At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as lines of ambulances roared down the streets and freezer vans packed into parking lots, the pediatric emergency department at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was quiet.

It was an eerie juxtaposition, says Chris Woodward, a pediatric-emergency-medicine specialist at the hospital, given what was happening just a few doors down. While adult emergency departments were being inundated, his team was so low on work that he worried positions might be cut. A small proportion of kids were getting very sick with COVID-19—some still are—but most weren’t. And due to school closures and scrupulous hygiene, they weren’t really catching other infections—flu, RSV, and the like—that might have sent them to the hospital in pre-pandemic years. Woodward and his colleagues couldn’t help but wonder if the brunt of the crisis had skipped them by. “It was, like, the least patients I saw in my career,” he told me.

That is no longer the case.

Across the country, children have for weeks been slammed with a massive, early wave of viral infections—driven largely by RSV, but also flu, rhinovirus, enterovirus, and SARS-CoV-2. Many emergency departments and intensive-care units are now at or past capacity, and resorting to extreme measures. At Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, in Maryland, staff has pitched a tent outside the emergency department to accommodate overflow; Connecticut Children’s Hospital mulled calling in the National Guard. It’s already the largest surge of infectious illnesses that some pediatricians have seen in their decades-long careers, and many worry that the worst is yet to come. “It is a crisis,” Sapna Kudchadkar, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist and anesthesiologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. “It’s bananas; it’s been full to the gills since September,” says Melissa J. Sacco, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at UVA Health. “Every night I turn away a patient, or tell the emergency department they have to have a PICU-level kid there for the foreseeable future.”

I asked Chris Carroll, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at Connecticut Children’s, how bad things were on a scale of 1 to 10. “Can I use a Spinal Tap reference?” he asked me back. “This is our 2020. This is as bad as it gets.”

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The autumn crush, experts told me, is fueled by dual factors: the disappearance of COVID mitigations and low population immunity. For much of the pandemic, some combination of masking, distancing, remote learning, and other tactics tamped down on the transmission of nearly all the respiratory viruses that normally come knocking during the colder months. This fall, though, as kids have flocked back into day cares and classrooms with almost no precautions in place, those microbes have made a catastrophic comeback. Rhinovirus and enterovirus were two of the first to overrun hospitals late this summer; now they’re being joined by RSV, all while SARS-CoV-2 remains in play. Also on the horizon is flu, which has begun to pick up in the South and the mid-Atlantic, triggering school closures or switches to remote learning. During the summer of 2021, when Delta swept across the nation, “we thought that was busy,” Woodward said. “We were wrong.”

Children, on the whole, are more susceptible to these microbes than they have been in years. Infants already have a rough time with viruses like RSV: The virus infiltrates the airways, causing them to swell and flood with mucus that their tiny lungs may struggle to expel. “It’s almost like breathing through a straw,” says Marietta Vazquez, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Yale. The more narrow and clogged the tubes get, “the less room you have to move air in and out.” Immunity accumulated from prior exposures can blunt that severity. But with the pandemic’s great viral vanishing, kids missed out on early encounters that would have trained up their bodies’ defensive cavalry. Hospitals are now caring for their usual RSV cohort—infants—as well as toddlers, many of whom are sicker than expected. Infections that might, in other years, have produced a trifling cold are progressing to pneumonia severe enough to require respiratory support. “The kids are just not handling it well,” says Stacy Williams, a PICU nurse at UVA Health.

Coinfections, too, have always posed a threat—but they’ve grown more common with SARS-CoV-2 in the mix. “There’s just one more virus they’re susceptible to,” Vazquez told me. Each additional bug can burden a child “with a bigger hill to climb, in terms of recovery,” says Shelby Lighton, a nurse at UVA Health. Some patients are leaving the hospital healthy, only to come right back. There are kids who “have had four respiratory viral illnesses since the start of September,” Woodward told me.

Pediatric care capacity in many parts of the country actually shrank after COVID hit, Sallie Permar, a pediatrician at NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell Medicine, whose hospital was among those that cut beds from its PICU, told me. A mass exodus of health-care workers—nurses in particular—has also left the system ill-equipped to meet the fresh wave of demand. At UVA Health, the pediatric ICU is operating with maybe two-thirds of the core staff it needs, Williams said. Many hospitals have been trying to call in reinforcements from inside and outside their institutions. But “you can’t just train a bunch of people quickly to take care of a two-month-old,” Kudchadkar said. To make do, some hospitals are doubling up patients in rooms; others have diverted parts of other care units to pediatrics, or are sending specialists across buildings to stabilize children who can’t get a bed in the ICU. In Baton Rouge, Woodward is regularly visiting the patients who have just been admitted to the hospital and are still being held in the emergency department, trying to figure out who’s healthy enough to go home so more space can be cleared. His emergency department used to take in, on average, about 130 patients a day; lately, that number has been closer to 250. “They can’t stay,” he told me. “We need this room for somebody else.”

Experts are also grappling with how to strike the right balance between raising awareness among caregivers and managing fears that may morph into overconcern. On the one hand, with all the talk of SARS-CoV-2 being “mild” in kids, some parents might ignore the signs of RSV, which can initially resemble those of COVID, then get much more serious, says Ashley Joffrion, a respiratory therapist at Baton Rouge General Medical Center. On the other hand, if families swamp already overstretched hospitals with illnesses that are truly mild enough to resolve at home, the system could fracture even further. “We definitely don’t want parents bringing kids in for every cold,” Williams told me. The key signs of severe respiratory sickness in children include wheezing, grunting, rapid or labored breaths, trouble drinking or swallowing, and bluing of the lips or fingernails. When in doubt, experts told me, parents should call their pediatrician for an assist.

[Read: The great pandemic hand-washing blooper]

With winter still ahead, the situation could take an even darker turn, especially as flu rates climb, and new SARS-CoV-2 subvariants loom. In most years, the chilly viral churn doesn’t abate until late winter, which means hospitals may be only at the start of a grueling few months. And still-spotty uptake of COVID vaccines among little kids, coupled with a recent dip in flu-shot uptake and the widespread abandonment of infection-prevention measures, could make things even worse, says Abdallah Dalabih, a pediatric-intensive-care specialist at Arkansas Children’s.

The spike in respiratory illness marks a jarring departure from a comforting narrative that’s dominated the intersection of infectious disease and little children’s health for nearly three years. When it comes to respiratory viruses, little children have always been a vulnerable group. This fall may force Americans to reset their expectations around young people’s resilience and recall, Lighton told me, “just how bad a ‘common cold’ can get.”

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked: “How should voters assess the physical and mental fitness of politicians, and how should the press cover such matters?”

Bekke points out that voters have a tough job:

How to decide who is mentally fit to serve is a true conundrum. Like beauty, it is mostly in the eye of the beholder. Media can be a big influence and paid ads can sway voters. Given the First Amendment, it’s difficult to throttle “free speech” regardless of its veracity. In the end, it comes down to the voters doing their due diligence and really paying attention to the candidate’s policies, rather than listening to media hype and attack ads.  

Glenn believes that the matter calls for impolite journalism, a necessity that is heightened by a generational characteristic of Baby Boomers:

If the World War II generation was the “Greatest Generation,” then the Baby Boomer generation is the “longest generation.” They refuse to retire; can’t imagine retiring; won’t retire!

The Greatest Generation made its name and reputation on the battlefields of Europe, all the time looking to return home to a normal life with their family, whether it existed yet or not. Once home in the postwar era, they set about building a career, a life, a family, and a nation, but always looked to retirement when they could enjoy the fruits of their labor in a much more private manner. The Baby Boomers are nothing like that. They have never contemplated any life beyond a professional one. And so their plan seems to be to hang on to whatever power, prestige, or routine their work affords them for as long as possible.

We all value this stubborn “not gonna quit” mentality, and of course many of us can be highly functional assets to our chosen profession very late in life. But it is equally apparent that many of us can and do lose some of our acuity and utility as we grow older. This physical reality, coupled with the psychological makeup of our current eldest generation, has forced the burden of determining “when it's time to go,” from the individual to the rest of society. None of us are comfortable making these decisions within our own families, much less for someone else’s family. These decisions are being made privately in company boardrooms and family living rooms all over America today. But in the political arena, such decisions are necessarily made in a very public setting.

Voting is a big responsibility. Every citizen is asked to make very difficult and messy boardroom and living-room decisions for our nation in a very public way. If we are to make the best decisions possible, we need accuracy and fairness more than politeness from our media. One’s physical and mental acuity is a valid voting factor. Is that ageism? Maybe. Is it appropriate for the people that have to choose the leaders of the free world?  

Absolutely.

If the days of the party nominations coming out of a smoke-filled back room are over—and they are—then we will have to make some very public, very uncomfortable decisions, and we will need some very public, very uncomfortable reporting to fulfill our civic duty.

Rachel feels herself to be at the mercy of media that are failing to perform their duties:

Can the population assess a candidate’s fitness to serve without honest reporting? We, the plebeian class, find ourselves caught between two forces of chaos while our journalistic class finds ever more justifications to align with one of them. Honest assessments are met with cries of some evil “-ism”, as if basic journalistic integrity is fodder for oppressors.

Our journalistic class has spent a year telling me Democracy is in peril—that if I do not come to the same conclusion as them, I am killing our republic. But I believe that the failure of our journalists to report honestly, to strive to separate their personal perspectives from their public service, is killing our democracy. A polity unable to honestly assess a candidate’s fitness because journalists fear having a scarlet A for ableism sewn to their profiles is a population incapable of carrying the weight of our democracy.

Whereas Harold would prefer a less individualistic approach to evaluating candidates:

There is a myth in America: Change, innovation, and genius flow from a single person, preferably a model of perfection. Those around them who made all of it possible share little in the success. It is a story that shapes who we perceive as being worthy to represent us. Should anyone exhibit any characteristic that is viewed as a deviation from perfection, then they are no longer qualified for the position. I find it all very disheartening.

And Timothy believes the press should avoid even raising the question of age in order to avoid ageism:

There are 90-year-olds getting college degrees and opening businesses and there are 60-year-olds rotting away in a recliner watching I Love Lucy reruns for the 96th time. Young politicians should not have their age used as a weapon to create doubt about their competency any more than an old politician should have their age used as a weapon to create doubt about their competency. Even mere mentions of a candidate’s age, presented as nothing more than fact, can impose bias in the public and should be avoided.

Other than the candidate meeting the legal minimum required age to serve in the office, there should be no mention of a candidate’s age by the press nor the opponent unless the candidate themselves makes it an issue. Just as a criminal defendant’s medical conditions can’t be pursued in court unless the defendant brings it up, age needs to be protected to start removing ageism from our conversations.

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Meredith attempts to draw distinctions:

As a mother of a neurodivergent son and a volunteer who helps adults with disabilities, ableism is not a subject I take lightly. We live in a country that continues to overlook the dignity, rights, and needs of citizens with disabilities and that undervalues the lives of our seniors. To assess a particular politician, ask one simple question: Can the impairments in question be mitigated with reasonable accommodations? If so, withholding those accommodations would be wrong. However, if there is no form of support that could assist a person in performing the duties to which they were elected, questioning their suitability is appropriate. A free and fair society must have a media where their fitness to serve can be challenged, but there is a way to do so that targets the issue and not the person.

If we keep throwing ableism and ageism around to shut down criticism, we become complicit in covering up the systemic ableism that permeates our world and presents the REAL problem for those living with disabilities or returning to the workforce at an advanced age. I DO see the impact of ableism in our society, in our cities, in how we educate, work, and recreate … I don’t see it in asking our elected officials to put the needs of their constituents above their own need to be the person holding the office when age or illness impairs their ability to serve. I share the desire that our politicians be cognitively capable.

Theodore wants voters to get help from experts so that they can make more objective decisions:

Where issues of mental competence or mental health arise, I would suggest a politically neutral panel of eminent doctors specializing in neurological and psychiatric disorders, perhaps convened by the National Academy of Sciences or some similarly distinguished, apolitical, medical or scientific body, either at the initiative of the convening body or upon the request of the candidate whose fitness has been challenged. The candidate or candidates would be asked to submit to examination by the panel. The panel would be tasked with examining the candidate and issuing a public report on the candidate’s fitness for the public office he or she seeks and, if appropriate, the candidate’s prognosis over his or her prospective term. The report should be couched in nontechnical, easily understandable language capable of being understood by the general public.

Bruce agrees:

I don’t believe voters can or should have to decide on the physical and mental health of candidates for public office when plenty of experienced experts are available. As a starter, I suggest a board of five nonpartisan physicians, including a neurologist and a psychiatrist, who are permitted to fully examine candidates for the presidency and vice presidency and report their findings publicly and transparently in a manner to be determined.

But Robert warns against misleading ourselves into overestimating the objectivity of our impressions and judgments:

This obsession with the mental and physical health of politicians is part of a larger problem: misuse of medical terminology to give a patina of scientific objectivity to subjective judgments. We label someone a “narcissist” when we mean to say he’s a bit full of himself. We call someone a “sociopath” when we mean to say she’s insensitive to our feelings. We rarely, if ever, diagnose people on our side. It is always a way of saying someone on the other side is unfit. But a mental or physical illness does not define a person. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy all suffered from serious illness while in office. All three are considered among the top presidents.

I think we should mostly leave mental- and physical-health concerns out of our political judgments. We’d be more honest if we called our politicians too old, cold, or stupid instead of making armchair diagnoses of dementia, psychopathy, or intellectual disability.

Gary stopped working to spare his patients the possibility of age-diminished performance, and criticizes politicians who stick around too long, arguing that in doing so they risk great harm to millions of people.

He writes:

I am a retired surgeon.

My mother is alive at 101; my father lived to be 97. Both appear (past tense for father) alert and cogent to a casual observer. That is far, far from true. I am well: no medications, quite active, etc. My experience with peers and patients (my practice was joint replacement; Medicare age heavily represented) and general observations prompted me to retire from surgery at age 70 and completely at 71.

I greatly enjoyed my medical/surgical practice and was in no way “burned out.” With a largely Medicare population, I am far from wealthy. In order to cheer myself—or, at least, to reassure myself of this decision—I did a little research. You can see how my voting will go from what I wrote:

Old age brings physical infirmity and illness. Mental decline—especially in tasks requiring rapid analysis and fluidity of thought—is also inevitable. Although length of life has increased, there has not been an accompanying improvement in physical and mental well-being. Between 5 and 14 percent of people aged over 70 suffer some form of dementia, and this incidence nearly doubles every five years. Roughly 20 percent of those aged over 80 are mentally impaired, and by 90 years, up to 40 percent have dementia.

Loss of insight and judgment are nearly universal with dementia. These changes may be subtle; worse, a person with diminished mental acuity will never recognize their dementia. For the elderly, rapid yet complete and accurate decision making as is required in some occupations may be difficult, even impossible. Conflict then occurs between personal interests versus public safety; these are ideally resolved in favor of public safety.

Certain positions come with a mandatory retirement age: air-traffic controller, 56 years; federal law-enforcement officer, 57 years; airline pilot, 65 years; diplomat (but not ambassador!), 65 years. At least eight states require mandatory retirement for certain types of judges. Several health systems have introduced mandatory retirement or competence testing by age 75. Doctors can injure people, of course, but only one at a time, and an airline pilot might be responsible for several hundred deaths. In either event, the effect of an error is immediate and obvious. With consequences delayed and unclear, a president, legislator, or judge might repeatedly ruin the lives of tens of millions with misguided decisions and undo a lifetime of their own accumulated esteem.

Woodrow Wilson represented the U.S. at the Paris Peace Talks following World War I. During these talks, Wilson became ill. One school of thought on how harshly the Treaty of Versailles treated Germany is that Wilson failed to counter the French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, who prevailed: Germany was destroyed, disorganized, and demoralized. The result in Germany included paranoia, rabidly defensive nationalism, intense racism, and division. The consequence was Hitler, World War II, and the Holocaust.

FDR was impaired when elected to his fourth term in 1944. The Yalta Conference in early 1945 determined the fate of Germany after World War II. According to some, its terms inadvertently set the way for Stalin and the Soviets to dominate Eastern Europe and precipitated the Cold War. It is believed that Roosevelt’s weakened state was partly responsible. FDR died two months later.

Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma will be 93 when his term is completed. Chuck Grassley is running for another Senate term; Senator Dianne Feinstein is leaning toward another term in 2024. If reelected, both will be 94 at the end of their term. In Congress, there are currently more than 10 members over the age of 80. The current Supreme Court’s conservative composition is in part attributable to the liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. RBG is respected as a Supreme Court justice and brilliant legal strategist. Yet, in her 80s and having survived several episodes of cancer, she lacked the insight to retire.

Just as the requisite hyperconfidence of a successful person might become dangerous hubris with years of power and influence, a decline from highly functional, wise, and insightful to mildly eccentric to overtly demented can subtly occur. Those in positions of power carry a burden to provide for clients, patients, constituents, customers. As they age, they deserve respect and, if desired and appropriate, a position where they will contribute. They also carry an obligation to potential successors, and their best action might be stepping aside, deferring to a younger, more astute and mentally agile individual who would benefit from mentorship or guidance. Consider Sir Isaac Newton’s observation: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

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Stephan offers a similar conclusion from the perspective of a different profession:

I’m [Federal Aviation Administration–licensed] as a commercial pilot, and I’m now 86. I no longer fly, either recreationally (which is my choice) or for work (which is the government’s choice). The FAA mandates a fixed retirement age for working pilots, which is basically age 65, though there are minor exceptions. I have also stopped driving unless it’s absolutely necessary. My 16-years-younger wife takes the wheel of our Porsche. That is my choice as well, even though I am still quite capable of driving, after a career as an automotive journalist, including the editorship of Car and Driver, that put me behind the wheel of plenty of high-performance cars, including my own modified Porsche track car.

If we don’t want 86-year-old pilots flying our airliners, why should we accept 86-year-old politicians flying our country? There should be a government-mandated retirement age, and I’d be happy with it at age 75. How many of these people whining about ableism/ageism are also complaining that they should be allowed to fly in airplanes piloted by people Dianne Feinstein’s age?  

I’m guessing none.

Margie and Don object to ageism:

As two retired business consultants who are now 83 and still going strong, we object to Americans’ reacting to anyone over 70 as somehow less able. We are very active in our retirement home, and volunteer for many other charitable endeavors here in Boulder. I do four exercise classes each week, have written letters to the local newspapers and hundreds of postcards to get out the vote, monitor the book club, attend painting sessions weekly, and host a potluck monthly for 30 to 35 residents. We also volunteer at our local library for various ESL programs. In addition, we stay in touch with our five children and 11 grandchildren, including sending boxes of homemade cookies to encourage our college students at midterms and to celebrate their birthdays. We stay informed by watching morning and nightly news, as well as the Sunday political programs and Fareed Zakaria’s take.  We are not just “napping our lives away,” that’s for sure.

My husband, a former college professor with a Ph.D., has climbed all the 14ers in the lower 48, still plays senior softball, manages the 70s team, and runs the Boulder Blues Softball Club. He works out in a gym, hikes or rides his bike at least three to four days per week. His interest in and concern for climate change has prompted him to take the lead in our efforts to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” and we now compost and recycle more than 70 percent of our refuse in our building. Fortunately for us, he also volunteers to help with everything else in our senior community, including running the Great Decisions discussion group sponsored by the Foreign Policy Association each winter. Our management here has benefitted from his advice and counsel on everything from staffing to the installation of electric chargers in our communal garage, used for charging our EV and two others.  

We take umbrage at the idea that anyone beyond a certain age can no longer contribute to the greater good. If the American public chooses to lump all of us in one category just because of our ages, they’re sadly mistaken. We think Joe Biden is doing an excellent job and, if allowed to continue, will do so in another term beginning in 2024.  

Dennis reflects that age giveth and taketh qualities of a good leader:

I have a saying: “I know that tomorrow I will be wiser than I am today, because I know that today, I am wiser than I was yesterday.” At age 77, I feel very wise and able to act on that wisdom.  

Nevertheless I must admit that my strength and stamina have declined. My ability to physically act is somewhat limited compared to decades ago. Wisdom and experience are excellent traits for leaders; however, each individual is different, and voters need to be able to fully evaluate all circumstances of a candidate’s fitness. Also, do circumstances require a leader who can carry the sword in a charge in battle or have the diplomatic skills to negotiate and maintain prosperity and peace?

Hopefully, I will be able to continue being wiser tomorrow than I am today. However, I realize that at some point I may not remember what wisdom I have gained today for tomorrow––and how, when, or if this decline should occur is unpredictable. Unfortunately, age does increase the probabilities of some decline, but not when and in whom.

I fully enjoy my retirement, although I know others my age and in my profession who continue to work. I believe that most people (who are free to choose) know when it is time to retire, and we should give a candidate some credit for knowing if they are fit for the job. Still, it is the voter’s right to have as much information as possible to evaluate a candidate, and the candidate’s obligation to provide that information, and the journalist’s obligation to report on it as well.

And Errol opines:

There is something to be said for your leader having poise and exuding strength. People can call that “ableism,” and maybe it is, but we live in the real world where superficialities have value. People are going to have to learn to live with that as long as humans exist.

Bono was 14 when his grandfather died. His family was at the cemetery burying him when his mother, Iris, fainted. His father, Bob, and older brother, Norman, took her to the hospital to have her checked out, and Bono went over to his grandmother’s house, where the family was gathering.

A little while later, one of his uncles burst in, wailing: “Iris is dying. Iris is dying. She’s had a stroke.”

It was at that instant, Bono says, that his home disappeared. A hole opened up within him. Bono is now 62 and reflecting on how many rock stars lost their mother at a crucial age: John Lennon, Johnny Rotten, Bob Geldof, Paul McCartney—the list of the abandoned goes on and on. Their mothers’ deaths left them with this bottomless craving. “People who need to be loved at scale, with 20,000 people screaming your name every night, are generally to be avoided,” Bono says with a laugh. “My kind of people.”

His mother lingered on for a few more days after the stroke. Bono and his brother were ushered into her hospital room, and they held her hands while the machine keeping her alive was flicked off.

Then Bono, his father, and his brother returned home and almost never spoke of her again. They barely even thought of her, at least for years. “It’s not just she’s dead; we disappeared her,” Bono says.

His father sunk into his opera. He would stand in front of their stereo, surrounded by the strains of La Traviata, lost to the rest of the world. Bono would watch him, unable to get to him. “He doesn’t notice that I’m in the room looking at him,” Bono writes in Surrender, his entrancing new memoir.

They no longer had a home, just a house. Bono blamed his father for his mother’s death. “I didn’t kill her; you killed her, by ignoring her. You won’t ignore me,” is how Bono puts it in the book. The three men who used to scream at the TV now scream at each other. Their passions are operatic. Bono’s living off cans of meat and beans and these little pellets of mush that turn into a kind of mashed potato when boiled. During these years he is drowning, clutching at anything to survive. His self-confidence drains away. He starts struggling in school. He wants to feel special, but there’s no evidence that he is. He desperately yearns to have his father pay attention to him. He finds he can win that attention only when they argue and when they play chess together. He can’t get his father’s attention unless he beats him at something.

His father had a beautiful tenor voice, but he protected himself from disappointment by not allowing himself any dreams about a musical career—and then his great regret in life was that he didn’t have the courage to try to pursue one. No wonder music would be exactly the thing Bono would want to go into, to succeed where his father didn’t, to make his father see him. “There’s a little bit of patricide” in the book, he admits to me. “If you ask yourself the question How would you take this man down? the answer would be, Become the tenor that he wished to be. Of course!”

Years later, Bono’s musical dreams all came true. But his father remained permanently irascible. One night U2 was playing a big arena in Texas and Bono flew his father to America, where he’d never been, to watch the concert. After the show, his father came backstage, looking emotional. Bono thought something profound was about to happen—the father-son connection he’s been waiting for all of his life. His father stuck out his hand. “Son,” he said, “you’re very professional.” He’d hit the limits of what he could express.

For Bono, getting in touch with his mother became a middle-age quest. When U2 was starting out, they rehearsed in a cottage built into an outer wall of the cemetery where his mother was buried. Bono worked on a song called “I Will Follow,” about a boy whose mother dies. The boy is telling her he will follow her into the grave. It never occurred to Bono that this song might be autobiographical. It never occurred to him to visit the grave of the woman who was lying about 100 yards away from where he was singing; he didn’t even think of her. “That’s the thing about sublimation. It’s almost the farthest we go to bury who we are,” he says now with some wonder.

Not until three decades later did he finally face her absence and what it did to him. In his 50s, he was able to write the lyrics for a song called “Iris (Hold Me Close).” One of them goes: “The ache / in my heart / is so much a part of who I am / Something in your eyes / took a thousand years to get here.”

I tell you all of this because there is something about him I’m trying to understand—I’ll call it his “muchness.” There is just a lot to the guy—so much driven intensity; so much sensitivity, anger, joy, and propulsive energy. If you watch U2 perform, you see three guys playing their instruments in a cool, understated way, and then this short, crazy Irishman climbing frantically around the stage. Spend any time with him offstage, and he is fantastically entertaining, filling every room with stories and argument. He’s a maximalist at nearly everything he does.

U2 in Chicago during their first American tour in 1981 (left to right: Adam Clayton, The Edge, Bono, and Larry Mullen Jr.) (Adrian Boot / Urbanimage.tv / Camera Press / Redux )

Musically and in his activist life, Bono exhibits a pattern of overreaching, his lofty goals sometimes exceeding his grasp. One grand project after another—gigantic concert tours, economic development in Africa, addressing the AIDS crisis. (Fighting AIDS and global poverty are his two biggest causes.) Years ago, he was a guest columnist for The New York Times. I used to tell him, “It’s not ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’ It’s just a column. Keep it pointed and prosaic.” I think he had trouble adjusting to the concept.

Some people find his muchness annoying and pretentious. He says that people are frequently telling him, “Just cool your jets, man. Just chill the fuck out.” But as he writes in his book, “It’s hard for me to turn myself off.”

Where does all of this come from?

One theory is that the fusion reactor within him was produced by the traumas of his youth. He’s yearning to fill the holes—the death of his mother, the absence of his father. By this theory, the story of Bono is one of scarcity, the story of the lifetime he’s spent trying to find the love that was ripped away.

Bono himself seems to accept this theory. Success is an “outworking of dysfunction,” he argues in the book, “a reward for really, really hard work, which may be obscuring some kind of neurosis.”

But people who operate out of a scarcity mindset usually have their resentments on full display. As far as I can tell, Bono doesn’t have a resentful bone in his body. Scarcity people never seem fully happy no matter how much they achieve. Bono is generally happy, energized, enthusiastic.

So perhaps the source of Bono’s energy and unrelenting drive may not be scarcity, but abundance. The guy had a rotten childhood, but since then he has been blessed with just about everything life can offer. Perhaps he is simply manically excited to take advantage of it all.

While I spent a few days with him in Dublin this fall, an old book came to mind. It was an analysis of American culture called People of Plenty, by the late historian David Potter. The core argument made by the school of historians Potter belonged to is that America’s natural character is defined by abundance. The European settlers who first came to the country found forests stretching on forever, flocks of geese so large that they required 30 minutes to take off. All of this possibility drove the settlers sort of mad. They found themselves walking more in a day than they had ever imagined, dreaming dreams bigger than they had ever imagined. These immigrants, the ones who weren’t brought here in chains, turned entrepreneurial, disordered, antic, religiously zealous, morally charged, messianic, and perpetually restless. They measured their life by how much they had grown and how far they had climbed. They were propelled by a central contradiction: They had this intense spiritual drive to complete God’s plans for humanity on this continent—and they also had this fevered ambition to get really rich. They were propelled by a moral materialism that would never let them rest.

One day I was riding around Dublin with Bono in a tiny Fiat, and the thought occurred to me: Bono’s a little like that. He may be Irish, but he’s got a lot of that loud, American, go-go type in him—part messiah, part showman.

We are sitting in Mount Temple, the school he attended during his teenage years. It is as generic and tattered a building as you can imagine, walls of cinder block painted bright colors. It was built by the World Bank at a time when Ireland was still the kind of poor country that depended on the World Bank.

Bono shows me the bulletin board where Larry Mullen Jr. tacked the notice that read Drummer seeks musicians to form band—the notice that produced U2. Bono shows me the music room where U2 first practiced together. It’s just a bunch of high-school chairs and desks with a metal case for instruments in the back and a beat-up piano in the front. Bono plays me a snippet of a Sinatra song.

“Something happened here,” Bono says. “Something was going on.” It certainly was and it certainly did. You can source Bono’s life to the psychic loss of his parents, or you can source it to what came next. Bono may have been a basket case at 14, but by 18 he had found the five people whom he would spend the rest of his life with—Jesus Christ; his wife, Ali; and his bandmates, Mullen, Adam Clayton, and David Evans—and he met them all at this school. He joined his band and started dating his wife in the exact same week. For a teenager who seemed to be drowning, he did a fantastic job of finding companions for life. Who manages to do all that by age 18?

[Read: When U2 went to Bosnia in 1997]

This was in the mid-1970s, the age of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, the high-water mark of punk rock. Bono and his gang were punk rockers. They wore kilts and bomber boots, mohawks and buzz haircuts. At some point in high school, they came across this radical Christian group called Shalom. Bono’s father was Catholic, and his mother had been Protestant, and he wanted nothing to do with the Church, or the vicious tribalism that was hurtling Ireland toward civil war. But this fringe Christian collective was different. Its members were suspicious of materialism. They put the poor at the heart of their faith. Their Jesus was this badass Jew who took on the establishment. “They lived like first-century Christians,” Bono recalls. “And we thought: That’s pretty punk. And they seemed to accept who we were. We thought, Wow, this is great.”

I ask him, wasn’t becoming Christian in the 1970s kind of uncool? “We were on a whole other level of uncool. We genuinely thought cool was uncool.” Bono’s point is that you can’t experience God while being cool—it takes pure abandon, the raw act of exposing yourself. That, he explains, is what makes faith like rock and roll.

Bono scrambles our categories. We’ve all inherited a certain culture-war narrative over the past 50 years. Rock and roll is on one side, along with sex, drugs, and liberation. Religion is on the other side, along with judgmentalism, sexual repression, and deference to authority. But for Bono, Mullen, and Evans—the U2 members who became and remain Christians—punk rock and the radical Christ are on the same team. (Evans became known as The Edge. Bono, born Paul David Hewson, was given the nickname that eventually became his stage name—shortened from Bono Vox of O’Connell Street—by his best friend since childhood.) The three of them embraced a faith that simply bypassed the encrustations of 2,000 years of religious civilization and returned straight to Jesus: the helpless baby who was born on a bed of straw and shit; the wandering troubadour who put the poor, the marginalized, and the ailing at the center of his gaze; the rebel outsider who confronted the power structures of his society and took them all on at once. This alternative form of Christianity is something that, say, American evangelicals could have adopted. But mostly they did not.

The boys formed their band, went through the hard apprenticeship of rejection that all teenage bands go through, and then finally got to make an album, Boy. Most rock albums, especially in those days, were about rebellion, coming of age, savvy knowingness, but this was an album about innocence, about seeing with the eyes of a child. U2 was announcing that the band was going to be in this world, but not of it.

Members of U2 pose for a photo in their Volkswagen van in 1980. (Martyn Goddard)

From that first album, U2’s strengths were evident. “Where others would hear harmony or counterpoint,” Bono writes, “I was better at finding the top line in the room, the hook, the clear thought.” Through the next couple of decades, the band turned out hit after hit, and although Bono is always saying how punk he is, I just hear popular, mainstream rock: “With or Without You,” “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “Beautiful Day.”

The band’s other great strength is the pseudo-religious power of their concerts. Bono was influenced by an obscure book called The Death and Resurrection Show: From Shaman to Superstar, by Rogan P. Taylor, which argues that modern performance culture has its ancient roots in shamanism. When we go to a concert, we enter the presence of a mystic who interacts with the spirit world and brings spiritual energies into the physical one. “We’re religious people even when we are not. We find ritual and ceremony powerful,” Bono says. “We were always interested in the ecstatic. I think our music reflects that.”

Boy was a success, and the band was on its way. But then The Edge, the lead guitarist, declared that he needed to quit. He told Bono he didn’t see how they could be both believers and in a band. He didn’t see how they could be global stars and fulfill the humbler “calling to serve a local community.” The world was so broken and needed love; what good could a few songs do? Bono, experiencing some of the same doubts, replied, “If you’re out, I’m out.”

Their manager, Paul McGuinness, who had just signed a bunch of contracts for their coming tour, was astounded. “Am I to gather from this that you have been talking with God?” he asked skeptically. Yes. “Do you think God would have you break a legal contract?”

But it was something else that really kept the band together. The Edge began to write “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” calling for an end to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. With that song U2 saw how rock could be not just an expression of what was going on in their lives, but a vehicle to help heal a broken world. They would be missional or not at all.

The band stayed together, but the tension The Edge identified has never gone away. How do you reconcile the humility of faith with the egotism of superstardom, the purity of the Holy Spirit with the material excess of show business, the drive to achieve musical greatness with the posture of surrender to grace?

Bono’s memoir can be read as a spiritual adventure story, a Pilgrim’s Progress with superyachts and supermodels (or as Bono jokes, “The pilgrim’s lack of progress”). On the one hand, it is called Surrender, and this act of surrendering himself to a higher love remains a guiding hope in his life. “I’d always be first up when there was an altar call, the ‘come to Jesus’ moment,” he writes in the book. “I still am. If I was in a café right now and someone said, ‘Stand up if you’re ready to give your life to Jesus,’ I’d be first to my feet. I took Jesus with me everywhere and I still do. I’ve never left Jesus out of the most banal or profane actions of my life.”

[Read: U2’s political, unstoppable, grating cheerfulness]

On the other hand, he also walks around with the most gargantuan worldly ambitions burning in his chest. From the beginning, Bono wanted U2 to be like the Beatles and the other great bands. “Megalomania started at a very early age,” he jokes. “It’s unbelievable. God almighty.” All these decades, Bono and his bandmates have been relentlessly chasing the perfect rock-and-roll album, the perfect show. He now admits this often made him impossible. Throughout the years, Bono insisted that U2 produce a new sound with every album, as the Beatles had. In the book he describes U2’s creative process in great detail, and it’s basically a series of scenes in which Bono is haranguing his mates: “Too familiar!” “Making a band, breaking a band, remaking a band.”

This grand ambitiousness has meant that they’ve taken a lot of musical risks, not all of which have paid off. Or as Bono puts it in Surrender, “Our best work is never too far from our worst.” During one reinvention moment he asks himself, “Why would I put everything at risk again? What’s got into me? What gets into me?”

I ask Bono about his core motivator. Is it the quest for achievement, for intimacy, for fame? “I’m ‘I don’t want to blow it’ motivated,” he says. “I’ve got these incredible opportunities and I don’t want to blow it.” He emails me a few days later to make the point that the enemy of greatness is not crap; the enemy of greatness is “very good.” You have to hammer, exhausted, through “very good” to get to greatness.

This ferocity is often hard on those around him. One day Bono worked himself up into such a rage that The Edge had to punch him on the side of the head. “The friendships in the band have been ins and outs for sure,” Bono says. “I have been insufferable at times. Pushing them and prodding them. Not wanting to blow it.”

I ask him whether the rage he keeps talking about is against only the injustices of the world, or also directed at the people he loves. “Both, sadly,” he says. “And I’ve had to apologize to my bandmates for the hectoring they’ve received over the years.” Has he brought his rage home to his family? “I have lost my temper a few times as a father.” (He has four children, all adults now.) “And that has brought me deep shame. But I’m that guy. I’m a bit wound up.”

The band’s worldly ambitions paid off in the most spectacular way. By the time U2 was rich and famous, Bono had entered the lofty height of celebrity—a life that doesn’t look much like the radical simplicity of the first-century Christians. He’s got a villa in the south of France. He’s friends with Christy Turlington and Brad Pitt. One time he was at a small White House dinner party with Barack Obama and, after an allergic reaction to some red wine, he left the table in the middle of the meal to take a nap in the Lincoln Bedroom. Another time Mikhail Gorbachev showed up at his front door in Dublin carrying a giant teddy bear. And another time he thought he’d peed his pants while sitting on Frank Sinatra’s couch. The stories in the book can be sidesplitting.

Bono’s social energy is on par with all his other kinds of energy, and as he speaks you realize the guy knows everybody—Bob Dylan, Pavarotti, Billy Graham, and Larry Summers; the pope, George W. Bush, Allen Ginsberg, and Quincy Jones. He’s so famous himself, he’s not name-dropping; he’s just thrilled to meet people. I have a theory that celebrities love to hang out with one another because deep down, they are still the sad outsiders they were in high school, and they’re thrilled that these cool people want to hang out with them.

Rowing for heaven by day and drinking with superstars by night—Bono’s spiritual adventure is the greatest high-wire act in show business. You can’t help wondering which way he’ll go. Will he be ruled by his rage or his compassion? Can he find inner stillness amid the raucous go-go of his life? Can he keep his focus on the celestial spheres when the people on the beach at Nice are so damn sexy? Can he die to self, or has his permanent tendency toward self-seriousness and pomposity become too great? If the guy is so concerned with his soul, why did he spend so much time writing about his hair? The ultimate questions at the center of it all are the same ones that have haunted American history: Can you be great and also good? Can you serve the higher realm while partying your way through this one?

Three things save him. The first is his wife, Ali. She is the star of the memoir, light and warmth, solidly grounded, deeply souled. Ali’s the one who tells him when he’s becoming too self-serious and losing his sense of mischief. She’s his emotional foundation and spiritual partner. “Ali will let her soul be searched only if you reciprocate and she is ready for the long dive,” Bono writes. “Best to arrive at her fort defenseless to have half a chance at challenging her own unbroachable defense system.”

Their home near Dublin has a gigantically long kitchen table made from a tree trunk that hosts dinners of 20 to 30 people, with dancing, drinking, and arguing about world affairs past 1 a.m. The place has the spirit of the perfect Irish pub. “It turns out I’m oriented toward horizontal relationships rather than vertical ones,” he says. His home is communal. His band is communal. His philanthropic work is communal. His life is rooted in peer relationships.

The second thing that saves him is his activism. About a decade ago, I went to a U2 concert. As I drove home, one of Bono’s people called me and asked if I wanted to hang out with him at his hotel. This is my dream: hanging out with a rock star after a concert. I got to the hotel bar and there was Bono, an archbishop, some World Bank economists, and a West African government official. We ended up talking about developing-world debt obligations until early in the morning.

Celebrity activists are in bad odor these days. Who cares what privileged superstars think? Bono has certainly fallen into many of those traps, but he is also a celebrity activist like no other. He knows who the deputy national security adviser is. He knows who the staff on the Senate Appropriations Committee are. He shows his face not just at large televised events, but in one-on-one meetings lobbying House staffers and mid-level White House officials on developing-world debt relief and money for drugs to combat HIV. “One of the greatest characters in my life over the last twenty-five years has been the capital city of the United States of America,” he writes.

He may be a mystic shaman on the concert stage, but his view of social change is unromantic; he knows that it starts with relentless pressure. (One day Bono was haranguing George W. Bush because AIDS medications weren’t getting to Africa fast enough. Finally, Bush interrupted him: “Can I speak? I am the president.”) It’s about long, tiring negotiations and compromise—stale coffee and, as he puts it to me, “damp cheese plates, soggy sandwiches late at night.” And it’s about rejecting fundamentalism in all its forms, religious or ideological. Stay flexible; make constant, steady progress.

Bono has been ruthlessly single-minded. He will meet with anybody who can help those causes, no matter how noxious to him they might be on other subjects. The most famous example is his successful campaign to woo Jesse Helms to support aid to Africa.

In Surrender, Bono relays a story, told to him by Harry Belafonte, that explains his methodology. When Bobby Kennedy was appointed attorney general, the civil-rights community was deeply suspicious of him. Martin Luther King Jr. hosted a meeting where the other leaders trashed Kennedy as an Irish redneck who would set back civil rights. King slammed his hand on the table and asked, “Does anyone here have anything positive to say about our new attorney general?” No, that’s the point, the others said; there’s nothing good about his record. King responded, “I’m releasing you into the world to find one positive thing to say about Bobby Kennedy, because that one positive thing will be the door through which our movement will have to pass.” They found that RFK was close to his bishop—and through that door they converted him into a great champion for civil rights.

Bono is often teased about his activism—I’m going to save the world, and I don’t care how many magazine covers I have to be on to do it. But this work has been a useful unfolding of his faith. “Your faith is an action,” he tells me. Preach the Gospel, but only use words if absolutely necessary. His activism has been the way he can take the fame life gave him and turn it into a useful currency. “While I hope God is with us in our mansions on the hill or holiday homes by the sea,” he writes, “I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable.”

His activism has also connected him with one of his enduring loves: America. At a time when many of us Americans feel a sense of national decline, Bono has a bracing alternative view. “America might be the greatest song the world has yet to hear,” he told an audience of Americans at the Fulbright Association in March. “It’s an exciting thought that after 246 years of this struggle for freedom, after 246 years of inching and crawling towards freedom, sometimes on your belly, sometimes on your knees, sometimes marching, sometimes striding—this might be the moment you let freedom ring.”

The third thing that has saved him has been his holy longing, or, as he might put it, God’s longing for him. Bono’s soul is perpetually aflame, and this drives him forward, nurtures his growth and his heavenly aspirations.

Bono has reached a point where he feels grateful for his father. In Surrender, Bono paints a warm, sympathetic portrait of the old man—who was in his own way a charming, talented guy who suffered a loss he could not process, who had his 14-year-old son coming at him with “guns blazing.”

These days, Bono—this noisy and garrulous man—craves silence. He points out that Elijah had to go to the cave to hear God, and God was heard not in the thunder and the wind but in the sound of silence. All of his life, he has reinvented himself. Now he thinks it may be time to do it again. “Music might be a jealous God. It was always the easiest thing for me. I wake up with melodies in my head,” he says. “But now I feel more like: Shut up and listen. If you want to take it to the next level, you may have to rethink your life.”

What does that look like? “The flag of surrender has come around again for me.” What does surrender mean exactly? “It’s just out of my reach. I’m getting to the place where I do not have to do, but just be. It’s trying to transcend myself. It’s like my antidote to me. The antidote to me is surrender.”

The ending of his book is a beautiful evocation of peace—a riotous man’s homage to stillness. He writes the book in lyrics, not paragraphs: “The wound of my teenage years that had become an opening is now closed / the search for home is now over / it is you / I am home / no longer in exile.” Can a guy like Bono really achieve stillness? Especially when he has so much yet to say?

It’s hard to know the answer to that. At one point he told me that throughout his whole life, he’s been searching for home, and that lately he has come to realize that home is not a place, but a person. I neglected to ask the follow-up question. Is that person Ali? Jesus? Any random soul he happens to be in front of that day? Maybe all of the above.

This article appears in the December 2022 print edition with the headline “Bono’s Great Adventure.”

In 1961, at the height of the civil-rights era, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order designed to improve access to opportunity for Black Americans. Government contractors were compelled to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” Six decades on, Americans remain divided over affirmative action. Some believe we do not have enough of it; others believe we have too much of it. And now the debate is about to get even more contentious.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear opening arguments in two affirmative-action cases: Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The first case contends that Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policy violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The second case alleges that UNC unconstitutionally favors Black and Latino students over others in its admissions process, violating the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, which prohibits selective denial of rights on the basis of race.

[Richard D. Kahlenberg: The affirmative action that colleges really need]

The cases represent a standoff between those who insist that the college-admissions process should essentially be limited to quantitative metrics, such as grades and test scores, and those who believe grades and test scores should be one of many factors in the admissions equation—along with leadership qualities, personal talents, race and ethnicity, and family circumstances. Ostensibly, the conflict between these opposing viewpoints was resolved two decades ago in the 2003 Supreme Court decision that bears one of our names, Grutter v. Bollinger—which held that the University of Michigan’s law-school-admission policy was constitutional because it was narrowly tailored to serve the compelling interest of attaining a diverse student body. Grutter was a landmark decision on affirmative action in higher education: It was the first case in which a majority of the Court adopted a unified position holding affirmative action to be constitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. But, as the upcoming cases attest, as a matter of legal interpretation, disagreement continues between those who aspire to absolute color blindness and those who defend the need for fostering a racially and ethnically fair learning environment.

A core element of this debate hinges on the notion of what constitutes “diversity” in contemporary America. In 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education compelled the desegregation of American schools—and sought to integrate American society—racial inequality in the U.S. was literally a black-and-white issue: 89 percent of the country was white, and 10 percent was Black. Today, white, Black, Asian American, and Latino students vie for admission alongside students from around the world. Some students—regardless of ethnicity—are privileged; others are disadvantaged.

Against this backdrop, we contend that Black students remain particularly and egregiously disadvantaged. Further, we contend that we need affirmative action now more than ever precisely because of today’s increased demographic complexity. If we do not redouble our commitment, Black students won’t just remain at the back of the line in American life; they will be pushed even further back.

To be sure, efforts to create equal opportunity and remediate past injustice through affirmative action have driven progress for Black Americans, who now occupy senior positions in many of our most prestigious and influential institutions—including the courts, universities, and corporations. But we must confront the irrefutable truth that in contemporary America, Black students’ educational opportunities vis-à-vis other groups remain separate and unequal.

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

From 1988 to 2014, the number of K–12 schools in the U.S. that had a 99 percent nonwhite student population more than doubled, from 2,762 schools to 6,727. By the 2010s, the percentage of Black students attending schools across the South that were at least 50 percent white had plunged by nearly half, from a peak of 44 percent to 23 percent. Predominantly white school districts collectively receive $23 billion more a year than predominantly nonwhite school districts, where Black students are less likely than white students to have access to college-preparatory-level math and science courses. Black Americans still lag behind white Americans in overall educational attainment. And Black males are twice as likely to quit school as their white male classmates.

Consequently, getting into college, competing once there, and graduating four years later is a harder slog for Black students, many of whom are underprepared and underfinanced compared with their white counterparts on campus. As a 2022 report issued by the Economic Policy Institute notes, “In 1968 blacks were just over half (56.0 percent) as likely as whites to have a college degree, a situation that is essentially the same today (54.2 percent).”

In Grutter, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, posited a “sunset clause” on racism in America. By the year 2028, she contended, puzzlingly, America would be color-blind. About five years shy of the arbitrary deadline she established, it is impossible to argue that Black Americans enjoy equality of opportunity. They do not. Affirmative action must continue, potentially for generations to come—because the invidious discrimination experienced by Black Americans over a three-century span has not been undone.

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases that could end America’s experiment with affirmative action in higher education. The challenges to the admissions programs at Harvard and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—both brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a coalition of unnamed students assembled by the conservative legal strategist Edward Blum—argue that the institutions discriminate against Asian American students, and that eliminating the use of race in admissions would fix the problem.

Lower courts have rejected SFFA’s arguments, leaning on more than 40 years of precedent that says the use of race in admissions is permissible in narrow circumstances. “Harvard has demonstrated that no workable and available race-neutral alternatives would allow it to achieve a diverse student body while still maintaining its standards for academic excellence,” Judge Allison Burroughs wrote in her 2019 opinion. But SFFA pressed on, and now the case sits before a conservative Supreme Court that has shown a willingness to overturn well-established precedents.

[Richard D. Kahlenberg: The affirmative action that colleges really need]

In her new book, Is Affirmative Action Fair? The Myth of Equity in College Admissions, Natasha Warikoo, a sociologist at Tufts University who has spent years examining race-conscious admissions, assesses the positions of those for and against affirmative action, and argues that we’re asking the wrong questions about how students get into college. By exalting merit, Warikoo warns, Americans have developed a skewed perception of the process—a perception that leads to challenges such as the one before the Court.

I spoke with Warikoo about her book, the Supreme Court hearing, and how we can better understand admissions.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Adam Harris: You write, “When we recognize the diverse goals that universities attempt to address through college admissions, it becomes clear that admission is not a certification of individual merit, or deservingness, nor was it ever meant to be.” Can you expand on that idea? Where do we have flaws in our understanding of college admissions?

Natasha Warikoo: In the past, it was like “We want to have a bar.” You had to have some demonstration that you could handle the work that we’re going to give you. And some of that was exclusionary. It was like “Can you pass the Latin test?” Well, most schools didn’t teach kids Latin, so it’s not that that was fair—it was “You’re going to be doing Latin; do you know Latin?”

But now, when we’re talking about super-selective places—there are more than 200 of them, so not just the Ivies, but also not most colleges—they have so many different interests that are playing into who they’re admitting. You’ve got the sports coaches who are trying to get their recruits; you’ve got the development office that gives a list and says, “These people have done a lot for this university—make sure you take a close look at that”; there’s the humanities departments who want to make sure there are people interested in the humanities, not just in STEM; the orchestra’s bassoon player may have graduated, and now the orchestra needs a bassoon player. So, there are all these different things that are going on, and the admissions office is trying to fulfill all these different interests and needs.

But ordinary people treat admissions as, you know, they’re lining people up from best to worst and taking the top ones, and if one of these says they’re not coming, then they take the next person. Well, that’s not how it works. They’re fulfilling organizational needs and desires. But somehow, we treat it as a prize—and whoever is most deserving gets in.

Harris: That plays into the broader idea in America around merit, and the way that we’ve oriented our society around merit. How do merit and the idea of fairness work together to give us the wrong idea about admission systems?

Warikoo: In all of these international surveys, when you look at respondents’ belief about whether people should be rewarded for merit over other things, Americans are much more likely to say yes than people in most other countries. A lot of modern societies believe in these ideas of meritocracy, but the United States is especially attached to the idea. We have this belief that some people are deserving—and the unspoken idea that some are undeserving. And there’s a sense of entitlement, like I did all of these things; I deserve a spot at these places.

But we should stop treating college admissions as if everybody is on an equal playing field and that the person who is the smartest, the most hardworking, the one with the most grit, is the one getting in. Instead of arguing about how affirmative action goes against our ideas of meritocracy, we should look at what colleges are actually trying to do.

Harris: Well, let’s talk about affirmative action. How has it been viewed since Justice Lewis Powell accepted the diversity rationale in the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case in 1978?

Warikoo: There’s a whole industry of research that develops after that decision to really try to dig into the impact of a diverse learning environment: What is the impact of having a roommate of a different race, going to a college that is diverse, being in a class with students who are a different race? And this research shows all these benefits: Groups make better decisions; students have more intellectual engagement; they improve their racial attitudes. There are even some findings that show a positive impact on civic engagement down the line. A student may not even have a diverse set of friends, but if they’re on a diverse campus, there seems to be some kind of impact.

So, all of this research shows these positive effects, and those data have been used in subsequent court cases defending affirmative action. But in the public conversation, many people recognize that it’s also an equity issue.

Harris: In 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary. And that’s what a lot of opponents of affirmative action say now: It may have been justified in the past, but it’s no longer necessary—and if we need something, we might be able to find a proxy. Are there proxies for race in admissions?

Warikoo: The legal requirement is that when you’re using these suspect categories such as race in a policy, you have to show that there’s no other way that you could do things instead. And it’s pretty clear that there’s no good stand-in for race. We can use class, and class is important. But I don’t see these as either-or. The Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin has looked at zip code as a stand-in, and it’s pretty clear that such an approach is not going to have an impact on the numbers of underrepresented minority students on campus. Because, you know, the overwhelming majority of people in the United States today are white. The majority of people who are poor in this country are white. So you’re not really going to racially diversify by looking at class.

Colleges have tried different things, such as the Texas “10 percent plan.” The research suggests that these other ideas are somewhat helpful, but the problem has been that graduation rates can go down when you’re just using a percent plan. And it’s not a stand-in for race-based affirmative action.

We can look at the data from the states that have banned affirmative action to understand that they have not figured out a stand-in. We see declines in every state, year on year, of the number of underrepresented minorities when affirmative action gets banned.

Harris: One of the through lines in the book is the purpose of higher education. What can colleges do better to be more honest about their goals?

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

Warikoo: One is being careful about how they talk about admissions. And when you dig into their language, many schools say that they’re looking to build a class, and that everyone makes a unique contribution. But they’re still publishing acceptance rates. There are so many ways in which the language they use buys into this idea that they are a place of excellence. This is the best class ever, you’re told when you’re a freshman.

When you have these elite colleges in which the student body comes from more resourced families than the average across 18 year-olds, it’s not just the best of the best. Your family’s resources play a role—whether you have parents who went to college, whether you grew up in certain neighborhoods or went to certain schools. Two-thirds of American adults don’t have a bachelor’s degree.

But I keep coming back to the question of What are we trying to do here? Our spending in the U.S. on higher education is regressive. The most elite colleges accept students who are the highest achieving and most resourced. But who needs the most support? When you look at what community colleges are doing in terms of social mobility, they blow places like Harvard and Tufts out of the water. Colleges should think much more about the role they want to play in our society, and how they should align admissions to those goals.

Harris: As I got toward the end of the book, where you talk about solutions, a couple of things really stuck out: the sort of anti-inclusive instinct that a lot of institutions have in terms of increasing their enrollment, where they don’t want to increase enrollment because that may upset alumni who attach value to the selectiveness of their institution. Or, if there were an admission lottery, families of high achievers may be frustrated. And my takeaway was: There’s really nothing the institutions may be able to do that is going to make everyone happy, so maybe they should just do what’s just.

Warikoo: Yes. There are so many more amazing 18-year-olds in our country—deserving, hardworking, ambitious, smart, whatever superlative you want to use—than there is space for them at Harvard, at UNC, at any given school.

But we have to stop acting like you deserve it and you don’t deserve it. It’s not about who deserves it. And that’s why I talk about a lottery system, because it implies you don’t deserve this more than anyone else—you got lucky. It already is luck: that your parents could afford to buy a house near a school that had a college counselor, or you had a tutor who could help you with your essay, or you went to a school with a crew team and you got recruited for crew—all kinds of things. It is luck. Why not call it what it is?

In a year when they are hoping for a red wave, Republicans have set their sights on defeating Colorado Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in their quest to gain control of the Senate chamber. On Friday night, Bennet engaged in a fast-paced and testy final debate with moderate GOP rival Joe O'Dea, who has distanced himself from former president Donald Trump as he has blamed Democrats for inflation and an energy policy that "straps working Americans."

Americans are used to voters being angry at Congress and the president, but there's a new vein of anger directed at local officials and a nationwide coordination in campaigns to recall or intimidate county supervisors and school board members.

Given all the attention that Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has drawn, one might forget how little it will affect most people. Although Musk fancies the platform “a common digital town square,” Twitter reports just 238 million daily active users in a world of nearly 8 billion. It just so happens, though, that there is a strong overlap among people who report the news, people who use Twitter, and people who are interested in Elon Musk.

But Musk could make one move that would have wide-ranging effects even for the prudent majority that avoids Twitter: welcoming back Donald Trump. Musk vowed in May to lift the former president’s ban from Twitter. He started making changes at the company yesterday, firing Twitter’s management team and announcing, “The bird is freed.”

[Charlie Warzel: How Elon Musk could actually kill Twitter]

Trump was never the most-followed figure on Twitter, but he was the most consequential, using the platform as a crucial tool to get himself elected president. His removal following the January 6 insurrection was a pivotal moment for Twitter and himself. Trump is always unpredictable, but there seem to be two likely outcomes for an escape from his digital Elba. Either Trump’s return to Twitter proves a return to the toxicity of the 2010s, in which his presence harms democracy but helps Democrats, or else the peculiar mix of factors that made him a Twitter phenomenon is no longer attainable.

One other slight possibility exists: Trump could be unbanned but stay away. In April, he promised that he’d stick with this own social-media platform, Truth Social. “I am not going on Twitter. I am going to stay on Truth,” he said on Fox News. Under his agreement with Truth, he “is generally obligated to make any social media post on Truth Social and may not make the same post on another social media site for 6 hours.”

[Quinta Jurecic: The ringmaster is gone]

But c’mon. Trump has never been bound by his own promises and contractual obligations. Truth Social is flailing as both a megaphone—it has never attracted a large user base, especially outside Trump loyalists—and as a business proposition. (Perhaps hiring a CEO best known for Keystone Cop–style antics in Congress was unwise.) He isn’t getting nearly the attention he wants there. In the absence of Twitter, he has taken to sending screenshots of his “Truths,” as the platform’s messages are inaptly called, to reporters via email in the hopes that they’ll post them on Twitter. It’s silly to expect him to resist the temptation to reclaim the greater audience he once had.

Musk could change his mind, too. He unsuccessfully tried to extract himself from buying Twitter, has already scaled back his claims of free-speech “absolutism,” and might face an advertiser boycott if he unbans Trump. Still, the promise is so central to his acquisition, and so attention-grabbing, that Musk is unlikely to backtrack.

In imagining how Trump’s return might play out, his behavior on Truth is instructive. Being exiled did nothing to reduce his flow of unhinged statements. He has threatened American Jews, embraced QAnon, attacked the FBI, and said that Senator Mitch McConnell has a “DEATH WISH.” That’s wild stuff, and you may have heard about some of the lowest lights, but much of this goes largely unnoticed beyond Truth users.

[David A. Graham: Whatever happened to Donald Trump?]

The utility of Twitter for Trump was not that he could communicate to his fans—he had plenty of channels for doing that. Twitter allowed him to communicate to everyone else. An inflammatory tweet would be retweeted by supporters, dunked on by critics, and amplified by journalists, before making its way to website homepages, cable news A-blocks, and newspaper front pages. Truths stay inside the bubble.

That rhetoric was bad for the functioning of American politics, and social media was a crucial part of his work to stir up the insurrection, but it was also probably bad for Trump. The constant attention fed Trump’s ego, but it reminded voters of what a loose cannon he was and is, too. After all, he never had a positive approval rating as president and never won the popular vote in an election.

Putting Trump back in the public eye would probably help Democrats, who have fared well when running against Trump (in 2018 and 2020) and are struggling now, forced to reckon with a bad economy without the bogeyman of Trump. This dynamic feeds an amusing charade among members of both parties. Democrats rail against Trump and express horror at the idea of his return, even as they realize that his reemergence would aid them electorally, at least in the short term. Meanwhile, as Matt Yglesias notes, few prominent Republicans are campaigning for his return to Twitter, even as they claim he’s an electoral asset.

But an alternative exists: Trump could come back and the effect could be negligible. The confluence of factors that made Trump so successful on Twitter in the mid-2010s are not all in place. Though Trump was already a celebrity—arguably a has-been—when he joined Twitter, the platform and his presence there were both somewhat novel. The idea of unfiltered thoughts from a famous person was unusual, and boy were his unfiltered. He was also unique in the Republican Party for the views he held, or sometimes for his willingness to publicly express them.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s 2024 soft launch]

Now neither is true. Twitter has seen decreasing numbers of active users and is particularly concerned about a decrease in use by “heavy tweeters,” according to internal documents obtained by Reuters. A greater portion of tweets involve porn and cryptocurrency, about which the jokes write themselves. Only 13 percent of Americans get their news regularly from Twitter, according to the Pew Research Center, a number that’s falling. On Facebook—another platform central to Trump’s rise, and another where he was banned but might someday be unbanned—the number of people getting news has also dropped, partly thanks to changes made by the company to deemphasize news.

As for the Republican Party, Trump has remade it in his own image, but that means plenty of other candidates have sprung up who have studied his example and are using it to their own advantage, seeking to devise a Trumpism that is more broadly palatable or might work better in 2022. To see how effective this is, look no further than Trump’s vituperation toward Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a star pupil turned rival.

As a result, the magic—whether white or black magic depends on your politics—of Trump’s old Twitter mojo might simply be gone. As one very infrequent Twitter user once remarked, you can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.

More than four months after the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health overturned Roe v. Wade, undoing nearly five decades of federally-guaranteed legal abortion access, Americans across the country are still wrestling with the consequences of the decision.

President Joe Biden stepped up his effort to paint Republicans as a threat to Americans' pocketbooks in a speech from upstate New York on Thursday, a closing argument that focuses less on his own accomplishments and more on what the GOP might do if they take control of Congress.