A decade ago, the inaugural season of Serial debuted. The podcast, about the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and questions surrounding the arrest and conviction of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, drew upon the alchemy of suspenseful storytelling and a taste for the lurid that has enticed Americans for centuries. Serial’s massive popularity, and its week-by-week format, overhauled how the genre was received: Audiences were no longer content with merely consuming the story. They wanted to be active participants, to post theories, drive by suspects’ houses, and call attention to errors.

As a result, the true-crime landscape was transformed. Its popularity has soared, making room for work that not only shocks but also asks deeper questions. There has been a welcome uptick in stories that focus on the victims of violence and the social structures that perpetuate it. But a perennial desire for the macabre doesn’t just dissipate under the umbrella of good intentions. The level of dreck in the genre—particularly cheap, poorly researched media that substitutes flippancy for compassion—continues to rise.

This glut makes it hard to identify the best true crime, which harnesses the instinct for titillation in the service of empathy, justice, and maybe even systemic change. These eight books are some of the most accomplished the genre has to offer. They broaden the definition of true crime itself—and most important, they interrogate their own telling of the story, reflecting an essential self-awareness about mining real people’s grief.

The Phantom Prince, by Elizabeth Kendall

So much has been written about Ted Bundy, who murdered dozens of women and girls in the 1970s, most of it wondering, from the outside, how Bundy got away with so much for so long. Kendall, however, had a more intimate perspective: She was his long-term girlfriend (though she uses a pseudonym here). She thought she knew Bundy well, but as the murders of women in the Pacific Northwest began to spread, and police sketches of a man named Ted circulated, she had to confront her level of denial—and then catalog the collateral damage of being a serial killer’s partner. This book is dedicated to figuring out what she actually knew and was kept from knowing, and Kendall does so in plain (if occasionally awkward) prose that doesn’t shy away from her own blind spots. True-crime memoirs were fairly rare in the early ’80s, when hers was released—and it remains an important one.

[Read: The gross spectacle of murder fandom]

Under the Bridge, by Rebecca Godfrey

The horrific 1997 murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk by several other teenagers prompted a reckoning in Victoria, British Columbia. Godfrey, the author of The Torn Skirt, a novel about the effects of a self-destructive girlhood, felt compelled to report on what happened, and why. The fine Hulu series of the same name, released in April and starring Riley Keough and Archie Panjabi, was more about Godfrey’s investigative quest than Virk’s murder. But the original work, which I’ve read multiple times, better depicts the toxic dynamic of teenage girls egging one another on from bullying to more violent acts, while also humanizing the victim and perpetrators.

The Red Parts, by Maggie Nelson

In 2005, Nelson published the poetry collection Jane: A Murder, which focuses on the then-unsolved murder of her aunt Jane Mixer 36 years before, and the pain of a case in limbo. This nonfiction companion, published two years later, deals with the fallout of the unexpected discovery and arrest of a suspect thanks to a new DNA match. Nelson’s exemplary prose style mixes pathos with absurdity (“Where I imagined I might find the ‘face of evil,’” she writes of Mixer’s killer, “I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd”), and conveys how this break upends everything she believed about Mixer, the case, and the legal system. Nelson probes still-open questions instead of arriving at anything remotely like “closure,” and the way she continues to ask them makes The Red Parts stand out.

[Read: The con man who became a true-crime writer]

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, by Kali Nicole Gross

Four years ago, my friend and fellow crime writer Elon Green investigated the alarming lack of true crime written by Black authors; today, white authors still tell most of these stories, most of which are about white victims. This is in part, I’ve come to believe, because so many crime narratives—particularly historical ones—depend on a written record of some kind, which tends to exclude people of color. This book by Gross, a historian based at Emory University, was a revelation to me for uncovering the fascinating, messy story of Tabbs, a formerly enslaved woman, probable fraudster, and murderer in 1880s Philadelphia. Tabbs does not fit into any easy box, and Gross’s careful research places the desperate acts of this particular woman against the backdrop of post-Reconstruction America, a time when the gap between what was promised at the end of slavery and what was actually possible widened sharply.

We Keep the Dead Close, by Becky Cooper

Cooper, a onetime New Yorker staffer, had for years been haunted by a story she’d heard while attending Harvard in the late 2000s: A girl had been murdered, and she had been having an affair with her professor, which the school covered up. The story turned out to be more myth than truth, but Cooper felt compelled to investigate, and she discovered that there had, in fact, been a long-unsolved murder. Some of the details eerily parallel those of The Red Parts—both victims are college students named Jane, both murdered in 1969—but Cooper’s book veers away from Nelson’s. The book, which conjures the vivid, all-too-brief life of the anthropology student Jane Britton, is a furious examination of a culture of complicity at Harvard, where, Cooper points out, sexual-misconduct allegations were (and still are) dismissed or ignored. And like Nelson, Cooper demolishes the concept of closure.

[Read: When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him]

The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Before Eisenberg put out her wonderful novel, Housemates, she worked primarily in the nonfiction space, publishing a 2017 feature story for Splinter about the missing Black trans teen Sage Smith, which was reprinted in my true-crime anthology Unspeakable Acts. She also published this book, a standout hybrid of reportage, memoir, and cultural criticism. Her subject was the 1980 murders of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero in Pocahontas County, West Virginia (and the subsequent wrongful conviction of a suspect)—but also the author’s own queer coming of age in the same area of Appalachia. Eisenberg is a warm, compassionate guide through a thicket of violence, abrupt endings, and youthful longings, and her book is an intelligent corrective to common true-crime tropes. “Telling a story is often about obligation and sympathy, identification, and empathy,” she writes. “With whom is your lot cast? To whom are you bound?”

Seventy Times Seven, by Alex Mar

I had been waiting many years for a book about Paula Cooper, the Black teenage girl who was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of Ruth Pelke, an elderly white woman, in the mid-’80s. Though she committed the crime with three other girls, only 15-year-old Cooper was given the death penalty. She became the youngest person on death row in the country at the time, leading to international outrage, a clemency campaign, and an unlikely friendship with the victim’s grandson, Bill. The points this story makes about the human capacity for empathy, who merits collective forgiveness, and the stubborn persistence of the death penalty are discomfiting. Mar (another Unspeakable Acts contributor) has made a long career of probing deeper questions, and in this book she eschews tidy narratives. Forgiveness does not, in fact, overcome the ramifications of violence, as will become clear in Bill’s home and work life—and in Paula’s, after she is eventually released from prison. Mar masterfully explores who is entitled to mercy, and how we continue to fail prisoners during and after their incarceration.

By the Fire We Carry, by Rebecca Nagle

Finally, this terrific new book, published just last month, looks at the larger picture of Indigenous autonomy and forced removal through the lens of one case—the murder of the Muscogee Nation member George Jacobs by another tribal member, Patrick Murphy—asking whether the state of Oklahoma actually had the jurisdiction to prosecute and execute Murphy. In 2020, the Supreme Court would eventually rule that much of eastern Oklahoma did remain an American Indian reservation; its decision set a far-reaching precedent that, in practice, would prove more complicated to enforce. Nagle, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a resident of Oklahoma, writes with sensitivity and empathy for the Native American communities she grew up in and around. Her work is similar in scope and feel to (and clearly in conversation with) Missing and Murdered and Stolen, the excellent podcasts by the Indigenous Canadian journalist Connie Walker.

One freezing day this spring, Shammas Malik was slogging through an agenda that would overwhelm anyone. The new mayor of Akron, Ohio, had to meet with a city-council member who was upset over a recent shooting in his ward. The interim police chief stopped by to discuss the incident, which underscored that Malik still had to pick a permanent head for the troubled department. Meanwhile, the council was debating whether to fund his plan—a hallmark promise of his campaign—to open the government up for more direct resident involvement and input. He was planning for his State of the City address, which was due in just a couple of weeks, on his 100th day in office—also his 33rd birthday. Merely contemplating such a schedule exhausted me, and unlike Malik, I had the benefit of sustenance; he was fasting for Ramadan.

Malik, however, was plowing through it with the almost annoying equanimity of an ascendant political star. He is the youngest mayor and the first mayor of color in the city’s history, placing him among a crop of young, ambitious Democratic mayors of color in the Buckeye State, including Cleveland’s Justin Bibb, age 37, and Cincinnati’s Aftab Pureval, who is 42, both of whom were elected in 2021. In an election cycle where the top of the Republican national ticket—including Ohio’s junior senator, J. D. Vance—has offered up wild fabrications about immigrants eating pets in nearby Springfield, they offer a different version of Buckeye State politics.

Barack Obama won Ohio twice, but whether a young brown man with a “funny name” can still win statewide there is unclear. The state’s mix of impoverished rural precincts and aging, decaying Rust Belt bastions have tipped toward Republicans. Senator Sherrod Brown, the most recent Democrat elected statewide, is in the fight of his political life against the Republican Bernie Moreno. Malik, Bibb, and Pureval could represent a new generation of Ohio leaders, not only in their backgrounds and ages but also in their approach. They could, however, find their paths to higher office blocked by the country’s hyperpartisanship—a fate that has shortened the careers of countless promising Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states, an invisible loss of talent that America pays for in ways immeasurable but profound.

[Stuart Stevens: I thought I understood the GOP. I was wrong.]

Malik, who is biracial, with a Pakistani father and a white mother, is young for the role and looks younger. With a high, reedy voice and a baby face only barely disguised with a beard, he usually wears a suit—“If I’m going to be a 32-year-old mayor, I can at least look the part,” he told me—but that just makes him seem a little like a kid dressed up for a special occasion. In fairness, Malik will always seem like a kid to me: I first met him as a teenager, when he was friends with my little sister. When I told J. Cherie Strachan, a political scientist at the University of Akron, that high-school friends used to joke that he was getting ready to be mayor, she laughed. “And now he's getting ready to be governor,” she said. “I can’t imagine that someone who is as ambitious as he is is going to stop at Akron.”

The real surprise might be that Malik is in Akron at all. Once, the city was the prosperous center of the nation’s tire industry, but its population has shrunk steadily since 1960. Firestone, Goodrich, and General Tire all left town; only Goodyear remains. The weather is bad. Any Akronite can reel off the names of many famous people from the city who left once they had a chance.

Malik could have been one of them. He excelled at Ohio State, graduated from Harvard Law School cum laude, and collected prestigious internships in Washington. He had no remaining family connections in Akron. Regardless, he decided to go home and take a job with the city’s lawyers in 2016, figuring he could always move to D.C. later. He found himself depressed and lonely, and when a friend asked if he’d be happier in the capital, he immediately answered yes. So why don’t you move? she asked.

“I think what I’m doing means something here, and I’m trying to find meaning here,” he said, recounting the conversation to me. “If I’m not [in Washington], probably somebody who thinks very similar to me, who’s going to work kind of the same as me, who’s going to do pretty much the same thing [will be]. If I’m not here, that’s not necessarily the case.”

The answer conveys a lot about Malik: his earnestness, his diligence and sense of responsibility, his openness around topics like mental health. Obama—another biracial, Harvard Law–educated politician—is an obvious model, evident in Malik’s pragmatic approach to politics, his seriousness of purpose, and his speaking style. A shelf in his sparsely decorated office captures the range of his influences: The New Jim Crow, Robert’s Rules of Order, Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball, and the Quran.

Malik’s character was shaped profoundly by both of his parents—but in very different ways. The greatest influence on his life was his mother, Helen Killory Qammar, a beloved chemical-engineering professor at the University of Akron. She instilled a sense of service, a love of vocation, and a focus on education. “She always was trying to do the right thing,” Malik  told the Akron Beacon Journal. “She was always treating people with kindness and dignity and respect and honesty.” Qammar died of cancer when Malik was 21.

Malik speaks frequently about her, but less so about his father, at least until the mayoral campaign. After Malik’s parents separated when he was 10, his father, Qammar Malik, a Pakistani immigrant, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, extortion, and impersonating a U.S. official in a blackmail scheme. During a mayoral debate in April 2023, Malik was asked how he thought about integrity. He shifted uncomfortably behind his lectern, as though wrestling with himself, then began to speak in a tremulous voice.

“I’m going to talk about something I never talked about in public before,” he said. “I have a father who’s a very dishonest guy, and this impacted me a lot as a kid. I talked to my dad through prison glass, and I don’t talk about it a lot because it’s something that is difficult to talk about, but it has guided my life to live every day with honesty.”

Despite his initial unhappiness upon returning to Akron, Malik stuck it out. When he learned that the city-council seat for the ward he grew up in was opening, he moved there and entered the race. Malik won the 2019 election in a stroll. (Driving around this spring, he was still new enough to his job that he was instinctively doing the work of a city-council member, sighing and making a note when he saw a light-pole banner that had become partially detached.) In June 2022, police shot and killed a 25-year-old Black man named Jayland Walker after a car chase, spurring protests. Three months later, Malik announced that he would run for mayor in 2023, challenging the incumbent Dan Horrigan in the Democratic primary. Within weeks, Horrigan announced that he would not seek reelection.

In Akron, as in many small and midsize cities, the Democratic Party dominates. The city hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1979, and the winner of the Democratic primary is a shoo-in for the general election. The city’s Democratic machine, including Horrigan, opposed Malik, which turned out to be a great asset in a city eager for change. Malik looked to Bibb’s successful race—featuring a young candidate who took on far more seasoned figures in Cleveland—as a model for his campaign.

The differences between Malik and other candidates were less about policy than philosophy. He ran down the middle on issues. In a race in which public safety was voters’ central concern, he promised both police reform and greater safety. Where he distinguished himself from the field was on governing style. During the campaign, he knocked on hundreds of doors and showed up at every event he could, leveraging his youth and energy. Wherever he went, he promised that as mayor he’d bring the same transparency and opportunity for public engagement into a city government that hadn’t felt very open or accessible for decades.

Strachan told me that Malik’s campaign was “facilitative, deliberative, inclusive, and focused on process.” These may be the hallmarks of a younger generation; Strachan noted that they’re also traditionally associated with a more feminine leadership style. And it was women who powered Malik’s victory. He won 43 percent of the vote in a seven-person field, and a postelection poll found that Malik won more votes from women than any other candidate won in total.

If anything, getting elected was the easy part. The council—perhaps eager to establish some leverage over an untested mayor—refused to fund a position to implement his public-engagement initiative. (“I don’t have to like it, but I’m gonna respect it,” he told me, paraphrasing the rapper Nipsey Hussle.) His attempt to change the city charter to allow him to seek outside candidates for police chief fell short. A mass shooting at a birthday party this summer shook the city and made national headlines; now some residents are clamoring for the police chief’s firing.

“It’s easy to get beaten down and just overwhelmed by the issues,” Tony O’Leary, a former deputy mayor who advised Malik’s transition into office, told me. “Shit just comes every day, no matter what you do or how well you prepare. It’s always the unexpected. It doesn’t matter what’s on your to-do list.”

When I spoke with Malik again in September, he said he was adjusting to the incrementalism of the job. The mayor has more power than a ward councilor, but also less chance to act unilaterally. His first nine months on the job, he joked, “have been like 54 years.” But Malik’s respect for process can mask a hard resolve.

“Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, right? But I should be confident in the things that I’m putting forward,” he said. “That doesn’t mean yelling, that doesn’t mean arguing, but it does mean being firm. I’m not going to bring something to someone unless it’s well thought out.”

Mayors don’t always have the luxury, or the burden, of ideology. Many of their most pressing issues aren’t partisan, and they may have to work with state and federal politicians with whom they disagree.

“When you’re dealing with the extreme MAGA-led Republican state legislature that we have in Columbus, I think it’s important to find commonsense, pragmatic Republican lawmakers that I can work with across the aisle who share my vision and love for Cleveland,” Bibb told me.

This fall, Donald Trump and Vance spent weeks fueling a national news cycle based on false, racist claims about legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and promising to deport them if elected. It fell to Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and Governor Mike DeWine, both Republicans, to refute those claims. Migration has taxed Springfield’s housing supply, but local officials also credit it with helping revitalize the economy.

In September, Malik joined a delegation of Ohio mayors that went to Springfield to meet with Rue, offer support, and compare notes. Back home, he told me that although he had no patience for fearmongering or racism, he understood the tension in Springfield.

“When there is a significant rise in population in a community, especially a city of 60,000 people, certainly there are going to be impacts. There’s going to be positive impact. There’s going to be challenges,” he said.

Akron experienced an influx of several thousand people, including many from Nepal and Bhutan, in the early 2000s. Malik said he was conscious of the concerns of longtime Akronites, but noted that, as in Springfield, population growth can help everyone. “I’m walking around a city that was built for 300,000 people,” he told me. “It’s now a city of 187,000 people. It doesn’t run if the population is 100,000.” (A couple of times, Malik half-jokingly tried to persuade me to move home too.)

Residents of bigger cities, which have more room and more liberal politics, may be receptive to this kind of argument—and to immigrants. Elsewhere, however, many Ohioans have been amenable to Trump’s message, focused on economic protectionism, nativism, and reduced immigration. His success there has taken Ohio out of the swing-state column at the national level. Broad political shifts, weak candidates, and gerrymandering have all but locked Democrats out of power at the state level. According to a count by David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, Democrats have won just one of 32 statewide races over the past decade, though the success last year of a constitutional amendment to protect abortion access has instilled some hope.

“To the extent that there’s a Democratic future, it’s the mayors, but what Ohio has been doing of late has been chewing up and spitting out Democrats with statewide aspirations,” Niven told me. Democrats hope that younger people and greater diversity will improve their statewide fortunes.

If the state ever turns purple again, Democrats will be looking to the people sitting in mayoral offices today and in the years ahead to win at the state level. “We need more mayors from big cities and medium-sized cities and small cities in this state working in the legislature, running for statewide offices,” he told me. (Bibb excluded himself from consideration, at least for the moment: “Right now, I’m just trying to get reelected in 2025.”)

Making the jump to statewide office isn’t easy, though, not only because of party affiliation but also because Ohio is regionally divided such that no mayor has much name recognition or reach across the state. In 2022, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley ran for governor as a Democrat but was trounced by the incumbent DeWine. Malik told me that he’s heard the optimistic speculation about his future but he’s focused on his current job. “I ran for mayor because I think I can do this job,” he said. “I’m not running for state representative or state senator, because I don’t know state government. I’m not running for Congress. I want to do this job.”

For once, Malik doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. But if he ever wanted to kick the tires, he’d be in the right place.

Facebook (META) began as a digital college yearbook, connecting Harvard students face to face. Three years ago on Monday, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his social media empire as Meta, betting billions on a future where we’d meet in virtual worlds instead.

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Growing up, my older brother was a good student, interested in science. We shared a bedroom, so I benefited from his knowledge at night as we lay in our beds and he regaled me with facts of all kinds, with specializations on such topics as the behavior of dinosaurs and the age of volcanoes. One scientific idea he talked about particularly stimulated my imagination—and has stayed with me to this day.

Throughout our bodies, our cells die and regenerate over and over again. Altogether, he told me, the cells in our bodies get turned over at least once every seven years. It turns out that this isn’t precisely right: Different cells regenerate at very different rates, and a small number of cells in the heart and in the brain will be the same when I die as when I was born. But for the most part, the seven-year rule is true, which leads to the strange conclusion that I am literally a different physical person from the one I was just a few years ago.

I still ponder that philosophical question today. I feel like the same person, year after year. Is this a reality that transcends my physical self or an illusion? This is not an original query, of course, nor a solely biological one. It is a philosophical debate that has raged for millennia.

Christians, for example, believe that each of us has an unchanging, permanent essence called the soul. Buddhists, however, believe that a core self is an illusion, and they focus instead on the anatman, or “not-self.” Even within the same philosophical tradition, such as that of the ancient Greeks, disputation on this issue went back and forth: Does the true essence of a person or thing reside in its unchanging nature, being, or in the fact that it is in flux, becoming. Plato argued the former; his student Aristotle, the latter.

So which is your view, and how does that guide the way you live? Whatever belief you hold, I will not tell you that you’re wrong. But I will say that where you come out on this question—whether you believe that you are primarily being or becoming—says a great deal about how you see the world. And this might also predict how happy you are about your life and future.

[From the April 2017 issue: Making Athens great again]

Plato believed that behind the visible, material world, which is always subject to change, lies a more fundamental, invisible universe of absolutes—“that which is Existent always and has no Becoming,” in his words. Natural science was the study of the mutable physical environment, but philosophy, which combined intelligence and reason in the “luminous realms,” studied the changeless eternal. To give an example: Veterinary science studies individual dogs, which are growing, changing, and dying, but philosophy alone can ponder the unalterable essence of perfect dogginess. (Indeed, philosophers ask the eternal question of whether Dog exists.)

Plato’s pupil Aristotle agreed that science provides an account of what we see but diverged from his teacher’s argument that an unchanging ideal was the true essence of things. On the contrary, given that the material universe was in a constant state of change—in substance, quality, quantity, and place—the change itself was part of the true nature of things. As such, becoming was Aristotle’s focus, rather than some perfect, invisible being. To understand the dog at its core was precisely to witness its growth, change, and death, not to ponder an unseen, transcendent dogginess.

From Aristotle’s belief in becoming, we can understand how he derived his belief in our essential nature. Our essence is an evolving one, as we change as people, he thought. You are who you are becoming. Your virtue as a human individual is not related to any static, unchanging identity; it is about the person you are turning into—who you are today, as opposed to who you were yesterday, or could be tomorrow.

This becoming, he amplified, is largely in your hands, not determined by nature. “None of the moral virtues arises in us by nature,” Aristotle wrote. “For nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.” You truly are, in Aristotelian terms, the life story you are writing through your actions and habits; as the historian and philosopher Will Durant summarized Aristotle’s view, “We are what we repeatedly do.”

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives this example of how the process works: “By abstaining from pleasures we become temperate, and it is when we have become so that we are most able to abstain from them.” In other words, through your habits of moderation, you create yourself as a temperate person—and that becomes your essence.

[Read: Philosophy could have been a lot more fun]

Now that we’ve defined how a Platonist sees the world and how an Aristotelian does, which are you in the way you live? The answer will depend on whether you see yourself chiefly in terms of an unchanging identity or a changing story. Arguably, given the dominance of identitarian thinking in contemporary culture, more and more people are in the former camp, because they define themselves primarily according to categories of race, religion, class, gender, or ideology. In contrast, though their way is less in vogue, Aristotelians see themselves as moving through growth and change, encountering and developing virtue, knowledge, enlightenment, even love.

None of this is to say that the choice between Platonism and Aristotelianism is a binary absolute. Neither being nor becoming is exclusively true or exists to the exclusion of the other. We all have some unchanging characteristics, and we also change in many ways. The philosophical camp that you fall into will depend on how you principally define yourself, and what you choose to pay attention to in others as you move through the world.

For example, if you are a Catholic, you might define that affiliation as involving unquestioned and unchanging beliefs, or rather as striving to grow in their Catholic faith. Both ways can be true—you can be a Catholic and think about becoming a better one—but one is more important to how you see yourself. Similarly, you can choose to see yourself as poor or as someone striving to improve their lot in life.

For Platonists, I am this and you are that, which fosters bonding social capital, in which people create social bonds over a shared identity. But this inevitably leads to in-groups and out-groups and conflict. Aristotelians are more likely to develop bridging social capital, in which social ties connect people in different walks of life as part of the same dynamic story of improvement and progress.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, these two philosophical approaches have different effects on happiness. Scholars have shown this in creative ways. In 2016, sociologists asked participants in an experiment to label themselves through moral identities, such as the degree to which they were “fair” or “honest,” and then they were rated by other participants according to these categories. Put another way, the first group was invited to see themselves in Platonic terms, as being essentially fair or honest, or unfair or dishonest.

The researchers found that the more strongly participants defined themselves this way, the unhappier they were when others involved in the experiment assessed their degree of these qualities differently. The people who didn’t set so much store by their identities were happier. This is consistent with the prickliness we see about getting identifiers right: If your sense of self is deeply tied to being a Harvard graduate, say, you will be very unhappy if someone mistakenly says you went to Ohio State.

On the Aristotelian side, research has consistently shown that when people see themselves as engaged in change and capable of progress, they are happier. One 2012 study of psychotherapy patients showed that when patients considered themselves subjects in a narrative of development, they had a sense of agency and their mental health improved.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Aristotle’s 10 rules for a good life]

Without prejudice toward either philosopher, what we can say with confidence is that you will have a better chance of realizing happiness if you can see yourself as a dynamic agent of your own progress. If you’d like to become more Aristotelian in your self-understanding, here are three steps to get you started.

1. Find the person you want to be.
To shake yourself out of a static identity, try devising a concrete goal that will require progress and change. A good way to do this is through analyzing what you admire about a real person or people you look up to. Aristotle himself recommends this when he writes, “Men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts.” The goal is not to grab a new fixed identity but to improve in virtue by following a concrete model of what success looks like.

2. Break down your model’s traits into component parts.
The person you want to emulate doubtless has a bundle of characteristics you like, and perhaps some you don’t. Write them all down. Let’s say that you would like to emulate her honesty, work ethic, and creativity but not her occasional haughtiness. The first three are approach goals; the last is an avoidance goal.

3. Make a plan.
To be a good Aristotelian, you need a plan to transform yourself in each dimension of your desired improvement. One handy way to do this was popularized by Benjamin Franklin, who sought to transform himself by setting out a calendar grid: Each week, he would seek to intensively practice one of the 13 virtues he wanted to cultivate. So, week one: temperance. Week two: frugality. Week three: sincerity. And so on.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to cope with election agony]

Our culture today is likely to push you to be a Platonist—to define yourself as being a particular sort of person, with a fixed, permanent character. This is certainly convenient for businesses and political parties: It makes you a repeat customer, a reliable voter, a faithful donor. Having such an immutable identity can be appealing if it also gives you a sense of belonging as “one of us,” not “one of them.”

But it can also leave you stuck in circumstances that you might not like, and that will make you less happy than you could be. Instead, become more of an Aristotelian, and that can set you free.

In the months leading up to a presidential election, bookstores fill with campaign memoirs. These titles are, for the most part, ghostwritten. They are devoid of psychological insights and bereft of telling moments, instead typically giving their readers the most stilted of self-portraits, produced in hackish haste. They are, really, a pretext for an aspirant’s book tour and perhaps an appearance on The View—in essence, a campaign advertisement squeezed between two covers.

But these self-serving vehicles shouldn’t indict the larger genre of political autobiography. Truly excellent books have been written about statecraft and power from the inside. And few professions brim with more humanity, in all of its flawed majesty: Politicians must confront both the irresistible temptations of high office and the inevitable shattering of high ideals, which means that they supply some very good stories. After all, some of the world’s most important writers began as failed leaders and frustrated government officials—think Niccolò Machiavelli, Nikolai Gogol, and Alexis de Tocqueville.

The books on this list were published years ago, but their distance from the present moment makes them so much more interesting than the quickies that have been churned out for the current election season. Several of them are set abroad, yet the essential moral questions about power that they document are universal. Each is a glimpse into the mind and character of those attracted to the most noble and the most crazed of professions, and offers a bracing reminder of the virtues and dangers of political life.

Fire and Ashes, by Michael Ignatieff

Intellectuals can’t help themselves. They look at the buffoons and dimwits who speechify on the stump and think, I can do better. Take Michael Ignatieff, who briefly ditched his life as a Harvard professor and journalist to become the head of Canada’s Liberal Party. In 2011, at the age of 64, he ran for prime minister—and led his party to its worst defeat since its founding in 1867. In Fire and Ashes, his memoir of his brief political career, he writes about the humiliations of the campaign trail, and his own disastrous performance on it, in the spirit of self-abasement. (The best section of the book is about the confusing indignities—visits to the dry cleaner, driving his own car—of returning to everyday life after leaving politics.) In the course of losing, Ignatieff acquired a profound new respect for the gritty business of politics and all the nose counting, horse trading, and baby kissing it requires. His crashing defeat is the stuff of redemption, having forced him to appreciate the rituals of the political vocation that he once dismissed as banal.

[Michael Ignatieff: Why would anyone become a politician?]

Witness, by Whittaker Chambers

This 1952 memoir is still thrust in the hands of budding young conservatives, as a means of inculcating them into the movement. Published during an annus mirabilis for conservative treatises, just as the American right was beginning to emerge in its modern incarnation, Witness is draped in apocalyptic rhetoric about the battle for the future of mankind—a style that helped establish the Manichaean mentality of postwar conservatism. But the book is more than an example of an outlook: It tells a series of epic stories. Chambers narrates his time as an underground Communist activist in the ’30s, a fascinating tale of subterfuge. An even larger stretch of the book is devoted to one of the great spectacles in modern American politics, the Alger Hiss affair. In 1948, after defecting from his sect, Chambers delivered devastating testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee accusing Hiss, a former State Department official and a paragon of the liberal establishment, of being a Soviet spy. History vindicates Chambers’s version of events, and his propulsive storytelling withstands the test of time.

Life So Far, by Betty Friedan

Humans have a deep longing to canonize political heroes as saints. But many successful activists are unpleasant human beings—frequently, in fact, royal pains in the ass. Nobody did more than Friedan to popularly advance the cause of feminism in the 1960s, but her method consisted of stubborn obstreperousness and an unstinting faith in her own righteousness. Her memoir is both a disturbing account of her marriage to an abusive man and the inside story of the founding of the National Organization for Women. Friedan’s charmingly self-aware prose provides a window into how feminist ideas were translated into an agenda—and a peek into the mind of one of America’s most effective, if occasionally self-defeating, reformers.

[Read: Melania really doesn’t care]

Palimpsest, by Gore Vidal

Vidal wrote some of the greatest American novels about politics—Burr, Lincoln, 1876. In this magnificently malicious memoir, he trains that political acumen on himself. He could write so vividly about the salons, cloakrooms, and dark corridors of Washington because he extracted texture, color, and understanding from his own life. His grandfather was T. P. Gore, a senator from Oklahoma. Jacqueline Onassis was his relative by marriage, and he writes about growing up alongside her on the banks of the Potomac. And for years, he baldly admits, he harbored the illusion that he might become a great politician himself, unsuccessfully running for Congress in 1960, and then for Senate in 1982. Vidal didn’t have a politician’s temperament, to say the least: He lived to feud. Robert F. Kennedy became Vidal’s nemesis after kicking him out of the White House for an embarrassing display of drunkenness; William F. Buckley, whom Vidal debated live in prime time during the political conventions of 1968, was another hated rival. The critic John Lahr once said that “no one quite pisses from the height that Vidal does,” which is pretty much the perfect blurb for this journey into a mind bursting with schadenfreude, hauteur, and an abiding affection for politics.

This Child Will Be Great, by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

In defeat, Ignatieff came to appreciate the nobility of politics. The life of Liberia’s Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female president—or, to borrow a cliché, “Africa’s Iron Lady”—is closer to the embodiment of that ideal. She led Liberia after suffering under the terrifying reigns of Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor, who corruptly governed their country; Taylor notoriously built an army of child soldiers and used rape as a weapon. As a leader of the opposition to these despots, Sirleaf survived imprisonment, exile, and an abusive husband. She narrowly avoided execution at the hands of a firing squad. Her literary style is modest, sometimes wonky—she’s a trained economist—but her memoir contains the complicated, tragic story of a nation, which she describes as “a conundrum wrapped in complexity and stuffed inside a paradox.” (That story is, in fact, a damning indictment of U.S. foreign policy.) Her biography is electrifying, an urgently useful example of persistence in the face of despair.

[Read: A dissident is built different]

Cold Cream, by Ferdinand Mount

Only a fraction of this hilarious, gorgeous memoir is about politics, but it’s so delightful that it merits a place on this list. Like Vidal and Igantieff, Mount is an intellectual who tried his hand at electoral politics. But when he ran for the British Parliament as a Tory, he had shortcomings: He spoke with “a languid gabble that communicated all too vividly my inner nervous state … I found myself overcome with boredom by the sound of my own voice. This sudden sensation of tedium verging on disgust did not go away with practice.” A few years later, he turned up as a speechwriter for Margaret Thatcher, as well as her chief policy adviser. As he chronicles life at 10 Downing Street, his ironic sensibility is the chief source of pleasure. His descriptions of Thatcher, especially her inability to read social cues, mingle with his admiration for her leadership and ideological zeal. There are shelves of gossipy books by aides; Mount’s wry retelling of his stint in the inner sanctum is my favorite.

As the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, veers into open xenophobia, Vice President Kamala Harris faces a crucial decision about how to respond when she appears today on Univision, the giant Spanish-language television network. Trump’s attacks on immigrants in the past few weeks have grown both sweeping and vitriolic: He is blaming migrants for a lengthening list of problems, even as he describes them in more dehumanizing and openly racist language. As he amplifies these attacks, Trump has also explicitly embraced the kind of eugenicist arguments that were used to justify huge cuts in immigration after World War I, such as his claim this week that Democrats are allowing in undocumented immigrants whose “bad genes” incline them toward murder.

“Certainly, in my lifetime nobody as prominent as Trump has been this intentional, this racist, so consistently—and this all-inclusive in terms of scapegoating,” Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, told me. “We have certainly seen flare-ups in the past, with governors in different states—and even with Trump, of course, in his first term. But this is on another level. And it begs the question of what comes next.”

Harris so far has responded to this Trump onslaught cautiously, and in a tone more of sorrow than of anger. She has often labeled Trump as divisive in general terms. But when talking about immigration, she has focused mostly on presenting herself as tough on border security. She has almost entirely avoided any direct discussion of Trump’s most militant immigration ideas—particularly his proposal to carry out the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants.

But Harris will very likely face pressure to offer a more frontal response to Trump’s mass-deportation plan in a town hall she’s holding with Univision in Nevada. With most polls still showing Trump making gains among Latinos since 2020, many Democratic activists and interest groups focused on that community believe that a more forceful rejoinder from Harris to Trump’s intensification of his anti-immigrant rhetoric can’t come too soon.

“We are in the last four weeks of the election, and she needs to be really clear about showing the contrast,” Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration-advocacy group, told me. “It is a missed opportunity for [Democrats] not to lean more into the consequences of this mass-deportation slogan.”

Leon Neal / Getty

Some immigrant-rights activists and Democratic strategists believe that Harris is so focused on proving her strength on the border that she has become reluctant to criticize almost any element of Trump’s immigration agenda, out of concern that doing so would support his jackhammer portrayal of her as soft on the issue. This debate among Democrats about Harris’s approach to immigration is part of a larger internal conversation that is quietly gathering momentum. Some senior party operatives are privately expressing concern that Harris is spending too much time trying to reassure voters about her own credentials, and not enough making a pointed case against a possible second Trump term. This pattern was starkly apparent in her series of friendly media interviews this week. “Bring a bazooka to a gunfight, please, not a BB gun,” one worried Democratic pollster told me yesterday. Today’s Univision town hall will provide another revealing measure of whether Harris is advancing her case forcefully enough in the campaign’s final stages.

[Watch: The candidates’ policy differences]

Hostility to immigrants and immigration has been integral to Trump’s political brand from the outset. Yet, even by his standards, the volume and venom of Trump’s attacks on immigrants have amped up sharply during this campaign.

In recent weeks, Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, have insisted that migrants are: stealing jobs from native-born Americans, spurring a national crime wave, driving up housing costs, spreading disease, committing voter fraud, and consuming so many Federal Emergency Management Agency resources that the government doesn’t have enough money to help hurricane victims in North Carolina and Florida. Despite protestations from local officials that the story is a fabrication, Trump and Vance have also insisted that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating residents’ pets.

The other claims have also been debunked. FEMA’s big reserves for responding to natural disasters are held in a congressionally appropriated account that is separate from the funds the agency has for resettling migrants. Violent crime, which rose immediately after the onset of the pandemic, has been declining, and some research suggests that undocumented migrants commit offenses at lower rates than native-born Americans. Despite Vance’s additional claim that Springfield, Ohio, has seen a “massive rise” in communicable disease, local records show that the county-wide rates of such diseases have declined over the past year.

Equally specious is the GOP candidates’ claim that all of the nation’s job growth is accruing to foreign-born workers. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided by the White House show that nearly 4.5 million more native-born Americans in their prime working years (defined as ages 25 to 54) are employed today than when Trump left office. Contrary to the Trump-Vance claim, this demographic group has added more jobs during President Joe Biden’s term than foreign-born workers have; the share of native-born workers ages 25 to 54 participating in the labor force is higher now than at any point in Trump’s presidency. The latest unemployment rate for native-born Americans in these prime working years is lower than for comparable foreign-born workers.

More ominous even than the multiplying allegations against migrants may be the language Trump is using to describe them. He has said that they are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing a formulation used by Adolf Hitler. In Ohio, he said of undocumented migrants, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.” Later in the same speech, he called them “animals.” In Wisconsin last month, he said of undocumented immigrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” Removing some of the undocumented migrants, Trump mused last month, during another Wisconsin visit, “will be a bloody story.”

Earlier this week, Trump resorted to unvarnished eugenics, twisting federal statistics to argue that the Biden administration has let into the country thousands of murderers. “You know now, a murderer—I believe this—it’s in their genes,” Trump told the conservative talk-show host Hugh Hewitt. “And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.” Hewitt chose not to challenge this toxic assertion.

Witnessing this cascade of allegations from Trump and Vance, Erika Lee, a Harvard history professor and the author of America for Americans, told me that she feels a weary sense of “déjà vu” about their anti-immigrant theme—“as if they have dusted off the well-worn playbook that generations of xenophobes have used before.” Nearly every major argument Trump is making, she says, has been made before by nativist campaigners during periods of anti-immigrant backlash.

In 1917, for instance, a Missouri journalist named James Murphy Ward wrote that the great wave of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century was taking jobs from Americans and threatening the nation’s religious traditions. Calling it a “foreign invasion,” he saw their importation as a Catholic plot to undermine the political influence of white American Protestants—this was the Great Replacement theory of his age. The title of Ward’s book would not seem out of place in a political debate today: The Immigration Problem; or, America First. And the most damning example of the immigrant menace that Ward claimed to find has an even more resonant contemporary echo.

“The Chinese laborers who have come to this country, we have been told, are not at all averse to a diet of rats,” Ward wrote, while “the writer himself has heard at least one of these aliens speak of little ‘pups’ as making ‘a fine soup.’”

[Adam Serwer: The real reason Trump and Vance are spreading lies about Haitians]

Harris’s response to Trump’s harsh turn on immigration has been constrained by the Biden administration’s difficulties with the issue. After Congress refused to consider Biden’s legislative proposal to combine tighter border security with a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s population of about 11 million undocumented immigrants, the administration struggled to respond to an unprecedented surge of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border.

The political pressure on Biden ratcheted up last year after Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started transporting tens of thousands of migrants to northern cities, straining local resources and prompting loud complaints from some Democratic mayors and governors. Finally, in January, Biden endorsed a bipartisan Senate plan led by the conservative James Lankford of Oklahoma that proposed to severely restrict opportunities to seek asylum.

When Lankford’s Republican colleagues abandoned the plan after Trump denounced it, Biden moved in June to use executive action to implement some of its key provisions that narrow opportunities for asylum. The new rules have reduced the number of migrants seeking asylum by as much as three-fourths since late last year, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. But the political damage was done. Polls consistently showed that Americans: disapproved of Biden’s performance on the border in larger numbers than on any other issue except inflation; by a big margin, trusted Trump more than Biden to handle the problem; and were growing more open to Trump’s hard-line solutions, including building a border wall and carrying out a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants already in the country. In July, Gallup found that the share of Americans who wanted to reduce immigration had reached 55 percent, the highest level since soon after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Republican groups, sensing a Democratic vulnerability, have spent heavily on ads portraying Harris—whom Biden early on appointed to deal with the root causes of migration—as weak on the border.

These headwinds have encouraged Harris to center her immigration messaging on convincing the public that she would be tough enough to secure the border. She has emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and as California’s attorney general pursuing “transnational gangs,” as well as promising to tighten Biden’s limits on asylum even more. She has also hugged the bipartisan Senate compromise that Trump derailed—similarly to the old political analysts’ joke about Rudolph Giuliani and the 9/11 terror attacks, a typical sentence on immigration for Harris is Noun, verb, Lankford.

Harris has coupled these promises of tougher enforcement with the traditional Democratic promise to “create, at long last, a pathway to citizenship for hardworking immigrants who have been here for years,” as she put it in Arizona last month during a set-piece speech on immigration. Yet she has almost completely avoided discussing Trump’s mass-deportation plan.

Implicitly, Harris’s agenda rejects any such scheme, because the longtime residents for whom she would provide a path to legalization are among those Trump would deport. Apart from a passing reference in a speech last month to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, however, she has not explicitly criticized the Trump plan; nor has Harris discussed at any length how the proposal would disrupt immigrant communities and harm the economy. When her running mate, Tim Walz, was asked directly about Trump’s deportation agenda during the vice-presidential debate earlier this month, he responded by talking almost entirely about the Lankford bill himself. Walz has called the language from Trump and Vance about immigrants “dehumanizing,” but Harris has tended to wrap Trump’s attacks on immigrants into a more generalized lament about his divisiveness.

[Paola Ramos: The immigrants who oppose immigration]

Amid the campaign sparring on immigration, Trump has seemed to be enjoying a double dividend: He has energized his core support of culturally conservative whites with vehement anti-immigrant language and has gained ground, according to most polls, with Latino voters, even as Latino communities would be the principal targets of his deportation plans. Although polls show Harris recovering much of the ground Biden had lost among Latinos, she is still lagging the level of support he had in 2020, particularly among Latino men.

Supporters at a rally for Donald Trump in the Bronx earlier this year.

Polls of the Latino community have consistently found that, like other voters, they are more concerned about the economy than immigration. Surveys also show a slice of Latino voters who, departing from the view among advocacy groups, feel that recent asylum seekers are, in effect, jumping the line—and this has moved them toward Trump’s hard-line approach.

But Carlos Odio, a Democratic pollster who focuses on Latino voters, says surveys show that support for mass deportation plummets among not only Latinos but also other voters when “people learn that Trump’s plans are to deport [undocumented] people who have been living and working here for decades.” So Trump is holding his elevated Latino support despite that opposition to mass deportation, Odio told me, in large part because most Latinos “don’t actually believe any of this stuff is going to happen”; they expect that the courts, Congress, or business groups would prevent him from pursuing widespread removals.

Odio, the senior vice president for research at the polling firm Equis, believes that Harris has run an effective campaign to regain much of Biden’s lost ground among Latino voters, but he thinks she could benefit from more forcefully targeting Trump’s enforcement agenda, including mass deportation and his refusal to rule out again separating migrant children from their parents at the border. (Given that nearly 4 million U.S.-citizen children have at least one undocumented parent, Trump’s deportation agenda could be said to amount to a mass family-separation policy as well.) “There has been such a desire to tamp down the border debate [that] there’s been less of an ability to pivot to other parts of the immigration debate that could be helpful,” Odio told me. Even conservative Latinos who moved toward Trump, he notes, overwhelmingly opposed his family-separation policies in an Equis post-2020 election survey.

Castro likewise thinks Harris’s overall approach to Latino voters has been sophisticated, but he worries that the reluctance that she, along with almost all other prominent Democrats, shows to challenging the mass-deportation proposal is “moving the Overton window” and normalizing the plan. “There’s not enough pushback on it,” Castro told me. “The consequence of not pushing back is that more people believe that something like mass deportation is a reasonable, moral policy choice, which is completely wrong.”

The history of immigration politics is that it tends to be what political scientists call a “thermostatic” issue, meaning that public opinion moves left when a president moves right (as happened under Trump) and right when a president moves left (as happened for most of Biden’s presidency). That pattern underscores the likelihood that enforcement of a Trump mass-deportation program—complete with TV images of mothers and children herded onto buses, even detained behind the barbed-wire fences of internment camps—would face much more public resistance in practice than polls suggest today.

Yet Lee, the Harvard historian, says that the previous eruptions of anti-immigrant agitation show how great a challenge the more explicit xenophobia that Trump has catalyzed could present in the years ahead. Although many scholars believe that xenophobia flourishes primarily during periods of economic distress, Lee says that a more common factor in the past “has been the effectiveness of the messenger and the medium.” For instance, she told me, the first great wave of 19th-century anti-Catholic agitation “spread through newspapers and newly available cheap novels”; then the anti-Chinese propaganda a few decades later “spread through even more newspapers and illustrated magazines.”

Those distribution systems for anti-immigrant ideas pale next to what we’re seeing today, Lee believes. “Now we have a 24/7 news cycle, organized networks pushing content, plus social-media platforms that broadcast xenophobia around the world as it happens,” she told me. “As a result, xenophobia today feels both frighteningly familiar and devastatingly more widespread and violent than other periods in history.”

Harris and other Democrats have tactical incentives to avoid a full-on confrontation with those sentiments in the final weeks before next month’s election. But the history of America’s experience with xenophobia indicates that Trump’s lurid attacks will only find a larger audience unless Harris, and others who believe in a more inclusive society, challenge them more directly than they have so far.

When the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, he designated funds to reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” The resulting Nobel Prizes have since been awarded to the discoverers of penicillin, X-rays, and the structure of DNA—and, as of today, to two scientists who, decades ago, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

Today, John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton received the Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking statistical methods that have advanced physics, chemistry, biology, and more. In the announcement, Ellen Moons, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics and a physicist at Karlstad University, celebrated the two laureates’ work, which used “fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks” that can “find patterns in large data sets.” She mentioned applications of their research in astrophysics and medical diagnosis, as well as in daily technologies such as facial recognition and language translation. She even alluded to the changes and challenges that AI may bring in the future. But she did not mention ChatGPT, widespread automation and the resulting global economic upheaval or prosperity, or the possibility of eliminating all disease with AI, as tech executives are wont to do.

Hopfield’s and Hinton’s respective research did lay the groundwork for the generative-AI revolution that Google CEO Sundar Pichai has compared to the harnessing of fire. In 1982, Hopfield invented a way for computer programs to store and recall patterns, reminiscent of human memory, and three years later, Hinton devised a way for programs to detect patterns from a set of examples. Those two methods and subsequent advances enabled this century’s machine-learning revolution, which is built upon machines that detect, store, and reproduce statistical patterns from huge amounts of data, such as genetic sequences, weather forecasts, and internet text.

The Nobel committee focused its remarks on the foundational aspects of artificial neural networks: the ability to feed unfathomably large and complex amounts of data into an algorithm that will then, more or less undirected, detect previously unseen and consequential patterns in those data. As a result, drug discovery, neuroscience, renewable-energy research, and particle physics are fundamentally changing. Last year, a biomedical researcher at Harvard told me, “We can really make discoveries that would not be possible without the use of AI.” All sorts of nonchatbot algorithms across the internet, on social-media and e-commerce and media websites, use neural networks. In a presentation about today’s award, the theoretical physicist Anders Irbäck, another committee member, noted how these neural networks have been applied in astrophysics, materials science, climate modeling, and molecular biology.

Following the announcement, journalists were eager to ask about generative AI and ChatGPT, and Hinton—who has frequently voiced fears of an AI apocalypse—likened its influence to that of the Industrial Revolution. “We have no experience of what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” Hinton, who called into the ceremony, said. But the two committee members giving answers, Moons and Irbäck, demurred on questions about “GPT” and danced around Hinton’s doomerism.

Today’s award, in other words, should not feed the AI-hype cycle. It is a celebration of the ways in which machine-learning research “benefits all of humanity,” to borrow OpenAI’s phrase, in largely unseen, grounded ways that are no less important for that pragmatism. The prize should not be taken as a prediction of a science-fictional utopia or dystopia to come so much as a recognition of all the ways that AI has already changed the world.

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The 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that the truth about life is largely invisible to humans. What we perceive around us is mostly a set of illusions, while reality—the inner essence of the world, or will (Wille, in German), as he conceived it—is generally out of our grasp. Yet he believed in one oracle that could reveal the secret verities: listening to music.

Schopenhauer’s theory was that the will is so ineffable that the nonverbal language of music alone could grant access to this apprehension of reality. Music, for Schopenhauer, thus opened up a unique channel of higher consciousness.

Although Schopenhauer was an atheist, his conception bears a strong resemblance to the idea held by many thinkers who find in music the language of the Divine. For example, the American Catholic scholar Peter Kreeft wrote in his 1989 book, Three Philosophies of Life, that “God is love, and music is the language of love; therefore, music is the language of God.”

I am not an expert in the academic debate about the metaphysics of music, but I do find this notion very suggestive—and it captures for me experiences I can’t access in any other way. I learned to read music at the age of five and spent all of my 20s as a professional classical musician. Like many musicians, I am synesthetic: Different pitches and chords evoke in my brain colors and even smells. These sensory effects make listening to, or playing, a great composition into an experience beyond the greatest fireworks show on Earth. To take in a Bach cantata or a Bruckner symphony is, for me, to glimpse for fleeting moments the majesty of creation and grasp why I exist in the universe.

Your experience of music may be a bit more, well, grounded than mine, and you’re thinking, frankly, that I should go get checked out by a neurologist for this issue. Fair enough. But Schopenhauer was onto something: We have plenty of evidence that music truly is one of the greatest ways to understand life more deeply.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Schopenhauer’s advice on how to achieve great things]

Music has appeared in every human society for which ethnographic evidence exists, according to research by a top scholar at Harvard’s Music Lab. Music is enmeshed with all of the important areas of our experience, from sweet lullabies to sappy love songs to hymns of religious praise. Although styles of music vary greatly around the world, the making and appreciation of music are such ubiquitous parts of human life that it can seem as much a phenomenon of our nature as a product of our culture.

Indeed, our brains are built to enjoy music, as scientists showed in a 2018 study conducted through the Berklee Music and Health Institute (part of the Berklee College of Music in Boston). We’re even hardwired to use music to help us heal. For example, when the brains of patients with Parkinson’s disease are stimulated by hearing a rhythmic piece such as a march, their symptoms may diminish and they are able to walk more naturally. Alzheimer’s patients who can’t remember family members typically are nonetheless able to recognize familiar songs. And people suffering from epilepsy can experience a dramatic decrease in seizures when listening to certain kinds of classical music—the so-called Mozart effect.

Over the past two decades, neuroscientists have also conducted experiments on the effects of music upon human emotions. For example, one 2006 experiment exposed people to chords that varied in degree of dissonance while scanning the limbic systems of the subjects’ brains, which is where emotions are produced. The paper found that positive emotions generally had an inverse correlation with dissonance. So we might practically deduce that a good way to raise your mood could be to block out the racket of street sounds (sirens, traffic, construction) in Manhattan with headphones delivering your favorite music.

The research findings on which genres of music bring the most happiness are inconclusive. One study found—based on characteristics of harmony, structure, and rhythm—that the world’s happiest song is the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” Another study found that grunge rock—known for its distorted electric guitar and nihilistic lyrics—is especially bad for happiness. Grunge not only raised hostility, sadness, tension, and fatigue for its listening participants, but also lowered caring, relaxation, mental clarity, and vigor. As a native of Seattle, where this genre was born, I found that this explained a thing or two about my misbegotten youth.

You might ask why someone would want to listen to miserable music, but obviously we do. You have very likely listened to sad songs after a bad breakup at some point. The function of sad music is not only to soothe you. Scholars also find that when people suffering from negative emotions consume disconsolate music, it helps them understand their feelings and find meaning in them. A sad song can help you feel less alone in your sadness and make sense of it.

In general, music amplifies positive and negative emotions most under two circumstances. First, when it’s performed live. British researchers asked participants to listen to classical music in three ways: live, prerecorded, and in an MTV-style video. Using sensors attached to the subjects’ scalps, the scholars detected significantly more brain activity for the in-person performance, indicating that this elicited the most engagement and focus in the listeners. Second, when one listens by oneself. In a 2018 experiment, researchers showed that happy music seems happier and sad music seems sadder when you listen to it alone, as opposed to listening with others.

[Read: Finding happiness in angry music]

If you want to use music more strategically to heighten your emotional experiences and gain a deeper sense of meaning and self-understanding, here are a few ideas to consider.

1. Decide what you want from your music.
The research indicates that a trade-off takes place between using music to bond socially and using it to intensify emotions. If you want the former result, listen with friends; if you want the latter outcome, listen by yourself. If you want a mixture of both, try going to a live concert with friends. If you want the richest emotional experience, go to a concert by yourself.

2. Follow a recipe.
The effects of music depend to a large extent on its underlying ingredients. For example, the music that typically elicits the most positive emotion has a fast tempo (between 140 and 150 beats per minute), features chords that include the seventh tone to create a sense of expectation, or is familiar to you. You could go study at the local conservatory to learn more about these elements, but the shortcut is just to create a catalog of songs you like. Pay attention to how each one makes you feel and write down its characteristics, in your own words; then look for patterns. You can build a personal music library this way based on emotional effect rather than style or artist.

3. Learn and grow.
Thinking about your music in terms of its effects on you will probably increase your appetite for new genres and help your tastes become more sophisticated. Once you start getting interested in increasing the emotional and cognitive effects of love songs, say, you might want to cultivate an interest in Italian opera. (I’d suggest starting with Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca or La Bohème.) If you like how an electric guitar shredding sick riffs stimulates your limbic system, try taking that experience to the next level with a flamenco virtuoso such as Paco de Lucía.

4. Play it yourself.
Among professional and amateur musicians, opinions differ about whether emotional experiences and life understanding are deeper when playing music as opposed to merely listening to it. Personally, I find listening better, but this may be influenced by having played in symphony orchestras under some of the world’s most tyrannical conductors. In fact, many musicians (including amateurs) find a kind of ecstasy in playing. One 2020 study looked at the well-being effects of playing music and found them to be significant and positive. Take a few lessons on your favorite instrument and see for yourself. I should note, however, that the researchers on that study included a comparison group of knitters—and they derived even more happiness than the musicians. Perhaps the ideal formula for bliss is to listen to music while knitting.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Here’s 10,000 hours. Don’t spend it all in one place.]

Living long before the era of recorded music, Schopenhauer had to get his transcendent musical experiences by going to concerts in Frankfurt, as well as playing his flute in his apartment, which he did for an hour a day. By the end of his life, he dedicated his attention almost entirely to just one composer, the Italian Gioachino Rossini, who was a contemporary (they were born four years apart). When he spoke of Rossini’s music, Schopenhauer is said to have rolled his eyes up toward heaven.

If you do the work, you too can make music a part of your life that goes beyond a pleasant background and becomes a lifelong journey into higher levels of consciousness and self-awareness. In short: Find your Rossini.

Donald Trump and his allies on the populist right believe they have a compelling argument for why the GOP is the true blue-collar party: Immigration is killing the American worker, and only Trump will put a stop to it. “Kamala Harris’s border invasion is also crushing the jobs and wages of African American workers and Hispanic American workers and also union members,” Trump declared at a recent rally. At other times, he has referred to immigration as “all-out economic warfare” on the working class. It’s a message that the former president repeats in one form or another at just about every one of his public appearances.

The argument carries a certain commonsense logic: Immigration means more workers competing for jobs, which translates to lower wages and employment rates for the native-born. During Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Republican Senator J. D. Vance said that his boss’s proposal to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants would “be really good for our workers, who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.”

Mainstream Democrats used to vigorously dispute the notion that immigration hurt native-born workers. No longer. Today, the two major parties are jockeying to convince voters that they are the ones who will truly secure the border. To the extent that liberals still defend immigration, they often do so by arguing that deporting migrants would reduce the labor supply and send prices soaring again—an argument that implicitly accepts the premise that immigrants do in fact depress wages.

This is a tragedy. The effect of immigration on wages is one of the most thoroughly studied topics in empirical economics, and the results are clear: Immigrants do not make native-born workers worse off, and probably make them better off. In many domains, the conventional wisdom among progressives is mistaken, oversimplified, or based on wishful thinking. The economics of immigration is not one of them.

Econ 101 tells us that when the supply of a good, like labor, increases, then the price of that good falls. This is the lens through which economists viewed immigration for much of the 20th century: great for corporations (cheap labor) and consumers (lower prices) but bad for native-born workers. Then a study came along that shattered the consensus.

In 1980, Fidel Castro briefly lifted Cuba’s ban on emigration, leading 125,000 people, most of whom lacked a high-school education, to travel from Mariel Bay to Miami in what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. In a few months, Miami’s workforce expanded by about 25 times as much as the U.S. workforce expands because of immigration in a typical year, creating the perfect conditions for a natural experiment. The economist David Card later realized that if he compared Miami with cities that did not experience the boatlift, he could isolate the effect that immigration had on native-born earning power. If immigrants really did depress wages, then surely the effect would be visible in Miami in the 1980s.

Instead, in a paper published in 1990, Card found that the boatlift had virtually no effect on either the wages or employment prospects of native-born workers in Miami, including those who lacked a college degree. Economists have since used similar natural experiments to study the effect of immigration in countries including Israel and Denmark, arriving at the same conclusion that Card did. (These studies mostly focus on low-skill immigration; high-skill immigration has long been viewed almost universally as economically beneficial.)

[Derek Thompson: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong]

The simple Econ 101 story turned out to have a blind spot: Immigrants aren’t just workers who compete for jobs; they are also consumers who buy things. They therefore increase not only the supply of labor, which reduces wages, but also the demand for it, which raises them. In the end, the two forces appear to cancel each other out. (The same logic explains why commentators who suggest that immigration is a helpful inflation-fighting tool are probably wrong. I have made a version of this mistake myself.)

Inevitably, not everyone accepted the new consensus. In a paper first circulated in 2015, the Harvard economist George Borjas reanalyzed Card’s data and concluded that even though average wages were indeed unaffected, the wages for natives who lacked a high-school degree—and thus competed most directly with the Marielitos—had fallen as a result of the boatlift. Borjas’s study seemed to back up restrictionist policy with empirical data, and for that reason became a pillar of anti-immigration discourse. In 2017, for example, Stephen Miller cited it when pressed by a New York Times reporter for evidence that immigration hurts American workers.

But Borjas’s debunking of Card, such as it was, has itself been debunked. The data underlying his argument turned out to be extremely suspect. Borjas had excluded women, Hispanic people, and workers who weren’t “prime age” from his analysis, arguing that the remaining group represented the workers most vulnerable to immigrant competition. As the economist Michael Clemens has pointed out, Borjas ended up with an absurdly tiny sample of just 17 workers a year, making it impossible to distinguish a legitimate finding from pure statistical noise. Another study looking at the same data, but for all native-born workers without a high-school degree, found no negative impact on wages. Subsequent natural experiment studies have yielded similar conclusions. “Economic models have long predicted that low-skill immigration would hurt the wages of low-skill workers,” Leah Boustan, an economist at Princeton University, told me. “But that turns out not to be true when we actually look at what happens in the real world.”

On paper, immigrants and natives without a high-school education might look like easily substitutable workers. In reality, they aren’t. Take the restaurant industry. New immigrants may disproportionately get hired as fry cooks, which, in turn, depresses wages for native-born fry cooks. But by lowering costs and generating lots of new demand, those same immigrants enable more restaurants to open that need not just fry cooks but also servers and hosts and bartenders. Native-born workers have an edge at getting those jobs, because, unlike new immigrants, they have the English skills and tacit cultural knowledge required to perform them.

This dynamic helps explain why many efforts to deport immigrants have hurt native-born workers. From 2008 to 2014, the Department of Homeland Security deported about half a million undocumented immigrants through its “Secure Communities” program. Because the initiative was rolled out in different counties at different times, researchers were able to compare how workers fared in places where mass deportation was under way against outcomes for those in as-yet unaffected places. They found that for every 100 migrant workers who were deported, nine fewer jobs existed for natives; native workers’ wages also fell slightly. Other studies of immigration crackdowns throughout American history have reached similar conclusions. When a community loses immigrant workers, the result isn’t higher-paid natives; it’s fewer child-care services provided, fewer meals prepared, and fewer homes built.

Low-skill immigration does have some economic costs. Most studies find that the income of other immigrants takes a hit when a new wave of migrants arrives. Low-skill immigration also tends to slightly exacerbate inequality because it increases demand for college-educated professionals such as doctors, managers, and lawyers, resulting in even larger wage gains for that group. But these complications don’t mean that immigration is crushing the American working class.

Hold on, immigration’s critics say: Natural experiments can only tell you so much. You must instead look at the broad sweep of American history. As the liberal New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has pointed out, the decades in which American workers experienced their fastest income gains—the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—occurred when immigration was near historic lows; since the ’70s, immigration has surged while wages for the median worker have stagnated. “The trajectory of American history tells a very clear story,” Oren Cass, the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank, told me. “High levels of immigration are correlated with poor outcomes for workers.”

The problem with relying on history is that correlations also only tell you so much. Some readers will recall that quite a few things have changed since the 1970s; most relevant for our purposes, these include the loosening of trade policy, the weakening of labor unions, and the enormous rise in corporate concentration. All of these trends have been more persuasively linked to the declining fortunes of the working class. Without some evidence of causation, the co-incidence of stagnating wages and rising immigration really does look like just that: a coincidence.

[Michael Podhorzer: The paradox of the American labor movement]

Two data points are instructive here. First, the parts of the country that have received the largest numbers of immigrants in recent decades—Texas, Florida, the D.C.-to-Boston corridor—are those that have experienced the least wage stagnation. Second, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has experienced both a huge surge in illegal immigration and perhaps the most significant reduction of wage inequality since the 1940s. That doesn’t mean high levels of immigration caused the spike in wages at the bottom. But that’s exactly the point: Historical trends don’t necessarily imply neat causal relationships.

The other problem is that you can just as easily make the circumstantial case that the natural-experiment literature underestimates the economic benefits of immigration. The aforementioned Denmark study tracked every single individual across the country (something that isn’t possible in the U.S. because of data constraints) over a 20-year period and found that low-skill natives who were most exposed to immigration responded by pursuing higher levels of education and moving to higher-paying occupations. Ultimately they achieved higher earnings than their peers who weren’t exposed to immigration. A study in the U.S. found that immigrants were 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to start a business, and that the rate of entrepreneurship was just as high for immigrants from low-income countries as those from high-income countries. “Immigrants to the U.S. create so many successful businesses that they ultimately appear to create more jobs as founders than they fill as workers,” Benjamin F. Jones, one of the authors, wrote in The Atlantic last year. Immigrants, he noted, are inherently risk-takers. “We should not be surprised that they are exceptionally entrepreneurial once they arrive.”

I admit to being partial to this view for personal reasons. My grandfather came to the U.S. in the 1960s as an undocumented immigrant from Lebanon, having never finished high school and speaking very little English. Within a few months, he landed a job as a car mechanic at a local gas station, leaving for work each morning before his kids woke up and returning after they were asleep at night. An economic study might find that he helped depress the wages of native-born mechanics, which might have been balanced out by his spending in other areas. What it probably wouldn’t capture is what happened next: He opened up his own station, and then another, and then another, employing dozens of mostly native-born mechanics, attendants, and cashiers. Along the way, he became a darling of his community, bringing a little bit of Arab hospitality to a mostly white suburb of New Jersey. His life was its own kind of natural experiment.

The appeal of restricting immigration has, to put it lightly, never been primarily about economics. Surveys of public opinion generally find that people’s feelings about immigration are driven less by material concerns than they are by cultural anxieties about crime, social norms, and national identity. Anti-immigrant sentiment is much higher among older Americans (many of whom are retired) living in rural areas that contain few immigrants than it is among working-age Americans in immigrant-heavy cities such as New York and Los Angeles.

Even if conservative policy wonks sincerely believe that limiting immigration would help the American worker, the guy at the top of the Republican ticket clearly has other things on his mind. In his debate against Kamala Harris, Trump, who has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” mentioned the supposed economic impact of migration exactly once. He spent much more time portraying undocumented immigrants as a marauding horde of psychopathic murderers “pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” At one now-infamous moment, he even claimed that immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. In Trump’s hands, the economic case against immigration is a fig leaf that barely obscures a much larger and more nakedly bigoted body of work.

[Gilad Edelman: Donald Trump’s theory of everything]

The example of Springfield is a revealing one. In the past few years, thousands of Haitian immigrants—overwhelmingly with legal status—have settled in the town of 58,000. This has led to some problems. Housing prices rose quickly. The health-care and education systems have come under stress. And relations between longtime residents and the new arrivals have at times been contentious, especially after a traffic accident caused by a Haitian immigrant last year resulted in the death of an 11-year-old boy.

But after decades of dwindling population and shrinking job opportunities, Springfield has also experienced a jolt of economic energy. The immigrants have helped auto factories stay in operation, filled shortages at distribution centers, and enabled new restaurants and small businesses to open. Wage growth in the city took off during the migration wave and stayed above 6 percent for two years, though it has since slowed down. And the flip side of strain on the housing, education, and health-care systems is that there are now more jobs available for construction workers, teachers, and nurses to meet that increased demand. “What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, said in a recent interview, referring to the Haitian immigrants. “They’re very happy to have them there, and frankly, that’s helped the economy.”

For DeWine and other public officials, this is a trade that is well worth making: Immigrants might cause some social tensions, but overall they make the place better off. Others, of course, disagree. According to Gallup, 2024 is the first year in nearly two decades that a majority of the public wants less immigration to the U.S. In the past year alone, the desire to reduce the amount of immigration has jumped by 10 points for Democrats and 15 points for Republicans. No matter who wins in November, we will likely see more restrictive immigration policy in years to come. If that is the will of the voters, so be it. Just don’t expect it to do anything to help the working class.

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

[Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading]

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

[Read: The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood]

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

The issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

[Xochitl Gonzalez: The schools that are no longer teaching kids to read books]

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.