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Coffee shops, churches, libraries, and concert venues are all shared spaces where mingling can take place. Yet the hustle and bustle of modern social life can pose challenges to relationship-building—even in spaces designed for exactly that.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we analyze how American efficiency culture holds us back from connecting in public, whether social spaces create a culture of interaction, and what it takes to actively participate in a community.

Hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado, and engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Build community with us! … via email. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”), Gavin Luke (“Nadir”), Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Dust Follows (“Willet”), Auxjack (“Mellow Soul”).

Click here to listen to additional seasons in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Host Julie Beck: I think what I’ve observed in public spaces, especially in my neighborhood, is really just a hustle and bustle. And people are going somewhere specific to do something specific with specific people. They’re sort of on a mission.

Eric Klinenberg: Efficiency is the enemy of social life. What kind of place would allow us to enjoy our lives and enjoy each other more than we do today? What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

Kellie Carter Jackson: You know, people say, like, misery loves company. I don’t think that is true. I think that misery in a lot of ways requires company; it requires kinship. It requires community. So that you are not isolated in your pain.

Klinenberg: What kinds of things would we need to reorient our society around?

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Beck: I’m Julie Beck, senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rebecca Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Rashid: Though I normally am not making a friend at the café, recently there was a girl that was working on her laptop. She noticed I was, too. We started chittin’ and chattin’, and after a few weeks of running into each other so many times at the café, she finally—slightly awkwardly—asked yesterday, “Hey, do you mind if I get your number if you maybe wanted to get a drink?” Very friendly, sweet sort of way of fighting through the awkward.

Beck: I’m so impressed! Of course, people do connect at cafés like you literally just did. And, you know, in Paris or whatever, they may be happy for people to linger and chat all day. But I think the connection that’s happening in those spaces, like, that’s not the purpose of the space; that’s a byproduct. Perhaps a welcome byproduct, but like the point of the space is to make money. The point is to sell you something.

Rashid: It’s a business.

Beck: They’re selling you a coffee; they’re selling you a sandwich. There are several cafés in D.C. that I really like that just don’t offer Wi-Fi, or they give you a ticket where you have like a couple of hours of Wi-Fi after you buy something. And I get why they’re doing that, because they want the customers to cycle through, and they don’t want people taking up tables all day when they could get a fresh paying customer in there.

That may well be good business sense. But if those are the only spaces that you have to maybe just mingle and get to know people that are in your neighborhood, what are the spaces where you can just have friendly mingling, and that’s the point?

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Beck: Eric Klinenberg is a researcher who is really into all of these questions that we’ve been talking about. He’s a professor of sociology at New York University, and he’s an expert on city infrastructure and urban life.

He wrote this book called Palaces for the People in which he talks about this concept called social infrastructure. That is essentially the physical spaces that are available to the public that are designed to facilitate these social connections.

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Klinenberg: If you want to have a transit system like a train, you need an infrastructure to carry the train, right? The rails, for instance, There is also an infrastructure that supports social life: social infrastructure. And when I say social infrastructure, I’m referring to physical places. They can be organizations; they can also be parks. Physical places that shape our capacity to interact.

When you have strong social infrastructure, people have a tendency to come out and linger. And if you live in a poor neighborhood where the social infrastructure is strong, if you’re older, if you’re more frail, if you’re very young, you might spend more time sitting on the stoop in front of your home. You might have a bench that you spend time on, that’s on your street. There might be a diner where you go every day.

And what that means is there are people who are used to seeing you out in those public places on a regular basis. And when it’s dangerous outside, someone might notice that you’re not there. And they might not even know your name. They might just know your face. Maybe they know where you live. They’re used to seeing each other in the public realm.

I grew up in Chicago. And in 1995, just before I was about to start graduate school in sociology, there was a heat wave that hit my hometown and lasted just a couple of days. But the temperatures were quite extreme. It got to about 106 degrees. Chicago did what it always does when there’s a heat wave: It turned on air conditioning everywhere you could go. And the power grid got overwhelmed. And very soon the, you know, electricity went out for thousands of homes.

At the end of this week, in July, Chicago had more than 700 deaths from the heat. And this was the pre-pandemic time. So people dying in a city in a couple of days seemed like an exceptional thing. We hadn’t gotten numb to it yet. I was really curious about what had happened, and the first thing I did was I made these maps to see which people and places in Chicago were hit hardest. And at first blush, the map looked exactly like you would expect it to look. The neighborhoods that were hit the hardest were on the south side and the west side of Chicago. They were the historically segregated Black, poor, ghettoized neighborhoods.

Beck: Right. Chicago’s extremely segregated.

Klinenberg: And when there’s a disaster, you know, poor people living in segregated neighborhoods will fare the worst. So I looked a little more closely at the map, and I noticed something that no one else had seen—which is that there were a bunch of neighborhoods that were located right next to places that were among the deadliest neighborhoods in Chicago. But this other set of places wound up being extraordinarily healthy.

Beck: So these were neighborhoods that were geographically really close to each other and shared a lot of characteristics, but they were having really different outcomes?

Klinenberg: Matching neighborhoods. Like, imagine two neighborhoods separated by one street—same level of poverty, same proportion of older people. The risk factors that we ordinarily look for were equal. But they had wildly disparate outcomes in this heat disaster. That’s the kind of puzzle that you live for when you’re a social scientist.

Klinenberg: And so, what I observed is that the neighborhoods that had really high death rates, they looked depleted. They had lost an enormous proportion of their population in the decades leading up to the heat wave. They had a lot of abandoned buildings. Even the little playgrounds were in terrible shape, not well-maintained.

And across the street in the neighborhoods that did better, the public spaces were much more viable. They didn’t have abandoned homes. They didn’t have empty lots. There were community institutions, grocery shops, coffee shops, a branch library, places that anchored public life.

In those neighborhoods in Chicago, people knocked on the door, and they checked in on each other. And as a consequence, if you lived in one of these poor neighborhoods that had a strong social infrastructure, you were more likely to survive the heat wave. People in the neighborhood across the street, the depleted neighborhood—they were 10 times more likely to die in the heat wave. And that difference was really quite stark.

Beck: So you said when we talk about regular infrastructure, we’re talking about what carries the train, right? So what carries the train of our relationships? What are the actual railroad tracks?

Klinenberg: Think about a playground, for instance. We know that one of the core places that families go to meet other families in their neighborhood is a playground. All kinds of socializing happens when parents or grandparents or caretakers of all kinds are pushing a swing and looking for a companion, someone to talk to.

Those conversations at the swing set often lead to a shared little break together on the bench or maybe to a picnic and then a playdate, and then two families getting to know each other and communities growing. If you took playgrounds out of American cities and suddenly there was no playground, our social lives would be radically different.

We act as if, you know, in the Old Testament, on the fifth day, God said, “Today I give you the playground and the library,” and it’s our birthright to spend time in them. We forget that these are achievements. These are human inventions.

We built giant parks, theaters, art spaces. We created a good society based on a vision of radical inclusion. Not quite radical enough. People have always been left out of our public spaces. There’s no history of this idea that is complete if it doesn’t pay attention to how racial segregation works and how racial violence works and how gender excluded some people from some public realms. All of that stuff is there in the history of public space. I think in the last several decades, we’ve kind of come to take all these places for granted.

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Beck: What is the connection between having places to just hang out and vibe and having a community rally together and support each other in an emergency like a heat wave?

Klinenberg: Well, one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. You can have places where people hang out and vibe and don’t get active and engaged on important civic matters. I generally argue that public spaces and social infrastructure—they’re a necessary condition for having some sense that we’re in it together, and we have some kind of common purpose. But they’re by no means sufficient. And so that has to do with programming; that has to do with design; that has to do with this feeling of being part of a shared project. And some public spaces give us that feeling, and others really don’t.

Beck: Yeah. I’m curious about the mechanics of how that even happens. I feel a bit of a divide, where being in public is for being active and relaxing is for home. And so much of the public space around me is bustling—people are engaging in commerce, or they’re just walking from here to there, and there are no opportunities to slow down and talk to each other. And I don’t know that we would. Does that make sense?

Klinenberg: Yeah. I mean, it makes perfect sense, because efficiency is the enemy of social life. You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.

And in fact, one of the really striking things, I think, for Americans when we travel to other countries is to see the extent to which people all over the world delight in sitting around: the culture of the souk or of the coffee shop or the wine bar or the plaza.

Beck: Oh, yeah, the five-hour dinners in France. Like, you can’t find that waiter to get your check. You know?

Klinenberg: (Laughing.)

Beck: He’s gone.

Klinenberg: Because the point is not to pay the check. The point is to be there. And it’s hard for us to come to terms with just how forcefully the ticking clock shapes our capacity to take pleasure in social life.

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​​Rashid: It’s interesting that you see the no Wi-Fi on the weekends as a way to cycle people out of the space. I thought that was the café or coffee shop making a grand gesture in favor of relationship-building.

Beck: Oh. I guess I’m just more cynical than you. But I think it’s because they need to make money. I go to the public pool with friends. I get books from the library. There is a very hot ticket at our local library, which is like a semi-regular puzzle swap that they do. Oh, and my partner and I, we’re very cool.

We go and we swap puzzles with the community. But I don’t feel like I am really building new relationships or getting to know my neighbors at these places, or even at these events. Like, I love these resources. I don’t want to lose them. I enjoy them, but I just kind of use them by myself or with people I already know.

Rashid: Yeah. And I think the norm of keeping to yourself is only fueled more by things like social media and being able to look away and be on your phone. And it’s interesting how just that shared physical presence with people also doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re closer.

Beck: Yeah, just because you go to the café doesn’t mean you’re going to look up from your phone.

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Beck: Do you think that to some degree we’ve replaced our relationship to social infrastructure with social media?

Klinenberg: I think of social media as like a communications infrastructure. It definitely helps us to engage other people. It’s a kind of impoverished social life that it delivers in the end.

Think about how life felt in April of 2020 when we were in the beginning of the pandemic, because we were all in our homes cut off from each other. We were talking to each other all the time, right? But we were physically isolated, and we were miserable. So that’s life where social media is social infrastructure.

Beck: I do wonder whether there is an individualism that is also affecting our living choices and the way that we engage with the social infrastructure.

Klinenberg: I discovered that the United States is a laggard, not a leader, when it comes to living alone. Living alone is far more common in most European societies than it is in the U.S. It’s more common in Japan. It’s more common in France and England. Scandinavian societies have the highest levels of living alone on Earth, and Germany is higher than the United States.

And what I learned about doing this research is that what really is driving living alone is interdependence. When you have a strong welfare state, and you guarantee people the capacity to make ends meet without being tethered to a partner who they might not want to be with.

Beck: Do you think, then, that solo livers rely on social infrastructure more?

Klinenberg: They do. They’re more likely to go out to bars and restaurants and cafés and to gyms, to go to concerts. I just published a paper in a journal called Social Problems with a graduate student named Jenny Leigh, and we interviewed 55 people who were living alone in New York during the first stage of the pandemic.

We talked to them about their experiences. And it was really interesting. Like, they talked very little about social isolation, and they didn’t complain that much about kind of conventional loneliness, like lacking people to talk to. But they felt physically lonely; they felt physically isolated.

And they really missed the kind of familiar strangers we see when we spend time in a neighborhood who just give us a sense of where we are and that we belong. They felt [an] acute kind of pain that was slightly different than the pain of the common conversation we had at the time.

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Klinenberg: One of the problems we have now is most cities, suburbs, towns in America have public libraries there. There’s neighborhood libraries. The building is there. And the buildings are generally not updated there. They need to have new HVACs. They need new bathrooms. They need new furniture, let alone new books.

Some are still not accessible to people in wheelchairs. I mean, there’s all kinds of problems with libraries, just physically, because we’ve underinvested in them. But libraries, unfortunately, have become the place of last resort for everyone who falls through the safety net.

Klinenberg: If you wake up in the morning in an American city and you don’t have a home, you’re told to go to a library. If you wake up in the morning and you’re suffering from an addiction problem, you need a warm place. They’ll send you to a library.

If you need to use a bathroom, you’ll go to a library. If you don’t have childcare for your kid, you might send your kid to a library. If you’re old and you’re alone, you might go to the library. We’ve used the library to try to solve all of these problems that deserve actual treatment.  

And how many times have you talked to someone who said, like, it’s basically a homeless shelter. What’s happened is we’ve stigmatized our public spaces, because we’ve done so little to address core problems that we’ve turned them into spaces of last resort for people who need a hand. And as we do that, we send another message to affluent, middle-class Americans, and that is: If you want a gathering place, build your own in the private sector. So we have a lot of work to do.

Beck: It’s really interesting to me to hear about the ways our environment either encourages or discourages interaction and community-building, because I think on some level I’ve always felt like if I don’t have that ideal sense of community that I really want, then it’s my fault for not trying hard enough. How much of this is just on the government? And there’s not much we can do besides, like, pestering aldermen.

Klinenberg: I think it’s on us to build the political institutions that we want and also to build the public places that we need. So, one of the miracles of American life is that we have these public libraries in every neighborhood.

Nobody would support the idea of a library if we didn’t already have it. It’s like a utopian socialist fantasy, the library. And the miracle is that we have them. If you think about the American public-park system, the public schools, like: We built all these things.

The reason so many of us feel like it’s so hard to hang out and enjoy the companionship of other people is because the signals we get from each other and from the state and from the corporate world tell us that we’re freakish and weird if we want that kind of collective experience. Everybody knows happiness is in your phone. It’s at the $22 cocktail bar. It’s at the $9 coffee shop, the $14 ice-cream cone. Those are the things that are supposed to give us pleasure.

And I think we need to start to imagine what a different kind of society might look like and how to rebuild public spaces that are the 21st-century version of the 20th-century library. What are the kinds of places we’d like to design so that we could be with each other differently?

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Beck: Another important piece—back to actually finding community in these spaces—is people acting on the opportunity to connect that they present. It’s hard if I’m going to the puzzle swap, and no one’s talking to each other. I mean, I’m guilty of going in and grabbing my puzzles and getting out and not really making a big effort to chitchat and make a new relationship there.

And it’s hard to feel like you’re just taking that on yourself to try to make that happen. It’s also: Do you see people welcoming you? Do you feel comfortable going up to someone to strike up a conversation? Do you see other people mingling? The design of a place can totally encourage or discourage interactions, but obviously so can the behavior of the people in the place.

Rashid: Right. Like, the friend I made at the café is kind of a rare occurrence, because normally people in the café are working, reading, or, as you’ve said before, with people they already know.

Beck: And the social norms of a café are going to be different than the social norms of a public pool or a local sports team or a church. In a café, everyone kind of has different agendas, like Becca’s out there making a friend. But, like, some people are just reading a book by themselves or having that one-on-one lunch with somebody. But in a church, for instance, like generally speaking, there’s a norm that we want to be in community with each other. We have shared values, and we’re here to connect.

Jackson: My church has been everything to me, because those relationships have just been so transformative and so deep. Every single highlight of my life, although like the church, my church has been there for me.

Beck: Kellie Carter Jackson is a historian and a professor from Wellesley College, and we recently spoke about the culture of care in her community. So in her life, she’s found that places like the church and her kids’ school have smoothed that path to building those deep relationships of support, because both the spaces themselves and the people in them have been welcoming.

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Beck: Do you feel like finding a church in the new places where you’ve moved to? Has that helped in getting to those deep relationships quickly?

Jackson: Yes, absolutely. I will say that when we lived in North Dakota, almost all of my friendships either came from the military or the church that we were going to. People were just so warm and so kind. And, you know, you would join like a Bible study group or a mommy-and-me group, and those became fast friendships.

When my husband was going through extensive training, he was in Memphis. He was out of town for like three months. And I was overwhelmed by three kids. They did a meal train and just brought—I hate cooking! [Laughter.] And so my church small group was like, “Hey, how can we take off some of the burdens since Nathaniel’s gone? What can we do?” And so, just to know that people would go the extra mile for you when you’re really taxed is huge.

Beck: Yeah. I guess I see, you know, church as sort of a natural gathering place because it has those kind of communal values built into the institution. How does your faith sort of influence your approach to community with your neighbors?

Jackson: I think that I have always tried to model what it means to be a good neighbor regardless of my neighbors’ religious affiliations. I grew up in the church, so my parents modeled for me hospitality. We always had people over at our house all the time. We have a big family; I’m one of seven. So it’s like, what’s one more? What’s six more? What’s 10 more?

(Laughter.)

Beck: Just bring ’em on in.

Jackson: Bring them on in. That is how I show my friendship, show my love, show my care. It is by making you feel welcome and by giving you a place to rest. And it does not always extend to people we know. Like, when I think of neighbors, I think that extends even into my kids’ school. So my six-year-old had a real hard time because not only had my mother-in-law passed away, but her great-grandmother had died as well. So we had like two big losses—a mother and a grandmother—in about a three-month period.

Jojo is my middle child’s name. Jojo was just distraught by it. Like, she cried for 30 minutes, and I couldn’t calm her down. I sent her teacher an email, and I said, “Hey, Jojo’s having a really hard time. I sent her to school with a picture of her grandmothers. She might keep it in her backpack; she might take it out. But I just want you to know, like, this is what’s going on.”

Beck: Yeah.

Jackson: And her teacher did something—gosh, sorry I’m getting emotional …

Beck: Aw.

Jackson: Her teacher saw her with the picture … and she said, “Jojo, do you want to share that with the classroom?” And so she got up in front of the classroom, and she talked about her grandmothers and just who they were. And the fact that her teacher gave her space to do that—it just meant, like, I don’t know her teacher very well, but I know that she loves my kid. And I know that she created space for my kid when she was having a hard time emotionally, and that she would do that for any kid. I am always overwhelmed by just the goodness of neighbors, and people’s capacity to provide comfort during hard times.

Beck: I mean, I think there’s so much go-it-alone-ness, um, in our culture a lot of the time. And like, sometimes you can get by with that. Like, it seems lonely, but like, you can do it, and—

Jackson: Can, but should you?

Beck: Yeah. But when you are in such a place of intense grief, like, it becomes very clear that you can’t.

Jackson: You can’t, and you shouldn’t. I mean,If I hear one more person say “God won’t give you more than you can bear,” I will want to punch them. But I think that we have these clichés that are so empty. You know, just giving people the freedom to feel what they feel, to act upon those feelings without feeling judged, to be heard. You know, most people just want to be heard.

You know, I think in the Black community, we care for one another. There is this idea of kinship. This idea that whether you are blood related or not, this is your auntie, this is your uncle, this is your cousin, this is your fam. That we see each other, that we recognize each other’s humanity, that we show up for each other. There is something about that familiarity of Blackness that connects people, that is both spiritual and cultural. And so, if you grew up in the church, I think those ideas are fortified for you of how you should show up and care for other people.

Beck: I mean, how do you get to that place with neighbors and people in your community without a church?

Jackson: I think it’s tough.

Beck: It is tough.

Jackson: I think it’s not impossible. I mean, there is something about a shared set of values sometimes that comes from the church, that allows making friendships to be a little bit easier. But if you don’t have that, sometimes I think that trust can be an issue. Like, I’ve had to let people know who are outside of my faith: You can depend on me; you can trust me. I’m not going to judge you. That our home is welcome to anyone, of all backgrounds.

Because I think people can sometimes be skittish around people that they think are religious. And I never wanted anyone that I connected with to feel like that.

I had a friend who was in graduate school whose mother passed away, and I remember reaching out to her, sending her food or a gift card—like, how are you doing? How are you feeling? You know, here’s some literature that helped me, because my siblings had passed away maybe about a year before. And she was a little startled, actually, by my response, I think. Because she said, you know, I grew up in a community of atheists. She said, we just don’t have a practice or tradition. That the idea of bringing food or, you know, sort of like ongoing care was not something that was a part of her tradition.

So regardless of people’s faith, my job as a good neighbor is to help shoulder some of that weight, so you don’t have to carry it all on your own. So I try to remember important dates. I try to remember names, which is why when I meet new people, “Oh, man! Okay, give me more capacity!”

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Rashid: So, Julie, where do you go to build community, or at least feel this sense of community in a shared space?  

Beck: I don’t feel like just sitting out on my front porch, if I had one, or going to a café or going to a specific place is going to make community come to me.

I feel like talking with both Eric and Kellie kind of made me realize that you need both the design of a place and the intentions and the values of the people who are using that space.

The sort of post-college secular world particularly doesn’t feel set up for just spontaneous, easy connection in the same way. If you just have an impeccably designed space where people don’t want to connect, then, like, I guess what you have is the Apple store. And if people really want to connect, and they don’t have anywhere to go to do that, then they’re going to struggle as well.

And even though this is kind of a frustrating takeaway, honestly, it feels to me like if you want that deep, interconnected sense of community outside of a church or a college or an institution that’s built to help you find it, you kind of have to swim against the current a little bit—and find a way to make it for yourself.

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This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Julie Beck. Managing Editor Andrea Valdez. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak.

This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.

Roman Roy was ready. He had written his eulogy for his father—a great man, he would say, great despite and because of it all—on hot-pink index cards. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. He had “pre-grieved,” he kept telling people, and so could be trusted to fulfill, one last time, the core duty of the family business: to love in a way that moves markets.

But Roman failed. His grief overcame him; trying to speak, he sobbed. The funeral that had been so carefully scripted suddenly broadcast dead air. Kendall, ad-libbing, stepped in to speak. Then Shiv. Their addresses—honest, calculating, and hewing to the talking points—were valedictories for Logan, and for their show. They also returned Succession, in its penultimate episode, to its original premise. The declining monarch, the children who compete for his crown, the rotating cast of lackeys and fools: Succession is King Lear, retold for the age of the media empire. And Logan’s funeral punctuates the translation. It transports Lear’s famous first scene to a cathedral on the Upper East Side. Kendall and Shiv are Goneril and Regan, complying with their father’s demands for flattery. Roman is Cordelia, the youngest and most devoted, unable to turn love into a show. Their performances will carve their kingdom, and this is both a ludicrous circumstance and a logical one: Family, for them, is an endless act of politics.

Lear treats loyalty as a fact so remarkable that its presence doubles as a plot twist. Succession is not alone in finding resonance in that concession. Late last month, having cited Lear’s connection to our “savage and judgmental” political environment, Kenneth Branagh shared his plans to stage it in London and New York. The news followed Al Pacino’s announcement that he, too, would be adapting Shakespeare’s play. Lear has been used as a lens for understanding, among many others, Dianne Feinstein, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Trump’s children. (In response to the former president’s indictment in March, the older sons, like Gonerils with Truth Social accounts, offered up theatrical rage; Ivanka’s wan response, meanwhile, had a whiff of both crisis comms and Cordelia.) Maureen Dowd recently treated Lear as a metaphor for American gerontocracy. She was inspired by the fact that, this spring, “the hottest ticket” in Washington, D.C., was the Shakespeare Theater Company’s take on the tragedy—a production channeling the chaos that comes “when madmen lead the blind.”

Lear may be, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called it, “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world”: a five-act ode, sprawling and taut, to the hard work of being human. Aging, selfishness, sacrifice, love, loyalty, grief—the play’s wisdom aches across the centuries. But Lear’s psychological insights are not, I think, what account for its new currency. Its political insights are. Shakespeare’s tragedy is a study of monarchy in crisis—of all that goes wrong when a leader’s problems become everyone else’s emergency. With every new staging, conditions that Americans prefer to think of as relics of an older, sadder time—inherited rule, incompetent despotism, coups—reveal their abiding impact. Lear’s ubiquity, in that sense, is understandable. It is also deeply embarrassing. The play should not translate so well. But here it is, all the same, ancient and acutely familiar. “Was he, maybe … losing it, a little?” Roman Roy asks himself, preparing the eulogy he will not deliver. He is talking about his father but also speaking to us, the audience. We might wonder the same. We, too, are the heirs of kings in decline.

Logan was not supposed to have survived Succession’s first season. The patriarch was originally set to die fairly early in the show, leaving his children to battle in the world he left behind. But the writers changed course. Logan lived. The decision made Succession even more directly Lear-like than it might have been. Succession’s characters speak, at times, with early-modern dudgeon. (“This is the day his reign ends,” Kendall announces as he executes one of many failed plans to usurp his father.) Sandy and Sandi Furness, the Roys’ rivals and sometime collaborators, call back to Horace Howard Furness, the 19th-century Shakespeare scholar, and to the son who shares his name. Connor spends the series living out an extremely Shakespearean joke: Logan’s oldest son, his most obvious heir, plays the role of the illegitimate child.

It is through Logan, though, that Succession transported some of Lear’s most famous iconography to the small screen. He is played by Brian Cox, an actor so famous for performing Lear that he wrote a book about the experience. Logan, the patriarch named for a king, wanders on seaside moors. Ailing, he is confined both to hospital beds and to a body that proves ever more unruly. He rages at his children, and his fury strikes like thunder.

Lear features more references to the natural world than any of Shakespeare’s other plays. Civilization and wildness, the allusions suggest, are never as distant as they might seem. And the two collide, in Lear, in the figure of the king. The monarch is, in the play, nature itself: the natural order exerting its brute continuities. But Lear violates that system. First, he abdicates. Then, he loses control over himself. Both forms of decline lead to destruction for everyone around him. The fragile order crumbles. Among those who seek to take his place, pettiness turns into violence. Bureaucracy gives way to brutality. Humans reveal themselves to be what they have been all along: animals, clawing their way to the top.

Lear’s own fall is both natural—to age, Lear concedes, is to decline—and exceptional. He raves. He acts like a child. Because of that, he is sometimes dubbed the “mad king.” (Performances of the play were banned during the reign of George III, for fear that the fictional monarch might remind audiences of the real one.) The play, though, resists a direct diagnosis for its main character. It treats Lear’s madness less as a conclusion than as an all-consuming question. Has the king lost his temper, or his mind? Where does being mad end and going mad begin? Do the distinctions, in the end, matter?

Succession applies those ambiguities to its own wayward monarchy. The show does not suggest that Logan has lost his sanity. Instead, it asks whether Logan’s brute rationality might be its own form of madness. Succession is, like Lear, preoccupied with the animal world—its hierarchies, its insults, its violence. And the show weaves that dour Darwinism into its treatment of power. Logan is, in every way but the most specific, a king. His health is a market indicator. His body is, like Lear’s, a proxy for nature. Logan makes his own climate. His whims become everybody else’s weather. He is selfish. He is cruel. In him, the assumptions that drive our political systems—market competition, callous individualism, survival of the fittest—come to their logical conclusions.

[Read: The bodily horrors of Succession]

The eulogies delivered at Logan’s funeral, by people who have spent their lives in his storm, are reminders of that. “He had a vitality, a force that could hurt,” Kendall told the crowd. “And it did.”

His pain is eloquent. It is also, in some sense, an answer to the question Roman asked as he rehearsed his eulogy: Had Logan, maybe … lost it? Roman answered that query as he answers most others: noncommittally. (“Who knows?” he shrugged to himself, on the matter of his father’s sanity. “But.”) And his indifference, like Kendall’s acknowledgement of Logan’s abusiveness, is something of a thesis statement for the show. Logan himself is not mad. He spreads madness all the same.

That tension makes for one of Succession’s most jarring, and powerful, tributes to Lear. In the show, as in the play, madness defies definition so insistently that the defiance itself begins to look like the point. Analyze these men however you want; debate their mental states as you will; they’ll keep doing what they do. They will keep inflicting their flaws on everybody else. They will keep seeing themselves not as agents of misfortune but as its victims. The rational mind acknowledges not only the reality of life but also the humility of it: The world does not belong to you; you belong to it. But the unfettered power that both men have enjoyed abets their delusion. Their ravings are arrogance gone awry.

And the delirium, crucially, is contagious. In Succession, it settles on Roman when, finding democracy to be personally inconvenient, he becomes a one-man act of election fraud. Kendall cedes to it when, after his panicked ex-wife tells him that she fears for their children, he dismisses her concerns: “You’re too online,” he tells her. “Okay? You’ve lost context. Everything is fine.” Rava is alive to the world in a way Kendall is not. The violence is spreading. It is violence that the Roys have brought about. But Kendall refuses to see it. He takes refuge in his fantasies. This is madness. It is also his true inheritance.

Succession can be hard to watch. Its satires—insights powered less by ironic distance from the world than by proximity to it—stab and sting and chafe. Logan is most obviously a stand-in for Rupert Murdoch, a man who, like Logan, made billions promising people that the world can be made simpler than it is. But he is also a proxy for Trump. Pundits have spent years analyzing the former president’s mind: Is he a narcissist? Is he gripped by dementia? Are his ravings real or merely extensions of his show? The answer is the same for Logan, and for Lear: It doesn’t matter. Trump does what he does because he can. His mind exerts itself wantonly. His delusions become inescapable.

And then, in short order, they become destructive. Trump is instability incarnate. Institutions pride themselves on minimizing the power of chance over people’s lives. Corporations have boards. Governments have redundancies. Every day, though, Trump lays bare the ease with which the weakness of one man—that addled brain, that cold heart—can settle into a system. The age of Trump is also the age of rampant conspiracism, of misinformation, of, in general, error run amok. Rantings and ravings are no longer exceptional; they are our rule. We live in a world that goes, every day, a little madder.

That is why Lear is so able to reach across the centuries and punch modern audiences in the gut. The typical Shakespearean plot is dense, full of jams and twists; Lear’s, though—teeming with affairs, betrayals, murders, tortures, banishments, poisonings, hangings, blindings—is especially frenzied. Story arcs lead to high-speed collisions; chaos becomes a narrative proposition. The tumult serves one of Lear’s most urgent insights: Power, when it becomes unreasonable, begets nihilism. The critic Harold Bloom has observed Lear’s obsession with absence. (“Nothing will come of nothing,” goes one of the king’s most famous lines.) And the play’s soap operatics abet all the emptiness. They disorient and overwhelm. Even in a play—even with action that is contained, neatly, to a stage—there is only so much chaos we can take before we give up trying to make sense of it all. For Lear’s audience as well as its characters, madness becomes environmental.

[Read: King Lear, from the June 1880 issue]

Shakespeare, in that way, anticipated the discord that shapes, and misshapes, this postmodern political moment. Monarchs, in Shakespeare’s time, rationalized their reigns tautologically: They were proxies for the divine, they claimed, ruling because they were meant to. Their ascendance to the throne, whether achieved through battle or treachery or accident of birth—and the choices they made while in power—were matters of godly will.

Americans, learning that history, typically take pleasure in mocking it. But we defer, too, to dynasties. We structure our society around birthrights. We allow inheritance—familial privilege, educational privilege, generational wealth—to act as a form of destiny. Succession indicts that inclination. The news offers daily reminders of it. “The question is, when Rupert dies, how are the kids aligned?” a former News Corp executive told the reporter Gabriel Sherman about the Murdoch family’s succession drama. This is a throwaway quote that says everything. Inheritance, for the Murdochs, is a game of musical chairs. It is a battle of attrition that will be won or lost in whatever arrangement happens to be there when the music ends. One family’s fortunes will become, in short order, everyone else’s fate.

Succession twists that dynamic, applying the vulnerabilities to its monarchs. At every turn, characters’ grandest plans are waylaid by mundanities. One of Kendall’s early attempts to overthrow his father is stymied by a traffic jam. Another attempt fails—and a man dies—because a deer, at just the wrong moment, leaps into a road. A shareholder meeting that will determine the fate of one of the world’s most powerful conglomerates falls apart because of … a urinary tract infection. (“The piss-mad king,” Roman pronounces the ailing Logan.)

Few would argue that the state of affairs that Succession is highlighting—so much power, concentrated among so few—is optimal. Systems, working well, have redundancies and safeguards, checks and balances. They will not crumble when one person goes rogue. In Succession, as in Lear, the people who will bear the brunt of all the melodrama are largely absent from the stage. That does not mean, though, that they are excluded from the stories. Audiences of Shakespeare’s time, taking in the tale—failing fathers, greedy children, madness, machinations, victors, spoils, chance—would have recognized their own history. And they would have understood, intuitively, the true impact of all the palace intrigue. When kingdoms are divided, the king’s subjects will bear the burdens.

Succession emphasizes the same thing. The show’s first episode closes with a shot of an apartment building in New York City. It is nighttime. The windows are ablaze with the flicker of televisions. The image captures the extent of the Roy family’s power. It also acknowledges the people who live under their rule. It clarifies the stakes of the show’s satire: We believe, still, in the divine right of kings. We merely outsource the old entitlements to newer gods.

A common criticism of Succession, and a fair one, is that the show, over time, has become repetitive. It recycles storylines. It reuses language, themes, and tropes so reliably that the viewer might wonder whether the echoes are resonant or simply redundant. But that recursiveness—Succession’s steady development, over its four seasons, of a sense of no ending—is integral to its messaging. In this universe, despite the appearance of world-shaking drama, very little meaningfully changes. The wealth that gives the Roys their power also gives their show a stifling sense of inertia.

The antics, and the stasis, resonate. We live in the wreckage of consequential absurdity. Succession came from a moment that was similar, in its way, to Lear’s: 1606, the year Shakespeare wrote his tragedy, was a time of relentless crisis. King James had ascended the throne in 1603, with hopes of joining England and Scotland into a unified Britain; he failed. In late 1605, a group of dissident Catholics attempted to destroy Parliament while the king and his family were in attendance. The Gunpowder Plot—“5/11”—was foiled at the last moment. The summer of 1606, in London, brought an outbreak of plague.

Shakespeare channeled the instability into his story of a kingdom fighting for its sanity. His Lear was a telling of another play, the True Chronicle History of King Leir. The original story ended happily, with Cordelia and her father raising an army together and reclaiming their kingdom in triumph. But Shakespeare, a bit like Cordelia herself, chose not to flatter his audience. He changed Leir’s ending, reshaping it to conform to that elemental definition of a Shakespearean tragedy: Pretty much everyone dies. In the process, he created an ageless omen. No redemption will come when the madmen lead the blind. The final tragedy of Lear is not that the king declines. It is that the king declines and takes everyone down with him. His madness spreads. It seeps. It writes itself into every story, and soon enough into history. And then—the greatest tragedy of all—the history repeats.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the paramilitary Wagner Group, has turned the war in Ukraine into his own show since early May. From the trenches of Bakhmut, on Telegram and other social-media channels, he’s decried the Russian military command as worthless and corrupt, particularly claiming that it has deprived his forces of ammunition. At a time of extraordinary top-down control in Russian media and politics, Prigozhin’s outbursts have left a lot of observers perplexed about just what kind of political or military tug-of-war is playing out in front of the international public.

In a video posted on May 4, Prigozhin showed himself surrounded by the bodies of dead Wagner fighters, hurling expletives at Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff. In another video days later, he threatened to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut if not provided with more ammunition. In still another, Prigozhin referred to a “grandfather” who prefers to store ammunition instead of supplying it to the front: “And what if this grandfather is a complete asshole?” he demanded.

Russians on social media often refer to Vladimir Putin as “ded” or “dedushka,” which means “grandfather,” leading many people to speculate that Prigozhin’s rant was a direct attack on Putin. But most likely it was not. In his videos, Prigozhin refers to Putin as the supreme commander in chief who understands the Wagner Group’s needs and gives orders that would fulfill them. These orders are then sabotaged by the military command.

In other words, Prigozhin is sticking with the lifesaving formula known in Russia as the “good tsar surrounded by bad boyars.” To turn on Putin would be suicide for him: He is waging an unequal fight with the Russian military leadership that has come to look like a fight for his own survival, and in which Putin is his only cover.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

Legally, the Wagner Group shouldn’t exist. Russian law holds mercenary activities to be punishable by years in prison. And yet, with Putin’s blessing, the Wagner Group has evolved into a powerful private army with its own heavy weaponry and even its own air force. Its prominence in the current conflict dates to last summer, when the Russian military had suffered disastrous defeats and more fighters were needed on the battlefield. The Kremlin gave Prigozhin access to Russian prisons, where he started recruiting inmates by the thousands. He had no legal basis whatsoever for this recruitment, but the access was a sign of Putin’s supreme trust in him, as well as an example of the Russian president’s signature style of running affairs noninstitutionally, through shadowy informal schemes.

For those prosecuting Putin’s assault on Ukraine, prison inmates have become a valuable commodity and an expendable supply—fuel for an under-equipped war that disdains human life. Starting in 2022, firsthand accounts have emerged detailing the execution of inmates in the Wagner barracks for defection or even for questioning orders. On the battlefield, inmates are sent to their death as cannon fodder. According to Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a charity advocating for prisoners’ rights, out of 50,000 recruited inmates, only 10,000 were still fighting as of January 2023, on account of mass casualties. The majority of the losses were suffered at the Battle of Bakhmut.

The military leadership has never cared for Prigozhin, certainly not since he has started repeatedly and publicly questioning its management of the war. For the FSB, Russia’s principal intelligence agency, as the owner of a private army, Prigozhin is necessarily an enemy of the state. But these enmities couldn’t touch him so long as he had direct access to and support from Putin himself.

Prigozhin’s position has grown less secure since the end of 2022, however. By that point, Putin understood that Russians would accept the mobilization he had announced in late September, and that he had no shortage of manpower to prosecute his war. High-ranking generals seized the opportunity to sideline Prigozhin bureaucratically. Wagner lost access to the prisons, and the Defense Ministry took control of sending convicts to the battlefield (this time, the Kremlin pushed through the necessary legislation to legalize the recruitment).

Prigozhin has responded by stepping up his criticism of the military. He accused Gerasimov of intentionally refusing to supply his troops with munitions. And he has started to cross the boundaries of his designated domain—warfare—and engage in politics.

This spring, Prigozhin hardly seems like the same zealot who, just a few months ago, bragged about executing defectors with sledgehammers and inspired terror in the Russian elite. He has stood up for Alexey Moskalev, the father who was handed a two-year jail term for his 12-year-old daughter’s anti-war drawing. He speaks with respect about Volodymyr Zelensky—a leader whom top Russian officials will refer to only as a “needle freak” or “Ukronazi.” He mocks officials and parliamentarians who urge nuclear strikes on Ukraine.

The irony is profound: A ruthless warlord, who in Soviet times spent years in prison for street robberies and violence, has somehow styled himself as a voice of common sense against an official Russian war narrative that is so grotesque in its hatred that it resembles B-movie villainy. Prigozhin’s common sense is heavily mixed with prison slang and outward aggression, however. Just this week, a member of Parliament noted that the Wagner Group is illegal under Russian law, and Prigozhin’s social networks responded with a video in which Wagner members threaten to come to Moscow’s Red Square and “fuck him and those like him in the ass.”  

[Tom Nichols: The case for increasing aid to Ukraine]

Prigozhin’s popularity is hard to measure, given Russia’s heavily censored commons. But his rise to prominence as a public figure tracks with a growing understanding that Putin’s war with Ukraine has failed and, to an even greater degree, that the military command has proved impotent. That deficiency is now common knowledge across the Russian elite. The retreat from Kherson last fall—led by General Sergei Surovikin, who was dismissed as the head of the military operation afterward and whom Prigozhin treats with meaningful respect—was the war’s only successful military operation, to the extent that it was thoroughly organized and most of the troops and weaponry were preserved.

Putin favors loyalty over achievement. He never wanted his war in Ukraine to produce war heroes; he reserves that status for himself. But now Prigozhin is filling the gap, styling himself as the “people’s commander”: a good soldier, open and straightforward, who has the courage to tell it like it is while the self-indulgent commanders chill in luxury mansions and posh restaurants in Moscow. In one of his latest videos from Bakhmut, Prigozhin is shown addressing his soldiers: “Okay, guys, let’s hope we will finish off these bureaucrats. Our enemy is not the Ukrainian military, but a Russian bureaucrat.”

Defeat is an orphan. The worse the situation at the front, the more appealing Prigozhin’s message becomes to Russians. The question is: Why does Putin allow it? Why does he tolerate a paramilitary warlord exposing the blunders of his military campaign and feeding off the failures of his generals?  

One reason may be practical: Prigozhin’s troops have proved their military efficiency, and they are still needed on the battlefield. Another could be personal. Putin has relied on Prigozhin’s assistance and advice on sensitive matters for a long time, and he has developed a habit of trusting him. Last October, The Washington Post reported that Prigozhin criticized the military command in direct conversation with Putin. One cannot conceive of anyone else allowed in Putin’s chambers who would dare to tell the Russian leader at least some part of the truth about the war.

No trust is indestructible, however. The latest U.S. intelligence leaks suggest that Prigozhin has contacted the Ukrainian intelligence directorate and offered to reveal Russian-troop positions in exchange for a Ukrainian withdrawal from Bakhmut. Will Putin now cast Prigozhin as a traitor and destroy him?

Not necessarily: He can treat the back-channel diplomacy as a legitimate activity. He could even be convinced that Prigozhin was luring the Ukrainians into a trap. Still, Prigozhin is playing with fire. Putin might well tolerate Prigozhin’s attacks on the military command, but as soon as he considers them an assault on the state itself, he will crush him.

Xochitl Gonzalez, a staff writer for The Atlantic, has been named a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary for her essays on how inequality shapes identity, and how gentrification warps the physical and emotional terrains of our lives.

Gonzalez, the author of the best-selling Olga Dies Dreaming and the forthcoming Anita de Monte Laughs Last, has a novelist’s eye. She puts flesh and blood on socioeconomic issues, and is brilliant at describing what gentrification feels like. It’s not just about rent and real estate; it’s more personal and visceral than that. In “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” she portrays gentrification as a sonic phenomenon: Silence is something expected from and imposed upon working-class communities by whiter and wealthier newcomers. She is especially attuned to the peculiar dislocation of gentrification, which makes people outsiders in their own homes.

Her outsider’s sensibility brings nuance and complexity to coverage of Latino issues, including whether there is a real Latino voting bloc, what Spanish means to Latino people who don’t speak it, and the persistence of anti-Black racism in Latino communities. More recently she has brought her wry humor and moral clarity to other stories about class, labor, and culture: the Hollywood writers’ strike, the plight of librarians, the meaning of exercise in the age of Ozempic, the political and biological history of New York City’s rat infestation.

Gonzalez doesn’t just write with outrage about the exploitation of the working class and the disdain for their culture and history. She writes with love about that culture and history—about the parades and the parties and the people in their shops and the grandmothers with their Clorox. She brings that world to life and makes you love it too: summer in the city through an open window, with “motorcycles revving, buses braking, couples squabbling, children summoning one another out to play, and music. Ceaseless music.”

Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?

The sound of gentrification is silence.

I Refuse to Gentrify My Cleaning Products

The cultural legacy of Windex

New York’s Rats Have Already Won

I thought having a rat czar would be an easy win for the city. I was wrong.

‘The Whole Thing Starts With Us’

The stories we love to binge don’t come from nowhere.

In the Age of Ozempic, What’s the Point of Working Out?

The idea that we exercise to get thin may be more dangerous than ever.

The Librarians Are Not Okay

“I’ve been called a pedophile. I’ve been called a groomer. I’ve been called a Communist pornographer.”

The New Case for Social Climbing

Meritocracy is make-believe. It’s all about who you know.

Selena Didn’t Know Spanish Either

Language—even its loss—is part of what makes Latinos Latino.

Salman Rushdie, Offense, and Artistic Expression

Would we defend The Satanic Verses if it were published today?

Democrats Still Have a Latinx Blind Spot

The victory of the ultraconservative congresswoman Mayra Flores in South Texas shows what Democratic campaigns are doing wrong.

America, the Sucio

How a Spanish idiom perfectly encapsulates the U.S.’s relationship with Puerto Rico

Enough With Latino Anti-Blackness

Latinos’ racism can reaffirm white supremacy.

Photographs by Phyllis B. Dooney

One Tuesday this past fall, Senior Police Officer Terry Cherry was struggling to connect with some 75 bleary Clemson University students doing their best to stay awake and not make eye contact with the day’s guest speaker. Cherry, who packs a lot of ebullience and authority into a short frame, was deploying nearly all of it to get their attention.

“Who here wants to be a police officer?” she asked. A few tentative hands went up. “Raise your hand if you want to be an FBI agent.” Twenty-some hands went up.

“What does the FBI do?” A long pause. “Anyone? Raise your hand.” Another pause. “Okay, I get this all the time from college students. Everyone wants to be in the FBI. You know why? Television. Not a single one of you can tell me what the FBI does.” By now, sheepish grins were cracking around the room. “You know what they don’t do? They don’t fly around and profile people that are serial killers and eat caviar and drink champagne on private jets.” (What do they do? Lots of counterterrorism and working alongside local agencies, she said with audible disdain.)

Many police departments across the United States are facing a recruiting crisis. Getting a high-resolution picture is impossible, because the U.S. has about 18,000 police agencies and no centralized data collection, but departments across the country report shedding officers, some as part of natural waves of retirement, some in response to the post–George Floyd moment. What made the indifference at Clemson especially notable was that Cherry was speaking to a criminal-justice class, which you’d expect to be full of students interested in careers in law enforcement. Even there, almost no students wanted to work patrol in a city police department. “Normally when I talk about policing, it's like, Oh, I don’t want to be just a police officer,” she said.

[David A. Graham: America is losing its Black police officers]

Cherry’s job is to change that. Or rather, it’s one of her jobs. Cherry is the recruiter for the city police department in Charleston, South Carolina. She’s charged with keeping the department’s ranks full by bringing in new officers, whether fresh recruits or transfers from other departments, and by retaining officers already on the force. Cherry's ambitions are larger than filling open positions in Charleston: She wants to change policing.

Right now, many people have ideas about how to fix American law enforcement. Many of the most prominent ideas involve shrinking the footprint of police, whether that’s full abolition (on the far left), reduced headcounts, or taking the tasks of responding to mental-health incidents, traffic offenses, and other issues out of the portfolio of police officers—all of which roughly fits under the umbrella of defunding. Even in places where civilian and police leaders want to add more officers, they are struggling to hire, in effect achieving activists’ goal of smaller forces. But rather than defund the police, Cherry wants to rebuild the force, one officer at a time. As she sees it, the best way to do that is to bring in people of all backgrounds, including those who wouldn’t otherwise become cops, producing a department that’s fairer and more representative.

To that end, she’s in constant motion, speaking with a lot of different people. I heard her compare her role to both a sales rep cornering a market and a college-football coach scouting prospects. At a job fair in Maryland, she had learned that several northeastern police departments were planning to attend Clemson’s criminal-justice job fair. Cherry is pretty confident that job fairs aren’t particularly useful for recruitment—mostly good for hobnobbing and handing out swag—but she wasn’t willing to risk out-of-staters snapping up the most promising South Carolina recruits, so she’d driven the four hours from Charleston to Clemson to sew up any prospects a couple of days before the event. After handing out a thick stack of business cards, even to students who said they weren’t interested in law enforcement, she drove home for her stepson’s high-school open house. Then she came back Thursday for the career fair. Cherry had already worked connections to request a spot at the fair close to the FBI.

Officer Terry Cherry of the Charleston Police Department meets with Deputy Chief Chito Walker about her recruiting efforts at headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 22, 2023. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

Police leaders began to speak about a crisis in staffing in the late 2010s. Across the country, tens of thousands of officers were hired following the passage of the 1994 crime bill, which provided federal money to departments to put cops on the beat, but many of those officers are reaching retiremen age. Not enough applicants have been coming forward to fill their roles.

Then came 2020, and the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, which produced massive protests against police and political efforts to defund departments. At the same time that police were struggling to respond to the new scrutiny and sometimes animosity, they were grappling with the coronavirus. The pandemic posed a particular danger to officers, who couldn’t opt to work from home, yet once vaccines were available, a good number of officers hated mandates so much that they quit rather than comply. When violent crime rose across the country in the second half of 2020, many cities that had cut public-safety budgets after the protests scrambled to reverse those cuts or to fill vacancies. Even now, fewer people want those jobs.

[Adam Serwer: The absurdity of comparing vaccine mandates to Nazi Germany]

That top-line description actually understates the challenge. Many agencies have announced initiatives to overhaul their hiring practices, though some skeptics regard much of this as window dressing. The goals include both avoiding some people who might want to join but who would make bad officers and also finding different kinds of officers. Though proponents of such initiatives mean that to include different backgrounds and mindsets and not just demographic diversity, it does include increasing the numbers of women, Black people and members of other racial minorities, and LGBTQ people in the ranks. The post-Floyd reckoning has made that task even harder, as some of the people agencies want aren’t feeling warm to careers in policing. Combine that dynamic with the wave of retirements, and you get large agencies that are actually seeing their diversity backsliding.

Last year, the chief in Durham, North Carolina, had to go on patrol to ease staffing shortages related to a 13 percent vacancy rate. Some 20 percent of jobs in the Philadelphia Police Department were empty. Chicago reported nearly 1,000 empty spots for patrol officers alone. New Orleans has lost about one-fifth of its force since 2020. After the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, some current and former officers there have blamed shoddy and hasty training by a department frantic to fill its ranks. This makes Charleston an outlier: Less than one-tenth of jobs is unfilled.

The Charleston Police Department has several things going for it: The city is beautiful, the climate is nice, the pay is better than in most other departments in the state, and the overall environment is friendly to law enforcement. “There’s an element of support in this part of the country, in this region, in the state, in the city, for police,” Charleston’s chief, Luther Reynolds, told me. “I talk to my counterparts in other parts of the country, and they don’t get that kind of support.”

He’s tried to use those built-in advantages to modernize his agency. “I’d rather go 100 officers short than hire somebody who does not deserve to be in this uniform.”

CPD hasn’t had to settle for major vacancy problems or accept subpar applications in large part because of Terry Cherry. She talks a lot about stereotypes—she complains that after Floyd’s murder, police officers were seen as all being like Derek Chauvin—and she herself doesn’t match the ones most people have about cops. To start, she is not a tall, clean-cut straight white man, though she does style her hair in what she calls a “man cut”: buzzed short on the sides, combed over the middle. She’s gay. She’s slowly working toward full sleeves of tattoos on both arms. She tried for a long time to hide those from her parents by wearing long sleeves until she just couldn’t bear the heat of a Charleston summer. Her father worried that the ink would keep her from moving up in the department, which cracked her up. “I was like, ‘I'm a little gay woman, like—what the hell, you think that’s gonna stop me? You’re crazy. You think tattoos are gonna be what it is?’” she told the Clemson students.

Cherry works at her desk at headquarters in Charleston on February 22, 2023. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic) Left: Trophies decorate Cherry’s office at the Charleston Police Department on February 22, 2023. Right: Cherry’s office features a photo of a female police officer at CPD headquarters in Charleston. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

Cherry doesn’t come from a traditional policing background, either. She grew up in Boone, North Carolina, a hippie college town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her parents—“ultra-Democrats,” as she puts it—were professors at Appalachian State University. For college, Cherry went about as far away in distance and style as she could, studying theater at UCLA. But as she approached 30, in the middle of a recession and with her movie-star dreams fading, she decided to follow her brother, a U.S. Capitol police officer, into law enforcement. And when she couldn’t find a job with a department in California, she broke her vow to never live in the South again and moved to Charleston, where her parents were planning to retire, and joined the police department.

Like pretty much every officer, she started on patrol. While working that job, Cherry read One Tribe at a Time: The Paper That Changed the War in Afghanistan by Jim Gant, a former Special Forces officer, about building relationships with locals in Afghanistan, and wondered whether she could apply its lessons to policing. She persuaded her bosses to let her start a special problem-solving initiative, but her fellow cops were not impressed. “They called me ‘hippie,’ called me a ‘hug-a-thug,’” she recalled. “They called me all kinds of things.” But the initiative started helping solve crimes, and the department noticed. When Reynolds was hired as chief, he selected her as a recruiter because he was impressed by her energy and her success working with the city’s Latino population. Cherry was shocked, in part because the job usually went to a more senior officer.

“We wanted her because she has so much energy,” Reynolds told me. “Everywhere she goes, she adds value … There’s nothing magical about that. She doesn’t have a golden horseshoe or anything. That’s just from her hard work.”

Her work ethic was important, because there wasn’t much for her to take over when she started, in 2018. With Anthony Gibson, a young sergeant who is Cherry’s opposite in many respects—tall and clean-cut, soft-spoken where she is loud, aphoristic where she is voluble—she implemented a strategic plan she’d written and started building a team. Since then, she’s recruited about 40 percent of the current department while also conducting research, writing academic articles about policing, speaking at national conferences on recruiting, and pursuing a doctorate in public administration at Valdosta State University, in Georgia.

Charleston has a history of racism, from slave auctions to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter beginning the Civil War to the 2015 massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, and in 2019, the department voluntarily embarked on a racial-bias assessment conducted by an outside consulting firm. The auditors found “significant progress” but also racial disparities in traffic stops, vague policies on use of force and professional standards, and poor accountability measures. CPD has adopted a progressive approach in other areas, including a focus on evidence-based policing; officers, including Cherry, participate in the Justice Department’s selective LEADS Scholars program, which trains mid-career officers in scientific research.

“The Terry Cherrys of the world need to have an environment where they can prosper and they can be free to express themselves,” Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told me. “Policing traditionally hasn’t allowed that in ways that it needs to … and not every part of policing is ready for that yet.”

Cherry greets the forensics team, which usually works at a location off-site, at headquarters in Charleston on February 22, 2023. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

Jeremy Wilson, a professor at Michigan State University who studies police recruitment and retention, first encountered Cherry at a conference. She immediately struck him as someone he needed to remember. They’re now working together on a paper on police retention.

What sets Cherry aside from typical officers also makes her an asset in trying to recruit nontraditional officers. She speaks cop fluently, but she’s equally conversant in the language of Millennial social justice and casually cites the Buddha. “I’m in the LGBTQ community. I’m very proud of that,” she told me. “But I’m also a police officer. I’m also equally proud of that.” Cherry speaks, with only a hint of irony, about “fighting the man” in pushing for social change. She rolls her eyes at the cavalcade of “dead white guys” assigned in the political philosophy class she’s taking for her doctorate and analyzes power dynamics in terms of “privilege.” She introduced and teaches a training course for officers on gender identity in Charleston. Don’t call her a liberal or try to place any other political label on her, though.

“I don’t think about it that way,” she said. “I love being a police officer … But that does not mean there’s not room for improvement in policing. Anyone who says that is a lunatic.”

Similarly, she said her approach to recruitment isn’t to try to find people from specific demographics to join the police. The end goal is a force that looks like society, but her method for achieving that is to cast a wide net and get the best cadets she can.

“People are attracted to the person selling the product. I’m not going to say it’s all my magnetic personality, but being nice to people makes the difference,” she told me. That basic kindness also happens to be what she’s looking for when she meets a prospective officer.

Left: Cherry changes into her “outdoor uniform” at headquarters in Charleston. Police officers are required to wear this uniform whenever out in public on duty. Cherry is preparing to go to a recruiting fair at the nearby Citadel. Right: An enlarged badge hangs on the walls at CPD headquarters in Charleston. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic) Cherry stands at her recruiting table at the Citadel in Charleston on February 22, 2023. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

But none of that soft stuff was her main focus at Clemson. Her problem was not fixing policing in the long term; it was getting a room full of tired, maybe bored undergraduates to see law enforcement as an enticing career path. One typical way to do this is to emphasize the traditional advantages of civil service: good benefits, early retirement, strong pensions, and public respect. The problem is that these are things of the past. The pay isn’t always high enough to entice the groups that departments want to attract now, especially when recruits know the job doesn’t come with the same public respect that the profession commanded in earlier times. What’s more, everyone knows that. So Cherry leaned into it.

“We’re the generation of being liked. Are we not?” She revved into full theater-kid mode, roaming across the front of the classroom in a CPD polo, cargo pants, and duty belt, throwing exaggerated shrugs and facial expressions at the class. But she told the students that if they wanted to see more social justice in law enforcement, the change would have to come from inside. So, she asked: Who wants to be a cop?

“If you won’t do the work, and you won’t do the work, and you won’t do the work, why should I do the work?” she said. “I shouldn’t. That’s what you think. Okay. Well, you know how long it takes me to quit? Two weeks. Today, I put in my leave slip. I say, ‘I’m done with policing.’ And I quit. Two weeks. You know how long it takes to train someone to do policing? A year. Or more, for them to be good.”

And then what happens? She pointed to places where wealthy residents have started their own private police forces, many with cops moonlighting, leaving poorer citizens to fend for themselves: “I’m sorry; did you think the rich wouldn’t get their security?”

Many law-enforcement advocates argue that defunding the police is a bad idea, because it doesn’t actually produce more justice. This is Cherry’s way of bringing that point down from the broad scope of policy to the personal level of career choice. Cherry returned to a point that I’ve heard reform-minded cops make many times: You can’t make policing pretty, but you can and should make it a lot fairer. She wants to convince people to accept the former in order to achieve the latter. Even the best policing sometimes requires using force. “It looks awful. It’s violence,” she said. “Everybody thinks they can do our job now. But no one wants to do it.”

This pep talk cum guilt trip might seem like a tough sell. But when the class was over, many more than the two timid hand-raisers approached Cherry to talk with her, ask for tips, or collect a business card. Almost all of them were women.

Cherry leaves headquarters with her recruiting table kit in Charleston. (Phyllis B. Dooney for The Atlantic)

Getting recruits to apply is the first step. You still have to get them onto the force and keep them there. Early one morning last fall, Cherry was holding a clipboard on the side of a track at The Citadel, the venerable military college in Charleston. It wasn’t hot yet, but even at that hour, the humidity wafting off the Ashley River was oppressive. Specifically, it was oppressing two aspiring Charleston police officers.

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At most police departments, applicants have to pass a physical abilities test, or PAT. In Charleston, that includes a bench press (indexed to percentage of body weight), sit-ups, then a 300-meter run, push-ups, and finally a 1.5-mile run.

These tests are a subject of debate in the profession, especially with so many agencies facing staffing challenges. Pretty much everyone agrees that cops should have some sort of fitness standard, because the job often requires physical movement. But as with so many aspects of policing today, a divide has opened between older-school cops who favor keeping things the way they’ve always been and reformers who find the specific requirements to be less important than a recruit’s holistic potential.

Cherry is an evangelist for fitness, warning the aspiring officers that cops who don’t exercise struggle to deal with stress and can end up divorced and with drinking problems. But she also bristles at accusations that changes to entrance requirements designed to attract nontraditional officers represents “lowering standards,” noting that as a short, gay, tattooed woman, she would have been excluded from many departments until recently. “I don’t wanna be a token,” Cherry said, but she believes that different life experiences make for innovation and creativity in the profession. And discrete skills are easy enough to impart. “I can teach you how to shoot. I can teach you how to drive. I can’t teach you to be a nice person.”

Before anyone could teach these two recruits, though, they would have to get past the PAT, and things weren’t looking good. The first, a young former bartender, breezed through every step until he hit the push-ups and got overheated; he eventually bowed out of the test. The second, a veteran, had passed a similar test in the military but said she was a little out of shape. She lagged behind her comrade through most of the tests but outlasted him on the push-ups. By then, however, she was too worn out to complete the longer run in enough time to qualify. Cherry, running in place alongside, half coaxed and half harangued her to at least finish the distance walking.

Cherry was encouraging in the moment, giving disappointed-coach vibes. She reminded the applicants to train before retaking the test, gave them some tips, and even offered to run with them if it’d help. In a recruiting study the department conducted in 2021, recruits said that one reason they decided to apply was that they felt Cherry and others took a personal interest in them and their families. Back at her desk later on, however, Cherry was frustrated that they didn’t prepare better for a simple test with transparent standards.

But she didn’t have time to dwell on it. She had an inbox of emails to answer from recruits, some of whom she wanted to take some on ride-alongs. She had more recruiting trips to make, she was teaching her gender-identity curriculum to another department, and she was participating in a police-centered social-justice fellowship. Cherry also had a full schedule of presentations in Las Vegas, San Diego, Dallas, and two in Washington, D.C., including one at the Department of Justice—plus another on Zoom, because she couldn’t find funding to travel to Iceland. Somewhere she had to squeeze in her doctoral studies.

Is it sustainable? Cherry probably can’t maintain her current pace, and in any case, she doesn’t want to. Going into recruitment was not her career plan. She still has aspirations to work on the department’s drug task force and apply for promotion to sergeant. Someday, she hopes to lead an agency of her own, something her colleagues see as certain.

“I told her, ‘I have no doubt that you’re going to be chief one day,’” Wilson told me. “I have no doubt she will accomplish anything she sets her mind to.”

Sometime soon, she’ll rotate to a new job. Gibson plans to change roles around the same time, giving the whole recruitment-and-retention team new leadership. Transitions like this are hard at any organization, but especially for one fronted by a charismatic individual. If Cherry is the one-of-a-kind officer who so many people who’ve met her say she is, then Charleston can’t expect to find another one of her waiting in the ranks of the department, regardless of how well she’s done her job. As I followed her, I wondered whether her success was just about her being the right person. No matter how many evidence-based studies and strategies an agency follows, someone has to implement them. I wondered whether Charleston will just revert to the national mean, struggling to fill its ranks once Cherry moves on.

She and her bosses are aware of this challenge. Cherry told me that she intended to leave her successor a strong foundation, but that whoever took the role next would have to find a way to make it work for them. Reynolds told me the test of the Charleston Police Department as an organization will be whether it has effectively built structures that can survive a change in personnel. That’s the challenge for policing more broadly too: To provide safe streets and just law enforcement, the profession will need to learn lessons from places like Charleston about how to build sustainable systems for hiring and retaining good officers.

For now, though, Cherry is still on the beat. Two days after speaking to the Clemson class, she was back at the university for its job fair, where a long line of students wanted to talk with her about her work and the department. Even more satisfyingly, she reported, “I was more popular than the FBI.” Not bad for just a police officer.