The writer Gary Indiana, who died last week at the age of 74, wrote about his obsessions with the calculated grace of a man who found them slightly embarrassing. He was a stylist of remarkable erudition, and possessed a startling range; his essays, criticism, plays, films, and fiction spanned seemingly endless topics, among them French Disneyland, Cuban prisons, the journalist Renata Adler, the sculptor Richard Serra, true-crime stories, the Boston Marathon bombings, and various men whose beauty slayed him. For the past several decades, he lived in a sixth-floor East Village walk-up cramped with thousands of volumes of literature. In Horse Crazy, Indiana’s first and best novel, his unnamed narrator invites a prospective boyfriend to his similarly cluttered apartment and feels ashamed—not of its mess, exactly, but of the sheer number of books on his shelves. “I suppose this is my life,” he says, after longing “for a garbage dumpster big enough to swallow the entire past.”

Born Gary Hoisington in 1950s New Hampshire, Indiana moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the aftermath of the famed Summer of Love and spent the rest of his life unromantically hungover from the period. The bohemian artistic milieu where he came of age was shifting toward the pop, the conceptual, and the camp, but Indiana was both suspicious of the future and unwilling to be in the thrall of the traditional. He participated in the debauched, stoned zeitgeist yet wrote about sex without triumph or tenderness—his lovers were scorned, dissatisfied. After moving to New York City in 1978, he became one of the defining countercultural writers of the ’80s, a decade he skewered; his tenure as Village Voice’s art critic was notable more for what he despised than for what he liked. Yet so much of what he lampooned throughout his career obsessed him—gorgeous young gay men, bizarre drug addicts, the thorny legacy of the ’60s, the downtown Manhattan scene he all but embodied even though he refused to be affiliated with it. He kept the culture of his time close to his chest, because what was in vogue fueled his indignation.

Horse Crazy is a particularly caustic experience. The novel’s very Indiana-ish narrator has recently landed a desirable job as a cultural critic at an influential magazine—a moment of recognition that terrifies and distresses him. He has a bit of money, but he finds money disgusting; he can write about anything he wants, but this freedom feels like a prison. “The less free I am, the freer I appear to be,” he tells the reader, in one of the book’s many takedowns of the creative life. One might imagine that the 35-year-old has more tender feelings toward Gregory Burgess, a 27-year-old former heroin addict of “extravagant comeliness,” to whom the narrator writes an “old-fashioned” 20-page single-spaced letter professing his desire.

Yet Horse Crazy is one of the best American novels about obsession in part because the narrator mostly dislikes Gregory, subjecting this object of lust to the same derisive interior voice that comments on virtually every other aspect of his life. His pristine exterior notwithstanding, Gregory personifies the very elements that make the book’s protagonist want to retch: He is an ascendant photographer whose fussy, expensive prints are sourced from pornography magazines (to which he expresses a moralistic opposition that exasperates the narrator). He is extremely articulate, yet much of what he says is fatuous and clichéd, informed by undigested pop psychology picked up seemingly through the osmosis of youth. The narrator detests Gregory’s music tastes, his artistic opinions, and, after sufficient exposure, his charm. He admits to enjoying Gregory’s personality only during a shopping expedition at a Salvation Army, where the younger man picks out grotesque garments and then reveals that he chose them precisely for their hideousness—he wants to offend the sensibilities of the restaurant where he waits tables. Carried away by a rare gust of sentimentality, the enamored narrator brushes some freshly fallen snow from his beloved’s hair.

Love, in Horse Crazy, is transactional, one-sided, unconsummated, and cruel; it pushes Indiana’s fictional stand-in out of dreamy solitude and into the savage present. The insufferable facets of Gregory’s personality are reflections of Indiana’s city and era. Horse Crazy came out in 1989, at the close of a decade that saw New York wrecked by both AIDS and drug epidemics. Gregory refuses to have sex with the narrator partially because of HIV fears, even though he may be sleeping with other people. He’s duplicitous about money, and the protagonist worries that he may be supporting a drug habit. Indiana holds out the possibility that many of the narrator’s suspicions are projections of his own behavior—he, too, has a penchant for lying to his friends, borrowing cash from them, and then never paying them back. He drinks constantly and grows dependent on speed. His former lovers are dying of AIDS, and he fixates on the virus’s incubation period to figure out whether he’ll also get sick.

[Read: Street photography from ’80s and ’90s New York]

Indiana understood that romantic obsession is timeless, a perpetual coil that revolves around itself only to be severed because its ostensible focus is an individual in a particular time and place. Every detail of Gregory’s life seems dredged from a satirical version of New York City, after the so-called gay cancer was identified and before Rudy Giuliani became mayor. The restaurant where Gregory works is owned by a coke-addled Frenchman named Philippe who wields cleavers to threaten his employees—a funny and well-deployed stereotype of the epicurean figures who cropped up as Manhattan’s food scene exploded during the ’80s. Gregory’s costly photographic practice echoes the monumental Cibachrome prints of the then-buzzy artist Jeff Wall, and more generally the money that flowed into galleries throughout the decade. His apparently ham-handed embrace of identity politics (“I have no right to use images of women,” he says about his work) reflects an age when such concerns were beginning to gain prominence in art discourse. Gregory’s judgmental perspectives on sex comically echo the culture wars raging in the United States when Horse Crazy was published. If the novel’s narrator, and perhaps Indiana himself, found these things alternately tiresome and foreboding, they also drew him out of his life and his walls of books, offering the vague promise that he could be a lover and not an observer—which is to say, that he could be less like himself.

But Horse Crazy, like much of Indiana’s output, avoids a thoroughgoing cynicism even as it disregards affection as “the mortal illness of lonely people.” Indiana diminished concepts such as love and hope not because his life or his work lacked them, but because he didn’t want these nebulous formulations to be used as Band-Aids on chronic societal problems and symptoms of the human condition. In Horse Crazy, his implacable skepticism forces the reader to consider the alienating effects of an era characterized by lethal STIs, unrepentant capitalism, bulldozed cultural history, and pervasive substance addiction. The book’s true love affair is with what cannot be reclaimed: a world untouched by disease and unspoiled by money. Indiana’s idea of being truthful was to react exactly the way his epoch needed him to. The withering vestiges of avant-garde New York—the writers, critics, artists, filmmakers, and dancers who have hung on since its peak—feel a little less vital today without his contempt.

On Sunday afternoon, I stood for three hours in a block of Midtown Manhattan—33rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues—surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. Every half hour or so, the herd shuffled forward 15 or 20 feet before the police barriers up ahead closed again. Whenever we moved, a chant of “USA! USA!” broke out, only to die as soon as progress stopped. Madison Square Garden, where Trump and an all-star MAGA lineup were on the bill, stood in view the whole time, a few hundred feet away. Snipers perched on high-rise rooftops, and a pair of drones hovered overhead. A friend had bought two tickets, but word reached us from the front that tickets weren’t being checked—they were a ruse for the campaign to snag fundraising emails. As the sun drifted toward the Hudson River and the sparkling fall day cooled off, the clock was outrunning us.

I’ve been in Trump crowds before, but never in New York City. The familiarly scuzzy and desolate neighborhood around Penn Station was filled with a political throng wearing an unusual amount of red for a city that dresses dark. Because it was New York, there were a lot more Black and brown people, and a lot more Orthodox Jews, than you’d see at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. An occupying force of unmistakable locals had taken over the street. My disorientation deepened all afternoon.

No one had more than six inches of personal space. To exit through the crush sideways and climb over metal barriers for a bathroom break or cup of coffee would take a major effort of will. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but chat.

Next to me stood a solemn-looking man in his 20s who held a tiny American flag in one hand. He said that he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a world-famous, progressively orthodox cultural institution where his politics made him a lonely dissident. One of about three? No, he said—there were secret comrades in warehousing. I asked if he thought the country could come together after the election, whatever the result. His answer—that Trump had the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans, more than enough to clean up the mess, and that Democrats alone were guilty of demonizing their opponents, because Republicans were just saying what was true—sounded like a no.

An hour later and 100 feet farther along, I was standing beside Richard and Jason, Trinidad-born men in MAGA caps, who live near me in Brooklyn. They supported Trump because of high prices—a dozen eggs for $6—and lack of international respect; also, The Apprentice. Richard was certain that Trump would win in a landslide—would even take deep-blue New York City. (There’s a lot of secret Trump support in Flatbush, he confided.) When I asked if he would accept a result that went against his candidate, Richard simply repeated: Trump in a landslide. I almost believed him, because the street had become an echo chamber—not the virtual kind, but a physical one—and I began to understand the power of crowds over the mind. As the afternoon wore on, it became harder to hold on to the thought that all these thousands of people were wrong.

Around 3 o’clock—after two hours of standing, and no progress for at least 45 minutes—my lower back throbbed. It was becoming clear that we would never cross 7th Avenue and reach the promised land of Madison Square Garden, and I began to imagine a stampede. If this had been an ordinary Manhattan traffic jam, the blare of car horns would have been deafening. But the crowd remained shockingly patient and pleasant, making instant friends in the American way. Promoters for a local betting market tossed out red T-shirts that gave Trump a 57 percent chance to win, and Richard, Jason, and my other neighbors took up a cry of “Bet on Trump! Bet on Trump!” On the sidewalk, a near-perfect Kim Jong Un impersonator was barking, “No to democracy! Yes to autocracy! That’s why I support Donald J. Trump!” and everyone was laughing. Being fellow Americans together, or New Yorkers, or even Yankee fans, wouldn’t have been enough to prevent things from getting ugly. Today, the week before Election Day, only a political tribe—the Fellowship of Trump on 33rd Street—creates such solidarity.

Close to 4 o’clock, we hadn’t moved in well over an hour. With this motionlessness in the heart of New York City, the crowd congealed into a single thought, and the thought became reality—it was as if Trump had somehow already won. Wedged between the men from Flatbush and a metal barricade, I was living in Trump’s America. The smiles and laughter, the cheerful outbreaks of chanting, the helpful calls of “Chair coming through, wheelchair coming”—all these tokens of happiness depended on a mass delusion that had everyone in its grip. It was absolutely possible for the unanimous belief of all these thousands of people to be wrong. And if I stayed here any longer, I might go under the spell too, like a lost climber who sits down to rest in the snow for a few minutes and never gets up. I squeezed my way along the sidewalk until I found an opening in the barricades and slipped out.

So I, along with 10,000 or 20,000 others, missed the big show inside Madison Square Garden. I missed the racist jokes and vulgar insults and profanity directed at Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; at Jews, Palestinians, women, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and the half of Americans who support Democrats. I missed the crude nativism, the conspiracy-theory mongering, the warnings of violence and revenge. I missed the grifters and the nepos, the opportunists and the fanatics, the heirs of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, the fascist wannabes who don’t quite have the chops—the dark mirror of the good will outside. I missed seeing what the hateful extravaganza would have done to my neighbors in the crowd on 33rd Street. And I went home wondering how a spell ever breaks.

We might as well start with the lowlight of last night’s Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. That would be Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster who’s part of Joe Rogan’s circle, and who was the evening’s first speaker.

“These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside,” he joked. “Just like they did to our country.” A minute later: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” It took a few more minutes before he got to the joke about Black people loving watermelons. Novel, edgy stuff—for a minstrel show in 1874.

Other speakers were only somewhat better. A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ” and “the devil.” The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised “to restore America to the true Americans.”) Melania Trump delivered a rare public speech that served mostly as a reminder of why her speeches are rare.

[Read: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks.

Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror—presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally. (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.)

“Stay on message,” pleaded Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican in a tight reelection race. That’s ridiculous. This—all of this—is the message of Trump’s campaign. Other Republicans may cringe at the coarseness of these comments, or worry that they will cost votes, but they made their choice long ago, and have stuck with them despite years of bigotry and other ugliness

[Adam Serwer: J. D. Vance’s empty nationalism]

Trump is running on nativism, crude stereotypes, and lies about immigrants. He has demeaned Harris in offensive and personal terms. He’s attacked American Jews for not supporting him. His disdain for Puerto Rico is long-standing, and his callousness after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was one of the most appalling moments of an appalling presidency. He feuded with the island’s elected officials, his administration tried to block aid, and he tried to swap the American territory for Greenland. (The Trump campaign said that Hinchcliffe’s routine “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” which is also absurd. He was invited by Trump to appear at a rally for Trump’s campaign, and made the joke standing at a lectern emblazoned with Trump’s name.)

The Trump campaign itself may be perfectly happy with how it all went down. Madison Square Garden, the most famous venue in Manhattan, a place that still enthralls him, was packed to the rafters for him. Counterprotests were muted, even as speakers at the rally boasted about entering the beating heart of liberalism. (As The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes, New York City has moved somewhat toward him, though any hopes of his winning the city or the state remain far-fetched.)

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump’s dog whistles are unmistakable]

The whole point of the rally was provocation. Trump has long demonstrated a view that it’s better when people are talking about him—even if they’re outraged—than talking about anyone else. The record is murky: Trump won in 2016 but lost the popular vote, lost in 2020, and led his party to poor performances in 2018 and 2022. But he appears to believe that this year could be different. Trump calculates that if people are thinking about immigration and race, they will move toward him, even if they disapprove of the policy solutions he’s offering (or just don’t believe he’ll implement them).

Some Democrats agree, and fret that the Harris campaign’s recent turn toward attacking Trump is a missed opportunity for the Democrat to make a positive case for herself or refocus on economic issues. The pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward warns in an email that “attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” while Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a Harris surrogate, warned that the rally was “bait.”

As a matter of electoral calculation, focusing on the offensive remarks last night may be unhelpful for Harris. But as an encapsulation of what Trump stands for as a candidate, and what he would bring to office, the rally was an effective medium for his closing message.

For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn’t want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in his driveway in western New York State and wake up on vacation in Florida (or wherever), what is the point?

Driverless cars have long supposedly been right around the corner. Elon Musk once said that fully self-driving cars would be ready by 2019. Ford planned to do it by 2021. The self-driving car is simultaneously a pipe dream and sort of, kind of the reality of many Americans. Waymo, a robotaxi company owned by Alphabet, is now providing 100,000 rides a week across a handful of U.S. cities. Just last week, Tesla announced its own robotaxi, the Cybercab, in dramatic fashion. Still, the fact remains: If you are in the driver’s seat of a car and out on the road nearly anywhere in America, you are responsible for the car, and you have to pay attention. My dad’s self-driving fantasy likely remains far away.

But driving is already changing. Normal cars—cars that are not considered fancy or experimental and strange—now come with advanced autonomous features. Some can park themselves. You can ask your electric Hummer to “crab walk” into or out of a tight corner that you can’t navigate yourself. It seems that if you are on a bad date and happen to be sitting on a restaurant patio not too far from where you parked your Hyundai Tucson SEL, you can press a button to make it pull up beside you on the street, getaway-car style. It’s still hard to imagine a time when no one needs to drive themselves anywhere, but that’s not the case with parallel parking. We might be a generation away from new drivers who never learn to parallel park at all.

It makes sense that the task would be innovated away. Parallel parking is a source of anxiety and humiliation: David Letterman once pranked a bunch of teenagers by asking them to try to parallel park in Midtown Manhattan, which went just as hilariously poorly as you might expect. Parallel parking isn’t as dangerous as, say, merging onto the highway or navigating a roundabout, but it’s a big source of fear for drivers—hence a Volkswagen ad campaign in which the company made posters for a fake horror movie called The Parallel Park. And then it’s a source of pride. Perfectly executed parking jobs are worthy of photographs and public bragging. My first parallel park in Brooklyn on the day I moved there at 21 was flawless. I didn’t know about alternate-side parking, so I ultimately was ticketed and compelled to pay $45 for the memory, but it was worth it.

Whether or not you live in a place where you have to parallel park often, you should know how to do it. At some point, you will at least need to be able to handle a car and its angles and blind spots and existence in physical space well enough to do something like it. But this is an “eat your vegetables” thing to say. So, I thought, the best people to look at in order to guess how long we have until parallel parking is an extinct art might be the people who don’t already have a driver’s license. According to some reports, Gen Z doesn’t want to learn how to drive—“I’ll call an Uber or 911,” one young woman told The Washington Post. Those who do want to learn have to do so in a weird transitional moment in which we are still pretending that parallel parking is something a human must do, even though it isn’t, a lot of the time.

I talked with some longtime driving-school instructors who spoke about self-parking features the way that high-school English teachers talk about ChatGPT. The kids are relying on them to their detriment, and it’s hard to get them to form good habits, said Brian Posada, an instructor at the Chicago-based Entourage Driving School (not named after the HBO show, he said). “I’ve got some students who are really rich,” he told me. As soon as they get their permits, their parents buy them Teslas or other fancy cars that can self-park. Even if he teaches them how to parallel park properly, they will not practice in their own time. “They get lazy,” he told me.

Parallel parking isn’t part of the driver’s-license exam in California, though Mike Thomas still teaches it at his AllGood Driving School. His existential dread is that he will one day be less like an educator and more like the person who teaches you how to use your iPhone. He tells teens not to rely on the newfangled tools or else they will not really know how to drive, but he doesn’t know whether they actually buy in. “It’s hard to get into the minds of teenagers,” he said. “You’d be amazed at how good teenagers are at telling people what they want to hear.” Both instructors told me, more or less, that although they can teach any teen to parallel park, they have little faith that these new drivers will keep up the skill or that they will try on their own.

Teens are betting, maybe correctly, that they soon may never have to parallel park at all. Already, if you live in Austin or San Francisco and want to avoid parallel parking downtown, you can order an Uber and be picked up by a driverless Waymo. But autonomous parking is much simpler to pull off than fully autonomous driving. When I pushed Greg Stevens, the former chief engineer of driver-assistance features at Ford, to give me an estimate of when nobody will have to drive themselves anywhere anymore, he would not say 2035 or 2050 or anything else. He said he would not guess.

“The horizon keeps receding,” he told me. Stevens now leads research at the University of Michigan’s Mcity, a huge testing facility for autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles. Most driving, he said—99.9 percent—is “really boring and repetitive and easy to automate.” But in the final .1 percent, there are edge cases: “things that happen that are very rare, but when they happen they’re very significant.” That’s a teen whipping an egg at your windshield, a mattress falling off the back of a truck, a weird patch of gravel, or whatever else. “Those are hard to encapsulate completely,” he said, “because there’s an infinite number of those types of scenarios that could happen.”

In many ways, people are still resisting the end of driving. One guy in Manhattan is agitating for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing human beings the “right to drive,” if they so choose, in our autonomous-vehicle future. It can be hard to predict whether people will want to use new features, Stevens told me: Some cars can now change lanes for you, if you let them, which people are scared to do. Most can try to keep you in your lane, but some people hate this a lot. And for now, self-driving cars are just not that much more pleasant to use than regular cars. On the highway, the car tracks your gaze and head position to make sure your eyes stay on the road the entire time—arguably more depressing and mind-numbing than regular highway driving.

Many people don’t want a self-parking car, which is why Ford has recently paused plans to put the feature in all new vehicles. I hate driving because it’s dangerous, but I am good at parallel parking, and I’m not ready to see it go. It’s the only aspect of operating a vehicle for which I have any talent. I don’t want to ease into a tight spot without the thrill of feeling competent. Parallel parking is arguably the hardest part of driving, but succeeding at it is the most gratifying.

If parallel parking persists for the simple reason that Americans don’t want to give it up, fully self-driving cars may have little hope. A country in which nobody has to change lanes on a six-lane highway or park on their own is a better country, objectively. I also spoke with Nicholas Giudice, a spatial-computing professor at the University of Maine who is working on autonomous vehicles with respect to “driving-limited populations” such as people with visual impairments or older adults. Giudice is legally blind and can’t currently drive a car. He said he would get in the first totally self-driving car anybody offered him: “If you tell me there’s one outside of my lab, I’ll hop into it now.”

Conventional parallel parking—sweating, straining, tapping the bumper of the car in front of you, finally getting the angle right on the 40th try—won’t have to disappear, but it could become part of a subculture one day, Giudice said. There will be driving clubs or special recreational driving tracks. Maybe there will be certain lanes on the highway where it would be allowed, at least for a while. “You can’t have 95 percent autonomous vehicles and a couple of yahoos driving around manually,” he said. “It will just be too dangerous.”

Am I a yahoo for still wanting to parallel park? I can mollify myself with a fantasy of parallel parking as not a chore but a fun little game to play in a closed environment. I can picture it next to the mini-golf and the batting cages at one of those multipurpose “family fun” centers. There’s one near my parents’ house where you can already ride a fake motorcycle and shoot a fake gun. My dad could drive me there with his feet up and a ball game on.

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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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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.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Illustrations by Anuj Shrestha

It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 4852.5291ʹS 12323.5116ʹW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.

They had been sailing a 60-foot foiling boat, the Mālama, in the Ocean Race, a round-the-world yachting competition, and had passed near that very spot, halfway between New Zealand and South America. Now, two months later, they had paused briefly in Newport, Rhode Island, before tackling the final stretch across the Atlantic. (And the Mālama would win the race.) I spoke with some members of the five-person crew before going out with them for a sail on Narragansett Bay. When I asked about their experience at the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, they all brought up the weather.

With a test pilot’s understatement, the crew described the conditions as “significant” or “strong” or “noteworthy” (or, once, “incredibly noteworthy”). The Southern Ocean, which girds the planet in the latitudes above Antarctica and below the other continents, has the worst weather in the world because its waters circulate without any landmass to slow them down. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the most powerful on Earth, a conveyor belt that never stops and that in recent years has been moving faster. These are the waters that tossed Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton. The winds are cold and brutal. Waves reach 60 or 70 feet. In a second, a racing boat’s speed can drop from 30 knots to five, then jump back to 30. You may have to ride out these conditions, slammed and jammed, for five days, 10 days, trimming sails from inside a tiny sealed cockpit, unable to stand up fully all that time. To sleep, you strap yourself into a harness. You may wake up bruised.

[Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go]

This is not a forgiving environment for a sailboat. But it’s a natural habitat for the albatross you find yourself watching through a foggy pane as it floats on air blowing across the water’s surface—gliding tightly down one enormous wave and then tightly up the next. The bird has a 10-foot wingspan, but the wings do not pump; locked and motionless, they achieve aerodynamic perfection. The albatross gives no thought to the longest swim. It may not have touched land in years.

The oceanic pole of inaccessibility goes by a more colloquial name: Point Nemo. The reference is not to the Disney fish, but to the captain in Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. In Latin, nemo means “no one,” which is appropriate because there is nothing and no one here. Point Nemo lies beyond any national jurisdiction. According to Flightradar24, a tracking site, the occasional commercial flight from Sydney or Auckland to Santiago flies overhead, when the wind is right. But no shipping lanes pass through Point Nemo. No country maintains a naval presence. Owing to eccentricities of the South Pacific Gyre, the sea here lacks nutrients to sustain much in the way of life—it is a marine desert. Because biological activity is minimal, the water is the clearest of any ocean.

What you do find in the broad swath of ocean around Point Nemo—at the bottom of the sea, two and a half miles below the surface—are the remains of spacecraft. They were brought down deliberately by means of a controlled deorbit, the idea being that the oceanic point of inaccessibility makes a better landing zone than someone’s rooftop in Florida or North Carolina. Parts of the old Soviet Mir space station are here somewhere, as are bits and pieces of more than 250 other spacecraft and their payloads. They had been sent beyond the planet’s atmosphere by half a dozen space agencies and a few private companies, and then their lives came to an end. There is a symmetry in the outer-space connection: If you are on a boat at Point Nemo, the closest human beings will likely be the astronauts aboard the International Space Station; it periodically passes directly above, at an altitude of about 250 miles. When their paths crossed at Point Nemo, the ISS astronauts and the sailors aboard the Mālama exchanged messages.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

The Mālama’s crew spoke with me about the experience of remoteness. At Point Nemo, they noted, there is no place to escape to. If a mast breaks, the closest help, by ship, from Chile or New Zealand, could be a week or two away. You need to be able to fix anything—sails, engines, electronics, the hull itself. The crew described sensations of rare clarity and acuity brought on by the sheer scale of risk. The austral environment adds a stark visual dimension. At this far-southern latitude, the interplay of light and cloud can be intense: the darks so very dark, the brights so very bright.

Simon Fisher, the Mālama’s navigator, described feeling like a trespasser as the boat approached Point Nemo—intruding where human beings do not belong. Crew members also described feelings of privilege and power. “There’s something very special,” Fisher said, “about knowing you’re someplace where everybody else isn’t.”

We all know the feeling. Rain-swept moors, trackless deserts, unpeopled islands. For me, such places are hard to resist. Metaphorically, of course, remoteness can be found anywhere—cities, books, relationships. But physical remoteness is a category of its own. It is an enhancer: It can make the glorious better and the terrible worse. The oceanic pole of inaccessibility distills physical remoteness on our planet into a pure and absolute form. There are continental poles of inaccessibility too—the place on each landmass that is farthest from the sea. But these locations are not always so remote. You can drive to some of them. People may live nearby. (The North American pole of inaccessibility is on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota.) But Point Nemo is nearly impossible to get to and offers nothing when you arrive, not even a place to stand. It is the anti-Everest: It beckons because nothing is there.

I first heard the name Point Nemo in 1997, when hydrophones on the floor of the South Pacific, thousands of miles apart, picked up the loudest underwater sound ever recorded. This got headlines, and the sound was quickly named the “Bloop.” What could be its source? Some speculated about an undiscovered form of marine life lurking in the abyssal depths. There was dark talk about Russian or American military activity. Readers of H. P. Lovecraft remembered that his undersea zombie city of R’lyeh was supposedly not far away. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration eventually concluded that the sound had come from the fracturing or calving of ice in Antarctica. In this instance, freakish conditions had directed the sound of an Antarctic event northward, toward a lonely expanse of ocean. Faraway hydrophones then picked up the sound and mistook its place of origin. News reports noted the proximity to Point Nemo.

[Video: The loudest underwater sound ever recorded has no scientific explanation]

You might have thought that a planetary feature as singular as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility would be as familiar as the North Pole or the equator. In a sci-fi story, this spot in the South Pacific might be a portal to some other dimension—or possibly the nexus of the universe, as the intersection of First and First in Manhattan was once said to be. Yet at the time of the Bloop, the location of the oceanic pole of inaccessibility had been known and named for only five years.

I have not been to Point Nemo, though it has maintained a curious hold on me for decades. Not long ago, I set out to find the handful of people on Earth who have some sort of personal connection to the place. I started with the man who put it on the map.

Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian-born engineer, left his homeland in the 1970s as political and intellectual life there became turbulent. At the University of Zagreb, he had studied geodesy—the science of measuring Earth’s physical properties, such as its shape and its orientation in space. Degree in hand, he eventually found his way to Calgary, Alberta, where he still lives and where I spent a few days with him last fall. At 81, he is no longer the avid mountaineer he once was, but he remains fit and bluff and gregarious. A trim gray beard and unkempt hair add a slight Ewok cast to his features.

After arriving in Canada, Lukatela was employed as a survey engineer. For several years, he worked on the Alaska Highway natural-gas pipeline. For another company, he determined the qibla—the precise alignment toward the Kaaba, in Mecca—for a new university and its mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In time, he created a software company whose product he named after the Greek astronomer Hipparchus. This was in the 1980s, when digital cartography was advancing rapidly and civilian GPS systems were on the horizon. The Hipparchus software library—“a family of algorithms that dealt with differential geometry on the surface of an ellipsoid,” as he described it, intending to be helpful—made it easier to bridge, mathematically, three-dimensional and two-dimensional geographical measurements. Lukatela can go on at length about the capabilities of Hipparchus, which he eventually sold to Microsoft, but two of the most significant were its power and its accuracy.

By his own admission, Lukatela is the kind of man who will not ask for directions. But he has a taste for geographical puzzles. He heard about the longest-swim problem from a friend at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and was immediately engaged. You could twirl a classroom globe and guess, correctly, that the oceanic pole of inaccessibility must lie in the South Pacific, probably concealed by the rectangle where most publishers of maps and globes put their logo. But no one had tried to establish the exact location. As Lukatela saw it, the logic of the search process was simple. It takes three points to define a circle. Lukatela needed to find the largest oceanic circle that met two criteria: The circumference had to be defined by three points of dry land. And inside the circle there could be no land at all. The oceanic point of inaccessibility would be the center of that circle.

I’ll leave the computational churning aside, except to say that Hipparchus was made for a problem like this. Drawing on a digitized cartographic database, it could generate millions of random locations in the ocean and calculate the distance from each on a spherical surface to the nearest point of land. Lukatela eventually found the three “proximity vertices” he needed. One of them is Ducie Island, a tiny atoll notable for a shark-infested lagoon. It is part of the Pitcairn Islands, a British overseas territory, where in 1790 the Bounty mutineers made their unhappy home. A second vertex is the even tinier Motu Nui, a Chilean possession, whose crags rise to the west of Easter Island. The character Moana, in the animated movie, comes from there. The third vertex is desolate Maher Island, off the coast of Antarctica. It is a breeding ground for Adélie penguins. The three islands define a circle of ocean larger than the old Soviet Union. Point Nemo, at the center, lies 1,670.4 miles from each vertex. For perspective, that is roughly the distance from Manhattan to Santa Fe.

Lukatela completed his calculations in 1992, and quietly shared the results with his friend at Woods Hole and a few other colleagues. As the young internet gained users, word about Point Nemo spread among a small subculture of geodesists, techies, and the simply curious. In time, new cartographic databases became available, moving the triangulation points slightly. Lukatela tried out two of the databases, each recalibration giving Point Nemo itself a nudge, but not by much.

Lukatela had named the oceanic pole of inaccessibility after the mysterious captain in the Jules Verne novel he had loved as a boy. Submerged in his steampunk submarine, Captain Nemo sought to keep his distance from terrestrial woes: “Here alone do I find independence! Here I recognize no superiors! Here I’m free!”

But Captain Nemo couldn’t entirely stay aloof from the rest of the planet, and neither can Point Nemo. Many of the boats in the Ocean Race carry a “science package”— equipment for collecting weather data and water samples from regions of the sea that are otherwise nearly impossible to monitor. Data collected by their instruments, later given to labs, reveal the presence of microplastics: Even at the oceanic point of inaccessibility, you are not beyond the reach of humanity.

An article this past spring in the journal Nature reported the results of a scientific expedition that bored deep into the sediment of the ocean floor near Point Nemo. The focus was on the fluctuating character, over millions of years, of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, whose existence became possible after tectonic forces separated Australia and South America from Antarctica. The current helps regulate temperatures worldwide and keep Antarctica cold. But, as the Nature article explained, its character is changing.

I spent several hours recently with one of the article’s authors, Gisela Winckler, at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, high on the Palisades overlooking the Hudson River. Winckler is a physicist and an oceanographer, and her interest in oceans and paleoclimate goes back to her graduate-school days at Heidelberg University, in Germany. She confessed that she’d first learned about Point Nemo not from a scientific paper but from the 2010 album Plastic Beach, by Damon Albarn’s project Gorillaz. Winckler is intrepid; early in her career, a quarter century ago, she descended to the Pacific floor in the submersible Alvin, looking for gas hydrates and methane seeps. Yellow foul-weather gear hangs behind her office door. On a table sits a drill bit used for collecting sediment samples. Water from Point Nemo is preserved in a vial.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

Winckler’s two-month expedition aboard the drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution, in 2019, was arduous. Scientists and crew members set out from Punta Arenas, Chile, near the start of the dark austral winter; they would not encounter another ship. The seas turned angry as soon as the Resolution left the Strait of Magellan, and stayed that way. The shipboard doctor got to know everyone. Winckler shrugged at the memory. That’s the Southern Ocean for you. The drill sites had been chosen because the South Pacific is understudied and because the area around Point Nemo had sediment of the right character: so thick and dense with datable microfossils that you can go back a million years and sometimes be able to tell what was happening century by century. The team went back further in time than that. The drills punched through the Pleistocene and into the Pliocene, collecting core samples down to a depth corresponding to 5 million years ago and beyond.

The work was frequently interrupted by WOW alerts—the acronym stands for “waiting on weather”—when the heave of the ship made drilling too dangerous. Five weeks into the expedition, a violent weather system the size of Australia came roaring from the west. The alert status hit the highest level—RAW, for “run away from weather”—and the Resolution ran.

But the team had collected enough. It would spend the next five years comparing sediment data with what is known or surmised about global temperatures through the ages. A 5-million-year pattern began to emerge. As Winckler explained, “During colder times, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current itself becomes cooler and slows down, shifting a little bit northward, toward the equator. But during warmer times, it warms and speeds up, shifting its latitude a little bit southward, toward the pole.” The current is warming now and therefore speeding up, and its course is more southerly—all of which erodes the Antarctic ice sheet. Warm water does more damage to ice than warm air can do.

Before I left the Palisades, Winckler walked me over to the Lamont-Doherty Core Repository, a sediment library where more than 20,000 tubes from decades of expeditions are stacked on floor-to-ceiling racks. The library was very cold—it’s kept at 2 degrees centigrade, the temperature of the sea bottom—and very humid. Open a tube, and the sediment may still be moist. I wondered idly if in her Point Nemo investigations Winckler had ever run into a bit of space junk. She laughed. No, the expedition hadn’t deployed underwater video, and the chances would have been infinitesimal anyway. Then again, she said, you never know. Some 30 years ago, during an expedition in the North Atlantic, she had seen a bottle of Beck’s beer from an array of cameras being towed a mile or two below the surface. In 2022, in the South Pacific, the headlights of a submersible at the bottom of the Mariana Trench—about seven miles down, the deepest spot in any ocean—picked up the glassy green of another beer bottle resting in the sediment.

Jonathan McDowell has never been to the ocean floor, but he does have a rough idea where the world’s oceanic space junk can be found. McDowell is an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also part of the team that manages science operations for the Chandra deep-space X-ray telescope. At more or less monthly intervals, he publishes a newsletter, Jonathan’s Space Report, notable for its wide-ranging expertise and quirky humor. He has written about Point Nemo and its environs, and in an annual report, he provides long lists, in teletype font, with the coordinates of known debris splashdowns.

British by parentage and upbringing, McDowell looks ready to step into the role of Doctor Who: rumpled dark suit, colorful T-shirt, hair like a yogi’s. He is 64, which he mentioned was 34 if you count in Martian years. I met him at his lair, in a gritty district near Cambridge—some 1,900 square feet of loft space crammed with books and computers, maps and globes. One shelf displays a plush-toy Tribble from a famous Star Trek episode. A small container on another shelf holds a washer from the camera of a U.S. spy satellite launched into orbit in 1962.

McDowell has been preoccupied by spaceflight all his life. His father was a physicist who taught at Royal Holloway, University of London. As a teenager, he began keeping track of rocket launches. In maturity, McDowell has realized a grander ambition: documenting the history of every object that has left the planet for outer space. Nothing is beneath his notice. He has studied orbiting bins of garbage discarded decades ago by Russia’s Salyut space stations. If a Beck’s bottle were circling the planet, he’d probably know. McDowell estimates that the thousands of files in binder boxes on his shelves hold physical records of 99 percent of all the objects that have made it into orbit. For what it covers, no database in the world matches the one in McDowell’s loft.

Unless something is in very high orbit, what goes up eventually comes down, by means of a controlled or uncontrolled deorbit. The pieces of rockets and satellites and space stations large enough to survive atmospheric reentry have to hit the planet’s surface somewhere. McDowell pulled several pages from a printer—colored maps with tiny dots showing places around the world where space debris has fallen. The maps reveal a cluster of dots spanning the South Pacific, like a mirror held up to the Milky Way.

Guiding objects carefully back to Earth became a priority after 1979, when the reentry of the American space station Skylab went awry and large chunks of debris rained down on southern Australia. No one was hurt, McDowell said, but NASA became an object of ridicule. The coastal town of Esperance made international news when it tried to fine the space agency for littering. From the 1990s on, more and more satellites were launched into orbit; the rockets that put them there were designed to fall back to Earth. The empty ocean around Point Nemo became a primary target zone: a “spacecraft cemetery,” as it’s sometimes called. That’s where Mir came down, in 2001. It’s where most of the spacecraft that supply the International Space Station come down. There are other cemeteries in other oceans, but the South Pacific is Forest Lawn. The reentry process is not an exact science, so the potential paths, while narrow, may be 1,000 miles long. When reentry is imminent, warnings go out to keep ships away.

Illustration by Anuj Shrestha

When I mentioned the conversation between the Mālama crew and its nearest neighbors, the space-station astronauts, McDowell pointed me toward a bank of flatscreens. He called up a three-dimensional image of Earth and then showed me the orbital path of the ISS over the previous 24 hours. Relative to the universe, he explained, the plane of the ISS orbit never changes—the station goes round and round, 16 times a day, five miles a second. But because the globe is spinning underneath, each orbit covers a different slice of the world—now China, now India, now Arabia. McDowell retrieved a moment from the day before. The red line of the orbit unspooled from between Antarctica and New Zealand and traced a path northeast across the Pacific. He pointed to the time stamp and the location. At least once a day, he said, the space station will be above Point Nemo.

[Read: A close look at the most distant object NASA has ever explored]

McDowell is drawn to the idea of remoteness, which maybe shouldn’t be surprising: To an astrophysicist, remoteness is never far away. But, he said, “there are layers and layers when it comes to how you think about it.” In 2019, a space probe relayed pictures of a 22-mile-long rock known as Arrokoth, the most distant object in our solar system ever to be visited by a spacecraft. That’s one kind of remote. More recently, the James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies more distant from our own than any known before. That’s another kind. McDowell brought the subject almost back to Earth. On our planet, he said, Point Nemo is definitely remote—as remote as you can get. “But I’m always moved by the thought of Mike Collins, who was the first person to be completely isolated from the rest of humanity when his two friends were on the moon and he was orbiting the far side, and he had the moon between him and every other human being who has ever lived.”

Collins himself wrote of that moment: “I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it.”

I joined Hrvoje Lukatela and his wife, Dunja, for dinner one evening at their home near the University of Calgary. Hrvoje and Dunja had met at university as young mountaineers—outdoors clubs offered a form of insulation from the Communist regime. They emigrated together soon after their marriage. In the basement office of their home, he still keeps his boyhood copy (in Croatian) of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Lukatela spread maps and computer printouts on the table as we ate.

Lukatela might wish to be remembered for the Hipparchus software library, but he accepts that the first line of his obituary will probably be about Point Nemo. He is proud of his discovery, and like a man with a hammer, he has a tendency to see everything as a nail. He and Dunja spend part of the year in Croatia, and in an email this past spring, he sent me some new calculations that solve the longest-swim problem for the Adriatic Sea (“with millimetric numerical precision”). Set him down alongside Loch Ness or the Central Park Reservoir, and I can guess what he’d be thinking.

Lukatela has a dream for Point Nemo, though probably not one that he can pursue alone. His hope is that someone, someday, will venture into the South Pacific and leave GPS receivers on Ducie Island, Motu Nui Island, and Maher Island, establishing the location of the triangulation points more accurately than ever before. While they’re at it, they might also drive brass geodetic markers into the rock. Ducie and Motu Nui would be relatively easy to get to—“I could do it on my own,” he ventured. (Dunja, listening, did not seem overly concerned.) Access to Maher Island, Lukatela went on, with its inhospitable location and brutal weather, might require some sort of government expedition.

[From the February 1906 issue: A history and future of human exploration]

What government would that even be? Lukatela indicated Maher Island on a map. Officially, it is part of Marie Byrd Land, one of the planet’s few remaining tracts of terra nullius—land claimed by no one. But Lukatela recalled hearing that Maher Island had recently come under the jurisdiction of one of those start-up micronations that people invent to advance some cause.

He was right. Maher is one of five Antarctic islands claimed by the Grand Duchy of Flandrensis, a Belgium-based micronation devoted to raising ecological awareness. At international conferences, the grand duke, Nicholas de Mersch d’Oyenberghe, wears military dress blues with handsome decorations and a yellow sash. But he answers his own email. Asked about Lukatela’s ambition, he explained that his country is the only one in the world that seeks to bar all human beings from its territory; the thousand or so people who have registered as citizens are all nonresidents. “No humans, only nature!” is the Grand Duchy’s motto. However, he went on, a mission to install a GPS receiver and a geodetic-survey marker would be deemed scientific, and welcomed. The Grand Duchy would be happy to provide a flag.

The astronaut Steve Bowen has orbited above Maher Island and Point Nemo many times. Before being selected by NASA, Bowen was a submariner; he knows a lot about life in a sealed container far from anywhere. He was one of the crew members aboard the International Space Station who spoke with the Ocean Race sailors as their trajectories crossed at Point Nemo. When I caught up with him this past summer, he compared his circumstances and theirs. The astronauts sleep a lot better, he said—in microgravity, you don’t wake up bruised. But the environment never changes. There is no fresh air, no wind, no rain. Bowen remembered the exhilaration whenever his submarine surfaced in open sea and he would emerge topside into the briny spray, tethered to the boat, taking in a view of nothing but water in every direction.

In the space station, Bowen would often float his way to the seven-window cupola—the observation module—and gaze at the planet below. From that altitude, you have a sight line extending 1,000 miles in every direction, an area about the size of Brazil. In a swath of the planet that big, Bowen said, you can almost always find a reference point—an island, a peninsula, something. The one exception: when the orbit takes you above Point Nemo. For a while, the view through the windows is all ocean.

That same expanse of ocean will one day receive the International Space Station. When it is decommissioned, in 2031, the parts that don’t burn up in the atmosphere will descend toward the South Pacific and its spacecraft cemetery.

Last March, aboard a chartered ship called the Hanse Explorer, a Yorkshire businessman named Chris Brown, 62, exchanged messages with Lukatela to make sure that he had the coordinates he needed—the original computation and the later variations. Brown values precision. As he explained when I reached him at his home in Harrogate after his return from the South Pacific, he and his son Mika had been determined to reach Point Nemo, and even have a swim, and he wanted to be certain he was in the right neighborhood.

This wasn’t just a lark. Brown has been attempting to visit all eight of the planet’s poles of inaccessibility, and he had already knocked off most of the continental ones. Point Nemo, the oceanic pole, was by far the most difficult. Brown is an adventurer, but he is also pragmatic. He once made arrangements to descend to the Titanic aboard the Titan submersible but withdrew in short order because of safety concerns—well founded, as it turned out, given the Titan’s tragic implosion in 2023. The ship he was chartering now could stay at sea for 40 days and was built for ice. Autumn had just begun in the Southern Hemisphere when the Browns left Puerto Montt, Chile, and the weather turned unfriendly at once. “Nausea was never far away,” he recalled.

[Read: The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism]

But approaching Point Nemo, eight days later, the Hanse Explorer found a brief window of calm. Steering a Zodiac inflatable boat and guided by a GPS device, Brown made his way to 4852.5291ʹS 12323.5116ʹW. He and Mika slipped overboard in their wetsuits, becoming the first human beings to enter the ocean here. A video of the event includes photos of the men being ferociously attacked by an albatross. While treading water, they managed to display the maritime flags for the letters N, E, M, and O. Then, mindful of Lukatela’s further calculations, they headed for two other spots, a few miles distant—just to be safe. Admiral Robert Peary’s claim to have been the first person to reach the North Pole, in 1909, has long been disputed; his math was almost certainly off. Brown did not want to become the Peary of Point Nemo.

He isn’t, of course. I think of him, rather, as Point Nemo’s Leif Erikson, the man credited with the first New World toe-touch by a European. I think of Hrvoje Lukatela as some combination of Juan de la Cosa and Martin Waldseemüller, the cartographers who first mapped and named the Western Hemisphere. Jonathan McDowell is perhaps Point Nemo’s Alexander von Humboldt, Gisela Winckler its Charles Lyell and Gertrude Bell. Steve Bowen and the Ocean Race crew, circumnavigating the globe in their different ways, have a wide choice of forebears. The grand duke of Flandrensis may not be Metternich, but he introduces a hint of geopolitics.

Unpopulated and in the middle of nowhere, Point Nemo is starting to have a history.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “The Most Remote Place in the World.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In 1923, as elite American universities began adopting quotas restricting the number of Jews they admitted, an organization was formed to provide a home for Jewish students on campus where they could congregate to pray, socialize, and feel welcome. This organization was called Hillel, and it has been the central address for Jewish life at colleges and universities ever since. That’s how I found my way to it when I was a student at UCLA; overwhelmed by the size of the university, I was looking to connect with a smaller group of individuals with whom I likely shared values, history, and a sense of cultural belonging.

I found this at Hillel, where I discovered so much about who I am in this world, and formed relationships that have lasted my entire adult life. That is why I have been heartbroken and horrified in recent months as the broader Hillel organization has become the target of regular threats and attacks.

Hillel is where I was taught how to pray, how to learn, and how to participate in charity and social-justice work. Hillel is where I learned to define my Judaism not by my immigrant grandparents’ experience and the Holocaust, but by the joy and beauty of Jewish culture as it is unfolding to this day.

Hillel has been foundational to so many Jewish stories over the past century. In the 1930s, it established a student refugee program, saving the lives of nearly 150 young European Jews. In 1947, it helped Hungarian-born Tom Lantos come to the U.S., where he became the only Holocaust survivor to ever be elected to Congress. In the 1950s and ’60s, Hillels across the country organized robust support for the civil-rights movement. In 1960, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Hillel director Max Ticktin addressed 500 students in a march on Library Mall and called for an end to both local and national discrimination, and encouraged students to fight against racist Jim Crow laws. I have raised my children at Hillel, continuing to participate in many capacities even after I received my doctorate; many Hillels are also community centers of a sort, providing religious and spiritual services, meals, and a sense of belonging for those who find themselves at a transition point in their life. When I travel the country and the world, I often visit a local Hillel, and find myself feeling perfectly at home.

[Read: The wrong way to fight campus anti-Semitism on campus]

And this organization is being attacked all over the country, a dynamic that emerged after October 7 and that appears to have grown only more frequent and intense in recent months, as students have returned to campus. At the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, a message on social media posted by the UW-Milwaukee Popular University for Palestine stated that “ANY organization or entity that supports Israel is not welcome at UWM,” specifically mentioning Hillel. The post went on to say that these organizations “will be treated accordingly as extremist criminals. Stay tuned,” and that Zionist groups will not be normalized or welcomed on campus. At Hunter College, in Manhattan, students at Hillel found a sign depicting an assault rifle, calling on students to Bring the war home next to a sign reading Hillel go to hell with an upside-down triangle, indicating that this Hillel is a target. At a recent Baruch College Hillel event held at a Midtown restaurant in New York City designed for incoming freshmen to learn about campus life, Jewish students were met with protesters shouting references to the hostages recently executed by Hamas; a video posted on Instagram featured a protester shouting to a female student, “Where’s Hersh, you ugly-ass bitch?” (The reference was to Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American citizen recently murdered by Hamas.)

In my time as an undergraduate and graduate student at UCLA, I thrived as a student leader at Hillel under the guidance of a boldly liberal Zionist rabbi. He said then what I still believe now: The Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and dignity, and deserve better from their own leadership as well as from Israel. As students, we sought to have peaceful, respectful conversations with students on campus who advocated for the establishment of a Palestinian state. We were met with accusations of racism, swastikas chalked on the bricks of Bruin Walk, and protesters who donned Hamas armbands and stared at us in stony silence. We watched in bewilderment as the “Zionism is racism” campaigns began to take hold on campuses across the country. It was astounding that students would not engage with even those of us who were trying to find common ground and believed in coexistence.

In the 1990s, many of us felt that we had little choice but to accept that a few student organizations were comfortable branding Zionism as a form of racism, or wearing regalia of terrorist organizations whose charters included the explicit elimination of the Jewish state. The refusal of some students to engage in dialogue was once an unspoken policy; now it is an explicit one. Anti-normalization is the name for this trend. It is rooted in the idea that merely talking with people who hold a different point of view from you is tantamount to recognition or acceptance of that view and should be avoided at all costs. The refusal to engage shuts down any dialogue and any sincere attempt to bridge our pain and find ways to communicate with empathy and compassion. This tactic reveals an intellectual weakness, an inability to respond reasonably to a point of view that is not your own. And it is fundamentally contrary to the basic values of the university and academia at large: exposure to and a free exchange of ideas, as well as the ability to find creative and positive outlets for differences of opinion.

[Read: How resilient are Jewish American traditions?]

It is, to put it plainly, undemocratic to support the tactics of drowning out and protesting Israeli or Jewish speakers simply because they are Jewish. It needs to be called out for what it is: anti-Semitism. It is anti-Semitic to seek to deny Jewish students the ability to access the most important organization for Jewish life on campus. We cannot allow this to be normalized.

As for me, I have been uninvited from venues since October 7 simply because I am Jewish. I have been shouted down, asked to leave, accused of a hatred I know not how to summon. And my response is one that I and generations of students have learned at Hillel. Hillel teaches that we should not be afraid to be Jewish. We can be proud to be American. And we deserve the rights and privileges awarded to every minority on campus: a safe place to gather, to pray, to learn, and to fight for what is right.

Each week Quartz highlights the most luxurious real estate listings across the country. These properties feature remarkable views, enviable locations, and lavish amenities — and they’re all on the market right now. Check out the best homes that are available with upcoming open houses.

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At a rally in Tel Aviv this past summer held by Israel’s beleaguered left, Yuval Noah Harari appeared as the keynote speaker. He began his speech not with the latest developments from Gaza or a grand pronouncement about how the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians might be solved. Instead, he did what Harari does best: place all of it, everything people tend to take for granted, within a very, very long historical framework. “Once upon a time, there was neither a Jewish people, nor a Palestinian people,” Harari said. “A hundred million years ago, this land was home to dinosaurs.”

Harari, as anyone who has bought a gift for a dad must know, is a historian whose books, starting with his account of human and civilizational evolution, Sapiens, have sold in the millions. Since the beginning of his stardom, Harari’s identity as an Israeli was no secret. His accent would give that away. But his feelings about his country were not something he openly shared. Consciously or not, he kept his distance from Israel as his stature rose in the pop-intellectual firmament and he jetted off to meetings with the likes of Mark Zuckerberg.

But starting two years ago, when Benjamin Netanyahu was reelected prime minister and formed an extreme-right government intent on dismantling some of the basic guardrails of Israeli democracy, Harari felt he couldn’t stay quiet. He is now among the most internationally famous Israelis speaking publicly about the possibility and necessity of peace.

As the anniversary of the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel approached, I wanted to hear from Harari, who happened to be in the United States touring with his new book, Nexus. We met on the Upper East Side of Manhattan one morning in mid-September.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Gal Beckerman: I’ve probably never felt more despairing in my life about Israel than I have in the past year. You bring historical perspective to everything that you work on, so I’m curious if that makes you see things more hopefully, or whether the country seems even more stuck from where you stand.

Yuval Noah Harari: Israel is at a crossroads. I don’t think its existence is at stake. I do think its identity is at stake. The soul of the country is now the battleground, and the outcome will decide not just the shape of Israel for many, many years to come, but also the shape of Judaism. I think that Judaism is at an intersection. Maybe we haven’t been in such a place for 2,000 years, since the end of the Second Temple era.

Beckerman: What is the parallel with that moment?

Harari: The Second Temple era ended after the Zealots took over with messianic visions and almost destroyed the Jewish people, almost destroyed the Jewish religion, which had to then reinvent itself. And we’ve come full circle. Judaism as we know it was born from the ashes of the Temple of Jerusalem in the failed rebellion against the Romans that the Zealots instigated. For me, the birth scene of Judaism is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the great sages, fleeing Jerusalem and coming to the Roman general Vespasian, who later became Roman emperor, and asking him for a favor: “Please give me Yavne and its wise men.” And Vespasian agrees. This is myth more than history. But this is the founding myth of Judaism. Yavne was a small town not far from present-day Tel Aviv, and that was where ben Zakkai established a learning center, and it changed the nature of Judaism.

Beckerman: It turned from a religion based on priests and temples and sacrifices into a religion of learning, right?

Harari: What do Jews do for the next 2,000 years? They learn—they sit in Yavne and they learn. They go to Egypt; they learn. They go to Brooklyn; they learn. And eventually the circle is almost closed. They come back. They come back to Jerusalem. And the Zealots have now taken over Jerusalem again. And the question that keeps bothering me: What did Jews learn in those 2,000 years? Why did ben Zakkai have to go ask Vespasian for Yavne? He could have just asked Vespasian, Tell me, how do you build an army? How do you fight wars? You Romans, you are so good with power, with violence. We Jews, we want to learn violence. We want to learn power. And Vespasian could have told ben Zakkai. Why did it take 2,000 years of learning in yeshivas to go back to that same moment and basically adopt the values of the Roman legion? Because if I think about what the values are of people like Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu—it’s the values of the Roman legion.

[Read: Yuval Noah Harari’s apocalyptic vision]

Beckerman: So if Netanyahu and his partners on the extreme right are the Zealots, how do you see the other side—yourself—in this battle for the soul of Israel?

Harari: I would say that the other side is Zionist, and it’s important to emphasize and reclaim this word, which has been vilified, not just now, but for decades. When I hear people compare Zionism with racism, this itself is a racist statement, because Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings. Turks can have national feelings, and Germans can have national feelings, but when Jews have national feelings, this is racism. Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact.

Beckerman: This is Zionism as I understand it. But the term has taken on different dimensions for so many people.

Harari: What the political conclusion is from these three facts, that’s up for grabs. And throughout Zionist history, for the past 150 years, people had different ideas. Some ideas were definitely racist and very violent. Some Zionists have denied the existence of a Palestinian people and the right to self-determination of Palestinians. But this is not a logical conclusion from the premises of Zionism. You can acknowledge that there is a Jewish people. It has a right to self-determination. It has a historical connection to the country. And at the same time, there is a Palestinian people. It also has a right to self-determination, and it also has deep historical, spiritual, cultural connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. And now the political question is, what do you do with these two facts? And there are potential solutions, a two-state solution, which you can argue, where exactly will the border pass and what will be the rights of Palestinians who remain in Israeli territory? And we can discuss all that. But basically, Zionism doesn’t deny the existence and rights of Palestinian people.

Beckerman: One of the other things I’ve been struggling with this past year has been the inability of most people to contain more than one narrative in their minds—like the two narratives you just described. And I’ll go a step further, which is to ask about empathy. I can contain the pain and the sorrow that I feel for what happened on October 7 and the people I know, what happened to Jews. And I can still open the newspaper and see what’s happening in Gaza and feel extraordinary pain too, but there are settings in which I can’t talk about the pain that I feel for one side or the other, because it immediately becomes a zero-sum game.

Harari: It’s like in an emergency room in a hospital, where there is triage. You have a couple of people shouting in pain. I’m shouting in pain and somebody near me is also shouting in pain. If the doctor pays attention to them, then maybe they take care of them and not of me. So I shout harder, and like any attention given to the pain of the other person, I feel it as an attack on me, because it has repercussions. I will suffer.

Beckerman: Do you think that Israelis’ capacity for empathy has been degraded over the past year?

Harari: This is one of the things that wars do. This is not unique to Israelis. When there is a war, the first few casualties get so much attention. The millionth casualty, it’s just a number. And this is one of the biggest dangers with the current war, is this process of desensitizing people, brutalizing people. This is how violence breeds more violence, because you get used to it, and it becomes easier. And this is what is now happening with the hostages. When Gilad Shalit was taken hostage 18 years ago, the whole country was focused on that, and Gilad Shalit’s family was sacred. Whatever you thought about the deal to release Shalit, to say a word against him or his family was really blasphemy. And now the police are beating up the families of the hostages. The people spit at them. People curse them. There is a propaganda campaign against them through the right-wing media.

Beckerman: Does this worry you?

Harari: It bothers me, and at the same time, as a historian, unfortunately it makes sense; it’s humanity. Most people have no capacity to empathize with the suffering of the other side, partly because it’s like a resource that is exhausted. In the Second World War, you would not see in British newspapers a lot of images of German families burned in their homes during the bombardment of Hamburg or Dresden.

Beckerman: I’ve heard you talk about the distinction between peace and justice, as a more reasonable way of trying to think about the conflict.

Harari: To some extent, every peace needs justice and every justice needs peace. But they are different ways of looking at reality, at history. Every peace deal in history required giving up some justice. You can’t have absolute justice. Peace is more objective. You can see, are people being killed or not? But people have very, very different concepts of what justice means to them. So if you try to gain absolute justice, you will never have peace. You cannot go back and bring the dead to life; you cannot undo the injuries, the rapes, the humiliation. The only change you can make is in the present. How do we make sure that more people are not killed and injured now and in the future?

[Read: The war that would not end]

Beckerman: I’m curious what you think about the pro-Palestinian protests here and why they have been so compelling, in particular, to young people.

Harari: Obviously, as often happens, you project your own problems, your own issues, onto a distant conflict. And many times, people don’t really understand the conflict. I see it especially with this projection of the colonialist interpretation. People take this model, which is very central in the United States and other Western countries, and impose it on a completely different situation. And they say, Okay, the Israelis are the white Europeans who came to colonize the indigenous Palestinians. And there are some kernels of truth in this, but it’s a wrong model. I mean, it denies the fact that there was continuous Jewish presence on the land, going back 3,000 years. For 2,000 years, Jews were one of the chief victims of European civilization, and suddenly now they become the Europeans? This also ignores the fact that more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews are not European. They are descendants of Middle Eastern Jews from Egypt, from Yemen, from Iraq, who were brutally expelled from their ancestral homes after 1948 by Arab governments in revenge for the 1948 war. So my husband, for example, his family is from Egypt, expelled by Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Beckerman: I know that you made a decision to publicly weigh in when Netanyahu’s coalition tried to pass a law curbing the power of the supreme court; you saw a threat to democracy. Does it still feel like that threat exists?

Harari: Yes, and then even after everything that has happened with October 7 and the war, Netanyahu and his colleagues are still at it. You know, he has not taken any responsibility for October 7. I don’t hold him responsible for every decision of some company commander in the army and so forth. But the prime minister, the leader of the country, has one major responsibility—to set the priorities. He decided that the No. 1 problem with Israel is the supreme court. The priority is to destroy the supreme court. And this is his responsibility, nobody else’s. And if he, if Israel had given a quarter of the attention that was given to the supreme court to Hamas, there would have been no October 7. And the other thing, which goes back to the beginning of our discussion: The Israeli nation is collapsing, the patriotic bonds that hold the nation together are being torn deliberately by Netanyahu and his colleagues. He is the most hated person in the history of Israel. Like 50 percent of the people just hate him on a level that is unimaginable. I think the No. 1 responsibility of a leader, especially for a country in such existential danger as Israel, is to unify. And he’s the last person on Earth who can unify Israel. If you go down the street in New York, you pick at random some person, that person has a better chance of uniting Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beckerman: This interview will be published around October 7, on the first anniversary. I’m curious where you think we will be next year, on the second anniversary.

Harari: I think it has a lot to do also with events in the United States, with the election in November. You see this wave of strongmen who believe only in power, only in force, who spread hate. People here ask me, Should Jews vote for Donald Trump? Should Jews vote for Kamala Harris? Who is better for the Jewish people? The key question is, what are the values of the Jewish people? Are the values of the Jewish people those of a bully who sees the world simply as a power game, where you need to subdue and win over everybody else?

Beckerman: Do you think the United States should exercise more pressure over Israel? A lot of activists really want Harris to pledge to stop selling arms to Israel. Do you think that’s a good thing?

Harari: Israel is facing a real existential threat from Iran and its proxies, and it’s no secret. They say it openly: They want to destroy Israel. What I think is that the United States should continue to support Israel, but demand something. Here, I am with Trump. You know this transactional worldview. You give so much money. Make some conditions for what Israel should do in exchange; use the leverage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Finding happiness in angry music]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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