If you are willing to lie very still in a giant metal tube for 16 hours and let magnets blast your brain as you listen, rapt, to hit podcasts, a computer just might be able to read your mind. Or at least its crude contours. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin recently trained an AI model to decipher the gist of a limited range of sentences as individuals listened to them—gesturing toward a near future in which artificial intelligence might give us a deeper understanding of the human mind.

The program analyzed fMRI scans of people listening to, or even just recalling, sentences from three shows: Modern Love, The Moth Radio Hour, and The Anthropocene Reviewed. Then, it used that brain-imaging data to reconstruct the content of those sentences. For example, when one subject heard “I don’t have my driver’s license yet,” the program deciphered the person’s brain scans and returned “She has not even started to learn to drive yet”—not a word-for-word re-creation, but a close approximation of the idea expressed in the original sentence. The program was also able to look at fMRI data of people watching short films and write approximate summaries of the clips, suggesting the AI was capturing not individual words from the brain scans, but underlying meanings.

The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience earlier this month, add to a new field of research that flips the conventional understanding of AI on its head. For decades, researchers have applied concepts from the human brain to the development of intelligent machines. ChatGPT, hyperrealistic-image generators such as Midjourney, and recent voice-cloning programs are built on layers of synthetic “neurons”: a bunch of equations that, somewhat like nerve cells, send outputs to one another to achieve a desired result. Yet even as human cognition has long inspired the design of “intelligent” computer programs, much about the inner workings of our brains has remained a mystery. Now, in a reversal of that approach, scientists are hoping to learn more about the mind by using synthetic neural networks to study our biological ones. It’s “unquestionably leading to advances that we just couldn’t imagine a few years ago,” says Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive scientist at MIT.

The AI program’s apparent proximity to mind reading has caused uproar on social and traditional media. But that aspect of the work is “more of a parlor trick,” Alexander Huth, a lead author of the Nature study and a neuroscientist at UT Austin, told me. The models were relatively imprecise and fine-tuned for every individual person who participated in the research, and most brain-scanning techniques provide very low-resolution data; we remain far, far away from a program that can plug into any person’s brain and understand what they’re thinking. The true value of this work lies in predicting which parts of the brain light up while listening to or imagining words, which could yield greater insights into the specific ways our neurons work together to create one of humanity’s defining attributes, language.

[Read: The difference between speaking and thinking]

Successfully building a program that can reconstruct the meaning of sentences, Huth said, primarily serves as “proof-of-principle that these models actually capture a lot about how the brain processes language.” Prior to this nascent AI revolution, neuroscientists and linguists relied on somewhat generalized verbal descriptions of the brain’s language network that were imprecise and hard to tie directly to observable brain activity. Hypotheses for exactly what aspects of language different brain regions are responsible for—or even the fundamental question of how the brain learns a language—were difficult or even impossible to test. (Perhaps one region recognizes sounds, another deals with syntax, and so on.) But now scientists could use AI models to better pinpoint what, precisely, those processes consist of. The benefits could extend beyond academic concerns—assisting people with certain disabilities, for example, according to Jerry Tang, the study’s other lead author and a computer scientist at UT Austin. “Our ultimate goal is to help restore communication to people who have lost the ability to speak,” he told me.

There has been some resistance to the idea that AI can help study the brain, especially among neuroscientists who study language. That’s because neural networks, which excel at finding statistical patterns, seem to lack basic elements of how humans process language, such as an understanding of what words mean. The difference between machine and human cognition is also intuitive: A program like GPT-4, which can write decent essays and excels at standardized tests, learns by processing terabytes of data from books and webpages, while children pick up a language with a fraction of 1 percent of that amount of words. “Teachers told us that artificial neural networks are really not the same as biological neural networks,” the neuroscientist Jean-Rémi King told me of his studies in the late 2000s. “This was just a metaphor.” Now leading research on the brain and AI at Meta, King is among many scientists refuting that old dogma. “We don’t think of this as a metaphor,” he told me. “We think of [AI] as a very useful model of how the brain processes information.”

In the past few years, scientists have shown that the inner workings of advanced AI programs offer a promising mathematical model of how our minds process language. When you type a sentence into ChatGPT or a similar program, its internal neural network represents that input as a set of numbers. When a person hears the same sentence, fMRI scans can capture how the neurons in their brain respond, and a computer is able to interpret those scans as basically another set of numbers. These processes repeat on many, many sentences to create two enormous data sets: one of how a machine represents language, and another for a human. Researchers can then map the relationship between these data sets using an algorithm known as an encoding model. Once that’s done, the encoding model can begin to extrapolate: How the AI responds to a sentence becomes the basis for predicting how neurons in the brain will fire in response to it, too.

New research using AI to study the brain’s language network seems to appear every few weeks. Each of these models could represent “a computationally precise hypothesis about what might be going on in the brain,” Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at MIT, told me. For instance, AI could help answer the open question of what exactly the human brain is aiming to do when it acquires a language—not just that a person is learning to communicate, but the specific neural mechanisms through which communication comes about. The idea is that if a computer model trained with a specific objective—such as learning to predict the next word in a sequence or judge a sentence’s grammatical coherence—proves best at predicting brain responses, then it’s possible the human mind shares that goal; maybe our minds, like GPT-4, work by determining what words are most likely to follow one another. The inner workings of a language model, then, become a computational theory of the brain.

[Read: ChatGPT is already obsolete]

These computational approaches are only a few years old, so there are many disagreements and competing theories. “There is no reason why the representation you learn from language models has to have anything to do with how the brain represents a sentence,” Francisco Pereira, the director of machine learning for the National Institute of Mental Health, told me. But that doesn’t mean a relationship cannot exist, and there are various ways to test whether it does. Unlike the brain, scientists can take apart, examine, and manipulate language models almost infinitely—so even if AI programs aren’t complete hypotheses of the brain, they are powerful tools for studying it. For instance, cognitive scientists can try to predict the responses of targeted brain regions, and test how different types of sentences elicit different types of brain responses, to figure out what those specific clusters of neurons do “and then step into territory that is unknown,” Greta Tuckute, who studies the brain and language at MIT, told me.

For now, the utility of AI may not be to precisely replicate that unknown neurological territory, but to devise heuristics for exploring it. “If you have a map that reproduces every little detail of the world, the map is useless because it’s the same size as the world,” Anna Ivanova, a cognitive scientist at MIT, told me, invoking a famous Borges parable. “And so you need abstraction.” It is by specifying and testing what to keep and jettison—choosing among streets and landmarks and buildings, then seeing how useful the resulting map is—that scientists are beginning to navigate the brain’s linguistic terrain.

When you collect statues of Lenin, Harlan Crow told me, “you get to be a bit of a snob.” The first Lenin I had seen that morning was a brass likeness in the entryway to Crow’s Dallas mansion—a house that capitalism built, if ever there was one. Lenin was in his Finland Station pose, but with his head replaced by Mickey Mouse’s. Crow’s office had at least one more Lenin. Now we were outside, pelted by rain in Crow’s Garden of Evil, admiring the fourth in a series of Lenins, an 18-footer harvested from western Ukraine. “There’s so many statues of Lenin,” Crow said, educating me on dictator-statue appreciation the way another rich guy might introduce a friend to the world of fine wine. Having a good story was crucial. “You don’t want a Lenin From Factory 107. You want Politburo.”

The many Lenins joined dozens of other petrified tyrants and world leaders, among them Communist revolutionaries (Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara), a few secular autocrats (Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak), and a few hunched babushkas, in remembrance of communism’s victims. “Most are Communist,” Crow said, but he acknowledged that he hadn’t sorted the statues perfectly according to gradations of evil. Some had been moved years ago, not because of a historical reevaluation but during renovations when he built a batting cage for his kids, who are now grown. When they were little, he said, “the kids used to be scared of them.”

The garden is really a mishmash of 20th-century evil, evil-lite, and a few of Crow’s heroes (in the last category: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Winston Churchill). “I have a number of people who are [just] dictators, like Pinochet and Juan Perón,” Crow said. “You can argue about Juan Perón, whether he was a force for good or a force for bad … You can argue about Mubarak.” He noted that Yugoslav President Josip Tito was preferable to Stalin, and Zhou Enlai (“one of my favorites”) was a big step up from Chairman Mao. “There are probably a few more guys in storage that I’ll eventually put out,” he said. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: “Probably more for good than bad,” he said. “But it’s complicated.”

Last month, Crow’s eccentric hobby became a side drama in a broader scandal over his friendship and financial relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Critics of that relationship drew attention to Crow’s garden statues as well as a small hoard of Third Reich memorabilia inside Crow’s enormous home library and museum. He owns a signed Mein Kampf, paintings by Hitler, and (reportedly) a Third Reich–era tea service. Crow said he hadn’t felt the need to sort the interior collection by level of evil, either. In the garden, he said, “I like these guys”—he motioned to Thatcher and Reagan, then to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro—“and I don’t like those guys. In my world, that’s blindingly obvious … But one thing I have learned from this is that I must not assume that things are obvious.”

“This is my era. I was born in 1949,” Crow said. “Communism was the great threat to the world.” The choice between capitalism and communism, freedom and serfdom, was a “big philosophical argument.” The Greatest Generation, he said, had a dramatic, existential shooting war. The Baby Boomers did not (“thankfully,” he added). “In my lifetime and your parents’ lifetime … we didn’t have the Battle of the Bulge or the storming of the beaches of Normandy.” But the big argument was worth memorializing. “I want us to remember it. I want us to learn from it,” he said. “And it’s pretty damn important that we remember it.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I should just get rid of it all,” he said. He knows that strangers have doubts about him, and about anyone who associates with him. “I’m not looking to be odd.” But the oddness was a colorful part of the case against his friend Thomas. “If you said, ‘Are you glad you did this?’ I would say, ‘I’m not sure.’”

Koba at rest. (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

When the twin Thomas and Third Reich scandals broke, I wrote that Crow is not a Nazi, and that to smear him as one is an offense against victims of actual Nazis, and against Crow himself. A week later, a public-relations firm representing Crow wrote to me to offer their client for an interview. When we met, Crow said he had read my article when it came out, and that very morning had reread the first couple of paragraphs, before hitting the Atlantic paywall. Even to be defended from this charge, he said, stung. “‘Harlan Crow Is Not a Nazi,’” he paraphrased the headline. “A bit too much like ‘Good News! Harlan Crow Stopped Beating His Wife.’”

Crow made clear that his preference would be not to talk at all about the current scandal—which had made him introspective about his relationship to politics, if not repentant. “My hope is that this is the last conversation I have on this topic in public,” he said. “I’m not the private person I was. I’m sad about that, but there’s nothing I can do. I just still kind of hope that it’ll all fade from memory, and I can go back to being just an old guy.”

[Graeme Wood: Clarence Thomas’s billionaire friend is no Nazi]

He surely knows deep down that the desire to be “just an old guy” is somewhere between delusional and a forlorn dream. Crow is not even a normal old ultrarich guy.

His statue garden and in-home museum are nothing compared with the living friends and politicians he has collected: ex-presidents (George W. Bush and the late Gerald Ford are especially beloved), scholars and writers (Charles Murray, David Brooks), and foreign dignitaries (the socialist British Prime Minister James Callaghan was an early guest on his yacht, on a cruise with Ford up the Dnipro River to Kyiv in the 1990s). His patronage of the American Enterprise Institute—to name just one of the venerable conservative institutions that take his money—has placed him near the center of the conservative movement for decades.

And his relationship with Thomas is irregular to the point of suspicion. ProPublica’s investigation revealed that Thomas accepted various goodies from Crow, including luxury vacations on Crow’s yacht and jet, private tuition for Thomas’s grand-nephew, and a real-estate deal with fishy particulars. Crow bought a house owned by Thomas. Thomas’s mother lives there rent-free. Thomas’s failure to report these gifts and transactions has led to accusations that the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court votes according to the wishes of his wealthy friend, a prolific donor to right-leaning political candidates and think tanks. Even if Thomas votes autonomously, they say, for the sake of transparency and the Court’s integrity, he should have reported the gifts, hospitality, and transactions.

Rules and norms apply to justices with integrity and to justices without it, to free the former from suspicion and to expose the latter. Thomas has resisted these rules more aggressively than any other justice. His critics have enjoyed a feast of cynicism at his expense. “We should all have friends like Clarence Thomas’s,” Eric Levitz of New York magazine wrote. At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Lisa Graves described this behavior as “stunning” and “astonishing,” because of the “appearance of impropriety,” and because even if Crow has no business before the Court, he certainly knows people who do, and he supports think tanks that have submitted amicus briefs. (Although I agree that the transparency standard for justices should be a full monty—nothing less than total disclosure of financial arrangements—the accusation of corruption is different. Justices with connections to Harvard or its myriad donors, supporters, and alumni are not automatically corrupted by these connections. And Harvard, unlike Crow’s think tanks, is a respondent in the most prominent case currently pending before the Court.)

But even if justices are bound by strict rules, their unbound friends are still subject to speculation, reasonable and unreasonable, about the nature of their relationship to those in power. Crow is like most people, in that he feels he has acted with the purest and most honorable intentions. He is unlike many, though, in thinking that the world should take his word for it—and that if it does not, that’s the world’s fault, and not his.

“I probably have more influence than the ordinary Joe,” Crow told me. “But I still don’t think of myself as a center of influence. I think of myself as a real-estate guy that lives in Texas.”

One common feature of the rich and powerful is that they do not feel rich and powerful. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who is an absolute monarch, told me he couldn’t just rule by fiat. He listed all the ways in which he was constrained by history, by family, by tribal interests. Last month Joe Biden told a group of visitors to the White House that “the one thing I thought when I got to be president, I’d get to give orders. But I take more orders than I ever did.”

With Crow, the psychology is similar. The liberal world thinks he orchestrates a vast right-wing conspiracy, because he is in fact surrounded by huge numbers of influential people, some who want his money and access to power, and some who are just friends. But Crow kept insisting that he has little power over the American political scene. Even with his fantastic wealth, he was incapable of preventing the rise of the politicians he most abhors, in particular Donald Trump.

And although he often says he wants to go back to being just a normal guy, it is not obvious that a man is normal when he is standing with you in his house next to a life-size mannequin of Winston Churchill and makes no comment about it until prompted. In the one-minute walk to his home office we passed perhaps a hundred objects—paintings, death masks, statues, swords, and other curios—whose presence in any normal guy’s home would have merited a proud explanation. He said he stopped giving tours long ago, after realizing that “most people just want to see a rich man’s house.” Crow happily acted as docent on request, but on our first pass through the collection, the only object that he flagged for special interest was a small ziggurat of foil-wrapped breakfast burritos and a tray of doughnuts, to which The Atlantic’s photographer and I were welcome.

Clarence Thomas and his family “have been dear friends for almost 30 years,” Crow said, denying that their friendship was political in any way. “It’s an ironic friendship, in the sense that I came from a world of silver spoons, and he came from a very difficult upbringing.” (Crow’s father, Trammell, who died in 2009, was at one point described in the press as the largest private landowner in the United States. Thomas did not see an indoor toilet until late in childhood.) Crow has taken Thomas on his yacht in Indonesia; he has hosted him at his resort in the Adirondacks.

I asked if he ever talked about law with Thomas. “I have never, nor would I ever, think about talking about matters that relate to the judiciary with Justice Clarence Thomas,” Crow said. He added that they “talk about the kind of things friends talk about,” such as weather and sports. In an email, he told me that “it’s not like we haven’t talked about work-related issues,” but that those conversations were casual and unrelated to jurisprudence. “It’s not realistic [for] two people [to] be friends and not talk about their jobs from time to time.” Thomas has spoken to him of his fondness for his clerks, or about bumping into Justice Stephen Breyer at Target. But Crow wrote that “it would be wrong” for him to talk about Court cases. “From my point of view, that is off limits. He and I don’t go there.”

[Adam Serwer: Clarence Thomas is winning his war on transparency]

Crow said he wasn’t a “law guy” and professed ignorance about any details of constitutional law. (The closest Crow has come to a Supreme Court case was in the early 2000s, when an architecture firm asked the Court to adjudicate a dispute with a firm in which Crow had a minority interest. The Court declined to hear the case.) “It would be absurd to me to talk to Justice Thomas about Supreme Court cases, because that’s not my world,” he told me at his house. “I could probably name maybe five or six cases. Brown v. Board of Education. Marbury v. Madison.” He thought for a bit and stopped at two. “We talk about life. We’re two guys who are the same age and grew up in the same era. We share a love of Motown.”

Harlan Crow at Old Parkland Campus in Dallas, Texas (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

He wanted to be normal, he said. But I noted that Thomas is not a normal friend, and friendships with Supreme Court justices are laden with responsibilities that normal friendships are not. Singing Diana Ross together on the deck of a yacht in Bali would be wholesome fun with a non-justice. But with Thomas it raised all sorts of issues. Between choruses of “Baby Love,” did Thomas wonder whether his next trip to Bali depended on his continuing to vote a certain way? What guarantee did Americans have that their friendship transcended such doubts?

“I’m not trying to say I’m this moral paragon, because I’m not. I’m just a guy that made lots of mistakes in my life,” Crow said. “But I do believe that I’m on the right side of right, morally and legally.” He said that it was “kind of weird to think that if you’re a justice on the Supreme Court, you can’t have friends. That’s not healthy. Should I have changed my life in order to have these friends? Or should I behave differently around them because of who they are?” He said if the billionaire and patron of leftist causes George Soros were hunting buddies with the chair of the Federal Reserve, he would not particularly care. “If they are genuine friends and people of good character”—he said his friends’ interactions with Soros suggest that he is—“I don’t think it’s up to me to decide.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong with your questions,” Crow told me. He recognized that character is “one of those highly subjective things.” But ultimately it is all that matters. “And I believe Justice Thomas to be a person of the highest character.”

For Crow, much hinged on this question of “good character.” In discussion of politicians, he often defaulted, in a way I found almost inspiringly optimistic, to analyzing them not by their policies but by their integrity. Integrity, he seemed to think, would isolate a politician or judge from influence, and would naturally incline that person toward a moderate, decent position. We discussed his nostalgia for a “good America,” whose politics existed on the spectrum between Reagan and Roosevelt, or better yet, between Romney and Obama (“an honorable man”), with his personal preference toward the Romney side. Thomas, he said, is “one of the most amazing and admirable people I know,” and it was as blindingly obvious that Thomas would not sell his soul for a series of vacations as it was that Harlan Crow was not a supporter of Adolf Hitler.

Moreover, the hospitality he offered to Thomas was not unusual. “For a long time, I’ve lived a certain lifestyle,” Crow said, sounding like he was about to confess to a kink. But the lifestyle he described was simply that of an extremely wealthy guy who likes to travel and host friends on holidays. “I’ve been successful. I have lived a comfortable life. I have a really big house,” he said. At his home in the Adirondacks, he said, a typical summer means 150 guests—work associates, parents of his children’s friends, a few wonks and political types. His yacht, too, is best understood as a floating extension of his hospitality. The only reason to have a yacht, he said, is to go places where one cannot go any other way—hopping around guano islands in the South Pacific, visiting the grave of a favorite Antarctic explorer on a tundra island in the South Atlantic, following the Northwest Passage. He likes to fill the staterooms with guests, both when he’s aboard and when he’s elsewhere.

“That’s the life I’ve lived. I don’t think there’s anything bad about it,” Crow said. He sees no reason to exclude Thomas from it. “I didn’t want to change my life.”

The ado over Thomas’s mother’s house seemed to baffle Crow completely. He said he considers Thomas’s rise “the kind of American story you dream about,” and he’d donated money in Thomas’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia, that would memorialize both his bootstrapped success and the Gullah-Geechee culture that produced him. Crow sent money to the Carnegie Library there; he bought the dilapidated former cannery where Thomas’s mother had worked (and gave the former owners a “life estate”—the right to remain living there until their deaths).

He said he’d had dinner at Thomas’s mother’s house “several times.” “She was a great cook, and probably still is at 94.” He’d asked Thomas if he could buy the house, at fair market value, and develop the area with the aim of eventually opening the house to the public to “honor” him. “I’m a real-estate guy,” Crow added modestly, and he figured that the neighborhood would improve if he bought and razed the drug dens and brothel on the same block, then sold the lots on the condition that the buyers build new houses. Thomas’s mother received a life estate as part of the transaction, which he said was “very common” in real-estate deals involving the elderly, and an “insignificant” expense in comparison to the cost of the deal as a whole.

“One day, I walked down that street with Justice Thomas, and there were mixed-race families living in the neighborhood,” he said. “The brothel and the crack houses were gone. There were kids riding bikes in the streets, families planning and working in their gardens. It was a neighborhood. And I’m very proud of that.”

Surely, I suggested, he could have structured the deal in a way that would not have involved writing a personal check to a Supreme Court justice. Create a foundation for public education, put impartial trustees on its board, and let it buy the house. Crow said he had done many deals in his life, and every one could, in retrospect, have been done a little better. This one wasn’t even a bad one, let alone corrupt. “It was a fair-market transaction, and I had a purpose,” Crow said. “I don’t see the foot fault.” But the idea that he had secretly corrupted his friend left him aghast. (I asked him whether he had any other financial relationships with Thomas or anyone related to Thomas, and he declined to answer, saying he doesn’t keep track of the hospitality extended to friends.)

[Brooke Harrington: Mob justice]

Crow is aware that being denounced in the press is an occupational hazard of being absurdly rich, and that one of the unwritten rules of the billionaire life is that one must not complain about being a billionaire. (As Anthony Hopkins said, playing a billionaire in The Edge: “Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.”) But Crow certainly feels embattled. “If I go out and help an old lady across the street this afternoon, there’ll be something written about my diabolical purpose and evil intent.”

Crow’s sensibility is bound in the local culture of Dallas. I grew up there and recognized it instantly. It is not familiar to most Americans. Austin is proud of its bumper sticker KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD. But Dallas’s weirdness is so deep that it perpetuates itself unintentionally, without noticing it. An auto-insurance agent specifies on his sign that he is named Ross but prefers to be addressed as “Pistol.” At the most famous historic site, you can have a picnic and watch tourists drive by and mimic the way John F. Kennedy’s head jerked “back and to the left” as it exploded. Crow has statues of fallen dictators in his yard, and those baffle outsiders. But I remember that Goff’s, the burger joint down the street from my house, had a statue of Lenin out front, salvaged in the 1990s from an Odesa, Ukraine, crane factory and outfitted with a plaque that said AMERICA WON. It was all very Dallas, and even without the plaque everyone would have known that its owner planted it there to mock rather than revere the Soviet Union, much as a high-school student might steal and display his crosstown rival’s mascot.

Heroes (Photographs by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

Crow’s emphasis on integrity is also vintage Dallas. Dallas’s citizens may not have more integrity than anyone else, but they surely do talk about it more. A classicist friend told me he was asked to translate a Dallas family’s made-up motto, “Do the right thing,” into Latin. (His suggestion, Fac Rectum, was not accepted.) Dallas is an honor society, like much of the South. And it is no surprise that a wealthy Dallasite who aspires to be a good citizen would revile the politician who more than any other has obliterated the idea that integrity is a requirement for office.

The figure of Donald Trump looms over conversations with Crow, perhaps especially when his name hasn’t been uttered for some time. Crow’s loathing for Trump and Trumpian politics is well known. “Countries don’t survive forever,” he told me, and he thought “reasonably small groups” on the right and left in America were sowing discord. Without Trump, he said, “we wouldn’t have gone as nuts on the right as we have.” He said he had proudly self-diagnosed himself with “Trump derangement syndrome” and preferred not to sidetrack our conversation about Thomas by going on an “anti-Trump jihad,” although he was tempted to do so. He was morose and reluctant for much of our conversation but lit up when he noted how the country had “repudiated” extremists of the right and left in the 2022 elections. The extremists of the right were the Trumpists. “I don’t think the left has a Trump equivalent,” Crow wrote to me later. “Thank God.” But he does consider the “progressive wing of the Democrat party” extreme, and he said he wished it had even less power than it does.

Crow describes himself as “center right,” and he deviates from the Republican Party not only in his refusal to genuflect to Trump but also in other ways, such as his support for legal access to abortion. He is a backer of the No Labels movement, which is a quixotic—some say foolhardy—attempt to vanquish extremists by fielding a presidential ticket across party lines. He spends a great deal of energy cultivating politicians who might be bipartisan-curious. (I told him I wondered if that sort of grooming by rich donors had empowered Trump in the first place. Many voters don’t want their politics determined through backroom dealing. He acknowledged that he did not understand reactionary politics, and he committed himself to listening more to the views of those enraged by the power of people like him.)

But for Trump himself, his distaste is permanent and unalterable. Part of this animus comes from the stunning 2016 repudiation of Crow’s political causes, into which he has poured millions. But the animus is even deeper, I suspect. Crow’s view of politics, and the viability of his argument that a rich man and a Supreme Court justice can just be friends with yachting benefits, depends on voters’ and elites’ voting out people of bad character. “Trump is a man without any principles at all,” Crow wrote in an email. “Bernie Sanders has principles; I just think they’re wrong. Trump doesn’t have any.”

In superficial ways, the two men are similar. Like Trump, Crow is a real-estate developer with political interests and assets that require the use of scientific notation to estimate. Both men grew up rich, then took over his father’s empire. In almost every other respect, they are total opposites. Trump cratered the empire he inherited, while investing in the sleaziest possible ventures; under Crow’s stewardship, the family fortune increased. Crow is appalled at the accusation that he used a shady real-estate deal to funnel money to a crony—which is, frankly, the kind of thing Trump would do. Trump commands attention and bellows; Crow speaks in a reluctant mumble. Trump inflates his net worth; Crow does not. Trump contemplates pulling out of NATO. Crow says he has no time for any politician who wavers in supporting Ukraine. (“The Ukrainians’ courage is unique in recent history,” he wrote to me. “I believe they’ve earned the right to their own independence.”) Crow begs to be assessed on whether he is a person of “good character.” Not even Trump’s most loyal fans could keep a straight face if their leader asked the same.

And then there is the matter of the two men’s hobbies. The poet Clive James once observed that wealth and culture do not go together. As a rule, he said, “the bigger the yacht, the smaller the library.” Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, could sleep every Supreme Court justice and still have room for Crow and the solicitor general. His library, which is a wing of his home, is not correspondingly small. It would be a jewel in the collection of any Ivy League school. He opens it more than 100 times a year for events and visits from schoolchildren and researchers.

Does Trump own any books? I browsed randomly on a few shelves in Crow’s library and found an early edition of Montesquieu’s L’esprit des Lois. Crow has a full-time archivist and librarian. At one point I asked Crow if he had in fact collected the signatures of every Supreme Court justice in American history. He paused, opened a small side door, and poked his head in to confirm with the librarian that the collection was complete. The librarian, who presumably sits there all day just waiting for such an inquiry, said they still lacked signatures from a handful of recent justices. (“Thanks!” Crow said, before closing the door.)

It is impossible to imagine Trump sailing for days in howling austral winds to reach the grave of Ernest Shackleton on South Georgia Island. Trump has no known friendships with Supreme Court justices, or indeed any friendships, period. Crow has many friends, and many acquaintances who have been his guests. One of his problems after the ProPublica exposé was that many possible character witnesses in his defense had been disqualified due to having accepted Crow’s hospitality. This includes Atlantic contributors who are employed, or have been employed, by think tanks he and his wife, Kathy, have funded, among them Arthur C. Brooks, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, and Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute as well as those who have dined or stayed at his homes, including the Atlantic contributing writer and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Crow stands in his library. (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

“What about the Hitler paintings?” I asked before leaving. He must have known the question was coming, but he took five full seconds before he gathered the courage to answer. “They’re put away,” he said.

“Permanently?”

He didn’t answer directly. He recalled a 2015 incident when he planned a fundraiser for Marco Rubio, and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz called his display of Hitler’s paintings “the height of insensitivity and indifference.” “So I took them down, and I put them in storage,” he said. But he sees nothing inherently wrong with displaying them. “Three World War II leaders—Churchill, Eisenhower, and Hitler— all being artists is in itself an interesting story,” he told me. “And I think it would be reasonable at some point to show pictures of all three of them together … But in the current environment, I’m going to say permanently—until I change my mind.”

He said he understood that certain objects mean different things to different people, and even though it was obvious to him that Nazis were bad, others might misread his intentions. “In a sensible world, people would be interested in things like that. But right now we’re not there,” he said. And the outrage over his Hitler paintings had shown him that he should consider how others feel. (This willingness to consider others’ feelings is itself a sign of his anti-Trumpishness.) “The idea that I might offend somebody, particularly somebody I care about, one of my friends, with this stuff—that hurts. I would never want to do that.”

“How about Hitler’s teapot and table linens?”

“Oh, they’re still upstairs,” he said. He admitted that Kathy had urged him to just put them away. “I’ve felt that right now it would be kind of deceptive to do that.” He said I could see the items but could not take photos.

We walked to a small room, away from the main floor of the library. “Kind of a catchall,” he said—a room with random items that didn’t fit elsewhere in his collection. Here was a sword owned by Douglas MacArthur, and another by a Japanese general present at the surrender. Then he turned, looking tense, to a display case with a rectangular leather cover, and opened it up, expecting to reveal the Nazi tableware within.

The case was empty, except for a sign that read NOT TO COMMEMORATE, BUT TO REMEMBER, IN HOPES THAT IT MAY NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

It was an awkward moment, and he seemed agitated at having misled me, even in this bizarre manner. “What I just said to you was wrong,” he said. “Somebody did something I didn’t know about.” He checked elsewhere in the room and found another empty case. “I didn’t know that. I’m not happy about it … I apologize.”

Crow looked ruffled. Even weirder than having Nazi memorabilia in your house is having it in your house but somehow losing track of it.

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A verdict against a sexual abuser and the indictment of a con-man fabulist are causes for optimism. But the fundamental indecency of the new American right marches on.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

An ominous warning to the E. Jean Carroll jury Your next mosquito repellent might already be in your shower. What Michael J. Fox figured out

A Tempered Celebration

People who have polluted the waters of American politics have had a bad few weeks. Another gang of seditionists was found guilty of plotting against the United States. Donald Trump was found liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll. And one of the weirdest phonies ever to bumble his way into a congressional seat, George Santos, has been booked by the Justice Department for a long list of alleged offenses. (He has pleaded not guilty to all of them.)

Unfortunately, I’m here to rain on your parade, because the struggle to restore basic decency in politics is still mostly a rearguard action.

But first, let’s drink in the good news that there is still some accountability for wrongdoing. The Justice Department secured yet more convictions for seditious conspiracy, this time against three leaders of the Proud Boys and their former chairman, Enrique Tarrio, who now joins the previously convicted Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, as another walking example of the banality of evil. The government asked that Rhodes get 25 years in federal prison. For a man already in his late 50s, that sentence (if levied) basically amounts to “from now on.” (Attorneys for Rhodes, Tarrio, and the three Proud Boys leaders have indicated that they plan to appeal the verdicts.)

Back in January, George Santos’s arrival in the People’s House dented my already shaky faith in the People. Santos, however, has finally been ensnared by his own prevarications. As my colleague David Graham wrote today, Santos might have been better off losing and remaining just another unknown flake who took a run at elected office, but like so many people in the age of Trump, his thirstiness brought him both fame and legal attention. Santos remains a free man, but only because three unnamed people have put up half a million dollars of bail money while he awaits trial for 13 federal charges.

And justice, of a sort, snared Trump himself when he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll. Trump’s defenders, including his lawyer (who says that Trump plans to appeal the verdict), are emphasizing that the jury declined to affirm the claim of rape, but they are carefully not mentioning that this decision may have been colored by some confusion about how to apply the term rape. Trump’s own deposition probably helped sink him, and it provided a reminder that our 45th president is a surly, smug child who never admits to a moment of regret or responsibility.

One might hope that Trump’s loss in New York would lead him to slink away in shame, but we now live in post-shame America. Instead, Trump will sit for a town hall on CNN tonight, where he will field questions as if he is a normal person running for office instead of a sexual abuser who incited sedition and violence against the government he is once again seeking to control.

Trump, of course, has the self-awareness of a traffic cone, and he is seemingly incapable of remorse. But CNN’s decision to move ahead with the event, as if nothing has happened, is disappointing. A more defensible position would have been to scrap the town-hall format and tell Trump that he is still invited to sit, one-on-one, with a CNN reporter. To present him to voters as just another candidate, however, is the very definition of normalizing his behavior.

I understand why CNN, as a journalistic outlet, would give a town hall to every candidate. Trump is the leading contender for the GOP presidential nomination, and he is by definition newsworthy. (I will be watching, and I will likely write about it, so I am in something of a glass house here myself.) But Trump has just been found liable for a hideous act. This feels, to me, nearly as distasteful as if a network were interviewing O. J. Simpson on his views about the future of professional sports right after his loss in civil court to the families of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

Trump and Santos are clowns, and sadly, we’ve gotten used to them. But their antics have also taken our attention away from the indecent behavior of other public figures. One might think, for example, that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy would be breathing a sigh of relief that Santos is reaching the end of his cringe-inducing political fan dance. One would be wrong. McCarthy, instead, is mumbling his way through fuzzy and shapeless expressions of concern.

Finally, let us temper any celebration of justice with the realization that Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is holding up nearly 200 promotions of senior U.S. military officers because … well, for a lot of reasons, apparently. Tuberville’s hold began weeks ago, when he objected to the Defense Department’s policy of paying for the travel of service members seeking an abortion. (Tuberville apparently thinks that if you’re a member of the military, and you drew the short straw of a deployment to a state whose laws on reproductive health care have been sent back to 1972, the U.S. government should not enable your interstate travel.)

Tuberville now has a new beef with the Pentagon: The senator from Alabama is upset that the U.S. military would like to prevent white supremacists from joining its ranks. In an interview with a Birmingham public-radio station, Tuberville was asked if he believes that white nationalists should be allowed to serve in the military. Referring to the Biden administration, Tuberville answered, “They call them that. I call them Americans.”

He went on to explain, for some reason, how the January 6 insurrectionists were mostly good people:

There were probably a hundred of them that came in, broke windows and broke doors that should have been locked up. That’s not how we do it in America. But there were hundreds of thousands that didn’t come in, outside, that were true Americans that believe in this country. But right after that, we, our military and Secretary Austin, put out an order to stand down and all military across the country, saying we’re going to run out the white nationalists, people that don’t believe how we believe. And that’s not how we do it in this country.

As it happens, I was a Defense Department employee when Austin issued that order, and I participated in that stand-down. It was a pretty anodyne event, and I was actually disappointed at the time that it wasn’t more forceful and more focused on the growing problem of extremism in the ranks. But even this watery response was too much for Tuberville’s fragile sensibilities.

(Tuberville, however, did have a reaction to the Carroll trial in New York. He said the verdict “makes me want to vote for [Trump] twice.”)

The cause of justice has advanced over the past few weeks. But the cause of decency is still under bombardment from people who have lost any sense of shame, while more reasonable people remain apparently unable to exercise the kind of moral judgment and leadership that should exile extremists, frauds, and abusers from the public square—and especially from offices of public trust.

Related:

George Santos would have been better off losing. The astonishing E. Jean Carroll verdict

Today’s News

Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging Representative George Santos with 13 counts, including money laundering, wire fraud, making false statements to the House of Representatives, and stealing public funds. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Advisers to the FDA voted that the benefits of an over-the-counter birth-control pill would outweigh the risks. The federal agency is expected to decide this summer whether to approve such a pill. The Labor Department reported that although rates remain high, inflation continued cooling in April, marking the slowest pace of price increases in two years.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf considers responses to the tragic death of Jordan Neely.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Taylor Hill / Getty; Philip Pacheco / Stringer / Getty.

Elizabeth Holmes Isn’t Fooling Anyone

Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone. Well, almost anyone.

The convicted fraudster and founder of the defunct medical start-up Theranos, is waiting to begin an 11-year sentence in federal prison. She received this punishment for misleading investors about her lab-in-a-box technology, which she claimed could run hundreds of tests on a few drops of blood. In reality, when Theranos’s Edison device wasn’t exploding, it was delivering unreliable results to frightened patients. Holmes’s fall from grace—she was once the youngest self-made woman billionaire—has been described over and over again. But there’s still a little more blood left in this stone.

On Sunday, The New York Times ran a profile of Holmes—which included the first interview she’s given since 2016. The author, Amy Chozick, suggests that she was charmed by Holmes, the devoted family woman. Chozick writes that Holmes is “gentle and charismatic,” and “didn’t seem like a hero or a villain. She seemed, like most people, somewhere in between.” This flattering or at least ambivalent tone was not well received.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

JOHN THYS / AFP / Getty; Museum of the City of New York / Getty

Read. The Earth Transformed: An Untold History, a sweeping new book from Peter Frankopan on how the climate has changed human society—and how we have changed the climate.

Listen. Steely Dan’s 1974 hit, “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” The perfectionist duo is capturing the hearts of a new generation of listeners.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Have you ever heard of Connie Converse? Until yesterday, I hadn’t, but after reading this story in The New York Times, I’m rather fascinated by her. She was one of the earliest singer-songwriters to buck the treacle of 1940s pop: Born in New Hampshire, she dropped out of Mount Holyoke College and became a kind of knockabout folk singer in New York a decade before Bob Dylan showed up. Her music career never took off, and she moved to Michigan, where her brother was a political-science professor. (Oddly enough, I was aware of her brother and his important work, because I have a Ph.D. in political science.)

And then, at 50 years old, she packed up her stuff in her car, said goodbye to her friends, and vanished.

I’m a sucker for this kind of “vanished artist” story, but not, in general, for her kind of music. Still, I looked up her only surviving compilation of recordings here on Spotify. I didn’t expect to find it mesmerizing, and now I think I get why the few people who knew of her thought she was better than Dylan.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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This afternoon, President Joe Biden met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in their first sit-down since February. The meeting produced no breakthroughs on the federal debt ceiling, even as a deadline for default looms in early June. I called my colleague Russell Berman, who has been watching the ongoing stalemate closely, for help creating a short guide to this moment.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The astonishing E. Jean Carroll verdict What could turn Biden’s reelection upside down EVs make parking even more annoying. “What GOP voters have told me since Trump’s indictment” Debt Questions, Answered

Is this 2011 all over again?

This month’s debt-ceiling crisis comes with a dose of déjà vu. As Russell explained last week, the circumstances largely echo the 2011 showdown between congressional Republicans and then-President Barack Obama: A new GOP majority in the House is using the looming threat of a national default—which would likely lead to a stock-market crash and possibly a recession— as leverage to push a first-term Democratic president to agree to spending cuts.

But after talking with Eric Cantor, who in 2011 was the House majority leader deputized to negotiate an agreement with then–Vice President Biden, Russell reported that the crisis we’re in now is worse than that of 12 years ago. He gave me three reasons:

Kevin McCarthy has a lot more to lose than his predecessors did. “Republicans have a much smaller majority in the House this time around,” Russell noted. McCarthy “is operating with much less room to maneuver, given how hard he had to fight just to get the job. There’s an ever-present threat that if he negotiates a bad deal or if he folds in this confrontation, he could be ousted.” One important subject is off the table this time around: Both parties have decided not to negotiate on the major entitlement programs of Medicare and Social Security. Russell explained that Republicans are not asking to cut those two major programs, as they did in 2011, due in large part “to the influence of former President Trump,” who endorsed a hands-off approach to the programs to avoid alienating older voters. The removal of these programs from negotiations could make it a bit easier to get to a deal, but it also means that if the GOP gets President Biden to agree to any cuts, they’re likely to be smaller than what the two parties were talking about in 2011. The most meaningful distinction between the 2011 standoff and today’s might also be the simplest: The two parties haven’t even started to negotiate. The deadline for America defaulting on its debt is a bit of a moving target, but Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that the country could default as soon as June 1 if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling. At this time in 2011, however, a lot of negotiation had already happened—“because the Obama administration conceded the premise that Republicans were offering, which was that this was something to negotiate over,” Russell said. Today’s meeting was really just the beginning of the conversation—and that’s a late start, with just three weeks until the deadline.

Why does this keep happening?

How did the U.S. wind up with such consistent debt-ceiling drama anyway? Russell explained that contentious debt-ceiling debates haven’t been the norm for America’s entire history. In fact, 2011 marked a shift away from debt-limit negotiations being anything other than a formality. “What the Republicans did in 2011 set a precedent that the Democrats really hate, in which the debt ceiling is not just automatically raised,” Russell said.

The idea of automatically raising the ceiling makes some sense if you think about what the debt ceiling actually is: “It’s essentially paying for spending that Congress has already authorized and appropriated,” Russell told me. “The common analogy is to the credit-card bill. You don’t really negotiate with your credit-card company over whether you’re going to pay the credit-card bill.”

Especially in the past few years, Democrats have put forth proposals to take these negotiations off the table and change the law, “so that Congress does not have this cudgel that can hold the United States economy hostage to what has been a very polarized, often dysfunctional legislative branch,” Russell said. Some Republicans have even expressed interest in these proposals too.

But until then … what’s next?

Russell walked me through three possible scenarios:

The parties do not reach a deal in the coming weeks, and the country either defaults or gets very close to defaulting on its debt. If that happens, “the stock markets begin to crash, and the political pressure ramps up significantly on both parties,” Russell said. “And that’s where you might see one party blink.” Speaker McCarthy, President Biden, and the two parties just “agree to punt,” as Russell puts it—“to basically say, We’re going to raise the debt ceiling for a short period of time, to buy time for formal negotiations on spending and the budget.” The GOP’s concession would be to raise the debt ceiling without getting any spending cuts, whereas President Biden’s concession would be to say, We’re going to negotiate on this where we had previously said we wouldn’t. The parties reach a deal. What would a deal look like? “The Republicans would like an agreement in which Congress and the president commit to reduce spending over the next two years, in addition to some other issues,” Russell told me. So a deal would include “an agreement on big-picture spending levels, plus maybe one or two other policy issues that aren’t directly related to spending, where the parties can make some progress.” The exact shape that such an agreement would take remains to be seen.

Related:

This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse. The logic behind Biden’s refusal to negotiate the debt ceiling Today’s News Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, was arrested. He has accused the country’s military of colluding against him. According to new draft recommendations from a prominent national health panel, women should start receiving mammograms at age 40 instead of age 50. A jury has found Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not rape, in the civil case brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll. Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic

How to Build (And Destroy) a Social Network

By Charlie Warzel

On a perfect spring day in 2017, I joined a gathering of right-wing internet trolls in Austin, Texas. They’d arranged the meetup to support the Infowars founder and conspiracist Alex Jones during his child-custody trial; I was reporting on all this and ended up in a stilted conversation with a prolific 4chan poster. We realized that we were born only a few miles apart from each other in Ohio, which apparently came as a shock. I thought all you blue checks were from New York City or California, he said with no trace of irony.

That was the first time I’d ever been referred to in the physical world as a “blue check.” Technically, the term meant that I was somebody who’d been verified on Twitter, but it was more familiar to me as a derogatory bit of internet slang. Sometime in the late 2010s, the moniker became a handy stand-in for a large class of mostly left-leaning journalists, celebrities, activists, and other personalities on Twitter. Blue checks were supposedly privileged and out of touch, like the “liberal elites” who preceded them.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Baby J (streaming on Netflix), a new comedy special in which John Mulaney brilliantly destroys his likable persona.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

In red and blue states, Democrats are consolidating their hold on the most economically productive places.

Metropolitan areas won by President Joe Biden in 2020 generated more of the total economic output than metros won by Donald Trump in 35 of the 50 states, according to new research by Brookings Metro provided exclusively to The Atlantic. Biden-won metros contributed the most to the GDP not only in all 25 states that he carried but also in 10 states won by Trump, including Texas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Utah, Ohio, and even Florida, Brookings found. Almost all of the states in which Trump-won metros accounted for the most economic output rank in the bottom half of all states for the total amount of national GDP produced within their borders.

[From the March 2017 issue: Red state, blue city]

Biden’s dominance was pronounced in the highest-output metro areas. Biden won 43 of the 50 metros, regardless of what state they were in, that generated the absolute most economic output; remarkably, he won every metro area that ranked No. 1 through 24 on that list of the most-productive places.

The Democrats’ ascendance in the most-prosperous metropolitan regions underscores how geographic and economic dynamics now reinforce the fundamental fault line in American politics between the people and places most comfortable with how the U.S. is changing and those who feel alienated or marginalized by those changes.

Just as Democrats now perform best among the voters most accepting of the demographic and cultural currents remaking 21st-century America, they have established a decisive advantage in diverse, well-educated metropolitan areas. Those places have become the locus of the emerging information economy in industries such as computing, communications, and advanced biotechnology.

And just as Republicans have relied primarily on the voters who feel most alienated and threatened by cultural and demographic change, their party has grown stronger in preponderantly white, blue-collar, midsize and smaller metro areas, as well as rural communities. Those are all places that generally have shared little in the transition to the information economy and remain much more reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: agriculture, fossil-fuel extraction, and manufacturing.

Neither party is entirely comfortable with this stark new political alignment. Much of Biden’s economic agenda, with its emphasis on creating jobs that do not require a college degree, is centered on courting working-class voters by channeling more investment and employment to communities that feel excluded from the information age’s opportunities. And some Republican strategists continue to worry about the party’s eroding position in the economically innovative white-collar suburbs of major metropolitan areas.

Yet the underlying economic forces widening this political divide will be difficult for either side to reverse, Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, told me. The places benefiting from the new opportunities in information-based industries, he said, tend to be racially diverse, densely populated, well educated, cosmopolitan, supported by prestigious institutions of higher education, and tolerant of diverse lifestyles. And the information age’s tendency to concentrate its benefits in a relatively small circle of “superstar cities” that fit that profile has hardly peaked. From 2010 to 2020, Muro said, the share of the nation’s total economic output generated by the 50 most-productive metropolitan areas increased from 62 to 64 percent, a significant jump in such a short span. “We are still in the midst of that massive shift, though there’s plenty of uncertainty right now,” Muro told me. “These are long cycles of economic history.”

The trajectory is toward greater conflict between the diverse, big places that have transitioned the furthest toward the information-age economy and the usually less diverse and smaller places that have not. Across GOP-controlled states, Republicans are using statewide power rooted in their dominance of nonmetropolitan areas to pass an aggressive agenda preempting authority from their largest cities across a wide range of issues and imposing cultural values largely rejected in those big cities; several are also now targeting public universities with laws banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and proposals to eliminate tenure for professors.

This sweeping offensive is especially striking because, as the Brookings data show, even many red states now rely on blue-leaning metro areas as their principal drivers of economic growth. Texas, for instance, is one of the places where Republicans are pursuing the most aggressive preemption agenda, but the metros won by Biden there in 2020 account for nearly three-fourths of the state’s total economic output.

[Read: An unprecedented divide between red and blue America]

“State antagonism toward cities is not sustainable,” says Amy Liu, the interim president of the Brookings Institution. “By handicapping local problem solving or attacking local institutions and employers, state lawmakers are undermining the very actors they need to build a thriving regional economy.”

At The Atlantic’s request, Muro and the senior research assistant Yang You of the Brookings Metro program calculated the share of state GDP generated across the 50 states in the metropolitan areas won by Biden and Trump in 2020. (The calculation was based on 2020 data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis. In federal statistics, 46 metropolitan areas extend across state lines—for instance, the New York metropolitan area also includes parts of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Brookings disaggregated the economic and political results along state boundaries to ensure that each was apportioned to the correct total.)

The analysis showed that the metros Biden carried generated 50 percent or more of state economic output in 28 states, and a plurality of state output in seven others. States where Biden-won metros accounted for the highest share of economic output included reliably blue states: His metros generated at least 90 percent of state economic output in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Jersey, California, Connecticut, New York, and Maryland. But the Biden-won metros also generated at least 80 percent of the total economic output in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia, as well as two-thirds in Michigan and almost exactly half in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—all key swing states. And the metros he carried generated at least half of total output in several Republican states, including Texas, Iowa, and Missouri.

The metropolitan areas Trump carried accounted for the most economic output in only 15 states. Twelve of the states where Trump metros accounted for the most economic activity ranked in the bottom half of all states for total output; the only exceptions were Indiana, Tennessee, and Louisiana. By contrast, Biden dominated the most productive states: His metros generated more of the output than the Trump metros in 22 of the 25 highest-producing states. As striking: Biden metros generated at least half of total output in 12 of the 15 most productive states and 19 of the top 25.

All of these results reflect the emphatic blue tilt of the largest and most economically productive metro areas. In 37 states, Biden won the single metro that generated the largest economic output. The results in the 50 metros that contributed the most to the national GDP regardless of their state were even more decisive: Biden, as noted above, not only carried 43 of them—and won the two dozen largest—but carried more of the highest-performing metros in red states than Trump did. The list of high-performing red-state metro areas that Biden carried included all four of the largest in Texas—Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio.

“The states that are most invested in the knowledge economy are overwhelmingly Democratic; large metros [in almost every state] are essentially universally Democratic; and affluent voters in these large metro areas are now overwhelmingly Democratic too,” Jacob Hacker, a Yale political scientist, told me. “The basic story seems to be that where you are seeing rapid economic growth, where the nation’s GDP is produced, you are seeing an ongoing shift toward the Democratic Party.”

Biden also won 28 of the next 50 metros that generated the most economic output, giving him 71 of the 100 largest overall, Brookings found. After the top 100, the switch flipped: Trump won 62 of the next 100 metros ranked by their total output, and 143 of the final 184 metros with the smallest economic output.

To understand these patterns better, the Brookings Metro analysis took an especially close look at the demographic and economic characteristics of metro areas in eight of the most politically competitive states, as well as the two mega-states in each party’s column: California and New York for the Democrats, and Texas and Florida for the Republicans.

[Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good]

Those results fill in the picture of a broad-based separation between the Democratic- and Republican-leaning places. Across those 12 states, Biden won about three-fifths of the metros with a population of at least 250,000; Trump won about three-fourths of those that are smaller. In these states, Biden won about three-fourths of the metros with more college graduates than average and Trump won about two-thirds of those with fewer college grads than average. Biden likewise won almost two-thirds of these states’ metros that are more racially diverse than average, and Trump won two-thirds of those that are less diverse. Biden predominated in the metros with the largest share of workers participating in digital industries, and Trump won 17 of the 20 metros with the largest share of workers engaged in manufacturing.

Despite their economic success, many of the largest blue-leaning metros, especially since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, have faced undeniable turbulence in the form of high housing costs, widespread homelessness, persistent economic inequality, downtown business centers weakened by the rise of remote work, and, in many cases, increasing crime. Some of the very largest metros “may be seeing new headwinds,” Muro said, but if employers look beyond them, the beneficiaries are less likely to be the smaller Trump-leaning places than the blue cities just outside the highest rung of economic activity, such as Denver, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Brookings’s analysis has found that even amid all of the pandemic’s disruption, the elevated share of total national economic output generated by the 50 largest metros remained constant from 2019 through 2021. Though trends can always change, Muro said, “it is hard to imagine a massive unrolling” of the concentration of economic opportunity that has characterized the digital era.

Lower taxes and especially less-expensive housing costs have helped many red-state metros remain competitive with those in blue states as the economy evolves, but a sustained conservative attack on red states’ most prosperous places could threaten that record. “The biggest worry is that the culture wars, the attack on the urban core, the attack on the self-governing of cities can have the unintended effect of pitting urban areas against their suburbs and rural neighbors when the modern economy is regional and we need all of these actors to work together,” Amy Liu of Brookings said.

This economic configuration has big implications for national politics. Hacker believes that over time, ceding so much ground in the most economically vibrant places “is not a sustainable position for the Republican Party to be in.” While the party is “benefiting from the undertow” of backlash against the overlapping economic and social transformations reconfiguring U.S. society, he added, “the places that are becoming bluer are growing faster; they are bigger … and they are also, as Republicans lament, setting the tone” for the emphasis on diversity and cultural liberalism now embraced by most big public and private institutions.

Still, Hacker noted, the GOP’s “structural advantages” in the electoral system—particularly the bias in the Senate and Electoral College toward small states least affected by these changes—may allow the party to offset for years the advantages that Democrats are reaping from “economic and demographic change.” The result could be a sustained standoff between a Republican political coalition centered on the smaller places that reflect what America has been and a Democratic party grounded in the economically preeminent large metros forging the nation’s future.

Austin Killips becomes the first transgender athlete to win a UCI women's stage race at the Tour of the Gila in New Mexico.

Most Americans were introduced to the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” in 2021, when the majority declined to block a Texas law that banned abortion in the state after six weeks. Despite the protestations of the conservative justices at the time, the decision foreshadowed the 6–3 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case guaranteeing the right to an abortion.

[Adam Serwer: By attacking me, Justice Alito proved my point]

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of the forthcoming The Shadow Docket, was one of the few legal observers who had been sounding the alarm on the Supreme Court’s use of emergency orders to make sweeping changes to American law outside of public scrutiny and regular procedure. Although emergency orders in time-sensitive cases had long been a part of the high court’s work, in recent years the volume, breadth, and partisan valence of the justices’ rulings in such matters had changed.

The conservative justices’ use of the shadow docket to make rapid, expansive rulings on important matters has since drawn public scrutiny and even criticism from both the Court’s Democratic appointees and Chief Justice John Roberts. Most recently, the Supreme Court stayed a ruling from a conservative judge outlawing the abortion drug mifepristone, an apparent retreat from the Court’s recent aggressive use of the shadow docket.

In his book, Vladeck notes that Justice Samuel Alito has “accused the shadow docket's critics of trying to intimidate the Court and undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of the public.” Vladeck explains, however, that he wrote the book not to delegitimize the Court, “but because I fear that the Court is delegitimizing itself, and that not enough people—the justices included—are noticing."

I spoke to Vladeck about his upcoming book, how the shadow docket has shaped American law, and whether public backlash to the Court’s conduct has had an effect on the justices.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Adam Serwer: What is the shadow docket? And why should people care?

Steve Vladeck: The term shadow docket is this evocative shorthand that Chicago law professor Will Baude coined in 2015, not as a pejorative, but just as an umbrella term to capture everything the Supreme Court does other than thoroughly explained, merits decisions [on the regular docket]. Will’s insight, which I’ve somewhat shamelessly appropriated, is that a lot of important stuff happens in the more technical side of the Court’s docket—important stuff that affects all of us, that shapes the law and lower courts, and that we sort of ignored at our peril. And what’s remarkable about that is that Will wrote that in 2015. And if anything, the last eight years have actually dramatically underscored just how right he was.

Serwer: How did the shadow docket change during the Trump administration?

Vladeck: It’s common for those who like to defend the Court to say, “There’s always been a shadow docket.” That’s true. The really big shift during the Trump administration is in how the Court used one slice of the shadow docket, what we might call the emergency docket. These are contexts in which a party is asking the Court to step in while a case is working its way through the courts, and either freeze a lower-court ruling or block government action that lower courts refuse to block.

And during the Trump administration, we see the Court intervening far more often, in non-death-penalty cases, where the emergency interventions are having statewide and nationwide effects. And so instead of the Court allowing an execution to proceed or freezing one, you have the Court allowing a Trump immigration policy to be carried out perhaps for three years, or freezing a state COVID restriction. That’s a huge qualitative shift. We also saw the Court doing this a lot more often. So there’s also a quantitative uptick. And all the while, the Court is hewing to its norm of not usually explaining any of these procedural orders. And so the Court is providing no rationale, no vote count, nor even telling us who wrote whatever the Court has said on the subject.

Serwer: How did COVID affect the shadow docket?

Vladeck: First we had the flurry of religious-liberty challenges to stay COVID-mitigation policies. And we saw these especially in blue states, where the claims were that COVID restrictions, insofar as they operated on houses of worship or other religious gatherings, violated the free-exercise clause.

Here we saw the Court’s most aggressive use of the shadow docket, repeatedly intervening—and especially after Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—to block these policies in New York, to block them in California, to block them in Colorado, to block them in New Jersey. The COVID cases pushed the Court to expand the scope of religious-liberty protection in the Constitution entirely through these emergency orders, orders that were usually unexplained and never had the same process as merits cases. And that’s especially telling because all this is happening as the Court has on its merits docket cases that would have given the justices similar opportunities to expand the free-exercise clause.

[Adam Serwer: Five justices did this because they could]

That’s the first way. Then you have all of these election cases, where you have either states that try to make it easier to vote remotely because of COVID or states that don’t and then get sued. So you have an unusual concentration of election-related disputes, where the Court is put in the position of trying to decide what rules should attach to voting as we get closer and closer to the election. And we see, in both of those contexts … we see the Court using these emergency orders to shape policy, oftentimes without making any law. And, you know, I think, perhaps most perniciously in ways that tended to at least appear to favor Republicans over Democrats.

Serwer: Some people would say that the Supreme Court did exactly what should have been done in these religious-liberty shadow-docket cases: They were protecting people’s right to worship. How do you see those cases, and how do you see them having changed the legal landscape as far as religious liberty is concerned?

Vladeck: Reasonable folks are going to disagree about what the free-exercise clause ought to protect. The question is, if the Court is going to change the meaning of the free-exercise clause, should it be doing so through a series of emergency orders, where there hasn’t really been a full opportunity for briefing, where there was no oral argument, where there was really very little opportunity for friends of the Court to weigh in? Should [the Court] be doing this in a context in which they’re only supposed to grant relief, if the rights are already “indisputably clear”—that’s the standard for an injunction pending appeal? Or should they be doing it the normal way on the merits docket?

And so what’s remarkable about the COVID cases is that here’s a context where, instead of just using emergency applications and emergency orders to adjust the status quo, the Court willfully changed the underlying constitutional principles, perhaps added them in ways that we would think are defensible, if not even normally desirable—but in a way that really is not supposed to be what these kinds of procedural orders are for.

Serwer: Did you think that the Texas case regarding Senate Bill 8 and abortion was the first time the shadow docket really started drawing public notice outside of Court watchers and reporters?

Vladeck: Oh, absolutely. And there’s actually some media scholarship that backs this up. There was a study in the Chicago Policy Review that tracked references to the shadow docket in mainstream media outlets, and they skyrocketed after the September 2020 nonintervention in the Texas case. I think it was really the S.B. 8 case that put this on the map.

That attention also produced some fascinating reactions. In response to that public blowback, we saw the first conservative attempts to defend what the Court had been doing, with Alito’s speech at Notre Dame and editorials in The Wall Street Journal. But we also see some of the justices shifting their behavior. There’s this remarkably cryptic, but I think important, concurring opinion that Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writes in the main health-care-worker vaccine case, at the end of October 2021. Justice Barrett basically says, Hey, just because you make out your case for emergency relief, doesn’t mean we have to grant it.

In retrospect, I think she was signaling that perhaps she and Justice Kavanaugh were lowering the temperature, and are going to be a little more cautious in when they would vote for emergency relief going forward. That’s borne out by what’s happened in the last 18 months, by how much less often the Court has granted emergency relief, by how much more often we’re seeing some combination of Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissent from rulings regarding emergency applications.

Serwer: How are the lower courts reacting to the way the Supreme Court has been using the shadow docket?

Vladeck: I think the lower courts are in a bit of a sticky wicket, because in some of these cases, especially in the COVID religious-liberty cases, the Supreme Court has been instructing lower courts that its unsigned, unexplained orders are precedential—and that lower courts are erring, as the Court says in one case of the Ninth Circuit, by not following rulings where there was no majority rationale. So I think the lower courts are largely doing their best, but it’s really hard to know what to do if you are a principled, faithful, lower-federal-court judge, when the Supreme Court historically has said, If we don’t provide a rationale, we’re not giving you precedent to follow, and then the Court acts differently in this context.

I think we’re seeing a bit of a smorgasbord where some lower courts are just following what the Supreme Court has said, and some are just throwing up their hands and saying, Without more guidance from the Supreme Court, I’m just sort of stuck here. That’s perhaps the biggest point on which there ought to be consensus: Leaving aside who wins and who loses, the less the Supreme Court explains itself in this context, the harder it is for the relevant actors, for the lower courts, for the relevant government officials, to understand what their responsibilities are. That should presumably be something we all have common cause in ameliorating.

Serwer: How would you describe the Court’s use of the shadow docket in voting-rights cases?

Vladeck: What we saw in 2022 was a pair of decisions in the Alabama and Louisiana cases where—after pretty exhaustive efforts to take evidence and get to the bottom of the factual disputes—lower courts had said, Hey, states, you’ve got to redraw your maps because the current ones violate the Voting Rights Act. And the Supreme Court, despite these lengthy lower-court rulings, just says, Hey, states, no, you don’t.

That’s especially significant in this particular moment, because between Alabama and Louisiana directly, that’s at least two House seats. There’s also a federal judge in Georgia who said he would have blocked Georgia’s maps but for the unexplained stay in the Alabama case. So that’s three House seats. You know, there’s a New York Times report that suggests that somewhere between seven and 10 House seats might have been directly affected by the Court’s voting-rights cases on the shadow docket in early 2022. That’s control of the House. If all of those districts had been majority-minority districts, I don’t think it’s that remarkable a suggestion that many of them would have been safe seats for Democrats. Instead, they were all safe seats for Republicans. And so right there, you have an argument that unsigned, unexplained orders from the Supreme Court helped Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives.

Serwer: Last week, the Court took up a ruling where a lower-court judge banned the abortion pill, which is the most common way that women today get abortions. What do you make of the Court’s decision there?

Vladeck: There’s so much to say about the mifepristone case. One thing is, in some respects, this is actually more like an old-school emergency application, where you have this remarkable outlier ruling by a lower court. It’s highly possible that the justices just looked at the equities and said, Whatever the right answer is to this case on appeal, we’re not going to disrupt such an important medication while that appeal works its way through the courts, that we’re going to sort of preserve the status quo, first and foremost, and worry about the legal issues later. So in that respect, I think it was actually probably a page out of the older playbook.  

I also think that it’s emblematic of why the shadow docket has become such an important part of any public discussion of the Supreme Court. Because the mifepristone case gets from an injunction, or at least a stay by a district judge, to a pretty important rule by the Supreme Court in two weeks. Ten years ago, that would have been unheard of, and it’s become, to a large degree, de rigeur—you know, the student-loan cases get to the Supreme Court remarkably quickly after they’re filed. Part of why the shadow docket has become so important is because we’re seeing more and more of these lower-court rulings that put pressure on the justices far earlier in cases than they’re used to, with far higher stakes at that stage in litigation than they’re used to.

[Stephen I. Vladeck: The Supreme Court needs to show its work]

If the Court is frustrated with how many of these cases are getting to it in this crazy expedited, record-free posture, the justices have a way of expressing that and saying, This is no way to run a railroad. And instead, what we’re seeing is just one emergency after another, for a Court that as recently as five, six, seven years ago, would maybe have gotten one of these cases a year.

Serwer: Do you think public criticism and internal dissent at the Court over the shadow docket has made a difference?

Vladeck: I do. I mean, I’ll never prove it. But I think it’s really hard to look at the overall data set and compare, for example, the October 2020 term to the last two terms and not see pretty significant shifts in at least how some of the justices are behaving. Not surprisingly, the shifts are principally centered on the three justices in the middle. So Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh.

But it’s hard to believe that that’s a coincidence. And it’s hard to believe that the subtle but significant shifts in when the Court has granted emergency relief and how it’s behaving in these cases are unrelated to some of the public criticism, to some of the pushback.

I think that’s an important point unto itself. There’s such a fatalism these days about the idea that the Court is in any way subject to public criticism, responsive to public criticism. To me, the shadow docket might be an object lesson and how maybe it actually is [responsive to public criticism], especially when we’re talking about procedural critiques, as opposed to substantive ones.