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Is it news that people are angry with Marjorie Taylor Greene?
This week, the Georgia Republican took advantage of Twitter’s newly liberalized character restrictions to do what she does best: suggest something unhinged, and sit back while her political opponents’ heads explode in white-hot rage.
“We need a national divorce,” she tweeted. “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.” The next day, she followed up by elaborating that she would like to see “a legal agreement” that would separate states to resolve ideological and political disagreements “while maintaining our legal union.” Rearranged this way, Americans can decide where and how to live, Greene concluded, and “we don’t have to argue with one another anymore.”
[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]
The Republican representative’s words prompted the outcry you’d expect from Democrats and columnists who questioned both her loyalty to the country and Republican leaders’ cowardice in refusing to rein her in. But Greene’s ideas are not as radical as some might be inclined to think. First, because what she’s calling for sounds not unlike Ronald Reagan’s idea of federalism. Second, because Greene is hardly the first person to suggest that the political party in power is making the United States wholly unlivable. I’m old enough to remember all the liberals who swore they’d move to Canada if Donald Trump won in 2016. (They didn’t!)
What’s interesting about Greene’s call for a “national divorce” is how it fits into a much longer history of similar calls for secession or disunion in American history—and what the growing frequency of such calls tells us about this particular modern political moment. “That it keeps coming up suggests there is something to it, and waving it away with reminders of Appomattox or quotes from Texas v. White probably isn’t going to cut it,” Richard Kreitner, the author of the 2020 book Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union, told me. This persistent theme in our politics, he added, “represents an impulse that cannot be simply wished away or ignored.”
This week, I talked with Kreitner about that constant theme—and whether it’s time for the people of the United States to reassess their 250-year union.
This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Elaine Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that there should be a “national divorce” between red and blue states. Obviously, this is what Greene is good at—saying something wild, getting a reaction. What was yours?
Richard Kreitner: Calls for secession have been becoming more common, louder, and have come from more prominent figures in the 21st century. So it’s not too surprising to find somebody in House Republican leadership embracing the idea.
She’s calling for a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union. That’s federalism. We can have arguments about what exactly that means, what the Founders thought it should mean, but she’s just arguing that the states should have more powers over things than the federal government. That’s the debate we’ve been having in American politics for decades.
So, to wrap it in this banner of “national divorce” seems to me to be taking advantage of all the talk of a second civil war, the boogaloo bois, and the secession talk that is growing in prominence. But each side has been talking about secession for many years—when they’re out of power. When they’re in power, they say, “Oh no, you can’t do that. That’s treasonous.”
Godfrey: When I think of secession, I think of the Civil War, and then I think of Texas. But you’ve written about how it goes back to the very beginning—how the United States has never been all that united.
Kreitner: My book starts by pointing out that the colonial period lasted 150 years—a very long time, about the same amount of time since our Civil War. And during that time, America was disunited. The colonies were, as Marjorie Taylor Greene would have them now, totally independent of one another. Their only relationship, their only political relationship, was with England itself, and that was a fairly loose relationship.
So this was the original state of things in America, one that the colonists themselves liked very much. They had control over their own affairs; there was very little meddling.
Occasionally, somebody—William Penn, Benjamin Franklin—would have the idea that it would be better to organize some kind of federation of the colonies, with Britain’s approval, to organize trade, land disputes, border issues, relationships with the Indians, and mutual defense. Every time somebody proposed that idea, they were laughed out of the room, because people considered the very idea of union to be antithetical to their cherished liberties.
Forming a union was kind of the last thing on their mind. Then we get to the Revolution. A lot of us are taught in school that the Revolution was fought to create a union, to create a nation. And it’s the exact opposite of that. The Union was created as a means to the end of securing independence from England. It was a last resort.
John Adams, when he goes to Philadelphia, is talking about how different Americans are from one another, how much they hate each other. George Washington in the Continental Army camp outside Boston in 1775 is talking about how much the New Englanders smell. Anytime these politicians meet in the Continental Congress, they’re described as a conclave of ambassadors from different nations. Many of them think a union will not survive after the war.
No golden age of American unity exists that you can point to and say, “That’s when we were united.” Even back then, people were issuing threats of secession when they were out of power, and then defending the Union as perpetual and inviolable once they had the power. Thomas Jefferson does this famous turnaround. In 1798, he mulls whether to threaten secession because he doesn’t like Adams’s administration. Then he wins the election of 1800, and says, “We must hold the Union together at any cost!” The people backing Adams now proposed secession.
Godfrey: Because of the Civil War, we think of secessionist calls as primarily reactionary. Are we right about that?
Kreitner: When I was researching, I was especially interested in whether there were any people whose values and ideals I shared—who had espoused the idea of secession not for white-supremacist reasons or to preserve slavery. I quickly landed on the abolitionists.
Many were in favor of northern secession from the Union in the years right before the Civil War. Their argument was gaining traction in the 1850s because they thought that participation in the Union was an important pillar in maintaining the institution of slavery. They thought that without the guarantee of the federal government’s aid to suppress an insurrection among the enslaved—which is the constitutional guarantee of the Fugitive Slave Act—slavery would be a much more insecure institution, the price of slaves would plummet, and the institution would die out.
John Quincy Adams, back in Congress after his presidency, introduced a petition from a group of citizens from a small town in Massachusetts demanding the dissolution of the United States, because they didn’t want their tax dollars to go toward the support of slavery anymore. These were ordinary American heroes, far from traitors.
Godfrey: Obviously the secession of the southern states was the big culmination of many years of those sentiments. When did we start hearing them again after the Civil War?
Kreitner: The Civil War was a national trauma; nearly a million people died. The fear of disunion persisted in American politics. The idea went underground for years.
In the 1890s, the populist movement and the rise of socialism in the United States were both opposed on the grounds that they were disunionist movements. Populism in the 1930s also dabbles in secessionism. That’s when a bill is introduced in a state legislature calling for secession for the first time since the Civil War, in North Dakota. Then in the ’60s, it starts to become an ethnic thing. There was the Republic of New Afrika, a movement of Black Americans in northern cities that called for the surrender of five southern states as a form of reparations for slavery. Then Hispanic Americans demanded the return of the Southwest that was lost in the Mexican-American War as a sovereign homeland. From a hippie newspaper published on the Lower East Side came a call for the creation of what was called the Underground States of America, which would be a kind of hippie confederacy. Lesbian separatist communes also envisioned themselves as secessionists.
Obviously, these were not order-shattering movements, but the idea lingered. Secession has always been available to malcontents of one kind or another. It defines American history.
Godfrey: So Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweets are not representative of some new treasonous trend?
Kreitner: The trend is old in the sense that American politics is starting to look rather similar to the way it was in the beginning, which was extremely fractured, totally dysfunctional, with foreign enemies prowling around the perimeter to see what kind of discord they could scare up, and real questions about whether the Union could survive.
We didn’t get through because of some predestined outcome; there’s no guarantee that we’re going to stay together. In many cases, our staying together had to do with mere chance and fear of the unknown—particularly fear of the economic consequences of disunion.
Godfrey: You’re saying that the frequency of these calls is not surprising, but that we should pay attention to them.
Kreitner: We’re totally undecided on this fundamental question of “Do we want to be a multiracial democracy or not?” While we persist in having that fundamental argument, we’re going to see political tensions. And when you see that in American history, you see secessionist movements.
So the course of growing hatred, rancor, and constitutional paralysis continues. I charted quite exactly from 2004, when there were memes going around showing maps separating “Jesusland” from the United States of Canada, to 2012, when you saw all these petitions from every state in the country arguing for secession. Then, of course, in 2016, you have Calexit.
California Representative Zoe Lofgren talked about secession after the 2016 election. She said: “Rational people, not the fringe, are now talking about whether states could be separated from the U.S.” I don’t know if anybody’s quoted her in relation to Marjorie Taylor Greene, but I can’t imagine her response today would be: “Oh boy, I guess we both have this idea! Maybe let’s have a substantive conversation about the merits and the drawbacks of being in one country together.”
[Peter Wehner: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s civil war]
In the coming years, especially with the Supreme Court so heavily stacked in favor of the right, the left is going to have a lot more cause for talking about secession than the right. And I think that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s screed—insane and stupid as it is—is an invitation that should be accepted: to talk concretely about whether this thing is working or not.
Godfrey: What would the result of that conversation be?
Kreitner: I don’t know what the end of it is. But the beginning is—instead of piling on and saying, “This is treason. You can’t talk about that; it’s un-American”—that we actually are capable of not only having conversations but also making decisions about what kind of country and what kind of government we want to have.
After all, we’re not seeing any positive arguments for the union. You look at all the commentary, and you don’t see any soaring odes to our shared nationality, why it’s important for us to remain together as a people. My response to Greene is not “I must remain united with this person at any cost,” but “Why would I want to be part of a government where this person is a leading figure? Why would I want to remain loyal to a Constitution so patently broken that somebody like this ascends to the highest ranks of power?”
I don’t have a programmatic view of what should happen, no firm sense of where to draw the new borders or what to do with people stuck behind enemy lines, only an understanding, based on my reading of American history, that this is a persistent theme in our politics and represents an impulse that cannot simply be wished away or ignored.
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Stephanie McCrummen is joining The Atlantic next month as a staff writer. She comes to The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2004.
In a note to staff, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: “Stephanie is one of America’s most esteemed reporters; her stories are gorgeously written, memorable, and complicated in all the ways that Atlantic stories should be.”
In 2018, Stephanie was a leading member of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, for work uncovering sexual misconduct allegations against Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate. In 2015, she spent time with friends of the perpetrator of the mass shooting at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the result of which was her chilling and deeply reported story “An American Void.” More recently she traveled to rural Georgia and, through the eyes of one voter, helped readers make sense of the surprising outcome of the midterm elections.
In addition to her focus on the forces driving American politics and culture, Stephanie has worked as a foreign correspondent for the Post, covering East and Central Africa, and as a metro reporter covering the Virginia suburbs. Before her tenure at the Post, she was a reporter for Newsday. Stephanie’s journalism has most recently been recognized with the George Polk Award in both 2020 and 2018, a Scripps Howard Foundation Ernie Pyle Award in 2020, and a 2018 Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting.
The Atlantic recently announced the hiring of Evan McMurry as senior editor overseeing audience, Yair Rosenberg and Xochitl Gonzalez as staff writers, and Eleanor Barkhorn as a senior editor.
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Last week, a gunman shot two Jews at close range as they departed morning prayer services in Los Angeles. The first victim was shot in the back on Wednesday. The second was shot multiple times in the arm on Thursday, less than 24 hours later. The attacks sent fear pulsing through the Jewish community of Los Angeles, as members wondered if their own place of worship would be targeted next. On Thursday evening, the alleged assailant was apprehended. Prosecutors say the 28-year-old Asian American man had a history of making anti-Semitic threats and possessed both a .380-caliber handgun and an AK-style rifle. It was a harrowing ordeal for America’s second-largest Jewish population. And yet, outside the Los Angeles Times and Jewish media outlets, the story went largely undiscussed on national front pages and cable news networks. The attacks never trended on social media. Which is why you might well be hearing about them now for the first time.
This is not an uncommon occurrence when it comes to American anti-Semitism. Here’s another disturbing story that has garnered little national attention: Over the past several years, local elected officials in New York and New Jersey have systematically worked to pass and impose laws with a single purpose—to keep Orthodox Jews out of their communities. The conduct of those officials was so egregious that the states’ attorneys general, Democrats Letitia James and Gurbir Grewal, respectively, pursued civil-rights lawsuits, alleging deliberate anti-Jewish discrimination.
In the case of Jackson Township, New Jersey, Grewal accused the local authorities of an array of abuses. These included “targeted and discriminatory surveillance of the homes of Orthodox Jews suspected of hosting communal prayer gatherings,” “enacting zoning ordinances in 2017 that essentially banned the establishment of yeshivas and dormitories,” and “discriminatory application of land use laws to inhibit the erection of sukkahs by the Township’s Jewish residents,” referring to the temporary huts built by religious Jews on their property to observe the holiday of Sukkot.
[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism]
The enmity behind these efforts was not particularly disguised. A Facebook group for an organization opposed to any influx of Orthodox residents titled “Rise Up Ocean County” became so overrun with anti-Jewish invective—such as “We need to get rid of them like Hitler did”—that the social-media company took the rare step of shutting it down. Last month, Jackson agreed to pay $1.35 million to an Orthodox girls school whose opening it had blocked a decade ago. It also recently settled a related lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice by committing to repeal discriminatory regulations and set up a settlement fund for the people affected by them.
None of this is new. In 2018, the township of Mahwah settled with Grewal in a similar case and repealed a discriminatory ordinance against Orthodox Jews. This happened after a town-council meeting in which a participant called on legislators to “remove the infection” of Hasidic Jews, drawing no rebuke from the councilors.
The story of New York’s Orange County follows the same sorry playbook. The region’s town of Chester is reputed to be the birthplace of Philadelphia Cream Cheese. But when Orthodox Jews began moving to the area, the residents saw not potential fellow enthusiasts, but a threat. In May 2020, James joined a lawsuit against local officials and accused them of “a concerted and systematic effort to prevent Hasidic Jewish families from moving to Chester.” In June 2021, Orange County and Chester settled with James and agreed to comply with the Fair Housing Act. “The discriminatory and illegal actions perpetrated by Orange County and the Town of Chester are blatantly antisemitic, and go against the diversity, inclusivity, and tolerance that New York prides itself on,” James said in her release announcing the settlement.
These long-running systemic efforts to outlaw Jewish life drew local news coverage, but scant notice in our national media and politics. For years, the same was true of the ongoing assaults on visibly religious Jews in the streets of Brooklyn, with some notable exceptions.
Why do some anti-Semitic incidents capture broad attention, while others languish in relative obscurity? What distinguishes comments made by leaders of the Women’s March from the actions of New York–township officials, or a synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh from one in Los Angeles?
In my decade reporting on such stories, I’ve come across many answers. Only one has consistently held true: Anti-Semitism is acknowledged when it conforms to one of two overarching partisan narratives that many journalists know how to tell and the public knows how to digest. On the one hand, there is the anti-Jewish bigotry that stems from white supremacists and neo-Nazis. This prejudice is right-coded, and typically attributed to conservatives. On the other, there is the anti-Jewish animus that results when anti-Zionism strays into anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel turns into vilification of Jews. This prejudice is left-coded, and typically attributed to progressives. Although these stories are simplifications, they should sound familiar because debates over them dominate our public discourse, not just in the press, but in the halls of Congress and the hothouse of social media.
What you’ll also notice is that all of the very real instances of anti-Semitism discussed above don’t fall into either of these baskets. Well-off neighborhoods passing bespoke ordinances to keep out Jews is neither white supremacy nor anti-Israel advocacy gone awry. Nor can Jews being shot and beaten up in the streets of their Brooklyn or Los Angeles neighborhoods by largely nonwhite assailants be blamed on the usual partisan bogeymen.
That’s why you might not have heard about these anti-Semitic acts. It’s not that politicians or journalists haven’t addressed them; in some cases, they have. It’s that these anti-Jewish incidents don’t fit into the usual stories we tell about anti-Semitism, so they don’t register, and are quickly forgotten if they are acknowledged at all.
[Gary Rosenblatt: Is it still safe to be a Jew in America?]
In December 2019, two gunmen shot up a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing four people and injuring three. In the aftermath of the attack, Representative Rashida Tlaib posted a tweet alongside a picture of one of the Jewish victims, declaring simply, “This is heartbreaking. White supremacy kills.” When it became clear that the culprits were in fact tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, the lawmaker deleted the tweet, and did not post a replacement. In this, Tlaib is not exceptional but representative. When Americans do not have a convenient partisan frame through which to process an anti-Semitic act, it is often met with silence or soon dropped from the agenda. We understand events by fitting them into established patterns, and without them, we can’t even see the event.
To be sure, anti-Semitic incidents elude our attention for other reasons as well. If an anti-Jewish attack leaves its victims bloodied but breathing, as happened in Los Angeles, it is less likely to make headlines. What’s more, if there is no explicit violence at all, as in the townships of New York and New Jersey, there is often no news. Without a body on the pavement to illustrate the impact, such discrimination remains abstract. There is also the uncomfortable question of the perpetrator’s identity. When the victimizer comes from a victimized community, like the Asian American assailant in Los Angeles or Black attackers in Brooklyn, many observers lack the vocabulary to address the complexity and opt to avoid the conversation entirely. Likewise, when the victims are visibly different, like Orthodox Jews, some have trouble identifying with them. On the flip side, the involvement of a celebrity—such as Kanye West and Mel Gibson—can lend a story greater popular appeal.
But although these considerations have some explanatory capacity, they cannot match the power of partisanship, which regularly enables some acts of anti-Semitism to achieve escape velocity, even as others do not. After all, nothing is able to elevate even the most abstruse anti-Semitism to our attention like a Trump tweet about Jews.
Partisan pull explains how Americans process the problem of anti-Semitism. It is also part of the problem. As long as the frames through which we view anti-Jewish prejudice are narrow and politicized, we will tend to misapprehend its nature and overlook incidents we should not. This has real-world consequences. Just because something goes unremarked doesn’t mean it doesn’t leave a mark. When we lack the language to discuss an anti-Semitic act, we cannot develop a strategy to counter it or find a way to protect and comfort its victims.
Anti-Jewish prejudice is as old as Judaism itself and predates our modern political categories and ideologies. Before there were Republicans and Democrats, progressives and conservatives, there were anti-Jewish bigots. Our response to the problem should acknowledge this fact, and make manifest the victims who have been rendered invisible by our own blinkered biases.
www.theatlantic.com › culture › archive › 2023 › 02 › titanic-james-cameron-25-years-later › 673185
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The Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, has a very good gift shop. Among its wares are sparkling replicas of the Heart of the Ocean necklace, T-shirts that read He’s my Jack → and She’s my Rose →, and, for the kids, tubs of electric-blue “iceberg slime.” In one corner, the visitors who have availed themselves of one of the museum’s main attractions—the chance to pose for pictures on a replica of the doomed ship’s grand stairway—pick up their photos. Next to sample images of grinning tourists stands a rack offering commemorative copies of newspapers originally published in mid-April of 1912. One of them reads, “NO HOPE LEFT; 1,535 DEAD.”
Time may heal all wounds, but Hollywood helps things along. For many Americans, Titanic now refers less to those 1,535 people than to just two: Jack and Rose. James Cameron’s semi-fictional film about the disaster—for a long while, the highest-grossing movie of all time—has taken on a memetic familiarity. Last year, a family re-created one of Titanic’s final scenes in a pool, playing Rose and Jack and an assortment of dead bodies; their effort went viral. The film changed the perception of the tragedy: All of those people, plunged into that indifferent sea, are now bound up with “I’m the king of the world!” and heated discussions about whether Jack could have fit on that door. Near, far, wherever you are—“Titanic” is, as a matter of memory, a horror story transmuted into a love story.
The movie that spurred this alchemy is now 25 years old. Timed to the anniversary, a remastered version of Titanic has returned to theaters; a new documentary about both the tragedy and the film’s portrayal of it is airing on National Geographic and streaming on Hulu. The films, at first glance, complement each other, relitigating the disaster from disparate angles: The first is a heavily sentimentalized work of historical fiction, the second a series of experiments about the physics of the ship’s sinking. In each, Cameron looms as auteur. In part because of that, and in part because the documentary flits indiscriminately between the historical Titanic and the cinematic version, the two works hint at our present even as they make their claims about the past. They are artifacts of a culture that is applying a choose-your-own-reality ethos not only to its news but to its history.
[Megan Garber: We’ve lost the plot]
Cameron’s aim in making Titanic, he has long said, was to humanize the past, thereby making it more compelling to audiences of the present. The writer-director did that first by adding fiction to the historical story, and then by romanticizing the addition. Jack and Rose, the young lovers at the heart of the film, are inventions meant to summon a broader truth.
In that, they succeed. And Cameron achieved his goal in many other ways too. Titanic is, as a matter of pure craft, epic filmmaking at its finest, compellingly paced and cannily scoped and offering a symphonic blend of pathos and humor and romance and action. It is suspenseful throughout—a remarkable feat considering that even first-time audiences know precisely how it will end. In terms of its fictional story, too, Titanic is masterful. As Chuck Klosterman observes in The Nineties, the film’s central drama is devoid of complication or nuance, offering viewers a sense of moral ease even amid the portrayal of crisis. The heroes here are extremely heroic; the villains are extremely villainous. The stakes, whether life and death or love and loss, are straightforward. “The single most interesting thing about Titanic,” Klosterman writes, “is its total commitment to expressing nothing that could be construed as interesting, now or then.”
Klosterman is correct. But the film’s narrative vacuity is not necessarily a drawback; on the contrary, it helps explain Titanic’s artistic appeal and cultural durability. It gives us, in its leads, characters who are also tropes: Jack is the charming, vaguely Dickensian dreamer, limited in means but rich in every other way; Rose, his complement, is equally vital but constrained by wealth’s privations (“Poor little rich girl,” Rose says of herself early on in the film, neatly summarizing her circumstances). The two, together, embody familiar American myths: restlessness, self-reinvention, the refusal to cede to circumstance. Their pasts, for them, are tethers; they spend much of the film freeing themselves from them. Titanic is in that sense a morality play layered over a fiction layered over a history.
But one of the remarkable features of the film is the attention it pays to the details of the historical event that serves alternately as its subject and its setting.
Titanic is, technically, a film within a film: Its version of 1912 is effectively an extended dream sequence nestled within the “true” story of an explorer who is searching for treasure in the wreckage of the ship. The bounty hunter, played by Bill Paxton, embodies the callous narcissism of the present. He films himself offering gauzy pronouncements about the ethereal vessel, resting on the ocean floor after “her long fall from the world above.” “You are so full of shit, boss,” his colleague retorts. Rose, now 101 years old, will spend the rest of the film correcting the men’s ignorance—so that they, and by extension the audience, will come not merely to know what happened to Titanic, but also to feel it.
Part of the lore that has built up around the film, over the past 25 years, involves the lengths Cameron went to to ensure that the story would be as historically accurate as possible. He brought an etiquette coach to set to teach the actors about the mannerisms of 1912’s upper class; even extras received the training. He re-created much of the ship’s interior based on drawings and photographs, and made a scaled replica of the exterior. He placed the latter within a massive water tank built for the occasion. He enlisted the original manufacturer of a carpet that was on the ship to re-create the furnishing—18,000 square feet in size. He commissioned similar re-creations of sculptures and woodworks and ashtrays. He strove for photorealism. He applied auteurism to the facts of the past. “We wanted this to be a definitive visualization of this moment in history,” Cameron said in 2009, “as if you’d gone back in a time machine and shot it.”
This collision of analytical rigor and invention has become a familiar mode. It is the same kind of thing deployed by many more recent works of semi-fictionalized history. A show such as The Crown, for example—which shares the Cameronian premise that fiction might humanize the past in ways that history alone cannot—pays minute attention to historical details while fabricating many other elements of its stories. And many other recent series and films, from biopics to more loosely conceived works of historical fiction, have taken a similar approach. In bringing history to life in the present, they tend to merge the facts and the fantasies so skillfully that the two elements, after a while, become effectively indistinguishable.
Another work that engages in that blurring is, as it happens, the documentary meant to add scientific data to Titanic’s story. Titanic: 25 Years Later With James Cameron is framed as a complement to the feature film, purporting to answer some of the outstanding historical questions about the real ship’s demise. (At what angle did it sink? Would having more lifeboats on board have saved more lives?) Deploying computer models, scaled-down re-creations of the ship, and human test subjects, the documentary presents a series of experiments that aim to solve the mysteries. This makes for a jarring viewing experience, though, because even the experiments defer to Cameron’s vision.
Take the test that doubles as the documentary’s denouement: an experiment meant to resolve “once and for all,” as Cameron puts it, the long-standing debate over the end of the film: whether Jack could have fit on the door along with Rose, thus ensuring that both would survive. To determine the answer, his team places two stunt doubles—of the same height and body mass as the Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio of 1997—into a laboratory swimming pool filled with water meant to mimic the cold of the icy mid-Atlantic. The doubles are dressed in replicas of costumes worn in the film (high-heeled shoes for “Rose,” suspenders for “Jack”) and are connected to sensors that monitor body temperature, heart rate, and other biodata.
The subjects soon enter a state that the experimenters call “clinical hypothermia.” The man playing Jack begins shaking with cold. Cameron and his co-experimenter ask “Jack” and “Rose” to attempt different configurations on the door. Could Rose have given Jack her life vest to help to insulate him from the cold? The actors, shivering, give that a try. Could positioning the vest under the door have made it more buoyant, and thus better able to support two people? They try again. Most of their attempts fail. But some, including a configuration in which both parties stretch, horizontally, across the door, seem partially effective.
But seem is the operative word. “We can’t possibly simulate the terror, the adrenaline, all the things that would have worked against them,” Cameron says, speaking to the camera. And thus: “Final verdict?” “Jack might have lived. But there’s a lot of variables.”
Of course there are—this is the performance of science, summoned to justify the fates of fictions. (The Jack-on-the-door experiment’s inconclusive conclusion was foreshadowed by another test Cameron conducted, meant to measure the time it would take for one of the ropes tethering a lifeboat to be untied: Using a replica of the rope and a period-accurate pocket knife, Cameron saws away. His team records how long he takes to sever the fibers. But then the director muses, “I think I probably would cut faster if my life depended on it,” effectively nullifying the test result.)
Auteurism, as such, is a feature even of the documentary that is premised on physics. Cameron discussed the “Could Jack have fit?” question five years ago, for Titanic’s 20th anniversary; at the time, he gave a very different explanation of his movie’s ending. Jack had to die, he insisted, because that is what his character would do. He is the star of a romantic epic. Sentiment demands its sacrifices. “Obviously it was an artistic choice,” Cameron said. He added, of the inevitability of Jack’s demise: “It’s called art; things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons.”
That earlier response is, in the end, the truer one. Cameron, the artist, is entirely within his rights to end his movie as he wants. And audiences are entirely within their rights to question—and debate—his choice. Five years later, though, the terms have changed. In the documentary, the “artistic reasons” and the “physics reasons” merge, and the result is familiar in its awkwardness. An experiment that promises to measure the biodata of fictional subjects: The absurdity resonates. Twenty-five years ago, Titanic turned a tragedy into a romance, and reaped its rewards. Today, its historical fiction has given way to the documentary’s speculative science. The genres blur. The historical event and the memory of it become ever more distant. “Now, we are talking about a fictional story, I do want to remind people,” Cameron says, as his new Jack and Rose shiver in the pool.
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On February 8, after a regularly scheduled chapel service on Asbury University’s campus, in Wilmore, Kentucky, a group of about 20 students lingered and began to worship and pray for one another. The chapel speaker that day, Zak Meerkreebs, had exhorted the students to “become the love of God by experiencing the love of God,” and closed with a prayer asking God to “revive us by your love.” According to the students, as they stayed and prayed, an unexplainable, surreal peace descended upon the room. As minutes stretched into hours, many students who had gone to class returned to the auditorium when they heard what was going on. They would eventually be joined by faculty, staff, and community members who trickled in to participate in worship and prayer.
In the days since, a stream of pilgrims has made its way to Wilmore. All of the auditorium’s almost 1,500 wooden flip seats are occupied; the walls and archways leading into the gathering space are crammed with people hungering to join in. Crowds have congregated in auditoriums and chapels elsewhere in town, singing and praying and reading the Bible. There has been a steady diet of proclamation (both standard preaching and personal testimonies), public confession, prayer (individual and corporate), scripture reading, and singing. People I have spoken with who entered these spaces describe encountering a “sweet presence,” “deep peace,” or “the quiet, heavy presence of God.” A sense of awe prevails. It is, one participant told me, as if “heaven opened up.”
I live 20 minutes from Asbury and have spent nine days there since the revival began, and I see a paradox at play. The event has gone viral online—on TikTok, the hashtag #asburyrevival has more than 100 million views and counting. But its appeal is actually its physicality and simplicity. In a time of factionalism, celebrity culture, and performance, what’s happening at Asbury is radically humble. And it gives me great hope for the future of American Christianity.
As of this Friday, the university will no longer hold public worship services. “I have been asked if Asbury is ‘stopping’ this outpouring of God’s Spirit and the stirring of human hearts,” the university president said in a statement. “I have responded by pointing out that we cannot stop something we did not start.” Indeed, the phenomenon has been reported to have spread to other schools, including Samford University, Lee University, and Cedarville University.
The images from Asbury have served a Rorschach-test-like function for onlookers from afar who have projected onto them their own hopes, fears, and past wounds. Some see what could be the seeds of another nationwide Great Awakening, and others see echoes of the crowds of January 6 and the looming threat of Christian nationalism. Many have suggested that these experiences embody simple hyped-up emotionalism and lack the necessary elements for “true revival,” whether those are quotas of conversions or minimum standards of preaching time.
What people watching online miss is the sense of divine presence and the unity of purpose that worshippers at Asbury are experiencing. In my discussions with participants, they repeatedly described the sensation of time slipping away and of being filled with love for God and for others. Tom McCall, a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary, described “a quiet but powerful sense of transcendence.” Glimpses of the transcendental nature of the experience can be seen on the faces in the photos, but not grasped.
And so, instead, many onlookers have opted to debate whether what is happening at Asbury is a revival at all. The word revival does not appear in the Bible, but it is often used to describe outpourings of God’s Holy Spirit that result in individual and corporate transformation, including personal holiness, greater love of neighbor, and boldness to proclaim the gospel of Jesus. It tends to be used synonymously with outpouring, renewal, and awakening, although many people would nuance these usages based on the scope and impact of any given event.
Asbury University has been careful in its descriptions, favoring “outpouring.” James Thobaben of Asbury Theological Seminary is comfortable labeling this a “revival,” and President Timothy Tennent of the same institution goes as far as to suggest that it is an “awakening.” Almost everyone involved acknowledges that the event’s long-term impact is still unknown.
Singing hymns and other religious songs—what Christians call worship—has been the central unifying element of this outpouring. Where Asbury’s 1970 revival was led and sustained by student testimony, this event is firmly centered on worship—a mix of piano, guitar, cajón, and an eclectic chorus of college students. There are no flashy light systems, screens, or celebrity worship leaders. “It’s not even low production—it’s no production,” Adam Russell, a Kentucky pastor and the director of Vineyard Worship (USA), observed on his podcast.
When a speaker stands before the crowds, no introductions or last names are offered. I’ve watched world-class biblical scholars usher people to open seats and the university’s president introduce himself by saying, “Hi, my name is Kevin. I work here at Asbury.” And although scholars and presidents are serving the community, the core of this movement, both its leadership and target audience, is the Gen Z students who have been present since the beginning.
The leaders on the ground have turned away people seeking to co-opt the event. Professional revivalists and Christian celebrities have been welcomed in, but they have not been offered platforms. Christian nationalists who arrived toting their flags have been allowed to enter but told to leave their flags at the door—this is about Jesus, not America. No AR-15s or individuals dressed in flak jackets are present. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson was asked not to come to cover the revival, because it has nothing to do with politics or business. No one wants to pervert or disrupt what God is seemingly doing in this community.
The events in Asbury are unsettling, because they are subversive in ways that are hard to articulate. In our world of 24/7 access, it is almost unheard-of for an event to not try to increase exposure through media. Not until day 12 was a livestream established, and even then only out of necessity, in an attempt to diffuse the crowds that had swamped this small town. Estimates suggest that thousands of participants flooded into Wilmore this past weekend. By Sunday, law enforcement was deflecting incoming traffic to alleviate the strain on the town’s infrastructure.
These students have chosen hiddenness and simplicity, selfless hospitality, and a relentless hunger for Jesus. I know this gives me hope for the future, and it should give you hope as well.
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After working for three decades as an operative in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party, Simon Rosenberg in 2022 became an overnight sensation. While most of the media was breathlessly predicting sweeping Republican gains in the midterm election (“Red Tsunami Watch,” Axios blared in a late-October headline), Rosenberg was the most visible public skeptic of the GOP-surge scenario.
For months, in a series of interviews, blog posts, and tweet streams, Rosenberg challenged the predictions of Democratic doom and highlighted a long docket of evidence—polls, early-voting results, fundraising totals, the Kansas abortion referendum—that contravened the prevailing media narrative. For anxious Democrats, in the weeks before the election, he was as much therapist as strategist.
[Read: How democrats avoided a red wave]
Apart from a few allies, such as the Democratic data analyst Tom Bonier, Rosenberg was so alone in his conviction that Politico wrote last summer that his “proclamations would carry profound reputational risk” because “history is on the side of big Republican wins this cycle.” Instead, after the election, Vox called Rosenberg “the guy who got the midterms right.” On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell said Rosenberg was “the only person I paid any attention to about polls” last year, because he “was always right,” and one host on the podcast Pod Save America asked, “Is Simon Rosenberg our God now?” before another host answered, “I think so.”
Amid all this attention, even adulation, Rosenberg delivered a major surprise last week when he announced that he was shutting down NDN, the Democratic advocacy and research group he has led since the mid-1990s. (From 1996 through 2004, the group was known as the New Democrat Network.) This week, I spoke with him by phone to talk about that decision, how the competition between the parties has changed over his career, and what he saw in the run-up to the 2022 election that so many others missed.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ron Brownstein: You just had an election in which you were unquestionably the most visible Democrat questioning the widespread expectation that a red wave was coming. We’ll talk in a minute about how you reached that conclusion. But to start, I think it’s a surprise to a lot of people that you would close up shop at NDN so soon after that success and the notoriety it generated. What prompted this decision?
Simon Rosenberg: Two things. I think that the age of the New Democrats, which was a very successful political project for the Democratic Party, has come to an end. The assumption of that politics, which began in earnest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was that the Cold War had been settled, that democracy had prevailed, that the West was ascendant. But with China’s decision to take the route that they’ve gone on, with Russia now having waged this intense insurgency against the West, the assumption that that system is going to prevail in the world is now under question. And I think that it’s birthing now for the United States a different era of politics, where we must be focused on two fundamental, existential questions. Can democracy prevail given the way that it’s being attacked from all sides? And can we prevent climate change from overwhelming the world that we know?
What I’ve been thinking is that I need to take a step back from what I was doing day to day, to give this more thought. I want to try to write a book and to take the perspective of having been part of the beginning of the last big shift in American politics, the emergence of the New Democrats, and start imagining what’s going to come next for the center left in the United States and around the world.
Brownstein: You mentioned that your political career started around the time of the last big shift in American politics. What were your first experiences in national politics?
Rosenberg: I had been working at ABC News in New York, and I was offered a job to go work for Michael Dukakis. I worked as a field organizer all over the country. And then in ’92 I became the communications director in New Hampshire for Bill Clinton.
That experience in the Clinton campaign was formative for me. After I started NDN, he came and gave a speech where he said there are a lot of people in Washington who can do politics, who can’t do policy, and there are a lot of people who can’t do policy but can do politics, but NDN is where we do both. I always felt that that was the best of Clintonism: this powerful connection between what we needed to do to make the country better and how to build the politics to get it done.
Brownstein: I want to stick with Clinton for a minute, because NDN’s original name was the New Democrat Network. But certainly, as we have seen over the last two Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton’s legacy has become very contested. What do you think Clinton and his generation of New Democrats got right and wrong?
Rosenberg: Any honest assessment of the New Democrat project has to view it as wildly successful, because when I went to work for Clinton in 1992, Democrats had lost five out of the six previous presidential elections. And the central project of the New Democrats was to make the Democratic Party competitive at the presidential level again. Since then, we’ve won more votes in seven of eight presidential elections. That’s the best popular-vote run of any American political party in our history. We’ve also seen three Democratic presidents that have served [since then]—Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have also made the country materially better during their presidencies.
Brownstein: Now that we’ve seen Donald Trump’s rise, and we’ve also seen the pushback against Trump in the last few elections, what’s the main lesson you take from his emergence?
Rosenberg: Yeah, it’s obviously disappointing. The emergence of what I call “Greater MAGA” has been a dark period in our history.
[From the March 2023 issue: The GOP is just obnoxious]
You have to recognize just how central to that is this narrative of the white tribe rallying around itself, and the sense of grievance, the sense of loss, the sense of decline. That’s what MAGA is. That’s all it is. Nothing more to it than that. We know from history, we know from other countries, when countries go into sectarian or tribal warfare, it can destroy a country, pull it apart. And Trump has created a domestic argument here that could potentially destroy the U.S. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene this week—advocating for the country to split into two, red and blue.
Part of the reason I’m taking a step back from NDN is that I don’t think that we have yet figured out how to talk to the American people about the nature of the conflict we’re in right now, with rising authoritarianism around the world, the weakening of democratic institutions here and in other places. My hope is that because Biden won’t be able to legislate very much for the next two years, he’ll spend his time talking to the American people and the West about the necessity of winning this conflict.
Brownstein: Certainly, there’s a collective exhale across America in the prodemocracy ranks that says, “We came up to the brink in 2022, but voters said no to the election deniers, and it looks like we’re heading back on course.” Is that too optimistic?
Rosenberg: The threat is still here. Look, I think [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis is even more MAGA than Trump. This idea that in 2024, Republicans are going to end up with a moderate, center-right candidate and distance themselves from the insanity of the Trump years, that’s just fantasy talk.
DeSantis has decided to double down on extremism and on MAGA. We will learn in the next year and a half about how it all plays out. But I think he misread the room; he’s misread the moment in history. He needed to become an anti-Trump; instead, he became more Trump than Trump. And I just don’t think there’s an appetite for that politics, particularly in the battlegrounds.
In this last election, there were really two elections. There was a bluer election inside the battlegrounds, and there was a redder election outside the battlegrounds. We actually gained ground in seven battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. It’s an extraordinary achievement given high inflation, a low Biden approval rating, traditional midterm dynamics. My view is, that happened because the fear of MAGA has created a supercharged grass roots; our candidates are raising unprecedented amounts of money; we have more labor to work in these races than we’ve ever had before. And where we have these muscular campaigns, we were able to control the information environment. And also push turnout up through the roof.
But outside the battlegrounds, we fell back in New York and California, and in Florida and Texas, the four biggest states in the country. And the admonition to us is that we are still not competitive enough in the national daily discourse; the Republicans, because of this incredible noise machine that they built, are still far louder than we are. Democrats have to become obsessive about being more competitive in the daily political discourse in the country.
There are two things we have to do. We have to build more media institutions. Republicans use ideological media to advance their politics in a way that we’ve never done. And we’re going to have to match that to some degree.
The second piece is that average Democratic activists have to recognize that they need to become information warriors daily. I worked in the [Clinton campaign] war room 30 years ago, and the way we think of the war room is 20 sweaty kids drinking Red Bulls, producing 30-second videos. I think the way we have to think of the war room now, it’s 4 million proud patriots getting up every day, spending a little bit of their day putting good information into our daily discourse to try to crowd out the poisonous information and right-wing propaganda. There’s a lot that average citizens can do in this.
Brownstein: Let me give you the devil’s-advocate view. Isn’t there a case that while the Republicans’ message machinery has proven extremely powerful at mobilizing their voters, it has pushed the Republican Party toward a politics that cannot win national majorities, and cannot win independent voters?
Rosenberg: One of the projects that I’m involved in is a way for Democrats to start thinking about how to get the 55 percent of the vote nationally and to not accept this unbelievably precarious place that we’re in. For all our success in 2022, we still lost the House, and MAGA is now in control of the building that they attacked two years ago. The Supreme Court isn’t done changing the United States. There’s still a lot of power and potency in MAGA, even if they don’t win this next election. The key is to defeat MAGA in such a definitive and declarative way that Republicans move on to a different kind of politics and become something more like a traditional center-right political party.
Brownstein: If you’re thinking about getting to 55 percent, let’s talk a little about what it might take to do that. There is a whole school of journalists and analysts making a late-’80s-style argument that Democrats are too influenced by a college-educated leadership class and are taking excessively liberal positions on cultural issues, especially crime and immigration, that are driving away working-class voters of all races. Are they right?
Rosenberg: I don’t think that we’re as out of position as they think we are, as evidenced by the last election.
We must stick together as a party because what will cause far-right political parties to succeed is when the prodemocracy coalition splits, and we can’t allow that to happen. As much as sometimes we want to have interfamily battles, those are self-indulgent at this point.
Those voices in our party that are arguing that we’re weak and we’re struggling, they’re wrong. When I look back at the arc of the Democratic Party since the late 1980s, we are arguably the most successful center-left party in the developed world over this period, probably with no near peer in terms of our ongoing success. And I’m very proud of that, but we now have different things we have to do than what we did before.
So I don’t think that this emerging criticism is entirely wrong, but it’s only half right. The goal should be to expand, not to reposition. There are four areas that I think we have to bear down on in the next two years for a potential Democratic expansion: young voters, Latinos, Never-MAGA or -Trumpers, and young women, post-Dobbs.
The No. 1 job is we just need more young people voting, period. It’s more registration, more communications, targeting them more in our campaigns. In the Democratic Party, young people are still at the kids’ table; they have to become the center of our politics now.
Brownstein: There was a widespread narrative in the media about the red wave. I spoke on the weekend before the election to half a dozen top-level Democratic operatives and pollsters who were anticipating disaster. You and a couple others were really the conspicuous exceptions to that. I’m wondering why the general wisdom, not only in the media, but in much of the party, was so off? And what are the implications of that for 2024?
Rosenberg: When I look back at what happened, I go back to something we’ve been discussing, which is the power of the right-wing propaganda machines to bully public opinion into places that it shouldn’t be going. And I think there was never a red wave, and there needs to be a lot more public introspection done by those of us who do political analysis about why so many people got it wrong.
The only way you could believe that a red wave was coming was if you just discounted the ugliness of MAGA. You had to get to a place where insurrection and these candidates that Republicans were running and the end of American democracy were somehow things that really weren’t important to people; where, as you heard commentators say, “Well, people, I guess, have settled that eggs costing 30 cents more is more important than loss of bodily autonomy by women.” It was always one of the most ridiculous parts of the discourse in the final few weeks of the election.
We had real data backing up everything that we were seeing, and we were sharing that data with reporters. I was writing it in my Twitter feed, which got 100 million views between the middle of October and Election Day. It wasn’t like the data wasn’t available to all the media analysts and others. But what happened wasn’t a failure of data, but a failure of analysis.
Brownstein: So, roll all of this forward for me into 2024. Are you comfortable with Democrats relying on Biden running again? And how do you assess the landscape at this point?
Rosenberg: I think that Biden is running for reelection. And I think that we’re favored in the presidential election. For us to win next year, the economy has to be good. And we have to look like we’ve been successful in Ukraine. Those two things are going to be paramount in him being able to say, “I’ve been a good president, and I may be a little bit old, but I still got 90 miles an hour on my fastball, and I’m able to get the job done right versus they’re still a little bit too crazy.”
What the Republicans should be worried about is we’ve had three consecutive elections where the battleground states have rejected MAGA. And so, if the Republicans present themselves as MAGA again, which looks almost inevitable, it’s going to be hard for them to win a presidential election in 2024 given that the battleground has muscle memory about MAGA and has voted now three times against it.
www.cnn.com › 2023 › 02 › 22 › politics › georgia-grand-jury-emily-kohrs-what-matters › index.html
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Housing shortages color all aspects of American life, my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote over the weekend, including bagels, music, and education. The solution seems simple: Build more homes. But that’s much easier said than done, especially when Americans disagree about the basic facts of the crisis.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The triumph of LaGuardia, America’s worst airport The forgotten Ron DeSantis book The death of the sex scene“Nowhere Is Immune”
“In my mind, bagel shops open at 6 a.m.,” my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote over the weekend. “That’s how it works. You should be able to feel caffeinated and carb-loaded at 6:03 a.m. every day of the year, including Christmas.” But in San Francisco, where Annie lives, it’s tough to find a bagel place that opens before 8:30 a.m. She blames the housing shortage.
Annie’s theory might sound a little far-fetched, but she goes on to explain the evidence to back it up: San Francisco is not building nearly enough homes to keep up with the jobs it has added in the past decade, and rents are higher in the city than pretty much anywhere else in the United States. This means that many families navigating child-care costs can’t afford to live in San Francisco; the city has the smallest share of children of any major American city. That’s all to say: San Francisco is not full of people “who might be up at 5:51 a.m. on a Sunday morning, ready to hit the bagel store.”
And this kind of cause-and-effect goes far beyond bagel stores, and far beyond San Francisco, Annie writes:
Housing costs are perverting just about every facet of American life, everywhere. What we eat, when we eat it, what music we listen to, what sports we play, how many friends we have, how often we see our extended families, where we go on vacation, how many children we bear, what kind of companies we found: All of it has gotten warped by the high cost of housing. Nowhere is immune, because big cities export their housing shortages to small cities, suburbs, and rural areas too.
A trio of analysts recently coined a term for this: a “housing theory of everything.” “You now hear it everywhere, at least if you’re the kind of person who goes to a lot of public-policy conferences or hangs out on econ Twitter,” Annie writes. The theory has caught on, she argues, because it’s true: “Housing costs really do affect everything.”
She explains:
[Housing costs are] shaping art by preventing young painters, musicians, and poets from congregating in cities … They’re shaping higher education, turning elite urban colleges into real-estate conglomerates and barring low-income students from attending. They are preventing new businesses from getting off the ground and are killing mom-and-pops. They’re making people lonely and reactionary and sick and angry.
So what do we do? The solution is simple on its face: “Build more homes in our most desirable places—granting more money, opportunity, entrepreneurial spark, health, togetherness, and tasty breakfast options to all of us,” as Annie puts it. But this fix isn’t easy to achieve, in part because many people struggle to even recognize that a housing shortage exists—even when the evidence is right in front of them.
My colleague Jerusalem Demsas reported on this problem a few months ago: “Before I get to the veritable library of studies, our personal experiences compel us to recognize that housing scarcity is all around us,” she wrote, in an essay aptly titled “Housing Breaks People’s Brains.”
Even the rich are struggling to find homes, a sign of how wide-ranging the shortage is. As Jerusalem noted, video clips have gone viral showing “hundreds of yuppies lining up to tour a single Manhattan apartment.” But many people don’t necessarily connect these real-estate woes with the reality of housing scarcity.
People also doubt the effects of building more housing: A study published last year noted that 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe that if a lot of new housing were built, rents and home prices would rise, when in actuality, the evidence—and economic theory—suggests that prices would fall.
In her article, Jerusalem offers a few theories for what’s behind these forms of denialism, but the consequences are clear: These types of thinking “push against the actual solution to the housing crisis: building enough homes,” she wrote. “After all, if there is no shortage or if building new homes doesn’t reduce rents, then no one has to tackle NIMBYism, no one has to work to bring down housing-construction costs, and no one needs to build millions of new homes in America’s cities and suburbs. In fact, this magical thinking goes, we can fix our housing crisis without changing much of anything at all.”
The first step toward solving the housing crisis might be aligning Americans around a shared reality—and as we’ve seen time and again, that’s not easy to do.
Related:
The U.S. needs more housing than almost anyone can imagine. Meet the latest housing-crisis scapegoat.Today’s News
Newly released documents show that former Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich put out a report that withheld details of his office’s investigation of Maricopa County voting in the 2020 election; the county is Arizona’s largest voting jurisdiction. A strong winter-storm system hit much of the continental U.S., leaving at least 75 million Americans under winter-weather warnings or advisories. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency threatened the Norfolk Southern Corporation with a legally binding $70,000 fine for each day the transport company fails to clean up the toxic waste from its train derailment in Ohio earlier this month.Dispatches
The Weekly Planet: Emma Marris asks: Are we trying to save animals in the wrong places? Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf probes the decline of organized religion in modern life.Explore all of our newsletters here.
Evening Read
Getty; The AtlanticThe Cure for Hiccups Exists
By Uri Bram
Hiccups are a weirdly distressing physical experience. In their normal version, they are benign and, given enough time and patience on the part of the sufferer, end by themselves. Yet there is something oddly unbearable about that brief eternity when you’ve just hiccuped and are waiting, powerlessly, for the next one to strike.
The search for a cure has, naturally enough in the age of the internet, resulted in a multitude of Reddit threads. Many claim a 100 percent, never-fails guarantee: putting a cold knife on the back of your tongue, saying pineapple, closing your eyes and gently pressing on your eyeballs, drinking water while holding down an ear. Specifically, your left ear.
Spoiler: None of these is a 100 percent, never-fails, guaranteed cure. As common and discomforting as experiencing hiccups is, remarkably little medical research has been done into the phenomenon—and even less into how to end a bout.
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Bleecker StreetRead. “There You Are,” a poem by Victoria Adukwei Bulley.
There you are
this cold day
boiling the water on the stove,
pouring the herbs into the pot,
hawthorn, rose;
Watch. Emily, a new film about the “most vexing” of the literary Brontë sisters.
P.S.
In a recently published article adapted from his new book, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, Jake Bittle writes about how climate change is affecting housing dynamics: Rising sea levels are turning coastal homes across the U.S. into sticks of dynamite, passed on to less and less wealthy owners with each sale—and at some point, they’re going to explode. Bittle’s work is another reminder that housing is inextricable from every other issue that touches American life, and life on our planet.
— Isabel
Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken will join The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Thursday, February 23—one year after Russia invaded Ukraine—to discuss the war’s latest developments and implications for U.S. foreign policy. Register for the virtual event here.