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Yesterday, The New York Times reported that people around Donald Trump are trying to figure out how “to quickly install loyalists in major positions without subjecting them to the risk of long-running and intrusive F.B.I. background checks.” Trump’s people, unsurprisingly, are worried about whether they’d pass a background check: As Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote in September, the MAGA-dominated GOP “is a moral freak show, and freak shows attract freaks”—who tend to have a hard time getting security clearances. The first Trump administration was rife with people (including his son-in-law, Jared Kushner) who were walking national-security risks, none worse than Trump himself. A second term, in which Trump would be free of adult supervision, would be even worse.

By the way, elected government leaders (even if they are convicted felons) do not go through background checks or have actual security clearances. Their access to classified information is granted by virtue of the trust placed in them by the voters; the president, as the chief executive, has access at will to information produced by the military, the intelligence community, and other executive-branch organizations.

For many other federal workers, however, security clearances are a necessary component of government service. Over the course of some 35 years, I held relatively ordinary secret and top-secret clearances while in various jobs, including my work for a defense contractor, my time as an adviser to a U.S. senator, and then in my position as a professor at a war college.

All of these, even at the lowest levels, involve allowing the government to do some uncomfortable peeping into your life—your finances, your family, even your romantic attachments. Clearances are meant to mitigate the risk that you will compromise important information, so the goal is to ensure that you aren’t emotionally unstable, or exploitable through blackmail, or vulnerable to offers of money. (Want to get a really thorough investigation? See if you can get cleared for CNDWI, or “Critical nuclear weapons design information.”)

You screw around with this process at your own professional and legal peril. Don’t want to admit that you cheated on your wife? Too bad. After all, if you’ll lie to her and then lie to the government about lying to her, what else will you lie about? Are you a bit too loose at the poker table, or are you a casual drug user but don’t think either is a big deal? That’s not for you to decide: Better fess up anyway. (And of course, you have to promise not to do it anymore.)

Once you have a clearance, you’ll be subjected to refresher courses on how to keep it, and you’ll have to submit to regular reinvestigations. You must also sit through “insider threat” training, during which you are taught how to recognize who among your co-workers might be a security risk—and how to report them. Red flags include not only signs of money issues, emotional problems, or substance abuse but also extreme political views or foreign loyalties.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX, America’s private space contractor and an organization presumably full of people with clearances. (I emailed SpaceX to ask how many of its workers have clearances. I have not gotten an answer.) Trump is surrounded by people who shouldn’t be given a clearance to open a checking account, much less set foot in a highly classified environment. But Musk has held a clearance for years, despite ringing the insider-threat bells louder than a percussion maestro hammering a giant glockenspiel.

Leave aside Musk smoking marijuana on Joe Rogan’s show back in 2018, a stunt done with such casual smugness that it would have cost almost anyone else their clearance. (The feds, including the U.S. military, don’t care about state laws about pot; they still demand that clearance holders treat weed as a prohibited substance.) But sharing a joint with bro-king Rogan is nothing. Six years later, The Wall Street Journal reported much more concerning drug use:

The world’s wealthiest person has used LSD, cocaine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms, often at private parties around the world, where attendees sign nondisclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter, according to people who have witnessed his drug use and others with knowledge of it.

An attorney for Musk denied the report, but even the rumor of this kind of drug use would be a five-alarm fire for most holders of a high clearance. But fine, even if the report is true, maybe all it means is that Musk is just a patriotic, if somewhat reckless, pharmaceutical cowboy. It’s not like he’s canoodling with the Russians or anything, is it?

Bad news. Musk (according to another bombshell story from The Wall Street Journal) has reportedly been in touch multiple times with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request.

Now, it’s not inherently a problem to have friends in Russia—I had some even when I was a government employee—but if you’re the guy at the desk next to me with access to highly classified technical information, and you’re chewing the fat now and then with the president of Russia, I’m pretty certain I’m required to at least raise an alert about a possible insider threat.

So why hasn’t that kind of report happened? Apparently, it has: Last week, the NASA administrator Bill Nelson said that Musk’s alleged contacts with Russia “should be investigated.” But the United States government seems to think that Musk is too big to fail and too important to fire. As an opinion piece in Government Executive put it this past winter:

In the case of Musk, it is clear the government has decided the benefits of his maintaining eligibility are worth the risks. It’s an easier case to make when you’re creating groundbreaking technology and helping get humans to Mars. It may be a harder case for you to make if your name is Joe and your job is to get a truck to the naval yard … That may seem like a double standard, but that’s if you forget that there is no universal standard.

If Trump is reelected, Musk likely won’t have anything to worry about. But at what point does Musk’s erratic behavior—including allegations of drug use, accusations of some two years of regular discussions with the leader of Russia, and his obvious, intense devotion to one party and its candidate—become too much of a risk for any other U.S. administration to tolerate?

It’s bad enough that Musk could be careless with classified data or expose himself to blackmail; it’s even more unsettling to imagine him undermining American security because of poor judgment, political grudges, and unwise foreign associations. Remember, this is a man who had to pay a $20 million fine for blabbing about taking Tesla private and had to agree to have some of his social-media posts overseen by a Tesla lawyer—and that’s not even close to classified information.

As a former clearance holder, I also worry that indulging Musk (and allowing future Trump appointees to bypass the clearance process) would be a toxic signal to the conscientious public servants who have protected America’s secrets. They have allowed the government to intrude deeply into their personal lives; they have worked to keep their finances tidy; they have avoided the use of prohibited substances and the abuse of legal ones.

If only they were more important; they could get away with almost anything.

Related:

What Elon Musk really wants Elon Musk has reached a new low.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

This is Trump’s message. The truth about polling Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal.

Today’s News

Two ballot boxes were set on fire in Oregon and Washington. Hundreds of ballots were burned in Washington, and the police said that they believe the fires were connected. Philadelphia’s district attorney sued Elon Musk and his America PAC for “running an illegal lottery” scheme by promising to pay $1 million a day to registered voters who signed America PAC’s petition defending the First and Second Amendments. The Pentagon announced that if North Korea joins the war in Ukraine, the U.S. will not set any new limits on Ukraine’s use of American-supplied weapons. In an updated estimate, the Pentagon said that roughly 10,000 North Korean troops have entered Russia.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: We’ve strayed from the spirit of Halloween, Stephanie Bai writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Pamela Littky / Disney / Hulu.

MomTok Is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood

By Sophie Gilbert

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women. The stars of the show are young wives and mothers in Utah who have become notable in a corner of the internet called MomTok; their online side hustles include performing 20-second group dances and lip-synching to clips from old movies, the financial success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of 21st-century womanhood, it’s almost too on the nose: a discordant jumble of feminist ideals, branded domesticity, and lip filler.

Read the full article.

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Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women. The stars of the show are young wives and mothers in Utah who have become notable in a corner of the internet called MomTok; their online side hustles include performing 20-second group dances and lip-syncing to clips from old movies, the financial success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of 21st-century womanhood, it’s almost too on the nose: a discordant jumble of feminist ideals, branded domesticity, and lip filler.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a logical end point for lifestyle-focused reality television, which has never quite been able to decide whether women should be gyrating on a pole or devoutly raising a dozen towheaded children. This show bravely asks: Why not both? “We’re all moms; we’re all Mormons. I guess you could say a lot of us in MomTok look similar … We’re just going off based [on] what’s trending,” Mayci (28, two kids) explains in the first episode. The camera cuts to the women filming a video. “Mayci, I need you to twerk your ass off, as hard as you can,” Jen (24, two kids) shrieks. Jessi (31, two kids) comments on the volume of Jen’s cleavage, amplified by her breastfeeding garments. Each woman has waist-length, barrel-curled hair and teeth as white as Mentos; most wear jeans and a tight Lycra top. No children are in sight. What we’re watching isn’t the kind of dreamy domesticity that traditional momfluencers post on Instagram. It’s something more interesting: the conflation of “motherhood” as an identity with desirability, fertility, and sexual power.

[Read: The redemption of the bad mother]

America loves mothers more than women, an inclination the 2024 election has demonstrated in abundance. Mothers are given license to do things that other women often aren’t, like getting angry or even seeking political power, as long as it’s understood that whatever they’re doing is on someone else’s behalf. In a commencement address to a conservative Catholic college earlier this year, the Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker even advised the female graduates in his audience to forgo careers altogether and focus on supporting their husbands as homemakers. The women of MomTok, while pushing back against some of the strictures of the Mormon Church, are living out this advice to a curiously literal degree. They’re financially supporting their husbands as homemakers, thanks to social media. “Who is currently, like, the breadwinner at home?” Demi (30, one child) asks at one point. “I think all of us?” Mayci replies. This looks like progress—women making money, at home, with the flexibility to set their own schedule and pick their own projects. But underlying this portrait is a darker reality: The only women who get to succeed at this kind of “work” are the ones who look the part.

The women of MomTok aren’t tradwives, the smock-wearing, Aga stove–warmed, calf-snuggling performance artists who fascinate and perplex us on social media. The Secret Lives mothers flirt and assert their independence and critique the men who try to control them. Some got married as teenagers after unplanned pregnancies; several are divorced. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement ahead of the show’s release noting that “a number of recent productions depict lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the church,” seemingly in reference to a widely publicized scandal involving one cast member that’s the least interesting part of the series.) Late in the season, Demi plans a girls’ trip to Las Vegas that includes VIP tickets to Chippendales, which prompts an alarming conflict between the more traditional Jen and her husband, Zac, whom she’s supported through college and is about to fund through medical school. Zac, despite having been given $2,500 by his wife to gamble on the trip, is furious that she’d agree—even as a joke—to see a male dance show. He threatens to take their kids and divorce her. “This type of behavior is exactly what MomTok is trying to break in our LDS faith,” Demi tells the camera. “We’re not doing this anymore.”

But even as they reject what they see as the suffocating confines of one institution for women, they’re bolstering another. The pursuit of a certain kind of highly maintained beauty for all eight women on the show seems to dominate everything else. In one episode, while getting Botox injections, several of the women gossip, semi-scandalized, about the fact that Jessi drank alcohol from a flask at Zac’s graduation party; the irony that they’re in that moment high on laughing gas administered to ease the pain of the injections seems lost on everyone. In a different episode, Jessi tells her friends that she’s getting a labiaplasty, which she refers to as “a mommy makeover,” because childbirth has changed the shape and appearance of her vulva. Plastic surgery, Mayci explains, is tacitly sanctioned by the LDS Church (though LDS leaders today caution against vanity); Salt Lake City has more plastic surgeons per resident than Los Angeles.

“We wanna make sure that we’re taking care of our bodies, and we’re always told that our body is a temple,” Mayci adds during the Botox episode. “It’s actually surprising that [the Church doesn’t] really care about plastic surgery?” The moment underscores the space for interpretive tension within a faith that discourages toxins while prizing beauty in all its forms as a reflection of morality and a source of happiness. And yet it’s hard not to read this show another way: as evidence of a specific online culture that encourages women to bear children while also requiring them to erase the visible evidence of their pregnancies. The physical toll of giving birth is covered up, made as inconspicuous as the children who have left these same marks. That these mothers be beautiful and desirable in this realm is paramount.

In one sense, this is what reality television has always wanted from women. Those who can exude sexuality from the safety of the domestic sphere have long been able to build lucrative businesses in the process. In 2022, a writer for Bustle counted 52 separate beauty lines launched by stars of the Real Housewives franchise, who leveraged their fame to sell perfumes, wigs, nail polish, “firming lotion,” and false eyelashes. But the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority. On Secret Lives, Mayci is seen launching Baby Mama, a line of “natal supplements” for women. No one on the show seems to question the primacy of beauty. After filming wrapped, Layla (22, two children) revealed in a podcast interview that she’s had six separate cosmetic procedures over four months. “I had kids young, and I love my babies to death, but they screwed up my body, and I wanted to feel hot again,” she said. Her co-star Demi added, “That’s just the Utah way!”

[Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting?]

Women who don’t accept—or can’t meet—these terms are, tellingly, less visible on the show, and thus less able to leverage their new fame. Mikayla (24, three children), a doe-eyed, strikingly beautiful woman who struggles with a chronic illness that causes skin flare-ups gets sidelined; she has no primary storylines of her own, and much less screen time than the others. This gravitation toward more visibly perfected stars stems perhaps from the aspirational ideal that momfluencers represent, as Sara Petersen writes in her 2023 book, Momfluenced. “As mothers, our everyday lives are full of gritty motherhood rawness, of children refusing to wear snow pants in blizzards, or the strain of holding back tears and curses upon stepping on another fucking Lego.” She adds, “Why would we want to spend our spare time consuming someone else’s rawness when we’re sick and tired of our own?”

The women of MomTok are enthralling because they symbolize the possibility of a mother’s desirability and influence—and of a broader sisterhood. They are, with the exception of the one stock villain, Whitney (31, two children), impossibly likable, funny and scrappy and unserious. They constantly invoke their sliver of the internet as a pillar of friendship and prosperity—as in “I really want this MomTok group to survive,” and “We need to get back to what MomTok was before all this happened.” Taylor (30, three children) says that the group built its following in the hope of changing people’s attitudes about Mormon women—and making space for them to be bolder and more outspoken than the norm. But all of the women on the show seem to have wholly absorbed the idea that to be heard as mothers in America, you first have to be seen, in high-definition, expensively augmented perfection.

In her 1991 book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf noted that the proliferation of sexualized images of women in music videos and television and magazines toward the end of the 20th century represented “a collective reactionary hallucination willed into being by both men and women stunned and disoriented by the rapidity with which gender relations have been transformed: a bulwark of reassurance against the flood of change.” The same dynamics have since been amplified a thousandfold on TikTok, where you have precisely one second to hook someone who’s idly scrolling. The politics of visibility are more loaded than ever. Beauty, as Wolf wrote decades ago, has fully taken over “the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage.” The lifelong project of self-maintenance used to be, for women, a distraction from recognizing the things we really need. Now it’s the most valid and laudable form of labor.

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Across the country, Donald Trump’s faithful fans sport MAGA merch—much of it emblazoned with antagonistic slogans—and line up to cheer for their candidate in arenas and event centers. His rallies are a cultural phenomenon, giving him a platform to boost violent rhetoric and deliver gibberish tirades. I spoke with my colleague John Hendrickson, who has been writing campaign-trail dispatches, about the differences he’s observed between Trump and Kamala Harris rallies and what draws people to such events.

A Never-Ending Tour

Lora Kelley: What makes attending a Trump rally feel different from other political events?

John Hendrickson: Trump long ago turned political rallies into a dark spectacle. Mitt Romney had rallies; John McCain had rallies; George W. Bush had rallies. But they didn’t have this carnival-type atmosphere.

I think a lot of people go because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Maybe you can trace it to the decline of social organizations and even church attendance. Going to a Trump rally, being part of the MAGA movement, offers a sense of community—for better or for worse.

Trump remains a singular force. There’s such a cult of personality around him. His rallies are technically part of the campaign, but they’re almost unmoored from the traditional confines of a campaign. They’re his lifeblood. It reminds me of Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour, which has been going on since 1988. Trump has more or less been on his own never-ending tour for the past nine years.

Lora: How does that atmosphere contrast with what you see on the Democratic side?

John: Trump paints a dystopian portrait that revolves around this idea of a migrant “invasion” that’s destroying the fabric of the United States. His slogan—“Make America great again”—is predicated on an imagined past. Harris has zeroed in on a simple idea of championing freedom, which, ironically, used to be a Republican talking point. Her campaign rhetoric, as a whole, is far more positive and optimistic than Trump’s, especially when she’s talking about basic things such as the economy. But her tone often changes when she gets to the threats Trump poses to more personal issues, such as abortion rights, or when she called him “increasingly unstable and unhinged” at her recent rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump has internalized that negativity sells. The events held by Democrats don’t necessarily have the same electricity as the MAGA rallies, unless a high-energy surrogate, such as Barack Obama, comes out. For all of the obvious horrors of Donald Trump, he has an ability to create this vortex as a speaker that his fans find enthralling—although he inevitably drones on and people reliably trickle out. And at last night’s town hall in Pennsylvania, he stood onstage and swayed to music for a while—one of the stranger things he’s ever done.

Lora: What kind of merch do you see at these rallies, and what does that tell you about the broader mood of the campaign?

John: Most of the Trump apparel isn’t produced by the actual campaign. It comes from independent vendors, like the people who sell T-shirts outside a concert. At any given Trump rally, I’ll see hundreds of different pieces of merchandise, and the messaging tends to be aggressive. The slogans are often taunting and feature variations of a shared theme: owning the libs. I have endless pictures of these shirts and stickers on my phone—“I Clean My Guns With Liberal Tears” was one I saw recently.

At Harris’s events, you may see a T-shirt with a silhouette of Trump that says “Nope,” or an abortion-rights-themed shirt that says something like “Hands Off My Body.” But in general, the Democratic slogans are far less antagonistic toward Republicans.

Lora: Have you noticed a shift in rhetoric and attitude from Trump or his rally attendees since Harris became the nominee?

John: Right after Harris took Joe Biden’s place, seemingly everyone—Trump, his surrogates, rank-and-file rally-goers—appeared lost as to how to attack her.

In these final weeks before Election Day, Trump and his followers are trying to paint Harris as incompetent, a liar, and someone who can’t be trusted. At the most recent Trump rally I attended, in Pennsylvania, Trump repeated forms of incompetent and incompetence over and over again. But the attacks can also be vague. I’ve heard some of his supporters try to claim that she’s an illegitimate candidate because she didn’t “earn” the nomination. Harris voters, for their part, often say that Trump is a threat to democracy and to their rights.

Lora: What value do these rallies bring to the candidates?

John: The candidates have to fire up their base and hope that the people who show up will go home and convince their friends and neighbors to vote. It takes a special kind of voter enthusiasm to put on a T-shirt, get in the car, and drive to a rally. Those people are more engaged than the average person who won’t take off from work or ditch another obligation to go hear a politician speak.

Harris has held some major rallies in the nearly 100 days of her campaign, drawing big crowds to arenas. But her events aren’t over-the-top like some of Trump’s. Later this month, Trump is going to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan. He’s by no means going to win New York, but holding the event feels like he’s planting a flag: Look at me—I’m headlining Madison Square Garden.

Related:

The Trump-Obama split screen in Pennsylvania On the National Mall with the RFK-to-MAGA pipeline

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump breaks down onstage. Peter Wehner: This election is different. Inside the carjacking crisis

Today’s News

A Fulton County judge ruled that Georgia county election officials cannot decline or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance. In a letter to Israel signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the United States warned that it might restrict military aid if Israel does not take steps to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within the next month. A man from North Carolina was arrested on Saturday and accused of making threats against FEMA workers.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Here’s how to start your search for a new hobby—and how to deal with the likelihood that you’ll be bad at it initially, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty

Dogs Are Entering a New Wave of Domestication

By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

In just a generation, we humans have abruptly changed the rules on our dogs. With urbanization increasing and space at a premium, the wild, abandoned places where children and dogs used to roam have disappeared from many American communities. Dogs have gone from working all day and sleeping outside to relaxing on the couch and sleeping in our beds. They are more a part of our families than ever—which means they share our indoor, sedentary lifestyle.

Read the full article.

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Why does anyone care about the Nobel Prize? “Dear James”: Should I break up with my Trump-loving partner? Anne Applebaum: The danger of believing that you are powerless The transparent cruelties of Diddy’s entertainment machine Donald Trump’s fascist romp The question hanging over Harris’s campaign

Culture Break

Illustration by Clay Rodery

Watch. In the 25 years since Fight Club’s release, the film (streaming on Hulu) has burrowed deeply into American culture—and its insights remain apt.

Read. Sandra Cisneros, who wrote The House on Mango Street, defied the traditional roles of womanhood.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, featuring our newest advice column, “Dear James,” from James Parker.

Are you something of a mystery to yourself?

Do you suffer from existential panic, spiritual fatigue, libidinal tangles, and compulsive idiocy? Are your moods beyond your control? Is every straw, for you, the last straw? Do you suspect, from time to time, that the world around you might be an enormous hallucination? Do you forget people’s names and then worry about it terribly? Do you weep at bad movies but find yourself unaccountably numb in the face of genuine sadness? Is stress wrecking your complexion, your joints, your digestive system? Do you experience a surge of pristine chaotic energy at precisely the moment that you should be falling asleep? Are you doing much too much of this, and not nearly enough of that?

If so, “Dear James” might be for you.

Below are the latest editions, which tackle issues as varied as post-graduation anxiety and an addiction to wellness podcasts.

If you’re looking for advice, drop a note to dearjames@theatlantic.com. Sign up here to receive this column weekly.

The Reading List

I See Every Tiny Problem as a Social Injustice

I’m totally exhausted with myself.

By James Parker

I Hate My Post-College Life

I’m utterly lost.

By James Parker

Cold Showers Are Free

So is meditation. And push-ups. And breathing.

By James Parker

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The elite college students who can’t read books Remember that DNA you gave 23andMe? The rise of the right-wing tattletale

The Week Ahead

Saturday Night, a comedy film about the 90 minutes of preparation before the October 1975 debut of Saturday Night Live (in theaters everywhere Friday) Season 4 of Abbott Elementary, a sitcom about a group of Philadelphia public-school teachers (streaming Wednesday on Hulu) Our Evenings, a novel by Alan Hollinghurst about the son of a Burmese man and a British dressmaker who gets a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic

Revenge of the Office

By Rose Horowitch

Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that the company’s more than 350,000 corporate employees must return to the office five days a week come January. In a memo, Jassy explained that he wants teams to be “joined at the hip” as they try to out-innovate other companies.

His employees don’t seem happy about it. The Amazon announcement was met with white-collar America’s version of a protest—a petition, angry LinkedIn posts, tense debates on Slack—and experts predict that some top talent will leave for companies with more flexible policies. Since May 2023, Amazon has allowed corporate employees to work from home two days a week by default. But to Jassy, 15 months of hybrid work only demonstrated the superiority of full-time in-office collaboration.

Read the full article.

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The playwright in the age of AI Gisèle Pelicot and the most unthinkable, ordinary crime Your individuality doesn’t matter. Industry knows why. Lost bullied its unlikeliest hero. Kris Kristofferson was country music’s philosopher king. Game Change knew exactly what was coming. What’s the appeal of indie rock’s new golden boy? More evidence that celebrities just don’t like you

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer? The Christian radicals are coming. An alarming new trend in hurricane deaths

Photo Album

A woman holds a plastic bag over her head to shelter herself from the rain as she walks along Fifth Avenue in New York City. (Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty)

Check out these photos of the week from around the world, showing a woman walking in the rain, devastating floods in Nepal and the United States, early Christmas celebrations in Venezuela, and more.

P.S.

Take a look at James Parker’s latest TikTok video about his column and why he wants to hear what’s ailing, torturing, and nagging readers.

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Fifteen years ago, an Apple ad campaign issued a paean to the triumph of the smartphone: There’s an app for that, it said. Today, that message sounds less like a promise than a threat. There’s an app for that? If only there weren’t.

Apps are all around us now. McDonald’s has an app. Dunkin’ has an app. Every chain restaurant has an app. Every food-delivery service too: Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Chowbus. Every supermarket and big-box store. I currently have 139 apps on my phone. These include: Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Joann Fabric, Dierbergs, Target, IKEA, Walmart, Whole Foods. I recently re-downloaded the Michaels app while I was in the Michaels checkout line just so I could apply a $5 coupon that the register failed to read from the app anyway.

Even when you’re lacking in a store-specific app, your apps will let you pay by app. You just need to figure out (or remember, if you ever knew) whether your gardener or your hair salon takes Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, or one of the new bank-provided services such as Zelle and Paze.

It’s enough to drive you crazy, which is a process you can also track with apps for mental health, such as Headspace and Calm. Lots of apps are aiming to help you feel your best. My iPhone comes with Apple Health, but you might also find yourself with Garmin or Strava or maybe Peloton if you’re into that, or whichever app you need to scan into your local gym, or Under Armour, a polyester-shirt app that is also a jogging app. The MyChart app may help you reach a subset of your doctors and check a portion of your medical-test results. As for the rest? Different apps!

The tree of apps is always growing, always sending out its seeds. I have an app for every airline I have ever flown. And in every place I ever go, I use fresh apps to get around. In New York, I scan into the subway using just my phone, but the subway app tells me which lines are out of service. For D.C., I have the SmarTrip app. At home, in St. Louis, I have a physical pass for the Metrolink, but if I want to buy a ticket for my kid, I need to use the Transit app. For hiring a car, I’ve got the Uber app, which works almost anywhere, but I also have the app for Lyft, and Curb for taxis, just in case. Also, parking: I have ParkMobile, PayByPhone, and one other app whose name I can’t keep straight because it doesn’t sound like a parking app. (The app is called Passport. It took me many minutes of browsing on my phone to figure that out.)

If you’ve got kids, you’ll know they are the Johnny Appleseeds of pointless apps. An app may connect you to their school for accessing their schoolwork or connecting to their teachers; only thing is, you might be assigned a different app each year, or different apps for different kids in different classes. It could be Class Dojo, Brightwheel, Bloomz, or TalkingPoints. It could be ClassLink, SchoolStatus, or PowerSchool. The school bus might also have an app, so you can track it. And if your kids play sports, God help you. A friend has an app, SportsEngine, that describes itself as “the one app that does it all.” And yet, she has several more youth-sports apps on top of that.

Let’s talk about the office. Yes, there’s an app for that. There are a thousand apps for that. Google Docs has an app, as do Google Sheets, Slides, Mail, and Search. Microsoft is highly app-enabled, with separate apps for Outlook, Word, and Excel. Then, of course, you’ve got the groupware apps that allow you to coordinate with colleagues, such as Slack, Teams, Zoho, and Pumble. And the office-infrastructure apps that your employer may be using to, you know, make your job easier: Workday, Salesforce, Notion, Zendesk, Jira, Box, Loom, Okta.

[Read: The app that monetized doing nothing]

And what about all the other apps that I haven’t yet brought up, the ones that may now be cluttering your phone? What about Doova, Nork, PingPong, and Genzillo?  Those are not actually apps (as far as I’m aware), but we all know that they could be, which is my point. Apps are now so numerous, and so ubiquitous, that they’ve become a form of nonsense.

Their premise is, of course, quite reasonable. Apps replaced clunky mobile websites with something clean and custom-made. They helped companies forge more direct connections with their customers, especially once push notifications came on the scene. They also made new kinds of services possible, such as geolocating nearby shops or restaurants, and camera-scanning your items for self-checkout. Apps could serve as branding too, because their icons—which are also business logos—were sitting on your smartphone screen. And apps allowed companies to collect a lot more data about their customers than websites ever did, including users’ locations, contacts, calendars, health information, and what other apps they might use and how often.

By 2021, when Apple started taking steps to curtail that data harvest, the app economy was already well established. Smartphones had become so widespread, companies could assume that any customer probably had one. That meant they could use their apps to off-load effort. Instead of printing boarding passes, Delta or American Airlines encouraged passengers to use their apps. At Ikea, customers could prepay for items in the app and speed through checkout. At Chipotle or Starbucks, an app allowed each customer to specify exactly which salsa or what kind of milk they wanted without holding people up. An apartment building that adopted a laundry app (ShinePay, LaundryView, WASH-Connect, etc.) spared itself the trouble of managing payments at its machines.

In other words, apps became bureaucratized. What started as a source of fun, efficiency, and convenience became enmeshed in daily life. Now it seems like every ordinary activity has been turned into an app, while the benefit of those apps has diminished.

Parking apps offer one example of this transformation. Back before ParkMobile and its ilk, you might still have had to drop coins into a street meter. Some of those meters had credit-card readers, but you couldn’t count on finding one (or one that worked). Parking apps did away with these annoyances. They could also remind you when your time was up and, in some cases, allow you to extend your parking session remotely. Everyone seemed to win: individuals, businesses, municipalities, and, of course, the app-driven services taking their cut. But like everything, app parking grew creaky as it aged. Different parking apps took over in different places as cities chose the vendors that gave them the best deals. These days, I use ParkMobile in some parts of town and Passport in others, a detail about the world I must keep in mind if I want to station my vehicle within it. The apps themselves became more complex too, burdened by greater customization and control at the user and municipal level. Sometimes I can use Apple Pay to park with ParkMobile; other times I can’t. Street signage has changed or vanished, so now I find myself relying on the app to determine whether I even have to pay after 6 p.m. on a weekday. (Confusingly, sometimes an app will say that parking is unavailable when it really means that payment is unavailable—because payment isn’t required.) The apps sometimes sign me out, and then I have to use my password-manager app just to log back in. Or, worse, my phone might have “off-loaded” whichever parking app I need because I haven’t used it in a while, such that I have to re-download it before leaving the car.

Similar frustrations play out across many of the apps that one can—or must—use to live a normal life. Even activities that once seemed simple may get you stuck inside a thicket of competing apps. I used to open the Hulu app to watch streaming content on Hulu—an app equivalent of an old television channel. Recently, Hulu became a part of Disney+, so I now watch Hulu via the Disney+ app instead. When HBO introduced a premium service, I got the HBO Go app so I could stream its shows. Then HBO became HBO Max, and I got that app, before HBO Max turned into  Max, a situation so knotty that HBO had to publish an FAQ about it.

I’d like to think that this hellscape is a temporary one. As the number of apps multiplies beyond all logic or utility, won’t people start resisting them? And if platform owners such as Apple ratchet up their privacy restrictions, won’t businesses adjust? Don’t count on it. Our app-ocalypse is much too far along already. Every crevice of contemporary life has been colonized. At every branch in your life, and with each new responsibility, apps will keep sprouting from your phone. You can't escape them. You won’t escape them, not even as you die, because—of course—there’s an app for that too.

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This weekend, at his rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Donald Trump descended into a spiral of rage and incoherence that was startling even by his standards. I know I’ve said this before, but this weekend felt different: Trump himself, as my colleague David Graham wrote today, admitted that he’s decided to start going darker than usual.

At this point, voters have everything they need to know about this election. (Tomorrow, the vice-presidential candidates will debate each other, which might not have much of an impact beyond providing another opportunity for J. D. Vance to drive down his already-low likability numbers.) Here are some realities that will likely shape the next four weeks.

Trump is going to get worse.

I’m not quite sure what happened to Trump in Erie, but he seems to be in some sort of emotional tailspin. The race is currently tied; Trump, however, is acting as if he’s losing badly and he’s struggling to process the loss. Other candidates, when faced with such a close election, might hitch up their pants, take a deep breath, and think about changing their approach, but that’s never been Trump’s style. Instead, Trump gave us a preview of the next month: He is going to ratchet up the racism, incoherence, lies, and calls for violence. If the polls get worse, Trump’s mental state will likely follow them.

Policy is not suddenly going to matter.

Earlier this month, the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote about very specific policy questions that Kamala Harris must answer to earn his vote. Harris has issued plenty of policy statements, and Stephens surely knows it. Such demands are a dodge: Policy is important, but Stephens and others, apparently unable to overcome their reticence to vote for a Democratic candidate, are using a focus on it as a way to rationalize their role as bystanders in an existentially important election.

MAGA Republicans, for their part, claim that policy is so important to them that they’re willing to overlook the odiousness of a candidate such as North Carolina’s gubernatorial contender Mark Robinson. But neither Trump nor other MAGA candidates, including Robinson, have any interest in policy. Instead, they create cycles of rage: They gin up fake controversies, thunder that no one is doing anything about these ostensibly explosive issues, and then promise to fix them all by punishing other Americans.

Major news outlets are not likely to start covering Trump differently.

Spotting headlines in national news sources in which Trump’s ravings are “sanewashed” to sound as if they are coherent policy has become something of a sport on social media. After Trump went on yet another unhinged tirade in Wisconsin this past weekend, Bloomberg posted on X: “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Well, yes, that’s one way to put it. Another would be to say: The GOP candidate seemed unstable and made several bizarre remarks during a campaign speech. Fortunately, Trump’s performances create a lot of videos where people can see his emotional state for themselves.

News about actual conditions in the country probably isn’t going to have much of an impact now.

This morning, the CNN anchor John Berman talked with the Republican House member Tom Emmer, who said that Joe Biden and Harris “broke the economy.” Berman countered that a top economist has called the current U.S. economy the best in 35 years.

Like so many other Trump defenders, Emmer didn’t care. He doesn’t have to. Many voters—and this is a bipartisan problem—have accepted the idea that the economy is terrible (and that crime is up, and that the cities are in flames, and so on). Gas could drop to a buck a gallon, and Harris could personally deliver a week’s worth of groceries to most Americans, and they’d probably still say (as they do now) that they are doing well, but they believe that it’s just awful everywhere else.

Undecided voters have everything they need to know right in front of them.

Some voters likely think that sitting out the election won’t change much. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein pointed out in a recent article, many “undecided” voters are not really undecided between the candidates: They’re deciding whether to vote at all. But they should take as a warning Trump’s fantasizing during the Erie event about dealing with crime by doing something that sounds like it’s from the movie The Purge.

The police aren’t allowed to do their job. They’re told: If you do anything, you’re going to lose your pension; you’re going to lose your family, your house, your car … One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out, and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know? It’ll end immediately.

This weird dystopian moment is not the only sign that Trump and his movement could upend the lives of wavering nonvoters. Trump, for months, has been making clear that only two groups exist in America: those who support him, and those who don’t—and anyone in that second group, by his definition, is “scum,” and his enemy.

Some of Trump’s supporters agree and are taking their cues from him. For example, soon after Trump and Vance singled out Springfield, Ohio, for being too welcoming of immigrants, one of the longtime local business owners—a fifth-generation Springfielder—started getting death threats for employing something like 30 Haitians in a company of 330 people. (His 80-year-old mother is also reportedly getting hateful calls. So much for the arguments that Trump voters are merely concerned about maintaining a sense of community out there in Real America.)

Nasty phone calls aimed at old ladies in Ohio and Trump’s freak-out in Erie should bring to an end any further deflections from uncommitted voters about not having enough information to decide what to do.

I won’t end this depressing list by adding that “turnout will decide the election,” because that’s been obvious for years. But I think it’s important to ask why this election, despite everything we now know, could tip to Trump.

Perhaps the most surprising but disconcerting reality is that the election, as a national matter, isn’t really that close. If the United States took a poll and used that to select a president, Trump would lose by millions of votes—just as he would have lost in 2016. Federalism is a wonderful system of government but a lousy way of electing national leaders: The Electoral College system (which I long defended as a way to balance the interests of 50 very different states) is now lopsidedly tilted in favor of real estate over people.

Understandably, this means that pro-democracy efforts are focused on a relative handful of people in a handful of states, but nothing—absolutely nothing—is going to shake loose the faithful MAGA voters who have stayed with Trump for the past eight years. Trump’s mad gibbering at rallies hasn’t done it; the Trump-Harris debate didn’t do it; Trump’s endorsement of people like Robinson didn’t do it. Trump once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. Close enough: He’s now rhapsodized about a night of cops brutalizing people on Fifth Avenue and everywhere else.

For years, I’ve advocated asking fellow citizens who support Trump whether he, and what he says, really represents who they are. After this weekend, there are no more questions to ask.

Related:

Trump is taking a dark turn. Peter Wehner: The Republican freak show

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

North Carolina was set up for disaster. Will RFK Jr.’s supporters vote for Trump? Hussein Ibish: Hezbollah got caught in its own trap.

Today’s News

Israeli officials said that commando units have been conducting ground raids in southern Lebanon. Israel’s military is also planning to carry out a limited ground operation in Lebanon, which will focus on the border, according to U.S. officials. At least 130 people were killed across six states and hundreds may be missing after Hurricane Helene made landfall last week. A Georgia judge struck down the state’s effective six-week abortion ban, ruling that it is unconstitutional.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: The decision to have kids comes down to a lot more than “baby fever”—and it may be about more than government support too, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Director Bartlett Sher, star Robert Downey Jr., and writer Ayad Akhtar OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Playwright in the Age of AI

By Jeffrey Goldberg

I’ve been in conversation for quite some time with Ayad Akhtar, whose play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, about artificial generative intelligence and its impact on cognition and creation. He’s one of the few writers I know whose position on AI can’t be reduced to the (understandable) plea For God’s sake, stop threatening my existence! In McNeal, he not only suggests that LLMs might be nondestructive utilities for human writers, but also deployed LLMs as he wrote (he’s used many of them, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini included). To my chagrin and astonishment, they seem to have helped him make an even better play. As you will see in our conversation, he doesn’t believe that this should be controversial.

Read the full article.

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Remember. Kris Kristofferson’s songs couched intimate moments in cosmic terms, pushing country music in an existentialist direction, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Debate. Twenty years after Lost’s premiere, the mistreatment of Hurley on the show (streaming on Netflix and Hulu) has become only more obvious, Rebecca Bodenheimer writes.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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