On the afternoon of February 8, 2018, more than two dozen law-enforcement officers crowded into a conference room in the Henry County Sheriff’s Office, on the outskirts of Atlanta. They were preparing to execute a no-knock warrant at 305 English Road, the home of a suspected drug dealer who had been under investigation for almost two years. The special agent leading the briefing told the team that 305 English Road was a small house with off-white siding and several broken-down cars out front, showed them an aerial photograph of the house, and gave them turn-by-turn directions to get there.

When the officers arrived at their destination, the house described in the warrant—305 English Road, run-down, off-white, with cars strewn across the yard—was right in front of them. But they walked past it to a different house, a tidy yellow one, 40 yards away. The house at 303 English Road looked nothing like the house described in the briefing and in the warrant. Yet, less than a minute after getting out of their cars, the officers set off flash grenades and used battering rams to smash open all three doors of the home.

Inside, they found Onree Norris, a 78-year-old Black man who had lived there for more than 50 years, raising his three children while he worked at a nearby rock quarry. Norris was no drug dealer. He had never been in any trouble with the law; he’d never even received a traffic ticket.

Onree Norris was watching the evening news in an armchair in his bedroom when he heard a thunderous sound, as if a bomb had gone off in his house. He got up to see what the commotion was and found a crowd of men in military gear in his hallway. Norris was more than twice as old as the target of the search warrant, but the officers pointed assault rifles at him anyway and yelled at him to raise his hands and get on the ground. When Norris told the officers that his knees were in bad shape, an officer grabbed Norris, pushed him down, and twisted his arm behind his back. Norris’s chest hurt, and he had trouble breathing. He told the officers that he had a heart condition—he’d had bypass surgery and had a pacemaker put in—but they kept him on the ground for several minutes. Norris was eventually led outside in handcuffs. When the officers realized they had blasted their way into the wrong house, they turned their cameras off one by one.

Whatever one believes about the job of policing—whether it’s that well-intentioned officers often must make split-second decisions that are easy to criticize in hindsight, or that the profession is inherently corrupt—there is no doubt that police officers sometimes egregiously abuse their authority. The videos that have filled our screens in recent years—most recently the surveillance footage of officers in Memphis fatally beating Tyre Nichols—offer horrifying evidence of this reality.

People who have lost loved ones or have themselves been harmed by the police often say that they want the officers involved to be punished and an assurance that something similar won’t happen in the future. Yet justice for victims of police misconduct is extremely difficult to achieve.

What happened in Memphis last week—the swift firing and arrest of the five officers who beat Nichols, and the murder charges they face—is highly unusual, a result of immediate public attention to an inconceivably barbaric attack. Although officers can be criminally prosecuted and sent to prison, they seldom are: Police are charged in less than 2 percent of fatal shootings and convicted in less than a third of those cases. Police departments rarely discipline or fire their officers.

Typically, victims’ only recourse is a civil lawsuit seeking money or court-ordered reforms. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled that people could sue officers who violated their constitutional rights under a federal statute enacted 90 years earlier, during the bloody years of Reconstruction. That statute, known then as the Ku Klux Klan Act and referred to as Section 1983 today, was meant to provide a remedy to Black people across the South who were being tortured and killed by white supremacists while local law enforcement either participated in the violence or stood idly by.

After that 1961 decision, the number of police-misconduct suits filed shot up. But so did concerns about the suits’ potentially ruinous effects. Settlements and judgments would bankrupt officers and cities; no one in their right mind would agree to become a police officer; the very fabric of our society would become unwound. These claims were exaggerated, if not simply false. But they have nevertheless been relied upon by courts, legislatures, and government officials over the past 60 years to justify the creation of multiple overlapping protections for officers and police departments that regularly deny justice to people whose rights have been violated.

The best-known of these protections is “qualified immunity.” When the Supreme Court created qualified immunity, in 1967, it was meant to shield officers from liability only if they were acting in “good faith” when they violated the Constitution. Yet the Court has repeatedly strengthened the doctrine. In 1982, the Court ruled that requiring officers to prove good faith was too much of a burden. Instead, they would be entitled to qualified immunity so long as they did not violate “clearly established law.” Over the years, what constitutes “clearly established law” has constricted. The Roberts Court, invoking the importance of qualified immunity to “society as a whole,” has emphasized that the law is “clearly established” only if a court has previously found nearly identical conduct to be unconstitutional. What began as a protection for officers acting in good faith has turned into a protection for officers with the good fortune to have violated the Constitution in a novel way.

It was qualified immunity that dashed Onree Norris’s hopes of getting justice. In 2018, Norris sued the officers who had raided his home, seeking money to compensate him for his physical and emotional injuries. But in 2020, a federal judge in the Northern District of Georgia granted the officers qualified immunity and dismissed the case; in 2021, a panel of three judges on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling.

The three appeals judges recognized that officers who execute a search warrant on the wrong home violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution unless they have made “a reasonable effort to ascertain and identify the place intended to be searched.” In fact, the very same court of appeals that heard Norris’s case in 2021 had ruled five years earlier that it was unconstitutional for an officer who executed a warrant on the wrong house to detain its residents at gunpoint—almost exactly what had happened to Norris. But that earlier court decision was not enough to defeat qualified immunity in Norris’s case, because it was “unpublished”—meaning that it was available online but had not been selected to be printed in the books of decisions that are issued each year—and the Eleventh Circuit is of the view that such unpublished decisions cannot “clearly establish” the law.

Just as George Floyd’s murder has come to represent all that is wrong with police violence and overreach, qualified immunity has come to represent all that is wrong with our system of police accountability. But, over the past 60 years, the Supreme Court has created multiple other barriers to holding police to account.

Take, for example, the standard that a plaintiff must meet to file a complaint. For decades, a complaint needed to include only a “short and plain” statement of the facts and why those facts entitled the plaintiff to relief. But in 2007, the Supreme Court did an about-face, requiring that plaintiffs include enough factual detail in their initial complaints to establish a “plausible” entitlement to relief.

This standard does not always pose a problem: Norris and his lawyer knew enough about what had happened during the raid of his home to write a detailed complaint. But sometimes a person whose rights have been violated doesn’t know the crucial details of their case.

Vicki Timpa searched for months for information about how her son, Tony, had died while handcuffed in Dallas police officers’ custody in August 2016. Department officials had body-camera videos that captured Tony’s last moments, but they refused to tell Timpa what had happened to her son or the names of the officers who were on the scene when he died. Timpa sued the city, but the case was dismissed because her complaint did not include enough factual detail about those last moments to establish a “plausible” claim.

When the Court set out the “plausibility” standard, it explained that, if filing a case were too easy, plaintiffs with “a largely groundless claim” could “take up the time” of defendants, and expensive discovery could “push cost-conscious defendants to settle even anemic cases.” But this rule puts people like Timpa in a bind: They are allowed discovery only if their complaints include evidence supporting their claims, but they can’t access that evidence without the tools of discovery.

(Timpa did eventually get the information she sought after she filed a public-records request and sued the city for not complying with it. Only with that information in hand could she defeat the motion to dismiss. But then her case was dismissed on qualified-immunity grounds because she could not point to a prior case with similar facts. That decision was overturned on appeal in December 2021, and Timpas’s case is set to go to trial in March, almost seven years after Tony was killed.)

The Supreme Court has also interpreted the Constitution in ways that deny relief to victims of police violence and overreach. The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” But in a series of decisions beginning in the 1960s, the Court has interpreted the “reasonableness” standard in a manner so deferential to police that officers can stop, arrest, search, beat, shoot, or kill people who have done nothing wrong without violating their rights.

On a July night in 2016, David Collie was walking down the street in Fort Worth, Texas, headed to a friend’s house, when two officers jumped out of their patrol car and yelled for Collie to raise his hands. The officers were on the lookout for two Black men who had robbed someone at a gas station. Collie was at least 10 years older, six inches shorter, and 30 pounds lighter than the smaller of the two robbery suspects. But he, like the suspects, was Black and was not wearing a shirt on that warm summer evening. Collie raised his hands. Just seconds later, and while standing more than 30 feet away, one of the officers shot Collie in the back. The hollow-point bullet entered Collie’s lung and punctured his spine. He survived, but was left paralyzed from the waist down.

When Collie sued, his case was dismissed by a district-court judge in Texas, and the decision was affirmed on appeal. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals called the case “tragic,” and a prime example of “an individual’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” but concluded that the officer had not violated Collie’s Fourth Amendment rights, because he reasonably—though mistakenly—thought he had seen a gun in Collie’s raised hand.

The Supreme Court has undermined the power and potential of civil-rights lawsuits in other ways: It has limited, for example, plaintiffs’ ability to sue local governments for their officers’ conduct and to win court orders requiring that departments change their behavior. Any one of the barriers, in isolation, would limit the power of civil-rights suits. In combination, they have made the police all but untouchable.

Even when people are able to secure a settlement or verdict to compensate them for their losses, police officers and departments rarely suffer any consequences for their wrongdoing.

The Supreme Court has long assumed that officers personally pay settlements and judgments entered against them. That is one of the justifications for qualified immunity. But officers’ bank accounts are protected by a wholly separate set of state laws and local policies requiring or allowing most governments to indemnify their officers when they are sued (meaning that they must pay for the officers’ defense and any award against them). As a result, vanishingly few police officers pay a penny in these cases.

Police departments typically don’t feel the financial sting of settlements or judgments either. Instead, the money is taken from local-government funds. And when money is tight, it tends to get pulled from the crevices of budgets earmarked for the least powerful: the marginalized people whose objections will carry the least political weight—the same people disproportionately likely to be abused by police.

Officers and officials could still learn from lawsuits, even without paying for them. But most make little effort to do so when a lawsuit doesn’t inspire front-page news or meetings with an angry mayor. Instead, government attorneys defend the officers in court, any settlement or judgment is paid out of the government’s budget or by the government’s insurer, and the law-enforcement agency moves on. In many cases, it does not even track the names of the officers, the alleged claims, the evidence revealed, the eventual resolution, or the amount paid.

Fundamental questions remain about what we should empower the police to do, and how to restore trust between law enforcement and the communities it serves. But no matter how governments ultimately answer these questions, they will almost certainly continue to authorize people to protect public safety. And some of those people will almost certainly abuse that authority. We need to get our system of governmental accountability working better than it does, no matter what our system of public safety looks like.

The fact that so many barriers to justice exist means that there is something for officials at every level of government to do.

The Supreme Court should reconsider its standards for qualified immunity, pleading rules, the Fourth Amendment, and municipal liability. But this seems unlikely, because a majority of the justices have demonstrated a durable hostility to plaintiffs in civil-rights cases.

Congress could remove many of the obstacles the Supreme Court has devised. And at least some members of Congress have shown an appetite for doing so. A bill to end qualified immunity, among other reforms, was passed in the House soon after the murder of George Floyd. But following 15 months of negotiations in the Senate, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act was abandoned. Republican Senator Tim Scott described the bill’s provision ending qualified immunity as a “poison pill” for Republican lawmakers.  

In the face of intransigence at the federal level, states have stepped in. Since May 2020, lawmakers in more than half of the states have proposed bills that would effectively do away with qualified immunity; these bills would allow people to bypass Section 1983 claims altogether and, instead, bring state-law claims for constitutional violations where qualified immunity could not be raised as a defense. State legislatures have additionally proposed bills that would limit police officers’ power to use force—prohibiting choke holds and no-knock warrants.

A bill enacted by Colorado in June 2020 is, in many ways, the gold standard. It allows people to sue law-enforcement officers for violations of the state constitution and prohibits officers from raising qualified immunity as a defense. The law also requires local governments to indemnify their officers unless they have been convicted of a crime, but allows cities to make officers contribute up to $25,000 or 5 percent of a settlement or judgment if the city concludes that the officer acted in bad faith. And the law bans officers from using choke holds, creating a bright-line limit on police power. Similar bills have passed in New Mexico and New York City, and are on the legislative agenda in other states. But other police-reform bills have failed in California, Washington, Virginia, and elsewhere.

I’ve testified in legislative hearings for bills in several states, and each has been frustratingly familiar. The people speaking against the bills threaten that if police officers cannot raise qualified immunity as a defense, they will be bankrupted for reasonable mistakes, and frivolous lawsuits will flood the courts. These assertions are just not true. Nevertheless, they have led lawmakers to vote against legislation that would take tentative but important steps toward a better system. Their inaction has left us with a world in which Onree Norris could receive nothing more than a few repairs to his doors after officers busted into his home and forced him to the floor; a world in which the Dallas Police Department could hide information about Tony Timpa’s death and then argue that his mother’s complaint should be dismissed because she did not have that information; a world in which David Collie could be shot and paralyzed from the waist down by a police officer, and require medical care for those injuries for the remainder of his life, but receive nothing, because the officer mistakenly thought Collie had a gun.

We need to stop being scared of unfounded claims about the dangers of too much justice, and start worrying about the people who have their lives shattered by the police—and then again by the courts.

This essay was adapted from the forthcoming Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable.

Some years ago, I got a call from an analyst at the National Counterterrorism Center. After yet another gruesome mass shooting (this time, it was Dylann Roof’s attack on a Bible-study group at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, that killed nine and wounded one), I had written an article about the young men who perpetrate such crimes. I suggested that an overview of these killers showed them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies. I called them “Lost Boys” as a nod to their arrested adolescence.

The NCTC called me because they had a working group on “countering violent extremism.” They had read my article and they, too, were interested in the problem of these otherwise-unremarkable boys and young men who, seemingly out of nowhere, lash out at society in various ways. We think you’re on to something, the analyst told me. He invited me to come down to Washington and discuss it with him and his colleagues.

The meeting was held in a classified environment so that the group’s members, representing multiple intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, could more easily share ideas and information. (I was a government employee at the time and held a clearance.) But we could have met in a busy restaurant for all it mattered—the commonalities among these young men, even across nations and cultures, are hardly a secret. They are man-boys who maintain a teenager’s sharp sense of self-absorbed grievance long after adolescence; they exhibit a combination of childish insecurity and lethally bold arrogance; they are sexually and socially insecure. Perhaps most dangerous, they go almost unnoticed until they explode. Some of them open fire on their schools or other institutions; others become Islamic radicals; yet others embrace right-wing-extremist conspiracies.

I emerged from the meeting with a lot of interesting puzzle pieces but no answers. Since then, there have been more such attacks, more bodies, more grief—but precious little progress on preventing such incidents. A few recent examples: In 2021, a 15-year-old boy murdered four of his fellow students in his Michigan high school. In 2022, an 18-year-old man carried out a massacre in a Texas school; another, the same age, committed a mass murder in a grocery store in upstate New York. A 21-year-old male attacked a Fourth of July parade in Illinois. A 22-year-old went on a rampage at an LBGTQ nightclub in Colorado.

These attacks are not merely “violence” in some general sense, nor are they similar to other gun crimes classified as “mass shootings” beyond the number of victims. Drug-war shoot-outs and gang vendettas are awful, but they are better-understood problems, in both their origins and possible remedies. The Lost Boys, however, are the perpetrators of out-of-the-blue massacres of innocents. Their actions are not driven by criminal gain, but instead are meant to shock us, to make us grieve, and finally, to force us to acknowledge the miserable existence of the young men behind the triggers.

After each Lost Boy killing, Americans are engulfed in grief and anger, but eventually, we are overtaken by a sense of helplessness. Sometimes, we respond by raging at one another; we fight about gun control or mental-health funding or the role of social media as we try to fix blame and reduce a seemingly inexplicable act to something discrete and solvable. But I wonder now, as I did back in 2015, if all of these debates are focusing on the wrong problems. Yes, the country is awash in guns; yes, depression seems to be on the rise in young people; yes, extremists are using social media to fuse together atomized losers into explosive compounds. But the raw material for all of the violence is mostly a stream of lost young men.

Why is this happening? What are we missing? Guns and anomie and extremism are only facets of the problem. The real malady afflicting these men, one about which I’ve written much in the intervening years since that original article, is the deluge of narcissism in the modern world, especially among failed-to-launch young men whose injured grandiosity leads them to blame others for their own shortcomings and insecurities—and to seek revenge.

The Lost Boys are mostly young and male, largely middle- or working-class. Frustrated by their own social awkwardness, they are so often described as “loners” that the trope has been around from as early as the 1980s. But these young males, no matter how “quiet,” are filled with an astonishing level of enraged resentment and entitlement about their roles as men, and they seek rationalizations for inflicting violence on a society they think has both ignored and injured them. They become what the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger called “radical losers,” unsuccessful men who feel that they have been denied their dominant role in society and who then channel their blunted male social impulses toward destruction.

And they are, above all, staggeringly narcissistic. Almost all of the recent mass killers, for example, thought they had a special mission in the world. We know this because they felt compelled to tell us so.  

Indeed, to search for the killer’s manifesto is now part of the ritual of investigating a massacre, a tradition we might trace back to the Unabomber, the ur-Lost Boy Ted Kaczynski, whose terror campaign included a demand that the press publish his 35,000-word treatise. (And yet, when he left society at 29, he wrote in his journal: “My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge. I do not expect to accomplish anything by it.”) There are many other examples: the Los Angeles mass killer Christopher Dorner left behind an 11,000-word screed in 2013; Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019, posted a 74-page rant to the internet. (Patrick Crusius, who murdered 23 people in El Paso in 2019, claimed to be inspired by Tarrant but managed to upload only four pages to the infamous 8chan site.) At this point, so many such documents exist that there are scholarly research studies analyzing them.

[Juliette Kayyem: A ‘lone-wolf’ shooter has an online pack]

Many of the Lost Boys claim to represent various causes derived from a wide spectrum of sources—sexism, racism, religious bigotry, conspiracy kookery, and anti-government extremism among them. (Nor are all of these aimless young men killers: When I first examined this problem, I also identified a type of Lost Boy who convinces himself that he’s doing good, such as Bowe Bergdahl, who thought of himself as the fictional action hero Jason Bourne when he deserted his military unit in Afghanistan in 2009, and Edward Snowden, who is the embodiment of a particular kind of nonviolent but nonetheless highly destructive misfit.)

Narcissism is a common malady, but for the Lost Boys, it is the indispensable primer for a bomb whose core is an unstable mass of insecurities about masculine identity. This, of course, helps explain why such spectacular and ghastly acts are an almost entirely male phenomenon. Women, who are less prone to commit violence in general, are rarely the perpetrators of these kinds of senseless massacres. In general, they do not share the same juvenile fantasies of power and dominance that are common to adolescent boys. Nor do they tend to harbor the same resentments about sex and status that are common to all teenagers but that in the Lost Boys persist beyond adolescence and soon grow to volcanic levels.

For example, in 2014 Elliot Rodger became a kind of patron saint of “incels,” or involuntary celibates (men angry at women for not having sex with them), when he killed six people and plowed his car into several more in California before killing himself. Rodger explicitly said his attack was “retribution” against other men—and the women who sleep with them—for having sex while he remained a virgin. Four years later, a self-described incel who’d praised Rodger killed 10 people in Toronto.

Lives that seem to unwind over problems related to sex or sexual identity are a persistent theme. Micah Johnson, a Black military veteran, claimed that he was avenging the deaths of Black people at the hands of the police when he ambushed Dallas police officers in 2016, killing five and wounding nine others. Perhaps more pertinent, though, was that Johnson was a failure as a soldier and his life had gone into free fall after he was booted from the Army for stealing women’s underwear from a female comrade. That same year, Omar Mateen, who had expressed particular animus toward homosexuals, became a mass killer when he attacked a gay nightclub in Florida, as did the accused recent Colorado shooter Anderson Aldrich. Aldrich’s lawyers have said that the alleged killer is nonbinary, but some observers, including a former friend, suspect Aldrich is merely attempting to troll the LGBTQ community.

Another way these young men express their sexual insecurity is to seek heroic redemption by imagining themselves as the defenders of helpless women against sexual threats from other men. Roof, for his part, thought he was on a mission to stop Black men from raping white women, a common racist trope in America. One of the members of a group of young Muslim men in Canada who planned to storm the Parliament in Ottawa in 2006 reportedly had a similar motivation, believing that NATO soldiers were raping Afghan women.

This masculine insecurity is even more striking when we consider the number of such young men who chose what we might think of as “the military cure,” by joining the armed forces in an apparent attempt to forge a more manly identity. In a society where relatively few people serve in the military, the Lost Boys are heavily overrepresented among veterans or would-be soldiers. Timothy McVeigh, who went on to become the Oklahoma City bomber, left the Army after being rejected for Special Forces. Dorner was a naval reserve officer; Johnson and Bergdahl went to Afghanistan. (Before he enlisted, friends told The Washington Post, Bergdahl had “identified with Japanese samurai warriors and medieval knights.”) Devin Kelley, who opened fire on a Texas church, joined the Air Force. Snowden joined the Army and tried for a Green Beret, but washed out. The “American Taliban” traitor, John Walker Lindh, also went overseas—but for a different army.

Jihadists, especially those radicalized in the West, are also examples of this syndrome. They join organizations that promise to create a powerful male identity, and, in some cases, to reward them with women as sex slaves. For all their supposed distaste for Western immorality, many of the young males who gravitate toward jihadism are avid consumers of forbidden Western delights, such as music, alcohol, drugs, and pornography. (Even in middle age, Osama bin Laden had quite a porn collection.) For these men, terrorism may be, among other things, some sort of self-purification, a way to deny their illicit desires by destroying the places and people that supposedly coax them toward perdition. (In a striking parallel, the American Robert Aaron Long—who at 21 had already been treated for sex addiction—is accused of opening fire on a string of massage parlors around Atlanta, killing eight, in an attempt, as he told law enforcement officers later, to eliminate the source of his “temptation.”)

[From the June 1986 issue: Thinking about terrorism]

Fear of women and hatred of minorities, animosity toward authority, patterns of absent or dysfunctional fathers, histories of being bullied, romance with symbols of power, conflicts of identity and sexuality—we can catalog at length the similarities among these young misfits. They are, in the main, scared and narcissistic boys, and like many boys teetering on the cusp of manhood, they are tormented by paradoxes: insecure but drenched in self-regard, fearful yet brave, full of self-doubt yet fascinated by heroism. For most males, this is a transitory part of adolescence. For the Lost Boys, it is a permanent condition, a deadly combination of stubborn immaturity and towering narcissism.

Knowing about the common characteristics of these killers and terrorists does not shed much light on what to do to thwart them. Stricter gun laws, a good idea in general, will not stop the mass murderers already among us who live in a society saturated with easily obtained weapons. Law enforcement can infiltrate and destroy violent militias, terror cells, and other threats, but that will not prevent unstable young men from searching for causes to justify their massacres—if they even bother with such ideas.

Likewise, arguments about “toxic masculinity,” as tempting as they are in these cases, miss the mark. The problem of toxic masculinity is real, but the swaggering jerks and violent abusers who sometimes become a threat to their partners (and themselves) are distinct from the insecure man-boys who decide to prove their worth—or just to prove that they exist—by committing extraordinary acts of mass murder. And, in general, toxic men are easy to spot. The Lost Boys are, by their nature, usually invisible until they strike.

Performative mass killings and large-scale terrorism are mostly post-1970s phenomena, and we can likely trace at least some of the Lost Boy problem to the rapid emergence in the past 40 years or so of a hypersexualized and yet lonelier, more atomized society. Likewise, the social institutions that once shaped and restrained the worst impulses of young men—religion, the military, schools, and even marriage itself—have gone through drastic and irrevocable changes in the same period.

[Michael Carpenter: Russia is co-opting angry young men]

We can lament some of those changes—I certainly do, particularly the collapse of a kind of mature sense of stoicism and self-control among men. But we cannot reverse them, not least because that would, in effect, require turning back time and unraveling years of social progress. The advances of women’s rights are especially terrifying to a certain cohort of the Lost Boys, but such progress was necessary and irrevocable, and society cannot be held hostage to the insecurities of a small group of males in arrested adolescence, no matter how dangerous they may be.

Western societies have now produced multiple generations of these young men, so we cannot hope to solve the problem by just waiting out the generational demography. (There are exceptions in the form of “lost old men,” but the two recent cases of older mass shooters in California—as well as the 64-year-old Las Vegas killer in 2017—are extremely rare outliers.) Perhaps more alarming, at least some of these young males seem to be aging into dangerous, frustrated middle-aged men, the gun-toting cosplayers who now have the time and money to pursue their angry fantasies. (Think of this as the Lost Boys becoming Proud Boys.)  

What we can do, however, is start talking more about the specific problem of dangerous male immaturity without falling into endless loops about gun control, public health, or “toxic masculinity.” We can, in schools and colleges, pay closer attention to the boys and young men who seem to be sliding toward darkness, perhaps with more attempts to pull them toward a community or into mentorship with older men. At the least, we should be able to find a way to engage in gentle interventions early rather than face more drastic consequences later. As Enzensberger presciently warned nearly two decades ago: “It is difficult to talk about the loser, and it is stupid not to.”

The immensity of the challenge, as I learned at that meeting in Washington years ago, is overwhelming. But we can start by redefining the basic problem and recognizing Lost Boys as a distinct phenomenon. We are not likely to stop the next mass attacker, school shooter, or terrorist, whether tomorrow or next year. If we recognize, however, that our current arguments are dead ends, we can start anew, and become more creative about finding solutions before we produce yet another generation of silent time bombs.

Britain's Zoe Atkin wins her first X Games gold medal in Ski Superpipe in Aspen, Colorado.

Unbearably adorable.

The 23-year-old alleged attacker is charged with killing 10 people in a Colorado supermarket in March 2021.

Of the dozens of hormones found in the human body, oxytocin might just be the most overrated. Linked to the pleasures of romance, orgasms, philanthropy, and more, the chemical has been endlessly billed as the “hug hormone,” the “moral molecule,” even “the source of love and prosperity.” It has inspired popular books and TED Talks. Scientists and writers have insisted that spritzing it up human nostrils can instill compassion and generosity; online sellers have marketed snake-oil oxytocin concoctions as “Liquid Trust.”

But as my colleague Ed Yong and others have repeatedly written, most of what’s said about the hormone is, at best, hyperbole. Sniffing the chemical doesn’t reliably make people more collaborative or trusting; trials testing it as a treatment for children with autism spectrum disorder have delivered lackluster results. And although decades of great research have shown that the versatile molecule can at times spark warm fuzzies in all sorts of species—cooperation in meerkats, monogamy in prairie voles, parental care in marmosets and sheep—under other circumstances, oxytocin can turn creatures from rodents to humans aggressive, fearful, even prejudiced.

Now researchers are finding that oxytocin may be not only insufficient for forging strong bonds, but also unnecessary. A new genetic study hints that prairie voles—fluffy, fist-size rodents that have long been poster children for oxytocin’s snuggly effects—can permanently partner up without it. The revelation could shake the foundations of an entire neuroscience subfield, and prompt scientists to reconsider some of the oldest evidence that once seemed to show that oxytocin was the be-all and end-all for animal affection. Cuddles, it turns out, can probably happen without the classic cuddle hormone—even in the most classically cuddly creatures of all.

[Read: The weak science behind the wrongly named moral molecule]

Oxytocin isn’t necessarily obsolete. “This shouldn’t be taken as, ‘Oh, oxytocin doesn’t do anything,’” says Lindsay Sailer, a neuroscientist at Cornell University. But researchers have good reason to be a bit gobsmacked. For all the messy, inconsistent, even shady data that have been gathered from human studies of the hormone, the evidence from prairie voles has always been considered rock-solid. The little rodents, native to the midwestern United States, are famous for being one of the few mammal species that monogamously mate for life and co-parent their young. Over many decades and across geographies, researchers have documented how the rodents nuzzle each other in their nests and console each other when stressed, how they aggressively rebuff the advances of other voles that attempt to homewreck. And every time they checked, “there was oxytocin, sitting in the middle of the story, over and over again,” says Sue Carter, a behavioral neurobiologist who pioneered some of the first studies on prairie-vole bonds. The molecular pathways driving the behaviors seemed just as clear-cut: When triggered by a social behavior, such as snuggling or sex, a region of the brain called the hypothalamus pumped out oxytocin; the hormone then latched on to its receptor, sparking a slew of lovey-dovey effects.

Years of follow-up studies continued to bear that thinking out. When scientists gave prairie voles drugs that kept oxytocin from linking up with its receptor, the rodents started snubbing their partners after any tryst. Meanwhile, simply stimulating the oxytocin receptor was enough to coax voles into settling down with strangers that they’d never mated with. The connection between oxytocin and pair bonding was so strong, so repeatable, so unquestionable that it became dogma. Zoe Donaldson, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies the hormone, recalls once receiving dismissive feedback on a grant because, in the words of the reviewer, “We already know everything that there is to know about prairie voles and oxytocin.”

So more than a decade ago, when Nirao Shah, a neurogeneticist and psychiatrist at Stanford, and his colleagues set out to cleave the oxytocin receptor from prairie voles using a genetic technique called CRISPR, they figured that their experiments would be a slam dunk. Part of the goal was, Shah told me, proof of principle: Researchers have yet to perfect genetic tools for voles the way they have in more common laboratory animals, such as mice. If the team’s manipulations worked, Shah reasoned, they’d beget a lineage of rodents that was immune to oxytocin’s influence, leaving them unfaithful to their mates and indifferent to their young—thereby proving that the CRISPR machinery had done its job.

That’s not what happened. The rodents continued to snuggle up with their families, as if nothing had changed. The find was baffling. At first, the team wondered if the experiment had simply failed. “I distinctly remember sitting there and just being like, Wait a sec; how is there not a difference?” Kristen Berendzen, a neurobiologist and psychiatrist at UC San Francisco who led the study, told me. But when three separate teams of researchers repeated the manipulations, the same thing happened again. It was as if they had successfully removed a car’s gas tank and still witnessed the engine roaring to life after an infusion of fuel. Something might have gone wrong in the experiments. That seems unlikely, though, says Larry Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the new study: Young’s team, he told me, has produced nearly identical results in his lab.

The explanations for how decades of oxytocin research could be upended are still being sussed out. Maybe oxytocin can attach to more than one hormone receptor—something that studies have hinted at over the years, Carter told me. But some researchers, Young among them, suspect a more radical possibility. Maybe, in the absence of its usual receptor, oxytocin no longer does anything at all—forcing the brain to blaze an alternative path toward affection. “I think other things pick up the slack,” Young told me.

That idea isn’t a total repudiation of the old research. Other prairie-vole experiments that used drugs to futz with oxytocin receptors were performed in adult animals who grew up with the hormone, says Devanand Manoli, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at UCSF who helped lead the new study. Wired to respond to oxytocin all through development, those rodent brains couldn’t compensate for its sudden loss late in life. But the Stanford-UCSF team bred animals that lacked the oxytocin receptor from birth, which could have prompted some other molecule, capable of binding to another receptor, to step in. Maybe the car never needed gas to run: Stripped of its tank from the get-go, it went all electric instead.

It would be easy to view this study as yet another blow to the oxytocin propaganda machine. But the researchers I spoke with think the results are more revealing than that. “What this shows us is how important pair bonding is,” Carter told me—to prairie voles, but also potentially to us. For social mammals, partnering up isn’t just sentimental. It’s an essential piece of how we construct communities, survive past childhood, and ensure that future generations can do the same. “These are some of the most important relationships that any mammal can have,” says Bianca Jones Marlin, a neuroscientist at Columbia University. When oxytocin’s around, it’s probably providing the oomph behind that intimacy. And if it’s not? “Evolution is not going to have a single point of failure for something that’s absolutely critical,” Manoli told me. Knocking oxytocin off its pedestal may feel like a letdown. But it’s almost comforting to consider that the drive to bond is just that unbreakable.

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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 Colorado bear bares all in 400 bear "selfies." CNN's Jeanne Moos explains how it strikes a pose.

In the dark early days of the pandemic, when we knew almost nothing and feared almost everything, there was a moment when people became very, very worried about toilets. More specifically, they were worried about the possibility that the cloud of particles toilets spew into the air when flushed—known in the scientific literature as “toilet plume”—might be a significant vector of COVID transmission. Because the coronavirus can be found in human excrement, “flushing the toilet may fling coronavirus aerosols all over,” The New York Times warned in June 2020. Every so often in the years since, the occasional PSA from a scientist or public-health expert has renewed the scatological panic.

In retrospect, so much of what we thought we knew in those early days was wrong. Lysoling our groceries turned out to not be helpful. Masking turned out to be very helpful. Hand-washing, though still important, was not all it was cracked up to be, and herd immunity, in the end, was a mirage. As the country shifts into post-pandemic life and takes stock of the past three years, it’s worth asking: What really was the deal with toilet plume?

The short answer is that our fears have not been substantiated, but they weren’t entirely overblown either. Scientists have been studying toilet plume for decades. They’ve found that plumes vary in magnitude depending on the type of toilet and flush mechanism. Flush energy plays a role too: The greater it is, the larger the plume. Closing the lid (if the toilet has one) helps a great deal, though even that cannot completely eliminate toilet plume—particles can still escape through the gap between the seat and the lid.

Whatever the specifics, the main conclusion from years of research preceding the pandemic has been consistent and disgusting: “Flush toilets produce substantial quantities of toilet plume aerosol capable of entraining microorganisms at least as large as bacteria … These bioaerosols may remain viable in the air for extended periods and travel with air currents,” scientists at the CDC and the University of Oklahoma College of Public Health wrote in a 2013 review paper titled “Lifting the Lid on Toilet Plume Aerosol.” In other words, when you flush a toilet, an unsettling amount of the contents go up rather than down.

Knowing this is one thing; seeing it is another. Traditionally, scientists have measured toilet plume with either a particle counter or, in at least one case, “a computational model of an idealized toilet.” But in a new study published last month, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder took things a step further, using bright-green lasers to render visible what usually, blessedly, is not. John Crimaldi, an engineering professor and a co-author of the study, who has spent 25 years using lasers to illuminate invisible phenomena, told me that he and his colleagues went into the experiment fully expecting to see something. Even so, they were “completely caught off guard” by the results. The plume was bigger, faster, and more energetic than they’d anticipated—“like an eruption,” Crimaldi said, or, as he and his colleagues put it in their paper, a “strong chaotic jet.”

Within eight seconds, the resulting cloud of aerosols shoots nearly five feet above the toilet bowl—that is, more than six feet above the ground. That is: straight into your face. After the initial burst, the plume continues to rise until it hits the ceiling, and then it wafts outward. It meets a wall and runs along it. Before long, it fills the room. Once that happens, it hangs around for a while. “You can sort of extrapolate in your own mind to walking into a public restroom in an airport that has 20 toilet stalls, all of them flushing every couple minutes,” Crimaldi said. Not a pleasant thought.

The question, then, is not so much whether toilet plume happens—like it or not, it clearly does—as whether it presents a legitimate transmission risk of COVID or anything else. This part is not so clear. The 2013 review paper identified studies of the original SARS virus as “among the most compelling indicators of the potential for toilet plume to cause airborne disease transmission.” (The authors also noted, in a dry aside, that although SARS was “not presently a common disease, it has demonstrated its potential for explosive spread and high mortality.”) The one such study the authors discuss explicitly is a report on the 2003 outbreak in Hong Kong’s Amoy Gardens apartment complex. That study, though, is far from conclusive, Mark Sobsey, an environmental microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. The researchers didn’t rule out other modes of transmission, nor did they attempt to culture live virus from the fecal matter—a far more reliable indicator of infectiousness than mere detection.

Beyond that, Sobsey said, there is little evidence that toilet plumes spread SARS or COVID-19. In his own review, published in December 2021, Sobsey found “no documented evidence” of viral transmission via fecal matter. This, at least, seems to track with the three years of pandemic experience we’ve all now endured. Although we can’t easily prove that bathrooms don’t play a significant role in spreading COVID-19, we haven’t seen any glaring indications that they do. And anyway, the coronavirus has found plenty of other awful ways to spread.

Just because toilet plume doesn’t seem to be a vector of COVID transmission, though, doesn’t mean you can forget about it. Gastrointestinal viruses such as norovirus, Sobsey told me, present a more serious risk of transmission via toilet plume, because they are known to spread via fecal matter. The only real solutions are structural. Improved ventilation would keep aerosolized waste from building up in the air, and germicidal lighting, though the technology is still being developed, could potentially disinfect what remains. Neither, however, would stop the plume in the first place. To do that, you would need to change the toilet itself: In order to create a smoother and thus better-contained flush, you could change the geometry of the bowl, the way the water enters and exits, or any number of other variables. Toilet manufacturers could also, you know, stop producing lidless toilets.

But none of that will save you the next time you find yourself staring into a toilet’s blank maw. Crimaldi suggests wearing a mask in public bathrooms to protect against not just the plume created when you flush but also the plumes left by the person who used the bathroom before you, the person who used it before them, and so on. You don’t need to have any great affection for masking as a public-health intervention to consider donning one for a few minutes to avoid literally breathing in shit. Sobsey offered another bit of unconventional bathroom-hygiene advice, which he acknowledged can only do so much to protect you: If you find yourself in a public restroom with a lidless toilet, he said, consider washing your hands before you flush. Then “hold your breath, flush the toilet, and leave.”

In the United States, the demand for pay transparency is building. Laws that require employers of a certain size to include pay information in job listings took effect on January 1 in California and Washington state. Similar laws were already in place in other areas, including Colorado, New York City, Westchester County, New York, and Jersey City, New Jersey.