When you order something online, getting that thing from the warehouse into your hot little hands is hard. Internet commerce is designed to obscure that difficulty—packages are supposed to alight on your welcome mat as though dropped there by the delivery fairy—but challenges persist, and they are only getting worse. There are just too many doorsteps, and too many things that need to alight on them. At the peak of demand, a single holiday season in the United States involves billions of deliveries, all ferried by hand to purchasers within days of dispatch.

In the shipping business, this end portion of a product’s journey from manufacturer to consumer is what’s known as “last mile.” It is an enormous problem without any immediate solution. Retailers and logistics firms boast of investments in automation and artificial intelligence and delivery robots, but right now nothing can meaningfully replace a guy driving a van to your address and walking your box to your front door. To account for this, large internet retailers, and especially Amazon, have spent years devising creative ways to bolster their delivery armies: signing high-volume deals with USPS and UPS, contracting with local logistics services to use their fleets, paying gig workers per package to make deliveries in their own car. Now Amazon is set to take the next step in enlisting every human possible to bring you your stuff; your online-shopping impulse buy might be delivered by your local florist or dry cleaner.

Earlier this week, the company announced that it would expand its Hub Delivery pilot program, which contracts with local businesses to deliver shipments of Amazon packages using the businesses’ staff and cars, to 23 states and some of the nation’s biggest cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle. To make it work, the company is trying to recruit 2,500 small businesses to the program—“no delivery experience required,” the Hub Delivery website tells prospective applicants. As part of this Amazon side hustle, businesses will turn their existing employees into package couriers, delivering up to 50 parcels a day. (Amazon has not responded with comment on the expansion.)

[Read: The free-returns party is over]

The program is only the latest effort to retrofit the infrastructure and labor force necessary to feed America’s online-shopping habit onto a landscape designed for much less mail and much more in-person interaction. So far, it remains an uneasy fit.

The difficulties of last mile become dizzying if you think about them for too long. Package delivery is labor-intensive work, conducted in all kinds of weather conditions and across all kinds of geographies, usually for little pay. In rural areas, the potential employee pool is small, and the number of deliveries that any one driver can make can be limited by the distance between houses. In urban areas, delivery drivers rarely have easy places to park their truck, so they block traffic, use sidewalks to organize stacks of packages, and navigate locked gates and broken buzzers. Many drivers work under tight surveillance, with some shipping companies tracking and timing every delivery made.

Amazon’s expansion of Hub Delivery seems to acknowledge that not all of these obstacles can be overcome by pushing individual workers to deliver more efficiently. In the U.S., the program was first tested in 2021, in a handful of states with significant rural populations—the customers for whom last-mile problems are perhaps most obviously immutable. In some of these areas, there may not consistently be enough deliveries to warrant a full-time local logistics operation, or the population may be so dispersed that a few people doing a few deliveries each during slow periods at the convenience store or hair salon could accomplish what a lone person in a dedicated delivery truck could not easily (or profitably) do in a single workday.

When expanded to dense cities, however, the logistical advantage of Hub Delivery over a traditional courier workforce seems a little more difficult to justify. Urban areas present an entirely different set of issues than rural ones: There are always plenty of packages that will all need to be delivered within a relatively confined geographic area, and hurdles such as finding safe parking or knowing how to get into a particular apartment building are ameliorated with experience. Because of its high volume and predictability, urban delivery is the kind of setup that lends itself especially well to permanent pools of full-time couriers, not people who thought they’d signed up to make coffee or arrange flowers or dry-clean dress shirts and are suddenly trying to gain access to your apartment building with a dolly full of cardboard boxes.

You don’t have to look that hard to see the appeal for Amazon. The payouts that the company is promising to affiliate businesses, who will need to provide their own delivery vehicles and insurance, are pretty meager: $27,000 a year at most, for a commitment to deliver 20 to 50 packages a day, seven days a week. The program is clearly not meant to support these local businesses hiring additional employees; the company says as much in the Hub Delivery FAQs. For just a couple of bucks or so per package, contracting with local businesses allows Amazon to access not only an existing labor source, but also existing management and equipment, to help get packages to people.

[Read: Of course instant groceries don’t work]

For some small-business owners, the opportunity to diversify their revenue streams and squeeze a little bit of additional work out of their staff is probably tempting, even though small businesses are not generally known for having more employees on the clock than they have work that needs to be done. Some small businesses have already become makeshift logistics nodes, accepting drop-offs for UPS or hosting a pickup locker for Amazon packages to bring in a little bit of extra money or foot traffic. The Hub Delivery expansion is just the next step toward being absorbed into someone else’s supply chain, even if it’s a rather big one.

For workers doing the actual deliveries, meanwhile, the value proposition is less clear. Unlike the Amazon Flex gig workers who deliver packages in their own car, these newly appointed couriers don’t receive any direct payment from Amazon for the number of deliveries they do, or for any of the organizational or logistical tasks required to handle dozens of packages a day. It’ll just be another thing added to their on-the-clock duties. That you could take a job as a barista or at an auto shop and actually end up spending much of your time involved in package delivery for Amazon at the sole discretion of your boss is, at best, unsettling.

If this program takes off, it could mean that you get your next order of bulk toilet paper a few hours faster, or that Amazon makes a little more money on it. But the grand lesson of the 24-hour-shipping era is that convenience comes with a cost. Amazon’s move is evidence of just how far major retailers have been allowed to creep into our lives. As they’ve built empires through relentless optimization and expansion, that ethos has come to influence issues such as wages and working conditions for labor forces far beyond their own. Now the very lines of that labor force are blurring. Anyone can be a delivery worker. You might be a delivery worker, even if you didn’t expect it when you got your job. No matter how much major retailers crow about automation and efficiency, nothing about the delivery economy can survive without the constant, steady availability of millions of hands to do the unglamorous work of moving packages through space. If you let yours go idle, your boss just might subcontract them out.

War with Mexico? It’s on the 2024 ballot, at least if you believe the campaign rhetoric of more and more Republican candidates.

In January, two Republican House members introduced a bill to authorize the use of military force inside Mexico. They were not know-nothings from the fringes of the MAGA caucus. One was Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy Seal who received a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. The other was Mike Waltz of Florida, a former Green Beret who served as the counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and was a successful entrepreneur before he entered Congress.

Military operations inside Mexico have been endorsed by Republican senators too. Last September, Tom Cotton of Arkansas published an op-ed that proposed:

We can also use special operators and elite tactical units in law enforcement to capture or kill kingpins, neutralize key lieutenants, and destroy the cartel’s super labs and organizational infrastructure. We must work closely with the Mexican government and ensure its continued support in this effort—but we cannot allow it to delay or hinder this necessary campaign.

At a committee hearing in March, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham also favored military operations: “America is under attack. Our nation is being attacked by foreign powers called drug cartels in Mexico.” He concluded: “They are at war with us. We need to be at war with them.” That was not a figure of speech. Along with fellow Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, Graham has repeatedly urged military operations against cartels backed by the “fury and might of the United States.”

[Anne Applebaum: How do you stop lawmakers from destroying the law?]

Also in March, Rolling Stone reported that former President Donald Trump—who is once again the Republican presidential front-runner—has asked advisers for war plans and has speculated about deploying Special Operations teams into Mexico.

At a campaign event in Eagle Pass, Texas, Trump’s closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, proposed a selective naval blockade of Mexican ports.

“These precursors are sent into Mexico,” he said, referring to chemicals used in the production of fentanyl. “The cartels are creating the drug. And then they’re moving the drug into the United States of America. We’ll mobilize the Coast Guard and the Navy to interdict precursor chemicals.”

Sometimes the proponents of military operations inside Mexico add a caveat about cooperating with the Mexican government, as Cotton did in his op-ed and as DeSantis does in the written supplement to his naval blockade proposal.

But DeSantis did not mention the caveat in his spoken remarks yesterday, and the caveats get dropped when the idea is promoted on television and in social media. The Fox News star Greg Gutfeld argued on his program in December 2022 that it didn’t matter whether Mexico agreed or not:

It’s time to take out cartels in Mexico, bomb the bleep out of them. It’ll be over in minutes … And it doesn’t matter if Mexico won’t agree, when their cartels are free to invade us anyway. We didn’t ask Pakistan if we could drop in and kill bin Laden.

Probably very little of this talk is meant to be taken literally. Much of it functions as a rhetorical escape from the political dilemma that Republicans and conservatives face.

Synthetic opioids are inflicting death and suffering across the United States: 70,000-plus Americans died of overdose in 2021. The Republican brand is to sound tough, to promise decisive action. In the past, that impulse led Republicans to vow a war on drugs inside the United States: harsher penalties for users and dealers, more powers for police to search and seize. But this time, the users are Americans whom Republicans regard as their own. Five out of every eight victims of opioid overdose are non-Hispanic white people. Whereas historically, fatal overdoses have been an urban problem, synthetic opioids have been taking lives almost exactly equally between urban and rural areas. In deep-blue states such as California and New York, the death rates from synthetic opioids are even worse in rural areas than in the cities.

Republican lawmakers have little appetite for a domestic crackdown that would criminalize so many of their own constituents and their constituents’ relatives. At the retail level, many a “dealer” is also a user, a member of the community seeking to finance his or her own addiction by spreading addiction to others. Contemporary conservatism tells a fable about virtuous middle-Americans beset by alien villains. Apply that fable to the fentanyl crisis, and you arrive where Fox’s Gutfeld did at the conclusion of his December monologue: “So that’s my plan, bomb the supply, reduce harm among the demand by availing safer, clean alternatives.” Compassion for us. Violence for them.

But even if bomb-Mexico talk is intended only to shift blame—to redirect anger toward politically safer targets—the talk carries real-world political dangers.

The first danger of these calls for unilateral U.S. intervention is that it alienates opinion inside Mexico. Trump, DeSantis, Graham, and the others are speaking to Americans. But Mexicans can hear too. Are Americans dying because of Mexican drug sales? Mexicans are dying because of American drug purchases. Mexico has about one-third the population of the United States, but four times the homicide rate. Many, if not most, of those homicides are casualties of the battles for market share set in motion by American drug demand. Does Mexico do too little to halt the flow of opioids northward? The United States does nothing to halt the flow of guns southward.

Mexican resentment of U.S. hypocrisy has weakened Mexican leaders who want to strengthen the partnership with the United States—and empowered exploiters of anti-American sentiment, including the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As American politicians shift from merely blaming Mexico to outright threatening Mexico, the resentment will only intensify.

[David Frum: The autocrat next door]

The second danger is an even more sinister effect within Mexico: American threats of war upon Mexico will enhance the political power of criminals against the Mexican state.

Criminals have often benefited from nationalism in protecting and supporting their operations inside Mexico. One notorious example: In 1985, Mexican cartel criminals abducted, tortured, and murdered a Drug Enforcement Agency officer, Enrique Camarena. The crime boss Rafael Caro Quintero was identified by the United States as the “intellectual author” of the murder. He was immediately arrested, but never extradited. Caro Quintero was rearrested by Mexican marines in July 2022. But President Lopez Obrador took exception at his daily morning press conference to reports that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency had located Caro Quintero, suggesting the Americans had overstepped. The Mexican courts meanwhile seemed to interpret U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s request for “immediate extradition” of Quintero as a potential infringement of the accused’s rights as a Mexican citizen. Nor unfortunately is this a unique case of Mexican officials using nationality as a justification to protect criminals from American justice. If Republican politicians revive ancient memories of past U.S. aggression against Mexico, it will make any such justifications more plausible and acceptable to Mexican opinion.

A third danger of the war talk is that Republican politicians are radicalizing their own voters. Three years ago, proposals to bomb Mexico would have sounded crazy. But if enough people repeat the talk—if it is debated, amplified, and validated by trusted commentators—the talk gains power. It becomes thinkable, sayable, and then ultimately doable. “Doable” is not the same as “done.” But an atmosphere is being created in which Republicans who do not speculate about war with Mexico may be perceived as weak.

DeSantis may imagine that his call for a naval blockade offers a moderate alternative to outright war. But he is still training Republican primary voters to expect a promise of some kind of military action against Mexico. It could be conducted beyond Mexican waters, farther from cameras that could record images of explosions or injured civilians. But think harder, and it’s actually an even more invasive idea than air strikes, because the blockade would need to continue for months, years, maybe forever.

The fourth danger is that the Republicans have ceased to consider even the most obvious risks. Despite Lindsey Graham’s vivid language, the Mexican criminal cartels are not in fact at war with the United States. They are doing business with the United States—a lethal business, but business all the same. As rational profit-maximizers, they take care to avoid direct confrontations with American power. In March, criminals abducted four Americans in Matamoros, Mexico, killing two. After the survivors were released, the local cartel issued a public letter of apology and surrendered five men whom it blamed for the abduction. “We have decided to turn over those who were directly involved and responsible in the events, who at all times acted under their own decision-making and lack of discipline,” the letter stated. Whatever was really going on in this murky story, clearly the cartel was worried about consequences for the murders.

But what if the U.S. begins bombing and rocketing cartel operations? Will the old restraints still apply? What would then deter the cartels from extending their violence across the border? “The enemy gets a vote,” goes an old warning. If the United States opts to escalate a law-enforcement challenge into a military conflict, it must prepare for its well-financed, well-armed antagonist to respond in kind. And unlike previous irregular antagonists, such as al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, this is one that intimately understands and has deeply penetrated U.S. society.

The risks to the United States extend beyond U.S. and Mexican territory. Right now, the United States and its allies are assisting Ukraine against a Russian invasion. What happens to the consensus behind that effort if, 18 months from now, the United States has bombed, invaded, or blockaded its own neighbor? What if U.S. forces unintentionally inflict civilian casualties or destroy the property and livelihoods of nearby innocents? The U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan in 2001 and against Iraq in 2003 were joined by global coalitions and supported by United Nations resolutions. There will be no such international legitimation for a U.S. attack inside Mexico, or blockade of Mexico, without the consent of the Mexican government.

There have been occasions in the past when the threat of unilateral U.S. action has pressured Mexican authorities to step up to their responsibilities. But in those cases, the threat was delivered behind closed doors, such that the Mexican side could yield without public humiliation. Today’s threats are creating the opposite pressure—so much so as to raise the question, disturbing on both sides of the border, “Is public humiliation maybe the real point of this otherwise futile exercise?”

The toll of opioids upon American life and American homes is indeed horrific. The cooperation of the Mexican state has been unsatisfying, as López Obrador has proved an especially unreliable and double-sided partner. U.S. frustration with Mexico has a valid basis, and nobody should pretend that the Mexican government is innocent amid the fentanyl traffic. The point is that the American government should not act brutishly, stupidly, and self-defeatingly.

[From the November 2021 issue: ‘I don’t know that I would even call it meth anymore’]

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who advised President Nixon on domestic affairs, told the following story in The American Scholar about his attempts to curb drug abuse by squeezing supply. In the late ’60s, the drug of concern was heroin; an important source of supply was via the port of Marseilles in France—the fabled “French Connection.” Over many months, Moynihan negotiated agreements to stop the flow through Marseilles, mercifully without the threat of rockets or Special Forces operations.

I found myself in a helicopter flying up to Camp David to report on this seeming success. The only other passenger was George P. Shultz [then the secretary of labor ], who was busy with official-looking papers. Even so, I related our triumph. He looked up. “Good,” said he, and returned to his tables and charts. “No, really,” said I, “this is a big event.” My cabinet colleague looked up, restated his perfunctory, “Good,” and once more returned to his paperwork. Crestfallen, I pondered, then said, “I suppose you think that so long as there is a demand for drugs, there will continue to be a supply.” George Shultz, sometime professor of economics at the University of Chicago, looked up with an air of genuine interest. “You know,” he said, “there’s hope for you yet!”

Drug interdiction has not worked in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, in Andean South America. American demand and American wealth will summon supply from somewhere, and if one channel of commerce is stopped, another will open. The drug problem is located here, and the answer must be found here. Belligerent snarls and growls may excite American emotions, and they may win some American votes. But if those snarls and growls are acted upon, they will plunge the United States into troubles compared with which the fentanyl problem of today will seem the least of evils. Unfortunately, it’s too late to silence the threats. They have become the price of entry to Republican politics. But it’s not too late to challenge and rebut them—and to elect leaders who understand that Mexico will be either America’s partner or America’s disaster.

For more than 75 years, the boys have been boxed in. Since 1948, Goofus and Gallant, the stars of their eponymous comic strip in Highlights for Children magazine, have taught generations of kids the dos and don’ts of how to be. The premise is as simple as it is effective: two panels, side by side, depicting two approaches to the same situation. On the left, Goofus does the wrong thing. On the right, Gallant does the correct thing. If Goofus is rude, Gallant is polite. If Goofus lies, Gallant tells the truth.

The boys are prepubescent, but their exact age is unclear, as is their relationship to each other. Though the style of their illustration has changed over the years (they were briefly elves with pointed ears before transforming, unannounced, into human boys), they have always been essentially identical to each other. Are they twin brothers? Friends? The same kid in alternate universes? Or is it more of a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation?

It doesn’t really matter. Goofus and Gallant are symbols more than characters. In every issue, they play out a sort of Calvinist destiny. Their essential nature was preordained by a higher power long ago—Goofus forever doomed to be a screwup, Gallant to be a smug little do-gooder. What can they do but play the roles that were laid out for them?

[Read: The parenting prophecy]

The higher power that created them was Garry Cleveland Myers, who first wrote a version of the strip called “The G-Twins” at the magazine Children’s Activities, before he co-founded Highlights with his wife, Caroline Clark Myers. But in another sense the characters sprang directly from the moral compass of society. I recently spent a day at the Library of Congress, reading Goofus and Gallant strips from over the years, and found that the panels are remarkable windows into history. They chart the shifting freedoms and boundaries of childhood, and illustrate how adults’ expectations of kids have changed over the decades.

Highlights is explicitly edutainment. The magazine’s tagline is “Fun with a purpose,” and many issues over the years have included guides to its contents for teachers and parents. A flyer tucked into a 1948 issue at the Library of Congress explains to parents how the magazine can be used for the “home training of the child.” “Character building threads through the book from cover to cover,” it reads.

That philosophy remains, and is perhaps most obvious in Goofus and Gallant. “The feature is designed to be a part of our work to help kids become their best selves,” Christine French Cully, Highlights’ current editor in chief, told me. “It’s about helping kids develop character and moral intelligence.”

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 1948 (Courtesy of Highlights)

Many of the comic’s themes are timeless. Again and again, I saw Goofus pocket lost money while Gallant chased down the owner. Goofus left a mess while Gallant tidied up; Goofus bullied and excluded other kids while Gallant welcomed them. If you crack open a December issue from any era, you’ll probably find Goofus being a greedy little gremlin about his Christmas presents, while Gallant rhapsodizes about the pleasures of giving to others. The strip also has a few oddly specific preoccupations—not messing with other people’s mail, changing from good clothes into “play clothes,” putting your bike away instead of dumping it on the lawn, and not blocking the sidewalk all appear multiple times over the decades. The core of what it means to be considerate hasn’t changed dramatically from 1948 to today.

But a lot has changed. Technology is an obvious example, and the strip has guided kids through the etiquette of sharing the TV with your family and taking a polite phone message all the way through to being quiet during a parent’s Zoom meeting and not giving out personal information online. (Poor Goofus has fallen prey to a couple of scams over the years.) Gender roles, in the world and in the magazine, have also grown more expansive over time. The boys’ father seems more present in modern strips, after an unsurprisingly long time in which I only ever saw their mother doing domestic labor.

Less immediately obvious are deeper shifts in the nature of childhood, and in adults’ conception of the ideal well-behaved child. For instance, the range of a child’s independence has shrunk considerably from Highlights’ early days. Goofus and Gallant ran amok in old strips, with little to no parental supervision. They completed errands on their own in 1955; they stayed out until the streetlights came on in 1965. As recently as 1990, Gallant simply left a note for his mom on the counter letting her know where he’d be, and peaced out. By today’s standards that feels more like Goofus behavior.

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 1990 (Courtesy of Highlights)

Kids don’t have as large of a roaming radius as they used to, Steven Mintz, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin who has studied the history of childhood, told me. “Until my kids were virtually teenagers, they were never out of my sight. Or if not my sight, my wife’s sight, or some adult that I viewed as responsible.”

[Read: ‘Intensive’ parenting is now the norm in America]

Newer strips don’t explicitly illustrate helicopter parenting or tell us that the boys have a packed and highly supervised extracurricular schedule. But previous indications of their independence are largely absent now. The boys are rarely pictured alone when they’re out in the world.

Perhaps another reason the lads are rarely by themselves is that Highlights editors are intentionally focusing the strip more on “social-emotional learning,” Cully told me. The modern Goofus and Gallant are not only demonstrating politeness, but teaching kids emotional intelligence and social skills. This is the most striking evolution I observed over the strip’s history. In the July 1955 issue, after some fairly benign panels about going to bed on time and not leaving garden rakes face up, comes a truly disturbing diptych of 1950s emotional repression. “When Goofus falls and skins his hands and knees, he cries like a baby,” the caption reads beneath a wailing, injured Goofus. Meanwhile, “Gallant gets up smiling, even if blood is seeping from his knees.” And indeed, Gallant sports a chilling smile in the drawing, as droplets of his blood sprinkle the earth.

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 1955 (Courtesy of Highlights)

A couple other comics present a less extreme but similar morality tale in which Goofus complains about being hurt, while Gallant cheerfully insists on helping his parents with chores even though his arm is in a sling. The message is clear: Expressing discontent is tantamount to misbehavior, and pain is no excuse.

This motif in the early strips is certainly shaped by the fact that Goofus and Gallant are, well, boys. Even fictional boys in the 1950s, it seems, were told not to cry. All the more notable, then, that by 2021, Goofus is the one telling another kid to stop crying while Gallant affirms that it’s okay to cry, and asks a sad friend if he wants to talk about what’s bothering him. And as we know, Goofus is always wrong, and Gallant is always right.

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 2021 (Courtesy of Highlights)

I started to notice a particular attentiveness to the boys’ emotional life starting around the 2000s, which grew more prominent over time. The strip has attempted more and more to account for the effect kids’ emotions can have on their behavior, and to demonstrate how to acknowledge those feelings while still behaving appropriately.

In a strip from 2000, Goofus clenches his fists and screams at a boxy monitor, “This computer is really annoying me!” Meanwhile, “Gallant politely asks for help when he feels frustrated.” In another, from 2005, Goofus complains about waiting in line, while “Gallant takes a few deep breaths when he feels impatient.” The Gallant of the new millennium addresses his feelings; he doesn’t repress them.

A Goofus and Gallant strip from 2005 (Courtesy of Highlights)

“One of the things that happens over time is that parents are not just disciplining their children, but they’re expecting their children to, in some ways, learn to discipline themselves,” Paula Fass, a professor emerita at UC Berkeley and the author of The End of American Childhood, told me.

Cully told me that at Highlights, they sum up what a child ought to be with what they call the “four C’s”: “curious, creative, caring, and confident.” Those are the traits the magazine tries to encourage. She added, “We try to keep our finger on the pulse of what concerns parents, and right now it’s mental health, making sure kids are kind.” Kind not just to others, but to themselves. Goofus beats himself up for being “bad at math” when he makes mistakes on an assignment, while Gallant admits his mistakes and instead says, “I need to study this chapter again.”

“These cartoons are much more psychologically knowledgeable and psychologically attentive” compared with the ones of the past, Mintz told me when I shared a selection of strips through the years with him. “There’s a certain kind of child that they’re trying to produce who has communication skills, who’s self-regulated. I think that’s our vision of what a child ought to be [today].”

The other thing that Cully really wants to convey about how Goofus and Gallant has changed is a message that is somewhat at odds with the format of the strip.

“We try really hard now, and have for a long time, to be clear that Goofus is not all bad, and Gallant is not all good,” she said. To do that within the confines of the dos-and-don’ts binary that is the strip’s raison d’être is “probably the hardest editorial job in the whole magazine.”

Every installment of Goofus and Gallant now has a line at the top that reads “There’s some of Goofus and Gallant in us all. When the Gallant shines through, we show our best self.” And alongside the comic, Highlights also publishes submissions from young readers talking about moments when they felt like either Goofus or Gallant, to show that everyone can relate to both of them at different times.

This mirrors a larger shift in the culture of American parenting, Fass told me, where it’s become prevalent to emphasize that although a particular behavior or choice may be bad or wrong, the child is not a bad kid.

“We just try to be really clear that Goofus isn’t always bad. He’s not. He’s just often making choices that aren’t thoughtful or safe,” Cully said. One recent example that illustrates this is a strip from July 2022 in which Goofus and Gallant both fight with a friend. “When Goofus gets upset, he yells unkind things he’ll regret,” the caption reads. We would never have gotten such insight into the future mental state of the Goofus of old. But the new Goofus is not a total monster—he will regret it later.

The starker differences between the Goofus and Gallant of the past and present aren’t signs that all parents of previous decades were emotionally distant disciplinarians, or that all parents today have endless patience for their kids’ big feelings. Nevertheless, the boys’ evolution reflects American parenting culture’s own evolution. As the fire and brimstone of “Because I said so” authoritarian parenting has fallen out of favor, Goofus and Gallant have also become more than the messengers of strict commandments. They have a spark of humanity.

So even if Goofus and Gallant will always be the devil and the angel sitting on kids’ shoulders, nowadays, you might say, there is a little more sympathy for the Goofus.