The classic American story of ambition—work hard and you will be rewarded—has never seemed more outdated. Wages haven’t kept pace with the cost of living. Mass layoffs are taking place in sectors that include tech and journalism. The pandemic, for many 9-to-5ers, prompted a large-scale assessment of what to reach for, how hard to try to attain it, and whether the object or the effort is truly worth it. Rather than seeing boundless striving as an unquestioned virtue, a wide swath of people are now just as likely to ask whether it might be doing them more harm than good.

This is a question that books are well equipped to answer. Literature is rife with characters like Jay Gatsby, whose ambition eventually brings him down, or who have no ambition to speak of, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby. Recent changes in my own job situation have encouraged me to reassess, with the help of reading, where I fall on that scale: What is it I actually want? If I had more of a say in directing the flow of my efforts, where would they go? When it really comes down to it, how hard do I actually want to be working—and when would I simply prefer not to?

The following seven titles offer ways to rethink our relationship to the sometimes kneejerk impulse that pushes us to want more. They acknowledge how social factors shape both what we aspire to and what’s considered attainable, and they challenge us to think critically about the things that we decide are desirable and why.

Grand Central Publishing

Free Food for Millionaires, by Min Jin Lee

Lee’s first novel opens with a warning: “Competence can be a curse.” The warned is Casey Han, a recent Princeton graduate. Her parents, who emigrated from Korea and manage a Manhattan dry cleaner, urge Casey to pursue a steady job in a field like law or medicine. But she covets a different kind of American dream: “a bright, glittering life” of luxury goods. Taking a summer internship at an investment-banking firm, she navigates its grueling hours and cutthroat competition very capably. But she carries the constant anxiety of trying to keep up with her primarily white peers who come from money and live a lifestyle she can’t afford. She’s also tripped up by her own expensive taste: Though she handles large sums on the trading floor, her personal finances are undermined by purchases of an antique book and luxe clothing. In her single-minded pursuit of wealth, she also manages to alienate her parents, her mentor, and her partner, and must confront whether the class mobility is worth the price. The dream of affluence lures Casey into its orbit but never quite admits her. Despite the supposed meritocracy at work, grit and determination are not enough.

Riverhead

Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss

After years of inconsistent employment, Biss, a writer and college professor, secures a stable job and is able to buy a house. Having and Being Had deploys memoir, research, and criticism to explore what happens after you get what you want—or what you have been told to want. Biss is ambivalent about her newly purchased home, perhaps the ultimate cultural symbol of prosperity: “After years of looking, I was no longer convinced that I wanted a house,” she writes. Her savings account once represented “hours banked, to be spent on writing, not working”; now she has no choice but to work full-time to pay the mortgage. Her discomfort also comes from being a gentrifier in her new Evanston, Illinois, neighborhood. Biss reminds us that private property is an idea, not an individual accomplishment, that sits at the center of a complex network of affluence and power. She redirects the reader’s attention from the white picket fence to exactly what gets bought—or bought into—with that down payment.

[Read: The cult classic that captures the grind of dead-end jobs]

Scribner

Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin

In this memoir, the writer and actor Steve Martin traces the rapid rise and decisive end of his career as a stand-up comic. His famously oddball act—which drew on props such as balloon hats and bananas—bore fruit faster, and on a bigger scale, than he could have imagined. It culminated in grueling arena tours that were so far from the sense of play and surprise that had brought him to the form in the first place that he decided to quit. Martin’s decision is bittersweet—he finds tremendous relief in escaping the exhaustion of the road and the isolation of fame, though he writes of the “war years” with a grudging affection. Because we see how much he wants comedic eminence and how deeply it shaped his childhood aspirations, we also understand the size of his sacrifice. But he’s able to parlay his fame into a film career, which has been even more successful than his career in stand-up was. By quitting at what seemed like his peak, Martin prompts his readers to consider whether material reward alone is reason to continue chasing a goal. What harmful patterns might it be keeping you bound to—and could there be freedom, or even greater heights, in letting it go?

Vintage

Astonish Me, by Maggie Shipstead

Set in the hypercompetitive world of professional ballet, Shipstead’s second novel follows Joan, a ballerina who helps another dancer, Arslan Rusakov, defect from the Soviet Union. Their relationship turns romantic, but their bond is tested by their respective levels of achievement—as Arslan’s star continues to rise, Joan’s career never really takes off, even though she’s dedicated her life to their art. Ultimately, their affair can’t withstand the tension. They break up and Joan retires from the stage, settling down with an old flame to raise her son and teach dance. When her child, Harry, shows unusual ballet prowess years later, Joan is brought back into Arslan’s orbit. The novel captures the frustrating limits of aspiration and offers the humbling reminder that, once you reach an elite level, further progress is determined by gradations finer than how hard you try. Astonish Me expresses the poignant loss of stepping back from the goals that once gave meaning to a life and the wistful feeling of nurturing those same yearnings in the next generation.

[Read: What we gain from a good-enough life]

W. W. Norton and Company

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, by Lan Samantha Chang

Chang’s third book is set in a prestigious writing program, a milieu the author knows well as the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The narrative follows the friendship between two male poets, Roman and Bernard, who compete for the attention and mentorship of their female professor, the renowned poet Miranda Sturgis. Miranda’s legendary workshop “bludgeonings” make her equally feared and esteemed. Both men are determined to impress her; both, too, feel a degree of entitlement to her consideration. Their belief in their poetic talents leads them to believe that Miranda owes them guidance—one of many sharp observations the novel makes about ambition’s gendered dimensions. Though the two protégés go on to have very different careers—a prize nets Roman critical validation and an eventual academic job; Bernard toils in a tiny studio before completing a late-stage masterwork—each is irrevocably shaped by his relationship with Miranda. As in Astonish Me, all of the artists in this book are already starting from a place of above-average talent. The factors that determine their success or failure are subtler. These poets’ careers flourish in part because they cultivated a mentor in a field where hitting it big can depend on who you know.

Vintage

Constructing a Nervous System, by Margo Jefferson

Jefferson’s follow-up to her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning memoir, Negroland, is ambitious in both its goals and its form. In the previous book, she traced the relationships and networks that shaped her while growing up in the ’50s and early ’60s as part of an insular, affluent Black community in Chicago. Constructing a Nervous System turns inward, drilling down to the first principles of Jefferson’s artistry. She decides that she “must break [herself] into pieces … then rebuild.” These components take many guises, such as repurposed song lyrics, or stage directions and script notes that evoke a one-woman show. As she reassembles the fragments, she also communes with a cast of writers and artists, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Josephine Baker, whose work she idolizes. Part of Jefferson’s impetus is to transcend the limitations that have been projected onto her by history and social mores. Growing up as a Black woman, Jefferson writes—a member of two groups “ruled lesser”—made her want  “to play in private with styles and personae deemed beyond my range,” and “to access powers my upbringing denied me.” Jefferson makes a stylish production of casting off those constraints, and in doing so, composes something wonderfully fresh.

[Read: The paradox of caring about ‘bullshit’ jobs]

Simon & Schuster

Bullshit Jobs, by David Graeber

The titular jobs of Graeber’s book aren’t low-paid or even precarious: They’re well compensated and frequently attract the traditionally ambitious. But Graeber argues that they create nothing of value and exist for largely symbolic reasons—to make an organization look important, for example, or to delegate work to a group of employees who were just fine managing themselves. “Bullshit jobs” are “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence,” such as a full-time receptionist who can do their day’s work in an hour and a half, he suggests. What separates these positions from purposeful ones is how it feels to the worker: A Mafia hit man who follows a code that likely imbues his work with deep value would be disqualified, Graeber says. He views the proliferation of these positions as a serious problem. “How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labor,” he writes, “when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?” Like buying a house, having a white-collar career would seem to be a sign of unambiguous triumph. But becoming too attached to traditional signifiers of stability can lead us away from more critical questions of how we should structure our working lives.

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Mike Pence and Chris Christie are each expected to announce their 2024 presidential candidacy this week. As the Republican primary field continues to grow, so do candidates’ awkward attempts to prove that they’re just regular people. Below, I explore the fraught nature of “dressing for the job you want” on the campaign trail.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The murder rate is suddenly falling. Get rid of the debt ceiling once and for all. How parking ruined everything Americana Cosplay

One of the most memorable scenes from HBO’s political satire Veep is an unsettlingly realistic campaign spot. Jonah Ryan, a WASPy, weaselly Capitol Hill aide, attempts to rebrand himself as an everyman when he runs for Congress. In lieu of his navy blazer and khakis, Jonah dons a flannel shirt and a puffy vest, and chops wood (poorly). He looks uncomfortable merely holding the axe, let alone swinging it.

I thought of Jonah this past weekend as former Vice President Mike Pence rolled into Des Moines, Iowa, straddling a Harley-Davidson. Pence mugged for the cameras in a black leather vest, jeans, and cowboy boots. To be fair, Pence was the only presidential candidate who actually rode a motorcycle to Senator Joni Ernst’s annual “Roast and Ride” charity glad-handing event, so he deserves a little bit of credit. But the photos were, well, quite funny. Pence has spent years cultivating a distinct personal image—that of a stoic, soft-spoken churchgoer who never has a hair out of place. Picture Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, then imagine his exact opposite: That’s Pence.

Still … at least he didn’t autograph a Bible! Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was also in Iowa this past weekend, and he graciously signed someone’s copy of the good book. (His wife, Casey, was photographed in her own motorcycle leather, adorned with an image of Florida, a gator, and the phrase Where Woke Goes to Die. She and her husband took an SUV, not a hog, to the event.)

As his campaign gets under way, DeSantis is also undergoing a Jonah-like evolution. He holds degrees from Harvard and Yale, yet he’s still learning basic retail-politics skills. My colleague Mark Leibovich recently observed DeSantis up close on the trail in New Hampshire. While working the rope line at an American Legion hall, DeSantis “smiled for the camera like the dentist had just asked him to bite down on a blob of putty; like he was trying to make a mold, or to fit one,” Leibovich wrote.

To be sure, the performative “I’m just like you” campaign pitch is by no means a purely Republican phenomenon. Remember in 2015, when Hillary Clinton informed us that she was “just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids”? Or way back in 2003, when John Kerry tried to court Philadelphia voters by visiting the divey cheesesteak mecca Pat’s and doomed his campaign by asking for Swiss cheese instead of Whiz?

In the last presidential election cycle, after being dogged by accusations of hiding from the coronavirus pandemic in his basement, Joe Biden released his own how-do-you-like-me-now campaign ad. As an electric guitar strummed in the background, Biden revved the engine of his convertible Corvette Stingray, then tore off down what looked like a very safe private road, ostensibly in support of an electric-vehicle future. The spot unintentionally called to mind the 2009 Onion headline “Shirtless Biden Washes Trans Am in White House Driveway.”

I asked my colleague Amanda Mull, who spent 10 years in the fashion industry and writes about consumerism, why presidential candidates lean into the same form of über-Americana year after year. “Politics is a strange industry full of fundamentally strange people who mostly don’t quite realize how odd they are,” she said.

She went on, “This working-man Americana cosplay is, on some level, an acknowledgement that politicians exist separately from regular people, and it’s an attempt to bridge a gap on an aesthetic level that they are incapable of bridging interpersonally. But they’re weird guys, so the end result is the exact opposite—they look so uncomfortable, so uncanny in their little jeans and boots, that they might as well have just landed from outer space.”

The current Republican front-runner, Donald Trump, skipped Iowa altogether this past weekend, but rest assured, he’s been busy doing his own pandering. Last week, Trump proposed a yearlong “Salute to America 250” party to be held at the Iowa state fairgrounds in celebration of the country’s coming semiquincentennial in 2026. “Together we will build it, and they will come,” Trump proclaimed. You could virtually smell the rising corn.

Related:

Ron DeSantis’s joyless ride Why won’t Trump’s rivals just say it? Today’s News A sonic boom was heard in the D.C. area after military jets scrambled to respond to a private flight crossing into restricted airspace. The plane was determined not to be a threat. The California attorney general is investigating whether a group of migrants that, on Friday, was flown to California on a private plane was sent by the state of Florida, calling it “state-sanctioned kidnapping.” The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, on allegations that the company is mishandling customer funds and lying to regulators and investors. Evening Read Illustration by Jo Imperio

In Defense of Humanity

By Adrienne LaFrance

On July 13, 1833, during a visit to the Cabinet of Natural History at the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, Ralph Waldo Emerson had an epiphany. Peering at the museum’s specimens—butterflies, hunks of amber and marble, carved seashells—he felt overwhelmed by the interconnectedness of nature, and humankind’s place within it.

The experience inspired him to write “The Uses of Natural History,” and to articulate a philosophy that put naturalism at the center of intellectual life in a technologically chaotic age—guiding him, along with the collective of writers and radical thinkers known as transcendentalists, to a new spiritual belief system. Through empirical observation of the natural world, Emerson believed, anyone could become “a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of our condition”—finding agency, individuality, and wonder in a mechanized age.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

The NBA Finals are tied at one game apiece, and if you’re not already watching, you still have time to tune in. The Denver Nuggets are vying for their first title in franchise history. Hardly anybody expected their opponents, the No. 8 seed Miami Heat, to make it this far, but their star, Jimmy Butler, is one of the greatest competitors in all of basketball. He’s going up against the mesmerizing Jamal Murray and the two-time MVP Nikola Jokić, who, despite his 6-foot-11-inch stature, can dribble and pass like a guard. Game 3 is Wednesday, and the series will go to at least five (hopefully more).

— John

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Real-life Ron DeSantis was here, finally. In the fidgety flesh; in Iowa, South Carolina, and, in this case, New Hampshire. Not some distant Sunshine State of potential or idealized Donald Trump alternative or voice in the far-off static of Twitter Spaces. But an actual human being interacting with other human beings, some 200 of them, packed into an American Legion hall in the town of Rochester.

“Okay, smile, close-up,” an older woman told the Florida governor, trying to pull him in for another photo. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, had just finished a midday campaign event, and the governor was now working a quick rope line—emphasis on quick and double emphasis on working. The fast-talking first lady is much better suited to this than her halting husband. He smiled for the camera like the dentist had just asked him to bite down on a blob of putty; like he was trying to make a mold, or to fit one. It was more of a cringe than a grin.

“Governor, I have a lot of relatives in Florida,” the next selfie guy told him. Everybody who meets DeSantis has relatives in Florida or a time-share on Clearwater Beach or a bunch of golf buddies who retired to the Villages. “Wow, really?” DeSantis said.

He was trying. But this did not look fun for him.

Retail politicking was never DeSantis’s gift. Not that it mattered much before, in the media-dominated expanse of Florida politics, where DeSantis has proved himself an elite culture warrior and troller of libs. DeSantis was reelected by 19 points last November. He calls himself the governor of the state “where woke goes to die,” which he believes will be a model for his presidency of the whole country, a red utopia in his own image.

[From the May 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

What does the on-paper promise of DeSantis look like in practice? DeSantis has performed a number of these in-person chores in recent days, after announcing his presidential campaign on May 24 in a glitchy Twitter Spaces appearance with Elon Musk.

As I watched him complete his rounds in New Hampshire on Thursday—visits to a VFW hall, an Elks Club, and a community college, in addition to the American Legion post—the essential duality of his campaign was laid bare: DeSantis is the ultimate performative politician when it comes to demonstrating outrage and “kneecapping” various woke abuses—but not so much when it comes to the actual in-person performance of politics.

The campaign billed his appearance in Rochester as a “fireside chat.” (The outside temperature was 90 degrees, and there was no actual fire.) The governor and first lady also held fireside chats this week at a welding shop in Salix, Iowa, and at an event space in Lexington, South Carolina. The term conjures the great American tradition started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Those were scary times—grim visages of malnourished kids and food riots and businessmen selling pencils on the street. FDR’s cozy evenings around the radio hearth were meant to project comfort and avuncular authority.

Sitting on gray armchairs onstage in Rochester—Casey cross-legged and Ron man-spread—the DeSanti reassured their audience that the Florida governor was the candidate best equipped to protect Americans from contemporary threats no less serious than stock-market crashes and bank closures. He was focused on a distinct set of modern menaces: “woke indoctrination” and “woke militaries” and “woke mind viruses” and “woke mobs” that endanger every institution of American life. He used woke more than a dozen times at each event (I counted).

Also, DeSantis said he’s a big supporter of “the death penalty for pedophiles” (applause); reminded every audience that he’d sent dozens of migrants to “beautiful Martha’s Vineyard” (bigger applause); and promised to end “this Faucian dystopia” around COVID once and for all (biggest applause).

Also, George Soros (boo).

[Mark Leibovich: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis]

Casey talked at each New Hampshire stop about the couple’s three young children, often in the vein of how adorably naughty they are—how they write on the walls of the governor’s mansion with permanent markers and leave crayon stains on the carpets. Ron spoke in personal terms less often, but when he did, it was usually to prove that he understands the need to protect kids from being preyed upon by the various and ruthless forces of wokeness. One recurring example on Thursday involved how outrageous it is that in certain swim competitions, a girl might wind up being defeated by a transgender opponent. “I’m particularly worried about this as the father of two daughters,” DeSantis told the Rochester crowd.

This played well in the room full of committed Republicans and likely primary voters, as it does on Fox. Clearly, this is a fraught and divisive issue, but one that’s been given outsized attention in recent years, especially in relation to the portion of the population it directly affects. By comparison, DeSantis never mentioned gun violence, the leading cause of death for children in this country, including many in his state (the site of the horrific Parkland massacre of 2018, the year before he became governor). DeSantis readily opts for the culture-war terrain, ignoring the rest, pretty much everywhere he goes.

His whole act can feel like a clunky contrivance—a forced persona railing against phony or hyped-up outrages. He can be irascible. Steve Peoples, a reporter for the Associated Press, approached DeSantis after a speech at a VFW hall in Laconia and asked the governor why he hadn’t taken any questions from the audience. “Are you blind?” DeSantis snapped at Peoples. “Are you blind? Okay, so, people are coming up to me, talking to me [about] whatever they want to talk to me about.”

No one in the room cared about this little outburst besides the reporters (who sent a clip of it bouncing across social media within minutes). And if the voters did care, it would probably reflect well on DeSantis in their eyes, demonstrating his willingness to get in the media’s face.

[Yair Rosenberg: DeSantis is making the same mistake Democrats did in 2020]

Journalists who managed to get near DeSantis this week unfailingly asked him about Donald Trump, the leading GOP candidate. In Rochester, NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez wondered about the former president’s claim that he would eliminate the federal government’s “administrative state” within six months of a second term. “Why didn’t you do it when you had four years?” DeSantis shot back.

In general, though, DeSantis didn’t mention Trump without being prompted—at least not explicitly. He drew clear, if barely veiled, contrasts. “I will end the culture of losing in the Republican Party,” he vowed Thursday night in Manchester. Unsaid, obviously, is that the GOP has underperformed in the past three national elections—and no one is more to blame than Trump and the various MAGA disciples he dragged into those campaigns.

“Politics is not about building a brand,” DeSantis went on to say. What matters is competence and conviction, not charisma. “My husband will never back down!” Casey added in support. In other words: He is effective and he will follow through and actually do real things, unlike you-know-who.

“Politics is not about entertainment,” DeSantis said in all of his New Hampshire speeches, usually at the end. He might be trying to prove as much.