If you are waking up across the south-central US, chances are you didn't get much sleep. Insanely strong storms ripped through traveling close to 100 mph. At one point, the National Weather Service Office in Norman, Oklahoma called them "historic."

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.

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What is your relationship with organized religion? How has it affected your life, and has its impact changed over time? I’m eager to hear anything about the varieties of your religious experiences.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

A Secular Lament About the Decline of Organized Religion

Brink Lindsey has never subscribed to an organized religion, but he shares with their adherents a sense that the decline in their ranks has been bad for the United States. At The Permanent Problem, he cautions those who regard that decline as a turn toward a more rational world:

Let’s be clear that the ebbing of traditional religious faith has far outpaced the advance of reason and scientific thinking. Yes, the number of people who have internalized the scientific worldview has grown steadily, especially with the surge in post-secondary education in the second half of the 20th century. And that worldview sits uneasily with a belief in the supernatural: as long ago as 1914, a survey of prominent American scientists found that 70 percent of them doubted the existence of God.  

But this kind of intellectual disenchantment remains a minority phenomenon. Most people who have fallen away from organized religious life remain exuberantly credulous: as G. K. Chesterton put it, “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” More than four in ten Americans believe that ghosts and demons exist and that psychics are real; a third believe in reincarnation; nearly 30 percent believe in astrology. In Europe, the churches may be empty, but comfortable majorities continue to profess faith in God or some higher power.

So the sunny view of organized religion’s retreat as humanity’s intellectual advance really can’t be sustained. We are not seeing the decline of supernaturalism so much as its privatization or atomization. Belief in the fantastic has escaped from its traditional repositories, where it served to bind us into communities founded on a shared sense of the sacred, and now exists as a disconnected jumble, accessible as a purely individual consumer choice to guide one’s personal search for meaning. What the sociologist Peter Berger called the “sacred canopy” has shattered and fallen to earth; we pick up shards here or there, on our own or in small groups, and whatever we manage to build with them is necessarily more fleeting and less inclusive than what we experienced before.

The Danger of a Bipolarized World

After President Joe Biden visited Ukraine this week and reassured its leaders of America’s support, Noah Millman surveyed recent geopolitical developments in relation to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and more broadly. In Gideon’s Substack, Millman voices his fear of “unpredictable escalatory spirals” in a world where democracies are at odds with all major autocracies:

Iran has emerged as a major supplier of drones to Russia, which has not only significantly bolstered Russia’s war effort but no doubt enhanced the reputation of Iran’s own military capacity ... Now, in a much more significant development, China appears to be heading in the direction of supplying Russia with military assistance, including lethal assistance. China’s productive capacity is unparalleled; if China does indeed step up to make sure Russia never runs out of ammunition, it’s hard to see how Russia could outright lose a war of attrition with Ukraine. The burden would fall on Kyiv to change the dynamic on the battlefield, which is a much taller order than letting the Russian army destroy itself.

That’s not the most worrisome thing to me about this development, though. What worries me most, rather, is the degree to which it implies a firming up of the lines of alliance. The United States is already wielding Iranian military support for Russia as a justification for keeping nuclear negotiations with that country on ice, even as the country edges closer to the nuclear threshold. The prospect of some kind of military conflict with Israel has surely increased. Meanwhile, if China does wind up supplying Russia with weapons, it would be a remarkable development not so much because of what it would do to U.S.-China relations—those continue on their downward spiral, which is precisely what one would expect after the United States all but declared war on China’s semiconductor industry—but because of what it might do to Sino-European relations.

I can’t think of anything better-calibrated to help the United States win Europe to its side in its confrontation with China than direct Chinese assistance for Russia’s war in Ukraine. If that hasn’t been an important consideration for the Chinese, it’s an indication of just how far down the road to globally polarized conflict we may already have gone. I worry about that development for many reasons. For one thing, it means that any regional or local conflict could potentially be polarized … But my biggest concern is that a bipolar system is fundamentally unstable, prone to unpredictable escalatory spirals.

On Jimmy Carter

James Fallows, who worked for Carter, argues in The Atlantic that the former president’s defining feature was his consistency:

… old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person. That is the message that comes through from Carter’s own prepresidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and his many postpresidential books, of which the most charming and revealing is An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. It is a theme of Jonathan Alter’s insightful biography, His Very Best. It is what I learned in two and a half years of working directly with Carter as a speechwriter during the 1976 campaign and on the White House staff, and in my connections with the Carter diaspora since then.

Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another. Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did.

Roald Dahl’s Sensitivity Readers

Commenting on intrusive edits made to new editions of books by the beloved children’s author, Helen Lewis argues in The Atlantic that the urge to profit is an important driver of the controversy:

A more honest stance would be that it’s time to take Roald Dahl’s work, put it on a Viking longboat, and sail it flaming into the sunset. Plenty of people are writing new children’s books; whatever we lose by discarding Dahl can be gained elsewhere. A form of Darwinism is rampant in the literary canon. Most authors who were best sellers in their day are now forgotten. Who reads Samuel Richardson’s Pamela now, except first-year literature students? Where are the Netflix adaptations of Hannah More’s pious-conduct books or the gratuitously blood-soaked plays of John Webster? The three best-selling books of 1922—the year when Ulysses was published—were If Winter Comes by A. S. M. Hutchinson, The Sheik by Edith M. Hull, and Gentle Julia by Booth Tarkington. Like most literature, those titles couldn’t escape the age in which they were written.

But Dahl staggers on, embarrassing the cultural gatekeepers by remaining popular despite being so thoroughly out of tune with the times. The work does so because of the dirty secret that children, and adults, like nastiness. They enjoy fat aunts and pranked teachers and the thrilling but illegal doping of pheasants. Today’s corporations want to have it all, though. They want the selling power of an author like Roald Dahl, shorn of the discomforting qualities that made him a best seller. They want things to be simple—a quality that we might call childlike, if Dahl hadn’t shown us that children can be so much more.

Provocation of the Week

Drawing on the free-speech rankings of colleges published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, David Zweig writes:

The colleges with the most stifling atmospheres for speech also have the most aggressive Covid vaccine policies. The colleges that most welcome and protect a free exchange of ideas, in turn, have the least intrusive vaccine requirements.

Number 1 ranked Chicago has no vaccine mandate at all. The university merely “strongly recommends” Covid vaccination. Numbers 2, 3, 4, and 5 on the list—Kansas State, Purdue, Mississippi State, and Oklahoma State—do not require any Covid vaccination either. They do each highly encourage vaccination, though.

At the bottom, Columbia not only requires the primary series for its students, but also requires the most recent bivalent booster. Ditto for second-to-last place Penn. For the many students who received an initial booster early on, this means a requirement of four doses. Rounding out the worst five colleges for free speech, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Georgetown, and Skidmore also mandate all students be boosted. Though compared to Columbia and Penn they are relatively lax, only requiring “a booster,” meaning the third shot could have been from a long while ago, and not necessarily the bivalent.

… That there is an association between respect toward free speech and respect toward bodily autonomy—or a lack thereof for each—at academic institutions shouldn’t surprise anyone. Both reflect attitudes either in agreement with or against a libertarian ideal of individual freedom. But the degree of correlation is still disheartening.

There is no evidence that requiring boosters (or even the primary series) at many colleges made an iota of difference regarding the transmission of Covid on campus or, more importantly, the incidence of severe disease relative to colleges that simply encourage vaccination. (It is not a secret that the vaccines do not stop infection or transmission, a phenomenon that most people have experienced firsthand.) But the administrators at Columbia and the like, by being the most militant with their vaccine requirements, get to signal their progressive bona fides, which, it seems, is what their institutions care about most.

An authoritarian is (per academic literature in political psychology) a person who so values oneness and sameness that they would rather impose it coercively on others than tolerate diversity and difference. Once you grasp that, it’s no surprise that institutions and people who coerce in one domain tend to also do so in seemingly unrelated domains.

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

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

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

The Books Briefing: What truly elevates poetry is not just what we write but also what inspires us to write it, Emma Sarappo argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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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Read. Keep Valentine’s Day going with these books to read with someone you love.

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Watch. Magic Mike’s Last Dance, in theaters, is as sexy as it is romantic. And Emily, also in theaters, is a sensitive, provocative look at Emily Brontë’s life.

Play our daily crossword.

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.

In 1925, teachers at the Negro Manual and Training High School of Muskogee, Oklahoma, made what they thought was an appropriate choice of textbook: The Negro in Our History, by the Harvard-trained Black historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson had written this "history of the United States as it has been influenced by the presence of the Negro" to supply the "need of schools long since desiring such a work," as he wrote in the book's preface. Upon learning of this textbook choice, White segregationists on the school board sprang immediately into action. They decreed that no book could be “instilled in the schools that is either klan or antiklan,” insinuating that Woodson’s Black history textbook was “antiklan."  

The school board banned the book. It confiscated all copies. It punished the teachers. It forced the resignation of the school’s principal. “It’s striking how similar that feels and sounds to the contemporary moment,” the Harvard education historian Jarvis R. Givens told me.

A century ago, white segregationists were banning anti-racist books and “Negro studies” as well as punishing and threatening anti-racist educators all over Jim Crow America.

In response to these incidents, Woodson embarked on a new initiative to support educators and promote Negro history. In 1926, he founded Negro History Week, which officially became Black History Month 50 years later. And Woodson’s most important scholarly contribution, his 1933 book, The Mis-education of the Negro, highlighted the importance of teaching Black history. The book argued that Black children learn to despise themselves—just as non-Black people learn to hate Black people—when Black history is not taught. As Woodson wrote, “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.” Combining pedagogical theory, history, and memoir, this was a book about the dangerously racist state of education, a book for 2023 as much as it was for 1933.

The Mis-education of the Negro was recently reissued with an introduction from Givens, who studies the history of American education and has written extensively on Black educators, including Carter G. Woodson. Givens helped develop the AP African American Studies course that was piloted in about 60 schools across the United States and recently rejected in Florida. We discussed the enduring relevance and power of this classic book 90 years after its birth.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Ibram X. Kendi: For the past two years, many politicians and political operatives have made the case that teaching white students about African American history, about slavery, about racism, makes them feel bad or is even a form of miseducation. But these operatives do not seem to care about the educational experience of Black children. I’m curious what Carter G. Woodson would say about the impact on Black children of not teaching that material. What is Woodson saying in Mis-education?

Jarvis R. Givens: He argues that the physical violence Black people experience in the world is inextricably linked to curricular violence. He would say Black students must be equipped with resources to resist this violation of their dignity and humanity; they must be given an opportunity to know themselves and the world on new terms. To deny Black students the opportunity to critically study Black life and culture is to deny them the opportunity to think outside of the racial myths that are deeply embedded in the American curriculum.

[Read: How a museum reckons with Black pain]

Kendi: It seems like this book could have just as easily been titled The Mis-education of the American.  

Givens: The overrepresentation of European and Euro American history and culture offers white people this kind of inflated sense of importance. Woodson would say that this has historically been part and parcel of the identity development of white students, or any other group who is taught to look down on and despise Black people as a means of propping themselves up. There are several parts in the book when Woodson points to this miseducation of non-Black people—especially when he writes, “There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.”

Kendi: Many people would oppose educators and books that state that Black people are “demons,” as former Ferguson officer Darren Wilson described Michael Brown. But there seems to be less concern about the harm that comes from what educators and books do not state. Can you share how Woodson talked about the harm that comes from absences?  

Givens: This is a really important question. We absolutely learn through omissions. We learn through things that are not included in curricula. It teaches us what’s deemed unworthy of inclusion, what’s deemed as lacking in “educational value” according to the state of Florida.

And this is something that I think is very, very important, even when we think about the way Black history and culture have been included. You know, for so long, you could read the entire history of slavery and never know that Black people resisted, that they led rebellions, that they formed Maroon communities. Students could walk away thinking that slavery was just this benevolent institution, that Black people had to work hard but they benefited from being immersed in the West and the Christian world. They made all these beautiful songs and sang all these Negro spirituals. This is evidence that they were happy. The absence of narratives about Black people fighting back presents them as these apolitical subjects. It strips them of their agency.

Kendi: So, those who are attacking what they call “critical race theory” characterize these omissions—that end up pacifying people—as “education.” And they classify anti-racist books (like, frankly, my own) and African American studies as “indoctrination.” What do you make of that?

Givens: If anything, there is a very clear system of indoctrination that has always been embedded in the American curriculum. It’s called white supremacy. By engaging in African American studies, we are inviting students to help undo that.

It’s also important to emphasize that there are diverse perspectives in African American studies. There is no one African American–studies perspective. We can have different kinds of intellectual projects and schools of thought. And the AP African American Studies course, from what I know of it, as someone who was part of the team of scholars and K–12 educators that developed it, is that we were all bringing the diversity of Black thought and debates to the table. The course represents a good model of the kind of plurality of thought that we might consider when we’re talking about reframing the larger structure of knowledge in American schools.  

Kendi: You wrote beautifully about the fight of Woodson and the Black teachers of his generation during Jim Crow in your book Fugitive Pedagogy. At that time, too, white segregationists were banning not only Woodson’s books but all sorts of anti-racist books and lessons. But Black teachers found ways to still teach Black students the truth. What are some of the lessons, particularly for teachers in this moment who want students to learn about racism and U.S. history and racial equality?  

Givens: The teachers I wrote about in Fugitive Pedagogy were deeply aware that the efforts to restrict what could and could not be taught in the classroom infringed on the dignity of Black students, and it also infringed on their dignity as Black educators. And there is a larger lesson here: that the dignity of students is always bound up with the dignity of teachers. How we treat and handle teachers says something about who we are as a society.  

The de-professionalization of teachers in America is something that’s been happening for a very long time. The teaching profession has become so debased not on the part of teachers themselves, but in terms of the social pressures that they’re having to operate under. It really exposes a deeply ingrained crisis in the culture of the society that we live in. Teachers are not viewed as intellectuals. They’re seen as people who are just supposed to come in and follow a script and not be thinking beings at all.

[Read: What anti-racist teachers do differently]

Kendi: Certainly. When they follow the unthinking script and demand that students do too, GOP operatives claim that is “education.”

And that brings me to a few of the striking quotes from The Mis-education of the Negro that I wanted to get your thoughts on. The first is relevant to what we were just discussing: “The mere imparting of information is not education.”

Givens: Woodson is saying that the purpose of education cannot just be simply to dump information into the minds of students. It has to be about guiding students on a journey to understand themselves in relationship to the world around them and to understand what they can do to push for social transformation so that they can live and aspire to a good life—a more meaningful life.

Kendi: Another quote from Woodson’s book: “The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with this interpretation of the crimes of the strong.”

Givens: Woodson is raising questions about the ideological underpinnings of the official curriculum. This is connected to where he points out that “the philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching.” He’s asking us to consider: What does it mean to base the education of Black students on an interpretation of human experience and a set of philosophies and ethics that justified the plunder of Africa and the enslavement of Black people? It erases and negates Black perspectives and the human striving of Black people. Therefore, Woodson says, “the education of any people should begin with the people themselves.”

Kendi: And finally, the most memorable quote from Mis-education: “If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

Givens: He’s naming how an education not based on liberatory principles can lead to oppressed people being complicit in their own domination. He’s naming how Black people can become so thoroughly miseducated that they become enlisted into the anti-Black protocols that have structured the world that we live in. This quote, for me, is very important for our reflections on Memphis and the violent death of Tyre Nichols.

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