Americans have long worried that immigrants will take their jobs. Henry Cabot Lodge, who championed restrictive immigration laws as a U.S. senator, described foreign-born workers in 1891 as a “great reservoir of cheap labor” that was “constantly pulling down the wages of the working people.”

Emma Lazarus, a contemporary of Lodge, presented a different point of view. Inspired by the Statue of Liberty, she wrote the 1883 poem “The New Colossus,” and her words “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” were later installed at the statue’s base.

[From the May 2021 issue: America never wanted the tired, poor, huddled masses]

The tension between Lodge and Lazarus—between economic self-interest and humanitarian ideals—continues to define our immigration debates. And yet, in a crucial way, both perspectives share the same flawed premise. A growing body of research suggests that immigrants are primarily neither job stealers nor a call upon our charity. Rather, they are overwhelmingly job creators.

If there are a certain number of jobs in an area, and immigrants settle there, it may seem intuitively true that immigrants will take jobs at the expense of native-born workers. Indeed, Lodge found this point “too obvious to need comment.” But he and his ideological heirs make two mistakes. First, immigrants don’t just add to the labor supply; they also add to labor demand. By joining a local economy, immigrants increase demand for goods and services—such as housing, food, and transportation—which in turn expands the need for local workers. This helps explain one of the most famous research findings in labor economics: David Card’s study of the Mariel boatlift from Cuba to Miami. From May to September 1980, approximately 125,000 Cubans arrived in Miami. Half of them settled there, increasing the local labor force by 7 percent. Nevertheless, Card found no negative effect on wages or employment levels in Miami.  

The second mistake made by the Lodge school is to think of immigrants only as workers or potential workers. This leaves out one of the most important ways in which immigrants participate in the economy: as employers. Immigrants create new businesses, and these businesses create new jobs. In fact, immigrants are dramatically more likely to start a new business than native-born Americans are. In a recent study, my co-authors and I analyzed the country of origin for the founder of every business created in the United States from 2005 to 2010. Our findings suggest that immigrants are 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to start a business. These are mostly small businesses, with just a few employees each—single-establishment restaurants, auto-repair shops, beauty salons, retail outlets, and so on. But immigrant founders are overrepresented as founders at every level of employment size, from firms employing a handful of workers to firms employing hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands. (Consider the likes of Google, eBay, Yahoo, and Tesla, or Dow, Dupont, Merck, and Pfizer before them—all founded or co-founded by immigrants.) When we added the numbers up, the results were striking: Immigrants to the U.S. create so many successful businesses that they ultimately appear to create more jobs as founders than they fill as workers. Furthermore, we found that immigrant-founded businesses pay wages at least on par with those of other businesses.

This result does not appear to depend on where exactly the immigrants come from. Immigrants to the U.S. start businesses at the same rate, and at all eventual employment sizes, regardless of whether they were born in OECD countries (which are mostly in Europe and have an income per capita that is 3.5 times higher than the world average).

One might still be concerned about regional differences. Immigrant entrepreneurs may create jobs in certain places, and even have a positive net effect on the national economy, while immigration disproportionately hurts non-immigrant workers in other areas. To analyze this possibility, we can return to the Mariel-boatlift example. The boatlift provided what economists call a “natural experiment.” Miami received an unexpected shock to its local labor market; other cities did not. This was for idiosyncratic geopolitical reasons: Fidel Castro announced to Cubans that if they wanted to leave, they could go down to Mariel and set sail, and he wouldn’t stop them. Those who emigrated went to Miami and not to comparable U.S. cities because Cuban émigrés were already there, and Miami was easy to reach by boat. The end result was the kind of randomly timed event that economists love to study.

[Read: The accidental experiment that changed men’s lives]

Two recent, independent projects drew on this approach to analyze the economic effects of the Age of Mass Migration (roughly 1850 to 1914). As with the Mariel boatlift, immigrants during this period typically came in discrete waves, driven by economic or political events in their homelands. They tended to settle where their fellow nationals had already come and in regions they could reach by rail, which was expanding West. (Think of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, about Bohemian immigrants settling on the Nebraska plains.) Examining the local impacts of these regional immigrant waves in cities and counties across the United States, the studies’ authors found that regions that experienced an influx of immigrants saw better economic performance. In the immediate years after the immigration, these areas experienced increased employment, even for American-born workers in sectors that drew immigrant labor. In the very long run, places with higher historic immigration levels saw less poverty, less unemployment, and higher per capita income.

At the national level, the economic case for immigration is related but broader. Today, the United States faces substantial economic challenges. Productivity growth has slowed. Government debt is alarmingly high. Our society is aging and retiring, with fewer Americans paying taxes and more relying on Social Security and Medicare. Immigrants can be a key solution to these problems. With their entrepreneurial potential, they can expand the workforce, drive technological progress, and increase overall growth.

Both major U.S. political parties say they want to create jobs and support America’s workers. Seeing immigrants clearly in the light of these goals calls for a fundamental shift in perspective. Progressives often tell very particular job-market stories, arguing that immigrants do jobs that Americans don’t want to do. Voters, however, are understandably skeptical that immigrants exist in some separate universe of jobs. The more accurate argument is that with immigration, there are many more jobs to go around. Immigrants start companies, creating more opportunities for everyone.

It’s not hard to see why this would be. To immigrate is to take a risk. It is to brave an ocean or a desert, or to cross the Darién Gap on foot. Immigrants create a new life for themselves. We should not be surprised that they are exceptionally entrepreneurial once they arrive.

And so, Lazarus’s poem needs a correction. Yes, many immigrants arrive after a difficult journey. But from an economic point of view, they are defined by their energy, not their weariness. We should say: Give us those who seek a better life. They will return the favor.

Support for this article was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Was the sexual revolution a mistake? From the 1960s through today, the majority of feminists would instantly answer “no.” Easier access to contraception, the relaxation of divorce laws, the legalization of abortion, less emphasis on virginity, reduced stigma around unmarried sex—all of these have been hailed as liberating for women.

But in the past few years, an emergent strand of feminism has questioned these assumptions. “Reactionary feminism”—the name was popularized by the British writer Mary Harrington—rests on a premise that sounds far more radical today than it once did: Men and women are different. In her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argues that individual physical variation “is built upon a biological substrate. Liberal feminists and trans activists may do their best to deny this, but it is still true that only one half of the human race is capable of getting pregnant, and—failing the invention of artificial wombs—this will remain true indefinitely.” Perry also argues for “evolved psychological differences between the sexes.” Men are innately much hornier, more eager for sexual variety, and much less likely to catch feelings from a one-night stand, she believes. Modern hookup culture serves men very well but forces women to deny their natural urges toward seeking commitment, affection, and protection.

These are heretical thoughts. For more than a decade, the dominant form of American feminism has maintained that differences between the sexes—whether in libido, crime rates, or even athletic performance—largely result from female socialization. Anything else is biological essentialism. The feminist scholar Catharine Mackinnon recently declared that she did not want to be part of “a movement for female body parts … Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.” This view extends to the assertion that male and female bodies do not differ enough to justify strict sex segregation in sporting competitions or prisons, domestic-violence shelters, and public changing rooms. Recently, a reporter asked the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, for a response to parents who worry about the safety of daughters competing in sports against genetically male athletes. Jean-Pierre responded with a terse smackdown. The reporter’s question, Jean-Pierre said, implied that “transgender kids are dangerous” and was therefore itself “dangerous.”

The reactionary feminists have no patience for this line of argument. In her new book, Feminism Against Progress, Harrington writes that the internet has encouraged us to think of ourselves as a “Meat Lego,” hunks of flesh that can be molded however we want. For women, that involves suppressing the messy biological reality of the female body—taking birth control, having consequence-free casual sex, even outsourcing pregnancies—to achieve something that might look like equality, but is really just pretending to be a man. “Realizing my body isn’t something I’m in but something I am is the heart of the case for reactionary feminism,” she writes.

Reactionary feminism is having a moment. Harrington recently toured the United States, where Feminism Against Progress was plugged in The Free Press, the heterodox equivalent of a glowing New York Times review. At the recent National Conservative conference in London, she shared the stage with Perry, whose book covers similar themes. Another NatCon speaker was Nina Power, a former leftist who is now a senior editor at Compact, an online magazine whose editors declare that they “oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.”

[Helen Lewis: Why so many conservatives feel like losers]

All three women are British—which is no coincidence. In Britain, where I live, feminism has developed around the assumption that women belong to a sex class with specific physical vulnerabilities. In America, the movement has been filtered through a progressive legal tradition of outlawing discrimination against a variety of marginalized groups, and because of the decades-long abortion fight, American feminism relies heavily on the concepts of choice and bodily autonomy. In the view of many mainstream U.S. feminist writers, Britain is TERF Island, a blasted heath of middle-class matrons radicalized by the parenting forum Mumsnet into conservatism and “weaponized white femininity.” The response of some British feminists is that, in practice, the agenda of mainstream American feminism has shriveled down to the abortion fight and corporate-empowerment platitudes, and is hamstrung by its strange refusal to accept the relevance of biology.

That said, Harrington was radicalized by Mumsnet, which she started reading more than a decade ago. “At the time, I was still a fully paid up Butlerite,” she told me in clipped English tones. She was referring to Judith Butler, the high priest of queer theory, which argues for the subversion of categories and norms. In her 20s, Harrington hung out in bohemian communities online and offline, and sometimes went by the name Sebastian. “My first glimmers of ambivalence” about queer theory, Harrington said, “were when I realized that pretty much every butch woman I’d ever dated had subsequently transitioned, and now thought of themselves as a man.” As a married mother of one, living in a small town, she went on Mumsnet and met other women who shared her ambivalence about the new ideology around gender.

Both Power and Perry had similar experiences that peeled them away from the progressive consensus. Perry’s was in the early days of motherhood, realizing her deep connection with her baby—and her economic dependence on her husband. Power, a scholar of Marxist and continental philosophy, told me that her apostasy was driven by a “general frustration with the progressive movement. It’s just gone mad.”

Inevitably, reactionary feminism’s focus on sex differences has been welcomed by many on the political right—who enjoy portraying liberals as reality-deniers and themselves as no-nonsense realists. It has also been welcomed by the manosphere, that loose collection of blogs and YouTube channels whose content melds positive advice and help for men with anti-feminism and misogyny. Perry has appeared on podcasts with Jordan Peterson and Rod Dreher; Harrington’s American publisher is Regnery, the conservative imprint whose top authors include Ann Coulter and Republican Senator Josh Hawley. “I walk a very strange line,” Harrington told me. “The best engagement I get is when my work hits a sweet spot between conservative Catholics, radical feminists, and the weird online right. That’s not a Venn diagram that I really thought existed, but apparently it’s an underserved niche.”

[Helen Lewis: The abortion debate is suddenly about ‘people’ not women]

In her advocacy for marriage and opposition to the birth-control pill, Harrington finds fans among religious conservatives. In her opposition to commercial surrogacy, the sex trade, and gender self-identification, she is aligned with radical feminists. And in her language and arguments, you can see the influence of internet micro-celebrities such as the pseudonymous author Bronze Age Pervert, whose self-published manifesto warned that modern society was replacing masculine strength with phalanxes of weedy “bugmen.” (His book became briefly popular with junior staffers in the Trump administration.)

Reactionary feminists and the manosphere like to cast liberal feminists as daydreaming utopians. Both groups argue that, look, men are men and women are women, and evolution ordained it so. Yes, they say, a small percentage of people are gay or gender-nonconforming, but that doesn’t change an overall picture shaped by millennia of sexual selection. Both groups invoke evolutionary psychology to explain their conclusions on female dating preferences, the reasons men cheat, and why so-called short kings struggle in the dating market.

I asked Stuart Ritchie, an academic psychologist turned science writer who has previously criticized the evidence base for Perry’s claims on porn use causing erectile dysfunction, if he finds this pop-science approach troublesome. He told me via email that evolutionary psychologists stress that their findings merely describe reality, rather than morally endorsing the effects of natural selection—what’s known as the naturalistic fallacy. “Both reactionary feminists and manosphere red-pillers are often committing exactly this fallacy, assuming that everything natural must be good, and that things that are more prevalent in the modern world [than in the past]—contraception, divorce, surrogacy, etc—must therefore be bad,” he added. “That’s not necessarily to defend any of those modern things, but just to say that the arguments used against them are often very weak and fallacious—and that might be the main overarching thing reactionary feminism and the manosphere have in common.”

Because it argues that men and women are fundamentally different in ways shaped by millennia of evolution, reactionary feminism is deeply fatalistic about the possibility of social change. (“Political horndogs will always abuse power,” Harrington claims in a recent article.) In Perry’s book, her belief, derived from evolutionary psychology, that men are uncontrollable sex beasts sits uneasily alongside the assertion that monogamous marriage and children are the optimum conditions for female flourishing. “Her core message seems to be simultaneously that men are usually ghastly and often potential rapists, and yet that women should also try very hard to marry one and never divorce him,” the British journalist Hugo Rifkind wrote after reading it. “Which, I must admit, I found a little unsatisfactory.”

When I asked Harrington how Americans had received her book, she said that Baby Boomers had been more defensive of the post-1960s ethos than younger generations have been. Many Gen Z and Millennial women are disillusioned with the modern sexual marketplace of abundant porn, dating apps, and unfulfilling hookups: In 2021, Billie Eilish told Howard Stern that she’d started watching porn at age 11, and “it destroyed my brain.” In the novels of Sally Rooney, sadomasochism is repeatedly presented as abusive and miserable rather than kinky and fun—much to the chagrin of “sex positive” feminists. In The Right to Sex, the ultraliberal Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan describes being challenged by her own students over what they see as her complacency about violent and misogynist porn. The widespread discontent felt by young people has led to unexpected collisions, such as the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba being interviewed by Church Times, a religious magazine, about her book-length critique of consent-only culture, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. Generation Z might not all agree that “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” as a New York Times trend piece put it, but they aren’t all libertines either.

Reactionary feminists take these concerns to their logical end. Louise Perry’s book begins by imagining the grave of the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who asked to be buried next to Marilyn Monroe. The sexual revolution worked out well for Hefner, she argues—he gained a house full of “playmates” and built an empire on female flesh bared in the name of empowerment. But for Monroe, being the sexiest woman alive brought mostly misery, including a string of men who wanted to bed her for the bragging rights. “There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to those women who follow its directives most obediently,” Perry writes.

[From the September 2021 issue: Sally Rooney addresses her critics]

Reactionary feminism also lionizes motherhood with a zeal that, in the case of Perry and Harrington, feels very personal. Perry wrote her book while pregnant, and Harrington wishes she could have had more than one child. “I came to motherhood pretty late, and I wish I’d started sooner,” Harrington told me. “That’s an ongoing source of regret for me.” Power, who does not have children, is nonetheless sympathetic to the other two women’s pro-family stance. “I’ve spoken to people in their 30s who desperately want to have a family and can’t,” she told me. “There’s something tragic about women who want to have a child but miss the moment. Louise is saying: Be realistic. Think about it sooner than later.”

Unfortunately, these paeans to the nuclear family sound judgmental, no matter how many times the reactionaries insist that they aren’t demonizing gay couples, single parents, and people without children—not least because they hand ammunition to anti-feminists who really do want women barefoot and pregnant.

Harrington’s jeremiad against the pill is the kookiest part of Feminism Against Progress. Put simply, she thinks sex is hotter when it might lead to conception, “because a woman who refuses birth control will be highly motivated to be choosy about her partners.” She lost me with the assertion that the rhythm method is freakier than BDSM because it’s “sex with the real danger left in.” And there’s more: “In a lifelong partnership, the possibility of conception itself is deeply erotic.” If there’s anything less sexy than imagining that your future child will soon be in the room with you, I don’t want to hear it.

While Perry’s book specifically castigates “those conservatives who are silly enough to think that returning to the 1950s is either possible or desirable,” renouncing effective birth control would immiserate many women and imprison some in abusive relationships. The pill’s reported downsides, such as irritability and anxiety, also have to be weighed against the toll that decades of childbearing took on previous generations, both physically and economically. While researching my 2020 history of feminism, Difficult Women, I found wrenching letters that the contraceptive pioneer Marie Stopes had received, and I told Harrington about some of them. “I have a very Weak Heart if I have any more it might prove fatal my inside is quite exausted [sic] I have a Prolapsed Womb, it is wicked to bring children into the world to Practicly [sic] starve,” read one from a 37-year-old mother of nine children. Another woman wrote: “He says if you won’t let me at the front, I will at the back. I don’t care which way it is so long as I get satisfied. Well Madam this is very painful to me, also I have wondered if it might be injurious.”

Is that a world to which any woman would want to return? “You can be sure that Stopes would have selected them to underline the point she wanted to make,” Harrington told me. “And the demographic that would have been writing to Stopes would have been self-selecting, for the reasons you would expect.”

Again and again, reactionary feminism offers a useful corrective and then goes to the edge of overkill. For example, its proponents argue for the revival of men’s single-sex spaces: sports clubs, bars, voluntary associations. This sounds unobjectionable, but could bring back the Mad Men days, when deals were sealed at the golf club or the strip club or a weird elitist retreat with a 40-foot owl. But Louise Perry takes the idea further by arguing that women should never get drunk or high “in public or in mixed company,” because of the risk of sexual assault. She thinks this is pragmatic; I find it incredibly bleak. As I told her during an interview about her book, I don’t want to live in a voluntary Saudi Arabia.

Reactionary feminism is not the dominant strain in Britain, any more than its opposite (what Harrington calls “Verso feminism,” after the radical-left publisher) is. Most British feminists, as far as I can tell, are centrists and soft-left moderates, the heirs of a tradition that developed in tandem with labor unions, placing hard constraints on both its conservatism and radicalism. The movement has stayed grounded in material conditions arising from physical sex differences—the challenges of pregnancy and motherhood, the threat of violence by bigger and stronger males. In the absence of a strong religious right and red-state governors banning abortion and passing punitive bills on LGBTQ issues, the gender debate is not so polarized here, and feminist thinkers and LGBTQ activists have more space to acknowledge that their interests are not always identical.

[Read: The unending assaults on girlhood]

Because of fears of being tarred as fascists or bigots, some American feminists refuse to even engage with any reactionary-feminist arguments. That is a shame, because the movement’s final tenet—that the unfettered free market should be kept away from bodies, particularly female ones—is one you might expect the political left to embrace. Reactionary feminism offers pungent criticism of liberal “choice feminism” and its laissez-faire attitude to the exploitation of women who have ostensibly chosen their circumstances. The reactionaries dare to say that some choices are better than others, and that being offered two bad options is no choice at all.

Many liberals support commercial surrogacy: Let women do what they want with their bodies, the argument goes. The reactionaries, meanwhile, reply that the industry is driven by inequality: Rich couples open their wallets, and poor women provide the labor. (They also argue that separating a newborn from its mother is cruel unless absolutely necessary.) Similarly, they note that the shibboleth that “sex work is work” is complicated by the fact that rich men buy sex, and poorer women (and men) sell it. Harrington sees trans medical care, too, as unhappily consumerist—an empowerment movement acting as a sales rep for Big Pharma. She also believes that feminists who advocate for government-supported day care—downplaying the importance of maternal attachment to small babies, in her view—are useful idiots for corporations who want women back at their desks.

“There are a great many conservatives who haven’t noticed quite how much Marxism I’ve smuggled in,” Harrington says. “Don’t put that in The Atlantic.” Then she relents: Reactionary feminism was coined half as a joke—turning an insult into a badge of honor—and half as a “signal scrambler.” If it isn’t provoking you, then it hasn’t worked.

In 2018, Oskar Eustis, who runs the Public Theater, where I advise Shakespeare productions, introduced me to the theater director Kenny Leon. He was hoping to persuade Kenny to direct something for Shakespeare in the Park, and asked me to talk with him. I’m a professor with no acting or directing experience, but I am good at cutting four-hour plays down to size, can explain to actors the difference between thee and you, and have written extensively about Shakespeare’s world. And after a decade or so of advising Royal Shakespeare Company and Public Theater productions, I could tell pretty quickly which directors were great at staging Shakespeare; it turns out surprisingly few.

Kenny was, like me, in his mid-60s. I’m a white guy from Brooklyn; he’s a Black man from the South. I knew him only by reputation: a Tony Award–winning director who had acted, run a couple of theater companies, and done a lot of work on television and Broadway, much of it illuminating Black life in America. We talked about which of Shakespeare’s plays he might find appealing and settled on Much Ado About Nothing, a darkish comedy that could accommodate an African American cast and be set in contemporary Georgia (it helped that the play’s locale, Messina, shared a name with a town not far from Atlanta). After only a couple of days of rehearsals, I could see that Kenny had an unrivaled gift for getting at the essence of Shakespeare. His production was thrilling. Most directors don’t like having a scholar in the room, but Kenny made clear that he enjoyed having me around. And I was learning a lot about the play that could never be picked up from books.

After that run, I saw everything Kenny directed on Broadway—A Soldier’s Play, Topdog/ Underdog, Ohio State Murders—always wondering if he’d return to Shakespeare. So I was thrilled in 2021 when he got in touch and said he was interested in directing Hamlet for a Shakespeare in the Park production. We went to work figuring out how to manage a cut that would allow him to, as Shakespeare put it, show “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” The challenge of making a play first staged in Elizabethan London speak to contemporary Americans was daunting. Watching Kenny direct over the past six weeks, surmounting this challenge, has been among the most gratifying experiences in my career as a Shakespearean. As dress rehearsal approached, I asked Kenny if we could chat while he grabbed a quick dinner in Manhattan’s theater district.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

James Shapiro: I just found an email from you, from February 2021, a month after the attack on the Capitol. And you wrote, “I’m reading Hamlet over breakfast. I do want to do it with an African American cast. Does it make sense to explore this story in a return to the South?” So you’ve been thinking about this play for two years now.

Kenny Leon: Yes. And we indeed set it in Atlanta a year after the start of the pandemic, a little bit after George Floyd’s murder and the racial reawakening. When we spoke, I had also been teaching classes virtually. And I looked into the eyes of the young people, and I saw the fear in them. I saw sadness in them about where our country was, where it was going in terms of politics, religion and almost everything. I realized that this is an opportunity to look at Hamlet through the lens of those students. Can I set this play in 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia, honoring everything that Shakespeare has on the page, only using his words, only substituting original songs that are more contemporary but nothing else? And as I went through that process, I got more and more excited.

Shapiro: And that meant focusing the play on certain of its themes?

Leon: We’re focusing on the relationships. We’re focusing on the domestic part of the play. We’re not focusing on the political, the military part of the play. Because when you get rid of our institutions, our armies and navies, and you get rid of presidents and governors, you’re left with people. People. People make up the military. People make up the government. People. So we focus it down on these people. Now, some of these people may be in positions of power; some may not be not in positions of power. But this is a Hamlet that is, at heart, about people.

Shapiro: There are always going to be those who are purists. A play called Hamlet was staged when Shakespeare came to London in the late 1580s. It wasn’t his Hamlet; it was somebody else’s. I’m sure some Elizabethan purist who came to see Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 1600 walked out of the Globe Theatre saying, “I can’t believe he messed with my favorite play. He made all these changes. How dare he tamper with it in that way?” I’m sure there are going to be people who say that about every Hamlet production they see, yours as well.

Leon: I think Shakespeare left a beautiful road map. I haven’t betrayed his road map. So, you know, he says, there’s a funeral. He says Hamlet’s father is dead. Set it in Atlanta, Georgia, so the funeral’s in southwest Atlanta. These people would sing at the funeral. So as people are walking into the Delacorte [the Central Park theater where Shakespeare in the Park is staged] it’s like, a funeral is in progress. I always wanted Solea Pfeiffer to be Ophelia.

John Douglas Thompson, Solea Pfeiffer, Nick Rehberger, and Laughton Royce in The Public’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, directed by Kenny Leon, running at The Delacorte Theater. (Photograph by Joan Marcus).

Shapiro: Because of her voice?

Leon: Because of her voice, and because of her look. It was important to me to have Hamlet’s side of the family be Black and Polonius’s side of the family be white or mixed race. That was important, to just get that race dynamic in there. And I knew I needed an Ophelia who could sing, because I know she has those two or three songs in there. And in other productions, I think people get bored or irritated by those songs. So I wanted to establish that Ophelia had a beautiful voice, almost like she’s a singer. And then you fall in love with her, and you feel that love for her early on. So then when we lose her, it means something. I wanted to give the women in the play a little more visible strength than in the past. So you have Lorraine Toussaint as Gertrude, playing it like Michelle Obama. And you have Solea, who has a beautiful singing voice. It gives them a little more strength and gives them a little bite to push back on the men.

Shapiro: You know, there’s somebody who’s not credited in the playbill who figured in a lot of moments, crucial moments, in your rehearsals: Leroy. I was hoping you might give him some credit here.

Leon: Yeah, I have a term, I introduced it … My biological father, Leroy, died about three years ago, and he is a guy who never left Tallahassee, Florida, until a year before he passed. You know, he’s a real basic guy. He’s the type of guy that would go into a New York restaurant and say, “Where the food at, boy? Where’s the food?” So I introduced that to the actors early on and said, “I want a play that Leroy could understand. Someone who’s never been to a play, someone who is an Everyman, and they want to be fed the things that theater has to offer.” We just have to, like you said, get to Shakespeare and lose the Shakespearean. So whenever I shout out the word Leroy! in rehearsals, that means I cannot understand what you’re talking about; I don’t know what you mean. So we have to get clear, make it clear for Leroy. So this is a Shakespeare that we’re trying to make clear for Leroy, a country guy who grew up in Tallahassee, Florida, with outdoor plumbing.

[Read: Shakespeare wrote insightfully about women. That doesn’t mean he was one.]

Shapiro: You know, at one point, I heard you ask the actors to “let the culture in.” What did you mean by that?

Leon: I’m always reminded of something August Wilson taught me: It’s that you have to be specific with the story you’re telling, especially culturally. And the more specific you are with the people in the play—who they are, where they come from, what they eat, how they do their hair, what music they listen to—the more specific you are, the better opportunity you have of saying something powerful and impactful and universal for everybody that comes to the Delacorte. So that’s what it’s about. To me, it’s not about reaching Black people or white people or intellectuals or nonintellectuals or theater folks. It’s about reaching human beings, reaching people. And I think by making this specific to Atlanta, Georgia, without changing the words—making the music specific, making the food specific, making their hair specific—we can do that.

Shapiro: John Douglas Thompson, who plays Claudius, told me that he was really struck by how this production is about community rather than Hamlet as an individual. Does that resonate with you?

Leon: Well that’s also because of the cut that you helped me with. It focused on the community, the relationships, the people. So once you focus on the people and you carve around that, it really helps—for one thing, because there’s no way a modern audience is going to sit for a five-hour production.

Shapiro: Well, I hope not, although sometimes they’re forced to. Now, you told me what you needed, and I was the butcher and happy to give you the cut you needed. It was easy because you decided that all this Polish, English, Norwegian, Danish stuff—the European geopolitical parts of the play—didn’t fit the Atlanta story. And once that was gone, we got it down closer to two and a half hours than four-hours plus. And again, it’s all Shakespeare’s language—except for the songs, which, as in Shakespeare’s day, including in Macbeth and Twelfth Night, could be swapped out for newer ones. It seems to me that you’ve been able to bring in more of a cultural story as a result. For example, the Black community’s experience of mourning, of burial, of responding to the dead, of ancestors and their presence in one’s life is particularly striking, and was a revelation for me with my Brooklyn, white, Jewish upbringing. Can you talk about the Ghost a little bit in the context of that?

Leon: The Ghost? Yeah. The Ghost is actually very familiar to my culture. I grew up Black, southern, Christian, but, you know, my culture has a different relationship with the spiritual world. Even if you go to see horror movies we’ve got a different sense of horror movies. We don’t trip down, running away from the monster. Man, we keep going. Or we’re not going to leave the woman in the car, if we think there’s a possibility of a ghost showing up. If you go back to the Caribbean and the African traditions, you can find our relationship to the dead. When Hamlet sees the Ghost, we don’t know if he actually sees it or if the ghost is in him or the ghost is part of him. But we do know that he believes that he is seeing a ghost. And at some point, the Ghost possesses him physically. And I think we pull that off. I think we did a pretty good job of that. But that’s also a culturally specific element that we’re bringing to the show.

Shapiro: Part of that specificity comes through in your choice of Hamlet, Ato Blankson-Wood. I’m just curious, is Ato the Hamlet that was in your head when you cast him?

[Read: Shakespeare write his best works during the plague]

Leon: You know, when I first met Ato—I ran into him last summer—I was consulting on a project that he and some young people were doing about racial awakening, and he took that “to be or not to be” speech, and he personalized it and made it appropriate for what young Black men were going through in America after George Floyd’s death. And so I knew that was the right quality for our Hamlet. And I sort of felt he could deliver that. And now, after working with him, I think it’s a generational performance. No one has quite found the love in that character like Ato has. No one has found the scary part. One of the things we wanted to explore was that idea and definition of what mental health is in our lives today. And he’s embraced that. It’s a scary emotional journey that he’s taking us through. And I just think that it’s a performance of a lifetime. And I couldn’t ask for a better defining moment for that character.

Shapiro: You know, it’s also a defining moment for Hamlet, all these years after its creation, that it could feel so intended for what he does with it, that there’s no tension between the words he’s saying and the character he’s bringing to the role.

Leon: There was one thing Ato asked me when we first started rehearsing: He said, “Can I bring all of me into this Hamlet?” I said, “Yes.” And I feel that it’s a three-dimensional character with a soul and a spirit and a mind and a future. It actually feels like a brand-new play. It feels like a character I’ve never met before.

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

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

Today’s special guest is Maya Chung, an associate editor on the Books team and a frequent contributor to our Books Briefing newsletter. Lately, Maya has been enjoying the style and ambience of the French novelist Maylis de Kerangal, is still thinking about a recent exhibition of work by the surrealist 20th-century artist Meret Oppenheim, and is enjoying post-hype-cycle prestige TV, which includes the fourth and final season of Succession.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

A star reporter’s break with reality The instant pot failed because it was a good product. The fake poor bride

The Culture Survey: Maya Chung

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I really hope to see the Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet in New York’s Central Park this summer. The early pandemic made me realize how much I’d taken for granted living in a city with such incredible theater, so I’ve been cherishing the experience of seeing live theater this past year. And there’s nothing like Shakespeare in the Park—whatever the play, it’s a totally enchanting experience. This year it’s a contemporary Hamlet directed by the celebrated Kenny Leon, who also did this season’s Tony-winning revival of Topdog/Underdog on Broadway. Setting Shakespeare in the modern day can sometimes be gimmicky, but when it’s done right, it captures the magic of his work, and how enduring it remains. [Related: All of Shakespeare’s plays are about race.]

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I don’t love watching shows when they’re at the height of their popularity, because when there’s a ton of chatter, I have a hard time figuring out what my actual, original thoughts are (and if I have any!). So I just finally started watching the fourth season of Succession. Avoiding spoilers while working on the Culture desk here has been nearly impossible, and some of the big bombshells did slip through. But I’m still savoring all of the delicious drama and insult-hurling. [Related: The Succession plot that explained the whole series]

I’m even more behind on The Handmaid’s Tale, which I also just started watching a couple weekends ago. The show came out in 2017, which wasn’t that long ago, but it has been really fascinating to watch it with a little bit of distance, especially given the political climate in which it premiered. Also, the performances are spectacular, and it’s visually gorgeous. [Related: The visceral, woman-centric horror of The Handmaid’s Tale]

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I read Maylis de Kerangal’s short novella Eastbound earlier this year, which is about a young Russian conscript who, once aboard the Trans-Siberian rail, decides to desert and meets a French woman who helps him. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I then read de Kerangal’s book The Heart, a similarly tense novel about the events and characters involved in a heart transplant—including the young man who dies in an accident, the woman who receives his heart, and the doctors and bureaucrats who make the transplant possible. In recent years I’ve sought out books for style and ambience rather than plot, perhaps because of my fickle attention span or perhaps after reading one too many plodding books. But de Kerangal reminded me how transportive it is when an author successfully creates that itching desire to know what happens next—without forgoing an ounce of style.

As for nonfiction, I’ve loved Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes, a book of fragmentary “notes”—which include memoir, theory, photos, and poetic musings—about Black life in America. I’ve been reading the book in blips and spurts over the past couple of months, which in some ways has felt like the best way to read it, because it’s meant I’ve been carrying Sharpe’s intelligent, lyrical voice around with me.

An author I will read anything by: For a long time I didn’t have an answer to this, but as a books editor, you get asked this, or a version of this question, a lot. Though my answer will likely change, right now, it’s Rachel Cusk and Rachel Ingalls. Two very different writers, both completely enrapturing and honest and intricate. [Related: Rachel Cusk won’t stay still.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I loved seeing Meret Oppenheim’s work at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year. I was previously uninitiated in her work but came away from the show entranced by her bleakness and her whimsy. My favorite part came near the end, where, across opposite walls on large sheets of paper, Oppenheim had made a blueprint for a retrospective of her work in Bern. For this, she drew tiny reproductions of her works so that the curators could see what order they should be displayed in. It made me strangely sad to see the artist’s career captured two-dimensionally, in such miniature. But that’s probably the wrong way to look at it; it’s likely that Oppenheim was proudly looking back at her life’s work, taking control of how exactly it should be consumed.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Even the title of Nicole Holofcener’s new movie, You Hurt My Feelings, made me snort—I love a literal title. (When I encountered the similarly prosaic book title Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in this lovely profile of his son, the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, I knew I had to get my hands on a copy.) In the movie, a woman falls apart when she overhears her husband admitting that he doesn’t like her new book. I’m an editor, not a writer, so I was able to laugh heartily at this premise. But I could imagine that for my writer colleagues, this one might hit a little too close to home. [Related: You Hurt My Feelings is a hilarious anxiety spiral.]

The Week Ahead

Season 2 of The Bear (all episodes streaming on Hulu on Thursday) I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Lorrie Moore’s strange new novel, full of death but also the author’s trademark humor (on sale Tuesday) Asteroid City, Wes Anderson’s new film that shows the director at his best, according to our critic (in theaters everywhere Friday)

More in Culture

Long live the delightfully dumb comedy. Paul McCartney: I saw you standing there. Killer Mike’s critique of wokeness Asteroid City is Wes Anderson at his best. What to read when you’re feeling ambitious What’s so funny about dying?

Catch up on The Atlantic

Jack Smith’s backup option Why Trump might just roll to the presidential nomination The pregnancy risk that doctor’s won’t mention

Photo Album

Stunning Cephalopod: Aquatic Life Finalist. The iridescent symmetry of this blanket octopus plays a key role in the cephalopod’s success as a predator. Four species of blanket octopuses roam tropical and subtropical seas—including the Gulf of Mexico, the Indian Ocean, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Mediterranean—searching for fish and crustaceans to eat.

Scroll through winners of the 2023 BigPicture Natural World Photography Competition.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump was arraigned in Miami on charges that he willfully retained documents containing some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and obstructed justice when federal officials tried to retrieve them.

Trump was charged with more than three dozen criminal counts covering seven different violations of federal law. The indictment is a chilling and devastating portrait of a president who betrayed his country. But it comes as no surprise. It constitutes only the latest link in an extraordinary chain of corruption.  

Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.

But what’s true of Trump isn’t true of the majority of his enablers. They see the colors that Trump cannot. They still know right from wrong. But for a combination of reasons, they have consistently overridden their conscience, in some cases unwittingly and in some cases cynically. They have talked themselves into believing, or half-believing, that Trump is America’s martyr and America’s savior.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

Trump’s behavior obviously speaks to his own character. But Trump’s behavior has also proved to be a test of the character of others—Republican politicians and voters, the GOP establishment and the evangelical movement. It’s proved to be a test of character for those who claim to be “constitutional conservatives” and “family values” advocates, for ethicists and public intellectuals, for right-wing commentators and party strategists.

With very few exceptions, and to varying degrees, they have failed it. They have turned against—or at the very least, at a crucial hour, they have failed to defend—ideals and institutions they once claimed to cherish. Donald Trump could not have so deeply wounded our republic without his enablers. It took a team effort.

And now here we are, eight summers after Trump announced his first bid for the presidency, and we find him facing 71 felony counts while still 30 points above his nearest GOP rival, having transformed the Republican Party in his own image in ways that exceed even what Ronald Reagan did. His imprint is on the party in a thousand different ways. Tens of millions of Americans see Trump as their angel of vengeance, and they can’t wait for the second act to get started.

The moral wreckage of Donald Trump’s presidency and post-presidency was predictable and even inevitable. The reason? Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss.

In July 2016, I described Trump as temperamentally unfit to be president—erratic, unprincipled, unstable, obsessive, a serial liar, and a misogynist who made racist appeals and who suffered from what, at the time, I called a “personality disorder.” On the day after Trump’s inauguration, I wrote, “A man with illiberal tendencies, a volatile personality and no internal checks is now president. This isn’t going to end well.” It hasn’t.

The scope and seriousness of Trump’s misconduct over the past eight years is staggering. He has relentlessly promoted lies and conspiracy theories, brutalized and dehumanized his opponents, threatened prosecutors and judges, and used his pardon power to subvert the legal system. He was found liable in a civil case of sexual abuse and defamation. He made hush-money payments to a porn star. He instigated a violent attack on the Capitol and attempted to overturn an election. He was impeached twice. And he is the first former president to be indicted, not once but twice. More indictments are likely to come.

Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House—Richard Nixon and Warren Harding among them—but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own. His degeneracy is unmatched in American presidential history and unsurpassed in American political history.

[Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann: Jack Smith’s backup option]

If Trump’s malice is obvious, what’s behind it is more difficult to assess. In 2016, the psychologist Dan McAdams wrote a psychological portrait of Trump for The Atlantic, which he later expanded into a book, The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning. McAdams describes Trump as “psychologically singular,” a man who “lacks an inner story to provide his life with temporal continuity, purpose, and meaning. He is the episodic man, living (and fighting) in the moment.” And that moment is free of ethical considerations and ethical constraints.

“Trump is like the alpha chimp who is always playing the short game, a brute-force game, to win at all costs,” McAdams claims. Trump himself said years ago, “Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat.”

Whatever the precise nature of Trump’s psychological pathologies—McAdams says Trump is “way more strange than any mental illness category that one can apply or create”—we can see for ourselves how they manifest: extreme narcissism, lack of empathy, feelings of persecution, grandiosity, and deceitfulness; impulsivity, shamelessness, remorselessness, and rage; a compulsive desire for attention, an obsessive need to dominate others, an eagerness to shatter social norms, and the belief that rules that apply to others don’t apply to him.

In his 1983 book, Statecraft as Soulcraft, George Will, one of the most consequential conservatives of the past half century, wrote that “the purpose of politics is to facilitate, as much as is prudent, the existence of worthy passions and the achievement of worthy aims.” Will was channeling Aristotle, who said in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The main concern of politics is to engender a certain character in the citizens and to make them good and disposed to perform noble actions.”

That is an extremely complicated and difficult task, but a worthy and ennobling one. There is dignity in the political vocation, which is why many of us went into politics in the first place.

Donald Trump, rather than using the presidency to elevate human sensibilities, did the opposite, and he did it relentlessly. Among the most damaging legacies of the Trump years is his barbarization of America’s civic and political life. He called the spirits from the vasty deep, and they came when summoned.

Many millions of Americans responded, determined that their country become more decent, more humane, more just. We are now in mid-story; none of us knows quite how it will end. An extraordinary drama is playing out, and each of us has a role to play in shaping the outcome.

[David Frum: An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies]

In his first book as president of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, Václav Havel offered his reflections on the nature and practice of politics. Is there a place for morality and simple decency in politics? Did his ideals and principles, forged through two decades of courageous opposition to totalitarianism, have a place in public life?

Havel believed they did, but he knew it was a struggle. “Anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong,” he wrote in Summer Meditations. “I have few illusions, but I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”

The playwright and former dissident added this: “A moral and intellectual state cannot be established through a constitution, or through law, or through directives, but only through complex, long-term, and never-ending work.”

What does that work look like in practice? “It is a way of going about things, and it demands the courage to breathe moral and spiritual motivation into everything, to seek the human dimension in all things. Science, technology, expertise, and so-called professionalism are not enough. Something more is necessary. For the sake of simplicity, it might be called spirit. Or feeling. Or conscience.”