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

Question of the Week

What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve policing and the criminal-justice system?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Earlier this month, a Black man named Keenan Darnell Anderson died at a Southern California hospital hours after he was repeatedly Tasered by LAPD officers as they attempted to arrest him following a traffic accident. In video footage where he alternately seems to be asking for help and confusedly resisting arrest, “the officers tell Anderson that if he does not stop resisting, they will Taser him,” MSNBC reported. “The video shows one officer, who appears to be Black, placing his elbow on Anderson's neck to pin him to the ground. At one point, Anderson yells, ‘They’re trying to George Floyd me.’” The story continues, “Police Chief Michel Moore said Anderson had committed a felony hit-and-run and tried to ‘get into another person's car without their permission.’”

I have no idea how to apportion blame in this particular death, but in an opinion article, also at MSNBC, Ja’han Jones contrasted “the widespread public outrage over Floyd’s death” and the dearth of attention paid to the death in Los Angeles. “What are we to make of this difference?” he wrote. “Has the public gotten busier since then? Crueler? More fickle? More tolerant of violence? More futile in our response to it? Where are the black Instagram squares, the corporate news releases claiming to stand for racial justice, the social media posts about white folks listening and learning about their privilege?” But Jones neglects to acknowledge that none of those responses did anything to lessen the number of police killings.

A subsequent Slate article titled “What Happened to the National Outrage Over Police Killings?” offered variations on the same theme. Its author, Shirin Ali, began by asserting that “an ongoing analysis by The Washington Post found Black Americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans—and in 2022, police killed the highest number of people on record.” That’s misleading, as the criminologist Peter Moskos pointed out: There were more police killings in 2022 than any year in the Washington Post database of fatal police shootings, but the newspaper has only been keeping track since 2015.

There is evidence to suggest police killings are much lower today than in the past. Moskos has found historical data on 18 major cities showing a 69 percent drop in police shootings since the early- to mid-1970s. Police in New York City and Los Angeles both shoot fewer people than they did then, even though the cities’ populations are now much bigger.

Nevertheless, police in America still kill far more people than in other liberal democracies. The Yale professor Phillip Goff, the co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, told Slate that although periodic reforms to American policing have improved it over the decades, police reform has also been stymied. The culprit, in his telling, is “people who think the best way to manage vulnerable Black communities is to lock them up or commit acts of violence whenever they are in a place where they shouldn’t be, where they violate a law that was made to give them opportunities to lock the folks up.”

Reading both articles, I was struck not so much by what was said as by what was neglected: hugely significant factors that are obviously influencing how Americans respond to police shootings compared with how they responded in 2013, when protesters marked the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; or during ensuing years, as #BlackLivesMatter began growing from a hashtag into an international movement; or in 2020, when Floyd was killed and the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in America and abroad.

What happened to the national outrage over police killings? It has been muted, in part, by a spike in gun homicides that dwarfs police killings in the number of Black lives that it has destroyed. The outrage has also been muted, in part, by trepidation after the weeks in 2020 when several anti-racist protests were marred by incidents of arson, vandalism, and looting, resulting in as much as $2 billion in damage and as many as  19 people killed. If history is any guide, affected neighborhoods will suffer for decades, disproportionately harming Black and brown communities and businesses.

And although it has always been hard to disentangle the exact relationship between the hearteningly widespread, decentralized activist movement Black Lives Matter and the coalition of groups called the Movement for Black Lives, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the Black Lives Matter PAC, and more, outrage is more muted now in part because of infighting among some prominent activists within these groups. Several individuals have come under scathing criticism from some of the very families they purported to champion, or are doing who-knows-what-exactly (some bought luxury real estate) with an unprecedented windfall of grassroots contributions.

Those of us who still want to improve policing need to face reality: Probing why Americans are reacting differently to the most recent death of a Black man after an encounter with police, without at least grappling with all that went wrong in recent years, is doomed to fail.  

Long before Black Lives Matter’s ascent, I was among those inveighing against policing injustices and America’s catastrophic War on Drugs, and trying and failing to significantly reduce police misconduct. Black Lives Matter arose in part because most of us who came before it largely failed. When it did, I hoped it would succeed spectacularly in reducing police killings and agreed with at least its premise that the issue warranted attention.

But it is now clear that the Black Lives Matter approach has largely failed too.

Despite an awareness-raising campaign as successful as any in my lifetime, untold millions of dollars in donations, and a position of influence within the progressive criminal-justice-reform coalition, there are just as many police killings as before Black Lives Matter began. Politically, a powerful faction inside the movement sought to elect more radical progressives; Donald Trump and Joe Biden won the next presidential elections. That same faction sought to “defund the police”; police budgets are now rising, and “defund” is unpopular with majorities of every racial group.

Whether or not you think those reforms should have prevailed, they did not. If impact matters more than intent, the criminal-justice-reform movement needs an alternative to Black Lives Matter that has better prospects for actually improving real lives. Today, almost every American is aware of police killings as an issue. Awareness has been raised, and returns are diminished.

I wish I knew the best way forward. I lament the breakup of the constructive alliance of libertarians, progressives, and religious conservatives who cooperated during the Obama Administration to achieve some worthy criminal-justice reforms, and I continue to be impressed with the ethos Jill Leovy sketched out in the book Ghettoside, offering one strategy that would (in my estimation) dramatically increase equity in American policing. (I also urge everyone to revisit this newsletter’s previous installments on the death penalty, which highlight the powerful abolitionist arguments of my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig, and the war on drugs, which keeps imposing staggering costs while failing to prevent pandemic opioid deaths.)

This week’s question is “What is the best way forward for Americans who want to improve the criminal-justice system?” I hope to air perspectives as diverse as the country, and perhaps plant seeds that grow into constructive new approaches.

Civilian Oversight and Its Discontents

At the Marshall Project, Jamiles Lartey describes the political battle in many municipalities over police-oversight boards, and argues that police unions frequently try to undermine their mission:

Resistance to oversight boards comes primarily from pro-law enforcement groups, especially police unions, who often make concerted efforts to dilute the power of the boards. Law enforcement voices frequently argue that civilians, by definition, don’t have the right knowledge to evaluate police actions. “It would be akin to putting a plumber in charge of the investigation of airplane crashes,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, told the Washington Post in 2021. When they can’t stop these oversight agencies, or weaken their powers, police unions sometimes seek to have allies placed in vacant board positions. In Chicago, where proponents recently won passage of a new oversight structure, WBEZ reported this week that the largest local police union is spending money “in an attempt to extend the union’s power into a domain created specifically to oversee the officers who make up the union’s membership.”

It’s common for negotiations about oversight bodies to include debate on whether people with close ties to the police (like former officers or family members of officers) are eligible to serve.

On the other side of the spectrum, some police abolitionists push back against these boards, arguing that they work “against deeper change.” It’s also not uncommon for community activists who initially back oversight boards to turn against them over time, frustrated by a lack of results. That’s how things are playing out in Dallas, where activists and board members are both expressing frustration with a board that had its powers expanded after the 2018 killing of Botham Jean by then-officer Amber Guyger. One board member told Bolts Magazine that their efforts were being “stonewalled,” “marginalized” and “put in a corner” by the department’s non-cooperation. The political wrangling about oversight boards is only one way that police departments and unions push back on accountability. In Boston, which rolled out its own independent watchdog body in 2021 (to mixed reviews), Mayor Michelle Wu is currently locked in a battle over the police union contract, and her desire to strengthen the disciplinary process for officer misconduct.

Continuing the DEI Conversation

In our last installment, I promised to run additional reader responses to the Question of the Week about diversity training and associated initiatives within organizations. Today’s collection explores how readers feel about the intersection of corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals and hiring practices.

Andy feels frustrated by a lack of specificity about what is expected of him––and a climate where open conversation and debate seems too risky to engage in:

In my company, we have a VP of Diversity, who has made a couple of presentations about how we “need” to be more diverse. But what does that look like? I’m in software. I’m a manager who has 10 people reporting to me. Five are white men (one an Orthodox Jew––how does he fit in?). One is an Asian man, one is an Asian woman, two are Indian women, and one is an Indian man. One of the Indian women is my highest-paid employee, deservedly. So, how much work do I have to do in order to make my team diverse?

So instead, we focus on “underrepresented,” which means women, Black, and Hispanic. Maybe gay or trans. How many "groups" do we put on the underrepresented list? Which ones? By the way, the other development manager working with me is a Black man, and our testing and product managers are Hispanic men. I’ve hired maybe 20 employees over my career. The majority are Indian, then Asian, men. My last few openings, I’ve had women recruiters, which, research says, is supposed to tilt the candidates toward women. Not working, I guess. Or maybe it’s actually reflective of the pool? Of course, there isn’t much room for discourse. I’m debating whether I should post this article in our “random” slack channel. Will I just get in trouble?

Jack hypothesizes that diversity work is less appealing when resources are scarce:

I took the all-day diversity class as a middle manager. The company was going through downsizing, which creates a zero-sum mentality that is not a good companion to confessions of moral turpitude, the holy grail of the day. Then the multimillion-dollar fee charged by the consultant came up, igniting two-way hostility.  A total fiasco. I concluded that movies would do a better job helping people internalize the diversity concepts.

D. believes that, for some positions, job candidates from historically underrepresented groups should get hired over white candidates for the sake of diversity, as opposed to a policy of strict nondiscrimination. But he is frustrated by his perception that his employer won’t admit that preference:

I am a card-carrying liberal teaching at a Canadian university. All members of hiring committees are mandated to do periodic equity training in order to sit on the committee, so I’ve done this at least twice. My experience is that the training is as good or as bad as the trainers: my second time was competent, boring, professional; it explained Canadian law and provincial law and university policies, and gave a few decent tips on how to balance the three when they are in conflict, which is pretty often.

But the first time was so insulting to our intelligence. What I most remember is the trainer’s complete ignorance of, or refusal to be honest about, affirmative action (which I support, by the way). The message was you must hire the best candidate, but make sure the best candidate is from an equity-deserving group. Our question: “Can we advertise that for diversity reasons we are only looking for, say, an Indigenous person to teach Indigenous studies?” The answer: “No, you can’t do that.” Our question: “So we have to accept applications from people who in reality have no chance of making the short list?” Their answer: “Hire the best person,” but with the implication that it would be a bad outcome to have a non-Indigenous instructor of Indigenous studies. I actually support the idea of diversity-oriented searches to address historical exclusion and present underrepresentation. Again, I’m a liberal.  But I don’t support lying in job ads.  

It’s the exact equivalent, in reverse, of the NFL mandate to give no-chance-in-hell interviews to minority head-coach candidates. So is the problem the training, or is it Canadian law, which refuses to call diversity preference or compensatory preference by its name, and just calls it “equity”? I’m not sure, but the English language weeps either way. To be clear, though, my awful experience was years back, and the second time, the trainers were pretty honest with us about the contradictions between laws at various levels.

Paul argues that the current approach to DEI generates a backlash from people who feel discriminated against:

I am a Ph.D. candidate at a flagship state university in the Midwest, and recently, a call was put out for scholarships and research funding. At the beginning of the application was the caveat that “priority will be given to underrepresented groups.” Although I am a military veteran, a “nontraditional” student (i.e. middle aged), and come from a rural and “underprivileged” background (whatever that means), I am quite persuaded that none of these “underrepresented” categories is what they meant. And that’s the problem.  

In modern academic circles, DEI initiatives engage in a good deal of coy linguistic posturing that is intended to signal “justice” but that actually sows confusion and resentment. It is well understood on campus that racial and sexual identities trump all other aspects of background and character, and that the commanding heights of student and faculty ambitions are occupied by a class of technocrats engaged in setting historical injustices straight. They do so, paradoxically, by engaging in precisely the kind of arbitrary and capricious discrimination that caused the historical injustices in the first place. And one daren’t lift so much as an eyebrow of critical inquiry (“Can we have a list of the groups to be favored and why?”) without risking professional sanction and social animus.

And even if these DEI programs were models of carefully and individually tailored merit-apportioning, it would hardly matter, since the general perception is quite the opposite. Like the Irish who “need not apply,” talented and ambitious men and women (if they are the wrong identity) quietly skulk to the sidelines to wait for the madness to end.

They don’t even look one another in the face.

Mike has concluded that it’s a waste of time for him to apply for jobs at an employer that is emphasizing certain kinds of DEI initiatives:

I was part of a layoff last week with nearly a universal demographic makeup: straight, white-looking men. The company was already 60 percent female. I have an MBA and a bunch of technical certifications. I look at data and can do analysis. Before I even respond to an inbound request from a prospective employer, I look at the DEI targets. If those targets require significant headcount growth or layoffs to meet goals based on historical trends … I will not apply or interview. I will point my POC and female friends their way.

It’s purely a numbers game.

The leaders are telling me they don’t want people like me … so they don’t get people like me. The shift from meritocracy to equity is going to cause businesses not focused on DEI to gain an advantage in the long term. I’m not less talented than I used to be; I am just the wrong race—and DEI is clear that being white makes me lower quality. There was one company I did accept an inbound with. They put their DEI targets against proportional talent metrics, and they wanted to promote proportionally. It was more work and didn’t look as good as the aggressive virtue signal, but I know if I land there, I just have to execute to win. TLDR: As a white male, when I see DEI, I know it normally means “We don’t want you, we don’t like you, and we will promote or hire literally anyone else if we can.”

James feels discarded by organizations with what he sees as an insufficient commitment to diversity and inclusion:

In my experience, as a visibly queer, Indigenous person in various leadership roles over the past decade, all that is being fulfilled by many diversity efforts––classes, webinars, newsletters, certification programs, and the like––is the documentation of completion rather than the work that should and must be done in order to actually effect change.

The people we should be listening to are Asian women, Black women, Indigenous women, queer women, and femmes of color—they are often at the bottom of the wage pool, subjected to microaggressions and outright discrimination. I’ve had a nonprofit leader ask me why we needed “another DEI class” when she had a certificate from just two or three years ago; I’ve had an instructor who touts a certification of excellence granted by some national institution or other using slurs and derogatory language about Indigenous people like it’s industry jargon. Because it is: Microaggressions; belittling remarks based on race, gender, identity, presentation, hair, makeup, clothes, body type; and the expectation of willingness to step into a stereotype are what we see. The closest thing many of us come to “inclusion” is that we’re all discarded in equal measure.

In an essay that takes aim at TikTok, Cory Doctorow puts forth a general theory of tech giants:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die … This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

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

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is staff writer John Hendrickson, who has just published a new book, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter, which you can read an excerpt of here. John has written for The Atlantic about, among other topics, President Joe Biden’s stutter and, most recently, I Didn’t See You There, an experimental documentary about living with a disability that he calls “kinetic and compelling.” John will read anything by Richard Price, bought tickets for all five of The Walkmen’s upcoming NYC reunion shows, and has probably watched The Fugitive 50 times.

But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life How Noma made fine dining far worse Stop trying to ask “smart questions.”

The Culture Survey: John Hendrickson

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I spent nearly a decade waiting and praying for The Walkmen to maybe someday reunite, doubting that it would ever happen. To me, they are the unsung heroes of the turn-of-the-millennium New York rock renaissance (think: The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio, Interpol—all the Meet Me in the Bathroom bands). Recently, when The Walkmen announced a five-night run in Manhattan in April, I impulsively bought tickets for all five shows. I will be screaming every word to every song.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: After cycling through The Office, The Larry Sanders Show, Parks and Recreation, a slew of Ken Burns documentaries, and several seasons of Alone, my wife and I have started watching NewsRadio at night before we fall asleep. Again: Unsung! Every line Phil Hartman delivers is masterful. Stephen Root, of Barry and Office Space fame, does deadpan humor like no one else. And it’s a bit surreal to watch Joe Rogan in one of his early roles, playing a meathead named Joe.

An actor I would watch in anything: Bill Hader

My favorite blockbuster: The Fugitive is as close as you can get to a perfect—for lack of a better phrase—popcorn movie. Brisk pacing! Snappy dialogue! A few huge action sequences counterbalanced with grisled guys in frumpy suits working the phones! I’ve probably seen it 50 times. [Related: Hollywood doesn’t make movies like The Fugitive anymore.]

Best novel I’ve recently read: I’m currently reading Laura Zigman’s Small World, about two middle-aged sisters who move in together, bringing decades of family baggage into the house. I don’t want to give too much of it away, but I’m in awe of Zigman’s ability to weave biting humor and tenderness so closely together.

An author I will read anything by: Richard Price [Related: Two good old-fashioned young novelists]

A song I’ll always dance to: Le Tigre, “Deceptacon.” Hit play and try to keep your body still. It’s impossible!

“When the Walkmen announced a five-night run in Manhattan in April, I impulsively bought tickets for all five shows,” John says. Above: The band performing in Washington, D.C., in 2013 (Leigh Vogel / Getty for Thread)

My go-to karaoke song: Patti Smith, “Because the Night.” I’m a horrible singer, but singing is salvation for me. I like to belt this one out on a Friday or Saturday night at Montero’s, an old fisherman’s dive bar near the East River in Brooklyn. I usually throw in a kick when the pre-chorus starts. I write about this a little bit in my book, Life on Delay, but singing relies on a different part of the brain than we use for speaking, and I never stutter when I sing. It’s freeing. Scores of current or former stutterers have turned to music at some point in their lives: Elvis Presley, Kendrick Lamar, Carly Simon, Ed Sheeran, Bill Withers, Noel Gallagher—to name just a few.

My favorite sad song: Charles Bradley’s cover of Black Sabbath’s “Changes” absolutely slays me. It transcends what you think of as recorded music—it’s as if Bradley’s soul is imprinted on the track. The full backstory about Bradley and his mother around the time of the recording makes it all the more poignant.

My favorite angry song: Thee Oh Sees, “I Come From The Mountain.” Whenever I’m stressed or anxious, I crank this as loud as I possibly can and head-bang at my desk. Colson Whitehead told 60 Minutes that they’re on his writing playlist!

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Annie Lowrey’s deeply vivid, personal account of her experience with pregnancy was the most memorable piece of journalism I read last year, full stop. It’ll stay with me forever.

A good recommendation I recently received: David Sims recently recommended to me the Apple series For All Mankind, sort of like Mad Men crossed with Apollo 13. [Related: How the space fantasy became banal]

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Watch this clip from “The PriceMaster.” It’s one minute of your life. Trust me.

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Gal Beckerman, Kate Lindsay, Xochitl Gonzalez, Spencer Kornhaber, Jenisha Watts, David French, Shirley Li, David Sims, Lenika Cruz, Jordan Calhoun, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert.

The Week Ahead

Maybe I Do, a romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Luke Bracey, William H. Macy, and Emma Roberts (in theaters Friday) Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, a posthumous book by David Graeber (Tuesday) The docuseries The 1619 Project, an expansion of the book by Nikole Hannah-Jones (first two episodes premiere Thursday on Hulu)

More in Culture

The film that accurately captures teen grief When good pain turns into bad pain This is the band that’s supposedly saving rock and roll? The calamitous lies of adulthood A slick mystery that takes place entirely on screens Skinamarink is a delightful nightmare. The line that Velma crossed

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Supreme Court justices do not seem to be getting along. Despite everything you think you know, America is on the right track. How Joe Biden wins again

Photo Album

A snow leopard against a backdrop of the mountains of Ladakh in northern India (© Sascha Fonseca / Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

Check out some entries in this year’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest (and vote for your favorite).

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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

Last week I asked, “What do you think about meat grown in a lab? Would you eat it? Will your grandchildren?”

Matt expects a species-defining shift:

Evolutionary leaps in our development have been marked by the development of tools, farming, domesticated animals, and sadly and tragically, industrial farming and food processing. Lab-grown meat is the next evolution of our meat consumption as a species.  

I.S. is excited.

“Heck yes, I’ll eat it!” she wrote. “If it tastes like the real deal and is safe, absolutely! I stopped eating factory-farmed meat two years ago, and I miss it so much! Especially bacon. Oh boy, do I miss bacon!”   

Meredith believes the technology will be widely embraced:

I stopped eating meat after being profoundly moved by an article in The Atlantic about nonhuman species having consciousness (“A Journey Into the Animal Mind,” by Ross Andersen). Meat grown in a lab is, so far as I can tell, ethical and humane. It can be produced in a more sanitary environment and saves animals and meat-production workers from the horror of meat slaughter. That is likely to encourage skeptics to try it. Given the choice between cruelty and kindness, I believe most humans will choose kindness.

Ruth reminds us that some vegetarians won’t want to consume lab-grown meat:

Lab-grown meat is a wonderful idea if it can prevent billions of animals being brought into existence merely to be tortured and die. I would not eat it. I am a vegetarian and I do not like the taste and texture of flesh or of substances that try to imitate flesh. I’m sorry to find that many restaurants have replaced their veggie and bean burgers with the Beyond Burger that I find repulsive. However, all of these substitutes are great for people who like the taste and texture of flesh. I applaud it and hope it succeeds worldwide.

Victoria expects her own attitude to change:

Would I eat lab-grown meat?

Right now, I might, in the way I’ve eaten escargot: skeptically. I suspect there is something lost in the bland sameness of a petri dish, and nothing can capture the nuances of diet and environment that impact an animal’s growth. But I also expect it will become commonplace and I’ll eat it without a second thought, because anyone with the slightest conscience can see that flooding animals with hormones to get them to grow unnaturally large—while keeping them in tiny cages and filthy, crowded conditions—is cruel.

John is a skeptic:

My spidey senses are telling me this is much ado about nothing. I doubt that the human population of Earth can be supported by lab-grown meat. If it tastes like chicken and costs a similar price, yes, I would eat it. But generally, I think putting our food in the hands of engineers, chemists, and industrialists is a bad, if unavoidable, plan. I’ve always been jealous of my friend who feeds his family with wild harvested game. Just last night, I made dinner from fish I caught. I’d have to spend a lot more time outdoors to pull that off in my household, but I could do it. And animals would live their lives free and wild, not confined to cages barely bigger than their oversize, genetically engineered bodies. Factory farms are a moral catastrophe, but feeding this many people practically requires [them].

Lavina opposes lab-grown meat:

The promise of lab-grown meat rings hollow. It will lead to new problems. It ignores the concept that food is life and replaces the normal processing of food with fake, lab-created food.

Our food is not a commodity; it is not “stuff” put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Fake meat ignores the diversity and cultural aspects of food. Its use of genetically modified ingredients to give it that “fake meat taste” will lead to disease and alter the gut biome. Why would we continue in this direction when diseases and poor health are at an all-time high? Instead of finding ways to improve our biodiversity and ecosystems by using regenerative farming techniques to improve climate change, the goal is to force people to consume fake meat and fake food products under the guise of [fighting] climate change regardless of local cultures, climates, and ecosystems. It is about control and profits. These fake foods are being promoted by billionaires who have no knowledge or consciousness of how food satisfies the soul and connects people.

I heard from several readers who believed that lab-grown meat was something billionaires wanted to foist on everyone else––and from many non-billionaire readers who are enthusiastic about lab-grown meat to spare animals or in hopes that it would be better for the planet.

J. doubts that nature can be improved upon:

Chickens are precisely optimized by evolution to make more chickens efficiently. Every part needed to make another chicken from cheap feed is right there. Growing chicken-muscle cells in an expensive, controlled artificial environment is destined to be inefficient by comparison. Using lab-grown meat won’t free up cropland used for animal feed; we will be increasing demand for the same foods, only now they will be fed to cells in the lab. It’s like charging an electric vehicle with a coal power plant, then claiming it’s a zero-emissions car. Anything can look green if you close your eyes tightly enough.

Zachary wants to hasten the arrival of lab-grown meat:

We need a Project Manhattan–level commitment toward getting the clean-meat industry past its growing pains and up to scale as soon as possible. This would solve a massive contributor to climate change. Most people will never become vegans. The world’s middle class is swelling, and with it, a demand to eat meat that the market will try to meet one way or another. A Project Meathattan is also politically palatable as it would demand no personal sacrifice from people. It’s a win-win for virtually everyone but the industrial livestock industry. I think once clean meat is at a competitive price point and taste, our culture’s attitude will flip like a switch overnight and it will become regarded as significantly more unethical to eat slaughtered meat. We will ask ourselves why we didn’t try to get this technology up to scale even sooner once we see it was possible.

Mark doesn’t want lab-grown meat forced on him:

People already eat highly processed food. This is usually not healthy. Artificial meat is another processed food. If people want to eat artificial meat, let them eat it. Just don’t create legislation that forces me to eat what you’ve decided is best for you. It’s not all-or-nothing. Not everyone has to eat the same thing. I’m going to keep eating what I have evolved to eat over the last million years. I’m going to continue to eat fresh vegetables, meat from chickens, cows, etc., and grains preferably grown in the United States.

MC anticipates a class divide:

Lab-grown meat is a trend most of us will participate in, perhaps unknowingly. Similarly to the GMO debate, I imagine a scenario where we’ll see restaurants priding themselves on being “lab-free.” The scalability of the industry seems likely to move lab-grown meat into fast food. Again, we will have another class demarcation. McDonald’s and Taco Bell will be able to fatten margins (as long as it scales) by replacing farm-grown meat with lab meat. Those on the lower echelons of society will be the mass market for “new meat.” Until it gets out of the Uncanny Valley, lab-grown meat will be a fad. But eventually it’ll be common. I don’t imagine future generations will care whether their Big Mac is real or not. Just if it tastes right. Ultimately, I don’t think anyone likes to see the sausage being made. Our industrial food complex feeds the world, and fewer people suffer due to technology. We have to improve, or the future will starve.

Mina can’t imagine killing animals if there is a real-meat alternative:

This is one of the most exciting discoveries man has made. I have always been a person who hates the idea of sentient creatures being slaughtered to please our tastes. Hypocritically, I have continued to eat meat after multiple attempts to stop. The substitutes at that time bore no resemblance to the real thing, by taste or texture. I couldn’t stand them.

I’m not sure if people can grasp what a game changer this would be for our planet. Between the environmental blessings of no more livestock destroying lands, water, and air with their living by-products, we can have a more respectful and peaceful approach to living creatures (which studies have shown leads to more positive feelings for others, both human and animals). No matter how hardened they might be to meat production, the workers in slaughterhouses and meat-packing facilities have high rates of family dysfunction and substance abuse, and also live mostly poverty-stricken lives. Imagine the toll this would take on you, to kill these animals one after another while they scream and fight to get away … I’ve seen it up close, and it is a sight you never get over.

I can’t wait for the day when I can finally access this new meat and live without guilt. Would I ever eat meat from living creatures again? Absolutely not. What would be the reasoning, when you have the same product on your plate without taking lives in the process?

Carolyn believes that “cultivated meat is critical to our global fight against climate change.” She writes:

I was raised vegetarian, so I’ve never knowingly eaten meat or understood the desire for it, but I’ve grown to understand that meat is deeply visceral, emotional, and cultural for billions of people. Despite telling folks how bad meat is for the planet, for animal welfare, for slaughterhouse workers, and for their health, global meat consumption is at an all-time high. Instead of focusing on changing people’s ingrained behaviors and habits, we should focus on changing meat itself. While I’m content eating tofu and chickpeas, for most people, nothing can beat the taste of meat except for, well, meat. And that’s what cultivated meat is.

I ate cultivated chicken from GOOD Meat (which currently sells it in Singapore) at COP27 in Egypt late last year. While l can’t tell you that it “tasted like chicken” (because I have no idea what chicken tastes like), it was fleshy and kind of grossed me out—so I’m thinking we’re on the right track? Plus, the meat eaters at my table fully approved. I think we are a ways off from cultivated meat going mainstream, but I am hopeful that what I tasted that day is part of the future and that the next generation looks back at the way we raised and slaughtered animals and thinks, Why did they do it that way?

Patrick runs a commercial cattle ranch with his family on the central coast of California. He writes:

Commercial cattle ranches focus on cattle headed for consumption. I grew up on the ranch then moved away for about 15 years to work in engineering. About six years ago I moved back to the area with my family to get more involved in the ranch. Since I’ve come back, I’ve been surprised to discover that the Meat Utopia is here. The United States is producing more beef than ever, with fewer cattle, and at a higher quality. I see these changes both in the national numbers and also in the way we do business on our own ranch.

The reasons are myriad. Genetic testing and performance monitoring has helped producers select for better-performing animals. Improvements in vaccination have reduced waste, illness, and death. A greater percentage of cattle have higher-quality carcasses. And North American cattle markets are optimizing international trade to match the desired cuts to the appropriate markets. These advancements have real-world implications to reduce the environmental impact of beef while improving the consumer product and keeping costs down. And by acreage, nearly all of the grazing is done on so-called marginal lands: land that is too arid or too steep to support farming.

Erin is in the same business:

My husband and I are cattle producers on a farm in rural west Alabama. Pretty obviously, I do not have moral qualms about eating meat. I’m an omnivore. I am biologically designed to convert meat into the vitamins, minerals, and proteins that sustain me. And I like it. Even so, I can envision a day when vat-grown meat is a primary source of protein. It will have to be ramped up to scale and it will have to get a lot cheaper, but it will be a significant source of protein for a growing world population. That doesn’t mean there will not be a niche market for the uber-wealthy to purchase beef.

For the record, there are a lot of misconceptions about animal agriculture. Cows spend all but the last six weeks of their lives eating grass. They may get mineral supplements as well, especially in winter, but very little grain, if any. Cattle can convert grass to protein. Humans cannot. We cannot digest cellulose. Perhaps in the rain forests of Brazil, the pastures could, and should, be restored to forest. But you are not going to grow a forest just anywhere. There will not be forests in west Texas or even in Kansas.

There is a lot of land in the world not suited for crops or forests that will grow grass. And one of the most efficient converters of grass into usable protein is a cow. Cows provide more than meat. There are hundreds of products produced from cattle: marshmallows, leather, gelatin, fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, and more. Just Google “products made from cattle” and you will be astounded. Vat-grown meat? It’s coming, but not in my lifetime. We’ll keep on growing cattle like we have for 40 years. And that is all I have time to say, because I need to move hay out of the barn for the cows before the rain comes.

Kathleen hopes lab-grown pork is delicious:

The only meat I will consume comes from local hunters, whose practices I know—quick, clean kill, full harvest and usage. The animal has had a full and healthy and natural life. And as my dear husband told me years ago, “Honey, nothing in nature dies of old age.” I would buy lab-grown meat in a heartbeat, as soon as it became available and was proven to be environmentally healthy and healthy for human consumption.

My primary motivation for [this] is animal cruelty. Breeding, raising, transporting, and slaughtering “food” animals is monstrous. In Canada, there are the farm lobbies, fishing-and-hunting lobbies, and vendor lobbies—all with massive clout—opposing any significant change. Seeing covert videos taken within animal “businesses” did it for me. And there’s the hideous environmental damage and the damage to human health caused by this “industry.” Altogether, inexcusable. I’m already buying and consuming “artificial” meat but would greatly welcome more variety. (I REALLY miss pork, and there are no pork substitutes available where I live … yet, I hope.)

Claire feels queasy about lab-grown meat:

I tend to be wary of chemically simulated foodstuffs …… so “chicken” fashioned from a sort of ooze during a process that the company prefers not to describe and that was also described as “gray” and “stringy” sounds atrocious. I’m unsure I would be brave enough to try that, nor would I serve it to an enemy. I hope restauranteurs in Singapore at least place an asterisk next to chicken on menus, with a corresponding footnote. Marketing euphemisms seem more likely: “ethically derived chicken,” etc. In spite of the “Utopia” marketing angle, I wonder if the cost to simulate chicken would be a net positive or if it would better serve Singapore to allocate some land for agricultural purposes.

Skya thinks artificial meat has promise for feeding pets:

Personally, I am a vegan and will remain so for health reasons. My cats, on the other hand … While humans are dragging their feet for various reasons, all the domesticated animals of the world could be eating laboratory meat right now, making a large dent in the damage that our passion for pets and other captive carnivores causes to the planet.

Karl gives two cheers for lab-grown meat … but not three:

I’ve been a vegan for ethical reasons since the end of college, so I welcome any developments that help usher in a future where we slaughter fewer animals just because their taste makes us happy. Based on animal-welfare laws (which largely protect animals such as cats and dogs), it’s clear that, collectively, we believe that animals should be treated humanely and their suffering should be minimized. However, we generally don’t extend these protections to the billions of farm animals living today. So reducing their consumption reduces their numbers and thus reduces their collective suffering. I think the reduction of suffering should be an easy position to support.

The environmental benefits have the potential to be incredible as well. A transition away from the inefficient practice of raising animals for food would lower our carbon footprint, reduce our water consumption, and save millions of acres of natural land from destruction. But I wouldn’t suddenly change my diet to match the 200-plus lbs of meat the average American consumes each year, regardless of the ethics. In the developed world, our level of meat consumption is unhealthy and is an immense contributor to disease burden. This is in terms of mortality, morbidity, health-related quality of life, and cost. Maybe we could all eat occasional lab-grown meat. It does taste good. But I don’t think it should be a regular thing. We should all cut back on our meat consumption.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

After declining to renew the contract of an adjunct professor, the president of Hamline University issued a statement that underscores the need to defend academic freedom in American universities.

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

The gas-stove debate exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics. Are our immune systems stuck in 2020? Netanyahu’s betrayal of democracy is a betrayal of Israel.

Student Drivers

Unless you follow academic politics, you might have missed the recent controversy at Hamline University, a small private college in St. Paul, Minnesota. The short version is that a professor named Erika López Prater showed students in her global-art-history class a 14th-century painting depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Aware that many Muslims regard such images as sacrilege, she warned ahead of time that she was going to show the picture and offered to excuse any student who did not want to view it.

Professor López Prater’s contract has not been renewed, and she will not be returning to the classroom. The university strenuously denies that she was fired. Of course, colleges let adjuncts go all the time, often reluctantly. But this, to me, seems like something more.

I began my 35-year teaching career in the late 1980s and was once a tenure-track faculty member at an elite college, where I was one of a handful of registered Republicans among a mostly liberal faculty. I have been denied tenure at one school and granted it at two others. I have been an adjunct, contract faculty (that is, working on a long-term contract but without actual tenure), a department chair, and a tenured full professor. I have led a tenure committee, and I have written tenure and promotion letters for candidates at other schools at the request of their institution. I have been a faculty member in a U.S. government institution, where I had to balance my right to self-expression against important and necessary legal restrictions on politicking in the classroom.

So I think I have a pretty clear idea of what goes on in classrooms. I know what academic freedom means. I think I know what “fired” looks like, and it seems to me that López Prater was fired—a conclusion that seems especially likely in the wake of a highly defensive public letter the school’s president, Fayneese Miller, wrote about the whole business.

After a piece about the controversy appeared in The New York Times, Miller issued a statement in which she decried how Hamline is now “under attack from forces outside our campus.”

Various so-called stakeholders interpreted the incident, as reported in various media, as one of “academic freedom.” The Times went so far as to cite PEN America’s claim that what was happening on our campus was one of the “most egregious violations of academic freedom” it had ever encountered.

It begs the question, “How?”

Allow me to interpret. By “so-called stakeholders,” Miller, I think, means people who believe this issue affects them, but who should buzz off and mind their own business. (And while I’m at it, stakeholders is a bit of jargon that should be banned from education.) About López Prater, Miller said, “The decision not to offer her another class was made at the unit level”—I assume here she means the department in which López Prater worked—”and in no way reflects on her ability to adequately teach the class.” Oh? Then what prompted “the decision at the unit level”?

Miller then lists the impeccably liberal credentials of Hamline as a school, none of which have anything to do with this case. After all of this throat clearing, she gets to the real questions she thinks should have been raised about academic freedom.

First, does your defense of academic freedom infringe upon the rights of students in violation of the very principles you defend? Second, does the claim that academic freedom is sacrosanct, and owes no debt to the traditions, beliefs, and views of students, comprise a privileged reaction?

This makes no sense. The “rights” of students were not jeopardized, and no curriculum owes a “debt” to any student’s “traditions, beliefs, and views.” (Indeed, if you don’t want your traditions, beliefs, or views challenged, then don’t come to a university, at least not to study anything in the humanities or the social sciences.) Miller’s view, it seems, is that academic freedom really only means as much freedom as your most sensitive students can stand, an irresponsible position that puts the university, the classroom, and the careers of scholars in the hands of students who are inexperienced in the subject matter, new to academic life, and, often, still in the throes of adolescence.

This, as I have written elsewhere, is contrary to the very notion of teaching itself. (It is also not anything close to the bedrock 1940 statement on the matter from the American Association of University Professors.) The goal of the university is to create educated and reasoning adults, not to shelter children against the pain of learning that the world is a complicated place. Classes are not a restaurant meal that must be served to students’ specifications; they are not a stand-up act that must make students laugh but never offend them. Miller is leaving the door open for future curricular challenges.

I myself have issued warnings for materials I show in class, notably the gory British nuclear-war movie Threads. I have offered to excuse students who might be disturbed by it, and I would not want someone to interfere with my class on nuclear weapons any more than I would interfere with anyone else’s about art history. There are, to be sure, plenty of times when professors do go off the rails, which is why their performance and syllabi—especially those of untenured faculty and outside adjuncts—are reviewed, in most schools, by a departmental or divisional committee. That doesn’t seem to be what happened here. A student complained, which apparently set in motion several events, including López Prater being summoned by a dean and a Hamline administrator sending an email to campus employees saying that certain actions taken in an online class were “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

Noting the school’s traditional Methodist mission that includes doing “all the good you can,” Miller adds, “To do all the good you can means, in part, minimizing harm.” Again, this is risible: The most effective way to avoid harm would be to walk into the classroom and ask the students what they’d like to talk about, let them vote on it, and give a veto to anyone who might be offended by the class’s choice.

Academic freedom is not an open invitation to be a jerk. It is not a license for faculty to harass students or to impose their will on them. But if all it means is that professors keep their jobs only at the sufferance of students, then it means nothing at all.

A significant part of the problem in American universities is the attack on tenure. López Prater was an adjunct—instructors who are far more vulnerable to dismissal at will. But that subject is too big to tackle today; I’ll write more on it here soon.

Related:

Academics are really, really worried about their freedom. How to fix the bias against free speech on campus

Today’s News

The annual inflation rate continued to slow in December, a new report shows. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the handling of classified documents that were found at President Joe Biden’s former office and his Delaware home. A judge set a new preliminary hearing date in June for the University of Idaho shooting suspect.

Evening Read

Tyler Comrie / Getty; The Atlantic

A Society That Can’t Get Enough of Work

By Lily Meyer

Work is not going well lately. Exhaustion and burnout are rampant; many young people are reconsidering whether they owe all their energy to their jobs, as seen in the widespread popularity of “quiet quitting.” An ongoing wave of unionization—including at Amazon and Starbucks—has led to victories, but has also been met with ferocious resistance from management. In this context, or perhaps in any context, it might feel absurd to imagine a society in which workers can’t get enough of work. It certainly would have seemed ludicrous to readers of the French firebrand Paul Lafargue’s satirical 1883 pamphlet, The Right to Be Lazy, in which he invents a Bizarro World where workers cause all kinds of “individual and social miseries” by refusing to quit at the end of the day.

Lafargue, a onetime doctor who became a critic, a socialist, and an activist, was a politically serious man, but in this recently reissued text, he uses humor to cut through the noise of political debate. His made-up work addicts are meant to help readers see the very real dangers of a system in which many have no choice but to work until they reach their breaking point. Lafargue’s mordant approach is still effective 140 years later. Mixed with the longevity of his ideas, it gives The Right to Be Lazy the angry, hilarious wisdom of a Shakespearean fool.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Can we talk about how weird baby mammals are? The Last of Us makes the apocalypse feel new again.

Culture Break

Netflix

Read. Try a classic book that lives up to its reputation: Almanac of the Dead, by Leslie Marmon Silko, is an epic with action spread skillfully across continents and years.

Watch. Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, on Netflix. It’s sharply funny, eerily timely, and confounding—but not unrewarding—to watch.

P.S.

I know I sound curmudgeonly and old-school about academic freedom (wait’ll you see what I have to say about tenure). I am deeply concerned, however, that changes taking place on American campuses are not so much a matter of left-right politics but rather the result of the growth of entitlement and narcissism, and the subsequent emergence of a client-servicing mentality in education and in many other areas of American life. This is a pretty large claim, so forgive me if I point you to a much fuller treatment of these issues in two books I wrote: The Death of Expertise and Our Own Worst Enemy.

In the meantime, step back and enjoy some laughs about higher education by watching Back to School, a 1986 comedy in which Rodney Dangerfield plays a vulgar clothing tycoon—think of a nicer version of his character from the raunchy 1980 film Caddyshack—who follows his son to college and then buys his own way in with a giant donation. It’s a good send-up of everything about college: snooty faculty, arrogant athletes, and big  money. (Watch for the Oscar-winner Ned Beatty’s classic line, as he defends admitting Dangerfield: “In all fairness … it was a really big check.”) As someone who studied political science and then worked in politics, I especially like Dangerfield disrupting a business class by telling the professor how things actually get done out in the real world. (And don’t miss the cameo by, of all people, Kurt Vonnegut.)

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Imagine a fairy-tale city—on the coast, perhaps, with sailboats bobbing in the breeze. This is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Omelas, a fictional utopia where “the air of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire.”

But Omelas holds a horrifying secret: Its continued existence relies on a single malnourished, unloved child being kept in a cellar, alone and uncomforted, in filth and fear.

“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas,” Le Guin writes. “They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, … even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”

Most citizens take the bargain. A few do not—they walk away, out of the city, never to be seen again. They give Le Guin’s 1973 story its title: “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”

Prince Harry probably didn’t have Omelas in mind when writing his new memoir, Spare. As he confesses several times in the text, he is not much of a reader. But perhaps J. R. Moehringer, his ghostwriter, did, because I have never seen the case against the monarchy made so powerfully as it is here. The cost of all the pomp and pageantry, the tabloid sales and the viral clicks, the patriotism and the tradition, has been the utter destruction of one boy’s mind.

[Read: How the British Royal Family became a global brand]

The first surprise, after the glutinous Oprah interview and the syrupy Netflix series, is that Spare is a gripping read—where else would you find charging elephants, hallucinations about talking trash cans, Afghan War stories, royal fistfights, and a prince’s frostbitten penis in a single narrative? Yet the overall tone is one of unrelenting misery. Harry’s paranoia, obsession, and anger ooze out of every page. He hates the press (oh, how he hates the press). His stepmother, Camilla, is “dangerous.” His sister-in-law, Kate, is stuck-up, dressing immaculately for a casual homemade dinner, whereas Meghan is happy to chill out in jeans. His brother, William, is jealous, brooding, and aging poorly—losing his resemblance to their late mother as he gets older, Harry cruelly notes. His father, now King Charles, is addicted to good headlines, and secures them by letting his staff brief against his own children. Yes, that’s right, Spare finally coughs up the allegations that Harry had only hinted at before: that his own family colluded with the media to depict him as a wastrel and Meghan as a diva.

Harry and Meghan, on Netflix, was cringe because all the billing and cooing about the couple’s world-shattering romance sat uneasily alongside Harry’s grumbles about the tabloids. Spare succeeds as a memoir by putting that romance in context. Again and again, girlfriends fall for Harry—and then see their private life systematically trashed. One calls him in tears about the paparazzi outside her flat. Another loves him but decides she would rather be free. By 30, Harry is wondering if he will ever find anyone prepared to deal with the curse of being his partner. Meghan Markle is the only woman who is prepared to endure the wholesale razing of her life to be with him. But even then, he compares his royal status to a disease: “I’d infected Meg, and her mother, with my contagion, otherwise known as my life.”  

This book is so honest about Harry’s dark side—his alcohol and drug use, his anxiety, the “red mist” his brother provoked in him—that it lends credibility to his complaints about the media in a way that the Netflix series did not. His troubles begin in August 1997, when his father wakes up Harry at Balmoral to tell him that his mother, Diana, has died. Charles, then the Prince of Wales, had been emotionally crippled by his own upbringing: A sensitive, bookish boy, the future king was bullied quite brutally at his boarding school, Gordonstoun. That seems to have left him unable to comfort his sons, and Harry deals with the trauma of losing Diana by blocking out all memories of her. He finds himself unable to talk about her, or to cry for her.

Harry also keenly feels his secondary status as the “spare” to the heir. There’s a mirthless joke about existing only to provide donated organs to William if needed, and he interprets every bit of normal brotherly bickering as a reminder of his lower rank in the hierarchy. Early on, Harry asserts that while he might not be a scholar, he can remember in great detail every place he’s been. And can he! One way to sum up Spare would be “Area Man Complains About Free Lodgings.” His half of a shared childhood bedroom is smaller and “less luxurious” than William’s; his Kensington Palace apartment has no light; the ceilings on his grace-and-favor cottage are too low. Worst of all, at Balmoral, he is given a “mini room in a narrow back corridor, among the offices of Palace staff.” The tiny violin is played heavily in this symphony.

If Harry’s complaints all seem phenomenally petty, we shouldn’t be surprised. Royal courts have always been like this, ensnaring their inhabitants in constant micro-battles for status. Nancy Mitford’s wonderful biography of Madame de Pompadour, mistress of the French King Louis XV, outlines the terrible consequences of the rigid etiquette of Versailles: French nobles let their country estates go to ruin while they bickered over who was allowed a chair instead of a stool in the king’s presence, or at what angle they could have their kneeling cushion in chapel. Even as an adult, Harry is infantilized, dependent on his father for money and on the wider royal network for permission to travel, endorse charitable causes, and propose marriage. “I’d been forced into this surreal state,” he writes, “this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground.”

Now imagine the restless status-seeking of a royal family combined with the distorting power of money and fame. Harry had the misfortune to be a teenager right at the nadir of British tabloid culture, when phone hacking was widespread, paparazzi were at their most intrusive, and the Metropolitan Police were useless at helping with either problem. The royals repeatedly wondered who was betraying them, even when no one was. The papers were simply listening to their voicemail messages. In 2007, Harry claims, a photo of him could fetch £30,000—a down payment on an apartment. “But a snap of me doing something aggressive? That might be a down payment on a house in the countryside.” (Oddly, this passage made me sympathetic to the photographers for once—we can’t all phone up “Granny” and ask for a bigger cottage on her estate.)

Throughout the book, Harry’s relatives counsel him to stop reading the press. That blessed state is clearly impossible, given his temperament, yet I am still astonished by how much attention he pays to his public image. He knows the names of individual journalists who have wronged him, although he rarely uses them. (He describes the media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand woman, the former tabloid editor Rebekah Brooks, as “Rehabber Kooks.”) He has even read Hilary Mantel’s “Royal Bodies” lecture—in which the author unpacked the British obsession with royalty, from Henry VIII’s era to the present day—although he doesn’t appear to have understood it. He thinks Mantel was dismissing the royals by likening them to pandas, when she was making the same point he is: “However airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.” Because of Harry’s intense focus on the media’s shortcomings, coverage of Spare has presented an ethical dilemma for the British press. Most have valiantly ignored his criticisms of their practices while going big on fraternal bickering and the genital injury Harry suffered on a charity trip to the North Pole.

Whatever else this book might be, it is a superb historical document. We know now that the King of England had an emotional-support (stuffed) animal called Teddy, used to do headstands to cure his bad back, and wears an overpowering cologne called Eau Sauvage. You can’t accuse Harry of holding back about himself, either: This book is soaked in booze and caked in vomit and even describes the unfortunate effect of anxiety medication on his bowels. He wets himself during a yacht race because he’s too nervous to take a leak in front of the crew. He applies his mother’s favorite moisturizer to his frost-ravaged “todger,” in a scene that my eyes almost physically rejected reading: “I found a tube, and the minute I opened it the smell transported me through time. I felt as if my mother was right there in the room. Then I took a smidge and applied it … down there.” The book ends with the birth of his daughter, Lilibet. The scene in the delivery room finds him down the business end, fielding the catch. “I wanted to say: Hello,” he recalls. “I wanted to say: ‘Where have you come from?’” (I mean, I can hazard a guess.)

[Helen Lewis: Harry and Meghan are playing a whole different game]

For hardened Harry-haters, this book will bolster their portrait of a vengeful narcissist unwilling to take any responsibility for his actions. Including the number of Afghans he killed while on duty—25—seems a genuine error of judgment, both because of its security implications for the military that he venerates and because Harry’s new fan base of coastal Americans will find it repellent. (On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Harry tried to blame the press for picking up the line, but the book does not shy away from it: “Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me ashamed.”)

Harry seems to have backed himself into a corner where he cannot acknowledge the existence of legitimate criticism or even that at least some of the wild media stories about him were true. There’s a British phrase—a “hooray Henry”—for a certain kind of posh partygoer, and for all his protestations that the media have invented a caricature of him, Harry does spend a lot of his own narrative utterly blotto. He does cocaine at 17. He drinks rum in “Club H,” the den in the basement of his father’s country home, with friends burdened with unimprovable aristo names like Badger, Casper, Rose, and Chimp. He smokes weed in palace gardens, careful not to let the smoke blow over the Duke of Kent. He takes shrooms at an American party and hallucinates that the toilet has a face. He even bangs through the laughing gas in the delivery room at the birth of his first child, and the nurses have to fetch another tank for his wife, who is in labor.

Despite all the therapy, some of the memoir does read like a spew of unprocessed emotions; other sections make you wish Harry would occasionally look on the bright side. His professed desire for reconciliation with his family jars with calling out his brother’s “alarming baldness,” his father’s pettiness, and his stepmother’s scheming. He is perpetually wronged, never at fault himself—or if he is, he had his reasons (bald brother, petty father, scheming stepmother, plus the beastly press and the tragedy of his mother’s death). He wore that Nazi uniform to a fancy-dress party only because William and Kate found it funny. He challenged a group of women he’d never met to play strip billiards in Las Vegas only because—well, we never find out. But he’s annoyed that one of them sold the photos of his bare ass to the tabloids all the same. Sometimes, despite the best efforts of his ghostwriter and publisher, moments of blithe aristocracy creep in: “Pa’s chef would sometimes stock my freezer with chicken pies,” for example, or “Meg and I were on the phone with Elton John.”

At one point, Harry mentions the “negativity bias” of the media: their preference for bad news and personal attacks. But his own negativity bias is incredibly strong. With a different narrator, this book would be a chronicle of a life marked by both service and adventure—gunning down Taliban fighters from an Apache helicopter, drinking champagne from a prosthetic leg at the South Pole, waving an ermine thong at his brother’s wedding, borrowing Tom Hardy’s costume from Mad Max for a party, calling in a military jet to tail his father’s car for a laugh—but everywhere a note of sourness creeps in, because every highlight is ruined, and every low moment is worsened, by the click-click-click of camera shutters.

Harry and I are nearly the same age. I’ve lived through everything in this book, from the outside—my own mother woke me up that morning in 1997 to tell me about the car crash. I, too, remember when Opal Fruits, a British candy, was renamed Starburst. Spare is therefore both intensely relatable and extraordinarily distant. Maybe I also told uncomprehending elderly relatives about Ali G at the turn of the century, but Harry taught a 101-year-old Queen Mother to snap her fingers and say “Booyakasha!”

And as this book might say, I have been on a journey. My sympathy for Harry and Meghan has waned since I applauded their initial decision to exchange royal life for exile in California. Their subsequent publicity tour strikes me as self-defeating, with the true quality of a family quarrel, reheating decades-old grievances, and marked by an unquenchable thirst for the last word. Thankfully, Spare helps the reader understand the inevitability of it all. These personalities in these circumstances had to create this outcome. Reflecting on his time calling in air strikes in Afghanistan, Harry writes that he enjoyed the poetry and jargon of communicating with the pilots: “And I found deeper meanings in the exercise. I’d often think: It’s the whole game, isn’t it? Getting people to see the world as you see it? And say it all back to you?” That sounds suspiciously close to a mission statement for the book—one of many instances when you can feel the ghostwriter’s hand—and if so, Harry is doomed to disappointment. You can tell your truth all you want, but you can’t make it the truth.

[K. A. Dilday: My time with the British aristocracy]

Yet this book still holds extraordinary power, not least as the best case yet against a hereditary monarchy. “My problem has never been with the monarchy, nor the concept of monarchy,” Harry writes. “It’s been with the press and the sick relationship that’s evolved between it and the palace.” But how else could such a relationship function, when a royal family exists only to exist? Literally no one would care about Harry’s opinions about elephants, or military veterans, or racism—or anything at all—if not for the accident of his birth.

At the same time, his readers will understand the inhumanity of thrusting anyone into this gilded hell without their permission. The public might love the tiaras and the traditions, but Harry’s memoir makes it impossible to ignore the broken people inside the institution. Support for the monarchy is consistently high in Britain, but I wonder how many people will read this book and think: It’s time to walk away from Omelas.