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Published in the October 1862 issue of The Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Autumnal Tints” arrived in a season of death. The Civil War was well into its second year, and copies of the magazine began reaching readers shortly after the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, a day with the grim distinction of being the single bloodiest of the conflict. Thoreau himself was already gone, having died four months earlier, a casualty not of war but of tuberculosis.

Thoreau’s essay makes no connection between the fall and the conditions of fighting, as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier did in “The Battle Autumn of 1862,” in the same issue. Instead, Thoreau’s work is a written version of what he’d initially imagined as a visual book—one in which he would compile the leaves of all the trees around him and follow their progression through the colors, from green to brown. (The magazine included a simple engraving of a  scarlet-oak leaf that he had rendered.) He had first drafted “Autumnal Tints” as a lecture in the 1850s, before the war’s start, and delivered a version of it in what would be the final public talk of his life. The event was far from a resounding success—a local newspaper deemed it “dull, commonplace and unsatisfactory”—and making the trip to Waterbury, Connecticut, in the bitter cold of December 1860 had worsened an illness from which Thoreau would never recover. The revised copy that appeared in The Atlantic gave the story new and enduring life.

“If I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally,” Thoreau wrote in a March 1862 letter, a few months before his death. As it was, weak and barely able to breathe, he could do little more than adapt some of his lectures into essays for The Atlantic with the help of his sister Sophia. The enterprise marked a reconciliation with the magazine. In 1858, the first installment of his “Chesuncook” essay had appeared in the June issue, minus one beloved sentence about a fallen pine tree: “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” He was incensed when he found the line unceremoniously axed from the printed copy. “Is this the avowed character of the Atlantic Monthly?” he demanded in a letter to the editor, James Russell Lowell. “I should like an early reply.” No reply, early or late, was forthcoming. Making matters worse, neither was Thoreau’s payment, which he’d already deemed lower than what he deserved. It took two additional letters to secure the $198 he was due.

The arrival of James T. Fields as The Atlantic’s editor in 1861 cleared the way for new contributions from Thoreau. Fields had first printed Walden seven years earlier at his publishing house, and he suggested another collaboration. Thoreau agreed, on much more favorable financial terms than most of the magazine’s other contributors, and on the condition that “no sentiment or sentence be altered or omitted without my consent.”

As Thoreau prepared the manuscripts for Fields, he confessed to a friend an inclination to expunge some of the humor from his writing, noting that “I cannot bear the levity I find.” But much levity does remain in “Autumnal Tints.” It is, on the whole, a joyous celebration of the season, and an invitation to “wild delight.” Through his observations, he divined that “man’s spirits should rise as high as Nature’s,—should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity.” As he worked through a catalog of trees and plants, he contrasted his own careful appreciation of the natural world around him (“The expression of this grass haunted me for a week”) with the bustle of his neighbors amid the busy occupations of the harvest. Stopping to take in the brilliant hues of the elms lining the Concord Common, he wondered “if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them.”

Death, however, is never far from “Autumnal Tints.” Keenly aware of his own imminent demise as he revised this manuscript for publication, Thoreau saw his mortality everywhere in the season. Walking on dead leaves in the forest, he imagined the setting as a grand and consecrated cemetery. “They that soared so loftily,” Thoreau wrote of the leaves, “how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.” Thoreau, still seeking joy on the verge of his own death, had learned the lesson well.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum in London. Captions are provided by the photographers and WPY organizers, and are lightly edited for style.

You’ve almost certainly had RSV. Most of us catch it before we turn 2. Usually it feels like a cold: runny nose, cough, maybe a fever. But RSV (short for “respiratory syncytial virus”) can take a dangerous turn. In the United States, it puts more babies in the hospital than any other virus and kills thousands of seniors each year. Cases tend to climb as the weather cools—so, right about now.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to be intent on spreading the word about RSV: He brought up the virus during interviews on both CNN and Fox News in August. He could have used those appearances to remind viewers about the RSV vaccine, which the FDA first approved in 2023 and the CDC recommends for older adults and for women in the later stages of pregnancy during the fall and winter. Instead, Kennedy made two false statements. First, on CNN, he called RSV “the biggest killer of kids in this country today.” (According to the CDC, it isn’t; cancer claims more children’s lives.) His other whopper was weirder: In both appearances, he blamed RSV on a scientific experiment gone wrong, saying on Fox that it “came from a laboratory” and on CNN that it came from gain-of-function experiments, or something like them.

To be clear, RSV did not leak from a lab. But Kennedy has been repeating this fiction on podcasts for years, and he included it in his 2021 book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Even in that compendium of dubious and debunked assertions, Kennedy’s theory about RSV—which involves nonhuman primates, a military research facility, and, of course, vaccines—stands out. It’s a case study in how, as an anti-vaccine activist, he has trafficked in half truths and half-baked narratives, and how he relies on loyalists who reinforce his beliefs rather than experts who can challenge them. Kennedy could easily have consulted the historical record or reached out to subject-matter experts. Instead, as he’s done frequently during his nearly two years as health secretary, he parroted the flawed research of an activist ally.

Kennedy claims RSV originated in captive chimpanzees, and then spread to humans. On a 2023 podcast, he said scientists deliberately infected a lab worker with the virus. In The Real Anthony Fauci, he endorses a different theory, writing that the virus “entered polio vaccines at the Walter Reed Hospital laboratories in 1955” and caused a “devastating pandemic.” It’s part of his absurd argument that polio vaccines caused more harm than the potentially paralytic disease itself.

In fact, RSV’s discovery did begin in a laboratory, with chimpanzees getting the sniffles. In October 1955, 14 chimps housed at an annex of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, all came down with what seemed like a cold. Scientists set about determining what made them sick, swabbing their throats and taking blood samples. Researchers isolated the virus and intentionally infected another group of chimps. In February 1956, a lab worker who had contact with the second group of chimps fell ill. Tests indicated that the worker and the chimps had the same virus.

If that were all you knew, you might think Kennedy was onto something: Chimps get sick, a lab worker catches it, and a novel pathogen is thereby unleashed on humanity. It’s a compelling story and one that supports Kennedy’s thesis that scientists, rather than diligently searching for the cures to what ails us, are courting disaster with their reckless experiments.

But the real story doesn’t end there. Evidence soon emerged that RSV had been circulating in humans long before it was found at Walter Reed. In 1957, researchers at Johns Hopkins University reported that 80 percent of the children they had tested in Baltimore had antibodies to the virus by age 4. Inmates at a federal prison in Ohio had antibodies too. Those findings strongly suggested widespread, long-standing human infection rather than a virus suddenly escaping from a chimp colony. The Johns Hopkins scientists surmised that the virus might be of human origin and had been “introduced into a susceptible population of chimpanzees.”

More solid proof of that hypothesis came decades later. A study published in 2007 detected RSV proteins in preserved lung tissue from a child who died in 1931, nearly a quarter century before the chimp outbreak. The authors called it “the earliest confirmed case of RSV infection ever reported.” Other evidence points back even earlier. Descriptions of an illness researchers believe was likely RSV can be found in accounts from the 19th century. An 1819 treatise refers to an “acute suffocative catarrh”—that is, a thick buildup of mucus—that matches RSV’s characteristic symptoms. A recent analysis of genetic changes in RSV estimated that ancestors of today’s virus have been circulating for hundreds of years.

I spoke with several RSV researchers about Kennedy’s theory. None of them gave it any credence, including Philip Roane, who was a technician at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1950s and helped identify the virus in children. (Roane, who is now 98 and a microbiology professor at Howard University, wasn’t given formal credit on the 1957 paper, but he received a box of chocolates and a bottle of scotch from the lead author.) When I told Larry Anderson, a professor emeritus of infectious diseases at Emory University and a longtime RSV researcher, what Kennedy had said, I had to wait until he stopped laughing to get his answer. This isn’t a theory that researchers I spoke with—some of whom have spent decades studying RSV—take seriously.

But Kennedy still had to get that theory from somewhere, right? In The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy cites a 2021 article, “From Chimpanzees to Children: The Origins of RSV,” by Lyn Redwood. The relationship between Kennedy and Redwood, a nurse practitioner and anti-vaccine activist, goes back to 2005: Redwood, who believes that her son’s autism was caused by exposure to a mercury-based preservative in vaccines, was among a group of activists looking to recruit prominent figures to support their cause. Kennedy credits her with helping persuade him to take on the issue of vaccine safety.

In her article, Redwood, who is now a senior adviser to the health secretary, suggests that RSV-infected cells from Walter Reed chimpanzees might somehow have made it into the polio vaccine. The tainted vaccine, in turn, could have infected millions of children who received it in the 1950s. But that speculation rests on an obvious error: The kidney cells used to produce early polio vaccines came from monkeys, not chimpanzees. Redwood conflates the two in her article, referring to the chimps at Walter Reed as “sick monkeys.” When I contacted Redwood recently, she defended her article, saying she did not believe the evidence that RSV had been circulating among humans before 1956, even after I sent her the paper about the 1931 tissue sample. (She didn’t respond to an email noting the monkey mistake.)

As for whether RSV made it into the polio vaccine, she told me that she “just posed the question” and that anyone who claimed otherwise would be “misrepresenting my article.” In his book, Kennedy does precisely that: He cites her article when he writes that the virus spread via polio vaccines. What began as confused conjecture by Redwood was repackaged by Kennedy as simple fact.

When I asked HHS for clarification on Kennedy’s views, a spokesperson told me in an email that RSV “originated from a troop of infected chimpanzees,” and that the virus “spread to lab workers and then to the public but not through vaccination.” None of that is true—and it contradicts the (also false) account in Kennedy’s book. When it comes to rewriting medical history, the health secretary can’t even keep his fictions straight.

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Typically, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division focuses its voting-rights efforts on ensuring that Americans are free to cast a ballot. Under the second Trump administration, the division has trained its focus on a different project: strong-arming states to hand over sensitive voter information to the federal government. Since September 2025, the Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against 30 states and the District of Columbia to this effect.

“This is a top priority,” the division’s head, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, said on a podcast hosted by the right-wing influencer Benny Johnson last December. Examining these records would help DOJ identify supposed voting by noncitizens and stamp out voter fraud, Dhillon explained: “I think eventually we’re going to win these cases, all of them.” DOJ had never before sought to collect these data, and the ominous ambiguity as to what the government plans to do with the information left many experts and election officials alarmed over how this might be used to interfere with the midterm elections. In a letter to the Justice Department, a group of Democratic secretaries of state voiced “immense concern” over DOJ’s apparent plans to share the data with the Department of Homeland Security.

Nearly a year later, however, the number of victories secured by the Justice Department in this litigation stands at zero. DOJ has lost 26 cases in district court and triumphed in none; Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, in Washington, D.C., handed the administration its latest defeat just last Friday. (Several cases remain pending.) The administration’s demands have been rejected by judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans—including several nominated by President Trump himself—a run of losses that represents an embarrassing defeat for Dhillon’s project. More important than humiliation: DOJ’s wipeout demonstrates how America’s decentralized system of elections, aided by the courts, is working to limit Trump’s efforts to corrupt democracy. Anxious narratives about his administration interfering with elections often portray the president as a figure who “can just will his fantasies into existence,” says Justin Levitt, an election-law expert at Loyola Law School and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division. But the Justice Department’s prolonged losing streak, Levitt told me, “is a pretty clean rebuttal” of Trump’s supposed invincibility.

Elections in the United States are conducted at the state and local levels, and the federal government has little involvement or control over how officials across the country manage the voting process. State and local jurisdictions maintain their own voter rolls—detailed records of voter information that can include sensitive material such as addresses, driver’s licenses, and partial Social Security numbers. But Trump, seeking to eradicate a supposed plague of voting by noncitizens, has clashed with this system. (In reality, such illegal votes are extraordinarily rare.)

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order tasking DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security with comparing state voter rolls against DHS systems. The plan had many problems. On the federal government’s end, the DHS program that the White House seemed to have in mind as a basis for comparison—Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE—was not originally designed to serve as a master list of citizens and can be glitchy and incomplete. Many states were unimpressed by the demand. “Go jump in the Gulf of Maine,” Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said on receiving DOJ’s voter-file request in July 2025. The federal government had no authority to make such a request, Bellows told the Maine Morning Star: “If Congress thought it was appropriate that there be a national voter file, Congress could have authorized the Department of Justice to do that, but they have not.”

A number of red states willingly agreed to hand over their voter files to the Civil Rights Division, but most states—concerned about upholding their obligation to protect residents’ privacy—took Bellows’s approach. Then, in September, DOJ went to court. “American citizens have a right to feel confident in the integrity of our electoral process,” Dhillon said in a statement announcing the first lawsuits, against Oregon and Maine. The initial suits targeted blue states that were familiar adversaries of the Trump administration. As time went on, though, the Civil Rights Division began to file cases against purple states and even those of the deepest ruby red—such as Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Idaho. “We will continue to work closely with our federal partners,” Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, wrote in a letter to the Justice Department. But, he said, he could not share the voter rolls “in the absence of a clear legal requirement that Idaho provide a copy of its complete, unredacted voter list.”

[Paul Rosenzweig: Using the power of the government to win elections]

Dhillon regularly posted chirpy announcements on X heralding new lawsuits against states and providing updates. Behind the scenes, though, things were not going smoothly. The DOJ attorneys whose names appeared on court filings, several of whom had worked to cast doubt on the 2020 election results before joining the department, appeared to be struggling under the weight of litigating dozens of cases nationwide. DOJ requested voter data from the wrong officials, spent months emailing an incorrect address in Oklahoma, filed two cases in the wrong court, and uploaded a court document with internal comments still in the PDF. (Oklahoma eventually settled the lawsuit and provided its rolls.) At one point, the department trumpeted a judge’s ruling in Connecticut as a significant victory when the order did little more than set a schedule for the case.

DOJ’s lawsuits against red states also alienated potential GOP allies, especially when the Civil Rights Division sent out an aggressive letter that seemingly hinted at potential criminal prosecution for the election officials resisting DOJ’s demands. “This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights,” Utah Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, posted on social media. Even in red states that had agreed to share their voter records, the process was bumpy. After comparing its voter rolls against the SAVE database, Texas identified more than 2,500 voters as possible noncitizens, and some counties began removing them from the rolls; at least some of those individuals turned out to be Americans who had legally registered to vote.

In court, DOJ’s main issue has been that it simply has no legal basis for its requests. Two of the statutes that it relied on in early cases, the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, don’t authorize the sorts of requests being made. Judges disagreed over whether the main statute wielded by DOJ, Title III of the Civil Rights Act, applied to the voter rolls at all. Even if it did, many judges agreed, DOJ had provided no reason to think that an investigation under Title III was justified. The Justice Department’s arguments would allow it to “embark on a fishing expedition of voter records in any state looking for concerns, without identifying a single issue with the state’s policies beforehand,” wrote Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California.

Judge Carter and Judge Sooknanan pointed to the Privacy Act of 1974, a federal statute that imposes civil and criminal penalties if the federal government does not go through certain processes before collecting sensitive personal information. Justin Levitt told me that this reasoning could spell trouble for the department when it comes to the voter rolls collected voluntarily from red states. “I think it’s very hard to read this analysis and not think that in other instances, where they did get the data, that somebody committed a federal misdemeanor,” Levitt said. (Along with other alumni of the Civil Rights Division, he filed amicus briefs against the government in many of the voter-roll cases.)

DOJ has continued to rack up losses over the course of 2026. In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the first appeals court to weigh in on the issue, ruled against the government. “Very powerful dissents!” Dhillon wrote on X in August, after the Sixth Circuit declined to reconsider the case. Attorney General Todd Blanche suggested in August that DOJ might ask the Supreme Court to intervene, but the department has yet to do so. And the defeats are still rolling in: Last month, judges tossed out cases in Washington, Vermont, and Georgia. Judge Sooknanan’s ruling last week found the entire, nationwide program of seeking voter rolls to be unlawful—a particularly harsh reprimand.

Many of the judges who dismissed DOJ’s lawsuits expressed concern about the lack of clarity regarding what the federal government plans to do with the data. “It appears that the DOJ is on a nationwide quest to gather the sensitive, private information of millions of Americans for use in a centralized federal database,” Carter wrote in his opinion. Several judges, pointing to press reports, raised questions as to whether the government intended to somehow use information contained in the voter rolls as part of an immigration-enforcement dragnet.

[Quinta Jurecic: Rules designed to create chaos]

Even if DOJ and DHS had been able to cobble together that exhaustive list, there is no obvious mechanism by which the federal government could use such a database to upend an election. “It’s a massive disconnect,” Levitt said, paraphrasing the administration’s reasoning: “Step one, collect voter files. Step three, elections with integrity. What’s step two?”

Had the Trump administration somehow identified supposedly illegitimate registrants on the voter rolls, it would not have been able to force states to remove voters against their will. Recently, for example, DHS informed Nevada that it had uncovered almost 16,000 potential noncitizens on the state’s publicly available voter lists, which lack the sensitive personal information that DOJ has been working to obtain. Under scrutiny, DHS “confirmed” only 185 of those names; according to Nevada, zero were actually noncitizens. Likewise, on Tuesday, DOJ sent similar letters to California demanding that the state withhold ballots from a list of “likely noncitizens” if it could not prove their citizenship. But even if California wanted to comply, the National Voter Registration Act prohibits mass purges of voters in the 90 days before the election. (Last year, in a decision now under review by the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that this provision also applies to potential noncitizens.)

DOJ’s quest for voter rolls is only one strand of the Trump administration’s larger effort to meddle with the midterms. Many of those plans have likewise fallen flat or been barred by the courts, such as the administration’s attempt to effectively make mail-in voting impossible. Others, such as DHS’s effort to bulk up the SAVE database, are moving forward but will likely lack broad effect on the vote this time around.

The Justice Department’s misadventures in seeking voter rolls are a reminder that just because the Trump administration tries something, that does not mean the plan is well conceived or destined for success. In this instance, it has been defeated by election officials, both Democrats and Republicans, who were committed to the nonpartisan work of putting democracy into practice.

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When some clever cultural historian writes the story of the Donald Trump years, this summer’s Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match on the White House lawn to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary will be a marker of … something: The 90-foot open-air “Claw,” near-naked gladiators, bloody faces, fireworks, and flyovers, with the most enduring remark coming from the heavyweight Josh Hokit, who told the podcaster Joe Rogan in his post-fight interview: “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” The spectacle, the staff writer Helen Lewis says on Radio Atlantic, represented “a level of masculinity that was … so far across the dial that it tipped into camp.”

The second Trump administration rode in on a wave of masculinity-obsessed media. But the White House is unpopular, the podcast bros have withdrawn, and the midterms are only weeks away. Is it possible that the cultural-political force of extreme masculinity is losing its power?

Lewis and her fellow staff writer Sophie Gilbert joined me in a live Radio Atlantic taped at this year’s The Atlantic Festival to discuss the intriguing hypothesis that the culture has reached “peak testosterone” and may soon perhaps enter a more balanced phase.

We discuss evidence on both sides. Yes, the Tate brothers are facing extradition and prosecution abroad, but no, the U.S. does not feel all that much closer to electing a female president. Yes, James Talarico, mocked as “Low-T Talarico” by Texas Republicans, is ahead in the U.S. Senate race. But the requirement that all candidates prove their high-T quotient by filming themselves working out at the gym has been so widely accepted that Democrats are doing it too. The live debate went on, until it reached an absurd conclusion of encouraging women in the audience to buy more meat.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I had a thought. Maybe it was when I was watching race car after race car zoom loudly down Pennsylvania Avenue this summer—and a very buff man standing next to me, dressed in very tight red-white-and-blue overall-shorts getup, cheering. I had the thought that maybe we have reached peak testosterone. That is, this long era we’ve been living in, fueled by Donald Trump but also other cultural forces, such as the manosphere, has reached its organic comical extreme. And thus, the era might be on its way out.

It’s just a theory, but one I recently got to test.

[Music]

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

At The Atlantic Festival last month, I talked to two of my favorite writers on all things masculine and feminine, staff writers Sophie Gilbert and Helen Lewis, for a live taping of Radio Atlantic. Here is our conversation:

[Audience applause]

Rosin: We’ve all been living through an extended period of, let’s call it, masculinism. And by the way, I don’t even know if that’s a real word, but, you know, as in the opposite of feminism, like the general promotion of manly things. So there’s Pete Hegseth’s push-ups, J. D. Vance’s cat ladies, and a-lot-less-funny stuff, like the broad influence of the Tate brothers on teenage boys or the rollback of Roe v. Wade. And this has been building for maybe five, 10 years, depending on where you locate its origins. But there are signs that we may be shifting out of peak testosterone.

So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. Is that true or not? I’m joined here today with Sophie Gilbert, who’s author of the book Girl on Girl and a Pulitzer finalist. Clap for Sophie.

[Audience applause]

Rosin: And Helen Lewis, whose first book is Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, and more recent book is The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea, and more recently, the June Atlantic cover story, “The Men Who Fear Women.”

[Audience applause]

Rosin: Helen, I’m gonna start with you. What in your mind represents peak testosterone? What event or thing?

Helen Lewis: Well, if we’re gonna talk culturally and politically, then it has to be the [Ultimate Fighting Championship] cage fight on the White House lawn, which is one of the most American things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Rosin: Thank you.

Lewis: But it was also one of the most testosterone-fueled. It was like a movie you could’ve shown inside the film Top Gun.

Rosin: Right.

Lewis: That’s how I felt about it. But for those of you who don’t know: So Donald Trump has for a long time been friends with Dana White, who is the head of the UFC. That’s been a mutually very beneficial relationship to the two of them. And one of the things that he wanted to do was create this spectacle on the White House lawn, so he builds an octagon. And you have this, you know—the fighters walk in. One of the fighters starts in the Oval Office, right? Which to me, feeling slightly pious about it, is kind of, like—slight desecration to have some guy in leopard-print shorts strolling out, you know, to get seven bells punched out of him.

And it was just this very, like, hoo-rah masculine event. There was blood on the kind of tiles. And that’s when you get, immediately afterwards, one of the fighters says on the camera, you know, Michelle Obama’s a man. So you get this immense, like, disrespect for a kind of a beloved first lady with the other half of America. So, to me, it was this peak moment of, I guess, a level of masculinity that was, as it always happens, so far across the dial that it tipped into camp.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: Which is what always happens with these things. It became absolutely, incredibly camp.

Rosin: No. 1, I feel slightly embarrassed having two people from the U.K. talk about this. (Laughs.)

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: It’s like, I do feel somehow responsible and like I have to apologize for it. And No. 2, it’s interesting what you said, because maybe peak and decline, they’re like—once you reach camp, maybe that’s not the sign that things are on the up, but the other direction. Do you have anything to add to the cage fight, watching it from over there?

Sophie Gilbert: No. (Laughs.)

[Audience laughter]

Gilbert: I mean, yeah, exactly everything that Helen said was exactly true. I mean, it’s astonishing. It’s astonishing. It’s so primal and so bloodthirsty and so absurd. But, as Helen said, we’ve hopefully peaked at this point.

Lewis: But the Tate brothers, who you’ve written about, they also sit on that line, where they’re at the same time very scary alleged sex traffickers, but also inherent to that is the campness, the incredibly tight trousers—

Gilbert: The tight trousers.

Lewis: —and the sockless [indecipherable].

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: They coast that same line of peak masculinity, don’t they?

Gilbert: Well, in terms of thinking about peaks, yes. I think the moment when it became clear to me that things might be changing or going at least in a slightly different direction was the moment that the Tates were arrested, because they had seemed Teflon for so long. They obviously have political connections. They have connections inside the White House. They had felt protected. There have been so many cases against them in Romania, in the U.K., in the U.S., so many charges. I did not know that I would ever see Andrew Tate be arrested or have any kind of measure of justice for the things that he’s been alleged to have done. And so the fact that he has been arrested, he and his brother, and they are still in jail months later, I think is perhaps a sign that things are beginning to change.

Rosin: I wonder if they ordered their prison pants—

Gilbert: Tailored.

Rosin: —extra tight. Yeah. Is that a privilege that you can have in prison?

Okay, I wanna talk more about the trajectory of masculinism, but first I wanna spend just a little bit of time defining our terms, because as I’ve been preparing for it, one line that’s really stood out to me is that there’s two almost opposite brands of what masculinism is. There’s the very civilizing brand, like the religious sort of patriarch, J. D. Vance brand. And then this other sort of pagan, Man must be free to roam without the chokehold of the female HR executive, you know?

So in your cover story, you wrote a lot about the American religious-evangelical side of it. Can you talk about what that was like and what they believe?

Lewis: Yeah, I mean, it’s something that I’ve been thinking about since at least 2018, when I interviewed Jordan Peterson, who was very early to some of these ideas. And he kind of synthesized the two of them, this idea of man’s raw essential nature, which was essentially like yearning towards violence, and then you had to have the correct kind of mastery of it.

What masculine education meant was tempering your essential violent, uncontrollable nature. And it’s not surprising to me that he ended up moving more towards Christianity, because there is a kind of operating set of ideas that you will find in the work of, for example, people like C. S. Lewis, which is about the sort of civilization force of Christianity on men.

So in the piece that I wrote, I looked at both sides of them. One’s you’ve got kind of—there’s the strain that follows through Nietzsche, which is anti-Christian, which is about the idea of like the über-mensch. So Nietzsche thought that people were what he called learned cattle, what I guess we call now called sheeple or NPCs. But he thought that some people had the ability to attain, like, this will to power; they could kind of dominate everybody else. And so that is a very appealing message, I think, to young men who don’t feel a great sense of agency, who don’t feel like mini patriarchs. If you’re a 16-, 17-year-old boy, you don’t feel like the master of all you survey. So I think that is a very powerful message.

But then because it’s America, you also have this very straightforwardly Christian aspect. I talked to Douglas Wilson, who runs about—he’s the co-founder of a congregation of about 170 churches. And they are some of the—you know, he wants to roll back the Nineteenth Amendment eventually, which gave women the vote. And they draw on, for example, Saint Paul’s idea of headship. This is the idea that godly women should be quiet.

So they have a very old-fashioned Christian patriarchy, which then, as I write in the piece, blends very well with this other range of very traditional beliefs about, for example, race, about the kind of necessary, like, the Judeo-Christian heritage and the civil enforce and the European Enlightenments. So all of it kind of bleeds together. But one of the odd things is that you often find, kind of, the pagan and the Christian combined in the same person. So one of the people I interviewed—not Bronze Age Pervert, sadly—was Raw Egg Nationalist.

Rosin: Do you guys know who Raw Egg Nationalist or Bronze Age Pervert are? No. Okay.

Gilbert: They’re too online.

Rosin: We won’t go on. I really wanna talk about them, but everyone was like, No one cares, so leave it alone. But yeah. Just ’cause they are the voice of—they are like the id of the manosphere, in my mind. If you go back, they’re like the original sources of all the stuff you read in the manosphere. I went back and read them, and I was like, Aha, that’s why they all hate women. It finally made sense to me. And I’ll read you one quote from them, and then I promise I’ll move on. But go ahead. Yeah.

Lewis: Yeah. Oh, no, go on. Give us a little bit of Bronze Age Pervert.

Rosin: Can I do one or two? Yeah. Okay. I’ll do the stupid one and then the profound one. Here’s the stupid one: “There are women who are great scientists, but, like women who were great chess players, or poets, they are probably spiritual lesbians.” Good one, Bronze Age Pervert. Okay.

Lewis: Why not actual lesbians?

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: I don’t know. Okay. I don’t know what a spiritual lesbian is. (Laughs.) I have no idea. I don’t know. Okay. Here’s the one that does sort of explain the manosphere hatred of women, though. “Anyone born with a will to conquest and expansion, any specimen born to courage and the expansion of boundaries, will feel thwarted now, will awaken at a young age to find themselves in a world pervaded by an evil and smothering shadow”—that’s us—“that seeks to blot out their spirit and break them.”

Gilbert: This is what I say to myself in the mirror when I wake up in the morning.

Rosin: Yes!

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: You say it to your husband, like, How can I blot you?

Gilbert: How can I smother today?

Rosin: Yes. Who can I smother?

Lewis: It’s a really useful closed loop of reasoning, though. So when I interviewed Jordan Peterson, he went on Joe Rogan’s podcast afterwards, and they were kind of grudgingly nice about me. They said I was a varsity-level player, right?

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Lewis: But then he said that I was animus possessed, which is a concept that comes from Jung. And it’s essentially the idea that your masculine side—if you’re a woman, your masculine side is too dominant. So you have this situation in which, even if you’re a woman and you do have a will to power or a will to blather on, as I very clearly do, that’s actually because, again, you’re either spiritually lesbian or spiritually male. So you can always loop it back to the fact that actually these gender roles are actually incredibly rigid. And yes, there are some exceptions, but that’s because they’re secretly not really women in some profound way.

Rosin: Okay. All right. You’ve got the two strains down: the Rousseauian civilizing and the Hobbesian (Makes sound.) raw id, whatever. So, Sophie, after Trump was elected the second time, you wrote the article, “Misogyny Comes Roaring Back.” And is it fair to say, you seem almost in a state of shock at that moment? And I’m wondering if it’s shifted in the last two years. If you wrote that story today, would the tone and feeling of it be different for you?

Gilbert: There was something about that moment, I think—there has been so much about the second Trump term that has been the first but, like, unhinged. Like, off the chain. There are no adults in the room. There’s no one holding him back. Everything is just sort of unfettered Trump, and I think the misogyny comes hand in hand with that. So the quote that I was thinking of was—who’s the internet personality? Sorry, I’m forgetting.

Lewis: Are you gonna say Nick Fuentes?

Gilbert: Exactly, Nick Fuentes. When he had that tweet that was, “Your body, my choice,” and I think that was the state of shock that you are referring to, where it just felt like, Okay, this is different. This is—

Rosin: Different. (Laughs.)

Gilbert: This is honest, real. Total degradation of women is the goal. And this is what will—like, it felt so endorsed, I think, by—and it felt so powerful. And then two years later, I do think, as you said, Helen, we possibly have reached a peak, and I think to a lot of people, the really grotesque masculinism, the performances of just unfettered cruelty and hatred of women, it seems to be turning more people off at this point, which I think is slightly cheering if we’re looking for signs of hope on the horizon.

And you can see sort of the new popularity of candidates like [the U.S. Senate candidate] James Talarico, who are not like that at all, who are men who are able to appear in public and present a more gracious persona and a less obvious hatred of women and all that we smother.

Rosin: So let’s talk about James Talarico, who’s a really great test case of where we are as a nation on these issues. I know that you wrote about this race. The Republicans have tried every way to call him gay.

Lewis: Gay.

Rosin: Yeah. Right. It’s like low T.

Lewis: They’re like, He doesn’t even like barbecue.

Gilbert: Yeah.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: Exactly. Yeah.

Lewis: Okay.

Rosin: Like vegan.

Lewis: Yeah, He’s vegan.

Rosin: He’s vegan. But last I checked, the polls show that he’s ahead. So—why are you making that face?

Lewis: No, ’cause I’m thinking the schadenfreude of it will be incredible. Because essentially, they had John Cornyn, who was a conservative Republican, and Donald Trump imposed instead Ken Paxton, who once stole a pen out of a security tray because he liked the look of it. This is the level of just, Oh, I’ll have that.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: And so because they haven’t got a single positive thing to say about Paxton, his record, lots of people in the state Republican Party hate him, it has all just been hard negative on Talarico. And it’s like they’re just turning a dial that just says homophobia and sexism up and up and up, and waiting for it to bite. And I think Sophie’s right. If you look at the poll, and Talarico has been consistently ahead in a state that the Democrats have targeted for a long time, that ought to be a Republican slam-dunk race. Even in a wave year, they should be able to hold that, and it’s genuinely in contention, because Talarico is normal—

[Audience laughter]

Lewis: —it’s, like, the low bar. He has apologized for some of the wilder things that he said in the 2020 time, when everybody got a bit overexcited. And because he hasn’t—I mean, he’s done some pretty punchy ads about Ken Paxton, for example. Like, he’s not soft in that sense. He’s willing to punch quite hard, but he hasn’t, to your point, Sophie, gone in for the kind of cruelty.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: And I think that’s the point. I think whenever it moves into just being mean to individual people, I think lots of Americans still recoil at that. There’s obviously a small chunk of people who love the idea that they can crush their enemies and like, Yeah, show it to the libs in the HR department. But most people, I think, still are genuinely decent, and they don’t—they might be interested in this thesis about the great feminization, but being rude to individual people is still a line that they feel quite queasy about.

Rosin: I can’t tell if what you’re saying is this turning up of the dial of sexism only works in individual cases and in individual races; if you’re making a broader point that maybe it’s just not working anymore; or a whole third point, which is that it’s been absorbed. Like, James Talarico did try and eat a big turkey leg, so that he has kind of—I know. It’s sad to think about.

Lewis: What’s sad about eating a big turkey leg? That’s awesome.

Gilbert: I know, lucky him.

Rosin: It’s just sad about, like, responding to these accusations that you’re gay by eating—

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: —a turkey leg. It’s just the sequence of events is a little depressing. (Laughs.)

Lewis: Yeah, okay.

Rosin: So is the idea that we’ve absorbed—like, that is the language that we speak now, so you just kind of have to submit? Can you imagine, Sophie—who are the feminist, the women leaders? It’s sort of weirdly hard to imagine now, even though things have gotten better.

Gilbert: I know. I mean, this is the thing in terms of thinking about the state of feminism. We don’t have the figureheads that feminism has always had. And I was thinking about this with the loss of Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, women who were really at the forefront of this movement that was actually very successful and got a lot done. And they were berated, and they were hated in their lifetime, and they certainly have been trashed by all different kinds of people. But they managed to win substantial gains for women over the course of their activist lives.

And I don’t know who the figureheads are now. I mean, there are sort of individual people who have enormous cultural sway, like Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain festival, obviously, was significant for its kind of cultural power, I think. Just to see a celebrity of that ilk stand up for reproductive rights felt very powerful to me and surprisingly unusual, I think. But in terms of people who are helping define feminism as a protest as a sort of intellectual movement, I don’t know who we have right now, and that feels strange.

Rosin: Yeah. When you were reading about Gloria Steinem, ’cause you recently wrote about her, it was kind of an interesting experience because some of the things she said felt sort of old-fashioned from the ’70s and ’80s, and some of the experience of reading about her was like, Wow, nothing has moved. I’m curious what stood out to you of what she said or what that period was like compared to now.

Gilbert: There was an article that Ms. magazine, which Gloria Steinem founded, ran in the ’70s, and it was titled, Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood, and it was about—I think it was kind of inspired by Steinem and how much she enraged other feminists. Specifically radical feminists, I think, felt that she was so mainstream in lots of ways.

To sort of see that tradition of tearing feminism apart by other feminists and to see sort of how little we’ve been able to move away from that and to work productively together. But also to remember that for all of the divisiveness, there were also moments in her career where she really was able to bring women together, and those were the moments when we had our most tangible gains, I would say. So as you said, a lot felt familiar, and it makes you think that nothing has really changed that much.

Lewis: I think it still feels very radical that she begins her memoir, the dedication is to the doctor who gave her an abortion when she was in her 20s.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: And you said, Promise me, you will never say what my name was, but also promise me you’ll live your life. And I think that even now, that still feels like a very edged thing. Lots of people would—that would still put their backs up, which, you know, 50 years later is, that still has that power—

Gilbert: Yeah.

Lewis: —I think is quite extraordinary. I mean, my analysis of the problem of feminism in America is that regardless of traditional ideas of left and right, this is a culture which is both very individualist in a very libertarian way—it’s very much about individual freedom to do things—and it is intensely capitalist. And those things are both really difficult for feminism. So I’ve just written—

Rosin: Wait, explain that in two more sentences.

Lewis: Well, I’ll give you the example, which is for the latest issue, I’ve written about surrogacy. I mean, in Britain, where Sophie and I live, there is a pretty well-developed feminist critique of that and from a labor-rights perspective, which is that surrogacy is paid for by rich women and mostly pursued by women who are much poorer than them. Some of those might be in other countries, in the developing world. Some of those might be in America. But there is a fundamental mismatch when one side can afford really good lawyers and the other can’t.

And I think that’s not the way that Americans tend to see it. They tend to see it as a matter of individual choice and consent. If the surrogate says yes, that’s, like, Who are we to question a woman’s bodily autonomy and choices? So I think that has been traditionally a really big problem for the feminist movement. It’s why I think the abortion-rights campaign succeeded on that, “My body, my choice,” because that’s a very American way of putting it.

And then the capitalist part of it, again, is about, you know, freedom to buy things, freedom to own things, but it’s very difficult. Women’s lives, because of childbearing, necessarily follow a different path in aggregate to men’s, and that is something that is, Is it your individual choice to have a child, or are you doing something for civilization and society that then the state should have a role in supporting? Because it is still seen as like, But you chose to have a child, so why are you not responsible for that?

Lewis: Whereas the European social-democratic model is much more open to the idea that children are a social good, and it’s all of our responsibility to pay for them.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: why it feels like one of the worst things you can be in politics today is a woman.

[Break]

Rosin: The other thing that I wanna talk about—we’ve talked a lot about the Republicans. It’s easy to talk about Trump, the manosphere, and testosterone. The Democrats are a new phenomenon, a little kind of different and interesting what’s happening there. And I will bring us back to a gym in Dearborn, Michigan.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: Where Hasan Piker—

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: Who’s a sort of lefty streamer, and [Abdul] El-Sayed, who’s running for office in Michigan, were—what were they doing, Helen?

Lewis: Well, they were doing some—oh God, I’m gonna get the names of the exercises wrong.

Rosin: Deadlifts?

Lewis: Yeah, I definitely watched them do, I think some, like, Turkish pull-up, which is a thing you do with a kettlebell. They were also bench-pressing. Abdul El-Sayed, who is the Senate candidate in Michigan, he can bench-press 315 pounds.

Rosin: Which you know. We all know, and it’s actually kind of important that we all know this, ’cause they have Muslim-sounding names, which right now is, like, the Republican Party can sort of put your picture up and just say “Muslim.” And El-Sayed doesn’t say he’s part of the [Democratic Socialists of America], but he’s sort of DSA affiliated. And so it almost feels like the working out makes you extremely socially acceptable or something, and that’s a very weird logic. But I’m wondering how you interpret them very ostentatiously working out.

Lewis: But it’s about redressing this idea that to be a liberal is to be a kind of effete, pencil-necked, you know, like, not a real man’s man.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Lewis: There’s a bit—

Gilbert: Soy boy.

Lewis: Yeah, a soy boy, exactly. You know, like a cheesy Millennial. So, you know, they are both—

Gilbert: It all comes back to tofu.

Lewis: They are both out working out. And there’s a line just after they did the bench press, which is an upper-body exercise, where Hasan Piker says, Haley Stevens couldn’t do that—who was the woman, primary opponent of Abdul El-Sayed. And me, getting on my little feminist high horse, was like, Actually, women’s upper body strength is one of the most sexually dimorphic things that there is. So of course she can’t bench-press 350 pounds. She doesn’t have, like, circulating testosterone at your level. But it was a really interesting moment of, like, Ha, women. Ha, they’re weak.

Rosin: Right.

Lewis: And I think that’s the word that I think Democratic men are most frightened of at the moment. When I interviewed [California Governor] Gavin Newsom for the magazine, he said he’d got this line from Clinton, which was like, Voters would rather you were strong and wrong than weak and right.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Lewis: And I think that’s something that Donald Trump has internalized.

Gilbert: Mm.

Lewis: Part of the idea of being a man and a leader is just like, I’m the decider, and maybe I decide things wrong, but I get to do that ’cause I’m the decider. And being too consensual is seen as feminine. You know, you’re like, You wanna have a hippie drum circle, and everybody’s just gonna talk about their feelings until you all come to a mushy consensus. No, what men do is men tell you things, and then other people do them.

So I can see that they—you know, and I think El-Sayed is an incredibly talented political candidate, but he has definitely got and embraced a kind of masculine aggression. Like, he’s very much a debate bro, right? He will argue with you in the ways that I don’t see other candidates doing. But you’re seeing it with, you know, [former Transportation Secretary] Pete Buttigieg, who, I think if he runs for president, will lean very heavily on having served in the military, for example. These very traditional ideas of masculinity are still things that voters like and that Democrats feel that they need to embrace.

Gilbert: What you were just saying about being strong and wrong, it made me think it’s not actually just an American phenomenon, ’cause it was [former Prime Minister] Keir Starmer’s downfall in the U.K., the idea that he was seen as sort of mushy, couldn’t make decisions, couldn’t stand by his principles, would have, like, a 10-person meeting for every tiny thing he had to do.

Lewis: Yeah, there was a description of him that I think famously did, from one of the biographies of Keir Starmer where it described him being like a driverless train, like the DLR, which is the automated trains in London. Like, It’s going somewhere, but one’s doing the pedals.

And I think that is something that we associate with masculinity. And you’re right; it makes it hard for female candidates, because if you’re a female candidate, how do you access that level of, like, I just tell people what to do without becoming the Karen, the school mom, the nag? You know, all of these negative stereotypes we have about female authority.

Rosin: Okay, but just let’s surface what we just said here. It’s profound actually. So the Republicans or MAGA has reached this sort of peak cartoonish, practically camp masculinity, and then as it rolls down the hill on the train, obviously driven by a woman, it’s careening off. But what’s happened is: It, like, seeps back up and becomes so mainstream that the Democrats pick it up as a kind of necessity. Like, even take what Democrats define, like, their almost embarrassingly desperate search for a working-class candidate. What is it that they define as working class?

Lewis: Jobs that men do.

Gilbert: Yes.

Lewis: It’s being an oysterman; it’s being a logger. It’s not being a nail technician.

Rosin: Right.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Rosin: Exactly. Which is a working-class job. Which is a working-class job.

Lewis: Exactly, done by many immigrants in America, yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. So Pete Buttigieg is an interesting example. It feels like, Democrats or the left—one choice would just be to sort of speak this idiom and go to the gym and bench-press and have everybody know how much you can bench-press. Another option would be to slightly expand the definition of masculinity such that it could possibly include a gay dad who served in the military. Does that just seem ridiculous? Like, if I say that out loud, you’re like, That will never happen, or, That won’t happen now. That’s going too far.

Gilbert: No, I think that makes sense. I’m thinking about Jon Ossoff, who was a documentary filmmaker before he was the senator in Georgia. Expanding masculinity feels fruitful at this point.

Lewis: Yeah. I feel less optimistic than you. I think there’ll be such tension in the Democrats about, This is the most important election of our lifetimes. We have to find the kind of candidate that we feel, like, least tense about. I mean, I hope it’s not true. The Democrats took a chance on Barack Hussein Obama, with his middle name and all this kind of stuff, and it worked out for them. And I hope that they can find it in themselves to look at candidates who don’t look central-casting masculinity next time. But I worry they’ll think, Oh, no, other voters are sexist. Other voters are homophobic.

Gilbert: Do you think there’s any chance that there’s a female candidate? I don’t either.

Rosin: Let’s take an audience poll. Any chance there’s a female candidate? No. No. No. No.

Lewis: Unless AOC goes for it, but I think, it doesn’t—

Rosin: Too soon.

Lewis: Yeah, and I think the announcement about her freezing her eggs, that’s not the kind of thing you do when you’re about to embark on a presidential cycle. So it’s a shame. And Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, essentially ruled herself out. So I think we could be looking at another, like, total sausage-fest debate stage, basically. Yeah, like it’s ’92 again.

Rosin: You heard it here, guys. Sausage-fest debate. Okay, so we’ve talked a lot about politics and where we are. Sophie, I wanna ask you about realms other than politics. What about in culture? You and I have talked about this. In your book Girl on Girl, I mean, the message is that Millennials grew up with a sort of ’90s, early-aughts culture that put bad ideas about women in their heads. How have you seen that evolve? Like, if you wrote the book about, you know, 2020s pop culture and women. It does feel different. It does feel like women have a lot more agency. You mentioned Olivia Rodrigo, but what do you think?

Gilbert: I mean, this is the one thing that I keep coming back to, because it’s a sign of a positive. Like, there aren’t many; we cling to the ones we have. But in terms of mainstream culture, it’s so much better than it was in the 2000s. In the 2000s, there were no women in movies at all. If women were present in movies, they were bitchy girlfriends who were annoyed that their husbands are going to Vegas, or they were, you know, bombshells in bikinis, or they were sort of crones who were figures of sexual disgust. I mean, that was what women did in movies in the 2000s, and I should know, I’ve seen them all. No.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Gilbert: But basically, movies—I mean, there’s a great quote in a Tad Friend New Yorker piece, I think of a profile of the actor Anna Faris, and it comes straight from a studio executive, and he’s like, You know, men make movies, and if they don’t wanna put women in movies, they won’t. And it was that simple. So the culture that we had in the 2000s was incredibly misogynistic, degrading to women.

But now we are in this moment where we have, in film, in television, all these stories being told about women’s lives that are about things like the transition into motherhood, the tyranny of beauty culture, what it’s like to age as a woman. We have all these actors in their 50s, 60s, 70s, people who are doing the most interesting work of their lives, like Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman. I mean, there is a slight counterargument that to be present, to be visible in public life, those women have to do an enormous amount of cosmetic work to themselves, so that’s a side note. But at the same time, just the fact that more women are being given the opportunity to make film and television, to tell stories about women for women, or just even cultural products that are interested in women feels like huge progress.

At the same time, if you look at music, I think there is no argument right now against the fact that women are culturally dominant. Music is the one form of culture where women are all-powerful. I mean, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Olivia Rodrigo. These are the ones who the fans are obsessed with, who the tickets go crazy for. I mean, women have a power in music that men do not have right now. I have no idea why, so if you guys know, please tell me later. But it’s interesting to see. At the same time—sorry, I keep telling—

Rosin: No, no, no. This is the only, like, unquestionably positive part of this conversation so far, so continue.

Gilbert: Well, I was gonna go negative now, which is to say that, as I do, I’m gonna smother you all. No, to come back, unfortunately, for a lot of people now, especially young people, mainstream culture is not film and television and music. It’s what they see on their phones whilst scrolling.

Rosin: Ah, that’s the problem.

Gilbert: And that is the realm, I think, where I would argue misogyny is worse, more cartoonish, more depraved, more hateful than it’s been in a very long time.

Rosin: More hateful?

Gilbert: It feels like it.

Lewis: I mean, my worry about the female dominance in pop music is it reflects the lack of importance of pop music in our culture. And I think you have to look at—if you look at AI, how many women are there in those tech companies? How many women are in crypto? Things that are hot and cool, men fence off for themselves. And I worry slightly about those cultural products, that actually, the female dominance of them might reflect their lack of importance. Like, You can let—the women can have those, right? You can’t have crypto. That’s ours, ’cause we all think we’re gonna get very rich off it. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve brought it down again.

Rosin: That is a very depressing argument. But it’s very interesting, because it is what happens in the labor market. Men used to be secretaries, like in the Dickensian era, you think, like, All the men are secretaries.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: And then women became secretaries, so they got paid a lot less, and the same is true for teachers.

Rosin: But I don’t think that’s true in pop music.

Gilbert: I don’t.

Rosin: What do you think?

Gilbert: I don’t. I mean, Taylor Swift is a billionaire. I mean, obviously there can only be one Taylor Swift. But in terms of cultural power, but also earning power, I wouldn’t write it off as insignificant, I don’t think.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay, I wanna spend our last few minutes talking about relationships, which is harder to talk about. Because it’s sort of less concrete, and there does seem to be—you know, our colleague Faith Hill has written about this—a kind of freeze of suspicion between men and women. As you’re talking about the internet, I know you’ve written about porn. What are you seeing in the kind of male-female relationship realm—you have children—that worries you?

Gilbert: I mean, I have recently been reading an advance copy of a book by a Financial Times journalist called Patricia Nilsson. And her book is called Guilty Pleasure. It’s about how the entire architecture of the internet is basically built on porn, because porn was the first major force on the internet. And so many of the elements that we take for granted—like algorithmic engagement, endless scrolling, the sort of endless shift towards extreme content—so much of that comes from porn. Even things like payment processing, like, that was initially, like—it was made for porn sites first before it was used anywhere else on the internet.

But her point was—this was also something that I’ve felt and not quite seen anyone state so clearly, which is: Basically the majority of modern porn on tube sites now is degrading and humiliating to women.

Rosin: In different ways than it ever has been? Or what’s notable about that right now?

Gilbert: There’s just sort of a lot of violence towards women, slapping, choking, but also just name-calling. And her point, and I think it’s true, is that a lot of this impulse has sort of, it’s filtered out into different aspects of the internet as well and certainly into male culture. So you have a generation of younger men now who have grown up watching this kind of content and are entirely habituated to the idea that you will call women these vile names. And there’s something about the idea that if you’re a young man and you have been taught that women are not your equal, that they’re not fully human, that they’re figures of degradation and sexual humiliation, how are you ever gonna have a meaningful relationship with a woman in your life?

And so, my colleague Faith Hill has written a lot about the loneliness crisis and the fact that Gen Z men and women aren’t having relationships in the same way. But I mean, as women, what are the options? If the option is being alone or being with someone who absolutely hates you, I think it’s quite a simple choice.

Lewis: There’s a sociologist I really like called Alice Evans, and she has this theory about essentially that young men and young women, if they hang out together in offline spaces, they essentially de-radicalize each other.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lewis: And I think that’s really part of what we’re talking about here. When I look at the algorithmic internet, it feels very sex segregated. There are things you get shown on your Instagram algorithm, your YouTube algorithm, and one of the first things that those algorithms want to know is whether or not you’re male or female. So if you’re a guy, you get advertised—and it’s done for advertisers, basically, because there’s one set of products you’re gonna get advertised, like, meat.

[Audience laughter]

Lewis: No, seriously, like, okay, well, meat is not a product. A lot of these men, a lot of the manosphere things have, like, boxes of meat that you can buy. Yeah. Like, Order some meat from men.

Rosin: I’d like a box of meat, please.

Lewis: And then if you’re a woman, then they’ll, obviously, like—they’ll try and sell you stuff about the fact that, you know, you’re ugly and repulsive—

Gilbert: Beauty products, yeah.

Lewis: —and you need to pay money to offset that.

Rosin: It will be, like, extract of meat to put on your face every night. Yeah.

Lewis: Yeah. Face meat. But I think that’s really worrying. So part of that is I think you’re having young boys and girls, and young men and women, spending time in very sex-segregated spaces because it’s them and their phone. And actually, if they were spending more time just with, you know—one of the things that predicts better equality is when men and women report having cross-sex friendships. In cultures where that isn’t the case, they tend to be much more unequal.

That’s one of the ways I worry about America is that going backwards, and actually, getting young people off their phones and just hanging out at a bar or wherever it might be, like a pool hall, bowling, or whatever all these things are. That I think would be powerfully de-radicalizing. But that’s one of the things that worries me about where tech has taken all this.

Rosin: I can end in two ways. One way I can end is to create a manifesto for all the people in this room to pervert the algorithm. So basically, I’m saying all the women in this room, just order meat.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: So that it flips the algorithm. We can all agree to do that together, ladies. Another way—

Lewis: I would say manly meats, as well.

Rosin: Yes.

Lewis: Preferably, like, venison. No chicken. Chicken’s for ladies.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: Yeah, not chicken. The gamier, the better. That’s what the T-shirt will say, The gamier, the better. No. Here’s, in all seriousness, I was thinking about your first book, and the women that you wrote about, it’s 11 Fights.

Lewis: Yeah.

Rosin: They were operating in very bad conditions, and I was wondering if in researching that book, there’s anything you learned about the modern era, or you see, even if it’s AOC, sort of somebody kind of operating in these unfavorable conditions but in a successful way.

Lewis: I mean, all I felt when I was writing this, and I don’t know if you felt this when you were writing Girl on Girl, was, like, these fights never go away.

Gilbert: Oh, yeah.

Lewis: Like, there’s just echoes constantly.

Gilbert: There’s just new iterations of them—

Lewis: Yeah, and it comes back.

Gilbert: —new technology. Yeah.

Lewis: But the other thing I felt was, you know, I saw some young journalist had got kind of bullied off Twitter because she’d written a piece about Sydney Sweeney, and everyone had called her fat, essentially. And I thought about posting, Do you know what really has previously worked against feminism, is just being rude about the physical appearance of feminism. That stopped women getting the vote. Well done. Yes, you did that one. That stopped women, like, you know, getting equal pay in the ’70s. No, it doesn’t.

Rosin: Yeah.

Lewis: Actually, it’s what people do when they’re losing.

Gilbert: Yeah.

Rosin: Love it.

Gilbert: But it’s also what happens when you write about anything related to men, as a woman. If it enrages a man, he will sic all his followers on you, and they will all make fun of your appearance, and it’s because they can’t counter the ideas. They don’t have an intellectual standpoint with which to argue with what you’re saying, so they say, You look old, and I’m like, Thank you. I’m 43.

[Audience laughter]

Rosin: All right, we’ll end on that. Thank you all for being such a great audience. Thank you.

[Audience applause]

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Genevieve Finn fact-checked. Miguel Carrascal engineered. Rob Smierciak provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

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I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Ukrainians have gotten used to awful news. But even by their standards, the past several days have felt dismal. Russian missile strikes are pounding Ukrainian cities relentlessly. Donald Trump announced a deal last week to buy Russian diesel fuel. Then came reports about disruptions in U.S. support to Ukraine, including the Starlink communication system. Together, these developments have caused alarm in Kyiv on a scale rarely seen since the start of the war.

The only letup in the gloom appeared on Friday, when Ukrainians had a chance to imagine their tormentor, Vladimir Putin, aboard his presidential plane, seething as it circled over Moscow, unable to land in his own capital. A swarm of Ukrainian drones had forced the closure of the city’s airports that day—all four of them—as Putin flew home from a trip to Turkmenistan. His plane, known as the Flying Kremlin, does not appear to have been the target. “It was purely coincidental,” a military officer familiar with the operation told me. “Just a matter of chance.”

Still, to many Ukrainians, it tasted briefly of revenge, and it showed that their military still has ways to hurt Russia’s economy and its leader, even if Trump decides to abandon them. On Tuesday night, nearly 500 drones attacked Moscow, again prompting the closure of its airports, according to the city’s mayor. Such methods may not be enough to force Putin to negotiate. But they allow Ukraine, if it chooses, to stay in the fight and keep up the pressure on Moscow to come to the table.

Since early last month, Ukrainian drones have interfered with air traffic over the Russian capital almost every day, a version of a military operation code-named M&Ms, which The Atlantic first reported in August. The operation does not rely on U.S. technology or intelligence, two of its architects told me. Instead, it uses drones produced in Ukraine and equipped with AI guidance systems to bring the war to Russia. (Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military plans.)

Such homegrown innovations could give Ukraine leverage in any future peace talks. But they do not bode well for the global state of aviation safety. Not since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have airports and airplanes looked more vulnerable. The Houthi rebel group, which is backed by Iran, launched two salvos of missiles and drones this weekend at the main airport in Riyadh, killing more than a dozen people and wounding hundreds. A week earlier, the U.S. Air Force evacuated a dozen bombers from an air base in England, reportedly due to a threat from Iranian drones.

The spread of these weapons has made such attacks far cheaper and easier to stage. In early August, German authorities discovered a suspected Russian drone at an airport near Leipzig, apparently armed with explosives and prepared to blow up a Ukrainian cargo jet. A month later, Russian drones targeted Zelensky’s plane as it took off from Moldova on the way to Norway. “That is the reality he lives in,” Norway’s prime minister, who first reported the apparent attempt on Zelensky’s life, said.

[Read: Trump’s October surprise]

Many world leaders now live in that reality, even Putin. On the day of his diverted flight to Moscow, the Russian leader spent 90 minutes on the phone with Trump, who announced after their call that the United States would buy millions of barrels of Russian diesel. To protect that deal, Trump urged Ukraine to stop bombing Russian oil refineries. Zelensky has reluctantly complied in recent days. But his military has intensified attacks on other sensitive targets, which could prove no less disruptive for Russia’s economy and the lives of its people. The spate of attacks on Russian data centers in the past week has made that clear.

Since October 8, Ukraine has bombed at least four Russian data centers, a class of targets it previously avoided. The attacks caused widespread outages of online services, including some of Russia’s most popular banking, delivery, map, and taxi apps. At Moscow’s airports, Ukrainian drones forced authorities to cancel 345 flights last week alone, according to a tally kept by Echo of Moscow, a Russian news outlet. “The Russian sky is becoming extremely dangerous,” Zelensky said on September 1, when he announced the start of the campaign to disrupt air traffic in Russia. “Civilian aviation has no place amid drones.”

The two architects of this campaign told me that it is only just getting started. So far, Ukraine has used long-range drones to clog the airspace around Russian airports without striking them directly. In one incident this weekend, debris from a downed Ukrainian drone reportedly fell on the airport in Sochi, causing a fire at an administrative building. Zelensky has not yet allowed his military to proceed with the original plan for operation M&Ms, which called for much more aggressive tactics.

According to the authors of the plan, the more ambitious version would use AI-guided drones to circumvent Russian air defenses and hit airports in Moscow and other cities. These drones will soon be manufactured at scale, one of the authors of the plan told me.

Although Trump has intervened to secure supplies of Russian diesel, he has said nothing about the recent attacks on Russian airports and data centers. On the contrary, when he first called on Zelensky last month to stop bombing Russian oil refineries, he tempered his demand with an invitation for Ukraine to bomb something else. “There are plenty of other targets,” Trump said.

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

But the same holds true of Ukraine. Last month, when Zelensky began the M&Ms operation, Russia intensified its bombing of civilians, launching regular daytime strikes against apartment blocks, schools, and academic institutions. Such attacks serve no military purpose other than to terrorize the population. The most recent casualty report from the United Nations said that the Russian bombing campaign reached “a new level of intensity” last month, killing at least 200 civilians and injuring 1,234 from September 1 to 24, when the report came out.

At this stage in the war, the escalations cut both ways. No matter what new weapons and tactics Ukraine deploys, Russia can always answer with more brutality. Trump no longer seems interested in stopping that cycle of violence. He has shifted from the role of mediator between warring sides to a dealmaker with the Russians, and that presents Zelensky with a stark choice: accept Trump’s and Putin’s demands to end the war on Russia’s terms or find new ways to continue fighting, with or without American support.

At the start of this year, when Ukrainian officials first offered Zelensky the M&Ms plan, he deemed it too dangerous. It called for as many as 1,000 drones to attack Moscow’s airports every day, making it impossible for civilian flights to operate. Zelensky allowed his defense minister at the time, Mykhailo Fedorov, to continue developing the AI-enabled drones required for the operation. But Zelensky kept a tight rein on their deployment, insisting that Fedorov minimize the risk to travelers, the two designers of the plan told me.

My first report about the operation, published on August 20, led to an intense public debate about its morality. Many in Ukraine and allied Western countries noted that Russia has shown no qualms about bombing the innocent. “It’s not fair for one side to break all the rules of war while the other side holds back,” a senior European official told me of Zelensky’s hesitation.

One of the architects of the plan told me that public pressure contributed to Zelensky’s decision to announce the start of the campaign on September 1. In a video address released that day, he called for all international airlines to stop flying to Russian airports. “Ukraine does not threaten civilian aviation as such—not a single civilian aircraft,” he said. “There will simply be drones in Russia’s skies on a scale that has to be taken into account.”

At the time, Ukraine did not have the means to act on Zelensky’s threat, one of the officials behind the operation told me. The military lacked the enormous fleet of specialized drones required to shut down Moscow’s airports for an extended period of time, he said. In response to Zelensky’s declaration, only one foreign carrier, Air Tanzania, briefly suspended flights to Moscow. Larger airlines, such as Emirates and Flydubai, continued as normal. “We didn’t follow through,” the Ukrainian official told me in frustration.

Ukrainian arms manufacturers are still developing the specialized drone fleet, which relies on an AI-enabled technique known as map matching to identify targets and decide when to strike, the second person behind the plan told me. He said Ukraine first used this new type of drone in combat in mid-September, when a handful of them struck targets in the Russian-occupied region of Donetsk. They have not yet been deployed at scale against Russian airports, he added.

[Read: Inside the feud over Ukraine’s drone success]

Instead, the Ukrainian armed forces have used other weapons to achieve a similar effect. Rather than targeting airports directly, drones need only to appear in the sky around Moscow, forcing Russian authorities to cancel flights or close runways until the threat subsides. One adviser to Zelensky called it a “side effect” of Ukraine’s regular drone strikes against various targets in Russia. Zelensky prefers this approach because it does not involve targeting civilian aircraft. “That would be piracy,” the adviser, who has not been involved in the operation known as M&Ms, said. “The president doesn’t want to allow that.”

His approach has still been disruptive for travelers in Russia. According to the tally from Echo of Moscow, the city’s airports restricted flights, on average, for more than three hours a day during the first full week of this month. On Friday, when Putin’s plane could not find a place to safely land in the capital, at least two of Moscow’s four airports remained closed to all flights for roughly seven hours.

For regular citizens, these disruptions have been compounded by the new wave of Ukrainian strikes against Russian data centers. Most of the attacks have targeted the facilities of Yandex, a local counterpart to Google that acts as the backbone of Russia’s digital economy. Millions of Russians use its services every day, and many of them posted angry rants on social media in response to the latest outages. Yandex could need up to six months to repair the damage to its data centers, the Russian business newspaper Kommersant reported.

As a bonus for Ukraine and many of its allies, the attacks appear to have caused a sharp decline in the activity of Russian bots across the internet, Zelensky noted in a video address to the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday. “It suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social-media platforms,” he said. “There was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations, because there were fewer bots.”

In response to such attacks, the Russian military has expanded its strikes against civilians. Locomotives have become a favorite target. In August, 37 of them came under attack, more than one a day, the head of Ukraine’s state railway company, Oleksandr Pertsovskyi, told me. Last month, the number rose to 47, including freight and passenger trains. When we met in Kyiv a few weeks ago, Pertsovskyi pulled out his phone and scrolled through a series of photos, each one showing trains torn apart by explosions. One of the gutted sleeper carriages had spilled its blackened cots and luggage onto the tracks. “This is how my mornings start now, with these reports and images, every day,” he said.

A few days later, Russian drones prompted the evacuation of a train full of foreign dignitaries traveling from Kyiv to Poland, including David Petraeus, the former director of the CIA. One of the passengers, an American philanthropist, told me that she walked through marshy fields in the middle of the night to get away from the train during an evacuation. The attack served as a reminder that no matter how creative Ukraine gets in targeting Moscow’s economic pressure points, Russia can always escalate, stomping on whatever norms remain un-trampled in this war. Trump’s deal to buy Russian fuel will make that easier by inviting the Kremlin to top up its war chest with billions of dollars in export revenue. The deal also lifts some of the sanctions that the U.S. had imposed to punish and isolate Russia, leaving Putin with even less reason to accept a cease-fire.

[Read: Why would Europeans believe Trump now?]

For some members of Zelensky’s team, that act of American betrayal felt less like a setback for their strategy to win the war than it did the end of their best hope for victory. Even one of the officials behind the plan to shut down Moscow’s airports told me that if the U.S. sides with Russia, Ukraine will have little choice but to abandon the ladder of escalation and sue for peace. “There’s a realization now that Russia will not collapse because of its difficult economic situation,” he said. In offering a lifeline to Russia’s energy industry, Trump made the U.S. an obstacle to the Ukrainian strategy of wearing down the Russian economy and exhausting its population. “That means we need to change our strategy,” the official said. “Russia will not collapse, at least not now.” Ukraine still has plenty of ways to make life miserable in Russia, but it will likely take more than that to force Putin to accept a truce.

Want to get a job in the Bay Area? The fastest-growing listings are for operations engineers, applied scientists, senior machine-learning engineers, principal cloud architects, forward-deployed engineers, and the like, according to Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “A year ago, people were very concerned about these types of jobs not coming to fruition,” she told me. Today, “it’s all AI. It’s all AI jobs.”

Or not quite all. Demand for estheticians, Pilates instructors, massage therapists, therapist therapists, and interior designers is also surging. And in a way, those are AI jobs too. It makes sense that someone earning seven figures a year at Anthropic would want a skilled person to untie the knots in their back and another to untie the knots in their psyche. Or that someone working a 72-hours-a-week, “996” schedule at Nvidia would not have time to shop for lamps for their Mission-style mansion on their own. Extraordinary wealth wants extraordinary luxuries.

If history is any guide, what is happening in San Francisco and Santa Clara will happen in Indianapolis, Baton Rouge, and elsewhere too. AI will destroy jobs. AI will create jobs. And AI will create wealth that will create jobs—an obscure and overlooked aspect of how technological change shapes the labor market, and one that, in the long term, might be the most transformative.

[Annie Lowrey: Time to consider becoming a bricklayer]

AI and other general-purpose technologies—powerful and adaptable inventions, such as the printing press and the internet, rather than narrowly applicable (if cool!) innovations like the walkie-talkie and the IV—have first-order, second-order, and third-order effects on employment. ChatGPT and Claude Code, for example, are eradicating jobs for interpreters and call-center employees, and generating jobs for electricians constructing data centers and machine-learning experts constructing algorithms. That’s the first-order effect: direct, immediate, obvious.

Then, AI is creating second-order roles for people applying, supporting, or iterating on the technology. These jobs are often “impossible” to imagine in advance, María Jesús Ramírez, a fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, told me. To explain, she pointed to the development of the combustion engine in the late 1800s. The machine gave birth to the automobile industry and fueled the railroad boom. Eventually, “it creates aircraft,” she told me, “and now we have pilots.” But who would have looked at a furnace and anticipated the need for cabin stewards and air traffic controllers? More to the point, who would have played around with Gemini a year or two ago and predicted that companies would start hiring robot trainers, deepfake investigators, AI-risk underwriters, and AI-powered perfumers? In a new report, Ramírez and her colleagues forecast that AI could create 500,000 to 2 million such novel positions in the coming years.

But then there are the third-order jobs—let’s call them “wealth jobs”—that technologies create, which are even harder to fathom. Advances such as hydraulic pumps, GPS systems, and Wi-Fi tend to create a small coterie of capitalists with a fortune to spend on indulgences. They also allow businesses to do more with less, lowering prices, bumping up profits, increasing the number of goods and services on offer, and amplifying worker wages. This means the elite aren’t the only ones who get to indulge: Middle-class consumers have more money in their pockets and get a bigger bang for their buck at the store.

“We become richer, and we can spend money on things or have jobs that, to our ancestors, would have been ridiculous,” explained Martha Gimbel, the executive director of the Yale Budget Lab. These jobs tend to be “things where you call your parents and you say, ‘I just paid someone to do X,’ and they say, ‘Martha, that is such a waste of money.’ Then they pause and go, ‘Was it great?’ And you’re like, ‘It was great, actually.’”

Take wedding planners. “You could have done that job 200 years ago,” she said. “But who would have paid you to do it?” Nobody, more or less. Yet today, perhaps one in 10 American couples hires someone to handle the logistics on their big day. Or CrossFit trainers. “If you said to our ancestors, ‘People are going to pay huge amounts of money to throw tires across a room,’ they would have thought you were crazy,” Gimbel told me. She paused. “To be sure, people doing CrossFit are crazy.” Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of them exist, forking over $200 a month to get fit. She noted that “water sommelier” is an actual position held by actual people, albeit just a few of them.

[Rogé Karma: Three ways to think about AI and jobs]

Wealth jobs tend to be service jobs: As incomes rise, families spend a higher portion of their paychecks on labor-intensive expenses such as higher education, health care, restaurant meals, and vacations, and a smaller portion on tradable goods, such as televisions and automobiles. Experts anticipate that AI will generate demand for in-person, face-to-face, personalized services in particular—the kind of things that LLMs and robots cannot and will never do. “People don’t want 10 cars,” Tanguy Catlin, also of the McKinsey Global Institute, told me. “They’re going to want to have something different, and I suspect there will be an emotional component to that.” Ullrich pointed to “wellness” services, meaning more jobs for cold-plunge installers, sauna technicians, and massage therapists. She also mentioned an uptick in hiring for house managers, people who will do your laundry and shopping and returns and keep your car registration up-to-date for you. (Swoon.)

Still, the wealth jobs of the future will exist only if AI really generates wealth. If the technology proves too expensive for businesses to use, the average American’s wages won’t go up and they won’t have the cash to hire a therapist to talk them through a mushroom trip. And if the wealth AI produces never trickles down to middle-income Americans—perhaps because AI hollows out white-collar employment—it won’t generate many jobs either. Pretty much everyone I know would love to hire a house manager. Pretty much nobody I know can afford to hire one, yet.

Have you ever counted the computers in your house? Tally them up now. I’ll wait. You’re probably including your desktop and laptop computers, if you own some. I bet you’re also including the smartphones and tablets. Depending on the size of your family, that might mean 10 at most. Right?

Your count is almost certainly wrong. I’ve got no fewer than 170 computers in my house. That’s because my home, like nearly everyone’s, is now chock-full of devices that a reasonable person might not even know are computers. Mine include speakers and thermostats, wall switches and electric plugs, door locks and cameras, printers and televisions, ceiling fans and window blinds. Robot vacuums, lawnmowers, and pool cleaners also log on. So do some refrigerators, toasters, and washing machines. And that’s just a sample. Together, this family of supposedly smart gadgets is sometimes referred to as the “internet of things,” or IoT. If you’ve got a thing that you interact with via an app, then it’s almost certainly online and chattering in the background.

IoT gadgets have always been insecure, both by design (to simplify operation or allow them to phone home to a manufacturer) and by habit (because normal people are not network administrators who can secure them). If compromised by network exploits, default-password intrusion, or other security vulnerabilities, these devices—these computers—can be harnessed by malicious parties from anywhere in the world to overwhelm a target with a distributed denial-of-service attack; to relay traffic for fraud or hacking; to collect data for sale, use, or ransom; or to spread malware that performs these and other malicious acts. Homes aren’t the only targets, either. Businesses are also at risk, because so many of their operations involve machinery that has been (foolishly, but understandably) connected to the internet. Just this week, hackers attacked hundreds of French supermarkets, spoiling millions of dollars’ worth of food by warming up refrigerators and freezers remotely.

None of this is new. But Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, published a blog post on Monday warning that artificial intelligence could make internet-of-things vulnerabilities worse. Ordinary malware follows the instructions its perpetrators wrote. That means it’s usually designed to exploit a specific vulnerability in a particular device—baby monitors, say—and then to use that vulnerability to run malicious software that does something specific, such as sending unwelcome traffic in a DDoS attack. AI introduces a new risk. Malware could install an AI model on many other nearby devices. Then a hostile program could, in effect, “chat” with that AI to carry out new kinds of pernicious acts. An Anthropic experiment successfully installed a small AI model across 15 Android TV boxes—the type of device that nearly every home contains, and that sends data to and from the internet constantly, even when the set appears to be turned off. Once the AI model is in place, malware programs with access could use it to help the malicious software gain access to even more devices, something that ordinary IoT exploits cannot do. That could help malware spread faster and more effectively.

[Peter Wehner: What if AI is the end of the world?]

The idea of a self-replicating AI botnet sounds profoundly dire, especially given the versions of that idea that philosophy and science fiction have imagined: Agent Smith copying himself over other people in The Matrix, the evolutionary swarm of autonomous machines in Stanisław Lem’s The Invincible, Nick Bostrom’s imagined machine so hell-bent on making paper clips that it extinguishes human life along the way. Recent worries about a hypothetically imminent AI-caused apocalypse have surely perked the public’s ear for anxiety about any type of wild AI fecundity. Not just We’re all gonna die, but A swarm of toasters and vacuum cleaners will be the agent of our doom.

But AI-facilitated IoT malware is concerning for the opposite reason: because it is so ordinary and mundane. The millions of small, internet-connected computers that malicious actors might exploit have remained at least somewhat resilient because those attackers usually need to target them explicitly. External changes, such as firmware updates and network alterations, can limit or eliminate the threats. If malware has access to the rough equivalent of a tiny ChatGPT, however, it might be able to make previously difficult or uneconomical attacks newly possible. In the blog post, Anthropic notes that newer devices with built-in AI chips, such as video-conferencing units and security cameras, might become particularly attractive targets, because their hardware makes running a hostile AI model easier. Beyond those obvious marks, previously hard-to-target, low-value computers—including budget televisions, digital picture frames, smart appliances, or older devices left unused but still connected to a network—might become newly penetrable.

The consequences of AI-accelerated malware remain more or less the same as those of the ordinary malware that is very likely running on your home network right now, without your knowledge. Instead of stealing your intimate photos or siphoning off your bank account, it mostly sends traffic to other networks, phones home with data to aggregate and sell, or routes traffic for shady activities to evade detection. That risk could expand should the AI-assisted spread that Anthropic predicts come to pass—a larger number of infected devices issuing greater disruption and facilitating more criminal activity and targeted exploitation.

The self-replicating AI botnet does not issue a substantially new kind of threat—at least for now. But sometimes a quantitative increase in a risk’s exposure can produce a qualitative change in that risk’s consequence. Take antibiotic resistance, for example, or wildfires. When a landscape accrues substantially greater dried materials that can fuel a fire, the same number of successful ignitions can spread much faster and more broadly. Climate change, human expansion into wildlands, and invasive-species infestations, among other factors, have increased both the chances for fire and its consequences. Exposure to wildfire risk becomes much greater than the simple presence of additional kindling might suggest. An AI-assisted IoT malicious-software inundation could increase the impact of malware substantially.

[Matteo Wong: How long until AI hacks everything?]

Even then, the outcome would be more witless and banal than the wildfire metaphor suggests. AI-assisted software hacks could, in theory, mess with the actual computers on a network, as in the French-supermarket attack. But instead of shutting off your home’s smart fridge, coordinated, global, AI-enabled malware is more likely to make networked-computing life harder and more miserable for everyone.

Email spam might offer a better metaphor for AI malware’s likely future. Junk email was annoying for years, but it remained manageable for a long time: You deleted the forwards from your weird uncle, and a simple spam filter caught much of the obvious junk. Eventually, though, email automation became cheap enough that it could both target enormous lists of addresses and personalize attacks, for phishing or exploitation. The low success rates of any single spam or phishing email ceased to be a problem once enormous mountains of junk email could be sent cheaply and easily. Now your inbox is ruined. Every email you receive from a stranger feels useless because you have begun to assume that email is all scams and garbage. (Phone calls and text messages are starting to feel the same way.)

AI malware could follow suit, adjusting probes for greater success, slowing down every computer and network by overwhelming it with garbage-processing and traffic, issuing a nuisance arms race of vulnerability-driven updates and patches, and perhaps even assembling a patchwork of previously valueless local-network data into quilts of persistent, individualized deception or harassment. A dumb risk with good odds, if low consequence, might prove to be more awful than a terrifying one that is highly unlikely.