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The Ukrainians are making progress in their long-awaited counteroffensive. Meanwhile, the Russian president is talking like a gangster and rattling the nuclear saber—again.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The woman who bought a mountain for God Justice comes for Hunter Biden. The failure of affirmative action

A Slow, Bloody Business

While we’re all distracted—understandably—by the spectacle of a former U.S. president under multiple criminal indictments, the war in Europe grinds on, consuming lives, burning cities, and threatening global peace. The Ukrainian counteroffensive is now clearly under way, and Kyiv’s forces are making incremental but concrete gains along the front. The Ukrainians are, for the moment, calm and confident; the Russians less so.

Ukrainian officials have been cautious in their evaluations of this early stage of the counteroffensive because they know it’s going to be a long summer. “Hot battles continue,” according to a statement from Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar, and the situation is “difficult.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged Russian counterattacks but said yesterday that no positions have been lost, while other areas have been “liberated.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, is talking tough—which itself is a tell, a sign of how he thinks this war is going.

Putin is trying to turn up the global temperature with some swagger about nuclear weapons. This past March, Putin said that he would base Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, close to Ukraine. Moscow and Minsk have since signed a formal agreement, and Putin now claims that the first weapons have arrived in Belarus. This may or may not be true; Putin has previously said that storage facilities for Russian warheads wouldn’t be ready until July, and the Russian military is not exactly known for getting things done ahead of time, so it’s unclear how much of this is (at this point) mere bluster. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a few days ago that the United States does not “see any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon”—which isn’t quite the same thing as saying that the weapons haven’t moved—but also that America has “no reason to adjust our own nuclear posture.”

Putin, meanwhile, said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week that he had no interest in returning to any conversations with the West about arms control. “We have more of these weapons than NATO countries do,” he said in answer to an interviewer’s question. “They know that, and they keep telling us to start negotiations on reductions. Well, you know, fuck ’em. As our people would say.”

CNN tried to render this Russian expression—хрен им—more gently, as “shove it,” but that’s not even close. Putin has often used this kind of gangsterish tone when he’s trying to project strength, especially to his own people in Russia. (He used similarly rough language, much to the Russian public’s delight, when speaking of what he would to do to Chechen terrorists, using a phrase that, in American Mob idiom, would basically translate as a vow “to whack them in their shithouses.”)

The leader of a nuclear-armed power sounding like Tony Soprano is alarming, but Putin is likely emphasizing Russia’s nuclear deterrent because his conventional forces have been repeatedly humiliated in combat. More to the point, although Russia still has a large military, Moscow has lost its best units and most highly trained officers and soldiers after a year of ghastly losses on the ground.

So what should we expect, and how should we think about this new phase in the war?

First, Americans especially should put aside what they know about recent U.S.-led wars such as the campaigns in Iraq: There will be no gathering on a “line of departure” followed by a massive air, armor, and infantry blitz. Nor is this like D-Day, with men storming the beaches and overwhelming enemy pillboxes. The counteroffensive had no real “beginning,” in that sense; the initial phase probably began with some tentative engagements against the Russians on the edges of Bakhmut shortly after Putin’s forces finally took what’s left of the town a few weeks ago.

Sadly, the Ukraine war is now more like World War I: Both sides have settled in along a large, static line. The Russian high command has been dreading this Ukrainian counteroffensive since last winter, and so the Russians have dug in, taking up defensive positions inside fortifications and huddling in trenches that will have to be cleared out one by one. (The Ukrainians have already released footage of their soldiers fighting in Russian trenches.) The Ukrainians must now probe, feint, and strike where they can, while trying to attack and disrupt Russian supply and reinforcements waiting in the rear, farther back from the battlefield.

Second, there will be no official “end” to the counteroffensive, either. (Well, unless Russia sues for peace, I suppose, but Putin has no apparent interest in any of that.) War is an uncertain and contingent thing; as we teach students at our senior military colleges, the enemy gets a vote on your strategy. Luck always gets a say as well. Americans are used to conflicts in which the United States deploys a large force, seizes the initiative, and keeps it for as long as we wish. The Ukrainians have no such luxury.

Although we should keep an eye on those Russian nukes (and whether Putin is really moving them), the real news in the coming weeks will be whether the Ukrainians can break through points along those Russian lines. The Russians are already engaging in savage counterattacks in an effort to blunt Ukrainian operations, and although sudden collapses and dramatic wins and losses on either side are always possible, the more likely story is one of Ukrainian progress measured by the names of small villages and the coordinates of grid squares on a map—a slower and far bloodier business.

As for Putin’s threats, the Russian president seems to be venting and showing off, which is one way to know that we are not yet in a crisis. When national leaders stop appearing in public, and both Moscow and Washington go quiet, that’s a time to worry. Putin is indulging his usual vulgar sense of humor, and though Americans, like Russians, also have some colorful local expressions, it is better for the Americans and NATO to be the resolute adults in the room, as they have been since the beginning of this criminal Russian onslaught.

Related:

The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive What happens if Russia stashes nukes in Belarus

Today’s News

Rescue crews are continuing the search for a submersible with five people aboard that went missing while traveling to tour the Titanic’s wreckage. As of this afternoon, it has about 40 hours of oxygen left. Hunter Biden, the president’s son, has reached a proposed plea deal with federal prosecutors. He will plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to owning a gun illegally, and will likely avoid jail time. China and Cuba are holding conversations about forming a new joint military-training facility on the island, according to U.S. officials.

Evening Read

Paramount / Everett

The Real Lesson of The Truman Show

By Megan Garber

Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.

The Truman Show hits a snag, though, and the problem is Truman. As he grows up, he proves himself to be less a bland everyman than someone who is quirky and restless and, in the best way, kind of a weirdo. Truman is also unusually inquisitive—a great quality for anyone who is not a piece of IP. Christof, consequently, has spent much of the show’s run trying to squelch Truman’s curiosity. He wants to be an explorer, an excited Truman tells a teacher. “You’re too late,” she replies, on cue. “There’s really nothing left to explore.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic*

Read. Robert Gottlieb, who edited Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, and others, died last week at 92. His memoir, Avid Reader, is an account of his storied career. Check out the book, and read a remembrance of him by Cynthia Ozick.

Listen. Janelle Monáe’s newest album, The Age of Pleasure, in which joy, extremity, and cheesiness are the mood.

Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.

P.S.

Nuclear weapons are always a grim business. But I have long been fascinated by how nuclear arms and fears of nuclear war seeped so deeply into our popular culture during the Cold War. (In fact, I used to teach a course about it at Harvard Extension School.) So if you’re looking for a little light music to accompany your reading about nuclear issues—such as this article by me last year and another here by my colleague Ross Andersen—I have a playlist for you.

This list won’t include all your sentimental favorites—sorry, fans of “99 Red Balloons”; we’ve heard that one enough—but there’s some odd stuff here: Did you know that Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was actually the flip side of a single about a nuclear war that leaves only one man and 13 women alive? (Bill sounds pretty happy about it.) And there are songs that even I didn’t realize were about nuclear war, such as “I Melt With You,” a favorite from my college days that I thought was about “melting” emotionally but, as it turns out, was about, you know, actually melting. Enjoy!

You’ll see a bit less of me in the next few weeks as I complete my last tour teaching in Harvard’s Summer School—a bittersweet milestone that rounds out 35 years of my previous career as an educator. I will be taking time this summer to work on an updated version of The Death of Expertise, in which I’ll talk about how the rejection of expertise is a problem that has gotten much worse in recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic. (You’ll get the first peek at that in an excerpt here in The Atlantic sometime in the fall.)

—Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.

The Truman Show hits a snag, though, and the problem is Truman. As he grows up, he proves himself to be less a bland everyman than someone who is quirky and restless and, in the best way, kind of a weirdo. Truman is also unusually inquisitive—a great quality for anyone who is not a piece of IP. Christof, consequently, has spent much of the show’s run trying to squelch Truman’s curiosity. He wants to be an explorer, an excited Truman tells a teacher. “You’re too late,” she replies, on cue. “There’s really nothing left to explore.”

The Truman Show, the film, premiered in June of 1998: a summer blockbuster guided less by literal explosions than by metaphorical ones. Its durability is typically attributed to its insights about technology: Through Truman’s story, the movie predicted, with eerie acuity, the rise of reality TV, the transactions of social media, the banality of surveillance. But Truman is not the story’s true everyman. The people who watch The Truman Show are. As the years go by, Christof’s efforts to keep Truman in Seahaven become more extreme and more cruel. The viewers watch anyway. The series, we learn, has a global audience of more than 1 billion people. That audience, for Christof and for all those who defer to him, rationalizes everything else. This is what elevates The Truman Show from prescience to prophesy. The viewers are watching a captive. They believe they are watching a star.

“As Truman grew up, we were forced to manufacture ways to keep him on the island,” Christof says in an interview partway through the film. He is making an admission; he thinks he is describing his artistic technique. The show killed Truman’s father before his eyes: a sailing trip, a squall, a hand sinking into the sea. The plot twist served partly to write an uncooperative actor off the show—The Truman Show requires compliance from its staff as well as its lead—but mostly to foster a fear of water in the young Truman. An island, after all, has only one kind of exit. Christof builds reminders of the trauma into the show’s otherwise sterile environment. Having been asked by a colleague to visit a client on another “island,” a fearful Truman encounters a half-sunken skiff tied to the pier. Christof, through his actors, plants the idea that Truman might have prevented the tragedy. “I don’t blame you,” Truman’s mother tells him at one point, magnanimously and unconvincingly.

On day 10,909 of The Truman Show’s run—the day the film begins—a klieg light falls from the sky. The intrusion of accident into this meticulously manufactured world leads Truman to do what his show cannot abide: to question. Is his reality … real? Is he part of an elaborate show? Truman confesses his doubts to his best friend, Marlon. Christof dictates Marlon’s response through the actor’s hidden earpiece: If Truman’s life is a show, Marlon says, then he would have to be in on the ruse. And “the last thing that I would ever do is lie to you.”

For the film’s viewers, scenes like this—gaslighting by way of a flamethrower—can be difficult to watch. And yet: In the movie, people do watch. Some do so fervently, invested in the life of Truman, the human character. Others tune in because there’s nothing else on. The movie interrupts its show-within-a-show to remind us that the series has made Truman not only a subject of sanctioned voyeurism but also a superstar. We see, at various moments, a Truman-themed bar—think TGI Friday’s, crowded with kitschy Trumanabilia—where fans go to watch the show together. (I’m a TRU believer, announces a bumper sticker pasted next to the TV.) We meet two older women seated next to couch pillows emblazoned with Truman’s face. We learn of the existence of TruTalk, a show dedicated to discussions of The Truman Show. We see the one-sided dynamics of the parasocial relationship, and the ease with which one person’s life can be repackaged as other people’s gossip. “I can’t believe he married Meryl on the rebound,” one woman tells another, her voice sharp with indignation.

[Read: We’ve lost the plot]

Truman’s partnership with Meryl—she is named, like Truman’s best friend, for a famous actor—is another slow-moving manipulation. Hannah, the actor who plays Meryl, is unable to disguise her dislike for Truman when she’s not facing him. Their dialogue in the film consists mostly of chipper banalities; Meryl is most animated, in Truman’s presence, when she is reciting the marketing copy that allows the show to double as an endless act of product placement. For Truman, too, the film implies, his marriage is an act of concession. The woman he really loves was an extra on the show: a fellow student at his college, meant to function, primarily, as scenery. He fell for her at first sight. The producers quickly removed her from the show. Attraction is unruly, Christof knows, and Meryl has already been cast in the role of “Truman’s love interest.”

Christof is the direct agent of Truman’s abuse, but the show’s audience enables it. Captivated by the storylines, they see nothing wrong with the fact that Truman’s freedom is the cost of their fun. We learn, eventually, about a group of people who protest Christof, his show, and the general assumption that bad behavior can be justified by good TV. But those people are “a very vocal minority,” TruTalk’s host says, dismissively, as he conducts a fawning interview with Christof.

They may be, or they may not. One of the still-resonant messages of The Truman Show is that mass media has a way of making, and then simply becoming, reality. However numerous the protesters are, they are, on their own, ineffective: There Truman remains, tracked by 5,000 cameras. And there is his audience, despite it all, like a merch-laden Greek chorus. They speak across time, to the people viewing the film: Would you watch The Truman Show? Or would you be one of the people who speak out against it?

The Truman Show was released in the years that found the Starr Report dominating headlines and series like The Jerry Springer Show turning voyeurism into a way of life. It arrived shortly before Survivor and Big Brother premiered. It asked questions about the shape American culture would take as we prepared to enter a new century. And it was not terribly optimistic about the answers.

[Read: Jerry Springer explained it all]

In that way, too, it was prescient. The Truman Show is extreme in its satire: Film audiences of the time would have recognized, in a way that the show’s in-universe audiences did not, all the madness in Christof’s methods. The fact that Truman is, as one character announces, “the first child to have been legally adopted by a corporation,” would have struck many as a cause for alarm. Christof, had he been a real-world producer of semi-scripted TV, would likely not have been the recipient of empty adulation that he is in the film. He would have been an even more influential figure: a purveyor of controversy.

Today, when works of pop culture revisit the 1990s, with all its ambient cruelties, they tend to do so with a tone of self-congratulation: Things might not be great now, they typically suggest, but look how much worse they were then. The Truman Show preemptively questioned some of that smugness. The film predicted how the louche voyeurism of that decade would settle into the muted voyeurism of this moment. It presaged the immense popularity of true crime, a genre that treats murder as a puzzle to be solved, abuses as stories waiting to be spun. It anticipated how readily we would come to see people as characters—the ease with which we would treat their lives as our entertainment.

[Read: A grim new low for internet sleuthing]

The Truman Show, as the screenwriter Andrew Niccol originally conceived it, was dark and gritty and openly dystopic. The script’s early version was set in New York City; rather than living a life of synthetic ease, Truman struggled. He had a drinking problem. He cheated on his wife. In a pivotal scene, while riding the subway, he witnessed an assault—and, as the cameras rolled, failed to intervene.

When Peter Weir signed on to direct the film, he asked for a change in course, and in tone. He thought the movie should be—or at least look like—a comedy. Weir and Niccol reworked the script together, relocating The Truman Show to the seemingly idyllic island of Seahaven, and remaking Truman as a man who is preternaturally positive. Weir cast Jim Carrey, then best known for his elastic-faced comedic abilities, as his protagonist. The shift turned a strong idea into a masterful one. It allowed The Truman Show to mimic the TV series it was named for: a work of dark insight wrapped in technicolor cheer. The shift also allowed the film to take that original subway scene—bystander apathy colliding with live TV—and diffuse its pathos into every moment.

Truman is not the only person who is being exploited in the name of escapism. Christof, we learn, hopes that The Truman Show will feature “television’s first on-air conception”; the film leaves it to the viewer to consider the consequences of that desire. Early on, we hear two fans of The Truman Show—security guards who watch it to pass the hours during their shifts—acknowledging, grudgingly, that the show declines to air intimacy between Truman and Meryl. The film shows Truman in public spaces, making cheerfully bland small talk with townspeople. It shows him at home, and at work. But it leaves its audience to wonder how the TV series itself—broadcasting 24 hours a day—defines privacy: Does it cut away while Truman is showering, or using the bathroom, or getting dressed?  

The Truman Show—the movie—is not subtle about its moral stance: Nods to privacy, in the context of the broader abuse, are not merely cosmetic, but also absurd. But the film counters its heavy-handedness with subtler explorations of the moral dynamics of the show. The people who take advantage of Truman do so, for the most part, convinced that they are engaged in acts of care. As he manipulates Truman, Christof treats his subject with paternal tenderness. His staffers wear T-shirts that read LOVE HIM, PROTECT HIM. The show surrounds Truman with characters who are, as stereotypes, protective and nurturing. Meryl is a nurse. When Truman expresses doubts about his upbringing, his mother proffers a family photo album, using tender family memories as tools of constraint.

Seahaven turns those illusions of protection into an environmental proposition. It is stridently—stiflingly—middle-class and almost entirely white. It exemplifies the mythologized ease of postwar America. By the end of the film, those illusions shatter. Truman cannot be contained; he’s too much of an individual to be content with the placid, plastic world that has been made for him. The film culminates in a hectic collision of metaphors: for religion, for politics, for the question of what the individual owes to the collective, and vice versa. Truman struggles to be himself in an environment built to enclose him. And he fights against all the people, alleged friends and neighbors and fellow citizens, who claimed to protect him. Seahaven falls apart; so do its many lies.

By its conclusion, then, The Truman Show turns its study of voyeurism into a study of complicity. The Truman Show, the series, is an ongoing social experiment with a dark conclusion: Very much, it suggests—too much—might be justified because it brings an audience. The people who make the decisions in The Truman Show all have their reasons. The executives, somber guys clad in black suits, represent the financial rationale: Eyeballs mean money, and money means everything. Christof, who wears his beret as he wears his sense of his genius—gaudily—represents the notion that art is an end in itself.

And then there’s the audience: massive, constant, mistaking exploitation for fandom. As Truman struggles to escape—the island, the show, and the life that has been imposed on him—he commandeers a boat. The producers create a storm. He falls off the vessel, struggling in the water, gasping for breath. He could die, before their eyes. The audience at the Truman Bar is rapt. “I got two to one he doesn’t make it,” someone shouts. “Hey, I want a piece of that!” yells another. The exchange is 25 years old. It hasn’t aged a bit.