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Here is a history of work in six words: from jobs to careers to callings.

Until quite recently, we had little concept of “progress” in our labor. Around the world, people hunted or harvested, just as their parents and grandparents had. They hammered nails. They assembled gears and sewed thread and patched homes. Their work was a matter of subsistence and necessity; it was not a race for status or an existential search for meaning. These were jobs. And for hundreds of millions of people everywhere, work is still work—grueling or boring or exploited or poorly paid, or all of the above.

In the 19th century, the railroads and the telegraph forced American companies to change the way they organized their labor. In 1800, traveling from Manhattan to Chicago took, on average, four weeks; in 1857, it took two days. With goods and information moving faster than ever, firms headquartered in major cities had to track prices from Los Angeles to Miami. To conduct this full orchestra of operations, they built a new system for organizing labor. They needed managers. “As late as 1840, there were no middle managers in the United States,” Alfred Chandler observed in The Visible Hand, his classic history of the rise of America’s managerial revolution.

Rail and telegraphs made new kinds of businesses possible, including department stores, mail-order houses, and the national oil and steel behemoths. Large companies required massive, multilevel bureaucracies. And within these laborious labyrinths, workers could ascend from grunt to manager to executive. These corporations invented the modern journey of a career, that narrative arc bending toward a set of precious initials: VP, SVP, CEO.

As the managerial revolution created a sense of professional progress, the decline of organized religion and social integration in the 20th century left many Americans bereft of any sense of spiritual progress. For some, work rose to fill the void. Many highly educated workers in the white-collar economy feel that their job cannot be “just a job” and that their career cannot be “just a career”: Their job must be their calling.

What’s wrong with that? Perhaps nothing. Some people simply love their job, and it would be ridiculous for me to tell them that actually, they are quietly suffering from some disease they cannot perceive. But many of them are also adherents to a cult of productivity and achievement, wherein anything short of finding one’s vocational soulmate amounts to a wasted life. These workers have founded a new kind of religion—one that valorizes work, career, and achievement above all else. And it’s making them a little bit crazy.

I call this new religion “workism.” Workism is not a simple evil or virtue; rather, it’s a complex phenomenon. It is rooted in the belief that work can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion: community, meaning, self-actualization. And it is characterized by the irony that, in a time of declining trust in so many institutions, we expect more than ever from the companies that employ us—and that, in an age of declining community attachments, the workplace has, for many, become the last community standing. This might be why more companies today feel obligated to serve on the front lines in political debates and culture-war battles.

The credo that work should be the centerpiece of one’s identity quietly governs several stages of modern life. For many children and their parents, it has created an obsession with educational achievement that is igniting an anxiety crisis. For adults, it leads to overwork in the labor force and less time focused on family, friends, and personal pursuits.

In some cases, the worship of work squeezes out other values and relationships that are more conducive to a healthy life and community. In an era of diminishing attachments, career and work sometimes seem like the last truly universal virtues. In a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, roughly half of Americans said that the most important part of a fulfilling life is work that provides joy and meaning. Less than a third said the same about being in a committed relationship or having children. Well, one might say, that’s just one report. But this week, a widely circulated Wall Street Journal survey found that traditional values such as patriotism, marriage, and community seem to be falling out of favor. Although the headline and viral graphs almost certainly exaggerate the degree of decline, the underlying survey found that one virtue finished first, above tolerance, community, and even self-fulfillment: “hard work.”

I think we’re at the cusp of a fourth revolution in work. If I were to write the lede of a similar essay in 20 years, I would have to say, “Here is a history of work in eight words: from jobs to careers to callings to …” Except I’m not sure what the eighth word should be yet.

Today, work and workism are facing a double-barreled revolution—the remote-work phenomenon and the dawn of generative AI.

By snipping the tether between work and home, telecommuting is changing the way that millions of people work, the kinds of companies they start, and where they live. The immediate implications are already fascinating: Fewer commutes and empty offices have decimated public-transit revenue, buckled the commercial-real-estate industry, and triggered showdowns between in-office bosses and white-collar workers seeking flexibility in their schedule. But the second-order effects might be even more interesting. Remote work has encouraged many Americans to seek bigger homes to accommodate their home office, which has created a “donut effect” of plumped-up housing prices in the suburbs of many metro areas. This year, a new paper noted that female remote workers are more likely to intend to have a baby than their all-office counterparts, suggesting that Work From Home could increase fertility rates. Some data even suggest that WFH has encouraged men to pull back on working hours, possibly putting a dent in workism itself.

Imagining utopian scenarios is easy: Perhaps the flattening of the job market will make labor more equal around the country and around the world; perhaps the legacies of workplace sexism, ageism, ableism, and racism will come crumbling down with the demise of the office. But imagining dystopian scenarios is equally easy: Perhaps the disappearance of the workplace will increase modern anomie and loneliness. If community means “where you keep showing up,” then, for many people, the office is all that’s left. What happens when it goes the way of bowling leagues and weekly church attendance?

The other prong is AI. Over the past few years, news of fresh AI breakthroughs—in solving games, in predicting protein shapes, in mimicking human language—has come fast and furious. The release of ChatGPT and GPT-4, the latest large language model from OpenAI, has transformed the way millions of people think about the future of work. People once believed that although machines were talented at replicating human brawn, general intelligence and creativity were firmly in the “for humans only” category. But we may discover that the opposite is true: Text-to-image tools such as Midjourney give ordinary people with little artistic genius access to a superhuman savant of pastiche, allowing them to mix and match styles to create characters, design homes, and produce extraordinary images. ChatGPT, using GPT-4 technology, can write code, poetry, parodies, news articles, book summaries, idea outlines, literature reviews, bibliographies, and bespoke Wikipedia pages about obscure historical events. The implications of this kind of program for white-collar industries are both thrilling and terrifying.

Confidently predicting the future of any larval technology is a fool’s errand. I’ll give it a go anyway. In the 1994 paper “Household Appliances and the Use of Time,” the economists Sue Bowden and Avner Offer found that time-using technologies (such as TV) diffused faster throughout the consumer economy than time-saving technologies (such as vacuum cleaners and refrigerators). The reasons are complex; breadwinner husbands may have demanded TVs before vacuums because they didn’t clean the house. But Bowden and Offer conclude that time-using novelties might also spread faster because they delight people and confer status. By extension, one might expect that generative AI tools such as Midjourney and ChatGPT will be gangbusters consumer technologies before they are mainstream producer technologies. For the next few months, the most obvious AI use case for nonprogrammers will be making stuff to share on social media and group texts in the spirit of “lol these machines are still dumb” or “lol this is kind of amazing.” Generative AI will waste 1 billion hours of time before it saves 1 billion hours of time.

But eventually, I expect that the technological descendants of these tools really will prove revolutionary, bringing the modern workforce into its fourth age of work: from jobs to careers to callings to chimeras.

The chimerical age of work will have several components. First, as people become fluent in the language and faculties of their AI tools, work in almost every economic domain will represent a co-production between human and machine. (If you think of the internet as a kind of proto-AI that allows individuals to work with a database of collective intelligence, you could argue that we’re already in the initial stages of this chimera age.) It will be common for architects and illustrators to work with text-to-image AI, and for home buyers to use these tools to mock up their dream home and rooms. It will be de rigueur for consultants and writers to outline, research, and brainstorm with LLMs; steadfastly refusing to use these tools will, in time, seem as arbitrary as never using search engines. Software engineers will consider AI co-programmers to be as fundamental to their work as computer keyboards. “Was this done with AI?” will soon be as strange and redundant a question as “Was this done with an internet connection?” (Every technology incurs a backlash culture, and I also suspect that, just as the rise of streaming music coincided with the resurgence of vinyl records, the eerie ubiquity of AI-inflected work will create a niche market of bespoke, explicitly anti-AI products.)

The word chimera has two very different meanings. The first is a mythological creature composed of three different animals, and it is in that spirit that I’m predicting a future of human-machine co-productions. But a chimera is also an illusory dream—something profoundly hoped for that doesn’t come to pass.

The technologies that most empower humanity almost always produce a shadow ledger of pain. The steam engine unleashed the industrial revolution and brutally shortened life spans. Nuclear technology can power energy reactors or atomic bombs. The internet makes us productive and unproductive, delighted and miserable, informed and deluded. Like the future of everything else, the future of work will be, above all, messy.

This article has been excerpted from Derek Thompson’s forthcoming book, On Work.

Two years ago I published a book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America. The book explores how different historical sites across the United States—including monuments, memorials, and museums—reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery. After the book came out, one of the main questions I got from readers asked where public memory was being engaged with more proactively and thoughtfully than what we so often see here in America. I would frequently invoke Germany, citing the work it had done to memorialize the Holocaust. But there came a point where I realized that I was citing the memorials in Germany without having spent any time with the memorials in Germany.

So I traveled to Germany to examine its landscape of memory for myself. I visited the homes from which Jewish families were taken, the train stations from which they were deported, the concentration camps where they were held, the crematoriums where bodies were burned.

I had conversations with Jewish Germans as well as Americans living in Germany, in an effort to understand how we might place the way America memorializes slavery in conversation with the way Germany memorializes the Holocaust.

What I learned is that the story of German memorialization is complex, multifaceted, and still evolving. Just like the story of America’s.

-Clint Smith

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Caitlin Dickerson: So what did you expect to find in Germany? I mean, were you essentially going to pick up lessons for the U.S.? Were you starting to become a little bit skeptical of Germany as this ideal for reckoning and atonement? I mean, what did you have in mind as you set out on this trip?

Clint Smith: I think in part, I went to Germany to put it in conversation with the process of memorialization here in the United States.

Dickerson: I’m Caitlin Dickerson. Today on Radio Atlantic, staff writer Clint Smith on the Holocaust, America’s legacy of slavery, and what it means to memorialize tragedy.

Smith: So it wasn’t necessarily to compare and contrast as much as it was an attempt to say, okay, “What’s happening in Germany, what’s happening in the United States? In what ways are these processes in conversation with one another?” America in so many places fails to properly memorialize and remember and account for its relationship to the history of slavery; what’s a place that does this well?

Dickerson: So where in Germany did you go to try to figure this out?

Smith: I went to a range of different places, including the House of the Wannsee Conference, which is this idyllic mansion outside of Berlin where the leaders of the Nazi party got together to outline and plan the contours of the Final Solution.

Clint: I’m here standing outside of the House of the Wannsee Conference. Already by the time they met here, people had been killed in mass murders—but this is where they would plan out how they would kill millions more. There’s a profound sort of juxtaposition between the scenery and the idyllic nature of it, and the terrible thing that was planned inside of it. Behind it is this lake with sailboats that are slowly passing by. The water sort of lapping against the shore. Can hear birds and wind chimes. It’s a strange thing. It’s a very strange thing.

Smith: If you could say your name and your position...

Deborah Hartmann: Okay. So my name is Deborah Hartmann.

Smith: And one of the people that I spoke to when I went to the House of the Wannsee Conference was Deborah Hartmann, who is the director of that museum. And one of the things we talked about in particular that I found really fascinating was the need to focus on not only the victims of the Holocaust, but also the perpetrators.

Hartmann: I think we have to learn something about the perspective of the perpetrators and not only about the perpetrators but also about the bystanders, and all those who were in a way involved. And this could be the neighbor who was not a member of the Nazi party, but who was just hanging around and had a nice view out of the window seeing neighbors being deported.

Smith: Which was so many people.

Hartmann: Yeah, of course.

Smith: It’s interesting, because I think part of what this place does, in some ways, is humanizes both the victims and the perpetrators.

Hartmann: Yes. And it is important, I think—because, of course, they were human beings as well. And, you know, in the afternoon, people who participated in the mass shootings wrote nice letters to their families at home.

Smith: They killed people in the morning, and wrote letters to their family and their children in the afternoon.

Hartmann: Exactly. And this is maybe what’s so difficult for us to understand. And to live with it.

Dickerson: She’s challenging, in a few different ways, the oversimplification of narratives around the Holocaust. And also: Humanizing the perpetrators is worth doing, because actually, human beings perpetrated this. It wasn’t fantastical characters of evil, but actual human beings.

Smith: Yeah; I think one of the things that she takes very seriously in her work is ensuring that we are not falling into the trap of reducing the people who are part of this history into two-dimensional caricatures of themselves.

Hartmann: And you know, then you suddenly see that the history is much more ambivalent, and it’s much more complicated. And today, I think that the Germans actually are very proud of what they have achieved in terms of confrontation, like with the past and coming to terms. But I think it becomes difficult when they feel—I don’t know, the term in English—maybe relieved. You understand what I mean?

Smith: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Hartmann: Because then it can turn into a very problematic direction.

Smith: This idea that “We’ve already done it.”

Hartmann: I mean, here you can see: Okay, this is still very challenging, I think, for Germans. Even in the fourth generation today. How can it be okay that my family was somehow involved in those atrocities?

Deidre Berger: I mean, there wasn’t really a confrontation until the ’60s, when the young generation started asking their parents what they did during the war.

Smith: Deidre Berger is an American woman who’s lived in Germany for many years. And both in America and in Germany, she has been deeply involved in Jewish organizations and Jewish advocacy groups, to ensure that Jewish people and Jewish history are accounted for. And the two of us got together on a chilly day in October at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in downtown Berlin.

Berger: And we had the Nuremberg trials in the late ’40s. There were the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the early/mid-1960s. And still, most perpetrators were never accused or tried or charged. And there was the attitude of “Let’s leave it behind us.”

This—this went right into the heart of families, and it tore families apart. And so they’d rather not talk about it. When I came to Germany in the mid-1980s, there was not much of a confrontation within families. So it took a very long time. A lot of the international climate was such that I think more of an understanding evolved, at least in the German political elite, of the importance of confronting the Holocaust, and also on the grassroots level.

So the 1960s is when the grassroots movement started in Germany to try and understand better what had happened in my town, what happened to the Jews. And there were quite a lot of good-minded Germans who pursued projects, who invited former members of their community who were Jewish, back to their towns. And out of this movement grew the idea that there needed to be a national monument. So it was a complicated conglomeration of interests that led to the establishment of this monument. I don’t know that there was one government who said, “You have to do this,” but it was an understanding in Germany that this was important to have a national symbol of recognition of German guilt for what had happened.

Dickerson: Clint, what does this monument—this symbol of recognition that she’s describing—actually look like?

Smith: So, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a 200,000-square-foot memorial at the heart of downtown Berlin. And when I say at the heart of downtown Berlin, I really mean it. It’s almost as if a massive memorial to slavery was placed in front of the White House. That’s sort of the first thing you notice. And it’s made up of more than 2,000 stone columns that are of different heights. And as you walk through the stone columns, it’s almost maze-like. And the ground beneath the columns rises and falls like waves, and so at different points within the space, you know, you have different amounts of light. So sometimes as your body moves down, it’ll get darker and darker.

And I think it’s a place that is meant to be haunting and overwhelming. But what’s also true is that it is a place that has become such an enmeshed part of the landscape. People are driving to work, people are walking their dogs, people are running. There are people who have obviously come there to engage with the space. And so I would see people who were crying and holding hands, sort of gently touching the stones as if it could sort of transport them back to this moment. There were also small children who were playing hide and seek—and so different people engage with the space in fundamentally different ways. And I think in some ways, that’s inevitable. But it’s also something that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

There are many people who’ve commented that the very name is too passive—the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. That it doesn’t talk about who did the murdering. There are those who say it’s too abstract. There are no names on the columns, but there are also those who believe that its size and its scale and its scope is unlike anything that any other country has ever done.

Smith: Do you remember when you first came here—when you first saw it and experienced it?

Berger: Yeah, when it was opened in 2005. I find it…very cold. And I’m not sure that I need this much concrete detail with all these stones to grasp the dimensions of this crime. But different people have different reactions. I think in the Jewish community, my reaction was fairly widespread. But on the other hand, I mean—I think there was a certain acceptance and degree of relief, almost, that there was a Holocaust monument that was finally erected in the heart of Berlin, very close to the German Parliament.

Smith: Oh, the German Parliament.

Berger: And that’s just on the other side, basically. And that was meaningful.

Smith: There’s nothing that Japan has built to account for Japanese imperialism of this scale. There’s nothing that the United States has built to account for a history of Indigenous genocide or chattel slavery. You know—this sort of thing at this size doesn’t exist anywhere [else]. And so different people fall on different ends of the spectrum about whether they think it is a space that is a net positive or not, whether it’s a place that does more good or more harm. And that was one of the things that I learned a lot from my conversation with Deidre Berger and others.

Berger: I’m not complaining, I think it is quite remarkable. Let’s keep in mind that in the center of a major city, a country acknowledges its guilt at genocide.

Dickerson: Berger talks about this desire already in the 1940s among some to move on and to forget. I’m interested in that impulse. I remember interviewing David Romo. He’s a historian of the U.S.-Mexico border and actually found that it was the U.S. Border Patrol that began using Zyklon B in its own gas chambers. That helped to inspire German scientists, who then brought them to Germany, turned up the potency of—of the solution and—and used it to kill Jewish people. He talked about amnesia and about forgetting as a response to shame—on both the sides of the perpetrators, but also the victims. It sounds like you’ve been thinking a lot about just how dangerous that can be.

Smith: Yeah;, I think that we have seen the direct implications of that. I mean, here in the United States, there was a very intentional, proactive attempt to distort and push aside the story of chattel slavery and what the Civil War was fought over. The idea perpetuated by the widows and the sisters and the mothers—who lost their husbands, brothers, who lost their sons, their nephews—that grief animated a desire to tell a very different story of who these men were and what they had died for. Because they didn’t want to remember their loved ones as someone who died perpetuating evil. They wanted to remember them with love. They began to talk about how slavery wasn’t central to the Civil War. How even if slavery had been central to the Civil War, it wasn’t even that bad; it was a benign or even a civilizing institution. And even if someone wasn’t actively perpetuating and disseminating misrepresentations about the Civil War and slavery, what there was was silence about it. And it’s interesting, because in Germany, there was its own version of silence after the end of the war—and it took generations before these monuments would be built. And this silence was eradicated.

Dickerson: Clint, you saw a lot of memorials while you were in Germany. Which ones stuck out to you most?

Smith: I remember the first time I saw the Stolpersteine, which are the brass stones that are placed in front of the former residences, or places of worship or places of work, of people who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis.

It was started by a guy named Gunter Demnig in 1996, whose own father was a Nazi soldier. And in many ways, this art project that he began seems to be a part of his own contrition.

And so these brass stones, these 10-by-10-centimeter stones, are placed in front of these homes—and they have the birthday, the death date, the deportation date of the people who were taken from these homes. This is the largest decentralized memorial in the world. And you’ll be walking down the streets of Berlin, and there will be two stumbling stones. And then you walk a little further down, and in front of another home there will be four. And in front of another home there will be seven. In front of another home, there will be 12.

Smith: Where are you from originally in the States?

Jennifer Neal: Uh, short answer: We moved a lot.

Smith: Got it.

Neal: But I tell everybody I’m from Chicago, because that’s the last American city I lived in before I left.

Smith: I met up with Jennifer Neal, who is an author and a journalist who lives in Berlin, calls Chicago home, and is a Black woman who is thinking about how Germany memorializes its past and is comparing it to how the United States is remembering its own past. And one of the things we talked about was the Stolpersteine and how prevalent they are, and in so many ways how effective they are.

Neal: I love that memorial, because it doesn’t give anybody an excuse to forget. And if you are one of those people who lives in the building that was formerly occupied by that victim, you see that every single day. And I think it’s one of the most brilliant memorials anywhere.

Smith: Hmm. Do you think that we could do something like that in the States? You know, I can’t help but wonder what a version of that tied to slavery would look like.

Neal: I mean, I’d be extremely curious to see what that looked like. I think in general, the United States hasn’t done jack shit enough to atone for slavery. I mean, where to begin? I think that’s the real question. I would love to see something along the lines of the Stolpersteine done in the United States, but I wouldn’t want it to stop there. I would want to see memorials like that all over the South and the North as well, to commemorate how slaves escaped from the South and went and moved to the North. I would love to see memorials like that to commemorate the victims who were forcibly sterilized in the United States.

I would love to see memorials to the victims of white flight and the housing crisis in Chicago. I would love to see memorials to the Great Migration. I would love to see memorials of all sorts like that. Will that happen? That’s where the question mark is.

Smith: It’s almost like if we did it, it would be the entire street—you know, because it’s 250 years. I mean, in front of Monticello. Like, what would that do to somebody when they entered that place?

Neal: Well, yeah; that’s a really powerful idea, because I know that a lot of the plantations have been rebranded as, like, venues for weddings and parties. And there are still so many people who don’t seem to understand or know why the U.S. Civil War was fought to begin with. And these plantations don’t really seem to be advertising what happened there. I think it’s also part of the problem.

Smith: But not everybody’s a huge fan of the stumbling stones or how ubiquitous they are. And Deidre Berger has her own complicated feelings about them.

Berger: Why should we be stepping on the memories of the victims? If anyone it should be perpetrators, although I’m not one for revenge or vindication, I don’t think we should step on people, whatever kind of person they were. There should be plaques on the wall. Why aren’t they? Because most of the owners of buildings wouldn’t accept, even to this day, a plaque saying Here’s where a Jewish family lived. And that’s the truth. And that’s not what people talk about. There’s a lot of reverence sometimes for this project that I’ve encountered, and people who work on it—sort of “I’ve done my penance now.” There’s enormous projections with this project on dead Jews.

Would it work in the States? I just don’t know. I’m not sure that it would, because there’s not a feeling of penance in the same way—of responsibility, unfortunately. And the time span [since the Civil War] is much further. I mean why shouldn’t we? But it’s the reality.

Dickerson: So, Clint, you went to Germany to better understand how it remembers the Holocaust and to put these two very different sets of circumstances in conversation with one another. In the United States, because of the very specific way in which slaves had been extracted from their homes and then were further separated from family, people pretty much know, right—as much as you and I do—that we’re the descendants of enslaved people. And the story often ends there.

You don’t have people who can walk around and tell their relatives’ very specific story from the beginning. I wonder if that plays a role. And can you talk about some of the other differences between the ways that they remember this past?

Smith: Yeah. You know, the most obvious is that there are still people who are alive today who survived the Holocaust. Another big difference is that in Germany there just aren’t many Jewish people left. Less than 200,000 Jewish people in Germany—which is less than a quarter of a percent of the population. And that’s very different than in the United States, where there are 40 million Black people.

Dickerson: Right. And I wonder, you know, did you come away thinking that anything like what’s happened in Germany could happen in the United States? And what would that take?

Smith: I think in the United States, it’s a question of scale, right? I mean, there are people in different parts of the United States who are building memorials and museums that are meant to directly account for this history. You know, I think about the Witness Stone Project in Connecticut, that was started by a group of middle-school and high-school educators who, along with their students—having been inspired by the Stolpersteine in Germany—would put down similar stones in places where enslaved people lived. And they’ve been doing that project for several years. It is happening.

And I think what is true is what I think is true in Germany: that the most meaningful monuments don’t necessarily have to be state sanctioned. I think so often, the most important memorials and museums and monuments are the ones that are created in local communities. And it is ordinary people who will be the ones to help this country see its history with clear eyes and honesty, even when this country tries to look the other way.

Dickerson: I mean will you continue to invoke Germany in your talks, and will you continue to think of it as a type of model for remembering the past?

Smith: I will continue to invoke Germany, though with a level of nuance and an additional acknowledgement of its complexity than perhaps I did before. And my hope is to continue thinking about this question. I’ve kind of become obsessed with how people remember the past.

Dickerson: I even wonder if this nuance makes it feel more accessible to Americans. You know, it’s not the case that all of German society rallied around these memorials, that everybody agreed that it was the right way to go. There’s something that makes it feel more accessible as a source of inspiration, knowing that it was fraught work. It still is today. And yet, you know, it’s been done again and again.

Smith: Yeah, it makes it feel less distant; it makes it feel less unachievable. You know, we’re in a moment right now where reckoning looks different than it has at any other point in my lifetime. Which isn’t to say it has been linear or perfect, or without backlash. But even amid the backlash, I think [it] still reflects an opportunity and a moment that is ripe for these sorts of memorials and monuments to come about.

Dickerson: Thanks so much, Clint. I really appreciate this conversation.

Smith: Thank you so much. I appreciate you having it with me.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez and Theo Balcomb, with editing from Claudine Ebeid. Thanks to producer Ethan Brooks and our engineer, Rob Smierciak. I’m Caitlin Dickerson.

The concern, as Edward Teller saw it, was quite literally the end of the world. He had run the calculations, and there was a real possibility, he told his Manhattan Project colleagues in 1942, that when they detonated the world’s first nuclear bomb, the blast would set off a chain reaction. The atmosphere would ignite. All life on Earth would be incinerated. Some of Teller’s colleagues dismissed the idea, but others didn’t. If there were even a slight possibility of atmospheric ignition, said Arthur Compton, the director of a Manhattan Project lab in Chicago, all work on the bomb should halt. “Better to accept the slavery of the Nazi,” he later wrote, “than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.”

I offer this story as an analogy for—or perhaps a contrast to—our present AI moment. In just a few months, the novelty of ChatGPT has given way to utter mania. Suddenly, AI is everywhere. Is this the beginning of a new misinformation crisis? A new intellectual-property crisis? The end of the college essay? Of white-collar work? Some worry, as Compton did 80 years ago, for the very future of humanity, and have advocated pausing or slowing down AI development; others say it’s already too late.

In the face of such excitement and uncertainty and fear, the best one can do is try to find a good analogy—some way to make this unfamiliar new technology a little more familiar. AI is fire. AI is steroids. AI is an alien toddler. (When I asked for an analogy of its own, GPT-4 suggested Pandora’s box—not terribly reassuring.) Some of these analogies are, to put it mildly, better than others. A few of them are even useful.

Given the past three years, it’s no wonder that pandemic-related analogies abound. AI development has been compared to gain-of-function research, for example. Proponents of the latter work, in which potentially deadly viruses are enhanced in a controlled laboratory setting, say it’s essential to stopping the next pandemic. Opponents say it’s less likely to prevent a catastrophe than to cause one—whether via an accidental leak or an act of bioterrorism.

At a literal level, this analogy works pretty well. AI development really is a kind of gain-of-function research—except algorithms, not viruses, are the things gaining the functions. Also, both hold out the promise of near-term benefits: This experiment could help to prevent the next pandemic; this AI could help to cure your cancer. And both come with potential, world-upending risks: This experiment could help to cause a pandemic many times deadlier than the one we just endured; this AI could wipe out humanity entirely. Putting a number to the probabilities for any of these outcomes, whether good or bad, is no simple thing. Serious people disagree vehemently about their likelihood.

[Read: Bird flu leaves the world with an existential choice]

What the gain-of-function analogy fails to capture are the motivations and incentives driving AI development. Experimental virology is an academic undertaking, mostly carried out at university laboratories by university professors, with the goal at least of protecting people. It is not a lucrative enterprise. Neither the scientists nor the institutions they represent are in it to get rich. The same cannot be said when it comes to AI. Two private companies with billion-dollar profits, Microsoft (partnered with OpenAI) and Google (partnered with Anthropic), are locked in a battle for AI supremacy. Even the smaller players in the industry are flooded with cash. Earlier this year, four top AI researchers at Google quit to start their own company, though they weren’t exactly sure what it would do; about a week later, it had a $100 million valuation. In this respect, the better analogy is …

Social media. Two decades ago, there was fresh money—lots of it—to be made in tech, and the way to make it was not by slowing down or waiting around or dithering about such trifles as the fate of democracy. Private companies moved fast at the risk of breaking human civilization, to hell with the haters. Regulations did not keep pace. All of the same could be said about today’s AI.

[Read: Money will kill ChatGPT’s magic]

The trouble with the social-media comparison is that it undersells the sheer destructive potential of AI. As damaging as social media has been, it does not present an existential threat. Nor does it appear to have conferred, on any country, very meaningful strategic advantage over foreign adversaries, worries about TikTok notwithstanding. The same cannot be said of AI. In that respect, the better analogy is …

Nuclear weapons. This comparison captures both the gravity of the threat and where that threat is likely to originate. Few individuals could muster the colossal resources and technical expertise needed to construct and deploy a nuclear bomb. Thankfully, nukes are the domain of nation-states. AI research has similarly high barriers to entry and similar global geopolitical dynamics. The AI arms race between the U.S. and China is under way, and tech executives are already invoking it as a justification for moving as quickly as possible. As was the case for nuclear-weapons research, citing international competition has been a way of dismissing pleas to pump the brakes.

But nuclear-weapons technology is much narrower in scope than AI. The utility of nukes is purely military; and governments, not companies or individuals, build and wield them. That makes their dangers less diffuse than those that come from AI research. In that respect, the better analogy is …

Electricity. A saw is for cutting, a pen for writing, a hammer for pounding nails. These things are tools; each has a specific function. Electricity does not. It’s less a tool than a force, more a coefficient than a constant, pervading virtually all aspects of life. AI is like this too—or it could be.

[Read: What have humans just unleashed?]

Except that electricity never (really) threatened to kill us all. AI may be diffuse, but it’s also menacing. Not even the nuclear analogy quite captures the nature of the threat. Forget the Cold War–era fears of American and Soviet leaders with their fingers hovering above little red buttons. The biggest threat of superintelligent AI is not that our adversaries will use it against us. It’s the superintelligent AI itself. In that respect, the better analogy is …

Teller’s fear of atmospheric ignition. Once you detonate the bomb—once you build the superintelligent AI—there is no going back. Either the atmosphere ignites or it doesn’t. No do-overs. In the end, Teller’s worry turned out to be unfounded. Further calculations demonstrated that the atmosphere would not ignite—though two Japanese cities eventually did—and the Manhattan Project moved forward.

No further calculations will rule out the possibility of AI apocalypse. The Teller analogy, like all the others, only goes so far. To some extent, this is just the nature of analogies: They are illuminating but incomplete. But it also speaks to the sweeping nature of AI. It encompasses elements of gain-of-function research, social media, and nuclear weapons. It is like all of them—and, in that way, like none of them.

Last December, during a Christmas Eve celebration with my in-laws in California, I observed what I now realize was the future of COVID for older people. As everyone crowded around the bagna cauda, a hot dipping sauce shared like fondue, it was clear that we, as a family, had implicitly agreed that the pandemic was over. Our nonagenarian relatives were not taking any precautions, nor was anyone else taking precautions to protect them. Endive spear in hand, I squeezed myself in between my 94-year-old grandfather-in-law and his spry 99-year-old sister and dug into the dip.

We all knew that older people bore the brunt of COVID, but the concerns seemed like a relic from earlier in the pandemic. The brutal biology of this disease meant that they disproportionately have fallen sick, been hospitalized, and died. Americans over 65 make up 17 percent of the U.S. population, but they have accounted for three-quarters of all COVID deaths. As the death count among older people began to rise in 2020, “a lot of my patients were really concerned that they were being exposed without anyone really caring about them,” Sharon Brangman, a geriatrician at SUNY Upstate University Hospital, told me.

But even now, three years into the pandemic, older people are still in a precarious position. While many Americans can tune out COVID and easily fend off an infection when it strikes, older adults continue to face real threats from the illness in the minutiae of their daily life: grocery trips, family gatherings, birthday parties, coffee dates. That is true even with the protective power of several shots and the broader retreat of the virus. “There is substantial risk, even if you’ve gotten all the vaccines,” Bernard Black, a law professor at Northwestern University who studies health policy, told me. More than 300 people still die from COVID each day, and the overwhelming majority of them are older. People ages 65 and up are currently hospitalized at nearly 11 times the rate of adults under 50.

Compounding this sickness are all the ways that, COVID aside, this pandemic has changed life for older adults. Enduring severe isolation and ongoing caregiver shortages, they have been disproportionately harmed by the past few years. Not all of them have experienced the pandemic in the same way. Americans of retirement age, 65 and older, are a huge population encompassing a range of incomes, health statuses, living situations, and racial backgrounds. Nevertheless, by virtue of their age alone, they live with a new reality: one in which life has become more dangerous—and in many ways worse—than it was before COVID.

The pandemic was destined to come after older Americans. Their immune systems tend to be weaker, making it harder for them to fight off an infection, and they are more likely to have comorbidities, which further increases their risk of severe illness. The precarity that many of them already faced going into 2020—poverty, social isolation and loneliness, inadequate personal care—left them poorly equipped for the arrival of the novel coronavirus. More than 1 million people lived in nursing homes, many of which were densely packed and short on staff when COVID tore through them.

A major reason older people are still at risk is that vaccines can’t entirely compensate for their immune systems. A study recently published in the journal Vaccines showed that for vaccinated adults ages 60 and over, the risk of dying from COVID versus other natural causes jumped from 11 percent to 34 percent within a year of completing their primary shot series. A booster dose brings the risk back down, but other research shows that it wears off too. A booster is a basic precaution, but “not one that everyone is taking,” Black, a co-author of the study, told me. Booster uptake among older Americans for the reengineered “bivalent” shots is the highest of all age groups, but still, nearly 60 percent have not gotten one.

For every COVID death, many more older people develop serious illness. Risk increases with age, and people older than 70 “have a substantially higher rate of hospitalizations” than those ages 60 to 69, Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Unlike younger people, most of whom fully recover from a bout with COVID, a return to baseline health is less guaranteed for older adults. In one study, 32 percent of adults over 65 were diagnosed with symptoms that lasted well beyond their COVID infection. Persistent coughs, aches, and joint pain can linger long after serious illness, together with indirect impacts such as loss of muscle strength and flexibility, which can affect older people’s ability to be independent, Rivers said. Older COVID survivors may also have a higher risk of cognitive decline. In some cases, these ailments could be part of long COVID, which may be more prevalent in older people.

Certainly, some older adults are able to make a full recovery. Brangman said she has “old and frail” geriatric patients who bounced back after flu-like symptoms, and younger ones who still experience weakness and fatigue. Still, these are not promising odds. The antiviral Paxlovid was supposed to help blunt the wave of old people falling sick and ending up in the hospital—and it can reduce severe disease by 50 to 90 percent. But unfortunately, it is not widely used; as of July, just a third of Americans 80 or older took Paxlovid.

The reality is that as long as the virus continues to be prevalent, older Americans will face these potential outcomes every time they leave their home. That doesn’t mean they will barricade themselves indoors, or that they even should. Still, “every decision that we make now is weighing that balance between risk and socialization,” Brangman said.

Long before the pandemic, the threat of illness was already very real for older people.  Where America has landed is hardly a new way of life but rather one that is simply more onerous. “One way to think about it is that this is a new risk that’s out there” alongside other natural causes of death, such as diabetes and heart failure, Black said. But it’s a risk older Americans can’t ignore, especially as the country has dropped all COVID precautions. Since Christmas Eve, I have felt uneasy about how readily I normalized putting so little effort into protecting my nonagenarian loved ones, despite knowing what might happen if they got sick. For older people, who must contend with the peril of attending similar gatherings, “there’s sort of no good choice,” Black said. “The world has changed.”

But this new post-pandemic reality also includes insidious effects on older people that aren’t directly related to COVID itself. Those who put off nonemergency visits to the doctor earlier in the pandemic, for example, risked worsening their existing health conditions. The first year of the pandemic plunged nearly everyone into isolation, but being alone created problems for older adults that still persist. Before the pandemic, the association between loneliness and higher mortality rates, increased cardiovascular risks, and dementia among older adults was already well established. Increased isolation during COVID amplified this association.

The consequences of isolation were especially profound for older adults with physical limitations, Naoko Muramatsu, a community-health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me. When caregivers or family members were unable to visit, people who required assistance for even the smallest tasks, such as fetching the mail and getting dressed, had no options. “If you don’t walk around and if you don’t do anything, we can expect that cognitive function will decline,” Muramatsu said; she has observed this firsthand in her research. One Chinese American woman, interviewed in a survey of older adults living alone with cognitive impairment during the pandemic, described the debilitating effect of sitting at home all day.“I am so useless now,” she told the interviewer. “I am confused so often. I forget things.”  

Even older adults who have weathered the direct and indirect effects of the pandemic still face other challenges that COVID has exacerbated. Many have long relied on personal caregivers or the staff at nursing facilities. These workers, already scarce before the pandemic, are even more so now because many quit or were affected by COVID themselves. “Long-term care has been in a crisis situation for a long time, but it’s even worse now,” Muramatsu said, noting that many home care workers are older adults themselves. Nursing homes nationwide now have nearly 200,000 fewer employees compared with March 2020, which is especially concerning as the proportion of Americans over age 65 explodes.

Older people won’t have one single approach to contending with this sad reality. “Everybody is trying to figure out what is the best way to function, to try to have some level of everyday life and activity, but also keep your risk of getting sick as low as possible,” Brangman said. Some of her patients are still opting to be cautious, while others consider this moment their “only chance to see grandchildren or concerts or go to family gatherings.” Either way, older Americans will have to wrestle with these decisions without so many of their peers who have died from COVID.

Again, many of these people did not have it great before the pandemic, even if the rest of the country wasn’t paying attention. “We often don’t provide the basic social support that older people need,” Kenneth Covinsky, a clinician-researcher at the UCSF Division of Geriatrics, said. Rather, ageism, the willful ignorance or indifference to the needs of older people, is baked into American life. It is perhaps the main reason older adults were so badly affected by the pandemic in the first place, as illustrated by the delayed introduction of safety precautions in nursing homes and the blithe acceptance of COVID deaths among older adults. If Americans couldn’t bring themselves to care at any point over the past three years, will they ever?

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

Question of the Week

What are your thoughts on cities versus suburbs?

Feel free to discuss their past, present, or future; their pluses and minuses; their respective roles in American life; or where you choose to live and why. As always, I encourage but do not require answers that draw on your own life experiences, so feel free to opine on specific cities or suburbs. And if nothing immediately comes to mind, perhaps the fodder below will prove inspiring.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

I grew up in the suburbs. And I have lived in the city––in New York City; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Paris; and Seville, plus significant stretches in San Francisco, Munich, and Berlin.

I see the appeal of both kinds of places. My “hometown” of Orange County, California, is about as good as it gets for suburbia: It has the best stretch of beaches in Southern California and a significant immigrant population from Mexico, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China, India, which provides cultural diversity—and also better food than many metropolises.. And my 20s and 30s happened to coincide with an urban renaissance that I didn’t see coming as an adolescent in the high-crime 1990s.

Gangsta rap, movies about the crack wars, and the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed were my earliest impressions of city life. Then I graduated from college in 2002 into a country where cities were suddenly safer than they’d been in a generation––and to the surprise of many, they kept getting safer and safer for years.

“No place feels so changed as the city of Los Angeles,” the journalist Sam Quinones wrote in late 2014. He explained:

In 2014, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that gang crime had dropped by nearly half since 2008. In 2012, L.A. had fewer total homicides (299) citywide than it had gang homicides alone in 2002 (350) and in 1992 (430). For the most part, Latino gang members no longer attack blacks in ways reminiscent of the Jim Crow South. Nor are gangs carjacking, assaulting, robbing, or in a dozen other ways blighting their own neighborhoods.

Quinones described the significance of the change this way:

This has amounted to an enormous tax cut for once-beleaguered working class neighborhoods. Stores are untagged, walls unscarred. Graffiti, which sparked gang wars for years, is almost immediately covered up. Once-notorious parks—El Salvador Park in Santa Ana, Smith Park in San Gabriel, Bordwell Park in Riverside are a few examples—are now safe places for families … The changes on Southern California streets over the last few years are unlike anything I’ve seen in my decades of writing about gangs. For the first time, it seems possible to tame a plague that once looked uncontrollable—and in doing so allow struggling neighborhoods, and the kids who grow up in them, a fighting chance.

Unfortunately, homicides in cities across the country spiked with the onset of the pandemic. Additionally, rising homelessness and addiction pose challenges to many city-dwellers’ quality of life.

In the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Uranga captures the consequences in a harrowing article about drug use and crime in L.A.’s public-transportation system:

Drug use is rampant in the Metro system. Since January, 22 people have died on Metro buses and trains, mostly from suspected overdoses—more people than all of 2022. Serious crimes—such as robbery, rape and aggravated assault—soared 24% last year...

“Horror.” That’s how one train operator recently described the scenes he sees daily. He declined to use his name because he was not authorized to talk to the media. Earlier that day, as he drove the Red Line subway, he saw a man masturbating in his seat and several people whom he refers to as “sleepers,” people who get high and nod off on the train.

“We don’t even see any business people anymore. We don’t see anybody going to Universal. It’s just people who have no other choice than to ride the system, homeless people and drug users.”

Commuters have abandoned large swaths of the Metro train system … For January, ridership on the Gold Line was 30% of the pre-pandemic levels, and the Red Line was 56% of them. The new $2.1-billion Crenshaw Line that officials tout as a bright spot with little crime had fewer than 2,100 average weekday boardings that month … The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported deaths linked to fentanyl rose from 109 in 2016 to 1,504 in 2021, amounting to a 1,280% increase.

Josh Barro argues in Very Serious that such transit-system woes in L.A. and elsewhere ought to be of greater concern to leftists who ostensibly want more Americans to live in cities and take public transportation. He writes:

People on the left have simply grown uncomfortable talking about the idea that crime—even less-serious crime—imposes significant social costs and requires policing and sometimes incarceration to address it. It’s more fun to talk about zoning. But this isn’t a problem that will be fixed with zoning. What’s needed on the subways is enforcement of rules: We need to go back to arresting people for illegal activity on transit, including fare-beating and for public drug use. If you’re using the subway as a place to sleep instead of as transportation, you’re trespassing. The subway is some of the most expensive and useful public infrastructure we have, and moving problems of homelessness and drug use and other disorder elsewhere, even into the streets, is not simply passing the buck—it’s moving the buck to a place where it imposes a lower social cost...

I realize that sounds cold, but letting homeless people and addicts take over the subway does not address problems of homelessness or addiction. It would be great if LA could move everyone without a home into permanent supportive housing, but the city has been unable to translate billions of dollars of taxpayer funds into an effective solution to the problem of homelessness. The immediate options facing LA are that it can have a terrible homelessness and addiction problem and a subway that people are willing to ride, or it can have a terrible homelessness and addiction problem and a subway that people are unwilling to ride. So far, the city is choosing the latter.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, where I have personally had my car window smashed while it was parked overnight, S.F. local Snehal Antani took to Twitter last week to complain about how a colleague was treated while visiting the city:

A teammate visiting San Francisco for an offsite called me frantically last night. After dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf they came back to a smashed car window and 2 stolen backpacks. $10K in gear lost, passports gone, etc. … “Laptop bags were in the trunk, nothing visible from the street”, a typical description of a smash & grab, yet thieves were able to find the specific car and knew to pull the rear seat down and reach into the trunk… how?

I explained, “these aren’t homeless [randomly] smashing windows. These are professionals using blue tooth [sic] scanners to find laptop bags. And idle iPad, Bose headphones, etc all emit Bluetooth. And let me guess, it was the rear window facing the street, because thieves drive up to the car, open their door, then smash+grab. A witness must be directly behind the thieves [to] see anything, all other views are blocked.”

My teammate said his companion was on the phone with the police, to which I said, “they don’t care. Maybe they’ll show up in a few hours, they’ll likely make you go to the station, but this happens thousands of times per week.” [Editor’s note: According to San Francisco crime data from across 2022, thefts from vehicles averaged less than 400 a week last year.] So now I need to include a pre-visit security brief to people traveling San Francisco. This is a big reason I’m hesitant to open an office in the city versus keeping a remote team and occasionally meeting up at a location to whiteboard. And my teammates will be scarred forever, being robbed hits you at your core, especially when it’s thousands of dollars of loss. There is no downtown recovery without an aggressive push for safety @LondonBreed. The next mayor will win by running on a simple platform: 1, safe neighborhoods; 2, Clean Streets; 3, great public schools

In a series of replies (some of which have since been deleted), John Hamasaki, a former San Francisco police commissioner and a current district-attorney candidate, wrote:

Interesting. Would getting your car window broken and some stuff stolen leave you “scarred forever”?

Is this what the suburbs do to you? Shelter you from basic city life experiences so that when they happen you are broken to the core?

I’ve had my window broken 2x when I was living paycheck to paycheck. It sucked financially, but it had zero impact on my sense of public safety.

I can’t even imagine the world one must live in where this would be the most traumatizing incident in their life.

Again, not to say it doesn’t suck. But maybe city life just isn’t for you. It’s not the suburbs. There is crime.

I’m grateful most of it is property crime instead of violent crime. But I’ve always felt safe in San Francisco, even after being on the wrong side of violent crime.

Hamasaki also wrote, “Name a big city in the US where you can just leave 10k worth of stuff in your car? It’s not San Francisco these people hate, it’s cities.”

In UnHerd, Joel Kotkin suggests that, contra the wishes of urbanists, the suburbs are once again the future:

London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles—these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottmann described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times’s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

… Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

The fading allure of the big city—further undermined by the post-pandemic shift to remote work in many sectors—is also taking place against the backdrop of an urban economy that has increasingly rewarded the few ... almost a fifth of residents in the 50 largest US cities live below the poverty line. Contrast this with the historic role of cities as engines of upward mobility. Even the addition last year of a few thousand migrants forced New York Mayor Eric Adams to declare a state of emergency; in other words, New York, a city largely built on the labour of newcomers, now seems too weak to house and employ a substantial number of immigrants. Amid this failure, perhaps it’s unsurprising that migrants and minorities are heading to America’s suburbs, sprawled sunbelt cities and smaller towns. So what is the urban future? The answer lies less in the central business districts than the suburbs and exurbs.

And this presents a nightmare for the traditional urbanist.

Is he right, or is another urban renaissance ahead?

Provocation of the Week

At a press conference hosted by the Internet Archive, its founder, Brewster Kahle, addressed Hachette v. Internet Archive, a Supreme Court case that addresses digital lending and copyright. Kahle argued that digital libraries ought to be free to operate much as brick- and-mortar libraries do:

The Internet Archive is a library I founded 26 years ago. This library has brought hundreds of years of books to the wikipedia generation, and now 4 massive publishers are suing to stop us.

As the world now looks to their screens for answers, what they find is often not good. People are struggling to figure out what is true and it is getting harder. Digital learners need access to a library of books, a library at least as deep as the libraries we older people had the privilege to grow up with.

The Internet Archive has worked with hundreds of libraries for decades to provide such a library of books. A library where each of those books can be read by one reader at a time. This is what libraries have always done.

We also work with libraries that are under threat. We work with many libraries that have closed their doors completely—libraries with unique collections: Claremont School of Theology, Marygrove College of Detroit, cooking school of Johnson & Wales Denver, Concordia College of Bronxville NY, Drug Policy Alliance’s library of NYC, the Evangelical Seminary of Pennsylvania. I have looked these librarians in the eye and told them that we are there for them.

They entrust their books to us, as a peer library, to carry forward their mission. Most of the books are not available from the publishers in digital form, and never will be. And as we have seen, students, researchers and the print-disabled continue to use these books for quotations and fact checking. And I think we can all agree we need to be able to do fact checking.

Here’s what’s at stake in this case: hundreds of libraries contributed millions of books to the Internet Archive for preservation in addition to those books we have purchased. Thousands of donors provided the funds to digitize them.

The publishers are now demanding that those millions of digitized books, not only be made inaccessible, but be destroyed.

This is horrendous. Let me say it again—the publishers are demanding that millions of digitized books be destroyed.

And if they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do. This could be the burning of the Library of Alexandria moment—millions of books from our community’s libraries—gone.

The dream of the Internet was to democratize access to knowledge, but if the big publishers have their way, excessive corporate control will be the nightmare of the Internet. That is what is at stake.

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Last week, the ongoing debate about COVID-19’s origins acquired a new plot twist. A French evolutionary biologist stumbled across a trove of genetic sequences extracted from swabs collected from surfaces at a wet market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the pandemic began; she and an international team of colleagues downloaded the data in hopes of understanding who—or what—might have ferried the virus into the venue. What they found, as The Atlantic first reported on Thursday, bolsters the case for the pandemic having purely natural roots: The genetic data suggest that live mammals illegally for sale at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market—among them, raccoon dogs, a foxlike species known to be susceptible to the virus—may have been carrying the coronavirus at the end of 2019.

But what might otherwise have been a straightforward story on new evidence has rapidly morphed into a mystery centered on the origins debate’s data gaps. Within a day or so of nabbing the sequences off a database called GISAID, the researchers told me, they reached out to the Chinese scientists who had uploaded the data to share some preliminary results. The next day, public access to the sequences was locked—according to GISAID, at the request of the Chinese researchers, who had previously analyzed the data and drawn distinctly different conclusions about what they contained.

[Read: The strongest evidence yet that an animal started the pandemic]

Yesterday evening, the international team behind the new Huanan-market analysis released a report on its findings—but did not post the underlying data. The write-up confirms that genetic material from raccoon dogs and several other mammals was found in some of the same spots at the wet market, as were bits of SARS-CoV-2’s genome around the time the outbreak began. Some of that animal genetic material, which was collected just days or weeks after the market was shut down, appears to be RNA—a particularly fast-degrading molecule. That strongly suggests that the mammals were present at the market not long before the samples were collected, making them a plausible channel for the virus to travel on its way to us. “I think we’re moving toward more and more evidence that this was an animal spillover at the market,” says Ravindra Gupta, a virologist at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the new research. “A year and a half ago, my confidence in the animal origin was 80 percent, something like that. Now it’s 95 percent or above.”

For now, the report is just that: a report, not yet formally reviewed by other scientists or even submitted for publication to the journal—and that will remain the case as long as this team continues to leave space for the researchers who originally collected the market samples, many of them based at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to prepare a paper of their own. And still missing are the raw sequence files that sparked the reanalysis in the first place—before vanishing from the public eye.

Every researcher I asked emphasized just how important the release of that evidence is to the origins investigation: Without data, there’s no base-level proof—nothing for the broader scientific community to independently scrutinize to confirm or refute the international team’s results. Absent raw data, “some people will say that this isn’t real,” says Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis. Data that flicker on and off publicly accessible parts of the internet also raise questions about other clues on the pandemic’s origins. Still more evidence might be out there, yet undisclosed.

Transparency is always an essential facet of research, but all the more so when the stakes are so high. SARS-CoV-2 has already killed nearly 7 million people, at least, and saddled countless people with chronic illness; it will kill and debilitate many more in the decades to come. Every investigation into how it began to spread among humans must be “conducted as openly as possible,” says Sarah Cobey, an infectious-disease modeler at the University of Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis.

The team behind the reanalysis still has copies of the genetic sequences its members downloaded earlier this month. But they’ve decided that they won’t be the ones to share them, several of them told me. For one, they don’t have sequences from the complete set of samples that the Chinese team collected in early 2020—just the fraction that they spotted and grabbed off GISAID. Even if they did have all of the data, the researchers contend that it’s not their place to post them publicly. That’s up to the China CDC team that originally collected and generated the data.

Part of the international team’s reasoning is rooted in academic decorum. There isn’t a set-in-stone guidebook among scientists, but adhering to unofficial rules on etiquette smooths successful collaborations across disciplines and international borders—especially during a global crisis such as this one. Releasing someone else’s data, the product of another team’s hard work, is a faux pas. It risks misattribution of credit, and opens the door to the Chinese researchers’ findings getting scooped before they publish a high-profile paper in a prestigious journal. “It isn’t right to share the original authors’ data without their consent,” says Niema Moshiri, a computational biologist at UC San Diego and one of the authors of the new report. “They produced the data, so it’s their data to share with the world.”

If the international team released what data it has, it could potentially stoke the fracas in other ways. The World Health Organization has publicly indicated that the data should come from the researchers who collected them first: On Friday, at a press briefing, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, admonished the Chinese researchers for keeping their data under wraps for so long, and called on them to release the sequences again. “These data could have and should have been shared three years ago,” he said. And the fact that it wasn’t is “disturbing,” given just how much it might have aided investigations early on, says Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense expert at George Mason University, who wasn’t involved in the new analysis.

Publishing the current report has already gotten the researchers into trouble with GISAID, the database where they found the genetic sequences. During the pandemic, the database has been a crucial hub for researchers sharing viral genome data; founded to provide open access to avian influenza genomes, it is also where researchers from the China CDC published the first whole-genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2, back in January 2020. A few days after the researchers downloaded the sequences, they told me, several of them were contacted by a GISAID administrator who chastised them about not being sufficiently collaborative with the China CDC team and warned them against publishing a paper using the China CDC data. They were in danger, the email said, of violating the site’s terms of use and would risk getting their database access revoked. Distributing the data to any non-GISAID users—including the broader research community—would also be a breach.

This morning, hours after the researchers released their report online, many of them found that they could no longer log in to GISAID—they received an error message when they input their username and password. “They may indeed be accusing us of having violated their terms,” Moshiri told me, though he can’t be sure. The ban was instated with absolutely no warning. Moshiri and his colleagues maintain that they did act in good faith and haven’t violated any of the database’s terms—that, contrary to GISAID’s accusations, they reached out multiple times with offers to collaborate with the China CDC, which has “thus far declined,” per the international team’s report.

GISAID didn’t respond when I reached out about the data’s disappearing act, its emails to the international team, and the group-wide ban. But in a statement released shortly after I contacted the database—one that echoes language in the emails sent to researchers—GISAID doubled down on accusing the international team of violating its terms of use by posting “an analysis report in direct contravention of the terms they agreed to as a condition to accessing the data, and despite having knowledge that the data generators are undergoing peer review assessment of their own publication.” GISAID also “strongly” suggested “that the complete and updated dataset will be made available as soon as possible,” but gave no timeline.

Why, exactly, the sequences were first made public only so recently, and why they have yet to reappear, remain unclear. In a recent statement, the WHO said that access to the data was withdrawn “apparently to allow further data updates by China CDC” to its original analysis on the market samples, which went under review for publication at the journal Nature last week. There’s no clarity, however, on what will happen if the paper is not published at all. When I reached out to three of the Chinese researchers—George Gao, William Liu, and Guizhen Wu—to ask about their intentions for the data, I didn’t receive a response.

“We want the data to come out more than anybody,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at George Mason University and one of the authors on the new analysis. Until then, the international team will be fielding accusations, already flooding in, that it falsified its analyses and overstated its conclusions.

Researchers around the world have been raising questions about these particular genetic sequences for at least a year. In February 2022, the Chinese researchers and their close collaborators released their analysis of the same market samples probed in the new report, as well as other bits of genetic data that haven’t yet been made public. But their interpretations deviate pretty drastically from the international team’s. The Chinese team contended that any shreds of virus found at the market had most likely been brought in by infected humans. “No animal host of SARS-CoV-2 can be deduced,” the researchers asserted at the time. Although the market had perhaps been an “amplifier” of the outbreak, their analysis read, “more work involving international coordination” would be needed to determine the “real origins of SARS-CoV-2.” When reached by Jon Cohen of Science magazine last week, Gao described the sequences that fleetingly appeared on GISAID as “[n]othing new. It had been known there was illegal animal dealing and this is why the market was immediately shut down.”

There is, then, a clear divergence between the two reports. Gao’s assessment indicates that finding animal genetic material in the market swabs merely confirms that live mammals were being illegally traded at the venue prior to January 2020. The researchers behind the new report insist that the narrative can now go a step further—they suggest not just that the animals were there, but that the animals, several of which are already known to be vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2, were there, in parts of the market where the virus was also found. That proximity, coupled with the virus’s inability to persist without a viable host, points to the possibility of an existing infection among animals, which could spark several more.

The Chinese researchers used this same logic of location—multiple types of genetic material pulled out of the same swab—to conclude that humans were carrying around the virus at Huanan. The reanalysis confirms that there probably were infected people at the market at some point before it closed. But they were unlikely to be the virus’s only chauffeurs: Across several samples, the amount of raccoon-dog genetic material dwarfs that of humans. At one stall in particular—located in the sector of the market where the most virus-positive swabs were found—the researchers discovered at least one sample that contained SARS-CoV-2 RNA, and was also overflowing with raccoon-dog genetic material, while containing very little DNA or RNA material matching the human genome. That same stall was photographically documented housing raccoon dogs in 2014. The case is not a slam dunk: No one has yet, for instance, identified a viral sample taken from a live animal that was swabbed at the market in 2019 before the venue was closed. Still, JHU’s Gronvall told me, the situation feels clearer than ever. “All of the science is pointed” in the direction of Huanan being the pandemic’s epicenter, she said.

To further untangle the significance of the sequences will require—you guessed it—the now-vanished genetic data. Some researchers are still withholding their judgment on the significance of the new analysis, because they haven’t gotten their hands on the genetic sequences themselves. Others are also wondering whether more data could yet emerge, given how long this particular set went unshared. “This is an indication to me in recent days that there is more data that exists,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, told me. Which means that she and her colleagues haven’t yet gotten the fullest picture of the pandemic’s early days that they could—and that they won’t be able to deliver much of a verdict until more information emerges. The new analysis does bolster the case for market animals acting as a conduit for the virus between bats (SARS-CoV-2’s likeliest original host, based on several studies on this coronavirus and others) and people; it doesn’t, however, “tell us that the other hypotheses didn’t happen. We can’t remove any of them,” Van Kerkhove told me.

More surveillance for the virus needs to be done in wild-animal populations, she said. Having the data from the market swabs could help with that, perhaps leading back to a population of mammals that might have caught the virus from bats or another intermediary in a particular part of China. At the same time, to further investigate the idea that SARS-CoV-2 first emerged out of a laboratory mishap, officials need to conduct intensive audits and investigations of virology laboratories in Wuhan and elsewhere. Last month, the U.S. Department of Energy ruled that such an accident was the likelier catalyst of the coronavirus outbreak than a natural spillover from wild animals to humans. The ruling echoed earlier judgments from the FBI and a Senate minority report. But it contrasted with the views of four other agencies, plus the National Intelligence Council, and it was made with “low confidence” and based on “new” evidence that has yet to be declassified.

[Read: The lab leak will haunt us forever]

The longer the investigation into the virus’s origins drags on, and the more distant the autumn of 2019 grows in our rearview, “the harder it becomes,” Van Kerkhove told me. Many in the research community were surprised that new information from market samples collected in early 2020 emerged at all, three years later. Settling the squabbles over SARS-CoV-2 will be especially tough because the Huanan market was so swiftly shut down after the outbreak began, and the traded animals at the venue rapidly culled, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and one of the researchers behind the new analysis. Raccoon dogs, one of the most prominent potential hosts to have emerged from the new analysis, are not even known to have been sampled live at the market. “That evidence is gone now,” if it ever existed, Koblentz, of George Mason University, told me. For months, Chinese officials were even adamant that no mammals were being illegally sold at the region’s wet markets at all.

So researchers continue to work with what they have: swabs from surfaces that can, at the very least, point to a susceptible animal being in the right place, at the right time, with the virus potentially inside it. “Right now, to the best of my knowledge, this data is the only way that we can actually look,” Rasmussen told me. It may never be enough to fully settle this debate. But right now, the world doesn’t even know the extent of the evidence available—or what could, or should, still emerge.

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

I held off on asking a new question of the week last Wednesday so I could share more of your reflections on cars. Below are the remainder of your thoughtful replies.

Eden fondly recalls a moment of peak freedom in a mechanically questionable vehicle:

Like most of my friends in 1995, I got my driver's license on my 16th birthday. My stepdad had hordes of busted-up cars on the front lawn, and he gifted me a royal-blue 1976 Volkswagen Scirocco that barely ran. Even though the car was a total POS, the excitement and joy I felt at driving that car by myself will always be one of the best feelings I have experienced in my life.

That first night, I picked up my friend Cody from his shift at the North Seattle Arby’s. He didn’t have to take the bus home that night for once. I put a battery-powered boom box in the back seat (there was no radio in the car, of course) and played a Led Zeppelin tape at full blast, reveling in my newfound freedom. Even now, it’s hard to imagine a time when I have felt freer than at that moment.  

The car would die if it idled for even a second. I could barely slow down to a full stop before I had to rev the engine. The driver and passenger seats weren’t even bolted down! If I gunned it at the bottom of a big hill, we would literally flip into the back seat, laughing until tears fell from our eyes. I remember the smell so vividly. Sometimes, I’ll get a whiff that reminds me of it, and I am transported back to flying down the street, my car packed with friends. My soul stirs with the sound of laughter and the crackling of the fuzzy boom box. I remember how many times we would go for drives just to drive.  

I had to learn a great deal about automobiles to make sure the car kept running and didn’t kill us. The number of times I locked my keys in there, or left the lights on until the battery died, is laughable. But I was never once embarrassed by the state of that car. As far as I was concerned, I was the envy of all my friends, rich as a sultan, and as free as a bird.

I’ll be nostalgic about it until I die.  

Amelia found that getting her driver’s license wasn’t all she imagined it would be:

I’m 16 and I’ve wanted to drive for as long as I could remember. I’ve been driving on my own for about three months. Even before I started driving myself, I considered the act of owning and driving a car emblematic of the independence you receive as an adult. Being able to drive yourself to school, to sports practice, to anywhere you wanted to go seemed too good to be true. I held these aspirations close, and no one rebuked me, thus my life was shaped by this modern, American version of independence. I saw teens living their best lives on TV and in movies, and they all had one thing in common: cars.

I live in a sprawling and rather car-dependent suburban area, so I can never walk anywhere. I can vividly remember my summers before my 15th year complaining or wandering around the house aimlessly because I didn’t have a job yet, and my parents and brother were gone for the day. None of my friends reached out, yet I still watched their lives continue on through a screen while faking my own in the same way. I remember one instance where, in a burst of confidence, I tried to ride my bike three miles to a local ice-cream shop and almost got run over by a car.

Now I can drive myself. I’m independent; I get to choose what music to play! I finally got what I wanted. But I still go everywhere mostly alone. Don’t get me wrong; I consider myself an extrovert. I see my friends as often as I can in and outside of school, but the thing is, nothing changed. We don’t carpool, because it’s too out of the way and everyone else drives alone anyways. Driving my own car wasn’t the magical switch I’d been looking for after all. Maybe it wasn’t as much me that was the problem, but the infrastructure that surrounded me.

J. is a driving enthusiast:

Goddamn I love cars! I realize they are polluting and occasionally murderous, but the convenience and freedom can’t be denied. Plus driving is just so fun! My commute is short, and at work, I get to drive a fire engine. Code 3 with lights and sirens! Running red lights! Wrong way down one-way streets to attempt to help society! It’s pretty great.

Cars have been a key part of my identity for more than three decades: My first car was a hand-me-down 1981 Ford Escort. Since that first car, I’ve owned the quirky (1987 Nissan Pulsar), the blue-collar (1977 Chevy pickup), the classic (1965 Chevy Bel Air), the sporty (1991 Nissan 300ZX), the practical (2006 Toyota Tacoma), the baby-mover (2008 Lexus RX350), and now, the grown-up (and first new) family car, a Mazda CX-5—with turbo! Some had custom wheels or paint. Almost all had custom sound systems.

My cars were my peacock tail, my rack of antlers. They enabled my life, which has been a pretty good one. I asked my wife to marry me in our car, and she accepted.

They also enabled some unsavory behavior: I used to pick up prostitutes, after a night out drinking, for years. Until the last time—when the prostitute turned out to be an undercover cop. I’ve been (at times) incredibly reckless, and (very often) incredibly lucky, behind the wheel. By the grace of God I never hurt anyone … and now I have a career where I drive fast (but not so recklessly) to help people in need.

Life is weird. And cars are awesome!

Maxx makes a case for glory without gasoline:

Last September, I gave my car to my college-town-bound little brother. I now live car-free in Minneapolis. I’m 25 and did not get my license until I was 19. I am now a passionate cyclist, scrappy public-transit enthusiast, and bold pedestrian. And I love it.

When I bike to work, I’ve shown up positive and awake, coffee optional. Figuring out how to get somewhere new is an opportunity to plan a pleasurable route. In summer, my friends and I take to our bicycles and hop from concert to park to bar to apartment. Cutting gas, insurance, and car payments out of our budgets, in whole or in part, gives us disposable income we can still afford to spend locally—and foolishly. Rather than letting it restrict us, there’s incredible freedom. You hardly worry about where to park, and, if folks behave responsibly enough, no one has to be shunted to the role of designated driver.

The day-to-day is a joy. My diet has to be up to the challenge of biking 80 miles a week in the summer, and 30 a week in the winter. And the conditioning and fresh-air perspective have expanded my imagination when it comes to travel and leisure; my brother and I are planning to bike across Minnesota, the long way, once he graduates. It would be a rather constrained road trip, but feels like a downright adventure on a bicycle.

In Minnesota, folks lampoon us car skeptics with the complaint that it’s winter for (an exaggerated proportion) of the year. I don’t want to be glib, but when I’m riding a fat-tire bike in fresh snow, I’m usually matching the speed of any responsible driver on city streets. Being free of the anxieties, expenses, and constant gripes of driving and car ownership is a seriously underrated luxury.

I aspire to have a family and realize that someday my weekends won’t revolve around the question of what pleasure we can find on quiet wheels. But I hope I can stay car-lite—walking to the grocery store, instilling active living and community in my children. We live in a world of people, places, and things. It can be hard to see them—or appreciate them—in a moving metal box.

A.l. opines on not having a car:

My family lives in a fairly dense suburban environment that was first developed about 100 years ago as a “streetcar neighborhood.” I live pretty close to my office and I ride my bike year-round. I also live nearby a bus line that runs directly to my office with no transfers.

About once a week, not having a car is a big hassle. Getting to work when it’s pouring rain, trying to get to a doctor appointment in a different part of town, stopping off for a work event in a different part of town on the way home from work, leaving for a business trip from home to the airport, etc. It’s a real pain.

Going to work, I have no issue using public transportation and no issue riding my bike, but both of them can be inflexible from a schedule standpoint in that both incur additional non-value-add time, roughly an hour each day—and that’s for someone who pays through the nose to live in a part of town where most of what I need is close by.

I’m struck by the strong downward pressure on my quality of life that comes from not having access to a car, and I empathize with people who don’t have the money to buy a car if they need one to manage their routine. I also feel a profound sense of guilt burning fossil fuels. I’ll never buy another gas-powered car. So I’m proud of being car-free, but somewhat conflicted.

Kate has appreciated many places she never could have gone but for trucks:

For me, a vehicle is a ticket to adventure. When I was 7 (1967), my parents hooked up a rented U-Haul trailer to the back of a six-cylinder Chevy truck, threw three kids in the back, and drove us from Reno, Nevada, to the Arctic Circle in Alaska. We navigated some 6,000-plus miles of highway, dirt roads, permafrost, sinkholes, mosquitoes, and wildlife. We camped out in national parks, roadside rests, KOAs, and gravel pits. In subsequent years we toured Canada, drove to Mexico City, and made it to most of the national parks. That upbringing fueled a love of the outdoors and the vehicles that could get me there.

In my younger years, I loved my 4x4s. They enable you to get stuck in more remote places!!! Grandkids and gas prices changed my preferences over the years. We still own a Chevy truck. However, my current adventure vehicle is a Subaru Outback. It can navigate dirt roads, is great in the snow, averages 25 mpg, and has plenty of room to sleep in the back. Can’t wait for the hybrid version.

Vasav has fallen out of love with cars over the years:

I went to the University of Michigan to become a mechanical engineer because I loved cars. My parents were immigrants from India, and every 4th of July we’d go on a road trip and they’d say how wonderful superhighways were and how they made America so great. We loved trains too. We never saw a conflict. You could love trains and cars. Most of our family vacations were road trips. There were a lot of them. And cars were incredibly cool.

In Ann Arbor, I didn’t need a car for most of my daily needs. A bike worked better. Then I joined the Air Force and had a two-year stint in Japan, where I had a similar relationship with cars. I now live in an inner-ring suburb of an overpriced metro. And I don’t hate cars. I appreciate them. I can’t imagine a lot of my outdoor adventures without them. But I much prefer walking, riding a bus or train, or even biking for most of my regular needs. What happened? I got old.

I now view cars as a tool, not the toy they were. I now view working on my car as a chore, not fun. And I had enough acquaintances die in accidents that I realized the dangers. I still think cars are incredible machines—a number of ingenious systems that all work together. I still love Detroit. But there are a lot of neat machines out there, and most are less dangerous. Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine taking a bus to go backpacking or trail biking, so there’s a happy medium.

Chris lists what he sees as the ills of car culture:

Car culture has reconfigured the landscape to accommodate drivers, as opposed to pedestrians. It has hollowed out small towns and many large cities by sucking commerce from downtown to the banal, ugly world of strip malls, vast parking lots, and endless suburban sprawl. It has atomized society by isolating commuters who would once have enjoyed random, face-to-face interactions on foot or public transport. It has poisoned the atmosphere and exacerbated global warming. Once a convenience, cars are now an expensive necessity. Car culture itself is a textbook example of path dependence—an optional mode of behavior that grew so dominant, it’s the only available mode.

Jack doesn’t have a car for a different reason:

Oakland, California, has bent over backwards to accommodate the livelihoods of criminals. In the hectic adjustment, I’ve had two cars stolen from my driveway after an earlier heist of four tires at a public-transit parking lot. Now I am a devoted Lyft customer. It’s a hot trend here.

Brad believes his early experiences with cars were character-building:

At 15, I got my first job, aiming for enough money to buy a car by my 16th birthday. I wanted to be as independent as possible from my family. Within a few weeks of my birthday, I paid $1,300 for an old Mazda and learned how to keep the car insured and fueled. Over the next five years, I drove Frankie (so named because his blue paint matched Sinatra’s famous eyes) more than 80,000 miles, shuttling myself and friends to jobs and activities, going on school trips, and traversing the 500 miles between college and home. That first car taught me a lot about financial responsibility and how to literally navigate my own life.  

Even back in 2004, when I started college, I found these qualities lacking in many of my peers. The rare individuals who had purchased and maintained their own cars before college generally seemed more likely to embrace and handle their new independence.

My second car, a used Audi A6, taught me resilience and the value of due diligence. Shortly before I started law school, I purchased Rita (so named because she was beautiful, troubled, and destined for tragedy, like the character on Dexter). On the drive home from the dealership, she broke down, beginning a parade of maladies that drained my savings in six months, completely overlapping with the first year of law school. I’d bought a lemon at a stunningly inopportune time in my life. It was a painful lesson, but better learned at 24 than 54. I offloaded Rita quickly, and have owned practical, reliable cars since. After all of this, I really don’t enjoy driving. I yearn for the days when public transportation will obviate the need for me to own a car, which will be better for me and for the planet.

If you’re going somewhere with Joanne, let her drive:

I grew up on a farm. At 5, I could steer a tractor up and down the rows of baled hay so my dad and a hired man could throw them on the wagon. I could drive our truck at 10, and if my parents were away, my twin brother and I would whip into town for a Dairy Queen. Fast-forward to high school, where we had an excellent driver’s ed instructor. The lessons were during our Ontario winters, and often involved practice pulling out of skids on empty but ice-covered parking lots. A useful skill! I am a senior now and back in the country, dealing with long country driveways, ice, snow, freezing rain, and whiteout conditions. They don’t faze me, or at least not yet, because of all that early driving experience.

And if you’re trying to improve our transportation infrastructure, consider this advice from K.S.:

My family emigrated to Detroit from Poland when I was 8 years old. My father still works for General Motors there. My mom had never had a driver’s license before we moved. Every well-meaning person helping our family to settle in would be quick to tell her that “if you’re not going to learn how to drive, you might as well go back—you can’t survive here if you don’t drive.”

Despite growing up in the Motor City, going to the North American Auto Show every year, and being frequently encouraged to become an engineer by my parents (the Detroit equivalent of immigrants pushing their kids to be doctors or lawyers), I never took to caring about cars. After college I moved to Chicago, then New York, and happily adopted a car-free urban life along with my Millennial cohort—we were killing cars, in addition to marriage and golf. I took it a step further and went to urban-planning school—became the kind of person who peddles 15-minute cities. I made killing car culture my actual job.

When I left New York and moved to L.A., I held strong(ish) for six months before I got a car. It was liberating to drive everywhere—eastside to westside, Malibu, day trips to Death Valley. I worked for the public-transit agency in L.A. You might think that I was a bit of a sham, but most of my colleagues drove to work. Like the many Angelinos who support tax measures to improve transit, we wanted better transit for L.A., but we wouldn’t be taking it to work ourselves. It wasn’t my fault. How else was I supposed to get to the beach and take selfies in the desert on the weekend? As a bonus, my relationship with my dad was on the up now that we had oil changes and cabin filters to talk about.

A few months ago I got a job offer in San Francisco, at an urban-design firm that’s all about building bike-friendly, walkable cities. While I was hesitant to give up my winter tan, the opportunity to reclaim my urban cred in S.F. was a bonus. All the driving in L.A. was getting old, and I missed taking the train to work and walking to get my morning coffee. I moved to the Bay but kept my car. I’ll need it to go on day trips and keep those hiking selfies going.  

The shameful secret not seen in those selfies: I’m three months into living in S.F., in a central, well-connected neighborhood, and I have yet to take public transit. I’ve been walking more—I walk to the gym and to get my coffee, just as I had imagined, but for all intents and purposes I’m stuck on driving. I drive to work many days, even though it’s less than two miles away; I drive to the grocery store; I drive 10 minutes to go on Hinge dates.

I’ve thought about taking the bus or train—I’ve checked routes, but every time I’ve chosen to drive. I always have an excuse: It’s raining; I’ll have to carry things; it’s late; I’m tired. Did L.A. ruin me? Probably not. I’m learning a new city and settling in. Driving feels safer—even though it literally is not—in a new environment. It’s allowed me to see a wider swath of the city in less time. As the weather gets nicer, and I learn the transit routes better, I will settle into a routine that will likely include using transit often.

People choose travel modes based on what is available to them and will maximize personal utility for a particular trip, not based on ideology alone. Like everything else, our ideas around cars have become politicized and positioned as yet another reason to polarize us against one another. As we sit and stare at our crumbling transit systems, the smog hovering above cities, or the annual car-related death tolls, picking a side—pro-car or anticar—isn’t going to help much. The solutions are likely to lie somewhere beyond the corners we’re backing ourselves into. They will require all of the tools and political will available.

If we’re all hovering at the ends of the spectrum, we may fail to see the most impactful solutions available to us. If we approach these challenges with curiosity, seeking to understand rather than debate, we may just come up with new and surprising systems to allow us to safely and sustainably move around and between places.

Much of the plot of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop is lost to me, though I consider it one of my favorite books. I have a sense that it involves a young priest rising through the ranks of the Catholic Church as New Mexico is flooded by settlers, and I also know that—spoiler alert!—he dies at the end. But what remain indelible are two oddly mathematical vistas. In the novel’s opening pages, a man winds his way through an endless landscape of conical red hills, so alike that “he seemed to be wandering in some geometrical nightmare.” Later, the bishop rides through the country and notices that the world is like a giant mirror: “Every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it or moved slowly up from behind it.”

I’ve never been to New Mexico, but I’m half-convinced I have by the clarity of these mental images. That is the power of place in literature, and the closest that prose comes to a magic trick: The best writers can transport you to an utterly different time and location and convince you that you can see it. The believable illusion of a well-written setting is crucial to the workings of storytelling, as Eudora Welty argues in her essay “Place in Fiction.” (Her Collected Stories is included in the list below.) “Fiction is all bound up in the local,” she writes, because “feelings are bound up in place.” The books in this list meld the particular—the quality of the air, say, in Zambia’s Lusaka or the Sahara or a Finnish island—with the abstract and timeless; in short, they capture what it’s like to be alive.

Open Letter Books

Winter in Sokcho, by Elisa Shua Dusapin (translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

“There wasn’t much to do in the winter” in Sokcho, South Korea, the unnamed narrator points out at the beginning of this compact, vivid novel. It’s a beach town that is bustling in the summer; it also sits just more than 35 miles away from the border with North Korea, and “electrified barbed wire fencing” lines the shore. But the chill and damp that saturate the book are central to its meaning. When a French cartoonist comes to stay at the rundown guesthouse the narrator works at, the two find themselves attracted to each other. Together they visit the DMZ, where the cold makes their eyelids stick to the binoculars that let them peer across the border. They eat fish at a drafty seaside food stall and gaze out at Sokcho from a rooftop in the rain, seeing “a jumble of orange and blue corrugated roofs, the burnt-out ruin of the cinema.” The pipes at the guesthouse freeze. These atmospheric details gesture at a deeper stasis: the narrator’s obligations to her mother that keep her in town, the extended war between the Koreas that keeps their citizens “in a winter that never ends.” “That was Sokcho, always waiting,” the narrator thinks, “for tourists, boats, men, spring.”

New York Review Books

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson (translated by Thomas Teal)

The Summer Book is shelved in the children’s section at my local library, but don’t be fooled by the simplicity of its prose: The novel is painfully profound when it comes to aging and death. Grandmother and young Sophia spend their summers on an island in the Gulf of Finland, making up tales about long-tailed ducks, exploring caves, and arguing about God. Life has an easy, elemental rhythm—the book is composed of vignettes that seem to take place almost outside of time—and yet the story is colored by Grandmother’s dizzy spells and reliance on medication. We slip imperceptibly into the characters’ consciousnesses, particularly Grandmother’s: “The wind was always blowing on this island, from one direction or another … a wild garden for someone growing up, but otherwise just days on top of days, and passing time.” The dead forests, mossy granite, and distant boats are described with the sharpness of lived experience: Jansson herself lived for half of each year on a similar island. Through her characters’ eyes, she conjures the care that stems from decades rooted in a single place, creating an unsentimental yet intimate portrayal of a home.

[Read: The questions we don’t ask our families but should]

Bloomsbury

Stories of the Sahara, by Sanmao (translated by Mike Fu)

In the Chinese-speaking world, the publication of Stories of the Sahara nearly 50 years ago was a literary sensation. Millions of copies have been sold since, in large part because of Sanmao’s wry, approachable, and intensely independent voice. “I’d always felt I wasn’t a part of the world around me,” she writes. “I often needed to go off the tracks of a normal life and do things without explanation”—things such as moving to El Aaiún, the capital of the then–Spanish territory of Western Sahara, propelled by a determination to become “the first female explorer to cross the Sahara.” Instead, her delightful travelogues feel like fables, depicting both the humdrum realities of desert living—the goats that keep falling through the roof of her house, the quirks of the native Sahrawis she and her husband, José, reside with—and the high adventure of escaping quicksand, seeing UFOs, and getting ill perhaps from a possibly cursed necklace. Looking out over the dunes, with their “quiet serenity and profound beauty,” she writes, “inspired an emotion close to pain.” Who wouldn’t be tempted, reading this, to “go off the tracks of a normal life”?

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

My Garden (Book):, by Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid’s enthusiasm for gardening is contagious, even for someone like me, who has managed to kill a succulent. In the summer, Kincaid writes, she frets about how late her wisterias bloom in her Vermont garden, among her phlox and buddleia and perennial pea, and about a “yellow border” of flowers that simply “does not work.” In the spring, she revels in her fritillarias, which smell like “the underarms of ten people you love.” But gardening for Kincaid isn’t just about tending her plot of land. It’s “an exercise in memory,” and in these short essays, she plumbs the dimensions of her garden beyond its physical realities. Her meditations circle around Antigua, where she was raised: She recalls the soursop tree she was sent to when she misbehaved; the afternoons with her father in the island’s botanical garden, filled with plants from across the British empire and none native to the island itself. Kincaid’s keen awareness of the world outside the garden—that same colonial need for possession shaped the Linnaean system of naming plants, she observes—makes her joy within it all the more satisfying.

[Read: Housekeeping is part of the wild world too]

Mariner

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, by Eudora Welty

This volume brings together every short story Welty wrote, the large majority of them set in small-town Mississippi. In the collection, women cluster together, opining, helping out at funerals, and fanning themselves waiting for rain; the men go off to drag the river for drowned bodies. The Natchez Trace, the historic trail that cuts through the state, crops up again and again, a wild, difficult, almost mythical road that looms large in the characters’ minds. Welty is famous for much-anthologized stories like the antic “Why I Live at the P.O.,” but her oeuvre is weird and dreamlike, with a pervading aura of secrecy: In one story, a deaf boy forms an attachment to Aaron Burr at the inn where Burr plans his conspiracy; in another, a girl is kept confined by a husband far too old for her in a plot straight out of a fairy tale. In each, Welty’s precise and lavish descriptions of the world abound—a night sky “transparent like grape flesh,” the “embroidering movements” of insects, the Mississippi River “reaching like a somnambulist driven to go in new places.” Every detail seems to hold meaning, to express some facet of the emotional revelations her characters are continually arriving at. Taken together, the stories feel like a glimpse into the humid, shadowed interior of the state itself.

Berlin, by Jason Lutes

In September 1928, two strangers meet on a train headed into Berlin: Marthe Müller, an artist from Cologne looking for her place in the world, and Kurt Severing, a journalist distraught by the dark political forces rending his beloved city. Lutes began this 580-page graphic novel in 1994 and completed it in 2018, and it’s a meticulously researched, gorgeous panoramic view of the last years of the Weimar Republic. The story focuses most attentively on the lives of ordinary Berliners, including Müller, Severing, and two families warped by the increasing chaos. Certain panels even capture the stray thoughts of city dwellers, which float in balloons above their heads as they ride the trams, attend art class, and bake bread. Throughout, Berlin glitters with American jazz and underground gay clubs, all while Communists clash violently with National Socialists in the streets—one party agitating for workers and revolution, the other seething with noxious anti-Semitism and outrage over Germany’s “humiliation” after World War I. On every page are the tensions of a culture on the brink.

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

Hogarth

The Old Drift, by Namwali Serpell

“This is the story of a nation,” the first page of The Old Drift informs us, “so it begins, of course, with a white man.” The nation is Zambia, and the novel traces three families through four generations and a century’s worth of history, including the country’s independence in 1964, the revolutionary fervor of its aftermath, and the turn to economic privatization in the 1990s. Resonant scenes on the Zambezi River bookend the novel, but the families mainly converge upon Lusaka, the capital city, and illuminate its various crannies—high-end hotels, an Indian wig-seller’s shop, the shacks in the Kalingalinga compound—as the characters’ paths intertwine. One woman sees a representative tableau of the city on display in a government office: “Old men in dark suits; young men in lighter suits; young women in skirt suits; old women in chitenges patterned with staplers, stars, turtles, forks.” Places are created by people, as Serpell suggests with her overflowing, diverse cast—her characters are variously of Italian, British, Bemba, and Indian descent. The infinite ramifications of human conflicts and connections are just as important as the landscape.

University of Chicago Press

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, by Norman Maclean

In the years since I first read this collection’s title story, I’ve never been able to think about fly-fishing without a genuine sense of reverence. The story’s narrator (a close stand-in for the real Maclean) has no idea how to help his troubled brother, Paul, who drinks too much and gets picked up by the police with increasing frequency. The most he can do is take Paul fly-fishing, an art they learned from their father, a Presbyterian minister. Maclean dedicates long, languid passages to the finer points of casting in the “great trout rivers” of western Montana, which manage to be both technical and transcendent: “It was one rhythm superimposed upon another, our father’s four-count rhythm of the line and wrist being still the base rhythm. But superimposed upon it was the piston two count of his arm and the long overriding four count of the completed figure eight of his reversed loop. The canyon was glorified by rhythms and colors.” The beauty of the story lies in its specificity—the summer of 1937 on the Big Blackfoot River—against the sweep of religion, the primeval forces of geology, and the pure ache of loving someone whom you struggle to understand.

From Dublin to Chicago, St Patrick's Day celebrated around the globe with music, dance and parades

If you go for an afternoon stroll around the streets of Chicago, Boston, or New York City on the weekend of St. Patrick’s Day, you should be prepared for crowds of revelers, likely wearing green with a Guinness in hand. This party atmosphere belies the political nature of both the holiday and the mass immigration of…

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