spider for the first time. They are an invasive species from Asia. Since that time, they have become ubiquitous in my area,” Nancy C. from Marietta, Georgia, writes. “Last year I began to notice how incredibly beautiful the adult female spiders are. Their abdomens have a gorgeous, intricate design that looks like a colorful maze. I realized that for years, I had been walking by such sublime beauty, and I hadn’t even recognized it.”

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

— Rafaela

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

All of which makes it so disconcerting, 10 years later, to see Kelly now, on her daily SiriusXM and YouTube show, cursing and sneering with long barrel curls and the gusto of someone hosting not a discussion of polling data but a Two Minutes Hate. “I’m just gonna be honest, she’s not the most attractive gal,” Kelly said on Monday, discussing the anonymous woman who has filed a lawsuit detailing her alleged gang rape at Cornell University. (The men named in the lawsuit have denied any wrongdoing.) “She’s extremely”—here Kelly screwed up her face in disgust—“beefy in, like, her arms and her legs. She has a whole video online talking about her cankles. And she possibly enjoyed being admired. This is how women make these mistakes. Admired, wanted—some women even foolishly say loved—by these guys at Cornell. This is probably a first for her. She’s probably thrilled to be so admired because she clearly didn’t grow up the incredibly beautiful one.”

[Sophie Gilbert: Is college getting less safe for women?]

We’ve seen some drastic heel turns in the media over the past few decades, but none quite as morally appalling as a former self-described advocate for female empowerment suggesting that a woman in this situation might have craved the attention because no one would have wanted to have sex with her otherwise. (Not to mention the contentions that the woman Kelly seems to be referring to, whose name has been leaked by some commentators, is not actually Jane Doe, based on her age and the fact that she would have been too young at the time to attend college.) Normally, I have a pretty strong constitution for this kind of bad-faith rage bait. But Kelly’s display this week of what I can describe only as performative hysteria has been hard to watch. Less than a minute into her show on Monday, she invoked the Salem witch trials. Twenty-three minutes in came her first pronounced use of the word fuck (I counted seven in total). That the whole performance was interspersed with ad reads for supplements and a tiny avatar of Kelly pointing giddily at the “Subscribe” button just added to the cognitive dissonance. It felt like watching morning television in Gilead.

I’ve been stuck all week on the question of how much of Kelly’s performance these days is attention-seeking behavior for the YouTube algorithm and how much is reflective of what she actually believes. Kelly, 55, grew up outside of Albany, where she also went to law school, becoming an editor at the Albany Law Review. She was an attorney for almost a decade, but has said that watching live newscasts on 9/11 inspired her to change careers and become a TV reporter. She was hired full-time at Fox News in 2004. Before long—according to her allegations—Ailes began making inappropriate comments, such as how sexy he imagined her bras must be. In January 2006, Kelly claimed, Ailes tried to kiss her; after his third attempt, she said she got up and walked out of his office. (Ailes denied Kelly’s allegations; he died in 2017.) Three months later, Kelly made a name for herself with her skeptical coverage of the Duke lacrosse team’s alleged gang rape of an erotic dancer. (The woman in question eventually admitted to fabricating the assault.)

All of this matters, I think, because it communicates to what extent Kelly’s apparent worldview—where she herself can face sexual harassment due to patriarchal power structures that protect and even reward abusive men, but other women are likely lying—has been shaped by her rise and fall on TV news. In 2016, she declined in an interview with NPR to call herself a feminist. (She dislikes the label, she said, as though it’s just a branding issue.) Her 2016 book, Settle for More, was published just a week after Trump won the presidential election, and became a No. 1 New York Times best seller. Reviews were lukewarm, perhaps because of the news environment: “For all the disgust that she claims to feel for the misogyny and male entitlement” that seemed to be ramping back up in the national culture, Isaac Chotiner wrote in Slate, “and for all the personal harm it caused her, our bleak future is one in which Megyn Kelly is likely to find herself right at home.”

But things took a downward turn when Kelly left the Fox fold. In 2017 she was poached by NBC News, which offered her an annual salary reported to be more than $20 million to host a daytime talk show, Megyn Kelly Today, and a Sunday-night news magazine, which was criticized for softball interviews with Vladimir Putin and Alex Jones and ultimately canceled. Megyn Kelly Today didn’t fare much better—Kelly, with her flinty self-possession, was criticized for being too chilly for daytime TV. During her first week, she awkwardly grilled Jane Fonda about whether she’d had plastic surgery while Fonda was promoting a movie next to her co-star Robert Redford. (“We really want to talk about that?” Fonda responded, after an agonizing few seconds of icy silence.) In October 2018, Megyn Kelly Today was canceled when Kelly defended blackface in a segment on Halloween costumes. Soon, she was dropped by her agency, CAA. A few months later, her NBC contract expired.

This moment seems to have influenced Kelly’s current persona. Public humiliation is hard for anyone to endure, but for someone with a renegade streak (“I’ve never been a ‘pc’ kind of person,” she reportedly wrote in her apology email to NBC staffers after her blackface comments), seeing so many people celebrating her failure must have been immensely painful. By the time The Megyn Kelly Show launched as a podcast in September 2020, mid-pandemic, Kelly was snidely describing her guests as lefties, complaining about the assault allegations against the Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh, and raging at the “dishonesty” of the press covering Trump.

The pivot, whatever its reason, seems to have done what it was supposed to. Kelly has more than 4 million YouTube subscribers and The Megyn Kelly Show is one of the top podcasts in the country. Because Kelly is half-Italian and half-Irish, she told Semafor in 2024, “if you choose to watch the show, you will definitely glean something from the hand gestures and facial expressions that you might not pick up from listening alone.”

Having watched Kelly all week, I can attest to this. Although she injects real poison in her voice to rage against, say, the singer Olivia Rodrigo for expressing support for Cornell’s Jane Doe, she accompanies this with the shrugs and waves of a waiter trying to describe tonight’s special of veal parmigiana. “Olivia, in sum, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” she said. “Shut up and stick to singing. I liked you better when you were in front of a microphone singing your weird little depressing songs. Shut UP. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

You can sense she’s imagining clips being spliced for TikTok and Instagram, and tailoring her delivery to provoke maximum indignation. As a rant, it feels much too phony—and cynical, given how fury seems to be the sole emotion that can build an audience in 2026, and the fact that Rodrigo is one of the most popular women alive. (“The only reliable way to reach mainstream or even moderate recognition against all the noise,” Rebecca Jennings wrote earlier this year in New York magazine, “is to either carpet-bomb social media with clips or to enrage wide swaths of the public.”)

But in moments, Kelly does seem to slip out of character. Although she seems perfectly happy excoriating Jane Doe, Kelly draws the line at revealing her name. “I know her name,” she said on Monday. “It’s been well publicized online. But no one in the mainstream media has said it. And as you know I’m seriously considering just saying it. And the reason I haven’t is because I don’t want to do anything to hurt this young woman, to get her hurt, or to add to the pain I’m sure she’s feeling.” Her voice is surprisingly gentle. Her hands stay down in her lap. Could it be that this woman who herself had to hire armed guards for her family after being personally targeted by Trump actually feels for someone caught in a similar nightmare? Is all this spewed-out ire and provocation really just about a reward as soul-rotting as clicks and followers? I don’t think Megyn Kelly will ever tell us, but I have my suspicions.

Somehow, America has yet to reach peak protein. Perhaps we never will. Even after David bars have gone viral for being bricks of essentially pure protein and Starbucks has rolled out lattes topped with “protein cold foam,” new and somehow weirder protein-laced products keep hitting shelves. You can now buy protein Honey Nut Cheerios, protein popcorn and PopCorners, protein sodas, protein ranch dressing, and protein chips. (Doritos launched a nacho-cheese-flavored version with 10 grams of protein per one-ounce serving.)

In an era of GLP-1 drugs and peptide stacks and Oura rings and self-optimization, of wellness influencers and looks-maxxers, everybody seems to be doing everything they can to eat as much protein as possible. The magical macronutrient will supposedly make you more muscular, or more toned, or thinner—or something, really anything, just better. Amid the protein frenzy, regular food seemingly doesn’t cut it anymore. Why order a simple flat white when you can instead sip a Dunkin’ Nutty Pumpkin Iced Protein Latte?

[Read: America has entered late-stage protein]

Into the fray, I would suggest a humble alternative: Have some yogurt. Calorie for calorie, Greek yogurt has more protein than Chipotle’s High Protein Low Calorie Bowl, Kraft’s new PowerMac, or yes, a Dunkin’ Nutty Pumpkin Iced Protein Latte. So do some traditional yogurts, as well as other fermented options in the dairy aisle such as skyr and kefir. And that’s if you opt for the full-fat, luscious kind (which I recommend). Nonfat Greek yogurt, which is lower in calories, is roughly as protein-dense as a David bar—with the added benefits of having just two ingredients (milk, culture) and not tasting like plastic.

Yogurt is not only full of protein but also good for your bones, your digestion, and your immune system. Yogurt is an ingredient: Eat it plain or bake with it, use it as the base of a sauce or dip, throw it in a marinade or soup. Sure, some yogurts have added sugars, but so does a Starbucks Iced Banana Protein Cream Matcha. And as far as health fads go, yogurt is typically probiotic. All things considered, yogurt may be the easiest protein of all.

[Read: Let’s not fool ourselves about yogurt]

In spite of everything it has going for it, yogurt has not been the face of the protein craze. Perhaps that’s because yogurt is not splashy or technologically innovative or referred to by a trademarked proper noun. A David bar may taste different and have distinct packaging from an RxBar or a Jacob protein bar made with beef tallow, but all plain yogurt is the same. Though some companies have released “protein-enhanced” yogurt (whatever that means), for the most part yogurt is not optimized by corporate food scientists and focus groups in the way that today’s protein-branded products are. Yogurt has been optimized in the sense that humans have consumed it for thousands of years.

Imagine wellness influencers suggesting that you dollop yogurt into a bowl and sprinkle berries on top without measuring anything. There wouldn’t be any regimen to adopt or wellness plan to pay for. There wouldn’t be any special trademarked protein products for influencers to hawk: The company behind the David bar, for instance, has sponsored Andrew Huberman and, until recently, Peter Attia was its chief science officer. The homemade parfait would all be rather mundane and boring compared with Attia’s rotation of four protein powders or the bodybuilder Chris Bumstead’s breakfast filet mignon. It wouldn’t get any views.

Protein is not just a health fad; it is a business. So is everything else in the world of wellness. Indeed, there’s something about many of these setups—which proffer the perfect low-calorie, high-protein snack to pick up on your way to work every morning; a biometric wristband to wear every night; supplements to consume every day for the rest of your life; a weight-loss drug you will inject every week—that keeps people coming back for more, giving their attention and money and energy to the endless pursuit of betterment.

Health and more broadly self-improvement are, obviously, admirable pursuits. Protein can be a way to achieve either. But obsessing over hitting those goals can become unhealthy, as most obsessions are. Have some yogurt, or don’t. You’ll probably be fine.

In December 2021, Elon Musk sat for an interview with The Babylon Bee, a conservative satire site. Having covered the typical topics (wokeness, free speech, Elizabeth Warren) and finding themselves with a bit more time to fill, the outlet’s then–creative director closed out the chat with a request. “The Babylon Bee is a Christian organization, and we’re a ministry,” he reminded Musk. So “we’re wondering if you could do us a quick solid and accept Jesus as your lord and savior?”

Musk laughed. The others did too. The guys waited for an answer, and Musk, after rambling a bit, gave one. Sure, he replied with a shrug—why not? “If Jesus is saving people,” he said, “I mean, I won’t stand in his way.”

The exchange makes a brief but incredibly effective appearance in Musk, the documentarian Alex Gibney’s new film: Asked for a come-to-Jesus moment, Musk professes his faith in himself. The Musk of 2021 was considerably less consequential than the Musk of today. He had not yet added Twitter—humanity’s “collective consciousness,” he once called it—to his portfolio, nor had he staged his hostile takeover of the United States government or become the world’s first trillionaire. Still, Musk had slightly more reason than most to assume his high status on the cosmic org chart.

Through Tesla and Starlink and SpaceX, his dominion stretched over the heavens and the Earth. Through Neuralink and his assorted experiments with artificial intelligence, Musk was expanding his reach into human hearts and minds. As a media figure, too, he was all but inescapable: a piece of software downloaded into people’s lives whether they had opted in to him or not.

Power, at that sort of scale, changes every equation. It can make hyperbole seem accurate. It can make a man, small and flawed, look like something more: a genius, an idol, an outlet for everyday faith. And the discrepancy between the person Musk is and the figure he claims to be is one of Musk’s running themes. The man sells himself as a savior; many have before. But he is where he is—he is what he is—because so many people have bought into the pitch. Delusions of grandeur are one thing. The real trouble comes when one person’s delusions become other people’s reality.

[Read: Maybe Alex Gibney did Elon Musk a favor]

Musk benefits, appropriately enough, from an exercise in data science. The man himself did not participate; he declined Gibney’s overtures in the most Muskian manner imaginable: through an insult-laden post on X. As a work-around, the director and his team created a database compiling every comment Musk has been recorded making in public. That data set—a galaxy-brained version of Musk—informed their assessment of him and individual moments in the film. Muskisms (about the likelihood that earthly life is a simulation, about the drawbacks of empathy, about humans’ future on Mars) make their way into the proceedings via a computer-generated version of Musk—an animated character who appears where, in a traditional documentary, Gibney might have quoted his subject.

To an extent, the approach turns the tables on Musk. It renders this person who talks fondly of humans’ cyborgian future as a cartoonishly uncanny, flagrantly inhuman presence. But it also highlights his cultural status as a man who is, at this point, something more than just a man.

The sources that Musk cites as it creates its portrait—among them the people who have worked with and lived with and, often, clashed with Musk—regularly mention the scale of his ego and the scope of his ambition. They attribute much of his success to his mythmaking capabilities: his romantic descriptions of technology, his branding of consumer goods as spiritual necessities. Tesla, Musk’s car company, “is not automobile manufacturing or automobile retailing,” the financial analyst Lawrence Fossi tells Gibney. “This is not finance”; instead, he says, it is religion. The mythology extends to Musk himself. “In Elon We Trust,” one of Musk’s followers once tweeted at him, in a post Gibney included in the film. Another informed him, “We follow you like a cult :).”

[Read: We are living in the fantasy world of 13-year-old boys]

A former girlfriend says in the film that Musk likes to compare himself to Kublai Khan, the 13th-century Mongolian warrior and emperor of China. And indeed, his megalomania is in one way a very old story: Human history has, for better and worse, been shaped by men who insisted on their godlike supremacy. But Musk’s version is also thoroughly modern. His power is systemic. His sieges rise from within.

One of the allegations the film makes against Musk concerns his incursion into the U.S. government: DOGE’s haphazard dismantling of government agencies, its destruction of scientific research, its toppling of USAID. The widespread effects of DOGE’s efforts—the cures that won’t be found; the vaccines that won’t be made; the food meant to save lives, left instead to rot—will likely never be fully known. Nevertheless, Musk argues, the raid has had a death toll: hundreds of thousands of people, and potentially many more.

When such accusations are made, the public might ask, and should ask, what accountability looks like at that level. But one of the affordances of planet-spanning power is that it can turn justice, as most people experience it, into something of a joke. If Musk is a category error incarnate—a man with, effectively, a gross national product; a guy whose influence extends beyond the stratosphere—the confusion does more than elevate him. It also helps inoculate him. The film quotes a newscaster’s summary of one of SpaceX’s early launches. “Only four entities have launched a space capsule into orbit and successfully brought it back to the Earth,” the reporter announces: “the United States, Russia, China, and Elon Musk.”

How do you make sense of that kind of power? How do you challenge it? One truism of modern life is that humans, as animals who would prefer to pretend that they are otherwise, were not made to thrive at our current scale. We weren’t meant to know this many people, to process this much information, to make sense of a world that stretches so far beyond our immediate grasp. Musk provides a corollary to those claims: It gives us a human who himself has become too colossal to make sense of, too unwieldy to respond to. Even more than his fellow tech titans, Musk exists at a scale that no man was able to before and enjoys power so complete that it becomes self-ratifying.

No man should be so godlike. No person should be so exceptional. In the film, Musk’s former girlfriend sums up the matter concisely: “Elon is a nuke,” she says—a human of mass destruction.

In 2017, when French voters first elected Emmanuel Macron as president, pundits hailed him as the antidote to their nation’s “decline.” The term, in the parlance of that moment, seemed to encompass a condition that was not just economic and cultural but existential: France, as an idea and ideal, was decaying as surely as its national debt was deepening.

Nearly 10 years later, as Macron’s second presidential term comes to an end, the French are nearly unanimous in their belief that their country is still on a downward slope. In a recent Ipsos-BVA poll, 85 percent of French respondents said that France was in decline, and 98 percent were dissatisfied with the present state of the country.

One might have seen such numbers in the spring of 1789, if opinion polls had existed then. In that prerevolutionary time, France was burdened with staggering debt, skyrocketing prices, and in a sclerotic state overseen by a clueless and corrupt elite. Today similar factors, together with the memory of past glory, are driving the public’s belief that France’s Fifth Republic is faltering. And declinism, in turn, seems to be fueling the rise of extremist radicals intent on remaking the republic itself.

Gallic morosity might be easy to dismiss. After all, few peoples are more inclined toward claims of national decay than the French. Members of the country’s political and intellectual elite point to auguries of its descent throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—a sweep of time punctuated by the rise and fall of authoritarian states (whether Bonapartist or Pétainist) and republican governments (from the Second to the Fifth). Charles de Gaulle’s assertion that France could not be France without la grandeur could be said to channel a certain anxiety as much as pride.

Soon after de Gaulle’s death in 1970, le déclinisme was again on the rise. Thirty years of economic growth came to an end with the global energy shocks and financial crises of that period. In 1976, the distinctly non-Gaullist president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, declared that France was no longer a fully autonomous power as it had been in the past, but was instead what commentators have described as a “world middle power”—an observation that angered his opponents across the political spectrum. An influx of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East had helped fuel decades of industrial growth; they then became scapegoats for growing fears over national decline and disintegration.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Our oldest ally]

As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, this French fixation expanded and darkened. Following Robert Frank’s fine historical account La hantise du déclin (The Obsession With Decline), published in 1994, came works such as Nicolas Baverez’s wildly polemical 2003 tract, La France qui tombe (Falling France). And then the public appetite for books proclaiming the End Times for France grew fiercer. Pundits furiously supplied the grim prognoses—most notoriously Éric Zemmour, who a little more than a decade ago published his best-selling Le suicide français, which married xenophobic rage to potted history. The book boosted the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims that Western elites are enabling great waves of Muslim immigrants to replace les français de souche—the loaded term for those of “purely French heritage.”

Zemmour went on to found a political movement named Reconquête!, a heavy-handed reference to the medieval “reconquest” by Catholic rulers of Moorish Spain. The party remains politically marginal, but its message—that France’s immigration policies amount to national suicide—has gone mainstream. The current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, recently proposed a three-year moratorium on legal immigration, declaring that France has reached “the limit of our capacities for integration and assimilation” of immigrants. This view, and the moratorium idea, have the approval of 63 percent of the public, judging from a CSA Institute opinion poll conducted in May.

Those numbers partly explain Marine Le Pen’s remarkable lead in polling for next spring’s presidential election. The movement she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, then called the National Front, once gathered neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, and die-hard supporters of the French colonial administration of Algeria. Now called National Rally, the party mainly demonizes Muslims in place of Jews as the source of all of France’s ills. But just last week, the party’s president, Jordan Bardella, was revealed to have spent his late teens marinating in the writings of the Holocaust denialist Alain Soral. In line with her party’s ethno-nationalist ideals, Le Pen promises a policy that she calls a “national priority,” which would give French citizens preferential treatment over noncitizens for an array of social benefits, and she has said she’d be willing to change the constitution by referendum.

The most recent Ifop-Fudicial poll, published on September 30, put Le Pen in the lead with 31 to 36 percent support. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the founder of the extreme-left party France Unbowed, is fighting for second place, at 14 to 17 percent. Like Le Pen, Mélenchon has pledged to disobey certain European Union regulations that infringe on French sovereignty; also like her, he seems to trust Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky less than Russian President Vladimir Putin; and, along with some members of Le Pen’s party, he enjoys flirting with anti-Semitic tropes. Both candidates exercise full control of the parties they either created or re-created and seem to satisfy the public’s broad desire, according to a 2019 Ipsos poll, for a “strong leader who will break the rules.”

Le Pen, the reactionary, and Mélenchon, the revolutionary, share a common goal: to bury the French Republic in its current form. Mélenchon seeks to replace the hybrid regime of the Fifth Republic, which fuses presidential and parliamentary institutions, with a Sixth Republic dominated solely by Parliament. Le Pen’s “national priority” would undermine the universalist foundation of French republicanism—and imposing it by referendum would elevate that instrument as a means of circumventing the legislature.

For French voters repelled by both extremes, the prospects are grim. Their predicament stems from a decision President Macron made in 2024. His party, Renaissance, and other centrist parties took a beating in elections for the European Parliament that year. Infuriated, Macron dissolved the National Assembly and called for snap elections. Rather than the usual face-off between the traditional right and left, three blocs of roughly equal size emerged: the remnants of Renaissance, the National Rally, and a hastily slapped-together coalition of left-wing parties—France Unbowed, Communists, Socialists, and the Ecologists—that purported to form a “republican rampart” against Le Pen.

Personality clashes have since reduced the republican rampart to rubble, allowing the National Rally and France Unbowed to solidify their places in the polls while a now-lame-duck president has meanwhile presided over a series of flailing governments that can’t seem to pass a budget through Parliament. The National Assembly has been paralyzed, and a host of politicians have tossed their hat into the ring for the upcoming presidential election. The first round of votes will happen on April 18 and, in the extremely likely case of no candidate winning a majority, the second round will take place on May 2. At last count, 34 presidential candidates have declared themselves, mostly from the center left and center right. Several others, including former President François Hollande and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, are testing the waters.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The violence sweeping France was never really about schools]

The proliferation of candidates attests to the fragmentation of a political landscape that once neatly divided into left and right. It is a sign not of healthy competition but of democratic fragmentation: This multitude of candidates, most with relatively few supporters, will ultimately help secure the second-round election for one of the two contenders who represent the greatest danger to democracy in France.

The growing prospect of this face-off reinforces a widespread perception of decline—of a nation not just reduced to the ranks of middle powers, but where the political center no longer holds. This explains, in part, what the Le Monde columnist Solenn de Royer describes as “a spirit of defeatism” now haunting French politics. During an August visit to a town in southern France, Macron adopted that language, urging a small crowd to resist “the rampant spirit of defeatism,” whether in response to recent wildfires or in politics. A few weeks later, two well-known establishment political figures, the conservative Xavier Bertrand and the socialist Bernard Cazeneuve, joined forces to press their followers not to give in to despair in response to Le Pen’s seemingly irresistible rise.

The call to resist such fatalism has been sounded before in France—from within the walls of the Paris Commune of 1871, and across the trenches of World War I. A presentiment of decline was thought to fuel pacifism in the interwar period, and de Gaulle decried such thinking in his BBC address in 1940. But perhaps no one in France has offered greater insight into the declinist mentality, and greater courage to combat it, than Marc Bloch, the historian who chronicled France’s defeat by Nazi Germany, in 1940. He attributed the debacle in part to an elite “only too ready to despair of the country they had been called upon to defend, and of the people who furnished the soldiers they commanded.”

More than 80 years later, the problem is less that France’s political elite is ready to despair of the country than that the nation is ready to despair of its political elite.

Updated at 1:36 p.m. on October 10, 2026

For more than four months, since this hurricane season began, the Atlantic has been eerily placid—a remarkable stretch without a single hurricane. That prolonged calm has been rudely interrupted by Hurricane Isaias, a Category 2 fastball that slammed into the Gulf Coast last night along the Florida panhandle. “I think we knew at some point we would likely have a hurricane,” Daniel Brown, the operations-division chief at the National Hurricane Center, told me.

Not to be outdone, the Pacific Ocean has two major storms brewing, including Hurricane Simon, a dangerous Category 4 storm off the coast of southwestern Mexico. A smaller one, Tropical Storm Rachel, is forecast to bring potentially more storm surge and flooding as far north as Southern California. “It’s a busy day here,” Brown said on Friday.

This season’s dynamic—an unruffled Atlantic and a frothing Pacific—has been right out of the El Niño playbook and was predicted months ago. El Niños tend to generate opposing winds—low-altitude trade winds out of the east and higher-up westerlies—that tear apart Atlantic storms as they try to form and also keep them from gaining strength. This type of wind shear is affecting Hurricane Isaias now, Brown said, and weakened the storm a little before it made landfall.

Isaias landed along the Gulf Coast with sustained winds of more than 100 mph; in places, it dropped more than a dozen inches of rain. Coastal counties had ordered evacuations; the governors of Alabama and Florida had declared emergencies; residents had scrambled through hurricane prep. During the storm, the wind ripped off roofs and toppled tree. t\Two people, one in Florida and one in Alabama, died after trees fell on their house, authorities said. Nearly 800,000 people were without power across the Southeast as of Saturday morning, according to poweroutage.com.

In the Pacific, by contrast, a Category 4 hurricane is almost par for the course this season. By this time of year, the Pacific has usually generated 13 storms potent enough to warrant their own name, Brown said. This year, we’re on number 19. This onrush of hurricanes has a great deal to do with the buildup of abnormally warm waters in the equatorial Pacific—which, at this point, are in certain areas more than 4 degrees Celsius warmer than usual. This warming gins up storm activity in that ocean; it’s been spinning up hurricanes and hurling them toward Hawaii for months. The storm swells have also eroded Southern California beaches and swamped homes, and they keep coming. On Friday, seawater flooded the streets of Balboa Peninsula, California, inundating cars and homes, well before Tropical Storm Rachel was anywhere close to arriving.

The coast of Mexico is at particular risk from Hurricane Simon, which is forecast to bring potentially dangerous flooding and landslides to coastal states such as Jalisco and Nayarit. Further north, on the Baja California peninsula, communities are still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Polo, which caused widespread flooding last month and displaced hundreds of people.

The storm scorecard in these oceans has only reinforced the notion that the world is in the midst of an unusually powerful El Niño. As I reported in August, key areas of the Pacific Ocean had already gotten hot enough to make this a “Super El Niño”; the experts I spoke with then were anticipating that the event could end up peaking at twice that amount of warming. If those trends hold, this could be the strongest El Niño ever recorded, and right now, “everything seems to be on track with this being a remarkable event,” Nick Novella, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told me.

This season has set a record already—this is the latest in the year that a hurricane has formed in the Atlantic at any time during the satellite era, since 1966. And it isn’t even close. “This record was broken by nearly a month,” Novella said. Normally, five Atlantic hurricanes form by the end of September. For residents of the Gulf Coast, the beleaguered hours after a storm makes landfall are all too familiar. As they assess the wreckage, hopefully the year’s first Atlantic storm will not have changed too dramatically how we remember this season of relative calm.