Taylor Swift’s inquisitiveness saved her from jumping on the doomed FTX bandwagon.

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This week, I talked to wildlife experts about my most pressing springtime animal questions. But first, here are three stories from The Atlantic:

The narcissists who endanger America An acute attack of Trumpism in Tennessee Adult ADHD is the Wild West of psychiatry.  

Making Themselves Known

When spring rolls around each year, my brain launches into a frantic running commentary. What is that bird doing? I wonder to myself as I walk around. This deer looks like Bambi. Why is that small rabbit all alone? Oh, no, his mother must be dead—like Bambi’s! Should I bring him inside and raise him as my own?

I am not the only one with questions. This is the busiest time of the year for wildlife rescuers and rehabilitators, whose job involves fielding inquiries from concerned citizens like myself. After a long winter, animals are suddenly making themselves known: coming out of hibernation and brumation, emerging from their hidey-holes. They’re having babies and crisscrossing roads and falling out of trees during wind storms. And we humans are encountering them in their various states of vulnerability.

So this week, I drove out to City Wildlife, a wildlife-rehabilitation center in Washington, D.C., to ask experts about the kinds of advice they find themselves doling out every spring. At the office, in the northwest part of the city, a flightless pigeon named Sally greeted me with a tilt of his head from his cage at the door. Four box turtles injured in lawn-equipment accidents were recovering in big plastic tubs. In a back room, volunteers were bottle-feeding baby squirrels, which was so cute I thought I might pass out.

At City Wildlife, I interviewed the experts Jen Mattioli and Jim Monsma—and then, for some regional diversity, I called the wildlife-rehabilitation specialist Tim Jasinski at the Lake Erie Nature & Science Center, in Ohio. Below, I’ve summarized the questions that both centers most often receive, and their best advice.

Some top-line notes: Baby animals are rarely abandoned by their parents; if you see them alone, it’s very likely that their parents are coming back. Touching a baby isn’t usually advisable, but your scent isn’t going to stop a baby’s mother from taking care of it either. When in doubt, call your local wildlife center. And for the love of God, keep your cats inside.

What do I do with this baby squirrel I found?

It’s baby-squirrel season! Other offices might have March Madness pools, but at City Wildlife, employees take bets on what day the first baby squirrels will arrive. The drop-offs began in earnest last week, with 18 babies brought to the center after severe storms knocked over their nests. The most common reasons for orphaned squirrels? Heavy winds and springtime tree-cutting.

The expert advice: If you find a baby squirrel sitting quietly on his own, he probably hasn’t been abandoned. Leave him where he is or, if you can reach his leafy nest, put him back inside it. His mother will probably return for him. You can identify an orphaned or abandoned baby squirrel by how desperate he’s acting: If he approaches you eagerly or climbs up your leg, he’s probably starving. Put him in a shoebox with air holes and bring him to your local wildlife rehabber for care.

Are these bunnies abandoned?

Eastern cottontails, the most common rabbits in North America, build their nests in shallow dugouts and line them with grass and fur. The thing to know about rabbits is that they are extremely chill parents: The mother leaves her babies alone for most of the day, returning only in the mornings and evenings to feed them. So the babies aren’t alone—they’re just alone right now.

The expert advice: Leave the nest of babies where it is. If your dog needs to walk in the yard, cover the nest temporarily with a laundry basket to protect the babies, then remove it when the dog goes back inside. If the mother is dead—maybe your dog or cat got to her—then call your local wildlife rehabber for next steps.

Can I bring this tiny deer inside?!

Don’t! Like rabbits, mother deer leave their baby alone for most of the day, returning only in the evenings to feed them.

The expert advice: If you find a baby deer in your yard or in the woods, leave him alone. Yes, it will be hard, because he’s so cute. But his mother will be back. If a fawn seems injured or is approaching people, call your local wildlife specialist for instructions.

Does this scruffy-looking bird need help?

Baby birds can be confusing. It helps to know the difference between nestlings and fledglings. Nestlings are naked and skinny, like a Skeksis from Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. Sometimes you’ll find nestlings in the spring that have fallen from their nests or were kicked out by parasitic birds. Fledglings are flightless but have feathers—the fuzzy, windswept version of their adult parents.

The expert advice: If you find a nestling on the ground that is still alive, call a local rehabber for advice; sometimes it can be re-nested. A fledgling, by contrast, will be okay by herself. She might look pretty helpless hopping along a sidewalk or yard. But don’t worry: Her mother is somewhere nearby. If the fledgling is near a busy road, it’s okay to move her to a bush nearby.

A key way to protect these vulnerable baby birds? Keep your cat inside. Cats—although adorable!—are backyard super-predators that kill fledglings and migratory birds. According to a 2013 study, cats may kill billions of birds each year in the United States alone.

One more thing: Bird migration is happening right now in the eastern United States, and people are encountering adult birds that have been stunned or killed by flying into windows. Glass kills as many as 1 billion birds every year in America, and experts have tips on how to make your windows bird-friendly. If you come across a concussed bird, call your local wildlife center.

For humans, spring is all pink blossoms and green grass and rainy days. But spring is a particularly vulnerable season in an animal’s early life. The more we know, the more we can help them out.

Related:

The future of conservation is basically Shazam for wildlife. America’s most misunderstood marsupial

Today’s News

In a private ceremony late last night, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would ban most abortions in the state after six weeks of pregnancy. A forthcoming state-supreme-court ruling on Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, which was passed last year, will determine if the new ban takes effect. The Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified U.S. documents was officially charged in Boston federal court with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material. Travel resumed at the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport after monumental rains and flooding forced the travel hub to shut down Wednesday.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Maya Chung rounds up books that ponder the empty promise of good intentions.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Sources: Amy Sussman / Getty; Frazer Harrison / Getty.

How Taylor Swift Infiltrated Dude Rock

By Spencer Kornhaber

The indie-rock band The National has long served as a mascot for a certain type of guy: literary, self-effacing, mordantly cool. With cryptic lyrics and brooding instrumentation, the quintet of scruffy brothers and schoolmates from Ohio conveys the yearnings of the sensitive male psyche. The band’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, has a voice so doleful and deep that it seems to emanate from a cavern. His typical narrator is a wallflower pining for validation from the life of the party—the romantic swooning of a man in need of rescue.

In the mid-to-late aughts, as The National was gathering acclaim with darkly experimental albums, another artist was rising to prominence: Taylor Swift. On the surface, these two acts are starkly different. Where The National’s songwriting is impressionistic, Swift’s is diaristic—built on personal stories that typically forgo abstraction or even difficult metaphor. Where The National’s charisma lies in its mysteriousness, Swift earnestly says just what she means. The National is known for somber dude-rock; Swift found fame with anthems of heartbroken but upbeat young-womanhood. (In her 2012 hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” she even jabbed at pretentious guys who are obsessed with dude-rock, like the ex who ran off to listen to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”) The National became the house band for a certain segment of Millennial yuppies; Swift became one of the biggest stars in the world.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

This week, one of my favorite reads was this profile of Stormy Daniels, the adult-film star at the center of Donald Trump’s indictment. You’ve probably read about the alleged hush-money payments by now and the contours of the Manhattan district attorney’s case. But this story, by Olivia Nuzzi, offers a really human look at what it’s like to be Daniels in this turbulent moment.

— Elaine

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

The indie-rock band The National has long served as a mascot for a certain type of guy: literary, self-effacing, mordantly cool. With cryptic lyrics and brooding instrumentation, the quintet of scruffy brothers and schoolmates from Ohio conveys the yearnings of the sensitive male psyche. The band’s lead singer, Matt Berninger, has a voice so doleful and deep that it seems to emanate from a cavern. His typical narrator is a wallflower pining for validation from the life of the party—the romantic swooning of a man in need of rescue.

In the mid-to-late aughts, as The National was gathering acclaim with darkly experimental albums, another artist was rising to prominence: Taylor Swift. On the surface, these two acts are starkly different. Where The National’s songwriting is impressionistic, Swift’s is diaristic—built on personal stories that typically forgo abstraction or even difficult metaphor. Where The National’s charisma lies in its mysteriousness, Swift earnestly says just what she means. The National is known for somber dude-rock; Swift found fame with anthems of heartbroken but upbeat young-womanhood. (In her 2012 hit “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” she even jabbed at pretentious guys who are obsessed with dude-rock, like the ex who ran off to listen to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.”) The National became the house band for a certain segment of Millennial yuppies; Swift became one of the biggest stars in the world.

[Read: The National further complicates its sadness]

So some listeners have been surprised to see the two emerge, in recent years, as close collaborators. After the pandemic interrupted Swift’s promotional plans for her 2019 album, Lover, she reached out to the multi-instrumentalist Aaron Dessner to help produce two new albums, Folklore and Evermore, the latter of which featured all five members of The National—whom she called her “favorite band”—in some capacity. The albums easily could have amounted to a credibility-chasing costume change: pop star goes coffee shop. Instead, they refreshed Swift’s style by pairing sophisticated, moody arrangements with a new lyrical approach. Rather than once again mine her own life for lyrics, she imagined fictional scenarios: a teenage love triangle, a murder conspiracy among friends, a romance between two con artists. Swift was availing herself of the freedoms, even imperatives, that men in rock and roll had long enjoyed—projecting moral ambiguity rather than wholesomeness and virtue.

Now it appears that Swift may have pushed the men of The National in new directions too. On the band’s latest album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, out in April, Swift’s influence feels pervasive. It’s not just her voice, which she lends to the lilting track “The Alcott”; she seems to have taught them something about the mode of candid self-expression that she has mastered. In so doing, The National and Taylor Swift have become one of the unlikeliest and most productive synergies in contemporary music—the cross-pollination of a gloomy indie-rock fraternity and proudly sentimental, stadium-charming pop.

Murky, male-driven art rock tends to encourage the confession of flaws without hope for absolution. Think of Leonard Cohen in “Famous Blue Raincoat,” a self-lacerating mash note to the man who cuckolded him. Or take the mealymouthed misery of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe on “Losing My Religion”: “Oh no, I’ve said too much / I haven’t said enough.” Like his predecessors, Berninger tends to use oblique, figurative language to evoke his own shame and humiliation. “I know you put in the hours to keep me in sunglasses,” he sang on “Secret Meeting” (2005), possibly alluding to the tears he’d shed over a lover and the ways he’d tried to hide them.

But in First Two Pages of Frankenstein, the songwriting is tighter and often brighter, and Berninger’s meanings are remarkably direct. On the hopeful-sounding “New Order T-Shirt,” Berninger collages images with his trademark flair, and then, atypically, explains himself in a chorus that Swift herself might have written: “I keep what I can of you / Split-second glimpses and snapshots and sounds.” Over the danceable beat of “Tropic Morning News,” Berninger even tells a tale about learning to share his inner life: “There’s nothing stopping me now / From saying all the painful parts out loud.”

The changes in style reflect a change in substance. Many old National songs are character studies of a morose, hapless man getting nurtured—or dumped—by a competent woman. The trope of wife or girlfriend as mothering savior looms perpetually, even as Berninger’s humor, grounded in the mundane realities of adult relationships, usually undercuts it. “Carin at the Liquor Store”—a 2017 track whose title refers to Berninger’s wife and lyrical co-writer, Carin Besser—sees him mocking his own abjection: “I was a worm, I was a creature … I was walking around like I was the one who found dead John Cheever.”

But if The National’s signature narrator used to be a lonely mope, here he’s no longer wallowing quite so helplessly. On the new album, Berninger sings about being useful to his romantic partners. In the gentle, kind closing track, “Send for Me,” he offers: “Send for me whenever wherever / Send for me I’ll come and get you.” Even the breakup songs are a bit rebalanced. The thundering “Eucalyptus,” for example, depicts a couple dividing their belongings. Listening to it is like watching a bout of arm wrestling that’s closely matched and oddly poignant. And on the plaintive ballad “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend,” he’s the one consoling someone whose interior world is—as has been the case for so many of The National’s past narrators—an “awful place.” The new lucidity of the lyrics thus has a constructive purpose. As Swift’s songs have always shown, reaching out to connect with others requires openhearted, straightforward communication—from her outright plea “Baby, just say yes” on the 2008 classic “Love Story” to her simple admission “I’m the problem, it’s me” on 2022’s “Anti-Hero.”

Berninger does seem a little bashful about now acting as a healer. On “Alien,” he wryly suggests, “I can be your nurse or something.” Nursing, as that “or something” acknowledges, is a role that our culture hasn’t exactly shown men how to play. Those who try, in music, tend to overshoot into messianic territory (see Coldplay’s “Fix You” or U2’s past few albums). In dialing back the misery and adding Swiftian uplift, the new album sometimes flirts with this kind of sappiness. One can almost imagine “Send for Me” as the first dance at a wedding or “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend” in a touching insurance ad.

[Read: The real Taylor Swift would never]

But the band guards against cheap inspirationalism by relying on the idiosyncrasies that have defined it all along. Its old motifs—romantic death and rebirth, sad saps saved by realists, drums that burst like flak cannons—now serve a new aim by acting as a reminder that empathy doesn’t come easily. Rescuing people can mean coaxing them to share how they really feel—and that process requires psychological struggle. On “Alien,” Berninger urges someone to “drop down out of the clouds you’re in.” A hint of conflict lurks in the line, acknowledging just how bracing such conversations can be. Real breakthroughs, these artists have shown in their work together, come from blunt and open exchange. As Swift and Berninger sing on “The Alcott”: “I tell you my problems / You tell me the truth … You tell me your problems / And I tell you the truth.”

This article appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “How Taylor Swift Infiltrated Dude Rock.”

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