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“People in the Northern Hemisphere are now neck-deep in a summer of travel—and so, too, are the coronaviruses they’re carrying,” our Science writer Katherine J. Wu reported in early July. As the summer goes on and the coronavirus subvariant BA.5 continues to spread, I checked back in with Katie about where things are.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Where do the Democrats find these guys? A world without white people A key 9/11 plotter is dead. He was already irrelevant. “A Bizarre Plateau”

Isabel Fattal: Where does America’s COVID-19 situation stand right now?

Katherine J. Wu: Things are not great right now. Based on the patterns of cases that we’re seeing, it’s pretty clear that we’re at a very high level, probably comparable to what we were seeing in terms of caseloads this past winter—among the worst caseloads of the pandemic.

It is true that hospitalization and death rates are down, but the more people you have infected, even a very small percentage can turn into an untenable number of hospitalizations and deaths. And every infection carries the risk of long COVID, or taking people away from school or work or their family. And the worrisome thing is, for the past few months, we’ve been at this bizarre plateau in terms of case counts not really coming back down and looking better.

Isabel: Last week, the Biden administration announced a plan to roll out retooled booster shots, which are expected to offer better protection against BA.5, in September. What’s your reaction to that news?

Katie: That sounds promising, but a lot still really needs to happen before then, and that’s what worries me. These vaccines are still being manufactured. They have not yet been authorized. The FDA hasn’t even seen data to show whether they outperform our current formulation in humans, and if so, by how much. Until that happens, the CDC can’t recommend an eligibility structure.

Is it going to go to high-risk people first? Are we going to have enough doses? We know that COVID funding is an absolute mess right now. And if we have limited doses, who gets them first? Are we going to have enough doses for young, healthy people to get them? Are we going to have enough doses for kids? Our youngest kids are still on their primary series.

The main worry has never been the technology. The concern is deployment, and making sure that people are able and willing to get these shots in an equitable way.

Isabel: What do we know right now about how effective these updated boosters would be against BA.5?

Katie: There’s not a lot of data to go off, so I’m going to be tentative here. I think we can expect them to be an improvement, but I can’t tell you if it’s going to be a 5 percent improvement or a 60 percent improvement. The other big asterisk on this is, what’s going to be around in September? Is it still going to be BA.5, is it going to be BA.6, or is it going to be another variant entirely?

The new vaccine is going to be half the original recipe and half something that is better tailored to BA.4/BA.5. And that, in a way, was a good bet hedge. That’s going to still give us the best of both worlds in terms of broadening our response.  

Isabel: What is one thing the Biden administration should be doing in its COVID-19 response that it’s not doing?

Katie: I think the main thing is to stop with the vaccine monomania. Don’t get me wrong: Vaccines are necessary for this response, but not sufficient. It’s been bizarre to watch the Biden administration say “Get boosted right now” while also loosening guidance around gathering, masking, and distancing, and claiming that America can practically declare independence from the virus. These things don’t match up.

We need multiple approaches to reduce transmission. It’s going bonkers right now, and this is not a sustainable way to coexist with this virus. I’m not saying that people need to have mask mandates forever, but when transmission rates are this high, it is a good idea to think about masking, to think about testing more often, paying attention to who is up-to-date on their vaccines and making sure that our approaches are complementing each other. We still have huge issues with access to Paxlovid, access to tests, access to everything.

Isabel: What are some of your pet peeves about the way the pandemic is being talked about right now?

Katie: We still need to care, but fearmongering too much is also going to make people check out. It’s not necessarily productive to say “Everyone is going to get long COVID by next year” (long COVID’s important to pay attention to, but this almost certainly isn’t true) or “This is the worst variant we have seen so far” (yes, variants are continuing to evolve, but we also have the tools to fight them). Find a way to meet people where they are, get them to tune in, but also trust that they can handle nuance.

Isabel: What else should Americans be thinking about right now in regard to the pandemic?

Katie: I just hope that with all the news about different outbreaks and viruses, people don’t accept this as normal. This is not normal. This is a sign that our public-health responses are failing, that we’re not leveraging the resources we have. This could become our normal if we let it, but it shouldn’t have to.

Related:

The BA.5 wave is what COVID normal looks like. America should’ve been able to handle monkeypox. Today’s News Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan, marking the highest-level visit by an American official in 25 years. Five states are holding primaries today. In Arizona, several Trump-endorsed candidates are on the ballot, including Mark Finchem, who brought the “Stop the Steal” movement to the state. The maker of Oatly recalled 53 products that may have been contaminated. Evening Read (Courtesy Chris Perez Howard)

His Mother’s Life Was a Mystery He Needed to Solve

By Lenika Cruz

Writing about the dead is difficult business. Whenever I write about my mother, I spend a lot of time struggling to recall: How did she take her coffee? What music made her dance? When she laughed, did she throw her head back, like I do? My ability to answer these questions—to try to create an honest portrait of her on the page—is constrained by the five and a half years we spent together before she died. To fill in the gaps, I’ve interviewed family and friends, even built an archive of documents and photos. Each piece of new information—her U.S. naturalization certificate, her honeymoon pictures—is a gift, but it’s also a reminder of all that I will never know about her.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why Britain changed its China stance A third nuclear age is upon us. Photo essay: When women enter the frame Culture Break (Michael Freimuth)

Read. A new cultural history of cheerfulness reveals its dark side.

Watch. Somebody Somewhere, an HBO Max show that’s been renewed for a second season. “Expect tears of sadness and of joy,” as our critic puts it.

Or try something else from our watch list of TV shows for short attention spans.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Covering the pandemic isn’t easy, so I asked Katie where she’s found a welcome distraction. Her answer: Rachel Gross’s new book, Vagina Obscura. “It’s a delightfully written dive into one of the human body’s least appreciated organs—one we shouldn’t be embarrassed to study or talk about, in all sorts of settings,” she told me.

— Isabel

Cheer up. Feel better. Don’t worry, be happy. Smile more. As an emotion, cheerfulness has astonishing range. At its best, it’s a style of kindness that we extend to others, a salve during times of trouble, and a way of coping with trauma and despair. At its worst, cheer can be breezily dishonest, an on-demand feeling that we can project to get what we want. It can also be a burden, especially for women and people of color, many of whom feel pressure to be constantly upbeat.

When it comes to moving votes and consuming public attention, the strongest and most negative emotions come to mind: anger, hatred, fear, resentment. But Timothy Hampton’s lively new cultural history of cheerfulness is a convincing argument that modest feelings matter too—even (or especially) as democracy shrivels and the planet overheats. Cheer, which Hampton describes as a “temporary lightness, a moderate uptick in mood,” turns out to have a captivating backstory; it’s helped people build communities, muddle through, and get ahead since at least the Middle Ages.

Hampton would like us to see cheerfulness as a rich moral sentiment, not just a fleeting psychological gimmick. Yet what he has really done, brilliantly if inadvertently, is reveal cheer’s shadow side: the way it lures us into valuing surfaces over substance, the peculiar degree to which it can be conjured and wielded at will, and, ultimately, how it so handily serves and protects those with power.

[Read: Why are we so spiteful?]

Cheer, according to Hampton, isn’t what it used to be. The cheap version we know today, a ploy for selling beer and breakfast cereal and political candidates, is the result of mass consumerism. In his telling, “modern marketing culture” ruined cheerfulness and remade it into a flimsy commodity. Yet cheer was once an emotion with genuine spiritual meaning as well as intellectual heft, Hampton suggests, gently but decisively shaping the history of Western modernity.

When cheer first made its English-language appearance at some point in the 14th century, however, it had not yet acquired these powers. From the Old French word chiere (and possibly the Spanish cara), it originally meant “face” or “countenance,” the visage or impression one offers to the world. In this neutral sense, cheer typically needed an adjective to accompany it. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for instance, knights were described as kneeling with “humble chere” or galloping into combat with “hardy cheare and face.”

During the religious tumult of the 16th and 17th centuries, cheerfulness took on a more positive gloss. For Protestant reformers such as John Calvin, bright positivity became a signal of Christian charity, virtue, and identity. Over time, cheer became a secular good more than a spiritual one. One powerful force transforming European political and intellectual life in the early modern period, after all, was sociability: gathering in salons and coffeehouses to conduct business and discuss bold new ideas about what was true and who should rule. A light demeanor and upbeat personality made all this easier and more enjoyable. As the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume explained, “true wisdom” was found in the “cheerful discourses” of light conversation, rather than in “the formal reasoning of the schools.” Cheer powered the growth of capitalism, too, by boosting productivity (the economist Adam Smith identified a virtuous circle in which higher wages led to cheerfulness and thus more diligent work) and fueling the consumer economy. By the 19th century, cheerfulness was a marker of social mobility: In the realist novels of writers such as Balzac and Stendhal, for instance, cheer is associated with lower-class provincial men on the make, happily hustling and ascendant in a new capitalist world.

Of course, the history of anything that human beings value is also, inescapably, a story of attempts to control it. Cheer has always felt more under our command than other feelings, treated as an emotion that can be deliberately triggered. Today, you might use balloons or a bouquet of flowers. In 1561, a Dutch physician advised that “good cheere” could be made via “kissing … dauncinge, Wyne, and singing.” One 17th-century medical handbook told its readers to mix a “Powder to Create Cheerfulness” by combining ingredients such as saffron, ambergris, and shavings of bone from a stag’s heart.

[Read: The weaponization of awkwardness]

This manipulative instinct has been especially obvious in the United States, a country that has pioneered the expression and commodification of cheerfulness in too many ways to count, including cheerleaders, Cheerios (invented in the 1940s and marketed with the slogan “He’s feeling his Cheery-oats!”), and the smiley-face icon. As American economic and geopolitical dominance swelled in the 20th century, a new wave of entrepreneurs and spiritual advisers told millions of readers that achieving worldly success was a matter of choosing to be cheerful. In the 1930s, the most famous of these figures was Dale Carnegie, whose best-selling handbook How to Win Friends and Influence People stressed the benefits of good cheer for business advancement. In 1952, a Protestant minister named Norman Peale published The Power of Positive Thinking, which argued that health and wealth were the result of optimism and a cheerful outlook. (One of Peale’s most infamous fans? Donald Trump.)

This self-determined vision of cheerfulness is still minting gigantic profits for the American self-help industry. See: the Rhonda Byrne best seller The Secret (remember “manifesting”?) and the cryptic sermons of Marianne Williamson, who has suggested that disease and despair are illusions that can be overcome by choosing more positive feelings. Feeling spontaneously, genuinely cheerful no longer matters—if it ever did. What’s crucial is that you put on a convincing show, for others as much as for yourself. As Hampton explains, modern life has stripped away cheer’s authenticity and made it fully performative: “To act cheerful is what it means to be cheerful.”

It is always comforting to think that modernity has corrupted us: our morals and our manners, our children and our politics, our intellectual lives and our natural environments. This means that there was once a golden age, something for us to recover. Hampton offers this kind of degeneration story about cheerfulness. He proposes that cheer has decayed from a substantive sentiment into the tacky and shallow feeling we’re familiar with today. American-style manufactured cheer is merely “a distant echo” of an “earlier moment,” he explains, “now largely stripped of its spiritual underpinnings.”

But Hampton’s own book reveals that cheerfulness was never really so pure. From the start, cheer’s earnest and best self has coexisted with its phonier twin. Medieval French nobles realized that by responding to hostile neighbors and potential threats by putting on a “good face” (bonne chère), they could avoid violent feuds. Renaissance courtiers learned from influential texts such as the Italian diplomat Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier that a chipper personality could grease the skids of their social or political ambitions. And many popular etiquette guides in the 18th century advised young women to carefully perform “constant cheerfulness,” as one called it, a kind of “innocent deceit” that would help them succeed in the world of men and manners. Counterfeit cheer, in other words, is not so modern an affliction as Hampton would like us to think.

Emotions are usually defined by their ungovernability, experienced as forces that wash over us and challenge our sense of agency. That quality is what makes most seem authentic and trustworthy to us. Fake anger or love feels like a betrayal. But fake cheer? It’s hard to say how it’s so different from the real thing. Cheer has always been perched on a knife’s edge between truth and falsity, making it especially vulnerable to political manipulation and abuse.

[Read: American cynicism has reached a breaking point]

Indeed, powerful interests have long used cheerfulness to counsel complacency and forestall action. At the turn of the 20th century, for instance, America’s striving middle classes and exhausted workers were instructed by best-selling inspirational books like Cheerfulness as a Life Power (1899) to be upbeat at work instead of complaining. Because cheer “lengthens the life of human machinery,” one writer explained, it would make everyone’s work easier and more efficient. Much later, Ronald Reagan (appropriately, a cheerleader in college) found in the rhetoric of buoyant national optimism a handy way to defang social democracy while boosting the neoliberal project. During his campaign for president, he tried to convince voters that success was owed largely to a cheerful mindset rather than government support or social conditions. Even today, America’s political establishment prefers its candidates to be “happy warriors” instead of furious crusaders, and frets more about the pessimistic tone of activists than the substance of the demands they make.

Nothing about this darker history means that cheer is anti-democratic, or that optimism is politically naive. Far from it. Social movements, as most organizers and activists will tell you, depend on it to make the hard work pleasurable. But it’s not as anodyne as we might think. Cheerfulness is a political emotion like any other, mercenary and vital and able to make worlds as well as break them. Hampton would like us to harness cheer’s overlooked ability to “transform the moral self.” Yet the greatest risk we face as democratic citizens may be not the neglect of cheerfulness, but rather the reverse: that we trust in it too easily.

As recently as 2015, Britain boasted of being China’s “best partner in the west.” It had become a founding member of Beijing’s controversial Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, against American opposition. While still a member of the European Union, its diplomats pushed for the EU to agree to a formal trade-and-investment deal with China. And Xi Jinping had even been honored with a lavish state visit to London. For Britain, the future was unmistakably Chinese.

From 2020 onward, however, Britain transformed itself from China’s best partner in Europe to its harshest critic, sweeping away decades of foreign-policy consensus in the most drastic such shift in the Western world. Britain became the first European power to formally block Huawei from its 5G telecoms network, led the global condemnation of Beijing’s barbaric treatment of its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, revoked the U.K. broadcasting license of China’s state-controlled CGTN, and offered a route to British citizenship for millions of people in Hong Kong who want to flee Beijing’s political repression.

The reasons for this turn were many: Brexit meant that Britain, having cut ties with its closest economic partner, the EU, could not afford to risk its relationship with its closest security ally, the United States, as well. The pandemic then entrenched public concern about Western reliance on China. And perhaps most important of all was Donald Trump. Even as he imposed steel tariffs on allies and belittled their leaders, the American president demanded that they stand with the United States against China.

Whereas Britain’s future had once seemed Chinese, it was back to being American. But in recent months, something strange started happening: London began softening its stance toward China again. Outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson this year approved a reopening of trade talks with China, and his government approved the sale of a microchip manufacturer to a Chinese company (though this is now in doubt).

Britain’s diplomatic back-and-forth in recent years has offered among the most extreme examples of how states are dealing with the wider geopolitical upheaval that has been taking place in response to China’s rise, a problem that no one yet seems to know the answer to. In Washington, a bipartisan consensus has formed around the notion that “engagement” with Beijing has failed, and that China is the only great rival to American supremacy in the 21st century. For continental Europe, Beijing is less an adversary than a risk to be accommodated, managed, and recognized, and the growth of its power an opportunity to carve out more “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. For Britain, trapped between the U.S. and Europe, it is a mixture of all of these things.

[Read: What returning to China taught me about China]

To understand what was going on, I spoke with more than a dozen senior government officials, diplomats, foreign-policy analysts, and lawmakers across the U.S., Britain, and Europe. (Many spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive government deliberations.) From these conversations a picture emerged of Britain clinging tightly to the new U.S. consensus, partly through judgment of its best interests and partly because of American pressure, while seeking to ensure its economic priorities with China are kept alive as much as possible as it faces up to the reality of the 21st century. Britain’s example shows how the widening standoff between Washington and Beijing will transform midsize powers that seek to avoid being drawn into a new cold war—and, more important, how the U.S. will not easily be able to maintain its grip on the world order that it created.

For decades, Britain followed a fairly consistent line in its policy toward Beijing, trying to balance security concerns against economic opportunities but typically erring on the side of engagement.

As early as 2003, Britain’s main telecommunications company approached Tony Blair’s government to seek permission to work with what was then a little-known Chinese company, Huawei, to upgrade the U.K.’s network. The partnership was waved through by officials who were more concerned with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, and Russia than some harmless Chinese firm.

By 2008, however, British intelligence agencies were warning that the Chinese state could use Huawei to gain access to Britain’s telecoms network. Soon after, the government—then led by Gordon Brown—established a watchdog to monitor Huawei, creating a first-of-its-kind arrangement involving a group of security-cleared former British officials and experts who would keep an eye on Huawei from inside the company on behalf of Britain. In effect, Britain had become sufficiently concerned about China spying on it that it demanded a special unit be created within Huawei to spy on the Chinese, but was insufficiently concerned to cancel Huawei contracts.

This was the environment in which David Cameron took over as prime minister in 2010—one in which cautious partnership with China had yielded concrete benefits for the U.K., but with hard-to-gauge costs. Over his six years in charge, Cameron would expand the relationship in an attempt to upgrade Britain’s infrastructure and open new markets for its financial-services industry. In 2014, London became one of the first international clearing centers for Chinese currency, before racing ahead of its competitors to become the major offshore center for renminbi trading. The following year, Cameron welcomed Xi to London for a state visit during which the British leader declared the beginning of a “golden era” in relations.

This was no one-off, but the culmination of a British strategy stretching back to at least the turn of the century. Britain was using its membership in the EU to turn itself into China’s financial gateway to the continent. Then came Brexit.

Following the referendum, Cameron was replaced by Theresa May, a more security-conscious China hawk who had spent the previous six years in the Home Office and was responsible for the domestic-intelligence agency MI5. In one of her first acts, she paused a decision on the construction of a British nuclear plant that was to receive Chinese investment. Then, in early 2018, on a three-day trip to China, May refused to sign off on a deal in which Britain would offer formal support for Xi’s infrastructure-building (and influence-generating) Belt and Road Initiative.

Once again, economic interests squashed political concerns. May’s early caution over China gave way to the same pressures that had pushed Cameron, Brown, and Blair: In April 2019, news leaked that May was preparing to give the go-ahead for Huawei’s involvement in building the country’s 5G network. By then, she had put aside her concerns about Chinese involvement in Britain’s nuclear industry as well. And then, once again, Brexit intervened.

May was replaced by Johnson, a far more liberal figure when it came to security and China. Immediately, Johnson slipped back into the old British policy, announcing that despite furious opposition from the U.S., the U.K. would allow Huawei to play a part in Britain’s 5G rollout. It was, in essence, a continuation of the Mayite policy—which itself was little more than a continuation of the cautious engagement that had been in place for decades.

[David Frum: Why Biden is right to end ambiguity on China]

The morning after Johnson’s Huawei decision, however, a Chinese student in Britain rang an emergency health line complaining that he and his mother visiting from Hubei felt unwell. At 7:50 p.m. that night, two paramedics dressed in hazmat suits arrived at the hotel where they were staying to take them to hospital. They would be the first people in Britain to test positive for the coronavirus. More than 200,000 people would ultimately die of COVID-19 in Britain. China’s role as nation zero, and its initial attempts to suppress news of the outbreak, would spark denunciations across the democratic world and demands for retaliation.

Even before the pandemic, opinion in the U.S. had shifted sharply against China, thanks in large part to the ferocity—and centrality—of Trump’s attacks on the country. This discord was almost inevitable anyway, given the great-power competition between the pair, but Trump played his part in speeding this process up and giving it political fire.

By May 2020, the U.S. had increased pressure on Britain and other European allies by unveiling sanctions on Huawei that, in effect, stopped it from being able to use American technology, a move that meant the British security services could no longer guarantee Huawei’s safety, because the company would soon be using non-Western technology that the British did not fully understand. This, in fact, was the very reason the U.S. had imposed its sanctions, and they served as a hammer blow to Britain’s strategy of careful engagement with China. In July 2020, Johnson’s government became the first in Europe to announce that Huawei would be banned from Britain’s 5G network. Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador in London, said Britain’s decision on Huawei, as well as the U.K.’s policies toward Xinjiang and Hong Kong, had “poisoned the atmosphere” between the two countries and Britain would “pay the price.” The Chinese state media threatened “retaliatory responses.”

In the end, London’s long-held strategy thus collapsed not through its own proactive choice but because of choices being made elsewhere. British foreign policy was forced to adapt to a world it did not want, and had tried to avoid.

When I put this to British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, she rejected (albeit somewhat unconvincingly) the idea that Britain had, effectively, been made to change its China policy.

Truss, the favorite to replace Johnson as prime minister, told me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had brought together countries against Russia, some of which might not be liberal or democratic but that nevertheless did not want to see “a world where might is right.”

In reply, I suggested that, in part, might is right. After all, we live in an American world, where the U.S. uses its power to set the rules. “I don’t agree with that,” Truss replied. “We don’t live in an American world. We live in a world where there is a coalition of nations who … subscribe to the values of freedom and democracy.”

I cited the example of China. As late as 2019, Britain was trying to push ahead with the Huawei 5G deal. “We changed because the Americans changed,” I said.

“That was not the reason we changed,” she responded.

I pushed back. “The Americans changed the rules of the game, and we didn’t have the ability to guarantee the security” of the telecoms network.

Again, she was insistent. “That was not the reason we changed. We changed because it was the right thing to do. I was in the government when the policy changed, and we changed because it was the right thing to do.”

[Read: How China wants to replace the U.S. order]

I pointed out that the same government, made up of the same people, had made a different decision earlier in the same year about what was right before changing its mind.

“Well, that is true,” Truss replied. “Every government, Tom, has its internal discussions and I can’t reveal the internal discussions that took place on both occasions. However, we did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Whatever your conclusion, to look at British foreign policy now is to see almost a complete overlap with the U.S., whether on the Iranian nuclear deal, climate change, the importance of spending more on defense, NATO, the threat posed by Russia, or—now—China. One of the lessons of the Huawei policy shift, and Britain’s shift more broadly, is that the U.S. can still force its allies into line if it is prepared to take its gloves off.

But under the surface, things are not quite so simple.

There are signs that, actually, Britain’s old policy is once again being quietly rebuilt. Amid intense U.S. pressure, including threats to curtail transatlantic intelligence sharing, Britain changed tack, falling into line. Yet since then, Britain has drifted back toward its position of cautiously opening up to China as far as it feels is safe—in part spurred by a frustration with Washington.

In February, it emerged that Johnson had given the green light to reopen trade talks with China that had been paused for years. Then it was revealed that the U.K. government had apparently approved the sale of a British microchip factory to a Chinese-owned firm, only for that decision to be kicked into the long grass. On each occasion, the announcements sparked a backlash among China skeptics in London. May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, who had pushed for stricter controls on any economic opening to China, reacted with resigned alarm. “It seems we will never learn,” he wrote. Tough policies over Xinjiang and Hong Kong remain in place, but the recent reports point to a softening of the hardest edges of Britain’s China policy. The reasons indicate the limits of Washington’s leadership in its confrontation with Beijing.

Today, some within the British government share a sense that Brexit and Johnson’s previous, seemingly warm relationship with Trump continue to be held against the U.K. by some in the Biden administration. Despite Britain’s being the most hawkish European ally on Russia and China, spending more than 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and supporting U.S. efforts on curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.K. believes it is treated as just another ally, criticized for its push to renegotiate its Brexit deal with the EU and ignored in its ambition to strike a free-trade deal with Washington. If this is the case, some in London wonder, why not be more independent where Britain’s core national interests are concerned?

In one sense, what does Britain have to lose from exploring deeper economic ties with China? The Biden administration has made clear there will be no trade deal with the U.S. anytime soon and, besides, the EU continues to pursue its own policy of engagement with China, despite continuing Chinese economic support for Russia during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rationale that long drove British policy is reasserting itself: The size and wealth of China means Britain simply cannot afford not to engage. With Britain outside the EU, economic growth sluggish, debt high, and few other obvious alternatives to increase trade, will any future prime minister really be able to ignore what China has to offer?

[Michael Schuman: What Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip says about China]

Britain’s apparent return to a more open China policy is a reminder of the difficulty Washington is going to have constructing and leading any kind of alliance—democratic or otherwise—to contain Beijing. Though it can use a policy of maximum pressure to force some countries into line, as it did with Britain over 5G—effectively removing London’s ability to sustain an independent policy—such a stance can go only so far. The U.S. remains powerful enough that its sticks can and do work, but without any carrots at all, this strategy will have limits.

Perhaps the main lesson of Britain’s experience with China is that core national interests are likely to reassert themselves in the long term, no matter which party, prime minister, chancellor, or president is in power in Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. In London, Johnson has pursued a policy that would have been familiar to any of the previous four British prime ministers this century, Labour and Conservative among them. The same is true of the EU. Such is the depth of economic entanglement with China today that it will take far more than talk of “democratic alliances” and threats to the rules-based order for Brussels, Berlin, Paris—and London—to seriously change course.

What does that mean for the U.S.? If it wants to construct a coalition behind its attempt to contain China, it will need to be prepared to threaten and cajole, yes, but also bribe far more effectively than it has until now. No longer is America the only dog in the pound, even if it still has the biggest bark.

The old saying is “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.” But that’s not quite true. Democrats wait for a dream candidate to come along—a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama—and they go out of their minds with excitement and ardor. But when they don’t find one, they kiss a frog and wait to see what happens. Then they stand at the altar wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into, the church doors swing open, and Michael Dukakis walks down the aisle.

It’s a pattern I’ve watched Democrats enact my whole life: Terrible Candidate/Important Election. It’s the opposite of a Hail Mary pass. It’s an Act of Contrition. Bless me father for I have sinned: I played John Kerry at wide receiver.

So here we are, with Donald Trump rattling his cage and Ron DeSantis emerging as Florida’s Duke of Wellington. Who knows what other rough beast could be slouching toward Iowa to be caucused. And Democrats? They’ve got a good man who’s a terrible candidate, and getting worse by the week.

My first experience with TC/IE took place when I was 10. The big one: 1972, McGovern versus Nixon. I grew up in Berkeley, California, and I never once saw a Nixon bumper sticker; every single car, including our own, had a McGovern sticker. He was going to be an excellent president because he was going to stop the war in Vietnam. One afternoon, looking out the car window at a sea of McGovern signs, I asked my mother if she thought Nixon would get any votes at all, and she said, “Oh, honey, he’s going to win.”

What? I was in a fifth-grade blue bubble and hadn’t even known it.

I know my mother was trying to prepare me, but how do you prepare a 10-year-old for Election Night, 1972? Even my own parents seemed unprepared for Nixon to carpet-bomb 49 states. I was allowed to stay up to watch the results come in. “Oof,” my father said every time another state went to Nixon. “Oof” or “A body blow.” Wednesday would be a day of healing.  

As bad as the defeat was, it came with a moral clarity—only strengthened over the decades—that that war was a travesty. It made the Iraq War look like the landing at Normandy. It seemed to me, in my childish apprehension of things, that this was what it meant to be a Democrat: that even in loss you had the consolation of knowing that your candidate was right and just, and that however small your part had been, you had aligned yourself with the thrilling possibility of justice.

Travel with me now to a Long Island living room, where 12 orders of kung pao chicken are slowly congealing and Walter Mondale is getting shellacked. It was the first election I was old enough to vote in, and I’d gone back to my parents’ town to watch the outcome. Mondale did not run on ending a terrible war. He ran on a nuclear freeze, the Equal Rights Amendment, and cutting the deficit. Feel the excitement? Ronald Reagan was 17 years older than Mondale, but he always looked fantastic. You’d spend hours fuming about all the rat-bastard things he was doing to the country, and then catch a glimpse of him on television and think, But for some reason, I kind of like that guy.

Mondale barely squeaked out a win in his home state of Minnesota. It wasn’t exactly heartbreaking to watch him lose; it was mostly a sense of confusion. Where did they find this guy? The prospect of waiting up to watch Mondale give a concession speech was heinous; his whole campaign had been a concession speech. Everyone left early; no one took home any kung pao chicken.

One thing was very clear to me after that election: What we needed was charisma. What we got was Michael Dukakis.

Dukakis said he was going to “rekindle the American spirit of invention and daring,” but he wasn’t a rekindling kind of guy; he was a let’s make sure this campfire is fully doused kind of guy. He said he would save us from “the limited ambitions” of the Reagan administration. The whole problem with the Reagan administration was that its ambitions were limitless. He was probably hindered by the dumbest fact about American politics: We usually choose the taller guy, and Dukakis was 5 foot 8.

Exciting interlude: Bill Clinton! Finally, some relief. Sex appeal, competence, Fleetwood Mac, and two terms. Also the 1994 crime bill, which accelerated mass incarceration, so—like every single president before and after—he left a complicated record.

John Kerry. That was the election when I finally realized that either the Democratic Party was high or I was. You could not imagine a more unelectable person. Kerry came back from a four-month hitch in Vietnam convinced that American war crimes were widespread, largely covered up, and encouraged by the officers who sent men into battle. He became the spokesman for a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and in a Senate hearing he described a recent meeting in which members talked about things that they had done: “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” He said that the men sent to Vietnam had been given the chance to die for the “biggest nothing in history.” The next day he took part in the most powerful anti-war protest of that era, and perhaps of any era, in which veterans stood outside the Capitol and hurled their medals and service ribbons back at the government that had awarded them. One man threw his cane over the fence.

It was one of many turning points in the anti-war movement. But it came with a steep cost, perhaps steeper than Kerry realized. When he testified, there were still American POWs in Vietnam. He implied that war crimes weren’t rare and terrible events but everyday occurrences. He dishonored 2.5 million servicemembers. No one who does that can ever become commander in chief.

I mean, isn’t that freaking obvious?

The one good thing about Kerry was that he represented rock bottom. It would be impossible to nominate another candidate so clearly bound to fail as John Kerry.

I speak too soon.

Hillary Clinton was the subject of decades of intense and volatile rage, much of which was directed at her by misogynists and lunatics. But to paraphrase Michael Jordan, misogynists and lunatics vote, too.

When she delivered her concession speech the day after the election—she’d had to pull herself together the night before—she seemed to be in a state of shock, and to feel somewhat culpable for what had happened to America. (Not an entirely misplaced emotion; there are at least 10 nonstops a day from New York to Michigan.)

In the speech, she repeated one of the big lines of her campaign: that someday we would elect a woman president and break “the tallest, hardest glass ceiling.” Did she honestly think that a rich white woman who had gone to Wellesley and Yale would have an inherently harder time of becoming president than any Black man in America?

She did. The problem with Hillary Clinton’s campaign was Hillary Clinton.

Joe Biden announced his first presidential campaign in June of 1987, a few weeks before my first wedding. We both experienced a long streak of summer richness and promise, but by September the honeymoons were over. I had traded the bridal registry at B. Altmam’s for a classroom in Metairie, Louisiana, and five sections of high-school English; Biden’s campaign had blown up in an astonishing plagiarism scandal.

In an early primary debate, Bided had lifted—almost word for word—a speech off a British Labour politician named Neil Kinnock. This included telling the audience that he was the first person in his family to go to college in “a thousand generations,” (taking the lineage back to Cro-Magnon Biden) and that he came from a family of coal miners. That no one in his family had worked in a mine, and that there were college graduates on his mother’s side of the family, were the least of his problems. Someone working for his rival for the nomination, Dukakis (remember him?), sent reporters a tape of the two men making their almost identical speeches, and the scandal kept growing from there.

It turned out that, in various speeches, Biden had lifted passages from Robert F. Kennedy and at least one line from John F. Kennedy (and not an obscure one, a greatest hit: “Each generation of Americans has been summoned,” which is the kind of thing you can say when you yourself have been summoned to defend the free world, not to take a summer lifeguard job in Delaware). He’d also lifted lines from some of Hubert Humphrey’s speeches. In that pre-internet era, it took a few days for reporters to find all of these quotations, but then there was a grand finale: In law school, he’d been assigned to write a 15-page paper, five pages of which turned out to have been plagiarized. He then held a press conference.

The goal of the press conference was to clear all of this up, and the effect of the press conference was to make viewers think that Joe Biden was a big dummy: “I’ve done some dumb things, and I’ll do some dumb things again. I’ve done some dumb things as a senator. I’ve done some dumb things as a lawyer. So, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve done something very dumb.” To my knowledge, it’s the only instance of a “Dumber days ahead” speech, and on that point alone it’s engaging. What Biden wanted America to know was that, yes, of course, he was a doer of dumb things, but he was basically a nice guy.

His approach to the problem was to address not the question of why he’d done these things, but rather how he’d done them. On the law-school paper: “I took the cases out of the Law Review article and the footnotes out of the Law Review article—and I honestly thought what I was doing was the right way of doing it—and the representation of what the cases said from the Law Review article. And then at the end of the Law Review article when they set out and said, ‘This is what all this means,’ I wrote that in my paper—and I footnoted it! I footnoted the Law Review article! I used, in a 15-page paper, I used five pages”—he holds his hand up, fingers splayed: five—“of the Law Review article.” He seemed to genuinely believe that this one footnote was a mark in his favor, not the clue that led the reader straight to the article he’d copied.

Regarding his speeches, he wanted the reporters to understand that “I don’t write speeches; I do them.”

Huh?

“I do them on the backs of envelopes,” he said, and for a moment you thought you might be about to board a train hurtling toward Gettysburg, but instead he explained the series of events that led to his lifting Neil Kinnock’s speech for his closing argument in the debate.

He said that the day before the debate, he’d realized that “I didn’t have a close.” He said, “Usually what I do, as you’ve observed, is I wait for the debate to go on and see where the debate takes us. So, to make an appropriate close, not some canned thing.” This would seem to obviate the need for coming up with a close, but when he got to Iowa, the need for one was pressing. “So I’m getting in the car, and there’s a young man named David Wilhelm who runs my campaign. And I said, ‘David, I don’t have a close.’ He says, ‘Well, we prepared you seven or eight closes!’ And I said, ‘I don’t agree with any of ’em. They don’t have any feeling to ’em. And he says, ‘Well, why don’t you do what you did on the Kinnock thing; that expresses what you mean.’ And I said, ‘You’re right!’ And I said, ‘Thinking about it—that applies to me!’ And that’s honest to God what happened—we were riding over in the van. And I mean I said that to my—” Here he seems to be getting ready to say “I said that to myself,” but then catches himself. “I mean I said that to him.”

It is at this point that we get the full Biden, because he turns to the side and asks an aide, “Was he in the van?” There’s a beat, presumably long enough for some panicked underling to mime Fuck if I know! And then Biden says, “I think he was.”

The entire point of this illustration is to tell us about a particular conversation with a particular person in a particular van, and a sentence later he tells us he doesn’t know if that person was even in the van. But God love him, he kind of sells it.

Much of the criticism lately of President Biden’s apparent senescence is based on something that happens to many old people: Age is determined to be the cause of some peculiar habit of behavior or thought, when in fact that habit has been with the person throughout his life. A lot of what people are calling the “gaffes” of old age are just Joe Biden. He’s a bullshitter, a teller of tall tales. His method has always been to give informal speeches that are discursive, anecdote-laden, in which the editing process takes place in real time. His classic move is to turn a forensic intelligence on the unimportant part of a situation and then to gloss over—or skip entirely—the main point. Barack Obama is said to have observed that it’s impossible to overestimate Joe Biden’s ability to fuck things up, and in large part that has to do with the endless, improvisational talking. But that gabbing is also the reason he was so effective at getting people to consider changing their votes when he was a senator and then the vice president. He doesn’t use verbal communication as a means of transmitting facts. He uses it to bond with someone. Talking is a kind of lubricant, easing people along to a new point of view—at the very, very least, you know that if you agree to change your vote, he might stop talking. He doesn’t hold grudges, he doesn’t shit-talk, and he tends to see the best in others.

It’s just that, as he ages, the whole system is slowing down, and his ability to bounce his way through gaffes and to revise stories in the midst of telling them (“Was he in the van? I think he was”) is diminishing. In the 1987 press conference, you can watch him remember that Anwar Sadat is dead halfway through saying the words “Anwar Sadat,” but he finesses it and keeps on rolling.

If Joe Biden had been the nominee in 2016 instead of Hillary Clinton, Trump would never have been elected. People didn’t hate Joe Biden back then. But now, for a dozen reasons—many of them not his fault—regard for him has plummeted.  

In the early decades of the last century, a Viennese surgeon named Eugen Steinach claimed that he could restore the virility of old men by grafting tissue from monkey glands onto their testes. The procedure was later modified to one that left the animal kingdom undisturbed and was essentially just a partial vasectomy. Sigmund Freud underwent the procedure, as did William Butler Yeats (in Ireland it earned him the nickname “The Gland Old Man”). They both raved about the results, which in and of itself is testament to the fantastical imaginings of old men.

Old men dream of youth and often embarrass themselves in its pursuit. Many younger people in the Democratic Party seem to think Joe Biden’s already out the door. Gavin Newsom isn’t just measuring for curtains, he’s packing the U-Haul. But Biden’s never been a quitter, and his great optimism has helped him survive the tragedies that have befallen him. He very well might want to run again, which would be a disaster.

In the middle of his second term, Barack Obama invited Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the White House for lunch. His plan was to gently suggest the possibility of her retiring before he left office, so that there would be no chance of her seat going to a conservative. She was then 85 and had had cancer five times. Nothing doing. She stayed right where she was, and soon enough we got Amy Coney Barrett.

Have you ever had to take the keys away from an old relative? It’s not easy. Sometimes you give up the fight to keep the peace. And then you hope against hope that everything will be all right.  

On the brink. That’s how we tend to think of humanity’s predicament during the most dangerous moments of the nuclear era. But as Thomas Schelling, the godfather of nuclear strategy, once pointed out, the phrase is misleading. The nuclear frontier is not “the sharp edge of a cliff where one can stand firmly, look down, and decide whether or not to plunge,” he wrote, but rather “a curved slope that one can stand on with some risk of slipping”—the slope getting steeper and riskier “as one moves toward the chasm.” Now the slope is getting steeper before our eyes.

That’s not just because of the potential for Russian President Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in a desperate effort to avert defeat in Ukraine. It’s also the result of a threat that isn’t making many headlines but that experts are currently concerned about: North Korea’s development of tactical nuclear weapons—less explosive, shorter-range arms designed for use on a battlefield.

North Korea has been pursuing tactical nuclear weapons for many years, but the latest chapter in this story begins in January 2021, when the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, explicitly pledged to build such weapons. Then came Pyongyang’s April 2022 test of a short-range missile expressly intended to be wielded as a tactical nuke, followed by cryptic June military announcements that some analysts interpreted as an indication that Kim is planning to deploy the weapons to his frontline artillery units. North Korea watchers expect the country to conduct its seventh nuclear test any day now, which would most likely be aimed at further honing small warheads that could be mated with shorter-range missiles.

If those predictions bear out, North Korea’s next nuclear test would herald what some scholars have dubbed a “third nuclear age.” The first age was dominated by the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, the second by post–Cold War dynamics among various emerging and aspiring nuclear-weapons powers.

[From the July/August 2022 issue: We have no nuclear strategy]

In a prescient 2019 essay, the scholars Nicholas L. Miller and Vipin Narang identified three main components of this new, third nuclear age: “renewed nuclear competition among several great powers” as arms-control agreements fall apart and these countries modernize their arsenals, the “emergence of new nuclear powers” (potentially including both U.S. allies and adversaries), and “a greater tolerance for escalation among existing nuclear powers.” North Korea’s work on tactical nuclear weapons testifies to the second and third dimensions.

This dangerous moment combines the challenges of great powers competing with and seeking to deter one another in the nuclear realm (the hallmark of the first nuclear age) with the challenges of stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons (the focus of the second)—plus destabilizing new weapons systems and vanishing international cooperation to keep any of it in check.

The third nuclear age ushers the world into “truly uncharted waters,” the scholar David Cooper has observed. “Everything we think we know about nuclear weapons—deterrence, coercion, etc. … is based on a very short, finite history from two of the world’s most stable periods: the frozen, bipolar stalemate of the Cold War and then the subsequent … ‘unipolar moment’ of the post–Cold War world where the United States essentially was unrivaled in power.”

Tactical nuclear weapons are often described as “small” nuclear weapons, but that’s something of a contradiction in terms—like saying not to worry about the small asteroid barreling toward your town. The smallness holds only when compared with the kinds of “strategic” nuclear weapons that the U.S. and the Soviet Union threatened to obliterate each other with during the Cold War. Many tactical nuclear weapons in the American and Russian arsenals pack more potential explosive power than the U.S. atomic bomb that killed roughly 70,000 people in Hiroshima, although these explosive yields can be adjusted to lower levels.

After the Cold War, the U.S. scaled back its tactical nuclear weapons amid the triumphalism and diminished security threats of that period. But Russia largely maintained its stockpile, which is currently about nine times the size of America’s.

And as Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has argued, if North Korea adopts tactical nuclear weapons, it would “manipulate [Schelling’s] slope” and “invite the United States and South Korea to stand on it.” North Korea is already predisposed to use its nuclear weapons early in a conflict with more powerful adversaries. The addition of tactical nukes, given their less destructive nature relative to strategic nukes, would further lower the bar for North Korean use of nuclear weapons. Deploying tactical nukes could involve Kim delegating some authority for command and control of those weapons to lower-ranking military commanders, particularly in wartime, and storing the weapons at more military bases throughout the country—which could significantly increase the risks of nuclear use as a result of accidents or miscalculations.

In, say, a non-nuclear conflict sparked by an act of North Korean aggression, Kim or one of his commanders, operating in the information-distortion field that is North Korea, could mistake a U.S. or South Korean retaliatory attack (or even something mundane, such as a civilian plane nearing North Korean airspace) for a more existential military offensive to wipe out the regime or its nuclear-weapons arsenal. They could respond by firing tactical nuclear weapons at U.S. or South Korean targets, leaving Washington and Seoul unsure about how to respond—particularly given U.S. qualms about again crossing the nuclear threshold and North Korea’s suspected capability to target the U.S. mainland with longer-range nuclear weapons.

North Korea could also deliberately turn to tactical nuclear weapons during an intensifying or stalemated conflict in an effort to spook its enemies and compel them to back down—an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy that the Russian military is thought to embrace.

[Eric Schlosser: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

The suddenly more real (if still very low-probability) prospect of Russian nuclear use in Ukraine is forcing policy makers, unpracticed in nuclear strategy and planning, to think hard about response options to such a brazen but bounded crossing of the nuclear threshold. In a similar vein, U.S. and allied officials need to proactively craft new policies and strategies for how to deter North Korea from using tactical nuclear weapons—and how to respond should deterrence fail. That could involve, for example, the U.S. and South Korean militaries making their bases less attractive targets for Pyongyang. It could also entail Washington and Seoul shifting their focus from the long-standing but now-quixotic goal of “denuclearizing” North Korea to engaging it in talks aimed at reaching arms-control agreements, reducing the threat that each side perceives from the other, managing crises before they spiral out of control, and mitigating the chances of a nuclear conflict erupting.

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev famously declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That reassuring sentiment was affirmed as recently as earlier this year by the five internationally recognized nuclear-weapons states. But in this third nuclear age, the line needs a corollary that recognizes the harsh realities of the times: Some nuclear-weapons states may indeed believe that a nuclear war can be won—and thus that one could be fought.

We often talk about the potential use of nuclear weapons in apocalyptic terms—as an act that would destroy the whole world. But that description of nuclear war as unthinkably horrific is a legacy of the Cold War. Limited use of nuclear weapons—use that could inflict tremendous destruction and shatter international norms but not destroy the world—is unfortunately thinkable. At the very least, it is incumbent upon policy makers to act as if it is thinkable; the very concept of tactical nuclear weapons is, in fact, premised on the idea that limited nuclear war is thinkable. We need to plan for such scenarios—even as we expend every effort to prevent them from materializing.

The joint bid by four nations aims to stage the 2030 final in the very same Centenario stadium that hosted the tournament's first title match ...

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.

Would you rather watch a video of a man you don’t know rescue a sloth, or read your cousin’s take on the January 6 hearings? Meta is betting on the former.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Of course Joe Biden has rebound COVID. Why do rich people love quiet? Donald Trump supporters think they’re in a fight to the death. Status Update

If you’ve logged into Facebook recently, as almost 2 billion people around the world do each day, you may have noticed something new in your feed: more strangers. Last week, the social-media giant introduced two new different versions of your Facebook feed. While the familiar main page, formerly known as the News Feed, used to be where family, friends, and other accounts you follow have long shared humblebrags, dubious headlines, and slices of everyday life, the new Home page combines those things with posts from strangers it suggests based on your past Facebook activity. When I logged on last week, that meant a video of a man rescuing a sloth from the road and a screenshot of a meme from Twitter about introverts.

A separate new tab, Feeds, will show you only the people you’ve chosen to follow. But with Home, Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—is clearly steering its users to an experience that emphasizes posts from pages and people you don’t know: viral content selected by an algorithm for maximum entertainment value and slack-jawed viewing time. In other words, Facebook now wants to be TikTok.    

TikTok is a short-form video platform that became famous for viral dances performed by the likes of fresh-faced tweens and teens whose queen was Charli D’Amelio. (Part of that DNA comes from Musical.ly, a lip-synching app that TikTok swallowed up in 2018.) But it truly exploded in the early days of the pandemic, when much of life moved online. Last fall, the app hit 1 billion active users. An estimated 25 percent of TikTok’s users in the U.S. are 10-to-19-years old—a demographic that Meta is hoping to win back.

Now TikTok is much more than a viral dance factory. TikTok generates many of the most inescapable memes, trends, and online debates. (If you’ve recently heard about coastal grandmothers or pink sauce, you have TikTok to thank, or maybe blame.) And if a meme doesn’t originate on TikTok, it usually ends up there, graduating from Twitter or Reddit to achieve true ubiquity. TikTok is now the closest thing the internet has to a town square, a place where every major news story, fashion trend, and cultural moment is filtered and repackaged into a short-form video.

Many young people are turning to TikTok and Instagram instead of Google to search for information such as where to get lunch; more and more, they rely on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube for news, as opposed to traditional outlets. Meanwhile, Facebook’s total user base declined for the first time at the end of 2021. In October, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced grand plans to pioneer the metaverse and move social media into virtual reality, eventually conceding that the technology needed to do this won’t be mainstream for another five to 10 years. Meta turned to a familiar tactic to regain relevance in the meantime: cribbing features from its contemporaries. (Instagram stories were the company’s successful answer to Snapchat; reels, a less successful rejoinder to TikTok.)

The Home feed is an ambitious, or maybe desperate, attempt to recreate TikTok’s special sauce (not the pink kind). The For You page, TikTok’s main portal, pulls videos from anywhere and everywhere; over time, the algorithm that powers it tailors the content to you based on how you watch and share each type of clip.

When Instagram recently experimented with new TikTok-like features, stars of the platform such as Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, and Chrissy Teigen howled in protest, and the head of the platform announced last week that it would reduce the number of suggested posts and scrap a new full-screen version as Instagram “works to improve” its algorithm. At the same time, Facebook cut funding for U.S. news publishers, essentially giving up on encouraging the sharing of anything of substance on the app.

No one famous is making a fuss about Facebook’s new changes, but Facebook has never been about famous people, anyway—not even the ones who are momentarily famous thanks to a viral video. Which probably isn’t a good sign for a company that’s prioritizing memes over status updates. Especially when the hot new thing is an app, BeReal, entirely focused on friends sharing “authentic” pictures once a day. Then again, Meta is already testing its own version of that too. Just in case.

Related:

How to leave an internet that’s always in crisis No, I will not BeReal. Today’s News In a step toward alleviating the global food crisis, a ship carrying Ukrainian grain left the port of Odesa for the first time since Russia’s invasion. Nancy Pelosi arrived in Singapore on Monday to kick off her Asia visit. Administration officials say they expect the trip to include a stop in Taiwan, which China has warned would provoke a response. The Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson, who has been accused by a number of women of sexual assault or misconduct, was suspended for six games without pay for violating the NFL’s personal-conduct policy.

Dispatches

Humans Being: Behind the violence and crassness of HBO Max’s Harley Quinn is an unexpectedly heartfelt series, Jordan Calhoun writes. I Have Notes: Culture warriors can try to ban books, but kids will still read them, Nicole Chung argues. Famous People: On a steamy afternoon, Lizzie and Kaitlyn finally learn to shuck oysters. Up for Debate: Readers write in with their experiences of class prejudice in America. Evening Read (Bettmann / Getty)

What Made Bill Russell a Hero

By Jemele Hill

Not many people can make Charles Barkley, the former NBA MVP and legendarily outspoken broadcaster, pipe down. But the NBA icon Bill Russell, who died on Sunday age 88, once called Barkley and did just that.

“He called me. ‘Charles Barkley, this is Bill Russell.’ I said, ‘Oh hey, Mr. Russell,’” Barkley told me. “He said, ‘I need you to shut the fuck up.’ I said, ‘Okay.’”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The myth of independent American families American motherhood Should the Parkland shooter die? Culture Break (Carlijn Jacobs / Parkwood Entertainment)

Read. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride, a novel so propulsive and fun that it’s almost hot to the touch.

Watch. The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie (available to rent on multiple platforms) is a pre-Clueless, Skittles-tinted ode to California ditz—but also so much more.

Listen. Beyoncé’s Renaissance is a big, gay mess. Hell yes, our critic writes.  

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Thanks for letting me hop on today’s Daily! If it didn’t make you curious about TikTok, maybe this will: The wonderfully woodsy TikTok hit “Stick Season,” by Noah Kahan. The artist first posted a snippet of the song back in October 2020, but it didn’t take off until last month, when users started sharing videos of their own covers. The song broke into the Spotify USA chart on July 20, and you can now catch Kahan on tour—if your city’s dates haven’t sold out.

— Kate

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.