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.

American intelligence officials are concerned that China is considering sending lethal aid to Russia. The West must increase the speed and scale of aid to Ukraine, to remind Beijing that it should stay out of a war Moscow is going to lose.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Judy Blume goes all the way. The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden Dear Therapist: My daughter’s stepbrother is actually her father.

More Than Warnings

Since the beginning of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against an innocent neighbor, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his diplomats have said many of the right things, warning against escalation in Ukraine, including the use of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, and reaffirming the principle of state sovereignty in international affairs. But China has also, of course, tried to provide support for a fellow authoritarian regime by continuing trade with Russia, criticizing Western sanctions, and in general pretending that Putin’s war of aggression—including his many crimes against humanity—is just another routine spat in the international community.

Now Beijing might be pondering a more aggressive move. CIA Director Bill Burns said over the weekend that China may be considering sending lethal aid (that is, artillery shells and the like rather than military gear or supplies) to Russia to help Putin’s forces, who are still floundering about in a bloodbath of their own making. Providing shells without more launchers might not help Russia very much in the short term, but it would be a provocative move meant to signal to the West that the authoritarians can and will support each other in attacks against their neighbors—an issue important to Beijing as it continues to covet Taiwan.

Burns indicated that the Chinese had not yet made a decision, and that the U.S. was discussing the possibility in public as a way of trying to warn them off. The Biden administration has been extremely savvy about releasing intelligence, and this seems to be yet another strategic leak.

We know what you’re thinking, the Americans are saying to China. Don’t do it.

It is time, however, for more than warnings.

A year ago, I was one of the more cautious supporters of aid to Ukraine. In those first chaotic weeks, I was heartened to see Ukrainian forces repel the invaders, but I knew that Russia had significant reserves. I was in favor of sending weapons, but I was mindful of the dangers of escalation, and especially the possibility that advanced Western weapons flooding into Ukraine would help Putin recast the conflict as a war between Russia and NATO. I worried, too, that Putin’s evident emotional state, characterized by delusions and rage, would lead him to take stupid and reckless measures whose consequences he himself would later be unable to control.

I think these were (and are) reasonable concerns, but Russia has escalated the violence despite the West’s measured approach. Putin remains as stubbornly delusional as ever, and he is sending thousands more troops into battles that have already killed or wounded some 200,000 men. A year of pretenses is over: The Russians themselves now know—as does the world—that this is Putin’s personal war and not, as he has tried to frame it, a campaign against neo-Nazis or shadowy globalists or militant trans activists. The West, meanwhile, has fully embraced its role as “the arsenal of democracy,” as it did against the actual Nazis, and Western arms, powered by Ukrainian courage and nimble Ukrainian strategy, are defeating Putin’s armies of hapless conscripts, corrupt officers, and mercenary criminals.

Now it’s time for the West to escalate its assistance to Ukraine, in ways that will deter China and defeat Russia. For example, the U.S. and NATO do not yet have to send advanced fighter jets to Ukraine—but they can start training Ukrainian pilots to fly them. To Russia, such a policy would say that things are about to get much worse for Putin’s forces in the field; to China, it would say that our commitment to Ukraine and to preserving the international order we helped create is greater than Beijing’s commitment to Moscow. As the Washington Post writer Max Boot noted last month, the Chinese president has an interest in helping a fellow autocrat, but he is also “an unsentimental practitioner of realpolitik” who “does not want to wind up on what could be the losing side.”

Putin thinks he can wear down the Ukrainians (and the West) through a protracted campaign of mass murder. The Biden administration has ably calibrated the Western response, and NATO has ruled out—as it should—any direct involvement of Western forces in this war. But if Putin remains unmoved and unwilling to stop, then the only answer is to increase the costs of his madness by sending more tanks, more artillery, more money, more aid of every kind. (We could also reopen the issue of whether we should provide longer-range systems, including the Army’s tactical missile system, the ATACMs.)

China must be warned away from assisting Russia, because so much more than the freedom of Ukraine is at stake in this war. Chinese aid would be yet another sign that the authoritarians intend to rewrite the rules—or at least the few left—that govern the international system of diplomacy, trade, and cooperation constructed while the wreckage of World War II was still smoldering. Many Europeans, who are closer to the misery Russia is inflicting on Ukraine, understand this better than Americans do.

Americans, for their part, need to think very hard about what happens if Russia wins—especially with an assist from the Chinese. They will be living in a North American redoubt, while more and more of the world around them will learn to accommodate new rules coming from Beijing and Moscow. The freedom of movement Americans take for granted—of goods, people, money, and even ideas—would shrink, limited by the growing power of the world’s two large dictatorial regimes and their minor satraps.

Some Americans may wonder why we should risk even more tension with Russia. The fact of the matter is that we no longer have a relationship with Russia worth preserving. We do have a common interest—as we did with the Soviet Union during the Cold War—in avoiding a nuclear conflict. We managed to agree on that interest while contesting hot spots around the globe for a half century, and we can do it again.

Americans who ask “What does any of this mean to me?” will find out just how much it means to them when things they want—or need—are provided only through the largesse and with the permission of their enemies. We knew this during the Cold War, and we must learn it again. We should ignore the pusillanimous Putinistas among the right-wing media. Instead, the United States and its allies must make the case, every day, for Ukrainian victory—and send the Ukrainians what they need to get the job done.

Related:

How China is using Vladimir Putin The war in Ukraine is the end of a world.

Today’s News

Britain and the European Union agreed to a deal that would end the dispute over post-Brexit trade rules for Northern Ireland. Severe thunderstorms in the central U.S. caused tornadoes and extreme winds in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, injuring more than a dozen residents and leaving thousands without power. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that gives him control over Disney World’s self-governing district.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson shares the seven questions about AI that he can’t stop asking himself. The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal examines what air travel reveals about humans.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job

By Ryan Bradley

I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week.

Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week.

Read the full article.

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Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ll be leaving you with my Atlantic colleagues here at the Daily for the rest of the week while I do some traveling. One of the places I am headed is Salem, Massachusetts, where I’ll be giving a talk. I have a sentimental attachment to the city because my Uncle Steve, whom I wrote about here, ran a diner there, Dot and Ray’s, that was a local institution for decades. (I think Dot and Ray were the previous owners.) For me, not only was Salem in the 1960s and ’70s a cool town with an amusement park; it meant all the fried chicken and clams and hamburgers and ice cream I could eat. To visit Uncle Steve and Aunt Virginia was always an epic outing, especially because they got all the Boston TV stations with stuff like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits on them.

But if you’re visiting New England and looking for places outside of the usual Boston tourist spots, you should visit the Witch City (not that there’s anything wrong with walking the Freedom Trail in Boston, which every American should do if the chance arises). Yes, the Salem Witch Trials kitsch can be a bit much, but the trials were an important part of American history, and the house where they took place is still there, along with a museum. There’s much more to Salem, however, including a fine maritime and cultural museum and a seaport. (And don’t forget the clams.)

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The war in Ukraine is the final shovel of dirt on the grave of any optimism about the world order that was born with the fall of Soviet Communism. Now we are faced with the long grind of defeating Moscow’s armies and eventually rebuilding a better world.

Before we turn to Ukraine, here are a few of today’s stories from The Atlantic.

The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are When a Christian revival goes viral The invisible victims of American anti-Semitism

Today I Grieve

Today marks a year since Russian President Vladimir Putin embarked on his mad quest to capture Ukraine and conjure into existence some sort of mutant Soviet-Christian-Slavic empire in Europe. On this grim anniversary, I will leave the political and strategic retrospectives to others; instead, I want to share a more personal grief about the passing of the hopes so many of us had for a better world at the end of the 20th century.

The first half of my life was dominated by the Cold War. I grew up next to a nuclear bomber base in Massachusetts. I studied Russian and Soviet affairs in college and graduate school. I first visited the Soviet Union when I was 22. I was 28 years old when the Berlin Wall fell. I turned 31 a few weeks before the Soviet flag was lowered for the last time.

When I visited Moscow on that initial trip in 1983, I sat on a curb on a summer night in Red Square, staring at the Soviet stars on top of the Kremlin. I had the sensation of being in the belly of the beast, right next to the beating heart of the enemy. I knew that hundreds of American nuclear warheads were aimed where I was sitting, and I was convinced that everything I knew was more than likely destined to end in flames. Peace seemed impossible; war felt imminent.

And then, within a few years, it was over. If you did not live through this time, it is difficult to explain the amazement and sense of optimism that came with the raspad, as Russians call the Soviet collapse, especially if you had spent any time in the former U.S.S.R. I have some fond memories of my trips to the pre-collapse Soviet Union (I made four from 1983 to 1991). It was a weird and fascinating place. But it was also every inch the “evil empire” that President Ronald Reagan described, a place of fear and daily low-grade paranoia where any form of social attachment, whether religion or simple hobbies, was discouraged if it fell outside the control of the party-state.

Perhaps one story can explain the disorienting sense of wonder I felt in those days after the Soviet collapse.

If you visited the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, Western music was forbidden. Soviet kids would trade almost anything they had to get their hands on rock records. I could play a little guitar in those days, and I and other Americans would catch Soviet acquaintances up on whatever was big in the U.S. at the time. But once the wine and vodka bottles were empty and the playing was over, the music was gone.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s. I was in a Russian gift shop, and as I browsed, the store piped in the song “Hero” by the late David Crosby. I was absentmindedly singing along, and I looked up to see the store clerk, a Russian woman perhaps a few years younger than me, also singing along. She smiled and nodded. I smiled back. “Great song,” I said to her in Russian. “One of my favorites,” she answered.

This might seem like a small thing, even trivial. But it would have been nearly unthinkable five or six years earlier. And at such moments in my later travels in Russia—including in 2004, when I walked into a Moscow courtroom to adopt my daughter—I thought: No one would willingly go backward. No one would choose to return to the hell they just escaped.

In fact, I was more concerned about places such as Ukraine. Russia, although a mess, had at least inherited the infrastructure of the Soviet government, but the new republics were starting from scratch, and, like Russia, they were still hip-deep in corrupt Soviet elites who were looking for new jobs. Nonetheless, the idea that anyone in Moscow would be stupid or deranged enough to want to reassemble the Soviet Union seemed to me a laughable fantasy. Even Putin himself—at least in public—often dismissed the idea.

I was wrong. I underestimated the power of Soviet imperial nostalgia. And so today, I grieve.

I grieve for the innocent people of Ukraine, for the dead and for the survivors, for the mutilated men and women, for the orphans and the kidnapped children. I grieve for the elderly who have had to live through the brutality of the Nazis and the Soviets and, now, the Russians. I grieve for a nation whose history will be forever changed by Putin’s crimes against humanity.

And yes, I grieve, too, for the Russians. I care not one bit for Putin or his criminal accomplices, who might never face justice in this world but who I am certain will one day stand before an inescapable and far more terrifying seat of judgment. But I grieve for the young men who have been used as “cannon meat,” for children whose fathers have been dragooned into the service of a dictator, for the people who once again are afraid to speak and who once again are being incarcerated as political prisoners.

Finally, I grieve for the end of a world I knew for most of my adult life. I have lived through two eras, one an age of undeclared war between two ideological foes that threatened instant destruction, the next a time of increasing freedom and global integration. This second world was full of chaos, but it was also grounded in hope. The Soviet collapse did not mean the end of war or of dictatorships, but after 1991, time seemed to be on the side of peace and democracy, if only we could summon the will and find the leadership to build on our heroic triumphs over Nazism and Communism.

Now I live in a new era, one in which the world order created in 1945 is collapsing. The United Nations, as I once wrote, is a squalid and dysfunctional organization, but it is still one of the greatest achievements of humanity. It was never designed, however, to function with one of its permanent members running amok as a nuclear-armed rogue state, and so today the front line of freedom is in Ukraine. But democracy is under attack everywhere, including here in the United States, and so I will celebrate the courage of Ukraine, the wisdom of NATO, and the steadfastness of the world’s democracies. But I also hear the quiet rustling of a shroud that is settling over the dreams—and perhaps, illusions—of a better world that for a moment seemed only inches from our grasp.

I do not know how this third era of my life will end, or if I will be alive to see it end. All I know is that I feel now as I did that night in Red Square, when I knew that democracy was in the fight of its life, that we might be facing a catastrophe, and that we must never waver.

Related:

How and when the war in Ukraine will end Biden’s hope vs. Putin’s lies

Today’s News

The prominent South Carolina former lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who is being tried for the murders of his wife and son, testified in court; he has pleaded not guilty on both charges. The musician R. Kelly was sentenced to 20 years in prison after his conviction last year on charges of child pornography and enticement of a minor. Kelly is already serving a different 30-year prison term for a 2021 conviction. Authorities said that a man in Orange County, Florida, shot and killed a fellow passenger in the car he was riding in, and then returned to the same neighborhood to shoot four more people, including a journalist who was covering the original shooting.

Dispatches

Unsettled Territory: Reading banned books and studying verboten topics are ways to defeat the forces of exclusion, Imani Perry writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Matt Chase / The Atlantic

The Secret Ingredient That Could Save Fake Meat

By Yasmin Tayag

Last month, at a dining table in a sunny New York City hotel suite, I found myself thrown completely off guard by a strip of fake bacon. I was there to taste a new kind of plant-based meat, which, like most Americans, I’ve tried before but never truly craved in the way that I’ve craved real meat. But even before I tried the bacon, or even saw it, I could tell it was different. The aroma of salt, smoke, and sizzling fat rising from the nearby kitchen seemed unmistakably real. The crispy bacon strips looked the part too—tiger-striped with golden fat and presented on a miniature BLT. Then crunch gave way to satisfying chew, followed by a burst of hickory and the incomparable juiciness of animal fat.

I knew it wasn’t real bacon, but for a moment, it fooled me. The bacon was indeed made from plants, just like the burger patties you can buy from companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. But it had been mixed with real pork fat. Well, kind of. What marbled the meat had not come from a butchered pig but a living hog whose fat cells had been sampled and grown in a vat.

Read the full article.

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20th Century Fox Film / Everett

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Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Today I’ll leave aside any recommendations for something to do over the weekend. Instead, I hope we Americans can all take a moment to reflect with gratitude on the fact that we are citizens of a great and good democracy, and that we are fortunate to be far from the horror of a battle that rages on even as we go about our lives here in safety every day.

— 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.

Right-wing political and media figures regularly level the accusation of “elitism” at other Americans. But new revelations from Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News and the Fox Corporation over claims of election fraud are reminders that the most cynical elites in America are the Republicans and their media valets.

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

An anti-racist professor faces “toxicity on the left today.” I watched Elon Musk kill Twitter’s culture from the inside. Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice.

Patronizing for Profit

Elected Republicans and their courtiers in the right-wing-media ecosystem deploy the word elite as an accusation, a calumny, almost a crime. To be one of the elite is to be a snooty, educated city dweller, a highbrow pretend-patriot who looks down upon the Real Americans who hunt and fish and drive pickup trucks to church. (It does not mean “rich people”; Donald Trump has gleefully referred to himself and his supporters as the “super-elite.”) The elites also support the production of “fake news” by liars who intend to hoodwink ordinary people into doing the bidding of wealthy globalists. They buy books and listen to National Public Radio and they probably read things like The Atlantic.

This shtick has been a remarkable success. Republicans have used it to convince millions of working people that super-educated gasbags such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Ron DeSantis are just ordinary folks who care deeply about kitchen-table issues that matter to their family and a secure future for their children, such as Hunter Biden’s sex life and whether public schools are letting kids pee in litter boxes.

In the entertainment hothouse, Fox News is the most prominent offender. The Fox all-star lineup, especially in prime time with Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, is a parade of millionaires who work for Rupert Murdoch, one of the richest and most powerful men in this corner of the Milky Way galaxy. Every day they warn their viewers that democracy is in peril because of people who majored in gender studies. All of this nuttery is delivered with a straight face—or in Carlson’s case, the weird mien of a dog watching a magic trick.

It’s one thing, however, to suspect that Fox personalities see their viewers as mere rubes who must be riled up in the name of corporate profit. It’s another entirely to have it all documented in black and white. Dominion might not win its lawsuit against Fox, but for the rest of America, the process has produced something more important than money: an admission, by Fox’s on-air personalities, of how much they disrespect and disdain their own viewers.

According to documents from Dominion’s legal filing, Fox News hosts repeatedly exchanged private doubts about Republicans’ 2020 election-fraud claims. Hannity, in the weeks after the 2020 election, said that the regular Fox guest and top conspiracy-pusher, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was “acting like an insane person.” Ingraham had a similar evaluation: “Such an idiot.” And it’s not like Murdoch didn’t share that sentiment: In one message, he said Giuliani and the Trump lawyer Sidney Powell were pushing “really crazy stuff” and he told Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott that their behavior was “damaging everybody.” (Fox reportedly banned Giuliani in 2021, putting up with him for weeks after January 6 and then shutting him down as the Dominion lawsuit gained momentum.)

There are few hours on Fox that manage to pack in more gibberish and nonsense than Carlson’s show, and yet—to give him one zeptosecond of credit—he took Powell apart in a segment on his show. In later months, of course, Carlson would continue to inject the information stream with various strains of conspiratorial pathogens, but when even Tucker Carlson is worried, perhaps it’s a sign that things are out of hand.

Of course, Carlson wasn’t worried about the truth; he was worried about the profitability of the Fox brand. When the Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich did a real-time fact-check on Twitter of a Trump tweet about voter fraud, Carlson tried to ruin her career. “Please get her fired,” he wrote in a text chain that included Hannity and Ingraham. He continued:

Seriously…What the fuck? I’m actually shocked…It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.

After the election, Carlson warned that angering Trump could have catastrophic consequences: “He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” Murdoch, too, said that he did not want to “antagonize Trump further.”

Meanwhile, the Fox producer Abby Grossberg was more worried about the torch-and-pitchfork Fox demographic. After the election, she reminded Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo that Fox’s faithful should be served the toxic gunk they craved: “To be honest, our audience doesn’t want to hear about a peaceful transition,” Grossberg texted. “Yes, agree,” Bartiromo answered in a heroic display of high-minded journalistic principle.

In other words: Our audience of American citizens wants to be encouraged in its desire to thwart the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in our history as a nation. And Bartiromo answered: Yes, let’s keep doing that.

As Vox’s Sean Illing tweeted today, Bartiromo’s thirsty pursuit of ratings is a reminder that “no one has a lower opinion of conservative voters than conservative media.” More important, Fox’s cynical fleecing of its viewers is an expression of titanic elitism, the sort that destroys reality in the minds of ordinary people for the sake of fame and money. Not only does such behavior reveal contempt for Fox’s viewers; it encourages the destruction of our system of government purely for ratings and a limo to and from the Fox mothership in Times Square. (New York City might be full of coastal “elitists,” but that’s where the Fox crew lives and works; we’ll know the real populist millennium has arrived when Fox packs off Hannity and Greg Gutfeld and Jeanine Pirro to its new offices in Kansas or Oklahoma.)

Although it’s amusing to bash the Fox celebrities who have been caught in this kind of grubby hypocrisy, the elitism of the American right is a much bigger problem because it drives so much of the unhinged populism that threatens our democracy. Fox News and the highly educated Republican officeholders who use its support to stay in office know exactly what they’re doing. But they are all now riding a tiger of their own creation: As the conservative writer George Will has noted, for the first time in American history, a major political party is terrified by its own voters.

Fox, of course, has said that the Dominion filing “mischaracterized the record,” and “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context,” and the network insisted in a legal brief it was merely observing its “commitment to inform fully and comment fairly.” Sadly, Fox will likely survive this disaster whether it wins or loses in court. Like the GOP base it serves, the network and its viewers have immense reserves of denial and rationalization they can bring to bear against the incursions of reality. “We can fix this,” Scott, the Fox CEO, wrote in the midst of this mess, “but we cannot smirk at our viewers any longer.”

But why not? It’s been working like a charm so far.

Related:

Brian Stelter: I never truly understood Fox News until now. Fox hosts knew—and lied anyway. (from 2021)

Today’s News

Six people have been killed in a series of shootings in Tate County, Mississippi. The five former Memphis police officers accused of killing Tyre Nichols pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder charges. The U.S. has finished recovering debris from the balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina, and so far, analysis of the remnants reinforce the conclusion that it was a Chinese spy balloon, officials said.

Dispatches

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Evening Read

Getty; The Atlantic

Buttons Are Bougie Now

By Drew Millard

The 2022 Ford Bronco Raptor, among the most expensive offerings in the car manufacturer’s line of tough-guy throwback SUVs, features 418 horsepower, a 10-speed transmission, axles borrowed from off-road-racing vehicles, and 37-inch tires meant for driving off sand dunes at unnecessarily high speeds. But when the automotive site Jalopnik got its hands on a Bronco Raptor for testing, the writer José Rodríguez Jr. singled out something else entirely to praise about the $70,000 SUV: its buttons. The Bronco Raptor features an array of buttons, switches, and knobs controlling everything from its off-road lights to its four-wheel-drive mode to whatever a “sway bar disconnect” is. So much can be done by actually pressing or turning an object that Rodríguez Jr. found the vehicle’s in-dash touch screen—the do-it-all “infotainment system” that has become ubiquitous in new vehicles—nearly vestigial.

Then again, the ability to manipulate a physical thing, a button, has become a premium feature not just in vehicles, but on gadgets of all stripes.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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P.S.

To get away from politics and this entire decade, I’ve been binge-watching old episodes of 30 Rock, Tina Fey’s inspired send-up of life as a comedy writer at NBC. And I have come to realize that Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of Jack Donaghy—on the show, the vice president of East Coast television and microwave-oven programming for General Electric—produced one of television’s greatest characters. In lesser hands, he could have been just another corporate buffoon, a foil for the clever creatives, but 30 Rock never let Jack become a red-faced Theodore J. Mooney or Milburn Drysdale; he was vicious, funny, sentimental, cynical, both a backstabber and a good friend.

Of course, the reason he’s also a candidate for becoming my spirit animal is that he is from Massachusetts (as I am), worked his way through a good school (as I did), and now is happily and self-indulgently aware of his own obnoxiousness. (I’m working on it.) When Fey’s Liz Lemon finds Jack in his office in a tuxedo, he says: “It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?” When his flinty harridan of a mom reproaches him for not appreciating her, he doesn’t miss a beat: “Mother, there are terrorist cells that are more nurturing than you are.” I’m not sure any actor but Baldwin and his hoarse whisper could pull off those lines. But even years later, I find myself laughing out loud. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to dress for dinner.

— 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.

Nikki Haley, one of the many Republicans who swore to stop Donald Trump in 2016 and then became a loyal supporter, is now running against Trump. Her campaign is already a collection of meaningless platitudes and she is unlikely to win, but she is the essential example of why the current GOP cannot be trusted with power.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Requiem for the Spartans Eagles are falling, bears are going blind: Bird flu is already a tragedy. Trump’s last-ditch gamble to avoid indictment

Why Did She Bother?

I will admit, as a charter Never Trumper, that I was also an early adopter of “Never Haley.” This is because I attach never to any candidate in 2024 who feinted at opposing Trump and then bent the knee to him later. But even in a party of cowards and hucksters, few people can rival Haley when it comes to platinum-tier opportunism.

Back in 2016, the then–South Carolina governor made a number of excellent points about why Donald Trump was unfit for public office. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,” she said at a Marco Rubio rally seven years ago this month. (Yes, a Marco Rubio rally. Such things once existed.) “That is not a part of our party. That is not who we are.”

But it’s who Nikki Haley was, at least for a while. We might attribute some of her later cringe-inducing sycophancy for Trump to her position in his White House, but even after the January 6 insurrection, as the former Republican operative Stuart Stevens noted recently, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” In late 2021, months after the Capitol attack, she said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham, but she’s certainly putting in the effort.

The video announcing Haley’s candidacy was as vapid and weightless a product as any in recent political memory. Of course, it checked all the right boxes: Family, devotion to public service, all the usual generic gloss, and all of it presented as if the past seven years had never happened. As an Indian American woman in a party whose standard-bearer is an endless stream of misogynistic and racist nuttery, her chances seem remote. (Right now, Haley is polling somewhere between Mike Pence and a dust bunny; she’s tied at 3 percent with a hypothetical Rubio candidacy.) So why is she running at all?

One possibility is that she’s getting out in front and taking some heat from Trump as a way of providing top cover to other candidates who will then reward her with the vice-president spot. It’s also possible that she thinks she can win. But it seems that Haley is just another Republican politician who is willing to make deals with the MAGA base if doing so is the price of remaining in public life. Haley, like Graham, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, and so many others, sees principles as disposable, making her yet another example of why the GOP cannot be trusted with power. Haley knows how to say the right things about how the violence of January 6 was bad, but to this day she refuses to hold Trump accountable, and so there is no way to know if she or any other candidate will withstand the antidemocratic demands of Republican primary voters. For Republicans in elected office, the GOP base is now so hostile to our democratic institutions that loyalty to the Constitution has become an unaffordable political luxury.

Another warning sign is that Haley and others have no apparent interest in changing any of these views among the GOP electorate. For all her talk about “a new generation,” Haley knows that the Republican base doesn’t want to move on. Those voters, to judge from the polls, want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.

Some of the critics who come at the Never Trumpers from the right will likely argue that rejecting someone such as Haley means, in effect, that Never Trump means Always Democrats, based on the magical thinking that Haley and other Republicans, if only given the chance, can restore some sanity to the party. After all, Haley’s a relatively centrist Republican, the kind who was at home in the old GOP of candidates such as the two George Bushes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. She isn’t going to lose all her political moorings just because the base fell in love with Trump for a while, is she?

Allow me to remind you that Elise Stefanik exists. She was once the kind of Republican that Haley claims to be, but led by her ambition and fueled by her liquid-nitrogen cynicism, she has since fused herself to Trump. (And it’s paying off for her: At 38 years old, she’s the House GOP conference chair.) To win in 2024, Haley and every other Republican candidate are going to turn into some version of Trump, or Stefanik, or Vance, and this makes every one of them untrustworthy around the levels of national power.

To note this is not to be a permanent friend or foe of any one party. Rather, it is a recognition of political reality. As a former Republican, I’d welcome the spirited primary between, say, former Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, and former Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. But because I currently live on this planet, I recognize that the GOP race is going to be a Trumpier-than-thou contest among imitators of Trump’s hideous shtick, all of them pretenders to Trump’s gilt-and-glitz throne.

Donald Trump is still the leader of the GOP and its choice (so far) for president in 2024, and Haley, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others, is courting Trump’s base. This means appeasing people who refuse to hold Trump responsible for trying to overthrow our government. As I wrote when Trump ran for reelection in 2020, and as I will continue to insist so long as the GOP resists reckoning with his legacy, no person or party should ever get a second chance to betray the Constitution.

Related:

What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina Why aren’t more people running for president?

Today’s News

The Congressional Budget Office said that the U.S. is on track to add almost $19 trillion in new debt over 10 years, about $3 trillion more than was previously forecast.   Some residents of East Palestine, Ohio, have refused to return home a week after an evacuation order was lifted, concerned about long-term health effects from the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals. The Justice Department is closing its sex-trafficking investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and will not charge him.

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The Weekly Planet: Electric cars are basically just cars now, Emma Marris writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf makes the case against internet pile-ons.

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Evening Read

Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic; Youness Srhiri / Anadolu Agency / Getty

Don’t Be Embarrassed to Commit to the Bit

By Michael Waters

Before last summer, Adonna Biel, a 27-year-old who works in communications, did not consider herself a fan of the high-energy rapper Pitbull. She knew the hits—“Timber,” featuring Kesha; the club smash “I Know You Want Me”—because Pitbull was elemental to the 2010s pop music that Biel had grown up hearing. But she’d given Pitbull little thought until last July, when she heard that he was performing an hour away from where she lived in Washington, D.C. She mentioned it offhandedly to some work friends. Things escalated. Within days, Biel and five of her colleagues—who had spent hardly any time together outside of the office—got their hands on VIP tickets.

Not only that: They assembled a collaborative playlist of Pitbull tracks. They rented a car, which they dubbed the “Pitbus,” to take them to the concert. On the ride over, one co-worker passed around a bald cap. (Pitbull is famously bald.) And at the concert itself, Biel bought a Pitbull shirt.

They did it all, Biel told me, to commit to the bit—a phrase with roots in the stand-up-comedy scene but that has, in recent years, come to describe something of a Gen Z and younger-Millennial life practice. When you want to act in a way that’s a little embarrassing or out of character, it’s easier to frame it as a kind of extended charade.

Read the full article.

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On Monday, I wrote about the balloons shot down over North America by U.S. jets, and I suggested some classic rock about invading Martians. Today I’ll direct you to some classic television that you might have missed back in 1970, a British show titled UFO that I fell in love with instantly as a 10-year-old and plan to rewatch soon. UFO was one of the many shows that tumbled out of ITC, the production company founded by the legendary Sir Lew Grade. Some of these shows—Danger Man and The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan, and Space: 1999, starring Martin Landau—were great. Others were, shall we say, idiosyncratic but watchable. (Robert Vaughn, star of the ITC series The Protectors, admitted in later years that even he didn’t really understand some of the plots in the show.)

UFO is a blast, right from Barry Gray’s late-1960s, swinging-Piccadilly instrumental theme song to the imagined world of 1980, in which the show is set. The governments of our planet, you see, have figured out that aliens are coming to Earth to harvest our organs (of course), and so they have secretly set up the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization, or SHADO, which is hidden under a film studio outside London and led by an American astronaut masquerading as the studio boss. (Why a film studio? Oh, shush.) This whole thing is supposed to be a gigantic secret, which is a neat trick, because SHADO has forces everywhere, including jets, a submarine, and tanks, along with a fully crewed moon base where all the women wear purple wigs—as one did on the moon in 1980, apparently. The whole thing is almost hallucinatory in its sets, colors, and cheap special effects, and I love every minute of it.

— 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.

Like astrology signs and the Enneagram, the psychological framework of attachment theory has become a popular blueprint for understanding the self. But as my colleague Faith Hill wrote last weekend in The Atlantic, the four attachment “types” aren’t as cut-and-dried as they may seem. In fact, the whole theory is widely misunderstood.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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Anxiously Attached

In the 1950s, the psychologist John Bowlby coined the term attachment to refer to the bond formed between an infant and its caregiver. He argued that this formative connection would go on to shape how an infant related to and bonded with other people for the rest of its life. His theory eventually led to the establishment of three different attachment “styles”: securely attached (describing people who are generally open and trusting); anxiously attached (describing people who “long for closeness but are paranoid that others will hurt them, and are thus preoccupied with validation,” as Faith puts it in her story); avoidantly attached (describing those who, “driven by the same fear of abandonment, keep others at arm’s length”); and disorganized, an honorary fourth type which combines anxious and avoidant traits and is a more recent addition to the taxonomy.

Attachment theory was once the provenance of psychology 101 lectures and perhaps also the psychotherapist’s couch. But today, the framework’s tidy behavioral-identity labels make it a natural candidate for online virality. Attachment theory has crossed the threshold into Gen Z memedom: In a Vox article published earlier this week, the writer Allie Volpe cited an attachment-theory TikTok that’s been viewed nearly 6 million times. That 37-second clip depicts a woman’s descent through a cascade of imagined worst-case scenarios after she wakes up to find that her boyfriend hasn’t texted good morning—“what dating someone with an anxious attachment style can look like,” the text above her head reads. If the video’s more than 3,600 viewer comments are any indication, the sketch strikes a chord.

This new popularity has brought with it a serious misconception about the framework: Many people seem to believe “that one’s style is set in stone during childhood, determined by connections with early caregivers, and doomed to play out in every relationship thereafter,” Faith writes. But the reality is much more complex.

In 2021, The New York Times attributed attachment theory’s renewed spotlight to the 2010 self-help book Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love. (Anecdotally, I can vouch for this book as the catalyst for at least one of my fellow elder-Millennial friends’ recent, enthusiastic preoccupation with the three main types.) But even the book’s authors are inclined to position attachment as more of a fluid tendency than a hard-set trait—as Faith explains, a “working model” that you’re constantly updating:

Amir Levine, a neuroscientist, Columbia University psychiatrist, and co-author of Attached, told me you can think of an attachment orientation as a working model of the world: a set of beliefs that are constantly put to the test. Those beliefs stem largely from the interactions you’ve already had—but your subsequent interactions keep shaping your expectations, which means that your working model can keep evolving.

In an excerpt, published in The Atlantic, from her 2022 book, Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends, the psychologist Marisa G. Franco elaborated on how our attachment styles can change based on each new relationship that comes into our lives:

We develop our attachment styles based in part on our early relationships with our caregivers … But attachment isn’t all our parents’ fault. Although early experiences with caregivers establish expectations about how we’ll be treated, these expectations likely evolve in other relationships. And they shape those relationships in turn.

None of this is to say that our formative relationships don’t stay with us. Some negative experiences, unfortunately, may stick with us forever. But as Faith points out, they aren’t determinative of our ability to form new connections. She writes, “You’ll likely meet people you can count on, and hopefully you’ll start to believe that you can count on yourself too.”

Related:

Attachment style isn’t destiny. The trait that “super friends” have in common

Today’s News

Three Michigan State University students were killed and five were injured in a shooting last night at two locations on campus. The gunman had no known affiliation with the university and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to police. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California announced that she will retire at the end of her current term. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, announced her Republican presidential campaign.

Evening Read

Ben Denzer

Math Is Magic

By Camonghne Felix

In second grade, I stopped being able to do math. One night I went to do my long-division homework and I couldn’t figure it out. My mom demanded that I sit with my math teacher because my sudden inability made no sense. Two weeks later, I was sent home with a disciplinary note for turning in only empty or incorrect homework and was accused of not paying attention in class.

Up until then I had been a “good” student, a “smart” girl. I remember the secret bliss I felt when I knew before my peers how to count fractions without the help of manipulatives, and how to subtract negatives. This can be only partially explained by the teaching I got in school. My mom, who was then studying computer science and psychology in her master’s program, was determined to instill a love of learning in my life. Over the course of a year, she built me a computer out of parts and installed all kinds of educational games on it. When I arrived home every day, I attended my mother’s academy, where I spent most of my afternoons watching the sun fall on the walls of my bedroom as I finger-punched my way through the programs.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

While preparing to write today’s Daily edition, I came across an incredible find in the Atlantic archive: a 14,600-word feature, from the February 1990 issue of the magazine, on the origins and evolution of attachment theory. The article includes interviews with then-83-year-old Bowlby and his contemporary, the American Canadian psychologist Mary Ainsworth (who is widely credited with developing the three primary attachment styles), both long since deceased. It’s an exemplar of old-fashioned (in a good way) long-form magazine journalism, and a fascinating snapshot of human inquiry and understanding.

— Kelli

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.

Over the past few weeks, U.S. military aircraft have shot down four “objects” over North America, one of which U.S. officials claim was a Chinese surveillance balloon. This is unusual but not a cause for panic.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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99 Red (Chinese?) Balloons

Almost everyone of, ahem, a certain age will remember the 1983 hit song “99 Red Balloons” by the German singer Nena. A classic bit of Cold War pop culture, the lyrics tell a story of a girl buying some balloons and letting them go into the air—where they are promptly misidentified as a threat by the world’s militaries, who then mistakenly launch World War III and destroy the planet. The song ends leaving Nena “standing pretty” in “this dust that was a city.” (Or, if you prefer the original German lyrics, die Welt in Trümmern liegen [“the world lies in ruins.”])

So let’s start by noting that whatever is going over the United States and Canada, it’s not that kind of threat. There are some objects over our shared continent, and these objects, according to both Washington and Ottawa, don’t belong there. Four of them have been shot down, including one taken down in an operation by NORAD, the joint U.S.-Canadian command that has been defending North American airspace since the early days of the Cold War. This is a first: Until last week, NORAD had never shot down anything.

These facts don’t tell us very much, and with so much still unclear, the Biden administration isn't sharing a whole lot at the moment. So let’s consider a few possibilities.

The simplest answer is that these objects are Chinese surveillance balloons. The National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications, John Kirby, said today that China “has a high-altitude balloon program for intelligence collection” and that at the present time, the program isn’t very good, but it’s improving. In a clapback at the administration’s critics, Kirby noted that the Chinese program “was operating during the previous administration, but they did not detect it. We detected it.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday claimed that the object downed on February 4 off the coast of South Carolina, along with two other objects taken down over Alaska and Canada, were all surveillance balloons. This assertion is especially plausible given the alacrity with which the Canadians, after consultation with the Americans, ordered their jets to destroy the object over the Yukon. (The Canadian rationale was that the object posed a threat to commercial aviation, but Canada’s defense minister noted that it was “potentially similar” to the first balloon downed off the U.S. coast.)

Beijing, according to Center for a New American Security’s CEO, Richard Fontaine, has been ever more assertive in testing North American skies with these balloons. Although the Chinese so far are in high dudgeon over these accusations, officials have admitted that another object spotted over Latin America belonged to the People’s Republic; they claimed that it was a meteorological balloon blown off course, and later reportedly apologized to Costa Rica for entering that country’s airspace. But the strongest evidence that the Chinese have been surging balloon flights over North America—where they could linger over targets as mobile observation posts—is that Beijing is now accusing the United States of doing exactly the same thing over China, an allegation the United States has denied.

In authoritarian regimes, many accusations are confessions.

Chinese mischief, however, doesn’t seem to explain the things that do not seem very balloonlike, including “octagonal” or “cylindrical” objects such as the ones destroyed by NORAD over Lake Huron and the Yukon. When asked yesterday to speculate about possible extraterrestrial origins of these objects, the NORAD commander General Glen VanHerck said, “I haven’t ruled out anything at this point.” That’s really just a military boilerplate answer when no one knows what’s going on, and Kirby today dismissed theories about aliens.

But if they’re not aliens, what are they? One possibility is that they’re other civilian airships, or junk of some kind floating around in the atmosphere that until now fell below NORAD’s definition of a threat. Remember, NORAD was created in the late 1950s to defend the U.S. and Canada against Soviet missile and bomber attacks, not to look for slow-moving balloons.

Now, as one U.S. official put it, “we basically opened the filters,” meaning that North American air defenses are now intentionally looking for smaller objects. As the Atlantic contributing writer Juliette Kayyem notes, if it seems like we’re now finding more of them, it’s because we’re actively looking for them. And as Kirby noted in today’s briefing, pilots flying at hundreds of miles an hour are trying to identify essentially stationary objects, so it’s too early to ask for a precise description.

Still, if both the U.S. and Canadian governments are confident enough about what they’re seeing to issue orders to open fire on these objects, the public may wonder why its leaders are not saying more about the targets.

As usual with military and intelligence operations, there are several reasons to hold information close at this point. We don’t want to tip off adversaries about how much we know, how much we were actually able to see in detail, and how quickly we could spot these objects. The United States has already begun to recover some of the debris, but it is never a good idea to share exactly how much of an opponent’s technology is in our hands.

(By the way, the armchair generals who are eager to send up more jets to shoot down yet more things should step back for a moment. The decision to engage an unidentified object always carries the risk of a mistake or an accident—or of endangering civilians on the ground. To return to 1983 for a moment, recall that the former Soviet Union had an itchy trigger finger when it came to incursions of its airspace, which is why in September of that year, a Soviet fighter jet shot down a South Korean civilian airliner, killing all 269 people aboard.)

For now, Washington and Ottawa have determined that these objects were violating U.S. and Canadian sovereignty, that they posed a real threat to commercial aviation, and that they had no business being where they were. We are unlikely to get more than that, other than confirmation of who owned these things—which is clearly making the Chinese somewhat sweaty. As is so often the case in national-security affairs, this is a time for patience and analysis rather than intemperance and panic.

Related:

The simple explanation for all these flying objects China’s balloon-size blunder is a huge opportunity.

Today’s News

About 100,000 protesters from across Israel gathered outside Parliament in Jerusalem to oppose the sweeping judicial overhaul that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has proposed. President Joe Biden fired the architect of the Capitol after allegations that he had misused government resources. A Georgia judge ordered the partial release of a special-grand-jury report investigating efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

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Ben Hickey

The Enduring Romance of Mixtapes

By Andee Tagle

Six years ago, when my now-husband was still just a friendly old flame from my high-school days, I sent him an Apple Music playlist of my favorite songs of the moment. This was not unusual: Song swapping, album recommendations, and musical one-upmanship had kept us in touch for nearly a decade. Instead of a coffee date, it was “Have you heard of Noname?” In lieu of a lengthy phone call, it was “Listened to the new GoldLink album yet?”

On this playlist, the final track was “Saved” by the R&B artist Khalid. “But I’ll keep your number saved / ’Cause I hope one day you’ll get the sense to call me,” goes the swoony chorus. “I’m hoping that you’ll say / You’re missing me the way I’m missing you.” It was an innocent offering, I swear! But for my now-husband, it was an opening. “That song told me there was a chance,” he told me years later. In 2022, we added it to the must-play list at our wedding.

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Okay, so maybe it’s not Chinese balloons. Maybe the aliens are about to invade. If so, I have the perfect soundtrack for you.

Back in 1978, the British musician and producer Jeff Wayne came up with the brilliantly weird idea of turning the classic H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds into a rock musical, and thus was born an offbeat but wonderful double-album set, released that spring. Wayne stayed true to the source material, even hiring Richard Burton to do the narration. The musicians and cast included Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy, Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues, David Essex, and Julie Covington. Despite mixing orchestral music with rock and disco, the whole thing works, and Hayward even scored a hit in America that fall with the haunting “Forever Autumn,” a song that’s been one of my personal favorites for more than 45 years. The album has remained a popular seller, and in 2011, it was rerecorded with a new cast, with Liam Neeson sitting in for the long-deceased Burton. (I am, however, not a fan of the remake.) It has also been performed live in various venues.

To this day, whenever I hear someone talk about aliens, all I can hear is Hayward singing, “The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one, he said.” (This is after Burton talks to the astronomer, Ogilvy, who pishposhes away concerns about the green flashes on the Martian surface that turn out to be the invading rockets.) And I still get chills hearing the electronic “ULLA!” that in the book was the Martian death rattle, but that Wayne reimagined as their battle cry. It’s one of the strangest albums in rock history but well worth an extended listen, if only to hear Burton’s whiskey-and-velvet voice one more time.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Late last year, the tech companies Stripe, Amazon, Facebook, Cisco, and Twitter laid off workers en masse. Come the new year, Google, Microsoft, Amazon (again), Salesforce, Dell, IBM, SAP, Zoom, and PayPal did the same.

Sure, many of those firms have seen their revenues and profits decline in the past year; the tech sector as a whole has been hit hard by shifting consumer behavior, falling advertising spending, and rising interest rates. Yet each of them, except Twitter, is making money—some of them wildly so. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, made $23 billion last year. Microsoft made more than $70 billion, placing it second in profitability among Standard & Poor’s 500 companies, behind Apple.

Those firms, in other words, did not need to let so many workers go; they chose to. And they did so because other tech firms were making the same choice. Laying off employees turns out to be infectious. And that makes it all the more insidious.

[Derek Thompson: What tech and media layoffs are really telling us about the economy]

Indeed, these tech layoffs (as well as a recent round of media layoffs, I should add) are what the Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer, an expert on organizational behavior, has termed “copycat layoffs.” When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so.

Shedding employees when everybody else is doing it avoids drawing public scrutiny to or creating reputational damage for a given firm, for one. A lone business announcing that it is downsizing is likely to be described as mismanaged or troubled, and may well be mismanaged or troubled. However merited, that kind of reputation tends to hinder a company from attracting investment, workers, and customers. But if a firm downsizes when everyone else is doing it, the public seldom notices and investors seldom care.

Copycat layoffs also let executives cite challenging business conditions as a justification for cuts, rather than their own boneheaded strategic decisions. In this scenario, the problem isn’t that corporate leadership poured billions of dollars into a quixotic new venture or hired hundreds of what ended up being redundant employees. It’s not that the C-suite misunderstood the competitive environment, necessitating a costly and painful readjustment. It’s Jay Powell! It’s a COVID-related reversion to the mean! Who could have known?

In addition to being simpler for executives to explain to their shareholders or the board, large-scale copycat layoffs are easier to carry out and better received by employees than selective or strategic layoffs. Managers let staffers go instead of firing them, blaming economic conditions rather than detailing their direct reports’ shortcomings. Morale might take less of a hit if the remaining workers fault the broader business environment instead of their bosses.

Another possible reason layoffs are contagious is that executives might take other firms’ hiring and firing decisions as a kind of market intelligence. Even when a company’s own financials appear sound, it may interpret a competitor’s layoff announcement as a sign of worsening conditions. Something less intellectual and more instinctual is at play too, Pfeffer told me. “Humans imitate other humans. We copy what other people do,” he said. “These tech companies copied one another in hiring on the way up, and now they’re copying each other in laying off on the way down. I would find it almost inexplicable if this kind of behavior did not get copied.” He added: “It does not make a lot of sense. If you’re going to achieve exceptional results, you need to do things that are different from what everybody else does.”

[Isabel Fattal: The tech-layoff ‘contagion’]

Indeed, reflexively laying off employees when every other company is doing so makes bad business sense. Downsizing is horrible for morale. It hinders the performance of retained workers. It is expensive, as many firms pay severance to departing employees. And layoffs do not tend to improve a given company’s profit margins, boost its valuation, or lead it to perform better than its peers either—in part because of the effect on surviving employees and the loss of institutional knowledge, and in part because layoffs tend to be a sign of mismanagement in the first place. (Indeed, chief executive officers who engage in mass layoffs are more likely to get pink-slipped themselves.)

Firms that downsize end up suffering. Laid-off employees suffer as well, particularly if few other firms are hiring. “There’s been an absence of discussion of the profound consequences, behaviorally and mentally and physically, of these decisions,” Pfeffer told me, pointing to the large body of research on the miserable and long-lasting health impacts of getting fired.

A better copycat trend would be for firms to proactively and aggressively avoid layoffs, as they did before becoming enthralled with “lean” management practices and focused on near-term returns in the 1970s. “Decades ago, layoffs were exceptional and done only in the face of pretty severe economic contractions,” Pfeffer told me. “You want to treat people like you treat any of your assets. Don’t hire and fire based on short-term considerations.” Or better yet, think about picking workers up when other firms are putting them down.

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.

Don’t be fooled by the unsettling elegance of the phrase toilet plume. It describes the invisible cloud of particles heaved by a toilet when flushed, and was once feared to be a vector for COVID-19. My colleague Jacob Stern recently revisited the toilet-plume panic for The Atlantic, writing that although this early-pandemic fear hasn’t been substantiated, there are still other reasons to beware of the open lid. I called him to find out more.

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Beware the Plume

Kelli María Korducki: You write that toilet plume has been a subject of scientific inquiry for quite some time. How did COVID enter that conversation, and when did it leave that conversation?

Jacob Stern: I’m not totally sure what the initial spark for it was. But as you say, people have been thinking about toilet plume for a shockingly long time. The earliest papers go all the way back to the 1950s. There’s also a history that I didn’t even get into in this article, of toilet-related public-health panics—many of them completely unjustified—having to do with either the civil-rights movement or the AIDS epidemic. And so, in some sense, it was deeply unsurprising that in this moment of fear and uncertainty, there would be a toilet-related panic around the coronavirus.

Kelli: I remember that panic. I had a friend who was convinced she was going to get COVID after an upstairs neighbor’s toilet overflowed, sometime in that scary first year of the pandemic. What do you think set off worries like this one?

Jacob: If you go back and look at when the big news articles about toilet plume were published, those were back in June 2020. There was a study published around that time, which I think was one of the instigators for this whole panic suggesting that toilets might be, as one of the newspapers put it, flinging coronavirus all over the place. And then there were another couple of waves of panic.

In my article, I mention a review paper from December 2021 [which found “no documented evidence” of viral transmission via fecal matter] that kind of dispelled the myth. But plenty of academic papers aren’t particularly noticed by the public. So I don’t think that, in the public imagination, that paper made all that big a dent.

Kelli: You point out in your article that even though the potential COVID connection was overblown, we should still be a little afraid of toilets.

Jacob: The basic takeaway is that even if it seems like toilets are not a vector of COVID transmission, there are still all sorts of other pathogens that are really unpleasant to have to deal with. In the case of toilet plume, gastrointestinal viruses such as norovirus are the main worry. And those, we know, are transmitted via what are called fecal-oral routes. Those are still a concern, as far as toilet plume goes. If you don’t want a stomach bug, it’s still worth worrying about.

Kelli: This may be too much information, but although I’ve read your article, I’m still kind of convinced that I caught COVID last year from a public bathroom. I can’t think of any other possible exposures in the infection time frame. Is my position defensible?

Jacob: I would say your position is defensible, yes. Despite the fact that it seems like toilet plume itself was not a huge driver of COVID transmission, there are obviously lots of other human beings in public bathrooms, all of whom are quite capable of transmitting COVID via respiratory pathways. So it seems totally plausible that you might have gotten COVID in the normal way, from someone else’s breath, and that just happened in the public restroom.

Kelli: Has your writing and reporting on this subject changed your behaviors around flushing?

Jacob: Yes, for sure. Even before I started reporting this story, the toilet-plume discourse had penetrated enough that I was already much more careful about always closing the lid on a toilet than I had been previously. Now I not only do that myself but get annoyed at family members and friends when they fail to do so. I’ve become pretty self-righteous about it.

I will also say that, when I have one on me, I will now wear a mask in a public restroom, which is certainly not something I would’ve especially gone out of my way to do before. After writing this story, putting on a mask for the three minutes I’m in a restroom—even if I’m not wearing one otherwise—seems like a great move rather than a pointless one.

Related:

Whatever happened to toilet plumes? Should everyone be masking again?

Today’s News

The World Health Organization warned of a “secondary disaster” for survivors of the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria in the face of forecasted snow and cold-weather conditions, in addition to a lack of power, water, and communications. The State Department announced that the Chinese spy balloon shot down by the U.S. military last weekend was capable of collecting electronic-communication signals. A Southwest Airlines executive testified at a congressional hearing about the airline’s holiday crisis, in which thousands of flights were canceled.

Evening Read

Faraz Hyder / Getty; The Atlantic

‘Scar Girl’ Is a Sign That the Internet Is Broken

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

The scar first appears on Annie Bonelli’s TikTok on March 18, 2021. In the video, she is in a car, earbuds in, lip-synching to the song “I Know,” by D. Savage. The mark on her cheek is blurry and soft, like a smudge of dirt. She is bobbing her head underneath a caption about how it feels when someone accidentally likes a social-media post that’s more than a year old. The lyrics offer the answer: “You say you hate me but you stalk my page, you fucking hypocrite,” Bonelli mouths.

The comments section is filled with thousands of people pretty much admitting to doing just that. For nearly two years, hordes of sleuths have fixated on Bonelli’s face, united in a mission that has sent them scrolling through years of the teenager’s TikTok videos and back to this video in particular, where her mark is visible for the first time. They want to know the truth: Is the pretty, blond 18-year-old’s facial scar real, or did she fake it for online attention?

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Claudette Barius / Warner Bros.

Read. A new poem by Cortney Lamar Charleston.

“In grief and despair, / it is the soul that is heavy and the bones that are weightless.”  

Watch. Magic Mike’s Last Dance, in theaters, is intimate and emotional without losing any of the franchise’s signature heat.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The science journalist Betsy Ladyzhets returned to the subject of toilets and infectious disease last week, writing about the CDC’s recent move to potentially mine COVID-19 data from airplane-lavatory wastewater in airports across the country: “Airplane-wastewater testing is poised to revolutionize how we track the coronavirus’s continued mutations around the world, along with other common viruses such as flu and RSV—and public-health threats that scientists don’t even know about yet.” It’s worth a read.

I would also be remiss not to reiterate Jacob’s final plea in our discussion: Close your toilet lids before flushing. “If this conversation does even a little bit of good for the cause of closing lids, then it will have been worth it,” he said.

— Kelli

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.

Computer games, like movies, music, and television, are part of our culture and often reflect our fears and worries—especially about the end of the world. And I’ve been playing them for years.

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

This is not 1943. The stubborn pathology of police culture Why the U.S. isn’t shooting down the Chinese spy balloon

Nuclear War and Zombies

Computer games get a bad rap among those who do not play them. People associate them, at worst, with adolescent violence (despite lack of conclusive evidence for that theory) or, more benignly, with creepy nerds in Mom’s basement, yelling into their headsets and jabbing at keyboards while wiping Cheetos dust off their glasses.

Well, I am a happily married 62-year-old professional, and I play computer games. In fact, I have been playing them since the dawn of the personal-computing age. Yes, games are part of the escape from reality that my colleague Megan Garber wrote about in her cover story for the March issue of the magazine, but they’re also a perfectly reasonable hobby.

Still, you might ask why a grown man with a busy life—or, you know, any life—would waste precious hours in front of a screen. At the risk of handing a rationalization to students who have not finished their homework, I will say that I not only enjoy the process of playing but also find that games enhance my productivity rather than destroy it. I play computer games for the same reason I play golf: The engrossing requirement to complete a set of objectives clears my mind. When I return from the golf course or close the game program, my brain has been shaken and cleared like an old Etch A Sketch, and I’m ready to work again.

Even pointless games can be relaxing (especially if they’re visually pretty), such as the “loot and shoot” adventures in which you kill something and take its money or possessions, over and over again. And sometimes, you just want to roll your army over some hapless Roman commander or drag space bandits through an asteroid field. But my favorites are the games that have intricate plots, because many of them are cultural markers that reveal what fascinates us—and more important, what scares us.

Back in the 1980s, for example, Americans wrestled with fears about World War III. So did games. I have spent my entire career studying war and nuclear weapons, and for me, roaming around in a destroyed world is much like going to horror or disaster movies, or reading fairy tales (which are really scary if you think about most of them): It’s a way of processing fear.

Consider Trinity, a 1986 text-based game. (Early computers had no serious graphics capability, so these games instead required you to read quite a bit and then issue commands and solve puzzles.) In Trinity, nuclear war breaks out at the beginning of the game; the player escapes through a portal and must tumble backwards through time all the way to the Trinity nuclear test site in 1945 in order to sabotage the first atomic bomb, thus preventing the nuclear-arms race and the eventual war.

Thematically, this was not exactly a game for children. Nor were the many games that followed it, including the 1988 classic Wasteland, in which the player must lead a team of Desert Rangers through the ruins of the Southwest to discover the source of a new threat that could finish the job of annihilating humanity. These games followed a spate of Cold War movies and music shot through with nuclear anxieties, such as WarGames, Red Dawn, The Day After, and Testament; you could play Trinity or Wasteland while listening to “99 Luftballons,” by Nena, or “It’s a Mistake,” by Men at Work, and spend a cozy afternoon traipsing through Armageddon. (Nuclear war is back: One game studio just released a highly detailed nuclear-conflict simulator, but I haven’t played it. Yet.)

As the nuclear threat receded and threats to our health, such as AIDS, began to dominate our fears, pop culture—including games—spoke to those fears. Biohazards became a dominant theme in gaming, with mad scientists and big corporations mucking about with our DNA, weird pathogens, doors to alternate dimensions, or even the gates to hell itself, all in the name of profit, while unleashing freaks and mutants on the rest of us.

The granddaddy of the biohazard-genre games, Resident Evil, was released in 1996 and led to several more games and movies; the first motion picture in the franchise debuted in 2002 and was followed by five more sequels and then a 2021 reboot. Last month, HBO premiered a new series, The Last of Us, based on a highly regarded game of the same name. It is set in a world where a fungus has turned most people into crazed zombies, and so far, like the game, it’s a hit.

Amazon is working on a series based on an even bigger end-of-the-world franchise: Fallout, a game that hit the shelves in 1997 and takes place about 100 years after a war with China. (The war was set off by an imperialistic global free-for-all over power and resources; the Americans, in keeping with the game’s retro-futuristic, back-to-the-1950s ethos, are super-patriotic McCarthyites who even annexed Canada just to be on the safe side.) Fallout was a kind of successor and homage to Wasteland, with a dark but often laugh-out-loud sense of humor, a fully realized postnuclear Los Angeles populated with fascinating characters, and a story line that, again, was not exactly for children. Fallout became a huge success, spawning multiple game sequels over the next two decades.

I am praying that Amazon doesn’t screw this up, because Fallout is my personal gaming obsession. I have played all of the original games multiple times, and as someone who’s had to live with the subject of nuclear war as part of my career, I appreciate the underlying melancholy in the Fallout world. Even my wife (who does not play computer games) found herself moved one evening as she peeked in to watch me walk through the ruins of our beloved Boston, where I found skeletons, sometimes side by side and holding hands, in destroyed homes. It’s a fun, often hilarious game, but underneath it all is a sadness that should be there if you’re thinking about the end of humanity.

It is natural to be fascinated by the ramifications of global catastrophe, but the best games present the player with difficult moral choices and awful, sometimes unavoidable dilemmas. There are many in Fallout and (a big one at the end of The Last of Us). Regardless of our choices, it can be healthy and cathartic to experience the terror and then revel in feeling safe, just like at the end of a slasher movie, when the lights come on and you look around. I’m still here. Everything is still here. It’s just a movie. It’s just a game.

Let’s hope it stays that way.

Related:

Kids are learning history from video games now. The Last of Us makes the apocalypse feel new again.

Today’s News

Secretary of State Antony Blinken postponed his trip to Beijing after a Chinese “intelligence-gathering” balloon was detected floating over the United States. The U.S. economy added 517,000 jobs in January, and the unemployment rate dropped to 3.4 percent—a low the country hasn’t seen since 1969. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Ukraine aims to hold on to the eastern city of Bakhmut for as long as it can.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: The economy is still very, very weird, Derek Thompson writes. Books Briefing: Sports offer more than winning, Elise Hannum writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Atlantic; Jamie Squire / Getty

The Slow-Motion Murder of Mikheil Saakashvili

By Anne Applebaum

Sixteen months after his arrest, Mikheil Saakashvili has lost more than 90 pounds and needs a walker to move around his prison hospital. The former Georgian president was for a time, on a hunger strike, which helps explain his weight loss and his exhaustion. But it does not explain the traces of arsenic, mercury, and other toxins that a doctor found in his hair and nail clippings. It does not explain the beatings he has described to his lawyer. It does not explain the constant pain in his left shoulder, neck, and spine.

Nor can anything other than malice—organized, official, state-sponsored malice—explain why Saakashvili is on a strange medical regimen that includes 14 different drugs, some addictive, some not approved for sale in the United States. Or why he has mild brain damage. Or why he has seizures. Giorgi Badridze, a former Georgian ambassador who keeps in constant touch with Saakashvili’s family, told me that “nothing has been exaggerated. He is doing really badly.” At age 55, Saakashvili is declining rapidly. And as he declines, so do the prospects of a sovereign, democratic Georgia.

Read the full article.

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Focus Features / Jaclyn Martinez / SBS Productions / Amazon Prime Video / Sundance Institute; The Atlantic

Read. Victory City, Salman Rushdie’s new novel, is a triumph.

Or try “Background,” a new short story by Elaine Hsieh Chou.

Watch. In theaters, M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin pairs a ludicrous horror concept with a healthy dose of tenderness.

On TV, Poker Face with Natasha Lyonne (streaming on Peacock) has a sting in its tail, our critic writes.

And keep your eye out for these 15 great indie films this year.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ll skip a longer sign-off today and instead suggest that you get your hands on some of the games I mentioned. Fallout aficionados argue over the best game in the series, but I rather love Fallout: New Vegas, and I recommend you start there. (I would avoid the multiplayer Fallout 76, which I think was poorly conceived and violates the spirit of the original games.) New Vegas has a cast that includes Matthew Perry, Kris Kristofferson, Felicia Day, William Sadler, Alex Rocco, Dave Foley, René Auberjonois, and—I am not kidding—Wayne Newton. It’s a hell of a story, and you get to hang around in postnuclear casinos and gamble, which is where I’d want to be if someone drops the Big One someday.

— 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.

Only a few years ago, democracies around the world seemed to be turning toward the pluto-populists, the wealthy men and women who convinced millions of ordinary voters that liberal democracy had run its course. They’re still out there—but their star may be dimming.

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

Do Republicans not know Trump will betray them? The hidden link between workaholism and mental health Someday, you might be able to eat your way out of a cold.

Pushing Back the Tide

In the autumn of 2017, I was in the Czech Republic on a speaking tour at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State to talk about the problem of disinformation and democracy. One night in Pilsen, a lovely city about an hour from Prague, I finished my presentation and asked for questions and discussion. A young man, speaking very good English, asked me if I would like to comment on the idea that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were involved with a ring of pedophiles, a common internet conspiracy theory that had already been around for a while and is now at the heart of the QAnon madness. I responded that this was a debunked story and that I was not going to be drawn into a debate about it.

After the talk, I spoke with this young man. I said, “You know better than this.” He smiled and admitted that the story was bunk, but that he’d just wanted to see what I would say. “And to make sure everyone in the room heard it,” I said. He smiled again and shrugged.

In other cities around the Czech Republic that fall, I fielded questions that included other conspiracy theories about NATO, the European Union, or Ukraine (or all three together); the movement of American nuclear weapons; criticism of the Western outrage at Russia for seizing Crimea; and other topics that seemed to be pulled right off of trashy websites. I began to see why other members of my various audiences (usually university-age young people) were pessimistic: In a country where Russian propaganda fell from the skies like electronic acid rain and oozed from computers like sludge from a cracked sewer pipe, how could ordinary citizens ever make informed decisions?

At the time, the Czech government was led by a pro-Russian president, Miloš Zeman, who was soon to be joined in the government by a populist prime minister, Andrej Babiš. A billionaire, Babiš campaigned on the high-minded slogan that “everybody steals” and vowed to run the government like a company. (That should sound familiar to American voters who had to listen to similar cynical bloviations from Donald Trump for so many years.) Zeman won a second term in 2018, and Babiš remained prime minister until late 2021. Pro-Western sentiment in the Czech Republic, as well as in other former Warsaw Pact nations that had since joined NATO, looked to be fizzling out.

Last month, Babiš not only lost his bid for the Czech presidency but also lost it to Petr Pavel, a retired Czech general who once held a senior position in NATO’s military leadership. Pavel is a newcomer to politics, but he clobbered Babiš—who by sheer virtue of name recognition and money should have been the favorite—garnering 58 percent of the vote in an election with a record 70 percent turnout. That’s not a squeaker; that’s a repudiation. Babiš, especially when faced with the coronavirus pandemic, was lousy at governing, as populists almost always are. But the Russian onslaught against Ukraine also seemed to break the spell for many Czechs, and this election is likely one more example of Vladimir Putin’s brutality in Ukraine undoing years of the careful propaganda that once bolstered Russia’s position in the world.

Pavel’s career began in the Czechoslovak military, where he was a member of the Communist Party. (This caused some griping and cheap shots among his opponents, but a young officer joining the Party as a matter of course was an expected part of a military career in those days.) After 1990, Pavel served in a United Nations peacekeeping mission and later as the chairman of NATO’s military committee, the top military body in the Atlantic Alliance.

If you want a sense of his campaign, one of his signs said, “Enough of chaos. I offer order and dignity.” (Again, millions of American voters can probably relate.) His views are an about-face from those of figures such Zeman and Babiš; he is proud of Czech aid to Ukraine and has said that the Ukrainians now “really deserve” NATO membership. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, but it is refreshing to see a government in Prague taking the regime in Moscow seriously as a mortal threat.

This is all good news not only for the Western allies but for democracy itself. Nevertheless, Pavel and the leaders of other democracies still have a full plate. The Czech presidency has some influence as a national symbol, but the Republic is a parliamentary system in which executive power rests with the prime minister (currently the center-right politician Petr Fiala). And in a classic Trumpy move, Babiš issued this ominous farewell: “Forget Babiš. Try to live without Babiš. Stop waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night feeling hatred for Babiš.” What this likely means, of course, is that Babiš—who still commands significant political and material resources—will be back.

Likewise, the move to the populist right is not over in neighboring Poland. And Viktor Orbán still rules Hungary, attended by a circle of American courtiers who believe he is the future of post-liberalism. (One of his admirers, Rod Dreher, just made the foolish mistake of accidentally reporting the truth: He publicized some of Orbán’s creepy pro-Russian and anti–European Union comments, and then backtracked quickly.)

Still, the Czech diplomat Petr Tuma (now in residence at the Atlantic Council, in Washington) is right to note that Pavel’s win “seems to follow a tide turning against global populism, including the defeats of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and former Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa.” We could add the American 2022 midterm elections to this list.

It’s been a tough few years for democracy, but populist leaders—as they almost inevitably do—are now reminding voters that they never have very much to offer beyond angry slogans, mistrust, and paranoia. (These days, many of them also have Putin’s war hanging around their neck.) The Czech presidential election is one more reminder that when voters decide in favor of freedom and decency, and then actually show up at the polls, democracy wins.

Related:

The Czech Republic’s fake-news problem (2017) We might have reached peak populism. (2021)

Today’s News

Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was removed from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a vote supported by the GOP House majority. The U.S. is increasing its military presence in the Philippines as part of an effort to counter China and prepare for a possible conflict over Taiwan. More than 15 million people in the Northeast are under wind-chill warnings or advisories, with potentially record-low temperatures expected starting tomorrow.

Evening Read

Joseph Prezioso / AFP / Getty

Tyre Nichols Wanted to Capture the Sunset

By Clint Smith

Vincent van Gogh’s painting Willows at Sunset is a dazzling kaleidoscope of twilight. The canvas is awash in orange and yellow brushstrokes, as if the painter meant to depict the world ablaze. An asymmetrical sun hovers in the background while beams of light shoot across the sky. Terra-cotta grass leans in the wind that I imagine van Gogh felt slide across his cheek. Three pollarded willows rise up from the earth and bend like bodies frozen mid-dance. Shades of black expand across their barren trunks, as if they are about to be swallowed by the oncoming night.

The piece, painted in 1888, wasn’t originally meant to be shared with the world. The wide brushstrokes on the canvas have led art historians to believe that van Gogh painted the image quickly, perhaps as a sketch for another work—the artist’s attempt to capture the majesty of a sunset before it slipped beyond the horizon.

Read the full article.

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Jonathan Groff, Ben Aldridge, and Kristen Cui in "Knock at the Cabin" (Phobymo / Universal Pictures)

Read. Elaine Hsieh Chou’s new short story, “Background.”

“Gene knew parents could be withholding, cold, distant. He didn’t know children could be too.”

Watch. M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin infuses a ludicrous horror concept with a healthy dose of tenderness.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’ve never been to Prague, it’s a wonderful place and one of my favorite cities. It’s also, arguably, where the Soviet empire began its slide into oblivion. In early 1968, reformers in the then-Czechoslovak leadership took over the government (thus giving us the term “Prague Spring” that we now apply to other uprisings). In August, Soviet tanks moved in and crushed the whole project, causing many of the men and women in the old Eastern bloc, and in the U.S.S.R. itself, to doubt their faith in Moscow and the future of Soviet communism. One of the best books on this, Nightfrost in Prague, was written by one of the officials who was forcibly taken to the Kremlin, but unfortunately, it’s out of print and kind of hard to get.

A former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, Norman Eisen, however, wrote a book in 2018 titled The Last Palace, which is a good introduction to the city and its history—and even its architecture, too, as it is told through the notable history of the ambassador’s residence. Eisen is known to news junkies as a regular commenter on cable news; he was the special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, including during Trump’s impeachment. The history of Central Europe can get a bit chewy for a general reader; instead, give The Last Palace a read—but beware of the urge it will instill in you to go and walk along the Charles Bridge.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.