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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weren’t we all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Are we in an intimacy crisis?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But has it gotten better?  

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Goldberg, welcome to The Permanent Questions.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Thank you.

Brooks: This must be—

Goldberg: I’m very wary.

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

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

Brooks: I’m a faculty member at Yale.

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

Brooks: Professors know what they’re talking about.

Goldberg: Good one.

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

Goldberg: It’s really deeply unlikely.

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

Goldberg: Isn’t that sad?

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

Goldberg: My political origin story?

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

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

Do you remember Al Shanker?

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

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

Brooks: Really?

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

Brooks: I had a similar upbringing, weirdly.

Goldberg: It’s not that weird, actually.

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

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

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

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

Brooks: Wait, what is the Lynyrd Skynyrd position?

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

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

Goldberg: You’re such a loser.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldberg: Yes, it is. (Laughs.)

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

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

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

Brooks: Is that true, really?

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

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

Brooks: For what reason?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldberg: Yeah, that’s true.

Brooks: These are abroad places.

Goldberg: Those are abroad.

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

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

Brooks: Okay, Mr. Obscure Foreign Correspondent.

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

Brooks: That’s fine.

Goldberg: And a wide selection of cheese ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooks: You had a much more—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldberg: Or does it?

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

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

Brooks: We as a national society.

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

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

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

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

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

Goldberg: Your old socialist roots coming out.

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

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

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

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

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

Brooks: I’ll send her this part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooks: They would’ve killed each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldberg: Are they mentally stable?

Brooks: That would be nice.

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

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

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

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

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

Brooks: Have you lost friends over Trump?

Goldberg: Have I lost friends over Trump?

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

Brooks: Well, we’re momentarily friends.

Goldberg: Again, shifting alliances.

Have I lost friends over Trump? No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brooks: It is about persuasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldberg: You’re an old fogey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goldberg: Did we accomplish anything in this podcast?

Brooks: We did.

Goldberg: Is this a podcast?

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

Goldberg: The Atlantic magazine.

Brooks: The Atlantic magazine, embodied truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m sorry, I’m getting on a—

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

Goldberg: Oh, that’s good.

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

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

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

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

Brooks: Spiritually tall.

Goldberg: But spiritually your canopy shades us all.

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

Goldberg: As wise as a redwood.

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

Goldberg: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Listen: The evidence on policing and crime]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Manipulator vs. manipulator]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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