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.

More From The Atlantic

SNL is excelling in one particular way. Photos: the snow monkeys of Nagano Dear Therapist: Can I cut my mom off from my children if she won’t seek therapy?

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.

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

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

Scientists tried to break cuddling. Instead, they broke 30 years of research. The weight-loss-drug revolution is a miracle—and a menace. What to read when you’re expecting The Culture Survey: Clint Smith

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’m very late to it, but I’ve been really enjoying Ramy. It’s a thoughtful, funny, and oftentimes incredibly sincere exploration of what coming-of-age as a Muslim American Millennial looks like. [Related: Ramy isn’t a travel show, but it could be]

An actor I would watch in anything: Mahershala Ali. The man is a genius. [Related: Green Book: A flimsy tale elevated by two great performances]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: The best novel I’ve read recently is When We Were Sisters, by Fatimah Asghar. I’ve known Fatimah for years now. We came up together in the slam-poetry scene in our early 20s, but they have always been someone who worked across genres and disciplines. Their debut novel is a gorgeous, lyrical meditation on the relationship among three sisters who lose their parents and are forced to raise one another in a world rife with uncertainty. It’s a beautiful novel that you can read in just a few sittings. [Related: All the brown girls on TV]

The best book of nonfiction I’ve read recently is Life on Delay, by my colleague here at The Atlantic John Hendrickson. I can’t remember the last time I read a book so human. Life on Delay brims with empathy and honesty. It is a book about family, complicated relationships, and how we come to understand who we are in the world. It moved me in ways that I haven’t experienced before. It’s fantastic. [Related: Why I dread saying my own name]

An author I will read anything by: Living today, Jhumpa Lahiri. From the past, Frederick Douglass.

A song I’ll always dance to: “If It Isn’t Love,” by New Edition

My go-to karaoke song: “Candy Rain,” by Soul for Real

My favorite sad song: “Pass You By,” by Boyz II Men

"[My favorite sad song is] 'Pass You By,' by Boyz II Men," says Clint. Above: The group perform at the 62nd annual Grammy Awards on January 26, 2020 (Kevin Winter / Getty)

An album that means a lot to me: Lupe Fiasco’s 2007 album, The Cool, was so formative for me during my college years because it expanded my understanding of the relationship between music and literature. It is an incredible literary document.

A visual artist that I cherish: Growing up, we had prints of the painter Jacob Lawrence’s work on our walls. I’m filled with nostalgia anytime I see his work.

Something I treasured as a teenager: My VHS tape of every goal in the 2002 World Cup. I watched it every night.

Something I recently revisited: Not a reread or a rewatch but a re-eat. I was obsessed with Lunchables when I was a kid. I recently had one for the first time in a long time and, man … it did not taste the same at all. Not sure what was going on with my elementary-school taste buds. [Related: The 30-year reign of Lunchables]

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: I don’t know that it changed my perspective so much as expanded it, but I recently read Nadja Drost’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize– and Michael Kelly Award–winning story “When Can We Really Rest?” about migrants from all over the world crossing the Colombia-Panama border to try and make it to the U.S. It blew me away.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Gotta be Ta-Nehisi’s “The Case for Reparations.”

Something delightful introduced to me by kids in my life: I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, and one of our favorite things to do on weekends is watch nature documentaries when we wake up. Shout out to David Attenborough. [Related: Blue Planet II is the greatest nature series of all time]

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

The Week Ahead Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, a frank portrait of cobalt-mining abuses by the modern-slavery scholar Siddharth Kara (on shelves Tuesday)   Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, a documentary inspired by the work of the Atlantic senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II (begins streaming on Peacock on Thursday) 80 for Brady, a comedy that joins the screen legends Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno, and Sally Field with the NFL star Tom Brady (in theaters Friday) Essay (Derek White / Getty)

Sam Smith’s Radical Centrism

By Spencer Kornhaber

Sam Smith’s music defines the word inoffensive—so why does the singer inspire so many arguments? For more than a decade, Smith’s distinctive voice has soaked through the collective consciousness like the syrup in a rum cake. But that success has also triggered annoyance from across the cultural spectrum. As a nonbinary person, Smith has been treated as a punch line by right-wing media. Earlier in their career, they also ticked off the queer commentariat by misstating gay history and tsk-tsking about Grindr. All along, critics have made sport of Smith for formulaic songwriting, mannered vocals, and a tendency to hire church choirs as if they’re available on Taskrabbit to install soul on demand.

Read the full article.

More in Culture The Oscar nominations are in, and a few big trends are out. A courtroom drama with an indecipherable culprit Poker Face has a sting in its tail. The meme that defined a decade Catch Up on The Atlantic The cognitive dissonance of the Monterey Park shooting An Asian American grief The NHL is gutless. Photo Album (Yannick Gouguenheim / Ocean Art)

Dip into the majestic depths of selected snapshots from the 2022 Ocean Art Underwater Photo Contest, whose winners were announced earlier this month.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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

A recent Jeopardy contestant lit into the show, claiming that it isn’t really all that good a measure of a player’s intelligence. He’s got a point—but not the one he thinks he’s making.

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

Memphis’s policing strategy was bound to result in tragedy. “We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate.” Tanks for Ukraine have shifted the balance of power in Europe.

Passing the Test

A series of viral Facebook posts by a recent Jeopardy contestant named Yogesh Raut have caused something of a minor kerfuffle among watchers of the show. Raut, to put it mildly, is unimpressed by the intellectual level of America’s premier game show. He won three games, but after the episodes began to air, he went online to argue that the show’s status as “the Olympics of quizzing” is undeserved.

This all puts me in a bit of a pickle. I am a former Jeopardy champion (I made it to the 1994 Tournament of Champions and the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions) who no longer likes the show very much. I wrote a year ago that Jeopardy has made some serious mistakes—chief among them ending the rule that winners step down after five victories—and should probably wrap up its legendary run. But Raut is wrong about what it takes to play Jeopardy.

So though I think the show should be retired, let me suggest to you three ways in which Jeopardy really is a test of your brainpower.

1. You need to be well-read, not well-educated.

The one place where I think I can agree with Raut and other critics of the game is that you do not need a lot of formal education or deep knowledge of any particular area to succeed at Jeopardy. After all, one of the greatest players of all time was a New York City cop. I have three graduate degrees, including a doctorate, and I got smoked by a librarian in my first tournament. (Some players theorize, in fact, that knowing too much about a subject can paralyze you; I have seen doctors and lawyers fumble questions in their area of expertise.)

You don’t need a Ph.D., but to do well at the game, you should be a voracious reader, which is how most people gain (and, more importantly, retain) facts and knowledge. My mom and I would watch the old daytime 1960s version on school snow days or when I was home sick, and she was a pretty sharp player—with a ninth-grade education. But my mom and dad were both readers; our house was full of books and magazines and newspapers.

Indeed, in my experience, people who approach Jeopardy as a test of formal smarts can really stink at playing the game. At my 1993 tryout in a big hotel in Burlington, Vermont, about 160 people walked in, as I recall, and about 15 of us walked out. The people who showed up with almanacs and atlases and fact books, the serious people whose eyes glared and nostrils flared at anyone who talked to them while they did some last-minute boning up … well, they all got turfed instantly. The rest of us had a grand old time, got our I passed the Jeopardy test! buttons, and went home to wait for a call from Los Angeles.

Now, I will grant you that getting things right does not mean you know a lot about the subject; it only means you successfully associated a clue with a fact. In one of my games, I was behind, and so I went for some high-money clues in “The Violin.” I was a young professor in security studies, so this did not seem like a natural choice. My then-wife was in the audience, and she turned to a friend in panic: “What’s he doing?! He doesn’t know anything about violins! Did he think it said Violence?”

And yet, I’d learned in my high-school stage band what pizzicato meant, a lucky break that helped me rack up some cash. That’s how you play the game.

2. You need to understand clues and riddles.

Jeopardy isn’t only about knowing stuff. You need to have a particular kind of intelligence to play the game, an agile mind that can not only recall factoids but also parse the game’s sneaky way of asking you for information.

One of Jeopardy’s favorite tricks is to firehose the player with a lot of extraneous and irrelevant detail while putting the answer right in front of you. I am making this up as an example, but a typical snare would be something like this: “A giant ruby was given to the Black Prince by Pedro the Cruel in 1367 and sits near a river of stinky and cold water known for its unusually shallow depth of 20 meters in this British capital.”

If you’re a nerd who overthinks everything and wants to show off your smarts, you’re standing there trying to unravel who the hell Pedro the Cruel was and which river is shallow and …

If you’re a Jeopardy player, your brain filtered out everything except “this British capital,” and you buzzed in and said “What is London?” while Brainiac over there was still trying to figure out who was in charge of what in the 14th century. You might not think that’s a form of intelligence, but when two other people are slamming away at their clickers and you’ve got a fraction of a second to recognize the real answer, your mental hard drive better be solid-state and super fast.

3. You need to combine intelligence with presence of mind—and never panic.

Raut is upset that the producers choose people who are telegenic. Having watched the show for many years, I think that’s nonsense; there are plenty of contestants who are not, shall we say, camera-friendly. What the producers do guard against, I learned, are people who freeze in front of a camera. (In Jeopardy lore, this is called “going Bambi,” like a deer caught in the headlights.)

Good Jeopardy players never let anything get inside their head, and the best of them pay almost no attention to the other players or even to the host: They read the question and decide whether to buzz in. I disliked super-champ James Holzhauer for many reasons, but his background as a Vegas odds guy meant he played the game with ice-cold ease, and that matters—a lot.

Full disclosure: My first Jeopardy run ended when I made all of these mistakes at once. At the end of the first game of the 1994 Tournament of Champions, the clue was “The last king of the Hellenes, he was the second to bear this name.”

Piece of cake. I’m part Greek, spent summers with my grandmother in Greece. Had a lot of drachmas in my pocket with the former king’s name on it: Constantine II.

And then panic and doubt crept in as the Final Jeopardy theme began its death-clock countdown. King of the Hellenes? Did they mean the ancient Greek empire? The Athenian alliance at Delos, the one defeated by … no, wait, I think that was a democracy, but … it’s Alexander, maybe? Were there two?

We all went for the Alexander bait, and we all lost. But my opponent made a smaller and smarter bet than I did, and that was that.

Look, I think Jeopardy has become too professionalized and too soulless. It’s lost the charm that made it an American institution, and frankly, I don’t much care for Ken Jennings or Mayim Bialik as hosts. (The show should have closed out its run when Alex Trebek died.) But make no mistake: People who win at Jeopardy are, in fact, as smart as they look.

Related:

It might be time to retire Jeopardy. Everyone loses on Jeopardy eventually.

Today’s News

Memphis officials released video footage showing the encounter with police that led to the death of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man. After beating Tommy Paul in the Australian Open semifinals, the tennis player Novak Djokovic is on track to win a 22nd Grand Slam title, which would equal Rafael Nadal’s record. A judge released footage of the moment Paul Pelosi, the husband of Representative Nancy Pelosi, was attacked in his home.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The weight-loss-drug revolution is a miracle—and a menace, Derek Thompson writes. The Books Briefing: Talking with children about painful topics can be complicated—but it can help shape their worldview for life, Bushra Seddique writes. Deep Shtetl: Yair Rosenberg shares a selection of reading material for Holocaust Remembrance Day.   

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Matt Chase / The Atlantic; Getty

Asteroid Measurements Make No Sense

By Marina Koren

A couple of newly discovered asteroids whizzed past our planet earlier this month, tracing their own loop around the sun. These two aren’t any more special than the thousands of other asteroids in the ever-growing catalog of near-Earth objects. But a recent news article in The Jerusalem Post described them in a rather eye-catching, even startling, way: Each rock, the story said, is “around the size of 22 emperor penguins stacked nose to toes.”

Now, if someone asked me to describe the size of an asteroid (or anything, for that matter), penguins wouldn’t be the first unit that comes to mind. But the penguin asteroid is only the latest example of a common strategy in science communication: evoking images of familiar, earthly objects to convey the scope of mysterious, celestial ones. Usually, small asteroids are said to be the size of buses, skyscrapers, football fields, tennis courts, cars—mundane, inanimate things. Lately, though, the convention seems to be veering toward the weird.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The flu-ification of COVID policy is almost complete. Photos of the week: firefly forest, turnip toss, and more

Culture Break

New York City's Riker's Island (Nina Berman / Redux)

Read. These books to read when you’re pregnant go beyond the standard guidebook to offer generous insight and reassurance.

A new oral history paints a vivid picture of life on Rikers Island, America’s most notorious jail.

And check out some cozy mystery series to keep you warm.

Watch. Poker Face, on Peacock, features Natasha Lyonne as a fun-to-watch crime-solving waitress.

If you’re in the mood for a movie, work through some of the Oscar-nominated front-runners.

And there’s always our foolproof list of 13 feel-good TV shows to watch this winter.

Listen. Spend time with the music of David Crosby, who died this month—and who was never a typical hippie, despite being one of the movement’s founders.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Speaking of game shows, one of the television joys of my early teenage years was to come home from school and catch the old Match Game, in which ordinary Americans and show-business folks tried to finish each other’s sentences without being too dirty for the network censors. I stumbled across it on my Roku recently, and now I am mesmerized all over again by the great Gene Rayburn and his rotating cast of wiseacres.

Match Game was, for its time, a bit blue: Many of the clues were meant to sound naughty and designed to lead contestants to say “boobs” or “tinkle” or something. Today, it’s a joy to watch because it’s so quaint. (This is the show, after all, where it was ostensibly scandalous that people were skating the edge of outing Charles Nelson Reilly as gay, including wink-wink jokes from Reilly himself.) The celebrities—some of whom were big 1970s stars—are clearly having a ball; there were rumors of some boozing during the dinner breaks, and it shows. Watching Match Game in 1973 was like listening in on an adult cocktail party; today, it’s like a visit to your favorite bar full of characters, a kind of real-life Cheers masquerading as a game show. If nothing else, tune in for a look back at the Good Old Days, when people dressed like their home appliances in a riot of autumn rust, harvest gold, and avocado green.

— 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.

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

The Ringmaster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

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

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P.S.

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

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

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

Oscar nominations will be announced next week. I called our culture writer Shirley Li for her tips on the movies and the buzz you should know about.

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

The George Santos saga isn’t (just) funny. How Joe Biden wins again How ChatGPT will destabilize white-collar work

Top Guns

Isabel Fattal: Are there any big themes that have emerged from this awards season, or any lessons about the state of Hollywood today?

Shirley Li: If there’s one way to summarize this awards season, it would be that it’s been a year of comebacks. When you look at the leading contenders in the performance categories, we have a lot of actors who are returning to the awards conversation after a long career of not being involved in such conversations. The names that come to mind include Brendan Fraser, Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan. All of those are actors who got shuffled out of Hollywood for one reason or another, but have been given these opportunities to return to acting or to finally sink their teeth into meaty roles, and are now deservedly getting their flowers.

I’d also say it’s been a year of comebacks when it comes to major sequels. Films like Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water being a part of the awards conversation signifies that there’s room for sequels to succeed beyond the box office, and that superhero films aren’t the only ones bringing audiences back to theaters, which have been struggling since the pandemic. Top Gun and Avatar made strong cases for seeing movies on the biggest screens possible.

Isabel: What is the importance, if any, of movie awards now?

Shirley: If done right—and this is hard to do—awards-show speeches can be a great opportunity to tell a story that’s not just, “I love my agents; I love my managers.” I think about [Everything Everywhere All at Once actor] Ke Huy Quan’s speech at the Golden Globes, where he talks about that feeling of self-doubt, of wondering whether his work as a child actor is all he had to offer, not just in his career but in his life. If more winners think about the story they can tell, that’s a way to reach people beyond the room, to be accessible to the general public.

Isabel: What are the two or three movies you need to watch if you want to keep up with the awards chatter?

Shirley: The first is Everything Everywhere All at Once. I think that film has a lot of momentum when it comes to this awards season, but on a broader scale, it’s such a fascinating example of how wild this medium can be. It’s almost impossible to classify when it comes to a genre. It comes from a pair of directors who have a really unique creative vision; they’re the ones who made the farting-corpse movie with Daniel Radcliffe. When you watch it, you don’t think of it as an Oscar contender, but it’s proof that a genre movie can make it really far.

The second movie is the more traditional contender in the mix: The Fabelmans, the Steven Spielberg–directed film that is plumbing his own childhood. It’s in some ways about why he became a director, but at the same time, it’s about how he wrestled with his parents’ divorce.

The third movie I recommend watching, which is now available on HBO Max, is The Banshees of Inisherin. It’s the film that reunites the writer-director Martin McDonagh with Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell. It’s this more intimate number about friendship and toxic masculinity and being a part of a small community. When it comes to awards season, I think it’s somewhere in between the other two films I recommended. It’s made by a previous Oscar winner, while at the same time being unconventional in its own way.

Isabel: I have a question about another awards contender, Tár. It has become something of a meme to pretend that Lydia Tár, the main character, is a real person. Why do you think this is?

Shirley: I was just talking about this with a friend who was asking the same thing, because on the surface, Lydia Tár is a real person is not a funny joke.

Even as a meme format, it doesn’t really make sense.

I think what set it off was Cate Blanchett’s performance. It’s so convincing. Lydia Tár is this EGOT-winning conductor. But as you watch the film, you kind of realize that “Lydia Tár” is a costume that this woman is wearing. And as the film goes on, it becomes both a horror and a comedy, and it goes into camp territory. It’s all grounded in this performance that is so sharp and that makes you almost believe that Lydia Tár is a real person. But to be honest, maybe the meme just comes from how funny “Lydia Tár” sounds.

Isabel: Have you had any arguments with fellow movie people about the awards contenders?

Shirley: One recent debate I had with a critic was over whether Babylon is any good and deserving of all this awards attention, or if it’s just so audaciously stupid that it tricks you into not being able to fully hate it.

Babylon didn’t do very well at the box office, so I doubt a lot of folks have seen it. It’s a film starring an A-list cast, including Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt, that’s about Hollywood’s transition from making silent pictures to making talkies. This is like catnip for awards committees—a big, maximalist Hollywood movie from Damien Chazelle, the director of La La Land, about Hollywood itself. But it’s also lewd and vulgar and three hours long. It spans decades. It is self-indulgent. It follows way too many characters. It opens with a scene in which an elephant poops onto the camera. Maybe that last bit’s all you need to know.

Isabel: Is there a movie or performance that you think is being overlooked?

Shirley: So many, but I’ll try to stick to just a few. The first one is Women Talking, the film directed and adapted by Sarah Polley from the 2018 novel of the same name. It’s a really tough sell, because the story is based on a series of real-life rapes that happened in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. It’s about one long conversation the women in this community have where they try to imagine what they can do next. But it’s more engaging than you might think. I worry that it’s coming so late in this awards season that people have just not been interested in seeing it or have not been able to see it.

Another contender that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is Aftersun, from the writer and director Charlotte Wells, which is a film about a father-daughter relationship and how we struggle to understand our parents. I think the performances in that are outstanding, and Wells is an immensely talented filmmaker, but I’m afraid the categories are too crowded at this point for them to make it in.

Related:

Hollywood can’t survive without movie theaters. The speeches that saved the Golden Globes

Today’s News

CIA Director Bill Burns reportedly briefed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week on the agency’s expectations for Russia’s military plans in the coming months. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced that it will cut about 12,000 jobs. Anti-abortion activists held the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. This is the first march since Roe v. Wade was overturned.

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Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty

What Happens When AI Has Read Everything?

Ross Andersen

Artificial intelligence has in recent years proved itself to be a quick study, although it is being educated in a manner that would shame the most brutal headmaster. Locked into airtight Borgesian libraries for months with no bathroom breaks or sleep, AIs are told not to emerge until they’ve finished a self-paced speed course in human culture. On the syllabus: a decent fraction of all the surviving text that we have ever produced.

When AIs surface from these epic study sessions, they possess astonishing new abilities. People with the most linguistically supple minds—hyperpolyglots—can reliably flip back and forth between a dozen languages; AIs can now translate between more than 100 in real time. They can churn out pastiche in a range of literary styles and write passable rhyming poetry. DeepMind’s Ithaca AI can glance at Greek letters etched into marble and guess the text that was chiseled off by vandals thousands of years ago.

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And pick up our staff writer John Hendrickson’s new book, Life on Delay: Making Peace With a Stutter.

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P.S.

I’ll leave you with a few more suggestions from Shirley for under-the-radar movies you should watch, even though you might not be hearing their names next week:

“The Woman King is a crowd-pleasing, great action film, and Viola Davis’s performance is a departure from what she’s done before.” “There’s a South Korean film called Decision to Leave that I wrote about. It’s a fantastic erotic thriller that I’m afraid will only be recognized in international categories, even though the direction is so sumptuous. I could not take my eyes off the screen. Every frame has new clues to the story.” “Lastly, there’s a tiny movie called Emily the Criminal that I think is mostly getting indie-awards attention. It stars Aubrey Plaza, and it’s such a sharp little movie about credit-card fraud, of all things, but that’s what makes it great and insightful about wealth and income inequality.”

— Isabel

A defeated New Mexico GOP candidate allegedly hired others to shoot at the homes of Democratic officials, in a case that is intensifying concerns about political violence in America.

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

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Negative Polarization

On Monday, police in New Mexico arrested Solomon Peña, a Republican who, after losing a race for state representative last fall, allegedly paid four men to participate in at least two shootings at the homes of Democratic state officials in Albuquerque. Peña has blamed his loss on election fraud, and police believe the attacks were politically motivated.

I called the Atlantic staff writer David Graham, who reported last summer on the killing of a retired judge in Wisconsin, to discuss the political violence that appears to be on the rise in America.

Isabel Fattal: In your article about the assassination of the retired judge, you wrote that, based on the limited research that exists, the U.S. is showing warning signs of a rise in political violence. What are those signs?

David Graham: There are a few. One is we just have a really polarized country, and in particular, we have what political scientists call “negative polarization” or “affective polarization,” where people are driven almost more by their dislike of the other party than they are by any kind of shared value among their own party. And you see attitudes of a kind of dehumanization—seeing the other side as less than human, as a threat to democracy. All of these things encourage folks to take up violence; they make them believe that violence might be justified.

So you have these risk factors. And then we see lots of political violence, even though it’s not always on the level of assassination. The most obvious case is January 6. We have seen some attempted assassinations. We had a shooting at the practice for a congressional baseball game in 2017, in which Republican Representative Steve Scalise and others were injured, and we had the Trump-supporting pipe bomber in 2018. We had a guy who tried to attack an FBI office in Cincinnati and was then killed.

Isabel: What was your reaction to this New Mexico case?

David: It’s interesting to compare it with the Wisconsin case. One thing that’s good about this is no one was killed or seriously injured, which is a major difference. But in other ways, as part of the trend, I think it’s almost a bit more concerning.

The Wisconsin case, from what we know, is somebody who had a personal vendetta against this judge because of a case where the judge ruled against him. People are always going to have that sort of disagreement, and what we don’t want is a situation where political violence is normalized so they think violence is a good way to deal with that.

But in Albuquerque, we have somebody who was specifically complaining about elections being stolen; who described himself as the “MAGA King”, according to postings online; and who seemed to be really motivated by the sorts of things we hear people talking about in regular discourse about “stolen” elections. So you can see how it connects to things we hear every day and then takes on this really dangerous form. In that sense, I think the outcome is less grave—but we need to be more worried.

Isabel: Solomon Peña, the alleged perpetrator in New Mexico, didn’t act alone—he involved other people in the shootings. What does that say more broadly about political violence right now?

David: I think the organization is alarming. On January 6, we could see some coordination among groups, but it’s unclear how coordinated it was. And you wonder, if these people had had their act together more, what might have happened? Could Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi have been harmed?

The same thing applies here. This guy was allegedly able to get some people to go shoot at these folks’ houses for him. It seems, from what we know now, that they’re kind of small-time criminals, so it’s not like this was a mass political movement. But it’s worrying that someone was able to enlist people. You wonder how big it gets when it goes beyond a single actor.

Isabel: What relevance, if any, do you think the recent convictions in the plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer have to this trend?

David: I think it’s a little ambiguous. It’s obviously important that people who commit crimes like this are caught and prosecuted and punished for it. The discourse around the Whitmer case is weird, because on the one hand, you have folks getting some pretty stiff sentences, and on the other hand, you have a critique—and this is not just on the right, you hear this from folks on the more civil-libertarian left too—saying, Is this a real plot, or is this something the FBI cooked up? Because we’ve seen cases where the FBI takes people who are prone to violence and helps get them going. You have an argument among some people that this plot was really deep-state puppeteering.

So in that case, although you have a deterrent effect, you also may end up with people distrusting the government more and being angrier about things.

Isabel: There’s obviously no easy answer to this, but what can be done to stem this violence?

David: The short answer is it’s really complicated. One thing we do know is that leaders make a difference, and when leaders are condoning or even encouraging violence, that is likely to produce more violence. When leaders say it’s unacceptable, even in the service of their cause, that will tamp it down. That’s not all of the answer, but it’s one simple answer that we do have.

Related:

A chilling assassination in Wisconsin The New Lost Cause

Today’s News

The United States hit its debt ceiling, and the Treasury Department announced that it has begun using “extraordinary measures” to prevent the federal government from breaching the limit. Prosecutors are planning to charge Alec Baldwin and one crew member with involuntary manslaughter in the 2021 accidental shooting on the set of the film Rust. The Agriculture Department announced that it is tightening its oversight on which products can be labeled “organic.”

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Evening Read

Jan Buchczik

Nothing Drains You Like Mixed Emotions

By Arthur Brooks

“Ōdī et amō,” the Roman poet Catullus wrote of his lover Lesbia about 2,000 years ago. “I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.”

Maybe you can relate. If you’ve ever had mixed feelings about someone you love, you know the intense discomfort that results. If your feelings were purely positive, of course, the relationship would be bliss. Even purely negative feelings would be better, because the course of action would be clear: Say goodbye. But mixed feelings leave you confused about the right thing to do.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

David recently wrote about a very different example of how political polarization plays out: the debate over gas stoves, which, he argues, exemplifies the silliest tendencies of American politics. But you can also read the article for the simple pleasure of his wordplay. It’s a sharp analysis with many great air-, cooking-, and heat-related puns nestled in it.

— Isabel

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.

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 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.

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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

Since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, he has apparently spent a considerable amount of time “looking into” the personal complaints of individual users who suspect that they are not as visible on the platform as they should be.

Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the fearmongering account Libs of TikTok, pointed out that she is on a “trends blacklist” and asked, “When will this be fixed @elonmusk?” A popular MAGA shitposter who goes by Catturd ™ wrote that he was “Shadowbanned, ghostbanned, searchbanned.” The far-right personality Jack Posobiec said that “a lot of people” had told him that they couldn’t see his tweets for some reason. And Musk replied to each one and offered all of them the same assurance: He would get to the bottom of it.

“Shadowbanning,” in its current usage, refers to a content-moderation tactic that reduces the visibility of a piece of borderline content rather than removing it entirely. It originally referred to something much more dramatic: quieting annoying personalities on message boards by making their posts totally invisible to everyone else. Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have denied doing anything that extreme, but they do limit content’s reach in various ways—it’s frequently unclear how or why, which makes people suspicious. Shadowbanning can mean that posts aren’t promoted to a wide audience, or it can mean something more severe, such as hiding accounts from search results (platforms tend to blame this on bugs).

In general, the practices that slow a post’s spread or limit an account’s reach are intended to be consolations or compromises—they allow for more nuanced moderation than a system in which something is only either left up or taken down, and a person is either not banned or banned. Regardless, shadowbanning has been a pet peeve of Republicans since 2018, when Donald Trump called it “discriminatory and illegal.” Controversy was renewed in December with the temporary uproar over “the Twitter Files,” a batch of pre-acquisition documents and internal communications about content moderation (including some practices that could be called shadowbanning) that Musk gave to hand-selected reporters.

Although Musk wants to be the hero who ends shadowbanning forever, he’s unlikely to fully assuage paranoia about it. After more than a decade of widespread social-media use, many people have deeply held pet theories about how algorithms work, and about how they affect them personally. So far, the Musk era of Twitter has been a shadowban Rorschach test, with different users seeing a different reality based on the stories they’re already telling themselves about their experiences on the platform. “Thank you @ElonMusk for lifting the #shadowban on controversial views,” an #exvegan who advocates for all-meat diets posted earlier this month. Meanwhile, Catturd ™ tweeted on Friday that he believes “all conservatives accounts are being throttled and hidden again just like before @elonmusk took over ownership.” Other users have also complained that they’re still being persecuted:

“It’s so dull & frustrating STILL being under a shadowban” “@Twitter busily shadowbanning folks again, including me” “Hi @elonmusk, can you stop hiding my cleavage from the world?”

Musk recently added “View” counts to the bottom of tweets, presumably with the intention of equipping users with data and giving them greater insight into whether others actually are seeing their tweets and just not liking them. This effort appeared to mostly anger people: The numbers were smaller than expected, which served as more evidence of shadowbanning.

[Read: The Elon Musk placebo effect]

Effective or not, Musk’s efforts indicate that moderation policy on major social-media platforms is moving into an anti-shadowban era. Users have been loudly agitated by shadowbanning for so long that platforms are finally acquiescing. Instagram introduced an “Account Status” tool in October 2021, which gives creators and business owners limited but meaningful insight into whether a professional account’s content has been marked as ineligible for recommendation (meaning that it won’t be promoted in the app’s Explore section or in other users’ feeds). In December, Musk announced, “Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal.” This update has yet to materialize (Musk says it’s coming “no later than next month”), but it’s sure to be popular when it does.

“Sometimes, it feels like everyone on the internet thinks they’ve been shadowbanned,” Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, wrote in The Atlantic last year. In a survey he helped run, 9.2 percent of social-media users said they believed they’d been shadowbanned at some point in the past year.

But of course, these people had no firm proof. Those who believe themselves to be shadowbanned can only swap stories, share data they’ve collected, make arguments, and suggest conspiracies. This is the subject of recent work by Laura Savolainen, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Helsinki. For a paper published last year, she used a tool called 4CAT to collect thousands of comments about shadowbanning posted in popular Reddit forums about Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Sorting through the comments, she saw social-media users sharing bits of what she calls “algorithmic folklore.” They would describe a fluctuation in the engagement on their accounts and then tell a story about what they imagined was causing it. Or they would listen to someone else describe their suspicions and help build on them.

These people evoke data and cite analytic tools that monitor account performance, demonstrating their “heightened awareness” of “ubiquitous numbers,” according to Savolainen. But the way in which many of them use these numbers is arbitrary. They fill in the gaps with speculation and personal grievance.

“Algorithms are very conducive to folklore because the systems are so opaque,” Savolainen told me. “These wider technological networks connect us to people on the other side of the world, and we don’t know who they are or why they made this decision or that decision.” Obviously, we’re going to have fraught relationships with something that undergirds our social lives and, for many, our financial stability. (In the survey that Nicholas ran, 20 percent of respondents who believed they’d been shadowbanned said it “affected their ability to make a living.”)

Here is where the shadowbanning debate becomes sort of a tragic misunderstanding. People who use social platforms think of themselves, naturally, as people. And they think of the algorithm as one all-powerful thing assessing them and passing judgment. In reality, the people who use these platforms are collections of data. Savolainen explains in her paper that the algorithms behind something like TikTok or Instagram regard their users as “composites of individual features—clusters continuously formed and reformed as the data traces users emit are processed and correlated.”

In the Reddit comments Savolainen cataloged, there were many people who took their shadowbanning “very, very personally.” They felt persecuted by the algorithm; sometimes, they felt self-doubt. “Am I shadowbanned, or is it just not good-quality content? Maybe I’m shadowbanned, or maybe I’m not that good of a singer after all. I’m not sure which would actually have been worse for people,” she told me.

[Read: ]To be honest with you, no influencer has been treated more unfairly than Donald Trump Jr.

To her mind, platforms owe us transparency not because it’s fair and because we are all entitled to a certain amount of visibility, but because they have created a fake emotional and mental conundrum for us, and they should resolve it. “Everything that goes on on a platform is already always artificial,” she said. There’s no control against which to compare any post’s performance, because post performance isn’t a concept that exists without social media. The distinction between “now the algorithm is working normally” and “now the algorithm is shadowbanning me” is all in the brain of the beholder. It makes no sense. It’s not reality. (It’s hurting my head.)

The people in charge of most of these platforms would argue that they can offer answers only within limits. If they start revealing every single consideration that goes into every single recommendation decision, people will begin to game the system in ways that nobody will like. Or, if they start providing a ton of context to users about the way their accounts are being treated by various algorithms, there’s no telling what people would actually make of the information. Some may only be further confused by it.

And what’s worse? You may find that you’re not shadowbanned. You may find that ignorance was bliss.