Police have described Emanuele Gregorini as "the head of the Italian mafia Latin America".

After spending most of the 2024 campaign blaming Democrats for inflation and insisting that tariffs don’t increase prices, Donald Trump and his allies have a new economic message: High prices are good.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, recently admitted to the Economic Club of New York that inflation-weary Americans could see a “one-time price adjustment” from Trump’s tariffs, but he quickly added that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” Representative Mark Alford of Missouri told CNN, “We all have a role to play in this to rightsize our government, and if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again.” And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put his own spin on the argument, telling NBC News that, yes, prices on imports will rise, but American-made goods will get cheaper, and that’s what matters. (In fact, tariffs generally lead to price increases for imported and domestic goods, because the latter face less foreign-price competition.)

It’s true that affordable goods and services are not, on their own, the definition of the American dream. But they’re a necessary component of it, and trade is one of the most important drivers of that affordability. Until recently, Republicans understood this quite well.

American workers are also American consumers who must devote a sizable chunk of their income to essential goods such as clothing, food, shelter, and energy—goods made cheaper and more plentiful by international trade. Produce and clothing from Latin America, lumber and energy from Canada, footwear and electronics from Asia, wine and cheese from Europe: All of these and more help Americans stretch their paychecks and live happier, healthier lives. Thanks to the internet, moreover, we benefit from internationally traded services too, whether it’s an online tutor in Pakistan, a personal trainer in London, a help-desk employee in India, or an accountant in the Philippines. And we gain from better or cheaper domestic goods and services that are forced to compete with imports on quality or price.

Overall, studies conservatively estimate that American households save thousands of dollars a year from the lower prices, increased variety, and global competition fomented by international trade. This increased purchasing power means not only that Americans have more “stuff” but also that their inflation-adjusted incomes are higher. As we just learned the hard way, bigger numbers on your paycheck mean nothing if you’re forced to spend even more on the things you need and want. In fact, one of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics. Money left over can also be saved for a rainy day or invested in things such as education and retirement.

[Rogé Karma: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

The counterargument—until recently associated with the political left—is that cheap and varied consumer goods are not worth sacrificing the strength of America’s domestic-manufacturing sector. Even if we accept that (questionable) premise, however, it doesn’t justify Trump’s tariffs, because those tariffs will hurt domestic manufacturing too. About half of U.S. imports are intermediate goods, raw materials, and capital equipment that American manufacturers use to make their products and sell them here and abroad. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these imports increase domestic-manufacturing output and jobs. Thus, for example, an expanding U.S. trade deficit in automotive goods has long coincided with gains in domestic automotive output and production capacity, and past U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum caused a slowdown in U.S. manufacturing output. Even if domestic manufacturers don’t buy imported parts, simply having access to them serves as an important competitive check on the prices of made-in-America manufacturing inputs. This is why Trump’s recent steel-tariff announcement gave U.S. steelmakers a “green light to lift prices,” as The Wall Street Journal put it.

Imports such as construction materials, medical goods, and computers also support many U.S. service industries. And imports are important for leisure and economic mobility. By trading for necessities instead of making them ourselves, Americans have more free time to use for fun or self-improvement (and more disposable income to pursue such things). According to a new study in the Journal of International Economics, “between 1950 and 2014, trade openness contributed to an additional 20 to 95 hours of leisure per worker per year”—invaluable time we can devote to entertainment, family, community, or education.

“Access to cheap goods” isn’t the American dream, but it sure helps us achieve it. This is particularly true for low-income workers who have tight budgets and little leisure time. Shelter, food, transport, utilities, and clothes accounted for approximately 68 percent of the poorest 20 percent of U.S. households’ annual expenditures but just about half of the richest 20 percent of households’ spending. It’s easy for someone worth, say, $521 million, like Bessent, to pay a few bucks more for everyday goods and still achieve his goals and ambitions; it’s far more difficult for a single mom with four kids to do the same.

Democrats used to be the ones offering a false choice between Americans’ access to affordable (often imported) stuff and our economic well-being. In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama told a union-sponsored-debate audience in Chicago that “people don’t want a cheaper T‑shirt if they’re losing a job in the process.” And Bernie Sanders famously said in 2015 that Americans “don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”

Back in those days, Republicans defended the link between trade and American prosperity. Today, only a few party outcasts, such as Mike Pence, dare to do so. Trump’s allies have made very clear that they are trying to achieve a dream. It just isn’t America’s.

Having recently found widespread recognition in the United States, one of Latin America’s greatest living authors has decided to challenge her newfound readers with a brilliant and bewildering novel about murder, castration, and the illegibility of poetry. Death Takes Me, by Cristina Rivera Garza, underscores the Mexican novelist’s intellectual depth as well as her formal playfulness, and confronts the way an environment rife with violence can shock citizens into numbness.

Rivera Garza teaches creative writing at the University of Houston and has lived for decades in the United States, but until recently, only a handful of her more than 20 books had appeared in English. That began to change in 2023, when she published her own translation of the work that would earn her a Pulitzer Prize, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a fiercely political memoir about the life and death of her younger sister, who was murdered at age 20 by an on-and-off boyfriend.

The critical consensus in the Spanish-speaking world is that Death Takes Me, which was originally published in 2008, is among Rivera Garza’s best books—a sophisticated answer to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that elaborates on the Chilean novelist’s blend of gruesome violence and literary puzzles from a feminist perspective. Whereas Liliana’s Invincible Summer is emotional, sincere, and relatively easy to follow, Death Takes Me is cerebral, fragmentary, and disorienting. Translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker, the novel is ostensibly about a series of murders of young men in an unnamed Mexican city, but it often seems more concerned with the study of poetry and psychoanalytic theory than with detective work. At one point, Rivera Garza interrupts the narrative to reproduce a scholarly article that she may or may not have submitted to a real academic journal; at another, she inserts a number of experimental poems that she published under a pseudonym a year before releasing Death Takes Me. The book’s unabashed intellectualism is the product of Mexican literary culture, which tends to abide by the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima’s famous motto, “Difficulty is the only stimulant.”  

But readers willing to play by Rivera Garza’s rules can expect a reward commensurate with their efforts, the sort of anti-noir novel that a ghostwriting team comprising Jorge Luis Borges, Jacques Lacan, and Clarice Lispector might deliver in response to a publisher’s request for a true-crime number. Like the murders it recounts, Death Takes Me resists interpretation, inducing in the reader a disconcerting mixture of numbness and anxiety. Those familiar with Rivera Garza’s more recent work will soon realize that the book has another, more political dimension. Although it approaches the issue obliquely by reversing the gender of the victims, Death Takes Me is the author’s first sustained meditation on femicide—and perhaps a preliminary study for the memoir she would publish more than a decade later.

[Read: A novel that probes the line between justice and revenge]

In the novel’s opening scene, a literature professor by the name of Cristina Rivera Garza goes out for a jog and stumbles upon the castrated body of a young man. Yet in the weeks that follow, as she sits down for tense interviews with the female detective in charge of the case and dodges the obsessive pursuit of a suspicious woman who claims to be a tabloid journalist, the aspect of the crime scene that most preoccupies her isn’t the dead man but what she noticed on the wall of the alley where she found him. Using nail polish as ink, someone had scribbled a few lines by Alejandra Pizarnik, an Argentine writer who wrote cryptic poems and anxious diaries about language, sex, and death before dying by suicide in 1972 at the age of 36—and who is also the subject of the academic paper published within the novel. (The fictional Rivera Garza, we later learn, is affiliated with the same university where the author taught while she was writing the novel.)

The reader soon notices uncanny parallels between the professor’s work and the detective’s. It’s not a coincidence that the adjective nonsensical can apply to a gruesome murder just as well as to a work of avant-garde literature. Cops and critics are, in some ways, in the same business: that of interpretation. They pay close attention, notice details, find clues; they gather evidence and formulate theories; they make a case for their hypotheses. Their work is a search for meaning—an attempt to make sense of mysterious signs.

As the terrified residents of the city continue to stumble upon castrated bodies, there’s no question that the perpetrator of these murders is a serial killer: Poems by Pizarnik are found at each crime scene. That detail alone, the detective insinuates to the professor, is enough to mark her as the prime suspect.

The theory is soon put to rest, though, when Rivera Garza starts receiving strange messages from the killer, signed with the names of different female artists. The letters are full of clues that produce nothing: no leads, no real suspects—and no hope. The truth is that, in this city, catching the murderer won’t change much. “It’s been a long time since a man died,” the detective’s assistant observes about halfway through the novel. “So what?” the detective responds, in a tone that the narrator describes as listless and bitter. “Women and children die, too. Women and children and men are still dying, too.”       

Although the novel keeps the details of its setting ambiguous, it seems to take place in Toluca, an hour away from Mexico City—and the capital of one of the most violent states in the country. Hence, I think, the detective’s hopelessness: In a nation where the murder rate is five times higher than the United States’, her work is condemned to fail. The trope of numb despair as a response to unending horror is one of the hallmarks of 21st-century Mexican literature. Recent entries in this canon include Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season and Clyo Mendoza's Fury, but the seminal example—if we understand that a writer’s nationality does not dictate what literary tradition they belong to—is undoubtedly 2666. That novel’s long list of forensic descriptions of murdered women in Mexico, which stretches for dozens of pages, seems meant to induce in the reader a feeling not unlike the listless bitterness of Rivera Garza’s detective.

The discussions of literary theory that fill the pages of Death Takes Me—besides Rivera Garza’s academic paper on Pizarnik, the novel features lengthy sections about the work of French psychoanalysts—serve a similar function to Bolaño’s appropriation of coroners’ dehumanizing language: They evoke detachment in the face of violence. But if this tactic is aesthetically effective and politically powerful, it’s because of the anxiety that courses beneath, in this city where even the detective knows that her work is pointless.

[Read: A novel that boldly rethinks the border]

The real Rivera Garza, however, seems unsatisfied with the hopelessness that haunts the pages of her own novel. Death Takes Me appears to have been a stepping stone to a more explicitly political confrontation with violence—one that refuses resignation and demands justice. Shortly after the Spanish edition of Liliana’s Invincible Summer was published in 2021, Rivera Garza declared in an interview with El País that “all of [her] previous books” had been preparations to finally “be able to write this one about [her] sister’s femicide.” That last word is important. Since 2012, Mexican law has considered that murders of women who are killed “for reasons related to their gender” constitute a different crime from other homicides. This much-belated change in language was meant to reflect the reality that, according to the United Nations, an average of 10 women are killed each day in Mexico.

The legal recognition of the specificity of gender violence was a hard-won victory for the Mexican feminist movement—a struggle that Rivera Garza documents in her memoir. But the subject was already on her mind in Death Takes Me. The difference here, of course, is that it’s men who must learn to live in a country where they can never feel safe:

It was no longer a personal fear by then, but paranoia. A cloud of dragonflies. A pod of lobsters. Frenetic destruction. Young men would seek, and eventually find, new ways to protect their genitals … Old men would speak of other, always better times, now gone. Before all of this was happening. Before, when a man was safe … The world, in the aftermath of Four Castrated Men, would be different as a result of being so very much, or exaggeratedly, the same world where the Detective would fail once again.

The passage makes a political point, of course, but the implausibility of its gender reversal is also very funny; readers recognize just how common the inverse scenario is. Here lies the greatest success of Death Takes Me: For all the numbness and the horror and the cerebral discussions of poetics, it’s also full of humor. It may well be that the novel’s most important contribution to our moment is that it consciously rejects the language of witnessing, elegy, and moral certainty on display in many contemporary stories about trauma. Death Takes Me, instead, suggests that personal grief and political anger can find expression, too, through ambiguity and irony—and even laughter.

Picture a plastic shopping bag that some busy customer picks up in the checkout line of a store—say, the British supermarket Tesco. That shopper piles her groceries into the bag, takes it home to a flat in London, and then recycles it.

Although she’ll think about the bag no further, its journey has just begun. From a recycling bin in London, it is trucked to Harwich, a port town 80 miles northeast, then shipped to Rotterdam, then driven across Germany into Poland, before finally coming to rest in a jumbled pile of trash outside an unmarked warehouse in southern Turkey. It might eventually get recycled, but it just as likely will sit there, baking in the sun, slowly disintegrating over years.

For most plastic bags, this odyssey is invisible. To one particular Tesco bag, however, Bloomberg journalists attached a tiny digital tracker, revealing its months-long, transcontinental journey—“a messy reality,” the reporters wrote, “that looks less like a virtuous circle and more like passing the buck.”

The story of this plastic bag appears early in Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, a new book by the journalist Alexander Clapp. The book reveals many such journeys, tracking the garbage of rich countries along hidden arteries toward some of the planet’s poorest places. One dark side of consumerism, it turns out, is all of the discarded wrappers and old iPhones piling up or being burned on the other side of the world.

This dumping exacts a devastating environmental toll—leaching toxic contaminants into water, air, and food, and miring whole regions in growing fields of rubbish. It’s also reshaping economies, having birthed an informal disposal industry that now employs millions of people. Towns in Indonesia are buried in millions of pounds of single-use plastics; communities across India and Bangladesh are populated by armies of migrant laborers tasked with dismantling cruise liners and oil tankers by hand. To describe this dystopian reality, Clapp assembles a narrative that is part history, part sociology, part horrifying travelogue. The result is a colonoscopy in book form, an exploration of the guts of the modern world.

The focus of Waste Wars may be trash, but the book highlights a literal manifestation of a much broader global dynamic: Rich countries tend to pass their problems on to poorer ones. Consider, for instance, the nuclear refuse that the United States dumped among Pacific island nations during the Cold War, which threatens radioactive disaster even decades later. Consider the refugees consigned by the United States to Latin America, by the European Union to Turkey and Pakistan, or by Australia to the island of Nauru. Consider, of course, the most devastating consequences of climate change, such as the rising seas threatening island nations that bear little responsibility for global carbon emissions.

[Read: What America owes the planet]

Waste Wars shows how wealthy, developed countries are, today, not only removing wealth from poorer, developing countries (in the form of materials and labor) but also sending back what the late sociologist R. Scott Frey called “anti-wealth.” In fact, the very places that long supplied rubber, cotton, metal, and other goods to imperial viceroys now serve as dumping grounds for the modern descendants of some of those same powers. This disheartening reality augurs a future in which the prosperity of a few affluent enclaves depends in part on the rest of the globe becoming ever more nasty, brutish, and hot.

Toward the beginning of his book, Clapp describes a counterintuitive consequence of the landmark environmental laws passed in the United States in the 1970s. Statutes such as the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act of 1972 banned scores of toxic substances, while others, including the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, made burying hazardous waste in U.S. soil much more expensive. A tricky new problem presented itself: what to do with all of the waste?

“America’s newfound commitment to environmentalism came with a little secret,” Clapp writes. “It didn’t extend to other countries.” As similar laws were passed across Europe and North America, a thriving, semilegal international waste trade soon sprang up. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, wealthy nations exported such unloved materials as asbestos and DDT to impoverished nations like Benin and Haiti, which were desperate to develop their economies yet rarely possessed facilities capable of properly disposing of toxic materials. These countries faced a choice, Clapp writes: “poison or poverty.” By the end of the ’80s, more waste than development aid, dollar for dollar, was flowing from the global North to the global South.

This dynamic was historically novel, yet it emerged from practices stretching back hundreds of years. In early modern Europe, the filthiest trades (such as tanning) were branded nuisances and forced out of cities and closer to those living at society’s margins. Factories, industrial smelters, and dumps were likewise relegated to places where Black and brown people in the Americas, or the Roma in Europe, or Dalits in India, were legally or economically compelled to live. As the historian Andrew Needham has noted, the 20th-century population boom of southwestern U.S. metropolises, including Phoenix, Albuquerque, and Los Angeles, relied on coal both mined and burned on Navajo and Hopi land—coal that by the early 1970s was generating five times more electricity than the Hoover Dam. The air-conditioned comfort of the Sun Belt, in other words, depended on the despoliation of Indigenous land.

By the late ’80s, many developing nations had had enough. The leaders of Caribbean and African states united to draft the Basel Convention, a 1989 international agreement effectively outlawing the export of hazardous waste to other countries. Today, 191 nations have ratified the convention. (The United States is one of the only holdouts.) It’s a spectacular accomplishment—a testament to transnational organizing and solidarity—and also, as Waste Wars demonstrates, a hollow one.

The global redistribution of “anti-wealth” did not cease; in fact, Clapp writes, it “exploded” in the 1990s. The rub lay in a provision of the Basel Convention, which stated that an object sent from one country to another for reuse, rather than disposal, wasn’t waste but a thing of value. Quickly, waste brokers learned to refer to their wares with such euphemisms as “recovered byproducts.” Those on the receiving end of the garbage learned to extract whatever value they could from discarded cardboard and busted laptops—and then dump, burn, or dissolve in acid what remained.

To illustrate the profound consequences of the global recycling economy, Clapp traveled to the Ghanaian slum of Agbogbloshie, where (until it was demolished a few years ago) a shadow workforce of migrants lived at the foot of a five-story mound of discarded electronics. On paper, these items weren’t all waste—some of them technically still worked—but most were dying or dead, and the laborers of Agbogbloshie dutifully wielded hammers to strip old televisions and smartphones of precious metals and incinerate the rest. Clapp highlights the particular irony of Agbogbloshie—a slum “clouded with cancerous smoke, encircled by acres of poisonous dirt”—occurring in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to free itself of colonialism. Despite the high hopes of its revolutionary generation, in some places, Ghana still experiences what Clapp calls “a story of foreign domination by other means.” More and more of these electronic-waste disposal sites are popping up around the world.

Yet the biggest villain in the global trash economy is plastic, and Clapp shows in horrifying detail the intractability of this problem. Derived from fossil fuels, plastic is cheap, convenient—and eternal. When, in the late 1980s, the public started to get concerned about plastic detritus, the petrochemical industry began promoting “recycling.” It was, mostly, public relations; plastics are notoriously difficult to recycle, and it’s hard to make a profit while doing so. But the messaging was effective. Plastic production continued to accelerate.

[Read: The cost of avoiding microplastics]

In the mid-1990s, China emerged as the principal destination for used cups, straws, and the like; the country’s growing manufacturing sector was eager to make use of cheap, recycled raw plastic. As Clapp reports, over the following quarter century, China accepted half the globe’s plastic waste, conveniently disappearing it even as air pollution spiked in its destinations in the country’s southeast. The plastic waste China received was filthy, much of it too dirty to be cleaned, shredded, and turned into new plastic.

The result was not only environmental catastrophe but license for unchecked consumption of cheap plastic goods that can take a few minutes to use but hundreds of years to decay. In the United States, plastic waste increased from 60 pounds per person in 1980 to 218 pounds per person in 2018. There is now a ton of discarded plastic for every human on the planet; the oceans contain 21,000 pieces of plastic for each person on Earth.

In 2017, citing pollution concerns, China announced that it would no longer accept the world’s plastic waste. “There was an opportunity here,” Clapp writes, for the world to finally tackle the problem of unsustainable plastic production. Instead, governmental and industrial leaders chose a simpler solution: “redirecting the inevitable pollution blight from China to more desperate countries.” In just two years, the amount of American plastic waste exported to Central America doubled; worldwide exports to Africa quadrupled, and in Thailand they increased twentyfold.

The international waste trade is a “crime,” Clapp concludes, and the refusal to address its root causes is a dereliction bearing “certain similarities to international failures to address the climate crisis.” Waste Wars demonstrates the mounting consequences of such inaction: Residents of wealthier nations are jeopardizing much of the planet in exchange for the freedom to ignore the consequences of their own convenience.