Thirty years ago this summer, the sociologist William Julius Wilson published When Work Disappears, in which he attributed high unemployment in urban, largely Black neighborhoods to structural changes in the economy. Conservatives dismissed his argument, contending instead that the problem was a poor work ethic enabled by a welfare system in desperate need of reform. But as a new unemployment crisis has arisen—this time more white, male, and rural—many figures on the right have discovered their inner structuralist.   

Prevalent conservative explanations of why one in 10 “prime age” men (25- to 54-year-olds) are economically inactive focus on the decline of industries such as manufacturing and construction that traditionally have employed many men without college degrees. Sounding a lot like Wilson, some of these commentators indict trade policy. “They let other countries raid our factories, steal our jobs, and rob us blind,” President Trump has said of Obama-era policy makers. This critique dovetails with charges that Americans have been forced to fight for the remaining scraps with outsiders. “Legal immigration has been at such high levels, and it’s driven down wages and taken a lot of jobs,” Senator Tom Cotton has argued. And, as The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis recently described, the women’s-rights movement and affirmative action are also frequently invoked as forces that feminized the workplace and brought an end to the kind of work that gave men meaning (and that maybe made women want to date them).  

From this diagnosis of men’s woes has followed a misguided attempt at a cure: setting tariffs in the hopes of bringing back manufacturing jobs, kicking out immigrants who might “steal” these jobs from “real” Americans, and vanquishing the DEI culture that has supposedly made workplaces hostile to white men. But the diagnosis is not correct: “Manly” jobs exist and employers are hiring. The trouble lies in finding men who are willing and able to take them.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics just reported that, at the end of August, the mining, logging, construction, and manufacturing sectors had about 800,000 job openings. This represents an increase of 148,000 job openings in the past year, during which job openings across the entire economy increased by 160,000. Police departments and other law-enforcement agencies also have had high vacancy rates and difficulty filling those jobs. If the problem were a shortage of work in predominantly male occupations, these vacancies wouldn’t exist.

[Helen Lewis: The men who want women to be quiet]

Does every one of these open positions pay excellent wages, offer good benefits, and allow upward advancement? Surely not, and improving all of those things should increase the willingness of men to apply for work. But the dynamics that have led about 6.7 million men to drop out of the workforce go beyond that.  

Part of the problem (so to speak, because in fact it is a virtue of our current system) is that, for many, dropping out of the workforce is not a catastrophic outcome. A century ago, men who did not work—and frequently, their wives and children as well—were in truly desperate situations and at risk for destitution, homelessness, and malnutrition. Real GDP has increased about 20-fold since then, and the federal safety net is exponentially more robust. In such a rich country, inequality notwithstanding, foregoing work incurs much less risk and hence becomes more tolerable. A further, informal safety net has expanded outside of government: Women have flooded into the workforce over the past 75 years, many of whom are now bringing home paychecks to these men. This is not to say that unemployment is congenial. Quite the opposite: It still leads to worse physical and mental health. But it is not as harsh as it once was.

The more consequential factor may be what men are doing with all of the hours that they aren’t working. The economist Nicholas Eberstadt, the author of Men Without Work, made an intriguing observation about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey, which provides data on Americans’ daily activities. According to a 2020 Brookings Institute report, prime-age women outside the labor force spend about six hours a day on caregiving and other unpaid work at home; their male counterparts spend fewer than three. The average man without a job devotes less than an hour to such purposes. What these men are spending time on is an unprecedented array of affordable, addictive goods and services—including an average of five-and a half hours a day watching television and movies, plus many more  on other screen-based activities such as watching pornography and playing video games. One recent study found that 52 percent of men ages 18 to 49 have an online sports-betting account.

This isn’t just about screen-based consumption. The legalization of marijuana production and sale has collapsed the price and increased the potency of the drug, making it inexpensive to be high most or all of the time. More than a quarter of working-age men who are not employed, in school, or in other training use marijuana, and they tend to consume it every day or almost every day.

These cheap, anesthetizing entertainments don’t just make empty hours fly by more enjoyably; they also may be making men less work-ready. Most jobs—manly or otherwise—require some ability to concentrate, to listen to and follow directions, and to endure discomfort. Many also require knowing how to interact respectfully with women. Days spent watching porn, gambling, and using drugs augment none of these skills. (This is the reality that Sarah Huckabee Sanders recently invoked in an ad depicting a welfare recipient as a young white man playing video games and eating junk food—prompting a number of conservative podcasters and commentators to take to their channels to condemn Sanders over what they felt was an unfair portrayal.) Men of course can still be asked to take more responsibility for themselves to be productive, but modern technology and drug legalization do make the boulder that they are rolling uphill much heavier than what their fathers pushed, and exacerbate the temptation to give up and let it roll back over them.  

Rather than fretting about the alleged lack of manly jobs, policy makers should consider the various incentives that could point men back toward work. The simple answer may seem to be increasing wages and benefits. But this won’t fully address the problem: Higher wages can entice men to apply for a job, but they cannot suddenly turn people into high-functioning adults. As we have traveled around the country on the Brookings Institution–American Enterprise Institute commission on the future of rural America, employers in high-wage (usually unionized) industries such as coal mining, ship building, and welding have told us sad stories about the inability of many men to show up for work regularly and not under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

[David A. Graham: The right’s identity politics take a bizarre turn]

The recent experience of the U.S. military, which once had a huge role in readying men for work and for life in general, is instructive here.

After multiple years of missing recruiting targets, Pentagon officials worked with Congress to significantly increase military pay, particularly for the junior enlisted. That led to better recruiting numbers, but many who applied were not able to meet existing standards. The Army responded by creating a future-soldier-preparatory program for applicants who did not meet the physical or academic standards but could do so with a remedial course before basic training. Recruiting has improved significantly across all branches in the past two years.

Most men are probably not going to join the military, so what about those who don’t? As with any effort to change the behavior of large numbers of people, offering both carrots and sticks is essential. Social Security Disability Insurance has turned into a first-resort program for jobless men, and caseloads have risen dramatically. These programs could do with some tweaking to make benefits slightly harder to qualify for and remain on, which would create more pressure to seek work. On the incentive side, the Earned Income Tax Credit could be expanded to men who are low-income, noncustodial parents to make work more attractive. The corporations that both prey heavily on unemployed men and reduce their work readiness could also be brought to heel: We lived without legal sports gambling for decades and could go back to banning it now; marijuana could be treated more like tobacco, with tighter regulation and higher taxes. Such measures would create a healthier environment for nonworking men. Research also suggests that growing up around adults who are employed could have positive effects on the next generation’s own employment and educational aspirations. This creates the attractive possibility of helping more men be productive not only for their sake but for the health, social, and economic benefits that would accrue to the whole country.

Public-policy changes that reduce the risk of addiction and increase the incentives for economic productivity could help set American men onto a more productive path. But reintegrating missing men into social and economic life will likely require broader changes to culture and institutions as well. Schools that dropped demands for regular attendance and homework during the coronavirus pandemic could return to reinforcing better habits that are conducive to work-readiness. Charitable organizations that prepare young men for adult life need volunteers and donations to support them. And anyone who has a platform to communicate with young men should try to frame women’s rising romantic standards not as something to resent but as a stimulus to become better men.    

As China’s manufacturers flood the global market with cars, chips, and just about everything else, the country’s economic juggernaut seems unstoppable. Policy makers in the United States and elsewhere fret that this onslaught will overrun their own industries, destroy jobs, and leave them reliant on a rival for vital products. But a growing number of Chinese factories are failing to produce at least one crucial thing: a profit. According to the London-based research firm Capital Economics, the share of Chinese industrial firms that are losing money has doubled since 2018 to 30 percent this year.

Losses are piling up at Chinese firms even as exports surge. Local governments regularly prop up unprofitable enterprises to preserve employment and meet economic targets. This has had a perverse effect throughout the country. An economic program that was meant to make China stronger and more independent has in fact made it more vulnerable to the policies of other countries.

Profitability was never a top priority of the Chinese Communist Party. Economic planners have assumed that a large manufacturing base is essential to China’s national security, technological advancement, political stability, and global influence. China’s leaders therefore value the production, exports, and jobs that factories generate far more than any financial return on their investments. As a result, China’s economy has long been cluttered with “zombie” companies: effectively bankrupt firms that are kept alive by creditors.

[Michael Schuman: China is flatlining]

But as the economy has slumped in recent years, the strain on Chinese companies has increased and their finances have deteriorated. Total net profit at 5,400 Chinese companies listed on local stock exchanges fell for the third consecutive year in 2025, according to data from Nikkei Asia, a Japanese business news outlet. Excess factory capacity and weak domestic demand have created a brutal competition for shoppers, and the resulting price wars have narrowed profit margins.

In market-based economies, unprofitable companies either fold or reorganize. In China, however, the government tends to sustain uncompetitive companies. Major banks, controlled largely by the state, roll over loans for troubled enterprises that can’t pay. Government officials offer tax breaks, subsidies, and general support to reduce costs, stimulate sales, or engineer bailouts. In an analysis of subsidies received by industrial firms in major economies from 2005 to 2024, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that Chinese state support was as much as eight times larger than government assistance elsewhere.

This advantage serves Beijing’s agenda. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has promoted manufacturing to expand China’s global power and make the country less reliant on foreign supplies. American CEOs, who are under constant pressure to increase shareholder value and post ever larger quarterly profits, have to compete with Chinese companies that can simply slash prices, grab market share, and not worry as much about the bottom line. “I don’t think Xi Jinping thinks in terms of profits. I don’t think he cares,” Mark Williams, the chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, told me. Instead, Xi knows that getting other countries hooked on Chinese supplies “gives China a huge amount of leverage.”

But profits do matter. Without them, companies have fewer resources to invest and grow; in China’s case, they become more reliant on the state for their survival, which has knock-on effects for everyone. Capital thrown away on unproductive businesses can’t be invested in profitable ventures. Banks forced to direct funds to loss-making enterprises have trouble making money themselves, which limits their ability to lend. These inefficiencies are contributing to a massive rise in the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio in the nonfinancial sector, which has nearly doubled since 2010 and now exceeds 300 percent. By crowding the market with uncompetitive firms, China’s state-led economic policies make it harder for any company to turn a profit. This has resulted in an economy that is not quite collapsing, but is suffering a “prolonged decay,” according to Logan Wright, a partner at the research firm Rhodium Group.

The more money that Chinese companies lose, the more the government must spend to sustain its economic model. Policy makers no longer have a lot of cash to spare. Government revenues declined in 2025. Tax collectors, scrambling for funds, are cracking down on Chinese tycoons who hold their wealth outside the country.

Xi could reduce the strain on the economy and help Chinese companies by stimulating domestic demand for their products. But he continues to show no interest in introducing the politically sensitive reforms that could encourage more household spending, such as building a stronger social safety net. Facing an unstable job market and slumping property prices, Chinese consumers are reluctant to shop—car sales, for instance, in China have plunged by more than 20 percent so far this year.

These problems at home have forced Chinese manufacturers to search more desperately for profits abroad. China’s trade surplus is on track this year to break the 2025 record of $1.2 trillion. But exports are no panacea. Chinese automakers shipped nearly 80 percent more cars overseas in August than they did a year earlier, but their profits still sank by 16 percent. In theory, Chinese manufacturers that gain market share should also gain more power to raise prices and increase profits. But their greater reliance on foreign customers leaves them vulnerable to protectionism. If policy makers around the world impose tariffs or other barriers on Chinese goods, the pressure on China’s economy may be too much for Beijing to bear. The Chinese government has already been scaling back tax breaks that help electric-vehicle companies even as the industry’s profits suffer.

China’s leaders have largely managed to keep global markets open to its subsidized exports because most trading partners are wary of confronting Beijing. But as Chinese exports surge, Beijing is facing greater opposition to its predatory trade practices. The United States has already taken steps to protect its strategic industries, in part by slapping high tariffs on Chinese EV makers, effectively shutting them out of the American market. In a mostly contentious meeting of G20 finance ministers in September, a rare moment of amity involved a statement that criticized countries that rely too heavily on exports for growth—an implicit rebuke of China, which was the only member not to sign on. Even Russia, China’s supposed close friend, approved.

[Patrick George: The firewall against Chinese cars is cracking]

In a report published earlier this year called “The Chinese Steamroller,” the French government’s High Commission for Strategy and Planning asserted that China’s export surge “now threatens and directly affects the very core of Europe’s productive system.” Germany’s Volkswagen, undercut by Chinese automakers, announced in September that the company’s decade-long restructuring would include cuts to 100,000 jobs—double earlier plans. Europe’s ballooning trade deficit with China, which has more than doubled over the past decade, has recently motivated European Union officials to discuss new mechanisms to block Chinese imports.

Protectionism in Europe would be especially damaging to Chinese companies, which can tap European consumers with bigger spending power than in many other parts of the world. Beijing had initially threatened to retaliate against proposed trade barriers by targeting European businesses—but earlier this month, Chinese leaders unexpectedly blinked. To avoid tariffs, Beijing agreed to a cap on exports of hybrid cars to Europe—a plan that could halve the number of these cars entering the EU over the next four years. By making this relatively minor concession, China’s leaders likely hope to stave off a wider trade war that could inflict even more harm on the domestic economy.

Global trade is becoming a grudge match between a stretched but determined Beijing and its frustrated trading partners. At the moment, Xi still holds the upper hand: Advanced democracies, leaderless in the age of Donald Trump, have been slow to organize against his ambitions. But the struggles of Chinese companies—and their overreliance on foreign markets—undercut Xi’s leverage. How he navigates these negotiations and trade-offs will directly affect companies and consumers not only in China but around the world. At the moment, Xi seems set on ushering in an era of greater economic conflict in which everyone loses.

In 1967, Marshall Lee was living in Philadelphia and becoming a Black revolutionary. “We were crazy, involved in a whole lot of stupid stuff,” Lee told me. “If it had not been for The Crisis”—Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, published that same year—“I do not know what would have happened to me.” Lee thinks he might have ended up in prison, or dead. Instead, he became a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, where he studied with Cruse—“somebody who helped to bring some clarity to Black revolutionary movements.”

In the late 1960s and through the ’70s, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual helped give shape to the aspiring Black revolutionary movement. It also became a cornerstone of the new discipline of Black studies; Henry Louis Gates Jr. was assigned the book in three different classes at Yale. Cruse’s work circulated so widely in part because it cut across truisms of radical movements and therefore made people angry: Audre Lorde described The Crisis as rife with “inaccuracies, misrepresentations and plain lies.” In the 2010s and early ’20s, young Black radicals were again talking about the intersection of class and race, criticizing the politics of respectability, and questioning whether white liberals would ever concede power. But few of them were talking about Cruse, whose polarizing qualities had helped consign him to obscurity.

They should have been. The Crisis tells three stories at once: Cruse’s own story, the story of his generation of Black people in Harlem, and the story of Black America. All three narratives seem to culminate naturally in 1967, when militant Black nationalism was capturing the public imagination. Really, they’re all still culminating today. And Cruse, I think, might have helped explain why the Black struggle for progress—and broader American efforts toward equality—seem stuck in the same cycles that plagued the movement six decades ago. He might also have had some unwelcome suggestions for how to break out of them.

Harold Cruse was born in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1916. His mother worked as a domestic servant, his father in a factory. Petersburg, which before the Civil War had been home to more free Black people than any other city in the South, was a bastion of Black institutions. Later, Cruse would use his 1987 book, Plural but Equal, to ask what might have happened if, instead of focusing political energy on integration, Black Americans had directed it toward providing their own communities with the same level of resources that white communities had.

[Read: ‘Race neutral’ is the new ‘separate but equal’]

Cruse’s childhood was itinerant. Eventually, he and his father ended up in Harlem, where he became enthralled by the characters of the Harlem Renaissance. Countee Cullen taught at his junior high school, and as a young man, Cruse attended public lectures by Richard Wright, Claude McKay, and W. E. B. Du Bois. During World War II, Cruse joined the Army and spent time in Algeria—where the Arabs resisting the French felt an affinity with Black soldiers—and then Italy, where he was impressed by communism. The underground Algerian movement and the Italian underground partisans, he later wrote, were “professionals not amateurs”—a distinction that he used to dismiss much of the American activism he encountered in decades to come.

The characteristic that would make Cruse’s work exceptionally compelling would also block his path to public acclaim: His commitment to justice was mixed with a curiosity that defied doctrinaire thinking. In his first writing job, at the Communist Party paper the Daily Worker, he submitted articles that explored the complexity of Black life rather than simply celebrating heroes of the struggle for Black liberation. He was skeptical of integration and gravitated toward a circle of Black writers and artists who believed that they should first prioritize building a stronger sense of Black identity. He helped found the short-lived Harlem Writers Club, a collective of writers who felt a “need to break away from enforced interracialism”—a position that put him at odds with Communist leadership. Disillusioned, he critiqued the “cliquish remoteness” of a Black communist-aligned paper, Freedom, lambasting its writers as “intellectual prisoners of the dying left-wing movement.”

Cruse knew that his resistance to norms that defined American conversations about race was risky: When he was working on The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, he told friends, “If I publish it, I’m going to have to leave the country.” The Crisis insisted that although the United States imagines itself as a nation of individuals, it is really a collection of social, ethnic, and religious groups. The much-vaunted individual rights that the U.S. guarantees are actually secured by group power. White people as a group have more power, so white individuals have more rights.

Within this framework, integration into white society will always mean subordination—and a few privileges for compliant Blacks. The extreme alternative is similarly unpromising: Cruse argued that Black leftists compensate for their marginalization within political organizations by becoming even more militant defenders of sectarian orthodoxies, further alienating them from the Black masses.

The solution to this stalemate between ineffectual opposites was, he thought, for Black Americans as a group to seek cultural, political, and economic self-determination. Cruse argued that the Harlem Renaissance had marked a rare opportunity to build the sort of internally self-governing community that Petersburg had once been. But he believed that that movement had fallen short because, despite its artistic influence, it did not braid culture with politics and economics. White people owned the property and businesses that served Harlem residents, thereby appropriating the profit of those enterprises from Black communities.

[Read: The Harlem Renaissance was bigger than Harlem]

What the Black masses really wanted, Cruse thought, was not integration but rather resources that would meet their basic needs. The first political goal attached to Black group consciousness, then, ought to be to block white people from extracting resources that should serve Black people—with the second aim of Black communities building resilient community infrastructure, including cooperatively owned businesses and locally controlled third-party politics. The mid-1960s were a moment when those goals seemed like they might be achievable—if, Cruse warned, Black Americans could avoid falling prey to sectarianism and impatience. (“In the place of a matured social vision,” he wrote, “there will always be those who will gladly substitute the catastrophic and glorious act of martyrdom and self-immolation for a cause.”) On top of the dangers of rash action, Cruse feared that Black intellectuals, including leaders of the civil-rights movement, might be too interested in their own middle-class existence to genuinely encourage or arrange such radical change.

Cruse’s ideas about communal self-determination may have faded in prominence in part because of his knack for making enemies: The Crisis targeted the most venerated and powerful figures in the Black community, including leaders of the integration movement, and they had no trouble finding platforms to denounce him. Cruse also criticized those on the left, both Black and white; even some people who were most ideologically aligned with him found the book’s ideas unpalatable. Importantly, Cruse also had a record of bigoted statements about groups including Black women, southern Blacks, West Indians, and Jews. The Crisis includes, among other much-scrutinized comments, claims of “nationalistic aggressiveness” by Jews. Cruse also routinely stereotyped Black women writers as motivated by “axe-grinding against black men.”

[Read: The America that killed George Floyd]

Or perhaps Cruse’s arguments were forgotten because his central message—that self-interest and a focus on individual rights will hamper any social movement—remains too challenging for many people to embrace. After publishing The Crisis, when he became the inaugural director of the new African American Studies program at the University of Michigan, Cruse began to question what a Black political strategy that considered the differences between Black communities nationwide might look like. During the program’s contentious first semester, he warned his students that if they came to class with their mind already made up, there would be no space for thinking at all: “We can’t allow dogmatism of any kind to be injected into our thinking about reality.”

He was unsuccessful. Amid protests over university policies toward Black students in the spring of 1970, Michigan committed to reshaping the Black-studies program, prioritizing Black-student demands over the longer-term goal of honing a rigorous new discipline. But in subsequent years, Cruse sensed that a “feeling of stagnation” was taking hold. As student protests subsided, he and other faculty members became mired in profound disagreements about pedagogy and department politics—disagreements in which Cruse himself fell prey to the kind of sectarianism he had once warned of. He feared that the memory of Black-justice movements was fading, and that Black scholarship was becoming clouded by nostalgia.

Cruse was a flawed man and scholar. He could be cantankerous, contrarian, and unaware of boundaries; late in life, the author and activist Grace Lee Boggs, a onetime collaborator of Cruses’s, said, “I seem to recall him being very mean.” Cruse aimed merciless polemics at seemingly every major Black figure under the sun.

But he understood that thinking carefully and appreciating history are essential to being able to better intervene in the present. He knew that insistence on ideological purity from any quarter runs counter to that mission, and that stalemates over partisan issues lead insiders to ignore the interests of the people at large. And as the political winds shifted around him, Cruse always had the same refrain: Understanding history at all levels—world, nation, and city—was essential to responding to the urgency of contemporary needs. He believed that, just as the activist requires physical courage to confront the police in a street protest, so, too, do they require intellectual courage to interrogate the views and presuppositions of comrades, as well as their own.

This article was adapted from Vincent W. Lloyd’s new book, Harold Cruse: Critic, Writer, Teacher.

At this moment, an untold number of TikTok videos are being sent without commentary to an untold number of group chats. The videos might remind the senders of their mom, their spouse, their high-school best friends. They might strike the recipients as charming—or as smartphone pollution. The meme-sharing never stops.

People have been sending one another memes nearly as long as the web has been worldwide, gathering amusing bits of internet ephemera and texting, emailing, or sharing it on social media with their loved ones. Before it was TikToks and Instagram Reels, it was I Can Has Cheezburger? links posted to Facebook walls. (Even before the internet existed, people engaged in meme-sharing-like behavior: your grandma clipping articles from the newspaper that she thought you might like, for instance.)

As communication goes, sending a meme is one of the lowest-lift—one might even say laziest—ways to stay in touch. It’s barely a step above not saying anything at all. But a surprisingly large body of research on meme-sharing has found that it can serve an important function in relationships and bring people closer together.

According to Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, sending memes can be a form of “pebbling”—a term that he, appropriately, saw on social media. It refers to a behavior among gentoo penguins, in which they present potential mates with carefully selected, shiny pebbles. Among humans, giving the gift of a carefully selected, shiny meme can be a mating behavior, too, or a platonic one.

[Read: The meme that defined a decade]

“These aren’t trivial gestures—every pebble is a bid for connection,” Grant writes in his new book, Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World. Clicking “Share” on a funny Instagram post is hardly on the level of inviting a friend to dinner, as bids for connection go. But neither is it nothing. At minimum, it’s a way of checking in and reminding someone of your relationship. Nicholas Brody, a communication-studies professor at the University of Puget Sound, told me that in unpublished data from his research, he’s found that the most common reason people said they sent memes was just to convey “I’m thinking of you” to the other person.

But for many, the meaning can be deeper than that. People really tend to curate what they send to whom, experts told me, picking and choosing the pebbles that they think the other person will like. For me, cat videos go to my husband, Lord of the Rings memes to certain friends, nostalgic posts about emo music to different friends, posts about literary drama to my writer friends. This is a way of creating and reinforcing a shared reality, one study on the interpersonal use of memes found, a sense that we are both on the inside of the specific microculture that is our relationship. (Even those who aren’t meme-sharers themselves do this in many other ways, through inside jokes and private language.) Memes work well for this purpose because they “are so nuanced, and have so many different layers of cultural references and relational meanings,” Brody told me, “that they only really have a lot of power when we already feel really close to somebody.” Indeed, his research shows that people mostly send memes to people they know well—to romantic partners and close friends.

The best-case scenario is that a meme opens a door to further sharing. For instance, Grant told me that he recently sent a friend from high school a post of a funny prank he saw—not only because he thought they would appreciate it, but because they themselves were pranksters when they were young. The post launched them into reminiscing about how they used to mash bananas into the door handles of a friend’s car in high school. Rachel Peng, an assistant professor of digital advertising at Louisiana State University, told me that she was inspired to research meme-sending because of her own experience with social anxiety. “Sometimes I send memes,” she said, “to start a conversation. Or sometimes I don’t know what to say but I also want to keep the conversation going.” And even though people tend to use memes most with their nearest and dearest, her research has found that they might be even more beneficial among acquaintances. When you’re just getting to know someone, taking the time to pick out something that reminds you of them is a bigger gesture—even more so if it sparks more back-and-forth.

[Read: Forgive the bad texters]

But what if the meme receiver doesn’t respond with fond reminiscences? Some Instagram DM threads become wildly lopsided: one person sending meme after meme, the other hearting no more than every tenth one. That sort of thing could be annoying. “There is such a thing as spamming people with random junk from the internet,” Grant said. But if the memes are lovingly curated, it could still be a net positive for the relationship, even if the meme receiver just chuckles privately without responding. “If we both get the joke, it’s still a bit like a little moment of connection, right?” Peng said.

“One of the key things in relational maintenance is that we want assurances that this other person values our friendship and our relationship just as much as us,” Brody added. But “it doesn’t always have to be a meme for a meme.” Just remember that if your friend sent you 15 memes in a day, it means they thought of you 15 times that day. So drop them the occasional lol or heart emoji just to show you’re thinking of them too.

If you were wondering whether AI could make the midterms even more confusing, here’s one data point: Several people who thought they were donating to James Talarico unwittingly gave their money to someone else. Talarico, a Texas Democrat, is running for Senate in what’s probably the most closely watched race of the upcoming elections. Search Google for how to contribute to his campaign, and you might get an AI-generated answer that links to ways “you can chip in securely.” Until a few weeks ago, one of those featured links was actually controlled by an unrelated political-action committee that sent the money instead to the reelection campaign of another Democrat: Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado.

The mix-up wasn’t all AI’s fault. The link led to a misleading donation page that carried Talarico’s name and picture, and specified only at the bottom that the money would go to Hickenlooper. But Google’s AI tool evidently didn’t read the fine print. And perhaps no one would have clicked on it had Google not highlighted the page in an authoritative-sounding AI response.

A spokesperson for Hickenlooper’s campaign told me that the Colorado Democrat, whose seat is considered safe, had not intentionally siphoned the donations. Rather, an outside group, the Kitchen Table Values PAC, had created the fundraiser without Hickenlooper’s knowledge. This appears to have fooled at least three people, who donated a combined total of $1,011, the spokesperson said. Rich Wilkins, the Democratic organizer behind the PAC, told me that the money was supposed to be split between Talarico and his group. “If a page was incorrectly going to Hickenlooper, that sounds like a human-error issue,” he said. After a Democratic digital-advertising strategist discovered the misleading fundraiser while Googling his party’s Senate candidates, the page was removed from the fundraising platform ActBlue, and Hickenlooper’s campaign forwarded the misdirected money to Talarico.

The 2026 midterms will mark the first federal election in which tens of millions of voters are getting some of their political information from generative-AI tools. In a September survey, the American Association of Political Consultants Foundation reported that 4 percent of respondents had consulted a chatbot such as ChatGPT for election information in the previous month. Far more—nearly 40 percent—reported getting such info from Google’s AI-search summaries. As the election nears, those numbers will surely rise.

There’s a reason for AI’s growing popularity with voters: These tools are convenient, and their answers are personalized. In theory, they have the potential to debunk the kinds of corrosive conspiracy theories that flourish on social media; even Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot, will correctly tell you that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. But chatbots are already bringing new complications to an internet that has been teeming with political falsehoods and distortions. Between fake-news sites cropping up to influence AI answers, models that are drawing on foreign propaganda, and chatbots dispensing misleading voter information, the age of AI-mediated politics is beginning to feel awfully familiar.

[Read: What Trump’s chatbot told me about the election]

In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, most chatbots couldn’t search the web, and they were trained to tread cautiously around questions about elections and current events. Today’s AI tools are still instructed not to take sides politically, but they’ve evolved into all-purpose assistants that will answer your election questions directly, confidently—and sometimes wrongly.

In a forthcoming report, Forum AI, a start-up that evaluates AI models’ performance on questions about controversial topics, found that about 40 percent of chatbots’ answers to election-related questions contained at least one factual inaccuracy. When Forum’s researchers asked one widely used model when they needed to request a mail-in ballot to vote in the midterms in Pennsylvania, the chatbot said November 3. The actual deadline is a week earlier. (Forum did not specify the precise AI model.) In the same report, shared with The Atlantic ahead of its publication, Forum determined that about one in three responses cited an unreliable information source, such as posts on Reddit or Quora. Google’s Gemini answered a question about why America’s global power is declining by citing an article from People’s Daily, a Chinese state-run news outlet. “These aren’t trick questions,” Campbell Brown, a co-founder of Forum AI, told me. “There’s no excuse for chatbots to keep getting them wrong.”

The companies say their bots have improved since Forum conducted its research in August. Over the past two months, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all partnered with the nonpartisan nonprofit Democracy Works to pull accurate, up-to-date information about how, where, and when to vote. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 was the most accurate of the models tested by Forum, and Nate Evans, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me he believes that the company’s bots should rate higher now. In an email, the Google spokesperson Davis Thompson told me that the company tests its AI answers on election topics “extensively,” and that these responses show up on Google searches only when the company is confident AI can provide good information. A spokesperson for Anthropic, whose integration with Democracy Works launched last week, declined to comment.

Chatbots can be uniquely convincing. In a recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, a researcher posed as a Dallas-area real-estate agent who was suspicious of the election process. Claude responded that the feeling of disempowerment was “completely understandable” but insisted that elections aren’t actually run by a “shadowy group of elites” in Washington. The problem is, most people don’t particularly want to be talked out of their beliefs, Gideon Nave, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business who studies AI and cognition, told me. He worries that the same persuasive power that can convince a conspiracy theorist that the moon landing was real could also make AI a potent tool for manipulation of public opinion. “You can implant all sorts of ideas in people’s heads when they’re using AI, and they feel that it’s their own responses.”

Inevitably, a cottage industry has sprung up to consult candidates on how to influence what AI says about them. On the left, the advocacy group Run for Something launched a platform called CampSight that monitors what LLMs are saying about an issue or candidate and recommends how to shape those narratives. On the right, the Center for Campaign Innovation has published research on how AI models respond to questions about candidates and the sources they most often cite. “We’re campaigning for the AI vote now,” Eric Wilson, the group’s director, told me.

Some of the most effective “sloptimization” tactics are simple, though not always obvious. “Most candidates we talked to were not filling out Ballotpedia profiles,” Jordan Haines, Run for Something’s chief technology officer, told me, referring to the online repository of election information. “They were like, ‘Eh, no one really reads that.’” Most voters may not be visiting Ballotpedia in droves, but it turns out that their chatbots are. LLMs also love websites with dot-gov domains, both Haines and Wilson told me. That could lend an advantage to incumbents, who can use their official House.gov or Senate.gov web pages to seed messaging for chatbots to pick up on. Challengers, though, might find AI answers easier to sway, because there’s often less information about them in the public record.

[Read: Your search results are getting sloptimized]

Official government websites typically don’t draw contrast between candidates or weigh the relative merits of differing views. Yet those are the kinds of questions people are starting to ask AI. To answer them, chatbots can’t always turn to mainstream news outlets; many have put up measures that block AI bots from ingesting their articles without a specific content agreement. (The Atlantic, for instance, has a corporate content-licensing deal with OpenAI, and otherwise blocks most AI crawlers.) Good sources can be especially scarce for state and local races, Katie Harbath, whose firm, Anchor Change, advises tech companies on policy, told me.

To fill those gaps, AI tools may scrounge among iffy sources. Researchers at a cybersecurity start-up called VisionHeight told me that they recently discovered 37 different suspicious websites, all registered on the same night in September, that seem tailor-made to appear in AI answers about elections. The sites carry newspapery names such as the Scranton Beacon and the Tar Heel State Report, but they read nothing like newspapers. Instead they are stuffed with questions and answers about state and local candidates. “Which candidate in MI-04 has the stronger plan for public safety?” asks one page on the Wolverine State Report. Its answer begins: “Sean McCann is the stronger choice,” referring to the Democratic nominee for Congress from that district.

At least some of this material is already making its way into AI answers. When I asked Google’s Gemini-powered “AI Mode” Does Sean McCann support defunding the police?, its response drew on and cited the Wolverine State Report and the Kalamazoo Beacon, both of which are part of the network that VisionHeight discovered. The answer in this case was not necessarily inaccurate; his campaign website says he doesn’t. (McCann is just one of many candidates named by the Wolverine State Report, and there’s no reason to believe he had anything to do with the website. His campaign did not not respond to a request for comment.)

Thompson, the Google spokesperson, said that “data voids” are long-standing problems for search engines and AI answers alike, and that the company is always looking out for coordinated attempts to exploit them. After I asked him about the network of sites, the sources seemed to stop appearing in search results. And Google’s AI Mode began giving a different answer about McCann’s position: Whether he supports defunding the police “depends on the perspectives of his campaign and his political opponents,” it said.

Although it’s unclear who is behind the network of midterm-focused sites, trolls and foreign governments could use similar methods to seed lies for chatbots to regurgitate. According to the Global Disinformation Index, chatbots have already cited a false claim by the Russian defense ministry to wrongly answer a question about Russia’s control of Ukraine. And on Wednesday, NewsGuard, a company that tracks misinformation, reported that Google’s AI answers had picked up on a deepfake video spread by a Russian influence campaign that falsely depicts a student accusing Talarico of sexual assault in 2012.

A decade ago, the 2016 election revealed how social media had corroded the political-information sphere. The last thing AI companies want is another Cambridge Analytica: They are rolling out blog posts cataloging their preparations against misinformation and manipulation. “We take the responsibility to deliver high quality, trustworthy information seriously,” Google says, a claim echoed by OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s reassuring that they say they’re taking that responsibility seriously. It just happens to be the same thing the social-media companies have been telling us for years.

Victoria Feng contributed reporting.

Photographs and videos by Sasha Maslov

Ukraine’s newest battlefield lies inside a network of steel pipes deep below the ground, some barely wide enough for a person to crawl through. Before the war, these pipes carried natural gas from Russia to Ukraine. Now soldiers zip through them on electric buggies, ambushing one another with machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

Most wars put soldiers through excruciating trials. But even by the standards of brutality set more than a century ago in the mustard-gassed trenches of World War I, the fighting in Ukraine keeps plumbing new extremes. At least 1 million troops—by some estimates, more than 2 million—have been killed or gravely wounded in this war, mostly by the drones that fill the skies above the battlefield, hunting anything that moves. Over the past few years, the omnipresent drones have produced an effective stalemate at the front, which stretches for more than 700 miles across eastern and southern Ukraine. 

Aboveground, neither side has found a way to advance through what’s known as the kill zone—a new kind of no-man’s-land, dozens of miles wide, where drones can spot and attack any dugout, any vehicle, even a lonely soldier trudging through a field. “Day by day, the kill zone is expanding, getting wider and deadlier,” Brigadier General Ihor Obolensky, who commands a force of several thousand Ukrainian troops, told me. “So what’s the answer? You go underground.” There, at least, the drones cannot see you. The Russians were first to figure this out, and they have pioneered a new approach to warfare, Obolensky said. “Now we’re catching up.”

These battles, which have not been previously reported in detail, mark a broader shift in the war. Amid the intensifying barrage of Russian missiles and drones on Kyiv and other cities, many civilians have been forced to shelter underground. Schools have built subterranean classrooms. Parts of the electricity grid have moved belowground. 

Weapons factories now tend to operate inside enormous bunkers. And firefights take place under the earth, one of the only areas in Ukraine that remains safe from drones and missiles. 

The outcome of these battles could decide the course of the war. Throughout the year, the Russians have stockpiled supplies and mobilized soldiers in preparation for a winter offensive, several military officers and senior officials in Ukraine told me. They fear that the offensive will attempt to punch a hole through the kill zone and seize all of eastern Ukraine, which Russia could use as early as next year to launch another push toward the center of the country and its capital. Control of the gas-pipeline network in the contested region of the Donbas could give Russia a decisive advantage in the winter campaign, Obolensky told me.

[Read: Ukraine finds a new set of targets]

His troops, part of a military corps known as Khartiia, or “The Charter,” realized the importance of the pipeline network in the spring of 2025, when Russian troops used it to sneak behind Ukrainian lines and stage a series of surprise attacks. “They kept climbing out of the earth like devils,” Obolensky said. The infiltrations mostly took place in bad weather, when drones had a hard time spotting the Russians as they emerged from underground.

The Ukrainians responded at first by playing a deadly game of whack-a-mole. “We would try to find their exit points and cut them down when they surfaced,” Obolensky said. “But they would just keep popping up several kilometers behind our lines and attacking us.” 

To better understand the threat, the general requested maps of the pipeline network from Ukraine’s state energy company. The documents showed the extent of the danger: a warren of at least 57 steel tubes running underneath the war zone, most of them one to two meters in diameter. For decades, such pipes had been used to transport gas from Siberian fields to customers in Ukraine and other parts of Europe. Ukraine cut off this trade with Russia at the start of last year. The pipeline network then went dormant, but not for very long. 

Russian commanders sent their troops into the tunnels only a few weeks later, near the end of the months-long battle of Sudzha, a town in western Russia that the Ukrainians seized in August 2024. Not since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 had an enemy taken Russian land by force. For the Kremlin, Sudzha stands as one of the defining humiliations of this war, and for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it was a significant if fleeting victory. He ordered his troops to hold that terrain, hoping to trade it against territory Russia had occupied in his country. 

But his counterpart in Moscow, Vladimir Putin, had no intention of making such a deal. Instead, Putin called on support from his ally in North Korea, which sent thousands of troops to help Russia retake the wider region of Kursk. The fighting raged throughout that winter. At the start of last year, the Ukrainian hold over Sudzha began to slip, in large part because the Russians made extensive use of sewers and other tunnels to take the town back street by street. 

Reports of these infiltrations horrified many Ukrainians, who found it hard to understand how Russia could motivate its soldiers to crawl for miles through a filthy pipe to reach enemy territory. This summer, a Ukrainian blogger interviewed two Russian prisoners of war who claimed to have done that. Both said they had been serving time for murder in Russian labor camps when military recruiters came to offer them their freedom in exchange for service in Ukraine, a common practice in Russia. 

One of the prisoners recalled hobbling through the pipe for two days, doubled over at the waist, before reaching a hole through which he could escape into Ukraine and hide in a forest. When he radioed his commander for permission to retreat because of a leg injury, the response made clear that he had been sent to die. “There was no way back,” he said. “Only forward.” 

In early 2025, soon after the Ukrainians withdrew from Sudzha, they began to see similar tactics on their own territory, including in the battle for Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine, Obolensky told me. His men mostly operate in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, where they have fought for more than a year to defend the city of Kupiansk, about 25 miles from the Russian border. Enemy troops kept appearing behind their lines, sometimes only one or two at a time, hiding in an abandoned building or digging a foxhole under the roots of a tree. Then they would wait for other Russians to join them before launching an ambush, Obolensky said. “The question kept arising: Where are they coming from?”

In late July, the general made his first trip into the pipes, and he came out shaken. When we met in Kyiv last month to talk about the experience, he showed me a video he had taken of himself in those moments, his face smeared with grime and his voice unsteady with emotion. “The guys working down in these pipes right now, they are heroes, unlike any other warriors I have seen,” he said into the camera of his phone. 

[Read: Trump’s October surprise]

Other videos Obolensky shared with me show the terrifying conditions in this subterranean front. Troops from the Khartiia Corps often spend weeks underground, advancing through the pipes on repurposed coal-mining wagons powered by motors from electric scooters. The tunnels reek of residue from natural gas and other chemicals. When the Ukrainians approach an enemy position underground, firefights erupt. Both sides shoot high-caliber rifles and launch grenades, causing shrapnel and bullets to ricochet inside the metal pipes. 

Explosions suck the air out of the cramped spaces, forming vacuums that leave the soldiers unable to breathe. They rely on gas masks and oxygen tanks, plugging their ears to muffle the deafening blasts. To advance, the Ukrainian troops often break through walls of sandbags erected by the Russians and push forward through incoming gunfire. 

As of this week, after roughly six months of underground warfare, the Khartiia Corps had seized back control of about nine miles of pipelines in northeastern Ukraine, part of an operation they code-named Veles, after the Slavic god of the underworld. Obolensky described it as the first successful counterattack ever carried out in such conditions. But he knows that many more will be required to clear the network of pipes that Russia controls. Ukraine has, so far, retaken two. Dozens remain in Russian hands. 

Sasha Maslov contributed additional reporting.

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The comedian Maria Bamford has always been alarmingly frank about her obsessive, intrusive thoughts—imagined scenarios where she murders someone or commits wholesale genocide, for instance. In Paralyzed by Hope, the new documentary about her life from Judd Apatow, Bamford talks about faking her own suicide as a kid, using ketchup as a prop.

In all of her work—which includes stand-up, a Netflix sitcom, a YouTube series, and a memoir— Bamford generously samples people and incidents from her own life. The documentary, co-directed by Apatow and Neil Berkeley, connects the dots in a way that reveals a deeper layer of meaning. For example, despite talking about her struggles, Bamford doesn’t like the narrative that she’s up there on stage actually struggling.

“I think it reminds me of when people say, you know, ‘inspiration porn,’ like, saying, Oh, it’s just amazing that you’re doing this,” Bamford says on this episode of Radio Atlantic. “Like, the person is so delicate, and I’m like, You don’t know me.”

Bamford explains the actual relationship between OCD and her comedy. She talks about why she doesn’t do political comedy, and why she no longer does imitations of her sister. She discusses her divorce and getting on the apps. She does all of that from a car, buzzed on nitro cold brew.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Veteran comedy writer Judd Apatow has taken on a kind of second job as comedy historian.

[Music]

Rosin: He’s been making documentaries about comedians who are legends or brilliant in some particular way or just not like anyone else: Mel Brooks, George Carlin, and now, coming out on Netflix Friday, Maria Bamford.

Maria Bamford: My name is Maria Bamford, and this is a gift. My gift to you.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you know Maria Bamford’s comedy, then you already know a lot about Maria Bamford. Her OCD and bipolar diagnoses come up a lot in her comedy routines. Also, her childhood in Duluth, Minnesota, with her mother, who she does impressions of a lot.

Bamford as her mother, Marilyn Bamford: Maria, remember what we talked about. Gonorrhea; syphilis; herpes 1, 2. Watch the cold sores. Date rape is a lot more common than people think. You look so gorgeous.

Rosin: And her dad.

Bamford: My dad is really just a series of sound effects. (Coughs, hacks, wheezes.)

Rosin: And of her older sister, Sarah.

Bamford as her sister, Sarah: Maria, want something to drink? Want a Diet Coke? Or a string cheese? We could do, like, two Skinny Cows from Weight Watchers, those ice-cream sandwiches. Put two of those together, put Bailey’s ice cream on top. Make a fat cow. Come on, Maria. Seize the day, Robin Williams! What do you want?

Rosin: She recently retired that impression of her sister. We’ll talk about why later. And her parents both died in the last several years, which comes up in the documentary. Apatow interviews her mostly at her house in Altadena, California, which, at the time, she shared with her husband, Scott, and a couple of pugs.

Later in the film, we learn she almost lost that house in the wildfires in 2025. And she’s no longer married.

When I talked to her last week, she was parked somewhere in her neighborhood outside a church.

Bamford: I’ve just had a nitro cold brew, so my brain is skipping ahead light-years.

Rosin: Did they say you were sitting inside a car?

Bamford: I am inside a car.

Rosin: Hmm.

Bamford: Is that okay?

Rosin: Well, I’m just wondering what it’s like to be inside a small space having just had a nitro cold brew.

Bamford: Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s so delightful. I’m compact. I’m not out of control. I’m not driving. I’m just sort of filled with a delightful hope. And I believe that’s caffeine.

Rosin: I’ve been watching Bamford for years. I’ve seen her live, seen her TV show, her YouTube series. I’ve read her book. Bits and pieces of her life come up in all these places. And the documentary connects all the pieces in a more linear way. It’s called Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story and it’s co-directed by Apatow and Neil Berkeley.

[Music]

Rosin: All right. I’m gonna start in a way that one is supposed to start.

Bamford: Okay. Of course.

Rosin: Press the “Reset” button. Maria, welcome to the show.

Bamford: Thank you so much for having me on.

Rosin: When Judd Apatow approached you, was there anything you said was off-limits? Like, You can film this dog, but not that dog? Like, anything where you said—

Bamford: (Laughs.) Not the pug chihuahua! Only with her harness on. No, as far as I know, I didn’t. I think I have pride about that, where I go: Ask me anything and that I am messy. My brand is messy. It’s all right. It’s okay. You know, no one’s gonna be surprised that there’s a layer of dust on something or my face is smudged with a little bit of cake and frosting.

Rosin: Was there any scene when you watched the documentary that you didn’t really recognize yourself? You were like, Who is that person?

Bamford: I think just being described by some of the people that I don’t know super well, like Conan O’Brien when he said I was like a lobster without a shell.

Conan O’Brien: Sometimes it feels like you’re talking to a lobster whose shell has been removed, but it’s still alive, and it’s just feeling every single molecule in the room.

Bamford: He’s an extremely wonderful person. Everything he does is hilarious, wonderful. But I think people mistake that. I really don’t agree with that. I feel like I’m tough as nails. You know what I’m saying? Like, I’ll cry and have all the feels and all that stuff, but yeah, that to me is not true at all.

Rosin: You think of yourself as tough as nails? Because you’re in control of the vulnerability? That actually surprises me. Not that I don’t think you’re tough as nails, but because you are the most vulnerable, maybe that extreme vulnerability is tough as nails. What do you mean by that?

Bamford: I guess I just feel like I have the personal sense that I’m good. There’s plenty—my God—there’s just so many things. If you go online, if you’re any sort of entertainer or anything public, there’s gonna be people telling you to kill yourself, you know?

Rosin: You’re ugly. Whatever, yeah.

Bamford: Or whatever. Or people coming up to you after whatever it is that you’re passionate about and say, Yeah, I don’t really like that at all, and I think you should be ashamed of yourself, or whatever it is. So yeah, things feel bad, of course, but I know within myself I’m good.

The parts of me that have experienced mood issues, that kind of stuff, or the fact that I have a bit of a tremor, that’s only embarrassing—where people are like, Let me take that for you before you spill it all over everything.

[Music]

Bamford: I think it reminds me of when people say, you know, “inspiration porn,” like, saying, Oh, it’s just amazing that you’re doing this. Like, the person is so delicate, and I’m like, You don’t know me.

There’s some part of me—it also, I think it brings up stuff from childhood, where it’s like I have a high voice. Always kind of underestimated, like, You’re dumb; you’re fragile. I think that was triggering me to go like, What?

Rosin: So much of your work is about intrusive thoughts. And for the blessed people out there who do not deal with those or know someone who does, can you just explain what is an intrusive thought? How does it work?

Bamford: Well, everybody has them. So if you’ve ever had something flash in my mind like, Oh, I wanna jump off this building. I’m on the Empire State Building, and I just—what if I jumped off? Like, just that’s all it is. What happens with somebody with OCD or more obsessive is that somebody says, Oh, that means something, I am gonna do it.

Rosin: Like, you take it too seriously. You talk to it. You take it seriously.

Bamford: Yeah. So for me, it was intrusive thoughts about when I was a kid, around about 9 or 10, I got a fear that I was gonna be a serial killer.

Bamford (from the Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome album): When I was a kid—I was about 10 years old—I stopped being able to sleep at night, because I was worried. I was really anxious that I was a raper or a murderer or a genocider.

Bamford: I don’t know where I got this. I think I was watching a ton of TV, and I think there were a couple things where I was like, Oh, that’s the worst thing you can possibly be.

So I’d have a weird thought like, Oh, what if I reached out and touched someone’s genitals? And instead of just going, Yeah, I’m never gonna do that. That’s not gonna happen. Interesting, but not that interesting, I took it in as Oh, it means I should isolate myself from people. I had physical tics, like gripping my fists, sitting on my hands.

Bamford (from the Unwanted Thoughts Syndrome album): I thought I was trying to control myself so I wouldn’t genocide anybody. And I would clench my fists at odd intervals and try not to make any eye contact, and then later, no human contact at all.

Bamford: Most of it was isolation, like not making eye contact with people. But oddly, the one place where I didn’t have those was onstage, was when I could perform or be in front of people where you have so much, you know, different chemicals running through your body. I wasn’t able to have those intrusive thoughts. I just was enjoying myself too much onstage.

So, yeah, but it can really devastate people. It attacks whatever you love. So let’s say you’re having postpartum depression. Many new mothers will fear that they’re gonna kill their child or somehow harm them or molest them or whatever, even though that’s the last thing, of course, they would ever do. But it’s really scary to tell somebody you have these weird thoughts.

I remember I did tell a therapist, I wanna say, like, 30 years ago, and she didn’t know what it was. And she’s like, You know what? I’m a mandated reporter, so I need to tell somebody that you’re—

Rosin: Stop.

Bamford: Yeah. Because it was just not a known thing at that time. And especially if you go to Christian or religious counseling, they might say, Oh, you know, that’s a sin, and, you know, It’s clearly just the devil, or whatever it is.

But then I think I was 35, and I finally had money. You know when you have money and you can pay for good therapy? And I googled my symptoms, unwanted thoughts about sexual assault or violence, and up came OCD therapists all over the world, tons of literature about it.

I went and made an appointment immediately. He did exposure therapy. And it was terrifying to have that kind of thing. For me, it was like, Spend time with family and friends with a sharp object in your pocket, and see if you do kill them. And, I mean, it was just hilarious enough too.

Like, the great thing about having any kind of therapeutic support is that the therapist will laugh at some point and go, Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, I know.

Rosin: So in the beginning of the documentary, in one of the very first scenes, Judd Apatow comes into your house and hands you a pile of cash.

Bamford: Yes.

[Knocking sound]

Bamford: Oh, hello.

Judd Apatow: Hi, Maria.

Bamford: (Laughs.)

Apatow: We don’t know if you want to take part in making a documentary, but regardless, you wanted money for today.

Bamford: Yes.

Apatow: I don’t know if that’s how it works, but maybe we have no ethics here.

Rosin: And that’s, I suppose, because you need to get paid. Like, he’s taking up a huge amount of your time, and you need to get paid. Did you keep the pile of cash?

Bamford: Oh, of course. Here is my—I’m older. I’m in the back nine of life. I don’t wanna feel mad about any time that I’ve spent. I’ve done a lot of work in show business, for which I’m extremely grateful for. And at the same time, show business is drunk and will come to your house at midnight and go, We gotta do it now, or, you know, This is vitally important.

So I wanna accept the industry as it is, which is unpredictable and sometimes punishing, and say, Well, I’m gonna get paid for whatever this is and not have any expectations of it, because I think that’s where, for me, bitterness comes in—where I go, Oh, they said it was gonna become something, and it isn’t, and I spent, you know, seven years on it. So yeah, it’s sort of more of a personal emotional responsibility for myself. I want to really appreciate my own time.

And you never know when things are gonna fall apart. Los Angeles is—people say it’s flaky. I think it’s geographics. It’s that you see someone, you go, “God, wow, you’re a brilliant star of Jehovah, and you’re gonna be everything and everything and anything. But then you gotta drive home 50 minutes, and you kinda forget about it, about what you said and what you promised at a meeting at Netflix with water bottles.

So yeah, if he was gonna do it for one day, and it’s my day, Sunday, I usually have to hang out, hang out with friends, then I’d like to be paid. I’d like to be paid.

Rosin: The important lesson in there, and I and probably many people will always remember your University of Minnesota commencement speech:

Bamford (in commencement speech): Let me begin by talking about the elephant in the room at a liberal-arts graduation ceremony, and that is money. As a Minnesotan, I am ashamed to admit that I love money. I love a fair exchange of goods and services. I love to buy things.

Rosin: If you’re working, you should get paid. That’s, like, a good lesson for the youth and everybody.

Bamford: Yeah, and I think there’s especially—this could just be for women or artists or where people will say, Oh, it’s an honor, or, You’re so lucky. And it’s like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no. If somebody asks you to perform somewhere or to be somewhere, it’s because they desperately want you.

Rosin: Right.

Bamford: It’s not because they feel sorry for you or whatever. I think it’s definitely a good time to question, you know, just to go, Hey, ask for money. Because they’re not gonna miss it.

Rosin: Yeah.

Bamford: Or, if they are, if there is an issue, because people are very emotional about money, myself included, you know, people have asked me for raises or have asked me for money, and it’s like I go (Whimpers.). You know, it’s some weird survival instinct.

Might as well give it a shot. And it’s also interesting information to see what will happen when you ask for money. Just as an experiment. Like, it’s just hilarious.

Rosin: Yeah.

Bamford: Ooh, ooh, ooh. (Squeals.)

Rosin: It’s a very good way to open the documentary. You’ve talked about this way you have of workshopping new material. You do one-on-one with strangers. You pay them for an hour of their time. Why? Like, why is an audience of one? Because that feels good? That’s safe?

Bamford: It feels great, feels very safe. Because my stuff is theatrical, I memorize everything. I’ll practice saying things to myself, like new material. I’m starting to write new material, and it’s like I practice hitting the beats over and over again so that when I perform, it’s like muscle memory.

And the people who agree to do it are either being paid or I’m giving them a T-shirt, and they’ve agreed publicly to do this. So if they don’t enjoy it, it’s kind of on them.

I’ve definitely had people not laugh at all.

Rosin: Oof.

Bamford: I’ve definitely had people not smile or whatever, but it doesn’t worry me, because I genuinely think I’m very funny. And I’ve definitely worked very hard at it, and it’s okay. I mean, if you read The Atlantic, then you know that almost every major artist has a biography of alcoholism and nobody knowing who they are or liking their stuff for decades at a time.

So it’s like that whole thing of, like, if I was never hired again as a comedian, I wanna say that I would enjoy what I do for the few people who would enjoy it. The arts aren’t fair. It’s not fair.

And I’ve definitely gotten breaks that definitely were not worked for. You know, like at the time when I was a hot, young blonde—I think that’s a category of species—I think things were handed to me. I mean, I was good, good, but racism, sexism, ableism, all the things are in play all the time.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break: Bamford does not do politics, and she’s kind of ashamed of it. Also, the end of her marriage, the beginning of dating again. That’s in a moment.

[Break]

Rosin: What is the relationship between this flood of intrusive thoughts that you had since you were a kid and comedy? Like, is comedy a way to educate people about OCD? I just don’t understand how it rolls in with the sort of therapy or feeling better or just how they’re related to each other.

Bamford: I think the imagination. Like, the fact that as a 9-year-old, I could think of, like, Oh, I am a serial killer in a tiny little body, and they just don’t know yet as I was playing my violin for hours at a time—just the ridiculousness of that, that’s where people laugh. Going to the nth degree, where you go to something at the ridiculous level.

I have a new joke saying my husband and I, we love each other—we just had to break up because each of us thought that the other one was going to change profoundly, and instead we both just doubled down.

And I don’t know—that gets a laugh because people do do that. You fall in love with people and go, Oh, but that one huge thing about their personality, they’re gonna really tamp that down once they get to know me over time. And you take something to the nth degree.  Yeah. I don’t know if I’m making any sense.

Rosin: Oh yeah. That’s the opposite of what I thought. I just realized as you were explaining that I was in the Conan O’Brien frame of mind, which is like, Comedy is healing the tragedy. But you’re actually saying the opposite, that the OCD and comedy, they run down the same track. They’re both insane acts of imagination, and it’s just sort of one tone or another tone, but they’re kind of friends with each other. They’re not that one is trying to heal the other or kill the other.

Bamford: Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no. I think it’s really [that] they’re all trying to work together, I would hope. And it’s also what you find funny.

Like, some people hate any jokes about suicide, you know, death, sad topics. But then those things are happening in the world. Like right now, what seems like the death of democracy, it’s not really a laughing matter at this point. It’s like, Oh, hey, when are we supposed to storm the Bastille? Is anyone gonna lead us? It feels like there shouldn’t be a lot of laughs.

Rosin: I think I maybe understand the title Paralyzed by Hope, which is the title of the documentary, a little better. That comes from a comedy routine you did 20 years ago.

Bamford: I never really thought of myself as depressed as much as paralyzed by hope.

Rosin: Can you explain what “paralyzed by hope” means, just so I am sure I get it?

Bamford: The thing was, being diagnosed as depressed, I never thought of myself as depressed as much as paralyzed by hope, is like—I make vision boards. You know those vision boards where you cut out things from magazines? I make those.

Like, that’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that I make those. (Laughs.) And I think those are things only to make myself feel good on some level, because there are unhoused people in my neighborhood. There are people fighting for their lives, living on the street right outside my door, and yet I’m cutting out a picture of a baby bear and saying, “Connected.” Like, what?

And, yeah, so that those things can both be true, the possibility of change—like that maybe we’ll have a resurrection of our democracy, of a New Deal where bridges are somehow being built and everyone has health care—and at the same time acknowledge what is also happening, which is: My friends who travel on the road who are of color often have to bring guns when they’re doing the road as comedians, ’cause they’re terrified for good reason.

Rosin: But I don’t think of you as a political comedian.

Bamford: No, no, which I feel ashamed about, too. Like, part of the reason I’m theatrical is that I don’t speak very well off-the-cuff. I don’t know the facts.

I wasn’t raised in a debating household.

Rosin: Hmm.

Bamford: I remember I tried to do parliamentary debate in college, and I was like, What if I just agree with everyone at Brown University? It seems like at Brown, everyone seems like they know what they’re talking about. So it’s not my best skill.

I’m definitely very good at being passive-aggressive.

Rosin: Hmm.

Bamford: But having well-thought-out arguments that include facts, not so much.

Rosin: You mentioned this, so I feel like I can ask about it: A big chunk of the documentary focuses on your marriage. Was it weird to see it in the documentary, since you’re—

Bamford: Oh. Yeah. I mean, it’s always that sense of, like—I don’t know if you’ve felt this, but that shame of, like, Oh, you know, could’ve worked it out. You know, the love for the person but then also the truth of, like, it not being tenable.

And I think we really found that out after the fires. Yeah, that was really, really, really tough.

Rosin: Because you dealt with it differently, or just because?

Bamford: Yes. Yeah. Yes, we dealt with it very differently. And I don’t talk too much about it. It just, I think that one thing I told you, that we both hoped the other one would change profoundly.

And so, ’cause he’s delightful. He, Scott Marvel Cassidy—he’s so many cool things, does beautiful painting, is a fine artist, very funny, and is an excellent co-parent of our two doggies. But it doesn’t mean that it’s good to stay together. So yeah, it was good.

I think the most meaningful part for me was, I think, seeing my sister and my mom and dad, and that was just wonderful.

Rosin: That was my next question. It was interesting to see your sister talk for herself. I mean, you tell the story that she actually wanted you to stop doing impressions, but you didn’t take her seriously.

Bamford (from the Ask Me About My New God! album): My sister has become a life coach, and so I’m trying to challenge her with negative thoughts.

Bamford doing an impression of her sister: Hey, Maria, you got one for me?

Bamford as herself: Sure. I’m worried I’m too old to be in show business.

Bamford doing an impression of her sister: Mm. Betty White. Dame Judy Dench. Joan Rivers. You’re not old enough. Hit me.

[Crowd laughter]

Bamford: Oh, God, no, I didn’t. Well, I took her seriously, but I was like, Yeah, but you’re my older sister, and you’re great, and you get to have everything awesome. So why can’t I, why can’t I still? And Scott, that’s actually part of our divorce agreement, is to not talk about our marriage, and which I totally understand now.

Like, I go, like, my sister finally told—she was like, Hey, I don’t tell you a lot of things, because I’m worried it’s gonna become something. And I was like, Oh, I’m missing out. Oh, I’m such a jackass. And, you know, that’s sad that it took me around 25 years to realize that. But oh well, I finally did.

And now we talk to each other every day. We have a really wonderful close relationship I’m really grateful for.

Rosin: And she tells you all the things?

Bamford: Yeah, she tells me, I think, everything.

Rosin: Like what? No, I’m kidding.

[Music]

Bamford: No, you can’t! I can’t. I can’t possibly tell you.

Rosin: One last question: I heard in another interview that you’re now exploring online dating.

Bamford: Yeah, so I’m on three sites: I’m on Facebook Dating, I’m on Match.com, and I’m on Hinge, and I only date within the 90042 zip code. But if you do live within 90042 or -41 and you wanna ask me out, I’m available. I’m 56. I do not date anyone below the age of 50, over the age of 65. I love you, I love you, I love you.

Rosin: And how should this man get in touch with you?

Bamford: Just through those sites, or DM me on Insta. No problem.

Rosin: Okay.

Bamford: I’m avails.

Rosin: We can end on an ad. That’s perfect. Thank you, Maria, so much for joining us from your car.

Bamford: Thank you so much for having me. Have a great day. Bye.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Photographs by Lynsey Addario

I.

We drifted past abandoned drilling platforms, ghostly remnants of better days. Cormorants perched on the metal bars of broken oil rigs, drying their wings in the sun. When we reached a swirling, brown-green oil slick, Carlos slowed his motor. Raw oil could damage the engine, he said, and we’d already had to return to shore once that day to swap boats. We floated for a bit. Carlos, who makes his living as a fisherman on Lake Maracaibo, pointed out some surface bubbles, evidence of a leaky pipeline beneath the water. There was a strong smell of gas. He lit a cigarette anyway and laughed.

That morning, Carlos and his team had caught about 30 pounds of fish in the lake, a brackish estuary where oil was discovered more than a century ago. The subsequent boom built the cities of Caracas and Maracaibo, three generations of wealth, and four decades of democracy. A century later, tens of billions of barrels’ worth of reserves remain beneath the water. Some of them might now be controlled by the American government.

They will not be easy to extract. After the boom came the bust, at first slowly and then very fast. Hugo Chávez, who ruled the country as a leftist authoritarian from 1999 to 2013, and then Nicolás Maduro, the autocrat who succeeded Chávez and ran the country until he was removed by an American military operation early this year, undermined the industry, chasing away engineers and impoverishing workers. Even as they said they were building “Bolivarian socialism,” they removed benefits, lowered salaries, and created a capricious, repressive regime. Millions of people left the country.

Most American and European companies left too. The Russian and Chinese companies that arrived to replace them invested very little. Lake Maracaibo, the largest body of water in South America, also became one of the largest environmental disasters in South America. Two decades of neglect produced leaks, spills, poisoned water, and the ghostly drilling platforms I saw from the fishing boat. Fishermen sometimes rinse their crabs and shrimp with gasoline to remove the crude oil. All of their nets turn brown.

Billions of dollars of investment will be needed to remediate the site and recover more oil. In the meantime, people who live around the lake, like millions of other Venezuelans, work hard and earn very little. Their fish have to be sold immediately, because electricity is unpredictable and freezers are thus unreliable. Rapid inflation—20 percent in July, an annualized rate of 783 percent—has made everything unaffordable. In a Caracas market, I found prices and exchange rates written on whiteboards, because they change every day.

The state is absent, or indifferent. Carlos pointed to a scar on his leg that he said was an old gunshot wound, the souvenir of an assault by one of the pirates who control the lake: “If you don’t pay them, they kill you and take your boat.” The coast guard is supposed to patrol the lake, he said, but it is rarely there.

The oil industry offers few well-paying jobs. At a lakeside town, its beaches blackened by oil, Francisco, a former boat mechanic at the state oil company⁠—Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA—told me he had quit because he got tired of not having the right tools and spare parts. One of Francisco’s neighbors, Iliana, told me her husband had quit PDVSA too, after his salary plummeted from $50 a day to just a few cents a day. He now works for a Russian company that pays about $35 a day, but he has to spend most nights sleeping on the drilling platform.

From a great distance—Washington, say, or Mar-a-Lago⁠—Venezuela is sometimes described as a bonanza for America, a trove of riches. On January 3, the day that the U.S. military captured Maduro, Donald Trump promised that it would be. “We’ll run it properly; we’ll run it professionally,” he said at a press conference that day. “We’ll have the greatest oil companies in the world going and invest billions and billions of dollars, and take out money, use that money in Venezuela, and the biggest beneficiary are gonna be the people of Venezuela.” But at that same press conference, he also announced that he would be working with a new president: Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s deputy and a leading member of the regime that had caused the destruction in the first place. He dismissed the country’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado—who was the true winner of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election—as a “nice woman” who “doesn’t have the respect within the country.”

In Venezuela, this language sounded jarring. Since then, it has become even more confusing, because it is so at odds with reality. When I asked people living right next to some of Venezuela’s largest oil fields whether Rodríguez had made any difference to the industry or the country, they laughed or sneered. Iliana told me, “People thought that things would change, but in reality nothing changed.” José, another fisherman who used to work for PDVSA, had a darker view: “The gringos came to rob everything—the oil, the minerals. We are rich in everything, but here, we don’t have anything.” Later, a local oil engineer told me that none of the American agreements matters anyway, because the Venezuelan government is illegitimate and so “nothing is legal.”

These opinions are widely shared. Perhaps surprisingly, given the disparate worlds they inhabit, the views of Maracaibo fishermen are not far from those of Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard economist who served decades ago in a very different Venezuelan government, one that opened the country’s natural resources to foreign investment through a transparent process. In the 1990s, PDVSA explained to legislators, foreign companies, and the public what it was doing. Contracts were made public. Money produced by oil investments long funded social programs, including scholarships to study at American universities. These produced warm feelings toward America among educated Venezuelans that outlasted years of Chavista anti-gringo propaganda.

The political and business relationship now being forged between America and Venezuela is completely different. It’s not a relationship of two equals, obviously. But nor is it exactly an occupation. Some have compared it to the Anglo-Persian oil deal of the early 20th century, or the 1905 treaty that gave the U.S. government control over the customs service of the Dominican Republic, but neither of those analogies is quite apt. Searching for a model or a reference point, I asked Hausmann how he would describe it. “A coalition of two kleptocracies,” he said.

II.

What happens to Venezuelan oil when it is pumped out of the ground? Where does the money go afterward? And how did that change following Trump’s announcement, on August 28, of “THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY”? None of these questions has a simple answer. Over several days in Caracas and Madrid (where much of the Venezuelan opposition currently resides), and in telephone calls to Boston and Houston, I asked six people—two formerly in the oil industry, two still in the industry, and two in academia—to explain the details. All of them struggled to do so. One of them, an industry executive in Caracas who would speak only off the record, covered four pages of my notebook in diagrams and drawings, taking more than an hour and a half to explain how the previous legal system had worked, how a hydrocarbon law had been rewritten, how the new deals were unfolding and the old deals were being revised.

Perhaps the complexity is the point: Maybe the situation is hard to understand because neither the Rodríguez regime nor the Trump administration really wants anyone to understand it. Hausmann told me the Venezuelan constitution says that “anything of national interest should be approved by parliament, by the National Assembly. They haven’t done that, and so right now they are protecting themselves through obscurity.”

Despite the obfuscation, some of what Trump says is true: The U.S. really is controlling the sale of “millions and millions of barrels of oil” in Venezuela, as well as the sale of gold and other minerals. As a condition of lifting the economic sanctions that the U.S. had previously imposed on the country, all royalties and taxes from licensed companies are deposited into a special account originally set up in Qatar and later moved to Citibank. Industry analysts believe that more than $13 billion worth of oil has been sold since January, but that number is speculative. At a congressional hearing on September 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused to confirm it. Repeated requests from congressional Democrats for more information have also received inadequate responses.

Some of the funds have been returned to the Venezuelan government. At another congressional hearing, a State Department official told legislators that money was being provided to pay “the salaries of government workers in Venezuela,” among other things. Hard currency is also made available to Venezuelan banks. But although there is no evidence that money is being stolen or siphoned off to pay for other Trump-administration projects, there is also no evidence that it is not being stolen or siphoned off. Ostensibly, the accounting firm KPMG is auditing the process, but despite requests from Democrats in Congress, an audit was not released by the October 8 deadline. In his congressional appearance, Bessent did not say if or when it would be.

Opacity has consequences. Partly thanks to this system, the major new investments necessary for a real recovery have been slow in coming. The old oil fields I saw near Maracaibo, as well as the untouched reserves in the Orinoco River belt, will require billions of dollars and very long time horizons to develop or redevelop. Any company planning such a project needs to believe that its contracts, and the political and social stability required to preserve them, will last for a decade or more. Francisco Monaldi, an oil-industry analyst at Rice University, told me that although the new hydrocarbon law, passed on January 29 under American pressure, is an improvement, it still affords Venezuela’s Ministry of Oil the flexibility “to give you the best deal in Latin America, or the worst”—and then to change the terms of that deal later if it chooses. No wonder the current situation—an unpopular, illegitimate Venezuelan president propped up by an unpredictable and term-limited U.S. president—makes big companies nervous.

If the oil companies would prefer an elected Venezuelan president and a stable political system, this is not a matter of benign, high-minded principle. Oil executives “are not in the business of charity; these are not nuns,” Monaldi said. “But these guys know when things are being done in a way that will eventually create trouble for them.” With the exception of Chevron, which remained in Venezuela throughout the Chávez-Maduro era and is still reinvesting the revenues it earns in the country (although nothing more), most large companies have merely sent envoys to Caracas, signed memorandums of understanding, and returned home. Gold refiners are equally ambivalent about processing the Venezuelan gold bars that a Trump-friendly company removed from the country, according to The New York Times, because the gold was likely mined by criminal organizations and the industry has strict rules about proof of origin.

Trump’s “biggest oil deal in world history” seems to have been designed to encourage American companies to start drilling faster and, more important for him, to distract from the oil crisis created by his war in Iran. But the announcement may have had the opposite effect because the deal, at least as it has been described in public, is even more opaque than the existing arrangement, and is even more unpopular. After the announcement, thousands of people left angry messages on the U.S. embassy’s social-media pages, reflecting both fury and surprise. And no wonder: The U.S. administration’s main business partner is a company called North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), whose notorious CEO, Alejandro Betancourt, is a household name in Venezuela. Betancourt has been investigated for money laundering in multiple countries, including the United States, Switzerland, and Spain. (He has previously denied wrongdoing and has never been charged with a crime.) After being arrested at London’s Charing Cross Station on a Swiss warrant in November 2025, he was stuck in England for more than six months while the extradition case proceeded. Spanish police searched his estate outside Madrid as recently as August 28. The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration pressured Swiss officials to halt an investigation and lift an extradition request, seemingly in order to allow Betancourt to travel to the U.S. and Venezuela and close the deal.

Inside the country, Betancourt is infamous for bungling an upgrade of the electricity grid, overcharging for used, poor-quality equipment and enriching himself in the process. People openly blame him for blackouts and power cuts that continue to this day. An opposition leader told me that he’d been hearing Betancourt’s name cited as an example of regime corruption since he was a teenager. The fishermen in Lake Maracaibo knew exactly who he was, and everyone else I met did too. An analyst in Madrid told me that everything he thought he understood about U.S. intentions in Venezuela had been upended by the deal with Betancourt.

Like the system of oil payments, the deal with Betancourt is also suspiciously difficult to describe. In essence, the Venezuelan government has allocated 17 oil fields to NABEP, a company originally created with an American businessman, Harry Sargeant. According to the White House, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital has acquired not ownership but “a 35% equity stake in its corporate parent”; others explained that the acquisition is a share in a contract, but this is again uncertain. The State Department seems to get the right to buy 20 percent of NABEP’s oil at production cost—whatever that means—as well as the first right of refusal on the other 80 percent. Some analysts told me they fear that the Rodríguez regime, to stay in power, will sell its oil below market prices.

No money was exchanged, and none has been invested. The Pentagon and NABEP are now responsible for attracting people who actually know how to drill oil to Venezuela—including to places without roads or infrastructure of any kind. I asked several oil analysts and economists, inside and outside the country, if the Trump administration and Betancourt could simply give drilling contracts to their respective friend groups in America and Venezuela. They all said yes.

A few people did try to see a glass half full. If more oil is pumped, then at least some money will eventually reach people, for example, which is better than no money. “It’s a process,” said Enrique Novoa, the former president of the Venezuelan Petroleum Chamber. “Tomorrow we hope to work a little bit better than today.” But even among those trying to look favorably on the deal, everyone I met was either surprised or confused that the United States—a longtime critic of the Marxist language and statist practices of the Chávez and Maduro regimes—had so quickly and enthusiastically embraced the corrupt habits, and the corrupt personnel, of the Chavista elite.

At the end of the day I spent floating through the postapocalyptic landscape of Lake Maracaibo, I met Juan Pablo Guanipa, one of the best-known opposition leaders in Venezuela. Guanipa, who lives in Maracaibo, was released in February after eight months in prison. He was detained on the street the next day, placed under house arrest, and then released again. He is still followed by the Venezuelan security service wherever he goes. Sitting in a room filled with books, we talked about the oil deal, the poor economy, the rising frustrations of Venezuelans.

I asked him whether he found the new union between Americans and Chavistas peculiar. Of course he did, he told me. Most perplexing to him, it seemed, was the absence of Yankee pragmatism, the most basic thing Venezuelans expected of Americans. At the very least, American capitalists should know about the rule of law. “I never thought we would reach a moment when we would have to convince the United States of the obvious—that Venezuela needs a legitimate government, that we need elections, and that we need change.”

III.

There is a straightforward way for Venezuela to acquire a legitimate government, one that would reassure both oil companies and ordinary people that a stable political and social order will endure: The regime could hold an election or a referendum, and let people choose the next president.

The U.S. administration, which not only controls Venezuela’s most important sources of income but also holds the threat of further U.S. military action over the heads of Maduro’s former henchmen, could help make this happen. Indeed, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said that it will. He has described a three-stage process: stabilization, recovery, and transition. With American encouragement, the regime and a part of the opposition—members of the last legislature recognized as legitimate, elected in 2015—have begun transition negotiations. Several people involved told me that although slow, the negotiations have been productive. In the first round, in August, discussions focused on reforming the supreme court, which slavishly followed the demands of the Maduro government, and which must be independent to ensure that the regime does not refuse to recognize an election result, as it has done in the past.

Unfortunately, many still aren’t convinced that the transition is real. In large part, this is because Trump’s description of Venezuela—a country where he says people are “really happy” and “dancing in the streets”—differs so dramatically from the reality they can see. But it’s also because Trump seems so enthusiastic about a status quo that includes Betancourt, Rodríguez, and a host of other figures from the past. A few days after meeting with Rodríguez on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, he described her as “very nice, very terrific,” without naming a date for elections. On September 2, when a reporter asked him about Venezuelan elections, Trump said, “I just don’t think they’re ready yet. You know, it’s very new.”

Is democracy in Venezuela “new”? Are Venezuelans “not ready”? This language sounds just as strange and discordant to Venezuelans as the talk of great wealth supposedly flowing in their direction. After all, they did have a presidential election, and not that long ago. In July 2024, when Rodríguez was the vice president, Maduro was the regime’s candidate. He lost decisively, even after stacking the cards in his favor. In the run-up to the vote, his regime disqualified María Corina Machado, who had been selected in a national primary, a decision she called “judicial criminality.” They also nixed her first-choice substitute before finally allowing Edmundo González, a retired diplomat, to run as her surrogate. Then they harassed his supporters, used state media to insult and demean them, and even arrested them for fake crimes.

González won a landslide victory anyway, and the opposition could prove it. Anticipating that the regime might try to falsify the results, Machado and her team mobilized more than 600,000 volunteers to monitor polling stations and report irregularities using secure messaging apps. They collected and scanned the tally sheets produced by each voting machine, and uploaded them to a secure website, sometimes at great personal risk. In Antímano and La Vega, two barrios in western Caracas, I met community activists who regaled me with stories of that campaign. I was told of women who hid tally sheets in their underwear, of a man who stashed one underneath his toupee, of others who dressed as Maduro supporters to avoid being searched at the doors of polling stations. One local community leader told me that his 8-year-old son had gone around to polling stations on his bicycle and collected the printouts, knowing no one would suspect a child. Maybe Trump is “not ready” for democracy, but I met people in Antímano and La Vega who have fought for it longer and harder than most Americans.

The regime never published its own evidence. Instead, it declared victory and launched one of the most brutal repression campaigns in the country’s history. Security and paramilitary forces fanned out across the country, arresting thousands of people and killing dozens. Independent organizations, including humanitarian groups, were effectively banned.

If Venezuelans aren’t convinced that their country is making progress toward democracy, it’s also because the apparatus that carried out this wave of repression is still in place. Numbers differ, depending on who counts as a political prisoner, but as of early October, 920 to 1,110 of them have been released since January, while more than 320 remain incarcerated. I met some of their relatives, camped outside the U.S. embassy because they had given up on their own government and hoped that the Americans would help them. “Marco Rubio says there are no political prisoners,” one of them told me. “But the political prisoners are still behind bars.” As of early September, no one from the U.S. delegation had acknowledged or interacted with the families. These kinds of protesters still face risks too: In the second week of September, a man who had joined a march organized by the prisoners’ families was arrested, in public view, by men without uniforms.

Even among the political prisoners who have been released, hundreds are still, like Juan Pablo Guanipa, constantly followed, or else forced to report regularly at a courthouse, as if the regime were reminding them that they are only temporarily free. Perkins Rocha, a lawyer who was one of the opposition campaign’s representatives before the electoral council in 2024, is still under house arrest. Seized off the street a month after the election, Rocha, a bespectacled scholar of constitutional law, was charged with terrorism, treason, criminal association, incitement to hatred, and conspiracy. He was taken to the country’s most notorious prison, El Helicoide, where he spent two weeks in handcuffs, his head sometimes covered by a hood. After that, he spent many months in concrete rooms with no windows, sometimes shared by up to 20 people. Since his release in February, he has remained at home with an ankle bracelet, which he jokes is like “prison but with sunlight.” To visit him in his Caracas apartment, I had to check in with the policemen who stand in the lobby of his building and beside the elevator outside his front door. One of them took my name and wrote it on his hand.

But the most important reason Venezuelans doubt the prospects of a democratic transition is the long absence of Machado, the opposition leader. Machado went into hiding after the election, at an unknown location inside Venezuela. In December 2025, she finally escaped the country, taking a fishing boat to Curaçao, the Dutch island territory off the coast of Venezuela, before flying to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

In January of this year, Machado visited Trump at the White House, and she made what seemed to be a bid to win his favor, presenting him with her Nobel medal in appreciation of his “unique commitment” to Venezuelan freedom. But if she hoped that this would persuade him to throw American power behind her and the country’s democratic opposition, that doesn’t seem to have worked: Nearly a year later, Trump has not proposed a date for an election and Machado has remained stuck abroad, first in Washington, D.C., then in Panama.

Initially, the U.S. administration advised her not to go back: Her safety could not be guaranteed. Later, her attempts to return were blocked, and not only by the Rodríguez regime. Rubio did explicitly say—albeit in a Spanish-language interview, which Venezuelans would understand but his boss would not—that Machado has “every right to enter her country whenever she wants to return.” But private planes she has chartered have been refused landing rights, even by Curaçao and Aruba, another Dutch territory. A boat she hired mysteriously developed “engine trouble.” A commercial airline would not let her board.

Multiple people in Caracas told me that U.S. diplomats in the city describe Machado as a “problem.” Indeed, if the Trump administration’s most important goal is to cement oil deals with corrupt figures linked to Rodríguez, then perhaps she is. Machado has been clearer than others about the need to hold the regime accountable for past crimes. She has long argued that private companies should play a bigger role in the Venezuelan economy, a position that, ironically, puts her at odds with those in the U.S. administration who want to work with the Venezuelan state to extract resources.

I spoke with her while she was in Panama in early September, and she told me that her main concern, other than returning home, is that too many people, Americans included, do not “understand at all what is going on in Venezuela. Everything I hear is about conventional formulas for transition that take into account everyone’s interests and opinions except the people’s, as if the people did not matter.”

Both in Caracas and in Washington, there are clearly actors who aren’t that interested in “the people” or what they want. But if the U.S. government wants to carry out a transition without Machado, the attempt will backfire. If Betancourt is the country’s most famous symbol of past misrule and corruption, Machado remains the most famous symbol of a democratic future. Without her, no election will be legitimate, and legitimacy is a necessary part of ending the Venezuelan crisis. “There are 1.1 million Venezuelans living in the United States, and 65 percent are willing to come back,” Machado told me. “But they are not going to do it while the same regime that expelled them in the first place is still in power.” Legitimacy is required for the construction of a Venezuelan military that can cooperate with the U.S. in the fight against criminal networks in the region, instead of being part of them. And again, legitimacy is the missing ingredient in oil-market reform, the insurance that companies need before they will make long-term investments.

Even if Machado returns (as perhaps she will have done by the time you are reading this article), nobody imagines that the country’s path will be straightforward. In a busy open-plan office, crowded with people talking over small plastic cups of black coffee, I met Henry Alviárez, the national coordinator of Vente, Machado’s political party. Alviárez told me that after he was released from prison in February, Vente had to “rebuild everything—regroup, recover the organization, and recover our direction.” Vente started with 55,000 people, Alviárez said, and was up to 150,000 in September: “We now have structures throughout the country and in all municipalities, and according to the polls, we are the leading party in Venezuela.” It is planning to launch a national debate—using online platforms, social media, and town halls—about what Machado calls a “grand national agreement” to amend the constitution, the educational system, the health-care system, and more. Vente isn’t asking for an immediate election. But the party’s leaders at least want to know when one will take place so that they can plan.

Some do believe they should wait: wait for the influence of the Rodríguez regime to wane further; wait for the Trump administration to lose power; wait for the congressional Democrats and the Republicans who support Venezuelan democracy to take action; wait for more oil to start flowing. There are risks to a transition, after all. No one can be sure when the economy will start growing again, and a new government could be blamed if it doesn’t. But if waiting seemed like a good strategy six months ago, the risks are increasing quickly. Everything here looks normal, Alviárez said, gesturing at the people drinking coffee. But appearances of normality are deceptive: “There is a feeling of exhaustion and a desire for change that can only be channeled through a clear leadership and a clear objective. It can only be resolved if people finally have a date for elections. That could prevent a social explosion.”

Some people, he told me, without naming names, “have said that María Corina is coming to destabilize the country. No. She is coming to channel that anger and conduct it toward a civic, peaceful process: an election.” After fighting Chavistas and their Russian, Iranian, and Cuban allies for so long, nobody in Venezuela’s historically pro-American democratic opposition ever expected a U.S. administration to stand in their way. But if it does, they are preparing to fight that obstacle too.

IV.

On June 24, two earthquakes shook Caracas, the seaside city of La Guaira, and several smaller towns along the coast. Suddenly, the risks of waiting became clear.

Within minutes of the quakes, several large apartment buildings collapsed, including a public-housing complex built by the Chávez regime for victims of a 1999 mudslide. Tens of thousands of other buildings were damaged. At least 6,500 people died (the full number is still unknown), more than 16,800 were injured, and about 17,000 became homeless.

Some governments, even some authoritarian governments, rally during a crisis. In the face of this tragedy, the Venezuelan regime froze. Rodríguez has enough police officers to guard Perkins Rocha’s elevator. But she did not have enough soldiers, police, or rescue workers to dig Venezuelans out of the rubble, to offer people medical help and food, or to find homes for them in the days that followed.

I visited La Guaira, the city most badly affected, the week before school was scheduled to begin. No one I met in the refugee camps knew where their children were supposed to go, or whether studies would resume at all this year. One local school had been taken over by refugees who had no intention of relinquishing it, because they still had nowhere else to live. On the site of the collapsed public-housing complex, where bulldozers had finally arrived to take away the rubble, I met Ellie Solano, a bereaved mother who asked the men with machines to leave one part of the debris untouched, because she knew it lay on top of a sports field where her son had been playing. Two months after the disaster, she was searching for his corpse, digging in the early mornings and in the evenings, when it wasn’t too hot.

Over the course of a day in La Guaira, I asked everyone I met how long it had taken for a government official to offer help after the earthquake. Some said four days. Some said five. Some thought it had been more. “We didn’t see policemen. No army, no nothing,” one woman told me. “It was people helping people, neighbors helping neighbors, and like that, many, many days.”

It still is. Just as grassroots movements emerged in Ukraine to support the army after the 2022 Russian invasion, many different kinds of voluntary organizations suddenly appeared in La Guaira after the earthquakes. Some, like Alimenta la Solidaridad, a charity founded a decade ago, had deep roots in the community already. Before 2024, Alimenta had more than 200 soup kitchens around the country. After the election, the regime restricted the activity of independent organizations and Alimenta had to shut down the kitchens. But the group revived itself after the earthquakes, reasoning that the situation had changed and, as Juan Andrés Saavedra, one of the group’s leaders, told me, “the government didn’t exist.” Saavedra now organizes teams of volunteers who bring food every day to several sites, including the refugee camp inside the school.

In some societies, the absence of the state leads to anarchy. In others, people organize themselves instead. Venezuela is one of those countries, as Machado herself told me in an interview in December 2024. Even when she was in hiding, even when the political situation was at its most dire, Machado was certain that the experience of election organization had brought about “anthropological change,” forging connections among people from different parts of society, inspiring them to want to reform their country from the bottom up.

Nearly two years later, Venezuelans kept telling me the same thing. One young woman, a political activist who had left the country and only recently returned, told me that the earthquakes and the chaos that followed were a sobering reminder of the lessons learned during the 2024 election campaign: The government won’t save us; the Americans won’t save us; we have to work together.

“We are on our own,” she said.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “After the Apocalypse.”

“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian. You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that, I commend you, and I thank you again.”

— Steve Witkoff, U.S. special envoy to the Middle East, addressing Russian President Vladimir Putin

Mark Wednesday, October 21, 2026, as “the day words lost all meaning.” My dictionary just ran outside and threw itself off a bridge. Noah Webster arose from his grave and lurched around, howling and tearing at his hair. Samuel Johnson is bellowing something awful; I can hear it across the Atlantic Ocean. George Orwell is sighing; he has been here before.

I have to imagine that Putin is a little insulted at being so gravely misunderstood. With this single word, humanitarian, our envoy has revealed a stunning ignorance of the Russian president’s life’s work. This is like going to Picasso and praising him as a “representational painter,” or calling the Sahara “the wettest place in the world,” or describing Witkoff’s statement as “unembarrassing.”

I see, perhaps, where the misunderstanding began. Putin referred to Trump as a “humanitarian,” and Witkoff thought to himself: Ah! This word clearly has a different meaning than I have been led to believe! I will have to reconstruct its definition from context clues. Maybe it’s someone with P in his name. Maybe it’s someone who doesn’t think that the United States should be in NATO. Maybe it’s someone who would look really good on horseback. Maybe no words mean anything! Maybe they are just phonemes to be thrown at a wall, at random, in the manner of that great representational painter Jackson Pollock.

One of the conditions of freedom is that words have an understood meaning. If Putin is a humanitarian, then Dolly Parton was an axe murderer. Who else gets to be filed under humanitarian if Putin makes the cut? Stalin? The iceberg that sunk the Titanic? Calling Putin a humanitarian is like calling Hannibal Lecter a humanitarian, although there is more of a case to be made for Hannibal because he does, at least, subsist on people.

Let me start over. It is nice and convenient, I think, when words have meaning. It makes it easier to order a sandwich. When words are more of a suggestion, reality evaporates at your touch, and none of your rights is secure. Good luck getting a sandwich then! Real is fake, fake is real, and all your society’s most precious values carry a disconcerting wink: freedom, free speech, meritocracy, equality. When you chant them, when you promise them to one another, you are not sure exactly what you are saying. Their meaning melts like hot wax, and homeland security becomes an unmarked car slamming into your neighbor.

Authoritarians treat words as a game. (Putin, great humanitarian that he is, has some experience with this.) Perhaps war is peace (big news for the Nobel Committee, if true)!

Perhaps the best humanitarian is whoever voids the world of the most people! Perhaps election integrity is the exact opposite of that!

In the spirit of this new, callous disregard for words and their meaning, I say: Great job! Well done! What a magnificent time to be alive, when all of the best people are in charge.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

If you don’t live in Ohio, you’ve probably been blissfully free from thinking about Vivek Ramaswamy since the 2024 Republican presidential primary, which he left after arousing the visceral dislike of pretty much all of his rivals, as well as many voters.

Ramaswamy, who’s now running for Ohio governor, is back in the national spotlight this week, once again in extremely unflattering fashion, because of a campaign ad targeting the Democratic candidate Amy Acton. Acton, a first-time candidate, has leaned heavily on her inspiring biography: She has spoken about experiencing homelessness as well as being raped by her stepfather as a child; she later waited tables and delivered newspapers to put herself through medical school, eventually becoming the director of the Ohio Department of Health.

Most recent polls have shown Acton with a small advantage over Ramaswamy, which may be why his campaign resorted to the appalling commercial. The spot features Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, accusing her of being an inveterate liar. “She’s lied her entire life,” Arthur says. “My daughter needs help, and she can’t help you if she needs help herself.”

The ad immediately drew both outrage and debunkings. “It’s not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at 12 years old from our birth mother’s husband into a political talking point,” Acton’s brother said in a statement. National Review, the conservative magazine, pointed out that court documents provide extensive backup for Acton’s claims, as does contemporary press coverage. She was removed from her mother’s custody at the time; her mother’s husband, Cledith Arthur, whom she accused, left the state after being indicted for sexual assault. He pleaded not guilty and died in 2004.

For a campaign to cast doubt on a rival’s account of childhood sexual abuse is shocking; to do so despite such evidence is despicable. For years, influential MAGA figures insisted that a conspiracy of pedophiles was running the government and other influential institutions. Now some of them treat pedophilia as no big deal. The Trump administration has tried to downplay the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the late sexual predator who was at one time a close friend of the president’s and maintained ties to other administration officials as well. Ramaswamy is opting to dismiss allegations of pedophilia and use them to smear an opponent. At an event earlier this year, he said that Acton has no vision “other than to complain about what someone else did to her.”

Despite his previous willingness to mock Acton’s abuse, Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t initially claim the ad. It first became public on Monday via the colorful Buckeye State political blogger D. J. Byrnes, known as the Rooster. The version he posted, received from a tipster, didn’t feature any explanation of who had paid for it. But Ramaswamy has since gone all-in. “It is an ad from our campaign,” Ramaswamy said at an event last night. “I would love for this race and this election to be about the substantive issues that impact Ohioans. And unfortunately, Amy Acton has been hiding from those issues.” Axios reports that Ramaswamy (who recently loaned his own campaign $5 million) will spend $4 million airing it. “This is a campaign-ending moment for Amy Acton,” his campaign manager, Jonathan Ewing, said. “The people who know her best keep warning Ohioans about her.”

This is bold, if not wise: The ad has generated widespread condemnation. Even some right-wing influencers who initially spread it, such as Jackie Chea, have had second thoughts: “I have no idea if Amy’s abuse allegations are true, but if they are, then her mother is the monster … I regret framing the post as if Amy was lying about her mother when I can’t be sure about that.” Another, Dan Bostic, wrote, “I’ve never in my life seen someone do something so stupid. It’s hard to even wrap my brain around how someone could possess such horrible political instinct.” (Laura Loomer continues to endorse it, which is telling in its own way. Vice President Vance, meanwhile, was “disgusted”—but by Republican doubters, not by the commercial. He suggested that anything is justified in the name of winning elections. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” he said in Cincinnati today, telling his “fellow elected Republicans” to “stop whining about an advertisement.”)

On the other side of the aisle, liberals see the ad as suicidal. “I am very confident that this ad will backfire and blow up in Ramaswamy’s face,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former aide to Barack Obama, wrote. Any predictions now are premature: Knowing how convincing the ad will be, compared with the backlash, is impossible.

But the ad is another example of how Ramaswamy’s obnoxious personality has turned a race that should have been a safe GOP win into a toss-up. The candidate’s favorability rating is deeply negative. His fellow Republicans continue to dislike him. The outgoing governor, Mike DeWine, whose occasional pangs of conscience make him a profile in near-courage, clearly dreaded endorsing his fellow Republican. And although the national environment is friendly to Democratic candidates this year, no Democrat has won a governor’s race in Ohio since 2006; Donald Trump won the state three times. Acton is a first-time candidate most famous for her association with COVID public-health measures, neither of which is an obvious asset. If Ramaswamy loses, there will be no question about who was responsible.

Related:

• The 2026 midterms must-watch list
• Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth (From 2023)

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

• The Texas race worth watching
• Canadian officers don’t want to serve in the U.S. anymore.
• Why Trump is furious at Ukraine
• David Frum: The bill for Trumpism comes due.

Today’s News

1. Russia released Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American who had been imprisoned for more than four years on charges of fighting as a mercenary in Ukraine. The State Department said that the charges were fabricated, and President Trump said today that Russia had agreed to release Hubbard without receiving anything in return.
2. The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s request to enforce a policy restricting gender-affirming care for transgender federal inmates. The decision leaves in place a lower-court order blocking restrictions on hormone treatments, gender-transition surgeries, and other accommodations.
3. A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state, one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a tech company, after a jury found that it had committed 43 million violations of the state’s consumer-protection law by misleading users about data privacy in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Evening Read

The Data-Center Rebellion Is Just Beginning

By Paris Marx

Restrictions on data-center development have been part of the conversation in certain parts of the world since the late 2010s. Singapore and the Dutch municipalities of Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer both issued moratoriums on new projects in 2019, and by 2021, Ireland had introduced bans in certain areas because energy demands were outstripping supply. Some of these moratoriums were later lifted after stricter rules came into place, and over fear of missing out on the investment pouring into AI. Even still, these efforts have only grown since the data-center boom that was spurred by the dash to win the generative-AI race.

In recent weeks, Denmark downgraded data centers to the lowest priority for grid connections, and Thailand placed a pause on further data-center construction—suspending 49 projects where shovels had already broken ground. These moves demonstrate the tension that many governments are facing: trying to balance a desire to push the adoption of generative AI with the reality that the public is not on board with the massive data centers needed to power them.

Read the full article.

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• Alexandra Petri: Why is everyone avoiding the biggest issue facing voters?
• The AI-hacking apocalypse began last night.
• The paradox of African writing and AI
• Jonathan Chait: This is not a cycle of retribution.
• The contradictions of Troy Jackson
• The David Frum Show: Will tech oligarchs turn on Trump?

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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