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On the campaign trail, Donald Trump has been very clear about the shape of his revenge against the mainstream media. He’s mused, a few times, about throwing reporters in jail if they refuse to leak their sources. He’s talked about taking away broadcast licenses of networks he’s deemed unfriendly. He’s made it clear that he will notice if any member of the press gets too free with their critiques and do his best to get in their way. These last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a signal that maybe his threats are having an impact. Both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had prepared endorsements of Kamala Harris, and their owners asked them at the last minute not to run them. Media reporters floated the obvious question of whether the owners backed off to appease Trump.

In this episode, we talk to Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic. This year, The Atlantic made the decision, rare in its history but consistent during the Trump years, to endorse a presidential candidate. (You can read the magazine’s endorsement of Kamala Harris here.) Goldberg talks about navigating both pressures from owners and threats from the administration. And we discuss the urgent question of whether the media, pummeled and discredited for years by Trump, is ready for a second Trump administration.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Journalists who have covered Donald Trump’s rallies—and I am one—know that it’s an uncomfortable situation. He’ll be giving a speech and mention the “fake media” or talk about reporters as the “enemy of the American people,” and then the crowd will all turn towards the press area and start pointing and booing.

Trump has said he would jail reporters who don’t reveal sources or take away broadcast licenses for outlets he doesn’t like. So there’s been a longtime standoff between the free press and a possible future president—which, in these last few days leading up to the election, has gotten a lot more real.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Recently, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, at the 11th hour, decided not to endorse a political candidate, because their owners asked them not to. Both of these papers were going to endorse Kamala Harris, so the last-second decision certainly makes it look like they were backing off to appease Trump.

Motives aside, though, this moment raises an urgent question: Can The Washington Post; the L.A. Times; us, The Atlantic; all of American journalism stand up to a second Trump administration? Today, days before the election, we have with us our own editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to talk about what’s at stake in this endorsement story.

Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: As you know, the L.A. Times and The Washington Post made news for announcing they would not be endorsing in this presidential race. What was your reaction to that news?

Jeffrey Goldberg: My reaction was that they are not masters of excellent timing. If they had decided that, which is a perfectly fine position to take—and in retrospect, I kind of, sort of wish we took that position in 2016.

Rosin: You do?

Goldberg: Kind of. I just said, “kind of, sort of.” That, I think, connotes ambivalence. Look—I see both sides of the issue, but that’s not the issue right now with the L.A. Times or The Washington Post.

If you’re going to decide that, decide it deliberately. Decide it, well, I would say, any time except two weeks before the most contentious and possibly closest election in American history.

The timing was exquisitely bad. I mean, you could not have chosen a worse time to make these decisions, and it’s mind-boggling.

Rosin: So what you’re saying is: It’s perfectly legitimate for us to have a debate and for newspapers, internally, to have a debate about whether endorsements or not are appropriate. Because, you know, Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, gave reasons in his op-ed for why he didn’t think endorsements were appropriate. So that’s a totally legitimate debate. It’s just that the timing of it is not right.

Goldberg: Yeah. The timing was awful in that it created mistrust, anger, anxiety. It’s way too late to make that decision. I mean, there’s a separate issue. I do believe that it’s the owner’s prerogative to decide if a newspaper should endorse X person or Y person.

Put aside the practical arguments, which, you know—does it really change anybody’s mind? Does it really do anything? I think it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to say that no journalism organization should speak in that kind of declarative voice.

You have a bunch of columnists. You have opinion writers. You have all kinds of people, podcasters. They should talk about what they think is going on in the election. They could talk about who they think is better and who is worse. I get all the sides of it. It’s just—it’s a little late in the process to announce that you’re not going to endorse.

Rosin: The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos—he did defend the decision in his op-ed, saying, Americans don’t trust the news media, and this is a move to restore that trust. Setting the timing aside for a minute, what do you think of that defense?

Goldberg: Horseshit. I think it’s horseshit. I thought the whole first three, four paragraphs of that were horseshit, blaming the victim. I mean, it’s true. It’s true. The media is very, very low in polls of trustworthiness, lower than even Congress at this point, but there’s a reason for that. And a very large reason is that there’s a concerted, multiyear, billion-dollar campaign to undermine public trust in traditional modes of American journalism.

I mean, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are just two of the people who are organizing a campaign to make sure that Americans don’t trust fact-based journalism. Fact-based journalism doesn’t work for them, and so they are literally killing the messenger. And so for Jeff Bezos to write that we, in the press, have a problem and that no one trusts us, without alerting people to one of the huge reasons why, strikes me as ridiculous.

Rosin: I see. So it’s horseshit because (A) it doesn’t apply to The Washington Post—The Washington Post is not part of the problem—and (B) he didn’t elaborate in any even remotely brave way about what he meant.

Goldberg: There’s a war going on against the quote-unquote mainstream media. People who do not want to be investigated by mainstream journalists, by investigative reporters who are professionally trained to uncover things that powerful people don’t want uncovered—the powerful people have organized themselves in a way to make sure that no citizen trusts The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the networks, the Associated Press, Reuters, plus a whole bevy of other investigative outfits.

They want to destroy our ability to communicate to people that we’re trying—I mean, look: I’m not saying that we always get things right. We don’t always get things right. But they have a vested interest in making sure that people don’t trust those outlets, because those outlets are investigating them. And for Jeff Bezos—who is part of the oligarchic class, obviously—for Jeff Bezos to write this op-ed or have it written for him without acknowledging this fundamental fact seemed to be absurd.

Rosin: So readers, as we know, reacted by canceling their subscriptions, 250,000 so far. And I have—

Goldberg: Which is crazy.

Rosin: Crazy. I have many friends who work on the Post. It’s adding up to what? Is it a tenth or an eighth of their subscription base?

Goldberg: I think it’s 10 percent of their subscription base.

Rosin: Which has already been waning over the last many years.

Goldberg: Well, I mean, it did grow. I mean, it grew in the Trump era. A lot of people believed them, as they should have, when they said that Trump was a threat to the democratic order and to the American idea. They made their motto literally “Democracy dies in darkness.”

A large number of people who were opposed to Trumpism became subscribers. What do they think is going to happen to those subscribers? The feeling of betrayal. I mean, I’ve talked to so many people who canceled or were thinking of canceling. The feeling of betrayal was deep in ways that I was even surprised. And here was an example of Jeff Bezos not understanding the consequences of his decision making.

Rosin: One obvious conclusion—or even mild conclusion—is that Jeff Bezos is concerned about what Trump thinks, which leads me to think that if Trump wins, lots of newspapers might have to account for that in their decision making and thinking. Like, it feels like that’s how a chilling effect comes to be, is that you have to take into account what Trump thinks, even if it’s minor. Like, I’ll lose some customers, or I won’t get this contract or another contract, that you have to be thinking about that, and that becomes part of the decision making.

Goldberg: Yeah. Look: no reason to disbelieve Bezos when he says that the meeting between Trump, Trump’s people, and the Blue Origin—his space company—the CEO of that space company that happened that same day was coincidental. He didn’t even know. He runs a very large organization. That’s completely plausible that he had no idea that the timing was just terribly bad for him.

The larger point is: If you have multifarious business dealings with the federal government, and you’re worried about a revenge-minded president with authoritarian predilections, it’s asking a lot of a CEO not to take the threat that that president poses into account when you make decisions, which suggests to me that he’s not equipped to be the owner of a newspaper.

The owner of a newspaper should place him or herself in a structurally oppositional frame of mind, which is: You have to be counter-opportunistic. Oh, the government’s gonna cut my $3 billion contract. Screw them. I’m going to do what’s right, and I’m going to stand up for the newspaper.

If you’re not equipped to own a publication, you really shouldn’t. You just really shouldn’t. And, you know, the shame of this is that, from everything I could see and everything that we all could see, he was pretty good at owning The Washington Post for a while.

Rosin: Well, that makes me wonder if the industry, as a whole, is ready for a possible second Trump administration. I mean, what you just described sounds like a kind of steeling and bravery that you have to be prepared for. And if Jeff Bezos, who has a huge amount of power, you know—like, if he loses a chunk, what does it matter?

If he can’t do it, doesn’t that make you worry about the industry in general?

Goldberg: Well, it depends, person to person. I mean, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is the owner of the Los Angeles Times, is in a different category. He and his family, apparently, just believe in meddling. I mean, they believe that—look: Let me take one step back and note that ownership in the American system—ownership of a publication or a quality publication or a putatively quality publication in the American system—is very complicated and counterintuitive.

You buy a thing. As a rich person, you buy a publication, a business, and then you have to promise not to interfere with the running of the business. That’s the way it’s worked, traditionally. You have to—literally, there’s no other business that I could think of where, you know, you go out and buy a bakery, and the first thing the bakery manager tells you is, Do not tell us what kind of bread to make, and if you do, all your employees are going to excoriate you publicly. You’d kind of be like, Well, I thought the fun part of owning a bakery is getting them to make bread I like, you know. And that’s what journalism is, and this is my relationship with our owner at The Atlantic.

You know, she turns over to me decision making on all editorial matters. We have a relationship of trust, and we communicate, and I use her as a sounding board all the time, and it’s a healthy relationship. But she accepts the line that our culture has devised and that a healthy democratic culture devises so that ownership is separate from editorial.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Earlier this month, The Atlantic endorsed Kamala Harris, which is the fifth time that the magazine has made an endorsement: Lincoln, LBJ, and then three times in the last three elections, all while Trump was the candidate and while you’ve been editor in chief.

Goldberg: Well, the first time, actually, was becoming editor, but I wasn’t yet editor. I had a lot to do with the editorial, but just technically speaking.

Rosin: Okay, so why did you break the mold here?

Goldberg: The Atlantic promises its readers that it’s going to be of no party or clique. That’s written to the founding manifesto of The Atlantic, written in 1857 and signed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne and all the rest. And, you know, I do not want to screw with those guys, right? (Clears throat.)

I just don’t want their ghosts haunting me. So we try very, very hard to be of no party or clique. But to me, the issue of Donald Trump is not an issue of party. I believe, and I think The Atlantic has expressed this belief in its journalism for 160-plus years: We believe that a strong conservative party, a strong conservative strain in American thinking, and a strong liberal strain—that makes a democracy healthy.

Let these ideas battle it out, and let the people decide who has the better idea. So we are a big tent, where we try to have differing opinions, but we don’t support a particular party. And if Hillary Clinton in 2016 were running against Mitt Romney, John McCain, Marco Rubio, you know, Jeb Bush—name the list—we would have felt no urge whatsoever to endorse.

But I looked back, and others looked back at the 1964 endorsement of Lyndon Johnson to try to understand what that was about. And it was not about Barry Goldwater’s positions on taxation or about privatization of government resources or even, in a way, foreign policy. It was about his demeanor. It was about his character. It was about his extremism.

And so the endorsement of LBJ was less an endorsement of LBJ than a warning about Barry Goldwater’s characterological defects. So when the subject of Trump comes up, we’re not looking at what he thinks we should do about the taxation of tips, or even his position on NATO, as ridiculous as I personally find it.

It’s about his honesty. It’s about his mental fitness. It’s about his moral fitness. It’s about his racism. It’s about his expressed misogyny. It’s about all those things. So it’s not about party. It’s not about ideas. It’s about behavior and disposition and the threat that he poses.

And so in 2016, and then again, for reasons of consistency, if nothing else, in 2020 and now in 2024, we felt a need to endorse—again, not because he’s a conservative, because he’s not actually a conservative.

Rosin: Now, in any of these times, did you ever have doubts—like, real, serious doubts that you should do it?

Goldberg: No. Again, in retrospect, getting into it, I understand where, you know, if Bezos had announced a year ago, You know what? We just don’t want to do this anymore—I totally understand the arguments for not doing it. We did it with Hillary. And remember: We were also, like everybody, in shock, in a kind of shock.

People who cover politics and know American politics—we were shocked that the Republican Party chose this person to be its standard-bearer four years after it picked Mitt Romney and eight years after it picked John McCain. How is this even possible?

So in that shock, in disbelief, I think we are more predisposed to say, You know what? This is so abnormal that we must say something. Then once you say it in 2016 and you see what he’s done over four years, then in 2020, how is it not possible to do the same thing? And then after January 6, 2021, it seemed pretty obvious to me that we would have to keep going with these anti-endorsements.

Rosin: And in your mind, does that shift the magazine’s position to less of an observer-critic and more of a participant in the election?

Goldberg: The magazine is a participant in the election in that members of the writers collective of The Atlantic are pretty clear, in many different ways, about how they feel about Donald Trump, what they think about Donald Trump.

And by the way, we’re not a resistance magazine, and I’ve said this over and over again. If we could run pro-Trump material that could pass through our fact-checking process, I would print it. Our goal is to say things that are true, right?

And so we do have pieces, from time to time, that come in that do argue that “X Trump policy is smart.” We ran a piece recently by H. R. McMaster, his former national security advisor, who said, You know what? Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some of the things that he’s done may be for the wrong reasons. Maybe he executed them stupidly. But these ideas are good ideas.

So we’ll run pieces like that. Again, it just has to get through fact-checking. So yes—it’s a definitively different kind of decision when you speak in an institutional voice, no byline, and say, The Atlantic believes that X person should be president and not Y person.

And yes, you can create an image out in the world that you are now aligned with a party. That’s why I’m so sensitive on this question of being of no party or clique, because this is not about Republican—

If, in the next election, the Republicans nominate, God knows, near anybody, I don’t feel, you know—as long as they adhere to basic notions of rule of law, as long as they exercise self-restraint in their behavior and speech, as long as they haven’t been proven to try to have overthrown the government.

I mean, I was down there on January 6. I saw, I heard his speech. And then I walked down to the Capitol. I know what he did. You know, there’s two candidates in the race right now. One tried to overthrow the government; the other didn’t. It’s not that hard to say, as an institution, We’re against overthrowing the government.

And so yeah, there are consequences to all these decisions, but I’m comfortable with the decision. As I said, there’s a part of me that wishes that we hadn’t gotten involved in that, but I’m also proud of the fact that we took these stands.

Rosin: In what?

Goldberg: In institutional endorsement.

Rosin: Like, if you could avoid it, you would?

Goldberg: Well, look: The Atlantic. I mean, one of the lessons of looking back at The Atlantic, you know, one of the great mysteries, by the way—I haven’t been able to figure this out: 1860, The Atlantic endorses Lincoln for president. 1864, no endorsement. It’s like, What does a guy have to do?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.

Goldberg: You know, jeez louise. I don’t know. I mean, I would love to find the papers, if there are papers, that communicate why they didn’t run an endorsement. (Laughs.) But anyway, you go from 1860 to 1964. You jump 104 years into the future before they endorse again. You know, as the editor in the Trump presidency, in the Trump era, I’ve got to say, Hmm, for 105, 104 years, they managed not to endorse. That means something. And so, you know, obviously, there’s going to be ambivalence in my thinking.

Rosin: Okay. Time to leave Lincoln and enter the future. After the break, we talk about what a second Trump era might look like.

[Break]

Rosin: All right. So you’ve touched on some of the stakes. Let’s contemplate an actual Trump era. Like, we’re living in a Trump era. You yourself have faced specific—well, I’ll take that back. The Atlantic has faced specific threats—

Goldberg: No. You could say me. It’s true.

Rosin: —from Trump. And, specifically, in response to your reporting. So in 2020, you reported that Trump called veterans and fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers,” which has clearly remained on Trump’s mind. Your recent reporting that he wished he had “the kind of generals Hitler had” also struck a chord. He’s not a fan. He’s interested in settling scores. Do you actually run through scenarios about the actual things that the magazine could face under a Trump presidency?

Goldberg: Sure. I don’t want to go into specifics, but there are, obviously—and again, I’m not trying to be dramatic here. I don’t expect storm troopers to come and try to padlock the doors of The Atlantic on January 20 if Trump should win or Trump should seize power in some manner or form.

But there are, obviously, ways that someone bent on revenge could take his revenge, not just on The Atlantic but a lot of the press and other institutions in American life. So of course we think about it. But you know, there’s exactly zero choice here. If you find out something that’s true, and it’s relevant for your readers, you just gotta—I don’t mean to sound self-righteous or anything, but that’s literally the job. So you’ve got to do it, regardless of what the threat may be.

Rosin: I mean, I actually do think about what it looks like, because this is a relatively new situation for Americans, for American journalists. I do have trouble imagining what it would look like to operate in that kind of atmosphere. Like, how does a president get in the way of American journalism?

Goldberg: Right. I mean, look: There are—I’m not talking about us, specifically, now—but there have been discussions broadly across journalism. Obviously, one thing that Trump has talked about again and again is changing the libel laws, right? And this would require the Supreme Court to overturn a decision made in the 1960s about what constitutes libel.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if they—and people who are supportive of Trump fund efforts to make it harder for journalists to do their jobs vis-à-vis, you know, nuisance lawsuits and trying to get legislation changed and trying to get the Supreme Court behind this legislation that would make it much easier to win libel suits against journalism organizations.

So there’s that. That’s a threat. There are other things that can happen, obviously. Something that’s been talked about a lot is the use of the IRS against enemies. I mean, obviously, in normal-behaving administrations, you’re not allowed to politicize the tax-auditing process, but I don’t put that past them, obviously.

There are a bunch of things that you can do that don’t involve, you know, frog-marching journalists to jail. I go back to this point: They’re helping to create an atmosphere that’s comprehensively hostile to work that previous American presidents—I’m going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson now—previous American presidents understood was indispensable to the smooth functioning of democracy. Which is to say: have a robust, independent press that could not be punished, jailed, silenced by a government.

Rosin: So that’s the thing that I most worry about, is the shifting understanding of facts and truth. In your conversation with Barack Obama a couple of years ago, it was very interesting. He talked about how, in his campaign, he used to be able to show up in places, say swing-voter places, and convince people to change their minds about him.

And then he told you that he doesn’t really think that that would be true anymore, because there’s a world where new information, a new fact, a truth—it doesn’t really move people. And I wonder if you think journalism is in a similar position. Like, we used to be able to show up and give people new information, new facts, and we would hope that those things would move them. And now it seems to work less that way.

Goldberg: Well, yeah. I’ll give you an example from my own work to buttress your point. So four years ago, I published a story based on sources that Donald Trump has repeatedly used the terms suckers and losers to describe American war dead and American war wounded.

Obviously, a very damaging story. And the criticism from the White House—Donald Trump’s White House at the time—was, Well, you don’t have any evidence. You don’t have any people on the record or using their names, so it’s all made up. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that became the discourse. Right?

Last year, John Kelly came out—John Kelly, former chief of staff, former Marine general, chief of staff to Donald Trump in his White House—came out and said, on the record with his name: Oh yeah. That’s true. He used to say “suckers” and “losers” all the time. He’s confirmed it to any number of publications. He confirmed it on the record to me. And so what I get, even today, are people saying, Well, you never proved it.

And I said, Well, actually, John Kelly’s now said that he’s heard Donald Trump. They say, You’ve never had any sources on the record. Well, John Kelly says it happened. Well, John Kelly’s a liar.

And it’s like, Okay, it doesn’t matter. My point is: It seems not to matter when you present people with what you consider to be evidence or what, in traditional journalism modes, is considered evidence. It doesn’t matter anymore. People are impervious to new information if it doesn’t conform to what they would like to believe.

And so we see that writ large, where, you know, the bubble around a certain group of people in America—let’s say the hardcore Trump voters—the bubble is impermeable, right? There’s no way of penetrating and saying, No. You said you wanted more evidence. Here’s evidence.

Nope. That evidence—that’s a deep fake. That evidence—nope. The person who says it to you is lying.

Rosin: Yes, Jeff, but that’s our tool. Like, that’s what we got. That’s what we do. Like, what we do is evidence, facts. We present those evidence and facts, and if those just drop dead to the ground, then what’s our role? Like, what are we doing?

Goldberg: Well, first of all, I never give up, because why would you give up trying to convince people (A)?

(B) and look: I do think this is a unique proposition of The Atlantic at this moment. I understand 30 percent of the people in America are really not going to believe, or say they don’t believe, The Atlantic at this moment. So we’re writing for the 70 percent, but I also think we’re writing for the 30 percent.

I think just because you’re banging your head against the wall doesn’t mean that wall is not eventually gonna crack. And we have to find new ways of communicating, new ways of buttressing our reporting.

I also believe that people change all the time. And just because this is the pattern, and this is the path we’re on, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be this way forever. I mean, I guess I’m optimistic in the sense that I think, you know, we’re in a fever period right now and that the fever will break.

You know, my colleague—our colleague—Caitlin Flanagan, always says that “the truth bats last.” And I hope she’s right. It’s just harder and harder.

I mean, this calls back to a little bit of the Jeff Bezos piece in which he doesn’t acknowledge that the reason the press is mistrusted is because powerful people are trying to get ordinary citizens to mistrust the press—for their own selfish business reasons or political reasons. So we just have to keep going.

I have a lot of criticism of publications—let’s call them elite publications—that are written for, let’s say, the 20 percent most liberal portion of America and don’t even try to get to other people anymore. Like, maybe it’s a great business model. And fine. You know, everybody should do their thing. Whatever.

But I don’t feel like The Atlantic is that. I think we have to try to build a bridge between, let’s say, these two bubbles: You know, the bubble in which quote-unquote mainstream media lives and the bubble in which the hardcore Trump supporters live. It’s a frustrating question because I don’t know the answer. I haven’t heard anybody come up with a formula for this, but we’re just gonna have to keep trying because the alternative, giving up, is pure nihilism to me.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, we are days before the election. We’ve lived through a Trump presidency. People are talking about this Trump presidency returning without the guardrails of the last one. So how do you see our role, your role in that kind of administration?

Goldberg: I imagine that a coming theoretical second Trump administration is going to be somewhat to very different from the first one in that—I mean, you’ve heard all these clichés before: There will be no grown-ups. Trump and his people know how to manipulate the workings of government better. The velociraptors have learned how to turn the door handles.

You’ve heard all of the lines about it. So we can have more drama and more threats to the constitutional order and more threats to what we used to think of as normative political behavior. But I don’t see our role changing, in the sense that we’re just gonna write about it every day. And we’re gonna cover it.

And, you know, I’ve said this to the staff before: The point of journalism—or the satisfaction of journalism—is not necessarily in changing the world for the better. If you change the world through your journalism to bring more light and truth and justice into the world, great. But you can’t wake up every day assuming that’s what’s going to happen, because most of it is frustrating, just like any job in the world is going to be frustrating. And progress, however you define it, is going to be incremental, and you’re not going to see it for a while, and so on.

But I think to myself, Look—we’re in a democratic emergency. I want to be able to tell myself, as an old man, that I did everything that I could do to try to bring the country back to some kind of normalcy, to hold people who are behaving abnormally accountable.

And I want, especially, the younger people at The Atlantic to think to themselves that, 40 years from now, 50 years from now, when their grandchildren say, What did you do in that antidemocratic era? I want them to be able to say, I did everything that I could do. And that’s important to me. I held my own standards up. I held the standards of my magazine up. And I invested, in a non-nihilistic way, in the future of this country, in the future of the ideas that animate it.

And, you know, that’s enough. All you can do is try using your journalism techniques, using the techniques of journalism to bring more illumination to the things that, in this case, a Donald Trump might do.

So all we can do is go to work and write about what they’re doing and cover what they’re doing and hold it up to the light and let people judge for themselves if what they’re doing is good or bad. So, you know, it’s anticlimactic in a way. It’s not overly dramatic. The thing that we can do is go to work and do our jobs, the jobs that we were trained to do.

We were not expecting, people my age, your age, whatever—we’ve been in journalism for a while, never really expecting a presidency like the first Trump presidency and certainly what could be a second Trump presidency. Never really expecting anything like this, but here we are.

So just cover the hell out of it, and make sure that you have put into the public record truth and reality and evidence, and, you know, tell truth to power. You know, you can’t do anything more than that. And so all we’re going to do is just do what we do.

Rosin: I really appreciate that. I feel exactly the same way. There are words out there like anxious, afraid, apathetic. I don’t feel any of those things. I feel alert.

Goldberg: Alertness is great. We have the tools to alert people to these changes. We don’t have to sit there just passively or impotently. So work as hard as you can to bring as much information and analysis to people who need it. That’s great—great to have a job, great to have a role.

Rosin: Thank you for being inspirational, Jeff.

Goldberg: You want me to sing outtakes from Sound of Music?

Rosin: I wouldn’t mind if you could stand on the desk while doing it. It would be even better.

Goldberg: “Climb Every Mountain?” I’ll sing “The Battle Hymn of the”—look: If we have another Trump presidency, we’re gonna get the staff every morning on Zoom to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” together.

Rosin: Sounds good. I’ll practice.

Goldberg: Yeah. I’m sure people are gonna really enjoy that.

Rosin: Sounds good. (Laughs.) All right, Jeff. Thank you so much for joining us.

Goldberg: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin.

Happy Halloween. Get lots of candy. And don’t forget to vote. Thank you for listening.

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Almost everyone knows the first line of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” Fewer people may remember what comes next—which might just be some of the best advice ever given to chase away a bit of depression:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Melville’s narrator was ostensibly a 19th-century whaler, whose cure for what he called the “hypos” was to hit the high seas and forget his troubles. Whaling was not exactly curling up with a cup of hot chocolate and a comfort dog; it was a brutal, exhausting, dangerous job (just read the rest of the novel for an ample account of that).

So Ishmael’s prescription might seem counterintuitive advice in today’s era of self-care. But Melville perhaps knew something that we have forgotten: When life is getting you down, the answer is not more comfort but less. If you’re troubled by your own case of the hypos, the remedy may be a tough challenge.

[From the June 1948 issue: W. Somerset Maugham on Moby-Dick]

In 2017, a scholar at the Murdoch University in Australia proposed a provocative hypothesis about why materially comfortable humans would nonetheless be drawn to difficult, even dangerous tasks. The researcher started from the observation that the universe is at once life-giving and deadly, and that therefore, from the outset, humans needed to embrace risk to flourish. This characteristic, arguably encoded in the genome ever since, may manifest in human beings as a tendency to adopt risky heroic behaviors and admire them in fellow humans.

That genetic inheritance gets reinforced by culture—which is why heroic adventure forms the basis of nearly all mythologies. This was Joseph Campbell’s famous conclusion in his 1949 study of archetypes, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In it, Campbell, who was a professor of literature, laid out the structure of the “monomyth,” which provides the underlying architecture of a narrative tradition that spans millennia commonly known as the “hero’s journey,” such as the Old Testament’s King David story and George Lucas’s Star Wars series.

This ur-myth opens with a call to adventure, proceeds through a series of difficult trials and dangerous obstacles, and finally ends in triumph. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who, among other things, popularized the concept of archetypes, saw that for anyone, pursuing some metaphorical form of the hero’s journey might be indispensable to finding satisfaction in life. “Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard,” he wrote.

Evidence from modern researchers does indeed suggest that framing one’s life as this type of quest, even when it is difficult or unwelcome, can lead to positive transformation. In one 2023 experiment, scholars asked participants to reframe their life as one that followed the steps in the hero’s journey. The researchers found that doing so raised their subjects’ sense of purpose; it also made a difficult task more meaningful to them and improved their resiliency to trouble.

But beyond simply rewriting your life story to be more of a hero’s journey, starting an actual one in the form of a voluntary challenge or adventure can bring immediate and big happiness benefits. Consider a 2013 study finding that experienced climbers tend to derive unusual spiritual inspiration, experience a greater sense of flow, and generally feel happier when they climb mountains. A 2023 meta-analysis of research on outdoor adventures showed that participants in these experiences profited in at least one of four ways: physical and mental balance, personal development, community, and immersion and transformation.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

A challenging adventure doesn’t have to be physical in nature to bestow benefits; it can equally be mental. Indeed, learning new things with a spirit of curiosity and exploration has been shown to induce positive moods. This raises an interesting paradox that appears in this field of happiness research: People derive a lot more happiness from high-skill activities that require learning than they do from low-skill ones that don’t, yet we typically settle for the latter. In other words, you will probably be much happier reading about philosophy or science than you will if you just scroll social media—so why are you still scrolling? The obvious answer is that it takes a lot less learning effort and mental focus—and although the happiness benefits of reading Cicero will probably be greater, they are deferred and seem abstract compared with the instant, if largely illusory, gratification of sitting on the couch watching videos on your phone.

Just as more demanding physical and mental adventures raise happiness, their absence can harm well-being. This is a common theme that has emerged from analysis of declining mental health during the coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns, when people suffered from a lack of external stimuli and new experiences. Those who did best during this period tended to be people with an “adventure-based mindset”—who purposely went in search of new, interesting, and challenging things to see and do.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why so many people are unhappy in retirement]

If you find yourself a bit “grim about the mouth” like Ishmael, you don’t necessarily need to risk your life chasing an enraged sperm whale around the world. But you don’t have to accommodate your melancholy, either. I can suggest two approaches that you can employ right away to take on your hypos.

The first strategy is to use that narrative device of the hero’s journey to reframe your difficulties. This can be especially powerful if you have recently endured an event or hardship from which you’re still struggling to recover. Say, for example, that you went through a bad breakup that you did not initiate. This experience is all too easy to frame as a humiliating defeat or evidence of failure. It is nothing of the sort if you can think of it this way instead: that your breakup jerked you out of a complacent reverie with unwelcome evidence that you were not actually in the right relationship.

That realization is in fact your call to adventure, per Campbell. Now, confronted with this truth, you can embark on the second stage of your journey: learning to overcome emotional obstacles and getting stronger through your pain. The greatest stage lies ahead, when you will emerge triumphant—more secure, more emotionally intelligent, more self-knowing—ready to love again and be happier, on your own terms.

The second strategy, if your life simply feels dull and gray, is to go find a challenge that is worthwhile, hard, maybe even scary. If you have gotten a little too comfortable marking time in work that doesn’t inspire you, perhaps you should announce (to yourself at least) your intention to quit and start a job search. If the information you carry in your head has become stale to you, maybe it is time to go back to school in a new field. For a physical challenge, sign up for a half-marathon in six months’ time or (my personal favorite) set out to walk a few hundred miles. If your terrestrial existence is getting tedious, go in search of metaphysical truths. And if it shocks people around you who always took you for someone without a spiritual bone in your body, all the better.

There is no guarantee that whatever adventure you choose will turn out the way you hope, of course. And that is the point. If it were safe, it wouldn’t be heroic; if it were predictable, it wouldn’t be an adventure. Even if your heroic exploits prove to be more uncomfortable or painful than you expected, that, too, is part of your journey. The object is not to win in a conventional way; it is to wake up and be fully alive. If it’s for the first time in a long time, it should be bracing.

[From the November 1956 issue: Ishmael and Ahab]

One last point about the adventure you might seek: A common mistake is not to be Ishmael but Captain Ahab. Ahab—the doomed skipper of the Pequod, the whaling ship whose crew Ishmael joined—was singularly consumed with finding and killing Moby Dick, the great white whale. The days leading up to Ahab’s fateful encounter with the great whale were a fever dream singularly focused on the object of his obsession. This makes Melville’s story an inverted myth: an antihero’s journey that began with a plan born of hate and vengefulness, that brought travails from which Ahab learned nothing, and that ended tragically in a way that permitted no return.

Your adventure should have a goal, it is true, but it is called a hero’s journey for a reason. Happiness comes not from the blip that is a moment of victory but from the long arc of living, learning, and loving. That is the best cure for a damp, drizzly November in your soul.

This article contains spoilers for Playground.

From paintings on ancient cave walls to parables, fables, and memes, animals have served as important storytelling tools. For instance, in Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift, the narrator describes the novel’s title character, a fearsome, mercurial poet, by observing, “A surfaced whale beside your boat might look at you as he looked with his wide-set gray eyes.” This deceptively simple metaphor challenges us to imagine an unsettling encounter with a big, strange presence, and situates us in a literary tradition with its sly allusion to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Bellow’s simile is instructive insofar as it’s evocative, and appealingly demanding in its layers of meaning compressed into a single sentence.

Contrast this with an artist’s encounter, in Richard Powers’s new novel, Playground, with a juvenile albatross: “Ina reached her hand into the chest of the decomposing bird and drew out two bottle caps, a squirt top, the bottom of a black film canister at least fifteen years old, a disposable cigarette lighter, a few meters of tangled-up monofilament line, and a button in the shape of a daisy.”

Like many passages in Playground, this teaches me important and timely things in serviceable prose: Plastics are bad because they kill birds; the consequences of human despoilment are gruesome if we dare look closely enough. I get it, I get it all too easily, when I read Powers’s preachier novels, whether they’re about trees (The Overstory), race (The Time of Our Singing), refugees (Generosity), or the challenges of single fatherhood for astrobiologists (Bewilderment). Powers has also written novels of greater subtlety, driven by a purist’s fascination with the inner workings of complex systems and instruments: The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, Orfeo, Plowing the Dark.

Playground seems on the surface to belong in the first group—the flat-character morality plays that have come to define Powers’s later career. It extends and deepens his ongoing project of telling stories that combine lyrical mastery with environmentalist didacticism to criticize humankind’s treatment of the world while attending to the promise of the nonhuman—natural and artificial. The setup of his latest also addresses the reader’s dilemma in confronting such work: What, exactly, is the contemporary novel for? To teach, or to challenge? Fortunately, for those who stick with Playground to the end, Powers doesn’t answer the question in flattering ways but instead complicates it confidently, exploring what art might look like in a less human future.

[Read: Writing the Pulitzer-winning The Overstory changed Richard Powers’s life]

The new novel begins with a creation story cum prayer about Ta’aroa, the Indigenous Polynesian creator god, before proceeding to detail the dilemmas of people living on the remote South Pacific island Makatea. During the early years of the 20th century, when the island was rich in phosphate crucial to industrial agriculture, it was ruined by the extraction work of foreign companies. It’s finally recovering when its 82 remaining human inhabitants are approached by a conglomerate seeking a host to build components of future floating cities. These new artificial islands will serve as swanky sanctuaries for uber-elites hoping to ride out the collapse of human society (or maybe just escape state regulations).

The novel’s human drama plays out as the islanders determine whether to vote yes to the seasteading project, and focuses on the intertwined stories of four main characters. Ina, a half-Polynesian sculptor and an attentive mom, and her husband, Rafi, a literary-minded Black educator, both live on Makatea. Todd, who is white, is Rafi’s boyhood friend turned enemy: They first bonded as bookish Chicago kids from dysfunctional families who loved playing Go. Todd is now the billionaire founder of a world-beating, all-in-one social-media, gaming, and commerce platform called Playground—and also the discreet money behind the seasteading endeavor. The project is in many ways motivated by Todd’s lifelong love of the ocean, itself inspired by the novel’s fourth major character, Evie, a trailblazing French Canadian scuba diver and scientist who holds Jane Goodall–grade celebrity status.

Playground is told in two ways that feel by turns overlong and undercooked—until they add up to something unexpected and genuinely fascinating. The dominant thread suggests a seemingly conventional, multi-perspective third-person novel featuring braided backstories interspersed with a chronicle of deliberations among the atoll’s inhabitants about whether to approve the project. Another narrative runs in tandem: a first-person series of reflections on Todd’s life and work, provoked and also marred—in their undulance and ellipsism—by his diagnosis of the degenerative brain disease known as Lewy body dementia. “I’m suffering from what we computer folks call latency,” Todd observes early on. “Retreating into the past … as more recent months and years grow fuzzy.” Three emotions recur for Todd: his regret over the break with Rafi and (by extension) Ina, the only people he’s ever felt close to; his longing, as a Midwestern boy, for the ocean wonders he first read about in Evie’s best-selling book; and his self-satisfaction as a Big Tech visionary. (“I bent under the obligation to become the first person to reach the Future. And here I am, successful at last.”)

Where is Todd, exactly? Ostensibly, he’s living in a splendid isolation afforded by his extreme wealth while his slick minions press the people of Makatea to agree to the conglomerate’s offer of large-scale economic renewal—while also implying that they could just as easily ask inhabitants of another Pacific island. On Makatea, Rafi broods and minds the children, at least until he becomes very upset after learning about Todd’s involvement in the project; Ina makes a dramatic protest sculpture out of garbage, some of it found in the bodies of little birds; the other islanders debate their voting rights versus the rights of the surrounding marine life; and Evie, now in her 90s, visits like an ethereal, demure white sage, commanding credibility from the islanders because of her mystical relationship to sea creatures, which we hear about again and again (and again). Eventually, nearing total mental and physical breakdown, Todd makes a dramatic trip to Makatea to meet Rafi and Ina and Evie, in hopes of achieving a perfect confluence of his goals in the realms of business, relationships, and world-building.

[Read: Going to extremes]

If this all sounds like fantasy fiction for rich white people, that’s because it is. I’m not being a crank here, whining again about how Powers falls short of the great American masters of marine-life metaphors. I’m pointing, in fact, to a revelation near the very end of the novel, which discloses its stunning conceit. The spoiler is warranted here, because revealing Powers’s destination serves his potential readers by placing fewer demands on their patience than he does. Todd is in fact immersed in an AI-generated story, created by a successor version of his first major creation. In the first-person sections, set off in italics, he’s been speaking to the AI, not us, the whole time. He’s fed it as much material as he could, from memory and information, about Makatea and about himself, Rafi, Ina, and Evie. In turn, the AI has created for him the very story we’ve been reading, interleaved with his reflections. His success lies in crafting and reading an artificially constructed story that fulfills wishes, answers unmet needs, and resolves regrets that ring his actual life.

The AI-generated components are incoherent, clichéd, cloying, and condescending: confusing chronologies, stereotypes about the simple nobility of Makatea’s Indigenous people and the resilience of inner-city Chicagoans, the sacral grandeur of animal and technological sentients. But suddenly, all of that makes sense, because the author has constructed a Powersian hall of mirrors: a novel that imagines what a novel might look like if it were composed by an AI developed by a misanthropic genius loner.

Ingenious tricks and clever devices abound in Powers’s fiction, but never before with the provocative implications of the turn in Playground. The novel offers a superb reversal of the scaled-up scavenging normative to AI art, but more than that, Playground challenges the readership—both admirers and critics—that Powers’s past work has created. Will true believers in Powers’s literary-ethical divinity feel betrayed by the late revelation, given their sincere investment in the story? Will they not only be moved by a fairy tale machined for a big, bad tech guy, the toughest of antiheroes to side with, but also believe that a nonhuman intelligence can capably capture and compel their imaginations? I hope so, inasmuch as this would lead to an intellectual reckoning of a different order than the surface expectation—that Powers’s latest novel simply teaches us that plastics are bad and Pacific Islanders are good. Moreover, reading Powers in this more difficult, demanding way affirms the imperative that Literature—recalcitrant in its ideas, characters, and storylines—should invite and sustain more of and from its readers.

In the end, Playground is exactly what I’d presumed it wasn’t: difficult, ambiguous, and resistant to au courant notions, all while trafficking in such ideas with deceptive coolness and ease. The novel exposes our dependency on fiction that promises morally clear accounts of our right-ordered relationship to animals, nature, each other, technology, literature—and to story itself.