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.

Question of the Week

What are your best tips––at this time of rapidly rising prices––for cutting costs in ways that meet your needs while depriving you of as little pleasure or convenience or comfort as possible? OR, looking back on your life, what do you consider to be your most wasteful spending?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

Summertime editions of this newsletter fretted repeatedly about the coming winter as ongoing effects of the pandemic and geopolitical turmoil (especially the war in Ukraine) triggered global inflation. Now Thanksgiving is almost here––Americans should expect a 28 percent increase in turkey prices––and around the world, all those early predictions of a tough winter are becoming reality.

In Britain, where there is still a cultural memory of World War II rationing and postwar stretches of economic hardship, food and cooking “have long been associated with upward mobility and aspiration,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert observes. That may explain the apparent sadness of the chef Jamie Oliver as he makes a new television show, Jamie’s £1 Wonders, about how to cook on a budget as energy and food costs soar across Europe and beyond.

In her estimation, the show succeeds by eschewing the expectation that celebrity chefs will indulge our culinary lifestyle fantasies and instead attempting to give the audience something more practical, like a recipe for a sweet-potato curry with chickpeas and frozen spinach that can be cooked entirely in the microwave, “which he says costs just six pence to run for 20 minutes.”

She writes:

If you consider food to be a bellwether for the state of the nation, Jamie’s £1 Wonders has an awful openness to it. This is where we are now: too poor to run our electric ovens, swapping pricey Parmesan for cheaper cheddar, reduced to trying to find joy in a three-pack of peppers and a microwaved tablespoon of jam. “This isn’t cooking as usual for me,” Oliver says at one point, brow furrowed. “But I do like the challenge.” The overarching message is that we can too, if we try—that this period of food-bank exhaustion and spiraling grocery prices can be but a temporary puzzle on the road to future plenitude. More than his relentless optimism, I appreciated his honesty and his effort. We expect celebrity chefs to be aspirational, to constantly prod us to try newer, shinier, more elaborate, more enticing things. It’s much less common for them to acknowledge the kind of ongoing, acute hardship Oliver is addressing—and to still insist that people can find some comfort in cooking through it.

[Read: What the midterm results really mean to voters]

Drought Exacerbates the Food Crisis

The burden of rising prices is, of course, higher in poorer countries. In Somalia, for example, millions of people lack sufficient food. Rania Dagash-Kamara, a UNICEF staffer, argued in a harrowing segment with NPR’s Ari Shapiro that climate change is a factor in the East African nation’s current food crisis.

SHAPIRO: When you visit Somalia, what does this crisis look like?

DAGASH-KAMARA: It looks different to most crises that I’ve seen in the last 22 years in the region. It is the frontlines of climate change. It is five failed rain seasons, which we’ve never seen in this part of the world - and a potential sixth one, actually, likely to fail. So people have lost millions of livestock. They’ve lost all their crop. They have lost all their assets, basically. And they’re on the move looking for assistance to survive.

And if I could zoom out a little bit, Ari, in the Horn of Africa, in total, the numbers have been escalating. We’re at close to 15 million children affected at this point, and that’s over 30 million people.

SHAPIRO: Are there people you’ve met in your visits to Somalia who you can tell us about, people you remember who put some individuality on this massive tragedy?

DAGASH-KAMARA: There is a mother that I met who was pregnant, and she also had 1-year-old twin boys, one sitting on her lap, one trying to breastfeed. They had walked 120 kilometers to get to our assistance. And they did. They were lucky. The child on her breast was crying because there was nothing coming out of her breast. And he was trying so desperately. The other one was totally lethargic and unable to move. His stare was blank. And that was one of the saddest things. She herself was malnourished, and her children were malnourished. And she was pregnant.

And many mothers we spoke to had the same story.

Problems Beget Problems

Elsewhere at NPR, Seyma Bayram reports on a study which found that food insecurity across Africa may lead to higher rates of AIDS on the continent:

Women and girls experiencing food insecurity were 28% more likely to engage in transactional sex, defined as sex in exchange for material goods, including food. They are also more likely to engage in high-risk or unprotected sex, sex before the age of 15, forced sex, or sex with a man who is 10 or more years older, the study found. This increases their risk of contracting HIV … The researchers found that providing direct food support to women significantly lowered the risk of contracting HIV.

The Twisted Logic of Trenches in Chernobyl

In Aeon, Michael Marder argues that an early chapter in the Russian invasion of Ukraine is striking in its absurdity and illustrative of the modes of thinking that continue to shape that conflict.

He writes:

The date was 24 February 2022. Under leaden-grey wintery sky, a column of tanks and armoured vehicles carrying 1,000 Russian servicemen crossed the Belorussian-Ukrainian border and rapidly moved further south, toward the town of Prip’yat and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Kicking up radioactive dust, heavy military equipment and its crew rolled along the most contaminated area, that of the Red Forest. No precautions were taken to keep the soldiers safe: they wore no protective gear, which would have prevented them from being exposed to radioactive particles, the timeless remainder of the 1986 nuclear accident that destroyed the plant’s reactor Number 4 and released tons of contaminated debris into the atmosphere.

On day one of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chernobyl was among the very first territories ‘taken’ in the still-ongoing war. As if a nuclear disaster site can be seized – as if it does not seize whomever and whatever is in its vicinity in advance, dictating its own rules of a deadly game. The occupying powers will discover the limits of mastery and of habitability the hard way, once they start experiencing the unmistakable symptoms of radiation sickness. But, for now, they are exhilarated with an easy victory, having negotiated the surrender of dozens of Ukrainian national guards and of the workers who maintain the nuclear power plant. And, just as they are settling into the place, or non-place, that will be unfit for human habitation for at least another 20,000 years, Russian soldiers are busy with an absurd task: digging trenches in Chernobyl.

Why trenches in Chernobyl?

Within the twisted logic of Vladimir Putin’s war, the strategic rationale was evident. The exclusion zone, in particular the territories adjacent to the exploded reactor, were to become the staging grounds for attacks that would be invulnerable to Ukrainian counterattacks: who, after all, would return artillery or any other sorts of fire emanating from there?

Crypto’s Trust Problem

Reflecting on the collapse of FTX, a major cryptocurrency exchange, Megan McArdle argues in The Washington Post that bitcoin, ethereum, and their lesser-known cousins need to be better trusted in order to succeed. But their fans are averse to much of what built confidence in traditional financial systems.

She writes:   

It’s not crazy to believe that crypto can change the world. I myself can’t exactly see what it’s good for, but the same question could have been asked about the joint stock company in the 1720s, when England was trying to recollect itself after the South Sea Bubble. It seems at least plausible that crypto, as with the corporation, will eventually evolve into a key part of the financial system. But as with public companies, a crucial part of that evolution will be making the product trustworthy. It took a lot of work to make the stock market boring enough to attract the wealth of more than half of all American households, a lot of institution-building to control fraud and limit the fallout from speculation. If crypto wants to become a world-changing financial technology, it will need to take the same journey.

The problem is, crypto tends to attract people who don’t want to trust the system — any system. That is the core idea behind bitcoin, the ur-cryptocurrency: no intermediaries who might be crooked, no government regulators, just a decentralized database and the remorseless, incorruptible logic of an algorithm.

This all sounds very exciting when crypto nerds talk about it. Decentralized finance! Permissionless innovation! But at present, too much of this freedom is being used to reinvent financial architectures that were de-permissioned for good reason — including the self-dealing clearinghouse, the undercapitalized market-maker and the Ponzi scheme.

The NBA’s New PR Problem

At the consistently interesting House of Strauss, the sports journalist Ethan Strauss opines on Kyrie Irving, the Brooklyn Nets player who was suspended after posting a link to a film that promotes anti-Semitic disinformation, arguing that the NBA erred in encouraging its players to air their political views:

He’s the end product of another failed corporate project: The NBA’s effort to promote the socially conscious sportsman, to fill the vacuum left by accelerated player movement.

It’s fine to be a socially conscious sportsman, within reason. The league just ran into some trouble when it became part of the #brand. Once the NBA was encouraging its protagonists to “speak out” and sell morality, it established an impossible standard that it would subsequently be judged against. The check was written, it couldn’t be cashed, and now the debts are accumulating.

If you buy into the idea that what athletes say is very important, as the NBA has, you can find yourself obsessively managing what they have to say, or, in this instance, what they happen to believe.

And what do NBA players happen to believe on the Jewish topic? How many players share Irving’s general outlook? … I couldn’t tell you, but it’s a nontrivial amount, even if LeBron James is trying to create some distance between Irving and the others. Hell, LeBron himself was rapping about “getting that Jewish money” on IG back in 2018. The day after, guys in the Warriors’ locker room were mostly aghast that anyone would take issue with LeBron doing this. I’ve been in locker rooms when The Jews were brought up. I’ve heard wacked-out conspiracies, admiration, scorn, oddly earnest questions about how “you people” are so good at making money. Was I offended? Not really. I think I preferred it to the standard White/Black humor that comes with a lot of awkward player-to-reporter jabs. Any banter that disrupted the routine was welcome in a world I was only visiting. But I mention it to point out the following: Kyrie Irving’s views on The Jews would not qualify him as some outlandish NBA outlier. He’s nuts, but his brand of nuts is fairly normal fare, even from a variety of athletes you probably like and root for.

The Jews are just one no-go zone for an NBA that actively encouraged its players to express themselves on social issues. Does the NBA want the unfiltered takes on women out there? What about gays? The NBA made a big show of moving its All-Star Game from North Carolina over the “trans bathroom bill.” Anyone in the league office want the uncensored modal NBA take on trans out there? This all prompts a question of the NBA: If these guys have takes that terrify you, then why did you encourage them to shout their opinions from rooftops? Yes, we can all understand abiding the opinions expressed by players. Again, I favor expansive free speech and dislike when corporations aggressively punish it. But why did you merge your organization with their messaging in an attempt to morally instruct the country?

… Kyrie is his own special case, but he’s also what happens in a league that refuses to establish boundaries. If expressing yourself is part of the product, then the product is under threat when self-expression goes bad.

[Read: Is Florida still a swing state?]

Provocation of the Week

In Brink Lindsey’s incisive newsletter, The Permanent Problem, he argues that, due to a global revolution 50 years ago, “the world today may very well be much poorer than it otherwise could have been—and the existence and extent of that massive loss are all but invisible.”

He explains:

The revolution I’m talking about is most closely associated with environmentalism, but I think it’s critically important not to conflate the two. I regard good stewardship of the natural world to be a bedrock component of “living wisely and agreeably and well,” and humanity’s record on that score during industrialization was abysmal. Accordingly, the emergence of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and ’70s—the growing recognition of the grievous harms inflicted by industry on both the natural world and human health, and the firming resolve to do something about it—must be judged as a large and necessary step forward in human progress.

No, the revolution I’m talking about can be described as the anti-Promethean backlash—the broad-based cultural turn away from those forms of technological progress that extend and amplify human mastery over the physical world. The quest to build bigger, go farther and faster and higher, and harness ever greater sources of power was, if not abandoned, then greatly deprioritized in the United States and other rich democracies starting in the 1960s and ’70s. We made it to the moon, and then stopped going. We pioneered commercial supersonic air travel, and then discontinued it. We developed nuclear power, and then stopped building new plants. There is really no precedent for this kind of abdication of powers in Western modernity; one historical parallel that comes to mind is the Ming dynasty’s abandonment of its expeditionary treasure fleet after the voyages of Zheng He.

It was primarily through environmentalism that the anti-Promethean backlash manifested itself and exerted influence over events, yet there is no fundamental, necessary connection between concern for the health and beauty of the natural world and antipathy toward—in Francis Bacon’s formulation, the use of science and technology “for the relief of man’s estate.” Indeed, as is now becoming clear in the context of climate change, it is only through the continued development of our technological powers that we can hope to arrest and reverse the immense damage we have caused.

Yet if the connection between environmentalism and the anti-Promethean backlash was theoretically contingent, in historical context it was eminently understandable that these two separate streams of thought met and merged. To see why, we need to understand why it was that the environmental movement emerged when it did. Industry had been loud and dirty from the beginning, and thus from early days had inspired romantic revulsion at its “dark satanic mills.” Why did it take until the 1960s for a mass environmental movement to emerge?

I believe that we can attribute the timing to the maturation of two deep social trends triggered by the spread of material plenty, and to the specific historical context in which those trends were building momentum. The first trend was the “postmaterialist, postmodern” cultural shift documented by Ronald Inglehart: as economic security spread throughout the populace, priorities shifted from physical security and material accumulation to self-expression and quality of life. With the confidence that hearth and home were safe and sound, people naturally turned their gaze to their broader surroundings and began to care more about the beauty and healthiness of those surroundings … The second trend, described in my last essay, was the growing power of loss aversion in step with the widening and deepening of affluence. As people acquired more, they had more to lose, and accordingly began worrying more about holding on to what they had. Greater attention to preserving our natural patrimony was one result; so was greater concern with environmental contaminants and their threats to human health …

The rapid growth of the environmental movement in the 1960s can thus be understood as a consequence of the ripening of these two trends, a kind of Baptists-and-bootleggers alliance of cultural attitudes: on the one hand, the high-minded broadening of moral horizons and greater empathy for the non-human “other”; on the other, the self-regarding “I’ve got mine, Jack” stance that regards change as not worth the bother if it carries any possibility of loss.

There is much more to his argument––and supporting charts––at the link.

That’s all for this week––see you on Monday.

Many songs about cowboys double as warnings to the women left behind. Their lyrics speak to mothers and wives of “broken bones” and broken homes. They apologize, but refuse to yield. The songs summon the dusty mythology of the American West—supposedly empty expanses, giddy possibilities, manhood tested and proved—while admitting its cost: For the cowboy to have his freedoms, countless others will sacrifice theirs.

Yellowstone, Taylor Sheridan’s TV juggernaut, is a new version of those old anthems. It is a show about a ranch that sprawls across southern Montana—the Yellowstone, owned for generations by the Dutton family—and the lengths the family will go to in their fight to keep the land for themselves. Yellowstone is also, as its central female character proves, a show about men: cowboys both literal and aspirational. Beth is the only daughter of the land baron John Dutton (Kevin Costner), and she is one of the three surviving children struggling with the inheritance John will—or will not—leave them. Played by the English actor Kelly Reilly, Beth is that too-rare figure in the world of prestige TV: an antihero who is also a woman. She is an agent of chaos. She is mercurial. She is cunning. She is funny. She is wise. She is cruel. Her father loves her dearly; he remarks, offhandedly, that she is “evil.”

[Read: How Taylor Sheridan created America’s most popular TV show]

Beth takes the stereotype of the femme fatale and knocks it askew: Although the term suggests a woman who will kill, Beth is a woman who will hold the knife to your neck and, rather than making the slice, delight in reminding you how easily she could. She is not simply a woman in a man’s world, although that is certainly the fact of her situation; she is also a woman who acts like a man in a man’s world. Almost every trait of Beth’s—her swagger, her savagery, her insecurity—stems from that dissonance. One mark of a compelling story is that its tropes are beginnings rather than endings. Yellowstone bears that brand. Much of the discussion surrounding it concerns its reputed status as a “red-state show.” But Yellowstone refuses, at every turn, to reduce itself to an easy cultural artifact. Its joys lie in its contradictions. The same is true of Beth, who is at once Yellowstone’s best character and its worst person. “Love you,” she tells her father, kissing his head lightly as she prepares to leave for work one morning. “Off to ruin a life.”

Beth will justify the day’s brutal business the same way she justifies almost everything she does: It is all, she will say, for family. Family, for the Duttons, is a form of manifest destiny; it is a moral code that often works to justify immorality. The Duttons murder and maim and torture. They ignore the rules, and make them. (In the fifth season of the show, which premiered this week on Paramount Network, John becomes, quite literally, a lawmaker.) In war, the standards are different. So the Duttons summon its language—“enemies,” “battles,” “our side”—as convenient incantations. Winning, whatever the cost, is necessary if John is to keep the promise he made to his father—the one his father made before that, and so on for generations: Keep the land. Never sell. Never cede an inch. One of Yellowstone’s many ironies is that it is, at its core, a show about real estate.

Beth, being a woman, is excluded from the Duttons’ physical fights. She wages hers, instead, through acts of psychological warfare. The first time we meet her, she is in a sleek boardroom, orchestrating a hostile takeover of an oil company. Its founder begs her for mercy: He started the whole thing in his garage, he says, and has given his life to it. She refuses. “Bitch,” he mutters.

Epithets, for Beth, are badges of honor: They mean that she has won whatever battle she has chosen to wage that day. She has conquered more territory, planted more flags. Many of Yellowstone’s tensions stem from characters being caught between different worlds. Monica, Beth’s sister-in-law, is by blood and upbringing a member of the Confederated Tribes of Broken Rock; her ancestors lived on the land that is now the Yellowstone. She is also, by her marriage to Kayce, a Dutton. Kayce is a military officer by training (he fought in Afghanistan) and a cowboy by nature; Jamie, his brother, is a wrangler with a law degree; John is a land baron and therefore a reluctant politician. All of them struggle with belonging—all of them, that is, except Beth. She isn’t anxious about where she stands in a world defined by fences. She makes every place her own. “You are the trailer park,” she tells a rival. “I am the tornado.”

[Read: John Muir on the Yellowstone National Park, 1898]

Beth drives a Mercedes and bulk-orders from Gucci and is an expert in mergers and acquisitions. But she is also at home on the land. In Yellowstone’s world, oneness with nature is a measure of not moral goodness, but a more pragmatic brand of merit. (Rip, the ranch’s fixer, is an unrepentant murderer and a grizzled avatar of what some call “natural law.”) Beth embodies that. She wears nature, often, quite literally—one of her go-to accessories is fur. When she has something to prove, which is most of the time, she dons animal prints. Whatever the context, whatever the time of day, Beth’s pale-blue eyes will likely be ringed with thick circles of kohl.

These are not merely aesthetic choices—they are indications of character. Beth is feral, but more specifically, she is feline: She plans and waits and stalks. Many cats of prey have eyes that are similarly circled—an adaptation, honed over wild millennia, that helps sharpen their vision for the hunt. And Beth is, perhaps above all, a hunter—of men and money and vengeance. Rip, at one point, invites her to a music festival. She refuses, telling him to pick something better suited to her personality. When he proposes that they get drunk and watch wolves eat a carcass, her eyes light up: She is not used to being so thoroughly understood. Beth believes in Darwinism in its various forms: its sense of genetic determinism; its assertion that might makes right; its stark understanding that death, fundamentally, makes life what it is. “Killing’s the one thing that everything on this planet does to survive, Tate,” John tells his young grandson after he teaches the boy how to kill a buck. “It’s the one thing we all share.”

Beth is the exception who proves the rule. She does not hunt with the men; that is not a woman’s place in this world. But her bloodlust is as strong as theirs; she has merely found other outlets for it, and other victims. Again and again, characters who do not share Beth’s most defining conviction—that there are insiders and outsiders, and that everything flows from this distinction—meet downfalls of epic proportions. “I believe in loving with your whole soul and destroying anything that wants to kill what you love,” she tells Rip. “That’s it. That’s all there is.”

Were Yellowstone a simpler show, it might stop there: Beth the romantic, Beth the chaotic, Beth the Manichaean. But her approach to the world, like everything else on the Dutton ranch, has outside competition. “Family” is not a straightforward matter, and every character has a wildly different idea of what belonging really entails—even as they summon it as a rationalization for their excesses. One of John’s opponents is Thomas Rainwater, the leader of the Confederated Tribes of Broken Rock and a foe as savvy and ruthless as the Duttons; for Thomas, “family” is the confederation, and the broader group of Americans who have borne the brunt of institutional injustice. The dissonance between their definitions—family as expansive and communal; family as stiflingly small—feeds some of Yellowstone’s most resonant interests: What is family, really? Is it a genetic fact or an ongoing act—of love, of labor, of endurance? How far do its protections extend? What do its exclusions mean for those on the wrong side of the fence?

For a show with a fairly narrow universe of main characters, Yellowstone features a remarkable number of adoption stories. Several main characters either adopt children or discover that they themselves were adopted. Beth, who cannot have children physically, takes in a young teenager whose parents have died. Later, when he calls her “mama,” she chides him: “I’m not your mother,” she growls, and she means it. Beth may be a woman who parents a kid, but she is stridently anti-maternal. Early in Yellowstone, Beth ends up an extremely reluctant babysitter for Tate, the nephew she barely knows. He’s hungry and asks her what she can cook. “A cheese plate,” she replies.

[Read: The horrors of wealth on ]Succession

The traumatized, without intervention, can become trapped in the moment of their injury. They can age without maturing. Beth’s mother died in front of her when Beth was a teenager—and maybe, Beth thinks, because of her. Beth is, in that way, the inverse of a superhero: The pain of the lost parent, rather than honing her sense of justice, obliterates it. In the show’s telling, her mother’s sudden death—an accident, split-second and endless—is the moment that Beth the person ended and Beth the monster began. Her grief traps her in a state of perpetual youth, making her both theatrically womanly and temperamentally adolescent, moody and melodramatic. She is in her 30s and calls her father “Daddy.” She does so unironically.

Beth is not merely tender toward her father; she treats him with the kind of fervent devotion that usually flows from parent to child. Beth is so completely maternal toward John that she oversees his diet (the fruit in the salad she serves him is good for prostate health, she explains to a full dinner table). She monitors his sex life. She is recklessly committed to preserving the ranch not for the land’s sake or for her own—she can’t wait for the day she’s rid of it, she says—but for John’s. In Beth, the typical timeline is reversed: The child holds the life of the parent in her hands.

The disorder is apt. The Dutton ranch is a place where people are branded along with the cattle, where grizzlies are roped like steer, where the physics that constrain the rest of the world no longer apply. The ranch’s spindly fences are misleading: The Yellowstone, for Beth as for so many others, is a paradise with no escape. Beth, though she has lived in the world beyond Montana—and though she is a skilled performer of disaffected urbanity—never really left home. She never got to figure out who she might be beyond, as so many characters call her, “the farmer’s daughter.” Instead, the ranch’s chronic chaos has resolved itself in her. In Beth, qualities that are stereotypically feminine—her sensitivity, her selflessness—curdle. Her intuition is her weapon; her devotion to her family is her absolution, she assumes, for all she destroys in the war.

In Beth, too, the rugged individualism so deeply associated with the American West transforms into something else: rugged exceptionalism. Her family values are her only values. And they tell her that other families must lose so that hers can win. Were the Duttons straightforward protagonists, it would be easy to read the show as endorsing the anti-communal and winner-take-all attitudes that have become so common in American politics. But the Duttons are not the only characters on Yellowstone, and their assumptions are not its only values. “I’m like, ‘Really?’” Sheridan told Sridhar Pappu, of the chatter surrounding the series. “The show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West, and land-grabbing. That’s a red-state show?” Ultimately, Yellowstone’s scripted melodramas resolve not with exclamations, but with question marks and ellipses. The Duttons have their codes, but it does not follow that the codes are correct. The cowboys are not always the heroes.

Beth embodies that tension. In the world beyond the ranch, she is a terrible person. Within the Dutton family, though, she is the most moral person of all. She chides her siblings for being insufficiently loyal—to their father, to his father, to the land. Their devotion to the cause is conditional; hers is total. Her inheritance is sacrifice. One battle Beth fights for the family creates a deep gash on her cheek, just under her eye. The wound heals; the scar remains. From a distance, it looks like a tear.