If there’s one thing most Israelis agree on after nearly a year and a half of war, it’s the need for a deep, impartial investigation into the catastrophe of October 7—laying bare what went wrong that day, beforehand, and possibly after. The demand for such an inquiry has escalated, voiced in equal measure by gaunt ex-hostages and the outgoing, guilt-ridden, military chief of staff.

And if there is one thing that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not want, it is such an investigation. The reason isn’t hard to fathom. A serious probe will likely hold Netanyahu responsible for Hamas catching Israel unprepared. Its conclusions could echo the signs directed at the prime minister at street protests: You’re the boss. You’re guilty.

Commissions of inquiry are the normal mechanism by which Israeli governance reckons with its response to extraordinary events. The procedure for creating one is enshrined in law: The cabinet votes to create the commission and defines the scope of its inquiry. The chief justice of the supreme court appoints the members, and a senior judge or retired judge chairs. In the weightiest investigations, the chief justice has chaired the commission. The panel can subpoena witnesses and documents. It can find individuals responsible for actions and omissions. The findings aren’t criminal convictions, but they can include recommendations to dismiss high officials.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why 70 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign]

The best-known inquiry commissions have near-mythic status in Israeli memory. One investigated how Israel was taken by surprise at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and its preliminary report sparked the resignation or dismissal first of top generals and then of Prime Minister Golda Meir, ending her career.

Another examined Israel’s role in the 1982 massacre, by a Lebanese Christian militia, of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. The inquiry’s most resounding conclusion was that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore “personal responsibility,” because he “ignored the danger of acts of revenge and bloodshed” by the militia. Sharon resigned. Even when he became prime minister many years later, he did not hold the defense post again, as some prime ministers have done.

With rare exceptions, the law on commissions of inquiry requires the government to decide to investigate itself. This is the procedure’s weakness, but popular pressure has historically proved effective in forcing the government’s hand. Meir decided to create the commission that ultimately forced her out in response to the public anger, spurred by army reservists returning home from the front. Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s government understood that it needed to act after an estimated 400,000 demonstrators flooded central Tel Aviv in what was then the largest protest the country had ever seen.

This history best explains why the public today expects an inquiry commission, and why Netanyahu resists appointing one: Disasters beget commissions, and commissions can beget upheaval.

Polling shows that up to 83 percent of Israelis, including a large majority of voters for parties in the ruling coalition, want a state inquiry into October 7. And in recent days, pressure for an inquiry has grown. One reason is that a slew of internal army investigations have been released, probing, among other things, the failure to defend border communities on the morning of the attack, and the years of overly sanguine assessments of Hamas.

Those inquiries reinforce earlier press reports based on leaks and add frightening detail. The Military Intelligence Directorate had stopped listening in real time to Hamas walkie-talkies. It had acquired Hamas’s plan for an invasion of Israel—and dismissed it as purely aspirational. Completely misreading Hamas, the army believed that it was deterred from attacking Israel by the outcome of previous fighting. That bias led it to dismiss multiple signs of the impending attack in the hours before it began.

The army’s investigation and a parallel one by the Shin Bet counterintelligence agency lay out those bodies’ mistakes. Only obliquely, though, do they say anything about the decisions or negligence of the government. This makes sense; an army investigation of elected leaders would have the scent of a coup. But the publication of the army probes draws attention to the government’s refusal to be investigated.

It also fits a pattern. Generals have acknowledged that they let the country down; Netanyahu hasn’t. The military chief of staff on October 7 and after, Herzi Halevi, resigned just after the current cease-fire began in January and left office last week. The disaster occurred “on my watch, and I bear responsibility,” Halevi said when he turned over command. Then he added—pointedly, as Netanyahu was present—“It’s not right that only the Israel Defense Forces investigate an event like this. Establishing a state commission of inquiry is necessary and essential.”

Early this month, opposition parties managed to force the Knesset to hold a debate on establishing a state commission. An opposition parliamentarian read a letter from Yarden Bibas, who was taken captive on October 7 and released in the first stage of the now-stalled hostage deal. Bibas was still observing the traditional Jewish week of mourning for his murdered wife and two small children, whose bodies had been returned from Gaza. “I call on you, Mr. Prime Minister,” Bibas wrote, to “unite the people of Israel, bring peace to our souls, fulfill the will of the people and the [victims’] families. Announce today the establishment of a state commission of inquiry.”

Netanyahu was required to respond, and he did so with a speech of more than half an hour that included jibes at the opposition and an attempt to link the former prime minister and outspoken government critic Ehud Barak to Jeffrey Epstein. On the inquiry issue itself, he conceded that “it’s crucial to investigate thoroughly everything that happened on October 7.” But, he claimed, a state commission would be “politically tilted” and its “conclusions known in advance.”

What he and “a majority of the people” wanted, he said, was an “objective, balanced” inquiry panel. He appeared to be referring to plans that his inner circle had reportedly floated to get around the commission law, possibly by establishing an ad hoc parliamentary panel with coalition and opposition members. Under the commission law, Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit would choose the panel, and the retired chief justice Esther Hayut could conceivably chair it. The prime minister and his coalition regard both judges as too liberal—and too independent. But what they seem to be suggesting instead is to choose the panel on the basis of party, which would be overtly political, as well as lacking the long precedent and settled law of a state commission.

[Read: How Netanyahu misread his relationship with Trump]

Netanyahu was prime minister for 13 of the 14 years before October 7. A commission of inquiry might look into his strategic choice to allow Hamas to remain in control of Gaza as a means of keeping the Palestinians divided. It might also determine whether the notion that Hamas had been deterred, and so did not pose an immediate threat, was the army’s and that Netanyahu simply failed to question it—or whether generals shaped their evaluations to fit what the prime minister wanted to hear. Such an inquiry could determine what warning signs the prime minister may have ignored in the days and years before the catastrophe.

In Israel, a state commission of inquiry is not merely a judicial instrument or a means of settling facts. It’s a ritual of national closure that allows people to put events in order and move on. The commission’s summary of errors and of horrors, its assessment of culpability, its recommendations for the future—all of these help turn trauma into history.

Netanyahu is more aware than anyone of what an inquiry might discover beyond what the public already knows. The longer and more insistently he opposes a state commission, the more he reinforces the expectation that he will be weighed in the balance and found wanting.

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

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Shane Harris, a staff writer who covers intelligence and national-security issues. He has written about the Trump administration’s military purge, what happens to federal agencies when DOGE takes over, and how Elon Musk is breaking the national-security system.

Shane recommends reading Bewilderment, by Richard Powers, a novel that is “freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three.” He also enjoys daily online etymology lessons, studying Old Masters paintings, and listening to the film scores of the late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The telepathy trap

America’s cultural revolution

Trump is breaking the fourth wall.

The Culture Survey: Shane Harris

The best novel I’ve recently read: Bewilderment, by Richard Powers. Like its predecessor—the towering, sylvan epic The Overstory—this novel worries about the possibly untenable relationship between humanity and the natural world. The books are thematically and stylistically similar; nearly every paragraph is freighted with insight, dread, hope, and often a mixture of the three. But Bewilderment is a quieter and more tangible story that sometimes felt like it could be The Overstory’s prequel. They are perfect companions, so if you’ve read one, read the other. [Related: The novel that asks, “What went wrong with mankind?”]

If you’ve read neither, give yourself the gift! Bewilderment follows a widowed astrobiologist named Theo Byrne, who is desperate to contain the volatile, emotional outbursts of his 9-year-old son. Robin is a prime target for bullies at school because of his affliction, which presents as a neurodivergent constellation and makes him acutely, sometimes painfully, aware of the physical degradation of the Earth and all the nonhumans that inhabit it.

Desperate for some treatment that doesn’t use medication, Theo has Robin try an experimental neurofeedback therapy that allows him to spend time with a version of his dead mother’s consciousness. The ramifications are … not “bewildering,” per se, but profoundly altering. When you finish the book, ask yourself, as I did, whether you would have made the same choice to bring even a modicum of relief for your child.

The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: I don’t love the term revisionist history, but Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey, is a highly readable book that revised my understanding of early Christianity and my thoughts about the Catholic Church. I’ll leave it to historians to debate the quality of Nixey’s scholarship—I’m way out of my depth there, but the book seems impeccably sourced and added to my evolving view on the nature of religion.

Nixey proposes that, contrary to the Catholic Church’s teachings, there was no clear agreement in Christianity’s early centuries about who Jesus was and why he mattered. Her argument is persuasive, and it excites me the way great investigative journalism does. Her book is as much a hunt to unearth old stories as it is an indictment of the Church fathers who buried them.

The last museum show that I loved: I had only a few free hours when I was in Munich last month for the annual Security Conference, so I went to the Alte Pinakothek, which houses one of the world’s most significant collections of Old Masters paintings. I wasn’t prepared for the physical scale and the beauty of this collection—and I saw only a fraction of it. I have never spent much time on this period of art because I’ve never been a huge fan of Christian imagery, which always struck me as redundant. The Alte Pinakothek converted me. There is just so much more to know about that epoch than I understood, and much of the knowledge is in that museum. I could have spent days there.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “If Christopher Calls,” by Foy Vance, and “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?,” by R.E.M.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Tom Read Wilson. I start most mornings with his word or phrase of the day on Instagram. Tom is a devoted lover of spoken language and a keen etymologist. He recently explained the Latin origins of the word risible, and demonstrated how it could be used positively and negatively. He shares colorful figures of speech from Australia, South Africa, and the American South, always in a regionally appropriate accent. (His Texas twang is really good.) On weekends, he will recite a Shakespearean sonnet—he is learning and performing all of them in order.

That’s all great. But I think Tom is at his best when he eschews the high-minded stuff. I first encountered him when the Instagram algorithm served up his straight-faced explanation of a “shit sandwich.” “Now, I don’t mean a sandwich containing fecal matter, nor do I mean a really rubbish panini,” Tom explained. He asked us to imagine a three-paragraph email in which bad news or criticism is sandwiched between more pleasant and easier-to-swallow sentences. Well, we’ve all received one of those! [Related: The two most dismissive words on the internet]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Jóhann Jóhannsson, the Icelandic composer who is probably best known for his collaboration with the filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. Jóhannsson scored Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival, which is one of my 10 favorite films of all time. (Sicario, by the way, is a movie that bears rewatching in light of the actions that the U.S. government is poised to take against Mexican drug cartels.) I am also captivated by Jóhannsson’s score for his own film, Last and First Men. He died from a drug overdose two years before the release; the composer Yair Elazar Glotman finished the music and collaborated with other superb musicians, including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who won an Oscar in 2020 for scoring Joker. [Related: The blockbuster that Hollywood was afraid to make]

I love Jóhannsson’s film scores and often listen to them while I write. But don’t overlook his studio albums. Fordlandia, inspired by a failed utopia that Henry Ford wanted to build in the jungles of Brazil, is so thematically coherent that you could imagine it was written for a movie. Jóhannsson’s work is often dark, brooding, and eerie, but it can be surprisingly melodic, and I love that he treats any object that can make a sound as a musical instrument. He occupies the same place in my imagination as Philip Seymour Hoffman, the actor who also died far too young from an overdose. They would surely have given us more masterpieces, but any artist would envy the body of work they left behind.

The Week Ahead

Black Bag, Steven Soderbergh’s new spy-thriller film about an intelligence agent whose wife is accused of betraying her country (in theaters Friday)

Season 3 of The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series about five young villagers who are part of an ancient prophecy (out Thursday)

Liquid: A Love Story, a novel by Mariam Rahmani about a Muslim scholar who leaves her career in academia to marry rich instead (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Andrew Harnik / Getty.

What Ketamine Does to the Human Brain

By Shayla Love

What Ketamine Does to the Human BrainBy Shayla LoveLast month, during Elon Musk’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, as he hoisted a chain saw in the air, stumbled over some of his words, and questioned whether there was really gold stored in Fort Knox, people on his social-media platform, X, started posting about ketamine.

Read the full article.

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“Dear James”: My husband is a mess.

Coaching is the new “asking your friends for help.”

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

Mitch McConnell and the president he calls “despicable”

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Photo Album

Evgenia Novozhenina / Reuters

Revelers watch a giant wooden installation depicting a mill tower burn during the annual celebration of Maslenitsa at the Nikola-Lenivets art park southwest of Moscow, on March 1, 2025. The cherished Russian folk festival has its origins in an ancient Slavic holiday marking the end of winter and spring’s arrival.

Spend time with photos of the week, including a caretaking humanoid robot in Japan, prayers for Pope Francis in Brazil, a polar-bear-plunge record attempt in the Czech Republic, and more.

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

For three years, I was President Barack Obama’s Russia adviser on the National Security Council and, for two, the U.S. ambassador to Russia. In that time, no assumption drove me crazier than this one about Russian President Vladimir Putin: “He’s a transactional leader.” I heard this characterization dozens and dozens of times. And in my view, it expressed a fundamental misunderstanding of Putin’s thinking and intentions.

I first met Putin in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1990. He was in charge of international contacts for Mayor Anatoly Sobchak. I was working for the National Democratic Institute, an American NGO dedicated to advancing democracy abroad. Back then, Putin was already known as a dealmaker of the corrupt kind, using his government position to make money for newly emerging private companies and foreign investors. He’s been doing that ever since, and some observers believe that it has made him the richest man in the world. But these sorts of transactions, as important as they were to his rise, don’t define the whole of his project.

The Putin who has governed Russia this past quarter century is an ideologue. He has developed a strong set of ideas about how Russia should be ruled and what place it should occupy in the world. On these matters, he is not guided by rational cost-benefit analysis or dealmaking so much as by real animus against democracy, liberalism, and the West, together with a determination to resurrect the Russian empire.

For too long, we in the West have underestimated Putin’s global ideological vision as an animating force for his foreign-policy agenda. The tragic consequence is that today Putinism is advancing across Europe and the United States.

In the beginning, Putin was an accidental leader. After Russia’s 1998 financial crash, its president, Boris Yeltsin, and the oligarchs around him scrambled to find a viable candidate to run against the Communists in the 2000 presidential election. They settled on an obscure KGB agent, selecting Putin to become first prime minister in August 1999, then acting president at the end of 1999, and then the ruling elite’s choice to succeed Yeltsin in the March 2000 election. Voters ratified Yeltsin’s pick, not the other way around.

[Read: Putin is loving this]

At the time, Putin was not anti-Western. He had not joined forces with the neo-imperialist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, or the Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Rather, he had spent the ’90s working as a mid-level bureaucrat for pro-democratic, pro-Western politicians, first Sobchak in St. Petersburg and later Yeltsin in Moscow. So the failure to anticipate his pivot away from these people and ideas is understandable.

But Putin made his disdain for democracy clear early in his rule. (I wrote about his autocratic proclivities just three weeks before Russia’s 2000 election.) On other issues, he initially signaled continuity with the Yeltsin era. For instance, Putin expressed pro-Western positions, adopted free-market policies, cut corporate and income taxes, and even suggested that Russia should join NATO: “Why not?” Putin answered when asked this in 2000. “I do not rule out such a possibility … Russia is a part of European culture, and I do not consider my own country in isolation from Europe … Therefore, it is with difficulty that I imagine NATO as an enemy.” After the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001, Putin fully embraced President George W. Bush’s idea of a global war on terror and even helped the U.S. open military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to support its war effort in Afghanistan.

Over time, however, Putin became less enamored with free markets and relations with the West. He began to gradually reassert state control over Russia’s economy and media. In 2003, for instance, he arrested Russia’s richest businessman, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and handed Khodorkovsky’s oil company to one of his KGB comrades, Igor Sechin, because Khodorkovsky was becoming too active in supporting the political opposition. By 2003, all of Russia’s independent television networks—TVS, TV6, and NTV—were either shut down or had become state channels.

Putin initially reacted calmly to NATO expansion, announced in 2002 and completed in 2004, because he still sought cooperation with the United States. But then popular protest movements that the Kremlin came to call “color revolutions” brought democratic, pro-Western governments to power in Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. Putin saw the sinister, orchestrating hand of the United States and the West behind these “coups” in countries too close to Russia for his comfort. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin berated the U.S. for interfering in the domestic politics of other countries in the service of its own ideas. He asserted, “One state and, of course, first and foremost, the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural, and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?”

Ideas such as freedom, democracy, and liberalism threatened Putin’s autocratic style of rule. Sure enough, in 2011, what happened in Georgia and Ukraine seemed poised to occur in Russia too. That December, Russia held a parliamentary election that was falsified in Putin’s favor, in the manner usual at the time. On this occasion, however, Russia’s election observers documented the irregularities, and political opposition leaders mobilized the biggest nationwide demonstration since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. At Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, Russian protesters chanted for free and fair elections—also for “Russia without Putin.”

[Read: The Putinization of America]

Putin was frightened, and so he pushed back hard. He blamed President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and me (I arrived as the U.S. ambassador in 2012, right as these demonstrations were taking place) for fomenting regime change against him and his government. He told his citizens that the U.S. sought the destruction of Russia as a country and was using “fifth column” agents such as Alexei Navalny and Boris Nemtsov (both later allegedly assassinated by Putin’s regime) as domestic agents to achieve these goals.

After his return to the presidency in 2012, Putin used ever more coercive methods to weaken opposition leaders, civil society, and independent media. In 2012, he closed down USAID’s operations in Russia—the very organization the Trump administration is shutting down today. Since then, Putin has consolidated his views and repressive policies, cracking down on the last remaining opposition after launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To justify this clampdown, Putin has evoked the defense of Russian sovereignty and conservative Christian values against the decadent liberal West. Not unlike other populists, he blamed international forces for Russia’s economic woes, but his real bread-and-butter issues were cultural clashes. He devoted obsessive attention to issues of sexual orientation, blaming the West for promoting homosexuality, LGBTQ identities, and other ideas he considers deviant and antithetical to Russian culture and traditions. As he bluntly claimed at the annual forum held by the Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club in 2013, “Many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.”

Putin has also repeatedly attacked the liberal international order, calling it a setup to maintain American hegemonic rule over the entire world. He wants to return to a 19th-century-style world, in which a handful of great powers dominate their spheres of influence unconstrained by multilateral institutions, international laws, or global norms. If the Cold War’s central ideological struggle of communism versus capitalism was between states, this new ideological struggle of illiberal nationalism versus liberal internationalism is being fought primarily within states.

After consolidating power at home, Putin began to propagate his conservative, populist, autocratic ideas internationally, but especially in the developed world. To do so he invested heavily in several instruments of influence and used them in support of largely far-right movements across the West.

He allocated considerable resources to Russian state media operating abroad, including the flagship television network Russia Today, the Sputnik news agency, and armies of propagandists across all social-media platforms. Russia’s ideological efforts in this domain were so effective in Romania’s 2024 presidential election, for instance, that an obscure far-right presidential candidate, Cǎlin Georgescu, came out of nowhere and won the first round. The violation of Romanian sovereignty was assessed by intelligence services to be so acute that the country’s supreme court felt compelled to cancel the second round of the election.

Putin deputized the Russian Orthodox Church to nurture relations with like-minded churches in the West, including evangelical ones in the United States. He personally fostered ties between the Orthodox Church in Moscow and its counterpart in the United States, a union that later helped him win endorsement of his annexation of Crimea from many in the Russian diaspora. When I was the U.S. ambassador to Russia, I witnessed the Russian Orthodox Church’s aggressive courtship of conservative Christian leaders from the United States. In 2013, Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage traveled to Moscow, where he gave a speech opposing the adoption of children by same-sex couples—something Putin sharply limited by law that same year, leading the American conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh to remark on his radio show, “I have to tell you that it freaks me out that Vladimir Putin is saying things I agree with.” In 2015, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church hosted Franklin Graham, the CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who praised Putin for “protecting Russian young people against homosexual propaganda.”

At the same time, Putin cultivated ties with illiberal populists across Europe. He shared with these leaders a rejection of liberalism, a commitment to traditional values, an embrace of national and ethnic identities, and a disdain for alleged constraints on sovereignty—whether those of the European Union on its members or of American “imperialism” on Russia. Putin’s closest ideological ally in Europe is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—the only EU leader who did not condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and who subsequently tried to block EU aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. No European leader has done more to weaken the EU than Orbán, and weakening the EU is precisely what Putin wants.    

In France, Putin has nurtured a relationship with the far-right politician Marine Le Pen, providing financial assistance for her 2017 presidential campaign and meeting her at the Kremlin that year in a public show of support. In turn, Le Pen enthused, “The model that is defended by Vladimir Putin, which is one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his own country, defending his identity, is one that I like, as long as I can defend this model in my own country.” In Italy, Putin has nurtured personal relations with the illiberal nationalist leader Matteo Salvini. Secret audio recordings revealed that Salvini’s Lega Nord allegedly participated in backroom deals with Russian operatives to receive funds from a Russian state-owned company. The United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage is a longtime Kremlin favorite thanks to his disdain for the EU; Putin’s government supported Farage’s Brexit campaign.

Shared anti-liberal and culturally reactionary values have also undergirded Putin’s relationships with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and nationalist-conservative-party leaders in Austria, Bulgaria, and Germany. More proximately, Putin has supported the Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko for decades, helping his autocratic partner hang onto power despite mass demonstrations following a fraudulent election in 2020. In Georgia, Putin has linked up with the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, whose political party, Georgian Dream, has undermined democratic institutions and suspended the country’s accession talks with the European Union for four years. In Ukraine, of course, Putin’s man was Viktor Yanukovych, who also tried to turn his country away from European ties and ideas, only to lose power to a popular uprising in 2014.

For the past decade, however, Putin’s most important target for ideological promotion was not Europe but the United States. He courted like-minded conservatives within the U.S. as a strategy for dividing and thereby weakening Russia’s foremost enemy. The conservative populist Pat Buchanan was an early darling of the Russian right. More recently, several major MAGA influencers, including Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson, have embraced the militant Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin as an ideological hero. Dugin is now a regular guest on American conservative podcasts, whose hosts frequently amplify their common ideas on social media. When Elon Musk publicly stated on X at the beginning of the month that the U.S. should quit NATO and the United Nations, Dugin echoed him. American and Russian nationalists share many common enemies these days, including the “globalists,” the “neocons,” the “gays,” and the “woke.”

Putin’s ideological promotion in the United States turned aggressive with the Kremlin’s direct meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Russian cyberintelligence officers stole thousands of emails and documents from Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff. They then publicized this content to embarrass the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate and help the Republican Party’s candidate, Donald Trump. Kremlin surrogates, in both traditional media and social media, campaigned in support of Trump and against Clinton. The extent to which these Russian efforts affected the outcome of that election is hard to measure. That Putin tried is clear.

During his first term as president, Trump made his support for Putin, his ideas, and his style of rule explicit. He never once criticized the Russian dictator over his human-rights record or anything else, but instead praised him as a strong leader. Unlike previous presidents, Trump did not publicly meet with Russian human-rights activists or opposition figures, and he paid zero attention to the Russian-supported war in eastern Ukraine, which started in 2014 and continued throughout his term. When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a cease-fire with Putin in 2019, Europeans were at the table, but Trump’s team was absent. Most shockingly, at a summit meeting in Helsinki in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian dictator against his own intelligence community and would not acknowledge Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. He also refused to debrief his senior staff after his one-on-one with Putin at that summit; one official characterized his attitude as suggesting,“This is between me and my friend.”

Trump did not succeed in enacting Putin’s full ideological agenda during that first term, however. Some of Trump’s senior national-security officials slowed or even altogether stopped the president from achieving the objectives he and Putin shared—for instance, ending NATO. In an unprecedented divide between a president and his national-security team, the first Trump administration at times pursued confrontational policies toward Russia, including expelling its diplomats with ties to intelligence, sanctioning its companies, and sending a modest military package to Ukraine. Putin blamed the American “deep state” for Trump’s failure to deliver. Trump sometimes hinted that he agreed.

After a four-year interregnum, Putin’s ideological ally is back in the White House. This time around, however, Trump is no longer constrained by old-school generals trying to slow him down. And this time around, the ideological solidarity between MAGA-ism and Putinism has become even more pronounced. Putin’s ideologues and Trump’s ideologues are both militantly anti-Zelensky, anti-Ukraine, and anti-Europe. They each admire the other’s “strong” leaders. Russian nationalists have pushed for the destruction of the alleged American deep state; Elon Musk and his aides express agreement and are attempting to do just that.

[Read: The simple explanation for why Trump turned against Ukraine]

Trump has now made the restoration of his personal relationship with Putin a top foreign-policy priority; negotiating an agreement to end the war in Ukraine is a secondary or tertiary concern. How else to explain why Trump has delivered to Putin multiple concessions without asking for anything in return?

After just a few weeks in office, the list of Trump’s concessions to Russia is truly extraordinary. It includes (1) intelligence sharing with Ukraine has been discontinued; (2) USAID assistance for Ukraine, including funding to repair its energy grid and for anti-corruption programs, has been discontinued; (3) U.S. funding for Russian civil society and independent media operating in exile has been stopped; (4) diplomatic relations with Moscow have been restored, beginning with a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in Saudi Arabia a few weeks ago; and (5) in radical reversal of past policy, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus, North Korea, and a handful of other rogue autocracies against a UN resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In addition, Trump has insisted that (6) Ukraine cannot join NATO; (7) Zelensky must give up territory to Russia; (8) no new military aid for Ukraine will be made available, even previously appropriated funding; (9) U.S. forces deployed in Europe might be reduced and will not participate in any peacekeeping mission in Ukraine; and (10) sanctions on Russia could be lifted, although Trump suddenly reversed himself last week when he said he was “strongly considering” new sanctions and tariffs.

To use Trump’s favorite metaphor for dealmaking, these are not clever “cards” played to shape a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Trump has secured nothing for either the United States or Ukraine by playing them. Instead, the concessions are meant to rekindle a personal relationship between Trump and Putin, anchored by a shared ideology. In all of American history, I cannot think of a more radical change in U.S. foreign policy in such a short period of time.

Many Russians reject Putinism. They remain liberal internationalists, not illiberal nationalists. However, these Russians have no ability to influence politics in Putin’s dictatorship. Many of them now live abroad.

Many Americans likewise reject Trump’s ideological mind meld with Putin. I am one of them; most Americans seem to share my view. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 81 percent of Americans do not trust Putin, and only 9 percent do. Unlike Russians, Americans still live in a democracy and therefore have the ability to influence their country’s foreign policy. The question moving forward is whether this overwhelming majority of Americans cares enough about this issue to try to do something about it, to try to slow Trump’s historic pivot of putting America on the side of the autocrats and against the democrats. To date, the answer is unclear.

The same question can be posed worldwide. Putinism resonates with millions in Europe, America, and other parts of the world. In Europe and the United States, Putin’s illiberal orthodox populism is more attractive than Xi Jinping Thought, which has some tepid followers in the developing world but very few fans in the developed world. For years, American national-security experts have rightly focused on addressing the rising threat from China, but wrongly neglected the threat from Russia, including this ideological menace.

In our new era of great-power competition between dictators and democrats, Russia is the generally junior partner to China in the axis of autocracies, except when it comes to the appeal of its style of governance. Xi, after all, has courted no ideological allies as powerful as the current president of the United States of America. And yet, the supporters of Putinism are not the majority anywhere—not even in Hungary.  

Right now, the transnational movement of illiberal nationalism is more organized, united, and strategic in its collective actions than the liberal democratic movement. But those in Europe and the United States who support liberal democracy should remember that they far outnumber those who embrace illiberal autocracy, and that they have a history of victory over the forces that oppose them. During the Cold War, political parties, trade unions, intellectuals, civil-society organizations, and even religious leaders forged transnational ties in defense of democratic ideas—remember the AFL-CIO’s embrace of Poland’s Solidarity movement? The global anti-apartheid movement? We can do these things again now.  

This is not the first time in history, or even in the past century, that democratic ideas appeared to wane as autocratic ideas appeared to surge. That happened in the 1930s. It happened again in the 1970s, when Marxist-Leninist regimes were seizing power in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, and the practice of American democracy at home was inspiring few worldwide, thanks to the violent suppression of protesters, the assassinations of political figures, and the resignation of President Nixon.

The world democratic movement eventually recovered from those dark periods. It has to find its nerve and recover now. The challenge of fighting for democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law just got a lot harder because the president of the United States—a title that used to be synonymous with the leader of the free world—just switched sides. That puts the onus on those within the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world who still support these ideals to get organized if they are to prevail over Putin’s ideology of illiberal nationalism.

Christian Michel has been held for six years in the high-profile AgustaWestland corruption case.

Led by Christian Stocker as chancellor, new ruling coalition keeps far-right Freedom Party in opposition.

Christian Schmidt calls for the 'immediate cessation of all activities that undermine the Dayton Peace Agreement'.

I’m a hard target for Ross Douthat’s evangelism. When I got a copy of his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, I felt an impulse to answer, Nope: Why You Should Leave Everyone Alone. I come from a family of atheists and am a lifelong nonbeliever. At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.  

Douthat came to religion through his parents’ New England Protestantism, which took a turn during his childhood from the mainline to the charismatic. His own systematic thinking and interest in the workings of worldly power led him to become a conservative Catholic. When The New York Times hired him as a columnist, he asked me for advice, which in itself showed his open-mindedness. I suggested that, as a precocious Harvard-educated blogger for this magazine, he should make sure now and then to get out of the world of precocious bloggers and talk with people unlike him—to report on the rest of the country. Douthat didn’t follow my advice, and he was probably right not to. His own mind, nourished by innate curiosity and wide reading, has become the most interesting site in the landscape of Times opinion. I read him, with admiration and annoyance, religiously.

But Believe suffers from the limitations of Douthat’s brilliance. He has absorbed a good deal of recent literature on cosmology, physics, neuroscience, and supernaturalism, and he devotes most of the book to arguing that scientific knowledge makes the existence of God more rather than less likely. Douthat is speaking to the well-educated contemporary reader who requires a rational case for religion, and among his key words are reasonable, sensible, and empirical. Belief, in Believe, isn’t a leap of faith marked by paradox, contradiction, or wild surmise; it’s a matter of mastering the research and figuring the odds. If brain chemistry hasn’t located the exact site of consciousness, that doesn’t suggest the extent of what human beings know—it’s evidence for the existence of the soul.

Douthat guides the reader through the science toward God with a gentle but insistent intellectualism that leaves this nonbeliever wanting less reason and more inspiration. I can’t follow him into his Middle Earth kingdom of angels, demons, and elves just because a book he’s read shows that a universe in which life is possible has a one in 10-to-the-120th-power chance of being random. We don’t fall in love because someone has made a plausible case for being great together. Some mysteries neither reason nor religion can explain.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book. “What account will you give of yourself if the believers turn out to have been right all along?” he demands—and then goes on to portray nonbelievers as shallow, mentally lazy, and status-obsessed, too concerned with sounding clever at a dinner party to see the obvious Truth:

That you took pointlessness for granted in a world shot through with signs of meaning and design? That you defaulted to unbelief because that seemed like the price of being intellectually serious or culturally respectable? That you were too busy to be curious, too consumed with things you knew to be passing to cast a prayer up to whatever eternity awaits?

This move—a dubious assumption that imputes unflattering qualities to the opposition and stacks the deck in Douthat’s favor—is familiar from some of his columns, and it brings Believe closer to his political journalism. Throughout the book Douthat the divine has a reflexive habit of belittling nonbelief in the same way that Douthat the columnist disparages liberalism. He repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

Believe appears at a moment when nonbelief seems to be running out of gas. Douthat’s purpose is to hasten the process. “Already the time of the new atheism is passing,” he writes; “already mystery and magic and enchantment seem to be rushing back into the world.” He has been predicting this for some time, and he is almost certainly right. Large numbers of people throughout the West feel that liberal society and the bureaucratic state are failing—not just to provide practical benefits but to offer meaning and community. Secular liberalism is not the same as atheism, but disillusionment with the former seems to be driving modern people into a new period of anti-rationalism and mysticism, with a growing distrust of established science, a leveling off of the percentage of nonbelieving Americans, and a trend toward public figures making high-profile conversions—to Christianity, in the case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the atheist refugee from repressive Islam; to Catholicism, in the case of J. D. Vance and others. Christopher Hitchens is dead and UFO sightings are on the rise.

[Read: Evangelicals made a bad trade]

President Donald Trump himself, whose first 78 years were nearly unmarked by signs of faith, has sworn a newfound religiosity since his near assassination. God saved him to make America great again, he has said several times, so “let’s bring religion back.” Days before Believe was published, Trump announced the creation of a Justice Department task force to root out anti-Christian bias, as well as a White House Faith Office, led by Paula White-Cain, Trump’s religious adviser, who has said that opposing him means opposing God. (This kind of theocratic edict has turned a generation of young Iranians against religion.) The president’s more ardent followers regard him as a kind of mythic figure, above history and politics, leading by spiritual power that connects him directly to the people. By this light, faith is inseparable from authoritarianism.

Believe is not a political book, but it would be naive to imagine that Douthat’s evangelism has no political implications. He acknowledges that the book could be “a work of Christian apologetics in disguise,” and his invitation to religion in general leads predictably to a case for Christianity in particular, preferably of the conservative-Catholic variety. In his columns he draws no bright line between religion and politics: Contemporary America is decadent, liberalism has famished our souls, and any renewal depends on faith—not New Ageism, not progressive Protestantism, but religion of a traditional, illiberal cast. Douthat has carried on a years-long flirtation with MAGA, endorsing many of its policies while hedging his personal dislike of Trump against his antipathy toward the opposition. (He refused to disclose his choice in the most recent election, which seems like a misdemeanor for a political columnist.) Douthat hasn’t gone as far as the head of the new White House Faith Office, but when he calls Trump a “man of destiny,” it isn’t easy to extricate his metaphysical leanings from his partisan ones.

Douthat wants you to abandon secular liberalism and become a believer at a moment when democracy is under assault from a phalanx of right-wing ideas, some of them religious. That is not a reason to believe or not to believe, for belief needs no reason. But it should make you pause and think before following Douthat on the path to his promised land.

School-aged child dies in Texas amid outbreak concentrated among followers of Christian sect.

Over the course of 2024, Aella cried on 71 different days, showered on 24, and took ketamine on 14. We know this because she meticulously gathers and posts information about people’s personal, emotional, and sexual lives—including her own. The crying number was unusually high, she says, because of a bad breakup. For many fans, the more boggling statistic was that last year, she had sex on only 41 days, but on one of those days, she had sex with nearly 40 people. We’ll come back to that.

After years of following Aella’s online outrages and unexpected insights, I wanted to meet her for myself—to understand her unusual occupation as a cam girl turned sex researcher, and to hear her perspective on what the internet has done to human sexuality. But my first IRL encounter with her, one day last spring, involved staring at a closed front door.

Aella had invited me to her home in Austin, but then slept through our designated appointment time. Even my frantic knocking and texting didn’t rouse her. Eventually, though, once she had woken up and been for a swim in the local springs, her assistant let me into the house and made me a mushroom coffee. Explaining that she was gradually bringing order to Aella’s life, the assistant opened a closet to reveal a rail of neatly hung bras. This was a first in my journalism career—being invited to appreciate an interviewee’s underwear. Not that Aella would mind, because her entire appeal is based around her lack of filter. Polaroids of her, masked and topless, were stuck to the fridge.

[Jane Coaston: The nudes internet]

“I can’t really get canceled,” she told me when I finally met her, “because what are you gonna do?” By then she was sitting with her legs curled up underneath her on a chair, wearing only a robe and underwear, next to a giant, curved monitor of the type beloved by crypto day traders.

Aella is her longtime pseudonym; the 33-year-old keeps her birth name private. Describing precisely what she does for a living is difficult: Her X bio describes her as a “whorelord” and a “vexworker,” by which she means that she is an OnlyFans star, occasional escort, and organizer of sex parties. She is unabashedly a nerd, once describing herself as “a gremlinesque neckbeard who found himself in a hot woman’s body.” And she has turned her experience of selling sex into a large-scale research project.

Thanks to her talent for virality, she has been able to create huge online surveys that, despite the limitations of the medium, provide some of the broadest insights that we have into sexuality in the 2020s. More than 700,000 people have responded to her “Big Kink” survey. She has learned, among other things, that “pigtails” are a more popular fetish than “armpits.” She is as uninhibited about asking inflammatory questions as she is about posting nudes: She has written about whether penis size is correlated with race (“We haven’t had a good, high-n study”) and asked her followers if they would support the creation of realistic child-size sex dolls for pedophiles (77.4 percent said no).

One of the biggest problems in sex research is recruiting participants who can be induced to answer questions honestly. This is where Aella’s experience of capturing the internet’s attention gives her an advantage. The Big Kink survey takes about 40 minutes to complete—long enough to weed out trollish and spam responses. But how could she expect to keep unpaid respondents interested for that long? Her solution was to promise them a freakiness rating at the end, like a classic BuzzFeed personality quiz.

Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist who serves as the executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, sees Aella as the young-Millennial version of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the sex educator whose grandmotherly charm made her a disarming advocate of sexual liberation. As Dr. Ruth understood, many Americans’ lives were once blighted by their inability to articulate, much less confront, their relationship needs. Even today, people withhold details about their sexual interests from their partners, their doctors, and academic researchers. Yet they’ll spill quite a lot to a sex-positive internet personality, and all those revelations add up to a huge body of information.

Like much American social-science research, Aella’s sample skews white and college-educated. Liberals are overrepresented in her data; most of her followers are men, but most of her survey respondents are women. Online polls like hers have limitations, Garcia told me. “But,” he added, “they do tell us what people are thinking about.”

Aella was raised in Idaho in a fundamentalist-Christian family that was so socially conservative, her parents showed her and her two younger sisters a censored version of Titanic. Her father is an evangelist and a radio host who used to be flooded by hate mail from atheists and other Christians. That turned out to be a preview of Aella’s own experience of threats and abuse, and good practice for life online. On a recent seven-and-a-half-hour episode of the podcast Whatever, she was part of a panel of 10 women who were hectored and mocked by Andrew Wilson, a fellow guest and self-described Christian “bloodsports debater.” When he insinuated that she didn’t understand science, she kept her cool and calmly explained basic statistical methods to him. His argumentative tactics, she said afterward, reminded her of her father’s.

She always felt like an outsider, she says now. She remembers writing in her teenage journals that “everybody else has access to a secret script that I don’t know what it is.” She left home at 17 after an argument. Once she started seeing flaws in her Christian beliefs, her faith crumbled quickly. “I have a tendency to take things to an extreme,” Aella once told Playboy. She flipped from devout teenager to libertine 20-something, barely passing through the dull span of vanilla dating and low-key Sunday churchgoing.

After dropping out of college in northern Idaho, Aella became a cam girl—because streaming explicit content for money couldn’t be worse than her day job on an electrical-equipment assembly line, she reckoned. She both enjoyed and excelled at it, and she soon started researching what made some girls more successful than others. Her findings surprised her: Viewers liked idiosyncrasy and theatricality as much as nudity and straightforward hotness. And so she began to stage surreal scenes—dressing up as a mime, pretending to seduce a chair, doing a “dinosaur moonwalk,” playing the accordion. On an internet filled with horny nerds, the juxtaposition of weird and sexy can be lucrative. She earned more than $100,000 in her best month on OnlyFans, and has thousands of paid subscribers on Substack.

Her first moment of virality outside the camming sites came in 2013, from a series of photos that showed her undressing, before being dragged off camera by garden gnomes. The “Getting Gnaked” set was viewed more than 2 million times within a year. Aella also found that, contrary to many of the stereotypes about online porn, a physically submissive woman was not what most straight men wanted. Instead, her customers fantasized about scenarios in which they were essentially passive—a “basic hot girl” just fell into their arms. “Like, Oh, we’re the last people on Earth, right?” she told the podcaster Lex Fridman. In a conclusion that might unsettle some feminists, she finds that the proportion of women who are interested in feeling submissive is greater than the proportion of men who want to feel dominant. Perhaps my favorite Aella claim is that she can arouse her escorting clients just by expressing enthusiasm as they explain high-level concepts to her. (Her current rate is $4,000 an hour.)

During her early career, she bounced around the U.S., living in Boston, New York, and the Bay Area, as well as Portland, Oregon. She gravitated toward a scene known as rationalism, wherein self-professed nerds apply a coldly rational lens to subjects that are often clouded by emotion or dogma, such as the heritability of intelligence, whether you should altruistically donate a kidney to a stranger, and whether it’s acceptable to have sex with your sister. “once i threw a party for the bay area rationalists, and the rules to attend were you had to be wearing a full-face coverage mask, and be naked,” she wrote on X in 2021, during the pandemic. “Many came; they all bravely stripped, donned weird masks … and then proceeded to sit in a polite circle and debate global trade.” Her bracingly unfiltered posts put her in my peripheral vision years ago; while I am worried about the potential for abuse and exploitation in sex work, her originality and openness have always intrigued me.

Last February, somewhat infamously, she enrolled 42 men to have sex with her en masse via a Google Form, then rented a venue, recruited eight women to act as fluffers, and asked the men to put on matching commemorative bathrobes. The resulting Substack post is a masterpiece, starting with an epigram from Nelson Mandela: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” (She detailed how two of the attendees, waiting in line, bonded over the fact that their start-ups had received support from the same venture-capital fund.) This was how she managed to have sex on so few days last year, but with so many different people. It is also one of many, many incidents in Aella’s life that most people would regard with awe, horror, or both.

[Helen Lewis: The outrage over ]100 Men only goes so far

Aella originally felt drawn to sex research because her own sexual interests are outside the mainstream. She practices polyamory and freely discusses her fetish for “consensual nonconsent”—which is to say, scenarios in which she pretends to be taking part against her will. If she were “super normie” about sex, she told me, “I don’t think I would have the need to dissect it.” This places her in the grand tradition of American sex researchers who defied convention in their own personal life and, whether they acknowledged it or not, became advocates for greater sexual permissiveness. Alfred Kinsey, a pioneer in the field in the 1940s and ’50s, was married to a woman but had sexual relationships with at least one of his male students. The biologist shocked the country with his first book about human sexuality, which claimed that only half the population is exclusively heterosexual throughout adulthood. “I suspect that Kinsey’s great project originated in the discovery of his own sexual ambiguities,” the author of a 1972 Atlantic article hypothesized. Kinsey’s ostensibly objective scholarship was a concealed polemic: He wanted to expand the scope of “normal.”

In the 1960s, the gynecologist William Masters and and his research partner (and later wife) Virginia Johnson also defied prim scholarly norms by serving as consultants to Playboy, reasoning that the magazine was a good way to reach young men, and they supplied female “surrogates”—therapeutic escorts—to single men with sexual inhibitions, erectile disorder, and other conditions.

Throughout the 20th century, sex researchers willed themselves to suspend moral judgment. Kinsey had a saying, Justin Garcia told me, that is often quoted at the institute that bears his name: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts—not the judges of the behaviors we describe.” Yet the field still has taboos, just different ones. The feminist commentators Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, whose work is highly influential on university campuses, have argued that pornography is inherently harmful to women. Some of Aella’s findings challenge that view. She finds that men who watch online porn, rather than being desensitized to what real-life sexual partners want, are better at guessing what women want in bed.

Aella is not familiar with the academic traditions that have shaped modern sex research. When I asked her about Kinsey and Masters and Johnson, she told me that she hadn’t read their work. This irritates some mainstream researchers: J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychology professor who studies sexual orientation and arousal, told me he was “annoyed” by what he saw as her casualness, and denied being merely territorial. “She hasn’t bothered to learn things,” Bailey told me. “Sex research is not just asking a few questions to a lot of people. If it were, we would know a lot more than we know.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Don’t fire people for making pornography in their spare time]

Nonetheless, Bailey said, “she talks about things without worry, and we should all be doing that a lot more.” He thinks that some mainstream academic sex research has suffered from “the encroachment of ideology,” becoming queer or feminist activism by other means. (Bailey’s 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, which argues that some gender transitions are sexually motivated, prompted some transgender activists to accuse him of research misconduct—claims that a subsequent investigation did not substantiate.) Bailey invited Aella to join an email discussion group he runs, and he asked her to promote a survey on sadomasochism that his graduate student was running. If he thought her work was worthless, he said, “I wouldn’t have asked for the help.”

Garcia noted that, because sex research is a prime target for political scrutiny, institutions like his take great care with study design, researchers’ conflicts of interests, and gaining approval from review boards. “Aella, her work blurs those boundaries,” he told me. “But they were created by a field to protect itself, and add rigor and protection from political attacks.”

Unconstrained by such concerns, Aella has spelunked through the extremes of modern sexuality. Among them is vore, a rare fetish “around swallowing someone whole or being swallowed whole, typically by a much larger creature,” as she put it. Researching the phenomenon is tricky. Trying to find, say, 300 people who like vore within the results of a bigger survey would require a huge initial number of respondents. Recruiting participants on a vore forum solves that problem, she has written, even if it does introduce some sampling bias: “Maybe these people are less ashamed about their fetish; maybe they’re lonelier in real life; maybe they’re much more into vore than the actual population of people into vore,” Aella argued. Or, of course, they could be lying.

[Helen Lewis: Nobody should care about a woman’s ‘body count’]

Still, as Aella and others have shown, the universe of niche sexual interests is enormous. And really, this is the big change that the internet has brought to sexuality itself—not just the study of it. Anyone who grew up with a latent vore fetish 100 years ago, or even 30, might have gone their whole life without meeting a fellow enthusiast for being swallowed whole. Bailey published research on people who both desire amputees and fantasize about becoming amputees. “What’s wonderful is that, today, people with these weird sexualities find each other online,” he told me. “It’s really a heyday for studying unusual phenomena like that.”

That raises some obvious follow-up questions: What if the internet is not just connecting people with weird sexual interests, but creating them? Should there ever be a time when sex researchers say, Hang on, that’s far enough?

Aella, who considers herself a libertarian, had come to Austin in the hope of meeting like-minded people, away from the default leftism of the Bay Area. But even in America’s supposed heterodoxy capital, she felt shunned. She joined an invitation-only society for freethinkers called Based in Austin, but was quickly kicked out of the group by fellow anti-woke warriors. Her offense was to post, in a chat thread about venue suggestions, a recommendation for a space where she had once held an orgy. She also didn’t last in a support group for OnlyFans creators, because other women—who she said were “very, very, like, social justice, very leftist”—objected to her provocative posts.

Aella thinks that America still has a deeply hypocritical attitude to sex. “It feels like we simultaneously have a culture where we say sexual liberalism is good, but in action, we find reasons to not allow individual expression to happen,” she told me when I caught up with her again over Zoom, a few months after my visit to Austin. She cited PornHub’s refusal to host videos of sleep fetishes. But there was a good reason for that policy, I said—the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other French men revealed that Pelicot had recruited men to rape his unconscious wife under the pretext that the couple were indulging a consensual fetish about “sleeping beauties.”

My main point of disagreement with Aella is that she has a much sunnier vision of human nature than I do. While some people do like consensual nonconsent, others clearly relish actual violation and sadism in and out of the bedroom. Aella’s blitheness about the risks of her job—she wrote a guide to escorting, in which she describes one client aggressively biting and choking her—seems to be born from the same off-kilter approach to life that makes her such a good amateur anthropologist. In Austin, I was surprised that she invited me, a total stranger, to meet her at home. Eighteen months earlier, a man had appeared at her door and attempted to kidnap her. (Police later found a garrote at his home, alongside a knife, duct tape, and the names of two other sex workers. The man took a plea deal and is already out of jail.)

[Helen Lewis: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Ultimately, she left the Texas capital after a different episode of personal turmoil. She had hoped to have children, only to discover in August that her primary partner wasn’t interested in starting a family. When she revealed the breakup online, a predictable storm of schadenfreude ensued. For “posting publicly about being devastated from a breakup,” she wrote on X, her reward was “people laughing how you deserved it.”

She packed up her belongings and moved back to California. Her new housemate is one of the fluffers from her orgy—a woman who was also dating Aella’s boyfriend but broke up with him too, in solidarity. “We were both dating my ex, and then we’re both not dating him,” she told me. With her living arrangements sorted, Aella wants to work on a book and co-author some scientific papers, both of which might allow her to gain the respectability she needs to attract more funding. She might seek out what she calls “performative credentials.”

In the meantime, though, she still embraces the queasily intimate dynamics of internet celebrity—an openness that provides rich fodder for cruel armchair psychologists. Isn’t she just getting back at Daddy? How will she ever find love? I find something endearing about her refusal to be bowed by this kind of jeering. Aella bravely voyages to the frontiers of American sexuality, collecting data on people’s darkest desires, uncovering the hidden economics of the online sex trade, and refusing—despite all the mockery—to filter herself.

Christian Democrats came first. But the far right and the left were the biggest gainers.