Republicans and Democrats have reached a debt-ceiling deal. Republicans will agree not to blow up the global economy if Democrats trim federal spending over the next two years, claw back money from the Internal Revenue Service, speed up the country’s energy-permitting process, and impose new work requirements on the food-stamp and welfare programs, among other changes.

Perhaps this is the best deal the two sides could have reached. Perhaps it is not that big a deal at all. But Congress got the deal by selling out some of America’s poorest and most vulnerable families. And it did so by expanding the use of a policy mechanism so janky, ineffective, and cruel that it should not exist. No work requirements in any program, for anyone, for any reason: This should be the policy goal going forward.

The deal, which is pending a vote in the House later today, requires “able-bodied” people ages 18 to 54 without dependents in the home to work at least 20 hours a week in order to get food stamps for more than three months every three years; previously, people only had to do so up to the age of 50. (The deal does expand access to the program for veterans and kids leaving foster care.) It also hinders states’ ability to exempt families on welfare from the program’s onerous work requirements.

Work requirements have a decent-enough theory behind them: If you are on the dole and you are an able-bodied adult, you should be working or trying to find a job. It’s good for people to work, and the government should not send citizens the message that it is fine not to.

The theory runs into problems in theory long before it runs into problems in practice. The point of Temporary Aid to Needy Families, the cash-welfare program, is to eliminate deep poverty among children. The point of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is to end hunger. The point of Medicaid—to which Republicans are desperate to add work requirements, which thank goodness failed in these talks—is to ensure that everyone has health coverage.

[James Surowiecki: The GOP’s unworkable work requirements]

Should infants and kids remain in poverty because their parents can’t hold down a job? Should people go hungry if they can’t work? Should they lose their health insurance if they won’t? The answer is no—of course not, no.

Then, there are the problems in practice. Work requirements impose grievous costs for limited (or possibly nonexistent) benefits. For one, determining who is “able-bodied” is difficult and invasive. Having a disability or a disabling condition is not enough. A person needs to have a specific kind of disability, certified in a Kafkaesque, months-long process. “It is notoriously difficult,” Pamela Herd, a Georgetown professor and an expert on administrative burdens, wrote in a blog post this week. “Not only does it require reams of paperwork and documentation, it requires effectively navigating a complex medical diagnostic process to verify one’s eligibility.” Each year, she noted, about 10,000 people die while waiting for their application to be processed.

It is worth pausing here for a moment to appreciate the cruelty. Imagine you have long COVID. Or incontinence due to pelvic-floor trauma from childbirth. Or an undiagnosed psychiatric condition. You’re having trouble coming up with enough money for groceries, so you decide to apply for SNAP. But you realize you need a disability exemption from the work requirement. You wait months to offer up intimate details about your body to a civil servant, and face a one-in-three chance of getting denied.

Then comes getting SNAP itself. Applying is quick and easy in some states, for some people. It is long and arduous for other people in other places. Half of the New Yorkers applying for SNAP in December failed to get their benefits within a month, as required by federal law; pervasive delays have spurred a class-action lawsuit against the state. If and when people do get approved, they must comply with their state’s work requirements, really two interlocking sets of work requirements. (Don’t get confused!) Folks have to document their hours and log them on buggy online systems. If they’re looking for work, they have to search in certain ways in certain locations. It’s annoying. It’s finicky.

Again, it is worth appreciating the cruelty of it all. Years ago, I spoke with a Texan on food stamps. She had been exempted from her state’s work requirement because she was pregnant. But she suffered a late miscarriage. Did she have to call her caseworker to tell them she had lost her baby? Would the state come after her for not informing them, clawing her food stamps back? Was there some kind of bereavement policy? Did she need to start complying with the work requirement there and then? Another person I spoke with, in Maine, struggled to use a computer or phone and did not have reliable transportation to bring her paperwork to her caseworker in person. What was she supposed to do?

You might argue that such policies are worth it, if they get people to work. But they don’t. Most adults using safety-net programs who are capable of working are working. They just earn too little. And many adults who aren’t working can’t work, because of illness, a lack of transportation, or some other reason. As a result, work requirements at best lead to modest increases in employment, ones that fade over time. In some cases, they do nothing to bolster it. Yet work requirements have a catastrophic impact on the people who will not or cannot comply with them. Those people become more likely to live in poverty, get evicted, and end up incarcerated or homeless.

[Derek Thompson: Why Americans care about work so much]

At a more philosophical level, work requirements cement the narrative that poverty is the fault of the poor rather than the fault of a society with inadequate social services, unchecked corporate concentration, an overgrown carceral system, low wages, and massive discrimination against Black and Latino workers. They bolster the theory that a lack of personal responsibility and cultural rot are the reasons that deprivation persists. They are a way for the state to bully the poor.

Perhaps the best argument for work requirements is that they make safety-net programs palatable to higher-income folks. But the truth is that few people have any kind of granular understanding of these policies; not a lot of people vote on the basis of the fine print in the TANF program.

Republicans worried about poor people working should start supporting policies proven to boost employment, like universal child care and effective job training. Democrats should feel ashamed for ever having supported work requirements. They should feel even more ashamed for offering them as a policy concession to Republicans now, when we have so much evidence of how little they help and how much they hurt.

An old truism says that logistics wins wars—a recognition that outcomes on the battlefield are a result of the systems that underpin the military. Similarly, the still-mushrooming fiasco of Jack Teixeira’s disclosure of national secrets is not just about a single service member or incident, but a cascading failure of systems within the armed services.

Teixeira, who was arrested in April, is accused of using his position in the Massachusetts Air National Guard to share top-secret intelligence with friends in the social-media forum Discord over the course of months—including sensitive information about the war in Ukraine and discussions with other governments.

[Kori Schake: A trivial motive for a dangerous leak]

Prosecutors’ filings as well as reporting on the case have slowly revealed the many moments when disaster could have been prevented. Given his behavior in high school, Teixeira should probably never have been able to enlist in the Air National Guard, and after he joined, he shouldn’t have been given security clearance. Once in the service, his theft of classified material should have been punished and stopped much sooner. More broadly, the circumstances that provided a 21-year-old guardsman with access to such sensitive information reflected a sloppy repurposing of Air National Guard units. The failure to detect his disclosures sooner was an intelligence problem. And Teixeira’s presence is emblematic of the broader problem of dealing with extremism within the ranks.

Teixeira was a troubled high-school student. In March 2018, he was suspended from school after “a classmate overheard him make remarks about weapons, including Molotov cocktails, guns at the school, and racial threats,” according to federal prosecutors. That led local police to deny him a gun license when he applied for one. When Teixeira sought to join the military, investigators were aware of the incident but allowed him to enlist. Then he was allowed to obtain top-secret clearance as part of his job. In short, his town police had higher standards than people charged with safeguarding national security.

Perhaps a young person’s juvenile mistakes shouldn’t be held against them, but the military excludes recruits who have smoked too much marijuana, which is legal in half the country, and denies clearance to people who owe too much on credit-card bills. (In an impressive display of chutzpah, Teixeira later used his enlistment and clearance to appeal the gun-license denial—and successfully got it overturned.)

Once he had his clearance, Teixeira began exfiltrating classified material. In at least three instances, superiors raised questions, but he doesn’t appear to have been punished or had his clearance revoked. Prosecutors say he was caught taking notes on intelligence in September and chastised. The following month, superiors observed that he asked disconcertingly detailed questions, unrelated to his job, during a meeting. In February, he was again caught viewing intelligence not related to his work. Throughout all of this, Teixeira was sharing sensitive information online, apparently not hesitating even when scolded.

“A guy like Teixeira gets a pass because … his most objectionable stuff, he was doing … in relatively protected and private spaces,” Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran who now tracks extremism and disinformation, told me. “It’s not like his commander knows what Discord is.” But Goldsmith said the answer isn’t officers snooping into every Guard member’s social-media presence: “We don’t want to live in a country where everything we do on the internet needs to be monitored.” Rather, better screening was needed when Teixeira enlisted and applied for clearance.

[Tom Nichols: The narcissists who endanger America]

Extremism among members of the military and veterans is a serious and difficult problem—as the many active-duty and former service members charged with crimes in the January 6 insurrection illustrated. This is not to say extremism is particularly rampant in the armed services. A RAND report last week found that support for white supremacism is lower in the military than in the general population, as is belief in QAnon. Support for political violence and belief in the “Great Replacement” theory are similarly prevalent within the military as in the rest of the country. But service members’ tactical discipline and their access to national-security assets make them more dangerous than the average citizen with off-the-deep-end beliefs. Early on, the Biden administration announced a push to fight extremism in the military, but CNN recently reported that Republican criticisms of the effort’s “wokeness” scuttled its efficacy.

In Teixeira’s case, it seems possible that his mien—white, clean-cut, self-styled as a patriot and gun lover—might have allowed him to escape earlier scrutiny, even though many men of his age and interests are inclined to extremism. “It’s pretty easy to keep your head down and not get into trouble, especially if you’re in the reserves or the Guard,” Goldsmith told me. “A guy like Teixeira doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to get in trouble.”

One might ask why a low-ranking, 21-year-old Air National Guard member had access to sensitive intelligence in the first place. One answer would seem to be the Defense Department searching for ways to deal with obsolete units. In 2005, 14 Air National Guard units, including Teixeira’s, quit flying airplanes as part of a reorganization. With the military relying more heavily on drones, the unit was reassigned to handle computers and intelligence from the unmanned aircraft.

My colleague Juliette Kayyem, who for a time oversaw the Massachusetts Air National Guard, wrote in April about how ridiculous it is that someone of Teixeira’s rank was able to see what he was seeing. As The New York Times explained recently, “Airmen like Mr. Teixeira typically fix hardware and software problems and conduct routine maintenance for hours at a time in what is essentially an I.T. support shop while others collect intelligence that they can transmit to ground forces around the world.”

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

If it is true that Teixeira shouldn’t have been in the military or given clearance, and that his position shouldn’t have afforded him access to the material he disclosed, one more glaring question remains: How did it take so long to detect him? “The unauthorized disclosure points to broader systemic failures in the safeguarding of U.S. intelligence information,” Brianna Rosen wrote at Just Security last month, adding, “Why did it take at least a month for the unauthorized disclosure to come to the attention of U.S. authorities?”

Since then, evidence has emerged that Teixeira had been sharing classified information since February 2022. This means that something often described as the worst leak in a decade took more than a year to detect. Somehow a system that manages to violate civil liberties on a mass scale is also unable to ferret out real threats with any speed. Together, these problems add up to a system that seems broken from the narrowest level of recruiting airmen to the broadest one of safeguarding national secrets.

This story contains spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Showtime’s Yellowjackets.

Back when she was just a member of the championship high-school soccer team known as the Yellowjackets, Natalie (played by Sophie Thatcher) was a wide midfielder, according to fans who studied the few scenes of the girls in action. The position comes with little glory. Wide midfielders don’t normally score the goals themselves; they are tasked with attacking from the wings and providing assists. They’re quietly powerful, in other words—often overlooked, yet integral to a squad’s success.

Off the pitch and throughout much of the Showtime drama Yellowjackets’ run, Natalie has performed a similarly underappreciated role. In 1996, after the team’s plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness, she becomes a hunter, only to disappoint her friends when the brutal winter leaves her empty-handed day after day. As an adult, Natalie (played by Juliette Lewis) attempts to unmask a blackmailer threatening her and her fellow survivors, only to be kidnapped by Lottie (Simone Kessell), another former Yellowjacket. Again and again, Natalie has been a crucial catalyst: In the past, she made clear to her teammates how tough the cold would be to endure, and in the present, her disappearance reunited the other women. Yet in the second-season finale, Yellowjackets killed her off. During a melodramatically staged, near-farcical scene, Misty (Christina Ricci) accidentally injects Natalie with a syringe full of poison after Natalie tries to stop her from hurting Lisa (Nicole Maines), a woman with whom Natalie had bonded at Lottie’s cultlike compound. As a way to cover up the circumstances of her passing, Natalie’s death is deemed an “accidental overdose”—a cruel punch line, given Natalie’s history of substance abuse.

Yellowjackets thrives on twisty plotting and gnarly action, but losing Natalie feels deeply misguided. She was the wild card, an unpredictable character who could engage with all sides of the show’s ongoing debates—over whether the girls’ barbarism was driven by natural instincts or supernatural forces, and whether the women can ever heal from their trauma. As a teenager, she ate human flesh to survive, but she also pushed back against the influence Lottie (played as a teenager by Courtney Eaton) held over the other Yellowjackets. As an adult, she confronted her demons—rather than suppressing them, as the other women did—by chasing clues to the murder of her ex and fellow survivor, Travis (Andres Soto). Natalie may not have always been easy to root for, but she was in many ways the ensemble’s conscience, someone willing to act when others wouldn’t, someone posing the questions others feared. Even before the crash, she’d been called a “burnout” by her teammates. By the time the wilderness took them, she had nothing to lose. Watching her, in both timelines, meant watching someone discover who they could be: not just a burnout or an addict, but a true teammate, fiercely trying to save as much of her squad as she could and seeking nothing in return.

The show isn’t completely done with her; Lottie crowns the younger Natalie in the finale as the group’s new leader, claiming that the wilderness spared her life and took their coach’s younger son Javi’s instead for a reason. The development, though, feels rushed. Natalie has barely begun mourning the death of Javi (Luciano Leroux), and the show glosses over her complicated romance with his brother, Travis (played in the past timeline by Kevin Alves). Worse, these events feel divorced from the show’s astute examination of teenage dynamics. The death of Jackie (Ella Purnell) last season resulted from the end of a best friendship, a common experience for many high-school girls; Javi’s death, meanwhile, comes off as contrived, an accident that has nothing to do with the girls’ existing relationships. Teenage Natalie’s new role—and the adoration she subsequently receives—seems, as a result, like a twist made for the sake of having a twist.

The twistier the ’90s segment of Yellowjackets became, the more tedious the present-day plot seemed. Although that was true for many of the characters in Season 2, Natalie’s story suffered the most. Adult Natalie’s misadventures at Lottie’s “wellness retreat” paled in comparison with Teenage Natalie’s trials in the wild, which included faking Javi’s death earlier in the season to protect Travis, trying to find food for the entire starving group, being hunted by her own teammates. Every time the show returned to Natalie in the present day, I felt myself losing interest, even though in theory, Natalie’s final moments redeem her. She puts herself in danger to save Lisa, instead of stepping aside as she had done when Javi fell through the ice. But the situations are nowhere near the same—Lisa had been threatening the women, whereas Javi had been helpless—and Natalie has only burdened Misty (Christina Ricci) with fresh guilt. Misty had already accidentally caused the death of one best friend; now she’ll have to contend with knowing she was fatal for another.

By the final stretch of Season 2, the show—so riveting and inventive in the arcs it has built for characters such as Misty—seemed to have no idea what to do with Natalie. She roamed the compound week after week, befriending people clad in lavender, passively drifting from room to room. But passive was never Natalie’s MO. She was a character who understood that the stakes only grew higher after the girls escaped the woods. As an adult, she was still trying to answer the same questions she had as a teenager: Whom could she trust? What could she do to be better understood? Yellowjackets could have interrogated Natalie’s jagged path to healing after her time in the wilderness, observing how a person explores her beliefs and learns to live a fuller life. Instead, it squandered her potential and did the worst thing anyone could do to an essential teammate: It forgot about her.

There might be some Americans who, a year-plus into the Ukraine war, might be growing numb to it. Some of those Americans might include me, the new host of Radio Atlantic. In my first episode, I confess this to Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and staff writer Anne Applebaum, who have just returned from a trip to Ukraine. We talk about their interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, why continued American support is necessary, and why my flagging attention doesn’t matter.

Applebaum, who has covered the war from start, clarifies the confusing but potentially critical recent developments. Anti-Putin forces conducted a raid inside Russia. And after months of a bloody battle, Bakhmut, Ukraine, is for the moment under Russian control, while Ukrainian forces push at the flanks of the city. We analyze whether this is the start of the much-discussed spring offensive, and where the war might be headed.

The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. My colleagues, Atlantic staff, writer Anne Applebaum and editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg just got back from Ukraine. They returned with a sense that something big was going to happen, and now it seems to be starting. This week, it looks like Russia has taken Bakhmut, a city where the fighting has been vicious and sustained, although the Ukrainians haven't surrendered yet. At the same time, there’s been a raid inside Russia by anti-Putin forces. Now, I have to admit: I’ve become a little numb to this war. I’m just not following it as closely as I used to. So, I got Anne in the studio to bring this moment into focus.

Rosin: All right, I think maybe let’s start with the attacks behind the Russian border. What do we know about what happened?

Anne Applebaum: We know that a small group of people describing themselves as “Free Russian” forces crossed the border from Ukraine into Russia near a city called Belgorod and occupied several villages. They seemed to have frightened people enough to cause a major evacuation.

They stayed for some period of time, so it wasn’t just that they crossed over for an hour and came back. And they described themselves as wanting to use this as a way to provoke Putin or unseat Putin.

Rosin: It’s really hard for me to tell how big a deal this is in the context of the war, because partly you’re describing it as almost like a political stunt.

Applebaum: It’s a political move. My guess—and I’m just guessing; I can’t prove it—is that part of the point is to show that Putin is weaker than people think he is. It’s also clearly designed to show ordinary Russians that they aren’t as safe as they think they are, and that the war isn’t going as well as the Kremlin says it is going. Maybe it also has greater military significance, but that we can’t know right now.

Rosin: It feels like a piece with the generally unconventional nature of tactics that the Ukrainians have been trying.

Applebaum: It’s part of a series of events and random explosions and actions that are designed to unnerve the Russians, unsettle Putin, unsettle the Russian elite, and convince ordinary Russians eventually that the war isn’t worth it, that they aren’t safe, and that the war is coming toward them.

Rosin: Got it. So the point is not necessarily “We are invading Russia.” The point is “This war is not worth your time.”

Applebaum: Yes.

Rosin: Like, it’s a psychological move.

Applebaum: Yes,remember, the Ukrainians do not have to occupy Moscow. They do not have to occupy any Russian territory. They don’t have to conquer anything.

All they have to do in order to win is get the Russians to go home.

Rosin: So this was happening at the same time that Bakhmut seems to be falling under Russian control.

Applebaum: But the Ukrainians haven’t surrendered Bakhmut. So it’s not the end of that piece of the conflict.

Rosin: These two things happened this week. Is this the beginning of what they’ve been talking about—the spring offensive?

Applebaum: It’s not gonna be like, there’s a moment when, you know, someone puts up a big banner and says, right, “Spring offensive has now begun.”

It just isn’t gonna look like that. Somebody quite senior in the U.S. military said to me a few days ago that what you’re likely to see over the next few weeks is lots of small things.

Rosin: This could be like a successful, isolated incident, or it could be the beginning—

Applebaum: —Or it could be the beginning of a different phase of the war. Yes.

So that's an update on where we are in this war. Now, I want to bring you a conversation I had with Jeffrey Goldberg and Anne Applebaum when they were fresh from visiting Ukraine because they had a real point of view on how we should think about this war..and I didn't. And it really helped me see what they see.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I wanted to see if Ukraine could win without the more concentrated help of the United States. That answer is abundantly clear. The United States in this conflict is the indispensable nation. Ukraine can’t lose because of their own moxie and spirit and fighting ingenuity, and the help that they’ve been getting from NATO and the United States so far. But Ukraine can’t win without a much more concerted U.S. and NATO effort to provide the Ukrainians with weapons on the highest level of complexity and effectiveness and scale.

Rosin: Okay. So your question is: How necessary is American help?

Goldberg: Yeah. And the cloud hovering over all of this is the possibility that Donald Trump could become president once again. We know he will take the United States from the Ukrainian side over to the Russian side. So I want to understand what the Biden administration has to do in the next year and a half in order to guarantee a Ukrainian victory, because I’m extremely worried about what happens if Donald Trump becomes president again. And, by the way, I’m not saying that I believe that Donald Trump is going to win right now. But Donald Trump has a very good chance of being the Republican Party nominee. And anyone who says that Donald Trump can’t win the presidency obviously doesn’t remember what happened in November 2016.

Rosin: Okay. The clock is ticking. We have to figure this out now. And this might actually be a critical year. You know what question just popped into my head?

Goldberg: No.

Rosin: Why do you care?

Goldberg: Me?

Rosin: Yeah. Like I’m asking that sincerely. Like, you’re an American guy sitting over here in this lovely office. Why do you care? There’s a lot of atrocities, and a lot of people living outside freedom. So, yeah.

Goldberg: If [Russia’s] allowed to win, it’s a signal victory for the forces of cruelty, barbarism, and authoritarianism. Authoritarians are on the march. It’s a little bit on the nose that Russia is buying drones from Iran. Russia is at the center of a global authoritarian movement that murders, tortures, uses poison gas, rapes, commits genocide. And the United States, at its best, is the country that leads the forces of progressivism and liberalism and humanism against those darker forces.

Rosin: Anne? What do you think?

Applebaum: I would add something to that: namely that it’s pretty clear that Russia launched the war not only to conquer Ukraine, but also as a kind of “screw you” to the international system. We don’t care about your stupid borders; we don’t care about human rights. We’re not bothered about your rules, about the treatment of children. We’re fine kidnapping and deporting children. We’re not interested in the Geneva Convention and the laws on war. And we’re going to prove it to you and show it to you every single day.

Rosin: So was there any reason you guys decided to go now? Like, is this a critical moment when you thought, Okay, we’ve got to be there now?

Applebaum: Yes. This is a critical moment. Neither side is advancing very far. If the Ukrainians are going to win the war, that needs to change. And so the question is: What are the Ukrainians doing to change the way they fight in the next phase of the war? So, we’re actually at a real turning point.

Rosin: What did you think you’d see when you got there? Did you drive around? Was it easy to get around?

Applebaum: We went together with a colonel: a former colonel from the Ukrainian Special Services, who took us to see a group of drone operators.

Goldberg: Wait, explain to me something. So we’re—this is just an abandoned house.

Translator: [Ukrainian speech.]

Goldberg: A civilian house. And you move from house to house for safety?

Speaker 4: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes we change our position.

Translator: Yeah. So people allowed them to be here.

Goldberg: You ask permission?

Translator: Yes. They ask permission. Yes, that’s the thing.

Rosin: And this was the drone workshop?

Applebaum: We actually saw two drone workshops. And what they’re doing is reconfiguring commercial drones. I mean, you can buy them on the Internet. The defense minister described them as wedding-ceremony drones, because in Ukraine, lots of people have them at their weddings.

Goldberg: What do you call them?

Oleksii Reznikov: Wedding-ceremony drones.

Goldberg: Why?

Reznikov: Because you use small drones to making footage of your wedding. Or, your daughter or son. So for wedding ceremony, you will use that camera? Yeah.

Applebaum: You know, you also have to imagine in Ukraine, it’s as if all the clever engineers from Silicon Valley have come to work at the Pentagon to save the country. And that’s something like what’s happening in these drone workshops—of which I should say there are probably dozens.

Goldberg: Dozens, if not hundreds. A drone workshop ... three people in a village can decide that they’re going to invent a better drone and then go do it.

Applebaum: You know, you think of [the] “defense industry” as being billion-dollar companies, and, you know, you think of the military having this kind of strict chain of command. In fact, in Ukraine, what you have is these almost volunteer units, so people of their own volition decide they’re going to create a drone workshop. It’s actually this kind of grassroots, networked, half–civil society, half-military effort that is fighting in different ways.

Rosin: All right. Let’s move on to the Zelensky interview.

Rosin: Was there a moment in the room with Zelensky when you felt something, or were genuinely moved? I mean, like an unexpected moment where you really felt the urgency that he feels.

Applebaum: When Zelensky talks about the civilizational differences between Ukraine and Russia—and by “civilization,” he means Ukraine is a modern democracy. It’s a networked, grassroots society. It’s fighting a brutal autocracy. And when he talks about that, he becomes unusually animated.

Goldberg: So the goal is to teach Russia to behave just like everybody else. Not better or worse, just like everybody.

Volodymyr Zelensky: To show everybody else, including Russia, that to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity. To respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals, not to take which is not yours.

Applebaum: And, you know, even when we asked him some questions about technology, he also clearly really liked talking about the tech university that he hopes to build one day. The achievements of Ukraine’s digital ministry, which has created this amazing app that every Ukrainian has: all their documents in their phone. Which has been, you know, hugely important for refugees and for people moving around the country. He becomes kind of expansive and enthusiastic.

And I think the reason for that is that those are the things that will make Ukraine this, you know, networked democracy that he wants it to be. So he has a very clear vision of what kind of country it is, and where it’s going. In order to achieve those things, he has to win the war. So it’s not so much that, you know, he becomes excited saying, I need this kind of weapon and that kind of weapon. He becomes excited when he’s talking about what he wants to build: you know, his dreams for the Ukraine of the future.

Rosin: And why does that matter to you?

Applebaum: Because it echoes with what so many other people I know in so many other parts of the world want also. Right before I went to Ukraine, I had a conversation with an Iranian friend of mine.

And he said to me, “We in Iran are waiting for the results of this war, because it will be so inspiring to us if a society like Ukraine can defeat a society like Russia. Because that’s what the Iranian human-rights movement, the Iranian democracy movement wants to do, too.”

And the conversations I’ve had with Venezuelans, with Belarusians, even with Poles—all of them find this war unbelievably inspiring. And it’s because it’s a war for a civilization that they also aspire to. So, there is a universal aspect of it.

Rosin: It’s really very basic. It’s: What kind of world are we gonna live in?

Applebaum: Yes. Are we going to live in a world, you know, where we talk about tech universities and new ways of making people’s lives better?

Or are we going to live in the kind of world that Russia wants to create, where the powerful can rape and murder and kidnap the weak? And those really are two choices in front of us.

Goldberg: [Zelensky] has this domino theory that goes like this: If the West allows Ukraine to fall, or to come under even partial permanent control of Russia, Russia does not stop. Russia goes into Moldova.

Zelensky: If they will occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they will occupy Moldova through Belarus, they will occupy Baltic countries, which are members of NATO. Of course they are brave people and they will fight—but they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapon. And when they will occupy NATO countries, the question is, will you send all your soldiers with weapons, all your pilots, all your ships? Will you send tanks and armored vehicles with your young people? Will you do? Because if you will not do it, you will have no NATO.

Rosin: Like, do we think Russia is going to invade Estonia?

Applebaum: Yes. I think Russia would invade Estonia. Putin, the interesting thing about him is, he always says what he’s going to do. He and others around him have made comments about Poland, you know, and the Baltic states as well. So I’m not as much in doubt of that. Remember, we just got through an American presidency during which, you know, Trump made it very clear several times on the record and multiple times off the record that he doesn’t like NATO. And the Russians heard that. And so I think this was the beginning of a kind of test. You know, if everybody caves on Ukraine, if they’re not going to defend Ukraine, why would they defend Poland?

Rosin: So the fact that it lands in my head like “foreign-policy chess game” is just because [of] a failure of imagination?

Applebaum: It’s a failure of imagination. And also, you’re not listening to Putin. I mean, he’s telling us all the time what he’s going to do. He’s telling us how he thinks.

Goldberg: That’s a failure of moral imagination. Because if somebody were being rounded up on the next street over to you and shot behind their houses and buried in a grave 100 feet from your house, you would be appalled, and you would rise up and fight them, even to your death. So there’s no difference between that and what’s happening in eastern Ukraine, except distance. Just keeps it just out of sight, out of mind. And that, by the way, I am being very, very careful and explicit to say that neither Anne or I or really anyone we know [is] advocating for the use of American troops in any combat situation. I mean, I think if there’s something that we’ve learned from previous American adventures—from Vietnam to Iraq and so on—is that if the people who are seeking liberation can’t do the physical fighting themselves, it’s not worth getting involved in that conflict. But here, you have a conflict that’s tailor-made for the U.S.’s strength. I don't think that Americans are anti-war. Americans are anti–“wars that you don’t win quickly.”

Rosin: I guess it’s that we have been, in the past, romanced by overseas narratives of freedom and democracy: gotten involved, spent a lot of money. And for what? Now you’re saying this is not one of those cases.

Applebaum: Well, we’re also not sending American soldiers there. You know, on the contrary, by investing in Ukrainians, you know, we might be saving American soldiers down the line. Again: The occupation of Ukraine, the presence of Russia on the borders of Poland or the Baltic states, these would then begin to be direct threats to people whom our treaties say we need to defend, ourselves. It would be very nice never to have to face that problem.

Rosin: I just want to end this episode sort of speaking to people who, you know, have stopped reading, basically. Like I’m a stand-in for those people.

Goldberg: You know what? We’ve been in Korea since 1950. The thing that allows us to stay in Korea that did not allow us to stay in Iraq or Afghanistan is that American soldiers aren’t dying. If the bullied, if the oppressed, if the invaded can defend themselves—if we provide them with some guns—isn’t that a better formula? And, by the way, it’s also a formula that Americans can live with, because Americans themselves are not in harm’s way.

Rosin: This is actually the perfect and correct kind of engagement for an age of limited attention span. Who cares if people don’t care? Who cares if people aren’t reading? Like, my question is not that relevant a question , because we’ve actually designed a form of engagement that’s effective, necessary…

Applebaum: But, you know, the point of this war isn’t to entertain Americans. The point of the war is to win. I actually have a Ukrainian friend who’s often outside the country, and she appears often on panels in conferences. And she says the most irritating question to her as a Ukrainian is, you know, “What will happen if everyone gets bored of the war?” And she’s like, well, “You know, I can’t afford to get bored of the war.”

The war is not there to entertain you. The point isn’t to be exciting.This is the moment when we’re making a principled stand in favor of Ukraine, but also in favor of a kind of world order and a set of rules that we believe in. Right now, there is political consensus.

Rosin: Mm hmm. That’s the T-shirt. Our war is not here to entertain you.

Goldberg: That actually is sort of an amazing statement.

Four hooded figures seemed to float down the stage, through the soft exhalations of a fog machine. On their shoulders, they carried a body clothed in black. Rain and lightning flashed a clean white on the screen behind them. When the man was finally laid on the ground, what followed looked like a resurrection: The spotlights found him, screams rose, and at last he stirred. Then he raised a microphone to his mouth.

This rock-star Lazarus was Min Yoongi, better known as the rapper and songwriter Suga of the Grammy-nominated, chart-topping South Korean group BTS. But none of his bandmates were onstage that night at UBS Arena, on Long Island, New York, because it was the first date of his solo world tour. Since last summer, the members have been focusing on individual projects as each prepares to complete his mandatory military service. The first in BTS to do a solo tour, Suga was also performing as Agust D, the name he adopted in 2016 for making music that was darker, more raw, and more personal than his group work. Last month, he released his studio album D-Day, the powerful conclusion to his trilogy of Agust D records, which delivered social critique and meditations on trauma, fame, mental illness, alienation, and forgiveness.

Suga’s ongoing tour, also titled D-Day, is the first real showcase of his oeuvre, and, on the sold-out U.S. leg of his tour, it felt like a declaration of artistic individuality more than a decade in the making. His concerts exploded with frontman energy and auteurist flourishes. But his most striking achievement was embracing pop music’s empathy-fueling potential while resisting its dehumanizing effects.

All 11 of his U.S. tour dates, which wrapped Wednesday night in Oakland, California, began with a short film that ended with Suga lying on a road in a thunderstorm. This was a reference to when he was hit by a car while working in Seoul part-time as a delivery boy to support himself while training to debut with BTS. The crash left him with a painful shoulder injury that continued to dog him even as BTS went on to achieve international fame. The segue from the video to the real-life Suga being carried onstage, seemingly lifeless, was smooth yet jarring—a reminder of the human vulnerability of a pop star whose fans camp outside concert venues for days.

When I saw Suga on that first night, at UBS Arena, as well as the final U.S. night, at Oakland Arena, his show challenged expectations of what a pop concert can do. On one level it was a dynamic hip-hop show, put on by a technically proficient rapper who as a kid would sample the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music to make his own beats. Suga set the tone for the evening with “Haegeum,” whose title refers both to a Korean string instrument and to the notion of lifting a ban on something that was forbidden. “Endless influx of information prohibits freedom of imagination / And seeks conformity of thought,” Suga rapped in Korean. “Slaves to capitalism, slaves to money, slaves to hatred and prejudice / Slaves to YouTube, slaves to flexin’.” The haegeum’s haunting strings and a deliciously grimy bass vibrated the air. Though the track was written entirely in Korean, the crowd roared the lyrics back to him. He practically entered a hypnotic state while running through a rap-heavy opening sequence with the defiant “Daechwita” and the earlier fan favorites “Agust D” and “Give It to Me.”

[Read: The friends who listen to BTS together stay together]

Before the audience could get too settled, Suga brought out his acoustic guitar, its body decorated with messages and drawings from the other six BTS members. He’d only learned to play the instrument during the pandemic, so his unplugged version of “Seesaw” cut a sharp contrast to previous performances of the song, which featured choreography, backup dancers, and an elaborate set. His effortless swagger during the earlier hype songs gave way to the quieter spectacle of Suga in singer-songwriter mode. Later, he sat down at an upright piano and performed his own version of the 2020 BTS track “Life Goes On” and, in a particularly emotional moment, a solo rendition of the song “Snooze,” which features the singer Woosung and the late Sakamoto. A clip of Suga and Sakamoto’s sole meeting, from late 2022, played beforehand on the big screen—the older musician playing the song on a grand piano while the younger man tries to contain his joy. Sakamoto’s presence on “Snooze,” one of his final collaborations, was especially poignant to Suga, who idolized him and wrote the song to comfort younger struggling artists.

[Read: The astonishing duality of BTS]

Again and again, D-Day allowed Suga to experiment in ways that he hadn’t been able to with BTS, and it was thrilling to see. Yes, he was still clearly a seasoned entertainer, who knew how to command the attention of tens of thousands of people, who could jump around a stage rapping without appearing to take a breath, as during the exhilarating medley of BTS rap songs in the middle of the concert. And at two Los Angeles shows, he welcomed guest appearances by the American singers Max and Halsey for their respective collaborations. But his subversive choices stood out too. The concert was interspersed with short films that evoked the dream logic of David Lynch and the grainy aesthetic of grind-house movies, telling the story of the musician’s three identities: the pop idol Suga, the shadow self Agust D, and the human Min Yoongi. The ultimate artistic aim of the concert seemed to be to clarify each of these distinct selves to the audience while recognizing that they must all exist together. Seeing him perform his solo BTS songs, including “Interlude: Shadow,” as well as his verses from tracks with the other BTS rappers, affirmed that he wasn’t looking to reject his past but instead was proud of it. After all, it had taken him to South Korea’s Blue House, America’s White House, the United Nations General Assembly, and the Grammys stage.

In another fascinating production choice, throughout the show, pieces of the extended stage were pulled to the ceiling by chains, giving Suga less and less space to perform, requiring him to navigate the platform more carefully. For his last pre-encore song, “Amygdala,” he stood on a lonely-looking square as fire blazed all around him, a terrifying prison. The centerpiece of the D-Day album, the emo-rap track serves as an origin story for the alter ego of Agust D, referencing his life’s defining traumas—the car accident, his mother’s heart surgery, and his father’s liver-cancer diagnosis—and how they shaped him. During the song’s final lines, apparently depleted, he collapsed on the ground, and the hooded figures returned to carry him away. Only this time, he wore all white, as though he’d been cleansed, his catharsis complete.

By the encore, all of the stage pieces had been removed, revealing the technical equipment that had been hiding beneath it. Scattered about were fire extinguishers, electrical cords, pyrotechnic devices. No longer elevated above the crowd, Suga performed his last few songs at ground level, right in front of fans, sometimes grabbing their phones and filming himself. These last moments were bittersweet: Much of the audience knew that after the tour ended in Seoul in late June, Suga would begin his military service for at least 18 months. That reality made the concerts feel like a temporary farewell. Fans’ glowing lightsticks rippled like a single wave throughout the arena. Every so often, carried by a feral energy, the crowd would start barking, making Suga gawk or laugh. In Oakland, he told the audience that he would return with the rest of the BTS members, asking fans to wait just a little longer.

On the tour’s first night, one more surprise awaited. I had assumed that the final song would be something sentimental or light-hearted. Instead, Suga walked over to an ominous circle of video cameras, stood right in the middle, and began murmuring the opening bars of “The Last.” This song, off his first mixtape, is one of his best and one of my favorites. It’s also a song I have a hard time listening to these days. On “The Last,” Suga raps about his OCD, depression, and social anxiety. His delivery starts out low and subdued and gradually grows more desperate; by the end he sounds like he’s somewhere between screaming and crying. When I first heard it years ago, I recalled my own unceasing panic attacks and the suffocating desire to die. The song lodged itself in my heart, a welcome shard.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

In recent years, Suga has made more music about growth, about self-love and being okay with uncertainty and suffering. He spoke early during the concert, in English, about wanting to perform with less anger, highlighting songs such as “SDL,” “People,” and “People Pt. 2”; these tracks painted a portrait of someone with a great capacity for measured reflection, forgiveness, and humility in the face of life’s challenges. I understand that too: The relief of no longer hurting so badly, of discovering healing on your own terms. So when I heard the first lines of “The Last” (“On the other side of the famous idol rapper stands my weak self, it’s a bit dangerous”), I froze. What was he doing? Those cameras—arrayed like a surveillance system, transmitting the videos to the screen above him—devoured and projected the anguish he was performing, suggesting that I was devouring it too.

But after a minute, I understood. Though he rapped with the same breathless passion he did as a striving 23-year-old, I realized that he wasn’t performing with pure fury but with an anger tempered by time. This emotion was no less powerful or sincere, but it was less damaging to the person communicating it. These days, he could stand in the flames and feel their heat, but not be consumed by them. He could connect with his younger self without fully becoming that person again.

Then the spell was over. The moment the song ended, the house lights went up so that we could see him walking in silence offstage. No goodbye, no drawn-out thank yous and waves to the cheering audience. Not even a glance backward. On the first night, people exchanged confused looks, shocked by his sudden exit. You could perhaps see this whole finale as a quiet confrontation with an audience, a grand assertion of the self by a beloved artist. But if it was a confrontation, it was one rooted in trust rather than condescension. Trust that the audience can sit with discomfort, that they’re self-aware enough not to be offended or horrified by what he’s showing them.

It was the perfect ending. A concert that began in darkness and mythmaking ended in light and exposure. Suga started the show being carried by others; he ended it by carrying himself out. What more could we want? He had just shown us everything.

From the ads I saw, Jury Duty looked like the last TV show I’d want to add to my watchlist. “12 jurors. 11 actors,” read the shrug of a tagline. The majority of the faces on the billboards looked bored or befuddled. And besides, Freevee, Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, was not one of my go-to platforms. I was certain the show would be a forgettable one.

How wrong I was. Jury Duty—a series starring mostly unknown performers, tucked away on a largely unknown streamer—is incredible reality television, a boundary-pushing hidden-camera program. Set inside a fake courtroom, the show follows Ronald, a guy who believes he’s participating in a documentary about jury duty but who is actually surrounded by actors roping him into progressively weirder scenarios. James Marsden plays a dirtbag version of himself who asks Ronald to help him run over-the-top lines for an audition. A socially awkward juror named Todd (played by David Brown) becomes Ronald’s hotel-room neighbor when the jury is sequestered. The meek Noah (Mekki Leeper) recruits Ronald as a wingman to woo a fellow juror, Jeannie (Edy Modica). “[The producers] said, ‘We want to create a hero’s journey for this man,’” Marsden explained in an interview. They’d test his resilience to all the absurdity, “and then we’ll go, ‘Hey, that was all fake!’ … Hopefully he doesn’t have a mental breakdown.” Luckily for everyone, Ronald didn’t. Instead, the result is part The Truman Show, part The Rehearsal, part The Office, part Punk’d—and all delightful.

Jury Duty has become a word-of-mouth hit, and Ronald a bona fide star. According to a JustWatch report, the show was the most popular streaming series the week of its finale in April, nabbing more viewers than Netflix’s Beef and The Diplomat. Ronald, meanwhile, just appeared in an ad with Ryan Reynolds. Given the show’s triumphs, the producers have teased the possibility of a second season; they told Variety that the best aspects of their concept are “infinitely repeatable.” But as true as that may be—other hoax-driven series in the past, such as Spike’s The Joe Schmo Show, ran for multiple seasons—creating more Jury Duty would be a shame.

After all, much of the show’s success depended on Ronald’s wonderfully chummy chemistry with the cast—a phenomenon that, the season finale revealed, took even the producers by surprise. Ronald often made the manufactured wackiness even more entertaining by simply taking every situation in stride. Yes, he was aware that he was being filmed, but only in the courthouse and while taping “interviews” for the fake documentary. The hidden cameras picked up some of the show’s best moments—organic, unscripted scenes that hinged on Ronald’s courteousness in spite of his confusion. He was accepting of Todd’s penchant for building unnecessary inventions, for example, even though Todd was obviously intended as an annoying presence. (His gadgets, such as a prosthetic ear that doubles as a Bluetooth device, tended to disrupt court proceedings.) Ronald invited Todd to watch A Bug’s Life with him, striking up a friendship rather than anything antagonistic. Again and again, the show tried to provoke Ronald, and again and again, Ronald remained unbothered: He gamely covered for Marsden when the actor “clogged” Ronald’s toilet. He helped Noah gain enough confidence to hook up with Jeannie. He even took the disjointed trial—which involved an extremely glitchy animated reenactment video that caused some cast members to break character on camera—totally seriously.

The “infinitely repeatable” setup of Jury Duty is simple: Dupe a normal person into reacting to abnormal scenarios for entertainment. But Ronald’s reactions—more tickled than spooked by the antics around him—transformed the show, giving it a sweeter tone. The cast responded to his kindness by forging genuine friendships with him and softening some narrative twists, commiserating with him about the surrounding oddness rather than trying to fool him further. Without Ronald, Jury Duty would have been just another prank show. With him, it became a hangout series that considered how people can connect in spite of their circumstances.

[Read: The paranoid style in American entertainment]

That’s not to say that Jury Duty’s planned comedic beats fell flat. The trial itself is packed with gags, including testimony from an influencer/DJ/actor/model/sometime-lash-technician (played by Lisa Gilroy) that’s one of the funniest performances I’ve seen on TV this year. But the bulk of the show’s charm comes from how it began mirroring Ronald’s equally bemused attitude toward the day-to-day proceedings, capturing how humorous even the most mundane elements of jury duty can be. I laughed out loud when one juror, the soft-spoken Ken (Ron Song), delivered an overcomplicated analogy to explain the case’s latest developments, while in the background, a bored Marsden could be seen attempting to entertain himself by spinning a sign.

Making more Jury Duty would risk losing that appeal. Second seasons tend to require higher stakes to keep audiences interested, and this series is not built for big swings, especially if it wants to avoid turning its subject into the butt of the joke. Jury Duty’s novelty also helped keep Ronald in the dark. Throughout the season, Ronald voiced how he felt like he was witnessing reality TV, but he never followed that thought through because, well, Jury Duty hadn’t aired yet. He also had no idea he’d be awarded $100,000 at the end of the series for his trouble—a prize that feels earned but that would make casting someone without an ulterior motive for another season harder to do. I’m already terrified that Ronald is going to Milkshake Duck. I’d be skeptical, even more than I already was, of any future protagonist’s true intentions.

Jury Duty worked, in other words, because it didn’t follow a preestablished formula, leaving it free to evolve with its unwitting subject. Maybe the production can finesse its casting strategy to generate similar results, but the longer a show like this runs, the more muddled its message becomes. Right now the series proves that anybody can be a hero. Overextending that idea could easily turn it into something saccharine, something predictable. Such order is certainly necessary in a courtroom—just not a fake one.

To hear the recording industry tell the story, copyright is the only thing protecting musicians from poverty and despair. Of course, that’s always been a myth. Copyright was designed to benefit the middlemen and gatekeepers, such as the record labels, over the artists themselves. That’s why the labels have a long history of never paying artists.

Does climate change directly influence the weather we experience? Until recently—for the past 40 years or so—that question has followed nearly every major hurricane or flood, every record snowfall or heat wave. In some people, it provokes instant denial, often political or economic, often rooted in prideful ignorance. But the question raises a genuine analytical issue: How do we determine the effect of incremental, global atmospheric change on locally transient weather systems? And how do we assess the effect that those systems—and the climate shifts underlying them—have had on human societies in the past? These are complicated questions. Now imagine trying to answer them throughout the whole of history, from the origin of our species to the day before yesterday. That’s the task the Oxford historian Peter Frankopan undertakes in The Earth Transformed: An Untold History.

Consider, for instance, what has come to be called the Little Ice Age, a period of sharply lower temperatures from (roughly) the 16th to the early 19th centuries. The term first appeared in 1939 in a report from the glaciers committee at the American Geophysical Union, and, as Frankopan notes, it “became popular with historians and general readers alike.” But was the Little Ice Age real? The idea of a prolonged era of sustained colder weather has evoked a kind of climate determinism, a tendency to blame human behavior in, say, the 17th century mainly on the temperature. The Little Ice Age has been used to explain any number of things: a sudden abundance of melancholy, “the growing popularity of beer,” the shift from open fireplaces to tiled stoves in Sweden, more clouds and darkness in paintings from the period, an “astonishing” increase in the persecution of women, even the gales that destroyed the Spanish Armada.

Frankopan acknowledges that this period was “a time of profound social, economic, political and ecological change.” But an abundance of data indicates that there was nothing climatically coherent or globally synchronous going on—nothing remotely like an ice age, not even a little one. The conclusion, drawn from “marine-core data, sea-ice incidence and ice-core isotope records,” is that there’s almost no evidence for a “climatically distinct and clearly cooler” Little Ice Age. On this, Frankopan, many climatologists, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree. The very idea of a sudden, global, uniform, and extended cold spell also goes against common sense. The Little Ice Age is supposed to have lasted several centuries. But, as Frankopan reminds us, we won’t discern “any consistency across either time or space” in a period that long. This can be hard to remember.

The best corrective to denial and determinism is accurate climate data. The more we have, the better we can assess the pattern and scale of past climatic variations and their effects. As Frankopan routinely notes in The Earth Transformed, climate contributes as often as it causes. Famine in seventh-century China, for example, was begun by drought but worsened by inept rulers, a pattern repeated again and again throughout history. “Even where connections seem both plausible and compelling,” Frankopan writes, “identifying the precise relationship between environmental and societal changes requires caution.” He refuses to generalize beyond the evidence and is scrupulous—almost testy—about the quality of the evidence he uses. (My favorite demurrer: “if data that is geographically and chronologically uneven is to be believed.”) From time to time, Frankopan may sound as though he’s debunking the argument that climate has helped determine the shape of human history. But he’s really refining it, giving it greater authority based on better evidence.

The question is no longer whether climate change can influence the scale and force of an individual hurricane or typhoon. Of course it can. We see it happening as storms intensify all around us. Global warming is affecting nearly every Earth system, including polar-ice conditions, monsoon cycles, ocean temperature, and the dynamics of the major ocean currents and oscillations. It’s bringing an end to what the poet Marianne Moore once called “the unegoistic action of the glaciers.” What use is history in this context? What is there to learn from episodes of the distant past, such as the 15th-century Famine of One Rabbit in what is now Mexico and the sixth-century floods described by Gregory of Tours?

[Read: The way we talk about nature is getting weirder]

Frankopan’s purpose in The Earth Transformed isn’t to explain how we find ourselves where we are climatically or to chronicle the steady increase of atmospheric carbon and our failure to curtail it. The book is doing something different. Frankopan presents an enormous panoply of cultures and societies affected by widely differing climatic pressures. He uses a wealth of new climate data and huge advances in climate modeling to understand “the role that climate has played in shaping the history of the world,” to retell history as if it were something more than the interactions of humans on a weather-less planet.

Here are two examples. Around the year 540, a major cluster of volcanic eruptions shrouded the Earth in dust, dimming the sun, causing temperatures to plummet, and decimating human populations. (One expert called these “the coldest decades in the Holocene.”) Seven hundred years later, in the early 13th century, Mongolia experienced the wettest conditions in more than 1,000 years. Extra moisture increased pasturage and allowed “enormous increases in the size of livestock herds, above all of horses.” On those horses and their progeny, Ghengis Khan and his hordes were mounted. One of these events is global; the other isn’t. It’s worth noting that neither contributed to a steadily worsening set of interactive environmental conditions of the kind that threaten us now. Neither was part of an intensifying feedback loop like the one we’re living in, which is continuous, cumulative, and global.

At the very least, it’s chastening to see how other humans in other times responded to the dynamic Earth systems in which their lives were embedded, chastening too to see how often climatic events tyrannized daily existence. But what can those episodes tell us about how we should respond to our likely fate? Here is how Frankopan explains the rationale behind The Earth Transformed: “As a historian, I know that the best way to address complex problems is to look back in time.” History, he adds, “can also teach valuable lessons that help formulate questions and sometimes even answers relating to some of the big issues that lie ahead of us.” I’m not questioning the value of writing history, of course. But “lessons,” “questions,” “answers,” “issues”—these are anodyne words, like “food for thought for the present and future.” They’re reminders that it may not be the historian’s job to detail the lessons or discover the answers. That’s up to us.

There’s no seceding from history. The present is both the future of the past and the past of the future. Environmental changes have been and will be shaped, Frankopan writes, “by what has already happened in the past, rather than simply by decisions made today.” In the second century B.C., the Greek historian Polybius observed that the past once consisted “‘of a series of unrelated episodes.’” But now, Polybius wrote, “‘history has become an organic whole,’” a conclusion that seems far truer in the 21st century than it was 2,200 years ago. And yet, climate change—which binds us all together in a common fate—creates an inescapable feeling that the present has become discontinuous from the past, like an ice shelf breaking free of Antarctica. Frankopan’s final summary of the present state of global warming is unflinching. It should instill in the reader a deep sense of humility, making it easier to grasp how much we resemble the humans who preceded us, no matter how ancient or unfamiliar they are. If The Earth Transformed has a moral, I think it’s this: We’re as foolish and catastrophically inattentive as any society—or global collection of societies—before us.

[Read: What it would take to see the world completely differently]

Over and over in the past 10,000 years or so, dynasties, empires, and whole congeries of states  have come into existence. They’ve flourished and then vanished. Again and again, humans have organized themselves into complex social entities that have eventually fallen apart, sometimes under climatic pressure, sometimes under forces released by it. Some of those civilizations, such as the Roman empire and the Mughal dynasty, are well known. But do you know the Corded Ware or Bell Beaker or Qijia cultures? How about the Hyksos in Egypt, circa 1640 B.C.? You may have heard of the Abbasid dynasty, which arose in the eighth century, but what about fifth-century Panjakent, “a magnificent jewel of a city in what is now Tajikistan”? Frankopan’s erudition is extravagant, as is his range of sources. The number of ancient societies and cultures he adduces as he guides us through time is almost staggering. But so is the fact that none of them survived. Becoming aware of their former existence—so many more of them than you ever imagined, an endless, almost biological skein of societal shapes and forms reaching back thousands of years—is enough to shift the ground under your feet. We think of this as “our” world, here and now, a culmination of sorts. But we’re just another episode in a social version of primary succession—like grasses growing on a new volcanic landscape.

One of humanity’s central myths about ourselves is that we have no habitat—nothing as circumscribed or as fixed as the relation between a red-winged blackbird and the wetland it lives beside, or a sea star and its tide pool. We save habitat for other creatures, because the word describes an irrevocable connection between a species and the environmental ground of its existence. (This is how Frankopan usually uses the word.) Humans, we believe, are too adaptable, too inventive to be pinned down—too flexible to be bounded. Plus, we don’t like to think of ourselves as animals. Our adaptability, like our mobility, is part of the evolutionary story we love to tell about Homo sapiens. But climate change is now shoving us up hard against the edges of our global habitat, and we can no longer pretend. Humans are no different from any other species whose habitat has been damaged or impaired or destroyed by us—except this time, the harm we’ve done is to ourselves.

In The Climate of London, a meteorological study published in 1818, the British chemist Luke Howard wrote this fascinating sentence: “Like fishes inhabiting the bottom of an ocean, we are insensible to much of what passes over our heads.” “Insensible” is how it feels to be unaware that you have a habitat. You might say that Howard’s sentence, written just before a new industrial England began to develop, signals the beginning of the end of what might be called our fishlike existence—our ability to ignore “what passes over our heads,” before atmospheric carbon began to increase. Reading that phrase, I can’t help thinking of John Ruskin’s observation that “one of the last pure sunsets” he ever saw was in 1876, nearly 150 years ago.

Our habitat is shaped and defined by climate but also by the presence of all other species on Earth (which help shape our climate)—something we find almost impossible to acknowledge. Humans have always lived in a planetary ecology that is the sum of all its parts. But in the past century and a half, we’ve channeled and suppressed and eliminated the reproductive potential of nature—the global torrent of other life in its habitat—to an extent that’s almost impossible to hold in one’s mind. We worry that the effect of climate change on humans will be catastrophic. But for innumerable species on this planet, the catastrophe has already come. We are their catastrophe, with untold effects on our own well-being. The Earth has never been Eden, and there has never been a Garden to return to. But if we don’t restrain ourselves now, the restraint the Earth imposes upon us will be brutal. We’ll come to know the nature of our habitat as we begin to be punished for violating its boundaries. That is the true story of Eden.

The first time I ever heard Steely Dan’s music wasn’t on a Steely Dan recording. It was the mid-1990s, and I was in my early teens, listening to a cassette of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989), a hip-hop album that blew my young mind. I wanted to hear one track in particular, a love song called “Eye Know,” over and over again: It was so effervescent, so totally joyful. A few years later, I learned that “Eye Know” was constructed around a sample of “Peg,” the fourth track of Steely Dan’s 1977 album, Aja. Meanwhile, another Aja sample was making the rounds in hip-hop: The opening track, “Black Cow,” was the bedrock for Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz’s 1997 rap-radio blockbuster, “Deja Vu (Uptown Baby).”

Music obsessive that I was, this confounded me. Steely Dan—the musical handle of the songwriting pair Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—was considered toxically uncool. Steely Dan was also in the midst of a decades-long hiatus from releasing new studio albums, after putting out seven from 1972 to 1980. I knew the band’s 1974 hit, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” a steady presence on classic-rock radio, but I had trouble wrapping my head and ears around it. The guy singing in a plaintive, nasal voice seemed pretty sure that Rikki was, in fact, going to lose that number; every time he sang “And you could have a change of hea-a-art,” a gnarled run of notes followed that sounded oddly aggressive. I recognized the bass piano line from Horace Silver’s bossa-jazz chestnut “Song for My Father,” because I’d played it in my own jazz-piano lessons. But what was it doing in a pop song? “Rikki” ’s strange combination of jazz, rock, and R&B, alchemized into a near-frictionless sonic slickness, seemed antithetical to the grunge-era ethos of anti-establishment, heart-on-your-sleeve authenticity.

In hindsight, Steely Dan’s Zelig-like presence in sample-based hip-hop looks like a harbinger of the band’s current renaissance: A duo that was one of the most polarizing acts in rock even at its peak, in the 1970s, has lately acquired an army of new fans, many of them remarkably young. Listeners born well after the group made its best-known work are especially ardent, as social-media accounts with names like “Good Steely Dan Takes” and “People Dancing to Steely Dan” (both of which have tens of thousands of followers) attest. Steely Dan memes steadily proliferate on Twitter and Instagram and among the massively popular r/SteelyDan Reddit community. In 2019, the music publication Pitchfork—which had reviewed the band’s 2000 comeback album, Two Against Nature, with cooler-than-thou contempt and given it a score of 1.6 out of 10—published retrospective reviews of five of the band’s most esteemed studio albums; all of them were rated 8.3 or higher.

The pop-culture critic Alex Pappademas (who wrote one of those Pitchfork reviews) dives into this “Danaissance” in Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors From the Songs of Steely Dan, a collection of illustrated essays dreamed up in collaboration with the artist Joan LeMay. The book doesn’t aspire to be a history of the band’s vicissitudes or a conventional march through its discography. Instead, Pappademas offers a lively series of ruminations about individual songs, loosely pegged to the characters who populate those songs and who are rendered in playfully detailed and colorful portraits by LeMay. The result is both a celebration and an artifact of the current Steely Dan moment.

Pappademas tries out several theories to explain the Danaissance’s timing. The most compelling of them is the idea that their songs, full of gallows humor and wry disillusionment, resonate with a generation raised on crashing economies and a climate crisis. “Donald and Walter’s songs of monied decadence, druggy disconnection, slow-motion apocalypse, and self-destructive escapism seemed satirically extreme way back when; now they seem prophetic,” he writes. “We are all Steely Dan characters now.”

[Read: Six books that music lovers should read]

The truth is, Steely Dan’s trajectory has never been readily explicable. The band’s success defied rock-and-roll logic at every turn, starting with the fact that it wasn’t really a band. Steely Dan was the invention of two young men who had met at Bard College in the late 1960s and were obsessed with Bob Dylan and Charlie Parker in equal measure. Shortly after leaving Bard, Fagen and Becker moved to Los Angeles to become in-house songwriters for ABC/Dunhill Records. When their compositions proved too offbeat for other ABC artists to perform, the pair began to record the work themselves, with Fagen on keyboards and vocals, Becker on bass, and a roster of top-flight rock players rounding out the proceedings. ABC released Steely Dan’s first album, Can’t Buy a Thrill, in 1972. It sold 500,000 copies within weeks and spun off two hit singles, “Do It Again” and “Reelin’ in the Years.”

If Can’t Buy a Thrill had been the only album Steely Dan ever made, we would remember the band very differently. Fagen doesn’t even sing lead on three of the album’s tracks, and by Steely Dan’s later standards, the music is almost shaggy, full of jangling guitars and earworm radio-pop flourishes. It’s steeped in folk rock, Beatles-esque chord changes, and ’60s-vintage soul grooves. No other Steely Dan album feels quite so eager to be liked.

When Fagen and Becker followed up a year later with Countdown to Ecstasy, their true sound took shape. Their second album is full of dazzling rhythms, sophisticated harmonic structures, lyrics that are spiky and evocative and seethe with mordant disaffection. “Will you still have a song to sing when the razor boy comes and takes your fancy things away?” Fagen croons on “Razor Boy,” so mellifluously that you can easily miss that he’s singing about death.

After Countdown, nearly every aspect of Fagen and Becker’s project felt like a deliberate flouting of rock conventions. No sooner had 1974’s Pretzel Logic, propelled by the popularity of “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” become their biggest-selling album yet than Fagen and Becker decided to stop touring and reimagine Steely Dan as a purely studio-based entity. The duo proceeded to host a churn of crack session musicians, summoned to perform—at near-impossible levels of exactitude—compositions that grew ever more ambitious and technically demanding. Working with the producer Gary Katz and the engineer Roger Nichols, Fagen and Becker were in pursuit of perfect tones, perfect textures, perfect sounds. Steely Dan released two more studio albums—Katy Lied (1975) and The Royal Scam (1976)—before Aja in 1977, and Gaucho three years later. And then Steely Dan didn’t make another studio album for 20 years.

Like jazz greats of earlier generations, Fagen and Becker composed music full of dense harmonic structures and intricate arrangements. They openly worshipped at the feet of those masters: The only cover they ever recorded was a reverently faithful rendition of Duke Ellington’s 1926 classic “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” which appeared on Pretzel Logic. (In case anyone missed it, the song was also included on Steely Dan’s 1978 Greatest Hits album.)

[From the May 1975 issue: Ellington in private]

They wrote surreal, scabrously witty songs about washed-up hipsters and failed threesomes, the incongruity of their buffed-to-a-shine sound adding to the humor. Their lyrics name-dropped a wide range of figures, among them the avant-garde mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian; the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin; and Napoleon. They also wrote about unforgettably strange fictional figures who went by names like “Felonious,” “Kid Charlemagne,” and “Deacon Blues.” In sharp and funny chapters, Pappademas riffs on this cast of characters in ways that capture the band’s cultural context and musical debts. The inspiration for “Kid Charlemagne,” for example, is the hippie “Acid King” Augustus Owsley Stanley III—the principal LSD chemist for the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead (as well as the Dead’s longtime soundman)—whose decline the song recounts. “Alone without a community of revolutionaries around him,” Pappademas writes, “he’s now just another criminal on the run.”

Steely Dan’s music posed a question: Was it possible to be an ironist and a perfectionist simultaneously? Was taking rock and roll this seriously a high-concept joke, or the only way to unlock the music’s full creative potential? Or had Steely Dan somehow come up with a blend of both, a virtuosic balancing act of scathing satire and fervent earnestness? At one point, Pappademas describes Fagen and Becker as “cynical about their own cynicism,” a phrase that hints at the fierce idealism that runs beneath the surface of even their iciest music.

Steely Dan’s Walter Becker (second from left) and Donald Fagen (far right) in 1973; others, from left to right: Jim Hodder, Denny Dias, and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. (Michael Ochs Archives / Getty)

Such contradictions made Steely Dan an anomalous presence in the landscape of 1970s rock. The band-that-wasn’t-really-a-band was devoid of the phallic swagger of, say, Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith. While Bruce Springsteen was redefining heroic authenticity and gracing the covers of national magazines, Fagen and Becker retreated behind their retinue of characters. Steely Dan’s ever-changing lineups deprived the band’s public of the personality-driven soap operas that fans thrilled to in groups such as the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac. The pair’s refusal to tour stood out as arena rock became a massive business; Fagen and Becker never even appeared on one of their studio-album covers. At a time when rock stardom was synonymous with being cool, the two of them seemed uninterested in being rock stars and completely indifferent to being cool.

Aja’s success was unusual, even for this unusual band. Released just weeks after Elvis Presley died and in the middle of the year that punk broke, the album became the biggest commercial hit of Steely Dan’s career, peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart. Fans debate whether it’s the best Steely Dan album, but it’s certainly the quintessential Steely Dan album. An extraordinary fusion of styles filtered through the duo’s explosively ambitious songcraft and sonic architecture, Aja features more than 30 credited musicians, a who’s who of the world’s top jazz, rock, and R&B session players.

[From the May 2011 issue: How heavy metal is keeping us sane]

An old joke about Steely Dan’s reliance on studio musicians has it that Fagen and Becker were writing music so difficult that they couldn’t even play it themselves. This isn’t true: Both were terrific instrumentalists and can be heard all over Aja. Still, the deployment of so many hired guns was one of the most controversial and misunderstood aspects of their endeavor; detractors, viewing it as proof of prefab inauthenticity, disparaged Steely Dan as essentially a factory dedicated to turning out the world’s most finely tuned musical product.

But enlisting studio players, far from an abdication of artistic vision, was a fanatical assertion of Fagen and Becker’s vision. The fantasy that rock-and-roll bands are democracies—melting pots of individual contributions and sensibilities, wholes greater than the sum of their parts—is deep-seated and attractive. By Aja, Steely Dan had dispensed with such notions (if its founders had ever embraced them): Fagen and Becker were the bosses, and everyone else was an employee. To use a famous example, the pair reportedly brought in as many as eight different guitarists to try playing the roughly 25-second guitar solo on “Peg.” (Jay Graydon finally got it, after what he later recalled as “four, five hours” of takes.)

From one angle, this looks like tyrannical micromanagement; from another, it looks like the sort of uncompromising rigor and sacrifice—of time, money, and other people’s individual talent—in the service of a relentless aspiration that certain great art requires. In the case of Steely Dan, listeners can find themselves under unforgiving pressure too: Insistent about making music entirely on their terms, Fagen and Becker deliver a sound defined by calculating precision, one that offers little of the visceral thrill of impulsivity that many fans expect from rock music. It’s a listening experience that some will find deeply alienating, others endlessly alluring.

[From the November 2021 issue: Jack Hamilton on how Spotify has made all music into background music]

“There are artists who don’t work this way,” Pappademas writes, “but none of them have made ‘Peg,’ ” a song that he extols in terms that distill the Steely Dan aesthetic: It’s “a hundred layers carefully positioned to create the illusion of casual cohesion, a whole ecosystem arrayed in a shape as sleek as a surfboard.” As detail-oriented as his muses, Pappademas dedicates an entire paragraph in an essay about “Show Biz Kids”—a song he identifies as the very first rock song “about being afraid of people younger and cooler than you”—to a four-bar phrase that occurs three minutes and 49 seconds in and lasts about seven seconds itself. The fleeting moment might seem tossed-off: The guitar drops out and we’re left with a roiling marimba and Fagen intoning a profane line about Hollywood scions (“They don’t give a fuck about anybody else”). But Pappademas, fastening on that small but crucial arrangement choice, pronounces it “the coolest and therefore most important part of the song.” “Yes!” I exclaimed, instantly appreciating his insight.

Fully accounting for the collective “Yes!” that is now greeting Steely Dan may be hopeless, but the lineage of that yes is rich and suggestive. Decades ago, young hip-hop artists stumbled upon Steely Dan because of the band’s popularity among a slightly older generation of Black listeners—De La Soul’s Kelvin Mercer (also known as Posdnuos) has recalled first listening to “Peg” as a child with his father, years before the sample found its way onto 3 Feet High and Rising. Now, as a new generation of listeners discovers the band, the sonic and stylistic polish of Steely Dan that seemed so divisive in the ’70s—and in the ’90s—is evidently no longer such a deterrent. Slick doesn’t carry the sting that it used to.

For those weary of the “rockism”-versus-“poptimism” debates of the past couple of decades—and who isn’t?—Steely Dan offers a welcome escape from the reductive opposition between rock as Promethean self-expression and pop as a big-tent pleasure center. The band didn’t mind being dismissed by the most doctrinaire rock partisans: “soulless, and by its calculated nature antithetical to what rock should be,” as a Rolling Stone review of Aja summed up the brief against them. At the same time, Steely Dan’s music is unapologetically snobbish, flouting the “everything is great” ethos of extreme poptimism.

A band that charts an idiosyncratic path ends up acquiring an eclectic audience, this one united by a tenacious devotion to the work of a pair of artists who were themselves nothing if not devoted. When I became a full-fledged Steely Dan fan in my 20s, I found the depth of care and attention in Fagen and Becker’s music deeply moving, even romantic. If the lyrics were often cynical, everything else felt like the opposite, and the tensions held in Steely Dan’s sound spoke to, well, my soul. I’m glad to know I have new company.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “Surrender to Steely Dan.”

Illustrations by Maxime Mouysset

Jeff Carpoff was a good mechanic. But as a businessman, he struggled. In the two decades since high school, he’d lost one repair shop after another, filed for personal bankruptcy, and watched a lender foreclose on the small house in a California refinery town where he’d lived with his wife and two young kids. By 2007, he was 36, jobless, and adrift.

Yet there, at his life’s lowest, the remarkable happened. A contraption he’d rigged up in his driveway—a car trailer decked with solar panels and a heavy battery—got the attention of people with real money. Carpoff could scarcely have imagined it. He’d never gone to college and had no experience in green technology. His invention, he thought, was “crazy, harebrained.” But investors saw the makings of a clean-energy revolution.

For decades, there was basically one way to rush power to places without electricity: the portable diesel generator. It kept equipment running and lights on at construction sites, outdoor events, movie sets, disaster zones. But diesel generators ate the ozone layer; warmed the planet; and caused smog, acid rain, and possibly cancer, on top of their noise, smell, and fuel cost.

Carpoff’s machine—a solar generator on wheels—was a sun-fueled alternative. He called it the Solar Eclipse. The design was so simple that it was a wonder no one seemed to have thought of it before.

Carpoff was a paunchy man with blue eyes and apple cheeks—a “big chipmunk,” as a colleague called him—who gulped rather than spit his chewing tobacco and spent Sundays watching NASCAR. In March 2011, he was singing the national anthem at a local baseball game when he got a text that he’d made his first major sale: The paint company Sherwin-Williams had bought 192 of his generators, for nearly $29 million. Twenty-nine frickin’ million. It reduced him to tears.

That’s how Carpoff told the story of the day his life changed.

The millions of dollars in that first deal were like the drips before a downpour. Over the next eight years, blue-chip corporations such as U.S. Bank, Progressive Insurance, and Geico would buy thousands of Carpoff’s generators. Inc. magazine would call his company, DC Solar, a “renewable energy powerhouse” with a product “people clearly needed.” The Obama administration would make DC Solar a partner—alongside Amazon, Alphabet, and AT&T—in a national program to enlist tech in the fight against climate change.

Sales would eventually top $2.5 billion, enough for Carpoff to fly by private jet and purchase a baseball team, more than a dozen houses, and a collection of muscle cars looked after by a guy named Bubba.

Onstage at a company Christmas party, as he neared the peak of his spectacular ascent, Carpoff celebrated the way he often did: with another tequila. “Fill that fucker up,” he said as an executive poured him a glass of Herradura Silver, with a stack of limes on the side. “All the way to the top.”

Carpoff had lived almost his whole life in the small city of Martinez, on Northern California’s industrial Carquinez Strait—“the place,” he liked to joke, “where the sewer meets the sea.” His childhood home, about a mile from the city’s Shell Oil refinery, overlooked a biker bar, which Carpoff described as a hangout for marauding Hell’s Angels. “We seen things as a kid that a kid just shouldn’t see,” he recalled in footage that DC Solar’s videographer, Steve Beal, played for me. “Fights, stabbings, shootings, prostitution—all kinds of just really crazy stuff.” Jeff’s mother, Rosalie, remembered the bar as at worst a little noisy. But her son was always a storyteller, she told me, prone to embellishment “to make people feel sorry for him or laugh.”

Rosalie worked three jobs to support Jeff and his older sister. (She and his dad, Ken, divorced when Jeff was 3.) But Jeff couldn’t wait to make money of his own. As a boy, he polished used tires for 10 cents apiece, fixed junk cars, and stocked shelves at the corner liquor mart. For fun, he popped wheelies in his truck in the Alhambra High School parking lot, splattering mud on teachers’ cars.

After graduation, state officials rapped him for mishandling hazardous materials at a garage he’d opened, his father said. Jeff had a meth addiction, which made things worse, and soon he was selling the drug to pay debts to dealers, he told people. “I was getting phone calls threatening me because he owed money,” Rosalie said.

His luck seemed to turn after he married Paulette Amato, his high-school sweetheart. She had helped him get clean, and around 2002, in a little garage on a Martinez backstreet, they opened an independent repair shop called Roverland USA. Customers came from across the Bay Area for the artful shortcuts Jeff took to fix Land Rovers on the cheap.

But the business imploded after a failed expansion into retail: Cut-rate auto parts that Carpoff and a new partner had custom-ordered, in bulk, from Mexico came back so poorly machined that one of his own mechanics refused to use them. “I was here to fix cars, not break them,” Marc Angelo, who worked at the repair shop, said when I visited his garage last year. By 2007, Roverland was dead, the Carpoffs’ mortgage was in default, and creditors were suing.

Again, Carpoff tried selling drugs. He pitched his weed to a medical-marijuana dispensary in Santa Cruz, but was turned away after lab tests found his cannabis to be extremely low-grade—“full of chemicals and shit,” the dispensary’s founder told me.

That’s when a former Roverland customer called with a fateful job offer: How would Jeff like to sell solar panels?

Carpoff began talking about the gig with a neighbor, who wanted panels for his weekend house but worried they’d get stolen when he wasn’t there. Carpoff started to wonder: Did panels have to be on the roof, where thieves could snatch them? What if you bolted the panels to a trailer? That way, you could roll them into your barn or garage when you were away—or hitch them to your truck to take with you.

The title of his first patent application just about summed it up: “Trailer With Solar Panels.” Not even Carpoff was sure it made any sense.

Most people in Silicon Valley have likely never heard of Martinez, even those who speed past it on I-680 en route to Lake Tahoe. But the world’s tech capital is just an hour’s drive to the south, and the myth of it, even closer: In every Bay Area garage is a tinkerer, and behind every tinkerer’s billion-dollar idea are the discerning investors who get in first, for pennies.

Dave Watson, a software consultant and an off-roading enthusiast who’d serviced his vehicles at Roverland, had stayed in touch with its former owner. After hearing Carpoff muse about solar on wheels, Watson gathered a group of local entrepreneurs in a parking lot to see Carpoff’s odd-looking trailer.

It had potential, they thought. Its two rows of solar panels—five per row—were attached to rotating beams, a clever design that let you lock them upright for aerodynamic transport on highways, then tilt them sunward once you’d parked. This wasn’t some niche anti-theft accessory; it was an all-purpose generator, towable anywhere for green power on the go. Sales of portable generators were headed toward $3 billion a year globally, and growing fast. If you converted even some of that to solar—particularly if you were first to market—you could become very rich.

By late 2008, Watson’s associates had loaned Carpoff $368,200 and formed a company, Pure Power Distribution, to market his invention. Hollywood was a chief target. Just a year earlier, the comedy Evan Almighty had been celebrated as the first carbon-neutral production by a major studio, and Al Gore’s landmark climate-change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, had won two Academy Awards.

[From the November 2015 issue: James Fallows on Al Gore’s green-technology investment strategy and the fight against climate change]

Carpoff’s invention could help the entertainment industry “lead the world in making ‘sustainable’ the standard,” declared the actor Hart Bochner, who promoted the devices. (Bochner is best known for playing a coked-up businessman in Die Hard. ) They were the perfect replacement for the diesel generators that powered on-location trailers for actors and makeup artists. The base camps of a few major movies—Inception (starring Leonardo DiCaprio), Valentine’s Day (Julia Roberts), Bad Words (Jason Bateman)—were willing to give them a shot. DiCaprio, an environmentalist, posted photos on Facebook.

Carpoff, meanwhile, traveled to the motorsports mecca of Daytona Beach, Florida, where he contacted a high-end real-estate agent and presented himself as a wealthy entrepreneur in the market for a mansion (in truth, he was close to broke). Over drinks by the pool at one home, he asked her if anyone in her world might want to invest in a revolutionary solar product.

The agent thought at once of a former client named Heidi Gliboff, a well-connected businesswoman in New York. When Gliboff saw schematics for Carpoff’s generators, “fireworks were going out of my head,” Gliboff told me. The idea of making solar mobile was “so unbelievably intriguing” that Gliboff soon offered to market the devices on commission.

In September 2010, she invited Carpoff to a Long Island City hotel to meet some finance professionals. Carpoff played the underdog, telling tales about growing up in a trailer park with a mom whose Hell’s Angels boyfriend put a gun to his face. (Carpoff’s family told me that the story lacked even a kernel of truth.) If DC Solar succeeded, Carpoff swore, he’d buy them all Harleys.

One of the professionals in the room, a financial modeler named Gary Knapp, helped introduce Carpoff to the law firm Nixon Peabody, which had a well-known tax-credits practice. It was an arcane legal specialty centered on the special tax perks for industries, such as renewable power, whose growth served broader national interests.

In 2005, Congress had tripled the value of a green-energy incentive called the investment tax credit. Businesses could reduce the federal income taxes they owed by an amount equal to 30 percent of their spending on solar equipment: a 30-cent public refund for every private dollar spent. The enlarged credit led to an explosion of new solar businesses, many of which could never have started, or survived, without it. Lawyers could help companies max out the credits without running afoul of byzantine IRS rules.

Maxime Mouysset

Carpoff spoke with a Nixon Peabody partner named Forrest Milder, who worked in the firm’s Boston office, had degrees from Harvard and MIT, and billed nearly $900 an hour. Carpoff may have been a bit different from Milder’s usual callers, but the freewheeling car mechanic and wonky tax lawyer met at an opportune time. In 2010, with law firms struggling after the Great Recession, the head of Nixon Peabody’s tax-credits practice had begun pressing partners to “think more creatively” about their business, according to a 2012 report in The Washington Post. Tax-credits partners were urged to invent new products, ideas, and fee structures, including free legal advice aimed at hooking potential clients on their services. Partners’ ability to “innovate” factored into their pay and was “the first question” they had to answer in annual evaluations.

“It’s like investing in a start-up,” one of the firm’s tax-credits partners said of this push to lead clients, rather than to follow them. “One in 10 hits, but if it hits, it’s a big deal.” (A lawyer for Milder and Nixon Peabody said that Milder’s decision to represent DC Solar was unrelated to the innovation initiative, and that Milder’s pay was not “materially impacted” by his work for the company.)

The aggressive deals that Knapp and Milder helped design for DC Solar were as alluring as Carpoff’s solar invention. Giant corporations could decide how much they wanted to save in taxes, then—through an investment fund created just for them—buy exactly the number of generators to achieve that figure. All they’d have to put down was 30 percent of the generators’ price—the exact amount they could deduct, dollar for dollar, from their federal tax returns through the investment tax credit.

DC Solar would not only loan buyers the other 70 percent; it would pay it back for them, with the money it made leasing out generators on their behalf. Carpoff was confident enough in the rental market—DC Solar, he said, had long-term leases in the works with major telecom, entertainment, and construction companies—that he guaranteed the loan payments and promised cash payouts of leftover leasing revenue.

The upshot was that buyers could collect the tax credits and lease payments without ever having to use, maintain, or even see their own generators. The deals offered so much value, for so little down, that pitch decks advertised internal rates of return of more than 50 percent.

U.S. Bank, a famously conservative institution, was immediately interested. Sherwin-Williams, for its part, was so eager that it “seems to not care whether there is any [due] diligence,” Milder wrote to Carpoff in December 2010, in emails quoted in court documents. The “attitude has been totally unlike anything I have ever seen.”

Carpoff decided to raise prices. DC Solar, he told his advisers, should sell generators for $150,000 apiece, 50 percent more than what he’d first proposed. And within five years, he said, he could charge renters up to $1,800 a month, more than twice his initial estimate. Carpoff seemed to intuit that some buyers might actually prefer higher prices, because the steeper the sticker price, the bigger the tax credit.

Milder expressed doubts about these suddenly inflated figures. “Do you REALLY think you can rent all 192 [generators] without any ‘vacancies’ for more than double what was originally projected?” he wrote to Carpoff in March 2011, a week before the Sherwin-Williams deal closed. Carpoff didn’t answer the question. His invention, he replied to Milder, was so compelling—it “really works and pays for it self in Fuel cost”—that he believed DC Solar would get a buyout offer within a couple of years. “PS,” he added, “maybe we can have lunch soon? In the Bahamas … lol.” By the end of March, Milder was not only representing DC Solar but writing lengthy tax opinions for buyers on the legality of the deals.

Less than two months after the Sherwin-Williams deal closed, Carpoff paid $1.3 million, in cash, for a new house with a pool, a guest cottage, and garages for six cars. It was in a gated community, up a winding road, on what he bragged was Martinez’s highest hill.

That fall, a group from Sherwin-Williams was set to visit DC Solar’s production facility to inspect its purchase. Under the terms of the deal, the paint company’s generators had to be built and “placed in service” by year’s end.

As workers prepared for the inspection, a DC Solar sales executive named Brian Caffrey noticed that only the first, most visible rows of generators were fully assembled. The generators in the rows behind—some two-thirds of the total—were in various states of incompletion, though you might not notice if you didn’t know what to look for.

“Jeff, you have rows and rows of unfinished generators you’re presenting as finished,” Caffrey recalled telling Carpoff.

“You don’t worry about that,” Carpoff replied.

Caffrey angrily quit, but Carpoff had bigger problems: Almost no one, it turned out, had any real use for his generators.

One reason was that the Solar Eclipse was prone to malfunction. Carpoff had no training in solar engineering. After sketching his idea on a napkin, he’d asked Paulette’s younger brother, Bobby Amato, a former Ford auto mechanic, to build it. “I had no idea how solar worked,” Amato told me. “Good thing they got Google and all that.”

The result wasn’t bad for a couple of guys who’d never done anything like it. But it wasn’t great, either.

Power would sometimes suddenly cut out—plunging makeup trailers for Disney’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day into darkness, and apparently leaving Pink’s trailer without air-conditioning at an MTV concert. A group of Northern California entrepreneurs who thought the early models might aid disaster relief thought again when plugging in a single hair dryer tripped the breaker.

Carpoff began affixing 100-gallon diesel generators to the trailers as backup for breakdowns or cloudy days. But the rumble of diesel on what was supposed to be a fossil-fuel alternative made people wonder how much the planet was really benefiting. If too many weeks passed without a tune-up, generators would exhale plumes of smoke when the diesel activated. “You can imagine a solar tower with black smoke coming out of it,” the public-safety director at a university that tried them told me. “Students would sometimes say, ‘What’s going on? Is it on fire?’ and we’d have to explain that.”

Maxime Mouysset

There were short-term rentals: a cancer benefit, music festivals, the awards dinner for a college’s sustainability conference. But there was no market for the five-to-10-year leases that were supposed to anchor DC Solar’s business. This was no small issue. If the company didn’t have a long-term lease for each of the hundreds of generators it sold, it could neither finance buyers’ giant purchase loans nor pay returns. If generators went unused, the IRS could bar buyers from claiming the solar tax credits. And if the IRS barred the credits, DC Solar would lose the only thing anyone seemed interested in.

The Carpoffs had options, even if they weren’t ideal. They could close DC Solar. Or they could file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, hoping that creditors would see enough worth saving to let the company reorganize.

Or maybe there was another way.

An idea took shape around June 2012, in a meeting Carpoff held with his accountant, Ronald Roach, and an individual, unnamed in court documents, who sources made clear was DC Solar’s general counsel, Ari Lauer. (Lauer didn’t respond to requests for comment.) What if DC Solar used purchase money from new buyers to pay “lease” money to earlier ones? With an accounting trick, the company could make cash from new generator sales look like lease payments from existing renters. (“Re-rent” was DC Solar’s in-house euphemism for these intracompany transfers.)

The plan had many of the hallmarks of a classic Ponzi scheme, but with a twist. DC Solar wouldn’t just defraud new buyers to pay earlier ones. By holding itself out as a legitimate solar company, it would give all of them—new and old—cover to drain millions of dollars of tax credits from the U.S. Treasury. The American taxpayer, that is, would subsidize the scam.

Carpoff would tell his inner circle it was temporary—the kind of fake-it-’til-you-make-it that every start-up dabbled in. The important thing was to keep revenue pouring into buyers’ accounts, even if it wasn’t coming from the leases DC Solar pitched as the bedrock of its business. Also important was pretending that the revenue was coming from those leases and that big companies like T-Mobile and Disney couldn’t get enough of the Solar Eclipse.

“Things are exploding here at DC Solar,” Carpoff started to say at company-wide meetings. “We’re going through the stratosphere.”

Money didn’t so much change Jeff Carpoff as give him the means to more fully be himself. He credited the American dream. “We are the land of the free,” he told his employees. “We can do anything.”

When he pulled into work in the morning, a hard-rock version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” thundered from the speakers of his red pickup truck. He later installed a massive, six-paneled photograph of the American flag on his factory walls and claimed that his family said the Pledge of Allegiance, in lieu of grace, at holiday meals.

On a trip to Las Vegas, Carpoff ordered a custom motorcycle with an “America theme” paint job. “On the tanks I want, like, the Statue of Liberty holding a flag and the flag blowing in the wind,” Carpoff told the shop’s owner, in an exchange captured in a 2012 episode of the reality-TV show Counting Cars. “I want the Constitution on the back fender.”

“We the People!” he proclaimed.

When the shop owner showed him the finished bike at the end of the episode, Carpoff, all smiles and high fives, was beside himself. “It just looks—how do I say this?—‘politically correct,’ ” he said, sending everyone there into hysterics.

If talking about cars and motorcycles came easy to Carpoff, talking about climate change did not. He often wore a pained expression as his marketing staff asked him to recite scripted lines for promotional videos.

“ ‘We strive for a healthier planet … by offering unique solar products that—’ Fuck!” Carpoff says in one of many fumbled takes. “I can’t remember. What the son of a bitch!” A shot of tequila sometimes helped.

John Miranda, a film and TV producer, joined the company as communications director because he believed in its potential to fight global warming. He began having doubts on his first day at headquarters. He’d driven into the lot to find one of Carpoff’s new muscle cars parked in a handicapped space, with a DC Solar employee changing the oil.

Carpoff, Miranda learned, was in fact a collector of vintage gas-guzzlers. His showpieces included a Dodge Charger painted like The Dukes of Hazzard ’s General Lee and a 1978 Trans Am once owned by Burt Reynolds, a replica of the one the actor had driven in Smokey and the Bandit.

No less perplexing was Carpoff’s choice of NASCAR as his main marketing partner. DC Solar spent millions sponsoring the Xfinity race series and drivers like Ross Chastain and Kyle Larson, with DC Solar’s logo splashed across cars, tracks, and racing suits. Not only was NASCAR one of the world’s most polluting sports, but the politics of its fans rarely aligned with those of the green businesses that might actually rent a solar generator. When Miranda tagged NASCAR in a DC Solar Facebook post, one of the first replies was “Solar is for fags.”

If employees asked questions, Paulette, a small but commanding woman, had a stock retort: Stay in your lane. She had grown irritable and hypervigilant, liable to explode at the least provocation.

Jeff, meanwhile, looked like he was having an enormous amount of fun. A sign he’d make for his office parking space bore the letters JMFC. It was the acronym for the nickname he’d given himself: Jeff “Mother Fuckin’ ” Carpoff. (He extended the honorific to Paulette and their kids, Lauren and Matt, whose parking spaces were marked PMFC, LMFC, and MMFC.)

It was hard to fault his confidence. In less than three years, he’d sold nearly 1,200 generators, for $174 million. Yet if you stopped by the company’s small headquarters—near a water-treatment plant in Concord, California—you might never guess at the torrents of money sloshing through its accounts.

Forrest Milder seemed taken aback by how fast the IRS had moved. “An audit from the IRS?” the tax lawyer wrote to Carpoff in July 2013 after learning that the Sherwin-Williams deal was under review. “Is this even old enough to be audited?”

As Milder worked to fend off an apparently deepening IRS investigation, Carpoff faced a more immediate threat. In February 2014, an alarming email had arrived from James Howard Jr., an investment executive who was helping Valley National Bank purchase $76.8 million worth of Carpoff’s generators.

Carpoff had told Howard that 80 to 90 percent of DC Solar’s generators were rented out. But Howard was demanding proof, and company executives knew they couldn’t provide it. A list of actual leases would reveal a minuscule 5 percent leasing rate, which would imperil the Valley National Bank deals and expose the Ponzi scheme.

A DC Solar lawyer—who court documents indicate is Ari Lauer—deflected by claiming that most lease information was confidential. But Howard refused to be put off. So Ronald Roach, the DC Solar accountant, leaned on a colleague named Rob Karmann.

Karmann was a former high-school classmate of Roach’s who struggled with alcohol abuse and had been fired from several jobs before calling Roach in search of work. This call led, however implausibly, to a job at DC Solar, first as controller, then as chief financial officer. Over four years, Karmann’s salary, with bonuses, would grow from $135,000 to $475,000, plus a company car and a golf membership.

Enjoying a sense of what an associate called “respectability” for the first time in his life, Karmann obligingly produced fictitious reports of who was leasing the units and for how much. (“This guy gets his shit done” was how Carpoff toasted him at one holiday party.) Karmann’s newfound social status was “probably the biggest reason … I was so willing to go along with stuff I should have walked away from,” he told me this past September, by phone from federal prison.

(Valley National Bank and Progressive Insurance did not respond to requests for comment. A U.S. Bank spokesperson told me, “While we conduct due diligence and review the business plans of companies we invest in, it’s not possible to know how individuals operating these companies will act in future periods.” Messages left for Gary Knapp, the financial modeler—and his son Nicholas Knapp, who would become one of DC Solar’s most prolific outside brokers—were not returned.)

Carpoff needed each new deal to be bigger than the last. He had no other way to cover the mushrooming “lease” payments (he told a colleague they were “killing” him, according to court documents), or the high-flying lifestyle that advertised his success. But investors were no longer taking it on faith that leases existed. Carpoff needed real—or at least real-looking—leases to show around, ideally from big-name brands.

Around September 2015, Carpoff approached his vice president of operations, Ryan Guidry, a Louisianan who’d had a long career as a bartender before marketing what an associate said were subprime loans in the lead-up to the 2008 mortgage crisis. Could Guidry find someone to sign a fake T-Mobile lease? Carpoff asked. A phony contract that committed “T-Mobile” to leasing 1,000 generators for at least a decade, at $13 million a year?

Carpoff said he’d pay $1 million to Guidry and $1 million more to whoever signed as “T-Mobile.”

Guidry thought of Alan Hansen, a local T-Mobile employee who had powered some San Francisco cell towers with rented Solar Eclipses during blackouts. Guidry invited Hansen to a bar, bought him a couple of beers, and put the forged lease in front of him, Hansen told me. (Neither Guidry nor his representatives responded to requests for comment.)

Hansen, a middle-aged Navy veteran frustrated by his failure to advance at T-Mobile, accepted the $1 million and signed the contract, deliberately not reading it. Carpoff then hired Hansen at a salary 60 percent higher than what he’d made at T-Mobile and gave him a do‑nothing job. Around DC Solar’s offices, Hansen carried himself with an air of dignity and spoke of once wanting to be a minister.

The following year, at the NASCAR season opener known as Speedweeks, Carpoff befriended Frank Kelleher, the managing director of International Speedway Corporation (ISC), which ran the Daytona International Speedway and other major NASCAR tracks.

Within months, ISC signed contracts to lease 1,500 generators for 10 years, at a cost of $150 million, according to court filings. But the contracts—marked “NON-CANCELLABLE” and “UNCONDITIONAL”—had an undisclosed addendum that gave DC Solar and ISC multiple outs. (NASCAR, which acquired ISC in 2019, did not respond to requests for comment.) Over about two years, ISC would pay DC Solar $8.5 million for its leases—and get $15 million in “sponsorship payments” from DC Solar. In an internal email from 2017, ISC’s CFO called it “a mutually beneficial relationship.”

The “T-Mobile” and ISC leases came together as DC Solar courted a whale. The insurance company Geico was owned by Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate was a seasoned user of tax credits and the fourth-largest company on the Fortune 500.

Buffett was bullish on solar. “If somebody walks in with a solar project tomorrow and it takes a billion dollars or it takes $3 billion, we’re ready to do it,” he would later say, at a 2017 shareholders’ meeting. “And the more the better.”

But DC Solar spooked Geico two weeks before the deal was to close, by asking for faster payments—supposedly to fix some supply-chain snag. Geico’s CFO, Mike Campbell, found the last-minute upsell “very troubling.” “It makes me wonder about their financial backing … and whether they can handle the volume of deals they are trying to put together,” Campbell wrote to a subordinate. “If there’s a way out of the deal, take it.”

DC Solar raced to pacify Campbell. The deal was salvaged. In four transactions over three years, Geico would buy 7,980 generators for nearly $1.2 billion, saving the company some $377 million in taxes. (A lawyer for Geico declined to say whether Buffett had played any role in the deal. A Berkshire spokesperson didn’t respond to messages.)

Flush with Geico’s money, DC Solar moved its headquarters, in the summer of 2016, from a back road in Concord to a modern hilltop facility 10 miles north, in Benicia, overlooking the rush of commuters on I-680.

Inspired by the shop floors at Chip Ganassi Racing, a prestigious racing organization whose NASCAR drivers DC Solar sponsored, Carpoff bought a Zamboni to keep his factory floor gleaming.

“When … the bankers come in,” Carpoff explained to a visitor, in a conversation captured by Steve Beal, DC Solar’s videographer, “they see this, and it’s automatically a great first impression.”

Impressions mattered more than ever, because within months of the move, DC Solar had all but stopped manufacturing Solar Eclipses—even as it sold record numbers of the devices. If you could fool smart businesspeople with fake leases, how much harder could it be to sell them fake generators? The very thing that had wowed early investors—the generators’ portability—made their absence from any particular location easy to explain away. “Here one day, there the next” had basically been the sales pitch.

To prove that the generators were somewhere, DC Solar had begun sending buyers “commissioning reports,” with a DMV-registered vehicle identification number and 20-point physical inspection for each unit. The “independent engineer” who produced these reports was not independent and not an engineer. Joseph Bayliss was a classmate of Carpoff’s from high-school auto shop, another “mope”—as an associate called him—with an inflated job title. “Never says no,” Carpoff said of Bayliss, in a tribute at a holiday party.

Carpoff employed a different tactic with buyers who insisted on counting their generators in person at DC Solar’s warehouses. He and his workers used putty knives, acetone, and mineral spirits to remove VIN stickers from generators belonging to earlier buyers, then applied, to those same units, the VINs of whatever buyer happened to be visiting. To dupe buyers who wanted real-time data on their units’ whereabouts, workers buried GPS transponders in out-of-the-way locations, minus the generators they were billed as being attached to.

Inspectors willing to drive hours to see their Solar Eclipses in the field were the hardest to misdirect. Carpoff had employees work overnight, delivering generators in the nick of time, to make it look like they’d been there all along.

Of the more than 17,000 generators sold from 2011 to 2018, only about 6,000 would be found to exist.

By 2016, the IRS had begun to catch on. The agency had examined DC Solar’s first two deals: the one with Sherwin-Williams, and another with a specially formed company called Aaron Burr LLC, an apparent allusion to the man who killed Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury secretary, in a duel.

IRS investigators concluded that the fair market value of each Solar Eclipse—if manufactured in the quantities claimed—was, with a reasonable markup, about $13,000. That was less than one-tenth of the $150,000 that DC Solar charged buyers. And that meant that the $45,000 buyers saved on their taxes for each generator was more than 300 percent of its value, instead of the 30 percent federal law allowed. It also meant that even if DC Solar never earned a cent from leases, buyers’ 30 percent down covered all the manufacturing costs, thrice over.

In addition, the IRS found, Sherwin-Williams and Aaron Burr were so insulated from risk that they were ineligible for most or all of the tax credits—and subject to penalties. DC Solar’s transaction structure, IRS investigators alleged, was a “sham” involving “a mere circular movement of money … to prop up a vastly overstated purchase price in order to impermissibly maximize the energy credit.”(In a statement to The Atlantic, Sherwin-Williams said that it relied, for due diligence, on “purported experts” in renewable-energy tax credits, and cautioned against “blaming the victims rather than the professionals who enabled this fraud.” Aaron Burr LLC did not respond to requests for comment.)

It was a damning allegation, but audit reports are confidential, leaving other investors in the dark.

In June 2016, around the time the IRS sent its findings to DC Solar, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx chose the company as a partner in the Obama administration’s Smart City Challenge, which pressed cities to adopt climate-friendly technology. The selection put DC Solar in the company of far better-known partners, including Amazon Web Services, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc., all of which promised to supply the winning city with technology and support.

When the Obama administration chose Columbus, Ohio, as its winning Smart City, the fact sheet citing DC Solar’s pledge—of $1.5 million in solar gear—came straight from the White House.

“We are now partners of the United States,” Dan Briggs, an executive with DC Solar’s charitable arm, who’d once run for a Nevada-state-assembly seat, boasted in an interview for a company holiday video. “We are recognized by the top people in government as being a go-to operator to help them get things done.

“Where this takes us in the future,” Briggs added, shaking his head, “is limitless.”

Back home in Martinez, the mayor and city council celebrated the Carpoffs as hometown heroes. The couple sponsored a holiday ice rink, donated $100,000 to the police, and bought the city a professional independent-league baseball team, the Martinez Clippers.

But they spent much more on themselves: cars; couture; homes in Cabo San Lucas and Las Vegas; a luxury box at the Raiders’ new NFL stadium; extravagant Christmas parties at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, where DC Solar’s workers—just 100 or so at the company’s peak—were treated to private performances by the pop band Sugar Ray, the rapper Pitbull, and the country duo Big & Rich.

Hardly a day went by when Carpoff wasn’t cooking up a new business idea, whether it was starting a bottled-water brand, producing a Sasquatch movie, or supplying light towers for President Donald Trump’s border wall, according to a senior employee, who called his boss “Willy Wonka.” Carpoff was already leasing warehouses to marijuana growers, one of whom was paying rent in $250,000 cash installments, he told associates.

At DC Solar’s 2017 holiday party, an executive named Mark Hughes lionized Carpoff as an epoch-making inventor. “The Thomas Edison of the West Coast,” Hughes said from the ballroom stage.

When Carpoff got to the lectern, he assessed himself differently. “I’m kind of entrepreneur,” he joked. “More manure than entre.”

To judge by the weak laughter, few in the audience found it funny. It cut too close, perhaps, to what many of them already suspected. The record-breaking sales in 2017—the more than 5,100 generators, for more than $748 million? It baffled the workers who knew how few were being built. “How is the company surviving?” Jason Rieger, a technician, recalled wondering. Accounting employees didn’t know what to think when Carpoff swaggered through the office with shopping bags stuffed with cash.

Maxime Mouysset

The Carpoffs had by then installed dozens of surveillance cameras around the offices and shop floor. Paulette scrutinized the feeds, which played on a large TV screen in her office, and barred workers from going alone into the file room, where contracts, invoices, and VIN registrations were stored. She interrogated an employee who made frequent bathroom trips and fired another for cc’ing a co-worker’s personal email rather than his company address. Two large dogs, Belgian Malinois named Diesel and Fou—the latter trained to attack—followed her everywhere. A plaque on her desk, one employee recalled, said I’ll be nicer if you’ll be smarter.

The fear Paulette inspired gave Jeff the slack to play the boss you felt lucky to have. At the end of all-hands meetings, he would pull hundreds of dollars from his pocket and give it to whichever employee best guessed its sum.

But the acts of generosity had started to feel performative. The Carpoffs had millions of dollars for over-the-top holiday parties but resisted better medical benefits for workers. “We all bit that fucking hook,” Bobby Amato, Paulette’s brother, told me, still bitter about Carpoff’s failures to credit him for co-inventing the generator. “[Jeff] said, ‘One day, we’re all going to be rich.’ I said, ‘I don’t see nobody being rich here but you.’ ”

Toughest to manipulate were the people who needed neither money nor approval: the professional dealmakers and investors who’d learned things about DC Solar that could destroy the company. On at least three such people, sources told me, Carpoff tried intimidation—summoning a burly Polish émigré, a reputed loan shark whom Carpoff alternately described as an experienced killer, a prison-camp survivor, and a mafioso.

An early investor who’d grown suspicious of Carpoff cut off all contact after a couple of encounters with the Pole, who the investor believes put a tracking device on his truck. “When I saw his ‘Polish Mafia’ come in, that was it,” the investor told me.

Whether the Polish man was a true thug or a wannabe is unclear. But Carpoff was an illusionist: It mattered less whether people were in actual danger—or on the brink of great wealth—than that they believed themselves to be.

At about 8 o’clock one weeknight around February 2018, Mimi Morales, who served as both cleaning lady and limo driver for the Carpoffs, noticed something amiss while vacuuming the offices: An employee named Sebastian Jano had used a back entrance and was coolly packing up his desk.

Jano, a solar-financing expert with law and business degrees from Villanova, was a new recruit. Carpoff had hired him the year before to solicit deals.

Morales asked Jano where he was going.

Jano replied that he’d gotten an offer from another company.

“He acted totally normal,” Morales told me. “No big deal. ‘Just getting my stuff.’ ”

DC Solar’s headquarters were already a paranoid place. But after Jano’s departure, workers noticed more paper-shredding and more closed-door meetings, and were no longer allowed to open mail.

The Carpoffs had secretly moved millions of dollars to offshore accounts in the Bahamas and the Cook Islands. In August, they bought a $5 million house in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis and applied for a government program there that supplies passports and citizenship to buyers of luxury homes.

Beal, the videographer, was putting together a celebratory film for the company’s 2018 Christmas party when he stopped by Carpoff’s office that fall. On the desk was what Beal described to me as a “holy-shit amount of money”: cliffs of cash so tall that people sitting on opposite sides wouldn’t have been able to see each other.

In early December, the Carpoffs told their office manager, Brian Strickland, that they were going on an unplanned vacation. They needed him to take photos for new passports, which someone was helping fast-track.

“They seemed in a rush,” Strickland told me. “The way they said it was ‘We have this guy who’s going to do it for us super quick.’ ”

On Tuesday, December 18, 2018, some 175 federal agents, supervised by the FBI’s Sacramento office, began streaming in unmarked cars toward Benicia and Martinez. Joining the bureau were agents with IRS Criminal Investigation and the U.S. Marshals Service.

At about 9:30 a.m., the agents swarmed DC Solar headquarters, while a SWAT team broke down the front door of the Carpoffs’ hillside home. Agents found nearly $1.7 million in cash in Carpoff’s office safe.

The agents pressed employees for the location of his cars. They were pointed down the street, to a trio of pristinely maintained warehouses. Inside was a museumlike collection that favored the American muscle car but spanned almost the entire history of the automobile, from a 1926 Ford Model T to a 2014 Tesla Model S—nearly 150 cars in all, beautiful to look at, but so battery-dead that U.S. Marshals couldn’t get many of them to start.

While the raids were under way, Carpoff called the office to ask if his and Paulette’s passports were still on his desk. Told no—agents had seized them—Carpoff said, “Oh fuck” and hung up.

It’s hard to know why he didn’t flee earlier. He had told a colleague that he was scared of flying over oceans. But another fear may have been stronger: Running would destroy the fantasy that had turned him from local screwup into local hotshot. Just three days before the raids, he was wearing black sequins and partying with Pitbull at the DC Solar holiday party, as if being Jeff “Mother Fuckin’ ” Carpoff for one more night trumped the grubby unknowns of a lifetime on the run.

Whether or not Carpoff knew it, his fantasy had begun to unravel about 10 months earlier, when the Securities and Exchange Commission received a whistleblower report from an employee who’d recently resigned. Court documents strongly suggest—and multiple sources confirmed—that the employee was Sebastian Jano, who’d startled the cleaning lady the night he left. (Jano did not respond to requests for comment.) According to court filings, the employee discovered the circular payments and confronted Carpoff and Lauer, DC Solar’s general counsel. Unmoved by Lauer’s alleged claim that there was a “method to the madness,” the employee quit. The SEC alerted the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, in Sacramento, which called in the FBI.

As agents seized cars and other assets that December day, Carpoff arranged for a Louis Vuitton bag stuffed with a men’s Cartier watch and as much as $640,000 in cash to be handed off—at a Las Vegas bar called Timbers—to a friend who’d trained the Carpoffs’ Belgian Malinois, the friend alleged in a lawsuit. (Carpoff had previously assured confidantes that he’d planned for contingencies. “He said, ‘I still have $500,000 worth of meth buried in a cemetery in Martinez,’ ” Morales told me. “He said, ‘That’s my emergency parachute.’ ”)

The next night, or the one after, Carpoff asked Bayliss—the high-school classmate who’d signed the fake commissioning reports—to meet in the parking lot of a Martinez Burger King. Carpoff told him to get a burner phone, travel to a Las Vegas warehouse, and trash the hundreds of fraudulent VIN stickers the company stored there. Bayliss, toasted as the guy who “never says no,” did as he was told.

As federal agents closed in, Carpoff told Bayliss to keep cool. If no one talked, Carpoff said, according to Bayliss, the government would have nothing to go on. But Bayliss sensed that the feds weren’t “that stupid,” according to an IRS memo of his interviews with investigators. And he finally said no. His meetings with federal agents and assistant U.S. attorneys in July 2019, and his agreement to plead guilty, all but gave the government its other targets. Over the next few months, prosecutors secured guilty pleas and cooperation from Roach, DC Solar’s accountant; Karmann, the CFO; and Guidry, the VP of operations. Hansen, who was paid $1 million for signing the fake T-Mobile lease, would admit his guilt a little later. All have been sentenced to prison, or are expected to be by the end of this year. (This past September, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit charging Lauer, DC Solar’s general counsel, with securities fraud. Lauer has filed a motion to dismiss, saying he violated no laws.)

The Carpoffs were cornered. Stripped of wealth—and of their lieutenants’ loyalty—they pleaded guilty on January 24, 2020: Carpoff to money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Paulette to money laundering and conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States. (The Carpoffs declined multiple interview requests for this story.)

Over eight years, in at least 34 deals, DC Solar had defrauded more than a dozen corporate customers out of almost $1 billion. Because those corporations had used the investment tax credit to deduct roughly that entire sum from their taxes, DC Solar had effectively robbed the American people. The corporations are expected to return their ill-gotten tax breaks to the U.S. Treasury. Most of them joined a 2019 lawsuit accusing more than a dozen of DC Solar’s legal and financial advisers—including Nixon Peabody and Milder—of negligence, malpractice, and fraud.

The lawyer for Milder and Nixon Peabody wrote to me that neither Milder nor the firm were aware of or complicit in any criminal fraud. Nixon Peabody, the lawyer said, served solely as tax counsel, providing opinions based on “an assumed set of facts” that were only later exposed as false or fraudulent. The lawyer added that the investors had access to at least as much information about the company’s performance. Though they deny any wrongdoing, Milder and Nixon Peabody agreed last year to pay the plaintiffs what court filings describe as a “substantial” undisclosed sum, a settlement larger than those paid, to date, by any of DC Solar’s other advisers.

[Read: The Solyndra scandal: What it is and why it matters]

Carpoff’s $1 billion Ponzi scheme was smaller, in dollars, than Bernie Madoff’s (about $19 billion) or R. Allen Stanford’s (about $7 billion). But it was nearly twice the size of the 21st century’s best-known green-energy scandal: the one involving Solyndra, the politically connected solar-panel company, based just 45 miles south of Martinez, that got a $535 million federal loan guarantee in 2009, only to go bankrupt two years later. It’s hard to think of another 10-figure fraud—in any sector—that rooked so many banks, insurance companies, and other sophisticated financiers. It’s harder still to conjure a billion-dollar swindle in which some of the nation’s top financial companies were outmaneuvered on their own turf by a high-school-educated, small-town mechanic.

Jeff Carpoff is serving his time in a medium-security correctional institution in Victorville, in a sun-scorched patch of California’s High Desert.

At his sentencing, on November 9, 2021, in a federal courthouse in Sacramento, he apologized to the government, investors, and his family. But his lawyer, Malcolm Segal, said that other people, who had not been charged, shared responsibility: The professional advisers who gave the deals the sheen of legitimacy. The brokers who got six-figure commissions for bringing buyers to the table. The buyers themselves, who vetted the transactions with teams of experts yet returned to DC Solar for one multimillion-dollar deal after the next.

When the judge, John Mendez, asked Carpoff if he had anything to add, Carpoff said, “Yeah.”

He claimed that he’d never had the brains for a tax-credit deal. He’d trusted the wrong people. He would have quit long ago had buyers cared about anything but their tax credits. “The bigger the deal, the easier they were to close,” Carpoff said. “It was the most bizarre thing.”

Then he told the judge that in 2018—the year of the FBI raid—he’d been on the cusp of finally setting things right. DC Solar had an offer for 30 leases from a sports-marketing company. It had a signed contract to provide 10,000 car chargers to the U.S. Department of Transportation for parking lots and schools across the country. (A DOT spokesperson told me there was never any such contract.)

When Carpoff started talking about new marketing plans for solar generators with video screens and facial-recognition software, Judge Mendez cut him off. “You were selling air,” the judge said. He sentenced Carpoff to 30 years in prison. Seven months later, Paulette, deemed less culpable, would be sentenced to 11 years and three months.

At a DC Solar holiday party a few years earlier, after a little tequila, Carpoff gleefully told the story of one of his first encounters with the law. He was 15 and had persuaded his high-school auto-shop teacher to sell him a 1970 Chevelle—even though Carpoff had no license, no insurance, and no registration. He’d driven it for less than a day when a highway patrolman gave him a ticket and ordered him to walk home.

Three decades later, the story still resonated enough for him to want to share it with a banquet hall full of investors and employees. During that glorious ride, in that exhilarating stretch before anyone realized how many laws he was breaking, “I said, ‘Man, I got away with this,’ ” he reminisced. “I’m like, ‘Man, look at me.’ ”

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “Burned.”