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

James contends that shootings by police mostly aren’t the products of “bad apple” cops:

Like a plane crash or a nuclear-plant mishap, they are the emergent result of training, hiring, dispatch, supervision, and more, all of which can be improved. An “event review,” not a “performance review” of the cop who pulls the trigger, allows for resident participation and expert input. This is not a substitute for discipline and punishment of violators. It assumes that the discipline of a lone violator is a bad place to stop if prevention is the goal.

Maryanne describes what made her late brother a good cop:

My brother Paul, a police officer for 37 years, died this past Thanksgiving Day. At Paul’s wake, the constant stream of fellow officers and staff demonstrated he was loved by all, but those to whom he was the field-training officer spoke about him in a tone of reverence. Many of your readers will suggest taking a hard look at how officers are trained. I would urge a hard look at who they are trained by. Can they demonstrate not just what to do but also how to be? Here is a story shared on Paul’s memorial website by one of his trainees:

“Paulie taught me the value of words over force. There is one particular incident I’ll never forget involving … a mentally unstable young man … who had real fighting skills. The guy kept repeating he would count to three and ‘kill all of us.’ He would get to two several times, which caused Kline and I to prepare for battle. Paulie, with his hands in his pockets and his calming demeanor, would say just what the kid needed to hear to interrupt his violent thoughts and reset. Eventually, the kid succumbed to Paul’s verbal judo and no force was required to bring the incident to a close. I’ll never forget that, or Paul, for all the other good he did. As a trainer years later, I always remembered that and tried to pass it along thanks to him. RIP Paulie. You touched many lives!”

My eulogy for Paul provided some additional context for how a beloved police field-training officer came to be the person he was and why that served his trainees and the community:

“The quality I’ve heard over and over again about Paul was that he was ‘nice,’ which is not the typical description of a cop; usually you hear good cop or bad cop, and nice cop may seem out of the norm. Often I suspected I was latching onto the word nice because he was my brother and of course I was biased. Yesterday at the wake, my biases were confirmed and I kept hearing story after story of what nice meant to his fellow officers and staff, that what most defined Paul were not the occasional events that resulted in his commendations or awards but instead his ‘thousand small acts of kindness.’”

Between the time Paul was married to his former wife and when he met and married Wei, the true love of his life, he found a very good counselor. Paul was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. As with many recurring adulthood patterns, the counselor saw there were roots in childhood, but a lot of it was fuzzy, and so they encouraged Paul to “go talk to your sister.” During that time we spent hours upon hours piecing together our childhood. Like many families, ours was touched by a depressed and alcoholic parent. The normal ebb and flow went between apparent calm and total chaos that kept us always on guard, not knowing which it would be at any given moment.

Bit by bit, we pieced together all the fractured moments to re-create many of the events we weren’t allowed to talk about and often told to ignore as if they hadn’t happened at all. At certain points, true to Paul’s nature, as all the memories of craziness and chaos began to emerge, he would just get me laughing and laughing, often by inserting the phrase “How in the world did we ever grow up to be fairly normal functioning adults?” The evidence and statistics were clearly not in our favor, and things easily could have gone in another direction.

But we had figured out how to cope. Paul’s role in our family was the “disrupter,” so any of you who marveled at Paul’s particularly skillful and effective methods for diffusing “domestic” calls who think he learned this at the police academy would be only partially correct. The truth is Paul started honing those skills from the time he was about 6. He transformed the coping and challenges of a child into kindness and helpfulness as an adult.

A few of you who had Paul as your field-training officer shared stories of Paul’s ability to use “Words, not force” in his work, and I will be forever proud that “Words, not force” is what you most wanted to share about what you learned from him. But now I’d like to share my favorite story that Paul shared with me … Of course it takes place in the police station.

Near the end of his career, after Paul had transferred from the street to the desk, one day a woman walked in … Paul sensed the signs of an alcoholic and he was sure this would have no small part in why the woman was there. The woman said that her teenage daughter hadn’t come home the prior night and she wanted to report her as a runaway. Paul took all the information and tried to reassure the woman that he thought her daughter was probably okay and just decided to stay over at a friend’s house. All the while, he was thinking to himself that he understood exactly why the daughter didn’t want to be at home.  

I can’t recall what the girl’s name was, but she needs a name for this story, so I’ll call her Amy. A while later, a teenage girl came into the station, walked up to Paul at the desk and just said “I need some help.” I suspect she was a little taken aback when Paul said “I bet you are Amy. Your mother has already been here, but you’ve come to the right place, and you’ve come to just the right person.” He took Amy to the back of the station and just sat and listened to her. It was no surprise to Paul that his assumptions were correct: This was a teenager struggling with a parent who was struggling with addiction.

He assured her there were safe places to share her story and get the support she needed. So they went over to the computer, where Paul helped her look up group meetings in the area. With a list in hand, Amy made a promise that she would go to the meetings, and also that she would go home. I think about Amy a lot and hope that she found the support she needed and grew up to be a “fairly normal functioning adult.” I can’t know any of that for sure, but I do know in my heart that when she left the police station that day, she felt a little more empowered and a lot less alone because she met Paul.

Scott is a criminal-defense attorney and longtime critic of flaws in policing and prosecuting:

For those of us who have spent decades trying to figure out and then implement reform, the past few years have been brutal. There was a rare window of opportunity for change, when the public wasn’t screaming for ever more laws, ever harsher punishments, and fewer alternatives to the historical (and failed) belief that we could punish our way out of violence, drugs, and crime. Instead, the activists took the field, indulging their fantasy ideological solutions that would neither work nor be accepted by the majority of Americans as viable solutions requiring trade-offs everyone could live with.

Simplistic solutions such as “defund,” based on ideologically bound understandings of the problem, never stood a chance. As soon as the next “wave” hit, as it surely would, the pendulum would swing and we would be back to the tried-and-failed more crimes, less due process, and harsher punishments. And here we are. We squandered a once-in-a-generation (or more) opportunity for serious reform where all stakeholders reached consensus and the best, if imperfect, fixes were accepted by a majority of Americans and to everyone’s benefit. Instead, we’re back where we started and no one was saved.

Robert urges an emphasis on accountability:

Eliminate qualified immunity, which renders all but the most egregious, outrageous conduct unaccountable. It is a long slog to change attitudes, but by making punishment more likely, we can change behavior. In an ideal world, we would also be able to foster a police culture where misbehavior is seen as an unacceptable stain on police as a whole and something that every effort is made to eliminate. Culture change is difficult to impossible to impose from outside, but it can occur.

I am a retired physician, and I remember the ’70s and early ’80s when physicians circled the wagons to defend malpracticing docs but gradually began to realize that malpractice hurt people and made everyone else look bad. The profession ceased to tolerate physician misbehavior. I can’t say how to make that happen in the police, but it’s where they need to go.

MC recommends more sunlight:

This issue is not about the failure of police departments but of the weak policing of them. I don't think policing can be improved much except by forced transparency and external enforcement of humane standards. Officers have to be more afraid of the consequences of brutality. Mandate body cameras that can't be disabled, monitored by an external office that doesn’t normally work with police officers. Footage becomes publicly available, with identities suppressed.

We’re horrified at police brutality whenever another video shows it. There’s nothing more horrifying than how obvious it is that this behavior is normal for the ones inflicting the violence. We must bring the eyes of the public into all the dark places where that treatment was learned and practiced.  

Jay wants police to be more active:

Improved policing begins with actually enforcing the law as written. We’ve deemed law enforcement of smaller crimes such as shoplifting, graffiti, and small theft “optional,” then wondered why larger crimes continue to soar. There’s little justice for criminals nor for victims in a system in which policing is optional, understaffed or harassed and harried into inertia.

C. is a white cop who is married to a Black police dispatcher on a college campus:

This question haunts me because of my job, because of my wife's job, and because any children we may have will have to interact with American police as mixed-race individuals.

One morning, we had a dining-hall employee pull into our department’s parking lot. She had been on her way to work on campus when her ex began following her in his car. She stopped at our department to scare him off, and to make us aware that he might show up at the dining hall to further harass her. We got information on the ex and found out that he had a warrant for misdemeanor assault (on the employee). The employee went on her way to work, and we followed to hang out in the area and keep an eye out.

The ex didn’t wait long, and parked right near the employee before she had even gotten out of her car. My shift partner found him first, and when I got on scene, the ex was outside his vehicle shouting toward the employee in her car. She was having a full-blown panic attack, breathing and crying so loud I could hear her through the closed car windows. And the ex had their child in the car. Couldn’t have been more than 2, and he wasn’t in a proper car seat; he was standing on the backseat looking out the window.

The ex was focused on the employee, ignoring my shift partner, and started freaking out at how much she was freaking out. I was likewise concerned about her, so I went ahead and radioed for medics to be dispatched. I could tell my shift partner was trying to get in a position to handcuff the ex, but he kept sidestepping, trying to keep an eye on the employee and still shouting toward her.

I knew if we went hands-on as the situation stood, it was going to be ugly (the guy was tall, like 6 foot 2, while my shift partner was a paltry 5 foot 5 and I’m an average 5 foot 10). So I got his attention and told him, “Look, I have medics on the way to check on her, but we can only do one thing at a time, and we have information that you have a warrant out. We’re still waiting for confirmation that the warrant is current and valid, but that’s what we know right now. If you would have a seat in our cruiser while we wait for that info, we can have medics check her out.”

The guy just stopped. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m not gonna lie. I got a warrant.’ He turned around and put his hands behind his back. My partner cuffed him and got him in a cruiser. I went to check on the employee, while our sergeant, who arrived during all this, retrieved the child and brought him to his mother. Medics showed up a bit later, and made sure the employee was okay.

Now, standard operating procedure when arresting someone with a warrant for a violent offense is to get them in a position where you can cuff them up real quick before they even know what’s happening, and then explain the situation. It’s supposed to prevent the individual from even trying to fight the arrest. In this situation, though, the guy was already amped way up; we had a woman that legitimately might need medical attention and a 2-year-old toddling around the back seat of a car. If we'd gone hands-on with no explanation, he would have struggled, and we would have had to fight to get him under control while his ex hyperventilated herself into passing out and his son watched from the car. It was going to be a bad day all around. So instead, I treated the guy with respect and explained the situation point-blank. And he let us arrest him.

My shift partner, later, told me he didn’t really like the way I’d handled it, and that we should’ve cuffed him before we told him about the warrant. I got a guy that brought his 2-year-old son with him to harass the mother of said son to let us arrest him for assault of that same mother. And my partner didn’t like the way I’d handled it. If that isn’t an indictment of police standard operating procedures and culture, then I don’t know what is.

Taylor argues that the best way forward is a relentless focus on creating and scaling up alternatives to police:

We should be thinking about crisis-response teams (Denver's STAR program relies on social workers to respond to calls), getting police out of traffic enforcement, and civilian systems for “welfare checks” (that often compose up to 70 percent of a jurisdiction’s 911 dispatches).

These programs take armed police out of the equation, in circumstances that most often escalate into police harassment, intimidation, abuse, and murder. They reduce harm, without any need for police-culture change, effective retraining, or functional internal accountability mechanisms.

But rebalancing public-safety budgets to rely far less on policing has not advanced, in part, because people with legitimate concerns about their safety cannot envision the world where police are not the first responders. "What happens when I call 911 if it’s not the police responding?” Before we will have the political space we need to then limit police to a narrower role, we need to build up these alternatives in a visible way and show they are effective, giving time for them to become a routine part of a multipronged public-safety structure.

Jaleelah urges a more active citizenry:

Monitor the police in your community. Go to city-council meetings and town halls. If police unions are blocking formal oversight, monitor them on the ground. If you see an officer yelling at a civilian, stop and record. If you see a barista threatening to call the police to remove a homeless person sleeping on a bench, try to mediate the disagreement.

Police officers may oppose civilian interference in their work. If that is the case, they should lobby their unions to make policy changes that will engender confidence in their intentions and capabilities. Until that happens, ordinary Americans’ on-the-ground surveillance is the only thing that can keep cops accountable.

D. H. argues that a lack of public understanding of what police work entails is an impediment to better policing:

The George Floyd situation was as close to indisputably wrong as any police-caused deaths in the past decade or so, and captured on videotape. It was clearly outrageous to keep him face down, handcuffed behind his back, and to continue to kneel on his neck while he was experiencing difficulty breathing.  

Other situations are not so clearly wrong, thus there is less outrage. Trying to shoehorn every deadly encounter with police into the same category as the George Floyd situation has probably hurt the cause rather than helped it, because people get outrage fatigue. We live in a violent society beset by an upsurge in violent crimes (at least in the Portland area). At this juncture, defunding the police feels more like giving free rein to criminals to prey on society, and encouraging vigilantes and militia to take policing into their own hands. “Defund the police” was one of the worst liberal rallying cries ever. The gun scourge in this country makes it feel very unsafe for officers and the public alike.

With the constant barrage of vitriol expressed toward the police, who would want to become a police officer? Who at retirement age would want to remain on the force? If they do not feel supported by the public, some may not feel highly motivated to protect and serve. How many quiet-quitting police officers are out there, and can you really blame them?  

We cannot work up sufficient outrage to take meaningful steps to prevent mass shootings, so why would anyone think a society numb to school and church shootings might remain outraged enough to effect meaningful change to the police organizations that must respond to those?  

I can understand how the fear of corrupt and/or brutal police could cause a rational person to resist arrest, as could impaired judgment from mental illness or intoxication.  However, if one chooses to resist arrest, that choice will be met by force (police violence) aimed to quickly overcome that resistance and gain control of the situation. Once force is employed, situations become much more volatile and outcomes worse. But, if police do not use force, then noncompliance will be encouraged. Getting the level of force right is more difficult in real time in the field than it may look after the fact.

I am not a police officer, but before retiring, I frequently represented them in civil-rights actions seeking money damages in federal court, and have a pretty good grasp on their perspective. They do have a strong sense that the public does not understand what they are called upon to do, and how they are trained to do it, and why they are trained that way (answer: survival). The way forward is thorny. The public needs to know what is and is not lawful police conduct. There is a lot of misinformation in the press, and the public deserves accurate information about persons armed and authorized to use force against them.  

Police should not police themselves; indeed, no group should police itself.  Recruiting diverse panels of retired judges, public defenders, prosecutors, academics, and others knowledgeable about the law and police procedures to take testimony, gather evidence about serious police conduct complaints, and issue public reports of their findings might be a start. It could help the poor and ignorant obtain representation in meritorious cases, publicly identify transgressing offices, and discourage frivolous lawsuits where the facts show the conduct was justified. Of course, that would cost money, and panels of experts can be wrong, biased, or even corrupted.  

Timothy believes that guns are a big part of the problem:

Improving policing is a tough problem as long as America remains a highly weaponed society. The police can’t respond to a traffic situation, a domestic situation, or even a missing-child situation without fearing for their lives. Hence, they react as if any situation is or will become violent. With the proliferation of drugs, their fears are increased. There are many situations where certain drugs increase a person’s sense of violence while deadening their awareness to pain or injury. That makes it really tough on the police.  

Jon concurs, and wants police officers to advocate for more gun control:

An acute manifestation of America’s gun insanity is that police departments, chiefs, sheriffs, and unions are not the most vocal supporters of gun-safety measures and laws to get guns off the streets. Where everyone (including, apparently, 6-year-olds) can possess a deadly weapon, police are not irrational to bring a sense of caution, or worse, fear, to almost every interaction, heightening tensions and leading to faster and deadlier escalations. This has contributed to more militant, violent, confrontational policing.

JD worries about the mental health of police officers:

I believe that the majority of those who undertake careers in law enforcement are motivated by a desire to make a positive difference. Over time, however, the soul-killing impact of repetitively dealing with humanity in its worst moments erodes empathy and altruism and generates resentment, hostility, fear, and an overarching effort to exert control.  

While our culture has made great strides in acknowledging the impact of PTSD on our veterans and others who experience trauma, only rarely does such understanding extend to law enforcement. As a former medical educator in a family-practice residency program, I recall the utility of Balint training in assisting medical-school graduates to maintain empathy and professionalism in the context of medical practices requiring them to encounter 15-20 persons a day, each seeking the best of medical care. Balint training created a context where peers could share the best and worst of their days in a judgment-free setting and, in the best of outcomes, permit them to renew their commitment.

Thanks to everyone who sent responses, whether or not I had space to print them––as ever, lots of great ones went unpublished. See you later this week.

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.

Elections have consequences. Florida’s governor has decided to root out wrong-think at one of Florida’s public colleges, and his harebrained meddling will likely harm the school, but he has every right to do it.

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

Republicans’ 2024 magical thinking March 2023 cover story: We’ve lost the plot. Montana’s Black mayor

Florida’s Soviet Commissars

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.

But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.

Elections have consequences. If the people of Florida, through their electoral choices, want to wreck one of their own colleges, it is within the state’s legitimate power to do so. In fact, Florida could decide tomorrow to amend its own constitution and abolish state universities entirely. There’s no national right to a college education, and if Florida wants to unleash a battalion of Guy Montags on its own state colleges and their libraries—well, that’s up to the voters.

But something more important is going on here. At this point in any discussion of college education, we are all supposed to acknowledge that colleges have, in fact, become ridiculously liberal. There’s some truth to that charge; I included some stories of campus boobery when I wrote about the role of colleges in America some years back. And only a few weeks ago, I joined the many people blasting Hamline University for going off the rails and violating basic principles of academic freedom while infantilizing and overprotecting students.

Fine, so stipulated: Many colleges do silly things and have silly professors saying silly things.

But the Sovietization of the New College isn’t about any of that. Something has changed on the American right, which is now seized with a hostility toward higher education that is driven by cultural resentment, and not by “critical race theory” or any of the other terms that most Americans don’t even understand. College among conservatives has become a kind of shorthand for identifying with all kinds of populist grievances, a ploy used even by Republicans with Ivy League educations as a means of cozying up to its non-college-educated and resentful base.

GOP attitudes about education have changed fast. As recently as 2015, most Republicans, by a wide margin, thought of universities as a positive influence on the United States. Four years later, those numbers flipped, and nearly 60 percent of Republicans saw universities as having a negative impact on the country.

It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to realize that those four years tracked with the rise of Donald Trump and a movement whose populist catechism includes seething anger at “the elites,” a class that no longer means “people with money and power”—after all, Republicans have gobs of both—but rather “those bookish snobs who look down on our True Real-American Values.” The Republican message, aided by the usual hypocrites in the right-wing entertainment ecosystem (such as Tucker Carlson, a prep-school product who told kids to drop out of college but asked Hunter Biden for help getting his own son into Georgetown), is that colleges are grabbing red-blooded American kids and replacing them with Woke Communist Pod People.

This is a completely bizarre line of attack: It posits that a graduate student making a pittance grading exams is more “elite” than a rich restaurant owner. But it works like a charm, in part because how Americans measure their success (and their relative status) has shifted from the simple metric of wealth to less tangible characteristics about education and lifestyle. Our national culture, for both better and worse, has arguably become more of a monoculture, even in rural areas. And many Americans, now living in a hyperconnected world, are more aware of cultural differences and the criticism of others. Those self-defined “real Americans” partake in that same overall national culture, of course, but they nonetheless engage in harsh judgment of their fellow citizens that is at least as venomous as what they imagine is being directed by “the elites” back at them.

Which brings us back to DeSantis—a graduate, he would apparently like you to forget, of Harvard and Yale. DeSantis is now a “populist,” much like Trump (Penn), Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard), Josh Hawley (Stanford and Yale), and Elise Stefanik (Harvard and the Ferengi  Diplomatic Academy). He has tasked Rufo (Georgetown and Harvard) to “remake” a school meant for the sons and daughters of Florida’s taxpayers not so that he can offer more opportunity to the people of his state, but so that he can run for president as just one of the regular folks whom reporters flock to interview in diners across the mountains and plains of a great nation.

Look, I live in New England surrounded by excellent public and private institutions, and I candidly admit that I couldn’t care less what kind of damage Florida does to its own schools. If Florida parents really don’t want Ron DeSantis appointing ideological commissars to annoy deans and department chairs, then they should head to the ballot box and fix it. But in the meantime, faux populists, the opportunists and hucksters who infest the modern GOP, are going to undermine education for the people who need it the most: the youngsters who rely on public education. And that’s a tragedy that will extend far beyond whatever becomes of the careers of Ron DeSantis or Christopher Rufo.

Related:

How Ivy League elites turned against democracy The professors silenced by Ron DeSantis’s anti-critical-race-theory legislation

Today’s News

A sixth Memphis police officer has been suspended from the force during the investigation of Tyre Nichols’s death. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is starting to present evidence to a grand jury in its criminal investigation into Donald Trump. The evidence focuses on Trump’s role in paying hush money to an adult-film star during his 2016 campaign. The Ukrainian air force warned that it would not be able to defend against Iranian ballistic missiles, should Russia obtain them.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects reader perspectives on how to improve policing. Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn attend a party with a very specific heart- and belly-warming theme. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how coffee became capitalism’s favorite drug.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman during HBO Films Pre Golden Globes Party Inside Coverage at Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, California (Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic / Getty)

The Luxury Dilemma

By Xochitl Gonzalez

Behind vine-covered walls on a modest hill overlooking Sunset Boulevard sits the decidedly immodest Chateau Marmont. The hotel was inspired by a French Gothic castle and, at 93, it is easily the oldest thing in Los Angeles that’s still considered sexy.

As a born-and-raised New Yorker without a driver’s license, I found the hotel the perfect place to park myself for a day of meetings in the era before Ubers and WeWorks and Soho Houses. I used to go there in the 2000s, back when I was a wedding planner. It was like a celebrity safari; stars would walk by, within arm’s reach. You could “do Los Angeles” without ever needing to move. I never could have afforded a room there, but I knew by reputation that at night it offered entertainment of a different sort: luxury and licentiousness and debauchery, unbounded by any rules.

In more recent years, I’ve returned to Los Angeles in a different career—as a screenwriter traveling on someone else’s dime. Naturally, I didn’t want to just take meetings at the Chateau; I wanted to stay there, to be a fly on the wall where the wild things were. Only I couldn’t.

I was told, in early 2021, that the hotel was not taking any new bookings.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Mia Goth and Alexander Skarsgård sit together in "Infinity Pool" (Neon Films)

Read. “Poem Beginning With a Sentence From My Last Will & Testament,” by Donald Platt.

“Lucy, when I die, / I want you to scatter one-third of my ashes among the sand dunes / of Virginia Beach.”

Watch. Infinity Pool, in theaters, is a gory, existential horror film with a premise deliciously nasty enough to keep you invested—even if it can’t quite keep up with its initial hook.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I usually take this final word in the Daily to direct you toward something fun or interesting, often derived from my admittedly oddball taste in pop culture. Today, I’m going to ask for your indulgence as I offer you something that I wrote yesterday in our Ideas section.

Some years ago, I wrote about the young losers and misfits among us who suddenly explode and commit mass murder. Even before the recent shootings in California (which actually are outliers in the general pattern of attacks by younger men), I’d decided to revisit this question. I wanted to think more about why America—and, yes, other nations as well—has produced so many lost young men who turn to performative and spectacular acts of murder or terrorism. I think the growth of narcissism is one of the answers, but I discuss it all at more length in this article, which I cannot say is pleasant reading but, I hope, offers a path toward more productive discussions about how to prevent such tragedies.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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.

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

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

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The Ringmaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

Why the French Want to Stop Working

By Pamela Druckerman

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

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

Read the full article.

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Or pick up another one of these seven books that will make you smarter.

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

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

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

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

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

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 of the diversity-training and DEI industries?” Dozens of readers shared their personal experiences, good and bad––so many, in fact, that I’m going to run some additional responses on Wednesday (if you haven’t yet signed up for the newsletter, do so here).

Today, we’ll start with four people who’ve led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in some capacity, and then we’ll hear from people who’ve been on the receiving end of diversity training at work. E. is a cynic about the aims of diversity work in corporate America:

I have worked in HR for Fortune 500 companies for 25 years in diversity, diversity and inclusion, and as an Equal Employment Opportunity officer. The intent of DEI training is for executives to think they are improving the organization for “minorities,” LGBTQ people, women, people with disabilities, etc. Spend a little money without any accountability or significant change. DEI training is to check a box. It is not meant to improve anything, and it doesn’t. Some trainings––the Intercultural Development Inventory, unconscious bias––make things worse. In general, DEI training exists to make executive teams and boards feel good.

M.V. is “enthusiastic about DEI work” and believes the grassroots group he leads at his workplace conducts it better than most outside consultants:

Far too often we trust external experts to bring solutions, which can neglect the critical value of truly centering employees and building culture from the bottom up. I’ve sat in corporate training sessions in which well-intended academics identify behaviors like “avoiding eye contact” as racial microaggressions. These generalities can do more harm than good; what if the person who can’t keep eye contact has social anxiety? Have we propagated that anxiety by encouraging the recipient to assume the worst implication?

The road toward reinforcing separation and the road toward building connection are, in fact, two different roads with different approaches. So how does our group approach DEI?

First, we value personal storytelling, which has been championed by the Moral Courage College founder Irshad Manji. There is a difference between hearing, say, about the importance of pronoun use from a nonbinary employee as compared to a training module. A discussion about labels with a diverse set of employees drives home the message that the “correct” term for a person can’t just be looked up but can only be gleaned through personal connection and the grace that comes with knowing the limitations of words.

Second, we adopt the teachings of Loretta Ross and Loan Tran on “calling in the calling-out culture,” which they offer in a superb online course. Though call-outs have their place, building trust and fostering mutual vulnerability are superior for having challenging conversations.

Third, we promote genuine curiosity and asking questions. The work by Mónica Guzmán of Braver Angels—including her book, I Never Thought of It That Way—teaches us to strive to understand the people we read and hear about but never meet. As she states, “Whoever is underrepresented in your life will be overrepresented in your imagination.”

Personal storytelling, calling people in, and getting genuinely curious: These three sets of tools can transform a culture and really help people be seen for who they actually are, not just the phantoms that fill the gaps in our heads, which are the root of much bias. These approaches that challenge the usual corporate DEI programming are largely championed by women of color (Manji, Ross, Guzmán, Chloé Valdary). For skeptics of DEI alternatives who also believe in centering the thinking of women of color during these times, I can suggest no stronger slate of philosophies to challenge their thinking.

Taisha has worked in the diversity industry for 15 years and believes a shift in its approach is needed: In a crisis-prone world, she writes, we need to organize people around shared goals, not shared identities. If a diverse group focuses on a goal (such as higher wages) that would benefit everyone working toward its, or a goal (such as reducing carbon emissions) that would benefit society in general, diversity goals will be achieved as a by-product of everyone cooperating.

She writes:

A common goal motivates people to handle themselves, so their personalities become less of a hindrance to the group’s purpose; to identify and develop their unique assets to benefit the group; and to recognize and mobilize their peers to do the same for the group’s good. Humans are inherently selfish and self-centered. But when we find something to believe in, we are more willing to set aside our personal likes and dislikes to work alongside others who share our goals. Then we think less of our identity differences. This sameness of purpose achieves inclusion without sacrificing differences.

The success of current unionizing efforts illustrate this new approach to DEI that I call  “Purpose not Personalities.” Unions organize a diverse group of people around a centrally compelling purpose (better treatment, higher wages, etc.) that motivates them to set aside whatever issues they might have with one another and dedicate the best of themselves, including their unique perspectives and skills, to help the group achieve success. To solve the many crises facing us, organizations can and should shift their DEI efforts to encourage less focus on personality or identity differences and more on group GOOD, trusting people to work out their differences as they lose sight of themselves.

Now on to the great majority of correspondents who have experienced DEI training sessions as participants. John agrees with the notion that an emphasis on shared goals tends to yield success:

I spent 24 years in the organization that, in my opinion, has done the best job with diversity and inclusion: the U.S. military. The real success happened at a cultural level: We all had a unifying mission. Anyone not in the military was the other, for the kinds of people that need an “other.”  And if someone did bring their prejudices and racism to work in the military, they were dealt with quite harshly. In this example, we should see a way forward. It is a shared mission and shared purpose that brings all people together. Anytime you substitute some other word for human, dehumanizing behavior occurs.

Our leaders, DEI educators, and media should all stress our shared culture and humanity. Instead, our leaders and DEI educators emphasize and exacerbate differences. We are doing the opposite of the right thing to bring about less racism and prejudice.

It’s noteworthy, I think, that the military took this approach with race far earlier than with sexual orientation, with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell formally in place until 2011, when the unifying mission (and the justness of equality under the law) was treated as mattering more than the difference in identity.

J., a high-school teacher in Canada, writes:

Diversity training is not about diversity. Diversity training is about providing excuses to institutions that don’t want to tackle poverty and the fundamental inequality of our capitalist system. Instead, they blame “institutional”' racism, an intentionally obscure term. What does it look like? How does one measure it? Who is implicated?

The conceit of these sessions during my 20 years as a teacher: You frontline workers, YOU are the reason these students fail. In my context—high schools—the only “proof” required for this conceit is the fact that some demographic groups do worse than others. We know that outcomes tell an incomplete story when variables like income, family, mental health, etc. are ignored. Diversity training is privileged people (professionals, administrators, politicians, professors, academics, many of whom make a good living as “experts” in this field) advancing a story, a theory. Yet, the literature demonstrates no meaningful successes to this decades-long progressive experiment.

We need viewpoint diversity in our institutions. Our fixation as progressives on dogma, and a narrow, Orwellian definition of what counts as diversity, is as much fuel for the culture wars as the excesses of the right. It’s just that we lefties are, ironically, too blind to our own privilege—educational privilege, class privilege, trauma privilege, etc.—to see it.

S. used to love being a professor:

I am a Bernie Sanders voter. I have spent 25 years working toward countering racism. I have lost friends and family, as I was “too woke.” I had my dream job, teaching mostly underprivileged students. I now almost loathe my job.

Faculty have been subjected to an authoritarian agenda of DEI/social justice since George Floyd was killed. His death had nothing to do with our campus or state, but it’s as if nothing matters anymore but racism, DEI, and payback for his situation. We are constantly peppered with meaningless utopian aspirations toward “equality of outcomes,” which is patently absurd, even within a family, let alone a state, school, nation, or planet. We are forced to listen to meaningless equity language and endure tortuous training and workshops, often required. They are usually run by unimpressive people whose qualifications seem dubious, usually taking the chance to scold the white faculty who have earned master’s and Ph.D.s and are established and renowned teachers who committed their lives to average-to-low pay for the sake of equity and justice.

Nobody dares offer any dissent. I have spoken to high-level administrators, people white and nonwhite, and they will not say anything. Nobody dares counter the social-justice/equity people. All are fearful of cancellation or firing. All have families and bills to pay and err on the side of lethargic caution. Everybody knows none of this is helping students.

I will never vote conservative on any policy, for what it’s worth. I will, however, wonder if I am in the most Orwellian career imaginable. My irritation is endless and my despondency palpable. My friends are tired of hearing about it. I’m a tenured, published, respected professor in California. on the verge of depression for the first time in my life.

Sherri, a gay woman who worked from 1988 to 2017, shared her thoughts on diversity training:

I’m a Ph.D. chemist, meaning I spent my career in a very male-dominated industry at a time when senior-level women were very rare, much less senior-level out LGBTQ people. I was closeted for the first 10 years of my career and then very out. In the ’90s, while I was still fairly junior and still closeted, my company, like many in the chemicals industry, started a Leadership Training protocol that in part focused on diversity awareness. I am convinced it is one of the worst things the company could have done.

They took a gaggle of senior managers off-site, away from day-to-day work pressures for a week; raised their awareness ofn “diversity”––which really just focused on representation––then sent them back with no skills for truly creating change. They all then felt that they “got it” and weren’t the problem. But day to day, they went back to their ingrained behaviors. Only now they felt enlightened and didn’t even try to look in the mirror.

Later, when I was out, I became a popular speaker on the internal circuit of department meetings to discuss what it felt like to be a gay senior woman at the company. I spent a fair amount of time trying to sensitize people to the concept of privilege without calling it that. The analogy I used was a fish versus a scuba diver. Both could survive in the ocean, but the fish did so effortlessly as the environment was built around their needs and capabilities. The scuba diver needed an oxygen tank, wet suit, fins, and had to expend a fair amount of energy to just survive in the ocean, much less thrive. The scuba diver was constantly aware of his difference and how much conscious effort it took to navigate underwater, and it was exhausting. The fish didn’t even know what water was.  

We are all fish in some ways and scuba divers in others. Where you are a fish, remember what it feels like when you are a scuba diver. And reach out to the scuba divers and help them survive.

We are so bent out of shape focusing on what we consider a “defining characteristic” that we miss what is most important: seeing each person as an individual human. We generalize and make assumptions based on gender, race, nationality, sexual orientation, or what have you. Maybe instead we should follow the Ted Lasso model of being “people curious.” Teach people about unintentional bias that all humans carry and use nontraditional examples like assumptions about how someone dresses or the school they went to or their accent. Then focus on the fact that bias in and of itself isn’t bad; it’s what you do with the knowledge that you carry bias. Don’t focus so much on someone’s speech or behavior as much as on what they should learn from it.

We will all make mistakes; we will all offend; in most cases it is not intentional. We all want to be seen as fully human and treated with respect. Can’t we just focus on that?

Richard is an engineer and describes how the DEI initiatives he’s been exposed to have changed:

In 2000, I moved from the U.K. to the U.S.A.

It was a job-related move, within a large company, working with semiconductors for automotive applications. About three years later, I encountered my first corporate DEI initiative. In the simplest terms, the company informed us that hiring practices were changing to increase profit. The training consisted of a few pages of reading, followed by a discussion during my manager’s weekly group meeting.

My boss provided us with a relevant example, and a nod in my direction. “Imagine a car with a subsystem design flaw that’s only exposed when driving on the left-hand side of the road.” He’d made his point: having a diverse team working on a problem would result in a more robust solution.

By 2018, I was working for a different tech company. I was also living in a much redder state, and DEI had become a divisive issue. Arriving extremely late to the game, my employer started rolling out DEI training. The introductory reading material was reluctant to mention the profit motive for maintaining a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workforce. DEI was presented as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.

Over the course of a year, a new branch appeared on the org chart, a vice president was hired, corporate goals were set, support groups established, and mailing lists created. Personal DEI goals were defined, refined, and aligned with corporate goals. Employee-development task lists were expected to feature several DEI-related objectives. Progress would need to be demonstrated on a quarterly basis. Mostly, my DEI training consisted of online “unconscious bias” courses provided by an external company.

At first, I was enthusiastic. Engineers like knowing how things work, and I thought I might gain some insight into my biases. But I soon realized that instead of gaining an increased level of self-awareness, I was simply learning the names of a long list of biases. Meanwhile, the continuing stream of emails from the DEI branch of the organization prompted me to set up an email filter, and my enthusiasm for the initiative began to wane. I started to feel like my corporate parents were openly expressing a preference for one of my siblings. It turns out you definitely can have too much of a good thing.

During one of my unconscious-bias courses, I learned that groups who’ve enjoyed an unchallenged, privileged position are the same groups most likely to feel threatened by change. What the courses didn’t mention was that any backlash directed at the intended beneficiaries of DEI initiatives would have been misplaced. I certainly felt exasperated with my employer, though.

The company seemed unwilling to explicitly state that certain new employees provided extra, unquantifiable value. And at no point did the company decide that some of that value should be returned to each new hire in the form of a higher salary. In fact, while the DEI initiative was being rolled out, salary ranges were tightened to prevent perceived discrimination. I’ve become less tolerant of heavy-handed corporate initiatives. A corporation should be able to profit by becoming more diverse, equitable, and inclusive while maintaining the morale of existing employees. In my experience, hitting the optimum rate of corporate culture change is difficult.

Greg, 61, says diversity training at the large aerospace company where he works has been addressed more intelligently and effectively than he would have anticipated based on media coverage.

He writes:

The training we had was pretty good, even to a skeptical observer. I remember a compelling discussion by one diversity trainer who said that we most frequently associate diversity considerations with gender and race, but that was in part a historical accident because those groupings were particularly important in the 1960s and 1970s when thinking about diversity as a workplace concept emerged. This trainer used an alternative case of employees in today’s workplace with prominent tattoos, a group that may be viscerally disturbing to older employees based on our conditioning when we were young, but tattoos are essentially irrelevant to workplace performance.

After President Donald Trump was elected, about 2,000 of our senior-level employees were on a quarterly phone call with our CEO. One asked: Given the change in administration, were we going to change our diversity policies? Our CEO replied that we would change nothing, because our policies were not to curry political favor. Our diversity strategy was to out-compete our rival companies, because we would expand our access to talent by addressing issues that have historically undervalued certain groups of people.

K. resents the training she was subjected to while doing civic work:

I have volunteered with the City of Madison (Wisconsin) Clerk’s Office every election since the 1990s and in recent years have worked as a special voting deputy helping with voter registration, taking absentee ballots to nursing homes, and the like. The city clerk’s office motto is “We exist to assist,” and most of us there let that be our guiding light in the service of democracy. Because our city is deeply concerned about equity, “diversity training” has been required for city personnel for the past several years. These sessions seem to be aimed at people who have never considered—much less worked to ameliorate—the problem of inequity and have only served to offend and alienate me.

I am an old progressive whose first professional position was bringing support services to migrant farm workers and their families. As a female raised in the 1960s, I know ALL about discrimination; you don’t need to describe it. The condescension implicit in these “woke” puppies presenting the novel idea that some people start off at a disadvantage to others is offensive.

I love my city, deeply respect its staff, and am still fully committed to equality as a cause, but showing me diversity slide shows has not had what I am pretty certain was the desired effect. And, yeah, it’s not about me, but please. I’ve been trying all my life. All. My. Life. I’ve been trying to make a difference.

Megan believes the DEI programming she has seen in higher education doesn’t address academia’s most pressing problems:

Grad school is a toxic environment: Students on assistantships are paid poverty wages, given health care they can barely afford, are overworked by advisers who perpetuate the bad mentorship practices they experienced, and get degrees in fields flooded with people vying for jobs. This is a bad environment for even a cis white male or female with good mental health … and the focus is increasing departmental diversity and pronoun training.

How is any person supposed to thrive here?

T.M. doesn’t fit neatly into any identity box:

I’ve worked as an adjunct professor for over a decade, mostly at a prestigious northeastern university. I’m also of Assyrian descent, with a heavy mix of old-school New England. I sometimes think the reason I wound up in American studies as a discipline is because in 1991, while I was doing a genealogy project for fifth-grade social studies, the teacher told me I couldn’t be an American. Here I was, 11 years old, the United States had gone to war in Iraq, and I didn’t feel comfortable trying to explain who or what Assyrians are. Iraq didn’t exist in 1906 when my father’s family came to America.

I don’t consider myself white-passing, but it’s been obvious since I was young that my grandfather and great-grandfather were of darker complexion than I am. I’m aware that I’ve been privileged by my white complexion, but I am often met with resistance to my belief that DEI is actually reinforcing the arbitrary cultural signifier of whiteness rather than decreasing it. Today, because I don’t fit neatly into one box, I find that the administrators at the university where I teach lack the same nuance as my fifth-grade social-studies teacher. My questions as to the efficacy of trainings are met with vague, bureaucratic language.

Echoing the language of Martin Luther King Jr., we at the university are told we are now a “beloved community,” but unlike MLK, the DEI initiatives ignore economic equity or inclusion. Diversity, instead, is merely a way to fit people into categorical racial boxes. It’s no wonder some people are resentful of being categorized into something that is so ill-defined.

The academy has failed to generate conversations that truly explore the functions of race and class. It’s off-putting to get boilerplate messaging about racial diversity from people who make six-figure salaries when they are the same people who cut my health care last year. I don’t see the equity or inclusion of that decision, but yet we are now “beloved.”

How can we truly be diverse, equitable, and inclusive when over half the faculty who teach in higher education are treated as disposable? We’re denying the very cracks in our foundation the administrators claim to be fixing. DEI isn’t a solution. It’s a corporate orthodoxy that creates problems. I am distrusting of these initiatives.

Caleb scoffs at “equity” efforts that ignore income:

I was an administrative assistant at a law firm in Maine. Through six hours of mandatory DEI trainings, professional and administrative staff alike were educated on the nuanced definitions of equality and equity, complete with visual aids of children standing on different sizes of wooden boxes. Meanwhile, there was an elephant in the room that was never acknowledged: the attorneys sitting in on these Zoom trainings with us were, and are still, paid in the range of five to 20 times what the administrative staff make.

During the pandemic, while we were expected to consume gas and time commuting to the office, masked up and at risk of infection, to sort and scan mail, print checks, etc., the professional staff could work from home, expense meals, and receive compensation for work-related travel. When I asked if I could receive compensation for my 90-minute commute, I was laughed out of the office. The consensus of the administrative staff after our mandatory six hours of preachy DEI trainings: They are a cruel joke so long as they ignore financial inequality. Of course, they could hardly be so popular in the business world if they highlighted the outrageous economic inequality it fosters.

Jaleelah, a student, describes how diversity programs feature in the world of competitive debate in Canada:

Virtually all debate teams and competitions have “equity officers” (a name that would give Ron DeSantis an aneurysm) who are responsible for “making sure participants are comfortable.” In practice, this means that barely trained university students are tasked with a wide range of responsibilities. Here is a list of equity functions I support:

Arranging subsidies for students who can’t afford to pay for competitions Communicating with organizers to ensure disabled debaters are only assigned to rooms they can physically access at tournaments Ensuring that there are no conflicts of interest between judges and the teams they are assigned to adjudicate

Here is a list of functions I oppose:

Mandating that trigger warnings be given before speeches (thankfully, this practice is not ubiquitous) Vetoing debate topics on the grounds that they might prompt people to make offensive arguments

And here is a list of functions that I have a neutral or varying opinion on:

Constantly reminding people not to make sweeping generalizations about groups of people Mediating conflicts between students (some equity officers are horrible mediators, but I generally support the approach) Providing input on debate topics (when it is clear that students are not permitted to issue vetoes)

That’s a long list, but equity teams usually run pretty smoothly. I suspect that there are three reasons for this. First, equity’s power in debate is sufficiently limited. Judges do not penalize teams for the sole reason that a speaker said something “inequitable.” Equity teams cannot intervene in debate rounds (outside of a situation where one competitor is screaming targeted slurs or physically assaulting another), nor can they alter the results. Their most severe power of removing people from clubs and competitions is almost exclusively reserved for students who have committed crimes against other students (and those people usually resign anyway). When people perceive overreach, they complain loudly. Trigger-warning mandates for speakers have been greatly reduced because a number of people (including me) argued that they are ineffective.

Second, there are social incentives for equity officers to avoid doing stupid things. All equity officers are also debaters. It’s a bad idea to harshly punish someone for accidentally saying something offensive when you know you’ll have to spend an entire weekend with their friends. Equity officers are not above other students. This is sharply different from DEI trainings in the corporate world where a team of outside instructors assume a position of power over a given office or team.

Finally, the debate community assumes that people have good intentions. When conversations about ideological bias arise, conservatives and communists never accuse liberals of intentionally rigging rounds against them—they analyze the ways in which common unconscious biases cause judges to favor certain arguments.

And last in today’s roundup, an anonymous reader shares a diversity-training experience that caused him a lot of anxiety:

After years of teaching history at the college level, I took a job at an elite private high school, drawn in part by their stated goal of investing time, energy, and money in DEI education and initiatives. The school had a contract with a DEI-training company to educate all the faculty and administrators via a three-day retreat on race. My research and teaching has focused on race throughout my career. In a real sense, talking and writing about race is my job. Due to my personal and professional goals, I signed up to go.

We were immediately told by the facilitators that the purpose was not to train us in DEI but instead to have us spend the entire time reflecting on our own racial journeys. It was immediately clear that the space was designed to be a sort of deconstructed learning experience, where we were expressly forbidden from discussing the issue from the standpoint of research or debate. Instead we would discuss it at a personal level. Such ideas and stories, once shared, were subject to attack by the facilitators.

One white, female teacher was talkative and engaged in the first couple sessions, and the facilitators called her out for what they felt was a race-based domination of the space. Certainly, she’d made some “mistakes” in what she said about race, but the goal appeared to extract some kind of mea culpa. She meekly apologized and never spoke again.

Later, we were told with the utmost confidence that none of us talk about race in the classroom and that when the subject comes up we all shy away from it out of fear and cowardice. When a couple of teachers, including me, said that we were required to talk about race as part of the subjects we teach, this was met with a reiteration of the assertion that we do so reluctantly. The white facilitator then sat down cross-legged on the floor and spent an hour telling us how racist she was. I’m not being flip: The gist was that she once thought she wasn’t but then learned that she was and now understood that no matter how much she learned, she’d never escape her racist origin. She asked the whites in the room for their thoughts.

No one said anything for a long time. Then a white teacher started crying and said she'd been picked on for being poor and dark-skinned as a kid. The facilitators made it clear that this was the wrong answer.

On the final day, the most notable activity was one in which the group was split into white and people-of-color affinity groups. Afterward we came back to the main room and reflected. A Black teacher talked about positive stereotyping of Black people being just as reductive as negative stereotyping. I responded that this was something I've taught about in the case of the Middle East, saying that Orientalism not only perpetuates nasty things about Middle Eastern peoples (e.g. “All Muslims are sexist”) but posits supposedly good characteristics as uniform (e.g. “All Muslims are hospitable”). After a break, we came back together and the facilitators said that before we went on they wanted to tackle something.

Facilitators: “In the last session, you used the word ‘Orientalism.’ We want you to know that ‘Oriental’ is a very racist term to describe Asian people. But you put an -ism at the end and we wanted to ask what you meant by that.”

Me: “Um, well, ‘Orientalism’ refers to a group of scholars who called themselves ‘Orientalists’ because they studied the Middle East, and from the 1960s onward, were criticized by other scholars (especially Edward Said) for their reliance on Western biases.”

Facilitators: “Well, that is the scholarly, academic world. Here, in this space, ‘Oriental’ is a racist term. And we want you to reflect on that.”

Me: “I’m, um, sorry if anyone took it that way. In my work, this is a term we use to talk about racism …” [face red, heart racing]

Facilitators [interrupting]: “We’re out here, in this space. That space is academic. In this space, this is a space where ‘Oriental’ shouldn’t be said.”

I was fuming. To me, that exchange totally undermined any authority they had to speak on race, if they didn’t even know the primary word used to describe racism against Middle Eastern people. It doesn’t matter if people who are supposed to be experts in race have never heard of the term “Orientalism,” as if they missed the post-9/11 debates over Western biases against anyone deemed “Eastern”––I could lose my job over being called racist.

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Some NATO nations are wavering about sending tanks and other advanced weapons to Ukraine. I understand fears of escalation, but if Russia wins in Ukraine, the world will lose.

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

A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump What really took America to war in Iraq The brutal reality of life in America’s most notorious jail

No Other Choice

I don’t often find myself agreeing with Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina conservative who long ago rebranded himself as Donald Trump’s faithful valet and No. 1 fan. Last week, however, Graham lashed out in frustration at the dithering in Europe and America over sending more weapons to Ukraine. “I am tired of the shit show surrounding who is going to send tanks and when they’re gonna send them,” he said during a press conference in Kyiv, flanked by Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. “World order is at stake. [Vladimir] Putin is trying to rewrite the map of Europe by force of arms.”

Graham is right. Germany, for example, has been reluctant to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine; the Germans, for their part, would likely prefer to see the United States send American tanks first. But everyone in the West should be sending anything the Ukrainians can learn to use, because a lot more than mere order is at stake, and order, by itself, is not enough. As Rousseau wrote, “Tranquility is found also in dungeons,” but that does not make dungeons desirable places to live. Global civilization itself is on the line: the world built after the defeat of the Axis, in which, for all of our faults as nations and peoples, we strive to live in peace and cooperation—and, at the least, to not butcher one another. If Russia’s campaign of terror and other likely war crimes erases Ukraine, it will be a defeat of the first order for every institution of international life, be it the United Nations or the international postal union.

I suspect that many people in Europe and the United States are having a hard time getting their arms around the magnitude of this threat. We are all afflicted by normalcy bias, our inherent resistance to accept that large changes can upend our lives. I struggled with this in the early stages of the war; I thought Ukraine would probably lose quickly, and then when the Russians were repulsed by the heroic Ukrainian defenses, I hoped (in vain) that the fighting would fizzle out, that Putin would try to conserve what was left of his shattered military, and that the world’s institutions, damaged by yet another act of Russian barbarism, would somehow continue to limp along.

We’re long past such possibilities. Putin has made clear that he will soak the ground of East-Central Europe with blood—both of Ukrainians and of his own hapless mobiks, the recently mobilized draftees he’s sending into the military meat grinder—if that’s what it takes to subjugate Kyiv and end the Kremlin’s unexpected and ongoing humiliation. At this point, the fight in Ukraine is not about borders or flags but about what kind of world we’ve built over the past century, and whether that world can sustain itself in the face of limitless brutality. As the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in Davos last week: “We don’t know when the war ends, but Ukraine has to win. I don’t see another choice.”

Neither do I, and it’s past time to send Ukraine even more and better weapons. (Or, as my colleague David Frum tweeted last June: “If there’s anything that Ukraine can use in any NATO warehouse from Vancouver to Vilnius, that’s a scandal. Empty every inventory.”) I say all this despite my concerns about escalation to a wider European and even global war. I still oppose direct U.S. and NATO intervention in this fight, and I have taken my share of criticism for that reticence. I do not fear that such measures will instantly provoke World War III. Rather, I reject proposals that I think could increase the odds of an accident or a miscalculation that could bring the superpowers into a nuclear standoff that none of them wants. (Putin, for all his bluster, has no interest in living out his last days eating dry rations in a dark fallout shelter, but that does not mean he is competent at assessing risks.)

Americans and their allies must face how far a Russian victory would extend beyond Ukraine. In a recent discussion with my old friend Andrew Michta (a scholar of European affairs who is now dean at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, in Germany), he referred to the conflict in Ukraine as a “system-transforming” war, as Russian aggression dissolves the last illusions of a stable European order that were perhaps too quickly embraced in the immediate post–Cold War euphoria. Andrew has always been less sanguine about the post–World War II international order than old-school institutionalists like me, but he has a point: The pessimists after 1991 were right about Russia and its inability to live in peace with its neighbors. If Ukraine loses, dictators elsewhere will draw the lesson that the West has lost its will to defend its friends—and itself.

If Russia finally captures Ukraine by mass murder, torture, and nuclear threats, then everything the world has gained since the defeat of the Axis in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991 will be in mortal peril. Putin will prove to himself and to every dictator on the planet that nothing has changed since Hitler, that lawless nations can achieve their aims by using force at will, by killing and raping innocent people and then literally grinding their ashes into the dirt. This is no longer about Russia’s neo-imperial dreams or Ukraine’s borders: This is a fight for the future of the international system and the safety of us all.

Related:

The brutal alternate world in which the U.S. abandoned Ukraine The bitter truth behind Russia’s looting of Ukrainian art

Today’s News

The first victims of Saturday night’s shooting at a Monterey Park, California, dance hall have been identified. Eleven people were killed and 10 others injured, and the gunman was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot. President Joe Biden plans to name Jeffrey Zients, his administration’s former COVID-19-response coordinator, as the next White House chief of staff.    The FDA is considering a change to how COVID-19 vaccines are updated. The simpler process would more closely resemble annual flu-shot updates, according to documents the organization posted online.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the pros and cons of corporate diversity training.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Ted S. Warren / Getty; Shutterstock

A Grim New Low for Internet Sleuthing

By Megan Garber

On November 13, 2022, four students from the University of Idaho—Ethan Chapin, Kaylee Goncalves, Xana Kernodle, and Madison Mogen—were found dead in the house that the latter three rented near campus. Each had been stabbed, seemingly in bed. Two other students lived in the house, and were apparently in their rooms that night; they were unharmed.

From the public’s standpoint, the case had few leads at first: an unknown assailant, an unknown motive. Law-enforcement officials in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, initially offered the public little information about the evidence they were gathering in their investigation. Into that void came a frenzy of public speculation—and, soon enough, public accusation. The familiar alchemy set in: The real crime, as the weeks dragged on, became a “true crime”; the murders, as people discussed them and analyzed them and competed to solve them, became a grim form of interactive entertainment.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The culture wars look different on Wikipedia. Aubrey Plaza gave SNL permission to get weird.

Culture Break

Harrison Ford in "The Fugitive" (Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy)

Read. “Woman in Labor,” a poem by Daria Serenko.

“Yesterday a woman began giving birth directly on the Red Square with an assault rifle pressed to her temple.”

Watch. Return to a blockbuster that was among the last of its kind. The Fugitive, available to stream on multiple platforms, is the perfect popcorn movie.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I had to do some traveling this weekend, and although I usually connect to airline Wi-Fi and annoy people with random thoughts on Twitter, flying is also a way to catch up on old movies. For some reason, this time out I put on the 1974 classic The Longest Yard, with Burt Reynolds playing a dissolute former football star who ends up in a Florida jail. He is cornered by a sadistic warden (played with genial smarm by the great Eddie Albert) who blackmails him into coaching the prison football team. Reynolds instead suggests tuning up the team of guards by having them play a pickup team composed of inmates, which goes about the way you’d expect. I seemed to recall liking it as a kid, and I wanted to see it again as an adult. (Do not confuse this one with a far-inferior 2005 remake starring Adam Sandler.)

I don’t like sports, and I’m not sure why I thought I would enjoy the movie, but I did, and the reason is that The Longest Yard isn’t really a football movie. It’s a prison movie built around the game between the inmates and guards, a kind of lighthearted Shawshank Redemption about bad men who, for one moment, get a chance to be the good guys. There’s even a murder of an innocent man, as there was in Shawshank, and a similar, if far less dramatic, moment of getting even with the creepy warden. And yes, it includes a message about sportsmanship, as the inmates earn the grudging respect of the guards at the end. Finally, long before it was a joke on The Simpsons, the movie actually gets a laugh by hitting a guy in the groin with a football. Twice.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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House Republicans are readying their subpoenas.

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

The greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory. Take detransitioners seriously. Who’s afraid of a portrait of Muhammad?

Probable Probes

After a few (er, 14) initial stumbles, House Republicans have elected a speaker and handed out committee gavels, and are now poised to deliver on the one promise to voters that they have the unchallenged power to keep: pursuing aggressive investigations of President Joe Biden, his administration, and, yes, even his family.

The flurry of inquiries that Republicans, under the auspices of Congress’s oversight power, plan to launch in the coming days and weeks might well overwhelm the Biden administration, not to mention the public. None of the hearings are likely to command the attention of last year’s Democratic-led January 6 committee, but they have the potential to reveal new information about how the federal government has operated over the past two years and to create political headaches for the president as he prepares to run for reelection. The investigations also carry risks for Republicans, who could lose public support if they appear to be tilting too far at conspiracy theories or pursuing overly partisan—and personal—takedowns of Biden and his son Hunter.

Here’s a guide to the probes that are likely to make headlines in the months ahead.

The Southern Border

Multiple House committees are planning hearings on an issue that Republicans made, along with tackling inflation, a centerpiece of their national campaign. They’ve accused Biden of willfully neglecting the influx of migrants across the southern border, and although the attacks frequently devolve into immigrant-bashing, the moral and legal conundrum over how to handle asylum seekers is becoming a bigger political liability for the president. Big-city Democratic mayors such as Eric Adams of New York are complaining that they lack the funds to accommodate the migrants who wind up on their streets. A big question is whether the hearings will stay focused on policy or whether they’ll turn into an impeachment drive against Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland security.

Hunter Biden

The personal and business dealings of the president’s surviving son have been a Republican obsession for years, and now the party has the power to hold hearings on what Representative Elise Stefanik of New York has called “the Biden crime family.” Hunter Biden is already under investigation by federal prosecutors in Delaware, and Republicans are intent on demonstrating both that he traded on access to his famous father overseas and that the president was aware of what his son was doing. The younger Biden may be in real legal jeopardy, but the GOP faces a tricky test in making the broader public care about Hunter Biden and keeping its probe focused on his alleged corruption rather than the more sordid personal activities of a troubled son.

The “Weaponization of the Federal Government”

To secure the House speakership, Kevin McCarthy agreed to conservative demands to create a select subcommittee modeled on a 1970s Senate panel that investigated abuses by the intelligence community. This one is focused on what Republicans call “the weaponization of the federal government,” and it’s likely to zero in on complaints from Donald Trump–aligned conservatives that the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies have unfairly targeted the former president and his supporters. Democrats see a more malicious motive: to undermine and thwart the many ongoing investigations involving Trump and GOP lawmakers, including the special counsel’s inquiry into Trump’s possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Biden’s Own Classified Documents

Republicans had barely claimed their new House majority when news broke that classified documents had been found at a think tank in Washington, D.C., where Biden had kept an office, and Biden’s residence in Delaware—handing them a fresh line of inquiry against the president. GOP leaders quickly launched a congressional investigation, but they will be competing with the Justice Department, which appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to look into the matter.

U.S.-China Relations

Democrats may see the other planned investigations as partisan exercises aimed at tarnishing the president, but not this one. A House vote last week to create a select committee on the “strategic competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party” earned broad bipartisan support, including from all of the top Democratic leaders. The committee is expected to focus on how the U.S. should counter China’s growing economic and military strength, the threat of its possible invasion of Taiwan, and American concerns about its human-rights abuses. Stronger U.S. policy toward China has long been a bipartisan cause in Congress; former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who voted for the bill, is a hawk who angered the Chinese government with her high-profile visit to Taiwan last year. That consensus is likely to add legitimacy to the committee’s work, although some progressives are wary of its potential to generate anti-Asian rhetoric.

Related:

Biden’s classified documents should have no impact on Trump’s legal jeopardy. The impeachment of Joe Biden (from October 2022)

Today’s News

A helicopter with senior Ukrainian officials onboard crashed in a Kyiv suburb, killing more than dozen people, including Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs. The cause of the crash is still unknown. Microsoft is planning to lay off about 10,000 employees as part of a broader effort to cut costs. New research shows that areas of Greenland are hotter than they have been at any point in the past 1,000 years.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores whether diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts actually exacerbate intolerance.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tommaso Ottomano

This Is the Band That’s Supposedly Saving Rock and Roll?

By Spencer Kornhaber

Early December, a tchotchke shop in Brooklyn—an employee advises me about which novelty socks to pair with which comical greeting card for a friend. Then her voice, previously curious and chatty, gains a sudden seriousness. She tells me about a concert she went to the night before. The band was Italian, it was saving rock and roll, and it’d play in the city again, that night. I suddenly understood the difference between a salesperson and an evangelist. The woman gave me an order: You must go see Måneskin.

I didn’t go, but I did know who Måneskin was. I first became aware of the group while attending a watch party for the 2021 Eurovision Song Competition. No one at the party could understand why a bar band in burgundy leather, playing what sounded like a Rage Against the Machine song edited for a Chevy ad, ran away with the top prize. Eurovision is known for Abba-style spectacle, silly and bright. Måneskin is all about scowling, and guitars that sound like carburetors. But clearly, the band had sparked passion somewhere—the kind of passion that, it turns out, converts listeners into proselytizers.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Let’s shake on it. When good pain turns into bad pain

Culture Break

A still from Hawa (Amazon Studios)

Read. “The Bug,” a new poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson.

“What did you expect? For me to let the bug / just be a bug. To leave it alone / when it already planned on dying.”

Watch. Hawa, streaming on Amazon Prime, accurately captures teen grief.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, James Kirchick’s book Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington, which came out last year. The title, with its focus on a single American city, actually undersells the book’s scope. More than a case study or chronology of a civil-rights movement, Secret City is a fascinating history of the past century of American politics. It reveals, or reminds, the reader of the supporting and often central role that the scandal of homosexuality—as it was too long understood—played in so many of the nation’s pivotal moments, including the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate. I had no idea, for example, that Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were all subject at one time or another to rumors that they were gay. Kirchick documents how gay life evolved from subculture to simply culture in Washington over the course of a few decades, and how the nation’s capital was both behind and ahead of the curve in the slow but profound shift in acceptance of gay men and women in public service.

— Russell

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.

Question of the Week

What do you think of the diversity-training and DEI industries? Do you have personal experiences with them? I’d love to hear from boosters and critics alike, especially if your commentary is grounded in something you’ve observed at work, school, or elsewhere in your life.

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

Conversations of Note

“What if diversity trainings are doing more harm than good?”

That’s the headline of a recent New York Times op-ed by Jesse Singal, the writer, podcaster, and author of a 2018 Atlantic cover story, who delves into the multibillion-dollar diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) industry. While its advocates claim that “diversity workshops can foster better intergroup relations, improve the retention of minority employees, close recruitment gaps and so on,” Singal writes, in practice there is “little evidence that many of these initiatives work.” And the type of diversity training “that is currently in vogue—mandatory trainings that blame dominant groups for D.E.I. problems—may well have a net-negative effect.”

I have a theory about why programs of that sort might fail. After Donald Trump was elected, I studied the political-psychology research on authoritarian personality types. I was especially impressed by the work of Karen Stenner, who found in her scholarship that “a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone blacks, let alone African Americans and their purported shortcomings” (though anti-Black, ideological racists do of course exist and African Americans are harmed regardless of what drives intolerance). “Ultimately,” Stenner contended, “much of what we think of as racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as ‘difference-ism,’” defined as “a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective order of oneness and sameness.”

As I explained in a 2019 article:

The distinction isn’t merely about word choice. It has critical implications for fighting and easing both racism and other forms of intolerance. For example, in an entirely separate experiment meant to manipulate the way authoritarians viewed “us” and “them,” subjects were told that NASA had verified the existence of alien life––beings “very different from us in ways we are not yet even able to imagine.” After being told that, the measured racial intolerance of authoritarian subjects decreased by half, a result that suggests a general intolerance of difference that varies with perceptions of otherness, not fixed antagonism against a racial group. Their boundaries (and thus their behavior!) can be swiftly altered, Stenner emphasized, just by this simple cognitive device of creating a “superordinate group”: making “black people look more like ‘us’ than ‘them’ when there are green people afoot.” Under these conditions, the authoritarians didn’t only become kinder to black people, Stenner noted; they also became more merciful to criminals—that is, less inclined to want a crackdown on perceived moral deviance.

As I went on to explain:

Stenner’s book reaches a conclusion that cuts against one of the main progressive strategies for fighting racism in American society: the belief that if we have the will, everyone can be socialized to respect and value difference. “All the available evidence indicates that exposure to difference, talking about difference, and applauding difference … are the surest way to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to guarantee the expression of their predispositions in manifestly intolerant attitudes and behaviors,” she wrote.

The appearance of sameness matters, and “apparent variance in beliefs, values, and culture seem to be more provocative of intolerant dispositions than racial and ethnic diversity,” so “parading, talking about, and applauding our sameness” seems wise when possible.

Put more simply, perhaps 15 percent of humans are psychologically ill-suited to dealing with difference—and when DEI-industry programming deliberately raises the salience of race in a given organization with the intention of urging anti-racism, the effect is to exacerbate differentism.

In an article that dovetails nicely with Stenner’s insights, Matthew Yglesias once explained why he believes that raising the salience of race in public-policy debates is frequently bad for anti-racism.

He wrote:

A deep body of scholarship across history, political science, and economics all broadly point toward the conclusion that increasing the salience of race can have harmful results.

One particularly frustrating example I came across years ago at Vox is that Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt found in experimental settings that telling people about racial disparities in the criminal justice system made people less supportive of reform.

And you could react to that by thinking “wow, that sucks, people shouldn’t be so terrible,” but I think most people believe there are tradeoffs between harshness in the criminal justice system and public safety. And while more progressive-minded people would say that’s overstated, there are clearly some margins on which it’s true. So if you tell people a penalty will be applied in a racist way, for many of them, that’s appealing—the system can crack down on dealers and addicts while they personally can rest assured that if their kid happens to be caught doing drugs, he’ll be okay. By the same token, a friend who’s running for office told me that many of the people she speaks to who are most agitated about crime also hate traffic cameras. My guess is that’s precisely because traffic cameras don’t engage in racial discrimination, and nice middle-class white people don’t like the idea of an enforcement system that doesn’t exempt them.

In the specific case of the cameras, I think we should have more of them and that the aim of our criminal justice system more broadly should be to catch a larger share of offenders in a non-discriminatory way and then punish them less harshly. Ideally, everyone who speeds would get caught and fined and the fines wouldn’t necessarily be very high, but people would stop doing speeding because the odds of detection are overwhelming.

And in the general case, I think it’s clear that the goal should be to reduce the salience of race in public debate and focus on the direct objects of reducing poverty, making policing more accountable, improving schools, reducing air pollution, expanding health insurance coverage, and otherwise solving the big problems of American society. All of this would, mechanically, close racial gaps. But highlighting that is genuinely counterproductive.

I mention these writers at such length because many diversity-loving people find it surprising that DEI training could be counterproductive, and Stenner and Yglesias’s work offers plausible explanations for why. But the intersection of politics, psychology, and race is exactly the sort of wildly complicated subject area where epistemic modesty and airing diverse viewpoints is vital for truth-seeking, so I hope that fans of DEI training and members of the industry will stand up for their work.

But to defend the industry in aggregate will require a lot of explaining. As Singal wrote, “Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is ‘disappointing,’ wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, ‘considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.’”

The Harvard Business Review has been publishing articles that cast doubt on the efficacy of mainstream DEI approaches for years. “One reason why I found Jesse’s piece so compelling is that he’s echoing arguments I made more than a year ago,” David French wrote in The Dispatch. “I quoted from a 2018 summary of studies by Harvard University professor Frank Dobbin and and Tel Aviv University professor Alexandra Kalev that said, ‘Hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that anti-bias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.’”

In French’s telling, that scholarship has implications for the culture wars:

We fight a tremendous amount over diversity training—even to the point of violating civil rights laws and the First Amendment—to either mandate or prohibit certain forms of DEI instruction when DEI instruction doesn’t impact hearts and minds much at all. It’s Diet Coke. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that just doesn’t deliver what its advocates hope for, nor does it foster identity politics in the way that many of its opponents fear.

… People just aren’t that malleable. For good and ill, we’re built of sterner, less flexible stuff, and periodic Corporate PowerPoints or group learning sessions can’t really shape peoples’ lives.

For more, see a podcast debate that Jane Coaston hosted on diversity initiatives and my 2021 profile of the entrepreneur and public intellectual Chloé Valdary, who offers an alternative approach to DEI training that she calls the Theory of Enchantment. Finally, for a deep dive into the history of the diversity-training industry, see Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s 2002 book Race Experts: How Racial Etiquette, Sensitivity Training, and New Age Therapy Hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.

“There’s No Planet B”

In Aeon, Arwen E. Nicholson and Raphaëlle D. Haywood reject the possibility of humanity moving off of Earth:

Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary colonisation. But can we really leave Earth and all our worries behind?

No. All these stories are missing what makes a planet habitable to us. What Earth-like means in astronomy textbooks and what it means to someone considering their survival prospects on a distant world are two vastly different things. We don’t just need a planet roughly the same size and temperature as Earth; we need a planet that spent billions of years evolving with us. We depend completely on the billions of other living organisms that make up Earth’s biosphere.

Without them, we cannot survive. Astronomical observations and Earth’s geological record are clear: the only planet that can support us is the one we evolved with. There is no plan B. There is no planet B. Our future is here, and it doesn’t have to mean we’re doomed.

Gas Stoves and Asthma

Emily Oster attempts to evaluate the data.

Berlin’s Failing Army

Spiegel International argues that even with war raging in Ukraine, and the attendant need for German contributions to European security, the German military is in dire shape. It reports the following:

In June, the Bundestag passed a 100-billion-euro special fund for the German military, and in December the Budget Committee released the first 13 billion from that fund for eight defense projects, including the new F-35 combat aircraft. “It is clear that we must invest much more in the security of our country in order to protect our freedom and our democracy,” the chancellor said in his February address to the nation. Scholz also formulated his political expectations: “The goal is a powerful, cutting-edge, progressive Bundeswehr that can be relied upon to protect us.” The question is: How much progress has been made on fulfilling that pledge. Since then, after all, the Defense Ministry has been producing little in the way of announcements about restructuring and reform, instead landing on the front pages due to gaffes and catastrophic shortcomings.

One example: The commander of the 10th Tank Division reported to his superiors that during an exercise with 18 Puma infantry fighting vehicles, all 18 of them broke down. It was a worrisome incident given that the ultra-modern weapons systems are a key component of the NATO rapid-reaction force. There is a lack of munitions and equipment—and arms deliveries to Ukraine have only worsened the situation. “The cupboards are almost bare,” said Alfons Mais, inspector general of the German army, at the beginning of the war. André Wüstner, head of the German Bundeswehr Association, seconds him: “We continue to be in free fall.” The situation is so bad that the German military has become a favorite punchline of late-night comedy shows … The German military, to be sure, is no stranger to mockery and ridicule, but it hasn’t been this bad in a long time.  

Is This Morning in America?

David Brooks argues in The Atlantic that the future is brighter for the country than many now imagine:

If a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted. The economist Tyler Cowen suggests a thought experiment to illustrate this point. Take out a piece of paper. In one column, list all of the major problems this country faces—inequality, political polarization, social distrust, climate change, and so on. In another column, write seven words: “America has more talent than ever before.” Cowen’s point is that column B is more important than column A. Societies don’t decline when they are in the midst of disruption and mess; they decline when they lose energy.

And creative energy is one thing America has in abundance.

Provocation of the Week

At Peet’s Coffee & Tea in Davis, California, some workers are trying to unionize. Faith Bennett reports on their grievances in Jacobin:

Like many other baristas and service workers, Peet’s employees are challenged by schedules that are delivered on short notice, unreliable hours, lean staffing, and difficulty securing coverage. As a result, café positions have high rates of turnover. But members of PWU are invested in making the job more sustainable for themselves and more tenable for those who come next.

In Davis, Peet’s workers report that they are often scheduled for shifts that are deliberately shortened so that they are not afforded breaks. Meanwhile mobile orders exacerbate understaffing issues: the company does not place restrictions on mobile orders, which often leads to a torrent of tickets, not all of which are picked up, and delays of drinks ordered by customers who arrive in person. The current practice around mobile orders exhausts baristas and contributes to frustration of customers, who sometimes direct that frustration toward staff.

Although it is possible to turn off the mobile order system, this can only be accomplished if staff from a given store put in a request to the district manager, who oversees operations at approximately seventeen locations. Having this request granted for even an hour is a rare occurrence … mobile orders, a lack of breaks, and understaffing curtail the ability to chat with regulars who look to baristas for social interaction.

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

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note.

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.

Recent breakthroughs in generative AI, such as the image generator DALL-E and the large language model ChatGPT, are “potentially akin to the release of the iPhone in 2007, or to the invention of the desktop computer,” Derek Thompson told me in December. Here are the latest AI developments to watch in the coming weeks and months.

But first, three new stories from The Atlantic.

The Supreme Court justices do not seem to be getting along. Asymmetrical conspiracism is hurting democracy. Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough.

Hype Machines

Investors are pouring money into AI.

Last year, investors put at least $1.37 billion into generative-AI companies across 78 deals—almost as much as they invested in the previous five years combined, according to the market-data company Pitchbook.

Microsoft, in particular, has taken a big leap: Since 2019, the company has invested $3 billion in OpenAI, which designed DALL-E and ChatGPT, and it’s reportedly in talks to invest another $10 billion. Microsoft purchased an exclusive license to some of OpenAI’s technology, and it’s working with OpenAI on a new version of its search engine, Bing, that would incorporate a ChatGPT-like tool.

Schools are concerned about academic integrity.

How will these tools change our lives? As Derek told me recently: “We don’t know. The architects of those technologies barely know. But it’s so interesting to play with, and the technology is improving so quickly, that we should absolutely take it seriously, as if it’s something that can’t be avoided.”

Some universities are modifying their courses to minimize the risk of students handing in essays generated by an AI tool. And they’ll likely have to deal with even more capable tools soon—OpenAI reportedly plans to release GPT-4, which would be better than the current versions at generating text. Meanwhile, a 22-year-old computer-science student has built an app to identify whether a piece of text was written by a bot.

It may be time to worry about deepfakes—again.

You might remember that term from back in 2018, when media outlets and misinformation experts panicked about a rise of fake, realistic-looking videos. (In a famous example that BuzzFeed engineered, Barack Obama appeared to say “President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.”)

While that panic remained just that—a panic—advances in generative AI “have experts concerned that a deepfake apocalypse” is on the horizon, our assistant editor Matteo Wong reported last month. As AI-generated media get more advanced, these experts argue, in the next few years the internet will be flooded with forged videos and audio touting false information.

Tools such as ChatGPT might not be as smart as they seem …

Last week, the Atlantic staff writer Ian Bogost injected some skepticism into the debate over AI. “ChatGPT doesn’t actually know anything—instead, it outputs compositions that simulate knowledge through persuasive structure,” Bogost wrote. “As the novelty of that surprise wears off, it is becoming clear that ChatGPT is less a magical wish-granting machine than an interpretive sparring partner.” Could all this investment into the tech, he asks, be chasing after a bad idea?

But don’t expect the hype to evaporate anytime soon.

Some have asked whether we’re witnessing Crypto 2.0: A complex new technology captures media attention and investor money, only for some of the high-profile businesses built around it to spectacularly crash. But crypto is not a good model for thinking about artificial intelligence, Derek told me. “Crypto was money without utility,” he argued, while tools such as ChatGPT are, “for now, utility without money.” Generative AI is “clearly something, even if one wants to argue that the thing it is is, for now, a toy,” he said.

Plus, AI has already succeeded in a way that crypto never did, Derek noted. Although you may hear some people use artificial intelligence as a catch-all term, the technology that’s currently breaking ground is the generative kind—tools with the ability to create new content, such as text or images. We’ve all been living with artificial intelligence for years now. “Go on Instagram. Why are certain stories or posts above others? Because of AI,” Derek said. “You’re living in a world that AI built when you use the most famous social-media apps.”

Related:

Your creativity won’t save your job from AI. Generative art is stupid. That’s how it should be.

Today’s News

Last year, deaths in China outnumbered births for the first time in six decades, the government announced. The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg was detained by German police while protesting the planned expansion of a coal mine. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Russell Gage was taken to the hospital after suffering a concussion in Monday’s playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers share their thoughts about lab-grown meat.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Martin Parr / Magnum

American Religion Is Not Dead Yet

By Wendy Cadge and Elan Babchuck

Take a drive down Main Street of just about any major city in the country, and—with the housing market ground to a halt—you might pass more churches for sale than homes. This phenomenon isn’t likely to change anytime soon; according to the author of a 2021 report on the future of religion in America, 30 percent of congregations are not likely to survive the next 20 years. Add in declining attendance and dwindling affiliation rates, and you’d be forgiven for concluding that American religion is heading toward extinction.

But the old metrics of success—attendance and affiliation, or, more colloquially, “butts, budgets, and buildings”—may no longer capture the state of American religion. Although participation in traditional religious settings (churches, synagogues, mosques, schools, etc.) is in decline, signs of life are popping up elsewhere: in conversations with chaplains, in communities started online that end up forming in-person bonds as well, in social-justice groups rooted in shared faith.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Elon Musk can’t solve Twitter’s “shadowbanning” problem. The literary legacy of C. Michael Curtis People’s choice: Wildlife photographer of the year

Culture Break

Still from Netflix's 'The Lying Life of Adults' (Eduardo Castaldo / Netflix)

Read. Still Pictures, Janet Malcolm’s posthumous memoir, critiques the idea of memoir itself.

Watch. The Lying Life of Adults, Netflix’s adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel, is at times maddening in its slowness—but it’s also stunning in a way that nothing has really been since Mad Men, our critic writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’re looking to dive deeper down the AI rabbit hole, I recommend the technology writer Max Read’s newsletter, Read Max. Read is undertaking a project to figure out how we should be thinking about AI, and last week, he listed seven thoughtful, provocative questions he’s using to guide his research, including “Why didn’t previous advances in AI tech create as much of a stir?” and “Is AI bullshit?”

— Isabel

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.