For the past several decades, Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, in New Hampshire, has hosted a frequent flier with no known credentials. It comes and goes as it pleases, always bypassing security; it carries no luggage, not even a government-issued ID.

But unlike the other passengers that regularly flock to Pease, the upland sandpiper—a spindly, brown-freckled bird native to North America’s grasslands—has no destination apart from the airport itself. The fields between Pease’s runway and taxiways are now the only place in the entire state where the species is known to regularly reproduce. Each year, about seven sandpiper couples nest in the airport’s meticulously mowed grasslands, fledging roughly a dozen chicks, according to Brett Ferry, a wildlife biologist at the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. Should they be snuffed out, Ferry told me, “that would be it for New Hampshire’s breeding population.”

New Hampshire’s sandpipers aren’t alone in their plight. Across the United States (and, really, the world), all sorts of animals that have lost their natural homes to urban development and human-driven climate change are seeking sanctuary at airports. Vulnerable butterflies have camped out at the dunes near LAX; an endangered garter snake has found one of its last refuges at San Francisco International Airport. Terrapin turtles searching for egg-laying sites have triggered traffic jams on JFK’s runways. But perhaps no group is in greater peril than the Northeast’s grassland birds, which, in recent decades, have found themselves almost exclusively relegated to airports and airfields. It’s a responsibility that these travel hubs never asked for, and mostly do not want. Now the regional survival of many species may hinge on the hospitality of some of the country’s most bird-averse spots.

[Read: A basic premise of conservation looks shakier than ever]

By most accounts, upland sandpipers, eastern meadowlarks, grasshopper sparrows, and other grassland birds have roots in the Midwest, only arriving en masse to the Northeast during the 19th century as European settlers converted massive tracts of land into agricultural fields. The birds found grass short enough to forage for insects in and tall enough to cloak their burrow-esque nests, and their population boomed. But just a century or so later, as America’s farming prospects shifted west, East Coasters began to abandon their fields. Some land regressed into forest; some was developed for other use. Almost as quickly as grassland-bird numbers had surged in the area, they plummeted.

In many northeastern states, grasshopper sparrows and eastern meadowlarks are now listed as endangered, threatened, or of special concern. Upland sandpipers, once abundant throughout the region, appear to have entirely vanished from Rhode Island, according to Charles Clarkson, the director of avian research for the Audubon Society of Rhode Island; they may soon be gone from Vermont too. The birds have several holdouts scattered throughout the region—among them, private farmlands, Maine’s blueberry barrens, even a few of New York’s landfills. But as reliable grasslands continue to grow scarcer, airports in particular “have become disproportionately important,” says Pamela Hunt, New Hampshire Audubon’s senior biologist for avian conservation.

Airports, of course, were never designed to be conservation sites—if anything, their core dictate is antithetical to that. “Our mission at the FAA is safe air travel; that is it,” says Amy Anderson, a wildlife biologist with the Federal Aviation Administration. That mission is very often synonymous with making the country’s travel hubs “less attractive for wildlife.” Airport lawns, which primarily serve as an aesthetically appealing buffer for water runoff and planes that skid off runways, are regularly mowed with blades that can destroy nests; they’re treated with chemicals that kill off the insects that many birds and small mammals eat. Creatures that mosey onto runways, where they can damage hardware or compromise landings and takeoffs, can expect to be shooed away with all manner of noise cannons, lasers, pyrotechnics, or even trained peregrine falcons. During emergencies, animals that can’t otherwise be dealt with may even be shot. When animals end up on these properties, it’s generally not because they’re pristine or safe. It’s “because they have no other option,” Clarkson told me.

For certain animals, these odd real-estate choices have paid dividends. The San Francisco garter snake and its primary prey, the California red-legged frog—federally listed as endangered and threatened, respectively—have found a stable home on SFO property, according to Natalie Reeder, the airport’s former wildlife biologist. Of the half dozen or so populations of garter snakes still found in California, SFO’s is the only one that is not in “really big trouble,” Reeder told me.

[Read: When conservationists kill lots (and lots) of animals]

But SFO’s haven is more an exception than the norm. After many years of sustaining a “very nicely growing population” of burrowing owls—a state-listed species of special concern—the airport in San Jose, California, stopped maintaining the birds’ artificial burrows, and their numbers plunged, says Sandra Menzel, a senior biologist at the natural-resource-management company Albion, who has studied the birds. A survey conducted last year found just one breeding pair at the airport, down from a 2002 peak of around 40. (An SJC spokesperson told me that “the reasons for the decline in owl numbers at the Airport are not fully known,” and pointed out that the birds have been declining in general “throughout the South Bay.”) In the Northeast, too, there’s been “all sorts of conflict,” says Patrick Comins, the executive director of the Connecticut Audubon Society. In his state, he told me, grassland birds staked out territory at Meriden-Markham Municipal Airport—only to later be crowded out by an intensive mowing regimen and space-hogging solar panels. (MMK didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

From the airports’ perspective, having vulnerable species on site is usually more trouble than it’s worth—especially when their winged tenants start to endanger humans attempting flight. Since the late 1980s or so, when the FAA started keeping track, birds and planes have collided more than 220,000 times—incidents that have, at times, downed entire aircrafts. The most serious concerns are usually big, flocking species, such as gulls or geese. But “even a 10-gram songbird, if it hits right, could take out an airplane,” Scott Rush, a wildlife ecologist at Mississippi State University, told me.

The tactics that airports deploy to avoid bird strikes don’t always work. Oregon’s Portland International Airport has, for many years, been aggressively stripping its grounds of vegetation, to the point of exposing the underlying soil, to deter grass-loving geese. “It looks like the moon,” says Nick Atwell, the senior natural-resources and wildlife manager at the Port of Portland. But the anti-goose strategy inadvertently transformed the airport’s landscape into perfect, barren bait for a threatened bird called the streaked horned lark. Despite PDX’s best efforts to keep the larks off runways, they’re now posing a strike risk. Atwell worries that the airport could become, or already is, an ecological sink: a habitat that lures in animals, only to accelerate their decline.

That may have already happened at New Jersey’s Atlantic City International Airport. In the early 2000s, the airport set aside 300 acres of its property as a sanctuary for upland sandpipers and other grassland birds, even modifying its regular mowing schedule in the summer to spare their nests. But within months of the intervention, “things went a little haywire,” says Chris Boggs, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist who’s been working with the airport since the early 1990s. Boggs estimates that total recorded bird strikes skyrocketed by 60 to 70 percent. He remembers scraping broken sandpiper bodies off the pavement, unable to stop himself from tallying up who was left. “We had three,” he would say to himself. “Now we have two.” By 2019, the airport had resumed its regular mowing protocol. It had wanted to help the birds, Boggs told me. Instead, “we were killing them off.”

[Read: The quiet disappearance of birds in North America]

At a few northeastern sites, humans and grassland birds have negotiated a truce. Pease, in New Hampshire, is one; another is Massachusetts’ Westover Air Reserve Base, one of the largest sanctuaries for grassland birds in the entire Northeast. Sandpipers, grasshopper sparrows, and eastern meadowlarks can all be found breeding on its 1,300-plus acres of viable habitat, which are far quieter and less traveled than commercial airports, says Andrew Vitz, the state ornithologist. Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife has aided in several of the site’s conservation efforts, including the planting of bird-friendly grasses.

Replicating those efforts could, in theory, turn more of the Northeast into hospitable grassland. Airports could, for instance, swap out some of their turf grass for hardier native species that require less summertime mowing, as Westover has. But many such proposals still feel like Band-Aids at best, says José Ramírez-Garofalo, a biologist at Rutgers University who is studying grassland birds at landfills. The birds are mostly confined to fragmented, artificial plots of land where people’s needs will almost always trump animals’.

In an ideal world, airports would just be layovers for grassland birds on their way to roomy tracts of protected land that they could call their own. But those habitats no longer exist. “If we truly want grasshopper sparrows and upland sandpipers to be a significant part of the community, it’s going to take a heck of an effort” to create space for them, says Brian Washburn, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture—efforts that people may not be willing to make. Which leaves animals still turning to airports as places of last resort. Creatures’ options are now so limited that even the ones repeatedly booted off the premises will often try to run, slither, or dig themselves back on, says Guiming Wang, a wildlife ecologist at Mississippi State University.

These strange, human-made habitats are now some of the last places in the Northeast where birders can glimpse grassland species and hear their whirring calls. “People from all around the region will come and see them,” Ramírez-Garofalo told me. But with the world’s appetite for travel increasing, experts such as Hunt, of New Hampshire Audubon, worry that even these few stable bird populations won’t be around for long. “It’s perfectly reasonable to think that despite everything we’re doing, they’ll still blink out,” she told me. As airports’ human clientele grows, their tolerance for their wild and rare residents may only further shrink.

When Lena McPeters first messaged her now-girlfriend on Facebook Dating, she didn’t know much about her; she just thought Camilla was cute. But pretty quickly, she realized: They didn’t speak the same language. Like, not even a little bit.

Lena, a hotel manager in Lubbock, Texas, spoke only English; Camilla, a factory supervisor who lived five hours away in Dallas, spoke only Spanish. She told Lena she’d been messaging her with the help of a translator app, and taught her to do the same—and then they just kept talking, each replying in the other’s language. Often, something wouldn’t translate well, so they’d have to keep trying to rephrase it. About three months in, Camilla visited for the first time.

On the way to pick her up at the bus station, Lena was terrified. How would they get through this first car ride without saying anything? But they ended up having a ball. Lena’s friends were totally charmed by Camilla. Keeping a steady back-and-forth conversation was tough, but still: “She was drinking with everybody, and she was dancing with everybody,” Lena told me. “And when she noticed there was silence in the room, she filled it.” (Using the translator app.) Every time someone told a story, Lena would use the app to summarize it for her.

Roughly 10 months later, they still don’t speak each other’s language fluently. But they do live together.

[Read: The scariest part of a relationship]

Today, multilingual relationships are more possible than ever. Globalization, accessible travel, and social media have made it easier to meet people who speak different languages. Language-learning resources such as Duolingo are widely available, and translators like the kind that Lena and Camilla use are becoming quicker, more accurate, and more popular. It’s a good time to fall in love across a language barrier. And when I talked with people who did, I came to think that they know something special about the guts, humor, and patience that falling in love with anyone requires.

What drew these partners together, if not conversation? The people I spoke with weren’t necessarily having profound discussions off the bat. (Though the same is true of plenty of partners who speak the same first language.) Regardless, they felt they got a strong sense of the other person, some vibe that didn’t just come from their words. That didn’t surprise the researchers I talked with; Nai Chieh Tien, a psychologist who has studied multilingual relationships and specializes in intercultural couples and family therapy, told me that a remarkable amount of communication is nonverbal. We might find someone appealing for any number of complex reasons—not always because of their eloquent philosophical musings, but maybe some mix of their smile, the way they hold themselves, the tone they use when talking to other people.

Some couples even felt that a language barrier helped relieve the typical weirdness of a first date; it shook them out of being serious or anxious. Sabrin Hasbun, an Italian Palestinian writer, grew up hearing family lore about her parents’ funny, awkward multilingual courtship. When they were first dating, for instance, her father didn’t know enough Italian to express his feelings for Sabrin’s mom. Instead, he’d sing her Frank Sinatra songs; she couldn’t understand English, but she knew that the music was romantic. So when Sabrin met her now-husband, Sergio, at university in the U.K., she started learning his native Spanish; in the meantime, they got by using her very basic English and the smidge of Italian that Sergio knew. But she didn’t find it scary—it was fun, even “liberating.”

People like Sabrin who tackle a language barrier for love might be a self-selecting group; they’re probably game for a learning experience in the first place. Research has shown that people high in open-mindedness and social initiative seem to feel more at ease in their multilingual relationships. Jean-Marc Dewaele, a linguistics professor at Birkbeck, University of London, told me that those who are more neurotic might worry that the obstacles are insurmountable. “I think you need to be a little bit of an optimist,” he said. Tien has also found that these partners tend to demonstrate openness and curiosity—after all, they’re there, willing to stumble through a conversation. A romance like this might be really hard for some people. But maybe those aren’t the people who are trying it.

[Read: What second-chance couples know about love]

The couples I talked with had thrown themselves into learning to communicate. But still, of course, they’d run into misunderstandings: At one point, Sabrin told Sergio she wanted to spend New Year’s Eve out rather than with his family, and said that if he decided to stay in, she would go celebrate without him. He interpreted her words as meaning she would break up with him. They realized they’d confused each other only weeks later, she said, when he professed how glad he was not to have lost her: “And I was like, What?”

Even with the right words, partners with different linguistic backgrounds might interpret things in very different ways. Finnish people tend to be quite comfortable with silence, Erika Sorvisto, a student in Finland, told me; their partner, Morris, who speaks Dutch and Bosnian, used to worry that Erika was mad at him. “Are you okay?” they said he’d ask. “You haven’t said anything in, like, five minutes.” Several people mentioned to me that the phrase I love you is used much more casually in English than its translation in some other languages. Ingrid Piller, a sociolinguist at Macquarie University in Australia, told me that in her native German, “I love you is … almost creepy.” When I asked what term she would use in German to express strong feelings, she said, “You don’t verbalize it so much.” Erika and Morris do declare their love—but in the other’s native language.

That’s partly because I love you really does mean something different in different cultures. But Erika also told me that when they and Morris hear it in their first language, it just seems to hit harder; “it has more feeling.” That’s a common phenomenon, Dewaele told me, related to what researchers call “emotional resonance”: Even when people speaking non-native tongues know what the words mean, they don’t always feel their power. When you acquire your first language, he said, the phrases you learn become loaded with meaning: Thinking of a swear word, you might imagine your teacher’s face when you used it inappropriately as a kid. Using an expression of love, you’re probably repeating what you’ve heard other people use—perhaps your parents while you were growing up, or in years of rom-com viewing. But you might not have those “rich emotional connotations” attached to subsequent languages you learn, at least not at first.

That can be especially tough in conversations you’d likely have with a partner: flirting, professing affection, arguing, discussing the future. You might feel like a bad actor on a stage, Dewaele told me, performing lines without really knowing if they’ll land. “It’s a minefield,” he said. “You don’t know whether these words will get you a slap in the face or, in fact, won’t be strong enough to express how you feel.”

You might even feel like another person altogether. In one study, Dewaele found that 85 percent of participants reported feeling somehow different when they switched languages. That could just be the lack of emotional resonance, or the clumsiness of not being fluent. But many people describe wholly separate personalities in their non-native tongue that might not be explained away by those factors.

Partly for this reason, the language a couple chooses to use together can shape their power dynamic in complicated ways. If they speak a language that’s native to only one partner, the other won’t just have to work harder to communicate; they might never feel like their most authentic self in the relationship. (Notably, women adopt their partner’s language much more commonly than men do.) When couples use a lingua franca—a third option that’s neither party’s first language—they might stand on more equal footing. But they might both sense that some crucial part of their identity is lost.

Several sources told me they worried that they and their partner might never know each other’s true selves. One of them was Asemahle Giwu, a teacher living in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her first language is Xhosa, and her partner’s is Sotho, but they speak English together. She told me that when she speaks Xhosa, she’s louder and funnier; when she speaks English, she’s “more deep” but also “a bit toned down.” And when her partner speaks Sotho, she finds him to be less of a gentleman, more “bad boy-ish.” Neither side is bad, but the shift itself makes her uncomfortable, especially when she notices it in herself. “Am I a hypocrite?” she wonders. “Am I trying to be someone I’m not?”

But I asked Asemahle if she feels like she’s really not herself when she speaks English—or if she’s just finding a different, but equally true, version. She said it’s the latter. Ultimately, she’s grateful that she’s discovered this new side of herself, and that she’s gotten to witness varied dimensions of her partner as well. “You get two worlds when you’re dating a person who speaks a different language,” she said. “And it’s nice living in both of them.”

[Read: My novel is a love letter my mother can’t read]

The arc of my talk with Asemahle mirrored what seemed like a pattern in most of my conversations: Many of the initial obstacles to multilingual relationships turned into sources of connection and deeper understanding—and eventually a richer life together.

For instance, the potential for miscommunication can lead couples to be more careful with their words, to try to speak as clearly as possible, and to check in more often to see if they’re on the same page. Kaisa Pietikäinen, a researcher at the Norwegian School of Economics, has found this in her studies on partners who use English as a lingua franca. “They’re quite patient in trying to arrive at a shared understanding,” she told me. “Instead of jumping to conclusions, they listen, and they take time, and they ask again, and they rephrase.” That struck me as a good idea for any couple.

Some long-term partners even develop what Pietikäinen calls “couple tongue”: their own unique lexicon that incorporates features of multiple languages. Sabrin and Sergio, for instance, now speak a mix of Italian, English, and Spanish together—and they didn’t even realize they’d been switching back and forth until their friends pointed it out. Sabrin told me that using three languages lets her access a wider range of thought and emotion, because some concepts are better expressed or only exist in one of them.

Even a lack of emotional resonance can be helpful sometimes. On the one hand, it can make arguing particularly difficult. Tien told me partners will say things like “I don’t even know how to start a fight, okay? … I just want to yell in my first language.” On the other hand, a language barrier can give partners some needed emotional distance; it can slow them down, allowing them to cool off—even laugh at the situation. “In the heat of an argument,” Sabrin told me, she’ll sometimes stop and say, “Oh … but can you tell me how to say that in English?” And that breaks the tension. Lena told me the same about using her translator app with Camilla. “How can you stay serious when you’re sitting there staring at each other all angrily with a robot voice behind you?” she said.

Many of the sources I spoke with found their language differences particularly challenging with people outside of the relationship. Sabrin said she felt totally overwhelmed meeting Sergio’s grandmother, who spoke a Spanish dialect that she hadn’t begun to master. She told me Sergio felt the same when he met her family, who spoke Italian so quickly that he felt he had to “close himself off.” Erika sometimes felt excluded hanging out with Morris’s friends, who didn’t want to limit their own conversations by switching to English, and struggled to communicate with his mother, who didn’t speak much English at all. Pietikäinen told me that this is a common dynamic: The partner meeting the friends or family feels isolated and left out, and the partner doing the introducing has to act as a translator rather than just relaxing with people they love.   

And yet, my sources seemed to be tackling this test, too, with the optimism and tenacity that researchers said are so common in multilingual couples. Erika is practicing their Dutch, but they also show Morris’s mom pictures on their phone to illustrate what they mean. The two sometimes bake together—and even though they don’t speak much during, they eat the sweets in each other’s company. “I feel closer to her,” Erika told me.

When I interviewed Sabrin, she said her best friend was visiting and Sergio was practicing Italian with her; they were all laughing as he mixed up words and smushed others together into new ones. And when his family was over for Easter, they had fun teaching Sabrin a new verb tense in Spanish. “It becomes an ongoing bonding experience,” she said.  

Perhaps language learning is an apt metaphor for falling in love. You have to be vulnerable, to admit what you don’t know, to risk messing up and making a fool of yourself. But if you can laugh at yourself, listen, and stick with it, you stand to gain a lot. Dewaele said that he’s told students learning a foreign tongue, “You will learn concepts that don’t exist in your first language, so it will open your mind.” So, too, might a partner, if you commit to understanding them more and more over time.

Things with Camilla haven’t always been easy, Lena told me. Once there was a fire in their building, and when she shook Camilla awake from her nap to tell her to leave the apartment, Lena found she couldn’t relay what was going on. She was frantically trying to explain while she gathered up her cats, and Camilla was just confused. They weren’t hurt, but it clarified just how much a language barrier can matter. Lena was shaken by it.

At one point, they almost broke up. Lena was tired of using the translator, tired of having to keep her phone charged in order to talk to her own girlfriend, tired of constantly working on her Spanish, tired of striving and stretching herself all the time. She worried that perhaps Camilla would never really know her, the version that came out when she was casually speaking English with friends. But when the couple decided that Camilla should go back to Dallas, Lena found she couldn’t bear to buy her the bus ticket. She didn’t want to wake up the next day, she realized, without Camilla there.

Earlier this spring, they had a big achievement: They sat at a bar for two hours without their translator, having a basic conversation using what they’d learned of each other’s language. It gave them hope, Lena told me. Since then, they’ve been spending most evenings without the app—unless they’re gossiping or having long talks—and they happen to make an excellent charades team. Lena has realized that this relationship is making her grow, however painfully at times, more than any other has.

She can’t wait for the day when she and Camilla can stop using the app for good. At that point, which could be years into the relationship, other couples might be growing bored; after the initial rush of getting to know each other, the honeymoon phase could be over. But Lena and Camilla will still have miles and miles of ground to cover—all the stories that were too hard to tell with the translator, the different ideas and selves that a new language can draw out. Lena hopes they’ll eventually move to Mexico, where Camilla is from and where much of her family still lives. “I’m excited to raise kids together and teach them our languages,” she told me. And she hopes that those kids will be inspired by their parents’ history to believe that love is worth working for.

New monitoring system aims to combat deforestation in Michoacan, but locals remain sceptical about enforcement.

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

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

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

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

Isabel: How do you approach debating now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen:

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

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

The Fight Over Animal Names Has Reached a New Extreme

By Ed Yong

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

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

Read the full article.

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P.S.

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

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Phase-3 trials show NmCV-5 vaccine can illicit immune response against the five main strains of meningococcal bacteria.

During a CNN town hall earlier this month, Donald Trump acted as expected. He used the phrase “wack job” to describe E. Jean Carroll, who was awarded $5 million in damages because a jury unanimously concluded that Trump had sexually abused and defamed her. His statement elicited applause and laughter from the mostly pro-Trump crowd. He also described the January 6 insurrection as a “beautiful day” and declared that, if reelected president in 2024, he would pardon a “large portion” of the rioters. Those statements, too, brought applause from the raucous audience.

There was more. Trump called the Black police officer who had shot and killed one of the rioters storming the Capitol a “thug,” falsely claiming that the officer had bragged about the incident. Trump defended taking top-secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate. He wouldn’t say whether he hoped that Ukraine would win the war against Russia. And he spewed lie after lie after lie about the 2020 election and virtually every other topic that came up.

As the CNN anchor Jake Tapper said of Trump, summing up the night, “He declared war on the truth, and I’m not sure that he didn’t win.”

The day after the town hall, I asked a person in the talk-radio world how his listeners had responded. “One hundred percent approval of Trump’s performance,” this individual, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly, told me. “I even tried to get people to call me who didn’t think he did well, but no luck. And I received a number of calls saying they had been either leaning towards [Ron] DeSantis or were firmly in his camp, and they said they have now decided to fully support Trump, based on the town hall.”

The question I’ve been asked more than any other during the Trump era is how Trump supporters—including tens of millions of evangelical Christians and Republicans who have long viewed themselves as champions of “family values” and “law and order”—justify their enthusiastic support for the former president. How do they rationalize their embrace of a man whose ethical transgressions and moral depravity so far exceed that of Bill Clinton, whom many of them attacked in the 1990s on moral grounds?

I’m intentional about trying to better understand the mind of Trump supporters. I read their articles and social-media posts, listen to their interviews, and track the findings of focus groups. I engage them in conversation and reply to their emails, less to debate than to listen. I think I’ve come to understand their perspective, even though I profoundly disagree with it.

[Read: The worst thing to come out of Trump’s town hall didn’t come from Trump]

Trump supporters can’t simply be dismissed as “a basket of deplorables.” Many are devoted parents and spouses, loyal friends and good neighbors, willing to reach out a hand to those in need. I can’t deny what I have seen with my own eyes; I can’t let my own aversion to Trump turn his supporters into caricatures. At the same time, they have aligned themselves with a malignant figure whose corruptions are undisguised. How can these things fit together?

Part of the explanation can be found in the realm of human psychology. None of us live comfortably with cognitive dissonance, the mental stress that results when people’s beliefs and actions come into direct contradiction with one another. This disharmony causes distress, agitation, and self-loathing. It can’t be sustained; something has to give.

The human mind creates defense mechanisms to eliminate such negative feelings: avoiding or ignoring the dissonance, undermining evidence of the dissonance, belittling its importance. What we human beings don’t do nearly enough is change our behavior so that it aligns with values that are estimable and ennobling.

If a person is on a diet and spends late nights eating snacks, they may tell themselves that they’ll work out the next day to burn off the extra calories. A smoker may justify her habit by reassuring herself that even though smoking can cause cancer, she knows people who have smoked and lived long, healthy lives. A man who cheats on his spouse may justify his actions by saying that the marriage was irretrievably broken, that he felt unloved by his wife, that he hasn’t felt happy for many years and she’s to blame.

“By coming up with these rationalizations, people are able to preserve the impression that their behaviors and attitudes are consistent,” Benjamin Le, a psychology professor of Haverford College, has written.

Which brings me back to supporters of Donald Trump. It’s a challenge for many of them, especially those who identify as people of faith, to reconcile what they claim to value—integrity, honor, truthfulness, decency, compassion—with the fact that they support a misogynist who has cheated on his wives and sexually abused women; threatened judges, prosecutors, and election officials; used hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance to pressure a foreign leader to dig up dirt on his political opponent; catalyzed a violent insurrection and engaged in a multipart conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election; dined with white-supremacist and anti-Semites; cheated on his taxes; lied pathologically; routinely used cruel and dehumanizing rhetoric; and promoted political violence.

So what are the psychological defense mechanisms Trump supporters employ to relieve feelings of dissonance, shame, and embarrassment?

First, Trump supporters deny the worst things he has done. Jury verdicts against him are always unfair; impeachments are unjust partisan acts. Investigations of him that have found wrongdoing, all of them, are “WITCH HUNTS.” That is true in perpetuity. So whatever Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Special Counsel Jack Smith find, whatever indictments they may bring, the charges are by definition unwarranted. Trump is always the victim of persecution. “I think I have been violated as badly as anybody that's ever walked,” he recently said.

Trump is not perfect, most of his supporters will concede; he may be rough around the edges—a “bull in a China shop,” in the words of one friend of mine; a “wrecking ball,” in the words of another—and a man who does some unsavory things. But all of that, and far more than that, is acceptable because he is a “fighter” for their cause, which they are convinced is just, true, and right. His conduct may not always be ideal, and you may not want your son to model his life after Donald Trump’s. But more than any other Republican politician, he understands the viciousness of his opponents and will respond in kind. Trump will bring an AR-15 to a cultural knife fight, and his supporters find that to be anywhere from tolerable to thrilling.

Second, Trump supporters catastrophize the threats of the left. It’s one thing to believe, as some of us do, that the progressive movement includes dangerous, illiberal elements that need to be opposed. But that is quite different from believing that if Democrats gain or maintain power, calamity follows and America as we know it dies.

What we’re talking about isn’t just fear; it’s a sense of desperation and impending doom. Trump supporters feel that the political right has lost on every front over the past several decades, even though that’s clearly not the case. Since 1990, for example, the right has gained significantly more power in the courts, in Congress, and in the media—hardly unimportant institutions. Roe v. Wade was overturned after a half century, securing one of the great goals of the American right, and no land has afforded more religious-liberty protections to Christians than the United States today. Yet none of these victories offers much reassurance to people addicted to “doomscrolling,” searching social media for upsetting news.

Moreover, the unwillingness of others to share in their despair—the unwillingness to fight as if our lives depended on the outcome of this or that political election—is viewed as a sign of weakness. All of this is reinforced by a media ecosystem that is constantly promoting narratives that elicit feelings of fright, grievance, agitation, and rage. Those outlets take their cue from Trump, who last year said Democrats are responsible for “blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable.” He added, “Our country is going to hell.”

If the threat is truly existential, then it justifies—indeed, it demands—that patriotic Americans stand with Trump, regardless of his ethical transgressions. To offer anything less than full support would be a betrayal of our nation. A significant number of Trump supporters see themselves as embattled but heroic figures, involved in a great drama, standing against the demise of almost everything they cherish.

[Peter Wehner: MAGA is ripping itself apart]

But this disposition comes with a price. Perfect love may cast out fear, as the New Testament says, but the converse is also true. As Aldous Huxley wrote, “Fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth.”

Third, Trump and his supporters are frantically trying to portray President Joe Biden as more corrupt than his predecessor. If Trump is an innocent man forever being framed, Biden is the head of a “crime family,” according to Trump, who labeled a set of unproven allegations against Biden as “Watergate times 10.”

The charge against Biden is led by the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, James Comer, who declared himself a “Trump man” shortly after the January 6 assault on the Capitol.

Comer’s target isn’t simply Hunter Biden, the president’s son, who has engaged in problematic business dealings. The U.S. attorney in Delaware, David C. Weiss, will soon decide whether Hunter Biden should be prosecuted for crimes related to taxes and a gun purchase. (The investigation into Hunter Biden began in 2018 and initially centered on his finances related to overseas business ties and consulting work, but later shifted in focus.)

However, Republicans are after the president himself, not his son, and so far, despite months of investigation, they have yet to uncover incriminating material about him. That doesn’t stop Republicans from accusing President Biden of wrongdoing. The Trump acolyte Charlie Kirk has admitted that “one of the reasons why Joe Biden is tough to beat is because he’s tough to hate.” Portraying Biden as unscrupulous is one way to change that impression, even if the specific charges made against him are false. If Republicans are able to get at least a draw between Biden and Trump on personal and public morality, they’ll take it.

A fourth justification that supporters of Donald Trump have constructed is that his presidency was an unqualified success, that Trump did practically everything right. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary: failing to build the wall or to get Mexico to pay for it, to reduce illegal immigration, to handle the coronavirus pandemic, to close the trade gap, to narrow the deficit or, pre-pandemic, substantially grow the economy and real wages. The Trump presidency, however, did witness health-care costs and drug prices increasing; income inequality growing; abortions rising after a three-decade decline; homicides spiking, including the largest single-year increase in murders in more than a century; the erosion of U.S. credibility worldwide; a posture of petty feuding with allies and abject capitulation to dictators; and a U.S.-Taliban agreement and subsequent announcement that the American military would withdraw, which had a devastating effect on the Afghan military’s morale and was a “catalyst” for its collapse, according to a May 2022 interim report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. Yet all of these things, and more, are either ignored or explained away.

Let’s assume that Trump supporters believe, contrary to the facts, that every bad thing that happened on Trump’s watch was not because of his policies but in spite of them. Even then, they’re conceding how easily thwarted Trump was and how, in many cases, he was ineffective.

[Peter Wehner: Trump supporters think they’re in a fight to the death]

A fair-minded assessment would conclude that on Trump’s watch, some things got better and some things got worse, some of which he’s responsible for and some of which he’s not. But no one can reasonably make the case that America was markedly better or stronger during the Trump presidency than under either his predecessor or his successor. And certainly America under Bill Clinton, reviled by many on the right, prospered in ways that far exceed anything we saw under Trump. But back then, unlike now, we were told that character mattered.

The psychological phenomenon I’ve described in this essay isn’t exclusive to members of one party or to politics. We all live in ways that are at odds with our deepest beliefs. We all rationalize our shortcomings; we all engage in forms of denial. Each of us has blind spots, seeing confirmation bias in others but not in ourselves. But there are varying degrees of self-deception, different lengths to which we go to justify our decisions. What is so striking is just how much Trump demanded of his supporters. He has gone to the darkest places, and they have followed him every step of the way.

So, will anything invalidate the rationalizations of Donald Trump supporters? Or do his violations bind them to him more tightly than ever? For almost eight years, the answer has been the latter. Trump’s sensibilities have become theirs; they have thoroughly internalized his will-to-power ethic. An extraordinary psychological and moral accommodation has occurred.

If a decade ago you had told Trump supporters that this is the kind of man they would defend, that this is what they would become, most of them would have been horrified.

At this stage, though, for Trump supporters to call him out would be to call out themselves, and that’s too painful for too many people. The greater the ethical compromises we make, the fiercer our justifications become—and the angrier and more frustrated we get at those who won’t go along for the ride.

If most Republicans finally do break with Trump—and at this point, very little evidence suggests they will—it won’t be because of any road-to-Damascus revelation. It will be done respectfully, even reverentially, not because they have rejected his style of politics, but because they sense that his time has come and gone. And if Trump is dethroned as the leader of the Republican Party, whoever succeeds him will have modeled themselves after him. Trumpism will outlive Trump. It’s the cost of the lies we sometimes tell ourselves.

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Of what are you afraid? Not a bomb. In Dar es Salaam the men,
with guns as long as arms, bent under the car to check  
for a ticking and you did not even flinch. Not of snow,
when in New Hampshire a white storm blanketed
the car in minutes and the highway transformed into
a blinding afterlife, skid red, and sightless sounds of metal colliding.
Not of dark, when the motorcycle’s headlight burned out
in the dead of night as we wound down a volcano’s steep body,
the road’s rocky jaw dropping to a rough sea, the free fall inches
from our feet. We fought. Years later, you said
the difference between the two of us was that I always
thought someone was coming to save me.
You said, Meg, if you pull over to the side of the volcano,
an angel will be dispatched, a donkey and a husband and a stable will appear.
If you stop the car in the blizzard, three wise men show up.
If your face moves when they search for bombs, you aren’t mistaken for one.
You said, No one is coming to save me.
You said, I save myself.

                        I said, okay.
                        I said, if you are the bomb then I am the bait.
                        I said, if I am saved by three wise men, what will this cost me?
                        Will I have to drop to my knees?
                        Because no man gives salvation away for free.

But I said none of this. Because when I heard No one is coming to save me,
I held you close like a good woman. Like all the women before me
who know what destroys and remakes, and what is destroyed in the remaking.