Bird flu, at this point, is somewhat of a misnomer. The virus, which primarily infects birds, is circulating uncontrolled around much of the world, devastating not just birds but wide swaths of the animal kingdom. Foxes, bobcats, and pigs have fallen ill. Grizzly bears have gone blind. Sea creatures, including seals and sea lions, have died in great numbers.

But none of the sickened animals has raised as much concern as mink. In October, a bird-flu outbreak erupted at a Spanish mink farm, killing thousands of the animals before the rest were culled. It later became clear that the virus had spread between the animals, picking up a mutation that helped it thrive in mammals. It was likely the first time that mammal-to-mammal spread drove a huge outbreak of bird flu. Because mink are known to spread certain viruses to humans, the fear was that the disease could jump from mink to people. No humans got sick from the outbreak in Spain, but other infections have spread from mink to humans before: In 2020, COVID outbreaks on Danish mink farms led to new mink-related variants that spread to a small number of humans.

As mammals ourselves, we have good reason to be concerned. Outbreaks on crowded mink farms are an ideal scenario for bird flu to mutate. If, in doing so, it picks up the ability to spread between humans, it could potentially start another global pandemic. “There are many reasons to be concerned about mink,” Tom Peacock, a flu researcher at Imperial College London, told me. Right now, mink are a problem we can’t afford to ignore.

For two animals with very different body types, mink and humans have some unusual similarities. Research suggests that we share similar receptors for COVID, bird flu, and human flu, through which these viruses can gain entry into our bodies. The numerous COVID outbreaks on mink farms during the early pandemic, and the bird-flu outbreak in Spain, gravely illustrate this point. It’s “not surprising” that mink can get these respiratory diseases, James Lowe, a veterinary-medicine professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. Mink are closely related to ferrets, which are so well known for their susceptibility to human flu that they’re the go-to model for flu research.

Mink wouldn’t get sick as often, and wouldn’t be as big an issue for humans, if we didn’t keep farming them for fur in the perfect conditions for outbreaks. Many barns used to raise mink are partially open-air, allowing infected wild birds to come in contact with the animals, sharing not only air but potentially food. Mink farms are also notoriously cramped: The Spanish farm, for example, kept tens of thousands of mink in about 30 barns. Viral transmission would be all but guaranteed in those conditions, but the animals are especially vulnerable. Because mink are normally solitary creatures, they face significant stress in packed barns, which may further predispose them to disease, Angela Bosco-Lauth, a biomedical-sciences professor at Colorado State University, told me. And because they’re often inbred so their coats look alike, an entire population may share a similar genetic susceptibility to disease. The frequency of outbreaks among mink, Bosco-Lauth said, “may actually have less to do with the animals and more to do with the fact that we raise them in the same way … we would an intensive cattle farm or chickens.”

So far, there’s no evidence that mink from the Spanish farm spread bird flu to humans: None of the workers tested positive for the virus, and since then, no other mink farms have reported outbreaks. “We’re just not very susceptible” to bird flu, Lowe said. Our bird-flu receptors are tucked deep in our lungs, but when we’re exposed, most of the virus gets caught in the nose, throat, and other parts of the upper respiratory tract. This is why bird-flu infection is less common in people but is often pneumonia-level severe when it does happen. Indeed, a few humans have gotten sick and died from bird flu in the 27 years that the current strain of bird flu, known as H5N1, has circulated. This month, a girl in Cambodia died from the virus after potentially encountering a sick bird. The more virus circulating in an environment, the higher the chances a person will get infected. “It’s a dose thing,” Lowe said.

But our susceptibility to bird flu could change. Another mink outbreak would give the virus more opportunities to keep mutating. The worry is that this could create a new variant that’s better at binding to the human flu receptors in our upper respiratory tract, Stephanie Seifert, a professor at Washington State University who studies zoonotic pathogens, told me. If the virus gains the ability to infect the nose and throat, Peacock, at Imperial College London, said, it would be better at spreading. Those mutations “would worry us the most.” Fortunately, the mutations that arose on the Spanish mink farm “were not as bad as many of us worried about,” he added, “but that doesn’t mean that the next time this happens, this will also be the case.”

Because mink carry the receptors for both bird flu and human flu, they could serve as “mixing vessels” for the viruses to combine, researchers wrote in 2021. (Ferrets, pigs, and humans share this quality too.) Through a process called reassortment, flu viruses can swap segments of their genome, resulting in a kind of Frankenstein pathogen. Although viruses remixed in this way aren’t necessarily more dangerous, they could be, and that’s not a risk worth taking. “The previous three influenza pandemics all arose due to mixing between avian and human influenza viruses,” Peacock said.

While there are good reasons to be concerned about mink, it is hard to gauge just how concerned we should be—especially given what we still don’t know about this changing virus. After the death of the young girl in Cambodia, the World Health Organization called the global bird flu situation “worrying,” while the CDC maintains that the risk to the public is low. Lowe said “it’s certainly not very risky” that bird flu will spill over into humans, but is worth keeping an eye on. H5N1 bird flu is not new, he added, and it hasn’t affected people en masse yet. But the virus has already changed in ways that make it better at infecting wild birds, and as it spreads in the wild, it may continue to change to better infect mammals, including humans. “We don’t understand enough to make strong predictions of public-health risk,” Jonathan Runstadler, an infectious-diseases professor at Tufts University, told me.

As bird flu continues to spread among birds and in domestic and wild animal populations, it will only become harder to control. The virus, formally seasonal, is already present year-round in parts of Europe and Asia, and it is poised to do the same in the Americas. Breaking the chain of transmission is vital to preventing another pandemic. An important step is to avoid situations where humans, mink, or any other animal could be infected with both human and bird flu at the same time.

Since the COVID outbreaks, mink farms have generally beefed up their biosecurity: Farm workers are often required to wear masks and protective gear, such as disposable overalls. To limit the risk to mink—and other susceptible hosts—farms need to reduce their size and density, reduce contact between mink and wild birds, and monitor the virus, Runstadler said. Some nations, including Mexico, Ecuador, have recently embraced bird-flu vaccines for poultry in light of the outbreaks. H5N1 vaccines are also available for humans, though they aren’t readily available. Still, one of the most obvious options is to shut mink farms down. “We probably should have done that after SARS-CoV-2,” Bosco-Lauth, at Colorado State, said. Doing so is controversial, however, because the global mink industry is valuable, with a huge market in China. Denmark, which produces up to 40 percent of the world’s mink pelts, temporarily banned mink breeding in 2020 after a spate of COVID outbreaks, but the ban expired last month, and farms are returning, albeit in a limited capacity.

Mink are far from the only animal that poses a bird-flu risk to humans. “Frankly, with what we’re seeing with other wildlife species, there really aren’t any mammals that I would discount at this point in time,” Bosco-Lauth said. Any mammal species repeatedly infected by the virus is a potential risk, including marine mammals, such as seals. But we should be most concerned about the ones humans frequently come into close contact with, especially animals that are raised in high density, such as pigs, Runstadler said. This doesn’t pose just a human public-health concern, he said, but the potential for “ecological disruption.” Bird flu can be a devastating disease for wildlife, killing animals swiftly and without mercy.

Whether or not bird flu makes the jump into humans, it isn’t the last virus that will threaten us—or mink. The era we live in has become known as the “Pandemicene,” as my colleague Ed Yong has called it, one defined by the regular spillover of viruses into humans, caused by our disruption of the normal trajectories of viral movement in nature. Mink may never pass bird flu to us. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be a risk the next time a novel influenza or coronavirus comes around. Doing nothing about mink essentially means choosing luck as a public-health strategy. Sooner or later, it will run out.

In the early days of the pandemic, one of the scariest and most surprising features of SARS-CoV-2 was its stealth. Initially assumed to transmit only from people who were actively sick—as its predecessor SARS-CoV did—the new coronavirus turned out to be a silent spreader, also spewing from the airways of people who were feeling just fine. After months of insisting that only the symptomatic had to mask, test, and isolate, officials scrambled to retool their guidance; singing, talking, laughing, even breathing in tight quarters were abruptly categorized as threats.

Three years later, the coronavirus is still silently spreading—but the fear of its covertness again seems gone. Enthusiasm for masking and testing has plummeted; isolation recommendations have been pared down, and may soon entirely disappear. “We’re just not communicating about asymptomatic transmission anymore,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. “People think, What’s the point? I feel fine.”

Although the concern over asymptomatic spread has dissipated, the threat itself has not. And even as our worries over the virus continue to shrink and be shunted aside, the virus—and the way it moves between us—is continuing to change. Which means that our best ideas for stopping its spread aren’t just getting forgotten; they’re going obsolete.

[Read: A negative COVID test has never been so meaningless]

When SARS-CoV-2 was new to the world and hardly anyone had immunity, symptomless spread probably accounted for most of the virus’s spread—at least 50 percent or so, says Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious-disease transmission modeler at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine. People wouldn’t start feeling sick until four, five, or six days, on average, after being infected. In the interim, the virus would be xeroxing itself at high speed in their airway, reaching potentially infectious levels a day or two before symptoms started. Silently infected people weren’t sneezing and coughing—symptoms that propel the virus more forcefully outward, increasing transmission efficiency. But at a time when tests were still scarce and slow to deliver results, not knowing they had the virus made them dangerous all the same. Precautionary tests were still scarce, or very slow to deliver results. So symptomless transmission became a norm, as did epic superspreading events.

Now, though, tests are more abundant, presymptomatic spread is a better-known danger, and repeated rounds of vaccination and infection have left behind layers of immunity. That protection, in particular, has slashed the severity and duration of acute symptoms, lowering the risk that people will end up in hospitals or morgues; it may even be chipping away at long COVID. At the same time, though, the addition of immunity has made the dynamics of symptomless transmission much more complex.

On an individual basis, at least, silent spread could be happening less often than it did before. One possible reason is that symptoms are now igniting sooner in people’s bodies, just three or so days, on average, after infection—a shift that roughly coincided with the rise of the first Omicron variant and could be a quirk of the virus itself. But Aubree Gordon, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that faster-arriving sicknesses are probably being driven in part by speedier immune responses, primed by past exposures. That means that illness might now coincide with or even precede the peak of contagiousness, shortening the average period in which people spread the virus before they feel sick. In that one very specific sense, COVID could now be a touch more flulike. Presymptomatic transmission of the flu does seem to happen on occasion, says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University. But in general, “people tend not to hit their highest viral levels until after they develop symptoms,” Gordon told me.

Coupled with more population-level immunity, this arrangement could be working in our favor. People might be less likely to pass the virus unwittingly to others. And thanks to the defenses we’ve collectively built up, the pathogen itself is also having more trouble exiting infected bodies and infiltrating new ones. That’s almost certainly part of the reason that this winter hasn’t been quite as bad as past ones have, COVID-wise, says Maia Majumder, an infectious-disease modeler at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital.

That said, a lot of people are still undoubtedly catching the coronavirus from people who aren’t feeling sick. Infection per infection, the risk of superspreading events might now be lower, but at the same time people have gotten chiller about socializing without masks and testing before gathering in groups—a behavioral change that’s bound to counteract at least some of the forward shift in symptoms. Presymptomatic spread might be less likely nowadays, but it’s nowhere near gone. Multiply a small amount of presymptomatic spread by a large number of cases, and that can still seed … another large number of cases.

[Read: You probably have an asymptomatic infection right now]

There could be some newcomers to the pool of silent spreaders, too—those who are now transmitting the virus without ever developing symptoms at all. With people’s defenses higher than they were even a year and a half ago, infections that might have once been severe are now moderate or mild; ones that might have once been mild are now unnoticeable, says Seyed Moghadas, a computational epidemiologist at York University. At the same time, though, immunity has probably transformed some symptomless-yet-contagious infections into non-transmissible cases, or kept some people from getting infected at all. Milder cases are of course welcome, Fitzpatrick told me, but no one knows exactly what these changes add up to: Depending on the rate and degree of each of those shifts, totally asymptomatic transmission might now be more common, less common, or sort of a wash.

Better studies on transmission patterns would help cut through the muck; they’re just not really happening anymore. “To get this data, you need to have pretty good testing for surveillance purposes, and that basically has stopped,” says Yonatan Grad, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

Meanwhile, people are just straight-up testing less, and rarely reporting any of the results they get at home. For many months now, even some people who are testing have been seeing strings of negative results days into bona-fide cases of COVID—sometimes a week or more past when their symptoms start. That’s troubling on two counts: First, some legit COVID cases are probably getting missed, and keeping people from accessing test-dependent treatments such as Paxlovid. Second, the disparity muddles the start and end of isolation. Per CDC guidelines, people who don’t test positive until a few days into their illness should still count their first day of symptoms as Day 0 of isolation. But if symptoms might sometimes outpace contagiousness, “I think those positive tests should restart the isolation clock,” Popescu told me, or risk releasing people back into society too soon.

[Read: People are fed up with rapid tests]

American testing guidelines, however, haven’t undergone a major overhaul in more than a year—right after Omicron blew across the nation, says Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. And even if the rules were to undergo a revamp, they wouldn’t necessarily guarantee more or better testing, which requires access and will. Testing programs have been winding down for many months; free diagnostics are once again growing scarce.

Through all of this, scientists and nonscientists alike are still wrestling with how to define silent infection in the first place. What counts as symptomless depends not just on biology, but behavior—and our vigilance. As worries over transmission continue to falter and fade, even mild infections may be mistaken for quiet ones, Grad told me, brushed off as allergies or stress. Biologically, the virus and the disease may not need to become that much more muted to spread with ease: Forgetting about silent spread may grease the wheels all on its own.

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.

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

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

Today’s special guest is the staff writer Amanda Mull, whose Atlantic column, “Material World,” delivers deep dives on consumer trends—such as the death of the smart shopper and the sudden ubiquity of gray floors—and what they reveal about American life. Most recently, she delved into the TikTok-fueled obsession with product “dupes.” When she’s not writing, Amanda can be found cheering for the University of Georgia Bulldogs (during football season, that is), snort-laughing at the comedy of Atsuko Okatsuka, and feeding her need to color by number.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The puzzling gap between how old you are and how old you think you are Netflix crossed a line. Permission-slip culture is hurting America.

The Culture Survey: Amanda Mull

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’m a huge college-football fan (Go Dawgs), and I have a lot of friends who are really into their NFL teams, so from Labor Day through early February, when I’m watching something, it’s almost always a football game. After the Super Bowl spits me back out into the world of regular television, I always spend a few weeks wandering the desert, looking for something I can get into, or at least something that’s fun enough to watch in the meantime. That’s a very long way of saying that I’m currently obsessed with Perfect Match, a genuinely very stupid Netflix dating show made up entirely of villains, reprobates, and fan favorites from other, equally stupid Netflix dating shows like Love Is Blind and Too Hot to Handle, both of which I have also watched.

An actor I would watch in anything: Paul Newman. I recently saw The Color of Money for the first time, in which he plays an aging pool hustler. Newman was 61 when that movie came out, and he was every bit as sexy and magnetic and watchable as he had been 20 or 30 years prior. [Related: Talking with Paul Newman (from 1975)]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I’m a few years late on both of these, but I adored The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel—a novel about wealth and talent and escape that I found so spellbinding, I devoured it in a weekend. The best nonfiction book I’ve read in years was Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. I went in knowing relatively little about The Troubles, and Keefe so expertly wove the historical record into the personal stories of some of the IRA’s most infamous members that the reading experience was sometimes closer to that of a novel than a political or military history. [Related: The art of second chances]

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Bruce Springsteen. My first concert was one of the Atlanta dates during his E Street Band reunion tour in 2000; my parents were supposed to go together but my mom isn’t much of a Bruce fan and hates crowds, so my dad, who had adored him since Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. came out in 1973, swapped me in at the last minute. I loved it so much that he began playing more Springsteen in the car for me and my little brother, and suddenly Dad had two teenage Bruce fans on his hands. When Bruce’s next tour came through Atlanta, we went back to see him as a family—even Mom, who had been outvoted by that point.

My dad passed away a few months ago, and when we were at the hospital to say goodbye, the palliative-care doctor told us that we should say things that would reassure him that we would be okay, and that we would take care of one another. So my brother and I told him, among other things, that we had Bruce tickets for the upcoming tour. [Related: David Brooks: How music made Bruce Springsteen]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “Edward Hopper’s New York,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibit runs until March 5 and includes many of Hopper’s more famous works, such as Automat and Early Sunday Morning, as well as a large selection of lesser-known paintings. What it does not include is Nighthawks, and I came away thinking that the show benefited from its absence. Some works of art are so famous that their presence can suck all the air out of a room. Without Nighthawks, the smaller, quieter moments of the exhibit—apt, considering Hopper’s subjects—had more room to breathe. [Related: Edward Hopper’s most interested vision (from 1979)]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I’m addicted to this app called Happy Color, which is basically just a huge catalog of color-by-number puzzles, plus a few new pictures to color every day. Some of them are familiar—there’s a whole category of historical fine art, which is my favorite—and some of them are genuinely bizarre, such as the one with a cartoon cat wearing a feathered cap and reading a book by candlelight. It requires just enough of your attention to be the perfect thing to do while you’re listening to a podcast or half-watching something on TV. I showed it to my mom a few years ago, and now when I call her, she sometimes laments that she’s been too busy to do as much coloring as she’d like.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Everyone who has young kids is already familiar with Bluey, I’m sure, but I saw it for the first time a couple of months ago while visiting a friend back home who has two small children. For the uninitiated, it’s an Australian cartoon about a family of heeler pups, and I was sort of gobsmacked by how good it was—sensitive, perceptive, funny. When my friend told his daughter that it was time to turn off the TV, I found myself feeling a glimmer of the same adversarial reaction that she had. [Related: Sophie Gilbert’s 27 favorite things in culture]

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: The Intruder, a stand-up comedy special by Atsuko Okatsuka on HBO Max. There is a recent trend, especially on streaming services, of advertising things as stand-up specials that are really more like one-man shows—you may enjoy them, and you may be moved by the comic’s personal hardships or political calls to action, but in the end it’s not clear that they were actually, you know, funny. Okatsuka doesn’t strip out the difficult parts of her own history—her mother’s schizophrenia, the years she spent as an undocumented immigrant in California—but, crucially, she never pulls the bait and switch. The Intruder was funny enough that I watched it again a week later.

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

The Week Ahead

The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality, a cultural history by the journalist Angela Saini that challenges common presumptions about gender inequality (on sale Tuesday) Daisy Jones and the Six, the TV adaptation of the best-selling 2019 novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid (begins streaming Friday on Amazon Prime Video) Creed III, the latest installment in the Rocky-adjacent boxing-film franchise, starring and directed by Michael B. Jordan (in theaters Friday)

Essay

20th Century Fox Film / Everett

Why Rewatching Titanic Is Different Now

By Megan Garber

The Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, has a very good gift shop. Among its wares are sparkling replicas of the Heart of the Ocean necklace, T-shirts that read he’s my jack → and she’s my rose →, and, for the kids, tubs of electric-blue “iceberg slime.” In one corner, the visitors who have availed themselves of one of the museum’s main attractions—the chance to pose for pictures on a replica of the doomed ship’s grand stairway—pick up their photos. Next to sample images of grinning tourists stands a rack offering commemorative copies of newspapers originally published in mid-April of 1912. One of them reads, “NO HOPE LEFT; 1,535 DEAD.”

Time may heal all wounds, but Hollywood helps things along. For many Americans, Titanic now refers less to those 1,535 people than to just two: Jack and Rose. James Cameron’s semi-fictional film about the disaster—for a long while, the highest-grossing movie of all time—has taken on a memetic familiarity. Last year, a family re-created one of Titanic’s final scenes in a pool, playing Rose and Jack and an assortment of dead bodies; their effort went viral. The film changed the perception of the tragedy: All of those people, plunged into that indifferent sea, are now bound up with “I’m the king of the world!” and heated discussions about whether Jack could have fit on that door. Near, far, wherever you are—“Titanic” is, as a matter of memory, a horror story transmuted into a love story.

Read the full article.

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Catch Up on The Atlantic

Are colds really worse, or are we all just weak babies now? When a Christian revival goes viral Roald Dahl can never be made nice.

Photo Album

Peter Nicholls / Reuters

Browse snapshots of Larry the Cat, the in-house rodent-controller of 10 Downing Street, who recently celebrated his 12th anniversary as the official “Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office.”

Or check out our editor’s selection of photos of the week.

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.

When the news first broke that George Santos, the freshman Republican representative from Long Island, had lied on his résumé, my first thought was, Well, of course—he’s a politician. As the scope of the lies grew, however, my evaluation changed: not a politician, but a con artist.

It’s a difference that I’ve stressed repeatedly in the years since I published a book about con artists. Branding anyone who misrepresents something or lies a bit as a con artist might be convenient, but if we do so, the term loses all meaning. For con artists, lying is a way of being. It reaches past exaggeration or misrepresentation into a prevailing disconnect from reality.

Santos’s long list of fabrications brings to mind some of the most prolific con artists of the past century. His educational history is made up: no attendance at Horace Mann, as far as anyone can tell. No Baruch, no NYU. In fact, no college degree at all. Though you have to admire his penchant for specifics—top 1 percent of his (nonexistent) Baruch class! (For one of many historical analogues, see Ferdinand Waldo Demara, a.k.a. the Great Impostor. Demara, a high-school dropout, made a habit of claiming others’ credentials as his own, including Ph.D.s, M.D.s, and any other degree he could get a hold of.) Nor do Goldman Sachs or Citigroup have records of Santos working there. (For a historic tour de force of fake employment histories, see Clark Rockefeller—real name, Christian Gerhartsreiter—who was not only a fake Rockefeller but also a claimant to quite the nonexistent business pedigree.) And that’s merely a sampling of Santos’s lies.

[Read: Why Americans get conned again and again]

How does someone in the public eye ever hope that deceptions of this magnitude will go undetected? What explains con artists’ impulse to deceive, repeatedly, even as the fictions they tell become harder to maintain? These questions have fascinated psychologists for years—and we’re beginning to find answers.

In three years of research on con artists—interviewing them, spending time with them, submitting them to psychological questionnaires, and reading any available psychological literature on them—I found that con artists tend to exhibit some combination of the so-called dark triad of personality traits, which have been studied in deceptive behavior more broadly: psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. Although psychopathy tends to get a lot of attention—few things are as eye-catching as the word psychopath—the trait that, to me, exemplifies the psychology of the con, and explains the hubris behind a pyramid of lies as high as Santos’s, is narcissism.

Narcissism in the case of the confidence artist is not narcissism in the sense that you and I might use when talking about someone who feels that the world revolves around them. It’s an almost pathological hubris; the thought that you haven’t gotten caught yet, so you never will get caught. The sense that, out of everyone, you deserve it the most, whatever it might be. True narcissism lets you rationalize all manner of sin; it’s self-delusion taken to an extreme.

Narcissism breeds, as well, a self-reinforcing cycle: The more you lie, the more entitled you feel—and the more qualified. In 2019, an international group of psychologists—Francesca Gino of Harvard, Wiley Wakeman of the Stockholm School of Economics, and Celia Moore of Bocconi University, in Italy—ran a series of studies that looked at cheating’s effects on self-image. Would people who cut corners on a task feel more or less confident in their skills afterward? The results were somewhat counterintuitive: Subjects who lied about their performance on a series of matrix problems actually felt more competent afterward. I must be good at this! Look at how well I did! (Ignore, for a moment, that I inflated my results.)

[Read: Can you spot a liar?]

The psychologists also went a step beyond the typical laboratory games to a pursuit more directly relevant to Santos: lying on a résumé. Participants were given a task—apply for a job using supplied credentials—and would receive a bonus if their application was deemed to be in the top 25 percent of all applicants. The trick was that each of the supplied credentials could be twisted or misrepresented, if the applicant so desired. Oxford Brookes University could become the University of Oxford. A two-week executive-education program at Harvard could become an actual degree from Harvard. And second-class honors could be inflated to first-class honors. A full 35 percent of participants chose to misrepresent themselves on at least one of their credentials—and the ones who did reported feeling significantly more competent at the end than those who had accurately conveyed their qualifications. It’s the extreme of dressing for the job you want—to the point where you begin to believe you’re more qualified for that job than those who worked for it.

The result is a perverse dynamic. The more a person like George Santos misrepresents himself and cons others for his own gain, the more entitled he feels to keep going. Why should I resign when I’m the most qualified for the job? The con artist, at least to some degree, comes to believe his own lies. One recent series of studies found that people who were confronted with evidence of self-deception—believing themselves to have performed better than they actually did, and better than the average person, on a series of trivia questions—not only failed to acknowledge their self-delusion but began to see others as the ones prone to it. (Cue Santos’s recent interview with Piers Morgan, in which the representative mostly deflected responsibility for his lies.)

Of course, it’s not enough to lie and justify your conning to yourself. You have to convince others to believe in you. I’ve argued that there’s a con for everyone: Not everyone will fall for every con, but anyone can fall for a con that’s well suited to them. The master con artist knows how to pick the right victims and the right venue—and then how to sell his story most effectively.

Here, Santos chose well. Politics is an area where shades of gray aren’t just tolerated; they are the norm. So if anyone ever catches you in a lie, it’s easy enough to explain it away. Add to that Santos’s choice of district—on Long Island, where there was little competition (he ran uncontested for the Republican nomination) and an element of time pressure (last-minute changes in the district-map lines thwarted would-be challengers)—and you have a perfect stage for even the biggest lies to go largely ignored.

[Caroline Mimbs Nyce: A resigned politician’s advice for George Santos]

Even in the ideal arena, how do you get others to put their trust in you? Con artists seem to intuitively grasp what psychology researchers know: We tend to trust people who appear and act similarly to us. (Some studies have grouped people together in relatively arbitrary ways, like whether they over- or underestimated the number of dots in a picture or whether they preferred art by Kandinsky or Klee, finding that participants were kinder to those they thought were like them.) Santos claimed to be Jewish, for instance, when he ran against Jewish opponents—and presumably wanted to capture that voter demographic. (He later claimed he had said he was “Jew-ish,” rather than “Jewish.”)

When all else fails, emotion, emotion, emotion. The more emotional we are, the more likely we are to give someone the benefit of the doubt and put our logic aside. Santos’s mother dying because of 9/11 was apparently false. Some of his employees dying in the Pulse nightclub shootings was also apparently false. His grandparents surviving the Holocaust, again, appears to have been fabricated. As Demara, the master con artist, once put it, Americans want to be liked more than they want to be right. We’d rather err on the side of sympathy than distrust. My heart goes out to the victim of tragedy—and if I suspect he’s making it up, I’ll keep it to myself.

Sure, there are calls for Santos to resign, and a House ethics investigation could be coming, to look into multiple complaints about his behavior. “A sick puppy,” Senator Mitt Romney called Santos at the State of the Union. And yet he’s still in Congress, head apparently not bowed in shame.

In early December, I received an electricity bill for 1,400 British pounds ($1,700). It was an absurd overcharge for six months of energy I hadn’t used, in a house I moved out of two years ago, from a company that was no longer my supplier. “Oh well,” I said to myself, “it’s just an obvious clerical error.” I assumed the problem would be resolved in an hour, tops.

I was wrong. I called the company seven times. I contacted its WhatsApp support line six times. I sent emails. Each time, someone new responded, restarting the entire process. At one point, I got a text from a subsidiary debt-collection agency threatening my credit rating. Finally, I was notified last week that the mistaken bill had been withdrawn. I had spent more than 20 hours of my life across two months fixing the company’s mistake. The company faced no penalty.

[Annie Lowrey: The time tax]

Although my example is drawn from my life in the U.K., I’m from the U.S. originally and I know that virtually all Americans will experience a version of this story. And plenty of them won’t know their rights, or won’t be able to spare 20 hours on hold, and they’ll take on huge debts as a result. Many people won’t just waste time on hold with private companies but with the government as they try to navigate the maddening labyrinth of benefits programs.

We tend to simply accept such experiences as a feature of modern life. But we shouldn’t. Good governments should make fixing these everyday failures a priority—and they just might help bolster the case for democracy if they do.

For the past several years, I and other scholars have been observing the erosion of American democracy. As a political scientist, I’ve studied authoritarianism and interviewed dissidents and despots across the globe to understand how and why democracies collapse. In the United States, all of the warning signs are blinking red. According to a recent New York Times poll, 71 percent of Americans say that “democracy is currently under threat.”

However, when voters in the 2022 midterms were asked to identify their top concern, only 7 percent identified democracy as the motivating factor for their vote. What explains that disconnect?

Democracy requires two forms of legitimacy to survive: input legitimacy and output legitimacy. Input refers to processes and procedures. Was the rule of law upheld? Did the election get certified properly? Are democratic norms being followed? Output refers to government effectiveness.

Most of the “save democracy” discourse during the Donald Trump years rightly focused on the input side of the equation, because the president posed an existential threat to the systems that differentiate democracy from authoritarianism. But commentators sometimes overlooked why so many people were willing to accept Trump’s attacks against the inputs. One reason may be that they felt the output side had already deteriorated.

Democracy usually isn’t under threat where it delivers. Conversely, people are less likely to rally to defend democracy if they believe the system is failing them. An international survey by Pew Research has found that only 41 percent of Americans are “satisfied” that democracy is working well, compared with 65 percent in Germany, 66 percent in Canada, 76 percent in New Zealand, and 79 percent in Sweden. And American output legitimacy is falling. Twenty years ago, about 60 percent of Americans had faith in the U.S. government to solve domestic problems. Today, that’s down to an abysmal 39 percent.

Think income inequality, an extortionate health-care system, and rural decay. Think, too, about the senses many people have that the sources of power—both public and private—are far away and unresponsive, and that when something goes wrong, they’re on their own. Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has argued that this anger breeds a “politics of resentment.”

Democracy’s ideal is built on a foundation of accountability. In the past, many, if not most, of the decisions that mattered to our lives were taken by people and businesses that felt close to us. That’s not the case anymore. Now all roads seem to lead to bad hold music.

[Read: Why airlines can get away with bad customer service]

Whenever we encounter a problem we didn’t create—like my outrageous electricity charge, or vacations ruined by an incompetent airline, or hospital-billing errors, or a mix-up at the IRS—all we can really do is go online for a customer-service number and cross our fingers that, by some miracle, the call won’t consume the entire day, or worse. When a person coping with cancer treatment spends hours on the phone with her insurance company or Medicaid, she may wonder why her society is so cruel, or so incompetent, or both. And she may start to see the appeal of a demagogue who promises to deliver simple solutions: the “I alone can fix it” candidate.

Experiences with distant power centers may also lead to conspiratorial thinking—to paranoid notions about who’s “really” pulling the levers. Two in five Americans now agree that it is definitely or probably true that “regardless of who is officially in charge of the government and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” Belief in that conspiracy theory is nine percentage points higher than it was last year.

Not for nothing, authoritarian populist messages usually take aim at a faraway, unresponsive, and faceless elite. For much of the population, that is the experience of power. Granted, authoritarian governments are objectively far worse at helping citizens deal with routine problems. Good luck trying to complain to the Chinese Communist Party or to the Kremlin. But for democracy to be saved from proto-authoritarian political movements, such as Trumpism, democracy can’t be viewed, as Winston Churchill put it, as only “the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” People in power need to proactively make the case for democracy through good governance at the level of everyday life.

That’s why President Joe Biden’s recent focus in the State of the Union address on “junk fees” was wise. This kind of policy sends a much-needed message: You should have democracy’s back, because it has yours. Routine dysfunction matters. Companies that engage in predatory billing, like the power company that wrongly charged me 1,400 pounds, should face serious fines. Corporations that steal your time through their own mistakes should be forced to compensate you for that time. Similarly, regulators should ensure that it is as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for it.

[Read: America’s most powerful medical debt collector]

In the European Union, if an airline causes a flight delay of more than three hours, it has to pay you 250 to 600 euros, depending on the length of the flight. In the U.K., when a train is more than 15 minutes late, I can go to a website and, in a few minutes, demand financial compensation.

For the most part in America, when you screw up, you pay, but when corporations or governments screw up, nobody pays. Even when protections do exist, they’re difficult to navigate, or are unknown to most citizens. Other democracies have made clear it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not rocket science to solve such maddening everyday problems, and American democracy would be better off if the government devoted more effort to it.

Dangerous would-be autocrats across the globe have attacked democratic norms, procedures, and institutions. More people will join the fight for democracy when they feel that democracy delivers for them. But for many people right now, their lived experience of democracy feels a lot like being stuck on hold.

The Idaho house where four college students were murdered in November will be demolished as a "healing step," the University of Idaho said in a statement Friday.

The University of Warwick says it has reversed its decision and offered its "sincere apologies".

Can a million people vanish from the planet without the world knowing? It seems impossible in this age of instant digital communications, ubiquitous smartphones, and global social-media platforms that anything of comparable consequence can go unnoticed and unrecorded—no matter how remote the country or how determined its rulers might be to hide the truth.

Yet that’s apparently what has happened in China over the past two and a half months. After the Chinese leader Xi Jinping removed his draconian restrictions to contain COVID-19 in December, the virus rampaged across the nation with explosive speed. According to one of the government’s top scientists, 80 percent of the populace has now been infected. But we don’t know the full impact of this surge. The Chinese government’s secrecy has managed to obscure what really happened during the country’s latest and worst COVID wave.

Independent experts, skeptical of Beijing’s official data on COVID deaths, have been forced to calculate their own estimates—which indicate much higher and more disturbing numbers than the government claims. These estimates range from about 1 million to 1.5 million deaths, suggesting that, in absolute terms, China may have suffered more fatalities from COVID in two months than the U.S. did in three years.

[Read: Zero COVID’s failure is Xi’s failure]

By any reckoning, a terrible tragedy unfolded in China in recent weeks. That we’re left guessing about its scale is important as well. If the Chinese leadership can hide a million dead, what else can it conceal from the world? Authoritarian states have a notorious history of shielding the sufferings they inflict from the eyes of the world. The number of Chinese people who perished in the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958–60), Mao Zedong’s crash modernization program, is still a subject of debate. In the era of Stalin’s gulags and Nazi concentration camps, limited technology and limitless repression helped dictators screen their atrocities.

Today, information wants to be free, as the netizen slogan goes. In a time when everyone carries the equivalent of a TV camera in their pocket and when satellites whir over a world saturated with open-source data, a new tech-empowered army of civic-minded citizens and whistleblowers was supposed to keep a closer watch on the bad guys. With greater transparency would come greater freedom.

The controversy over China’s death count, however, shows how much control autocratic states still wield over information. As China rises, its leadership’s inherent secrecy is a problem for all of us. Decisions made in Beijing and events in China have ramifications for global economic growth, jobs, prices, the environment, the stock market, and global security. But all too often, the world has to rummage through scraps of anecdotal evidence, opaque official pronouncements, and glimpses provided by outsiders to guess at how Beijing chooses its policies, and at the effect they have on the country—and thus China’s impact on our lives.

The Chinese Communist Party likes it that way. All governments have their secrets, of course, and try to spin news cycles and narratives. But in open societies, the debates of congresses and election campaigns expose the policy-making process to public view. Journalists, activists, and regular citizens are always poking around, asking uncomfortable questions, and posting on Instagram and TikTok.

[Read: Mourning becomes China]

No authoritarian state could survive that scrutiny, and the Chinese Communist Party has erected an extensive security state to make sure it doesn’t face such examination. China’s party-controlled legislature—the National People’s Congress, which is due to meet in early March—is more a pep rally than a debating society. In the absence of a free press, no watchful estate of reporters exists to keep tabs on the powerful. The intrepid and inquisitive are usually silenced: The citizen-journalist Zhang Zhan, for instance, was sentenced to four years in prison for documenting the original COVID outbreak in Wuhan in 2020.

As powerful as China’s police state is, however, it does not control every source of information. During the recent wave of infections, satellite imagery revealed heightened activity at cremation centers. In addition, domestic footage of overwhelmed hospital wards found its way onto Chinese social media. But once detected, such glimpses are quickly removed by China’s platoons of censors.

Concealing inconvenient truths is an industrial enterprise for the Communist Party. The Tiananmen massacre of 1989, common knowledge to much of the world, has been scrubbed from the domestic record. More recently, the Chinese government has worked to hide its mass detentions and torture of China’s minority Uyghur community in the Xinjiang region.

Chinese authorities have been obfuscating on COVID-19 since the pandemic began. The World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the coronavirus has stalled because of China’s lack of cooperation, but the Chinese foreign ministry continues to deflect responsibility by regurgitating an old conspiracy theory that the virus originated in the United States. Now the government appears to be trying to erase the country’s entire COVID experience from national consciousness. The zero-COVID policy, which employed large-scale quarantines and business shutdowns to contain the virus, had been heralded by authorities as a “magic weapon” to protect the people. But since the restrictions were removed, the term zero COVID has vanished from official discourse.

Next to disappear is COVID itself. China’s equivalent agency to the CDC determined recently that a new cycle of mass infection is “unlikely to occur” in coming months.

The government has tried to bury the memory of the dead with as much dispatch as it ditched its lockdowns. When COVID began to spread rapidly in December, the initial death counts released by the health authorities were so unbelievable that even the party brass seemed to realize they lacked credibility. That led to a mid-January announcement that 60,000 people had perished in the latest wave, and, more recently, the official tally of deaths has risen to a touch more than 83,000. We can’t say with absolute certainty that the Chinese government’s data are false, but public-health experts and other specialists have looked askance at these figures. Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, called them a “vast undercount.”

[Jiwei Xiao: My mother just died of COVID in Wuhan]

One possibility is that China’s top leaders do not themselves know the real total. Contrary to the widely held image of China’s autocrats as a surveillance state’s all-knowing supervisors, the leadership in Beijing can, by the very nature of its rule, be left in the dark about what’s happening in the country.

“We think of China as a very high-capacity authoritarian regime, where the center is in control,” Jennifer Pan, a political scientist at Stanford University, told me. “The reality is that every authoritarian government that does not have free media faces a problem where they have trouble gathering reliable and accurate information.”

“Governance is delegated to local governments, and local governments have very strong incentives to keep bad news from being seen by the center,” she went on. “In order to be promoted, they have to show they are doing well.” In the case of COVID deaths, “we shouldn’t necessarily assume the central Chinese government has an accurate handle of what is going on.”

In the absence of reliable information, the Communist Party can conjure its own version of reality—and the leadership has embraced a narrative to fit the data it has, last week declaring that it had achieved a “major and decisive victory” over COVID and “effectively protected the people’s lives and health.” With this success, “China has created a miracle in human history.” A commentary published by the official news agency, Xinhua, added that the triumph was evidence of the party’s “governance capacity.”

Whether the Chinese people swallow this swill is another unknown. Without freedom of speech, the government also denies any true picture of public opinion that might open up the Communist Party to criticism. But the party has little choice but to promote this kind of narrative. Because its leaders present themselves as infallible, they can never admit to the full extent of the COVID catastrophe.

“Shocking the public presents a threat to the government,” Eric Harwit, an Asian-studies professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who studies Chinese social media, told me. The authorities “think it’s something the people can’t handle—they can’t handle the truth.”

Beyond that, the state and its supporters had previously promoted China’s comparatively low death count to claim that the country’s authoritarian system, which had rigidly imposed the zero-COVID policy, was superior to other forms of government, especially liberal democracy. Revealing the real death count would not only damage the party’s reputation at home but also embarrass its leadership abroad.

Yet the party’s penchant for misinformation comes with risks. Average Chinese citizens have more information at their fingertips than they’ve had in the past, thanks to smartphones and social media. As extensive and effective as the authorities’ censorship operation is, it can still be caught off guard by popular expression on social platforms, which allow individuals to connect with a broad network of people and sources. Over time, the gap between what the officials say and what the public sees could damage the party’s credibility.

The case of the missing million is a chilling reminder that the Communist Party can still make people disappear, and the world may never know. Beijing’s secrecy creates other, immediate problems. How can a government unwilling to reveal COVID deaths be trusted to share other vital information, such as China’s greenhouse-gas emissions, crucial to tackling global warming? Beijing’s resistance to cooperating with the international community in a search for answers about the origins of this pandemic does nothing to help world leaders prevent the next one. The fact that we barely understand how Xi and his team have made COVID-related decisions is an indication of how cloistered the party’s inner sanctum remains.

The chasm between what we know about China and what we need to know about China is much too large. The party will keep it that way.