After half-heartedly including some actual professionals in his first administration, Donald Trump is now served almost exclusively by sycophants and family members. The president has made clear that he cares about loyalty more than qualifications, but the astonishing incompetence and corruption of many of his appointees raise an obvious question: What does it take to get fired by Trump’s White House?

Kimberly Guilfoyle’s resignation yesterday as ambassador to Greece provides some clues. Guilfoyle has been accused of blatant corruption both before and during her time as an envoy. She denies these allegations, but her resignation—which the White House requested—isn’t really about corruption. The idea that Guilfoyle, and only Guilfoyle, crossed some sort of previously unseen corruption red line is laughable. If ethical and legal questions, including the now-moribund standard of “appearances of impropriety,” were grounds for dismissal in this administration, Trump would have already shed several other members of his team.

Rather, Guilfoyle was pushed out because she was an embarrassment. She overstepped her bounds, tried to trade on the president’s name, and then made the administration look bad when she got caught. Also, she is a woman, and in this administration, self-dealing is mostly a man’s game.

Indeed, by comparison with the charges leveled at others—including against the president himself, who seems utterly unconcerned with notions such as “emoluments”—Guilfoyle is decidedly a small-timer. This past spring, for example, the Financial Times reported that a broker for Pete Hegseth attempted to make a big investment in defense industries just before the Iran war, raising suspicions of insider trading. FBI Director Kash Patel has been accused of using government money as a slush fund to pay improper bonuses to his favorites within the Bureau. “Border Czar” Tom Homan was caught on audio in 2024 accepting $50,000 in cash (wrapped in a Cava food bag, always the sign of a deal on the up-and-up) from undercover FBI agents posing as business executives, and yet he remains in his job. Hegseth and Homan deny any wrongdoing; Patel and the FBI have offered no comment or explanation. And the journalist Dexter Filkins recently described Trump’s son-in-law and roving minister-without-portfolio Jared Kushner as representative of “a new kind of Washington figure, for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth.”

[Read: Trump’s team of mercenaries]

Guilfoyle may have been a relative piker among giants in the grift game, but her real sin was the pathetic and humiliating nature of her behavior. (Even Homan managed not to seem quite so grubby when reportedly accepting a bag of greenbacks.) Her messages to a Trump donor asking for money to help pay her huge credit-card bills are cringe-inducing. “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she wrote to the Trump supporter Eric Deters when asking him to wire a cool $100,000 directly into her American Express account in July 2025, just before her confirmation hearings.

Worse, she continually told Deters to stop writing things down and just contact her on Signal. “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing,” she said. This was apparently Guilfoyle’s version of the infamous “Stringer Bell rule,” named for a character from the television series The Wire who dressed down one of his drug-dealing accomplices for being stupid enough to keep written notes on a criminal conspiracy. The problem is that she, too, violated that rule: She made her requests to Deters to stop writing things down in writing.

Deters, unsurprisingly, kept all the messages. Guilfoyle, he asserts, offered him access to the Trump administration. “I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” he claims she told him. When she didn’t deliver, he warned Guilfoyle and White House officials earlier this month that he would go public with their correspondence and then made good on that threat.

The newly minted ambassador, meanwhile, was flitting about southeastern Europe in the company of Greek tycoons. But again, rather than enjoy the perks of her job in discreet luxury, she bragged about her connections to these wealthy men and tried to present herself as some sort of made woman from the inner Trump orbit who had the juice to get things done.

According to The Wall Street Journal, she went to Davos in January 2026 and was excluded from a dinner being held for Eric Trump. She decided to pressure an American businessman to help her get in. “You know, I can deliver the world to you. Which you deserve,” she said. (This time, she was caught on audio, rather than by text message.) “I’m going to make you a lot of fucking money,” she told the American. She also raged about the impudence of the dinner’s Greek hostess. “You don’t have the fucking U.S., you know, ambassador to Greece not come. She should be kissing my fucking ass.”

Again, Trump Sr. has no problem with F-bombs; he deploys them regularly. He has no problem with money grabs while in public office; he has enriched himself while president and has explicitly or implicitly blessed similar efforts by other subordinates to profit from their positions. But he apparently draws a line when his son’s former fiancée does not show proper appreciation for the courtesy of being stashed in Athens—Athens!—and then lands in the newspapers looking like an aging waitress cadging tips from marks in a casino. Honey, just put it on the tray. Don’t tell my manager, and I’ll get you to the good poker table.

[David Frum: Trump’s last loyal constituency]

Guilfoyle was once so tight with the Trumps that she was given a prime-time slot to fawn over the president during the 2020 GOP convention. It was a disastrous, over-the-top performance, but Trump loved it, reportedly calling her “my Kimberly” and comparing her to the former Argentine first lady Eva Perón. Earlier this year, Trump said of his emissary to Greece: “Kimberly Guilfoyle has been my friend for a long time. I love calling her Kimber-lay. That’s my little pet name, right? But you are the greatest, and I heard they love you over there.”

But over the past several days, the president saw bad publicity about this demanding, middle-aged woman, thrown over by his son for a younger wife—as Trump himself has done to previous spouses—trying to profit off his presidency while making a fool of herself and encouraging more bad press about corruption just before the midterm elections. Guilfoyle had to go, and Trump jettisoned her quickly and coldly. “She wasn’t a member of my family,” the president said yesterday. “She, uh, I guess dated my son a long time ago.”

“Dated”? I guess? She was in line for years to become the president’s daughter-in-law, married to his first-born son. Now she’s just some dame one of his kids used to know.

Guilfoyle didn’t get it. All she had to do was stay out of trouble. But that was too hard for her, and now she’s learned that making money off this presidency means following some rules. Don’t be too obvious; don’t embarrass the boss; don’t get caught if you can help it. And especially, don’t be an older woman.

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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses President Trump’s announced diesel deal with Russia, the administration’s abandonment of Ukraine, and why Trump is giving up so much to gain very little.

Then, David is joined from Kyiv by Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian journalist and the author of the new book The Land of Tears and Hope. David and Illia talk about the history of Ukraine, its current state as the war with Russia rages on, and how and why the Trump administration seems so hostile to the country.

Finally, David concludes with discussion about why so little literature exists about the history of slavery in Eastern Europe.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion. But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans.

[Music]

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Illia Ponomarenko, author of a new history of Ukraine, Land of Tears and Hope, available from Bloomsbury in the month of November. Illia and I will discuss the deep history of Ukraine, the recent onslaught of Russian drones and missiles on Ukrainian cities, and how Ukrainians feel about their abandonment by the Trump administration.

This week’s book will also be Eastern European–focused. It’s not a book that exists. It’s a book that I would like to read, and I set out a research assignment for some intrepid Eastern Europeanist to deliver a book I would like to know more about in, again, in the deep history of the lands that are now Ukraine, now Poland, and now Russia.

But before either the dialogue with Illia or the book discussion, some opening thoughts about the most shocking recent turn in the U.S.-Ukraine story.

When Illia and I recorded our dialogue, we did not yet know about this announcement that was pending from the Trump administration, declaring or imagining or proposing, or whatever the word is, for what is likely vaporware. Not a real deal; a big purchase, a massive—in the words of President Trump—a massive purchase of Russian diesel fuel for the United States.

Now, I wrote an article for The Atlantic this past weekend with the facts and figures about just how negligible an achievement this so-called deal really is. The United States is a diesel superpower. It’s probably the largest producer of diesel on Earth. We don’t exactly know that for sure, because we don’t know really how much China produces, but probably the United States is the largest producer of diesel in the world. It is certainly the largest exporter of diesel in the world. And it produces much more than it uses at home. So it exports about a million and a half barrels of diesel fuel a day.

The reason American prices have been rising so fast for truckers and farmers and others who use diesel fuel is not because of anything that’s happening in the U.S. market, or even the North American market. The United States imports a little diesel fuel from Canada because it’s easier sometimes to import from Canada and then to export from the Gulf Coast than to supply the United States entirely from its own resources. The reason that the price has been rising is because of disturbances in the global market. What matters is world demand and world supply of diesel, not U.S. demand and U.S. supply of diesel.

Now, if this Russian deal exists at all, it’s a matter of a few hours’ worth of U.S. production and U.S. consumption. It’s not a big event, and it won’t change world prices because Russia doesn’t have a lot of diesel to sell. Although Russia used to be a big diesel producer, Russian oil facilities have been damaged so intensely by Ukrainian missile and drone fire that Russia has very little diesel to contribute. In fact, Russia has had an export ban on diesel since July. If Russia has any diesel to sell, it’s going to take it from another consumer; India, maybe. And by diverting diesel oil from India to the United States, it doesn’t do anything for the United States, which has more than enough diesel here at home. It makes life a little tougher for India, and it doesn’t change the world price at all, because nothing happens in global supply and demand. The whole thing is a complete nothingburger.

But it does two things that are important. The first is: The Russians have dangled in front of the Trump inner circle the prospect of enormous wealth for them if American sanctions on Russia are dismantled. And it’s taken a first step toward the dismantling of those sanctions and put the United States on the path to confrontation with Ukraine, because President Trump now has to worry the only way he can get Russian diesel is if the Ukrainians stop attacking Russian energy facilities, which they are doing in retaliation for the Russian attacks on their cities and schools and historical societies and hospitals, on their civilian population. They have struck back against Russian energy infrastructure to cramp Russia’s war-making ability.

President Trump has now created a situation where his goal of seeming to do something about diesel and maybe also enriching a lot of people who are in his inner circle is in conflict with Ukraine’s self-defense, and the only way he can get what he wants is by ordering Ukraine to stop defending itself. And we have seen already Trump’s pressure on Ukraine: If you continue to strike the Russian energy infrastructure, you are making an enemy of me.

He is taking away Ukraine’s war-making ability for his own reasons, in ways that will not help American motorists even slightly, American farmers, American truckers. And of course, he is doing nothing to bring about a resolution of the conflict in the Persian Gulf, which has removed so much diesel fuel from Europe and Asia because that’s where those countries get their supplies from.

Trump from the beginning of this second presidency has taken Ukraine as a kind of personal affront. Now, a lot of this is a little hard to understand, but maybe we don’t need to understand it. You know, when I was working on my story about Trump’s vaporware diesel deal, an editor asked me, Do you think Trump believes it? Do you think he imagines that these few barrels he’s getting from Russia are, in fact, going to make any difference to American supply? Or is he totally delusional? And I had to answer, I don’t actually—of course, I don’t know the answer to that question. My instinct—it’s just an instinct—is that President Trump was much more of a self-aware con man when he entered politics a decade ago than he is now. He now may be kind of lost: truly in a world of illusions, where he no longer himself knows what is true and what is a lie.

But it doesn’t matter, because there’s a consistent through line, whether these are deceptions of others or deceptions of himself. The through line is: He just is tantalized by the prospect of vast wealth for himself and others by doing deals with Russia. And he’s willing to sacrifice the lives and security and independence of Ukraine to his ambition. And he treats Ukraine’s self-assertion and self-defense as an act of impudence and defiance—not against those who are trying to invade and aggress and annex Ukraine, but against himself. Because Ukraine bothers him, and he doesn’t like it, and he wants it to go away.

What he’s leaving all Americans with is one of the most shameful passages in the history of American foreign policy. A people that are defending their national sovereignty, that are fighting back under the most difficult conditions with the supremest forms of human bravery. Who ask only from the United States the wherewithal with which to defend themselves, and who are being denied that wherewithal by President Trump for reasons we can’t understand, but none of which look good. I hope anyone who can hear my voice will join me in sharing their dismay and their shame at what President Trump has done to the good name of American democracy and American world leadership.

And now my dialogue with Illia Ponomarenko.

[Music]

Frum: Illia Ponomarenko was born in 1992 in a small town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. He studied at Mariupol State University. When Russia invaded his home region in 2014, Illia began his career as a reporter. He has never stopped.

His first book, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, was published in 2024 to global acclaim. Illness closed his path to military service, so he turned to a deeper fight: the fight over whether Ukraine has a history of its own. His new book, The Land of Tears and Hope, tells the Ukrainian story from the Slavic tribes and the Vikings through the Cossacks, Soviet terror, and the Maidan to this very war today. It will be published next month. Order it now.

Illia Ponomarenko, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Illia Ponomarenko: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Frum: Illia, you have written this deeply moving history of Ukraine, and I want to address it in full, but the events of the past days in Ukraine have been so dramatic and so horrible I think we must start there.

So tell us, we’re speaking in the early part of October, tell us the situation as it is now and what has happened in the past days to your country.

Illia Ponomarenko: Well, of course, the centerpiece of any news and the spotlight is Kyiv, this capital city, and what’s happening. The air battle over Kyiv that’s going on nonstop for days and weeks already, with drones, missiles. Never stopping, day and night.

So the central attention is given to the defense of the capital and to preserving life in the capital. And Russians are really trying to abrupt the very existence of the city, to instill fear, to abrupt transportation, normal food supply, water supplies. Bridges over the Dnipro River that divides the city, which is extremely vital. So Russians have switched to this tactic of trying to absolutely paralyze the very heart of the country—to install fear, to enforce the capitulation, since they can’t get any substantial military success for the fifth year of this war.

But I must say that, you know, I live just outside Kyiv in suburbs, and also in several places in Kyiv Oblast, in the outskirts. But I spend as much time as I can in the city, in many ways just to be there with my city, in there. And I would say that over the last three days, which is what I said on social media, the air battle—this constant attack—the entire environment had become a little less stressful, a little calmer. I would say I think, this my feeling, that Ukrainians managed—the Ukrainian military managed to overcome this surprise and shock and managed to adapt to this new situation. And I think if the situation continues, we might say that Russians have weakened in terms of their ability to strike Kyiv on the daily basis. So Ukrainians have made another move to adapt to what Russia does, and it goes on and on and on. So it’s constant battle between Ukrainian adaptation and Russian attempts to paralyze the city.

Frum: Let me try a little context. I think from the point of view of a lot of people in the Western world, in the United States—we’re so far away. It seems like this is an endless story of Russian attacks, Ukrainian defense. But there was a true intensification of the Russian air attack on the capital of Ukraine beginning at about the end of September, with some new technologies, some new methods. And the first effect was very devastating. A much greater loss of life, much greater damage than had been the case until the later part of September, the beginning of October. And so it is this new campaign—this intensified campaign at the end of September, beginning of October—that you say is now running out of impetus and faltering a little bit?

Ponomarenko: It gets significantly visibly weaker in terms of the number of drones, Russian drones, that made it to the capital and strike. So there are far less booms in the sky over Kyiv over the last few days, which is good. Which is something that enlightens us, because the military also reports a lot of new technologies, counter-technologies that are being applied to intercept jet-powered Russian drones that are super difficult targets to get.

Frum: These jet-powered drones, this is the new—because drones, until now, have been slow. And they could be shot down with a .50-caliber machine gun if the weapon-wielder was fast and skillful enough. But a jet-powered drone moves much faster, and so can’t be intercepted by a machine gun. You need a much more sophisticated technology to catch the jet-powered drone.

Ponomarenko: Yeah. One of the bright pictures of life in Kyiv is always seeing, in the streets, pickups with machine guns—sometimes it’s M2 Browning machine guns—with the mobile air-defense groups that try to shoot these things down.

But when it comes to jet-powered drones, which is the next step essentially, and especially when it comes to mass-produced, jet-powered drones, it’s a huge problem. Because they move at velocity of 700, 600 kilometers per hour. So it’s an insanely complicated target to get. And they are cheap; they are easy, simple. They are massive. So could be swarms of them over the Ukrainian cities.

Nonetheless, within weeks we started getting new solutions to this. There are—you know, Ukrainian defense in many ways is comprised of many, many private companies that suggest many, many technical solutions. Right now we have five or six prototype interceptor drones that are engine-powered, or jet-powered, that are being presented by various companies in Ukraine. And they are simply showing the first results, just the first results, on videos intercepting these Russian jet-powered drones. So surprisingly, it goes fast. The entire Russian campaign against Kyiv was a shock. It was sharp. It intensified really quickly and shockingly. But at the same time, the Ukrainian response to this is very fast and very sharp. So our big question is whether we could launch the mass production of a successful prototype that works well. And this is exactly, essentially, how this war works.

Frum: Ukraine is striking deeply at Russian targets, especially energy-production targets, ever farther into Russia. And there are reports—I don’t know how much weight to put on them—of surrenders among Russian ground troops, of deteriorating performance among Russian ground troops, that make us think that maybe something deeper is happening in the war than just the strike, counter-strike—the cycle of innovation and counter-innovation you describe.

Ponomarenko: But also, another front of this war is actual battlefield war, that’s happening along from the frozen front line in Ukraine’s south and east. And we have a situation in which Ukrainian military, in one of the most important, if not the most important axis of Russian attack, which is near the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk—the very core of the industrial part of Donbas that’s still under Ukrainian control, and also the belt of the fortress cities in Ukraine’s east.

The Ukrainian military, over the months of very careful, very clandestine operations, managed to inflict a very, very serious defeat to local Russian forces. So that’s why we get pictures of surrendered Russian troops, because they got encircled; they got captured. That’s how the Ukrainian military, and it’s pretty open, and it could be independently verified that Ukrainian military have tactical gains. And also they managed to cut off one of the accesses of Russian attacks on these fortress cities: the northern claw, as we call it.

So Ukraine, despite all the bombs, despite all the bravado from the Russian side, Ukraine has pretty significant tactical successes on the field, on the battlefield. Which are pretty impressive on the scale of this war, five years on.

Frum: What can you tell us about the present state of American assistance to Ukraine?

The Trump administration has cut off aid to Ukraine. Such American weapons as you get are paid for by your European counterparts and allies. Is there any American intelligence flowing to Ukraine? Is there any non-material assistance you’re getting? Or is the attitude truly as hostile in Ukraine as it seems to be from the point of view of Washington, D.C.?

Ponomarenko: Well, of course, we are very far from being in the place where we’ve been under the previous administration when we had consistent and very serious and very regular packages of assistance. Right now, you are right to say that what’s being delivered to Ukraine from the United States is being purchased as part of the Pearl program by European backers. It’s mostly about supplies, technical maintenance, things that help maintain the U.S.-made hardware in possession of Ukraine. Very important part of this American participation is, of course, the intelligence. And I must say that despite all the complexities or all the complications that Ukrainian administration has with the United States, this intelligence sharing is one of the most important things that Ukraine has from outside the country, because it’s about saving lives. It’s about giving early warnings about Russian missile attacks. This is what we get from Americans, essentially.

So in many ways, what you see, from the point of view of [President Volodymyr] Zelensky—the way he talks to Donald Trump, the way he tries to preserve a more or less stable relationship with the United States and with the Trump administration—it’s about intelligence. Because this is something that we would be extremely, extremely reluctant to lose. Because it’s about saving lives; it’s about air defense.

Frum: Can you offer any generalization about how Ukrainians today feel about their relationship with the United States? And what the United States has done for them as it has become less generous, but not yet zero generosity?

Ponomarenko: Well, I’m really trying to give you a very average attitude that’s been present in the Ukrainian public opinion. Of course, a lot of people are dissatisfied. A lot of people are stressed about this, because one of the things that we always thought of as unshakable, as static as the Earth itself, is the American support. Bipartisan support in both house chambers of the Congress, in the White House. We always thought that our interests are 100 percent complacent with America’s interests, and this is what we thought was unshakable and unmovable.

I am not going to lie to you that Donald Trump remains one of the least popular figures in Ukraine. Because of many reasons, mostly because of a lot of words that he said about Ukraine. And I cannot lie to you that this image also affects really badly on the image of the United States as a country, or on the United States as a people, in the eyes of Ukrainians. A lot of emotions are involved into this. We must understand that war, being at war, is a very emotional thing. It’s about a lot of strong words; a lot of strong thoughts about this.

But I would not say that a lot of people here still respect the United States, still consider America to be the leader of the free world, the cornerstone of this free world. And despite everything that has happened over the last couple of years, still consider America to be probably back anytime soon in terms of its presence and its posture and its leadership.

So I would say that, you know, of course, feelings are very complicated. Feelings are very emotional about Americans. I cannot say that I agree with a lot of those things that I hear from my fellow Ukrainians about Americans and American aid. I really try, and I think it’s extremely fair and just to separate what this administration, what politicians do, what they say about, about us, what they do. And also, I try to remind my fellow Ukrainians of how many Americans do support Ukraine up to this day. We have figures between 60 and 70 percent on both sides of the political spectrum. I cannot stress this enough that, after all these years, having so many people across the ocean being so eager in terms of supporting Ukraine—the country that they probably never heard about before this war—is something that is to be deeply appreciated and something that is very ours to have.

Frum: For those of us who, like you, believe in the role of the United States as the guarantor of the free world, and who believe that the phrase free world means something, this has been a shameful hour. And the patience, and maybe someday the understanding and even forgiveness of the Ukrainian people to this deviation from America’s role in the world, is felt here too, and should be felt.

Let me talk to you about your book. And again, the title is The Land of Tears and Hope. It is, as you say, it’s emotional. And it is not a classic history written with chapter one, chapter two, that we—you jump like a film director from scene to scene, and pass over a lot of years, and have a very arresting technique.

Frum: Ukraine is one of the world’s newest states. Or the present Ukrainian state is one of the world’s newest states, founded in 1991. You make us feel the antiquity of Ukrainian culture, language, sensibility. How do you manage this contrast between the newness of the government, the newness of the constitution, the newness of the state, and the antiquity of everything that the state is built on?

Ponomarenko: That’s a very interesting thing about modern Ukraine. By saying modern Ukraine, I mean the country that was built after the revolution of 2014, which is the newest phase of Ukrainian existence. Because Ukraine is very young in terms of being a political entity, especially when it comes to being very independently thinking, sensing itself as an independent nation-state, not someone’s backyard, not as also Russia. But in terms of feeling itself like an entity, a country, a nation with its own home. It’s a very new thing to Ukraine even compared to its just 35 years of its independence.

And at the same time, Ukrainians—and Ukrainian people in general as a people, as ethnicity—have a very long historical memory. And a lot of things that are dearest to us, that are part of our culture, of our everyday thinking about traditions, of the fairy tale that we tell to our children through the night, and many of those things date back to medieval times. Date back to the early modernity, like Ukrainian Cossacks. They date back to pre-Christian times, ancient Slavic tribes.

You know, when I was writing this book, it was a surprise even to me when I realized this: how many things we have from our everyday traditions, from our holiday celebrations, from our sayings that we get back from pre-Christian times, from thousands of years ago. A lot of things in our life go back to those times—when there was no Ukraine, neither as a nation, neither as a state, neither as in, even in a word in this. But they live with us.

Frum: I think this is something that Americans especially have a hard time understanding. Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion, about verbal undertakings to Mikhail Gorbachev back when there was a Soviet Union. And then what, well, what does it say in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994?

But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans. For them, this war is about whether Ukraine exists—as a culture, as a polity, as a society—or whether you’re just sort of charming primitive, rural Russians who don’t understand that you need to belong to the greater entity of Mother Russia.

And you talk a lot about that in the book, about the distinctiveness of Ukraine. And maybe begin with this question: So, how many years separate the founding of the city of Kyiv from the founding of the city of Moscow?

Ponomarenko: Whoa. It’s even a complicated question to answer when the city of Kyiv, as we know it, was founded. Because there are lots of evidence, lots of arguments among scientists. But let’s try to set the beginnings of Kyiv as a continuous city around the fall of the Roman Empire’s time. And when it comes to Moscow, a lot of people barely realize that. They imagine Kyiv and Ukraine and what ended up being Ukraine, and then what ended up being Russia, as in the model that Moscow gave birth to Kyiv, gave birth to Ukraine. It’s an offshoot of great Russian tradition. But at the same time, the situation was just exactly vice versa.

There was ancient Kyiv—ancient great kingdom of those people who are ancestors. And those people, once upon a time, many years after their best time, after their blossoming time, they established what was a very distant fort in the forest that was named Moscow. So essentially, those cities, those lands that ended up being the historical core of Russia—we’re talking about the city of Vladimir, of Suzdal, the very core of Russia—they were settlers. They were settled from, say, historical Kyiv to those places, because people were seeking land, new territories. So, simple truth is that what ended up being Ukraine gave birth to what ended up being Russia—not vice versa.

But at the same time I do give this information, I do provide the reader with these thoughts about the past and the common roots of Eastern Slavic peoples, Russians, Ukrainian people, Russians. But at the same time, I do not stick to this very nationalistic and very radical and simplified view that Ukraine is the only country that has the roots in this long past, and no one else does. I think that Russians and Ukrainians have a common origin, and also Belorussians.

But Ukraine—what we have right now in Ukraine—has the biggest share of these roots belonging to it. So that’s my position about this. And why I wrote about this book is that in Ukraine of today, a very important part of life is getting back to these roots, appreciating this. Stopping to think about us, ourselves and this country as the backyard of Russia—but a country that has its roots back through to the Middle Ages, to ancient times, that was the cradle of Christianity in this region of human civilization. That has very ancient and very beautiful and in many ways unique historical wonders in this land. A huge part of Ukrainian life right now in this national awakening is getting back to its roots, its ancient roots.

Frum: In more recent times, and by that I mean the past few hundred years, Ukraine has been entangled in very grim, bloody, complex relations with not only with the Russian neighbors, but with Poles and with its Jewish minority. And these swirl together in stories that are sometimes very powerfully resonant, but sometimes very ugly and bloody. And you talk about that a lot: about the Ukrainian-Polish duality, the Ukrainian-Jewish duality, as well as the Ukrainian-Russian duality.

Ponomarenko: I do talk about this. And my central point in this regard is that Ukraine is a very rich country. Ukraine is a very beautiful country. And because of this, it has a very tragic history. And Timothy Snyder, historian that is insanely popular in Ukraine, he was just brutally right to include Ukraine as part of the so-called bloodlands. Because Ukraine, with all its riches, with all its geographical position, it has always been a target for many empires that wanted to possess Ukraine and its riches. And its geographical positions, its human resources, its brains.

So in many ways, the Ukrainian history—and I realized it myself as I was preparing for this book—I realized that we are essentially as a people, Ukrainian people have been moving for many centuries in this closed circle of trying to get independence and its own nationhood, and losing it again. And becoming a powerhouse for new empires and a donor of resources for new wars, new empires. Such as the Russian Empire was in many, many ways built on the conquest and possession of Ukrainian riches. Same goes about Stalin’s USSR. Hitler wanted Ukraine badly as part of his Lebensraum, because Ukraine is a very fertile land. It’s a very pleasant land to be on.

Ukraine is a part of human civilization where it’s really good to be a master in. You have a really rich empire if you have Ukraine. And this moving on this vicious circle of history, it always comes with insane blood, with insane national intra-ethnic feuds, violence, social tensions. Such as with Jewish population, with Polish population. So my very central point of this book eventually is that it’s a land of tears because of many, many wars; many, many tragedies. Some of the worst tragedies of human history happened in Ukrainian lands between parties that wanted to possess this land. But also a land of hope, because we hope that with this independent Ukraine and in this war in which Ukraine may again lose its freedom and its independence, there is hope that at least at this time—for the first time in many, many centuries—we could break through this vicious circle, and upheld this democratic, free, strong Ukraine that would never be a powerhouse and a donor for new empires and new wars.

Frum: I grew up in Canada, which was the center of a lot of diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity. And I don’t want to make this too much of a generalization, but I would say, when I was young anyway, that diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity tended very much to the reactionary side: ultra-nationalist and very defensive of Ukraine and all that it had done. And so there was a tendency to say, to think that the bloodshed between Ukrainians and Poles, it stretches back to the 1600s, but was very intense during the Second World War. The Ukrainians were innocent; the Poles were guilty. The crimes against the Jews, well, they didn’t happen, and if they happened, the Jews deserved them.

And what has been striking about Ukrainian culture since 1991, and especially since 2014, and very much in your book, is the ability to tell a story of national pride while integrating national shames, without letting those shames detract from the future. And understanding that Ukrainians and Poles had a very tangled history. Ukrainians and Jews have had a tangled history, a lot of suffering. And yet something new and modern and liberal can emerge from this by recognizing the full truth and all the components of the Ukrainian national identity.

Ponomarenko: In my book, I specifically stay away from radical views or idealizing the history of this land. I state it very clear, and I think it’s a very just thing to say that Ukraine is a very complicated place. It’s a very brutal place in history. It’s a very terrible place in terms of all the blood that was shed for this country, and in this country. It’s one of the crossroads of this world where many people wanted to be a master in.

So I specifically say that when it comes to, for instance, the killings of Jewish and pogroms. For instance, we have a national hero of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who led the greatest and the biggest rebellion of Ukrainian Cossacks since the 17th century, that almost led to the installment of the Ukrainian nationhood within the old Polish crown. And right now, especially in the last 100 years, Bohdan Khmelnytsky is idolized. It’s his own monuments. He’s on Ukrainian money. He’s the symbol of the founding fathers of the Ukrainian nationhood. But at the same time, one of the darkest pages of Ukrainian history is the way the Jewish population was treated during those uprisings, because the uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks against the Polish crown in the 17th century was the outburst of anger of extremely poor people. Of extremely oppressed people in terms of their religion, in terms of their money. It was an outburst of anger against the very system they were living in, with nobles being absolutely unpunishable with religious oppression. So it naturally fell upon Jews, as part of this system that was also unjust toward them in this regard.

Frum: Because the Polish nobles were far away, and the Jews were neighbors right next door.

Ponomarenko: Yeah; it was a very complicated social system. In which Jews, for instance, when it comes to 17th century—in that period, for instance—Jews were laid upon with duties like taxes, or they were the only ones that are allowed to with banking operations. And who loves people who you owe money, or who collect taxes, or who run bars, for instance. Who have monopoly on producing drinks, for instance.

So it was about a lot of hatred, about a lot of injustices. And try to explain to a very angry peasant—who has been robbed, who has been poor, extremely destitute, who has barely any education when it comes to basic things—when emotions go through, try to explain to these people, to this angry crowd ready to take up arms and commit massacres, that, for instance, Jews are not guilty of this; that they are surviving also on the last wheels.

So in general, Ukrainian history is full of such things. And in my book, I do not represent any radical. I do not provide any justifications. I explain how it happened, what happened. But I do not idealize. And I simply speak on behalf of very average, young Ukrainian that’s thinking about this country with no nationalism, with no radical points, with no attempts to idealize Ukraine and its history.

Ukraine is a complicated place. And what’s important also about this country, especially when it comes to the Ukraine of today, is that I see it with my own eyes from everyday life in my country. That we have overcome a lot of those things that drag us down from the past. We mentioned Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Despite all this past, despite such a bloody history of pogroms dating back to 20th century, what we have right now in Ukraine is that the chief rabbi of Ukraine is a hard advocate for Ukrainian victory, and he spends basically entire his life advocating support for Ukraine. His son, his adopted son, died fighting for Ukraine as a volunteer in the armed forces. When it comes to Islam, for instance, we have a chief mufti, former chief mufti of Ukraine—which is the top priest, or top clergyman, for Ukrainian Muslim community—he resigned from his position, and he’s a battlefield medic with the Ukrainian military.

We have Jewish presidents as of now.

Frum: Well, I sometimes think that it’s going to be fascinating to explain when my grandchildren or great-grandchildren visit Kyiv that the biggest statue in Kyiv is Khmelnytsky—who ranks along with, just behind Hitler as one of the greatest villains in Jewish history—and the second-biggest statue in Kyiv will be of President Zelensky.

Ponomarenko: I’m not sure about this, because Ukrainians tend to be highly critical towards the leader that they have as of the moment.

Frum: While he’s alive, sure.

Ponomarenko: Yeah; as of the moment, yeah. One of the things that really saved this country and continues moving forward is that we have a tendency of being extremely critical towards any sort of authority. So, Zelensky might, could have been like a war hero. He could be a president that was elected by a landslide. But it always happens that Ukrainians fall in love very quickly, and they get dissatisfied and extremely critical very quickly, even quicker than that.

But when it comes to—you have a very good point about monuments. I take a walk in downtown Kyiv, and I see a monument for Sholem Aleichem, the great Jewish writer. We have a museum for him in downtown Kyiv. We have—what’s the word for this? It’s the placard with the commemorative placard, commemorative plate. Toward, yeah—that marks the building where Golda Meir was born and raised in Kyiv. She’s a girl from Kyiv.

At the same time, we have a lot of Jewish places. There are Middle Eastern cuisine restaurants, and what’s important in this is that they often share the same street with Muslim places, with halal places for Muslims. One of the most important and popular Kyiv restaurants is, it’s called Musafir. It’s Crimean Tatar food. Like a Muslim place that gives you, essentially, gives you a vibe of a Muslim homecoming and Muslim cuisine. And I can give you a lot of examples of such things in a predominantly Slavic country with Christian churches and all those things.

But what I really appreciate about my country—and I really feel about this—is that I see that in this country, with its feeling of purpose that unites confessions, religions, many ethnicities. I really like this, about my Ukraine.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about another painful historical passage. And there’s been, especially in very recent weeks, an attempt to stoke Polish-Ukrainian animosities that date back to the events of the Second World War. Poland and Ukraine had claims on overlapping territories. The ebb and tide of wars sometimes favoring the Poles, sometimes favoring the Ukrainians. Led to terrible massacres. And Poland has been an indispensable ally of Ukraine in its struggle for freedom, but there have been attempts politically to sort of trigger, push those painful memories of the past in a way that would sever the Polish-Ukrainian relationship. How does that play in Ukrainian culture? How does that play in Ukrainian politics?

Ponomarenko: I too confidently can say that something that could be called “a Polish question” is absolutely absent in Ukrainian politics. Nobody talks about Poland. Nobody talks about the complicated Polish-Ukrainian history. Average Ukrainian—especially when it comes to those who are beside arguments on Twitter with Poles—average Ukrainian thinks about Poland as a neighboring country that has not wasted any time, just like we did, with its independence. That has gained enormous successes as an economy. Essentially the example of what could have happened to Ukraine if we haven’t wasted our time.

Frum: I mean, both of you—Poland in 1989 was almost as poor as Ukraine was in 1989.

Ponomarenko: Yeah, if not poorer. If not poorer, yes.

Frum: And Poland made a series of very bold free-market choices, ripped the bandage off, took a real—I was there in 1990. It was tough. But Poland has had this remarkable growth. The free-market policies have paid off, and Poland is now on its way to becoming a fully developed—if it’s not already a fully developed country, it’s minutes away from being a fully developed country.

Illia Ponomarenko: It’s very cool. It’s very impressive in this regard. And my entire point in my book, and in my entire presence on social media and everywhere, is that I’m trying to talk like an average, simple Ukrainian, that has no extreme political views of this. An average, simple Ukrainian says that Poland is a cool place. It’s very impressive that they have achieved this. Two million, if my memory doesn’t fail me, two million Ukrainians live in Poland and work in Poland. And we spend a lot of time using Polish airports, in general using Poland as a hub. Not only for, you know, the military supplies and everything, but also for substituting things that are not available to us because of the wartime.

Most of the people go—if we need airports, most of the people in Ukraine still go to Poland to cross the border and to get to the airports and travel for anything. So, it’s really sad to see that from the Polish side, we see that this complicated history between Ukrainians and Poles often gets used as a political tool within Poland.

I definitely can say that nobody talks about this in Ukraine, because we have far more pressing problems on our heads, to be honest. But I must say that it’s really sad, and it was pretty shocking to me to see that, beyond those fiery rhetorics and playing politics about this, we have pretty material things happening. Like continuing and shocking attacks on Ukrainians in Poland. That’s happening. They are popping up in the news, way too frequent, which is kind of shocking to disregard.

Frum: One thing that you very eloquently write about is something that Ukrainians, as you say, do feel strongly about, and that is the flag of the European Union. And you have this very poetic passage in the book where you describe as Ukraine was negotiating a kind of auxiliary membership in the European Union, just before the Maidan in 2014, that the European flags began to appear. And I think in most of Europe, the European flag is associated with regulations on fishing, food safety, air [control]—you know, what kind of coolant you can use in a refrigerator. A series of boring bureaucratic technicalities to make sure that goods and services can move across borders.

It isn’t any kind of inspirational idea anymore. It’s just a bunch of rules. But you describe very movingly how, for Ukrainians, it became an idea.

Ponomarenko: We have a pretty long history of this European Union flag of being a symbol. It dates back to 20, 25 years ago, when Ukrainians started massively thinking about going west, essentially turning away from Russia.

Essentially it’s about the emergence of my generation, of the people in their 20s and 30s. It is in our childhood that we started getting things like democracy from school. Human rights; the rule of law. We started understanding this as something very normal—something very good to aspire to.

So I’m not sure if I had this in my book. But there was, in early days of Euromaidan revolution, it was late 2013 in Mariupol. We had a little rally in support of signing this association agreement with the European Union, and I remember myself leading a small crowd of my friends, students, and also a couple of lecturers. And all holding this European flag and moving through Mariupol avenues.

It has always been a symbol of hope. It has always been a symbol of a generation that is pretty different from our parents. It has always been a symbol of us really wanting to be in this place where our biggest problem is regulations—you know, the temperature in our ACs, boring laws, these arguments over percentages. It’s just an idealized, very romantic dream of Ukraine overcoming a lot of things that drag us behind. And a romantic dream of Ukraine as a nation, as a state. Just getting closer to who we were. Very modern, very Westernized in our mindsets, in our tastes and everything. A generation that is really not different from any generation right now in the West.

But we had a state that was incompatible with our values, especially when it comes to hyper-corruption during the [Viktor] Yanukovych presidency. And this state, the mafia state, under the wing of Moscow, has become so incompatible with our values—with our aspirations for the future, with the way we think about our country, the way we want it to be—that it essentially led to a revolution. And the symbol was moving towards that place where people argue about ACs as their biggest problems, instead of us.

Frum: It’s now a dozen years since that revolution in the Maidan. Historians write about the past. I don’t know if you consider yourself an historian. I don’t know whether your next book will also be in history, but sometimes they’re tempted to make a comment about the future. Can you look out and say—if your future self could write one more chapter of the book, what would that chapter look like?

Ponomarenko: If I could, I would want to give an afterword in the history, in the book, about the way it came to be for Ukraine after the end. Because I end not on a strictly positive mode. My book’s ending is about hope. It brings a reader to a moment when the full-scale Russian invasion starts in 2022. And I’m not promising myself and the reader a victory. I’m not promising myself, and the victory a success. I’m not saying that Ukraine will win. I’m talking about hope, and essentially the last word in my book is hope. The hope that we will prevail—we will break through this vicious circle that we have been discussing right now.

And one of the images that I had in my head, and I expressed in my final words in this book, is this idea of Christmastime. Christmas Eve in Kyiv in the evening, in the frosty night, in the first Christmas after the war. Kyiv is one of the most beautiful places to celebrate Christmas in terms of the spirit, the spirit of Christmas here.

And I would want to write an afterword of how this first Christmas after the war in free, independent Ukraine would take place. Because it’s just like the European Union flag—it’s a dream. It’s something to aspire to. It’s something to hope for. And it would mean that our hope came true: of saving this country and giving it, handing it over to our children.

Christmas in postwar Kyiv, in independent Ukraine—that would be my afterword, I’d say. Yeah.

Frum: And Christmas is so symbolic for Ukrainians, because even the date on which you celebrate Christmas expresses your vision of the kind of future you want for your country. Whether that is December 25th, as would be celebrated to your west, or a different date, as would be celebrated to your east.

Ponomarenko: We officially switched to having two Christmases. Officially in Ukraine, there are two Christmases, so it serves both traditions. [December] 25th or January 7th. And, of course, it’s part of the de-Russification, the getting out of the Russian-style traditions. With—it goes along with the disgust with everything that’s represented by Russian church, Russian traditions, Russian way of life and everything. And I truly believed that this thing with Christmas on December 25th was more of a formal thing, or more about the youth, you know? Westernized youth; we want the same Christmas, just like on Home Alone day. It’s more about us being too westernized as distant from, you know, most of the population that sticks to the older traditions.

But at the same time, with every year of this war, I see it with every Christmas. That really, far more people that I expected do celebrate and switch to Christmas on December.

Frum: Whatever day it is, I wish you that future Christmas in peace and freedom. I hope it comes soon. Illia, thank you so much for joining me. The book is The Land of Tears and Hope. It will be published in November by Bloomsbury. As you said, it was written originally in English. It’s a very moving book. It is very cinematic, very dramatic. And it was both exciting and very touching to read, and I was grateful to have a chance to read an early edition of it. Illia Ponomarenko, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Ponomarenko: Thank you. Thank you very much for this.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Thanks so much to Illia Ponomarenko for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is not a book I have read. It’s not a book I can read, because it’s a book that doesn’t exist yet, but that I want to read. Let me explain.

Our modern world has been shaped by slavery and the traffic in slaves. Illia makes the point, in his remarkable history of Ukraine, that Ukraine was a target of slaving through much of the past 500 years.

That point is made briefly in Illia’s book, because there’s not a lot that is known about that compared to the other great slave traffics that made the modern world.

Imagine a map of Western Eurasia. Draw a line from the Ural Mountains that separates European from Asian-Russia through the Middle East, putting Iran on our one side of the line and India and what’s now Pakistan on the other side of the line, around Africa and into the Western world, North America, South America. In that world, in the past 500 years, there have been four massive, horrifying slave traffics.

By far the best known is the one that took African slaves across the Atlantic to the New World. That slave traffic is very well documented. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to the website slavevoyages.org, and there you will find a database of every known slave ship that crossed the Atlantic over the past 500 years. About 36,000 ships’ voyages, in all, that moved about 12 million people. Twelve and a half million people got on the boats; about 10 and a half million people got off the boats. Of those people—the 10 and a half million who got off the boats in the New World—about 46 percent went to Brazil, the rest to elsewhere in Spanish America. About three and a half percent went to what became the United States. Their fates, their destinies, their horrors, their sufferings: Those are as well studied as any topic in modern history.

But there are three other slave traffics that are not nearly so well known. Maybe the runner-up in terms of well-knownness is the slave traffic that took people from Italy, southern France, southern Spain, as far away as England and even Iceland, into the western part of North Africa, to what’s now Algeria and Tunisia, the Barbary Coast. That also is reasonably well studied, because the languages of the people who were enslaved are well known to Western scholars. They spoke French; they spoke Spanish; they spoke Italian. And the slavers spoke Arabic, a language that is also quite well known to Western scholarship. And there’s an estimate that in the 200 years or 250 years from 1530 to 1780, about a million people were taken from France, Italy, Spain—as far away as England, Ireland, and Iceland—into western North Africa.

The two other traffics, however, are not nearly so well known. The traffic from Africa east into the Middle East. That’s not so well known. And the traffic from what is now Ukraine, Poland, and Russia into what is now the Middle East, into what was then the Ottoman Empire, is also very poorly studied. And that last is the book that I want to read about.

The estimate that scholars have—and it’s a very rough estimate—is that over the past 500 years, about 2 million people were taken from what is now Poland, Ukraine, Western Russia, into what is now the Middle East, into the Ottoman Empire. The records on this are very poor, and they are in languages that are not well understood in the West. They’re in the Ottoman archives. They’re in other small languages of Eastern Europe. And of course, Eastern Europe has been subject to all kinds of horrifying violence in recent times that destroyed archives, that destroyed archeological sites. So it’s kind of a mysterious topic.

And the topic has also been distorted because, for much of the past 100 years, Eastern European history was channeled through institutions dominated by the former Soviet Union, which propounded a heavy-handed Marxism that—for reasons of its own ideological internal necessity—didn’t take seriously the slave operations. Of what affected the foreign slave operations. They’re very interested in serfdom: the people who were held to the land inside Eastern Europe. But not so interested in the people who were removed from it.

But as Ukraine and Poland and these other countries find their own destiny, this is a topic I think we need to know better. Slavery is violence. Slavery is inflicted by people more capable of organized violence on people less capable of organized violence. People and nations. What does it do to a nation to be on the receiving end of organized violence, foreign-organized violence, century after century in the way that Eastern Europeans were? How does it change them? How does it shape their national sense of themselves? That’s a subject I’d like to know a lot more about, and there isn’t the literature to tell me about it. But as Ukraine and Poland and the others find their place in the modern world, I think it’s a story that we need to know more about, and that I’d like to read more about.

So if there’s anyone out there who has fluency or familiarity or even competence in Ottoman archives—Turkish language, Polish language, Ukrainian language, Russian language—here’s an assignment for you: Help us understand what it did to Eastern Europe to be on the receiving end of this organized violence for so many hundreds of years. And how that experience feeds, if it does feed, into the rising national consciousness of Eastern Europe today.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you will share this program on whatever platforms are available to you. Remember, as always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you’re minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Please consider that. See you soon here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

Home Depot, Instagram, Fidelity, and TikTok are just a few of the companies that have recently ordered their employees back to the office five days a week, part of a broader shift toward stricter return-to-office mandates. Such policies cut down on working from home, yet they don’t always cut down on remote work. Many employees now commute to the office only to spend each day on video calls with colleagues who are elsewhere, or even down the hall. They’re in the office but still working remotely.

We are two economists who have spent years studying how remote work shapes learning, productivity, happiness, and career progression. We have been struck by how often people picture the alternative to working from home as an office where nearly everyone is together. The modern office looks very different from that ideal. Today, the alternative to working from home is often working in a sea of mostly empty cubicles.

In a September survey of 1,835 college-educated American workers, we found that, on their most recent day at the office, more than 70 percent of respondents had at least one member of their team who was not in the building with them. As a result, roughly half of respondents had no fully in-person meetings. And more than a third had exclusively online meetings because their teams moved meetings entirely online whenever anyone was remote. For these workers, the commute to the office buys little more than a different background on their video calls.

The commute is costly. The typical American spends 54 minutes getting to and from work in a day, which they rank among their most hated activities. Yet when colleagues are actually together, this commute can be worth it.

[Stephanie H. Murray: “Commuting is bad”—particularly for women]

In-person connection often unlocks the best parts of work. It sparks creativity; in an experiment published in Nature, pairs who brainstormed in person came up with about 14 percent more ideas than those brainstorming online. Face-to-face work also boosts mentorship, increasing the comments that people receive on their work by about 20 percent. Perhaps as a result, people consistently do better work when face-to-face with their colleagues and rate this work as more meaningful than work done alone.

But these benefits are fragile. In our research, we find that having just one distant teammate weakens the connections among those sitting side by side, as team meetings move partially or fully online. Thus, any exposure to remote work in the office eliminates many benefits of the commute.

Working remotely from the office has become so common because we have yet to shed two remnants of the pandemic era. The first is sprawl: Teams stretch across multiple locations. A typical team might have, say, a few employees who work in the same city, a couple who are fully remote, and one who works in a satellite office far away. So even if every teammate were in their office, the team meeting would still be largely online.

During the lockdown, distance didn’t matter for jobs that could be done over Zoom. Many companies hired people far from their team’s central hub, and allowed existing employees to move farther away. In our analysis of data from one Fortune 500 firm, about 60 percent of corporate employees had at least one distant teammate after the pandemic, up from 20 percent before. Among small businesses, the distance between employees and the central office nearly tripled from 2019 to 2023, driven in large part by employees who live too far away to regularly commute to work.

Many companies have simply accepted this geographic sprawl. If a team is already dispersed, managers may see nothing wrong with hiring a candidate in Detroit even though the team’s center of gravity is in Denver. Our analysis finds that job posts among Fortune 500 firms now list multiple possible office locations five times as often as a decade ago.

Bad habits are another remnant of the lockdown. During COVID, many workers became accustomed to focusing on their own to-do list and churning through more tasks in less time. Now many still view in-office interactions with colleagues as distractions from their work. As they see it, going to the office means they spend time commuting just to lose more time chatting. That view misses the potential for these conversations to spark new ideas, propel others’ growth, and improve the quality of their work.

Consequently, many stay home as much as they can get away with. Our analysis finds that the typical worker commutes in one fewer day than companies require: Ask for four and you get three. This might not sound like such a big deal, but on any given day, someone is likely staying home and causing their on-site peers to be on Zoom calls.

When one person fails to show up, the office has less of a draw for the rest of the team. This is especially true for managers; if the leader stays home, the rank and file often follow suit. Pretty quickly, the people who initially followed the rules start to skip the commute too.

[Read: Revenge of the office]

Even when people do go into the office, many send out Teams or Zoom links rather than moseying over to a conference room. On their most recent day in the office, 52 percent of workers with meetings had at least one held online even though all the participants were in the same building. Skipping the schlep to the conference room can feel efficient. But this convenience cuts out the small moments that create deeper connections: the chat before the meeting starts, the debrief on the way back to your desk.

Rolling back this trend of working remotely from the office feels Sisyphean. Reuniting colleagues who have scattered to the four corners of a Zoom screen seems impossible. And showing up in a conference room feels pointless when the other participants are a few doors down on their laptop. Mandating more time in an office has neither ensured that colleagues go to the same office nor that they meet in person rather than online. The result is that bringing people back to the office often relocates—rather than reduces—remote work.

But an isolated workday doesn’t have to be the new norm. Companies could regather teams, by paying remote workers to relocate and refocusing hiring on each team’s central hub. When recongregating is impractical, they could hold regular off-sites. Companies could revamp performance reviews to reward the things that happen best in person: the creative breakthroughs, the mentorship moments. That way, conversations with co-workers would feel like essential parts of work rather than distractions from the solo tasks that people could do faster from home. Not every workday has to be in the office. But ensuring that in-office days are in-person days could make work feel more human.

Since September, giant snails have put one Florida neighborhood on high alert. No one in a roughly 300-acre zone in the city of Hialeah, just outside of Miami, is allowed to move yard waste or even a single brick into or out of the neighborhood without explicit permission from state authorities. Teams of scientists patrol the area in search of giant African land snails, enormous mollusks with tiny teeth, a foot bigger than a 5-year-old’s, and the tendency to spread the rat-lungworm parasite, which is exactly as delightful as it sounds.

The snails, which actually grow to about eight inches in length, but can stretch—if nothing else, for headline-writing purposes—to nine inches, have worried Florida authorities since 1969. Since then, the state has spent millions of dollars fending off three infestations. One such operation took a decade to complete. Now, whenever a snail is found, inspectors from the state agriculture department’s Division of Plant Industry start patrolling. They set out bait and drench hatchling-harboring soil with anti-mollusk poison. Then they distribute mug shots to the public. (That step might seem unnecessary, given that we are talking about snails the size of chipmunks, but the experts I talked with all emphasized the importance of anti-snail awareness.) An area is considered clean only after it has been monitored and treated for three years.

This time, the problem “seems to be limited to just one city block,” Paul Skelley, a main architect of the agriculture department’s crackdown, told me. But the response is full-bore. “We are serious about this snail in Florida,” Skelley said. “When you find these cancers, you don’t want to let them fester. You need to cut them out.”

Skelley was part of the response to the last big infestation, which lasted from 2011 until 2021, and he sounds somewhat keyed up on the phone. Giant African land snails (also known as GALS) really are giant, and meaty and sweaty-looking, like a boxer’s fist just out of the glove. “When you see the whole body out moving around,” he said, “it’s unbelievable.”   

Earlier this century, the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared these snails one of the worst invasive species on Earth. GALS are prevalent across a thick belt of the globe, centered on the equator, and their slime trail is widening: After expanding their range from East Africa through Madagascar, India, and the Pacific Islands, they have lately been spotted in Argentina, Beijing, and, somehow, the Italian Alps. And as climate change makes more of the world warmer and wetter, they could conquer even more territory. Skelley considers his state a firewall. If the snails spread through Florida, “they could get quite a distance up the East Coast and inland” by hitching rides with humans, he said.

Once they arrive somewhere new, GALS quickly multiply, and then make trouble just by being themselves. They love eating—beans, melons, ornamental flowers, shrubs—which is why they’re a hazard to agriculture. When cars run them over, the snails’ pointy shells can puncture tires. In search of minerals needed to grow their shells, they target stucco, eating our houses to build theirs.

All of this can happen at a scale difficult to imagine. In the past, in Hawaii, brigades of the snails have blocked roads after rainstorms, eventually creating “a sort of mush of snail bodies and slime,” Robert Cowie, a snail researcher at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told me. “Cars were skidding.” In Keralam, in India, where recent monsoons created the wet, humid conditions in which the snails thrive, teachers clear them daily from schools and playgrounds. In Florida, during the most recent big outbreak, Skelley’s team would purge a yard the size of a couple of parking spaces and end up pulling out maybe 2,000 snails.

On their own, the African snails move as one would expect, but Skelley jokes that they can go up to 70 miles an hour—“as fast as humans can move them.” And humans—whether they’re taken in by the snails’ charisma and impressive bulk, or just unaware of the threat—like to move them. Florida’s first brush with GALS began in 1966, when a young boy brought three home from a vacation in Hawaii. His grandmother found them, the story goes, and put them out in her North Miami garden. By 1973, those three snails had become 18,000, which the state located and destroyed.

Harboring the snails anywhere in the United States without a permit is illegal. Still, federal, state, and customs inspectors continue to confiscate GALS from pet owners and breeders, from schools, and from the occasional religious practitioner who (allegedly) drinks their mucus. So far, Florida’s giant-snail infestations have all been in cities and suburbs, far from farmland or protected ecosystems. But “we’re scared to death that it’s going to be found in the Everglades, some national park,” Skelley said. “That’s the worst case.”

Brazil is already there. An agronomist brought the snails into the country in 1988, most likely from Indonesia, in an ill-advised attempt to create a market for giant escargot. He sold snail-rearing kits to hundreds of hopefuls, who raised GALS in their backyards. “He had a very good intention,” Silvana Thiengo, the head of the Malacology Laboratory at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, told me. But unfortunately, “Brazilians are not used to eating escargot.”

The snails were soon discarded on streets and in rivers. Now Thiengo receives snail specimens from around the country, and most of them are giants. They’re in urban gardens, tempting dogs to play with them; in croplands, eating bananas, beans, and soy; in the middle of the Amazon and in the country’s massive tropical wetland, the Pantanal. She and her colleagues worry about how large numbers of giant snails might compete with native species “for food, for space, for everything.”

A particular worry is the rat-lungworm parasite, which can infect humans, pets, livestock, and wildlife. In humans, the worms burrow into the brain and can cause coma and death. Although the disease is quite rare, Thiengo and her colleagues have found that human cases of it have been ticking up in Brazil. But at this point, the snails are so widespread in the country that little can be done about them. Although Brazil once ran national anti-snail campaigns, all have been phased out.

In some cases, trying to get rid of these snails has caused more problems than it has solved—and again, not through any fault of the snails. In Hawaii, where GALS were originally introduced by a gardener who thought they would make a fun yard ornament, the Hawaii Department of Agriculture tried to control the giant-snail population by introducing more than a dozen new carnivorous snails to the islands in the 1950s. One of the new species, the rosy wolf snail, developed a taste for Hawaii’s hundreds of species of endemic land snails, or kāhuli. It ate so many that more than half of those species are now extinct.

Still, once GALS have settled into the places they’ve invaded, something mysterious tends to happen, Cowie, the University of Hawaii snail researcher, told me. Their numbers die down. And the snails themselves get smaller. Hawaii’s snails are now at “a handleable level,” he said. “Maybe not acceptable, but you can deal with it.” The state has given up fighting them.

Cowie hasn’t. After it rains, he goes out into his garden with a pair of tongs and a garbage bag. He picks them up, giant out-of-place snail after giant out-of-place snail. He can’t stop the forces—globalization, ignorance, human folly—that ferry snails from place to place. But he can stop the snails in his own yard. He considers it his responsibility to move them one last time—into his freezer, and then into the trash.

Sometimes, disasters can be clarifying. Not so long ago, the Houthi warriors who have ruled northern Yemen for the past decade seemed more like a nuisance to Saudi Arabia than a threat. The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was busy glad-handing with tech bros and AI executives, talking up the kingdom’s future as a tourism destination. Then, on Saturday, a Houthi missile struck two terminals in the Saudi capital’s main airport, sending fire and smoke through the halls and causing ceiling tiles to collapse on terrified passengers. Pilgrims making their way to Mecca rolled their suitcases through trails of blood.

Although Houthi strikes are not new in the kingdom, Saturday’s attack on the Riyadh airport, which killed 13 people and wounded hundreds, signaled something different. The Houthis apparently have the ability to evade the kingdom’s dwindling supply of missile interceptors by launching coordinated waves of drone swarms, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia is now a country where the ruler must shuttle among palaces equipped with underground bunkers.

“Total disbelief,” a friend in Riyadh told me. “I don’t think people thought this could happen to them.”

Saudi Arabia cannot realize the crown prince’s dreams of economic and social transformation—or even continue luring foreign investors—if this kind of mayhem becomes routine. But the Houthis have become ever more intransigent, and the limits of Saudi Arabia’s ability to contain them ever more apparent.

[Read: The Houthis have a rich sense of irony and timing]

“It is starting to look as if there is no diplomatic third way,” Adam Baron, a fellow at the New America Foundation, in Washington, who specializes in Yemen and the Gulf, told me. “The Saudis will have to try to push the Houthis back militarily or accept a settlement that essentially leaves the Houthis in control of Yemen.”

Both of those possibilities are risky. Experience has taught the Saudis that only a sustained ground offensive will make real headway against the Houthis, who have survived multiple bombing campaigns over the past decade, including last year’s seven-week air war by the United States. But the Saudis don’t have a ground force equal to the task. They depend on the perennially divided armed forces commanded by Yemen’s weak, internationally recognized government, based in the country’s south.

Last month, the Houthis captured the area around the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a crucial conduit for global oil supplies, and the Saudis responded by coordinating a new offensive to recapture the lost terrain. That effort has had mixed results; the Saudi-backed forces retook some ground, but the Houthis have unleashed a new level of firepower at the kingdom, including the strikes on the Riyadh airport.

The Saudis hope to build a larger military coalition against the Houthis and have held talks with the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey. But those countries have made clear that their support goes only so far. They might be willing to help defend the kingdom’s borders in the event of a major ground incursion (one of the nightmare scenarios being discussed in Riyadh), but they will not become involved in a war to recapture northern Yemen.

This reluctance is rooted in history: The Turks suffered legendary defeats in Yemen in the 17th and 19th centuries. Egypt got drawn into a civil war in Yemen in the 1960s—a draining conflict that has been called Egypt’s Vietnam.

The Saudis could instead seek some kind of settlement with the Houthis in exchange for peace, but this seems equally elusive. The United Nations has been mediating talks in Yemen since 2012. It helped negotiate a 2022 truce that ended a seven-year war between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition. But the Houthis, who adhere to a revolutionary ideology rooted in an offshoot of Shiite Islam, have grown steadily more aggressive in their demands.

Although the Houthis are fiercely independent and have their own ideas about ruling Yemen, their strategy appears to be carefully coordinated with Iran, which is still locked in its own struggle against Israel and the United States. Tehran has helped train and arm the Houthis over the years, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps advisers are widely said to be taking part in the current fighting. The Houthis appear to be using fiber optics supplied by China to build a far more sophisticated drone force. All of this makes any kind of reliable settlement with the Houthis more difficult to achieve.

[Graeme Wood: The only thing the Houthis have done successfully]

“If you listen to the speeches by Houthi leaders, they basically say there is no such thing as Saudi Arabia—they see the kingdom as totally illegitimate and want to see it fall,” Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Princeton University and an expert on Saudi Arabia and Yemen, told me. “And unfortunately, they are able to draw on a deep well of resentment against the role that Saudi Arabia has historically played in Yemen.”

In recent months, the Houthis have stepped up their demands, insisting that the Saudis withdraw all support from the internationally recognized government in the south, lift all sanctions, and pay reparations. But they have a long-standing habit of moving the goalposts in negotiations.

“What would it take to placate the Houthis?” Haykel asked. “Can you live with them?”

Many Saudis fear the answer is no. But the alternative is a war that could turn the whole country into a battleground.

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Driving through Arizona on a Saturday morning, I saw a line of cars nearly a mile long stopped along a high-desert highway. I slowed, thinking there had been an accident. Then I realized that all of those people were waiting in line for food. 

Weeks later, I went back to the area and met Kandy Soto. The retired administrative aide and courtroom clerk had once been a regular donor to her local food bank. But when I met her last month, she was a recipient of other people’s generosity, preparing to fill a bag with groceries that her family could no longer afford. Soto told me that the cost of canned vegetables seemed to creep up nearly every time she went to the store. After checking prices against her budget, she might buy some cheap fish fillets or canned meats, but beef or poultry were out of the question. Sometimes she left empty-handed. 

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When she voted for Donald Trump two years ago, Soto counted on him to fulfill his promise to “make America affordable again” following painful spikes in inflation under Joe Biden. She wonders what kind of life Trump and his family are living, because she sees no signs of the roaring economy he talks about. Her own family has had a run of bad luck: Her husband had to stop working after injuring his neck and requiring surgery. Then they learned that their modest retirement income made them ineligible for public assistance. All the while, prices for gas and groceries climbed. The situation grew so dire a few months ago that the 66-year-old Soto had to set aside any feelings of shame and drive 20 miles to the Community Cupboard Food Bank in Prescott. “It takes an older person a lot of giving up to do something like this,” she said. 

In the surrounding county, Yavapai, Trump took 66 percent of the vote on his way to winning Arizona two years ago. In 2016, he staged a final campaign rally here before Election Day. Trump is counting on the region to help blunt what polls forecast to be a Democratic rout next month, and will hold a rally Wednesday in Bullhead City, about 200 miles to the northwest. But the president’s grip appears to be loosening, and the state of the economy explains why. 

The toll of rising prices has been especially acute in Arizona. About half a million residents have lost their food stamps since the summer of 2025 because of changes in Trump’s signature tax legislation, which limits assistance and penalizes states that make mistakes when they grant benefits. The law is still being phased in, and Arizona was among the first states to enact the changes. 

Nearly everyone I spoke with in the area last month, including Trump supporters, said they feel worse off than they were before the 2024 election. Unemployment in Arizona stood at 3.8 percent in August 2024; this August it was 4.9 percent, according to federal data. Many people I spoke with in the county said they are working, but their paychecks haven’t kept up with increased prices for gas and food. Almost all told me they are angry about Trump’s decisions to start a war and spend hundreds of millions of dollars ornamenting a capital city they will never see. They were incredulous to hear him claim that their lives have improved with him in office. Many said they are also disillusioned with Congress and with both political parties. They lamented the corruption they see as endemic in the government and in large corporations, and denounced billionaires, whom they view as capitalizing on their pain. 

[Read: Trump voters are over it]

People told me they are anxious about many things: future employment opportunities, feeding their children healthy meals, keeping small businesses running, affording car repairs. Trump has said that “the American dream is back.” But not for the people I spoke with in Yavapai County.

Victoria Dombrowski has found a way to help her family in this economy: the barter system. 

She lost $800 a month in food stamps after state officials, who administer the program, took aggressive action to comply with new eligibility requirements mandated by the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Dombrowski, a stay-at-home mother of two young children, told me she had completed the renewal paperwork and had made it all the way to the end of the process, which included an interview with a caseworker about her financial situation. But even after waiting on hold for days and enlisting help from a nonprofit group, she couldn’t get through to staff at the Arizona Department of Economic Security. “And so I just gave up,” she said. I met Dombrowski at a dollar store, where she now shops because she can no longer afford Walmart. 

Dombrowski’s husband works at an auto-parts store, but his income isn’t enough to support the family. So she occasionally began picking up boxes of free food that were offered in the community. But more often than not, she said, the food was expired or the offerings were sugary desserts that didn’t give her kids the nutrition they needed. “My fridge is still empty,” she said. Dombrowski once prided herself on making her family hearty home-cooked food, such as meatloaf and potatoes. Since losing food aid, she has had little choice but to serve cheap microwavable meals. She and others have started bartering for services. For her son’s birthday this summer, she trimmed a dog’s nails; in exchange, a friend brought animals to her home for a petting-zoo-themed party. 

Across Arizona, food banks are seeing profound need. They served, on average, 626,881 people monthly in 2024; about 786,366 Arizonans have used a food bank each month this year, according to the Arizona Food Bank Network. Wages aren’t rising as fast as expenses, and more Arizonans continue to lose their food stamps due to changes from the tax bill.

The Community Cupboard Food Bank in Prescott recently received a call on behalf of 17 veterans in the community who had “no food, whatsoever,” Jim Phelps, the organization’s executive director, told me. Workers made an emergency haul one night, packing a Tesla with two loads of food to distribute. Ron Brannon was one of the people waiting for something to eat. Brannon, a tall and lanky disabled Army veteran, told me that if he worked really hard at it, he could stretch his Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits until the tenth of each month. His monthly total was recently cut to $60, and when his balance hits $0, “I just go without,” the 68-year-old said. Sam Riske, a 32-year-old former military police officer who wore her baby in a carrier as she waited in line for food delivered by the Community Cupboard, told me that she’s been trying since February to get answers from state officials about the status of her application for temporary cash assistance for low-income families. This summer, she said, her family lost about $780 in monthly food benefits because she didn’t keep up with her eligibility paperwork. To make ends meet, she has taken up dog sitting. Her partner has taken odd jobs. 

[Read: Public anger is rising]

Outside a popular carnicería in Prescott Valley where federal officials carried out immigration-enforcement operations this summer, a woman who declined to give me her full name out of fear of drawing attention to her situation complained of high food prices and a shortage of laborers that has squeezed her family’s roofing company. But all of that is the least of her concerns, she said as she loaded groceries in her car. Her husband was recently deported, and she’s just trying to make it through the day, running her household and managing employees. “It’s hard right now,” the 37-year-old said. She isn’t counting on anything to get better anytime soon. Inside of the meat shop, banda music blared. A manager politely asked me to leave, explaining that the immigration operations had made customers fearful. Business had been down since then, and she didn’t want the presence of a reporter to make it worse.

Many Republicans I talked with said they supported those immigration crackdowns, even though they brought pain and fear to many people in their community. Dawn Zimmerman, a cosmetologist who owns a studio in Mayer, Arizona, told me that Trump, whom she voted for in 2024, is “doing a lot.” But with out-of-control costs, she added, people are “freaking out.” Prices for hair products have exploded, she said, and her clients are now buying them for less at big-box retailers or online. Fewer people are coming to get their hair done. But she is reluctant to raise prices, because so many clients are older or on fixed incomes. Zimmerman didn’t vote in the primary election, she said, but does intend to vote in November. When I asked if she planned to support Republicans, she was noncommittal: “It’s hard right now because there’s a lot of—there’s more deceit.” I asked what she meant. She cited Trump’s tendency to offload blame for why people can’t see “how good the country is doing”—and how disconnected he seems from her pain. 

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

Welcome to Over/Under, a newsletter on prediction markets, gambling, and the culture of risk in America. Platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket are changing how people interact with modern life—politics, video games, movies, and even the weather. Sports gambling is booming. If you have a hunch, and an internet connection, you can bet on almost anything.

Even for those who don’t partake, this phenomenon is difficult to ignore. Athletes are signing multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals to expand their reach. Livestreamers spend hours playing slots and other online casino games while millions watch. News organizations (not ours!) are entering into corporate partnerships with top prediction markets. Last month, a titanic image of Sydney Sweeney appeared on a billboard in Times Square, coaxing viewers to log on and trade. And the betting itself is just a few taps away on our smartphones.

In some ways, this all feels reminiscent of the crypto boom I covered in the early 2020s, when a once-niche industry was repackaging itself for the mainstream, and opportunistic ecosystems were sprouting up all around it. Today, users are betting on things that would make at least some of the bookies of the past squirm: war, disease, and natural disasters. Politicians are betting on their own odds of being elected. A master sergeant in the Army allegedly deployed insider knowledge on Polymarket to profit from the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Federal prosecutors are just starting to crack down on the insider-trading problem—and the industry is still figuring out how it wants to respond.

You probably have questions. I know I have questions. In this newsletter, I hope to explore not just how betting works today, but also how the risks we take shape the society we live in.

The mythical story of the Buffalo Bills could be told like this: Their fans are crazy and live in the snow. They shovel this snow out of their stadium to help their godforsaken football team, which, until recently, was most famous for losing the Super Bowl four times in a row in the early 1990s. According to one theory, those failures fed into Timothy McVeigh’s derangement before he planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing. The franchise was an utter disaster, for the most part, until the 2018 arrival of an otherworldly quarterback named Josh Allen, who has exhibited many heroics. But he has yet to bring his team to the Super Bowl.

Four of his playoff runs have ended with haunting losses to the quarterback Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. The others were cut short in unromantic fashion—­most recently by one of the sloppier performances of Allen’s career, against the Denver Broncos.

From the outside, you might ask: “Can he really do it?” But in Buffalo, the words Josh Allen come out like “Good morning.” On a Sunday afternoon in September, I sat down in an ancient tavern near the Buffalo River to eat chicken wings and watch the Bills’ division rivals, the New England Patriots, play the Pittsburgh Steelers. An older man joined me and asked, unprompted, if I liked Josh Allen. “Who doesn’t?” I said. He revealed that he was wearing a Josh Allen shirt under his sweater, said that he would get another one for me out of his car, and then did.

Josh Allen is everywhere in Buffalo. He appears in murals and on billboards; road signs are doctored to feature his name and face. At the grocery store, you can buy Josh Allen Crunch Time cereal and cantaloupes grown on the Allen family’s farm, in Firebaugh, California. There is hardly a business in the city that does not possess at least one life-size cutout of the man. (Shortly after I left, an 11-story banner of him went up downtown.)

In a parking lot near the team’s brand-new Highmark Stadium, I chatted with Jenny Kless, a kind-eyed woman who tailgates out of a refurbished Volkswagen bus. When it came time to talk about Josh Allen, she put her hand over her heart. “What a beautiful person he is,” she said, and assured me that Bills fans believe he can do anything. “I’m gonna spell that for you: B-I-L-L-I-E-V-E.”

I found Andy Dikens and Gary Thomas tailgating by a Tesla Cybertruck. They told me they’d been following the team since the ’80s and now had the same opinion on Josh Allen, which they expressed in tandem:

Dikens: He’s a stud.
Thomas: He’s the best player in the league.
Dikens: Best player in the league by far.
Thomas: Definitely a stud, I agree.

Leo Roth, a longtime sports columnist for the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, about 60 miles east, told me that Allen is the best player Buffalo has ever had, and claimed that even Jim Kelly, the first-ballot Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Bills to those four consecutive Super Bowls, would agree. (When I emailed Kelly to confirm, he answered, “Yes, I’m not scared to admit that.”) As many sports people see it, Roth said, Allen may be the team’s best, last hope of redemption. “If you can’t win it with this guy,” they say, “you probably never will.”

To saddle one man with the hopes and dreams of an entire city is a heady gamble with, well, the hopes and dreams of an entire city. But Buffalo’s circumstances may inspire a little shooting-for-the-moon. It’s a highly segregated, economically stagnant, postindustrial city that has been struggling for decades. Buffalo has a fascinating history and many great qualities; it would be unfair and inaccurate to say the people there have nothing but football. Yet football plainly matters far more to its modern-day sense of self than anything else.

Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University who has lived in the area for 30 years, was the first person I spoke with who directly acknowledged the risks involved in belief. “I suppose I look at Josh Allen like I would look at an economy that was based on one agricultural product,” he said. In that situation, you have to pray.

The Bills’ new, $2 billion stadium, a gigantic silver spaceship plopped among converted mills and manufacturing plants, was partly paid for by Erie County and New York State taxpayers; the state leased the place to the team’s owners, Terry and Kim Pegula (who also own the Buffalo Sabres). The stadium is named—as its predecessor was—for a health-­insurance company. Inside, the design and decor nod to local folkways, most notably in the form of a 20-foot sculpture of a broken folding table—the cheap kind that you would buy for a backyard barbecue or school fund­raiser.

This is a monument to a Buffalo tradition. Sometime in the 2010s, fans began body-slamming foldable tables at tailgates. Although now understood as something people do in good humor, because they are drunk and love the Bills so much, that’s not how the ritual started. “They were doing stuff like that because the team was so bad,” Mike Catalana, the sports director of the ABC affiliate in Rochester, told me. They needed to entertain themselves somehow. My husband’s childhood friend Dan, whose family is from Buffalo, put it differently: The table-breaking habit was a display of dark humor—­half-ironic self-harm carried out by people who were miserable.

I grew up in a small town south of Rochester, which also gets a good deal of lake-effect snow. Still, I remember a general feeling that our neighbor city was full of eccentrics who, for un­fathomable reasons, had chosen to live in a depressed Arctic-like region rather than someplace normal. The Bills were part of their sad lot. We had some true-blue fans in my hometown, but in general our community regarded the Bills with a degree of remove—we wished them well, but we didn’t necessarily want to get involved. My classmates instead concocted reasons to root for better teams: the Steelers, the Patriots, the Colts. Today, many people I grew up with are now Bills Mafia. But I know—and they know—it wasn’t always so.

I don’t begrudge anybody their porch flags or bumper stickers, however they behaved in decades past. The spirit is catching, and what else are you going to do? A couple of Christmases ago, my uncle—a farmer who is known locally for his Bing Crosby eyes and sometimes-mean-­spirited sense of humor—told me that he’d been rooting against the Bills because he didn’t like to see other people getting so excited. But, he said, he’d had to stop. Even he couldn’t root against a guy like Josh Allen.

On paper, the Bills’ chances may be better than they’ve ever been before. (By week four of this season, the Vegas odds were giving them the best shot at winning the Super Bowl.) The Bills’ defense has gotten younger and faster; they traded for the very talented wide receiver DJ Moore. Many of the fans I met in Buffalo suggested that Allen is also getting better—that he’s more mature as a player and a human being, having married the actor Hailee Steinfeld and become a family man. They love her too, and call her the queen of Buffalo.

By the week of my visit, the Bills had already won their first game of the season, in Houston, on a touchdown throw from Allen after the two-­minute warning. Now they were set to play the Detroit Lions, in what would be the first-ever regular-season game in a stadium that all manner of T-shirts call The House That Josh Built. A few controversies about the building had already emerged—fan backlash against the soaring cost of attendance, a confusing sod debacle—but in the tailgate areas on Thursday afternoon, people were simply amped and optimistic.

When I arrived at Hammer’s Lot, a popular site down the street from both the remnants of the old stadium and its gleaming replacement, the first person I saw was shirtless and, frankly, pantsless. He wore a gladiator-style skirt constructed entirely out of Labatt Blue boxes. I’d guess that 80 percent of the men were wearing Josh Allen jerseys. But the crowd was diverse. I saw super-pregnant women in red-and-blue zebra-striped leggings, older women in red-and-blue-bedazzled jeans, and teen girls in sweatshirts with red and blue hearts on the sleeves.

There are some generational divides and hints of factions within the Bills fandom, and you might sketch the boundaries of these groups based on their relationship to this parking lot. The longtime owner, local resident Eric Matwijow, is beloved by a huge crowd of regulars; he claims that some of them have spread their family members’ ashes on his gravel. Matwijow also told me that “woke” or “nose ring” Bills fans do not like him. Nor do the table-slammers, because Hammer’s Lot prohibits that activity (on account of its being dangerous and stupid). He also openly resents the people who call themselves the “Bills Mafia” because he is old enough to remember the actual Mafia in Buffalo, which, as he mentioned to me, was all about murder and torture and stealing and other crimes.

To be fair, Del Reid, a 50-year-old former web developer, coined the term Bills Mafia accidentally, in 2011. It was a tongue-in-cheek response during a Twitter feud with a sports reporter that took on a life of its own. Reid and Matwijow have very different styles and a degree of personal animosity, but they come together on one thing, which is, of course, Josh Allen. Neither was bothered that their hometown quarterback is from California. He’s not from California California, they each separately explained, but from the Central Valley. He’s “not a surfer dude,” Reid told me. “He’s a farm boy,” Matwijow said.

The way they talked about him reminded me of how A. Bartlett Giamatti once described New Yorkers’ feelings toward the great Mets pitcher Tom Seaver, who also came east from California, bringing miracles. “He contrasted completely with the part of the country he was known to come from,” Giamatti, a future baseball commissioner, wrote in 1977. People who had little in common with Seaver loved him because he was “a working guy who got rewarded,” “who went by the rules and made it.”

Although Allen isn’t a Buffalo native, he fits in as though he were, Reid added. “We love him, and he loves us back.”

In the plaza in front of Highmark Stadium, enormous steel bison puffed steam from their nostrils. Inside the stadium, the energy was even more rock-and-roll.

Before the game, an introductory video declared the new Highmark “a beacon of blue-collar football built for Buffalo, by Buffalo.” The crowd’s full-throated celebration was followed by the boom of fireworks. More than 60,000 attendees had been given light-up bracelets that were designed to flash red, white, and blue at dramatic moments, such as when Allen ran onto the field for the first time.

The Bills loped down the field on their opening drive, which ended with Allen running for a touchdown and the Jumbotron instructing everyone to sing “The Bills make me want to SHOUT!” The Bills scored another touchdown on their next drive, and we stood to “SHOUT!” again. When Allen ran it in toward the end of the third quarter, we were on our fifth rendition. The final score was 41–31, and the Bills were 2–0 by midnight. “I can’t wait to watch the highlights,” a woman in front of me said, with a sigh, to a friend as we walked to our cars.

Just before I left Buffalo, I sat with my laptop in the café section of a Wegmans—where customers could impulse-buy a chunk of turf from the old stadium for $99.99—and listened to the old men nearby chat about the game over coffee and doughnuts. It was good news and bad news. Allen looked perfect, but the defense needs to gel, they said. Things were going well, but nobody knows what will happen in a long season. Sports are sick and twisted. Even the hottest start can fizzle out, as Buffalonians know in their bones. (They would lose to the Patriots in week four.)

The Bills curse is vague. The fans feel cursed, but they have never settled on the place to pin this feeling. One theory holds that Buffalo is destined to lose because President William McKinley was assassinated in the city, at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. Mark Poloncarz, the county executive who helped negotiate the terms for the new stadium, told me that he’d joined Mayor Sean Ryan to lay a wreath at a monument to McKinley in downtown Buffalo this year, and that Ryan had asked McKinley to release the city from his vengeance. Other theories about the Bills’ misfortune involve more classic stuff—for instance, that the old stadium had been placed nearly on top of a small cemetery, and occupied land that once belonged to Native Americans. (The new stadium is at least 1,000 feet from the cemetery and has signage that acknowledges the Seneca Nation.)

Phil Passafiume, a Buffalo fan I spoke with in Hammer’s Lot, suggested one more factor: The old Highmark had featured O. J. Simpson on a wall among the team’s other legends; the new one leaves him off. The city and team have addressed so many of their potential curses this year; if the Bills finally do win, they’ll never know which one was really the source of their troubles.

That their day of triumph will come, this year or sometime soon, feels inevitable to me—if only because it’s too dark to imagine otherwise. The Sunday after my trip, as I sat in a Brooklyn sports bar watching the Bills with my hands pressed to my face, fully converted to the cause, I thought back to what Roth, the newspaper columnist, had said about Josh Allen: “If you can’t win it with this guy, you probably never will.” Knock on wood and God forbid.

*Illustration source images: Kevin Sabitus / Getty; Bryan M. Bennett / Getty; Ric Tapia / Getty; Juan Alejandro Bernal / Shutterstock; Quintin Soloviev / Wikimedia.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “The Most Cursed Team in American Sports.”

I’m your new press secretary, Katie Zacharia! You may know me from my appearances on Fox News; I am pretty sure that is how the president knows me. That is how he identifies all possible candidates for jobs: turning on the TV and pointing. My successor will be a Kalshi commercial.

I also might be a lawyer! Where did I pass the bar, you ask? After I moved to China. No further questions! (See, I am getting into the press-secretary spirit already.)

When you consider that this is my first time reading words out loud, today was actually a pretty impressive performance. I swear that I have seen a sentence before, and I know where one stops and. Starts. And whether? To speak. With a rising inflection? This lends an air of trepidation to every one of my prepared words, as though saying any one of them aloud might cause a trapdoor to open beneath me.

I’m bringing a kind of “unlicensed bus driver” energy to this speech: unsteady at best, with many seemingly random stops in unexpected places. Just call me Vote by Mail, because my delivery is raising a lot of questions in the White House.

I am excited for this job because—well, let me use my exact words: “I get to do what I was doing on the outside already, which was hoping to amplify, multiply, and expand upon President Trump’s incredible agenda for the American people. And what I hope to do in this position is to take that into an official capacity and only build on, only amplify, and only multiply, to the extent possible, all of the wins he’s making for Americans, for, for Americans to understand how much has changed in this brief period of time—what he’s been able to accomplish. My goal is to be able to communicate that in complete tandem with the president, as he is his own best spokesperson and will absolutely be leading the way as with that.”

So there you have it. Wasn’t it Dan Quayle who once said that “verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things”? I assume he meant that positively!

Am I enjoying this job? In a word: no. I thought there would be more saying “HOW DARE YOU” to people asking questions, which I felt equipped to do. By the way, how do you think this is going so far? I have referred to my husband as “my president” only one time! That’s good, right?

Let me preempt some of your questions for me. No, this is not spoken-word poetry. No, I am not what turns up when you Google woman who has just seen the letters of the alphabet for the first time and is frightened of all of them. No, I am not a malfunctioning AI. Did you see me drink water even a single time? Yes, I am the best person for the job, provided the job does not involve reading any more words or answering any more questions.

This is the kind of meritocracy we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. As Pete Hegseth and I like to say, it’s not meritocracy if it doesn’t include me.

No further questions! And look at that—it’s been 14 whole minutes already. That’s time! Good thing I will never have to do this again.