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More than six months after the FDA announced a shortage of the ADHD drug Adderall and its generic variations, many Americans who rely on the medication continue struggling to obtain it. This supply crisis points to serious inadequacies in the diagnosis and treatment of the disorder, especially in adults.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

America is in its insecure-attachment era. “I don’t want to see you get high.” Clarence Thomas is winning his war on transparency. Dangerous Gaps

Much has been written about the toll of the ongoing Adderall shortage on Americans with ADHD, a population that includes me. But we don’t get enough credit for our ingenuity.

This week, for instance, I repeated the baroque prescription-refill process that I first developed last summer—months before the FDA’s formal announcement of a supply shortage in October, but by which point the shortage was apparent to legion prescribers and patients across the country. Among other steps too tedious to detail here, the task involves placing prescription orders at small neighborhood pharmacies (which are more likely than national chains to have the drug in stock) with somewhat restrictive hours of operation. On the whole, this strategy has worked out; throughout the supply shortage, I’ve gone very few days without access to medication. Many others have been less lucky.

As my colleague Yasmin Tayag noted in a recent Atlantic article, this medication shortage is the result of a “perfect storm” of manufacturing and regulatory factors, compounded by a dramatic surge in demand. Although the pandemic accelerated that trend, it’s been in motion for years: From 2007 to 2016, adult-ADHD diagnoses shot up by 123 percent in the U.S., and adults replaced children as the primary consumers of the medications typically prescribed to treat the condition. Both the acute spike and the longer-running pattern can be attributed, at least in part, to growing awareness about the presentation of ADHD and other executive-functioning disorders.

More recently, COVID-19 lockdowns disrupted daily routines and forced many people to adapt to new schedules that posed conflicting demands on their attention. For some, this highlighted difficulties with time management, organization, and focus. Increased stress and anxiety likely also exacerbated ADHD symptoms, or made them more apparent.

But even people without ADHD have likely experienced a range of emotional and cognitive effects of pandemic-related stress—difficulty concentrating, irritability, restlessness—that resemble ADHD symptoms. And in the U.S., where the diagnosis of adult ADHD largely relies on self-reported symptoms, clinicians may not always be able to tell whether a patient’s account of their experience is accurate. As such, it’s plausible that the pandemic drove an increase in ADHD misdiagnoses, which, in turn, contributed to greater overall demand for Adderall. (It’s important to note that the passing similarities between ADHD symptoms and other human responses to the quotidian challenges of 21st-century life are also responsible for some of the lingering stigma that surrounds the disorder, including the common misperception that it isn’t “real”—a misperception that is at least partly to blame for the likelihood that the overwhelming majority of adults who meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD remain undiagnosed.)

The problem is double-pronged. For one, as Yasmin pointed out, the U.S. lacks standardized clinical guidelines for identifying ADHD in adults. In an interview for The Guardian last year, the clinical psychologist and ADHD researcher Margaret Sibley told me that, in an ideal world, the assessment process for ADHD would involve hours of legwork on the part of practitioners: talking to the individuals, assessing their medical histories, and even reaching out to family members to get their perspective. In other words, the best-practice scenario would require time investments that are completely untenable within the current health-care system.

For patients to benefit from such a comprehensive evaluation by a licensed mental-health clinician, they would need to have access to those services in the first place, and the time off work with which to use them. In a country without universal health care, let alone universal mental-health care, the logistical arithmetic doesn’t add up for the millions of people who might otherwise benefit from procedural improvements in diagnosing ADHD and all kinds of other disorders.

Which leads us to the second issue: treatment. In the United States, prescription psychostimulant medications such as Adderall are almost always the first course of action after an ADHD diagnosis, but stimulants aren’t necessarily the safest treatment route, let alone the most effective. Moreover, the Drug Enforcement Administration classifies these medicines as Schedule II drugs with a high potential for addiction or misuse. What this means, in practice, is that sharp increases in ADHD diagnosis—and thus greater demand for ADHD medication—aren’t guaranteed to be met with expanded drug-production allotments by the DEA. And although limiting the circulation of Schedule II medications is, in theory, sound public-health policy, the approach creates new challenges when those medications are the first-line treatment for a chronic condition.

There are no simple solutions here, but the Adderall shortage has sharpened the picture of the ripple effects produced by mental-health-care access gaps. And although my geographic and financial privilege will likely keep working in my favor for as long as these drugs remain difficult to obtain, scores of other Americans with ADHD will be forced to make do with no recourse.

Related:

Adult ADHD is the Wild West of psychiatry. ADHD is different for women. Today’s News At a news conference in Jerusalem, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that the recent lawsuit filed by the Walt Disney Co. was “political.” Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusation resulted in the brutal murder of Emmett Till, has died. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol addressed a joint session of Congress and urged North Korea to end its nuclear provocations. Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

You Will Miss Bed Bath & Beyond

By Amanda Mull

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

This shopping trip was the kind of minor domestic milestone that abounds in young adulthood. I had no idea how to navigate anything about New York, and I was looking everywhere for signals that this new life would be viable for me. On that first day, I began the process of figuring all of that out by getting myself to a store that sold affordable bed linens.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

Late this morning, I found out that Jerry Springer had died. I heard the news the way I suspect many of my approximate age-peers across the country did: by text from a very old friend. A pal I’ve known since elementary school broke the news (“oh wow, Jerry Springer died”); a few hours later, my partner chimed in (“damn, Jerry Springer”). For our particular young-Gen-Xer-to-elder-Millennial generational slice, the notorious talk-show pioneer (and onetime mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio) transcends the voyeuristic television spectacle that, for better or worse, is what history will remember him for. As my colleague Megan Garber writes, “His show’s concessions predicted the ease with which American politics would give way to entertainment. He was an omen of all that can go wrong when audiences treat boredom as vice.” But he was also a reflection of what in retrospect seems like the comparable innocence of our 1990s childhoods—when Springer-esque entertainment was strictly a guilty pleasure.

— Kelli

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Imagine you’re in the heart of New York City—for example, on the steps of Madison Square Garden. One of the very first things you would notice there, no matter the time of day or the weather, would be the pungent aroma of burning reefer. This would also be the case if you found yourself at the entrance to the Q train at Union Square, or at a chessboard in Washington Square Park, or under some scaffolding erected on any random block in SoHo. Smelling cannabis has become an inescapable feature of living in (or visiting) the city, an emblem of life in New York akin to sipping a crème at a café table in Paris or strolling through Rome eating a gelato. In some parts of Midtown, weed aromas pump through the streets like those bizarre plumes of steam that blow continuously from orange-striped tubes at intersections.

Not so long ago, the United States took a draconian approach to marijuana. As recently as 2017, New York City alone recorded more than 18,000 arrests for weed possession, down from a peak of more than 50,000 in 2011. Some 93 percent of those 2017 arrests were for possession in public view or public consumption. In 2021, New York State approved legislation to legalize recreational marijuana, and adults may now smoke it wherever they can smoke tobacco. By the end of 2022, the grand total of marijuana arrests and summonses—in this city of 8.5 million inhabitants—had fallen to 179. It is an unmistakably good thing that New York, along with much of American society, has abandoned the puritanical War on Drugs absolutism that sought to prevent otherwise law-abiding adults from ever getting high on pain of criminal prosecution. Anti-marijuana laws from a previous, stricter era were not only hypocritical and ineffective—everyone who wanted to smoke weed could still do so; they were enforced to an extremely unequal measure, falling much harder on Black and Latino citizens. The old regime was clearly unsustainable.

[David A. Graham: Biden goes to pot]

But too much of a good thing can pose an entirely new set of problems, and two competing truths often exist simultaneously. The computer scientists Dylan Hadfield-Menell and Simon Zhuang argue that optimizing the pursuit of any given goal will lead to unanticipated consequences, including the achievement of ends that are antithetical to the original objective. In a recent podcast, the physicist Max Tegmark provided a concrete example of this idea. Pretend you’ve programmed a car to drive from Boston to New York City by telling it to go as southward as physically possible. Eventually, it will arrive in Manhattan, but without any further steps to redirect or halt its movement, it will inevitably keep going all the way to Florida. Tegmark says that the principle can be applied to the development of artificial intelligence. It can also help make sense of why I can’t step outside without smelling marijuana.

The desire to correct past wrongs hasn’t just resulted in marijuana smoking becoming permissible in most areas where tobacco smoking is allowed. Because of a larger disinclination toward any punitiveness at all, blunt-smoking can now be observed even where cigarettes are considered inappropriate or offensive. Police aren’t enforcing the law where it still holds. It is progress that people are no longer facing jail time for personal weed possession; it does not follow, however, that Americans should accept a total erosion of the etiquette around public consumption in shared and non-designated spaces. The car has traveled way past New York City and is on a ferry to Patagonia.

Several months ago, coming into New York City from the liberal-arts college in the Hudson Valley where I teach—where, for what it’s worth, I have never seen anyone openly smoking—I complained offhandedly on Twitter about the omnipresent aroma of cannabis. This wasn’t even an original observation. In 2018, as the city was still in the early stages of shifting its drug policy, Ginia Bellafante wrote in The New York Times that marijuana is the “signature olfactory experience of New York.” And last year, the mayor, Eric Adams, joked at a press conference, “The No. 1 thing I smell right now is pot. It’s like everybody’s smoking a joint now.”

I received a huge amount of pushback for my remark (in addition to quite a lot of agreement), much of it premised on the idea that any social response to public weed smell would inevitably result in the warehousing of Black and brown bodies. In fact, I don’t want the police to put public weed-smokers in jail. I simply think New Yorkers should do a better job of policing themselves: a middle ground in which smokers of any color exercise discretion where the law employs restraint.

[Sarah Milov: Marijuana reform should focus on inequality]

The pushback against my complaint is ongoing. Last week, in the libertarian magazine Reason, Liz Wolfe published an article titled “New York City Should Have Always Smelled Like Pot,” in which she opens with a rebuttal of my tweet. Hers is about the most compelling argument I’ve seen in favor of the new normal, and to her credit, she declines to partake in the customary gaslighting that would deny that a change has occurred in the first place. “The smell of weed in the streets,” Wolfe argues, “is a sign of progress and tolerance, not decline.”

Tolerance is a wonderful value in principle. And as the intolerant have long understood, it is also a value that can be easily exploited. It works best when buttressed by agreed-upon standards and a common investment in informal norms. “Some of today’s stoners do have a bit too much chutzpah,” Wolfe concedes, “like the guy I saw on the G train rolling a joint at 9 a.m. on an especially packed train car.” That experience rings familiar. On a recent Monday morning, I boarded an overflowing L train from Williamsburg into Manhattan, the entire car reeking of freshly puffed ganja. Progress demands that elderly people and small children must also inhale this? Something is perversely unserious about a culture that insists the answer is yes and that you are some kind of “Karen” if you beg to differ.  

“Fellow New Yorkers who have long tolerated cigarette smoke clogging up the public airways,” Wolfe writes, “should offer the same grace to weed.” But cigarette smokers haven’t had their way for two decades now, and anyone who would dare light a Marlboro on the subway today would receive the most withering glare—and possibly risk physical assault—because we now have not only laws but also real taboos around the spreading of secondhand smoke. Which is one reason you barely smell cigarettes at all, even in the streets, parks, and plazas where the scent of weed prevails.

The reflex to dismiss any criticism of violations against communal consideration exemplifies an evolving progressive politics, what the writer Michael Shellenberger has referred to as an ethos of “left-libertarianism.” In ways large and small, it has degraded urban spaces. In the absence of wider unspoken controls, the anything-goes mentality flirts with pandemonium. Turned up to a certain pitch, it produces something much worse than a public nuisance: It encourages self-reinforcing disorder. Look at San Francisco or Portland, Oregon, where tent encampments and open hard-drug use have in some districts made healthy and productive activity all but impossible. New York is by no means at a West Coast level of decline, but such states of decay are not binary. They operate along a dismal continuum, and public spaces forfeit structure by gradation. Broken windows left untended really do tell larger stories.

When is the last time you’ve seen someone pounding shots of vodka on the subway? You haven’t, and for good reason. Drug possession was once a crime as well as a taboo. Now that we’ve optimized the admirable goal of ensuring that it isn’t the former, we need a redirect to preserve the latter.

The real problem with space is there’s not enough of it—at least not when it comes to places to put people. With billionaires funding their own space programs and investors pouring cash into new start-ups aimed at building a true space economy, millions of humans may end up working and living away from Earth in a century or two. If that happens, all of those people will need somewhere to live. But as of yet, no would-be captain of space industry has proposed a viable housing plan.

Mars, which gets a lot of attention as ground zero for humanity’s future, is really just a good place to die. The Red Planet is a frozen desert with a thin atmosphere and no protecting magnetic field. The threat from high-energy solar radiation is so extreme that cities would have to be built underground or covered by thick domes. And the surface of Mars (or any planet or moon) sits at the bottom of a deep gravitational well (that is, a high-gravity region) that rockets must climb out of or carefully drop down into. This makes visits between the surface and space an expensive proposition: It takes a lot of rocket fuel to climb up and down those wells, and rocket fuel doesn’t grow on trees (and trees don’t grow on Mars).

Any serious efforts to live outside Earth will have to go beyond the immediately obvious destinations such as Mars. There are options that don’t involve the great expense of climbing out of gravity wells and the great danger of falling back down them again. Based on recent work, my colleagues and I may have found a candidate with none of Mars’s tricky problems. If we’re right, our real future in space may be not on the surface of planets, but inside asteroids.

NASA has been considering non-planet, non-moon options for our future space housing as far back as the early 1970s, when it began exploring designs for “space habitats.” Then, in 1976, the Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill published The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. The book, which became an instant classic, was full of plans for permanent space cities contained in shining metal cylinders, the largest of which was 20 miles long and four miles across.

[From the January/February 2015 issue: 5,200 days in space]

These “O’Neill cylinders” addressed the biggest and most fundamental problem of not living on a planet: no gravity. Research indicates that when people live in zero gravity for more than a few months, their eyeballs bulge out, their retinas can detach, their muscles atrophy, and their bones become brittle. While there aren’t many data on the problem, evidence suggests that humans may require somewhere around one-third of Earth’s gravity in order to function properly. That’s one reason people such as Elon Musk are so bullish on Mars: Its surface gravity is just above that one-third limit. An O’Neill cylinder wouldn’t be massive enough to generate significant gravity, but O’Neill designed them to rotate around their long axis, producing gravitylike centrifugal force. Residents would live happily on the cylinder’s inner surface, pulled “downward” away from the center.

The stunning artwork that accompanied O’Neill’s designs showed futuristic communities set amid beautiful, landscaped parklands where the horizon curved upward. The pictures fired the imagination of a generation of space nerds, including me and, more notably, Jeff Bezos, who owns the rocket company Blue Origin and is a big fan of space habitats. But O’Neill cylinders have a crucial problem: Bringing millions of tons of raw materials up from a gravity well (even a shallow one such as the moon’s) and then fabricating them into the necessary steel beams, trusses, and construction essentials would be prohibitively expensive. I’ve seen an estimate of $100 trillion a cylinder.

One could conceivably get the material from asteroids, which don’t have significant gravity. But even after grinding the asteroids down, you’d still need giant space factories for transforming the extracted raw materials into O’Neill cylinders. That wouldn’t be cheap either. The one thing asteroids have going for them is their sheer quantity: Thousands of the flying space mountains zoom around on orbits that pass near Earth. Actually, if you think about it, that’s a lot of potential real estate.

[Read: NASA is practicing asteroid deflection. You know, just in case.]

To be clear, we can’t live on asteroids (too little gravity, too much radiation). And we can’t live in metal tubes made from asteroids (too expensive). But there may be a third option: living inside asteroids.

It’s an idea that science-fiction writers, at least, have taken notice of for more than a decade. Hollowed-out space rocks, set into rotation to generate centrifugal force, play a central role in Amazon’s TV series The Expanse (based on the books series of the same name). In that fictional future, about 100 million “Belters” live in asteroid cities, where the thick rock walls offer free, natural protection from high-energy solar radiation. (The Expanse is on Amazon for a reason: Bezos loved the show so much that he rescued it from cancellation from the Syfy channel).

But science fiction is one thing; the laws of physics are another. I and my colleagues at the University of Rochester wanted to find out if asteroid habitats are really a possibility. Within the next several centuries, humans may very well have the technology to dig out big living spaces in an asteroid and set it spinning. But when my colleague Alice Quillen, an asteroid expert, and I ran the calculations on that plan, we found that spinning a large asteroid fast enough to create artificial gravity would crack and fracture the asteroid rock matrix, leading to the whole asteroid flinging apart. As a huge fan of The Expanse, I was bummed out by this result. But Alice came up with another approach.

[Read: A handful of asteroid could help decipher our entire existence]

Most asteroids, it turns out, aren’t solid rocks. The ones smaller than about 10 kilometers across are a mixture of sand, pebbles, rocks, and boulders held together by the weak force of their own gravity. Spinning such a body would send its component parts flying into space immediately—unless, as Alice pointed out, you could hold them together. All we needed was a very big bag.

Imagine a swarm of robots easing up to one of these rubble-pile asteroids and covering it with an ultra-strong, ultralight elastic webbing. (Carbon nanowires, which can be as thin as a few atoms, are a good option. They’re currently produced in only small amounts, but we could manufacture them en masse in the future.) Once the cylinder-shaped “bag” is set, the asteroid could then be slowly spun via rocket motors anchored deep in the rubble. As the rubble pile spins faster, it would begin flinging out those pebbles, rocks, and boulders, pushing the carbon-nanowire webbing outward with them.

Rendering of a space habitat made by spinning an asteroid (Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester)

At some point, the bag would hit its maximum extension, and the expanding rubble would slam into now-rigid webbing. Debris flung into the taut bag would be compacted, forming a giant, hollow, concrete cylinder. Once the dust clears, towns, cities, parks, and farmland could all be built on the inner surface of the cylinder, just like in O’Neill’s designs. That surface could be enclosed with a transparent roof to hold in an atmosphere; imagine a bicycle tire with clear plastic running around the inner circumference. Outside the living area, the thick concrete walls would protect against radiation.

[Read: Just like that, we’re making oxygen on Mars]

Led by a very smart engineering Ph.D. student named Peter Miklavcic, our team ran a series of simulations to study the plan. It seemed to work: Our models showed that a small rubble-pile asteroid, just a few football fields across, could be expanded into a cylindrical space habitat with about 22 square miles of living area. That’s roughly the size of Manhattan, where more than 1.5 million people currently live. Multiply that by the solar system’s tens of thousands of asteroids, and The Expanse’s 100 million space dwellers could be easily accommodated.

Humans do not yet have the technology to build asteroid cities. It’s also possible that we will never have the kind of industrial space infrastructure necessary to make this idea a reality. Maybe it won’t be possible to manufacture enough carbon nanowire to make the asteroid bags. Maybe social systems are unstable in permanently enclosed habitats. These are all possibilities. But the paper summarizing our results, which we published last year, suggests that the overall plan is viable. The technologies we proposed using don’t break any laws of physics; they are reasonable extrapolations of capacities we have now. Such extrapolations can seem fantastical, but they prove true more often than you might think. Remember that in 1900, no one had ever flown an airplane. Now, as you read this, hundreds of thousands of people are safely hurtling five miles above the ground at hundreds of miles an hour.

[Read: When a Mars simulation goes wrong]

Perhaps future generations will blaze ahead with Mars settlements anyway, deciding to drop down treacherous gravity wells and take their chances on an unforgiving desert. But I’d rather imagine the solar system hung with thousands of asteroid cities, each a spinning jewel of human creativity and promise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The death of the smart shopper]

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

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

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

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

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Pushing the Needle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

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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.

It’s been a difficult and disorienting four weeks in MAGA world.

On March 30, former President Donald Trump was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury for his alleged role in participating in a scheme to cover up potential sex scandals during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump is the nation’s first former president to face criminal charges, and more serious charges may well follow.

Last week, Fox News, the highest-rated and most influential cable news network in America, agreed to pay more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to resolve a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s promotion of deranged conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. It was, according to The Washington Post, the largest publicly disclosed monetary settlement ever in an American defamation action. There are more, and potentially more expensive, lawsuits pending.

And on Monday Fox abruptly cut ties with its biggest prime-time star, Tucker Carlson, one of the most mendacious and poisonous figures in the history of American television.

[David A. Graham: Tucker’s successor will be worse]

“I’m shocked. I’m surprised,” Donald Trump told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly. “I think Tucker’s been terrific,” the former president added. “He’s been, especially over the last year or so, he’s been terrific to me.” Other key figures on the MAGA right, like Donald Trump Jr., described the network’s decision as “mind-blowing,” and called Carlson “an actual thought leader in conservatism” and a “once-in-a-generation type talent.”

Republican Senator J. D. Vance, in a text message to The New York Times, said, “Tucker is a giant, and the most powerful voice against idiotic wars and an economy that placed plutocrats over workers. This is a huge loss for a conservative movement that hopes to be worthy of its own voters.” Representative Matt Gaetz, a MAGA star, lavished praise on Carlson during an appearance on Newsmax. And Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News host, said it was a “sad day for Fox News” but a “great day for Tucker,” because he no longer had to “answer to a corporate power.”

What used to rule the day on the American right was “owning the libs.” But now they are owning one another.

Some of us have spent the better part of eight years warning about the incalculable damage that would be done to the United States, to its politics and culture, and to the Christian witness by those who embraced a Trumpian ethic, defined by cruelty, lawlessness, the shattering of norms and traditional boundaries, and an eagerness to annihilate truth and trust in institutions. Those warnings have been validated, those concerns vindicated. What happened on January 6 wasn’t an anomaly; it was an apotheosis.

Now this movement, which has taken such delight in aiming its nihilistic arrows at the Democratic Party and the Republican establishment, at media outlets and scientists, is in the process of devouring itself. A l’exemple de Saturne, la revolution devore ses enfants.

It is a lesson nearly as old as time itself: Those whose passions are inflamed—and Trump supporters are nothing if not perennially inflamed—are drawn to destruction. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years,” the 18th-century conservative statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke warned.

Lack of restraint is the essence of the Trump movement. Shattering guardrails is what they find thrilling. But what MAGA adherents forget is that those guardrails exist to protect not only others, but also ourselves from excess, self-indulgence, and self-harm. There’s a reason that temperance—self-mastery, the capacity to moderate inordinate desires, balance that produces internal harmony—is one of the four cardinal virtues.   

The extremism, aggression, and lack of restraint in MAGA world are spreading rather than receding. They are becoming more rather than less indiscriminate. Those who are part of that movement, and certainly those who lead it, act as if they’re invincible, as if the rules don’t apply to them, as if they can say anything and get away with anything. That has certainly been true of Trump, and it is often true of those who have patterned themselves after Trump, which is to say, virtually the entire Republican Party.

But it goes even beyond this. MAGA world directs its ridicule at those who exercise temperance, who embrace restraint, and who ask themselves what they should do rather than what they can get away with. Those who reject the ethic of Thrasymachus—the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes might makes right and injustice is better than justice—are dismissed as weak and delicate. The denizens of MAGA world not only relish discarding guardrails; they scorn those who abide by them.

The priority for those who love our country is to contain the wreckage and defeat the MAGA movement. We’re still in mid-drama, so that day is a ways off. But it will come. Because in the end, those who live without limits are destroyed by them.

Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a major force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.

Two of the top news stories in recent weeks—the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal indictment in People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump and the three-quarter-billion-dollar settlement in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network—may seem like independent affairs, but they are parts of one bigger story. That story is how former President Trump has been able to control what information is available to the public, as he has repeatedly done in an effort to aggrandize and cling to his own power. His willing helpers were media companies, but they were not acting as news organizations. The National Enquirer deliberately generated false information and hid true information from the public as part of a scheme to secure Trump’s grip on political power. Fox aired false claims and questioned true ones as it sought to placate Trump’s supporters. Together they have succeeded in polluting the marketplace of ideas in which democratic politics is supposed to thrive.

[John Hendrickson: Inside the Manhattan criminal court with Donald Trump]

But law and litigation has helped bring this story to light. The courts—a place where facts still matter—have shown a path to catching up with the wrongdoers, but worryingly, these cases could also be treated as a guide for future collusive media outlets keen on engaging in disinformation while sidestepping exposure.

Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s criminal case—beyond the headlines about the first-ever charge against a former president and the hush money paid to a porn star—is about the capitulation of the National Enquirer to Trump’s 2016 campaign. The two were a natural pair, as seen in the Bragg indictment and statement of facts: a popular media outlet conspiring with a campaign to suppress stories that could damage the candidate’s chances of being elected. The proof of such an unholy alignment is direct: David Pecker, the head of the National Enquirer, admitted to the Department of Justice that he, Trump, and Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen engaged in a catch-and-kill scheme for stories about alleged affairs and one-night stands involving Trump, with the goal of keeping such information from voters. It was a smart move. After all, it had been the Enquirer that broke the 2007 story of then–Democratic Senator John Edwards’s affair, which ended that presidential aspirant’s political career.

The arrangement with Pecker went further than killing negative stories about Trump, to encompass promoting negative stories about Trump’s Republican and Democratic adversaries. On Trump’s road to the GOP presidential nomination, the Enquirer published more than 60 stories attacking his political opponents.

This scheme thus bore an uncanny resemblance to the contemporaneous Russian disinformation efforts, which also promoted Trump and denigrated his Republican primary adversaries while attacking 2016 Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and praising her challengers, including Senator Bernie Sanders. (All of this is outlined in the federal indictment of the Internet Research Agency and the Russians helping run that company.) Similarly, the Federal Election Commission sanctioned American Media Inc., the National Enquirer’s parent company, for its illegal interference in the 2016 election. AMI agreed to pay $187,500 in fines after the FEC’s nonpartisan staff found that the catch-and-kill arrangement, in coordination with Trump and Cohen, violated federal campaign-finance law.

That we know of the AMI-Trump alliance is fortuitous. The coordination of a candidate with a powerful media outlet in the lead-up to an election would not have necessarily come to light but for the secret payment of money to kill adverse stories—payments that attracted the attention of federal and state prosecutors and led to Cohen’s conviction for campaign-finance charges and Trump’s indictment on charges of falsifying business records. If Trump and AMI had been content to publish favorable stories about Trump and derogatory pieces about his adversaries—regardless of truth—without the element of hush money, we might be none the wiser as to this systemic corruption of our electoral process.

A very similar fortuity revealed an even more pervasive systemic corruption of our electoral process, one involving Trump’s collusion with another media outlet, this one far more influential. Fox Corporation and its subsidiary Fox News would have avoided their recent legal troubles if they had steered clear of targeting Dominion Voting Systems, a private company with enough resources to sue. If their election-fraud claims had been more diffuse and focused on unspecified figures or governments, the now-infamous Fox emails and texts may have never come to light.

But because Dominion brought its civil suit with its attendant right to discovery of Fox’s internal communications, the public now can see an effort—strikingly similar to that by AMI—to curry favor with one and only one candidate, in spite of many Fox employees’ private antipathy toward the man. The Dominion suit revealed how Fox actively sought to promote Trump’s effort to stay in office after losing the 2020 presidential election. Like AMI, Fox became the amanuensis of the then-president, regurgitating nightly his election-fraud claims, lies that plenty of people at Fox, up to and including News Corp Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch, disbelieved. Such efforts included direct coordination with the White House and Trump campaign, reminiscent of the direct coordination between Sean Hannity and Paul Manafort years earlier.

Indeed, the judge overseeing the Dominion suit found that the plaintiff had so overwhelmingly established certain facts, there was no need for the jurors to consider them at trial. One such fact: Dominion did not tamper with any election results, and any claims to that effect by Fox were false. The court went further in its pretrial rulings with respect to the role Fox played in promoting this falsehood. Remarkably, the court precluded Fox from trying to convince jurors—had a trial taken place—that it was merely reporting the news.

[Read: Stormy Daniels’s oh-so-familiar story]

This is yet another aspect that aligns the two cases. In the defamation lawsuit, Fox had argued that regardless of whether the network believed Trump’s election-fraud claims, they were news and thus it had a responsibility to report them. The court rejected this argument, not because such a defense could not be valid in theory, but because that defense was not factually supported in this case. As Murdoch himself admitted, the Fox anchors were not impartially reporting; they were “endorsing” Trump’s claims.

Similarly, AMI claimed in front of the Federal Election Commission that it was covered by the so-called press exemption, which holds that “any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication” does not count as an expenditure on a political campaign. Relying primarily on AMI’s own statements to the Justice Department, the FEC easily rejected this claim. The company “disclaim[ed] a journalistic or editorial purpose” by admitting that it had made the hush-money payments for the express purpose of assisting the Trump campaign, the FEC legal staff explained.

In short, these conclusions of the federal court in the Fox case and the FEC and Bragg in the hush-money case underscore the nature of this threat to American democracy. In both these cases, the most damning thing is not their outcome—Dominion’s settlement or a Manhattan jury’s eventual verdict—but their revelations.

When national media companies pollute the information environment in collusion with a political campaign, the question becomes whether American institutions and the legal system can adequately respond. The courts may hinder Trump, or for that matter any politician with autocratic leanings, from colluding with media companies. But the worrying messages to such politicians may be to avoid mischaracterizing or paying hush money altogether and to avoid defaming a company with deep pockets when promulgating the next big lie. Bragg and Dominion may win their battles, but the electorate may lose the war.   

One person was killed when a parking garage partially collapsed Tuesday in lower Manhattan’s Financial District, Mayor Eric Adams said. Five people were injured.

No foul play is suspected in the US structure's collapse, which took place near Pace University in lower Manhattan.