The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exploded in 2020 and 2021, but it is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans, where officials are dismantling DEI bureaucracies in public institutions. Corporations are cutting back on DEI spending and personnel. News outlets such as The New York Times and New York magazine are publishing more articles that cover the industry with skepticism. And DEI practitioners themselves are raising concerns about how their competitors operate.

The scrutiny is overdue. This growing multibillion-dollar industry was embedded into so many powerful public and private institutions so quickly that due diligence was skipped and costly failures guaranteed.

Now and forever, employers should advertise jobs to applicants of all races and ethnicities, afford everyone an equal opportunity to be hired and promoted, manage workplaces free of discrimination, and foster company cultures where everyone is treated with dignity. America should conserve any gains it has made in recent years toward an equal-opportunity economy. Perhaps the best of the DEI industry spurred the country in that direction.

However, the worst of the DEI industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive. And even people who highly value diversity and inclusion should feel queasy about the DEI gold rush that began in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. A poor Black man’s death became a pretext to sell hazily defined consulting services to corporations, as if billions in outlays, mostly among relatively privileged corporate workers, was an apt and equitable response. A radical course correction is warranted––but first, let’s reflect on how we got here.

On rare occasions, a depraved act captures the attention of a nation so completely that there is a widespread impulse to vow “never again” and to act in the hope of making good on that promise. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination prompted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered a global war against al-Qaeda, among many other things, including the tenuously connected invasion and occupation of Iraq.

[Conor Friedersdorf: “They learn to parrot what they know they’re supposed to say” ]

Floyd’s murder was similarly galvanizing. Arresting, trying, and convicting the police officers involved, and implementing new police training, was the most immediate response. But Floyd’s story suggested some additional possibilities. With several criminal convictions in his past, Floyd tried to turn his life around, preaching nonviolence in a neighborhood plagued by gun crime, serving as a mentor to young people, and trying to stay employed. He also struggled with drug addiction, layoffs due to circumstances beyond his control, and money problems that presumably played a role in the counterfeit bill he was trying to pass on the day that he was killed. If a callous police officer was the primary cause of his death, secondary causes were as complex and varied as poverty in America.

So how strange––how obscene, in fact––that America’s professional class largely reacted to Floyd’s murder not by lavishing so much of the resources spent in his name on helping poor people, or the formerly (or currently) incarcerated, or people with addictions, or the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, or children of single mothers, or graduates of underfunded high schools, but rather by hiring DEI consultants to gather employees together for trainings.  

In what, exactly?

It is often hard to say. What has one been trained to do after hearing Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author and social-justice educator, lecture on what she calls “white fragility,” or after pondering a slide deck with cartoons meant to illustrate the difference between equality and equity as critical theorists understand it?

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty / Interaction Institute for Social Change

Or after absorbing the racial-equity consultant Tema Okun’s widely circulated claims that attributes including “sense of urgency” and beliefs including “individualism” are traits of “white supremacy culture”? (Okun made these claims in a 1999 article that even she regards as widely misused. She once told an interviewer about the article, “It was not researched. I didn’t sit down and deliberate. It just came through me.” She has launched a website that explains her views in far more detail and with more nuance.)

Consider a specific PR pitch from a DEI consultant in 2021, chosen for how typical it is. It leads by invoking Floyd’s death as the impetus to “take bolder actions.” It promises expertise in “best practices” to corporate leaders. Then it pivots to naming a specific training on offer, “Microaggressions in the Workplace,” which, along with other offerings, will help “create a culture where employees feel valued and are encouraged to be their true selves, celebrating each individual’s uniqueness.” The pitch claims that this training “enables talent acquisition, retention, and career advancement.” Is it not inappropriate to use an unemployed Black man’s murder by police to justify expenditures on reducing unintentional micro-slights at work so the bosses can retain more talent?

[Conor Friedersdorf: Can Chloé Valdary sell skeptics on DEI?]

Of course, setting aside unseemly invocations of Floyd’s name, an initiative needn’t be a coherent response to his death to be defensible or worthwhile. All companies should invest in being equal-opportunity employers, including affirmative steps to ensure, for example, that managers haven’t unwittingly introduced unjust pay disparities or culturally biased dress codes. Beyond that, if DEI consultants made life better for marginalized groups or people of color or any other identifiable cohort within a given corporation or organization, or boosted corporate profits so that their fees paid for themselves, the industry could be justified on different terms.

But most DEI consulting fails those tests.

Harvard Business Review published an article in 2012 called “Diversity Training Doesn’t Work,” which drew heavily on research published in 2007 by  the sociologists Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev, and Erin Kelly. “A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had ‘no positive effects in the average workplace,’” the article reported. “Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing.” In 2018, Dobbin and Kalev wrote that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.”

Portending the 2020 explosion of DEI, they continued, “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade, with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around. But they persist, worried about the optics of getting rid of training, concerned about litigation, unwilling to take more difficult but consequential steps or simply in the thrall of glossy training materials and their purveyors.”

And no wonder that DEI consultants struggle to be effective: In a 2021 article in the Annual Review of Psychology, a team of scholars concluded that the underlying research on how to intervene to reduce prejudice is itself flawed and underwhelming while regularly oversold.

A paper published in the 2022 Annual Review of Psychology concluded, “In examining hundreds of articles on the topic, we discovered that the literature is amorphous and complex and does not allow us to reach decisive conclusions regarding best practices in diversity training.” The authors continued, “We suggest that the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals.”

Those outside the industry are hardly alone in levying harsh critiques. Many industry insiders are scathing as well. Last year in Harvard Business Review, Lily Zheng, a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist, consultant, and speaker, posited that the DEI industrial complex has a “big, poorly kept secret”: “The actual efficacy” of most trainings and interventions is “lower than many practitioners make it out to be.” In Zheng’s telling, the industry’s problems flow in large part from “the extreme lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners.”

Zheng was even more blunt in comments to New York in 2021:

When your clients are these companies that are desperate to do anything and don’t quite understand how this works, ineffective DEI work can be lucrative. And we’re seeing cynicism pop up as a result, that DEI is just a shitty way in which companies burn money.

And I’m like, Yeah, it can be.

What if instead of burning the money, we simply redirected it to the poor?

Yes, I understand that it isn’t as if that money would have gone to the neediest among us but for the DEI initiatives of the past few years. Still, I am being serious when I propose that alternative. (I should note that The Atlantic, like many media companies, holds DEI trainings for new hires. These trainings include discussions of Okun’s critique of “sense of urgency” and an updated version of the equity/equality cartoon.)

[Conor Friedersdorf: Professors need the power to fire diversity bureaucrats]

The DEI spending of 2020 and 2021 was a signal sent from executives to workers that the bosses are good people who value DEI, a signal executives sent because many workers valued it. Put another way, the outlays were symbolic. At best, they symbolized something like “We care and we’re willing to spend money to prove it.” But don’t results matter more than intention?

A more jaded appraisal is that many kinds of DEI spending symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good.

In that telling, the DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.  

It would be too sweeping to say that no DEI consultant should ever get hired. Underneath that jargony umbrella is a subset of valuable professionals who have expertise in things like improving hiring procedures, boosting retention, resolving conflict, facilitating hard conversations after a lawsuit, processing a traumatic event, or assessing and fixing an actually discriminatory workplace. In a given circumstance, a company might need one or more of those skills. Ideally, larger organizations develop human-resources teams with all of those skills.

But the reflexive hiring of DEI consultants with dubious expertise and hazy methods is like setting money on fire in a nation where too many people are struggling just to get by. The professional class should feel good about having done something for social justice not after conducting or attending a DEI session, but after giving money to poor people. And to any CEO eager to show social-justice-minded employees that he or she cares, I urge this: Before hiring a DEI consultant, calculate the cost and let workers vote on whether the money should go to the DEI consultant or be given to the poor. Presented with that choice, I bet most workers would make the equitable decision.

Sign up for The Weekly Planet, The Atlantic’s newsletter about living through climate change, here.

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 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.

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed on a bill to raise the debt ceiling. If the bill passes the House Rules Committee vote today, then House Republicans will vote on it later this week. As we wait to find out the future of the legislation ahead of next week’s default deadline, we’re spending today’s newsletter thinking about how these negotiations fit into the larger cultural battles being waged across the country.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

AI is an insult now. The aspects of manifestation we shouldn’t discount The blue-strawberry problem The most compelling female character on television

A Struggle for Control

Over the past decade, America’s debt-limit negotiations have turned from an institutional formality into a polarized political debate. And in 2023, these negotiations have also taken on elements of the nation’s culture wars. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein noted last week, the budget cuts that House Republicans have argued for are focused on “the relatively small slice of the federal budget that funds most of the government’s investments in children and young adults, who are the most racially diverse generations in American history.” Programs that benefit America’s young people, such as Head Start or Pell Grants, bear the burden of House Republicans’ desired cuts, while Social Security and Medicare are exempt from budget cuts (unlike in previous GOP debt-reduction plans).

“The budget fight, in many ways, represents the fiscal equivalent to the battle over cultural issues raging through Republican-controlled states across the country,” Ron wrote. This debate is a new front, Ron argues, in “the struggle for control of the nation’s direction.” What’s ostensibly a fiscal feud is also a clash between the interests of the older, predominantly white voters who make up the GOP base and the younger, more diverse Americans who Democrats are coming to rely on.

I checked in with Ron by email this afternoon to see how the bipartisan agreement of this past weekend affected the prognosis for programs that serve America’s young people. Ron reminded me that because the deal calls for overall caps rather than cuts to individual programs, anticipating what the specific cuts might be is difficult, until Congress passes its appropriations bills for those programs later this year. And GOP lawmakers did not end up with the 10 years of spending caps they had initially called for: Instead, the agreed-upon legislation includes just two years of caps and then switches to targets that are not legally binding. But even though the country will not ultimately see the full extent of House Republicans’ initial desired cuts, the proposal itself is notable for what it says about the voters the party hopes to reach. As Ron aptly put it:

Looming over these [spending] choices is the intertwined generational and racial re-sorting of the two parties’ electoral coalitions … The GOP has become more dependent on older white people who are either eligible for the federal retirement programs or nearing eligibility.

For the Democrats’ part, Biden’s own budget proposal sought to increase taxes for top-earning Americans (who also tend to be older) in order to preserve spending that benefits young people. This proposal did not make it into the weekend’s agreement, however.

As we keep our eye on the developments of the next few days, Ron’s conclusion offers a helpful reminder of the stakes of these negotiations:

In 2024, Millennials and Gen Z may, for the first time, cast as many ballots as the Baby Boomers and older generations; by 2028, they will almost certainly surpass the older groups. In the fight over the federal budget and debt ceiling—just as in the struggles over cultural issues unfolding in the states—Republicans appear to be racing to lock into law policies that favor their older, white base before the rising generations acquire the electoral clout to force a different direction.

Related:

Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers Why Biden caved

Today’s News

A drone attack hit Moscow, damaging residential buildings in civilian areas. Ukraine has denied “direct” involvement. Elizabeth Holmes reported to prison to begin serving her sentence of more than 11 years. Nine people were injured in a mass shooting at Florida’s Hollywood Beach Broadwalk on Memorial Day.

More From The Atlantic

What the pandemic simulations missed How to fall in love when you don’t speak the same language Biden is more fearful than the Ukrainians are.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Bettmann / Getty

Read. Cynthia Ozick’s new short story, “Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All,” about the seduction of radio. Then read this new Atlantic interview about her writing process.

Listen. The latest episode of our How to Talk to People podcast covers the infrastructure of community—and how the design of physical spaces can either encourage or discourage relationships.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Editor’s Note: On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.

Don't want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear Therapist” in your inbox.

Dear Therapist,

My stepdaughter is 35 years old and has been in a relationship with a 38-year-old man for five years. He is an only child with odd parents and is a bit odd himself. It takes so much patience to deal with his idiosyncrasies—such as his food habits, for example.  

He comes to our house for holiday meals and never brings anything, but comes with containers to take food home. He never buys gifts for my stepdaughter. They have been going to weddings of her friends, but it doesn’t occur to him to think of marriage or making a commitment to her.  

She bought her own condo three years ago, but he seems content with a tiny apartment. She is sort of resigned to this dead-end relationship, but I need a good way to convince her that she can move on. Help.

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Many people can relate to your dilemma of anxiously watching someone they care about make what seems to them like a bad choice in life. Understandably, you want your stepdaughter to be happy, and your concern comes from a place of love. But love, especially in parenting, can be complicated, because sometimes love can lead us to confuse our own desires and values with those of our children. This is true when they’re young and doesn’t necessarily get any easier as they move through adulthood and the consequences of their choices become more significant.

You asked for a good way to persuade your stepdaughter to move on, but the more important question you need to answer is how you can express your love by offering the support that serves her best. This is where gaining clarity on the line between her feelings and yours comes in.

Specifically, I notice that when you describe your stepdaughter’s boyfriend, you don’t say who is bothered by him and his behaviors. For instance, whose patience is tested by what you call his idiosyncrasies—hers, yours, or both? Has she expressed frustration that he doesn’t buy her gifts, or are you assuming she feels as you might in this situation? Do you know that marriage “doesn’t occur to him” when they go to friends’ weddings based on her sharing that with you, or are you simply guessing because they aren’t engaged? Once you distinguish any assumptions you might be making from what your stepdaughter is actually experiencing, you’ll know how to support her well-being.

Let’s say that she has discussed with you her unhappiness over the various issues you mention in your letter. In that case, the most helpful thing you can do for her is to simply listen and ask nonjudgmental questions, while keeping your opinions to yourself. If she says, “His idiosyncrasies are hard to deal with,” instead of responding with “I know, I think he’s very odd!,” you can say, “Have you considered talking to him about your frustration?” If she says she has but he’s unwilling to be more flexible, instead of saying, “See, that’s why you should leave him!,” you can say, “That sounds really hard. How are you feeling about that?” Similarly, if she says, “He never buys me gifts,” instead of calling him a cheapskate or selfish, you can say, “Have you told him how you feel about this?” If she says she hasn’t, you might ask, “What’s keeping you from being open with him?” If she says she has but his response feels invalidating (“I don’t believe in gifts”), you could say, “I can imagine how hurtful it must feel when you’re with someone who doesn’t respond to what you need.”

This is called supportive reflection, and you can apply it to all of her complaints. If she makes a comment about his not having her level of ambition or lifestyle preferences, instead of insulting his choices or character, you could say, “How are the two of you working through this difference?” And if she expresses concern about his interest in marriage, you can ask, “Are the two of you talking openly about your goals and his, and whether they align on a timetable that realistically works for both of you, given that you’ve spent five years together?” If she shares that she’s “resigned” to staying in a “dead-end relationship,” you might say, “It breaks my heart to see you in a relationship that isn’t making you happy. I wonder if seeing a therapist might help you see your worth more clearly.”

One mistake many well-meaning parents make in trying to protect their children from wasting time with someone they view as the wrong partner is becoming so aggressively critical of the partner that their children no longer feel comfortable voicing their own ambivalence about the relationship. Instead, the children wind up feeling an even stronger need to defend their partner and hide any issues that do come up and for which they might otherwise want your guidance and support. Moreover, if they eventually get married, they’ll always know that their parents think that their spouse (and perhaps the mother or father of their future children) is a loser.

By listening and asking questions, you’re directing these concerns back to your stepdaughter so she can give them some thought herself while also implying that instead of telling you what she doesn’t like, she should be talking about these issues with her boyfriend. If she and her boyfriend can’t communicate openly and take each other’s needs seriously—or if their needs and desires are incompatible—they will be far better off confronting these realities together rather than using that valuable time to vent to you. Most important, you’re reflecting back to her that she is worthy of being in a fulfilling relationship that aligns with her needs and life goals, and, by implication, that if that isn’t possible with this particular person, she deserves to find it elsewhere.

Remember that even with your support, your stepdaughter might not change her mind. We can’t protect our children from the mistakes (perceived or real) they make in life, but we can always provide supportive guidance along the way and make sure to be there for them if things go badly.

However, if the concerns you write about are yours alone, the best way to support your stepdaughter’s well-being is to take steps to contain your own anxiety about her choices. Although the kind of relationship she’s in might not appeal to you, you’re going to need to get genuinely curious about why it appeals to her. Find out what she likes about her boyfriend by trying to see him through her eyes and take in the entirety of who he is. Ask her what she loves about him so you can get to know him better. Listen more closely for the positive stories she tells about him and their relationship. Most people are not all good or all bad, and focusing on his positive aspects, if he does make your stepdaughter happy, will help you offer the kind of love and support you seem eager to provide.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

Coffee shops, churches, libraries, and concert venues are all shared spaces where mingling can take place. Yet the hustle and bustle of modern social life can pose challenges to relationship-building—even in spaces designed for exactly that.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we analyze how American efficiency culture holds us back from connecting in public, whether social spaces create a culture of interaction, and what it takes to actively participate in a community.

Hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado, and engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Build community with us! … via email. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”), Gavin Luke (“Nadir”), Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Dust Follows (“Willet”), Auxjack (“Mellow Soul”).

Click here to listen to additional seasons in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Host Julie Beck: I think what I’ve observed in public spaces, especially in my neighborhood, is really just a hustle and bustle. And people are going somewhere specific to do something specific with specific people. They’re sort of on a mission.

Eric Klinenberg: Efficiency is the enemy of social life. What kind of place would allow us to enjoy our lives and enjoy each other more than we do today? What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

Kellie Carter Jackson: You know, people say, like, misery loves company. I don’t think that is true. I think that misery in a lot of ways requires company; it requires kinship. It requires community. So that you are not isolated in your pain.

Klinenberg: What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

__

Beck: I’m Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Rashid: Though I normally am not making a friend at the café, recently there was a girl that was working on her laptop. She noticed I was, too. We started chittin’ and chattin’, and after a few weeks of running into each other so many times at the café, she finally—slightly awkwardly—asked yesterday, “Hey, do you mind if I get your number if you maybe wanted to get a drink?” Very friendly, sweet sort of way of fighting through the awkward.

Beck: I’m so impressed! Of course, people do connect at cafés like you literally just did. And, you know, in Paris or whatever, they may be happy for people to linger and chat all day. But I think the connection that’s happening in those spaces, like, that’s not the purpose of the space; that’s a byproduct. Perhaps a welcome byproduct, but like the point of the space is to make money. The point is to sell you something.

Rashid: It’s a business.

Beck: They’re selling you a coffee; they’re selling you a sandwich. There are several cafés in D.C. that I really like that just don’t offer Wi-Fi, or they give you a ticket where you have like a couple of hours of Wi-Fi after you buy something. And I get why they’re doing that, because they want the customers to cycle through, and they don’t want people taking up tables all day when they could get a fresh paying customer in there.

That may well be good business sense. But if those are the only spaces that you have to maybe just mingle and get to know people that are in your neighborhood, what are the spaces where you can just have friendly mingling, and that’s the point?

__

Beck: Eric Klinenberg is a researcher who is really into all of these questions that we’ve been talking about. He’s a professor of sociology at New York University, and he’s an expert on city infrastructure and urban life.

He wrote this book called Palaces for the People in which he talks about this concept called social infrastructure. That is essentially the physical spaces that are available to the public that are designed to facilitate these social connections.

__

Klinenberg: If you want to have a transit system like a train, you need an infrastructure to carry the train, right? The rails, for instance, There is also an infrastructure that supports social life: social infrastructure. And when I say social infrastructure, I’m referring to physical places. They can be organizations; they can also be parks. Physical places that shape our capacity to interact.

When you have strong social infrastructure, people have a tendency to come out and linger. And if you live in a poor neighborhood where the social infrastructure is strong, if you’re older, if you’re more frail, if you’re very young, you might spend more time sitting on the stoop in front of your home. You might have a bench that you spend time on, that’s on your street. There might be a diner where you go every day.

And what that means is there are people who are used to seeing you out in those public places on a regular basis. And when it’s dangerous outside, someone might notice that you’re not there. And they might not even know your name. They might just know your face. Maybe they know where you live. They’re used to seeing each other in the public realm.

I grew up in Chicago. And in 1995, just before I was about to start graduate school in sociology, there was a heat wave that hit my hometown and lasted just a couple of days. But the temperatures were quite extreme. It got to about 106 degrees. Chicago did what it always does when there’s a heat wave: It turned on air conditioning everywhere you could go. And the power grid got overwhelmed. And very soon the, you know, electricity went out for thousands of homes.

At the end of this week, in July, Chicago had more than 700 deaths from the heat. And this was the pre-pandemic time. So people dying in a city in a couple of days seemed like an exceptional thing. We hadn’t gotten numb to it yet. I was really curious about what had happened, and the first thing I did was I made these maps to see which people and places in Chicago were hit hardest. And at first blush, the map looked exactly like you would expect it to look. The neighborhoods that were hit the hardest were on the south side and the west side of Chicago. They were the historically segregated Black, poor, ghettoized neighborhoods.

Beck: Right. Chicago’s extremely segregated.

Klinenberg: And when there’s a disaster, you know, poor people living in segregated neighborhoods will fare the worst. So I looked a little more closely at the map, and I noticed something that no one else had seen—which is that there were a bunch of neighborhoods that were located right next to places that were among the deadliest neighborhoods in Chicago. But this other set of places wound up being extraordinarily healthy.

Beck: So these were neighborhoods that were geographically really close to each other and shared a lot of characteristics, but they were having really different outcomes?

Klinenberg: Matching neighborhoods. Like, imagine two neighborhoods separated by one street—same level of poverty, same proportion of older people. The risk factors that we ordinarily look for were equal. But they had wildly disparate outcomes in this heat disaster. That’s the kind of puzzle that you live for when you’re a social scientist.

Klinenberg: And so, what I observed is that the neighborhoods that had really high death rates, they looked depleted. They had lost an enormous proportion of their population in the decades leading up to the heat wave. They had a lot of abandoned buildings. Even the little playgrounds were in terrible shape, not well-maintained.

And across the street in the neighborhoods that did better, the public spaces were much more viable. They didn’t have abandoned homes. They didn’t have empty lots. There were community institutions, grocery shops, coffee shops, a branch library, places that anchored public life.

In those neighborhoods in Chicago, people knocked on the door, and they checked in on each other. And as a consequence, if you lived in one of these poor neighborhoods that had a strong social infrastructure, you were more likely to survive the heat wave. People in the neighborhood across the street, the depleted neighborhood—they were 10 times more likely to die in the heat wave. And that difference was really quite stark.

Beck: So you said when we talk about regular infrastructure, we’re talking about what carries the train, right? So what carries the train of our relationships? What are the actual railroad tracks?

Klinenberg: Think about a playground, for instance. We know that one of the core places that families go to meet other families in their neighborhood is a playground. All kinds of socializing happens when parents or grandparents or caretakers of all kinds are pushing a swing and looking for a companion, someone to talk to.

Those conversations at the swing set often lead to a shared little break together on the bench or maybe to a picnic and then a playdate, and then two families getting to know each other and communities growing. If you took playgrounds out of American cities and suddenly there was no playground, our social lives would be radically different.

We act as if, you know, in the Old Testament, on the fifth day, God said, “Today I give you the playground and the library,” and it’s our birthright to spend time in them. We forget that these are achievements. These are human inventions.

We built giant parks, theaters, art spaces. We created a good society based on a vision of radical inclusion. Not quite radical enough. People have always been left out of our public spaces. There’s no history of this idea that is complete if it doesn’t pay attention to how racial segregation works and how racial violence works and how gender excluded some people from some public realms. All of that stuff is there in the history of public space. I think in the last several decades, we’ve kind of come to take all these places for granted.

__

Beck: What is the connection between having places to just hang out and vibe and having a community rally together and support each other in an emergency like a heat wave?

Klinenberg: Well, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. You can have places where people hang out and vibe and don’t get active and engaged on important civic matters. I generally argue that public spaces and social infrastructure—they’re a necessary condition for having some sense that we’re in it together, and we have some kind of common purpose. But they’re by no means sufficient. And so that has to do with programming; that has to do with design; that has to do with this feeling of being part of a shared project. And some public spaces give us that feeling, and others really don’t.

Beck: Yeah. I’m curious about the mechanics of how that even happens. I feel a bit of a divide, where being in public is for being active and relaxing is for home. And so much of the public space around me is bustling—people are engaging in commerce, or they’re just walking from here to there, and there are no opportunities to slow down and talk to each other. And I don’t know that we would. Does that make sense?

Klinenberg: Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense, because efficiency is the enemy of social life. You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.

And in fact, one of the really striking things, I think, for Americans when we travel to other countries is to see the extent to which people all over the world delight in sitting around: the culture of the souk or of the coffee shop or the wine bar or the plaza.

Beck: Oh, yeah, the five-hour dinners in France. Like, you can’t find that waiter to get your check. You know?

Klinenberg: (Laughing.)

Beck: He’s gone.

Klinenberg: Because the point is not to pay the check. The point is to be there. And it’s hard for us to come to terms with just how forcefully the ticking clock shapes our capacity to take pleasure in social life.

__

​​Rashid: It’s interesting that you see the no Wi-Fi on the weekends as a way to cycle people out of the space. I thought that was the café or coffee shop making a grand gesture in favor of relationship-building.

Beck: Oh. I guess I’m just more cynical than you. But I think it’s because they need to make money. I go to the public pool with friends. I get books from the library. There is a very hot ticket at our local library, which is like a semi-regular puzzle swap that they do. Oh, and my partner and I, we’re very cool.

We go and we swap puzzles with the community. But I don’t feel like I am really building new relationships or getting to know my neighbors at these places, or even at these events. Like, I love these resources. I don’t want to lose them. I enjoy them, but I just kind of use them by myself or with people I already know.

Rashid: Yeah. And I think the norm of keeping to yourself is only fueled more by things like social media and being able to look away and be on your phone. And it’s interesting how just that shared physical presence with people also doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re closer.

Beck: Yeah, just because you go to the café doesn’t mean you’re going to look up from your phone.

—

Beck: Do you think that to some degree we’ve replaced our relationship to social infrastructure with social media?

Klinenberg: I think of social media as like a communications infrastructure. It definitely helps us to engage other people. It’s a kind of impoverished social life that it delivers in the end.

Think about how life felt in April of 2020 when we were in the beginning of the pandemic, because we were all in our homes cut off from each other. We were talking to each other all the time, right? But we were physically isolated, and we were miserable. So that’s life where social media is social infrastructure.

Beck: I do wonder whether there is an individualism that is also affecting our living choices and the way that we engage with the social infrastructure.

Klinenberg: I discovered that the United States is a laggard, not a leader, when it comes to living alone. Living alone is far more common in most European societies than it is in the U.S. It’s more common in Japan. It’s more common in France and England. Scandinavian societies have the highest levels of living alone on Earth, and Germany is higher than the United States.

And what I learned about doing this research is that what really is driving living alone is interdependence. When you have a strong welfare state, and you guarantee people the capacity to make ends meet without being tethered to a partner who they might not want to be with.

Beck: Do you think, then, that solo livers rely on social infrastructure more?

Klinenberg: They do. They’re more likely to go out to bars and restaurants and cafés and to gyms, to go to concerts. I just published a paper in a journal called Social Problems with a graduate student named Jenny Leigh, and we interviewed 55 people who were living alone in New York during the first stage of the pandemic.

We talked to them about their experiences. And it was really interesting. Like, they talked very little about social isolation, and they didn’t complain that much about kind of conventional loneliness, like lacking people to talk to. But they felt physically lonely; they felt physically isolated.

And they really missed the kind of familiar strangers we see when we spend time in a neighborhood who just give us a sense of where we are and that we belong. They felt [an] acute kind of pain that was slightly different than the pain of the common conversation we had at the time.

__

Klinenberg: One of the problems we have now is most cities, suburbs, towns in America have public libraries there. There’s neighborhood libraries. The building is there. And the buildings are generally not updated there. They need to have new HVACs. They need new bathrooms. They need new furniture, let alone new books.

Some are still not accessible to people in wheelchairs. I mean, there’s all kinds of problems with libraries, just physically, because we’ve underinvested in them. But libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net.

Klinenberg: If you wake up in the morning in an American city and you don’t have a home, you’re told to go to a library. If you wake up in the morning and you’re suffering from an addiction problem, you need a warm place. They’ll send you to a library.

If you need to use a bathroom, you’ll go to a library. If you don’t have childcare for your kid, you might send your kid to a library. If you’re old and you’re alone, you might go to the library. We’ve used the library to try to solve all of these problems that deserve actual treatment.  

And how many times have you talked to someone who said, like, it’s basically a homeless shelter. What’s happened is we’ve stigmatized our public spaces, because we’ve done so little to address core problems that we’ve turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a hand. And as we do that, we send another message to affluent, middle-class Americans, and that is: If you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector. So we have a lot of work to do.

Beck: It’s really interesting to me to hear about the ways our environment either encourages or discourages interaction and community-building, because I think on some level I’ve always felt like if I don’t have that ideal sense of community that I really want, then it’s my fault for not trying hard enough. How much of this is just on the government? And there’s not much we can do besides, like, pestering aldermen.

Klinenberg: I think it’s on us to build the political institutions that we want and also to build the public places that we need. So, one of the miracles of American life is that we have these public libraries in every neighborhood.

Nobody would support the idea of a library if we didn’t already have it. It’s like a utopian socialist fantasy, the library. And the miracle is that we have them. If you think about the American public-park system, the public schools, like: We built all these things.

The reason so many of us feel like it’s so hard to hang out and enjoy the companionship of other people is because the signals we get from each other and from the state and from the corporate world tell us that we’re freakish and weird if we want that kind of collective experience. Everybody knows happiness is in your phone. It’s at the $22 cocktail bar. It’s at the $9 coffee shop, the $14 ice-cream cone. Those are the things that are supposed to give us pleasure.

And I think we need to start to imagine what a different kind of society might look like and how to rebuild public spaces that are the 21st-century version of the 20th-century library. What are the kinds of places we’d like to design so that we could be with each other differently?

__

Beck: Another important piece—back to actually finding community in these spaces—is people acting on the opportunity to connect that they present. It’s hard if I’m going to the puzzle swap, and no one’s talking to each other. I mean, I’m guilty of going in and grabbing my puzzles and getting out and not really making a big effort to chitchat and make a new relationship there.

And it’s hard to feel like you’re just taking that on yourself to try to make that happen. It’s also: Do you see people welcoming you? Do you feel comfortable going up to someone to strike up a conversation? Do you see other people mingling? The design of a place can totally encourage or discourage interactions, but obviously so can the behavior of the people in the place.

Rashid: Right. Like, the friend I made at the café is kind of a rare occurrence, because normally people in the café are working, reading, or, as you’ve said before, with people they already know.

Beck: And the social norms of a café are going to be different than the social norms of a public pool or a local sports team or a church. In a café, everyone kind of has different agendas, like Becca’s out there making a friend. But, like, some people are just reading a book by themselves or having that one-on-one lunch with somebody. But in a church, for instance, like generally speaking, there’s a norm that we want to be in community with each other. We have shared values, and we’re here to connect.

Jackson: My church has been everything to me, because those relationships have just been so transformative and so deep. Every single highlight of my life, although like the church, my church has been there for me.

Beck: Kellie Carter Jackson is a historian and a professor from Wellesley College, and we recently spoke about the culture of care in her community. So in her life, she’s found that places like the church and her kids’ school have smoothed that path to building those deep relationships of support, because both the spaces themselves and the people in them have been welcoming.

—

Beck: Do you feel like finding a church in the new places where you’ve moved to? Has that helped in getting to those deep relationships quickly?

Jackson: Yes, absolutely. I will say that when we lived in North Dakota, almost all of my friendships either came from the military or the church that we were going to. People were just so warm and so kind. And, you know, you would join like a Bible study group or a mommy-and-me group, and those became fast friendships.

When my husband was going through extensive training, he was in Memphis. He was out of town for like three months. And I was overwhelmed by three kids. They did a meal train and just brought—I hate cooking! [Laughter.] And so my church small group was like, “Hey, how can we take off some of the burdens since Nathaniel’s gone? What can we do?” And so, just to know that people would go the extra mile for you when you’re really taxed is huge.

Beck: Yeah. I guess I see, you know, church as sort of a natural gathering place because it has those kind of communal values built into the institution. How does your faith sort of influence your approach to community with your neighbors?

Jackson: I think that I have always tried to model what it means to be a good neighbor regardless of my neighbors’ religious affiliations. I grew up in the church, so my parents modeled for me hospitality. We always had people over at our house all the time. We have a big family; I’m one of seven. So it’s like, what’s one more? What’s six more? What’s 10 more?

(Laughter.)

Beck: Just bring ’em on in.

Jackson: Bring them on in. That is how I show my friendship, show my love, show my care. It is by making you feel welcome and by giving you a place to rest. And it does not always extend to people we know. Like, when I think of neighbors, I think that extends even into my kids’ school. So my six-year-old had a real hard time because not only had my mother-in-law passed away, but her great-grandmother had died as well. So we had like two big losses—a mother and a grandmother—in about a three-month period.

Jojo is my middle child’s name. Jojo was just distraught by it. Like, she cried for 30 minutes, and I couldn’t calm her down. I sent her teacher an email, and I said, “Hey, Jojo’s having a really hard time. I sent her to school with a picture of her grandmothers. She might keep it in her backpack; she might take it out. But I just want you to know, like, this is what’s going on.”

Beck: Yeah.

Jackson: And her teacher did something—gosh, sorry I’m getting emotional …

Beck: Aw.

Jackson: Her teacher saw her with the picture … and she said, “Jojo, do you want to share that with the classroom?” And so she got up in front of the classroom, and she talked about her grandmothers and just who they were. And the fact that her teacher gave her space to do that—it just meant, like, I don’t know her teacher very well, but I know that she loves my kid. And I know that she created space for my kid when she was having a hard time emotionally, and that she would do that for any kid. I am always overwhelmed by just the goodness of neighbors, and people’s capacity to provide comfort during hard times.

Beck: I mean, I think there’s so much go-it-alone-ness, um, in our culture a lot of the time. And like, sometimes you can get by with that. Like, it seems lonely, but like, you can do it, and—

Jackson: Can, but should you?

Beck: Yeah. But when you are in such a place of intense grief, like, it becomes very clear that you can’t.

Jackson: You can’t, and you shouldn’t. I mean,If I hear one more person say “God won’t give you more than you can bear,” I will want to punch them. But I think that we have these clichés that are so empty. You know, just giving people the freedom to feel what they feel, to act upon those feelings without feeling judged, to be heard. You know, most people just want to be heard.

You know, I think in the Black community, we care for one another. There is this idea of kinship. This idea that whether you are blood related or not, this is your auntie, this is your uncle, this is your cousin, this is your fam. That we see each other, that we recognize each other’s humanity, that we show up for each other. There is something about that familiarity of Blackness that connects people, that is both spiritual and cultural. And so, if you grew up in the church, I think those ideas are fortified for you of how you should show up and care for other people.

Beck: I mean, how do you get to that place with neighbors and people in your community without a church?

Jackson: I think it’s tough.

Beck: It is tough.

Jackson: I think it’s not impossible. I mean, there is something about a shared set of values sometimes that comes from the church, that allows making friendships to be a little bit easier. But if you don’t have that, sometimes I think that trust can be an issue. Like, I’ve had to let people know who are outside of my faith: You can depend on me; you can trust me. I’m not going to judge you. That our home is welcome to anyone, of all backgrounds.

Because I think people can sometimes be skittish around people that they think are religious. And I never wanted anyone that I connected with to feel like that.

I had a friend who was in graduate school whose mother passed away, and I remember reaching out to her, sending her food or a gift card—like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? You know, here’s some literature that helped me, because my siblings had passed away maybe about a year before. And she was a little startled, actually, by my response, I think. Because she said, you know, I grew up in a community of atheists. She said, we just don’t have a practice or tradition. That the idea of bringing food or, you know, sort of like ongoing care was not something that was a part of her tradition.

So regardless of people’s faith, my job as a good neighbor is to help shoulder some of that weight, so you don’t have to carry it all on your own. So I try to remember important dates. I try to remember names, which is why when I meet new people, “Oh, man! Okay, give me more capacity!”

__

Rashid: So, Julie, where do you go to build community, or at least feel this sense of community in a shared space?  

Beck: I don’t feel like just sitting out on my front porch, if I had one, or going to a café or going to a specific place is going to make community come to me.

I feel like talking with both Eric and Kellie kind of made me realize that you need both the design of a place and the intentions and the values of the people who are using that space.

The sort of post-college secular world particularly doesn’t feel set up for just spontaneous, easy connection in the same way. If you just have an impeccably designed space where people don’t want to connect, then, like, I guess what you have is the Apple store. And if people really want to connect, and they don’t have anywhere to go to do that, then they’re going to struggle as well.

And even though this is kind of a frustrating takeaway, honestly, it feels to me like if you want that deep, interconnected sense of community outside of a church or a college or an institution that’s built to help you find it, you kind of have to swim against the current a little bit—and find a way to make it for yourself.

__

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Julie Beck. Managing Editor Andrea Valdez. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak.

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

Good morning! I’m the senior Books editor at The Atlantic. I’m taking over today’s culture edition of the Daily for something a little different: an exciting update from our Books section, and some recommendations for your summer reading list.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The first social-media babies are growing up—and they’re horrified. Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis Twitter is a far-right social network.

Your Summer Reads

This past week was a big one at The Atlantic’s Books desk. Not only did we publish our annual summer reading guide (more about that soon), but we also relaunched the Books Briefing, our weekly newsletter where you can find all things bookish in The Atlantic: essays, recommendations, reports from the literary world.

One thing you should know is that our approach to books is a little different here. With all due respect to the traditional book review and its thumbs-up or thumbs-down assessment, we know that our readers want more than just to be told whether they should buy a book (though we hope to help with that as well). They want to understand how a novel might give them a new way to think about language or altruism. They want the concepts embedded in the best nonfiction books—whether it’s okay to live a “good-enough life,” for instance, or what the difference is between accomplishment and mastery—to be debated, not just named. And they want incisive profiles of storytelling masters, such as David Grann, and of novelists who are trying something strange and original, such as Catherine Lacey. They want the latest on book banning.

We’ve got all of it. And the Books Briefing will really be the best way for you to stay caught up. This week, for example, we’re pointing to our summer reading guide, which we just published. This is the annual opportunity our writers and editors get to share some of their favorites with you.

Many of the books on our list are older and have earned their place as treasured recommendations over time (one of mine this year is Lore Segal’s Her First American; you’ll never find a more eccentric love story). But we like to make sure our readers also know about some of the brand-new books out this summer that we think are worth picking up.  Here are a few highlights:

This year, my colleague Maya Chung looked at Emma Cline’s The Guest and the “feeling of sweaty anxiety” it creates through the story of a young grifter on Long Island who survives by taking advantage of nearly everyone she meets. Emma Sarappo, also an editor on the Books desk, read Samantha Irby’s Quietly Hostile, a hilarious collection of essays that tracks the great transition from being “young and lubricated,” as Irby puts it, to being middle-aged. Nicole Acheampong, on our Culture desk, delved into Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans—a group portrait of a loose circle of friends in Iowa City fighting and loving and fighting as they come of age. And I took the nonfiction route and spent time with David Grann’s The Wager, about an 18th-century shipwreck off the coast of Patagonia and its mutinous aftermath—an incredible story rendered by Grann as a narrative that insists you keep reading.

For people inclined toward audiobooks (a newly acquired habit of mine), I’ll leave you with a recommendation from some of my recent listening. I’m a big fan of James McBride’s work and loved his last novel, Deacon King Kong, which I actually chose as one of my summer reads last year. His new book, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, is out in August, and in anticipation, I decided to listen to his memoir, The Color of Water. The book is McBride’s love letter to his mother—a Jewish immigrant and the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi—who survived a brutal childhood in the South, left her family at 17, and married a Black man and raised 12 children in Brooklyn. The audiobook is read alternately by a voice actor who presents McBride’s narration (JD Jackson) and a different actor for the chapters in which Ruth McBride tells her life story in the first person (Susan Denaker). It’s a wonderful way to take in the memoir and appreciate McBride’s reconstruction of his family’s history, and the voice he gives back to his mother.

There’s a lot more if you check out our guide to summer reading. And sign up for our newsletter, where we’ll keep you plied with book recommendations and provocative ideas week to week.

Happy reading!

Read past editions of the Sunday Daily with Adam Harris, Saahil Desai, Yasmin Tayag, Damon Beres, Julie Beck, Faith Hill, and Derek Thompson.

The Week Ahead

The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America, in which the journalist Monica Potts uncovers the plight of girls and women in the nation’s rural towns (on sale Tuesday) Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the long-awaited sequel to 2018’s “exuberant and inventive” Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (in theaters Friday) Searching for Soul Food, which follows the celebrity chef Alisa Reynolds in her quest to find out what soul food looks like around the world (begins streaming Friday on Hulu)

Essay

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Magnus Wennman / Alamy; Graphica Artis / Getty.

The 400-Year-Old Tragedy That Captures Our Chaos

By Megan Garber

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.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Yellowjackets, how could you? A Chinese American show that doesn’t bother to explain itself Tina Turner’s cosmic life You Hurt My Feelings is a hilarious anxiety spiral. We still don’t know Anna Nicole Smith. Chain-Gang All-Stars is Gladiator meets the American prison system. The 1880s political novel that could have been written today

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The far right is splintering. The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham. Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers

Photo Album

A child runs near a scarecrow displayed at the annual Scarecrows Fair in the Italian village of Castellar, near Cuneo, on May 22, 2023. During the fair, people exhibit—in gardens, courtyards, fields, or streets—scarecrows they have made. (Marco Bertorello / AFP / Getty)

Check out the Chelsea Flower Show in England, a scarecrow fair in Italy, and the rest of our photo editor’s selections of the week’s best snapshots.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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.

The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has signed an agreement with Russia to base Russian nuclear weapons in his country. The strategic impact of such a move is negligible, but a lot can go wrong with this foolish plan.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The play that explains Succession (and everything else) The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet. COVID shots are still one giant experiment. AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets. A Tense Summer

Russia has taken another step toward nuclearizing its satrapy in neighboring Belarus. This is bad news but not a crisis (yet). But first, I want to add a note to what I wrote a few weeks ago about the drone attack on the Kremlin.

I suggested that the weird strike on a Kremlin building was unlikely to be an act sanctioned or carried out by the Ukrainian government. My best guess at the time was that the Russians might be pulling some kind of false-flag stunt to justify more repression and violence against Ukraine as well as internal dissent in Russia. I didn’t think the Ukrainians would attack an empty building in the middle of the night.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, now thinks the strike could have been some kind of Ukrainian special operation. Those same American analysts, according to The New York Times, are not exactly sure who authorized action against the Russian capital:

U.S. intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.

That’s not much to go on, especially because the intelligence community’s confidence in this view is “low,” meaning there is at least some general, but not specific, evidence for it. The Americans suggest the attack may have been “orchestrated” by the Ukrainian security services, but that could mean any number of possibilities, including civilians, a small militia, a few people loosely affiliated with the Ukrainians, or even a commando team.

The best evidence, however, that this was not a false flag is that with the exception of firing a wave of missiles, the Russian government has said and done almost nothing in response either in Ukraine or in Russia. If Vladimir Putin’s security forces had engineered the incident, they’d almost certainly be taking advantage of it, but they’re not. Instead, the Kremlin seems paralyzed and has clamped down on any further reporting about the whole business; if the Ukrainian goal was to rattle Russian leaders, mission accomplished. So my theory has gone up in smoke—a hazard of trying to piece together an explanation while waiting for better evidence—but I thought it important to update you here.

Now, about those Belarus nukes.

Putin announced back in March that he intended to station nuclear arms in Belarus, a move that had Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doing a bit of uneasy throat-clearing as he tried to stay in Putin’s good graces while being understandably nervous about hosting weapons of mass destruction in his fiefdom. The hesitation is over: Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu yesterday signed a formal agreement allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.

This would be the first time post-Soviet Russia has stationed nuclear weapons outside its own territory, but the bombs aren’t in Belarus yet. Lukashenko was in Moscow yesterday to attend a summit of the Eurasian Economic Forum, and although he claimed that the complicated process of relocating Russian nuclear bombs has already begun, I don’t believe him. (There I go again, theorizing in the absence of evidence. But Western intelligence agencies watch the movement of Russian nuclear weapons pretty closely, and so far, none of them has indicated that they see anything happening.) Besides, Lukashenko’s assertion wasn’t exactly definitive; when asked in Moscow if the weapons had already arrived, he said, “Maybe. I will go and take a look.”

Now, without getting too far over my skis, I will say that the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons in their territory know without exception whether they have them or not, and don’t need to “go and take a look.” Lukashenko’s flip comment suggests to me that he knows that nothing has been moved yet, and that he understands that his role in this dangerous sideshow is to play along with the Kremlin’s attempt to jangle Western nerves about nuclear war.

Putin, for his part, has said that storage facilities for Russian nuclear arms will be complete by July 1. Nuclear weapons, of course, require highly secure military installations and personnel trained in dealing with such systems, such as how to load them onto their delivery vehicles, and the unique safety precautions that surround them. Even in the best of times, nuclear weapons are a high-maintenance proposition, and accidents do happen: In 2007, an American B-52 flew across the United States with six nuclear bombs that the crew didn’t realize were mounted on the wings.

It’s also possible that Putin is squeezing political impact of a nuclear agreement while he still can, given recent questions about Lukashenko’s health. The Belarus strongman has looked weak lately. It would be very much Putin’s gangland style to make sure he gets Belarus as a stage for his nuclear threats as soon as possible, if he thinks the grim reaper is about to step in.

Putin’s July deadline is also important because it means the Russians will be moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what looks to be a summer of intense fighting. Such a timetable is probably intentional. The Kremlin boss believes that the West is deeply afraid of nuclear war, and he intends to play on that fear. Western leaders, of course, are deeply afraid of nuclear war, because they are not utter psychopaths. Putin and his generals, although brutal and vicious men, are afraid of it, too, no matter what they might say, because they are not suicidal. (So were Soviet leaders and their generals, as we learned after the Cold War.)

What Putin fails to understand, however, is that years of struggling with the Soviet Union taught the United States and its allies how to contend with an aggressive Kremlin and the dangers of escalation at the same time. Putin, as I often note, is a Soviet nostalgist who longs for the old Soviet empire and who still seems to believe that a weak and decadent West will not continue to oppose him.

As ever, I worry not about Putin’s deliberate move to start World War III, but about some kind of error or accident when transferring nuclear weapons from one paranoid authoritarian country to another. Putin may well place nuclear weapons close to Ukraine and then claim that NATO is threatening Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thus provoking a crisis he thinks will induce the West to back away from supporting Kyiv. This would be yet another harebrained blunder in a series of poor moves, but Putin, as we know, is not exactly a master strategist. It’s going to be a tense summer.

Related:

“Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin.” The irreversible change in Belarus Today’s News A South Carolina circuit-court judge has temporarily blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, one day after Governor Henry McMaster signed it into law. A House committee led by Texas Republicans recommended the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday, citing years of alleged lawbreaking and misconduct. The Mississippi police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old Black boy, has been suspended with pay as the shooting is investigated. Dispatches Work in Progress: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham, James Surowiecki writes.

The Books Briefing: Books editor Gal Beckerman breaks down what you should be reading this summer—just in time for the season’s unofficial start.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Carlos Lopez-Calleja / Disney

A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain Itself

By Shirley Li

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s the Chinese character for fortune! These hard-boiled eggs are brown because they’ve been soaked in tea! In an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.

American Born Chinese doesn’t bother with such disclaimers. The Disney+ show, now streaming, is exuberant and unabashed about its hyper-specific focus on the Chinese American experience.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Jennifer Egan: Martin Amis taught me how to be funny.

How America can avoid the next debt-ceiling showdown

Ozempic in teens is a mess.

Culture Break Kailey Schwerman / Showtime

Watch. Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale (streaming on Showtime) made a terrible mistake.

Listen. To the first episode of the newly launched Radio Atlantic podcast with host Hanna Rosin, on whether the war in Ukraine can recapture the world’s attention at a crucial moment.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This is my last Daily for the next week or so, as I am headed off for some sunshine and downtime, but senior editor Isabel Fattal and our colleagues at The Atlantic will keep things as lively here as ever. (This newsletter will be off on Monday for Memorial Day, so look for the next edition on Tuesday.)

With vacation on my mind, I want to recommend a gem of a movie about Las Vegas that has lived in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an undeniable masterpiece) for too long. Twenty years ago, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin starred in The Cooler, one of the bleakest movies about Sin City since Leaving Las Vegas. Macy plays a “cooler,” a guy whose bad luck is so contagious that the casinos hire him to stand near people who win too much money at the tables.

It’s a love story and a crime story, but it’s also about old Vegas becoming a new (and sillier) Vegas. Back then, developers were making an inane attempt to transform an industry mostly devoted to gambling, booze, and sex into a theme park for families. Alec Baldwin—who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor—rails against it all in a rant about the Strip circa 2002: “You mean that Disneyland mook fest out there? Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced hooker with an exclusive clientele … It makes me want to cry, because I remember the way she used to be.”

I cheer him on every time. See you in a few weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Today we relaunched The Atlantic’s flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, with a new host: senior editor Hanna Rosin, a former Atlantic writer who went on to become the editorial director for audio at New York magazine. “There’s this phrase someone said to me recently: road-testing ideas, like you would road-test a car,” Hanna says in the trailer for the new podcast. “You run them through the dirt, see if they can stand up to actual real-world conditions.” I called Hanna to talk about what road-testing ideas will look like on Radio Atlantic, and what America’s national conversation is missing.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Colorado’s ingenious idea for solving the housing crisis DeSantis’s launch was not the only thing that crashed. Think about your death and live better. Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers Rules of Debate

Isabel Fattal: In the podcast trailer, you reflect on your past as a champion high-school debater, and how the experience shaped the way you scrutinize ideas. Explain.

Hanna Rosin: I have an extremely conflicted relationship with my debate past, because winning is fun, but over many years, I came to distance myself from that mercenary way of approaching ideas. The upside of debating is that it keeps you nimble—someone throws ideas at you, and you can look at them from every angle and find the opposing side. It keeps your mind flexible and not rigid, and it teaches you a rigorous discipline of picking things apart. The downside of it is, if you’re not careful, you can lose a sense of what you actually believe. It can seem like a game. If you go too far down that path, you lose a sense of what’s important, what the boundaries are.

Isabel: How do you approach debating now?

Hanna: I no longer think of debate as a game. The way debates are happening in our country right now, everything’s on the table. I feel very nervous about treating it as fun. There are a lot of things being brought back to the table that I thought were completely settled. And there are also forms of debate that used to be completely off the table. If we had made up facts when I was a high-school debater, we would have been kicked out of the league. The whole thing has gotten chaotic and reckless.

The good part of this new world of debate is that the doors are much more open for a lot more people to participate. The bad part of it is that we haven’t established any rules at all. We haven’t established rules about what’s true and not true, what is allowed to be up for debate and what isn’t, and what the tone can be that stays on the right side of respectful. Right now it’s just a free-for-all. That needs to be figured out.

Isabel: How does your thinking about the state of debate play into the new Radio Atlantic?

Hanna: This is a thinking-out-loud podcast. I’m very open to having people on the podcast change my mind in the moment. I like to enter a room and have a fixed idea about something, and then somebody changes my mind about the idea. I'm not especially attached to being the absolute authority on the thing. I know what the rules of journalism and facts are, but I don’t actually know what the rules of debate are. I don’t even know what my own new rules of debate are. So I would like to use this podcast to figure that out.

Isabel: How do you think about the exchange of ideas in podcasting, in particular? What might Radio Atlantic do differently?

Hanna: I think the podcast world divides into two categories. One category is clubby—you’re already in the club, we believe the same things and it’s affirming, and it’s nice to be in a space with people who you consider like-minded. And the other form is neutral: You yourself as the host are just letting the expert lay out their case.

With Radio Atlantic, I’m trying to do neither of those things. I definitely will come in with a position, and hopefully that position will be clear and I will articulate it. Sometimes that position will be aligned with the person I’m talking to, and sometimes it won’t. To me, the momentum of this particular podcast comes from movement—movement in my own position or ideas. You start in one place with an idea or an insight, and you have your curiosity drive you to some totally different place.

Isabel: What are some topics you’ll cover on the show?

Hanna: Our first episode is basically me trying to feel what Anne Applebaum and Jeff Goldberg feel in their Ukraine cover story, because I’m sort of sheepishly admitting that I’ve stopped paying attention. I’m not necessarily resistant—I’m just being honest about the fact that I don’t feel it in the way I did at the beginning of the war, which is probably true of a lot of people. I’m trying, in the studio, to see what they see and feel what they feel.

Another conversation we’re going to have is about social media and teens. There’s so much debate now about whether social media is causing the rise in teen depression. I feel like the conversation has, for almost 10 years, run back and forth from hysteria to “no big deal.” And so my aim in conversation is to actually understand, What do we know? What literally, specifically, do we know? What social media, which teens, how does it affect them, who exactly is vulnerable? And the show does have some narrative elements too, exploring the consequences of ideas on people’s lives.

Listen:

(Re)introducing Radio Atlantic The war is not here to entertain you. Today’s News Governor Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch on Twitter Spaces crashed, delaying his announcement by almost half an hour yesterday. The leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, was sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of seditious conspiracy on January 6th, 2021. The Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Water Act does not allow the EPA to regulate discharges into some wetlands, curtailing the agency’s ability to address water pollution. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf contemplates Ron DeSantis’s presidential candidacy.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Library of Congress; Getty.

The Fight Over Animal Names Has Reached a New Extreme

By Ed Yong

Stephen Hampton has been watching birds for more than 50 years, and for almost all of that time, he thought nothing of names like Townsend’s warbler or Anna’s hummingbird: “They were just the names in the bird book that you grow up with,” he told me. Then, a few years ago, Hampton realized how Scott’s oriole—a beautiful black-and-yellow bird—got its name.

Darius Couch, a U.S. Army officer and amateur naturalist, named the oriole in 1854 after his commander, General Winfield Scott. Sixteen years earlier, Scott dutifully began a government campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove the Cherokee people from their homelands in the Southeastern United States. His soldiers rounded up Cherokee, separated their families, looted their homes, and crammed them into stockades and barges, where many of them died. Thousands of Cherokee, including Hampton’s great-great-grandfather and dozens more of his ancestors, were forced to move west along the Trail of Tears. Scott’s oriole is a monument to a man who oversaw the dispossession of Hampton’s family, and saying its name now “hits me in the gut, takes my breath away,” Hampton, who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, wrote in 2021.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020. A trans prom on the Capitol lawn Tina Turner’s cosmic life Push notifications are out of control. Culture Break Jeong Park / A24

Watch. You Hurt My Feelings (in theaters now), about a writer who finds out that her husband doesn’t like her novel manuscript, is a hilarious anxiety spiral.

Listen. To a collection of highlights from May’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’re looking to sharpen your own debating muscles, last year, another debate champion recommended 10 books that taught him how to argue.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

It would have been better for Governor Ron DeSantis if his Twitter Spaces announcement had crashed altogether. As bad as the tech failures were, the really bad part of his presidential launch was the part when the tech worked—and the world could hear a man radically and pathetically unready for national leadership.

DeSantis won the governorship of Florida in 2018 after a campaign in which he proclaimed himself one of Donald Trump’s most zealous and fawning followers. His best-known ad showed him indoctrinating his infant children into the Trump cult: “Then Mr. Trump said, ‘You’re fired.’ I love that part.” That history raised the question: Could DeSantis ever emerge as his own man; could he transition from follower to leader?

Last night’s formal presidential announcement offered him a big-audience opportunity to reveal himself in a new role. Instead, he showed himself to be a beta to the bottom of his soul, one of nature’s henchmen.

After racing through his drab, standard-issue stump speech, DeSantis submitted himself to what felt like an old-time radio call-in show, hosted by Elon Musk and Musk’s business partner, David Sacks, who is also known as one of the most scornful anti-Ukraine trolls on Twitter. The two hosts made it clear that, in their opinion, DeSantis was the third-ranking attraction of the evening. They talked about Twitter, not about DeSantis’s presidential aspirations. They summoned callers from the weirdest corners of the far right. One of them needed to be reminded to unmute himself, like Grandpa on the Zoom call. Another praised DeSantis as a “cold-blooded, ruthless assassin”—this on the first anniversary of the Uvalde school massacre.

In the aftermath of the debacle, declaring a presidential run in a Twitter chat may appear to have been a miscalculation. Yet it started as a calculation entirely in keeping with DeSantis’s style of campaigning.

DeSantis’s ads raise barriers between the candidate and the voters. In his first one, voters again and again encounter the candidate via a screen: They see him on TV, on their phone. In the one scene in which the candidate is inserted among actual people, they look at one another and raise their phones toward him, presumably to video the encounter. In his second ad, DeSantis walks toward a speaker’s platform as somebody else’s voice delivers his message for him. Obviously, the directors of these ads are adopting strategies to cope with an immediate problem: DeSantis looks awkward when he interacts with people, and his voice is grating and uninspiring. But the unintended effect is to send a message that the candidate is a contrivance.

So it was unsurprising that DeSantis would make his announcement on what sounded like an amateur hour. He was literally invisible at his own announcement. He did not interact with voters. He was protected from direct exposure by the interposition of allies and supporters. Or such was the plan.  

[David A. Graham: The non-rise and actual fall of Ron DeSantis]

Only, the plan backfired. This time, DeSantis was not protected by all the layers of mediation around him. He was thoroughly and humiliatingly exposed.

Nobody ever seemed to have given any thought to the question What’s our message to the people we hope to persuade to our cause?

Watch some old announcement speeches on YouTube, and you see a carefully considered plan in every one. The candidates stand among family or supporters; they speak to particular crowds; they focus on biography or policy or some crisis of the day. Somebody has thought hard about why the candidate is there, what the candidate hopes to achieve, what the point of this exercise is.

DeSantis’s corporate sponsors had a plan. They were there to demonstrate the messaging potential of Twitter Spaces for far-right political content. That plan went awry when Twitter Spaces proved glitchy and unreliable, but still, a plan it was. DeSantis, though, had no plan. He just twirled about Elon Musk’s ballroom, dancing to Musk’s tune.

Why should Ron DeSantis be the Republican nominee, then perhaps ultimately the president of the United States? What does he hope to achieve for his country? Those were the questions he should have been seeking to answer, but almost all of his remarks were backwards-looking: about COVID, book bans, his feud with Disney. Whether you agreed or disagreed with his talking points, whether you thought his tone whining and aggrieved or righteous and defiant, everything he had to say was about the past, his past: how he’d been right and his critics had been unfair and wrong (he specifically complained about The Atlantic).

Announcement speeches are occasions for broad visions, reflections on the things that bind and unite Americans. Barack Obama expressed such a vision in 2007:

This campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us. It must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. It will take your time, your energy, and your advice to push us forward when we’re doing right, and let us know when we’re not. This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.

George W. Bush hit the same notes in 1999:

We will also tell every American, “The dream is for you.” Tell forgotten children in failed schools, “The dream is for you.” Tell families, from the barrios of L.A. to the Rio Grande Valley: “El sueno americano es para ti.” Tell men and women in our decaying cities, “The dream is for you.” Tell confused young people, starved of ideals, “The dream is for you.” This is the kind of campaign we must run.

There was no such message from DeSantis for Americans in 2023. No dreams, no commonality. It was a message for a faction, not a nation. It was a small message for a big country. DeSantis has gotten this far by identifying enemies rather than building coalitions—but it now seems that “this far” is as far as he’s going to go.

Into the gap where the intentional message should have gone, DeSantis’s true message inserted itself. He’s a divider who seeks a position that usually is won by unifiers. To the question of his potential for the highest office, he showed us once again that he is merely one of nature’s followers hoping to thrust himself into a leadership role that does not suit him.

[David Frum: Is Ron DeSantis flaming out already?]

DeSantis likes to present himself as a man eager for political combat. In a 2022 ad for reelection as governor, he dressed up in a flight suit and pretended to instruct fellow pilots: “Never, ever back down from a fight.” His super PAC is literally named “Never Back Down.” Yet in the fight immediately upon him, the fight against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, DeSantis always backs down. He may deal the occasional side insult in oblique, passive-aggressive language that does not mention Trump by name. He decries a “culture of losing” in the GOP, and maybe that’s supposed to imply that Trump did, in fact, lose the presidential election of 2020. But DeSantis does not dare say so explicitly—and it’s almost unimaginable that he’d ever have the nerve to say so to Trump’s face on a debate stage, assuming he ever had the nerve to share a debate stage with Trump at all.

“Trump specializes in creating dominance-and-submission rituals,” I wrote here a year ago. “Roll over once, and you cannot get back on your feet again.” DeSantis has rolled over so often for Trump that by now he qualifies for a job with Cirque du Soleil. Trump attacks, and DeSantis bleeds; Trump attacks again, and DeSantis bleeds some more. DeSantis is tough on gay school teachers, tough on Disney, but weak on foreign dictators and weak on Trump.

Bill Clinton used to say that “strong and wrong beats weak and right.” DeSantis already bet his political career on the hope that truculence and peevishness might be perceived as strength. That bet was proving a bad one even before his self-abasing announcement event. It looks even worse afterward.

[David Frum: Never again Trump]

Those of us who identify as Never Trump Republicans are sometimes challenged: Why don’t we  back DeSantis, the poll-leading alternative to Trump? One answer was to doubt that DeSantis ever presented much of an alternative. Back in 2021, a wealthy Floridian who had donated to DeSantis’s campaigns for governor cautioned me, “There are two kinds of people in politics: those who think DeSantis is a viable national candidate, and those who have met Ron DeSantis.”

Yet even assuming his viability, the question remains for us: What kind of alternative would DeSantis be? We did not want Trump’s abuse of power for selfish advantage replicated by a president who differed from Trump only by arriving at the office on time instead of watching television until 11 a.m. We did not want a more efficient use of nontransparency to conceal financial corruption. We did not want more strenuous disdain for allies—Ukraine today, who knows who else tomorrow? We did not want a more systematic and shrewd exploitation of tensions in American society, more deft manipulation of resentments along lines of race, faith, sex, region, and educational attainment.

Never Trump Republicans want a free-trade, free-market economic conservative. We want a Republican who upholds the rule of law, defends free institutions, and supports democracies under fire. We want honor, character, and largeness of spirit. Is that too much to ask from our former political home? And if so, why would we return to it?

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.