The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, Central Africa Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement on Friday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks,  mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Minister of Defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” On Friday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.  

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” Given the snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast food restaurant, formerly known as McDonalds), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

[Read: A crisis erupts in Russia]

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.  

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—there are no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, since so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it) you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler) of Bellingcat and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said that the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke to him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly eleven months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now Military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that the Defense Minister Shoigu come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation on Saturday morning. A telegram channel that is believed to represent  Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

[Read: Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire]

If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be. For months—years, really—Putin has blamed all of his country’s troubles on outsiders: America, Europe, NATO. He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a façade made of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony “white Christian nationalism” for foreign audiences, and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption. Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military, and indeed of modern Russia.

Prigozhin is cynical, brutal, and violent. He and his men are motivated by money and self-interest. They are angry at the corruption of the top brass, the bad equipment provided to them, the incredible number of lives wasted. They aren’t Christian, and they don’t care about Peter the Great. Prigozhin is offering them a psychologically comfortable explanation for their current predicament: they failed to defeat Ukraine because they were betrayed by their leaders.

There are some precedents for this moment. In 1905, the Russian fleet’s disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution. In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another, more famous revolution. Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance on Saturday morning. At that moment, he said, “arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe [leading to] destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side. He was wrong.  

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers what they experience or observe personally that is most at odds with what they see portrayed in the media.

G. is a 77-year-old woman:

I’m not seeing the real me. I wish the entertainment media would tell the truth about people like me who are my age. I don’t wear (or own) an apron. I’m perfectly comfortable with technology. I taught my 20-year-old granddaughter how to populate a website.

Don’t let looks fool you. I am a sexual person. I love my family but value my privacy and independence. Managing that space is harder than you think. The never-ending display of face lifts and rejuvenation products is a mean-spirited denial of the real beauty of age.

G.Y. offers an analogy:

I am a southerner—from the deepest of the deep South. We southerners don’t hear our own accent, just as my New England friends don’t hear their accents. It takes an outsider to hear and point out the sonic nuances that we never notice in ourselves. And if the accent is to be portrayed—by a stage actor, for example—it requires a farcical overexaggerated caricature to portray the accent in a universally recognizable way.

This is the problem with our political discourse and how it is reported on by perfectly good and conscientious journalists. None of us are capable of hearing our own ideological accents, but they are glaringly obvious to the rest of the world. All of our assumptions are assumed and so we imagine them to be conventional wisdom. And you just can’t edit out your ideological accent when you are immersed in it any more than you could dry yourself off while swimming in a lake.

All of our [national] media outlets are located on the coast, as is the entertainment industry, as is our seat of federal governance, and so they are all immersed in one particular ideological accent. Not only do they not hear it, but they also can’t possibly hear it, nor should we expect them to. It can only be pointed out by an observant outsider and can only be illustrated or portrayed by outsiders with a sort of exaggerated vaudeville act—oversimplifying and overemphasizing small, nuanced tones and tenors.  Think, for example, the exaggerated and overheated Kabuki theater of political talk radio.

In the past, before the advent of internet and instant posting, the reporters lived in the same ideologically accented bubble, but if you wanted your story to be picked up off the wire in Topeka, or Racine, or Little Rock, or any town in Middle America, you had to get the attention of the local editor that was conversant in the local vernacular. If the local editor in Topeka did not pick up the story, it did not get read in Topeka. Now the newsrooms are populated by Ivy League–credentialed elites, just a younger version of the editors. And so again we miss the vital opportunity for writing in the vernacular of the nation rather than our own particular provincial perspective. After all, New York and Washington, D.C., are easily the two most provincial towns in America. The most obvious solution is to disperse our reporters to the hinterlands, but will any of them be willing to trade Manhattan for Racine?

Eric harkens back to pandemic coverage:

I take umbrage with the portrayal of essential workers by media organizations. As someone who has worked at grocery stores throughout the pandemic, I felt as if the media treated essential workers as a strange curiosity who do not consume media themselves. The use of the royal we in phrases like “We’ve all been at home the past few years” became so ubiquitous as to go unquestioned. Actually, many of us went out into the world on a daily basis. There were so many articles talking about the difficulties of isolation or cohabitating during the pandemic. But I could find none that addressed the struggle of an essential worker living with someone who never left the house.

Jaleelah sees a lot more hand-wringing about the unwillingness of young people to debate than she does real-world support for them to do it:

The biggest threat to debate on campus does come from administrators, but in an indirect manner: Debate clubs in Canada often receive little to no funding from their universities. Hundreds of curious students seek out my debate team, but since the university I attend started charging all clubs $100 per room booking (after 10 or so freebies), we don’t have the space for all of them to speak. Dozens of students who practice constructing and delivering arguments for weeks or months express interest in debating students from other schools. But since there’s some obscure rule against funding off-campus events, we can only send a handful of them to competitions. With so many prominent conservatives publicly lamenting the decline of debate, one might assume that sponsors are jumping to support the activity. That is sadly not the case.

Kimberly is glad that people who are obese are now portrayed in media and that fat-shaming is being challenged, but believes that almost all such portrayals are leaving out the health challenges of obesity:

I have three very good friends who are obese and they all suffer with diabetes and decreased mobility. All have had knee replacements and two have serious respiratory issues. On television, all that you see is fat and happy, with good health insinuated, whereas in reality that is often not the case.

Earl believes that “much of the media have a less-than-adult portrayal of religion in the lives of Americans.”

He writes:

The writer/reporter who admits to having been “raised Lutheran” or otherwise concluded their religious participation before finishing high school nevertheless will write or report on religion as if everyone has the same, often two-dimensional, perspective on a part of the human experience that has been around since humans were invented. When religious beliefs, dogma, and practices conflict with hot-topic issues in the secular, popular culture, the media usually make no effort to probe into the religious basis of such matters.

Media that pride themselves on accurate and in-depth reporting have knowledge of the U.S. political system and its history well beyond high-school courses. When writing and reporting on religious affairs, they need to educate themselves to a level commensurate with the topics at hand.

Leela opines on media portrayals of Asian Americans:

As a mixed-race Jewish teenage girl, I’ve never been able to find a piece of modern media that quite encapsulates my life. However, one of the biggest discrepancies between my life and the media is the current portrayal of “Asian stories.” I’m half South Asian, and nearly every time I see a movie or television show in the United States that claims to be capturing the “Asian experience,” it’s actually just about East Asians. Always Be My Maybe, Crazy Rich Asians, Fresh Off the Boat, Shang-Chi, Beef, Minari, and more films and shows that I’m encouraged to watch because they “capture what it’s like to be an Asian American” don’t have a single person who looks like me. I 100 percent believe that the stories told in these movies and television shows are important, and I don’t feel like South, Southeast, or Central Asians should have been randomly inserted into them. But just for once, I’d like to see a movie about the Asian experience that lives up to its marketing by actually including characters from more than one region of Asia.

Based on the majority of TV shows and movies that are promoted as “telling Asian stories,” you’d think Asia was only made up of China, Japan, Korea, and sometimes Vietnam. This impacts how Asian Americans like me, whose families don’t come from those countries, are treated. Even the action of casually referring to myself as Asian has led to me needing to open Google Maps to show others that India is in Asia, to “prove” why I can identify that way, and I have never felt comfortable joining organizations such as my school’s Asian Student Union because I feel as though I’m not the type of Asian that it was created for.

I also feel as though the media’s limited idea of who gets to be Asian American has impacted their reporting on hate crimes. When South Asians and Middle Eastern people (many of whom are also Asian) are targeted as “terrorists,” it should also be an issue that the Asian American community and their allies rally together and raise awareness about, just like we showed up to protest the attacks on East and Southeast Asians during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can’t explain how amazing it was to watch Never Have I Ever and see it front and center on Netflix’s recommended shows during AAPI heritage month. Seeing characters who look like me and my family on a show that was included in a list of media about the “Asian experience,” a marketing tagline which used to only reaffirm my sense of not belonging in the Asian community, makes me smile every time I rewatch it. I hope that in the future, movies and television shows will start to get made that showcase the full range of diverse stories and experiences within the Asian diaspora.

Matthew opines on homeownership:

This will come as a very heterodox viewpoint to the narrative of my generation, but I disagree with the portrayal of home ownership as out of reach for most Americans. My partner and I were making less than $100K combined a year when we bought our home in Dallas. We had been renters our whole lives (mid-30s at the time) and lived in central Dallas in an affordable apartment in a VERY expensive area. Rents kept climbing but we knew we wanted to buy. We eventually looked at much more affordable homes in a slowly gentrifying area that was within five miles of downtown. We paid $225K for our home in 2016 and found our mortgage payment to be less than rent for many of our friends.

Our home needed lots of work. (Still does!!) It’s vintage 1969. No granite countertops, some really ugly carpet and wallpaper, but it’s our project. We’ve been doing bit by bit to make it better. When I hear so many people complain about the affordability of homes, I can’t help but think, “Of course you can’t afford to live where you rent right now!” The narrative that we’re being told is that you should be able to buy a house convenient to the best places in town. It’s not realistic! There are affordable houses available, they just aren’t where you want to live. You might have to sacrifice convenience, location, and amenities.

I realize that there are cities and places that are ABSOLUTELY too expensive and have terrible policies that have made homeownership a real struggle. I am really fortunate to have a good job and was able to afford the many surprise costs of buying a home. But, to constantly reinforce to a whole generation that they CANNOT afford to own a home doesn’t mesh with reality. That dream is possible with adjusting expectations and potentially looking outside your comfort zone.

John believes there is a negativity bias built into media:

The biggest difference between my personal observations and the media’s reported news is just how amazingly good everything really is in our country. Whether you are watching Fox News or reading The Washington Post, you might get the impression that things are very, very bad in America. They aren’t. While there are plenty of negative things to report on, unemployment is low, goods are plentiful, and people have discretionary money to spend.

Typical news quote: “Our country is divided as ever.” No, not really. And if the media wasn’t complicit in the politicians’ efforts to divide us into neat groups, we would be less divided. I have all types on my boat for fishing trips and all are welcome. Trump superfans to LGBTQ, we all have a lot in common, and in my experience, all you have to do to get along with most anyone is be polite and friendly (and maybe avoid political discussions).

But it really is more than that. Our country, somehow, is still behind some of the greatest innovations the world has seen. And our country keeps innovating, and it makes the world a better place. IT devices are reliable and capable in a way that even 10 years ago would’ve seemed impossible. Health care has advances that are simply amazing, helping people not just live longer, but live better lives. This list could just go on and on. What is often lacking, especially from TV media, is context. My spouse and I watch the evening news every day, and she often says, “I needed one more sentence.” Instead of getting that additional context, we get the next sensationalized outrage bait.

Dan and Vicky are curious about the explanation for a demographic shift:

What we see in the media that conflicts with our professional and personal experiences: The apparent frequency of transgenderism—i.e., individuals whose identities conflict with their biological sex. We are in our mid-70s. As children, one of us remembers Christine Jorgensen. That’s it in terms of individuals who are transgender. We had no knowledge of anyone in elementary school, high school, college, or graduate school who seemed to identify as a different gender than their biological sex.

In the ’70s one of us became a police officer, and spent her entire career in law enforcement. She was one of a group of five women who were admitted to the police academy in Seattle. She worked as a patrol officer, in corrections, setting up a marshals service for a county in Washington, as an advocate for abused women going through the court system, and as a juvenile probation counselor. The other one of us went to graduate school in the ’70s, earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt. Then he went to Illinois State University and taught for 30 years. His speciality was children and families. In that time he had a professional practice of psychology, he trained graduate-level counselors, and he was a psychological consultant for numerous community agencies.

Thus, in our professional careers we have seen or consulted for thousands of children and families. We also had children ourselves in the ’70s and ’80s and knew dozens and dozens of their friends, in addition to their schoolmates. In that time, we can, together, tentatively identify only ONE person who appeared to be transgender. One, in 70 years of knowing children and 40 years of working with children and in the community for both of us.    

One could argue that transgender people would have kept this to themselves in these decades, but that seems a stretch. We worked with children/adolescents/families on a very intimate basis … hundreds and hundreds of them. We also worked with students and co-workers who were virtually all kind and accepting people. Dozens and dozens and dozens of other professionals, all of whom would have been extremely open and compassionate with any child who would have expressed transgender ideas.

While neither of us denies the idea that there are people whose gender identity does not match their biological sex, the issue is that there seems to be a virtual explosion in numbers. To write this observation off as being due to people being unwilling or unable to communicate their gender confusion in the past does not seem possible given the extremely large number of children and adolescents we have known personally and professionally, and the number of other professionals who we knew well who consulted with us on their most challenging cases. Why? What explains the apparent explosion?

Gary remarks on demonization:

The most jarring thing for me is to see conservatives and liberals painted with such negative “brushes” by the media. I know several people from all viewpoints stretching from very conservative to very liberal. They are all decent people with the good of the nation at heart. Caring for and loving one another is not limited to one political viewpoint.  On one side you hear conservatives explained as uncaring Neanderthals who want a 1950s patriarchy. On the other side you hear liberals illustrated as crazy people whose minds are twisted like pretzels to reconcile all their conflicting ideological views. The media seems unable or unwilling to treat everyone with dignity and respect just for being a human being.

And a shark attack in Egypt, Gaddafi's fifth son on hunger strike in Lebanon. Here's the Middle East this week.

In 2018, when the Norwegian government announced plans to increase fathers’ parental leave by five weeks, many Norwegians were thrilled. Nina Mikkelson, a mother whose then-1-year-old was still nursing, wasn’t one of them. In Norway, paid parental leave is divided into three parts: some reserved for the mother, some for the father, and a third portion that can be used by either parent. Increasing the father’s share meant cutting down the sharable portion, effectively reducing the amount of leave available to mothers by more than a month. And there was talk among some government officials of going further, getting rid of the third discretionary bucket altogether.

Mikkelson posted about her frustrations in a breastfeeding-support Facebook group and found them shared by a number of other women. So she created a new group devoted to protesting the father quota, called “Permisjonen Burde Foreldre Fordele,” or “Leave Should Be Shared by Parents,” reflecting the group’s primary goal: that every family be able to divide their leave as they see fit. The group became active in the comment sections of articles reporting on the reform. After the policy went into effect, the press took interest and the movement against the father quota gained notoriety under a simplified name: Permisjonsopprøret—“Leave Rebellion.”

Paid parental leave has a long history in Europe. Its original purpose was to protect the health of both mother and child. But over the past few decades, encouraging fathers to take leave has become a priority in many countries. The goal is to promote “gender equality in the labor market through promoting gender equality in the division of household work,” Libertad González, an associate professor of economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, told me. In regions all over the world, mothers are more likely than fathers to leave their jobs or reduce their hours at some point after having kids, which significantly reduces their lifetime earnings. The hope is that if more fathers take leave, employers will be less likely to discriminate against women in hiring and promotions, and men will contribute more at home, freeing up mothers to give more time and energy to work.  

[Read: Parental leave is American exceptionalism at its bleakest]

The problem is that getting dads to take paternity leave is quite difficult. Making parental leave gender neutral is not enough: In the European countries (as well as in Canada and Australia) where leave is shared or transferable between parents, it’s overwhelmingly taken by mothers. The issue is not necessarily that fathers don’t want to take leave. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many fear professional consequences for doing so, and strong cultural norms still reinforce the idea that women should be primary caregivers, González told me. Many countries have started giving parents little choice in the matter, reserving some amount of leave specifically for fathers on a use-it-or-lose-it basis. The so-called father quota acts as a “progressive lever” that encourages families to break from the traditional mold, González said. Norway is the birthplace of this approach. The country converted its maternity leave to gender-neutral parental leave, most of which could be split between parents as desired, in 1978. But few fathers took any, so in 1993, Norway implemented four weeks of paid parental leave just for dads—and within a few years, most dads were taking it. Sweden did the same two years later, and both countries have expanded their father quotas over time. Many other countries have since followed suit.

But there’s little consensus on how much leave ought to be reserved for fathers. Some groups believe that all leave ought to be equally and nontransferably divided between parents. Only through what advocates call “co-responsibility” of care, the argument goes, can modern societies ever hope to achieve real gender equality. The European Union put out a directive that came into effect last year requiring all of its member states to provide both mothers and fathers with four months each of parental leave, two months of which must be paid and nontransferrable. But though equalizing parental leave seems like a straightforward win for gender equality at home and at work, reserving leave for fathers is not without trade-offs. By design, it leaves couples little choice in how to divvy up their leave, which can pose challenges—mostly for women. Not everyone is on board with such a rigid approach.

The Nordic region has become a model of gender equality for the rest of Europe for good reasons, Ann-Zofie Duvander, a demography professor at Stockholm University and an expert on fathers’ use of parental leave, told me. Norway, Sweden, and Iceland all have very high rates of female labor-force participation. Teasing out the degree to which the father quota is responsible for this or other trends is tricky—its impact likely manifests gradually and works in conjunction with other family policies—but from Duvander’s perspective, it’s undeniably having an effect on society. If you can’t see that, “you’re living in another reality,” she said.

[Read: Why Icelandic dads take parental leave and Japanese dads don’t]

Elsewhere, however, the intended benefits of paternity leave have been slow to materialize. Spain implemented a two-week father quota in 2007 and has since expanded it to put mothers and fathers on equal footing; as of 2021, both dads and moms get 16 weeks of fully paid and nontransferable leave. González, who has been closely tracking Spain’s leave reform, told me that in a few ways, it’s been a remarkable success. A solid majority of fathers are taking their leave, and since the quota was put in place, Spanish fathers have been doing more child care, both during their leave and after. What’s more, children whose dads were eligible for longer paternity leave have more gender-egalitarian attitudes toward the organization of family life than kids whose fathers had access to only a very short leave.

But at least so far, the expansion of paternity leave hasn’t had much of a lasting effect on women’s employment. Mothers are still far more likely to take unpaid leave or work part-time after their paid leave is up. Meanwhile, “men are taking the leave and then they’re going back to work at the same pace as before,” González told me. “We see no big impact in terms of gender gaps and labor-market outcomes at a societal level.” And there may have been some unintended consequences: The paternity leave did seem to help equalize employment outcomes within a subset of couples, but those couples also went on to have fewer kids overall and divorce at higher rates.

Expanding the father quota doesn’t necessarily make life easier for mothers. Not all men take the leave reserved for them. This is especially true in countries where leave is poorly paid, and in those with more traditional gender norms. But even in the highly gender-egalitarian Nordic countries where leave is fully compensated, a nontrivial portion of men don’t use it. The ones who don’t are usually those with the least education and income. Increasing paternity leave does nothing to help a mother whose partner won’t take it, and could actively make her life harder if it comes at the expense of leave she might otherwise take.

Even in cases where a father is willing and able to take some leave, some mothers would prefer to take that time themselves, in many cases because they are still recovering from childbirth or still nursing. In Spain, some mothers resent the government’s decision to devote public resources to expanding paternity leave when they feel like they don’t have enough leave themselves. A group of feminist mothers called the Asociación Petra Maternidades Feministas has argued, among other things, that the government ought to prioritize lengthening the paid leave available to mothers to enable them to breastfeed exclusively for six months, as the World Health Organization recommends.

In Norway, where mothers have up to about seven months of fully paid leave, the women of Leave Rebellion feel this results in too little time to make the transition from breastfeeding to bottles and pumping or formula and solids. “The last couple of weeks of your leave … will be very, very stressful,” Marthe Lilleborge, a founding member of the group, told me. Some women work jobs where pumping or taking breaks to nurse is not possible or practical. Parents can extend their time off with unpaid leave—something a rising number of Norwegian women are doing—but lose some employee benefits, such as pension contributions. A survey undertaken in 2021 to investigate the rise in Norwegian mothers taking unpaid leave found that, on average, fathers are content with a quota of 15 weeks—women say it should be shortened to 11. Duvander told me that people seem mostly happy with the father quota in Sweden—on average, men there actually take more leave than is earmarked for them—but that could have something to do with the fact that leave there is so generous: Even with three months reserved for fathers, mothers are able to take more than a year if they choose. The longer the leave, the more likely women will be willing to share it, Duvander said.

Ensuring both that all birth mothers feel their needs are met and that fathers and mothers take leave in equal measure would likely require giving both parents a lot of leave, which may be out of reach for governments with limited budgets—but not everyone agrees that a perfect 50–50 split of leave ought to be the goal. The women of Leave Rebellion believe that there are plenty of reasonable explanations for why women tend to claim more leave after the birth of a child than fathers: Birthing mothers have very specific needs and responsibilities during the months after a child is born that fathers and non-birthing parents don’t. The experience of the newborn period, like pregnancy or childbirth itself, is inherently unequal. Leaving the choice of how to split up parental leave to each couple and allowing for the possibility of a gender-unequal division is, in their view, the equitable approach. If taking more time out of formal employment to care for children puts mothers at an economic disadvantage, then the government should focus on overhauling the economic system to better value and support caregiving, and going after employers who discriminate against those who do that caregiving. “Don’t go after the babies and the mothers,” Lilleborge told me.

In that sense, the father quota has become a battleground for feminists with differing visions of equality. Mikkelson suspects that although Leave Rebellion failed to reverse Norway’s 2018 leave reform, it seems to have successfully quelled momentum toward splitting Norway’s parental leave down the middle. But in Norway and elsewhere, the father quota will likely continue to divide mothers.

Like many Millennials who have spent far too much time online, my friends and I are plenty familiar with the five love languages. By the time my friend Alexis sent our group chat a podcast digging into the book that the theory—which purports to explain what people desire from their romantic partners—is based on, I was fairly certain that I’d already heard everything I needed to know. I’d seen the memes and read the articles. The day before, I’d even taken the Atlantic quiz inspired by the proliferation of similar personality tests. But despite being able to name all five languages—words of affirmation, quality time, physical touch, gifts, and acts of service—I couldn’t recall having ever encountered its source material, The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts. The love-language lore had transcended its origin point, making it feel like “something that started appearing in framed posters in Airbnbs starting in, like, 2015,” as Michael Hobbes, an If Books Could Kill co-host, notes in a recent episode.

On If Books Could Kill, Hobbes and his co-host, the lawyer Peter Shamshiri, revisit best sellers whose airy truisms and occasionally questionable logic have shaped the American cultural landscape over the past several decades. In episodes that last about an hour, Hobbes and Shamshiri take turns diving into one specific book in their glossy pantheon of choice: “the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” By contextualizing each of the texts, Hobbes and Shamshiri elucidate the myths that these books fueled in their heyday—and what made people want to believe them.

If Books Could Kill captures the distinct strangeness of only vaguely remembering a book that was once everywhere. Perhaps you recall the colors of its cover design, or the fact that its author was on an episode of daytime television you watched while home sick. So it’s especially satisfying to hear Hobbes and Shamshiri present their painstakingly detailed dispatches from the morass of late-20th-century best-sellers lists. For every raised eyebrow at a Hudson News bookstand, it seems, Hobbes and Shamshiri have spent hours reading the original texts, researching the authors, tracing the broader cultural ascent of their ideas, consulting academic articles on the subjects, and, finally, torturing each other with anachronistic details. Among the best If Books Could Kill episodes are those like the 5 Love Languages dissection, which focuses on the cottage industry of pop-psychology relationship-advice books, and those that home in on pseudoscience prosperity manuals such as Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. Books like these claim to make readers’ lives better by sharing information that’s usually hidden from us normies. If readers can simply understand how rich people think or crack the code to lasting romance, these books suggest, they can be happy too.

On its face, The 5 Love Languages is arguably the least objectionable text the duo have covered: The idea that people in romantic pairings should consider the ways their partner wants to be shown love is hard to argue with, even if the widespread misapplication of love-language theory has been, as Shamshiri notes, a “classic American cultural thing of taking something and repackaging it in its shallowest and most selfish iteration.” The book was written by the Southern Baptist pastor Gary Chapman and has sold more than 15 million copies since it was first published in 1992. But if you’ve encountered any of Chapman’s writing, odds are it’s from the updated edition published in 2015, which Hobbes calls “the misogyny-minus version.”  

For the episode on the book, Shamshiri went back to the original ’90s text, which contains, among other debunked gender stereotypes, an assertion in the “Physical Touch” chapter that men want sex all the time, whereas women need emotional connection for intimacy to be satisfying. (Nowhere in Chapman’s books is any attention paid to the romantic dynamics of queer couples—at one point, Shamshiri jokes that such relationships are “like the female orgasm, not discussed or implied.”) In one chapter, a woman tells Chapman that her husband verbally berates her and refuses counseling. Chapman, in the 1992 version, suggests that the husband’s love language is physical touch and counsels the wife to start initiating sex frequently and more aggressively. When she balks because sex with him makes her feel used and unloved, he advises her to draw upon Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount in order to gather strength. In the anecdote that appears in later editions, Shamshiri mentions, Chapman simply suggests that the wife be more physically affectionate in general. Although the sexual mandate is less explicit there, the idea that sex is a sacrifice that women must endure in heterosexual marriage persists.

[Read: The summer reading guide]

By pointing out such patterns across multiple editions of the same series, Hobbes and Shamshiri also address a larger pattern within publishing, especially among the Christian publishing houses that tend to produce these runaway relationship-advice hits. For Chapman’s book, the 2015 “mass-market retool,” as Shamshiri puts it, made The 5 Love Languages “less expressly sexist, less reactionary overall, less overtly religious.” He notes that removing a reference to Jesus washing the feet of his disciples as an example of an act of service certainly does lend the new edition a veneer of modernity. But Shamshiri and Hobbes’s attention to these cosmetic differences also highlights the tremendous latitude that best-selling authors are given when they recycle old text with new or euphemistic language.  

Another example is John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships, which was published in the same year as The 5 Love Languages. Listening to Hobbes and Shamshiri’s episode about the book, I had flashbacks to seeing it everywhere as a child—airport bookstores, sure, but also on my mother’s nightstand, even at a hair salon. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus may have introduced a new fantastical framework into discussions of gender dynamics within heterosexual relationships, but the book’s success was fueled more by its perceived ability to “explain” men’s “alien” behavior to women than by any real, piercing psychological insight. In order for a book like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus or any of its spin-offs to dominate best-sellers lists across decades, the readers, reviewers, and people who consume its lessons by proxy all need to believe, on some basic level, that biological sex is a defining variable in human communication.

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus does address essentialist views of men’s communication patterns, but many of Gray’s conclusions in these chapters are framed as advice to women. For women who have internalized the idea that it’s their job to maintain their romantic relationship—to entice their husband to be nicer to them—Gray’s book offers a potential road map. The If Books Could Kill episode trots out plenty of eye-roll-worthy excerpts, but, crucially, Hobbes and Shamshiri also dig into research that more richly charts why and how communication patterns develop across populations. (Men and women are socialized on the same planet, it turns out.)

Hobbes and Shamshiri aren’t new to podcasting, and If Books Could Kill benefits from the inquisitiveness and skepticism that drive their prior productions. In 2018, Hobbes and his fellow journalist Sarah Marshall created You’re Wrong About, which gained a massive following for its wry, deeply researched explorations of major historical events and cultural phenomena that remain widely misremembered. (Hobbes co-hosted until late 2021, and Marshall still leads the series.) On Maintenance Phase, which launched in October 2020, Hobbes and the author Aubrey Gordon interrogate wellness-industry myths and the specter of fatphobia in American culture. Shamshiri’s first foray into podcasting, the acerbic Supreme Court–analysis series 5-4, ballooned in popularity after the Dobbs ruling last year.

Like the pair’s earlier series, If Books Could Kill doesn’t traffic in cynicism for cynicism’s sake. A great takedown is delicious in its own right, but that’s not quite the show’s aim. Some of its strongest moments are when Hobbes and Shamshiri reflect on how profoundly one book, one author, or one franchise has influenced public opinion. When talking about Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!, the duo trace how the book’s author, Robert Kiyosaki, rose to extreme popularity after appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. Put more plainly: Benefiting from a billionaire’s resources is what jump-started his career writing about how regular people can access wealth. Taking shots at Kiyosaki and Gray would be easy, but the podcast leaves listeners with something deeper than the satisfaction of dunking on their work. (That’s what Twitter is for.)

If Books Could Kill resists the impulse to be satisfied with reaching into libraries past just to point and laugh (though, to be fair, there is a lot of laughter on the show). Books such as Rich Dad Poor Dad and The Secret are instructive because of what they reveal about American financial anxieties in the late 20th century and early aughts, when Reagan-era welfare-state fearmongering crept into pop culture across mediums. That so many readers have been willing to take some of these books at face value isn’t merely an indictment of the authors. But at least the next time you walk past one of these titles in the airport, you can be confident that you’re not missing much.

These are not your average reservoirs.

The plastic-lined cavities span, on average, 20 acres—more than 15 American football fields. Nicknamed “mega-basins,” they resemble enormous swimming pools scooped into farmland; about 100 basin projects are in the works across France. In wetter winter months, the basins are pumped full of groundwater; during punishing droughts and heat waves, those waters are meant to provide “life insurance” for farmers, who are among the region’s heaviest water users.

In 2022, France faced its worst drought on record; 2023 stands to be worse still. In 2020, anticipating future dry spells, federal environmental and agricultural agencies proposed prioritizing and subsidizing basins as “the most satisfactory way of securing water resources.”

But critics say that this so-called climate-change adaptation is, in reality, a maladaptation—a lesson in how not to prepare for water scarcity. Already, almost two-thirds of the world’s population experiences a water shortage for at least one month each year, and “basins are absolutely not the solution,” Christian Amblard, a hydrobiologist and an honorary director at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, told me.

Humans have, for millennia, smoothed out seasonal water availability by damming rivers or lakes to create artificial reservoirs. Jordan’s Jawa Dam, the world’s oldest, is 5,000 years old. But the first mega-basins in France were built only a few decades ago and, unlike traditional dams, draw some of their reserves from underground. Once on the surface, this water becomes vulnerable to evaporation (even more so as the planet warms) and to pathogens including bacteria and toxic algae.

France is not the only country collecting groundwater to combat major droughts. Others have done the same, with devastating effects on local people and ecosystems. In Petorca, Chile, about 30 groundwater-rights bearers control 60 percent of the region’s total streamflow; most residents depend on a few daily hours of access to water-tank trucks for their needs. In India, groundwater is a primary source for drinking water; overexploitation has led to declining groundwater levels across the country and could slash some winter agricultural yields by up to two-thirds, experts warn. Iran has increased its groundwater withdrawal by 200,000 percent over the past 50-plus years and now faces a potential state of “water bankruptcy.”

[Read: Suddenly, California has too much water]

Climate change will leave many regions alternating between harsh multiyear droughts and sudden, extreme flooding—all as the water frozen in Earth’s poles, glaciers, and permafrost melts away. Groundwater might seem to be a limitless resource of moisture in the unpredictable and imbalanced future. But it’s not, and scientists say that the freshwater lying beneath our feet should be managed  like any other nonrenewable resource.

“They’re thinking very short-term,” Amblard said of mega-basin proponents. “Water needs to stay in the ground.”

Surface water is all the water we can observe: ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. It coats almost three-quarters of the planet. When we imagine water, we usually envision surface water.

Our stores of groundwater, on the other hand, are invisible and vast.  Most of this water is stored in the gaps between rocks, sediment, and sand—think of it like the moisture in a sopping wet sponge. Some groundwater is relatively young, but some represents the remains of rain that fell thousands of years ago. Overall, groundwater accounts for 98 percent of Earth’s unfrozen freshwater. It provides one-third of global drinking water and nearly half of the planet’s agricultural irrigation.

Water is constantly cycling between below-ground stores and the world above. When rain falls or snow melts, some replenishes surface waters, some evaporates, and some filters down into underground aquifers. Inversely, aquifers recharge surface waters like lakes and wetlands, and pop up to form mountain springs or oases in arid lands.

Despite our utter dependence on groundwater, we know relatively little about it. Even within the hydrological community and at global water summits, “groundwater is kind of sidelined,” Karen Villholth, a groundwater expert and the director of Water Cycle Innovation, in South Africa, told me. It’s technically more difficult to measure than visible water, more complex in its fluid dynamics, and historically under- or unregulated. It “is often poorly understood, and consequently undervalued, mismanaged and even abused,” UNESCO declared in 2022. “It’s not so easy to grapple with,” Villholth said. “It’s simply easier to avoid.”

Take a crucial U.S. groundwater case, 1861’s Frazier v. Brown. The dispute involved two feuding neighbors and “a certain hole, wickedly and maliciously dug, for the purpose of destroying” a water spring that had, “from time immemorial, ran and oozed, out of the ground.” Frazier v. Brown questioned the rights of a landowner to subterranean water on the property. Ohio’s Supreme Court ultimately argued against any such right, on the premise that groundwater was too mysterious to regulate, “so secret, occult and concealed” were its origins and movement. (The case has since been overturned.)

Today, groundwater is still a mystery, says Elisabeth Lictevout, a hydrogeologist and the director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre in the Netherlands. Scientists and state officials often don’t have a complete grasp of groundwater’s location, geology, depth, volume, and quality. They’re rarely certain of how quickly it can be replenished, or exactly how much is being pumped away in legal and illegal operations. “Today we are clearly not capable of doing a worldwide groundwater survey,” Lictevout told me. Without more precise data, we lack useful models that could better guide its responsible management. “It’s a big problem,” she said. “It’s revolting, even.”

[Read: 2050 is closer than 1990]

Water experts are certain, however, that humans are relying on groundwater more than ever. UNESCO reports that groundwater use is at an all-time high, with a global sixfold increase over the past 70 years. Across the planet, groundwater in arid and semi-arid regions—including in the U.S. High Plains and Central Valley aquifers, the North China Plain, Australia’s Canning Basin, the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, South America’s Guarani Aquifer, and several aquifers beneath northwestern India and the Middle East—is experiencing rapid depletion. In 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey found that the country had tripled the previous century’s groundwater-withdrawal rate by 2008. Many aquifers—which, because they are subterranean, cannot easily be cleaned—are also being contaminated by toxic chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers, industrial discharge, waste disposal, and pumping-related pollutants.

Because these waters are hidden and can seem “infinite,” Lictevout said, few people “see the consequences of our actions.” She and other hydrology experts often turn to a fiscal analogy: All of the planet’s freshwater represents a bank account. Rainfall and snowmelt are the income. Evaporation and water pumping are the expenditures. Rivers, lakes, and reservoirs are the checking account. Groundwater is the savings or retirement fund—which we are tapping into.

“We have to be careful about dipping into our savings,” says Jay Famiglietti, an Arizona State University hydrologist and the executive director emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security.

As they face down hotter and drier growing seasons, some French farmers say the water backup of basins is crucial to food security. (Agriculture, according to the federal government, accounts for two-thirds of France’s total water consumption.)

“If we don’t continue with this project, there are farms that won’t survive,” Francois Petorin, an administrator of the 200-plus-farm Water Co-op 79, in Western France, has said. "We have no other choice."

Under a deal with local water authorities, farmers can access set volumes from the basins in exchange for reducing pesticide use, planting fields with hedges, and increasing biodiversity. Proponents of the mega-basins also argue that they would be careful to pump only when groundwater levels are above certain thresholds and would draw from shallow aquifers that could be quickly recharged by precipitation.

[Read: One nation under water]

Experts don’t disagree that groundwater must be a part of adapting to climate change. But many argue that overdependence on and overexploitation of a shrinking natural resource cannot be the solution to a problem created by the overdependence on and overexploitation of nonrenewable natural resources.

Instead, experts told me that regulated groundwater tapping could be paired with other adaptations—many of which involve reducing water use and consumption. Farmers could swap out water-intensive crops such as corn (which is grown on 60 percent of France’s irrigated lands, much of it for livestock) in favor of drought-resistant species adapted to local climates. They could employ  more efficient irrigation technologies and plow less, which would make for healthier, more permeable soil, which could retain more water and filter it down more effectively to aquifers. Reducing meat consumption and cutting down on food waste would also shrink water use. Instead of drawing groundwater up for dry seasons, we could inject and help infuse water into depleted aquifers for storage.

“It is a common resource, at the end of the day,” Villholth said. “It’s an issue of equity. It’s almost a democratic question.”

That’s certainly how France’s mega-basin opponents see it. They have staged numerous protests and acts of civil disobedience, including planting hedges on land earmarked for basins and excavating crucial pumps and pipes. In March, thousands of activists (30,000 according to organizers, 6,000 according to state officials) faced off against 3,000 militarized police over the construction of a new mega-basin in Sainte-Soline, in western France, that would supply 12 farms. Organizers say 200-plus people were injured by tear-gas grenades and rubber-ball launchers. A few weeks later, a French court approved the construction of 16 heavily subsidized mega-reservoirs in western France, including the one at Sainte-Soline.

This is one advantage of mega-basins: They make the invisible hyper-visible. “It puts the matter in front of everybody,” Villholth said. Pulled to the surface, groundwater becomes more measurable, as does its use—as do debates over the ethics of its use. But that won’t tell us how much is left. If we’re not careful, we’ll discover that only once it’s all tapped out.