Twenty-nine years ago, Dave Grohl, then the drummer for Nirvana, lost his singer, the band’s brilliant and vexed leader, Kurt Cobain. Last year, Grohl, now the leader of Foo Fighters, lost his drummer, the dazzling Taylor Hawkins. And then, a few months later, Grohl’s mother, Virginia, died. She was, among other things, the ne plus ultra of rock moms, a teacher by profession whose support for her charismatic, punk-loving, unscholarly (her gentle word) son was unfaltering and absolute.

One blow, then another. It was all a bit much. Grohl is an unreasonably buoyant person, but it was hard to imagine how he would pull himself out of a trough dug by such concentrated loss.

But he did. And he did so by writing his way out.

Not long after his mother died, Grohl told me that he was writing new songs—songs, he suggested, that would address, among other subjects, grief and mortality. I hoped for the best but was expecting something less. Not that anguish and moody interiority are foreign to Foo Fighters—“I Should Have Known” and “These Days,” from the 2011 album Wasting Light, could be written only by someone familiar with the capriciousness of sudden loss—but mawkishness nevertheless threatened.

These worries were needless. The latest Foo Fighters album, But Here We Are, is a soaring, frenzied guitar attack whose songs often recall the band’s best stadium-shaking anthems. But more to the point, it is filled with lyrics that feel true in their sustained confrontation with the album’s main subject: shattering absence.

Before I continue, an admission of bias: You are reading a fan’s notes, not an album review, so discount accordingly. Grohl has written for this magazine, and he and I are friends, though my love for his music predates our friendship by decades. His songs have made me happy since Scream, his first band, which he joined in 1986. Grohl’s unswerving commitment to exuberant drums-and-distortion-pedal noise makes him a hero to those of us who are waiting—in vain, most likely—for the triumphal return of rock. Foo Fighters shows are joyous communal gatherings—because of the music, of course, but also because Grohl is a self-aware rock star with superior comic timing. He is also unusually gracious to the very large number of people who lose their minds in his presence, including the middle-aged fellow who recently approached him in a restaurant, hoping to show him his Dave Grohl tribute tattoo. The tattoo was apparently located in some unspeakable place, and Grohl deftly and kindly steered the fan away from stripping.

[Read: The day the live concert returns]

Another acknowledgement: Grohl and I have spoken quite a bit about this album, but I’m respecting his desire, and that of the band, to let the music speak for itself. They have done no press around the album, a decision I understand personally, if not professionally.

This album, however, explains itself, even across its more elliptical songs. The ferocious title track, a genuine Foo Fighters pile driver, makes itself understood through Grohl’s throat-tearing screams: “I gave you my heart / But here we are / Saved you my heart / But here we are.”

In some ways, But Here We Are is reminiscent of The Rising, the 2002 Springsteen masterpiece, which explored the sudden void that is created by tragedy, though with less thrashing. The Rising was a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The sadness that conjured But Here We Are into being is a more familiar, everyday one. Hawkins, in addition to being one of the great drummers of his era, was Grohl’s closest friend. The desert created by his unexpected death is the space Grohl explores with deep sincerity. In “Under You,” Grohl sings, “Someone said I’ll never see your face again / Part of me just can’t believe it’s true / Pictures of us sharing songs and cigarettes / This is how I’ll always picture you.”

There are hints of dark complication scattered across the album: In “Hearing Voices,” Grohl sings, apparently to Hawkins, “Every night I tell myself / Nothing like you could last forever / No one cries like you … / No one lies like you.” This album is an act of forthright self-exposure, an unaffected testament to the love that is organic and integral in the best friendships. “I had a person I loved, and just like that / I was left to live without him,” he describes, heartbreakingly, in “The Glass.”

Disbelief at the reality of death is threaded through these songs. The first track, “Rescued,” opens with an act of mercy for fans who have been waiting for Grohl to address the loss of Hawkins: “It came in a flash, it came out of nowhere / It happened so fast, and then it was over.”

Jen Rosenstein

But it is Virginia Grohl’s loss that in many ways sits at the center of this album. Reviews of But Here We Are have been uniformly positive, but I’ve also noticed some interpretative confusion among the critics. Songs that are clearly about the death of Grohl’s mother are sometimes described as tributes to Hawkins. About some songs there is no confusion. “The Teacher,” a 10-minute opus, is a tribute to Virginia, even quoting her last words to Grohl, who kept vigil bedside in her last days. “Hey kid, what’s the plan for tomorrow? / Where will I wake up? / Where will I wake up?”

“The Teacher” is followed by the album’s final track, “Rest,” a haunting song that starts with a single, mournful acoustic guitar and ends with the album’s first and only vision of peace: “Waking up, had another dream of us / In the warm Virginia sun, there I will meet you.” The plea to rest is directed at both Hawkins and Virginia Grohl. “Virginia sun” does double duty here: Grohl is a proud native of Washington, D.C.’s Virginia suburbs, and Hawkins, like the other Foo Fighters, was virtually an adopted son of Virginia Grohl’s.  

Though the new album ends with the acceptance of death, Grohl is making a more complicated argument across its 10 songs: With some deaths, there is resolution—sometimes, everything that should have been said between two people actually gets said. One has the sense that this is the case with his mother. With Taylor Hawkins, there was no such resolution. He died before his time, suddenly, shockingly. Virginia’s death was despair-inducing but nonetheless part of the natural order. Hawkins’s, like Cobain’s before his, was not. Grohl has dug himself, and his band, out of a trough, but absence, to borrow from W. S. Merwin, goes through him like a thread through a needle, stitching everything with its color.

But Here We Are is the best Foo Fighters album in quite some time. Tragedy isn’t necessary to produce transcendent music. But here, it did.

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

Question of the Week

What do you think about the Supreme Court decision in this term’s affirmative-action cases?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

The Supreme Court’s decision striking down the use of race in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina was released today. Here’s an excerpt from Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion:

The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well. “One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities.” But when a university admits students “on the basis of race, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that [students] of a particular race, because of their race, think alike … at the very least alike in the sense of being different from nonminority students. In doing so, the university furthers “stereotypes that treat individuals as the product of their race, evaluating their thoughts and efforts—their very worth as citizens—according to a criterion barred to the Government by history and the Constitution” …

While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is “inherently unequal,” said Brown. It depends, says the dissent.

And here is an excerpt from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent:

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind …

Today, the Court concludes that indifference to race is the only constitutionally permissible means to achieve racial equality in college admissions. That interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not only contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history, but is also grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation. Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today. That is true for society writ large and, more specifically, for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), two institutions with a long history of racial exclusion. Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality …

Society remains highly segregated … Moreover, underrepresented minority students are more likely to live in poverty and attend schools with a high concentration of poverty … In turn, underrepresented minorities are more likely to attend schools with less qualified teachers, less challenging curricula, lower standardized test scores, and fewer extracurricular activities and advanced placement courses. It is thus unsurprising that there are achievement gaps along racial lines, even after controlling for income differences …

Students of color, particularly Black students, are disproportionately disciplined or suspended, interrupting their academic progress and increasing their risk of involvement with the criminal justice system. Underrepresented minorities are less likely to have parents with a postsecondary education who may be familiar with the college application process. Further, low-income children of color are less likely to attend preschool and other early childhood education programs that increase educational attainment. All of these interlocked factors place underrepresented minorities multiple steps behind the starting line in the race for college admissions.

Don’t Break Up With Your Friends

Here at The Atlantic, Olga Khazan describes a pattern she has noticed in multiple female friendships:

First comes the spark of affinity at the group hang: You loved the Ferrante novels too? Then come the bottomless brunches, if you don’t have kids, or playground dates, if you do. Together, you and your new friend weave text threads scheduling coffee and reassuring each other that you’re being normal and that those other people are being crazy. Periodically, the heart emoji interjects.

Eventually, though, comes a minor affront, a misunderstanding, a misalignment—then another, and another. They’re all small things, of course, but like, she always does this. And then, all too often, comes what is known in therapy circles as the “giant block of text.”

What’s more, she writes, “advice is proliferating on how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us. Online guides abound for ‘how to break up with a friend,’ as though the struggle is in what to say, rather than whether to do it. One TikTok therapist suggested that you tell your erstwhile friend ‘you don’t have the capacity to invest’ in the friendship any longer, like you’re a frazzled broker and they’re a fading stock. The massive paragraph of text, though not a friend breakup per se, often reads like one—and leads to one.”

Khazan argues for a different approach:

You don’t need a guide for breaking up with your friends, because you don’t need to break up with your friends. You just need to make more friends … The resounding chorus from everyone I interviewed was that no one person can fulfill all of your needs. Some friends are good listeners, some invite you on fun trips. The person you call in a crisis might not be the one who tells the best jokes at happy hour.

American Spoilsports

In an attempt to attract a younger fan base, professional sports leagues are touting their commitments to social justice. Ethan Strauss argues that the attendant politicization carries a cost:

America is composed of many societies and cultures. Among these cultures is a cohort of people who believe that sports serve a higher purpose, if not a massively important societal function. Kenny Chesney’s red state-rooted song “The Boys of Fall” is a good example. It’s an ode to football, from the high school level on up, that’s deeply emotional and totally without irony.

This game really matters to a lot of people, even if the New York Times so often portrays it in a negative light. As is true of sports generally, it binds the young to the old, and directs men, especially, towards a form of combat engagement that doesn’t raze cities. It’s a spiritual experience, an endeavor with almost mystical properties.

Back before sports became a massive industry, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens, his famous work on the importance of “play” in culture generation. In it, Huizinga coined the term “magic circle” to describe the space where we suspend normal rules in favor of a temporary artificial reality, e.g. a game. In Huizinga’s construction, we are under a spell when participating in this reality. Those who break the spell are called “spoil-sports,” a term that’s endured to this day. From Homo Ludens:

The spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion — a pregnant word which means literally “in-play” (from inlusion, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.

In bringing politics to the magic circle, the leagues themselves have become spoil-sports, breaking the spell over certain fans.

More Money, More Problems

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok tries to explain why many people think that it was easier for families to thrive in bygone generations, even though the economic data say otherwise. He notes nostalgia and the effects of social media, but focuses on the value of time, drawing on a theory expressed by Staffan Burenstam Linder in The Harried Leisure Class.

Tabarrok writes:

Real GDP per capita has doubled since the early 1980s but there are still only 24 hours in a day. How do consumers respond to all that increased wealth and no additional time? By focusing consumption on goods that are cheap to consume in time. We consume “fast food,” we choose to watch television or movies “on demand,” rather than read books or go to plays or live music performances. We consume multiple goods at the same time as when we eat and watch, talk and drive, and exercise and listen. And we manage, schedule and control our time more carefully with time planners, “to do” lists and calendaring.

That can be difficult:

Time management is a cognitively strenuous task, leaving us feeling harried. As the opportunity cost of time increases, our concern about “wasting” our precious hours grows more acute. On balance, we are better off, but the blessing of high-value time can overwhelm some individuals, just as can the ready availability of high-calorie food.

So, whose time has seen an especially remarkable appreciation in the past few decades? Women’s time has experienced a surge in value. As more women have pursued higher education and stepped into professional roles, their time’s value has more than doubled, incentivizing a substantial reorganization of daily life with consequent transaction costs. It’s expensive for highly educated women to be homemakers but that means substituting the wife’s time for a host of market services, day care, house cleaning, transportation and so forth. Juggling all of these tasks is difficult. Women’s time has become more valuable but also more constrained and requiring more strategic allocation and optimization for both spouses. In previous eras, a spouse who stayed at home served as a reserve pool of time, providing a buffer to manage unexpected disruptions such as a sick child or a car breakdown with greater ease. Today, the same disruption requires a cascade of rescheduling and negotiations to manage the situation effectively.

It feels hard.

Covering similar terrain, Matthew Yglesias argues that “if you want a genuine 1950s lifestyle today, you can probably afford it.” He explains:

Middle-class people from the past were poor by our standards. In 1950, the average new single-family home was 983 square feet. If you’re willing to live someplace unfashionable like Cleveland, I can find you a 1,346-square-foot, three-bedroom house for $189,900. That’s an estimated monthly payment of $1,382 per month or $16,584 per year. Let’s say you’re living by the rule of thumb that says housing should be 30% of your annual income. Well, that pencils out to $55,280 per year. Is that out of reach for the modern Ohioan? The BLS says the mean wage for all occupations in the Cleveland metro area is $59,530. There’s no all-occupations median, unfortunately. But for postal service clerks, the median is $56,200. Suppose you know a skilled trade and you can apply for this mechanic job at the airport that pays $32/hour. That’s north of $60k per year.

So what about child care? Summer camp? All that Baumol stuff? Well, it doesn’t matter, because you’re thriving 1950s-style and your wife takes care of all that. People think it’s weird that you guys only have one car, but that’s the ‘50s for you. It’s a 27-minute commute to your job at the airport by metro. You’re four blocks from the elementary school and two blocks from the playground, so mom and the kids are fine to be carless if you need it for the day, and it’s only a 25-minute walk to the shopping center at Kamm’s Corners.

Of course with three kids and a modest income, you’re not taking vacations by airplane or dining out much, but 1950s people didn’t do that either … For $80 you can get a television with a bigger screen and better resolution than what RCA was selling for $400 in 1965.

Provocation of the Week

In Liberties, James Kirchick argues that an important figure in the struggle for gay rights doesn’t get his due:

While Stonewall was the birthplace of gay liberation, the movement for gay civic equality had begun much earlier. After some fizzling starts in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1950’s, the effort found its footing in the more staid precincts of Washington, D.C. The leaders of this cause may not have been “revolting” drag queens, but they were revolutionaries, of a sort.

The central figure was a Harvard-trained astronomer named Franklin E. Kameny. In 1957, Kameny was fired from his job with the Army Map Service on account of his homosexuality. Thousands of people had already been terminated on such grounds, but Kameny was the first to challenge his dismissal, a decision that would, in the words of the legal scholar William Eskridge, eventually make him “the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement.’” In 1960, Kameny appealed to the Supreme Court to restore his job. The petition that he wrote invoked the noblest aspirations of the American founding: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To the government’s claim that his firing was justified on account of its right to prohibit those engaged in “immoral” conduct, Kameny replied with what was, for its time, a radical, even scandalous, retort: “Petitioner asserts, flatly, unequivocally, and absolutely uncompromisingly, that homosexuality, whether by mere inclination or by overt act, is not only not immoral, but that, for those choosing voluntarily to engage in homosexual acts, such acts are moral in a real and positive sense, and are good, right, and desirable, socially and personally.” He continued: “In their being nothing more than a reflection of ancient primitive, archaic, obsolete taboos and prejudices, the policies are an incongruous, anachronistic relic of the Stone Age carried over into the Space Age—and a harmful relic!”

Inspired by the African-American civil rights movement, Kameny expressed his outrage at being treated as a “second-rate citizen,” and like the leaders of that heroic struggle he appealed to America’s revolutionary founding document for redress:

We may commence with the Declaration of Independence, and its affirmation, as an “inalienable right,” that of “the pursuit of happiness.” Surely a most fundamental, unobjectionable, and unexceptionable element in human happiness is the right to bestow affection upon, and to receive affection from whom one wishes. Yet, upon pain of severe penalty, the government itself would abridge this right for the homosexual.

Kameny’s arguments may have been revolutionary, but his goals were not. He had no desire to overturn the American government; he just wanted it to live up to its self-proclaimed principles. When his appeal to the Supreme Court was denied, Kameny founded the first sustained organization in the United States to represent the interests of “homophiles” (as some gays called themselves at the time), the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., in which capacity he led peaceful protests, wrote letters to every member of Congress, and engaged in public awareness campaigns. In 1965 — four years before Stonewall — Kameny organized the first picket for gay rights outside the White House. Men were required to wear jackets and ties; women, blouses and skirts reaching below the knee. “If you’re asking for equal employment rights,” he instructed his nine comrades, “look employable.” Eight years later, he played a crucial role in lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its register of mental disorders.

To the younger and more militant gay liberationists of New York and San Francisco, Kameny’s dedication to liberal reform reeked of assimilationism. Many of them came to view Kameny with contempt, speaking of him in the same tones with which black nationalists derided Martin Luther King, Jr. With his fussy dress codes, his carefully typewritten letters, and his veneration of the Constitution, Kameny was a practitioner of dreaded “respectability politics,” which for radicals (then and now) has been the great scourge of American liberalism. But Kameny was no conformist. In his petition in 1960, he declared:

These entire proceedings, from the Civil Service Commission regulation through its administration and the consequent adverse personnel actions, to respondents’ courtroom arguments, are a classic, textbook exercise in the imposition of conformity for the sake of nothing else than conformity, and of the rigorous suppression of dissent, difference, and non-conformity. There is no more reason or need for a citizen’s sexual tastes or habits to conform to those of the majority than there is for his gastronomic ones to do so, and there is certainly no rational basis for making his employment, whether private or by the government, contingent upon such conformity.

In 2015—fifty years after staging his picket outside the White House, and four years after his death at the age of eighty-six—Kameny was vindicated when the very Supreme Court that had refused to hear his case of wrongful termination ruled that the Constitution recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry.

That’s all for this week. A happy Fourth of July to my American readers. I’ll be on vacation next week, so I’ll see you all the week after that.

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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.

In the June 1940 issue of The Atlantic, the iconoclastic Black American author Richard Wright responded to a review of his recently published novel, Native Son, that had appeared in this magazine the month prior. Wright’s rebuttal, titled “I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me,” took his reviewer to task for a great many critical misreadings, most involving his characterization of the novel’s murderous protagonist, Bigger Thomas. But among the most arresting lines was an observation wholly removed from Chicago, where Native Son is set, and Mississippi, where both Wright and the critic, David L. Cohn, were born. After asserting that “the Negro problem in America is not beyond solution,” Wright dropped a parenthetical that portended a core tension in his future work: “I write from a country—Mexico—where people of all races and colors live in harmony and without racial prejudices or theories of racial superiority. Whites and Indians live and work and die here, always resisting the attempts of Anglo-Saxon tourists and industrialists to introduce racial hate and discrimination.”

Wright’s view of racism as a uniquely American inheritance would recur through much of his work—most intensely in “I Choose Exile,” an unpublished but later resurfaced 1951 essay in which Wright waxed poetic about France (“above all, a land of refuge”). Wright was by no means the first Black American creative figure to find artistic freedom and relative safety only after leaving the United States. Paris played host, and later home, to Josephine Baker and other Black American performers, as well as James Baldwin and William Gardner Smith. The city looms large in the Black intellectual history of the 20th century, and for many on this side of Y2K, the prospect of finding freedom overseas remains as alluring as ever.

Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad, a new book by the historian Tamara J. Walker, contextualizes the eternal conundrum of Wright’s work and politics by focusing on a different phase of his elective exile. Walker’s book constructs a lineage of Black Americans nurturing creative ingenuity through migration, making the case for freedom of movement as a companion to the freedom of expression. But it also elucidates the complex ways that anti-Black racism manifested both within the United States and in the countries where her subjects sought (and sometimes found) refuge. For example, Wright spent 1950 in Buenos Aires, then referred to as “the Paris of the Americas,” where the first film adaptation of Native Son was being shot. Unlike his travels in Paris or Mexico, his experience of Argentina was “one of the darkest times of his life,” Walker writes, and was rarely referenced in his own work. By situating his experience within a larger tradition of Black exodus, Walker paints a more nuanced portrait of the mordant literary figure—someone whose prescience, born partly of exile, still troubles the literary canon.

Of the loose cadre of Black expats living on either side of the Seine, Wright was certainly the most sanguine about his years in Europe. The author wrote about his time in Paris with breathless enthusiasm, maintaining until his death in 1960 that “there is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America!” Both Baldwin and Gardner Smith, however, rejected Wright’s view of Paris as a racial utopia, even as they both found some measure of comfort and success there. Not long after Wright’s death, Baldwin published “Alas, Poor Richard,” a sorrowful account of their fractured friendship in which he criticized his erstwhile friend and mentor for idealizing a country that “would not have been a city of refuge for us if we had not been armed with American passports.”  

Walker, an associate professor of Africana studies at Barnard College of Columbia University, takes up this contradiction in her book: Each chapter of Beyond the Shores relays the story of one or two people (many of them artists of some kind—authors, singers, pianists, filmmakers) who traveled to one or two places during a specific decade. Their journeys take them to some expected vistas (Paris, London, post–World War II Germany) as well as to destinations with far less scholarship on Black American presence: Đà Nẵng, Kabondo, Kisumu, Yangiyul. In a chapter focusing on Ricki Stevenson, an American journalist turned tour guide in modern Paris, Walker underscores the enduring truth of Baldwin’s civil-rights-era critique. The multigenerational presence of Black people from African and West Indian nations once colonized by France began in the 17th century, when they were trafficked as human cargo. That many white Parisians would welcome an upwardly mobile American auteur in the early 20th century didn’t mean racial tolerance was inherently embedded in French society, as evidenced by the rising popularity of the far-right National Front—and its “calls for the eviction of non-white immigrants from France” and treatment of “French-born Arabs and Blacks as noncitizens”—in the 1980s.

Read: I tried to be a communist

Subjects are introduced in chronological order, with Walker making deft connections across chapters and narratives by mapping changes in policies, movements, and prevailing social attitudes in the United States, as well as in the other countries. The chapter about Richard Wright’s time in Argentina, for example, lays out how the threat of political and financial backlash from the United States kept other nations (including France) from hosting film adaptations of Native Son. The censorship followed Wright outside American borders: Spanish-language translations of the film were titled Sangre Negra, or “Black Blood,” rather than Hijo Nativo, which might have engendered more audience identification with its protagonist.

The first chapter points the reader toward the Washington, D.C.–born singer and actor Florence Mills, who made her Paris debut in 1926, when she was 30 years old. By then, Mills had been performing for two decades across the United States, earning rave reviews in productions such as the all-Black Broadway musical Shuffle Along. But Mills knew that Broadway success would not carry her to Hollywood, as it had for white actors. When the impresario of Blackbirds, the revue she’d been headlining, signed the cast up for a Paris run, Mills took a chance on moving to the city where she’d heard of more opportunities for Black singers, vaudeville acts, and cabaret performers.

Upon making her debut in France, Mills immediately drew comparisons to Josephine Baker, whose influence on modern cultural production is ubiquitous. But in recounting Mills’s years in Europe, Walker expands upon that narrow resemblance. Part of what makes Beyond the Shores so satisfying is Walker’s vivid depictions of the environments that her subjects entered when they immigrated. Their stories are rendered not solely through what they produced, but also through what they saw, what they ate, what they must have felt. Walker describes the pillars of diasporic nightlife that earned parts of 1920s Paris the nickname “French Harlem,” where “patrons could dance to Martinican biguines, which derived from the folk songs of the enslaved, Senegalese orchestra tunes that included elements of Cuban music that traveled to African airways and migrated to France, and even some African American jazz.”

View of American author Richard Wright as he walks in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, France, 1959 (Gisele Freund/Photo Researchers History/Getty)

In such a setting, Mills and her fellow performers could move through everyday life—and toward bigger stages—without being hobbled by the crushing weight of Jim Crow. The Black press in America took note: One headline from the New York Amsterdam News read, “Colored Artists Holding Sway and Being Treated Like Human Beings by the French.” Walker takes care to complicate such assessments, enumerating the organizations in France that were fighting anti-Blackness on their home turf even as American performers garnered acclaim. And of course, Mills’s time in Paris was not without moments of overt discrimination, especially when a local economic downturn led to an influx of white American patrons at bars and cafés. Walker approaches these points of difficulty with empathetic rigor, as she does with moments of discomfort between Black Americans and other Black people they encountered in their travels. The American passport functions, in some instances, as a totem of whiteness: “In Nigeria, locals alternately called African American Peace Corps volunteers ‘white black’ and ‘native foreigners,’” Walker writes, “while Cameroonians referred to one volunteer as a ‘Black white woman.’”

With each story, Beyond the Shores builds a canon of Black creative expression that crosses both temporal and geographic barriers. “Bringing Florence back into the mainstream spotlight does more than simply renew attention to her remarkable life and career,” Walker writes. “It’s an opportunity to remember that Baker was just one of countless African American performers who made their way to the City of Light, left indelible marks on its cultural landscape, and turned it into a destination for new forms of music, dancing, and cross-cultural mingling that would be felt for decades to come.” Walker threads Beyond the Shores together with excavations of her own family’s journeys too: In the book’s prologue, she explains how hearing about her grandfather’s service abroad in World War II prompted some of her earliest childhood questions about Black migration. As others’ stories unfold, so does her own, giving the book the feel of a travel memoir without ever losing the gravity of a historical compendium. The interplay deepens the book’s storytelling; by observing the past through the lives of others, she seems to suggest, we can imagine an alternate vision of our own future.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech is warbling, crackling, scratchy—sort of like Marge Simpson’s. His voice, he told me, is “fucked up.” The official medical diagnosis is spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the larynx. He didn’t always sound this way; his speaking style changed when he was in his 40s. Kennedy has said he suspects an influenza vaccine might have been the catalyst. This idea is not supported by science.

He was telling me about his life with one arm outstretched on the velvet sofa of his suite at the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan. It was the end of May, and a breeze blew in through the open doors leading to a private terrace. Two of his aides sat nearby, typing and eavesdropping. A security guard stood in the hallway.

Kennedy was finishing a plate of room-service risotto, and his navy tie was carefully tucked into his white button-down shirt. He’s taller, tanner, and buffer than the average 69-year-old. He is, after all, a Kennedy. His blue eyes oscillate between piercing and adrift, depending on the topic of discussion.

He told me that he’s surrounded by “integrative medical people”—naturopaths, osteopaths, healers of all sorts. “A lot of them think that they can cure me,” he said. Last year, Kennedy traveled to Japan for surgery to try to fix his voice. “I’ve got these doctors that have given me a formula,” he said. “They’re not even doctors, actually, these guys.”

I asked him what, exactly, he was taking.

“The stuff that they gave me? I don’t know what it is. It’s supposed to reorient your electric energy.” He believes it’s working.

When he was 19, Kennedy jumped off a dock into shallow water, which he says left him nearly paralyzed. For decades, he could hardly turn his head. Seven years ago, at a convention of chiropractors, a healer performed a 30-minute “manipulation of energy”—making chanting noises while holding his hands six inches over Kennedy’s body. The next morning, his neck felt better. “I don’t know if they had anything to do with each other, but, you know, it was weird,” he said.

Though he’s been a member of the premier American political dynasty his whole life and a noted environmentalist for decades, most people are just now discovering the breadth and depth of Kennedy’s belief system. He has promoted a theory that Wi-Fi radiation causes cancer and “leaky brain,” saying it “opens your blood-brain barrier.” He has suggested that antidepressants might have contributed to the rise in mass shootings. He told me he believes that Ukraine is engaged in a “proxy” war and that Russia’s invasion, although “illegal,” would not have taken place if the United States “didn’t want it to.”

Kennedy reached a new level of notoriety in 2021, after the publication of his conspiratorial treatise The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It has sold more than 1 million copies, according to his publisher, “despite censorship, boycotts from bookstores and libraries, and hit pieces against the author.” The book cemented his status as one of America’s foremost anti-vaxxers. It also helped lay the foundation for his Democratic presidential primary campaign against Joe Biden.

[Read: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: A cheat sheet]

On the campaign trail, he paints a conspiratorial picture of collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. If elected, he has said he would gut the Food and Drug Administration and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.” His most ominous message is also his simplest: He feels his country is being taken away from him. It’s a familiar theme, similar to former President Donald Trump’s. But whereas Trump relies heavily on white identity politics, Kennedy is spinning up a more diverse web of supporters: anti-vaxxers, anti-government individuals, Silicon Valley magnates, “freethinking” celebrities, libertarians, Trump-weary Republicans, and Democrats who believe Biden is too old and feeble for a second term.

So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent. What had initially been written off as a stunt has evolved into a complex threat to both Biden and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. Put another way: Kennedy’s support is real.

He is tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche. Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them. Falling down conspiratorial internet rabbit holes has become an entirely normal pastime. Study after study confirms a very real “epidemic of loneliness.” Scores of people are bored and depressed and searching for narratives to help explain their anxiety and isolation. Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.

Even though Kennedy remains a long-shot candidate, his presence in the 2024 race cannot be ignored. “My goal is to do the right thing, and whatever God wants is going to happen,” Kennedy told me. He now earnestly believes that in 12 months, he will be the Democratic nominee for president.

“Every individual, like every nation, has a darker side and a lighter side,” Kennedy told me. “And the easiest thing for a political leader to do is to appeal to all those darker angels.”

He was talking about George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor and subject of Kennedy’s senior thesis at Harvard.

“Most populism begins with a core of idealism, and then it’s hijacked,” he said. “Because the easiest way to keep a populist movement together is by appealing—you employ all the alchemies of demagoguery—and appealing to our greed, our anger, our hatred, our fear, our xenophobia, tribal impulses.”

Does Kennedy consider himself a populist? “He considers himself a Democrat,” his communications director, Stefanie Spear, told me in an email. The most charitable spin on Kennedy’s candidacy is that he aims to be the iconoclastic unifier of a polarized country. He looks in the mirror and sees a man fighting for the rights of the poor and the powerless, as his father did when he ran for president more than half a century ago.

Kennedy markets himself as a maverick, someone outside the system. But he’s very much using his lineage—son of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy—as part of his sales pitch. Now living in Los Angeles with his third wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, he nonetheless launched his campaign in Boston, the center of the Kennedy universe. The phrase I’M A KENNEDY DEMOCRAT is splashed across the center of his campaign website. Visitors can click through a carousel of wistful black-and-white family photos. There he is as a young boy with a gap-toothed smile, offering a salute. There he is visiting his Uncle John in the Oval Office.

[Alan Brinkley: The legacy of John F. Kennedy]

Robert F. Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, with their seven children, in February 1963. (Ethel was expecting their eighth child in June.) The boys, from left, are Robert Jr., 8; David, 7; Michael, 4; and Joe, 10. The girls, from left, are Kathleen, 11; Kerry, 3; and Mary Courtney, 6. (AP)

In reality, his relationship with his family is more complicated. Several of his siblings have criticized his anti-vaccine activism around COVID. Last year, at an anti-vaccine rally in Washington, D.C., Kennedy suggested that Jews in Nazi Germany had more freedom than Americans today. In response, his sister Kerry Kennedy tweeted, “Bobby’s lies and fear-mongering yesterday were both sickening and destructive. I strongly condemn him for his hateful rhetoric.” (He later issued an apology.) In 2019, a trio of notable Kennedys wrote an op-ed in Politico pegged to a recent measles outbreak in the United States. RFK Jr., they said, “has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.” Several Kennedys serve in the Biden administration, and others—including RFK Jr.’s younger sister Rory and his first cousin Patrick—are actively supporting Biden’s reelection effort.

Multiple eras of Kennedy’s life have been marked by violence and despair. He was just 14 years old when his father was assassinated. His second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, struggled with mental illness and died by suicide while the couple was estranged and in the process of divorcing. He told me he believes that “almost every American has been exposed, mostly within their own families, to mental illness, depression, drug addiction, alcoholism.” In 1983, Kennedy himself was arrested for heroin possession and entered rehab. He recently told The Washington Post that he still regularly attends 12-step meetings.

Kennedy maintains a mental list of everyone he’s known who has died. He told me that each morning he spends an hour having a quiet conversation with those people, usually while out hiking alone. He asks the deceased to help him be a good person, a good father, a good writer, a good attorney. He prays for his six children. He’s been doing this for 40 years. The list now holds more than 200 names.

I asked him if he felt that his dad or uncle had sent him any messages encouraging him to run for president.

“I don’t really have two-way conversations of that type,” he said. “And I would mistrust anything that I got from those waters, because I know there’s people throughout history who have heard voices.”

He laughed.

“It’s hard to be the arbiter of your own sanity. It’s dangerous.”

The morning before we met, I watched a recent interview Kennedy had given to ABC News in which he said, “I don’t trust authority.” In our conversation, I asked him how he planned to campaign on this message while simultaneously persuading voters to grant him the most consequential authority in the world.

“My intention is to make authority trustworthy,” he said, sounding like a shrewd politician. “People don’t trust authority, because the trusted authorities have been lying to them. The media lies to the public.”

I was recording our conversation on two separate devices. I asked him if the dual recordings, plus the fact that he could see me taking notes, was enough to convince him that whatever I wrote would be accurate.

“Your quotes of mine may be accurate,” he said. “Do I think that they may be twisted? I think that’s highly likely. ”

I wondered why, if that was the case, he had agreed to talk with me at all.

“I’ll talk to anybody,” he said.

That includes some of the most prominent figures in right-wing politics. He told me that he’d met with Trump before he was inaugurated, and that he had once flown on Trump’s private plane. (Later he said he believes Trump could lead America “down the road to darkness.”) He told me how, as a young man, he had spent several weeks in a tent in Kenya with Roger Ailes—they were filming a nature documentary—and how they had remained friends even though Kennedy disapproved of Ailes’s tactics at Fox News. He also brought up Tucker Carlson. I asked if he’d spoken with the former Fox News host since his firing earlier this spring.

“I’ve texted with him,” Kennedy said.

“What’s he up to?” I asked.

“He’s—you know what he’s up to. He’s starting a Twitter … thing. Yeah, I’m going to go on it. They’ve already contacted me.”

Kennedy told me he’s heard the whispers about the nature of his campaign. Some people believe his candidacy is just a stalking-horse bid to help elect Trump, or at least siphon support away from Biden.

One week before Kennedy entered the race, the longtime Trump ally and self-proclaimed “dirty trickster” Roger Stone wrote a curious Substack post titled “What About Bobby?” in which he suggested the idea of a Trump-Kennedy unity ticket. In a text message to me, Stone said his essay was nothing but a “whimsical” piece of writing, noting that the idea had “legal and political” obstacles. A photo of the two men—plus former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, a notable conspiracy theorist—had been circulating on the internet; Stone called it opposition research from Biden’s team. “Contrary to Twitter created mythology, I don’t know Robert Kennedy,” he texted. “I have no role in his campaign, and certainly played no role in his decision to run.”

I asked Kennedy about a recent report that had gotten some attention: Had Steve Bannon encouraged him to enter the race?

[From the July/August 2022 issue: American Rasputin]

“No,” he said. “I mean, let me put it this way: I never heard any encouragement from him. And I never spoke to him.” He then offered a clarification: He had been a guest on Bannon’s podcast during the pandemic once or twice, and the two had met a few years before that.

When I asked Bannon if he had urged Kennedy to challenge Biden, he said, “I don’t want to talk about personal conversations.” He told me he believes Kennedy could be a major political figure. “I was pleasantly surprised when he announced,” he said.

“He’s drawing from many of those Trump voters—the two-time Obama, onetime Trump—that are still disaffected, want change, and maybe haven’t found a permanent home in the Trump movement,” Bannon said. “Populist left, populist right—and where that Venn diagram overlaps—he’s talking to those people.” Bannon told me the audience for his podcast, War Room, “loves” Kennedy. “I think Tucker’s seeing it, Rogan’s seeing it, other people—the Tucker-Rogan-Elon-Bannon-combo-platter right, obviously some of us are farther right than others—I think are seeing it. It’s a new nomenclature in politics,” he said.

“And obviously the Democrats are scared to death of it, so they don’t even want to touch it. They want to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Photograph by Chris Buck for The Atlantic

Perhaps more than anyone in politics, Kennedy is the embodiment of the crunchy-to-conspiracist pipeline—the pathway from living a life honoring the natural world to questioning, well, everything you thought you knew. For much of his life, he was a respected attorney and environmentalist. In the 1980s, Kennedy began working with the nonprofit Riverkeeper to preserve New York’s Hudson River, and he later co-founded the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is affiliated with conservation efforts around the world. Like many other environmentalists, he grew distrustful of government, convinced that regulatory agencies had fallen under the thrall of the corporations they were supposed to be supervising.

I asked Kennedy if there was a link between his earlier work and his present-day advocacy against vaccines. “The most direct and concrete nexus is mercury,” he said.

In the 2000s, Kennedy said, he read a report about the presence of mercury in fish. “It struck me then that we were living in a science-fiction nightmare where my children and the children of most Americans could now no longer engage in this seminal primal activity of American youth, which is to go fishing with their father and mother at their local fishing hole and come home and safely eat the fish,” he said.

As an environmentalist, Kennedy traveled around the country giving lectures, and about two decades ago, mercury poisoning became a focal point of these talks. He soon noticed a pattern: Mothers would approach him after his speeches, telling him about their children’s developmental issues, which they were convinced could be traced back to vaccines that contained thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative. “They all had kind of the same story,” Kennedy said. “Which was striking to me, because my inclination would be to dismiss them.”

[Read: Inside the mind of an anti-vaxxer]

He said that one of these women, a Minnesotan named Sarah Bridges, showed up on his front porch with a pile of studies 18 inches deep, telling him, “I’m not leaving here until you read those.” Kennedy read the abstracts, and his beliefs about vaccines began to shift. He went on to become the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a prominent anti-vaccine nonprofit.

When I contacted Bridges, she noted that she is a college friend of Kennedy’s sister-in-law and clarified that she had approached Kennedy while visiting his family’s compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, she confirmed that she gave Kennedy a stack of documents related to thimerosal, and that this likely was the beginning of his anti-vaccine journey.

Bridges’s family story is tragic: One of her children ended up in the hospital after receiving the pertussis vaccine. He now lives with a seizure disorder, developmental delays, and autism—conditions Bridges believes were ultimately caused by his reaction to the vaccine, even though studies have shown that vaccines do not cause autism. Bridges says she received compensation from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, colloquially known as “vaccine court,” for her son’s brain damage.

Bridges doesn’t consider herself an anti-vaxxer. She told me that she still talks with Kennedy once in a while, but that she was surprised to learn he was running for president. She’s a lifelong Democrat, and declined to say whether she would support him in the election. She did tell me that she has received two doses of the COVID vaccine. She views the extremity of her son’s reaction as the exception, not the rule. “I think the American public is smart enough that we can have a nuanced conversation: that vaccines can both be a public good and there can be—and there, I think, is—a subset of people who don’t respond to them,” she said.

Kennedy’s campaign manager, the former Ohio congressman and two-time presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, strongly objects to anyone labeling his candidate “anti-vaxx.” When I used the term to describe Kennedy, Kucinich told me that such a characterization was a “left-handed smear” and “a clipped assessment that has been used for political purposes by the adherents of the pharmaceutical industry who want to engage in a sort of absurd reductionism.” Kennedy, he said, stands for vaccine safety.

I asked Kucinich to specify which vaccines Kennedy supports. He seemed flummoxed.

“No!” he said. “This is … no. We’re not—look, no.”

At one point, Kennedy looked me dead in the eye and asked if I knew where the term conspiracy theory came from. I did not. He informed me that the phrase was coined by the CIA after his uncle’s assassination in 1963 as part of a larger effort to discredit anyone who claimed that the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, hadn’t acted alone. This origin story is not true. A recent Associated Press fact-check dates the term’s usage as far back as 1863, and notes that it also appeared in reports after the shooting of President James Garfield in 1881.

JFK’s assassination and Kennedy’s father’s, just five years apart, are two of the defining moments of modern American life. But they are difficult subjects to discuss with surviving family members without feeling exploitative. Kennedy doesn’t shy away from talking about either murder, and embraces conspiracy theories about both.

“I think the evidence that the CIA murdered my uncle is overwhelming, I would say, beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “As an attorney, I would be very comfortable arguing that case to a jury. I think that the evidence that the CIA murdered my father is circumstantial but very, very, very persuasive. Or very compelling. Let me put it that way—very compelling. And of course the CIA participation in the cover-up of both those murders is also beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s very well documented.” (In a written statement, a CIA spokesperson said: “The notion that CIA was involved in the deaths of either John F. Kennedy or Robert F. Kennedy is absolutely false.”)

Two years ago, hundreds of QAnon supporters gathered in Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK’s assassination. They were convinced that JFK Jr., who died in a plane crash in 1999, would dramatically reappear and that Donald Trump would be reinstated as president. I asked Kennedy what he made of all this.

“Are you equating them with people who believe that my uncle was killed by the CIA?” he asked. There was pain in his voice. It was the first time in our conversation that he appeared to get upset.

[From the June 2020 issue: The prophecies of Q]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as pallbearer during his father’s funeral (Photo by Fairchild Archive / Penske Media / Getty)

Unlike many conspiracists, Kennedy will actually listen to and respond to your questions. He’s personable, and does not come off as a jerk. But he gets essential facts wrong, and remains prone to statements that can leave you dumbfounded. Recently, the Fox News host Neil Cavuto had to correct him on air after he claimed that “we”—as in the United States—had “killed 350,000 Ukrainian kids.”

I brought up the QAnon adherents who’d flocked to Dallas because I wanted to know how he felt about the fact that so many disparate conspiracies in America were blending together. I asked him what he would say to Alex Jones, the conspiracist who spent years lying about the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“There’s only so many discussions that you can have, and only so many areas where you can actually, you know, examine the evidence,” Kennedy said. “I’d say, ‘Show me the evidence of what you’re saying, and let’s look at it, and let’s look at whether it is conceivably real.’” He told me he didn’t know exactly what Jones had said about the tragedy. When I explained that Jones had claimed the whole thing was a hoax—and that he had lost a landmark defamation suit—Kennedy said he thought that was an appropriate outcome. “If somebody says something’s wrong, sue them.”

“I mean,” he said, “I know people whose children were killed at Sandy Hook.”

Who will vote for Kennedy?

He was recently endorsed by the Clueless star Alicia Silverstone. Earlier this month, Jack Dorsey, the hippie billionaire and a Twitter co-founder, shared a Fox News clip of Kennedy saying he could beat Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis in 2024. “He can and will,” Dorsey tweeted. Another tech mogul, David Sacks, recently co-hosted a fundraiser for Kennedy, as well as a Twitter Spaces event with him alongside his “PayPal mafia” ally Elon Musk. Sacks, whose Twitter header photo features a banner that reads FREE SPEECH, has an eclectic history of political donations: Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and DeSantis, to name a few.

Kennedy continues to win praise from right-wing activists, influencers, and media outlets. While some of this support feels earnest, like a fawning multithousand-word ode from National Review, others feel like a wink. The New York Post covered his campaign-kickoff event under the headline “‘Never Seen So Many Hot MILFs’: Inside RFK Jr’s White House Bid Launch.”

So far, Kennedy hasn’t staged many rallies. He favors long, winding media appearances. (He’s said that he believes 2024 “will be decided by podcasts.”) He recently talked COVID and 5G conspiracy theories with Joe Rogan, and his conversation with Jordan Peterson was removed from YouTube because of what the company deemed COVID misinformation. The day we met, Kennedy told me that he had just recorded a podcast with the journalist Matt Taibbi.

I asked Taibbi, who wrote for me when I was an editor at Rolling Stone and who now publishes independently on Substack, if he could see himself voting for Kennedy next year.

“Yeah, it’s possible,” Taibbi said. “I didn’t vote for anybody last time, because it was …” He trailed off, stifling laughter. “I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So if he manages to get the nomination, I would certainly consider it.”

Years ago, in a long Rolling Stone article, Kennedy falsely asserted that the 2004 election had been stolen. The article has since been deleted from the magazine’s online archive.

“I’ve never been a fan of electoral-theft stories,” Taibbi said. “But I don’t have to agree with RFK about everything,” he added. “He’s certainly farther along on his beliefs about the vaccine than I am. But I think he is tapping into something that I definitely feel is legitimate, which is this frustration with the kind of establishment reporting, and this feeling of a lack of choice, and the frustration over issues like Ukraine—you know, that kind of stuff. I totally get his candidacy from that standpoint.”

Kennedy’s campaign operation is lean. He told Sacks and Musk that he has only about 50 people on the payroll. He’s beginning to spend more time in the early-voting state of New Hampshire. I asked Kucinich about Kennedy’s plans for summer: large-scale rallies? A visit to the Iowa State Fair? He could offer no concrete details, and told me to stay tuned.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Despite the buzz and early attention, Kennedy does not have a clear path to the nomination. No incumbent president in modern history has been defeated in a primary. (Kennedy’s uncle Ted came close during his primary challenge to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.) Following decades of precedent, the Democratic National Committee won’t hold primary debates against a sitting president.

“We’re not spending much time right now thinking about the DNC,” he said. “We’re organizing our own campaign.”

Spokespeople for the DNC, the Biden campaign, and the White House did not offer comment for this article.

“Democrats know RFK Jr. isn’t actually a Democrat,” Jim Messina, who led Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and is in close touch with the Biden 2024 team, said in a statement. “He is not a legitimate candidate in the Democratic primary and shouldn’t be treated like one. His offensive ideas align him with Trump and the other GOP candidates running for president, and are repellent to what Democrats and swing voters are looking for.”

I asked Kennedy what he thought would be more harmful to the country: four more years of Biden or another term for Trump.

“I can’t answer that,” he said.

He paused for a long beat. He shook his head, then pivoted the conversation to Russia.

“I think that either one of them is, you know, I mean, I can conceive of Biden getting us into a nuclear war right now.”

Kennedy’s 2024 campaign, like Trump’s, has an epic We are engaged in a final showdown tenor to it. But maybe this sentiment runs deeper than his current candidacy. These are the opening lines of Kennedy’s 2018 memoir, American Values:

From my youngest days I always had the feeling that we were all involved in some great crusade, that the world was a battleground for good and evil, and that our lives would be consumed in that conflict. It would be my good fortune if I could play an important or heroic role.

[Read: The martyr at CPAC]

Since meeting Kennedy, I’ve thought about what he said about populism—how it emerges, how it’s exploited and weaponized. He seems to believe that he is doing the right thing by running for president, that history has finally found him, as it found his uncle and father. That he is the man—the Kennedy—to lead America through an era of unrelenting chaos. But I don’t know how to believe his message when it’s enveloped in exaggeration, conspiracy, and falsehoods.

The United States has grown only more conspiratorial in the half century since the publication of Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” There are those who refuse to get the COVID vaccine because of the slim potential of adverse side effects, and then there are those who earnestly fear that these innoculations are a way for the federal government to implant microchips in the bodies of citizens. The line between fact and fantasy has blurred, and fewer and fewer Americans are tethered to something larger or more meaningful than themselves.

Kennedy was raised in the Catholic Church and regularly attended Mass for most of his life. These days, he told me, his belief system is drawn from a wide array of sources.

“The first line of the Tao is something to the effect that ‘If it can be said, then it’s not truth’—that the path that is prescribed to you is never the true path, that basically we all have to find our own path to God, and to enlightenment, or nirvana, or whatever you call it,” he said.

He’s now walking his family’s path, determined to prevail in the battle of good against evil. He’s said he’s running under the premise of telling people the truth.

But as with so many of the stories he tells, it’s hard to square Kennedy’s truth with reality.

Last month, during a meeting of Democrats in rural southwestern Iowa, a man raised his hand. “What are three noncontroversial issues that Democrats should be talking about right now?” he asked the evening’s speaker, Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor and a minor state celebrity.

I watched from the side of the room as Sand answered quickly. The first two issues Democrats should talk about are new state laws dealing with democracy and education, he told the man. And then they should talk about their support for abortion rights. “People in the Iowa Republican Party and their activist base” want to “criminalize abortion,” Sand said.

I registered this response with a surprised blink. Noncontroversial? Democrats in competitive states, and especially committed centrists like Sand, aren’t usually so eager to foreground abortion on the campaign trail. This seemed new.

[Read: The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa]

Ascribing a narrative to some elections is easy. The past two midterm cycles are a case in point. The Democrats’ 2018 blue wave, for example, will go down as a woman-led backlash to a grab-’em-by-the-groin president. In 2022, Democrats performed better than expected, according to many analysts, because abortion rights were on the ballot. Now, a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Democrats want to do it again.

They’re betting that they can re-create and even supercharge their successes last year by centering abortion rights in their platform once again in the lead-up to 2024. They want all of their elected officials—even state auditors—talking about the issue. “If we can do all that, we’re gonna be telling the same story in December 2024 that we told in 2022,” Yasmin Radjy, the executive director of the progressive political group Swing Left, told me.

But this time, Republicans might be better prepared for the fight.

After the leaked draft opinion before the Dobbs decision last May, many in Washington assumed that abortion would fade from voters’ minds by the time November rolled around. “As we get further away from the shock of that event, of Roe being overturned, you don’t think that … people will sort of lose interest?” CNN’s Don Lemon asked the Democratic political strategist Tom Bonier in September 2022. People did not. Two months later, Democrats celebrated better-than-expected results—avoiding not only the kind of “shellacking” that Barack Obama’s party had suffered in 2010, but the widely predicted red wave. The Democrats narrowly lost the House but retained control of the Senate, flipping Pennsylvania in the process. Abortion-rights campaigners won ballot measures in six states.

“The lesson has been well learned,” Bonier told me last week. “This is an issue that is incredibly effective, both for mobilizing voters but also for winning over swing voters.”

[Read: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?]

The latest polling suggests that the issue is very much alive. A record-high number of registered U.S. voters say that abortion is the most important factor in their decision about whom to vote for, and most of those voters support abortion rights, according to Gallup. Rather than growing less salient over time, abortion may even have gained potency: Roughly a quarter of Americans say that recent state efforts to block abortion access have made them more supportive of abortion rights, not less, according to a USA Today poll last week. Not only that, but recent data suggest that demand for abortion has not been much deterred, despite post-Dobbs efforts to restrict it.

Americans have watched as Republicans in 20 states restricted or banned abortion outright, and activists took aim at interstate travel for abortions and the pill mifepristone. Stories about pregnant women at risk of bleeding out or becoming septic after being denied abortions have lit up the internet for months. All of this attention and sentiment seem unlikely to dissipate by November 2024.

“Republicans ran races on this issue for decades,” the Democratic strategist Lis Smith told me. “You’re gonna see Democrats run on this issue for decades to come as well.”

Already, Democratic activists plan to engage swing voters by forcing the issue in as many states as possible. So far, legislators in New York and Maryland have introduced abortion-related ballot measures for 2024. Similar efforts are under way in other states, including Florida, Arizona, Missouri, South Dakota, and Iowa.

Smith and her fellow party operatives are confident that they’ve landed on a message that works—especially in purple states where candidates need to win over at least a few moderates and independents. The most successful Democrats last year anchored their abortion messages around the concept of personal liberty, Swing Left’s Radjy told me, because it was “the single issue that is equally popular among far left, far right, center left, and center right.” Radjy shared with me a research report that concluded: “With limited attention and resources, [candidates should] lead with the freedom to decide. Freedom is resonating with the base and conflicted supporters, as well as Soft Biden and Soft Trump women.”

Smith echoed this reframing. “Republican politicians want to insert themselves into women’s personal medical decisions,” she said, by way of exemplifying the message. “They want to take away this critical freedom from you.” In her view, that gives Democratic candidates a decisive advantage: They don’t even have to say the word abortion; they only have to use the language of freedom for people to be receptive.

Joe Biden has never been the most comfortable or natural messenger on abortion. But even he is giving the so-called freedom framework a try. Freedom is the first word in the president’s reelection-announcement ad. Republicans, he says in a voice-over, are “dictating what health-care decisions women can make”; they are “banning books, and telling people who they can love.”

[Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion]

It’s helpful, Democratic strategists told me, that the Republicans jockeying for the presidential nomination have been murky at best on the issue. Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley held a press conference in April to explain that she sees a federal role in restricting abortion, but wouldn’t say what. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was foggy on his own commitments in interviews before appearing to support a 15-week national ban. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who recently signed a six-week limit on abortion, talks about that ban selectively. The leader of the primary pack, Donald Trump, has said that abortion laws should be left to the states, but told a reporter recently that he, too, is “looking at” a 15-week restriction.

Trump clearly wants to appease the primary base while keeping some room to maneuver in the general election. But if he’s the nominee, Democrats say, he’ll have to answer for the end of Roe, as well as the anti-abortion positions advocated by other Republicans. “When I worked for Obama in 2012, as rapid-response director, we tied Mitt Romney to the most extreme positions in his party,” Smith told me. If Trump is the abortion-banning GOP’s nominee, they will “hang that around his neck like a millstone.”

I found it difficult to locate Republican strategists willing to talk with me about abortion, and even fewer who see it as a winning issue for their party. One exception was the Republican pollster and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, who says that Republicans can be successful in campaigning on abortion—if they talk about it the right way. At a press conference celebrating the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, hosted by the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, Conway seemed to take a swipe at the former president—and the rest of the wishy-washy primary field. “If you’re running to be president of the United States, it should be easy to have a 15-minimum-week standard,” she said.

To win on abortion is to frame your opponent as more extreme, and Democrats have made that easy, says Conway, who also acts as an adviser to the Republican National Committee. Broad federal legislation put forward by Democratic lawmakers last year, in response to the Dobbs leak, would prevent states from banning abortion “after fetal viability” for reasons of the mother’s life or health. Republicans claim that this means that Democrats support termination at all stages of pregnancy. Voters may not like outright bans on abortion, but they also generally don’t support abortion without limits. Conway advises Republican candidates to explain to voters whether they support exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, and get that out of the way—and then demand that their Democratic opponents define the time limits they favor. “I’d ask each and every one of them, ‘What are your exceptions? I’ve shown you mine,’” Conway told me.

[Read: The abortion absolutist]

Conway’s bullishness is belied by what some of her political allies are up to. While Democrats are pushing for ballot measures that will enshrine abortion rights into law, Republicans are trying to make it harder to pass state constitutional amendments. For example, after it became clear that a ballot measure could result in new abortion protections being added to the Ohio Constitution, state Republicans proposed their own ballot measure asking voters in a special election later this summer to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments.

This scheme does not demonstrate faith that a majority of voters are with them. But it does set up Ohio as the first practical test of abortion’s salience as a political issue in 2024. If Democrats can get their voters to show up this August in the name of abortion rights, maybe they can do it next year too.

This article was originally published by High Country News.

Around the middle of April, spring in the still chilly and wet Pacific Northwest seemed a long way off. Just two weeks later, though, Spokane hit a daily record of 84 degrees Fahrenheit; a month of historic heat ensued. During a heat wave that started around May 12, Portland’s metro area beat records for consecutive May days over 80 degrees (nine) and 90 degrees (four). Coastal communities set records in the 90s too. Later in the month, Washington and eastern Oregon toppled even more records. Smoke drifted down from Canadian wildfires. Vegetable gardens wilted. It hardly rained.

May, to Northwesterners, bore all the hallmarks of summer.

Spring is notoriously fickle, but this year, the season’s transition “happened faster than it almost always does,” says Nick Bond, Washington’s state climatologist. “It was a little bit of a whipsaw around here.” Such instability—particularly during the shoulder seasons—is expected to rise because of climate change. Spring temperatures in the Northwest haven’t been warming as quickly as those in other seasons, but according to Bond, they’re catching up.

After the strange start to 2023, he says, the community, including climate scientists, “now appreciates, a little bit more than before, that spring matters.” Without it, water supplies, ecosystems, agriculture, and more get out of whack. “We got a little bit more complete and nuanced view of how all this works,” Bond says.

Here’s what we learned from this year’s skipped spring:

Fire and drought risk grew. In April, the Northwest’s snowpack looked about average. Then it “did a disappearing act,” Bond’s office reported on June 8. Starting in early May, snow melted at record rates. Waterways flooded. That has big implications for the whole region, says Dan McEvoy, a climatologist at the Western Regional Climate Center whose research includes spring heat waves: “One place that will show up is in earlier fire danger.” By mid-June, hundreds of acres had burned in Oregon and Washington. Another worry is drought. The National Weather Service reported that the area considered to be in drought grew in May. Much of western Washington and northwestern Oregon is expected to follow later this year. “That hinges on summer temperatures,” McEvoy says, but all signs point to a hot, dry summer too.

[Read: Nowhere should expect a cool summer]

Our bodies also aren’t ready for such early heat. In a normal seasonal cycle, by the time temperatures peak in the summer, people’s bodies—and behavior—have had months to acclimate. Health risks rise only when the temperature is higher than the local “normal.” This means that in the Northwest, in May, heat in the low 90s can be dangerous, even if it wouldn’t be in August. The mid-May heat wave resulted in at least 160 heat-related emergency-room visits in Oregon and Washington over four days, a rate more than 30 times higher than normal. The heat caught many people off guard—even Adelle Monteblanco, a public-health professor and extreme-heat researcher at Pacific University. Excited to test her new thermal camera, she went for a walk. “I had my hat and my water bottle, and my badge of toughness, because I had lived in the South for six years, so 90 degrees ain’t that bad,” she says. “I lasted 10 minutes. I had to turn around. It was so hot that it was making it really tough to breathe.”

Animals struggle too. Birds and insects are just getting started in spring. They’re emerging from winter dormancy, migrating, nesting—all of which makes them especially vulnerable to sudden temperature swings and overall shifts.

When heat hits during the nesting season—March through early July—young birds “are often immobile or can’t fly long distances. They can literally bake,” says Joe Liebezeit, the interim statewide conservation director at Portland Audubon. He couldn’t say whether that happened this May—his organization’s rescue center was closed because of winter-storm damage, and he says that the smallest, most vulnerable species often go unnoticed. But the record-breaking heat wave in June 2020 caused what his colleagues called a “hawkpocalypse” of well over 100 dehydrated and injured young hawks brought there and to other centers. As early heat waves become more common, he expects that more birds will suffer. Research suggests that birds’ bodies and behaviors are already changing to keep up with climate change: Some species are physically shrinking, others are nesting earlier, and some are migrating sooner. But for many, those adaptations aren’t coming fast enough, Liebezeit says.

Research indicates that bugs are even less able to adapt to extreme heat—if it hits during the wrong part of their life cycle, they can go sterile or die. This May, the timing wasn’t so bad, says Scott Hoffman Black, the executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. The cool April meant that most pollinators hadn’t emerged yet. “But then, man, they came out in droves,” he says. Now he’s worried about what this summer might bring. Early heat and drought may mean bugs have fewer resources later in the year, which means less food for some bird species too.

Farmers, however, may benefit from early warming—or some crops might, at least, and some farmers, if they’re able to take advantage of the lengthening season, says Mark Pavek, a potato agronomist at Washington State University. Some Northwest potato growers are adapting to warmer springs by getting potatoes in the ground sooner, he says, but that isn’t always easy—or cheap. “About 60 percent of our seed potatoes come from Montana, and there’s a couple of passes on the highway between here and there,” Pavek says. “If it’s too cold, they can’t transport the potatoes unless it’s in a semi that has insulation and heaters.” That adds expense. So can having more workers, earlier in the year, to plant.

[Read: Wheat can’t catch a break right now]

This May, in regions such as the Columbia Basin where potatoes had already started to emerge, “they really just took off growing fast,” Pavek says. However, he adds, early growth also means farmers must water and fertilize their plants sooner. And overall warming trends are causing some pests to thrive, adding even more complications and costs. And big, early-season investments can be risky: Extreme heat later in the year can damage the potatoes. “Even the pros and experts are sometimes not sure what to be doing,” Pavek says—as conditions get harder to predict and react to, “sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw.”

iA short recap of the past 24 hours in Russia reads like the backstory for a fanciful episode of Madam Secretary or The West Wing. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the brutal convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, declared war on the Russian Ministry of Defense and marched into the city of Rostov-on-Don. He then headed north for Moscow, carrying his demand for the ousting of Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. The city went on alert.

Prigozhin and his men came within 125 miles of the capital—that is, closer to Moscow than Philadelphia is to Washington, D.C. He then said that a deal had been struck and that Wagner’s forces were turning around to avoid bloodshed. Apparently, however, the blood Prigozhin saved from being shed was his own. If the “deal” announced by the Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov accurately reflects the outcome of this whole bizarre episode, Prigozhin has in the space of a day gone from being a powerful warlord to a man living on borrowed time in a foreign country, waiting for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inevitable retribution.

According to Peskov, Russia is dropping all charges against Prigozhin, who must now go into exile in Belarus. Wagner fighters who did not take part in the rebellion will be given amnesty, and then they will sign contracts that will bring them under the control of Shoigu’s Ministry of Defense. I suggested yesterday that Shoigu’s attempt to seize Wagner’s men and dissolve the force might be one of the reasons Prigozhin went on the march. This outcome is a defeat of the first order for Prigozhin, who has now lost everything except his life.

We can at this point only speculate about why Prigozhin undertook this putsch, and why it all failed so quickly. One possibility is that Prigozhin had allies in Moscow who promised to support him, and somehow that support fell through: Perhaps his friends in the Kremlin got cold feet, or were less numerous than Prigozhin realized, or never existed at all. Prigozhin, after all, is not exactly a military genius or a diplomat; he’s a violent, arrogant, emotional man who may well have embarked on this scheme huffing from a vat of his own overconfidence.

Read: Why coups fail

Nonetheless, this bizarre episode is not a win for Putin. 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. Putin reportedly worries a great deal about being assassinated, and so perhaps he wanted to hunker down until he had more clarity about who might be in league with Prigozhin. But whatever the reason, he vowed to deal with Prigozhin decisively and then blew town, probably to his retreat at Valdai, in a move that looked weak and disorganized.

Bringing in President Alexander Lukashenko as a broker at first seemed an odd choice on Putin’s part, but it makes a bit more sense in light of the supposed deal. The Belarusian autocrat could personally vouch for Prigozhin’s safe passage; Lukashenko has no connections in Moscow that are more important than Putin; he does not live or work in the Kremlin and so he was a secure choice to carry out Putin’s terms; he owes Putin his continued rule and has no reason to betray him. Also, sending in Lukashenko was something of a power move: Putin is a former intelligence officer, and in that world, Prigozhin is merely a scummy convict. The two men were friendly before this, but they were not equals. It would have been a huge loss of face for the president of a great power to negotiate with his former chef in person.

Prigozhin gets to stay alive, at least for the moment, but his life as he knew it (and maybe in any sense) is over. Putin, however, is now politically weaker than ever. The once unchallengeable czar is no longer invincible. The master of the Kremlin had to make a deal with a convict—again, in Putin’s culture, among the lowest of the low—just to avert the shock and embarrassment of an armed march into the Russian capital while other Russians are fighting on the front lines in Ukraine.

Prigozhin drew blood and then walked away from a man who never, ever lets such a personal offense go unavenged. Putin, however, may have had no choice, which is yet another sign of his precarious situation. All of the options were terrifying: Ordering the Russian military to attack armed Russian men would have been a huge risk, especially because those men (and their hatred of the bureaucrats at the Defense Ministry) have at least some support among Russia’s officers and political elites. Killing Prigozhin outright was also a high-risk proposition; with their leader dead and the Russian military closing in, the Wagnerites might have decided to fight to the death.

Read: Russia slides into civil war

This wound to Putin’s power goes deep, but how deep is difficult to gauge for now, especially because we do not know whether Shoigu or Gerasimov still have their jobs. And although the rebellion has taken Wagner off the field in Ukraine, Putin may still seek to cover this ignominious moment by escalating Russia’s brutality there. But two things appear certain. First, Putin has suffered a huge political blow, and he has survived by making deals both with Prigozhin and with his own colleagues in the Kremlin that are, by any definition, a humiliation. And second, Yevgeny Prigozhin has changed the Russian political environment surrounding Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Prigozhin’s rebellion and its effects will last beyond today, but how long he will live in Belarus—or stay alive in Belarus—to see how the rest of it plays out is unclear.