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.

State police were forced to seek out a cattleman's help to catch the bovine, which is now safe and has not been charged.

Thirty-five years ago this week, I was working at a local bookstore in Winnetka, Illinois, the quiet suburb of Chicago where I grew up. It was a warm, sunny day, a week before my 18th birthday. The store was called Scotland Yard and specialized in murder mysteries, which is the kind of detail you think about later.

Around lunchtime, customers started coming in agitated. Had we heard what was happening? We hadn’t. In 1988 news traveled slowly. There were rumors of someone running around with a gun. We turned on the radio. It was a woman who had some kind of grudge. She was running from house to house. People came in with more news. She was poisoning people. She had set fire to a house. No, it was a school in Highland Park, a town up the road. She was targeting children. Which children? She’d gone into another school. She was looking for fourth graders at Hubbard Woods, our local elementary school. There had been a shooting at Hubbard Woods. My little brother was in the fourth grade at Hubbard Woods.

Winnetka is an affluent place, which in 1988 meant it was a safe place. Children rode their bikes everywhere without helmets, and made their way to and from school without parental supervision. My family has lived in Winnetka and neighboring villages on the North Shore of Chicago for four generations. Hubbard Woods, redbrick and low-roofed, sits in a leafy enclave within the leafy town, and someone had entered it with guns.

No one was answering the phone at home. Short of running to the school myself, which felt like contributing to a crisis rather than solving it, I had no way to find out whether my brother was safe.

The fear that overtook our village that afternoon—the horror of not knowing whether a small child to whom you are viscerally attached has just been slaughtered while learning multiplication tables—was unfamiliar to the majority of Americans. Today, all too many know exactly how it feels. Today, as an American sister, I would race to the school because I know. Today, American parents fling themselves into active-shooter situations because they know. Today, American second graders text their parents to say goodbye because they know. No one else in the world lives like this.

[From the October 2018 issue: The bullet in my arm]

The rumors we heard that day had sounded garbled and far-fetched but were broadly accurate. It was a woman, named Laurie Dann, and she did have a grudge. She was a former babysitter for local families and had exhibited disturbing behavior for a while. She had decided to target some of the children she had cared for, especially those in one family who had told her they were moving away, as well as those of her ex-husband’s family. She dropped off arsenic-laced Rice Krispies Treats and fruit juice at several local homes. She picked up the younger children of the family she’d targeted and brought them along while she tried to set fire to a school in Highland Park. After taking the children home to their mother, she set their house on fire, but they all managed to escape. Dann had three handguns, and headed to Hubbard Woods.

It has not been widely reported, it seems, but those of us in the community have always known why she went there—she was searching for the family’s older children, who were in fourth and fifth grade. But the fourth and fifth graders were on a field trip to Chicago that day—the targeted children and their classmates, including my brother, were spared because of a fluke.

Dann shot one child she found in the hallway before entering a second-grade classroom, where the children were with a substitute teacher. The teacher tried to disarm her, but Dann succeeded in herding the children into a corner and opened fire. She murdered an 8-year-old boy named Nick Corwin. A child in front of Nick Corwin ducked, escaping physical harm, but not the trauma that followed. Another child was shot in the neck and survived. Dann shot six children at Hubbard Woods that day, five of whom survived. The children were taking a bicycle-safety test when Dann entered the classroom, a detail I think about a lot. We were about to become a society that makes children take bicycle-safety tests while permitting them to be slaughtered by people with guns.

My brother’s bus was diverted to Washburne, the middle school, on the way back. They were told there had been an accident. They knew their younger classmates were taking a bicycle-safety test and couldn’t figure out what kind of accident would mean the school had to be closed. None of us recognized that day the very specific survivor’s guilt awaiting those children, that they would live the rest of their lives knowing Dann had intended for them to be the victims, not the second graders she shot instead.

My brother still lives in Winnetka. For years, he didn’t talk about that day, and we didn’t ask. Now he has his own children, and they attend local schools. The elder, at Washburne, has started active-shooter drills. Last summer, a killer took an assault rifle to the Fourth of July parade in nearby Highland Park. My brother was with his family at Winnetka’s parade a few miles away, when everyone was told to evacuate because there was an active shooter. He told his wife, who was terrorized, that he had already been through his shooting trauma, and was processing the fear differently. Then they had to explain the reality of guns in America to their preschooler, who attends Hubbard Woods.

We’re at a point of iterated, escalating trauma: the same people being affected by mass shootings across generations. Laurie Dann had three handguns and killed one child and wounded six people. The shooter in Highland Park had a semiautomatic rifle with three 30-round magazines. He killed seven people and wounded 48.

My brother has started talking about what happened in 1988. He has a lot to say about Americans’ decision to sacrifice our children’s physical and emotional safety for the privilege of playing with weapons designed for war.

The Hubbard Woods shooting is now sometimes called “the first school shooting.” Thanks in part to the rare circumstance of the killer being a woman, and to the rich whiteness of Winnetka, the story of Laurie Dann fed a new phenomenon: the rolling news cycle. After she fled the school, Dann entered the home of the Andrew family, still brandishing the guns and claiming that her bloodstained appearance was because she had been raped. Not knowing what had happened, the Andrews tried to ease her into surrendering the guns, while getting help. When she saw the police coming, Dann shot 20-year-old Philip Andrew in the chest before taking her own life. The young man survived and became a gun-regulation advocate. People who survive such incidents are overwhelmingly likely to become gun-regulation advocates. Maybe we should listen to them.

Winnetka worked swiftly in the aftermath of the Hubbard Woods shooting to pass stricter gun regulation. This law stood until 2008, when the town council voted to repeal it in response to the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia v. Heller decision. For 20 years, it was difficult to obtain guns on the North Shore, and we had no mass shootings.

Since the Heller decision, mass shootings have exploded across the United States. Twenty percent of the public mass shootings in America from 1966 to 2019 took place in the last six years of that period.

It takes ingenuity to avoid blaming guns for gun deaths. Blame mental illness. Blame doorways. Blame teachers who won’t take a loaded weapon into the classroom. A Michigan school district just banned backpacks because a loaded gun was found in a third grader’s bag—the third weapon to be found in a backpack in the district this year. There were 44,358 gun deaths in the U.S. in 2022. They weren’t all mass shootings, but none of them was caused by a backpack.

After a shooting two weeks ago at a mall in Allen, Texas, that left eight dead, including children, the conservative talk-show host Megyn Kelly took to Twitter to blame mass shootings on the people who argue for gun regulation, a statement so irrational, it is hard to fathom. But there she was, insisting that mass shootings continue because people keep arguing that fewer assault weapons might result in fewer mass shootings from assault weapons. “You have LOST. It’s DONE,” Kelly declared. “For the love of God what else can be done?”

Kelly blames mental illness, but there is no evidence that mental disturbance is disproportionately high in the United States, or that it has recently spiked here, while there is plenty of evidence that gun ownership has.

What else can be done? We can limit access to these guns. Many other countries have had mass shootings over the past few decades. They responded with tighter gun regulations, which have led to fewer mass shootings. Serbia had two mass shootings two weeks ago, and instantly tightened its gun regulations, because everyone who is not American knows that regulating guns keeps gun violence down.

[Read: What the U.S. can learn about gun violence from Serbia]

Eleven years after the Hubbard Woods shooting, in 1999, two teenagers killed 13 people, and themselves, at Columbine High School, in Colorado. Four months later I  moved to England for an academic job, arriving three years after the U.K.’s equivalent of Columbine, when a gunman opened fire at a school assembly in Dunblane, Scotland. He shot 32 people, killing 16 children and one teacher, before killing himself. The U.K. quickly passed gun regulations that have never been overturned, and for which there is no movement to overturn. The legislation has ensured that the Dunblane massacre remains, to this day, the deadliest mass shooting in the U.K.’s history. Guns were not banned: People still have the right to use them for hunting and sports. But they are regulated.

The British do not have a debate about “school shootings.” Every British person I have ever met, across political lines, considers the very existence of a gun debate in America to be self-evidently unhinged. What on earth is there to debate? Whether it’s okay to butcher children in classrooms? Hubbard Woods should have been our Dunblane, long before Columbine or Sandy Hook or Uvalde.

The fact that Winnetka immediately passed gun laws after the Hubbard Woods shooting, laws that worked, disproves gun advocates’ lie that America has always been this way because of the Second Amendment. We were stunned in 1988 because mass shootings were rare. The premise of Megyn Kelly’s diatribe is that guns are inevitable in American life and therefore so are mass shootings, unless we come up with some other, as-yet-unimagined solution. She should know as well as I do that this is simply untrue, because she and I were born in the same year, and we didn’t grow up with mass shootings, or active-shooter drills, or politicians calling for the arming of teachers or metal detectors or single-entry points or security guards at preschools.

If it were true that the Second Amendment has made unregulated guns an inevitability in American life, then mass shootings at schools would have been happening long before 1988. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 became legendary because the shooting in Chicago of six professional criminals and one bystander shocked the nation. When bank robbers like John Dillinger started using machine guns, the government responded with the National Firearms Act in 1934, which mandated tight regulation of machine guns. They remain difficult to purchase, and by an uncanny coincidence, machine guns are rarely deployed in American mass shootings today. More than two-thirds of the 35 deadliest mass shootings in American history have taken place since Republicans allowed the assault-weapons ban to lapse in 2004, and the majority of them have involved assault weapons, which can now be purchased in corner shops in many states. Sometimes correlation is causation.

Our current reality was bequeathed to us not by the Framers but by the Supreme Court. In Heller, it ruled that the Second Amendment’s association of the right to bear arms with the necessity of a well-regulated militia did not actually mean that the right to bear arms has anything to do with militias or their being well regulated. Evidently James Madison just threw that part in for the hell of it.

Gun advocates speak as if Supreme Court decisions like Heller are immutable. But Supreme Court decisions can be reversed, as we all learned last summer, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade. There is no reason Heller’s willful misreading of the Second Amendment may not someday carry as much legal force as the 1857 Dred Scott decision. That ruling also rested upon a mythical claim, namely that African Americans had never been considered citizens, when in fact the franchise had been gradually withdrawn from African Americans in many states.

Many Americans declared after Dred Scott that the raging debate over the legal status of fugitive slaves was finished, that the anti-slavery side had lost and should shut up. But a decade later, the decision was overturned, because the derangement of human slavery was incompatible with democracy. Dred Scott showed what happens when you try to build actual laws upon political fictions: Reality collides with the myth. That is what is happening with the American gun debate today.

In March, a few days after a man in Nashville shot six people to death, my British husband was chatting with a Frenchman. “Ma femme vient des Etats-Unis,” my husband explained. My French is poor, but I had no trouble understanding the response: “Les Etats-Unis—c’est incroyable! C’est incomprehensible.” Everyone else in the world is simply dumbfounded. Why would you allow your children to be slaughtered by guns while also making them take bicycle-safety tests? C’est incroyable.

You might say communal living runs in Julia Rosenblatt’s family. Her parents met in a six-unit house shared by college students and anti-war activists in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in the 1970s and lived there until shortly before her birth. In high school, Rosenblatt heard stories about the commune and fantasized about the lifestyle, she told me. So when, as an adult, she decided to move into a house with 10 other people—her husband, her two kids, and six of her friends, plus one of their children—it wasn’t a big surprise to her family and friends. In 2014, Rosenblatt chose a nine-bedroom mansion in a wealthy enclave of Hartford, Connecticut, which cost, in total, a little less than half a million dollars. She knew the house was technically meant for a single family, but she didn’t think much of it. Her group was living together—sharing the living room and bathrooms; collectively preparing meals—much like a typical family.

A few months after moving in, Rosenblatt found a cease-and-desist letter in the mail from the city, demanding that the 11 of them vacate their house. The charge was an obscure zoning violation: Rosenblatt’s group had broken the definition of family in Hartford. More than two unrelated people, according to laws buried deep in the city code, could not live together under the same roof. Neighbors, Rosenblatt learned later, had filed a complaint after seeing the number of cars parked outside of her house.

Rosenblatt went to court, and eventually, in 2016, the city dropped its case against her. But laws like Hartford’s are widespread across the U.S., though they are unevenly enforced. A study from last year found that 23 of the 30 largest American metro areas placed limits on the kinds of groups who could buy or rent a single-family home. Most of these statutes define family as people related by “blood, marriage, or adoption.” Though some places permit additional “unrelated persons” (usually two to five) to live under the same roof, others don’t allow any at all. Yet this does not reflect how a lot of Americans live. Although 44 percent of households in the U.S. were composed of married parents and their children in 1965, just 19 percent were in 2020, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Much of the rest of the country lives with roommates, in multigenerational households, or with long-term partners they’re not married to.

For decades, “definitions of family” clauses have sculpted who is allowed to live with whom across America, entrenching the nuclear family through housing law. At times, these clauses have also become convenient vehicles for NIMBYism: Neighborhood groups have deployed them to block queer and extended-family households from forming. Limited definitions of family are all over the legal system. Laws for domestic violence, rent control, insurance, and—as I’ve written about before—inheritance rely on narrow understandings of the term, which often prioritize biological and marital relationships, and relegate other kinds of relationships. Yet efforts to reform zoning laws have also charted a better way to consider kinship in modern America—one based on how people act together and care for one another.

There are few good statistics on how often people are blocked from living together because they are not considered family. Some cases start with a complaint from a neighbor to a city’s zoning-enforcement officer, which might bubble up into a more serious sanction. Lincoln, Nebraska, which allows only families related by blood, marriage, or adoption, plus two unrelated people, to live together, sees about 20 to 30 complaints a year, according to the Lincoln Journal Star.

Bryan Wagner, the president of the American Association of Code Enforcement, told me that the enforcement of these rules appears to be “variable” across the country. He speculated that college areas would field more complaints than quieter residential communities. But in his 10 years working as a code-enforcement official in the city of Westerville, Ohio, “I can probably count on two hands the number of complaints I’ve received alleging over-occupancy violations,” he said.

Complaints from neighbors do trickle in, though, and their outcomes sometimes feel cruel. In 2016, the town of Wolcott, Connecticut, refused to allow a group home for people with disabilities to open. A resident of Bar Harbor, Maine, fought the development of a home for seasonal workers (last year, the resident lost the case). Perhaps even more egregious, in 2006, an unmarried couple with three kids—including one from a partner’s previous relationship—in Black Jack, Missouri, was forced from their home because the town’s zoning ordinance effectively banned unmarried couples from living with more than one child.

In several cases, the weight of these laws has fallen most heavily on immigrant families living in multigenerational households. After the city of Manassas, Virginia, passed a law in 2005 that restricted single-family households to only “immediate relatives,” zoning-enforcement officers largely wielded it against Latino households. In Cobb County, Georgia, 95 percent of investigations into violations of family-based zoning also focused on Latino residents. A similar pattern has appeared in the cities of Waukegan and Cicero in Illinois.

How zoning legislation became concerned with the definition of family probably traces back to a Berkeley, California, real-estate developer named Duncan McDuffie. In 1916, McDuffie successfully lobbied the city to implement one of the earliest forms of single-family zoning laws, which restricted development to stand-alone homes only, as opposed to duplexes or apartments. Single-family zoning, he argued, would “prevent deterioration and assist in stabilizing values” in the city. Another effect—this one largely unstated—was that it would prevent Black residents from moving into developments adjacent to his properties. McDuffie’s properties included stipulations that they not be sold to nonwhite residents, and citizens soon petitioned to use the new regulations to stop a Black-run dance hall from opening nearby.

In other words, single-family zoning was exclusionary from the start. But the term family was not. Zoning laws spread across the U.S. in the 1920s and ’30s, but Kate Redburn, a historian at Columbia Law School who has written about these laws, told me that it was surprising “to find how willing courts were to interpret the term family and these statutes extremely broadly.” Courts kept an open mind: Sorority sisters and temporary roommates, for instance, had little trouble living together in houses meant for single families. Michigan’s supreme court even remarked in 1943 that “the word ‘family’ is one of great flexibility.”

[From the March 2020 issue: The nuclear family was a mistake]

By the end of the 1960s, however, the rising political power of homeowners and a growing fear of communes encouraged local governments to restrict the word’s definition. “One of the ideal ways to respond to that moral decline in their view is to legislate the ideal social force, and that’s going to be a nuclear family,” Redburn said. In 1976, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, wielded its ban on unrelated people living together to order out a pair of men—whom press reports implied to be gay, according to Redburn—from their home. Even foster parents were affected: Newark, New Jersey, convicted several of them because they had too many “unrelated persons”—meaning their foster children—in their home.

Parallel to these efforts, restrictive definitions of family were entering other parts of the law. When states began passing domestic-violence statutes, for instance, they largely excluded same-sex couples, and in some cases even unmarried partners, from protection. A similar phenomenon has played out in rent-control and accident-insurance cases, where people who consider themselves family are surprised to find that they don’t meet the legal definition—and therefore can’t receive insurance coverage or inherit a rent-controlled apartment.

Today, definitions of family are slowly expanding again—and, in some ways, becoming even more capacious than those from the early 20th century. Recently, a court in New Jersey recognized that half-siblings who didn’t share a home but who were frequently together at family functions counted as “household members” in the context of domestic violence. In zoning law, too, some officials have attempted to purge definitions that, in many cases, have not been updated since the 1960s: In recent years, both Iowa and Oregon have done away with family-based occupancy limits.

Other cities have chosen to update their laws in a more interesting way—measuring family based on how people act together. These so-called functional-family rules allow groups who do traditional household acts, such as making meals together and sharing expenses, to count as a family, regardless of biological or legal ties. Burlington, Vermont, for instance, allows groups who share furniture, expenses, and food preparation to live together. In Mount Pleasant, Michigan, functional families merely need to prove a permanent “demonstrable and recognizable bond.” In its rent-stabilization laws, New York City defines a family member as any person “who can prove emotional and financial commitment, and interdependence” with the main tenant—wording so expansive that, late last year, a New York court suggested that people in polyamorous relationships should qualify as family.

[Cory Doctorow: This is what Netflix thinks your family is]

Gradually, definitions of family focused on mutual care are entering other parts of the law. In its sick- and family-leave policy, for instance, Colorado now allows workers to take time off to care for any “person for whom the employee is responsible for providing or arranging health- or safety-related care.” Solangel Maldonado, a law professor at Seton Hall University, also pointed me to the rise of “de facto parent” legislation, which recognizes parentage based on action—for example, for an unmarried partner of the biological parent. Roughly two-thirds of states have these laws on the books, either by court mandate or explicit legislation. “It is very much this idea that families are not created necessarily by blood or by law, but rather by what people do for each other,” Maldonado said.

In the context of zoning, functional-family rules are still a half measure. In the midst of a housing crisis, why restrict living arrangements to any kind of family at all? Still, though in many cases imperfect, these definitions are clearing a path toward a bigger, vital idea: A person’s relationships with their loved ones, irrespective of biological or marital ties, can and should be enshrined in law.

In the dark, early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Michael Toce noticed a surprising trend. As a pediatric-emergency-medicine doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, he was seeing lots of kids who had taken too much medication. The problem wasn’t that they’d overdosed on opioids or painkillers or marijuana. Instead, they’d swallowed too much melatonin, an over-the-counter supplement used as a sleep aid. The ill effects of this mistake seemed mild at the worst—drowsiness, nausea, vomiting—but the number of kids who were affected was going up, up, up.

Other doctors around the country were observing something similar. In 2022, a group in Michigan invited Toce to collaborate on a study of the phenomenon. Their findings, published last June, were striking. Over the prior 10 years, the number of annual calls to poison control for pediatric melatonin overdoses had risen by 530 percent. By 2020, poison control was receiving more calls about pediatric overdoses on melatonin than on any other substance. Just last month, in a broader study based on emergency-room data over a similar period, researchers at the CDC reported a 420 percent increase in visits for pediatric melatonin ingestions. Meanwhile, the overdose numbers for other substances plummeted during the 2010s: Tylenol, down 53 percent; opioids, down 54 percent; many cough and cold medications, down 72 percent. The question is: What sets melatonin apart?

The most obvious answer is its recent surge in popularity. From 2009 to 2018, American melatonin use increased fivefold, and from 2016 to 2020, U.S. sales of the supplement rose from $285 million to $821 million. A pandemic-era surge in diagnosed sleep disorders may have only accelerated this growing popularity. The year before melatonin usage began to rise, the CDC launched an initiative to reduce pediatric overdoses as a whole. It promoted the widespread adoption of flow restrictors and child-resistant packaging, and ran campaigns to educate parents about medication safety and storage. It’s possible that melatonin overdoses are rarer now than they would have been without the CDC’s safety initiative, but are still increasing on account of the supplement’s overall success in the marketplace.

Those changes in demand are “definitely a factor” in the associated surge in overdoses, says Pieter Cohen, a doctor and supplements expert at Cambridge Health Alliance, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Whether they account for all of the surge or most of it or merely some of it remains a mystery. Several other factors would also seem to be involved, Cohen told me. For starters, many melatonin supplements come in an appetizing gummy form. So do all sorts of vitamins and minerals for kids—vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, zinc—but melatonin is not a vitamin or a mineral. It’s an active hormone, and the body has not developed great mechanisms for coping with its intake in excess, Cohen said.

[Read: Why do we need to sleep?]

Nearly all of the patients Toce saw had eaten gummies, and most of those identified in the CDC’s emergency-room study were 3 to 5 years old. Maribeth Lovegrove, the researcher who led the CDC research, told me that for most medications, pediatric overdoses are concentrated among children under 2 years old. This discrepancy is telling, she said. Babies don’t know what they’re eating and often put random stuff in their mouth; slightly older kids, such as the ones who have been taking too much melatonin, may be more likely to mistake gummies for candy.

Supplements are regulated by the FDA more as foods than as medications. That means that, the CDC’s safety initiative notwithstanding, melatonin’s packaging doesn’t have to be child resistant. The fact that it is marketed as a “natural” supplement may also lead parents to assume that it’s safe, Lovegrove said. And the actual quantity of melatonin contained in each gummy—as well as how that relates to the dosage advertised on the packaging—isn’t strictly regulated either, Cohen told me. Last month, he published a study with researchers from the University of Mississippi showing that many melatonin-gummy brands contain wildly different amounts of the hormone than they claim to. One contained three and a half times more than advertised; another contained no melatonin at all. A Canadian study from 2017 that looked at melatonin supplements more generally, not just at gummies, reached a similar conclusion. In at least one case, these discrepancies have led to a lawsuit.

Although the overwhelming majority of overdoses that the Michigan group identified were as mild as the ones Toce had seen, a small percentage were not. Nearly 300 children required intensive care, five had to be put on ventilators, and two died. Toce found this, too, to be surprising. “When you take too much of anything, you’re always going to have some degree of an upset stomach, some nausea, vomiting,” he told me. But there is no known mechanism by which melatonin could cause more severe complications, and Toce said it’s hard to know whether the supplement really played a role at all. Perhaps some other ingredient in the gummies caused the bad reactions, or maybe it was something else entirely—an unfortunate coincidence of timing.

[Read: The mysterious link between COVID-19 and sleep]

Michael Beuhler, a doctor who co-authored a paper investigating seven children’s deaths in North Carolina potentially related to melatonin, thinks they were most likely caused by melatonin overdoses, paired perhaps with some unusual susceptibility among the victims. “You don’t want to say melatonin definitely, 100 percent caused these deaths,” Beuhler told me, but “this is the type of thing that should be making people hit the pause button, especially when using it in small children.” For the moment, Cohen said, the exact source of deadly outcomes remains “a big mystery.”

A mystery made even harder to solve by the murkiness of the supplement industry. The industry has many well-known problems: a lack of scientific evidence for the benefits of certain products, a habit of misleading marketing, a deep reliance on magical thinking. But the recent spate of pediatric melatonin overdoses represents another big one: the products’ maddening irregularity. If no one knows what’s in the supplements, doctors may never understand whether or how they cause serious harm.

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

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

Today’s special guest is Saahil Desai, a senior associate editor for Science, Technology, and Health. Saahil also writes for The Atlantic, most recently reporting on the (maybe) AI-powered future of political polling and the pizza-delivery box as an industrial-design failure. He’s currently a fan of the “genius and deeply problematic” gonzo-comedy series Jury Duty; rereading a 73-year-old Atlantic article introducing readers to a tasty, exotic dish called pizza; and relishing his midwestern roots with a particular Twitter paean to middle-American architecture.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Surrender to Steely Dan. Your next mosquito repellent might already be in your shower. The free-returns party is over. The Culture Survey: Saahil Desai

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Trust me, you have not truly lived until you’ve gotten hooked on time-lapse-plant YouTube. (Stick with me here.) The absolute best is a pumpkin plant that, in 90 seconds, goes from a seedling to a monstrosity the size of a tennis court, producing a 1,323-pound pumpkin. Watching, in a matter of seconds, the monthslong process of the orangey gourd inflating like a water balloon puts my brain in low-power mode when that’s exactly what I need.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The new series Jury Duty is like nothing I have ever seen—at once charming, genius, and deeply problematic. The premise of the show is that it’s part mockumentary, part social experiment: An unsuspecting citizen named Ronald is picked as a juror for what he doesn’t realize is a staged trial. The jury—all actors, Ronald aside—get sequestered in a hotel, and from there, everything becomes progressively more absurd; there’s an appearance from the purported inventor of something called “chair pants” (chants!), and the actor James Marsden calls the paparazzi on himself inside the courtroom. In spite of the mounting wackiness of the gags, Ronald never seems to realize that he has been Truman Show–ed, and it is pure comedic gold. [Related: The paranoid style in American entertainment (from 2020)]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, I have become completely pizza-obsessed. (You don’t want to get me started on all the reasons I think you should buy a pizza oven.) For a story I wrote earlier this year about why the pizza box is abominable, I stumbled on this amazing Atlantic article from 1949, which talks about pizza as if it’s a completely alien concept—which, at that point, it was for most Americans. The headline is just “Pizza,” and the first few lines get me every single time:

The waiter moves aside the glasses of red wine, and sets before you a king-sized open pie. It is piping hot; the brown crust holds a bubbling cheese-and-tomato filling. There is a wonderful savor of fresh bread, melted cheese, and herbs. This is a pizza, Italian for pie.

Something I loved as a teenager and still love: Like other mildly pretentious, highly annoying 17-year-olds in the 2010s, I was a Wes Anderson bro in high school—and I still have a huge soft spot for him. Anderson’s movies have stuck with me as embodying sprezzatura, the Italian word for “studied carelessness” (which I know only as someone who is mildly pretentious and highly annoying!). Anderson’s obsession with in-your-face whimsy has gotten a bit stale, but his 2014 hit, The Grand Budapest Hotel, does something for me that few films can. It’s both silly and serious in a way that could easily flop, but doesn’t. [Related: The Grand Budapest Hotel is a thoughtful comedy about tragedy. (From 2015)]

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: I’ve been on a bit of a Jai Paul kick of late. The enigmatic British musician is touring after his first live performance ever. His story verges on music lore at this point: In 2013, a collection of his demos leaked online and were nothing short of a sensation. Then Paul simply vanished. His hit single “Str8 Outta Mumbai”—finally on Spotify and other streaming services—is still a delight today, splicing together colorful pop beats with Bollywood samples.

A YouTuber, TikToker, Twitch streamer, or other online creator that I’m a fan of: Here’s a niche one: the Twitter account Midwest Modern. The guy behind it, Josh Lipnik, goes around the Midwest posting photos of the region’s weird, beautiful, and usually unheralded architecture. His photos of Art Deco everything in my hometown of Cincinnati are amazing, but what I love most is just how many downright incredible buildings he finds in small towns where you might not expect them. May I introduce you to the Union National Bank Branch in Youngstown, Ohio; St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in Zilwaukee, Michigan; and the People’s State Bank in Berne, Indiana?

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Yasmin Tayag, Damon Beres, Julie Beck, Faith Hill, Derek Thompson, Tom Nichols, and Amy Weiss-Meyer.

The Week Ahead Quietly Hostile: Essays, a new collection by the humorist and best-selling author Samantha Irby (on sale Tuesday) Rainn Wilson and the Geography of Bliss, in which the actor traverses the globe in search of the happiest societies on Earth (begins streaming Thursday on Peacock) Fast X, the 10th (but not final) installment in the Fast & Furious film franchise (in theaters Friday) Essay Illustration by Anthony Gerace

A Better Way of Buying—And Wanting—Things

By Lily Meyer

It can seem, these days, like we are meant to be constantly acquiring things while also constantly getting rid of them. Mass consumption is everywhere—endless online shopping; always a new iPhone or device—as is the reactionary minimalist ethos that demands that we declutter our lives. But the relationships we have with our things tend to be more complicated than either of those extremes allow. Objects are more than just the sum of their parts. I would never give up my copies of my grandmother’s cookbooks. I’m also not going to quit my search for the perfect pair of jeans. I remember a great outfit, and what I did in it, for a long time.

The writer Katy Kelleher is seemingly no different. In her debut book, The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, she seeks to understand both her collector’s impulse and her longing “for more, always more, even when I know I already have enough.” A magpie’s nest of research and anecdotes about the objects that attract her, the book examines the tension she feels between wanting the things she wants—clothes, cosmetics, home goods—and acknowledging the murkier story of how some of those items were made and marketed. “I’ve never found an object,” she writes, “that was untouched by the depravity of human greed or unblemished by the chemical undoings of time.”

Read the full article.

More in Culture The defiant humanity of E. Jean Carroll An ode to writing odes Who was Cleopatra’s daughter? The worst thing to come out of Donald Trump’s town hall didn’t come from Trump. BlackBerry is a new kind of business biopic. My night in the Sistine Chapel Catch Up on The Atlantic The wedding trend couples love and guests hate Elizabeth Holmes isn’t fooling anyone. An ominous warning to the E. Jean Carroll jury Photo Album Lauren DeCicca / Getty

Behold a skateboarding dog in Bangkok, a drone-and-light show in central Australia, the Southeast Asian Games in Cambodia, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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

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

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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

A Tempered Celebration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

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

Elizabeth Holmes Isn’t Fooling Anyone

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

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

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

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The medical care that helps no one The book-bans debate has finally reached a turning point. Don’t execute people in public.

Culture Break

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

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

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

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

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

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

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

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Nante Niemi went missing for two days while camping in remote woodland in Michigan state.

Donald Trump is the clear GOP front-runner for 2024. This isn’t news—he has dominated most polling since the day Joe Biden was sworn in. Despite leading the GOP to a historically bad midterm, being saddled with a dismal 25 percent approval rating, and becoming the first former president to be indicted, his prospects for winning the Republican nomination are only growing stronger.

Since the indictment, Republicans—including those running against him—have rallied to Trump’s defense. His fundraising has surged. And he’s racked up endorsements. Meanwhile, his Republican opposition is floundering. Nikki Haley is apparently double-counting her fundraising. Mike Pence is getting booed by party hard-liners. Asa Hutchinson, Tim Scott, and Vivek Ramaswamy toil in also-ran obscurity. Ron DeSantis is the only candidate within hailing distance of Trump, but his campaign is sputtering.

Over the course of hundreds of focus groups I’ve conducted, a large chunk of GOP voters have made clear that they would be content with a nominee other than Trump in 2024—preferably a “Trump without the baggage”–style candidate. They like that the former president is, in their words, a “fighter.” But after eight years of Trump tweets, taunts, and tantrums, they’re open to—in many cases eager for—new alternatives. So how is Trump on pace to run away with the nomination?

For a while, DeSantis looked like a plausible contender. In my focus groups, Republican voters admired the Florida governor’s “aggressiveness,” favorably citing his decision to ship migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Others said they liked his approach to the pandemic and approvingly quoted his unofficial campaign slogan: “Florida is where woke goes to die.”

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

But I’ve seen a marked change in recent weeks. Trump and his super PAC are trying to paint DeSantis as a deficit hawk hell-bent on slashing Medicare and Social Security. These kinds of attacks are aimed at tying DeSantis to the establishment in the eyes of voters—a view that’s starting to creep into the focus groups.

“As I started to learn more about Ron DeSantis and where he is on the political spectrum and how he’s voted in the past, now I’m not sure I’d vote for the man,” Sharon, a two-time Trump voter from Illinois, told me. Others called him “alienating” and said they “aren’t necessarily comfortable” with his policies.

Criticism of his culture-war crusade against Disney has come up as well. “Everything about that is why I’m not necessarily a big fan of him,” said Wesley, a Republican from Maryland. “I get the impression that he very much governs to the people on the internet more so than the people in his state.”

Colleen, a Republican from Georgia, called DeSantis’s war with Disney “a little goofy,” saying, “It’s Disney World! Leave it alone.” Informed about DeSantis’s suggestion to build a prison next to the theme park, Ruth—a Michigan Republican—exclaimed, “Why would you do that? That’s terrible.”

As the base sours on DeSantis, it’s coming home to Trump. When I convened a group of GOP voters the day after Trump’s indictment, their assessment was nearly unanimous: “It’s a complete distraction and it’s a waste of time.” “It’s being blown out of proportion.” “Just ridiculous and a terrible direction for us to go.”

We asked one group whether they had donated to Trump before the indictment. Only three out of nine had, but after the indictment, all nine said they would. None said another indictment or arrest would change their minds. And none thought Trump should drop out.

“As far as a mug shot goes, he’s going to market the hell out of that,” said Chris, a two-time Trump voter from Illinois, imagining a future arrest. “Every one of us is going to buy one of those shirts.” Most hands went up when I asked who would buy one.

In the most recent group, five out of seven participants said they would vote for Trump if the primary were held that day.

One of the peculiar pathologies of Republican-primary politics is that even Trump’s competition feels unable to criticize him. Case in point: After Trump was indicted, DeSantis called the move “un-American,” Pence called it “an outrage,” and Haley said it was “more about revenge than it is about justice.”

They are in a trap of their own making. For eight years, Republican leaders have defended Trump at every turn—from the Access Hollywood tape to “very fine people on both sides.” From the first impeachment to January 6 to the second impeachment.

They thought that by covering for Trump they were tapping into his power, but they were actually giving away their own—mortgaging themselves and their reputations to Trump’s lies and depravities. By defending him then, they have made it impossible to credibly accuse him of anything now.

[Read: The GOP’s “abusive relationship” with Trump]

This problem is compounded by the deep relationship that Trump has cultivated with Republican voters. He’s been a constant presence in their lives for eight years—or, for Apprentice fans, much longer. They defended him on Facebook and argued about him over Thanksgiving dinners. Millions of them have voted for him twice.

DeSantis, in contrast, became a national figure only about 18 months ago. Some Republicans like his anti-“woke” stunts, but the fracas with Disney shows that this will get him only so far. The shallowness of this attachment is allowing Trump to define DeSantis for a national audience before DeSantis has the chance to define himself.

“I don’t know enough about him. I would have to learn more to see where he stands on a lot of things,” Sandy, a North Dakota Republican, said of DeSantis in a recent focus group. Many others echoed this idea.

The Trump camp is gleefully filling that information vacuum. The former president has called DeSantis “a total flameout,” “highly overrated,” and “a really bad politician.” His super PAC is skewering DeSantis as a pudding-fingered entitlement-slasher and “just another career politician.” DeSantis’s response has been almost nonexistent.

Unless the Republican field coalesces around an alternative soon, Trump will almost certainly cruise to the nomination—just as he did in 2016. Today, Trump is in the pole position, and gaining. Fox and CNN lifted their shadow bans on him. And, thanks to the indictment, he’s back in his sweet spot of aggrieved victimhood.

Already, parts of the Republican establishment are resigning themselves to another Trump coronation. Although DeSantis was once their great hope, the plan now—once again—seems to be to sit back and pray that the Democrats take care of Trump for them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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