Janssen, the pharmaceutical division of the Johnson & Johnson companies, announced Wednesday that it will scrap development of a vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, in adults.

A group led by billionaire Josh Harris and NBA legend Magic Johnson has officially placed a bid to buy the NFL's Washington Commanders from embattled owner Daniel Snyder, a source told CNN on Tuesday.

Awash in strobes, Seth “Freakin” Rollins begins his waltz to the ring. His nemesis, the YouTube star Logan Paul, is there waiting for him.

Rollins pauses beneath the jumbotron and holds his arms outstretched like Christ the Redeemer. Green and purple spotlights dart and swirl around Boston’s TD Garden. Thousands of fans start screaming the “whoa-ohh-ohh” part of Rollins’s theme song; exponentially more are live-tweeting the broadcast at home. It’s just before 9 o’clock on a frigid Monday in March—we haven’t even reached Act II of the three-hour pageant. RAW debuted 30 years ago and remains the top-rated cable program nearly every week, trouncing Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow, whose fiery monologues are—knowingly or not—greatly influenced by those of professional wrestlers.

Rollins takes another step forward. Flames burst toward the ceiling. I’m mid-arena, enthralled, sitting next to Abraham Josephine Riesman, the author of Ringmaster, a new biography of WWE Executive Chair Vince McMahon, whose valorization of violent spectacle over morals led to, as the book’s subtitle wants you to believe, “the unmaking of America.” I’ve brought Riesman here to unpack that claim, and to better understand how one man could have such a profound influence on American culture and politics.

[Read: Donald Trump, wrestling heel]

You may recognize McMahon as the eye-bulging star of the internet’s go-to reaction meme. He also happens to be a close personal friend of former President Donald Trump. (His wife, Linda, served in Trump’s Cabinet as small-business secretary after two failed Senate bids in Connecticut.) McMahon stepped down from his position as WWE CEO last summer following allegations of sexual misconduct with female employees and related hush-money payments. Nevertheless, he’s still the company’s biggest shareholder and, depending on whom you ask, its puppeteer.

Though ostensibly banished from public-facing wrestling engagements, McMahon is rumored to be in the building tonight to welcome back his former moneymaker John Cena. But Cena and his jorts won’t slide into the ring for a while. Right now, the jacked-up crowd is chanting “FUCK YOU, LOGAN!” at 27-year-old Paul, who revels in the hatred. It’s loud. “Look at the smile on Logan Paul’s face,” Riesman shouts into my left ear. “He’s a dangerous man!”

Is wrestling real? Is it fake? The answer to both questions is, paradoxically, yes. The outcome of each contest is scripted. The body slams and submissions are choreographed. Sworn enemies are, in all likelihood, friends. But the Undertaker (Mark Calaway) really did throw Mankind (Mick Foley) off the top of that steel cage during a 1998 King of the Ring pay-per-view match. Foley really did fall 16 feet and crash through the announcers’ table. He was carted off on a stretcher, only to fight the paramedics and stumble back to the ring, where the Undertaker once again sent Foley’s massive body flying, this time through the “Hell in a Cell” chain-link roof. A bit later, the Undertaker choke-slammed him onto a pile of thumbtacks. By the time the match was over, Foley had a badly injured shoulder and a broken tooth shoved up his nose. Professional wrestling delivers sensory overload that’s almost impossible to capture with mere description. “It’s the best [thing] I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” Andy Warhol said of a 1985 match at Madison Square Garden.

Eight years ago, a pervasive idea took hold in what passes for our “national political conversation.” During the summer and fall of 2015, with each new rally, interview, and debate, we were told that the outsider candidate Donald Trump was transforming American politics into wrestling. It was a convenient, if ahistorical, conceit. Politics and wrestling were entangled long before Trump descended the golden escalator and villainized imagined adversaries to the delight of hooting fans and cable-TV cameras. Around the turn of the millennium, Jesse “The Body” Ventura made televised wrestling cameos while serving as the governor of Minnesota. Teddy Roosevelt brought his love of wrestling into the White House. “George Washington wrestled,” Riesman writes in Ringmaster, “as did Abraham Lincoln, who fought in roughly three hundred matches—indeed, a famous one in New Salem, Illinois, in 1831 made Honest Abe a local celebrity and was a key factor in putting him on the path to politics.”

Millions of people love wrestling; millions more loathe it. Many people simply don’t know what to do with it. Although the symbiotic relationship between politics and wrestling goes back centuries, it is fair to say that Trump exploited WWE tools and tricks better than anyone who had come before him. TV networks once carried Trump’s campaign rallies live because of their sheer unpredictability. In January 2016, it wasn’t enough for Trump to kick protesters out of a Vermont rally; he directed security to “throw ’em out into the cold” and “confiscate their coats.”

In Boston, while watching Seth Rollins and Logan Paul provoke, then pummel, each other, Riesman predicted—with a distressingly low level of irony—that Paul would be president of the United States someday. Paul is a skilled trash-talker and, despite his youth, a veteran self-promoter, two qualities that would serve him well in politics. One of the WWE’s greatest orators, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, spoke at the Republican National Convention during the peak of his wrestling career. Johnson, a household name even without his wrestling moniker, has been hinting at his own presidential run for the better part of a decade. Kane (Glenn Jacobs), the fire-and-brimstone on-screen brother of the Undertaker, is currently the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee.

Trump, though twice impeached and not a wrestler, remains a proud member of the WWE Hall of Fame. Even if you’ve never watched a single match, you’ve likely seen the clip of the 45th president shaving Vince McMahon’s head with maniacal joy, or the one of him clotheslining his dear friend just outside the ropes. And if not, you’ve certainly seen the edited version in which instead of McMahon, Trump pulverizes the CNN logo. Trump shared that one on his official Twitter account in 2017, back before he was banned (and later reinstated) for inciting a violent mob at the Capitol.

I kept going over Riesman’s subtitle—The Unmaking of America—in my head while watching RAW a few weeks after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. During that speech, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, clad in a white, fur-collared coat suitable for the WWE legend Ric Flair, shouted, “Liar!” at Biden. Her congressional colleague Lauren Boebert has released scores of short, taped monologues that look and sound more than a little like wrestling promos. During Trump’s term, the CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s earnest sparring in the White House briefing room often resembled pre-bout barbs. Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, infamously asserted—with absurd sincerity—that his new boss had drawn the biggest crowd in inauguration history, period. Revisiting that day recently, I thought again of Ric Flair and his boundless hyperbole: “I’ve got a limousine sittin’ out there a mile long!”

[Read: Viceland’s Dark Side of the Ring shows the sleaze and humanity of wrestling]

Riesman’s book is not about politics, nor is it strictly about wrestling. More than anything, Ringmaster describes one man’s greed and his quest for ultimate power, for control. Thus, politics—implicit and explicit—are woven through the decades-long narrative history of violence-as-capitalism. Yes, matches are rigged, and story lines play out over months or years, but it’s not all a show: Wrestlers really do get hurt. Sometimes they covertly slice their own skin with a blade to produce real blood. Other times, stunts go horribly wrong, such as when Owen Hart’s theatrical descent into the ring with faulty wiring ended his life in 1999. Chris Benoit, after years living with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, murdered his family and then committed suicide in 2007.

“You have a lot of injury and death that comes out of wrestling in a way that it certainly does not in other athletic events, with the possible exception of boxing,” Riesman said. “Pro wrestlers die younger on average than a lot of other professions. And somehow that gets glossed over.”

Through exhaustive research and a few key in-depth interviews—namely with Hart’s more famous older brother Bret—Riesman unspools a story of a messy beast that’s not quite a sport and not quite an opera, and has long occupied a dangerous gray area. As a reader, your appetite for territorial wrestling-promoter disputes and regional-broadcast wars will vary, though Ringmaster contains several valuable insights about how money and influence affect politics.

“Even before he started accepting their campaign dollars, Rick Santorum owed a debt to the McMahon family,” Riesman writes. In the 1980s, the future U.S. senator and Republican presidential candidate was a young lawyer lobbying for deregulation on behalf of the WWE (then called the WWF). “Santorum was aggressive in his efforts to sway legislators and officials to Vince and Linda’s point of view,” we learn, especially when it came to loosening wrestling’s health-and-safety protocols.

The ’80s were a curious time for wrestling culture, and most of Ringmaster’s memorable anecdotes take place during this period. In 1988, then-businessman Donald Trump “hosted” Wrestlemania at the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. That word is in quotes because, as with so much involving Trump, it was a con—the actual event took place across the street, at the Atlantic City Convention Center. (TV audiences were none the wiser, Riesman notes, and this helped Trump build his brand.) Two years earlier, the lawyer G. Gordon Liddy, of Watergate fame, served as a Wrestlemania celebrity guest judge. A year before that, Gloria Steinem and the former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro filmed segments in which they emasculated “Rowdy” Roddy Piper to show support for Piper’s then-rival, the pop star Cindy Lauper. Although it was still derided as a sideshow, wrestling was going mainstream. Nonwrestlers—including Trump—played a key role in this evolution.

Over dinner before we walked to the arena, I asked Riesman, who goes by Josie, about the masculine stereotypes embedded within wrestling culture. Truthfully, my question was a little clumsier than that. I wanted to know if she thought that the “average” WWE fan we were about to encounter might be surprised to learn that she, a Harvard-educated transgender woman, could love something so barbaric.

“Wrestling is a carnival, and the carnival is a great leveler—there are people who came into wrestling as kids and came out as diehard Trump supporters or Second Amendment thumpers, but then you have people like me who came out as queer, weirdo anarchists,” she said. “I watched wrestling as a kid with a lot of people who came at wrestling from having been sports fans, but I was the one who came at it from the entertainment side.” Specifically, Riesman told me, she loved the wrestlers’ knack for elocution. “I had been doing musical theater, and it felt like musical theater to me. I found it thrilling; I didn't care about the matches,” she said. “I love the drama.”

Ringmaster has one of the best dedication pages I’ve read: “For my mother, who custom-stitched me a tearaway T-shirt after I first saw Hulk Hogan on TV.” One Halloween, my own saintly mom used a black marker to draw the Rock’s trademark sideburns on both of my cheeks and helped me wedge a set of football shoulder pads under a JUST BRING IT shirt to complete the costume. Like most parents, she didn’t love that I loved wrestling, but she eventually understood that I and every other middle-school boy was obsessed with it. RAW, Smackdown—we couldn’t look away. Maybe it was transitive: Watching a “good guy” like the Rock deliver “the people’s elbow” to a bullying foe was cathartic.

Or maybe we were just addicted to the story lines. Reflecting on my interview with Riesman, and her use of the word drama, I thought again of Santorum, who, after his failed bid for the White House in 2016, joined CNN as a political commentator. Although CNN positions itself as centrist, it leans left, and, until his firing in 2021, Santorum was one of its few Trump defenders. In other words, he was the network’s go-to “heel,” in wrestling parlance—a bad guy. I thought back to a line from the former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, who helped bring Trump and The Apprentice into American living rooms back when he was at NBC. Zucker once told a reporter for The New York Times Magazine that he viewed CNN’s pro-Trump panelists as “characters in a drama.” On-camera feuds boosted ratings. Political TV panels, like professional wrestling, could be both live and structured with familiar set pieces each week. Yet you never knew what someone might say or do. With WWE, McMahon perfected a sports-and-entertainment behemoth that kept 12-year-olds like me glued to the TV. With Trump, Zucker and his competitors were crafting similar news-and-politics-and-entertainment products. Flashy graphics, flying taunts, unraveling democracy: Who could look away?  

In Boston, the RAW broadcast cut away for a commercial break, and the jumbotron ran a WWE promo: “This May,” a booming voice began, “live from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia …” WWE is currently in the midst of a 10-year deal to stage programming in the Middle East, a privilege for which the kingdom is paying an estimated $40 million per event, according to Riesman. One of WWE’s rising stars, the scrappy and cerebral Sami Zayn, is the son of Syrian immigrants. Zayn reportedly refuses to participate in the Saudi gigs and thus, Riesman argued to me, “can never be champ.” Some wrestling insiders allege that it’s the Saudis who have banned him, on account of his ethnicity and political leanings. (Zayn has also been known to share links from the socialist magazine Jacobin—back in December, he wrote “GOAT” over a photo the publication had posted of the leftist public intellectual Noam Chomsky.) The WWE did not respond to a request for comment about Zayn’s involvement in matches in Saudi Arabia.

As Wrestlemania returns next weekend, Seth Rollins and Logan Paul will once again square off. During the main event, the title belt may transfer from the uber-dominant Roman Reigns to Cody Rhodes, son of the legendary wrestler Dusty Rhodes. The younger Rhodes is a buttoned-up, blue-eyed, bleached-blond character whose nickname is “The American Nightmare”—the inverse of his father, “The American Dream.” Rhodes’s logo is a menacing skull with eagle wings covered in an American flag. His entrance song also has its own choral “whoa-ohh-ohh.” It is hard to watch Rhodes strut out into the arena in his suit and tie and not think of a tougher, fitter, more strapping Trump—or, for that matter, Vince McMahon. Riesman’s full portrait of McMahon is by no means a puff piece, though I’d also hesitate to call it a hit job. For all of McMahon’s undesirable traits, for all the toxic masculinity, Riesman does seem impressed by his ability to vanquish his enemies through the years. More than an aloof businessman, McMahon is portrayed as an unhealthily competitive auteur who tapped into the American id and, on occasion, made magic.

Trump, in relative exile, seems obsessed with rekindling his 2016 campaign’s grotesque, supersize magic. For a while, Trump has been road-testing nicknames in hopes of denigrating his strongest 2024 rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “Ron DeSanctimonius” wasn’t cutting it. “Meatball Ron” had potential. “Tiny D” was, well …

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

DeSantis, for his part, recently reacted to news of Trump’s legal troubles with a slow-motion insult: “I don’t know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair,” he said at a press conference last week. Though still a fairly new force in Republican politics, DeSantis, too, makes a brief cameo in Ringmaster. In April 2020, barely one month into the coronavirus pandemic, DeSantis deemed WWE an essential business, and permitted the organization to film fanless events at its facility in Orlando. The result was oddly quiet and a tad dystopian. “You can have a baseball game without a crowd,” Riesman said. “You can’t really have a wrestling match without a crowd.” Nor, for that matter, a political rally.

Riesman and I were at RAW right after I watched Trump deliver one of the darkest speeches of his career. “I am your retribution,” Trump told his CPAC fans. Though it wasn’t his strongest turn at the mic, the former president sounded more than a little like a pro wrestler, psyching himself up, hobbling back to the ring. And people seemed hungry for it.

Jules Feiffer and I were born 94 years ago in the Bronx, two months apart. We both grew up to be terrible at sports, and we both started to draw characters from the comics when we were 8 or 9 years old. We both became cartoonists, and last year, both of us ended up in different emergency rooms with heart failure, in the same week.

After four or five days, we were both discharged from the hospital with pretty much the same array of pills, as well as orders to stay away from salt. But Jules’s doctor gave him an additional admonishment: Jules had to move far away from his home on Shelter Island. The humidity was bad for his lungs. Joan Holden, Jules’s wife, wasted no time in doing research to find out which area had the best air quality. It turned out that the air around Cooperstown, New York, was about as good as you could get, so Joan and Jules bought a house in a nearby town.

I live in Manhattan but was determined to pay Jules a visit—we have been friends for half a century, and I was the best man when Jules married Joan. And, in a way, I owe the career I’ve had as a caricaturist to Jules. His work as a cartoonist, a novelist, a playwright, and a creator of children’s books over the past 70 years inspired me to attempt things I never would have without his example.

In 1956, when his strip in The Village Voice began appearing, I was an art director at CBS Television designing ads for I Love Lucy, Amos ‘n’ Andy, and other shows that I found unwatchable. Suddenly, there was Jules’s strip every week, describing the way we lived—our hang-ups, our desires, our fears, our politics. He was doing what I dreamed of doing: using comic art as commentary. Before my 27th birthday, I quit CBS and started freelancing.

[Read: The cartoon that captures the damaged American male]

It’s difficult for a generation younger than mine to realize how important Jules’s drawings were to so many of us in America in the 1950s and ’60s. There were some great cartoonists, but not so much when it came to the kind of sophisticated social and political commentary we now take for granted. The era of Doonesbury and The Simpsons, which Jules helped make possible, had yet to come. Jules created and occupied a space of his own: part editorial cartoon, part comic strip, part session on the couch. His style—his line, his language—was deceptively simple, and unlike anything else at the time. Across several panels, one character would give voice to a monologue, two characters would hold a conversation, or a woman would dance amid her swirling thoughts—rarely more than that. In the 1950s, newspaper cartoons didn’t really focus on relationships, therapy, conformity, self-doubt, or the latest fads in lifestyle and literature. In the early ’60s, even liberal newspapers were nervous about the civil-rights movement and virtually unanimous in their support of the Vietnam War. Because Jules was a lone voice of protest for so long, he was revered by many readers.

After Jules and Joan moved into their new home, Joan emailed me photographs, and I promised I would visit. But I didn’t see how I could. The drive there would take more than four hours, and I had promised my daughter (after badly denting her car) that I would never get behind the wheel again. Jules’s driving days were over too: He had macular degeneration. To the rescue came my friend Katherine Hourigan, a vice president of Knopf Doubleday and a good friend of Jules’s. Kathy offered to drive me to Joan and Jules’s place in upstate New York.

The events that led to my friendship with Jules began in 1974, when Clay Felker, a co-founder and the editor of New York magazine, bought The Village Voice, the countercultural weekly that had started publication in 1955. Back then, freelancers who wrote for the Voice liked to call it a “writer’s newspaper” because, as they described it, their stories went into print pretty much unedited. On the other hand, those lucky contributors, including cartoonists, made little or no money. The Voice’s unofficial policy seemed to be “We don’t edit you, and we don’t pay you.” When, in 1956, the editors agreed to run Jules’s comic strip—at first called Sick, Sick, Sick—he was ecstatically happy to accept $0 a week just to get published. After Felker took over the Voice, its low-paid staff joined a union, and Jules’s salary jumped to $25 a week.

Another result of the Voice changing hands was that Felker gave me—a contributor to New York magazine since its very beginning—a weekly spot in the Voice. Jules and I would now be appearing just a page apart every week. This put us in the position of being dueling cartoonists, but Jules’s parry-slash-and lunge had made him famous long before I joined the paper. His celebrated comic strip—now called simply Feiffer—was being syndicated in newspapers from coast to coast, as well as overseas in The Observer. The film director Stanley Kubrick was so taken by Jules’s strip that he wrote to him praising his “eminently speakable and funny” dialogue. He suggested that they collaborate on a screenplay.

[Read: The alien majesty of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon]

Instead, Jules used his gift for dialogue to write a novel, Harry, the Rat With Women, and followed that with a play, Little Murders. The latter was turned into a movie in 1971, the same year that another film, Carnal Knowledge, for which Jules wrote the screenplay, opened in theaters. Despite his dizzying array of creative undertakings—his critical history The Great Comic Book Heroes; his illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth; and the Oscar-winning animated film Munro, about a little boy who is drafted into the Army—Jules never missed a deadline in the 41 years that his cartoon strip appeared in the Voice.

An illustration by Jules Feiffer from The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

In the 1970s, when we met at parties or spoke on the same panel, we were always friendly, but we did not become close friends until Jules met my wife, Nancy. It was easy for a boy from the Bronx to be attracted to Nancy: Her voice was warm and soft, and her speech was clearly enunciated. She radiated what Quakers call “inner light,” and—best of all—she had been a fan of Jules’s since her college days. Jules figured that if Nancy had married me, I must be more interesting than he’d thought.

One summer, Kathy Hourigan invited Nancy and me to the cottage she rented on Martha’s Vineyard, and Jules, who had a large, turn-of-the-century saltbox house, invited us all to dinner. When Nancy told Jules how much she admired his home, he explained that he had bought it with the $650,000 he’d picked up for writing the Carnal Knowledge screenplay, adding that he had initially written it for the stage but “rewrote it for the screen because Mike Nichols said he would rather direct it as a movie.” Jules made it sound so easy to write a screenplay that I promised myself that as soon as I got back to Manhattan, I would learn how to type.

Having the Feiffer strip and my own cartoon a page apart in the Voice worked out well. Even when we both tackled the same subject in the same issue, our approach was very different. Most of the time, I felt I held my own against Jules’s sequential drawings, but not when it came to the war in Vietnam. On that subject, Jules couldn’t be touched. The attempt by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon to force Christian dictators down the throats of Buddhist Vietnamese in the name of anti-communism produced many brilliant cartoons from many pens, but none with more rage, wit, and concision than Jules’s.

Unfortunately, my happy stay at the Voice was short-lived. In 1977, Rupert Murdoch bought a controlling interest in New York and the Voice, and Felker was gone. I resigned, along with many other contributors. Feiffer saw no reason to leave the Voice, and Murdoch never interfered with his strip. In 1986, Jules finally won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. After 30 years of brilliant graphic commentary, it was long overdue. “Every 30 years,” Jules said at the time, “the Pulitzer committee gives me a prize, whether I deserve it or not.”

[Read: Trump’s future isn’t up to Fox News]

Jules and I were thrown together again in 1992, when Tina Brown took over the editorship of The New Yorker. Tina saw nothing wrong with going after celebrated writers and cartoonists who had made their reputation outside the magazine’s hallowed halls; she wanted Jules Feiffer, and gave him two pages to do a strip for her first issue. I contributed the cover for that issue.

The Monday it hit the newsstands, Jules and I were bowled over when the magazine was delivered to us by messenger. I have no idea how many other contributors received a copy by hand, but such gestures on Tina’s part were the first indication I had that concern for the bottom line was very low on her list of priorities. Although I had broken into the The New Yorker a year earlier, I phoned Jules, and we congratulated each other on making it into the magazine that had snubbed us when we were young.

Jules continued to have triumphs in the years ahead, but he also had troubles. His screenplay for Popeye didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped, and some of his later plays received lukewarm reviews. He also had to cope with a long, acrimonious divorce. And then there was the brutal fact that his eyesight was failing.

After four hours of driving from one boring highway to another, we were told by the car’s GPS that we had arrived at Joan and Jules’s home. Kathy and I found ourselves in front of a very long one-story house that Joan later described as neoclassical or Gustavian. No one answered our knock, so we just walked in. We soon discovered Joan in the kitchen; she welcomed us with hugs and rushed to find Jules in the other wing, and we followed. When he saw us—or the blurred image of us—he let out his familiar high-decibel shout of joy, and we all returned to the kitchen. The house has enormous picture windows with a spectacular view of a lake and the voluptuous mountains beyond it. I wondered how much of the view Jules could actually enjoy, though he had spoken enthusiastically about seeing his home’s surroundings for the first time.

After lunch, Jules and I spent time together in his studio. “This is the biggest studio I ever had,” Jules roared at the top of his lungs as we entered. I guess he wanted his friends in Manhattan to hear—they’d all told him not to move out of the city. I’m not sure Jules could afford to live in Manhattan anymore; the divorce had drained his savings. The one time he’d tried to make a little extra money by drawing a strip for an advertisement, he’d received a letter calling him “a sellout,” and that was enough to make Jules swear off ever doing another ad. The great New Yorker cartoonists Peter Arno, Charles Saxon, and Charles Addams had all drawn for advertising agencies, and nobody had ever called them sellouts. But the followers of Jules expected their hero to be above drawing for a whiskey ad.

As I sat with Jules, I saw a lot of taped-up boxes from the move that he still hadn’t opened. But one of my drawings from my book The Saturday Kid had been unpacked and was hanging on his wall; I’d given it to Jules years ago as a peace offering. That book had come close to ruining our friendship.

This was decades ago, but here’s what happened. I had called Jules and asked if he would consider writing a book, which I would illustrate, about a poor boy in the 1930s who goes to the movies every Saturday morning and daydreams himself into those movies. Jules jumped at the idea and promised I’d have copy in a week or two. After six months went by, I decided I could write the book myself. That’s when his copy arrived. It was mostly about a boy with a terrible mother. It was Jules’s mother, not mine. I told him I couldn’t do his book. He felt betrayed and went off to write his own book for children, The Man in the Ceiling, which was brilliant and became a best seller, as did most of his other children’s books. He forgave me.

Jules brought over a few drawings that he had done recently. I found out later that the essayist Roger Rosenblatt was using them in his new book, Cataract Blues. Looking at the thin lines crossing this way and that, it was hard for me to figure out what exactly Jules meant to convey, but his work, done in blue ink, had a quality that reminded me of some Paul Klee drawings. One of them seemed to me to be of three bridges, perhaps ones that cross the East River. I told Jules they were lovely, and they were. But they didn’t look anything like those assured, energetic drawings that I so admired.

An illustration by Jules Feiffer from Cataract Blues, by Roger Rosenblatt

Before Kathy and I got in the car to drive back to New York, Joan and Jules walked out with us and pointed to their barn. It was temperature-controlled—a previous owner had used it to store paintings and wine. It is intended to become a repository for many of Jules’s original drawings, currently in storage in New York City. The archive encompasses seven decades of our national life, or at least a version captured with India ink on Bristol board. Maybe the Smithsonian will come calling.

Fiona Bruce asks the Question Time audience if they believe the former PM told a committee of MPs the truth.

Boris Johnson's grilling on whether he lied about partygate makes up most front pages on Thursday.

The former PM says Downing Street staff did not touch each other’s pens but passed drinks at events.

What were some of the significant responses in Boris Johnson's three hour question session in front of MPs?

The former PM repeatedly insists he did not deliberately lie to Parliament in a marathon grilling.

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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