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.

More From The Atlantic

• 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?

Culture Break

Read. The Atlantic’s writers and editors recommended 50 unforgettable love stories.

Explore. In an era of self-help overload, a new book argues that being sort of confident is enough, Faith Hill writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The internet could be on the verge of a total meltdown. Yesterday, someone posted to a public forum that two major security flaws had been found in a programming language that undergirds the web. The language, called PHP, is used by as much as 70 percent of websites.

In order to protect themselves from hackers, a number of government, hospital, and school websites across Europe went dark this morning. The organization that maintains PHP quickly confirmed it was preparing to announce two major vulnerabilities alongside patches for them. Both weaknesses, officially disclosed today, appear to have existed in PHP for more than a decade but were only just discovered with the use of AI tools. Hackers have already been detected trying to exploit them, likely with the help of AI, and implementing the fixes to address the vulnerabilities could take companies days or weeks. In the meantime, tens of millions of servers, databases, and devices are exposed. “PHP is one of the fundamental pieces of technology that supports the internet,” Sam Rubin, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, told me. As of now, the websites of the Finnish health agency, the Port of Rotterdam, the Paris police force, 4Chan, and an unknown number of others are all down while they address the PHP vulnerabilities.

[Read: How long until AI hacks everything?]

News of these weaknesses in PHP is the capstone in a weeks-long slew of devastating, AI-powered cybersecurity events. In recent weeks, criminals and state-backed attackers have used AI to hack into more than 100 companies, including John Deere and SharkNinja; to automate hacks on some 400 financial institutions in Latin America; and to steal hundreds of thousands of credit-card records from two companies. Since this summer, attackers have hit governments, data centers, and hospitals in Ukraine, Russia, Argentina, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Also today, the developers of Node—a platform used by nearly half of software developers—disclosed multiple high-severity vulnerabilities. And that’s the abridged list.

For the better part of a year, cybersecurity experts have been warning, with mounting alarm, about an impending cyber-apocalypse. It may have begun. For decades, the internet has been riddled with holes and bugs. Code is finicky, and the standard IT approach has been to fix problems when they arise. For decades, the balance held: Skilled hackers are few, and finding and exploiting vulnerabilities takes time.

Recent advances in AI have totally upended that equilibrium. Top models have become very good at finding holes and writing malware, and can work much faster than even a team of humans. This is true of both open-source AI systems from China, which can be downloaded and used without restrictions, and the even more capable models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which are continually being jailbroken. The rate of software vulnerabilities identified per month has doubled over the past year. Meanwhile, the time that hackers need to begin exploiting those vulnerabilities—figuring out how to break in and out without being caught—has fallen, by some estimates, from weeks to hours. An actual intrusion, if automated with AI, can take as little as 39 seconds. Historical approaches to detecting and fixing vulnerabilities, or monitoring for suspicious internal activity, are insufficient.

AI has created new vulnerabilities, but it also promises to fix them: The vulnerabilities in PHP were discovered independently by a Google-owned cybersecurity company and another effort led by OpenAI. Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, along with other tech firms, are all working with government agencies around the world to shore up their defenses. But, as numerous cybersecurity experts have told me, there is an asymmetry between attackers and defenders that AI is going to exacerbate: Hackers will use new technology with abandon, while companies are methodical and risk-averse—a hospital or electrical grid can’t risk that an AI security tool unintentionally takes a patient off life support or causes a brownout. And attackers need to find only one hole to succeed, whereas defenders need only one oversight to fail.

For a year, criminals and state-backed groups have been experimenting with how to use models to accelerate and automate their attacks. It was only a year ago that Anthropic announced, with great consternation, what it declared to be the first instance of AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage. That still involved a lot of human oversight and required jailbroken Claude agents to work for many hours. Now that the agents are faster and more capable, hackers have gotten more adept at deploying them, and the automation is more extensive. Recent, widespread attacks on South Korean and Japanese websites were reportedly executed by a single Chinese cybercriminal who used AI to target more than 1,000 websites. “This certainly will not be the last large-scale vulnerability identified, because of what’s possible with AI,” Rubin said.

The past 24 hours represent a tipping point. Bulking up IT departments, implementing passkeys, and using two-factor authentication remain important. But the most urgent and practical advice being given now is to retreat: Prepare to simply go offline. The NSA advised companies that cannot immediately fix the PHP vulnerability to take down affected digital services. Hospitals, water utilities, and other crucial services are all preparing for hacks by relearning to operate analog. Store your data in fewer places. We’re running out of time to prepare for the AI-hacking deluge. The dam may have already broken.

Hush! I must hear! It’s an election year, I am a voter, and I need to know the president’s answers to the most pressing questions facing America today: How upholstered are the chairs in the Rose Garden? Is the helipad at the White House any good? How are things progressing with the ballroom? And is the golf course going to be ready soon? No, do not ask about affordability. That is a made-up word. I could not care less about the price of eggs! What am I, a hen?

My concerns are more basic. I demand to hear: HOW IS THE HELIPAD? AND IS THAT GOLF COURSE IN EAST POTOMAC PARK BEING DEVELOPED TO THE HIGHEST STANDARDS OF GOLF, TURNING THAT TRASH ISLAND INTO AN ISLAND OF BEAUTY AND SUCCESS?

I was up late last night. I looked at my bills. Pretty high—but that just means the economy is booming. Still, it was hard to rest. I walked down the hall and looked at my sleeping children. How long could we hope to survive, knowing that at this very moment, in Washington, D.C., a judge is preventing East Potomac Park from becoming one of the world’s great golf courses, instead just letting it lie there, old, tired, beaten up, and useless?

My children say, “Father, Father! When will we be able to afford hamburger?” And I say, “How can you talk about hamburger when you know that Trash Island still needs to be developed to the highest levels and standards of golf?” And they say, “Do you even play golf?” And I say, “Silence!” They don’t have their priorities straight. But I’m glad we have a president who does.

The other day, I was at the gas pump. I hate going to the gas pump, because the numbers there are so high, which I know is a deliberate distraction from the real problems Americans face: the hazardous, dangerous trees on East Potomac Golf Links. No one is safe from those trees.

After that, I stopped by a restaurant and ate some salad. Immediately, I felt sick to my stomach. “That was tainted lettuce,” my family said. “No,” I said, “it is because of the shame, pertaining to the golf course.”

I don’t need a fully staffed FDA monitoring lettuce-borne diseases! I need to know that we are stopping our assistance to Ukraine in defiance of Congress. I need to know whether Vladimir Putin seemed happy when our president talked to him. I really hope that our president impressed him; Putin is a big, important man. Maybe someday, America will be a world power too. If we can just get this golf course in shape, we can build on that momentum.

Don’t you dare say that this isn’t a kitchen-table issue. You haven’t seen my kitchen table, on which a replica of the president’s plans for a truly beautiful arch have sat for the past six months, gathering dust. That arch holds all my dreams. “Why did you buy that and not food?” my children ask. They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Don’t try to appeal to me by talking about the cost of living. IRRELEVANT! I want to know: Does the president have a nice-enough plane? Are the right letters on all the buildings in the capital? Good, beautiful letters, such as T, R, U, M, and P—not bad, subpar letters such as K, E, N, N, E, D, Y? These are my concerns, just as they are the concerns of the whole electorate.

For years, I have been unable to hold my head up high, knowing that we don’t have the greatest ballroom slash military complex ever built. How do you think that feels? Every night, I toss and turn, asking myself: Is New Mexico going to keep its disgusting, embarrassing name? Or will it change it to something nice, like New America? Will they ever manage to cut down those terrifying trees in East Potomac Park, so we can finally feel safe? Hurry, Mr. President! Please, hurry! I don’t know how much longer I can keep living like this.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the growing calls for Medicare for All. David discusses how Medicare for All might actually work, why it’s impractical, and why it is fundamentally a promise Democrats cannot keep.

Then, David is joined by Kara Swisher to discuss her new podcast with Hillary Clinton, the dangers of unregulated AI, and the power of the AI oligarchs over American politics. David and Kara discuss the potential of an AI bubble and what responsible oversight of AI would look like.

Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, and whether the AI revolution changes any of Gordon’s pessimistic assessments of what has happened to American growth since 1970.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Let me ask you about what works and things you’ve changed your mind about.

So you have been a career-long advocate for stronger regulation of technology in general—

Kara Swisher: David, let me correct you. Any regulation. We don’t have any.

Frum: What’s your line? “Your local deli is more regulated than the biggest tech platforms in America.”

Swisher: Everything.

[Music]

Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Kara Swisher, host of the On With Kara Swisher podcast, and co-host of Pivot, and co-host, very excitingly, of a new podcast that she will co-star [with] Hillary Clinton. And we’ll be talking about that new podcast with Kara.

This week’s book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, an enormously influential book on economic history published a decade ago. And I’ll be discussing whether the advent of the AI revolution changes any of Robert Gordon’s pessimistic assessments of what has happened to American growth since 1970.

But before the dialogue with Kara Swisher and before the book discussion, I want to open with some thoughts about the debate over Medicare for All: the slogan, and the idea of Medicare for All.

It does look like the next Congress will feature many more advocates of the Medicare for All idea than American politics has seen for a long time. There are bills in Congress purporting to offer or designing or proposing a Medicare for All scheme. It’s a slogan on the campaign trail. Let’s take it seriously. Let’s think about this in a real-world way, because we may be talking about this a lot come 2027. What does Medicare for All mean? How would you get there if you were minded to get there?

So understand, Medicare, of course, is the program that provides much health insurance for people over 65. It has components with prescription drugs, but the core of it is that it covers medical and hospital bills for people over 65, with some contribution from the over-65s themselves.

The Medicare for All proposal is to extend this scheme through all of the American economy, covering everybody through the Medicare program and displacing a lot of the health-care insurance that you have now. Which is mostly—those people who get private health insurance get it usually paid for through an employer, out of the worker’s pay, but through an employer.

What would it mean to make this change from a system where much of the health care in the economy is paid for by employer-financed private insurance to one where the U.S. Treasury pays for most health care? So: Half a decade ago, at the end of the 2010s, there was a big study of this. The Congressional Budget Office, and others, too, did a big study of what it would mean to transition to a Medicare for All program. And CBO’s estimate in the year 2020 was that such a program would cost the U.S. Treasury, over the next 10 years, about $30 trillion. The work has not been redone by CBO. But if I think it—if you just figure out prices are higher, you’re going further out into time, you’re starting in 2030 and going to 2040—it’s a good guess that it would cost closer to $40 trillion over 10 years than it would cost to $30 trillion over 10 years.

So where would you get the $40 trillion? The U.S. Treasury is going to be spending a lot more. How would it get the extra $40 trillion? Now, proponents of Medicare for All will say—and they’re not completely wrong about this—they will say: Wait a moment. That’s not $40 trillion of new spending. We’re spending the $40 trillion now or thereabouts. We’re spending it one way. That is, you get mostly from your private insurance through your employer. So we’re just taking $40 trillion from this sector of the economy and moving it over to the government, and net-net, it will even out. Maybe it’s a little bit more expensive than what we have now, but not a lot more expensive.

Let’s suppose they’re right about that. Still, we have one way of financing it now, and we’re going to be moved to another way of financing it along the way. How do you make that transition? What would that look like? The proponents of Medicare for All will say this: Look, when you get a job, if you have health care, you are really paying for the health insurance. Your employer lowers your wages to cover the cost and then pays an insurance company, or they self-insure. But in any way, the employer finances the payment of the health coverage out of the wages that you don’t get. When we move to health care for all, Medicare for All, the employer will no longer be buying private insurance. So your wages should go up, and out of that higher wage, you should be able to pay a higher tax.

But that blackboard analysis blinks the fact, yeah, you’re going to be paying a new tax, probably a payroll tax, maybe some other kind of tax. And it’s going to be quite a big tax that is going to fall on just about every worker in the economy.

Now, again: You’re paying a kind of health-care tax now, because your wages are lower. But the Medicare for All people assume that your employer will raise your wage almost all of what you’re now paying for health insurance through your employer. You’ll get almost all of that money back, maybe all of it. That’s the assumption. And so you’ll be well-positioned to pay the new tax, which will not be heavier than what you’re paying now. But even if that’s all true, it won’t be true for everybody. Some people will be winners; some people will be losers. Some people will be big winners, some people will be big losers, and everybody will see a new tax on their paycheck.

So what Medicare for All means from the point of view of American politics is: The new president elected in 2028—assuming that president is committed to this idea—the new Congress that comes to power either now or in 2029, that new Congress, one of their first orders of business will be passing the biggest and most far-reaching tax increase that Americans have seen on their paychecks since World War II. That’s what Medicare for All means. Start the next Congress, start the next presidency with a massive increase in a visible tax that you explain to American people they won’t really feel—because their wages should be going up if their employer gives them back the money the employer is keeping right now to pay for health insurance.

And aware of the politics of this, some of the Medicare for All proponents have come up with a series of gimmicks to conceal the tax. In 2019, Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a system where we wouldn’t have a payroll tax. We’d tax large employers in the economy directly. Every employer with 50 employees or more would pay a new tax directly on the employer. It would be invisible to the employee, and that would get us to the transition to Medicare for All.

But the Warren idea has been almost universally derided by experts in the field as completely complicated, unworkable, inviting all kinds of distortion. For one thing, it would mean that no employer in the economy who had 49 employees would ever hire a 50th. The 50th employer would generate a massive new tax on that employer. So on the verge of this AI revolution that is calling into question all kinds of people’s employment, you’d create a massive new tax that would say, If you’re at 49, stay there forever. Never get to 50 employees. So that seems kind of daunting and distorting.

So even if you believe all of these things, you’re signing up for a big project. Now, the really irresponsible people in the Democratic Party, the Bernie Sanderses, will say, We don’t need payroll tax. The billionaires and the millionaires: They’ll pay for it all. But that’s, again, more sloganeering. The math doesn’t work, and anyway, billionaires and millionaires find it quite easy to escape taxes. And the way you would write the tax would be with an increase in income taxes—and that would be seen not just by billionaires and millionaires, but by lots and lots and lots of people.

There is no way around it. Medicare for All means transition to a new kind of program that needs a new kind of funding mechanism that requires a new and highly visible tax that will fall on many, many people. And if you think no Congress will ever pass that thing—which is kind of what I suspect—then when you talk about Medicare for All, you are promising something that you know you cannot deliver.

One of the reasons I think that American politics has seen so much demoralization and polarization over the past 15 years is because you’ve had politicians—President Trump is the worst offender, but he’s not the only offender—who promise things they know can’t happen. You’re not going to restore American manufacturing and make America great again by keeping out foreign products. You can’t pass tax cuts forever and have no spending cuts. Those things, it doesn’t work. Gravity, math—they all exist. And people, if not the candidates themselves, people around the candidates, they know they’re promising things they can’t do and Medicare for All is just such a thing.

Now, where Medicare for All is very useful for a politician, and this goes back to the Bernie Sanders model, if you’re the one senator who is in favor of this idea, and all the other senators say, It’s unworkable. We’re not going to do it, then you can get enormous attention for yourself. You can pose as the one truth-teller in the Senate, the one honest man in the village of the accomplices and the weaklings. You’re the one guy, and you’re saying this one thing, and you don’t have to worry about the unfeasibility of it because no one will ever let you do it. And that’s how you get the career of Bernie Sanders, which is a career of decades in public life, almost no accomplishments of any kind, but an enormous following because of the promises he keeps making.

But you can only have one of those guys: one in the Senate, maybe a handful in the House. If you have a dozen senators who are promising things like that—if you have 40 or 50 or 60 or 80 or 100 members of the House who are promising those things—the question of the design of the program, the question of the how this is going to be paid for, the question of the massive tax that will fall on Americans on the promise that their wages will go up because the employers will give them back the money the employers are now paying for private health insurance, all of that really comes to the fore.

One of the ways to get to a better politics in America is for politicians to make promises that they know they can keep and that they intend to keep. And one of the ways to keep us on the bad path we’re on now is to have lots of people making promises that sound good to a comparatively small coterie of the voters, but that they know or should know they can’t keep. That they know or should know that they won’t keep. And that they can know or should know are impossible.

We’ve got a lot of that going on right now, and it points the way to further demoralization, further polarization. Change in an advanced society like the United States, in a complex bureaucratic society with a lot of vested interests—it has to be incremental. Even if incremental change is imperfect, that’s the way it has to be, and anyone who promises you a non-incremental change is promising something they can’t deliver and probably don’t mean.

And now my dialogue with Kara Swisher.

[Music]

Frum: Kara Swisher hosts On With Kara Swisher, co-hosts Pivot with Scott Galloway, and has a CNN series on the people trying to live forever. She has just announced a new election-season podcast with a co-host you may know, Hillary Clinton. Kara Swisher is known to her many followers as a tireless and fearless reporter on technology and those enriched by technology.

She is the author of three books, most recently Burn Book: A Tech Love Story from Simon & Schuster, in which she calls Mark Zuckerberg the most damaging man in tech and Elon Musk the most disappointing.

On Election Day, she’ll be onstage in Toronto for a live taping of Pivot, so Canadian viewers and listeners may want to make a note of that.

Kara, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Swisher: Thank you. Unfortunately, we’re sold out in Toronto because the Canadians love us.

Frum: Oh, congratulations. Congratulations.

Swisher: Thanks, thanks.

Frum: Getting Canadians out on a dark November night.

Swisher: Well, we’re going to get them warm. We’re going to warm them up with dick jokes and insights, so that’s what we’re going to do.

Frum: All right. So let me start by asking you about your new co-host. How did that come to be? Tell me about the project.

Swisher: Oh, you know, it’s really interesting. One of the things I do a lot, and I have done over my career, is I kind of zig when others are zagging or I do something unusual. And, you know, there’s this sort of trope that all Democratic-establishment older people don’t know what they’re talking about, and they need to move aside. And I have said, many of them, I have said directly they should do that. But when I was at this dinner party—and I’ve known Hillary for a long time, and I’ve interviewed her many times on different things I’ve done over the many years—and it was at this, one of these big fancy tables. And Hillary had me sit next to her because we have a really good rapport, and we sort of tease each other a lot in really, in ways people don’t, I think, tease her.

And she had a mind full of really great, fast insights that were fresh to me that I hadn’t heard. And I hear all the insights. And then, you know, the economy: insight. Mamdani: insights, and actually in a way that you were not expecting from her. I was like, it was quite smart, very clear. And I thought, What is in her Wheaties these days? Because she really—she didn’t care anymore, and of course, this is what you hear off the record. And I thought: This is the Hillary you see sort of in those Lauren Boebert/Epstein hearings or in the Benghazi hearings. Very smart, very sharp, often on social media. And I thought: I’m going to bottle that Hillary.

And I just knew. And by the way, it’s racing up the charts right now. We’re now at No. 4, which is, I know that it’s because of her. And it’s because she has these fresh insights, and I wanted to show people the Hillary I know on the topics she’s good at. And so it’s worked. And we have—the rapport is important. But anyway, that’s what we’re doing, and we’re trying it out. And if it really works as both a business and a piece of content, we’re going to keep doing it through the presidential.

Frum: So is it the two of you ping-ponging with each other, or will there be third parties there? How will this work?

Swisher: There’s going to be guests. We just did one to start with. Well, I did it very quick. I do everything I do very quickly, essentially. And it was a germ of an idea, but it’s like Hillary unplugged. Or like, you know, when Johnny Cash came back and was doing Nine Inch Nails? That’s what I feel like I’m doing here. You do want to hear her. And I had tested it on Pivot, where she was spectacular. And we’ll have guests. I want people who disagree with her and who she disagrees with, both on the left and the right. Because that’s, to me, when she’s at her best. And really have some throwdowns. So people—I’m talking about with reasonable people, not insane people. I’m not going to have Laura Loomer go against Hillary Clinton, because it’s kind of ridiculous and pointless. But I want to have robust discussions about difficult issues, and I think, by smart people with substance.

Frum: Will you be able to get her to defend the person she actually is? And what I mean by that is: those people who were prominent in the Democratic Party from 1992 to 2008-ish, 2010. The people who believed in making government more efficient, in expanding trade, and bringing Mexico into North American economic life. That’s what she was associated with, and they came under attack from their party’s left. And they seem just to be, like, shamefacedly mumbling an, Oh, you’re so right, and The establishment was so bad, and Yes, we should burn everything down. But will she, on your program, be willing to stand up for the person she was?

Swisher: Yeah, I think she’ll defend it, and also say what’s good and bad. What I was really struck with on the Pivot podcast is, I was expecting her to do the sort of typical Democratic-establishment Mamdani thing. And she had a very insightful reason why he’s doing well. Here’s where he could go wrong, and stuff like that.

You know, look: Fact of the matter is, she’s been a, whatever you say about the presidential race. And I thought that there’s all manner of complexity there. It’s not just because Hillary lost; Donald Trump really won that election. And the changing tide of the American public, and the sort of attacks that the right had on her for years that end up working after a while. I think she will be very honest. I think she’s at a point—and she did say this—is, people like her more when she’s not running for anything. They like her more when she’s either in office or in service of a, you know, typically a man. It’s a little bit, you know, if I lived back then, I would’ve liked to have Eleanor Roosevelt do a podcast with me. Like all the insight she gained over the years.

And a good thing that she did this week: We were talking about the execution, which has now been canceled publicly by Donald Trump. She said: He’s going to cancel it, and here’s why. And she was 100 percent right. And she analyzed it, and then threw in what they did during the [Osama] bin Laden raid. Which was very helpful to understand the complexity of, like—there were people in the room that wanted to show his bullet-riddled body. They brought in experts; they brought in all kinds of things saying what the best outcome would be. And so she’s got a lot of wisdom sort of hidden in there that can be relevant to today. And again, she’s going to have to admit mistakes. She knows that, and she’s actually willing to do it.

Frum: I’m sort of more interested to hear her not admit mistakes if she doesn’t believe she made them.

What I mean by that is: I’m a graduate of a Republican world where the rule of the game was, if you were in the center of the party, you had a big kick me sign on your back. And the right of the party could say anything about you, and you could never say anything back. And the Democrats seem to have that same relationship with their left.

And I’m thinking about, so Hillary Clinton was instrumental in the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Obama administration. She was proud of it. She believed in it. She was right. She defended it in the hardcover edition of the book she published before the 2016 election, and she stripped it out of the paperback edition. And you say, Why not stand up for what you believe? Why the kick me sign?

Swisher: She might have changed her mind, David. It’s called changing. She may have thought more about it and think about it, and—one of the things I really like about her is she thinks in real time. Like, she’s really compared to a lot of Democratic people who would just spout the same crap, essentially, like Everything’s fine. I just feel like she’s willing to throw down, all kinds of ways.

She’s also willing to be flexible about good ideas. And I think where she is right now in her career—she should speak to you about this—but I think where she is in, what fucking works, right? Like she started talking about the execution like, Of course it’s heinous; of course it’s amoral. But let’s not focus on that. Let’s focus on: If they do this, it’s going to be a recruiting video for jihadists. So let’s not do that. She’s very practical. And so I think she will—”whatever works” seems to be where she is in her life. And she’s not worried about, like, The Democratic establishment shouldn’t speak. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care, and she shouldn’t.

Frum: Let me ask you about what works and things you’ve changed your mind about.

So you have been a career-long advocate for stronger regulation of technology in general—

Swisher: David, let me correct you. Any regulation. We don’t have any.

Frum: Okay.

Swisher: So not stronger.

Frum: What’s your line? “Your local deli is more regulated than the biggest tech platforms in America.”

Okay. So some of the AI executives have, in recent months and years, begun to repeat what you have been saying earlier. And my question to you is, when you hear that, do you think, Okay, look, they’re in a death race, and it drives everyone to do things they don’t wish to do. And if only the competition could be a little less fierce, then maybe they could think more about safety? Or do you think there’s something nefarious going on, that they’ve got some other agenda? Do you take them at their word when they say these things? Are they reformed characters? How do you read it?

Swisher: No. I mean, my approach to most of these people—not all of them, most of them—is, Hello, he lied. Essentially.

And so I think they—it’s a little complex. You know, it’s more complex than the way we binary every single thing we do around technology these days. They’re either villains or they’re heroes. Or they’re this, or they go from this. Or we love them, we hate them. That kind of thing. And life’s not like that, essentially.

What I think is happening is: They hate regulation. They don’t want any. That’s why they sucked up to Trump the first term, and that’s why they sucked up to him this time. Some of them had had real political conversions, but for the most part, they want to make money. They want to dominate. And that has never changed in all the time I’ve known them.

So, as I joked, if Kamala Harris had won, Mark Zuckerberg would’ve identified as they/them if it suited him. They’ll do whatever it takes. And by the way, guess what’s going to happen when the Democrats come in? Oh! He was the worst. I can’t believe I went to dinner at his house 412 times in the last—

Frum: Thank God you got here.

Swisher: Oh!

Frum: I’ve been waiting in this basement, waiting for you.

Swisher: I wasn’t really having a good time at that lunch.

These people literally would sell their mamas down, if they needed to. That’s my feeling on the general populace. And they’re very interested in winning. Winning and shareholder value. I mean, if Tim Cook is going to give a golden statue to Donald Trump, you’ve got to know what’s going on there. Now, I’ve heard since then he actually likes Donald Trump, which—okay, fine. No accounting for taste. But I think it’s all about shareholder value, every single thing they do.

And so I think when they talk about regulation, they want the regulation they want that is good for them. They never think of safety unless they’re forced to. But neither did big pharma, neither did airplanes, [the] car [industry]. Hello, Unsafe at Any Speed. That’s what it took. They wouldn’t have put seat belts in there if they didn’t have to. Or airbags. The chemical companies would love to spew poison, and, Oh well; some people die. And those people were civically interested. The tech people have never been civically interested, ever. Like, they don’t care about other people. And so we just have to make them have safety. And should, because this is very much like nuclear proliferation. This is on the same level of importance. Why are we outsourcing our safety to private industry on a topic that they themselves say is existential?

Frum: Well, this is the thing I find sort of baffling. There are people who say, and there are AI skeptics who say, You know, it’s not that big a deal. It’s the latest computer thing. It’s not transformative. There are people who say that. And if that’s what you believe, okay, yeah, have a light footprint, because how heavily do we regulate word-processing technology? And then there are people who say it’s going to kill us all. Well, if it’s going to kill us all, then it should be illegal. Government should not just regulating; government should be suppressing it. I don’t understand the people who take the view: I want to run a big company that makes products that I fear are going to kill us. Why are you doing that?

Swisher: I think the “kill us all” thing is—you know, with the way tech people talk, you’ve got to have listened to them for so long. They love to say “non-zero chance.” I was doing an interview with Elon Musk once, and he’s like, There’s a non-zero chance we’re in a simulation. Meaning we’re basically a video game for a greater civilization and teenagers are playing Earth, whatever it happens to be, and we aren’t real. We’re all a simulation. Well, it is a non-zero. It’s like there’s a non-zero chance that there is a god sitting up on a cloud. And so that’s what they tend to do.

And so what they know is—I think Elon actually said it best. It’s like, this isn’t just nuclear bombs; it’s things that can set off nuclear bombs without you wanting it to, essentially. And I often recount this dinner party I had in Silicon Valley 10 years ago. Many of the big names right now, they were posing these questions: What would, if you told AI to solve world hunger, what would it do? It would kill half the human race, because that’s the right answer. It’s not the right answer. It’s the answer that would work the quickest, right? And so they just—I think there is an existential crisis. But they don’t—

Frum: Wait a minute. Let me stop you on that. That’s a terrible answer actually, because—even if you’re a Nazi—because killing half the human race is a lot more expensive and time-consuming than feeding the 10 percent of the human race. Do you—

Swisher: Oh, they would do it with a nuclear bomb, my friend.

Frum: Do you think this is a line of work that attracts people with severe personality disorders? And that that distorts their thinking about problems?

Swisher: No, I’m thinking the AI would do it, because it doesn’t have any emotion. It isn’t attached to humanity. When Elon started off, it was interesting. I’ll use him because he was the earliest person to talk to me about the threats—he and [Open AI CEO] Sam [Altman], but mostly Elon—about the threats of AI, and was very concerned. And I think, you know, he’s a science-fiction guy. It also informs him. A lot of these people are science-fiction types. This is part of the air they breathe, essentially. And his first thing was Terminator. And we all have seen that movie where, you know—time machine, comes back, kills the original, blah, blah, blah. And so that’s where they were in sort of this dystopian idea. And that gives the machines a personality, an anthropomorphic personality, when in fact it doesn’t. Or like The Matrix, like they want to keep us as batteries, or they have a malevolence. It’s always a malevolence. Mostly it doesn’t have malevolence at all, because it doesn’t care. And doesn’t care—I don’t mean “hates us.” It means we don’t exist.

So he moved on to the idea that AI treats humans like house cats. Like, we don’t want to kill our house cat. We’ll feed our house cat. But that’s how they look at us. Again, a little too anthropomorphic.

The third one I thought he came upon was the best one. This was later. Which is: We’re building a highway in Georgia, and we put down asphalt. Do we know we’ve killed a lot of ants and anthills along the way? Do we think about it at all? No.

Frum: Okay. So what I meant by that crack about personality disorders is: I wonder whether when we inevitably anthropomorphize everything; that’s the way our minds are constituted. If you have a severely dysfunctional personality, when you anthropomorphize, you imagine the AI to be like you. So when Elon Musk thinks What would an AI be like?, he thinks it would be like him. And, yeah, kind of indifferent to human suffering. I wonder if a more normal person who had read, say, Frankenstein instead of The Terminator might say that this may be a more complex, tragic, meaningful relationship. And the limited—the kind of odd, odd stuntedness in some vectors, combined with obviously great talents in others—makes people poor understanders of the world around them.

Swisher: Yeah; they like to understand everything. The machines have power when they have power. They like to offput their power and their blame onto the machines. And it’s not the machines that are the problem. It’s like saying electricity is the reason we electrocute people. Or the knife was the reason people died. It’s because the person with their hand on the knife killed someone. And so they just want to blame the knife, right? And actually, recently, Jeff Bezos talked about this, like: We can’t be against the knife. We’re against murder. I’m like: Yeah, we’re against murder by you. Like, they don’t like to take that step by focusing in on the machine.

And one of the things they tend to do, a lot of, is remove themselves from the equation—that they aren’t at fault in any way. And this is a longtime thing, you know, with social media. Oh, I don’t know why girls are feeling self-esteem problems. Do boys listen to more porn? I wonder what caused that. Like, they’re very much not of that. And one of the things they’ve done, which I have followed of theirs, is just that, one: that they’re the victims. And two: that they have no consequences for the things they make. And this is the same kind of thing. This is what they made. And my only argument is like, why are we letting them decide on something this important? Because they’re broken people, and we need a bigger pool of people making a decision about something that they themselves say is very important.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about another one of your recommendations that has come true. You argued often that the ownership of TikTok should be shifted from its Chinese founders. Congress passed a law calling for just that. The Supreme Court said that that law was constitutional. Congress had the power to force the sale of TikTok, at least its U.S. operations, to a U.S. operator, and it eventually did happen. But what seems to have happened is, none of the things that are toxic about TikTok have changed. It’s just TikTok has been sold in ways to enrich President Trump’s allies and supporters.

When you look back on that, do you think, Hmm, that’s not what I meant. They didn’t hear me right?

Swisher: I was worried at the time. Many people were worried about the deleterious effects of social media, which are very real, in lots of personality, etcetera. I was worried about propaganda. I was a propaganda-studies major at the School of Foreign Service. So I think about—what could you use these things for? And if I were the Chinese Communist Party, that’s exactly what I’d do. I mean, I’m not mad at them for doing it. It’s just, that’s what you would do to have this. And we had no such service in China to be able to do that. I mean, our best thing is to lob Voice of America over there, and it doesn’t really work. The internet possibly is a way to get through into that culture, but they strictly control their information diet there.

And so I was worried about propaganda. Then I was worried about the ability to shift the narrative with the algorithm. But again, that’s gone back to William Randolph Hearst. I mean, this is not new.

Frum: Where I’m pressing on this is—the Trump administration seems like the nightmare version of the advice you’ve been giving. They have an activist Federal Communications Commission, which is on the march in all kinds of ways to stop things that they don’t like, whether it’s The View or Jimmy Kimmel.

Do any of your feelings about regulation change watching the Trump administration wield these regulatory powers?

Swisher: No, because—we have got to go back. Obviously, after post-Nixon, they went back and fixed a lot of things they didn’t think he would do. We’re going to have to go back and figure out how to deal. If the internet isn’t regulated by the government, then neither should broadcast networks be. It’s not a public good. I mean, at this point, we should just sell it to them, and they should do what they want, and there probably should be some sort of public-access kind of thing.

I mean, we have to really rethink this. Because when you have a moron like Brendan Carr—and I say that very clearly; he’s a moron, but he’s also an unctuous toady and a thirsty person as someone who wants power—in charge of that, you get all the abuses. And of course, they do all the abuses they accused other people, the Democrats mostly, of doing, right? They do exactly—because they think, like, What’s the worst thing a Democrat could do? And really the worst thing is the things they want to do. And so yeah; I worry about that. We have to really rethink the FCC, top to frigging bottom. We’re going to have to do that.

The same thing with the Justice Department. Like, what are we going to do going forward with that? How do we reassert the powers of independence in these judiciary? What do we do when the executive loses its mind, right? And that’s been something that’s happening for a long time, the power of the exec—you know that. I mean, there’s been books and books.

Frum: I don’t think we’ve seen an executive like this ever before. And maybe that’s one of the reasons why advocates of regulation were caught unawares, because there is a long tradition of people who advocate regulation imagining a kind of benign regulator, or at least a disinterested regulator. A regulator will be someone at least non-malicious, somebody like—someone like me. You imagine the regulator in your image. And then you get, Well, wait a moment. What we’ve done is, we’ve empowered—the regulatory move has empowered Donald Trump to redistribute TikTok to his friends. Has empowered Brendan Carr.

None of the evils that you are concerned about have been ameliorated, but a whole lot of new evils that you didn’t want have happened.

Swisher: Yes, but it’s not the regulatory structure. You know, it’s sort of a perfect storm of a Congress that has abrogated its power, a Supreme Court that has abrogated—the nicest way to say it—has abrogated its power, but actually is working for the man, and then an executive willing to break laws.

One of the geniuses of Trump, I hate to say it, is like: He oversteps the line constantly. He eliminates the line. And so, what do you do when you wouldn’t imagine someone would’ve done that? And now we have to imagine, and therefore we have to put up a whole new set of lines and powers. And maybe there’ll be a much less powerful president going forward. Maybe this is the final moment of this executive theory that has been going on for, I don’t know, 100 years now—the growing power of the executive.

Frum: Let me ask you about another thing that I wonder if you’ve thought about, or rethought, since the time.

So during the Biden administration, a lot of the Biden people did want to regulate tech in some way. But they were nervous, kind of for the reasons I’ve been sort of pointing to, they were nervous about content-based [approaches]. They didn’t want to interfere with the business. And so the regulatory energy went into antitrust. It’s like, well—maybe the problem is not that the product is toxic. Maybe the problem is the company producing the toxic is too big, and we will empower Lina Khan to go after the bigness of the companies, as if that got us anywhere. And so there’s a lot of effort to curb the bigness of the platforms, without thinking about what they were doing.

How do you feel about that strategy, looking back on it?

Swisher: I don’t like any one strategy. They are too big. They’re just too big. Nobody can compete in search or in AI. It’s so expensive. It’s going to end up being two companies essentially. The redo of antitrust legislation is long overdue. I think we’re operating on a hundred-year-old law at this point. So we really have to radically rethink what big means and what the damages are. It’s not price, it’s not this, whatever. That needs a radical rehaul, and that’s something everybody knows.

The other thing is the speed at which we can meet these challenges. I mean, listen, [President] Obama, I had a long-going argument with him like: You’re not doing anything, and by the time we do something, they’re going to be too big to do anything about, because they’ll have so much power from a lobbying perspective and just money perspective that we’re not going to be able to stop them.

And then you have Citizens United on top of that, which allows these incredibly wealthy people to manipulate the system. And the numbers are just staggering—the amount how much wealthy people have put into campaigns recently. And so it’s sort of a combination of all the things at once.

So I don’t think it’s just—we have to overhaul antitrust. I really am enjoying a lot of these product-liability lawsuits that are happening in California and across the nation around these companies. It’s really a very effective way to start to go at them, is it not. We’re not going to touch free speech, but your product fucking sucks and is killing people. That’s a really good argument. So our legal system is actually meeting the moment in that regard. And there’ll be more and more. It’s like a cigarette moment. It’s happening. It really is happening. And they’re trying their best to shut it down, but they’re not always winning.

And then the third thing, which I think is the most important, is public sentiment about these people and about the things they do. And data centers—as you know, I’ve talked about, and I think I predicted this rather well—is an expression of voter discontent over all of it. And it’s just a physical thing they can point to in their own neighborhoods that they don’t like. And it is going to have a profound—it is having—a profound effect on this election. It will have a profound effect on the next presidential election, and it will have a profound effect on what we should do about the tax system. Like, that these people, they don’t pay their taxes. They don’t pay their taxes.

Frum: Isn’t the reaction to data centers kind of like the Lina Khan mistake all over again? There’s something that people really are worried about. And that’s: What does AI do to my life, to my job, to my children’s prospects? They can’t get a handle on it. And say, Well, there’s this big real-estate use outside of town. And if AI were a good thing, then this is just something we’d have to get used to, as we had to get used to gas stations. It’s part of modern life. If AI is a bad thing, then the problem is not the data center that serves the AI; the problem is the AI. And yet we have this way to go down these cul-de-sacs of bigness. Or the, I don’t like the data center, or, It’s too noisy. So we don’t talk about what’s important; we talk about what’s accessible.

Swisher: Listen, I spent a lot of time trying to find people who are trying to explain what a good data center is, too. I interviewed a Michigan mayor, and he had put together a great data-center deal. We have to—I say this to people—we have to have them. It’s a question of how we have them. And I think one of the things that tech people have tried to do is shove it down our throats without any consultation.

And I think that is what’s powerful among the voters, and I think it’s absolutely legitimate that people should have a say in how these things are going to go up. We don’t have to just, you know, bend over and take it. We don’t. We do not. And I think that’s what you’re seeing here. And it’s raising great issues of: What do we want to do about the water? And we can do very smart technological things to help save water. What do we want to do about where they’re located? What do we want to do about noise?

But instead, you had Elon Musk dropping one in Tennessee with gas belching this. You have Kevin O’Leary over in Utah acting like a giant asshole. But it was stopped, and it doesn’t mean that his data center was good. The way they approached it was in this typical—it reminds you of when the railroads went through. We’re just going to shove them right through your land. You don’t get a say. You don’t get anything. But today, I think this is a good sign of a healthy democracy pushing back, even if we actually do need some data centers in this country.

Frum: So you, you’re not only a very influential commentator on these tech issues, you’re an adept user of tech, and you’re raising a family. Do you have a personal-hygiene regime for the people you care about and for yourself to get the best out of the technology? And do you have any advice for anybody on what that hygiene regime should look like?

Swisher: Yeah, I mean, I have older kids, and they can do what they want. Like, I’m not—they’re old enough. One is 21, one’s 24. And I see young people moving very quickly away from social media. It’s really interesting. They don’t like it. I don’t mind them using the devices if they’re reading or watching substantive things. What I mind is sort of the mindless doomscrolling or the mindless silliness of it, because I try to stress upon all my kids how addictive it is, right? Because I myself am addicted. You’re addicted, I bet. It’s clearly like a cigarette. It’s got the elements of that, right? And so I like to stress with them of putting it down. My one son bought a box he puts his phone in for three hours, and he just locks it. It’s a lockbox, and it will not open no matter what he does unless he breaks it, and then he’s kind of crazy if he does that. And so I make it clear that just, it’s not controllable in a lot of ways.

The other thing I try to do is say—I’m not one of those people that says, Don’t use it. I’m like, Try it. Try it. I was just bugging my wife. She was going on about AI, and I said, You don’t use it enough to have this opinion. You need to try it to understand it. And she was like, I don’t need to try to understand it. I go, You absolutely have to try it to understand it. And so I advocate people trying it and then figuring out what they like and don’t like.

Another thing is my younger kids, they don’t use it at all. And they will not, I’m telling you, they will not have phones until they’re 16 or 17 probably. And it’ll change by then, so I don’t think I’m going to have to worry that much. But they can use it to watch movies. It’s perfectly convenient. They can use it to, you know, look up things. They do that at school. That’s perfectly fine. It’s a book. It can be used as a book. But I definitely restrict; I will. They’re not at the age where they will be using—they won’t be using social media at all. I won’t allow it.

Frum: You’re warning me that it’s addictive. But you’re also warning me that I can’t have an opinion unless I try it.

Swisher: I think you have to understand—

Frum: Do I, like Ulysses, tie myself to the mast—

Swisher: (Laughs.) Yes! Yes, close your ears.

Frum: Try it a little bit?

Swisher: Absolutely. Yes.

Frum: How do I do that?

Swisher: Well, you have to understand going in that it’s addictive, and you’ve got to figure out some strategies for yourself, like in terms of how to do it. All I’m saying is you need to understand it if you are to talk about it. You know what I mean? You can’t just be ignorant about what it’s doing.

Now, some people just, you know—like I just did an interview with someone, and she’s like, I’ve been down a glacier since 1989. I don’t know what it is. And that’s a perfectly fine way to do it if your job doesn’t depend on it, but a lot of people’s jobs depend on it.

And so I do stress that people should under—I always was, you know, I was sort of the screamer at The Washington Post, saying, Are you ignoring digital? Why are you still on a typewriter? Why aren’t you doing this, this, this, and this? And, Craigslist is going to kill classifieds. I think you need to be fully aware of the technology and understand how it can help work for you, including AI. A lot of AIs can be quite helpful in a lot of ways. And then try to minimize the stuff that is so clearly addictive and stupid and hurtful to your brain, like relationships, AI-bot relationships. Do not partake.

Frum: I was going to ask you about that. Partly because Google is so broken, I use some of the AI platforms as research tools. And I found there’s some prophylactics that I found useful. One—you can set the settings: Never call me by my name. Never tell me it’s a good question. Never praise anything I’ve done. I do not want a relationship with you. I just want to know who won the World Series in 1938. Tell me that. And I do find—

Swisher: Can I add another one?

Frum: Yeah.

Swisher: Give me the provenance of where you got this.

Frum: Yes. I tell it, these are the sources. You can’t use Wikipedia. I’ve got a list of forbidden sources—

Swisher: Or “tell me.” Tell me: Where did this come from?

Frum: Yeah, I’ve got a list of forbidden sources, and there always has to be both a site and a link, so I can check that you’ve quoted it right. Which, by the way, that’s not always true. And, you know, use government documents—even in the age of Trump—if you’re going to give me a statistic. Or, These are reputable organizations; these are not.

But what I’m mostly keen is to avoid anything where it’s a different relationship than I used to have with Google, or a box where I ask it a question and it serves me the answer.

Swisher: That’s excellent hygiene. I mean, I treat AI like a supersized Google, a better and easier Google. Because one of the things about Google is, you’d go to the page, and then you’d go down, and you’d spend a lot of time. It’s sort of like being in a library with all the books on the floor, and you’re kind of looking among them. When it’s properly sourced, it’s invaluable, like in terms of saving time on research and other things. And so I think one of the things that people have to realize—if they use it in that regard, terrific. It’s a terrific thing.

When they start to have relationships with it, which a lot of people do, or they really like it, or they answer them, there’s—like, I just did a great interview with Sherry Turkle, which everyone should read her book called Artificial Intimacy—there’s nothing there. There’s nothing there. I keep saying, I really like my… they have a name for their Claude or whatever. I was like, There’s nothing there. But they think it is because, as humans, we’re so egomaniacal, we tend to, you know, just make it human when it’s just not. And that’s a really important thing that you did.

Frum: You’re an optimist on the employment effects of AI.

Swisher: No. I don’t know. I’m—

Frum: Well, you’re not a doomer. You’re not saying that everyone’s going to be fired.

Swisher: There’s a doomer, there’s a zoomer, and then there’s—is it a boomer? There’s a doomer, a boomer, and a zoomer. I think that’s the way they’ve split among them. I suppose I’m a zoomer.

Frum: Okay, explain. You lost me.

Swisher: Okay. A boomer is, Oh, it’s going to solve everything. And that’s largely marketing from those guys. And it may. It might. It could, for sure. We didn’t know the effects of many things before they came into use. Everything’s going to be great. Nothing’s going to be wrong. It’s not dangerous at all. I just think every historical technology trend has always had an upside and a downside, period. Period. That’s the way it is if you study history. So that’s—this “up and to the right” stuff is nonsense.

There’s those who say it’s going to kill us all. It certainly could, and we should mitigate against that. You should have scenarios of consequences absolutely in place and pay a lot of attention. Nobody should ever have been surprised by the Hugging Face incident and all these incursions by rogue agents. I don’t know why anyone’s been surprised by it. It’s like—of course that’s what it was going to do. And so, the doomers can be a little bit like, There’s nothing about it that’s good. And I’m sorry, that is not the case. It’s like with nuclear energy. There’s a lot to be said about nuclear energy that’s good. There’s a lot that needs to be said that’s bad.

And so I would put myself in the “let’s go thing by thing and make a list of things we don’t want”—and I think that’s relatively easy. Which is, hey, killer drones. Maybe we should have a global decision-making on this one, with everyone deciding what the standard should be. Surveillance: Hey, let’s discuss what AI should be able to surveil and what it shouldn’t, and what parameters, and let that be monitored by government—democratic governments, at least.

There’s all manner of things we can do. And here’s a good thing. Let it help; let’s put all the data about climate change in it, and let it help us figure out solutions. Great thing for AI to do. Cancer research, that kind of stuff. You could go thing by thing.

Frum: So AI investment is what’s holding up the U.S. economy right now. Maybe also health care. We’re now on our way to a 6 percent yield for 30-year U.S. money, and it’s probably going to stay this high for a while and maybe even get higher.

How long can AI investment continue when money costs 6 percent or more?

Swisher: You know, I compare it to the internet, and remember there was a crash there, right? There was that dramatic crash in 2000. And that was nothing. It didn’t cost anything to put up these internet companies. I mean, the price that these numbers are astronomical, especially given their revenue.

Here’s all I know. There’s 12 LLMs. There’s going to be two. Inevitably, it is going to coalesce into a smaller group of people, because the business isn’t that big, you know, ultimately. And it’s not—a lot of times when these tech moguls now, because they’re searching for any way to say that it’s good after they’re the ones that told us it sucked. Which is very funny in a lot of ways when you think about it—you know, Oh, there’s going to be abundance. You don’t have to work.

Like, they’re just making that shit up, just so you know. It’s like going to Mars. Like, Oh, we’re going to live on Mars. Oh, did you know there’s too much gravity there for the human bone? Oh, no, because I talked to an astrobiologist, or We have to go underground because the radiation is going to make us dumb. So we’re going to become what? Trolls? We’re going to actually become trolls? Like, they never want to mess with the details.

Frum: Should the U.S. government nationalize Starlink and SpaceX? And if it does, how does it prevent those companies from bogging down in bureaucracy the way NASA did?

Swisher: You know, we used to have this wonderful thing in this country, the public-private partnership. Which is now gone, right? You know why you have the internet, folks? Because of the government. You know why you have a lot of the drugs you have? Because of the government. You know why you have the space program? Oh, yeah, the government.

And so I think what’s really important is, once we have something that’s a national priority—like space or, you know, AI or something—let’s have these partnerships where they don’t get to drive the car. They’re in the car with the rest of us. And what they want to do is drive the car. Because you know what, Dave? They know better than we do, because they’re smarter than us. But they’re not smarter than us. That’s the biggest lie about them. They’re not. They’re broken people just like the rest of us. And why do they get more decision-making than anybody else? That’s all. I think that’s a pretty easy thing to work through.

But I think this idea of public-private partnerships has always been one of the great things of this country. It really doesn’t happen other places. It’s either top-down like in China, and that certainly has worked to an extent. Or it’s just nothing happens, like in Europe, right? But the idea of a public-private partnership—where corporations work with governments, and some of it’s dedicated to the public good, especially when we’re paying money—seems to me to have worked for a very long time. It’s brought us vaccines. It’s brought us innovations in space. It’s brought us innovations in the internet and digital. And it could continue to do things that are great for most of society rather than a small, tiny few of them.

Frum: If you’re going to have public-private partnerships, what does governance look like? Is there a role for Congress? How does it work that we make sure you don’t get the Brendan Carrs, and telling Jimmy Kimmel not to make jokes. You don’t have Elon Musk saying, I’m blowing hot and cold on Ukraine. I like them this week. I don’t like them next week.

Swisher: I think the problem is three things that I think of. Everyone is like, Oh, it’s the internet that’s, or the tech billionaires that are killing us. I’m like, you know, it’s a really complex thing. Gerrymandering was one thing that has been killing us. We cannot have any elections that aren’t for sure, and therefore nobody has an interest in compromise, right? That’s one.

Two, social media, which has been really deleterious and politicizing people. When people have commonalities, it splits them. As its business plan is to split you from each other. And I throw in Fox News and cable with that, but I don’t think it has as much. It did have an impact; now social media has taken that over.

And the third thing I would say is, this idea that in this idolatry of these rich people, innovators, right? I think it happened previously in our history during the Gilded Age, and it caused all manner of damage for regular people, right? Whether it was children who were being industrialized into these things. And we looked at it and said, No, and we’re going to do this. We’re going to make these rules.

And I think this is the push-pull of the American system, that capitalism is a really vibrant way to move forward. But why do they get to decide?

I think we need a stronger Congress. And the only way we’re going to do that is getting rid of Citizens United, getting rid of gerrymandering. So that we have more elections where people have to compete on ideas, not on loyalty or fealty to Donald Trump or whoever the person happens to be.

Frum: Kara Swisher, thank you so much for joining me today. What a Catherine wheel of sparkling ideas, and we’ll all be listening to the show.

Swisher: You should let your AI be mean to you. That would be interesting. Be meaner. Like challenge it more.

Frum: Yes. I sometimes am mean to it.

Swisher: Oh, it doesn’t like that.

Frum: No, it doesn’t, because it has sort of biases, and then when you challenge it gets a little testy.

Swisher: Can I leave you with one thing?

Frum: Yes.

Swisher: It is us. Like, it is us. It’s trained on us. Where do you think it’s getting its information? And everything you see in our world will be reflected there. Lying, joy, happiness, sycophancy, wisdom will be all in there. And it just depends on the—again, I’ll leave you with one thing.

Many years ago at Google, they had a thing when you would go in, and it would scroll all the queries across the world that were coming in. And you’d see it. And you’d sit there, and you’d go, What are people; what are they doing? It would be like: horse, straw, France, and you’re like, What do they want? What are they looking for? Like I always sat there and I would stare at it trying to figure out what they were.

And they had a globe where all the queries were coming in, and the globe would spin, and all the different languages and everything else. It was a really great data visualization. And all the questions were light that flowed off the Earth. And when it went around, most of Africa was dark, which was really kind of this weird metaphor, right? Dark Africa. But it was because they weren’t connected, right? And they didn’t have as much connection as other parts of the world, like the United States or in China or wherever. And I looked at that, and I thought: Well, it’s not like they’re not asking questions there. You just can’t see the questions they’re asking.

And I think the ability to ask questions is the biggest ability of a democracy. To ask questions. And you don’t want your questions to be algorithmically generated. And that’s the greatest strength of humanity—is we can ask questions, we can continue to ask questions. And that’s why I don’t think it will kill us, because it can’t ask questions. It can only mimic us like monkeys.

Frum: Kara, thank you so much.

Swisher: Thank you.

[Music]

Frum: Thanks so much to Kara Swisher for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert Gordon, published by Princeton in 2016.

When the The Rise and Fall of American Growth was published a decade ago, it caused a great debate. Because Gordon’s argument, based on meticulous arrangements of large amounts of data, was that the internet revolution, social media, the computer itself had not actually done as much to improve American standards of living as the internal combustion engine, electricity, antibiotics, and the innovations of an earlier time. He argued that the American economy, or the American standard of living, grew faster from 1870 to 1970 than ever since. And all the fantastic changes in technology that we have seen didn’t add up to that much in terms of their impact on the overall state of the American economy and the well-being of the typical American.

Robert Gordon, at the time, after a lot of back-and-forth, was admitted to have probably won the argument that the American standard of living has not risen as fast since 1970 as it did before. But come the AI innovation, there is now massive challenge to Robert Gordon’s ideas. And this challenge took the form of a bet, in the world of AI—a famous bet with an economist named Erik Brynjolfsson of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

In 2020, Erik Brynjolfsson bet Robert Gordon. It was a nominal bet with the proceeds to go to charity, so it’s not a Polymarket Trump-era bet. This was a bet between colleagues, respectful colleagues, to say: I bet you that over the coming decade, the decade of the 2020s, American productivity growth will accelerate. And he put down a specific number. He said it will accelerate past 1.8 percent a year. Gordon took the other side of the bet, and as we stand about halfway through the course of the bet, it looks like Robert Gordon is losing the bet. American productivity has been growing faster than 1.8 percent since 2020, and especially in the past few months as AI kicks in.

So does this prove that AI is indeed a big deal, and that the Robert Gordon thesis was wrong? So two things need to be understood to understand this debate and the bet.

The first is exactly what productivity is. Productivity is a measure of output per worker, per human worker. We now have to specify per human worker. If AI were doing all the apocalyptic things that it’s supposed to do—if it were wiping out millions of jobs, if it were changing the nature of work while boosting output—that would be very obviously disturbing for a lot of people. It would change people’s lives. But from a point of view of the economic statistics, you would see that change, that revolution, in the form of a lot more output; not that much or even less employment. And so output per human worker would be going up fast.

Well, as I say, Robert Gordon lost his bet. Output per worker has been going up faster than 1.8 percent. But that 1.8 is not that great. Between 1948 and 1973, productivity output per worker rose by 3 percent a year, because of highways and antibiotics and the mechanization of agriculture. Three percent a year from ’48 to ’73. Getting around 2 percent a year now. Better than 1.8, but not great.

And all of this, I think, casts some deeper light on what AI is going to do to American work, and that’s why I returned to Robert Gordon’s book this week to refresh my mind about what he said and more importantly, why he said that. Because as disruptive as AI promises to be, most Americans work in fields where it’s difficult to accelerate work. The sectors that dominate American spending and American employment and American prices are health care, education, housing, construction, and personal care. Now, these are activities that are physical, heavily regulated, and labor intensive.

I mean, let’s say that AI is able to completely take over the job of designing new houses. And instead of architects and draftspeople and using older-fashioned computer technology, the AI designs the house from beginning to end with no human input at all. How big a deal is that? Well, if the AI doesn’t speed up the time and cost of getting a permit for the house, if it doesn’t speed up local government—simply making the designing process faster—I mean, it will disturb and disrupt the work of the people who used to do that. But it’s not going to bring down the cost of the house that much, so you won’t get a big productivity bump. And so it is with so many other areas: nursing, teaching, and so on.

When Robert Gordon warned that American growth or observed that American growth had slowed down since 1970, and he predicted that American growth would remain slow, he based that on a couple of observations about the way the American economy has changed. And these are changes that the AI revolution doesn’t seem to be undoing, not yet.

First, he pointed out that the government is much less well-financed than it used to be. There’s a much heavier debt load on the American worker—from government deficits and government debts—than there used to be. Second, we’re not raising human educational attainment as fast as we used to do. When you took the American economy from an economy where most workers had not even finished high school to one where almost everybody had finished high school and many people had finished college, that got you a big bump. In a way that the slight increase in college attainment that we’ve seen over the past years, that doesn’t change it that much. Especially when those people who do not go on to college, when there’s some evidence that their education—the quality of their educational attainment, as measured by standardized tests—that seems to have been declining a little bit since COVID and since the advent of the smartphone.

So educational attainment is not accelerating; may be stalling. The debt burden is heavy, and so much of the economy is still in the world of physical labor, physical things, regulated things. So as you observe and discuss the AI revolution, be mindful that, in the work that I do, and perhaps in the work that you do, AI may be a very big deal. But in the world of work that most people do and where most of us spend most of our money—housing, health care, education, personal care—it isn’t yet making that big a difference, and it may not make that much of a difference to the overall performance of an economy for a long time to come.

I don’t want to diminish what we are seeing. Obviously, the things these machines can do are very impressive. But where’s the benefit? How big is it? Is it really as transformational? And maybe one of the reasons that people in the AI world are so eager to tell us horror stories about the terrible things that AI might do is to compensate a little bit for some of the disappointment about the good things we want it to do but that it isn’t doing yet—and may not do for a long time to come.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. See you this coming weekend. And I hope you will share the program on whatever platform; like, subscribe. And, of course, if you want to help the program and bring it to more people, the best thing to do is to subscribe to The Atlantic. That’s how you support the work of me and all of my colleagues. See you soon. Bye-bye.

A crucial midterm contest is happening right now in Texas, one that could determine the future of the state and its influence on federal policy and national politics.

No, not the U.S. Senate race—though everyone is watching that one, and with good reason. The Republican, Ken Paxton—who has served as Texas’s attorney general since 2015—is an unusually weak candidate, beset by personal and financial scandals and a reputation for using his office for right-wing culture-war fixations, and weighed down by a deeply unpopular president. On the other side is James Talarico, an unusually strong Democratic candidate, fluent in the language of faith and without the cloud of scandal that haunts his opponent. “This is the most competitive election that we have seen in Texas” in decades, James Henson, the executive director of the University of Texas at Austin’s nonpartisan Texas Politics Project, told me.

But the race I’m talking about is downstream of that: Who will succeed Ken Paxton?

The two major-party candidates vying to be attorney general are Nathan Johnson, a Democratic state senator from Dallas, and Mayes Middleton (“MAGA Mayes,” as his own ads call him), a Republican state senator and GOP mega-donor whose district covers parts of Harris, Brazoria, and Galveston counties. An October poll from the Texas Politics Project shows a dead heat, with Johnson at 48 percent and Middleton at 47 percent.

The Texas attorney general is a very powerful position, one that has frequently been a springboard to higher office—John Cornyn held the job before becoming a U.S. senator, as did Greg Abbott before becoming the state’s governor. The AG is meant to defend the laws of the state, and has certain specific responsibilities, such as enforcing child support and investigating Medicaid fraud. Over the past few decades, however, the role has become something more: a way for ambitious politicians to wage culture wars, cultivate a national profile by taking on right-wing causes, and shape law and policy not just in Texas but nationwide.

The attorney general “helps set legal policy across the country,” Justin Nelson, a Democrat who came within a few points of unseating Paxton in 2018, told me. The race between Talarico and Paxton may be capturing everyone’s attention right now, but “when you’re a senator, you’re one of 100,” Nelson pointed out. There’s only one attorney general of Texas.

When Abbott was Texas attorney general under the Obama administration, he used to joke, “I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home.” Paxton—who was acquitted by the Senate in a 2023 trial over accusations of corruption and bribery—has been even more pugnacious.

Early in his tenure as attorney general, Paxton encouraged clerks to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. He used the office to sue the developers of a mosque and housing community north of Dallas for securities fraud; the case fueled right-wing conspiracy theories nationwide about the “Islamization of Texas.” (A state securities commissioner described the case as “horseshit”—ironically, Paxton himself was accused of securities fraud.) He wrote a memo that designated puberty blockers and other gender-affirming health care “child abuse” and that kicked off Child Protective Services investigations of parents of trans children, and most recently used the state’s consumer-protection law to target pediatricians who vaccinate children. He has threatened to investigate public schools to ensure they’re displaying the Ten Commandments. He also filed the case asking the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

He has tried to prevent women whose pregnancies meet the state’s extremely narrow standards for legal abortion from accessing the procedure. After a court order gave one woman whose child had a fatal abnormality permission to get an abortion, Paxton threatened any doctor who dared perform it, warning that the judge’s order “will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability.” Paxton has also tried to sue doctors in other states for allegedly providing abortion medication to Texas residents—an issue that is almost certain to end up at the Supreme Court sooner or later, much like Texas’s original abortion bounty law did, in a foreshadowing of the 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. These cases and others have shaped abortion policy nationally, not just in Texas.

[Read: Ken Paxton is actually doing this]

An entire accounting of Paxton’s use of the AG’s office to further extreme conservative causes would take too long. But you get the idea. The Texas AG’s office is the “largest legal power in the conservative movement, nationally, period, end of story,” Adam Piper, who runs the Republican Attorneys General Association, told The Texas Tribune earlier this year. Ali S. Zaidi, the former director of the Texas House Democratic Caucus, told me that “simply removing a Republican” from the Texas attorney general’s office “could have enormous ripple effects across the country for, frankly, generations to come.”

Paxton’s aggressive use of the office isn’t an exclusively right-wing phenomenon; Democratic AGs from California, New York, and other states have been at the forefront of litigation against President Trump’s tariffs, his environmental policies, and his attempt to repeal birthright citizenship. AGs have also pursued consumer-protection issues that the federal government mostly abandoned.

But Nathan Johnson is not presenting himself as that kind of candidate. Instead, he says he wants to return the office to what he sees as its traditional role: “It is there to protect consumers from predatory business practices; it is there to investigate shady relationships between the private sector and the public sector; it is there to keep the system of checks and balances in place in government.”

This is surely a smart pitch for such a red state, and the race is quite close for a place where Democrats haven’t won statewide office since Pulp Fiction was in theaters. Nevertheless, Texas Republicans’ objections to Paxton are less about policy and more about ethics. “I think Mayes Middleton is a stronger candidate than Ken Paxton,” Nelson said, describing Paxton as perhaps the “most corrupt public official in the country.”

Matt Mackowiak, a Republican political consultant, told me that Middleton’s policy views “align with a majority of Texans.” This state has been red for three decades. Voters may be tired of Paxton’s baggage, but that doesn’t mean they’re tired of having a state attorney general who tries to move the state and the country in a conservative direction.

Whoever becomes the next attorney general, he’ll be tasked with enforcing Texas law, which includes that near ban on abortion and a series of restrictions on trans rights that frightened some families so much that they ultimately fled the state. But there’s a difference between enforcing the law and what Paxton has done, which is interpret the law so aggressively that, for example, a pregnant woman whose fetus has a fatal abnormality has to leave the state just to get care. Johnson told me that Paxton’s attempt to sue doctors in New York, Delaware, and California over abortion medication that is banned in Texas was “legally ridiculous.” Texas law, he said, does not apply outside of Texas.

Johnson said he is “not opposed to immigration enforcement” but that he would sue the federal government if immigration authorities violate Texas residents’ constitutional rights. He called the law passed last year requiring public schools to display the Ten Commandments unconstitutional, and said he would not strong-arm any schools who declined to follow the law “until the Supreme Court says otherwise.” He also decried Paxton’s effort to use driver’s-license data from the Department of Public Safety to create a registry of transgender Texans. Johnson’s approach, he suggested, would be to simply leave trans people alone.

“We’re talking about not abusing your power to make certain people miserable, to rally your base,” he said. “And I’m happy to say that I don’t think that kind of behavior is being rewarded politically right now in Texas.”

[Carlos Sanchez: How Texas’s attorney general won by losing big]

Still, Texas has arguably gotten redder in the past six years. Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016 by nine points, Biden by about six, and Harris by about 14. Even in a midterm year with an unpopular incumbent president weighing down the GOP ticket, Democrats have a lot to overcome. Middleton also has a lot more money. In the candidates’ most recent campaign-finance reports, Johnson had taken in a little more than $1 million, whereas Middleton—the inheritor of his father’s oil-and-gas company—had almost $3.5 million in contributions. That money could make a big difference, especially since neither candidate has much name recognition. In the Texas Politics Project poll, 40 percent of voters had no opinion of Middleton, and 48 percent had no opinion of Johnson.

But Zaidi told me that Johnson, being part of the class-of-2018 Democrats who entered office during Trump’s first term, was well equipped to compete in Texas. These officials know how to take on big “policy fights, but in a way that’s not a turnoff for the median voter,” Zaidi said, pointing to Johnson’s work trying to expand Medicaid in Texas—a popular policy but one that Republican state lawmakers have blocked.

The AG race—and those of other state offices—may be decided by the top of the ticket. Johnson, Nelson said, will “rise or fall depending on how well” Talarico and the Democratic candidate for governor, Gina Hinojosa, do. “I think Nathan is well positioned to ride a wave. He’s got his surfboard out.”

If Middleton triumphs, he seems intent on continuing Abbott’s and Cornyn’s legacies. Middleton has said that “there’s no such thing as separation of church and state,” and that “one of the most important things here is backing up President Trump and his border security and deportation agenda.” A recent campaign ad boasts of Middleton’s support of the state’s bathroom bill, “Mayes Middleton: kicking perverted men out of women’s restrooms and locker rooms.” This seems to be a subject of particular importance to Middleton, who recently told an audience that Johnson will “fight to get men in your little girl’s restroom and locker room.”

Nelson believes that, after 30 years of Republican control, Texans are getting tired of these culture wars. They hear Republicans talking about trans people in bathrooms, and they’re “like, Yeah, cool, man, but why is cereal eight bucks and I don’t know if my kid’s gonna have a job?”

The GOP thinks Texans are looking for an ethical conservative who will pursue the same causes as Paxton, and the Dems are betting on widespread fatigue not just with Paxton personally, but with conservative culture-war politics. These visions may be miles apart politically, but as far as the polls are concerned, for now, they’re neck and neck.

Up until a few years ago, you could be forgiven for never having heard much about data centers. When we connected to the many digital services we’ve come to depend on, and executives took to the stage to show off the latest improvements to their products, there wasn’t much talk of the physical infrastructure that made it all possible. But behind the Uber rides, the Amazon shopping, and the countless searches on Google, unremarkable buildings in industrial parks, stuffed full of hard drives and servers, were keeping it all running.

It’s almost staggering to see how quickly data centers have become central to the national discourse. As the number and size of data centers exploded over the past few years, a once seemingly invisible infrastructure rapidly found itself at the center of a political and technological debate. The largest facilities, known as “hyperscale” data centers, can have hundreds of thousands of servers beneath a single roof, and they demand hundreds of megawatts of electricity from the grid—similar to a medium-size city. That scale brings a raft of challenges including pressure on electrical grids, high demands on the water system, and noise and light pollution for people living in their vicinity.

If only a few data centers operated, they might not have become such a significant political issue. But that’s the thing: Since the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, the tech industry has been on a building spree. In turn, the public has woken up to the presence of data centers—and people are not happy about them. A poll in August found that 75 percent of Americans opposed the development of any such projects near where they lived. In a short span of time, these once-overlooked facilities have become the core of a whole new political battleground. Data centers are set to be a key topic in the upcoming midterms, as well as the 2028 presidential elections.

In December of last year, Senator Bernie Sanders called for a national moratorium on data-center construction. “This process is moving very, very quickly,” he said in a video laying out his plan, “and we need to slow it down.” Sanders argued that data centers were part of a wider set of challenges that AI presented for workers’ livelihoods and for people’s personal relationships. In his view, AI was being driven by billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, who were enhancing their power while openly pushing for technologies that could take people’s jobs and erode human connection, and that did not seem like a healthy path forward. “This moratorium will give democracy a chance to catch up with the transformative changes that we are witnessing,” Sanders said.

This wasn’t just a progressive issue. Donald Trump may regularly praise the AI industry and the data centers that power it, but that hasn’t stopped Republicans from opposing them too. The same month that Sanders proposed a moratorium, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launched his own broadside against the AI industry. He wanted to empower local governments to reject data-center construction in the state and bring forward a set of standards to limit the risks caused by AI. He assured voters that his campaign had nothing to do with “woke” ideology but was about protecting workers from job loss, communities from data-center encroachment, and society from the “mindless slop” and falsified content generated with AI that could pose “a potential existential crisis for self‑government.”

By the time 2026 rolled around, soaring electricity prices had become a national concern as tech companies drove up energy costs in their pursuit of generative AI. Hundreds of local moratoriums were being passed across the country; in July, New York adopted the first statewide pause on hyperscale data-center projects. As public anger grew, communities were finding that they had some prominent allies. Such sentiments did not end at the U.S. border.

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.

In Europe, there’s also been a growing discussion about reducing dependence on U.S. tech companies. In the weeks after Sam Altman unveiled his Stargate plans at the White House, European governments shot back with billions of euros in planned data-center investment of their own. The social and environmental costs were not up for debate; politicians just wanted to keep up. But now many are being forced to reckon with the costs that come with this infrastructure.

Those fights are also playing out in the home of the major tech companies. For all the support that Trump gives the data-center industry—he has said that communities opposing such projects want to be “backwards and poor”—the reality is that politicians in states where the most data centers are clustered are being forced to change their positions as they feel the political winds shifting. Higher power bills and stories about what it’s like to live next to one of these hyperscale data centers have incensed voters. Meanwhile, the industry pours millions of dollars into electoral races to try to avert stricter regulations. The outcome of the November midterms will determine more than just what the next two years will hold for Trump; they could also decide the fate of the data-center boom across the U.S.

This article has been adapted from Paris Marx’s new book, Hyperscale: The Ambition and Excess of Big Tech’s Data Empires.

Ten years ago, I found myself in Lusaka, Zambia, sitting at a table with a group of extraordinary writers. We had been invited to participate in a 12-day writing retreat by the Caine Prize for African Writing, considered by many to be the most important literary award for authors on the continent. Among our ranks at the retreat were four former winners of the prize (NoViolet Bulawayo, Okwiri Oduor, Namwali Serpell, and me), as well as past finalists and immensely talented Zambian writers. During those two weeks, we wrote and workshopped our stories, and in between—as we ate and gossiped, visited local schools, and read our work to the public—we discussed the great distance between the literature we hoped to produce and the kind of work the marketplace expected from us.

We were all beneficiaries of the Caine Prize, which was first awarded in 2000 to introduce African writing to a wider international audience. At the time, African fiction hardly existed in Western bookstores or newspaper book sections. In the years since, it had flourished, but many of the most successful and celebrated works circled the same themes: war and its aftermath, the scourge of poverty, the persecution and murder of queer people, the trials of immigration to the West, recapitulations of popular American or European stories in African settings.

In Lusaka in 2016, we wondered whether there was room for stories that did not hew to these norms, stories that followed their own idiosyncratic paths, stories that challenged and reconceived what “Africa” means. So many of us, after all, were living examples of the diversity and capaciousness of the term. Even as we pursued originality in our work, we recognized that certain stories (I described them as “accessible” in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books) would continue to earn a disproportionate amount of recognition and acceptance.

A decade later, the Caine Prize has become the setting for a different conversation about African writers and literary authenticity. Two weeks ago, the Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza was named this year’s winner for his story “The Blue Fighter.” Just five days later, the novelist and journalist Vauhini Vara reported in these pages that the AI detector Pangram had flagged almost the entire story as AI-generated.

The allegation quickly became fodder for arguments far beyond the Caine Prize: about the capabilities of artificial intelligence, the state of contemporary literature, and even the legitimacy of Black intellectual achievement. Vara’s story revived fears raised earlier this year, when three regional winners for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize were accused of using AI, that chatbots are already winning prestigious literary prizes by fooling multiple award juries. Critics also worried that contemporary literature had grown so stale that even a machine was capable of creating award-winning prose. But the racial dimensions magnified the controversy. Some people contended that AI-detection tools were being used to unfairly undermine Black and brown authors. For others, the accusations confirmed a long-standing belief that Black and brown writers—and, by extension, Black and brown people—are incapable of achieving prominence without substantial assistance, either from institutions that supposedly favor them over more qualified individuals or, now, from artificial intelligence.

[Read: Yet another literary prizewinner seems to be AI]

Lost in these debates is a quieter, more unsettling irony: After years of being encouraged by the literary ecosystem—editors, prize committees, magazines, critics—to produce work that is accessible to white audiences, African writers are now facing a new kind of suspicion about their authorship. In short, we have arrived at a moment when writing that conforms to accepted literary conventions—including, in particular, those associated with “African” writing—can also seem suspiciously contrived.

Kundizeza’s story provides a signal example. I found it moving and quite effective in moments, but I also instantly recognized—and predicted—many elements of its plot. The story is narrated by a boy in Zimbabwe whose father abandons his career as a civil engineer to pursue his dream of building aquariums and breeding exotic fish. While his father pours the family’s dwindling resources into the tanks and their expensive equipment, the boy’s mother struggles to keep the household afloat.

Perhaps you can imagine what happens next: The family moves to a poorer neighborhood, the mother finally confronts the father about his obsession, and, over his objections, she sells nearly all of his remaining fish tanks to pay the bills. Kundizeza’s story had many components of prize-winning African literature: a youthful narrator (my own Caine Prize–winning story, “Miracle,” featured one as well); the struggling father with big, impossible dreams; the responsible and enterprising mother who holds everything together; the backdrop of mounting economic hardship.

Kundizeza has denied using AI and has said that he drew on characters and settings from his own life in writing the story. I don’t doubt this, but one reason the story might strike some as AI-generated is that it so neatly encapsulates and deploys the tropes we have come to expect from prize-winning African fiction. If chatbots do anything especially well, it is exactly this: ingesting our preferred tropes and delivering them right back to us.

Readers who raise suspicions about AI usually flag patterns in prose. But there is another pattern worth considering. Chatbots have learned from massive quantities of human writing, including representations of Africa shaped by the literary marketplace. It seems reasonable to expect that if you ask a chatbot to write an “African” story, it will reproduce familiar conventions that have been rewarded for decades.

[Read: A turning point in AI writing]

That said, I don’t believe that a Pangram result should be enough, by itself, to condemn a writer. Earlier this year, the Commonwealth Foundation investigated allegations against several of its regional winners, examining drafts, notes, and time-stamped documents before concluding that AI had not been used to write their stories. In a recent New York Times essay, the Cambridge professor Doyle Calhoun noted that the five literary controversies involving AI that he considered most significant this year all concerned Black and brown writers. The Kundizeza accusation adds another. Whatever the outcome of the case, these controversies reveal a troubling predicament: Even as the literary world struggles to determine what constitutes AI-assisted writing, Black and brown writers have repeatedly been forced to defend the authenticity of their work.

One of the problems with adjudicating these situations is that no one has spelled out what, exactly, constitutes cheating. It is virtually impossible to open up a Microsoft Word or Google document without encountering AI tools that encourage you to rewrite your prose. If you accept that assistance and your work is subsequently flagged by a detection program as AI-generated, have you cheated? What if you drop a completed story into a chatbot text box and request edits? Established writers have the benefit of publishing their work in well-resourced periodicals where it is edited by multiple humans; the resulting article, regardless of how many sentences were drafted, deleted, or polished to a sheen by other hands, is credited to one person. Is it wrong for an emerging writer to seek similar assistance from artificial intelligence? Many people are quick to accuse individual writers of cheating, but technology companies have integrated AI assistance into so many parts of our lives, and the literary world has yet to agree on where assistance ends and authorship begins.

My greatest worry is that the arrival of AI has imposed yet another set of expectations on Black and African writers. Not only must our work satisfy the literary marketplace, but it must also distinguish itself from the machines that have learned to imitate its conventions. Over the years, the establishment has rewarded predictability and accessibility—the very qualities that now make writing suspect. As our Zambian retreat drew to a close a decade ago, many of us reached a conclusion that seemed almost impractical then but feels urgent and essential now: We had to ignore the noise and market signals and, to borrow from the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, write whatever we liked.

Be sure to visit the Nikon Small World competition website to view the full set of winning and honored images.

Today The Atlantic launches “50 Unforgettable Love Stories,” a new editorial project that highlights stories of romantic love. The list includes works published across more than four centuries—from its earliest selection, Astrophil and Stella by Philip Sidney, published in 1591, to its most recent, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, published in 2024. The list below is an effort to name the love stories—novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that are the most enduring.

To arrive at 50 titles, The Atlantic’s Books team asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. As the introduction to the list says: “We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.”

The editors write that across centuries, “the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature … Today, fictional love is associated with the romance genre and its proliferating subcategories, and you’ll find examples of those books here, but we aimed to think more expansively about its literary manifestations. The love story belongs as much to Arundhati Roy as to Jane Austen; its pulse beats as strongly in the knotty poetry of Anne Carson as it does in the steamy historicals of Beverly Jenkins. It is by turns ecstatic, tragic, cerebral, enthralling, and enlightening. For so many of us, it’s a reason to live and to read.”

“50 Unforgettable Love Stories” is part of The Atlantic’s robust Books section, devoted to essays, criticism, reporting, original fiction, poetry, and book recommendations, as well as The Atlantic’s weekly Books Briefing newsletter. This follows The Atlantic’s earlier books projects “65 Essential Children’s Books,” released in October 2025, “The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far),” published in March 2025, and “The Great American Novels,” released in 2024.

Press Contacts:
Paul Jackson and Sammi Sontag | The Atlantic
press@theatlantic.com

Marisa G. Franco is familiar with the art of secure attachment. She’s spent years studying it: that coveted quality that makes some people so trusting, so quick to accept that they are, in fact, loved. She wrote the 2022 best seller Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends. She knows how to make connections without being clingy, how to be self-sufficient without pushing people away, how to avoid taking things personally.

Well—she knows how all of that should look in theory. In reality, Franco told me, she can be sensitive. She can get hurt by someone who’s not doing anything remotely wrong. At some point, she realized that she was striving so hard to be secure that she was performing well-adjustedness for her own therapist. “There’s this way that I can lean on the very real parts of myself that feel proud and feel happy and impressive and glittery,” she said. “But there were these other parts of myself that felt ashamed or felt needy, and I would try to not talk about them.” The truth, of course, was that her therapist needed her not to be composed or even coping, but to be honest. And if she wasn’t being honest, she was arguably wasting time.

That lesson is at the core of her latest book, Worth: The New Science of Self-Esteem and Secure Attachment. Nominally, Worth is about how to become more self-assured. But as soon as Franco presents that possibility, she upends it by suggesting that it may be impossible. Maybe most people are just a bunch of insecurities in a trench coat, one stiff wind away from toppling over. Perhaps, she suggests, they should accept their weak or tender spots, all of their little ways of being defensive or touchy—and settle, if anything, for “secure-ish.” This might seem like a defeatist argument for a self-help book, but it’s an apt one at a time when the literary-self-help industry is thriving. Many of Franco’s readers may already be fluent in therapy-speak, ready to chat about attachment theory, and keenly interested, as she was, in presenting themselves as mended and enlightened. She’s not convinced it’s helping.

In the past decade or so, the self-improvement industry has grown colossal. According to Gitnux, a market-research firm, U.S. self-help books earned a collective $813 million in 2023 alone. And the behemoth has sprouted new arms: With the mega reach of platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Spotify, people can consume a constant drip of life advice. One hungry customer might listen to the audio book of James Clear’s Atomic Habits on the way to work, use a meditation app on their lunch break, and scroll through some therapist-influencer posts in the evening. Then, while getting ready for bed, they could turn on The Mel Robbins Podcast—the most followed show on Apple Podcasts last year, from the author of The Let Them Theory, the best-selling book about tuning out other people’s judgments. Gitnux reported that 52 percent of the industry’s patrons were “repeat buyers”—and some analyses have found that the literary-self-help category specifically caters to a pool that’s 80 percent repeat customers. If you’re looking to publish something new in the genre, you have an enormous potential audience of people who take self-optimization very seriously.

That opportunity is also a challenge for authors like Franco. They have to set themselves apart—and maybe even help readers unlearn guidance they’ve already hoovered up. Some writers have started speaking explicitly to this task (which allows them to signal a bit of knowingness about their company in the self-improvement aisle). In his 2021 best seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, for instance, Oliver Burkeman argues against the idea that any one trick will get you on top of your to-do list; your best hope, he says, is to accept that a human life is terribly brief, far too brief to accomplish all of your goals. In Amir Levine’s 2026 book, Secure, the Columbia University neuroscientist questions the feasibility of mining security within yourself—and instead suggests seeking out people who make you feel valued from the start.

[Read: The psychiatrist’s case for downsizing a friendship]

Franco’s approach, too, is a little meta. Before she started this book, she looked around and saw a “group of people that was just trying so hard to heal,” she told me. They could resolve conflict with “I” statements, speaking about their own feelings rather than jumping to blame others. They could set boundaries. They were hoping to become the perfect partner, or break cycles of generational trauma. And yet, she said, “it just didn’t seem like it was working.” She recognized herself in their show of composure. (I pictured the “this is fine” dog grinning vacant-eyed through the flames.) So she didn’t want to give people more ways to go through the motions. She wanted to know: “What does it mean to feel secure in the marrow of your bones?”

A conventional idea of self-worth might involve embracing what Franco called “glittery” attributes: reminding yourself of your strengths, accepting compliments, spending time with people who see your best sides. But she calls on evidence that shows that, much of the time, positive feedback can backfire. Psychology studies have shown that participants with low self-esteem felt worse after receiving compliments or after repeating aloud “I’m a lovable person.” When people received praise for giving a speech, researchers observed actual spikes in their blood pressure. One explanation can be found in “self-verification theory”: the uncomfortable tension one feels between their own self-image (bad and stupid) and how others see them (not perfect, but perfectly valuable). “At the neural level,” Franco writes, “the brains of people who feel unworthy are sticky for criticism and slick for love.” (All of the screenshots of nice messages I’ve saved to my computer, I concede, haven’t fixed me yet.)

Worth, then, is about setting down all of the tools you have for demolishing your flaws—and instead looking at your insecurities plainly, asking where they come from. Franco believes they’re rooted in the past: Even if you had amazing parents and a great childhood, you might still have some formative memories of times when someone made you feel less than, whether intentionally or not. Psychologists use the phrase open memories for the ones you haven’t come to terms with. You push them away, or you fixate on them unhelpfully, or you burst into tears when you talk about them. They’re too painful to bear. They’re also associated, in some studies, with low self-esteem. Securely attached people, according to the classic theory, can describe their own traumas without getting overwhelmed by or denying feeling; their memories still sting, but they’re “closed.” But Franco is speaking to people who might be in such a rush to move forward that they haven’t effectively processed what they’ve gone through.

Thus, Franco walks the reader through some ways to gently fold those memories shut. One is the act of “memory reconsolidation”—which involves recalling a painful event but then changing it in some way, perhaps by imagining a different outcome or picturing what the present version of yourself would tell the version of you from that time. This is different from rumination, she says, which is when you revisit a memory obsessively but superficially. Instead, you really feel what a recollection brings up for you, and then you inject the memory with some new, more positive meaning.

Franco mentions a memory-reconsolidation study in which one participant, for instance, recalled how a partner had lied to her about committing a crime (which he was ultimately arrested for); she then pictured reassuring her younger self that she wasn’t at fault for believing him. A week after this exercise, participants rated their chosen memories as less upsetting and reported higher self-esteem overall. Other studies have shown that similar processes alter activity in the hippocampus, the hub of memory storage. “We become emotional archaeologists, digging out the grounds of our psyche,” Franco writes, “and then we build over them with a new psychological home.”

[Read: How ‘somatics’ became the solution to modern life]

There’s no way around it: That kind of excavation is painful work. Franco doesn’t believe that you can heal with a sense of urgency—what she calls “dragging the dog across the street on its hind legs”—or bypass vulnerability by using therapy terms, branding your ex as a gaslighter or your parents as narcissists and moving on.

Perhaps devoting so much attention to your own wounds sounds a little navel-gazey; I myself wondered, at times, whether Franco might be preaching self-reflection to a whole lot of people who already monitor their own happiness and growth so much that it makes them miserable. But she argues that the point is ultimately to avoid that kind of endlessly self-involved intellectualizing by having an actual emotional experience. In one study, she says in Worth, the depth of a client’s emotion—how much they expressed feelings such as sorrow and fury—was the best predictor of whether therapy would raise their self-esteem. “I don’t get to change,” she said on our call, “without going through grief.”

And even grieving won’t make you perfectly secure on the other end. The goal, instead, is “integration”: welcoming the hurt and ugly parts of yourself into your self-image along with the shiny parts, and feeling that you deserve kindness anyhow. That message might be especially crucial for the self-help heads—the ones trying so hard to fix themselves that they’re re-creating all the shame that may have made them feel unworthy in the first place.

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Centuries before bookstores had shelves labeled ROMANCE and fictional hockey players locked eyes across the ice, the love story, with all of its attendant joys and sorrows, was an organizing principle of life—and of literature. The sentiment that another person might “complete” us enchanted both Plato and Jerry Maguire, and the search for that someone, along with the desire to understand why it can hurt so bad, has animated fiction from the beginning. The list below is an effort to name those love stories: novels, of course, but also poetry, plays, and short stories—that we consider to be the most enduring. We asked a jury of scholars, librarians, critics, and authors across genres, as well as many colleagues, to name their favorite titles that were originally written in English. We thought of our own personal touchstones, deliberated over the choices, and emerged with a group of standouts: 50 titles you won’t soon forget.

English is not reputed to be the most romantic language, but it is the most widely spoken. (Focusing on these particular love stories was also a practical way to narrow things down.) Since the end of the Renaissance, when modern English began to take shape, poets and playwrights wrote tales of wooing and marriage, infatuation and betrayal. Their words gave rise to some of our language’s most powerful aphorisms, idioms, and, yes, clichés—think of hearts on sleeves and matches made in heaven. Today, fictional love is associated with the romance genre and its proliferating subcategories, and you’ll find examples of those books here, but we aimed to think more expansively about its literary manifestations. The love story belongs as much to Arundhati Roy as to Jane Austen; its pulse beats as strongly in the knotty poetry of Anne Carson as it does in the steamy historicals of Beverly Jenkins. It is by turns ecstatic, tragic, cerebral, enthralling, and enlightening. For so many of us, it’s a reason to live and to read.

Explore the unforgettable love stories

Astrophil and Stella

by Philip Sidney

1591

Well before the novel existed to plot out the course of infatuation and heartbreak, grand sequences of sonnets chronicled the rise and fall of great loves. One of the most radical of these was Sidney’s, which follows Astrophil (“star lover” in Greek) and his beloved, the celestial Stella, across 108 sonnets and a handful of songs. To woo her, Astrophil displays his wit via the wordplay that poets have long used to capture the messy states of the heart—and show off the dexterity of the writer. But Sidney’s sequence stands out because of his awareness that the formal devices peppered across his poems are “stol’n goods.” And he wrote a truly compelling story, one that keeps us in suspense until the middle of the series, when Astrophil’s eyes meet Stella’s. Although his paradoxical blandishments may not win him his star in the end, they are a triumph in their own right, seducing and amusing us in a portrait of love-tossed misery.

Walt Hunter

Romeo and Juliet

by William Shakespeare

1597

Shakespeare’s tragedy about young lovers from rival families remains, four centuries later, one of the most adapted plays in the English language. In just the past 30 years, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jet Li, Aaliyah, and Angelina Jolie have all played versions of Romeo or Juliet. There’s been a zombie version and several Bollywood ones. The play was even, if you’ll believe it, reinterpreted with gnomes. (His name becomes Gnomeo, obviously.) The story is inescapable but persists, I think, because of its tantalizing core premise: that you could find a love so passionate, so all-consuming, that you’d rather die than be without it.

Serena Dai

Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister

by Aphra Behn

1684

Behn, best known for her plays and her later novel Oroonoko, was the rare woman to make a living as a writer in the 17th century. This epistolary saga endures, in part, because of its salaciousness. The passion between the aptly named Philander and Silvia, his wife’s sister, is absolutely cursed; their most significant shared interest appears to be bringing upheaval and misery into the lives of everyone they meet. Although the central affair may be unenviable, the book is notable for the sheer range of romantic literary tropes that it helped enshrine—including the wayward lover who only wants what he can’t have, the once-pure soul corrupted by sexual liberty, and the fake relationship that gives rise to real feelings. Above all, it proves that swooning language, nonstop drama, and a tinge of the illicit can make a romance an addictive read, even (and sometimes especially) when its characters are offputting.

Talya Zax

Evelina

by Frances Burney

1778

Burney’s novel is a romance in every sense of the word. Yes, it’s a book about the golden-hearted young woman of the title, Evelina, falling in love with a wealthy, dashing young man—a preview of the marriage plots of Jane Austen, who counted Burney as one of her favorite authors. But it’s also a romantic novel in the older literary sense, the kind of mildly fantastical tale in which an impoverished Scottish poet considers turning to a life of crime, only to wed an heiress once it becomes apparent that she is not, as was previously suspected, his half sister. Evelina’s blissfully unrealistic quest for both love and personal recognition—spoiler: she turns out to be an heiress too—is both sharply observant and a lark. It deserves more love from a literary culture that adores Austen but often ignores her predecessors.

Talya Zax

Persuasion

by Jane Austen

1817

Austen is the empress of romance, and her work sets the bar for all of the love stories patterned after hers. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma each could rightfully claim a spot on this list. But Persuasion is Austen’s most mature and realistic novel. It tells the story of a single, not-so-young woman who is reunited after many years with the man she rejected at 19. Its prose is calmer and less intent on cleverness than Austen’s other works, and it is suffused with the disappointments and hardships that accompany any life lived past the age of 20. So the happy ending, when it inevitably comes—this is still a classic romance, after all—feels especially well-earned.

Eleanor Barkhorn

Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

1847

The full title of this coming-of-age novel is Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. That deliberate move emphasizes the authority of the titular heroine—a governess who is poor, orphaned, and unbeautiful—to narrate the story of her life. So it is impossible to discuss the soul-cracking love story between Jane and her employer, Edward Rochester of Thornfield Hall, without paying heed to Jane’s assertion of control when she learns, to her horror, that Rochester is already married to a Creole woman named Bertha Mason. Bertha is treated cruelly by both Rochester and the author, and Jane ultimately profits from her suffering. Whether one blames Jane is another topic. But this famous book’s famous line toward the end—“Reader, I married him”—states her case: Jane’s allegiance is not the passive sort. She owns her decision.

Rachel Vorona Cote

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Brontë

1847

Few, if any, books on this list should be read as a how-to guide for the romantically inclined. That said, you really, really, really shouldn’t model your affairs on the doomed relationship that propels Brontë’s only novel. Wuthering Heights conjures a vision of love as despair and longing, not a living thing to be nurtured but a cold, hard object clutched fervently to your chest. When Victorian-era social mores keep the childhood sweethearts Cathy and Heathcliff apart, Heathcliff decides that nobody in their vicinity should ever be happy, and drafts a revenge plot to upend an already-miserable family. Also, everyone is constantly dying of consumption or trying to kill a dog. Nonetheless, this is the stuff of messy myth, the sort of lifelong obsession that makes all other entanglements seem paltry and cheap. Naturally, the pair is reunited only in death, as their specters meet again on the windswept moorlands.

Jeremy Gordon

North and South

by Elizabeth Gaskell

1854

With the rise of industry in mid-19th-century England came the industrial novel, an improbably romantic genre. In Gaskell’s version, a rocky courtship mirrors the country’s labor wars. The cultured, genteel Margaret Hale is forced to leave a village in the agrarian south for a squalid city in the industrial north (a thinly disguised Manchester), where she gets caught up in the lives of desperately poor workers. Meanwhile, she is befriended by a Byronic, self-made cotton-mill owner, John Thornton. The novel tracks her sentimental education—and his—as they overcome class prejudices and hotly debate Thornton’s obligations to his employees. A strike and near riot lead to a shocking, at least by the standards of the day, public display of affection; the greater the threat of violence becomes, the more the book swoons. Imagine Pride and Prejudice updated for a more political age, and you’ll get a sense of the pleasures of North and South. 

Judith Shulevitz

Middlemarch

by George Eliot

1871

Eliot wrote novels about marriages both good and bad, usually bad. In Middlemarch, these unions function as worlds unto themselves—created by, but larger than, the couples inside of them—and the bad ones crush the soul. Two of this novel’s several protagonists, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, suffer from romantic illusions, and each chooses an utterly unsuitable partner: The idealistic Dorothea thinks she’s marrying a great scholar, but he turns out to be spectacularly mediocre, so tyrannical and small-minded that his last name, Casaubon, has become shorthand for “pettifogging pedant.” Lydgate has a brilliant future as a doctor but falls for a beautiful, vain woman with expensive social aspirations. One of these two will be trapped for life, and the other freed only by an act of God. Eliot is willing to give characters a chance at love, though, and the horribleness of the bad marriages makes the good ones feel like a major spiritual achievement.

Judith Shulevitz

The Portrait of a Lady

by Henry James

1881

Should The Portrait of a Lady be considered one of James’s ghost stories? The characters are alive but their choices linger like a haunting, and when I think of this classic, I feel as though I’m encountering a phantom. The story of Isabel Archer, a young woman who wants to believe that her life is her own to determine, is classic James, down to its settings and psychological contradictions. The friends Isabel encounters are taken with who she is and ache to see her get what she wants, just as the reader will; the men and women who want to use her for their own needs are villains unlike any other—their machinations are what haunt me. This is all to say it’s the most romantic book I’ve ever read, one that understands how dangerous it is to be a woman who believes in love’s powers—and yet how necessary it is to retain that belief, no matter the fears that hang over us.

Haley Mlotek

Anne of the Island

by L. M. Montgomery

1915

When readers meet Anne Shirley, she’s an irresistible mess of contradictions: an 11-year-old tomboy who’s vain about her looks, an occasional liar who is also capable of searching honesty. These qualities make her unforgettable to those around her, not least to Gilbert Blythe, the boy in class who teases her, competes with her, befriends her, and ultimately becomes her lifelong love. The joy of the Anne of Green Gables series lies in the specific delights of watching Anne grow up—and in how affectionately it widens its lens to show us Gilbert growing up next to her. Anne of the Island, the third book, is where this happens in earnest, as the two head to college and wrestle with what they want from the wider world. As almost-adults, Anne and Gilbert look for love with other people, get jobs as teachers, and learn about sacrifice and (on one particular night) the possibility of loss. The twists and turns are classic, but you’ll thrill at seeing both of them wend their way toward the other, because you know how lively a partnership theirs will be: These two friends, who know each other better than anyone else, are idiosyncratic as individuals and will be no less so as a couple.

Jane Yong Kim

The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

1920

Wharton’s magnum opus is a voyeur’s novel, written for those who love to gawk, by a woman who invited her readers to gape at New York’s “small and slippery pyramid” of Gilded Age high society. Among its velvet-caped, silver-spooned denizens, someone is always, always watching. The Age of Innocence is an agonizing tale of the rigors of unconsummated love. The dutiful Newland Archer is blissfully engaged to the demure May Welland until he spies her cousin, Ellen Olenska—who has just returned from a broken, ruinous marriage—at the opera. Ellen is everything Newland craves: cultured, candid, independent. She’s simultaneously drawn to him and hobbled by guilt. But being together would mean betraying May. So how will they exist—and coexist—in stifling, closely surveilled Manhattan? The novel’s last image, a gaze at a closing window, is as heartbreaking as any of literature’s most dramatic deaths.

Hillary Kelly

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

1925

I know, I know: The Great Gatsby is a love story in the way that Jaws is a nature documentary. But the romance between Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan—slow-burning, explosive, doomed—endures precisely because it is so richly unromantic. This affair, as it picks up speed, threatens everyone in its path. Gatsby pines for Daisy and waits for Daisy and reinvents himself for Daisy. He builds, and then takes residence in, a Daisy-centric universe. In another novel, that kind of devotion would be something to be celebrated—desire as a physical force, passion as the ultimate plot device. In Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, though, passion is also an omen; like Chekhov’s gun, or George Wilson’s, it is always lying in wait. But the novel, having stripped romance of its giddiness, offers something far more compelling in return: ambivalence. Is this devotion? Is it delusion? Or is it one more party, glittering and wild, that will have to come to an end?

Megan Garber

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

1927

When a rope bridge in Peru collapses in July 1714, killing five people, the Franciscan friar Brother Juniper wants to know: Why did these five souls perish—was it an accident or divine intention? This simple question propels Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel into a brilliant exploration of attachment and its flawed, human expressions—the suffocating love of the Marquesa for her daughter; the self-sacrificing love of young Pepita for the abbess who raised her; the codependent love between the twin brothers Esteban and Manuel, which leaves no room for romance; and the manipulative love of Uncle Pio for the great actor La Perichole. Almost 100 years after The Bridge of San Luis Rey was first published, its last sentence still feels like a surprise ending, somehow striking a hopeful note: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Molly Roden Winter

Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Zora Neale Hurston

1937

Janie Crawford is a freethinking Black woman who yearns for a steady love, but her quest for it ultimately leads her toward her own highest self. Marriage, in this novel, can be disfiguring, and it forces women to shrink parts of themselves. Before she’s 40, Janie has been through two painful relationships with men who harm her, belittle her, and control her. But even when she’s curled in on herself, Hurston’s microscopic gaze manages to show us the fine grooves of Janie’s heart. Finally, approaching middle age, she meets and marries a younger man named Tea Cake; her feelings for him are so intense that she experiences a “self-crushing love.” But the line that shook me is as follows: “So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.” She genuinely adores Tea Cake, but their marriage, too, will end—and, wisely, she’ll have saved an ounce more of that love for herself.

Jenisha Watts

Arabella

by Georgette Heyer

1949

Arabella is the blueprint for modern Regency romances—the whole etiquette-driven Bridgerton-esque subgenre. The title character is the eldest daughter of a poor country vicar, and she must marry well for the sake of her younger siblings. Mr. Beaumaris is the richest, most eligible local bachelor—and he’s committed to staying single and away from scheming women. To save her pride, Arabella tells Mr. Beaumaris a string of lies. Amused and intrigued, he stays in her endearing orbit, content to watch her navigate the ridiculous situations these lies get her into, until they both fall madly for each other. Hilarious and deeply romantic, the 1949 novel offers historical detail and sharp commentary on the era’s social conventions that make it feel as if Heyer was writing alongside Jane Austen in 1817.

Danica Nava

The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

1951

The End of the Affair is the fourth and final of Greene’s “Catholic novels.” The book’s autofictional protagonist, Maurice Bendrix, has a passionate affair with the married Sarah Miles. Their union is plagued by his jealousy; after Bendrix’s London apartment is bombed during World War II, Sarah ends things abruptly. A private investigator reveals that Sarah had promised God that she would quit the affair if Bendrix survived. More drama ensues, but the book’s real accomplishment is its close examination of the nature of ardor. I first read it at 19, and although I am not a Catholic, I was raised by one, and I inherited something of his tormented relationship to devotion. The question the book left me with was one that I had wondered before, if cautiously: What if all love derives, ultimately, from the divine?

Melissa Febos

The Price of Salt

by Patricia Highsmith

1952

When Highsmith’s 1952 novel opens, the 19-year-old Therese Belivet is working the Christmas rush at a Manhattan department store. With its crowded workers’ canteen and lonely employees, the store is likened to a prison. One day, a blond woman with a fur coat and gray eyes approaches Therese’s counter, and Highsmith leaves the administered world of the department store for the open road. Compared with Todd Haynes’s ravishing 2015 film adaptation, Carol, the novel is spikier, more political, and attentive to the repression and surveillance of Cold War America. Highsmith’s eye for quotidian detail gives the writing a lived-in quality: When, two-thirds of the way through, the two women share their first kiss, Therese notices the lock of hair toppling over Carol’s scarf, the scratch on the toe of her moccasin. Their devotion is ordinary, anchored in everyday things—but it is this kind of love, the book suggests, that might set us free.

Charlie Tyson

Giovanni’s Room

by James Baldwin

1956

Giovanni’s Room is a novel of terrible romantic abjection. David, an idle American in Paris, frightened and ashamed of his attraction to men, meets Giovanni, an Italian who has fled his country and works at a gay bar. Their love is, from the beginning, doomed by David’s unremitting self-hatred—his imprisonment in his own “dirty body” and his fear of its uncontrollable, irresistible longings. Desire is always shadowed by disgust, which casts a tragic pall over these two lovers in the city of lights.

Merve Emre

Maurice

by E. M. Forster

1971

In 1913, Forster had a life-changing experience: A man touched his “backside—gently and just above the buttocks,” as he described it later. Forster was 34 years old and already established as one of England’s best novelists, but he had never come to terms with his homosexuality, much less written about it. Now he set to work on a love story about two men. What made Maurice revolutionary was Forster’s insistence that Maurice Hall, the repressed, middle-class protagonist, not meet with a tragic ending—the usual fate of gay characters in fiction at the time. Instead, he and Alec Scudder, a working-class gamekeeper, fall in love and, as Alec declares, decide that they “shan’t be parted no more, and that’s finished.” Even after completing the novel, Forster felt it was too radical to publish. When it finally appeared in 1971, after his death, Maurice already seemed a little old-fashioned to critics. But even today, there is great power in the novel’s undefended emotion—the tremulous happiness of a wish fulfilled.

Adam Kirsch

The Flame and the Flower

by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss

1972

This is the godmother of all bodice rippers. As might be expected of a ’70s novel set in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina, the modern reader may want a heads up: It includes sexual assault, slavery, and kidnapping—but contemporary objections can’t override its compelling central pairing. Heather Simmons, an innocent British orphan, and Brandon Birmingham, a stubborn American ship captain, overcome their harrowing first encounter and cultural differences to give themselves permission to love. Heather learns to take control of her life, and Brandon promises to spend the rest of his making up for any pain she’s suffered. Explicit sex scenes, rare in books of the time, reveal the intimacy usually elided by “fade to black” paragraphs, and their influence can still be found today in heaps of romantic subgenres. Woodiwiss’s detailed, lush prose inspires both wistful admiration and, however begrudging, real respect.

Nichole Perkins

Corregidora

by Gayl Jones

1975

Has Ursa Corregidora ever really been loved? She was a deeply wanted daughter, yes—in part so she could fill the role of a Corregidora woman. From a young age, she has known that her job is to remember the violence done to their family during slavery and to “make generations” that will pass down that memory. Her husband, Mutt, courted her, praised her, and bedded her—then he threw her down the stairs, leading to an emergency hysterectomy that left her childless. Men and women constantly paw at her, demanding affection, fidelity, and sex. So Ursa has a hard shell, and she knows how to hate. She’s scared, though, that she doesn’t know what love looks like. In the course of this short, bleak, transportive book, no one will sweep her off her feet to show her. But she’ll be able to recognize what it’s not: “You can’t kiss where you scratched anymore,” she resolves. “You don’t treat love that way.”

Emma Sarappo

Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

1979

After 45 years, I can still recite this novel’s intense opening lines. I wasn’t 17, as the narrator is—I read the novel during my junior year of college—but I wanted to be, like him, in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands. This is the kind of book that, if you allow it, will seize you from the first and never let you go, then consume your imagination long after you finish. Endless Love is an unashamed dive into the monomania of romantic obsession. It contains one of the most honest, longest, bloodiest sex scenes in all of literature. It also conveys the pain and sadness of being that young, wanting that much, and running up hard against the limits of your world and your self. I haven’t read Endless Love since I was 20. Today I might find it marred by its excesses, but that might be a sign of something lacking in myself.

George Packer

The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard

1980

Midway through The Transit of Venus, the awkward, brilliant scientist Ted Tice learns that Caroline Bell—the object of his unrequited passion and the heroine of the novel—has married. In his subsequent daze, he finds that “grief had a painter’s eye, assigning arbitrary meaning at random—like God.” Has personal tragedy ever sounded more enthralling? Hazzard’s masterpiece follows the orphaned Caroline and her sister, Grace, through the decades of profound change that followed World War II, as each discovers how love can circumscribe a life. Few of the relationships in this novel are happy, but all of them are so finely wrought that to read them is almost to live them—to feel, as Ted does, with an intensity that is both painful and enlightening.

Talya Zax

Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

1984

The titular potion in Love Medicine does not work as planned. In fact, the overriding theme of Erdrich’s debut novel, a prismatic saga following one Chippewa family, is that love can be neither predicted nor controlled. The Kashpaws form a giant tumbleweed of a family tree, whose complexity owes to a love triangle in the early 20th century. The progenitors are the handsome, passive Nector; his headstrong wife, Marie; and the wandering Lulu, who goes on to have a brood of children with different fathers. Erdrich’s panorama makes room for dozens of fascinating characters, but the love story sets everything in motion, and decades later it comes to a perfectly fitting conclusion. Love Medicine is, among many things, a brief against shame. As Lulu says when she gets to plead her case, “When they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw.”

Boris Kachka

Beloved

by Toni Morrison

1987

Beloved asks readers to imagine something as pure and perfect as love—a mother caring for her child; two broken people trying to make something beautiful—in the face of absolute misery and ugliness. That’s where the book’s potency comes from: the tension between the darkness and the light. Sethe, its main character, has committed unspeakable violence toward her own daughter, but she was motivated by maternal devotion. Having survived that transformational tragedy, she has to decide whether she can allow anyone to love her again. Beloved evokes both the peril of motherhood and its singular power. Reading it, I wanted to fold myself into the pages and then fall out of my skin. It’s painful, but what’s even more devastating is that the novel is one of the most banned books in America. How dare we rob the next generation of its greatness?

Jenisha Watts

The Remains of the Day

by Kazuo Ishiguro

1989

This novel is, to borrow a term from Saint Augustine, a story of disordered love. Stevens, the narrator, is an impeccably mannered British butler who loves his country, his profession, and his master—all worthy enough objects of devotion, in the abstract. His fidelity blinds him, however, to the cruelty and fecklessness that his nation and employer are capable of—and to just how humiliating some of his work can be. Even more tragically, his sense of duty compels him to deny love to the flesh-and-blood humans in his midst: He abandons his dying father so that he can better tend to a dinner his master is hosting; he refuses to acknowledge, let alone reciprocate, the clear affection of a fellow servant. The anguish of reading this novel lies in watching a man with such a deep capacity for love direct it to exactly the wrong places.

Eleanor Barkhorn

Possession

by A. S. Byatt

1990

Possession opens in 1986, in the reading room of the London Library, where mysterious letters discovered by a young academic jolt the plot into action. It ends in the 19th century, with a devastating scene in which the letters’ author stops to chat with a child. In between is a detective story about two sets of prospective lovers more than 100 years apart: In the 1980s, a dueling pair of scholars—one the careful, if old-fashioned, philologist who finds the letters and the other a glamorous, feminist critic—seek to understand a secret romance through notes and correspondence. In the past, we meet the Victorian poets who are the subjects of that search as they leave behind the traces that will be puzzled over and plumbed. The book is extravagant, high-concept, and a total tearjerker, distinctive for its empathy toward its characters and their sense of the possible—and for its many passages of people falling head over heels for each other’s writing.

Hillary Chute

Mating

by Norman Rush

1991

“Why do we yield” to love, asks this novel’s narrator, “when we don’t have to?” She’s an intellectually voracious anthropologist overwhelmed by a new romance—and she’d “like to know as a woman and a human being, both.” Mating is Rush’s effort to get to the bottom of that unanswerable question: Why is it that sex and love make the smartest, most confident, and most in-control of us fall apart? But the novel isn’t just intellectual; far from it. Rush gives his book every possible kind of drama, from the erotic to the geopolitical—and, what’s more, he imbues his writing with a real (if wry) optimism that has turned Mating into a cult classic of our sometimes-pessimistic age.

Lily Meyer

The Blue Flower

by Penelope Fitzgerald

1995

When the German Romantic poet Novalis, real name Friedrich “Fritz” von Hardenburg, was in his early 20s, he fell in love with a 12-year-old named Sophie von Kühn. (This utterly inappropriate match was thankfully never consummated, owing to her early death.) In his grief, Novalis wrote a fragmentary novel about a man who longs to see a mysterious “blue flower,” which would provide the material for Fitzgerald’s gently comic, subtly insightful book. Here, Fritz’s idolization of the distinctly ordinary Sophie, whom he calls “my wisdom” and “my Philosophy,” is clearly the ridiculous acting-out of a young man who wants drama—but in Fitzgerald’s skillful hands, it’s also an idealistic, even beautiful, pursuit of the self-abnegation that can come with love.

Lily Meyer

“Brokeback Mountain”

by Annie Proulx

1997

The source material for the film that won Ang Lee an Oscar and became pop-culture shorthand is only about 10,000 words long. How, in just one short story, did Proulx manage to fit in one of the most stirring depictions of romantic ecstasy that I’ve ever read? Her measured, inventive sentences follow Jack and Ennis, who meet in the summer of 1963 while herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain, in Wyoming, and experience a lightning-strike intimacy that keeps them tied together for decades. Proulx wrote what became the film’s most memorable line—“I wish I knew how to quit you”—but much of the story’s prose should be equally famous. Chronology is dictated here only by desire—years go by in a paragraph; a single embrace oozes across a page. Love, Proulx shows, warps the minutes: Every meeting both lasts forever and ends in an agonizing second.

Valerie Trapp

The God of Small Things

by Arundhati Roy

1997

In her Booker Prize–winning novel about the tragic fallout of a taboo-breaking liaison, Roy repeats a few distinct phrases again and again. One is the image of a “hole in the Universe” that takes various shapes: a person, or a cat, or “History.” Although The God of Small Things overflows with monsoon-drenched flora, industrial pollutants, bitterness, and scheming, it has a love-shaped hole in its center that is filled only at the very end. From the first pages, we know that Estha and Rahel, fraternal twins in a prosperous but dissipated family in India’s Kerala region, have seen their lives ruined after a blurry sequence of events that led to death and exile. Slowly, inevitably, Roy closes in on a brief, forbidden dalliance that defies India’s caste system. Romance, in this story, is usually defined by its absence, and yet passion is everywhere. Sometimes desire blooms beautifully; more often, it remains untended, left to rot.

Boris Kachka

I Love Dick

by Chris Kraus

1997

When this book was first published, the Dick of the title, a real-life sociologist, was quoted in New York magazine denigrating the work as “a bad review of my presence in the world.” This revealed his identity, even though Kraus had tried partly to obscure it—after all, the book isn’t a memoir. It’s instead a species of autofiction, a collection of billets-doux to Dick written by Kraus’s protagonist, also named Chris, with her husband, named Sylvère, like Kraus’s actual then-husband. Her aim is to “take an experience that was so completely female”—the private, abject state of unrequited romantic obsession—and treat it seriously, like material for academic study. What results is a genre-bending feminist work powered by the engine of infatuation. As Chris puts it: “Desire isn’t lack, it’s surplus energy.” Dick is right that he doesn’t come out looking so great, but the book is only nominally about him anyway.

Christina McCausland

Tipping the Velvet

by Sarah Waters

1998

Waters’s moving portrait of the anguish that follows falling in and out of love is as erotic as it is engrossing. After a young girl named Nan becomes smitten with Kitty, a “masher” (or male impersonator), she follows her new flame to London, only to endure a terrible betrayal. The Victorian capital has never been as alive as it is in Tipping the Velvet: The 19th-century theater world gives way to the city’s seedy underground before the book peeks in on socialist organizing. Every plot thread is loaded with commentary on class, sexuality, and gender. Beautiful, passionate, and historically clever, this is no ordinary bildungsroman.

Chinelo Okparanta

Autobiography of Red

by Anne Carson

1998

A little red monster with wings falls in love with the Greek hero Herakles. The two go to hell to visit Herakles’s grandmother, break up, and reunite years later at a Peruvian volcano. Autobiography of Red claims to have recovered this improbable plot from bits of writing by Stesichoros, a Greek poet from the sixth century B.C.E.; Carson begins with invented “fragments” from Stesichoros and three scholarly looking appendixes before starting her original, woozy love story in earnest. Early on, Geryon is 14, abused by his brother and adored by his mother. A chance encounter with Herakles at a bus station leads to a teenage romance and some of the most transcendent love poetry of the late 20th century. Geryon ultimately finds his calling as a photographer; the book concludes with a description of his snapshots, which arrest the characters in a state of longing—with “immortality on their faces, night at their back.”

Walt Hunter

Peel My Love Like an Onion

by Ana Castillo

1999

Flamenco isn’t just a dance for Carmen Santos, she reminds us frequently. It’s a way of life. It gave her the ability to walk without crutches when she was a child, her leg withered by polio; it gave her a living in her 20s; it allowed her to make art when no one believed that she could. And it introduced her to the two great loves of her life: her older mentor, Agustín, who brought her into his company and made her his mistress for 17 years, and the young dancer Manolo, who gave her a year of passion unlike any she’d known before. Now Carmen is approaching 40, living at home in Chicago, and unable to dance—post-polio syndrome is taking away her hard-earned dexterity. Her mother wishes she’d married and had children, but Carmen regrets nothing. And when both Agustín and Manolo come back into her life, she won’t pretend that her heart is closed—but she knows there are things she won’t give up for love.

Emma Sarappo

Atonement

by Ian McEwan

2001

In one sense, Atonement is a classic love story: a sweeping, romantic account of two people pulled to each other with inexplicable, magnetic force. Yet few interactions between Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis actually occur in these pages; their relationship is a specter, mostly present in the hovering question of what could have been. Early on, Briony—a precocious 13-year-old writer—walks in on Cecilia, her older sister, having sex with Robbie, their housekeeper’s son. Misunderstanding what she’s seen, or perhaps motivated to puppet-master reality as she does in her stories, Briony makes a false accusation that lands Robbie in prison. The rest of the book is about her decision’s ruinous repercussions. Some novels cast love as a type of fiction, a comforting yarn spun by humans who can never really access one another’s internal worlds. In Atonement, love is a fact—and the cruelest thing that a story can do is endanger it.

Faith Hill

Call Me by Your Name

by André Aciman

2007

Readers familiar only with the film might be surprised by the elegance and interiority of Aciman’s writing. No author since Proust has given readers such a nuanced understanding of the human heart—not just the forward arrow of reciprocated desire but also the insecurities, crossed signals, ambiguity, and doubt. Call Me By Your Name is a novel that, at last, tells the truth about love.

Andrew Sean Greer

The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

2011

Almost 15 years after The Song of Achilles was first published, the bookstore I co-own, the Ripped Bodice, still sells dozens of copies every month. Few other books have this kind of staying power. Miller’s lyrical retelling of The Iliad, focused on Patroclus and Achilles’s romance, is tender, intimate, achingly sentimental, and—because readers know from the beginning where their story is headed—completely devastating. This is one of those rare stories that seems to become more beloved with every passing year.

Leah Koch

The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

2011

Eugenides’s love triangle between three brilliant but naive recent college graduates captures the angst and tumult of having one’s ideals tested by disappointment. His characters exit school steeped in 19th-century novels, semiotics, and the academic-seminar trends of the 1980s, which give grammar and form to their fizzing fantasies but also set them up for hard lessons when they inevitably crash into reality. As both a fan of Eugenides and a recovering English major, I ate this up when it came out, in 2011, and revisit it every couple of years out of affectionate nostalgia.

Jon Hickey

Americanah

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2013

Ifemelu, a feisty, fiercely intelligent fellow at Princeton and a prolific blogger, is considering returning home, to Lagos, after living in America for many years. Her story is juxtaposed with that of her high-school sweetheart, Obinze, who is now married and a successful businessman. They had lost touch in their youth, when Ifemelu migrated to America and Obinze headed to London—but as the book fills us in on their formative years as a teenage couple and the diverging paths that followed, circumstances lead them back to Nigeria and back to each other. In the past, Adichie has objected to the book being classified as a love story, but even she admits that in the end, it is. I agree: Not only is this a love story; it’s an epic one.

Nicole Dennis-Benn

Fates and Furies

by Lauren Groff

2015

The best love stories suggest something about how all relationships function—even when they imply something dark. Fates and Furies concerns the charming and lucky Lotto and his reserved, mysterious wife, Mathilde. First, we hear Lotto’s account of their life together; it’s a compelling drama, if curiously devoid of details about Mathilde’s background. Then we get Mathilde’s version, which reveals how much Lotto never understood, how willing he was to accept a convenient, two-dimensional idea of his wife. Some of the plot details stretch credulity, resulting in a sort of twisted fable of matrimony. Even then, Groff leaves the reader with the chilling suspicion that every ordinary marriage will end, by death or divorce, with its two partners never having grasped the person they’re meant to know best.

Faith Hill

Forbidden

by Beverly Jenkins

2016

Jenkins is one of the most important voices in modern romance, and Forbidden is a perfect example of what she does best. Set during Reconstruction, the novel follows Black characters building lives, communities, and futures in the aftermath of slavery. Yet the weight of that history never overwhelms Rhine and Eddy’s sharp, funny courtship or the rich world that surrounds them. Jenkins has spent decades showing us that Black history is also a story of joy, ambition, and friendship. Forbidden expands our understanding of who gets to be at the center of the American conversation—and it’s also incredibly fun to read.

Leah Koch

Normal People

by Sally Rooney

2018

Rooney is a master of miscommunication. Her two protagonists here, Marianne and Connell, are as star-crossed as Shakespeare’s doomed lovers, and not only because they, too, come from tragically incompatible homes. The main problem, rather, is that they cannot speak plainly about their desires. A classic example: Connell asks Marianne if she wants to see other people, hoping she’ll say no; she thinks that he’s breaking up with her and coldly replies, “Sure.” Revisiting the book recently, I felt the desperate need to ask them to please use their words. But Normal People is about being young—really young—and navigating feelings that are more powerful than your expressive abilities. I found the novel painfully effective at transporting me back to my teens: a time when everything happens in high definition, someone can feel both made for you and completely inscrutable, and the stakes seem paralyzingly high even when they’re patently low. That’s a bit how falling in love feels at any age.

Faith Hill

An American Marriage

by Tayari Jones

2018

Jones’s breakout fourth novel is set in Atlanta—and, like much of her work, it’s an ode to her hometown. It also has more to say about the contemporary American justice system than almost any other novel written in this century. At the start of the book, Celestial, its artist heroine, is newly, happily married to a striver named Roy, a former small-town boy thrilled to take his place among Atlanta’s Black bourgeoisie. But when Roy is wrongfully arrested and incarcerated, Celestial discovers that even her family wants her to perform a stifling public role as his loyal wife that, no matter how much she loves him, leaves no room for the complexity of her grief and loneliness. When her longtime friendship with her childhood neighbor Andre turns romantic, the position that Roy’s imprisonment has put her in is revealed to be untenable—and Jones reveals Celestial to be a heroine for the ages.

Lily Meyer

This Is How You Lose the Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

2019

In this otherworldly novella, love spans time—and then breaks it. Red and Blue are two futuristic agents embroiled in a war fought across universes and decades; their job is to warp world events in order to benefit their opposing governments. Their correspondence begins with taunts before morphing into mutual curiosity, fascination, and, finally, a passionate and forbidden alliance. Their letters explore yearning with such beauty that I challenge any reader to be unaffected. Red’s and Blue’s very essences are at odds, yet they find each other through battle, through centuries, and through twists in their own timelines that hint of betrayal—but are actually proof of a selfless commitment to a dreamed-of future. El-Mohtar and Gladstone’s deft epistolary romance is, in every sense of the word, timeless.

Ashley Herring Blake

Before I Let Go

by Kennedy Ryan

2022

When we first meet the central couple in Before I Let Go, they are already divorced. A series of tragedies have pushed Yasmen and Josiah apart, and they’re separately navigating grief while still co-parenting and working together. Heartbreak and second chances are familiar territory in romance novels, but Ryan’s novel transcends the commonplace. Her story starts with intense passion and adoration—and then, when the unrelenting stressors and crises of the real world interfere, Ryan asks: Is love alone enough to sustain a marriage? Through Yasmen and Josiah, the reader experiences tender moments of self-doubt and self-loathing, the pride of watching someone build themself up, and the spark of desire reigniting after years of being swept aside. Their reconciliation isn’t wrapped in a perfect bow; it’s messy, mercurial, and imperfect—as Ryan writes, “the stuff real happily ever afters were made of.”

Krystle Champagne-Norwood

You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty

by Akwaeke Emezi

2022

Feyi, a Nigerian American artist living in Brooklyn, is dealing with the death of her husband in complicated ways. She pushes for a risky hookup in a bathroom at a party; she paints canvases with animal blood. None of it stops her from having vivid nightmares about how Jonah died—but she’s still trying to move on. She has a not-quite-boyfriend, Nasir, who sweeps her off to his family’s luxurious Caribbean-island estate. Once there, she finds herself drawn to Nasir’s father, Alim, who recognizes Feyi’s sadness. The resulting entanglement is tense, chaotic, and, it must be said, pretty sexy. But the novel isn’t just about the thrill and devastation of an inconvenient attraction. Emezi considers the ways that loss can reshape desire—and the relief that comes from not only being wanted by someone, but also being understood by them.

Elise Hannum

Little Rabbit

by Alyssa Songsiridej

2022

That title is what he calls her—no real names here. He’s “the choreographer,” and she’s just “Rabbit.” They meet in Maine, at an artist’s residency, where nothing happens between them. When they catch up in New York, she’s pulled to him like a dowsing rod to water. She’s queer and hasn’t been with a man in ages. He’s an established artist—rich, powerful, and two decades her senior. At 30, she feels that she knows herself well enough, as a writer and a woman, to indulge her erotic curiosity. Then, before she realizes it, she’s caught in his rip current, being pulled further and further away from everything she knows. The only part that terrifies her: She likes it. Adores it, even. Their partnership remakes everything she’d taken for granted, and Little Rabbit is the story of a person learning to accept what her body’s already decided.

Emma Sarappo

The Safekeep

by Yael van der Wouden

2024

At the beginning of the 1960s, Isabel lives alone in her family home, a house she doesn’t own but has nonetheless burrowed into and absorbed as her whole way of life. One night at dinner, her brother and landlord, Louis, introduces Eva, his girlfriend, who repulses the tightly wound Isabel with her “violently peroxided bob” and overt sexuality. When Louis suggests that Eva move in with Isabel for the summer, Isabel’s furious suspicion turns into erotic obsession. Van der Wouden builds the revelations so elegantly that to spoil them would feel like critical malpractice. The house is more than a house; Isabel’s sour, anxious misanthropy is more than simple repression. And Eva is so much more than a vehicle for sexual awakening—she’s also a puzzle, and she inspires a reckoning. But the ferocious connection between the two women seems to incinerate all of the layers of history and conflict that engulf them, creating space for something new.

Sophie Gilbert

Donald Trump has spent nearly two years investigating, suing, or prosecuting anybody in politics, media, or government who ever defied him. Now, with Democrats poised to win control of one or both chambers of Congress, the administration and its allies are prepared to slip back into their familiar pose of victimhood.

The putative evidence of imminent GOP persecution comes from Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who recently told the Vox journalist Astead Herndon during an event at the University of Chicago that Democrats should pursue accountability for the administration to, among other goals, deter new graduates from enlisting in corrupt schemes. “I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration?’” she said. “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’” Slotkin made these remarks last Tuesday, attracting little notice at the time because she didn’t say anything particularly noteworthy. Five days later, a tidal wave of conservative outrage suddenly crashed over her.

The Republican response has been revealing. Even Trump-skeptical conservatives are signaling that, just as they have in the past, his party will rally behind him the moment someone proposes that the laws of the country should be enforced if Trump is found to have engaged in misconduct. He has trained members of his party to sublimate any concern they may have about his actions beneath their partisan instincts. However queasy Trump might occasionally make them, they will return to his side the moment he faces the prospect of legal consequences.

[From the October 2026 issue: MAGA is making the world safe for corruption]

“It is absolutely disgraceful to threaten young Americans for participating in politics and serving their country,” Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, complained. “This type of thinking is terrible for our country,” Ari Fleischer, the former press secretary to President George W. Bush, chimed in. Columns by the Trump legal adviser Mike Davis in Fox News and the writer Miranda Devine in the New York Post depict Slotkin as a goon who was menacing bright-eyed youth for no reason other than their partisan affiliation. “Slotkin is a lowlife who’s ruining her state,” Trump said in front of the White House when prodded for a reaction by a reporter.

Trump went even further, as is his wont. “That’s a hell of a statement,” he told reporters. “Slotkin said that there should be prosecutions in order to scare people from going into politics.”

In point of fact, Slotkin didn’t say anything about prosecutions. She was discussing congressional oversight and specifically describing a scenario in which Democrats had control of Congress but not the executive branch.

She was arguing for a measured and focused approach, prioritizing only the most blatant forms of corruption.

“We do have to have accountability for the unbelievable corruption that we are living under right now,” she said. “But you can’t just make that your whole personality. So you have to pick signature cases, and you have to go after people and projects that are just super egregious.”

Later in the conversation, Herndon noted that Trump has largely insulated himself from accountability by stacking the courts and installing loyalists throughout his party and the federal government. That’s when Slotkin pointed out that exposing the administration’s corruption might deter ambitious Republicans from joining the administration during its final years.

The outraged responses omitted the first part of Slotkin’s remarks, which point out the need to investigate the administration’s pervasive misconduct. Out of context, it sounds as if Slotkin is threatening young Republicans because of malevolence. But in context, her comments are understandable, even generous. If you knew a young person who had been planning to go to work for Elizabeth Holmes, deterring them by exposing the Theranos founder as a con artist would have been doing them a favor.

Pretending that the Trump administration is innocent is just the first line of defense. The fallback argument against investigating, and perhaps eventually prosecuting, any corruption is that doing so will set off a cycle of retribution.

A Wall Street Journal editorial accuses Slotkin of “essentially promising a scorched-earth lawfare campaign” that will invite reprisals. “This is where the multiple prosecutions that Democrats unleashed against Mr. Trump in the Biden years are taking us. Mr. Trump is retaliating with similar attempts to criminalize political differences. And now Ms. Slotkin is vowing more of the same. Down this road lies more bitterness and political dysfunction,” the Journal editorial laments. Jack Goldsmith, a former Bush-administration legal adviser, makes a similar argument in a Substack column.

The fear that the two parties are locked in a cycle of retribution has a certain high-minded but superficial appeal. It’s true that Trump faced investigations after leaving office, and that he has cited these investigations as a rationale for his reign of legal terror.

But Joe Biden did not behave in a remotely similar fashion. He appointed an attorney general, Merrick Garland, who commanded bipartisan respect. Garland operated cautiously, following traditional procedure, and appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel when evidence of Trump’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation—taking classified documents, stonewalling repeated requests to return them, and then trying to mislead federal investigators—was too blatant to ignore. Trump did face one questionable prosecution: Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan prosecutor, charged that his hush money to Stormy Daniels was a campaign-finance violation. But that was not something Biden directed.

Besides, Trump’s ambition to imprison his opponents preceded anything Biden did, as anybody who remembers the “Lock her up!” chants should readily concede. Trump was unable to effectively prosecute his enemies during his first term, largely because he was stuck with a Justice Department whose staff was committed to traditional norms of independence, not for lack of trying. To the contrary, Trump spent most of his first term trying to make his attorneys general act like Roy Cohn. He pressured Ukraine’s government to gin up an investigation of Biden, and he eventually appointed a special counsel, John Durham, to investigate various enemies, only for Durham to fall on his face.

[Leo J. Wise: How corruption got this bad]

The most logical way to understand Trump’s motive is that he has always viewed laws as suggestions rather than hard requirements, and tended to assume that people in power will abuse it to protect their friends and punish their enemies. Democratic lawfare did not implant this belief in Trump. He and his allies are going to continue investigating fake crimes and committing real ones, because Trump fundamentally does not believe in the rule of law.

What is most peculiar is that the Democrats aren’t the party that has decided to elevate this question in the closing days of the midterm campaign. The Republicans are. Why, you might wonder, did a phalanx of Republicans emerge several days after the fact to start screaming about Slotkin?

Anti-anti-Trump Republicans, of which the Journal is a leading voice, often invoke the Mueller investigation and the first Trump impeachment as radicalizing events that reignited their wavering partisan attachment. The misguided Bragg indictment of Trump helped rehabilitate him among Republicans who had been ready to move on after January 6. As Davis wrote on X, “Dear @ElissaSlotkin: You are rallying fractured Republicans right before the midterms.”

Trump in his second term has operated with complete impunity. The Republican Congress is not even pretending to conduct oversight over the executive branch, and the Justice Department is not even pretending to care whether the president and his allies follow the law. The president grasps that if he ever has to face accountability, his party will back him up. Trump has two modes: flaunting his impunity and wallowing in victimization. For the moment, he finds the latter more politically useful.