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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.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Fox News will likely never face any real consequences for the biggest scandal in the history of American media. But will Republican voters finally understand who really looks down on them?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Loathing and Indifference
It’s time to talk about elitism.
Last month, I wrote that the revelations about Fox News in the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit showed that Fox personalities, for all their populist bloviation, are actually titanic elitists. This is not the elitism of those who think they are smarter or more capable than others—I’ll get to that in a moment—but a new and gruesome elitism of the American right, a kind of hatred and disgust on the part of right-wing media and political leaders for the people they claim to love and defend. Greed and cynicism and moral poverty can explain only so much of what we’ve learned about Fox; what the Dominion filings show is a staggering, dehumanizing version of elitism among people who have made a living by presenting themselves as the only truth-tellers who can be trusted by ordinary Americans.
I am, to say the least, no stranger to the charge of elitism. When I wrote a book in 2018 titled The Death of Expertise, a study of how people have become so narcissistic and so addled by cable and the internet that they believe themselves to be smarter than doctors and diplomats, I was regularly tagged as an “elitist.” And the truth is: I am an elitist, insofar as I believe that some people are better at things than others.
But even beyond talent and ability, I do in fact firmly believe that some opinions, political views, personal actions, and life choices are better than others. As I wrote in my book at the time:
Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s. This is the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense. It is a flat assertion of actual equality that is always illogical, sometimes funny, and often dangerous.
If that makes me an elitist, so be it.
In this, elitism is the opposite of populism, whose adherents believe that virtue and competence reside in the common wisdom of a nebulous coalition called “the people.” This pernicious and romantic myth is often a danger to liberal democracies and constitutional orders that are founded, first and foremost, on the inherent rights of individuals rather than whatever raw majorities think is right at any given time.
The American right, however, now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.” They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics.
(As an aside, note that the insecure whining about being “looked down upon” is wildly asymmetrical: Trump voters have no trouble looking down on their opponents as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, “human scum.” But they react to criticism with a kind of deep hurt, as if others must accommodate their emotional well-being. Many of these same people gleefully adopted “Fuck your feelings” as a rallying cry but never expected that it was a slogan that worked both ways.)
In 2016, I believed that good people were making a mistake. In 2023, I cannot dismiss their choices as mere mistakes. Instead, I accept and respect the human agency that has led Trump supporters to their current choices. Indeed, I insist on recognizing that agency: I have never agreed with the people who dismiss Trump voters as robotic simpletons who were mesmerized by Russian memes. I believe that today’s Trump supporters are people who are making a conscious, knowing, and morally flawed choice to continue supporting a sociopath and a party chock-full of seditionists.
I have argued with some of these people. Sometimes, I have mocked them. Mostly, I have refused to engage them. But whatever my feelings are about the abominable choices of Trump supporters, here is the one thing I have never done that Fox’s hosts did for years: I have never patronized any of the people I disagree with.
Unlike people such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, I have never told anyone—including you, readers of The Atlantic—anything I don’t believe. What we’re seeing at Fox, however, is lying on a grand scale, done with a snide loathing for the audience and a cool indifference to the damage being done to the nation. Fox, and the Republican Party it serves, for years has relentlessly patronized its audience, cooing to viewers about how right they are not to trust anyone else, banging the desk about the corruption of American institutions, and shouting into the camera about how the liars and betrayers must pay.
Fox’s stars did all of this while privately communicating with one another and rolling their eyes with contempt, admitting without a shred of shame that they were lying through their teeth. From Rupert Murdoch on down, top Fox personalities have admitted that they fed the rubes all of this red, rotting meat to keep them out of the way of the Fox limos headed to Long Island and Connecticut.
You can see this same kind of contemptuous elitism in Republicans such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Elise Stefanik. They couldn’t care less about the voters—those hoopleheads back home who have to be placated with idiotic speeches against trans people and “critical race theory.” These politicians were bred to be leaders, you see, and having to gouge some votes out of the hayseeds back home requires a bit of performance art now and then, a small price to pay so that the sons and daughters of Harvard and Yale, Princeton and Stanford, can live in the imperial capital and rule as is their due and their right.
Some years ago, I was at a meeting of one of the committees of the National Academy of Sciences. The conferees asked me how scientists—there were Nobel laureates in the room—could defend the cause of knowledge. Stand your ground, I told them. Never hesitate to tell people they’re wrong. One panel member shook his head: “Tom, people don’t like to be condescended to.” I said, “I agree, but what they hate even more is to be patronized.”
I believed it then, but we’re now testing that hypothesis on a national scale. I hope I wasn’t wrong.
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Today’s News
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Evening Read
We Programmed ChatGPT Into This Article
By Ian Bogost
ChatGPT, the internet-famous AI text generator, has taken on a new form. Once a website you could visit, it is now a service that you can integrate into software of all kinds, from spreadsheet programs to delivery apps to magazine websites such as this one. Snapchat added ChatGPT to its chat service (it suggested that users might type “Can you write me a haiku about my cheese-obsessed friend Lukas?”), and Instacart plans to add a recipe robot. Many more will follow.
They will be weirder than you might think. Instead of one big AI chat app that delivers knowledge or cheese poetry, the ChatGPT service (and others like it) will become an AI confetti bomb that sticks to everything. AI text in your grocery app. AI text in your workplace-compliance courseware. AI text in your HVAC how-to guide. AI text everywhere—even later in this article—thanks to an API.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Our Share of Night, a grand, eloquent, and startling new novel by the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez.
Watch. We don’t quite live in the country Poker Face (streaming on Peacock) depicts. But, in an odd way, we should wish to, our critic writes.
P.S.
If you’d like a more humorous defense of elitism—okay, an outright funny and entertaining one—check out Joel Stein’s 2019 book, In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You Are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book. I’ll admit that I like it because I’m in it (Joel interviewed me, naturally, as a defender of elitism), but it’s also a sly exploration of the culture war that erupted after Trump redefined elite to mean anyone whom he doesn’t like, except for when he’s using the same word to refer to himself and anyone who likes him.
Stein talked with a lot of folks, including the Dilbert creator, Scott Adams, who had not yet lit the bonfire of his self-cancellation. (In Stein’s visit with him, however, you can see it coming.) Stein even gets a sit-down with—wait for it—Tucker Carlson. When Stein realizes that Carlson is slagging James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, he says, “It made me want to throw Tucker into the sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”
A writer who can make fun of Tucker Carlson while riffing on James Joyce is a writer you’ll want to read.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
A political display is posted on the outside of the Fox News headquarters in New York in July 2020.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Former President Donald Trump gave a long and deranged speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference this weekend. We need to stop treating support for Trump as if it’s just another political choice and instead work to isolate his renewed threat to our democracy and our national security.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
A Test of Character
Donald Trump went to CPAC and gave a speech that was, even by his delusional standards, dark and violent. Much of it was hallucinatory. Amusing as it is to listen to President von Munchausen and his many “sir” stories, Trump is the former commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces and the current front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024. He is as dangerous as ever to our democracy and to our national security.
But I also want to turn attention from Trump’s evident emotional issues to consider a more unsettling question: How, in 2023, after all we know about this man and his attacks on our government and our Constitution, do we engage the people who heard that speech and support Donald Trump’s candidacy? How do we turn the discussion away from partisanship and toward good citizenship—and to the protection of our constitutional order?
In the past, reporters have approached such questions gingerly, poking their head into coffee shops, asking for comments at rallies, and claiming to overhear conversations at gas stations, all in the service of trying to understand Trump voters. (Only The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper has ever managed to get anywhere in such interviews, and the answers he elicits are often terrifyingly dumb.) These respectful conversations with Trump voters have produced almost nothing useful beyond failed theories about “economic anxiety” and other rationalizations that capture little about why Trump voters continue to support a posse of authoritarian goons.
In 2016, Trump supporters could lean on a slew of hopeful arguments: Trump is just acting; he’ll hire professional staff; the “good” Republicans will keep him in line; the job will sober him up. All of these would be disproved over time. (It didn’t help that the alternative at the time was Hillary Clinton, for whom I voted but whose campaign was a tough sell to many people.) But by 2020, Trump, along with his enablers at Fox and other right-wing outlets, had created a kind of impermeable anti-reality field around the GOP base. This shell of pure denial defeated almost any argument about anything.
Media, flummoxed by having a sociopathic narcissist in the Oval Office, treated Trump like a normal political leader, and soon we all—even me—became accustomed to the fact that the president of the United States routinely sounded like the guy at the end of the bar who makes you decide to take your drink over to a table or a booth. When Joe Biden won, I hoped that this strange fever gripping so many Americans would finally pass. But the fever did not break, not even after January 6, 2021, and the many hearings that showed Trump’s responsibility for the events of that black day.
And now Trump has kicked off his attempt to regain office with a litany of lunacy. His speech at CPAC has been recounted by my Atlantic colleagues; John Hendrickson notes Trump’s return to the classics of grievance, and McKay Coppins describes how Trump has managed to become part of the typically boring CPAC kitsch.
But we shouldn’t mistake Trump’s gibbering for harmless political glossolalia. As Charlie Sykes said this morning, CPAC is “a serious threat masquerading as a cultic circus cum clown car,” and revealed “what a Trump 2.0 would look like.” This is a former president whose pitch included “I am your retribution.” Retribution for what, exactly, was left unsaid, but revenge for being turned out of office is likely high on the list. The Trumpian millennium turned into a tawdry four years of grubby incompetence and an ignominious loss. If Trump wins again, there will be a flurry of pardons, the same cast of miscreants will return to Pennsylvania Avenue, and, this time, they won’t even pretend to care about the Constitution or the rule of law.
Imagine an administration where we’ll all be nostalgic for the high-mindedness of Bill Barr.
Trump also reminded us that he is an existential menace to our national security. He reveled in a story he first told last spring—almost certainly a fiction—about how he informed a meeting of NATO leaders that he would let the Russians roll over them if they weren’t paid up. (Trump still thinks NATO is a protection racket.) He then fantasized about how easily a Russian attack could destroy NATO’s headquarters.
We’ve all cataloged this kind of Trumpian weirdness many times, and I still feel pity for the fact-checkers who try to keep up with him. But I wonder if there is any point. By now it should be clear that the people listening to Trump don’t care about facts, or even about policy or politics. They enjoy the show, and they want it back on TV for another four years. And this is a problem not with Trump but with the voters.
It is long past time to admit that support for Trump, after all that we now know, is a moral failing. As I wrote in a recent book, there is such a thing as being a bad citizen in a democracy, and we should cease the pretend arguments about policy—remember, the 2020 GOP convention didn’t even bother with a platform. Instead, anyone who cares about the health of American democracy, of any party or political belief, should say clearly that to applaud Trump’s fantasies and threats at CPAC is to show an utter lack of civic character. (I might say that it is no better than applauding David Duke, but why invoke the former KKK leader when Trump has already had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who he seems to think is a swell guy?)
The man who bellowed and sweated his way through almost two hours of authoritarian madness is still the same man who instigated an attack on our Capitol (and on his own vice president), the man who would hand our allies to Russia if they’re behind on the vig, the man who thinks a free press is his enemy, the man who tried to wave away a pandemic as thousands and thousands of Americans died.
Stigma and judgment have a place in politics. There was a time when we forced people out of public life for offenses far less than Donald Trump’s violent and seditious corruption. We were a better country for it, and returning to that better time starts with media outlets holding elected Republicans to account for Trump’s statements—but also with each of us refusing to accept rationalizations and equivocation from even our friends and family. I said in 2016 that the Trump campaign was a test of character, and that millions of us were failing it. The stakes are even clearer and steeper now; we cannot fail this test again.
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Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up more reader responses about organized religion.
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Evening Read
A Bird’s-Eye View
By Elaine Godfrey
Have you ever looked at a duck? I mean really looked at one.
If you have, then you’ve probably noticed how a duck somehow manages to appear graceful and goofy at the same time, with her rounded head nestled perfectly into her body and her rubbery feet flapping beneath the water. Sometimes she’ll twist her elegant neck around to peck and pull at her wings, preening—which actually involves gathering oil from glands near her tail and combing it through her feathers to keep them waterproof.
This is important work for a duck. And it can be nice to watch, pondering how else she occupies her time and letting your mind wander back to childhood memories of Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck and Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings. I indulged in this for a while this week during a tour of the National Zoo’s Bird House, in Northwest Washington, D.C. After six years of renovation, the exhibit will finally reopen on March 13.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Wolfish, Erica Berry’s debut book, explores what we perceive as threats—and teaches us to live with our fears.
Watch. If blockbuster-level gore is what you’re after, our critic writes, Cocaine Bear (in theaters) delivers.
P.S.
Some folks on social media recently pointed me to a documentary on Amazon Prime titled The Sound of 007. I am a sucker for all things James Bond (and I have been known to have some controversial views on casting the role), but I especially love the music. The brassy horns and electric guitars, the cheesy lyrics, the overwrought performances—all of it makes me wish I were playing baccarat in London or Hong Kong in 1967 while smoking and saying things like “banco.”
There’s a lot in the special about John Barry, the king of 007 scores, and especially about the origins of Monty Norman’s instantly recognizable theme. (Weird factoid: It was originally meant for a musical that Norman was writing based on a V. S. Naipaul novel set among the East Indian community of Trinidad, and so it had a kind of bouncy, sitar-influenced sound. Barry jazzed it up.) The documentary includes many interviews and archival clips, and some of the stories behind these songs are amazing: Dame Shirley Bassey had to take off her bustier to hit the notes in “Goldfinger,” and Tom Jones says he nearly passed out trying to finish off “Thunderball.” There’s also some honest talk about the not-great themes: Dame Shirley detested “Moonraker,” and no one much liked “All Time High,” from Octopussy. The producer Harry Saltzman apparently tried to veto one of the true classics, “Diamonds Are Forever,” because it was too risqué. (No, really.) I admit I yawned a bit at the later contributions from Sam Smith and Billie Eilish, but The Sound of 007 is an engrossing musical tour through the Bond movies.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
Supporters celebrate as they listen to Donald Trump's address to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.
Before we turn to Ukraine, here are a few of today’s stories from The Atlantic.
Today I Grieve
Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.
The first half of my life was dominated by the Cold War. I grew up next to a nuclear bomber base in Massachusetts. I studied Russian and Soviet affairs in college and graduate school. I first visited the Soviet Union when I was 22. I was 28 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I turned 31 a few weeks before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time.
When I visited Moscow on that initial trip in 1983, I sat on a curb on a summer night in Red Square, staring at the Soviet stars on top of the Kremlin. I had the sensation of being in the belly of the beast, right next to the beating heart of the enemy. I knew that hundreds of American nuclear warheads were aimed where I was sitting, and I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.
And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse, especially if you had spent any time in the former U.S.S.R. I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.
Perhaps one story can explain the disorienting sense of wonder I felt in those days after the Soviet collapse.
If you visited the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, Western music was forbidden. Soviet kids would trade almost anything they had to get their hands on rock records. I could play a little guitar in those days, and I and other Americans would catch Soviet acquaintances up on whatever was big in the U.S. at the time. But once the wine and vodka bottles were empty and the playing was over, the music was gone.
Fast-forward to the early 1990s. I was in a Russian gift shop, and as I browsed, the store piped in the song “Hero” by the late David Crosby. I was absentmindedly singing along, and I looked up to see the store clerk, a Russian woman perhaps a few years younger than me, also singing along. She smiled and nodded. I smiled back. “Great song,” I said to her in Russian. “One of my favorites,” she answered.
This might seem like a small thing, even trivial. But it would have been nearly unthinkable five or six years earlier. And at such moments in my later travels in Russia—including in 2004, when I walked into a Moscow courtroom to adopt my daughter—I thought: No one would willingly go backward. No one would choose to return to the hell they just escaped.
In fact, I was more concerned about places such as Ukraine. Russia, although a mess, had at least inherited the infrastructure of the Soviet government, but the new republics were starting from scratch, and, like Russia, they were still hip-deep in corrupt Soviet elites who were looking for new jobs. Nonetheless, the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.
I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.
I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin’s crimes against humanity.
And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.
Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.
Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and so I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies. But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.
I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.
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Evening Read
The Secret Ingredient That Could Save Fake Meat
By Yasmin Tayag
Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.
I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.
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“When my mother left me in the orphanage, / I invented love with strangers. / And if it wasn’t there, I made it be there.”
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P.S.
Today I’ll leave aside any recommendations for something to do over the weekend. Instead, I hope we Americans can all take a moment to reflect with gratitude on the fact that we are citizens of a great and good democracy, and that we are fortunate to be far from the horror of a battle that rages on even as we go about our lives here in safety every day.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
A Soviet coat of arms on a high-rise building in Pripyat
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Vladimir Putin gave his annual address to the Russian Federal Assembly today, and it was a farrago of paranoia and lies; meanwhile President Joe Biden humiliated the Kremlin by walking the streets of Kyiv in broad daylight. The Russian president knows he is losing.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Out of Options
Every December, Russian President Vladimir Putin gives an address to the Russian Federal Assembly—a Russian version of the State of the Union. Today, after a delay likely related to Russia’s serial battlefield losses in Ukraine, Putin spent some two hours unloading a barrage of lies, grievances, and bizarre historical revisions in his attempt to justify the bloodletting he began a year ago. He also said Russia would suspend participation in a crucial nuclear-arms-control treaty with the United States. What does this all mean?
It means, more than anything, that Putin is desperate. He’s losing in Ukraine, where, according to a British estimate last week, roughly 200,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded. Even Russia’s tough-guy Wagner mercenaries are getting cut to pieces: The National Security Council official John Kirby said in a briefing Friday that the Wagner Group—many of them convicted criminals—has taken 30,000 casualties, which is about half the entire group’s strength and a huge number even for a contractor force. (Note to Russian jailbirds: Your odds of staying alive are better in prison.)
Putin may be a dictator, but even dictators have to justify losses. The Russian president started his speech by going full Orwell, claiming that the West started the war and that Russia was obliged to take up arms to put a stop to it all. (He might as well have said, “Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania,” and he came close.) He also repeated his accusation that the U.S. and NATO “rapidly deployed their army bases and secret biological laboratories near the borders of our country,” but this section was omitted from the English text published on the official Kremlin website, perhaps because it’s a bonkers charge that has long been debunked. The line, however, doesn’t seem to have been ad-libbed; it’s in the Russian text posted on the Russian president’s official website.
Putin went on to claim that the plot to turn Ukraine into “anti-Russia” goes all the way back to the dark plans hatched by … the Austro-Hungarian empire. Apparently, the conspiracy theorists are right: If you look deeply enough into any international problem, there’s a Habsburg lurking around somewhere. The Russian president then assured his audience that his war was against the regime in Kyiv, not the people of Ukraine, even as his forces continue to butcher Ukrainian civilians and commit crimes against humanity.
Putin included his usual tirade against sexual perversion in the West, a standard bit of boilerplate aimed not only at his own citizens but also at the European (and American) right-wingers who adore his supposed stance against Western moral decadence. Much of the rest of Putin’s speech was a similar rehearsal of Moscow’s classic, old-school Cold War charges against “the West” in general and the United States in particular. It was, as I wrote about a similar speech Putin gave a year ago when he began the war, shot after shot straight from a bottle of Soviet-era moonshine—the 180-proof good stuff about global confrontations, Nazis, and Washington’s many aggressions. He went on; as they would say in Russian, i tak dalee, “and so on and so forth,” but as we might say more colloquially in English, yada yada yada.
On a more substantive note, Putin announced Russia would suspend further cooperation under the New START Treaty, the nuclear-arms-control agreement signed by the U.S. and Russia in 2011 and extended in 2021, which is in effect until 2026. Under New START, the United States and Russia agreed to a limit of 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads, along with on-site verification—the right of each side to visit the other’s military bases—and other means of exchanging information. The Russians have already suspended on-site verification, and the U.S. State Department nearly a month ago said that Russia was failing to comply with the treaty.
This is unfortunate, as on-site inspections help build trust and transparency, but it’s not a crisis. I worked on these issues for years, but I also asked Amy Woolf—a specialist in U.S. and Russian arms control, a former adviser to Congress, and one of the most judicious experts on nuclear affairs in the country—for her take on Putin’s speech. She told me that Putin’s recalcitrance could continue to erode U.S. confidence in Russian compliance with START, but “it does not mean that Putin plans, at this time or in the near future, to increase its forces beyond the bounds of the treaty limits.” I agree.
Likewise, Putin said that Russia would resume nuclear testing—but only if the United States conducted new tests. Again I agree with Woolf: This was likely a “throwaway line,” she told me. I would even say it came across as meaningless; the United States has no immediate plans to resume nuclear testing, and so Putin was answering a question no one was asking.
Putin has put himself and his country in a desperate situation, and he has run out of options, including nuclear threats. This is not to say that the risk of nuclear conflict has evaporated; as I noted on the most recent episode of the Radio Atlantic podcast, there is still plenty of room for Putin to do something foolish and set a terrible chain of events in motion. But after a year, it seems that the Russian president’s plan—if it can even be called that—is to consign more of his young men to the Ukrainian abattoir while hoping that the West somehow tires of the whole business. As the Atlantic contributing writer Eliot Cohen pointed out yesterday, however, Biden’s visit to Kyiv and his pledge of “unwavering and unflagging commitment” had to be a “gut punch” to Putin, dashing any hopes that the Free World will give up on Ukraine.
The Russian president is still counting on Kyiv and its armies to collapse, or perhaps on an election to remove Biden, or for Europe to lose its nerve, or for China, perhaps, to come to Moscow’s rescue (which would be both a balm and a deep humiliation). But he also knows that time may be running out at home: After a year of war, there are only so many young men left to kill and only so many generals left to blame.
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Evening Read
Junk Food Is Bad for You. Is It Bad for Raccoons?
By Katherine J. Wu
I was in college when I saw my first truly chonky raccoon. It was perched on the rim of a trash can, a half-eaten tuna-salad sandwich clutched between its forepaws, its whiskers pinwheeling as it chewed. From across the quad, the raccoon fixed me with a beady-eyed stare of reproach, as if daring me to steal its already-filched fish. But I was much more interested in the creature, which looked twice as big as any raccoon I’d seen before. It was also a wild animal that had chosen a very unwild meal. And I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a link between the two.
As cities have grown and green spaces have shrunk, many wild animals, especially those in the Western world, have adopted diets that look an awful lot like ours. Squirrels snarf hard taco shells, and abscond with Nutella jars; subway rats chow down on pizza, while seagulls have ripped fries and even a KFC wrap straight out of human mouths. For at least some creatures, the menu changes seem to come with consequences.
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P.S.
Forty years ago this month, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy premiered in American movie theaters. Something between a drama and a black comedy, it starred Robert De Niro as a celebrity stalker named Rupert Pupkin, a 30-something loser who thinks he’s an undiscovered but great comedian. Of course, he’s actually a mediocre doofus and a tad unhinged; he spends his nights in his mother’s basement chatting with life-size cutouts of Liza Minnelli and the popular late-night host he hopes to one day impress, Jerry Langford. (Langford is played, with perfect contempt and boredom, by Jerry Lewis, proving once again that comedians are often the best dramatic actors.) Finally, he and another kooky stalker launch a plot to kidnap Langford and thus guarantee Pupkin a shot on the show.
The King of Comedy was a flop. De Niro captured Pupkin’s earnest but stupid narcissism so well that he’s uncomfortable to watch, which is perhaps why it fared so poorly at the box office. But it was also prophetic: Decades later, we live in a world of Pupkins, people who are constantly seeking rewards in a new economy based not on money, but on attention. Narcissism, on the rise for at least 40 years, now blazes out of control in American society. To watch the movie again is to realize that what was once dark humor about people on the fringe is now an almost unremarkable plot, and the ending that once annoyed me (which I will not spoil for you) now seems perfect. But it’s deeply unsettling to recognize an America that agrees with Pupkin, who says: “I figure it this way: better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.”
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will join The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Thursday, February 23—one year after Russia invaded Ukraine—to discuss the war’s latest developments and implications for U.S. foreign policy. Register for the virtual event here.
Do we need to worry about the nuclear threat of Putin’s war in Europe the way we worried during the Cold War? Listen to Tom Nichols on Radio Atlantic:
Vladimir Putin during his briefing after the State Council meeting at the Grand Kremlin Palace on December 22, 2022
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Right-wing political and media figures regularly level the accusation of “elitism” at other Americans. But new revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the Fox Corporation over claims of election fraud are reminders that the most cynical elites in America are the Republicans and their media valets.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Patronizing for Profit
Elected Republicans and their courtiers in the right-wing-media ecosystem deploy the word elite as an accusation, a calumny, almost a crime. To be one of the elite is to be a snooty, educated city dweller, a highbrow pretend-patriot who looks down upon the Real Americans who hunt and fish and drive pickup trucks to church. (It does not mean “rich people”; Donald Trump has gleefully referred to himself and his supporters as the “super-elite.”) The elites also support the production of “fake news” by liars who intend to hoodwink ordinary people into doing the bidding of wealthy globalists. They buy books and listen to National Public Radio and they probably read things like The Atlantic.
This shtick has been a remarkable success. Republicans have used it to convince millions of working people that super-educated gasbags such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Ron DeSantis are just ordinary folks who care deeply about kitchen-table issues that matter to their family and a secure future for their children, such as Hunter Biden’s sex life and whether public schools are letting kids pee in litter boxes.
In the entertainment hothouse, Fox News is the most prominent offender. The Fox all-star lineup, especially in prime time with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, is a parade of millionaires who work for Rupert Murdoch, one of the richest and most powerful men in this corner of the Milky Way galaxy. Every day they warn their viewers that democracy is in peril because of people who majored in gender studies. All of this nuttery is delivered with a straight face—or in Carlson’s case, the weird mien of a dog watching a magic trick.
It’s one thing, however, to suspect that Fox personalities see their viewers as mere rubes who must be riled up in the name of corporate profit. It’s another entirely to have it all documented in black and white. Dominion might not win its lawsuit against Fox, but for the rest of America, the process has produced something more important than money: an admission, by Fox’s on-air personalities, of how much they disrespect and disdain their own viewers.
According to documents from Dominion’s legal filing, Fox News hosts repeatedly exchanged private doubts about Republicans’ 2020 election-fraud claims. Hannity, in the weeks after the 2020 election, said that the regular Fox guest and top conspiracy-pusher, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was “acting like an insane person.” Ingraham had a similar evaluation: “Such an idiot.” And it’s not like Murdoch didn’t share that sentiment: In one message, he said Giuliani and the Trump lawyer Sidney Powell were pushing “really crazy stuff” and he told Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that their behavior was “damaging everybody.” (Fox reportedly banned Giuliani in 2021, putting up with him for weeks after January 6 and then shutting him down as the Dominion lawsuit gained momentum.)
There are few hours on Fox that manage to pack in more gibberish and nonsense than Carlson’s show, and yet—to give him one zeptosecond of credit—he took Powell apart in a segment on his show. In later months, of course, Carlson would continue to inject the information stream with various strains of conspiratorial pathogens, but when even Tucker Carlson is worried, perhaps it’s a sign that things are out of hand.
Of course, Carlson wasn’t worried about the truth; he was worried about the profitability of the Fox brand. When the Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich did a real-time fact-check on Twitter of a Trump tweet about voter fraud, Carlson tried to ruin her career. “Please get her fired,” he wrote in a text chain that included Hannity and Ingraham. He continued:
Seriously…What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.
After the election, Carlson warned that angering Trump could have catastrophic consequences: “He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” Murdoch, too, said that he did not want to “antagonize Trump further.”
Meanwhile, the Fox producer Abby Grossberg was more worried about the torch-and-pitchfork Fox demographic. After the election, she reminded Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo that Fox’s faithful should be served the toxic gunk they craved: “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition,” Grossberg texted. “Yes, agree,” Bartiromo answered in a heroic display of high-minded journalistic principle.
In other words: Our audience of American citizens wants to be encouraged in its desire to thwart the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our history as a nation. And Bartiromo answered: Yes, let’s keep doing that.
As Vox’s Sean Illing tweeted today, Bartiromo’s thirsty pursuit of ratings is a reminder that “no one has a lower opinion of conservative voters than conservative media.” More important, Fox’s cynical fleecing of its viewers is an expression of titanic elitism, the sort that destroys reality in the minds of ordinary people for the sake of fame and money. Not only does such behavior reveal contempt for Fox’s viewers; it encourages the destruction of our system of government purely for ratings and a limo to and from the Fox mothership in Times Square. (New York City might be full of coastal “elitists,” but that’s where the Fox crew lives and works; we’ll know the real populist millennium has arrived when Fox packs off Hannity and Greg Gutfeld and Jeanine Pirro to its new offices in Kansas or Oklahoma.)
Although it’s amusing to bash the Fox celebrities who have been caught in this kind of grubby hypocrisy, the elitism of the American right is a much bigger problem because it drives so much of the unhinged populism that threatens our democracy. Fox News and the highly educated Republican officeholders who use its support to stay in office know exactly what they’re doing. But they are all now riding a tiger of their own creation: As the conservative writer George Will has noted, for the first time in American history, a major political party is terrified by its own voters.
Fox, of course, has said that the Dominion filing “mischaracterized the record,” and “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context,” and the network insisted in a legal brief it was merely observing its “commitment to inform fully and comment fairly.” Sadly, Fox will likely survive this disaster whether it wins or loses in court. Like the GOP base it serves, the network and its viewers have immense reserves of denial and rationalization they can bring to bear against the incursions of reality. “We can fix this,” Scott, the Fox CEO, wrote in the midst of this mess, “but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”
But why not? It’s been working like a charm so far.
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Evening Read
Buttons Are Bougie Now
By Drew Millard
The 2022 Ford Bronco Raptor, among the most expensive offerings in the car manufacturer’s line of tough-guy throwback SUVs, features 418 horsepower, a 10-speed transmission, axles borrowed from off-road-racing vehicles, and 37-inch tires meant for driving off sand dunes at unnecessarily high speeds. But when the automotive site Jalopnik got its hands on a Bronco Raptor for testing, the writer José Rodríguez Jr. singled out something else entirely to praise about the $70,000 SUV: its buttons. The Bronco Raptor features an array of buttons, switches, and knobs controlling everything from its off-road lights to its four-wheel-drive mode to whatever a “sway bar disconnect” is. So much can be done by actually pressing or turning an object that Rodríguez Jr. found the vehicle’s in-dash touch screen—the do-it-all “infotainment system” that has become ubiquitous in new vehicles—nearly vestigial.
Then again, the ability to manipulate a physical thing, a button, has become a premium feature not just in vehicles, but on gadgets of all stripes.
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P.S.
To get away from politics and this entire decade, I’ve been binge-watching old episodes of 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s inspired send-up of life as a comedy writer at NBC. And I have come to realize that Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of Jack Donaghy—on the show, the vice president of East Coast television and microwave-oven programming for General Electric—produced one of television’s greatest characters. In lesser hands, he could have been just another corporate buffoon, a foil for the clever creatives, but 30 Rock never let Jack become a red-faced Theodore J. Mooney or Milburn Drysdale; he was vicious, funny, sentimental, cynical, both a backstabber and a good friend.
Of course, the reason he’s also a candidate for becoming my spirit animal is that he is from Massachusetts (as I am), worked his way through a good school (as I did), and now is happily and self-indulgently aware of his own obnoxiousness. (I’m working on it.) When Fey’s Liz Lemon finds Jack in his office in a tuxedo, he says: “It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?” When his flinty harridan of a mom reproaches him for not appreciating her, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Mother, there are terrorist cells that are more nurturing than you are.” I’m not sure any actor but Baldwin and his hoarse whisper could pull off those lines. But even years later, I find myself laughing out loud. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to dress for dinner.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
The Fox News logo at Fox Studios on August 16, 2011, in New York City
During the Cold War, NATO had nightmares of hundreds of thousands of Moscow’s troops pouring across international borders and igniting a major ground war with a democracy in Europe. Western governments feared that such a move by the Kremlin would lead to escalation—first to a world war and perhaps even to a nuclear conflict.
That was then; this is now.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is nearly a year old, and the Ukrainians are holding on. The Russians, so far, not only have been pushed back, but are taking immense casualties and material losses. For many Americans, the war is now just another conflict in the news. Do we need to worry about the nuclear threat of Putin’s war in Europe the way we worried about such things three decades ago?
Our staff writer Tom Nichols, an expert on nuclear weapons and the Cold War, counsels Americans not to be obsessed with nuclear escalation, but to be aware of the possibilities for accidents and miscalculations. You can hear his thoughts here:
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Tom Nichols: It’s been a year since the Russians invaded Ukraine and launched the biggest conventional war in Europe since the Nazis. One of the things that I think we’ve all worried about in that time is the underlying problem of nuclear weapons.
This is a nuclear-armed power at war with hundreds of thousands of people in the middle of Europe. This is the nightmare that American foreign policy has dreaded since the beginning of the nuclear age.
And I think people have kind of put it out of their mind, how potentially dangerous this conflict is, which is understandable, but also, I think, takes us away from thinking about something that is really the most important foreign problem in the world today.
During the Cold War, we would’ve thought about that every day, but these days, people just don’t think about it, and I think they should.
My name is Tom Nichols. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. For 25 years, I was a professor of national-security affairs at Naval War College.
For this episode of Radio Atlantic, I want to talk about nuclear weapons and what I think we should have learned from the history of the Cold War about how to think about this conflict today.
I was aware of nuclear weapons at a pretty young age because my hometown, Chicopee, Massachusetts, was home to a giant nuclear-bomber base, Strategic Air Command’s East Coast headquarters, which had the big B-52s that would fly missions with nuclear weapons directly to the Soviet Union.
I had a classic childhood of air-raid sirens, and hiding in the basement, and going under the desks, and doing all of that stuff. My high-school biology teacher had a grim sense of humor and told us, you know, because of the Air Force base, we were slated for instant destruction. He said, Yeah, if anything ever happens, we’re gone. We’re gone in seven or eight minutes. So I guess the idea of nuclear war and nuclear weapons was a little more present in my life at an earlier age than for a lot of other kids.
It’s been a long time since anyone’s really had to worry about global nuclear war. It’s been over 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I think people who lived through the Cold War were more than happy to forget about it. I know I am glad to have it far in the past. And I think younger people who didn’t experience it have a hard time understanding what it was all aboutand what that fear was about—because it’s part of ancient history now.
But I think people really need to understand that Cold War history to understand what’s going on today, and how decision makers in Washington and in Europe, and even in Moscow, are playing out this war—because many of these weapons are still right where we left them.
We have fewer of them, but we still have thousands of these weapons, many of them on a very short trigger. We could go from the beginning of this podcast to the end of the world, that short of [a] time. And it’s easy to forget that. During the Cold War, we were constantly aware of it, because it was the central influence on our foreign policy. But it’s important for us to look back at the history of the Cold War because we survived a long and very tense struggle with a nuclear-armed opponent. Now, some of that was through good and sensible policy. And some of it was just through dumb luck.
Of course, the first big crisis that Americans really faced where they had to think about the existential threat of nuclear weapons was the Cuban missile crisis, in October of 1962.
I was barely 2 years old. But living next to this big, plump nuclear target in Massachusetts, we actually knew people in my hometown who built fallout shelters. But we got through the Cuban missile crisis, in part because President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev realized what was at stake.
The gamble to put missiles in Cuba had failed, and that we had to—as Khruschev put it in one of his messages—we had to stop pulling on the ends of the rope and tightening the knot of war. But we also got incredibly lucky.
There was a moment aboard a Soviet submarine where the sub commander thought they were under attack. And he wanted to use nuclear-tipped torpedoes to take out the American fleet, which would’ve triggered a holocaust.
I mean, it would’ve been an incredible amount of devastation on the world. Tens, hundreds of millions of people dead. And, um, fortunately a senior commander who had to consent to the captain’s idea vetoed the whole thing. He said, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t think they’re trying to sink us, and I do not consent. And so by this one lucky break with this one Soviet officer, we averted the end of the world. I mean, we averted utter catastrophe.
After the Cuban missile crisis, people are now even more aware of this existential threat of nuclear weapons and it starts cropping up everywhere, especially in our pop culture. I mean, they were always there in the ’50s; there were movies about the communist threat and attacks on America. But after the Cuban missile crisis, that’s when you start getting movies like Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe.
Both were about an accidental nuclear war, which becomes a theme for most of the Cold War. In Dr. Strangelove, an American general goes nuts and orders an attack on Russia. And in Fail Safe, a piece of machinery goes bad and the same thing happens. And I think this reflected this fear that we now had to live with, this constant threat of something that we and the Soviets didn’t even want to do, but could happen anyway.
Even the James Bond movies, which were supposed to be kind of campy and fun, nuclear weapons were really often the source of danger in them. You know, bad guys were stealing them; people were trying to track our nuclear submarines. Throughout the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s nuclear weapons really become just kind of soaked into our popular culture.
We all know the Cuban missile crisis because it’s just part of our common knowledge about the world, even for people that didn’t live through it. I think we don’t realize how dangerous other times were. I always think of 1983 as the year we almost didn’t make it.
1983 was an incredibly tense year. President Ronald Reagan began the year calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” And announced that the United States would start pouring billions of dollars into an effort to defend against Soviet missiles, including space-based defenses, which the Soviets found incredibly threatening.
The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union had just completely broken down. Really, by the fall of 1983, it felt like war was inevitable. It certainly felt like to me war was inevitable. There was kind of that smell of gunpowder in the air. We were all pretty scared. I was pretty scared. I was a graduate student at that point. I was 23 years old, and I was certain that this war, this cataclysmic war, was going to happen not only in my lifetime, but probably before I was 30 years old.
And then a lot of things happened in 1983 that elevated the level of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union to extraordinary levels. I would say really dangerous levels. The Soviets did their best to prove they were an evil empire by shooting down a fully loaded civilian airliner, killing 269 people. Just weeks after the shoot-down of the Korean airliner, Soviet Air Defenses got an erroneous report of an American missile launch against them. And this is another one of those cases where we were just lucky. We were just fortunate.
And in this case, it was a Soviet Air Defense officer, a lieutenant colonel, who saw this warning that the Americans had launched five missiles. And he said, You know, nobody starts World War III with five missiles. That seems wrong.
And he said, I just, I think the system—which still had some bugs—I just don’t think the system’s right. We’re gonna wait that out. We’re gonna ignore that. He was actually later reprimanded.
It was almost like he was reprimanded and congratulated at the same time, because if he had called Moscow and said, Look, I’m doing my duty. I’m reporting Soviet Air Defenses have seen American birds are in the air. They’re coming at us and over to you, Kremlin. And from there, a lot of bad decisions could have cascaded into World War III, especially after a year where we had been in such amazingly high conflict with each other.
Once again, just as after the Cuban missile crisis, the increase in tension in the 1980s really comes through in the popular culture. Music, movies, TV puts this sense of threat into the minds of ordinary Americans in a way that we just don’t have now. So people are going to the movies and they’re seeing movies like WarGames, once again about an accidental nuclear war. They’re seeing movies like Red Dawn, about a very intentional war by the Soviet Union against the United States.
The Soviets thought that Red Dawn was actually part of Reagan’s attempt to use Hollywood to prepare Americans for World War III. In music, Ronald Reagan as a character made appearances in videos by Genesis or by Men at Work. That November, the biggest television event in history was The Day After, which was a cinematic representation of World War III.
I mean, it was everywhere. By 1983, ’84, we were soaked in this fear of World War III. Nuclear war and Armageddon, no matter where you looked. I remember in the fall of 1983 going to see the new James Bond movie, one of the last Roger Moore movies, called Octopussy. And the whole plot amazed me because, of course, I was studying this stuff at the time, I was studying NATO and nuclear weapons.
And here’s this opening scene where a mad Soviet general says, If only we can convince the West to give up its nuclear weapons, we can finally invade and take over the world.
I saw all of these films as either a college student or a young graduate student, and again, it was just kind of woven into my life. Well, of course, this movie is about nuclear war. Of course, this movie is about a Soviet invasion. Of course, this movie is about, you know, the end of the world, because it was always there. It was always in the background. But after the end of the Cold War, that remarkable amount of pop-culture knowledge and just general cultural awareness sort of fades away.
I think one reason that people today don’t look back at the Cold War with the same sense of threat is that it all ended so quickly. We went from [these] terrifying year[s] of 1983, 1984. And then suddenly Gorbachev comes in; Reagan reaches out to him; Gorbachev reaches back. They jointly agree in 1985—they issue a statement that to this day, is still considered official policy by the Russian Federation and by the United States of America. They jointly declare a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.
And all of a sudden, by the summer of 1985, 1986, it’s just over, and, like, 40 years of tension just came to an end in the space of 20, 24 months. Something I just didn’t think I would see in my lifetime. And I think that’s really created a false sense of security in later generations.
After the Cold War, in the ’90s we have a Russia that’s basically friendly to the United States but nuclear weapons are still a danger. For example, in 1995, Norway launched a scientific satellite on top of a missile—I think they were gonna study the northern lights—and the scientists gave everybody notice, you know, We’re gonna be launching this satellite. You’re gonna see a missile launch from Norway.
Somebody in Russia just didn’t get the message, and the Russian defense people came to President Boris Yeltsin and they said, This might be a NATO attack. And they gave him the option to activate and launch Russian nuclear weapons. Yeltsin conferred with his people, and fortunately—because our relations were good, and because Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton had a good relationship, and because tensions were low in the world—Yeltsin says, Yeah, okay. I don’t buy that. I’m sure it’s nothing.
But imagine again, if that had been somebody else.
And that brings us to today. The first thing to understand is: We are in a better place than we were during the Cold War in many ways. During the Cold War, we had tens of thousands of weapons pointed at each other. Now by treaty, the United States and the Russian Federation each have about 1,500 nuclear weapons deployed and ready to go. Now, that’s a lot of nuclear weapons, but 1,500 is a lot better than 30,000 or 40,000.
Nonetheless, we are dealing with a much more dangerous Russian regime with this mafia state led by Vladimir Putin.
Putin is a mafia boss. There is no one to stop him from doing whatever he wants. And he has really convinced himself that he is some kind of great world historical figure who is going to reestablish this Christian Slavic empire throughout the former Soviet Union and remnants of the old Russian empire. And that makes him uniquely dangerous.
People might wonder why Putin is even bothering with nuclear threats, because we’ve always thought of Russia as this giant conventional power because that’s the legacy of the Cold War. We were outnumbered. NATO at the time was only 16 countries. We were totally outnumbered by the Soviets and the Warsaw Pact in everything—men, tanks, artillery—and of course, the only way we could have repulsed an attack by the Soviet Union into Europe would’ve been to use nuclear weapons.
I know earlier I mentioned the movie Octopussy. We’ve come a long way from the days when that mad Russian general could say, If only we got rid of nuclear weapons and NATO’s nuclear weapons, we could roll our tanks from Czechoslovakia to Poland through Germany and on into France.
What people need to understand is that Russia is now the weaker conventional power. The Russians are now the ones saying, Listen, if things go really badly for us and we’re losing, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons. The difference between Russia now and NATO then is: NATO was threatening these nuclear weapons if they were invaded and they were being just rolled over by Soviet tanks on their way to the English Channel. The Russians today are saying, We started this war, and if it goes badly for us, we reserve the right to use nuclear weapons to get ourselves out of a jam.
This conventional weakness is actually what makes them more dangerous, because they’re now continually being humiliated in the field. And a country that had gotten by by convincing people that they were a great conventional power, that they had a lot of conventional capability, they’re being revealed now as a hollow power. They can’t even defeat a country a third of their own size.
And so when they’re running out of options, you can understand at that point where Putin says, Well, the only way to scramble the deck and to get a do-over here is to use some small nuclear weapon in that area to kind of sober everybody up and shock them into coming to the table or giving me what I want.
Now, I think that would be incredibly stupid. And I think a lot of people around the world, including China and other countries, have told Putin that would be a really bad idea. But I think one thing we’ve learned from this war is that Putin is a really lousy strategist who takes dumb chances because he’s just not very competent.
And that comes back to the Cold War lesson—that you don’t worry about someone starting World War III as much as you worry about bumbling into World War III because of a bunch of really dumb decisions by people who thought they were doing something smart and didn’t understand that they were actually doing something really dangerous.
So where does this leave us? This major war is raging through the middle of Europe, the scenario that we always dreaded during the Cold War; thousands and thousands of Moscow’s troops flooding across borders. What’s the right way to think about this? Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that this really is a war to defend democracy against an aggressive, authoritarian imperial state.
The front line of the fight for civilization, really, is in Ukraine now. If Ukraine loses this war, the world will be a very different place. That’s what makes it imperative that Americans think about this problem. I think it’s imperative to support Ukraine in this fight, but we should do that with a prudent understanding of real risks that haven’t gone away.
And so I think the Cold War provides some really good guidance here, which is to be engaged, to be aware, but not to be panicked. Not to become consumed by this fear every day, because that becomes paralyzing, that becomes debilitating. It’s bad for you as a person. And it’s bad for democracies’ ability to make decisions—because then you simply don’t make any decisions at all, out of fear.
I think it’s important not to fall victim to Cold War amnesia and forget everything we learned. But I also don’t think we should become consumed by a new Cold War paranoia where we live every day thinking that we’re on the edge of Armageddon.
Just how worried should we be about nukes?
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Computer games, like movies, music, and television, are part of our culture and often reflect our fears and worries—especially about the end of the world. And I’ve been playing them for years.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Nuclear War and Zombies
Computer games get a bad rap among those who do not play them. People associate them, at worst, with adolescent violence (despite lack of conclusive evidence for that theory) or, more benignly, with creepy nerds in Mom’s basement, yelling into their headsets and jabbing at keyboards while wiping Cheetos dust off their glasses.
Well, I am a happily married 62-year-old professional, and I play computer games. In fact, I have been playing them since the dawn of the personal-computing age. Yes, games are part of the escape from reality that my colleague Megan Garber wrote about in her cover story for the March issue of the magazine, but they’re also a perfectly reasonable hobby.
Still, you might ask why a grown man with a busy life—or, you know, any life—would waste precious hours in front of a screen. At the risk of handing a rationalization to students who have not finished their homework, I will say that I not only enjoy the process of playing but also find that games enhance my productivity rather than destroy it. I play computer games for the same reason I play golf: The engrossing requirement to complete a set of objectives clears my mind. When I return from the golf course or close the game program, my brain has been shaken and cleared like an old Etch A Sketch, and I’m ready to work again.
Even pointless games can be relaxing (especially if they’re visually pretty), such as the “loot and shoot” adventures in which you kill something and take its money or possessions, over and over again. And sometimes, you just want to roll your army over some hapless Roman commander or drag space bandits through an asteroid field. But my favorites are the games that have intricate plots, because many of them are cultural markers that reveal what fascinates us—and more important, what scares us.
Back in the 1980s, for example, Americans wrestled with fears about World War III. So did games. I have spent my entire career studying war and nuclear weapons, and for me, roaming around in a destroyed world is much like going to horror or disaster movies, or reading fairy tales (which are really scary if you think about most of them): It’s a way of processing fear.
Consider Trinity, a 1986 text-based game. (Early computers had no serious graphics capability, so these games instead required you to read quite a bit and then issue commands and solve puzzles.) In Trinity, nuclear war breaks out at the beginning of the game; the player escapes through a portal and must tumble backwards through time all the way to the Trinity nuclear test site in 1945 in order to sabotage the first atomic bomb, thus preventing the nuclear-arms race and the eventual war.
Thematically, this was not exactly a game for children. Nor were the many games that followed it, including the 1988 classic Wasteland, in which the player must lead a team of Desert Rangers through the ruins of the Southwest to discover the source of a new threat that could finish the job of annihilating humanity. These games followed a spate of Cold War movies and music shot through with nuclear anxieties, such as WarGames, Red Dawn, The Day After, and Testament; you could play Trinity or Wasteland while listening to “99 Luftballons,” by Nena, or “It’s a Mistake,” by Men at Work, and spend a cozy afternoon traipsing through Armageddon. (Nuclear war is back: One game studio just released a highly detailed nuclear-conflict simulator, but I haven’t played it. Yet.)
As the nuclear threat receded and threats to our health, such as AIDS, began to dominate our fears, pop culture—including games—spoke to those fears. Biohazards became a dominant theme in gaming, with mad scientists and big corporations mucking about with our DNA, weird pathogens, doors to alternate dimensions, or even the gates to hell itself, all in the name of profit, while unleashing freaks and mutants on the rest of us.
The granddaddy of the biohazard-genre games, Resident Evil, was released in 1996 and led to several more games and movies; the first motion picture in the franchise debuted in 2002 and was followed by five more sequels and then a 2021 reboot. Last month, HBO premiered a new series, The Last of Us, based on a highly regarded game of the same name. It is set in a world where a fungus has turned most people into crazed zombies, and so far, like the game, it’s a hit.
Amazon is working on a series based on an even bigger end-of-the-world franchise: Fallout, a game that hit the shelves in 1997 and takes place about 100 years after a war with China. (The war was set off by an imperialistic global free-for-all over power and resources; the Americans, in keeping with the game’s retro-futuristic, back-to-the-1950s ethos, are super-patriotic McCarthyites who even annexed Canada just to be on the safe side.) Fallout was a kind of successor and homage to Wasteland, with a dark but often laugh-out-loud sense of humor, a fully realized postnuclear Los Angeles populated with fascinating characters, and a story line that, again, was not exactly for children. Fallout became a huge success, spawning multiple game sequels over the next two decades.
I am praying that Amazon doesn’t screw this up, because Fallout is my personal gaming obsession. I have played all of the original games multiple times, and as someone who’s had to live with the subject of nuclear war as part of my career, I appreciate the underlying melancholy in the Fallout world. Even my wife (who does not play computer games) found herself moved one evening as she peeked in to watch me walk through the ruins of our beloved Boston, where I found skeletons, sometimes side by side and holding hands, in destroyed homes. It’s a fun, often hilarious game, but underneath it all is a sadness that should be there if you’re thinking about the end of humanity.
It is natural to be fascinated by the ramifications of global catastrophe, but the best games present the player with difficult moral choices and awful, sometimes unavoidable dilemmas. There are many in Fallout and (a big one at the end of The Last of Us). Regardless of our choices, it can be healthy and cathartic to experience the terror and then revel in feeling safe, just like at the end of a slasher movie, when the lights come on and you look around. I’m still here. Everything is still here. It’s just a movie. It’s just a game.
Let’s hope it stays that way.
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Evening Read
The Slow-Motion Murder of Mikheil Saakashvili
By Anne Applebaum
Sixteen months after his arrest, Mikheil Saakashvili has lost more than 90 pounds and needs a walker to move around his prison hospital. The former Georgian president was for a time, on a hunger strike, which helps explain his weight loss and his exhaustion. But it does not explain the traces of arsenic, mercury, and other toxins that a doctor found in his hair and nail clippings. It does not explain the beatings he has described to his lawyer. It does not explain the constant pain in his left shoulder, neck, and spine.
Nor can anything other than malice—organized, official, state-sponsored malice—explain why Saakashvili is on a strange medical regimen that includes 14 different drugs, some addictive, some not approved for sale in the United States. Or why he has mild brain damage. Or why he has seizures. Giorgi Badridze, a former Georgian ambassador who keeps in constant touch with Saakashvili’s family, told me that “nothing has been exaggerated. He is doing really badly.” At age 55, Saakashvili is declining rapidly. And as he declines, so do the prospects of a sovereign, democratic Georgia.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Victory City, Salman Rushdie’s new novel, is a triumph.
Or try “Background,” a new short story by Elaine Hsieh Chou.
Watch. In theaters, M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin pairs a ludicrous horror concept with a healthy dose of tenderness.
On TV, Poker Face with Natasha Lyonne (streaming on Peacock) has a sting in its tail, our critic writes.
And keep your eye out for these 15 great indie films this year.
P.S.
I’ll skip a longer sign-off today and instead suggest that you get your hands on some of the games I mentioned. Fallout aficionados argue over the best game in the series, but I rather love Fallout: New Vegas, and I recommend you start there. (I would avoid the multiplayer Fallout 76, which I think was poorly conceived and violates the spirit of the original games.) New Vegas has a cast that includes Matthew Perry, Kris Kristofferson, Felicia Day, William Sadler, Alex Rocco, Dave Foley, René Auberjonois, and—I am not kidding—Wayne Newton. It’s a hell of a story, and you get to hang around in postnuclear casinos and gamble, which is where I’d want to be if someone drops the Big One someday.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
The Fallout 4 video-game launch event in Los Angeles in 2015
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Only a few years ago, democracies around the world seemed to be turning toward the pluto-populists, the wealthy men and women who convinced millions of ordinary voters that liberal democracy had run its course. They’re still out there—but their star may be dimming.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Pushing Back the Tide
In the autumn of 2017, I was in the Czech Republic on a speaking tour at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State to talk about the problem of disinformation and democracy. One night in Pilsen, a lovely city about an hour from Prague, I finished my presentation and asked for questions and discussion. A young man, speaking very good English, asked me if I would like to comment on the idea that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were involved with a ring of pedophiles, a common internet conspiracy theory that had already been around for a while and is now at the heart of the QAnon madness. I responded that this was a debunked story and that I was not going to be drawn into a debate about it.
After the talk, I spoke with this young man. I said, “You know better than this.” He smiled and admitted that the story was bunk, but that he’d just wanted to see what I would say. “And to make sure everyone in the room heard it,” I said. He smiled again and shrugged.
In other cities around the Czech Republic that fall, I fielded questions that included other conspiracy theories about NATO, the European Union, or Ukraine (or all three together); the movement of American nuclear weapons; criticism of the Western outrage at Russia for seizing Crimea; and other topics that seemed to be pulled right off of trashy websites. I began to see why other members of my various audiences (usually university-age young people) were pessimistic: In a country where Russian propaganda fell from the skies like electronic acid rain and oozed from computers like sludge from a cracked sewer pipe, how could ordinary citizens ever make informed decisions?
At the time, the Czech government was led by a pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, who was soon to be joined in the government by a populist prime minister, Andrej Babiš. A billionaire, Babiš campaigned on the high-minded slogan that “everybody steals” and vowed to run the government like a company. (That should sound familiar to American voters who had to listen to similar cynical bloviations from Donald Trump for so many years.) Zeman won a second term in 2018, and Babiš remained prime minister until late 2021. Pro-Western sentiment in the Czech Republic, as well as in other former Warsaw Pact nations that had since joined NATO, looked to be fizzling out.
Last month, Babiš not only lost his bid for the Czech presidency but also lost it to Petr Pavel, a retired Czech general who once held a senior position in NATO’s military leadership. Pavel is a newcomer to politics, but he clobbered Babiš—who by sheer virtue of name recognition and money should have been the favorite—garnering 58 percent of the vote in an election with a record 70 percent turnout. That’s not a squeaker; that’s a repudiation. Babiš, especially when faced with the coronavirus pandemic, was lousy at governing, as populists almost always are. But the Russian onslaught against Ukraine also seemed to break the spell for many Czechs, and this election is likely one more example of Vladimir Putin’s brutality in Ukraine undoing years of the careful propaganda that once bolstered Russia’s position in the world.
Pavel’s career began in the Czechoslovak military, where he was a member of the Communist Party. (This caused some griping and cheap shots among his opponents, but a young officer joining the Party as a matter of course was an expected part of a military career in those days.) After 1990, Pavel served in a United Nations peacekeeping mission and later as the chairman of NATO’s military committee, the top military body in the Atlantic Alliance.
If you want a sense of his campaign, one of his signs said, “Enough of chaos. I offer order and dignity.” (Again, millions of American voters can probably relate.) His views are an about-face from those of figures such Zeman and Babiš; he is proud of Czech aid to Ukraine and has said that the Ukrainians now “really deserve” NATO membership. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, but it is refreshing to see a government in Prague taking the regime in Moscow seriously as a mortal threat.
This is all good news not only for the Western allies but for democracy itself. Nevertheless, Pavel and the leaders of other democracies still have a full plate. The Czech presidency has some influence as a national symbol, but the Republic is a parliamentary system in which executive power rests with the prime minister (currently the center-right politician Petr Fiala). And in a classic Trumpy move, Babiš issued this ominous farewell: “Forget Babiš. Try to live without Babiš. Stop waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night feeling hatred for Babiš.” What this likely means, of course, is that Babiš—who still commands significant political and material resources—will be back.
Likewise, the move to the populist right is not over in neighboring Poland. And Viktor Orbán still rules Hungary, attended by a circle of American courtiers who believe he is the future of post-liberalism. (One of his admirers, Rod Dreher, just made the foolish mistake of accidentally reporting the truth: He publicized some of Orbán’s creepy pro-Russian and anti–European Union comments, and then backtracked quickly.)
Still, the Czech diplomat Petr Tuma (now in residence at the Atlantic Council, in Washington) is right to note that Pavel’s win “seems to follow a tide turning against global populism, including the defeats of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa.” We could add the American 2022 midterm elections to this list.
It’s been a tough few years for democracy, but populist leaders—as they almost inevitably do—are now reminding voters that they never have very much to offer beyond angry slogans, mistrust, and paranoia. (These days, many of them also have Putin’s war hanging around their neck.) The Czech presidential election is one more reminder that when voters decide in favor of freedom and decency, and then actually show up at the polls, democracy wins.
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Evening Read
Tyre Nichols Wanted to Capture the Sunset
By Clint Smith
Vincent van Gogh’s painting Willows at Sunset is a dazzling kaleidoscope of twilight. The canvas is awash in orange and yellow brushstrokes, as if the painter meant to depict the world ablaze. An asymmetrical sun hovers in the background while beams of light shoot across the sky. Terra-cotta grass leans in the wind that I imagine van Gogh felt slide across his cheek. Three pollarded willows rise up from the earth and bend like bodies frozen mid-dance. Shades of black expand across their barren trunks, as if they are about to be swallowed by the oncoming night.
The piece, painted in 1888, wasn’t originally meant to be shared with the world. The wide brushstrokes on the canvas have led art historians to believe that van Gogh painted the image quickly, perhaps as a sketch for another work—the artist’s attempt to capture the majesty of a sunset before it slipped beyond the horizon.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Elaine Hsieh Chou’s new short story, “Background.”
“Gene knew parents could be withholding, cold, distant. He didn’t know children could be too.”
Watch. M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin infuses a ludicrous horror concept with a healthy dose of tenderness.
P.S.
If you’ve never been to Prague, it’s a wonderful place and one of my favorite cities. It’s also, arguably, where the Soviet empire began its slide into oblivion. In early 1968, reformers in the then-Czechoslovak leadership took over the government (thus giving us the term “Prague Spring” that we now apply to other uprisings). In August, Soviet tanks moved in and crushed the whole project, causing many of the men and women in the old Eastern bloc, and in the U.S.S.R. itself, to doubt their faith in Moscow and the future of Soviet communism. One of the best books on this, Nightfrost in Prague, was written by one of the officials who was forcibly taken to the Kremlin, but unfortunately, it’s out of print and kind of hard to get.
A former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, Norman Eisen, however, wrote a book in 2018 titled The Last Palace, which is a good introduction to the city and its history—and even its architecture, too, as it is told through the notable history of the ambassador’s residence. Eisen is known to news junkies as a regular commenter on cable news; he was the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including during Trump’s impeachment. The history of Central Europe can get a bit chewy for a general reader; instead, give The Last Palace a read—but beware of the urge it will instill in you to go and walk along the Charles Bridge.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
Czech President-elect Petr Pavel arrives for an interview with Agence France-Presse on his foreign policy in Prague, on February 2.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Florida’s Soviet Commissars
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.
Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”
As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.
Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.
But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.
Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so. In fact, Florida could decide tomorrow to amend its own constitution and abolish state universities entirely. There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.
But something more important is going on here. At this point in any discussion of college education, we are all supposed to acknowledge that colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal. There’s some truth to that charge; I included some stories of campus boobery when I wrote about the role of colleges in America some years back. And only a few weeks ago, I joined the many people blasting Hamline University for going off the rails and violating basic principles of academic freedom while infantilizing and overprotecting students.
Fine, so stipulated: Many colleges do silly things and have silly professors saying silly things.
But the Sovietization of the New College isn’t about any of that. Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.
GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.
It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to realize that those four years tracked with the rise of Donald Trump and a movement whose populist catechism includes seething anger at “the elites,” a class that no longer means “people with money and power”—after all, Republicans have gobs of both—but rather “those bookish snobs who look down on our True Real-American Values.” The Republican message, aided by the usual hypocrites in the right-wing entertainment ecosystem (such as Tucker Carlson, a prep-school product who told kids to drop out of college but asked Hunter Biden for help getting his own son into Georgetown), is that colleges are grabbing red-blooded American kids and replacing them with Woke Communist Pod People.
This is a completely bizarre line of attack: It posits that a graduate student making a pittance grading exams is more “elite” than a rich restaurant owner. But it works like a charm, in part because how Americans measure their success (and their relative status) has shifted from the simple metric of wealth to less tangible characteristics about education and lifestyle. Our national culture, for both better and worse, has arguably become more of a monoculture, even in rural areas. And many Americans, now living in a hyperconnected world, are more aware of cultural differences and the criticism of others. Those self-defined “real Americans” partake in that same overall national culture, of course, but they nonetheless engage in harsh judgment of their fellow citizens that is at least as venomous as what they imagine is being directed by “the elites” back at them.
Which brings us back to DeSantis—a graduate, he would apparently like you to forget, of Harvard and Yale. DeSantis is now a “populist,” much like Trump (Penn), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard and the Ferengi Diplomatic Academy). He has tasked Rufo (Georgetown and Harvard) to “remake” a school meant for the sons and daughters of Florida’s taxpayers not so that he can offer more opportunity to the people of his state, but so that he can run for president as just one of the regular folks whom reporters flock to interview in diners across the mountains and plains of a great nation.
Look, I live in New England surrounded by excellent public and private institutions, and I candidly admit that I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools. If Florida parents really don’t want Ron DeSantis appointing ideological commissars to annoy deans and department chairs, then they should head to the ballot box and fix it. But in the meantime, faux populists, the opportunists and hucksters who infest the modern GOP, are going to undermine education for the people who need it the most: the youngsters who rely on public education. And that’s a tragedy that will extend far beyond whatever becomes of the careers of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo.
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Evening Read
The Luxury Dilemma
By Xochitl Gonzalez
Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.
As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.
In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.
I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings.
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Culture Break
Read. “Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament,” by Donald Platt.
“Lucy, when I die, / I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes / of Virginia Beach.”
Watch. Infinity Pool, in theaters, is a gory, existential horror film with a premise deliciously nasty enough to keep you invested—even if it can’t quite keep up with its initial hook.
P.S.
I usually take this final word in the Daily to direct you toward something fun or interesting, often derived from my admittedly oddball taste in pop culture. Today, I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I offer you something that I wrote yesterday in our Ideas section.
Some years ago, I wrote about the young losers and misfits among us who suddenly explode and commit mass murder. Even before the recent shootings in California (which actually are outliers in the general pattern of attacks by younger men), I’d decided to revisit this question. I wanted to think more about why America—and, yes, other nations as well—has produced so many lost young men who turn to performative and spectacular acts of murder or terrorism. I think the growth of narcissism is one of the answers, but I discuss it all at more length in this article, which I cannot say is pleasant reading but, I hope, offers a path toward more productive discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
Supporters of Governor DeSantis celebrate his victory during his Election Night watch party at the Tampa Convention Center on November 8, 2022.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
A recent Jeopardy contestant lit into the show, claiming that it isn’t really all that good a measure of a player’s intelligence. He’s got a point—but not the one he thinks he’s making.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Passing the Test
A series of viral Facebook posts by a recent Jeopardy contestant named Yogesh Raut have caused something of a minor kerfuffle among watchers of the show. Raut, to put it mildly, is unimpressed by the intellectual level of America’s premier game show. He won three games, but after the episodes began to air, he went online to argue that the show’s status as “the Olympics of quizzing” is undeserved.
This all puts me in a bit of a pickle. I am a former Jeopardy champion (I made it to the 1994 Tournament of Champions and the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions) who no longer likes the show very much. I wrote a year ago that Jeopardy has made some serious mistakes—chief among them ending the rule that winners step down after five victories—and should probably wrap up its legendary run. But Raut is wrong about what it takes to play Jeopardy.
So though I think the show should be retired, let me suggest to you three ways in which Jeopardy really is a test of your brainpower.
1. You need to be well-read, not well-educated.
The one place where I think I can agree with Raut and other critics of the game is that you do not need a lot of formal education or deep knowledge of any particular area to succeed at Jeopardy. After all, one of the greatest players of all time was a New York City cop. I have three graduate degrees, including a doctorate, and I got smoked by a librarian in my first tournament. (Some players theorize, in fact, that knowing too much about a subject can paralyze you; I have seen doctors and lawyers fumble questions in their area of expertise.)
You don’t need a Ph.D., but to do well at the game, you should be a voracious reader, which is how most people gain (and, more importantly, retain) facts and knowledge. My mom and I would watch the old daytime 1960s version on school snow days or when I was home sick, and she was a pretty sharp player—with a ninth-grade education. But my mom and dad were both readers; our house was full of books and magazines and newspapers.
Indeed, in my experience, people who approach Jeopardy as a test of formal smarts can really stink at playing the game. At my 1993 tryout in a big hotel in Burlington, Vermont, about 160 people walked in, as I recall, and about 15 of us walked out. The people who showed up with almanacs and atlases and fact books, the serious people whose eyes glared and nostrils flared at anyone who talked to them while they did some last-minute boning up … well, they all got turfed instantly. The rest of us had a grand old time, got our I passed the Jeopardy test! buttons, and went home to wait for a call from Los Angeles.
Now, I will grant you that getting things right does not mean you know a lot about the subject; it only means you successfully associated a clue with a fact. In one of my games, I was behind, and so I went for some high-money clues in “The Violin.” I was a young professor in security studies, so this did not seem like a natural choice. My then-wife was in the audience, and she turned to a friend in panic: “What’s he doing?! He doesn’t know anything about violins! Did he think it said Violence?”
And yet, I’d learned in my high-school stage band what pizzicato meant, a lucky break that helped me rack up some cash. That’s how you play the game.
2. You need to understand clues and riddles.
Jeopardy isn’t only about knowing stuff. You need to have a particular kind of intelligence to play the game, an agile mind that can not only recall factoids but also parse the game’s sneaky way of asking you for information.
One of Jeopardy’s favorite tricks is to firehose the player with a lot of extraneous and irrelevant detail while putting the answer right in front of you. I am making this up as an example, but a typical snare would be something like this: “A giant ruby was given to the Black Prince by Pedro the Cruel in 1367 and sits near a river of stinky and cold water known for its unusually shallow depth of 20 meters in this British capital.”
If you’re a nerd who overthinks everything and wants to show off your smarts, you’re standing there trying to unravel who the hell Pedro the Cruel was and which river is shallow and …
If you’re a Jeopardy player, your brain filtered out everything except “this British capital,” and you buzzed in and said “What is London?” while Brainiac over there was still trying to figure out who was in charge of what in the 14th century. You might not think that’s a form of intelligence, but when two other people are slamming away at their clickers and you’ve got a fraction of a second to recognize the real answer, your mental hard drive better be solid-state and super fast.
3. You need to combine intelligence with presence of mind—and never panic.
Raut is upset that the producers choose people who are telegenic. Having watched the show for many years, I think that’s nonsense; there are plenty of contestants who are not, shall we say, camera-friendly. What the producers do guard against, I learned, are people who freeze in front of a camera. (In Jeopardy lore, this is called “going Bambi,” like a deer caught in the headlights.)
Good Jeopardy players never let anything get inside their head, and the best of them pay almost no attention to the other players or even to the host: They read the question and decide whether to buzz in. I disliked super-champ James Holzhauer for many reasons, but his background as a Vegas odds guy meant he played the game with ice-cold ease, and that matters—a lot.
Full disclosure: My first Jeopardy run ended when I made all of these mistakes at once. At the end of the first game of the 1994 Tournament of Champions, the clue was “The last king of the Hellenes, he was the second to bear this name.”
Piece of cake. I’m part Greek, spent summers with my grandmother in Greece. Had a lot of drachmas in my pocket with the former king’s name on it: Constantine II.
And then panic and doubt crept in as the Final Jeopardy theme began its death-clock countdown. King of the Hellenes? Did they mean the ancient Greek empire? The Athenian alliance at Delos, the one defeated by … no, wait, I think that was a democracy, but … it’s Alexander, maybe? Were there two?
We all went for the Alexander bait, and we all lost. But my opponent made a smaller and smarter bet than I did, and that was that.
Look, I think Jeopardy has become too professionalized and too soulless. It’s lost the charm that made it an American institution, and frankly, I don’t much care for Ken Jennings or Mayim Bialik as hosts. (The show should have closed out its run when Alex Trebek died.) But make no mistake: People who win at Jeopardy are, in fact, as smart as they look.
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Evening Read
Asteroid Measurements Make No Sense
By Marina Koren
A couple of newly discovered asteroids whizzed past our planet earlier this month, tracing their own loop around the sun. These two aren’t any more special than the thousands of other asteroids in the ever-growing catalog of near-Earth objects. But a recent news article in The Jerusalem Post described them in a rather eye-catching, even startling, way: Each rock, the story said, is “around the size of 22 emperor penguins stacked nose to toes.”
Now, if someone asked me to describe the size of an asteroid (or anything, for that matter), penguins wouldn’t be the first unit that comes to mind. But the penguin asteroid is only the latest example of a common strategy in science communication: evoking images of familiar, earthly objects to convey the scope of mysterious, celestial ones. Usually, small asteroids are said to be the size of buses, skyscrapers, football fields, tennis courts, cars—mundane, inanimate things. Lately, though, the convention seems to be veering toward the weird.
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Culture Break
Read. These books to read when you’re pregnant go beyond the standard guidebook to offer generous insight and reassurance.
A new oral history paints a vivid picture of life on Rikers Island, America’s most notorious jail.
And check out some cozy mystery series to keep you warm.
Watch. Poker Face, on Peacock, features Natasha Lyonne as a fun-to-watch crime-solving waitress.
If you’re in the mood for a movie, work through some of the Oscar-nominated front-runners.
And there’s always our foolproof list of 13 feel-good TV shows to watch this winter.
Listen. Spend time with the music of David Crosby, who died this month—and who was never a typical hippie, despite being one of the movement’s founders.
P.S.
Speaking of game shows, one of the television joys of my early teenage years was to come home from school and catch the old Match Game, in which ordinary Americans and show-business folks tried to finish each other’s sentences without being too dirty for the network censors. I stumbled across it on my Roku recently, and now I am mesmerized all over again by the great Gene Rayburn and his rotating cast of wiseacres.
Match Game was, for its time, a bit blue: Many of the clues were meant to sound naughty and designed to lead contestants to say “boobs” or “tinkle” or something. Today, it’s a joy to watch because it’s so quaint. (This is the show, after all, where it was ostensibly scandalous that people were skating the edge of outing Charles Nelson Reilly as gay, including wink-wink jokes from Reilly himself.) The celebrities—some of whom were big 1970s stars—are clearly having a ball; there were rumors of some boozing during the dinner breaks, and it shows. Watching Match Game in 1973 was like listening in on an adult cocktail party; today, it’s like a visit to your favorite bar full of characters, a kind of real-life Cheers masquerading as a game show. If nothing else, tune in for a look back at the Good Old Days, when people dressed like their home appliances in a riot of autumn rust, harvest gold, and avocado green.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Some NATO nations are wavering about sending tanks and other advanced weapons to Ukraine. I understand fears of escalation, but if Russia wins in Ukraine, the world will lose.
But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
No Other Choice
I don’t often find myself agreeing with Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina conservative who long ago rebranded himself as Donald Trump’s faithful valet and No. 1 fan. Last week, however, Graham lashed out in frustration at the dithering in Europe and America over sending more weapons to Ukraine. “I am tired of the shit show surrounding who is going to send tanks and when they’re gonna send them,” he said during a press conference in Kyiv, flanked by Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. “World order is at stake. [Vladimir] Putin is trying to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.”
Graham is right. Germany, for example, has been reluctant to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine; the Germans, for their part, would likely prefer to see the United States send American tanks first. But everyone in the West should be sending anything the Ukrainians can learn to use, because a lot more than mere order is at stake, and order, by itself, is not enough. As Rousseau wrote, “Tranquility is found also in dungeons,” but that does not make dungeons desirable places to live. Global civilization itself is on the line: the world built after the defeat of the Axis, in which, for all of our faults as nations and peoples, we strive to live in peace and cooperation—and, at the least, to not butcher one another. If Russia’s campaign of terror and other likely war crimes erases Ukraine, it will be a defeat of the first order for every institution of international life, be it the United Nations or the international postal union.
I suspect that many people in Europe and the United States are having a hard time getting their arms around the magnitude of this threat. We are all afflicted by normalcy bias, our inherent resistance to accept that large changes can upend our lives. I struggled with this in the early stages of the war; I thought Ukraine would probably lose quickly, and then when the Russians were repulsed by the heroic Ukrainian defenses, I hoped (in vain) that the fighting would fizzle out, that Putin would try to conserve what was left of his shattered military, and that the world’s institutions, damaged by yet another act of Russian barbarism, would somehow continue to limp along.
We’re long past such possibilities. Putin has made clear that he will soak the ground of East-Central Europe with blood—both of Ukrainians and of his own hapless mobiks, the recently mobilized draftees he’s sending into the military meat grinder—if that’s what it takes to subjugate Kyiv and end the Kremlin’s unexpected and ongoing humiliation. At this point, the fight in Ukraine is not about borders or flags but about what kind of world we’ve built over the past century, and whether that world can sustain itself in the face of limitless brutality. As the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in Davos last week: “We don’t know when the war ends, but Ukraine has to win. I don’t see another choice.”
Neither do I, and it’s past time to send Ukraine even more and better weapons. (Or, as my colleague David Frum tweeted last June: “If there’s anything that Ukraine can use in any NATO warehouse from Vancouver to Vilnius, that’s a scandal. Empty every inventory.”) I say all this despite my concerns about escalation to a wider European and even global war. I still oppose direct U.S. and NATO intervention in this fight, and I have taken my share of criticism for that reticence. I do not fear that such measures will instantly provoke World War III. Rather, I reject proposals that I think could increase the odds of an accident or a miscalculation that could bring the superpowers into a nuclear standoff that none of them wants. (Putin, for all his bluster, has no interest in living out his last days eating dry rations in a dark fallout shelter, but that does not mean he is competent at assessing risks.)
Americans and their allies must face how far a Russian victory would extend beyond Ukraine. In a recent discussion with my old friend Andrew Michta (a scholar of European affairs who is now dean at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, in Germany), he referred to the conflict in Ukraine as a “system-transforming” war, as Russian aggression dissolves the last illusions of a stable European order that were perhaps too quickly embraced in the immediate post–Cold War euphoria. Andrew has always been less sanguine about the post–World War II international order than old-school institutionalists like me, but he has a point: The pessimists after 1991 were right about Russia and its inability to live in peace with its neighbors. If Ukraine loses, dictators elsewhere will draw the lesson that the West has lost its will to defend its friends—and itself.
If Russia finally captures Ukraine by mass murder, torture, and nuclear threats, then everything the world has gained since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 will be in mortal peril. Putin will prove to himself and to every dictator on the planet that nothing has changed since Hitler, that lawless nations can achieve their aims by using force at will, by killing and raping innocent people and then literally grinding their ashes into the dirt. This is no longer about Russia’s neo-imperial dreams or Ukraine’s borders: This is a fight for the future of the international system and the safety of us all.
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Evening Read
A Grim New Low for Internet Sleuthing
By Megan Garber
On November 13, 2022, four students from the University of Idaho—Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Madison Mogen—were found dead in the house that the latter three rented near campus. Each had been stabbed, seemingly in bed. Two other students lived in the house, and were apparently in their rooms that night; they were unharmed.
From the public’s standpoint, the case had few leads at first: an unknown assailant, an unknown motive. Law-enforcement officials in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, initially offered the public little information about the evidence they were gathering in their investigation. Into that void came a frenzy of public speculation—and, soon enough, public accusation. The familiar alchemy set in: The real crime, as the weeks dragged on, became a “true crime”; the murders, as people discussed them and analyzed them and competed to solve them, became a grim form of interactive entertainment.
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Culture Break
Read. “Woman in Labor,” a poem by Daria Serenko.
“Yesterday a woman began giving birth directly on the Red Square with an assault rifle pressed to her temple.”
Watch. Return to a blockbuster that was among the last of its kind. The Fugitive, available to stream on multiple platforms, is the perfect popcorn movie.
P.S.
I had to do some traveling this weekend, and although I usually connect to airline Wi-Fi and annoy people with random thoughts on Twitter, flying is also a way to catch up on old movies. For some reason, this time out I put on the 1974 classic The Longest Yard, with Burt Reynolds playing a dissolute former football star who ends up in a Florida jail. He is cornered by a sadistic warden (played with genial smarm by the great Eddie Albert) who blackmails him into coaching the prison football team. Reynolds instead suggests tuning up the team of guards by having them play a pickup team composed of inmates, which goes about the way you’d expect. I seemed to recall liking it as a kid, and I wanted to see it again as an adult. (Do not confuse this one with a far-inferior 2005 remake starring Adam Sandler.)
I don’t like sports, and I’m not sure why I thought I would enjoy the movie, but I did, and the reason is that The Longest Yard isn’t really a football movie. It’s a prison movie built around the game between the inmates and guards, a kind of lighthearted Shawshank Redemption about bad men who, for one moment, get a chance to be the good guys. There’s even a murder of an innocent man, as there was in Shawshank, and a similar, if far less dramatic, moment of getting even with the creepy warden. And yes, it includes a message about sportsmanship, as the inmates earn the grudging respect of the guards at the end. Finally, long before it was a joke on The Simpsons, the movie actually gets a laugh by hitting a guy in the groin with a football. Twice.
— Tom
Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.
A Ukrainian tank sits under covering in the Kharkiv district of Ukraine
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