There was a time, not so long ago, when you actually had to show up at a concert to get ripped off. Scalping, the process of buying tickets for cheap and reselling them to desperate fans, usually on the day of a show, used to be limited to crowded stadium entranceways and sidewalk waiting areas.

These days it all happens on Ticketmaster. As fans of Taylor Swift know best, America’s leading online ticket peddler is a mess: Late last year, the site buckled under the pressure of presale demand for the megastar’s Eras Tour. When a bot attack overwhelmed the site, many fans were left in the lurch, forced to turn to secondary markets with markups in the tens of thousands of dollars. In a congressional hearing this week sparked largely by that fiasco, just about everyone ganged up on Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation Entertainment. “I want to congratulate and thank you for an absolutely stunning achievement,” Senator Richard Blumenthal told Live Nation’s president and CFO, Joe Berchtold. “You have brought together Republicans and Democrats in an absolutely unified cause.”

The Swift debacle may have had the precise kind of universal appeal to unite Congress on this issue—the site’s partial crash provoked widespread outrage—but even if this is an edge case, Ticketmaster represents a product that’s fundamentally unsatisfying even when it works. An interface that should be minimal and clear is mired in confusion, and plagued by automated scalpers that snap up tickets faster than real, human customers can check out. Considering Ticketmaster’s size and value, you would expect something smoother: Live Nation now controls much of the American market for live events and tickets; to encounter this multibillion-dollar chimera of an events-promotion firm, venue-management business, and ticketing platform isn’t really a choice, in 2023, as much as a demoralizing inevitability. Even putting aside all the problems that come with Ticketmaster’s enormous market share, the site’s basic consumer experience has begun to feel rickety. If customers have nowhere else to go, why bother changing things?

Buying tickets to a Taylor Swift concert will probably put a dent in your wallet, but it shouldn’t—to quote Swift’s own assessment of the situation—feel like going through “several bear attacks.” In the best-case scenario, customers would feed money into the system and receive their tickets without much hassle. That’s not the reality for many consumers. Take the biggest problem people seem to have with Ticketmaster: hidden fees. In some instances, fans end up paying an additional 60 or 70 percent of a ticket’s face value—charges with opaque names that pop up at the last second. That fees are high is one thing; that customers don’t even know what these fees are for, or that they don’t necessarily know they’re coming, is another. Even when Ticketmaster is ostensibly doing its job, purchasers are likely to come away overloaded. (In an emailed statement, Ticketmaster professed full support for “upfront all-in pricing” and said that it has “invested over $1 billion in capital to improve the Ticketmaster system.”)

But Ticketmaster’s woes don’t end with fees. Sales of all types have been plagued with bot attacks for years. Taylor Swift presale tickets involved a kind of anti-bot verification system, but as Berchtold admitted during the hearing, bots got in anyway. This was an issue even before Ticketmaster merged with Live Nation in 2010—bots, which can snag tickets within fractions of a second and artificially inflate prices for any sort of live event, are something this industry can’t seem to beat. The problem is compounded by long wait times: Fans might end up queueing hours and hours for a ticket that not only is out of reach, but is funneled straight into the resale market, where brutal markups await. In the case of the Swift tour, fans who didn’t make it onto the presale list didn’t have any customer experience at all—Ticketmaster canceled the public sale when it realized it didn’t have enough tickets left to sell.

During the hearing, Berchtold tried to claim that Ticketmaster dominates the market because of the quality of its product, but these confusions are as much a result of poor design as extractive business decisions abetted by the company’s disproportionate power in the marketplace. The CEO of the corporate rival SeatGeek, who was also at the hearing, said, “We don’t know who has the best product, because there is not a competition.” (SeatGeek is not perfect either: The company apparently charged one woman 14 times for Swift tickets she never even purchased.)

Despite what Live Nation’s president seems to want Congress to think, the company now finds itself in this position largely because of its market dominance. It’s true of many businesses, but particularly those that offer some kind of tech solution: As competition wanes, the product itself stagnates. Because no other company poses a serious threat to Live Nation’s market share, it has no financial reason to invest greater resources into solving its bot problem, or to reinforce its infrastructure to be able to handle millions of concurrent requests.

At a moment when much of the discourse around tech monopolies has to do with the social, political, and economic power they’ve come to exert over the past two decades, it’s easy to forget about the evolution of the products themselves. Google—the internet search tool, not the company—hasn’t changed all that much over the past 15 years, because it hasn’t really needed to; it’s still the search tool of choice for the majority of information seekers, even if the site isn’t quite as effective as it used to be. That Amazon has figured out one-day delivery makes for a better consumer experience, but search results are now cluttered with ads and intrusive product recommendations.

Though it can feel as intractable as a utility company, Ticketmaster is still mostly a functional business. But it shouldn’t wait to reveal hidden fees until the moment of purchase, and it certainly shouldn’t leave its infrastructure this vulnerable to outside manipulation. The biggest ticketer should expect the most traffic, and it should protect its tech accordingly. These are basic asks of a product that’s in many ways stuck in the past. If only Ticketmaster had a reason to listen.

Like many American cities, Memphis, Tennessee, has a long history of vexed relationships between the police and Black citizens. Also like many cities, it has seen an increase in activism for police reform in recent years. But over the past two years, as I reported on policing in Memphis, I heard laments from activists that they struggled to bring the attention of elected officials and a broad swath of citizens to the problems they saw.

The lack of attention may no longer be an issue—at least for now.

Earlier this month, 29-year-old Tyre Nichols died after an encounter with officers near his home. Officials initially said Nichols was stopped for reckless driving. They described a confrontation with officers and said Nichols tried to flee before another confrontation. How true this account is remains to be seen. No footage of the incident has yet been made public, but the city is expected to release it this evening.

[David A. Graham: The murders in Memphis aren’t stopping]

Whatever happened, officers beat Nichols, who was taken away in an ambulance and died three days later, on January 10. Everyone who has seen the footage describes it as horrific. On January 20, Memphis Police Chief C. J. Davis fired the five officers involved. Yesterday, Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy announced second-degree-murder charges against the men.

“In a word, it’s absolutely appalling,” David Rausch, the director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, said of the video during a press conference yesterday. “I’m shocked; I’m sickened by what I saw and what we learned through our investigation.”

What I heard from Memphians during my reporting was that the city is simultaneously underpoliced and overpoliced. Residents, especially Black ones in areas with high crime, complain about rampant violence. (Nichols and all five officers in this case are Black.) They don’t want to defund or abolish the police; they want criminals locked up and safe streets. But they also complain that officers focus too much on minor offenses while serious criminals walk free.

[David A. Graham: Derek Chauvin’s conviction is the exception that proves the rule]

Beyond that, many Memphians describe a police department prone to excessive force and abuses. After George Floyd’s murder, Mayor Jim Strickland convened a group to reimagine local policing, and although activists said they were shut out of the process, even that team’s report described widespread fear and distrust of the cops. The department has also repeatedly illegally surveilled activists. Through all of that, it has struggled to make any dent in the city’s violent-crime rate. City and police officials refused to explain or defend their strategy to me.

The officers charged in Nichols’s death were all members of the SCORPION team, a unit that Davis formed shortly after taking over the department in 2021. (The name stands for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods.) It’s a classic example of hot-spot policing, a tactic that aims to reduce crime by concentrating officers in locations with large numbers of crimes.

Hot-spot policing has a proven record of success in many places, but it also elevates the risk of anyone in the area getting swept up by police. “Point me to the ideal neighborhood in any community in the country, or any suburban community,” the Reverend Earle Fisher, a veteran Memphis activist, told me in 2021. “Guess what you don’t see? Any police officers.”

[David A. Graham: America is having a violence wave, not a crime wave]

Officials have not provided very much detail about why Nichols, who reportedly did not have a criminal record, was stopped, but a lawyer for Nichols’s family said that officers were conducting traffic stops in unmarked cars. “This is a pretextual traffic stop, which, let’s call it what it is: It’s a racist traffic stop,” he said at a press conference.

The problem with a troubled department like Memphis’s adopting a tool like hot-spot policing is that culture tends to triumph over tactics. If police are accustomed to making questionable stops or regularly use excessive force against suspects, they’ll probably continue to do those things. Davis has now ordered a review of the SCORPION unit.

One reason the Nichols case has gotten so much more attention than previous examples of police violence in Memphis is District Attorney Mulroy, who was elected last year as a reformist candidate, defeating the longtime incumbent Amy Weirich, a tough-on-crime prosecutor. History shows he’ll have a tough task ahead of him; even when police officers are charged in civilians deaths, convictions are infrequent. But scrutiny of the city’s law-enforcement strategy is overdue. Memphians deserve to live in safety—from both violent crime and their own police department.

About a decade ago, Susan Yanovski, an obesity researcher at the National Institutes of Health, held a symposium to discuss a question that bedeviled her field: Why was it so hard to develop weight-loss drugs that actually worked and didn’t harm the people they were meant to help?

For years, the most popular weight-loss pills had earned their stigma. For example, the drug cocktail known as fen-phen was taken off the market for causing heart disease almost as reliably as it promoted healthy weight loss. The only intervention that seemed to work consistently was bariatric surgery. Doctors sliced into patients’ digestive system to reduce stomach size and slow the absorption of nutrients to stave off feelings of hunger. But these operations were expensive and complicated, and in some cases posed serious risks.

Yanovski was looking for a breakthrough. She wanted the effects of bariatric surgery without the surgery. The symposium’s conclusion, however, was dreary. The miracle drug that everybody was looking for simply did not exist.

Except, maybe it did exist. Just not where most weight-loss researchers were looking.

In the early 2010s, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk developed a medication called semaglutide for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. It was approved by the FDA as an injectable called Ozempic. The company soon realized that patients on Ozempic reported significant weight loss as a side effect. Novo Nordisk ran further trials on the drug and discovered that it was, in fact, “associated with less hunger and food cravings.” They rereleased the drug for weight loss under a new name: Wegovy.

Ozempic, Wegovy, and similar drugs represent the vanguard of a weight-loss revolution. Last year, Yanovski attended a conference in San Diego on the results of a new Novo Nordisk trial for adolescents and teens with severe obesity. The hotel ballroom was standing-room only, according to the scientific journal Nature, and the results of the trial were met with cheers, “like you were at a Broadway show.” After a year, young patients on semaglutide said they lost nearly 35 pounds on average. Teens on the placebo actually gained weight.

Here was the breakthrough that Yanovski, the obesity-research community, and perhaps the entire world were looking for: the effects of bariatric surgery without the surgery.

In the past few years, use of new weight-loss medication has grown, putting the U.S. in the early stages of a drug boom. One story you could tell about these drugs is that they represent a watershed moment for scientific discovery. In a country where each generation has been more overweight than the one that came before it, a marvelous medication seemed to fall out of the sky.

But just months into this weight-loss-drug bonanza, a range of medical, cultural, and political challenges has materialized. Doctors are reporting rampant use of these new weight-loss drugs among the very rich. The surge of off-label use of Ozempic is already creating a shortage of the medication for people with type 2 diabetes. Now that celebrity skinniness is merely an injection away, online “thin culture” has returned, likely exacerbating Americans’ fraught relationship with body image. On paper, these drugs might be a miracle. In the real world, they’re also becoming a menace.

Before wading too deeply into skepticism, let’s reiterate the stakes. More than 40 percent of U.S. adults, including about 20 percent of children and teens, are considered obese. These Americans face elevated risks for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, and various cancers, along with mobility issues associated with being overweight. During the pandemic, obesity may have tripled the risk of hospitalization with a COVID infection. Among women living in poverty, in particular, obesity rates are higher. Treatment for obesity would increase longevity, improve health, and possibly even save the entire health system hundreds of billions of dollars in the long run.

For years, doctors have encouraged overweight patients to begin with diet and exercise. This sounds like a levelheaded approach to health care. But it’s not always a useful suggestion. “There are lots of people who are very successful in every aspect of their life—in school, at work, and in their communities—and it’s just in this area of being able to control their body weight that they struggle,” Yanovski, who is now a co-director of the Office of Obesity Research at NIH, told me on my podcast, Plain English. “People who haven’t experienced it themselves often think Just push away your plate! But we know it’s not that simple.” Even in NIH studies overseen by behavioral scientists working with extremely motivated patients, more than half of people with obesity can’t maintain their weight-loss goals, she said.

Where behavioral changes have failed, chemistry might succeed. The drug semaglutide mimics a protein in the gut that assists digestion. After a meal, semaglutide stimulates the release of insulin, lowering blood sugar. It also appears to slow the emptying of the stomach, which reduces feelings of hunger. “There also seems to be an effect of these medications in the brain that affects food reward,” Yanovski said. “People on semaglutide report they’re not thinking about food all the time.”

Every drug has side effects. Patients on semaglutide and similar drugs have reported nausea and vomiting, which can be partly managed by starting patients on a low dose. The drugs can also produce gallstones, which are common among all patients undergoing rapid weight loss. Some people using Ozempic report accelerated “facial aging” when they lose fat in their cheeks.

Nevertheless, as a medical achievement, these drugs are stupendous inventions. But as I’ve written in The Atlantic, invention is one thing; implementation is another. And the current rollout of these weight-loss drugs raises questions about ethics, fairness, culture, and America’s berserk relationship with beauty.

Ozempic and Wegovy can cost roughly $1,000 or more a month for people trying to lose weight. Most insurance companies do not cover weight-loss medication. In the U.S., racial and ethnic minorities and low-income Americans have higher rates of diabetes and obesity. But since they cost $12,000 a year or more without insurance coverage—and that’s not even counting higher prices on the black market—the drugs’ first clientele is likely to be the richest Americans, not the poorest.

As demand rises, insurance rules and public policy might adapt. For the first time, the Federal Employee Health Benefit program agreed to cover some anti-obesity medication. Other insurance companies might follow. One Morgan Stanley model projected that semaglutide and similar weight-loss drugs could be a $30 billion market by 2030. That’s about 10 percent of all U.S. drug spending. This level of prevalence is inconceivable without insurance coverage, but coverage of these drugs could warp the cost of private and public insurance to an inconceivable degree. If every obese American were on semaglutide at its current price of $15,000 a year, the total cost would be roughly 10 percent of the entire U.S. economy, or $2.1 trillion. That’s not going to happen.

More likely is that influencers, celebrities, and millionaires will monopolize the market for weight-loss medication. In the past six months, Hollywood Ozempic stories have reached an obnoxious level of ubiquity. TikTok has become overrun with #myozempicjourney testimonials and week-by-week photo collages of disappearing waistlines. After years of magazines and advertisers grappling with the dangers of promoting unrealistic body images, New York magazine reports that “thin is in,” as the waifish “heroin chic” of the 1990s makes its medicalized return to the mainstream.

These drugs will also scramble our relationship with the basic concept of willpower in ways that aren’t cleanly good or bad. How long should doctors recommend that their patients press forward with “diet and exercise” recommendations now that pills and injectables may safely and more consistently keep off weight? Is the U.S. health-care system really ready to treat obesity like it’s any other disease? Obesity is not a failure of the will, Yanovski told me, again and again. “It is a complex chronic disease,” she said. “It affects almost every organ system. If you can successfully treat obesity instead of the individual conditions, it could have a positive impact on health.”

I think that’s right. But there is still something menacing in the rollout of these young miracles. Semaglutide seems to collapse the complex interplay of genes, environment, diet, metabolism, and exercise into a simple injection with a luxury price tag. I’m holding out hope that these drugs will soon augur a public-health revolution. In early 2023, however, they represent an elite cultural makeover more than a medical intervention.

About a decade ago, Susan Yanovski, an obesity researcher at the National Institutes of Health, held a symposium to discuss a question that bedeviled her field: Why was it so hard to develop weight-loss drugs that actually worked and didn’t harm the people they were meant to help?

For years, the most popular weight-loss pills had earned their stigma. For example, the drug cocktail known as fen-phen was taken off the market for causing heart disease almost as reliably as it promoted healthy weight loss. The only intervention that seemed to work consistently was bariatric surgery. Doctors sliced into patients’ digestive system to reduce stomach size and slow the absorption of nutrients to stave off feelings of hunger. But these operations were expensive and complicated, and in some cases posed serious risks.

Yanovski was looking for a breakthrough. She wanted the effects of bariatric surgery without the surgery. The symposium’s conclusion, however, was dreary. The miracle drug that everybody was looking for simply did not exist.

Except, maybe it did exist. Just not where most weight-loss researchers were looking.

In the early 2010s, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk developed a medication called semaglutide for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. It was approved by the FDA as an injectable called Ozempic. The company soon realized that patients on Ozempic reported significant weight loss as a side effect. Novo Nordisk ran further trials on the drug and discovered that it was, in fact, “associated with less hunger and food cravings.” They rereleased the drug for weight loss under a new name: Wegovy.

Ozempic, Wegovy, and similar drugs represent the vanguard of a weight-loss revolution. Last year, Yanovski attended a conference in San Diego on the results of a new Novo Nordisk trial for adolescents and teens with severe obesity. The hotel ballroom was standing-room only, according to the scientific journal Nature, and the results of the trial were met with cheers, “like you were at a Broadway show.” After a year, young patients on semaglutide said they lost nearly 35 pounds on average. Teens on the placebo actually gained weight.

Here was the breakthrough that Yanovski, the obesity-research community, and perhaps the entire world were looking for: the effects of bariatric surgery without the surgery.

In the past few years, use of new weight-loss medication has grown, putting the U.S. in the early stages of a drug boom. One story you could tell about these drugs is that they represent a watershed moment for scientific discovery. In a country where each generation has been more overweight than the one that came before it, a marvelous medication seemed to fall out of the sky.

But just months into this weight-loss-drug bonanza, a range of medical, cultural, and political challenges has materialized. Doctors are reporting rampant use of these new weight-loss drugs among the very rich. The surge of off-label use of Ozempic is already creating a shortage of the medication for people with type 2 diabetes. Now that celebrity skinniness is merely an injection away, online “thin culture” has returned, likely exacerbating Americans’ fraught relationship with body image. On paper, these drugs might be a miracle. In the real world, they’re also becoming a menace.

Before wading too deeply into skepticism, let’s reiterate the stakes. More than 40 percent of U.S. adults, including about 20 percent of children and teens, are considered obese. These Americans face elevated risks for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, and various cancers, along with mobility issues associated with being overweight. During the pandemic, obesity may have tripled the risk of hospitalization with a COVID infection. Among women living in poverty, in particular, obesity rates are higher. Treatment for obesity would increase longevity, improve health, and possibly even save the entire health system hundreds of billions of dollars in the long run.

For years, doctors have encouraged overweight patients to begin with diet and exercise. This sounds like a levelheaded approach to health care. But it’s not always a useful suggestion. “There are lots of people who are very successful in every aspect of their life—in school, at work, and in their communities—and it’s just in this area of being able to control their body weight that they struggle,” Yanovski, who is now a co-director of the Office of Obesity Research at NIH, told me on my podcast, Plain English. “People who haven’t experienced it themselves often think Just push away your plate! But we know it’s not that simple.” Even in NIH studies overseen by behavioral scientists working with extremely motivated patients, more than half of people with obesity can’t maintain their weight-loss goals, she said.

Where behavioral changes have failed, chemistry might succeed. The drug semaglutide mimics a protein in the gut that assists digestion. After a meal, semaglutide stimulates the release of insulin, lowering blood sugar. It also appears to slow the emptying of the stomach, which reduces feelings of hunger. “There also seems to be an effect of these medications in the brain that affects food reward,” Yanovski said. “People on semaglutide report they’re not thinking about food all the time.”

Every drug has side effects. Patients on semaglutide and similar drugs have reported nausea and vomiting, which can be partly managed by starting patients on a low dose. The drugs can also produce gallstones, which are common among all patients undergoing rapid weight loss. Some people using Ozempic report accelerated “facial aging” when they lose fat in their cheeks.

Nevertheless, as a medical achievement, these drugs are stupendous inventions. But as I’ve written in The Atlantic, invention is one thing; implementation is another. And the current rollout of these weight-loss drugs raises questions about ethics, fairness, culture, and America’s berserk relationship with beauty.

Ozempic and Wegovy can cost roughly $1,000 or more a month for people trying to lose weight. Most insurance companies do not cover weight-loss medication. In the U.S., racial and ethnic minorities and low-income Americans have higher rates of diabetes and obesity. But since they cost $12,000 a year or more without insurance coverage—and that’s not even counting higher prices on the black market—the drugs’ first clientele is likely to be the richest Americans, not the poorest.

As demand rises, insurance rules and public policy might adapt. For the first time, the Federal Employee Health Benefit program agreed to cover some anti-obesity medication. Other insurance companies might follow. One Morgan Stanley model projected that semaglutide and similar weight-loss drugs could be a $30 billion market by 2030. That’s about 10 percent of all U.S. drug spending. This level of prevalence is inconceivable without insurance coverage, but coverage of these drugs could warp the cost of private and public insurance to an inconceivable degree. If every obese American were on semaglutide at its current price of $15,000 a year, the total cost would be roughly 10 percent of the entire U.S. economy, or $2.1 trillion. That’s not going to happen.

More likely is that influencers, celebrities, and millionaires will monopolize the market for weight-loss medication. In the past six months, Hollywood Ozempic stories have reached an obnoxious level of ubiquity. TikTok has become overrun with #myozempicjourney testimonials and week-by-week photo collages of disappearing waistlines. After years of magazines and advertisers grappling with the dangers of promoting unrealistic body images, New York magazine reports that “thin is in,” as the waifish “heroin chic” of the 1990s makes its medicalized return to the mainstream.

These drugs will also scramble our relationship with the basic concept of willpower in ways that aren’t cleanly good or bad. How long should doctors recommend that their patients press forward with “diet and exercise” recommendations now that pills and injectables may safely and more consistently keep off weight? Is the U.S. health-care system really ready to treat obesity like it’s any other disease? Obesity is not a failure of the will, Yanovski told me, again and again. “It is a complex chronic disease,” she said. “It affects almost every organ system. If you can successfully treat obesity instead of the individual conditions, it could have a positive impact on health.”

I think that’s right. But there is still something menacing in the rollout of these young miracles. Semaglutide seems to collapse the complex interplay of genes, environment, diet, metabolism, and exercise into a simple injection with a luxury price tag. I’m holding out hope that these drugs will soon augur a public-health revolution. In early 2023, however, they represent an elite cultural makeover more than a medical intervention.

Extreme cold, high inflation and spiralling energy costs are affecting every aspect of American life.

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America has suffered an onslaught of mass shootings in the first weeks of 2023, adding to an ever-growing national community of survivors and grievers.

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

Meet the latest housing-crisis scapegoat. Trump and Facebook’s mutual decay Whatever happened to toilet plumes?

After

California Governor Gavin Newsom was at the hospital with victims of the Monterey Park shooting on Monday when he got pulled away to be briefed about two shootings that had just occurred in Half Moon Bay. The U.S. has experienced more mass shootings so far in 2023 than by this point in any year on record. And with a recent Supreme Court ruling opening the door to dismantling many of America’s remaining firearm regulations, gun violence in America may soon get even worse.

Today I’d like to focus on the communities that mass shootings touch—and the communities that form as a result of this singular type of grief.

Yesterday, my colleague Shirley Li wrote about the complex emotions many Asian Americans are wrestling with after the shootings in California.

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.

“I’d always believed ethnic enclaves such as Monterey Park were uniquely protected,” Shirley writes.

As my colleague Katherine Hu points out, “Regardless of an attacker’s motive, the trauma of violence remains.”

Lives have been senselessly lost. And in the same way that past attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have helped form an invisible, pervasive dread, the attacks of the past few days will continue to affect many of us, compounding our fear and raising the risk of future copycat shootings.

And with each act of gun violence, another community grows: the “unfortunate family” of survivors and those grieving. As my colleague Julie Beck wrote in 2017:

Many people who have lost loved ones in a mass shooting forge friendships and rely on each other for a kind of support that can only come from someone who’s been through the same thing … “There’s an unspoken understanding that no one else really can give you,” [Caren Teves, whose son was killed in the Aurora, Colorado, shooting] said. “There’s no words that even need to be spoken. It is a very unique situation that we’re in, but all too common. I call us the unfortunate family of gun-violence survivors.”

This “family” is made up of hundreds of people processing their experiences in a range of ways, including by taking political action. When I reported on the Parkland, Florida, school shooting for The Atlantic in 2018, I noted that the student survivors’ quick turn to advocating for tighter gun laws was part of “a long tradition of American mourners who channel their grief into political activism.” (The Parkland shooting survivor X González’s recent essay for The Cut, on what it was like to grieve as a teenager in front of the entire country, and where they find themselves five years later, is worth spending time with.)

Social action can provide some comfort. Jeremy Richman, the father of a Sandy Hook student who was killed in the school shooting there in 2012, told me that after the attack, he and his wife got started right away on what would become the Avielle Foundation, a nonprofit named for his daughter and dedicated to preventing violence. “In a blurry 48 hours we created the mission and the vision of the foundation,” Richman said in 2018. “We knew exactly what we were going to do.” On a personal level, he told me, it “motivated us to get out of bed and move.” But they were also “profoundly committed to preventing others from suffering in the way that we were suffering and continue to [suffer to] this day.”

Activism, of course, does not make grief or trauma bearable, and sometimes it is too much to bear entirely. Richman died by suicide in 2019. The lasting, often misunderstood, trauma and grief that result from a mass shooting continue long after the rest of the world has moved on.

Related:

The cognitive dissonance of the Monterey Park shooting The forever aftermath of a mass shooting

Today’s News

Five former Memphis police officers have been charged with murder in the death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man who died three days after an encounter with the officers. The Memphis police chief described the incident as “heinous, reckless and inhumane.” U.S. gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022, according to preliminary data, which indicates solid economic growth. Representative Adam Schiff of California, who led Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, announced that he will run for U.S. Senate in 2024.

Evening Read

Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic

The Meme That Defined a Decade

By Megan Garber

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.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The case for sleepovers The NHL is gutless. Photos: Winners of the 2022 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest

Culture Break

Peacock

Watch. In Poker Face, streaming on Peacock, Natasha Lyonne is extremely fun to watch as a crime-solving waitress on the run.

Listen. Sam Smith’s new album, Gloria, is a reminder that the prominent queer singer thrives at playing to the middle—but that their centrism is still radical.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

For a nuanced look at America’s gun crisis, I recommend my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro’s 2018 essay “The Bullet in My Arm.” Elaina grew up in a gun-loving town in Alabama, as she puts it, but only began to understand America’s relationships with guns once she herself was shot.

— Isabel

A marine researcher found a 'rare,' 4-foot-long American eel washed up in Texas while surveying a beach.