When we write history, it tends to be tidy and led by great men. In real time, it’s messy but still astonishing. Last weekend, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who leads a private army called the Wagner Group, attempted what many have called a coup against Russian President Vladimir Putin. Technically, it failed. He landed in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, pledged to march to Moscow, and then turned around. Nothing about this series of events suggests expert planning or high competence. Prigozhin is a former prisoner and a former hotdog salesman. Staff writer Tom Nichols puts him in a league with “gangsters” and “clowns.”

But sometimes gangsters and clowns are the ones who shake up the established order. Prigozhin’s march lasted barely 48 hours, yet it seems to have changed the conversation about Russia. Putin appears shaken and, as staff writer Anne Applebaum put it, “panicky.” His response to such a direct threat has been surprisingly tentative. The mutiny may have technically failed, but it left some revolutionary thoughts in people’s minds. Putin is not, in fact, invulnerable. Which means Russians might have a choice.

In this episode, Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols explain this week’s wild turn of events in Russia and the door those events opened.

“We’ve lived with Putin for 23 years. We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever, and that he reigned supreme,” Nichols says about this remarkable moment. “That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?”

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Over the weekend, something wild happened in Russia. A man named Yevgeny Prigozhin seemed to start a rebellion. His private army, the Wagner Group, fights alongside Russian troops in Ukraine. But this weekend they turned their guns against Russia itself. They took over a major southern city called Rostov-on-Don and then pledged to march on Moscow, making it hundreds of miles before turning around.

Was this a mutiny? Was it a failed coup? People are debating Prigozhin’s motives and whether he thought he had internal support. Zooming out, though, what it means is that one man—a guy who was in prison, then became a hotdog salesman, and then rose up to become a loyal protégé of President Vladimir Putin—turned on Putin, humiliated him, and somehow survived. We’ve been told that Prigozhin is now in Belarus. Anyway, the news is moving quickly and there’s been lots of speculation. Two people I trust to ground us are Atlantic staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols.

So Tom, the past week’s events in Russia have been called a coup and a mutiny; however, you refer to it as a falling-0out among gangsters. What did you mean by that?

Tom Nichols: Well, the problem is that the Russian state is a conglomeration of power players who are much like the five families—you know, in the old Godfather movie—these are mobsters, and Putin is the gangster in chief. But he has capos under him. And there was some issue there about territory and control with Prigozhin and his forces, who were going to be pulled in under another one of Putin’s cronies, the minister of defense.

And, um, things got outta control.

Rosin: So how does Prigozhin fit into that picture? Sort of where is he in the gangster taxonomy?

Nichols: Well, he’s got his own crew. He’s a powerful captain. He’s got his own army. He has, you know, 25,000 well-armed, battle-hardened men who answer to him. And another capo was threatening to take that away from him, and he wasn’t going to stand for that.

Rosin: So you see it less as a geopolitical battle than just an internal fight for power between two people?

Nichols: People have multiple motivations for doing things. I think a lot of what Prigozhin tapped into is real. People are, both in the military and back home, fed up with the way that the guys in Moscow have run this war and taken immense casualties and pretty much gotten nowhere. I mean, that’s a real thing.

It’s a real problem, but it’s also in part a struggle for power among these players. So there are multiple things going on here and, and not all of them, I think, are clear to us over here right now.

Rosin: Right. So Anne, looking towards the real motives that Tom brought up, Prigozhin has for a long time been openly criticizing the war in Ukraine and the motives for the war in Ukraine. What types of things has he been saying, and why do you think they struck a chord?

Anne Applebaum: For the last several weeks and months, really, Prigozhin has been blaming the leaders of the army, the leaders of the military, for failing to provide leadership, failing to provide equipment. I mean, he’s focused in particular on the minister of defense, [Sergei] Shoigu and the army chief of the general staff.

And he talks about them using very insulting language. He talks about Shoigu, you know, living a luxury life. And [Valery] Gerasimov being a paranoid, crazy person who shouts at people. These are very personal anecdotal descriptions of them. Um, which may well ring a bell among people around them as something that’s true.

More recently, and right before his strange ride to Moscow, he came out with a much more substantive critique. In other words, he began talking about the causes of the war itself. He said, well, the war was—the only reason we’re fighting this war is because Shoigu wants to advance. He wants to be a marshal. You know, he wants a better rank.

And because lots of people in Moscow were making money off of the 2014 occupations of Ukraine territories in the east that they gained at that time, and they want more. They got greedy and wanted more.

In other words, it’s not a war for empire. It’s not about the glory of Russia. It’s not about NATO. It’s not about any of the things that Putin has said. It’s just about greedy people wanting more. The appeal of this narrative is that it’s very comfortable for Russians to hear that there’s a reason why they’re failing. You know that there are specific people to blame.

Rosin: And you mean failing in the war in Ukraine?

Applebaum: I mean failing in the war in Ukraine in that they were supposed to conquer the country in three days and that didn’t happen. There’s been massive casualties [and] losses of equipment. It may also have an echo among people who want someone to blame for general misery. The economy hasn’t been going well for a while. People can see corruption all around them. It’s not like it’s a big secret. And pinning it on specific people saying these guys are responsible for failure might be something that a lot of Russians want to hear.

Rosin: Yeah. I can see as you guys are talking how it can be both a gangster war and something that is sincere and taps into a true vein of discontent. Like, it can be both of those things at the same time. Now, this question is for either of you: We are getting news trickling out this week about the possibility that Prigozhin had some kind of support in the Russian military. If that’s true, and I know that’s a big if, what does that change about how we should understand the situation?

Applebaum: So I assumed he had some kind of support in the military, both because of the way he behaved in Rostov-on-Don, where he seemed chummy with the generals at the head of the Southern Military District and where his soldiers were tolerated and almost welcomed in the city. He couldn’t have done that and he couldn’t have kept going without somebody being on his side. And it seems like he expected more, or he thought there would be more support, so that doesn’t surprise me at all. I mean, the precise names of who it was and what their motives were, I don’t think we really know that yet, although there have been concrete names mentioned in the press. But he clearly expected something more to happen.

Nichols: Yeah, I agree with Anne. I don’t think you march on Rostov-on-Don and then turn north toward Moscow and think that you’re on your own. There may have been some specific people that he had spoken to, but I think there was also a larger expectation—because remember, Prigozhin’s a pretty arrogant guy, and there is a lot of discontent in the Russian military—that he was just expecting that there would be units that he would just pick up along the way or that around Moscow would get word of this and say: We’re on your side.

And I’ve been curious about Putin’s tentativeness, his procrastination and all this, and I wonder, given these reports, whether he had concerns himself about which units—if he ordered an attack or if he wanted to do something more demonstrative—which units would actually obey his orders or which units would actually stay with him or join the mutiny if they were forced to make a choice. But again, we can’t know that for sure. But it certainly makes a lot of sense that Prigozhin wasn’t going to do this without having spoken to somebody in Moscow and in Rostov-on-Don.

Rosin: Right. So the reason this continues to be a live issue is because it matters who supported him. It matters because it speaks to the degree of insecurity on Putin’s side, and it speaks to sort of how strong the discontent is.

Nichols: It matters because it says that the Russian government and the Russian high command have serious stresses and cracks that are now obvious that had been either smaller early on and hidden, or that had somehow been papered over. But the idea that somehow Putin is completely in charge and invulnerable to challenges—that’s gone.

Rosin: Yeah, and that’s important. Now, Anne, if Prigozhin, as you say, was aiming for something bigger and it didn’t quite work out or technically failed, as we talk about it we still have to grapple with what happened on the other side, which is that he arrived in a Russian city and the citizens kind of shrugged. What did that tell you?

Applebaum: So I thought that was quite significant. We’ve all read many times these somber analyses of so-called polling data from Russia saying that people support Putin. What this showed was that the citizens of Rostov-on-Don weren’t particularly bothered that a brutal warlord showed up in the city, said he wanted to change some things and get them done.

Maybe he was going to go and take Putin’s people down. Maybe he was going to go and take Putin himself down. And they applauded him and they were taking selfies with him. And they started chanting when the Wagner Group was pulling out of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday evening—they were chanting, “Wagner, Wagner” in the streets.

That shows that the support for Putin is pretty weak. It’s passive. He’s the guy there and we don’t see any alternatives, but the instant an alternative emerges, well, you know, that might be interesting. I mean, Prigozhin is not exactly an attractive figure, but maybe from their point of view, he’s more honest; he seems more effective.

And as I said in the beginning, he’s offering them an explanation that’s psychologically comfortable. Why is this war going so badly? Why haven’t we won? Why is everything so corrupt? Why is the army so dysfunctional? Why are so many people dying?

Okay, well he just gave us a reason. The reason is because there are these corrupt generals in charge and they’re doing a bad job. And that’s something that people would like to hear. They want an explanation for this strange war that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and is only causing damage.

Rosin: Now, Tom, in the aftermath of all of this, Putin has given a statement talking about treason, not naming Prigozhin explicitly. And given what Anne just said, and what you just said about how strong a challenge this actually is, what is this hesitation about? I mean, this whole incident could have ended with Prigozhin dead, but instead he’s in Belarus, or we think he’s in Belarus. And he’s alive, or we think he’s alive.

Nichols: I think both of them are feeling about to figure out who their allies are and they’re both making appeals to society that are meant to isolate. In Putin’s case, he’s just isolating Prigozhin without naming him, saying: Hey, all you heavily armed crack commando mercenary guys, I understand that you were led astray. And it’s okay to come home.

So when he talks about traitors, I mean, this isn’t Stalinism. He’s not saying, Oh, that whole unit, they’re all dead. He’s trying to plant internal divisions there. As is Prigozhin, who has been really careful to say, Look, I’m not trying to overthrow the president. I’m not trying to overthrow the government. But these two guys at the top, Shoigu and Gerasimov, the minister of defense and the chief of the general staff, they gotta go. And if I have to march to Moscow to get them out, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So they’re both being very careful not to proliferate more enemies in society or among the other elites than they need to. Now, for Prigozhin, that makes sense. For Putin, that’s very revealing. I mean, he’s the president of the country and here he is, kind of tiptoeing around, trying not to aggravate thousands of armed men who were part of a mutiny. So while they’re both doing the same thing, I think it’s really revealing that one of them happens to be the president of the country.

Rosin: Yeah, and as much as I understand the iconography of Putin is important—who’s weak, who’s strong—as a unit of analysis. Strong man, shirtless on a horse, does not necessarily wanna lose out to a hotdog-salesman ex-prisoner.

Nichols: Right. He actually appeared in public the first two times—he looked awful; I mean, it looked like a bunker video—where he is standing in front of a desk and he’s kind of raging to the camera. He finally came out again with all of the pomp and all the trappings of his office, coming down the big staircase and the honor guard snapping to attention.

And addressing the troops, the officers, he said something really interesting. He said: You prevented a civil war. Which is not true. Nobody actually did that. It’s certainly not true that the army put down a civil war in the offing. Nothing like that happened, and to make that appeal is to try to pull the military closer to the president, to say: You’re my heroes. I know you saved the country and you will keep saving the country. Which to me was a really striking thing to do. Again, as you and everybody’s been pointing out, Prigozhin is still—at least we think—still alive and running around issuing statements.

Rosin: So what comes next? After the break, we speculate. But with restraint.

[BREAK]

Rosin: Now, because both of you have studied the situation so closely, my natural temptation is to lob a lot of future-prediction questions at you. Like, what does this mean for Ukraine and what does the weakened Putin mean for a global order? Is it just too hard to speculate?

Applebaum: I feel there are so many missing pieces of this story and so many oddities about it that don’t add up. I would need to know more before I would be confident about telling you that, you know, at 7 o’clock on September the first, X or Y will happen next. Almost everything we know about this story, I mean, it’s like the shadows on Plato’s Cave, you know? We’re seeing the reflections of activities. There are these Russian military bloggers who you have to follow in order to understand any of this. And of course, they’re telling the story from their point of view.

State television is telling it from Putin’s propaganda point of view. It’s not as if we have a reliable source of information who will lay it out for us and give us the facts. Even the story as we’re speaking. I mean, this may even change before this podcast comes out, but as we’re speaking, we’ve been told by several very unreliable people that Prigozhin is in Belarus,—by the Russian spokesman and by the Belarussian.

And, you know, those people have lied so many times that until I see a photograph of Prigozhin, I don’t believe it. He’s gotta have a photograph of him in Minsk and I need to know that it’s not Photoshopped. And then I’m sure it’s true. So that’s why I think it’s very hard to—you don’t wanna make too many sweeping conclusions yet.

I mean, we know what we saw on Saturday. And what we saw on Saturday was a mutiny, and it did demonstrate far more weakness in the state and unpreparedness than anybody was certain was there. We know that Putin was the first to start using the language of civil war. He did it on Saturday morning, and so that indicates that he at least thinks something very serious was happening.

Which is an indication, again, that there may be more to the story to come, but making clear predictions about what will happen, certainly to the war in Ukraine—I mean, I’m not sure yet that it has affected the war in Ukraine. Maybe it will affect Russian troop morale. Maybe it lets us know that there will be more trouble with the military command.

But it hasn’t had a specific effect on the ground yet that we can see. And until that happens, I’m just reluctant to make too many predictions.

Nichols: Yeah, I think when it comes to the war in Ukraine, too many people have had this idea that all the Russian forces are going to stop and say, No, wait. We’re not going to fight until we get this sorted out. Um, they’re still fighting. The situation at the front is the situation at the front, and that doesn’t really change because of this.

So what Ukraine has to do, and the support we need to give them—that doesn’t change … the reluctance to prognosticate. Well, you know, there were a lot of people who said the Soviet Union couldn’t fall. People that study Russia have figured out that you can get burned on these predictions, in part because when you’re predicting stuff, you tend to be predicting the behavior of institutions writ large because you know how they operate. This is all contingent on individuals, and trying to predict the behavior of these kind of Mafia-like characters is really difficult to do, because that could all change in a moment when they decide to shift alliances or one of them runs afoul of another of them.

So I’m with Anne here. I don’t want to get too detailed about what’s going to happen next week … This definitely wounded Putin and he is in a different situation than he was.

I don’t think there’s any going back to sort of pre-June in Russian politics right now.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean that’s important enough. As you were talking, Tom, I was thinking if you write the histories of a lot of mutinies and coups, they do start with an action by someone who seems like a gangster and seems to be behaving in a ridiculous way. Like, coups can start in ridiculous ways.

Applebaum: It is also true that coups and mutinies that don’t succeed can have an impact on politics too. And there’s some famous examples from Russian history: There’s a revolution that doesn’t succeed in 1905, but it had a profound impact on the state. It forced the czar, Nicholas, to pass a constitution and create a Duma—a Parliament.

It very much changed the way that he was perceived. And then in the run-up to the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were also a number of strikes and moments, you know, and other, different kinds of events that happened. And some of them were unsuccessful. The Bolsheviks had a march that was unsuccessful, but ultimately there was a revolution.

They did take power. And those earlier events, you know, looked retrospectively more important than they may have seemed at the time. And it’s too early to say whether that’s what this is. But it’s clearly the case though that a failed event can have political consequences even beyond those of the immediate moment.

Nichols: Right. The 1991 coup was a complete clown show, and it failed. The guy that was actually was supposed to step in as president and replace Gorbachev was, like, drunk all the time, and the whole thing was just a complete mess. But it had a profound impact on the final days of the Soviet Union and on the collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the countries of the post-Soviet space. Most mutinies and coups don’t succeed, but as Anne pointed out, they can have an immense impact just because they happened at all.

Rosin: Now all I wanna do is ask you guys to speculate, because now it’s very interesting. Now I’m thinking: Okay, so which directions does it go? You know, Is there a future for Prigozhin? Is he making a play to replace Putin one day? Are there other Prigozhins out there? I mean, are any of those answerable questions?

Applebaum: I think you can talk about options. Again, you can look at the past. It seems to me, in the case of Putin, one possibility is: Now that there’s been a challenge that didn’t succeed but that revealed weakness, will there be more challenges? And so you might say, Well, that’s clearly now an option in a way that it wasn’t before last week.

You could also guess that Putin might now try another crackdown. What do leaders do who have been weakened? Leaders like him. Dictators. Well, one of the things they do is they lash out and they try and reestablish their preeminence or their dominance. And they do that by arresting people or purging people. I don’t know what that would be in the case of modern Russia. Cutting off the internet? Or shutting the borders? I mean, you can sort of imagine scenarios, because he will now need to make up for the fact that he’s seen to be weaker. And I’m not saying either one of those will happen, but those are things that, based on how these things have played out in other times in other places, you can guess at.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, as you look at this, I’m trying to put myself in your head. You’re sort of looking at the dictator’s playbook, watching how he rewrites the story of what just happened in real time and trying to see what other dictators would do or have done in the past. Is that how you track these events?

Applebaum: Yes. And I’m also thinking of Russian history. In the history of the Soviet Communist Party, every time there was a failure or a disaster, they would try to re-up the ideology and sort of restart the project and crack down. It goes in waves, all the way from 1917 up to 1991. And you can imagine a similar pattern working itself out here, yes.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: I feel like I’m going back to the toolbox of the old-school Sovietology that I learned back in the 1980s. And so, rather than prognosticate, I’ll just say the things I’m looking for. I’m literally now looking at videos of who’s sitting next to whom at these meetings. Who’s still in. Who might be out.

I’m looking for personnel changes. Does the minister of defense survive? Does the chief of the general staff get replaced? This now becomes kind of a game of trying to follow all of these people and their portfolios as some kind of indicator of what’s actually happening behind the scenes.

Rosin: Tom, what’s the larger through line you’re tracking? You’re tracking the chess pieces—who’s going here and who’s falling off the board—but what’s the bigger story?

Nichols: I think it’s going to be: Is Putin trying to shore up his power base or is there an alternative base forming against him? I think that’s the thing to watch. You know, we’ve lived with Putin for 23 years seeming to be [invincible], except for when he first arrived in power and when he had a serious challenge around 2011.

We’ve kind of internalized his narrative that he’s untouchable and he can stay forever. And that he reigns supreme. That’s gone. And so I think it’s a pretty natural thing to wonder: If he’s not that powerful and if he doesn’t have that kind of support, how long can he remain in power?

Because until now he has made sure that there were no alternatives to him. And I think what Prigozhin did was to say, well, there could be at least some alternative. Maybe not good ones. But you can in fact oppose this guy and criticize his team and get away with it.

Rosin: Yeah. Basically, Russians, you might have a choice. That’s as much as we can say.

Nichols: Not a great choice, but a choice somewhere.

Rosin: Yeah. Anne, this may be a strange way to put it, but is there a sense that this incident exposes how alone, or kind of lost in his own head, Putin is? He conceived of the war in isolation. The military was never necessarily enthusiastic. Now we have a vision of him not exactly sure who his allies are and who’s on his team, and I just got this vision of: dictator alone.

Applebaum: So we’ve had intimations of that for a couple of years now. In fact, Prigozhin himself has hinted that Putin doesn’t really know what’s going on [and] they’re lying to him. And many others have said that too. So we’ve already had this idea that he doesn’t really know what’s going on on the battlefield. And this incident did make it seem like he also didn’t really know what was going on at home.

I mean, for someone who’s now saying they had foreknowledge of this, he didn’t react like somebody who was confident of the outcome. The speech he gave on Saturday morning was panicky. It was about the civil war in 1917 and “our nation is at stake.”

He didn’t give off the impression of someone who was staying in charge. And so there very much is the impression that he somehow lives in this by himself, surrounded by security guards in some bunker. And that feels more and more like an accurate description of his life.

Rosin: Yeah. Well, I guess a lot more to come this week. This year. For a while. But thank you both for helping us understand what just happened.

Applebaum: Thanks.

Nichols: Thank you.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, the executive producer of audio at The Atlantic. Engineering is by Rob Smerciak. Fact-checking by Yvonne Kim. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, A. C. Valdez, and Vann Newkirk. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

The values of individualism that encourage us to go it alone are in constant tension with the desire for community that many people crave. But when attempting to do things on our own, we may miss out on the joys of coming together.

This season’s finale conversation features writer Mia Birdsong, who highlights the cultural and philosophical roots of Americans’ struggle to build community. In a culture pushing us to put our own oxygen mask on first, Mia argues for the quiet radicalness of asking for help and showing up for others.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip,” “Just Manners”), Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), and Yonder Dale (“Simple Gestures”).

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, do you remember the first time I approached you in the office?

Julie Beck: [Laughter.] Yes.

Rashid: I sent you a message from behind your desk, saying, “Hi, can I come to your desk?”—while…staring at you sitting at your desk.

Beck: From…let’s be clear…less than 10 feet away.

Rashid: Yes.

Beck: I was like, “Yes, you can?” I remember you being really tentative when you kind of crept up, and I was like, “You don’t have to ask permission to come say hi to me.” And then I was wondering if I looked really unapproachable or something. But I was really excited to meet you, because we’d been working together on Zoom for a while, but it was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: I promise that is not my usual approach. I think I just forgot how to human a little bit, and what it felt like to work with people in an office. So I think I thought I was being polite, but I maybe just made it a bit weird.

—

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

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

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

—

Rashid: When Julie and I first got together to develop the series—after my awkward desk approach [Chuckle]—we talked a lot about how we wanted the show to explore how small, everyday conversations can become the deeper connections that we want more of in our lives.

Knowing how to talk to people isn’t simply for the sake of starting conversation or fighting through the awkwardness of small talk. The point is to ultimately reach a deeper understanding of the people around us.

Beck: What I’ve always wanted, and what I think so many people long for, is this sense that you are part of a rich, interconnected community. That you have an extended network of support and love, full of many different kinds of relationships that serve many different purposes. And the types of conversations we’ve explored in the podcast so far are the stepping stones that lead up to that.

And now, we’ve arrived at our finale episode. And this is a big one. We’re going to talk about how you build a community, and that can be a really complex concept. The barriers that can make that rich sense of community feel hard to find are not just psychological, within our own minds. There are cultural barriers, too.

Mia Birdsong: The American narrative about freedom—which is deeply individualistic—is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself.

Rashid: Reaching out may be exactly what we need to do to find the community support we need.

Birdsong: I’m just like, Ugh, I can’t figure this out, and I’m like, Duh! Like, ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it.

Beck: Mia Birdsong is the author of a book called How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. In our conversation, she explores how the injustices baked into our country’s history have limited people’s ability to connect with one another, and how we understand the definition of community.

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave, right, was considered unfree, was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Rashid: Mia argues that today, too many people equate freedom with independence, and that can lead us to go it alone when we don’t need to.

Birdsong: And I think we’ve been told, right? The people who are strong—the people who are achieving and are successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own. And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering.

Beck: I think we definitely tell ourselves a lot of stories about how other people must have it more together than we do.

Birdsong: And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person.

Rashid: Mia gets into all of it. She shares real advice about how to ask people for support…without feeling bad about it. And how that can actually bring us together.

—

Beck: Mia, there’s been a lot of research on how lonely Americans are, how disconnected people are from their neighbors. And a lot of people feeling like they don’t have anybody to confide in, even. What do you think is behind all that?

Birdsong: There’s a Harvard study; there’s been a couple of Cigna studies. The BBC did a loneliness experiment, which was a global study. And, you know, Americans are lonely. Loneliness has been increasing, and unsurprisingly, the pandemic made it worse. The BBC study was interesting because it found that loneliness is highest among young people, men, and those who are in an individualistic society—a.k.a., America.

Beck: What is the role that you think individualism plays in all this?

Birdsong: When I think about individualism in America, I connect that very strongly to capitalism—how America defines what success looks like and what it means to be a good person.

And part of what capitalism has done is: It has inserted the exchange of money. I didn’t, you know, get together with a bunch of my friends and build my house. I paid for it.

What’s interesting is that among people who don’t have money, don’t have as much access to money, you see a lot more relational childcare. Like, where your neighbor—or your best friend or your sister or your dad—takes care of your kids. And then that social fabric gets built in, because it’s not a transaction. It is what family does.

And then I think the other piece is that the definition of success is so much about the idea that one can be a self-made man, right? Or pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

So there’s this idea that as an individual, you’re going to work hard, and you’re going to make it on your own—which “invisibilizes” all of the help that people do get. Either from the systems that exist and the privileges and advantages you have, depending on your relationship with that system.

So I think about, you know: People who are born wealthy tend to stay wealthy. If you’re white, if you’re male, if you’re able-bodied, if you’re straight, there are all of these advantages that you end up having.

Beck: And there’s a sense, too, like acknowledging any help that you did get makes your success seem less impressive somehow.

Birdsong: And we think that asking for help is a form of weakness. The more attached you are to this version of what it means to be successful and happy and good, the less you are connected to other humans. Because you’re out there trying to make it on your own.

__

Birdsong: Part of how somebody who was a slave was considered unfree was not just because they were in bondage, but because they had been separated from their people. And to be free was to be in connected community.

Beck: Wow.

Birdsong: And it added a whole other layer to how I think about the Black experience in America, from being kidnapped and trafficked from home. And if we think about our people as being not just the human beings around us, but also the land we’re from—our ancestors, right?

Through to: An intrinsic part of the way that America practiced slavery was about the threat or experience of being sold away from your family. To the prison-industrial complex, right?

And through all of that, there’s also been Black people’s resistance to it—from people jumping overboard slave ships because they’re like, I’m going home one way or another. Obviously, people running away from plantations.

After Emancipation there’s this archive where you can look at these online. There were all of these advertisements that we placed in newspapers, trying to find loved ones that we hadn’t seen for decades. Sometimes it was one of our children. Sometimes it was a parent. Sometimes it was, you know, a best friend. Sometimes it was a spouse.

They’re beautiful and heartbreaking, ’cause they’re all very short. But they’re people talking about how they’re looking for somebody and they were sold to this person. So their name might have changed. The limit on the kind of information they had about this loved one—but the determination that they had to find them—was just like…rejection of the ways in which slavery was making Black people unfree. It was this insistence, right?

Beck: And the freedom to reconnect.

Birdsong: Totally. And I think about how many Black folks I know who find out, you know, when they’re an adult that Uncle Bobby is not actually their dad’s brother, but is their dad’s best friend from elementary school.

I have a friend who told me about her and her siblings looking at these family photos and realizing they didn’t know who was chosen family and who was blood or legal family. And then also, ultimately, that it didn’t matter.

And all of that stands in such stark contrast to the American narrative about freedom, which is deeply individualistic. Which is that depending on or counting on other people makes you less free, and you’re more free if you only have to count on yourself. Which means that you need to hoard resources, so that you have everything that you need. You get everything through transaction, so that you don’t owe anybody.

It means you don’t ask for help. It means you’re not responsible for or accountable to anybody. The idea of freedom being you can do whatever the hell you want, and nobody can tell you otherwise, right?

And that is so antithetical to what it means to be a person. Because we are fundamentally social animals. Like, we need care, right? And this American idea of freedom is so separated from that.

Beck: So when you say the American-dream narrative is antithetical to freedom, what do you specifically mean by the American-dream narrative?

Birdsong: So when I think about the fundamental ideals that were written into the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and who was articulating that...we had white, straight as far as we know, landowning men. Who represented a minority of the American population.

Women were not considered at all—that’s like half right there. No Black people. No poor people. So when I think about that, and I think about what the American dream is—that’s the ideal, right? And that you do that through working hard, not asking for help. And, you know, you’re amassing your kingdom.

Beck: Mm.

Birdsong: That is not being a person. That is not about being in community. It’s not about caring for others. There’s nothing in there about love. It’s such an existentially central part of the human experience—our pursuit of and desire for and need for love.

—

Beck: Can you tell me about a time your community really showed up for you?

Birdsong: Ooh, yes. In July of 2021, I got diagnosed with colon cancer. And Stage 3 colon cancer. And I was going to have to have surgery and ultimately went through three months of really intensive chemotherapy, very aggressive chemo.

Beck: Ugh.

Birdsong: Yeah, it was no fun. But 20 minutes after I got the news, I had a phone call with my friend Aisha. We were working on a project together, and I was all anxious. Not because I had been told I had cancer, but because I didn’t know when I was going to be able to, like, continue the project.

So I totally got on the phone with her, and I was like, “Girl, I’m so sorry. But I just found out I have cancer, and I have to have surgery. So I’m going to have to postpone my work on this project.” She was like, “Mia.” She was like, “Let’s take a breath.”

And in that breath, I moved from kind of hiding from what was scary about this—behind “I have to get this work done”—to being in this place of being able to feel how afraid I was. But also, like, not alone.

Before we got off the phone, she had the meal train set up that would ultimately make sure that my family got fed while I was in the hospital recovering from surgery, and then for the three months that I was going through chemo.

She then circled up with three other friends of ours. And this group of Black women who called themselves “Mia’s Care Squad” then basically coordinated all of the things with the rest of my community—like, my larger community—that I would need.

They made spreadsheets. They had email chains: a squad of people who would run errands for me. They collected everybody’s advice. So I wasn’t getting bombarded with like, you know, all kinds of advice. But I totally wanted advice, because I was like, “I’ve never had cancer before. I want the advice.”

I feel like there was this way in which they tended to my physical well-being—but they also were tending to my spirit and my heart. They created a “joy fund” for me.

Beck: Oh my gosh; what does that mean?

Birdsong: Which was like a pile of money for me to spend only on things that would bring me joy. I bought a lot of art supplies.

When I was having surgery, there was a group of people outside on the hospital lawn singing for me.

The way that this group came together. And I remember having this moment in the beginning of being like, I am absolutely going to tell my community what’s going on with me. I’m not going to be one of those people who secretly goes through chemo. I’m like, Everybody’s going to know. And I am absolutely asking for their help. I do not want to do this thing by myself.

Beck: What did it feel like to hear your friends singing outside your hospital room?

Birdsong: Well, I couldn’t hear them, because I was in the basement of the hospital having my part of my colon taken out. But I knew that they were there. And I remember as I was getting the anesthesia, holding—because I saw them when I was coming into the hospital.

I remember just holding them in my head. And oh, my God. Because, you know, I was terrified. It was so comforting to know that they were out there singing for me.

So I’ve now been cancer-free for more than a year. And when I look back on that experience, I mean: It sucked. It was terrible. Like, cancer sucks, chemo sucks. But there’s a way in which it wove the fabric of community together tighter for them. I mean—we have shared the spreadsheets with so many other people.

And I know that what my community did has been a model for other people who have also gone through cancer or just, you know, something terrible. I feel so grateful that I got to have that level of love and care, and that I didn’t have any shame about receiving it.

—

Beck: I want to talk more about asking for help and offering help, because I feel like that’s very loaded. Why are so many of us hesitant to ask for help?

Birdsong: I think that, one: We often don’t see people asking for help, so we think everybody else is doing it on their own. Which is a lie. Not only is everybody else doing it on their own, but that it’s easy, right? When in fact, all of us are just a hot mess if we’re doing it on our own. We’re suffering.

Beck: It’s all smoke and mirrors.

Birdsong: Totally. So there’s that piece: that we don’t have a lot of good modeling for it. And I think we’ve been told that the people who have their shit together—the people who are strong, who are achieving and successful—are doing it on their own. They’re figuring out how to do it on their own.

And that there is actually some little badge of honor that we get from suffering. When I was in my 20s and 30s, especially: the way that people would say how they got no sleep and were really tired.

Beck: Yes.

Birdsong: As like, something they were proud of.

Beck: “I worked so much. I’m so busy. My calendar is so full. I’m so tired.” Exactly. Like—congratulations?

Birdsong: Yes. Exactly—that thing, right? That is like, I have suffered in order to be productive. I have suffered in order to achieve. So that there is some way in which we have tied together “suffering and pain” with “being a good person and achievement.” I feel I’m at this place where I’m like, No, I want ease. Just because I can do something by myself doesn’t mean that I should.

I absolutely have to remind myself of this. I often find myself struggling—usually it’s something that I’m thinking about, not so much a task I need to do—but I’m just like, Oh, I can’t figure this out. And I’m like, Duh! Ask for help. Like, talk to somebody about it. And inevitably—even if it’s just sharing the anxiety or stress or hardness of the thing—I automatically feel better, just because I’m being witnessed.

Beck: Is there a right way to ask for help?

Birdsong: Well, I’ll tell you what works for me. I often find, generally, that casting a wide net is better, right? Especially if it’s hard to ask for help. Asking one person and them saying “no” means you have to go do it again. When I text my neighbors for a lemon, right, I text all of them. I’m not texting them one at a time. I think the other thing is to tell on yourself and to say.

Beck: To tattle on yourself? [Laughter.]

Birdsong: Yes! To be like: I need help with something. I’m finding it really challenging to ask for help. I don’t want to be a burden. I’m going to do it anyway. And then, ideally, you’re able to have conversations with people, and they can reassure you that you’re not a burden.

I don’t know anybody who is constantly asking for help, that other people are like, Oh my God, Like, stop. That’s not my experience. I feel mostly we don’t ask enough. Maybe practice with things that feel like less of a lift—that don’t feel so critical to you, but that feel like they would bring you some ease.

If you know a friend is going to the store, ask them to pick you up some coffee because they’re going to be there anyway. And then you can go by and get the coffee.

Beck: And if they say no to picking up the coffee, that doesn’t destroy my confidence in the same way.

Birdsong: Totally. Maybe I already have coffee, and I’m just going to pretend I need coffee and see what happens.

Beck: What are your thoughts on the right way to offer help? Because a piece of advice that I hear a lot is that you shouldn’t ask “How can I help?” or “What can I do for you?” Because that’s more stress on the person: to then find something for you to do when maybe they’re in crisis or something.

Birdsong: Right, ’cause it’s not specific.

Beck: And then the advice is: “You should just do something without being asked.” But then, what if that’s unwelcome?

Birdsong: Totally. So this is where I’m also like, we need to stop trying to get an A in asking and offering for help.

Beck: I feel very called out by that.

Birdsong: We’re going to mess it up. I know, all of the high achievers are like, I want to get an A in asking and offering help. I think if we really have no idea what we can offer, we can say to people, “I want to offer some help, and I don’t know what would be useful to you.”

Beck: Mm hmm.

Birdsong: “Do you have an idea about something that would be useful, or is there someone who is close to you who does know what might be useful? And can I talk to them?” We don’t want to offer help that is not useful, because it feels risky.

And I think this is where we have to like, tap into what we know about our loved ones and come up with—here are three things that you could offer, right? And offer those and see if they want any of them. Or do a thing and see what happens. And bring them food. The death of a loved one is not going to be made worse by the fact that you gave them bread and they’re gluten free.

Beck: Small potatoes at that point.

Birdsong: Exactly. When I think about something like a joy fund, right? There’s a kind of imagination that was required to come up with that, that I think is harder in times where we’re all grinding with work and shepherding children and commuting and all of that. There was something about the slowing down of the pandemic. And in my mind, that was the slowing down of the wheel of capitalism that gave people room to show up for me in a particular way.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And I’m saying all of that because—especially right now, like we’re not post-pandemic, but we’re capitalism—the wheel of capitalism has started winding along the way that it was before.

And our mental capacity gets sucked up by, you know, both our paid and unpaid labor. And keeping our lives going. So I want us to give ourselves some grace when we find it challenging to make the space that we need for community.

Beck: Right. Because it’s not entirely our doing.

Birdsong: Exactly.

Rashid: Julie, there was an interesting survey on time use showing that by 2019, the average American was spending only four hours per week with friends—which doesn’t seem like a whole lot of time to me. And there was an almost 40 percent decline from five years before that. So, it seems like there’s so much we’re pressured to squeeze into a week or a day that four hours per week is all many people can even manage.

Beck: That was even before the pandemic, too. So I can’t imagine it’s gotten better since. But you’re right, Becca, that time is finite, and life is full of demands. Which is breaking news, I know. I mean: It would be nice to see those stats go up. But also, no matter what, it’s never going to be possible to always be a perfect friend or a perfect neighbor.

Mia said, “You need to stop trying to get an A-plus in helping people.” And I felt very personally roasted by that, because sometimes I do think about community-building as…homework? [Laughter.]

Even though I want to focus on relationships more than personal achievement in my life, those values of hard work and perfectionism follow me into my personal life as well—where if I’m not living up to that ideal of creating a perfect utopian community for me and the people I love, then I’m subconsciously giving myself a bad grade. What a nerd!

Rashid: You’re not a nerd…you’re trying to stay on top of it! I now make it a point on Sunday evenings to kind of write out a list of things I want to do in the next few weeks. And then I try to actually set up social time with my group of friends—I actually started a little neighborhood supper club with my friends, where we do themed dinners every month.

I like that it’s created this routine for us—where I know we have this thing we like doing together, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.

Beck: I like that you attend to your correspondences on Sunday night. It’s very Pride and Prejudice of you. [Laughter.]

Beck: So Mia, we’ve been talking a lot about how communities show up for each other in a crisis. And I think most people are really ready to show up in a crisis. But how can we have that kind of interdependence when it’s not a crisis?

Birdsong: Right, because all of us are going to experience crisis. That’s just a given. I have met so many older white men who—their wives die, and they’re in this moment of crisis, and they have nobody. They have their therapist, is who they have. They will just start talking to anybody about what’s going on with them, because they are so lonely.

So I think about that as the opposite of what we want.

Beck: Yeah.

Birdsong: And part of it, for them, is that they’ve kind of put all of their social connection in the one basket of their wife. And when that person doesn’t exist anymore, they’re just set adrift.

Beck: So community is, by its nature, something that has to be built by multiple people, of course. But if you are feeling a lack of community in your life, what can you as an individual do to kickstart that process?

Birdsong: So, the advice people get is often to join a thing. And I’m like, that sounds lame in some way. But it’s also totally true. Especially as adults, right? We don’t have that built-in, kind of like a school situation—where we’re meeting people who we know we’re building friendships with.

Beck: Right. We have work.

Birdsong: Exactly. Which I feel is not actually where you should be centering your social life. Because despite what your boss might say, your work is not your family. I mean, people obviously build genuine relationships there, but that should not be your most important social interaction.

So I’m like: book clubs. Activism. If you have some kind of faith, a faith community. Because you’re not going to meet people sitting at home, like I’ve tried.

I think the other piece is that sometimes we know people, but we don’t allow ourselves to be known by them. We’re not having the kinds of conversations that allow people to see into the interior of our lives. We’re not really telling them what’s going on with us. We stick to small talk. Right?

It is a recounting of what happened that was interesting in your life. And, you know, you say that you’re “good” as opposed to what you’re struggling with, or how you’re actually feeling. Or something that you’re wrestling with that could even be, you know, an intellectual thing. It doesn’t have to be painful. But we keep things at this surface level, and we don’t allow things to go deep.

Beck: How do you figure out what you want a community to look like in your life and then bring that into the real world? It seems like a very basic question, but it also seems really hard to actually do it.

Birdsong: Yes. And part of it is to get quiet with yourself. Notice the part of you that is longing for something. And I think, to make some room for it, and to notice how you’re thinking about that part. Like, if it makes you anxious, or if you wish it didn’t exist, or if it’s beautiful in some way to you—sit and find that piece of you. And I think you have to ask it, right? What is it that it wants?

You don’t make a strategic plan for building community. So then it’s really about seeing what that leads you to, and seeing who it leads you to.

I think for many of us, it is like—we have people in our lives, but we want to bring them closer in some way. I think that we actually have more knowledge and wisdom about how to build relationships than we give ourselves credit for. And I think primarily what gets in our way is not “Do we know what to do?” but “Are we willing to do it?”

There is no way to be in close relationships without being seen in some way. And I think many of us—I am “many of us”—are terrified of being known. We want people to see the best version of ourself, because we think that’s the version that people will love. That’s the version that people will praise.

That’s the version that people will want to, you know, be around. But nobody is that version of themselves. We are all many things. Sure, we do good and we do well, but we also mess up and are unsure and insecure and have a hard time.

Beck: I feel like what I’m hearing you say is that if there’s a basic action to community-building, it is “not hiding.”

Birdsong: Totally. Yes.

Rashid: You know, one thing I have noticed ever since the pandemic, Julie, is that most of my socializing is now a lot more homebound, which is not a good or bad thing. Yeah, but: I established a lot of new traditions with my community, like cooking dinner at different people’s houses or movie nights, or things in my life that used to be oriented around going out and meeting at bars.

And that still happens, too. But I have established a sort of newness in the rituals I have with my circle of people. What about you? I mean, have you learned anything in the making of this podcast that has changed your approach to your existing relationships, or helped you build new ones?

Beck: I wish I had a big update for you that would illustrate my personal growth. But I don’t think a lot has really changed with my friends or in my community. I’m not best friends with my neighbors yet. I think what I’ve noticed more is just patterns in how I think about my relationship to my community.

Rashid: I feel like that’s what we’ve set out to do, right? Sort of break down these steps of just bringing people closer to us. The initial awkward small talk, the hanging out, the scheduling the hangouts, the tough communication with friendships, and ultimately the sort of selfless disposition that you need to have if you want your relationships to feel more mutual and not feel transactional.

Beck: I think another hallmark of life in our capitalistic society is the pressure to optimize and self-improve all the time. I fall into that trap of thinking things will be better if I change this or if I change that.

So it kind of strikes me that a lot of my angst comes from feeling like I need to optimize my community toward some ideal through my own hard work—which is actually a very self-centered way to think about it.

The point of a community is that it’s not just in one individual’s control. And as much as it’s good to put effort into your relationships, you also have to just let go and be curious and see what’s actually there, and enjoy what’s there.

Rashid: And I think when you do try to control the situation, you can end up with our messaging-behind-the-desk situation, where before saying “Hi” I thought it was maybe a better idea to message you first, and make sure that you were comfortable with the interaction and all of that.

Beck: But you know, an imperfect awkward beginning like that can actually lead to something great. Because we’ve really become friends while making this podcast! You’ve been to my house; we’ve had many long, rambly, chatty drinks together. You’ve met my partner, you’ve met my sister, you’ve met a bunch of my friends.

Some of that was the result of intentional effort and reaching out and scheduling. But it was also the result of easing up on overthinking, and just being together. So I think it’s a balance of effort and ease—or effort, but not to a neurotic degree.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Are we moving too fast for America’s national pastime? Hanna Rosin asks staff writer Mark Leibovich whether the changes MLB is making to the game could help him fall in love with baseball all over again.

Interested in the changes baseball’s making? Read Mark’s article on how Moneyball broke baseball — and how the same people who broke it are back, trying to save it.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, first question: Can you just list for me some rituals that baseball players do?

Mark Leibovich: Um, you know, spitting into their hands and rubbing their hands together, staring into space, slapping their chest, Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves, tipping their hat, balancing their hat, looking to the right field grandstand, looking to the left field grandstand, crossing themselves.

They invent new ones all the time. It’s completely dynamic. A pitcher might tug at his cap and wiggle his leg when going into a motion.

Rosin: Do people lick their bats?

Leibovich: Apparently Yasiel Puig does.

Rosin: Eww.

Leibovich: Yeah. But no, I think that’s a pretty rare thing. And sounds unsanitary too.

Rosin: And what do these rituals have to do with baseball?

Leibovich: Nothing, except that they have been there forever—and players have always had rituals. Oh, this is a big part of the problem in baseball. This is why the people in charge have moved to make it faster.

Rosin: That is my friend Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic who gets all the best assignments.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: I’ve known Mark for enough years to see all the fan gear faded. Red Sox hat, Red Sox T-shirts with holes in them. Red Sox socks. I’ve even seen a picture of little Mark at the game with his dad.

Leibovich: Oh my God. The first spring-training game—like, my friends and I would rush home from school to listen to the game on the radio.

Rosin: His love of this game…it was deep.

Leibovich: Every year, my birthday party was all my friends coming, and we would play a game of pickup baseball at the intersection near the little cul-de-sac I grew up on.

But it’s not necessarily like little 7-year-old Mark here. Mean, if you had seen me, I guess I would’ve been in my late 30s. They had these scintillating couple of playoff series where the Red Sox finally came back. I mean, you know, those are some intense sports-watching things.

I mean, this was the culture of my youth, and that is just gone.

Rosin: And is it gone? Because life is just so fast now.

Leibovich: I think that’s part of it. I think baseball has gotten much slower. I mean, games literally took, you know, two and a half hours when I was a kid. Now, you know, as of last year they took three hours, 10 minutes or so.

Rosin: So it’s the two things moving in opposite directions. It’s like: Just as we were speeding up and getting faster, baseball just got slower.

Leibovich: You have these two things moving in opposite directions—baseball getting slower, and our brains getting faster and our attention spans shrinking.

And all of this was moving in a direction antithetical to enjoying baseball.

Rosin: It’s funny;. when you put it that starkly, it actually makes me a little sad. Like we just have no room for anything slow in our busy lives anymore.

Leibovich: Yes. I mean, it’s funny ’cause we have these conversations, and it’s like, “Oh, baseball is to blame. It’s these self-indulgent ritual-doers who are Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves all day.” Maybe this is just our problem. I mean, there are a lot of slow, reflective things we don’t do anymore.

Rosin: So, Mark: When you set out to write about baseball, you thought that the sport was dying. And then, it did something to save itself...maybe. What did baseball do?

Leibovich: They have initiated a set of rules [in Major League Baseball]. One, and most importantly, to make the game go faster. And two: certain rules to make there be more action and offense. Less waiting around in baseball; more fun to watch.

Rosin: Got it. So just like: faster everything. More exciting.

Rosin: What’s one thing they did?

Leibovich: Well, the big thing is a pitch clock.

A pitch clock is a new tool that has appeared in every major-league ballpark this year. In which there’s this big clock in the outfield and also behind home plate—

Rosin: —like a literal clock.

Leibovich: A literal clock. It counts down from 15 seconds.

A pitcher now has 15 seconds to pitch the ball, or 20 seconds if there’s someone on base. And the batter has to be in the box ready to hit by the eight-second mark. So there are only eight seconds left. The batter has to be ready.

Rosin: And what else did they do?

__

Bigger bases

Leibovich: One of the things they did was they made the bases bigger, which, you know, people can understand. It’s a bigger base now. What that does is it encourages stolen bases. It makes running bases a safer thing, ’cause you have more of a safe haven to grab onto, or slide into.

They’re reducing pickoff throws, which took forever. And things like that. So they’re encouraging more offense.

Rosin: This isn’t technical baseball language, but it does feel like a real vibe shift.

Leibovich: It very much is. And it’s hard to explain, but when you’re actually watching a game, there is urgency.

Urgency: It is not a word that anyone would ever associate with baseball in recent years.

Now, you sit and you watch—and people are not screwing around. And you sort of internalize that as a viewer or a listener, and you say, “Wait a minute; things are happening faster. I better pay closer attention. I better not check my phone as closely.”

And so the whole vibe is, yes, maybe less relaxing. But ultimately more satisfying, because more is happening, and it’s happening faster.

Rosin: And why did they make all these changes?

Leibovich: Well, part of it is just: Baseball was falling further and further behind things like football and basketball and other sports that are a lot more compelling.

They go much faster and, frankly, are more national spectacles. Like everyone gathers to watch the Super Bowl.

So I actually went to a World Series game last fall between the Phillies and the Astros. And I drove up to Philadelphia. And, you know, it was a World Series game, and it was a no-hitter. The Astros pitchers—four of them—combined to no-hit the Phillies. This was historic, or theoretically it was historic.

No one really noticed. No one remembers it. And this is a World Series game—the likes of which are routinely being outrated on TV by early-season NFL games.

I mean, as our culture speeds up, as brains speed up—you know, cell phones and computers and attention spans. Just the whole culture has sped up. Baseball has slowed down.

And finally, they sort of decided to, all at once, just get very tough and say, “Okay, there is now a clock in baseball.” Lo and behold, it has already shaved 25, maybe 30 minutes off of games in the first couple of months in this season.

__

Theo Epstein

Rosin: So. Who is the main architect of speeding baseball up?

Leibovich: There are a few of them. But probably the best known is a guy named Theo Epstein, who is this legendary figure in baseball.

He was the youngest general manager in history. He was named general manager of the Boston Red Sox at age 28. He is known for bringing the first World Series championship to Boston in 86 years. He then left the Red Sox and went to the Chicago Cubs—who had an even longer World Series drought—and he delivered after 108 years.

So he sort of has this legend attached to him. And he left the Cubs a couple of years ago, and he joined Major League Baseball as a consultant.

__

Moneyball

Rosin: Isn’t Theo Epstein associated with the whole “Moneyball revolution” in baseball?

Leibovich: Yes. He did not pioneer it. Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s is given credit for that. But Theo Epstein is known as the chief disciple who applied some of these new theories in baseball and actually won World Series with it for the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

Rosin: Tell me if this is right. This is what I understand about Moneyball. Okay. I read the book; I saw the movie. So Moneyball was a revolution that, as I recall, was supposed to modernize baseball. Like, instead of tracking one set of statistics about players, they tracked a different set of statistics about players. Which turned out to be the actual critical factors in winning a game, and allowed teams with fewer resources to beat rich, fancy teams.

But also what I understood about Moneyball was that it was supposed to have fixed baseball.

So didn’t we fix baseball?

Leibovich: You know, very interesting terminology here, and we’re gonna try to make it not complicated. It fixed baseball for teams trying to win baseball games—i.e., the Oakland A’s, right? Who have less resources and did more with less.

The innovations we’re seeing now? It’s not about winning baseball games. Because the commissioner of baseball [Rob Manfred] and now Theo Epstein, his consultant—they work for all of baseball. They work for the fans; they work for the interests of entertainment.

So it has nothing to do with a competitive advantage between the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees. It has everything to do with the entertainment attention span of someone watching a Disney movie or playing a video game or watching the Super Bowl or something like that.

Rosin: Moneyball fixed one set of problems, but then created another set of problems.

Leibovich: Well, they created a blueprint for teams to do better with less resources—but it was a terrible thing to watch. I mean, it created more walks, more strikeouts, slower action. So yeah: I mean, it solved one problem. It created any number of problems if you are a consumer of entertainment.

__

Mental-Skills Coaching

Rosin: You know, I get why they need to move faster. One of the things that you wrote about from the slow era, which I really appreciate, was this mental-skills coaching. I was surprised and maybe happily surprised to learn that they teach baseball players how to meditate in real time while they’re on the field.

Leibovich: In a sense, yes. I mean, that’s been part of the 21st-century revolution in baseball, and in the service of giving baseball players and teams a slightly better competitive advantage. They have taught mental skills, imaging, little mini-meditations, visualizations, things that you do. Because sports, especially baseball, is a big mind game, right?

You need to put yourself in a very relaxed state, or a state that puts you in a good position to succeed.

Rosin: That seems so nice and enlightened, and that’s what we tell our children to do when they’re stressed out. That’s what we tell everyone. Like, we’re all supposed to slow down and meditate.

Leibovich: Yeah; it might be nice. But it also gets introduced into the culture, which by and large introduces more time and dawdling into the culture of baseball. So David Ortiz, Nomar Garciaparra, Robinson Canó: They have these rituals where they take their deep breaths, and they clap, and they sort of see the field.

And then the owner of the Seattle Mariners told me this: He was teaching his son’s Little League team, and all of a sudden half the Little League team is trying to imitate Robinson Canóby stepping out during the at-bat and doing his little ritual. And so: “Sorry, we gotta wait for Jimmy over here to do his little Robinson Canó–like ritual.”

And then John Stanton, the owner of the Mariners, said to me, “Look, we have just taught an entire generation of kids that it’s okay to pace around the mound for however long and waste all this time.”

And I guarantee you, it would be a lot more interesting to watch Johnny try to dunk like LeBron James or kick a soccer ball like Messi or something than it is Johnny from Seattle trying to imitate Robinson Canó between the 2-and-1 and 2-and-2 pitch.

And so, again, in a very crude way: The pitch clock sort of disrupts all of that all at once.

__

Juan Soto

Rosin: You know what: We haven’t talked about how the players feel about all of this.

Leibovich: Hmm.

Rosin: You talked to Padres star player Juan Soto about the pitch clock. Let’s listen to that.

Leibovich: Do you think the clock is a good thing? Like, did the times of the baseball games used to bother you? Or did you ever get impatient, sort of waiting for pitches to come and stuff, just watching a game when you’re playing in it?

Juan Soto: I feel like if you enjoy the games, you gotta give them time to think. And to see, look around and look at everything. I mean: I know for fans sometimes it gets boring. But for baseball players, they will never get bored.

Leibovich: So you were never bored at a baseball game.

Soto: No, never. Never. It’s never too long. It’s never too short. I’m just enjoying the game.

Rosin: What was your impression of what he was saying there?

Leibovich: He was saying like, “Look; this is my life. This is my job. This is what I love to do. I don’t care if you’re bored.” I mean, I’ve had many, many people I interviewed for this story say that a million different ways. Like: “I can’t worry about whether you’re entertained or not. You know, I’m gonna get fired if I lose this many games. Or if my batting average dips below  2.0, whatever.”

No one was saying, “Oh look—the ratings from last night’s game were higher than the night before. Oh, ticket sales are up around baseball. We are being more entertaining.” No one cares about that, huh? Nor should they.

Rosin: So, the players feel one way—and we, the fans, feel another. So I guess that’s why Padres star Manny Machado, in his very first pitch-clock game, was like, “No, thank you.”

After the break: Can Mark learn to love baseball again?

__

Rosin: You’ve been to a pitch-clock game.

Leibovich: The first pitch-clock game.

Rosin: Ooh!

Leibovich: Well, the first spring-training pitch-clock game.

Rosin: You were in a box, sitting with all these guys, right?

Leibovich: It wasn’t a box. It was actually a couple of rows up from the field in a spring-training game, with, basically, the orchestrators of this from Major League Baseball. One of them was Theo Epstein. Another guy was Morgan Sword, who is basically the director of on-field operations for Major League Baseball, who has been putting this all in place.

Rosin: And what were you guys talking about?

Leibovich: Well, mostly we were watching the game. I mean, this is like the first day of school for Morgan and Theo. This is this thing they had been envisioning and trying to put in place for months, and even years. And this was the first game in which it was actually happening

Rosin: And were they nervous, like on edge? What was the vibe?

Leibovich: Morgan was extremely nervous. He was a basket case, and usually he’s pretty chill. So yeah, that was pretty glaring.

Rosin: Why was he a basket case?

Leibovich: He was a basket case because he had been thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong. First of all, he’s being scrutinized. Everyone in baseball is watching to see how this first pitch-clock game is gonna go off. But he’s also spent so much time talking to umpires, talking to players, talking to managers, talking to game officials, talking to clock operators. You know, it’s basically starting up a whole cabinet department within baseball that didn’t exist before.

And so obviously on Day One, you’re gonna be nervous.

—

Leibovich: So what’s your experience as a fan been during this interregnum for you? What about your son?

Theo Epstein: Yeah. I mean, my son—my 15-year-old—I can’t help but notice his lack of desire to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour game, really.

Rosin: So who is that?

Leibovich: That was Theo Epstein. He was telling me about what his personal experience is as a baseball fan during this time when he is not affiliated with the team.

Rosin: And he’s saying his son is bored? Like, can’t watch baseball anymore?

Leibovich: Yeah.

Epstein: And especially during the pandemic, I noticed so much of his life existed through gaming. Interacting and doing commerce and everything else, like all through the computer. And Fortnite—it’s like a 10-, 15-minute game. Obviously, it’s a bit of a cliché that the Gen Z generation grew up on their phones.

Leibovich: Yeah. The patience. it’s not a cliché; it’s brain chemistry. It’s real. It is very real.

Rosin: So it’s not just about our attention span. I guess what he is panicking about is that he’s got these sons who should be baseball fans, but they can barely pay attention for more than 10 seconds.

So it makes you feel like the future of the sport is not—

Rosin: Yeah. So this is a multitiered problem, right? So not only are older former fans’ brains adapting to a faster life and moving away from baseball; there’s also this new generation that doesn’t even see what the fuss is about to begin with, and aren’t exactly reading Moneyball and reading George Will columns and watching Field of Dreams to see what the fuss is about.

Rosin: Yes. It’s actually pretty cool that you were present at the creation of new baseball—the new era of baseball.

Leibovich: I’m glad. I’m glad you appreciate this. Because this was a momentous day. And of course it was also a very mundane day, but yeah: It felt momentous.

Rosin: Right. The first-ever game in the new era of baseball. Like, was it more fun? Did you like it? Did time move faster?

Leibovich: So the game was very crisp. It was 3 to 2; I think Seattle won. Basically, all these executives, they were rooting not for the Mariners or the Padres. They were rooting for this game to be very, very fast. ’Cause they knew everyone was looking at this as like, Oh, this is the new baseball. We want it to work.

And yeah, it was very enjoyable.

I was very glad that the game took less than two hours and 30 minutes. I know Theo Epstein was; he wanted to go take a nap. The person to my right wanted to catch a flight back to New York or wherever he was going.

Rosin: So people were living their lives. I gotta catch a flight, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And it fit into their busy lives.

Leibovich: Much more so.

Rosin: Hmm. I can’t really tell if you, Mark Leibovich, were into the game. Like, you know when you’re into a game.

Leibovich: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I’ve seen you be into a football game.

Leibovich: Yeah. Have you ever seen me be into a baseball game?

Rosin: No.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: You used the word enjoyable? Enjoyable is like a dead word. Were you into the game? Personally, I prefer just fast games; I like watching basketball, I like watching soccer. I want to maybe get on board with faster baseball.

Leibovich: Yes.

Rosin: And so I guess I’m wondering where you are. Like, are you on board with faster baseball? Like when you were there, were you like, Ah, this is gonna work?

Leibovich: Yeah. I saw a minor-league game a few years ago that had a clock, and I was like, Yeah, this is it. This is totally it. I was watching an NBA playoff game with my wife and my daughter Nell, who said, “You know, there’s something really nice about a game that you know is gonna last two hours and 20 minutes.” There’s a clock on the NBA game. And if you’re a soccer fan, it’s gonna take two hours. The commissioner of baseball himself, Rob Manfred, said to me, “Look, what in your life do you really want to do for more than two and a half hours at a shot?” Even people sitting up in the front office, or the commissioner of baseball, would be like: Wow, do we really have to watch this for more than two and a half hours?

Rosin: Yeah. Like the people who are supposed to be…

Leibovich: Management, managers, commissioners. Things like that.

Rosin: I guess I just have to accept that this is where we are now.

Like, we are just not people who have patience for a three-hour pastime. We just don’t have it.

Leibovich: Right. But here’s the thing: Games literally did not take three hours in 1969. They took much less, like two and a half hours. Or probably less than that. I don’t know; maybe people then would have had less patience. But again, these two things are moving in opposite directions.

Rosin: Let’s say we shaved enough time off baseball that it lasted the same amount of time as it did when you were a kid.

Leibovich: Right.

Rosin: Do you think you could ever feel about baseball the same way you felt when you were a kid? Do you actually feel like you could feel the same way?

Leibovich: I mean, look: Can you feel the same way about something as a 50-something-year-old as you did when you were 7 or 8?

I mean, you have a much less mature brain when you’re a kid, for better or for worse. You see the world much more clearly, much more innocently. With much less sense of proportion, and so forth. So, I don’t know, and maybe my fandom growing up is shaped by nostalgia. Now that I think about it and talk about it, I would think so—because right now I associate it with good times for my youth.

Rosin: So it feels like where we are this summer is that we—the fans—really want baseball to change. The players are somewhat resistant. The rules are in place. Do you think that this will save baseball?

Leibovich: I think it will help baseball. I think early results are that it has helped baseball.

If you go by the actual shrinking time of games, if you go by the ratings and the ticket sales and so forth, the first few months of the season have been very encouraging. The larger point is, you know: Is this putting a Band-Aid on a larger sort of existential problem that baseball is ultimately not going to be able to deal with?

Rosin: All right. So now that you’re done with your reporting, and there are no legends inviting you to sit in their boxes with them and talk to Juan Soto, are you gonna go to any games?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, again, a lot of it comes down to…

Rosin: Was that like “Yeah,” or was that like “Yes”?

Leibovich: Yes. And I’ll tell you what probably the decider will be. I mean, I’m parochial. I care about my team, the Red Sox. The Red Sox were not supposed to be good this year. They’re kind of mediocre, but they’re an entertaining team, and I have cared about them. So I have watched. If they completely implode, I’ll probably stop watching. So like Juan Soto and him wanting good numbers, I want my team to do well. And I will probably drop off. But if I do go to a game this year, I’m thrilled that it’s not gonna go past 11 o’clock.

Rosin: Right. So it’s love, but it’s conditional love.

Leibovich: Totally.

Rosin: Like, they’ve won you back, but conditionally.

Leibovich: Hundred percent.

Rosin: I think where I’m at is: I still would rather see a Washington Spirit game. But if somebody, say a child—anybody’s child—asks me to go to a game, I won’t recoil in horror. I’ll be like, “Yeah, okay, sure. I’ll try it.”

Leibovich: Here’s what I’ll say to you. And it’s very intimate. But I’m gonna invite you to a game. We both live in Washington, and so we’re gonna go. And whoever wants to join us can join us. And hopefully, the recoiling in horror will not transpire. And if it does, we can just leave.

__

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checker is Michelle Ciarrocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, Kevin Townsend, Theo Balcomb, and Vann Newkirk. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

If you like it, tell some Red Sox fans or some Yankees fans; whatever. Tell all the fans.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

Are commitment issues impacting our ability to connect with the people who live around us? Relationship-building may involve a commitment to the belief that neighbors are worthy of getting to know.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, author Pete Davis makes the case for building relationships with your neighbors and offers some practical advice for how to take the first steps toward creating a wider community.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid. The managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

We don’t need you to bring along flowers or baked goods to be a part of the How to Talk to People neighborhood. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), and Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, tell me about your relationship with your neighbors.

Julie Beck: In our apartment building, it’s a huge apartment building. It’s basically the size of a whole city block. And there are tons of people there. The only people whose names I even know are my immediate neighbors, because we share a roof patio. Like, I can see them over the fence.

And when they first moved in, I remember my partner and I were gardening on the roof, And I was like, “Joe, we need to introduce ourselves to them.” And he was like, “Nope, we’re not going to.” He was like, “I don’t want to. You can do that.”

We did exchange names and say hi, and that felt like a big victory. However, we immediately thereafter went back to ignoring each other. Every time we see each other on the roof, maybe there’s a small wave—but like, that’s it.

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

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

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: It’s really strange to think that neighbors are the people who are literally closest to you, and yet so many of us don’t know them at all.

Pete Davis: You know, I’d walk around town, and I’d walk around the neighborhood and I’d be grumpy that everyone was so cold. And what are people like these days? They weren’t like this when I lived here 10 years ago. [Julie: Laughter.] But then I started practicing, you know? Well: I’m kind of like them, too, because I’m not reaching out to them. You know?

Beck: Pete Davis is a civic advocate and the author of the book Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing. He thinks one reason that neighbors don’t always bother to get to know one another is that our society has commitment issues.

Davis: What I noticed was that all the people that were giving me hope and giving my peers hope had in common was that they were all people who decided to forego a life of keeping their options open and instead make a commitment to a particular thing over the long haul.

Beck: So what does keeping our options open have to do with our sense of feeling like we’re connected to our community? What exactly about committing helps us feel connected?

Davis: You know, I moved back to my hometown after school. And I was gliding on the surface of everything when I moved back—just trying to get a sense of the place again—and I was feeling down on the place. I’m like, Why did we move back? Maybe we shouldn’t have moved back. Am I just moving back because I have this nostalgia? You know, all these things.

You know, when you think about becoming friends with a neighbor, those fears that I mentioned of commitment are fears that are present with you. If I have to commit every Thursday at 7 p.m. to go to this meeting, who knows what I’ll miss out on.

Beck: I do feel like there is a common refrain these days that people just don’t know their neighbors like they used to. Is that true? Was there ever a time when Americans were really good at getting to know their neighbors?

Davis: Yeah; I think it is true. I think, you know, there’s always been a spirit of nostalgia, but we actually have data to show that this type of nostalgia might be correct. The great cite here is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam: the book that was kind of famous in the early 2000s about the decline of community in America. And he has data set after data set, graph after graph, that show that this is the case.

So “neighbors” in the broad sense of the term—you know, people in your town. You look at any angle on it, and we’re seeing a decline. So between the 1970s and the 1990s, the amount of club meetings that we went to per year was cut in half. The amount of people serving as an officer in a club, the amount of people attending public meetings: all major declines. Membership in religious congregations—it was 75 percent of Americans at the mid-century mark, and now, in the last few years, it crossed under 50 percent, you know?

You look at informal socializing: Putnam was able to find the national picnic data set. Where in the mid-’70s, we went on an average of five picnics a year with our neighbors.

Beck: Oh, my. [Laughter.]

Davis: And that was down to two by the ’90s.

Beck: Bring back picnics! Oh, my God.

Davis: Bring back picnics, and people doing dinner parties. The amount of people that say they have no friends—you know, in 1990, that was only 3 percent of Americans. In 2021, it was 12 percent. And so we do have numbers that show we’re in a neighboring crisis.

Beck: And well, I know we’ve already been talking about this with the spicy picnic data, but can you give us kind of an overview of how Americans’ relationship with their neighbors has evolved in the last 50 years?

Davis: Yeah. There was a famous essay even written back in the ’70s about the early rise of back patios. It was by Richard Thomas. And, you know, the front porch used to be the iconic appendage to a house. And starting in the ’70s and ’80s, interest in back patios started growing and then exploded in the ’90s and 2000s.

And now when you’re watching HGTV, or being toured in a new house or a new build by a realtor, they’re going to talk more about the back patio than the front porch. And both of those are socializing. The difference is the back patio is friends you already know, whereas the front porch is an opportunity to meet the people that start as strangers who live around you and turn them into friends that you know. Which is much less likely if the main socializing area is in the back of your house than in the front of your house.

And because it’s a front porch—maybe you don’t know this person yet. You don’t feel comfortable having them in your house. But we used to design our houses in a way that had this liminal space between kind of stranger and intimate privacy where community is built.

Beck: Maybe also a part of the barrier to talking to our neighbors is that we don’t have a lot of context for them beyond their geographical proximity. Maybe we know that they walk their dog at 8:00 every morning, but we don’t know what kind of person they are a lot of the time.

One thing that’s not given me a great ton of faith in my neighbors is I joined Nextdoor, perhaps misguidedly. And it’s a really tough space—just of people’s fears and worst sides really being on display. It’s just post after post about crime: “I’m afraid of this.” “Watch out for these two young boys that were looking at my house the other day.”

And I think people are often very reasonably wary of interacting with their neighbors in the sense that those people might be coming to those interactions with a lot of biases, unwarranted fears, and assumptions. And racism or sexism, or any of the things that can make our interactions with strangers in public ranging from extremely uncomfortable to dangerous.

Rashid: Right.

Beck: And so I do want to acknowledge that if people have that wariness of their neighbors not treating them as fully human, that is very fair. Simply getting better at talking to people is not going to dissolve racism or sexism or street harassment, or any of those deep-rooted societal problems that infect our relationships with our neighbors. That’s a much bigger problem than just “Do I know my neighbor’s name?”

Davis: I don’t want to be naive with all this messaging that every neighbor is going to be nice. And even among nice neighbors, there’s going to be this layer—just because of the culture that we’re living in—of seeing more, you know, I call it the Ring-camera culture of 2020s America. Where everyone outside your door is someone who’s out to get you, whether it’s a politician trying to get your vote or a door-to-door salesperson.

If that’s your experience of the outside world, because we live in such a low community time, it’s harder to form a community now than it is in a higher-trust society or a higher-trust era. I don’t think it’s something we all have to do alone.

If you’re the type of person that knows three other people in the apartment complex and you’re all friends, you’ve been there a long time and you’re more confident and outgoing and you have less to lose, and you’re less scared of this thing—which doesn’t make you any better, but it’s just like a quality you have—you need to give a little bit of that to everyone else. By being the person who has a little bit more wiggle room to have the vulnerability to lead in breaking the ice.

Beck: Yeah. As it becomes less common for anyone even to knock on your door, then it’s more alarming when someone does. Or you’re just expecting that when you’re at home, you’re going to be left alone.

So how can you build relationships with your neighbors that are as respectfully distant as they need to be, but also can be intimate enough to provide some support?

Davis: There’s a lot of ways to invite people to come be part of your life. So, you know, one of them isn’t knocking—it could be leaving an invitation. That will make them feel comfortable to receive this message and then make an affirmative choice to join or not. No one wants that person who immediately is way too vulnerable and intimate with you.

Beck: You know, Becca, sometimes I feel like there’s this sort of invisible barrier that feels almost physically effortful to push through before you can just say something to a neighbor.

There was a sociologist named Erving Goffman who called that barrier “civil inattention.” And it’s essentially, you know, the default polite posture that we have toward strangers in public. It’s essentially saying I see that you exist, and then you completely withdraw your attention from them and look away and look at your phone and leave them alone.

Rashid: So this is what always happens in the bathroom when you’re both washing your hands.

Beck: Yes, that’s right. The brief eye contact in the mirror, the tight smile. And then you look down and you’re washing your hands very, very solitarily. And that is exactly what happens in my building. Right.

You know, we’re walking down the hall toward each other. We’re looking down. And then there’s a little smile. And then we pass each other, and we don’t speak. That makes me feel like it would be invasive to try to strike up a conversation with them, like we’re both signaling that we want to be left alone.

Rashid: I’m going to tell you a little story about my neighbor who did invade my space.

Beck: Okay. [Laughter.]

Rashid: I’m fine, I’m safe. I was getting into one of two elevators in my building. We have our big moving-your-couch-from-floor-to-floor elevator. And then the small elevator that not more than one person should be getting into at a time.

Beck: And it was the small one, I’m sure.

Rashid: It was, of course, the small one. And he just slightly turned his body and said, “So, you’re a singer.”

[Laughter.]

Beck: Which you are, for the record.

Rashid: I think I am. And I just started profusely apologizing. I was like, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea that my YouTube karaoke was playing that loud, and I was singing over it.”

But it made me extremely self-aware. As you said, someone popped that invisible bubble between us of never acknowledging that we have this relationship, whatever it may be.

Beck: So, do you wish he had just never said anything and continued the sort of fiction that you are just two strangers who know nothing about each other?

Rashid: I mean as much as it was a bit jarring, in the end it was actually kind of nice.

Beck: There is a weird intimacy that we do have with our neighbors, like he can hear what you’re playing through the walls. You share a wall. But if we pass each other, we sort of don’t acknowledge that weird intimacy, or we just pretend that we’re complete strangers with no context of each other.

Davis: Totally. And in some ways, sometimes people are relieved when the intimacy is admitted to, because it pops the tension of it all. You know, I can hear you. I can see you. I saw that you didn’t bring your trash out. Or something, you know, without being nosy. There’s always the—we don’t want uber conformity, and we don’t want invasions of privacy. But there’s something in the middle.

Beck: Yeah. My building, God bless them, they’re always trying to host these community events. So, you know, it’ll be like It’s Valentine’s Day, come down and get some free drinks and cookies. And people will go. And then they’ll just take the food and leave, or they’ll just talk to whoever they live with that they already came down there with. There’s no mixing. They’re not getting people to mix. What are they doing wrong?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we need to have some of these events run by the people themselves. You also have to have an aggressive host, where even though it seems like it’s really annoying to be the host that says, “Hey, I got to know you and I got to know you, so you should talk because you’re both nurses and you both have third-graders. You guys should talk.” You know, that is the type of thing that brings people together. It’s not just automatic of “You lay out Valentine’s Day cookies and everyone’s going to talk,” because you have to have someone that breaks the ice and brings people together.

Beck: Well, this is where I struggle, right? Because I can see how when you first move somewhere, that seems like a natural opportunity to introduce yourself to the people who live next to you or something.

But I’ve lived in my building for two and a half years now. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for almost 10 years, and I feel like it’s too late. I don’t have that excuse of being new anymore. Now so much time has passed that it just feels really weird to randomly try to get something going now.

Davis: You know, it is nice when you just move somewhere that you have this excuse like, “Hi, I just moved here.” And people are going to give you the honeymoon period of that’s not a weird thing to say. That “get out of awkwardness free” card is gone when you’re not.

Beck: Oh yeah, it’s long gone.

Davis: But you know, I’ve always believed that this isn’t something that we need to overthink. You have to just walk up to a neighbor in some way and invite them to be closer to you, which is obviously really awkward. It’s so awkward. That’s the reason we’re all not neighborly with each other.

Beck: Right.

Davis: But everyone is waiting for someone to do that to them. You know, that’s the funny thing. And in some ways, we’re all playing a prisoner’s dilemma with each other where it’s like, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me. And they’re thinking in their head, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me, or Maybe they don’t trust me or whatever.

And the way to break that prisoner’s dilemma with each other is for someone to go a little bit above and beyond, to have an act of vulnerability. And so a gift is one example of that, which is—“I went out of my way to show you an act of goodwill, to show you not only that I’m trustworthy a little bit more, but also that I think you’re trustworthy a little bit more.”

Mention the concert you went to last weekend when you’re passing in the hallway. Mention something about your family. It doesn’t need to be totally too much information. It can just be the next level of personality.

Beck: You know Becca, even at the most sort of super-benign and cliched neighbor interaction of going over to borrow something, I’ve actually had a negative experience with that myself.

Rashid: Can you tell me what happened?

Beck: Yeah; it was a really simple interaction. I had moved into my current apartment building, and we had all of our taped-up boxes, but I realized that I had packed the scissors inside one of the taped-up boxes, and that I needed scissors to open the taped-up box to get the scissors.

I thought, You know; that’s fine. I’ll just go ask a neighbor. Everybody has scissors. That’s an opportunity to introduce myself and also get something that I need.

So I went down the hall and I knocked on the door that had a light on under it or something, where it seemed like somebody was home. And this very harried woman came to the door, and she had her phone at her ear. And she was like, “What?! What do you need?”

And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I just moved in. I just needed to borrow some scissors. Like, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but do you have scissors?” And she kind of huffed, and then went off and got the scissors.

She did give them to me, but in a very annoyed way. She probably wasn’t expecting a rando to knock on her door in the middle of the day, but I just went and used her scissors and then silently returned them. And then we never spoke again.

Rashid: Did she apologize when you returned the scissors?

Beck: No. She just took them back and just was like, thanks. I think she probably felt sort of interrupted and having her privacy impeded upon. But also I had a very benign request and was met with open hostility. So it did not make me want to knock on more doors, that’s for sure. It was just a reminder: Just because somebody lives near you doesn’t mean they’re going to be neighborly.

Beck: How can you ask a next-door neighbor for help without feeling like you’re an inconvenience?

Davis: You know, the amazing thing is that, with relationships, it all works the opposite of what our fears are telling us, the way that they work. So, you know, you think giving something away means you lose something. But actually, giving something is a gain.

You think that when you reveal something about yourself, it’ll make you hated because people will disagree with the particularities of you., But it actually makes you loved more, and being generic is what alienates you from people.

Beck: One of the things that’s been relieving, but also tough, is that on the one hand, the idea that having that kind of community you want feels so hard is not just your fault for not trying hard enough. Because there’s a lot of institutional things at work.

But then it also feels discouraging, because there’s only so much I as one person can do to change any of that.

Davis: It is none of our faults, and we shouldn’t be accountable. This is not a finger-wagging at individuals to solve this alone. Like, the answer’s just going to be all of us deciding to be nicer and reach out more.

It needs to be a mix of us individually doing that, and rebuilding the civic infrastructure that helps us do it. You know, it’s not just reaching out to your neighbors. It’s reaching out to your neighbors to talk about how we can reach out to our neighbors.

Beck: And what are some things that you’ve done in your life to be committed and stay committed to your neighbors? Do you bring them cookies? What do you do?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we are increasing our gift game.

Beck: Okay, [Laughter.] What’s your best gift?

Davis: We’re mostly doing baked goods and flowers now. And actually, the flowers is a double commitment—which is our local farmer’s market. We’ve become friends with the florist there, and we’re going to go visit the florist at their flower farm soon because we’ve decided to not just treat them as, you know, the person we buy flowers from. And then we bring those flowers to our neighbors and try to have a connection there.

The book that changed my life more than any other is called I and Thou by Martin Buber, who is a Jewish theologian from the early 20th century. He lays out these two ways of relating to the world. He calls them “I and it” and “I and thou,” or “I and you.”

And what “I and it” is: You see everything around you. You see other people, but also the whole world. You see them as objects—its—that have served purposes in your life. Only reflecting what they are to you, how they bother you, or how they help you, how they’re different from you, out there, similar to you.

“I and you” relates to all the rest of the world as “you.” They are fellow subjects. They are also players in the video game of life. They are full of life. They have a depth that you can’t understand. When you really are engaging with them, and you let all of the ways that they measure up or help you or facilitate you or bother you or compare with everything else.

When you let that fall away, you’re bathed in the light of their shared reality with you. They’re also there. And even just a small victory in that fight by building a tiny relationship with one other person isn’t a small thing. It’s everything.

Beck: That’s amazing. [Laughter.] Pete, thank you so much. It was really, really great talking to you and having you on the show.

Davis: Thank you so much. So appreciate what you’re doing with this.

Beck: Yeah, Becca: I appreciated Pete talking about tiny steps and the importance of small relationships.

I think I can get stuck in black-and-white thinking sometimes, where I’m like, Oh, the stakes are really high. Because either my neighbor is going to hate me like the Scissor Lady, or if I just do all the right things, then we’re going to be best buds and we’ll share beers on the roof in the evening. And, as with most things, I think the truth is often somewhere more in the middle.

Rashid: And there’s this concept called Dunbar’s number. The psychologist Robin Dunbar has theorized that people are only able to actually cognitively handle maintaining so many relationships at once—about five deep, intimate friendships at a time. But you can actually handle about 150 or so friendships total in your sort of larger web of the friends of friends, and college friends.

So I feel like neighbors maybe fall into one of those outer rings, where it’s okay that you just sort of know their name and the name of their dog. And, you know, that type of relationship is enough.

Beck: So my very small update on my own neighbor relationship is: The other day I saw those same roof neighbors who we introduced ourselves to like a year ago and then never spoke to again. And I sort of made myself go over there and say, “Hey, you’re so and so and so and so, right?” Like, I remember your names.

I just said, “I wanted to offer, since we share a roof, and it would be really easy if you’re ever out of town and you need us to water your plants, we would be happy to.” And they were like, “Oh great! Like, same! We would be happy to do that, too.” So, we did make that tiny step toward a very small plant-watering relationship.

Beck: It’s actually a lot more than nothing to have someone right next door who’s a little something more than a stranger.

Rashid: I mean, now every time I sing, I know someone is listening. [Laughter.]

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule next week on a pair of decisions about affirmative action in higher education. Both were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group dedicated to eliminating “race and ethnicity from college admissions.” One case is against Harvard, likely because anything involving Harvard guarantees some attention. The other is against the University of North Carolina, one of the most prestigious public university systems that hasn’t banned affirmative action yet. Both cases involve Asian American plaintiffs, a historically underprivileged minority group and not the usual aggrieved white applicant. This is a detail that has also complicated, and maybe even confused, the picture.

If this conservative Court strikes down affirmative action, which many legal experts expect, the decisions will likely have profound and immediate consequences for many institutions. When Michigan voters banned affirmative action by ballot measure in 2006, Black enrollment at the University of Michigan dropped to 4 percent, in a state that is 13 percent Black. The effects ripple out. Elite institutions produce politicians and doctors and future leaders of all kinds. But as Adam Harris, a longtime education writer for the Atlantic and this week’s Radio Atlantic guest, points out, we’ve lost sight of universities as serving this broader good. Instead, we tend to see them narrowly, as vehicles for individual advancement.

These cases have been kicking around for nearly a decade, and I have followed them loosely. But until this conversation with Harris, I did not realize how hazy I was on some very important questions: how universities have been using affirmative action all these years, and how much groups such as SFFA had co-opted the conversation.

Harris is bracing for next week’s decisions but would not be surprised if the Court eliminates affirmative action. What he clarifies for me in this episode is that affirmative action has been heading in this direction for many decades. Almost as soon as affirmative action became an important tool in the 1960s to redress past racial injustice, it was met with a backlash. The backlash chipped away at the tool until it was just a tiny scalpel. And these latest decisions are potentially the backlash’s final triumph.

“When I think of higher education, it’s a great democratizing way to expand civic good. But if we are put into a position where higher education is no longer able to fill that central role, where higher education grows less diverse, and where those institutions that are feeders for Congress or feeders for the Supreme Court that have the most funding enroll fewer students of color, Black students, Hispanic students, where does that leave us as a country?”

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: A lot of attacks on higher-education admissions, particularly at these highly selective institutions, gain traction. And that’s because they’re such black boxes. You think about what these institutions sort of bestowed on students in terms of the prestige that they have on the back end, and the fact that, on the front end, you have this sort of black box in terms of how people get into them.

They’re seats that people want to get to because they know the potential benefits. I mean, all but one of the Supreme Court justices attended either Harvard or Yale’s law school.

Hanna Rosin: I can never get over that. I mean, honestly, I just find that just unbelievable. Like, it’s so specific.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: The Supreme Court is about to issue a set of rulings on affirmative action and higher education. These decisions are a big deal because, if it goes the way we expect, it could change how universities decide who to admit and therefore who gets what kinds of opportunities in life. Like, for example, being a Supreme Court justice.

Now, these cases have been kicking around for almost a decade, and here are the basics. They were brought by a conservative group of activists called Students for Fair Admissions—one against a private university (Harvard) and one against a public university (UNC). The plaintiffs are Asian Americans who say affirmative action is shutting them out, which adds complications. The cases would overturn a 2003 decision allowing some affirmative action, and do away with it for good.

But I realized only recently that I’m a little hazy on some important things, like how universities have been using affirmative action all these years. And how really—no matter what the Supreme Court decides—the backlash against affirmative action already has the upper hand.

So to understand these latest cases, we need to get clear on a pattern that’s been going on since the 1960s. In this episode, we’re gonna talk to Adam Harris, a staff writer who covers higher education for The Atlantic. Hi, Adam.

Harris: Hey, how’s it going?

Rosin: Good. Okay, Adam, so what is the fundamental question the Supreme Court is considering?

Harris: So the big question in this case, which has effectively been the big question in all of the race-conscious-admissions cases, is whether or not institutions can use race in the admission of their students.

Rosin: You know, when I hear that question, I tend to make some assumptions. Like, a basic one is that universities do use race as a deciding factor in admissions and that it’s an important tool for racial justice.

Harris: So, sort of. They use it in a limited way, and they can never use it as the deciding factor. The only rationale allowed by the Court is to increase diversity in the student body, which is very different from trying to atone for a legacy of discrimination. And also some states have already banned the use of affirmative action entirely, like California and Michigan.

Rosin: Which is what the Supreme Court might do nationally.

Harris: Right. And after those states banned affirmative action, we saw the number of Black students enrolled at their universities drop dramatically.

Rosin: You know, I read your book, The State Must Provide, and various other things that you sent me. It was my homework. And mostly what I discovered is that I had fundamentally misunderstood what we talk about when we talk about affirmative action and its connection to racial justice. So one of the things I want to talk to you about is how did we get here? How did we arrive at this point?

Harris: Yeah. So affirmative action or race-conscious admissions kind of first came into the lexicon in the 1960s as a way to fix some of that harm that had been done from legalized segregation in higher education.

If you looked across the landscape, there were all of these really minute ways that institutions had segregated and discriminated against students. In the 1960s and 1970s, institutions started to create programs that would help enhance their Black enrollment. (Typically, it was their Black enrollment.)

And some of this, of course, was under their own volition. And some of this was because in 1965, you got the Higher Education Act; you got some of the civil-rights laws that are effectively saying: If you are a program or anything that is receiving federal funding and you are discriminating against people, you will have that federal funding revoked.

And so they were trying to figure out ways to build out their Black population that they have been keeping down for so long.

Rosin: Okay, so affirmative action began as this civil-rights-era project in all kinds of universities around the country. But I guess the thing that really struck me in doing my homework for this episode about the current Supreme Court cases is that affirmative action, as I understood it—it barely makes it out of that era.

Harris: Yeah, you know, at the time, right, we’ve seen the civil-rights movement, we’ve seen the advances that had been made. And those were met with a, Perhaps we’re going too far into the: We’re discriminating against other people by trying to address this past harm.

Effectively, they’re trying to kill this program in the cradle before it even has a chance to make a dent in that discrimination.

Rosin: So the backlash moment happens pretty much right away, but what happens that kills affirmative action “in the cradle”?

Harris: So what happened is a Supreme Court decision in the 1970s known as Bakke.

Archival [Justice Warren Burger]: First case on today’s calendar is No. 76-811, Regents of the University of California against Bakke.

Harris: So Allan Bakke is a white veteran who is trying to get into medical school. He’s in his early 30s, which at the time people thought was a little bit too old to first enroll in medical school. But he has these credentials that he thinks should really benefit him. He’s effectively worked at a NASA hub for a little bit. And so he applies to several schools, including the University of California Davis’s Medical School.

Archival [Bakke lawyer Reynold Colvin]: From the very beginning of this lawsuit, he stated the case in terms of the fact that he had twice applied … and twice he had been refused ... Both in the years 1973 and in the year 1974.

Rosin: So if he was rejected from all these schools, why does he sue UC Davis?

Harris: So Bakke gets a tip from an insider at the university who tells him: Hey, we have this admissions program that allots 16 seats that were effectively designated for students who were from insular minority groups. And perhaps one of the reasons that you didn’t get into this 100-person class is because of one of those 16 seats.

Rosin: Okay, so it’s October of 1977. Bakke’s case is now before the Supreme Court. How do the justices respond?

Harris: Well, there’s a great moment with Thurgood Marshall, who of course had argued Brown v. Board of Education, and was now a justice on the Court.

Archival [Justice Thurgood Marshall]: Your client did compete for the 84 seats, didn’t he?

Archival [Colvin]: Yes, he did.

Archival [Marshall]: And he lost?

Archival [Colvin]: Yes, he did.

Archival [Marshall]: Now, would your argument be the same if one instead of 16 seats were left open?

Archival [Colvin]: No. Most respectfully, the argument does not turn on the numbers.

Harris: It was one of those times where you almost hear him being sort of sarcastic in his questioning. He’s really needling Bakke’s lawyer and saying, “So it depends on which way you look at it.” And he’s like, “Well, yes, it does.” “It does?”

Archival [Colvin]: The numbers are unimportant. Unimportant. It is the principle of keeping a man out because of his race that is important.

Archival [Marshall]: You’re arguing about keeping somebody out and the other side is arguing by getting somebody in?

Archival [Colvin]: That’s right.

Archival [Marshall]: So it depends on which way you look at it, doesn’t it?

Archival [Colvin]: It depends on which way you look at the problem.

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: The problem—

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: If I may finish—

Archival [Marshall]: It does?

Archival [Colvin]: The problem is—

Archival [Marshall]: You’re talking about your client’s rights; don’t these underprivileged people have some rights?

Archival [Colvin]: They certainly have the right—

Archival [Marshall]: The right to eat cake?

Harris: It’s a very: Why are we here arguing about this when just two decades ago, I was before this very Court trying to get students into segregated elementary schools?

Like, we just had this debate. We just had this argument about this historical discrimination and ongoing discrimination. Why are you back in front of me arguing that we’ve gone too far when we’ve only just started?

You know, when Marshall says, “You’re talking about your client’s rights; don’t these underprivileged folks have rights too?,” he’s pointing to all of the different ways that higher education had discriminated against Black people. And so, I think he’s pointing to the fact that there is a harm that needs to be addressed, a past harm that needs to be addressed. And these people should have the rights to have that harm addressed.

Rosin: That’s what he means by “Don’t underprivileged people have some rights?” He’s basically trying to frame a purpose for affirmative action that is redressing past wrongs.

Harris: Exactly. As a remedy for past discrimination.

Rosin: And so where do the justices land? What ends up being the outcome?

Harris: The outcome is sort of a compromise. It’s ultimately what becomes known as the diversity bargain. So, as opposed to the original conception of affirmative action, where they were trying to provide some redress for historical discrimination, this case effectively says: Look, we can’t hold students nowadays—white students nowadays—accountable for what happened in the past and to provide additional seats or to set aside seats for certain classes of students. That would be an impermissible benefit for those students, because it would be harming or potentially alienating those white students who otherwise may have been able to get into it.

And so the Court ultimately says, Look, we do think that it’s important to use race in admissions, because we think that diverse classes are important for the benefit of all students. So the use of race in admissions goes from being a tool to address historical discrimination to ultimately being this sort of amenity that was good for all students on campus. It was good for white students to interact with Black students. It was good for Black students to interact with Hispanic students, right? It was good for the entire student body, as opposed to, you know, accounting for a legacy of discrimination.

Rosin: Interesting. So already, right away, affirmative action has one hand tied behind its back. Like, they don’t ban it outright, but they won’t use it. They won’t let it be used as a tool for racial justice.

It sounds like what they’re saying is that essentially, it has to work for the white students too. Like, it can only exist if it makes the white students’ lives better, which means the backlash kind of won?

Harris: In some sense. It doesn’t sort of wholly say that you have to eliminate the use of race altogether. It’s saying that you can look at race in an admissions process, but only in concert with a host of other factors and never as the factor that decides whether a student gets in or does not.

Rosin: And then what I understood is that over the next many years, in a series of Court cases, the Supreme Court leans in and sort of codifies this diversity bargain.

Harris: Right, the Bakke decision was this very tenuous compromise. It’s not until 2003 that we got a majority of the Supreme Court validating affirmative action. And that comes in a case against the University of Michigan called Grutter v. Bollinger.

Rosin: So the Michigan case is a win for advocates of affirmative action because it settles that as a rationale, but all it actually is doing is confirming the limited diversity bargain that we talked about.

Harris: Exactly. If we think of redress for past discrimination as the entire pie, this case effectively salvaged that little slice of the pie that they actually ended up getting in Bakke.

And you even have Justice Sandra Day O’Connor sort of putting a timeline on the need for the use of race in admissions, effectively saying, 25 years on from the end of this case, it may no longer be necessary to use race in admissions.

Rosin: So it’s like, We’re gonna give you this tiny little tool, and this tiny little tool is gonna solve the problem in 25 years.

Harris: That was the logic of the Court. Exactly.

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, when I started off saying I misunderstood something, I think I misunderstood the degree to which my thinking about affirmative action and the role it played in higher education had been colonized by this shrinking. Like, I just am thinking about this in a small box. It’s not even part of the effort to redress past wrongs anymore. And it has not been for a long, long time.

Harris: Exactly.

Rosin: So what did happen? I mean, Sandra Day O’Connor had a vision for what happens 25 years down the road. What happened on the ground in states and in universities?

Harris: So on the ground, you had a couple of different things that happened. Michigan, of course, this was the state that did it. This was the state that protected the use of race in admissions.

And just a couple of years later, Michigan voters ultimately proposed and voted on a ballot measure that would eliminate the use of race in admissions altogether.

And very quickly, we saw what happens when an affirmative-action program goes away. There was a precipitous decline in Black enrollment at the University of Michigan, from around 7 percent, then to around the 4 percent that we regularly see today.

Rosin: I think I’m confused about something. If the Supreme Court ratified it, why were Michigan voters allowed to do that?

Harris: So the Supreme Court effectively just said, you can use, but the voters had the right—

Rosin: But the voters had the right, I see. So the ballot measure is essentially another data point in a history of backlash.

Harris: Yes. Michigan, California, and nine states in total have banned the use of race in admission either through their legislature or through public propositions

Rosin: It’s weird. It’s like a double whammy. Like we still talk about affirmative action as if it’s trying to accomplish the same goals it did in the late 60s. And it never has—

Harris: And it never has. Exactly.

Rosin: So yeah, it’s sort of two hands tied behind its back. You mentioned the numbers dropping at the University of Michigan; so it’s down to 4 percent.

Harris: Yeah, it hovers around 4 percent now.

Rosin: But in a state that is what percent Black?

Harris: Around 13 percent.

Rosin: So it’s well below.

Harris: Well below. And if you look across the landscape at most public flagship institutions, the big institutions in the state—the University of Texas, the University of Michigan, University of Alabama, LSU—most institutions do not come close to meeting its public percentage of high-school graduates in terms of their Black enrollment.

I mean, look at a place like Auburn University. In 1985, Bo Jackson won the Heisman there as the best college football player in the country. That same day, a federal judge said it was the most segregated institution in the state of Alabama.

Fast-forward to today, and they have roughly the same percentage of Black students now. And so the idea that we have around the admissions system, who’s getting in, and how they’re getting in—it’s just very warped.

Rosin: It’s so warped. Listening to you say it, like, how could it have changed? And these cases make it into the news and you have this sense that affirmative action is this incredibly powerful tool that has been transforming universities since the 1960s. And it’s not. It’s like a teeny, tiny little scalpel.

Harris: Yeah. We had a brief period where it was a really aggressive tool, and then after Bakke that sort of went away.

Rosin: I mean, the way you’re talking about it, it feels like we’re rolling backwards.

Harris: In a lot of ways, we are. You know, affirmative action and the use of race in admissions of course has not been perfect. It hasn’t been a remedy for past discrimination in higher ed. But it was a tool to sort of keep things where they were.

If it goes away, there’s a lot of concern that—that tool is now gone. And we know what happens when that tool goes away and we have these precipitous declines.

Rosin: This is a bad place to be, because now we have to contemplate this actual decision that we’re faced with. I mean, one of the pieces of homework you gave me was this conversation you recorded with Lee Bollinger.

For people who don’t know who he is, Bollinger has been the president of Columbia University for the past 20 years, but before that, he was the president of University of Michigan, which is why that 2003 opinion is called Grutter v. Bollinger. Anyway, you guys have this pretty depressing exchange, so I just wanna play it:

Harris: What happens to the texture of America’s most selective higher-education institutions if affirmative action goes away? If they’re no longer allowed to use race in admissions?

Lee Bollinger: So I think we have to imagine what it’s like to go back to a world before affirmative action. There was virtually no ethnic diversity, but no racial diversity. Very few African Americans, and what does that look like in an America we know today?

If our universities—our top universities—have a very small number of African Americans, that says a lot about not attending to it, especially since we spent 50 years really trying to change that, and changing it.

Rosin: Okay, so that brings us back to the cases today. These cases have a slight twist because they involve the rights of Asian Americans, a group that’s also been disenfranchised in certain ways. So it’s not the typical white student that we see in other cases.

Harris: Right, exactly. And that factor of it is something that made people take a second look. This is a case that had some twists and turns because of the ways that admissions officers had portrayed Asian American students in their notes.

Rosin: So does that make you feel differently about these cases than the previous ones we’ve been talking about?

Harris: In some ways it makes you take a closer look at what the actual facts of this case are. And it was interesting because at the district-court trial, there was a lot made of the several different factors that went into a student’s admissions decision.

And one of the big ones that came out of that was the sort of “ALDCs,” right? The athletes, legacies, donors, and children of faculty. And that was really focused on. They really sort of drove at that, the Students for Fair Admissions, as one of the reasons and ways that Asian Americans were sort of left out, and there was a side process, and it was always a question of how you were going to wrap that back to: Okay, are they being discriminated on the basis of their race? Is this because Black students are getting in? Asian American students aren’t getting in? And ultimately, what Harvard is arguing is: Listen, we may have an issue with the way that we have sort of calculated those numbers, but you can view these two things on different tracks. They’re not necessarily connected.

Rosin: I see. So what they’re saying—which it sounds like you agree with—is: Sure, we accept there may be an issue around the admission of Asian American students. There may be issues around the admissions of legacies and very, very many things, but that doesn’t have much to do with affirmative action and Black and brown students. Is that what you’re saying?

Harris: Effectively, yes. They are saying that just because they’re using race in their admissions decision, that is not the thing that is ultimately keeping Asian American students out. Because the ways that you can use race is never as the final thing. So say if you have two students with identical backgrounds, and one student is Black, one student’s Asian American, the university isn’t going to say: Well, we have enough Asian American students. We don’t have enough Black students. And so the Black student’s gonna get put over the top, effectively. There may be issues with the admission system, but that doesn’t have to do with the fact that Black students are getting into the university.

Rosin: Right. Like that side is arguing it very literally. Like Student A, who is Asian, did not get in because Student B, who is Black, did get in. But of course, it’s not like that. There’s a million different factors involved in why anybody does or doesn’t get in, and it’s all really complicated, including how they use race.

Harris: Exactly. So it may have been that, you know, they needed an additional polo player, or maybe they needed an extra tuba, right? The first-chair tuba had graduated and so they needed to replace their tuba player. There are all these different ways that universities are thinking about shaping an admitted class of students that aren’t limited to this sort of, who scored the highest on the SAT or who has the highest GPA.

Rosin: Right. Right. Because one thing I’ve been thinking about is: You’ve talked about a history of backlash. Even if it’s tiny amounts of progress, there’s a sort of solidifying of the diversity rationale, then there’s a backlash against that. And I’m trying to understand if this latest case is just part of that many-decades-long backlash.

Harris: In some ways, yes. The way that higher education is being attacked in this moment—the tenure battles that are going on, the fights to control curriculum—a lot of that backlash stems from this idea of losing out on what is effectively a private good at this point. People don’t think of higher education as: Oh, if this person gets a college degree, it’s good for everybody. It’s: That person got a college degree that’s going to enhance their job prospects. They could be president or, if they go to Harvard Law School, a Supreme Court justice one day.

You know, this case sort of falls squarely into that early-2000s [era of] Brown saying, Hey, we want to study our history and legacy of segregation and discrimination at Brown University. And Harvard’s like, Oh, I want to do the same thing. We’re in a moment where those institutions are finally having to account for that. And at that very moment, you have this attack that may remove one of the tools that has helped to have that enhanced minority enrollment.

Rosin: Okay. Oh, I see. So this is essentially a bookend to the late ’60s. This is a moment when universities, either because it’s been forced on them or because they wanna do it, are doing some racial reckoning, and it’s just at this very moment that it gets shut down. Is that what you’re saying?

Harris: Essentially, yeah.

Rosin: You know, it’s funny, Adam, I know you’ve written about higher education for a long time.

I feel like you care about higher education, like you believe in higher education at some level, right? As what? Like, as a vehicle for what?

Harris: So, George Washington, in his first address before Congress, gets up and he talks about this list of priorities. All of these big things that America absolutely needs.

And included in that is this really interesting paragraph where he says: “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.”

Effectively, at the time, they were thinking of ways to build a national character.And that’s George Washington. That’s Benjamin Rush. That’s James Madison. That’s Thomas Jefferson. They were thinking of these different ways to build a national character. And they thought that universities were the way to do that, to build good citizens, because you could teach people to be a citizen in K through 12 or in primary schools.

But they weren’t really grasping it. This was the real place where you would develop those citizens. And at several times of national disruption you’ve had these calls back to, We need to invest more in higher education. With the War of 1812, you already had West Point there, but the federal government says, Okay, we need to give additional money to West Point because this is a good for the public.

The Civil War breaks out and you have the 17 million acres of land doled out during the Morrill Act.

The G.I. Bill, right? All of these big, grand investments in a public good and something that was not only good for the private individual, but good for everyone.

And so when I think of higher education, it’s a great sort of democratizing way to expand one’s sort of civic good.

But if we are put into a position where higher education is no longer able to fill that central role, where higher education grows less diverse, and where those institutions that are feeders for Congress or feeders for the Supreme Court that have the most funding enroll fewer students of color, Black students, Hispanic students, where does that leave us as a country?

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, part of what you’re saying is that we just talk about Harvard, Yale, the sort of elite institutions all the time, but there is this whole other universe of things and people, which represents a much larger number of people than these elite institutions.

Harris: Yes. The majority of students who are enrolled in higher education attend institutions that accept more than 50 percent of their applicants.

And so I think that our understanding of the issues in higher education gets a little bit warped because of the sort of power dynamics of these institutions, right? So you look at the Supreme Court; you say that, Wow, everybody but one person went to these two law schools. And that sort of shapes your perception of higher education generally.When there are millions and millions and millions of students who go to community colleges, who go to public regional institutions who are being well served by these institutions, but that could be better served if these institutions were funded in the same way as the sort of important work they do.

I look at a state like North Carolina, for example. If you are a Black student in North Carolina attending a public college: 23 percent of Black students attend one of the 12 predominantly white, four-year institutions; around 27 percent attend one of the five public HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities]; and around 50 percent attend one of the community colleges in the state.

And so if you’re pushing students out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pushing them out of North Carolina State University, it’s only going to become more important for the state of North Carolina to fund those community colleges that the students are attending, to fund those HBCUs and other public regional institutions that those students are attending.

Rosin: And that’s definitely a good thing. It’s like you divert the attention towards the places where education is actually happening.

Harris: Absolutely.

Rosin: So it’s, you’re saying its utility is that it might reveal a truth. I think what’s hard about that for me is that, I mean, Bollinger himself talked about how frustrated he seemed that, why can’t people connect with this issue? Like, it was so obvious to him as not an activist, but just as the president of Michigan, that universities should play a role in redressing wrongs.

And he banged his head a little bit, like, why, can’t they, why isn’t this obvious to everybody, you know? Yet I feel like you’re still optimistic in saying just this decision will make, you know, people will finally understand.

Harris: You know, in the same way, as I was writing through the book, right, it’s like there have been instance after instance after instance of the ways that institutions have shown and the ways that the courts have shown and the ways that the, you know, states have shown that they were willing to discriminate against Black students in higher education. And that needs to be addressed.

I do have some pessimism about what it would take for the courts to reverse that. You know, because, of course, at the minimum it’s like, okay, you hold on to this little bit of race-conscious admissions that we have, that’s kind of been preventing the dam from just opening, and everything falling apart. But I don’t know. I think that I still have to remain hopeful.

Rosin: I don’t wanna bust your optimism. I feel like you’re temperamentally a hopeful person.

Harris: I am temperamentally hopeful. And I think it’s not necessarily optimism as much as it’s a silver lining. That in some ways this iteration of affirmative action, of race-conscious admissions, that we have is a veil that just sort of obscures the reality of what we have in higher education. It is a veil that has been helpful. But I think a natural system would be something along the lines of what, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg says when she was dissenting in Gratz [v. Bollinger]. She effectively says: Wouldn’t it be better for universities just to be honest about what they’re doing and trying to make up for this past harm? So we’re not just sort of dealing in this black-box environment?

I think in that same way, this will show that those gaps in terms of the funding are only going to grow wider. The disparities are only going to get worse in terms of the funding for students. And if that’s not a wake-up call for people, I have a hard time seeing what will be.

Rosin: Yeah.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Theo Balcomb. Our executive producer is Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checkers are Sam Fentress and Michelle Ciarocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back next Thursday.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

What motivated two families to engage in the organized chaos of shared living, and how did they learn to talk through, and shape, new expectations for their family life at home?

In this episode of How to Talk to People, we hear from Deborah Tepley and Luke Jackson, who remember when they first asked their best friends to buy a house with them. The Flemings—soon to be expecting their first child—didn’t hesitate to say yes. Their real-estate agent and extended families warned against the decision, but the families shared a vision of a home where the values of community could flourish in practice.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid; the managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

Be part of the How to Talk to People family. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), Bomull (“Latte”), and Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Julie Beck: What are some common misconceptions about your home life that you find yourself having to explain to people?

Deborah Tepley: We’re not swingers. [Laughter.]

Bethany Fleming: I think a lot of people when we say like, “Oh yeah, we live with another couple,” they’re like, Oh, like they live in the basement.

Beck: No one’s banished to the basement.

Bethany: And then there’s like a whole slew of questions about “How does that work?”

—

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

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

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: Deborah Tepley, Luke Jackson, and Bethany and TJ Fleming kindly invited us into their home on a Monday afternoon.

I first reported on their shared living setup back in 2019 in an article called “The Case for Buying a House With Friends.” But this was the first time we’d met in person.

Rashid: When Julie and I walked into their house, I felt a sort of ease and playfulness in their shared living setup. Their decor was simple and airy, with cream walls and dark accents. And two light-gray couches, where we recorded for the next few hours.

Beck: It was really cozy and honestly amazingly clean, considering two young kids lived there: one named Mary Hayley and the other named Pax. But as down to earth as they are, their home life is actually kind of quietly radical.

Rashid: It’s all well and good to live with friends when you’re young, but the concept of “settling down” can be a strong motivator in adulthood. And “single-family homes” are called that name for a reason because the expectation is a single family will live in them. As limiting as that may be.

Beck: So this all started a few years ago at a New Year’s brunch. The four friends who had met at church were enjoying some champagne, having some laughs. And then kind of out of nowhere: Luke proposed that they should all buy a house together. And all four of them were down. They were excited to try a more communal way of living.

Deborah: We are currently in our shared home, which is in Petworth in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C.

Luke Jackson: And this is Luke. We are in our living room, which is great.

TJ Fleming: And this is TJ, and I would just add that it’s a bright, sunny day outside, and we can see many of the plants we’ve planted.

Bethany: I don’t have anything to add.

Beck: Okay, great. [Laughter.]

Beck: So after many logistical conversations and plenty of financial spreadsheets, they now have a group mortgage and split the costs of their home 50/50 between the two couples.

Rashid: While visiting with these families, I found myself wondering whether how we define what makes a house a home may be what limits us. I feel like our culture can pressure adults to orient family life exclusively around a romantic partner and children. But it’s not always immediately clear to me how to build community in a different way and what that looks like.

Luke: Yeah; it’s always like, “Oh, so you’re renting together?” and I’m like, “No, no, no. We bought a house with other people.” People assume that we regret it.

Deborah: I think people are very curious about the logistics of the arrangement. They’re curious about the kids and how that works. Before offering that information to someone, I do think about it: Do I want to have this conversation? And so that is something I actually do consider before sharing about our shared living situation.

Beck: How much energy do you have to explain yourself today?

Deborah: That’s right. Yeah.

Beck: Do you think it’s just that our sort of American ideal of “one family, one home,” “my home is my castle” vibes is so strong that they’re like, They must be in the basement. They couldn’t possibly be upstairs.

Luke: That’s what I think. Yeah—that people think about what their life at home looks like, and they assume that ours must be some recognizable version of that.

TJ: The message of the American dream of  “Buy your own house” ... the National Association of Realtors has been really successful in making sure everyone believes that’s for them. [Laughter.] You know, we still get most of those benefits. It’s just, we share it..

Deborah: And I think that is a difference, from either renting together or one household renting to another. There is not the same sense of shared ownership. There’s also, I think, maybe a power differential if one household owns a house and one is renting.

But we’re all in it. So if something breaks or if something needs to be repaired, we’re all invested. We all really care about the outcome. And I think that actually helps us to avoid conflict, because we’re all so invested in this property and we love this house.

Beck: And whose idea was it first to buy a house together?

Deborah: I had been pitching Luke on living in community for a couple of years. I grew up in a big family, and I really love living with other people. I loved living with roommates. And so I kept sending him different articles or podcasts about different people who are in group-house situations. And Luke had never had a roommate other than a family member before he married me. And so he said, “Absolutely not.”

And then one day he came home after listening to a podcast or a sermon that I had sent to him and said, “I think I might be open to this.” That being said, no one was more surprised than me when Luke popped the question at New Year’s brunch to TJ and Bethany.

Beck: So you were both married at the time of the New Year’s brunch.

TJ: Yeah.

Beck: And did you feel any pressure, as married couples, for your home life to look a certain way?

Luke: I think culturally, you just assume: You get married, you buy a home. You know, have a family and live like an independent, nuclear kind of family unit.

And so I think that had always been my assumption of what our married life would look like. But as Deborah and I were sort of talking about buying a home and what might that look like, and this was definitely not one of the default options. [Chuckles.]

Beck: What would people say when you told them that you were thinking of doing this? What kind of pushback would you get?

Deborah: When we talked about it with other people, everyone thought it was a bad idea, including our real-estate agent. I think most people were worried about the worst-case scenarios. What if it doesn’t work? You’re all on the mortgage. What happens when someone has kids? If it doesn’t work, how are you guys going to be able to split amicably?

Bethany: I got a lot of questions about what discipline looks like. And, do they even like kids? What if they don’t like your kids? But I felt like, you know, it’s Luke and Deborah: They’re going to love our kids. And if I am going to parent for the first time in front of anyone, I would want it to be Luke and Deborah, you know?

Beck: What was it that you wanted from your home life that wouldn’t be met by the traditional single-family-home arrangement? And what did you hope that this would provide instead?

Bethany: You know, all four of us have full-time jobs. And so when you’re living in community, we split groceries; we divide up who’s cooking and when. And, you know, there’s a lot of talk out there about how the domestic labor falls on one partner in a relationship. And so we divide that among four people.

TJ: Neither of us on our own would have purchased this house, financially speaking. We got to buy a larger property in a neighborhood that we were more excited about living in.

Luke: Yeah; I maybe approached it least practically of any of us. [Laughter.] So living even with just a spouse, right, is challenging. But it also encouraged me to grow, to be gentler, to be kinder. To be less self-centered.

And so I was sort of thinking, Wow, if living with just Deborah has done that, imagine adding more people to the mix. I don’t know if that’s panned out quite the way that I thought it would.

Bethany: Doubled in size!

Luke: Tripled in size!

TJ: Luke, you’ve become gentler and softer.

Luke: Thank you.That’s reassuring to hear. I actually think it makes us better people, and encourages us to grow less self-centered to live in community like this.

Deborah: I think that people often assume that we made this decision for financial reasons. I think it was more of a missional kind of—the desire to live in community, and to live with TJ and Bethany.

And I thought I would be a bigger person, like you imagine I’ll be really altruistic. And I think a lot of times I’m not, and I really have appreciated their grace and forgiveness toward me when I’m not a big person, or when my behavior is very poor. And so there’s a lot of opportunities for grace and forgiveness. And I’ve been the recipient of that time and time again.

Bethany: Yeah; I also just think it’s a lot of fun. I really feel like we’re not communicating how much fun we have together. Someone’s always around to talk to or hang out with.

Rashid: You know, Julie, I’m at an age where many of my friends have serious romantic partners and many even have kids. So the time for casual hangouts is understandably limited. But there has been a noticeable shift in the ease of just meeting up and hanging out spontaneously.

Beck: Yeah; that is something that I worry about a little bit—being in a long-term relationship. We’ve also been through a pandemic and just only hanging out with each other for a few years.

I don’t want us to be super-insular in our relationship. And that does happen—married people are a lot less likely than single people to hang out with their friends and neighbors. And research shows that holds true across race, age, and socioeconomic status.

So even though I don’t think we’re going to necessarily invite another couple to move in with us right now, I am trying to be more deliberate about spending more time with my friends regularly. As much as we love each other, I don’t want our love for each other to pull us away from our friendships.

Rashid: Culturally, sometimes it feels like it’s not very adult to want to live with your friends forever. So although that is my ideal scenario—to have a huge, L-shaped IKEA sectional couch where my partner along with 10 friends can all sit together—it doesn’t always feel the most realistic when it comes to a long-term living situation, where I can actually live with those sort of chosen family members of mine and make a home with them.

Beck: I mean, especially once you reach certain milestones—like if you do choose to get married or if you do choose to have kids—the expectation kind of gets even stronger that you’re going to live with just your nuclear family: just your partner and your kids.

Rashid: And the cultural and social pressures are just one part of the equation. In the case of these two families, they had to lay out and untangle their individual expectations—and fears—too.

Beck: So going into this, that’s what you were hoping for from it. What were you afraid of?

Bethany: Oh, that’s a good question. We wrote all those things down. This was a suggestion from our realtor. He was like, “Before you guys start on this process, write down all your fears, fold them up on pieces of paper, put them in a bowl, and just pull them out one by one and talk about it.” And so that’s what we did.

Beck: What else do you all remember about the bowl conversation?

Deborah: Well, we all cried. One of my responses was that they would regret having bought a house with us in a year or two years. And I just thought about how bad that would feel.

Luke: I mean, I think fundamentally, it was about rejection, right? Like, wow: They’re going to live with me, and they’re going to figure out what I’m really like. And they’re going to be like “Wish we had done a hard pass, like six months ago” kind of thing.

TJ: Similar to any relationship where, you know, something is going to change, you worry about, like, Will I lose this friend? Or Will things not be as fine? Or Will they be way different? And you know, that was, I guess, one of my fears.

Luke: One other thing we talked about—I think we talked a lot about—what happens if somebody really goes off the rails? I think several of us have had mental illness in the family, and had family members suddenly go through a mental-health crisis and change.

What if God forbid, one of us gets divorced or whatever? I remember the mental-health one being one that we all cried about.

Beck: What do you remember about move-in day and the sort of weeks and months following that?

Bethany: Oh, my gosh. I was seven months pregnant. But I do remember during that time we would all take family walks late at night. And you know, nothing fit so I looked ridiculous. And Luke and Deborah walk really fast, so they were just really walking very, very slowly. We all walked at my pace so that we could talk. We did it every night.

Luke: We all had something that we were anticipating kind of together. Getting the nursery ready. And talking through: “When is Bethany’s mom coming?” “When is TJ’s mom coming?” “When they go to the hospital, what are we going to do?” Just being a really fun period when we all were kind of looking forward to Mary Hayley’s arrival and waiting with bated breath.

Beck: How did you both decide the role that you wanted Luke and Deborah to play in your children’s lives?

Bethany: Aw, what a really sweet question. I mean, well, Luke and Deborah are the godparents to our children. That felt like a really obvious one. We want our children to experience Luke and Deborah, and just the kindness and the love that they bring to our family. I mean, we’re a family.

Deborah: I mean, we’re just part of their normal life. And they’ve never asked, “Why do you live here?”

Beck: What were the discussions about parenting in this shared environment like?

TJ: I mean, I think we’re all just on the same page. Bethany and I, we’re going to parent our children how we thought was right. I think it’s really hard to do this if you don’t have some kind of shared value system with another couple. I think you need at least some kind of shared faith system or shared non-faith system to do that.

Bethany: I mean, I think it’s helpful for people to know, “Hey, this is a strategy we’re using when this happens.” We decided early on: TJ and I will discipline our kids, and Deborah and Luke are like their aunt and uncle. They uphold the rules. They don’t encourage the kids to break the rules, right? But TJ and I provide the discipline or consequences. I think that has also helped: just that boundary.

Beck: I wanted to ask Luke and Deborah: How did you feel about committing not to live just with another couple, but with someone else’s kids? I think a lot of us who play the sort of aunt or uncle role to our friends’ kids—at least myself—I know I dip in, I dip out. You know: I show up, I show ’em a movie, I pump ’em full of sugar, and I send them on their way to their parents. But you sign on to be there for all of it, all the time.

Luke: TJ and Bethany were upfront that they were planning on having kids, from our very first conversation about this. We always knew going in, you know, that this was what we were signing up for. But it is humbling that we actually do still have the option of dipping out.

Maybe not quite to the same degree. You know, you can still hear the screaming from the bedroom. But we can actually step away and have some privacy or let TJ and Bethany deal with whatever is happening.

Deborah: I think we thought it would be a great adventure. And on the one hand, we did know we were getting ourselves into. We’d been around kids enough. But I don’t think we had an idealized or romanticized view of what it would be like to live with kids. We were not planning to have kids. We knew that. But I think we felt like this would be a good way to participate in the life of kids.

TJ: And our kids love them.

Deborah: We love their kids. We are crazy about them.

Luke: They’re very sweet.

Bethany: I think that has been one of the great joys of living together. Getting to parent with a community that I think we wouldn’t have otherwise. I think a lot of people feel isolated in their house with their kids. And on the one hand, it is hard parenting in front of the audience, you know. And on the other, I’m so glad that we’re doing it together. And so that has made a big difference.

Luke: We have a two-to-one adult-to-child ratio in the house. And I think a lot of people would hear that and be pretty envious, because it does provide more adults. Not just in terms of safety and keeping an eye on things, but just ... kids are attention sponges. And it’s nice to have more people in the house who can help, you know, kind of nurture them.

And it’s also really fun to hear the kids starting to use crazy words that I use and that Deborah uses. It’s a privilege to get to be playing a role in raising children without actually having had them.

Beck: Do you eat together every night?

Deborah: We do. Whoever is here eats together.

Beck: And the kids, too?

Bethany: Yep.

Beck: What are some of the rituals and rhythms that you’ve established in your house? Kind of week to week.

Deborah: Initially, we did a weekly house meeting. And we still do house meetings, not quite weekly. And I think part of that is just we don’t have the need for them as frequently as we did at first.

We got this idea from another group house in D.C. They said that they do a meeting every week, and they ask, first of all, what’s working and what’s not working. Everyone goes around and has to respond to both questions.

Just the little things that really can grate on you, or things that might be upsetting to you that might just fester for a long time. And so I think that’s been a good practice for us: just sort of getting things out in the open. It provides a forum for that.

Beck: What are some conflict-management strategies in your house? Do you have specific ways that you go about it?

Bethany: Having a structure for regular communication is really helpful, because you don’t feel this pressure to bring something up in the moment when you may or may not be ready to talk about it. Like, Oh, I know we’re having a meeting, and so I can just bring it up there.

Luke: Many of the lessons from marriage also apply, things like “You can’t hold someone accountable to it if you didn’t say it out loud.” You also have to say what’s working, right?

Deborah: Honestly, that question—“What’s working? What’s not working?”—is a really hard question to answer, in part because you don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. And, you know, it just really forces you to talk about things that you wouldn’t talk about otherwise. So I think that has forced me to be a better communicator.

I think that’s an added benefit of living with people: You see their life so close up and personal, and you see the way that they resolve conflict and the way that they parent their kids, and all of those things. And so I feel like I’ve learned a lot. And I think I’m a better communicator because I’ve lived with TJ and Bethany.

Luke: Yeah; I would second that. Living in a community challenges you to just be emotionally intelligent, right? Is this a me problem, or is this actually, you know, maybe somebody said something that was hurtful, or they were just not thinking about it? How am I feeling and why? And is it something that I need other people to help me deal with, or is it something that I can, you know, process on my own?

Deborah: Yeah. And I think living in a community forces you to work out your own kind of marriage in the community. And there’s this infamous night where we all sat down to dinner. We sat down, and I said, “You know, Luke and I are fighting, and we need some time. And so we’re going to go work this out, and we’ll be back in 15 minutes.”

Deborah: And Bethany said, “TJ and I are fighting, too!” And I think that TJ and Luke were both like, “we’re fighting?” So we split up into separate areas of the house. And we came back after 15 minutes and finished dinner together.

TJ: I have no recollection of that; that’s hilarious.

Luke: We love each other and that love actually is based on a commitment. Right? And I think that commitment predates a mortgage, but a mortgage is a useful symbol of that as well. And so, yeah: Out of that commitment comes a desire to “Well, let’s make this work.” We want to make this work. And so how do we do that in a way that’s best for everybody?

Beck: I think what’s kind of remarkable to me about the commitment is that friendship culture in the U.S. and maybe elsewhere today is very anti-commitment, I think. And not always in a bad way, necessarily—but I think friendship is defined in some ways by its voluntary nature. You don’t have those formal commitments that you have in marriage, that you have in a nuclear family.

And so there can become this sort of sense of, you know, “I love you and you’re my friend.” But the highest truth is everybody needs to do what’s best for themselves. And I think it is rare that you would put an obligation onto your friend or accept an obligation from your friend.

Luke: Yeah, definitely. I think I’m setting healthy boundaries. Like “I need to do some self-care”—that kind of language. I think we have a kind of shared moral framework that’s based on our faith.

And, at least to my reading, at the heart of Christianity is actually “other-centered love”—that I’m choosing what’s best for you, not for me. And so I think that informs our shared living and our commitment to one another as well. And there are benefits for me. But I also want to love, and I want to serve you and your kids and Deborah, and I think that really is our starting place as a house.

TJ: Yeah; again there has to be a shared vision outside of yourself. Or why else would you be doing it? There’s many days or weeks where you want to be somewhere else; this happens to me all the time just because of my personality. “I want to move to Florida because it’s cold.” I can’t tell you how many times I say that in the winter.

But without that shared vision of something bigger outside of you, it’s not going to last more than a year or two, because you’re going to find a reason to escape. I think it’s really easy to make “community” a theoretical concept. What I’ve learned about community through living with others, including Luke and Deborah, is that community is a real granular thing in real life.

It’s the people you’re with on a daily basis, how you interact with them. It’s how intentional you are with them, and it doesn’t actually come naturally. Building real community is not an ideology. It’s a practice.

And that goes for our house. But that also goes with my other friendships. I want to have lifelong friendships outside of this house, and I have to spend time with those people, or else we’re not actually close.

Beck: Can you all still imagine any scenarios where one of you would want to move out, or two of you would want to move out?

Luke: I mean, I guess if somebody’s got a job—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—somewhere else. And then, something that we have talked about is that the kids are sharing a room right now. At some point they’ll need to not share a room together. And so, would we buy a different house? Would we maybe need to go our separate ways?

Deborah: Initially when we decided to do this together, we signed a three-year contract. And now we’re past that three-year mark, and we have a retreat every year in May where we talk about the future and sort of what the next year looks like, and what our timeline is. And so I think we just have this opportunity to revisit that every year.

TJ: There’s kind of a running clock on a couple of our careers. And so we’ve talked about that openly. It’s not like an elephant in the room or something.

Beck: Yeah. And how do you think you guys would approach it if somebody did want to move out?

Luke: So this was one of the things that we made sure that we really ironed out before we actually bought the house together. We would have the house independently appraised. If there’s one couple that wants to stay in the house, they would have an opportunity to actually buy the other couple out.

If that’s not possible or the other couple didn’t want to, then we would either sell the house and just split the [proceeds]—I think right now our equity would just be 50-50—or we could also rent the house out and split the proceeds from the rent as well. So one of those options.

Beck: Would you recommend your choice to other people?

Luke: Absolutely.

TJ: Yeah; I think they need to go through the process. [Laughter.]

Deborah: Yeah; I think so too. I think you really want to, you know, count the cost. You need to make sure you’re doing it with the right people. But as long as you can trust them in general and trust them financially, I think that’s a big part of it.

Luke: Yeah. Ninety percent of what goes on, right, is very day-to-day and very mundane, and the big questions only come up so often.

Beck: When someone puts microphones in your house and asks them to you?

Luke: Right. [Laughter.]

Deborah: You know, I married a strong introvert who would like to be in his man cave most of the time. Luke is not the only one bearing the burden of my social needs; there’s like a whole house of people to share that.

Beck: Becca, I agree with Deborah. I do think you need different people to fill different roles in your life. It reminds me of a concept called the All-or-Nothing Marriage, which comes from the psychologist Eli Finkel. And he’s kind of theorizing that people just expect even more from their marriages than they used to.

Way back when, you know, it was basically a financial arrangement. Right? And then we wanted love on top of that. And now we even want self-actualization on top of that, and to become our best selves through this relationship. And it could be very isolating if that one person is your sort of be-all end-all.

Rashid: Yeah, you know, I grew up in a multigenerational house as a kid, and my aunt and uncle would come over every weekend. And there were lots of people meeting my emotional needs as a kid, not just my parents. So whenever I saw just two parents and a kid at the dinner table at my friends’ houses, I was always interested in this sort of stark difference with my family that was sort of a chaotic, buffet-style mess of a dinner every weekend.

Beck: Sounds fun.

Rashid: It was. But I realized it’s just a totally different setup when one person or just two people are expected to fill in the gaps of what an extended family, or an extended network of people, can do. It is interesting to me that in mainstream American culture, the romantic partner is expected to be your everything.

Beck: Yeah. Like, help raise your kids and hear all of your work stories that they don’t understand and help you around the house. And they’re your go-to person for every concert and movie and anything that you do. It’s just a lot for one relationship to hold. It’s a lot of weight to ask for from anybody.

Rashid: And actually it’s been shown that relying on a variety of people to meet different emotional needs can be better for people’s well-being.

TJ: To get back to your earlier question, just on our block on this side, there’s three or four shared intergenerational arrangements, whether it’s family or otherwise. It’s actually not that weird, you know?

Beck: Yeah. If I want to suss out a friend to see if they’d be down for this, how should I broach the conversation?

Luke: I think you want to make it a compliment: “I’ve been thinking about living in community and wanting to do that intentionally. And when I thought about that, you were someone that I thought, Wow, you would be a great person to live in community with.”

I would suggest that people talk to your spouse first. “This is what I’m thinking; what do you think about that? How do you think that would impact our relationship? What would be great about it?” Not just: “What are you afraid of?”

Beck: What have you all learned about each other along the way?

Deborah: When you live together, you learn who is coming down the stairs before you see them. You learn kind of their footfall. You learn that TJ lets out a large sigh every morning as he comes down the stairs first thing. So you have that level of intimacy with people.

Luke: I’ll take the more depressing approach.

TJ: Whoa, right on cue.

Deborah: Are you sure?

Luke: Everybody in the house is shocked. Even when you change your living situation, you’re still the same person, right? All of the same things that I struggled with, living with Deborah—like, Hey, whoa, they’re still true. I’m still me. I think there’s always that temptation, like TJ said—to escape, to move somewhere else, to like, enter a new situation—and then I’ll be a new person. No; you’re going to enter in your situation, and you’re going to be the same you that you always have been. And so is that the right situation to move into or not?

TJ: I think I’ve just learned that Luke and Deborah are better people than I even thought. I can appreciate them at a deeper level than I could before we lived together. And even though yeah, we’ve had arguments or disagreements, I still think they’re some of the best, most generous people that I know. It amplifies the good.

Bethany: I like the idea of “We got to choose our family.” I don’t know; it’s just brought a lot of joy.

Rashid: And Julie, there are signs that other models of living, other than single-family homes are also becoming more normalized in our culture.

Beck: Yeah; because there’s something about the nuclear-family household that encourages people to turn inward away from the possibility of that broader community. But if you want to have those other layers of support in your life, then it takes some really intentional planning to resist the pull of that model of home life that is really held up as the building block of society.

Rashid: And maybe even a hint of rebellion.

Beck: Just a hint.

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Last Friday, The Atlantic published Tim Alberta’s profile of then–CNN CEO Chris Licht. Yesterday, Licht was ousted from the network. Below, in selected excerpts from today’s episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, Alberta reflects on how Licht’s attempts to save the network went so wrong.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive The golf merger may be dead on arrival Is Gen Z coming for the GOP? The happiest way to change jobs A Plan Gone Awry

When Chris Licht was brought in to replace CNN’s former president Jeff Zucker in 2022, he was on a mission: He wanted to rid the network of what he saw as the mistakes of the Trump era, and to welcome more Republican viewers. After spending long periods of time talking with Licht over the past year, my colleague Tim Alberta found that while Licht’s theory of how to fix CNN may have made sense, the execution of that theory seemed to backfire at every turn.

The Atlantic published Alberta’s major profile of Licht last Friday. Yesterday, CNN staff learned that Licht is leaving the network. On today’s episode of our podcast Radio Atlantic, in his first (and, so far, only) interview on his reporting about Licht and CNN, Alberta joined host Hanna Rosin to discuss this week’s news. Below are some highlights from their conversation.

Licht came in with an “incredibly ambitious objective.”

After Alberta told Rosin how hard he’d worked to pitch Licht’s team on this story, she wondered: Why did Alberta want to write this profile so badly? “CNN had really been the poster child for Republican attacks on the media during the Trump years,” he replied. “I’d spent as much time covering Republican voters and Republican campaigns as anybody over the past five or six years. And I’d seen firsthand, time and time and time again, how, at rallies or smaller candidate events, CNN had sort of become the face of the hysterical liberal media that was out to get Trump and leading a witch hunt on his impeachment and on January 6 and on everything else.”

“Licht came in and quite overtly made it known, from the beginning, that his mission was to change that perception of CNN—was not to coddle the extreme right wing, so to speak, but to win back the sort of respectable rank-and-file Republican voter who had become so distrustful of CNN during those previous five or six years. And that struck me as an incredibly ambitious objective for somebody taking over one of the world’s biggest news organizations … at a really sensitive time.”

Licht was an awkward fit from the start.

Licht’s network predecessor, Jeff Zucker, was a beloved, “larger-than-life figure who had real personal rapport with just about everybody—not only the on-air talent but the producers behind the scenes, the camera crews,” Alberta explained. Licht, on the other hand, “went out of his way from the outset to be everything that Zucker wasn’t. So if Zucker was warm and affectionate and intimate with everyone, Licht was sort of cold and detached, almost aloof, purposely inaccessible.”

One of Licht’s first decisions as CEO was to turn Zucker’s former office—on the 17th floor of the CNN building, in the heart of the network’s newsroom—into a conference room. He then moved himself up to an office on the 22nd floor, a spot that most employees didn’t even know how to find. “And that one move, although it seems small, I think really in many ways came to define Licht’s relationship with his journalists,” Alberta said.

Licht’s mission was about more than just CNN.

“This was about the journalism industry itself,” Alberta said. Licht was “making it known that he felt that all of media had gotten played by President Trump. And he believed that if something was not done to fix that, that if there weren’t dramatic measures taken to restore and rehabilitate the media’s image in the eyes of much of the country, that it posed a real threat to democracy itself.”

So what happened to that mission?

Alberta quotes “the great philosopher Mike Tyson”: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth … Chris Licht had a plan, and then he came in and he got punched in the mouth a bunch of times.

“The recurring theme that I heard from a lot of the top talent at CNN was that, in a lot of ways, they actually agreed in theory with the mission that Chris Licht had laid out, as far as toning down some of the outrage, trying to be more selective with when they really wanted it dialed up to 11, as he would say, and go strong on certain stories,” Alberta said. “But the execution of that mission was really what started to become shaky.”

One particularly troubling question was “what [to] do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks? Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?”

Licht’s programming decisions sometimes seemed to answer that question in ways that conflicted with his stated vision, Alberta explained, culminating in the network’s much-criticized town hall with Donald Trump last month.

Licht seemed defeated during Alberta’s final interview.

When Alberta met with Licht in mid-May, a week after the Trump town hall, “I could sense, having … gotten to know him fairly well over some period of time, that there was something a little bit different in his body language, that there was some self-doubt. There was maybe even a bit of sadness that things had gone so wrong.”

Looking back, did Licht’s mission fail?

Alberta pointed out that Licht set a lofty goal for himself: to reimagine the mainstream media’s relationship with a Republican base that had been “systematically manipulated” into not trusting them for decades. “It’s hard to draw any other conclusion” than failure “just based on the ratings,” Alberta said. “One year in the grand scheme of things is not a ton of time, but in that one year, there was just no measurable improvement. And in fact, all of the measurables actually showed that things were getting worse.”

Rosin posed an important final question: “My immediate thought after hearing that he was out at CNN was, In our political climate, is it even possible to do a reset like he was trying to do?”

“I think that’s the $64,000 question here, to be honest,” Alberta replied. He noted that he sees some of the internet’s “pile on” of Licht as unfair. Licht is a “talented guy” who has been successful in his past roles, Alberta said, and “I do think that he was dealt an exceptionally difficult hand, but I also think he made it even harder on himself than it had to be.”

“I don’t know if anybody at this point is capable of doing what Chris set out to do.”

Listen to the full podcast episode here.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

Today’s News In a surprise decision, the United States Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that Alabama’s current congressional map dilutes the electoral power of its Black voters, a likely violation of the Voting Rights Act. Federal prosecutors handling the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents were spotted at a Miami courthouse where a grand jury has been hearing witness testimony, further evidence of a potential indictment. The Baptist minister Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network and an influential coalition of conservative Christians, has died at the age of 93. Robertson is widely considered a key figure in the rise of religious conservatism over recent decades. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf considers the battle over smartphones in schools. Weekly Planet: The not-COVID reason to mask is here, Katherine J. Wu writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read CBS Photo Archive / Getty

The People Who Use Their Parents’ First Name

By Jacob Stern

On a 1971 episode of The Brady Bunch, the family’s eldest son, Greg, decides that, as a freshly minted high schooler, he ought to be treated like a man. When he asks for his own bedroom, his parents acquiesce. When he asks for money to buy new clothes, they give it to him. When he asks to skip the family camping trip, they say okay.

But when he sits down at the breakfast table and calls his parents by their first name—“Morning, Carol! Morning, Mike!”—well, that’s a bridge too far. “Now, look, Greg,” his father answers with a wag of his finger. “Calling your parents by their first names might be the fad these days, but around here, we are still ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ to you!”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Don’t forget the other half of Europe’s abortion compromise. We don’t really know what wildfire smoke does to your brain. Netanyahu sends in the clowns. Culture Break Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Frazer Harrison / Getty; Jerod Harris / Bravo / NBC / Getty; Paula Lobo / Disney / Getty

Read. Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, in which the Slate staff writer Henry Grabar makes a case for why parking has made American life worse.

Watch. Top Chef, the juggernaut cooking competition that, for 20 seasons, has redefined what it means to be a chef—and a leader.

Play our daily crossword.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta spent long stretches of the past year talking to CNN’s then-CEO Chris Licht about his grand experiment to reset the cable giant as a venue more welcoming to Republicans. In a major profile of Licht, Alberta documented the many disasters along the way, culminating in Licht’s ouster from the network this week.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin talks to Alberta about the rise and fall of Licht, and what it means for the media.

“This is a guy who had been working 80-hour weeks since he took the job and had been really pouring himself into trying to remake CNN into something different and something new,” Alberta recalled of the period leading up to a disastrous CNN town hall with Donald Trump that Licht oversaw. He had, “with the world watching, failed,” Alberta said. “And that was crushing for him.”

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk with Tim Alberta, who watched the implosion at CNN up close in real time. And I ask him: Did Licht’s mission to redefine journalism fail because of Licht or because it is a fundamentally misguided mission?

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Tim Alberta: It was apparent to me immediately when I saw Chris after the town hall ended that he knew this wasn’t good.

Hanna Rosin: “Chris” is Chris Licht, the former CEO of CNN, who was ousted this week. And that’s my colleague Tim Alberta, who’s been reporting on Licht for the past year.

Alberta: This is a guy who I’ve gotten to know decently well over the past year or so, a guy who’s just got a bottomless supply of self-confidence.

And, in that moment, when the town hall ended and I met him in the lobby, he was pale. His shoulders were sort of slumped. He looked distressed. Thoroughly distressed.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. You may have read about the Trump Town Hall in Manchester, New Hampshire that CNN aired last month. Maybe you even watched it. The event was part of Licht’s broader mission to signal that Republicans and even Trump supporters were welcome at CNN again.

Which was connected to an even bigger mission, one that Licht defined as getting back to real journalism: truths, facts, and less spin. Instead, CNN lost control of the town hall. Trump used it as a forum to double down on lies about the 2020 election. Among other unsavory things. It was pretty much universally considered a disaster and backstage, right after the event, Licht knew it.

Alberta: It was a deeply human moment where I, I think a guy who, you know, agree with his decisions, disagree with his decisions, whatever.

This is a guy who had been working, like, 80 hour weeks since he took the job and had been really pouring himself into trying to remake CNN into something different and something new, and had in this moment with the world watching failed. And that was, it was, it was, um, it was crushing for him. You could just see it in, in that, in that moment

Rosin: In this episode, we talked to Tim Alberta, who watched the implosion at CNN up close in real time.

Alberta: So I first met Chris last summer. We had dinner. I had been pitching his team on doing this story. Ultimately after pushing and pushing, pushing, there was a meeting set up over dinner in New York.

Rosin: Can I ask, why did you want to meet him so badly? What was interesting to you about this story?

Alberta: Well, I think, a couple of things. First, CNN had really been the poster child for Republican attacks on the media during the Trump years. I’d spent as much time covering Republican voters and Republican campaigns as anybody over the past five or six years.

And I’d seen firsthand time and time and time again. How at rallies or smaller candidate events how CNN had sort of become the face of the hysterical liberal media that was out to get Trump and leading a witch hunt on his impeachment and on January 6th and on everything else.

And so what was interesting to me was that Licht came in, and, and quite overtly made it known, from the beginning, that his mission was to change that perception of CNN, was not to coddle the extreme right wing, so to speak, but to win back the sort of respectable rank and file Republican voter who had become so distrustful of CNN during those previous five or six years.

And that struck me as an incredibly ambitious objective for somebody taking over, one of the world’s biggest news organizations. You know, CNN has 4,000, some employees spread all across the world, and, you’re, you’re, you’re coming in at a really sensitive time, taking over this incredibly difficult job, and in some sense you’re making it harder on yourself by staking out that sort of very ambitious goal.

Rosin: You watched Chris Licht come in as a newbie at CNN. How did he fit in in the beginning?

Alberta: Well, awkwardly, I think is the, is the fair way to say it, because you have to keep in mind that he was following Jeff Zucker, who had been there for, I guess at that point, about a decade, and was beloved. He was sort of a larger than life figure who had real personal rapport with just about everybody.

Not only the on-air talent, but the producers behind the scenes, the camera crews, uh, this guy just sort of made everybody feel like part of a family. And he was affectionate, had nicknames, knew everybody’s kids. I mean, and, and so obviously when Zucker was forced out as president of CNN at the beginning of 2022 and, and then Licht came in shortly thereafter, he inherited a newsroom that was reeling from the departure of sort of their, their fearless leader, Jeff Zucker, who had, you know, keep in mind really sort of steered CNN through an unprecedented period of, of almost warfare with the White House during the Trump years where there were threats called into CNN, reporters being singled out as the enemy of the people, you know, they were really under fire in, in ways that we’d never seen a news organization under fire from a White House before. And so there was this, this incredibly tense dynamic already there. And then Zucker is forced out and Licht walks into that.

Meanwhile, there’s incredible financial turmoil. There’s been a change in ownership with a new parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, taking over CNN and their financials are pretty wobbly, and so there’s massive cost cutting.

And Licht, sort of stepping into that position, I think really went out of his way from the outset to be everything that Zucker wasn’t.

So if Zucker was warm and affectionate and intimate with everyone, Licht was, sort of, cold and detached, almost aloof, purposely inaccessible.

In fact, one of the first things he did after taking the job was turn Zucker’s office on the 17th floor, which was right outside some of the main studios right in the heart of the newsroom, and turned it into a conference room as sort of a symbolic move. And then he himself picked an office up on the 22nd floor in a space most employees at CNN, including longtime veteran reporters, they didn’t even know how to find that office. and that, that one move, although it seems small, I think really in many ways came to define Licht’s relationship with his journalists.

Rosin: And so why do you think he thought this mission was important? Was it just about saving CNN or was it about something broader?

Alberta: So it became clear to me from the earliest conversations that I began having with people, well before Licht even agreed to participate in this piece, that to Chris Licht. This was about more than CNN. This was about the journalism industry itself. He had made it known that he didn’t blame a lot of these folks for their souring on the mainstream media.

That he saw some of the, the, the big news organizations getting over their skis on certain stories or perhaps giving too much attention to the stylistic stuff at, at the expense of the more substantive, uh, stories that they could have been covering. In other words, Licht was sort of making it known that he felt that all of media had gotten played by President Trump. And he believed that if something was not done to fix that, that if there weren’t dramatic measures taken to restore and rehabilitate the media’s image in the eyes of much of the country, that it posed a, a real threat to democracy itself. I mean, that’s not an overstatement.

Rosin: Wow. So it was not just a business decision to save CNN. It was not just about saving cable news. It was not even just about journalism and media. It was an even bigger project. It sounds like.

Alberta: I think what’s clear is two things. Number one, to the people at the top at Warner Brothers Discovery from the Board of Directors to the CEO, David Zaslav, they were very much invested in CNN as a, you know, profit center.

A place that was, you know, accustomed to making over a billion dollars annually and a prestigious brand that could generate a lot of revenue. And I think Licht viewed it somewhat differently. Licht was trained as a journalist. He calls journalism his first love. He practiced being Walter Cronkite in his basement as a kid putting on fake newscasts.

I mean, this is a guy who really loves the news and, and, and so I think, whether one agrees with him or completely disagrees with him or is somewhere in between, it’s, I think it’s worth recognizing just at a, at a sort of ground level that this is someone who really does consider himself a journalist, first and foremost, and really believed that the institution of journalism in America was under assault.

And that some of its trouble was self-inflicted. And he believed that if he could introduce a new model at CNN that was built around toning down the commentary, dialing back the outrage, and leading with facts, and, and, and just really being very careful with tone and orienting everything toward,sort of fact forward journalism.

That if they could restore trust in the CNN brand by doing that then it would create a model that the entire industry might try to replicate. And, and that was really his vision from the outset.

Rosin:. So he starts off on this incredibly ambitious, serious mission almost to turn back time on journalism. Was there a moment you could pinpoint when this mission started to go wrong?

Alberta: Well, I would say two things. First, you could argue that it was almost doomed from the beginning because, you know, cable news has been in sort of long decline, predating Trump, postdating Trump, even though Trump sort of breathed some artificial life into ratings and revenues for a few years there, it’s been clear for a long time because of cord cutting, because of these silly little things we carry around in our pockets all day and stare at too much.

Um, for a whole host of reasons that cable news has been in trouble. I also think that there’s not any compelling evidence to suggest that Americans, or at least any critical mass of Americans, want to get their news without fear or favor, that, that, that there’s any critical mass of Americans who just want the facts and then wanna make up their own mind. I mean, there’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest in fact that Americans want to get their news from sources that will, sort of, reaffirm their existing worldviews and, and tell them what they want to hear and not necessarily challenge them where their idols lie.

And that’s, I think, the thing Chris Licht tried to challenge from the outset and really, really sold people around him hard on the idea that, for the sake of American democracy, we needed to do something about that. And I think in that sense, he was probably fighting a doomed mission from the very beginning.

Rosin: So he was fighting a doomed mission. It was difficult from the outset. He decided to do it anyway. So what actually happened? I mean, he must have known it was gonna be difficult.

Alberta: Yes. Well, a–and as the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And that’s sort of what happened at CNN. Chris Licht had a plan, and then he came in and he got punched in the mouth a bunch of times. Um, you know, the recurring theme that I heard from a lot of the top talent at CNN was that in a lot of ways, they actually agreed in theory with the mission that Chris Licht had laid out as far as toning down some of the outrage, trying to be more selective with when they really wanted it dialed up to 11, as he would say, and, and, and go strong on, on certain stories.

But the execution of that mission was really what started to become shaky and, and really, I think the first glimpse into that that I got was watching behind the scenes as CNN prepared last fall to launch its new morning show. Now, Licht had made a decision to take Don Lemon, who was probably the most polarizing personality at CNN and make Lemon the face of this new morning show called CNN This Morning. And, and so in some ways Licht had tied his fate to Don Lemon’s fate, and as of the springtime when Lemon had committed, sort of, a series of blunders and had made some enemies internally, and obviously the most notable incident was when he said that Nikki Haley, the presidential candidate who’s 51 years old, was past her prime and that a woman’s only in her prime if she’s in her twenties or thirties or forties. And it caused so much turmoil, at the network, and it was a mess. And it was clear at that point that the one thing that he had really been counting on as a win, this morning show, was looking more and more like loss every day.

Rosin: In addition to this morning show drama he was wading through...not everyone at CNN was on board with his mission right? He may have defined it as truth and journalism, but lots of other people pointed out many many problems with what he was actually trying to do, in practice.

Alberta: Yeah. Because beyond just giving that sort of broad definition that I think a lot of us would agree to around what good journalism should be, you know, leading with the facts and telling the truth without fear or favor, um, the specifics became a bit troubling.

And, you know, specifically the question of, you know, what do you do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and, uh, prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks? Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?

Do you have to have some rules in place around how you cover those people? And, you know, Licht would fall back repeatedly on this analogy of some people like rain, some people don’t like rain, and we will have anybody on this network whether they like rain or don’t like rain, but we will not have people on this network who say that it’s not raining outside when it really is. Now, it’s an interesting metaphor but I think the problem for Licht is that the application of it was a little bit uneven. Even going back to the very beginning of his tenure, one of the first programming decisions he made after taking over as the new boss at CNN was to tell his producers to downplay the first hearing of the January 6th committee in Congress.

Remember, it was shown in primetime, this was sort of a, ’get your popcorn ready’ primetime special event that MSNBC went wall to wall with its coverage and earned monster ratings. But because of Licht’s edict to the staff, CNN covered it very casually, didn’t give it the sort of attention that it would have given something like that in previous years, and it got slaughtered in the ratings by MSNBC.

So, there were a lot of examples along the way that gave cause to some of Licht’s own journalists to question, okay, well he says the mission is this thing, but is our execution really in keeping with that, and ultimately it was the town hall with Donald Trump that really broke the camel’s back.

Rosin: Okay. Tell me how that whole event came about

Alberta: Licht and his team had been working for some time to reach an agreement with the former president Donald Trump to bring him on CNN for some sort of big interview.

What they ultimately agreed on was a town hall in New Hampshire, the first in the nation primary state and Licht knew that he was going to get a lot of pushback from his own employees on this. Uh, a lot of people who felt that Trump should not be platformed, that he’d, uh, caused sufficient distress to the country with his lies and his assaults on the ballot box.

And his, um, disruption of the transition of power that CNN should not be platforming him at all, much less in a town hall format. And, and you know, I, I would just flashback quickly to the very first conversation I ever had with Chris where we talked about how the media covered Trump in the past and how it needs to cover him in the future. And I was really slack jawed, just shocked, frankly, when Chris said to me, well, I think the media has learned its lesson.

This is not something that I lose sleep over. This idea, this question of how do we cover Trump? I, you know, and, and I said, whaaaat really? Like, you, you, you think you’ve, you think you’ve got the answer? And he said, yeah, we cover him the same way as anybody, right? We, we, we hold him accountable with the facts and we don’t let him play us.

And, uh, we don’t, dial it up to 11 every time so that we lose the trust of the audience. You know, this is, this is pretty simple stuff. That’s what he said to me. And…

Rosin: I’ve heard other editors say that, by the way, but go ahead.

Alberta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and so he did two things. First, he picked Kaitlan Collins, the Rising Star reporter at CNN, who everybody there has a ton of respect for, picked her to host this town hall event with Trump.

And second, he made a really forceful case to his senior staff and told them, look, If not CNN, then who? We alone have the experience putting these events on. We have the journalistic chops, we’ve got Kaitlan, we can fact check in real time. We can hold him accountable in front of a live international audience in ways that nobody else can.

So why shouldn’t we do it? And he really made a strong case to his team and he won over people who, who had been resistant to it. He really got a lot of buy-in. But in the process of doing that, he made it very clear that all the chips were now in the center of the table. That this was it.

That this was the big bet that Licht was willing to make, that he needed this win badly. That he needed this sort of signature moment to validate his approach, not only his approach to courting Republican viewers, but also his approach to dealing with his own staff, people who were really, sort of, resistant to some of what he was prescribing and, and how he was going about executing this mission.

So, so really this was setting up to be the make or break moment for Chris Licht at CNN, and he knew it going into Manchester.

Rosin: And it sounds like it was also part of his bigger mission of we can have a different kind of conversation that involves truth and involves airing things more honestly, like it was part of that conversation as well

Alberta: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Rosin: Now you were there, you were close to them as this was all going, not just present at the town hall, but talking to Licht as this was happening, what was, what was he like during the event?

Alberta: So I only talked to him briefly before the program, and then we spoke after the program. So he pulled me into a hallway that was kind of on the sidelines of the main auditorium where the event had just emptied out. And we talked for a few minutes there, and I asked him, you know, did this advance the mission, the journalistic mission of CNN that you’ve spent so much time describing to me?

And, you know, he couldn’t say, no, it didn’t. But he also, in that moment, to his credit, I don’t think he was even capable of lying to me and putting on a brave face and saying, yeah, of course it did. and so he just looked at me and he said, that’s too early to say.

Rosin: Hmm. So what did people say? Like how did people respond to that town hall?

Alberta: Not well, it was immediately and widely panned across the ideological spectrum of left and right, the partisan spectrum of blue and red, the, you know, journalistic spectrum. I mean, it was just, it was hard to find anybody defending it. And in fact, you know, Licht’s own employee, the media writer Oliver Darcy, published his newsletter, “Reliable Sources.” A couple of hours after the town hall concluded and Oliver’s opening line in the newsletter was: “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN [Wednesday evening].”

Rosin: So it sounds like if Licht’s original mission was to model a different kind of conversation with a new kind of open tone, it accomplished exactly the opposite.

Alberta: I think that’s right. and again, there’s a difference between theory and execution. In theory, the town hall was defensible, but the execution of the town hall was not.

Rosin: After the break, an inside look at Licht’s final days. And what happens at CNN after.

Rosin: So how did things unfold in the weeks following the town hall that led to the news this week of him being pushed out?

Alberta: So the week following the town hall, I was in New York and I had a pre-arranged, hard-won pre-arranged meeting with David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, the parent company of CNN. And, at the very last minute, the office of Zaslav informed me that he was no longer willing to speak on the record with me for this story, even though that had been the agreement.

And as I said, it was sort of a hard-won agreement over some time of negotiations. So that was another red flag that just told me that obviously if the boss, the big boss, if he’s unwilling to put himself out there on the record in support of his embattled leader at CNN, that’s not a good sign for him.

And in fact, I even told Zaslav’s office, I told him very plainly, do you know how this is gonna look? You do recognize I’m giving you a chance here to defend your guy and to defend Zaslav himself, and you’re passing on it. You’re hiding from me, changing the rules of our agreement to do this interview. And they decided to do that. And so that was another moment where it was very clear to me that he was in trouble.

So the next day after the canceled meeting, I sat down with Licht for our final interview. And I could sense having, again, gotten to know him fairly well over some period of time, that there was something a little bit different in his body language. That there was some self-doubt. There was maybe even a bit of sadness that things had gone so wrong. There was, I think, an acceptance at that point of just how bad things were for him internally.

You know, when I was asking about his employees being so upset with him, when I was poking and prodding on specific things that they were upset with him about, he didn’t make any effort to push back on it or to dispute the premise or to try to, you know, kind of talk his way out. He just seemed in that moment almost resigned to the realities of how badly things had gone awry inside of his organization.

And, that in and of itself was, was just, almost stunning to me because this was a guy who, in all of our interactions, he was just so predictably confident and self-assured and always had this kind of look in his eye like he knew something you didn’t know..

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but your Atlantic story was published on June 2nd. He was out on June 7th. When I read your story, I thought, Ooh, it would be very hard for this person to keep their job. And I did wonder, were you surprised by the news this week?

Alberta: [sigh] I can’t say that I was surprised if only because in the days after the piece was published, I was just inundated with text messages and emails and phone calls from people at CNN telling me the situation there was untenable, that there was no way he could survive this. And, that was all unsolicited.

I was not reaching out, trying to follow up on the situation. I, I was not looking to try to break the news of him, you know, being ousted or anything like that. It was just organically obvious that the situation there just wasn’t sustainable. Um, he had lost the trust of too many people. And frankly, I think it’s worth saying that he’d lost the trust of a lot of these folks before the story had come out.

And I think when the story came out, what I heard time and time and time again from journalists was that there was no coming back from it. That the relationships there could not be rebuilt after some of the things he had said in the piece. And so in that sense, no, I was not surprised.

Rosin: You know, it’s, it’s weird to be a reporter in a position of having a story come out and then someone gets fired. In your case, it sounds like you see yourself as just a chronicler of something that was already unfolding, not like a causer of events, but just you wrote this story, this happened. It was already on its way.

Alberta: Well, yes, I, I, let me say it this way, I’ve had a number of CNN reporters reach out. People who are friends of mine, people who I’ve known and worked with and respected for a long time, who all were saying basically the same thing to me, independent of one another, which is that, Hey, don’t feel bad about this. Because I think because they think I’m a nice guy—I hope because they think I’m a nice guy.

Rosin: So, is your conclusion that Licht’s experiment, his mission, did fail. There was no reset with Republican voters viewing CNN, like it didn’t work.

Alberta: It’s hard to draw any other conclusion just based on the ratings. I mean, Chris’s biggest problem was, as I think I said earlier, that he just didn’t have a win that he could point to.

Rosin: Mhmm.

Alberta: And if your goal is to reclaim some significant chunk of lost voters who have written off your news network, that’s going to take time. And I think everybody understood that it was going to take time.

And one year in the grand scheme of things is not a ton of time, but in that one year, there was just no measurable improvement. And in fact, all of the measurables actually showed that things were getting worse. And so just in judging the execution of the journalistic vision that Licht had laid out for me and laid out for his staff upfront I don’t know how you could view it as anything other than a failure because the metrics by which you would judge it do not look good.

Rosin: Now you’ve said a few times this is a matter of execution. But I have to say, his failure does leave me wondering if anyone could have succeeded. Like my immediate thought after hearing that he was out at CNN, was in our political climate is it even possible to do a reset like he was trying to do?

Alberta: I think that’s the $64,000 question here, to be honest. And let’s be clear, like, I think that there’s been a pile on because of social media and the way that our news environment works, there’s been a pile on and a lot of people taking shots at Chris Licht, some of which I think are probably unfair.

You know, this is, this is a talented guy and a guy who’d been pretty successful everywhere he’d been. And I do think that he was dealt an exceptionally difficult hand, but I also think he made it even harder on himself than it had to be. And to your specific question, I don’t know if anybody at this point is capable of doing what Chris set out to do, which is sort of re-imagining the mainstream media’s relationship with a Republican base that has been, sort of, systematically manipulated into not trusting the mainstream media for decades.

I think it’s really healthy to have at least some piece of the market offering what Licht was envisioning and trying to win back disaffected, distrusting Republican viewers with more of a straight news, just the facts ma’am, approach. I think that that’s very much worth trying. It’s just, in some ways, it strikes me as an utterly impossible task. And I think if he could do it all over again, even if his goals were the same, I’m pretty sure that Chris Licht would go about emphasizing them and articulating them a little bit differently because he, in a lot of ways, sort of set himself up for failure.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show. We are very glad that you were following this story so closely.

Alberta: You’re welcome Hanna. Thank you for having me.

Tim Alberta: It was apparent to me immediately when I saw Chris after the town hall ended that he knew this wasn’t good.

Hanna Rosin: “Chris” is Chris Licht, the former CEO of CNN, who was ousted this week. And that’s my colleague Tim Alberta, who’s been reporting on Licht for the past year.

Alberta: This is a guy who I’ve gotten to know decently well over the past year or so, a guy who’s just got a bottomless supply of self-confidence.

And in that moment, when the town hall ended and I met him in the lobby, he was pale. His shoulders were sort of slumped. He looked distressed. Thoroughly distressed.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. You may have read about the Trump Town Hall in Manchester, New Hampshire that CNN aired last month. Maybe you even watched it. The event was part of Licht’s broader mission to signal that Republicans and even Trump supporters were welcome at CNN again.

Which was connected to an even bigger mission, one that Licht defined as getting back to real journalism: truths, facts, and less spin. Instead, CNN lost control of the town hall. Trump used it as a forum to double down on lies about the 2020 election. Among other unsavory things. It was pretty much universally considered a disaster and backstage, right after the event, Licht knew it.

Alberta: It was a deeply human moment where I, I think a guy who, you know, agree with his decisions, disagree with his decisions, whatever.

This is a guy who had been working, like, 80 hour weeks since he took the job and had been really pouring himself into trying to remake CNN into something different and something new, and had in this moment with the world watching failed. And that was, it was, it was, um, it was crushing for him. You could just see it in, in that, in that moment

Rosin: In this episode, we talked to Tim Alberta, who watched the implosion at CNN up close in real time.

Tim: So I first met Chris last summer. We had dinner. I had been pitching his team on doing this story. Ultimately after pushing and pushing, pushing, there was a meeting set up over dinner in New York.

Rosin: Can I ask, why did you want to meet him so badly? What was interesting to you about this story?

Alberta: Well, I think, a couple of things. First, CNN had really been the poster child for Republican attacks on the media during the Trump years. I’d spent as much time covering Republican voters and Republican campaigns as anybody over the past five or six years.

And I’d seen firsthand time and time and time again. How at rallies or smaller candidate events how CNN had sort of become the face of the hysterical liberal media that was out to get Trump and leading a witch hunt on his impeachment and on January 6th and on everything else.

And so what was interesting to me was that Licht came in, and, and quite overtly made it known, from the beginning, that his mission was to change that perception of CNN, was not to coddle the extreme right wing, so to speak, but to win back the sort of respectable rank and file Republican voter who had become so distrustful of CNN during those previous five or six years.

And that struck me as an incredibly ambitious objective for somebody taking over, one of the world’s biggest news organizations. You know, CNN has 4,000, some employees spread all across the world, and, you’re, you’re, you’re coming in at a really sensitive time, taking over this incredibly difficult job, and in some sense you’re making it harder on yourself by staking out that sort of very ambitious goal.

Rosin: You watched Chris Licht come in as a newbie at CNN. How did he fit in in the beginning?

Alberta: Well, awkwardly, I think is the, is the fair way to say it, because you have to keep in mind that he was following Jeff Zucker, who had been there for, I guess at that point, about a decade, and was beloved. He was sort of a larger than life figure who had real personal rapport with just about everybody.

Not only the on-air talent, but the producers behind the scenes, the camera crews, uh, this guy just sort of made everybody feel like part of a family. And he was affectionate, had nicknames, knew everybody’s kids. I mean, and, and so obviously when Zucker was forced out as president of CNN at the beginning of 2022 and, and then Licht came in shortly thereafter, he inherited a newsroom that was reeling from the departure of sort of their, their fearless leader, Jeff Zucker, who had, you know, keep in mind really sort of steered CNN through an unprecedented period of, of almost warfare with the White House during the Trump years where there were threats called into CNN, reporters being singled out as the enemy of the people, you know, they were really under fire in, in ways that we’d never seen a news organization under fire from a White House before. And so there was this, this incredibly tense dynamic already there. And then Zucker is forced out and Licht walks into that.

Meanwhile, there’s incredible financial turmoil. There’s been a change in ownership with a new parent company, Warner Brothers Discovery, taking over CNN and their financials are pretty wobbly, and so there’s massive cost cutting.

And Licht, sort of stepping into that position, I think really went out of his way from the outset to be everything that Zucker wasn’t.

So if Zucker was warm and affectionate and intimate with everyone, Licht was, sort of, cold and detached, almost aloof, purposely inaccessible.

In fact, one of the first things he did after taking the job was turn Zucker’s office on the 17th floor, which was right outside some of the main studios right in the heart of the newsroom, and turned it into a conference room as sort of a symbolic move. And then he himself picked an office up on the 22nd floor in a space most employees at CNN, including longtime veteran reporters, they didn’t even know how to find that office. and that, that one move, although it seems small, I think really in many ways came to define Licht’s relationship with his journalists.

Rosin: And so why do you think he thought this mission was important? Was it just about saving CNN or was it about something broader?

Alberta: So it became clear to me from the earliest conversations that I began having with people, well before Licht even agreed to participate in this piece, that to Chris Licht. This was about more than CNN. This was about the journalism industry itself. He had made it known that he didn’t blame a lot of these folks for their souring on the mainstream media.

That he saw some of the, the, the big news organizations getting over their skis on certain stories or perhaps giving too much attention to the stylistic stuff at, at the expense of the more substantive, uh, stories that they could have been covering. In other words, Licht was sort of making it known that he felt that all of media had been broken in some sense, or at the very least, had gotten played by President Trump. And he believed that if something was not done to fix that, that if there weren’t dramatic measures taken to restore and rehabilitate the media’s image in the eyes of much of the country, that it posed a, a real threat to democracy itself. I mean, that’s not an overstatement.

Rosin: Wow. So it was not just a business decision to save CNN. It was not just about saving cable news. It was not even just about journalism and media. It was an even bigger project. It sounds like.

Alberta: I think what’s clear is two things. Number one, to the people at the top at Warner Brothers Discovery from the Board of Directors to the CEO, David Zaslav, they were very much invested in CNN as a, you know, profit center.

A place that was, you know, accustomed to making over a billion dollars annually and a prestigious brand that could generate a lot of revenue. And I think Licht viewed it somewhat differently. Licht was trained as a journalist. He calls journalism his first love. He practiced being Walter Cronkite in his basement as a kid putting on fake newscasts.

I mean, this is a guy who really loves the news and, and, and so I think, whether one agrees with him or completely disagrees with him or is somewhere in between, it’s, I think it’s worth recognizing just at a, at a sort of ground level that this is someone who really does consider himself a journalist, first and foremost, and really believed that the institution of journalism in America was under assault.

And that some of its trouble was self-inflicted. And he believed that if he could introduce a new model at CNN that was built around toning down the commentary, dialing back the outrage, and leading with facts, and, and, and just really being very careful with tone and orienting everything toward,sort of fact forward journalism.

That if they could restore trust in the CNN brand by doing that then it would create a model that the entire industry might try to replicate. And, and that was really his vision from the outset.

Rosin:. So he starts off on this incredibly ambitious, serious mission almost to turn back time on journalism. Was there a moment you could pinpoint when this mission started to go wrong?

Alberta: Well, I would say two things. First, you could argue that it was almost doomed from the beginning because, you know, cable news has been in sort of long decline, predating Trump, postdating Trump, even though Trump sort of breathed some artificial life into ratings and revenues for a few years there, it’s been clear for a long time because of cord cutting, because of these silly little things we carry around in our pockets all day and stare at too much.

Um, for a whole host of reasons that cable news has been in trouble. I also think that there’s not any compelling evidence to suggest that Americans, or at least any critical mass of Americans, want to get their news without fear or favor, that, that, that there’s any critical mass of Americans who just want the facts and then wanna make up their own mind. I mean, there’s quite a bit of evidence to suggest in fact that Americans want to get their news from sources that will, sort of, reaffirm their existing worldviews and, and tell them what they want to hear and not necessarily challenge them where their idols lie.

And that’s, I think, the thing Chris Licht tried to challenge from the outset and really, really sold people around him hard on the idea that, for the sake of American democracy, we needed to do something about that. And I think in that sense, he was probably fighting a doomed mission from the very beginning.

Rosin: So he was fighting a doomed mission. It was difficult from the outset. He decided to do it anyway. So what actually happened? I mean, he must have known it was gonna be difficult.

Alberta: Yes. Well, a–and as the great philosopher Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And that’s sort of what happened at CNN. Chris Licht had a plan, and then he came in and he got punched in the mouth a bunch of times. Um, you know, the recurring theme that I heard from a lot of the top talent at CNN was that in a lot of ways, they actually agreed in theory with the mission that Chris Licht had laid out as far as toning down some of the outrage, trying to be more selective with when they really wanted it dialed up to 11, as he would say, and, and, and go strong on, on certain stories.

But the execution of that mission was really what started to become shaky and, and really, I think the first glimpse into that that I got was watching behind the scenes as CNN prepared last fall to launch its new morning show. Now, Licht had made a decision to take Don Lemon, who was probably the most polarizing personality at CNN and make Lemon the face of this new morning show called CNN This Morning. And, and so in some ways Licht had tied his fate to Don Lemon’s fate, and as of the springtime when Lemon had committed, sort of, a series of blunders and had made some enemies internally, and obviously the most notable incident was when he said that Nikki Haley, the presidential candidate who’s 51 years old, was past her prime and that a woman’s only in her prime if she’s in her twenties or thirties or forties. And it caused so much turmoil, at the network, and it was a mess. And it was clear at that point that the one thing that he had really been counting on as a win, this morning show, was looking more and more like loss every day.

Rosin: In addition to this morning show drama he was wading through...not everyone at CNN was on board with his mission right? He may have defined it as truth and journalism, but lots of other people pointed out many many problems with what he was actually trying to do, in practice.

Alberta: Yeah. Because beyond just giving that sort of broad definition that I think a lot of us would agree to around what good journalism should be, you know, leading with the facts and telling the truth without fear or favor, um, the specifics became a bit troubling.

And, you know, specifically the question of, you know, what do you do with Republicans who systematically attempted to deconstruct our democratic institutions a couple of years ago and, uh, prevent a peaceful transition of power. I mean, what do you do with those folks? Do you treat them as rational actors who need to be given a platform to reach the viewing masses?

Do you have to have some rules in place around how you cover those people? And, you know, Licht would fall back repeatedly on this analogy of some people like rain, some people don’t like rain, and we will have anybody on this network whether they like rain or don’t like rain, but we will not have people on this network who say that it’s not raining outside when it really is. Now, it’s an interesting metaphor but I think the problem for Licht is that the application of it was a little bit uneven. Even going back to the very beginning of his tenure, one of the first programming decisions he made after taking over as the new boss at CNN was to tell his producers to downplay the first hearing of the January 6th committee in Congress.

Remember, it was shown in primetime, this was sort of a, ’get your popcorn ready’ primetime special event that MSNBC went wall to wall with its coverage and earned monster ratings. But because of Licht’s edict to the staff, CNN covered it very casually, didn’t give it the sort of attention that it would have given something like that in previous years, and it got slaughtered in the ratings by MSNBC.

So, there were a lot of examples along the way that gave cause to some of Licht’s own journalists to question, okay, well he says the mission is this thing, but is our execution really in keeping with that, and ultimately it was the town hall with Donald Trump that really broke the camel’s back.

Rosin: Okay. Tell me how that whole event came about

Alberta: Licht and his team had been working for some time to reach an agreement with the former president Donald Trump to bring him on CNN for some sort of big interview.

What they ultimately agreed on was a town hall in New Hampshire, the first in the nation primary state and Licht knew that he was going to get a lot of pushback from his own employees on this. Uh, a lot of people who felt that Trump should not be platformed, that he’d, uh, caused sufficient distress to the country with his lies and his assaults on the ballot box.

And his, um, disruption of the transition of power that CNN should not be platforming him at all, much less in a town hall format. And, and you know, I, I would just flashback quickly to the very first conversation I ever had with Chris where we talked about how the media covered Trump in the past and how it needs to cover him in the future. And I was really slack jawed, just shocked, frankly, when Chris said to me, well, I think the media has learned its lesson.

This is not something that I lose sleep over. This idea, this question of how do we cover Trump? I, you know, and, and I said, whaaaat really? Like, you, you, you think you’ve, you think you’ve got the answer? And he said, yeah, we cover him the same way as anybody, right? We, we, we hold him accountable with the facts and we don’t let him play us.

And, uh, we don’t, dial it up to 11 every time so that we lose the trust of the audience. You know, this is, this is pretty simple stuff. That’s what he said to me. And…

Rosin: I’ve heard other editors say that, by the way, but go ahead.

Alberta: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and so he did two things. First, he picked Kaitlan Collins, the Rising Star reporter at CNN, who everybody there has a ton of respect for, picked her to host this town hall event with Trump.

And second, he made a really forceful case to his senior staff and told them, look, If not CNN, then who? We alone have the experience putting these events on. We have the journalistic chops, we’ve got Kaitlan, we can fact check in real time. We can hold him accountable in front of a live international audience in ways that nobody else can.

So why shouldn’t we do it? And he really made a strong case to his team and he won over people who, who had been resistant to it. He really got a lot of buy-in. But in the process of doing that, he made it very clear that all the chips were now in the center of the table. That this was it.

That this was the big bet that Licht was willing to make, that he needed this win badly. That he needed this sort of signature moment to validate his approach, not only his approach to courting Republican viewers, but also his approach to dealing with his own staff, people who were really, sort of, resistant to some of what he was prescribing and, and how he was going about executing this mission.

So, so really this was setting up to be the make or break moment for Chris Licht at CNN, and he knew it going into Manchester.

Rosin: And it sounds like it was also part of his bigger mission of we can have a different kind of conversation that involves truth and involves airing things more honestly, like it was part of that conversation as well

Alberta: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Rosin: Now you were there, you were close to them as this was all going, not just present at the town hall, but talking to Licht as this was happening, what was, what was he like during the event?

Alberta: So I only talked to him briefly before the program, and then we spoke after the program. So he pulled me into a hallway that was kind of on the sidelines of the main auditorium where the event had just emptied out. And we talked for a few minutes there, and I asked him, you know, did this advance the mission, the journalistic mission of CNN that you’ve spent so much time describing to me?

And, you know, he couldn’t say, no, it didn’t. But he also, in that moment, to his credit, I don’t think he was even capable of lying to me and putting on a brave face and saying, yeah, of course it did. and so he just looked at me and he said, that’s too early to say.

Rosin: Hmm. So what did people say? Like how did people respond to that town hall?

Alberta: Not well, it was immediately and widely panned across the ideological spectrum of left and right, the partisan spectrum of blue and red, the, you know, journalistic spectrum. I mean, it was just, it was hard to find anybody defending it. And in fact, you know, Licht’s own employee, the media writer Oliver Darcy, published his newsletter, Reliable Sources. a couple of hours after the town hall concluded and Oliver’s opening line in the newsletter was, it’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN tonight, or something just like that.

Rosin: So it sounds like if, if Licht’s original mission was to model a different kind of conversation with a new kind of open tone, it accomplished exactly the opposite.

Alberta: I think that’s right. and again, there’s a difference between theory and execution. In theory, the town hall was defensible, but the execution of the town hall was not.

Rosin: After the break, an inside look at Licht’s final days. And what happens at CNN after.

Rosin: So how did things unfold in the weeks following the town hall that led to the news this week of him being pushed out?

Alberta: So the week following the town hall, I was in New York and I had a pre-arranged, hard-won pre-arranged, meeting with David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, the parent company of CNN. And, at the very last minute, the office of Zaslav informed me that he was no longer willing to speak on the record with me for this story, even though that had been the agreement.

And as I said, it was sort of a hard-won agreement over some time of negotiations. So that was another red flag that just told me that obviously if the boss, the big boss, if he’s unwilling to put himself out there on the record in support of his embattled leader at CNN, that’s not a good sign for him.

And in fact, I even told Zaslav’s office, I told him very plainly, do you know how this is gonna look? You do recognize I’m giving you a chance here to defend your guy and to defend Zaslav himself, and you’re passing on it. You’re hiding from me, changing the rules of our agreement to do this interview. And they decided to do that. And so that was another moment where it was very clear to me that he was in trouble.

So the next day after, after the canceled meeting, I sat down with Licht for our final interview. And I could sense having, again, gotten to know him fairly well over some period of time, that there was something a little bit different in his body language. That there was some self-doubt. There was maybe even a bit of sadness that things had gone so wrong. There was, I think, an acceptance at that point of just how bad things were for him internally.

You know, when I was asking about his employees being so upset with him, when I was poking and prodding on specific things that they were upset with him about, he didn’t make any effort to push back on it or to dispute the premise or to try to, you know, kind of talk his way out. He just, he, he seemed in that moment almost resigned to the realities of how badly things had gone awry inside of his organization.

And, that in and of itself was, was just, almost stunning to me because this was a guy who, in all of our interactions, he was just so predictably confident and self-assured and, always had this kind of look in his eye like he knew something you didn’t know..

Rosin: Yeah, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but your Atlantic story was published on June 2nd. He was out on June 7th. When I read your story, I thought, Ooh, it would be very hard for this person to keep their job. And I did wonder, were you surprised by the news this week?

Alberta: [sigh] I can’t say that I was surprised if only because in the days after the piece was published, I was just inundated with text messages and emails and phone calls from people at CNN telling me the situation there was untenable, that there was no way he could survive this. And, that was all unsolicited.

I was not reaching out, trying to follow up on the situation. I, I was not looking to try to break the news of him, you know, being ousted or anything like that. It was just organically obvious that the situation there just wasn’t sustainable. Um, he had lost the trust of too many people. And frankly, I think it’s worth saying that he’d lost the trust of a lot of these folks before the story had come out.

And I think when the story came out, what I heard time and time and time again from journalists there was that there was no coming back from it. That the relationships there could not be rebuilt, after some of the things he had said in the piece. And so in that sense, no, I was not surprised.

Rosin: You know, it’s, it’s weird to be a reporter in a position of having a story come out and then someone gets fired. In your case, it sounds like you see yourself as just a chronicler of something that was already unfolding, not like a causer of events, but just you wrote this story, this happened. It was already on its way.

Alberta: Well, yes, I, I, let me say it this way, I’ve had a number of CNN reporters reach out to me today. People who are friends of mine, people who I’ve known and worked with and respected for a long time, who all were saying basically the same thing to me, independent of one another, which is that, Hey, don’t feel bad about this.

Because, I think because they think I’m a nice guy, I hope because they think I’m a nice guy, don’t feel bad about this because this was coming sooner or later.

Rosin: So, is your conclusion that Licht’s experiment, his mission, did fail. There was no reset with Republican voters viewing CNN, like it didn’t work.

Alberta: It’s hard to draw any other conclusion just based on the ratings. I mean, Chris’s biggest problem was, as I think I said earlier, that he just didn’t have a win that he could point to.

Rosin: Mhmm.

Alberta: And if your goal is to reclaim some significant chunk of lost voters who have written off your news network, that’s going to take time. And I think everybody understood that it was going to take time.

And one year in the grand scheme of things is not a ton of time, but in that one year, there was just no measurable improvement. And in fact, all of the measurables actually showed that things were getting worse. And so just in judging the execution of the journalistic vision that Licht had laid out for me and laid out for his staff upfront I don’t know how you could view it as anything other than a failure because the metrics by which you would judge it do not look good.

Rosin: Now you’ve said a few times this is a matter of execution. But I have to say, his failure does leave me wondering if anyone could have succeeded. Like my immediate thought after hearing that he, he was out at CNN, was in our political climate is it even possible to do a reset like he was trying to do?

Alberta: I think that’s the $64,000 question here, to be honest. And let’s be clear, like, I think that there’s been a pile on because of social media and the way that our news environment works, there’s been a pile on and a lot of people taking shots at Chris Licht, some of which I think are probably unfair.

You know, this is, this is a talented guy and a guy who’d been pretty successful everywhere he’d been. And I do think that he was dealt an exceptionally difficult hand, but I also think he made it even harder on himself than it had to be. And to your specific question, I don’t know if anybody at this point is capable of doing what Chris set out to do, which is sort of re-imagining the mainstream media’s relationship with a Republican base that has been, sort of, systematically manipulated into not trusting the mainstream media for decades.

I think it’s really healthy to have at least some piece of the market offering what Licht was envisioning and trying to win back disaffected, distrusting Republican viewers with more of a straight news, just the facts ma’am, approach. I think that that’s very much worth trying it’s just, in some ways, it strikes me as an utterly impossible task. And I think if he could do it all over again, even if his goals were the same, I’m pretty sure that Chris Licht would go about emphasizing them and articulating them a little bit differently because he, in a lot of ways, sort of set himself up for failure.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming on the show. We are very glad that you were following this story so closely.

Alberta: You’re welcome Hanna. Thank you for having me.

Listen and subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google | Pocket Casts

The terms of friendship are both voluntary and vague—yet people often find themselves disappointed by unmet expectations. In this episode of How to Talk to People, we explore how to have the difficult conversations that can make our friendships richer and how to set expectations in a relationship defined by choice.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The managing editor of How to Talk to People is Andrea Valdez.

Be friends with How to Talk to People. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”), Arthur Benson (“Charmed Encounter,” “She Is Whimsical,” “Organized Chaos”), Bomull (“Latte”), and Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”).

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

Marisa Franco: “He had a bachelor party, and half of his friends bailed last minute on his own bachelor party. And he was talking about these friends and how one of them lived next to him, and I thought in my head, Those are not friends. How is this guy defining friendship?

Julie Beck: Is this when I get on my soapbox?

Rebecca Rashid: Yeah, you can get on your soapbox.

Beck: Okay, so flaking … I hate it.

Lizzie Post: I think doing the thing where you just don’t show up is really not cool.

Franco: If you think it’s going to happen organically, you’re not going to have friends.

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

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

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

__

Beck: Becca, I know it might seem strange to suggest we don’t know how to talk to our friends and need a podcast to tell us how. But actually, there are a lot of common misunderstandings and conflicts in friendship that often go unspoken. The beauty and the challenge of friendship is that it encompasses so many different types of relationships, but that means sometimes friends have clashing expectations of what the friendship should look like. We don’t always talk about that explicitly. Flaking is a prime example of a kind of unspoken friction that can build up in friendships.

Rashid: What is it about flaking in particular that bothers you?

Beck: It’s not just that it annoys me. I don’t think anybody likes being flaked on. It’s this sense that it has become so very normalized in our culture and is just a routine part of social life—that you actually almost have to expect that, like, a good percentage of the time, if you make a plan with somebody that plan is going to change or get canceled.

I think we’re a little too quick to be like, If I am not in optimal, tip-top shape to show up, then I won’t show up. Or that we have to be completely at ease, completely comfortable, completely full of vim and vigor to totally hang out with our friends.

And I’m not upset if you lose your childcare and you have to back out, or if you get sick. Things happen. Life happens. I think we can all be understanding. What bugs me is that it feels just completely fine in a lot of social circles to just cancel with no explanation or the reason is just I’m not feeling up to it today or I’m really tired from work.

I think it’s kind of part and parcel with a big premium that we put on protecting our energy as like the greatest good. But I don’t know if we should protect our energy at the cost of our relationships.

Post: There’s a certain point where it just feels like, okay, do you care about this friendship?

Beck: I think that Lizzie Post could help us. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, who is a famous etiquette expert who wrote a well-known column about 100 years ago. Lizzie is now the co-president of the Emily Post Institute, and she recently published the sort of updated centennial edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette.

There’s definitely no shortage of dating advice columns or parenting advice out there. But I think what we wanted to find was some more etiquette tips, or best practices for managing those tricky conversations in friendships where expectations are less well-defined. And that’s right up Lizzie’s alley.

__

Beck: I’m going to start with a big philosophical question. What do you owe your friends?

Post: We are such individuals, and just like in relationships, your love language might be different. In friendships, your friendship language is different. So what one person thinks we owe a friend, another person might think, No, that’s ridiculous; no way. So I think it’s a very, very personal question. And that makes navigating those relationships that are our friendships a little bit more difficult, and something that we want to pay more attention to. To recognize that not everyone sees friendship the exact same way that we do.

Beck: Something that I have noticed is that it feels totally normalized to flake on plans. So, for instance, if you and I make a plan today to get drinks next Friday, I’m going to feel like when Friday comes around, I’m going to feel a need to text you to ask, “Are we still on for drinks today?” And it would not be strange for you to text me the day before, or even day of, to say, “You know, actually something came up” or “I’m just not feeling up to it.” Have you observed this too?

Post: Absolutely. I think to a certain degree, it’s always been the norm that if you don’t feel well or if an emergency happens. If you’ve got a stomach bug, that’s understandable. That’s not flaking out. That’s life happening and getting in the way of fun, social plans.

Beck: Yeah.

Post: But I do think that there is a larger trend of being much more willing to let the emotional “Do I feel like it?” play a factor in whether or not they end up committing to or actually following through on plans.

Beck: Or the sense that the plans that we make are not set in stone, or what takes precedence is, like, just needing to do what’s best for you.

Post: Well, and some people even say that it’s like an insult to the friendship of getting together, that it’s like, “Oh, hanging out with me sounds like a chore for you right now?” And there are times where that’s true. We get it; like, we all have learned that bandwidths have capacities. I get it. I don’t know that we need to be leaning into that, like, every week.

Beck: Yeah. And I mean, I’ve been told that I am too curmudgeonly about this. [Laughter.] I remember planning a party and sort of complaining to someone about how I couldn’t really plan like how much food to buy or anything, because half of the people who responded “Yes” to the invite wouldn’t show up.

Post: Yep!

Beck: And the person told me that I was being unreasonable–

Post: What?!

Beck: That I needed to accept and account for the fact that this is just part of social life.

Post: I would not have been pleased if I had been told by a friend to just expect that 50 percent of my guest list isn’t going to show up for a party that they said they would come to. I would let friends know, like, as we talk about entertaining styles and preferences. I mean, these are things friends can talk about.

And you also get to be you. You’re creating your own entertaining style. You’re creating your own adult life in this world. And it might be something that you find you really value in friendship is cultivating a group of friends who really stick to their plans.

Beck: Yeah. Some of it has to be just sort of the deep-seated, like, childhood fear of throwing a party and nobody comes. Right?

Post: I have that too, yes.

Beck: I mean, if something happens often enough, is it just not rude? But just the way that things are … and we need to just deal with it?

Post: That’s a great question. The place where this one doesn’t check that box for me is that there’s enough people like you and me out in the world who don’t appreciate this, who don’t see this as a good trend. You know what I mean? This idea of committing to things and canceling very last-minute for effectively no reason other than just not totally feeling up to it, even though there’s nothing wrong with you.

Beck: Mmm.

Post: I think that this is something that’s frustrating a lot of people the same way for a good 20, 30, 40, 50 ... I think even my great-great-grandmother was writing about it. So we’re going to go ahead and say 70 years. People have been annoyed at the fact that people don’t RSVP well.

Like, there’s always going to be a couple of friends who, no matter what, show up really late. There’s always going to be someone who’s your most likely to cancel.

Beck: Yeah.

Post: There’s also always going to be the person most likely to always show up. You know, the person most likely to offer to bring something or to surprise you. You know, like, there’s the good stuff, too.

Beck: Yeah. We should give those people a medal.

Post: They deserve—yes, gold stars. [Laughter.]

__

Beck: Becca, there is a really interesting study that I saw a while back where the researchers asked people how they would approach different conflicts with friends versus with a romantic partner. And generally, people expected that you would actively address a problem with a romantic partner. You would talk about it. You know, they say, like, “Never go to bed angry.” But they found that there was more of a culture of passivity in friendships, that people were more likely to say nothing and just kind of hope the issue went away on its own, or kind of quietly put some distance in the friendship rather than talking about a problem.

Rashid: Passivity in my own approach to friendships comes from a fear that being too direct may come across as aggressive, or asking for too much. It makes my desire for a deeper connection with friends, especially in adulthood, feel needy or childish. Or sometimes even inappropriate or, like, overstepping.

__

Beck: Okay, so can we talk about how to practically handle these situations? If a friend flakes on me, how should I respond? Right now I feel like my only option is to just say, “Okay, I understand.”

Post: I often feel resigned to polite acceptance as well. I think that this is one of those things where, in the moment, that really is the best thing you can do. Because if they’re canceling really last-minute—like, within the day of the party—you’ve got things you’re busy doing, and you’ve got other guests that you have to focus on.

So in some ways it makes your own life easier to take that kind of etiquette high-road route. And say, “Oh, you know, I’m really sorry to hear that. If you change your mind, feel free to come.” You know, especially if it’s that I just don’t feel like it, you know? “Hey, if you find after an hour, you’ve rebounded and you’re ready to come on over.”

Beck: I mean, is there a way to respectfully say that it bothers you? Or would you even recommend doing that?

Post: This is something that I might do at a different time. It might be one of those things where you find a good moment, where you’re talking about your friendship. A moment will present itself and you can say: “Hey, you know, I got to be honest. That’s actually something that, you know, I will cop to. I feel hurt when that happens.”

Beck: This sort of “no worries if not” culture. This is a phrase that I hear a lot, and find myself using and then hate myself for using a lot. [Laughter.] Which is, you know—it feels hard or burdensome to ask friends for help, or ask them to show up for us in some type of way. So: “Lizzie, would you mind, like, pet-sitting my cat while I’m out of town? But no worries if not.” So just immediately giving you an out.

Post: Yeah, yeah.

Beck: It feels like an etiquette thing, because it feels like I’m being polite and deferential. But is being polite really equal to not asking each other for anything?

Post: It’s more so acknowledging that this person might really want to do you a favor and be there for you, and you want to let them know it’s truly okay if they can’t. I think a lot of that is about removing pressure for people. And that, I think, is polite. Like, I can find politeness in that.

Beck: Yeah; it’s very situational, I mean, maybe I just got broken up with. I’m so upset, and I’m like, “Lizzie, can you please talk? But no worries. But then there are some worries, if not.” You know? I also just feel like I don’t understand why you would think of showing up for a friend as a burden.

Post: I think a lot of it is that it can be. If you have a lot going on, if you’re going through a lot, sometimes adding that moment of someone else’s need that isn’t a partner, that isn’t a child, that isn’t a parent—you know, they don’t live with you—that it can feel like something you don’t have the capacity to do.

At the same time, it’s amazing to see what you actually still have in your reserves when you attempt a moment of giving and generosity, when you feel like you don’t have anything.

I think what I really like about modern friendships is the willingness to ask if it would be okay to lean on someone. That’s something I don’t always think has been a part of things. I don’t know that in Emily’s day, when things were really hard, just how much you got to lean into a friend, the way we lean into them now.

__

Rashid: I think what stuck out to me, Julie, about our conversation with Lizzie is how this balance of sort of the American mainstream culture of individualism and the voluntary nature of friendship is a tough thing to balance. And it’s hard to know what to ask of our friends.

Beck: Totally. I mean, the thing about friendship, right, is that it is purely and entirely defined by choice, and the things we put on each other we have to decide within every single friendship. Etiquette is a really helpful framework for thinking through what to say in specific situations. But a lot of people could benefit from broader, bigger conversations about the foundational issues of their friendships: “How intimate is this friendship? What is our role in each other’s lives? What do we expect from each other?”

Rashid: Mhmm.

Beck: Like, friends are friends because they choose to be. Not because they got a marriage license, not because somebody gave birth to somebody. You choose to be friends, and so you choose to show up for each other. And when we live in a culture that is so individualistic, we can default to that kind of “you do you,” and we’ll just give to each other what we can when we can. Having any sort of understood obligation to one another can be hard. If you are expecting something different than your friend is expecting, or just getting on the same page about what this friendship is and the level of expectation that we have of each other, it can be tricky.

__

Franco: I had a friend who was coming back from Mexico, and she was arriving at the airport at like midnight.

Beck: Marisa Franco is a psychologist and the author of the book Platonic.

Franco: And this is a friend I really wanted to get closer to. And I know that, you know, going out of your way to help someone in a time of need. Great way to get closer to someone.

Beck: Hot, too-hot tip.

Franco: But I’m like: Oh, my gosh, I hate staying up late. I’m a morning person. I go to sleep at, like, 10:32. Should I pick her up?

Beck: I gotta pause this conversation I was having with Marisa Franco for a second, because while we were talking I found myself thinking about Lizzie Post’s etiquette advice. And I actually think that sometimes we can be too polite to our friends. Like, maybe we’re hesitant to even ask in the first place whether they can pick us up at the airport. And that sort of over-politeness, I think, can hold us back from having deeper friendships. And with her airport example, Marisa offered a straightforward example for figuring that out for yourself.

Franco: And Julie, I literally had to ask myself, Would I do this for a romantic partner? Because of the ways romantic partners have monopolized what my brain associated with, like, deep love. So I had to ask myself that question. And when I did, I said, Yeah, I would pick her up. I would pick up a romantic partner at the airport.

Beck: Marisa is someone who’s thought really deeply about how our culture encourages us to put friendships last on the priority list. And that can lead to us being weirdly, overly polite to our friends, like we’re putting ourselves last before even talking about whether that’s what we both really want. She and I talked a lot about the communication challenges that can happen if you want friendships to be more central in your life.

__

Franco: The model of friendship that we have is just so threadbare, more threadbare than it feels like it’s ever been—that this is just someone who we go to once-a-month happy hours with.

Beck: Yeah. It’s so interesting to me to see the way that friendship is defined by flexibility, in a way that no other relationship is. There’s no specific role a friend has to play in your life.

If I introduce you to somebody, and I say, “This is my friend Marisa,” that could mean anything from “We’ve known each other since the day we were born and have never been apart” to “We get coffee at work sometimes.”

Every friendship is different, and it has to be designed by the friends themselves. And of course, the endless possibility is a strength of it. But do you think it can also be overwhelming to people?

Franco: Yeah; definitely both things. It’s something that I love about friendship, because it’s like whatever need I have, I can get met through friendship. Like, we could be platonic life partners or we could hang out twice a year.

But the slipperiness of that is that, I think, a lot of the times there is conflict in friendship—because this is my understanding of friendship versus yours. You’re like, “Friendship is trivial and not something to put a lot of effort in,” and “Good vibes only.” And I’m like, “Friendships are deep and sustaining and profound relationships for me.”

And if we have that different view of friendship, you’re not going to show up at times when I really need you. And you’re not going to expect me to get upset, because if I had your expectation, I might not have gotten upset.

I was talking to a friend’s husband. He had a bachelor party, and half of his friends bailed last-minute on his own bachelor party. Everyone had to pay a thousand dollars to go to his bachelor party for like two nights.

Beck: Nooo!

Franco: A thousand dollars to go to his bachelor party for two nights. And he was talking about these friends, and how one of them lived next to him. And I thought in my head, Those are not friends. How is this guy defining friendship? Like, that is not how I define friendship.

And so that made me think of the difference between “good friend” versus “good company.” Good company: I like you as a person. We enjoy our time together. We have good conversations. Good friendship: A friend is someone you invest in. It is a commitment. It is: I’m showing up in your times of need. It is: I’m doing things that sometimes might inconvenience me, because I’m thinking about how much they’ll mean to you. It is: I’m going to celebrate your successes. It’s: I’m going to follow through with what I say that I will do to the extent possible. It’s, basically: I’m considering you, and I’m considering your needs. In a lot of our culture, we’re stuck on “good company” and we haven’t gotten to “good friendship.”

Beck: How do you set those expectations in a friendship when it is a voluntary relationship?

Franco: With communication. Like, I’ve had to tell friends, for example, “I would love to hear from you more. I notice I’m often the one here reaching out. Would you be open to that?” And it’s taking that risk, right? Because it is a risk.

Because that could lead them to say, “This person expects too much. I’m gonna back away.” But it could also lead them to say, “Yeah; I’m going to show up, and I’m going to reinvest, and I’m going to make sure Marisa feels like she’s in a reciprocal friendship.”

It’s also okay to just talk about it in a more upfront way. Like, I went on a retreat with some friends. I guess it was like a series of questions that went around in regards to like, how do we support each other as friends? And one of the questions was like, “Do you like when friends show up at the last minute at your house?” Oh, it’s a helpful question to ask. You know, like sometimes I’m in your neighborhood; I’m like, Should I reach out? Should I not? If I don’t ask, I might assume, No. And then there’s a missed opportunity to connect. So, yeah.

Beck: The showing up last-minute—well, first of all, I feel like that’s something that always happens on TV shows, right? Like on The O.C., they were always just walking over to each other’s house to have a serious conversation without ever, like, calling to say, “I’m coming over.” And it feels very unrealistic.

And at the same time, I do have a friend who lives around the corner who will sometimes text me like, “I’m walking by your place. Do you want to come down?”

I think something that I’ve observed is a sort of strange politeness or formality in the way that people sometimes interact with their friends. For example, you know, we text to set up a time to call instead of just calling. Are we just avoiding inconveniencing each other? Why would that be such a worry?

Franco: Yeah. I think a lot of the times we fear imposing; we fear burdening people. But like, the biggest burden we place can sometimes be our silence, because we want to be polite. And yeah—I think people think This is me not imposing. This is me trying to respect or understand a friend’s boundaries. But the thing is, we don’t actually ask what they are. What I tend to see is it’s more from a place that This friend doesn’t want to hear from me or This friend will be burdened by me.

So thus, It’s the kind act for me to do less. Let me not reach out when they’re going through all this grief, because they probably want their time alone. You know? So one thing that I always talk about with making friends is assume people like you, because it’s going to trigger a set of behaviors—warmth, openness—that is going to make that more likely to be true.

But I also think the more we assume people like us, the more intimacy that we have with them. So the more we assume They’re just going to want to hear from me on the phone. I don’t have to set up this time to call. I’m assuming that you love me.

Franco: I teach a class on loneliness. And one of my students is like, “I just think if I had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night, like, who could I call?” And I’m like, “How would you feel if one of the friends that you made reached out to you in the middle of the night because they needed help with going to the hospital?” He says, “I would feel totally honored that they picked me.”

Beck: Yes.

Franco: And the problem is, when it comes to our glitchy brains, when we’re predicting how we come off, we tend to be a lot more cynical and negative than what is the truth.

Especially with asking for help from friends, I get really nervous about it, and I take myself through that exercise where I’m like, Well, what if this friend asked me for the same thing? How would I feel? That’s probably the more accurate outcome.

Beck: Is there a sense that we feel like we need to be deferential to everything else that our friends have going on in their lives to the degree that we deprioritize ourselves before they have a chance to deprioritize us?

Franco: Yes; I think that’s right. You know, there is this theory basically arguing that we need to operate along two poles: of protecting ourselves and protecting the relationship. And there’s a lot of people who are often in this place of protecting themselves by not reaching out and being overly deferential. Not being vulnerable, not initiating. But they don’t often realize that there is a cost to all that self-protection, which is your relationships.

Beck: I feel like to some degree, there’s a feeling that we’re supposed to just accept whatever it is that our friends are able to offer, Or that the only acceptable response is—“It’s okay; I understand.” That the highest value, or the truest truth, is that everybody needs to do what’s best for themselves. And I think that’s so stars-and-stripes American. I don’t know if it’s that way everywhere. I think maybe it would be helpful if you can explain what individualistic boundaries are, and what the boundaries you’re seeing that you think are overly self-focused look like.

Franco: Yeah. I think the self-focused boundaries look like, in a sort of overarching way: I’m going to fulfill my needs no matter what your needs are. Which looks like, “Hey, you know, if you call me really upset at 10 p.m., I’m not going to answer” or “Hey, like, I don’t need to make time for you, because at this time in my life I’m very, very busy.”

To me, setting a boundary is a communal act. It’s like: “I set this boundary for myself so I can invest in our friendship in the long term and not get burned out.” And it’s: “I’m going to consider your needs when I set this boundary.” And it’s almost like: “I’m going to set this boundary and also offer an offering like, ‘Oh, I’m not free to talk at that time. What about another time?’” Or even like, you know, “I’m not free to come to that, but I’m rooting for you, and I’m supporting you.” Sometimes it’s just for affirmation. That’s the offering.

Beck: Do you have a sense of why you think that is a genre of boundaries that’s become popular? Is it sort of self-care, and “I need to put my own oxygen mask on before I can put on yours?”

Franco: Yeah. I think about a lot of friendship behaviors there’s an emotional incongruity. What I mean is that your experience of this act is very different from your friends’ in a way that you’re not always privy to.

So you might set this boundary, thinking about: Oh, I’m really busy, and this is going to benefit me. But when your friend receives that boundary, they’re feeling like: I’m so alone, and I have no one in this moment when we really, really need someone. And so there’s just this, I guess, this disconnect between our two emotional worlds in that moment.

Because if we’re only thinking about our reality, it makes a lot of sense. But when we think about our co-realities—our reality and the other person’s reality—then we might realize that even if this act benefits us, the costs for our friend are far greater.

You know, when you have a healthy relationship, what happens is you begin to include them in your sense of self. So there’s a disconnect happening when you’re willing to completely upset and let down your friend to meet your own needs.

Beck: Yeah.

Franco: And that’s kind of what I’m referring to with these individualistic boundaries, which is like: I’m going to get 100 percent of my needs met. Even if zero percent of your needs are going to be met.

The communal boundary is to protect the relationship. The individualistic boundary is to protect yourself.

__

Beck: So, Marisa, I’ve been reporting on friendship for a long time. And when we’re discussing kind of how we make friends, and how do we maintain those friendships, I feel like the conversation often stops at this very simplistic platitude of “friendship takes work,” and that’s very vague and general. But I’m also wondering with your perspective as a psychologist, whether you see anything kind of dicey about suggesting that friendship is labor.

Franco: I think so. [Chuckles.] I mean, what are all our associations with “work”? Like, negative. Something that we have to do, Something that we need to get compensated for to be able to do. And I think when we use those capitalistic terms for friendship, we not only are applying that term, but the web of associations that we add to that term—the baggage of all of those associations.

So I like the idea of friendship taking effort rather than friendship taking work. I want to convey that in friendship, we’re going to be inconvenienced. In friendship, we’re going to do things that we don’t want to do. In friendship, we are going to have to go out of our way and take initiative and be proactive and all of those things. And I think those all fit into the realm of “effort.” But when we say “work,” it’s almost like it’s something that we don’t want.

Beck: I mean, I don’t think most people’s intentions are usually bad. It just seems like some of the norms in our culture are steering us toward undermining our friendships without maybe realizing it. Where if it is something that you really want to prioritize in your life, it feels a little bit like swimming against the current.

Franco: It does. It can feel like unrequited love a lot. But I will say, there’s also subcommunities, like queer communities. [Chuckles.] Where it’s a lot more common for people to put a lot more value on friendship. And there’s talks about asexual communities; there’s talks about platonic life partners. I think queer communities are the pioneers of friendship and could teach hetero people a lot. I don’t know if you’ve heard the term “relationship anarchy,” but it’s, um…

Beck: No; can you explain it?

Franco: It’s one of my faves. It’s this idea that we don’t need to use what society has told us as our guideposts for the value that we place on different types of relationships. We can choose what resonates most with us. And my choice is: I want to value, again, friends as much as a potential spouse. Like, that’s the hierarchy that I would want in my life in the larger anarchy framework. If you start from a place of anarchy, where would you want friends to be in your personal valuing system?

__

Rashid: So when I was out of town for a week last week, Julie, one of my best friends texted me saying, “Okay, I’m going to be ‘full, needy boyfriend’ when you’re back.” [Chuckles.] And we hadn’t been talking for a week or so, because we were both too busy. And I just thought it was so nice that she sent that little note.

And the first thing I thought was: A lot of times when we’re trying to express to friends how much we miss each other or love each other or need each other, it’s kind of as if we only have the language of romance to express that. And sometimes we use the language of love that we understand through romantic partnerships; [it] expresses that we have that need for our friends at all.

Beck: Right. Like, it was very cute and sweet that she said that. But also, like—you don’t have to minimize wanting to hang out with your friend by, like, pretending you’re acting like a needy boyfriend. Like, you are allowed to miss your friend.

Rashid: Right. Totally.

Beck: That study I referenced earlier that was talking about a culture of passivity—it was sort of focusing on conflict. But I would venture to say that there’s kind of a culture of passivity in the good times as well.

You know, where friendship is too often like a relationship of convenience, or will go with the flow. And “I’ll see you when I see you.” And it’s hard to actually keep up a friendship if you’re being passive in that way and you just expect it to come effortlessly.

Rashid: Right. And I genuinely don’t know how a lot of my friendships would function if we didn’t put in that quote unquote “work.” Because, you know, two of my best friends live outside of the U.S., and we are in different time zones and don’t catch each other easily. And usually one of them tries to call me super early in the morning, my time—which half the time I can’t even pick up the phone.

It’s just emblematic of that sort of small gesture you can make for a friend. And it shows me that, you know—they tried to catch me, and if they could, they would be on the phone with me right now.

Beck: And do you feel like that, quote unquote, “work” and effort that you put in to try to catch each other in different time zones is a burden to you?

Rashid: No, not at all. It’s the smallest, you know, gesture of love that we could sort of show each other, and takes almost no effort.

Beck: Yeah. But that’s why I think it’s so strange that it’s like, “Oh, the work of friendship is some hard or negative or burdensome thing.” Like, you’re so happy to see that missed call. And I’m sure she was so happy to call you.

__

That’s all for this episode of How to Talk to People. This episode was produced by Becca Rashid, and hosted by me, Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The managing producer of How to Talk to People is Andrea Valdez.

Last month, the surgeon general released a lengthy advisory calling attention to social media and its effects on the mental health of teenagers. Historically, a warning from the surgeon general pointed a big neon sign at an issue that we might not be sure how much to worry about: cigarettes, AIDS, drunk driving. But people are already worried about social media—and they’re acting on those concerns. School districts are suing social-media companies for “knowingly” harming children. Legislators are grilling tech-company founders in hearings. Pundits are calling for age-restricting access to apps. Everyone just wants to do something, anything, to get this under control.

This is all understandable. Teenagers have become more anxious and more depressed. A notable rise in depression started in 2012, about the time many high schoolers got smartphones. Many parents who had teenagers during that period saw these changes in real time: A child who might have been ruffled by school social dynamics suddenly couldn’t escape them, and her mental health tanked.

The problem is real. But is it as real as the problems caused by cigarettes or drunk driving? We don’t know yet. Researchers have only started to understand who is vulnerable and what we can do to protect them. In this conversation, we talk with Kaitlyn Tiffany, who covers tech for The Atlantic and has been tracking the unfolding research into the effects of social media in detail. We won’t tell you whether to worry a lot, or not at all. We’ll just step away from the urgency for a moment to tell you what experts know, what they are guessing at, and how you might proceed in all that frustrating uncertainty.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. So last week I was talking to a friend of mine who shared this fantasy she has of shipping her kids to a tech-free island where there were no phones, no tablets, no video games, no computers, not even a television. Now, I’ve parented three teenagers. And I’ve had this fantasy myself many, many times.

And like all fantasies of frustrated parents, it’s useless. Like you can practically hear the teen eye rolls in the background. This episode is my attempt to be useful to address the problem of teens, their phones, and their mental health from a place of facts and research and actual knowledge.

So this week I'm going to talk to staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany, who writes about tech and online culture, and who knows that this issue is both urgent—laws are being considered right now—and annoyingly hard to pin down.

Kaitlyn Tiffany: Obviously, in eight years of writing about social media, I would not ever argue that it’s unfair to criticize these tech companies or that there’s not a ton to criticize, but it just seems counterproductive to constantly just be blaring the sirens rather than saying anything specific.

Rosin: Oh my God, I’m so glad to hear you say that. The word I keep writing down every time, almost every time I read about teens and social media, is broad. Like I’ve, I, I’ve moved away from hysterical, which is what I used to write down, but I still feel intellectually like it’s just too broad.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely.

Rosin: And part of why I wanted to talk to Tiffany now is that it’s not just parents who are trying to crack this. It’s teachers, the teens themselves, but also legislators. There is a real hunger to do something. Pass something now, and last week gave that a big push forward.

Archival: Today, the U.S. surgeon general released sobering new figures on teen social-media use and its effects on their mental health. Dr. Vivek Murphy says social media’s effect on the mental health of young people isn’t fully understood yet. It is a main contributor to depression, anxiety, and other problems in the nation’s teenagers.

Rosin: So Tiffany, what exactly did the surgeon general say last week?

Tiffany: So the surgeon general released this 19-page advisory about social media that basically identifies it as a quote public-health challenge, but also emphasized that there’s a lot of research that needs to be done before people can say that social media is, quote, unquote, safe. So that’s kind of an interesting approach. He’s not saying that we need to prove that it’s dangerous. He’s saying we need to prove that it’s not dangerous.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Tiffany: And he’s drawing attention to possible risks of harm, especially for adolescents in, like, specific developmental stages. So younger preteen girls—11 to 13— boys, 14 to 15 years old, but also acknowledging there are these known, quote, unquote, evidence gaps. So was the most harmful thing that you’re losing sleep? Is the most harmful thing that you are not seeing your friends in person, et cetera? But the headline, yeah, is kind of like, Everyone pay attention to this.

It could be really bad.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so here is kind of a big question. What do we know about social media and kids at this point?

Tiffany: What we know is that through the process of doing hundreds of studies, researchers have somewhat narrowed down to some really pertinent questions about when and under which circumstances social media would be bad. It’s not in all circumstances, and it’s not for everyone. I know that is very confusing, but that is pretty much what we know.

Rosin: Yeah it creates this funky moment where legislators wanna do something now. And I bet the surgeon general’s report will just make that more intense. But the research doesn’t have enough nuance right now. Like in order to know what to do, you kind of have to know more precisely what the problem is, but the research isn’t quite there yet.

Tiffany: Right.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So maybe we should talk about how we got here.

Tiffany: Yeah, so I’d say there are three pretty significant moments we should touch on. A lot of researchers, or people who are interested in this topic, point to 2012 as being sort of the saturation point where the iPhone had been out long enough that young kids were starting to have them. It was also the year that Facebook acquired Instagram, which ballooned its growth, led to it launching on Android and becoming sort of a part of everyone’s daily lives.

Rosin: So the image we have of a teenager walking around with a phone, looking at whatever they’re looking at [on] Snapchat, Instagram, that started in 2012?

Tiffany: Yeah. Or, you know, became sort of the mass phenomenon by 2012. I remember somebody in my high school having an iPhone in 2007, but he was like the only person that everybody would, like, line up to play with it. It wasn’t normal yet.

Rosin: Yeah, 2012 was exactly the year that my then-preteen daughter got a cellphone, and that everybody suddenly had one in middle school.

Okay, let’s back up, because I didn’t ask you an important question: Are you interested in naming your generation? Just because a lot of this conversation is often framed as generational battles, so I’m curious to understand where you intersect with social media.

Tiffany: Oh yeah, sure. I’m a Millennial, so I did not have social media until, like, the very end of high school. My senior year, I got a Facebook account, and then I guess I wasn’t on Instagram until I [had] almost graduated from college because I didn’t have a smartphone right away.

Rosin: I just think it’s important to locate people in where they are. It’s like, are they the alarmed parent generation or are they the teenager? Are they somewhere in the middle?

Tiffany: Yeah, totally.

Rosin: Okay, so then it’s just everybody’s walking around with cellphones and then what happens?

Tiffany: Yeah, so, the next significant turning point is in 2017, where there is a bit of a backlash, I think partly driven by interest in some tech personalities talking about how they don’t let their kids use screens. But then actually sort of—

Rosin: Is that really—that’s, that’s one of the things that did it?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: That’s really funny.

Tiffany: I think it comes up a bit that, like, Steve Jobs didn’t think kids should use technology like that. But yeah, 2016, 2017, there’s more concern about should kids be spending the whole day looking at their smartphones. And The Atlantic actually published a really big piece by a researcher named Jean Twenge where the headline was “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

Rosin: [Gasps] That is such an Atlantic-y headline. That’s actually one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you, because I remember, I remember reading that story. I just remember having a huge resistance to it. Even though, you know, I wrote for The Atlantic, just thinking, like, Wow, that’s throwing the gauntlet down.

That’s, like, a really big question. I mean, I know it had a question mark after it, but it was like, have smartphones destroyed a generation?

Tiffany: Yeah. And it’s like, and we think the answer is yes.

Rosin: Right, right. All right, so what did Twenge argue in that article?

Tiffany: Yeah. So she was talking about these numbers that she’d been seeing, which come out regularly, from this survey that the National Institute on Drug Abuse conducts, asking adolescents about how happy they are and how they spend their free time. And she was noticing this correlation between spending a lot of time looking at screens and also expressing unhappiness and depression and suicidal ideation. That was the first thing that really concerned her. And then she was also pulling out these more specific data points, like a decrease in [the] number of teenagers who were driving or going out on dates or who had ever had sex. And there was the trend line showing that people were saying “I often feel left out of things,” or “A lot of times I feel lonely,” or “I get less than seven hours of sleep per night.” Those were concerning to her as well.

Rosin: So just to be perfectly clear, the headline says, has X caused Y, but what the data did was put X next to Y, right? It was just like in these last few years, teenagers have gotten smartphones. Also, in these last few years, there’s been this marked shift in a lot of markers of wellness. It was “an elbow in the data,” like that it was unmissable because it was such a sharp turn.

So it’s like, we see the sharp turn. Also, there were cellphones. There’s no causality there, right?

Tiffany: Yeah, yeah, so she’s talking about CDC surveys that were not specifically intended to look at how social media might affect teen mental health. They were, you know, sort of general as of like teen behavior and psychology.

And then she was creatively reading them and presenting a very legitimate hypothesis. But then, social-science researchers were presented with the challenge then of seeing whether that would bear out. So right after her article came out, there’s a huge balloon in the amount of research that was conducted. But, yeah, the first step would’ve just been like, Cool hypothesis. Let’s give it a whirl.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So basically that’s what I thought. Basically what’s happening between 2017 and now is, like, Cool hypothesis. Let’s test it out in lots of different formats. Let’s road test it here and there, and let’s just see, like, does it hold up? So what were the dynamics that researchers started to hypothesize?

Tiffany: So around this time, the initial question that people had was about screen time overall. So the next notable moment would have come in 2019, when researchers from Oxford published this study that was looking for correlations between digital-technology use and well-being.

And once they found this small correlation, they then sort of set it up against some other things to provide context to readers, which is pretty innovative I guess, because it allowed the study to travel pretty far, because rather than saying, Oh, the association between technology use and well-being is negative 0.049, which is probably meaningless to most people, you can say that the association between technology use and well-being is smaller than the association that’s been found between well-being and binge drinking or smoking or even having asthma or wearing glasses. And it’s only very slightly larger than the association between well-being and eating potatoes.

Rosin: Oh, this is the potato study, right?

Tiffany: Yes. The iconic potato study.

Rosin: The Great Potato Study. I remember that study, and I remember headlines like “Screen Time Is About as Dangerous as Potatoes,” and I remember finding it also totally unsatisfying because it was like, “Oh, you know, it’s ruining a generation.” “No, it’s totally cool. It’s fine. Like, there’s no problem. Don’t worry about it.” It was like neither of those answers seemed correct or were satisfying.

Like, you could see as a parent that something historically monumental was happening and you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. And just from my perspective, like, I neither wanted to be completely, totally alarmed, nor did I want to be like, “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” you know?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think the value of the potato study is that it was sort of like resetting the table a bit—like the objective, you know, when the researchers talked about the study after it was published, was to kind of acknowledge that screen time as a category is just like too broad to study in a meaningful way, because people use screens for so many different things, you know? They use them to harass and stalk people, or they use them to, like, do a yoga video. They use them to research their homework. They use them to, like, mindlessly scroll through TikTok. Like, it would be impossible to get a meaningful answer at, like, a high level about how screens as a blanket category affect people’s lives.

Rosin: Right, right. It’s useful to have a reset so that we can start narrowing in on what the problem actually is, because there is an actual problem, right? Like, depression is rising. It is a real thing. I mean, I’ve looked at the same data set that these researchers are concerned about, and they’re right. It’s really stark. Like, look at rates of depression and suicidality among teenage girls, and it’s incontrovertible that something is happening. So we’re worried about something beyond just, you know, We hate Mark Zuckerberg.

Tiffany: Yeah. I mean, the legitimate worry is that there are obvious and measured increases in depression among young people. There was a big CDC trend report that came out earlier this year that was looking at the data from 2011 to 2021.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Tiffany: So in 2011, 28 percent of teenagers said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and in 2021, that number had jumped to 42 percent.

And they saw big jumps in the percentage of high-school students who experienced, quote, persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a jump in the percentage that considered suicide, as well as they started measuring for the first time the percentage that said they’d experienced poor mental health, including stress and anxiety and depression in the past 30 days. That number was 29 percent. And for female students, 57 percent said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and 69 percent of LGBTQ students. So those were kind of the dramatic top-line numbers that were widely covered and alarming.

Rosin: Yeah, and I guess we can all imagine there are lots and lots of reasons why young people would feel hopeless or in despair. But I also will say I’ve had many conversations with fellow parents who would describe it as night and day, like what their child was like before they were deep in social media all day and all night and had no escape from it.

And what they were like after that was their reality. Like people can truly narrate, you know, Okay, my child was like this. They would go in their room and draw; they would read a book; even if they had a bad time at school, they could escape from it. And then all of a sudden that wasn’t possible. It became like it totally occupied their psyche.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely.

Rosin: So, okay, so let me summarize so far. So you had the Twenge article, which was like a boom in one direction, and then you had the potato research, which was a boom in the other direction. And it just sort of flipped-flopped back and forth. There’s hysteria. There’s the bounce back from hysteria. And hopefully, what I’m hoping is that, since 2012, researchers start to get more specific.

Like they start to narrow in on who’s vulnerable and what kinds of behaviors are vulnerable.

Tiffany: Yeah. I think once you get past the Oxford study in 2019, you’re at a point where you’re saying it’s not yes or no, and we’re done talking about screens. That’s pointless. Let’s talk specifically about social media, and let’s pull the data out into more specific segments so that we can be talking about specific populations, because it’s also a waste of our time to say, Screens do X to everyone all the time.

Rosin: Okay, so you and I have had this really lovely clarifying academic discussion, but the world doesn’t necessarily have patience for our lovely little academic discussion, because there is this growing urgency for regulatory or legislative intervention, and it’s kind of becoming hard to resist.

Tiffany: Yeah, so I think the question of, like, regulatory or legislative intervention has been much more urgent and frequently asked in the last couple of years, since the Facebook files were leaked by Frances Haugen. To time stamp, this was in the fall of 2021. Frances Haugen, who was an employee at Facebook, leaked a huge batch of documents from the company to a bunch of journalists. And in the Facebook files, the most dramatic revelation was this collection of slides presenting internal research that Facebook had done where teen girls expressly said, Instagram makes me feel bad about myself or causes all of these problems for me in my emotional life.

And the thing that was sort of missing from a lot of the conversation around those slides was that they were conducted not scientifically, like admittedly not scientifically, not for scientific purposes. So there’s a pretty big contrast between that and the sort of like decades of studies proving that cigarettes cause cancer.

But the takeaway from the Frances Haugen leak was that meme of, like, “Facebook knew”—like, Facebook knew it was doing this.

And so that was kind of transitioned quite smoothly and quickly into this comparison to Big Tobacco, which is super common now.

And I get why people use these metaphors. I just, like, worry about how literal people take them sometimes, because cigarettes do not have societal benefits and people died horrifically of lung cancer. That is simply not the same thing as the questions that we have about social media.

Like, tobacco is bad for everyone. Full stop. If you smoke cigarettes, that’s bad for you, and there’s no debate about that. And social media can be bad for some people in certain circumstances, but it also would be pretty ridiculous, I think, to argue that it has no benefits whatsoever.

Rosin: Right.

Tiffany: And it’s not as simple as saying: “Drop the cigarette; it’s gonna kill you.”

Rosin: Mm, this is so helpful. I already understand so much more than I did, you know, half an hour ago when we started this conversation. For me, this is important and satisfying because almost everything I read in the popular media, like, nothing feels specific enough to me. So that’s basically what I’m looking for. It’s, like, Oh, we’re about to enter this era where we’re gonna haul people up to the Hill and make all this legislation.

But before I know how to think about all that legislation or if I think it’s the right thing to do, or not the right thing to do, I just feel like I need to understand a little better what the problem is and, like, who, who we’re targeting and what the research shows and just understand it a little better.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely. If there are big policy changes now, it will be hard to, first of all, prove what kind of effect they have and, second of all, reverse them if they don’t work. So, the stakes are really high; we should definitely figure out what we’re doing.

Rosin: Okay, that brings us to now. So let’s you and I do it. Let’s get into specifics. What concrete things do researchers actually know? And what directions are they pointing in now?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think there are still questions that remain to be answered, and hopefully some of those will come as we’ve had more time to do, like, longer studies. There’s one that’s being done right now that started in 2016 that’s looking at the same group over a period of 10 years. So you can maybe identify specifically cause and effect, but there’s been some smaller-scale ones that I think pretty convincingly prove that there are these windows of acute vulnerability for teenagers, and specifically for young girls between 11 and 13 and boys between 14 and 15.

But for girls it’s even more apparent, and there are pretty clear relations between specific mental-health outcomes. So as social-media use goes up, the satisfaction in their appearance goes sharply down, in a study that came out last year. So those things are starting to be repeated more clearly, which also gives important clues as to the mechanisms of how social-media use would affect somebody’s mental health, because, like, in that case, that’s obviously an issue of, like, of body image and social comparison, which is about the platform itself.

Whereas, you know, some other studies have wondered, maybe it’s not anything that they’re doing online. Maybe it’s just the fact that being on your phone means that you sleep less or go outside less, or hang out with your friends in person less. So if that’s the case, you know, that becomes maybe more of an issue of parenting than if it is specifically about the content they’re being served or about the sort of basic structure of the app. Like, that’s really good to know and is important to act on. I think it is obviously still difficult to say, like, “What are you gonna do about the fact that Instagram makes girls feel bad about the way that they look?” That’s a pretty broad problem with a lot of cultural history and baggage, but it’s at least, like, something to focus on.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. It’s funny; a lot of this is, like, it sort of ends up in a commonsense realm.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: I have my parent hat [on] now. So, like everything else, it requires knowing the child, and, whether it’s a teacher who knows the child or a parent or friends, it’s like there are young girls whose brains are still developing, who are just past puberty, who are maybe self-conscious, and social media can exacerbate, it sounds like, existing dynamics that girls have struggled with forever.

And so if you know that there’s a kid who’s just especially vulnerable to those dynamics, and let’s say you notice them up all night or not sleeping or really fixated on these things.

Tiffany: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Rosin: Like, as a parent, I’ve definitely had the instinct of, like, Get off your damn phone. But it seems like if you’re actually looking for vulnerability, it’s a little more precise than that.

Tiffany: Yeah. And I think it sounds kind of hokey to be, like, “Just talk to your kids.” But these do seem to be things that kids are pretty articulate about.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So the dynamics they’re talking about with young girls, are they just the dynamics of time immemorial? Like do they ever get into, you know, is it scrolling that’s the problem? Is it scrolling for X number of hours? Is it your close friends, or is it looking at pictures of the Kardashians?

Like, what have they ever, like, homed in on sort of, what is the behavior that leaves you feeling vulnerable? Like, is it passive or active? Is it posting pictures or just looking at other people’s pictures?

Tiffany: Yeah, there was a period where there was a lot of interest in that distinction between active and passive use: people sort of arguing that there might be a difference in terms of how social media affects you, whether you’re actively messaging people and posting stuff. And that might be good, whereas passively scrolling and, you know, just seeing things that make you feel bad would be worse.

But it kind of came down to these aren’t meaningful distinctions, because there’s good active use and there’s destructive active use and there’s good passive use. You know, I spend a lot of time scrolling on my phone, because I am reading The Atlantic, which is passive use, of my phone.

And there’s bad passive use, which would be like when you’re scrolling and you don’t know why and you didn’t wanna be, and it makes you feel bad.

Rosin: Got it. So it’s not as mechanistic as what you are doing. What matters is who you are at the moment that you’re doing it, and what your orientation towards it is. Like, if you happen to be in a moment of distress and you’re in a certain age, it doesn’t matter if you’re using it actively or passively; social media is gonna amplify your distress.

Tiffany: Yeah, and there’s been some more recent research that suggests that it could matter how you think about social media as well. So if you feel like social media is fun—it’s where I connect with my friends; I use it for the X reason and then I stop using it, because I’m in control—like, in those situations it can be related to positive outcomes, as opposed to negative outcomes.

Negative outcomes are more tied to feeling, like, I have no control over this and I’m spending so much time doing it and I don’t want to be.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. That’s important too. So that is, that’s actually, there’s another parenting lesson in there. If you can somehow orient your kid towards a feeling of control, like, Use this in a way that benefits you and don’t let it use you. Again, very commonsensical, but maybe that’s—that gives you another tool, like, I’m not just yelling at you because you’re on your phone. I’m trying to understand how you are orienting yourself and managing the time that you’re on your phone and whether it’s serving you or it’s making you feel worse.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: Yeah. So despite the research being incomplete and the questions being thorny and philosophical, there are going to be things proposed. So what do you know about the things that have already been proposed?

Tiffany: So there are state laws that have been passed or proposed in many states already that would make it so that minors can’t be on social media without parental permission.

Rosin: That’s age-gating, right?

Tiffany: That’s the age-gating solution, yeah, that a lot of pundits have been sort of advocating for, for the past couple of years, including Frances Haugen. I think those will face a lot of challenges, including, like, in enforceability and just, like, First Amendment issues. A lot of free-speech-issue groups would say that it’s not productive to just prohibit young people from speaking in public.

I think just, like, personally, it just seems very punitive, even if that’s not how people, like, mean it to come off to kids. Like, how else are they gonna receive it? And it’s just a more dramatic measure than I think people are giving credit for. Because you can say, like, “Hey, well, we age-gate other things.You can’t drive until X age. You can’t drink until X age. Why not say you can’t have an Instagram until X age?” But you are in effect yanking something away from millions of teenagers, some of whom might be like really, I don't know, emotionally dependent on it. Or even just like creatively dependent or like really enjoy using it and it’s not harming them.

And it, it just seems really—it’s really dramatic and really abrupt and something that should only be considered if there’s, like, absolutely a rock-solid evidence base in my opinion.

Rosin: Interesting. I also don’t know how you would measure this at all, but it does create a sense of distrust between generations, because you could make the argument as a parent that smoking is inherently bad. You can’t smoke as a kid. Drinking is, you know, you’re just not ready to drink; you’re not ready to drive a car.

But I, but I don’t know that a kid would fully get on board with the idea that you’re not ready to use any social media at all. Like, they could understand, okay, there are some dangers out there and we should talk about it and sort of watch for vulnerabilities, but like, an N-O? I don’t know.

Tiffany: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay, so is there, are there other proposals that you’ve seen that seem interesting or dangerous?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think the FTC is trying to, like, be a bit more creative about how to limit Facebook and Instagram’s ability to profit off of targeted advertising towards teens, which some people would maybe think of as being productive, because it eliminates a little bit of their profit motive to keep teens on the app all the time.

You know, I’m pro-privacy. I think that’s a good idea. It’s pretty complicated in that it’s not just about what Facebook does, but yeah. I mean, I think that’s a good thing to aim for for sure.

Rosin: Now, how would that address the original problem we discussed, which is depression?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I feel like a lot of this is sort of like setting up a, a kind of, like, Rein those guys in. But the problem we started out with was that social media was making kids distressed.

Tiffany: Yeah. I guess this gets at why it’s so important for the research to identify the specific problems and the specific mechanisms, because, like, if the main way that social media is causing depression or anxiety in teens is because it’s preventing them from getting enough sleep and it’s preventing them from seeing their friends in public, just purely hypothetically, like then what you could, like, deduce from that is that, like, okay, maybe these products are just too addictive, and our kids are being sort of coerced into staying on them for too long.

And it’s not about the content; it’s just about purely how much time they’re taking away from things that make them happier and healthier. So in that situation, it’s a little bit more obvious why reducing Instagram’s incentive to, like, keep kids on the app and to, you know, get more data from them that they can monetize and serve them more ads, like, Instagram would be more incentivized to focus on adults and not serve as many ads to kids. And, and you know, personally I don’t think, like, Instagram is just, like, ruthlessly driven to extract all monetary value from children. Even as, again, I don’t wanna be in the position of, like, defending a corporation, but that’s sort of the logic and that’s sort of the reason why you have to get more specific.

And if the answer is that the main way that Instagram causes depression is through negative social comparison and like poor body image instigated by seeing all of these images of models, like, no, probably privacy protection isn’t gonna solve that problem. We’d have to come up with something else.

Rosin: You know, we talked about this; it’s hard to talk about, but like, we get stuck in a moment or sort of, like, in the same way we get stuck in a musical moment. We get stuck in a kind of social-media moment.

And meanwhile, like, people have moved along. They’re using different platforms; they’re kind of navigating it much more deftly, say, than the generation or even the two years before them.

Tiffany: Yeah, I always sort of, like, marvel at my younger sister’s levels of adjustment and happiness. But, I guess, I mean, this is not scientific at all. This is just like a personal pet theory based on nothing except anecdotal experience, but, like, they are a little bit more squarely in this demographic of concern. I think two of them would be considered Gen Z? And my understanding from, from watching them or talking to them is, like, they really experienced very little strife around social media because it felt pretty natural to them, you know? They post goofy—like, ugly, sometimes—pictures of themselves. And, you know, that’s, like, funny and fun for them. I sometimes wonder if there is, like. a kind of narrow band of people, like maybe around my age or a little bit younger, who were forced to adapt to these things in real time, in the middle of puberty, which made it maybe more fraught than if you had just always thought of Instagram as something that existed and something that you were gonna one day use.

Rosin: You know, that is such a good point. It’s anecdotal, of course, but we do talk about his research as if these teenagers are fixed in time. Like there was only this one band of teenagers, but maybe they got the onslaught and then as time went on, people got more adjusted. Like, they themselves changed and maybe caught up with things.

So maybe the teenagers we’re legislating for are not the same teenagers we studied. And the problems of the earlier set of young people, they just might not be the same as the problems of teenagers now.

Tiffany: Yeah, because, like, I did have a lot of anxiety around Instagram in my early 20s when I first had it, and have gone through periods like, you know, during breakups where Instagram is like absolutely a toxic minefield for me in many ways, including, like, all of the body-image stuff we’ve been talking about. But, but I—I sometimes do, yeah, just think like, Huh, maybe there’s something about, like, kind of always having this and sort of deciding how to use it yourself and just be like, “Well, it exists; it’s part of life.”

Rosin: Yeah, no, I mean, there’s a, there’s actually a really good lesson in there, because what you’re describing about your sisters is they use it; like, it exists. They know the name of it; their older sister used it. Lots of people use it. It’s not this new, crazy thing.

And so they just do with it what they want, you know? And they kind of like make it work for them. Like, every once in a while it’s gonna get you down, but if you can use it how you wanna use it, then sure, why not?

Like, it must seem absolutely absurd. These discussions about, like, End it tomorrow. It’s like, why? You know, I’m just posting dumb pictures of my friends.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: You know, at so many stages of this, I’ve just wanted to push it away and not think about it. But the truth is, like, the depression rates keep rising. Like, there is something at the heart of this. I don’t know that we’ve made all the connections properly yet, but there is something there that we should keep paying attention to. What do you think the next few years are gonna look like? Like, what’s the best-case and worst-case scenario for how we rein this in, now that the surgeon general has said, “Time to do something about it”? Like, I bet if you look back in history, it’s like, the surgeon general issues a report, it’s a symbolic moment, and the culture around things changes. What is the best case and worst case for social media?

Tiffany: I think worst case would be what we were talking about, just really dramatic measures like a blanket age-gate that isn’t based in evidence and there’s kind of no way to undo it and no way to see what effect it has for 10 years. I think that's the worst-case scenario.

I think best-case scenario would be kind of where we are, like, watching people sort of chip away at the problem, find these specific places where we can intervene, whether that’s educating teenagers, educating parents, or whether it’s putting pressure on Facebook to do things like share data with researchers, which they can be pretty stingy about.

I think, like, that would be really productive. I think, like, part of the issue that we keep running into with this is that there’s not, like, a great headline and there’s not a silver bullet. So it is sort of just, like, the boring answer of like, Well, we need to keep learning, you know?

Rosin: Right. That would be the sexy Atlantic headline.

Tiffany: Yeah. Real nerds here.

Rosin: It would be like, Let’s figure out how social media is affecting the mental health of teenagers and put into place small measures to ameliorate it.

Tiffany: Right?

Rosin: I would totally, totally read that article.

Tiffany: Yeah. And start over from scratch in two years, once we are no longer even using any of these platforms we’ve been talking about.

Rosin: Right. That’s the subhead.