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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Cynthia Ozick about her writing process.

Do I have rivals? Competitors? Certainly: the sports blatherers with their outer-borough accents, the medicine men and their elixirs, the partisan boosters who stir up primitive rage, the DJs peddling their caterwaulings. From one end of the dial to the other, clamor and cacophony. My mode is otherwise: seduction, consolation, the whisper, the voice that caresses and heals. The voice of a lover. And sometimes of a skeptic.

The middle of the night is mine. From 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. I am sovereign here in my windowless cubicle. My desk with its scattered papers and corn-muffin crumbs, my electric coffee pot, my chair, my mic, the ancillary mic that connects me to the tech interior (and to Peter, the screener who weeds out the nuts and the cranks), the extra chair that is never used, the door that leads to my personal W.C., the time signal on the clock on the wall.

And out there in the invisible dark, the sleepless, the solitary old with their decrepit hearing aids, the unknown tormented who lie awake in their hundreds of thousands—those unpredictable callers to call-in shows, the braggarts, the know-it-alls, the timid stutterers, the unassuaged sufferers of unforgiven family quarrels, the enraged, the bitter, the lonely, the hopeless, the jilted, the sacked. The masses of racked human roil.

I sleep during that daylight I rarely see, except as it seeps in the advancing hours under the threshold of the door to my cubicle, which during broadcasts is always shut. The tech interior incessantly keeps track of audience ratings, but they mean nothing to me; I am, after all, on the leaner side of 74, and have had my steady following for years. I cut off the feed when the commercials take over and during those so-called musical intervals (drums tearing into the brain). Almost always I can predict what is to come—someone’s nocturnal cry in a parched tract of wilderness peopled only by the unlucky. And by me, their intimate, their confidante. Their trustworthy tryst. And sometimes their disloyal doubter.

Nicky at Night is how I am featured. And here, in this no-man’s-land of secrecy, is where I am confounding. My radio voice is, in fact, my primary toolbox, and can travel as it pleases into both high and low registers. Am I Nicholas or Nicole? Whichever suits the need. Whatever your hunger, I am the sustenance. Name your belief, and I am your god. But I can be impatient too. I can reprimand, I can correct the self-pitying. Some say I am a charlatan, a deceiver, a shaman; but never mind, this only increases my popularity; in the land of video, I would count as a showpiece. And show is the key. Nothing on radio can be shown. All the world is drawn to screens, to faces, to seeing. Radio is obsolete. It ought not to exist. An illusion. If you call me, you hallucinate. I am not meant to be seen.

Yet here was a figure sitting in my unused chair.

“How did you get in here?” I said.

“Saw your name on the door, took a chance it wasn’t locked—”

“I’m on in five minutes, so get out, go.”

“But I’ve been waiting for you, and you know me, you’ve known me forever. I’m not just any random nobody.”

I did not say Of course you are. You all are, every one of you. Aloud I said, “I’ll call security if you don’t get out right now.”

“You don’t understand. You saved my life.”

One of those, I thought. The ones in pursuit of a savior. The ones mostly winnowed out by Peter.

These invasions occasionally happen. The seekers (so I’ve privately named them) usually ask for money. Once I’ve mentioned security and hand them some cash, they disappear. This one did not.

“I just want to sit here awhile and watch how you do it, see if you mean what you say.”

“Please leave. I need my privacy when I’m at work.”

“I won’t be in the way, and I’ll even set up the coffee. Well look, you’ve got only one cup, but it’s all right, I should stay away from caffeine anyhow.”

The on-air light on the wall went on. Two minutes.

Into the ancillary mic I shouted, “Music!”

Horns, clarinets, and a raucous nasal chorus swelled, crowding the air, followed by security with their badges. Before she fled, the intruder—the seeker—threw out, “Impostor! Fake!”

This incident, brief and harmless though it was, left its mark. I felt scathed and unsettled: It is true that I am an impostor, and what performer isn’t? Still, the word stirred an unexpected longing. The impostor is a puppeteer whose marionette is the self, an unfulfilled living actor turned wooden. At heart, buried and undisclosed, didn’t I hope to be a seeker myself? To break out of the prison of pretense into the freedom of … what? Feeling. Pure feeling.

And once I did. The caller’s story—they all have stories—was preposterous. He claimed he was 19 and already a widower. He pronounced this in separate syllables: wi-do-wer, as if he had still to get used to it. His wife had died tragically and unexpectedly, from fast-acting leukemia. This expression alone, fast-acting leukemia, appeared to be lifted from an all-night cancer barker. He said he had fathered an infant, and that his former wife’s mother was caring for it, and that he was barred from ever seeing his own flesh and blood, not that he cared. This was all so absurdly melodramatic, and all of it in some newly ripened boyish timbre, that I half-believed he was a brazen brat up well past his bedtime on purpose to lampoon. He said he saw right through me, and was ready to offer some advice.

“You could use a partner,” he said. “You’re getting tedious, all on your own.”

Voices are what I know, and he was not 19.

I said, “How old are you really?”

“So why don’t you see for yourself? If you invite me, I’ll come.”

“Sorry, I don’t have visitors.”

“I’d come as a collaborator.”

Here was a smart aleck whom Peter ought to have sent packing. And when Peter fails me, I have my cutoff switch. I use it sparingly, though, so as not to seem brutish. I maintain my auditory smile.

But I used it now.

Less than a week later I discovered him—the purported widower—at ease in my extra chair. I had arrived early, but he might have been there for half the day. I knew him by his boy’s voice, yet now it carried a different syrup: He had cajoled security into trusting that the talk-show host had summoned him. He was surely much younger than 19. And because I had scolded him with my gruffest inflections, he had supposed the host to be Nicholas, but here was Nicole instead. I caught the spasm of surprise in his eyes. They were very black eyes; the pupil and the iris made a single oval of lightless dark. His head was all Mediterranean, Italian or Greek or Levantine: the curly black hair, winding wild over the ears, the earth-carved nose and mouth. The nose, the source of life’s breath … but that mouth!

What I saw—what came over me, in the way of instinct, of unwilled sensation—was that the boy was beautiful. His hands were beautiful. The throat with its Adam’s apple (the name itself a hint of Eden), the bare uninnocent nape. This was distracting; it was unnatural, as much as if he had been acutely disfigured. I was forced to stare. I was unable not to look and look.

I said, “Go home and go to bed. Don’t you have school in the morning?”

“I’ve listened to you every night for months. Every night when you’re on. I’ve got one of these transistor radios, fits into a pocket. I can keep you like a secret.”

“And when I’m not on?”

“Mostly I spend the night in the library. The big one with the lions. I go in just before closing, and afterward they can never find me. The best place is periodicals. That’s how I get to keep up.”

A drawer in my table was partly open. He had sniffed out the box of corn muffins. A random circle of yellow crumbs was spread around his feet. But he had no shoes. Instead, here was a row of flawless little toes in plastic sandals, and then the pathos of a boy’s lone big toe.

Was he a runaway, a truant? A busy thief? A chronic master of stealth? Was there a parental search under way? Or was he a mote among the abandoned homeless, with no one to miss him? Was it his intuition to conceal himself in fantasy (the forbidden infant, warm nights among the stacks)? Had he come to me as a protector, to hide out?

“You should put me on the air,” he said.

The air: a raft that rode on the wind.

But something was breaking out, a disruption, an unruly directive—a decree—I had never before heeded, or taken to heart. His beauty was terrifying. It looted, it deprived me of my own secrets. I looked and I looked, I saw and I saw, but fitfully. Furtively. I didn’t dare hold my gaze; he was a child, not an exhibit. He could not have been more than 14. A septuagenarian staring at a vagabond boy. A stupidity and a perplexity.

And I all at once took in that I would, in fact, do it—put the boy on the air. There was no logic to it, no reason, a kidnapping, an exploitation of a minor, and thousands would know. The station manager would know. The station owner would know. I might be sacked for underhandedness. For an unannounced turning, for running wild.

“Come here,” I told the boy. “Sit next to me. Bring over that other chair. We’ll share the mic.”

His closeness dizzied me. It was as if I had inhaled a drug. Or was the boy redolent of some faint narcotic that, so suffocatingly near was he, was leaching through my skin?

And so it began. The signature opening, that choir of tumult I so much despised; but I had neglected to ask him his name. There was no need to put questions, or to explain. His voice alone carried the hours. The widower was nowhere. The boy was an instrument of fabrication. He led from disbelief to disbelief. New implausibles swarmed. The somnolent woke; the boy’s voice roused them to the long-ago children they once were, or fathered, or mothered, or lost, or mourned, or were estranged from. He animated them, they were drawn to him like the millings of shadowy moths, they seemed to see what he made them see, he was visible in his voice. The boy’s voice, the look of the boy, an unfolding, an unnerving, an undoing that made me afraid of the very thing it was: a visitation of feeling, pure feeling.

Daylight crept under the doorsill.

“Thank you,” the boy said then. “I hope you think I did well.”

He swiped the last of the corn muffins and left. There were no repercussions. Whether the ratings thickened or shrank I was never told. The audience returned to its usual configuration: grief and grievance, lamentation and despair. Those end-of-life larynxes scratching out their woes were sickening me; at 75, I retired. My slot was instantly replaced by a chiropractor hawking his surefire panacea, and I was just as instantly forgotten, never mind that he and I were equal saviors. What is more evanescent than a voice on the radio?

In my newly freed leisure I went often to the movies, though I disliked being made to see what in novels I could otherwise see for myself, how a room was replicated, the carpet, the vase on the windowsill, the large sofa, the small sofa, five figurines on a shelf. All of them falsifying shadows, specters declaiming reality. I had the notion that beauty, supernal beauty, would not go to waste, and could be captured and somehow disseminated, as it had been one night on the radio. Maturity must somehow abrade or deform it; for this I was prepared. But the boy could not have become what he already was: an actor. An impostor.

Still, it is indisputable that a boy grows into a man. I explored the reading tables in the periodicals room of the library. The boy had hidden in the midnight stacks; the man was missing from the tables.

I listened to the radio at night. I still do—what elderly insomniac does not? I tune in to the pundits, the show-offs, the hucksters, the healers, the howlers, the ringmasters, the weather forecasters, the traffic reporters, the inescapable musical intervals that screech. I search through the dial, from highest to lowest, until tedium and fatigue overcome naked hope. And all who are sleepless must ask—what is more fleeting than feeling, pure feeling?

There are no Earth-shattering battles in Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings—no vehicular duels to the death, or time-traveling invaders, or portals in the sky, or whatever other epic calamities this summer’s blockbusters will be offering up to cinemagoers. But the stakes still feel apocalyptic. The plot is set in motion when Beth (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a teacher and writer who is working on a new novel, overhears her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), offhandedly confess a dark secret to someone: He doesn’t think her latest manuscript is very good. Upon hearing this, Beth spirals into pure existential anguish, and it doesn’t feel unearned.

For decades, Holofcener has made movies about upper-middle-class intellectuals hurting one another’s feelings; her body of work includes some of the most enduring indie satires of a generation. Yet she’s hugely underrated, perhaps because her films tend to be about slight subjects, or perhaps because comedy-dramas have become embarrassingly scarce in Hollywood these days. But although Holofcener’s subject matter is trivial, her films don’t feel disposable. You Hurt My Feelings is droll, but it’s also an (appropriately titled) emotional roller coaster. Its adroit quality mirrors all of Holofcener’s best work, including the devastating Lovely & Amazing, the spiky Please Give, and the beautifully melancholic Enough Said, in which Louis-Dreyfus plays an analogue for the writer-director.  

You Hurt My Feelings also has a self-reflective tinge. Holofcener has said the movie is not autobiographical but about a chilling what-if that she’s long harbored: What if the people she most trusted did not, in fact, enjoy her work? What if the back pats and supportive comments she got from her closest friends and family were phony? Don makes just one glib critique, nothing more, but it is enough to make her doubt her entire career—a nightmare that’s both deeply relatable and undeniably, hilariously outsize.

[Read: It’s your friends who break your heart]

The reality is that Beth doesn’t really have much to complain about. She enjoys a nice New York City life with a well-appointed apartment, a reliable sister named Sarah (Michaela Watkins), a steady teaching job, and a husband and a son who both seem devoted to her. But Holofcener cleverly adds tiny cracks of insecurity to every character arc. Beth and Don’s partnership is in a bit of a rut; they give each other the same kinds of boring anniversary gifts year after year. Beth’s son, Eliott (Owen Teague), is a sensitive soul lost in a dead-end job at a marijuana vendor. And Sarah is worried about her husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), and his long-term prospects as a struggling actor.

Holofcener meticulously colors in these details, along with the looming presence of Beth’s mother, Georgia (a hysterically imperious Jeannie Berlin), and Don’s misgivings as a therapist whose patients seem dissatisfied with his work. When Beth accidentally hears Don’s criticism, the admission is an atom bomb that exposes everyone else’s buried anxieties. Meanwhile, Beth now fears that she’ll never trust her husband again, even though his transgression was, in theory, quite minor.

Louis-Dreyfus is a master at selling a visceral sense of hurt against a comedy-of-errors backdrop. I was reminded of her similarly blistering work in the largely forgotten Downhill, another portrait of a fracturing marriage. That film didn’t really work, but she had an outstanding star turn as someone wrestling with a violation. In You Hurt My Feelings, the violation is far shallower, but Holofcener traces its fallout with enough nuance to transcend accusations of pettiness. Yes, the only things getting hurt in this movie are feelings—but for some of us, no scenario is more terrifying than that.

Kate Akyuz is a Girl Scout troop leader who drives a pale-blue Toyota Sienna minivan around her island community—a place full of Teslas and BMWs, surrounded by a large freshwater lake that marks Seattle’s eastern edge. She works for the county government on flood safety and salmon-habitat restoration. But two years ago, she made her first foray into local politics, declaring her candidacy for Mercer Island City Council Position No. 6. Soon after, Akyuz became the unlikely target of what appears to have been a misinformation campaign meant to influence the election.

At the time, residents of major cities all along the West Coast, including Seattle, were expressing concern and anger over an ongoing homelessness crisis that local leaders are still struggling to address. Mercer Island is one of the most expensive places to live in America—the estate of Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, sold a waterfront mansion and other properties for $67 million last year—and its public spaces are generally pristine. The population is nearly 70 percent white, the median household income is $170,000, and fears of Seattle-style problems run deep. In February 2021, the island’s city council voted to ban camping on sidewalks and prohibit sleeping overnight in vehicles.

Akyuz, a Democrat, had opposed this vote; she wanted any action against camping to be coupled with better addiction treatment and mental-health services on Mercer Island. After she launched her novice candidacy, a well-known council incumbent, Lisa Anderl, decided to switch seats to run against her, presenting the island with a sharp contrast on the fall ballot. Anderl was pro–camping ban. In a three-way primary-election contest meant to winnow the field down to two general-election candidates, Akyuz ended up ahead of Anderl by 471 votes, with the third candidate trailing far behind both of them.

“That’s when the misinformation exploded,” Akyuz told me.

There is no television station devoted to Mercer Island issues, and the shrunken Mercer Island Reporter, the longtime local newspaper, is down to 1,600 paying subscribers for its print edition. Even so, the 25,000 people on this six-square-mile crescent of land remain hungry for information about their community. As elsewhere, the local media void is being filled by residents sharing information online, particularly over the platform Nextdoor, which aims to be at the center of all things hyperlocal.

Launched in 2011, Nextdoor says it has a unique value proposition: delivering “trusted information” with a “local perspective.” It promises conversations among “real neighbors,” a very different service than that offered by platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and Facebook. Nextdoor says it’s now used by one in three U.S. households. More than half of Mercer Island’s residents—about 15,000—use the platform. It’s where many of the island’s civic debates unfurl. During the heated 2021 city-council race between Anderl and Akyuz, residents saw Nextdoor playing an additional role: as a font of misinformation.

Anderl was accused of wanting to defund the fire department. (She had voted to study outsourcing some functions.) But Akyuz felt that she herself received far worse treatment. She was cast on Nextdoor as a troubadour for Seattle-style homeless encampments, with one Anderl donor posting that Akyuz wanted to allow encampments on school grounds. During the campaign’s final stretch, a Nextdoor post falsely stated that Akyuz had been endorsed by Seattle’s Socialist city-council member, Kshama Sawant. “Don’t let this happen on MI,” the post said. “Avoid a candidate endorsed by Sawant. Don’t vote Akyuz.”

Akyuz tried to defend herself and correct misinformation through her own Nextdoor posts and comments, only to be suspended from the platform days before the general election. (After the election, a Nextdoor representative told her the suspension had been “excessive” and rescinded it.) Akyuz believed there was a pattern: Nextdoor posts that could damage her campaign seemed to be tolerated, whereas posts that could hurt Anderl’s seemed to be quickly removed, even when they didn’t appear to violate the platform’s rules.

It was weird, and she didn’t know what to make of it. “You’re like, ‘Am I being paranoid, or is this coordinated?’” Akyuz said. “And you don’t know; you don’t know.”

Something else Akyuz didn’t know: In small communities all over the country, concerns about politically biased moderation on Nextdoor have been raised repeatedly, along with concerns about people using fake accounts on the platform.

[Read: How to build (and destroy) a social network]

These concerns have been posted on an internal Nextdoor forum for volunteer moderators. They were expressed in a 2021 column in Petaluma, California’s, local newspaper, the Argus-Courier, under the headline “Nextdoor Harms Local Democracy.” The company has also been accused of delivering election-related misinformation to its users. In 2020, for example, Michigan officials filed a lawsuit based on their belief that misinformation on Nextdoor sank a local ballot measure proposing a tax hike to fund police and fire services. (In that lawsuit, Nextdoor invoked its protections under Section 230, a controversial liability shield that Congress gave digital platforms 27 years ago. The case was ultimately dismissed.)

Taken together, these complaints show frustrated moderators, platform users, and local officials all struggling to find an effective venue for airing their worry that Nextdoor isn’t doing enough to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform.

One more thing Akyuz didn’t know: Two of the roughly 60 Nextdoor moderators on Mercer Island were quietly gathering evidence that an influence operation was indeed under way in the race for Mercer Island City Council Position No. 6.

“At this point, Nextdoor is actively tampering in local elections,” one of the moderators wrote in an email to Nextdoor just over a week before Election Day. “It’s awful and extraordinarily undemocratic.”

To this day, what really happened on Nextdoor during the Akyuz-Anderl race is something of a mystery, although emails from Nextdoor, along with other evidence, point toward a kind of digital astroturfing. Akyuz, who lost by a little over 1,000 votes, believes that Nextdoor’s volunteer moderators “interfered” with the election. Three local moderators who spoke with me also suspect this. Misinformation and biased moderation on Nextdoor “without a doubt” affected the outcome of the city-council election, says Washington State Representative Tana Senn, a Democrat who supported Akyuz.

Anderl, for her part, said she has no way of knowing whether there was biased moderation on Nextdoor aimed at helping her campaign, but she rejects the idea that it could have altered the outcome of the election. “Nextdoor does not move the needle on a thousand people,” she said.

Of course, the entity with the greatest insight into what truly occurred is Nextdoor. In response to a list of questions, Nextdoor said that it is “aware of the case mentioned” but that it does not comment on individual cases as a matter of policy.

None of this sat right with me. No, it wasn’t a presidential election—okay, it wasn’t even a mayoral election. But if Nextdoor communities across the country really are being taken over by bad actors, potentially with the power to swing elections without consequence, I wanted to know: How is it happening? One day last summer, seeking to learn more about how the interference in the Akyuz-Anderl race supposedly went down, I got in my car and drove from my home in Seattle to Mercer Island’s Aubrey Davis Park, where I was to meet one of the moderators who had noticed strange patterns in the race.

I sat down on some empty bleachers near a baseball field. The moderator sat down next to me, pulled out a laptop, and showed me a spreadsheet. (Three of the four Mercer Island moderators I spoke with requested anonymity because they hope to continue moderating for Nextdoor.)

The spreadsheet tracked a series of moderator accounts on Mercer Island that my source had found suspicious. At first, those accounts were targeting posts related to the city-council race, according to my source. My source alerted Nextdoor repeatedly and, after getting no response, eventually emailed Sarah Friar, the company’s CEO. Only then did a support manager reach out and ask for more information. The city-council election had been over for months, but my source had noticed that the same suspicious moderators were removing posts related to Black History Month. The company launched an investigation that revealed “a group of fraudsters,” according to a follow-up email from the support manager, who removed a handful of moderator accounts. But my source noticed that new suspicious moderators kept popping up for weeks, likely as replacements for the ones that were taken down. In total, about 20 Mercer Island moderator accounts were removed.

“We all know there were fake accounts,” a moderator named Daniel Thompson wrote in a long discussion thread last spring. “But what I find amazing is fake accounts could become” moderators.

Danny Glasser, another Mercer Island moderator, explained to me how the interference might have worked. Glasser worked at Microsoft for 26 years, focusing on the company’s social-networking products for more than 15 of them. He’s a neighborhood lead, the highest level of Nextdoor community moderator, and he’s “frustrated” by the seemingly inadequate vetting of moderators.

If a post is reported Nextdoor moderators can vote “remove,” “maybe,” or “keep.” As Glasser explained: “If a post fairly quickly gets three ‘remove’ votes from moderators without getting any ‘keep’ votes, that post tends to be removed almost immediately.” His suspicion, shared by other moderators I spoke with, is that three “remove” votes without a single “keep” vote trigger a takedown action from Nextdoor’s algorithm. The vulnerability in Nextdoor’s system, he continued, is that those three votes could be coming from, for example, one biased moderator who controls two other sock-puppet moderator accounts. Or they could come from sock-puppet moderator accounts controlled by anyone.

Mercer Island moderators told me that biased moderation votes from accounts they suspected were fake occurred over and over during the Akyuz-Anderl contest. “The ones that I know about were all pro-Anderl and anti-Akyuz,” including a number of anti-Akyuz votes that were cast in the middle of the night, one moderator told me: “What are the chances that these people are all going to be sitting by their computers in the 3 a.m. hour?”

Screenshots back up the claims. They show, for example, the “endorsed by Sawant” post, which Akyuz herself reported, calling it “inaccurate and hurtful.” The moderator accounts that considered Akyuz’s complaint included four accounts that disappeared after Nextdoor’s fraudster purge.

Another example documented by the moderators involved a Nextdoor post that endorsed Akyuz and criticized Anderl. It was reported for “public shaming” and removed. All five moderators that voted to take the post down (including two of the same accounts that had previously voted to keep the false “endorsed by Sawant” post) disappeared from Nextdoor after the fraudster purge.

Anderl, for her part, told me she has no illusions about the accuracy of Nextdoor information. “It’s too easy to get an account,” she said. She recalled that, years ago, when she first joined Nextdoor, she had to provide the company with her street address, send back a postcard mailed to her by Nextdoor, even have a neighbor vouch for her. Then, once she was in, she had to use her first and last name in any posts. “I don’t think that’s there anymore,” Anderl said, a concern that was echoed by other Mercer Island residents.

Indeed, when my editor, who lives in New York, tested this claim, he found that it was easy to sign up for Nextdoor using a fake address and a fake name—and to become a new member of Mercer Island Nextdoor while actually residing on the opposite coast. Nextdoor would not discuss how exactly it verifies users, saying only that its process is based “on trust.”

Every social platform struggles with moderation issues. Nextdoor, like Facebook and Twitter, uses algorithms to create the endless feeds of user-generated content viewed by its 42 million “weekly active users.” But the fact that its content is policed largely by 210,000 unpaid volunteers makes Nextdoor different. This volunteer-heavy approach is called community moderation.

When I looked through a private forum for Nextdoor moderators (which has since been shut down), I saw recurring questions and complaints. A moderator from Humble, Texas, griped about “bias” and “collusion” among local moderators who were allegedly working together to remove comments. Another from Portland, Oregon, said that neighborhood moderators were voting to remove posts “based on whether or not they agree with the post as opposed to if it breaks the rules.”

[Read: What petty Nextdoor posts reveal about America]

Nearly identical concerns have been lodged from Wakefield, Rhode Island (a moderator was voting “based on her own bias and partisan views”); Brookfield, Wisconsin (“Our area has 4 [moderators] who regularly seem to vote per personal or political bias”); and Concord, California (“There appear to be [moderators] that vote in sync on one side of the political spectrum. They take down posts that disagree with their political leanings, but leave up others that they support”).

Fake accounts are another recurring concern. From Laguna Niguel, California, under the heading “Biased Leads—Making Their Own Rules,” a moderator wrote, “ND really needs to verify identity and home address, making sure it matches and that there aren’t multiple in system.” From Knoxville, Tennessee: “We’ve seen an influx of fake accounts in our neighborhood recently.” One of the responses, from North Bend, Washington, noted that “reporting someone is a cumbersome process and often takes multiple reports before the fake profile is removed.”

In theory, a decentralized approach to content decisions could produce great results, because local moderators likely understand their community’s norms and nuances better than a bunch of hired hands. But there are drawbacks, as Shagun Jhaver, an assistant professor at Rutgers University who has studied community moderation, explained to me: “There’s a lot of power that these moderators can wield over their communities … Does this attract power-hungry individuals? Does it attract individuals who are actually interested and motivated to do community engagement? That is also an open question.”  

Using volunteer moderators does cost less, and a recent paper from researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities tried to place a dollar value on that savings by assessing Reddit’s volunteer moderators. It found that those unpaid moderators collectively put in 466 hours of work a day in 2020—uncompensated labor that, according to the researchers, was worth $3.4 million. A different paper, published in 2021, described dynamics like this as part of “the implicit feudalism of online communities,” and noted the fallout from an early version of the community-moderation strategy, AOL’s Community Leader Program: It ended up the subject of a class-action lawsuit, which was settled for $15 million, and an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Technically, Nextdoor requires nothing of its unpaid moderators: no minimum hours, no mandatory training, nothing that might suggest that the relationship is employer-employee. Further emphasizing the distance between Nextdoor and its volunteer moderators, Nextdoor’s terms of service state in all caps: “WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACTIONS TAKEN BY THESE MEMBERS.”

But if Nextdoor were to take more responsibility for its moderators, and if it paid them like employees, that “could be one way to get the best of both worlds, where you’re not exploiting individuals, but you’re still embedding individuals in communities where they can have a more special focus,” Jhaver said. He added, “I’m not aware of any platform which actually does that.”

Evelyn Douek, an assistant professor at Stanford Law School and an expert on content moderation who occasionally contributes to The Atlantic, told me that what happened in the Akyuz-Anderl race was “somewhat inevitable” because of Nextdoor’s moderation policies. “In this particular case, it was locals,” Douek pointed out. “But there’s no particular reason why it would need to be.” Corporations, unions, interest groups, and ideologues of all stripes have deep interest in the outcomes of local elections. “You could imagine outsiders doing exactly the same thing in other places,” Douek said.

In an indication that Nextdoor at least knows that moderation is an ongoing issue, Caty Kobe, Nextdoor’s head of community, appeared on a late-January webinar for moderators and tackled what she called “the ever-question”: What to do about politically biased moderators? Kobe’s answer was the same one she gave during a webinar in October: Report them to Nextdoor. In 2022, Nextdoor began allowing users to submit an appeal if they felt their post had been unfairly removed. Roughly 10 percent of appeals were successful last year.

Douek’s words stuck in my mind and eventually got me wondering how much effort it would take for me to become a Nextdoor moderator. At the time, the midterm elections were nearing, and Nextdoor was promoting its efforts to protect the U.S. electoral process. I’d only joined the platform a few months earlier, and my single contribution to the platform had been one comment left on another person’s post about some local flowers.

I sent a message through Nextdoor’s “Contact Us” page asking if I was eligible to become a moderator. Within a day, I’d been invited to become a review-team member in my neighborhood. “You’re in!” the email from Nextdoor said.

I was offered resources for learning about content moderation on Nextdoor, but I wasn’t required to review any of them, so I ignored them and jumped right in. The first moderation opportunity presented to me by Nextdoor: a comment about Seattle’s Socialist city-council member, Kshama Sawant. It had been reported as disrespectful for comparing her to “a malignant cancer.”

Research for this story was funded by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, using a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

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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.

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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

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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.

For as long as I have been feeding myself—which, for the record, is several decades now—I have been feeding myself fast. I bite big, in rapid succession; my chews are hasty and few. In the time it takes others to get through a third of their meal, mine is already gone. You could reasonably call my approach to eating pneumatic, reminiscent of a suction-feeding fish or a Roomba run amok.

Where my vacuuming mouth goes, advice to constrain it follows. Internet writers have declared slowness akin to slimness; self-described “foodies” lament that there’s “nothing worse” than watching a guest inhale a painstakingly prepared meal. There are even children’s songs that warn against the perils of eating too fast. My family and friends—most of whom have long since learned to avoid “splitting” entrees with me—often comment on my speed. “Slow down,” one of my aunts fretted at a recent meal. “Don’t you know that eating fast is bad for you?”

I do, or at least I have heard. Over the decades, a multitude of studies have found that people who eat faster are more likely to consume more calories and carry more weight; they’re also more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes. “The data are very robust,” says Kathleen Melanson of the University of Rhode Island; the evidence holds up when researchers look across geographies, genders, and age. The findings have even prompted researchers to conduct eating-speed interventions, and design devices—vibrating forks and wearable tech—that they hope will slow diners down.

But the widespread mantra of go slower probably isn’t as definitive or universal as it at first seems. Fast eaters like me aren’t necessarily doomed to metabolic misfortune; many of us can probably safely and happily keep hoovering our meals. Most studies examining eating speed rely on population-level observations taken at single points in time, rather than extended clinical trials that track people assigned to eat fast or slow; they can speak to associations between pace and certain aspects of health, but not to cause and effect. And not all of them actually agree on whether protracted eating boosts satisfaction or leads people to eat less. Even among experts, “there is no consensus about the benefits of eating slow,” says Tany E. Garcidueñas-Fimbres, a nutrition researcher at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in Spain, who has studied eating rates.

[Read: American food will never look natural again]

The idea that eating too fast could raise certain health risks absolutely does make sense. The key, experts told me, is the potential mismatch between the rate at which we consume nutrients and the rate at which we perceive and process them. Our brain doesn’t register fullness until it’s received a series of cues from the digestive tract: chewing in the mouth, swallowing down the throat; distension in the stomach, transit into the small intestine. Flood the gastrointestinal tract with a ton of food at once, and those signals might struggle to keep pace—making it easier to wolf down more food than the gut is asking for. Fast eating may also inundate the blood with sugar, risking insulin resistance—a common precursor to diabetes, says Michio Shimabukuro, a metabolism researcher at Fukushima Medical University, in Japan.

The big asterisk here is that a lot of these ideas are still theoretical, says Janine Higgins, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, who’s studied eating pace. Research that merely demonstrates an association between fast eating and higher food intake cannot prove which observation led to the other, if there’s a causal link at all. Some other factor—stress, an underlying medical condition, even diet composition—could be driving both. “The good science is just completely lacking,” says Susan Roberts, a nutrition researcher at Tufts University.

Scientists don’t even have universal definitions of what “slow” or “fast” eating is, or how to measure it. Studies over the years have used total meal time, chew speed, and other metrics—but all have their drawbacks. Articles sometimes point to a cutoff of 20 minutes per meal, claiming that’s how long the body takes to feel full. But Matthew Hayes, a nutritional neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized that as an oversimplification: Satisfaction signals start trickling into the brain almost immediately when we eat, and fullness thresholds vary among people and circumstances. Studies that ask volunteers to rate their own speeds have issues too: People often compare themselves with friends and family, who won’t represent the population at large. Eating rate can also fluctuate over a lifetime or even a day, depending on hunger, stress, time constraints, the pace of present company, even the tempo of background music.

In an evolutionary sense, all of us humans eat absurdly fast. We eat “orders of magnitude quicker” than our primate relatives, just over one hour a day compared with their almost 12, says Adam van Casteren, a feeding ecologist at the University of Manchester, in England. That’s thanks largely to how we treat our food: Fire, tools such as knives, and, more recently, chemical processing have softened nature’s raw ingredients, liberating us from “the prison of mastication,” as van Casteren puts it. Modern Western diets have taken that pattern to an extreme. They’re chock-full of ultra-processed foods, so soft and sugar- and fat-laden that they can be gulped down with nary a chew—which could be one of the factors that drive faster eating and chronic metabolic ills.

[Read: Junk food is bad for you. Is it bad for raccoons?]

In plenty of circumstances, slowing down will come with perks, not least because it could curb the risk of choking or excess gas. It could also temper blood-sugar spikes in people with diets heavy in processed foods—which whiz through the digestive tract, Roberts told me, though the healthier move would probably be eating fewer of those foods to begin with. And some studies focused on people with high BMI, including Melanson’s, have shown that eating slower can aid weight loss. But, she cautioned, those results won’t necessarily apply to everyone.

The main impact of leisurely eating may not even be about chewing rates or bite size per se, but about helping people eat more mindfully. “A lot of us are distracted when we eat,” says Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “And so we are missing our hunger and satiety cues.” In countries such as the United States, people also have to wrestle with the immense pressure “to be done with lunch really fast,” Herman Pontzer, an anthropologist at Duke University, told me. Couple that with the fast foods we tend to reach for, and maybe it’s no shock that people don’t feel satisfied as they scarf down their meals.

The point here isn’t to demonize slow eating; in the grand scheme of things, it seems a pretty healthful thing to do. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that “eat slow” should be a blanket command. For people already eating a lot of high-fiber foods—which the body naturally processes ploddingly—Roberts doesn’t think sluggish chewing has much to add. The extolling of slow eating is, at best, “a half truth,” Hayes told me, that’s become easy to exploit.

[Read: Someday, you might be able to eat your way out of a cold]

I do feel self-conscious when I’m the first person at the table to finish by a mile, and I don’t enjoy the stares and the comments about my “big appetite.” Certain super-slow eaters might get teased for making others wait, but they’re generally not getting chastised for ruining their health. When I asked experts if it was harmful to eat too slowly, several of them told me they’d never even considered it—and that the answer was probably no.

Still, for the most part, I’m happy to be the Usain Bolt of chewing. My hot foods stay hot, and my cold foods stay cold. I’ve intermittently tried slow eating over the years, deploying some of the usual tricks: smaller utensils, tinier bites, crunchier foods. I even, once, tried to count my chews. The biggest difference I felt, though, wasn’t fullness or more satisfaction; I just kind of hated the way that my mushy food lingered in my mouth.

Maybe if I’d stuck with slow eating, I would have lost some gassiness, choking risk, or weight—but also, I think, some joy. There’s something to speed-eating that can be plain old fun, akin to the rush of zooming down an empty highway in a red sports car. If I have just an hour-ish (or, knowing me, less) of eating each day, I’d prefer to relish every brisk, indecorous bite.

Former Pakistan PM tells Al Jazeera the government and military want to 'crush' his PTI party ahead of the polls.

One spring day in 1970, a tall, slightly awkward undergraduate named Timothy Keller was standing with friends on the main quadrangle of Bucknell University’s campus in central Pennsylvania. Students were protesting in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings; they crowded onto the quad, half-listening to speakers who vied for the open mic. Keller, a new convert to Christianity and a religion major, ordinarily would have been busy with courses in existential philosophy, Buddhism, and biblical criticism. But at the moment, he and his friends in the campus chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship were trying to decide how to participate in this tense moment, when their peers were angry and probably not interested in talking about God.

They did not commandeer the microphone to rail at classmates about their sins; even single-minded evangelicals can read a room now and then. Instead, they set up a table nearby with a stack of Christian books and made a sign with bold lettering: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ Is Credible and Existentially Satisfying. “They didn’t get much of a response—mostly mocking and eye rolls,” Collin Hansen writes in his recent biography of Keller.

But some bystanders did bite: How could Jesus possibly be relevant when the world is on fire? Keller, manning the books table, was in his element, quietly suggesting that they set aside political categories for the moment. Don’t look away from economic or racial injustice; don’t stop hating war, or stifle your anger at corrupt and lying leaders. Just try looking at all of that through Christian lenses, and you’ll see idolatry, the worship of self: the real things that wreck our world.

Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival

Keller, who died May 19 at age 72 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, was the most influential Christian apologist and evangelical leader of his generation, even if his name is unfamiliar to many secular people. The flood of articles noting his death have remarked on the flourishing megachurch he built in supposedly godless Manhattan; the hundreds of new congregations he helped plant around the world; the best-selling books he wrote that made the case for Christianity to a popular audience. And that’s all true. But in all of this, two fundamental ideas propelled him: Biblical Christianity is not a political position, and secular liberalism deserves theological critique—because it is not simply how the world really works, but is itself a kind of faith.

When Tim and his wife, Kathy, founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in 1989, the prospects seemed dismal. Walking the city streets, Keller was struck by how many grand historic church buildings had been repurposed as clubs, coffee shops, and condos—visible signs that New Yorkers seemed to have moved on from church. Yet over the decades that followed, Redeemer grew into a booming congregation of several thousand people, including many young doctors, lawyers, bankers, and artists who never considered themselves the churchgoing type.

Journalists were confused by why so many “yuppie Manhattanites” would attend this “conservative evangelical” church. Keller had the quiet charisma of a professor at a small liberal-arts college rather than the persona of a megachurch warlord; he poured energy into co-founding institutions, such as the church network and media organization The Gospel Coalition, rather than nurturing a cult of personality.

Moreover, he was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America, and was not shy about his denomination’s conservative teachings on sexual identity and gender roles. The PCA does not bless same-sex marriages and discourages the use of the phrase gay Christian because it elevates homosexuality as an “identity marker alongside our identity as new creations in Christ.” The denomination teaches the “complementarity” of men and women, “displayed when a Christian husband expresses his responsibility of headship in sacrificial love to his wife,” and does not ordain women as pastors, though women can serve in some leadership roles. But Keller never led with those issues, and steered every conversation back to how broken and miserable we all are without the free gift of God’s grace. “The real culture war is taking place inside our own disordered hearts, wracked by inordinate desires for things that control us, that lead us to feel superior and exclude those without them, that fail to satisfy us even when we get them,” he wrote in 2008 in his breakout best-seller, The Reason for God.

The year the Kellers founded Redeemer, the mainstream media were preoccupied with a very different group of evangelical leaders. Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, and their colleagues had recently founded the Christian Coalition of America, the latest in a series of organizations carrying the banner for conservative Christian activists who lashed the gospel to Republican policy goals. While they sacralized nostalgia for a bygone Christian America in which white middle-class men had the largest share of cultural prestige and economic privilege, Keller was busy ministering to post-Christian, pluralist, urban Americans, convincing them to decouple Christianity from any political platform.

In later years, on one of the very few occasions when Keller made a public statement about politics—halfway through the Trump administration—he published an op-ed in The New York Times insisting that Christians should reject tidy alignment with either the Republicans or Democrats. “Following the Bible and the early church,” he wrote,  “Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.”

[Timothy Keller: Growing my faith in the face of death]

Keller’s approach—to spurn tribalism, avoid picking unnecessary fights, and preach to our shared existential angst—was not normal, not even in New York City. A century earlier, the fundamentalist movement was born primarily in the urban north, where Keller’s Reformed Protestant forebears founded breakaway churches and Bible institutes to rebel against a tide of non-Protestant immigrants, first-wave feminism, new trends in biblical criticism, and other changes they saw as threats to both the authority of scripture and their own cultural status. America replayed that same basic culture war in the 1960s and ’70s, when Keller was an undergraduate. We are in the throes of another rerun now.

Over that time, the great evangelical tradition of apologetics—making reasoned arguments for Christian truth claims based on historical evidence, scientific discoveries, and moral philosophy—largely fell captive to these culture wars. One might have expected Keller to imitate the apologists who were at the height of their powers while he was starting out as a young pastor: men like Francis Schaeffer and Josh McDowell, who blended their mission to defend the truth of Christianity with their callings as culture warriors.  

Instead, he modeled his writing and preaching on irenic British Christians: the Anglican minister John Stott and, especially, C. S. Lewis (although Keller’s books feature a wide range of cultural and literary references, including Pascal, Tolstoy, the movie Fargo, various atheist thinkers—even, at least once, the Disney cartoon Frozen). Over the years, Keller became not just a Christian apologist but a sophisticated critic of secular liberalism, especially its worship of personal autonomy as the highest good. He pushed his audiences to consider whether total sexual freedom was truly the pinnacle of human liberation, or whether the boundaries of marriage might actually enrich their lives. He took on the false idol of professional achievement: “As long as you think there is a pretty good chance that you will achieve some of your dreams, as long as you think you have a shot at success, you experience your inner emptiness as ‘drive’ and your anxiety as ‘hope,’” he wrote in 2013’s Encounters With Jesus. “And so you can remain almost completely oblivious to how deep your thirst actually is.”

Secular Americans in the 21st century might think they are free individuals, living true to themselves—but in fact they have unconsciously absorbed the preferences and prejudices of their particular cultural setting, he wrote in what may be his most important book, 2016’s Making Sense of God. All humans, in all historical contexts, “use some kind of filter—a set of beliefs and values—to sift through our hearts and determine which emotions and sensibilities we will value and incorporate into our core identity and which we will not. It is this value-laden filter that forms our identity, rather than our feelings themselves.”

In these later years, he drew more and more on the philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor: each, in his own way, a forceful critic of secular modernity, but all cited more often in scholarly journals than in sermons or popular books. Keller’s unique evangelistic gift lay in simplifying and popularizing their dense academic arguments to help a wide range of Christians and nonbelievers see that the secularization of Western culture was not so much a story about traditional faiths declining—what Taylor calls the “subtraction story”—but a story of new, equally metaphysical assumptions taking hold. Keller insisted that these assumptions cannot adequately explain human experience. We all seek what Taylor calls “fullness”: an idea that, Keller wrote, “is neither strictly a belief nor a mere experience. It is the perception that life is greater than can be accounted for by naturalistic explanations … It is the widespread, actual lived condition of most human beings regardless of worldview.”

[Molly Worthen: Why conservative evangelicals like Trump]

His insights hit a nerve at a time when evangelicals were realizing that “postmodern” and “urban” challenges—religious diversity; isolation; transience—were becoming  common in rural and suburban contexts as well. Keller was ahead of the curve in confronting these changes. Younger pastors and lay Christians found in him a mentor who might help them make traditional Christianity seem plausible to indifferent, even hostile, hearers—and, possibly, help them survive American evangelicalism’s current doom spiral of anger and political idolatry.

In his hugely influential 2012 book on starting new churches, Center Church, he used the analogy of the four seasons to describe the church’s changing relationship to culture. Keller believed the American church was well into its autumn season, when Christian influence is in decline; people are opting for other master narratives to explain their lives; evangelists who trained in the “summertime” of Christendom are flailing.

In all his apologetic work, Keller politely deconstructed secular narratives of meaning and happiness before making any attempt to convince his audience that Jesus’s tomb really was empty—and always in the tone of a humble conversation partner rather than a browbeating crusader. He was careful to present his arguments as “clues” rather than airtight proof: a set of hints—in the fine-tuning of the universe; in human moral instincts; in the intriguing historical evidence from Jesus’s life and death—which, taken together, do not wholly eliminate doubts, but have an awfully good chance of making you doubt your doubts.

Yet by the end of Keller’s long career, he had accumulated plenty of critics on both the left and the right who complained that his claim to sidestep politics in favor of the big existential questions was a red herring, an attempt to evade the issues that cause the most pain and anger in ordinary people’s lives. In 2017, Princeton Theological Seminary rescinded a prestigious lecture invitation it had extended to Keller after many in the seminary community objected to his views on gender and sexuality. Carol Howard Merritt, a Presbyterian minister in the more liberal Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) denomination, called him “one of the loudest, most read, and most adhered-to proponents of male headship in the home … I have spent years with women who have tried to de-program themselves after growing up in this baptized abuse.”

[Tim Alberta: How politics poisoned the evangelical church]

American Christians—not to mention U.S. courts—are also in a long-running battle over whether the religious objection to same-sex relationships is akin to anti-Black racism, and therefore an intolerable and anachronistic doctrine, or whether it is acceptable within the bounds of religious freedom. Keller’s long-term legacy in mainstream culture depends on how these legal and cultural debates evolve.

Meanwhile, conservatives criticize Keller’s “third way” philosophy as “instinctively accommodating” to secular contexts, as James R. Wood, then an associate editor at the conservative Christian magazine First Things, wrote last spring. He used to admire Keller but has changed his mind as American culture has grown more hostile to traditional Christianity. “A lot of former fanboys like me are coming to similar conclusions,” he wrote. “The evangelistic desire to minimize offense to gain a hearing for the gospel can obscure what our political moment requires.” Better, perhaps, to sharpen the contradictions.

It’s possible that Keller’s strategy was the luxury of a less polarized time. Now that Christians on the right and the left both feel remorselessly persecuted, many believe they have no choice but to purify their own ranks and defeat the forces of evil at the ballot box. There are more urgent tasks than patiently engaging a skeptic.  

Keller’s aim was never to make the gospel any less outrageous, but to make our own private idols moreso. He wanted to help sincere and restless people (and that’s most of us) finally see the false gods we are worshiping—whether we realize it or not.

The first ever BlackBerry, released in 1999, came with just five megabytes of storage, or the equivalent of about a single song. That is so small a percentage of the storage offered by top-of-the-line, one-terabyte phones today that you are better off writing it in scientific notation. If its full storage capacity was purposed for music, a modern iPhone or Samsung Galaxy could hold hundreds of thousands of downloaded songs, representing more than 1 million minutes of audio.

And yet those same phones will sometimes whine that your voicemail is full. Exceed some seemingly mysterious limit, and your inbox shuts down until you go through and prune it. Would-be message leavers are hard-bounced: “The mailbox is full and cannot accept any messages at this time. Goodbye.”

It feels oddly in tension with the rest of our digital lives. We have been conditioned to expect a kind of data maximalism from years of free storage on Gmail, iMessage, and Facebook. But it seems wireless carriers, who have stored voicemails on behalf of customers since the pre-smartphone era, would rather not be in the business of hosting an unlimited supply of audio messages. Instead, they force the data equivalent of the KonMari Method: Declutter your inbox and save whatever is sentimental or important.

Carriers record and capture voicemail because they maintain all of the telephone-related parts of your device. (They’re also the ones that assign you a phone number and connect you to a wireless network.) Verizon, AT&T, TMobile, and so on—these are the companies that initially grab your voicemails for you.

[Read: Phones will never be fun again]

And at one time, it ended there. A person would check their voicemail by calling their own number and entering a passcode. But then came smartphones. The voicemail section of your device is now called Visual Voicemail, and it’s layered on top of the carrier’s system. Your smartphone’s software, which is likely made by Apple, Google, or Samsung depending on what type of phone you have, retrieves your messages from the carrier’s server, downloading them to your phone and displaying a list of them in a scrollable way. You may even get a rough transcription of the messages.

However, most carriers still limit the number or cumulative length of the messages you can store within their system. The typical voicemail plan is not very big; even premium plans from the country’s largest carriers max out at about 40 messages a user. When asked why voicemail storage limits exist in the era of data sprawl, a spokesperson for AT&T wrote that the company aims to “provide customers access to their messages in an efficient, reliable, and fast manner”: a nonspecific answer that suggests that having access to a very large number of voicemails might lead to an inefficient, unreliable, and slow experience. Although most of us own smartphones, carriers do still provide the old dial-in service—maybe for those with flip phones or landlines—and it’s hard to imagine navigating through thousands of old recordings this way.

The interplay between Visual Voicemail and the traditional voicemail system—in a sense, a melding of new and old technologies—is where things get a little weird and interesting. When you get a notification that your voicemail is full, it’s referring to your carrier’s voicemail system. Remember, your device itself could theoretically hold more voicemails than you might ever receive in a lifetime, and the iPhone, at least, makes good on this promise: If you dial into the voicemail system the old-fashioned way and delete a message there, it will remain in your Visual Voicemail inbox forevermore. (Or at least until you decide to delete it there, too.) You can also export voicemails to your email or a file-hosting service. All of these are pretty good ways to get around your carrier’s storage limits. A spokesperson for Verizon told me that storage limits are “very seldom an issue” for this reason.   

Still, why the hassle? None of the three biggest wireless providers—AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile—would tell me how many voicemails they’re storing at any given time, and what infrastructure is required to do so. In general, data-storage costs aren’t what they used to be. Paul Finnigan, a voicemail pioneer who until 1999 led the International Voicemail Association, a trade group that developed voicemail standards, told me that in the early days of the technology, it cost his company 10 cents (about 40 cents in today’s money) to store a single message for 24 hours. Now, experts told me, it’s way cheaper.

But storing data in general requires managing it and protecting it from bad actors, which might be something these companies hope to avoid as much as possible. “​The more data that you have and the longer that you have it for, the greater the risk that you’re inviting,” Chris Frascella, a law fellow at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, told me. Frascella said that generally speaking, when companies take a “data-minimalism approach,” it is to minimize the hacking risk, “because data that’s not there can’t be compromised.” From a privacy and security perspective, storage limits might actually be a good thing for the consumer; they probably leave us less exposed. Just last month, T-Mobile disclosed a data breach affecting more than 800 customers, its ninth since 2018; all three major carriers have likewise had some kind of data compromised in recent years.

[Read: Don’t trash your old phone—give it a second life]

Granted, in 2023, no one seems to be clamoring for unlimited voicemail stored with their carrier—or clamoring for voicemail at all. The technology’s eulogy has been written and rewritten for more than a decade. But it has also proved to be curiously unkillable. AT&T told me that the majority of people still set up and use their voicemail inbox, and that from the company’s perspective, the technology is “healthy.” A Verizon spokesperson told me over email that “rumors of voicemail’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

So the technology is in a tricky place: People don’t love it, but they can’t seem to give it up. To better understand this tension, I called Steve Whittaker, a professor of human-computer interaction at UC Santa Cruz who worked on visual voicemail in the late ’90s. When he didn’t pick up, his prerecorded greeting suggested that email would be a better way to reach him.

“A lot of the time, technologies don’t really die,” Whittaker said when we eventually caught up by phone. “They just kind of get layered on top of each other.” It’s hard to see a world in which remote, asynchronous audio messaging sputters out completely, but that doesn’t mean it has to be through voicemail, exactly: Voice memos of the sort that you can send on iMessage or WhatsApp offer all the whimsy and personal touch of voicemail while dodging all of the unfun parts.  

Still, one of voicemail’s advantages is simply that it doesn’t involve any screens or buttons or downloading any software. You’re prompted to speak, and you do so. Anyone can do it, and everyone does. This can have sentimental advantages. When one person I interviewed for this story mentioned saving messages from his mother in case she died, I knew exactly what he was talking about. After my grandfather died, I took comfort in replaying an old voicemail of him singing me “Happy Birthday,” as he would insist on doing every year.

But no amount of voicemail from my grandfather will change the fact that he’s gone. And for every sweet or heartwarming message from someone you love, there are probably a dozen or more that you have no use for. No one wants to hold on to every callback message from their health-care provider. And don’t even get me started on spam.

The internet of the past 20 or so years has tried to convince us that digital nostalgia is good, and that it is charming and not creepy to see a Facebook photo from 10 years ago resurface on our News Feed. That’s made it harder to let go of things, or to delete accounts, for fear of what we might lose. “If we didn’t have limits, we would gorge ourselves to death on this,” Roger Entner, a telecommunications expert and the founder of Recon Analytics, told me, explaining that, although most people are diligent about listening to, say, a voicemail about getting some milk and eggs from the store and then deleting it, others treat the same message “as a gem that needs to be preserved for eternity.”

In a time when we have the option to hoard endless digital libraries about our lives, perhaps it’s nice to have one technology that still occasionally forces us to consider what’s really important. Right now your carrier requires you to tend to your garden regularly, which is unintentionally refreshing. Our lives are ephemeral, and perhaps more of our data should be as well.

Defending Donald Trump was always awkward.

So many incidents unfolded in a familiar pattern. Somebody would accuse the ex-president of something bad. The ex-president’s supporters would spring into action to deny the charge—only to be undercut when Trump pivoted, admitted everything, and even bragged about it.

President Trump would never try to pressure an embattled democracy by withholding military aid.

Screech, tzzzip.

President Trump was perfectly within his rights to pressure an embattled democracy by withholding military aid.

Defending the indefensible wears people down. Even the most committed and tribal warrior of the right must have sometimes wished that Trump didn’t keep making the job so hard.

Maybe if there were some way to fight for the Trump cause that circumvented Trump personally? Even better if the spotlight could be shifted from Trump entirely and focused on ideological and cultural enemies instead.

In 2019, Trump was scorched by two massive reports detailing the assistance provided to his 2016 presidential campaign by Russian intelligence agencies. The first, by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, also presented evidence of obstruction of justice. The Mueller document was supplemented by the even weightier report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then chaired by Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina.

The factual record presented by those two accounts was damning. Mueller’s investigation produced some three dozen indictments, seven guilty pleas, and one conviction at trial. Among those sent to prison was Trump’s own campaign chair, Paul Manafort. Mueller also documented the main elements of an obstruction of justice case against Trump—though Mueller heeded the internal Department of Justice rule against prosecuting a serving president.

The Trump White House and its supporters could not refute the material. They sought instead to distort its content and cushion its impact. Attorney General William Barr, for example, withheld the Mueller report for nearly a month to review and make redactions, even as Barr’s office hastened to publish an executive summary that represented the report as an exoneration of Trump personally. (Congress later learned that Mueller had complained to Barr about the summary distorting the special counsel’s findings.) Six Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee appended a statement acknowledging Russian interference in the 2016 election, while insisting that “then-Candidate Trump was not complicit.”

[David A. Graham: The John Durham report gave Trump what he wanted]

But distortion and cushioning are not very satisfactory responses. The facts are the facts; people can assess them for themselves and reach unwelcome conclusions, as five Democratic senators on the Intelligence Committee did in their reply to the six Republicans: “Russian intelligence services’ assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process and Trump and his associates’ participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modern era.”

For the political allies of a character like Trump, it’s dangerous to be cast on the defensive. He’s done so much bad stuff. A certain number of the tribalists may tolerate it all and find ways to equivocate, but the less committed may lose faith. The TV talking heads can repeat “no collusion” over and over, but Trump does keep saying all those complimentary things about Vladimir Putin, no matter what atrocities the Russian president commits. Some of the less anesthetized Republicans are bound to wonder: Why?

Safer, then, to shift to counter-accusation. Which was the mission Barr assigned to his chosen special counsel, John Durham.

Almost from the start of the Trump-Russia investigation, Trump had insisted that he was the real victim. Trump-Russia was a conspiracy cooked up by President Barack Obama, candidate Hillary Clinton, the FBI, and the media to frame him, Trump.

In March 2017, then-President Trump tweeted, “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” and “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” The Department of Justice acknowledged in September 2017 that there was no basis for Trump’s outlandish claim. But the allegation of anti-Trump plotting reverberated through Trump world for the duration of the administration and beyond.

[David Frum: The system failed the test of Trump]

Fossilized versions of this defunct counter-allegation can be found strewn through the text of the Durham report. For example, on page 81:

The Office also considered as part of its investigation the government’s handling of certain intelligence that it received during the summer of 2016. That intelligence concerned the purported “approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services. We refer to that intelligence hereafter as the ‘Clinton Plan Intelligence.’”

Durham turns over this fossil a few more times before reluctantly relinquishing it. Durham is willing to disregard some, even many, inconvenient realities (including his own sparse prosecution record: one guilty plea from an FBI attorney for altering an email—a case based on investigative work already done by the DOJ’s own inspector general, Michael Horowitz, as Charles Savage of The New York Times observed today).

Yet, unlike Trump himself and many in the Trump mediasphere, Durham would not jettison the structure of reality altogether. His report eventually reconciles itself to the delusionary nature of the so-called Clinton Plan. It grudgingly and glancingly accepts that there really was Russian interference in the election of 2016, that it cannot be dismissed as merely the mewling of a scheming Clinton campaign.

Rather than endorse the theory of a global anti-Trump conspiracy, Durham settles into a long bill of grievances against the FBI. The agency’s methods, he argues, were too aggressive; its agents were too ready to believe the worst about Trump. The FBI had only enough information to justify a preliminary investigation, not a full one—a distinction the report carefully parses for some pages. This, in the end, is the gravamen of the Durham report: The FBI overreacted to the available information about Trump’s Russia contacts and should have moved more cautiously before advancing to the next phase of an investigation.

[David Frum: Don’t indict Trump with this]

Specialists in the law and practice of counter-intelligence can argue whether Durham has correctly interpreted the appropriate modalities of FBI procedure. Very possibly, Durham is correct. Yet even if he is, isn’t this all kind of underwhelming? Durham’s sponsors hoped to reveal a globe-spanning conspiracy to vilify an innocent Donald Trump. What he delivered for them instead was a list of arguable procedural infractions by the FBI.  

Not to belittle the importance of procedural infractions—perpetrators can go free if the infraction is serious enough—but such an infraction doesn’t necessarily make the perp innocent. If the case is dropped because of faulty procedures, that’s a sanction against police misconduct, not an absolution of the accused.

Post-Durham, we are exactly where we were pre-Durham.

U.S. government agencies have meticulously documented the help Russian espionage agencies provided to the Trump campaign in 2016. It is a matter of record that the Trump campaign wanted and sought even more help—specifically, that it tried to communicate with WikiLeaks about material from hacked Democratic Party communications.

People in the Trump orbit were caught lying and lying again about their Russian connections. As president, Trump took extraordinary pains to conceal his discussions with Putin, even from other members of his own administration.

That’s all beyond dispute. Durham’s efforts to reopen the disputes failed miserably. What may matter more, however, is what the Durham report does, rather than what it says. What the report says is in essence a classic Miranda-rights criminal defense of a kind that conservatives dislike when it benefits a mugger or a car thief: “The cops messed up in this way or that, and therefore my client must go free, even though we all know he did exactly what he is accused of.”

[David A. Graham: Barr misled the public—and it worked]

But what the report does is offer an excuse and escape to Republicans and conservatives who want to protect Trump without outright defending him. Durham tells the story of Trump-Russia while deleting both Trump and Russia. A great many people are eager for that telling. It changes the subject to something much less uncomfortable than the evidence that the Trump presidency was compromised by a corrupt foreign dictatorship.

This revisionism also offers partisans an exciting future possibility: a justification for new rounds of post-Trump culture war. Dan Crenshaw, for example, is a rising leader in the Republican Party—one who has always kept some moral and political distance from Trump, and who is firmly anchored to the pro-Ukraine, anti-Putin side of the GOP House caucus. Yet even he tweeted after Durham:

I’ve never been a reactive “lock ’em up” type. But this Durham report is a lock ’em up moment. We should be looking for statutes that apply to these egregious violations of public trust. If they don’t exist, it’s time we create them so it never happens again.

Similarly, Nikki Haley, the former UN ambassador and a candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination, today demanded retaliation against the FBI: “If we can’t hold the FBI accountable for the Russian hoax, we are no different from South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo. This type of corruption should never happen in America.”

Crenshaw’s and Haley’s menacing but vague language makes clear that they both understand there’s almost certainly no statute to invoke here. They are not calling for measures consistent with the rule of law but are instead appealing to dark fantasies of cultural revenge. But fantasies of cultural revenge are a powerful resource in Republican politics. Durham’s report provides hope that this resource can be distilled and bottled for future use, all its Trump-vintage muck boiled away.

Durham offers something else too. One of the big projects of post-Trump Republican politics is to assert greater partisan control over the federal civil service. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis argued this in a February 2023 interview on Fox News:

You look at all these entrenched bureaucrats … they need to be cleaned out … There is a proposal that I think a lot of us wanted to see under the prior administration to do a schedule F, so anybody that has any policy role is classified as a schedule F, and they can be removed by the president. The left would litigate that, but I honestly think we would win on that in the Supreme Court … Who controls the executive branch? Is it the elected president or is it some bureaucrat in the bowels of the bureaucracy that can’t be fired? ... Whoever gets a majority in the electoral college has the right to impose their agenda through the executive branch.

The Durham report may become the leading documentary evidence for this point of view in the next Republican administration.

As a legal text, the Durham report is limp and meager. As a history of recent events, it is misleading. But don’t dismiss its significance because of its intellectual defects. The Durham report is already proving to be a huge success as a prop and support for the bitterest partisan rancor. And its fullest import may yet lie ahead: as a rationalization for abuses of power by Trump-legacy administrations of the future.