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This week, I talked to wildlife experts about my most pressing springtime animal questions. But first, here are three stories from The Atlantic:

The narcissists who endanger America An acute attack of Trumpism in Tennessee Adult ADHD is the Wild West of psychiatry.  

Making Themselves Known

When spring rolls around each year, my brain launches into a frantic running commentary. What is that bird doing? I wonder to myself as I walk around. This deer looks like Bambi. Why is that small rabbit all alone? Oh, no, his mother must be dead—like Bambi’s! Should I bring him inside and raise him as my own?

I am not the only one with questions. This is the busiest time of the year for wildlife rescuers and rehabilitators, whose job involves fielding inquiries from concerned citizens like myself. After a long winter, animals are suddenly making themselves known: coming out of hibernation and brumation, emerging from their hidey-holes. They’re having babies and crisscrossing roads and falling out of trees during wind storms. And we humans are encountering them in their various states of vulnerability.

So this week, I drove out to City Wildlife, a wildlife-rehabilitation center in Washington, D.C., to ask experts about the kinds of advice they find themselves doling out every spring. At the office, in the northwest part of the city, a flightless pigeon named Sally greeted me with a tilt of his head from his cage at the door. Four box turtles injured in lawn-equipment accidents were recovering in big plastic tubs. In a back room, volunteers were bottle-feeding baby squirrels, which was so cute I thought I might pass out.

At City Wildlife, I interviewed the experts Jen Mattioli and Jim Monsma—and then, for some regional diversity, I called the wildlife-rehabilitation specialist Tim Jasinski at the Lake Erie Nature & Science Center, in Ohio. Below, I’ve summarized the questions that both centers most often receive, and their best advice.

Some top-line notes: Baby animals are rarely abandoned by their parents; if you see them alone, it’s very likely that their parents are coming back. Touching a baby isn’t usually advisable, but your scent isn’t going to stop a baby’s mother from taking care of it either. When in doubt, call your local wildlife center. And for the love of God, keep your cats inside.

What do I do with this baby squirrel I found?

It’s baby-squirrel season! Other offices might have March Madness pools, but at City Wildlife, employees take bets on what day the first baby squirrels will arrive. The drop-offs began in earnest last week, with 18 babies brought to the center after severe storms knocked over their nests. The most common reasons for orphaned squirrels? Heavy winds and springtime tree-cutting.

The expert advice: If you find a baby squirrel sitting quietly on his own, he probably hasn’t been abandoned. Leave him where he is or, if you can reach his leafy nest, put him back inside it. His mother will probably return for him. You can identify an orphaned or abandoned baby squirrel by how desperate he’s acting: If he approaches you eagerly or climbs up your leg, he’s probably starving. Put him in a shoebox with air holes and bring him to your local wildlife rehabber for care.

Are these bunnies abandoned?

Eastern cottontails, the most common rabbits in North America, build their nests in shallow dugouts and line them with grass and fur. The thing to know about rabbits is that they are extremely chill parents: The mother leaves her babies alone for most of the day, returning only in the mornings and evenings to feed them. So the babies aren’t alone—they’re just alone right now.

The expert advice: Leave the nest of babies where it is. If your dog needs to walk in the yard, cover the nest temporarily with a laundry basket to protect the babies, then remove it when the dog goes back inside. If the mother is dead—maybe your dog or cat got to her—then call your local wildlife rehabber for next steps.

Can I bring this tiny deer inside?!

Don’t! Like rabbits, mother deer leave their baby alone for most of the day, returning only in the evenings to feed them.

The expert advice: If you find a baby deer in your yard or in the woods, leave him alone. Yes, it will be hard, because he’s so cute. But his mother will be back. If a fawn seems injured or is approaching people, call your local wildlife specialist for instructions.

Does this scruffy-looking bird need help?

Baby birds can be confusing. It helps to know the difference between nestlings and fledglings. Nestlings are naked and skinny, like a Skeksis from Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. Sometimes you’ll find nestlings in the spring that have fallen from their nests or were kicked out by parasitic birds. Fledglings are flightless but have feathers—the fuzzy, windswept version of their adult parents.

The expert advice: If you find a nestling on the ground that is still alive, call a local rehabber for advice; sometimes it can be re-nested. A fledgling, by contrast, will be okay by herself. She might look pretty helpless hopping along a sidewalk or yard. But don’t worry: Her mother is somewhere nearby. If the fledgling is near a busy road, it’s okay to move her to a bush nearby.

A key way to protect these vulnerable baby birds? Keep your cat inside. Cats—although adorable!—are backyard super-predators that kill fledglings and migratory birds. According to a 2013 study, cats may kill billions of birds each year in the United States alone.

One more thing: Bird migration is happening right now in the eastern United States, and people are encountering adult birds that have been stunned or killed by flying into windows. Glass kills as many as 1 billion birds every year in America, and experts have tips on how to make your windows bird-friendly. If you come across a concussed bird, call your local wildlife center.

For humans, spring is all pink blossoms and green grass and rainy days. But spring is a particularly vulnerable season in an animal’s early life. The more we know, the more we can help them out.

Related:

The future of conservation is basically Shazam for wildlife. America’s most misunderstood marsupial

Today’s News

In a private ceremony late last night, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would ban most abortions in the state after six weeks of pregnancy. A forthcoming state-supreme-court ruling on Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, which was passed last year, will determine if the new ban takes effect. The Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified U.S. documents was officially charged in Boston federal court with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material. Travel resumed at the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport after monumental rains and flooding forced the travel hub to shut down Wednesday.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Maya Chung rounds up books that ponder the empty promise of good intentions.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Amy Sussman / Getty; Frazer Harrison / Getty.

How Taylor Swift Infiltrated Dude Rock

By Spencer Kornhaber

The indie-rock band The National has long served as a mascot for a certain type of guy: literary, self-effacing, mordantly cool. With cryptic lyrics and brooding instrumentation, the quintet of scruffy brothers and schoolmates from Ohio conveys the yearnings of the sensitive male psyche. The band’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, has a voice so doleful and deep that it seems to emanate from a cavern. His typical narrator is a wallflower pining for validation from the life of the party—the romantic swooning of a man in need of rescue.

In the mid-to-late aughts, as The National was gathering acclaim with darkly experimental albums, another artist was rising to prominence: Taylor Swift. On the surface, these two acts are starkly different. Where The National’s songwriting is impressionistic, Swift’s is diaristic—built on personal stories that typically forgo abstraction or even difficult metaphor. Where The National’s charisma lies in its mysteriousness, Swift earnestly says just what she means. The National is known for somber dude-rock; Swift found fame with anthems of heartbroken but upbeat young-womanhood. (In her 2012 hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” she even jabbed at pretentious guys who are obsessed with dude-rock, like the ex who ran off to listen to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”) The National became the house band for a certain segment of Millennial yuppies; Swift became one of the biggest stars in the world.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A single judge shouldn’t have this kind of national power. Seltzer is torture. The mirror test is broken.

Culture Break

Georges De Keerle / Getty

Read. Two new books argue that America urgently needs to reevaluate its child-welfare system.

And these seven celebrities published actually great memoirs.

Watch. Netflix’s Beef brings TV viewers the antiheroine (played by Ali Wong) they’ve been missing.

P.S.

This week, one of my favorite reads was this profile of Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star at the center of Donald Trump’s indictment. You’ve probably read about the alleged hush-money payments by now and the contours of the Manhattan district attorney’s case. But this story, by Olivia Nuzzi, offers a really human look at what it’s like to be Daniels in this turbulent moment.

— Elaine

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

Former President Donald Trump's personal financial disclosure report was made public Friday after he filed it with the Federal Election Commission. The report is likely to offer some new insights into his post-presidential finances.

Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump's handling of classified documents are pressing multiple witnesses for details about their attorneys, including whether any of them have attempted to influence testimony in order to protect the former president, multiple sources tell CNN.

“An enormous threat.” “An unacceptable national security risk.” “A spy balloon in your phone.” These are descriptions—from members of Congress and American regulators—not of a hidden piece of malware or a computer virus, but of the Chinese social-media app TikTok. Most U.S. citizens know TikTok as the place where they can watch people do stupid dances or post clips of themselves cooking. But many government officials view the app as a Trojan horse, a device that will enable the Chinese Communist Party to insinuate itself into American life and subvert national security. And that has led civil servants and elected representatives to call on the U.S. government to cut off Americans’ access to TikTok, the app’s enormous popularity with them notwithstanding.

The efforts to ban TikTok go back to the summer of 2020, when President Donald Trump, citing his powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, issued an executive order prohibiting any American from participating in any transaction with the app. That order was struck down in the courts. But the impulse behind it hasn’t gone away. In January, Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill to ban TikTok from the U.S., and last month, Democrat Mark Warner and Republican John Thune introduced another Senate bill, the RESTRICT Act, which would empower the president to impose tight restrictions on “technology from foreign adversaries”—very much including TikTok.

What has the video-sharing platform done to merit this treatment? Well, the concern is not so much what it’s done as what it might do—or, perhaps more accurately, what the Chinese government might make it do. The company’s critics accuse it of collecting hoards of private information about its users, including data not only from within the app but from other apps as well. This information might, in theory, involve compromising material that could be used to blackmail U.S. citizens. The critics also point to the possibility of the Chinese government’s using the site as a propaganda outlet, swaying opinions by feeding American viewers certain clips.

In fact, little if any evidence suggests that TikTok’s data-collection practices are meaningfully different from—or any more invasive than—those of other social-media companies. To the extent that those practices are problematic invasions of privacy, the logical remedy would surely be to impose industry-wide standards. But for TikTok’s critics, those similarities pale next to the key difference between TikTok and its competitors: It’s a Chinese company—which means it could be legally required to hand over data to the Chinese government. TikTok insists that it has moved all of its American-user data to U.S. servers, but no one seems to believe that this would really make a difference if Beijing applied serious pressure to TikTok’s parent company. And so national security, we’re told, demands that TikTok be shut down in the U.S.

If TikTok were just a technology company, banning U.S. customers from doing business with it would be well within the government’s powers, as well as in line with similar actions the government has taken in the past. But TikTok isn’t just, or even primarily, a technology company. It’s a media platform, so banning it would be far more consequential. Cutting off Americans’ access to one of their favorite sources of information and entertainment would be legally and constitutionally dubious. Worse still, it would be wrong on the merits.

Any TikTok ban would have to contend with the Berman amendments, a series of changes to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that prohibit the president from using sanctions to restrict the exchange of “information or informational materials,” including via electronic media. And then there are First Amendment considerations. As a foreign-owned company, TikTok itself does not itself enjoy that constitutional protection, but the U.S. Supreme Court has long held that the First Amendment protects the right of Americans to “receive and consider” information and ideas, no matter their source. In 1965, for instance, the Court struck down a federal law that imposed controls on “Communist political propaganda” that was “printed or otherwise prepared in a foreign country,” declaring unconstitutional the government’s attempt to “control the flow of ideas to the public.”

On top of this, a TikTok ban would be more problematic than limiting the flow of communist propaganda from abroad, because most of the content Americans consume on TikTok is generated by, yes, other Americans. Even if you think it should be permissible for the government to prevent Americans from reading, say, The Pyongyang Times, domestic measures blocking access to Bernie Sanders clips or a video of a guy skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac would be a remarkably far-reaching intrusion into Americans’ lives. Although content creators could migrate to other platforms, and users would find ways to circumvent the ban, such government action would radically curtail Americans’ right to receive and consider information and ideas.

Congress has the power, of course, to adjust the Berman amendments to allow itself to shut TikTok down within the United States. And the Supreme Court could decide that a TikTok ban is justified on national-security grounds. The real issue, though, is not whether the government can shut down TikTok; it’s whether it should. The national-security concerns may be legitimate, but even given the government’s compelling interest in limiting the Chinese government’s access to Americans’ data, any regulations it puts in place should be narrowly tailored to achieve that goal alone. Preventing Americans from using TikTok entirely is the opposite of that—and doing so would put the government in the position of deciding what content Americans are allowed access to and what they’re not.

I grant that the Chinese government puts itself in exactly that position all the time. YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are all banned inside the country. Internet search terms are censored. Text messages are monitored. Even TikTok doesn’t operate inside China. But what Beijing does is hardly an argument in favor of our banning TikTok, because emulating authoritarian censorship plays to China’s strengths, not our own.

Passing comprehensive user-privacy legislation on all social-media companies operating in the U.S. would be a good idea. Shutting down one of Americans’ favorite apps is not. We don’t need to become more like China. And we don’t need to become less like America.

Last Friday, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ordered an end to the sale of mifepristone, a drug approved by the FDA 23 years ago that’s used to induce abortions, anywhere in the United States. He’s just a single judge in a small courthouse in Amarillo, Texas. Does he really have the power to dictate national policy about drug safety? If so, should he have that power?

The answer to the first question is complicated—more on that in a moment—but the answer to the second is easy. Of course he shouldn’t.

[Mary Ziegler: The Texas abortion-pill ruling signals pro-lifers’ next push]

When I ask new law students what courts are for, I’m likely to hear that they’re for “holding government accountable” or “protecting our constitutional rights.” That’s a common lay understanding: We’ve grown accustomed to judges taking center stage in national debates over abortion, health care, immigration, and other headline-grabbing issues.

But the traditional role of the courts is not to superintend what the government does. It’s to resolve disputes between the parties who appear before them. By offering a neutral, state-sanctioned forum, courts reduce the risk that angry people will take matters into their own hands. That’s a crucial but limited role. Judges aren’t supposed to adjudicate abstract political disputes or to rule on the rights of parties who aren’t involved in a given case.

Over time, however, some federal judges have become comfortable with a more sweeping vision of their role. Especially in the past decade, as the partisan divide has hardened, judges on both sides have grown more willing to wade into divisive policy disputes and to extend their rulings not just to the parties before them, but across the whole country.

The resulting “nationwide injunctions” are pernicious, as the Notre Dame law professor Sam Bray and I argued five years ago in this magazine. For starters, they purport to settle a legal question for the entire country, even if cases presenting the same question are pending before other judges who might have disagreed. That cuts off the ability of smart judges to contribute to an ongoing legal debate.

Nationwide injunctions also create procedural train wrecks. The government usually has no choice but to race to an appeals court or, failing that, the U.S. Supreme Court, to get the injunction lifted. These rushed appeals don’t have the benefit of full, careful briefing and argument. That’s exactly what happened in the mifepristone case: The government scurried to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to ask it to pause the lower court’s decision, which the court did in part late Wednesday evening.

Finally, and of perhaps greatest concern, nationwide injunctions supercharge the incentives for ideologically motivated plaintiffs to hunt for like-minded judges to hear their cases, knowing they can win big if they can just find the right judge. That’s why the plaintiffs in the mifepristone case filed suit in Amarillo. They knew their case would be assigned to Judge Kacsmaryk, who in his short time on the bench had shown himself to be a reliable partisan warrior. It’s also why many of the highest-profile challenges to Trump-administration policies were filed in California, with its relatively high concentration of liberal judges.

The ideological pattern of nationwide injunctions is as predictable as it is striking. During the Biden administration, nationwide injunctions have been issued against its mask mandate on public transportation, its vaccine mandate for health-care workers, its extension of stimulus relief to Black farmers, its effort to set a price on the social cost of carbon, and its termination of former President Donald Trump’s “remain in Mexico” policy. Every one of these injunctions came from a judge appointed by a Republican president.

Likewise, nationwide injunctions were issued against the Trump administration for its travel bans, its public-charge rule, its exemptions from the contraception mandate, its changes to asylum policy, its abortion-related rules under Title X, and its elimination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Every one of these injunctions came from a judge appointed by a Democratic president.

This is a dismaying picture, and is all but guaranteed to breed cynicism about the courts. Still, nationwide injunctions have their defenders. Arguments in their favor were especially appealing to liberal lawyers during the Trump administration. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, patience may be wearing thin. If you look closely, a bipartisan consensus may slowly be emerging that nationwide injunctions are inappropriate.

Judge Kacsmaryk clearly didn’t get the memo. Now, in fairness, he didn’t say he was entering a nationwide injunction. Instead, he said he was wiping the FDA’s approval of mifepristone from the books under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a bedrock 1946 statute allowing for court review of actions taken by federal agencies. No FDA approval, no mifepristone. (Actually, the judge said something stranger than that: He said he was postponing the effective date of mifepristone’s approval, even though the approval took effect 23 years ago. That’s bananas—the whole opinion, to be honest, is bananas—but for our purposes, it’s a distinction without a difference.)

[Patrick T. Brown: I’m pro-life. I worry that the abortion-pill ruling could backfire.]

Invoking the APA allowed the judge to rest his decision not on his discretionary power to issue injunctions, but on a supposedly clear legal command from Congress. That’s a growing trend in the lower courts. As nationwide injunctions get a bad odor, “universal vacatur” under the APA is taking its place. The APA says that courts shall “set aside” an agency’s unlawful action. The action is just gone, so it’s okay to prevent the government from relying on it. Hence, a nationwide injunction.

Just two weeks ago, for example, a different Texas judge used the APA to enter a “universal remedy” against agency rules requiring health insurers to cover certain preventive services free of charge under the Affordable Care Act. According to the judge, he had no choice in the matter.

Is that really what the “set aside” language means? Turns out that’s a lively topic of debate. Some judges on the D.C. Circuit, the influential appeals court in Washington, D.C., have concluded, without much analysis, that nationwide injunctions should typically accompany orders to “set aside” an agency action. At oral argument in a case last month, Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that he agreed: “With those of us who were on the D.C. Circuit, you know, five times before breakfast, that’s what you do in an APA case.” (Jonathan Adler at Case Western Law School has a good explanation for why the D.C. Circuit came to think this way.)

A narrower interpretation is available, however, and it’s a sounder one. According to the 1947 Attorney General’s Manual on the APA, the law was just “a general restatement of the principles of judicial review embodied in many statutes and judicial decisions.” One of those principles is that injunctions should be as narrow as possible while still providing complete relief to the injured party. Against that backdrop, it’d be odd to read words (i.e., set aside) that don’t mention injunctions as authorizing injunctions that are broader than necessary.

Recent work by John Harrison, a University of Virginia law professor, reinforces the point. When the APA was adopted, Harrison argues, Congress commonly used the words set aside to tell courts to ignore an unlawful action—to treat it as a nullity—in the case at hand. But that’s it. The APA didn’t confer the power to go further and enjoin or annul the action.

Say an employer, for example, files a lawsuit over an agency decision requiring businesses to cover certain preventive care for their workers, like in the other Texas case I mentioned. Under this narrower interpretation of the APA, the judge would ignore the agency decision—would set it aside—once it was found to be unlawful. Presto: The employer would no longer be subject to the obligation.

The underlying agency decision, however, would remain intact. No one except that employer’s workers would lose coverage. The agency that lost in court would then have to decide what to do in future cases. Maybe it would throw in the towel and let all employers off the hook. Maybe it would double down and fight in other courts. But that’s up to the agency, not the courts.

This debate over the APA hasn’t been conclusively resolved, and it may not be anytime soon. But the legal complexity shouldn’t be allowed to obscure a very simple point: It’s wildly improper in a democracy for a single judge to determine the rights of Americans everywhere. As I was reading Judge Kacsmaryk’s opinion, I couldn’t stop thinking of the satirist Alexandra Petri’s take on whether he might take the drug off the shelves:

Yes! This is a real possibility, because our legal system is working just the way it ought to work! In an ideal society, your rights and ability to access medicine and direct the course of your own life are guaranteed and unalterable—unless a Trump-appointed judge named Matt decides to say, “Nah.”

It doesn’t have to be like this. Judges such as Matt have assumed powers they were never given and that they ought not to have. The Supreme Court shouldn’t allow this, and should take its chance, whether in the mifepristone case or in another instance soon, to end nationwide injunctions.

The FBI yesterday arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guard employee, for posting highly sensitive Pentagon documents online. Teixeira, at this point, seems to have had no reason for spilling national secrets to a chat group other than that he wanted to show off, impress his friends, and establish himself as an important person in a small community of digital gamers. This, from the available reporting, seems different from the cases of other young people who compromised national security, including Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, and, of course, Edward Snowden.

But all of these cases—as well as the notorious cases of much older people who betrayed their country, such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen—are bound by the common thread of narcissism. Teixeira, if early reports prove accurate, might be the dorkiest of these cases, but make no mistake: The damage he is alleged to have caused so far looks to be immense, all because he reportedly wanted to be the boss among a clique of online pals.

Brainless bragging so far seems to apply in Teixeira’s case. But my assertion about betrayal and narcissism will infuriate those who see Winner and Snowden as noble whistleblowers who should have been honored rather than persecuted. Winner, they might note, suffered for her choices (and got a sentence far stiffer than most of the January 6 insurrectionists). Snowden fled—or, as his apologists would argue, had to flee—to Russia to remain beyond the reach of an American state determined to punish him for revealing government misconduct.

[Juliette Kayyem: I oversaw the Massachusetts Air National Guard. I cannot fathom how this happened.]

The romanticized versions of these stories fail to account for the various shades of narcissistic behavior on display in all these cases, and especially in the most recent breaches. I am not here to argue the case for or against any of these people, but for the record, I think Snowden was (and is) a traitor, Winner was naive and foolish, and Manning was, mostly, a victim. All did serious damage to this nation. For most of my adult life, in positions in the U.S. Senate and the Defense Department, I held a security clearance; I would not have made the same choices, and I deplore theirs.

Despite their various justifications, however, the crimes both of declared whistleblowers and avowed traitors are not that different from those Teixeira is alleged to have committed. They are the product of a protracted epidemic of narcissism, and if the U.S. national-security community does not find a way to protect classified information from this malady, it’s going to happen again.

To be fair, intelligence organizations are not exactly blind to the problem. Intelligence professionals use the acronym MICE to explain the four main reasons why people betray their country: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Money is always an issue, which is why people in deep financial difficulty will often be flagged as a risk and even have their clearances suspended. Some ideologies, especially those centered around anti-government grievances, can be dangerous. Compromising information can lead people to hide their own secrets by betraying their nation’s secrets instead.

But that last category, ego, can be the weakness that is hardest to spot. No urine test flips positive for a dangerous narcissist. No bank statement reveals a deficit of principle or a surplus of self-regard. Polygraphs are of arguable reliability, and clearly neither deter nor even discover some people willing to take risks. At higher levels, clearance holders have to pass psychological examinations, but narcissism can look a lot like ambition and self-confidence, just as expressions of high principle and rectitude can mask self-serving rationalizations.

[Tom Nichols: The narcissism of the angry young men]

Of course, betrayal sometimes has all of these issues at work. The CIA turncoat Ames, for example, was finally caught in the 1990s in part due to investigations into his finances, but for years, he was also a disgruntled and passed-over operative with a drinking problem who used to zip around in a Jaguar. (It’s never the ones you suspect.) Hanssen, the FBI traitor who gave up so much dangerous material that he could have faced the death penalty, was something of a weirdo: a devout Catholic who secretly taped sex with his wife, went to men’s clubs to convert strippers, and was such a dark and strange presence that his co-workers dubbed him “the Mortician” and “Dr. Death.” But with his Russian handlers, he was “Ramon,” a hero and a swashbuckler.

Even the legendary British mole, Kim Philby, was an upper-class rake, an elite dandy who nonetheless professed to the end of his life—perhaps sincerely—that he was a loyal Soviet Marxist. But he was also an egotistical charmer, a user, and a liar, as those who knew him later came to understand, with painful clarity.

Snowden, for his part, vacillated between hard-right views and anti-government gripes, but underneath it all was a young man who, for most of his life, had been invisible and who yearned for recognition. Online, he called himself “The True HOOHAH,” a military-style moniker. (He tried to join the Army Special Forces, but washed out.) He apparently considered male modeling. At one point, he chose a new digital avatar, “Wolfking Awesomefox.” He finally found the importance he craved by stealing hundreds of thousands of documents (materials he later admitted he had not read or vetted) and instantly became an international celebrity.

The Winner and Manning cases are sadder stories, songs with different lyrics but the same music. Winner was convinced that she had the responsibility to tell the world about Russian attempts to interfere in American politics. (She had no background in such matters; she was hired as a linguist.) Manning, a lonely misfit in the Army, found an online friendship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and handed over thousands of documents that she herself had no hope of understanding.

Narcissism, as I’ve written elsewhere, is on the rise, in the United States and around the world. It is destroying many of the social and political norms that sustain a democratic nation, and especially those that guide public service. People consumed by concerns over their social status, as Teixeira seemed to be, or who will mortgage national security for companionship and approval, as Manning did, or who—in the case of of Snowden and Winner—think of themselves as the ultimate arbiters of the social good, are all menaces to national security, no matter what their reasons.

[Read: Should intelligence whistleblowers be protected?]

What can be done to mitigate these risks? First, implement the easiest and most obvious fix: Slash the number of security clearances. Far too many people who don’t need them are carrying risky clearances, mostly because of outdated Cold War rules. I was one: When I was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, I had to hold a SECRET clearance because of a Defense Department rule that people who train or educate American military officers need a clearance, even if they’re not working with restricted documents. My clearance gave me access to classified materials if I wanted to read them, and classified events if I wanted to attend them, but I didn’t need one to do my job and neither do a lot of other people who can access classified material for no useful purpose.

Next, change the hidebound and tangled clearance process that looks for easily identifiable human frailties such as adultery and substance abuse, but somehow overlooks the dangers of narcissism. I do not have a precise set of prescriptions for how to go about this—but I hope that more attention to social-media postings and online chatroom activity become a standard part of  a background check. The process sometimes seems to zero in on measurable problems rather than less tangible personality flaws. When I was asked, for example, about colleagues by investigators—a common part of the clearance and re-clearance process—I was always struck by how much they centered on such concrete things as money or infidelity.

Meanwhile, each year as a federal employee, I had to sit through hours of training about how to protect information, which included how to spot more nebulous “insider threats.” We were told to be watchful for anger, behavioral changes, foreign contacts, financial irregularities, and outbursts about American policies. And each year, I would ruefully tote up all the senior government officials I would have gladly reported, including former President Donald Trump and retired General Michael Flynn, men who checked nearly every “insider threat” box on the list. Nonetheless, it was a reminder of the importance of supporting and protecting patriotic whistleblowers—especially the ones who might face the wrath of vengeful bureaucrats and politicians.

But while all of these risk factors are important, most people, even burdened with their human failings, are not going to reveal America’s secrets. If we’re going to stop the next reckless narcissist—whether it’s a swaggering adolescent jerk or a self-styled crusader—the U.S. national security establishment is going to need sharper instincts, and must start confronting the one vice that unites them all.

Yes, we need to know who is in deep financial straits, or who harbors a secret grudge against America. But mostly, we need to inquire more closely into who among us will betray our country for fame, for approval, or because they somehow think that our laws and classifications are for less enlightened citizens than themselves. Unlocking that one secret is crucial to protecting our national security in a new age of narcissism.

Former President Donald Trump is suing Michael Cohen for $500 million in damages for allegedly breaching his contract as Trump's former personal attorney. CNN's Kaitlan Collins talks to Cohen about the lawsuit.

In an exclusive interview with CNN's Kaitlan Collins, Bill Barr, the attorney general for former President Donald Trump, discusses the probe into the classified documents found in Trump's Mar-a-Lago home.

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The $1.6 billion Fox News defamation trial is about to begin. More than Rupert Murdoch’s pocketbook is at stake—practically the entire media industry is watching with schadenfreude, and maybe even a little dread.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Supreme Court is likely to reject the independent state legislature theory Nutrition science’s most preposterous result: Could ice cream possibly be good for you? The not-so-secret key to emotional balance A Look Down the Fox Hole

The word of the week is malice. Did Fox News act with “actual malice” in broadcasting a litany of lies about Dominion Voting Systems’ machines in the days and weeks after the 2020 presidential election? On Monday, a jury in Wilmington, Delaware, will hear opening arguments in the landmark case.

Very few defamation suits go to trial. The evidence against Fox is overwhelming. Some of the network’s biggest names, including Tucker Carlson, had their private text messages surface in the discovery process. “The software shit is absurd,” Carlson wrote to his producer. Even Murdoch, in his deposition, personally cast doubt on former President Donald Trump’s claims about a “stolen election.” He also acknowledged that several of his hosts “endorsed” the Dominion conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, the Fox brass kept allowing lunacy about Dominion to transpire on its airwaves. (No, Dominion does not have secret ties to the family of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, for instance.) Last year, Dominion CEO John Poulos told 60 Minutes that he and his employees have faced threats and harassment as a result of the lies.

The unfortunate reality is that news organizations get stories wrong all the time. The sheer thought of landing their work on the Corrections page can keep journalists up at night. David Simon captured this perpetual anxiety during Season 5 of The Wire, in an episode fittingly titled “Unconfirmed Reports.” In a particularly memorable scene, Gus Haynes, the grizzled city editor of The Baltimore Sun, springs out of bed and calls the paper’s night desk, asking a fellow editor to make sure he didn’t accidentally transpose two details in the course of futzing with a story. (He didn’t.) Such a mistake would have been just that, a mistake—which is qualitatively different from acting with malice, or with heightened disregard for the truth, the burden of proof in a defamation suit like Dominion’s.

Last year, Sarah Palin’s defamation suit against The New York Times was dismissed because of Palin’s basic failure to prove her case. Palin had sued the paper over an editorial that contained inaccuracies, but Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that Palin hadn’t provided adequate evidence to meet the legal standard required of a public figure suing for libel. The Times did not live up to its high standards, but neither did it act with actual malice.

While it’s tempting to grab some popcorn and root against Fox next week, the fact that the network known for propaganda is furiously (if unsuccessfully) invoking the First Amendment in its own defense complicates things. In our present era of dystopian book banning and library defunding, journalists and citizens alike should be wary of any legal precedent that could potentially narrow existing First Amendment freedoms.

No, Fox does not have a “right” to peddle lies about a technology company from Toronto. But high-profile cases such as this one can have a perilous downstream effect. Future lawyers can cite even part of a ruling to bend a judge or jury toward their side in a contentious case. We should all be hoping for truth and justice to prevail, while simultaneously praying that we don’t keep seeing more First Amendment(ish) cases going to trial in the years to come. The best press is an empowered press, so long as it’s not reckless.

To keep matters interesting: The case may still settle before Monday morning. Fox has already suffered some behind-the-scenes exposure (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) and may want to avoid any additional texts or emails becoming public. Murdoch, Carlson, and other household Fox names could also be forced to testify.

If the trial does last its expected four weeks, I’ll be curious to see the extent to which the people who drew jury duty understand the nuances in question. Eight years ago, Marvin Gaye’s estate successfully sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, claiming that Thicke and Williams’s mega-hit “Blurred Lines” plagiarized Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Each set of song lyrics is different, but they are sonically similar in terms of “groove” or “feel.” In a surprise to music-industry experts, Gaye’s estate won the verdict, but the jury did not find the offense to be “willful.” Those stakes were no doubt lower than the ones in the Dominion case, but the jury will have to parse similar details—namely the difference between an incorrect statement and a malicious lie.

Meanwhile, the next presidential election is just getting rolling, with Trump and Joe Biden poised for a rematch. After a reported “soft ban,” Fox is giving Trump plenty of airtime again. This week, he sat down for an interview with Carlson to discuss his first indictment. Carlson let the former president ramble at length, and even praised his statements as “moderate, sensible, and wise.” Yet, as we learned in the plethora of Dominion evidence, Carlson once texted of Trump, “I hate him passionately.”

Related:

Brian Stelter: I never truly understood Fox News until now. Why Fox News lied to its viewers Today’s News Federal investigators arrested an Air National Guardsman in their inquiry of leaked classified intelligence documents. A federal appeals court ruled late yesterday that the abortion pill mifepristone could remain available, but left restrictions in place that prevent the drug’s access by mail, partly overruling a Texas judge’s decision last week that declared the Food and Drug Administration’s original approval of the drug, in 2000, invalid. Former President Donald Trump was deposed in New York City as part of the $250 million civil lawsuit filed by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, which alleges widespread fraud by Trump and his company. Dispatches Work in Progress: Derek Thompson delves into the rise of public crusaders who are private reactionaries.

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Evening Read Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Money May Buy Happiness. But Not as Much as You Think.

By Michael Mechanic

For more than half a century, researchers at UCLA have conducted a massive annual survey of incoming college students titled “The American Freshman: National Norms.” One part of the survey asks students to rank 20 life goals on a scale from “not important” to “essential.” Most are lofty aspirations such as becoming a community leader, contributing to scientific progress, creating artistic works, and launching a suc­cessful business. Surveyed in 1969, freshmen entering four-year colleges were most interested in “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” (85 percent considered it “essential” or “very important”); “raising a family” (73 percent); and “helping others who are in difficulty” (69 percent). Ten years later, freshmen opted for “being an authority in my field” (74 percent), followed by “helping others” and “raising a family.”

But something shifted amid the Reagan Revolution, which deregulated Wall Street, revamped the tax code, and set the nation hurtling toward levels of wealth and income inequality unseen since before the Great Depression. By 1989, a new priority had taken over the survey’s top position, and has appeared there on and off ever since: money. Indeed, the No. 1 goal of the Class of 2023, deemed “essential” or “very important” by more than four in five students, was “being very well off financially.”

Read the full article.

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Read. In The Real Work, the writer Adam Gopnik extols the virtues of striving for mastery in place of superficial achievements.

Watch. Showing Up, the new film (now in theaters) by the director Kelly Reichardt, understands what a creative life actually looks like.

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P.S.

It’s hard not to watch all of this Fox News drama unfold against the backdrop of the final season of Succession without noticing a few parallels. The briefly unified sibling trio of Kendall, Shiv, and Roman are still duking it out in the remaining episodes to be their father’s successor. My extremely idiotic and unfounded prediction is that Cousin Greg will get full control of the company. In the immortal words of Greg, “If it is to be said, so it be, so it is.”

— John

Kelli María Korducki and Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.