The best, most audacious idea of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been to present franchises within franchises, entwining various long-running series with their own internal logic and casts of favorites. The films imitate the feeling of comic books, of which people would select issues with their favorite heroes and occasionally shell out for the special ones where they cross over with everyone else. The concept has seldom worked on-screen, though—brands such as Iron Man and Captain America always felt bogged down by guest appearances and post-credits scenes setting up other heroes for the next Avengers movie. Meanwhile, the general thrust of Marvel’s storytelling feels particularly adrift this year after the latest, sludgy Ant-Man film.

However, none of these problems troubles Guardians of the Galaxy, the director James Gunn’s sci-fi action-adventure franchise about a ragtag group of cosmic warriors. Its third entry, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, will be released next week, after a six-year wait. Although the Guardians have popped up in a couple of Avengers entries, as any good Marvel property must, they have largely succeeded at maintaining their own charm. Gunn’s newest film, which has been billed as his last Guardians movie and has the air of a fond farewell, is unmistakably his own: a cheeky but sentimental salute to the misfit stars of a rewarding piece of space opera.

Still, Guardians 3 begins by dwelling on a bit of business from the Avengers movies. In them, the rascally protagonist Peter Quill (played by Chris Pratt) lost his girlfriend, Gamora (Zoe Saldaña), in a grand act of sacrifice, only to regain a new version of her from an earlier time that had no memory of, or affection for, him. The new film sums up this state of affairs neatly enough, with the kind of hurried pique that suggests some grumpiness at having to indulge a wider cinematic universe. But really, the only important info is that Quill is now drinking himself into a regretful stupor rather than working to save the universe.

He's shaken out of that reverie by an attack on his pal and partner Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), a gun-toting, foul-mouthed raccoon of significant intelligence. Rocket is being pursued by the High Evolutionary (a wonderfully preening Chukwudi Iwuji), a geneticist whose cruel experimentation on animals led to Rocket’s creation. Thus, the Guardians must band together once again, to save their friend and defeat his tormentor. That conceit keeps the story stakes pleasantly personal: Yes, the High Evolutionary has soldiers and genetically modified beasties at his command, but there is no Thanos-level, universe-ending threat to defeat here.

Instead, Gunn loads the film with heartfelt flashbacks to Rocket’s life as a test subject, showing him building bonds with other cute, wet-eyed creatures, including an otter named Lylla (Linda Cardellini), as they try to survive the High Evolutionary’s experiments. It’s a bit maudlin at moments—and the film is not short, at two hours and 30 minutes—but that kind of broad emotion has always been a major part of Gunn’s Guardians movies. There’s the irreverent humor that defined his earlier work as a filmmaker (which included clever but schlocky genre fare such as Slither and Super), and there’s also unabashed sincerity.

Since their introduction, the Guardians have grown to include Gamora’s frosty sister, Nebula (Karen Gillan); the sweetheart empath Mantis (Pom Klementieff); a shifty former pirate named Kraglin (Sean Gunn, also the director’s brother); and a Soviet talking dog called Cosmo (Maria Bakalova), who round out the cast alongside original members including Drax (Dave Bautista) and Groot (Vin Diesel). Gunn has built up all kinds of profound interpersonal connections between this sizable ensemble over three movies, and in Guardians 3, he delights in indulging them, digging into all of the ways this makeshift family improves even as its members bicker.

[Read: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is Marvel’s first real comic-book movie in years]

This is probably the only remaining Marvel franchise where I truly care about the characters and what happens to them, which lends Guardians 3 a narrative weight that is a hundred times more powerful than fear of a portentous supervillain. That emotional investment has been missing from so many superhero films (and not just Marvel ones) of late: a sense of why the story should continue beyond making more money and spinning off more characters and merchandise. Guardians 3 is a cheerful goodbye to many of the studio’s best heroes, who somehow managed to get through an entire series without being ruined by the larger superhero universe they inhabit. For Marvel, that’s both a win and a problem.

Librarians and archivists in Ukraine today are fighting to retain control of the country’s institutional repositories of memory. The bodies of knowledge for which they are responsible are under attack from Russian forces. According to the Ukrainian Library Association, three national and state libraries, including the National Scientific Medical Library of Ukraine, as well as some 25 university libraries, have been severely damaged or destroyed. The most shocking statistics relate to public libraries: 47 have been completely destroyed beyond repair; another 158 are badly damaged and in need of repair; and a further 276 have received less serious damage.

The toll of ruination includes several buildings of the Karazin University Library in Kharkiv, which held more than 3 million volumes, including many early printed books and manuscripts, as well as important Ukrainian archival collections. In March 2022, a missile exploded in the Rare Book Library, destroying or damaging more than 60,000 precious volumes, and leaving the University Library staff with a daunting task to rescue books damaged by fire, water, and shrapnel. The Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan is among those who have pledged funds to help rebuild the library.

The destruction of libraries was inevitable given such frequent and heavy bombardment of Ukrainian towns and cities, but some evidence suggests that Russian forces not only targeted universities, but homed in on their libraries—and deliberately so. The day after the Tarnovsky House and Library for Youth in Chernihiv, northern Ukraine, was hit by Russian ordnance in March last year, the governor, Vyacheslav Chaus, went to inspect the damage and caustically remarked on his Telegram channel, “A stadium and a library. Such strategic objects.” His sarcasm missed the point: The destruction of knowledge and erasure of memory has always been a war aim for those who seek to impose their own version of history on the next generation.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

An even more stark example was the attack in March 2022 on the archives of the State Security Service of Chernihiv Oblast. Tens of thousands of records of Ukrainians, collected by KGB agents during the Soviet era, were destroyed by occupying Russian forces. These archives had been one of the most accessible sources of declassified KGB records from the former Soviet Union. There are also reports of archival documents being seized by Russian occupiers, and that the Russian state archival agency, Rosarkhiv, has been active in occupied territories. Many of these archives contain records of Ukraine’s centralized rule during the Soviet period, including accounts of the oppression and torture of Ukrainian citizens—an uncomfortable story for today’s Kremlin.

Speaking recently from Kyiv, Oksana Bruy, the president of the Ukrainian Library Association, told me, “With the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, new challenges related to this war were added to those that Ukrainian libraries already faced.” She highlighted “the damage and destruction of library buildings, equipment, technology and collections by Russian rockets and bombs. In this context, preserving valuable and rare documents, which are the heritage not only of Ukraine, but of the whole world, is particularly acute.”

In occupied Ukraine, Russian troops are taking books from libraries and ruining them by dumping them in brine. To Bruy, this is a systematic attack on the very idea of Ukraine. “The Russians are destroying Ukrainian historical literature and fiction,” she said. In the district of Kupyansk, in Kharkiv Oblast, the Russian occupying forces ordered all school-library books published after 1991 to be registered and destroyed, even children’s books and fairy tales. They were replaced with officially sanctioned materials brought in from the Russian Federation.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, Ukraine formed a distinct part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and later of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Documents relating to Ukrainian lands, known as the Ruthenian Metrica, were compiled from original sources and collated into registers in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. As Poland gained regional supremacy over Lithuania in the 1740s, these registers were moved to Warsaw. In 1795, Poland underwent one of its successive partitions, and the registers were seized by Catherine the Great and transported to St. Petersburg.

Following the First World War, the records were returned to Warsaw—except the parts that related to Ukraine, which were torn out of the registers and retained in Moscow. Their presence there came to light only after 1989, when the new policy of openness admitted researchers to the archives. These records could arguably be considered artifacts of Ukraine’s history, of Poland’s, or of Lithuania’s. Clearly, though, they cannot be considered documents of Russian history. The fact that they have remained in Moscow shows Russia’s enduring contempt for the idea of an independent Ukrainian identity.

During the Second World War, the Nazi regime took a close interest in the archives of their enemies. The Reich Security Main Office and an operational unit known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) were tasked with identifying and seizing library and archival collections from across Europe. Those deemed important were sent to Germany; the rest were destroyed.

The ERR took its name from its founder, Alfred Rosenberg, one of the chief architects of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish policies. He was tried at the Nuremberg trials, and hanged in 1946, for crimes that included the plunder of archives, museums, and private collections. At war’s end, when Soviet forces established control over Central and Eastern Europe, the future of the region’s memory became once again the center of a struggle for political control.

Much of the material looted by the Nazis and discovered at the end of the war was returned to the countries from which it had been seized—more than 3 million books and documents were recovered at the Offenbach Archival Depository outside Frankfurt and restored to their sources by American forces. Records found in Soviet-occupied territory were requisitioned a second time. More than 40 railway wagons carried off millions of books and documents (most of them not originally from Russia) to a massive archival center in Moscow, which is now part of the Russian State Military Archive and notoriously difficult to access.

[George Packer: This is not 1943]

The Russian Federation has followed the U.S.S.R.’s position on seized archive and library collections, either denying their existence or viewing them as reparations for the devastation inflicted by German aggression on the Russian people during the war. The official ideology of the Russian state has altered, but its iron grip on archival material that can be used to dictate an official historical narrative has not changed.

In the post-Soviet era, however, Ukraine has behaved very differently. In 2002, one of Europe’s most important musical archives was returned to its home in Berlin after an absence of more than 50 years, having been presumed lost or destroyed in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Sing-Akademie, founded in 1791 as a choral society, had an outstanding collection of Bach materials, but also manuscript scores by Buxtehude, Froberger, Haydn, Handel, and Mozart.

Originally removed from Berlin in 1943, as the tide of the war turned, the city’s cultural and scientific institutions began to move collections away from the danger brought on by the ever more frequent bombing raids. The Sing-Akademie archive was found by Red Army troops in a Silesian castle in 1945. From there, Soviet authorities moved the collection to the Kyiv Conservatory, where it was secretly housed before being transferred to the Central State Archive–Museum of Literature and Art of the Soviet republic of Ukraine.

Finally, in the 1990s, intrepid researchers tracked down the Sing-Akademie archive’s presence in post-Soviet Kyiv. Three years of diplomacy then followed in order to secure its return to Berlin, against some domestic opposition in Ukraine and severe pressure from Russia. Although Ukraine did not demand any compensatory payment, the German government made a substantial donation to the reconstruction of a church in Kyiv.

The Sing-Akademie archive, now fully available to scholars, has enabled numerous performances, broadcasts, and publications; the renewed access to its materials has enriched world culture. Although not all Ukrainians approved at the time, the return of the archive did play an important part in a process of cultural and political reconciliation, helping Ukraine to become European again.

For many librarians and archivists, the scenes in Ukraine are a catastrophe. For our colleagues there, the uncertainty of whether they will have a building, a collection, staff, or a community to serve are taking a severe emotional toll. Foreign professionals like me have been doing what we can. Along with other cultural-heritage organizations across the U.K., my own institution, the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, along with the university’s museums, sent a truckload of conservation supplies and equipment to Ukraine, and we’ve been encouraged by the images we’ve seen of the crates opened and the supplies put to good purpose. Many international library and archival institutions have been working together to defend Ukraine’s digital space and the electronic-archival collections of its memory institutions from Russian cyber attacks.

“Libraries are currently playing an important role in bringing Ukraine closer to victory,” Lyusyena Shum told me. She runs the organization Library Country Ukraine, which supports libraries across the country. Libraries have become humanitarian and volunteer centers—some helping support displaced persons, others providing aid to the armed forces. “Librarians are the drivers of the struggle on the intellectual front for the brains of Ukrainians,” she said.

We all need them to succeed. Ukraine is fighting a vicious war of extreme violence. But it is also fighting a war of memory and identity. Librarians and archivists are playing a crucial role in the battle for control of the country’s past—for the sake of its future.

For many months now, Ukrainian and Russian forces have been waging a bloody battle over what might look like the most insignificant of locations. On tiny patches of land around small cities in the Donbas region—such as Avdiivka, Vuhledar, and, most famously, Bakhmut—the combat has been so intense that many Western commentators and outlets have been second-guessing and criticizing the Ukrainian government’s insistence on continuing to fight in those areas. According to documents included in the recent Discord leak, U.S. intelligence officials have been warning Kyiv for months to withdraw from Bakhmut. Far better, the skeptics’ argument goes, for the Ukrainians to pull out of the cities and take up new, more easily defended positions in the countryside, leaving the Russians—who seem willing to devote enormous quantities of soldiers and equipment to the fight—only small gains of little military value. Some observers even claim that, in holding on to Bakhmut, the Ukrainians might be jeopardizing their expected counteroffensive, in part by using so many munitions to defend the city.

But Ukraine does not have the luxury of choosing where it has to fight, precisely because it is preparing a counteroffensive. As it seeks to roll back the Russian forces that advanced farther into Ukrainian territory in last year’s Battle of the Donbas, Ukraine needs some time to master a wide variety of new equipment provided by its European allies and the United States, while simultaneously wearing down Russian troops and equipment.

[Read: Impossible choices in the Battle of the Donbas]

Far from being needlessly destructive, the Ukrainian decision to fight for Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and Vuhledar—in what we are calling the Second Battle of the Donbas—has been, like most of the Ukrainian military’s decisions in this war, grounded in solid strategic understanding. The plan has been to use the benefits of being on the defensive to accumulate and train forces for the counteroffensive. Indeed, rather than harming any counteroffensive, the Ukrainian decision to prolong the fighting in these cities has more likely been integral to maximizing the chances of success.

The Ukrainian armed forces face an enemy with a quantitative advantage. The Russian army, particularly after the hastily prepared mobilization that started last September, had brought in a large number of new soldiers—albeit ones equipped, because of Russia’s earlier battlefield losses, with ever older and worse-maintained equipment than in earlier phases of the war. This expanded but flawed army needed time to train. Russia would have served its own interest better by allowing the new troops to develop their skills in protected defensive positions and by letting more experienced soldiers rest up in preparation for a Ukrainian attack. If Ukraine wants to get back the territory that Russia seized last year or in 2014, it will have to force the occupiers to retreat. And if the current war has made anything clear, it is that trying to advance against modern firepower is a dangerous job—as the Ukrainians themselves have demonstrated to Russian invaders many times in the current war.

Yet even after Russia’s 2022 campaign revealed major deficits in its forces’ leadership and effectiveness, Moscow’s military strategists seemed obsessed with the idea of taking the small communities now in contention in the Donbas. So Russia went back on the offensive without trying to fix its manifold problems. The Russian effort in Bakhmut was particularly intense because the community had become the target of the infamous Wagner Group, a private military company organized by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a onetime Kremlin caterer who is sometimes known as “Putin’s chef” and has become one of the pillars of his regime. The Russian army, meanwhile, set its eyes on Kupyansk, Lyman, Avdiivka, and Vuhledar and committed significant resources to their capture. In this way, the Russians unleashed a deadly competition within their own side, as the army and Wagner each seemed to go to greater and greater lengths to outdo each other for political purposes.

The fighting in Vuhledar produced one of the most extraordinary sights of the war. In early February, the Russians, desperate to take the town, ordered a column of tanks to advance single file down a road without demining equipment. The Ukrainians destroyed the whole column by scattering mines before and behind, leading to losses so catastrophic that the Russian commander was fired. Similarly, Russian formations failed to bypass and surround Avdiivka, failed to seize Kupyansk, made countless unsuccessful attempts to relieve Ukrainian pressure on Kreminna, and were unable to push Ukrainian formations back to Lyman (which Russia occupied before Ukraine liberated it in early October). Each of these failed operations cost the Russians dearly.

[Read: How and when the war in Ukraine will end]

Bakhmut has been an even more grisly example of the Russian willingness to sacrifice soldiers. The Wagner Group has adopted a particularly perverse form of warfare. Raw, inexperienced troops of convicts are sent forward to attack Ukrainian lines with almost no hope of survival. Their role is only to be targets—to make the Ukrainians expose their own positions by opening fire. The apparent hope is that Russian artillery and subsequent assault waves can then advance past the bodies of their dead comrades. By applying these extremely costly “human waves” tactics, Wagner has been repeating a Red Army practice from World War II—one that today’s Western admirers of Soviet operational art typically don’t highlight.

However, even this form of self-destructive warfare has yielded only small territorial gains, and the losses of Russian soldiers, especially at Bakhmut, have been particularly shocking. A NATO official told The Guardian in late March that the Russians were suffering 1,200 to 1,500 casualties a day in the Second Battle of the Donbas, with most occurring in and around Bakhmut.

Ukraine has suffered real losses too. In December, when President Volodymyr Zelensky made his famous visit to Washington, one of the most emotional sections of his address to Congress dwelled on the fighting in Bakhmut. “Every inch of that land is soaked in blood; roaring guns sound every hour,” he said, adding, “The fight for Bakhmut will change the tragic story of our war for independence and of freedom.” In March, when Zelensky visited the Bakhmut front, he thanked soldiers for their heroic efforts while also stressing that the fight must continue until Ukraine wins. He has insisted that if Bakhmut falls, then Putin will smell weakness and use a Russian victory to muster international pressure against Ukrainian interests.

The Second Battle of the Donbas has exposed the terrible strategic choices that modern war forces upon combatants. Zelensky’s decision to prolong and play up the significance of the battle might seem callous, but it is part of a considered attempt to reduce Ukrainian losses in the future and prepare for the counteroffensive. Far better for Ukrainian forces to confront a large, unskilled Russian army when it is doing the attacking and exposing itself to great losses. If the Russian leadership keeps trying to press forward under these circumstances, the Ukrainians have to keep taking advantage.

Vladimir Kara-Murza has rejected the charges against him as political and likened the judicial proceedings against him to the show trials during the rule of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Should intelligence whistleblowers be protected?]

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

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

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

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

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

Russia has yet to resort to the drastic reprisals of the Stalinist years, but the regime’s opponents still face some deepening perils.

Soldiers at the northern edge of the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine are constantly on alert with Russian forces nearby. CNN's Ben Wedeman speaks to the men, who include a nuclear physicist who uses a gun and a veteran of the Soviet army who reminisces on the days when Russians, now the enemy, were his comrades-in-arms.

In his speech last night to his supporters at Mar-a-Lago, made several hours after he was arraigned in Manhattan on 34 felony counts, Donald Trump took aim at Juan Merchan, the judge in the 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,” Trump said. He also compared the conduct of Merchan, who presided over the Trump Organization’s tax-fraud trial, to something “right out of the old Soviet Union.”

Earlier in the day, two of Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, attacked the judge’s daughter as well, with the former tweeting a picture of her. This came a few days after Trump posted a fake image of himself swinging a baseball bat at the head of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whom Trump referred to on his Truth Social platform as an “animal.”

[Read: The humiliation of Donald Trump]

I recently wrote that Trump was behaving like a mob boss. That comparison turns out to have been insulting to mob bosses everywhere. Andrew Weissmann, a former lead prosecutor in Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s office, was asked on MSNBC about Trump’s attack on Judge Merchan and his family. Noting that he had prosecuted Mafia cases in the past, Weissmann said, “You do not have this behavior from a mob boss. There is a rule in organized crime. You do not do this with respect to prosecutors. You don’t do this with respect to the judge. You certainly don’t go after their families. It’s bad business to do that.” Leave it to Donald Trump to go where Mafia dons will not.

On the day Trump was arraigned, the RealClearPolitics average of polls showed him far ahead of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 50.8 percent to 24.6 percent, with no other Republican drawing above 5 percent. In recent weeks, Trump has been surging in the polls, including since the indictment was announced.

Sarah Longwell, who has been doing focus groups with two-time Trump voters, reports that in her most recent groups, everyone supported Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination, which hasn’t been the case for months and months.

[David Frum: Never again Trump]

Almost all elected Republicans who have spoken out have rallied to defend Trump. Senator Lindsey Graham appeared to be on the verge of tears as he begged people to send money to support Trump. Even those positioning themselves to challenge Trump for the GOP nomination are rising to the defense of the indicted ex-president. In listening to them, you would think Trump has never done anything wrong, ever. He is a victim, a persecuted martyr—and, as Marjorie Taylor Greene reminded us, he is in good company: Jesus was arrested too. (This was a particularly nice touch during Holy Week.)

Two things are happening at once: Trump, depraved and deranged, is lashing out, more venomous than ever. As my colleague David Graham notes, in last night’s speech, Trump described Special Counsel Jack Smith as “a radical-left lunatic known as a bomb thrower”; the Fulton County, Georgia, prosecutor Fani Willis as “a local racist Democrat district attorney in Atlanta”; and New York Attorney General Letitia James as a “racist.” All three are investigating Trump.

Republican officials, whether they appreciate and admire Trump or are fearful of and submissive to him, continue to stand by him. They recognize that he is the most dominant and popular figure in the Republican Party. And they are stuck with him.

They have had countless opportunities over the years to take the exit ramp, from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, to Trump’s first impeachment, to his attempt to overthrow an election, to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. They have refused every time. More criminal charges of an even more serious nature are unlikely to change that. We’re witnessing the political equivalent of abuse victims struggling to break with their abusers. Having long failed to part ways with Trump, they now feel like they can never break with him. Privately, many Republicans hope that someone else, anyone else, including prosecutors, will do what they were too craven to do, and free them of Trump. But publicly, they are, almost to a person, on his side. The tribe demands no less of its members. To do otherwise is to suffer the fate of the intrepid Liz Cheney.

Republican leaders never grasped how, at every juncture, their willingness to go along with Trump even when they knew better—their willingness to defend his misdeeds, to attack his critics, to bite their tongue, to engage in whataboutism—increased Trump’s hold on the party and further radicalized the base. As that happened, the “normies” became more passive, more compliant, less influential, and more willing to accept and defend a man who is, by any reasonable standard, crazed and unstable. And so, here we are.

The Trump era has been illuminating in this regard. In the past, wondering just how far a party would go in defense of its leader was a matter of speculation. But Trump has moved this question from the realm of speculation to the realm of reality. The GOP has hitched its wagon to Trump, and he is leading them to places even they never imagined. A grotesque man presides over a grotesque party.

In January 2016, when Trump said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters, people thought it was hyperbole. It turned out to be prophecy.

I found it hard to get to sleep on Thursday night after seeing news that a Moscow court had charged the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich with espionage. The images from outside the court shocked many of us. The Moscow press pack is a tight-knit community, and Gershkovich’s colleagues from the BBC, the Financial Times, Politico, and other publications posted “Journalism is not a crime” on their social media. As a journalist who has covered Russia for most of my career and worked closely with many foreign reporters, I count myself among Evan’s friends. The spying charges—a ludicrous pretext for what is, in effect, hostage-taking by the Russian state—threaten the 31-year-old reporter with a possible sentence of 20 years in prison.

Multiple Russian sources told me that, according to their knowledge of how Russia’s government operates, such a consequential action—the first arrest of an American journalist on espionage charges since the Soviet era—could not have been authorized without President Vladimir Putin’s assent. They also said that the razrabotka, an old KGB term for a surveillance and investigation operation, had begun against Gershkovich weeks before his arrest. It had been triggered, they said, by a paragraph in an article published in late December that carried his byline, along with those of three other Journal staff.

The Journal article described how intelligence reports from frontline commanders in Ukraine were “edited” by the KGB’s successor organization, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, before reaching Putin’s hawkish ally Nikolai Patrushev, a former KGB agent who’s now the secretary of Russia’s Security Council. A source with connections in the Russian state media who asked not to be named for reasons of personal security told me that they read the article as suggesting that Patrushev was, in effect, “censoring the reports from the battlefields for Putin.” By the time the reports have been filtered through Patrushev and reach Putin himself, they are “often out of date,” the Journal reported, and “carefully calibrated to emphasize successes and play down setbacks” in the progress of the war.

[David Patrikarakos: Inside Ukraine’s nonviolent resistance: chatbots, yellow paint, and payoffs]

Last week, a man was reportedly abducted from outside a restaurant in Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains. With his face obscured by a sweater pulled up over his face, he was bundled into a van by security officers. The Journal could not verify whether this man was in fact Gershkovich, but the reporter was in the city working on assignment, and the details described were instantly recognizable as the hallmarks of an operation by the FSB. Gershkovich was quickly transported to Moscow and locked up in the notorious Lefortovo Prison, where many victims of Stalin’s purges had been tortured and shot.

The very same FSB was the agency that certified the Russian foreign-affairs ministry’s clearance for Gershkovich, the usual vetting procedure for members of the international press in Putin’s Russia. “Old KGB officers always thought of Americans as their enemies, but now they see themselves fighting a war with Washington, so Patrushev and his key men in FSB are extremely vindictive,” Gennady Gudkov, himself a former KGB officer, told me.

He shared the view that the December Journal article had touched a sore spot among Putin’s associates—“so in their view,” the report was “driving a wedge between Putin and the FSB, between Putin and Patrushev.” Gudkov, who was also a deputy in the State Duma (one of the few willing to voice public criticism of Putin), told me that Patrushev has high political ambitions for his son, 45-year-old Dmitry Patrushev, who currently serves as Russia’s minister of agriculture.

After the Kremlin began its suppression in 2021 on the Nobel Prize–winning human-rights group Memorial, and last year forced the closure of Russia’s preeminent independent newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, the remaining foreign correspondents in Moscow commonly discussed whether they themselves might be the next target for the FSB. Those fears have now been borne out. I spoke with Ivan Pavlov, a leading attorney in Moscow who specializes in politically sensitive cases like Gershkovich’s. “Now the rules have changed,” he told me. “Every accredited correspondent for American media should realize that they are seen as enemies, as a potential hostage for swapping.”

Gershkovich was born in New York, the son of Soviet Jewish immigrants. He moved to work in Russia six years ago and soon became known for his incisive investigative journalism. He lived in Peredelkino, a dacha complex just outside Moscow that had been a Soviet-era writers’ community, and was a journalist at The Moscow Times. The Wall Street Journal hired Gershkovich in January 2022, and he soon gained a reputation for his knowledgeable reporting on the leading players in Putin’s circle, their intrigues and conflicts.

[Read: The bitter truth behind Russia’s looting of Ukrainian art]

In Putin’s Russia, acquiring such inside information can be hazardous. Some of Russia’s best investigative journalists on these themes, including Timur Olevsky, the editor of the online investigative outlet The Insider, and Ilya Barabanov, a correspondent for the BBC’s Russian service, have been pushed out of the country by threats and smear campaigns. I reached Barabanov by phone in Riga, Latvia, where he is now based, and he related one especially chilling episode. “I was reporting Prigozhin and Wagner stories for the BBC, and one morning, I found crutches left right outside my apartment door,” he told me. “Somebody was leaving me a message.”

He went on to explain that Putin has a network of former KGB colleagues, loyalists who head major state enterprises, who can take care of such business as surveilling those whom the regime regards as enemies—including at least 18 Russian journalists arrested in connection with anti-war protests last year. One of them, Maria Ponomarenko, was sentenced to six years in prison for a social-media post about last year’s Russian air strike on the drama theater in Mariupol. What’s changed now is that the Kremlin’s crackdown has gone beyond its domestic enemies. If “an American journalist like Gershkovich travels to Nizhny Tagil [an industrial city in the Urals], the center of Russia’s tank production,” Barabanov told me, “I can see how” one of these oligarchs “complains to his friend Putin about an ‘American spy.’” (There is no indication that Gershkovich’s assignment at the time of his arrest had any connection with the tank plant.)

Several Moscow bureaus of the U.S. press, including The New York Times, evacuated their correspondents soon after the invasion of Ukraine last year. After most American correspondents left, reporting in Russia became more challenging. The few colleagues who stayed—and continued to report on the mobilization, on the growing number of coffins returning from Ukraine, on the escalating crackdowns on any critics of the regime—are inevitably more visible. That could now mean more vulnerable. The Insider’s Olevsky says he admired Gershkovich’s courage; he himself is now based in Prague, but has a keen sense of the prevailing paranoia swirling around the Kremlin. “Everybody in Moscow is thinking these days who will be punished for the war crimes and who is to blame for Putin’s criminal decisions during the year of the war,” Olevsky told me.

Since Evan’s detention, I have been thinking of the famous words of the Soviet dissident poet Anna Akhmatova about the arrest in 1963 of a talented young poet named Joseph Brodsky: “What a biography they are fashioning for our red-haired friend!” she said of Brodsky’s KGB interrogators, referring to the sort of confession they would concoct for him to sign. Today, I hope for the early release of my friend, however it can be achieved. I trust that the U.S. State Department and Gershkovich’s employer are doing their utmost. And I hope that one day soon, it will be the FSB agents who have reason to be losing sleep.

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

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

Today’s special guest will be familiar to readers of The Daily: the Atlantic staff writer Tom Nichols. Tom’s incisive current-events analysis and swashbuckling prose are most frequently found in weekday editions of this very newsletter. His writing on Russia, national security, and, of course, American politics also regularly appears elsewhere in our magazine.

Anyone who knows Tom, either personally or through his writing, is likely aware that he’s just a bit of a 1980s film and TV buff. But he’s been known to dip a toe into the 21st century too. These days, he’s engrossed in the fourth and final season of Succession, eagerly anticipating the return of the Star Trek prequel series Strange New Worlds, and treasures a Robert Lowell poem that was first published—as it happens—in The Atlantic.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Something odd is happening with handbags. Why Americans care about work so much There’s exactly one good reason to buy a house. The Culture Survey: Tom Nichols

The upcoming entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: Well, the honest answer is that I’m glued to the final season of Succession because I’m in it. (I have a very small part as a cranky right-wing pundit. I know: “Nice reach, Tom.”) And Succession, of course, is an incredible series.

But I’m very excited to hear that Strange New Worlds, the Star Trek prequel series, is coming back for at least two more seasons. Of course, I’m already familiar with SNW; the debut that has me most fascinated, however, is the upcoming Amazon Prime series Fallout, based on the immensely popular game franchise. (The first Fallout game debuted in 1997, so that tells you how long I’ve been playing it.) The Fallout world is a weird place; if you’ve seen the series Hello Tomorrow!, where the 1950s are reimagined with floating cars and space travel and malfunctioning robot bartenders, it’s something like that.

Except it all takes place after a nuclear war. So I’m hoping they get that right. [Related: The real Succession endgame]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I just discovered A Spy Among Friends, a limited series based on a book about the infamous Kim Philby espionage affair of the early 1960s. It’s beautifully done. I began my career in Soviet and Russian affairs, and so I’m familiar with the details of the Philby spy caper—which is good, because the series assumes a lot of familiarity with the history. But it’s the kind of period drama you can enjoy watching just for the fine details of its production and re-creation of an era. [Related: Washington—the fifth man (from 1988)]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I’m going to be clever here and say that I have always loved a song that is both quiet and loud: “Don’t Want to Wait Anymore” by The Tubes. You’ll have to hear it to get that comment, I think.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: I have a particular attachment to Joe Jackson. Most people will know him only from a few hits back in the ’80s, such as “Steppin’ Out,” but I feel like he’s one of those artists whose work I have been able to appreciate at every stage of my life. I enjoyed his autobiography, A Cure for Gravity, which is a memoir of growing up and falling in love with music, rather than some trashy rock tell-all. There’s a self-awareness and sly humor and even an awkwardness in his songs that can still make me as pensive now as when I first heard them 30 or 40 years ago.

I suppose I’d add Al Stewart here too. His songs about history are both beautiful and nerdy: He’s a perfectionist, and I have to love a guy who once lamented that he accidentally referred to Henry Tudor as Henry Plantagenet. I recently saw him do a small concert where he performed his album Year of the Cat in its entirety, and at my age, I appreciate a rock star who can perform well while aging gracefully. (Mick Jagger: Take a lesson.)

A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: “The Oath of the Horatii,” by Jacques-Louis David. Don’t ask me why; I saw it as a teenager in a bookstore in Boston, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. There was something about the stilted drama of the scene, the valiant backstory about the defenders of Rome, that made me stare. (Also, I also am slightly color-blind, so maybe the vivid reds and silver in the painting got through my defective eyeballs.) When I began teaching military officers, my understanding of the painting changed: I came to see it both as a celebration of military loyalty, but also, at least to me, as a warning about the seductive glorification of war. For some 20 years, I kept a print of it on the wall of my office at the Naval War College.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: One of the lousier jobs I had as a teenager was as a janitor at the old Spalding sports-equipment company, which back then was headquartered in my hometown. But one of the perks was that some of the offices I had to clean were air-conditioned, so I’d goof off while working the evening shift by reading the books that the art department had strewn around their desks. That’s where I discovered Cape Light, a book of photographs by Joel Meyerowitz. I fell in love with that book at 18 years old, and I still keep a copy right next to my desk for when I need a soothing mental and visual break. My house is decorated with several large prints from the book.

The thing I loved as a teen that I hate now? Vintage arena rock. I was driving along the other day and the band Kansas came on the radio, and I thought: Wait—didn’t I used to love this stuff? The days when I would hear Asia or Kansas and turn the volume to 11 are long over for me. (Some things haven’t changed, however: I am infamous on social media for my love of the group Boston, and my disdain—which I have had since childhood—for Led Zeppelin.) [Related: More than an album cover (from 2015)]

The last debate I had about culture: I cannot pinpoint the last debate I had about culture, because so many people think my taste is so awful on so many things that it’s more like an ongoing project than a single debate. [Related: The complex psychology of why people like things (from 2016)]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I’m not literate enough to fully appreciate most poetry, but I was introduced to the work of Robert Lowell in college, and it stuck. Perhaps I feel a connection to him as a New Englander; I reread “For the Union Dead”—published in The Atlantic in 1960, the year of my birth—every year. But the line that kept coming back to me over the years, and now occurs to me more often as I age, is from “Terminal Days at Beverly Farms,” a very short poem in which Lowell paints a spare, melancholy, almost Edward Hopper–like portrait in words of his father’s last days as a retired naval officer. The old man, restless and in declining health, lived in Beverly Farms, on the North Shore of Massachusetts, an area where I had family and that I have loved since childhood. I have been to the “Maritime Museum in Salem” where his father spent many leisurely hours, and I have ridden the commuter trains to Boston whose tracks shone “like a double-barrelled shotgun through the scarlet late August sumac.”

But it’s the last line that gets to me, because it’s such a simple observation about the penultimate moments before death. I don’t mean to end here on a morbid note, because oddly, this line does not depress me. But I’ve often thought of it because it’s likely how most people die—without speeches or final declarations or drama.

Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.

His vision was still twenty-twenty.

After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,

his last words to Mother were:

“I feel awful.”

[Related: The difficult grandeur of Robert Lowell (from 1975)]

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

The Week Ahead

1. Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a two-part documentary series on the former child model and actress (begins streaming Monday on Hulu)

2. A Living Remedy, a meditation on American inequality and the second memoir by the best-selling author and Atlantic contributing writer Nicole Chung (on sale Tuesday)

3. Air, from the director Ben Affleck, traces the blockbuster footwear collaboration between Nike and Michael Jordan that would cement both of their legacies (in theaters Wednesday)

Essay Illustration by Daniel Zender / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

A Tale of Maternal Ambivalence

By Daphne Merkin

Motherhood has always been a subject ripe for mythmaking, whether vilification or idealization. Although fictional accounts, from antiquity until today, have offered us terrible, even treacherous mothers, including Euripides’s Medea and Livia Soprano, depictions of unrealistically all-good mothers, such as Marmee from Little Women, are more common and provide a sense of comfort. Maternal characters on the dark end of the spectrum provoke our unease because their monstrous behavior so clearly threatens society’s standards for mothers. They show that mother love isn’t inevitable, and that veering off from the expected response to a cuddly new infant isn’t inconceivable.

If motherhood brings with it the burden of our projected hopes, new mothers are especially hemmed in by wishful imagery, presumed to be ecstatically bonding with their just-emerged infants as they suckle at milk-filled breasts, everything smelling sweetly of baby powder. The phenomenon of postpartum depression, for instance, a condition that affects 10 to 15 percent of women, has been given short shrift in literature and other genres when not ignored entirely. This is true as well when it comes to the evocation of maternal ambivalence, the less-than-wholehearted response to the birth of a child, which is mostly viewed as a momentary glitch in the smooth transition from pregnancy to childbirth to motherhood instead of being seen as a sign of internal conflict.

Read the full article.

More in Culture What California means to writers A romantic comedy you never want to end Is Silicon Valley beyond redemption? Dungeons & Dragons and the return of the sincere blockbuster Seven books the critics were wrong about The real Succession endgame ‘Rock and roll ain’t what it used to be.’ Catch Up on The Atlantic An astonishing, frightening first for the country Childbirth is no fun. But an extremely fast birth can be worse. Ron DeSantis chose the wrong college to take over Photo Album VCG / Getty

Tourists pick tea leaves in Fujian province, China; demonstrators convene in Israel, France, and the Texas State Capitol in Austin; and more, in our editor’s photo selections of the week.

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