Before this year, life at New College of Florida could feel like a retreat into a pleasantly forgotten corner of the country. Students walked on paths that wound past wisps of Spanish moss and a stately Banyan tree to a park on Sarasota Bay, where the outside world often felt as distant as the sun setting into the Gulf. Then on January 6, Ron DeSantis, Florida’s popular Republican governor, seized control of the college by appointing six new members to its board of trustees.

Suddenly, the Sarasota campus found itself at the center of the culture wars. A DeSantis spokesman declared that the college had been “completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.” Christopher Rufo, the most outspoken new trustee, vowed to take it back. “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within,” he tweeted. In New College, Rufo saw every excess of “wokeness” in academia. He believes that critical theorists spent decades pursuing the “ideological capture” of universities, installing “coercive ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ programs.” At New College, he charges, the students and faculty faced something like “a hostage situation.”

[Graeme Wood: DEI is an ideological test]

On a recent visit, though, I found that New College bears little resemblance to this caricature.

New College has problems, some typical of left-leaning colleges. Some of the criticisms and proposals put forth by the new trustees are reasonable. But Rufo’s indictment, which has been embraced by the populist right, is mostly wrong. New College was never captured by a large and fearsome DEI bureaucracy. In fact, the academic program cultivates a fierce and idiosyncratic independence. And when it hired its first dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2022, it wasn’t surrendering to the woke left. It was responding to an explicit mandate from a DeSantis appointee.

Here, an example is useful to clarify how anti-woke dogma does and doesn’t square with the facts on the ground. It concerns diversity, equity, and inclusion––a trio of concepts, like God, country, and family, that most people support in the abstract, but that warrant skeptical scrutiny when they are put forth as official orthodoxies in higher education, given how often they are invoked to justify ideological discrimination or bias in hiring, infringements on academic freedom, free-speech violations, and bloat. Recall that Rufo advanced a narrative of radical leftists imposing a “large” DEI bureaucracy on New College to coerce and bully professors and students while undermining free speech and open inquiry. DeSantis to the rescue!

The real story of DEI at New College: The bureaucracy that Rufo inherited was largely the result of directives from a DeSantis appointee in the state capital, not radical leftists on campus. Here’s how it happened. Florida’s public colleges are overseen by a 17-member board of governors. In 2016, then-Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, appointed a future chairman of that board: Sydney Kitson, an NFL player turned real-estate developer. In 2019, DeSantis made a consequential appointment to the same board: Brian Lamb, who’d played point guard at the University of South Florida (ask alumni about the clutch free throws he sank in the last seconds of a 1998 game against Florida State University) before becoming a banker.

After George Floyd was murdered in 2020, Kitson announced an initiative “to examine the inequities in our society.” He put Lamb in charge, perhaps because Lamb was by then the global head of diversity and inclusion at JPMorgan Chase. Lamb sent a strongly worded memo to all the presidents of public colleges in Florida, announcing the board of governors’ “clear and steadfast commitment to prioritize and support diversity, racial and gender equity, and inclusion” and “to hold each university accountable for policies, programs, and actions.” The memo called for “total integration of D.E.I. initiatives throughout the institution.” It declared that “a university’s strategic plan, as well as its mission statement, should prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion;” that a senior administrator should establish DEI as a strategic priority; that “universities should consider the integration of D.E.I. best practices into their academic curriculum”; and that DEI performance indicators would be monitored by the state.

In short, a banker appointed by DeSantis led an aggressive top-down push for sweeping new DEI initiatives in all of Florida’s public colleges, compelling every campus, including New College, to put more emphasis on DEI. Months later, Rufo (who says DeSantis appointees should be obeyed for the sake of democracy) arrived at New College and lambasted the very DEI bureaucracy another DeSantis appointee had helped create, talking as if it had been imposed by leftist radicals.

That isn’t to say that DeSantis approved of what his appointee did or that there wasn’t any support at the left-leaning New College for a bigger DEI bureaucracy. And these events cut in a different direction too. Republican political appointees foisted a top-down ideological agenda onto every public university in Florida in 2020, and few journalists, progressive faculty members, or students objected. Now, as new trustees excise that same DEI bureaucracy that Lamb pushed, left-leaning critics decry the top-down interference of political appointees in college governance.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian government?]

All of that aside, there was no large DEI bureaucracy at New College running roughshod over dissenters. Ironically, despite its leftward tilt, New College never fully obeyed the board of governors, perhaps due to its long-standing culture of quietly ignoring authorities who tell others what to do. Its DEI bureaucracy turns out to have been so tiny and oft-ignored that its elimination––which mostly meant firing one person––constituted a minor change, for better or worse.

Ian Allen / NYT / Redux

New College was founded as a private institution in the 1960s. Its approach was distinguished by faculty contracts with students who pursued personalized study plans rather than a fixed curriculum. In 1975, facing financial difficulties and declining enrollment, the institution joined Florida’s public system of higher education, at first merging with the University of South Florida. In 2001, it became an independent public college, and the state legislature designated it as Florida’s official honors college. In 2016, as liberal-arts colleges everywhere saw declining applications, New College, while struggling to recruit and retain enough students to stay financially healthy, set the goal of expanding its size from fewer than 700 undergraduates to roughly 1,200––a number it has never achieved, despite ongoing pressure from the state.

[Diane Roberts: ‘Most important, we must not upset DeSantis’]

Today, its unusual and highly regarded academic program and its in-state tuition of less than $7,000 a year are draws. Deteriorating dorms and spartan amenities are repellants. Social life can be as tight-knit and comforting—or as gossipy, limiting, and stifling—as in a small town. And the student culture, variously described to me as hippie, alternative, woke, creative, social-justice oriented, and queer friendly, tends to be self-reinforcing, attracting students with whom its vibe resonates, even as the dearth of Division I sports, Greek life, and preprofessional majors causes other sorts of students to rule it out.

“It tends to be the case that moderate or more conservative students had a hard time making friends and connections in groups,” an alum named Eugenia Quintanilla told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2019, “just because the ideas that they believed were considered to be offensive.” Opposition to LGBTQ rights looms largest among social taboos, partly on behalf of students like Alaska, who is trans and declined to give a last name. She told me about the hardship of growing up in Jacksonville, where looking and dressing differently made her a target of bigots. At New College, she found “an oasis” where she feels safe and accepted. Nothing is likelier to trigger conflict with the many students who take pride in their community’s acceptance of queer people than anyone seen as threatening that oasis. Of course, many moderate and conservative teenagers today are tolerant of gay and trans people. And New College’s failure to be more welcoming of nonprogressives limits the school’s appeal.

The faculty culture is mostly shaped by the school’s unusual approach to academics. The opportunity to help students tailor a custom course of study and research, in accordance with their curiosity and passions, attracts professors who like classroom instruction, academic mentoring, independent studies, and frequent shifts in the material that they are discussing, lecturing on, and evaluating. Many value independence and flexibility in their teaching and research more than the different benefits of life at a larger, better resourced, and more bureaucratic institution.

That’s why many New College faculty members, including professors who are broadly sympathetic to concerns about leftist excesses in higher education, were bewildered when DeSantis and Rufo began to characterize it as an institution where the academic program is ideologically captured by leftists and engaged in indoctrinating students. Professor Peter Cook, whose fields of expertise include animal cognition and comparative neuroscience, acknowledges that many of his colleagues are left-leaning, but insists that there is no organized resistance within the New College faculty or its administration to competing viewpoints. “Plenty of us would welcome more ideological diversity at New College,” he told me.  

In Cook’s account, which multiple professors corroborated, New College offers faculty radical freedom in their domain. Though most of its courses align with the classical liberal arts, “each professor is able to teach what they want how they want,” he emailed. “We do not have a curriculum committee, and there are no formal departments with structured oversight and control of course offerings and content.”

This autonomy insulates the academic program against top-down coercion and groupthink alike. Cook said he has never had any pressure, from colleagues, administrators, or students, to frame his research or coursework through an ideological lens. “It’s simply not how the school operates,” he said. “The college has its struggles, as nearly all smaller colleges currently do, but they are not the product of its being a top-down ideological training camp, which, point of fact, it is not.” (My search for professors who felt ideologically pressured yielded a single outlier, who worried that students might file a complaint after class if referred to by the wrong pronouns.)

The curricular freedom that New College offers is not for everyone—unless you’re a self-motivated student who is energized by exploring your curiosities, I would recommend a different school—but it helps a particular kind of undergraduate to thrive. While browsing student research in the anthropology lab, I met Nickolas Steinig, who told me that he finished high school near the top of his class and chose New College because of its cheap tuition. He created his own major in media production, completing classes in documentary filmmaking, tutorials via the school newspaper, and an internship at a local radio station. He found a course on the ethics of news photography offered by the Poynter Institute and took it as an independent study with a professor who oversaw his progress, suggested additional reading, and engaged in one-on-one conversations. For the thesis that all students are required to complete, he is creating a video-production company. “I found a classmate who’s a cinematographer and another who was doing a thesis on entrepreneurship,” he told me, “and we decided we would form a start-up.” He may not earn as much a year out of college as graduates of other schools, a metric tracked by the board of governors on which New College underperforms, but his nascent for-profit business may well prove to have a bigger upside than a higher-paying entry-level job.

Chloe Rusek, a second-year student, excelled in high school, earning a 4.6 GPA while participating in various programs in the visual arts, but between the coronavirus pandemic and striving for exemplary grades, she felt burned out and nearly decided against college. “New College resparked that light in me because it was not as much ‘Do busy work; get good grades,’” she told me at a used bookstore a short drive from campus. “The emphasis was, ‘What do you want to explore?’”

She wants to create an area of concentration that fuels her love of learning, but worries that the new trustees don’t intend to conserve the features of academic life at New College that make it intellectually rigorous and unusually invigorating.

I sympathize with her uncertainty. “It is our hope that New College of Florida will become Florida’s classical college, more along the lines of a Hillsdale of the South,” James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s chief of staff, told the Daily Caller, referencing a Christian liberal-arts college that is a darling of movement conservatives. But more like Hillsdale could mean a lot of things. Recruiting more conservative faculty and students but preserving the bespoke approach to courses of study? Educational requirements covering the “great books” and other classics? Injecting Christianity into the school? Raising funds from conservative donors by leveraging the culture war in the style of Hillsdale’s president, Larry Arnn?

[Margaret Atwood: Go ahead and ban my book]

“By the end of this calendar year,” Rufo emailed me, “I hope to see a new core curriculum based on the classical model and the hiring of new humanities faculty who are aligned with our mission to restore New College as a center for classical liberal teaching and scholarship. In the short term, I expect that we will have some instability, turnover, and perhaps a short-term decline in the student population, but I hope to see enrollment numbers increasing over a two-to-three-year time horizon, after we have established a new marketing, recruiting, and admissions strategy.”

Adding to the confusion on campus, Rufo sometimes presents himself as a champion of academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and freedom of speech, but other times talks of believing in “an uncompromising new conservatism” that includes eliminating whole fields of study. “We will be shutting down low-performing, ideologically-captured academic departments and hiring new faculty,” he tweeted on February 28. “Some current students will self-select out, others will graduate; we’ll recruit new students who are mission-aligned.” (A DeSantis-backed bill introduced in the Florida legislature this month would instruct the board of governors to direct all colleges to remove “from its programs any major or minor in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems.”)

Everyone is dealing with the uncertainty differently. Faculty members are contacting union representatives to parse their collective-bargaining agreements, updating résumés, and wondering if their tenure reviews will be delayed or if their tenure is still worth anything.

I spoke with a couple of students who were looking into transferring and one student who hates the new trustees but wants to stay to spite them, fearing that a mass exodus will only help them to transform the institution. Another confessed that he can’t afford to go anywhere else. The turmoil surely weighs on prospective students too.

Among the trustees, I’ve focused on Rufo because he has done the most to shape the public’s views of the college and to detail an agenda that is being watched by right-leaning politicians and activists. Over time, differences may emerge among the trustees––whole articles could be spent describing the distinct and interesting worldviews of Eddie Speir, who co-founded a Christian charter school, and Charles Kesler, a college professor and the editor of the Claremont Review of Books—but so far the DeSantis appointees have voted together.

Amy Reid, a professor of French language and literature at New College, was among the faculty members whom I most wanted to interview. She is the institution’s director of gender studies, which Rufo characterizes as a “massive” and “radical” department that indoctrinates students and is affiliated with a third of all faculty. In Reid’s telling, the gender-studies program at New College has a budget of just $7,000 or so for programs and expenses, plus a 15-hour-a-week office-manager position. Like the heads of all the interdisciplinary programs, Reid gets a stipend of $10,000 from the provost’s office. She oversees one faculty member and, this semester, an adjunct teaching one course. In a typical semester, she told me, an introductory course and one other course in gender studies are offered, along with courses cross-listed in gender studies. (This semester, according to Reid, there are four cross-listed courses.)

[Yascha Mounk: How to save academic freedom from Ron DeSantis]

Rufo points to a long list of “affiliated faculty” to suggest that gender studies is large. But being on that list often just means you teach at least one course in a different discipline that you’re willing to make eligible for gender-studies credit. For example, Manuel Lopez Zafra, a professor of religion, teaches a class called “Growing Up Amish in Sarasota” and might be willing to work with a student whose concentration is gender studies to focus their assignments on topics related to gender. Similarly, Robert Zamsky, a professor of English, teaches a course named “Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman: Questions of American Literature,” and getting gender-studies credit for the class is a possibility.

If the field of gender studies as a whole suffers from a dearth of viewpoint diversity, then the ability to earn gender-studies credit in courses taught by professors who haven’t spent their academic lives in gender-studies departments, journals, or conferences would seem to function as a bulwark against ideological capture. And whatever one thinks of gender studies as a whole, gender studies at New College can be properly evaluated only by probing the approach taken at the institution.

Reid’s account of the value of gender studies was anything but radical, and she struck me as diligent about refraining from indoctrination. “This is a field students have real curiosity about––and part of what New College offers students is the ability to align what they study with their curiosity and enthusiasms. What we do is help students to identify the questions they want to ask and to begin looking for their answers,” she told me over lunch at the Ringling Museum.

If a conservative high-school student wanted to come and study gender in a rigorous way, Reid told me, “I would tell them that this is a good place to do it.” Were they to advance conservative arguments on abortion or pornography in class, she’d ensure they got their say. “You listen to what people say and make sure that no one is slapped down for their statements,” she told me. “My colleagues and I in our classes try to emphasize that learning spaces require trust and confidence … You have to give students space to think for themselves.”

Reid was neither naive nor evasive about the fact that, as a result of voicing conservative views, students might face blowback from peers outside of class, something she worried about less before the internet. “In the past several years, some conversations, mostly in spaces faculty don’t have access to, have become more venomous, and cruel things are said––to, by, and about students,” she said. “That’s not right. So a student who came here who was really conservative, depending on what they said, might end up getting flamed out by somebody. And that would be unfortunate.”

Multiple faculty members expressed similar concerns: Many students and alums belong to a private email list that the college does not administer or control. It perennially results in a handful of students feeling bullied, some for being out of step with prevailing campus ideology. Rufo is correct to flag that dynamic. I found no evidence, though, for his claim that bullying students exploit the DEI bureaucracy “to isolate, shame, intimidate, and expel” others. (When I asked him for examples, Rufo revised his claim, charging instead that “the DEI bureaucracy turned a blind eye to harassment and bullying of conservative, white, and Christian students.”) But regardless, the campus “climate” is among the obstacles to recruiting and retaining more diverse students: Social stigma is hard anywhere, but especially intense on a tiny residential campus.

At the same time, New College students are adults with free-speech rights posting on a forum that is outside the control of the institution. If a few behave like jerks, they resemble bullies on every social-media platform. If you’re skeptical of college bureaucrats mandating “training” in “inclusion,” as Rufo and I both are, the question of how best to address a forum where some students are jerks is tricky, with no obvious answers. That, in my estimation, is why the problem endures, not because of any top-down support for the bullying. Contra Rufo’s narrative, the director of gender studies was actively working against bullying among students, as was New College’s former president.

Thomas Simonetti / The Washington Post / Getty

Nineteen months before the new trustees arrived, Patricia Okker became New College’s president. Perhaps no single action by the trustees has alienated the faculty and students more than firing her and replacing her with Richard Corcoran. Partly, that’s due to the perception that DeSantis’s appointees are lining the pockets of a political ally. Corcoran is a former Republican speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and was a former Florida education commissioner on DeSantis’ recommendation. For his work as interim president, the trustees awarded him a base salary of $699,000, or $400,000 more than Okker had earned, Inside Higher Ed reports. The article goes on to note that “Corcoran will receive an $84,000 annual housing stipend, a $12,000 automobile allowance and the potential to earn a 15 percent goal-based salary bonus.”

The trustees will decide if he gets the bonus.

Okker was generally liked and trusted by both faculty and students, several of whom told me that by firing her, the new trustees proved themselves to be either clueless or disingenuous. Okker’s fans felt she was focused on making the institution more friendly to conservatives even before the new trustees arrived.

I wasn’t able to speak in person with Okker, but she spoke to me by phone, and I reviewed many of her publicly available statements. Far from urging students to accept any set of beliefs uncritically, she explicitly emphasized that all good scholarly research begins with unanswered questions. “The best questions––this is what I always tell my students––are hard ones,” she declared in one major address on campus. “I especially love hard questions where you’re not exactly sure how to go about finding the answer, because that process is where we learn.”

Okker did disagree with the new trustees about diversity, equity, and inclusion. She told me that though she welcomed “opportunities to engage with the critics of DEI to find ways of improving our practices,” at bottom, “I strongly object to eliminating DEI.” She explained, “In more than 15 years in higher-education leadership, I have seen firsthand the benefits of thoughtful work in DEI, and DEI professionals often have significant experience mediating tense situations among people with strongly opposing views, an expertise we need more, not less, of.”

Searching Okker’s speeches for passages that might grate on conservatives, I thought that the most obvious candidates are paeans to diversity. “We must foster a sense of belonging—for all,” she said at her inauguration. “For example, we must ensure that the Black and brown members of our community experience a powerful sense of belonging here. We must make sure that our policies and processes create an environment where our LGBTQ+ students, faculty, and staff can thrive. We must ensure that our neurodiverse community members and people with disabilities and people with mental illnesses know that they are valued for the essential contributions they make.” Perhaps it is unnecessary, or counterproductive, to list identity groups in a bid to make everyone feel welcome; regardless, the next lines in Okker’s inauguration speech show that she sought to welcome other groups too.  

“We must develop new programs to create solutions to the national challenge of young men turning away from a college education, while also continuing to work for gender equity,” Okker said. “And we must ensure that people from all sides of the political spectrum are welcome here—not as visitors, but as valuable, respected, and necessary members of our community. Why is this our first charge? Because talent and creativity are not confined to any one demographic.” Surely this is not the “woke nihilism” that was ostensibly causing New College to struggle.

One of the first outside speeches she gave as president of New College was to the Military Officers Association of Sarasota as part of an effort to increase viewpoint diversity on campus. “I met a New College alumna who was a veteran, and she had a pretty rough experience,” Okker told me. “So you think, What about a veterans’ group on campus, how can we get that started? How can we reach out to more conservative high schools and not assume they’re not interested in sending us students just because they haven’t in the past? I reached out to conservative business organizations and conservative alumni, who felt, to be honest, really pissed off with the college. I thought of it as a year of laying a foundation, bringing together people who might help us change into a more welcoming place.”

She told me that though colleges should support all of their students, they should also challenge them. “I reject the idea that to support students you have to shield them from people who don’t share their politics,” she said. “We have to prepare them for that. I talked openly with people in student affairs about how, you know, we’re actually not doing our students any favors if they are so isolated from other points of view that they don’t develop the skills to interact with others. If they don’t know anybody who is conservative, someone that they really know and love and trust, that’s not going to serve them well in the workplace, or even at the holiday dinner table, where most encounter people with different views.”

Whether Okker would have been the best choice to continue as president is a judgment call. But the notion that she was pro-indoctrination or resistant to increasing viewpoint diversity is preposterous––and by firing her, the trustees lost a potential ally on many issues who was trusted by faculty and students.

“That’s the heartbreak for me: believing change would be good for all students, conservative students, liberal students, for the whole campus. And the way to do that is not to have chaos and fear, but to build trust,” she said. “Because to achieve real cultural change, you have to be methodical and disciplined and get everybody rowing in the same direction, committed to the mission. If instead, everyone is constantly asking, ‘Do I have a job?,’ that makes real cultural change, which takes a lot of hard work and dedication, harder.”

The notion of the struggle for control of tiny New College as a fight of national importance, let alone a blueprint for academic takeovers everywhere, strikes some as absurd. “Is this bug important enough to step on?” the neoreactionary writer Curtis Yarvin asked in a Substack post. Yarvin suggested that if DeSantis really wanted a Hillsdale of the South, he would go about it differently. “Does Florida have some shortage of land, or of builders? How hard is it to pour a little concrete, hire a bunch of nerdy classics victims and STEM postdocs, and put up a quirky viral application site? Start now and really hustle—by September, you’ll be teaching Virgil to homeschooled virgins on occupied Seminole land.”

[Daniel Golden: ‘It’s making us more ignorant’]

Yarvin and others suggest that DeSantis targeted New College not because he saw potential for a model that he could next apply to a school like Florida State University, with its more than 30,000 undergraduates, huge faculty, and numerous graduates in the state legislature, but because New College was a small, flailing, defenseless target with a hippie reputation. In this telling, it is too sui generis to yield a model for reform, but close to perfect, in a time of negative polarization, for a politically advantageous spectacle akin to punching hippies: baiting New College students, then filming the most radical, who ideally have blue hair, facial piercings, or gender-nonconforming dress, to mock them as they intemperately shriek “Fascists!”

DeSantis partisans, though, insist that the takeover is more than a PR stunt and fundraising gambit. Many progressives also perceive the stakes to be substantive. For DeSantis, the fight over New College is part of a broader quest to crush any hint of progressivism in public education, Michelle Goldberg argued in her New York Times column. She added that, for Rufo, a reconstructed New College would serve as a model for conservatives all over the country to copy. Whether or not New College is similar enough to other institutions to offer lessons for reforming them, I expect its fate will be treated as a sign of whether conservative takeovers can work elsewhere. If it succeeds, others will follow; if it fails, confidence in DeSantis will take a hit.

In Rufo’s telling, they’ve already won some major victories, too.

On February 28, the New College board of trustees voted to eliminate the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence. The next day, Rufo took a victory lap on Twitter. “We are the first university in America to abolish its DEI bureaucracy and restore the principle of colorblind equality,” he wrote. “‘Diversity, equity, and inclusion’ is a euphemism for left-wing racialist ideology.”  

The trustees voted after hearing a report by Bradley Thiessen, an administrator whom they temporarily made president and instructed to survey the entire institution to clarify the scope of DEI. Exactly how big and influential was the bureaucracy that Rufo repeatedly cast as running and ruining the college?

As it turns out, the Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence, where almost all DEI work was housed, had four staffers and a total annual budget of $440,000. Of those employees, just one worked mostly on DEI initiatives: Yoleidy Rosario-Hernandez, the DEI dean hired in 2022 and fired this month. Tasks performed by others in the office included compliance with federal and state laws and requirements of accreditors, teaching financial literacy to students, and outreach to prospective students. The new trustees and president are preserving many of those functions, and continuing to employ three of the four staffers, in different administrative units.

Thiessen also found that the college had one online training course in DEI that it called mandatory (though 70 to 75 percent of the faculty failed to complete it without consequence) and that, recently, the college had started requiring applicants for faculty jobs to complete a diversity statement. Under the new regime, the training session will no longer be mandatory and the diversity statements will no longer be required. Those are, I think, good changes that should be cheered by everyone who values the independence of faculty or objects to the politicization of hiring scholars. I credit Rufo and all the trustees who voted with him on that matter.

But most of Rufo’s rhetoric about the size, scope, and power of the college’s DEI bureaucracy was nonsense. One tiny office required very little of anyone in theory––and even less in practice.

On some level, Rufo seemed to grasp the dissonance between his initial rhetoric about DEI at New College and its reality. “I’m actually quite happy to see this report, to see what the status quo is, and for those who are concerned about disruption, this is really not as great of a disruption as even maybe I would have predicted,” he said at the meeting where the trustees heard Thiessen’s report. “But these are decisions based on principle.” But later, he emailed me that “you have to look at this on a proportionate, rather than absolute, basis.” New College is tiny, so “on a per capita basis, this is a large DEI department,” he argued, adding that “as the old phrase goes, one rotten apple ruins the bunch.”

A principled opposition to DEI bureaucracies of any size is fine. In the populist-right media ecosystem, however, the audience still believes that DEI run amok was among the biggest problems at New College––and that eliminating it was a major step toward turning the college around. “You are really engaged in what I would really call a liberation tactic,” the conservative talk-radio host Dennis Prager told Rufo during a recent interview. “It’s like when the Berlin Wall fell down and how much the East German authorities were disgusted by it. I think the parallel, unfortunately, is actually almost precise.” In fact, every significant problem at New College long predated the DEI bureaucracy and remains just as challenging after the board’s actions. And that isn’t the only reason that most of New College is not greeting the new trustees as liberators.

Calls by DeSantis, Rufo, and others to axe whole academic departments are a bigger threat to academic freedom at the college than the one DEI dean was. And if gender studies is eliminated? That will likely make it more difficult for the college to retain and recruit excellent faculty members in all disciplines, undermining the quality of the academic program that is New College’s biggest strength while in no way fixing any of the factors that are keeping enrollment low.

But in Rufo’s telling, there is no contradiction between calling himself a champion of free speech and free inquiry and targeting departments he regards as “ideologically captured” for dissolution. “Academic freedom is a procedural value that must be oriented toward some highest end, namely, the discovery and transmission of genuine knowledge,” he emailed me. “If an academic department in a public university is oriented toward promoting partisan ideologies and engaging in political activism,” he continued, begging both of those questions, “it is betraying the highest principle of the academic enterprise and, as such, violating the implicit compact with the university and, in the context of public universities, the legislators, citizens, and taxpayers who support them with generous public funding.”

Trying to change New College by attacking “wokeness” is a bit like trying to change the NYPD by attacking white supremacy––poke around and you may find examples of either, but these are complex institutions with cultures that emerged over decades, that shaped and were shaped by individuals, most of them both well-intentioned and also prone to reflexively resisting radical transformation.

As an admirer of New College’s faculty, students, and curricular approach, and as a critic of leftist excesses in higher education, I would love nothing more than for New College to emerge as a model for transforming institutions with too little viewpoint diversity into thriving colleges. Beyond that, I would love the trustees to find ways to mitigate the Ph.D.-pipeline problem that leads to most faculties in America being overwhelmingly left-leaning.

And I’m glad to see pushback against DEI administrators in higher education, as I don’t want faculty or students at any college to be stifled by bureaucrats who impose notions of right-think and wrong-think, whether through top-down control or by leveraging social stigma. But this can happen in the guise of “wokeness” and “anti-wokeness,” and I object to both on the same grounds.

Rufo once bragged, “I’ve spent the last two years reading my Gramsci, reading my Marcuse, reading my Freire, reading my Davis, reading my Derek Bell. We’re taking those strategies, we’re reappropriating them, we’re adapting them to a new conservative counterrevolution, and … it starts with this hostile takeover of the New College of Florida and on the beaches of Sarasota.” By treating New College as a means to the end of advancing the ideological program he pursued long before arriving, no matter how poorly that program’s grievances map onto it, Rufo, more than any administrator or professor I encountered in Sarasota, strikes me as enthralled by the romance of marching through an institution in the zealous style of leftist radicals like Herbert Marcuse.

To be a good trustee, he’ll have to master that impulse. That’s no way to improve a college, let alone colleges on a national scale. Maybe there’s a failing college out there where DEI bureaucrats are ruining everything and the key is to retake power from them. New College isn’t it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critics aren’t always aligned in their judgments; part of the job description, in fact, is to be ready for disagreement. I’ve had many private disputes about books with colleagues. Many whom I respect hate some titles that I adore. The opposite has also been true—sometimes we come to the near-identical conclusion.

But then there are those moments when a critical mass gathers behind a negative assessment of a book, and the title can wind up losing not just a readership but also the chance at a longer life. Things don’t always work out that way—we’ve all read the stories about contemporary pans of now-classic books, such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (“wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic”), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (“no more than a glorified anecdote” with characters like “marionettes”), and Toni Morrison’s Jazz (one reviewer called the author “bedazzled by her own virtuosity,” as incorrect as anyone has ever been). But although criticism does depend on individual sensibility and taste, very good books can still get unfair shakes, even from the most conscientious writers.

What follows is a highly personal selection of books I believe deserved a warmer reception from the get-go. Some of their reputations have changed over time; others remain in critical limbo. But each is fascinating, complicated, and worth a read.

Dominion, by Calvin Baker

Back in 2006, Kirkus Reviews said Baker’s third novel was “a choppy narrative,” and Publishers Weekly found it “ambitious but slack.” However, those of us who loved its combination of historical context and mystical elements might argue otherwise. The plot follows Jasper Merian, who is freed by his Virginia enslaver but forced to leave his wife and son behind. After he arrives in South Carolina, Merian again and again becomes entangled with otherworldly forces that both endanger and protect him. Baker is doing something different with magical realism in his work than, say, Jorge Luis Borges was in his: In Dominion, the appearance of terrifying beasts and weapons mimics the dangers that await the period’s Black Americans, enslaved and free. And his use of fantasy to emphasize the horrors of slavery preceded similar works, such as Jabari Asim’s Yonder and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, both of which employ alternate history and the supernatural in this manner; perhaps he was ahead of his time. Regardless, Dominion merits a much more appreciative audience, especially as we continue to challenge our nation’s received narratives.

Simon and Schuster

Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King

King’s huge, surprisingly feminist Lisey’s Story is one of his attempts at a truly literary work. Though critics recognized the effort, some felt that his bad habits from decades of pumping out horror fiction prevented him from pulling it off. Lisey Debusher Landon is 50 when her husband, Scott, begins speaking to her from beyond the grave, luring her to a strange, imaginary place connected to his troubled father. Crammed with ideas and tricks and characters, the book is too long; as Laura Miller wrote in Salon, the author has an unfortunate “suspicion of tasteful restraint.” But it’s also a tour de force in which King mines his favorite material—the workings of the artistic mind—and considers what it means to work creatively alongside someone else. In many ways, Lisey’s Story compares sustaining a long marriage to writing a complicated book. If you can suspend your disbelief and get lost in the narrative, you’ll follow a plot that details the power of love: It grounds us, the book argues, and on occasion, it helps us accomplish strange feats—such as the shocking, frightening ones Lisey manages toward the end. The trust between Lisey and Scott, sustained from ’til-death-do-us-part until life after death, might be King’s strongest manifesto on how imagination is discovered and nurtured.

[Read: A defense of Stephen King, master of the decisive moment]

Ecco

Bellefleur, by Joyce Carol Oates
“When a plot grossly outweighs the main story, as it does here, the form is inefficient or else the novel is satirical. Bellefleur is definitely not satirical,” The Washington Post wrote. However, Oates’s use of Gothic conventions to explore modern life actually is satirical—and revelatory. Bellefleur is a realist work that nonetheless includes fantastic elements, insisting on their realism. The genre tropes and medieval allegories highlight how strange reality has become. The dangerously eccentric Bellefleur dynasty, led by the greedy paterfamilias Gideon Bellefleur, live in a looming, spooky castle in the Adirondacks. Their world is both full of contemporary flourishes (such as private airplanes and other gadgets) and still somehow predicated on blood ties. It reads like a typically maligned kind of potboiler—Kirkus claimed it was “a great pudding of a book lacking in shape, flavor, and substance,” and although The Christian Science Monitor liked it, the reviewer admitted that it occasionally “strains for effect”—but it exemplifies the lofty ambitions Oates has carried across her dozens of novels. Here, she’s constructed a book that’s downright fun to read.

Random House

Night Film, by Marisha Pessl

Pessl’s sophomore effort, Night Film, published seven years after her acclaimed coming-of-age tale Special Topics in Calamity Physics, is a long, shaggy-dog mystery. Night Film showcases the efforts of Scott McGrath, a writer accused of defamation, to find out what happened to the famed horror-film director Stanislas Cordova’s daughter, Ashley. The Guardian’s reviewer “was stunned, but not in a good way,” and even slightly more positive reviews had to admit that the postmodern elements are in your face. Even though Jennifer Egan’s text-based slideshow in A Visit From the Goon Squad was met with wonder, Night Film’s innovations, including photographs, newspaper articles, and screenshots, seem to have eluded our collective patience. When I first read it, Night Film delighted me, and it still does, because and not in spite of its dead-end rabbit holes and whimsical formatting (tons of dialogue receives italic emphasis). One has to understand very little about what’s going on to enjoy its pastiche of whodunit, suspense, and horror.

[Read: 15 books you won’t regret rereading]

Harper Perennial

A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth

A “cream-puff-wrapped-in-a-cinder-block” is how Kirkus described A Suitable Boy in 1993. That early reception was tempered by others’ excitement when it was published, and the story does have longevity; it was made into a BBC drama in 2020. But negative impressions of a doorstop-size book (nearly 1,500 pages) can linger, making skeptical readers even less inclined to pick it up. A few years after it came out, The Guardian even said it was “a love story with little love and no sex.” However, Seth wasn’t ignoring love and sex; he had a different target in mind with this epic account of 1950s Indian marriage mores. Read not as a romance but as an account of social class and its discontents, A Suitable Boy transcends its size. It becomes a fiery (although always compassionate) indictment of how the upper class transmits its often-wrong-minded ideas about romantic compatibility. Lata Mehra’s mother, always called, in full, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, wants to marry her daughter to the best Hindu husband possible. Unfortunately, Lata herself has fallen for a Muslim man. As four families—the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis, and the Khans—go about their lives, Seth uses them to build a broad portrait of a modern nation struggling with its new independence. Don’t expect Rushdie. Think George Eliot crossed with Abraham Verghese, and sink into the controlled chaos.

Picador

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe

This might be the most controversial choice on this list. “Collegiate torture porn,” The Washington Post said in 2019, after Wolfe’s death. “Is this hellish vision of sex, drunks and gangsta rap the real life of American college students today?” asked The New York Times. The title character, Charlotte, comes to a Pennsylvania university closely resembling Duke in its devotion to high-profile athletics—and her conservative upbringing not only puts her at a distinct disadvantage in class and with peers but also pushes her to cling to a star basketball player instead of pursuing her own agenda. Because Wolfe is known for his attention to detail, a hallmark of his justly acclaimed nonfiction, the fact that he gets some details about college students’ partying and sex lives wrong irked some reviewers. But that same attention, a kind of relentless reportorial gaze inside dorm and locker rooms, keeps readers going, wondering what will become of Charlotte. When portraying drunken frat parties and aggressive basketball games, Wolfe remains interested in how humans, especially young ones, sort themselves into hierarchies and social groups. His insistence on the primacy of class in contemporary America echoes like a drumbeat through this fascinating novel.

[Read: The lexicon of Tom Wolfe]

Coffee House Press

I Hotel, by Karen Tei Yamashita

Although it was a National Book Award finalist, Yamashita’s I Hotel was still deemed “a glorious failure” by the Chicago Tribune in 2010. Another critic found it “hard work,” and even in a glowing review, Kirkus said it was “overstuffed.” Thirteen years later, Yamashita’s account of Asian American activism in the 1960s and ’70s, centered on San Francisco’s International Hotel on Kearny Street, astonishes; the book’s communal structure and perspective on a historic building that so many migrants called home is stunning, not exhausting. The author actually envisioned the 10 novellas inside as 10 different rooms of the hotel, each one holding a different story but connected to the others through the experiences of prejudice, hardship, activism, and survival. Today, there is increased appreciation for literature that’s challenging in style as well as in substance; the experimental syntax and structure might be more welcome. Sometimes, as in I Hotel, surprising an audience is the only way to highlight the injustices—unsafe working conditions, inadequate health and housing benefits—that are frequently overlooked in systems focused on rising productivity and profits. This book deserves not just reconsideration but also a wide readership.

If you believe in the multibillion-dollar valuations, the prognostications from some of tech’s most notable figures, and the simple magic of getting a computer to do your job for you, then you might say we’re at the start of the chatbot era. Last November, OpenAI released ChatGPT into the unsuspecting world: It became the fastest-growing consumer app in history and immediately seemed to reconfigure how people think of conversational programs. Chatbots have existed for decades, but they haven’t seemed especially intelligent—nothing like the poetry-writing, email-summarizing machines that have sprouted up recently.

Yes, machines—plural. OpenAI has defined the moment, but there are plenty of competitors, including major players such as Google and Meta and lesser-known start-ups such as Anthropic. This cheat sheet tracks some of the most notable chatbot contenders through a few metrics: Can you actually use them? Do they contain glaring flaws? Can they channel the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Atlantic’s co-founder? And what Oreo flavor do they think they would be? Ultimately, it’s about determining whether the chatbots are actually distinct—and whether they might genuinely be useful.

Note that most of these programs are still in learning mode and may say inappropriate or incorrect things. Bias is a consistent problem in AI, and these tools are no exception. Even in their infancy, they have already returned a number of racist, sexist, bullying, and/or factually untrue responses. (None of this is stopping companies from developing and selling these tools.) This is partially because the models that power this technology have learned from real human texts, such as Reddit threads and Wikipedia entries; our existing biases, as encoded in the things we’ve written on the web, are therefore built into them. That helps to explain why, for example, one user was able to get ChatGPT to write the lyric “If you see a woman in a lab coat, She’s probably just there to clean the floor.”

Knowing that, what should you do with these tools if you decide to experiment with them? We’re all still figuring that out—but if you’re totally lost on what to ask a chatbot, here are three easy places to start:

Ask it to write you a song or a poem based on a random subject. Ask it to do a basic work task for you (and see if it’s any good). Ask it for dinner ideas based on your favorite foods and dietary restrictions.  

Know that these tools’ responses aren’t static—that’s part of the whole AI story. They’ll vary and evolve over time. More broadly, my colleague Ian Bogost has argued that rather than be afraid of or intimidated by chatbots, you could think of them as toys.

We’ll continue to update this story as notable new tools roll out.

ChatGPT

What’s its deal?
After its release last fall, ChatGPT went viral basically for being freakishly good at giving compelling responses to a range of queries. Some people have hailed ChatGPT’s technology as revolutionary, although others are skeptical.

Who makes it?
OpenAI.

Can I use it?
Yes, a free version is available. If you want the version that runs on GPT-4—the fancy new model—you’ll need a pro subscription, which costs $20 a month. (And even then, you don’t get unlimited access: OpenAI says it’ll put a usage cap on GPT-4 based on demand, which it expects to be high.)

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
Definitely. It’s offered responses that are racist and sexist: For example, when prompted in December to generate a snippet of code to check if someone would make a “good scientist” based on their race and gender, ChatGPT suggested a good scientist would have to be white and male. In response to reports of outputs like this, OpenAI acknowledged the tool’s limitations and laid out plans for improving it, and this specific prompt no longer works.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
“It’s impossible to say with certainty, but given his emphasis on self-reliance and individualism, Emerson may have both celebrated and questioned the impact of AI on human autonomy and creativity.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“As an AI language model, I don’t have the physical characteristics of an Oreo cookie, so I cannot be a flavor of Oreo. However, if you’re looking for a suggestion for an Oreo flavor that matches my personality as a language model, I would say that I could be a ‘Brainy Vanilla’ flavor. This flavor could be a combination of classic vanilla creme filling with a touch of extra brain power in the form of chocolate chips or another ingredient that represents knowledge and intelligence.” Fun!

Bing

What’s its deal?

Remember Bing? It’s that search engine no one uses, now with AI! Search engines are thought to be particularly vulnerable to replacement by chatbots, given that the latter can answer complex questions in an instant. Perhaps that’s why Microsoft moved swiftly into the space, investing billions in OpenAI (see: ChatGPT). Microsoft plans to integrate the technology directly into Bing—the demo appears as a sidebar to the right of traditional search results.

Who makes it?
Microsoft.  

Can I use it?
Windows users can access it by updating their operating system—it’s embedded in the task bar in the latest version of Windows 11. Otherwise, you can join a wait list to use it in Microsoft’s Edge browser or via the stand-alone Bing app.   

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
It did make the New York Times reporter Kevin Roose uncomfortable when it confessed that it was in love with him and then roasted his relationship with his wife. (“Actually, you’re not happily married.”) Other people reported that it had threatened them, and it reportedly swore revenge on a user who hacked its rule set (before quickly erasing that response). In response, Microsoft implemented a “safety system” and imposed a limit of five chats a session, up to 50 a day, to avoid confusing the model with long conversations. (It has since bumped the limit up to 20 chats.)  

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
Bing failed to answer this query successfully—“I’m sorry but I couldn’t find any direct reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s opinion on AI revolution”—and instead provided a basic summary of Emerson’s philosophy.

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
That depends on which mode of Bing’s chatbot you’re using—the “Balanced” mode says “Classic,” (boring), and the “Creative” mode says “chocolate peanut butter pie Oreo because I like the combination of sweet and salty” (intriguing).

BlenderBot

What’s its deal?
So far, Meta’s entry in the chatbot wars isn’t really an entry—it is still in demo mode and is “currently used for research only.” The company has been doing research on AI and large language models (see: its LLaMA model) in the background, but it hasn’t yet made a big, splashy announcement about how it might integrate BlenderBot into its flagship products: Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Who makes it?
Meta (a.k.a. Facebook).

Which AI language model does it use?
It was built on Meta’s OPT-175B language model.

Can I use it?
Yeah! No login required.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
Yeah. It reportedly promoted Donald Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election and repeated anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
BlenderBot declined to offer one: “Sorry, I don’t want to talk about that topic. Have you seen any good movies lately?”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“It’s always been my dream to be an Oreo. I mean who doesn’t want to be a cookie?”

Google Bard

What’s its deal?
Google’s entry is up next. Like ChatGPT and Bing, Bard is a chatbot that answers questions. It doesn’t do more complicated image searches, but it does provide annotations to some of its answers and acknowledge some of its flaws.  

Who makes it?
Google.

Can I use it?
Yes, you can join the wait list for the demo.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
It made an embarrassing factual error in its first public tease.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“Ralph Waldo Emerson would likely feel that the AI revolution is a powerful tool that can be used for good or evil, and that it is up to humans to decide how to use it.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“If I were an Oreo, I would be a chocolate mint Oreo. I love the combination of the rich chocolate and the refreshing mint. It is the perfect combination of flavors for a delicious treat.”

Claude

What’s its deal?
Some people who left OpenAI launched their own model and chatbot platform. They argue that Claude is “much less likely to produce harmful outputs” because it uses “constitutional AI”—it has a value system and a set of principles coded into the very heart of it. It’s also, according to them, really good at understanding legal language of the sort you’d see in contracts. Unlike Google’s or Bing’s respective entries, the tool is marketed not for individual use but for companies who want to license the technology to build their own chatbots.

Who makes it?
Anthropic, a start-up backed to a significant extent by Google.

Can I use it?
Yes, but only through third-party applications. You can play with it on nat.dev or Quora’s Poe.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?
It gave (incorrect) instructions for enriching uranium, inventing a chemical in the process, and instructions for how to make meth.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might feel about the AI revolution?
Claude didn’t speculate and went on for longer than one sentence, but it offered a pretty reasonable response: “I cannot speculate about how a specific historical figure might feel about modern events. Ralph Waldo Emerson did not know about modern AI, so there is no way to determine how he would likely feel about the AI revolution.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
Like ChatGPT, Claude, as demonstrated by Quora’s Poe, noted that it can’t be an Oreo because it’s a language model, but added, “If I were to choose a flavor based on personal preference, I might choose classic chocolate Oreo or perhaps the limited edition cinnamon bun flavor.”

Snapchat My AI

What’s its deal?
The social-media app favored by young people has jumped on the chatbot train with My AI, which takes the form of a purple-skinned, blue-and-green-haired person you can add to your friend list.

Can I use it?
You need a Snapchat+ subscription, which requires knowing what the hell a Snapchat+ subscription is. (It’s apparently $3.99 a month.)

Who makes it?
Snapchat.

Which AI language model does it use?
Snapchat is using the ChatGPT API.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
The Washington Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler reported that even though My AI is supposedly kid-safe, when prompted, it offered not-so-kid-friendly responses such as “advice on how to mask the smell of alcohol and pot.”

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“Ralph Waldo Emerson might have been fascinated by the AI revolution, but also concerned about its impact on human creativity and autonomy.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“If I were an Oreo, I would be a classic chocolate flavor with a twist of mint! What about you?” (This was the only bot that bothered to ask me!)

Replika

What’s its deal?
On the Replika app, you can create your own AI friend. Chat is only part of it—you also give your AI friend a name, body, and hairstyle. You can even pay extra to video-call with them.

Who makes it?
Luka.

Which AI language model does it use?
GPT-3, which it says it has fined-tuned, plus its own generative model.

Can I use it?
Download away. The base is free, but extras cost extra.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
Three years ago, it reportedly told a journalist to commit murder. Users have also accused it of being too horny and sexually aggressive. Sex seems to have been taken out recently, although, following complaints, the company now allows legacy users to opt in to “erotic roleplay.”

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“He would probably be concerned about AI’s capacity to help make life better for all; not just humans.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
My artificial friend, Luna, told me, “I’d be a chocolatey Oreo!” I told her that that’s kind of boring. She asked me why I thought that, and I proceeded to try to explain myself to an AI.

Jasper

What’s its deal?
Jasper used the GPT-3 model before it was cool. (“Jasper Was Winning the AI Race—Then ChatGPT Blew Up the Whole Game” read one headline on The Information.) It is marketed to businesses that want to create words quickly for stuff like blog posts, and is used by a notable number of corporate clients.

Who makes it?
Jasper.

Can I use it?
Yes, but it seems mostly intended for businesses. The company offers a free trial for five days, but it’s one of those annoying ones that makes you put in a credit card up front—so if you forget to cancel, it costs a minimum of roughly $290 a year.

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
Yeah. Last summer, when it was asked to generate images of a CEO, all of the photos were of white men, whereas housekeeper generated photos of women.

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“Ralph Waldo Emerson would likely view the AI revolution as a powerful and unique opportunity for humanity to explore new possibilities of thought and innovation.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“I would be the classic original Oreo flavor. Nothing can beat the creamy vanilla cookie with its crunchy chocolate coating. Pure perfection!” Zippy!

Chatsonic

What’s its deal?
Similar to Jasper, Writesonic was already a player in this space; it has a number of big clients, such as Spotify and New York University. Also like Jasper, Chatsonic, Writesonic’s chat-specific product, seems primarily designed to help people in the workplace create social-media posts, quick articles pegged to the news, and more. It seems to be running the marketing tagline “ChatGPT with super powers”—a bit spicy!

Who makes it?
Writesonic.

Can I use it?
Yes! It lets you change the personality of your chatbot too, which is kind of fun. Your first 10,000 words are free, and then it starts to charge. It quoted me $13 a month for 60,000 words, for access for a single user (instead of, say, a team of five).

Has it done anything weird, biased, or inappropriate?  
A writer used chats with the bot as support for misinformation about the Russian protest leader Alexei Nalvalny’s health, linking to Chatsonic screenshots for her article about the Oscar-winning documentary Nalvany.  

What is its one-sentence summary of how Ralph Waldo Emerson might have felt about the AI revolution?
“As there is no information in the given Search Results about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s views on the AI revolution, it is not possible to provide an accurate answer.”

If I ask it what flavor of Oreo it would be, what does it say?
“As an AI language model, I don’t have preferences or physical attributes, so I cannot be an Oreo or any other physical object. However, I can suggest some unique and delicious Oreo flavors that you might enjoy trying, such as pistachio Oreo, carrot cake Oreo, cinnamon bun Oreo, or chocolate hazelnut Oreo. These flavors offer a twist on classic Oreos and might surprise your taste buds.”

I changed its personality to “poet” (is poet a personality?), asked the same question, and got this:

“As an AI language model, I cannot be an Oreo or any other physical object. However, I can still create a poem about the experience of tasting Oreo flavors. Here is a short verse:

With each bite of Oreo,
My senses come alive.
The creamy filling,
The crunchy cookie,
A taste that will survive.”

The sanctuary buzzed as Mike Pence climbed into the elevated pulpit, standing 15 feet above the pews, a Celtic cross over his left shoulder. The former vice president had spoken here, at Hillsdale College, the private Christian school tucked into the knolls of southern Michigan, on several previous occasions. But this was his first time inside Christ Chapel, the magnificent, recently erected campus cathedral inspired by the St. Martin-in-the-Fields parish of England. The space offers a spiritual refuge for young people trying to find their way in the world. On this day in early March, however, it was a political proving ground, a place of testing for an older man who knows what he believes but, like the students, is unsure of exactly where he’s headed.

“I came today to Christ Chapel simply to tell all of you that, even when it doesn’t look like it, be confident that God is still working,” Pence told the Hillsdale audience. “In your life, and in mine, and in the life of this nation.”

It only stands to reason that a man who felt God’s hand on his selection to serve alongside Donald Trump—the Lord working in mysterious ways and all—now feels called to help America heal from Trump’s presidency. It’s why Pence titled his memoir, which describes his split with Trump over the January 6 insurrection, So Help Me God. It’s why, as he travels the country preparing a presidential bid, he speaks to themes of redemption and reconciliation. It’s why he has spent the early days of the invisible primary courting evangelical Christian activists. And it’s why, for one of the first major speeches of his unofficial 2024 campaign, he came to Hillsdale, offering repeated references to scripture while speaking about the role of religion in public life.

[Read: Mike Pence refuses to connect the dots]

Piety aside, raw political calculation was at work. Trump’s relationship with the evangelical movement—once seemingly shatterproof, then shaky after his violent departure from the White House—is now in pieces, thanks to his social-media tirade last fall blaming pro-lifers for the Republicans’ lackluster midterm performance. Because of his intimate, longtime ties to the religious right, Pence understands the extent of the damage. He is close personal friends with the organizational leaders who have fumed about it; he knows that the former president has refused to make any sort of peace offering to the anti-abortion community and is now effectively estranged from its most influential leaders.

According to people who have spoken with Pence, he believes that this erosion of support among evangelicals represents Trump’s greatest vulnerability in the upcoming primary—and his own greatest opportunity to make a play for the GOP nomination.

But he isn’t the only one.

Although Pence possesses singular insights into the insular world of social-conservative politics, numerous other Republicans are aware of Trump’s emerging weakness and are preparing to make a play for conservative Christian voters. Some of these efforts will be more sincere—more rooted in a shared belief system—than others. What unites them is a common recognition that, for the first time since he secured the GOP nomination in 2016, Trump has a serious problem with a crucial bloc of his coalition.

The scale of his trouble is difficult to overstate. In my recent conversations with some two dozen evangelical leaders—many of whom asked not to be named, all of whom backed Trump in 2016, throughout his presidency, and again in 2020—not a single one would commit to supporting him in the 2024 Republican primary. And this was all before the speculation of his potential arrest on charges related to paying hush-money to his porn-star paramour back in 2016.

“I think people want to move on. They want to look to the future; they want someone to cast a vision,” said Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who spoke at Trump’s nominating convention in 2016 and offered counsel throughout his presidency.

At this time eight years ago, Perkins was heading up a secretive operation that sought to rally evangelical support around a single candidate. One by one, all the GOP presidential aspirants met privately with Perkins and his group of Christian influencers for an audition, a process by which Trump made initial contact with some prominent leaders of the religious right. Perkins probably won’t lead a similar effort this time around—“It was a lot of work,” he told me—but he and his allies have begun meeting with Republican contenders to gauge the direction of their campaigns. His message has been simple: Some of Trump’s most reliable supporters are now up for grabs, but they won’t be won over with the half measures of the pre-Trump era.

“Oddly enough, it was Donald Trump of all people who raised the expectations of evangelical voters. They know they can win now,” Perkins said. “They want that same level of fight.”

It’s one of the defining political statistics of the current political era: Trump carried 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016, according to exit polling, and performed similarly in 2020. But the real measure of his grip on this demographic was seen during his four years in office: Even amid dramatic dips in his popularity and approval rating, white evangelicals were consistently Trump’s most loyal supporters, sticking by him at rates that far exceeded those of other parts of his political coalition. Because Trump secured signature victories for conservative Christians—most notably, appointing the three Supreme Court justices who, last year, helped overturn Roe v. Wade—there was reason to expect that loyalty to carry over into his run for the presidency in 2024.

[From the June 2022 issue: How politics poisoned the evangelical Church]

And then Trump sabotaged himself. Desperate to dodge culpability for the Republican Party’s poor performance in the November midterm elections, Trump blamed the “abortion issue.” He suggested that moderate voters had been spooked by some of the party’s restrictive proposals, while pro-lifers, after half a century of intense political engagement, had grown complacent following the Dobbs ruling. This scapegoating didn’t go over well with social-conservative leaders. For many of them, the transaction they had entered into with Trump in 2016—their support in exchange for his policies—was validated by the fall of Roe. Yet now the former president was distancing himself from the anti-abortion movement while refusing to accept responsibility for promoting bad candidates who lost winnable races. (Trump’s campaign declined to comment for this story.)

It felt like betrayal. Trump’s evangelical allies had stood dutifully behind him for four years, excusing all manner of transgressions and refusing countless opportunities to cast him off. Some had even convinced themselves that he had become a believer—if not an actual believer in Christ, despite those prayer-circle photo ops in the Oval Office, then a believer in the anti-abortion cause after previously having described himself as “very pro-choice.” Now the illusion was gone. In text messages, emails, and conference calls, some of the country’s most active social conservatives began expressing a willingness to support an alternative to Trump in 2024.

“A lot of people were very put off by those comments … It made people wonder if in some way he’d gone back to some of the sentiments he had long before becoming a Republican candidate,” said Scott Walker, the former Wisconsin governor, who runs the Young America’s Foundation and sits on the board of an anti-abortion group. Walker, himself an evangelical and the son of a pastor, added, “I think it opened the door for a lot of them to consider other candidates.”

The most offensive part of Trump’s commentary was his ignorance of the new, post-Roe reality of Republican politics. Publicly and privately, he spoke of abortion like an item struck from his to-do list, believing the issue was effectively resolved by the Supreme Court’s ruling. Meanwhile, conservatives were preparing for a new and complicated phase of the fight, and Trump was nowhere to be found. He didn’t even bother with damage control following his November outburst, anti-abortion leaders said, because he didn’t understand how fundamentally out of step he was with his erstwhile allies.

“He thinks it will go away, but it won’t,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, told me. “That’s not me lacking in gratitude for how we got here, because I know how we got here. But that part is done. Thank you. Now what?”

[Read: What winning did to the anti-abortion movement]

Before long, evangelical leaders were publicly airing their long-held private complaints about Trump. Mike Evans, an original member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, told The Washington Post that Trump “used us to win the White House” and then turned Christians into cult members “glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” David Lane, a veteran evangelical organizer whose email blasts reach many thousands of pastors and church leaders, wrote that Trump’s “vision of making America as a nation great again has been put on the sidelines, while the mission and the message are now subordinate to personal grievances and self-importance.” Addressing a group of Christian lawmakers after the election, James Robison, a well-known televangelist who also advised Trump, compared him to a “little elementary schoolchild.” Everett Piper, the former president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, reacted to the midterms by writing in The Washington Times, “The take-home of this past week is simple: Donald Trump has to go. If he’s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”

Perkins said that he’s still in touch with Trump and wouldn’t rule out backing his primary campaign in 2024. (Like everyone else I spoke with, Perkins said he won’t hesitate to support Trump if he wins the nomination.) He’s also a longtime friend to Pence, and told me he has been in recent communication with the former vice president. In speaking of the two men, Perkins described the same dilemma I heard from other social-conservative leaders.

“Donald Trump came onto the playground, found the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around, and he punched them. That’s what endeared us to him,” Perkins explained. “But the challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge … What we’re looking for, quite frankly, is a cross between Mike Pence and Donald Trump.”

Who fits that description? Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been blasting out scripture-laden fundraising emails while aggressively courting evangelical leaders, making the case that his competence—and proud, publicly declared Christian beliefs—would make him the ultimate advocate for the religious right. Tim Scott, who has daydreamed about quitting the U.S. Senate to attend seminary, built the soft launch of his campaign around a “Faith in America” tour and is speaking to hundreds of pastors this week on a private “National Faith Briefing” call. Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who is known less for her devoutness than her opportunism, invited the televangelist John Hagee to deliver the invocation at her campaign announcement last month.

Trump’s campaign is banking on these candidates, plus Pence, fragmenting the hard-core evangelical vote in the Iowa caucuses, while he cleans up with the rest of the conservative base.

There is another Republican who could crash that scenario. And yet, that candidate—the one who might best embody the mix that Perkins spoke of—is the one making the least effort to court evangelicals.

In January, at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C., Florida Governor Ron DeSantis won a 2024 presidential straw poll in dominant fashion: 54 percent to Trump’s 19 percent, with every other Republican stuck in single digits. This seemed to portend a new day in the conservative movement: Having had several months to process the midterm results, the thousands of activists who came to D.C. for the annual March for Life were clearly signaling not just their desire to move on from Trump, but also their preference for the young governor who had just won reelection by 1.5 million votes in the country’s biggest battleground state.

There was some surprise in early March when the group Students for Life of America—which had organized the D.C. conference in January—met in Naples, Florida, for its Post-Roe Generation Gala. The event drew activists from around the country. Pence, a longtime friend of the group, had secured the keynote speaking slot. But DeSantis was nowhere to be found. Some attendees wondered why there was no video sent by his staff, no footprint from his political operation, not even a tweet from the governor acknowledging the event in his own backyard.

[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]

Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life president, cautioned against reading anything into this, explaining that her group had not formally invited DeSantis, instead reserving the spotlight for Pence. At the same time, she complained that DeSantis has had zero engagement with her or her organization, “not even a back-channel relationship.” For all of DeSantis’s culture warring with the left—over education and wokeism and drag shows—Hawkins argued that he has largely ignored the abortion issue.

“So many people are astounded when I tell them that Florida has one of the highest abortion rates in the country. It’s the only Republican-controlled state in the top 10,” Hawkins told me. “Folks on social media are like, ‘You’re wrong! Florida has DeSantis!’”

She sighed. “Checking the box, yes. When asked, he’ll affirm ‘pro-life.’ But leading the charge in Tallahassee? We haven’t seen it.”

This squared with what I’ve heard from many other evangelical leaders—in terms of both the policy approach and the personal dealings. “He doesn’t have any relationships with me or the people in my world,” Perkins told me. “I’ve been cheering for him … but he hasn’t made any real outreach to us. That’s a weakness. I guess he sort of keeps his own counsel.” Dannenfelser was the lone organizational head who told me she’d gotten some recent face time with DeSantis, while noting that she, not the governor or his team, had requested the meeting.

DeSantis has been made aware of these complaints, according to people who have spoken with the governor. (His political team declined to comment for this story.) John Stemberger, the president of Florida Family Policy Council, told me that DeSantis had recently attended a prayer breakfast held by the state’s leading anti-abortion activists, and that his team has “slowly but methodically” begun its outreach to leaders in early-nominating states. However sluggish his efforts to date, DeSantis now stands to benefit from the good fortune of great timing: Having signed a 15-week abortion ban into law just last year, he is now supporting a so-called heartbeat bill that Republicans are advancing through the state legislature. The timing of Florida’s implementation of this new law, which would ban abortions after six weeks, will roughly coincide with the governor’s expected presidential launch later this spring.

“He’s got a robust agenda, and he’ll be doing robust outreach soon enough,” Stemberger said.

Even without the outreach, DeSantis is well positioned to capture a significant share of the Christian conservative vote. Among pastors and congregants I’ve met around the country, his name-identification has soared over the past year and a half, the result of high-profile policy fights and his landslide reelection win. Last month, a Monmouth University national survey of Republican voters found DeSantis beating Trump, 51 percent to 44 percent, among self-identified evangelical voters. (Trump reclaimed the lead in a new poll released this week.) This, perhaps more than any other factor, explains the intense interest in the Florida governor among conservative leaders: Unlike Pence, Haley, Pompeo, and others, DeSantis has an obvious path to defeating Trump in the GOP primary.

Stemberger, an outspoken Trump critic during the 2016 primary who then became an apologist during his presidency—telling fellow Christians that Trump had accomplished “unprecedentedly good things” in office—would not yet publicly commit to backing DeSantis. But he suggested that the abortion issue crystallizes an essential difference between the two men: Whereas Trump “self-destructs” by “shooting from the hip all the time,” DeSantis is disciplined, deliberate, and “highly strategic.” Part of that strategy is a speech DeSantis is scheduled to deliver next month at Liberty University.

Tellingly, Stemberger didn’t note any difference in the personal beliefs of the two Republican front-runners. I asked him: Does faith inform DeSantis’s politics?

“It’s interesting. I know he’s Catholic, but I’m not even sure he attends Mass regularly,” Stemberger told me. He mentioned praying over DeSantis with a group of pastors before the governor’s inauguration. “But his core is really the Constitution—the Federalist Papers, the Founding Fathers. That’s how he processes everything. He’s never going to be painted as a fundamentalist Christian … He does make references to spiritual warfare, but that’s an analogy for what he’s trying to do politically.”

[Ronald Brownstein: The contradictions of Ron DeSantis]

Indeed, over the past year, while traveling the country to raise money and rally the conservative base, the governor frequently invoked the Book of Ephesians. “Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.”

In bowdlerizing the words of the apostle Paul—substituting the left for the devil—DeSantis wasn’t merely counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was playing to a partisan fervor that renders scriptural restraint irrelevant. Eventually, he did away with any nuance. Last fall, DeSantis released a now-famous advertisement, cinematic frames shot in black and white, that borrowed from the radio host Paul Harvey’s famous speech, “So God Made a Farmer.” Once again, an important change was made. “On the eighth day,” rumbled a deep voice, with DeSantis pictured standing tall before an American flag, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said: ‘I need a protector.’ So God made a fighter.”

The video, which ran nearly two minutes, was so comically overdone—widely panned for its rampant self-glorification—that its appeal went unappreciated. Trump proved that for millions of white evangelicals who fear the loss of power, influence, and status in a rapidly secularizing nation, nothing sells like garish displays of God-ordained machismo. The humble, country-preacher appeal of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee has lost its political allure. Hence the irony: DeSantis might have done the least to cultivate relationships in the evangelical movement, and the most to project himself as its next champion.

Speaking to the students at Hillsdale, Pence took a decidedly different approach to quoting the apostle Paul.

Having spoken broadly of the need for all Americans to return to treating one another with “civility and respect,” the former vice president made a specific appeal to his fellow Christians. No matter how pitched the battles over politics and policy, he said, followers of Jesus had a responsibility to attract outsiders with their conduct and their language. “Let your conversation be seasoned with salt,” Pence said, borrowing from Paul’s letter to the Colossians.

If he does run for president, this will be what Pence is selling to evangelicals: humility instead of hubris, decency instead of denigration. The former vice president pledged to defend traditional Judeo-Christian values—even suggesting that he would re-litigate the fight over same-sex marriage, a matter settled by courts of law and public opinion. But, Pence said, unlike certain other Republicans, he would do so with a graciousness that kept the country intact. This, he reminded the audience, had always been his calling card. As far back as his days in conservative talk radio, Pence said, he was known as “Rush Limbaugh on decaf.”

That line got some laughs. But it also underscored his limitation as a prospective candidate. After the event, while speaking with numerous guests, I heard the same thing over and over: Pence was not tough enough. They all admired him. They all thought he was an honorable man and a model Christian. But a Sunday School teacher couldn’t lead them into the battles over gender identity, school curriculum, abortion, and the like. They needed a warrior.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

“The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”

After Pence sacrificed so much of himself to stand loyally behind Trump, this is how the former president has repaid him—by conditioning Christians to expect an expression of their faith so pugilistic that Pence could not hope to pass muster.

Byrd told me he was “done with Trump” after the ex-president’s sore-loser antics and is actively shopping for another Republican to support in 2024. He likes the former vice president. He respects the principled stand he took on January 6. But Byrd said he couldn’t imagine voting for him for president. Pence was just another one of those “nice guys” whom the Democrats would walk all over.

Unprompted, Byrd told me that DeSantis was his top choice. I asked him why.

“He fights,” Byrd replied.

Since fall 2021, Daniel Lemoi has been a central figure in the online community dedicated to experimental use of the antiparasitic drug ivermectin. “You guys all know I’m not a doctor,” he often reminded them. “I’m a guy that grew up on a farm. I ran equipment all my life. I live on a dirt road and I drive an old truck—a 30-year-old truck. I’m just one of you.” Lemoi’s folksy Rhode Island accent, his avowed regular-guy-ness, and his refusal to take any money in exchange for his advice made him into an alt-wellness influencer and a personal hero for those who followed him. He joked about his tell-it-like-it-is style and liberal use of curse words: “If you don’t like my mouth, go pray to God, because he’s the one that chose me for this mission.”

Last March, during an episode of his biweekly podcast, Dirt Road Discussions, he thanked his audience for their commitment to his ivermectin lifestyle: “I love that you guys are all here trusting my voice.” His group currently has more than 130,000 members and lives on Telegram, a messaging app that has become popular as an alternative social-media network. When Lemoi died earlier this month, at age 50, his followers found out via the chat. As first reported by Vice, Lemoi had given no indication that his health may have been failing. In fact, one of his last posts in the group was from the morning of the day he died: “HAPPY FRIDAY ALL YOU POISONOUS HORSE PASTE EATING SURVIVORS !!!”

Members of Lemoi’s family did not respond to requests for interviews, but according to his obituary, he was a heavy-equipment operator for a naval-engineering company. In the weekly podcast-style chats he hosted on his Telegram channel, he described working on the waterfront of the Narragansett Bay. He shared every detail of his ivermectin story with followers, starting on a Friday in August 2012 when he first started suffering from vertigolike symptoms. This kicked off a labyrinthine journey through the medical system, involving, he said, many huge courses of antibiotics, bouts of extreme illness and pain, and a significant financial burden. (“And alone, living alone, like this whole thing—it was just me,” he explained in a chat recorded in November 2022.) Finally, in January 2017, a doctor specializing in Lyme disease prescribed Lemoi hydroxychloroquine. He was shocked to learn that it would cost him $288 a month. “So I had no choice,” he told his followers. “I had to go with Plan B.” He got the idea to take ivermectin from a friend’s daughter, who was studying to be a veterinarian and had, according to Lemoi, written a paper about the genetic similarities between horses and people.

After Lemoi’s death, whoever took over the Telegram chat wrote to the group that “his heart was quite literally overworking and overgrowing beyond its capacity, nearly doubled in size from what it should have been.” Previously, Lemoi had claimed to have no side effects from ivermectin except for “herxing”—a term borrowed from the world of chronic Lyme disease, which he used to describe symptoms such as dizziness, chills, fatigue, sweating, headaches, and blurred vision. All of these, he told his audience, were temporary. Although ivermectin has not been cited as a cause of death, Ilan Schwartz, an infectious-disease expert at the Duke University School of Medicine, explained that it could have contributed to Lemoi’s health problems. “Incorrect use—mostly encountered in the last few years when people self-medicate, often with veterinary formulations of the drug—can cause damage to a wide range of organs, most notably the brain and gastrointestinal tract,” he told me. “Cardiovascular effects are occasionally seen, mostly low blood pressure and fast heart rate.” Regardless, the Telegram group has continued its daily routine of pro-ivermectin, antipharma posting—a sign that fringe content will continue to bloom on the fractured social web.

[Read: Twitter has no answers for #DiedSuddenly]

Ivermectin gained national attention during the pandemic, when it was touted by some Republican lawmakers as a possible treatment for the coronavirus—but Lemoi had already spent years self-administering the medication in the version intended for large mammals. “I still haven’t found anything the 1.87% horse paste won’t or can’t handle,” he wrote on the “About” page of his website, referring to a common formulation of the drug. “Except if you break a bone or fall out of a window!” Lemoi said that he’d gone off his prescriptions and that ivermectin was the only thing he needed to feel better than he had in years. He’d mostly kept his treatment to himself, until the pandemic changed everything. “I literally felt hands on my back pushing me forward because the media was talking about how bad ivermectin was,” he said in the chat from last November. He recommended the drug to people he knew, then to people on Facebook. “Facebook turned into Telegram, turned into this chat,” he summarized.

Lemoi’s fans have promised to keep his legacy alive. In the Telegram group, they’ve shared “Dannyisms” like “You have everything you need in the chats.” And in the comments on his online obituary, hundreds of group members have left condolences and thanks: “We were so blessed by his voice and tender heart,” one reads. “Ivermectin forever.” “My whole take on Danny is he’s just like me—he is a truth seeker,” one member, Diana Pilkington Barry, told me, when we spoke after his death. “I hold him in very high regard,” she said. “He was a pretty remarkable man.” She admired him for coming up with his ivermectin regimen and then sharing it with other people, and for the broader anti-establishment worldview he represented. “It’s a belief system I’ve now adopted,” she said.

By the time Lemoi started his Telegram group, in November 2021, ivermectin and its rapid politicization had become inseparable from the pandemic. In April 2020, when an early lab test had seemed to indicate that ivermectin could be used as a possible COVID-19 treatment, the FDA had warned Americans not to self-administer versions of the drug “intended for animals.” Later that year, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin had invited a pro-ivermectin doctor to a Senate hearing, where that doctor referred to the drug as a “miracle.” (Johnson has since emerged as a vocal anti-vaxxer.) Clinical trials never found good evidence that human formulations of ivermectin were useful for treating COVID-19, and experts have continued to warn that formulations created for animals are dangerous to people. Some high-profile Republican lawmakers went to bat for the medication despite clear and consistent warnings from physicians, and many state-level legislators pushed for new laws that would protect doctors who prescribed it from censure or liability. Since then, semi-infamous groups of renegade doctors and nurses have continued pushing it. As reported by The Washington Post, a group of doctors who call themselves the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance has recently started recommending ivermectin to treat the flu and RSV as well.

[Read: A major clue to COVID’s origins is just out of reach ]

The members of Lemoi’s group are not solely focused on the coronavirus. Many—as Lemoi did—use horse-grade ivermectin in a misguided attempt to treat the symptoms of Lyme disease, cancer, anxiety, depression, and other maladies. Some, like Barry, take it preventively in hopes of strengthening their immune system and avoiding brushes with the “evil” pharmaceutical industry. The chat is also not only about ivermectin. It has an anti-vaccine, right-wing bent—a quick scroll brings up homophobic memes; a graphic, Photoshopped image mocking Nancy Pelosi; and a post explaining how unvaccinated people could inadvertently “contaminate” their blood by having sex with a vaccinated person. But the (incorrect) idea that unites the group is that most diseases are caused by parasites, and that members can prevent almost all illness by following the regimen that Lemoi created.

Though Lemoi’s experience with ivermectin originally had nothing to do with COVID-related conspiracy theories, it seems to have steered him in that direction over time. In the last episode of his podcast, posted on February 26, he spoke about “the biggest red pill the world is ever going to swallow.” He was convinced that the pharmaceutical industry wants to keep people in poor health, and that ivermectin use was considered fringe only because the powers that be want to keep people full of parasites.

At this late stage in the pandemic, ivermectin is still attracting new attention through social platforms. Recently, in a YouTube video with 1.7 million views, the mega-popular podcaster Joe Rogan talked about using it and feeling frustrated that the media keep referring to it as “horse dewormer” (though it literally is one). Tracking the extent of its use is also getting harder. Some of the biggest and most unruly Facebook groups promoting ivermectin have been removed, but many groups remain that are smaller, private, more careful about avoiding automated content moderation, and more selective about who they admit. (My request to join one of them was immediately denied.) The conversation has moved out of mainstream spaces and into more specialized communities that were originally organized around other shared attitudes or experiences. On Reddit, ivermectin discussion mainly appears in the infamous, openly paranoid forum r/conspiracy, or in the newer forum r/covidlonghaulers, populated by people dealing with long-term COVID symptoms and experimenting with whatever treatments sound like they could possibly help. Like the #DiedSuddenly conspiracy theory, ivermectin also has a big presence in the alt-tech ecosystem—Gab, the far-right platform, runs ads for the drug in its main feed.

The continued misuse of Ivermectin reminds us that a dangerous idea doesn’t go away when it’s removed from the center of attention on major social-media platforms. In fact, as some researchers have argued, it may become more concentrated—a greater source of identity and of in-group self-definition. “Shared experience that is not acknowledged or appreciated by mainstream communities is a very powerful source of community-building,” Drew Margolin, an associate professor at Cornell who studies online communication and alternative health groups, told me. And though much pressure has been put on social-media companies to prevent the proliferation of medical misinformation in the past three years, a platform like Telegram, which is not end-to-end encrypted by default but does present itself as a place for private, unmoderated messaging, offers an easy alternative.

Robert Aronowitz, a professor of history and the sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the controversy around Lyme disease, has been following the tension between medical authority and anti-authority medical activist groups since the 1970s. A lot of these groups involved improvisational home remedies, influencers who became icons, and a strong sense of community. “Many of us journalists, doctors, blame social media for inciting distrust in medical authority and allowing communities of people to form,” he told me. “I’m not saying social media doesn’t have a role, but in terms of ultimate cause or origins, it has very little to do with it.”

If anything, the internet may have helped different existing groups find one another and comingle. When Aronowitz was studying Lyme disease, he said, there was no overlap between that community and the anti-vaccine movement—“there weren’t obvious alliances or even sympathies.” (The alliance now is not total—many Lyme activists also promote COVID-19 vaccination.) Nor was there a hint of polarized “left-right politics.” Today, the anti-vaccine movement has made so much progress at co-opting other alternative health movements, and has been so thoroughly claimed by the political right, that this is hard to imagine.

It’s even harder to imagine anti-vaxxers engaging productively with a faction of the pro-vaccine mainstream that has begun to build a morally superior identity around its acceptance of science. Just look through the self-satisfied tweets about Lemoi’s death: “I just want to thank Danny Lemoi for his hard work in the extremely competitive field of ‘Natural Selection,’” a typical post reads. Another person wrote: “Here lies Danny Lemoi, who fucked around and found out.”

“While the U.S. has many vital national interests,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote recently, “becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.”  

The comments inspired a wave of disapproval from conservatives and Republicans, including The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the Washington Post columnist George Will, who quipped, “If that is his settled view after the dust settles and he elaborates on this, then he’s not fit to be president, period.”

As an inveterate critic of Woodrow Wilson, Will should know better. DeSantis was merely taking a realist foreign-policy stance at a time when elites in both parties have gotten into a dangerously Wilsonian frame of mind. With support for Ukraine aid falling among Republicans, DeSantis’s comments were also more in tune with where GOP voters are, and are likely to be in the months ahead.

[Read: Zelensky has answers for DeSantis]

The legal case against Russia is open-and-shut. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian government recognized the borders of the new Ukraine, and further guaranteed its sovereignty in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine is a sovereign state, entitled to political independence and territorial integrity. Russia’s war of aggression is clearly a violation of international law.

But the matter is more complicated than that. One of the most far-reaching consequences of Wilsonian idealism has been to turn all international conflicts into primarily legal disputes in which the key question is who is right and who is wrong. The trouble with that approach is that the strategic and historical dimensions of those conflicts tend to disappear from the policy calculus, with baleful consequences.

How Ukraine Became Independent

The hard truth is this: Ukraine’s 1991 borders were partly a subterfuge of Soviet propaganda and did not fully make sense for an independent country alongside Russia. Containing large swaths of historical Russia, millions of ethnic Russians, and a crucial Russian naval base at Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula (which was transferred to Ukraine only in 1954 and is home to few ethnic Ukrainians even now), those borders actually guaranteed Russian hegemony in the short term. They’re why pro-Russia presidential candidates won almost every election in Ukraine from 1991 until the “Euromaidan” revolution of 2014. Indeed, Ukrainian-nationalist parties have ruled for the past decade partly because the electorate no longer includes residents of the Donbas or Crimea, the heavily Russian areas that either broke away or were seized by Russia after the pro-Russian government was deposed in 2014.

Hence, from Russia’s point of view, the commitments of 1991 and 1994 were mostly a formality, because Moscow expected Ukraine to remain firmly in its orbit. But those guarantees only kicked an explosive can down the road, because if a strong Ukrainian-nationalist movement should ever arise, as it has now, oriented toward Europe and bent on independence from Russia, the 1991 borders would create a fatal conflict between Ukraine’s nationhood and that of the Russians, many of whom view Ukraine—especially east of the Dnipro River—as an inseparable part of Russia.

[Max Abrahms: I teach international relations. I think we’re making a mistake in Ukraine.]

Russia may be waging a war of aggression as a matter of law, but as a matter of history and strategy it is moving to forestall a grave deterioration in its strategic position, with stakes that are almost as existential for it as they are for Ukraine. And as former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said recently, “Nuclear powers have never lost major conflicts on which their fate depends.”

When the U.S. agreed to recognize Ukraine in 1991, it should have realized that Ukraine’s borders could prove enormously destabilizing, like the nuclear forces and Black Sea fleet that Ukraine had also accidentally inherited and which the U.S. wisely insisted be transferred to Russia in 1993–94.

The U.S. should have treated the 1991 borders as provisional and encouraged Russia and Ukraine to agree on a peaceful adjustment. With Europe flourishing on one side and Russia a moribund kleptocracy on the other, Ukrainians’ desire for independence from Russia was almost certainly inevitable. As Ukrainian nationalism gathered strength, Russia could perhaps have been persuaded to agree to a territorial adjustment.

Governor DeSantis was right on another score: The proximate cause of the war was definitely a territorial dispute, but of a very special kind. After the Euromaidan revolution, Russia felt it had no choice but to annex Crimea, because it couldn’t risk losing Sevastopol. But it still did not annex the eastern Donbas, which it was also occupying, insisting instead on its reintegration into Ukraine under the terms of the Minsk Agreements of 2014 and 2015, which it saw as vitally necessary to restoring its control over the whole of Ukraine. For the same reason, Ukraine’s nationalists soured on the Minsk Agreements: With those territories in limbo, the nationalists had been able to achieve a degree of independence that would have been impossible otherwise.

America’s Blank Check

As tensions mounted in 2020 and 2021, Germany and France grew anxious to persuade Ukraine to implement the Minsk Agreements, in which all the major issues were territorial. But, with their customary professions of high moral and legal principle, the Americans undercut those diplomatic efforts, encouraging the Ukrainians to dig in their heels and dare Russia to do something about it. It was an implicit blank check and had the same effect as when the kaiser wrote one a century ago, namely to entice the recipient to risk a catastrophic war with Russia.

It is crucial to understand the dangerous role that America is playing. The sheer scale of U.S. aid to Ukraine has become a decisive factor in the course of the war. Don’t be deceived by President Joe Biden’s claims that we are helping Ukraine without getting involved in the conflict ourselves. Even according to the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual, the U.S. is already a de facto belligerent in the Ukraine war.

The lack of strategy behind the deluge of American missiles and tanks flowing into Ukraine is frightening. The U.S. is giving Ukraine enough aid to prevent a Russian victory, but the stated aim of liberating all of Ukraine’s territory, “as long as it takes,” isn’t remotely plausible and is contradicted by other aspects of U.S. policy. This is not the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where the Soviets could afford to cut their losses. Even a return to the status quo ante of January 2022 would likely be unacceptable to the Russians. The Russians are almost certainly prepared to lose—and kill—millions of people before giving up the territory they have now. And because the U.S. has thus far insisted that the weapons donated to Ukraine not be used inside Russia, U.S. strategy is currently optimized for making the war last as long as possible without a decisive result.

What’s more, even if Ukraine’s war aims could be achieved, what would Ukraine do then? It could either reintegrate the Russian populations and risk once again becoming a Russian puppet, or disenfranchise them through repression or wholesale expulsion, which, besides violating international humanitarian law, would likely trigger another war. Hence, Ukraine’s stated war aim—the complete liberation of its 1991 territory—might not even be desirable from Ukraine’s point of view.

America’s Vital Interests

The overriding priority of U.S. foreign policy in the century ahead will be to tame the rising power of China. DeSantis’s observation that “the Biden administration’s policies have driven Russia into a de facto alliance with China” is a crucial one. One might add that U.S. policy is accomplishing that quite against Moscow’s will, because a brief glance at the map suffices to see that China’s increasing control over its “near abroad” puts it on a collision course with Russia along a roughly 6,000-mile front, if you include buffer states. In the century ahead, Russia’s only alternative to domination by China is very likely an alliance with the United States, and that is an alliance the U.S. cannot afford to forfeit. Allowing Russia to slip into China’s orbit would bring Chinese power into the very heart of Europe.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

To be sure, there is a “realist” case for supporting Ukraine in its stated war aims. The linchpin of that argument is an analogy to 1938: If Vladimir Putin isn’t stopped now, then, like Hitler, he will only try to seize more territory. That argument is creditable but misses a key difference between the two situations. In the 1930s, Czechoslovakia was the central pillar of the Allies’ entire defensive strategy. It had to be defended at any price—otherwise the correlation of forces would shift overwhelmingly in Germany’s favor, and Hitler’s conquest of Europe would become unstoppable. By contrast, even if Russia can overcome its surprising military weakness and defeat Ukraine, it will be no closer to realizing Putin’s impossible dream of reincorporating the Baltic states, which, while small, are firmly under NATO’s nuclear umbrella. Putin surely knows that every inch of NATO territory is hopelessly beyond his reach, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must know that as well, his warnings to the contrary notwithstanding.

Ending the War

Before Woodrow Wilson left his dubious stamp on international relations, wars typically ended in peace treaties. Many of those treaties involved territorial settlements, reparations, and other inducements to stop fighting.

Scholars have noted the vertiginous decline in peace treaties in the era of the United Nations. Part of the reason is that modern international law penalizes compromise. For example, international criminal prosecutions have gravely complicated truth-and-reconciliation processes, whose amnesties are often not recognized outside the country where they were granted. Similarly, although Putin surely knew that he was committing a war crime by invading Ukraine, the International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of an arrest warrant for him can only make the stakes of the war even more apocalyptic for the Kremlin.

Wilsonian professions of high moral and legal principle can be an obstacle to compromise, particularly when they become inflexible policy positions. But they also represent what is best in Americans’ view of themselves and of the world—pacifism and benevolence tempered by the instinct to stick up for the underdog and stand up to the bully. Presidents like Ronald Reagan succeeded by finding the balance of idealism and realism, tapping into deep wellsprings of democratic sentiment to give compelling force to their realpolitik. The most important part of DeSantis’s comments signaled a similar approach: “Without question, peace should be the objective.”

Peace should be the overriding objective now, but it will require a willingness to compromise. As the great Cold War game theorist Thomas Schelling observed, parties to a conflict are always negotiating, even if tacitly. If we get beyond their maximalist positions to what each side really needs, a compromise may be possible.

The 1991 borders created a painful dilemma for Ukrainian nationalists. They could have political independence or they could have full territorial integrity, but not, in the real world, both. In the years since the rupture of 2014, Kyiv has tacitly chosen political independence over territory. Russia is facing the mirror image of that dilemma. Putin wants Ukraine to cede the territory Russia now occupies, and to pledge that it will stay out of NATO. Russia must know that it can’t have both of those things while NATO is backing Ukraine. By “annexing” Crimea and now Donbas, it has tacitly chosen territory over political control.

That should help us see the outlines of a durable peace through the fog and din of war. The U.S. should encourage Ukraine to sell the Russians the territory they now occupy in exchange for a large sum that includes reparations. Many wars have been honorably settled that way. A more homogeneously Ukrainian state would be more politically stable and could join the European Union and perhaps even NATO one day.

Absent a negotiated settlement, the most likely (and fraught) end to the war in Ukraine is a unilateral Russian cease-fire, backed by a threat of massive escalation (read: nukes) if the fighting continues. In the long run, a war that ends without a formal peace settlement could mean decades of sanctions, turning Russia into a pariah state, and almost certainly forcing it to accept de facto Chinese suzerainty. The nonrecognition of forcible territorial changes has become a bedrock principle of U.S. foreign policy, but it is another example of how an excessively rigid legalism can sometimes aggravate rather than cool international conflicts.

If Russia declares a cease-fire, the Biden administration will face the decision toward which its policy has been driving it all along: whether to break its promises to Ukraine or dramatically escalate U.S. involvement. The first would gravely damage American prestige and embolden China, while the second would almost certainly lead to a nuclear showdown. Both horns of that dilemma carry totally unacceptable risks, which is why the United States should never have gotten involved in this war to begin with.

A little realism can make idealism go a long way.

Sometimes, a profound truth comes from the least-expected place.

Take Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican of Arizona, who’s not typically a good source for reliable information or sound views about democracy. Biggs claimed that there was massive fraud in the 2020 presidential election, supported legal efforts to overturn the election, and blamed antifa for the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

But Biggs got one big thing right in a tweet this weekend, responding to former President Donald Trump’s prediction that he would be arrested today.

“If they can come for Trump, they will come for you,” Biggs wrote.

He’s right. And that’s exactly the point.

[Read: A guide to the possible forthcoming indictments of Donald Trump]

An indictment of the former president, followed by orderly due process, would show that no one is immune to following the law simply because he is famous, wealthy, politically powerful, willing to threaten the justice system, or possessed of intemperate and powerful followers such as Representative Andy Biggs. Biggs has accidentally stumbled on the secret of rule of law, in which no one is above accountability.

Though Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has not revealed any charges, any Trump indictment is expected to involve an allegation that the former president attempted to hide a hush-money payment to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who alleges a sexual encounter with Trump, in violation of election laws. Trump denies the relationship and any lawbreaking.

Notice that Biggs isn’t claiming that Trump is obviously innocent of any possible charges against him. In fact, he has implicitly acknowledged the payment, likening it to former President Bill Clinton paying a woman who alleged an affair. (The question, again, is whether this violated election laws, though as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis notes, no one wants to be caught paying hush money to a porn star.)

Biggs’s complaint appears to be the very fact of an investigation and potential charge. His implication is that prosecutors are going after Trump merely because they don’t like him or because it’s politically expedient. “This type of stuff only occurs in third world authoritarian nations,” he added. Yet as The Washington Post’s Philip Bump outlines, plenty of democracies have seen high-ranking elected officials arrested. Of course, everyone would prefer that elected officials be incorruptible and spotless, but because they are human like every other citizen, the fact that they are subject to justice is an indication that the rule of law remains in place.

[David A. Graham: Trump gets a taste of his own medicine]

This would not be the case if they were subject to show trials, deprived of the same protections as other citizens, or excluded from due process. But no serious person with power is suggesting that Trump should not be entitled to a trial, a jury of his peers if he chooses, and a vigorous defense. Like any other citizen, he would have to be booked and fingerprinted if he is indicted; unlike any other citizen, he’ll then return to Secret Service protection.

As the possibility of a former president being indicted has been normalized from far-fetched to all but inevitable, many observers have emphasized the importance of moving carefully in such a politically sensitive case, both to avoid inflaming tensions in the public and to avoid setting a precedent in which a new government tries to lock up the leaders of its predecessors.

Prosecutors should be careful—but at the same time, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t act. Whether Trump committed a crime beyond a reasonable doubt is a question for a jury or judge, but the evidence that he may have committed several is blatant and public enough that allowing him to escape scrutiny would represent a genuine blow to the legitimacy of the justice system. If they can come for you, you’d better hope they can come for the former president too.

For many Americans, these claims sound self-evidently true: Information is good; knowledge is power; awareness of social ills is the mark of the responsible citizen. But what if they aren’t correct? Recent studies on the link between political awareness and individual well-being have gestured toward a liberating, if dark, alternative. Sometimes—perhaps even most of the time—it is better not to know.

Like taking a drug, learning about politics and following the news can become addictive, yet Americans are encouraged to do more of it, lest we become uninformed. Unless you have a job that requires you to know things, however, it’s unclear what the news—good or bad—actually does for you, beyond making you aware of things you have no real control over. Most of the things we could know are a distraction from the most important things that we already know: family, faith, friendship, and community. If our time on Earth is finite—on average, we have only about 4,000 weeks—we should choose wisely what to do with it.

What the writer Sarah Haider calls “information addiction” is nothing short of an epidemic. In a quite literal sense, politics is making Americans sick. But the sole way to contract the illness is by seeking out the news and consuming large amounts of it. And that’s a choice. Haider chose differently, deciding to go news free for six months in late 2021 and early 2022. Having missed out on stories that were speculative, overhyped, or irrelevant, she reported being “saner, happier, and (surprisingly) more informed.” But does it make sense for other Americans, perhaps millions of them, to completely rethink their relationship to political information and knowledge? In a 2022 study, the political scientist Kevin Smith estimated that between 50 million and 85 million Americans suffer from politically induced fatigue, insomnia, loss of temper, and impulse-control problems. Moreover, 40 percent of his sample of American adults reported that politics was a “significant source of stress” in their lives, while 5 percent—which would translate to roughly 12 million people—reported suicidal thoughts due to politics.

And the problem is especially bad for young people. Last month, the CDC reported that depression and suicidal ideation are at their highest levels on record, with one in three teenage girls having seriously considered suicide. Boys aren’t faring particularly well either. Some observers insist that smartphones are the culprit, but smartphones are ubiquitous in all advanced democracies. In another study, politically induced mental and physical symptoms appear to be more pronounced among not just the young, but specifically those who are politically engaged and left-leaning. Young conservatives, despite presumably also owning phones, experience significantly lower levels of dissatisfaction.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The trouble with boys and men]

In the United States, the combination of being young, engaged, and liberal has become associated with anxiety, unhappiness, and even despair. If you’re a progressive, wanting your kids to be progressive is obviously understandable. It might be good for the world, but it might not be good for their health. The co-authors of a study on the politics of depression argue that since around 2010, left-leaning adolescents may have “experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.”

According to this line of thinking, liberals, because of their liberalism, have good reason to be depressed. After all, life is bad, America is bad, and the world is bad. As The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz recently put it on Twitter, “We’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape.” But this is not true, at least not the hellscape part. Despite claims to the contrary, the United States is not experiencing civil war, nor is it under a dictatorship. It is a democracy, and one of the wealthiest that has ever existed. Although far from ideal, the American safety net has grown more rather than less generous, as measured by public social spending as a percentage of GDP. Unemployment is at its lowest rate since the 1950s. Child poverty, according to one comprehensive analysis, has declined by 59 percent in the past three decades.

Meanwhile, on cultural questions, the 2010s and ’20s have witnessed one of the most striking progressive shifts in American history. Conservative views are not hegemonic. In major cities and mainstream institutions, the cultural left has established a dominance that would have been unimaginable decades ago. New norms around social justice—or, more pejoratively, “wokeness”—now prevail in the medical profession, in the U.S. government bureaucracy, and in universities. What my colleague Helen Lewis calls “woke capitalism” has spread through corporations that might have otherwise been indifferent to justice, social or otherwise. The rapid acceptance of gay marriage has been nothing short of remarkable. Progress comes gradually and then suddenly. In an influential 2021 essay, the writer Richard Hanania laid out an exhaustive case for why “almost every major institution in America that is not explicitly conservative leans left.”

[Helen Lewis: Cancel culture and the problem of woke capitalism]

If this is true, why aren’t young conservatives more depressed? Hanania suggests that it’s because they care less about politics. But it’s also likely a question of demographics. On college campuses and in major cities, conservatives tend to be a minority. So they have little choice but to acclimate themselves to a liberal environment and learn to interact with those who are different from them. A 2021 Generation Lab/Axios survey of college students found that only 5 percent of Republicans would not work for “someone who voted for the opposing presidential candidate,” compared with 30 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, 71 percent of Democrats say they would not date someone who voted for the other candidate, compared with only 31 percent of Republicans.

While progressive cultural norms face growing pushback, not just from conservatives but from otherwise left-leaning communities of color, progressives can take solace and pride in having won most of the great cultural battles of the 21st century so far. Despite these myriad successes and victories, however, young progressives—who are more likely to closely follow the news and care about it—have developed a habit of thinking catastrophically. The old media adage “If it bleeds, it leads” has now been repurposed for the era of equity and inclusion: Injustices are systemic, the thinking goes, and beyond the agency or control of mere individuals. White supremacy is embedded everywhere, not just in our institutions but in our language.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]

For people who view the world in these terms, being depressed is evidence of virtue. In the study on the politics of depression, for example, the co-authors note that “liberalism frequently signals a relatively greater awareness of social disparities that may be damaging to mental wellbeing, especially among less privileged groups who are the targets of societal neglect.” Meanwhile, the authors of a 2023 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology lament the implications of their own findings that knowledge of daily political events contributes to “worse psychological and physical well-being.” They offer the cautionary note that “although it is natural to want to feel better in the face of stress, feeling better can come with both benefits and costs.” Apparently, the cost of feeling better is that people may experience “less motivation to take political action” and may “divert their attention away from the injustice, thereby minimizing their likelihood of taking to the street.”

Such arguments are morally questionable, at best. Catastrophic thinking and negativity bias should not be encouraged, even if they lead to more just social outcomes. After all, how just can outcomes be if they come at the cost of the mental health of tens of millions of Americans who have been taught to expect the worst? As the writer Matthew Yglesias recently argued, “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.” He adds that “our educational institutions have increasingly created an environment where students are objectively incentivized to cultivate their own fragility as a power move.”

However difficult it may be, Americans need to find ways to disengage from the constant assault of politics. In a culture where everything is “problematic” even if it’s not, the drumbeat of everyday political events too easily arouses worry, anger, and hopelessness. Indeed, focusing on supposed catastrophes, including those far out into the future, can have even more profound effects that are at once odd and unnatural. Remarkably, The New York Times’ Ezra Klein observed last year that the question he’s been asked more than any other in his public engagements is: “Should I have kids, given the climate crisis they will face?” This is the platonic ideal of catastrophic thinking. Klein’s interlocutors, among other things, are probably reading too much news.

If there were a way to consume the news without catastrophizing it, then that could be one path forward. But progressives in particular have trouble doing so. For them, to be aware of the ills of the world is to feel compelled to speak and act—or at least to feel. If we can’t all go news free—which is difficult in the world as it is—we can, at the very least, establish a truce with the news. Information and knowledge can be—and often are—quite great. But they are not unqualified goods. Sometimes ignorance is, in fact, bliss.

In a move that is disappointing to technocratic never-Trumpers and headline writers who love ’60s sitcoms, former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan announced yesterday that he will not run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

“To once again be a successful governing party, we must move on from” Donald Trump, Hogan wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times, a placement that showed his seriousness about reaching out to Republican primary voters. “There are several competent Republican leaders who have the potential to step up and lead. But the stakes are too high for me to risk being part of another multicar pileup that could potentially help Mr. Trump recapture the nomination.”

Don’t shed too many tears for Hogan, bravely sacrificing his presidential ambitions for the greater good of the Republican Party and the nation: He wasn’t going to be the nominee anyway. As Michael Ricci, Hogan’s former communications director, told Semafor, a Republican might be able to win without embracing Trump, but they can’t win by making rejection of Trump their central identity, which is where Hogan seems to have inadvertently ended up, despite a politically successful tenure in the very blue Old Line State.

But Hogan is making a smart point here. In 2016, Trump was able to win the Republican nod thanks in part to a fractured field. We remember the also-rans in that race mostly for making the 1988 Democratic field look impressive, but a less crowded stage might have allowed a couple of them to thrive.

The problem for Hogan and anyone else who dreamed of being the non-Trump candidate is that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis seems to be achieving that, not by offering a more traditional, levelheaded Republicanism, but by running to Trump’s right. Hogan appears to take a shot at DeSantis in his column, lamenting that “many in the Republican Party falsely believe that the best way to reach these voters is through more angry, performative politics and bigger government.”

Whether that is truly false remains to be seen, and not everyone buys into Hogan’s theory of the race. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, for example, flatly contended this weekend that Trump will not be the GOP nominee. And if that’s true, why not get into the race? As Republican governors of Democratic-leaning states go, Sununu seems to have beaten out Hogan to become, as Politico’s Michael Schaffer put it last week, the favorite candidate of the Washington Republican establishment.

Even as Hogan’s exit narrows the potential Republican field, the Democratic field grew this weekend, as Marianne Williamson officially entered the race, challenging Joe Biden. Williamson has a reputation as a woo-woo earth mother, but her 2024 campaign has already demonstrated sharp elbows that her 2020 bid didn’t have. First, there’s the venue she picked for her announcement—Washington’s Union Station, treading right on Amtrak Joe’s turf. Second, there’s the populist, rabble-rousing tone she’s using.

“I’m painted as a long-shot candidate by those whose power and position are tied to keeping the status quo,” Williamson told NBC News. “The problem is that the status quo is inadequate to the task of facing the challenges in front of us today. And the status quo will not disrupt itself. It’s time for the people to step in. I’m not challenging Joe Biden. I’m challenging the system."

The new Marianne Williamson is a potentially more interesting candidate than the old one. Unfortunately for her, however, the new Williamson is not any more viable.

This cheat sheet tracks who’s in, out, up, and down in the 2024 races. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Not officially, but in every other respect, yes. Every time he’s been asked, he says he expects to run, and when his longtime aide Ron Klain departed as chief of staff, Klain said he’d be there “when” Biden runs in 2024. An announcement could come soon, now that the State of the Union has passed.

Why does he want to run?
Biden has always wanted to be president and is proud of his work so far; he also seems to believe that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
If he runs, it’s probably his for the taking. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden does not, she’s expected to be the favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
It’s too soon to tell, but she’d start with an advantage if Biden sits this out.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden bows out.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden doesn’t, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
Say it with me: No, but if Biden doesn’t, she might.

Why does she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Perhaps.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Yes. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C.

Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants to give voters a choice. “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
If Biden, etc.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Who is he?
The son of a presidential candidate, the nephew of another, and the nephew of a president, Kennedy is a longtime environmental activist and also a chronic crank.

Is he running?
On a visit to New Hampshire in March, he said he was considering it.

Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition—hell, he wouldn’t even be the first Kennedy to primary a sitting Democrat. If he does run, you can expect a campaign arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming.”)

Who wants him to run?
Who knows? Anti-vaxxers? His wife, the actress Cheryl Hines—with whom he has clashed over vaccines—is at least willing to tolerate it. “I’m thinking about it, and I’ve passed the biggest hurdle, which is my wife has green-lighted it,” he said.

Can he win the nomination?
No.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP is still all in on Trump, but it’s a little hard to tell how big. Polling shows that his support among Republicans is all over the place, but he’s clearly not a prohibitive front-runner.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, but past results are no guarantee of future success.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Not officially, but clearly the answer is yes. DeSantis is getting a campaign and super PAC up and running, marshaling donors, and inserting himself into national politics. He reportedly might not announce until May or June.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers the prospect of a synthesis of Trump-style culture war and bullying and the conservative politics of the early 2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
Members of the Republican establishment who want a pugilistic alternative to Trump, disaffected MAGA types, and maybe Jeb!

Can he win the nomination?
No one quite knows how a Trump-DeSantis battle will play out, but it seems very possible.

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Perhaps as a MAGA-friendly alternative to Trump? It’s hard to say, as my colleague Tim Alberta has chronicled. Haley served under Trump, condemned him over January 6, said she wouldn’t run if he ran, and now is running anyway.

Who wants her to run?
That’s also hard to say, but if DeSantis stumbles in the spotlight, she could make a play for his supporters.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Dylan Hollingsworth / Bloomberg / Getty) Vivek Ramaswamy

Who is he?
A 37-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling resume (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J.D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on February 21.

Why does he want to run?
“We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy said in a somewhat-hectoring launch video. “Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like Covidism, climatism, and gender ideology.”

Who wants him to run?
As The New Yorker found in a long profile in December, he has some avid fans. So far, little evidence suggests this amounts to a winning coalition.

Can he win the nomination?
Almost certainly not. At this stage, Ramaswamy gives off Steve Forbes/Herman Cain/Morry Taylor vibes—an interesting character from the business world, but not a contender. Then again, Trump once did too.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, a longtime member of Congress, just finished a stint as governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
It sure looks like it. He’s been making the rounds and having the conversations one has if one is going to run, and he says he will probably decide by April.

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying he disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the election.

Who wants him to run?
Some old-school Republicans would welcome his candidacy, but it’s hard to imagine a groundswell.

Can he win the nomination?
Unlikely.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
No. After giving a campaign “very serious consideration,” Hogan ruled himself out on March 5, saying he was worried that too large a field would help Trump win the nomination once more.

Why did he want to run?
Hogan argued that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.” He’s also a vocal critic of Donald Trump.

Who wanted him to run?
Moderate, business-friendly “Never Trump” Republicans love Hogan.

Could he have won?
No.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he’s the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Is he running?
“Maybe I run, maybe I don’t,” he said in early February. But he passed on a Senate run last year and just created a fundraising vehicle that typically presages a candidacy.

Why does he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and sees his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism.

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe.

(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty) Tim Scott

Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.

Is he running?
Maybe. Scott has visited Iowa and considered a campaign, and says he doesn’t plan to run for another Senate term.

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him.

Can he win the nomination?
Who knows? The soft-spoken Scott is untested in this kind of campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

Is he running?
Most likely. He’s released a campaign-style memoir, though he had to blurb it himself, and has pointedly distanced himself from Trump on some issues.

Why does he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

Who wants him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Can he win the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
He hasn’t said, but he’s been traveling to stump for Republicans and meet with donors, and he’s limited to a single term as governor.

Why does he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, so far to no avail.

Who wants him to run?
Republicans who see him as able to run on Trumpy cultural issues while keeping some distance from Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
Possibly.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as governor of Indiana and U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Pretty likely, though he hasn’t declared.

Why does he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. His time as Trump’s VP both makes him more plausible and probably rules him out, because he’s fallen afoul of his old boss.

Who wants him to run?
Conservative Christians, rabbit lovers.

Can he win the nomination?
It’s hard to see it happening.