Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Last week I asked readers if they want Ron DeSantis’s Republican primary campaign to succeed or to fail.

Ann wants DeSantis to win the nomination over Donald Trump:

DeSantis had a really good interview with Trey Gowdy on the Fox News Channel. He seemed strong, grounded, realistic, determined, capable, balanced, and smart. And he has the values we as Americans should embrace (at least most of them). Donald Trump, unfortunately, cannot control himself. He is too irrational, too narcissistic, and not smart. I voted for Trump the last time, but I hope that I get to vote for DeSantis this time.

Many readers disagreed about whether they feared Trump or DeSantis more. For example, Matt’s top priority is preventing Trump from returning to the White House:

While I won’t be voting for Ron DeSantis in the general election, I might use my primary vote for him. As much as I hope that Joe Biden would beat Donald Trump, I don’t want to take that chance. I would gladly have the lesser of the evils. DeSantis is a performative conservative populist: traditional, Harvard-educated conservatism wrapped in “stick it to the libs” showmanship. He probably stands the best chance to beat Trump. And while I find his politics abhorrent, Trump represents a much larger threat to democracy. DeSantis would be an iterative Republican president. Trump is dangerous, and I wouldn’t take the risk. Practically every other option on the table is better than Trump 2.0.

I’m getting tired of these existential-crisis elections. I miss the days of Obama/Romney, Bush/Kerry, even Obama/McCain. If the other team won, I didn’t doubt the continuation of the Union.

Trump would pose that threat; DeSantis, less so.

Similarly, Steve feels confident that Trump would be awful, while DeSantis, whose behavior in Florida he dislikes, is more of an unknown quantity:

When Trump won, I was hoping that the gravity of the office would somehow enable him to rise to the occasion of personal and professional competence and greatness. Alas, after less than a month in service he demonstrated that this was not to be. Unfortunately, his administration rolled incompetently downhill from there. I feel that as unacceptable as I view DeSantis’s political machinations in his home state of Florida, I’m hoping that much of his socially deplorable behavior and policy there is primarily to satisfy the MAGA base, to get elected. I’m hoping that if he got elected—unlike Trump, who would embark on his revenge and self-aggrandizement tour—DeSantis could, and hopefully would, revert back to the middle under the sacred weight of the Oval Office and perform more credibly for all. At least there’d be a chance—unlike for the ex-president.

Robert fleshes out why Trump is ostensibly worse:

Every American should want DeSantis to beat Trump in the primary. Every American should want anyone to beat Trump in the primary. Trump brazenly violated his oath of office. It was the worst betrayal in American history—worse even than the Confederacy, because that at least didn’t come from the White House itself.

For 224 years, power passed peacefully from one presidential administration to the next. It was something we were proud of. Trump ended that tradition. He has no place in public life.

DeSantis is a smarmy, unimaginative little bully. Even without considering his political positions, he is in every respect a worse man than Biden. We don’t know if he won’t accept the results of the 2024 election if he loses. But we know Trump won’t.

And Paul sketches out a bank-shot scenario:

I would like DeSantis to win, because Trump would be so betrayed and angry—his fragile ego crushed—that he would take his revenge by running as a third-party candidate, practically ensuring a victory for the Democrats and Joe Biden.

In contrast, Emelia fears DeSantis more:

The difference is that DeSantis will carry out and see through his plans. The one advantage of Trump (as awful as he is) is that he can’t focus long enough to see anything through. Often I suspect that many centrists and liberals’ only real issue with Trump is that he’s crass and rude. Plenty of other politicians have policies just as harmful but display basic social niceties.

SHG offered similar analysis:

I had hoped that DeSantis could finally free the Republican Party from Trump’s clutches, but between his positions on abortion, free speech, academic freedom, and pardoning some of the convicted January 6 insurrectionists, I fear that DeSantis will be an uncharismatic—but potentially more capable and therefore more dangerous—Trump-Lite.

Gary disagrees––he wants DeSantis to win the primary and wouldn’t mind if he won the general election too:

I would like to see Governor DeSantis as the Republican nominee. He is very competent at governing. Why is he better than President Biden? Because of his mental acuity and physical stamina. Second, he governs from a more right-of-center position rather than a far-left position.

Conservatism and liberalism both have attractive components to guide a nation’s policies. Too much of either simply causes more division. My distinct feeling is that Biden has little to actually say about policy and that “puppet masters” with a much more radical leftist view are actually developing policy and shaping his public statements.

Another sizable group of Democratic readers are sanguine because they are confident that Biden will win reelection. Here’s Chadd:

As a resident of south Florida, I deplore everything that Ron DeSantis stands for. That said, I think that Trump versus Biden 2024 is a foregone conclusion, and I’m actually fine with it. Of course Democrats are gonna run Biden again. He’s a winner, and regardless of the hair-on-fire coverage on Fox and conservative media, most everyone I know is better off than they were two years ago, and the news isn’t the constant chaos that defined Trump’s presidency.

People want calm. People want to feel safe and that the government functions and isn’t out to get them. Biden has given us a sense of calm, professionalism, and decency that was missed during the Trump years.

I think the establishment Dems want Trump to win the nomination. I don’t know if it’s a conscious effort or just what’s happening, but that’s how it seems. A two-time loser (if we’re going just on popular vote) versus a three-time winner who got the most votes of any presidential candidate in history! The answer is right in front of us.

G. is a college student in Florida:

I may have a bit of a biased perspective, considering that DeSantis just recently barred federal or state funds to DEI programs, but please hear me out. The amount of disrespect DeSantis has for the younger members of Florida’s voter constituency is absolutely something he would bring with him to the White House. He has given up on persuading portions of our age group to support him genuinely, while limiting the amount of information we have access to. A DeSantis administration means that the entire nation would be constantly patronized while DeSantis uses the power of the executive branch to fight a culture war.

I feel inclined to defend my university and my high school’s excellent dual-enrollment and AP programs from the suggestion that they are “woke indoctrination,” because I was never intellectually stifled, censored, or repressed by either of them. We were freely allowed to discuss and exchange serious ideas. There was no one who was too fragile to debate me if we disagreed. We discussed current LGBTQ+ issues in a way that was respectful and dignified. In the Women’s Studies course I took this year, I argued for the end of femininity as a relevant cultural concept, and no one batted an eye. This is an extremely niche viewpoint, but I was allowed to advocate for it theoretically, because my campus was indoctrinating no one and everyone taking this course was there by choice.

DeSantis does not know what it is like to be on a Florida campus, learning and growing and forming ideals. He went to Harvard. I believe Biden could win if voters had to choose between him and Trump.

The Republican Party desires the brute-force approach DeSantis takes. The culture wars energize their base, the fiscal conservatism energizes their rich donors, and DeSantis is considerably younger than Biden. He could very well beat Biden, so I’m hoping he never gets past Trump.

I. S. is ready for a new generation of politicians:

I would take any of the Republicans over Trump. I would take any of the Democrats over Biden. It’s long past time for that generation to start spending more time with their families.

Arlene advocates for a matriarchy in which I, too, would be replaced:

I want every Republican to lose. I would love to have every white man over 40 replaced by a woman. If we want to preserve America, the America I believe in, we cannot let either of these Republican men win. I don’t know what happened to the Republican Party. I am a white woman of 66 years, and I have never seen such selfishness!

Women are who will save America.   

Vickie wants a unity ticket that she knows won’t happen:

I am a registered Republican. I am also socially liberal. I did not and would never vote for Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis frightens me. He is much smarter than Trump, but not much better. I vacillate back and forth.  Biden isn’t a great choice either. If the Democrats had a better candidate, I’d probably go DeSantis. Since Biden beat Trump once, I’ll wager he can do so again.

I would love to see a mixed-party ticket. I know that I live in fantasy land, but I really believe that would make a major contribution toward the return of a rational democracy. We need two strong, realistic parties. Present strife hurts both.

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Five years ago, when Bill Ferro would take a road trip in his electric BMW i3, he needed to be ready for anything.

Driving from Boston to Charlotte meant bringing along a 50-foot extension cord; a blanket, in case he needed to turn the car’s heater off to maximize its range; and a spreadsheet full of alternate plans in case the unexpected happened at public charging stations. In one memorable instance, he was forced to rush several miles at midnight to a backup charger when a plug in a dark mall parking lot not only failed to work but refused to unlatch from his car.

Today, Ferro gets into his Tesla, punches his destination into its navigation system, and doesn’t think much about running out of electrons.

This is likely what it will take to persuade Americans to switch to electric vehicles: the ability to drive wherever you want, whenever you want, and never seriously worry about getting stuck.  

The public charging experience today is significantly better than it was when Ferro rolled the dice in his i3. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the number of charging ports in America more than doubled from 2018 to 2022. A wide range of companies, including Walmart, Shell, Subway, and Mercedes-Benz, are getting into the market. And Ford recently announced that its cars will be compatible with Tesla’s expansive charging network starting in 2025.

But Ferro, the founder of EVSession, a data platform that tracks charger reliability, admits that those developments are not enough for what’s coming.

In the next few years, as more new cars become battery-powered, millions of Americans are projected to be driving electric for the first time. They’ll be getting used to a new technology that is inherently different than what they’ve known for decades. Thus far, public EV chargers have largely served early adopters, committed environmentalists, and a small subset of commuters. Now that EVs are becoming practical, high-range family cars, their drivers aren’t going to accept compromises or risks when they’re taking kids to school or trying to get to work on time. They’ll expect the same level of convenience they get now.

[Read: EVs make parking even more annoying]

In short: Americans will need more public chargers if the goal of drastically reducing carbon emissions from cars is to succeed. Right now, drivers who want to do that may be nervously eyeing the charging networks in their areas or along the way to places they want to travel, wondering if they’ll be able to do everything in these new cars that they’ve always done.

“I think [public charging] is the thing that is, right now, in the way of mass adoption,” Ferro told me. “Five years ago, it was range. Now the infrastructure is deterring those people who are just not gung ho about getting an EV.”

I’ve seen this growth, and its continued challenges, firsthand over a decade of testing and writing about cars. Five years ago, my first experience in the Chevrolet Bolt EV involved spending the better part of a day looking for a way to charge up in New York; now four public plugs are within walking distance of my Brooklyn apartment.

But I still often have to wait for those plugs to open up, or deal with gas-car drivers who park there instead. Driving out of town in any EV besides a Tesla (the company’s proprietary Superchargers are regarded as the most abundant, easiest-to-use plugs out there) still requires planning—and a little luck. I might encounter public charging stations with no open stalls, broken chargers, proprietary payment apps I don’t have, or charging speeds too slow to be useful. On top of that, chargers simply remain too rare.

Help is on the way from the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Over the next few years, the government will dole out $7.5 billion in grants for EV charging, a massive, multibillion-dollar gift to the private sector that comes with strict requirements for reliability, user interaction, and accessibility.

Success will look like a national network of chargers that “work every time” and “are able to be used by any driver, any EV, anywhere,” Gabe Klein, the executive director of the Department of Energy’s Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, told me. That office just announced a coalition of national labs, charging providers, and car companies (including Tesla) to work on making charging more reliable and seamless.

The idea behind these grants is that they’ll make private-sector companies step up to capitalize on the next big thing—a market-driven solution, you might call it. “There’s a competitive imperative to be there and to provide a good charging experience to customers,” Albert Gore, the executive director of the nonprofit Zero Emission Transportation Association, told me. But the truth is that there’s no magic-bullet solution that will make the number of public chargers match up perfectly with all of the EVs on the road. And in the interim, charging will go through an awkward adolescence.

For the most part, today’s EVs can serve people’s needs better than ever. These cars are designed to be charged primarily at home, and Americans still mostly commute or run errands, covering only short distances each day. In the future, most EV charging could look like what I saw at the rooftop parking lot of a Target in San Francisco: some three dozen Tesla drivers seamlessly adding juice at fast and super-fast speeds while they shopped or waited in their cars. Most of them were new Tesla owners, and none of them had the kind of war stories Ferro has. For them, charging was functional, uneventful, extremely convenient, and reliable—given about as much consideration as charging a smartphone.

With each step from that model, though, charging infrastructure starts to look a notch less dependable. Shared charging in a condo garage is harder than charging in a single-family home. Charging a car that’s parked on city streets most of the time is harder still. And leaving behind routine to travel far and wide opens up the possibility of the most chaos. While the plan to charge up the entire nation works its way toward reality, a whole new generation of EV owners could be waiting in line to charge at the few available stalls during road trips, forced to deal with onerous payment apps, constantly dogged by broken chargers, or at a loss for how to conveniently charge when far from home. These problems worry potential EV owners enough that a recent J.D. Power report found that a growing number of consumers say they are “very unlikely” to buy an EV—despite lucrative tax incentives—in part because of “persistent concerns about charging infrastructure.”

Ryan Mackenzie knows some of these headaches well. His garage includes a Tesla Model Y and a Volkswagen ID.4, and this means his phone has a hodgepodge of apps such as Electrify America for charging, PlugShare for crowdsourced station reviews, and Tesla’s own.

Besides Tesla’s network, “the only real game in town that allows you to go nationwide is Electrify America, and they have their troubles,” Mackenzie, who lives in San Antonio, told me. Sometimes charging with Electrify America—born from Volkswagen as punishment for its diesel scandal—works perfectly fine. “Other times, you get there and your stall doesn’t work, or it starts working and it fails,” he said. (Electrify America told me it monitors stations around the clock, and that the number of charging sessions it provided in 2022 increased by 3.5 times compared with 2021, and 20 times compared with 2020. “This growth is a true testament to the robustness and quality of the network," a spokesperson said, via email.)

Or consider the experience offered by other older providers such as ChargePoint, which, like Electrify America, is often the subject of considerable customer ire. ChargePoint’s revenue comes not just from selling charging hardware to property owners but also from maintenance contracts to fix chargers when they break. In other words, if a driver encounters a broken ChargePoint charger, ultimately the property owner who bought the hardware is responsible for getting it fixed. (ChargePoint did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: A classic American car is having an identity crisis]

Broken chargers are a serious problem even in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Teslas and Polestars are ubiquitous but where, at one point in early 2022, more than 25 percent of stations were nonfunctional, a recent study found.

Given the onslaught of EVs hitting the market and the public funding available, the known problems will soon be more visible to current and potential EV drivers. But so will the possible fixes.

One of the first things that will happen as EV infrastructure expands is that parking garages, lots, and city streets will simply have more working chargers, some installed by new players eager to make the network not just grow but grow up.

For instance, Flash, an Austin-based start-up, recently signed an exclusive charging-station partnership with the national garage giant One Parking. Ben Davee, the general manager of Flash’s electric-vehicle-charging division, told me that the company is rolling out thousands of garage chargers with an emphasis on multiple payment options such as credit cards and Apple Pay and rapid-response fixes to broken units; Flash is shooting for “99.9 percent uptime.” Davee said that besides adding new chargers, the start-up’s model is “rip and replace”: If you’re a garage owner dissatisfied with the ramshackle chargers you have now, go with Flash instead.

New York–based itselectric wants to solve the apartment- and city-dweller charging problem with sleek-looking overnight curbside chargers and detachable cords kept by members. (In theory, this keeps city streets from becoming a hellscape of wires.) The company is piloting a program in two Brooklyn locations this spring.

Both companies address the problem of EV chargers needing to be everywhere cars are, not just in the garages of affluent homeowners. (Neither has taken public money yet.) To date, charging companies have gone where the market already exists; the majority of public chargers are located in America’s wealthiest counties.

Gore admits that there’s no policy to ensure that chargers match with EV growth nationally. But closing that gap is a top priority for public-funding initiatives. The $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Program aims to expand public access for DC fast charging—which can add significant range to many modern EVs in about 20 minutes—across the country’s major highway corridors. To secure funding for other public road projects, states must ensure that at least four public DC fast chargers can be found every 50 miles along those corridors. Another $2.5 billion grant program will add chargers to rural and low-income areas and communities with few private parking spaces.

New minimum standards for federally funded public chargers also aim to end the irritating experiences EV drivers have endured thus far, said Klein, the Department of Energy official. They include requirements for uptime greater than 97 percent, unifying the payment experience and ending the walled-garden app problem, and ensuring consistent plug types and the number of chargers available.

Still, the thousands of chargers that already exist will not be held to the new, tougher NEVI rules. Ferro worries that those legacy chargers could continue to dog EV drivers for years, even as more people become EV drivers. In terms of regulations, “we’re at the one-yard line on the other end of the field,” he said.

The new drivers entering this arena likely won’t have to worry about blankets and extension cords and spreadsheets, as he once did. It might take an abundance of public chargers to convince people that electricity can viably replace gasoline, but perhaps fewer than they imagine. “Once people actually own an EV, they understand that, on average, their use of DC fast charging is maybe between 1 and 10 percent of their annual charging use,” Gore said. In my own experience, any EV with more than 300 miles of range can surprise with its ability to run for a few days without charging. And people will quickly learn new habits. Right now, most drivers are used to running their gas tanks fairly low before filling up at a station. As the charging network expands, new EV drivers will learn that they can charge every time they’re parked at home, in a garage, or at the office.

Ben Prochazka, a longtime EV driver and the executive director of the Electrification Coalition, an EV-policy nonprofit, likened this transition to the move from landlines to mobile phones. One day, those comparisons to getting gas may be entirely lost on future generations.

“My 5-year-old thinks gas stations are just convenience stores where you go buy drinks and snacks,” he said.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her final collection of essays. In 2021, the poet Leila Chatti took up Oliver’s words, reflecting on the challenge of them: “All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world / begging to be noticed.”

For those of us working to slow down, to smell the roses, to look one another in the eyes rather than in the iMessage bubbles, Oliver is a perfect guide. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, “It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs.”

The world makes its demands, and distraction has both personal costs and societal ones. My colleague Megan Garber has smartly noted how an overload of information and a fracturing of attention makes people, and Americans in particular, less equipped to meet the challenges of the moment. “Today’s news moves as a maelstrom [of] information at once trifling and historic, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, funny, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing, fleeting, loud—so much of it, at so many scales,” she wrote in 2021.

A lack of attention is dangerous. But we might also spend time thinking about the beauty of its presence, what attention gives back to those who pay it. I’ll leave you with a few more of Oliver’s words: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”

On Attention

“Attention Is the Beginning of Devotion”

By Franklin Foer

The late poet Mary Oliver warned against looking without noticing. In an age of distraction, her work is more urgent than ever.

The Great Fracturing of American Attention

By Megan Garber

Why resisting distraction is one of the foundational challenges of this moment

Mister Rogers and the Art of Paying Attention

By Adelia Moore

The beloved children’s-show host knew what was at the heart of human relationships.

Still Curious?

“Moccasin Flowers”: Oliver celebrates the beautiful fervor of life in the face of oblivion with characteristically simple and poignant verse. The fight for attention: We may live in an endlessly distracted world, but where we focus our gaze still matters.

Other Diversions

The fight over animal names has reached a new extreme. Eating fast is bad for you—right? AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets.

P.S.

If you’re interested in reading another poet whose work focuses on attention to the details of our lives and how we share those details with others, pick up something by Maggie Smith. I recommend her poem “First Fall.”

— Isabel

This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.

Roman Roy was ready. He had written his eulogy for his father—a great man, he would say, great despite and because of it all—on hot-pink index cards. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. He had “pre-grieved,” he kept telling people, and so could be trusted to fulfill, one last time, the core duty of the family business: to love in a way that moves markets.

But Roman failed. His grief overcame him; trying to speak, he sobbed. The funeral that had been so carefully scripted suddenly broadcast dead air. Kendall, ad-libbing, stepped in to speak. Then Shiv. Their addresses—honest, calculating, and hewing to the talking points—were valedictories for Logan, and for their show. They also returned Succession, in its penultimate episode, to its original premise. The declining monarch, the children who compete for his crown, the rotating cast of lackeys and fools: Succession is King Lear, retold for the age of the media empire. And Logan’s funeral punctuates the translation. It transports Lear’s famous first scene to a cathedral on the Upper East Side. Kendall and Shiv are Goneril and Regan, complying with their father’s demands for flattery. Roman is Cordelia, the youngest and most devoted, unable to turn love into a show. Their performances will carve their kingdom, and this is both a ludicrous circumstance and a logical one: Family, for them, is an endless act of politics.

Lear treats loyalty as a fact so remarkable that its presence doubles as a plot twist. Succession is not alone in finding resonance in that concession. Late last month, having cited Lear’s connection to our “savage and judgmental” political environment, Kenneth Branagh shared his plans to stage it in London and New York. The news followed Al Pacino’s announcement that he, too, would be adapting Shakespeare’s play. Lear has been used as a lens for understanding, among many others, Dianne Feinstein, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Trump’s children. (In response to the former president’s indictment in March, the older sons, like Gonerils with Truth Social accounts, offered up theatrical rage; Ivanka’s wan response, meanwhile, had a whiff of both crisis comms and Cordelia.) Maureen Dowd recently treated Lear as a metaphor for American gerontocracy. She was inspired by the fact that, this spring, “the hottest ticket” in Washington, D.C., was the Shakespeare Theater Company’s take on the tragedy—a production channeling the chaos that comes “when madmen lead the blind.”

Lear may be, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called it, “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world”: a five-act ode, sprawling and taut, to the hard work of being human. Aging, selfishness, sacrifice, love, loyalty, grief—the play’s wisdom aches across the centuries. But Lear’s psychological insights are not, I think, what account for its new currency. Its political insights are. Shakespeare’s tragedy is a study of monarchy in crisis—of all that goes wrong when a leader’s problems become everyone else’s emergency. With every new staging, conditions that Americans prefer to think of as relics of an older, sadder time—inherited rule, incompetent despotism, coups—reveal their abiding impact. Lear’s ubiquity, in that sense, is understandable. It is also deeply embarrassing. The play should not translate so well. But here it is, all the same, ancient and acutely familiar. “Was he, maybe … losing it, a little?” Roman Roy asks himself, preparing the eulogy he will not deliver. He is talking about his father but also speaking to us, the audience. We might wonder the same. We, too, are the heirs of kings in decline.

Logan was not supposed to have survived Succession’s first season. The patriarch was originally set to die fairly early in the show, leaving his children to battle in the world he left behind. But the writers changed course. Logan lived. The decision made Succession even more directly Lear-like than it might have been. Succession’s characters speak, at times, with early-modern dudgeon. (“This is the day his reign ends,” Kendall announces as he executes one of many failed plans to usurp his father.) Sandy and Sandi Furness, the Roys’ rivals and sometime collaborators, call back to Horace Howard Furness, the 19th-century Shakespeare scholar, and to the son who shares his name. Connor spends the series living out an extremely Shakespearean joke: Logan’s oldest son, his most obvious heir, plays the role of the illegitimate child.

It is through Logan, though, that Succession transported some of Lear’s most famous iconography to the small screen. He is played by Brian Cox, an actor so famous for performing Lear that he wrote a book about the experience. Logan, the patriarch named for a king, wanders on seaside moors. Ailing, he is confined both to hospital beds and to a body that proves ever more unruly. He rages at his children, and his fury strikes like thunder.

Lear features more references to the natural world than any of Shakespeare’s other plays. Civilization and wildness, the allusions suggest, are never as distant as they might seem. And the two collide, in Lear, in the figure of the king. The monarch is, in the play, nature itself: the natural order exerting its brute continuities. But Lear violates that system. First, he abdicates. Then, he loses control over himself. Both forms of decline lead to destruction for everyone around him. The fragile order crumbles. Among those who seek to take his place, pettiness turns into violence. Bureaucracy gives way to brutality. Humans reveal themselves to be what they have been all along: animals, clawing their way to the top.

Lear’s own fall is both natural—to age, Lear concedes, is to decline—and exceptional. He raves. He acts like a child. Because of that, he is sometimes dubbed the “mad king.” (Performances of the play were banned during the reign of George III, for fear that the fictional monarch might remind audiences of the real one.) The play, though, resists a direct diagnosis for its main character. It treats Lear’s madness less as a conclusion than as an all-consuming question. Has the king lost his temper, or his mind? Where does being mad end and going mad begin? Do the distinctions, in the end, matter?

Succession applies those ambiguities to its own wayward monarchy. The show does not suggest that Logan has lost his sanity. Instead, it asks whether Logan’s brute rationality might be its own form of madness. Succession is, like Lear, preoccupied with the animal world—its hierarchies, its insults, its violence. And the show weaves that dour Darwinism into its treatment of power. Logan is, in every way but the most specific, a king. His health is a market indicator. His body is, like Lear’s, a proxy for nature. Logan makes his own climate. His whims become everybody else’s weather. He is selfish. He is cruel. In him, the assumptions that drive our political systems—market competition, callous individualism, survival of the fittest—come to their logical conclusions.

[Read: The bodily horrors of Succession]

The eulogies delivered at Logan’s funeral, by people who have spent their lives in his storm, are reminders of that. “He had a vitality, a force that could hurt,” Kendall told the crowd. “And it did.”

His pain is eloquent. It is also, in some sense, an answer to the question Roman asked as he rehearsed his eulogy: Had Logan, maybe … lost it? Roman answered that query as he answers most others: noncommittally. (“Who knows?” he shrugged to himself, on the matter of his father’s sanity. “But.”) And his indifference, like Kendall’s acknowledgement of Logan’s abusiveness, is something of a thesis statement for the show. Logan himself is not mad. He spreads madness all the same.

That tension makes for one of Succession’s most jarring, and powerful, tributes to Lear. In the show, as in the play, madness defies definition so insistently that the defiance itself begins to look like the point. Analyze these men however you want; debate their mental states as you will; they’ll keep doing what they do. They will keep inflicting their flaws on everybody else. They will keep seeing themselves not as agents of misfortune but as its victims. The rational mind acknowledges not only the reality of life but also the humility of it: The world does not belong to you; you belong to it. But the unfettered power that both men have enjoyed abets their delusion. Their ravings are arrogance gone awry.

And the delirium, crucially, is contagious. In Succession, it settles on Roman when, finding democracy to be personally inconvenient, he becomes a one-man act of election fraud. Kendall cedes to it when, after his panicked ex-wife tells him that she fears for their children, he dismisses her concerns: “You’re too online,” he tells her. “Okay? You’ve lost context. Everything is fine.” Rava is alive to the world in a way Kendall is not. The violence is spreading. It is violence that the Roys have brought about. But Kendall refuses to see it. He takes refuge in his fantasies. This is madness. It is also his true inheritance.

Succession can be hard to watch. Its satires—insights powered less by ironic distance from the world than by proximity to it—stab and sting and chafe. Logan is most obviously a stand-in for Rupert Murdoch, a man who, like Logan, made billions promising people that the world can be made simpler than it is. But he is also a proxy for Trump. Pundits have spent years analyzing the former president’s mind: Is he a narcissist? Is he gripped by dementia? Are his ravings real or merely extensions of his show? The answer is the same for Logan, and for Lear: It doesn’t matter. Trump does what he does because he can. His mind exerts itself wantonly. His delusions become inescapable.

And then, in short order, they become destructive. Trump is instability incarnate. Institutions pride themselves on minimizing the power of chance over people’s lives. Corporations have boards. Governments have redundancies. Every day, though, Trump lays bare the ease with which the weakness of one man—that addled brain, that cold heart—can settle into a system. The age of Trump is also the age of rampant conspiracism, of misinformation, of, in general, error run amok. Rantings and ravings are no longer exceptional; they are our rule. We live in a world that goes, every day, a little madder.

That is why Lear is so able to reach across the centuries and punch modern audiences in the gut. The typical Shakespearean plot is dense, full of jams and twists; Lear’s, though—teeming with affairs, betrayals, murders, tortures, banishments, poisonings, hangings, blindings—is especially frenzied. Story arcs lead to high-speed collisions; chaos becomes a narrative proposition. The tumult serves one of Lear’s most urgent insights: Power, when it becomes unreasonable, begets nihilism. The critic Harold Bloom has observed Lear’s obsession with absence. (“Nothing will come of nothing,” goes one of the king’s most famous lines.) And the play’s soap operatics abet all the emptiness. They disorient and overwhelm. Even in a play—even with action that is contained, neatly, to a stage—there is only so much chaos we can take before we give up trying to make sense of it all. For Lear’s audience as well as its characters, madness becomes environmental.

[Read: King Lear, from the June 1880 issue]

Shakespeare, in that way, anticipated the discord that shapes, and misshapes, this postmodern political moment. Monarchs, in Shakespeare’s time, rationalized their reigns tautologically: They were proxies for the divine, they claimed, ruling because they were meant to. Their ascendance to the throne, whether achieved through battle or treachery or accident of birth—and the choices they made while in power—were matters of godly will.

Americans, learning that history, typically take pleasure in mocking it. But we defer, too, to dynasties. We structure our society around birthrights. We allow inheritance—familial privilege, educational privilege, generational wealth—to act as a form of destiny. Succession indicts that inclination. The news offers daily reminders of it. “The question is, when Rupert dies, how are the kids aligned?” a former News Corp executive told the reporter Gabriel Sherman about the Murdoch family’s succession drama. This is a throwaway quote that says everything. Inheritance, for the Murdochs, is a game of musical chairs. It is a battle of attrition that will be won or lost in whatever arrangement happens to be there when the music ends. One family’s fortunes will become, in short order, everyone else’s fate.

Succession twists that dynamic, applying the vulnerabilities to its monarchs. At every turn, characters’ grandest plans are waylaid by mundanities. One of Kendall’s early attempts to overthrow his father is stymied by a traffic jam. Another attempt fails—and a man dies—because a deer, at just the wrong moment, leaps into a road. A shareholder meeting that will determine the fate of one of the world’s most powerful conglomerates falls apart because of … a urinary tract infection. (“The piss-mad king,” Roman pronounces the ailing Logan.)

Few would argue that the state of affairs that Succession is highlighting—so much power, concentrated among so few—is optimal. Systems, working well, have redundancies and safeguards, checks and balances. They will not crumble when one person goes rogue. In Succession, as in Lear, the people who will bear the brunt of all the melodrama are largely absent from the stage. That does not mean, though, that they are excluded from the stories. Audiences of Shakespeare’s time, taking in the tale—failing fathers, greedy children, madness, machinations, victors, spoils, chance—would have recognized their own history. And they would have understood, intuitively, the true impact of all the palace intrigue. When kingdoms are divided, the king’s subjects will bear the burdens.

Succession emphasizes the same thing. The show’s first episode closes with a shot of an apartment building in New York City. It is nighttime. The windows are ablaze with the flicker of televisions. The image captures the extent of the Roy family’s power. It also acknowledges the people who live under their rule. It clarifies the stakes of the show’s satire: We believe, still, in the divine right of kings. We merely outsource the old entitlements to newer gods.

A common criticism of Succession, and a fair one, is that the show, over time, has become repetitive. It recycles storylines. It reuses language, themes, and tropes so reliably that the viewer might wonder whether the echoes are resonant or simply redundant. But that recursiveness—Succession’s steady development, over its four seasons, of a sense of no ending—is integral to its messaging. In this universe, despite the appearance of world-shaking drama, very little meaningfully changes. The wealth that gives the Roys their power also gives their show a stifling sense of inertia.

The antics, and the stasis, resonate. We live in the wreckage of consequential absurdity. Succession came from a moment that was similar, in its way, to Lear’s: 1606, the year Shakespeare wrote his tragedy, was a time of relentless crisis. King James had ascended the throne in 1603, with hopes of joining England and Scotland into a unified Britain; he failed. In late 1605, a group of dissident Catholics attempted to destroy Parliament while the king and his family were in attendance. The Gunpowder Plot—“5/11”—was foiled at the last moment. The summer of 1606, in London, brought an outbreak of plague.

Shakespeare channeled the instability into his story of a kingdom fighting for its sanity. His Lear was a telling of another play, the True Chronicle History of King Leir. The original story ended happily, with Cordelia and her father raising an army together and reclaiming their kingdom in triumph. But Shakespeare, a bit like Cordelia herself, chose not to flatter his audience. He changed Leir’s ending, reshaping it to conform to that elemental definition of a Shakespearean tragedy: Pretty much everyone dies. In the process, he created an ageless omen. No redemption will come when the madmen lead the blind. The final tragedy of Lear is not that the king declines. It is that the king declines and takes everyone down with him. His madness spreads. It seeps. It writes itself into every story, and soon enough into history. And then—the greatest tragedy of all—the history repeats.

This fall, millions of Americans might be lining up for yet another kind of COVID vaccine:  their first-ever dose that lacks the strain that ignited the pandemic more than three and a half years ago. Unlike the current, bivalent vaccine, which guards against two variants at once, the next one could, like the first version of the shot, have only one main ingredient—the spike protein of the XBB.1 lineage of the Omicron variant, the globe’s current dominant clade.

That plan isn’t yet set. The FDA still has to convene a panel of experts, then is expected to make a final call on autumn’s recipe next month. But several experts told me they hope the agency follows the recent recommendation of a World Health Organization advisory group and focuses the next vaccine only on the strains now circulating.

The switch in strategy—from two variants to one, from original SARS-CoV-2 plus Omicron to XBB.1 alone—would be momentous but wise, experts told me, reflecting the world’s updated understanding of the virus’s evolution and the immune system’s quirks. “It just makes a lot of sense,” said Melanie Ott, the director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, in San Francisco. XBB.1 is the main coronavirus group circulating today; neither the original variant nor BA.5, the two coronavirus flavors in the bivalent shot, is meaningfully around anymore. And an XBB.1-focused vaccine may give the global population a particularly good shot at broadening immunity.

At the same time, COVID vaccines are still in a sort of beta-testing stage. In the past three-plus years, the virus has spawned countless iterations, many of which have been extremely good at outsmarting us; we humans, meanwhile, are only on our third-ish attempt at designing a vaccine that can keep pace with the pathogen’s evolutionary sprints. And we’re very much still learning about the coronavirus’s capacity for flexibility and change, says Rafi Ahmed, an immunologist at Emory University. By now, it’s long been clear that vaccines are essential for preventing severe disease and death, and that some cadence of boosting is probably necessary to keep the shots’ effectiveness high. But when the virus alters its evolutionary tactics, our vaccination strategy must follow—and experts are still puzzling out how to account for those changes as they select the shots for each year.

In the spring and summer of 2022, the last time the U.S. was mulling on a new vaccine formula, Omicron was still relatively new, and the coronavirus’s evolution seemed very much in flux. The pathogen had spent more than two years erratically slingshotting out Greek-letter variants without an obvious succession plan. Instead of accumulating genetic changes within a single lineage—a more iterative form of evolution, roughly akin to what flu strains do—the coronavirus produced a bunch of distantly related variants that jockeyed for control. Delta was not a direct descendant of Alpha; Omicron was not a Delta offshoot; no one could say with any certainty what would arise next, or when. “We didn’t understand the trajectory,” says Kanta Subbarao, the head of the WHO advisory group convened to make recommendations on COVID vaccines.

And so the experts played it safe. Including an Omicron variant in the shot felt essential, because of how much the virus had changed. But going all in on Omicron seemed too risky—some experts worried that “the virus would flip back,” Subbarao told me, to a variant more similar to Alpha or Delta or something else. As a compromise, several countries, including the United States, went with a combination: half original, half Omicron, in an attempt to reinvigorate OG immunity while laying down new defenses against the circulating strains du jour.

And those shots did bolster preexisting immunity, as boosters should. But they didn’t rouse a fresh set of responses against Omicron to the degree that some experts had hoped they would, Ott told me. Already trained on the ancestral version of the virus, people’s bodies seemed to have gotten a bit myopic—repeatedly reawakening defenses against past variants, at the expense of new ones that might have more potently attacked Omicron. The outcome was never thought to be damaging, Subbarao told me: The bivalent, for instance, still broadened people’s immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 compared with, say, another dose of the original-recipe shot, and was effective at tamping down hospitalization rates. But Ahmed told me that, in retrospect, he thinks an Omicron-only boost might have further revved that already powerful effect.

Going full bore on XBB.1 now could keep the world from falling into that same trap twice. People who get an updated shot with that strain alone would receive only the new, unfamiliar ingredient, allowing the immune system to focus on the fresh material and potentially break out of an ancestral-strain rut. XBB.1’s spike protein also would not be diluted with one from an older variant—a concern Ahmed has with the current bivalent shot. When researchers added Omicron to their vaccine recipes, they didn’t double the total amount of spike protein; they subbed out half of what was there before. That left vaccine recipients with just half the Omicron-focused mRNA they might have gotten had the shot been monovalent, and probably a more lackluster antibody response.

Recent work from the lab of Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, suggests another reason the Omicron half of the shot didn’t pack enough of an immunizing punch. Subvariants from this lineage, including BA.5 and XBB.1, carry at least one mutation that makes their spike protein unstable—to the point where it seems less likely than other versions of the spike protein to stick around for long enough to sufficiently school immune cells. In a bivalent vaccine, in particular, the immune response could end up biased toward non-Omicron ingredients, exacerbating the tendencies of already immunized people to focus their energy on the ancestral strain. For the same reason, a monovalent XBB.1, too, might not deliver the anticipated immunizing dose, Menachery told me. But if people take it (still a big if), and hospitalizations remain low among those up-to-date on their shots, a once-a-year total-strain switch-out might be the choice for next year’s vaccine too.

Dropping the ancestral strain from the vaccine isn’t without risk. The virus could still produce a variant totally different from XBB.1, though that does, at this point, seem unlikely. For a year and a half now, Omicron has endured, and it now has the longest tenure of a single Greek-letter variant since the pandemic’s start. Even the subvariants within the Omicron family seem to be sprouting off each other more predictably; after a long stint of inconsistency, the virus’s shape-shifting now seems “less jumpy,” says Leo Poon, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. It may be a sign that humans and the virus have reached a détente now that the population is blanketed in a relatively stable layer of immunity. Plus, even if a stray Alpha or Delta descendant were to rise up, the world wouldn’t be caught entirely off guard: So many people have banked protection against those and other past variants that they’d probably still be well buffered against COVID’s worst acute outcomes. (That reassurance doesn’t hold, though, for people who still need primary-series shots, including the kids being born into the world every day. An XBB.1 boost might be a great option for people with preexisting immunity. But a bivalent that can offer more breadth might still be the more risk-averse choice for someone whose immunological slate is blank.)

More vaccination-strategy shifts will undoubtedly come. SARS-CoV-2 is still new to us; so are our shots. But the virus’s evolution, as of late, has been getting a shade more flu-like, and its transmission patterns a touch more seasonal. Regulators in the U.S. have already announced that COVID vaccines will probably be offered each year in the fall—as annual flu shots are. The viruses aren’t at all the same. But as the years progress, the comparison between COVID and flu shots could get more apt still—if, say, the coronavirus also starts to produce multiple, genetically distinct strains that simultaneously circulate. In that case, vaccinating against multiple versions of the virus at once might be the most effective defense.

Flu shots could be a useful template in another way: Although those shots have followed roughly the same guidelines for many years, with experts meeting twice a year to decide whether and how to update each autumn’s vaccine ingredients, they, too, have needed some flexibility. Until 2012, the vaccines were trivalent, containing ingredients that would immunize people against three separate strains at once; now many, including all of the U.S.’s, are quadrivalent—and soon, based on new evidence, researchers may push for those to return to a three-strain recipe. At the same time, flu and COVID vaccines share a major drawback. Our shots’ ingredients are still selected months ahead of when the injections actually reach us—leaving immune systems lagging behind a virus that has, in the interim, sprinted ahead. Until the world has something more universal, our vaccination strategies will have to be reactive, scrambling to play catch-up with these pathogens’ evolutionary whims.

As clocks across Washington, D.C., struck 1 on the morning of March 4, 1879, the Capitol bustled with activity. Sleepless tourists packed its halls; Cabinet secretaries stayed huddled in consultation with congressmen; diplomats and socialites remained shoulder-to-shoulder in the Senate viewing gallery, transfixed by the scene unfolding below them.

They were all witnessing a grimly fascinating event—one that few Americans had, until that moment, thought possible: Their government was about to run out of money. More startling, the reason for its insolvency was not some economic crisis, nor war, but a deliberate act of sabotage. For the first time, one party had decided to withhold federal funding in an attempt to extort policy change from the other.

Modern Americans have grown tragically accustomed to party politics interrupting the core functions of government. Federal shutdowns seem to come and go like bad-weather events. President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy are currently sparring over what it will take for Congress to raise the nation’s debt ceiling so that we don’t default on our debts. That is what makes the country’s first self-inflicted funding crisis so fascinating: In the events informing the almost-shutdown of 1879—and the force that eventually resolved it—are lessons that might help us snap out of what has become an awful national habit.

The possible 1879 shutdown was devised with a particularly nefarious policy goal in mind. The House was controlled by the Democratic Party, whose representatives wanted to force Republican President Rutherford Hayes to yield what remained of Black voting rights in the post-Reconstruction South. To achieve this, they attached “riders” to crucial funding bills in the spring of 1879—addendums explicitly banning federal troops from monitoring southern polling sites against violence or fraud. When Hayes refused to sign these, Congress adjourned on March 4 without having passed sufficient funds for the government to operate. The president was forced to immediately summon a special session.

The battle had been met, but already its outcome was essentially decided. The Democrats’ unprecedented attempt to use their budgetary influence to secure policy change was doomed to fail, for three reasons.

The first was the president’s refusal to come to the bargaining table. From the onset of the funding standoff, Hayes expressed outrage at both its goal (as a friend had explained to him: to help Democrats “kill with impunity so many negroes as … to frighten the survivors from the polls of the South”) and its brazenness. He ruled out any compromise, promising to veto any new funding bills containing the riders. “It will be a severe, perhaps a long contest,” he wrote. Still, Hayes continued, “I do not fear it. I do not even dread it.”  

The second reason for the shutdown’s futility presented itself after Hayes’s announcement. Now confident in White House support, House Republicans—led by future President James Garfield—developed an aggressive floor plan aimed at publicly confronting Democrats for gambling with the economic and social well-being of the country.

Garfield’s March 29 House speech launching this strategy shocked even Republicans with its vigor. Arms waving, the minority leader spent an hour accusing Democrats of treason for taking the government fiscally hostage. Garfield was a famously mild-mannered presence in Congress, but he could not contain his fury at the abuse of procedural power on display. He decried it as a potential deathblow to the country:

The House has today resolved to enter upon a revolution against the Constitution and government of the United States … the Democratic Representatives declare that, if they are not permitted to force upon the other house and upon the Executive, against their consent, the repeal of a law … this refusal will be considered sufficient ground for starving this government to death. That is the proposition which we denounce as revolution. On this ground we plant ourselves, and here we will stand to the end.

The effect was immediate. Garfield’s speech sent some Democrats scurrying to tell journalists that they didn’t support the shutdown. Others persisted in passing funding bills with the offensive riders attached, but President Hayes fulfilled his promise to veto these. Ultimately, though, the final and most important reason America’s first federal shutdown failed was that citizens were appalled by it.

Bankers publicly decried the impact of the crisis on “the business interests of the country.” Voters buried Democratic congressmen with letters and petitions demanding an end to the nonsense. Most devastating, America’s early comedians had a banner season; all through the spring, major papers ran joke columns about the partisan tail-chasing in Congress (“The dessert always reminds me of the veto, because it is the last thing on the bill”).   

Eventually, House Democrats got the message. A freshman from Texas joined their caucus in June. New colleagues asked whether voters had elected him to add “backbone” to the shutdown fight. No, he solemnly replied, the people wanted not backbone, “but brains” in Congress for a change.

Democrats caved by late June, passing funding bills that mostly contained only scaled-down, meaningless riders. These Hayes duly signed into law. “Was there ever anything more ridiculous?” the secretary of state harrumphed as things in Washington finally got back to normal.

Modern Americans can answer this question with an embarrassed “yes.” What was once dismissed as absurd has been normalized. Though the issues at stake have changed, Garfield’s warnings of a future wherein Congress can abuse its power of the purse to “starve” the rest of government for policy concessions have been validated. It is almost certainly a reason Americans mistrust government (and Congress in particular) more than ever.

So long as officeholders of either party continue to view budget standoffs as possible political boons, all Americans suffer. Fortunately, the parable of 1879 shows how this “new normal” might be reversed—if enough citizens commit themselves to leading the charge.

We certainly have more ways to do so than ever before. Business leaders can get on television to communicate the dire economic consequences of petty political fights—as they recently have. Through social media, average Americans can focus their frustration directly on fiscal saboteurs in the House. Humor—whether from late-night hosts or TikTok stars—can “go viral” in a way that 19th-century columnists would only marvel (and probably grimace) at.

In the long run, though, ending the politics of fiscal sabotage will still require Americans to take their dissatisfaction with it to the ballot box, as we have before. There is something comforting in that.

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.

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

This evening, Ron DeSantis is announcing his presidential campaign by talking to Elon Musk on Twitter. The Florida governor’s attempt to fit into Donald Trump’s shoes is only going to get worse from here.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Four forces bind Trump’s supporters more tightly than ever. The meat paradox There is no evidence strong enough to end the pandemic-origins debate. Local politics was already messy. Then came Nextdoor.

Not Serious People

I am not going to open Twitter this evening to hear Ron DeSantis announce—finally, for real, no joke, this time he means it—his campaign to become the leader of the free world. Neither are you, in all likelihood; Twitter is composed of a tiny fraction of highly engaged social-media users, and most people in America aren’t on the platform. Even fewer use Twitter Spaces, the audio component of Twitter where users can tune in to a live conversation. (I’ve participated in some of them. They’re fun, but a bit cumbersome.)

More to the point, very few of the people Ron DeSantis wants to reach are on Twitter. Most of them won’t hear any of the conversation, unless somehow the Ron and Elon Show is blasted from loudspeakers in Florida’s retirement mecca, The Villages. Yesterday, after Fox News announced tonight’s event, Reuters published an explainer: “What is Twitter Spaces where DeSantis will announce his presidential run?” If you’re unfamiliar enough with Twitter that you need to read the explainer, you’re not likely to join the event.

Regardless of what plays out tonight, or how many people tune in (or don’t) to hear it, I have to wonder: Who came up with the galaxy-brained idea of matching up two of the most socially awkward people in American public life for a spontaneous discussion on Twitter? It’s not even laden with the pomp and suspense of a real announcement: As my colleague David Frum tweeted yesterday, “If you tell Fox News you plan to announce your candidacy on Twitter, isn’t that really … announcing on Fox News?”

In any case, the venue is, to say the least, something of a risk. The last time Musk tried to participate in a Twitter Spaces event, he got exasperated with journalists for asking him questions and quickly left the discussion. (Much like Donald Trump, Musk seemingly cannot internalize that everyone in the world does not actually work for him.) This time, Musk has brought in his friend David Sacks as the moderator. Musk reportedly once tossed Sacks out of a room with a wave of his hand by saying, “David, this meeting is too technical for you.” Sacks denies that this happened, but still, a close Musk adviser like Sacks is unlikely to ask anything too challenging.

DeSantis’s campaign likely saw two reasons for choosing this stunt. First, Trump has not come back to Twitter, despite Musk lifting the former’s president ban from the platform. (Trump vowed not to return, and amazingly, it’s one of the few public promises he’s ever kept.) The Florida governor will get a Trump-free environment, where he can show that he’s cool and hip and down with his fellow kids on the interwebs, unlike the elderly Trump. (Trump, of course, pioneered the abuse of social media for political reasons, but he’s now over on his own platform.)

The second reason is likely more important: DeSantis seems to think he can win the nomination by imitating Trump (sometimes physically), and part of that, apparently, is owning the libs on social media. In that sense, Musk’s weird and cloddish right-wing politics make him a perfect partner for DeSantis; both of them need a public-relations boost after months of missteps. Of course, Musk will still be a billionaire and the CEO of three major companies no matter who likes or hates him. DeSantis, meanwhile, needs money and Republican primary voters, and he has apparently decided that the way to gain Trump’s share of those voters is to troll, and troll hard, while generating free publicity by appearing with the guy who tried to wreck Twitter just to get even with the blue-check media elites.

DeSantis’s moves so far fit into that strategy. The war with Disney, the attack on public education, the phobic reaction to anything regarding race, sexuality, or gender—it’s all performative cruelty aimed at the most socially and politically retrograde voters, which is another way of saying “the GOP-base voters who will decide the primaries.” DeSantis could be a true believer in his own policies, but he’s clearly decided to lean into the idea of being a Trumplike outsider and culture warrior. (As Jill Lawrence pointed out today in The Bulwark, possible candidates such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin are also culture-war partisans, but they seem to understand the risks of scaring off less extreme voters.)

In my view,  the United States will be better off if Donald Trump does not become the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. His continued support of violent insurrectionists forever renders him unfit to participate in our elections; anyone would be better on the ticket than Trump, and that includes DeSantis. But DeSantis has learned from Trump that winning the GOP nomination is not about policy; it’s about playacting. He knows that the primary faithful want rallies and revenge, costumes and chaos.

The presidency is a job for a serious person, but in today’s Republican Party, serious people need not apply. DeSantis seems to understand this, and will appear with Elon Musk in the hope, perhaps, of winning over Twitter power users such as @catturd2 and the various pestilential extremists Musk welcomed back to the platform. Though it might be a good move for DeSantis—who needs to do something to reinflate his shrinking political bubble—his cozying up to Musk is just another moment when Succession’s Logan Roy might look at the 2024 GOP primary candidates as he did at his children, shake his head sadly, and say: “You are not serious people.”

Related:

The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis Twitter is a far-right social network.

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris called for Congress to enact more gun-safety legislation on the first anniversary of the mass shooting in Uvalde. Tina Turner, the rock-and-roll pioneer and pop icon, died at the age of 83 after a long illness. Montana banned people dressed in drag from reading books to children at public schools and libraries, becoming the first state to do so.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Hawaii's feral chickens are out of control, Tove Danovich writes.

More From The Atlantic

The problem with how the census classifies white people The silence that mass shootings leave behind There is no constitutional end run around the debt ceiling.

Culture Break

Read. Chain-Gang All-Stars, a new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah that’s set in a world where imprisoned people duel to the death as entertainment for others.

Watch. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (streaming on Netflix), a perplexing new documentary that offers glimpses of the tabloid star but fails to reckon with the forces that ruined her.

P.S.

Though some readers may know that I spent more than 25 years teaching at the Naval War College (and many years before that teaching at Dartmouth and Georgetown), they may not know that I also have taught for 18 years in Harvard’s continuing-education division, the Harvard Extension School. I have now retired from Extension, and last night I was honored to receive the school’s highest award, the Harvard Extension School Medal, for my teaching and service. Harvard’s program is (of course!) the oldest in America: Founded as the Lowell Institute in 1835 (Oliver Wendell Holmes, who named this very magazine, was a lecturer then), it became known as “Extension” in the early 20th century. I was proud to be part of the mission to deliver quality education to anyone who wanted it, including the nontraditional students who would come to class after a full day at work—just as I had.

My time at Extension, however, also taught me that Americans often overlook or underestimate the value of such programs. I am an advocate for residential, four-year college programs—that is, for the students likely to benefit from them. Not everyone can or should go to a full-time program; some students would rather work, others need to pick up a course on a topic only as part of their professional development, and others might be lifelong learners who are coming back to school merely out of interest in a particular subject. Continuing-education programs at America’s universities help provide this learning at a fraction of the cost of a full-time degree, and often with the same instructors and on the very same campuses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

The U.S. Census Bureau is considering a historic revision to the 2030 count that would recognize the distinct ethnicity of people of Middle Eastern and North African descent—primarily Arab Americans, who have been subject to post-9/11 discrimination and, until now, have been grouped into the nebulous American amalgam of “white” people.

The census should make this simple and obvious change, but it shouldn’t stop there. It should overhaul the entirety of its facile race and ethnicity reporting.

Like people of Middle Eastern and North African origins, millions of other Americans have been funneled into one side of our country’s enduring binary of whiteness or the other. According to today’s census forms, Greeks, Irish, Italians, Slavs (who were systematically excluded for a century), and Jews—who are still the target of white-supremacist violence—are indistinct from people with Mayflower backgrounds.

[Yair Rosenberg: Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism]

Being an unspecified “white” person has allowed many of us to blend in, when the most unifying thing we might do in this era of identity-driven polarization is acknowledge all the ways we are different.

Today’s nationalist identity politics are grounded in the grievances of people who think of themselves as white, who fear that established norms are being undone and find it difficult to see themselves in the faces of newer immigrant arrivals. Their insecurity has inspired a new wave of nativism and racial politics in the run-up to the “majority minority” milestone in 2044, when the Census Bureau projects that the share of non-Hispanic white Americans will dip below 50 percent.

But the simplistic survey questions that underpin this milestone—and the accompanying backlash—reflect the choices the bureau has made until now. Once a decade since 1970, the bureau’s demographers and economists make the conscious decision to measure America’s diversity first according to whether someone self-identifies as “Hispanic or Latino” and then whether they are “Black or African American,” “White,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” or “some other race.”

If these current questions about ethnicity were replaced by a required “select all that apply” question that asked Americans to report the various national, religious, and tribal origins of their ancestors, it would allow us to contextualize race in all the diversity the census’s blunt categories defy. This would not only generate more detailed and measurable data; it would also prompt Americans to reflect on their heritage.

Even the category “Middle Eastern or North African” veils an immense amount of diversity. It groups Iranians, Saudis, Moroccans, Turks, Israelis, and Afghans together. Dozens of other groups would surely appreciate their own checkbox too: Algerians, Bangladeshis, Brazilians, Ghanaians, Sudanese, Trinidadians.

Those who may not be able to trace their lineage to a specific country—including many African Americans—might select a regional origin or identify as “American descendants of slaves.”

Accounting for these differences would swiftly reveal the way today’s racial categories oversimplify the diversity of a nation that has long featured a majority composed of minorities and high rates of intergroup marriage. When we recognize the thousands of national, religious, and language groups that are overlaid, boundaries are harder to draw.

[Richard Alba, Morris Levy, and Dowell Myers: The myth of a majority-minority America]

America’s racial and ethnic lines, which are now recorded by bureaucrats in an office building in Suitland, Maryland, were not drawn in ink at the Constitutional Convention by Washington, Madison, and Mason. The census, instead, reproduces categories that initially reflected the racial worldview of America’s British colonizers and then evolved over a convoluted history that the legal scholar David Bernstein has called “a combination of amateur anthropology and sociology, interest group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, lack of public oversight, and happenstance.”

It’s arguable that the census must account for these categories because so many Americans continue to classify themselves and others along these lines.That said, to contend that the census should reflect existing social boundaries ignores its integral role in constructing them.

Census categories took their modern form after World War II, an era in which the U.S. government began formalizing its system of racial classification to address civil-rights violations. During this period, intense lobbying of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by different parties produced newly recognized categories for people of Asian origins and “American Indians.” Many lighter-skinned ethnic and religious minorities were classified as “white” on employment forms, despite their persistent socioeconomic struggles or exclusion.

Nearly a decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned employment discrimination, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a 1973 report urging the federal government to create a system to collect data on the distribution of America’s major ethnic and racial groups. The resulting categories became required for all reporting by federal agencies when the Office of Management and Budget issued the “race and ethnic standards” that remain the basis for today’s classification system.

The current boundaries ignore the disparate experiences and identities of people of “Asian or Pacific Islander,” backgrounds whose origins stretch from islands in the Western Pacific to the Indian subcontinent. (The Census of 1970 actually classified South Asians as “white.”) They lump Spaniards together with Bolivian mestizos, and recent sub-Saharan arrivals with other Black Americans whose families have been here for centuries.

For their part, Middle Eastern and North African Americans have sought a separate category on census forms for decades. Although early generations of Middle Eastern immigrants saw whiteness as their path toward equal rights, there has been a growing disconnect between the U.S. government’s classification and people’s lived experience.

Under the Obama administration, the Census Bureau conducted studies to determine the extent to which Middle Eastern Americans distinguish themselves from white people in advance of the 2020 count. The researchers concluded that including a “Middle Eastern or North African” category on questionnaires would be “optimal” because it “helps MENA respondents to more accurately report their MENA identities.” The effort stalled during the Trump administration, despite the way the White House’s “Muslim ban” implicitly acknowledged many inside this subgroup. The Biden administration has since endorsed a checkbox for Middle Eastern ethnicity alongside the “Hispanic” checkbox.

It would be just as optimal to ensure that other Americans can report their origins too. If the census were to facilitate this, researchers, businesses, and public agencies could examine trends with much more nuance and identify inequities among people of certain national ancestries. Presently, the main time the federal government acknowledges greater detail is when a hate crime occurs.

Why does it take discrimination—or violence—to formally recognize the importance and relevance of people’s national origin and religion? If these are a common basis for discrimination, then they have clearly reached a level of public salience that makes them worthy of full public accounting.

As consequential as census labels are for the way Americans perceive their country, they may be more consequential for the way Americans see themselves. The census could be a reminder of our own complicated stories at a moment when the population share of the foreign-born approaches a historic peak and the boundaries of whiteness can hardly stretch any further. It could reinforce the unquantifiable diversity of American identity rather than its conformity to categories perceived to be mutually exclusive.

Photographs by Spencer Ostrander

Over the course of two years, Spencer Ostrander made several trips around the country to take pictures of the sites of more than 30 mass shootings. This is a small selection from that body of work. The numbers of those killed and injured in each incident do not include the perpetrators.

A

ccording to a recent estimate by the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Research Institute, there are 393 million guns currently owned by residents of the United States—more than one firearm for every man, woman, and child in the country. Each year, approximately 40,000 Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those 40,000 gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for about half of all suicides per year. With the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, and the law-enforcement killings caused by guns, the average comes out to more than 100 Americans killed by bullets every day.

On that same average day, another 200-plus are wounded by guns, which translates into 80,000 a year. Eighty thousand wounded and 40,000 dead, or 120,000 ambulance calls and emergency-room cases for every 12-month tick of the clock, but the toll of gun violence goes far beyond the pierced and bloodied bodies of the victims themselves, spilling out into the devastations visited upon their immediate families, their extended families, their friends, their fellow workers, the people of their neighborhoods, their schools, their churches, their softball teams, and their communities at large—the vast brigade of lives touched by the presence of a single person who lives or has lived among them—meaning that the number of Americans directly or indirectly marked by gun violence every year must be tallied in the millions.

Those are the facts, but helpful as it is to look at the figures that support those facts, they do not answer the question of why mass shootings occur so frequently in America and nowhere else. Bloodshed and death on this scale and at this level of frequency would seem to call for national action, a concerted effort on the part of state, federal, and municipal governments to control what by any measure of rational understanding is a public-health crisis. America’s relationship to guns is anything but rational, however, and therefore we have done little or nothing to fix the problem. It’s not that we lack the intelligence or the wherewithal to relieve this threat to the safety and well-being of society, but for complex historical reasons, we have lacked the will to do so, and so obdurate have we become in our refusal to address the problem that in 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was barred by Congress from using federal funds to conduct research that “may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” (In 2019, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health were given $25 million to research gun violence.)

[Read: Five people died in the Kentucky shooting. The full toll is much higher.]

Macy’s department store, at Cascade Mall,
Burlington, Washington.
September 23, 2016:
5 people killed. Macy’s department store, at Cascade Mall,
Burlington, Washington.
September 23, 2016:
5 people killed. Umpqua Community College,
Roseburg, Oregon.
October 1, 2015:
9 people killed, 8 injured by gunfire. Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church,
Charleston, South Carolina.
June 17, 2015:
9 people killed, 1 injured by gunfire.

By contrast, consider the progress we have made with the cars we drive and how conscientiously we have pushed down the death and injury rates caused by automobile accidents over the years. And make no mistake about it: Cars are not terribly different from guns. A high-powered automatic rifle and a 4,000-pound Chevy barreling down a highway at 70 or 80 miles an hour are both lethal weapons.

The car has been with us since the tail end of the 19th century, and at the beginning of its life the horseless carriage was seen as nothing more than a faster, motorized version of the horse-drawn carriage. Consequently, there were initially no standardized laws or regulations governing its use: no licenses, for example, which meant no road tests to prove one’s competence behind the wheel; no stop signs; no traffic lights; no speed limits, no brake signals; no rearview or side-view mirrors; no left- or right-turn-signal lights; no penalties for drunk driving; no shatterproof windshields; no padded dashboards; and no seat belts.

Bit by bit, over the better part of the 20th century, each one of those improvements was made—made and enforced by law—and the roads, streets, and highways of the country have become safer because of them. There are still an appalling number of traffic deaths in America every year, but compared with the dizzying rates of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, the percentage of deaths per total miles driven by about 229 million licensed American drivers in close to 280 million registered vehicles—trucks, vans, passenger cars, buses, and motorcycles—has in fact been vastly reduced. Which raises the question: If we could face up to the dangers represented by cars and use our brains and sense of common purpose to combat those dangers, why haven’t we been able to do the same thing with guns?

[Read: Coming undone in the age of mass shootings]

Ned Peppers Bar,
Dayton, Ohio.
August 4, 2019:
9 people killed, 17 injured by gunfire. Left:
King Soopers supermarket,
Boulder, Colorado.
March 22, 2021:
10 people killed.
Right:
Mandalay Bay Hotel,
Paradise, Nevada.
October 1, 2017:
60 people killed, 422 injured by gunfire. Tree of Life Synagogue,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
October 27, 2018:
11 people killed, 6 injured by gunfire. Sikh Temple of Wisconsin,
Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
August 5, 2012:
7 people killed, 3 injured by gunfire.

Guns have been around a lot longer than cars, of course, but cars are much bigger than guns and therefore more visible, and after circulating among us for the past 120 years, they have established a hold on the American imagination no less dominant than the spell cast by our passion for guns. Cars and guns are the twin pillars of our deepest national mythology, for the car and the gun each represents an idea of freedom and individual empowerment, the most exciting forms of self-expression available to us: Dare yourself to push the gas pedal to the floor, and suddenly you are racing along at 100 miles an hour; curl your fingers around the trigger of your Glock or AR-15, and you own the world.

Nor do we ever tire of watching and thinking about those things. The two most beloved components of American films have long been the shoot-out and the car chase, and no matter how many times we have lost ourselves in the spectacle of those deftly orchestrated thrill-a-thons as they played out on-screen, we still go back for more.

[Read: The second generation of school shootings]

On the other hand, for all the similarities between cars and guns, there are fundamental differences as well. Guns exist for the sole purpose of destroying life, whereas cars are manufactured to carry the living from one place to another, and even if too many drivers, passengers, and pedestrians happen to be killed in cars and because of cars, we largely call their deaths accidental, a tragic by-product of the risks and dangers of the road. By contrast, nearly every death by gun is intentional, whether the person using the gun is a soldier in battle, a hunter stalking deer in the woods, a deranged or cold-blooded murderer on a city street or in the kitchen of someone’s house, an armed robber who panics while holding up a jewelry store, or a crushed, despairing soul who downs half a bottle of bourbon in a dark room and then fires a bullet into his head.

Cars are a necessity of civilian life in America. Guns are not, and as more and more Americans have come to understand that, the percentage of households that own guns has been dropping steadily over the past five decades, from half of them to a third of them. Yet the number of guns currently owned by Americans has grown—and just a small group of people own a great percentage of these guns. How to account for this great difference, and why at this moment in our history have Americans been pulling further and further apart on the subject of guns, leading to a situation in which most of us want little or nothing to do with them and some of us—a minority that contains millions—have fetishized them into emblems of American freedom, an essential human right granted to all citizens by the Framers of the Constitution?

Walmart,
El Paso, Texas.
August 3, 2019:
23 people killed, 22 injured by gunfire. Century 16 movie theater,
Aurora, Colorado.
July 20, 2012:
12 people killed, 58 injured by gunfire. Pulse nightclub,
Orlando, Florida.
June 12, 2016:
49 people killed, 53 injured by gunfire. Borderline Bar and Grill,
Thousand Oaks, California.
November 7, 2018:
12 people killed, 1 injured by gunfire.

This article has been excerpted from Paul Auster’s new book, Bloodbath Nation, with photographs by Spencer Ostrander.