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Standing on the Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument, I heard President Donald Trump deliver his fiery address. “You’re never going to take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he said to the crowd, claiming that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen from him. I could see men climbing the trees around the park, dressed in fatigues with Glocks at their side, as I heard security announcements prohibiting backpacks, chairs, and flagpoles play over the loudspeakers. When Rudy Giuliani took the podium, I heard him say, “Let’s have trial by combat,” and the crowd roared.
I heard people chant “USA! USA!” as I marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Department of Justice. I even heard Jacob Chansley, now infamously known as the “QAnon Shaman,” roar, “FREEDOM!” as we approached the steps of the Capitol.
I wasn’t at the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. I was at the January Sixth Experience, a $40, three-hour Airbnb “experience” that promised to deliver the “definitive walking tour of the conspiracy and national security event of our lifetimes.” “See the sights of Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Capitol,” the hosts advertised, “as you trace the steps of the mob that attacked Congress.”
[Peter Wehner: The GOP is a battering ram against truth]
That’s how I found myself, along with four fellow tour-goers sporting sensible walking shoes with water bottles in hand, following in the footsteps of the insurrectionists on a cloudy day last month. As our guide, Kevin W. Smith, recounted the lead-up to and events of January 6, he played the speeches and chants from a small Bluetooth speaker strapped to the side of his backpack, and showed us photos of those armed men in the trees and other insurrectionists from a binder packed with screenshots of tweets, maps, and more images from the day.
As we avoided sidelong glances from other tourists, equal parts intrigued and disturbed by this small group broadcasting Trump-rally speeches on its walk to the Capitol, I thought: Perhaps history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as walking tour.
Depending on whom you ask, January 6 was any number of things: an existential threat to our democracy. A slapstick fascist comedy worthy of mockery, not remembrance. Trump called it “a beautiful day.” In March, when Tucker Carlson still had his Fox News show, he aired selective footage of the riot, which he had exclusively received from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, aiming to warp perceptions of the event. “These were not insurrectionists. They were sightseers,” Carlson said. To some conspiracy theorists, the insurrection didn’t happen at all.
The January 6 participants have also attempted to revise history. “I am a political prisoner,” Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, said at his sentencing hearing in May, where he received 18 years in prison for seditious-conspiracy charges related to his role in the insurrection. Pointing out that Rhodes had “prepared to take up arms and foment revolution,” Judge Amit P. Mehta replied: “You’re not a political prisoner, Mr. Rhodes. You’re here because of your actions.” John Strand, who was caught on video pushing past a fallen police officer to enter the Capitol building on January 6 and later convicted on five criminal counts, declared, “I did nothing wrong.”
The appropriation and misappropriation of January 6 get at a deeper question: How should we remember and memorialize that day? Despite extensive media coverage, prime-time congressional hearings and an accompanying 800-page report, and more than 1,000 people criminally charged, nearly two and a half years later, we have no consensus about how to tell the story of January 6 and its aftermath. As Robert Costa, CBS News’s lead election correspondent, said recently, “January 6 hasn’t settled into the national consciousness as a significant event.”
Smith, a 40-year-old Republican “until I couldn’t be anymore,” believes that the January Sixth Experience is part of the answer. Smith's background as a former U.S. intelligence analyst informs the tour's treatment of the insurrection as a national-security event, which he likens to the British burning of the Capitol in 1814. Though he left government for the private sector in 2019, Smith watched the events of January 6 unfold from a “sensitive compartmented information facility”—basically Pentagon jargon for a “secure room”—in Northern Virginia surrounded by intelligence-community colleagues. “Though it wasn’t as much a surprise to me because I had seen it bubbling up for weeks, none of us could really believe what we were witnessing,” Smith told me.
[Adam Serwer: The January 6 deniers are going to lose]
Smith delivers the tour with the quiet authority of a national-park ranger. He’s distilled the immense amount of information, social-media posts, and other noise from that day into digestible chunks and entertaining anecdotes. Since he began the tours on January 7 of this year, just after the insurrection’s two-year anniversary, Smith has conducted five of them. He says the cost of admission will go toward technological improvements (large-screen tablets to play videos, a louder speaker) and eventually toward hiring an additional guide or two.
On official tours of the Capitol, guides can mention January 6 only if asked, “a policy that in many ways reflects a country at odds with itself, unable to agree on fact and truth and reluctant to engage on the history of a day that threatened democracy,” Joe Heim wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year. This frustrated Smith. “How are you just gonna not talk about this thing?” Smith asked me. “It is part of our history; it is part of this building. We should talk about it, instead of just pretending it didn’t happen or bickering over it.”
Similar frustrations led the producers and writers of The Daily Show With Trevor Noah to develop a tour of their own. “It feels like there’s an active effort made by each party to either forget it, bury it, or downplay it,” Jocelyn Conn, a producer of the show, told me. “The government can’t even agree on whether we should memorialize it, because they can’t agree on the facts right now.” So last summer, they launched “In the Footsteps of the Freedomsurrection,” a self-guided audio tour that offers “a brand-new way to relive the magic” of the insurrection. The Daily Show team hopes that these installations and stunts, much like its Trump Twitter presidential library and mock January 6 monuments, will keep the true story of the riot from getting lost.
The humorous treatment draws out the absurdity of the day. Hearing along The Daily Show tour that Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri sold mugs with an image of himself cheering on the rioters literally stopped me in my tracks, prompting me to ask myself, Did that really happen? (It did.) “We’re just like, ‘Here’s what happened, and this is why it’s funny.’ And if you can’t laugh at things, you’re gonna cry or feel outraged,” Jen Flanz, the program’s showrunner, told me.
Walking tours seem especially well suited to offer clarity. Michael Epstein, an expert in place-based storytelling and the founder of Walking Cinema, says that certain issues, such as climate change and gentrification, are difficult to continually engage with because they can seem hopeless. But presenting the story in an entertaining and dynamic way can unlock something. Walking tours can “put your mind in a world like a good novel,” Epstein told me. According to Conn, “To see it for yourself is a whole different way of experiencing it, than to see the coverage on television.”
I’ve written about January 6 for the website Lawfare, so I wasn’t sure how much I’d get out of a tour, but I was engaged in a new way by hearing the ambient sounds of the crowd, and seeing the sturdy wrought-iron light pole at the Capitol that rioters had felled. Listening to a Kimberly Guilfoyle speech in public felt like a small price to pay for authenticity.
Yet walking tours have their obvious limits in the culture wars. When I first reached out to Smith after stumbling on the January Sixth Experience, its name made me think the tour was more of an insurrection reenactment for the MAGA set than a deeply researched anti-disinformation project.
Maybe there are people seeking the MAGA experience, but they haven’t ended up on Smith’s tour just yet. “Everybody there was on the same page,” he said.
It sometimes seemed like Smith was preaching to the choir; many of his more unsavory anecdotes from January 6 elicited disapproving head shakes and tsk-tsks. Amelia, an active-duty Air Force service member who first heard about January 6 from her mother while stationed in South Korea, told me that she was attending the tour for a second time after troubling conversations with her more right-wing colleagues. “All of us here are obviously of the same mind,” she said, and no one on the tour disagreed. (She asked that her last name not be used.)
[Conor Friedersdorf: The contested significance of January 6]
Another woman, Scarlett Bunting, who was previewing the tour for her women’s social club, the Belles, worried that some of the members who support Trump would find the tour offensive. She wondered aloud if Smith could “tailor” the content.
Smith welcomes doubters, but his aim isn’t necessarily to change anyone’s mind. “I don’t approach this as a Democrat trying to tear apart a narrative,” he told us on the tour, describing his “forensic” approach. “I barely even said the word Republican today, right? It doesn’t matter to me. There was a perpetrator, and this is a crime scene.”
The Daily Show had a similar sense of mission. “We’re not out there trying to convert anyone to think anything,” Flanz said. Her colleague, a co–executive producer named Ramin Hedayati, agreed: “We just wanted to remind people that this was a bad thing that happened. And we should not forget that.”
Smith told me he sees a “promise of transformation” in presenting people with these facts. He imagines people going on his tour and then returning to their “living rooms and front porches and Facebook groups.”
“It’s about making January 6 feel more real to you as a person who cares about the country,” he said. “Giving you an emotional (and also factual) base for engaging with people who trust you and could be influenced by your sincere views.”
Along the tour, we walked past the National Archives, just as the insurrectionists did. Two 65-ton statues flank the entrance: A wizened old man sits with a closed book on his lap, Study the Past etched into the plinth beneath him; across from him, a young woman sits with an open book, most of its pages still blank, and under her the Shakespeare quote “What is Past is Prologue.” Smith likes this stop of the tour best. “My personal mission, if there is one, is embodied by those two statues,” he told me. “We have to be mindful of what happened on January 6, 2021; what that tells us about where we are as a society; and what it could mean for our future.”
This article was originally published by Quanta.
More than four decades ago, field ecologists set out to quantify the diversity of trees on a forested plot on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, one of the most intensively studied tracts of tropical forest on the planet. They began counting every tree that had a trunk wider than a centimeter. They identified the species, measured the trunks, and calculated the biomass of each individual. They put ladders up the trees, examined saplings, and recorded it all in sprawling spreadsheets.
As they looked at the data accumulating year after year, they began to notice something odd. With some 300 species, the tree diversity on the tiny 15-square-kilometer island was staggering. But the distribution of trees among those species was also heavily lopsided, with most of the trees belonging to only a few species.
Since those early studies, that overstuffed, highly uneven pattern has been seen repeatedly in ecosystems around the world, particularly in rainforests. The ecologist Stephen Hubbell of UCLA, who was part of the team behind the Barro Colorado surveys, estimates that less than 2 percent of the tree species in the Amazon account for half of all the individual trees, meaning that 98 percent of the species are rare.
Such high biodiversity flies in the face of predictions made by a leading theory of ecology, which says that in a stable ecosystem, every niche or role should be occupied by one species. Niche theory suggests that there are not enough niches to enable all the species the ecologists saw to stably exist. Competition over niches between similar species should have sent the rarities into extinction (or led them to adapt to slightly different niches).
A new ecological modeling paper in Nature by James O’Dwyer and Kenneth Jops of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign explains at least part of this discrepancy. They found that species that should seemingly be head-to-head competitors can share an ecosystem if details of their life histories—such as how long they live and how many offspring they have—line up in the right way. O’Dwyer and Jops’ work also helps explain why one of the most successful ways to model ecologies often arrives at accurate results, even though it glosses over almost all we know about how organisms function.
Back in 2001, the paradoxically high biodiversity on Barro Colorado Island inspired Hubbell to propose the groundbreaking neutral theory of ecology. Traditional ecology theory stressed the competition for niches between species. But Hubbell pointed out that species might not really matter in that equation because, in effect, individuals compete for resources with members of their own species too. He suggested that patterns of diversity in ecosystems might largely be the products of random processes.
[Read: A basic premise of animal conservation looks shakier than ever]
For a theory that dealt with biodiversity, Hubbell’s neutral theory was sparse. It ignored variations in life spans, nutritional quirks, and other details that distinguish one species from another. In models based on the theory, every individual in a theoretical ecosystem is identical. Once the clock starts, the ecosystem evolves stochastically, with individuals outcompeting and replacing one another at random. The theory was completely at odds with species-based approaches to ecology, and it provoked impassioned debate among ecologists because it seemed so counterintuitive.
Yet surprisingly, as the random walks in the neutral models progressed, they reproduced key features of what Hubbell and his colleagues saw in their data from Barro Colorado Island and what others have seen elsewhere. In this modeling that almost perversely acknowledges no differences, there are flashes of the real world.
That tension between the models and reality has long interested O’Dwyer. Why did neutral theory seem to work so well? Was there a way to bring in information about how species function to get results that might look still more realistic?
One of the things that make neutral models appealing, O’Dwyer told me, is that there really are deep universalities among many living things. While animal species are not identical, they are remarkably similar at the level of, say, the circulatory system. According to a principle called Kleiber’s law, for example, the metabolic rate of an animal generally increases with its size, scaling as a power law—the same power law, no matter the species. (Several theories about why Kleiber’s law is true have been offered, but the answer is still debated.)
Given those signs of underlying order, O’Dwyer wondered whether some details of how organisms live matter more than others in determining how successfully species will compete and survive over evolutionary time. Take metabolism again: If an ecosystem can be seen as an expression of its inhabitants’ metabolisms, then the organisms’ sizes are special, significant numbers. The size of an individual may be more useful in modeling its fate over time than any number of other details about its diet or species identity.
O’Dwyer wondered whether one of those crucial, privileged factors might be captured by life history, a concept that combines species statistics such as average number of offspring, time until sexual maturity, and life span. Imagine a plot of 50 individual plants. Each has its own life span, its own pattern of reproduction. After three months, one plant might produce 100 seeds, while another, similar one produces 88. Maybe 80 percent of those seeds will germinate, producing the next generation, which will go through its own version of this cycle. Even within a species, individual plants’ numbers will vary, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, a phenomenon called demographic noise. If this variation is random, in the manner of Hubbell’s neutral theory, what patterns will emerge over successive generations?
O’Dwyer knew he had found someone who could help him explore that question when Jops joined his lab as a graduate student. Jops had previously studied whether models using life histories could predict a vulnerable plant species' survival. Together, they started to hammer out the math that would describe what happens when life history meets competition.
In Jops and O’Dwyer’s model, as in neutral models, stochasticity—the influence of random factors on deterministic interactions among the species—is important. The life histories of species, however, can amplify or reduce the effects of that randomness. “Life history is a kind of lens through which demographic noise works,” O’Dwyer said.
When the researchers allowed their model to progress through time, putting each simulated individual through its paces, they found that certain species could persist alongside each other for long periods even though they were competing for the same resources. Looking deeper into the numbers for an explanation, Jops and O’Dwyer found that a complex measurement called effective population size seemed useful for describing a kind of complementarity that could exist among species. It encapsulated the fact that a species could have high mortality at one point in its life cycle, then low mortality at another, while a complementary species might have low mortality at the first point and high mortality at the second. The more similar this measurement was for two species, the more likely it was that the pair could live alongside each other despite competing for space and nutrition.
[Read: One of evolution’s biggest moments was re-created in a year]
“They experience demographic noise at the same amplitude,” O’Dwyer said. “That’s the key for them to live together a long time.”
The researchers wondered if similar patterns prevailed in the real world. They drew on the COMPADRE database, which houses details about hundreds of plant, fungal, and bacterial species collected from a variety of studies and sources, and they zeroed in on perennial plants that all lived together in the same research plots. They discovered that, as their model had predicted, the plant species that lived together had closely matching life histories: Pairs of species living in the same ecosystem tend to be more complementary than randomly drawn pairs.
The findings suggest ways in which species that are in competition could work well alongside each other without invoking distinct niches, says Annette Ostling, a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Austin: “The coolest part is that they are highlighting that these ideas … can extend to species that are pretty different but complementary.”
To William Kunin, a professor of ecology at the University of Leeds in England, the paper suggests one reason the natural world, for all its complexity, can resemble a neutral model: Ecological processes may have a way of canceling each other out, so that what seems like endless variety can have a simple outcome he described as “emergent neutrality.” Hubbell, for his part, appreciates the expansion of his initial work. “It offers some thoughts on how to generalize neutral models, to tweak them to put in a bit of species differences, expanding and contracting to see what happens to diversity in a local community,” he says.
This is just one bite out of the problem of understanding how biodiversity arises and why it persists, however. “In ecology, we struggle with the relationship between pattern and process. Many different processes can produce the same pattern,” Ostling says. O’Dwyer hopes that in the coming years, more data about the real world can help researchers discern whether effective population size is consistently able to explain coexistence.
Kunin hopes that the paper will inspire others to keep working with ideas from neutral theory. In a field where the unique qualities of individuals, rather than their commonalities, have long held sway, neutral theory has forced ecologists to be creative. “It’s kicked us out of our mental ruts and made us think about which things really matter,” he says.
Hubbell, who unleashed neutral theory on ecology so many years ago, wonders whether truly immense data sets about real forests could yield the kind of detail needed to make the relationship between life history and biodiversity clearer. “This is the kind of building on neutral theory that I was hoping would happen,” he says of the new paper. “But it’s only a baby step toward really understanding diversity.”
In a playful moment a century ago, the historian Carl Becker pondered this counterfactual: What if Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson, had drafted the Declaration of Independence? A scholar of the American Revolution, Becker knew that such a thing was plausible. Franklin was, after all, on the Committee of Five in Philadelphia, which was allotted the job of drawing up the text in June 1776. A gifted writer of great standing, he was just the sort of person who might compose a document of such paramount importance.
Yet Becker thought the idea absurd. Although he admired Franklin for his “intimate and confidential” style, Becker did not believe that the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack could have written such sentences as “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” or “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.” These lines were charged with a peculiar, arresting quality, mixing precision with poetry. This quality Becker associated with Jefferson’s “engaging felicities”—quite different from Franklin’s prose, which had an “air of the tavern or print shop.”
In fact, Franklin would have been very unlikely to produce the Declaration’s first draft. By 1776, he was too worn out by the strains of life to tackle the challenge. Also, as he later confided to Jefferson, he had made it a rule to “avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body,” because taking on a task of that nature was to invite trouble. Jefferson, then still 33, would learn the wisdom of this for himself when Congress debated his draft. First, on about June 12, he sat down at a traveling desk of his own design in the parlor of his lodgings on Seventh and Market Street and started work on the Declaration of Independence.
[Tom Nichols: Reclaiming real American patriotism]
Franklin was, however, among the first to read Jefferson’s efforts, a week or so later—as was John Adams, who found himself “delighted with its high tone, and the flights of oratory with which it abounded.” From Adams, this was high praise, but there was also a hint of something else in his compliment. The “flights of oratory” certainly had luster, but did the words have real substance? Becker himself, in a close rereading of the “original Rough draught,” confessed that Jefferson’s prose sometimes left him with a feeling of insecurity, “as of resting one’s weight on something fragile.”
Nowhere is this sensation more present than in the Declaration’s most celebrated phrase, “the pursuit of Happiness.”
This appears in the second sentence of the document as Jefferson outlines his brief list of “unalienable rights”—“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The final four words have an instant aesthetic allure, but the longer one lingers over them, the more a riddle appears. Why has Jefferson denoted both life and liberty as rights, but not happiness, which is qualified by the word pursuit? Was this use of pursuit purely rhetorical? As the 19th-century lawyer Rufus Choate believed, was it nothing more than one of those “glittering and sounding generalities” designed to ornament “that passionate and eloquent manifesto”?
Many commentators have interpreted pursuit in this way over time. It adds rhythm and flourish at a pivotal early moment in the text. Others, however, have not been so sure. To the Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., “the pursuit of Happiness” had real meaning, but not the meaning most readers recognize today. To illustrate his point, Schlesinger sifted through patriot literature by such writers as James Otis, Josiah Quincy II, James Wilson, and Adams himself. All of them wrote about happiness, though—unlike Jefferson—framed it not as something people should merely “strive for but as something that was theirs by natural right.”
The clearest expression of this strand of American thought came in George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was drafted in May 1776. In it, Mason spoke of “pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” Mason’s text, which was reprinted in Philadelphia newspapers in early June, has long been acknowledged as a key influence on Jefferson. The link between the two declarations is plain enough, yet the crucial shift from “obtaining happiness” to simply pursuing it is not so easily explained.
[Arthur C. Brooks: Ben Franklin’s radical theory of happiness]
In 1964, Schlesinger wrote a striking short essay titled “The Lost Meaning of ‘The Pursuit of Happiness,’” in which he offered a new interpretation. For years, he argued, people had been reading that line incorrectly. Schlesinger believed that when Jefferson wrote pursuit, he was using it in the word’s “more emphatic” meaning—as lawyers used to talk about “the pursuit of the law” or doctors spoke of “the pursuit of medicine.” This did not mean questing after or chasing down. Instead, it implied a person’s engagement with a practice or vocation already in their possession. Jefferson was not at odds with the other Founders at all, according to Schlesinger, but in his reading of the line the shift in meaning was significant: Some of the romantic sense of mission, some of the novelty of its idea of itself, was gone.
“The pursuit of Happiness” may be pure rhetoric, as Choate believed, or it may have a lost meaning, as Schlesinger argued, but there is a third interpretation we should consider. The age of Enlightenment out of which the United States arose was abuzz with discussions of happiness. What was it? How best to acquire it? Debating clubs churned over these issues. The philosopher Francis Hutcheson came up with complex formulas involving human qualities such as “benevolence” (B), “ability” (A), “self-love” (S), and “interest” (I) to create the conditions for what he termed the “moment of good” (M). (One part of his workings went M = B + S x A = BA.) Others relied on experience more than theory. Having encountered the Indigenous people of New Holland (modern-day Australia) for the first time, Captain Cook sailed away mulling, ungrammatically, whether they were “far more happier than we Europeans.”
But the author who wrote with the most intensity about happiness during the Revolutionary period was Samuel Johnson. Johnson was someone all of the Founders knew well. Ever since the reproduction of parts of his poem “The Vanity of Human Wishes” in Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1750, his work had found a ready audience in the colonies. As the historian James G. Basker has pointed out, “Johnson was a part of the consciousness of every literate American during the Founding Era.” And for Jefferson, he notes in particular, “the connection was unusually subtle and sustained.”
As a young man, Jefferson sought out Johnson’s political tracts. He recommended Johnson’s Dictionary as a necessary addition to the library a friend was constructing, and he always made sure he had a copy to hand himself, whether he was in Monticello or Paris. Later, in a 1798 letter, he confessed to using it as “a Repertory, to find favorite passages which I wished to recollect,” although he added intriguingly, “but too rarely with success.”
This line captures something of the place Johnson occupied in Jefferson’s mind—often there, not always as a welcome guest. In 1775, Johnson had emerged as the sharpest British critic of what he called the “wild, indefinite and obscure” resolutions of the Continental Congress. Jefferson had felt the warmth of his prose more than most. Reading the copy of Johnson’s furious polemic Taxation No Tyranny that he’d acquired shortly after its publication that year, the slave-owning Jefferson would have been confronted with a distinctly personal taunt: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
[Read: Lessons from Thomas Jefferson’s failure on slavery]
Johnson’s admonitions did not just haunt Jefferson at Monticello; they also followed him to Philadelphia in 1776. The week that Jefferson arrived to attend the Congress in May, The Pennsylvania Evening Post printed a long letter about “Doctor Johnson,” his Dictionary, and the use of words as weapons. Jefferson would not respond openly to any of this. In politics, he and Johnson were as divided as could be, but when it came to another matter, happiness, there was an odd convergence between the two. Five times before 1776, in all of his major works—The Rambler, Dictionary, The Idler, the novella Rasselas, and the political pamphlet The False Alarm—Johnson used the phrase the pursuit of happiness.
That construction was not itself exceptional: As Basker observes, “it also occurs in other writers of the period and the question of whether Jefferson took it directly from Johnson remains tantalizingly open.” More notable, and important, is the similarity in how these two great figures thought about happiness. Time and again, Johnson stressed his belief that pursuing happiness was a natural human instinct. This impulse, however, came with a warning. To pursue was natural; to obtain was a different proposition.
Johnson demonstrated this distinction most powerfully in Rasselas, which was published first in Britain in 1759 and then in Philadelphia in 1768. This moral fable recounted the adventures of an Abyssinian prince who, with his colorful entourage, was always seeking but never quite finding happiness. Sometimes, their journey would be lit up by moments of hope; more frequently came disappointment. At one point, in a quintessentially Johnsonian twist, one of the characters cries out in exasperation at the paradox that confronts them: “Yet what, said she, is to be expected from our persuit of happiness, when we find the state of life to be such, that happiness itself is the cause of misery?”
As the literary scholar Thomas Keymer has noted, Rasselas provides a clue to help us unpick one of the most engaging and ambiguous lines in the Declaration. By 1776, Jefferson was already known for his “happy talent for composition,” but this was only a part of his genius. He seems, too, to have had the gift of foresight. In that line, he frames, eloquently yet economically, the kind of country this new republic would be.
It was to be a place of promise, but it would not promise too much. It could not be both the land of opportunity and a place of greater safety. Pursue happiness, by all means, but do not expect a guarantee of obtaining it. Already in Jefferson’s rough draft, “The United States of America”—one of the very first uses of this name—we can glimpse the emerging nation’s essential character.
That character endures to this day. The United States would offer those who wished to come the chance of bettering themselves. But like Johnson, Jefferson seems to have appreciated the risks of the quest. Who knew, especially in the perilous summer of 1776, what lay ahead? The “pursuit of Happiness” was enough.
Today we’re offering a brief history lesson (and a brief themed diversion). But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
With the Fourth of July comes all the complexities of collective observance—patriotism, fireworks, picnics, apathy, resistance. The holiday has always been one of dualities. It has also always been political.
After 1776, the day was celebrated throughout the Revolutionary War. “The trend in the early republic would be for July Fourth, and other celebrations modeled on the Fourth, to spread nationalism and, at the same time, to provide venues for divisive political expression,” the historian David Waldstreicher wrote in 2019—the year then-President Trump ordered a military parade, complete with tanks, to observe the day.
After the Civil War, Black Americans in the South transformed the date into a celebration of emancipation, according to the historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts, complete with martial displays, dedicated performances, and food and drink. “The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out,” they explained in 2018.
In the decades after the Civil War, the Fourth gradually lost its civic character and was marked in many cases by drunken, raucous affairs, rife with gunfire, injury, illness, and death, our deputy editor Yoni Appelbaum wrote in 2011. The public-health solution in New England? Massive public spectacles—bonfires—in lieu of smaller gatherings. Today, that tradition lives on in the form of public fireworks displays.
Whether you’re waiting for fireworks, working, traveling, or resting at home today, join us for another time-honored tradition: a game of trivia. Below are five clues drawn from The Atlantic’s archives.
“A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other,” this president observed in his first inaugural address, “but the different parts of our country can not do this. They can not but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them.”
Assessing this film in 1996, Roger Ebert called it “in the tradition of silly summer fun, and on that level I kind of liked it.” Our staff writer Megan Garber wrote that it was, “in the era before cowboy diplomacy and the isolationist impulses that sprang from it, a comically blithe rendering of American exceptionalism.” (Bonus points if you can name the director.)
The first newspaper printing of the Declaration of Independence contains a crucial typo that has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the document intended, the political theorist and scholar Danielle Allen has argued. This typo comes midway in the famous sentence that begins with “We hold these truths to be self-evident ….” Can you complete it?
This country gained independence from the United States on July 4, 1946, after almost half a century of American colonial rule. “In 1776, the United States sought to escape the rule of one empire. On its way out the door, its representatives proclaimed that just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. After 1898, the United States acquired an empire of its own. And between that latter outcome and the former words gaped an uncomfortable contradiction,” David Frum wrote in 2021. “That contradiction was no less apparent a century ago than it is today.”
This American author and abolitionist is perhaps best known for writing the anthem “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (a five-stanza poem that The Atlantic paid $5 to publish in February 1862), but she was also a noted pacifist and advocate for women’s rights. Her work for The Atlantic shows “the point of view of a woman before modern feminism—the point of view of someone who wants to pitch in but must do so from the confines of the home,” Spencer Kornhaber wrote. Her poem “The Flag,” for instance, goes:
My wine is not of the choicest, yet bears it an honest brand;
And the bread that I bid you lighten I break with no sparing hand;
But pause, ere you pass to taste it, one act must accomplished be:
Salute the flag in its virtue, before ye sit down with me.
Related:
In 1902, Bliss Perry contemplated the beginnings of American imperialism and the waning of patriotic spirit.
Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time. And You Have to Buy Groceries.
By Adam Frank
The whole universe is humming. Actually, the whole universe is Mongolian throat singing. Every star, every planet, every continent, every building, every person is vibrating along to the slow cosmic beat.
That’s the takeaway from [the recent] remarkable announcement that scientists have detected a “cosmic background” of ripples in the structure of space and time. If the result bears up as more data are gathered, it’s a discovery that promises to open new windows on everything from the evolution of galaxies to the origin of the universe.
Scientists had been awaiting such a discovery for decades. More than 100 years ago, Einstein introduced his radical general theory of relativity. For Einstein, space and time were a single entity, “space-time,” comprising a flexible fabric that could be stretched and compressed, bent and warped. In general relativity, matter makes space-time bend, and space-time, in turn, guides how unconstrained matter will move. Because space-time is flexible, you can make it wave. Just like snapping a bedsheet, if you move enough matter around fast enough, a wave of distorted space-time will ripple outward into the universe.
Read. Written on Water, a collection of essays first published in 1944 by the Shanghainese writer Eileen Chang, whose observant essays about day-to-day realities double as a manual for surviving history.
And if you want to pick up something new but only have short stretches of time, Morgan Ome recommends five essay and short-story collections that are easy to read at your own pace.
Watch. Crash Course in Romance, on Netflix, a drama series featuring an all-star cast of Korean actors that aptly depicts the pressures students face in hypercompetitive academic environments.
Play. Our new print crossword puzzle puts a fresh narrative spin on a classic, as our crossword-puzzles editor Caleb Madison explains. The deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes.
Three American presidents notably died on Independence Day—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Monroe—and one was born on this day. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who throughout his life wrote frequently for The Atlantic, shares this birthday too. Hawthorne even did a fair bit of reporting: In this 1862 essay, for instance, he traveled from Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., to interview civil and military leaders during the Civil War.
— Shan
When my family fled Vietnam at the end of the war, we had to leave so much behind: documents, belongings, even family members. My sister and I were babies then, and our dad, when questioned by American immigration officials, forgot the exact days we had been born. So did our uncles and grandmother. As my dad once explained it, birthdays didn’t really matter in Vietnam, or at least they didn’t used to. Instead, aging was measured by Tet, the lunar new year. Everyone moving forward at the same time. Later I would learn how common it was for refugees and immigrants in the United States to have two dates of birth, a legal one and an actual one. For my sister and me, our dad’s best guesses became our legal birth dates. Our actual birth dates were a question, and we wouldn’t find an answer for decades.
At some point in my childhood, my grandmother Noi decided that my birthday would be August 31 and that my sister’s would be March 2, a week or two off from our legal dates. We didn’t know if these were the actual days on which we were born, but because Noi said it, we went with it. My sister took the liberty of alternating her celebrations between her two dates, and over the years I saw that we would have to decide for ourselves what a “real” birthday meant. Still, growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I envied my friends who could cite details about their own birth, down to the minute. No one in my refugee family had a birth certificate. I spent years longing for what I thought of as evidence of my beginnings.
Instead, I had a card with the words resident alien on them. As I reached age 18, I would apply for American citizenship and eventually receive a certificate of naturalization that would allow me to get a U.S. passport—the ultimate proof of identity. I had no clue that birth certificates as we know them today were a 20th-century development, implemented as a way of keeping records of the population and a way to distinguish those who were born on American soil from those who weren’t. It didn’t occur to me, at all, to question the strangeness of being a living person having to prove that you had been born.
[Read: The strange origins of American birthday celebrations]
When I finally met my mother, who came to the United States as a refugee years after the rest of us did, I was 19. She was living in Boston, and we walked around Chinatown talking about construction and the weather. I had to work up the nerve to ask what she could tell me about when and where I’d been born, and what that had been like for her. My dad and grandmother could only ever say that I was born in a hospital—forget about the recording of time, or weight, or length. But my mother didn’t remember anything either. I have asked her about it almost every time I’ve visited her in the years since, as if she’ll suddenly recall. But she always looks at me as if to say, What difference does it make?
“Who knows?” she said, with a little laugh, the last time I saw her in Boston, two years ago. Another time she had said, “Why does it matter? You’re here now.”
Sometimes I’ve wondered if maybe my dad forgot when my sister and I were born because he didn’t think he would need to know. Or maybe he forgot because he needed to in order to leave his home, his country.
Secretly, I am always on the lookout for dual-birthday people. Because that is more than a coincidence, more than the brief euphoria of finding out someone else shares your date of birth. People with two birthdays share a specific history of migration and displacement. They carry a diasporic marker, a sometimes careful harboring of selves.
[Read: The lesson I wish I never had to learn about motherhood]
After my grandmother Noi died in 2007, my sister and I looked through the photo albums Noi had kept in her bedroom at my uncle’s house. She’d had these albums since the 1970s and ’80s, and the pictures were yellowed. She stored them in a drawer of a credenza, where we found a small box that I hadn’t seen before. It held her few pieces of gold and jade jewelry and more photos.
At the bottom of this box: two whisper-thin pieces of paper. Tear-off pages from one-a-day calendars written in Vietnamese and French. One said March 2. The other, August 31. On the back of the latter she had written my name.
Had Noi carried these with her all the way from Vietnam when we left, escaping the end of a war? Or had someone sent them to her? Why had we never seen these pages before? Had she forgotten that she had them? No one will ever be able to say. My sister and I just stared at them, at each other. All those years of wondering, seemingly answered.
It’s a gift, this knowledge, but at the same time I understand that it doesn’t change anything. As my mother told me, we’re here now.
I haven’t really celebrated my birthday since I was 10 years old. I had stopped wondering, many years back, if the birthday Noi gave me was my real one. The dates that stay in my mind are April 29, the day we became refugees; December 21, the solstice day my grandmother died; the days my own children were born.
Still, whenever I have to write down my legal date and place of birth, I feel like I’m slipping into an alternate identity. Like going by one name with friends and another with my family. Like how I never say “Ho Chi Minh City” when I talk about where I was born; I say “Saigon.” I have always held two birthdays in my mind. The legal one and the real one. I could be either/or. I could have a secret identity.
Maybe this slippage, this in-between, is what my grandmother was offering when she gave me my real birth date. Like so many Vietnamese refugees and immigrants, she looked forward more than back. She did not talk in regrets. She didn’t forget the past, but she didn’t live in it either.
When I look at the calendar page that serves as my birth certificate, marked with my grandmother’s handwriting, I cannot help thinking about the peculiarity of wanting to keep a moment of time. I know, better now, that birthdays are less about age and more about the fact of another year made, shaped, endured. Another year of being a person in this world. It is not an accomplishment, being born—that is, not our own accomplishment. But staying alive is. That’s what my family did, all of us, even if we weren’t in the same city or country. We lived in spaces as we were building them. We were looking, all the time, for a sense of arrival.
Nostalgia is usually an unproductive emotion. Our memories can deceive us, especially as we get older. But every so often, nostalgia can remind us of something important. As we celebrate another Fourth of July, I find myself wistful about the patriotism that was once common in America—and keenly aware of how much I miss it.
This realization struck me unexpectedly as I was driving to the beach near my home. I am a New Englander to my bones. I was born and raised near the Berkshires, and educated in Boston. I have lived in Vermont and New Hampshire, and now I have settled in Rhode Island, on the shores of the Atlantic. Despite a career that took me to New York and Washington, D.C., I am, I admit, a living stereotype of regional loyalty—and, perhaps, of more than a little provincialism.
I was awash in thoughts of lobster rolls and salt water as I neared the dunes. And then that damn tearjerker of a John Denver song about West Virginia came on my car radio.
The song isn’t even really about the Mountain State; it was inspired by locales in Maryland and Massachusetts. But I have been to West Virginia, and I know that it is a beautiful place. I have never wanted to live anywhere but New England, yet every time I hear “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” I understand, even if only for a few minutes, why no one would ever want to live anywhere but West Virginia, too
That’s when I experienced the jolt of a feeling we used to think of as patriotism: the joyful love of country. Patriotism, unlike its ugly half brother, nationalism, is rooted in optimism and confidence; nationalism is a sour inferiority complex, a sullen attachment to blood-and-soil fantasies that is always looking abroad with insecurity and even hatred. Instead, I was taking in the New England shoreline but seeing in my mind the Blue Ridge Mountains, and I felt moved with wonder—and gratitude—for the miracle that is the United States.
[David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]
How I miss that feeling. Because usually when I think of West Virginia these days, my first thought tends to be: red state. I now see many voters there, and in other states, as my civic opponents. I know that many of them likely hear “Boston” and they, too, think of a place filled with their blue-state enemies. I feel that I’m at a great distance from so many of my fellow citizens, as do they, I’m sure, from people like me. And I hate it.
Later, as I headed home to prepare for the holiday weekend, my mind kept returning to another summer, 40 years ago, in a different America and a different world.
I spent the summer of 1983, right after college graduation, in the Soviet Union studying Russian. I was in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), a beautiful city shrouded in a palpable sense of evil. KGB goons were everywhere. (They weren’t hard to spot, because they wanted visiting Americans like me, and the Soviet citizens who might speak with us, to see them.) I saw firsthand what oppression looks like, when people are afraid to speak in public, to associate, to move about, and to worship as they wish. I saw, as well, the power of propaganda: So many times, I was asked by Soviet citizens why the United States was determined to embark on a nuclear war, as if the smell of gunpowder was in the air and it was only a matter of time until Armageddon.
I was with a group of American students, and we were eager to meet Soviet people. The city is so far north that in the summer the sun never truly sets, and we had many warm conversations with young Leningraders—glares from the KGB notwithstanding—along the banks of the Neva River during the strange, half-lit gloom of these “White Nights.” Among ourselves, of course, our relations were as one might expect of college kids: Some friendships formed, some conflicts simmered, some romances bloomed, and some frostiness settled in among cliques.
If, however, we ran into anyone else from the United States, perhaps during a tour or in the hotel, most of us reacted as if we were all long-lost friends. The distances in the U.S. shrank to nothing. Boston and Jackson, Chicago and Dallas, Sacramento and Charlotte—all of us at that point were next-door neighbors meeting in a harsh and hostile land. It is difficult today to explain to a globalized and mobile generation the sense of fellowship evoked by encountering Americans overseas in the days when international travel was a rarer luxury than it is now. But to meet other Americans in a place such as the Soviet Union was often like a family reunion despite all of us being complete strangers.
[Read: What if America had lost the revolutionary war?]
Some years later, I returned to a more liberalized U.S.S.R. under the then–Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. I was part of an American delegation to a workshop on arms control with members of the Soviet diplomatic and military establishments. We all stayed together on a riverboat, where we also held our meetings. (A sad note: The boat traveled the Dnipro River in what was still Soviet Ukraine, and I walked through towns and cities, including Zaporizhzhya, that have since been reduced to rubble.) One day, our Soviet hosts woke us by piping the song “The City of New Orleans” to our staterooms, with its refrain of Good morning, America. How are ya? It was like a warm call from home, even if I’d never been to any of the locations (New Orleans, Memphis … Kankakee?) mentioned in the lyrics.
Today, many Americans regard one another as foreigners in their own country. Montgomery and Burlington? Charleston and Seattle? We might as well be measuring interstellar distances. We talk about “blue” and “red,” and we call one another communists and fascists, tossing off facile labels that once, among more serious people, were fighting words.
I am not going to both-sides this: I have no patience with people who casually refer to anyone with whom they disagree as “fascists,” but such people are a small and annoying minority. The reality is that the Americans who have taught us all to hate one another instantly at the sight of a license plate or at the first intonation of a regional accent are the vanguard of the new American right, and they have found fame and money in promoting division and even sedition.
These are the people, on our radios and televisions and even in the halls of Congress, who encourage us to fly Gadsden and Confederate flags and to deface our cars with obscene and stupid bumper stickers; they subject us to inane prattle about national divorce as they watch the purchases and ratings and donations roll in. Such people have made it hard for any of us to be patriotic; they pollute the incense of patriotism with the stink of nationalism so that they can issue their shrill call to arms for Americans to oppose Americans.
[Tom Nichols: Gorbachev’s fatal trap]
Their appeals demean every voter, even those of us who resist their propaganda, because all of us who hear them find ourselves drawing lines and taking sides. When I think of Ohio, for example, I no longer think (as I did for most of my life) of a heartland state and the birthplace of presidents. Instead, I wonder how my fellow American citizens there could have sent to Congress such disgraceful poltroons as Jim Jordan and J. D. Vance—men, in my view, whose fidelity to the Constitution takes a back seat to personal ambition, and whose love of country I will, without reservation, call into question. Likewise, when I think of Florida, I envision a natural wonderland turned into a political wasteland by some of the most ridiculous and reprehensible characters in American politics.
I struggle, especially, with the shocking fact that many of my fellow Americans, led by cynical right-wing-media charlatans, are now supporting Russia while Moscow conducts a criminal war. These voters have been taught to fear their own government—and other Americans who disagree with them—more than a foreign regime that seeks the destruction of their nation. I remember the old leftists of the Cold War era: Some of them were very bad indeed, but few of them were this bad, and their half-baked anti-Americanism found little support among the broad mass of the American public. Now, thanks to the new rightists, an even worse and more enduring anti-Americanism has become the foundational belief of millions of American citizens.
I know that such thoughts make me part of the problem. And yes, I will always believe that voting for someone such as Jordan (or, for that matter, Donald Trump) is, on some level, a moral failing. But that has nothing to do with whether Ohio and Florida are part of the America I love, a nation full of good people whose politics are less important than their shared citizenship with me in this republic. I might hate the way most Floridians vote, but I would defend every square inch of the state from anyone who would want to take it from us and subjugate any of its people.
When I returned from that first Soviet excursion back in 1983, we landed at JFK on July 4—the finest day there could be to return to America after a grim sojourn in the Land of the Soviets. By the time my short connecting hop to Hartford took off, it was dark. We flew low across Long Island and Connecticut, and I could see the Fourth of July fireworks in towns below us. I was a young man and so, naturally, I was too tough to cry, but I felt my eyes welling as I watched town after town celebrate our national holiday. I was exhausted, not only from the trip but from a summer in an imprisoned nation. I was so glad to be home, to be free, to be safe again among other Americans.
[Conor Friedersdorf: Independence Day in a divided America]
I want us all to experience that feeling. And so, for one day, on this Fourth, I am going to think of my fellow citizens as if I’d just met them in Soviet Leningrad. Just for the day, I won’t care where their votes went in the past few elections—or if they voted at all. I won’t care where they stand on Roe v. Wade or student-debt forgiveness. I won’t care if any of them think America is a capitalist hellhole. I won’t bother about their loves and hates. They’re Americans, and like it or not, we are bound to one another in one of the greatest and most noble experiments in human history. Our destiny together, stand or fall, is inescapable.
Tomorrow, we can go back to bickering. But just for this Fourth, I hope we can all try, with an open spirit, to think of our fellow Americans as friends and family, brothers and sisters, and people whose hands we would gratefully clasp if we met in a faraway and dangerous place.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization announced today that Jens Stoltenberg, its secretary-general for the past nine years, will stay on for an almost unprecedented tenth year. Last week, after that development had already been predicted by The Times of London, the Financial Times, Politico, and who knows how many defense-industry newsletters, I met Stoltenberg in his clean, functional, almost featureless office—white walls, gray carpet—deep inside NATO’s shiny Brussels headquarters. I asked him about it.
“I have one plan, and that is to go back to Norway,” he replied, deadpan. I raised an eyebrow. Yes, he conceded, there are “some requests for me to stay on.” Beyond that, he would not comment. Not hypothetically. Not under embargo. When the inevitable announcement was finally made this morning, he said in a statement that he was “honored,” because “in a more dangerous world, our great Alliance is more important than ever.”
It would be hard to find a better illustration of the qualities that make Stoltenberg so popular. NATO is a defensive alliance representing a wide variety of countries and regions—Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, Scandinavia and Turkey, Britain and France. It makes decisions by consensus. To achieve that consensus, the NATO secretary-general does not personally need to fight battles or win wars. That’s the job of the supreme allied commander, who is always an American, as well as the 31 NATO heads of state and their 31 armies. Instead, the secretary-general, who is always a European, succeeds if he talks to everybody, finds common ground, negotiates compromises, never leaks, and never puts himself at the center of the story, even when the story is about him.
In recent years, this sort of person—call him Multilateral Man (though of course some of them are women)—has had a bad rap. Enemies of the European Union, NATO, and the alphabet soup of organizations run out of Washington, Geneva, and Brussels have taken to calling their employees “unelected bureaucrats.” Multilateral Man is said to be lazy, or wasteful, or powerless. In an age that celebrates “sovereignty,” “national interest,” and the achievements of his chief opponents (usually called “strongmen”), critics disparage Multilateral Man as parasitic or pointless. Sometimes the critics have a point.
But Stoltenberg is where he is precisely because he actually believes in multilateral organizations, NATO in particular. More than that, he thinks they are force multipliers that function better than the autocracies run by strongmen. He has argued that point rather passionately with NATO’s critics, among them Donald Trump, whom he famously won over by showing him bar charts illustrating increases in allied military spending. (“I love graphs,” Stoltenberg told me.)
[Read: ‘It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality’]
He also thinks that endless rounds of negotiation over alliance policy are worthwhile, because ultimately the result is a stronger sense of commitment. To those who say NATO is less efficient, he asks: “Less efficient than what? Compared to what?” True, if you don’t have NATO, “you don’t have a slow-moving decision process.” But that’s because if you don’t have NATO, you don’t have any decision process at all, at least not a collective decision process. “I believe in collective defense; I believe in one for all and all for one, that attack on one ally will trigger a response from the others.” And this, he says, is not just “good for small nations”; it’s “good for big nations too.” Everybody needs friends, even Americans.
Strictly speaking, Stoltenberg is not an unelected bureaucrat in any case, given that he has now been “elected” four times by NATO heads of state, twice for regular terms in office and twice for extensions. He also spent many years as an elected politician. As prime minister of Norway (from 2000 to 2001 and again from 2005 to 2013), he regularly ran coalition governments, and so he got used to forging compromises. As the son of another Norwegian politician (his father was both defense minister and foreign minister), he grew up eating breakfast with world leaders, among them Nelson Mandela, and thus learned the value of personal contacts. He once told a radio station that he hadn’t realized until many years later that it is not actually normal for foreign ministers to invite foreign leaders into their kitchen.
Breakfast isn’t always practical, nowadays, and so, according to those around him, he makes up for it with flurries of text messages and a constant round of visits to NATO capitals. He attended the inauguration of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last month, spent extra time in Istanbul, brought his wife and squeezed in some conversations about Swedish accession. In the 48 hours before I saw him, he had met with the prime ministers of Denmark and Bulgaria, as well as the president of France. He had attended a training exercise in Lithuania the previous weekend, and a meeting of the European Council, which includes all European Union heads of state, that morning. If he was tired of this endless carousel, he didn’t say so.
But at this particular moment, what really qualifies Stoltenberg for this job is his clarity about the dangers posed by Russia and a special affinity for Ukraine. Here I am treading delicately, because we don’t yet know the full details of the package NATO will offer Ukraine at a summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week. The Ukrainians are asking for full NATO membership, which is nothing new: This subject was first seriously discussed at a NATO summit back in 2008. The decision taken at the time, to deny Ukraine a path to admission but to imply that it might be granted in the future, was the worst one possible, because it left Ukraine in a gray zone, aspiring to join the West but without any Western security guarantees. The world has shifted since then, and many more countries are now open to the idea of Ukrainian membership. Although the U.S. government is reluctant to support that while the war continues, for fear that American soldiers would immediately be drawn into the conflict, the Biden administration might eventually consider it too.
[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]
For the moment, NATO will offer a series of proposals for longer-term military integration and aid. Ukraine will shift from Soviet to Western weapons systems and will be offered new institutional arrangements, including the creation of a NATO-Ukraine council, which don’t sound like much outside the Brussels bubble but mean a lot to people inside. Plans for eventually speeding up the process—Ukraine, like Finland and Sweden, may eventually be allowed to join without an extensive “membership action plan”—are also under consideration. Some countries may ultimately offer bilateral assurances as well.
Naturally, Stoltenberg didn’t tell me which countries hold which positions, even though these are widely reported. “My main task,” he said, “is not to give interesting answers, but it is to ensure that we make progress on the issue of membership for Ukraine.” Julianne Smith, the U.S. ambassador to NATO, told me that Stoltenberg hasn’t been looking for “the least common denominator” in his negotiations, but is rather seeking to forge the best deal possible for Ukraine. Maybe this is American spin in advance of the summit, but if so, it has a broader point. Because Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that time is on his side, one of NATO’s central tasks is to convince him that time is not on his side, that the Western alliance will go on backing Ukraine, indefinitely. The expression long term comes up in a lot of transatlantic conversations about Ukraine. So does the word permanent. Stoltenberg’s durability is part of that message too.
But why should a former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party (and youthful anti-war activist) be so dedicated to this task? I saw Stoltenberg speak with great emotion about Ukraine at a private event a few months ago, and last week I asked him about that too. He told me that this was the result of personal experience. He visited then-Communist Eastern Europe during the Cold War, and saw stark contrasts between its inhabitants and their counterparts in the West. “I thought these were totally different people,” he recalled. “They have different clothing, everything smells different … and it was really dark, and it was so far away. But now I go to Riga or to Tallinn—I was just in Vilnius—and these are very trendy, modern cities; if anything, they are more trendy, more modern, and more creative than in Scandinavia.” The people were not different after all: “This was about politics, the rules that they lived under, and I am ashamed that I didn’t realize that earlier. And to some extent, I also made the same mistake about Ukraine.”
For Stoltenberg, as for so many Europeans, the current war stirred some even older memories. Turning to his office wall, Stoltenberg pointed to a photograph (black and white, in keeping with the austere aesthetic) of his grandfather at age 100, a former Norwegian army captain who was at one point in German captivity. Both his parents and grandparents used to walk around Oslo and point out locations of wartime events—“There was an explosion there, a sabotage attack here; the resistance used to hide in that flat”—and he knows this tour so well that he can do it with his own children. The Ukrainians, he told me, “are fighting the same fight that we fought against Nazism.”
[Alex Zeldin: The other history of the Holocaust]
This dual realization—that Ukrainians aren’t so different from Westerners, and that they are fighting a familiar kind of war—isn’t unique to Stoltenberg. On the contrary, quite a few European leaders, and for that matter ordinary Europeans, have traveled the same journey, which is why he and others in and around NATO seem so confident in their “long term” and “permanent” commitment to Ukraine. He insists that this transformation began not last year but at the start of his term in 2014, when NATO had just been surprised and confused by the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. After that, spending rose, and strategic plans shifted. In 2016, the alliance agreed to set up battle groups—led by Americans in Poland, Germans in Lithuania, Brits in Estonia, and Canadians in Latvia. By February 24, 2022, “NATO was prepared. We had all of the increased readiness, we had all of the increased defense spending, we had deployed forces to the eastern border, and we had agreed defense plans—new defense plans—that we activated that morning.”
Not everybody had taken this shift seriously. In 2019, French President Emmanuel Macron described NATO as “brain dead.” The Russian president’s disregard for NATO and its leaders had far greater consequences. Putin claimed to be offended by NATO’s presence on his western border, but in practice he was not bothered by it, and certainly not deterred by it. Had he really believed in the transatlantic commitment to Ukraine, or had he really feared NATO aggression, he surely would not have invaded at all.
But although historians will argue about whether NATO could have done more to deter Russia, it is already clear that NATO did much more to help Ukraine than Putin expected once the war began. Putin not only underestimated Ukraine; he also underestimated Multilateral Men—the officials who, like Jens Stoltenberg and his counterparts at the European Union, helped the White House put together the military, political, and diplomatic response. Putin believed his own propaganda, the same propaganda used by the transatlantic far right: Democracies are weak, autocrats are strong, and people who use polite, diplomatic language won’t defend themselves. This turned out to be wrong. “Democracies have proven much more resilient, much stronger than our adversaries believe,” Stoltenberg told me. And autocracies are more fragile: “As we’ve just seen, authoritarian systems can just, suddenly, break down.”
Here is a prediction: Over the next year—and this one, everyone swears, really is his last—Stoltenberg won’t be making any charismatic speeches about Ukraine or NATO. He won’t join the fray, start arguments, or appear on television unless he has too. Instead, he will keep talking about a “multiyear program of moving Ukraine from Soviet standards and equipment doctrines to NATO standards and doctrines,” keep meeting with prime ministers and foreign ministers, keep working on the integration of Ukraine into Europe. And then, one day, it will have happened.
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Reading short novels and encountering a range of characters’ worlds in quick succession can be a singular pleasure, especially in the summertime.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Taut and Potent
My most controversial opinion is that most books should be either 100 or 1,000 pages. I am joking, obviously—sort of. Length is not a good proxy for quality, and a story should take the time it demands. But after years of gravitating toward baggy narrative journeys, I have lately become enchanted by novellas.
I admire short novels largely because I love witnessing the skill that goes into achieving an efficient word-to-idea ratio. But I also find it a lot of fun, especially in the summer, to dip into varied lives in rapid succession. I am not the only one turning to sparse texts: As Kate Dwyer reported in Esquire last week, slim volumes are having a moment. Dwyer identifies “a desire among general audiences for the concise, intense books that have been gaining momentum in the literary fiction and nonfiction categories in recent years.” She reports that Annie Ernaux’s Nobel win last fall played a role in calcifying the prestige of potent, short works.
I don’t think short books have intrinsic merit any more than long ones do. In recent years, I have read a number of sub-200-page novels that I found insufferable (another benefit of a short book: If it’s bad, it’s over soon). But many of the good ones, in my experience, rely on an intriguing sense of disorientation. The short novel can be an ideal format for narrative swerves.
Yesterday afternoon, lying in front of a box fan awaiting the humid summer rain, I finished Hanna Bervoets’s We Had to Remove This Post, a taut, haunting novel that weighs in at 144 pages. In the book, readers follow a content moderator as she navigates gory posts on the social-media site she works with and applies content rules that often feel arbitrary. This novel, in its singular focus on vulnerable workers and their relationships with one another, laces in a neat indictment of the corporation looming in the background. But the story is not about the technology, not really. It’s about the workers who suffer because of it. And late in the book, we discover darkness rooted more deeply in the protagonist than was apparent at the start. “You don’t get it, do you?” a former lover asks our narrator, confronting her. (As a reader, I too did not get it—until I did!)
By total coincidence, last month I finished another slim psychological novel in which our narrator is repeatedly told “You just don’t get it” by an ex: Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending (163 pages). I will not pretend that this echo is meaningful to anyone besides me. But that’s part of the fun of reading short novels back to back: the delight of building a constellation of references and patterns only apparent to oneself. You can do this with any type of book, in theory. But reading a bunch of slight texts back to back is a sure way to swiftly build up your own arsenal.
If you are looking for some short novels to get you started, here are a few I’ve read and loved over the past year. I think near-constantly about Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino and Sagittarius, paired novellas about two fraught family relationships. In Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, which follows a boarding-school girl in Switzerland, death lurks on each of the 101 pages. Adrian Nathan West’s My Father’s Diet, the hilarious tale of a young man whose divorced dad gets into powerlifting, is packaged in the perfect container for the scope of the story: 176 pages.
Short novels are even sneaking into works of long, complex fiction: In Lucy Ives’s labyrinthine Life Is Everywhere, the protagonist’s eerie novella, a riff on Hamlet, pops up hundreds of pages in. (And to continue the theme of fun personal tie-ins, I am currently in the midst of another uncanny and wry retelling of Hamlet, this time from the point of view of a fetus: Ian McEwan’s Nutshell, which at 208 pages is on the longer end of what I’d consider truly short.)
In spite of my zeal for short books, I still mostly read longer novels. This year, I moved away from Goodreads, which I only ever updated haphazardly, seeking to gain privacy and stanch the flow of my personal data to Amazon. Now I track what I read in a spreadsheet. A bit of number-crunching tells me that the average length of the books I’ve read in print this year is 256 pages. That strikes me as a truly average length. (I also found it sort of fun, looking back at my reading list, to find that I read three books that are exactly 288 pages this spring.) Everything in moderation including moderation, I suppose. I love a short novel whose every page promises to be thick with meaning, and I love a shaggy epic full of beautiful prose. I feel grateful, as a reader, to have such a range to choose from.
One more note of praise for the short novel: Part of the joy is that you can stumble into them and stumble back out, enriched, a few hours later. About a year ago, meaning to order the entire Copenhagen Trilogy, I accidentally ordered just the first volume. Childhood, by Tove Ditlevsen, arrived on my doorstep, all 99 pages of it. I was disappointed at first to realize my error. But then I read the book in maybe two sittings. It was lovely and brief. At some point I will probably read the other two volumes. But for now, I am content.
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Evening Read
Hip-Hop’s Midlife Slump
By Xochitl Gonzalez
In the summer of 1998, the line to get into Mecca on a Sunday night might stretch from the entrance to the Tunnel nightclub on Manhattan’s 12th Avenue all the way to the end of the block; hundreds of bodies, clothed and barely clothed in Versace and DKNY and Polo Sport, vibrating with anticipation. Passing cars with their booming stereos, either scoping out the scene or hunting for parking, offered a preview of what was inside: the sounds of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim. These people weren’t waiting just to listen to music. They were there to be part of it. To be in the room where Biggie Smalls and Mary J. Blige had performed. To be on the dance floor when Funkmaster Flex dropped a bomb on the next summer anthem. They were waiting to be at the center of hip-hop.
What they didn’t realize was that the center of hip-hop had shifted.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito explores the psychic toll of class mobility.
Watch. Choose from 11 undersung TV shows that our culture writers wish had received more attention this year.
Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.
P.S.
I somehow totally missed the high-seas literary romp Let Them All Talk when the movie came out in 2020, so it was to my great pleasure and amusement that I ended up watching it on a long flight last fall. In case you also missed it: Basically, a novelist (Meryl Streep!) is sent on a transatlantic voyage, and her agent (Gemma Chan!) secretly follows her aboard to try to find out what’s going on with her next book. Streep brings along her nephew, played by the charming Lucas Hedges, and she’s also joined by two friends, because why not? Antics of a sort, along with conversations about literary ethics and making a life as a writer, ensue on board. The film, directed by Steven Soderbergh, was shot on the Queen Mary 2, and the actors improvise atop the story, which was written by Deborah Eisenberg. It’s a funny, if kind of unwieldy, tale that combines many elements I enjoy. I recommend it (streaming on Max) to supplement your short-novel reading on this holiday not-quite-weekend.
— Lora
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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
According to the lawsuit, Haltigan believes in “colorblind inclusivity,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “merit-based evaluation”—all ideas that could lead to a low-scoring statement based on the starting rubric UC Santa Cruz publishes online to help guide prospective applicants.
“To receive a high score under the terms set by the rubric,” the complaint alleges, “an applicant must express agreement with specific socio-political ideas, including the view that treating individuals differently based on their race or sex is desirable.” Thus, the lawsuit argues, Haltigan must express ideas with which he disagrees to have a chance of getting hired.
The lawsuit compares the DEI-statement requirement to Red Scare–era loyalty oaths that asked people to affirm that they were not members of the Communist Party. It calls the statements “a thinly veiled attempt to ensure dogmatic conformity throughout the university system.”
Conor Friedersdorf: The DEI industry needs to check its privilege
UC Santa Cruz’s requirement is part of a larger trend: Almost half of large colleges now include DEI criteria in tenure standards, while the American Enterprise Institute found that 19 percent of academic job postings required DEI statements, which were required more frequently at elite institutions. Still, there is significant opposition to the practice. A 2022 survey of nearly 1,500 U.S. faculty members found that 50 percent of respondents considered the statements “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” And the Academic Freedom Alliance, a group composed of faculty members with a wide range of political perspectives, argues that diversity statements erase “the distinction between academic expertise and ideological conformity” and create scenarios “inimical to fundamental values that should govern academic life.”
The Haltigan lawsuit—filed by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a right-leaning nonprofit—is the first major free-speech challenge to a public institution that requires these statements. If Haltigan prevails, state institutions may be unable to mandate diversity statements in the future, or may find themselves constrained in how they solicit or assess such statements.
“Taking a principled stand against the use of the DEI rubric in the Academy is crucial for the continued survival of our institutions of higher learning,” he declared in a Substack post earlier this year.
Alternatively, a victory for UC Santa Cruz may entrench the trend of compelling academics to submit DEI statements in institutions that are under the control of the left—and serve as a blueprint for the populist right to impose its own analogous requirements in state college systems it controls. For example, Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, who was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis to help overhaul higher education in Florida, advocates replacing diversity, equity, and inclusion with equality, merit, and colorblindness. If California can lawfully force professors to detail their contributions to DEI, Florida can presumably force all of its professors to detail their contributions to EMC. And innovative state legislatures could create any number of new favored-concept triads to impose on professors in their states.
That outcome would balkanize state university systems into factions with competing litmus tests. Higher education as a whole would be better off if the Haltigan victory puts an end to this coercive trend.
The University of California is a fitting place for a test case on diversity statements. It imposed loyalty oaths on faculty members during the Red Scare, birthed a free-speech movement in 1964, was a litigant in the 1977 Supreme Court case that gave rise to the diversity rationale for affirmative action, and in 1996 helped inspire California voters to pass Proposition 209. That voter initiative amended the Golden State’s constitution to ban discrimination or preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In 2020, at the height of the racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder, voters in deep-blue California reaffirmed race neutrality by an even wider margin. This continued to block the UC system’s preferred approach, which was to increase diversity in hiring by considering, not disregarding, applicants’ race. Indeed, the insistence on nondiscrimination by California voters has long been regarded with hostility by many UC system administrators. Rewarding contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion is partly their attempt to increase racial diversity among professors in a way that does not violate the law.
[Read: The problem with how higher education treats diversity]
The regime these administrators created is a case study in concept creep. Around 2005, the UC system began to change how it evaluated professors. As ever, they would be judged based on teaching, research, and service. But the system-wide personnel manual was updated with a novel provision: Job candidates who showed that they promoted “diversity and equal opportunity” in teaching, research, or service could get credit for doing so. Imagine a job candidate who, for example, did volunteer work mentoring high schoolers in a disadvantaged neighborhood to help prepare them for college. That would presumably benefit the state of California, the UC system by improving its applicant pool, and the teaching skills of the volunteer, who’d gain experience in what helps such students to succeed. Giving positive credit for such activities seemed sensible.
But how much credit?
A 2014 letter from the chair of the Assembly of the UC Academic Senate addressed that question, stating that faculty efforts to promote “equal opportunity and diversity” should be evaluated “on the same basis as other contributions.” They should not, however, be considered “a ‘fourth leg’ of evaluation, in addition to teaching, research, and service.”
If matters stood there, the UC approach to “diversity and equal opportunity” might not face legal challenges. But administrators successfully pushed for a more radical approach. What began as an option to highlight work that advanced “diversity and equal opportunity” morphed over time into mandatory statements on contributions to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The shift circa 2018 from the possibility of credit for something to a forced accounting of it was important. So was the shift from the widely shared value of equal opportunity to equity (a contested and controversial concept with no widely agreed-upon meaning) and inclusion. The bundled triad of DEI is typically justified by positing that hiring a racially and ethnically diverse faculty or admitting a diverse student body is not enough—for the institution and everyone in it to thrive, the best approach (in this telling) is to treat some groups differently than others to account for structural disadvantages they suffer and to make sure everyone feels welcome, hence “inclusion.”
That theory of how diversity works is worth taking seriously. Still, it is just a theory. I am a proponent of a diverse University of California, but I believe that its students would better thrive across identity groups in a culture of charity, forbearance, and individualism. A Marxist might regard solidarity as vital. A conservative might emphasize the importance of personal virtue, an appreciation of every institution’s imperfectability, and the assimilation of all students to a culture of rigorous truth-seeking. Many Californians of all identities believe in treating everyone equally regardless of their race or their gender.
UC Santa Cruz has not yet responded to Haltigan’s lawsuit. But its chancellor, Cynthia K. Larive, states on the UC Santa Cruz website that the institution asks for a contributions-to-DEI statement because it is “a Hispanic-Serving” and “Asian American Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institution” that has “a high proportion of first generation students,” and that it therefore seeks to hire professors “who will contribute to promoting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment.” In her telling, the statements help to “assess a candidate’s skills, experience, and ability to contribute to the work they would be doing in supporting our students, staff, and faculty.”
Perhaps the most extreme developments in the UC system’s use of DEI statements are taking place on the Davis, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, and Riverside campuses, where pilot programs treat mandatory diversity statements not as one factor among many in an overall evaluation of candidates, but as a threshold test. In other words, if a group of academics applied for jobs, their DEI statements would be read and scored, and only applicants with the highest DEI statement scores would make it to the next round. The others would never be evaluated on their research, teaching, or service. This is a revolutionary change in how to evaluate professors.
This approach—one that is under direct challenge in the Haltigan lawsuit—was scrutinized in detail by Daniel M. Ortner of the Pacific Legal Foundation in an article for the Catholic University Law Review. When UC Berkeley hired for life-sciences jobs through its pilot program, Ortner reports, 679 qualified applicants were eliminated based on their DEI statements alone. “Seventy-six percent of qualified applicants were rejected without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence, or their ability to contribute to their field,” he wrote. “As far as the university knew, these applicants could have well been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.”
At UC Davis, 50 percent of applicants in some searches were disqualified based on their DEI statements alone. Abigail Thompson, then the chair of the mathematics department at UC Davis, dissented from its approach in a 2019 column for the American Mathematics Society newsletter. “Classical liberals aspire to treat every person as a unique individual,” she wrote. “Requiring candidates to believe that people should be treated differently according to their identity is indeed a political test.”
More striking than her argument was the polarized response from other academics, captured by the letters to the editor. Some wrote in agreement and some in substantive disagreement, as is appropriate. But a group letter signed by scores of mathematicians from institutions all over the United States asserted, without evidence, that the American Mathematics Society “harmed the mathematics community, particularly mathematicians from marginalized backgrounds,” merely by airing Thompson’s critique of diversity statements. “We are disappointed by the editorial decision to publish the piece,” they wrote. Mathematicians hold a diversity of views about mandatory DEI statements. But just one faction asserts that others do harm merely by expressing their viewpoint among colleagues. Just one faction openly wanted to deny such dissent a platform. Are members of that progressive faction fair when they score DEI statements that are in tension with their own political beliefs? It is not unreasonable for liberal, conservative, and centrist faculty members to be skeptical. And many are.
A rival group letter decried the “attempt to intimidate the AMS into publishing only articles that hew to a very specific point of view,” adding, “If we allow ourselves to be intimidated into avoiding discussion of how best to achieve diversity, we undermine our attempts to achieve it.”
The most formidable defender of mandatory diversity statements may be Brian Soucek, a law professor at UC Davis. He’s participated in debates organized by FIRE and the Federalist Society (organizations that tend to be more skeptical of DEI) and recently won a UC Davis Chancellor’s Achievement Award for Diversity and Community. In an April 2022 article for the UC Davis Law Review, he acknowledged that “certain types or uses of diversity statements would be indefensible from a constitutional or academic freedom standpoint” but argued that, should a university want to require diversity statements, it can do so in ways that violate neither academic freedom nor the Constitution. He has worked to make UC Davis’s approach to DEI statements more defensible.
Someone evaluating a diversity-statement regime, he suggests, should focus on the following attributes:
Soucek argues that the ability to help diverse students to thrive is directly relevant to a law professor’s core duties, not something irrelevant to legitimate educational or academic objectives. As for concerns that mandatory diversity statements might entrench orthodoxies of thought in academia, or create the perception that political forces or fear of job loss drives academic conclusions, he argues that those concerns, while real, are not unique to diversity statements—they also apply to the research and teaching statements that most job candidates must provide.
“Academic freedom, and the system of peer review that it is built upon, is a fragile business, always susceptible not just to outside interference, but also to corruption from within,” he wrote in his law-review article. But diversity statements strike me as more vulnerable to “corruption from within” than research statements. Although a hiring committee of chemists might or might not do a fair job evaluating the research of applicants, at least committee members credibly possess the expertise to render better judgments than anyone else—they know better than state legislators or DEI administrators or history professors or the public how to assess chemistry research.
[Read: What is faculty diversity worth to a university?]
On what basis can chemistry professors claim equivalent expertise in how best to advance diversity in higher education generally, or even in chemistry specifically? It wouldn’t be shocking if historians or economists or sociologists were better-positioned to understand why a demographic group was underrepresented in chemistry or how best to change that. Most hiring-committee members possess no special expertise in diversity, or equity, or inclusion. Absent empirically grounded expertise, academics are more likely to defer to what’s popular for political or careerist reasons, and even insofar as they are earnest in their judgments about which job candidates would best advance diversity, equity, or inclusion, there is no reason to afford their nonexpert opinions on the matter any more deference than the opinions of anyone else.
Ultimately, Soucek’s idealized regime of mandatory diversity statements—tailored to particular disciplines and judged by faculty members without outside political interference—strikes me as a theoretical improvement on the status quo but, in practice, unrealistic in what it presumes of hiring committees. Meanwhile, most real-world regimes of diversity statements, including those at campuses in the University of California system, lack the sort of safeguards Soucek recommends, and may not assess anything more than the ability to submit an essay that resonates with hiring committees. Whether an applicant’s high-scoring DEI statement actually correlates with better research or teaching outcomes is unclear and largely unstudied.
The costs of mandatory DEI statements are far too high to justify, especially absent evidence that they do significant good. Alas, proponents seem unaware of those costs. Yes, they know that they are imposing a requirement that many colleagues find uncomfortable. But they may be less aware of the message that higher-education institutions send to the public by demanding these statements.
Mandatory DEI statements send the message that professors should be evaluated not only on research and teaching, but on their contributions to improving society. Academics may regret validating that premise in the future, if college administrators or legislators or voters want to judge them based on how they advance a different understanding of social progress, one that departs more from their own—for example, how they’ve contributed to a war effort widely regarded as righteous.
Mandatory DEI statements send the message that it’s okay for academics to chill the speech of colleagues. If half of faculty members believe that diversity statements are ideological litmus tests, fear of failing the test will chill free expression within a large cohort, even if they are wrong. Shouldn’t that alone make the half of academics who support these statements rethink their stance?
Mandatory DEI statements send a message that is anti-pluralistic. I believe that diversity and inclusion are good. I do not think that universities should reward advancing those particular values more than all others. Some aspiring professors are well suited to advancing diversity. Great! The time of others is better spent mitigating climate change, or serving as expert witnesses in trials, or pioneering new treatments for cancer. Insofar as all academics must check a compulsory “advancing DEI” box, many will waste time on work that provides little or no benefit instead of doing kinds of work where they enjoy a comparative advantage in improving the world.
And mandatory DEI statements send the message that viewpoint diversity and dissent are neither valuable nor necessary—that if you’ve identified the right values, a monoculture in support of them is preferable. The scoring rubric for evaluating candidates’ statements that UC Santa Cruz published declares that a superlative statement “discusses diversity, equity, and inclusion as core values of the University that every faculty member should actively contribute to advancing.” Do academics really want to assert that any value should be held by “every” faculty member? Academics who value DEI work should want smart critics of the approach commenting from inside academic institutions to point out flaws and shortcomings that boosters miss.
Demanding that everyone get on board and embrace the same values and social-justice priorities will inevitably narrow the sort of people who apply to work and get hired in higher education.
In that sense, mandatory DEI statements are profoundly anti-diversity. And that strikes me as an especially perilous hypocrisy for academics to indulge at a time of falling popular support for higher education. A society can afford its college professors radical freedom to dissent from social orthodoxies or it can demand conformity, but not both. Academic-freedom advocates can credibly argue that scholars must be free to criticize or even to denigrate God, the nuclear family, America, motherhood, capitalism, Christianity, John Wayne movies, Thanksgiving Day, the military, the police, beer, penetrative sex, and the internal combustion engine—but not if academics are effectively prohibited from criticizing progressivism’s sacred values.
The UC system could advance diversity in research and teaching in lots of uncontroversial ways. Instead, in the name of diversity, the hiring process is being loaded in favor of professors who subscribe to the particular ideology of DEI partisans as if every good hire would see things as they do. I do not want California voters to strip the UC system of more of its ability to self-govern, but if this hypocrisy inspires a reformist ballot initiative, administrators will deserve it, regardless of what the judiciary decides about whether they are violating the First Amendment.
Over the past month, record-setting high temperatures have been recorded in several places across the northern hemisphere. Dangerous heat waves in Europe, Asia, and North America have driven people to nearby beaches, lakes, and water parks to find relief. Collected below, recent images show people and animals doing what they can to beat the heat.
Twitter may have just had its worst weekend ever, technically speaking. In response to a series of server emergencies, Elon Musk, the Twitter owner and self-professed free-speech “absolutist,” decided to limit how many tweets people can view, and how they can view them. This was not your average fail whale. It was the social-media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 p.m.—a baffling, antithetical business decision for a platform that depends on engaging users (and showing them ads) as much as possible. It costs $44 billion to buy yourself a digital town square. Breaking it, however, is free.
First, Twitter set a policy requiring that web users log in to view tweets—immediately limiting the potential audience for any given post to people who have Twitter—and later, Musk announced limits to how many tweets users can consume in a day, purportedly to counter “extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” Although these measures will supposedly be reversed, as others have been during Musk’s tenure, they amount to a sledgehammering of a platform that’s been quietly wasting away for months: Twitter is now literally unusable if you don’t have an account, or if you do have an account and access it a lot. It is the clearest sign yet that Musk does not have his platform under control—that he cannot deliver a consistently functional experience for what was once one of the most vibrant and important social networks on the planet.
The extreme, even illogical nature of these interventions led to some speculation: Is Twitter’s so-called rate limit a technical mistake that’s being passed off as an executive decision? Or is it the opposite: a daring gambit of 13-dimensional chess, whereby Musk is trying to plunge the company into bankruptcy and restructuring? The situation has made conspiracy theorists out of onlookers who can’t help but wonder whether Musk’s plan has been to slowly and steadily destroy the platform all along.
Such theories are compelling, but they all share a flaw, in that they presuppose both a rational actor and a plan. You may not find either here. I’ve reported on Musk for the past five years, speaking with dozens of employees in the process to try to understand his rationales. The takeaway is clear: His motivations are frequently not what they seem, and chaos is a given. His money and power command attention and his actions have far-reaching consequences, but his behavior is rarely befitting of his station.
Of course, many of his acolytes—especially those in Silicon Valley—have tended to believe that he has everything in hand. “It’s remarkable how many people who’ve never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who’s run Tesla and SpaceX,” the investor Paul Graham tweeted in November, after Musk took over the social network. “In both those companies, people die if the software doesn’t work right. Do you really think he’s not up to managing a social network?” But it has been clear since the moment we got a glimpse into his phone that Musk’s purchase of Twitter was defined by impulse: It appears to have been triggered in part by getting his feelings hurt by the company’s previous CEO. The decision was rash enough that he tried three times to back out of it.
[Read: Twitter’s slow and painful end]
Musk’s management style at the platform has appeared equally unstrategic. After saddling the company with a mountain of debt to complete his acquisition in October, he decided to tweet baseless conspiracy theories and alienate advertisers; days before this incident, the marketing lead in charge of managing Twitter’s brand partnerships had resigned. Musk quickly unbanned Twitter’s most egregious rule breakers; fired most of the employees, including those in charge of technical duties; and bungled the rollout of Twitter’s paid-verification system. Compared with a year earlier, Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks beginning April 1 was down 59 percent.
Recently, Musk’s public-facing strategy to turn his company around has been to continue tweeting thinly veiled conspiracy theories and sex jokes, cozy up to far-right politicians, hire a CEO who was initially contractually forbidden to negotiate with some of Twitter’s brand partners, and float fighting Mark Zuckerberg in a cage match. To date, Musk’s leadership has degraded the reliability of Twitter’s service, filled the platform with bigots and spam, and alienated many of its power users. But this weekend’s disasters are different. The decision to limit people’s ability to consume content on the platform is the rapid unscheduled disassembly of the never-ending, real-time feed of information that makes Twitter Twitter.
[Read: Elon Musk’s text messages explain everything]
His supporters are confused and, perhaps, starting to feel the cracks of cognitive dissonance. “Surely someone who can figure out how to build spaceships can figure out how to distinguish scrapers from legit users,” Graham—the same one who supported Musk in November—tweeted on Saturday. What reasonable answer could there be for an advertising company to drastically limit the time that potentially hundreds of millions of users can spend on its website? (Maybe this one: On Saturday, outside developers appeared to discover an unfixed bug in Twitter’s web app that was flooding the network’s own servers with self-requests, to the point that the platform couldn’t function—a problem likely compounded by Twitter’s skeleton crew of engineers. When I reached out for clarification, the company auto-responded with an email containing a poop emoji.)
All the money and trolling can’t hide what’s obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention to his Twitter tenure: Elon Musk is bad at this. His incompetence should unravel his image as a visionary, one whose ambitions extend as far as colonizing Mars. This reputation as a genius, more than his billions, is Musk’s real fortune; it masks the impetuousness he demonstrates so frequently on Twitter. But Musk has spent this currency recklessly. Who in their right mind would explore space with a man who can’t keep a website running?
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The ancient Greeks called it katabasis: a test of heroism by descent into the underworld. The deeper you go, the more difficult the journey becomes. But if you can withstand the heat as you approach eternal damnation, you return to Earth’s surface with the wisdom to transcend mortal fear. This mythic quest has long captured the cultural imagination, from Orpheus to Barbarian. It has the power to bestow superhuman glory on those who survive. And it’s also the concept behind my new crossword, appearing on the back page of each new print issue of The Atlantic.
The back page of a print magazine is consecrated space for a puzzle: one final flourish, like the cherry on a sundae or the outro of a power ballad. Even in our age of ephemerality, the essential experience of the crossword, to me, remains sitting around the breakfast table with loved ones and the Sunday New York Times Magazine, shouting answers, arguing, passing the puzzle around, pooling knowledge to forge ahead and collectively rise to the intellectual challenge.
To do justice to this tradition for The Atlantic’s elegant and historic print editions, I knew I needed to make something diabolically special. I wanted to give the classic print crossword a fresh narrative spin without changing the tried-and-true mechanics that have kept readers turning to the back page Sunday after Sunday for so many years. The Atlantic mini, which we publish every weekday and Sundays, gets larger and more difficult as the week progresses. This structure offers a gentle introduction to novice players, and it gives experienced solvers a yardstick they can measure themselves against week after week. It’s the cruciverbal journey that first hooked me: an ongoing test of acuity, contextualizing personal progress across a week, a month, a year. What if that same journey could be re-created over the course of one puzzle?
At first glance, Inferno might seem like your average, run-of-the-mill crossword puzzle. List of numbered clues? Check. Empty grid with corresponding numbers? Double check. You, the inveterate solver, using one to fill in the other? Duh. But look again: The grid you’ve come to know as perfectly square has been transmogrified into a tall, thin pillar, like a skyscraper. And once you start solving, you’ll see that the puzzle begins easy as pie, and gets tougher and tougher as you solve downward, until, I hope, you reach the bottom stumped and sweating. The puzzle is a slow descent into devilish difficulty, simple enough to slip into but nearly impossible to complete. That’s why it’s called an Inferno: Like Dante’s katabasis into hell, the deeper you go, the more severe the punishment.
Inferno taps into what I love about print puzzles. You solve as much as you can. Then you get stuck and stow the magazine somewhere safe while the frustrating blockade of clues burbles in your subconscious. A few days later, you pick the puzzle back up to find the knot of knowledge untied by some unseen cognitive force inside you. Your momentum returns, and you cruise along victoriously … until you hit the next impenetrable barricade. Lather, rinse, and repeat; before you know it, you’ve conquered the unconquerable, and another magazine with another unconquerable challenge arrives in the mail.
Can you plumb the very bottom of this puzzle’s infernal depths before the next issue hits the newsstands? Can you at least get a little closer each time? My advice, as with every crossword, is to be patient and build from what you know. A long “spine” answer will run down the center of the puzzle, traversing each tier of difficulty, which should help you gain a toehold in even the toughest tangles. Test your prowess starting in the July/August 2023 issue of The Atlantic. The puzzle will also be available to play online, and the answer key will be posted on www.theatlantic.com/inferno.
As much as I love falling into a book and letting it consume an entire day, my free time doesn’t always arrive in uninterrupted stretches. Instead, it might be sprinkled throughout a hectic schedule: 10 minutes while I’m waiting at the doctor’s office, another 15 minutes riding the train, 30 minutes before falling asleep. These pockets of idle time could be spent scrolling on TikTok or answering emails, but I find that they are perfect for sneaking in reading—particularly short-story and essay collections, which you can enjoy in starts and stops.
Last month, I revisited the Pulitzer-winning volume Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri, and its intimate vignettes of the Indian diaspora. Lahiri’s short fiction focuses on characters, young and old, confronting the pangs of assimilation and alienation; each narrative conjures a rich and vivid world of its own. I decided that a concrete, achievable task would be tackling one story every night. They welcomed me in for a brief stay before releasing me to a dinner reservation, to my unfinished laundry, or to sleep. When reading starts to feel impossible, turn to books that you can work through at your own pace. These five titles can be consumed over days, weeks, or even months—ready for you whenever you want to dive back in.
Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again, by Danny Licht
In the time it takes to boil water for pasta, you can finish several of Licht’s delightful hybrid recipe-essays. The 78-page zine-like book encourages home cooks to view the task of preparing a meal not as a chore but as an act of emotional nourishment. Just as Licht prompts his readers to slow down and appreciate the process of assembling ingredients and letting them meld, his conversational language is best savored unhurriedly. The instructions for the simple Italian-ish dishes—a pot of beans, a creamy lemon risotto, pasta with braised chuck roast—cultivate an intuitive and meditative approach to putting food on the table. “Cooking does not need to be a race to the table, and it does not need to have an upper limit on what is possible or what is delicious or even what is beautiful,” Licht writes. “Instead, it can be a drama in parts, each act vital, and each giving way to the next. It can be like life itself.”
Cursed Bunny, by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur
Squeamish readers beware, because no one does body horror like Chung. Her frightening stories force you to sit in discomfort: A family seeks revenge on an unscrupulous businessman through a supernatural bunny lamp that destroys everything around it; a woman begins taking birth-control pills, but they fertilize a surreal, immaculate pregnancy, and she’s forced to look for a husband; a boy escapes Promethean torture at the hands of a monster, only to be further abused by the people who rescue him. For some, the subject matter may actually necessitate taking breaks. Thankfully, moving through the collection at a measured pace allows Hur’s straightforward translation—and the macabre scenarios that Chung creates—to feel fresh on every visit.
[Read: You can read any of these short novels in a weekend]
Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, by Danielle Evans
Deliberately reading Evans’s 2010 debut allows the collection’s tenderness and warmth to wash over you the same way a conversation with an old friend does: Secrets are divulged, and old memories start to creep into the present. Her best stories—“Snakes,” “Virgins,” “Harvest,” and “Robert E. Lee Is Dead”—focus on the complicated and intense relationships between young women, many of whom are Black. Evans’s characters betray and uplift one another, sometimes simultaneously, and are infused with humor and generosity. Some of her plots deal with major coming-of-age milestones, like a first pregnancy or the end of high school. But in her deft hands, a night at the club or a summer with Grandma can also be a defining moment, one whose weight might not be realized until much later.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks
During his career as a neurologist, Sacks studied people with the most curious brain abnormalities, such as Dr. P., the titular man who could not accurately identify objects (or other humans). This collection of neurological case studies moves beyond clinical descriptions and focuses on the humanity of Sacks’s patients. The 24 essays are grouped by theme—“Losses,” “Excesses,” “Transports,” and “The World of the Simple”—but they don’t have to be read chronologically, as they are all discrete accounts. Sacks combines explanations of psychological theory, as well as snippets of dialogue between him and his subjects, to create nuanced portraits of people facing extreme medical challenges. What may be abnormal for much of the audience is normal for Sacks’s patients, and seeing through their eyes generates a renewed recognition of the tenacity of the human spirit—a feeling worth sitting with.
[Read: The adults who treat reading like homework]
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories, by Hisaye Yamamoto
Yamamoto’s 1988 collection captures the dignity and disillusionment of the Japanese community in America during and after World War II. Together, the stories create a snapshot of a group during a transitory phase in the United States. But reading them separately, as singular narratives, allows for a greater appreciation of the ordinary people who lived through this sweeping and weighty moment in history. The title story, “Seventeen Syllables,” highlights how the realities of immigration—such as a language barrier and shifting cultural norms—contribute to the divide between a mother and a daughter. Despite being written in the second half of the 20th century, Yamamoto’s stories about anti-Asian racism, sexual harassment, and generational estrangement transcend their period; they could easily be transplanted to the current day, thanks to her ability to make the mess of daily life resonate across the decades.
This spring, I was standing on the forward bow of the MS Santa Cruz II, bird-watching with a group of tourists under the cliffs of the Galápagos’s largest island, when one member of our company lowered his binoculars. “Lord have mercy!” he declared. “It’s just like it used to be.”
I could see it too. There was something atavistic, almost Cretaceous about it all: the scrubby landscape and enervating climate; the hordes of sluglike black iguanas on the sea rocks; the albatrosses and frigate birds that, seen against the light, could be taken for pterodactyls.
For centuries, pirates, whalers, and explorers—and now scientists and conservationists— have presented the Galápagos as fixed in time, a kind of Pompeii for naturalists. As the 2006 BBC production Galápagos put it, the islands are “a mysterious prehistoric world, a landscape that profoundly influences life … plumbed directly into the heart of the Earth.” Today, the Charles Darwin Foundation invites donors to join the Pristine Galapagos Society, while tourism companies lure customers with promises of arriving as Darwin did, to a place pure and innocent, unperturbed by humanity. My own visit on the MS Santa Cruz II was paid for by the cruise company Hurtigruten, which invites customers to “journey in Darwin’s footsteps.” (I reviewed the trip for The Globe and Mail.)
Such a view is more marketing than truth. Tourism campaigns that tout the archipelago as untouched belie—and contribute to—the existential threat facing it. Even as those campaigns draw visitors to the Galápagos with the pretense of an untouched world, those visitors significantly contribute to the degradation of the archipelago’s delicate ecological integrity. And if the islands become so damaged that the myth of the prehistoric can no longer be sustained, the tourism that supports the local economy and funds many conservation efforts may dry up, leading to further ecological decay.
Until about 90 years ago, the ecological health of the Galápagos wasn’t a major concern of either the Ecuadorian government or international conservation organizations. People had lived on the islands since the early 19th century, growing crops and fishing; still, by the 1950s, the population was less than 2,000. Near the end of that decade, scientists sponsored by UNESCO and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature found the impact of the local population to be unsustainable, notably because of the flora and fauna that residents introduced. Governments and international organizations stepped in, and in 1959, both the Galápagos National Park (GNP) and the Charles Darwin Foundation were established, tasked with working in concert to preserve and improve the archipelago’s ecology. In 1966, Julian Huxley, the first honorary president of the foundation (and a former president of the Eugenics Society in the U.K.), wrote of his hope that the park would become “a living memorial of Darwin—not only a museum of evolution in action, but an important laboratory for the furtherance of … a truly Darwinian biology.”
[From the September 1952 issue: Darwin and the islands of evolution]
Huxley’s vision was a wish in contradiction—memorial to evolution, museum of action. It does, however, make for catchy marketing, and the idea of the Galápagos as a diorama of prehistory became a keystone of tour outfitters’ spiel: Visit “the islands that time forgot,” the line goes, “a living museum” where one can “walk in the footsteps of Darwin” in his “living laboratory.” Other ecological destinations, from the African savannah to the Amazonian rainforest, have, of course, been similarly advertised. What makes the Galápagos’s situation particularly ironic is the archipelago’s position as an emblem of nature’s adaptability.
Despite the marketing, on the islands, “change is constant,” says Rakan Zahawi, the Charles Darwin Foundation’s executive director. One example: A recent study of the famous finches showed that they are altering their behavior as they adapt to new food sources and predators. Dolph Schluter, an evolutionary biologist with the University of British Columbia who studied Galápagos finches in the late 1970s, told me that, at the time, he felt “that maybe our scientific generation was the last in history to study organisms in the environment in which they evolved.”
Part of the problem is the ceaseless arrival of invasive plants and animals. Zahawi told me that “the rate of introduction of species is exponential.” They reach the Galápagos in a variety of ways—carried by the major sea currents that converge at the archipelago, but also unwittingly in cruise ships’ bilge water, food shipments, and visitor’s pockets. “A vast majority of the work we do is to mitigate the impacts of tourism,” Zahawi said. “Many biologists would love to work on more basic biology, but the reality is very different.”
[Read: A basic premise of animal conservation looks shakier than ever]
In 2003, Ecuador passed a regulation of “Total Control” for invasive species on the Galápagos, and the park has since beefed up biosecurity measures for visitors and initiated campaigns to cull invasive animals. Visitors’ money is reinvested into conservation efforts. Park rules—staying on waymarked paths, not touching the tortoises—are strongly enforced by GNP guides, without whom visitors may not access the park. And yet, the tourist ecosystem as a whole is still damaging: the sewage, the construction, the never-ending demand for novel experiences. At the park’s founding in 1968, the recommended annual limit for tourists had been set at a mere 12,000. Last year, nearly 270,000 visitors spilled from cruise ships and international flights to drink pink gin, eat sushi, and footle around in I Love Boobies T-shirts.
In turn, the explosion of tourism has precipitated enormous growth in the residential population. Today, more than 30,000 Galápagueños live across the islands, chiefly in the town of Puerto Ayora. Eighty percent of them are employed in services related to tourism. “The human population always demands more goods, more services, more space, but there’s no space here,” says María José Barragán, the foundation’s science director. Diego Quiroga, an anthropologist at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, has found that many Galápagos residents consider health care, educational infrastructure, and access to basic services inadequate on the archipelago, even as they live and work in the shadow of luxury hotels for tourists.
The marketing of the islands as a place apart from the inexorable motion of life, and the ecological destruction that results from that reputation, form what Quiroga calls the “Galápagos Paradox.” It’s a vicious cycle that threatens, eventually, to collapse entirely. The desire to see the unique ecology before it is gone, even if seeing it hastens its demise, is a dilemma facing many fragile ecosystems. “Everything in Galápagos is built on its uniqueness: its biodiversity, its emblematic ecosystem,” Zahawi said. “If that’s gone, then I don’t see what will hold this place together.”
Even given the Galápagos’s favored position as a pilgrimage site of conservation, as well as the sheer money and time invested in maintaining that status, its defenders are anxious about its future. Both Zahawi and Quiroga point to Hawaii as a possible model for the Galápagos’s next century: a place where conservation efforts have largely lost to the economics of tourism despite naturalists’ best efforts. One recent attempt to introduce tourism-related levies for nonresidents failed before lawmakers in Hawaii this spring, though such a tax may still pass. “Many, many species there are on life support,” Zahawi said. “And many have gone extinct because we didn’t see the threat in time to react.” In comparison, he said, Ecuador has done well to limit what could be a much more accelerated process.
[Read: The Galápagos’s secret weapon against climate change]
During my time on Galápagos, my guide, Daniel Moreano, told my group over and over in a rote soliloquy, “The park is an experiment.” When I questioned him privately about the focus of this so-called experiment, his tone was lighter and more skeptical. “Let’s say it’s evolution.” Then, after a few steps, he laughed and added, “No—devolution! We’ll see how long it lasts.”
In 2018, scholars at the University of Padua examined the work of various writers from the same region as the celebrated author published under the pen name Elena Ferrante—hoping to determine, once and for all, her true identity. Comparing their lexicon and syntax, the researchers found the most striking overlap between Ferrante’s sentences and those of the prolific Naples-born novelist Domenico Starnone. Though the study acknowledges that “it is difficult to precisely define his role,” it concludes that “there is a good chance that Domenico Starnone knows ‘who is,’ or rather, ‘what is’ Elena Ferrante.” (Starnone has denied that he is the author behind Ferrante’s books.)
I prefer to leave the speculation to scholars in Padua. For readers who are content, as I am, to let the enigma of Elena Ferrante’s identity remain unsolved, Starnone’s potent early novel The House on Via Gemito is rewarding on its own terms. Starnone is a writer exquisitely attuned to class anxieties: As his later novels do, Via Gemito explores the emotional cost of class mobility, and the psychic toll of changing one’s speech patterns and behavior for the sake of social and financial gain.
[Read: An open letter to Elena Ferrante—whoever you are]
In Starnone’s 2019 novel, Trust (published in English in 2021), the protagonist, Pietro, attributes his professional success to being “a flexible sort of person.” Like the narrator in Via Gemito, Pietro no longer lives in the working-class Neopolitan neighborhood of his childhood. He teaches literature in a public high school and tours the country, giving lectures on a book he’s recently published. He has learned to withhold any trace of Neapolitan intonation from his speech—a linguistic malleability that, he remarks, has “yielded excellent results.” The deeper question in Trust, as in Via Gemito, is whether one can achieve those results without compromising one’s integrity.
The House on Via Gemito won the prestigious Strega Prize in 2001, establishing Starnone as one of Italy’s foremost writers. But his work wasn’t widely known in English until Jhumpa Lahiri translated his novels Ties and Trick, as well as Trust, to great acclaim over the past decade. Oonagh Stransky’s vibrant new translation of Via Gemito is the first time this novel—longer and looser than Starnone’s later works—is available to readers in English.
The narrator in Via Gemito shares Starnone’s first name, shortened to Mimí, and like Starnone, he is a writer. (Starnone frequently includes flickers of his own reflection in his books; in Ties, for instance, the protagonist, Aldo, teaches literature in a public high school, as Starnone once did, and as Pietro does in Trust.) Mimí is deliberate about what aspects of his identity he projects to the world. He describes his outward persona as a “screen” of “courtesy, duty and impassivity” that he’s learned to wrap around himself in public. This ongoing performance has been integral to his literary success but has also estranged him from his siblings and everyone else from his working-class youth in Naples. Behind his carefully maintained facade of bourgeois restraint, Mimí exists in a state of acute private agony, consumed “with losing contact with my father and, consequently, my entire family.”
Via Gemito is the verbal exhuming of that estranged and now deceased father, Federí, as Mimí, now an adult, looks back on his childhood. A railway clerk by day, Federí would turn his family’s cramped apartment into an art studio at night. He insisted on repurposing the family’s one good bedsheet, stretching it out to create the large-scale canvas he couldn’t afford to buy. He lashed out at his wife frequently, calling her ignorant and vain, and, during one particularly fraught episode, burned her hair combs. Starnone leaves the hypocrisy implicit: Federí berating his wife for her vanity when his family’s survival depended on their willingness to accommodate his ego. If he left new paintings drying on their beds, they didn’t dare ask to move them.
Like any narcissist, Federí remained oblivious to any deprivations other than his own. When his wife became ill, Federí didn’t notice. He was too busy obsessing over the gatekeepers of the local art world, swearing about the “shitheads” who ignored his work and demeaned him at openings. Mimí regards each of his father’s obscenities as if they are beads on a string, what he calls “the rosary of my youth.” Despite his general impulsiveness, Federí was intentional with language: One of his greatest sources of pride was his ability to pronounce certain words with upper-class intonation. In one scene, Federí corrects his wife’s clipped articulation of pronto on the phone, gloating about his ability to pronounce the word like a highly educated person would.
For Federí, speech was one of the few areas of his life where he felt entirely in control, and Mimí inherits his father’s reverence for language as a form of self-determination. Starnone’s exacting approach to writing exhibits a similar faith that identifying precisely the right word might very well change his destiny. He scrubs every sentence to shiny perfection with a determined ferocity similar to that of Federí scrubbing the railroad grease from his hands before an art opening.
[Read: A novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going]
Mimi, too, keeps scrubbing away, determined to remove the traces of his working-class father. Unlike Federí, who burped in the faces of those who insulted or ignored him at art events, Mimí is outwardly impassive. But internally, his striving for literary acclaim is as fury-fueled as his father’s had been in Naples’s local art circles. In Starnone’s novels, releasing yourself from whatever bitterness consumed your parents is an ultimately futile pursuit. Like his father, Mimí remains painfully prone to humiliation for “an indefinite amount of time, maybe my whole life.”
Nowhere is the emotional toll of his shapeshifting more clearly on display than in a scene from Mimí’s adolescence, when he begins to try on different voices and behaviors, and adopt the mannerisms of relatives and strangers. One day, he arrives at church wearing a tunic his mother has cut as short as a girl’s dress. There, he ends up performing the female part in a dance with a classmate, a muddling of gender roles that leaves him feeling so humiliated that he begins to see himself not as a physical form, but as “an intimate sigh, a moan.” Shame, this scene suggests, is a powerful psychic trap, and the only reliable way out is through acts of imagination. It’s a stirring memory for an adult male narrator to share, one that stayed with me as vividly as the wary gaze of the Neapolitan mastiff that Federí paints after dark, with its large muzzle and piercing eyes.
In the summer of 1998, the line to get into Mecca on a Sunday night might stretch from the entrance to the Tunnel nightclub on Manhattan’s 12th Avenue all the way to the end of the block; hundreds of bodies, clothed and barely clothed in Versace and DKNY and Polo Sport, vibrating with anticipation. Passing cars with their booming stereos, either scoping out the scene or hunting for parking, offered a preview of what was inside: the sounds of Jay-Z and Busta Rhymes and Lil’ Kim. These people weren’t waiting just to listen to music. They were there to be part of it. To be in the room where Biggie Smalls and Mary J. Blige had performed. To be on the dance floor when Funkmaster Flex dropped a bomb on the next summer anthem. They were waiting to be at the center of hip-hop.
What they didn’t realize was that the center of hip-hop had shifted. Relocated not just to another club or another borough, but to a beachfront estate in East Hampton. Although Sundays at the Tunnel would endure for a few more years, nothing in hip-hop, or American culture, would ever be quite the same again.
It’s been 25 years since Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, hosted the first of what would become his annual White Party at his home in the Hamptons. The house was all white and so was the dress code: not a cream frock or beige stripe to be seen. Against the cultural landscape of late-’90s America, the simple fact of a Black music executive coming to the predominantly white Hamptons was presented as a spectacle. That summer, The New York Times reported, “the Harlem-born rap producer and performer had played host at the Bridgehampton polo matches, looking dapper in a seersucker suit and straw boater. The polo-playing swells had invited him and he had agreed, as long as the day could be a benefit for Daddy’s House, a foundation he runs that supports inner-city children.”
To be clear, hip-hop was already a global phenomenon whose booming sales were achieved through crossover appeal to white consumers. Plenty of them were out buying Dr. Dre and Nas CDs. Combs was well known to hip-hop aficionados as an ambitious music mogul—his story of going from a Howard University dropout turned wunderkind intern at Uptown Records to a mega-successful A&R executive there was the kind of thing that made you wonder why you were paying tuition. But to those young white Americans, in 1998, he was just the newest rap sensation to ascend the pop charts. When Combs’s single “Can’t Nobody Hold Me Down” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 the year before, it was only the tenth rap track to do so. The genre was still viewed as subversive—“Black music” or “urban music,” music that was made not for the polo-playing swells, but for the inner-city children whom their charity matches benefited.
Hip-hop was born at a birthday party in the Bronx, a neglected part of a neglected city. The music and culture that emerged were shaped by the unique mix of Black and Puerto Rican people pushed, together, to the margins of society. It was our music. I was a Nuyorican girl in Brooklyn in the ’80s and ’90s; hip-hop soundtracked my life. If Casey Kasem was the voice of America, on my radio, Angie Martinez was the voice of New York.
When I went to college in Providence, I realized all that I’d taken for granted. There was no Hot 97 to tune into. There were no car stereos blasting anything, much less the latest Mobb Deep. Hip-hop became a care package or a phone call to your best friend from home: a way to transcend time and space. It also became a way for the few students of color to create community.
You could find us, every Thursday, at Funk Night, dancing to Foxy Brown or Big Pun. Sundays, when the school’s alternative-rock station turned the airways over to what the industry termed “Black music” were a day of revelry. Kids who came back from a trip to New York with bootleg hip-hop mixtapes from Canal Street or off-the-radio recordings from Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia’s underground show were lauded like pirates returning home with a bounty. We knew that hip-hop was many things, but not static. We understood that it was going to evolve. What we weren’t perhaps ready for was for it to go truly mainstream—to belong to everyone.
The media were quick to anoint Combs a “modern-day Gatsby,” a moniker Combs himself seems to have relished. “Have I read The Great Gatsby?” he said to a reporter in 2001. “I am the Great Gatsby.” It’s an obvious comparison—men of new money and sketchy pasts hosting their way into Long Island polite society—but a lazy one. Fitzgerald’s character used wealth to prove that he could fit into the old-money world. Combs’s White Party showcased his world; he invited his guests to step into his universe and play on his terms. And, in doing so, he shifted the larger culture.
Would frat boys ever have rapped along to Kanye West without the White Party? Would tech bros have bought $1,000 bottles of $40 liquor and drunkenly belted out the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind”? Would Drake have headlined worldwide tours? Would midwestern housewives be posting TikToks of themselves disinfecting countertops to Cardi B songs? It’s hard to imagine that a single party (featuring a Mister Softee truck) could redefine who gets to be a bona fide global pop star but, by all accounts, Puffy was no ordinary host.
The man had a vision. “I wanted to strip away everyone’s image,” Combs told Oprah Winfrey years after the first White Party, “and put us all in the same color, and on the same level.” That the level chosen was a playground for the white and wealthy was no accident. Upon closing a merger of his Bad Boy record label with BMG for a reported $40 million in 1998, he told Newsweek, “I’m trying to go where no young Black man has gone before.”
“It was about being a part of the movement that was a new lifestyle behind hip-hop,” Cheryl Fox told me. Now a photographer, she worked for Puffy’s publicist at the time of the first White Party. The Hamptons, the all-white attire: It was Puffy’s idea. But the white people, she said, were a publicity strategy. “He was doing clubs, and he was doing parties that did not have white people,” she told me. “I brought the worlds together, and then I was like, ‘You got to step out of the music. You can’t just do everything music.’” She meant that he should expand the guest list to include actors and designers and financiers—the kinds of people who were already flocking to the Hamptons.
In the end, “I had the craziest mix,” Combs told Oprah. “Some of my boys from Harlem; Leonardo DiCaprio, after he’d just finished Titanic. I had socialites there and relatives from down south.” Paris Hilton was there. Martha Stewart was there. “People wanted to be down with Puff,” Gwen Niles, a Bad Boy rep at the time, told me about that first party. “People were curious: Who is this rap guy?”
Hip-hop was already popular. The message the party sent was that hip-hop, and the people who made it, were also “safe.”
Rap music was for so long cast by white media as dangerous, the sonic embodiment of lawlessness and violence. This narrative was so sticky that it kept hip-hop confined to the margins of pop culture despite its commercial success.
Hip-hop didn’t always help itself out here. Artists screwed up in the ways artists in all genres do—with drug addictions, outbursts, arrests—but when it came to hip-hop, those transgressions were used to reinforce cultural stereotypes. Misogyny had been embedded in the lyrics of hip-hop nearly since its inception. A heartbreaking 2005 feature by Elizabeth Méndez Berry in Vibe exposed the real-world violence inflicted upon women by some of hip-hop’s most beloved artists, including Biggie Smalls and Big Pun. Homophobia in hip-hop perpetuated anti-queer attitudes, particularly in communities of color. And although lyrical battles have always been a thing, rhetorical fights never needed to become deadly physical ones.
This was the context in which Puffy headed to the Hamptons. Though only 28, he had baggage. While a young executive at Uptown in 1991, he had organized a celebrity basketball game at CUNY’s City College to raise money for AIDS charities. Tickets were oversold, and a stampede left nine people dead and many more injured. The tragedy stayed in the headlines for weeks. (Years later, Puffy would settle civil suits with victims.)
In 1993, Combs launched Bad Boy Records, with a roster of stars such as Biggie. The label met with immediate success, but also controversy, after a shooting involving the California rapper Tupac Shakur embroiled Bad Boy in a contentious battle between East and West. By the spring of 1997, Biggie and Tupac were dead—Biggie gunned down in Los Angeles in what appeared to be retribution for the killing of Tupac the year before. Biggie was shot while stopped at a red light; Combs was in another car in the entourage. (Neither murder has been solved.) That fall, Combs performed “I’ll Be Missing You,” his tribute to Biggie, live at MTV’s Video Music Awards. With a choir in the rafters, Combs danced through his grief. It was a moment of rebirth, of reinvention. Combs and the gospel singers wore white.
To be clear, most of what Puffy was making as an artist and producer in this era was accessible to a white, affluent fan base. These were the kind of tracks that sampled songs your parents would have danced to, spliced and sped up so that you wanted to dance to them now. Outside of “I’ll Be Missing You” and a few songs about heartbreak, many of the lyrics were about getting, having, and spending money.
But Puffy made possible the crossover explosion of more substantial artists such as Lauryn Hill and OutKast and Jay-Z, the first generation of hip-hop superstars.
You could also say that Puffy took a musical neighborhood—one that held history and heritage and layers of meaning—and gentrified it. Cleaned it up for whiter, wealthier patrons to enjoy, people who had no idea of what the “old ’hood” was about. Both things can be true.
The summer of 1998 was also the summer before my last year of college. Up in Providence, a local copycat to Hot 97 had cropped up and gained traction: WWKX, Hot 106, “the Rhythm of Southern New England.” Seemingly overnight, the frat houses added DMX to their rotation. A classmate—a white socialite from the Upper East Side—came back senior year with box braids describing herself as a real “hip-hop head.” Funk Night became a campus-wide phenomenon, and then it ceased to exist. Nobody needed a hip-hop night when every night was hip-hop night.
In rap, the feeling was “I’m keeping it real. I’m gonna stay on this block,” Jay-Z recounts of this era in the Bad Boy documentary, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. “And our feeling was like, Yeah? I’ll see you when I get back.” Emotions around this ran hot at the time—the idea that hip-hop had left its true fans behind. But in the end, more of us were happy to see hip-hop conquer the world than were grouching in the corner about the good ol’ days.
In 2009, Puffy, by then known as Diddy, relocated his White Party to Los Angeles; hip-hop’s new mecca was the land of celebrity. The vibe, according to people who were there, just wasn’t the same. But hip-hop itself was moving on to bigger and bigger arenas. In 2018, hip-hop dominated streaming, and accounted for more than 24 percent of record sales that year. That same year, Eminem headlined Coachella, Drake dominated the Billboard 100 for months, and Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize.
Then something shifted again. This year isn’t just the 25th anniversary of the first White Party. It’s the 50th anniversary of hip-hop itself. And although it’s come a long way since Kool Herc deejayed a Bronx basement dance party, the genre appears to be suffering a midlife slump.
For the first time in three decades, no hip-hop single has hit No. 1 yet this year. Record sales are down. According to one senior music executive I spoke with, who asked to remain anonymous because she wasn’t authorized to speak, festivals have been reluctant to book rappers as headliners since 2021. That’s the year that eight people were crushed to death at the Astroworld Festival in Houston; two more died later of their injuries. The performer Travis Scott was accused (fairly or unfairly) of riling up the crowd. (Coachella hasn’t had a true hip-hop headliner since Eminem.)
But the other question is: Which headliners would they even book? Kendrick Lamar is winding down his 2022 tour. Nicki Minaj doesn’t have a new album coming out until the fall. Staple acts such as J. Cole probably won’t release an album this year at all. Megan Thee Stallion, who got shot a few years ago and has been feeling burned out by the industry, is taking a break from music. As the legendary artists Too $hort and E-40 wrote in this magazine, since 2018, hip-hop has seen at least one rapper’s life a year ended by violence. The careers of Gunna and Young Thug—two major acts on the rise—have stalled while they’ve been caught up in RICO charges in Atlanta. (Perhaps sensing an opportunity, Drake just announced that a new album and tour would be coming soon.)
Recently, The New York Times ran an article about how the Hamptons have lost their cool. Too affluent. Too old. Too out of touch. Maybe hip-hop, for the first time, is suffering from similar doldrums. But obituaries to the genre have been written before. It’s only a matter of time before a new Gatsby shows up, ready to throw a party.
Fifty years ago, one American faced Independence Day having just lost much of his personal freedom. Dwight Elliot Stone, the U.S. military’s last draftee, was inducted into the United States Army on June 30, 1973. Private Stone served not in Vietnam but in the safer yet equally humid swamps of Fort Polk, Louisiana. His 17 months in uniform brought down the curtain on the draft. Stone was the last of more than 17 million men conscripted into the U.S. military.
Those who joined the American military in July of 1973, and in the five decades since, have been part of what is known as America’s “all-volunteer force,” or AVF. For most Americans, the AVF is something to be celebrated, but foreign to their daily lives. The AVF gave most Americans the freedom to be indifferent to their military, shifting the burden of service to a smaller, self-selected cohort of citizens.
The AVF receives endless accolades; American politicians often refer to it as “the finest fighting force the world has ever known.” But despite 20 years of war and military interventions with mixed results, the all-volunteer force has been subject to little debate about whether it’s still the right force for America.
When these discussions do occur, most focus on democratic accountability. As President George W. Bush quipped about the Iraq War to a group of Oval Office visitors in 2006: “If I had to do this with a draft army, I would have been impeached by now.” The idea that misguided wars might be prevented by a more engaged population has its appeal, but the AVF also faces more practical challenges.
As it turns 50 this week, the all-volunteer force appears unsustainable. It is threatened on three fronts: cost, capacity, and continued ability to find enough Americans willing and able to serve.
A military that has to compete with the civilian job market for workers is extremely expensive. Military pay and benefits make up the single largest category in the Defense Department budget. These costs have skyrocketed since 9/11, rising by more than 50 percent in real terms. In 2012, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank, projected that if personnel costs continue to grow at that rate and the overall defense budget remains flat, military personnel costs will consume the entire defense budget by 2039. A worsening recruiting environment has led to enlistment bonuses of up to $50,000, and retention bonuses as much as 10 times that amount for pilots and other crucial personnel. And this is all without mentioning the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose budget is approaching half the size of the Defense Department’s.
Because of its cost, the AVF is too small to handle a major war or emergency. When faced with two medium-size campaigns, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the AVF was seriously challenged to provide sufficient troops, despite constant mobilization of reservists, the enlistment of local allies, and the deployment of copious contractors. A major conflict would break the AVF—an open secret in defense circles, but something that few in Washington want to discuss. Over the past year of fighting, Russia and Ukraine have both taken casualties equal to at least half the active-duty U.S. Army. (U.S. military doctrine says that a force is destroyed after sustaining 30 percent casualties). Selective Service, subject to even less scrutiny than the AVF, remains on the books because if we ever enter into another major conflict, we will need a draft again.
The current recruiting crisis has become the most pressing short- and long-term challenge for the AVF. All-volunteer force is a misnomer: The U.S. military should be described as an all-recruited force. Each young American who ships off to boot camp is the result of intense effort by an enormous recruiting and marketing apparatus. The Army alone has assigned more than 10,000 soldiers, equivalent to about three brigades, to recruiting duty. In the Marine Corps, the joke is that Marine Corps Recruiting Command eats first: The Corps’ recruiting and marketing budget is sacrosanct. Ballpark bomber flyovers and “Be All You Can Be” don’t come cheap.
The stark fact is that most young Americans can’t currently serve and even fewer want to. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, just 23 percent of Americans ages 17–24 are eligible to enlist without a waiver. Obesity, medical and mental-health issues, or a history of substance abuse prevent most of their peers from being able to serve. The switch to a new military health-records system, MHS Genesis, is also making recruiting tougher by revealing the actual mental and physical health of recruits, after decades of half-truths and fudged standards. The overall propensity to serve is even worse than the eligibility. Most of those who are eligible to enlist are currently enrolled in college. Just 9 percent of young Americans would seriously consider military service, near the all-time low since the AVF began. COVID restrictions made it tougher for military recruiters to find and meet this extremely small tranche of young Americans; online efforts have been a poor substitute for in-person recruiting.
These trends have been exacerbated by historically low unemployment rates. Any perceived negative of military service is amplified when there are more opportunities to stay home and live comfortably. The result is that 2023 is likely to be the worst year for military recruiting since the AVF began. Most of the services have already said that they will fail to hit their recruiting targets. The Army, short 15,000 recruits last year and facing the same shortfall this year, is shrinking. The Army’s top enlisted leader, Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, recently warned that trying to do more with less is putting “an enormous strain” on soldiers and their families.
The response to these challenges takes the usual American form: throwing more money at the problem. But higher pay and more bonuses have their limits. Total compensation for military service is already in the 90th percentile for equivalent civilian work for enlisted personnel in their first decade of service. Pay is now secondary to lifestyle concerns for many service members debating another enlistment.
There are also long-term structural challenges that counter the appeal of increased compensation. Foremost among these is that the profession of arms has become a family trade. A declining societal ethos of service, coupled to the tendency of mission-focused military recruiters to “fish where the fish are” by focusing on high-yield geographic areas, has made multigenerational military families the norm. In 2019, nearly 80 percent of Army recruits reported having a family member who had served. For almost 30 percent, that person was a parent. Since the end of the draft, the American republic has quietly, steadily acquired a military caste. Any significant decline in this caste’s willingness to continue serving—a foreseeable event in the aftermath of two failed wars and the increasing influence of partisan politics on the military—will pose an existential threat to the AVF. There are signs that this has already begun to happen. A 2021 survey by the Military Family Advisory Network found that just 62.9 percent of military and veteran families would recommend military life, down from 74.5 percent two years before.
The other structural challenge facing the AVF is that it is still based on the career and family norms of the 1950s. In an era of increased career mobility and dual-income households, the military is still designed for a world of single-income families with the civilian spouse playing the role of supportive camp follower. President Joe Biden’s recent moves to support the careers of military spouses will help, but can have only a marginal effect. Military spouses will still be subject to an itinerant lifestyle that regularly moves them to predominantly rural areas where professional opportunities are in short supply. With more women than men completing college and pursuing professional careers, the pool of families willing to take on the burden of military service under this model is steadily dwindling.
The military career model also assumes that senior leaders will be with the same organization for 30 years or more, making the institution an extreme outlier among large employers. This limits the talent pool to those who find such a commitment palatable. In a world where drones and artificial intelligence will likely dominate future conflicts, the isolated and heavily bureaucratic professional-development models of the military will struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation. Congress has authorized lateral entry measures—enlisting those with needed skills at far higher initial rank and pay—to break open this closed labor market, but cultural resistance from the services has prevented these policies from making much impact.
The AVF’s problems should give pause to any politicians or policy makers who are somehow still sanguine about America’s ability to win wars. In any major conflict, the military will have to dramatically expand and adapt in ways the AVF cannot manage. America has not even begun to have a conversation about what comes next.
For 50 years, most Americans have had the luxury of ignoring their military, even as they paid its large and growing bills. Through Cold War peace and post-9/11 wars, the all-volunteer force has consisted only of those who chose to join it. But the deepening recruiting crisis and the structural threats to the sustainability of the AVF make the future of our all-recruited military a crucial national-security issue. Private Stone is unlikely to be America’s last draftee.
For many years, the English flag was an ambivalent symbol—the flag of the Crusaders who raided medieval Jerusalem, the flag of imperial conquest, and a flag appropriated by the white nationalists of the English Defence League. The cross of Saint George, red on a white background, was also the flag of a bunch of losers. The English men’s soccer team hasn’t won a major title since the 1966 World Cup.
Here in Europe, as in the United States, debates about flags are useful proxies for other cultural anxieties. Flags force us into a confrontation with our country’s history as a source of pride, or shame, or both. They create an us, whose composition can be inclusive or exclusive. And, quite honestly, they can stop the left from winning elections. Being uncomfortable with a national flag is often interpreted (or misinterpreted) as a sign that you don’t love the country it represents. The Scottish saltire and the Welsh red dragon have been thoroughly reclaimed by the nationalist parties of those countries, and even the Union Jack, which blends the flags of Britain’s constituent nations, was rehabilitated in the 1990s by New Labour. But until recently, the English flag languished behind them, unloved and unwaved.
[Read: Raising the American flag made in China]
The flag of Saint George is central to the plot of Dear England, a new play that has just opened at London’s National Theatre. The drama begins with a historical moment of personal and national humiliation. It is the semifinal of the 1996 European championships, England versus Germany, a match that resulted in a 1–1 draw and a penalty shoot-out. The first five players from both teams have all scored, meaning the rules change to “sudden death.” If a player misses his penalty, and his opposing number scores, the first team is out of the competition.
In this cauldron of pressure, a 25-year-old named Gareth Southgate steps up to the penalty spot—and kicks a slow ball directly at the goalkeeper, who blocks it.
For an audience in London, Dear England doesn’t need to show what came next. Almost the whole country knows, including those who aren’t sports fans or hadn’t even been born at the time. England’s goalkeeper, David Seaman, wearing one of the worst shirts ever designed—he looks like a children’s-party entertainer—can’t get a glove to the German team’s next penalty kick. That makes it 6–5 Germany, which goes on to the final and ultimately wins the trophy. Gareth Southgate, meanwhile, goes home with the weight of an entire country’s disappointment upon him. That winter, he makes a pizza ad where the joke is that he has to wear a paper bag on his head in public.
For a while, failure seemed to be history’s verdict on Southgate. “Every single day now, when I walk down the street, it is always mentioned to me,” he told a podcast in 2012. “When you have played for 20 years and that is the first thing people think about you, it is a bit of a downer.” But in 2016, he got the chance to become the temporary manager of the English men’s football team, after the incumbent was caught in a newspaper sting operation over his financial dealings. Since then, Southgate has been an unexpected success in the “impossible job,” taking England to the brink of victory—while nurturing a generation of players who are unafraid to speak out on child poverty and fans’ racism.
Southgate has turned England’s football players from tabloid punch lines into role models, and insisted that no single man should ever bear a team’s defeat alone, as he once did. During a period when Britain has been bitterly divided by Brexit, he’s created a team that belongs as much to a young Black girl in Brixton, South London, as it does to an older white man in Boston, Lincolnshire. He has encouraged a broadly secular, majority-white country to cheer for a young man of Nigerian heritage whose Instagram bio reads, “God’s child.” Southgate once hired a psychologist to encourage his young male players to talk about their fears and feelings, and has made them link arms during penalty shoot-outs. He has become so personally popular that England’s fans have awarded him a chant: “Southgate you’re the one / You still turn me on / Football’s coming home again.”
Okay, okay, after six years of Southgate’s management, England still hasn’t won anything. But the team has played with grace and lost with honor. This has given the country hope.
[Ben Rhodes: This is no time for passive patriotism]
Southgate understands that the power of sport is the power of story—the redemption arc, the last-minute comeback, the underdog triumph, the grudge paid back. He understands that soccer gives people values around which everyone can coalesce, regardless of their political beliefs: hard work, sacrifice, humility, courage. James Graham, the playwright behind Dear England, understands that too. Much of his work for the past decade has been focused on the country’s shifting identity, whether among former mining communities in the BBC drama Sherwood or within the emerging Thatcherite working class depicted in the hit play Ink. Graham is now the closest thing England has to a national playwright. You can probably imagine the demographics of an audience at a subsidized theater performance in London—whiter, richer, and more liberal than the country overall. Yet by the end of Dear England, the crowd was on its feet, shouting along to the unofficial anthem of the Southgate era, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” (Well, except for the former BBC journalist sitting next to me, who fled after the first half, perhaps finding it all a little too populist.)
Early on in Dear England, a senior football official accuses the Southgate character (played with eerie accuracy by Joseph Fiennes) of picking a team captain, Harry Kane, who is just like him. Kane is a decent guy—a father of three, with another on the way, married to his childhood sweetheart—but he is no one’s idea of an orator. All of his charisma is located in his feet. Graham’s script turns Kane, England’s most prolific goal scorer ever, into an avatar of stoic, unassuming English masculinity, a man for whom finding the right words is less important than leading by example. (The contrast with the hyper-loquacious but unprincipled former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is briefly drawn.) In one scene, Kane is shown wearing a rainbow captain’s armband at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to support LGBTQ rights, only to be forced to remove it by officials who don’t want to upset the more conservative countries in the tournament. In another, Kane leads the England team in taking a knee to protest racism—a white man from North London genuflecting in solidarity with his Black and mixed-race teammates.
The real-life Southgate has been manager through a period when the national team has become much less white, a trend that prompts anxiety among those who worry that immigration and multiculturalism are transforming England into a country they don’t recognize. (In the 1991 census, five years before Southgate missed his penalty, England and Wales were 94.1 percent white. That figure is now 81.7 percent.) Dear England’s soundtrack reflects this, shifting from the white Brit-pop of the 1990s to Stormzy’s 2019 hit “Crown.” That song is a doubly resonant choice. The lyrics—“heavy is the head that wears the crown”—certainly apply to managing the national football team. Stormzy, like Southgate, has also raised questions about what patriotism means today. When the rapper became the first Black British solo artist to headline the Glastonbury music festival, he wore a monochrome stab-proof vest adorned with the Union Jack. It was both a riff on the traditional John Bull caricature of Englishness and a rejoinder to the National Front’s racist slogan “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack.”
Southgate’s great achievement off the pitch has been to elevate national pride above racial divisions and to blend concepts dear to the right and the left into a new-model patriotism. His own beliefs, like those of many successful politicians, defy neat, stereotypical categorization. In June 2021, he wrote the open letter from which Graham’s play gets its title. “Dear England,” it began. “It has been an extremely difficult year.” Southgate referenced his grandfather’s service in the Second World War to explain why playing for England had been such an honor: “The idea of representing ‘Queen and country’ has always been important to me.” (He is a patron of Help for Heroes, a charity for veterans.) Having made this appeal to the right, though, Southgate moved into the tricky terrain of race, traditionally associated with the left: “Why would you choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin? Why? Unfortunately for those people that engage in that kind of behaviour, I have some bad news. You’re on the losing side.” The letter’s final image was of a young England fan watching the team, filling out a wall chart, looking up to the players, and feeling proud of the country they represent. The letter was, by quite some distance, more powerful and deeply felt than any speech I heard a politician give during the same turbulent period.
Inevitably, though, some commentators think that Southgate’s version of patriotism—respecting tradition without being blind to the sins of the past—is taking inclusion too far. Ahead of the last World Cup, the former footballer turned COVID contrarian Matt Le Tissier appeared on a talk show hosted by Nigel Farage, a leading Brexiteer, to complain that “woke Mr. Southgate” needed to instill a more “positive” attitude in the team. When the English forward Marcus Rashford, who was raised by a single mother, used his life story to campaign for free school meals during vacations, he faced similar jibes about “sticking to football.” Raheem Sterling, the English player whose criticisms of racism have been most uncompromising, has come in for particular heat. In 2018, his decision to get a tattoo of a rifle on his right calf led to demands, amplified in tabloids and social media, that he be dropped from the squad. The next day, Sterling revealed that the tattoo commemorated his late father, shot dead in Jamaica when he was 2, and his own promise never to pick up a gun. “I shoot with my right foot so it has a deeper meaning,” he added.
Southgate has always supported Sterling in his decision to speak out rather than suffer in silence. In December 2021, they gave a joint interview in which Southgate described criticizing another Black player for getting a yellow card for bad behavior, before realizing that he had faced racist chants throughout the game. Southgate also revealed his fear that reporting the chants against Black players was pointless because the football authorities would do nothing. “At the very least, this had to be a team where we were united on how we saw it,” he added.
Like the incident with the rainbow armband, this careful answer reveals the difficult terrain Southgate must navigate. He faces backlash from unreconstructed racists, who take loud and ostentatious offense at rich young Black men criticizing their country, even when those criticisms are couched in a desire for England to be better. But he must also steer his lads through the world of the image-conscious, money-obsessed, and sometimes openly corrupt football authorities, which—much like American sports leagues—tend to regard racism and other bigotries as PR problems rather than social-justice issues. (Perhaps if homophobic abuse had prompted a wave of popular outrage equivalent in scale to the George Floyd protests, the soccer authorities would rethink their stance on rainbow armbands. But with virtually no openly gay footballers, that seems a distant prospect.)
The scene that everyone will talk about in Dear England—after warm reviews, I expect it to transfer to a commercial theater, and probably become a television drama—shows Southgate in a meeting with his team, unfurling England’s flag and asking players to define what it means. They express unease with its legacy from the Crusades, and its associations with racism, before he clarifies his request. The team needs to say what the flag means to them. He asks them to talk about the places they grew up—Milton Keynes, a town best known as a temple to the traffic circle; Washington (the one in northeast England, not the United States); Walthamstow in North London; Wythenshawe near Manchester. Some of these are “shit places,” one player observes. Yes, replies another, “but they’re our shit places.”
This is about as perfect a distillation of English patriotism as you could hope to encounter. But the play’s real heart comes earlier, when Southgate first meets his coaching staff and players, and bluntly informs them that they are unlikely to win their next tournament. Why does England, a team that last won a World Cup more than half a century ago, still arrive at competitions expecting to dominate them effortlessly? he wonders. And why does it harbor a sense of wounded entitlement when it fails?
[Read: Britain’s distasteful soccer sellout]
In a drama that could easily have fallen into overripe metaphors for the state of the nation, the actors do not imbue these lines with unnecessary portentousness. But those questions do reflect the central challenge of Englishness in the 21st century. Is England always doomed to feel diminished by the end of its empire and by its relegation from the top rank of world powers? Or can the country rebuild itself, with hard work and humility, into something new? The question also applies to masculinity, the secondary theme of Dear England. “At home, I’m below the kids and the dogs in the pecking order but publicly I am the England men’s football team manager,” wrote Southgate in his famous letter. Both there and in the play, he talks about being a father figure to the players, some of whom have never known their own fathers.
Does change always have to feel like loss? Not if you write a new story instead of mourning the old one, argues Dear England. It’s a message that could also apply to the United States: How about a story where you can take a knee and fly the flag, and do both with equal pride?
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
On the southernmost continent, you can see enormous stretches of wind-sculpted ice that seem carved from marble, and others that are smooth and green as emerald. You can see icebergs, whales, emperor penguins. Visitors have described the place as otherworldly, magical, and majestic. The light, Jon Krakauer has said, is so ravishing, “you get drugged by it.”
Travelers are drawn to Antarctica for what they can find there—the wildlife, the scenery, the sense of adventure—and for what they can’t: cars, buildings, cell towers. They talk about the overwhelming silence. The Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge called it “the quietest place I have ever been.”
All of these attractions are getting harder to find in the rest of the world. They’re disappearing in Antarctica too. The continent is melting; whole chunks are prematurely tumbling into the ocean. And more people than ever are in Antarctica because tourism is on a tear.
Four decades ago, the continent saw only a few hundred visitors each summer. More than 100,000 people traveled there this past season, the majority arriving on cruises. In the context of a land this size, that number may not sound like a lot. It’s roughly the capacity of Michigan Stadium, or about the attendance of the CES tech conference back in January.
But it’s also a record—and a 40 percent jump over 2019–20, the season before the coronavirus pandemic brought Antarctic travel to a near standstill. And although scientists who visit the continent to study its life and demise have a clear place here, many sightseers bring a whiff of “last-chance tourism”—a desire to see a place before it’s gone, even if that means helping hasten its disappearance. Perversely, the climate change that imperils Antarctica is making the continent easier to visit; melting sea ice has extended the cruising season. Travel companies are scrambling to add capacity. Cruise lines have launched several new ships over the past couple of years. Silversea’s ultra-luxurious Silver Endeavour is being used for “fast-track” trips—time-crunched travelers can save a few days by flying directly to Antarctica in business class.
Overtourism isn’t a new story. But Antarctica, designated as a global commons, is different from any other place on Earth. It’s less like a too-crowded national park and more like the moon, or the geographical equivalent of an uncontacted people. It is singular, and in its relative wildness and silence, it is the last of its kind. And because Antarctica is different, we should treat it differently: Let the last relatively untouched landscape stay that way.
Traveling to Antarctica is a carbon-intensive activity. Flights and cruises must cross thousands of miles in extreme conditions, contributing to the climate change that is causing ice loss and threatening whales, seals, and penguins. By one estimate, the carbon footprint for a person’s Antarctic cruise can be roughly equivalent to the average European’s output for a year, because cruise ships are heavy polluters and tourists have to fly so far. Almost all travel presents this problem on some level. But “this kind of tourism involves a larger carbon footprint than other kinds of tourism,” says Yu-Fai Leung, a professor in the College of Natural Resources at North Carolina State University who has done extensive research on Antarctic travel.
Antarctic tourism also directly imperils an already fragile ecosystem. Soot deposits from ship engines accelerate snow melting. Hikes can damage flora that take well over a decade to regrow in the harsh environment. Humans risk introducing disease and invasive species. Their very presence, North Carolina State scientists have shown, stresses out penguins, and could affect the animals’ breeding.
Yet as tourism gets more popular, companies are competing to offer high-contact experiences that are more exciting than gazing at glaciers from the deck of a ship. Last year, for instance, a company named White Desert opened its latest luxury camp in Antarctica. Its sleeping domes, roughly 60 miles from the coast, are perched near an emperor-penguin colony and can be reached only by private jet. Guests, who pay at least $65,000 a stay, are encouraged to explore the continent by plane, Ski-Doos, and Arctic truck before enjoying a gourmet meal whose ingredients are flown in from South Africa.
All of this adds up. A recent study found that less than a third of the continent is still “pristine,” with no record of any human visitation. Those untouched areas don’t include Antarctica’s most biodiverse areas; like wildlife—and often because of wildlife—people prefer to gather in places that aren’t coated in ice. As more tourists arrive, going deeper into the continent to avoid other tourists and engage in a wider range of activities, those virgin areas will inevitably shrink.
The international community has banned mining on the continent, and ships aren’t allowed to use heavy fuel oil in its waters. Yet tourism is still only loosely regulated. “I think it’s fair to say the rules are just not good enough,” Tim Stephens, a professor at the University of Sydney who specializes in international law, told me. There’s no single central source of governance for tourism. The Antarctic Treaty System imposes broad environmental restrictions on the continent. Individual governments have varying laws that regulate operators, ships, and aircraft. The International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators has extensive guidelines it requires its members to follow, out of genuine concern and, perhaps, to ward off more rigorous outside regulation.
Gina Greer, IAATO’s executive director, says the organization is proactive about protecting Antarctica. Visitors are asked to keep a distance from wildlife, decontaminate their shoes to keep novel bugs and bacteria at bay, stay on established paths, and more. Because tour operators visit the same sites repeatedly, they can spot changes in the landscape or wildlife populations and notify scientists.
This spring, IAATO added a new slow zone—an area where ships have to reduce their speed to 10 knots because whales have been congregating there in greater numbers—to those implemented in 2019. “It’s amazing to see how members come together and make decisions that may be difficult but are necessary,” Greer told me.
Still, these are all essentially voluntary behaviors. And some operators don’t belong to IAATO.
Accidents also have a way of happening despite the best intentions. In 2007, the MS Explorer, a 250-foot expedition cruise ship, sank near penguin breeding grounds on the South Shetland Islands, leaving behind a wreck and a mile-long oil slick. Most cruise ships are registered in what Stephens calls “flag-convenient countries” that are lax on oversight. “If you have a cruise ship going down in Antarctica, it’s not going to be the same seriousness as the Exxon Valdez,” he said. “But it’s not going to be pretty.”
To reduce crowding and environmental pressure, modern-day tourists have been asked to think twice about visiting a slew of alluring places: Venice, Bali, Big Sur. But the calculus can get complicated—in almost any destination, you have locals who are trying to improve (or just sustain) their lot.
Most of the Maldives, for instance, lies just a meter above sea level. “Climate change is an existential threat,” Aminath Shauna, the minister of environment, climate change, and technology, said in an interview with the IMF in 2021. “There’s no higher ground we can run to.”
Within decades, the decadent overwater bungalows that the islands are known for could be underwater bungalows. But more than a quarter of the country’s GDP comes from tourism. So this year, the Maldives hopes to welcome 1.8 million tourists—all of whom can reach it only by plane or boat rides that indirectly contribute to rising seas.
That conflict doesn’t exist in Antarctica. With no human residents, it’s the rare place that still belongs to nature, as much as that’s possible. It is actually most valuable to us when left wild, so that it can continue to act as a buffer against climate change, a storehouse of the world’s fresh water, and a refuge for birds, whales, seals, fish, and even the krill that the entire marine ecosystem depends on.
Some argue that tourists become ambassadors for the continent—that is, for its protection and for environmental change. That’s laudable, but unsupported by research, which has shown that in many cases Antarctic tourists become ambassadors for more tourism.
Antarctica doesn’t need ambassadors; it needs guardians. Putting this land off-limits would signify how fragile and important—almost sacred—it is. Putting it at risk to give deep-pocketed tourists a sense of awe is simply not worth it.
We have more than a continent—or even our planet—at stake. The treaties that govern Antarctica helped lay the foundation for space agreements. Space is already crowded and junked up with human-made debris. Tourism will only add to the problem; experts are warning that it is intensely polluting and could deplete the ozone layer. If we can’t jointly act to put Antarctica off limits, our view of the moon may eventually be marred. Imagine a SpaceX–branded glamping resort, or a Blue Origin oasis stocked entirely by Amazon’s space-delivery business.
As a species, we’re not very good at self-restraint (see: AI). And these days, few arenas exist where individual decisions make a difference. Antarctica could be one of them. Maybe, despite our deepest impulses to explore, we can leave one place in the world alone.
This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.
Anglophone readers of Mieko Kanai’s whirling, urgent novel Mild Vertigo will face only one disappointment: There’s not yet much more where it came from. Kanai was born in Japan in 1947 and has written roughly 30 novels and story collections over the course of a career that has also included poetry, criticism, and essay writing, but so far only a fraction of her body of work has appeared in English.
Mild Vertigo, translated by Polly Barton, should generate high demand for more. It is a 26-year-old novel very much grounded in middle-class Tokyo, and yet it manages to feel both universal and of the moment, perhaps because of its workaday concerns: the seduction and despair of consumerism and housework. Mild Vertigo, though, gets its potent immediacy not from its subject matter, per se, but from Kanai’s astonishing ability to write a domestic horror story that somehow doubles as a surprising glorification of domestic life.
Mild Vertigo opens with its protagonist, a stay-at-home mom named Natsumi, obsessing over how to arrange the apartment she and her husband have just bought. Not how to arrange it now: Natsumi, whose children are in elementary school, is already trying to work out how to rearrange their rooms and storage systems to best accommodate her kids as they approach their teenage years. Kanai mixes this fretting with intensely detailed descriptions of the apartment and its contents, as well as Natsumi’s insecurities about her cooking process, her mother’s thoughts about the new apartment, and her decision to replace its old tatami matting with laminate flooring, which “meant that cleaning was simple, and it was also far more hygienic compared to carpet, which makes it easy for dust mites to multiply, and besides, laminate flooring is in fashion, so of course they were going to go for that,” and so on.
Kanai writes about Natsumi’s every decision using an onslaught of clauses—comma after comma, and hardly a period in sight. Considering the differences between English and Japanese syntax, translating her prose surely required a fair amount of rearranging words and re-creating rhythms, which Barton does beautifully. The effect is often hypnotic. Stream-of-consciousness writing tends to be. But unlike many novels of this sort, Mild Vertigo doesn’t stun readers simply by shoving them deep into its protagonist’s head. Rather, Kanai makes clear how genuinely overwhelming it is to approach household life as granularly as Natsumi does. Natsumi herself is alternately entranced, repulsed, and exhausted by the thoroughness and indecision that dictate her domestic routine.
Mild Vertigo is, in a loose, ambient sense, a feminist novel, but it’s hardly the tale of a feminist awakening. Natsumi knows from the start that her obsessiveness about cleaning and decorating is closely linked to the consumerist messages she’s absorbed. In the novel’s opening sentence, she admits to choosing an apartment with a luxurious modern kitchen not out of a commitment to cooking but because the kitchen “looked like the interiors she often saw and admired in the glossy pages of women’s magazines.” But once her family has moved in, she feels that the kitchen is “too good for her.” Although it makes her feel deficient as a wife and mother, she can’t “bring herself to make the kind of meals that would mess up the kitchen.” Maintaining appearances seems more important to Natsumi than any other kind of performance—which helps explain Mild Vertigo’s astounding profusion of visual detail.
[Read: A better way of buying—and wanting—things]
Often, Natsumi’s day-to-day life makes her miserable to the point of disorientation or disgust. She sees that there’s “something Sisyphean in the roster of simple domestic tasks” that she performs over and over; a recurring motif in the novel is the physical sickness she feels on contemplating the sameness of her weekly grocery run, the degree of familiarity she has with the supermarket nearby. Similarly, her aversion to dirty bathwater and stray hairs goes far beyond a desire for a clean home: Just imagining taking a bath in water her husband has already used, as she tends to do, gives her the sensation that the “lines of her body had dissolved and were blending … with another body,” a thought that triggers evocatively written nausea. Her body, imperiled by the grimy bathwater, seems to stand in for her sense of self, imperiled by her role as a wife and mother.
Yet Mild Vertigo is not a work of true body horror. Natsumi’s skin doesn’t dissolve. Nor does she descend, “Yellow Wallpaper”–style, into insanity brought on by the suffocating nature of being a housewife. Indeed, Natsumi doesn’t always hate her life. She certainly isn’t trying to escape it. Mild Vertigo may be a condemnation of the Sisyphean demands of housekeeping, but it also sees something profound in domesticity. Kanai regards Natsumi’s home, outfits, and routines with the same close attention that Herman Melville gave the whaling industry in Moby-Dick or Karl Ove Knausgaard gave his memories in My Struggle.
In doing so, Kanai turns housekeeping into a form of art—showing, in addition to its tedious sides, its magical, beautiful, and outright strange ones. At the end of the first chapter, Natsumi falls into a trance watching water run from her kitchen sink, “sparkling in the light and twisting like a bundle of strings, or rather a snake.” She knows there’s “nothing remarkable about it whatsoever, it was an utterly ordinary thing,” and yet she allows herself to stand at the counter, in awe of the beauty of a stream of water that, on another day, would mean only noodles to cook or dishes to wash. Her ability to key into such moments is a product of her open-mindedness—the same trait that makes dirty bathwater upsetting or, for that matter, a magazine-touted kitchen too tempting to resist. She is so intellectually porous she at times struggles to locate herself.
[Read: What we gain from a good-enough life]
Among Kanai’s achievements is her ability to make Natsumi’s porousness into a worldview of sorts. Midway through Mild Vertigo, a friend of Natsumi’s clips and photocopies a review of a photography exhibition for her, which Kanai includes in full. Initially, the essay seems bafflingly unrelated to the novel’s themes, but gradually, the critic begins to praise the open, lingering quality of the photographer’s gaze, admiring the “placid sensuality and supremely personal curiosity [the photos direct] at a particular momentary scene.” It’ll hardly be lost on readers that Natsumi’s gaze has precisely the same quality. In fact, by this point in the novel, they are likely to have picked up a bit of it, if only temporarily.
Mild Vertigo comes with an afterword by the American novelist Kate Zambreno, whose work tends toward the dreamy and meditative. She is, perhaps, an especially porous reader and writer; she seems to soak up so much of Natsumi’s perspective that her essay, which is loosely about the overlaps between Mild Vertigo and her own life in 2020s Brooklyn, reads like an admiring imitation of Kanai’s novel. (For writers, imitation is not only a form of flattery but also a valuable tool.) At no point does Zambreno reflect seriously on the differences between being a housewife in 1990s Tokyo and a working writer in contemporary New York, which is frustrating, but her contribution effectively shows “the interior of an experience of a novel like this, how a novel invades you, as much as you invade it.” Mild Vertigo is, indeed, an invasive novel about feeling invaded, a cautionary tale about the domesticity messaging that inundates women that is also an invitation to luxuriate in it. Reading it made me want to both flee my house and clean it.
Mild Vertigo captures a truth that’s hard to acknowledge, let alone discuss. For many, many women, home and marriage mean restriction and confinement, and yet many, many women love and glory in their marriages and homes. Context—cultural, personal, temporal—changes this tension without erasing it. A realist might suggest that this cognitive disconnect cannot be erased without significant structural changes in nearly every country across the globe; a cautious optimist would perhaps add that, in an egalitarian future, men and women might share the burdens of this enigma equally. We do all need homes; we all deserve clean, safe, warm, and welcoming ones. Mild Vertigo’s detailed attention and moments of beauty honor the work of creating such a space, and its steep descents into unhappiness and revulsion demonstrate the sometimes-staggering emotional cost of doing so. Of all the many things in Mild Vertigo to admire, perhaps the biggest one is that Kanai gets the paradox of domesticity right.
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