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The tech world’s most attention-grabbing man had a very busy week. Elon Musk launched a rocket, dealt with bad news at Tesla, stoked fear that AI could end humankind, and rolled out another controversial change on Twitter. Through it all, Musk exemplifies the danger of what happens when technology and ego collide.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

When the media bow to Trump - A crucial character trait for happiness The internet of the 2010s ended today.

An Explosive Week

Earlier today, a SpaceX rocket exploded in the skies over the Gulf of Mexico, detonating itself after the booster failed to separate from the upper portion of the vehicle after launch. Watching the clip, from start to fiery finish, I was struck above all else by the sound of applause—routine during such launches, of course, but marked by a different timbre this week.

SpaceX is one of Elon Musk’s many projects, a private transportation company with ambitions to serve “Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.” As CEO, Musk splits his attention between this lofty mission and his duties as CEO of both Tesla and Twitter, the latter of which he acquired in a frenzy for $44 billion last year. Through these roles he has secured his spot as one of America’s most transfixing subjects, a polarizing man for a polarized age, whose accomplishments are slopped over with failure. The rocket blew up; Tesla’s profits are down more than 20 percent year over year; Twitter is, well, Twitter. No surprise, then, that Musk has grown to embrace the role of performer, as when he appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday for a lengthy freak-out about artificial intelligence. In this environment—at least for a man like Musk—value and substance are secondary concerns. What matters is that people are paying attention and reacting.

No wonder then that he promised yesterday that his electric cars would become fully self-driving as soon as this year—an application of AI technology that has already been implicated in a number of deaths—just days after he warned on Tucker that AI is “a danger to the public.” There is no ideological consistency, just bluster and unyielding demands for attention. My colleague Charlie Warzel has called it the myth of the tech genius: After years of growth and innovation in the tech industry, many people lionize the supposedly great men at the center of it all, without reason.

The myth is not harmless. AI, and especially generative AI, that newer strain you’ve heard about or seen in the likes of ChatGPT and DALL-E, demands scrutiny. Although the technology currently seems more likely to destroy high-school-English assignments than it is to rend our flesh and blood, there are serious risks to contend with: Misinformation is a big one, and so is a flood of “gray goo,” as the writer Matthew Kirschenbaum evocatively put it—endless junk content written and published by AI.

There are also deeper effects of existing AI systems that scholars such as Safiya Noble, Joy Buolamwini, and Virginia Eubanks have called attention to for years: racial bias and automated inequality. Rather than address these problems, Musk is focused elsewhere. He announced during his Carlson appearance that he would develop something called TruthGPT, “a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.” (I suspect we’re a few years out from that, at least.)

Musk exemplifies the danger at the intersection of technology and ego: There are serious problems to be dealt with, but distractions always seem to take precedence. This has already played out on Twitter, which has mutated under Musk’s stewardship into a broken mess of contradictions without any meaningful oversight. Musk has promised transparency into the platform’s inner workings, but has made consequential decisions behind closed doors. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote:

Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has recklessly pulled down guardrails, such as dramatically downsizing teams dedicated to safety and internal accountability and haphazardly opening up its blue-check verification system to anyone willing to pay a fee (while removing the actual identity-verifying part in the process). Major decisions that affect the user experience are made without clear justification … the company pulled the blue check off The New York Times’ Twitter account, and … labeled NPR “state-affiliated media.” Donald Moynihan, a policy professor at Georgetown University who frequently writes on tech governance, noted on Twitter that policies once used to safeguard users “are now being rewritten in obviously nonsensical ways to fit with the whims of its owner.”

Today, Musk followed through on an earlier promise to remove the blue checks from users who won’t pay a monthly subscription fee to the platform. The little icon was a status marker, sure, but it was also a symbol of some kind of higher order on the social network: Gone with it is the final vestige of the Twitter that once was. Still, there is applause. Musk’s adoring fans treat the pay-to-play scheme as part of the CEO’s supposed free-speech crusade, suggesting that the ability to buy a check mark puts everyone on equal footing—but a privilege that can, must, be bought isn’t much of a privilege at all.

Perhaps there’s no need to eulogize the old Twitter. The platform has always had problems, has always distorted conversations and turned too many people toward their darkest impulses. But it was also, at least, the creation of a community. To the extent that Twitter’s downfall represents the end of the age of social media, it is because the platform has abandoned users in favor of the whims of one man.

Still, the social network has its devotees; so will TruthGPT, if and when it launches. Some clapped when the rocket lifted off. Some clapped when it exploded. And somewhere beyond the smoke was Elon Musk, taking it all in.

Related:

Elon Musk has broken disaster-response Twitter. Elon Musk’s explosive day

Today’s News

BuzzFeed is shutting down its unprofitable news division as part of broader cuts at the company, and will concentrate its news efforts on HuffPost, which BuzzFeed acquired in 2020. The House approved a bill that would ban transgender women and girls from women’s and girls’ sports at federally supported schools and colleges. It is unlikely to pass the Senate. SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built, launched in Texas for its inaugural test flight and exploded in midair roughly four minutes after launch.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

The End of Recommendation Letters

By Ian Bogost

Early spring greened outside the picture window in the faculty club. I was lunching with a group of fellow professors, and, as happens these days when we assemble, generative artificial intelligence was discussed. Are your students using it? What are you doing to prevent cheating? Heads were shaken in chagrin as iced teas were sipped for comfort.

But then, one of my colleagues wondered: Could he use AI to generate a reference letter for a student? Faculty write loads of these every year, in support of applications for internships, fellowships, industry jobs, graduate school, university posts. They all tend to be more or less the same, yet they also somehow take a lot of time, and saving some of it might be nice. Other, similar ideas spilled out quickly. Maybe ChatGPT could help with grant proposals. Or syllabi, even? The ideas seemed revelatory, but also scandalous.

Scandalous because we faculty, like all faculty everywhere, were drawn into an educators’ panic about AI over the winter … And now, in the faculty club, we professors were musing over how to automate our own assignments?

Read the full article.

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Watch. Catch up on the fourth and final season of Barry, which premiered on HBO on Sunday.

As Barry has become less of a straightforward comedy, it’s become an even better show, our writer argued last year.

Play our daily crossword.

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.

Professional influencing—put simply, making a living from creating and sharing content about one’s personal life—can seem like a bizarre career choice. In some ways it is. But taking the influencer economy seriously can help us better understand how the contours of the “American dream” are shifting for a new generation.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What your favorite personality test says about you Fox News lost the lawsuit but won the war. This country will break our hearts again.

Love and Hate

Fifty-four percent of young Americans would become an influencer if given the chance. This statistic, from a 2019 Morning Consult report, has made the rounds and been profusely ridiculed by people online. But if you look a little deeper, this desire reflects a deep economic pessimism on the part of Gen Z. A 2022 survey found that 23 percent of the generation never expects to retire, while 59 percent does not own or expect to own a home in their lifetime, numbers that were higher than for any other generation surveyed. Gen Z was also more likely to work multiple jobs and do independent work, despite many of them wanting more permanent roles.

We haven’t yet seen how Gen Z’s financial prospects will shake out. But homeownership and retirement are much more distant goals than they were a few decades ago. Although Gen Z could make a financial comeback, like Millennials have, their current uncertainty is shaping how they approach traditional work norms, and how they might transform the labor system as they age further into the workforce.

Influencing, in the context of inflation and mass layoffs, can appear to be the new American dream for Gen Z. Watching someone film their own life and make a disproportionate amount of money from doing so, without being beholden to anyone, seems like an appealing way to avoid financial uncertainty. The payoff can be life-changing. Seeing the rise of successful influencers (or even your high-school friend who decided to start regularly posting on TikTok), you might be easily convinced that if you keep posting videos, follow other creators, and engage with your viewers, you, too, could pull in $20,000 for a single Instagram post.

But the dream is deceptive. Influencing may appear to be a different type of labor—or not be labor at all—but it still falls into the same traps as traditional work. Not everyone succeeds, for one. As Alice Marwick, an associate communication professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains, most discussions around influencers focus on mega influencers (commonly defined as those with more than 1 million followers): the kind who can live in luxury based solely on their content. “But that’s the tiniest tip of the pyramid,” Marwick told me. “Beneath them, there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are trying to do the same thing, but not succeeding.” For those people, she explains, it’s one of many stressful careers with long hours and no guarantee of success.

Although influencing is certainly a privileged form of labor, it is work. The social-media economy, whether society takes it seriously or not, is a crucial part of broader systems of American capital. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany recently wrote, creators have become vital assets for social-media companies and advertisers, but they generally lack worker protections, despite having similar concerns as more traditional workers. As Kaitlyn explains, creators are concerned about pay transparency, discussing unionization, and even starting to strike when they feel they are being taken advantage of or discriminated against. Despite their freedom from an employer, they are also reliant on platforms and institutions that they may not agree with. As I wrote yesterday, some influencers have become skeptical of social-media platforms and their effects on people’s mental health, but will typically only go so far as to discuss these concerns on those same platforms—which are, unfortunately, the foundation of their livelihood.

Influencing also puts concerns about class in America into stark relief. Even for young Americans who don’t want to become an influencer, odds are that they at least follow one. Content can be merely a form of entertainment, but it’s also possible that the act of watching someone else vlog their beautiful, comfortable life is rooted in a deeper belief that you may never attain what they have. Instead of improving our own lives, we continue to watch, as their subscriber numbers grow and their houses get larger, and our circumstances remain the same.

Influencers occupy a space between traditional and nontraditional paths to success, between an alternative to 9-to-5 American capitalism and an embodiment of it. As Marwick explained to me, a number of people enjoy lifestyle vlogs because “if you have a really difficult life, sometimes you just want to sit and watch someone do something in a pretty house.” It’s a way to remove yourself from the stress of day-to-day life, or even long-term thoughts about your economic stability. But at the same time, Marwick notes, many viewers are holding on to “very real class resentment that is based on very real issues, and that can rear its head at any time.” Influencers are hated and loved for the same reasons—a double-edged sword of the worst kind.

Related:

Even influencers are scared of the internet. The influencer industry is having an existential crisis.

Today’s News

Fox News agreed to settle for $787.5 million in the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems. A Moscow court upheld the detention of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested during a reporting trip to Russia last month. Today is the deadline to submit individual tax returns in the United States.

Evening Read

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Wikimedia

A History of Humanity in Which Humans Are Secondary

By Katherine J. Wu

Most accounts of humanity’s origins, and our evolution since, have understandably put Homo sapiens center stage. It was our ingenuity, our tools, our cultural savvy that enabled our species to survive long past others—that allowed wars to be won, religions to blossom, and empires to rise and expand while others crumbled and fell. But despite what the schoolbooks tell us, humans might not be the main protagonists in our own history. As Jonathan Kennedy argues in his new book, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, the microscopic agents behind our deadliest infectious diseases should be taking center stage instead. Germs and pestilence—and not merely the people who bore them—have shaped inflection point after inflection point in our species’ timeline, from our first major successful foray out of Africa to the rise of Christianity, to even the United States’ bloody bid for independence.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I’ve been watching influencers for almost a decade now. Bethany Mota (formerly known as Macbarbie07) and Michelle Phan, for instance, have a deep grip on my psyche. As someone who thinks often about the delusions of the internet, I find it fascinating how much I enjoy watching lifestyle vlogs, where people go grocery shopping and organize their fridges in aesthetic, edited ways. I recently interviewed one of my favorite beauty influencers, Jenn Im, for my article about the phenomenon of “meta-content,” where influencers post on social media about the harms of social media. One of the first things I did to relax after the story published was to watch her most recent vlog about life as a mom—my brain melted into goo, which is exactly what I needed.

If you want to read more about influencers and the internet, I’d recommend starting with Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino, which I recommended to Jenn recently (and am secretly hoping she discusses on her YouTube channel). Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman is also a classic. Lastly, I’d recommend anything by Megan Garber, a staff writer here at The Atlantic. Megan has a talent for explaining everything that I’ve been noticing but can’t quite describe, and her recent cover story, “We’re Already Living in the Metaverse,” is no exception.

— Kat

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.

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:

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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.

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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

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Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Michael Mechanic

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

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

Read the full article.

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

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

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.

Last Tuesday’s Wisconsin election might have been overshadowed by the news of Donald Trump’s arraignment, but Trump and his party were likely paying close attention to the race—and the dangers it portends for the GOP in 2024.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Cover story: American madness The real hero of Ted Lasso Please don’t ask me to play your board game.

An Iron Grip

Last Tuesday, the liberal Milwaukee County judge Janet Protasiewicz won an election that gave Wisconsin liberals a 4–3 majority on the state’s supreme court after 15 years of conservative control. The results of the state’s judicial race are a likely barometer—and a possible determinant—of the GOP’s prospects in 2024.

As my colleague Ronald Brownstein noted in the days leading up to the Wisconsin election, the contest would prove “a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.” A Protasiewicz win, he wrote, would also affirm that support for legal abortion has hastened college-educated suburban voters’ collective “recoil” from the Trump GOP. “Such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections,” Ron explained.

In an Atlantic article last week, the former Milwaukee talk-radio host and The Bulwark editor at large Charlie Sykes doubled down on Brownstein’s assertion. “‘As long as abortion is an issue,’ one Republican legislator told me, ‘we won’t ever win another statewide election,’” Sykes wrote.

With Protasiewicz’s victory, Wisconsin Republicans may have even more to worry about than voters’ attachment to reproductive rights. That’s because, as my colleague Adam Serwer noted last weekend, Wisconsin is a notoriously fickle swing state that Republicans have gerrymandered “with scientific precision” since 2010—driven, in no small part, by its conservative-majority supreme court.

Adam writes:

Thanks to their precise drawing of legislative districts, Republicans have maintained something close to a two-thirds majority whether they won more votes or not … And year after year, the right-wing majority on the state supreme court would ensure that gerrymandered maps kept their political allies in power and safely protected from voter backlash. Some mismatch between the popular vote and legislative districts is not inherently nefarious—it just happens to be both deliberate and extreme in Wisconsin’s case.

“Extreme” is no overstatement. Robert Yablon, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a faculty co-director of the State Democracy Research Initiative, told me by email that although Democrats have won more of Wisconsin’s statewide elections in recent years than their Republican opponents have, “under the maps that the Republican-controlled legislature drew in 2011, Republicans maintained an iron grip on the legislature throughout the last decade—even in years when Democratic candidates won more votes statewide.”

Following the 2020 census, the Wisconsin Supreme Court went on to uphold revised electoral maps that further solidified Republicans’ advantage in the state. Although Wisconsin Democrats saw the reelection of Governor Tony Evers last November, Republicans claimed a two-thirds supermajority in the State Senate following a special election to fill a suburban Milwaukee seat last Tuesday. Republicans are just short of a supermajority in the state assembly and hold six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats.

But Democrats still hope to turn the Badger State around. Last week, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released its House Democrats’ Districts in Play plan for the 2024 election cycle, outlining which congressional districts the party will target in its efforts to retake control of the House. The DCCC’s plan listed Wisconsin’s first and third districts among the 31 Republican-held House seats Democrats deem particularly flippable next fall—an outlook that appears to hinge (at least in part) on the prospect of electoral redistricting. If Protasiewicz were to make good on a remark from earlier this year, in which she hinted at plans to review challenges to the state’s current electoral maps, the court could approve new maps that would improve Democrats’ odds of clawing back power in those districts.

“Having more balanced electoral maps could certainly make a difference in 2024,” Yablon told me. “There’s no guarantee that such maps would enable Democrats to win a legislative majority, but they could create meaningful competition for legislative control for the first time in more than a decade. At a minimum, Republicans would likely see their current legislative majorities shrink.”

Whether or not new electoral maps could make a difference in 2024 will, of course, depend on their being redrawn and approved in the first place—and fast.

Related:

Make Wisconsin a democracy again. The first electoral test of Trump’s indictment

Today’s News

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg sued Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio in a move to block interference by congressional Republicans in the criminal case against Donald Trump. In a dramatic effort to conserve supplies from the drought-stricken Colorado River, the Biden administration proposed a plan that would reduce the amount of water allotted to California, Arizona, and Nevada. The shooter who killed five of his colleagues at a bank in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, yesterday morning legally bought the AR-15-style rifle used in the attack, the interim Louisville Metro Police chief said today.

Evening Read

Bettmann / Getty

The Moms Who Breastfeed Without Being Pregnant

By Sarah Zhang

While her wife was pregnant with their son, Aimee MacDonald took an unusual step of preparing her own body for the baby’s arrival. First she began taking hormones, and then for six weeks straight, she pumped her breasts day and night every two to three hours. This process tricked her body into a pregnant and then postpartum state so she could make breast milk. By the time the couple’s son arrived, she was pumping 27 ounces a day—enough to feed a baby—all without actually getting pregnant or giving birth.

And so, after a 38-hour labor and emergency C-section, MacDonald’s wife could do what many mothers who just gave birth might desperately want to but cannot: rest, sleep, and recover from surgery. Meanwhile, MacDonald tried nursing their baby. She held him to her breast, and he latched right away. Over the next 15 months, the two mothers co-nursed their son, switching back and forth, trading feedings in the middle of the night. MacDonald had breastfed her older daughter the usual way—as in, by herself—a decade earlier, and she remembered the bone-deep exhaustion. She did not want that for her wife. Inducing lactation meant they could share in the ups and the downs of breastfeeding together.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Abbott Elementary (and pay special attention to Mr. Johnson, the janitor on the ABC comedy).

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P.S.

I suppose this is where I out myself as a native Wisconsinite—a cheesehead, if you will—who has followed the electoral goings-on of my home state with varying degrees of attentiveness (and mounting bafflement) in the years since my departure. But if there’s any single resource that’s helped fill in the blanks of my political literacy, it’s The Fall of Wisconsin. The 2018 book by the journalist Dan Kaufman, also from Wisconsin, traces the “conservative conquest” of a state that was, until relatively recently, taken for granted as a progressive stronghold. In case the book’s title doesn’t make it incredibly obvious, Kaufman is not exactly an ideologically impartial observer. But his deep research provides useful background for understanding the past 15 years of Badger State politics and, by extension, broader rifts in the American electorate.

— Kelli

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.

After his arraignment in New York, a weary Donald Trump returned to Mar-a-Lago, where he made a rambling and disjointed statement. (To call it a “speech” would be too generous.) There was almost nothing notable in it, with one dangerous exception: Trump’s obvious attempt to intimidate the judge presiding over his criminal trial.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

The Trump indictment is actually quite damning. Ozempic is about to be old news. Angel Reese can shine as brightly as she wants. A Brazen Move

Lawyers are already arguing about the now-unsealed indictment in the Manhattan case against Donald Trump. As a layman, I thought the indictment documents laid out a clear story about Trump’s behavior. But there’s a long way to go before a judge or a jury resolves any of it.

Trump, for his part, didn’t dwell on the case when he returned to his safe space in Florida. He spoke for only about 25 minutes, which is usually just the amount of time it takes him to clear his throat. But in that short time, he talked about everything—and I mean everything.

There were the usual cries of “Russia Russia Russia” and “Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine,” which Trump now tends to repeat as a kind of ritual invocation without context. He went off about the Georgia investigation involving his call to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger looking for more votes in the 2020 election, referring to that call as “even more perfect” than the call to Ukraine that helped get him impeached. He railed against the “lunatic” Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the probes into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, and called the former investigation the “boxes hoax.” He even went after the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, which he called “a radical-left troublemaking organization.” If you’ve ever wondered why America is in trouble, you need look no further, apparently, than those unruly Trotskyite archivists.

As usual, Trump’s histrionics would be comical if the stakes were not so high. He is the leader not only of the Republican Party but of a cult of personality that we already know will answer his calls for violence, which is why the most dangerous part of Trump’s litany of complaints last night was his effort to intimidate the family of Juan Merchan, the judge who will preside over his case:

I have a Trump-hating judge with a Trump-hating wife and family whose daughter worked for Kamala Harris and now receives money from the Biden-Harris campaign. And a lot of it.

This wasn’t some random neural misfire from the pachinko machine inside Trump’s head. It was part of a campaign that had been launched in the right-wing media ecosystem two days earlier, shortly after Trump arrived in New York.

On the night of April 3, the trashy disinformation site Gateway Pundit (which I refuse to link to here) posted a “bombshell” about Judge Merchan’s daughter, who apparently worked at a company whose clients included the Biden-Harris campaign. The next day, the right-wing site Breitbart (again, I will not bother with a link) picked up the story and quoted from a tweet (now deleted) from Trump’s son Eric. Later, Donald Trump Jr. shared a link to the Breitbart piece—which prominently displayed what appears to be a picture of the judge with his daughter—on Twitter and Truth Social, calling her “yet another connection in this hand picked democrat [sic] show trial.” Junior left the implication hanging there, but when Trump Sr. returned to Florida last night, he connected that final dot, asserting that the judge’s daughter is now personally on Joe Biden’s campaign payroll.

There is no subtlety here. Trump and the people who fashioned this non-story into a “bombshell” knew exactly what they were doing. Making such accusations while spreading the daughter’s picture around the right-wing media swamps is dangerous. But Trump, his failsons, and the family’s various enablers were all sending a message to the judge: You have a lovely daughter, Your Honor, and we know who she is and where she is.

This is a classic move from the authoritarian playbook: If you are threatened by the law, threaten those who administer the law. Menacing judges and prosecutors is something gang members and Mafia goons have occasionally tried over the years, but to their (limited) credit, most crooks aren’t usually this foolish or brazen. Would-be caudillos, however, especially those bolstered by an extremist following, are more willing to roll those dice.

Donald Trump has never faced serious criminal consequences—or, really, any consequences—that he could not smother with enough money. (Losing the 2020 election was likely the first time in his life that large numbers of people disobeyed him, and his current troubles stem from his inability to cope with that realization.) He may yet wriggle out of the criminal charges in Manhattan, but there are likely more to come from Georgia and Washington, D.C.

And yet, Trump is still the choice of millions for the presidency, despite his attacks on the rule of law and the judges who oversee it. We cannot say we have not been warned: The authoritarian rule and personal threats Trump will bring back to the White House were on full display last night in a resort ballroom in Florida.

Related:

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Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read The Atlantic / Getty

Return of the People Machine

By Saahil Desai

Even a halfway-decent political campaign knows you better than you know yourself. A candidate’s army of number crunchers vacuums up any morsel of personal information that might affect the choice we make at the polls. In 2020, Donald Trump and the Republican Party compiled 3,000 data points on every single voter in America. In 2012, the data nerds helped Barack Obama parse the electorate to microtarget his door-knocking efforts toward the most-persuadable swing voters. And in 1960, John F. Kennedy had the People Machine. Using computers that were 250,000 times less powerful than a modern MacBook, Kennedy’s operatives built a simulation of the presidential election, modeling how 480 types of voters would respond to any conceivable twist in the campaign. If JFK made a civil-rights speech in the Deep South, the People Machine could, in the words of its creators, “predict the approximate small fraction of a percent difference that such a speech would make in each state and consequently … pinpoint the state where it could affect the electoral vote.”

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I’m forgoing recommendations today except to say that I will be on CNN this evening at 9 p.m. ET to talk about the Trump indictment. I will also be away for the next few days, so I want to wish a happy Passover and a happy Easter to those among you who celebrate. I will, however, take a minute to explain why you’ll hear me wishing a happy Easter to my fellow Orthodox Christians next week. We Orthodox do things a little differently. Mostly, it’s about calendars, but here’s the basic explanation from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America:

Orthodox Pascha frequently occurs later than Western Easter because the Orthodox Church uses inaccurate scientific calculations that rely on the inaccurate Julian Calendar to determine the date of Pascha for each year.

It then gets a lot more complicated: “Because of Christian dependence on unreliable Jewish calculations of the vernal full moon for Passover, and because of the varying Christian traditions … ” Look, the simple answer is that every few years, your Orthodox friends might be celebrating Easter on the same day as everyone else, but usually, our Easter will be about one to four weeks later—so don’t be surprised if you hear us talking about eggs and bunnies (and my Greek grandmother’s lamb recipe) long after everyone else.

Or, as we Orthodox kids used to joke: “What’s the best part of being Orthodox? Half-off Easter candy.”

— Tom

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.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is once again trying to manipulate nuclear weapons to compensate for the ongoing Russian military disaster in Ukraine. These new Russian moves are dangerous but not a crisis.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Don’t take your eye off Jack Smith. David Frum: Never again Trump When did people start brushing dogs’ teeth?

Useless, Stupid, and Provocative

You can always tell when things are going badly on the battlefield for the Russians in Ukraine, because Vladimir Putin starts talking about nuclear weapons. For weeks, the Russians have been pounding the city of Bakhmut, but so far, Bakhmut remains in Ukrainian hands, despite repeated Russian—and Western—predictions that it would fall. (The Ukrainian high command recently said that the situation is “being stabilized,” which is mostly good news.) No matter what happens next, however, the cost to the Russians has been immense: Russian commanders are now reportedly using “human wave” tactics, sending poorly armed men into battle merely to absorb Ukrainian ammunition and die so that the next group of attackers can get closer to the lines.

Putin knows that there will be no triumphal breakthrough. Even if Bakhmut is eventually taken, the Russians will be planting a flag on a pile of their own corpses. And so, in his desperation to change the narrative both at home and abroad, Putin has returned to taking nuclear gambles. Putin told Russian television on March 25 that he intends to station Russian tactical nuclear weapons in neighboring Belarus, a country that borders both Ukraine and NATO. Yesterday, the Russian ambassador to Belarus doubled down on Putin’s threat, announcing that Russia plans to deploy those weapons in the western part of Belarus—near the border with its NATO neighbors.

This is both more and less than it seems, but first, we should review some definitions.

There is no particular technological characteristic to a “tactical” nuclear weapon. In practice, tactical nuclear weapons are usually intended for delivery at short range (roughly less than 500 kilometers) with smaller warheads, and they are aimed at battlefield objectives such as concentrations of enemy forces or bases in the rear. “Strategic” weapons, such as intercontinental ballistic missiles or strategic bombers, traverse far greater distances and are primarily aimed at enemy strategic nuclear weapons (such as silos, bomber bases, and submarine pens), infrastructure, industry, and, in the most horrific instance, the enemy’s cities. These major targets are meant to affect the overall outcome of the war.

Tactical weapons are considerably less powerful because they’re intended for use close to the line of battle, and they pack only a fraction of the punch of a strategic warhead. (Dropping a city-buster bomb on a battlefield will indeed kill the enemy, but it will also kill your own forces and flatten everything else for five or six miles in every direction.) These tactical nuclear arms can be as small as 10 or 20 kilotons, or even just one, but “small” is relative in the world of nuclear weapons; the bomb America dropped on Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons. (A kiloton is the explosive power equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT.) Even a small weapon can do a lot of damage, kill a lot of people, and poison a lot of land.

Putin didn’t specify which Russian systems he would station in Belarus. There are a few options: He could place short-range missiles near the Belarus border, or he could store tactical warheads for use on Russian bomber aircraft. Russian forces, obviously, would guard and crew these systems, rather than transferring them to Belarus.

Whatever he ends up doing, this announcement is a trifecta of Putinist foreign policy: It is useless, stupid, and provocative all at the same time.

It’s a useless gambit, because moving tactical nukes to Belarus doesn’t really buy Russia any military advantage. It’s possible that Putin is doing this to lash Belarus’s strongman, Alexander Lukashenko, more tightly to the mast of Russia’s sinking ship in Ukraine. It might justify placing elite Russian forces in Belarus territory for years to come, but Russia already has plenty of ability to deliver tactical strikes on Ukraine and NATO.

Putting nuclear weapons in Belarus is also strategically stupid, because it buys Putin more political trouble than it’s worth. Lukashenko has said he approves of the plan, but he almost certainly doesn’t want these things in his country, not only because it will emphasize that he’s merely one of Putin’s local gauleiters but also because it will create even more instability in Belarus itself. Lukashenko is hated by many of his own citizens, and he triumphed in the last election only by fraud and force. Making Belarus into a frontline nuclear target won’t help matters.

Perhaps even dumber is that Putin runs the risk of annoying the Chinese. The Russian president may be the stud duck in the Kremlin, but in Eurasia, he’s now a junior partner of the richer and more powerful Xi Jinping. As Mike McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, noted, the Belarus decision is a snub to Xi, who just issued a joint statement with Putin that included a call for “all nuclear powers” not to deploy their nuclear weapons beyond their national territories and to withdraw all nuclear weapons deployed abroad.

That passage was supposed to be a warning to the Americans. Putin, however, has stepped on that message by threatening to station nuclear arms outside of Russia for the first time since the end of the Cold War. (A Chinese diplomat on Monday gingerly deflected a question about the Belarus issue, referring to a previous statement by the five major nuclear powers that a nuclear war could never be won and must never be fought. That statement was also signed by Russia, so we might assume this answer was an indication of Chinese displeasure.)

Finally, Putin’s announcement is provocative, because it shows yet again how quickly the Russian leader will resort to nuclear threats. Putin, at this point, is likely frustrated that his mentions of nuclear arms no longer rattle Washington or Brussels, and he is trying to squeeze just a bit more juice out of the nuclear lemon by dragging another state into the fray.

Nuclear threats are never to be taken lightly, but for now, Putin’s announcement—and so far, it is only that, an announcement—is not a crisis that requires any direct response from anyone. (Well, the Chinese might like a word, but that’s Beijing’s problem.) U.S. and NATO intelligence analysts are, as always, continually watching to see whether Russia is taking concrete steps to use such weapons (for example, if they detect that warheads are being moved from storage to active units that could employ them), but so far, according to U.S. sources, none of that is happening.

Nevertheless, a foreign leader trying to extricate himself from a military disaster by making nuclear threats is more likely to make other foolish moves. As spring progresses, Russia’s position will likely become more dire, so we can expect Putin to try to press this raw nerve again and again—especially as the Russian body count continues to climb.

Related:

Russia’s nuclear bluster is a sign of panic. Fear of nuclear war has warped the West’s Ukraine strategy.

Today’s News

Donald Trump has arrived in New York City, where he is expected to be arraigned tomorrow. McDonald’s temporarily closed its U.S. offices this week, asking employees to work remotely as the company prepares for layoffs. More than 30 people were killed by tornadoes across the southern, midwestern, and northeastern U.S. this past weekend.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf’s readers reflect on humanity’s place in the cosmos.

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Evening Read

Video by The Atlantic. Source: Beryl Denman Lacey / Gaumont British Instructional / Internet Archive

Hiccups Have a Curious Relation to Cancer

By Marion Renault

Colleen Kennedy, a retired medical assistant, was prepared for the annihilation of chemotherapy and radiation treatment for stage-three lung cancer. She hadn’t expected the hiccup fits that started about halfway through her first treatment round. They left her gasping for air and sent pain ricocheting through her already tender body. At times, they triggered her gag reflex and made her throw up. After they subsided, she felt tired, sore, breathless—as if she’d just finished a tough workout. They were, Kennedy, now 54, told me, “nothing compared to what we would consider normal hiccups at all.” They lasted for nearly a year.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

There are two other stories from Russia in the past week, both of them indications of how badly the war is going.

The big story is the seizure of an American reporter by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained in the city of Yekaterinburg on espionage charges, which the Journal denies. My guess, based on the timing, is that this could be retaliation for the charges filed in Washington against an alleged Russian military-intelligence operative who was apprehended earlier in Brazil. Grabbing Gershkovich is an even more extreme ploy than arresting the American basketball player Brittney Griner on drug charges: Accusing a high-profile journalist of spying doesn’t just mean that the Russians likely want another prisoner exchange; it could also indicate that they’re desperate to extinguish Western coverage of the situation in Russia.

The other story is an intriguing article by my friend Michael Weiss about a Ukrainian operation in which three Russian pilots were offered bribes to defect—with their jets. The deal later fell apart, but I called Weiss to ask just how far along this whole caper got. The Ukrainians found the Russian pilots through some open-source sleuthing and made the cash offers. The pilots were interested and gave up “a lot of information, including about their aircraft, bases, and routes.” Things apparently went sour, Weiss told me, when the wife of one pilot got cold feet and blew the whistle; another was betrayed by a girlfriend (who the Ukrainians, according to Weiss, think may have been in bed, so to speak, with the FSB). Unless these three men were already working with Russian security agents—which is unlikely—they’re in a world of trouble, which is why the Ukrainians, as Weiss reports, see the outcome as a win: They didn’t get the planes, but “we managed to eliminate all three war criminals without getting up from the table.”

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.