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The idea of the “informed consumer” may have always been a myth, but online shopping has made distinguishing between reality and manipulation even harder.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

America’s lowest standard Why Pope Francis isn’t with the West on Ukraine Every emergency needs to end, even COVID-19. AI is about to make social media (much) more toxic. An Illusion of Control

Booking a hotel room used to be fairly easy. But as my colleague Jacob Stern wrote earlier this week, the process has recently become a “uniquely excruciating experience.” You might see a few good deals on booking websites, only to click through and find that they’ve become unavailable. In the event that a room is genuinely up for grabs, it can turn out to be much more expensive than the price you were first shown, because of additional fees and taxes. The ordeal, Jacob writes, “will leave you questioning what is true and what is false. It will beat you down until, at a certain point, you won’t even care.”

One potential culprit for this hotel-booking fiasco is the airline industry, which pioneered the use of “dynamic pricing” in the 1980s, adjusting rates in response to supply-and-demand changes. By the late ’90s, hotels had adopted the practice as well. Jacob explains that the resulting price fluctuations cause problems for deal aggregators such as Expedia and Booking.com, which are able to scrape pricing information only periodically and therefore struggle to keep up with the latest figures.

In the end, the common theme of hotel booking is shoppers’ inability to tell what’s really on offer. As Jacob writes:

The best analogy for online hotel booking, I think, is a hall of mirrors: You can’t tell what’s real, and you can’t escape. In that sense, hotel booking, perhaps more than any other everyday commercial experience, fits perfectly into the landscape of 2023 America. This is online shopping for the “post-truth” era.

Post-truth describes the rest of our online-shopping ecosystem as well. In her February article “The Death of the Smart Shopper,” my colleague Amanda Mull notes that Amazon has become filled with junk results and apparent repeats of the same exact product—sometimes with the same exact image—but with different sellers, prices, and ratings. “In these conditions, understanding what it is you’re buying, where it came from, and what you can expect of it is a fool’s errand,” Amanda writes. This problem isn’t limited to Amazon, she explains. Although being an informed consumer has always been challenging, it’s basically impossible in 2023.

Brick-and-mortar retailers are no strangers to consumer manipulation. But shopping on the internet tricks would-be buyers into believing that if they can’t distinguish reality from sales tactics, it’s their own fault. Shoppers can now conduct their own mini research projects when deciding what to buy: They can read reviews, watch videos, consult the opinions of influencers and product-recommendation sites such as Wirecutter and The Strategist, compare products across multiple brands. But access to such information offers merely the illusion of control. Amanda writes:

Because you’re shopping online, you can’t go look at most of the products in a store, and you can’t tell how—or whether—one thing is different from the very similar thing two thumbnails down. You can’t tell if a particular product will spy on you or sell your data … You buy something cheap and hope it holds up—or at least tides you over—for a while. If it doesn’t, you probably can’t get someone on the phone to solve your problem, so you toss it or squirrel it away in the back of a storage closet.

Amanda acknowledges that misleading online-retail tactics might seem trivial to some. But she makes a good case for caring about the decline of what’s left of informed shopping: “If you can’t differentiate one product from a dozen listings for a seemingly identical thing,” she writes, “you can’t even begin to understand the conditions under which it was produced, or at what cost to workers and the environment.” Online shopping strips consumers of our ability to understand the world we’re living in. And yet, we’re living in it, scrolling through product after product, searching for something true.

Related:

Hotel booking is a post-truth nightmare. The death of the smart shopper Today’s News Rochelle Walensky announced that she will step down from her position as the CDC director on June 30. The killing of Jordan Neely, who was placed in a chokehold by another passenger on a subway train, was ruled a homicide by New York City’s medical examiner. Job growth in the U.S. accelerated in April despite interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. Dispatches Books Briefing: Authors frequently manipulate language to unsettle their audiences, Elise Hannum writes. Small choices can have stark consequences.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Illustration by Oliver Munday / The Atlantic. Sources: Mark Newman / Getty; Laflor / Getty.

Call of the Wild

By James Parker

Overheard in the men’s bathroom of a movie theater in Boston, after a screening of Creed III:

“That movie basically just makes me want to get in shape.”

“It makes me want to get in shape mentally.”

“Huh?”

“Bro, that movie was all about mental stuff. You didn’t get that?”

The mental stuff. That’s where it’s at. The mind, the mind—it can bear you sweetly along on pulses of transparent super-energy, or it can rear up and bite your face off. And if, like me, you’ve watched 432 episodes of survival TV, the beloved subgenre that pits bare, forked man against the unrelenting wilderness, you’ve seen it happen over and over again. It’s not Alaska that breaks you, or Mongolia, or northeastern Labrador—it’s the contents of your own head.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The ice-cream theory of Joe Biden’s success The Goopification of AI Bing is a trap.

Culture Break

Apple TV+

Read. A Minor Revolution, a new book about why our children should be more demanding, not less.

Watch. Apple TV+’s new adaptation of Frog and Toad adds a cast of woodland friends that highlight, rather than hide, the duo’s profound partnership.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I explored how our brains get tricked into buying certain products for an edition of the Wonder Reader newsletter last year. Digging through The Atlantic’s archives for stories about shopping, I came across a hilarious account of an annoying shopping experience from 1931. “I don’t like to shop, but I do like to buy,” an advertising executive named Frances Taylor wrote.

One moment in her essay makes me chuckle every time: Looking for an over-the-bed lamp, she’s told that the store only has “one … it is pink and it is broken.” “I too am pink and broken,” Taylor writes, “but I manage to reach another store.” As Amanda reminded us, a golden era of shopping never really existed.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

In early 2011, Ken Jennings looked like humanity’s last hope. Watson, an artificial intelligence created by the tech giant IBM, had picked off lesser Jeopardy players before the show’s all-time champ entered a three-day exhibition match. At the end of the first game, Watson—a machine the size of 10 refrigerators—had Jennings on the ropes, leading $35,734 to $4,800. On day three, Watson finished the job. “I for one welcome our new computer overlords,” Jennings wrote on his video screen during Final Jeopardy.

Watson was better than any previous AI at addressing a problem that had long stumped researchers: How do you get a computer to precisely understand a clue posed in idiomatic English and then spit out the correct answer (or, as in Jeopardy, the right question)? “Not a hit list of documents where the answer may be,” which is what search engines returned, “but the very specific answer,” David Ferrucci, Watson’s lead developer, told me. His team fed Watson more than 200 million pages of documents—from dictionaries, encyclopedias, novels, plays, the Bible—creating something that sure seemed like a synthetic brain. And America lost its mind over it: “Could Watson be coming next for our jobs in radiology or the law?” NPR asked in a story called “The Dark Side of Watson.” Four months after its Jeopardy win, the computer was named Person of the Year at the Webby Awards. (Watson’s acceptance speech: “Person of the Year: ironic.”)

But now that people are once again facing questions about seemingly omnipotent AI, Watson is conspicuously absent. When I asked the longtime tech analyst Benedict Evans about Watson, he quoted Obi-Wan Kenobi: “That’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.” ChatGPT and other new generative-AI tools can furnish pastiche poetry and popes wearing Balenciaga, capabilities that far exceed what Watson could do a decade ago, though ones still based in the ideas of natural-language processing that helped dethrone Jennings. Watson should be bragging in its stilted voice, not fading into irrelevance. But its trajectory is happening all over again; part of what doomed the technology is now poised to chip away at the potential of popular AI products today.

The first thing to know about Watson is that it isn’t dead. The machine’s models and algorithms have been nipped and tucked into a body of B2B software. Today IBM sells Watson by subscription, folding the code into applications like Watson Assistant, Watson Orchestrate, and Watson Discovery, which help automate back-end processes within customer service, human resources, and document entry and analysis. Companies like Honda, Siemens, and CVS Health hit up “Big Blue” for AI assistance on a number of automation projects, and an IBM spokesperson told me that the company’s Watson tools are used by more than 100 million people. If you ask IBM to build you an app that uses machine learning to optimize something in your business, “they’ll be very happy to build that, and it will probably be perfectly good,” Evans said.

From the very beginning, IBM wanted to turn Watson into a business tool. After all, this is IBM—the International Business Machines Corporation—a company that long ago carved out a niche catering to big firms that need IT help. But what Watson has become is much more modest than IBM’s initial sales pitch, which included unleashing the machine’s fact-finding prowess on topics as varied as stock tips and personalized cancer treatments. And to remind everyone just how revolutionary Watson was, IBM put out TV commercials in which Watson cheerfully bantered with celebrities like Ridley Scott and Serena Williams. The company soon struck AI-centric deals with hospitals such as Memorial Sloan Kettering and the MD Anderson Cancer Center; they slowly foundered. Watson the machine could play Jeopardy at a very high level; Watson the digital assistant, essentially a swole Clippy fed on enterprise data and techno-optimism, could barely read doctors’ handwriting, let alone disrupt oncology.

The tech just didn’t measure up. “There was no intelligence there,” Evans said. Watson’s machine-learning models were very advanced for 2011, but not compared with bots like ChatGPT, which have ingested much of what has been published online. Watson was trained on far less information and excelled only at answering fact-based questions like the kind you find on Jeopardy. That talent contained obvious commercial potential—at least in certain areas, like search. “I think that what Watson was good at at the time kind of morphed into what you see Google doing,” Ferrucci said: surfacing precise answers to colloquial questions.

But the suits in charge went after the bigger and more technically challenging game of feeding the machine entirely different types of material. They viewed Watson as a generational meal ticket. “There was a lot of hyperbole around it, and a lot of lack of appreciation for what it really can do and what it can’t do, and ultimately what is needed to effectively solve business problems,” Ferrucci said. He left IBM in 2012 and later founded an AI start-up called Elemental Cognition.

When asked about what went wrong, an IBM spokesperson pointed me to a recent statement from CEO Arving Krishna: “I think the mistake we made in 2011 is that we concluded something correctly, but drew the wrong conclusions from the conclusions.” Watson was “a concept car,” Kareem Yusuf, the head of product management for IBM’s software portfolio, told me—a proof of technology meant to prod further innovation.

And yet to others, IBM may have seemed more concerned with building a showroom for its flashy convertible than figuring out how to design next year’s model. Part of IBM’s problem was structural. Richer, nimbler companies like Google, Facebook, and even Uber were driving the most relevant AI research, developing their own algorithms and threading them through everyday software. “If you were a cutting-edge machine-learning academic,” Evans said, “and Google comes to you and Meta comes to you and IBM comes to you, why would you go to IBM? It’s a company from the ’70s.” By the mid-2010s, he told me, Google and Facebook were leading the pack on machine-learning research and development, making big bets on AI start-ups such as DeepMind. Meanwhile, IBM was producing a 90-second Academy Awards spot starring Watson, Carrie Fisher, and the voice of Steve Buscemi.

In a sense, IBM’s vision for a suite of business tools built around machine learning and natural-language processing has come true—just not thanks to IBM. Today, AI powers your search results, assembles your news feed, and alerts your bank to possible fraud activity. It hums in the background of “everything you deal with every day,” Rosanne Liu, a senior research scientist at Google and the co-founder of ML Collective, a research nonprofit, told me. This AI moment is creating even more of a corporate clamor for automation as every company wants a bot of its own.

Although Watson has been reduced to a historical footnote, IBM is still getting in on the action. The most advanced AI work is not happening in IBM’s Westchester, New York, headquarters, but much of it is open-source and has a short shelf life. Tailoring Silicon Valley’s hand-me-downs can be a profitable business. Yusuf invoked platoons of knowledge workers armed with the tools of the 20th century. “You’ve got people with PDFs, highlighters,” he said. IBM can offer them programs that help them do better—that bump their productivity a few points, or decrease their error rates, or spot problems faster, such as faults on a manufacturing line or cracks in a bridge.

Whatever IBM makes next won’t fulfill the promise implied by Watson’s early run, but that promise was misunderstood—in many ways by IBM most of all. Watson was a demo model capable of drumming up enormous popular interest, but its potential sputtered as soon as the C-suite attempted to turn on the money spigot. The same thing seems to be true of the new crop of AI tools. High schoolers can generate A Separate Peace essays in the voice of Mitch Hedberg, sure, but that’s not where the money is. Instead, ChatGPT is quickly being sanded down into a million product-market fits. The banal consumer and enterprise software that results—features to help you find photos of your dog or sell you a slightly better kibble—could become as invisible to us as all the other data we passively consume. In March, Salesforce introduced Einstein GPT, a product that uses OpenAI’s technology to draft sales emails, part of a trend that Evans recently described as the “boring automation of boring processes in the boring back-offices of boring companies.” Watson’s legacy—a big name attached to a humble purpose—is playing out yet again.

The future of AI may still prove to be truly world-changing in the way that Watson once suggested. But the only business that IBM has managed to disrupt is its own. On Monday, International Workers’ Day, it announced that it would pause hiring for roughly 7,800 jobs that it believes AI could perform in the coming years. Vacating thousands of roles in the name of cost-saving measures has rarely sounded so upbeat, but after years of positive spin, why back down now? Yusuf swore that IBM’s future is just around the corner, and this time would be different. “Watch this space,” he said.

Pope Francis has staked a position on the war in Ukraine that puts him more in line with Beijing, New Delhi, and Brasília than Washington, London, or Brussels: He wants to end Ukraine’s armament by the West and negotiate an immediate cease-fire. Earlier this week, Francis vaguely alluded to a mission he was working on to end the conflict. Yet he seems to have alienated many of the actors whose support he would need to do so.

“Never in the last sixty years,” wrote Marco Politi, a journalist who has covered the papacy since 1971, “with regard to a matter of such international importance has the Holy See found itself in such a marginal position.”

Still, Francis’s actions are neither arbitrary nor irrational. They are a deliberate response to how the Catholic Church is changing—and will continue to change—in the 21st century. More Catholics than ever before live outside the West and don’t see the war in Ukraine on the same terms as Europe and the United States do. Understood in this light, Francis’s position previews the future of the Church as a geopolitical force, one that will be far less acquiescent to the West.

Western leaders have any number of reasons to be upset with Francis’s response to the war. In addition to criticizing the West’s efforts to arm Ukraine, he has implied that NATO deserves blame for the invasion, often quoting an unnamed diplomat who accused NATO of “barking at Russia’s door.” Though Francis has condemned Russian war crimes and sympathized with Ukrainians’ suffering, he hasn’t condemned Vladimir Putin. Rather, Francis has praised him as a man of culture and even suggested that the Russian president has been acting on legitimate security concerns.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

This represents a dramatic break with the Vatican’s traditional philosophy. Historically, the Holy See has practiced what academics call the “great power” model of diplomacy, attaching itself to the superpower of the day. Over the centuries, that’s meant de facto alliances with the Holy Roman Empire, the French monarchy, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. For most of the 20th century, Rome attached itself to Western powers, so much so that Pope Pius XII, the pope during the Second World War and a ferocious anti-Communist, was dubbed “the chaplain of NATO.”

No modern pope has practiced great-power diplomacy as effectively as John Paul II. By the time he celebrated his 10th anniversary as pope some 35 years ago, he was one of the most consequential leaders on the planet—not merely a spiritual figure, but a political one, leading the Cold War fight against Communism. Accumulating such influence would have been unthinkable without the West’s support.

Nowhere was John Paul’s geopolitical power more apparent than in his native Poland. The first Polish pope helped restore democracy to his country by supporting Solidarity, the national opposition movement to Communist rule. Solidarity’s massive labor strikes, which John Paul catalyzed, forced the regime to open talks with the opposition that eventually led to Poland’s liberation from Soviet rule. This was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, and John Paul’s part in its demise was crucial.

The contrast between John Paul’s outsize role in global affairs and Pope Francis’s role in them today is hard to overstate.

As Francis completed his tenth year as pope in March, a contest between Russia and the West was once again being waged on a proxy site in Eastern Europe. Now, however, the pope is at odds with Western powers, instead of operating in concert with them.

Francis has embraced what might be seen as the Vatican’s first multipolar geopolitical strategy. Instead of hewing to the Western consensus, Francis has sought nontraditional allies in his pursuit of a solution in Ukraine, such as Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in part to avoid antagonizing Russia. In this vein, the pope and his top aides have called for a 21st-century version of the Helsinki process, a diplomatic effort to reduce tensions during the Cold War that brought together a diverse set of Eastern and Western nations.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: The reinvention of the Catholic Church]

One reason for the Vatican’s geopolitical realignment under Francis is biographical. As the first pope from Latin America, Francis came into office feeling the same ambivalence about the United States and the other Western powers as many Latin American leaders, given America’s history of interference in the region.

But the principal reason is demographic.

In 1900, there were roughly 267 million Catholics in the world, more than 200 million of whom were in Europe and North America. At the time, the makeup of the Church was not much different from what it was in the 16th century.

By 2000, there were nearly 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, but only 350 million of them were Europeans and North Americans. The overwhelming majority, 720 million, lived in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. More than 400 million lived in Latin America alone. By 2025, only one in five Catholics will be a non-Hispanic Caucasian.

This is the most rapid, and most sweeping, demographic transformation of Roman Catholicism in its 2,000-year history. Perhaps the only real comparison is to the first decades of the Church, when Saint Paul left Asia Minor to evangelize Greece and Rome, thereby transforming Christianity from a sect within Palestinian Judaism into a transnational religious movement.

The Vatican is always slow to respond to such changes. As the old saying goes, if you hear that the end of the world is coming, head for Rome, because it will get there last. Francis’s papacy—and his position on Ukraine in particular—represents the beginning of the Church’s pastoral and political expression of its new demographic realities.

The best way to make sense of Francis, then, isn’t in terms of left versus right, or even East versus West, but North versus South. Across the global South, the conflict in Ukraine is seen largely as a European affair, one without an obvious hero or villain. The pope’s call for a halt to arms transfers, an end to the fighting, and negotiations that all sides could support coincides with the majority sentiment among Catholics who don’t live in NATO member states.

The Catholic Church is not a democracy. But Western critics have for centuries demanded that it become more responsive to the will of the people over whose souls it claims jurisdiction. Perhaps, therefore, observers jarred by Pope Francis’s position on Ukraine might pause for a moment to consider whether Francis is simply reflecting the instincts and desires of his base, to use the political jargon.

For better or worse, the worldviews of his constituents will move further and further from the conventional political wisdom of the West. Should we be surprised when he rejects it?

King Charles III and Prince William have been meeting well wishers near Buckingham Palace.

The Biden administration plans to send additional active-duty troops to the border with Mexico in anticipation of a migrant surge up to and after May 11. On that day, the White House’s activation of Title 42—the 1944 law that allows the quick expulsion of immigrants to stop the “introduction of communicable disease” during a public-health emergency—will expire, along with most other emergency measures dating back to the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Invoked by President Donald Trump in early 2020, and clearly aligning with his overall approach to border enforcement, Title 42 helped curb the flow of migrants into this country by essentially halting the admission of people seeking asylum. The policy’s end is widely expected to accelerate the movement of migrants hoping to take advantage of what they will view, and what smugglers will portray to them, as more permissive borders.

There is a crisis at the country’s southern border—a humanitarian crisis, a public-safety crisis, a social-services crisis. But it is not a pandemic-related public-health crisis; the virus is circulating widely in the United States regardless of whether migrants enter the country.

Last month, President Joe Biden signed legislation ending the national COVID-19 emergency period. When the Department of Health and Human Services lets the federal public-health emergency for COVID-19 expire next week, nearly the full array of policies that accompanied the government’s emergency response will vanish. Because the COVID crisis led to an expansion of social-welfare benefits and access to free testing, some left-leaning health advocates have lamented the end of the official emergency. But Title 42 is as much a part of the pandemic response as was an expanded safety net. The immigration policy demonstrates that emergency powers can also be used for ends that disturb or appall progressives—which is why people from across the political spectrum should be wary of extending those powers indefinitely. Whether the restrictive border-enforcement strategy since 2020 is good or bad is a matter for our normal political process—not public-health powers—to settle.  

[Read: The pandemic’s soft closing]

America has a lot of problems, but not all of them are crises. Emergency laws, which allow presidents to bypass standard legislative and regulatory channels in times of need, should not be a pretext for the left or right to impose its favored policies by fiat. The end of the public-health emergency is a welcome and necessary change. It’s welcome because it captures the reality of a receding pandemic; as of late last month, about 150 Americans a day were dying of COVID-19, a tragic number but one down substantially from a peak of more than 4,300 in early 2021. And the change is necessary because it requires us to stop trying to fix long-standing public-policy challenges through emergency powers.

Crisis management wasn’t designed to save America from itself. The field has a very specific job: When an event disrupts the core capabilities of an institution or entity, as a deadly respiratory virus with no treatment or vaccine did to the United States and its health-care system in early 2020, the government has the ability to make demands that the public otherwise wouldn’t tolerate. But as conditions on the ground change—as the search-and-rescue efforts that follow an earthquake or a hurricane give way to rebuilding—officials must relinquish their enhanced authority.

The past half century is replete with examples of measures that far outlasted the crises that inspired them. Aggressive law-enforcement provisions of the post-9/11 PATRIOT Act continue to be used in investigations unrelated to global terrorism. Similarly, the FDA’s prohibition against blood donations by gay or bisexual men began in the early 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic. The policy persisted for decades, despite changes in science and advances in blood-testing technology, and only this year did the FDA propose a rule that did not require men who have sex with men to abstain if they want to qualify as blood donors. Emergency rules have a way of becoming permanent unless they are allowed to expire.  

The failures of America’s health system and Congress’s inability to pass comprehensive immigration reform were evident long before the coronavirus arrived. A common saying in public-policy circles holds that we should never let a crisis go to waste. Natural disasters and pandemics expose the inequities in society and the dysfunction in government, and sudden adversity gives communities the chance to end policies and practices that weren’t working to begin with. But complex problems typically can’t be solved through the application of emergency powers. My own view is that, although the emergency social-safety provisions helped those most in need, the use of Title 42 was a brutal and unforgiving policy that essentially ended asylum in the United States.

[Juliette Kayyem: The pandemic is ending with a whimper]

The Biden administration—which must try to manage the flow of migrants under existing immigration law—has recently proposed new border-enforcement regulations that severely curtail asylum applications by those who arrive at the border illegally. These stricter policies mirror many aspects of Title 42, but they will have to be enacted through the standard regulatory process, which allows the public to comment; enduring changes in immigration policy must come through the legislative branch.

For better or worse, if our democracy is too broken to produce workable policies on that or any other issue, then a crisis isn’t going to fix it. In the meantime, the only way to prevent the abuse of exceptional powers is to formally abolish them. The COVID emergency ends May 11. America’s remaining woes are ours to fix, or not.

The second episode of Apple TV+’s new kids’ series Frog and Toad adapts a lovely vignette titled “Ice Cream” from Arnold Lobel’s book Frog and Toad All Year. In Lobel’s original, the story is simple. On a hot summer day, Frog and Toad sit by the pond and wish for ice cream. Toad volunteers to go get it, but as he walks back with two cones of chocolate ice cream, the heat causes them to melt onto his head, covering his face and attracting debris such as leaves and sticks. His new mask makes him look like a monster, causing other creatures to flee and warn Frog of the “thing with horns” (ice-cream cones). The tension in the exceedingly short story is that Frog won’t recognize Toad, that he’ll run away in fear after all this trouble his friend has gone to. But Frog recognizes him right away, crying, “Good heavens! … That thing is Toad!” After Toad washes up, the two return to the store for new cones: a happily ever after if ever there was one.

Apple TV+’s adaptation retains all of the vignette’s important elements, but it features the notable addition of a whole cast of woodland friends. Lobel’s version has the odd bird or mouse that does little other than carry dialogue. In the new show, Mink, Mouse, Robin, and Snail are all characters with their own personalities. Mink plays a banjo and sings about the ice-cream flavors he sells. Snail is charmingly blasé about the incongruity of their slowness in contrast to their job delivering mail. Mouse is sweet. Robin is chatty. At first, these characters annoyed me. Part of the beauty of Lobel’s original books is their intent, quiet focus on Frog and Toad as a duo. In comparison, the TV show feels, well, loud. There are many voices, many personas, even the odd song here and there. At best, I initially thought, this change distracts from our protagonists. At worst, it is antithetical to Lobel’s books. Why add all these new faces to a story that is essentially a portrait of companionship?

But the longer I watched, the more I wondered if the introduction of other creatures wasn’t an elegant way to acknowledge and explore Frog and Toad’s singular love for each other. After all, Frog and Toad aren’t just children’s-book characters; they’ve also become queer icons. Lobel’s daughter has mused that she thinks his creation of the Frog and Toad books was the beginning of his own coming out—that the exploration of same-sex amphibian love might have given him the courage to live openly as a gay man. Considering the increasing precarity of queer life in America today, with children’s books being censored for LGBTQ themes and medical treatment being severely restricted for trans children and teenagers, it feels all the more important for a contemporary television adaptation of Lobel’s work to highlight, as opposed to hide, Frog and Toad’s profound partnership.

In Lobel’s books, Frog and Toad’s love is found in the spareness of the text. We can read between the lines and marvel at his drawings, noting how the characters dote on each other. Apple TV+ takes the opposite approach. By placing its main characters in a fully fleshed-out society, we get to see how Frog and Toad interact with their neighbors, friends, and acquaintances. Because we know how the characters are in public, we can contrast their behavior in private. Take the “Ice Cream” vignette, for example. As his terrified woodland neighbors stream by, Frog panics. He joins in their fear because that’s what you do when your friends tell you something horrible is clomping down the path toward you. But when he sees the thing trundling toward him, his realization is wordless and immediate: Underneath all the mess is Toad.

In this context, we see that Frog and Toad’s bond is precious and different. In the first episode, Toad bakes what he declares to be the best cookies he’s ever made. Though Robin asks several pointed questions about the cookies, Toad makes a beeline to Frog’s house. Frog is the only object of Toad’s attention, the only creature with whom he could even think to share the best-ever cookies. Later, when spring arrives and Toad doesn’t want to wake up from his “long sleep”—Lobel’s whimsical take on amphibious hibernation—Frog doesn’t shrug and leave to spend the day with other friends. Similar to Toad’s cookies, the gorgeousness of the changing season fixes Frog’s focus on Toad. This is a moment that must be experienced with someone who complements and helps make sense of his everyday existence.

[Read: What if friendship, not marriage, was at the center of life?]

In short, Frog and Toad are more than just friends. They’re best friends. It’s the way Frog and Toad refer to themselves, and it’s a term I think is purposeful, capacious, and smart. Best friends choose each other every day. They share their lives, whether the deluge of delight on the first spring day or the doldrums of waiting for the mail to come. When we say “best friend,” we can invoke both the romantic aspects of friendship and the companionable aspect of romance. In Apple TV+’s rendition, the platonic flatness of Frog and Toad’s interactions with other characters elevates their connection. No matter how you look at it, Frog and Toad are partners in their beautiful, shared life.

More and more, children, long associated with innocence and joy, seem to terrify us. In the forthcoming novel Cutting Teeth, a group of bloodthirsty 4-year-olds are suspects in a murder case. Baby Teeth features a little girl who “may have a truly sinister agenda,” as the novel’s jacket copy explains. And on the 2022 HBO show The Baby, an adorable infant falls from the sky and then lots of people die. In these stories and the many others like them, maternal ambivalence, ordinary and healthy for a mother to express, is transmuted into a horror story in which children have violent, occasionally vampiric, appetites.

Even in subtler representations of the trials and tribulations of motherhood, something is amiss with our young ones. “The baby I hold in my arms is a leech, let’s call her Button,” Szilvia Molnar writes in her new novel, The Nursery. The book is a sensitive and smart examination of postpartum depression, the kind of suffering that I have only empathized with when experienced by friends, and certainly worthy of literary treatment. But as a reader and an observer I can’t help but notice that there it is again, the child as a threat, a seemingly immutable reality in our culture’s portrayal of little humans. In the mother’s arms is not a unique and vulnerable human being with a name but an alien creature who poses harm. These are the children who pervade contemporary parenthood literature. They need too much and take everything: our well-being, our hopes, our dreams. Even our blood.

But perhaps, as a new book suggests, we’re seeing this all wrong. Maybe the problem isn’t that our kids are too demanding. Maybe the real issue is that they need to demand more—just not from their very tired and lonely parents. They need more attention, more devotion, and more acknowledgment from society overall. In A Minor Revolution, the law professor Adam Benforado makes the case for children’s rights, which, in the United States, are sorely, if not entirely surprisingly, lacking. The real demon lurking in the playroom, and the reason parenting is so oppressive, is the way children’s vulnerability is systematically ignored by the world at large.

Parenthood will never be a fairy tale, and good riddance to a popular culture that presented it solely as such. But the nightmare in which a new mom like the protagonist of The Nursery spends day after day alone with her baby—horrible for mental health—is not the only other option. Children’s rights, as Benforado presents them, can help us reach that non-idealized, non–horror story, messy, fruitful, and joyful middle ground of family life that remains tragically hard for American parents to achieve.

The U.S. is the only member state of the United Nations that has not ratified the Conventions on the Rights of the Child. This treaty, first adopted in 1989, establishes a basic set of rights for children that aims to ensure their safety and healthy development. Children should have the freedom to play and learn, and freedom from exploitation and torture. One need not be a particularly close reader of the news to notice that America is in dire need of this set of assurances—or that it wouldn’t help just children but parents too. Guaranteeing children the right to learn is also guaranteeing parents the right to free, quality education for their children.

[Read: The parenting prophecy]

The U.S. has remained a holdout in part because of a deeply entrenched fear that children’s rights are in opposition to parents’ rights. Nobody—not the government, not to mention the UN—is going to tell American parents what they can and can’t do in their homes. And yet, this very overwhelming responsibility borne by parents alone has metabolized into fear and fatigue, and, ultimately, resentment toward our children. I, for one, would very much like more help from the government in ensuring that my kids have a safe and nurturing environment to go to every day while I work.

Benforado, whose academic works focus on criminal justice alongside children’s rights, has written a book that reads like a manifesto. His ideas are bold, to the point, and ambitious, though some are further out of reach than others. Promising America’s children quality early-childhood education and caregiving is not that difficult to envision. Experts have overwhelmingly proved this to be a good long-term investment for the productivity and psychological and physical well-being of the adults of the future—as well as the adults of today. Passing a universal paid-leave policy to make sure that babies can connect with their caregivers, long a global standard, shouldn’t be hard to imagine either. Nor, for that matter, should making sure that products for babies and children are properly monitored for safety. And if we’re going for low-hanging fruit, what about a criminal-justice system that takes into account whether prosecuting a person will likely lead to their children being abandoned or severely neglected? These are the kinds of agenda items that one can feel shocked to learn don’t already exist.

Others, such as giving minors the right to vote and protecting children from gun violence and climate catastrophes, feel unachievable in today’s political environment. In particular, Benforado makes a compelling case for enfranchising youth and offers a few different ideas as to how this might be implemented and at what age. He anticipates the obvious objections, pointing out that as a society we don’t screen any other voters for their news literacy, historical knowledge, or ability to make good decisions. And do not children, or at least the adults directly attached to children who Benforado suggests might vote on their behalf in some capacity, have a distinct set of priorities, including achieving some of these agenda items? For them, the future isn’t abstract; it’s the reality they are going to inhabit. This gives them a longer-term political perspective than most politicians are able to hold today.

There’s yet a third category of Benforado’s aspirations that I found hard to conceptualize as potential rights. This includes protecting our children from bullying, by children and adults, and having a less individualistic and more cooperative approach toward raising children. I can see how having better social-emotional-learning programs in schools might help our children be kinder to one another. And perhaps if we had more humane work schedules, leave policies, and lower costs of living, we might have a more robust culture of volunteerism and mutual aid. But ultimately our inability to be good and giving people is a Hydra-headed problem in need of solutions that are more complex and wide-ranging than just declaring that a different reality materializes by fiat.

Reading this book made me want to take a nap. The fatigue was not born of boredom and not a reflection on the author or subject matter. Rather, it was the experience of moving in fewer than 200 pages through a detailed examination of our society’s recklessness toward children and then feeling a deep swell of exhaustion as a mom of two not-at-all-demonic kids in this environment.  

In “The Right to Be Heard,” a chapter on late adolescence, Benforado tells the story of a teenage boy named Wylie who lives in Greenbrier, Arkansas. One Wednesday morning, he stood up and left his class to join the national protest against gun violence following the Parkland shootings. In response, the school offered him a choice between suspension and two “swats.” Wylie chose swats, although, because he was 17, his dad had to come to the school and sign a waver. Parent rights. The dean ordered Wylie to put his hands on the wall, stated his crime, and then, using a cricket bat marked with the words Board of Education, a deliberate, nauseating pun, hit Wylie twice on his thighs. A 2016 study found that corporal punishment is still legal in schools in 19 states, and more than 160,000 students experience this kind of punishment every year. This is a horror story, no novelistic or slasher-film treatment required, and particularly for Black students and those with disabilities who are more likely to be on the wrong end of the paddle compared with their white and nondisabled counterparts.

There are Benforado’s own children, who would be drinking lead-contaminated water—which the city of Philadelphia said was just fine—if he hadn’t had the confidence that comes by way of a Harvard law degree, the time and energy to get the water tested a second time, and then the money to replace his own pipes. Or what about the case of the Fisher-Price Rock ’n Play Sleeper that everyone I knew had and swore by, trusted by millions of sleep-deprived new parents, Benforado included. In 2019, it was recalled after dozens of babies died while inside of it. The sleeper wasn’t, as Benforado points out, subject to a single safety test before it hit the shelves a decade earlier.

[Read: Judging parents online is now a national sport]

His book had me thinking about all of the daily indignities of parenting, and being a child, in our society. I thought about those viral news stories about already tired, already busy parents of small children who pack goody bags for the adult passengers on their upcoming flights in an attempt to mitigate these strangers’ potential fury at having to suffer the injustice and frustration of sitting next to young human beings. And what about these young human beings who are made to feel wrong or bad when acting in an age-appropriate manner in public? Where is the parallel conversation about the million ways in which air travel is inhospitable to these parents and children? I was once denied access to my 3-year-old son’s stroller for 90 minutes during the middle of the night while going through customs at JFK. He was too tired to stand. We were too tired to carry him. His hilarious reentry photo, pudgy features distorted by sustained fury, only kind of makes up for it.

Benforado largely focuses on how the absence of comprehensive rights for children affects the one in six American children who live in poverty, and rightly so. Wealth is a remarkably effective replacement for politically enshrined power; those without it suffer far more than those with it. Still, we are all hurt by the lack of systematic concern with our children—and not just in the collective, “It takes a village” sense. We’re either consumed with worry about our children and not being able to buy, with money, time, or expertise, a better life for them, or, if we are half-decent people, we’re consumed with the morality of using our money, time, and expertise to advocate on behalf of our children. The book would have benefited from more personal stories of parents and children in the second camp, illustrating how the status quo taints parenthood and childhood for all—possibly garnering more support for the children’s-rights movement in the process. In a world without these rights, I often feel like my only two options are being a helicopter mom looking out for my special snowflakes or sending my kids to a school or out to walk on streets that are not, sadly, designed with their safety in mind. Thinking about either option exhausts me. I write this knowing, feeling, that there are millions of parents who would happily trade difficult decisions for no decisions at all. I hate it all.

No matter one’s economic or social status, the rights of parents and the rights of children are intricately bound up. Unfortunately, Benforado doesn’t spend time exploring how bound up they actually are. Instead he mostly yields to the conservative construction in which parents’ rights are in opposition to children’s rights. “Parents have the God-given right and responsibility to direct and guide their children’s moral education,” declared the Texas Republican platform in 2018. This vision might include the right to homeschool with a curriculum downloaded from an anonymous Reddit user, to spank our kids, to deny a teenager a COVID vaccine even though she really wants one (as was the case with a girl whose story was cited in the book), or to control the books available to children at the local library.

But of course rights work the other way too. I don’t just want freedom from government intervention when it comes to my kids. I want freedom to send my children to the local public school where they will receive a good education. I want freedom to spend time with my children after they are born and not rush back to work, which, as a freelancer with no paid leave, I did twice. I want the freedom to be a free-range parent in a city with better urban design and safe public places. I want the freedom to go to Target and not worry that the thing I am buying to help my newborn sleep is a death trap. I doubt more ink spent on showing how parents’ rights and children’s rights are symbiotic would do much to convince those who seem intent on seeing them as opposed to each other, but it might help ignite his argument for that enormous middle that doesn’t think about these issues in ideological terms.

Benforado’s biggest idea, the one he ends the book with, is that we should think about children in every policy and business decision we make, guided by a federal bureau dedicated to children’s welfare. I’d add that we need to think of their parents and caregivers too. “Your child’s life is not your own,” Benforado explains early in the book, with the best of intentions, in his extremely sympathetic and worthy attempt to protect kids. Yes, they are not our own. But they are also, not not our own. They depend on us, and with that dependence comes pressure and responsibility for which we parents currently receive little support.

I want the right to enjoy my kids more, to worry less, rush less, work less, and spend less on summer camps, education, and extracurriculars. I want all kids to have the right, starting with paid parental leave and going from there, to a less overwhelmed parent. Make this happen, and I suspect we’d see a new crop of parenthood tales in which horror-story children are replaced by characters that more closely resemble the complicated, beautiful, challenging, id-filled beings in our homes. They’re fascinating.

One of the most revealing statements of the 2020 presidential campaign wasn’t uttered by the candidates. It came instead from a former Republican congressman. “It’s difficult to attack vanilla,” griped Florida’s Carlos Curbelo, lamenting the failure of GOP attacks against then-candidate Joe Biden. Curbelo probably intended to deride the former vice president as milquetoast. But he inadvertently landed on the key to Biden’s success: No one hates vanilla. Biden’s flavor of politics is not everyone’s favorite, but it’s one that most people are happy to accept.

Biden won in 2020 by 7 million votes, but the criticisms of his candidacy have not changed. To the president’s detractors, many of them Democrats, he is old, uninspired, and bland. He lacks the dynamism needed to excite younger voters, and his resistance to radical change fails to meet the moment. But this critique fundamentally misunderstands Biden’s appeal: He wins because he’s banal, not in spite of it. That’s because his brand of politics is the perfect counter to the acquired taste of today’s Trump-led Republican Party.

Consider the contrast between Biden and his opposition: For the 2022 midterms, GOP primary voters nominated a parade of Trump-endorsed conspiracy theorists who denied the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. Say what you will about these candidates and their views, they did excite the base and certainly weren’t boring. Yet nearly all of them lost, ceding competitive swing states in the process. It turned out that what energized Republican partisans repelled the independent voters the party needed to win elections.

Biden embodies the opposite approach. He excels at being an acceptable candidate to the maximum number of general-election voters, even as he inspires only middling enthusiasm among his party’s loudest voices. This quiet cultivation of consensus—rather than crowd-pleasing bombast—is how Biden won the White House. He is vanilla in a world of pistachio and rocky road, unobjectionable to most people and unlikely to trigger any allergies. This is often more about Biden’s affect than his aspirations: Even when he is pursuing ambitious policies, he tends to cast them in common-sensical rather than revolutionary terms.

[Read: Biden isn’t popular. That might not matter in 2024.]

Pundits and activists have never warmed to Biden, but that’s because they are connoisseurs forever seeking fresh flavors. Biden understands that most voters do not live and breathe politics, and that they prize reliability over novelty. Many Americans just want an unobtrusive president who won’t demand their constant attention, especially after years of experiencing the opposite.

Being basic has its benefits: According to The Cook Political Report, polls show that Biden overwhelmingly wins voters who “somewhat disapprove” of him, whereas Trump loses the same set. For the dissatisfied, the president is a safe bet; his predecessor is a turnoff. In the frustrated words of the Fox News host Jesse Watters, “There’s not a ‘Hate Biden’ vote that’s out there. You know, when Trump’s on the ballot, there’s that ‘Hate Trump’ Democrat vote? People just don’t feel the same passion against the guy.” It’s hard to get excited about vanilla, but it’s even harder to get angry about it.

Biden’s intentionally inoffensive formula is superior to Trump’s abrasive one, as the 2020 and 2022 elections demonstrated. And yet, with Trump currently on track to secure the 2024 GOP nomination, Republicans are poised to repeat their mistakes. A recent CBS survey found that 75 percent of GOP primary voters who back Trump are doing so because they believe that “he actually won in 2020.” By contrast, polls have repeatedly found that large majorities of Americans believe that Trump lost. The former president’s loyalists are seeking to serve exactly what the broader electorate is not willing to consume.

This is where Biden’s anodyne affect becomes an asset rather than a liability, especially today. By taking conventional but popular positions that resonate with both Democrats and independents, Biden makes himself the dependable choice. And by receding into the background and letting his opponent do the talking, Biden ensures that the coming campaign cycle centers on the other side’s profoundly unpopular positions. When the only alternative to vanilla is rum raisin with a side of insurrection, the unassuming starts to look quite attractive.

Because Trump is peddling a product that is toxic to a majority of voters, there’s no need for a flashy candidate to compete with him for the spotlight. Biden doesn’t want to drown out Trump’s wild conspiracies and petty cruelties—he wants independent voters to hear them and remember why most of them rejected Trump twice at the ballot box. In a very real way, Trump is the Biden campaign’s best surrogate.

[David A. Graham: Make politics boring again]

In recent months, the likely Republican nominee has been arrested, gone on trial for civil damages in a rape case, and snatched a reporter’s phone after the journalist asked him questions he didn’t like. Trump regularly makes extreme statements that thrill his supporters but alienate more moderate voters. At a recent conservative conference, he declared, “The sinister forces trying to kill America have done everything they can to stop me, to silence you, and to turn this nation into a socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals, and dangerous refugees that no other country wants.” The longer the campaign continues, the more Trump will remind audiences why they dislike him. He is, in other words, the anti-Biden.

None of this means the president won’t lose to Trump in a 2024 rematch, which polls project to be perilously close. But it helps explain why Biden continues to outperform expectations, despite obvious shortcomings such as his age, propensity for gaffes, and history of failed presidential campaigns. It’s understandable that certain Democrats want someone with more flavor to be their standard-bearer, but the trick to being a consensus candidate is to avoid giving voters reasons not to vote for you. That’s Biden’s specialty—and Trump’s weakness.

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With 18 months to go before the 2024 election, a Trump-Biden rematch seems imminent, a sharp reversal of expectation from as recently as this March. Trump’s resurgence is a reminder of what has become a nonnegotiable trait for presidential contenders—and the electorate’s Achilles’ heel.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

A country governed by fear The only way out of the child-gender culture war Ted Lasso has lost its way. The outer limits of liberalism A Good Show

Donald Trump becoming the 2024 Republican front-runner wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. When various Trump-endorsed candidates lost their races in November’s midterms, it appeared that the stench of MAGA had putrefied into surefire voter repellant. But by spring, something had changed. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, briefly the heir presumptive of Trump’s GOP, came under new scrutiny. Once again, this would be Trump’s nomination to lose.

Set aside that he has achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the first former U.S. president to be indicted on criminal charges (a hiccup that, some polling has shown, may have actually boosted his electoral prospects among Republicans). Forget the fact that this particular milestone landed amid a tangle of legal challenges so numerous that Trump himself appears barely able to keep track of them. Forget his tacit endorsement of incarcerated January 6 seditionists, or that he is currently standing trial in a federal civil court over a rape accusation by the writer E. Jean Carroll. Trump has something going for him that DeSantis and other would-be leaders of his party simply don’t: The man is very funny.

Worse, he knows it. Whether or not the 45th president has ever believed himself to be a “very stable genius,” for instance, that now notorious 2018 soundbite is just one of a bottomless supply of examples suggesting the reflexive hijinks of a practiced class clown (consider, also, “covfefe”).

Some critics of the former president might be disinclined to agree with this point, which is their prerogative. But my observation is hardly original. In 2018, Damian Reilly argued in The Spectator that even the then-president’s “most ardent detractors” would have to admit that Trump is not just funny; he’s funny on purpose. And, Reilly added, it was specifically in the humor department that Trump had incontrovertibly bested his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The question Is Trump funny? was, by the time of Reilly’s writing, an established soul-searching prompt for pundits across the ideological spectrum. That there would be any hand-wringing or hesitation, on the part of Trump’s many critics, to acknowledge the possibility reveals much about the outsize role of humor in politics. Which is to say: It plays a perhaps larger role than many of us would care to acknowledge.

Wariness at this state of affairs is not unwarranted. After all, the ability to elicit chuckles from a crowd has no bearing on a person’s fitness to lead. Being funny has, nevertheless, become a necessary virtue for those seeking the highest elected office of the land. It cannot be the only virtue a candidate possesses, but it’s a nonnegotiable one.

The NPR correspondent Ari Shapiro noted as much ahead of the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when President Barack Obama was vying for his own reelection against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Shapiro also narrowed in on why humor is so nonnegotiable. “Humor is an essential tool in any politician’s kit—all the more so in an age of instant, constant media,” he explained. “It can disarm an opponent, woo a skeptical voter or pierce an argument.”

Shapiro pointed out that although both candidates had been “the butt of a lot more jokes” than they’d made, it was Romney who faced the steeper uphill trek of “trying to reverse his reputation as a humorless aristocrat.” (Romney’s insistence, in a CNN news hit, that he “live[s] for laughter” did not exactly help his cause.)

My colleague Megan Garber made a similar observation in her March cover story, in which she argued that American politics has come to resemble a kind of 24-hour reality-television feed, accentuating the ever-blurrier boundary between life and fiction. Recounting some constituents’ blasé responses to last fall’s news of New York Representative George Santos’s many biographical fabrications, Megan noticed echoes of an earlier political moment. “Their reactions,” she wrote, “are reminiscent of the Obama voter who explained to Politico, in 2016, why he would be switching his allegiances: ‘At least Trump is fun to watch.’”

Comedic timing is no measure of moral standing, judgment, or intelligence. Most of us would never flex the skill of “clownery” on a job résumé, and for very good reasons—reasons that likewise apply to public-office aspirants. But, as bygone election seasons have shown time and time again, the thrall of a good show can eclipse better judgment. Let the circus begin.

Related:

Is Ron DeSantis flaming out? We’ve lost the plot. Today’s News Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and three other members of the group were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 Capitol attack. Russia claimed that the United States was behind a drone attack on the Kremlin. A jury found that Ed Sheeran did not infringe on the copyright of Marvin Gaye’s song “Let’s Get It On.” Dispatches Up for Debate: Tucker Carlson was wrong in his analysis of the media, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

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Evening Read Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic

The Future of Policing Is a ‘Little Gay Woman’ Named Terry Cherry

By David A. Graham

One Tuesday this past fall, Senior Police Officer Terry Cherry was struggling to connect with some 75 bleary Clemson University students doing their best to stay awake and not make eye contact with the day’s guest speaker. Cherry, who packs a lot of ebullience and authority into a short frame, was deploying nearly all of it to get their attention.

“Who here wants to be a police officer?” she asked. A few tentative hands went up. “Raise your hand if you want to be an FBI agent.” Twenty-some hands went up.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Republicans’ big rich-city problem This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse. What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine Culture Break Illustration by Jan Buchczik

Read. Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, a novel in which language hits its limit—and keeps on going.

Watch. A rerun of The Office (streaming on Peacock). Then learn what Rainn Wilson knows about God.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Speaking of “covfefe,” I recommend revisiting that typo turned meme—and what it meant—in this brief yet incisive 2019 salvo by Atlantic executive editor Adrienne LaFrance: “Long after the president’s tweets are stripped of meaning by the passage of time and the rotting of the internet, his severest critics will still have to grapple with the short distance between politics and entertainment in America, and the man who for years toyed so masterfully with a nation’s attention.”

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.