Updated at 1:55 p.m. ET on January 16, 2025

Imagine that a foreign-born billionaire buys Facebook, asks its engineers to boost his own posts, and then introduces a payment system that rewards users for pandering to his whims and prejudices.

Also imagine that the billionaire happens across a news report on the death toll in Iraq following the allied invasion back in 2003, and links that carnage to the intelligence failures that were used to justify the war. Bristling with righteous outrage, our fictional billionaire then suggests that the state and the media have covered up this whole incendiary topic.

This was how Elon Musk sounded to many Britons after he belatedly discovered the organized child-sexual-abuse networks known as “grooming gangs.” Here was a real scandal: Networks of adult men, primarily British citizens of Pakistani descent, had trafficked and raped young girls in towns across England, over many years, aided by failures of local governments and the police. But the scandal wasn’t new, nor had reporters ignored it en masse. “You don’t hate the legacy media enough,” Musk insisted at one point during his multiday spree of posts on X, his social-media platform. Never mind that a legacy media outlet—Rupert Murdoch’s London Times—first broke the story of the child-sex-abuse ring in Rotherham, 14 years ago.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk has appointed himself king of the world]

Musk’s horrified reaction to the scandal, which appears to have been prompted by a viral post on New Year’s Eve, is entirely justified. However, it comes quite late, and demonstrates his usual self-centeredness: His thinking seems to be that if he didn’t hear about the scandal during the 2010s, then surely no one else did, either. His ownership of X, and his alliance with Donald Trump, gives him the power to force any issue he likes into the political conversation. Lately he has used that power to intervene in European politics, berating British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, boosting the German far-right Alternative für Deutschland, and attacking the European Union for its efforts to regulate his businesses. Starmer’s opponents on the right, including the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, have been quick to echo Musk’s interest in the grooming gangs—even though Badenoch’s party was in power as the story originally unfolded.

The Times reporting kicked off dozens of prosecutions, multiple public inquiries, and even a primetime British Broadcasting Corporation drama. The story was well known enough that one of the police whistleblowers appeared on a celebrity reality-television show in 2018. The news even reached America: In 2014, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat observed that “what happened in Rotherham was rooted both in left-wing multiculturalism and in much more old-fashioned prejudices about race and sex and class.” The ethnicity of the perpetrators mattered, he argued, but so did the status of the victims—working-class girls whom the police saw as “‘tarts’ who deserved roughly what they got.”

Musk’s newfound revulsion at the details of the abuse is entirely justified—read the sentencing reports if you have the stomach for it. “Girls were raped callously, viciously, and violently,” the judge told nine men convicted of grooming offenses in the northern towns of Oldham and Rochdale in 2012, adding, “Some of you acted as you did to satiate your lust, some to make money out of them. All of you treated them as though they were worthless and beyond all respect.”

The sexual abuse of children occurs in all human societies, but the forms it takes are culturally dependent. Like school shootings in the United States, grooming gangs are a particular type of crime that emerged from the laws and social conditions of a specific time and place. The gangs are not representative of the whole picture of what researchers call “group-based child sexual exploitation”—a phenomenon that in Britain appears to be dominated by men who are white, as you would expect from the makeup of the population. (England and Wales are more than 80 percent white, census data show; “Asian ethnic groups” are about 9 percent of the population.) Most grooming-gang defendants in the cases that have attracted media attention, however, were men of Pakistani descent. Many were connected to the nighttime economy, such as by running minicab firms and delivering takeout. They primarily targeted vulnerable girls—runaways or those who lived in foster homes. We know all this because of extensive reporting, testimony by victims and whistleblowers, and the bravery of politicians such as Ann Cryer and Sarah Champion, two Labour Party members of Parliament who were shunned by their own side for speaking out.

[Ali Breland: Elon Musk’s X endgame]

It is entirely reasonable to ask why they were shunned. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the racial dynamics of the grooming gangs made English towns extremely reluctant to face what was happening. Local South Asian communities were afraid to report the perpetrators in their midst. Police did not record complaints or investigate the issue actively; by some accounts, race riots in Oldham in 2001 made police emphasize “community cohesion” over what should have been their primary concern—dismantling organized-rape gangs regardless of the demographics of the perpetrators. White members of municipal councils fell into a pattern of assuming that problems among British Pakistanis were best left to their fellow councilors from that community. “Rotherham isn’t a very PC place, I think that is why the council overcompensated too much,” one local officer told an investigator in 2015. “It doesn’t want to be accused of being racist.”

Living through this story, experiencing the slow accretion of details and convictions and inquiries in real time, clearly felt very different from learning about it all at once. One of the main complaints to have surfaced since Musk reheated this story is that much of the original coverage was piecemeal and overly restrained: Had gangs of white men been trafficking immigrant women, it might have prompted a reckoning comparable to America’s protests over the 2020 murder of George Floyd. What qualifies as a “reckoning” is arguable—but I agree that the left would have raised hell about such a story, as the right has done with this one.

In response, some commentators, on both the left and right, have called for a “national conversation” about the gangs. What that conversation would sound like, however, is the tricky part. Would it include calls for the mass deportation of migrants, as many on Europe’s emergent right want? Is the answer militant secularization of Britain? Or a renewed insistence that the United Kingdom is a Christian country? Should Britain enact a “Muslim ban” or reject asylum seekers from Muslim-majority countries? When liberals are still queasy about engaging with this topic, it’s because they sense that these shadow arguments lie just out of sight.

Although Musk is powerful enough to draw new attention to the Rotherham scandal, polling suggests that most Britons see his interventions as opportunistic. The X owner has a deep animus toward Starmer, the Labour prime minister, whom Musk sees as an enemy of free speech in general and of his platform in particular. Many of Musk’s posts called for implausible scenarios such as the King dissolving Parliament or the country holding fresh elections, adding to the sense that Musk had not deeply researched the topic before picking up his phone to post.

Nonetheless, the Conservative opposition, led by Badenoch, pandered to him, demanding a fresh national inquiry to “join the dots.” That reverses the Tory position of a year ago—back when the party was in power and had the ability to commission whatever inquiries it deemed necessary. (In 2019, the future Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that investigating historic sex abuses was money “spaffed up a wall.”)

Badenoch’s decision to echo the Musk line also minimized the work that the Conservatives did do in government to tackle rape gangs. Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak created a “grooming gangs task force” that has helped police make more than 550 arrests. The Tories also accepted that some sentences given to gang members had been too lenient, and proposed to create a new aggravating factor in sex offenses involving grooming. That will likely be included in the Crime and Policing Bill this spring, alongside a mandatory-reporting measure requiring social workers and others to notify police when they suspect children are being abused. Despite all that progress, Badenoch understands that calling for a new investigation is one of the few ways for an opposition leader to attract attention. (Today, Labour caved and promised a “rapid audit” and more funding for local inquiries.) Just as the activist left sometimes refuses to believe that civil-rights victories have been achieved—remaining instead in a state of politically lucrative perma-war—so the right will not claim victory in having already forced Britain to take these gangs seriously. Conservatives want the fight, not the win.

[Read: He’s no Elon Musk]

Intriguingly, Britain’s other right-wing party, Reform, has been less harmoniously in tune with Musk in the past couple of weeks than the Tories have. Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, has joined Badenoch in calling for a new nationwide inquiry into the gangs. But he has refused to fulfill a peculiar demand from Musk: to normalize the pseudonymous agitator Tommy Robinson, whom the far right credits for making the grooming scandal public. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, is not a folk hero. A founder of the xenophobic English Defence League, he risked collapsing one of the grooming trials by filming the defendants outside it. He is also a convicted mortgage fraudster and is currently in jail for contempt of court in a different case.

Robinson badly needs mainstream support to shake off his thuggish reputation, and Musk has taken up his cause. “Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk declared on X. He also faulted Farage—who has sought to keep racist “bad apples” out of Reform—for distancing himself from Robinson. Farage “doesn’t have what it takes,” Musk complained. Once again, the billionaire seemed out of touch with the British political scene: Farage, a key champion of Brexit, is the most successful leader that the British populist right has ever had. Reform won more than 4 million votes in last year’s election and looks set to make big gains in local contests in May.

To many Britons’ relief, Musk seems to be moving on to other subjects, including the California wildfires. His intervention has presented liberals with a difficult terrain to navigate. Yes, his interest was opportunistic. Yes, he spread conspiracy theories as well as the true scandalous details. But at least part of his instinctive reaction was correct: This was and is a scandal that shames Britain, as the Times asserted in 2012. It just isn’t a hidden one, thanks to the many victims and whistleblowers who have brought it into the open , beginning more than a decade ago. They deserve the tribute of having their bravery acknowledged.

When Donald Trump completes his once-unthinkable return to the White House, he’ll face a world far more violent and unsettled than when he unwillingly gave up power four years ago.

And his very presence behind the Resolute desk feels destined to destabilize it further.

Trump has offered mysterious plans to bring quick ends to the wars raging in Ukraine and the Middle East. He has antagonized allies and mused about a return to an age of American imperialism, when the United States could simply seize the territory it wanted. He and his advisers have threatened trade wars and allied themselves with movements that have eroded democracies and supported rising authoritarians.

And Trump is again poised to push an “America First” foreign policy—inward-looking and transactional—at a moment when a lack of superpower leadership could embolden China to move on Taiwan or lead to renewed conflict in the Middle East, just as the region seems on the doorstep of its biggest transformation in generations.

“Trump is less of a surprise this time but will be a test. The international system has baked in that Trump is not an instinctive supporter of alliances, that he will be inconsistent,” James Stavridis, a former supreme allied commander of NATO, told me. “Allies and adversaries alike are going to know that nothing is free; everything is a negotiation.”

[Read: How ‘America first’ became America alone]

Trump, Biden officials ruefully note in private, will inherit a strong hand. He will take the helm of a healthy economy and will become the first U.S. president in decades to assume office without a large-scale military deployment in an overseas war zone. And the grueling conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza—which Trump has demanded end immediately—both appear to be at inflection points, with war-weary sides showing a willingness to talk.

The president-elect has said there will be “hell to pay in the Middle East” if Hamas hasn’t released the hostages seized on October 7, 2023, by the time he is inaugurated. After months of negotiations by President Joe Biden’s team, a breakthrough appears at hand to pause fighting and release some hostages.

The moment has come during the incumbent’s final days in office, yet Trump has been quick to take credit—the deal was made with input from his Middle East envoy—even as a permanent resolution to the conflict remains uncertain. And his intervention does seem to have played a key role in achieving a breakthrough. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appeared eager to start Trump’s second term on the incoming president-elect’s good side while Hamas may have been spooked by his bombast. But as the cease-fire slowly unfurls in the weeks ahead, Trump’s tempestuousness could just as easily endanger the fragile deal.

During his reelection campaign, Trump repeatedly proclaimed that he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine “within 24 hours,” a claim he has since softened. Indeed, nowhere will his swearing-in be more nervously watched than in Kyiv. Trump, of course, has long derided NATO, the alliance that has propped up Ukraine. Moscow has made some halting advances, despite a last-ditch surge of aid to Ukraine from the Biden administration. And the president-elect’s desire for a quick, negotiated end to the conflict seems likely to ratify some of Russia’s territorial gains.

Trump’s White House and the MAGA-ified House of Representatives have shown no appetite to send substantial aid or military equipment to the front, and although Europe will gamely try to pick up the slack, Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself will suffer without American support. Russia’s advantage in manpower—bolstered by the North Korean troops it is using as cannon fodder—will only expand, and Russian President Vladimir Putin may grow more confident that he can simply win a war of attrition.

[Read: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

One senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the incoming administration, identified Trump’s long-standing deference to Putin as a grave concern, particularly if Russia’s aggression sets off NATO’s mutual-defense pact. “If Trump gives in to Putin an inch, he’ll take a mile,” the official told me. “If he turns his back completely and encourages him to move beyond Ukraine, think how much more costly it will be if Article 5 gets triggered. Then we have American skin in the game.”

Divisions are already emerging in Trump’s orbit as to the best approach to Ukraine and beyond. Steve Bannon, the right-wing provocateur and first-term Trump aide, has argued against globalism. Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who has become Trump’s most influential informal adviser, has used his fortune and social-media reach to prop up right-wingers in the U.K. and Germany who are eager to walk away from Kyiv. That echoes the approach of the incoming vice president, J. D. Vance.

But not all of Trump’s team is in lockstep. The secretary-of-state nominee, Marco Rubio, has been a NATO defender, and Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser, has argued forcefully in favor of tougher sanctions on Moscow’s energy sector to strangle Putin’s government economically.

Those divisions feel familiar. Trump’s first-term diplomatic and national-security teams—initially stocked with Republican stalwarts whose views were far closer to GOP orthodoxy than those embraced by MAGA—often found themselves feuding among themselves. Both camps were frequently frustrated by a president who had few consistent desires other than a need for flattery.

The result was a haphazard foreign policy. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un started out on the receiving end of “fire and fury,” only to later receive what Trump called “beautiful letters.” China went from foe to friend and then back again. And even as his administration levied tough sanctions against Russia, Trump continually cozied up to Putin, siding with the dictator over his own U.S. intelligence agencies in Helsinki.

[Read: No more Mr. Tough Guy on China]

That unpredictability, although it brought chaos before, could work to Trump’s advantage on the world stage this time around, his new crop of advisers believes. Would any foreign adversary dare test Trump if they can’t anticipate his response? Trump himself leaned into the idea in October, when he told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he would not have to use military force to prevent Beijing from blockading Taiwan, because Chinese President Xi Jinping “respects me and he knows I’m fucking crazy.”

It’s far less calculated than Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory of the case—far more born of Trump’s own whims and ego—but the end result, his advisers argue, could be the same.

And that, to put it mildly, was on full display during the transition.

Maps showing the familiar view of the Western Hemisphere, but with the U.S. borders cartoonishly expanded, have become popular right-wing memes. Suddenly, Greenland is part of the United States. Upon closer examination, so is the Panama Canal. And Canada—our friendly, polite neighbor to the north—is now the 51st state.

There are debates even in Trump World as to how serious any of these efforts at territorial expansion might be, and all agree that a healthy dose of trolling was involved in Trump dispatching Donald Trump Jr. to Greenland or calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “governor.” But foreign capitals have long learned to take the elder Trump both literally and seriously.

Trump’s desire for Greenland—based on its strategic location and abundant resources—has rattled not only Denmark, which governs the island, but also other NATO members, which are aghast at the incoming American president’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the island. Similarly, Trump’s threats toward Panama and his bullying of Canada—including warnings of sweeping tariffs—have again sent a clear message to the world: Under its 47th president, the United States cannot be counted on to enforce the rules-based order that has defined the postwar era.

[Read: The intellectual rationalization for annexing Greenland]

A Trump-transition spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In the Middle East, Israel’s response to October 7 created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza but also decimated the Iranian proxies that have served as buffers for Tehran for decades, leaving the regime newly vulnerable.

“Iran is now at the weakest point since 1979,” Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security adviser, said on Monday. “There is a cease-fire in Lebanon and the possibility of a new political future with a new president. Russia and Iran’s lackey in Syria, [Bashar al-Assad], is gone.”

In his first term, Trump withdrew the United States from a nuclear deal with Iran, implemented a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, and brokered the Abraham Accords, which further isolated Tehran. He authorized the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the general who directed Iran’s militias and proxy forces around the Middle East. He’s now filled his Cabinet with Iran hawks, including Waltz—which could put him at odds with Gulf allies who seem more inclined to try for a détente with Tehran.

The only certainty is more uncertainty. And the president-elect was quick to embrace the chaos when asked by a reporter at a news conference last month about his plans for Iran.

“How could I tell you a thing like that now? It’s just … you don’t talk about that before something may or may not happen,” Trump said. “I don’t want to insult you. I just think it’s just not something that I would ever answer having to do with there or any other place in the world.”

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

For such a ubiquitous beverage, milk is surprisingly controversial. In recent years, the drink—appetizingly defined by the FDA as the “lacteal secretion” of cows—has sparked heated disputes about its healthiness, its safety, and, with the proliferation of milk alternatives, what it even is. The ongoing outbreak of bird flu, which has spread to nearly 1,000 U.S. dairy herds and turned up in samples of unpasteurized milk, is but the latest flash point in the nation’s dairy drama, which has been ongoing for more than 150 years.

To Americans, milk has always been much more than a drink. It is a symbol of all that is pure and natural—of a simpler, pastoral time. In 1910, the writer Dallas Lore Shari rhapsodized in an Atlantic story about the scene that greeted him at his rural family farm after a day’s work in the dirty, lonely city. “Four shining faces gather round on upturned buckets behind the cow. The lantern flickers, the milk foams, the stories flow,” he wrote. Milk was a respite from the coldness and isolation of the modern age. Newer conveniences such as canned condensed milk and milk delivery could save time and money, he acknowledged, but at a spiritual cost.

Nostalgia for the bygone era of family farms and rustic comforts mounted as milk production was revolutionized. In 1859, an unnamed writer lamented the erosion of old farming practices, in one of the earliest mentions of milk in The Atlantic. He commended a new book that criticized “the folly of the false system of economy which thinks it good farming to get the greatest quantity of milk with the least expenditure of fodder.” Others viewed the introduction of technology into dairying with suspicion. “I never see a milk-cart go by without a sense of vats and pipe-lines and pulleys and pandemonium, of everything that is gross and mechanical and utterly foreign to the fields,” one Atlantic writer complained in 1920. “It is no wonder that there is something wrong with their butter.”

In spite of the pushback, milk production continued to industrialize. It simply had to: As America’s growing population demanded more milk, a safe supply became harder to maintain. Milk, in its raw form—that is, straight from the cow—is prone to contamination with potentially deadly pathogens. Stringent regulation was a matter of public health, argued Hollis Godfrey, the former president of the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry, in 1907. He claimed that, served raw, milk was responsible in some big cities for more than a quarter of deaths among children by age 5 (the drink was a major source of nutrition for young kids). Pasteurization, the process of heating milk to kill pathogens, was first introduced to major American dairies in the 1890s, to great effect. Between 1907 and 1923, New York City’s infant death rate decreased by more than 50 percent, in part a result of mandated milk pasteurization.

As milk grew safer and more accessible, it became a standard part of adult diets. Not everyone agreed that this was a good thing. Soldiers in World War I were furnished with cans of condensed milk—part of the “barbaric” and “uncivilized” meals they endured, one veteran wrote in the Atlantic in 1920. The drink became popular among women too, to the chagrin of the writer Don Cortes, who in 1957 complained in this magazine that the “trouble with the American woman is simply that she is brought up on milk.” The beverage made her so vigorous, so feisty, so “elongated” in height that she took to interests such as activism and lost all sense of femininity—or so his argument went.

All the while, skepticism about industrially produced milk remained. As I wrote earlier this year, critics of pasteurization in the early 1910s argued that it destroyed the nutritious properties and helpful bacteria in milk, a hugely oversimplified claim that raw-milk enthusiasts still make today. Some proposed experimentations with milk must have seemed shocking to the public, such as those described in a 1957 Atlantic report: “vaccinated” milk, which could contain antibodies produced by injecting cows’ udders with vaccines, or milk blended with juice, which would help children “drink their morning milk and fruit juice simultaneously.” With the advent of even newer innovations in milk in recent decades—strawberry-flavored, plant-based, and shelf-stable, to name a few—the drink’s natural connotations seem all but lost.

Milk has come a long way from the family farm; it is now mainly the purview of science and policy. Much of the pushback against innovation in milk today is not just about the milk itself but also about government overreach (indeed, milk-drinking is at its lowest point since the 1970s, but consumption of raw milk has spiked in the past year). Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the most visible raw-milk enthusiast, has vowed to end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of products including raw milk if he leads the Department of Health and Human Services. His vision to “Make America Healthy Again” has been embraced by some Americans who believe, just like the pasteurized-milk skeptics a century ago, that such a future represents not only better milk, but a better life.

Watch the moment and reaction of America's Danielle Collins taunting the Australian Open crowd after beating Australia's Destanee Aiava in the second round.

Here’s a simple question: Is moderate drinking okay?

Like millions of Americans, I look forward to a glass of wine—sure, occasionally two—while cooking or eating dinner. I strongly believe that an ice-cold pilsner on a hot summer day is, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, suggestive evidence that a divine spirit exists and gets a kick out of seeing us buzzed.

But, like most people, I understand that booze isn’t medicine. I don’t consider a bottle of California cabernet to be the equivalent of a liquid statin. Drinking to excess is dangerous for our bodies and those around us. Having more than three or four drinks a night is strongly related to a host of diseases, including liver cirrhosis, and alcohol addiction is a scourge for those genetically predisposed to dependency.

If the evidence against heavy drinking is clear, the research on my wine-with-dinner habit is a wasteland of confusion and contradiction. This month, the U.S. surgeon general published a new recommendation that all alcohol come with a warning label indicating it increases the risk of cancer. Around the same time, a meta-analysis published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that moderate alcohol drinking is associated with a longer life. Many scientists scoffed at both of these headlines, claiming that the underlying studies are so flawed that to derive strong conclusions from them would be like trying to make a fine wine out of a bunch of supermarket grapes.

I’ve spent the past few weeks poring over studies, meta-analyses, and commentaries. I’ve crashed my web browser with an oversupply of research-paper tabs. I’ve spoken with researchers and then consulted with other scientists who disagreed with those researchers. And I’ve reached two conclusions. First, my seemingly simple question about moderate drinking may not have a simple answer. Second, I’m not making any plans to give up my nightly glass of wine.

Alcohol ambivalence has been with us for almost as long as alcohol. The notion that booze is enjoyable in small doses and hellish in excess was captured well by Eubulus, a Greek comic poet of the fourth century B.C.E., who wrote that although two bowls of wine brought “love and pleasure,” five led to “shouting,” nine led to “bile,” and 10 produced outright “madness, in that it makes people throw things.”

In the late 20th century, however, conventional wisdom lurched strongly toward the idea that moderate drinking was healthy, especially when the beverage of choice was red wine. In 1991, Morley Safer, a correspondent for CBS, recorded a segment of 60 Minutes titled “The French Paradox,” in which he pointed out that the French filled their stomachs with meat, oil, butter, and other sources of fat, yet managed to live long lives with lower rates of cardiovascular disease than their Northern European peers. “The answer to the riddle, the explanation of the paradox, may lie in this inviting glass” of red wine, Safer told viewers. Following the report, demand for red wine in the U.S. surged.

[Read: America has a drinking problem]

The notion that a glass of red wine every night is akin to medicine wasn’t just embraced by a gullible news media. It was assumed as a matter of scientific fact by many researchers. “The evidence amassed is sufficient to bracket skeptics of alcohol’s protective effects with the doubters of manned lunar landings and members of the flat-Earth society,” the behavioral psychologist and health researcher Tim Stockwell wrote in 2000.

Today, however, Stockwell is himself a flat-earther, so to speak. In the past 25 years, he has spent, he told me, “thousands and thousands of hours” reevaluating studies on alcohol and health. And now he’s convinced, as many other scientists are, that the supposed health benefits of moderate drinking were based on bad research and confounded variables.

A technical term for the so-called French paradox is the “J curve.” When you plot the number of drinks people consume along an X axis and their risk of dying along the Y axis, most observational studies show a shallow dip at about one drink a day for women and two drinks a day for men, suggesting protection against all-cause mortality. Then the line rises—and rises and rises—confirming the idea that excessive drinking is plainly unhealthy. The resulting graph looks like a J, hence the name.

The J-curve thesis suffers from many problems, Stockwell told me. It relies on faulty comparisons between moderate drinkers and nondrinkers. Moderate drinkers tend to be richer, healthier, and more social, while nondrinkers are a motley group that includes people who have never had alcohol (who tend to be poorer), people who quit drinking alcohol because they’re sick, and even recovering alcoholics. In short, many moderate drinkers are healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with drinking, and many nondrinkers are less healthy for reasons that have nothing to do with alcohol abstention.

[Read: Not just sober-curious, but neo-temperate]

When Stockwell and his fellow researchers threw out the observational studies that were beyond salvation and adjusted the rest to account for some of the confounders I listed above, “the J curve disappeared,” he told me. By some interpretations, even a small amount of alcohol—as little as three drinks a week—seemed to increase the risk of cancer and death.

The demise of the J curve is profoundly affecting public-health guidance. In 2011, Canada’s public-health agencies said that men could safely enjoy up to three oversize drinks a night with two abstinent days a week—about 15 drinks a week. In 2023, the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction revised its guidelines to define low-risk drinking as no more than two drinks a week.

Here’s my concern: The end of the J curve has made way for a new emerging conventional wisdom—that moderate drinking is seriously risky—that is also built on flawed studies and potentially overconfident conclusions. The pendulum is swinging from flawed “red wine is basically heart medicine!” TV segments to questionable warnings about the risk of moderate drinking and cancer. After all, we’re still dealing with observational studies that struggle to account for the differences between diverse groups.

[Read: Is a glass of wine harmless? Wrong question.]

In a widely read breakdown of alcohol-health research, the scientist and author Vinay Prasad wrote that the observational research on which scientists are still basing their conclusions suffers from a litany of “old data, shitty data, confounded data, weak definitions, measurement error, multiplicity, time-zero problems, and illogical results.” As he memorably summarized the problem: “A meta-analysis is like a juicer, it only tastes as good as what you put in.” Even folks like Stockwell who are trying to turn the flawed data into useful reviews are like well-meaning chefs, toiling in the kitchen, doing their best to make coq au vin out of a lot of chicken droppings.

The U.S. surgeon general’s new report on alcohol recommended adding a more “prominent” warning label on all alcoholic beverages about cancer risks. The top-line findings were startling. Alcohol contributes to about 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths each year, the surgeon general said. The guiding motivation sounded honorable. About three-fourths of adults drink once or more a week, and fewer than half of them are aware of the relationship between alcohol and cancer risk.

But many studies linking alcohol to cancer risk are bedeviled by the confounding problems facing many observational studies. For example, a study can find a relationship between moderate alcohol consumption and breast-cancer detection, but moderate consumption is correlated with income, as is access to mammograms.

One of the best-established mechanisms for alcohol being related to cancer is that alcohol breaks down into acetaldehyde in the body, which binds to and damages DNA, increasing the risk that a new cell grows out of control and becomes a cancerous tumor. This mechanism has been demonstrated in animal studies. But, as Prasad points out, we don’t approve drugs based on animal studies alone; many drugs work in mice and fail in clinical trials in humans. Just because we observe a biological mechanism in mice doesn’t mean you should live your life based on the assumption that the same cellular dance is happening inside your body.

[Read: The truth about breast cancer and drinking red wine—or any alcohol]

I’m willing to believe, even in the absence of slam-dunk evidence, that alcohol increases the risk of developing certain types of cancer for certain people. But as the surgeon general’s report itself points out, it’s important to distinguish between “absolute” and “relative” risk. Owning a swimming pool dramatically increases the relative risk that somebody in the house will drown, but the absolute risk of drowning in your backyard swimming pool is blessedly low. In a similar way, some analyses have concluded that even moderate drinking can increase a person’s odds of getting mouth cancer by about 40 percent. But given that the lifetime absolute risk of developing mouth cancer is less than 1 percent, this means one drink a day increases the typical individual’s chance of developing mouth cancer by about 0.3 percentage points. The surgeon general reports that moderate drinking (say, one drink a night) increases the relative risk of breast cancer by 10 percent, but that merely raises the absolute lifetime risk of getting breast cancer from about 11 percent to about 13 percent. Assuming that the math is sound, I think that’s a good thing to know. But if you pass this information along to a friend, I think you can forgive them for saying: Sorry, I like my chardonnay more than I like your two percentage points with a low confidence interval.

Where does this leave us? Not so far from our ancient-Greek friend Eubulus. Thousands of years and hundreds of studies after the Greek poet observed the dubious benefits of too much wine, we have much more data without much more certainty.

In her review of the literature, the economist Emily Oster concluded that “alcohol isn’t especially good for your health.” I think she’s probably right. But life isn’t—or, at least, shouldn’t be—about avoiding every activity with a whisker of risk. Cookies are not good for your health, either, as Oster points out, but only the grouchiest doctors will instruct their healthy patients to foreswear Oreos. Even salubrious activities—trying to bench your bodyweight, getting in a car to hang out with a friend—incur the real possibility of injury.

[Read: A daily drink is almost certainly not going to hurt you]

An appreciation for uncertainty is nice, but it’s not very memorable. I wanted a takeaway about alcohol and health that I could repeat to a friend if they ever ask me to summarize this article in a sentence. So I pressed Tim Stockwell to define his most cautious conclusions in a memorable way, even if I thought he might be overconfident in his caution.

“One drink a day for men or women will reduce your life expectancy on average by about three months,” he said. Moderate drinkers should have in their mind that “every drink reduces your expected longevity by about five minutes.” (The risk compounds for heavier drinkers, he added. “If you drink at a heavier level, two or three drinks a day, that goes up to like 10, 15, 20 minutes per drink—not per drinking day, but per drink.”)

Every drink takes five minutes off your life. Maybe the thought scares you. Personally, I find great comfort in it—even as I suspect it suffers from the same flaws that plague this entire field. Several months ago, I spoke with the Stanford University scientist Euan Ashley, who studies the cellular effects of exercise. He has concluded that every minute of exercise adds five extra minutes of life.

When you put these two statistics together, you get this wonderful bit of rough longevity arithmetic: For moderate drinkers, every drink reduces your life by the same five minutes that one minute of exercise can add back. There’s a motto for healthy moderation: Have a drink? Have a jog.

Even this kind of arithmetic can miss a bigger point. To reduce our existence to a mere game of minutes gained and lost is to squeeze the life out of life. Alcohol is not like a vitamin or pill that we swiftly consume in the solitude of our bathrooms, which can be straightforwardly evaluated in controlled laboratory testing. At best, moderate alcohol consumption is enmeshed in activities that we share with other people: cooking, dinners, parties, celebrations, rituals, get-togethers—life! It is pleasure, and it is people. It is a social mortar for our age of social isolation.

[Read: The anti-social century]

An underrated aspect of the surgeon general’s report is that it is following, rather than trailblazing, a national shift away from alcohol. As recently as 2005, Americans were more likely to say that alcohol was good for their health, instead of bad. Last year, they were more than five times as likely to say it was bad, instead of good. In the first seven months of 2024, alcohol sales volume declined for beer, wine, and spirits. The decline seemed especially pronounced among young people.

To the extent that alcohol carries a serious risk of excess and addiction, less booze in America seems purely positive. But for those without religious or personal objections, healthy drinking is social drinking, and the decline of alcohol seems related to the fact that Americans now spend less time in face-to-face socializing than any period in modern history. That some Americans are trading the blurry haze of intoxication for the crystal clarity of sobriety is a blessing for their minds and guts. But in some cases, they may be trading an ancient drug of socialization for the novel intoxicants of isolation.

One in three U.S. adults between 18 and 34 live in the home of their parent or parents, according to Census data.

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No drug is quite like nicotine. When it hits your bloodstream, you’re sent on a ride of double euphoria: an immediate jolt of adrenaline, like a strong cup of coffee injected directly into your brain, along with the calming effect of a beer. Nicotine is what gets people hooked on cigarettes, despite their health risks and putrid smell. It is, in essence, what cigarette companies are selling, and what they’ve always been selling. Without nicotine, a cigarette is just smoldering leaves wrapped in some fancy paper.

But if the Biden administration gets its way, that’s essentially all cigarettes will be. Today, regulators at the FDA announced that they are pushing forward with a rule that would dramatically limit how much nicotine can go in a cigarette. The average cigarette nowadays is estimated to have roughly 17 milligrams of the drug. Under the new regulation, that would fall to less than one milligram. If enacted—still a big if—it would decimate the demand for cigarettes more effectively than any public-service announcement ever could.

The idea behind the proposal is to make cigarettes nonaddictive. One study found that some young people begin feeling the symptoms of nicotine addiction within a matter of days after starting to smoke. In 2022, roughly half of adult smokers tried to quit, but fewer than 10 percent were ultimately successful.

For that reason, the rule could permanently change smoking in America. The FDA insists that the proposal isn’t a ban per se. But in the rule’s intended effect, ban may indeed be an apt term. The FDA estimates that nearly 13 million people—more than 40 percent of current adult smokers—would quit smoking within one year of the rule taking effect. After all, why inhale cancerous fumes without even the promise of a buzz? By the end of the century, the FDA predicts, 4.3 million fewer people would die because of cigarettes. The agency’s move, therefore, should be wonderful news for just about everyone except tobacco executives. (Luis Pinto, a vice president at Reynolds American, which makes Camel and Newport cigarettes, told me in an email that the policy “would effectively eliminate legal cigarettes and fuel an already massive illicit nicotine market.”)

Still, there’s no telling whether the FDA’s idea will actually come to fruition. The regulation released today is just a proposal. For the next eight months, the public—including tobacco companies—will have the opportunity to comment on the proposal. Then the Trump administration can decide whether to finalize the regulation as is, make changes, or scrap it entirely. Donald Trump has not signaled what he will do, and his relationship to cigarettes is complicated. In 2017, his FDA commissioner put the idea of cutting the nicotine in cigarettes to nonaddictive levels on the agency’s agenda. But the tobacco industry has recently attempted to cozy up to the president-elect. A subsidiary of Reynolds donated $10 million to a super PAC backing Trump. Even if the Trump administration finalizes the rule, the FDA plans to give tobacco companies two years to comply, meaning that the earliest cigarettes would actually change would be fall 2027.

If Trump goes through with the rule, it may be the end of cigarettes. But although cigarettes might be inseparable from nicotine, nicotine is not inseparable from cigarettes. These days, people looking to consume the drug can pop a coffee-flavored Zyn in their upper lip or puff on a banana-ice-flavored e-cigarette. These products are generally safer than cigarettes because they do not burn tobacco, and it is tobacco smoke, not nicotine, that causes most of the harmful effects of cigarettes. FDA estimates that should cigarettes lose their nicotine, roughly half of current smokers would transition to other, safer products to get their fix, Brian King, the head of the FDA’s tobacco center, told me.

Whether nicotine’s staying power is a good thing is still unclear. Few people—even in the tobacco industry—will argue with a straight face that cigarettes are safe. Nicotine defenders, however, are far more common. In my time covering nicotine, I have spoken with plenty of people who emphatically believe that the drug helps them get through their day, and that their habit is no more shameful or harmful than an addiction to caffeine. There is clearly a market for these products. Just ask Philip Morris International, which earlier this year invested $600 million to build a new factory to meet surging demand for Zyn. But it’s true, too, that nicotine is addictive, regardless of how it’s consumed. There isn’t much data looking at long-term impacts of these new nicotine-delivery devices, but the effects of nicotine, such as increased heart rate and blood pressure, are enough to give cardiologists pause.

I promised my parents—both smokers during my childhood—that I’d never pick up a cigarette. I kept that promise. But about a year ago, I started to wonder just how bad safer forms of nicotine could actually be. (Mom, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry.) I found myself experimenting with Zyn. Doing so gave me a window into why my parents craved cigarettes, but it also quickly gave me a firsthand look at why it was always so hard for them to quit. My one-Zyn-a-day habit quickly became two, and two became four. And yet, each time the pouch hit my lip, that burst of dopamine seemed to get more and more lackluster. Soon enough, I was reaching for nicotine without even thinking about it. The FDA’s new proposal, if finalized, will mean that misguided teens (or, in my case, 33-year-olds) prone to experimentation won’t do so with deadly cigarettes. But that will be far from the end of America’s relationship with nicotine.