As a major storm system moves across the central US and Great Lakes regions, Boston and New York City are on track for their biggest snow events of the season after an unusually warm winter, according to CNN meteorologists.

Like so many cities before it, Phoenix went all out to host the Super Bowl earlier this month. Expecting about 1 million fans to come to town for the biggest American sporting event of the year, the city rolled out a fleet of self-driving electric vehicles to ferry visitors from the airport. Robots sifted through the trash to pull out anything that could be composted. A 9,500-square-foot mural commemorating the event now graces a theater downtown, the largest official mural in Super Bowl history.

There were less visible developments, too. In preparation for the game, the local authorities upgraded a network of cameras around the city’s downtown—and have kept them running after the spectators have left. A spokesperson for the Phoenix Police Department would not confirm the exact type of the cameras installed, but ABC15 footage shows that they are a model manufactured by Axis Communications with enough zooming capability to produce a close-up portrait of any passerby from an extended distance, even when it’s completely dark out. The Phoenix police have said that the surveillance upgrades don’t involve facial-recognition technology, but Axis’s website specifies that the cameras are embedded with an “AI-based object detection and classification” system. Among other tricks, the cameras can tell if someone is loitering in an area for too long.

Advanced surveillance tactics are in use at other events venues. Late last year, Madison Square Garden in New York City found itself in the news for denying people access to games by means of a secretive facial-recognition system. One 28-year-old lawyer was reportedly approached by a stadium official who identified him by name and denied him entry simply because he is an employee of a law firm that represents clients who are suing the venue. But sports matches have long played host to surveillance measures that are, at times, implausibly intrusive or use certain technology that has not yet made its way into the mainstream of everyday life.

Sporting events, like any major gathering, have no choice but to monitor fans in the name of safety. A big stadium can fit 100,000 people, and global events such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games draw far more visitors—they are clear targets. Such spaces “should be of high importance from a security point of view,” says Daniel Eborall, a global director at the AI security start-up Irex who previously managed security at Texas A&M’s 100,000-plus-person Kyle Field. With such big crowds, violent outbreaks and acts of terror could have nightmarish consequences. In 2015, an attacker with a suicide belt was stopped by security officials before he could get inside Paris’s Stade de France, where close to 80,000 people were watching a soccer game.

And yet sports also have a way of bringing out particularly Orwellian tendencies in their organizers. For billionaire team owners, cities that have bet the house on stadiums, and less-than-democratic host governments, anything that poses a threat to business or reputation, even protesting or panhandling, can count as a matter of security. In some instances, organizers stretch surveillance far beyond the bounds of public safety to serve their own interests. During the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, for example, two women were detained for wearing orange clothes. Authorities suspected that they were engaged in a guerilla marketing campaign to promote a Dutch beer brand that was not an official FIFA sponsor.

Many organizers have broad power to act on these impulses, especially when an event is on private property. A big enough sports event on public property, meanwhile, can trigger special government authorizations. In France, the government plans to change national law so that it can use cameras that detect suspicious behavior at the 2024 Paris Olympics. The amount of money available for such gear is near-unlimited, especially in the post-9/11 era, because security budgets have mushroomed in the name of preventing mass terror. Authorities earmarked about $180 million for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. It is now routine for Olympic host cities to spend 10 times that amont.

With these high stakes, the traditional instruments of venue security—metal detectors, guards, sniffer dogs—are sometimes supplemented with technologies that have yet to be used elsewhere. Back in 2008, for example, when uncrewed surveillance aircraft were still almost exclusively the domain of militaries, Swiss police considered using air-force drones to circle over the European Football Championship. Facial recognition to identify criminals was tested even earlier, at Super Bowl XXXV in 2001, a time when the technology was barely known to exist outside of movies. And while spy balloons are now in the news, the Rio de Janeiro police launched a small fleet of them during the 2016 Olympics.

Such early and exuberant displays of surveillant prowess can have a contagion effect. When one club or government enacts “extraordinary security measures,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, told me, “you’ll have security people at other venues saying, ‘Well, we’re very serious too. We need this.’” Now artificial intelligence is ushering in the next sports-surveillance arms race. ​​According to a 2021 study by the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security, sports-venue security directors were most likely to cite facial recognition as the technology they would acquire to beef up their venue security if funding allowed. Stadiums are particularly good for honing facial-recognition systems, researchers have noted, because groups of spectators are all facing in the same direction. “If the technology works in the sample-size test environment” of a stadium, Eborall told me, “then it can also be rolled out within the city environment and further public spaces.”

In some cases, this sort of intrusive technology does seem to improve the experience of being a fan. A survey of fans who entered the New York Mets’ Citi Field Stadium by way of a new facial-recognition access system reported that 80 percent of respondents found it to be a “more convenient and engaging way” to get into the stands. Security is one of the main factors pushing sports venues towards surveillance measures such as AI and facial recognition, Francisco Klauser, an expert on urban surveillance at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, told me, “but commercialization is also another one.” For example, the Minnesota Vikings have been testing a giant wide-area camera to detect demographic information about fans such as gender and age, while also estimating whether they’re paying attention to the game and the advertising.

Sports are a harbinger of a future of surveillance that is more intrusive, multitudinous, and expansive. But they aren’t just showing us the future. Sometimes, they’re directly bringing it about. In the lead-up to the 2010 World Cup, South Africa’s police minister openly proclaimed that its investments in surveillance technology were “not only meant for the event but will continue to assist the police in their crime-fighting initiatives long after the Soccer World Cup is over.” An AI-based camera on a street corner that might one day help identify a violent fan could eventually out a protester exercising a fundamental right.

This bond between sports and surveillance seems unlikely to break. Following the uproar over Madison Square Garden’s facial-recognition policies, the state supreme court in Manhattan granted an injunction that forbids the venue from turning away people with tickets from concerts and shows (although it can refuse to sell tickets, or revoke them). But the ruling makes an explicit exception: If it’s game night, the Garden can kick out whomever it wants.

Yeva Hrytsak, a ballet student at the American Ballet School in New York City, remembers the "unthinkable" phone call she received on February 24, 2022, from her family in Ukraine, one day after arriving in the United States -- one that threw her life into turmoil.

The alligator rescued from a New York City park last week had swallowed a bathtub stopper, according to an update from zoo officials.

It sounds like something out of Aesop’s Fables: A captive owl escapes from the zoo into the big, scary city. Everyone doubts that he can feed and take care of himself—and he proves them wrong. That bird is Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl that fled the Central Park Zoo earlier this month after vandals cut his wire-mesh enclosure. He quickly won over New Yorkers’ hearts, becoming a symbol of freedom and terrorizing the park’s rodents.

Flaco has wide, piercing eyes set in a bold brow; a broad chest; and a majestic, tigerlike swirl of sienna-and-black feathers. When he curls up in the sun or closes his eyes as his ear tufts bend in the breeze, he transforms into an unfathomably fluffy rabbit. He is, as Walt Whitman once wrote of New York City’s workers, “well-form’d, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes.” He belongs to one of the world’s largest owl species, whose wings can span six feet. But despite his heft and allure, Flaco’s freedom initially seemed precarious, even unwise. He came to the zoo before he was a year old, in 2010, and his caretakers and many onlookers feared that he had never hunted before, or had forgotten how.

But within a few days, Flaco was coughing up pellets, a sure sign that he was eating. Soon after, people saw him clutching dead rats. Citing his surprising ability to survive on his own (and the fact that he was too smart for them to catch), last Friday the zoo abandoned its efforts to recapture Flaco. News reports attributed his hunting to his “survival instincts,” “killer instincts,” and “hunting instincts”—a victory of Flaco’s “ancient” ancestry over modern confinement. But recent science suggests instinct is really a fable, a fiction we tell ourselves because it sounds nice. And it’s probably not what is allowing Flaco to survive.

[Read: Why is everyone stealing parrots?]

Instinct has always been a slippery concept. Charles Darwin refused to define the word, writing, “Everyone understands what is meant, when it is said that instinct impels the cuckoo to migrate and to lay its eggs in other birds’ nests.” The modern notion of instinct dates back to the 1930s, when scientists first began sustained research of animal behavior in a natural context, or ethology. Instinct broadly describes innate, inherited, preprogrammed behaviors in animals, and has been very influential in biology and the study of development; the 1973 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to a group of scientists known for their work on instinct. Migrating birds, baby sea turtles orienting themselves toward the ocean, and even newborn humans displaying an understanding of numbers have all been described as acting on instinct.

Yet today, some researchers consider instinct a dirty word—a murky, even lazy label that obstructs investigations into how behaviors develop. Scott Robinson, the director of Pacific Ethological Laboratories, told me that instinct is like the Cheshire Cat: It is clear upon first glance, but the closer you look, the more it blurs and fades. Ethologists and developmental psychologists complain that the term could refer to an ability present at birth, a skill learned before it is used, a trait encoded in DNA, or something else entirely—scientists don’t specify and thus don’t investigate. “Instinct is just a label, and it obscures the underlying complexity of things,” says the University of Iowa behavioral neuroscientist Mark Blumberg. “And it obscures their origins. When you say it’s instinctive, you immediately think it’s hardwired”—a description, he says, that rarely holds up to scrutiny.

In the past few decades, the attribution of several animal behaviors to instinct has been debunked. Biologists once thought that chicks responded to their mother’s calls because they naturally recognized her voice; later, scientists realized that baby birds start learning their species’ sounds by vocalizing while still in the egg. If the eggs were silenced, newborn chicks no longer preferred their own species’ maternal calls—researchers could even manipulate the eggs such that the babies responded to the calls of different species altogether. Rats were assumed to land on their feet after a fall thanks to instinct, until some space-reared pups fell on their back: Gravity, not genetics, appears to be responsible for self-righting. Being born on Earth is, perhaps, a sort of inheritance—but it’s not instinct.

[Read: A new test for an old theory about dreams]

We don’t have many details about Flaco’s upbringing or life in captivity, and the Central Park Zoo declined an interview. It’s unclear whether another bird ever taught him to snag prey—which is what owl parents typically do in the wild, says Stephanie Ashley, the curator of birds at the Peregrine Fund. Data show that various predators raised in captivity are at higher risk of starvation, which is why sanctuaries typically teach injured or captive birds of prey to hunt before releasing them. Zoos usually feed the corpses of rodents and other animals to birds of prey. If Flaco had no concept of rat-catching before this month, instinct would be a tempting way to explain his quick mastery of it. But Ashley told me that owl hunting is a combination of instinct and study—the birds want to catch food and have to learn how.

Maybe Flaco had some experience hunting in the wild before he entered the zoo. Maybe rats snuck into his enclosure from time to time, giving him at least some opportunity to practice hunting them. (Flaco appeared to exit the zoo with a penchant for rats—early on, zoo staff baited a trap with a white lab rat, but Flaco managed to extricate himself and flee.) Perhaps hunger, the familiar aroma of rodents, or something else about his upbringing led him to swoop down on unsuspecting vermin. Also, catching rats in New York City isn’t exactly the hardest skill for an owl to learn, even if he’s never seen it done: Rodent sightings doubled in the city in 2022. Flaco is surviving “thanks to the great abundance of rodents in Central Park,” says David Barrett, a birder who closely tracks the owl and runs a Twitter account that posts frequent updates. And Flaco’s hunting has improved with every catch—another sign of plain old learning.

Hunting is not the only skill typically described as “innate” that Flaco’s long captivity denied him. Early on, flying proved a struggle: On his first night out, according to Barrett, Flaco had to stop after four blocks and rest on the sidewalk. Even after that, he sometimes had to abort and reattempt landings. Now his range extends to the north end of the park, more than two miles from where he began—last weekend, I ventured to the park to see him, only to realize that he had left his usual perch and, based on the next day’s reports, gone exploring. He’s started to land “seemingly effortlessly, with grace,” Barrett says, all of which should improve his hunting as well.

Maybe Flaco is not blessed with innate gifts, then; perhaps he is simply a sharp and persevering student. Many New Yorkers, whether native or transplanted, have had to be students too. Your first subway ride is terrifying; by your hundredth, you know which train car is closest to your exit. You navigate Manhattan via street signs, then learn to orient yourself by the nearest skyscraper. Flaco traverses the city with aplomb, avoiding tourists and nosy neighbors. He comes to life at night and detests vermin. He’s a true New Yorker, and as anyone who lives here could tell you, that’s not something you’re born with—it’s something you learn.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

“In 2004, Steven Spielberg made an entire movie about the terror of getting stuck for months in an airport,” my colleague Ian Bogost wrote in a recent article, “but I might be happy never to leave the new LaGuardia.”

I had the same feeling flying out from the newly rebuilt LaGuardia Airport in New York City this past Thanksgiving. “I could spend the day here,” I texted my family as I browsed the expensive candy options at one shop in my terminal. That’s an odd feeling to have about a place that, as Bogost notes, has long been defined by how placeless it feels. “Like hotels, conference centers, and shopping malls, they could be distinguished precisely by their indistinctness,” he writes.

The new LaGuardia is trying to reinvent the airport as a place that actually feels like a place. But for now, most airports across the world will continue to be defined by their lack of distinctness. In part because of that fact, airports are good places to watch humans being human: worrying, rushing, dawdling, arguing, eating. Then we get on the plane, and we take a breath—we watch movies, we dream, and we sometimes even cry.

Today’s stories explore who we are when we travel, and what we really want from the experience of getting somewhere.

On Flying

Peter Garritano for The Atlantic

America Built an Actually Good Airport

LaGuardia is reborn, and it has a message for the nation.

By Ian Bogost

Ariel Skelley / Getty

There are Two Types of Airport People

By Amanda Mull

Some travelers love being late.

DreamWorks Pictures; The Atlantic

The Guilt-Free Pleasure of Airplane Movies

By Lenika Cruz

Amid the endless tiny indignities of air travel, only one true retreat remains.

Still Curious?

The dilemma of babies on airplanes: Hamstrung by the need to ensure their kids don’t inconvenience anyone else, parents can’t do much parenting at all. The opening of “the world’s most useless airport”: Images of a new airport in the tiny and isolated British island of Saint Helena (From 2017)

Other Diversions

Junk food is bad for you. Is it bad for raccoons? The secret ingredient that could save fake meat Raiders of the lost web (From 2015)

P.S.

My colleague Amanda Mull’s airport story inspired weeks of passionate debate from both early- and late-arriving travelers back in 2019—so much so that we rounded up a collection of reader replies.

One reader sounded like they might not even need a rebuilt LaGuardia: “Airports are fun … Why hang around that extra hour in the hotel or at home when you can sit in an airport, nursing a beer and watching the planes go by?”

— Isabel

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.

More From The Atlantic

Happiness is a warm coffee. Never mind Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “national divorce.” Why this Democratic strategist walked away

Culture Break

20th Century Fox Film / Everett

Read. “The Body’s River,” a new poem by Jan Beatty.

“When my mother left me in the orphanage, / I invented love with strangers. / And if it wasn’t there, I made it be there.”

Watch. Revisit Titanic. Twenty-five years later, it feels different.

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.

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.

This lab-grown fat, or “cultivated fat,” was made by Mission Barns, a San Francisco start-up, with one purpose: to win people over to plant-based meat. And a lot of people need to be won over, it seems. The plant-based-meat industry, which a few years ago seemed destined for mainstream success, is now struggling. Once the novelty of seeing plant protein “bleed” wore off, the high price, middling nutrition, and just-okay flavor of plant-based meat has become harder for consumers to overlook, food analysts told me. In 2021 and 2022, many of the fast-food chains that had once given plant-based meat a national platform—Burger King, Dunkin’, McDonald’s—lost interest in selling it. In the past four months, the two most visible plant-based-meat companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, have each announced layoffs.

Meanwhile, the future of meat alternatives—lab-grown meat that is molecularly identical to the real deal—is at least several years away, lodged between science fiction than reality. But we can’t wait until then to eat less meat; it’s one of the single best things that regular people can do for the climate, and also helps address concerns about animal suffering and health. Lab-grown fat might be the bridge. It is created using the same approach as lab-grown meat, but it’s far simpler to make and can be mixed into existing plant-based foods, Elysabeth Alfano, the CEO of the investment firm VegTech Invest, told me. As such, it’s likely to become commercially available far sooner—maybe even within the next few years. Maybe all it will take to save fake meat is a little animal fat.

Animal fat is culinary magic. It creates the juiciness of a burger, and leaves a buttery coat on the tongue. Its absence is the reason that chicken breasts taste so bland. Fat, the chef Samin Nosrat wrote in Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is “a source of both rich flavor and of a particular desired texture.” The fake meat on the market now is definitely lacking in the flavor and texture departments. Most products approximate meatiness using a concoction of plant oils, flavorings, binders, and salt, which is certainly meatier than the bean burgers that came before it, but is far from perfect: The food blog Serious Eats, for instance, has pointed out off-putting flavor notes, at least prior to cooking, including coconut and cat food. On a molecular level, plant fat is ill-equipped to mimic its animal counterpart. Coconut oil, common in plant-based meat, is solid at room temperature but melts under relatively low heat, so it spills out into the pan while cooking. As a result, the mouthfeel of plant-based meat tends to be more greasy than sumptuous.

Replacing those plant oils with cultivated animal fat, which keeps its structure when heated, would maintain the flavor and juiciness people expect of real meat, Audrey Gyr, the start-up innovation specialist at the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for plant-based substitutes, told me. In a sense, the technique of using animal fat to flavor plants is hardly new. Chicken schmaltz has long lent rich nuttiness to potato latkes; rendered guanciale is what gives a classic amatriciana its succulence. Plant-based bacon enhanced with pork fat follows from the same culinary tradition, but it’s very high-tech. Fat cells sampled from a live animal are grown in huge bioreactors and fed with plant-derived sugars, proteins, and other growth components. In time, they multiply to form a mass of fat cells: a soft, pale solid with robust flavor, the same white substance you might see encircling a pork chop or marbling a steak.

Out of the bioreactor, the fat “looks a little bit like margarine,” Ed Steele, a co-founder of the London-based cultivated-fat company Hoxton Farms, told me. It is a complicated process, but far easier than engineering cultivated meat, which involves many cell types that must be coaxed into rigid muscle fibers. Fat involves one type of cell and is most useful as a formless blob. Just as in the human body, all it takes is time, space, and a steady drip of sugars, oils, and other fats, Eitan Fischer, CEO of Mission Barns, told me. The bacon I’d tried at the tasting had been constructed by layering cultivated fat with plant-based protein, curing and smoking the loaf, then slicing it into bacon-like strips. Mixing just 10 percent cultivated fat with plant-based protein by mass, Steele said, can make a product taste and feel like the real thing.

Already, cultivated-fat products are within sight. Mission Barns plans to incorporate its cultivated fat into its own plant-based products; Hoxton Farms hopes to sell its fat directly to existing plant-based-meat manufacturers. Other companies, such as the Belgian start-up Peace of Meat, the Berlin-based Cultimate Foods, and Singapore’s fish-focused ImpacFat, are also working on their own versions of cultivated fat. In theory, the fat can be mixed into virtually any type of plant-based meat—nuggets, sausages, paté. In the U.S., a path to market is already being cleared. Last November, cultivated chicken from the California start-up Upside Foods received FDA clearance; now it’s waiting on additional clearance from the Department of Agriculture. Pending its own regulatory approvals, Mission Barns says it is ready to launch its products in a few supermarkets and restaurants, which also include a convincingly porky plant-based meatball I also tried at the tasting. (Due to the pending approval, I had to sign a liability waiver before digging in.)

I left the tasting with animal fat on my lips and a new conviction in my mind: At the right price, I’d buy this bacon over the regular stuff. Because cultivated fat can be made without harming animals—the fat cells in the bacon I tasted came from a happily free-ranging pig named Dawn, a PR rep for Mission Barns told me—it may appeal to flexitarians like myself who just want to eat less meat.

Although there’s no guarantee it would taste as good at home as it did when prepared by Mission Barns’s private chef, with its realistic texture and flavor, cultivated fat could solve the main issue plaguing plant-based meat: It just doesn’t taste that good. Cultivated fat is “the next step in making environmentally friendly foods more palatable to the average consumer,” Jennifer Bartashus, a packaged-food analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told me.

But cultivated fat still faces some of the same problems that have turned America off plant-based meat. The current products for sale are not particularly healthy, and cultivated fat would not change that fact. Building consumer trust and familiarity may also be an issue. Some people are leery of plant-based products because they’re confused about what they’re made of. The more complex notion of cultivated fat may be just as unappetizing, if not more so. “We still don’t know exactly how consumers are going to feel about cultivated fat,” Gyr said. Certainly, finding a catchy name for these products would help, but I have struggled to find a term less clunky than “plant-based meat flavored with cultivated animal fat” to describe what I ate. Unless cultivated-fat companies really nail their marketing, they could go the way of “blended meat”—mixtures of plant-based protein and real meat introduced by three meat companies in 2019, which was “a bit of a marketing failure,” Gyr said.

Above all, though, is the price relative to that of traditional meat. Plant-based meat’s higher cost has partly been blamed for the industry’s slump, and products containing cultivated fat, in all likelihood, will not be cheaper in the near future. Neither founder I spoke with shared specific numbers; Fischer, of Mission Barns, said only that the company’s small production scale makes it “fairly expensive” compared with traditional meat products, while Steele said his hope is that companies using Hoxton Farms’ cultivated fat in their plant-based-meat recipes won’t have to spend more than they do now.  

Despite these obstacles, cultivated fat is promising for the flagging plant-based-meat industry because of the fact that it is absolutely delicious. Cultivated fat could “lead to a new round of innovation that will pull consumers back in,” Bartashus said. After all, plant-based and real meat could reach cost parity around 2026, at which point even more companies might want to get in on meat alternatives. Cultivated fat might warm us up to the future of fully cultivated meat. With enough time, lab-grown chicken breasts could become as boring as regular chicken breasts.

Enthusiasm about cultivated fat, and fake meat in general, has a distinctly techno-optimist flavor, as if persuading all meat eaters to embrace plants gussied up in bacon grease will be easy. “Eventually our goal is to outcompete current conventional meat prices, whether it’s meatballs or bacon,” Fischer said. But even as the problems with eating meat have only become clearer, meat consumption in the U.S. has continued to rise. Globally, meat consumption in countries such as India and China is expected to skyrocket in the coming years. At the very least, cultivated fat provides consumers with another option at a time when eating a steak for one meal and then opting for plant-based meat the next can count as a win.

Since the tasting, I’ve often thought about why eating the bacon left me feeling so perplexed. When I gnawed on the crispy golden edge of one of the strips, I knew I was eating real bacon fat, but my brain still wrestled with the idea that it had not come directly from a piece of pork. I’ve only ever known a world where animal fat comes from slaughtered animals. That is changing. If cultivated fat can tide the plant-based-meat industry over until lab-grown meat becomes a reality, these new products will have done their part. In the meantime, we may come to find that they’re already good enough.

If you are an American parent, you are mired in contradiction wherever you look: Children are too coddled, a strident Facebook post might shout at you, right before you read an article about the dangers of letting kids go outside alone. It takes a village, you are told, but also, everyone hates it when you bring your toddler on a plane or into a restaurant. You read that modern American parenting is uniquely isolating and expensive, then watch in befuddlement while Congress lets the expanded child tax credit expire.

The Parent Test, a new reality-TV show on ABC, promises to throw confused parents a lifeline and identify “today’s most effective parenting style.” The show is hosted by Adolph Brown—a clinical psychologist, motivational speaker, and father of eight—and the actor Ali Wentworth, mother of two. It follows 12 families, each embodying a different style of parenting, and assesses each style for its likelihood of producing eventual adults who are “emotionally whole,” and able to have “healthy relationships” and “navigate today’s world.” Each family is filmed doing a series of parenting challenges, and the rest of the parents analyze the footage, voting one style out after every round. In the finale, the families choose one parenting style to rule them all. It’s American Gladiators gone domestic, set in a cozy amphitheater. But the battle metaphor ripples outward, painting a lonely picture of American parents fighting for their children’s success and safety in a dangerous world while everyone watches, judges, and weighs in.

[Read: Why American moms can’t get enough expert parenting advice]

The parenting styles are “Intensive,” “High-Achievement,” “Disciplined,” “Free-Range,” “Natural,” “Helicopter,” “Child-Led,” “Routine,” “Negotiation,” “Traditional,” “Strict,” and “New Age.” This taxonomy is fairly meaningless; some styles are about actions while others seem purely based on vibes. “Helicopter” has a more concrete meaning, in terms of daily parenting decisions, than does “Traditional,” and some of the parents struggle to define the parameters of their own practice. This show will not teach you what “Routine” or “Natural” means in the context of a 4-year-old melting down at Arby’s.

Apples-to-apples comparisons are impossible between these families, whose children range in number from one to six, and in age from toddlers to young adults on their way out of the nest. It’s unfair to measure, as the show does in one challenge, the performance of a group of preteens and teens asked to cook a meal on their own against that of a 6-year-old wielding a knife between his anxious mom and dad. And the children’s individual personalities are barely acknowledged; each child is treated by the show as a small, malleable lump of clay.  

Moreover, the contestants live vastly different lives. This is The Parent Test’s main strength: the way it showcases the diversity of American families. The show features, among others, an interracial Mormon couple, a family of Iranian Jewish Americans, several Asian American families, a Black mom raising her deceased brother’s biological child, a gay Black single dad raising a son. Yet, paradoxically, the show’s diversity highlights the futility of its primary goal: trying to divine universal lessons by comparing the experiences of families in very different situations.

Many of these parents are clearly working against something—whether it’s their own painful upbringing or their panic over what their kids face in an unjust society. Dennis, the High-Achievement dad, who is Black and gay, and sometimes criticized by the other parents for pushing his son too hard, speaks with painful openness about his hope to raise “the personification of Black excellence.” This causes Hashim, the Helicopter dad, who is also Black, to weep as he describes what it’s like to watch a “superfit, superhuman Black man raising another Black man.” Hashim and his wife, Johnetta, imply at another point that their Helicopter philosophy is motivated by their need to protect their six Black children from a racist world. During a contentious conversation about spanking, Elisabeth, the mother of the Free-Range family, shares that she “grew up in an abusive home” and speaks with vulnerability about her conviction that hitting a child is wrong.

And yet, with all this explicit evidence that families bring tremendous specificity to their child-rearing, the show acts as though parenting occurs in a vacuum. Viewers don’t learn a lot about families’ communities or social networks—we don’t see the kids’ schools or much of their neighborhoods; we don’t see their child-care providers or extended family members. When people outside the family appear in footage, they are typically treated either as set dressing (other patrons at a restaurant, service workers helping facilitate a challenge) or, in a few stark instances, as a threat.

[Read: The surprising benefits of talking to strangers]

Several challenges stand apart from the others for their ethical dubiousness and sheer shock value. In the first, about “stranger danger,” the parents tell their kids they are leaving (or going upstairs, etc.) for a few moments. While they are gone, an actor in a utility-worker uniform rings the doorbell. If a child answers the door, the actor asks if parents are home and whether they can come in to check the gas. The kids who “fail” the challenge are those who credulously let the faux gas-utility employee inside, where, the implication is, they would assault and/or murder them if this were real.

It’s hard to express how much I hated this exercise. Wentworth defends it with a breathless evocation of her teenage girls and life in New York City, where she claims “crime is up” and you “can’t prepare them enough.” The main threats to kids are of a much different nature than a kidnapper pretending to be a utility employee, and most child abductions are by someone known to the child. But Brown insists: The nameless criminals out there pose “an urgent child-safety issue.” The parents of the kids who failed the challenge sob as they watch the footage. One parent, a father from the Routine family, refuses to let their segment be aired, and excoriates the show for its traumatic role-play of this nightmare scenario. The other parents tell him it’s necessary for the common good, and soon, he and his husband are voted out of the running.

The show acknowledges the statistical unlikelihood of stranger danger in a later segment that stokes a different fear—a challenge wherein a family friend comes and tries to pick up a child from an activity. Setting the stage, Brown explains that most abductions “are carried out by people known to the victim.” But this, too, may contain an elision: From 2006 to 2014, 43 percent of Amber Alert kidnappers were the child’s father, and nearly 25 percent were the mother. When several parents mildly point out that trust and community are important, the Strict mom says emphatically, “We are in a war,” arguing that parents must (we assume metaphorically) “arm” their children. One of the Routine dads pushes back, Strict mom doubles down, and war is left to stand, mostly untroubled, as the correct analogy for raising children. In a later episode, the show mashes the “Fear” button again with a dog-walking actor who tries to lure the children away from a playground to see some puppies; even when the kids don’t go, there are tears and dramatic shots of empty swings to hint at the consequence of parental failure to prepare.

The show justifies these exercises with an ironclad logic—you would do anything to prevent this; you would never forgive yourself if you didn’t—and I admit that the first segment got in my head, leading me to devise a mnemonic for my younger child (“Only Known Growns”). But this fetish for stranger danger (and close-family-friend danger) is perverse given all the more common dangers kids face that the show ignores entirely—such as traffic violence or opioids—or ones it mentions only in passing, such as gun violence, briefly invoked after a highly engineered challenge about bullying.

Amid these challenges, The Parent Test treats its contestants with gentleness that is perhaps unusual among reality shows; for one, the parents who are voted out get to stay on and discuss with the group for the rest of the episodes. But it’s ultimately mediated by the reality-show gaze, with all the flourishes of the medium: dramatic music and cuts, selective editing to emphasize the parents side-eyeing each other or furiously scribbling notes. The mild subversion of the show is that the parents end up being mostly kind to one another. I was moved by the way they located strengths in their peers’ styles, even when you could tell they found their approach to be batshit.

[Read: Parents are sacrificing their social lives on the altar of intensive parenting]

I rooted for all the parents, even the ones whose views are antithetical to mine, because parenting is hard, and our society loves to judge parents while withholding material support. The show itself is part of that tradition, disguising voyeuristic competition as a vehicle for empathy and reinforcing an isolationist philosophy of family life. You and your kids are all alone in a hard world, it seems to tell the contestants, and some of you are honestly kind of weird.

People can become better parents in all kinds of ways. I’ve taken parenting classes; I go to therapy; I click on Dr. Becky videos. As I watched the show, I listened to Brown’s advice and took notes from some of the parents. But I’m suspicious of the idea that every child is just a few “style” tweaks away from a wonderful life. I reject the implication that if some awful tragedy befalls a family, it’s because they missed a parenting step along the way, especially in a society that the show tacitly admits is unfair. I believe that a view of the family as an optimizable unit that must individually perfect itself runs counter to the collective enterprise that is human life.

One night, after I watched four episodes of The Parent Test in a row, I went out with two of my mom friends from the block. Among us we have five kids, and come from different backgrounds. All of our kids have rummaged through the fridges of one another’s houses. I’ve picked these kids up from school; their parents are my emergency contacts. This network we have formed is born of luck, pandemic desperation, and cultivated effort. As we drank beer, shared fries, and exchanged exasperating stories of our beloved babies, I realized how anxious it had made me to watch the show’s parents squirm alone under the camera’s eye. How for all its talk of optimizing, the show ignores one of the main things that has helped me be a better parent: a little help from my friends.

Photographs by Peter Garritano for The Atlantic

In 2004, Steven Spielberg made an entire movie about the terror of getting stuck for months in an airport, but I might be happy never to leave the new LaGuardia

Air travel itself, the part where you are crammed like a rodent into a metal tube, is clearly miserable. So is everything in its orbit: the barfsome cab from the city, the shameful indignity of security, the sullen panic of being away from home, and—most of all—the ghastly purgatory of the airport that detains you.

For a very long time, New York City’s LaGuardia Airport felt like the intricately dressed set of an apocalypse film. Spread across its terminals were abandoned check-in stands gone feral, floors damp with discharged moistures, low ceilings looming over dark corridors. Now, near the end of a nine-year, $8 billion rebuild of its main terminals and roadways, LaGuardia has become an unexpected hero for American infrastructural renewal. It is an incredible airport.

Terminal B, which houses most airlines, feels like a theme park—in a good way. Delta’s Terminal C, still under construction, has had its cramped and dingy concourses replaced with airy new spaces and a swank, cavernous airline club. Across the airport, sedans and taxis breeze through drop-offs and pickups unencumbered. The aircraft taxiways flow now too, making arrivals and departures more efficient. Slowly, word is getting out. People return from the Big Apple and talk about their trip to its airport instead of its restaurants or museums or theaters.

I went to LaGuardia to find out how this unlikely victory was wrested from the claws of long-term neglect—and what its example can teach a nation with decrepit and outmoded infrastructure. Many of America’s roads, bridges, airports, and other facilities to keep the people and the economy in motion were erected in the 1960s, two generations ago. In the time since then, the U.S. population has nearly doubled, yet efforts to address the nation’s growing need have fallen flat. Even 2021’s giant infrastructure bill invested only a fraction of what many civil-engineering experts say the nation needs.

Our country once took pride in building things, but then all the things got built. To take pride in rebuilding them will require new approaches to design. When I paid a visit to the renovated airport in East Elmhurst, Queens, I found that it has a message for America: The future of infrastructure is here, and it’s fun, and it’s expensive, and it’s built right on top of its forebears.

Frank Scremin, an extremely tall, impossibly friendly mechanical engineer turned airport-management CEO, rushed me up an escalator. (Shocked that I’d met a friendly person in New York City, I quickly learned that, of course, he’s also Canadian.) I’d just traversed the largest TSA checkpoint I’ve ever seen in a matter of minutes. It was an unusual experience in that it did not create in me feelings of existential despair. A curtain of windows dumped natural light across my path as I tried to get my bearings. “We have to go,” Scremin said. “The show is about to start.”

The escalator spilled us directly onto a floor of shops and then out into a courtyard where patterned streams of water were surging from the ceiling into a fountain below. Projectors, set up above, cast images of the Statue of Liberty, the Chrysler Building, and other New York landmarks across the runnels, synchronized to music. This was “the show”—a Vegas-style water feature—and the passengers nearby stood rapt.

An airport isn’t generally a place where one stops moving, except to wait, sit, eat, or urinate. That’s even more the case in New York City, the world’s most impatient place. But in the center of the rebuilt LaGuardia, I watched, mesmerized, as travelers parked their roll-aboards abruptly, just so they could watch the stalks of water raining down. The shows change seasonally, giving even frequent fliers a reason to pause.

Airlines and their passengers have conflicting goals. An airline wants to get passengers to the gates and on the planes on time. Passengers want to avoid the boredom and discomfort that comes with spending time in airport seats. The only available distractions—walking, looking, shopping, eating, and entertainment—come at the cost of anxiety around departure.

Terminal B attempts to address this problem in its physical design. A central check-in and security space leads to this commercial zone, which then branches out to two concourses of gates, each accessed via a glass sky bridge that rises over the taxiways, planes passing underneath. Large, continuously updated signage shows travelers the timing of their flights. Human agents flank these signs, ready to answer questions and give advice.

“In the U.S., we’re very much a go-to-the-gate culture,” said Scremin, who led this terminal’s redevelopment and now heads its management for LaGuardia Gateway Partners, a private-sector operator. By encouraging people to occupy the commercial district that radiates out from the fountain for as long as possible, Scremin explains, the airport discourages them from crowding together too early at the gates. It also brings in revenue for Scremin’s company, through retail leases.

Both goals are best accomplished, it turns out, by filling the airport with gratifying, even meaningful, activity. Scremin sees his role as being more like a hotelier’s than a property manager’s. Lighting dims and cools as the day turns to evening. The staff are dressed in black, hotel-style uniforms, and even the restrooms have attendants—and shelves, and entryways wide enough that you don’t bump suitcases with other passengers. The terminal is a place you want to be in rather than one you wish would just spit you out again. This is LaGuardia’s first lesson for rebuilders. Infrastructure can’t just serve a functional purpose, not anymore. It has to offer an experience.

Some might sneer at that experience—Ugh, the airport has been Disney-fied. But let’s be honest: So has everything else. Times Square is a cartoon circus, and SoHo is a shopping mall. Little is packed in the Meatpacking District, and Washington Square Arch is an Instagram backdrop as much as a monument. Consumerism is crass, but it can be a price worth paying for renewal.

LaGuardia, which opened in 1939, was long overdue for some improvement. By the ’60s, and the heyday of the jet age, the city had already outgrown it. Half a century later, the airport felt more punishment than port. The terminals, far too small and pressed too close together, created a bottleneck for runway traffic that added to delays. Funnels routed roof leaks into trash cans scattered around the terminals. On the streets outside, cars clogged departure lanes, and taxi-stand queues overflowed with deflated travelers. LaGuardia was a hellscape that even demons had abandoned.    

In 2014, then–Vice President Joe Biden inveighed against the place: “If I took you and blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you must think, ‘I must be in some third-world country,’” he said at an event in Philadelphia, adding “I’m not joking” when his audience laughed. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is responsible for the facility, had been talking about redevelopment for years, but Biden’s comment was a catalyst. Until then, Port Authority Executive Director Rick Cotton told me, redevelopment at LaGuardia had been done piecemeal: a new garage here, a renovated road there. But this time the agency developed a master plan to redevelop the whole airport—its two main terminals and the entire roadway network.

“As if rebuilding an airport isn’t challenging enough,” Cotton said, “the commitment was to keep it operating during the construction.” LaGuardia was serving about 28 million passengers a year at the time, on more than 350,000 flights. All of those people and flights were meant to continue as before, except the old airport would slowly vanish as a new one took its place.

The charge, both crackbrained and essential, reveals LaGuardia’s second lesson: rebuilding infrastructure means erecting new on top of old. A roadway or a power plant or an airport that nobody needs and isn’t used doesn’t have to be fixed up. Infrastructure gets rebuilt because it’s still important, and that’s what makes rebuilding hard.

To solve this problem, the Port Authority collaborated with Terminal B’s LaGuardia Gateway Partners and Delta Airlines, which operates Terminal C, on a design that would allow them to construct the new airport terminals over the old ones, as in physically above them. The constraint to keep the airport fully operational got baked into the new design. At Terminal B, the dramatic sky bridges that ferry passengers from the commercial center to the concourses were put there not for drama, but to allow the builders to keep the old airport operating beneath the bridges while the new one was constructed (after which the old terminals were demolished and turned into taxiways).

In the terminal, Ryan Marzullo, Delta’s managing director of New York construction and design, showed me the traces of such decision making in the completed structure, including angled steel pylons in passageways that had to be overbuilt with structural trusses to accommodate the old roads, where taxi and passenger-car traffic flowed underneath. Suspending the bridge temporarily, he said, cost at least $8 million. Marzullo had many other stories of costly construction carried out just to make way for more, even costlier construction. Twenty million dollars went into a temporary elevated road that was used for two years during construction and eventually demolished.

These are design and engineering feats, but also testaments to will, collaboration, and the acceptance of a budgetary reality that hasn’t been commonplace for a century: Sometimes you just have to spend money—a lot of money—to get something done. Rick Cotton admits that wouldn’t have happened without the Port Authority’s private partners. LaGuardia’s failure, so far, to extend subway service to its door shows just how difficult fitting the pieces together is. (It might yet happen.) But the lack of public transit is to some extent a function of what was there before: That’s what happens when you’re building new on top of old. The refurbished airport is more efficient than it’s ever been, but the ghosts of its deficiencies linger.

Airports, wrote the anthropologist Marc Augé in the early 1990s, are “non-places.” Like hotels, conference centers, and shopping malls, they could be distinguished precisely by their indistinctness. When you go inside most airports, Augé explained, you might as well be going anywhere—New York, Topeka, Paris, Macau.

The new LaGuardia aspires to be not just any airport, but New York City’s airport. The fountain show in Terminal B offers place-ness; so do local-business outlet shops, installations by local artists, and expansive views of the Manhattan skyline. Indeed it was the lack of this quality—or at least an embarrassing mismatch of place—that inspired the first version of the airport, back in the ’30s. After landing at Newark, the only commercial option at the time, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia complained that his ticket said “New York,” but he had landed in New Jersey. He demanded to be flown to the city for real, kicking off a campaign that eventually led to the new development. (As mayor, La Guardia was an infrastructure guy, overseeing the construction of two city airports, including the one that would later take his name.)

Shame and pride are two sides of the same coin. Twice now, the dishonor of New York City’s airports has helped catalyze their future. So here’s the third and final lesson for reinvigorating the nation’s infrastructure: Americans pretend that reason drives big changes, but passion always takes the wheel. Even Cotton, of the Port Authority, seems to think that’s true. When I asked him what other municipalities might learn from LaGuardia, he first listed off some platitudes about ambition and capability, a commitment to overcome obstacles and go through walls. But then he acknowledged another, deeper motivation: “the dismal situation to which we had fallen.”

Perhaps the inspiration for renewal can benefit from, or even require, an awakening humiliation. LaGuardia’s reconstruction was, in some sense, a response to Biden’s insult, but also to the disgraceful state of the airport—which has now been transformed into a swanky theme park. Rebuilding wasn’t easy, but the challenge of deciding to rebuild came first. Perhaps the pride of building is less important than the shame of having failed to do so. If the nation’s civil engineering has now become a joke, and “infrastructure week” is just a punch line, that could mean America is on the right track.