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.

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.

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.

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.

Tomorrow marks one year since a shooter killed 19 students and two teachers at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school—the deadliest school shooting since the one at Sandy Hook a decade prior. Each of these grim American anniversaries raises the same question: Has the country made progress in curbing the likelihood of mass shootings since the tragedy? Today’s newsletter will check in on a few overlapping factors of America’s gun-violence crisis.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The first social-media babies are growing up—and they’re horrified. The second generation of school shootings The Republican primary has entered its chaos phase.

Escalating Trauma

In a new essay, the writer Sarah Churchwell summarizes what America has begun to feel like in 2023: “We’re at a point of iterated, escalating trauma: the same people being affected by mass shootings across generations.” Churchwell writes about her brother, whose elementary school was targeted by a shooter when he was a child, and who, more recently, evaded a mass shooting at a nearby Fourth of July parade—and was then forced to explain the reality of such events to his preschooler.

This morbid mass-shooting tradition can seem particularly intractable because it involves overlapping conflicts in American policy, culture, and society. First, of course, is the matter of guns. As I wrote last month, a majority of Americans support gun-control measures such as universal background checks for gun purchases, but the nation’s political system fails to enact even these popular gun-control policies because of the intense political polarization over the issue and influence of the domestic gun industry.

In my story, I cited an Atlantic essay by the Stanford Law School professor John J. Donohue pointing out the disparity that exists even between National Rifle Association leaders and the organization’s own members. “Repeated surveys show that while the NRA membership consistently supports reasonable measures such as universal background checks,” he wrote, “NRA leaders stake out a much more extreme position.”

The role of the NRA is crucial to understanding America’s gun situation, but just as important is understanding how the Supreme Court has recently altered the lines of the debate. The Court’s decision last year in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen changed the framework that courts use when determining the constitutionality of firearm regulations, broadening interpretations of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments to protect an American’s right to legally carry a handgun in public. Although the power of the NRA has long slowed the passage of new gun-reform measures in Congress, this Supreme Court ruling makes some existing modern laws that restrict firearms liable to being ruled unconstitutional in the future.

Setting aside Americans’ access to firearms, there’s also the question of how to address the emotional or psychological ills that could drive someone to turn to gun violence in the first place. My Atlantic Daily colleague Tom Nichols outlined his theory of the “Lost Boys” last month, in which he suggests that a scourge of male narcissism is likely to blame:

Yes, the country is awash in guns; yes, depression seems to be on the rise in young people; yes, extremists are using social media to fuse together atomized losers into explosive compounds. But the raw material for all of the violence is mostly a stream of lost young men.

Why is this happening? What are we missing? Guns and anomie and extremism are only facets of the problem. The real malady afflicting these men … is the deluge of narcissism in the modern world, especially among failed-to-launch young men whose injured grandiosity leads them to blame others for their own shortcomings and insecurities—and to seek revenge.

Other Atlantic writers have turned their attention to the social-media ecosystem waiting to capitalize on angry young men’s worst impulses. Last year, the writer Juliette Kayyem noted that “lone wolf” shooters may act alone but often have an “online pack” of peers who share their ideology.

Last week, the sociologist Eric Gordy pointed to a lesson America might learn from Serbia, a country shocked by two mass shootings in the course of a week earlier this month. Because semiautomatic weapons are illegal in Serbia, the government was able to respond quickly, Gordy explained: “It took only a day for President Aleksander Vučić to deliver a speech promising swift action to protect public safety and to reduce ownership of illegal firearms by 90 percent.” But for many Serbian observers, limiting gun access was only the first step in dealing with a larger problem—a country where “political elites and tabloid media continue to promote ethno-nationalist resentment and hatred.”

Gordy notes that many American gun-control advocates are reluctant to blame cultural or psychological causes, rather than the sheer number of guns in the country, for the persistence of mass shootings. But he argues that it’s worth paying attention to the residents of Serbia who are arguing that “eliminating the danger of violence will also require building institutions that are truthful and responsible, and building a culture that is, if not tolerant and understanding, then at least relatively nontoxic.”

This brings us back to Uvalde. On May 8, Republicans unexpectedly allowed a bill that would raise the purchase age for semiautomatic rifles to advance out of a House committee. A likely impetus for this sudden move is, by all definitions, the very opposite of progress: a mass shooting days prior, this time near Dallas at an outdoor mall, where nine people were killed.

Related:

A firearm-owning Republican’s solutions for gun violence Mass shootings are a problem America can’t fix

Today’s News

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis plans to announce his 2024 presidential campaign in a live audio conversation with Elon Musk on Twitter tomorrow. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued a public advisory on the “profound risk of harm” that social media can have on young people. A man is in custody after crashing a U-Haul truck carrying a Nazi flag into a security barrier near the White House last night. Investigators are treating it as a potentially intentional incident.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ thoughts on the marijuana-legalization divide.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

In Ukraine, brutality lingers. Tim Keller’s critique of liberal secularism Photos: Extreme weather brings deadly flooding to northern Italy.

Culture Break

Tina Thorpe / HBO

Read. The Late Americans, the new novel by Brandon Taylor, which hits bookstores today. Or check out another title from The Atlantic’s summer reading guide, which includes 20 books you should grab this season.

Watch. A Black Lady Sketch Show (streaming on Max). It’s the perfect mix of random and hilarious.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This week is a good time to hear from America’s kids. I recommend this collection of reflections from students across the country, in their own handwriting, after the Uvalde shooting.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu 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.

Senator Tim Scott today joined the ranks of GOP candidates hoping to displace Donald Trump as the party’s nominee. America would be better off if one of them could win, but the GOP is no longer a normal political party.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Beware of the food that isn’t food. Harlan Crow wants to stop talking about Clarence Thomas. Where living with friends is still technically illegal A firearm-owning Republican’s solutions for gun violence

Thanos From Queens

Tim Scott of South Carolina joined the field of Republican contenders for the GOP presidential nomination today. He’s polling in single digits among primary voters, as are all of the other (so far) declared candidates. Only Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is managing to get out of the basement—rumors are that he will announce his candidacy this week—and even he is getting walloped by Donald Trump in polls of the Republican faithful.

Scott seems like a classic no-hoper presidential prospect but a strong choice for vice president, which of course is why some weaker candidates run and then bow out (see “Harris, Kamala”). The current GOP field, however, includes at least some politicians who should be credible alternatives to Trump: In any other year, people such as DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Asa Hutchinson, all current or former governors from the South, would be obvious contenders. Instead, their campaigns are flailing about in limbo while the rest of the field is populated by the likes of the wealthy gadfly Vivek Ramaswamy and the radio-talk-show host Larry Elder.

Of course, in a normal year, a twice-impeached president who has been held liable for sexual abuse would do the decent thing and vanish from public life.

The United States desperately needs a normal presidential election, the kind of election that is not shadowed by gloom and violence and weirdos in freaky costumes pushing conspiracy theories. Americans surely remember a time when two candidates (sometimes with an independent crashing the gates) had debates, argued about national policy, and made the case for having the vision and talent and experience to serve as the chief executive of a superpower. Sure, those elections were full of nasty smears and dirty tricks, but they were always recognizable as part of a grand tradition stretching all the way back to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—rivals and patriots who traded ugly blows—of contenders fighting hard to secure the public’s blessing to hold power for four years.

Such an election, however, requires two functional political parties. The Republicans are in the grip of a cult of personality, so there’s little hope for a normal GOP primary and almost none for a traditional presidential election. Meanwhile, Republican candidates refuse to take a direct run at Donald Trump and speak the truth—loudly—to his voters; instead, they talk about all of the good that Trump has done but then plead with voters to understand that Trump is unelectable. (Hutchinson, who is unequivocal in his view of Trump, has been an honorable exception here and has called for Trump to drop out.)

The electability argument about Trump is not only amoral, but it also might not even be true: Trump might be able to win again. In normal times, there’s nothing wrong with “electability” arguments. It is hardly the low road, if presented with two reasonable candidates in a primary, to choose the one who can prevail in a general election. But such a choice assumes the existence of  “reasonable” candidates. Instead, some of the Republicans who are running or leaning toward running against Trump are saying, in effect, that Trump really should be the candidate, but he can’t win—instead of saying, unequivocally, that no decent party should ever nominate this man again, whether he can win or not.

Republican contenders are caught in a bind. If they run against Trump, they will likely lose. But if they don’t run against Trump, they will certainly lose—to Trump, and then everyone in America loses. GOP primary candidates want to pick up Trump’s voters without overtly selling them Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories, which is why the “electability” dodge is nothing but pandering and cowardice. Not that any of these hopefuls have tried to lay a punch on Trump: Haley is AWOL—is she even still running?—and DeSantis is busy clomping around with flaming wastebaskets on his feet as he tries to stomp out fires he’s already set.

Tim Scott is an especially vexing case, because he has a life story that should have made him the natural anti-Trump candidate in every way. A religious man who triumphed over poverty, got an education, and became a successful businessman, his life and character are a photo-negative image of Trump’s. And yet, Scott can’t help himself: He’s “thankful” for Trump’s years in office.

None of these Republicans are going to overcome the Thanos from Queens, who, with a snap of his fingers, will soon make half of the GOP field disappear.

These Republicans are likely waiting for a miracle, an act of God that takes Trump out of contention. And by “act of God,” of course, they mean “an act of Fani Willis or Jack Smith.” This is a vain hope: Without a compelling argument from within the Republican Party that Fani Willis and Jack Smith or for that matter, Alvin Bragg, are right to indict Trump—as Bragg has done and Willis and Smith could do soon—and that the former president is a menace to the country, Trump will simply brush away his legal troubles and hope he can sprint to the White House before he’s arrested.

No one is going to displace Trump by running gently. A candidate who takes Trump on, with moral force and directness, might well lose the nomination, but he or she could at least inject some sanity into the Republican-primary process and set the stage for the eventual recovery—a healing that will take years—of the GOP or some reformed successor as a center-right party. DeSantis would rather be elected as Trump’s Mini-Me. (It might work.) Hutchinson has tried to speak up, but too quietly. Haley, like so many other former Trump officials, is too compromised by service to Trump to be credible as his nemesis. Tim Scott is perfectly positioned to make the case, but he won’t.

A Republican who thinks Trump can be beaten in a primary by gargling warm words such as electability is a Republican in denial. Trump is already creating a reality-distortion field around the primary, as he will again in the general election. Is it possible that the GOP base would respond to some fire and brimstone about Trump, instead of from him? We cannot know, because it hasn’t been tried—yet.

Related:

Why outspoken women scare Trump America’s lowest standard

Today’s News

The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has vowed to transfer the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut to the Russian army by June 1. Ukraine insists that the city has not been entirely captured. Arizona, California, and Nevada agreed on a plan to reduce water usage from the drought-stricken Colorado River.   Speaker Kevin McCarthy said U.S.-debt-ceiling talks were on the “right path” ahead of a meeting with President Joe Biden this evening.  

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn down “Pumptinis” at a live screening of the scariest show on TV.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Apple TV+

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon Is a Triumph

By David Sims

David Grann’s nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI is the sprawling story of a criminal investigation undoing a systemic evil. It lays out in riveting detail the mystery of the Osage murders of the 1920s, when dozens of Native Americans were killed in a grand conspiracy to exploit their oil-rich land. Grann digs into the societal phenomenon surrounding the Osage, many of whom became ultra-wealthy after generations of displacement and persecution. But the book’s through line is the federal investigator Tom White, who helped solve the murders on the orders of a young J. Edgar Hoover.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will be released in theaters this October, takes a very different narrative approach.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The Roys stumble into the real world. A world without Martin Amis My friend, Tim Keller

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Read. The Princess Casamassima, a novel written more than 100 years ago (and originally serialized by The Atlantic!), is a political novel that could’ve been written today.

Listen. The first podcast episode of our new podcast series How to Talk to People, which explores the barriers to good small talk.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’m concerned about events at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, where the Russians have apparently dug in for a fight. I’m especially concerned that the Kremlin, facing a Ukrainian counteroffensive, might be planning a nuclear disaster in retaliation for losing more ground. That hasn’t happened yet, and I promise I’ll come back to this if events change.

In the meantime, however, the danger at the Ukrainian nuclear installation has jogged loose a memory of a lost bit of music from the 1980s. After the 1986 disaster at Chernobyl—also in Ukraine—the New Zealand musician Shona Laing released a song in 1987 titled “Soviet Snow.” (You can see the video here.) Given my, ah, heterodox musical tastes, you might be surprised that I would like something with such obvious environmental advocacy. (Don’t tell the other young Ronald Reagan voters, but I also bought Bruce Cockburn’s Stealing Fire album in 1984, and I still like it.) There is an urgency and panic in the song, a strong New Wave feel over Laing’s plea:

Are we wide awake? Is the world aware?

Radiation over Red Square

Creeping on to cross Roman roads

I remember feeling a great unease hearing that song the first time. Thirty-six years later, I am feeling that same unease once more.

— Tom

Katherine Hu 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.

Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is the author and Atlantic staff writer Adam Harris. Adam covers education and politics; most recently, he wrote about the impending school-funding crisis faced by public-school students and educators across the United States. (He’s also a not-so-secret soccer buff whose byline you may have spotted in our coverage of the 2022 World Cup.) These days, Adam unwinds by watching—and cracking up at—the reliably hilarious A Black Lady Sketch Show, is revisiting the “propulsive and engaging” writing of the author Charles Johnson, and can’t resist the Creed movie franchise (nor, relatedly, the thrall of a training montage).

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Did scientists accidentally invent an anti-addiction drug? The only career advice you’ll ever need ‘Stealth wealth’ is a fake trend. The Culture Survey: Adam Harris

A musical artist who means a lot to me: The Black country-music pioneer Charley Pride’s music has been with me for as long as I can remember. To my mind, he’s the most interesting musical artist who does not have a biopic (yet). He first rose to prominence as a standout baseball pitcher; he played for the Memphis Red Sox and the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues and made it as far as a tryout for the California Angels. When his baseball career ended, he reinvented himself—or, to put it better, drew once more from his well of talents—and became one of the most popular country singers in the world.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I’ve watched the movies in the Creed franchise—including the most recent—more times than any one person should. What can I say? There is nothing that quite compares to a training montage. Similarly, I often find myself putting on 5 to 7, the 2014 romance film starring Bérénice Marlohe and the late Anton Yelchin.

[Related: Creed III and the power of a worthy opponent;

Creed lands every punch. (2015)]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Hop in the car, roll the windows down, and put on “Texas Sun,” by Leon Bridges and Khruangbin. It’s almost guaranteed to improve your mood. And as several of my colleagues know, I’m embarrassingly fond of the band Yellowcard and will turn up “Southern Air,” from their 2012 album of the same name, at will.

This southern air is all I need
Breathe it in and I can see
Camera sets behind my eyes
All the colors of my life

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The one show that I can rely on for a laugh week in and week out is A Black Lady Sketch Show. There’s not much more to say about it. It’s the perfect mix of random and hilarious.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: About a month ago, I started thumbing through the first couple of pages of Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, which tells the story of the illegal American slave trade and won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1990. The next thing I knew, it was several hours later, and I was nearly finished. I’d forgotten how propulsive and engaging Johnson is as a writer.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: About six years ago, NASA’s Cassini, which orbited Saturn for 13 years, ran out of fuel and crash-landed onto the planet. It was a rather emotional event for followers of the project, and afterward, my colleague Marina Koren wrote about the ways in which we mourn space machines. Her writing is stirring, and the article has stuck with me since I first read it:

The spacecraft has no human or animal qualities, and it is not designed to give lifelike cues, like a tilt to signal curiosity or a shudder to suggest fear. But it can communicate in its own language, transmitting data back to Earth. It has ventured into dangerous territory, all alone, to seek answers about the unknown. And it appears, as NASA suggests in its closing narrative, that Cassini has accepted its mortality. Soon its work will be over, and it will no longer exist. That, perhaps, is the most human thing of all.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I’m actually going to pick two here: The first is “Yet I Do Marvel,” by Countee Cullen—particularly his examination of faith and understanding and wonder. These lines—“Yet I do marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!”—have been burned into my brain since my undergrad years.

The second is “where you are planted,” by Evie Shockley. It is a poignant ghazal that feels like home, and whose final couplet feels like it came from my own heart:

i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i :

it’s part of what makes me evie :  i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.

[Related:

The magazine that helped 1920s kids navigate racism (2021);

“On These I Stand” (1947) ]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Saahil Desai, Yasmin Tayag, Damon Beres, Julie Beck, Faith Hill, Derek Thompson, and Tom Nichols.

The Week Ahead The Late Americans, the author Brandon Taylor’s new novel about the coming-of-age—and artistic ambition—of a group of young adults in Iowa City (on sale Tuesday) What Am I Eating? With Zooey Deschanel, in which the actor debunks popular myths about the food we eat (begins streaming Tuesday on Max) The Little Mermaid, the long-awaited live-action remake of the Disney animated classic (in theaters Friday) Essay Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: YouTube.

TV Isn’t About to Get Worse. It Already Is

By Caroline Framke

The moment the Hollywood writer’s strike became a possibility, some TV fans and reporters worried that shows were about to take a turn for the worse. Some predicted an era reminiscent of the 100-day strike in 2007–08: a parade of reruns, reliance on reality shows, and hastily lowered standards on-screen. But it’s way too late to be anticipating TV’s decline now. As streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and Peacock have gone from representing the entertainment industry’s Wild West to its inevitable future, television at large has embraced quantity over quality—a fact that striking Writers Guild of America members know better than anyone. The painful truth is that TV isn’t about to get worse. It’s already worse—and the quality might slip even further.

How many times have you watched a new show only to realize that an entire season has passed but barely anything has happened? How many times have you checked an episode’s duration and wondered why it’s doubled since the show started? How many times have you forgotten the details of a show hardly a week after you binged it? I have spent a decade watching as much television as possible for a living—including as chief TV critic at Variety from 2018 to 2022—and I’m here to say: It’s not just you. There is so much TV now, and the impact on storytelling has become unavoidable. The early years of streaming, which introduced shows such as Orange Is the New Black, The Handmaid’s Tale, and BoJack Horseman, felt like an exciting tasting menu. Today, we have an all-you-can-eat buffet that won’t let us stop eating long enough to breathe.

Read the full article.

Culture Break Suga of BTS’s world tour is pop subversion at its finest. The provocative optimism of Master Gardener My novel is a love letter my mother can’t read. When a hapless villain somehow takes down a presidency Fast & Furious and pretty stale The billionaires who are threatening democracy The defining emotion of modern life Writing in the ruins Jury Duty is terrific TV. It shouldn’t get another season. More from The Atlantic The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa Why outspoken women scare Trump Something weird is going on with melatonin. Photo Album Fadel Senna / AFP / Getty

Browse snapshots of a break-dancing championship in Morocco, rally racing in Portugal, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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.

Quiet luxury, stealth wealth, Succession core. In recent months, these terms have been applied to a fashion phenomenon that’s captured the attention of TikTok and mainstream-media outlets alike. The trend ostensibly describes the style proclivities of America’s 1 percent—but it’s really more of a message about the anxieties of everyone else.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

ChatGPT is already obsolete. Did scientists accidentally invent an anti-addiction drug? It’s not enough for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.

Ludicrously Capacious

“Stealth wealth”—both the concept and the conversation around it—isn’t new. But one week in late March, two capstone events kicked the chatter into overdrive: the start of Gwyneth Paltrow’s trial over a 2016 skiing incident, and the premiere of the fourth and final season of Succession. In a near instant, savvy sartorialists spotted parallels between the actor and Goop founder’s “courtcore” and the subdued opulence of the billionaire Roy family at the center of HBO’s hit series.

“Much has been made of Kendall Roy’s baseball cap,” my colleague Amanda Mull mused in her recent Atlantic article dissecting the so-called trend. Indeed, the $625 Loro Piana cap donned by the troubled second son of the fictional dynastic clan has become an oft-cited exemplar of the discreetly-status-signaling fashion of the wealthiest Americans. As Amanda sums it up, “The textiles and cuts are impeccable, the colors are neutral, and the finishes are subtle and logo-free.”

In other words: If you know, you know. And being in-the-know, while also telegraphing that knowledge, is how elites uphold (and protect) their social codes. Proponents of the stealth-wealth concept insist that toting around a battered, five-figure handbag or swathing oneself in staid cashmere affirms membership to the rarefied class aptly described, by Amanda, as “the genuinely, generationally wealthy.” Quiet luxury—or so the theory goes—says I belong here. And, by extension: You don’t.

The anxiety surrounding the unspoken rules of elite-class membership makes for great entertainment, whether it’s the Gilded Age grandeur depicted in Edith Wharton novels or the “ludicrously capacious bag” that all but guest-starred in a recent Succession episode. But stealth-wealth style—as either a unified aesthetic or a universally understood upper-class membership card—is a myth, Amanda writes. Instead, she notes, the people most preoccupied with the so-called trend’s associated signifiers appear to be those furthest from its reach: the teens and 20-somethings who disproportionately make and consume content on TikTok, and who “[dissect] these looks and [devour] the lessons they seemingly teach.”

She writes:

In one popular type of video, a young woman walks viewers through the tricks to getting the stealth-wealth look—high-quality basics, neutral colors, no logos—or demonstrates how to turn a regular outfit into a signifier of stealth wealth. TikTok’s dominant user base is at exactly the point in life where learning how status functions in the broader adult world becomes very important. They’re thinking about heading off to college or into the professional world, and presenting themselves to new groups of people in these scenarios is a very high-stakes game of dress-up. The Roys are not stylish or well dressed, but they are a pretty good guide for what to look for in a Zara knockoff if you want to blend in at an internship.

As Amanda points out, it makes sense that the covert messaging of quiet-luxury style would resonate with the fledgling adults of TikTok, who are actively figuring out how to self-present for the professional world. But insecurities around status, class, and access aren’t the sole purview of the young. They may, in fact, be symptoms of a more widespread sense of precarity—and an ever-greater distance between most Americans and the hallmarks of ultra wealth.

The timing of today’s stealth-wealth fixation is hardly coincidental. During the pandemic, the income gap between the highest and lowest U.S. earners widened for the first time in a decade. The wealthiest Americans are richer now than ever before. Yet, as the fashion critic Rachel Tashjian recently wrote in The Washington Post, somehow, the uber-monied class seems to have become less visible as its economic power has grown. “Other than the dysfunctional family we see on television every Sunday night, the one percent is almost out of view, especially for those who have spent the past few years learning about clothing (and status) through social media,” Tashjian observed.

As social-media fashion detectives continue their efforts to crack the code of superrich style, they underscore the chasm between one-percenters and everyone else. Because, as Amanda points out, the stealth-wealth rulebook was never really a thing to begin with: The mega-wealthy dress in all sorts of ways, occupying the spectrum from “understated” to “Paris Hilton circa 2007.” It’s not their status anxiety being reflected in the trend, but the fretful ruminations of a have-not majority, straining to hold their grip on much-lower rungs of the ladder.

Related:

There’s no secret to how wealthy people dress. Something odd is happening with handbags.

Today’s News

Debt-ceiling talks between the White House and House Republicans resumed a few hours after they were put on pause. President Joe Biden approved a plan to train Ukrainian pilots on U.S. F-16s, potentially paving the way for sending advanced fighter jets to Ukraine.

Republican Senator Tim Scott quietly filed paperwork to run in the 2024 presidential election.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Turning history into a juicy story is a risky endeavor, Nicole Acheampong writes. Can we really know the figures of the past?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Trent Parke/ Magnum

Growing My Faith in the Face of Death

By Timothy Keller

Note: The pastor Timothy Keller, author of the below essay from 2021, died today at age 72.

I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book, On Death, relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared.

On the way home from a conference of Asian Christians in Kuala Lumpur in February 2020, I developed an intestinal infection. A scan at the hospital showed what looked like enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen: No cause for concern, but come back in three months just to check. My book was published. And then, while all of us in New York City were trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, I learned that I already had an agent of death growing inside me.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire. The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa Suga of BTS’s world tour is pop subversion at its finest. How the right and the left switched sides on Big Business

Culture Break

Illustration by Ángel Hernández

Read. Jenny Xie’s debut novel, Holding Pattern, focuses on a mother-daughter relationship with resonances of the author’s own. It’s a love letter that her mother won’t be able to read.

Watch. The film Master Gardener (in theaters) takes on neo-Nazism and white supremacy—and is Paul Schrader’s most hopeful work yet.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Years ago, I ran a feminist book club out of the wonderful Type bookstore in Toronto, the city where I spent my peak-TikTok-demographic years and started my journalism career. If memory serves, our first selection was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—an interesting novel to encounter at that formative phase of my life, amid the city’s rapid transformation from a cosmopolitan patchwork of immigrant neighborhoods into a playground for the rich. Of course, not everyone is able to replicate my experience of discovering Wharton as a youngish-adult woman facing the imminent threat of being unable to pay rent. But even though those conditions certainly heightened the novel’s effect, it’s worth a read at any age (or economic bracket). If you haven’t read it, you must.

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

An ex-Daily Mirror news editor told a court he "had no reason to believe" freelancers broke the law.

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.

Republican lawmakers in several states have begun the process of rolling back tenure at their public institutions of higher education on the grounds that no one should have a lifetime job. And yet, many national conservatives seem determined to defend Justice Clarence Thomas on those very grounds.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The only career advice you’ll ever need Why so many conservatives feel like losers The most jarring—and revealing—moment from Trump’s CNN town hall Something weird is going on with Melatonin. Dancing Bears

Conservatives, in general, hate the idea of academic tenure. I say this not only as an impression after 35 years in academia (most of them while I was a Republican), but also because conservative officials are taking concrete action against tenure now in states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. (Republicans have engaged in similar attempts over the past several years in North Dakota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and several other states.)

Decades ago, when conservatives were more consistent in their views, their position on tenure proceeded from their worship of markets. They argued that no other business would protect employees from the consequences of poor performance or even misconduct with an unbreakable contract. A coherent position, perhaps, but one rife with incorrect assumptions, as I’ll explain below.

Full disclosure: I have been denied tenure twice, and granted tenure twice. I’ve chaired a tenure committee, and been on both sides of the tenure process. Often, it’s not a pretty business, but it is essential to higher education.

With some variations between small colleges and big professional schools, the tenure process mostly looks like this: A new teacher with a Ph.D. holds the rank of assistant professor for three years, at which time they face a contract renewal for another three years. During that next contract, they will “come up for tenure,” an up-or-out decision, much like the cut the U.S. military makes after certain ranks, or when a professional firm makes decisions about partnerships.

The applicant submits a package of accumulated work, and his or her department will also ask senior faculty at other institutions to review the entire file and submit letters with their recommendations. (I have been asked to write such letters myself.) The entire package then gets a recommendation from the department and is sent up to a higher body, drawn from other departments and usually convened by an academic dean. A final recommendation is then sent to the school president. At any point in this process, the candidate’s application can fail.

There are multiple layers of review here, and sure, there are many opportunities for mischief. (A classic move, for example, is for committee members to solicit letters from reviewers they know will either support or torpedo a candidate’s application.) Candidates who succeed become an associate professor; the title of full “professor” comes years later and requires another complete review in most places. After tenure, faculty are insulated from firing for just about anything except gross misconduct or financial exigencies—say, if a department is eliminated or cut back.

But “misconduct” covers a lot of ground, and tenured faculty are far from unfireable. Falsifying research, engaging in sex with with students (at least, at those schools where such relationships are forbidden), nonperformance of duties (like not showing up for class), and criminal behavior can all count. My first tenure contract was with a Catholic school that had a “moral turpitude” clause, which as you could imagine can mean many things.

Tenured faculty, however, cannot be fired for having unorthodox or unpopular views, for being liberals or conservatives, for failing your kid no matter how smart you think Poopsie really is, or for being jerks in general. This is as it should be: Some opinions will always be controversial; some teaching styles rub people the wrong way; some classes are harder than others. There are, to be sure, cases where professors are so wildly offensive that they functionally destroy the classroom environment—but such cases are rare and should be adjudicated by the institution, not by the state.

The alternative to tenure is to keep faculty on short-term contracts and to abandon the important democratic principle of academic freedom. If faculty can be fired—or their contracts quietly “non-renewed”—for any reason, they will self-censor. If they think the students are unhappy, they will pander. If you want faculty who are confident, will say what they think, and will deal honestly with students, tenure is essential. If you want faculty who will become timid clock-punchers, then contracts are the way to go. The contract system eventually grinds down even the most well-intentioned academics, and, as I once warned one of my own institutions, it turns many of them into dancing bears for student and administration applause.

Dancing bears are exactly what today’s Republicans want. Some of the market-oriented GOP attacks on hidebound faculty many years ago had merit; during my career I saw colleges wrestle with that very problem. The current GOP assault on tenure, however, is about culture, not economics or even education. The GOP base doesn’t like that universities are full of liberals, and so Republican elected officials attack higher education for the rush of approval they’ll get, much of it from people who no longer have kids anywhere near college age. As FiveThirtyEight’s Monica Potts noted, there’s a reason that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed his tenure-review bill in a ceremony at The Villages, Florida’s noted retirement community.

Meanwhile, New York’s Representative Elise Stefanik proudly sponsored a legislative attack on academic freedom, charging that leftism “has pervaded” the State University of New York system and asserting that she was going to do something about it. Elise Stefanik, of course, went to Harvard. But like DeSantis (a graduate of Harvard and Yale), she was going to make sure that the commoners weren’t exposed to any dangerous ideas at the schools reserved for the proles, the rabble whose names are not Elise Stefanik or Ron DeSantis.

Nowhere, however, is the hatred of a guaranteed lifetime job more hypocritical than in the continued right-wing defenses of Justice Clarence Thomas.

The litany of Thomas’s ethical issues is far beyond anything that required poor Abe Fortas to step down from the Supreme Court in 1969. Thomas’s behavior cannot adequately be captured by so gentle a phrase as the appearance of impropriety, the standard set for other U.S. judges. But despite Thomas being utterly insulated from consequences, conservatives deny even that Thomas should face criticism. As Justice Samuel Alito whined recently: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

(Alito is plenty angry about criticism of the members of his own club, but he seems less concerned about attacks on other government employees—especially far less powerful people such as teachers, election officials, and civil servants. But I digress.)

What’s really going on, of course, is that Republicans have given up on persuading their fellow citizens to support them at the ballot box, and so they’ve decided to get what they want by using a tactic for which they once excoriated the left: appealing to judges who have lifetime appointments. Professors with secure jobs are a threat to the republic, apparently, but judges who can throw the country into turmoil with one poorly reasoned opinion must be defended at all costs.

I support lifetime tenure for federal judges and Supreme Court justices, not least because I do not want them to try to time their judgments against impending deadlines for retirement. But Republicans across the country who are railing against ostensibly unfireable elites on campuses might consider being a bit more consistent about one sitting in regal isolation on First Street in Washington, D.C.

Today’s News The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google and Twitter in a victory for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social-media platforms from liability over content posted by users. An 8-year-old girl died in a detention facility in Texas, as the death toll at the southern border continues to rise. Disney canceled its construction plans for a roughly $1 billion office complex in Orlando. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf weighs in on the problem with state bans on gender care.

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Evening Read Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Ellen Graham / Getty; Harrington Collection / Getty.

How to Have a Realistic Conversation About Beauty With Your Kids

By Elise Hu

Talking to my three elementary-school-age daughters about beauty can be hard. No matter how much I insist that their looks don’t matter, that their character is what truly counts in life, they don’t believe me. About a year ago, I was tiptoeing down the hallway after tucking my 9- and 6-year-olds into their bunk bed when I overheard the younger one. “Momma says it doesn’t matter if you’re beautiful; it matters if you’re clever,” she said to her sister. The eldest replied, “She only says that because she’s already pretty.”

As I recount in my book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital, that moment stopped me cold. But my children were right to be skeptical of my advice. Study after study confirms that prettiness can be a privilege.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I wrote a few days ago about the infighting among Russian elites, who are all keen to blame one another for Russia’s miserable military performance. The Ukrainians are soon to launch a counteroffensive, and the reporter Anna Nemtsova wrote today that she’s never seen the Kremlin so rattled. And rightly so: Russian casualties are mind-boggling. By most estimates, in the battle for Bakhmut, 20,000 Russian men have been killed and 80,000 more wounded. One hundred thousand casualties in six months and mostly in the fight for one city is why both the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group, the privately run army of mercenaries, are now populating their ranks with men dredged out of Russia’s prisons.

Life inside Russia’s prisons is a mystery to most Westerners, but it is actually a very structured hierarchy, based on rules and castes. I want to point readers toward this excellent explainer on Russian prison culture, and why that culture all but guarantees that the prisoners would be an almost ungovernable military force. The decision to use convicted criminals might seem, to Westerners, a sign of brutal resolve, but it was an extreme, even strategically insane move that has hurt Russian operations more than it helped—and produced few advances but plenty of Russian corpses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.