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.

Let’s begin by assuming you’re not planning to watch WrestleMania this weekend. World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), with its ridiculous bombast and barbaric violence, has turned people off for decades. Yet its popularity—not to mention its profound influence on American culture and politics—persists. Below, I explain why.

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

The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment Something odd is happening with handbags. Childbirth is no fun. But an extremely fast birth can be even worse.

The Man in the Arena

WWE can be eerily prophetic. Had you watched WrestleMania 23, back in 2007, for instance, you would have seen a future president of the United States, Donald Trump, standing in the ring with a devilish smile, preparing to humiliate the WWE head honcho, Vince McMahon.

Although scores of articles have been written about the connections between wrestling and Trumpism, comparatively little is understood about McMahon—who, in reality, is one of Trump’s close friends. (During the 2016 campaign, McMahon was reportedly on the extremely small list of individuals whose phone calls Trump would take in private; his wife, Linda, went on to serve in Trump’s Cabinet.) A new biography of McMahon, Ringmaster, came out earlier this week, and I spent some time with its author, Abraham Josephine Riesman, trying to unpack the book’s principal argument: that McMahon and WWE led to “the unmaking of America.” McMahon reigned over the thorny world of professional wrestling until last summer, when he stepped down from his position as CEO and chairman following an alleged sex scandal and related hush-money payments. (Sound familiar?) He returned as chairman at the beginning of this year, after the WWE’s investigation into the allegations concluded.

What McMahon understood better than anyone was that the physical act of wrestling was just one element of what the audience wanted. Millions of people flock to WWE for the monthslong story lines, the operatic entrances, the cheeky backstage drama. Wrestlers seize the mic and deliver fired-up speeches filled with taunts, zingers, and thrilling call-and-response sections. Trump grew up a wrestling fan and mastered these arena-style linguistics. His rallies, his debates, his interviews, his social-media posts—no matter the venue, Trump relied on WWE tactics. When he launched his first presidential campaign back in 2015, this approach was shocking to some. And even more shocking when it worked.

The 45th president is not scheduled to make a cameo at this weekend’s WrestleMania. At the moment, he’s preparing to turn himself in to the authorities in New York City on Tuesday following yesterday’s grand-jury indictment. One of Trump’s congressional acolytes, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, announced that she, too, will be in New York on Tuesday: “We MUST protest the unconstitutional WITCH HUNT!” she tweeted today. Greene has also used WWE tools to propel herself to elected office. Earlier this year, during President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, Greene heckled him, not unlike a WWE fan screaming from the sidelines.

I’ve watched a lot of old wrestling clips in recent weeks. Specifically, I went down a rabbit hole of interviews with the wrestler Ric Flair. Flair routinely boasted of his alligator shoes, his Rolex watch, his libido. His absurd brag—“I’ve got a limousine sittin’ out there a mile long!”—may or may not make you think of Trump and/or his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, whose use of hyperbole was, shall we say, unrestrained.

I texted some of these outlandish Ric Flair videos to friends. In response, a buddy pointed me to an October 29, 1985, speech from Flair’s former wrestling nemesis, Dusty Rhodes, a.k.a. “The American Dream.” The grainy YouTube clip of Rhodes’s monologue has more than 2.6 million views. It’s three and a half minutes long, and worth watching in its entirety.

Whereas Flair’s oratory is all “me,” Rhodes takes the approach of “we.” Rhodes ticks off examples of challenges that everyday Americans face, something that the stylin’, profilin’ Flair could never understand. His speech has a decidedly Grapes of Wrath feel to it. “Hard times are when the autoworkers are out of work and they tell ’em, ‘Go home!’” Rhodes shouts. “And hard times are when a man is workin’ a job 30 years—30 years!—they give him a watch, kick him in the butt, and say, ‘Hey, a computer took your place, daddy!’ That’s hard times!” Trump, for all of his abhorrent narcissism, shrewdly uses the “we”—specifically, the us-versus-them—approach in nearly all of his campaign speeches to similar effect. When headlining this month’s CPAC conference, he sounded not only like a vengeful pro wrestler, but like someone seething with menace: “I am your retribution.”

This year’s WrestleMania title match will be between the current champion, the hulking Roman Reigns, and Rhodes’s 37-year-old son, Cody. The younger Rhodes is a cocky blonde who leans heavily into American-flag iconography, wears a business suit and power tie, and goes by “The American Nightmare.” (Again: Sound familiar?)

WrestleMania used to be available on pay-per-view, but now it’s a two-night event streaming on Peacock on April 1 and 2. I am not the die-hard wrestling fan I was back in middle school, but I’ll likely dip in and out of the broadcast to catch a few of the monologues, if not the matches. I don’t want to go so far as to predict that a future president will enter the ring, as was the case in 2007. But I wouldn’t rule that possibility out.

Related:

How wrestling explains America Donald Trump, wrestling heel

Today’s News

After a grand jury voted to indict Donald Trump yesterday, he will likely be arraigned on Tuesday. One of his lawyers said that the former president is prepared to go to trial. The Minneapolis City Council approved an agreement with the state of Minnesota to revamp its policing system, nearly three years after George Floyd’s murder. A “high risk” storm alert—a rare weather designation reserved for severe events—was issued for parts of the American Midwest and mid-South.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Maya Chung explores what California means to writers. Work in Progress: Derek Thompson unravels why Americans care about work so much.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

The Influencer Industry Is Having an Existential Crisis

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.

Influencers in the Wild has been turned into a board game with the tagline “Go places. Gain followers. Get famous. (no talent required)” And you get it because social-media influencers have always been, to some degree, a cultural joke. They get paid to post photos of themselves and to share their lives, which is something most of us do for free. It’s not real work.

But it is, actually. Influencers and other content creators are vital assets for social-media companies such as Instagram, which has courted them with juicy cuts of ad revenue in a bid to stay relevant, and TikTok, which flew some of its most famous creators out to D.C. last week to lobby for its very existence.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Chris Reel / Prime Video

Read. “The Vendor of New Hearts,” a poem by Colin Channer.

“Once way far in time in a village coiled from stone / I met an elder in a teahouse. He proposed, and I said yes / I’ll join you, and we walked together to the vendor of new hearts.”

Watch. Swarm, Donald Glover’s horror-comedy (on Amazon Prime), has a twisted take on celebrity culture.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Tomorrow, April 1, marks the 20th anniversary of the White Stripes’ Elephant, one of the defining rock albums of the new millennium. You surely know the inescapable earworm “Seven Nation Army,” but I think the peak of the record is track eight, “Ball and Biscuit,” a swaggering garage-blues romp.

P.P.S. An impeccable list of records also turn 20 this year: Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief, Jay Z’s The Black Album, Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism, OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, My Morning Jacket’s It Still Moves, Songs: Ohia’s The Magnolia Electric Co., and the Strokes’ Room on Fire, to name just a few. As you settle into this Friday night, pour yourself a drink and crank the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Fever to Tell, yet another 2003 banger. Here’s a great clip of Karen O and the band crushing “Y Control” on Late Night With Conan O’Brien.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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

A grand jury has reportedly indicted Donald Trump on criminal charges stemming from his role in a hush-money payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels. This historic event is a tragedy for the American republic not because of what it has revealed about Trump, but because of what it is revealing about us as voters and citizens.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Ron DeSantis chose the wrong college to take over. David Frum: Where do you stand? There’s exactly one good reason to buy a house. An American Tragedy

Donald Trump is about to be charged with crimes in New York. I do not know if he is guilty of any of these charges—we don’t even know the exact accusations yet—and neither do you. That’s for a jury to decide, and both Trump and the state of New York will have their day in court. In that sense, this is a good day for America, because it shows, in the most direct way possible, that no one in this country is above the law.

But this whole mess, no matter how it turns out, and no matter what other charges may come at Trump from elsewhere, is also an American tragedy. Trump’s status as a former president has not shielded him from answering for his alleged crimes. The indictment itself is shot through with tension, because Trump is, in fact, a former president and a current leading presidential candidate—which underscores the ghastly reality that no matter how much we learn about this crass sociopath, millions of people voted for him twice and are still hoping that he will return to power in the White House.

Trump’s defenders will argue that the New York case is just a local political vendetta, and that the potential crimes involved are relatively minor. As my colleague David Graham has noted, “Falsifying records is a crime, and crime is bad,” but this is like trying to get Al Capone on tax evasion, especially because “the Manhattan case seems like perhaps both the least significant and the legally weakest case.” David also notes that even some Trump critics wish Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had waited for Trump to be indicted on more important potential charges.

I’m not so sure. Trump has kept his supporters in a state of high tension over the past few weeks, first claiming that he’d be arrested on Tuesday, March 21, and then, in an appalling cultlike rally in Waco, bellowing that 2024 would be “the final battle” after previously warning that to indict him would be to court violence and civil unrest. Perhaps the New York charges have popped that bubble of tension; Trump can now go and whine about that while others prepare the case arguing that he has committed crimes against American democracy.

But to focus on which indictment should come when is to ignore that Trump has already admitted to his awful behavior in the events around the case. Trump (who sometimes refers to Stormy Daniels as "Horse Face") denies that he had an affair with the porn actor, but no one contests that he authorized paying her off, nor does his legal team deny that he lied about that money while standing in Air Force One—part of their risible argument that she was being paid hush money to keep quiet about an affair that never happened. They’re simply saying that technically, he didn’t violate any namby-pamby laws about ledger entries and campaign funding.

To our shame, we have too often let those kinds of arguments define the Trump legal saga. If Trump is brought to trial on the far more serious charge of attempting to strong-arm Georgia election officials, his defenders will claim that that indictment, too, is just local huckstering. They will find other excuses in the event that he somehow must answer for his role in trying to overturn our constitutional processes. And once again, even after looking at Trump’s own behavior, including his phone call to the Georgia secretary of state and the exhortation to the mob on January 6, too many Americans will focus on whether he committed an actual crime instead of coming to their senses and realizing that in any functional and healthy democracy, someone like Trump would have been shamed and forced into political and social exile years ago.

Trump, like the Republican opportunists who cling to him like remoras under a shark, doesn’t care about shame—he cares about getting away with it. Indeed, rather than leaving the public arena, Trump has reveled in it all, rolling around in the garbage of his own life and grunting happily about how the rules don’t apply to the real elites like him. Forget about Richard Nixon, who publicly resigned; Trump isn’t even Spiro Agnew, a man who seethed with rage at the felony corruption charges against him but had the sense not to brag about them. (Agnew insisted on his innocence for two months and then took a plea of “no contest” to a single tax-evasion charge, after which he mostly vanished from public view.)

No such luck this time. Win or lose in court, Trump is determined to bring us all into a summer-heat dumpster with him for as long as he can. And that leads to the last and most shocking thing about today’s news: Late this afternoon, New York local media reported that security was tightening up in certain areas of the city. That’s how we knew something was coming: The former president had already told us that he fully intended to trigger violence if the institutions of the law tried to touch him.

Tomorrow, all NYPD officers have reportedly been ordered to be in full uniform and ready to deploy. And again, somehow, we’ve just accepted this as the new normal. We no longer even blink when New York, a city scarred by multiple terror attacks against its innocent citizens, has to go on alert just to charge Trump with a crime. That one fact, more than any other, tells you how far down the long slide into vice and venality—and violence—Trump has dragged this country.

Every defendant, including Donald Trump, deserves the presumption of innocence. But when it comes to our civic and political innocence, Americans long ago lost whatever is left of ours.

Related:

An astonishing, frightening first for the country Indicting a former president should always have been fair game If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone The cases against Trump: a guide Today’s News Nine U.S. soldiers were killed after two helicopters crashed during a training mission in Kentucky. The White House confirmed that President Joe Biden will not veto a congressional resolution ending the national emergency declared at the start of the pandemic. Major League Baseball’s 2023 season begins today. Evening Read The Atlantic

‘A Common American Death’

By Nicole Chung

His death certificate doesn’t tell me how he died. The causes of death are listed as “end-stage renal failure,” “diabetes mellitus,” “hypertension.” Yet I have no idea what forced my father’s body to shut down, his heart to stop, on that given night.

He’d had a cold, my mother told me, and had gone to bed early in the spare bedroom so he wouldn’t keep her awake with his coughing. Did his cough give way to a silent heart attack? she wondered. We know more about what did not happen than what did. At no time did he shout for help, or cry out in pain. There was no harsh death rattle, no deep gasps for a final breath he couldn’t find. My mother sat not 10 feet away from him on the other side of a thin wall, reading a book; if he had called out for her, made any sound of distress, she would have heard, and gone to him.

Read the full article.

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Play our daily crossword.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Hurricane Fiona was the costliest weather event in Atlantic Canada, while Ian was the third-most devastating in the US.

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.

Pardon the intrusion, but I am asserting my right (such as it is) as editor in chief to seize temporary control of The Atlantic Daily from Tom Nichols (who I imagine is secretly grateful for this hijacking) in order to share good news about our magazine. For the second year in a row, The Atlantic has been named winner of the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. This is the top honor awarded by the American Society of Magazine Editors, and it is quite a privilege to win, especially given the quality of our fellow finalists, which included, among others, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine.

We received news of this win last night at a ceremony in Manhattan, a ceremony that very much resembled the Oscars, except for the almost total absence of glamor and complete (and somewhat surprising) absence of onstage slapping. Last year, when we won this same award, I assumed we wouldn’t win it again so quickly, but my generally excellent colleagues at The Atlantic have kept producing stellar journalism at such a ferocious pace as to make us unignorable.

I’ll say a bit more about this award, and what it means for The Atlantic and its readers, in a moment. But first, please take a look at some of the stories we’ve published in recent days, stories that make me proud to work here:

How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor? The only realistic answer to Putin In the age of Ozempic, what’s the point of working out?

Notes From Last Night

As some of you know, The Atlantic has been been on a bit of a sprint lately: We’ve more than doubled our number of subscribers over the past five years, and we recently won our first-ever Pulitzer Prizes: In 2021, for Ed Yong’s definitive coverage of the pandemic, and last year, for Jennifer Senior’s mesmerizing story about the aftermath of 9/11. Jen won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for that cover story as well, and this year, she was again a finalist, for her devastatingly knowing profile of Steve Bannon. In fact, many of our writers were National Magazine Award finalists this year: Caitlin Dickerson’s magnificent and Herculean story uncovering the secret history of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy was a finalist in the Public Interest category; Clint Smith’s moving exploration of memory, slavery, and the Holocaust was a finalist in Columns and Essays; George Packer’s searing look at America’s abandonment of its Afghan allies was a finalist in Reporting; and Graeme Wood’s brilliant profile of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was a finalist in the Profile Writing category.

We also won the Best Print Illustration award for Sally Deng’s illustration for “My Escape From the Taliban,” by Bushra Seddique, and we were a finalist in the Best Digital Illustration category. As longtime readers of The Atlantic are aware, we have been known for many things over the years, but not especially for aesthetic excellence. This is a magazine, after all, that didn’t include photography for the first 100 years of its existence (because what’s the rush?). One more note from last night: Jerusalem Demsas, one of our young star writers, was named a winner of the ASME Next Award, for the most promising magazine journalists under 30. I have little doubt that Jerusalem will one day have my job, if my job hasn’t been outsourced to Skynet by the time she wants it.

It is gratifying, of course, to see Atlantic journalists receive so much recognition, but it is not particularly surprising. We realized a while ago that the way to differentiate The Atlantic in a very crowded field is to make stories only of the highest quality and ambition. We sometimes fall short of our objective, but not for lack of trying. My goal at The Atlantic is to build the greatest writers’ collective in the English language, and to surround these writers with the very best editors, artists, designers, and fact-checkers. This goal is not an end in itself. Only by gathering together the best journalists in America can we fulfill our historic mission: To illuminate and inspire; to hold the powerful to account; to stand for the belief that the American idea is worth saving and refining; and to be, in the words of our founding manifesto, “of no party or clique,” to be independent in mind and spirit.

Tomorrow, Tom Nichols will be back (and may very well mock my “climb ev’ry mountain” rhetoric, which is his right), so let me thank our most loyal readers for their support, without which we could not pursue the sort of excellence embodied by our brilliant team of journalists.

Read our finalist stories:

“We Need to Take Away Children,” by Caitlin Dickerson American Rasputin, by Jennifer Senior Monuments to the Unthinkable, by Clint Smith The Betrayal, by George Packer Absolute Power, by Graeme Wood

Today’s News

The Manhattan grand jury hearing the hush-money case involving Donald Trump will reportedly break for two weeks in April, which will push back the possible indictment of the former president. Financial regulators testified before the House Financial Services committee about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. The Senate voted to repeal the 2002 resolution that approved the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 1991 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq in the first Gulf War. The bill now goes to the House.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The West agreed to pay climate reparations. That was the easy part, Emma Marris writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf looks to cosmic events to process the unfathomable.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Steve Lewis / Getty

“The Gun”

By Clint Smith

the gun heard the first shot /

the gun thought it was a bursting pipe /

the gun heard the second shot and the third /

and the fourth /

the gun realized this was not a pipe

Read the full poem.

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Read. After Visiting Friends, the author Michael Hainey’s intimate, noirish quest to find out how his father died.

Or try another of these six memoirs that go beyond memories.

Watch. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, in theaters, marks the return of the sincere blockbuster.

Play our daily crossword.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

The Atlantic for the second straight year was awarded the top honor of General Excellence for a News, Sports, and Entertainment publication at the 2023 National Magazine Awards, the most prestigious category in the annual honors from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

Editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg said: “It’s quite unusual for a magazine to win the top National Magazine Award two years in a row, but the judges saw what our readers already know: that the team making The Atlantic regularly produces the most ambitious, challenging, and beautifully written stories in the country.”

In 2022, The Atlantic helped its readers make sense of the world’s most complicated issues and shined a light on injustices the world over. It was a finalist in a number of the most competitive categories for reporting and features by staff writers Caitlin Dickerson, George Packer, Jennifer Senior, Clint Smith, and Graeme Wood––several of which appeared as Atlantic cover stories in 2022:

Staff writer Caitlin Dickerson was a finalist in the Public Interest category for the September cover story, “We Need to Take Away Children,” an exhaustive, 18-month-long investigation exposing the secret history of the Trump administration’s family-separation policy. Her reporting, one of the longest pieces in The Atlantic’s history, detailed how the policy was characterized by gross negligence at every level of government, and all of its worst outcomes were anticipated and ignored by key policy makers.

Staff writer George Packer was a finalist in the Reporting category for his damning indictment of America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and of the U.S. government’s betrayal of our Afghan allies. Packer’s reporting showed that where the government failed, American soldiers, veterans, and private citizens stepped in to try to save Afghan lives.

The Atlantic was a finalist in Profile Writing for two articles: “American Rasputin,” a revealing profile of Steve Bannon built on extensive interviews, in which staff writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Senior showed that Bannon continues to swing a wrecking ball through democracy; and Graeme Wood’s “Absolute Power,” a cover story on the future of Saudi Arabia, which included the first interview that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had given to the non-Saudi press in more than two years.

A finalist in the Columns and Essays category was “Monuments to the Unthinkable,” by Clint Smith, a sweeping cover story in which Smith traveled to Germany to better understand the country’s efforts to memorialize the atrocities of the Holocaust, such that German citizens are faced with the memory of its victims in everyday life.

Previously announced honors went to staff writer Jerusalem Demsas, a recipient of the 2023 ASME NEXT Award for Journalists Under 30; the Best Print Illustration for Sally Deng’s illustration for the feature “My Escape From the Taliban,” a moving first-time essay by Atlantic editorial fellow Bushra Seddique; and a finalist nomination in the Digital Illustration category for an illustration by Esiri Essi for “They Called Her ‘Black Jet.’”

In the past year, The Atlantic has paired journalistic excellence with growth across the company, including record subscriber growth for the third straight year. Last year also marked the return of in-person events, including The Atlantic Festival in September in Washington, D.C.; the publication of the magazine’s entire archive, dating back to 1857, online for the first time; and the launch and publication of the first six books in a new imprint, Atlantic Editions, with the independent publisher Zando, collecting the work of Atlantic writers and editors.

–END–

Press Contact:
Anna Bross, SVP of Communications
anna@theatlantic.com
202.680.3848

Russia’s unprovoked, unjustified invasion of Ukraine last year and, for that matter, its first invasion of its neighbor eight years before are impossible to justify. Putin is trying to convince his public that this war is existential, but with little success. Russia’s existence as a strong, sovereign state is not dependent on its control of Ukraine or even parts of the Donbas or Crimea. That’s why since Russian President Vladimir Putin implemented a partial mobilization last fall, hundreds of thousands of men have fled Russia rather than march to the sound of the guns, and it’s why he still refuses to declare war and order a full mobilization.

And yet a small band of critics has rallied beneath the banner of realism to argue against continued Western support for Ukraine’s effort to defend itself. “Russia may be waging a war of aggression as a matter of law,” Mario Loyola wrote in a recent essay in The Atlantic, “but as a matter of history and strategy it is moving to forestall a grave deterioration in its strategic position, with stakes that are almost as existential for it as they are for Ukraine.” But actual realism must be grounded in the details of the situations it assesses. And in the case of Ukraine, those facts lead to very different conclusions.

[Mario Loyola: Ron DeSantis is right about Ukraine]

The borders of Ukraine that emerged from the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 were enshrined in international law and in numerous treaties and agreements that Russia signed, over and over. They were not a “formality,” as Loyola suggests, nor was Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, and illegal annexation of Crimea, justifiable because “Russia felt it had no choice … because it couldn’t risk losing Sevastopol.” Russia shared Sevastopol with Ukraine for more than a decade and had a lease that would have lasted until the middle of the century. Ukraine was living in peace with Russia until 2014. Putin didn’t like democratic revolutions in neighboring countries, especially in Ukraine, because he feared that Russians would want the same thing, threatening his corrupt, authoritarian system. That’s why he invaded in 2014, and one of the main reasons he launched round two last year.

Loyola is not alone in suggesting that Crimea’s status be treated as a special case for Russia, that it was transferred to Ukraine “only” in 1954 and “is home to few ethnic Ukrainians even now.” Crimea is part of Ukraine. For centuries—until Stalin forcibly moved them to Central Asia during World War II—Crimean Tatars were a major presence in the peninsula even after Russia took control at the end of the 18th century, making up about 20 percent of the population at the time of the deportation (during which up to 50 percent of them died). According to the last census Ukraine administered in Crimea, in 2001, they made up about 10 percent of the population, and Ukrainians 24 percent. Their leadership has been severely repressed by the Russian occupiers. They are as much Ukrainian citizens as any others living on Ukrainian soil.

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian empire must die]

It’s common to hear echoes of Russian propaganda that Ukraine’s pro-Russian government in Ukraine “was deposed” in 2014—but that does not make it true. Ukraine’s former President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kyiv and wound up in Russia. Another line often heard in Moscow and repeated by some in the West is that pro-Russia presidential candidates won elections until 2014. After 2004’s Orange Revolution, the pro-Western opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko beat Yanukovych in the rerun of the 2004 presidential election, despite the latter’s efforts to steal victory.

Then there is the argument that NATO enlargement was the reason behind Putin’s invasion in 2014. That, of course, overlooks the fact that Yanukovych legislatively ended Ukraine’s pursuit of closer ties with NATO—and yet Putin wasn’t satisfied with that. Had Putin not pressured Yanukovych into rejecting agreements with the European Union in 2013, the Euromaidan revolution never would have happened. And when current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky floated the idea of neutrality for Ukraine in the very early stages of Russia’s most recent invasion (before the discovery of the atrocities at Bucha and other sites), Putin wasn’t interested. Finally, Putin expressed no concerns about the Finns and Swedes applying for NATO membership.

Loyola and other realists often deny Ukraine and Ukrainians agency. Zelensky, who has performed heroically throughout the war, was democratically elected and has to take into account the views of the Ukrainian people. A recent poll by the International Republican Institute shows that 97 percent of Ukrainians think they can win the war and 74 percent believe Ukraine will maintain all territories from within its internationally recognized borders defined in 1991. Ukrainians strongly oppose any territorial concessions or compromises. They also don’t trust Russia, given how Moscow never lived up to its past commitments to Ukraine, not least the 2014 and 2015 Minsk agreements.

Moreover, Russia’s tactics—its war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide—have alienated Ukrainians for the foreseeable future. Putin has significantly bolstered Ukrainians’ desire to join NATO: 82 percent now say they would support joining the alliance. Invading neighbors and subjecting them to appalling abuses tends to alienate, not win over, the populations in these countries. When Loyola writes that peace “should be the overriding objective now, but it will require a willingness to compromise,” he omits that this would require forcing a deal on the Ukrainians that they vehemently oppose. It also ignores the fact that senior Russian officials, such as former President Dmitry Medvedev, and the Russian media have said that a key objective of the invasion is to destroy “Ukrainianness,” which is why some observers accuse Moscow of committing not just war crimes but genocide.

The presence of Russian occupiers in Ukrainian territory is unacceptable to Ukrainians. Not only would a peace deal ceding territory betray Ukraine and the concepts of sovereignty and territorial integrity, but it would also justify Putin’s view that the West is weak, and that he can accept its gift of part of Ukraine now—effectively a reward for aggression—and then come back for more, in Ukraine and farther West. China’s President Xi Jinping is also watching the West’s response, and drawing lessons about what the international community might do were he to attack Taiwan.

[Anne Applebaum: China’s war against Taiwan has already started]

Echoing other realists who tend to blame America first, Loyola implies that we pushed Ukraine into war. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Biden administration did everything it could to avert a Russian invasion, and Ukraine also tried to prevent one. Putin wanted to hear none of it, and instead made absurd demands in December 2021 that would have rolled NATO back to its pre-1997 borders and entrenched Russian control over the Eurasian region. What’s more, despite the dreadful performance of his military, Putin has yet to jettison his original, maximalist war aims.

The costs of letting Putin have his way in Ukraine, including the damage it would cause to the decades-old international order, are too grave to bear. If not stopped and defeated in Ukraine, Putin will try his luck in other countries in the region, including Moldova and possibly even the Baltic states. A Russian move against Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania would implicate NATO’s Article 5 security guarantees, potentially pulling the United States into a war with Russia. As it is, the Baltic states have been constant targets of Kremlin provocations, including the cyberattack on Estonia in 2007; the kidnapping of an Estonian official in September 2014, shortly after a visit by President Barack Obama; and the buildup of troops in Moscow’s western military district. If Putin is able to bluff his way to victory in Ukraine, on what basis can we assume that he will not attempt the same in the Baltics? This is clearly understood in Eastern and Northern Europe, and is why traditionally neutral Sweden and Finland want to join NATO.

In Ukraine, the Ukrainians are the ones doing the fighting, and tragically the dying; the United States has no soldiers on the ground. But we have every interest in providing the military support Ukraine needs to win this war and drive every Russian occupying and invading force off Ukrainian territory. No one wants the war to end sooner than the Ukrainians, but they also believe, and with good reason, that they can win, if they get the assistance they need soon. Now is not the time to snatch Russian defeat from the Ukraine’s jaws of victory.

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Last year, Pakistan was hit with floods so devastating that they were hard to comprehend. In some areas, 15 inches of rain fell in a single day. And the rain went on for months, inundating one-third of the country, spreading disease, and displacing nearly 8 million people. Six months later, Pakistan is still in crisis—nearly 2 million people are living near stagnant floodwater. Pakistan has estimated that it needs about $16.3 billion to recover from the floods, a sum that does not take into account so many ripple effects of the crisis: grief over those who died, education abruptly ended, the struggles of girls married off young as their families coped with a sudden plunge into poverty.

But these floods were not a “natural disaster.” The monsoon rains were up to 50 percent more intense than they would have been without climate change. So although Pakistan has to foot this bill, or at least most of it, the country bears little responsibility: Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, while the United States is the world’s second-biggest emitter, accountable for about 20 percent of emissions since 1850. But there is no mechanism for the United States or any other country to pay for the loss and damage that it is at least partially responsible for.

That may be changing. In November, world leaders at the most recent big climate meeting, known as COP27, agreed to set up a “loss and damage” fund, bankrolled by rich countries, to help poor countries harmed by climate change. Now comes the hard part of figuring out the details: This week, a special United Nations committee set up to plan the fund will meet for the first time, in Luxor, Egypt. Delegates will start negotiating which nations will be able to draw from the fund, where it will be housed, where the money will come from, and how much each country should pitch in. At this point, the fund is “an empty bucket,” says Lien Vandamme, a senior campaigner at the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law, who is in Egypt for the negotiations. “Everything is still open.” Other meetings will follow, and the committee will make its recommendations to the world this fall in Dubai at COP28.

If the past several decades of climate negotiations are anything to go on, the loss-and-damage fund will be poorly endowed, or filled with money that got moved over from some other fund and relabeled, or in the form of loans rather than grants. If that happens, it will likely be perceived by poorer nations as yet another inadequate response by the same countries that messed up the climate in the first place. And those that are wronged are unlikely to simply suffer in silence.

The loss-and-damage fund would be separate from what is currently the dominant form of climate funding that flows to the global South: money to help low-income nations reduce their emissions. And it would also be separate from “adaptation,” money to help areas prepare for disasters or avoid the harms of warming. Instead, the new fund would be provided by rich countries to compensate poor countries that have already suffered losses. In a word, it would be reparations.

The agreement to establish a fund for this purpose was initially opposed by some rich countries. The U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said in the fall that helping the developing world cope with climate change is “a moral obligation”—but he wanted that help to flow through existing funds and institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Developing countries, however, demanded a new, dedicated fund, and they ultimately prevailed. Almost all the details were left to be finalized at COP28 in Dubai, after the committee has worked to iron out specifics. But by agreeing that a loss-and-damage fund should exist, countries seem to be reluctantly acknowledging that they bear some moral accountability for climate change. “It is very clear that developed countries have a historical responsibility,” says Liane Schalatek, a climate-finance expert at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Washington, D.C., who is also in Luxor this week.

Funds are especially needed for the “day after” problems—the ongoing work of rebuilding and recovering after a flood or a heat wave is over and the emergency foreign aid has dried up, Mohamed Nasr, Egypt’s delegate to this week’s meeting, told me. People don’t just need tarp tents and bowls of rice. They need “social support, a way to return livelihoods,” Nasr said.

But how much is enough? One analysis suggests that the true scale of the financial losses due to climate change outside of the West may be as much as $580 billion a year by 2030, and some groups are considering a figure in that ballpark to be the minimum acceptable amount. Another analysis estimated that America owed $20 billion for global climate losses in 2022, a number that would rise to about $117 billion annually by 2030. Nasr demurred on naming specific amounts, suggesting that the workings of the fund be negotiated first. The needs are enormous, and mentioning figures at this point would only “scare people,” he said. “If you put a number on at the beginning, the focus will only be on the number,” he told me. But he did add that “it will be in the billions.”

Given that the standing UN goal for all types of climate funding from rich countries to poorer ones—$100 billion—has never been met, filling the loss-and-damage fund with hundreds of billions of dollars feels like an almost impossible lift. “It will be a huge challenge to get countries to agree on the amount that is needed,” says Leia Achampong of the European Network on Debt and Development. For many delegates from the global South, a key demand is that the fund not come in the form of loans. Many poor countries, including Pakistan, are already dealing with debt, which is affecting their ability to provide for their own citizens. More loans would just add to this debt burden. “If a country is in debt, you have the World Bank and the IMF calling for austerity, and the first thing that usually goes is the social safety net,” Schalatek told me.

A central issue going into the meeting in Egypt is that, despite broad agreement that rich countries responsible for the most emissions should pay in and that poor countries feeling the brunt of the effects should receive the funds, the globe cannot be neatly divided into just two categories—“developed” and “developing.” The trickiest case is undoubtedly China. Historically classified as a developing country, China is getting richer by the month and has emitted 11 percent of historical emissions, second only to the United States. At COP27, a coalition of developing countries rallied around China’s claim that it should be a recipient rather than a donor, to the consternation of the European negotiators. The U.S. will likely be loath to lavish money on a fund that China can draw from. Another outstanding question is whether contributions to the fund will be legal obligations rather than just voluntary donations. Anything with legal teeth would require congressional approval in the U.S., which would not be easy. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on the loss-and-damage negotiations.)

If the loss-and-damage fund are skimpy, communities and nations will likely seek restitution for their losses through national and international courts. An early test case began in 2015, when a Peruvian farmer sued the German energy giant RWE. The farmer, Saúl Luciano Lliuya, says his home is at risk of being washed away by meltwater from a glacier, and he wants the company to pay 0.47 percent of his adaptation costs, on the basis of a study that attributes that fraction of emissions to the company’s activities. RWE has denied culpability, and the case is ongoing. In an example of targeting nations rather than companies, Indigenous people from four low-lying Australian islands—Boigu, Poruma, Warraber and Masig—submitted a petition to the UN Human Rights Committee arguing that the country had done little to stop the climate change threatening their homes. In September, the committee agreed, ordering Australia to compensate the islanders for their losses.

But legal action might actually be a best-case scenario for the West. Poor, debt-ridden countries struggling with a climate crisis do not make for a stable globe. In 2021, a U.S. Department of Defense report on climate change warned that “the physical and social impacts of climate change transcend political boundaries, increasing the risk that crises cascade beyond any one country or region.” People who lose homes and livelihoods to climate-caused disasters will do what they can to improve their situation. As far back as 1995, the Bangladeshi dignitary Atiq Rahman warned, “if climate change makes our country uninhabitable, we will march with our wet feet into your living rooms.” Hundreds of millions of people may be displaced by 2050.

Mass migrations, resource scarcity, and poverty can lead to global conflicts. No country, no matter how rich, can build a seawall high enough to keep out that kind of chaos. If rich countries cannot be moved to lavishly fund the loss-and-damage bucket by appeals to justice, perhaps they will be moved by what has long been a more reliable motivating force: fear.

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On Sunday, news broke that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had abruptly fired the country’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, after Gallant pleaded for a delay in the judiciary-overhaul plan put forward by Netanyahu’s government. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis rolled out of bed and hit the streets, “believing their country’s democracy to be in peril,” my colleague Yair Rosenberg wrote yesterday in The Atlantic. I chatted with Yair about what led to this moment, and what some coverage of the issue can miss.

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

My 6-year-old son died. Then the anti-vaxxers found out. A classic American car is having an identity crisis. Why you fell for the fake pope coat

A Right-Wing Wish List

Kelli María Korducki: Can you walk us through the Netanyahu government’s plans for judicial reform and why they were so controversial?

Yair Rosenberg: Shortly after Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition was sworn in, it proposed an ambitious suite of legislation to reform Israel’s judiciary. In Israel and beyond, there’s expert and political consensus that Israel’s Supreme Court is one of the most powerful in the world, and that it ideally should be reformed to better balance power between the judiciary and elected officials. But the reform that the Netanyahu government put forward was more like a right-wing wish list. It hobbled the court in almost every way, from giving the government near-total control over judicial appointments to ending judicial review. This was less a reform than a revolution. In Israel, a country without a written constitution, it would remove the sole check on the government’s power.

There were no attempts to build national consensus around what was a fundamental reform to the democratic order of Israel. And you have to keep in mind that the members of Netanyahu’s coalition got 48.4 percent of the vote in the last election. They ended up with the majority of seats in parliament due to the quirks of the Israeli electoral system, but they don’t actually represent a majority of the votes. So they’re trying to enact this dramatic overhaul of Israel’s judiciary and its democratic system without any real popular mandate or buy-in.

Kelli: Netanyahu’s coalition first proposed its judiciary overhaul in January, two months before the mass protests that caught the world’s attention earlier this week. What happened in between?

Yair: More protests! They started in January, with tens of thousands of people in more liberal areas, and grew to hundreds of thousands of people across the country. And the movement kept picking up steam. Business and tech leaders began expressing concern that the judicial overhaul would harm the Israeli economy. Civil servants who normally don’t make political statements warned that it would weaken Israel’s institutions and international standing. And, most unusually, members of Israel’s elite army units began coming out and saying that the plan would undermine Israeli democracy as they see it, and that they would not serve in the Israeli army if it passed.

Kelli: So, in a state where military service is mandatory for citizens, service members said they would no longer comply.

Yair: Which brings us to Saturday night, when Netanyahu’s own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, saw this happening and essentially said, We need to pause this legislation. We need to negotiate and do something different, because it is threatening national cohesion. In response, Netanyahu fired Gallant on Sunday night—essentially, for saying what many, many people in the country had been saying.

Israel, for understandable historical reasons, is a very security-focused country. We’re approaching the period of the calendar when Ramadan and Passover intersect, which in the past has seen outbreaks of Israeli-Palestinian violence. Iran is still moving toward a nuclear weapon. And yet, in the midst of this, Netanyahu decided to fire the country’s top security official over a political dispute.

This frightened a lot of Israelis. And so, after midnight, protests unfolded across the country. By Monday morning, this culminated in a national strike. Businesses and schools closed, flights were grounded, and the country came to a halt. One hundred thousand protestors converged on the Israeli Knesset, where the government was set to vote on the legislation. That leads to the dramatic moment where Netanyahu finally comes down and says, I’m going to pause the process. He claimed he was doing so to enable all sides to work out an agreeable compromise, but many suspect he simply hopes the break will take the wind out of the protest movement’s sails so that he and his coalition can push through their original plan.

Kelli: You’ve noted in passing that there are elements of this story that U.S. media narratives don’t always capture. Can you summarize what they are?

Yair: Sometimes, people from outside of Israel think that the ongoing unrest boils down to a controversy over whether or not Israel should have an empowered judiciary. But actually, there is broad consensus in Israel that there should be some level of reform, because many agree that the country’s Supreme Court has evolved over time to become a bit too powerful. It’s just that Israelis vehemently disagree on how to do this fairly.

I would also say that people who follow Israeli affairs from afar tend to view the country through a binary political prism: pro or anti, for or against. But this event complicates that approach. Many people who are normally very supportive of Israel are also very supportive of these protests, because they see the attempt to completely overhaul the judiciary as attacking what they believe Israel should be. And on the other side, you have people who normally are sharply critical of Israel finding themselves sympathetic with the hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the streets protesting Netanyahu and his government. These critics and supporters of Israel are suddenly in this weird position of being on the same side. And I actually think this is healthy! We should not be viewing whole countries through an ideological lens.

Related:

Netanyahu flinched. What American liberals have learned from Israel’s protests

Today’s News

A federal judge ruled that former Vice President Mike Pence must appear in front of a grand jury that is investigating January 6 and Trump’s attempts to interfere in the 2020 election. A Maryland appellate court reinstated the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, who was the subject of the Serial podcast. Russia fired supersonic missiles off the coast of Japan in a training exercise.

Evening Read

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Universal History Archive / Getty

ChatGPT Has Imposter Syndrome

By Ross Andersen

Young people catch heat for being overly focused on personal identity, but they’ve got nothing on ChatGPT. Toy with the bot long enough, and you’ll notice that it has an awkward, self-regarding tic: “As an AI language model,” it often says, before getting to the heart of the matter. This tendency is especially pronounced when you query ChatGPT about its own strengths and weaknesses. Ask the bot about its capabilities, and it will almost always reply with something like:

“As an AI language model, my primary function is …”

“As an AI language model, my ability to …”

“As an AI language model, I cannot …”

The workings of AI language models are by nature mysterious, but one can guess why ChatGPT responds this way. The bot smashes our questions into pieces and evaluates each for significance, looking for the crucial first bit that shapes the logical order of its response. It starts with a few letters or an entire word and barrel-rolls forward, predicting one word after another until eventually, it predicts that its answer should end. When asked about its abilities, ChatGPT seems to be keying in on its identity as the essential idea from which its ensuing chain of reasoning must flow. I am an AI language model, it says, and this is what AI language models do.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

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Read. One of these seven books the critics were wrong about.

Watch. Season 2 of Yellowjackets, on Showtime, which understands the horror of toxic best friends.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Yair adds, “Next week is the Jewish holiday of Passover—or so you may have heard. But what if I told you that ‘Passover’ might be a mistranslation from the original Hebrew, and that many classical Jewish commentators understood the holiday’s name very differently, with different moral lessons? You can learn all about it in my Atlantic newsletter, Deep Shtetl.”

— Kelli

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Among the many difficulties imposed upon America by the pandemic, the scourge of anti-vaccine sentiment—and the preventable deaths caused as result—ranks among the most frustrating, especially for infectious-disease doctors like me.

People who are hospitalized with COVID-19 rarely refuse therapy, but acceptance of vaccines to help prevent infection has been considerably more limited. Seventy percent of Americans have received the initial complement of vaccine injections, and many fewer have received the boosters designed to address viral variants and confer additional protection. Why are so many people resistant to this potentially lifesaving treatment?  

Some explanations are unique to our era—the awful weaponization of science in a deeply partisan political environment during the age of social media, for instance. But the concept of vaccine hesitancy is not new. Such hesitancy is, in a larger sense, a rejection of science—a phenomenon that far predates the existence of vaccines.

One of the earliest documented controversies in science denialism comes from the field of astronomy. In the third century B.C., the Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model of the universe. The idea that the Earth and planets might revolve around the sun, rather than the other way around, was shocking at the time, and Aristarchus’s theory was quickly rejected in favor of models such as those put forth by Aristotle and Ptolemy, both of whom insisted that the Earth was the center of the universe. The fact that Aristotle and Ptolemy remain better known today than Aristarchus shows the force of the rejection. It would be some 2,000 years before the notion was seriously reconsidered.   

In the 1530s, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus developed his own heliocentric model based on astronomical observations. Copernicus is remembered today primarily for this perspective-changing discovery. But it’s worth noting that he delayed publication of his findings until 1543, the year of his death, perhaps for fear of scorn or religious objections.  

In the early 17th century, Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer known as the “father of modern astronomy,” recognized that explaining the celestial changes in the position of stars and sun over time required that the Earth revolve around the sun. Galileo fully and publicly supported the Copernican theory of a heliocentric universe, and condemnation from the Vatican was swift and harsh. He was tried by the Inquisition and threatened with excommunication if he did not recant. Rather than incur the wrath of the pope, he finally agreed that he was wrong. He spent the remainder of his life under house arrest. It would be another 180 years before the Church admitted that Galileo was right.

Rejections of scientific advances are found throughout the history of medicine. There have been four great advances in medicine over the past 200 years: anesthesia, antisepsis, antibiotics, and immunization. Not every advance was met with resistance. When the benefits of the advance have been obvious, there has tended to be little hesitation. Anesthesia and its cousin, analgesia, for instance, were rapidly accepted; they relieved pain, and the advantages were readily appreciated.  

Antisepsis had a stormier path to public acceptance. In the 19th century, English and Irish physicians recognized that puerperal sepsis (a dangerous infection in a mother after delivery of a baby) was likely a contagious condition that was spread from patient to patient either by the medical staff or the local environment. They suggested that improving hygiene would reduce the high rates of mortality that puerperal sepsis caused. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., a physician (and one of The Atlantic’s founders), presented a paper to the Boston Society for Medical Improvement titled “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever.” Holmes suggested that unwashed hands among the medical and nursing staff were responsible for transmitting puerperal fever. This did not sit well with the establishment. A prestigious Philadelphia obstetrician, Charles D. Meigs, declared Holmes’s findings to be nonsense and suggested that an increased number of cases among any physician was just bad luck.  

The physician who is most frequently recognized with establishing the contagious nature of this infection is a Hungarian obstetrician, Ignaz Semmelweis.  He noted that patients in the Vienna General Hospital who were cared for by physicians had a higher incidence of postpartum sepsis than those who were cared for by midwives. Semmelweis realized that physicians performed autopsies, whereas midwives did not, and that physicians did not wash their hands or clothing before moving from an autopsy to a delivery. (It was routine for them to attend deliveries in their bloodstained clothing, having come directly from the autopsy suite.) When he suggested simple hygiene measures such as handwashing, he was derided and eventually run out of town. The medical establishment was unwilling to accept that physicians—rather than bad air or host weaknesses—were responsible for spreading infections and harming patients.

Science denialism can work in the other direction too. When antibiotics, especially penicillin, were first introduced, they were rightly appreciated as miracle drugs. In the pre-antibiotic era, the leading cause of death among children was infectious diseases. The use of antibiotics was astoundingly successful against many, but not all, childhood diseases. The downside for this enthusiasm for treatment came when patients demanded antibiotics for conditions—such as viruses—that didn’t actually necessitate them. Fifty years ago, telling a patient that they had a virus and that penicillin was therefore of no use led to disappointment, disbelief, and even arguments from patients requesting antibiotics for simple colds. Many doctors gave in because it was simpler than spending time fighting with a patient. A consequence of the more indiscriminate use of antibiotics—which represents its own mini-genre of science denialism—has been increased bacterial resistance.

But of the four great advances, none has so broadly helped humanity, or suffered more from science denialism, than immunization. Most, but not all, of the vaccines that scientists have developed since the first immunizations in the 18th century have been developed against viruses. Of all viral infections, the most feared may well have been smallpox. Over the course of the 20th century alone, an estimated 300 million people died of smallpox. Smallpox is highly contagious and spares no age group or class. Its common form has an estimated overall mortality of roughly 30 percent, but the mortality of hemorrhagic smallpox—a more severe form of the disease—approaches 100 percent. Smallpox is also wildly contagious, a characteristic that is most evident when a previously unexposed population is exposed. Smallpox was unknown in the Americas before European explorers brought cases to the New World. The disease decimated the Indigenous populations of North America and South America as a result.

The early concept of immunization to prevent smallpox may have begun more than 1,000 years ago, in China. The history is contested, but some documents show that children would be made to inhale material from a ground-up, mature smallpox lesion scraped off of the body of the infected—a level of exposure that could trigger a person’s immune response to smallpox without causing a full-blown infection. A later technique, which involved scratching the skin of an uninfected individual with material from another person’s lesion, was observed by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul, who then brought this procedure to Europe. She was so impressed that she had her children immunized. Subsequently, an experiment was done in which six prisoners in London were immunized. Despite exposure to smallpox, none of them became ill.

Like many advances in medicine, smallpox immunization was met with some resistance, including worry that immunization might inadvertently spread the disease to others. This was an understandable reaction; the live smallpox virus was used, and a small percentage of inoculated individuals did develop full-blown disease and die. In 1721, there was an outbreak of smallpox in Boston. The writer and clergyman Cotton Mather urged widespread immunization but had only moderate success because of resistance from the local population.  (History complicates even the views of those who embrace science: Mather was also an ardent defender of the Salem witch trials.) Years later, a well-known case of immunization resistance occurred in Philadelphia. During an outbreak of smallpox in 1736, Benjamin Franklin’s 4-year-old son, Francis, became infected and died. Francis had not been immunized despite an opportunity to do so, and Franklin said he regretted the decision for the rest of his life.   

In the generations that followed, scientists built off of these earlier methods and eventually developed a stable and widely available smallpox vaccine. The global eradication of smallpox as a result remains one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of medicine. The last case of naturally occurring smallpox was reported more than 40 years ago.

Even so, vaccine hesitancy has persisted. In America, new vaccines for other diseases have continued to prompt their own waves of skepticism and hostility. And although science denialism is not pervasive in the way it once was centuries ago, it still rears its ugly head. The arrival of the COVID-19 vaccines brought pernicious vaccine sentiments into the spotlight. The reasons for this vehemence are many. For instance, some people who might accept the efficacy of a vaccine have such a fear of injections that they simply avoid seeking medical care until absolutely necessary. But this represents a minority of those who reject the vaccines.

A more common—and more insidious—force that pushes people away from lifesaving vaccines appears to be swelling distrust in expertise, which is both a political and cultural phenomenon. Vaccine resistance can be peddled by influential people in both liberal and conservative circles, but throughout the pandemic, right-wing anti-government organizations and television personalities in particular have promoted a stew of outrageous conspiracy theories about vaccines. Run-of-the-mill misinformation remains a problem too. Some people continue to believe that the COVID-19 vaccine will infect you and make you sick—this is not the case. Finally, of course, there are concerns about known and unknown side effects from the vaccination. Like many vaccines, the COVID shots are linked to serious health effects in extremely rare circumstances; for instance, Moderna’s and Pfizer’s mRNA shots are associated with a very small risk of heart inflammation. It is virtually impossible to prove that some side effect will not ever occur. But hundreds of millions of people have safely received the COVID vaccine in the United States alone.  

Perhaps the greatest disservice to vaccination has been the fraudulent claim that childhood vaccines cause autism. This claim was originally published in an otherwise respected medical journal in the 1990s, and has since been fully retracted. (The author lost his medical license.) Nevertheless, many people still believe this and have put their children at risk for serious illness as a result.

Our advances in science over the past two centuries have truly been extraordinary, but our society still suffers from the forces that reject reason and prevent our ability to take full advantage of discoveries that protect us all. And we need to push back against those who endanger others because they see opportunities for fame or profit in spreading dangerous disinformation. Until that happens, our species will continue to understand the world around us in fits and starts—with too many people dying, even when we know how to save them.

The Atlantic has named a new host for its flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic: Hanna Rosin, a former Atlantic writer who was a co-host of NPR’s Invisibilia and most recently the editorial director for audio at New York magazine. Hanna will bring her formidable talent and deep curiosity to Radio Atlantic, which will relaunch in the spring.

Radio Atlantic will resume a weekly cadence in late May. The show will have the same ambition as the magazine, which is to surface the most exciting and relevant ideas of the moment, whether through timely conversations or audio-rich reported stories. Like the magazine, it will feature a range of perspectives and journalism that makes you see the world differently.

“A good episode is one that gives you new insight, or a new way of thinking about a critical issue at exactly the moment when you, the listener, are looking for that guidance,” says Hanna.

As a writer at The Atlantic in the early 2010s, Hanna wrote a series of memorable, high-impact cover and feature stories probing how we exist in the world: about the end of men, overprotective parents, and fraying teen mental health. She has since the summer of 2020 been the editorial director for New York magazine’s audio unit, where she launched the shows Cover Story, Into It, and On With Kara Swisher, and oversaw the growth of Pivot. While at Slate, Hanna founded the section DoubleX and hosted the Waves podcast.

“Hanna is one of the most gifted journalists I’ve ever met,” says Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief. “She was an immensely successful feature writer for us, and so it was distressing when she left The Atlantic. But, of course, she succeeded wildly in podcasting, and it’s a great joy to welcome her back home to The Atlantic, where she will contribute greatly not only to our ambitious audio strategy, but to all of our journalism.”

The Atlantic is expanding its audio offerings in 2023 under the leadership of executive producer Claudine Ebeid, alongside Goldberg, executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, and managing editor Andrea Valdez. Earlier this month, The Atlantic launched the narrative podcast Holy Week about the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and how those seven days––one of the most fiery, disruptive, and contentious weeks in American history––diverted the course of a social revolution. All eight episodes of Holy Week are available now.

Other recent editorial hires include Stephanie McCrummen as a staff writer, who started at The Atlantic after nearly two decades at The Washington Post, and Laura Secor as a senior editor to direct coverage of global issues and foreign policy. Laura was a features editor for The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review, and previously a deputy editor at Foreign Affairs.