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The Latest

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions programs as practiced at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard are unconstitutional, upending more than four decades of precedent on the use of race in college admissions.

Spend time with our writers’ analysis of the decision:

“Race neutral” is the new “separate but equal,” Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi argue. The decision takes a tool meant to prevent discrimination against Black Americans and turns it on its head, Adam Harris explains. Curtailing affirmative action is a blow against a rising generation, Ronald Brownstein argues.

The price of attending blockbuster concerts is astronomical, but Americans are still buying tickets. Why, in our weird economic moment, is live music a priority?

First, here are three more new stories from The Atlantic:

Russia has reached a dead end. The end of optimism in China “My dad had dementia. He also had Facebook.”

Fleeting and Scarce

For the past few months, my Instagram feed has been peppered with posts of people going to see the Taylor Swift Eras tour in various cities around the country. Friends and their friends, bedecked in cowboy boots, glitter, and beaded bracelets, are sharing giddy stories from stadium parking lots and nosebleed seats. I’m happy for them—it looks like fun!—and, frankly, I’m also wondering how they all scored tickets.

Tickets to the show were difficult to get on Ticketmaster, to put it mildly. So chaotic was the presale in November that Swift herself likened the process to “bear attacks.” It prompted a Senate Judiciary subcommittee to initiate a hearing on lack of competition in the concert-ticket industry. Resold tickets went for many hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars.

I have become curious in recent months about why, in a period of high inflation and financial strain for many Americans, some people are so willing to shell out for concert tickets. It’s not just Taylor—Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen are also among the superstars who are selling out stadiums while charging hundreds or thousands of dollars for passes to their blockbuster shows.

The obvious reason is that these artists are great, and many fans who can (even loosely) afford to see them want to. Unemployment is low, and some fans have discretionary income they are open to spending. People have deepened their relationship with musicians during the coronavirus pandemic, my colleague Spencer Kornhaber told me. He said that the huge appetite for concerts we are seeing now may be a “lagging indicator of that demand for experience.”

Concert tickets are not the stalwart inflation indicator that gas fluctuations or egg prices are, but how people approach them tells us a lot about the ways Americans are spending their money. Rapidly rising prices for services—including items such as concert tickets—are now responsible for a bigger portion of overall inflation than they have been in years past. As grocery inflation moderates and gas prices go down, the prices of services remain stubbornly high. (That category includes a range of nonphysical items that rely on labor, including hospital care and school tuition as well as event tickets.) Even as the Fed cranks up interest rates to try to curb consumer spending, these categories seem to be resistant. “We’re not seeing that slowdown in [the cost of] services we expected,” Jason Mercer, a live-entertainment analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, told me. One possible reason that prices are high, he added, is that concert organizers and artists are “taking advantage” of pent-up demand from consumers after years without live events.

How people are spending their money is a good indicator of how they are feeling. If someone is signing a long-term lease or buying a house, that suggests they feel optimistic about the future (at least optimistic enough that they are willing to enter a long-term financial engagement, which they expect they will have enough money to continue). But if someone is buying a concert ticket, that tells us more about how they are feeling right then, in that moment, as the New York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek explained on a recent episode of the Times podcast The Daily. Tickets are a onetime purchase—though they can be a major one, and are becoming pricier.

The average resale price for concert tickets went from $116 over a three-month period in mid-2019 to $240 over the same period this year, according to data SeatGeek shared with me. And the inflation rate for “live performing admission events” is currently 2.6 percent higher than overall inflation in the U.S., Reuters reported. (In a paper on “rockonomics,” Princeton researchers found that from the late 1980s through early 2000s, concert-ticket prices outpaced inflation.)

A number of factors are causing ticket prices to spike. Even before the pandemic, the costs of running a large show—factoring in artists, vendors, venues, promoters, and others—were high. Now new variables, such as supply-chain disruptions and COVID-related delays, have made it even pricier. Mercer, the Moody’s analyst, told me that artists, who help set the initial price for concert tickets, may also be influenced by seeing others raise prices: “It's almost as though one artist sets a new bar and then the next artist can take it from there.”

Many people are also blaming Ticketmaster, whose parent company, Live Nation, controls a significant share of the live-music-ticketing market, for exorbitant prices and fees. In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the effects of the company’s dominance. (The musician Clyde Lawrence began his testimony, “Good morning, senators, and thank you for inviting us today to the most unique gig we’ve had in years.”) Some artists have tried to resist Ticketmaster. Robert Smith of The Cure successfully pressured the company to refund some fees this spring, and Maggie Rogers announced that she would sell some tickets for her Summer of ’23 Tour in person. (Asked for comment about ticket prices and their fee calculation, Ticketmaster passed along links to blog posts and other publicly available information. Their testimony in the January Senate hearing can be read here.)

Although major concerts are now massively expensive, smaller artists are finding touring so unsustainable that they are canceling their shows. That the economics of live music are not panning out for them suggests something surprising: Live music “might be undervalued, really,” Spencer told me.

Concerts are not the main driver of inflation, of course, but economists are still paying attention to the events’ impact on the wider economy. As I wrote in this newsletter a couple of weeks ago, economists in Sweden worried that Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour had led to a surge in local prices. Last week, the chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management published a note titled “A Beyoncé Price Bounce?” exploring whether her tour had led to a similar phenomenon in the United Kingdom. “For UK inflation, the pressures may persist,” he concluded.

In this odd economic moment, many people are finding that concerts and other experiences are how they want to spend their money. Seeing Taylor sing for more than three hours, or reaching transcendence in Beyoncé’s mosh pit, may just be worth it to some. “Having one special night with one particular, highly coveted artist in one space—you can never have it again,” Spencer told me. “Live music is one of the most fleeting and scarce commodities that you can imagine.”

Related:

How Taylor Swift broke Ticketmaster Why it matters who caused inflation

Today’s News

Violent protests over the fatal police shooting of a 17-year-old in France continued for a second night. Almost 200 people were arrested yesterday evening. The U.S. economy grew 2 percent in the first quarter of the year, which was higher than previous estimates. “Presumed human remains” were recovered from the wreckage of the Titan submersible.

More From The Atlantic

The triumph of coming in third The mutiny could be a gift to Putin. The world’s most important app (for now)

Culture Break

Listen. In a new episode of Radio Atlantic, staff writers Anne Applebaum and Tom Nichols discuss the week’s events in Russia—and the power of a failed revolt.

Watch. The Turner Classic Movies channel, with its ad-free screenings of old films, is a genuine pleasure. It’s also facing deep staffing cuts.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Though I would not consider myself a Swiftie, I enjoy many of Taylor Swift’s songs and appreciate that she’s an excellent businesswoman. One of my favorite Taylor nuggets: When FTX approached her about a sponsorship deal, she apparently asked, “Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities?” This question proved prescient, as it is now a question the SEC is asking!

She dodged a decentralized bullet. A host of other celebrity spokespeople were named in a class-action suit right after FTX collapsed, and various others, including Lindsay Lohan, Akon, and Jake Paul, have since faced SEC charges for promoting crypto assets without proper disclosures. Last month, Shaquille O’Neal was served papers at an NBA playoff game in the Miami venue formerly known as FTX Arena.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

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

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

Listen to the conversation here:

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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

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

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

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

And, um, things got outta control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[BREAK]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosin: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Applebaum: Thanks.

Nichols: Thank you.

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

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.

“A short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing,” my colleague Tom Nichols wrote yesterday. Today’s newsletter will walk you through our writers’ most urgent and clarifying analysis on the whirlwind events of the past weekend.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The first MAGA Democrat Dear Therapist: I’ve been dumped by my friends. The battle for I-95

A Permanent Scar

This past Saturday morning, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense. After advancing hundreds of miles toward the capital, Prigozhin announced that a deal had been struck and that his forces were turning back around.

As Atlantic writers reminded us throughout the weekend, Prigozhin’s brief coup was and remains a fast-moving story, and following it requires disentangling complex webs of disinformation. Below is some of our writers’ most useful analysis to help you put Russia’s crisis in context.

The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble.

“We can at this point only speculate about why Prigozhin undertook this putsch, and why it all failed so quickly,” Tom wrote on Saturday, but “this bizarre episode is not a win for Putin.” Tom explains:

The Russian dictator has been visibly wounded, and he will now bear the permanent scar of political vulnerability. Instead of looking like a decisive autocrat (or even just a mob boss in command of his crew), Putin left Moscow after issuing a short video in which he was visibly angry and off his usual self-assured game.

As for Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader “drew blood and then walked away from a man who never, ever lets such a personal offense go unavenged. But Putin may have had no choice, which is yet another sign of his precarious situation,” Tom writes.

The Russian president is caught in his own trap.

Our staff writer Anne Applebaum suggests paying attention to the reactions of the Russian people. When the Wagner Group mercenaries arrived in the city of Rostov-on-Don on Saturday morning and declared themselves the new rulers, “they met no resistance,” Anne reported. “One photograph, published by The New York Times, shows them walking at a leisurely pace across a street, one of their tanks in the background, holding yellow coffee cups.” She goes on:

This was the most remarkable aspect of the whole day: Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime—not the security services, not the army, and not the general public. On the contrary, many seemed sorry to see him go.

To understand this response, Anne explains, observers must reckon with the power of apathy. “A certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all.” Through a constant barrage of propaganda, Putin convinces Russian citizens that there is no truth to be found. And if nothing is true, then why protest or engage in politics?

But apathy works both ways: “If no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war,” Anne explains. “Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.”

Why did Prigozhin’s coup fail?

Brian Klaas, who has studied coups around the world, offered some lessons from the history of such uprisings. The most successful coups are those run by a unified military, Klaas writes. “In Thailand, for example, coups are usually executed by the military brass, who announce that they are toppling civilian politicians. With nobody with guns to oppose them, Thai coups almost always succeed … After all, what’s the president or prime minister going to do—shoot back at the army?”

In Russia, however, the coup was carried out by a faction connected to the country’s military sector. In those cases, “the plot will likely succeed less on strength than on perception. The plotters are playing a PR game, in which they’re trying to create the impression that their coup is destined to triumph.”

I recommend reading Klaas’s explainer in full. But if you’re wondering what to look for as you follow this news story, I’ll leave you with his advice:

If you’re watching events and trying to understand the strategic logic of coups and how Putin’s regime might end, look out for whether the loyalists stay loyal or start to peel off toward those challenging him. If important figures begin to abandon the regime en masse, Putin is toast.

What do the weekend’s events mean for Ukraine?

Prigozhin’s loss is Ukraine’s gain, the Atlantic contributing writer Elliot Ackerman argued today. “Although Prigozhin was able to negotiate a safe exit from Russia (at least for now), an early casualty of this coup seems to be the Wagner Group itself; Vladimir Putin is unlikely to keep it intact,” Ackerman explains—which means that “over the course of a single weekend, Prigozhin and Putin have jointly done what the Ukrainian military and its NATO allies have failed to achieve in 18 months of war: They’ve removed Russia’s single most effective fighting force from the battlefield.”

“The question we should all be asking now is how to capitalize on Prigozhin’s success,” Ackerman writes.

Related:

The coup is over, but Putin is in trouble. Putin is caught in his own trap.

Today’s News

Fox News announced that Jesse Watters will fill Tucker Carlson’s former prime-time slot, which has been vacant since Carlson’s show was canceled in April. The Supreme Court restored a federal ruling on racial gerrymandering, which stated that Louisiana’s congressional lines likely diluted the power of Black voters. President Joe Biden announced more than $42 billion in federal funding to expand high-speed internet access across the country.

Evening Read

Venice Gordon for The Atlantic

The Monk Who Thinks the World Is Ending

By Annie Lowrey

The monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.

Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance. Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”

Humanity has “exponentially destroyed life on the same curve as we have exponentially increased intelligence,” he tells his congregants. Now the “crazy suicide wizards” of Silicon Valley have ushered in another revolution. They have created artificial intelligence.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The cancer-drug shortage is different. “I shouldn’t have to accept being in deepfake porn.” There will never be another Second Life.

Culture Break

Disney

Listen. American narratives about “freedom” can make us miss out on the joys of coming together. The newest episode of How to Talk to People teaches us how to not go it alone.

Watch. It’s hard to be mad at Indiana Jones. The action franchise’s fifth installment, in theaters this Friday, doesn’t break new ground, but it does give viewers what they want.

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.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

The sharp exchange between former President Barack Obama and two nonwhite 2024 GOP presidential candidates captures how diverging perceptions about racial inequity have emerged as a central fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.

In their presidential campaigns, Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is Black, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian American, have repeatedly insisted that systemic or structural racism is no longer a problem in America. That drew a sharp rebuke earlier this month from Obama, who said the pair had joined “a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can all make it.’”   

Both Scott and Haley responded by accusing Obama of treating minority voters as victims and repeating their claims that racism and structural inequities can no longer hold back anyone who will “work hard” and display “integrity” and “grit,” as Scott told a mostly white audience at a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity last Tuesday.

[Read: ‘People who are different are not the problem in America’]

“When I hear people telling me that America is a racist nation, I got to say: Not my America, not our America,” Scott declared to loud applause.

Scott and Haley have leaned into the criticism from Obama, highlighting it to raise their profile in a Republican presidential race where each has attracted just single-digit support in national polls. But in responding to Obama, they have demonstrated how difficult it has become for any GOP leader—especially one who is not white—to challenge the party consensus that the nation has transcended discrimination against minorities and women.

For a Republican coalition that still relies predominantly on white voters, hearing nonwhite GOP candidates dismiss racism offers “acquittal and absolution,” says Robert P. Jones, the founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies American attitudes toward race and culture. Such comments from figures like Scott and Haley, he told me, provide “permission” for other Republicans “to not even have to ask the questions” about whether systemic discrimination still shapes U.S. society.

Likewise, Michael Steele, the Black former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he believes that Scott is expressing such an absolutist rejection of racism—despite Scott’s acknowledgment that he has faced racial profiling in his own life—because he recognizes that that assertion is what the GOP’s mainly white electorate wants to hear.

Republicans, Steele told me, like finding “the Black man to put out there to say that shit to begin with. You pick someone to affirm the lie in a way that you ostensibly take your fingerprints off it. You create this artificial legitimacy around an illegitimate point.”

One of the core beliefs that binds the modern Republican coalition, particularly since the rise of Donald Trump, is rejection of the idea that racial minorities and women face structural bias in American society.

Studies of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections conducted by the Tufts political scientist Brian Schaffner and his colleagues used the Cooperative Election Study, a large-scale national poll, to determine the factors that predicted which candidate voters supported in those races. Those studies found that in each contest, the single best predictor of who voted for Trump was the belief that systemic racism no longer exists in the U.S.; the second-best predictor was denial that systemic bias exists against women.

Within the GOP, those views command overwhelming support. In an email, Schaffner told me almost nine in 10 Republicans reject the idea that structural discrimination exists against racial minorities; about three-fourths doubt that women face entrenched bias. Fully two-thirds of Republicans say there’s little bias against either minorities or women. Only one in 20 Republicans, Schaffner found, believe that both groups still face systematic discrimination.

As Trump more overtly identified the GOP with white racial resentments, Democrats have moved in the opposite direction. Since Obama’s presidency, polls show, the share of Democrats who say that Black Americans and other minorities face structural discrimination has dramatically increased. With more Democrats describing systemic racism as a problem, the gap between the two parties on racial questions has notably widened over roughly the past 15 years.

Other surveys document a further step in thinking among Republicans. Not only do a majority of Republican voters assert that structural barriers no longer constrain women or minorities; a majority also claim that core GOP constituencies are the real victims of bias.

In PRRI polling, about two-thirds of Republicans agreed that discrimination against white people is now as big a problem as bias against minorities. In a 2022 national survey, PerryUndem, a firm that polls for progressive organizations, found that about seven in 10 Republicans agreed both that “white men are the most attacked group in the country right now” and that “these days society seems to punish men just for acting like men.”

[Tom Nichols: The pointless Nikki Haley campaign]

Similarly, in a national 2021 survey conducted by a UCLA  polling project, Republicans believed there to be more discrimination against white people than against other racial groups, more against men than women, and more against Christians than other religious groups, such as Muslims and Jews. “Republicans see a racial order in which historically privileged groups, like white Americans, are now the real victims,” the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck wrote in their book The Bitter End, which cited the UCLA research.

Sides, a professor at Vanderbilt University, points out that the claim that white people are the victims of “reverse discrimination” has been a rallying cry for the right since the civil-rights era. But, he told me, that long-standing conservative complaint “has become supercharged in this current climate” because of “the demographic reality that white Americans, and white Christian Americans, are not going to be as numerically dominant or as politically powerful as they used to be.”

As Obama correctly noted, both Scott and Haley are following a long line of earlier nonwhite GOP candidates who similarly declared that America has transcended racial discrimination. The late Herman Cain, a Black Republican who sought the party’s 2012 presidential nomination, insisted at the time, “I don’t believe racism in this country holds anybody back in a big way.” Ben Carson, who ran against Trump for the 2016 GOP nomination and then served as his secretary of housing and urban development, offered his audiences similar assurances. Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee last year to run in Georgia against Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, released an ad in which he declared, “Senator Warnock believes America is a bad country full of racist people. I believe we’re a great country full of generous people.”

Scott and Haley have regularly issued similar pronouncements. Both have stressed America’s racial progress over the past several generations. Scott has pointedly contrasted his experience with that of his late grandfather, who he said had to step off the sidewalk when a white person passed. Scott’s emphasis on that progress marks a shift that his critics find jarring after his candid acknowledgments earlier in his career that he faced racial profiling from Capitol Hill police even after his election to the Senate. Scott is “kind of whistling past the point, when you want to create this impression that there’s no racism, where in the next sentence you tell us how you have been profiled by Capitol Hill police,” Steele told me.

In their campaigns, Scott and Haley have each contended that they succeeded in life because family members encouraged them to take personal responsibility for their fate and not to identify as a victim. The same path, both say, is open today to any American regardless of race or ethnicity. “The left,” Scott insisted at the Hannity town hall, refuses “to deal with America in 2023 and not 1923 because they know that the truth of my life disproves the lies of their radical agenda.”

Obama, though, in his comments on The Axe Files, a podcast hosted by his former top political adviser David Axelrod, acknowledged racial progress over his lifetime: “The good news is that I think we are closer to an approximation of the ideal than we were 100 years ago or 200 years ago.” But he said that Scott, Haley, and the other Republicans stressing individual responsibility are disregarding the persistence of wide gaps between white Americans and racial minorities on a broad array of economic and social measures. If political leaders “pretend as if everything’s equal and fair,” Obama said, “then I think people are rightly skeptical” of their commitment to ensuring equal opportunity.

Steele agrees with Obama. “I cannot give quarter to this idea that people in this country don’t hold racist attitudes, No. 1, and No. 2, the institutions that a lot of these folks built reflect that racism in a variety of ways,” he told me. Steele wants Haley and Scott to try to convince an audience of Black people otherwise. “Come to Prince George’s County, and you look Black people in the eye and tell them there’s no racism,” said Steele, who served as Maryland’s lieutenant governor in the mid-2000s. “Or let’s take that conversation to Howard University. It’s easy to do when you have 1,000 white people hooting and hollering at every word you say.”

Carlos Curbelo, a Cuban American Republican former U.S. representative from Miami, also believes that, for Scott, accepting the party consensus discounting racism is the prerequisite for GOP voters listening to him on anything else. “Part of what he is banking on is that he is a man of color who is making these pronouncements,” Curbelo told me.

But Curbelo also maintains that each side in this exchange is overstating its case. Obama and other Democrats, he says, downplay the extent to which individual minorities can now overcome discrimination, while Republicans like Scott unrealistically excuse the persistence of structural racial barriers. “There is some validity to what he and Haley are saying,” Curbelo told me. “I just wish they would explain the whole issue, not just the half that is more convenient for them right now.”

As the sparring between Obama and Scott and Haley demonstrates, the two parties appear locked in an action-and-reaction cycle that is pushing them further apart on racial questions. The more traditionally marginalized groups demand greater recognition and influence, the more aggressively conservatives push back, and vice versa. For at least the rest of this decade, that cycle seems far more likely to intensify than abate.

The Democrats’ increased reliance on voters of color—and the increased focus on racial equity by the white voters in their coalition—has pressured them to direct greater attention on racial injustice in everything from school curricula to the behavior of police departments.

Republicans, whose Trump-era coalition has grown more reliant on the voters most uneasy with all the ways America is changing, have responded by digging in against these demands for new approaches. Across the red states, Republican-controlled governments are moving with remarkable speed and consistency to pass laws limiting classroom discussion of racial or gender inequities, banning books, and barring programs meant to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Republicans portray this wave of legislation as a fundamentally defensive attempt to prevent radical “woke” ideas from indoctrinating young people. But to Democrats and their allies, it’s GOP officials like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who are seeking to suppress the nation’s diverse younger generations with restrictive new laws on voting, LGBTQ rights, and how teachers can discuss America’s racial record.

[Sarah Isgur: What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiona]

PRRI’s Jones, who has written several books on race and religion, offers a telling example of how the conservative approach to racial injustice has hardened. He notes that as recently as the 1990s, the deeply conservative Southern Baptist Convention, in a formal statement repudiating its role in supporting slavery, apologized “to all African Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”

Given the current climate on racial issues within conservative circles, Jones told me, he considers it virtually inconceivable that the Southern Baptist Convention today would acknowledge that systemic racism even exists, much less apologize for it. “The external historical reckoning the country is going through,” Jones told me, is prompting an “internal response” within the GOP that has generated a virtually lockstep rejection of racism as an ongoing problem.

There’s no question that all of these cultural causes now generate more passion inside the GOP coalition than such traditional party priorities as cutting taxes, limiting regulation, and promoting a strong national defense. “Issues related to race alongside gender identity and similar things, that’s their bread and butter,” Vanderbilt’s Sides says of GOP candidates today. “That’s what they want to talk about.”

Haley and Scott have placed themselves directly in that current. Their insistence that America has moved beyond racial inequality will surely win them loud applause from a mostly white Republican primary electorate that gets an extra jolt of satisfaction from hearing a person of color validate that view. Their endorsement of those arguments may not be enough to allow either to overtake better-known, better-funded alternatives, chiefly Trump and DeSantis, who are offering very much the same case. But echoing the claim that discrimination is in the past may be their ante for any future advancement in the Trump-era GOP.

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.

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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.

Donald Trump has long had the power to turn insignificant moments into days-long news events, but on Tuesday he managed something even more difficult: He did the reverse. The former president of the United States was arrested and arraigned on 37 felony charges, and it felt like an anti-climax.

Several factors explain this. The potent and precise indictment, covering Trump’s attempt to conceal highly sensitive national-security documents, was unsealed on Friday, so no new information emerged today. Despite fears of some observers about violence or disruption, Trump came and went from a federal courthouse in Miami without serious incident. Americans have become so accustomed to a circus following Trump everywhere he goes that anything else is a surprise. Television networks aired wall-to-wall coverage of … well, what, exactly? Cameras and recordings weren’t allowed in the courtroom where he was arraigned, and Trump himself was barely seen on his way in and out.

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Moreover, although these charges are more perilous than one filed in Manhattan, this isn’t the first time Trump has been indicted, and the idea that he would face charges—that a major presidential candidate would be facing so many legal troubles—has somehow become the new normal.

That left a Trump speech in New Jersey Tuesday evening as the ostensible marquee event—his first public remarks since he revealed last week that he’d been indicted. Yet this, too, ended up being a bit of a letdown, or at least a misdirection. Trump had lots of fiery rhetoric, but for all the heat, it shed little light on the case: what the legal issues are, or why Trump was so determined not to comply with the federal government’s requests to return records that did not belong to him.

“Today we witnessed the most evil and heinous abuse of power in the history of our country,” Trump said at the start of his speech, a bold claim that would come as news to any student of history, including graduates of middle-school social-studies classes outside of Florida. Things did not get better, or more factually based, from there. Only a fool would have expected a chastened Trump, and the fool would have been disappointed.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

Trump blamed his prosecution on Joe Biden, whom he labeled “the most corrupt president” in U.S. history. There’s no evidence Biden had any role in the case, and the White House has said the president found out about the indictment only after Trump broke the news. Biden has carefully remained mum on the case since, though he no doubt relishes the charges against a rival whom he has criticized as a threat to U.S. democracy.

Trump also attacked Special Counsel Jack Smith, whom he said (without evidence) was “a raging and uncontrolled Trump hater.” Trump added, “I’ve named him ‘Deranged Jack Smith.’” The ad hominem attack demonstrates both how his nickname game has weakened and perhaps also why he struggles to hire and keep attorneys.

But most of the president’s speech skirted any kind of real engagement with the charges against him. His central point was that he had the right to possess the documents he did under the Presidential Records Act, and that as president he had the power to declassify them. These arguments are neither new nor relevant. Trump has used them since the Mar-a-Lago search, though he has provided no evidence for declassification.

[Tom Nichols: The United States v. Donald Trump]

The problem for Trump that his indictment sidesteps these matters. Trump complained that the charges never mentioned the Presidential Records Act, and he is correct: It doesn’t engage with the question of whether he had a right to possess the documents. Instead, all of the charges focus on his actions after a May 2022 subpoena to return them. Once that request was made, he allegedly went to great lengths to hide documents from the federal government and even from his own attorneys, and this is where Smith homed in.

Following Trump’s explanations was also difficult for anyone who isn’t immersed in the right-wing discourse. He served up a conspiratorial word salad, tossing together the Clinton socks case and acid-washing and Burisma. The former president did offer a partial answer to the greatest mystery of the case: Why was Trump so determined to keep the documents?

“Many people have asked me why I had these boxes,” he said. “The answer, besides having every right under the Presidential Records Act, is these boxes were containing all types of personal belongings,” including shirts and shoes. But chaotic storage is no excuse for violation of the law, and it hardly explains his dogged attempts—detailed by his own attorney—to avoid handing over documents such as military attack plans.

Once liable to start speaking and continue for a couple hours, Trump has been more concise in some of his recent speeches. As he wrapped up Tuesday, after just 30 minutes, he complained that the Justice Department had broken an unwritten rule against prosecuting a former president and current presidential candidate. The risks of letting Trump continue to flout the law with impunity arguably outweigh the downsides, but the indictment does carry risks.

“You just don’t, unless it’s really bad,” Trump said. He had unwittingly delivered the most illuminating commentary of the day.

Donald Trump’s arraignment today at a federal courthouse in Miami will mark a new phase in the incitement campaigns that Trump has waged for most of his political career. Since his indictment on charges related to the unlawful retention and storage of classified documents at his Florida resort, Trump and his allies have attacked the prosecutor, his wife, the Justice Department, President Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, among others. The language they are using is filled with words of war, elevating concerns among terrorism experts and security planners that Trump’s supporters pose the same threat of violence that they did before the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.

Yet although the threat has not disappeared, it has evolved. Highly organized violence like the January 6 riot now appears less likely. The urgent question is what dangerous individuals might do on their own and whether authorities are prepared to stop them.

[Tom Nichols: The arraignment of Citizen Trump]

Incitement to violence is not an on/off switch, and the mere use of words doesn’t necessarily lead to violence. Ideally, political leaders of any persuasion would avoid belligerent language, because they should know its potential consequences. But worrying about whether the base is emboldened is not the correct metric; the thing to watch is whether the number of supporters who are inclined to violence is growing.

Their words are hot, but coordination appears to be lacking. Law-enforcement monitoring of websites and potential planning in Florida is not pointing to any specific or credible threat. The atmosphere is obviously intense, but Trump does not have the resources he once had. He is no longer in charge of any military or law-enforcement agency that he could call upon to help his cause. And unlike on January 6, when Trump declined to mobilize a government response to the riot, his disinclination to step in against violence won’t prevent anyone else from taking action. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is running against Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential-candidate nomination, has been hesitant to overtly challenge his rival, but he is unlikely to conspire to help Trump if violence breaks out during court proceedings in the coming weeks.

January 6 happened at a specific place and time: at the Capitol, just as Trump’s loss was being certified for good—a one-time event that his supporters felt highly motivated to disrupt. Although the former president’s arraignment is a highly public occasion, and supporters have been organizing some public protests, criminal cases have a way of dragging on. Yesterday afternoon, doubts persisted even over whether Trump would have local counsel to represent him. The justice system’s slow pace reduces the incentive to disrupt any day’s proceedings. No one moment is decisive, especially in this early phase.

Another difference from January 6 is that Trump’s supporters now have reason to understand that getting swept up in the moment has legal consequences. Trump has vowed to pardon rioters if he were to become president again. But so far, such promises haven’t been worth much. Hundreds of his supporters have been indicted, and many have been sent to jail. Numerous January 6 defendants have asserted their belief that the government—specifically Trump—condoned their efforts. Some have expressed outrage, disappointment, and a sense of betrayal. A violent movement cannot succeed without soldiers.

[David A. Graham: Unprecedented]

Even if the level of discontent among Trump’s supporters hasn’t changed, people generally need leadership to turn to coordinated violence. Trump is unruly and angry, but he also seems quite isolated. The major groups that helped organize January 6, including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, have lost much of their potency; their leaders are in jail, and they’ve turned against one another.

People can talk tough, but that won’t translate into violence without organization and a focused commitment. I’m not dismissing the importance of the people cosplaying as militants; I’m merely suggesting that the pool of Americans willing to go to real war for Trump has likely shrunk.

The most worrisome possibility now is not an insurrection, revolution, or riot, but an act of violence by an individual. Incitement doesn’t have to involve a specific plan to direct named individuals to commit a specific act of terrorism. By stirring up rage and paranoia among his followers, Trump and others may be emboldening some to act violently. Trump supporters are allowed to protest, and their safety must also be protected. Authorities must be on the alert for anyone with the means and desire to try to alter the course of events through deadly force.

Fortunately, the January 6 prosecutions have been a powerful response to Trump’s greatest achievement: making violence a natural extension of political differences. But the persistence of violent rhetoric is a reminder that anything could still happen.

Groups calling themselves the Free Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps have launched raids inside Russia. Drones have flown over Moscow, damaging what may be the homes of Russian intelligence officers and buzzing the Kremlin itself. Unusually intense fighting has been reported this week in several parts of eastern Ukraine, with completely different versions of events provided by Russians and Ukrainians. Conflicts have also been reported between the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group and the soldiers of the regular Russian army.

What does it all mean? That the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

In a week that also marks the 79th anniversary of D-Day, we should note the many ways in which this military action does not, and probably will not, resemble the Normandy landing. Perhaps at some point there will be a lot of Ukrainian troops massed in one place, taking huge casualties—or perhaps not. Perhaps there will be a galvanized, coordinated Russian military response—or perhaps the response will look more like it did on Tuesday, when a dam that was under direct Russian control collapsed, leading to the inundation of southern Ukraine. Nor was that the only disaster: A series of smaller man-made floods has also washed over Russian-occupied territories in the past few days.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

This counteroffensive will also look different from the D-Day movies, because Ukraine’s goals are not merely military. Yes, Ukrainian troops are probing Russian defenses up and down the 1,000-kilometer front line. Yes, the Ukrainians are conducting “shaping operations,” hitting ammunition dumps and other targets behind Russian lines. Yes, Ukraine wants to take back territory lost since February 2022, as well as territory lost in 2014. Yes, we know the Ukrainians can do it, because they’ve done it before. They fought the Russians out of northern Ukraine at the very beginning of the war. They recaptured Russian-held parts of the Kharkiv district in September, and the city of Kherson a couple of months later.

But in addition to taking back land, they are also conducting a sort of psychological shaping operation: They have to convince the Russian elite that the war was a mistake and that Russia can’t win it, not in the short term and not in the long term, either. Toward this end, they are also seeking to convince ordinary Russians that they aren’t as safe as they thought, that the war is nearer to their own homes than they believed, and that President Vladimir Putin isn’t as wise as they imagined. And the Ukrainians have to do all of this without a full-scale invasion of Russia, without occupying Moscow, and without a spectacular Russian surrender in Red Square.

The anti-Putin Russians fighting in Russia are part of that battle. This group, which seems to contain some authentic Russian extremists and some authentic opponents of Putin (but may also contain Ukrainians pretending to be Russian extremists or opponents of Putin), does have a military purpose. These incursions can help neutralize the immediate border zone, and draw Russian troops away from more important battles. The group’s leaders appear to have killed a senior Russian officer and are said to have taken prisoners.

But they, too, are part of a different game. As one of the group’s members (nickname “Caesar”) told The New York Times, they aim to provide “a demonstration to the people of Russia that it is possible to create resistance and fight against the Putin regime inside Russia.” By their very existence, they prove that apathy is not mandatory, that the Russian nation is not unified, and that no one is secure just because they live inside the borders of Russia.  

[Tom Nichols: The world awaits Ukraine’s counteroffensive]

The drones in Moscow could have the same effect. I don’t know who launched them—Ukrainian special forces, Russian saboteurs, or Ukrainian special forces pretending to be Russian saboteurs. But the effect is the same: They show Muscovites that no one is untouchable, not even the residents of the Kremlin. Maybe they won’t persuade people to “create resistance and fight against the Putin regime,” but they might help persuade people to start thinking about what comes next.

And indeed, some people are clearly thinking about what comes next. Although no evidence indicates that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenaries, is actively trying to eliminate Putin, he does seem to be part of a competition to replace him, should the Russian president accidentally fall out a window. During an interview Monday, he mocked the luxurious life of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s daughter, implied that Shoigu himself is lazy, and described the chief of the general staff throwing “paranoid tantrums, yelling and squealing at anyone surrounding him.” We are, he said, “two months away from the firing squads”—by which he meant the firing squads that will eliminate these degenerate leaders. One Russian officer who said he had been captured and interrogated by the Wagner group issued a statement claiming that Prigozhin’s men were threatening and humiliating Russian soldiers. Prigozhin, in turn, says the regular Russian army opened fire on his mercenaries and left land mines to obstruct their movement.

In this context, the destruction not just of the big dam on the Dnipro River but of other dams and waterways all across occupied Ukraine has a clear purpose. Floods create chaos, forcing the Ukrainian state to care for evacuees. They put large, unexpected bodies of water between the Ukrainians and Russian forces, making it impossible to move equipment. These actions also send a psychological message: We will do anything—anything—to stop you. We don’t care how it looks. We don’t care who it damages. Confirmed reports say that the Russian occupation regime is not rescuing people stranded on the roof of their house by the flood, and that the Russian army is shelling people engaged in rescue operations. Russian soldiers have also drowned, Ukrainian spokespeople believe. An army that was willing to waste tens of thousands of men in the pointless nine-month battle of Bakhmut is unlikely to care.

Remember that all of this—the weird psyops, the exploded dam, the Russian infighting—has unfolded even before anyone has reliably spotted the Western-trained, Western-equipped Ukrainian brigades that are meant to lead this counteroffensive. On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced with great fanfare that it had destroyed some of this equipment, including a German Leopard 2 tank. Hours later, Russian bloggers examined the video clips they produced. Alas, the objects destroyed seem to be not Leopard tanks but John Deere tractors. Future reports from the Russian ministry should be treated with caution.

Future reports from any source should be treated with caution. What we can see is not the “fog of war,” in the old-fashioned sense; instead it is a kind of swirling tornado, a maelstrom of claims and counterclaims, memes and countermemes, real battles taking place away from television screens and fake ones happening on camera. The Normandy landings were followed by a long, bloody Allied slog through France, which no one back home watched in real time. The certainty that D-Day was a true turning point emerged only in retrospect. This Ukrainian counteroffensive is, so far, disappointing fans of panoramic drama, set-piece battles, and heroic tales. Those might, or might not, come later. In the meantime, remember that the true purpose of the counteroffensive is not your entertainment.

Ten years ago, an unorthodox reporting team flew from New York to Hong Kong to meet someone claiming to be a spy who was ready to hand over a trove of top-secret documents. The hastily assembled group of journalists comprised the U.S. documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras; the blogger Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist at The Guardian; and myself, a Guardian reporter based in New York.

I did not know the identity of the person we were to meet. He or she had sent a “welcome pack,” a sample of classified documents that appeared genuine—but I was still uncertain, wondering whether the potential story might be an elaborate fraud or the work of a disgruntled crank. The source turned out to be no hoaxer but a contractor with the National Security Agency: Edward Snowden.

Then age 29, Snowden had become disillusioned by what he had seen inside the NSA of the scale of intrusion into privacy in the post-9/11 U.S.—some of it illegal—and around the world. He had decided to become a whistleblower. We spent almost a week interviewing him during the day in his cluttered room, in the Mira Hotel in Kowloon, and then writing stories late into the night.  

At the end of one of the interviews, I asked Snowden for evidence showing the involvement of the NSA’s British surveillance partner, the Government Communications Headquarters. The next morning, he gave me a memory stick. I expected it to contain one or two examples; instead, it stored tens of thousands of documents, covering both the NSA and GCHQ. These were to form the basis for subsequent reporting by The Guardian, The New York Times, and ProPublica, which became partners in investigating and publishing the story. Snowden had given even more material to Poitras and Greenwald. In sheer quantity, this was the biggest leak in intelligence history.

What remains a puzzle to me is why the U.S. intelligence agencies seemingly never tried to stop him or us. Greenwald and I stayed in a hotel a taxi ride away, and each morning, as we traveled to see Snowden, I expected to find him gone, spirited away. Conceivably, the U.S. agencies were unaware of how many documents Snowden was sharing with us. I hope one day an answer to this conundrum might emerge in a release of declassified archives or a disclosure by a retired intelligence officer.

[Read: Would the U.S. grant asylum to a man who exposed Russia’s spying?]

Also reporting the story was the investigative journalist Barton Gellman, then of The Washington Post (and now a staff writer at The Atlantic). For various reasons, including the concerns of Post lawyers, Gellman decided against going to Hong Kong, opting to work on the stories from the United States. Writing in the Post near the end of 2013, Gellman summarized the significance of the Snowden story thus: “Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.”

The Snowden revelations about the collection of citizens’ private communications provoked public outrage in the U.S. and around the world. Ten years on, what has changed? How should we now balance the benefits of greater awareness of surveillance against the damage that intelligence agencies claim was done to their capabilities? And what of the protagonists in the original story, caught up in the political turmoil of the past decade?

The disclosures did bring some tangible results. In both the U.S and the U.K., lawmakers introduced important if limited reforms, and courts ruled in favor of enhanced privacy. Less tangible, though real enough, was a growth in public awareness of surveillance. When the first stories emerged from our encounter in Hong Kong, the response of some people was a blasé “We knew that.” No, they did not. They might have suspected large-scale data collection, but few outside the intelligence apparatus had any inkling of its true extent and the agencies’ powers. Knowledge of the ease with which phones can be hacked and the vulnerability of other electronic communications has become mainstream, even commonplace, over the past decade.

Another major change resulted specifically from Snowden’s disclosure of the PRISM program, which revealed the extent to which Big Tech firms—including Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Apple—were handing over users’ personal data to the agencies. Initially, Silicon Valley was embarrassed to have its collaboration with the spy agencies exposed—but that turned to anger when Snowden’s further disclosures demonstrated that the spooks were also helping themselves to the companies’ data by exploiting backdoor vulnerabilities. Ignoring opposition from the intelligence community, Big Tech ushered in end-to-end encryption years earlier than originally planned. A wariness that did not exist in the industry before 2013 still persists.

Ben Wizner, who works at the American Civil Liberties Union and is Snowden’s lawyer, views the affair’s repercussions as “exponentially more positive” than he’d have predicted at the time—though with important qualifications, both for Snowden and for society.

“I thought the most likely outcome of the situation is he will be in prison and the world will shrug,” he told me when we spoke recently. “And he is not in prison, and the world did not shrug. We in fact had an extraordinary, historic global debate about technology, surveillance, and liberty that continues to this day and will frame, in some ways, the debate about AI and new technology that are emerging.”

As for Snowden himself, he has continued to live in exile in Moscow, where he ended up after leaving Hong Kong. He remains in contact with the original reporting team that met him in Hong Kong, and I have visited him three times in Moscow. On Friday—which was the anniversary of when Poitras, Greenwald, and I landed in Hong Kong—Snowden and I spoke online. Even with the perspective of a decade, he has no regrets. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption alone was a valuable legacy, he told me: “That was a pipe dream in 2013 when the story broke. An enormous fraction of global internet traffic traveled electronically naked. Now it is a rare sight.”

But he is not satisfied with such gains—not least because privacy has only come under further assault from technological advances. “The idea that after the revelations in 2013 there would be rainbows and unicorns the next day is not realistic,” he told me. “It is an ongoing process. And we will have to be working at it for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives and beyond.”

Before the Snowden affair, I had mainly covered foreign affairs and politics, including six years I spent as The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief. After Hong Kong, I took up a beat in London covering national security. At first, I found that the intelligence community bore a grudge—conversations I had with officials would begin with their saying, “Let’s put Snowden behind us,” but they’d invariably end up asking, “Do you realize how much damage you did?”

That assessment has persisted in some quarters. A former head of GCHQ, Sir David Omand, told me he believes that the public-interest argument is outweighed by damage the leaks caused. “On the downside, I think it is pretty significant that operations had to be halted,” he said. SIS, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, “had to close human-intelligence operations down for fear of information analyzed by Russians, the Chinese, Iranians.”

Ciaran Martin, who was the director-general of cyber security at GCHQ, brought in to deal with fallout from the Snowden revelations, expressed his sense that our stories had an implicit double standard, portraying the intelligence services of Western democracies as “uniquely evil actors” while ignoring what Russia and China were doing. “The charge that we were the principal malignant actors on the internet was pretty shaky at the time and completely unsustainable now,” he told me. “It is not an argument that could be made from within the borders of the Russian Federation.”

Snowden disputes the damage narrative and says the agencies never produced any evidence for that. “Disruption? Sure, that is plausible,” he said. “But it is hard to claim ‘damage’ if, despite 10 years of hysterics, the sky never fell in.”  

GCHQ itself changed after Snowden. Despite some rearguard action, it went from being the most secretive of the British agencies to the most open—from a single press officer who mostly responded with “no comment,” to an in-house team of media professionals who hold regular briefings. More significantly, GCHQ opened a public branch in 2016, the National Cyber Security Centre, with Martin as its first head. The center issues information on potential threats and acts as a resource for companies and individuals looking to improve their cybersecurity.

[Tom Nichols: The narcissists who endanger America]

As I read through the Snowden documents, many showed the agencies—which eavesdropped on terrorists, the Taliban, hostage takers, human traffickers, and drug cartels—in a good light. Scott Shane, a national-security correspondent at The New York Times with whom I worked at the time, reached the same conclusion. I regret that more of this context was not reflected in our coverage—though this is not a matter of hindsight: Both Shane and I did write stories in 2013 that attempted to provide this balance. If neither of these efforts gained much traction, that may have reflected a lack of public appetite at the time for greater nuance in the prevailing story about surveillance.  

I regret that some idealistic young officials at GCHQ whom I later encountered felt injured by our reporting, that their work was denigrated. But a far greater regret is that I did not devote much thought to what would happen to Snowden himself next.

When he left Hong Kong, he had tickets that would take him to Ecuador via Moscow and Cuba (as a distraction tactic, he also held tickets for other destinations in Latin America). Fidel Narvaez, the consul at the Ecuadorian embassy in London at the time, told me last week of his conviction that Russia, viewing Snowden’s presence as a propaganda coup, used the excuse of the U.S. cancellation of Snowden’s passport to keep him at the airport terminal in Moscow. Narvaez flew there to see Snowden at the time and negotiate with the Russians; he himself had signed an emergency travel document that would have allowed Snowden to continue his journey. Narvaez concludes that Snowden “was basically trapped and kidnapped.”

Nevertheless, if he had reached Ecuador, a change in government there in 2017 would probably have resulted in his being handed over to the U.S. authorities—in which case Snowden would likely be sitting in a U.S. prison today. Yet his exile in Russia has led to harsh criticism from some quarters—and the vilification has intensified since the invasion of Ukraine and his taking Russian citizenship (he applied for it before the war but was granted it only last year).

He is accused by his detractors of not denouncing Russia’s surveillance as well as its treatment of gay rights, repression of dissidents and journalists, and other antidemocratic measures. In fact, he has spoken out on all of these things. Although he has described the Russian government as corrupt and denounced it for election fraud, any direct attack on President Vladimir Putin would be extremely risky for him, inviting retaliation or even expulsion. Until about two years ago, he maintained a relatively high profile, doing media interviews, making speeches, and tweeting regularly. Today, he is less visible, giving only rare media interviews and cutting down on speeches and social-media activity.

And what of the others? Poitras was a crucial player. Snowden had reached out to her after initially failing to get a response from Greenwald. To her credit, she engaged with him, even though she had reason to fear an entrapment plot after becoming persona non grata with the U.S. government over her film work in Iraq. She was on the team honored with a Pulitzer Prize awarded in 2014 for the Snowden reporting. She went on to win an Oscar in 2015 for her film about Snowden, Citizenfour.

Gellman, whose work largely earned the Post its share of the Pulitzer with The Guardian, published a detailed account of the Snowden affair, Dark Mirror, in 2020. Greenwald, who also wrote a book version of the story, No Place to Hide, went on to co-found The Intercept but parted ways with the publication in 2020. His contrarianism, criticism of mainstream media, and sniping at the Biden administration have attracted the wrath of liberals—an animus exacerbated by his regular appearances on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show.

Other protagonists included the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who sent a colleague, Sarah Harrison, to help Snowden flee Hong Kong, and Greenwald’s husband, David Miranda, who was detained at London’s Heathrow Airport under a counterterrorism law because he had been carrying Snowden material. (Miranda, who went on to become a member of Brazil’s Congress, died in May this year, aged 37.)

As for me, I got off lightly—minor hassles in the first year, when I found myself routinely held up at U.K. passport control because my name had been placed on a watch list. While we were in Hong Kong, The Guardian sent its head of legal affairs to provide advice. When I asked about some specific liability, she replied, “You have already broken so many laws; a few more won’t make much difference.”

The Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, and the U.S. editor, Janine Gibson, resisted considerable pressure not to publish the original reporting. Subsequently, in a bizarre scene that served little practical purpose, Rusbridger agreed to a British-government request to physically destroy the Guardian computers that held our copy of the documents. GCHQ’s argument was that The Guardian did not have the expertise to keep the archive secure. We continued reporting from New York.

Rusbridger did inform British officials that he would not publish material more broadly than those stories about privacy—Snowden had asked for this from the start, and Rusbridger had already issued it as an edict to reporters. Later, Rusbridger asked me to go back to The New York Times, which still had the material, to review it all and draw up a list of additional stories that might become reportable if we were freed from the mandate to confine stories to privacy issues. I returned to London with a list of about a dozen, which he rejected—not only because he had not intended to renege on the agreement with Snowden, but also because none of them was as explosive as the original stories. With our colleagues at the Post, the Times, Der Spiegel, and the other media organizations involved, we had already done the best. In the end, we published only about 1 percent of the documents.

A copy of the Snowden documents remains locked in an office at the Times, so far as I know. The Guardian looked briefly at finding an alternative without success. At some point, the issue of where to store them permanently will presumably have to be addressed—though the issue may, in an important sense, be moot. “One can reasonably assume that the whole archive is in the hands of the Russians and Chinese states,” Martin, who left GCHQ in 2020 to become a professor at Oxford, told me, “and if you look at what has happened in the last decade, that is not a good thing.” (Snowden disputes the assumption that Russia and China have the archive.)

In another sense, it’s moot because the world has moved on. The public awareness of surveillance that was created by the Snowden revelations has curdled into a worldly cynicism about how much data Big Tech collects on us and what powerful new tools of intrusion governments have at their disposal. This is what weighs on Snowden today: developments such as facial-recognition software, AI, and invasive spyware such as Pegasus, which make the NSA’s surveillance powers that he exposed in 2013 look like “child’s play,” he told me.

“We trusted the government not to screw us. But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did,” he said. “That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power.”