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

After a chaotic summer of air travel in 2022, flights have been running relatively smoothly this year. But then storms in the Northeast this past week caused a series of flight cancellations. Here’s what to expect as the country heads into a projected record-high travel weekend—and how to keep your cool amidst air-travel unknowns.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Being alive is bad for your health. Elite multiculturalism is over. Dave Grohl’s monument to mortality How to lose a century of progress

First Snag of the Season

An airport concourse after midnight is not a happy place: The travelers—bone-tired, their anticipation curdled into boredom and despair—rest their weary heads on benches and jackets. The restaurants have turned off their lights; the newsstands have pulled down their grates; the bars have flipped up their stools for the night.

Until this week, it appeared as if many Americans would be spared such indignities this travel season. Flight cancellations were down from last summer, and Memorial Day weekend went off with few travel hitches. After a summer of pain last year, when airlines and airports buckled under demand from travelers, and chaos last winter, when weather and tech problems snowballed into a yuletide imbroglio, things were going pretty smoothly.

In June of last year, 2.7 percent of flights were canceled, whereas 1.9 percent of flights have been canceled this month so far (that number may change after cancellations today), Kathleen Bangs, a spokesperson for FlightAware, a company that tracks flights, told me. Although that difference might not sound like a lot, Bangs said, travelers feel the difference. She added that delays have gone up slightly, from 24 percent last June to 26 percent this June.

Then, last weekend, storms hit the Northeast. Cancellations and delays spiked as weather issues collided with established staffing and operational issues. “Last weekend was the first real snag of the season,” Bangs said. Airlines canceled thousands of flights this week—more than 8 percent of scheduled flights were canceled on Tuesday, according to FlightAware—ahead of what is projected to be the busiest Fourth of July travel weekend on record. “Did weather start it? Yes. Why it caused a cascade for them, we just don’t know,” Bangs added.

Various parties are pointing fingers. United, which canceled more than 3,000 flights this past week, according to FlightAware, was quick to blame the Federal Aviation Administration for some of its woes. “The FAA frankly failed us this weekend,” United’s CEO reportedly wrote in a memo to staff. In an email, United told me that it is ready for the holiday weekend and is seeing far fewer delays today than in previous days this week.

“There’s shared responsibility between Mother Nature, the airline’s own actions, and the FAA,” Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst for Atmosphere Research Group, told me. “The FAA is not the sole cause and shouldn’t be made out to be the bogeyman.” It doesn’t help matters that we are at the end of a calendar month, when pilots and flight attendants may be running up against their maximum flying hours, he added.

Indeed, the FAA is currently quite understaffed—though it has said that it did not have staffing issues along the East Coast on Monday or Tuesday of this week. The FAA told me that it hires controllers annually and is hiring 1,500 people this year, adding that it recently completed a review of the distribution of controllers. (Republic and Endeavor, a subsidiary of Delta, also saw high rates of cancellations, according to FlightAware. Republic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Delta told me that “as always, Delta and our connection partners work with our partners at the FAA to meet our shared top priority of safety, while running the most efficient operation possible for our customers.”)

The good news is that, after a few rough days, operations were recovering by yesterday. There were fewer flight cancellations that day compared with the ones leading up to it. Things may go okay for the airlines from here—“barring a computer meltdown,” Bangs said—as long as the weather cooperates. She added that even dense smoke could impact visibility and operations. That could remain an issue this summer as fires continue both in the U.S. and Canada.

Travelers cannot control acts of God—if only!—or airline-personnel issues. Indeed, what can be so frustrating about air travel is that so many factors are out of your control. But there are things travelers can do to try to avoid problems—or at least to increase the chances of having a decently comfortable time in the face of all the unknowns.

Bangs told me that if she were flying this weekend, she would try to get on the first flight of the day. “Statistically, there’s such a better chance of that flight not getting canceled,” she said. Harteveldt echoed that advice. If it’s doable for you, Bangs said, it could be worth looking into trying to change your booking to get on an earlier flight—or switching to a direct flight in order to reduce the chance of one leg of a trip messing up connecting flights. Also, download your airline’s app. It’s an easy way to make sure you have up-to-date info and can communicate with the airline in case things go awry.

Some of their other tips came down to preparation and attitude: It might be rough out there. Wake up early, pack light, and have your necessities consolidated in case you need to check a carry-on. Lines may be long at security. Give yourself time, and be flexible.

Bangs’s final tip: Be nice to flight attendants. Bangs, a former pilot, said that many flight attendants are scarred from “air rage” and difficult passenger interactions over the past few years. Though an airplane can be the site of frustration, seat kickers, and nonpotable water, it is also a place of work for people who have been through a lot. Be cool, everyone. And good luck if you’re traveling.

Related:

Air travel is a disaster right now. Here’s why. (From 2022) Air travel is going to be very bad, for a very long time.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s student-debt-relief plan, arguing that it overstepped the Education Department’s authority and required clear approval from Congress. Poor air quality is still affecting American cities, with experts warning that northern summer winds could continue to bring smoke from Canadian wildfires all season. Brazil’s electoral court voted to ban Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for the next eight years on account of making false claims about voting-system integrity.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf solicits readers’ thoughts on affirmative action. The Books Briefing: Anyone looking for a guide to surviving our unstable era should look no further than the work of Eileen Chang, Maya Chung writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Olivia Rodrigo’s big, bloody return The Biden White House is following an ugly Trump precedent. The juicy secrets of everyday life

Culture Break

Bettmann / Getty

Read. Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad expands upon the history of the Black Americans who nurtured their creativity overseas.

Watch. The second season of The Bear (streaming on Hulu) cements it as the rare prestige show that actually succeeds at radical reinvention.

Or check out these 11 undersung TV shows to watch this summer.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you plan to play pickleball this weekend, be careful: Analysts found that pickleball injuries may cost Americans nearly $400 million this year, and picklers appear to be driving up health-care costs.

The sport has grown massively over the past few years and is projected to keep growing. Many people love the sport, and I myself have enjoyed a bit of pickle from time to time. But not everyone is a fan. The game has notably angered many tennis players, and The New York Times reported today that people have been filing lawsuits complaining about the game’s noises. “The most grating and disruptive sound in the entire athletic ecosystem right now may be the staccato pop-pop-pop emanating from America’s rapidly multiplying pickleball courts,” the reporter Andrew Keh writes.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

Last week, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg announced their plans to duke it out in a cage fight. But this potential feud is less important than what it tells us about how Musk is influencing the rules of engagement in Silicon Valley.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The tape of Trump discussing classified documents America’s most popular drug has a puzzling side effect. We finally know why. Goodbye, Ozempic. The Roberts Court draws a line.

A Race to the Bottom

Something strange is happening on Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram.

For years, he posted periodic, classic dad-and-CEO fare: anniversary shots with his wife. Photos of his kids and dog being cute. Meta product announcements.

In recent months, though, Zuckerberg has been posting more about fighting. Not the kind that involves firing back at critics on behalf of his oft-embattled social-media empire, but actual mixed-martial-arts training. Earlier this month, he posted a video of himself tussling with a jiujitsu champion. On Memorial Day, he posted himself in a camouflage flak vest, flushed after an intense army workout. And last week, Zuckerberg and Elon Musk said they were going to have a cage fight. The men apparently have ongoing personal tensions, and Meta is working on building a Twitter competitor. But announcing in public their intent to fight takes things to another level.

If you rolled your eyes at the cage-fight news: fair enough. The idea of two middle-aged executives, each facing an onslaught of business and public-image problems, literally duking it out is a bit on the nose. But the fight itself—and whether or not it happens—is less important than what it tells us about how Musk is reshaping Silicon Valley. Musk is mainstreaming new standards of behavior, and some of his peers are joining him in misguided acts of masculine aggression and populist appeals.

Leaders such as Musk and Zuckerberg (and, to some extent, even their less-bombastic but quite buff peer Jeff Bezos) have lately been striving to embody and project a specific flavor of masculine—and political—strength. As my colleague Ian Bogost wrote last week, “the nerd-CEO’s mighty body has become an apparatus for securing and extending his power.”

The two executives’ cage-fight announcement is “a reflection of a really tight monoculture of Silicon Valley’s most powerful people, most of whom are men,” Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington who researches the tech industry, told me. In other words, the would-be participants embody the industry’s bro culture.

Zuckerberg’s recent interest in waging physical battles marks a departure for the CEO, who a few years ago seemed more interested in emulating someone like Bill Gates, an executive who parlayed his entrepreneurial success into philanthropy, O’Mara added. Zuckerberg has been very famous since he was quite young. His early years at the helm of his social-media empire—“I’m CEO, Bitch” business cards and all—were lightly, and sometimes ungenerously, fictionalized in The Social Network by the time he was in his mid-20s. He has consciously curated his image in the years since.

For a long time, Zuckerberg led Facebook as a “product guy,” focusing on the tech while letting Sheryl Sandberg lead the ads business and communications. But overlapping crises—disinformation, Cambridge Analytica, antitrust—after the 2016 election seemingly changed his approach: First, he struck a contrite tone and embarked on a listening tour in 2017.The response was not resoundingly positive. By the following summer, he had hardened his image at the company, announcing that he was gearing up to be a “wartime” leader. He has struck various stances in public over the years, but coming to blows with business rivals has not been among them—yet.

Musk, meanwhile, has a history of such stunts. At the onset of the war in Ukraine, he tweeted that he would like to battle Vladimir Putin in single combat, and he apparently has ongoing back pain linked to a past fight with a sumo wrestler. That Zuckerberg is playing along shows that the rules of engagement have changed.

Musk has incited a race to the bottom for Silicon Valley leaders. As he becomes more powerful, some  other executives are quietly—and not so quietly—following his lead, cracking down on dissent, slashing jobs, and attempting to wrestle back power from employees. Even as Musk has destabilized Twitter and sparked near-constant controversy in his leadership of the platform, some peers have applauded him. He widened the scope of what CEOs could do, giving observers tacit permission to push boundaries. “He’s someone who’s willing to do things in public that are transgressing the rules of the game,” O’Mara said.

During the first few months of Musk’s Twitter reign, few executives were willing to praise him on the record—though Reed Hastings, then a co-CEO of Netflix, did call Musk “the bravest, most creative person on the planet” in November. A few months later, Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, told Insider that executives around Silicon Valley have been asking, “Do they need to unleash their own Elon within them?” The Washington Post reported this past Saturday that Zuckerberg was undergoing an “Elonization” as he attempts to appeal to Musk’s base, the proposed cage fight being the latest event in his rebrand. (Facebook declined to comment. A request for comment to Twitter’s press email was returned with a poop emoji auto-responder.)

Whether or when the cage match will actually happen is unclear. Musk’s mother, for her part, has lobbied against it. But whether Zuckerberg unleashes his “inner Elon” in a cage or not, both men are seeking to grab attention distinct from their business woes—and succeeding.

The tech industry has long offered wide latitude to bosses, especially male founders. Musk didn’t invent the idea of acting out in public. But he has continued to move the goalposts for all of his peers.

In a video posted on Twitter last week, Dana White, the president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, told TMZ that he had spoken with both men and that they were “absolutely dead serious” about fighting. He added something that I believe gets to the heart of the matter: “Everybody would want to see it.”

Musk responded with two fire emojis.

Related:

The nerds are bullies now. Elon Musk revealed what Twitter always was.

Today’s News

In an audio recording obtained by CNN, former President Donald Trump appears to acknowledge keeping classified national-security documents. Chicago’s air quality momentarily became the worst among major cities in the world after Canadian wildfire smoke blanketed the region. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which took effect today, expands protections for pregnant workers, requiring employers to accommodate pregnancy-related medical conditions.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers weigh in on the public debates they would want to witness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Wild Horizons / Universal Images Group / Getty

Who’s the Cutest Little Dolphin? Is It You?

By Ed Yong

Across human cultures and languages, adults talk to babies in a very particular way. They raise their pitch and broaden its range, while also shortening and repeating their utterances; the latter features occur even in sign language. Mothers use this exaggerated and musical style of speech (which is sometimes called “motherese”), but so do fathers, older children, and other caregivers. Infants prefer listening to it, which might help them bond with adults and learn language faster.

But to truly understand what baby talk is for, and how it evolved, we need to know which other animals use it, if any.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How to escape “the worst possible timeline.” The Harry and Meghan podcasts we’ll never get to hear My hometown is getting a $100 billion dose of Bidenomics.

Culture Break

Macall Polay / Columbia Pictures

Read. “The Posting,” a new short story by Sara Freeman, explores the implosion of a marriage. Then, read an interview about her writing process.

Watch. No Hard Feelings, Jennifer Lawrence’s R-rated rom-com, is in theaters now. And thank goodness for it.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last week, my Daily colleague Tom Nichols visited us in the New York office (very fun!). We started talking about how delightful and even helpful it can be to write while listening to movie soundtracks. Different songs can complement different writing vibes—during college, for example, I found the frenetic instrumentals of the soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel valuable while writing papers in the library.

So while writing today’s newsletter, I fired up the soundtrack to The Social Network in my AirPods. I recommend you do the same the next time you need to enter deep-focus mode. It was on theme, yes. But it’s also a great album in its own right; the composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won an Oscar for Best Original Score when the movie came out. Listen to its elegant and moody tracks, then take in the cover of the Radiohead song “Creep,” sung by a girls’ choir, in the movie’s perfect trailer.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

Today, the hosts of our podcast How to Talk to People offer advice on making small talk, finding connection, and prioritizing friendships in a world that doesn’t always put non-romantic relationships first.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Has COVID’s patient zero finally been named? The elegant, utterly original comedy of Alex Edelman The nerds are bullies now. India is not Modi, we once said. I wish I still believed it.

Advice, Not Homework

The title of the most recent season of The Atlantic’s How To podcast, How to Talk to People, was sort of a joke—but not entirely, the podcast’s host, Julie Beck, and its producer, Rebecca Rashid, told me recently. Talking to people is not as easy as it might sound. For instance: How does a person make small talk without fainting from awkwardness? And how can we expand our social connections in a society that’s not exactly built for meeting new people? I chatted with Julie and Becca about this season of the podcast, which wraps up next week, and about the value of focusing on the human relationships that tend to get ignored.

Isabel Fattal: Have either of you taken any advice from the podcast back to your own life? Have you met an acquaintance on a train and said, “It’s been so great talking to you. I’m going to go read my book now”?

Julie Beck: I have not been brave enough to use that line yet, but I also don’t know if the situation has arisen. I definitely feel out of my body when I’m doing small talk sometimes now. I have the meta commentary of, Am I doing a good job?

Becca Rashid: I’ve learned from the show more about boundaries for people who don’t always want to be spoken to. I’m the person striking up a conversation with everyone—at cafés I work at, the bus driver, anyone I see consistently enough.

Julie: You took us to your favorite boba shop, and as we walked in, they were like, “Becca!”

When I think about what I’ve learned, it’s less about me changing my habits than just thinking about community a little bit differently. I'm always beating myself up for not reaching out enough or not doing X, Y, or Z. I tend to think, If I was just more diligent and better and did all of these things, then we would have a beautiful, interconnected, happy community utopia. I’ve learned about balancing the reality of life and people’s different needs and competing priorities. Not everyone is going to have the same priorities as you, and that’s fine. I’ve learned to notice what you have and be grateful for that, and not always try to optimize every facet of how you approach your relationships.

Isabel: I love that, because I think, in our self-help-focused era, you can listen to a podcast like this and think, Oh, this podcast is going to help me optimize every moment of my life. It’s good to remind ourselves that’s not the point.

Julie: Right. We want to give you advice, but we don’t want to give you homework.

Isabel: Julie, after conducting 100 interviews with groups of friends for your “Friendship Files” series, you landed on the six forces that fuel friendship. Has this podcast changed your view of those six forces at all?

Julie: I do think all six forces came across in a lot of these conversations—particularly intention, being deliberate and putting effort in, and also grace, which I think is what we were just talking about in terms of “stop optimizing.” One question I had for myself is whether obligation should be added. I think that word has a really negative connotation: It’s something that you don’t want to do, something you are burdened by. But that was a big thread of conversation throughout this podcast, about how so much of friendship culture in America is designed around not putting obligations on one another.

I don’t think we ever used this, because I felt—and continue to feel, even in this moment—like a cheeseball, pretentious person. But there is a C. S. Lewis quote I really love—he wrote a letter to his friend after his wife died, and reflected on having a lot of free time he wished he didn’t have. He wrote, “One doesn’t realise in early life that the price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy one must be tied.”

I don’t actually think of all obligations as a bad thing. In some ways, the commitments that we make to our friends and our neighbors fuel our happiness.

Isabel: Is there anything else you were hoping to discuss that we didn’t get to?

Julie: Just that Becca and I really became friends while we made the podcast.

Becca: I’m a big “food is my love language” person. Julie has brought me food at work, but she’s also brought food to my house. I think that was the moment I realized we were true friends, Julie. For me, it was the reception of the food.

Related:

How to make small talk The six forces that fuel friendship

Listen to the full How to Talk to People series here.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration’s immigration-enforcement guidelines, which prioritize the arrest of undocumented people who have serious criminal records, are deemed threats to national security, or recently crossed the border.    Starbucks workers in Seattle launched a strike, alleging that Pride-month decorations are being banned in some stores, which Starbucks has denied. Employees of more than 150 locations plan to participate over the next week. Temporary I-95 lanes opened today in northeast Philadelphia after a tanker-truck fire closed a stretch of the interstate earlier this month.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: You should try listening to your literature, Emma Sarappo writes. Audiobooks are less demanding than their printed counterparts—and maybe that’s a good thing.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

More From The Atlantic

Photos of the week: Mormon crickets, dragon boats, floating concert “Generative AI should not replace thinking at my university.”

Culture Break

NBC / Getty

Read. These nine works of serious literature will also make you laugh.

Watch. The Truman Show (available on Hulu, Prime Video, and other streaming platforms) offers powerful insight into the complicities of modern life.

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

Or play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’ve only got time for one episode of the How to Talk to People podcast, I’d recommend this one about the two married couples who bought a home together (but, as they find themselves frequently clarifying, are not swingers).

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

An expedition to see the remains of the Titanic turned into a tragedy. How did it go so wrong?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Why not Whitmer? The ghost of a once era-defining show How the vape shops won Go ahead, try to explain milk.

Lost Contact

The Titan, a submersible vessel carrying passengers to see the ruins of the Titanic, lost contact with its support ship during a dive on Sunday. The ensuing search-and-rescue mission in the Atlantic Ocean covered some 10,000 square miles. This afternoon, OceanGate Expeditions, the tourism and research company running the voyage, announced that it believed that all of the passengers “have sadly been lost.” The U.S. Coast Guard said soon after that debris from the vessel had been found on the ocean floor, about 1,600 feet from the bow of the Titanic.

The search-and-rescue effort had become a race against the clock, as the vessel was believed to have had about four days’ worth of oxygen on board. Five people were on the expedition: Stockton Rush, OceanGate’s chief executive; Hamish Harding, a British businessman and explorer; Paul-Henri Nargeolet, who had traveled to the Titanic site more than 35 times; Shahzada Dawood, a British-Pakistani businessman; and Suleman Dawood, Shahzada’s 19-year-old son. Suleman was a business student in Glasgow.

Over the past week, alarming reports about the vessel have emerged. As my colleague Marina Koren wrote in a story today about the tragic ending to Sunday’s expedition:

Most concerning of all, it is not clear whether the Titan was inspected for safety by outside experts. In 2018, dozens of industry experts warned OceanGate that if the company didn’t put the Titan through an independent safety assessment, its Titanic expeditions could face potentially “catastrophic” problems. Even OceanGate’s own director of marine operations was at the time worried about “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths,” The New York Times reported this week. At least one previous dive had problems too: According to Pogue, a Titan expedition last year got lost on the seafloor for about five hours.

Although officials don’t know what caused the disaster or what regulations might have prevented it, OceanGate’s leaders have argued in the past that innovation can be at odds with safety regulations. In a 2019 blog post, the company wrote, “Bringing an outside entity up to speed on every innovation before it is put into real-world testing is anathema to rapid innovation.” (OceanGate did not respond to a request for comment about safety concerns regarding the Titan.)

As Marina noted today, the space-tourism industry often draws attention to the safety measures of its craft—at least in public. (What the companies do in private is another story, she reminds us.) But by comparison, “OceanGate’s public approach to safety seems almost cavalier, less like modern-day space tourism and more reminiscent of the rushed and occasionally ramshackle efforts of the space race,” she writes. In the 2018 open letter from industry experts, more than three dozen people, including oceanographers and industry experts, warned that the company’s “experimental” approach “would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry.”

What those consequences might be remains to be seen. At the news conference earlier today, John Mauger, a rear admiral of the U.S. Coast Guard, acknowledged that many questions linger about how, when, and why this happened. “That’s going to be, I’m sure, the focus of future review,” he said. “Right now, we’re focused on documenting the scene.”

Related:

The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism How could this have happened?

Today’s News

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is meeting with President Joe Biden for a state visit to discuss new partnerships between the two countries. The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been detained by Russian officials on espionage charges that he denies, lost his appeal against pretrial detention. Tropical Storm Bret is nearing the eastern Caribbean, moving at just below the speeds of a Category 1 hurricane.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf reflects on Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., and the public debates worth having.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

San Antonio, the Spurs, and me Generative AI should not replace thinking at my university.

Culture Break

Listen. Are we just too impatient for baseball? In a new episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin and staff writer Mark Leibovich discuss the MLB’s attempt to save the sport.

Watch. The Bear’s second season (streaming on Hulu) is a radical and profound reinvention.

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

P.S.

Don’t miss Marina’s piece from earlier this week, also linked above in the “Related” section. Marina, who covers science and space exploration, reflected on the parallels—and differences—between space and deep-sea tourism. “The voyage, as grim as it seems now, is one of many treacherous tourism options for the wealthy,” she wrote.

– Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

For more than a week now, Reddit moderators have been using the site’s tools to protest proposed business changes. The stalemate reveals how much power the site’s users have accumulated over the years—and just how much the site depends on its moderators’ free labor.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump seems to be afraid, very afraid. Pixar’s talking blobs are becoming more and more unsatisfying. The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism

Not a Worker, Not a Customer

If you’re looking for pictures of John Oliver, for some reason, I have a recommendation for you: The Reddit group r/pics. For the past several days, the r/pics forum, normally populated with food pictures and nature shots, has featured a steady drumbeat of photos of the comedian: John Oliver with his wife. John Oliver’s face Photoshopped onto Spider-Man’s body. John Oliver at a desk. John Oliver on his show. Indeed, the group’s moderators have forbidden users from posting anything besides John Oliver photos.

This is more than just a fun stunt (though it is pretty fun for observers). It is one of the various creative ways that Reddit moderators have used their authority in recent days to register discontent with proposed changes to Reddit’s business.

For the past 10 days, moderators of thousands of Reddit forums have been protesting the company’s plans to charge third parties to run apps on the site. Last week, nearly 9,000 forums went dark for 48 hours. Some forums remain shut down this week, and others are continuing to disrupt the normal flow of posts through the pipelines of the platform.

The trouble began after, earlier this spring, Reddit said it would start charging some other companies for Application Programming Interface (or API) access. In April, the company framed upcoming changes as an effort to ensure that it would be compensated when AI companies scraped the site’s reams of user-generated content. More recently, changes have meant that some beloved apps that make the site easier to use will be forced to shut down because of prohibitive expenses.

Reddit moderators can be forgiven for resenting changes that might make their lives harder. After all, they do a significant amount of work for free. Reddit’s users, especially power users such as moderators, contribute in a big way to the quality and growth of the platform. They lead and nurture (and police) communities that gather around various interests, such as relationships, parenting, plumbing, or weighing in on whether, in a given situation, a poster is the asshole. The relationship between Reddit and its users is unique. The company places outsize responsibility on its volunteer moderators, but as a result, they also have outsize power—which means that their coordinated actions can cause much disruption on the platform.

Moderators are not paid employees of the site. But they are not always customers, either—though Reddit has a premium tier, many users don’t pay to use the platform. Reddit, like many tech companies that provide free products, runs ads (cue the adage “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”). Now, with its new rules, the company is attempting to monetize the content that users—and particularly moderators—have been generating for free.

By protesting the changes, moderators are reminding Reddit just how much the site needs them—and how much the moderators need third-party tools. “Many Reddit moderators rely on third-party apps in order to do their jobs,” my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany, who reports on internet culture for The Atlantic and recently wrote a great book about online communities and fandom, reminded me this morning. “Without them, they’re rightfully concerned that their forums will be flooded with garbage.”

The API debate has exposed broader fault lines on the site, Fraser Raeburn, a historian and Reddit moderator, told me. He said that Reddit should better acknowledge “the role volunteers play within it, in terms of curating content and keeping Reddit a relatively safe and functional part of the internet.” The moderators of his forum, r/AskHistorians, have restricted posts on their forum as part of the protest. Raeburn said he hopes to see Reddit’s leaders engage constructively with questions and clarify how they will handle the disruptions that come from losing some add-ons.

So far, things have been fractious. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told NBC last week that moderators were like “landed gentry,” and suggested that he might make changes that would allow users to vote moderators out. (When I asked Reddit for comment on the recent protests, I was directed to a blog post from last week on the API updates.) For now, moderators remain powerful.

Moderated communities are what have made Reddit distinctive as a platform, and as a result, helped it last. As Kaitlyn pointed out, “Reddit’s model of empowering moderators has given the site a much longer shelf life than I think many would have thought possible 10 years ago.”

It’s not easy for a tech company to make a lot of money and make all of its users happy—especially on a platform that has an open-source ethos. For all the talk among VCs and techies about the power of community, Reddit is demonstrating how fraught the community-based model can be. Especially as Reddit eyes a potential IPO, its corporate interests and user needs may clash.

Raeburn told me he wants this resolved so that he can get back to the reason he’s on the site: talking about history. But for now, he marvels at the way that the site’s structure and culture made this type of action possible. “Reddit had to give us a degree of control over the site because they wanted us to do that work for them,” Raeburn said. “Reddit, probably inadvertently, has created the structure for protest to succeed.”

Related:

Reddit is finally facing its legacy of racism. Inside r/relationships, the unbearably human corner of Reddit

Today’s News

A ProPublica report revealed that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had failed to disclose a 2008 luxury fishing trip with a wealthy conservative donor. Alito wrote an op-ed defending himself in The Wall Street Journal. President Joe Biden referred to Xi Jinping as a dictator at a campaign event in California. The Federal Reserve is likely to raise interest rates in the coming months, despite holding them steady last week.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers reflect on how media portrayals can sometimes be at odds with their own life experiences. The Weekly Planet: Car-rental companies are ruining EVs, Saahil Desai writes. Good luck charging your surprise electric rental car.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Indian dissidents have had it with America praising Modi. How deterrence policies create border chaos We’ve been thinking about the internet all wrong. The future of books is audiobooks.

Culture Break

Read. “The Night Before I Leave Home,” a new poem by Elisa Gonzalez.

“my brother gets out of bed at three, having lain down / only a few hours before, and pulls on his jeans, and stubs his toe / on the bed frame”

Watch. I Think You Should Leave (streaming on Netflix) is a comedy series that reveals the absurdity of office culture.

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

Or play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you haven’t already read it, I recommend checking out Kaitlyn’s book Everything I Need I Get From You, which is about the boy band One Direction but also about how fans reshaped the internet. Come for Kaitlyn visiting the spot at the side of the road where Harry Styles threw up; stay for her analysis about how users influenced and created value for major corporations. Also, I now see Beatles fans in a new light.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

Hi, everyone! I’m Lora Kelley, and I am a new writer for the Daily. I’m thrilled to be working with Tom Nichols and the team to bring you the newsletter. I joined The Atlantic in an interesting week for the economy—after two years of runaway inflation, which led the Federal Reserve to crank up interest rates, the government announced on Wednesday that it would be pressing pause on its hikes for now. Today I explore a question that’s dividing economists: Whose fault is inflation, anyway—and why does it matter?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The fake poor bride

Car-rental companies are ruining EVs.

The choice the Philippines didn’t want to make

America can take a breath: Inflation is finally cooling off. It’s now hovering at about 4 percent, according to Consumer Price Index (CPI) data released earlier this week, down from the 9.1 percent peak in June of last year. But the Fed is saying that it would like inflation to be closer to 2 percent, and that it may raise interest rates again in the future to try to get the country there. Now that inflation has abated (for the moment), discussions have turned to how we got here.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell recently said that rising wages were not the principal driver of inflation. As economists, the media, and laypeople alike try to figure out whom to blame instead, fingers are pointing at the consumers who started spending large amounts of saved dollars and stimulus checks in 2020; at the corporations that have seen juicy profit margins after raising their prices; and, in Sweden, even at … Beyoncé?

Trying to understand the factors that fueled inflation is important, because whom we blame for inflation also shapes what we do about it. If inflation is caused primarily by overheated consumer demand, then it makes sense for the Fed to quell spending by hiking interest rates. But if corporations, rather than consumers, are driving inflation by raising their prices, then other tools may make more sense.

One conventional explanation is that widespread consumer spending started in 2020 and persisted in the years that followed, causing demand to explode and prices to spike. Some economists have called the influx of post-lockdown spending on goods and travel “revenge spending,” and recent data show that it is receding after two years.

The Fed has consistently raised interest rates in its past 10 meetings in part to get consumers to stop spending money—and so far, the hikes seem to be working. “The Fed has done the thing you would expect the Fed to do,” Chris Conlon, an economist at NYU, told me. “Right now, it looks like raising rates is starting to cool demand and temper expectations.” (Pulling this lever is imprecise, however, and can cause pain: High interest rates have triggered layoffs, especially in tech, and made it harder for a lot of people to afford big-ticket purchases such as houses and cars.)

Although CPI data show clear patterns in consumer spending and demand, another explanation, that corporations are fueling inflation by raising prices in order to increase profits, has been gaining steam in recent months. Some economists are taking a closer look at the idea that corporations’ profit margins could be playing a role in keeping inflation high—especially after recent earnings calls in which corporations reported that profits are up even as they are selling fewer goods.

Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, argues that a host of geopolitical factors have provided “cover” for firms to raise prices. Weber refers to the phenomenon as “sellers’ inflation,” but others call this “greedflation,” “excuseflation,” and “profit-led inflation.” Companies wrestled back pricing power earlier in the pandemic—and consumers, seeing high prices at the gas station and everywhere else, came to expect higher prices. Now, some ask, are companies doing more than simply responding to costs, and instead just ramping up prices to pad their margins—and in the process, feeding inflation like a pandemic baker feeding sourdough starter?

“If you believe that big corporations are the ones who are pushing up prices,” Rakeen Mabud, the chief economist at the progressive nonprofit Groundwork Collaborative, told me, “then there are a lot more tools in our toolbox” to address the issue. “We can go way beyond the Fed,” she added. Those tools, she told me, include tax policies that target excess profits or incentivize productive investment in firms. “We’re really seeing a big rethink of some orthodox understandings of inflation and its causes,” she said.

Conlon, however, is interested in possible factors beyond greed that may be pushing companies to raise prices. “Strong demand will also generate rising prices, rising profits, higher output,” he told me. He and his colleagues recently published a paper that found that, from 2018 to 2022, there was no correlation between the companies whose markups have risen the most and the industries in which prices have risen the quickest.

The exact causes and dynamics of our current inflationary moment may take time to unravel—Conlon predicted that in a few years, we may have more information about how companies behaved these past few years. These data will be worth a close look, especially if shocks to the economy continue apace in years to come. It’s become a bit of a cliché to say that we are living in unprecedented times. But a rash of recent, intersecting crises—supply-chain snarls, the war in Ukraine, elevated gas prices, bird flu—did scramble consumer spending, leading companies to raise prices over the past few years. Things may stay strange. Understanding what happened could inform how we respond to future shocks.

I will leave you with some good news, after all this talk of disaster: Global inflation is not all Beyoncé’s fault, though Swedish economists said this week that her Renaissance tour in Stockholm caused a surge in local prices—“It’s quite astonishing for a single event,” one economist told the Financial Times. One person, even an amazing one, can’t single-handedly cause inflation. But her music can probably alleviate some of the pain of thinking through all of this.

Today’s News

After a multiyear investigation into George Floyd’s murder, the Justice Department released a report finding frequent instances of excessive force by Minneapolis police officers, and unlawful discrimination against Black and Native American people.

The gunman who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 was convicted by a federal jury.

Several federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Energy, were affected by a global hacking campaign, according to officials.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman reflects on the powerful weirdness of Cormac McCarthy.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

What youth activists do that adults can’t

What does it mean to be Latino?

Why are so many women being told their hormones are out of whack?

Netflix

Watch. The final season of the sparkly teen comedy Never Have I Ever, on Netflix, cleverly solves TV’s college problem.

Listen. New albums by Janelle Monáe, Jake Shears, and Jessie Ware usher in the age of pleasure.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I know I cannot compete with Tom Nichols when it comes to 1980s movie references. For everyone’s sake, I will not try. But I did happen to watch a film from 1987 during my time off between jobs that I liked very much. The Éric Rohmer movie, whose title translates from French to Boyfriends and Girlfriends, is a New Wave romantic comedy about, yes, boyfriends and girlfriends. But to my pleasant surprise, it was also about jobs, and how a new class of suburban young people was fitting work into their lives. Against a backdrop of pools and excellent outfits, the characters discuss bureaucracy, commuting into Paris, and having or not having a boss. I think a lot about “the future of work,” so it was fun to dip into the past of work too.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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

A growing body of research complicates the question of social media’s effects on teens. But that hasn’t stopped many adults from perpetual worrying about its presumed perils.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Jack Smith’s backup option Trump can’t bluster his way through court. The gross spectacle of murder fandom

Grown-People Lore

More than half a decade has passed since the psychologist Jean Twenge asked, in a viral Atlantic feature, whether smartphones had “destroyed” the generation we’ve since anointed as Gen Z. In the intervening years, asking that question has become a popular pastime, a way to fill the uncomfortable silences between other societal crises (of which there have been plenty). Yet despite the years of hand-wringing over the presumed perils of young people’s use of smartphones—and social media, in particular—a growing body of research complicates the equation.

Said equation was never exactly straightforward in the first place. Even last month’s high-profile advisory on social media and youth mental health, from the U.S. surgeon general, acknowledged both negative and positive effects of young people’s connectivity through digital platforms. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany put it in a recent article, “The results have continually been mixed: Screens are ubiquitous, and they’re personal.”

If the science is so tough to pin down, why is the panic so widespread? Blame that common menace of seemingly unsolvable equations: too many variables.

Consider the research on smartphone use by adults. In terms of mental-health correlates, studies have found a similarly mixed bag as they have for kids and teens. Such uneven findings point toward the need to ask more, and perhaps different, questions about the technological, sociocultural, and material factors behind people’s reported states of mind, and perhaps hone in on areas of overlap. The takeaway might then evolve from “social media causes anxiety and depression” to, for example, “social-media content featuring people having rewarding experiences such as fun and friendship can worsen symptoms of anxiety.” But though that logic is true across the board, when adults are the research subject group in question, such nuance is likelier to enter the picture than when observers are probing the trouble with young people today—a conversation rife with conflated correlations and causations.

Then there’s the X factor of what I’ll diplomatically call “grown-people lore.” Those of us old enough to remember navigating jobs and social lives before everyone carried around a tiny pocket computer are wont to idealize that now-improbable-seeming before time, often forgetting that it came with its own inconveniences and anxieties. We also forget the panics that pervaded adults’ conversations during our coming-of-age, which may have differed in their content but otherwise echoed the tenor of current social-media debates. (In my late-1990s preadolescence, for instance, there was much angst over the potential impact of music lyrics on young people’s mental health, and serious debate as to whether the work of artists such as Marilyn Manson increased teens’ susceptibility to violent behavior.)

Nostalgia colors perspective, and all but certainly shapes widespread hypotheses of the clear and present dangers young people face. Because of this, adults across generations, and in every day and age, have demonstrated a knack for neglecting to apply the lessons of prior eras’ panics to the present moment. Today’s Gen X and Millennial parents fretting about their children’s social-media use may or may not be comforted to learn that, according to some studies, the overconsumption of TV and video games that marked many of their late-20th-century childhoods likely had a comparable impact on their tender, developing brains—for better and for worse.

This is not to diminish the real risks of excess social-media use on young people. A pronounced spike in teen mental illness neatly aligns with the dawn of the smartphone age—or, as the social psychologist and Atlantic contributor Jonathan Haidt calls it, “the transition to phone-based childhoods.” Parents and teachers see the ramifications firsthand: shortened attention spans, distractibility, strained interpersonal relationships, and, yes, elevated rates of depression and anxiety disorders, especially among girls.

Many young people are wary of tech dependency too. Their concerns, however, show a wider scope of analysis than those addressed in today’s social-media-dominated discussions, revealing a desire to find paths to a peaceful coexistence with digital tools, and also reflecting real introspection, wisdom, and resilience. This generation may indeed face hazards that their predecessors did not. But the evidence certainly seems to suggest that they’re far from a cohort “destroyed.”

Related:

No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens. Get phones out of schools now.

Today’s News

Politico reported that former President Donald Trump raised more than $2 million at his first major campaign fundraiser of the season, hours after his arraignment in Florida, according to a source familiar with the campaign.   The Southern Baptist Convention voted to uphold the expulsion of two churches for having women pastors.    A fishing boat carrying migrants sank off the coast of Greece. At least 78 have died, and more are feared missing.  

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: French people are fighting over giant pools of water, Marion Renault reports.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Focus Features

Asteroid City Is Wes Anderson at His Best

By David Sims

I am here, hat in hand, to admit that I underestimated Wes Anderson. I’ve enjoyed the filmmaker’s work for many years—his methodical aesthetic, the subject of a thousand weak parodies, might be the most recognizable in moviemaking right now. But in the past decade or so, I struggled to excavate much deeper meaning beneath Anderson’s fine-tuned flair, and began to worry that he was disappearing inside his own eccentricities. Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch, in particular, seemed like charming, flimsy confections. His new film, Asteroid City, is a vigorous rebuke to that very critique. It pairs his inimitable visual elegance with an impassioned argument about the power of storytelling. And it’s a reminder that Anderson remains one of cinema’s best.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Saturn’s frozen moon just got a lot more interesting. Summer vacation is moving indoors. The owners who run teams for the money

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Read. Blood Meridian, one of Cormac McCarthy’s many novels that depicts worlds not built for you and me.

Listen. The podcast If Books Could Kill delves into the airport best sellers that we can’t escape.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’re interested in further exploring the panics and preoccupations of yesteryear, I have two podcasts to recommend: You’re Wrong About (which busts common cultural myths about American life) and You Must Remember This (a series on 20th-century Hollywood and the sensibilities that surround it). Specifically, check out the May 2018 You’re Wrong About episode on the satanic panic of the 1980s and the current, ongoing You Must Remember This series “Erotic 90’s,” which explores the decade’s attitudes toward sex and women, and their treatment in cinema.

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

Donald Trump was arrested and arraigned today—without incident—and he has now pleaded not guilty to 37 charges tied to the alleged mishandling of classified documents. But before we see more possible indictments (from Georgia or the January 6 investigation), Americans should not lose sight of the astonishing charges read to Trump today in Florida.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens. The threat from Trump’s supporters has evolved. The plutocrat vs. the monopoly Toast.

Perhaps former Attorney General William Barr—not a man I am given to quoting approvingly—said it best:

I was shocked by the degree of sensitivity of these documents and how many there were ... and I think the counts under the Espionage Act that he willfully retained those documents are solid counts … If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.

I’m not so sure about the “toast” part. Trump lucked out by drawing Judge Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed and whose last involvement with one of his cases produced a decision so biased in his favor and so poorly reasoned that a federal appeals court—including two more Trump appointees—overturned her ruling in a judicial body slam. And a Florida jury raises the odds that someone in one panel will simply refuse to convict no matter how strong the case. (MAGA emotions are running high: Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon—the beneficiary of a last-minute Trump pardon—reacted to Barr’s comments with a warning: “We’re gonna shove this up your ass, okay?”)

Let’s just say that I will be pleasantly surprised if Trump one day faces anything worse than a few rounds of golf with an ankle monitor. But before the inevitable blizzard of motions and delays and general mayhem, I thought we should review the actual charges in the indictment itself.

First, here’s what the government claims Trump took to Florida:

The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.

Remember, no one on the Trump team is really disputing this. Some Republicans, in a desperate struggle with reality, are suggesting that Trump did nothing wrong, but Trump—who cannot stop talking—says he had the right to take anything he wanted, especially after rendering the documents harmless using the Kreskin Declassification Method.

But perhaps the materials were at least in a safe place:

Between January 2021 and August 2022, The Mar-a-Lago Club hosted more than 150 social events, including weddings, movie premieres, and fundraisers that together drew tens of thousands of guests.

Ah. But Trump has a Secret Service detail; could they help protect the documents?

[The Secret Service] was not responsible for the protection of TRUMP's boxes or their contents. TRUMP did not inform the Secret Service that he was storing boxes containing classified documents at The Mar-a-Lago Club.

Oh.

Meanwhile, Trump’s aides—including his alleged co-conspirator, Walt Nauta—were moving this stuff around. (Nauta was indicted on six counts, including obstruction and making false statements, and he has not yet entered a plea; he requested an extension on his arraignment, now set for June 27.) When some of the boxes toppled over, Nauta apparently took a picture of classified material:

On December 7, 2021, NAUTA found several of TRUMP’s boxes fallen and their contents spilled onto the floor of the Storage Room, including a document marked “SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY,” which denoted that the information in the document was releasable only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance consisting of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. NAUTA texted Trump Employee 2, “I opened the door and found this …” NAUTA also attached two photographs he took of the spill. Trump Employee 2 replied, “Oh no oh no,” and “I’m sorry potus had my phone.” One of the photographs NAUTA texted to Trump Employee 2 is depicted below with the visible classified information redacted.

The only thing missing here is “Yakety Sax” as a soundtrack.

But perhaps Trump misunderstood or didn’t realize what he had, and he wanted to cooperate with the government to get the papers back where they belong? Unfortunately, one of Trump’s own lawyers made sure to memorialize Trump’s comments on that issue—because lawyers, despite the Stringer Bell Rule, know when to protect themselves by taking notes:

Well what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?

Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here? Well look isn’t it better if there are no documents?

In one of the more widely publicized moments described in the indictment, Trump was apparently recorded, during a meeting with a writer working on a book (who was accompanied by his publisher) and two of Trump’s staff, saying that he had a U.S. war plan against a foreign nation (read: Iran) in his hand. He is recorded as admitting both that the document is classified and that he no longer has the power to declassify it. But for those of us who have worked with classified information, Smith adds an important detail:

At the time of this exchange, the writer, the publisher, and TRUMP’s two staff members did not have security clearances or any need-to-know any classified information about a plan of attack on Country A.

If this happened, Trump released classified information to people who should not see classified information.

This incident is particularly galling because one of the president’s former attorneys, Robert Ray, has been arguing that although the charges in the indictment are serious, they don’t show evidence of damage to U.S. national security. This is a risible claim: No one, at this point, can say with any confidence whether American national security has or has not been damaged. We do not live in a movie where intelligence leaks produce clear and instant disasters.

But more to the point, even Ray admitted that the government doesn’t need to prove such harm; that’s not how any of this works. Trump faces 31 counts of “willful retention of national defense information,” not some notional charge of “actually damaging American security in some obvious way.” As a former Defense Department employee, I can only imagine what would have happened had I spirited boxes of classified information to my home and then, after my arrest, said, “Well, sure, I took it, but there’s no evidence I’ve hurt national security. At least not yet.”

Donald Trump is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, it will likely be a long time before we find out if our justice system is capable of Dropcapholding a former president to account. But if these charges were leveled against any other American citizen, they would be, in Bill Barr’s words, toast.

Related:

Will Trump get a speedy trial? This indictment is different. Today’s News Twenty-two U.S. service members were injured in a helicopter accident in northeast Syria. The novelist Cormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89. New York City Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell announced her resignation after 18 months in the role. Dispatches Up for Debate: Young people, parents, and educators reflect on the potential hazards of smartphones for children.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Rita Harper / eyevine / Redux

Killer Mike’s Critique of Wokeness

By Spencer Kornhaber

Killer Mike is a man of contradictions. He has campaigned for Bernie Sanders and rapped about celebrating Ronald Reagan’s death; he also supports gun ownership and speaks warmly about Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Years ago, he renounced the Christian faith he was raised with, but his first solo album in a decade, Michael—whose cover is a childhood photo of Mike, adorned with devil horns and a halo—is laden with gospel choirs and biblical references. “You don’t have to pick a side with me,” the 48-year-old said over Zoom, amid tokes from a joint. “You gonna go to church with me. You gonna go to the Blue Flame with me.”

That flexibility has, at times, invited controversy. Last year, a HuffPost column referred to the rapper as “more politically dangerous than Kanye West” because he’d praised Kemp’s outreach to Black constituents while the incumbent governor supported policies that Democrats say make it harder for those constituents to vote. Though many of his songs envision violent revolution, he went viral for asking protesters not to burn buildings during the George Floyd protests, leading some commentators to accuse him of playing to too many sides.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Beatlemania through Paul McCartney’s camera You don’t have to cremate your cat. Culture Break Al Levine / NBC Universal / Getty

Read. “Fieldnotes,” a new poem by Zoe Hitzig.

“You could tell by the gait, the way the body moved, and / when, and how, they approached.”

Listen. The Hans and Franz episodes of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast remind us that a very stupid premise can make for the most hilarious movie.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Summer is here (pretty much), and I have begun to dive into books. I’m now done with the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris’s new book, The Big Break. If you ask me what it’s about, I will wave my hands at the hot mess of American politics and say, “All this,” but it’s actually a series of wonderfully rendered portraits of the people, as the subtitle puts it, who are “the gamblers, party animals and true believers trying to win in Washington while America loses its mind.” It’s my favorite kind of book about politics: informative but fun.

If you want a taste of it, the Post ran an excerpt a few months ago about the rise and fall of Sean McElwee, a 30-ish political operative. It’s a compelling read, and in one of his final conversations with Terris, McElwee sums up everything that can make a young person’s head spin in Our Nation’s Capital:  “You know the craziest thing?” McElwee says. “Before all this, I really thought everyone liked me.”

I’m enjoying the book, and you might too—if only because it will make you glad you don’t work in Washington.

— Tom

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

Former President Donald Trump, along with one of his aides, has been indicted for federal crimes involving highly sensitive national-security documents. Trump and his enablers are already trying to brush the charges away as the result of a witch hunt over a minor issue, but this indictment shows why Trump was, and remains, a threat to national security.

Defiant Recklessness

Special Counsel Jack Smith has successfully petitioned to unseal the indictment of Donald Trump and his aide Walt Nauta on multiple charges revolving around Trump’s removal of classified material from the White House and his belligerent refusal to return them. The charges include making false statements, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding and concealing records, and willful retention of national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act.

When Trump learned of the indictment yesterday, he and his devoted coterie of Republican apologists, including House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, got right to work trying to minimize the charges as a politically motivated “weaponization” of the law. Even Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who (at least in theory) is running against Trump, felt the need to side with the most notorious Florida Man now facing justice. As my colleague David Frum notes, this is about as sincere as the grief at a Mafia funeral, but the fact that DeSantis and others feel the need to placate such paranoia is indicative of how unhinged the GOP base has become.

Smith, however, isn’t pussyfooting around: The charges—38 of them—are a big deal. And before the GOP gaslighting reaches supernova levels, let’s also bear in mind that what Trump actually did is a big deal too. He claimed that he declassified, by fiat, boxes of classified information, and then appears to have left all of that material sitting in ballrooms, bedrooms, and bathrooms. To this day, he insists that he had every right to do whatever he wanted with America’s secrets. Fortunately, the court has unsealed the indictment, because Americans need to know, and care, about the magnitude of Trump’s alleged offenses.

To understand the severity of the charges against Trump, consider a thought experiment: Imagine that Vladimir Putin is one day driven from the Kremlin, perhaps in a coup or in the face of a popular revolt. He jumps into his limousine and heads for self-imposed exile in a remote dacha. His trunk is full of secret documents that he decided belong to him, including details of the Russian nuclear deterrent and Russia’s military weaknesses.

Now imagine how valuable those boxes would be to any intelligence organization in the world. I spent the early years of my career analyzing Soviet and Russian documents as an academic Sovietologist, and I would have loved to see such materials. Small, seemingly trivial details—something as innocuous as a desk calendar or a notepad—might not mean much to a layperson, but to a professional, they could be pure gold. To get even a peek at such Russian materials would be an intelligence triumph.

But of course, I would never have been able to lay my hands on them, because a cache of such immense importance, if U.S. operatives spirited any of it out of Russia, would have been secured in a vault somewhere deep in the CIA. Trump, meanwhile, left highly sensitive American documents lying around at a golf resort like practice balls on the driving range. According to the indictment:

The Mar-a-Lago Club was an active social club, which, between January 2021 and August 2022, hosted events for tens of thousands of members and guests. After TRUMP’s presidency, The Mar-a-Lago Club was not an authorized location for the storage, possession, review, display, or discussion of classified documents. Nevertheless, TRUMP stored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club—including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.

Actually, it might be harder to steal practice balls. “The Storage Room,” the indictment notes, “was near the liquor supply closet, linen room, lock shop, and various other rooms.” These are not exactly low-traffic areas. Worse yet, the indictment asserts that Trump had some of these documents at his club in New Jersey, where he showed files to people who had no business seeing them. (One of them, according to the indictment, was something Trump claimed was a plan of attack on a foreign country prepared for him by the Department of Defense and a senior military official.)

Normally, when there is spillage of classified material—and such events are common, including during presidential transitions—it’s treated much like the spillage of toxic waste: Even if it’s an accident, everyone involved must cooperate to find the source of the spill, evaluate the amount of danger, and contain and clean the area. What Trump has already admitted to doing—taking classified documents and then defying the U.S. government’s repeated demands to return them—is like driving off with a truckload of toxic chemicals, splashing them around, and then, when the guys in the hazmat suits show up, telling them he had every right to dump out the barrels on his own property and that they can go take a hike.

Judging from the indictment (and its damning photographs), Trump did all of this while leaving some of the most tempting intelligence targets in the Western world open to theft or reproduction. The indictment is both astounding and horrifying, with pictures of classified materials sitting in unsecured boxes around Mar-a-Lago that could give hives to anyone who’s ever held a security clearance (as I did for most of my adult life). At this point, we may never know who saw what, or which documents are now in the hands of our enemies. In any decent democracy, this intentional and defiant recklessness with classified material would be added to the list of acts that should prohibit Trump from ever holding any position of government responsibility ever again.

Trump’s enablers, however, will try to set the agenda, just as they did when Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed his report in 2019 on Trump’s alleged collusion with the Russians. Back then, Attorney General William Barr performed a major act of civic sabotage by bowdlerizing Mueller’s findings before anyone saw the actual report. I was in Switzerland at the time, and when a daily newspaper back in the United States asked me to write about the report, all I had to go on was Barr’s version; although I suspected that the full truth was worse, I could write only from what I had at the moment—which is exactly what Barr intended.

Trump-supporting Republicans are attempting to replicate Barr’s dishonest play by convincing Americans that Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have personally indicted Trump over a nothingburger. Like many who have commented on the documents fiasco, McCarthy, Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley, and others must know that this is a flat lie, but it’s a lie that will work on millions of people. Smith and the government of the United States have made clear that Donald Trump has yet again betrayed his country. The rest of us should say so to our fellow citizens—and to those craven elected representatives who refuse to admit it—loudly and clearly.

Related:

An exit from the GOP’s labyrinth of Trump lies This indictment is different.

Today’s News

The White House released intelligence indicating that Russia plans to build a drone-manufacturing plant east of Moscow using materials supplied by Iran. Air quality has improved in the northeastern United States and Ontario as wildfires continue to burn in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada; firefighters from the U.S., France, and some Commonwealth nations have joined local fire crews in combating the ongoing blazes. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a video interview on Friday that Russia can “definitely state” that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

Dispatches

Books Briefing: The author Charles Portis was a “uniquely Southern” storyteller whose stories dripped with pathos and humor, Gal Beckerman writes.

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More From The Atlantic

Don’t censor racism out of the past. The price of Title 42 is the battered bodies of my patients. Inside Frank Bascombe’s head, again

Culture Break

Read. A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is told by a narrator whose reliability comes into question as the story unfolds—and is eventually undone entirely by a single pronoun slip.

Watch. Past Lives, in theaters, is a film in which distance and quiet are key to understanding a soaring intimacy.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

As you can see, I am back from my vacation. Each year, I make a pilgrimage to Las Vegas; my wife and I are native New Englanders, but we have come to love the desert and the dry, clear air that gives us a break from humidity and allergies. (Every time I go to the Southwest, I think of the late Harry Anderson, playing the Boston trickster “Harry the Hat” on Cheers and sneering at a competing con man from Phoenix: “I was never impressed by Arizona hustlers, except they got good sinuses.”) I like the noise and bustle of casinos: I play some blackjack and throw some dice, and, yes, I know the odds are against me. Shush. Let me enjoy my kitschy moment of thinking I’m hanging with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis and Joey Bishop before their 3 a.m. show.

Speaking of the Rat Pack, I also love that at least a few Vegas steakhouses are trying to enforce a lost tradition: dress codes. I am a bear on this issue and always have been when it comes to fine dining. I caused a bit of consternation on Twitter when I said this the other day; there are people who think dress codes are outdated and uptight and even racist—which they can be, if they are enforced selectively. Otherwise, sorry, but not sorry: No beachwear and no tank tops, thank you. No ball caps. No overly revealing clothes, please, and gentlemen must wear closed-toe shoes. And if you reek of perfectly legal cannabis, that is your right, but (at least at one famous locale) you might not be seated. The days of jackets and ties are over, but there’s nothing wrong with dressing like an adult, and if you’re going to hang with the memory of Dino and Sammy, and drink overpriced bourbon, the least you can do is take off your hat and show up wearing a clean shirt.

— Tom

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

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.

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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.

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Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.