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

In recent years, Americans appear to be getting more and more uncomfortable with intimacy. Why? And is this trend reversible?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The GOP’s unworkable work requirements Why won’t powerful men learn? Just wait until Trump is a chatbot. Disconnected People

When my colleague Faith Hill recently interviewed Michael Hilgers, a therapist with more than 20 years of experience, he painted a worrying picture of intimacy in America: “It’s painful to watch just how disconnected people are,” he said. Even when Hilgers can sense that clients do want to pursue deep social connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there,” he noted.

One might say that America is in its insecure-attachment era.

Let’s back up a little: Insecure attachment is a term used to describe three of the four basic human “attachment styles” that researchers have identified. The framework has risen in popularity in recent years, appearing alongside astrology signs and Enneagram types as social-media-friendly ways to understand the self. Faith lays out the four styles in her recent article:

People with a secure style feel that they can depend on others and that others can depend on them too. Those with a dismissing style—more commonly known as “avoidant”—are overly committed to independence and don’t feel that they need much deep emotional connection. People with a preoccupied (or “anxious”) style badly want intimacy but, fearing rejection, cling or search for validation. And people with fearful (or “disorganized”) attachment crave intimacy, too—but like those with the dismissing style, they distrust people and end up pushing them away.

Over the past few decades, researchers have noticed a decline in secure attachment and an increase in the dismissing and fearful styles. These two insecure styles are “associated with lack of trust and self-isolation,” Faith explains. She notes that American distrust in institutions has also been on the rise for years—it’s well known that more and more Americans are feeling skeptical of the government, organized religion, the media, corporations, and police. But recent research and anecdotal evidence suggest that Americans are growing more wary not only of “hypothetical, nameless Americans,” but of their own colleagues, neighbors, friends, partners, and parents.

The root causes of America’s trust issues are impossible to diagnose with certainty, but they could well be a reflection of Americans’ worries about societal problems. One psychologist who did research into Americans’ insecure-attachment trend “rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with,” Faith writes: “war in Europe, ChatGPT threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news,” as well as financial precarity. As Faith puts it: “When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships.”

Some researchers argue for other likely suspects, such as smartphone use or the fact that more Americans than ever are living alone. The decline in emotional intimacy is also happening against the backdrop of a decline in physical intimacy. Our senior editor Kate Julian explored this “sex recession,” particularly among young adults, in her 2018 magazine cover story.

A lack of trust is showing up in the workplace as well. In 2021, our contributing writer Jerry Useem reported on studies suggesting that trust among colleagues is declining in the era of remote and hybrid work:

The longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, a recent study of more than 5,400 Finnish workers found, the more their faith in colleagues fell. Ward van Zoonen of Erasmus University, in the Netherlands, began measuring trust among those office workers early in 2020. He asked them: How much did they trust their peers? How much did they trust their supervisors? And how much did they believe that those people trusted them? What he found was unsettling. In March 2020, trust levels were fairly high. By May, they had slipped. By October—about seven months into the pandemic—the employees’ degree of confidence in one another was down substantially.

All in all, as Faith writes, “we can’t determine why people are putting up walls, growing further and further away from one another. We just know it’s happening.” The good news is that if humans have the capacity to lose trust in one another, they can also work to build it back up. “The experts I spoke with were surprisingly hopeful,” Faith concludes:

Hilgers [the therapist] knows firsthand that it’s possible for people with attachment issues to change—he’s helped many of them do it. Our culture puts a lot of value on trusting your gut, he told me, but that’s not always the right move if your intuition tells you that it’s a mistake to let people in. So he gently guides them to override that instinct; when people make connections and nothing bad happens, their gut feeling slowly starts to change.”

As Faith argued in an earlier article, attachment styles are not destiny, despite what the internet might lead you to believe. “Your attachment style is not so much a fixed category you fall into, like an astrology sign, but rather a tendency that can vary among different relationships and, in turn, is continuously shaped by those relationships,” she wrote. “Perhaps most important, you can take steps to change it”—and connect with others better as a result.

Related:

America is in its insecure-attachment era. The trait that “super friends” have in common Today’s News Russia’s Defense Ministry said that it had targeted Ukrainian army reserve units with high-precision missile strikes to prevent them from reaching the front lines. A Utah judge postponed ruling on a statewide abortion-clinic ban to next week, following the failure yesterday of two anti-abortion bills in Nebraska and South Carolina. Former Vice President Mike Pence reportedly appeared before a federal grand jury for more than seven hours to testify in a criminal investigation into alleged efforts by Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Dispatches Books Briefing: We need to make room for more voices in philosophy, Kate Cray writes. With a wider canon, enlightenment could come from anywhere. Work in Progress: AI tools are a waste of time, Derek Thompson argues. Many people are simply using them as toys.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Maskot / Getty

A Teen Gender-Care Debate Is Spreading Across Europe

By Frieda Klotz

As Republicans across the U.S. intensify their efforts to legislate against transgender rights, they are finding aid and comfort in an unlikely place: Western Europe, where governments and medical authorities in at least five countries that once led the way on gender-affirming treatments for children and adolescents are now reversing course, arguing that the science undergirding these treatments is unproven, and their benefits unclear.

The about-face by these countries concerns the so-called Dutch protocol, which has for at least a decade been viewed by many clinicians as the gold-standard approach to care for children and teenagers with gender dysphoria.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A cheerful goodbye to the Guardians of the Galaxy Why Hollywood writers may go on strike Nikki Haley’s dilemma is also the Republicans’ problem. Long-haulers are trying to define themselves. Culture Break Graeme Hunter / HBO

Read. “The Renovation,” a new short story from Kenan Orhan about exile from Turkey and longing for a homeland.

Watch. The latest episode of Succession (streaming on HBO Max), which features the creepiest corporate retreat ever.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last year, Faith wrote one of my favorite Atlantic articles in recent memory, about people with a very unique social appetite: the “nocturnals,” or the ultra-introverts who come alive when most people are fast asleep.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

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.

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

Most Americans do not want President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in another head-to-head match for the White House. But barring a dramatic change in circumstances, that’s the contest we’ll see in 2024.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Tucker Carlson’s successor will be worse. A refuge from internet algorithms is hiding in plain sight. Dear Therapist: I won’t marry someone with a mountain of debt. Chris Christie doesn’t want to hear the name Trump.

Existential and Inevitable

Polls for the past six months or so have consistently shown that a majority of Americans do not want to see a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And yet, unless health issues sideline one or the other (or unless a newly unemployed Tucker Carlson decides to take his angry-racist-preppie shtick into politics), the Trump-Biden showdown feels inevitable.

But Trump and Biden are likely to be renominated for very different reasons. Obviously, Biden is the incumbent—and, as I have argued, has been a remarkably successful president under difficult circumstances. Whatever the grousing from Democratic faithful, parties do not torpedo their own president: The only sitting chief executive who was elected in his own right and then denied renomination for another term was Franklin Pierce, in 1856. (Four others were denied nomination after becoming president upon the death of the incumbent.)

My colleague Mark Leibovich, however, has suggested that Biden’s age is too big a problem to ignore, and that the Democrats would benefit from a contested primary:

The public silence around the president’s predicament has become tiresome and potentially catastrophic for the Democratic Party. Somebody should make a refreshing nuisance of themselves and involve the voters in this decision.

I don’t quite agree. Biden, as the expression goes, has lost a step, but I kind of like the new Joe Biden. As a senator and a vice president, Biden was often a great source of Kinsley gaffes, the accidental truth-telling that made him a must-watch on the Sunday shows. Biden as president is different, and not just older. There’s a greater seriousness to him, a somberness, and an obvious weight on his shoulders. To me, that’s a better Biden.

But the president is older. He’s still liable to blurt out a gaffe or scramble his sentences, and it sounds less charming or amusing now than it did a decade ago. And sometimes, his rambles go off into mystifying detours, some of which are untrue. But on the man’s record alone, it’s going to be hard to argue to Democrats and independents that he somehow doesn’t deserve another term. Republicans, for their part, seem to know this, which is why they’ve rarely bothered attacking Biden on policy, resorting to debt-ceiling chicanery and invocations of Hunter Biden rather than more substantive (and legitimate) criticism.

Let’s put it this way: If Ted Kennedy could not take out Jimmy Carter, no one in today’s Democratic Party is going to defeat Joe Biden.

But let’s also admit an uncomfortable truth that the Democrats dare not say out loud: At least some of the concerns about Joe Biden’s age are in reality barely veiled worries about Kamala Harris. Biden’s approval ratings are struggling, but the vice president’s numbers are worse—in fact, among the worst of any modern vice president at this point in an administration. (Mike Pence is a strong competitor in this category.) I think Harris ran a lousy campaign and has been, at best, a lackluster VP. Yes, Joe Biden rambles, but Harris, when off script, often sounds like a compilation of disjointed clichés, delivered with a kind of corporate-trainer earnestness. (Some of this is likely related to her reported staffing problems.) Her few forays into policy have been unimpressive, and even her intensely dedicated online supporters seem to have become a bit quieter.

Personally, I have no doubt that if something happened to President Biden, Vice President Harris—along with an able and well-staffed administration—would be a reasonable steward of the White House for the remainder of Biden’s term. Nevertheless, when health and age are prominent issues (as they were with Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower), voters are going to look more closely at the vice president. Harris no doubt still has dedicated supporters in the party, but that might not be enough to overcome how much of America just doesn’t like her.

Concerns about Joe Biden’s renomination, however, are trivial compared with the problem facing those Republicans—roughly four in 10—who do not want Donald Trump as the GOP nominee.

The GOP as a political institution has functionally ceased to exist at the presidential level. The nomination process is controlled, at this point, by a cult of personality; Trump bitter-enders are now the backbone of the party, and their fanaticism gives Trump a stable plurality of votes that no other candidate can match. To defeat Trump for the nomination, a conventional candidate would not only have to attack Trump hammer and tongs; they would also have to demand that the national Republican Party buck millions of its own base voters. This is even more unlikely than Biden getting primaried by some youthful Democrat, because it would require the Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel and other GOP leaders to replace the tapioca in their spines with something like principle, and declare that the Party of Lincoln will not lend its money and support to a sociopath who has incited violent sedition against the government of the United States.

That’s not going to happen. It is possible, I suppose, that if Trump is facing multiple state and federal indictments by late summer, Republicans will finally throw their support to someone else, perhaps even Ron DeSantis, out of desperation. But for now, the nomination belongs to Donald Trump.

I would be relieved to be wrong about this, but if nothing changes, 2024 will again be a stark and existential choice. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has grumbled that if the election is Biden versus Trump again, he probably won’t vote. The rest of us, however, cannot afford this kind of petty tantrum. The Republican Party has mutated from a political organization into an authoritarian movement. Democracy itself will be on the line for the third time since 2020, and staying home—or taking the dodge of voting for some no-hope third-party candidate—is not a responsible option.

Related:

The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden Leave Joe Biden alone.

In Remembrance

Courtesy of Michael Kelly’s family

Michael Kelly, who was the editor in chief of The Atlantic from 1999 to 2002, worked at many publications in a career that was tragically cut short 20 years ago this month. He wrote for small newspapers and big ones, for political magazines and general-interest ones. He was a beat reporter and a writer of profiles and feature stories, a war correspondent and a columnist. He led a number of publications—The New Republic, National Journal, The Atlantic. His acclaimed reporting on the Gulf War, in 1991, was eventually turned into the book Martyrs’ Day. Mike was covering the Iraq War for The Atlantic in 2003 when he was killed on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Michael Kelly is remembered the same way by everyone who worked with him. He was disorganized—his desk drawers held manuscripts but also laundry and dishes—and his handwriting was illegible. He was disarmingly funny, raised by journalist parents in a boisterous Irish family. He was passionate about his principles—a collection of his writing, Things Worth Fighting For, was aptly titled. Perhaps counterintuitively, given his own strong convictions, one thing he believed in was the value of publishing diverse points of view: Ideas need vigorous testing. Another was the central importance of character in public life.

Mike’s family—including his wife, Madelyn, and his children, Tamzin and Jack—and many friends and colleagues gathered this past weekend in Washington, D.C., to mark the 20th anniversary of his death. Tamzin and Jack were 6 and 4 when Mike was killed. “One lesson my father taught me,” Tamzin Kelly said in her remarks, “is the importance of standing up for what you believe in. More than that, the importance of believing what you believe in.” Jack Kelly spoke about the experience of encountering his father through the pages of Things Worth Fighting For—discovering the opinions they shared and, more important, the ones they did not:

It’s both useful and comforting to think about our similarities with those we’ve lost. But there’s a flatness to it—it takes a static image of the dead and asks us to find a portion of ourselves in it. Thinking of our differences with those who are gone is at once more difficult and more rewarding: It asks us how we might have co-evolved with them, how we may have changed each other, and how we would have loved each other as humans who—like all humans—argue and disagree.

A year after Mike’s death, Robert Vare, the editor of Things Worth Fighting For, wrote about his colleague and friend in an article for The Atlantic. You can find Vare’s article here.

— Cullen Murphy, editor at large at The Atlantic

Today’s News

CNN released a statement declaring an end to its relationship with the anchor Don Lemon. Myles Cosgrove, the former Louisville officer who fired the fatal shot that killed Breonna Taylor, has been hired by a police force in a nearby county. Countries are hurrying to extract their citizens from Sudan as violence continues between the military and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn head to Queens for a day at the racetrack.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Dianne Feinstein and the cult of indispensability Welcome to the creepiest corporate retreat ever. Harry Potter was always meant to be television.

Culture Break

Thomas Jordan

Read. “AAAAdam,” a new poem by Adam Giannelli.

“my mother liked // the name because it couldn’t be undone / by a nickname and my father loved my mother.”

Watch. The Canadian comedy Letterkenny (available on Hulu), which delights in wordplay and linguistic silliness.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Tucker Carlson was reportedly fired from Fox News today. I will not deny the schadenfreude of seeing Fox boot one of the most cynical and destructive figures in American public life off the air. (And one who took a weird shot at me in his program some weeks ago.) If the reports of his firing are true, this would be Carlson’s third dismissal from a media network; he’s only 53, so maybe he can take a bit of time to consider why this keeps happening to him. Unless his replacement is someone worse—and my colleague David Graham thinks that’s a distinct possibility—Fox has made at least one decision that will improve our public discourse.

Today’s news reminded me how much it seems as though the writers of the HBO series Succession have a crystal ball somewhere. Last night’s episode (covered here by The Atlantic’s Spencer Kornhaber) had Lukas Matsson, the internet tycoon trying to buy out the Roy family businesses, talking about how it’s time for ATN—the series’ obvious Fox News stand-in—to dump its “news for angry old people” format. As I’ve told you, I have a bit part in some upcoming Succession episodes as an ATN pundit, and although I cannot tell you what happens next, I think it’s fair to say that art and life will remain intertwined in the coming weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

Today’s special guest is senior editor Julie Beck. Julie oversees our family section and created The Friendship Files, a special series that explores—you guessed it—stories about navigating friendship. She’s also the writer behind one of my personal favorite Atlantic stories from the past year, on the rites and traditions of “childlore” (featuring such time-honored rituals as drawing the “cool S” and typing “BOOBS” on a calculator). These days, Julie is enjoying the quirky Canadian comedy series Letterkenny and getting swole with the help of the writer and weight-lifting influencer Casey Johnston. She also remains unapologetically smitten with the “bleeding-heart howl” of the 2000s emo legend Dashboard Confessional.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

America fails the civilization test. Too many Americans are missing out on the best kitchen gadget. The end of recommendation letters The Culture Survey: Julie Beck

Something I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: My favorite band in high school was Dashboard Confessional, which was a cool thing to like until I got to college and learned that emo was embarrassing and we were supposed to be into irony and indie sleaze now. Luckily, I’ve held on to my love for Chris Carrabba and his bleeding-heart howl for 20 years; now we’re apparently in an emo revival, and the band is touring again. [Related: Dashboard Confessional, or when it was cool to have feelings]

I was also a big Twilight fan as a teen, and although I will always have some nostalgia for it, I can no longer defend the series’ central romance. I was recently reminiscing with my best friends from high school about how the book swept our entire friend group, and how strange and sad it was that not a single one of us questioned sparkle-vampire Edward Cullen’s behavior at the time. He climbs through Bella’s window to watch her sleep, and he even disables her truck apart to prevent her from visiting a friend. Readers are supposed to understand that this is because he just loves her so much and wants to protect her, and indeed, we all thought it was the most romantic thing ever. Meanwhile, the other corner of the love triangle—a werewolf named Jacob, who treats Bella like she has human agency, has fun with her, and doesn’t stop her from taking risks—is just a temporary distraction before Bella ultimately recommits to her stalker boyfriend and his controlling family. As I’ve grown up, I’ve found that the path to emotional maturity requires switching allegiances from Team Edward to Team Jacob. (As long as you ignore the whole maybe-falling-in-love-with-a-baby thing.) [Related: At its core, the Twilight saga is a story about ____.]

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Casey Johnston wrote the “Ask a Swole Woman” column at various publications for many years and now writes a newsletter called She’s A Beast, which I highly recommend to folks of any gender who are interested in getting into weight lifting. Even if you’ve never touched a weight before, her beginner’s program, “Liftoff: Couch to Barbell” is really welcoming. She’s also a much-needed voice of reason, regularly calling bullshit where she sees it when it comes to the weight-loss industry (see: “The Yassification of Ozempic”).

Lifting weights has turned working out from a penance that I resent into something more like a science experiment—what can my body do if I invest in it? Can I pick up my own body weight? (I can.) Can I get my suitcase into the overhead bin without help? (You betcha.) Can I get rid of my constant shoulder pain from being a professional computer gremlin? (Sort of—but you still need an ergonomic desk setup, kids!) Can I quiet the voices telling me the only reason to move my body is to make it smaller? (Yes—not all the time, but more than I ever dreamed was possible.) Thanks to weight lifting, I’ve found a new and honestly revelatory relationship to exercise and to my body in my 30s—and Johnston’s writing was my gateway.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “Sleepwalker” by Julie Byrne is a gentle masterpiece, as is the rest of her album Not Even Happiness. But if what you’re looking for is happiness, then listen to “Set It Free” by Now, Now. It sounds like a perfect summer day (and also kind of like Tom Petty gone emo).

A good recommendation I recently received: My dear friend Nathalie convinced me to start watching Letterkenny. It’s a Canadian comedy about a fictional town in rural Ontario, where cliques of farmers, burnouts, hockey players, and Native residents of a nearby reservation clash over petty small-town dramas—but also help and support one another when it counts. What’s most fun about the show is its dialogue: The characters delight in wordplay, and they draw on a sprawling glossary of Canadian slang and in-jokes for long scenes of linguistic silliness. I find myself quoting the show all the time. See: “Pitter patter,” which means “Let’s go!” [Related: The dirtbag is back.]

An author I will read anything by: I’ve been slowly working my way through Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s books since I read and loved Mexican Gothic a few years ago. I’m in awe of her creativity and versatility; she writes across a wide range of genres—gothic horror, noir, historical-fantasy romance—and seems to nail every one.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Wish,” by W. S. Merwin:

Please one more

kiss in the kitchen

before we turn the lights off

I have a print of it, in Merwin’s handwriting, framed in my apartment (near the kitchen). In just three lines, it says pretty much everything about what really matters in this too-short life. [Related: The poet of premature endings]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Faith Hill, Derek Thompson, Tom Nichols, Amy Weiss-Meyer, Kaitlyn Tiffany, Bhumi Tharoor, and Amanda Mull.

The Week Ahead Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, a book by the writer Claire Dederer that wrestles with the question of how to enjoy good art by bad people (on sale Tuesday) Iconic America, an eight-part docuseries that explores American history through a close examination of its national symbols (premieres Wednesday on PBS at 9 p.m. ET) Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the film adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved 1970 novel (in theaters Friday) Essay Clémentine Schneidermann for The Atlantic

The Most Quietly Radical Writer on Television

By Sophie Gilbert

Until she was 5 years old, Alice Birch lived in a commune in the Malvern Hills, a bucolic area in the west of England known for bluebell woods and wandering poets. It was, she recalls, quite low-key for a commune, “not culty, not wild”—just a 19th-century redbrick country house with orchards and vegetable gardens and adults trying to live out their collectivist ideals. At night, the whole group ate together around a big round table, and Birch would listen quietly as people talked. Though everyone was broadly left-leaning, she remembers a good amount of disagreement; she couldn’t always understand what was being talked about, but she felt the tension, the crackle of ideas sparking as they met in the air.

“That’s theater,” she told me last month, sitting at a table inside London’s National Theatre. Before Birch became a highly prized film and television writer, she was a playwright—“There’s no one better,” the woman in the theater bookstore told me, her eyes glinting, as I picked up some of Birch’s plays—and throughout her work, the dinner table is often where everything kicks off. In the smash TV adaptation of Normal People that she co-wrote with Sally Rooney, a shady alfresco lunch in Italy turns into an eruption of emotional violence. [Blank], a 2019 play that premiered at London’s Donmar Warehouse, features a 45-minute scene called “Dinner Party,” in which a gathering over meze is interrupted by cocaine dealers, wine deliveries, and eventually a child wielding a baseball bat.

Read the full article.

More in Culture Abbott Elementary lets Black kids be kids. Seven books to read as a family Little Richard and the truth about rock and roll’s queer origins Why Ari Aster freaks people out Vermeer’s revelations The trap of celebrity More from The Atlantic California isn’t special. The internet of the 2010s just ended. The myth of the broke Millennial Photo Album The “blue forest” near Halle, Belgium, on April 18, 2023. (Johanna Geron / Reuters)

Behold a carpet of bluebells in Belgium, a robotic inspector in Paris, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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

The internet of the 2010s was chaotic, delightful, and, most of all, human. What happens to life online as that humanity fades away?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Silicon Valley’s favorite slogan has lost all meaning. Too many Americans are missing out on the best kitchen gadget. Elon Musk revealed what Twitter always was.

Chaotically Human

My colleague Charlie Warzel worked at BuzzFeed News in the 2010s. He identifies those years as a specific era of the internet—one that symbolically died yesterday with the news of the website shutting down. Yesterday, Charlie offered a glimpse of what those years felt like for people working in digital media:

I worked at BuzzFeed News for nearly six years—from March 2013 until January 2019. For most of that time, it felt a bit like standing in the eye of the hurricane that is the internet. Glorious chaos was everywhere around you, yet it felt like the perfect vantage to observe the commercial web grow up. I don’t mean to sound self-aggrandizing, but it is legitimately hard to capture the cultural relevance of BuzzFeed to the media landscape of the mid-2010s, and the excitement and centrality of the organization’s approach to news. There was “The Dress,” a bit of internet ephemera that went so viral, we joked that that day might have been the last good one on the internet.

Charlie goes on, and his essay is worth reading in full, but today I’d like to focus on the point he ends on: that the internet of the 2010s was human in a way that today’s is not. Charlie doesn’t just mean human in the sense of not generated by a machine. He’s referring to chaos, unpredictability, delight—all of the things that made spending time on the internet fun.

Charlie explains how Buzzfeed News’ ethos emphasized paying attention to the joyful and personal elements of life online:

BuzzFeed News was oriented around the mission of finding, celebrating, and chronicling the indelible humanity pouring out of every nook and cranny of the internet, so it makes sense that any iteration that comes next will be more interested in employing machines to create content. The BuzzFeed era of media is now officially over. What comes next in the ChatGPT era is likely to be just as disruptive, but I doubt it’ll be as joyous and chaotic. And I guarantee it’ll feel less human.

The shrinking humanity of the internet is a theme that Charlie’s been thinking about for a while. Last year, he wrote about why many observers feel that Google Search is not as efficient as it used to be—some argue that the tool returns results that are both drier and less useful than they once were. Charlie learned in his reporting that some of the changes the Search tool has rolled out are likely the result of Google’s crackdowns on misinformation and low-quality content. But these changes might also mean that Google Search has stopped delivering interesting results, he argues:

In theory, we crave authoritative information, but authoritative information can be dry and boring. It reads more like a government form or a textbook than a novel. The internet that many people know and love is the opposite—it is messy, chaotic, unpredictable. It is exhausting, unending, and always a little bit dangerous. It is profoundly human.

It’s also worth remembering the downsides of this humanity, Charlie notes: The unpredictability that some people are nostalgic for also gave way to conspiracy theories and hate speech in Google Search results.

The Google Search example raises its own set of complex questions, and I encourage those interested to read Charlie’s essay and the corresponding edition of his newsletter, Galaxy Brain. But the strong reactions to Google Search and the ways it is changing are further evidence that many people crave an old internet that now feels lost.

If the internet is becoming less human, then something related is happening to social media in particular: It’s becoming less familiar. Social-media platforms such as Friendster and Myspace, and then Facebook and Instagram, were built primarily to connect users with friends and family. But in recent years, this goal has given way to an era of “performance” media, as the internet writer Kate Lindsay put it in an Atlantic article last year. Now, she wrote, “we create online primarily to reach people we don’t know instead of the people we do.”

Facebook and Instagram are struggling to attract and retain a younger generation of users, Lindsay notes, because younger users prefer video. They’re on TikTok now, most likely watching content created by people they don’t know. And in this new phase of “performance” media, we lose some humanity too. “There is no longer an online equivalent of the local bar or coffee shop: a place to encounter friends and family and find person-to-person connection,” Lindsay wrote.

I came of age in the Tumblr era of the mid-2010s, and although I was too shy to put anything of myself on display, I found joy in lurking for hours online. Now those of us looking for a place to have low-stakes fun on the internet are struggling to find one. The future of social-media platforms could surprise us: IOS downloads of the Tumblr app were up by 62 percent the week after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, suggesting that the somewhat forgotten platform could see a resurgence as some users leave Twitter.

I may not have personally known the bloggers I was keeping up with on Tumblr, but my time there still felt human in a way that my experiences online have not since. The feeling is tough to find words for, but maybe that’s the point: As the internet grows up, we won’t know what we’ve lost until it’s gone.

Related:

The internet of the 2010s ended today. Instagram is over.

Today’s News

Less than a year after overturning Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court is expected to decide tonight on whether the abortion pill mifepristone should remain widely available while litigation challenging the FDA’s approval of the drug continues. The Russian military stated that one of its fighter jets accidentally bombed Belgorod, a Russian city near the Ukrainian border. Dominic Raab stepped down from his roles as deputy prime minister and justice secretary of Britain after an official inquiry found that he had engaged in intimidating behavior on multiple occasions, one of which involved a misuse of power.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: America has failed the civilization test, writes Derek Thompson. The Books Briefing: Elise Hannum rounds up books about celebrity—and observes how difficult it can be to appear both otherworldly and relatable. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf explores how the gender debate veered off track.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

National Gallery of Art, Widener Collection

Vermeer’s Revelations

By Susan Tallman

Of all the great painters of the golden age when the small, soggy Netherlands arose as an improbable global power, Johannes Vermeer is the most beloved and the most disarming. Rembrandt gives us grandeur and human frailty, Frans Hals gives us brio, Pieter de Hooch gives us busy burghers, but Vermeer issues an invitation. The trompe l’oeil curtain is pulled back, and if the people on the other side don’t turn to greet us, it’s only because we are always expected.

Vermeer’s paintings are few in number and scattered over three continents, and they rarely travel. The 28 gathered in Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum’s current, dazzling exhibition represent about three-quarters of the surviving work—“a greater number than the artist might have ever seen together himself,” a co-curator, Pieter Roelofs, notes—and make this the largest Vermeer show in history. The previous record holder took place 27 years ago at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and at the Mauritshuis, in The Hague. Prior to that, the only chance to see anything close would have been the Amsterdam auction in May 1696 that dispersed perhaps half of everything he’d painted in his life.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Murders are spiking in Memphis. A memoir about friendship and illness Gavin Newsom is not governing.

Culture Break

Brian Shumway / Gallery Stock

Read. Journey, a wordless picture book, is about the expedition of a girl with a magical red crayon. It’s one of seven books that you should read as a family.

Watch. Ari Aster’s newest movie, Beau Is Afraid, invites you into the director’s anxious fantasies.

Play our daily crossword.

While you’re over on Charlie’s Galaxy Brain page, check out the November newsletter in which he comes up with a great term for our evolving internet age: geriatric social media. (It’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

— Isabel

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

In footage from Moscow released this week, the detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich looked defiant. “He knows he hasn’t done anything wrong,” Jason Rezaian, a journalist who was arrested in Iran in 2014, told me. Gershkovich must also know that his detention is part of a bigger story.

First, here are four new articles from The Atlantic:

The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion. California isn’t special. Long COVID is being erased—again. The Fox News lawsuit was never going to save America. A Look of Defiance

This week we caught the first glimpse of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich since he was arrested three weeks ago on charges of espionage. The brief clip was surreal: an American journalist standing inside a glass cage in a Moscow courtroom. Local Russian reporters shouted words of support; security guards rebuked them. But the thing that stood out most to me was the expression on Gershkovich’s face—not quite a smile, but a smirk.

Gershkovich’s arrest has provoked global outrage, and for good reason. He’s the first foreign journalist to be charged with espionage in Russia since the Cold War. The White House has called the charges against him “ridiculous” and demanded his release. The Journal has similarly denied the accusation of spying, and described his arrest as “a vicious affront to a free press.” There is no existing evidence that Gershkovich was a spy, and many experts believe his detention is meant to intimidate the foreign correspondents who remain in the country. (Gershkovich pleaded not guilty; he was denied bail, and he’ll remain in the Lefortovo Prison pending trial.)

As a journalist who covers the nexus of politics and the media, I’ve written about many of the issues raised by Gershkovich’s case: Russian information warfare, press freedom, authoritarian crackdowns on journalism. But after I watched those moments in the Moscow courtroom, the smirk is what stayed with me. What is Gershkovich going through right now? What is he thinking?

To try and understand, I called Jason Rezaian. As a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, Rezaian was arrested in Iran in 2014 on bogus spying charges. He was held captive for 544 days in Tehran, where he endured a sham trial not entirely unlike the one Gershkovich is likely to face.

Rezaian told me that the first weeks of imprisonment at the hands of an autocratic regime are disorienting. “You’re asking, Why am I here? What’s going on? This is all a big mistake.” Pretty soon, his initial hopes that the whole ordeal would get straightened out gave way to fear. Although the precise conditions of Gershkovich’s imprisonment are unknown, experts and former inmates at Lefortovo Prison believe he spent the first weeks of captivity in solitary confinement (as did Rezaian). “The experience of solitary confinement is pretty universal,” Rezaian told me. “It’s designed to break you down to a small, scared, malleable animal.” During Rezaian’s imprisonment, he said, he was routinely told by his captors that he would likely face execution.

That’s why Rezaian told me he, too, was impressed by Gershkovich’s smirk. “The thing that stuck out to me was the defiance,” Rezaian said. “He knows he hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Gershkovich must also know that his detention is part of a broader story. Vladimir Putin’s regime has been cracking down on independent Russian news outlets for years, and has gotten only more aggressive since its invasion of Ukraine. Some Russian-language outlets have been forced to relocate to other countries; others have shut down. That means that much of the credible reporting on Russia has come from foreign outlets. Now that could change. “This is a dramatic escalation,” Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told me. “They have all but snuffed out Russian journalism. Foreign correspondents have somewhat been able to operate—this essentially sends a message that if they continue to do so, they potentially face jail.”

Russia isn’t the only country that’s becoming more hostile to journalists. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stepped up censorship of coverage critical of his government, and thrown scores of reporters in jail. In India, one of the last remaining news channels known for independent reporting was recently acquired by a billionaire ally of the country’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 363 reporters were in prison around the world as of December 2022—more than at any point in the past 30 years.

Ginsberg attributes this grim statistic to the “decline of democracy and democratic norms worldwide.” Governments’ use of the court system against reporters, she said, is “a way of muddying the waters, equating journalism with criminal activity in the eyes of the public.”

Here in the U.S., we reporters have it pretty good by comparison. The First Amendment remains the envy of the world, and with rare exceptions, we are able to do our jobs safely without threat of imprisonment or violence. I’ll admit that I sometimes cringe when I see my fellow American political reporters self-righteously grandstand on cable news about the hardships we face, as though we’re persecuted heroes deserving of public sympathy and reverence. In truth, we’re just people doing our jobs—and not always perfectly.

But even in America, we’re not immune to rising anti-press sentiment. The former president—and current front-runner for the Republican nomination—has dubbed the news media “the enemy of the people,” and campaigned on making it easier to sue journalists. His supporters frequently target individual reporters for online harassment. And as I reported in a cover story for The Atlantic in 2021, local newspapers across the country are being systematically gutted by a hedge fund founded by a wealthy donor to that same former president.

All of which is to say, now is not a good time for civic-minded Americans to look away from genuine authoritarian assaults on the press. When I talked to Rezaian and Ginsberg, I asked them both what ordinary people could do to support Gershkovich. Rezaian said the thing he craved most in captivity was outside contact: “Whatever connection you have to the free world, it’s like oxygen.” To that end, friends of Gershkovich have set up an email address to which you can send supportive notes; they’ll translate the notes into Russian—ensuring that they pass through the prison’s screening system—and send them to his cell. The email is freegershkovich@gmail.com.

Ginsberg, meanwhile, stressed the importance of keeping the international spotlight on Gershkovich’s case by posting on social media or calling congressional representatives. “This isn’t just about Evan,” she told me. “It’s about our ability to understand what’s going on in Russia and all over the world.”

Related:

Russia escalates its war on reporters. A secretive hedge fund is gutting newsrooms. Today’s News The Supreme Court extended a temporary stay on a lower-court ruling, upholding the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, which will preserve access to the drug through at least the end of the workweek. Two teenage boys were charged with murder in connection with the shooting at a 16th-birthday party in Alabama that injured 32 and left four dead over the weekend. Facebook parent company Meta began a new round of layoffs; the cuts are reportedly focused on workers in technical roles, including members of the user-experience and messaging teams. Dispatches The Weekly Planet: Collecting food scraps in your kitchen can invite insect invaders—but there are plenty of ways to outsmart them, Katherine J. Wu writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty

Nutrition Research Forgot About Dads

By Virginia Sole-Smith

When his 18-year-old daughter Francine first started losing weight, in the fall of 2018, Kenneth initially thought it was a good thing. Francine had always been artistic but never particularly athletic, which puzzled her father. Kenneth, now 47, is a runner with dozens of half-marathons and even one ultramarathon under his belt.

When Francine started to express an interest in exercising and joining Kenneth’s wife, Tracy, for workouts, Kenneth and Tracy thought it was a positive sign. When Francine announced that she was vegan, they rolled with it.

Then Francine’s hair started to fall out.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Images of Ramadan 2023 You should ask a chatbot to make you a drink. The myth of the broke Millennial Culture Break Gilles Mingasson / ABC

Read. A new book argues that the microscopic agents behind our deadliest infectious diseases are the real protagonists of human history.

Watch. Abbott Elementary, whose second-season finale airs tonight (pay extra close attention to its dryly funny janitor, Mr. Johnson).

Play our daily crossword.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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

The people who live and work in Appalachian coal country tend to be viewed as climate-change villains rather than victims. But the deadly floods that swept a pocket of eastern Kentucky last summer challenge common preconceptions about which Americans are vulnerable to environmental disasters, and what—or who—is to blame.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The myth of the broke Millennial ChatGPT will change housework. We’re in denial about our dogs. The violent fantasy behind the Texas governor’s pardon demand The Weight of the Rain

To understand how a freak summer rainstorm could kill 44 Appalachian residents and leave thousands more displaced across eastern Kentucky, you could consider the moment in the early morning hours of July 28, 2022, when the floodwaters that swelled from local creeks darkened from muddy brown to charcoal gray, rising high enough to loosen mobile homes, trucks, and trees from their perches and hurl them through the valleys like missiles. You could recall how the weight of the rain forced families to seek shelter in the hills and watch as their communities washed away down the hollows.

Or you could read an Atlantic article from April 1962. Written by a Kentucky lawyer named Harry Caudill, “The Rape of the Appalachians” was a broadside against a relatively new method of coal extraction—strip mining—and it managed to predict precisely the environmental catastrophe that befell eastern Kentucky this past summer.

“By a process which produces huge and immediate profits for a few industrialists, the southern Appalachians are literally being ripped to shreds,” Caudill wrote. “Eventually every taxpayer from Maine to Hawaii will have to pay the cost of flood control and soil reclamation.”

Traditional mines had been dug downward in the search for coal deposits, then outward along their seams, allowing a team of miners to descend into mountains, chip away at the fuel, and cart it up to the surface. Strip-mining operations, by contrast, deploy bulldozers to clear timber from a ridge’s surface in horizontal streaks, then blast into the mountain’s side with explosives, exposing a seam to the open air. This allows for more efficient extraction of coal but eliminates the forests that help drain and slow runoff from rainstorms. So when the thunderstorms began in late July 2022, water rushed down the mountains unabated, destroying a Breathitt County community called Lost Creek, a small collection of homes gathered down the mountain from a strip mine.

Ned Pillersdorf, a lawyer in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, put it in simpler terms. “If you pour a gallon of milk on a table, it will run off all at once,” he told me. “If you put some towels down, it drips off.” By blasting away soil and timber, strip mining has the effect of ripping towels from the table. As a result, strip mines, he explained, are “time bombs.” When the storms came, water flooded the screened porch where Pillersdorf watches baseball, but he and his family were otherwise unaffected. In Lost Creek, though, nearly every single home was destroyed, Pillersdorf said. Two residents died. “On July 28,” he continued, “one of the time bombs went off.”

Today, Pillersdorf is leading a class-action lawsuit on behalf of many of the residents of Lost Creek against Blackhawk Mining, the company that operates the strip mine, and a subsidiary of Blackhawk, Pine Branch Mining. In an argument not unlike Caudill’s, he alleges that the company’s failure to “reclaim” the mine, by reforesting the area and maintaining silt ponds to prevent excessive runoff, aggravated the flooding. (In a response to his legal complaint, lawyers for Blackhawk and Pine Branch denied all of Pillersdorf’s allegations; the flood, they claimed, was an act of God.)

“I’m not a person that hates the coal industry or anything like that,” Gregory Chase Hays, one of Pillersdorf’s plaintiffs, told me. Like many people in the area, Hays has benefited from coal extraction at various points throughout his life; his grandfather and stepfather were both employed in the coal industry. But he’s come to question how the industry treats the communities around mines: Not long after midnight on July 28, Hays watched as his neighbor’s home floated through his yard. That night, he and one of his sons carried his mother-in-law to higher ground through waist-deep floodwaters. When they were at last able to return to their home, Hays found a notice from one of the local coal companies announcing that it intended to continue blasting away in the mountains nearby. It was posted on the bottom of their door; their stoop had been swept away.

The July floods displaced thousands of people. Some lived in tents for months. Hays, whose HVAC system was destroyed, had his air-conditioning fixed only this past Wednesday.

A February report from the Ohio River Valley Institute and Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center estimates that it will cost $450 million to $950 million to rebuild the approximately 9,000 homes damaged by flooding. As of early March, FEMA has provided just more than $100 million. In keeping with Caudill’s grim prediction that mining would enrich only a few industrialists, the counties most exposed to the potential hazards of strip mining are also among the most impoverished in the United States: Without significant assistance, many families won’t be able to rebuild.

And as global temperatures continue to rise, storms like those that flooded eastern Kentucky and devastated the community of Lost Creek are likely to become more and more frequent. Across Appalachia, each has the potential to unleash a similar catastrophe.

Related:

The photographer undoing the myth of Appalachia Henry Caudill on the destruction of the Appalachians (from 1962) Today’s News Violence in Sudan has continued for a third day as rival generals fight for control of the northeast African country. Millions of residents are hiding in their homes, and the toll of civilian deaths and injuries continues to rise. A grand jury in Summit County, Ohio, decided not to charge police officers in the death of 25-year-old Jayland Walker, a Black man shot by police in 2022 after an attempted traffic stop. Two Kenyan runners were champions in today’s Boston Marathon—Evans Chebet for a second consecutive year in the men’s race and Hellen Obiri in the women’s race. Dispatches Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on what they believe is the best cuisine on earth.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic

Why Does Contact Say So Much About God?

By Jaime Green

“As I imagine it,” Carl Sagan once said, “there will be a multilayered message. First there is a beacon, an announcement signal, something that says, Pay attention. This is not some natural astronomical phenomenon. This is a signal from intelligent beings … Then, the next layer is one that says, This message is directed specifically to you guys on Earth. It isn’t directed to anybody else. And the third part of the message is the real content, which is a very complex set of data in a new language, which is also explained.”

He was describing his novel, Contact, a 370-or-so-page answer, literally or in spirit, to every question we can ask about how finding alien intelligence might go. Yes, there’s conflict and strife—acts of terrorism, government obstruction, frustration and loss and death—but at its core the story promises an inviting cosmos. A door opening to a galactic community. We’re not only not alone but also welcomed. This hope is central to the idealistic origins of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), to Sagan’s motivations as a scientist and communicator. It also makes it especially weird that the novel ends with its heroine finding proof that God is real, but we’ll get to that.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Vermeer’s revelations SNL has struck gold with “Lisa From Temecula.” Animals are migrating to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Culture Break A24

Read. “Argument With a Child,” a poem by Katie Peterson.

“Plant your eyes on that place mat of the world / you love and don’t / move them until it stops hurting.”

Watch. Aftersun, available to rent on multiple platforms, is a film to watch—and to weep over—alone.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ve been fascinated by Harry Caudill since I first reported on his life and legacy for a photo essay featuring the work of the documentary photographer Stacy Kranitz. The success of “The Rape of the Appalachians” gave the lawyer a national platform, and in a series of follow-up articles and books, Caudill became a spokesperson of sorts for Appalachia and its plight. Today, his book Night Comes to the Cumberlands is credited in part with spurring the War on Poverty. But a dark undercurrent ran through much of his work: Caudill blamed Appalachians themselves—his neighbors—for their misfortune, and had little faith that they could change their circumstances. His writing brought billions of dollars of aid to the region but also engrained an enduring stereotype of Appalachia as a poverty-stricken backwater. Later in life, he embraced the theories of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist turned eugenics advocate William Shockley and attempted to establish a program to offer cash bonuses to Appalachians who volunteered to be sterilized. (It never took off.)

If you’re interested in learning more about Harry Caudill’s meteoric rise and rapid fall from grace, I highly recommend the Lexington Herald Leader’s excellent five-part series by John Cheves and Bill Estep, published for the 50th anniversary of Night Comes to the Cumberlands. I also encourage you to spend some time with Stacy’s striking photography; in addition to her work subverting Caudill’s stereotypes of Appalachia, her images have appeared alongside reporting on Tennessee’s abortion ban and the state’s efforts to expel Justin Pearson and Justin Jones from its legislature.

— Andrew

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

Today’s special guest is Atlantic senior associate editor Faith Hill. A wearer of many hats, Faith edits stories for our Family section, commissions and edits our original poetry submissions, and, as a writer, frequently chronicles eye-opening trends in relationships and human behavior. She recently wrote about the awkward in-between-ship of early-stage romantic entanglement, the widespread misinterpretation of attachment theory, and second-chance couples. In our survey, Faith discusses her “sick” childhood obsession with the singer Avril Lavigne, how she recently loved (and wept at) the movie Aftersun, and her coming to terms with, in rewatching the TV series Girls, the startling possibility that she just might be a Marnie.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Nutrition science’s most preposterous result: Could ice cream possibly be good for you? The not-so-secret key to emotional balance Welcome to wedding sprawl. The Culture Survey: Faith Hill

The last thing that made me cry: I saw Aftersun in a theater with friends whom I love and trust, but part of me still wishes I’d seen it alone; when the movie ended and the lights came on, they revealed that I was fully weeping. The train ride home with one of those friends was pretty quiet, save for the occasional “Whoa,” “That was intense,” or, as we looked briefly at each other’s overwhelmed, vacant stare, “Yeah.” I couldn’t read reviews for more than a week afterward—I felt so fragile about it. [Related: When a father is just out of reach]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’ve been dutifully watching the new season of Love Is Blind, though I’m not sure enjoying is quite the right word for my experience. The contestants make me either angry or sad; none of the couples seem like they’ll last or even like they really like each other. Every time I watch it, I end up texting someone, “I’m depressed.” And yet, when new episodes drop, I immediately binge them and complain about waiting for the next ones. Is that just what it means to love a TV show in our modern age? [Related: Why America loves Love Is Blind;

Love Is Blind was the ultimate reality-TV paradox. (From 2020)]

Something I loved as a teenager and still love: As a kid, I had a sick obsession with the pop-punk singer Avril Lavigne. I say “sick” because of the sheer extent of it; I mean, I wore neckties to school to mimic her style. I somehow managed to write all of my assignments about her. My teachers had to mention it at parent-teacher conferences. Everyone told me—probably out of genuine concern for my mental health—that it was just a phase I’d grow out of. In some ways, I did—but also, have you listened to “Fall to Pieces” lately? Genius. When I love, I love hard. [Related: What Avril Lavigne has always understood about growing up]

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: Like many people, I’ve been rewatching HBO’s Girls. I was always a Marnie defender: She’s terrible, obviously, but the show’s characters all are! Why does everyone hate her the most? My old theory was that viewers were especially irked by the character most similar to them, and there are a lot of Marnies in the world. But I didn’t believe I was one of them; I’m not at all type A, nor am I one of those people who always look clean. I felt I had room to empathize with her.

My revisit of the series has me wondering, though, if I’d perhaps gotten the rule backwards; maybe everyone feels for the character most similar to them, and I’ve been a Marnie all along—competitive, insecure, weirdly attracted to Ray, desperate to build a life that seems successful just to prove my own worth. I recently watched the episode where Ray, upon request, tells Marnie everything that’s wrong with her. “When you’re excluded from things,” he says at one point in his long list, “you’re outrageously offended and hold on to this grudge.” Do we not all do that?

[Related: The wistful, sharp return of Girls (from 2017);

Girls: Still flawless at being itself (from 2016)]

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: I know this answer is the least cool imaginable, but—I’m sorry—I really do love Vincent van Gogh. You can somehow feel in every work, even the still lives and the landscapes, the pulse of his anguish, his searching, his intensity. It’s like the paint is alive and writhing in turmoil. And he was a beautiful writer too; his letters to his brother, Theo, chart his despair, his moments of joy, his constant questioning of how to live a good life. “In the springtime a bird in a cage knows very well that there’s something he’d be good for,” he wrote in one, explaining that he was at once ambitious, hopeful, and profoundly lost. “He feels very clearly that there’s something to be done but he can’t do it.” Maybe van Gogh was a Marnie too.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: As someone who’s deeply afraid of my friends getting married and abandoning me forever, I felt validated and fired up reading “What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse.” I mention it to people all the time, pointing wildly to the paragraph about single people being more connected to those around them, my voice rising in pitch until the nearest glass shatters. No one has committed—yet—to platonically raising children with me. But by the time my friends hit 35, I expect they’ll come crawling.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Tiana Clark is an excellent poet, and I still think often of her poem “I Stare at a Cormorant.” The whole first stanza is one long sentence in which she breathlessly hops from watching a cormorant stretched in the sun to memories of lifting up her hands in church as a kid, wanting but failing to feel overcome. She balances perfectly between hope and longing, capturing the ways we do experience transcendent moments—just briefly, before they slip through our fingers.  

I’m still stumbling

through this life hoping for anyone or

something to save me. I’m still thinking

about the cormorant who disappeared

when I was writing this poem. I was just

looking down and finishing a line

and then I looked back up—gone.

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

The Week Ahead Barry, the darkly comedic saga of a listless hit man (played by Bill Hader), returns to HBO for its fourth and final season (premieres tonight at 10 p.m. EDT on HBO and HBO Max). The Wager, the New Yorker staff writer David Grann’s latest book, unspools a true story of shipwreck, treachery, and empire (on sale Tuesday). Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant—yes, that’s the movie’s title—stars Jake Gyllenhaal as a U.S.-military sergeant who forges a bond with his local interpreter, played by Dar Salim, during his last tour in Afghanistan (in theaters Friday). Essay (Photo-illustration by Oliver Munday. Sources: Samir Hussein / WireImage / Getty; Alfred Ellis and Walery / Getty.)

It’s Okay to Like Good Art by Bad People

By Judith Shulevitz

In 1895, the popular satirist and dandy Oscar Wilde was tried and sentenced to a prison term, with hard labor, for “gross indecency,” meaning sexual acts with men. The ordeal effectively ended his career, shortened his life, and made his name synonymous with depravity for at least a generation. The young Katherine Mansfield, struggling with her alarming attraction to women, wrote to a friend in 1909 that thinking about Wilde had led to “fits of madness” like those that drove him to “his ruin and his mental decay.”

More than a century later, Wilde is a canonical figure, the preeminent wit of Victorian literature and the beau ideal of the queer aesthetic—campy, ironic, a gender-boundary provocateur. To most of his contemporaries, Wilde wound up being a monster. To us, he’s an icon. But if he were held to today’s standards of appropriate sexual behavior, homosexual or heterosexual, he’d be a monster again. Wilde didn’t just sleep with men. He slept with “rent boys” (male prostitutes) and teenage boys picked up for brief trysts.

Read the full article.

More in Culture Beau is afraid is your worst nightmare, and it’s wonderful. How Taylor Swift infiltrated dude rock Seven celebrities who published actually great memoirs The real hero of Ted Lasso The film that understands what a creative life really looks like An institution that’s been broken for 200 years A biting satire about the idealistic left The pornography paradox The spiritual emptiness of achievement Catch Up on The Atlantic The narcissists who endanger America The dangerous rise of ‘front-yard politics’ The court is likely to reject the independent state legislature theory. Photo Album (Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP)

An unusually wet winter has led to a “superbloom” of wildflowers in California. Our photo editor rounded up some of the best recent snapshots from the southern portion of the state.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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

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.

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

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.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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.

More From The Atlantic The Tennessee expulsions are just the beginning Yes, Trump could get convicted and still become president again The dumbest chess AI has a lesson for us Culture Break A24

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.

Play our daily crossword.

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.