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

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

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

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

Notes From Last Night

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

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

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

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

Read our finalist stories:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

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

“The Gun”

By Clint Smith

the gun heard the first shot /

the gun thought it was a bursting pipe /

the gun heard the second shot and the third /

and the fourth /

the gun realized this was not a pipe

Read the full poem.

More From The Atlantic

One more reason to hate cockroaches Stop sharing viral college-acceptance videos. Photos: a collection of cherry blossoms

Culture Break

Paramount Pictures

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

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

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

Play our daily crossword.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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.

In 2017, I was trying to write How to Be an Antiracist. Words came onto the page slower than ever. On some days, no words came at all. Clearly, I was in crisis.

I don’t believe in writer’s block. When words aren’t flowing onto the page, I know why: I haven’t researched enough, organized the material enough, thought enough to exhume clarity, meticulously outlined my thoughts enough. I haven’t prepared myself to write.

But no matter how much I prepared, I still struggled to convey what my research and reasoning showed. I struggled because I was planning to challenge traditional conceptions of racism, and to defy the multiracial and bipartisan consensus that race neutrality was possible and that “not racist” was a definable identity. And I struggled because I was planning to describe a largely unknown corrective posture—being anti-racist—with long historical roots. These departures from tradition were at the front of my struggling mind. But at the back of my mind was a more existential struggle—a struggle I think is operating at the front of our collective mind today.

[Ibram X. Kendi: The mantra of white supremacy]

It took an existential threat for me to transcend my struggle and finish writing the book. Can we recognize the existential threat we face today, and use it to transcend our struggles?

As I tried to write my book, I struggled over what it means to be an intellectual. Or to be more precise: I struggled because what I wanted to write and the way in which I wanted to write it diverged from traditional notions of what it means to be an intellectual.

The intellectual has been traditionally framed as measured, objective, ideologically neutral, and apolitical, superior to ordinary people who allow emotion, subjectivity, ideology, and their own lived experiences to cloud their reason. Group inequality has traditionally been reasoned to stem from group hierarchy. Those who advance anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, and anti-homophobic ideas have historically been framed as anti-intellectual.

The traditional construct of the intellectual has produced and reinforced bigoted ideas of group hierarchy—the most anti-intellectual constructs existing. But this framing is crumbling, leading to the crisis of the intellectual.

Behind the scenes of the very public anti–critical race theory, anti-woke, and anti–anti-racism campaign waged mostly by Republican politicos is another overlapping and more bipartisan campaign waged mostly by people who think of themselves as intellectuals. Both campaigns emerged in reaction to the demonstrations in the summer of 2020 that carried anti-racist intellectuals to the forefront of public awareness.

These intellectuals not only highlighted the crisis of racism but, in the process, started changing the public conception of the intellectual. Their work was more in line with that of medical researchers seeking a cure to a disease ravaging their community than with philosophers theorizing on a social disease for theory’s sake from a safe remove. We need the model these new intellectuals pursued to save humanity from the existential threats that humans have created, including climate change, global pandemics, bigotry, and war.

But this new conception of the intellectual and those who put it into practice face all sorts of resistance. Opponents denounce the “illiberal” dangers of identity politics and proclaim the limits of “lived experience.” They argue that identity politics makes everything about identity, or spurs a clash of identities. In fact, the term identity politics was coined in the 1970s, a time when Black lesbian women in organizations like Boston’s Combahee River Collective were being implored to focus their activist work on the needs of Black men, in Black power spaces; white women, in feminist areas; and gay men, in gay-liberation struggles—on everyone’s oppression but their own. They were determined to change that. “This focus upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics,” Demita Frazier, Beverly Smith, and Barbara Smith wrote in the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement. It is common sense for people to focus on their own oppression, but these activists did not wish to focus only on their own oppression. The Combahee River Collective was “organizing Black feminists as we continue to do political work in coalition with other groups.”

Forty-six years later, when intellectuals of all races produce work on matters primarily affecting white people, the assumed subject of intellectual pursuits, these thinkers are seldom accused of engaging in identity politics. Their work isn’t considered dangerous. These thinkers are not framed as divisive and political. Instead, they are praised for example, for exposing the opioid crisis in white America, praised for pushing back against blaming the addicted for their addictions, praised for enriching their work with lived experiences, praised for uncovering the corporations behind the crisis, praised for advocating research-based policy solutions, praised for seeking truth based on evidence, praised for being intellectuals. As they all should be. But when anti-racist intellectuals expose the crisis of racism, push back against efforts to problematize people of color in the face of racial inequities, enrich our essays with lived experiences, point to racist power and policies as the problem, and advocate for research-based anti-racist policy solutions, the reactions couldn’t be more different. We are told that “truth seeking” and “activism” don’t mix.

American traditions do not breed intellectuals; they breed propagandists and careerists focusing their gaze on the prominent and privileged and powerful and on whatever challenges are afflicting them. Intellectuals today, when focused on the oppression of our own groups—as embodied in the emergence of Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Disability Studies, Latino Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian American Studies—are ridiculed for pursuing fields that lack “educational value,” and our books, courses, programs, and departments are shut down and banned by the action of Republicans and the inaction of Democrats. We are told to research, think, and write about people, meaning not our people. We are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

[Jarvis R. Givens: What’s missing from the discourse about anti-racist teaching]

Think about the gaslighting of it all. We are told that white people are being replaced in society, in their jobs within the “intellectual” class. One of the most successful living authors, James Patterson, claimed that white men are experiencing “another form of racism” as they, according to Patterson, struggle to break through as writers in publishing, theater, TV, and film.

Aggrieved white people and their racist propagandists are offering similarly dangerous replacement theories across the “intellectual” class. If white people are being replaced by Black and Latino people, then why are Black and Latino people still underrepresented across many sectors of the “intellectual” class—among authors, in publishing, among full-time faculty, in newsrooms? (Such evidence likely compelled James Patterson to backtrack and apologize.) With all of this evidence, other commentators have focused on the extent of “self-censorship” or “cancel culture” affecting white people (as if people of color aren’t self-censoring or being canceled at least as often). Worst of all, the racist perpetrators of these theories, like Donald Trump, frame themselves as the victims. When Scott Adams has his comic dropped after he called Black people a “hate group” and told his white listeners “to get the hell away from Black people,” they claim that the real problem is anti-whiteness.

And then, when anti-racist intellectuals historicize these white-supremacist talking points about anti-racism being anti-white and give evidence of their long and deep and violent history, when we historicize disparities like the racial wealth gap that are as much the product of the past as the present, when new research and thinking allow us to revise present understandings of the past, when we use the past to better understand the present and the future, we are told to keep the past in the past. We are told not to change the inequitable present, and not to expect anything to change in the future. We are told to look away as the past rains down furiously on the present. Or we are told that intellectuals should focus only on how society has progressed, a suicidal and illogical act when a tornado is ravaging your community. Yet again, we are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

“Above all, historians should make us understand the ways in which the past was distinct,” the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote. When we are told that historical writings should be irrelevant to our contemporary debates, it is not hard to figure out why. History, when taught truthfully, reveals the bigotry in our contemporary debates. Which is why the conservators of bigotry don’t want history taught in schools. It has nothing to do with the discomfort of children. It is uncomfortable for the opponents of truthful history to have the rest of us see them, to have their kids to see them. They don’t want anyone to clearly see how closely they replicate colonizers, land stealers, human traders, enslavers, Klansmen, lynchers, anti-suffragists, robber barons, Nazis, and Jim Crow segregationists who attacked democracy, allowed mass killings, bound people in freedom’s name, ridiculed truth tellers and immigrants, lied for sport, banned books, strove to control women’s reproduction, blamed the poor for their poverty, bashed unions, and engaged in political violence. Historical amnesia is vital to the conservation of their bigotry. Because historical amnesia suppresses our resistance to their bigotry.

Or, for others, it is about conserving tradition. James Sweet, while serving as the American Historical Association president last year, challenged what he calls “presentism” in the profession. He recently clarified that his target was the “professional historians who believe that social justice should be their first port of entry, which is not the way that we’ve traditionally done history.” And yet, throughout most of the history of history as a discipline, historians have centered Europe, white people, men, and the wealthy in their accounts and composed tales of their superiority. That is the way historians have traditionally done history until recent decades, all of this social injustice entering our collective consciousness clothed in neutrality and objectivity. So now, abolishing the master’s narrative and emancipating the truth must be one of our first ports of entry. To be an intellectual is to know that the truth will set humanity free to gain the power to make humanity free.

Maybe I did have writer’s block when I started composing How to Be an Antiracist back in 2017. I did not suffer from that sort of blockage when writing Stamped From the Beginning, several years earlier. Writing that book was like writing in a cave, to the cave. I didn’t think many people would read the book, let alone think of me as an intellectual. All I cared about was writing history.

But when Stamped From the Beginning won a National Book Award, I began to think about my standing as an intellectual. Suddenly, I was writing in the public square, to the public square. The traditional strictures kept blocking the writing. Be objective. Be apolitical. Be balanced. Be measured. Your primary audience should be others in your field. Keep them in mind. Do not defy the orthodoxy they created. Reinforce it. Satisfy them to advance your career. I faced a blockade of old and fraught traditions regarding what it means to be an intellectual that had nothing to do with the process of truth finding and telling.

[Ibram X. Kendi: The double terror of being Black in America]

Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who looked like me or who had a background like mine, who came from a non-elite academic pedigree, emerged proudly from a historically Black university, earned a doctorate in African American Studies. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who researched like me, thought like me, wrote like me—or who researched, thought, or wrote for people like me. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who are not ranking groups of people in the face of inequity and injustice. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include those of us who are fixated and focused wholly and totally on uncovering and clarifying complex truths that can radically improve the human condition. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include our conception of the intellectual.

I knew this. I knew about the equation of the Enlightenment and “reason” and “objectivity” and “empiricism” with whiteness and Western Europe and masculinity and the bourgeoisie. I knew that Francis Bacon, the father of “empiricism” in the sciences, held anti-Black racist ideas, and that his work became the basis for “empirical” quests among eugenicists to assert natural human hierarchy that climaxed in the mass sterilization of Black and Latina and disabled and low-income women in the United States and in the Holocaust of Jews and other “undesirables” in Nazi Germany. I knew that the originator of “objectivity” in history, Leopold von Ranke, believed that the “world divinely ordered” meant Europeans, Christians, and the wealthy at the top. I knew that bigoted academics, who obscured their bigotry behind their objectivity, founded almost every academic discipline in the United States. I knew that objectivity and the construct of “balance” migrated from the U.S. academy to U.S. journalism as professional ideals after World War I, when a wave of newspaper mergers and closings compelled reporters to appeal to wide swaths of the public. (Sound familiar?) I knew that the Hutchins Commission, organized in 1947 to report on the proper function of the media, had warned against objective and balanced reporting that was “factually correct but substantially untrue.” I knew that traditional conceptions of the intellectual serve the status quo of injustice.

Intellectuals who are people of color, women, non-Christian, LGBTQ, or working class—indeed intellectuals of all identities who have challenged the status quo, especially traditional and bigoted conventions—have historically been cast aside as nonintellectuals. Commentators lambasted the investigative journalist and educator Ida B. Wells as “partisan” and “a licentious defamer” for the “obscene filth that flows from her pen”—all for finding and telling the hard truths about lynchings. Scholars described W. E. B. Du Bois, a pioneering historian, sociologist, and editor, as “bitter” after he wrote The Souls of Black Folk and his magnum opus, Black Reconstruction. In his landmark book, An American Dilemma, the Swedish Nobel laureate and economist Gunnar Myrdal dismissed the work of Carter G. Woodson—the father of Black History Month—and other Black scholars studying “Negro history and culture” as “basically an expression of the Negro protest,” in spite of its “scholarly pretenses and accomplishments.”

Gay professors were among those harassed and arrested by the U.S. Park Police’s “Pervert Elimination” campaign in Washington, D.C., in 1947—just as LGBTQ teachers are being harassed and censored today. Spelman College fired the Jewish professor Howard Zinn in 1963 for “radicalizing” Black women students by telling them the truth about U.S. history—and firings or threats of firing continue today at other schools and colleges. In 2021, the University of North Carolina’s board of trustees denied tenure to the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones over “politics.”

When the traditionalists today disagree with the evidence-based findings of intellectuals—or envy the prominence of our work—too often they do not contest our findings with their own evidence. They do not usually engage in intellectual activity. They misrepresent our work. They play up minor typos or small miscues to take down major theses. They call us names they never define, like “leftist” or “Marxist” or “woke” or “socialist” or “prophet” or “grifter” or “political” or “racist.” All to attack our credibility as intellectuals—to reassert their own credibility. In politics, they say, when you can’t win on policy, you smear the candidate. In intellectualism, when you can’t win on evidence, you smear the intellectual.

I knew the smears were coming, because I knew history. What blocked my writing bound my intellectualism. What finally set me free to be an intellectual was the face of death, a face I still stare at to amass the courage to be an intellectual.

It took me all of 2017 to write six chapters of How to Be an Antiracist. A slog. But when doctors diagnosed me with Stage 4 colon cancer in January 2018, when I figured I probably wouldn’t survive a disease that kills 86 percent of people in five years, when I decided that this book would be my last major will and testament to the world, everything that blocked my writing wilted away, along with my prospects for living. I no longer cared about those traditional conceptions of the intellectual—just like I no longer cared about the orthodoxy of racial thinking. I no longer cared about the backlash that was likely to come. All I cared about was telling the truth through the lens of research and evidence, reaction be damned. And just like that, between chemotherapy treatments, the words started flowing, furiously: 13 chapters in a few months.

Since I wasn’t going to live, I wanted to write a book that could help prevent our people from dying at the hands of racism. Yes, I was told I would die, but I wanted to tell my people to live. Like an intellectual.

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

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

Today’s special guest is the staff writer Jerusalem Demsas, whose work examines inefficiencies and oversights in policy, housing, and infrastructure. She recently wrote about how environmental laws are being used by birders, an anti-immigration group, and an oil and gas company, not to protect the environment but to defend the status quo, and reported on what she called the “obvious” answer to homelessness for the January/February issue of the magazine. She’s also a winner of the American Society of Magazine Editors’ ASME NEXT Award for Journalists Under 30.

These days, Jerusalem spends her leisure time falling down Reddit rabbit holes, reading the poetry of W. H. Auden, and rocking out to Vampire Weekend. You’ll find her culture and entertainment recommendations below.

But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The strongest evidence yet that an animal started the pandemic What have humans just unleashed? How please stopped being polite The Culture Survey: Jerusalem Demsas

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Abbott Elementary. I’m someone who can usually only watch TV while doing at least one or two other things at the same time, and this show grabs my full attention. Unbelievably funny. [Related: Abbott Elementary, Minx, and the end of the girlboss myth]

An actor I would watch in anything: Amy Adams. I fell in love with her while watching Arrival, and every time she comes on-screen, anyone near me gets a five- to 10-minute monologue about how the Academy is biased against science fiction. [Related: Is Arrival the best “first contact” film ever made?]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is a fantastic science-fiction novel that I recently read. The best thing about science fiction is when someone is able to construct a world that is both familiar—or at least logically consistent with how we see the world—and adds a new depth or dimension to our understanding of it. Tchaikovsky does that brilliantly.

For a nonfiction work, I’d choose Strangers to Ourselves, by Rachel Aviv. Aviv is probably the best example of a nonfiction writer who has a clear perspective and shows it through the stories she tells. Many nonfiction writers fall too far in one direction: Either it’s sort of unclear what they’re getting at and we’re bogged down in characters or narrative that don’t advance our understanding, or there’s too much preaching and in-your-face explanations that leave us wanting a more human dimension. [Related: The diagnosis trap]

An author I will read anything by: Ted Chiang. Kazuo Ishiguro. Jeffrey Eugenides. Melissa Caruso. Gabrielle Zevin. (Okay, sorry, that’s five, but my editors are letting me keep them all in!)

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Hozier recently released some new songs that prompted me to go back to one of my favorites off his first EP: “Cherry Wine.” It’s probably my favorite of his. And my go-to karaoke song is “Gloria,” by Laura Branigan, so I have to pick that for my loud song!

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Vampire Weekend is a band that I’ve listened to through many formative moments of my life. Their self-titled album was released as I was finishing middle school, Modern Vampires of the City was released as I was graduating high school, and Father of the Bride was what I listened to as I was struggling to make a career change. Some of my favorites are “Big Blue”; “Jerusalem, New York, Berlin”; “Ya Hey”; “Don’t Lie”; and “Walcott.”

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I went to Berlin for the first time last year and visited the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, where a man who had been imprisoned by the Stasi—the state security service of East Germany—as a youth gave us a tour of the former prison. He explained that in 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia following the Prague Spring, he and his friends papered his community with the following message:

“Citizens - Comrades. Alien tanks in Czechoslovakia only serve the class enemy. Think about the reputation of Socialism in the world. Demand truthful information. Nobody is too stupid to think for himself.”

As a result of this political activity, he was arrested and held in the prison. He walked us through it, weaving his own story with what history has uncovered about the experiences of other prisoners, as we stepped carefully through narrow hallways and cold cells, and peered into a replica of the transport van that brought him to the prison. He recounted a winding journey that took several times longer than a direct route would have, in order to confuse the detainees as to where they actually were (sometimes just minutes from home). Our guide also described the experience of living as neighbors with some of the very people responsible for his unjust incarceration and mistreatment: Many of the implicated officials were never fully held accountable, and some may have continued to live in East Berlin.

Despite what he had been through, the guide ended the tour by saying, “It has not been such a hard life. It has been a good life.” He exhorted us to see democracy as a constant project, lest we end up with any of its alternatives. [Related: The lingering trauma of Stasi surveillance]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: I doubt there’s a more important story written in recent memory than Caitlin Dickerson’s “An American Catastrophe.” I spend a lot of time writing about how to reduce roadblocks to government progress. It’s easy to make the case for efficiency in our government when what we’re talking about is building housing, clean-energy infrastructure, and mass transit, or other policies I agree with. It’s more challenging (but probably even more important) to contend with what to do when democracies vote for people willing to pursue extreme and horrific policy agendas. A big part of that is accountability through the press, which is what makes Caitlin’s piece so great. [Related: “We need to take away children.”]

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: As an avid r/AmITheAsshole reader, I discovered r/BestofRedditorUpdates last year and refuse to disclose how much time I’ve spent on that subreddit chasing down threads and updates to stories people tell (or make up) on Reddit. The best tales are the ones where there is significant ambiguity over what the right thing to do actually is. I find it endlessly fascinating to watch people debate morality in real time, and to force my friends to read the posts and tell me what they think. [Related: Inside r/Relationships, the unbearably human corner of Reddit]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Musée des Beaux Arts,” by W. H. Auden. The author is reacting in part to the painting Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in which Icarus (from the Greek myth) is drowning. The only part of him you see is his legs flailing above the water right before he dies. The majority of the painting is made up of an indifferent world—ships sailing, workers continuing about their day. The sun shines brightly, and no one knows about the boy’s death.

“Musée des Beaux Arts,” by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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

The Week Ahead

1. Marie Antoinette, a new period drama about the teenage Marie Antoinette (premieres tonight at 10 EST on PBS)

2. Poverty, by America, a new book by the sociologist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Matthew Desmond about the persistence of poverty in the U.S. (on sale Tuesday)

3. John Wick: Chapter 4, in which Keanu Reeves’s stoic assassin faces his scariest foe yet: his own weariness (in theaters Friday)

Essay Illustration by Adam Maida

America’s Most Insidious Myth

By Emi Nietfeld

When I was 17, I won $20,000 from the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans. Named after the prolific 19th-century novelist whose rags-to-riches tales have come to represent the idea of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” the scholarship honors youth who have overcome adversity, which, for me, included my parents’ mental illnesses, time in foster care, and stints of homelessness.

In April 2010, the Distinguished Americans flew me and the other 103 winners to Washington, D.C., for a mandatory convention. We stayed at a nice hotel and spent an entire day learning table manners. We met Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who I remember shook hands with the boys and hugged the girls. Before the event’s big gala, we posed in rented finery, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the center of our group photo. The political commentator Lou Dobbs praised the awardees’ perseverance in his opening speech. In the words of the Horatio Alger Association, we were “deserving scholars” who illustrated “the limitless possibilities available through the American free-enterprise system.” We were proof that anyone could make it.

Read the full article.

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Browse the top snapshots from the 2023 Sony World Photography Awards; our editor rounded up 22 winners and finalists from across the contest’s 10 categories.

Galway Kinnell was a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, an anti-war activist, a member of the civil-rights group Congress of Racial Equality, and a devoted husband and father. He was not a man of faith. And yet, having been raised in a devout family, he said in a 1989 interview with Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, “the language of Christianity remains with me.” Without it, he didn’t know quite how to talk about what he treasured. In his poem “The Olive Wood Fire,” he goes as far as referring to his son as “God.” (“There isn’t actually any other word which will do,” he told Columbia.)

“The Cellist” treats its subject—a musician nervously preparing and then performing—with a similar supernatural sense of awe. “The music seems to rise from the crater left / when heaven was torn up and taken off the earth,” Kinnell writes. Even the cellist’s sweat is likened to “the waters / the fishes multiplied in at Galilee,” her musical notes “the bush … now glittering in the dark.” We don’t know who this cellist is to Kinnell, and we don’t necessarily get the sense that they’re close. But he notices her shaking hands, her dog-eared pages, the eventual triumphant glimmer in her eyes. He observes her with such wonder and intensity that his scrutiny feels like love, even reverence.

Kinnell may have left Christianity behind, but he was a master of those virtues that religion, in its best forms, can promote: concern for other humans, attention to transcendence in the everyday, an impulse for self-reflection. (The cellist reminds him of “the disparity / between all the tenderness I’ve received / and the amount I’ve given.”) Here, he’s demonstrated that poetry itself can encourage these same qualities—and offer a language with which to express them. The cellist’s performance is a lesson in generosity, in devoting oneself to something completely. So, too, is Kinnell's way of writing about it.

— Faith Hill

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