The campaign by American photographer Nan Goldin to shame galleries and museums into cutting ties with the Sackler families, the owners of OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma, was always under a lens — that was part of its point. Beginning in 2018, a number of noisy protests at some of the art world's finest institutions, including the Met, the Guggenheim and the Louvre, were designed to attract as much publicity as possible as they highlighted the horrors of the United States' opioid epidemic and called out Purdue Pharma's role in it. They proved highly effective.

A few years ago, a photographer in China captured a sign in a government office with one of those amusing translation errors. The sign said, in Chinese, 伤残评定办 (“Disability Assessment Office”), which was rendered in English as “Office of Mayhem Evaluation.” I found this phrase so charmingly bureaucratic that when I started writing about terrorism, I considered having it posted on my office door.

We at the American bureau of the Office of Mayhem Evaluation have suffered through a busy and perplexing few days. On Saturday, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran allegedly shot and killed 10 people in Monterey Park, California. On Monday, 66-year-old Chunli Zhao allegedly shot and killed seven people in Half Moon Bay, about 400 miles up the California coast. The first shooter is dead and left only fleeting traces of a motive. Zhao is in custody, and his motives are similarly resistant to evaluation, although according to early reports he is an ornery type. Apparently he was once accused of threatening to attack someone with a knife, and of attempting to smother him with a pillow (that most comfy of deadly weapons). Adding to the perplexity are these men’s age and ethnicity: both senior citizens, and both ethnically Chinese.

[Read: An Asian American grief]

Humans are by nature self-obsessed and prone to seeking meaning and patterns, especially in atrocities. I chalk up some of the early reactions to these tendencies: Commentators saw that Asian Americans were murdered, and speculated (wrongly, it appears) that the shootings were the most recent in the string of random, racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans, especially old folks. Surely when someone commits mass murder, he has a reason, even a bad one. So we speculate, sometimes in ways that inflame our anxieties, and wait for someone to discover the killer’s manifesto or rants on social media.

Sometimes that discovery arrives. But in my career of mayhem evaluation, I have found that a manifesto, or indeed a coherent motive, is a courtesy many mass killers fail to pay. The expectation that killers will explain themselves in clear, grammatical prose, as Anders Behring Breivik did, or in poetry, as members of the Islamic State did, will lead us on many a snipe hunt. Most shooters don’t think straight. For that matter, most nonshooters don’t either.

That is true even of those who meticulously plan their massacre. To date, the highest body count in an American mass shooting is held by a 64-year-old professional gambler at Las Vegas’s Mandalay Bay in 2017. Like the men suspected of this past weekend’s killings, he was unusually old. When the Las Vegas police issued their report on the atrocity, they came up with no motive whatsoever: no hatred of country-music fans, of particular races or religions, or even of humans in general. He was indiscriminate in all senses. Still others on the psychopath spectrum seem to have killed purposelessly, like the German who lethally injected several dozen care-home residents out of “boredom.” Coleridge called this species of evil “motiveless malignity,” and it describes minds far less sophisticated than Iago’s.

Such vacuous mayhem leaves little to evaluate. But in the aftermath of these horrors, we can at least try to maintain standards of decency by observing a few precautions. The first is to show restraint in drawing conclusions based on the killer’s or victims’ names, ethnicity, race, or religion. Yes, a shooter named Abdelhamid Abaaoud is more likely to be a jihadist than one named Huu Can Tran. But there are irritable loners of many races and creeds, and there’s little harm in waiting a day or two to make sure that you’ve distinguished the ordinary lunatics from the ideological fanatics.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: On murders, especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel]

The second is to remember, contrary to all instincts, that the story might not be about you—not about your pet subject, not about your community, not about the issues that affect you and occupy your thoughts, no matter how important or worthy those issues may be. When five staff members of the Capital Gazette were murdered in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2018, I watched the news and assumed that journalism was under attack. More precisely, it turned out, journalists were under attack for reporting accurately on a violent creep, who responded murderously. The beef was mostly personal. The victims died in the line of duty, but my preoccupation with press freedom—for which I make no apology—made me assume that the massacre was an attack on the profession itself.

Similarly, Asian Americans can die without Asian Americans as a class coming under attack. I grieve for the individuals slain in California; I am outraged about the beatings of Asian grannies on city streets. But decency forbids my treating the first group’s apparently unrelated deaths as an opportunity to bring attention to the second.

These recent killings, which may or may not remain in the “motive undetermined” category, do raise one issue that is salient irrespective of motive. Americans continue to arm themselves as if the apocalypse is coming in a matter of months, and as if the police have gone on permanent sabbatical. Recently, a relative of mine in New England went to a local bank branch to get documents notarized for her concealed-carry permit. The nice man at the counter, who also offered her favorable intro rates on a new checking account, told her that he was on intimate terms with the application process. “Since the pandemic, everyone’s been coming in to get their gun permits,” he said. Then he confided, probably in contravention of some Bank of America customer-service policy, that he was licensed to carry his Glock in 37 states.

Ideological killers will find guns, one way or another. They’re hard to stop, because they never stop thinking about killing. And as guns become more ubiquitous, the motiveless and impulsive spree killers will be more likely to have one nearby when the impulse strikes—and so they will make up a growing share of these awful incidents. We need to be ready to evaluate both types of mayhem with caution and restraint. And as a matter of policy, the government should try to ensure that the embittered psychos who live among us are armed with nothing more dangerous than a pillow.

New Year’s resolutions had barely been resolved before parents across the nation started thinking ahead to summer. The scramble to sign kids up for summer camp begins in January, because limited slots and huge demand have led to a highly competitive environment that verges on absurd. Case in point: Rachael Deane, a mother in Richmond, Virginia, has a summer-camp spreadsheet. She joked to me that it is “more sophisticated than a bill tracker” she uses to follow legislation in her work at a children’s-advocacy nonprofit; the spreadsheet is color-coded, and registration dates are cross-posted onto her work calendar so she can jump into action as soon as slots open.

Deane’s intense approach reflects the state of modern parenthood. The lack of universal child care is a pain point for parents throughout the year, but the summer is a unique headache. As with after-school care, parents have to navigate a confusing patchwork of options, but in the summer, they need a plan for all day, every day, for three months. And society leaves them largely on their own to figure it out: A 2019 survey from the Center for American Progress found that for three-quarters of parents, securing summer care was at least a little bit difficult. The system is essentially a competition that has winners and losers, and rests upon a willful ignorance of the reality of most American families—only one-fifth of all parents are stay-at-home. Change is long overdue.

I believe part of the problem is that in the U.S., education is a right for kids, and a responsibility for the state, while care outside schools, despite being just as vital for child development, is seen as solely the parents’ responsibility. So when the academic calendar ends, the government bows out. As Amanda Lenhart, a researcher who has studied summer care, told me, “We’ve made a decision culturally to push the burden of caring for kids during the summer fully onto parents, and forcing them to manage. It’s in some ways a throwback to an idealized family setup and work setup that never existed for most people anyway.” Indeed, the system’s assumption that one parent (read: the mother) should be available to watch the kids is a prime example of what the historian Stephanie Coontz calls “the way we never were.”

[Read: America’s child-care equilibrium has shattered]

Although some people wax nostalgic about lightly supervised summers spent mainly by themselves or with friends, the landscape has shifted since the 1980s, and this is no longer a viable option for many families. The sociologist Jessica Calarco explained in an interview with the writer Anne Helen Petersen that several factors led to the change. These included new laws about the minimum age at which children can be home alone, and a desire among certain parents for specialty camps to give their kids a leg up in college admissions. In parallel, the economic challenges of running camps drove a decline in options and an increase in prices.

The lack of affordable summer care leads to very different choice sets for parents in different income brackets. The mid-winter dash for summer-camp spots occurs mostly, though not exclusively, among wealthier, more educated parents. Lenhart’s research found that about one-third of parents in 2018 were sending their kids to camp; another study concluded that the kids of college graduates had an attendance rate seven times higher than that of kids whose parents had only a high-school diploma or less.

Parents who go this route face a logistical puzzle: Few summer programs run for multiple weeks, cover the hours when parents are working, and are reasonably affordable. Although many municipal parks-and-recreation departments valiantly try to provide inclusive low-cost options, there simply aren’t enough slots to go around. Making matters worse, camp sign-ups tend to be first come, first served, provoking a page-refreshing scrum more appropriate to acquiring Taylor Swift tickets than securing care for one’s children. I was discussing this topic with my literary agent, Laura Usselman, and she told me that in her small Georgia city, camp registration opens at 9 a.m. on one day in January, and “many of the camps are full by 9:03.”

Lower-income parents, for whom camps are often entirely out of reach, sometimes have to shape their entire work lives around the need for summer care. The Center for American Progress survey found that, to accommodate summer-care needs, more than half of families had “at least one parent [plan] to make a job change that will result in reduced income.” Calarco explained that in her research interviews with mothers, “quite a few have talked about how they made their own career decisions around the fact that their kids would be home in the summers and after school”—choosing a lower-paying job because it was closer to family who could help, for example, or taking part-time gig jobs.

The most obvious solution to this problem—year-round school—has never really gained traction in the United States. A mere 4 percent of U.S. schools have year-round schedules, and these still have substantial breaks. Summer vacation’s place in the American cultural mindset is deeply entrenched; there is also a fair case that children need opportunities for open play and creativity through an extended summer break to complement academic study.

Other countries have different approaches that preserve summer vacation without leaving parents scrambling every year. Municipalities in Sweden, for instance, are required by law to offer parents slots in programs known as fritidshem, or “leisure-time centers,” until their children turn 13. These centers provide both before- and after-school supervision and care during school breaks. In Germany, children have a legal right to day care; although there isn’t a corresponding policy for school breaks, some towns and cities organize comprehensive holiday programming, often in partnership with local schools. It’s not free, but the costs are moderate and financial aid is generally available.

Approaches like these in the U.S. would, of course, require funding, and maybe even legislation. Sadly, this country has shown time and again that it is unwilling to commit major resources to child care, laying the problem at parents’ feet instead. A cultural shift is needed to smooth the path for potential policy shifts. The summer scramble seems unlikely to end unless U.S. society moves its philosophy away from “every family for itself” and toward an understanding that school, work, and child care are all interconnected.

[Read: Why child care is so ridiculously expensive]

There have been recent glimmers of possibility. Although it was interrupted by the pandemic, two New York City council members introduced legislation in early 2020 to offer free summer camp for all youths in the city. Last year, several school districts across the country used pandemic-relief funding to temporarily provide free summer programming. Yet the fact that such policies are new and notable underlines the absurdity of America’s inconsistent ideas about when and where families deserve support. As Lenhart told me, “We’ve decided culturally and politically that the care of very young children, and the care of children in one season [of the year], is a burden to be borne by the family as opposed to spread across the community.”

Child care shouldn’t be a luxury good that the wealthy fight over, the middle class squeezes to acquire, and low-income folks do without. But that’s what it becomes every summer when parents’ options are shelling out for expensive camps, fighting for limited slots in affordable programs, or nothing. Until action is taken, forcing parents to sprint to sign up for summer camp in the dead of winter is a not-so-subtle message about how the nation really feels about them.

Memes rarely endure. Most explode and recede at nearly the same moment: the same month or week or day. But the meme best known as “This Is Fine”—the one with the dog sipping from a mug as a fire rages around him—has lasted. It is now 10 years old, and it is somehow more relevant than ever. Memes are typically associated with creative adaptability, the image and text editable into nearly endless iterations. “This Is Fine,” though, is a work of near-endless interpretability: It says so much, so economically. That elasticity has contributed to its persistence. The flame-licked dog, that avatar of learned helplessness, speaks not only to individual people—but also, it turns out, to the country.

The meme comes from KC Green’s six-panel comic “On Fire.” In the first, the dog, wearing a small bowler hat, sits at a table, surrounded by flames. In the second, the dog smiles brightly and says, “This is fine.” In the third, as the flames get closer, the still-grinning hound takes a drink of what looks to be coffee and says, “I’m okay with the events that are unfolding currently.” In the fourth, he takes another swig. Here, the panels that have so far maintained a consistent color scheme—yellow, brown, orange—introduce a new color: red. As the dog drinks, his left leg catches fire. “That’s okay, things are going to be okay,” the dog says, his leg now stripped of flesh. The final panel brings the obvious conclusion: Things are not going to be okay. The dog, consumed by the fire, melts away.

Green created “On Fire”—an entry in his comic series Gunshow—in January 2013. For him, the comic represented a kind of reassurance in the face of instability: He had begun taking antidepressants, he’s said in interviews, and was worried about whether the medications would be a good fit for him. (The dog’s full name, appropriately: Question Hound.) Green, in creating “On Fire,” was trying to reassure himself. “It kind of feels like you just have to ignore all the insanity around you like a burning house,” he recently told NPR. “And the comic just ended up writing itself after that.”

When “On Fire” went viral a year later—after users posted the comic’s first two panels to Reddit and the image-sharing site Imgur—many of those who amplified it focused on its potential for self-deprecation: It stood in for the small acts of avoidance and complacency and denial that are familiar features of people’s lives. In the dog surrounded by fire, they saw themselves. Students used the meme to describe feeling unprepared for upcoming tests. Workers used it to describe the stresses of their job. This was the “that feeling when” era of the social web—a moment when people were mining their daily experiences for insights that might be turned into shareable media. And “This Is Fine” applied to many of the situations people found themselves in as they navigated the world. The meme was personal. It was relatable. It could shape-shift for any situation. Its three ironized words—this is fine—were a useful stand-in, The Verge’s Chris Plante put it, “for when a situation becomes so terrible our brains refuse to grapple with its severity.”

[Read: The SNL sketch that perfectly mocks our upside-down reality]

Green has compared “This Is Fine” to a “good piece of art,” and the comparison is apt: He made the comic intentionally vague so that it could support very different interpretations. “This Is Fine,” for all its quirky internet-iness, also has a Mona Lisa quality. Question Dog, merrily facing his preventable demise, is effectively smiling and grimacing at once.

By 2016, that flexibility had brought a shift; audiences began to see in the dog not only themselves but their fellow Americans. As many people contended with the fact that Donald Trump might become president—as they watched him announce to the Republican National Convention that “I alone can fix it,” as they reread Orwell, as they wondered what it really might mean to “make America great again”—the dog’s denial broadened to something more national, cultural, collective. Question Hound’s cheerful inertia began to read as a proxy for a shared sense of helplessness: flames everywhere, and nowhere to go.

Once, “the house burning may have just been your final exams,” Green recently told The Washington Post. “Now, it’s feeling like it’s the world, it’s your country.”

Politicians inevitably tried to turn the meme into a message. The GOP’s official Twitter account, reacting to the proceedings of 2016’s Democratic National Convention, invoked “This Is Fine” in an attempt to mock their rivals. Typically, when brands and institutions adopt a meme for their ends, its death will quickly ensue; “This Is Fine,” though, survived. And it has taken on a new sensibility in the process. Question Hound, after years of upheaval and loss—much of it either created or permitted by leaders who, like him, could have put out the fires—doesn’t read merely as a victim. In his willful inaction, he now looks a bit like a villain. He could do something. He chooses not to. He acts out an absurdist version of what so many national politicians have done, essentially, in recent years: He sips his coffee while the world burns. COVID, climate change, fascism, bigotry, mass shootings, book bans, curtailed rights—this is fine, many leaders have said. This is fine, many people have agreed. The flames encroach. Nothing changes.

[Read: The great fracturing of American attention]

But memes are ever malleable. And comics can be rewritten. In 2016, Green created an updated version of “On Fire” with an alternative ending. The new comic is titled “This Is Not Fine.” It begins as the classic comic does: Question Hound, seated by the table, surrounded by the flames. “Th—” he begins. And then he wakes from his stupor. “THIS IS NOT FINE!!” he screams, in panic. And then: “Oh my God everything’s on fire,” he says, as his hat falls off and his eyes bug out of his head. He grabs a fire extinguisher. “There was no reason to let it last this long and get this bad,” he says. And then he douses the flames.

In reporting on the housing crisis, I often hear some version of a simple story purporting to explain why so many Americans struggle to afford a place to live. The story goes like this: Housing costs are unaffordable because [INSERT BAD COMPANY HERE] is greedy and jacking up prices. The villain can be Airbnb or developers; it can be deep-pocketed foreigners or iBuyers. The story is compelling because it does not directly implicate regular people, sympathetic institutions, or elected officials.

To state the obvious, stories can be compelling without being true. Especially suspect are stories that scapegoat a group or an entity that is impossible or at least very difficult to defend: banks or oil companies or criminals, say. The scapegoat takes the blame for a complex problem. The trick is to cast a villain such that the surrounding facts become irrelevant. Who cares whether criminals have actually destroyed American cities? Attempting to stress-test theories like this just makes you look pro-crime and puts you on the same side as people who have committed terrible acts. But false narratives are dangerous because they distract attention from real problems, and plausible solutions.

The latest version of the housing-villain story targets private-equity firms and hedge funds, broadly “institutional investors” that have supposedly been outcompeting regular homebuyers and are therefore responsible for the skyrocketing rents and home prices of 2020 and 2021. “One of the largest hedge funds, the largest Wall Street firms in the world, is going around and buying up every single-family home in this country,” J. D. Vance argued at the start of his senatorial campaign in 2021, noting that first-time homebuyers, disproportionately Black Americans, were unable to become homeowners as a result.

I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but the idea that these firms are ultimately responsible for our housing-affordability crisis is absolutely ridiculous, and no one who knows anything about housing markets believes it. Yet this story has gained so much traction that it has spawned hearings and bills on Capitol Hill. One recent effort by Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon seeks to levy high taxes on any company owning more than 100 single-family homes, in order to push it to sell those homes to owner-occupants or smaller investors. I asked Merkley what drew his attention to hedge-fund activity in the housing market, and he told me that he had “started to hear from people in the neighborhood saying, ‘Here’s the problem: We’re competing when we’re looking for a home; we’re competing against all-cash offers from businesses’ … It brought me back to thinking about whether we should have American families having to compete against billionaires to have a place to rent or to buy.”

[Jerusalem Demsas: Housing breaks people’s brains]

In order to have the type of pricing power that would allow any entity to push up rents and home prices, it would need to own significant shares if not an outright majority of homes in a particular market. At the national level, this is obviously not happening. According to one report, institutional investors purchased just 3 percent of homes sold in 2021. At the state level, the story seems unlikely as well. Georgia, a state with a relatively high amount of investor activity, saw some 8.5 percent of 2021 home sales go to the largest investors, according to CoreLogic data. In Merkley’s home state, just 2 percent of sales went to “mega-investors,” who own 1,001 or more properties. But 8 or 2 percent of home sales doesn’t mean 8 or 2 percent of the total housing stock—far from it. After all, most homes aren’t up for sale; from year to year, a great majority of homes remain in the same hands. Further, a purchase does not mean a permanent holding. Investors in both states quite likely went on to sell some of these homes.

At any rate: Home prices and rents increased quickly across the country, in communities large and small. When trying to determine what is responsible for this phenomenon, you have to find an explanation that is common to all of these places, not one that is particular to this market or that one. From August 2020 to August 2021, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Montana, and Idaho, saw the most significant home-price increases, but of those states, just the first two saw relatively high rates of mega-investors, again according to CoreLogic data. (2021 data shows that Arizona saw the highest at roughly 8.9 percent of homes on the market going to mega-investors.)

Additionally, some proponents of the scapegoat story argue that even if institutional investors are not dominant at the state level, they could still be distorting local real estate. Someone looking for a three-bedroom single-family home in the suburbs of Atlanta is not equally satisfied with one in the Savannah suburbs, so what matters to that person is the local context. But just because something is theoretically possible doesn’t mean it’s actually happening. And these theories imbue investors with a mastermind quality that they frankly haven’t earned. For instance, fearmongering about Zillow buying up real estate fell flat when the company exited the market after off-loading many homes at a loss.   

If there are no solid data supporting the institutional-investor-scapegoat story, there are certainly plenty of misleading statistics. Here’s one egregious example: A report from the House Financial Services Committee reads that “in the third quarter of 2021 alone, institutional investors bought 42.8% of homes for sale in the Atlanta metro area and 38.8% of homes in the Phoenix-Glendale-Scottsdale area.” These are unbelievably big numbers, and they are—literally unbelievable, that is. The citation provided in the document was not correct, but I was able to find the relevant report and, wouldn’t you know it, that’s not what it says. The report shows only the share of purchases made by investors, not institutional investors. Why does this matter? Because investors include people or entities who own fewer than 10 properties, midsize investors who own 10 to 99 homes, iBuyers—which buy properties and then immediately resell them—and even people who purchase vacation homes through an LLC. Relatedly, a New America report last year of investor activity in North Carolina suggests that investor growth in that market is actually being driven by smaller players.

I’ve seen this type of bait and switch more times than I can count. Instead of being clear that institutional investors make up just a small fraction of total investor purchases, politicians conflate statistics, tangling up true facts with a predetermined story. At an event on the rise of institutional investors, Marcia Fudge, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, noted that in Cleveland’s eastern inner-ring suburbs, “investors have purchased nearly ⅓ of homes every year since 2015.” This is not as blatant as the House committee report, because Fudge was careful to say merely “investors.” But in the context of her remarks, given at an event titled “Institutional Investors in Housing,” the implication was that private-equity firms or hedge funds were taking over Cleveland.

[Annie Lowrey: The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine]

This bait and switch matters. First, because it reveals a lack of rigor when people find data to fit a preordained narrative instead of looking to determine what is actually happening. Second, because if these homes are being bought by a wide range of investors, this reduces even further the likelihood that any single investor has significant enough market share to mess with prices.

The other deceptive part of the latest scapegoat story is that these institutional investors are regularly outbidding homebuyers with all-cash offers. Although all-cash offers are certainly on the rise, many of these bids are from wealthy people, house flippers, or smaller landlords. And one survey of realtors found an average “0% difference in offer price of institutional buyers compared to other buyers.” In 2021, according to a recent report, the “median purchase price of institutional buyers [was] typically 26% lower than the states’ median purchase prices,” suggesting that they are not typically competing with ordinary individual buyers, anyway. Institutional investors tend to specialize in distressed communities. In these markets, they can take advantage of economies of scale in making repairs.  

There are real problems with corporate landlords. For instance, large corporate investors are significantly more likely to file eviction notices “even after controlling for past foreclosure status, property characteristics, tenant characteristics, and neighborhood,” according to a study of Fulton County, Georgia.  As the sociologist Esther Sullivan has argued, corporate investors may also take advantage of mobile-home owners, who tend not to own the land beneath their unit, by escalating fees for the maintenance of park properties.

These problems are worth solving by, say, increasing resources for code enforcement so that landlords of all stripes are held accountable for not keeping their properties habitable. Local governments should also  create rental registries that can track important information about properties and landlords to allow for both careful study and accountability of bad actors. The urban-policy expert Bruce Katz and his co-authors have also recommended that states require LLCs to disclose beneficial owners—anyone who owns more than 25 percent of the entity.

But if some institutional investors make bad landlords, that doesn’t mean they’re behind the housing-affordability crisis. They are not why rents are so high or why homeownership is out of reach for so many. Investors are not driving the unaffordability; they are responding to it. Many different investors are all flocking into the housing market; what is most relevant is the fundamental reason  they are all being drawn there.

Housing is primarily unaffordable in this country because of persistent undersupply. In fact, institutional investors are entering the single-family-home market precisely because supply constraints have led to skyrocketing prices. One institutional investor’s SEC filing admitted just that, celebrating a “decline” in supply that has “driven strong rental rate growth and home price appreciation.” The filing also lamented the possibility that “continuing development … will increase the supply of housing and exacerbate competition for residents.”  

A lack of supply is caused by a complex web of rules and regulations that prevent developers—profit and nonprofit alike—from building enough housing to meet demand. A recent report from Freddie Mac estimates a shortage of 3.8 million housing units. For decades the United States has been underbuilding in employment hubs (such as San Francisco, New York, and Boston) and the surrounding suburbs, pushing prices up. Elected officials have allowed the home-building process to become hijacked by unrepresentative opposition and gummed up in legal challenges, many under the guise of bogus environmental concerns.

If elected officials want to fix the problem, they should eliminate those constraints, such as regulations that require large structures on large lots of land or bans on duplexes, triplexes, and multifamily buildings. And they should curtail the various legal pathways that are used to obstruct new housing. As the Brookings Institution expert Jenny Schuetz explained to the House Financial Services Committee last summer: “Targeting a small subset of landlords without addressing underlying market conditions and policy gaps will not meaningfully improve the well-being of renters and prospective homebuyers.”  

[M. Nolan Gray: How California exported its worst problem to Texas]

As I’ve followed the scapegoat story, I’ve also been struck by the implicit suggestion that renters are less worthy of single-family homes than owner-occupants are. After all, corporate landlords rent to real people. In his announcement speech, Vance made the implicit explicit, arguing, “If you can’t own a home in your community, you’re not a real citizen.” And Merkley’s bill, which hopes to transfer single-family-rental homes to owner-occupants, skates past what its success would mean for renters. One report indicates that 85 percent of single-family-rental residents would not qualify for a mortgage.

I asked Merkley’s office what would happen to the families renting these properties if his bill were to pass and large investors were forced to sell them off. His office pointed me to a provision that would create down-payment assistance for potential homebuyers, and argued that pushing investors out of the market would reduce rents. But down-payment assistance doesn’t change the fact that most of these renters don’t have the credit score to qualify for a mortgage, nor would the assistance necessarily go to the families settled in these homes now. And I hope by this point it’s clear that even if institutional investors exited these markets, that would not make a dent in home prices or rents. Notably, a similar policy in Hong Kong led to a reduction in short-term speculation but did “not effectively cool down housing prices.”

Private equity isn’t the first villain, and it likely won’t be the last, to be cast in the role of the housing scapegoat. Airbnb, foreign buyers, greedy developers—all of these groups have taken center stage and probably will again. Nobody needs to defend these entities, but playing whack-a-mole with the villain of the moment won’t increase the amount of affordable housing we build, it won’t untangle the uncomfortable matrix of interests that opposes change and growth and opportunities for first-time homebuyers, and it won’t satisfy the growing anger of the tens of millions of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.

The political project of building enough affordable housing and enacting necessary tenant protections is a hard one. Don’t let make-believe villains distract you from the real solutions to the housing crisis. We have to build.

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Kevin McCarthy has begun his job as speaker by servicing the demands of the most extreme—and weirdest—members who supported him, thus handing the People’s House to the Clown Caucus.

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

Kanye West, Sam Bankman-Fried, and the cult of not reading A Hollywood armorer on the Rust shooting charges The coffee alternative Americans just can’t get behind

The Ringmaster

Now controlled by its most unhinged members, the Republican Party has returned to power in the People’s House. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the ringmaster of this circus, is happily paying off his debts by engaging in petty payback, conjuring up inane committees, threatening to crash the U.S. economy, and protecting a walking monument to fraud named George Santos, who may or may not actually be named “George Santos.”

In the enduring words of Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Politics, in Washington or anywhere else, is about deals. No one should have expected McCarthy to make his way to the gavel without signing a few ugly promissory notes along the way. Sometimes, friends are betrayed and enemies are elevated; an important project can end up taking a back seat to a boondoggle. Just ask Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, who got pushed out of the chairmanship of Ways and Means in favor of Jason Smith of Missouri, a choice preferred by the MAGA caucus. “You fucked me,” he reportedly said to at McCarthy on the floor of the House. “I know it was you, you whipped against me.” Buchanan, a source on the House floor told Tara Palmeri at Puck, was so angry that the speaker’s security people were about to step in. (McCarthy’s office denies that this happened.)

It’s one thing to pay political debts, even the kind that McCarthy accepted despite their steep and humiliating vig. It’s another to hand off control of crucial issues to a claque of clowns who have no idea what they’re doing and are willing to harm the national security of the United States as long as it suits their political purposes.

Let us leave aside the removal of Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the Intelligence Committee. The republic will not rise or fall based on such things, and if McCarthy wants to engage in snippy stoogery to ingratiate himself with the MAGA caucus and soothe Donald Trump’s hurt feelings, it is within his power to do so. In his letter to Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the speaker claimed his decision was all about “integrity.” This is not just the death of irony; it is a North Korean–style, firing-squad-by-anti-aircraft-gun execution of irony. Worse, McCarthy even has the right to channel, as he did, Joseph McCarthy, and smear Swalwell by alluding to derogatory information that the FBI supposedly has about him. It might not be honorable or professional, but he can do it.

McCarthy’s shuffle of the Intelligence Committee pales in comparison to the creation of two new committees, both of which were part of the Filene’s Basement clearance of the new speaker’s political soul. One of them, on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of the Republican assault on science that predated Trump but reached new heights with the former president’s disjointed gibbering about bleach injections. The committee will include the conspiracy theorist and McCarthy’s new best friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ronny Jackson of Texas, the former White House physician who assured us in 2018 that Trump only weighed 239 pounds and was in astoundingly good health.

The COVID committee is unlikely to move the needle (if you’ll pardon the expression) on public health. No one’s mind will be changed if Jackson and Tucker Carlson bloviate to each other about things neither of them really believes. Most of the damage from such a committee will likely be concentrated among the vaccine refusers, who already seem determined to get sick and die to make a political point.

The “weaponization” committee is worse, and likely to do far more damage to the United States, because it is starting from the premise that the machinery of the United States government—law enforcement, the intelligence community, and federal agencies—has been turned against the average American citizen. Jim Jordan, who stands out even in this GOP for his partisan recklessness, will serve as chair. The committee will include members whom I think of as the “You-Know-Better-Than-This Caucus”: people with top-flight educations and enough experience to know that Jordan is a crank, but who nevertheless will support attacks on American institutions if that’s what it takes to avoid being sent back home to live among their constituents. Two standouts here are Thomas Massie (an MIT graduate who apparently majored in alchemy and astrology), and the ever-reliable Elise Stefanik (Harvard), whose political hemoglobin is now composed of equal parts cynicism and antifreeze.

The committee will include other monuments to probity, such as Chip Roy; Dan Bishop, who has claimed that the 2020 election was rigged; Harriet Hageman, the woman who defeated Liz Cheney in Wyoming; and Kat Cammack of Florida, who alleged that Democrats were drinking on the House floor during the speakership fight. All of them will have access to highly sensitive information from across the U.S. government.

Jordan and his posse are styling themselves as a new Church Committee, the 1975 investigation into the Cold War misdeeds of American intelligence organizations headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church. This dishonors Church, whose committee uncovered genuinely shocking abuses by agencies that had for too long escaped oversight during the early days of the struggle with the Soviet Union. Church himself was a patriot, unlike some of the charlatans on this new committee, but even Church’s investigation did at least some damage with its revelations, and some of the reforms (especially the move away from relying on human intelligence) undertaken later based in part on its findings were unwise. In any case, his fame was short-lived: He was defeated for reelection in 1980 and died in 1984. (Full disclosure: I spoke at a conference held in Church’s honor many years ago and met with his widow.)

The Church Committee was, in its day, a necessary walk across the hot coals for Americans who had invested too much power and trust in the executive branch. I suspect that the Jordan committee will not look to uncover abuses, but rather to portray any government actions that it does not like as abuses, especially the investigations into Trump. It will be the Church Committee turned on its head, as members of Congress seek to protect a lawless president by destroying the agencies that stand between our democracy and his ambitions.

Kevin McCarthy will be fine with all of it, as long as he gets to wear the top hat and red tails while indulging in the fantasy that he is in control of the clowns and wild animals, and not the other way around.

Related:

Speaker in name only Why Kevin McCarthy can’t lose George Santos

Today’s News

President Joe Biden announced that he would send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine, and Germany announced that it would send an initial shipment of 14 Leopard 2 tanks. The arraignment of the suspect in the Half Moon Bay, California, mass shooting was postponed until Feb. 16. School officials were warned on three separate occasions that a 6-year-old who later shot his first-grade teacher in Virginia had a gun or had made threats, according to an attorney for the teacher.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Public outrage hasn’t improved policing, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

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Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

Why the French Want to Stop Working

By Pamela Druckerman

If you want to understand why the French overwhelmingly oppose raising their official retirement age from 62 to 64, you could start by looking at last week’s enormous street protest in Paris.

“Retirement before arthritis” read one handwritten sign. “Leave us time to live before we die” said another. One elderly protester was dressed ironically as “a banker” with a black top hat, bow tie, and cigar—like the Mr. Monopoly mascot of the board game. “It’s the end of the beans!” he exclaimed to the crowd, using a popular expression to mean that pension reform is the last straw.

Read the full article.

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An Asian American grief Why are toy commercials still like this?

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Watch. Saint Omer, in theaters, turns a true crime into a complicated elegy.

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P.S.

The Church Committee revealed outrages (including assassination plots) that today might seem like they were taken from bad spy-movie scripts. But such things were deadly serious business, as the United States moved from World War II into the Cold War determined to do whatever it took to defeat Soviet communism. For decades, Americans romanticized spies and spying as glamorous and exciting, but in reality, espionage was a nasty business. Our British cousins knew this better than we did, which is why British spy fiction was always grittier than its American counterpart. (The James Bond novels are pretty dour, sometimes even sadistic; Hollywood cleaned them up.)

But just because we lost our innocence about spying doesn’t mean we can’t still enjoy the culture it produced back in the day. In that spirit, let me recommend to you Secret Agent, an offering on a wonderful, listener-supported San Francisco–based internet radio station called SomaFM. There are plenty of great channels on SomaFM—I especially like Left Coast 70s, which is just what it sounds like—but Secret Agent is a lot of fun, a mixture of 1960s lounge and light jazz, soundtracks, and other tidbits, with the occasional line from 007 and other spies spliced in here and there. It’s a nice throwback to the days when espionage was cool, and it’s great music for working or a get-together over martinis, which should be shaken and … well, you know.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

News of mass shootings, as frequently as they happen in the U.S., has been shown to produce acute stress and anxiety. But for many Asian Americans, this past week’s deadly attacks in California—first in Monterey Park, then in Half Moon Bay—feel profoundly different. The tragedies occurred around the Lunar New Year, during a time meant for celebration. And not only did they happen in areas that have historically been sanctuaries for Asian residents, but the suspects in both cases are themselves Asian.

These events have added fuel to what my colleague Katherine Hu described as “an invisible, pervasive dread” among many Asian Americans, including myself. For days I’ve been struggling to process—and produce fully formed thoughts about—the shootings. How should I respond, as someone of Chinese descent, living mere miles away from Monterey Park? When I was asked to potentially reflect on my personal experience for The Atlantic, I hesitated. After all, I’d gone about my day after reading the news, even putting off calling my folks. Was that wrong?

My confusion may have stemmed, in part, from the inexplicability of these crimes, Christine Catipon, the president-elect of the Asian American Psychological Association, told me. “There’s absolutely a lot of cognitive dissonance happening,” she said. “Why would someone do this on Lunar New Year? … Why would [the alleged perpetrator] be someone from our community?”

[Read: An Asian American grief]

Indeed, the other psychologists I spoke with also acknowledged the painful, conflicting emotions that might arise from these incidents. “For a large part of the Asian American community, we don’t have a very public, practiced language” around a tragedy such as the Monterey Park shooting, said William Ming Liu, a counseling-psychology professor at the University of Maryland. “We’re trying to figure out, like, Who are we? How do we come together? What does it mean for us?” he told me. “These complex traumas take time to process.” The result, he said, has been greater anxiety, hypersensitivity, and “a spike in fear” that is affecting many in the Asian diaspora in subtle but potentially severe ways.

The shootings happened close to Lunar New Year, a holiday that is celebrated in different ways among different ethnic communities but that’s generally considered to be a moment of renewal and conviviality. For me, this meant cleaning my home to welcome good fortune, cooking traditional dishes, and gathering with my closest friends. The violence that occurred on Lunar New Year’s eve in Monterey Park forced many to reconcile jubilation with terror. “This should be a time of celebration … about joyousness and family and coming together,” said Sherry Wang, an associate professor at Santa Clara University. “This is such an exponential level of cultural pain that is juxtaposed with a cultural celebration that cuts across borders.”

In addition, many Asian Americans are still wrestling with the knowledge that they’ve been—or could be—targets of attacks spurred by racist language about the pandemic’s origins. Hearing news of violence against any Asian population in the U.S. might produce a shock and suspicion that builds on that underlying anxiety. Liu told me his initial thought after learning of the first shooting was, “This [has to be] somebody from outside the community who found this community of Asian Americans.”

Wang also assumed that, given the racist motives for some previous attacks, what happened in Monterey Park was a hate crime. Thus, when the alleged shooter was revealed to be an Asian man, those existing, potent negative emotions became further twisted, requiring “a lot of mental gymnastics,” Wang said. “We have to push against our own [ideas] of how violence can happen to our communities, when it’s from somebody within our community.”

She added that many Asian cultures value respect for elders; the idea that they could hurt their own is almost incomprehensible. In other words, these developments can challenge assumptions within the Asian community that certain spaces are safe for them. I’d always believed ethnic enclaves such as Monterey Park were uniquely protected. I’d never thought that ballroom dancing, the activity many of the victims there were participating in, could somehow lead to death; my dad danced for years at our local cultural center.

And then there is the issue of rhetoric: The term Asian American, despite being established in the late 1960s by Asian American activists hoping to consolidate political power, can be limiting. The label could cause many different ethnic groups to be seen as a single society and be expected to have a shared response—as well as a shared understanding of events such as these shootings. Yet, Liu explained, the possible motives behind these crimes can be hard to talk about even among ostensibly similar cultures. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are all sorts of collective traumas and individual traumas a lot of our elders have experienced but have never processed and never dealt with,” he said, listing traumas associated with their backgrounds and their experiences immigrating to the U.S. as examples.

Incidents of anti-Asian attacks during the pandemic, Wang said, introduced a generation of Asian Americans to language about racial trauma but not necessarily about other forms of brutality, such as domestic violence, which became a point of discussion in response to the Monterey Park shooting. She said that race is just one factor, complicated by other issues such as gender, national origin, and immigration status.

At this point, it can feel as though there are more questions than answers when it comes to understanding these shootings. Still, the experts I spoke with emphasized the importance of providing more mental health care to Asian American communities, as well as the need for them to “step back and recharge in whatever way you need to,” as Wang put it. “I think we have to be aware of our limits and our boundaries,” Catipon added, recommending the AAPA’s list of resources for help. “Sometimes it’s okay to find things that give us joy … I would just encourage people, if they’re noticing that they’re having a hard time functioning, to get support. [Asking for help] doesn’t mean that you’re weak. It doesn’t mean anything like that if you’re affected by these things. It means you’re human.”