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Question of the Week

Earlier this week, the NFL player Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped on the field after a violent collision with another player; a mountain climber died after an avalanche on Britain’s highest mountain; and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles launched a new program to treat kids with sports injuries. Although the three events are technically unrelated, they each serve as a timely reminder of the potential hazards of athletic pursuits.

What do you think about the health and safety risks that are inherent (to different degrees) in sports and the ethical questions they raise? Feel free to discuss professional athletes, college athletes, “extreme” athletes in especially risky sports, youth sports, or sports that you’ve played and how you thought about risks and the rewards.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com.

Conversations of Note

The strongest opinion I have about sports and related risks concerns college athletics. Consider a quotation from a website designed for young athletes who are being recruited. It begins with the question, “Can an athletic scholarship be taken away?” Here is part of the answer:

If you are injured, depending on the school you attend and whether it happened outside of games or practice, your scholarship can be pulled.

In my estimation, if an athlete on a college athletic scholarship is injured in a way that renders them physically unable to play their sport, the institution should still cover their tuition.

Back in 2013, Meghan Walsh wrote about this subject in The Atlantic:

Upon joining a Division I team, every participant must have insurance and undergo a medical examination before playing. But when it comes to protecting players, who generate billions of dollars every year, from having to pay unanticipated medical bills or ensuring they receive superior, impartial health care, there are no official NCAA provisions in place. Thus, when a player is injured, nothing prevents the athletic director from refusing to pay related medical bills—which sometimes keep coming for years. Even for those with private insurance, some policies don't cover varsity sports injuries, have high deductibles, or refuse to pay the entire amount due. In such situations, the remaining costs fall to the athlete (many schools, though, do pay those bills).

The NCAA has a catastrophic-injury fund that kicks in when personal deductibles exceed $90,000 … According to Ramogi Huma, the president of the National College Players Association, schools are more likely to help cover costs if the player is high-profile and the injury is severe or public, such as the one Louisville’s Kevin Ware suffered when he broke his leg during a 2013 March Madness game. Or when the running back Marcus Lattimore twisted his knee almost 180 degrees during a televised game last year.

There is also no provision in the Division I Manual to prohibit a coach from revoking a scholarship the year after a recruit gets hurt. For those from poor families and without coverage through a parent, this means that a young man or young woman can be enlisted on the promise of an education, get injured on the field, and lose his or her only source of medical insurance precisely when he or she needs it most. “There is no doubt there are horror stories out there about schools terminating scholarships,” says Warren Zola, the assistant dean for graduate programs in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and a sports-business expert. “It comes down to the ethos of particular schools.”

[Read: Is this the start of an AI takeover?]

On Martian Life

In the course of opining against putting a human on Mars––because robots explore the planet much better than humans can––Maciej Cegłowski argues on his blog, Idle Words, that the most important new information we’ve recently gotten about the possibility of life on Mars was obtained on Earth:

Microbiologists had long suspected that the 12,000 or so known species of microbes were just a fraction of the total, with perhaps another hundred thousand “unculturable” species left to discover. But when new sequencing technology became available at the turn of the century, it showed the number of species might be as high as one trillion. In the genomic gold rush that followed, researchers discovered not just dozens of unsuspected microbial phyla, but two entire new branches of life.

These new techniques confirmed that earth’s crust is inhabited to a depth of kilometers by a ‘deep biosphere’ of slow-living microbes nourished by geochemical processes and radioactive decay. One group of microbes was discovered still living their best lives 100 million years after being sealed in sedimentary rock. Another was found enjoying a rewarding, long-term relationship with fungal partners deep beneath the seafloor. This underground ecology, which we have barely started to explore, might account for a third of the biomass on earth.

At this point, it is hard to not find life on Earth. Microbes have been discovered living in cloud tops, inside nuclear reactor cores, and in aerosols high in the stratosphere. Bacteria not only stay viable for years on the space station hull, but sometimes do better out there than inside the spacecraft. Environments long thought to be sterile, like anoxic brines at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea, are in fact as rich in microbial life as a gas station hot dog. Even microbes trapped for millions of years in salt crystals or Antarctic ice have shown they can wake up and get back to metabolizing without so much as a cup of coffee.

The fact that we failed to notice 99.999% of life on Earth until a few years ago is unsettling and has implications for Mars. The existence of a deep biosphere in particular narrows the habitability gap between our planets to the point where it probably doesn’t exist—there is likely at least one corner of Mars that an Earth organism could call home. It also adds support to the theory that life may have started as an interplanetary infection, a literal Venereal disease that spread across the early solar system by meteorite. If that is the case, and if our distant relatives are still alive in some deep Martian cave, then just about the worst way to go looking for them would be to land in a septic spacecraft.

The New Normal

In a column about changes that have endured even as most people stopped paying attention to COVID-19, The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle argues that pre-pandemic urban life probably isn’t ever coming back:

Weekday foot traffic in downtowns remains about one-third below 2019 levels, and public transit ridership averages about two-thirds of what it was. This suggests a permanent shift in the way cities are organized, with daily economic activity moving toward the peripheries, including exurbs at distances that would be intolerably far from downtown for a daily commute but manageable for going to the office once or twice a week. Cities will need to redesign large swathes of their urban centers around residential and leisure activities rather than 9-to-5 workdays, and adjust their tax codes and spending accordingly.

The Near Future of the Republican Party

The journalist Josh Barro believes that abortion was an issue that hurt Republicans in the recent midterm elections, and that it is likely to hurt their prospects again when the 2024 election cycle comes around.

In his Very Serious newsletter, he writes:

Polls tend to show clear majorities of voters who think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Abortion bans with no exceptions are extremely unpopular, but that doesn’t mean creating exceptions that apply only to a small number of the most alarming situations is sufficient to stem the political damage. One Republican who ran very well in 2022 was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and one political advantage he had is that Florida has (so far) charted a moderate path on abortion compared to many other Republican-controlled states. Abortion in Florida remains legal through 15 weeks of pregnancy … But Florida’s 15-week ban predated the Dobbs decision. The state’s legislature wasn’t in session when Dobbs was handed down, and the Republicans who hold majorities in both houses are under significant pressure to further restrict abortion when they get back to work this month. DeSantis’s political strategy so far has been to fudge the issue — asked last month about a proposal to prohibit abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, he dodged, saying “I’m willing to sign great life legislation. That’s what I’ve always said I would do.”

… Fudging isn’t likely to work forever. Laws that broadly permit first-trimester abortions are politically sustainable because they satisfy public opinion by making abortions generally permitted in the circumstances when most women seek them. But pro-life activists actually want abortion broadly prohibited. We have not yet seen what a Republican presidential primary looks like post-Dobbs. I expect the candidates will be asked over and over what they’ll do on abortion, in much the same way that Democratic presidential candidates are constantly pressed to outbid each other on health care policy. If all DeSantis has to offer is a ban at 15 weeks (or 12 weeks), he’ll be outbid …

The Near Future of the Democratic Party

At its company newsletter, the political-consulting firm ClearPath Strategies looks back on the 2022 midterms and argues that the success Democrats experienced was not sustainable, because it relied too heavily on having an unusually strong field of candidates.

The analysis:

The Democratic Party also holds a negative favorability rating (44%-53%). More than half (51%) of voters think the party is too extreme. And by a 2:1 margin, voters prefer Republicans over Democrats on handling arguably the biggest issue of the election (inflation). So it would appear the Democrats defied history despite the party and President, not because of them.

But how?

Extraordinarily. Strong. Candidates.

Raphael Warnock, Mark Kelly, John Fetterman, Maggie Hassan, Catherine Cortez Masto. As we’ve said, Democrats require great candidates to win elections. Democrats outperformed expectations because their candidates built brands independent of the deeply unpopular Party and President. They did not echo the President’s final plea to voters to defend democracy. Instead, they were laser focused on the issues that mattered in their races, inflation and abortion rights.

Democratic party strategists are patting themselves on the back for defending democracy, but they lost the House and arguably left a few Senate seats on the table. Instead of asking how they prevented a Red Wave, they should ask why they failed to achieve a historic Blue Wave. Dems had extremely high quality candidates. Trump’s insertion into the election provided the gift of hand-picked, cringe-worthy candidates in key races. And in a moment when people still crave stability, Trump’s brand of aggressive chaos served as a reminder of the risks of the modern GOP, over which he still maintains a strong grip.

“Really strong candidates” is not a good strategy. We must ask ourselves: how much stronger of a night would Dems have had if they could leverage a strong party brand or strong party leadership?

They go on to articulate their view of why some successful Democratic Party candidates are ill-suited to be party leaders:

Mark Kelly cannot be both the independent, Arizona-focused advocate and also a leader of the Democratic Party. Raphael Warnock cannot be the Georgia Reverend, fighting for people regardless of party, and also a leader of the Democratic Party. If Democrats continue to require strong, independent candidates to win elections, those same would-be leaders cannot lead the party. To lead is to lose. They must remain independent. Investing in long-term party building is as much about building a strong bench as it is building a strong brand by advancing a strategy to serve people.

Critiques of Independent Sinema

In my most recent Atlantic article, I argued that whatever one thinks of Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s character or positions, there is one reason to celebrate her recent change in party affiliation from Democrat to independent: It makes Congress more representative.

After all, “independent” is––per years of Gallup data––typically the country’s most popular party affiliation, with more Americans identifying that way than as Democrats or Republicans. Recent polls suggest that, if the Senate reflected the American electorate’s party affiliations, the chamber would include 35 to 50 independent members. Yet until Sinema’s announcement, the Senate had just two independents: Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, both of whom caucus with the Democrats. The 117th House of Representatives had no independents, and neither will the 118th when it takes office tomorrow.

… The dearth of independents is contributing to a loss of faith in Congress as a representative democratic institution. An alarming 70 to 80 percent of Americans disapprove of the job the national legislature is doing, Gallup polls in recent months suggest. The branch’s approval rating among Democrats and Republicans has long fluctuated based on which party is in charge, but independents are consistently cool to Congress. This is hardly surprising; one would expect the one-third to one-half of Americans who decline to affiliate with Democrats or Republicans to dislike a system dominated by them.

Numerous readers emailed responses to the article.

Bob is an independent who is frustrated with the status quo:

Thank you for your excellent article about independent voters. Too often, pundits seem to assume we are either uninterested in politics or are partisans in disguise, i.e., “lean Democrat” or “lean Republican.” No doubt that is true for some, perhaps many, people; however, you are “not alone in disliking how Democrats have used their control of the White House and Congress but also wishing I had somewhere to turn other than the Republican Party.” I have been an active independent voter for nearly six decades and have typically leaned away from one party or the other. Right now, I am leaning away from the Republicans.

Stephen suggested an alternative to independents:

I agree with your overall premise (our two party system is bad and broken and leads to people feeling underrepresented) but disagree with your solution (more Independents). Instead, I’d like to see more parties which necessitate the building of coalitions to accomplish things, which I believe will lead to both more nuanced positions and to a greater ability to compromise … Party structures are useful precisely because they “get help with funding, campaign infrastructure, voter outreach, or ballot access,” which is why I’m suggesting that we should have more of them. However, our electoral system is prohibitive of third parties.

John Oliver has a good video on third parties, as does CGP Grey. GGP Grey’s series on different voting systems in particular has influenced my thoughts here). Both of them argue that third parties mostly play Spoiler and, as a result, have a difficult time getting rolling.

Dave argued that Sinema is different from the Senate’s other two independents in an important respect:

Senators Angus King and Bernie Sanders ran as independents; they didn’t switch parties. And while a large swath of the country waited from 2016-2020 for honorable men to appear and become independents while the ex-president wrecked the office of the presidency and America’s good standing, somehow there were no such honorable men. Senator Sinema may be beholden to her constituency first, but she appears to be more beholden to corporate interests and becoming rich via her office. Opportunists should not be put in the same category as senators Sanders and King.

[Read: A chatbot’s predictions for the future of AI]

In contrast, John doesn’t care whether Sinema changed her affiliation opportunistically or not:

I am registered as a Republican, but I was registered as a Democrat last year and an independent before that. I was a Republican until the rise of the Tea Party. That turned me into an independent. Donald Trump turned me into a Democrat. I switched back to Republican because I wanted to vote in the Republican Primary in the closed primary system in Florida. I see myself as an independent, but I intend to switch back and forth between being registered as a Democrat or Republican based on the primary I want to vote it.

I have a lot of policy conversations with my friends—some Republican and some Democrat. When we get beyond the popular narratives, we have a lot of common ground. The roughly third, third, third make up of the country could be about right depending on how you frame the question. If you got deep into detailed policy, it would be quarter, half, quarter. The country is nowhere near as divided as people think. It is the extremists who push that narrative. It is their interest to frame the division as nearly evenly split since that puts them in a more powerful position. The reality is that the extremists are a vocal minority.

I don’t know whether we give Sinema credit for being principled or driven by the politics of a purple state. But we need more people who are willing to buck the party line. Moderate Democrat, moderate Republican, independent, whatever you call it, we need reasonable people who can find middle ground we can all tolerate. We are a diverse country. Nobody is going to get everything they want. The only sustainable solutions are in the middle.

“’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky”

In The Atlantic, Bianca Bosker describes and ponders “supertalls,” skyscrapers that are “often defined as buildings more than 300 meters in height, but better known as the cloud-puncturing sci-fi towers that look like digital renderings, even when you’re staring at them from the sidewalk.”

She writes:

First supertalls were impossible, then a rarity. Now they’re all over the place. In 2019 alone, developers added more supertalls than had existed prior to the year 2000; there are now a couple hundred worldwide … Some supertalls have an even more futuristic designation: superslim. These buildings are alternately described as “needle towers” or “toothpick skyscrapers” … Building engineers, like judgy modeling agents, have varying definitions of superslim, but they usually agree that such buildings must have a height-to-width ratio of at least 10 to 1. To put that in perspective, the Empire State Building (one of the world’s first supertalls, completed in 1931) is about three times taller than it is wide—“pudgy,” as one engineer described it to me. Steinway Tower is 24 times taller than it is wide—nearly as slim as a No. 2 pencil, and the skinniest supertall in the world. These superslim buildings—and supertalls generally—have relied on engineering breakthroughs to combat the perilous physics that go with height…

Like many cutting-edge innovations, supertalls can behave unpredictably. In strong winds, occupants have reported water sloshing in toilet bowls, chandeliers swaying, and panes of glass fluttering. The architect Adrian Smith, who has designed numerous supertalls, contends that you’re in supertall territory not just when you hit 300 meters, but when you build so high that you get into “potentially unknown issues.” And, he acknowledges, there are “still mistakes being made.”

Supertalls aren’t necessarily good neighbors. Their shadows can reach half a mile, and they can magnify the winds at street level, churning the air into high-speed gusts as far as three blocks away. Many New Yorkers consider the city’s proliferating supertalls at best an eyesore—“Awful Waffle” is one nickname for 432 Park Avenue, a luxury condominium that looks like a strip of graph paper stuck on the Manhattan skyline. At worst, they’re considered nonsensical constructions that exacerbate the city’s affordable-housing crisis, contribute to climate change, and stand as totems to inequality … Today many of New York’s supertalls are designed to serve as homes for the superrich—“the modern-day castle, if you will,” says Stephen DeSimone, a structural engineer who’s worked on supertalls in the city. “You’re living amongst the sky, like the rest of the world isn’t good enough.” Supertalls have made even fans of tall buildings wonder whether we’ve built too high, for too few—and finally gone too far. Staring up at them from the dark, blustery sidewalk, it’s hard not to wonder: Is there anything to love?

Provocation of the Week

In the newsletter Hold That Thought, Sarah Haider reads up on the success women are having relative to men in earning bachelor’s degrees, and investigates scholarships to determine if there are disparities in who qualifies. Her thought-provoking conclusions:

As far as I can tell, “Male” is the only noticeably underrepresented demographic in college that is also highly underrepresented in the scholarship world. In fact, it is the only demographic where the majority receives many more exclusive scholarship opportunities than the minority. According to a study by the SAVE Title IX Equity Project analyzing scholarships exclusive to one sex in 115 universities, “among 1,161 sex-specific scholarships, 91.6% were reserved for female students, with only 8.4% designated for male students.”

Not surprising, exactly. Perhaps a bit more surprising: Despite a lot of crowing about how few men go into female dominated fields, as far as I could find, there is little money offered to encourage them. Women who wish to “break barriers” in STEM can look forward to diving into a mountain of money, but men who wish to do the same in a profession like Speech-Language Pathology (90%+ female) can look forward to nothing of the sort.

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

Kevin McCarthy’s humiliation, and that of Donald Trump alongside him, offers a tall draft of schadenfreude. At the end of that, though, the nation is left with an empty glass and a bitter taste.

For many reasons, McCarthy is unfit for the speakership: He undermined the 2020 election, he is dishonest, he is (as we see) unable to marshal his caucus. But his defectors aren’t really interested in a speaker who is able to keep the House organized or functional, and their ability to hold Congress hostage while attempting to achieve it is a flashing red light for the country.

One can draw some very general conclusions about the anti-McCarthy clique: Its members are mostly far to the right, and they are mostly very pro-Trump, notwithstanding their disagreement on this issue with Trump, who supports McCarthy. All but two of them are election deniers, The Washington Post noted.

[David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s loyalty to Trump got him nothing]

But the dispute in place here is not fundamentally ideological, as Jonathan Chait writes, or at least not in traditional terms. This isn’t a simple question of conservative versus moderate. If it were, Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn’t be one of McCarthy’s most fiery defenders in this battle. Rather, the divide is about whether the House should be able to accomplish anything at all, and whether the GOP caucus will be bound by political reality. Greene’s presence on the McCarthy side indicates that she has a more realistic theory of governance and power, which says a lot about her counterparts here.

Today, in nominating McCarthy on the fourth round of balloting, Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin said, “There are things I want that I know are impossible to get done in this Congress,” but argued that McCarthy was best-positioned to achieve what was possible. But the rebels start from a premise that nothing is impossible if they’re simply dedicated enough to the cause. They believe they can wrestle the Senate and the White House into submission through force of will. The changes they seek might effectively prevent the House from doing anything, but they don’t see that as a problem; stasis and refusal are tools of hard-core conservatism in their hands.

McCarthy is not an ideologue. He is, at heart, a transactional politician who thrives on relationships. When the rebels rise in the chamber and aver that their disagreement with McCarthy is not personal, they can be both sincere and at the same time spurning him in sharply personal terms, because that is what he is. He has already tried to win them over by offering concessions on some demands, including the number of representatives needed for a motion to vacate, which could force a vote on ejecting the speaker at any time. (It would also gut ethics investigations.) These concessions would make McCarthy a weak speaker if he were able to win the chair, which it appears he cannot. Watching McCarthy try to bargain with them has been darkly humorous, because dealing is in McCarthy’s blood but they are fundamentally anti-deal, whether with Democrats or with him. That is, in fact, their core precept.

The overwhelming majority of the Republican caucus sided with McCarthy, at least at the start of this process. But this is not to say that the rest of the GOP is innocent of the rebels’ kind of thinking. Since 2011, congressional Republicans as a whole have slumped toward the belief that simply sticking to their guns is enough. Much like Donald Trump, the rebels are both continuous with recent trends in the Republican Party but also a break from them, in terms of their zealotry.

[Read: The humiliation of Kevin McCarthy]

No example is more clear than the debt ceiling, an odd, vestigial limit on the nation’s borrowing power. It doesn’t actually affect spending; Congress decides what to spend and then has to pay for that (or borrow), regardless of where the debt limit is set. Refusing to borrow to pay that debt would simply put the nation in default. But Republicans—including McCarthy—have repeatedly voted against raising the debt ceiling anyway, claiming that that would somehow constrain spending, or tried to use it as a backdoor method to enact massive spending cuts.

The debt ceiling is one reason the outcome of this speaker vote matters: The new Congress will have to raise the debt limit or else produce a default sometime in the next few months. McCarthy has been unable to satisfy either the rebels, who want no surrender, or his moderates, who want no part of an economic catastrophe. “Is he willing to shut the government down rather than raise the debt ceiling?” Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, one rebel, said today. “That’s a nonnegotiable item.”

But whatever McCarthy’s particular weaknesses, any speaker will face the same quandary. That might be true even of legislators with better conservative bona fides, such as current House Majority Whip Steve Scalise; at least one McCarthy dissident said he wouldn’t vote for anyone who’d been in leadership for the past decade. Whether McCarthy or someone else, the next speaker will not only need 218 votes; he or she will also need a miracle.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) speaks on the House floor ahead of the latest vote for House speaker, chastising former President Donald Trump for supporting Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for the speakership. CNN political commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin discusses.

CNN's Kaitlan Collins talks to Republican Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) about former President Donald Trump telling House Republicans to vote for Kevin McCarthy to be Speaker of the House in a social media post.

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Over the holiday weekend, the Russians fired a wave of missiles at Ukraine—all of which Ukraine claims to have stopped in the first complete defeat of such an attack in this war. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian strike killed scores of Russians at a makeshift military headquarters. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Kevin McCarthy’s loyalty to Trump got him nothing. The Republican majority’s opening debacle You’ll miss gerontocracy when it’s gone. New Year, New Depths

The Russians, according to the Ukrainian government, fired more than 80 weapons (mostly, it seems, Iranian-made drones) at Ukraine since the start of the new year, and the Ukrainians claim they intercepted every one of them. But the attack is more evidence that Russia’s war on Ukraine is, at this point, an attempt to murder civilians and torment the survivors enough to press their government to capitulate. The Russians, of course, have misjudged their enemy: The Ukrainians have no intention of surrendering and are fighting back with great effectiveness. The Russian high command learned this yet again over the holiday weekend, when the Ukrainians scored a direct hit on a makeshift Russian barracks, killing at least 89 soldiers.

I write “at least” 89 because that is the number the Russians admit were killed, and therefore it is almost certainly a lie meant to hide larger casualties. Igor Girkin, once a separatist commander in eastern Ukraine, has become a constant critic of Vladmir Putin’s war effort; he claims that the soldiers were bunked in the same building as ammunition, and that the ensuing conflagration killed and wounded “hundreds,” which is likely closer to the truth. Dara Massicot, an analyst at the RAND corporation (and, I’m pleased to note, one of my students when I taught at the Naval War College), told me today that given the “nature of the destruction at that facility, the official Russian numbers are likely significantly undercounting casualties,” and that reports from Russian social-media channels (often more reliable than official communications) suggest that 200 to 300 men could have been lost.

The successful Ukrainian defense and the Russian losses are good news for Ukraine. Every bit of optimism, however, must be tempered by two realities. First, Ukraine remains outnumbered and potentially outgunned by a much larger Russian Federation. The Ukrainians have survived this far through a combination of excellent strategy, the resilience of its people and their leaders, an infusion of highly lethal Western weapons, the courage of the men and women on the front lines, and a mind-boggling amount of Russian incompetence and stupidity.

The second reality, however, is that the Russians don’t really care about losses. They are willing to sacrifice their own men by the truckload. We are all rightly appalled by the damage the Kremlin is willing to inflict on Ukraine and its people in its unprovoked aggression, but Putin’s cruelty extends to his fellow citizens: He is sending untrained, under-provisioned, and poorly armed men to their death literally to try to plug the holes in his lines with human meat—which is what one of their own commanders has reportedly called them. The Russian president hates Ukrainians, but he and his senior officers seem to hate their own men nearly as much.

Meanwhile, on New Year’s Eve—with so many Russian soldiers only hours from being killed in their bunks—Putin’s minions hosted a televised party that defies description. Performers put on cheesy song-and-dance numbers seemingly lifted from 1970s Soviet pop culture while Russian officers (whose gaudy dress uniforms looked like they were stolen from the palace guards of a James Bond villain) looked on with forced smiles. Parts of the telecast looked as if they had been shot elsewhere and then chroma-keyed into the production, adding a shiny gloss of unreality to the whole mess. One of the hosts, decked out in a red velvet tux, even chortled a cartoonishly evil threat into the camera: “Like it or not, Russia is enlarging!”

That’s a pretty daring claim to make while Russian forces are on the defensive and men are being buried in the rubble of their base. The whole event, like so much of what’s broadcast on Russian television now, seemed like a mash-up of a Soviet variety show, the dystopian news and TV ads from Robocop, and the galas for the rich elites from The Hunger Games, with hosts as creepy as, if less polished than, Caesar Flickerman and Effie Trinket.

This tacky, over-the-top Russian decadence is all the more striking when we think back to Putin’s ostensible reasons for launching this war. He and his lieutenants promised to save the Ukrainians from Nazis, and then from the immoral West and its rich overlords and sexual deviants. He would gather his fellow Slavs under the protective wings of the Russian eagle. Instead, Putin and his Kremlin toadies are blowing those same Slavs to pieces while they themselves swan around wearing fantastically expensive designer clothes and jewelry, dancing and laughing it up while they send Russian boys to their doom.

I still do not know how this all ends. Putin’s barbarism means that it is impossible, even once the war is over, for Russia to reenter the ranks of the civilized world. As I said recently in a discussion with Ian Bremmer and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Russia is now a nuclear-armed rogue state with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. I disagreed with President Joe Biden’s gaffe back in March about how Putin “cannot remain in power,” but I understood the frustration that led to Biden’s outburst. Even if Putin is somehow removed, however, why would anyone give a new Russian regime the benefit of the doubt, at least without war-crimes trials of the “leaders” who launched this blood-soaked misadventure?

Ukraine will survive, recover, and be rebuilt with aid from around the world. But Russia, willing to watch its own men burn in their bunkers for the sake of a dictator’s ego, will have a long way to go before it can again lay claim to being part of a community of nations.

Related:

Ukraine unplugged Sudden Russian death syndrome Today’s News Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new minister of national security, visited a Jerusalem holy site despite condemnation from Arab leadership and threats by Hamas. The former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud and other crimes. Bloggers and other prominent Russian critics criticized Russia’s military operations following Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day strike on Russian forces. Dispatches Up For Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ predictions for the future of artificial intelligence. Humans Being: Movies need more than reviews, argues Jordan Calhoun in the final edition of his newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read (Gregory Halpern / Magnun)

The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe

By Dacher Keltner

What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered.

But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.

Read the full article.

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Read. How to Do Nothing, by the artist Jenny Odell—or choose another of these eight self-help books that are actually helpful.

Listen. Dive into a Broadway cast recording of Company or check out any one of the late composer Stephen Sondheim’s Gen Z–approved musicals about outsiders.

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P.S.

That bizarre Russian New Year’s Eve party reminded me of the weird alternative universe created in the first Robocop movie. Released in 1987, Robocop envisioned an early 21st-century world (specifically, Detroit) overtaken by urban rot and excessive consumerism. Some of the movie’s predictions, which famously included Detroit declaring bankruptcy, seemed silly in the 1980s but turned out to be a little too on the nose: Detroit went broke in 2013. The movie also foresaw the shimmery shallowness of cable news, which was still a novelty at that time. Peter Weller was terrific in the title role (and I still say this movie should have made him first choice for the role of Batman, which went to Michael Keaton in 1989).

But the fictional ads scattered throughout the film really shine. The “Family Heart Center” invitation to come and check out the new line of artificial hearts is prescient, even if it seems less funny now that we are deluged with pharmaceutical ads (which I think should be outlawed); the ad for the new “6000 SUX” sedan was a stinging tribute to gigantic and inefficient American cars, but it seems quaint in an era when Americans have skipped right over big cars and now prize huge trucks as some sort of personal statement. I am also rather nostalgic for Nukem!, the family game of nuclear-arms racing that ends with the sore loser blowing everyone else up. Very violent, Robocop is not a movie for everyone, but if you can take the bloodshed, there’s a clever critique of late-20th-century America embedded in a darn good science-fiction romp.

— Tom

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

High-level politics is fundamentally about dealmaking. You can’t succeed as anything more than a back-bencher if you aren’t willing to make a deal with almost anyone on almost anything. In Faust, a deal with the devil is fatal; on Capitol Hill, it’s how you survive.

But those “almosts” are essential, a lesson Kevin McCarthy is demonstrating this week. More politically disastrous than a deal with the devil, the Californian made a deal with Donald Trump, and now he’s learning how little it was worth. McCarthy decided early on to stay as close to the former president as possible, but even Trump’s steadfast public support couldn’t prevent embarrassment in today’s vote for speaker of the House. Nearly everyone who has pinned their political hopes on Trump has, for one reason or another, had it backfire on them. McCarthy’s case is just a vivid example.

After three ballots, McCarthy has failed to win enough votes to become speaker of the House, a lifelong ambition. It’s the first time since 1923 that the House has taken multiple rounds to choose its leader, but a small faction of hard-line Republicans has refused to back McCarthy, depriving him of the majority he needs. Early this evening, the House adjourned until noon tomorrow, with the outcome still up in the air. The most likely ends are either that McCarthy withdraws or that he makes concessions to conservatives that will secure their votes but render his control of the caucus and House weak and probably short-lived.

McCarthy is not known for having any particularly strong political ideology beyond a general conservatism, but his affability and energy helped him rise in the Republican conference. In fall 2015, when Speaker John Boehner resigned, McCarthy was majority leader and seemed set to succeed him but abruptly withdrew from the race when it became clear that he didn’t have enough support. Instead, Paul Ryan became speaker.

[Read: The tragedy of the Congress]

In May 2016, as Trump gradually mowed down presidential-primary rivals, any Republican officeholder could find two main reasons for backing Trump. The first was political: Whatever else was going on, he was the presumptive Republican nominee, and no one was going to win conservative policy goals with a Democratic president. The second was, if less admirable, more straightforward: Hitching one’s wagon to Trump might help advance one’s personal fortunes. McCarthy decided to back Trump. He wasn’t among the very first prominent Republicans to do so, but he was early in the wave, and before Ryan.

And McCarthy stuck with it. When The Washington Post in October 2016 published a tape of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women, many Republicans (including Ryan) flinched, but not McCarthy. Once Trump won his surprise victory, McCarthy’s loyalty seemed to pay off. Conservative policy victories in Congress were few and far between—to Ryan’s frustration—but McCarthy reaped the personal gains. The president referred to him as “my Kevin,” and even if detractors saw this as a sign of sycophancy, McCarthy was happy to enjoy the status that proximity to Trump gave him.

[David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s artless lie]

McCarthy broke from Trump only once, briefly, after the January 6 insurrection, when he privately called Trump’s behavior unacceptable and told members he’d ask the president to resign. (He had reason to be angry at Trump, who had flippantly dismissed his pleas for help that day, saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”) But he quickly moved to mend the breach, flying to Mar-a-Lago in late January 2021 to prostrate himself. He also tried to deny his private remarks until reporters produced tapes.

Over the next two years, he remained close to Trump, and courted the most hard-core Trump supporters. Faced with the challenge of how to handle Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new representative with a slate of appalling statements and passionate conservative support, McCarthy chose to only lightly castigate and then align with Greene. Those moves were cowardly and often self-debasing, but they were effective. Greene became a key ally, and Trump, though famous for rewarding loyalty with betrayal, remained supportive. Ahead of the 2022 midterms, McCarthy looked like a lock to finally take the gavel and lead an expected large new GOP majority.

[David A. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a symptom of what ails the GOP]

Yet McCarthy’s speaker bid turned into a mess, because Trump’s magic turned out not to be the help he thought it would be. First, the forces that Trump marshaled were not really his own but borrowed; his genius was harnessing a sentiment already in the GOP that others were not willing to embrace, which meant he had limited power to command MAGA representatives who opposed McCarthy. Second, backlash against Trumpism helped make the new GOP majority thin and precarious, rather than producing a robust one where McCarthy might have won the speakership easily, despite defections on the far right. Third, Trump is weaker than he once was, in part because of the underwhelming midterm results and in part because of his legal travails.

McCarthy’s struggles today are yet another example of how casting in with Trump tends to leave candidates casting around for a lifeline. Trump can certainly break his enemies: If McCarthy had opposed Trump, it must be said, he would never have been in position to lose the speaker vote. But Trump’s ability to make his allies is limited, and not merely because he’s only ever really looking out for himself. Republicans who have flocked to Trump for aggrandizement have repeatedly suffered for it, whether Jeff Sessions (unceremoniously fired) or Mike Pence (hunted by a mob). Some, like McCarthy’s former lieutenant Liz Cheney, have thought better of their alliance and been punished for that too. The fate of others, such as the 2024 hopefuls Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, is yet to be written, but McCarthy stands as a warning.