On the first day of the rest of my life, I went to Bed Bath & Beyond. It was a rainy spring Monday in 2011, and like generations of optimistic 20-somethings before me, I had just washed up on New York City’s shores with two bulging suitcases and the keys to a tiny, dingy apartment. I had spent most of the previous year saving every cent possible so that I could rent and furnish a bedroom in an unfashionable, relatively cheap part of Manhattan, but before I could unpack my clothes or sleep in the new bed I had scheduled for delivery the next day, I needed to buy everything else: sheets, blankets, pillows, towels, hangers, a hamper.

This shopping trip was the kind of minor domestic milestone that abounds in young adulthood. I had no idea how to navigate anything about New York, and I was looking everywhere for signals that this new life would be viable for me. On that first day, I began the process of figuring all of that out by getting myself to a store that sold affordable bed linens. I looked up the East Side bus routes, found my M2 stop, and watched carefully out the window until the street signs indicated that we were nearing the Queensboro Bridge. Soon I was looking up at a staggeringly enormous Bed Bath & Beyond, complete with a cart escalator between floors. Inside, I assembled such a voluminous pile of textiles that I could not carry my purchases to my apartment and arranged for a delivery later that night. After I paid, I felt so flush with competency that I walked all the way home in the rain.

Twelve years later, my tenure in New York has outlasted not just that Bed Bath & Beyond location, which closed at the end of 2020, but also the business as a whole. On Sunday, after years of financialized chicanery and strategic blunders, the company announced that it had filed for bankruptcy. It plans to close its remaining stores nationwide and stop accepting its signature big blue coupons this week.

[Read: Of course instant groceries don’t work]

I’ll cop to a bit of personal nostalgia for Bed Bath & Beyond, even though it’s not the kind of business that is especially easy to romanticize—retailers of its era and size are among the corporatized chains that helped put many mom-and-pop stores out of business a generation ago. As a place to shop, it had a lot working in its favor. You knew when Bed Bath & Beyond was the right place to go, and you knew what you could expect to find there: extra-long twin sheets for your first college dorm, a housewarming gift that might actually be useful, a citrus juicer and some serving bowls before hosting the year’s first cookout. If you needed a garlic press or a summer-weight duvet, Bed Bath & Beyond had enough versions of either to make you feel like you really had options, but not so many that they all began to feel like meaningless junk, as so often happens online. It was a business responsive to the actual rhythms of daily existence—the cooking, the laundry, the showering—and a convenient place to have nearby.

That nearby part is important. In broad terms, Bed Bath & Beyond’s fall mirrors those of many other once-powerful retailers—Toys “R” Us, Sears, Gap, Kmart, and The Limited among them—that have been forced to close stores or cease operating entirely. The accumulating absences have left many malls and commercial corridors, especially those in more rural or less wealthy areas, to languish half-vacant, and this has begun to eat away at one of the core structures of modern American life. That life is more satisfying when you can touch something before you buy it, when vendors near you sell things you might need at the last minute, when people in your community can gather in places to do the mundane errands and chores of living. These spaces are social and convivial, even if just minorly so; they require people to interact with strangers and contend with the messy realities of life alongside others. The centrality of these market spaces persists across time, culture, and geography, and it predates capitalism by millennia. No matter the economic system, for people to trade for things they can’t do or make themselves, they need a common place.

[Read: The death of the smart shopper]

Whatever that place looks like where you live now, it’s important to your community’s health. Bigger, better-known stores draw foot traffic to smaller stores and restaurants, all of which give greater visibility to other types of businesses nearby. These are areas where people go to work and walk around and spend their money, which are theoretically all things that we want people to be doing in their daily lives—the kinds of things that, say, help set coherent community norms for how to act in public, or that let teenagers gather to try out adult behaviors such as buying their own clothes or having an unsupervised lunch with friends or applying for a job. This process is how people gain skill and confidence in navigating social interactions and the world at large.

What I am explaining here is just how a town or city works, when it does—where jobs and opportunity come from, why people decide to move to a place, why they decide to stay. Whether Bed Bath & Beyond fails is, by itself, not going to break any particular city, but the larger trend that has helped it toward failure might eventually do exactly that. The more economic activity goes to e-commerce and just a few brick-and-mortar megaretailers, the more that activity fades from public view. Instead, it’s attended to by low-wage workers sequestered in warehouses or largely behind the scenes in big-box stores, and by delivery drivers alone in their truck. What consumers get in return is convenience, or at least the semblance of it: Shop all you want without leaving your home, and if you must go out, get everything you need in a single store. But as this new way of shopping becomes dominant, it also flattens out some of the social and physical texture of life. Regularly traversing the physical plane is pretty good for most people, even if it’s just to buy groceries or replace your worn-out sheets. Convenience can provide only so much, and it alone is not a particularly worthy ultimate goal of human existence.

A reversal in course to the immediate past—the era of slightly smaller, better-differentiated big-box chain stores like Bed Bath & Beyond—wouldn’t do a great deal to solve this problem. These stores were just an earlier phase of what we have now, created by the same financial efficiency seeking. Still, losing them is no great victory. It won’t dampen America’s rabid overconsumption; it will simply change the channels through which it occurs. What will replace the spots vacated by public-facing businesses is, so far, not something more fun or vibrant or fulfilling. It’s not something that encourages people to learn how to navigate a city or try new things or leave their home and interact with the world. So far, it’s usually nothing at all.

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Tucker Carlson is, for now, off the air and lying low. But his rapid slide from would-be journalist to venomous demagogue is the story of a generation of political commentators who found that inducing madness in the American public was better than the drudgery of working a job outside the conservative hothouses.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The coming Biden blowout We’ve had a cheaper, more potent Ozempic alternative for decades. John Mulaney’s Baby J takes apart a likable comedian. MAGA is ripping itself apart.

Pushing the Needle

Tucker Carlson has been fired, and you’ve probably already read a bushel of stories about his dismissal, his career, and his influence. Today, I want to share with you a more personal reflection. (Full disclosure: Carlson took a bizarre swipe at me toward the end of his time at Fox.) I always thought of Carlson as one of the worst things to happen to millions of Americans, and particularly to the working class. As Margaret Sullivan recently wrote, “Despite his smarmy demeanor, and aging prep-school appearance,” Carlson became “a twisted kind of working-class hero.”

Not to me. I grew up working-class, and I admit that I never much cared for Carlson, a son of remarkable privilege and wealth, even before he became this creepy version of himself. I am about a decade older than Carlson, and when he began his career in the 1990s, I was a young academic and a Republican who’d worked in a city hall, a state legislature, and the U.S. Senate (as well as a number of other less glamorous jobs). Perhaps I should have liked him more because of his obvious desire to be taken seriously as an intellectual, but maybe that was also the problem: Carlson was too obvious, too effortful. I was already a fan of people such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer, and I didn’t need a young, bow-tied, lightweight imitator.

But still, I read his writing in conservative magazines, and that of others in his cohort. After all, back in those days, they were my tribe. But the early ’90s, I believe, is where things went wrong for this generation of young conservatives. Privileged, highly educated, stung by Bill Clinton’s win—and, soon, bored—they decided that they were all slated for greater things in public life. The dull slog of high-paying professional jobs was not for them, not if it meant living outside the media or political ecosystems of New York and Washington.

A 1995 New York Times Magazine profile of this group, some of them soon to be Carlson’s co-workers, was full of red flags, but it was Laura Ingraham, whose show now packages hot bile in dry ice, who presaged what Fox’s prime-time lineup would look like. After a late dinner party in Washington, she took the Times writer for a drive:

“You think we’re nuts, don’t you?” muttered Laura Ingraham, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas and now an attorney at the Washington offices of the power firm of Skadden, Arps. Ingraham, who is also a frequent guest on CNN, had had it with a particularly long-winded argument over some review in The New Republic. It could have been worse. They could have been the dweebs and nerds that liberals imagine young conservatives to be.

Or, more accurately, they could have been the dweebs and nerds they themselves feared they were. And in time, they realized that the way to dump their day jobs for better gigs in radio and television was to become more and more extreme—and to sell their act to an audience that was nothing like them or the people at D.C. dinner parties. They would have their due, even if they had to poison the brains of ordinary Americans to get it.

Carlson joined this attention-seeking conservative generation and tried on various personas. At one point, he had a show on MSNBC that was canceled after a year. I never saw it. I do remember Carlson as the co-host of Crossfire; I didn’t think he did a very good job representing thoughtful conservatives, and he ended up getting pantsed live on national television by Jon Stewart. He was soon let go from CNN.

When Carlson got his own show on Fox News in 2016, however, I noticed.

This new Tucker Carlson decided to throw off the pretense of intellectualism. (According to The New York Times, he was “determined to avoid his fate at CNN and MSNBC.”) He understood what Fox viewers wanted, and he took the old Tucker—the one who claimed to care about truth and journalistic responsibility—and drove him to a farm upstate where he could run free with the other journalists. The guy who returned alone in his car to the studio in Manhattan was a stone-cold, cynical demagogue. By God, no one was going to fire that guy.

What concerned me was not that Carlson was selling political fentanyl; that’s Fox’s business model. It was that Carlson, unlike many people in his audience, knew better. He jammed the needle right into the arms of the Fox audience, spewing populist nonsense while running away from his own hyper-privileged background. I suppose I found this especially grating because for years I’ve lived in Rhode Island, almost within sight of the spires of Carlson’s pricey prep school, by the Newport beaches. (This area also produced Michael Flynn and Sean Spicer, but please don’t judge us—it’s actually lovely here.)

Every night, Carlson encouraged American citizens to join him in his angry nihilism, telling his fans that America and its institutions were hopelessly corrupt, and that they were essentially living in a failed state. He and his fellow Fox hosts, meanwhile, presented themselves as the guardians of the real America, crowing in ostensible solidarity with an audience that, as we would later learn from the Dominion lawsuit, they regarded with both contempt and fear.

An especially hateful aspect of Carlson’s rants is that they often targeted the institutions and norms—colleges, the U.S. military, capitalism itself—that help so many Americans get a chance at a better life. No matter the issue, Carlson was able to find some resentful, angry, us-versus-them angle, tacking effortlessly from sounding like a pompous theocrat one day to a founding member of Code Pink the next. If you were trying to undermine a nation and dissolve its hopes for the future, you could hardly design a better vehicle than Tucker Carlson Tonight.

But give him credit: He was committed to the bit. A man who has never known a day of hard work in his life was soon posing in flannel and work pants in a remarkably pristine “workshop,” and inviting some of the worst people in American life to come to his redoubt to complain about how much America seems to irrationally hate Vladimir Putin, violent seditionists, and, by extension somehow, poor ordinary Joes such as Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson.

Carlson is emblematic of the entire conservative movement now, and especially the media millionaires who serve as its chief propagandists. The conservative world has become a kind of needle skyscraper with a tiny number of wealthy, superbly educated right-wing media and political elites in the penthouses, looking down at an expanse of angry Americans whose rage they themselves helped create. As one Fox staffer said in a text to the former CNN host Brian Stelter shortly after the January 6 insurrection, “What have we done?”

If only Carlson and others were capable of asking themselves the same question.

Related:

Tucker Carlson’s final moments on Fox were as dangerous as they were absurd. Will Tucker Carlson become Alex Jones?

Today’s News

The Walt Disney Company is suing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, alleging that he has weaponized government power against the company. As part of their ongoing debt-ceiling standoff with the Biden administration, House Republicans are pushing for work requirements for some of the millions of Americans receiving food stamps and Medicaid benefits. Volodymyr Zelensky held his first conversation with Xi Jinping since Russia invaded Ukraine. China has declared itself to be neutral in the conflict.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: The singer, actor, and civil-rights hero Harry Belafonte understood persuasion, Conor Friedersdorf writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

How I Got Bamboo-zled by Baby Clothes

By Sarah Zhang

To be pregnant for the first time is to be the world’s most anxious, needy, and ignorant consumer all at once. Good luck buying a pile of stuff whose uses are still hypothetical to you! What, for instance, is the best sleep sack? When I was four months pregnant and still barely aware of the existence of sleep sacks, a mom giving recommendations handed me one made of bamboo. “Feel—soooo soft,” she said. I reached out to caress, and it really was soooo soft. This was my introduction to the cult of bamboo.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The green revolution will not be painless. Why women never stop coming of age The Supreme Court seems poised to decide an imaginary case.

Culture Break

Heritage Art / Heritage Images / Getty

Read. The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, a new biography of the poet that shows how she used poetry to criticize slavery.

Listen. Harry Belafonte’s legendary album Calypso. The late artist showed how popular songs could be a tool of the struggle for freedom.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I am, strangely, revisiting some childhood memories while redecorating my home office. (I’ve posted some pictures on Twitter.) For many years, I had something of a standard academic’s home office: a lot of books and maps, a bit of conference swag here and there. But I’ve decided in my dotage to bring in some color from the 1960s, including a framed collection of Batman cards (the kind that came with that dusty-pink stick of gum), a Star Trek wall intercom, and an original poster from the Japanese sci-fi classic Destroy All Monsters, starring Godzilla and a cast of his buddies. While I was hanging the movie poster, I wondered: Why do we love those Godzilla movies? They’re terrible. Are we just nostalgic—as I sometimes am—for the old, velvet-draped movie palaces full of kids? I think it’s something more.

If you’ve never seen the original Godzilla, it’s actually kind of terrifying. It’s way too intense for young kids; I can’t remember when I first saw it on television, but it scared the pants off me. The stuff that came later, with the cheesy music and the cartoonish overacting by the guys in the rubber kaiju outfits, were versions that kids and adults could watch together. They answered all of your toughest kid questions: What if Godzilla fought aliens? (I am a King Ghidorah fan.) What if Godzilla duked it out with … King Kong? (I thought Godzilla was robbed in that one.) I love scary monster movies, but now and then, you want more monsters and fewer scares. Maybe the analogy here is Heath Ledger and Cesar Romero: Both are great Jokers, but sometimes, you’d like to enjoy the character with a shade fewer homicides. Being able to enjoy both is, perhaps, one of the subtle rewards of growing up.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

In the late 1980s, the fortunes of Nick Navarro, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, were on the rise. Elected in 1984 and on his way to nearly tripling his agency’s budget, he was also demonstrating a flair for dealing with the media—“P. T. Barnum with a Cuban accent,” said one South Florida defense lawyer. Navarro and his office starred in the inaugural season of Cops, the pioneering Fox reality-TV series, and made national news by clashing with the rap star Luther Campbell—including having him arrested—for sexually explicit lyrics on albums by Campbell’s 2 Live Crew.

Navarro’s relations with the media weren’t universally cordial, however, and spawned a constitutional challenge that may now have profound implications for another publicity-loving Florida politician, Governor Ron DeSantis: It exposes one of DeSantis’s most recent high-profile gambits as a brazen violation of the First Amendment.

On November 17, 1988, a Fort Lauderdale daily, The Broward Review, ran a front-page article that Sheriff Navarro found especially vexing. It was headlined “Navarro Failed to Act on Corruption Warnings,” with the subhead “Broward Sheriff didn’t pursue reports that a Bahamian cocaine trafficker was bribing his deputies.”

The story was the latest in a series the Review had run criticizing the Broward sheriff’s office, the county’s largest law-enforcement agency, and Navarro was fed up. The morning it appeared, he ordered a halt to the 20-year business relationship between the sheriff’s office and the Review, which, along with covering local business and law, had been the chief publishing venue for required public notices of sheriff’s sales and forfeitures. This revenue amounted to thousands of dollars each year—not a fortune, but enough to matter to a small daily.

[From the July/August 2020 issue: The dark soul of the sunshine state]

I was the editor in chief of the Review (later renamed the Broward Daily Business Review) and its sister papers in Miami and West Palm Beach, which were owned by American Lawyer Media, the legal publisher created and run by the journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill. When I told Brill what Navarro had done, he conferred with his friend Floyd Abrams—the First Amendment litigator who had represented The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case—and we did the traditional American thing: We sued.

We won in 1990, after a two-day trial in the U.S. District Court in Miami. We were upheld unanimously on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. Navarro’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rebuffed.

We won because what Navarro did was plainly illegal. He had used the power of his public office to punish my newspaper for exercising its First Amendment rights.

The parallels between Navarro’s actions and those of the current governor are unmistakable. DeSantis has spearheaded the successful move to withdraw something of value from the Walt Disney Company—its 50-year control of the special taxing district that essentially governs a 25,000-acre Central Florida spread including Disney World—in reprisal for Disney’s vocal criticism of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, assailed as homophobic. With DeSantis, as with Navarro, public authorities withheld a public benefit as punishment for exercising a core constitutional right, and yesterday Disney finally sued.

Even in 1988, the law in this area was neither subtle nor oblique. Brill told me he got the idea of suing the sheriff from his recollections of a class in constitutional law taught by Thomas I. Emerson, a legendary First Amendment scholar at Yale, and Abrams was able to rely on fresh precedent: a 1986 case out of Mississippi—upheld by the Fifth Circuit—that was almost precisely on point. There, the federal court ordered a local governing board to restore public-notice advertising it had yanked from a local newspaper in retaliation for the paper’s criticism of its performance.

The principle wasn’t new even then. In a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case brought by a fired community-college teacher, Associate Justice Potter Stewart wrote the majority opinion: “For at least a quarter-century, this Court has made clear that even though a person has no ‘right’ to a valuable governmental benefit and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely. It may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interests—especially, his interest in freedom of speech.”

The main difference between the Navarro case and the DeSantis-versus-Disney affair was Navarro’s refusal to admit to his motives. In deposition, Navarro acknowledged that he had learned of the November 17 article from an aide on the morning it ran, while he was vacationing in the Bahamas. Still, he claimed to have ordered the severing of the business relationship out of concern that the Review’s circulation was too low, even though he could cite no circulation numbers or indications that sales picked up after ads began running elsewhere. (During a break in Navarro’s deposition, the Review’s lead counsel, Abrams, said to me, “Now we know what his defense is—a fabrication.”) Elsewhere, Navarro offered further justifications for what he’d done, telling one Review reporter he ran into in a convenience store, “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”

Unlike Navarro, however, there’s no fabrication or ambiguity when it comes to the recent actions of Florida Governor DeSantis and state lawmakers. DeSantis has proudly denounced Disney for its “wokeness,” in particular its public opposition to the “Don’t Say Gay” law, which severely restricts classroom instruction related to sexual orientation and gender. “I think they crossed the line,” DeSantis said of Disney last spring. “We’re going to make sure we’re fighting back when people are threatening our parents and threatening our kids.”

In a tweet a few weeks later, DeSantis elaborated: “You’re a corporation based in Burbank, California, and you’re going to martial your economic might to attack the parents of my state?” he wrote. “We view that as a provocation, and we’re going to fight back against that.”

The result was a bill, passed by the legislature, to strip Disney of authorization granted in 1967 that allowed it to administer the expanse outside Orlando where Disney World is located.

The money is of a different order of magnitude, but at their core, the anti-Disney moves are illegal for the same reason Sheriff Navarro’s advertising cutoff was illegal: They are governmental actions that punish a private person or entity for exercising constitutional rights.

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

As Abrams wrote to me, “Florida didn’t have to make any deal with Disney in the first place. It was free to seek to change the terms of it or even abandon it for all sorts of reasons except one: that Disney exercised its First Amendment right to speak out on an issue of public policy. Just as Sheriff Navarro was barred by the First Amendment from cancelling a commercial relationship with a publication because it had criticized him, Gov. DeSantis violated the First Amendment by stripping Disney of a benefit because of its public position on anti-gay rights legislation.”

Likewise, the First Amendment scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school, wrote in an email to me, “The law is clear that retaliation against a person—that includes a corporation—for its speech violates the First Amendment. Gov. DeSantis and the Florida legislature have done exactly that, and said that is what they were doing, in its reprisal against Disney.”

Navarro lost his race for a third term as sheriff and left office in 1993. At the time, some commentators blamed his media notoriety, especially his dustup with 2 Live Crew, for his defeat. (Navarro passed away in 2011.) The Broward Review case seems to have played no role in his downfall. Indeed it did little beyond winning my paper $23,000 in damages and our lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.

It would, however, be a delicious sort of irony if the ruling—a response to Navarro’s petulant and vindictive actions—now resurfaces as his most enduring contribution to the rule of law, and affirms anew one of our country’s most basic principles.  

A New York judge has admonished Trump for calling the trial a 'witch hunt' on the social network Truth Social.

When the writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig read Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret as a fourth grader, she felt an overwhelming sense of relief. The Judy Blume novel’s 11-year-old protagonist helped clarify her own confusing emotions. Like Craig, Margaret worried about her flat chest, felt her parents couldn’t solve every problem, and asked existential questions to try to make sense of her anxieties. Craig found comfort in Margaret’s tale of moving with her family to the New Jersey suburbs, questioning her faith, and, yes, preparing for her period to arrive—a coming-of-age story that has resonated with millions of other young women since Blume’s beloved book hit shelves in 1970.

A few decades later, Craig had a significantly different response to the novel as an adult. She’d been rereading Blume’s books with an eye toward potentially adapting her work; when she reached the end of Margaret, she bawled. In the final chapter, Margaret gets her first period and tells her mother; together, they laugh and cry, and Margaret, in her mind, thanks God “an awful lot.” Something about the scene devastated Craig, she told me over breakfast in Culver City, California, earlier this month. “I was like, What happened to me?” she recalled. “Why has this struck me so deeply? I swear, I walked around for three days trying to articulate it.” Finally, she had an epiphany: Margaret’s words reminded Craig more of her present-day reality than of her fourth-grade self. Her concerns—how she’s doing as a mother, whether she’s succeeding as a filmmaker—may be more grown-up now, but that same innocent need for guidance, spiritual or otherwise, persists. “I feel like that question mark,” Craig explained, “has never gone away.”

In other words, Margaret isn’t merely a book about the mortifying messiness of puberty; it’s also a subtle examination of how, for women, growing up can be a never-ending experience. Craig’s film adaptation, the first mainstream-studio take on Blume’s work, understands that intimately. In theaters Friday, the movie is faithful to the novel’s most memorable scenes—“We must, we must, we must increase our bust!”—while juxtaposing the story of Margaret Simon (played by Abby Ryder Fortson) with that of her mother, Barbara (Rachel McAdams), and her grandmother Sylvia (Kathy Bates). By imagining the interior lives of the adults, Craig allows their narratives to parallel Margaret’s.

The result is a film that feels nostalgic and fresh, a rare story of a tween that considers an often overlooked truth: Adults, too, continue to change all the time. Craig’s work exhibits the same sharpness that made her directorial debut, 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen, a modern young-adult classic. Margaret avoids cliché in favor of emotional truth, showing how simultaneously tender and confusing the experience of negotiating your identity can be at any age. “Anytime you’re on the precipice of something new,” Craig explained, “it just feels like, I don’t quite know how to be this new version of myself … In a lot of ways, we’re coming of age over and over and over again.”

Margaret the book often reads like the journal of an extremely precise, extremely observant 11-year-old. The “simple poetry” of Margaret’s voice, as Craig put it, can be illuminating, capturing the insecurities of the women around Margaret with the same childlike directness with which she details, say, the cute boys in class. She notices, for instance, how Barbara’s constant presence is both a comfort and somewhat of a burden. There she is, welcoming Margaret back from school, but there she is, too, going over the instructions “three dozen times” for Margaret’s solo visit to Sylvia in New York. “My mother’s always telling me about when she was a girl,” Margaret thinks. “It’s supposed to make me feel that she understands everything.”

[Read: The importance of the coming-of-age novel]

In lines like these, Craig saw herself. In 2015, she had to leave her 2-year-old son for more than two months so she could shoot The Edge of Seventeen in Canada; upon returning, she felt so guilty that she vowed to be the most attentive mother ever—to be everything her son could possibly need. “I’m going to do all the things; I am going to be there; I’m going to do playdates; I’m going to cut up fruit, you know, and do nothing else,” she recalled thinking, with a sigh. “And then I got to the end of about three months of that, and I just felt so depressed, honestly, and miserable. I just felt like this other part of me was starving.”

Dana Hawley / Lionsgate

The experience of being too involved as a mother drove Craig’s vision for the film, as well as her pitch to Blume. After exchanging emails with the author, Craig, along with her mentor and co-producer, James L. Brooks, visited Blume at her Key West, Florida, home and spoke of how rewarding the novel was to reread. Craig said Barbara, by way of Margaret’s observations, had unlocked a feeling she’d been trying to understand—about her approach to parenting, about why Margaret is considered timeless. To her, the story seemed to be “three women in life transitions running in tandem.” She wanted the film adaptation to be a true period piece, set in 1970, in which the emotional journeys of Margaret, Barbara, and Sylvia collapse the time between the past and the present.  

Blume was on board immediately, and told Craig to imagine as much of Sylvia’s and Barbara’s backstories as she wished. Craig began theorizing, pulling from Blume's matter-of-fact prose. In Barbara, who’s described as an artist in the book, Craig infused much of her own unease about balancing a creative career with domestic duties; she came up with scenes of Barbara trying to devote herself to a life as a full-time, stay-at-home, PTA-assisting mom. As for Sylvia, Craig noted how Margaret seemed conflicted about her grandmother’s attachment to her. (“Grandma’s always reminding me of how nobody lives forever and everything she has is for me,” Margaret thinks in the novel. “I hate it when she talks like that.”) She imagined Sylvia living vicariously through Margaret, and feeling unmoored by the Simons leaving New York City. In one scene that Craig wrote, Sylvia sits at her desk looking at a to-do list on which she’s written only two tasks—dusting and doing the crossword—both of which have already been completed.

These glimpses into Barbara’s and Sylvia’s lives feel Blume-ian, mundane yet enlightening at the same time. Like Margaret, Barbara and Sylvia are trying to fit in—not with a clique of teenagers, of course, but with what’s expected of them. “Barbara goes to the extreme of quitting both painting and teaching art,” McAdams told me over email, “to be more like everyone else, because maybe they’ve figured out something she hasn’t.”

Bates, meanwhile, saw Margaret as a story about the importance of self-awareness. Because the novel was published when Bates was in her 20s, the 74-year-old actor didn’t read it until she signed on to the film. She saw herself and women she knew in Blume’s words. Margaret’s confusion about her body reminded Bates of her childhood spent in a girls’ school in Memphis, she told me over the phone, where she and her classmates learned how to be “proper young ladies” who wore garter belts to formal tea parties years before learning about sex. Sylvia reminded her of her sister, who set aside her acting ambitions to look after her family, and of her aunt, who always theatrically doted on Bates. Blume’s Margaret could see how every woman was still developing, Bates explained. “To me, Margaret was very, very deep,” she said. “This is a young girl who has the wisdom to think for herself … [She has] the intelligence to step back and look at the women around her.”

[Read: The Edge of Seventeen is an instant teen classic]

Craig did the same, examining how the figures around Margaret felt. “Everything I write, I put myself into the story and I have to start with ‘Where does it hurt?’” Craig explained, putting her hand on her heart. “Like, when I feel myself as that character, what aches? … With Barbara, it’s a real deep question of Am I a good enough mom? With Sylvia, it’s What is my life about now, if the center of it has suddenly been removed?”

Each character finds that the answer requires tapping into a child’s mindset. “When we’re young,” Bates pointed out, “we have imagination”—the kind that can push past the belief that people must accomplish certain things, figure out certain ideas, by a certain age. She told me to read a poem by Billy Collins called “On Turning Ten” after our call to better understand what she meant. So I did. It includes these lines:

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.

Among the many lessons it teaches about growing up, Margaret the book shows the importance of that “beautiful complexity.” The youthful mix of self-consciousness and self-awareness—of vulnerability and curiosity—isn’t a phase, but an ongoing experience. Turning 12 can be as confounding as turning 43 can be as confounding as turning 75. “I don’t know when I don’t feel like Margaret,” Craig said, laughing. “It’s kind of always.”

Late in the movie, Barbara sits with her daughter and says, “It gets tiring, trying so hard all the time, doesn’t it?” The line, written for the film, distills the magic of Craig’s adaptation. The tension comes not from dramatic set pieces, but from the turbulence of negotiating one’s identity and place in the world. Margaret wrestles with choosing a religion, Barbara struggles to adapt to suburban parenthood, and Sylvia contends with the idea of fending for herself. Countless circumstances, the movie makes clear, can lead to feeling 11 again, small and worried and seeking assurance that life won’t always be so uncontrollable. Are you there, anyone at all? we might as well be asking all the time. If we’re lucky, we get to figure out an answer for ourselves.

A few years ago, Billy Raymond Counterman was convicted of stalking. Now his case is before the Supreme Court—where, bafflingly, the justices spent oral arguments last week exploring how to define a “true threat,” something Counterman was never convicted of making. Threats and stalking are entirely different crimes, with entirely different elements and constitutional implications. If the Court goes ahead and issues a ruling about threats, as it seems poised to do, it could inadvertently weaken stalking laws around the country. A set of imaginary facts could lead to serious real-world harm.

How did we get here? At some point around 2014, Counterman apparently became obsessed with Coles Whalen, a singer-songwriter in Denver. He seems to have suffered from delusions that the two were in a relationship, despite never having met. Over the course of two years, Counterman sent her hundreds of direct messages on Facebook. Some were aggressive. Some were creepy, as when he asked if he’d seen her driving a white Jeep, a car she had once owned. Many were simply confusing or mundane, such as when he said he would bring her tomatoes from his garden, sent a frog emoji, or asked Whalen, a complete stranger, “I am going to the store would you like anything?” Whalen repeatedly blocked him, but Counterman just created new accounts. The messages would not stop.

[Timothy Zick: Making true threats is a crime]

Whalen eventually went to the police. Prosecutors initially charged Counterman with both making threats and stalking, but dropped the threats charge before trial. This was smart: The stalking charge was a much better fit for what Counterman had done. One of the most common techniques stalkers use is “life invasion,” the persistent and unwanted intrusion into the daily routines of their victims. Life invasion can be profoundly traumatic even when it doesn’t involve overt threats—in part because the willingness of a total stranger to force their way into your life raises the implicit question of what else they will do. Whalen testified that she began having panic attacks, terrified that Counterman would show up at her concerts. Her performing career stalled, and she found another job. The jury concluded that, in this case, it was reasonable for Whalen to experience “serious emotional distress” as a result of Counterman’s relentless stream of messages. He was convicted and sentenced to prison.

Here is where the case took a strange turn. On appeal, Counterman’s lawyers argued that his stalking conviction was unconstitutional. Counterman hadn’t intended to scare Whalen, they claimed, and so his messages to Whalen did not rise to the level of true threats. Given that he hadn’t been convicted of making threats in the first place, this was a bit like a driver challenging a speeding ticket on the grounds that he wasn’t drunk. And yet Colorado reached for its Breathalyzer. Instead of simply pointing out that the stalking statute didn’t require them to prove that he had threatened anyone, the state’s lawyers engaged with the debate on Counterman’s terms. Focusing on a handful of messages, including “Fuck off permanently” and “Die. Don’t need you,” they contended that Counterman had indeed threatened Whalen. They argued that what mattered was what he had said, taken in context, not his subjective intent. The Colorado Court of Appeals agreed, rejecting Counterman’s appeal but implicitly affirming his framing of the case.

And so, by the time Counterman’s appeal reached the Supreme Court, the underlying facts had been reimagined. Now the case was packaged as a chance to finally weigh in on a long-running dispute in First Amendment law. Everyone agrees that free speech doesn’t include the right to threaten someone, but views differ on what makes a threat a threat. Is it an objective question of how a reasonable person would react to what was said? Or is it subjective, turning on whether the speaker intended to terrify?

It’s the kind of subtle distinction that lawyers, judges, and academics love to sweat over, which may help explain why nobody seemed to notice how far the case had drifted from what had actually happened. Indeed, the Court and many constitutional lawyers had been waiting for years for such a case. Counterman’s lawyer, John Elwood, had pressed for the subjective theory in a 2015 case, Elonis v. United States, which The New York Times described at the time as an opportunity for the Court to determine “how the First Amendment applies to social media.” In the end, however, the Court decided the case on statutory grounds, leaving the First Amendment question for another day.

[Read: Does a true threat require a guilty mind?]

In the media, Counterman was billed as a chance for the Court to revisit Elonis, and the significant differences between the cases got swept aside. Both concerned disturbing messages on Facebook, but whereas Anthony Elonis publicly posted a handful of violent screeds to his Facebook page, visible to his friends, Counterman sent hundreds upon hundreds of private messages to a single stranger who repeatedly blocked him.

Before the oral argument, we filed an amicus brief, along with fellow First Amendment scholar Eugene Volokh, urging the Court not to treat Counterman as a true-threats case. Ultimately, however, the arguments proceeded as if in another universe—one in which Counterman had actually been charged, prosecuted, and convicted for making threats. At one point, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked whether Colorado could have had an easier time if it had “pursued the defendant for stalking and secured a conviction for that.” The answer to that question is definitively yes, because that is in fact what happened. But, apparently committed to arguing about true threats, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser went along with the conceit that that’s what the case was about. By this point, the lawyers, the justices, and the other amicus briefs seemed to have lost sight of where this case had actually started.

This is not merely an academic or theoretical concern. How the Court characterizes Counterman’s behavior could have a significant effect on future stalking cases. Courts have for the most part rejected First Amendment challenges to stalking laws so long as they are narrowly defined to criminalize repeated, unwanted communication that is directed at a specific individual, and that causes that person significant emotional distress. But Counterman could change that. When lower courts apply Supreme Court precedent, they often look at the facts of the case to see how it applies to the one they’re deciding. If the Court accepts Counterman’s legal theory, lower courts will see a case in which a stalking conviction was overturned because it didn’t meet the criteria for true threats. The practical effect could be to dramatically raise the constitutional bar for protecting cyberstalking victims.  

This would be a tragic outcome. Stalking laws were passed precisely to protect victims, mostly women, from menacing behavior even when their tormentor made no explicit threats. California enacted the United States’ first stalking law in 1990 after the actress Rebecca Schaeffer was shot and killed by an obsessive fan who had stalked her for years. Soon after, in unrelated incidents, four other California women were killed by stalkers. In every case, the killers had stalked their victims relentlessly, and in every case, law enforcement had been powerless to help until it was too late. Since then, all 50 states as well as the federal government have enacted laws against stalking.

Studies show that many stalkers do not expressly threaten their victims. To prevent the law from intervening unless a stalker says a particular set of words would be to misunderstand the harm that stalking laws seek to prevent. And it would leave millions of victims a year without the ability to seek protection.

This outcome is still hypothetical, of course. The Court can easily avoid it by resisting the urge to graft a constitutional ruling onto a completely mismatched set of facts. Billy Raymond Counterman couldn’t distinguish between reality and fantasy. Hopefully the Court is up to the challenge.

Even as the whole of Silicon Valley grapples with historic inflation, a bank crash, and mass layoffs, Google’s woes stand apart. The explosion of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence more broadly has produced something of an existential crisis for the company, a “code red” moment for the business. “Am I concerned? Yes,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, told The New York Times. But Google employees are encountering another problem: “They took away the dried mango,” says a project manager at Google’s San Francisco office, whom I agreed not to name to protect the employee from reprisal. At least at that office, the project manager said, workers are seeing less of long-cherished food items—not just the mango, but also the Maui-onion chips and the fun-size bags of M&Ms.

Cost-cutting measures have gutted some of Google’s famous perks. In a company-wide email last month, Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat announced rollbacks on certain in-office amenities, including company-sponsored fitness classes, massages, and the availability of so-called microkitchens: pantries stocked with everything from low-calorie pork rinds to spicy Brazilian flower buds. These perks have long been an inextricable part of Google’s culture, even in an industry flush with nap pods and coffee bars—a way to recruit top talent and keep coders happy during long days in the office. “The idea was ‘We’re going to make it so wonderful to be here that you never need to leave,’” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. “Are they giving up on that idea?”

Google told me they’re still committed to perks, and indeed, the free meals are still around. “As we’ve consistently said, we set a high bar for industry-leading perks, benefits and office amenities, and will continue that into the future,” Google spokesperson Ryan Lamont said in an email. But the cutbacks are seemingly coming at an inopportune time: If there was ever a moment when Google needed to recruit top talent, it’s now. Although overall demand for software engineers has slowed, money and jobs are still flocking to a buzzy new breed of generative AI. OpenAI, after all, makes a point of matching Google’s daily meals and handing out “fresh-baked cookies.” Google’s new attitude toward perks may be an admission of what was true all along: Perks are perks—just expendable add-ons. They’re nice to have in the good times but hardly essential in the bad.

The world of HR has long claimed that happy workers are productive workers, but Google treated that idea like a mantra, creating offices that were less like cubicle-packed grids and more like adult playgrounds (complete with in-office slides and rock-climbing walls). As part of what the company refers to as “Googley extras,” it has given employees free yoga and pilates classes, fully comped team trips, and even once-a-week eyebrow shaping. Other big companies, and even start-ups flush with venture-capital cash, realized that to have a shot at competing for talent, they’d need to start subsidizing the same sort of lifestyle. Massages and macchiatos were just the start: Apple has hosted private concerts with artists such as Stevie Wonder and Maroon 5; Dropcam, a start-up Google bought in 2014 (whose tech it has recently decided to phase out), reportedly offered each employee a free helicopter ride, piloted by the CEO, to a destination of their choosing. Others, such as WeWork, simply handed out tequila around the clock.

The Googley extras aren’t gone, by any means, but they’re no longer guaranteed. Google’s infamous shuttle buses, known to clog San Francisco streets as they ferry employees to and from the office, are running less frequently, and traditional laptops have become a privilege reserved for employees in engineering roles. Everyone else must now make do with slightly wimpier netbooks. Part of this reduction in amenities has to do with the new reality of hybrid work, which has itself become a perk. It makes sense to trim the shuttle-bus schedule if fewer people are taking the bus to work every day. Same goes for the reported reduction in in-office muffins, although understanding the rationale behind the crackdown doesn’t necessarily make it sting any less.

It’s not just Google, either. “My sense is that [perks] are being pulled back broadly,” Cappelli said. “So many public companies feel that they have to look like they’re belt-tightening for investors.” After just a year, Salesforce has abandoned its “Trailblazer Ranch,” a 75-acre retreat meant to host guided nature walks, group cooking classes, sessions for meditation, and “art journaling.” Over at Meta, already a year out from its decision to cancel free laundry and dry-cleaning services, employees are expressing similar frustrations over snacks.

Still, it all cuts a little deeper at Google. That’s in part because Google has taken such care to cement its reputation as the best place in the world to work, the plushest employer in a sea of plush. As any Google employee will insist, the lunches were never as good at Apple or Microsoft. The message is perhaps symbolic as much as practical. Muffins are not a real financial concern for Alphabet, Google’s $1.3 trillion parent company, which could very much still cash in on the new AI boom. But for the company’s workers, it’s not the muffins themselves, but their absence, that may end up having the greatest impact. “The way it is conveyed to people matters as much as the perks themselves,” Cappelli said. If an abundance of perks signals care and intention, what might a lack of perks represent? “You’re sending the opposite signal: ‘We don’t really care about you so much, and that’s why we’re taking it away.’”

Flashy perks helped produce an illusion of safety that couldn’t last. Surface-level penny-pinching is ultimately about assuring investors that costs are under control; employees’ annoyance is just part of the bargain. You’ll know your employer really means business when it lays off your whole team. And if Google is willing to cut down on some of its most visible perks just as generative AI threatens to upend its business, then maybe it’s not too concerned about OpenAI outdoing it in the snack department. The end of muffins and dried-mango slices amounts to a gesture more than anything else—a way of reminding current employees that these are lean times, and they should start acting like it.

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