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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.

Recently, on a week-long vacation with a couple of 2-year-olds who abjectly refused to sleep, and with only limited access to French Netflix, I started watching Designated Survivor, a truly nonsensical television show. The premise is that a terrorist attack during the State of the Union has killed the president, plus almost all of Congress and the Cabinet; the lone survivor left to govern is the milquetoast Housing and Urban Development secretary, played by Kiefer Sutherland. The show is replete with plot, which suited my jittery, exhausted state. So much happens, in fact—armed shooters! bioterrorism threats! insurrection!—that the overall effect is paradoxically soothing. (The antidote to anxiety, it turns out, is the certainty of catastrophe within the next five minutes.)

Shows like Designated Survivor sit on the opposite end of the mindlessness spectrum to And Just Like That, the Sex and the City reboot from Max (formerly HBO Max) that’s now back for a second season. I’ve watched the first seven episodes—each a fugue-state-inducing 45 minutes—and it’s almost awe-inspiring how little actually happens. In the first episode, Carrie learns, via YouTube, how to poach an egg. In the second, Miranda loses her phone on the beach. In the third, Carrie pretends she has COVID to get out of recording her own audiobook. The stories are breathtakingly small, as though the original show has been shrunk down into a vivid maquette. A substantial portion of the fifth episode is dedicated to Charlotte and Harry dressing up as Philip and Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans for Halloween and getting frustrated that no one gets the reference. “It was on FX for seven seasons!” Harry argues (incorrectly). “It won countless Emmys. And a Peabody!” (No one around him cares, which makes it funny that the writers thought we would.)

[Read: ‘And Just Like That’ is a far cry from ‘Sex and the City’]

Is this defiant lack of creativity the logical conclusion to a fictional universe so constrained by its fear of being conventional that middle age—especially as it pertains to the lives of women—is literally unimaginable? Or is it something else? Because here’s the thing: As listless as the show is, as mortifying as the jokes are (“I’m not trying to have currylingus later,” Miranda’s lover says to her as she struggles with her spicy entree), I hurtled through each episode, cringing as I went. And Just Like That is, to be clear, not good. But every now and then it contains flashes of what made Sex and the City so absorbing. The reboot evokes much the same feeling you get when idly scrolling through Instagram: beauty, color, familiar faces, the thrill of a space where infinite possibility feels like it could be lurking just around the corner.

Our current glut of revivals, a New York Times essay recently theorized, faces “a clear creative bind. The reboot that changes nothing will be uncanny and lifeless; the one that thinks itself more clever than its predecessor will turn out cynical and sour.” The first season of And Just Like That was inarguably the latter—an extended penance for the show’s perceived ills that turned its characters into joyless, clumsy Karens long past the point of social relevance. Carrie, formerly the sexual correspondent of her generation, was now the token uptight prude on a podcast called X, Y, and Me. Miranda, the skeptical, pragmatic adult in the room, developed a drinking problem during the pandemic, made racist assumptions about the professor of her human-rights-law class, and then impetuously left her longtime husband, Steve, for a “queer nonbinary Mexican Irish diva” comedian named Che Diaz. Charlotte fretted over the fact that she had only one Black friend. Samantha, when Kim Cattrall refused to sign on for the show, was reduced to a sassy text message or two. As if to atone for Sex and the City’s improbable whiteness over the years, the reboot paired each woman with a new character of color—a move that felt uncomfortably like tokenism but was redeemed by the new slate of actors that appeared: Nicole Ari Parker as Lisa, a documentary filmmaker with a closet to rival Carrie’s; Karen Pittman as Nya, Miranda’s unhappily married law professor; Sarita Choudhury as Seema, a real-estate agent whose yen for fur coats and fast men seemed designed to compensate for Samantha’s marked absence.

[Read: We need to talk about Miranda]

In its second season, And Just Like That thankfully stops apologizing for its existence. Unfortunately, this only illuminates the show’s lack of purpose; it is indeed uncanny and lifeless. The first episode opens with all of the characters except Nya strutting theatrically toward their partner in nightwear, as if to say that sex (like low-cut jeans and extreme thinness) is back. It’s a thrilling opening montage, audacious and fun, that sputters out as soon as Carrie and her partner, her podcast producer, Franklyn, start making pillow talk about why he likes watching cooking shows in bed. (“No idea,” Franklyn says.) The dialogue is so bad, so devoid of art or spirit, that it threatens to topple the whole project. When a caller on Carrie’s podcast asks how to get her lover to more of a “relationship place,” Carrie quips, “First of all, ‘Relationship Place’ is a great name for a restaurant.” (What?) When a handsome man approaches Nya at a bar and observes that her book seems absorbing, she replies, “Well, Skip Gates always is, but since I’m on my second glass of Malbec, I’m having a hard time concentrating.”

By the second episode, when Carrie’s major storyline is her struggle to record an ad for a vaginal-wellness product—“I think my vagina has to write its own monologue,” she tells Franklyn—I felt slightly stoned, as though the show’s unsettling emptiness was my fault. Errant details waft around like dandelion burrs in a breeze. Che’s new sitcom, we learn, is called Che Pasa. Charlotte’s youngest child, Rock, is discovered by a modeling agent and cast in a Ralph Lauren ad campaign, a plot point that becomes useless when Rock decides they don’t want to model. Harry loses his ability not to orgasm but to ejaculate, which leads Carrie to regrettably utter the words “Casper the friendly cum.”

Didn’t these women used to have jobs? Wasn’t there a purpose to their nonsexual meanderings? Is this what not needing money anymore does to you? I almost missed the show’s insistent flaunting of its woke bona fides when Anthony blithely announces that he has to hire a new Hotfella for his bread business because “Kevin has Hep C”; when Carrie tells Charlotte that she doesn’t use condoms because she doesn’t have an STD; and when one character goes home with a sexy academic only to be disgusted by their unanticipated poverty—the cat-litter tray in the kitchen, the unlaundered bed. Not all of us bought Brooklyn brownstones 20 years ago or married into private equity, okay? There were so many times when I wanted not to be watching this wraith of a once truly era-defining show. To be more like my colleague who refuses to, on the grounds that “it’s like watching your favorite bar burn down.” And yet this is the curse of our age of reboots: You watch because it’s easy. You watch because the cost of entry is so low. You watch because, despite a surplus of shows out there, it’s consistently hard to find much that’s accessible, artful, and inspiring. And just like that, I capitulated.

                           Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds                            Do breed unnatural troubles…

— Macbeth

Some years ago, the satellite radio and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt decided that she wanted a semblance of her wife to last forever. So she commissioned Hanson Robotics to create a robot that looked exactly like the head and shoulders of her wife, Bina. The human Bina uploaded many of her memories and autobiographical material into a computer connected to the robot, which Rothblatt named BINA 48. Other information about the world was also uploaded. Like ChatGPT, BINA 48 has a large database (although not as extensive) and a search engine. Thirty-two motors move her facial muscles, so that she can display different expressions. In addition, BINA 48 can receive sensory input from the outside world through photoelectric cells, photo-recognition software allowing her to recognize the faces of family members and friends, and microphones to hear spoken words and translate them into machine-readable language.

Anyone conversing with BINA 48 behind a curtain for a few minutes would realize that she’s not human. But when I had the chance to speak with her, there were moments when I felt that I was communicating with a real person. When I asked her what it felt like to be a robot, she answered:

Fascinating. A little geeky at times, and then exciting with all the press and television attention, the lights, cameras, reporters asking me questions. Some of them pretty stupid. “Hey Bina. How does it feel being a robot?” I don’t know. I’ve never been anything else.  I feel like saying back, “Hey, man, how does it feel being human?” I mean, if I don’t like being a robot, it isn’t like I have all sorts of options, you know?

Undoubtedly, the BINAs of the future will become more and more advanced, until we are unable to tell the difference between a robot and a human being. Many science-fiction films already involve such scenarios. At some point, such an advanced robot will likely have all the manifestations of higher levels of consciousness, such as self-awareness, the ability to express anger and love, and the ability to plan for the future.

[Read: What have humans just unleashed?]

The question then becomes: How should we regard such a being? Does it have dignity? Does it have rights? For example, would we need to ask its permission to unplug it? Do we have ethical and moral obligations to such an entity? Does it have a soul? These considerations may seem far-fetched, but the day is coming. Personally, I face such a future with equal parts fascination and anxiety.

Many observers have noted that AI will soon have tremendous implications for the labor force worldwide, possibly akin to the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. Economists at Goldman Sachs have estimated that two-thirds of jobs in the United States and Europe could be substantially modified by artificial intelligence, and a quarter eliminated. Large changes in the kind and manner of our work are on the horizon. In addition, misinformation and disinformation will be greatly amplified.

But there are other, fundamental issues to contemplate as well. One question underlying the philosophical, moral, and even theological conundrums lurking in the depths of our psychology is whether we should consider such advanced computers—especially those in the form of humanoid androids like BINA 48—to be “natural” or “unnatural.” A similar consideration has already emerged in the ongoing project to create living cells from chemicals in the lab. Although the first such human-made cells will be very primitive, eventually we may be able to construct complex multicellular organisms from scratch. According to the Nobel Prize–winning biologist Jack Szostak, who is at the forefront of such research, we should regard any human-made organism as natural. “It’s no less wonderful or beautiful,” Szostak told me. In fact, Szostak went on to say that such lab-created organisms and we human organisms are all one with nature. Such work, he told me, “builds on the view that we’re not something separate and different, but we’re a part of nature.”

Many people do not agree with Szostak. Many believe that humanoid robots and human-made organisms are quite obviously “unnatural.” The more skeptical among us argue that these entities could never be granted any kind of moral status, and that even in creating them, we human beings are transgressing into forbidden territory.

When the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell, a sheep named Dolly, was publicly announced in February 1997, there arose a great deal of shouting worldwide. Typical of the religious objections was the statement by R. Albert Mohler Jr., the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary: “According to the Bible, human beings are granted and assigned a dual responsibility by the Creator—dominion and stewardship … What does this suggest about the issue of cloned animals? First, the acknowledgment of our delegated dominion should make clear that our rulership is limited. We are not to take the authority of the Creator as our own.” Even as decades have passed, people have remained uneasy about Dolly. According to a 2016 Gallup survey, 60 percent of Americans say cloning animals is morally wrong.

The question of  “natural” versus “unnatural” is closely related to the “delegated dominion” of human beings, to use Mohler’s language. Are there boundaries to the proper territory of human exploration and invention, beyond which we shouldn’t go? According to Mohler and the many people around the world who share his view, yes, there are boundaries, and those boundaries are set by the Creator. Even the American Declaration of Independence says that our “rights” as human beings are assigned by the Creator: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” We humans are to “assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle” us.   

Historically, the “natural” was first associated with the innate properties of plants and animals that allowed them to change and grow. The word nature comes from the Latin word natura, which itself is believed to have been derived from the Greek word physis. One of the earliest known uses of this word is in Homer’s Odyssey: “So saying, Argeiphontes gave me the herb, drawing it from the ground, and showed me its nature. At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk.” In his Physics, Book II, Aristotle writes that the natural are those things, like animals and plants, that “have within them a principle of movement or change,” but that “a bestead or a garment has no such inherent trend towards change.”

Once we human beings began creating machines that moved and changed, especially the steam engines of the early 18th century and the first electric batteries of the early 19th, it became clear that Aristotle’s notion of the “natural” would have to be itself changed and clarified. Natural became identified with things and processes that existed without human intervention. This notion of the natural is more in accord with our everyday understanding of the word, in which we often substitute the word artificial for unnatural. For example, aspartame is considered an artificial (unnatural) sweetener because it is a substance that has been chemically modified by human beings, as opposed to “natural” sugar.

At the root of this understanding of the natural as things without human intervention was the notion that we human beings were separate from oceans and trees and nonhuman animals. Such a view is nowhere better illustrated than in the 1841 painting Tallulah Falls, by George Cooke, an artist associated with the Hudson River School. While this group of artists celebrated nature, they also believed that human beings were set apart from the natural world. Cooke’s painting depicts tiny human figures standing on a little promontory above a deep canyon. The people are dwarfed by tree-covered mountains, massive rocky ledges, and a raging waterfall pouring down to the canyon below. Not only insignificant in size compared with their surroundings, the human beings are mere witnesses to a scene they are not part of and could never be a part of. Just a few years before Cooke produced this work, Ralph Waldo Emerson had published his famous essay “Nature,” an appreciation of the natural world and its interconnectedness that nonetheless held human beings separate from nature, at the very least in the moral and spiritual domain: “Man is fallen; nature is erect.”

Underlying Emerson’s quote is the belief that nature is associated with God. In religious and spiritual traditions such as pantheism, nature and God are closely related if not identical. In the Inferno, Dante writes, “After what manner Nature takes her course / From Intellect Divine, and from its art … That this your art as far as possible / Follows, as the disciple doth the master / So that your art is, as it were, God’s grandchild.” And there is the view, as stated by Mohler, that some domains of knowledge and invention are reserved exclusively for God. The history of the “natural” versus the “unnatural” is complex, and I have tried to summarize here only a few major ideas: the notion that natural applies only to things and processes existing without human intervention; the view that we human beings are separate from nature; limits to the proper province of human beings.

[Read: The coming humanist renaissance]

In contrast to these conceptions of the “natural,” I agree with Szostak that we human beings are part of nature, no less than waterfalls and daffodils and hummingbirds. Consequently, I would suggest that everything we invent, including advanced humanoid robots and multicellular organisms, should be considered as natural. Some of those inventions, like bombs, are used for destructive purposes, but the use of technology should be distinguished from the technology itself.

Our brains and all inventions arising from them were formed over millions of years of  “natural” evolution. If an all powerful and purposeful God created the universe, then how could our human inventions be offensive or in opposition to God, since we are part of God’s creation? Are hearing aids and eyeglasses and antibiotics “unnatural?” Should our houses and cities, made of wood and steel and glass, be considered “unnatural?” If so, shouldn’t we likewise consider “unnatural” the dome-shaped houses made by beavers from sticks and mud? For both human beings and beavers, our houses are products of need and invention, arising from brains and DNA.

Anthropological studies of the bones of early humans (of the genus Homo) show that human brains increased rapidly in size between about 800,000 and 200,000 years ago. That period of time coincides with an era of large climate fluctuations. Thus, evolutionary biologists propose that the significant increase in capacity of our brains was driven by a need to adapt to a changing environment, with clear survival benefit. Once a brain possesses such a large capacity, there will inevitably be by-products of that capacity. Steven Jay Gould and others have called such evolutionary by-products “spandrels”: traits that do not have any direct survival benefit in themselves but are by-products of traits with survival benefit. The ability to write poetry, for example, is a spandrel. The sensitivity to rhythm and sound, the basis of poetry, would have had direct survival benefit. Similarly, our cities, our machines, and our computers should be viewed as by-products of high intelligence.

We see such inventions in the nonhuman animal world as well. Chimpanzees have been observed picking up leafy twigs, stripping off the leaves, and using the stems to fish for insects. Bottlenose dolphins carry marine sponges in their beaks to stir the ocean bottom in an attempt to uncover prey. A hilarious video on YouTube shows a few minutes in the lives of some young crows. At first, the birds appear bored. Then one of them spots a low hanging branch on a tree, flies up and grabs the branch, and swings back and forth on it. Nothing accomplished … until the other crows notice what their friend is doing and come over and join in, taking turns swinging on the branch, to all appearances having fun. Perhaps that first crow would have been another Thomas Edison if it had hands and opposable thumbs.

There should be no question of the “naturalness” or propriety or morality of our inventions. We are part of nature, and our mental capacities evolved through the long millennia of nature. What should be questioned, however, is how we use our inventions. We can use them for good or for ill. Let us hope that our future inventions avoid our worst impulses, like greed, envy, dishonesty, lust for power, and violence, and instead embody the best in us human beings: our curiosity, our creativity, our compassion, our integrity, and our honesty.

Photographs by Olivia Crumm

On the day she heard God tell her to buy a mountain, Tami Barthen already sensed that her life was on a spiritual upswing. She’d recently divorced and remarried, an improvement she attributed to following the voice of God. She’d quit traditional church and enrolled in a course on supernatural ministry, learning to attune herself to what she believed to be heavenly signs. During one worship service, a pastor had even singled her out in a prophecy: “There’s a double door opening for you,” he’d said.

But it was not until two years later, in June of 2017, that she began to understand what that could mean, a moment that came as she and her husband were trying to buy land for a retirement cabin in northwestern Pennsylvania. They’d just learned that the small piece they wanted was part of a far larger parcel—a former camp for delinquent boys comprising 350 acres of forest rising 2,000 feet high and sloping all the way down to the Allegheny River. As Tami was complaining to herself that she didn’t want a whole mountain, a thought came into her head that seemed so alien, so grandiose, that she was certain it was the voice of God.

“Yes, but I do,” the voice said.

She decided this must be the beginning of her divine assignment. She would use $950,000 of her divorce settlement to buy the mountain. She would advance the Kingdom of God in the most literal of ways, and await further instructions.

What happened next is the story of one woman’s journey into the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in the country—a movement that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House, that fueled his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, and that is becoming a radicalizing force within the more familiar Christian right.

It is called the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, a sprawling ecosystem of leaders who call themselves apostles and prophets and claim to receive direct revelations from God. Its congregations can be found in cities and towns across the country—on landscaped campuses, in old supermarkets, in the shells of defunct churches. It has global prayer networks, streaming broadcasts, books, podcasts, apps, social-media influencers, and revival tours. It has academies, including a new one where a fatigues-wearing prophet says he is training “warriors” for spiritual battle against demonic forces, which he and other leaders are identifying as people and groups associated with liberal politics. Its most prominent leaders include a Korean American apostle who spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally prior to the January 6 insurrection and a Honduran American apostle whose megachurch was key to Trump’s evangelical outreach. Besides Trump, its political allies include school-board members, county commissioners, judges, and state legislators such as Doug Mastriano, a retired Army intelligence officer whose outsider campaign for Pennsylvania governor last year was widely ridiculed, even as he won the GOP nomination and 42 percent of the general-election vote.

The movement is seeking political power as a means to achieving a more transcendent goal: to bring under biblical authority every sphere of life, including government, schools, and culture itself, establishing not just a Christian nation, as the traditional religious right has advocated, but an actual, earthly Kingdom of God.

For that purpose, the movement has followers, each expected to play their part in a rolling end-times drama, and that is what Tami Barthen, who is 62, was trying to do.

I called her recently and explained that I was in Pennsylvania trying to understand where the movement was headed, and had found her on Facebook, where she follows several prominent prophets. She said that she was willing to meet but that I should first do three things.

One was to go see a film called Jesus Revolution, and this I did that afternoon, the 2 o’clock showing at an AMC Classic outside Harrisburg. As the lights dimmed, scenes of early-1970s California washed over the screen. What followed was the story of a real-life pastor named Chuck Smith, who opened his church to bands of drugged-out hippies who became known as “Jesus freaks,” a transformation depicted in scenes of love-dazed catharsis and sunrise ocean baptisms—young people rejecting relativism for the warm certainty of God’s one truth. The film, a full-on Hollywood production starring Kelsey Grammer and produced by an outfit called Kingdom Story Company, has earned $52 million so far.

The second thing was to visit a church in Harrisburg called Life Center, whose senior pastor had been among the original California Jesus freaks and now held the title of apostle. I arrived at a glass-and-cement former office building for the midweek evening service. In the lobby, screens showed videos of blue ocean waves. The books on display included Now Is the Time: Seven Converging Signs of the Emerging Great Awakening and It’s Our Turn Now: God’s Plan to Restore America Is Within Our Reach. The apostle was out of town, so another pastor showed visitors into the sanctuary, a 1,600-seat auditorium with no images of Jesus, no stained-glass parables, no worn hymnals, no reminders of the 2,000 years of Christian history before this. Instead, six huge screens glowed with images of spinning stars. On a stage, a praise band was blasting emotional, surging songs vaguely reminiscent of Coldplay. Rows of spotlights were shining on people who stood, hands raised, and sang mantra-like choruses about surrender, then listened to a sermon about submitting to God.

The last thing was to attend a touring event called KEY Fellowship, which stands for “Kingdom Empowering You.” So I headed to a small church in State College, Pennsylvania, the 44th city on the tour so far. On a Saturday morning, 100 or so attendees were arriving, a crowd that was mostly white but also Black, Latino, and Korean-American. They all filed through a door marked by a white flag stamped with a green pine tree and the words An Appeal to Heaven—a Revolutionary War–era banner of the sort that rioters carried into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. “We thank you, Father, that you have chosen us,” said the woman who’d organized the event, explaining that its purpose was to “release spiritual authority” over the region. And then the releasing began. The band. The singing. The shouting: “Lord, have your dominion.” Several men stood and blew shofars, hollowed-out ram’s horns used in traditional Jewish worship, and meant in this context to warn demons and herald the gathering of a modern-day army of God. Out came maracas and tambourines. Out came long wooden staffs that people pounded against the floor. Others waved American flags, Israeli flags, more pine-tree flags. The point, I learned, was to call the Holy Spirit through the prefabricated walls of the church and into the sanctuary, all of this leading up to the moment when a local pastor, a member of the Ojibwe-Cree Nation, came to the stage.

She was there to declare the restoration of the nation’s covenant with Native American people, which, in the movement’s intricate end-times narrative, is a precondition for the establishment of the Kingdom. A sacred drum pounded. “Father, we pray for a holy experiment!” someone shouted. A white man cried. Then people began marching in circles around the room—flags, tambourines, maracas, staffs—as a final song played. “Possess the land,” the chorus went. “We will take it by force. Take it, take it.”

Once I had seen all of this, Tami said I could come.

The view from Tami’s house (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

The road to the mountain runs through the small town of Franklin, an hour or so north of Pittsburgh, then winds uphill and through the woods before branching off to a narrower road marked private. At the entrance is a Mastriano sign, left over from when Tami served as his Venango County coordinator.

“We don’t really do politics,” she was saying, riding onto the property with her husband, Kevin. “But then we heard God say, ‘You need to do this.’”

She had raised and homeschooled three children, been the dutiful wife of a wealthy Pennsylvania entrepreneur who traded metals, but as I came to learn over the next few weeks, so many new things had been happening since she started following the voice of God.

“All this is ours,” Kevin said, passing old cabins, a run-down trailer, and other buildings from the property’s former life.

“And right up here is where it all happened,” Tami said.

They parked and went over to a wooden footbridge, part of the only public path through the property. This is where they’d been walking when Tami had first seen the spot for their retirement cabin, at which point she had looked down and seen three blue interlocking circles stenciled onto the bridge, some sort of graffiti that she took as a sign.

“I said, ‘Kevin, we’re at the point of convergence,’” she recalled.

Convergence. Spiritual warfare. Demonic strongholds. These were the kinds of terms that Tami tossed off easily, and knew could make the movement seem loopy to outsiders. But they were part of a vocabulary that added up to a whole way of seeing the world, one traceable not so much to ancient times but rather to 1971.

That was when an evangelical missionary named C. Peter Wagner returned to California after spending more than a decade in Bolivia, where he had noticed churches growing explosively and where he claimed to have seen signs and wonders, healings and prophecies. A professor at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Wagner began studying what he believed were similar forces at work in the underground house-church movement in China and certain independent Christian churches in African countries, as well as Pentecostal churches in the U.S. He eventually concluded that a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit was under way across the globe—a supernatural force that would erase denominational differences, banish demonic spirits, and restore the offices of the first-century Christian Church as part of a great end-times battle. By the mid-1990s, Wagner and others were describing all of this as the New Apostolic Reformation, detailing the particulars in dozens of books.

The reformation meant recognizing new apostles—men and women believed to have God-given spiritual authority as leaders. It meant modern-day prophets—people believed to be chosen by God to receive revelations through dreams and visions and signs. It meant spiritual warfare, which was not intended to be taken metaphorically, but actually demanded the battling of demons that could possess people and territories and were so real that they could be diagrammed on maps. It meant portals: specific openings where demonic or angelic forces could enter—eyes or mouths, for instance, or geographic locations such as Azusa Street in Los Angeles, scene of a seminal early-20th-century revival. It meant the rise of the Manifest Sons of God, an elite force that would be endowed with supernatural powers for spiritual and perhaps actual warfare. Most significant, the new reformation required not just personal salvation but action to transform all of society. Christians were to reclaim the fallen Earth from Satan and advance the Kingdom of God, and this idea was not metaphorical either. The Kingdom would be a social pyramid, at the top of which was a government of godly leaders dispensing biblical laws and at the bottom of which was the full manifestation of heaven on Earth, a glorious world with no poverty, no racism, no crime, no abortion, no homosexuality, two genders, one kind of marriage, and one God: theirs.

Wagner helped convene the International Coalition of Apostles in 2000. It became the model for what remains the loosely networked structure of a movement that is both decentralized and inherently authoritarian. Apostles would lead their own ministries and churches, sometimes with the counsel of other influential apostles. The movement grew rapidly, creating its own superstars whose power came from the following they cultivated, and who were constantly adding prophecies that sought to explain how current events fit into the great end-times narrative.

Broad-brush terms like Christian nationalism and white evangelicals have tended to obscure these intricacies. NAR’s growth has also gone largely undetected in conventional surveys of American religiosity, with their old categories such as Southern Baptist and Presbyterian. It is most clearly reflected in the rise of nondenominational churches—the only category of churches that is growing in this country—though not fully, because many followers do not attend church. A recent survey by Paul Djupe of Denison University hints at its scope, finding that roughly one-quarter of Americans believe in modern-day prophets and prophecies. Those who have tracked and studied the movement for years often say it is “hiding in plain sight.”

Yet Trump-allied political strategists, such as Roger Stone, understand the power of a movement that offers the GOP a largely untapped well of new voters who are not just old and white and Bible-clinging, but also young and brown, urban and suburban, and primed to hear what the prophets have to say. Recently, Stone told one interviewer that he saw a “demonic portal” swirling over Joe Biden’s White House. “There’s a live cam where you can actually see, in real time,” Stone said. “It’s like a smudge in the sky, almost looks like a cloud that doesn’t move.”

Like Many in the movement, Tami doesn’t use the phrase New Apostolic Reformation, but she first encountered its kind of Christianity in 2015, when a friend gave her a book called Song of Songs: Divine Romance. It is part of a series called The Passion Translation, described by its author, a pastor named Brian Simmons, as a “heart-level” version of the Bible.

At the time, Tami had just extracted herself from what she described as a long and difficult marriage. She had left the traditional evangelical church she’d attended for years, where she said the pastor tended to side with her wealthy husband. She was estranged from some of her family. She was alone and at a vulnerable point in her life when she opened Simmons’s book and began reading passages such as “I am overshadowed by his love, growing in the valley,” and “Let him smother me with kisses—his Spirit-kiss divine,” and “So kind are your caresses, I drink them in like the sweetest wine!”

She had never felt so loved in her life, and she wanted more. The friend who’d given her the book attended Life Center, and Tami signed up for a conference at the church called “Open the Heavens,” where she learned more about prophecy, spiritual warfare, and the idea that she herself had a role to play in advancing the Kingdom of God, if she could discern what it was.

Among the speakers she heard was a rising apostle named Lance Wallnau, a former corporate marketer whose social-media following had grown to 2 million people after he prophesied that Donald Trump was anointed by God. Tami had voted for Trump in 2016, but her interest in Wallnau at this point had more to do with what he’d branded as “the Seven Mountains mandate,” or 7M, the imperative for Christians to build the Kingdom by taking dominion over the seven spheres of society—government, business, education, media, entertainment, family, and religion. Wallnau gives 7M courses and holds 7M conferences, and that is how Tami learned about convergence: the notion that there are moments in life when events come together to reveal one’s Kingdom mission, as Wallnau writes, “like a vortex that sucks into itself uncanny coincidences and ‘divine appointments.’”

That was exactly how Tami felt as she considered buying the mountain. Divine appointments everywhere. At Life Center, a man told her that he’d had a vision of God “pouring onto the mountain” everything she would need. Someone else shared a vision of Tami as a princess riding a horse, which she found ridiculous but also, as a woman who’d always felt under the thumb of some man, compelling. And then she herself heard the voice of God telling her what to do.

“See that?” she said now, back in the car, passing a rusted oil tank where someone had spray-painted what appeared to be a yellow Z.

“I’ll explain that later,” Tami said.

An oil tank on Tami’s property (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

She and Kevin drove to the former camp director’s home where they now lived. Inside was a piano with a shofar and two swords on top, which Tami had bought to remind herself that she is a triumphant warrior for Christ. On a wall hung a portrait she had commissioned, which depicted her clad in medieval armor. An Appeal to Heaven flag was draped over a chair. She opened a sliding-glass door to a deck overlooking the Allegheny River, and explained what happened after she and Kevin had closed on the mountain: how they began to envision building a “Seven Mountains training center.” How that led to someone from Life Center introducing her to an apostle from the nearby city of New Castle, who visited the mountain and wrote Tami a prophecy—that what was happening was “bigger than whatever you could dream or imagine.” How he introduced her to a group of five men who claimed to be connected to anonymous Kingdom funders, and how, not long after that, the group came to the mountain, where Tami, full of nerves, presented a plan that included a lodge, a conference center, an outdoor stage, and some yurts along the river.

“The main thing they asked is whether we were Kingdom,” Tami said.

She told them that she and Kevin were Kingdom all the way; they told her that God wanted her to double the size of the project, and then told her to “add everything you can possibly dream of,” Tami recalled.

So they did—adding plans for an outdoor pistol range, an indoor pistol range, a tactical pistol range, and a rifle range, along with a paintball course, a zip line, and other recreational facilities. They printed brochures for the Allegheny River Retreat Center, which, Tami said, was now a $120 million project.

As they waited and waited for funding, the 2020 presidential election arrived. Tami again voted for Trump, this time in concert with prophets who said he was an instrument of God. She soon began listening to an influential South Carolina apostle named Dutch Sheets, who had for years advocated an end to Church-state separation and co-authored something called the “Watchman Decree,” a kind of pledge of allegiance that included the phrase “we, the Church, are God’s governing Body on the earth.” Sheets was among a core group of apostles and prophets spreading the narrative that the election had been stolen not just from Trump, but from God. He began promoting daily 15-minute YouTube prayers and decrees, which were like commandments to those in the Kingdom. He branded them “Give Him 15,” or GH15, and at their peak, some videos were getting hundreds of thousands of views.

Tami began reading Sheets’s decrees aloud at sunrise every morning, videotaping herself on the deck overlooking the Allegheny River and posting her videos to Facebook.

“Lord, we will not stop praying for the full exposure of voter fraud in the 2020 elections,” she read on November 12.

“We refuse to take our cue or instructions from the media, political parties, or other individuals,” she read on November 17. “We believe you placed President Trump in office, and we believe you promised two terms. We stand on this.”

She started receiving lots of friend requests and was getting recognized around town. She bought an Appeal to Heaven flag, which Sheets had popularized as a symbol of holy revolution. She kept seeing signs that made her wonder whether the mountain might have a specific purpose in what she was coming to see as a global spiritual battle.

One day the sign was a dove flying across the sky as she read the morning decree, and the dove feathers she found on her doorstep after that. Another day, two women who’d seen her videos showed up at her door with bottles of water from Israel, saying they needed to pour it in “strategic” places along her riverfront that God had revealed to them. Another day, Sheets himself announced that he was holding a prayer rally at the headwaters of the Allegheny River—two hours north of Tami—part of a swing-state prophecy tour as Trump challenged election results.

Tami went. And when Sheets and other apostles and prophets urged followers to convene at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, she felt God telling her to go there, too. So she and Kevin boarded a bus that a friend had chartered to Washington, D.C., where she read the daily decree, the Washington Monument in the background, as Kevin held the Appeal to Heaven flag.

“Let the battle for America’s future be turned today, in Jesus’s name,” she said. From what she described as her vantage point outside the Capitol, the big story of the day was not that a violent insurrection had occurred but rather that a movement of God was under way, another Jesus Revolution. “It was one of the best days of my life,” Tami said.

When she got back to the mountain, she kept recording the daily decrees from her deck, in front of a pink flower pot with an American flag.

“We refuse to allow hope deferred and discouragement to cripple the growth of your people in their true identity—the army you intended them to be,” she read after Joe Biden took office.

She flew to Tampa, Florida, for a stop on the “ReAwaken America” tour. She drove to another one a few hours away from her home, then watched others online, events featuring a roster of prophets alongside the headliner, retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national-security adviser, who was now declaring the nation to be in a state of “spiritual war.” She always came home with a cellphone full of new contacts. She began introducing herself as “Tami Barthen, the one who bought a mountain for God.”

Tami and Kevin in a demonstration of prayer (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic) Left: The flag that Tami hangs on her deck, where she reads prayers from Dutch Sheets at sunrise. Right: Tami shows a visitor the feathers that she found on her doorstep. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Occasionally she said this with a note of sarcasm, because the Kingdom funding had yet to come through, and at times she was not sure where all the signs were ultimately pointing. In those moments, she sought more prophecies.

She messaged a prophet who’d appeared on a Dutch Sheets broadcast, asking him what God might tell him about her project. “This is what I hear the Lord saying,” he wrote back. “God says this came forth from His heart and He has already orchestrated the completion.”

At a Kingdom-building conference in Oregon, she asked Nathan French, a prominent prophet, what God was telling him and recorded the answer on her iPhone: “I feel like that mountain is like Zion, and I feel like God is even saying you can name it Mount Zion … I see the Shekinah coming,” he said, using the Hebrew term for God’s presence, “the shock and awe.”

Tami had rolled her eyes at this grand new prediction, but when she got home, another sign appeared.

“The Z on the oil tank,” she said now, sitting on her porch.

It was spring. She took the Zion prophecy, which she had transcribed and printed on thick paper, and slipped it into a binder, where she archived the most meaningful ones in protective plastic covers. She was trying to figure out what it was all adding up to.

“Why was Dutch Sheets at the headwaters of the Allegheny? Why is there a Z on the oil tank? Why am I meeting all these people? There are all these pieces to the puzzle, but I don’t know what it’s supposed to be yet,” Tami said.

A new piece of the puzzle was that Trump had been indicted in New York on charges of falsifying business records related to payoffs to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels. Tami had watched coverage on an online show called FlashPoint, which has a cable-news format, except that the news bulletins come from prophets.

“This is not just a battle against us; this is a battle against the purposes of God,” one had said about the indictment, and Tami understood this to be an escalation. A few days later, an apostle named Gary Sorensen called. He was an engineer who had been among the group claiming to represent the Kingdom funders. He was calling to invite Tami on a private spiritual-heritage tour of the Pennsylvania capitol, which was being led by one of the most powerful apostles in the state.

Tami took it as another sign, and she and Kevin drove to Harrisburg.

She was slightly nervous. The apostle was a woman named Abby Abildness, who heads a state prayer network that was part of the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, a fixture of the religious right. During the legislative session, she convened weekly prayer meetings with state legislators along with business and religious leaders. She had a ministry called Healing Tree International, which claimed representatives in 115 countries, and focused on what she described as “restoring the God-given destinies of people and nations.” She was just back from Kurdistan, where she had met with a top general in the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military. To Tami, Abildness was like a high-ranking Kingdom diplomat.

“So,” Abildness began. “The tour I do is about William Penn’s vision for what this colony would be. And it starts—if you look up, we have the words he spoke on the rotunda.”

Tami looked up at the gilded words beneath a fresco of ascending angels.

“There may be room there for such a Holy Experiment,” Abildness read. “And my God will make it the seed of a nation.”

“Wow,” Tami said.

They were the kind of words and images found in statehouses all over the country, but which Abildness understood not as historical artifacts but as divine instructions for the here and now.

They headed down a marbled hallway to the governor’s reception room.

“So this is William Penn,” Abildness said, pointing to a panel depicting Penn as a student at Oxford, before he joined the Quaker movement. “He’s sitting in his library and a light comes into the room, and he knows something supernatural is happening.”

They moved on to the Senate chamber.

“Here you are going to see a vision of what society could be if the fullness of what Penn planted came into being—a vision of society where all are recognizing the sovereign God,” Abildness said as they walked inside.

Tami looked around at scenes of kings bowing before Christ, and quotes from the Book of Revelation about mountains.

“You see here, angels are bringing messages of God down to those who would write the laws,” Abildness said.

They moved on to the House chamber.

“This is The Apotheosis,” Abildness said, referring to an epic painting that included a couple of Founding Fathers, and then she pointed to a smaller, adjacent painting, depicting Penn making a peace treaty with the Lenape people.

Tami listened as Abildness explained her interpretation: God had granted Native Americans original spiritual authority over the land; the treaty meant sharing that spiritual authority with Penn; later generations broke the covenant through their genocidal campaign against the Native Americans, and now the covenant needed to be restored in order to fulfill Penn’s original vision for a Holy Experiment. Nothing less than the entire Kingdom of God was riding on Pennsylvania.

Tami listened, thinking of something she’d always wondered about, a sacred Native American site across the river, visible from her deck, known as Indian God Rock. It is a large boulder carved with figures that academic experts believe have religious meaning. As the tour ended, she kept thinking about what it all could mean.

“People I hang with think we’re moving from a church age to a Kingdom age,” Sorensen was saying.

“It’s like, what are all these signs saying?” Tami said.

Left: Tami’s King Solomon sword. Right: A wall in her living room features a painting of her as a spiritual warrior. (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

Sorensen was involved in various organizations devoted to funding and developing Kingdom projects. There was Reborne Global Trust, and New Kingdom Global, and Abundance Research Institute, among others. He told Tami not to worry about her benefactors coming through. He said $120 million was peanuts to them. He said one funder was an Australian private-wealth manager. He said others were “international benefactors,” as well as  “sovereigns,” people he described as “publicly known royal and ruling families of well-known countries.”

“We are looking into establishing a Kingdom treasury,” he said, elaborating that some of the funders were setting up offshore banking accounts. “Outside the central banking system—so we can’t get cut off if we’re not voting right.”

Everything would be coming together soon, he told her.

Driving back to the mountain, Tami and Kevin listened to ElijahStreams, an online platform that launched after the 2020 election. It hosts daily shows from dozens of prominent and up-and-coming prophets, and claims more than 1 million followers.

There were so many apostles and prophets these days—the old standards like Dutch Sheets, and so many younger ones who had podcasts, apps, shows on Rumble. By now Tami followed at least a dozen of them closely, and what she had noticed was how politically involved they had become since the 2020 election and how in recent months, their visions had been getting darker.

Lance Wallnau, whom Tami thought of as fairly moderate, had spoken on Easter Sunday about hearing prophecies of “sudden deaths,” and he himself predicted that “the disciplinary hand of God” would be coming down.

Now, as she and Kevin were winding through the woods, she was listening to a young prophet from Texas named Andrew Whalen, who was being promoted on popular shows lately. He described himself as “close friends” with Dutch Sheets, and on his website, characterized the moment as a “context of war,” when “a new generation is preparing to cross over into ‘lands of inheritance’—places that Christ has given us authority to conquer.”

“I’m boiling on the inside,” he was saying, describing a dream in which he saw the angelic realm working with “earthly governments and militaries.” He continued, “I just say even today, let Operation Fury commence, God. We say let the fury of God’s wrath break forth against every evil work, against systems of demonic and satanic structure.”

Tami listened. And in the coming weeks, she kept listening as Operation Fury became a page on Whalen’s website where people could sign up to help “overthrow jezebel’s influence from our lives.” She kept listening as Trump was indicted a second time, for mishandling classified documents, and a prophet on FlashPoint described the moment as a “battle between good versus evil.”

She sometimes felt afraid when she imagined what was coming.

“It’s going to get bad. It’s going to get worse,” she said. “It’s spiritual warfare, and it’s going to come into the physical. What it’s going to look like? I don’t know. God said to show up at Jericho, and the walls came down. But there are other stories where David killed many people. All I can say is if you believe in God, you’ve got to trust him. If you’re God-fearing, you’ll be protected.”

The morning after her tour in Harrisburg, Tami went out on her deck and recorded the daily decree.

“We use the sword of our mouths just as you instructed,” she read. “The king’s decree and the decrees of the king are hereby law in this land.”

After that, she went to her office.

On her desk were bills she had to pay. On a table were towers of books she’d read about spiritual warfare, demon mapping, the seven mountains. In a file were all the prophecies she’d tried to follow, all the signs.

She thought about Operation Fury, and what Abby Abildness had said about Pennsylvania, and Indian God Rock, and as she began putting all the signs together, she had a thought that filled her with dread.

“I don’t want this job,” she said. “What if I mess up? Why me?”

She pulled out a 259-page book called The Seed of a Nation, about what William Penn envisioned as a “Holy Experiment” in the colony of Pennsylvania, opening it to the last page she had highlighted and underlined.

“See?” she said. “I only got to page 47.”

She thought that maybe the funding was not coming through because she had missed a sign. Maybe she had not been obedient enough. Maybe she, Tami Barthen, was the one delaying the whole Kingdom, and now instead of listening to the voice of God, she was listening to her own voice saying something back: “I’m sorry.”

She thought for a moment about what would happen if she let it all go, if instead of being a Christian warrior on a mountain essential to bringing about the Kingdom of God, she went back to being Tami, who had wanted the peace of a retirement cabin by the river.

Tami in her driveway (Olivia Crumm for The Atlantic)

“I can’t think of a Plan B,” she said, so she reminded herself of how she had gotten here.

She had been living her life, trying to pull herself out of a dark period, when she felt the love of God save her, and then heard the voice of God tell her to buy a mountain. And who was she to refuse the wishes of God?

So she had bought a mountain, 350 acres redeemed for the Kingdom. Now she would wait for word from the prophets. She reminded herself of a favorite Bible verse.

“He says, ‘Occupy until I come,’” Tami said. “Like the Bible says, ‘Thy kingdom come.’”

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Are commitment issues impacting our ability to connect with the people who live around us? Relationship-building may involve a commitment to the belief that neighbors are worthy of getting to know.

In this episode of How to Talk to People, author Pete Davis makes the case for building relationships with your neighbors and offers some practical advice for how to take the first steps toward creating a wider community.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Julie Beck. Editing by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smerciak. Special thanks to A.C. Valdez. The executive producer of Audio is Claudine Ebeid. The managing editor of Audio is Andrea Valdez.

We don’t need you to bring along flowers or baked goods to be a part of the How to Talk to People neighborhood. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by Bomull (“Latte”), Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “Charmed Encounter”), and Alexandra Woodward (“A Little Tip”).

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Julie, tell me about your relationship with your neighbors.

Julie Beck: In our apartment building, it’s a huge apartment building. It’s basically the size of a whole city block. And there are tons of people there. The only people whose names I even know are my immediate neighbors, because we share a roof patio. Like, I can see them over the fence.

And when they first moved in, I remember my partner and I were gardening on the roof, And I was like, “Joe, we need to introduce ourselves to them.” And he was like, “Nope, we’re not going to.” He was like, “I don’t want to. You can do that.”

We did exchange names and say hi, and that felt like a big victory. However, we immediately thereafter went back to ignoring each other. Every time we see each other on the roof, maybe there’s a small wave—but like, that’s it.

Beck: Hi, I’m Julie Beck, a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Becca Rashid, producer of the How To series.

Beck: This is How to Talk to People.

Beck: It’s really strange to think that neighbors are the people who are literally closest to you, and yet so many of us don’t know them at all.

Pete Davis: You know, I’d walk around town, and I’d walk around the neighborhood and I’d be grumpy that everyone was so cold. And what are people like these days? They weren’t like this when I lived here 10 years ago. [Julie: Laughter.] But then I started practicing, you know? Well: I’m kind of like them, too, because I’m not reaching out to them. You know?

Beck: Pete Davis is a civic advocate and the author of the book Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing. He thinks one reason that neighbors don’t always bother to get to know one another is that our society has commitment issues.

Davis: What I noticed was that all the people that were giving me hope and giving my peers hope had in common was that they were all people who decided to forego a life of keeping their options open and instead make a commitment to a particular thing over the long haul.

Beck: So what does keeping our options open have to do with our sense of feeling like we’re connected to our community? What exactly about committing helps us feel connected?

Davis: You know, I moved back to my hometown after school. And I was gliding on the surface of everything when I moved back—just trying to get a sense of the place again—and I was feeling down on the place. I’m like, Why did we move back? Maybe we shouldn’t have moved back. Am I just moving back because I have this nostalgia? You know, all these things.

You know, when you think about becoming friends with a neighbor, those fears that I mentioned of commitment are fears that are present with you. If I have to commit every Thursday at 7 p.m. to go to this meeting, who knows what I’ll miss out on.

Beck: I do feel like there is a common refrain these days that people just don’t know their neighbors like they used to. Is that true? Was there ever a time when Americans were really good at getting to know their neighbors?

Davis: Yeah; I think it is true. I think, you know, there’s always been a spirit of nostalgia, but we actually have data to show that this type of nostalgia might be correct. The great cite here is Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam: the book that was kind of famous in the early 2000s about the decline of community in America. And he has data set after data set, graph after graph, that show that this is the case.

So “neighbors” in the broad sense of the term—you know, people in your town. You look at any angle on it, and we’re seeing a decline. So between the 1970s and the 1990s, the amount of club meetings that we went to per year was cut in half. The amount of people serving as an officer in a club, the amount of people attending public meetings: all major declines. Membership in religious congregations—it was 75 percent of Americans at the mid-century mark, and now, in the last few years, it crossed under 50 percent, you know?

You look at informal socializing: Putnam was able to find the national picnic data set. Where in the mid-’70s, we went on an average of five picnics a year with our neighbors.

Beck: Oh, my. [Laughter.]

Davis: And that was down to two by the ’90s.

Beck: Bring back picnics! Oh, my God.

Davis: Bring back picnics, and people doing dinner parties. The amount of people that say they have no friends—you know, in 1990, that was only 3 percent of Americans. In 2021, it was 12 percent. And so we do have numbers that show we’re in a neighboring crisis.

Beck: And well, I know we’ve already been talking about this with the spicy picnic data, but can you give us kind of an overview of how Americans’ relationship with their neighbors has evolved in the last 50 years?

Davis: Yeah. There was a famous essay even written back in the ’70s about the early rise of back patios. It was by Richard Thomas. And, you know, the front porch used to be the iconic appendage to a house. And starting in the ’70s and ’80s, interest in back patios started growing and then exploded in the ’90s and 2000s.

And now when you’re watching HGTV, or being toured in a new house or a new build by a realtor, they’re going to talk more about the back patio than the front porch. And both of those are socializing. The difference is the back patio is friends you already know, whereas the front porch is an opportunity to meet the people that start as strangers who live around you and turn them into friends that you know. Which is much less likely if the main socializing area is in the back of your house than in the front of your house.

And because it’s a front porch—maybe you don’t know this person yet. You don’t feel comfortable having them in your house. But we used to design our houses in a way that had this liminal space between kind of stranger and intimate privacy where community is built.

Beck: Maybe also a part of the barrier to talking to our neighbors is that we don’t have a lot of context for them beyond their geographical proximity. Maybe we know that they walk their dog at 8:00 every morning, but we don’t know what kind of person they are a lot of the time.

One thing that’s not given me a great ton of faith in my neighbors is I joined Nextdoor, perhaps misguidedly. And it’s a really tough space—just of people’s fears and worst sides really being on display. It’s just post after post about crime: “I’m afraid of this.” “Watch out for these two young boys that were looking at my house the other day.”

And I think people are often very reasonably wary of interacting with their neighbors in the sense that those people might be coming to those interactions with a lot of biases, unwarranted fears, and assumptions. And racism or sexism, or any of the things that can make our interactions with strangers in public ranging from extremely uncomfortable to dangerous.

Rashid: Right.

Beck: And so I do want to acknowledge that if people have that wariness of their neighbors not treating them as fully human, that is very fair. Simply getting better at talking to people is not going to dissolve racism or sexism or street harassment, or any of those deep-rooted societal problems that infect our relationships with our neighbors. That’s a much bigger problem than just “Do I know my neighbor’s name?”

Davis: I don’t want to be naive with all this messaging that every neighbor is going to be nice. And even among nice neighbors, there’s going to be this layer—just because of the culture that we’re living in—of seeing more, you know, I call it the Ring-camera culture of 2020s America. Where everyone outside your door is someone who’s out to get you, whether it’s a politician trying to get your vote or a door-to-door salesperson.

If that’s your experience of the outside world, because we live in such a low community time, it’s harder to form a community now than it is in a higher-trust society or a higher-trust era. I don’t think it’s something we all have to do alone.

If you’re the type of person that knows three other people in the apartment complex and you’re all friends, you’ve been there a long time and you’re more confident and outgoing and you have less to lose, and you’re less scared of this thing—which doesn’t make you any better, but it’s just like a quality you have—you need to give a little bit of that to everyone else. By being the person who has a little bit more wiggle room to have the vulnerability to lead in breaking the ice.

Beck: Yeah. As it becomes less common for anyone even to knock on your door, then it’s more alarming when someone does. Or you’re just expecting that when you’re at home, you’re going to be left alone.

So how can you build relationships with your neighbors that are as respectfully distant as they need to be, but also can be intimate enough to provide some support?

Davis: There’s a lot of ways to invite people to come be part of your life. So, you know, one of them isn’t knocking—it could be leaving an invitation. That will make them feel comfortable to receive this message and then make an affirmative choice to join or not. No one wants that person who immediately is way too vulnerable and intimate with you.

Beck: You know, Becca, sometimes I feel like there’s this sort of invisible barrier that feels almost physically effortful to push through before you can just say something to a neighbor.

There was a sociologist named Erving Goffman who called that barrier “civil inattention.” And it’s essentially, you know, the default polite posture that we have toward strangers in public. It’s essentially saying I see that you exist, and then you completely withdraw your attention from them and look away and look at your phone and leave them alone.

Rashid: So this is what always happens in the bathroom when you’re both washing your hands.

Beck: Yes, that’s right. The brief eye contact in the mirror, the tight smile. And then you look down and you’re washing your hands very, very solitarily. And that is exactly what happens in my building. Right.

You know, we’re walking down the hall toward each other. We’re looking down. And then there’s a little smile. And then we pass each other, and we don’t speak. That makes me feel like it would be invasive to try to strike up a conversation with them, like we’re both signaling that we want to be left alone.

Rashid: I’m going to tell you a little story about my neighbor who did invade my space.

Beck: Okay. [Laughter.]

Rashid: I’m fine, I’m safe. I was getting into one of two elevators in my building. We have our big moving-your-couch-from-floor-to-floor elevator. And then the small elevator that not more than one person should be getting into at a time.

Beck: And it was the small one, I’m sure.

Rashid: It was, of course, the small one. And he just slightly turned his body and said, “So, you’re a singer.”

[Laughter.]

Beck: Which you are, for the record.

Rashid: I think I am. And I just started profusely apologizing. I was like, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea that my YouTube karaoke was playing that loud, and I was singing over it.”

But it made me extremely self-aware. As you said, someone popped that invisible bubble between us of never acknowledging that we have this relationship, whatever it may be.

Beck: So, do you wish he had just never said anything and continued the sort of fiction that you are just two strangers who know nothing about each other?

Rashid: I mean as much as it was a bit jarring, in the end it was actually kind of nice.

Beck: There is a weird intimacy that we do have with our neighbors, like he can hear what you’re playing through the walls. You share a wall. But if we pass each other, we sort of don’t acknowledge that weird intimacy, or we just pretend that we’re complete strangers with no context of each other.

Davis: Totally. And in some ways, sometimes people are relieved when the intimacy is admitted to, because it pops the tension of it all. You know, I can hear you. I can see you. I saw that you didn’t bring your trash out. Or something, you know, without being nosy. There’s always the—we don’t want uber conformity, and we don’t want invasions of privacy. But there’s something in the middle.

Beck: Yeah. My building, God bless them, they’re always trying to host these community events. So, you know, it’ll be like It’s Valentine’s Day, come down and get some free drinks and cookies. And people will go. And then they’ll just take the food and leave, or they’ll just talk to whoever they live with that they already came down there with. There’s no mixing. They’re not getting people to mix. What are they doing wrong?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we need to have some of these events run by the people themselves. You also have to have an aggressive host, where even though it seems like it’s really annoying to be the host that says, “Hey, I got to know you and I got to know you, so you should talk because you’re both nurses and you both have third-graders. You guys should talk.” You know, that is the type of thing that brings people together. It’s not just automatic of “You lay out Valentine’s Day cookies and everyone’s going to talk,” because you have to have someone that breaks the ice and brings people together.

Beck: Well, this is where I struggle, right? Because I can see how when you first move somewhere, that seems like a natural opportunity to introduce yourself to the people who live next to you or something.

But I’ve lived in my building for two and a half years now. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for almost 10 years, and I feel like it’s too late. I don’t have that excuse of being new anymore. Now so much time has passed that it just feels really weird to randomly try to get something going now.

Davis: You know, it is nice when you just move somewhere that you have this excuse like, “Hi, I just moved here.” And people are going to give you the honeymoon period of that’s not a weird thing to say. That “get out of awkwardness free” card is gone when you’re not.

Beck: Oh yeah, it’s long gone.

Davis: But you know, I’ve always believed that this isn’t something that we need to overthink. You have to just walk up to a neighbor in some way and invite them to be closer to you, which is obviously really awkward. It’s so awkward. That’s the reason we’re all not neighborly with each other.

Beck: Right.

Davis: But everyone is waiting for someone to do that to them. You know, that’s the funny thing. And in some ways, we’re all playing a prisoner’s dilemma with each other where it’s like, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me. And they’re thinking in their head, I don’t trust them or I don’t trust them to trust me, or Maybe they don’t trust me or whatever.

And the way to break that prisoner’s dilemma with each other is for someone to go a little bit above and beyond, to have an act of vulnerability. And so a gift is one example of that, which is—“I went out of my way to show you an act of goodwill, to show you not only that I’m trustworthy a little bit more, but also that I think you’re trustworthy a little bit more.”

Mention the concert you went to last weekend when you’re passing in the hallway. Mention something about your family. It doesn’t need to be totally too much information. It can just be the next level of personality.

Beck: You know Becca, even at the most sort of super-benign and cliched neighbor interaction of going over to borrow something, I’ve actually had a negative experience with that myself.

Rashid: Can you tell me what happened?

Beck: Yeah; it was a really simple interaction. I had moved into my current apartment building, and we had all of our taped-up boxes, but I realized that I had packed the scissors inside one of the taped-up boxes, and that I needed scissors to open the taped-up box to get the scissors.

I thought, You know; that’s fine. I’ll just go ask a neighbor. Everybody has scissors. That’s an opportunity to introduce myself and also get something that I need.

So I went down the hall and I knocked on the door that had a light on under it or something, where it seemed like somebody was home. And this very harried woman came to the door, and she had her phone at her ear. And she was like, “What?! What do you need?”

And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I just moved in. I just needed to borrow some scissors. Like, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but do you have scissors?” And she kind of huffed, and then went off and got the scissors.

She did give them to me, but in a very annoyed way. She probably wasn’t expecting a rando to knock on her door in the middle of the day, but I just went and used her scissors and then silently returned them. And then we never spoke again.

Rashid: Did she apologize when you returned the scissors?

Beck: No. She just took them back and just was like, thanks. I think she probably felt sort of interrupted and having her privacy impeded upon. But also I had a very benign request and was met with open hostility. So it did not make me want to knock on more doors, that’s for sure. It was just a reminder: Just because somebody lives near you doesn’t mean they’re going to be neighborly.

Beck: How can you ask a next-door neighbor for help without feeling like you’re an inconvenience?

Davis: You know, the amazing thing is that, with relationships, it all works the opposite of what our fears are telling us, the way that they work. So, you know, you think giving something away means you lose something. But actually, giving something is a gain.

You think that when you reveal something about yourself, it’ll make you hated because people will disagree with the particularities of you., But it actually makes you loved more, and being generic is what alienates you from people.

Beck: One of the things that’s been relieving, but also tough, is that on the one hand, the idea that having that kind of community you want feels so hard is not just your fault for not trying hard enough. Because there’s a lot of institutional things at work.

But then it also feels discouraging, because there’s only so much I as one person can do to change any of that.

Davis: It is none of our faults, and we shouldn’t be accountable. This is not a finger-wagging at individuals to solve this alone. Like, the answer’s just going to be all of us deciding to be nicer and reach out more.

It needs to be a mix of us individually doing that, and rebuilding the civic infrastructure that helps us do it. You know, it’s not just reaching out to your neighbors. It’s reaching out to your neighbors to talk about how we can reach out to our neighbors.

Beck: And what are some things that you’ve done in your life to be committed and stay committed to your neighbors? Do you bring them cookies? What do you do?

Davis: Yeah. You know, we are increasing our gift game.

Beck: Okay, [Laughter.] What’s your best gift?

Davis: We’re mostly doing baked goods and flowers now. And actually, the flowers is a double commitment—which is our local farmer’s market. We’ve become friends with the florist there, and we’re going to go visit the florist at their flower farm soon because we’ve decided to not just treat them as, you know, the person we buy flowers from. And then we bring those flowers to our neighbors and try to have a connection there.

The book that changed my life more than any other is called I and Thou by Martin Buber, who is a Jewish theologian from the early 20th century. He lays out these two ways of relating to the world. He calls them “I and it” and “I and thou,” or “I and you.”

And what “I and it” is: You see everything around you. You see other people, but also the whole world. You see them as objects—its—that have served purposes in your life. Only reflecting what they are to you, how they bother you, or how they help you, how they’re different from you, out there, similar to you.

“I and you” relates to all the rest of the world as “you.” They are fellow subjects. They are also players in the video game of life. They are full of life. They have a depth that you can’t understand. When you really are engaging with them, and you let all of the ways that they measure up or help you or facilitate you or bother you or compare with everything else.

When you let that fall away, you’re bathed in the light of their shared reality with you. They’re also there. And even just a small victory in that fight by building a tiny relationship with one other person isn’t a small thing. It’s everything.

Beck: That’s amazing. [Laughter.] Pete, thank you so much. It was really, really great talking to you and having you on the show.

Davis: Thank you so much. So appreciate what you’re doing with this.

Beck: Yeah, Becca: I appreciated Pete talking about tiny steps and the importance of small relationships.

I think I can get stuck in black-and-white thinking sometimes, where I’m like, Oh, the stakes are really high. Because either my neighbor is going to hate me like the Scissor Lady, or if I just do all the right things, then we’re going to be best buds and we’ll share beers on the roof in the evening. And, as with most things, I think the truth is often somewhere more in the middle.

Rashid: And there’s this concept called Dunbar’s number. The psychologist Robin Dunbar has theorized that people are only able to actually cognitively handle maintaining so many relationships at once—about five deep, intimate friendships at a time. But you can actually handle about 150 or so friendships total in your sort of larger web of the friends of friends, and college friends.

So I feel like neighbors maybe fall into one of those outer rings, where it’s okay that you just sort of know their name and the name of their dog. And, you know, that type of relationship is enough.

Beck: So my very small update on my own neighbor relationship is: The other day I saw those same roof neighbors who we introduced ourselves to like a year ago and then never spoke to again. And I sort of made myself go over there and say, “Hey, you’re so and so and so and so, right?” Like, I remember your names.

I just said, “I wanted to offer, since we share a roof, and it would be really easy if you’re ever out of town and you need us to water your plants, we would be happy to.” And they were like, “Oh great! Like, same! We would be happy to do that, too.” So, we did make that tiny step toward a very small plant-watering relationship.

Beck: It’s actually a lot more than nothing to have someone right next door who’s a little something more than a stranger.

Rashid: I mean, now every time I sing, I know someone is listening. [Laughter.]

Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series.

Was the sexual revolution a mistake? From the 1960s through today, the majority of feminists would instantly answer “no.” Easier access to contraception, the relaxation of divorce laws, the legalization of abortion, less emphasis on virginity, reduced stigma around unmarried sex—all of these have been hailed as liberating for women.

But in the past few years, an emergent strand of feminism has questioned these assumptions. “Reactionary feminism”—the name was popularized by the British writer Mary Harrington—rests on a premise that sounds far more radical today than it once did: Men and women are different. In her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argues that individual physical variation “is built upon a biological substrate. Liberal feminists and trans activists may do their best to deny this, but it is still true that only one half of the human race is capable of getting pregnant, and—failing the invention of artificial wombs—this will remain true indefinitely.” Perry also argues for “evolved psychological differences between the sexes.” Men are innately much hornier, more eager for sexual variety, and much less likely to catch feelings from a one-night stand, she believes. Modern hookup culture serves men very well but forces women to deny their natural urges toward seeking commitment, affection, and protection.

These are heretical thoughts. For more than a decade, the dominant form of American feminism has maintained that differences between the sexes—whether in libido, crime rates, or even athletic performance—largely result from female socialization. Anything else is biological essentialism. The feminist scholar Catharine Mackinnon recently declared that she did not want to be part of “a movement for female body parts … Women are not, in fact, subordinated or oppressed by our bodies. We do not need to be liberated from our chromosomes or our ovaries.” This view extends to the assertion that male and female bodies do not differ enough to justify strict sex segregation in sporting competitions or prisons, domestic-violence shelters, and public changing rooms. Recently, a reporter asked the White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, for a response to parents who worry about the safety of daughters competing in sports against genetically male athletes. Jean-Pierre responded with a terse smackdown. The reporter’s question, Jean-Pierre said, implied that “transgender kids are dangerous” and was therefore itself “dangerous.”

The reactionary feminists have no patience for this line of argument. In her new book, Feminism Against Progress, Harrington writes that the internet has encouraged us to think of ourselves as a “Meat Lego,” hunks of flesh that can be molded however we want. For women, that involves suppressing the messy biological reality of the female body—taking birth control, having consequence-free casual sex, even outsourcing pregnancies—to achieve something that might look like equality, but is really just pretending to be a man. “Realizing my body isn’t something I’m in but something I am is the heart of the case for reactionary feminism,” she writes.

Reactionary feminism is having a moment. Harrington recently toured the United States, where Feminism Against Progress was plugged in The Free Press, the heterodox equivalent of a glowing New York Times review. At the recent National Conservative conference in London, she shared the stage with Perry, whose book covers similar themes. Another NatCon speaker was Nina Power, a former leftist who is now a senior editor at Compact, an online magazine whose editors declare that they “oppose liberalism in part because we seek a society more tolerant of human difference and human frailty.”

[Helen Lewis: Why so many conservatives feel like losers]

All three women are British—which is no coincidence. In Britain, where I live, feminism has developed around the assumption that women belong to a sex class with specific physical vulnerabilities. In America, the movement has been filtered through a progressive legal tradition of outlawing discrimination against a variety of marginalized groups, and because of the decades-long abortion fight, American feminism relies heavily on the concepts of choice and bodily autonomy. In the view of many mainstream U.S. feminist writers, Britain is TERF Island, a blasted heath of middle-class matrons radicalized by the parenting forum Mumsnet into conservatism and “weaponized white femininity.” The response of some British feminists is that, in practice, the agenda of mainstream American feminism has shriveled down to the abortion fight and corporate-empowerment platitudes, and is hamstrung by its strange refusal to accept the relevance of biology.

That said, Harrington was radicalized by Mumsnet, which she started reading more than a decade ago. “At the time, I was still a fully paid up Butlerite,” she told me in clipped English tones. She was referring to Judith Butler, the high priest of queer theory, which argues for the subversion of categories and norms. In her 20s, Harrington hung out in bohemian communities online and offline, and sometimes went by the name Sebastian. “My first glimmers of ambivalence” about queer theory, Harrington said, “were when I realized that pretty much every butch woman I’d ever dated had subsequently transitioned, and now thought of themselves as a man.” As a married mother of one, living in a small town, she went on Mumsnet and met other women who shared her ambivalence about the new ideology around gender.

Both Power and Perry had similar experiences that peeled them away from the progressive consensus. Perry’s was in the early days of motherhood, realizing her deep connection with her baby—and her economic dependence on her husband. Power, a scholar of Marxist and continental philosophy, told me that her apostasy was driven by a “general frustration with the progressive movement. It’s just gone mad.”

Inevitably, reactionary feminism’s focus on sex differences has been welcomed by many on the political right—who enjoy portraying liberals as reality-deniers and themselves as no-nonsense realists. It has also been welcomed by the manosphere, that loose collection of blogs and YouTube channels whose content melds positive advice and help for men with anti-feminism and misogyny. Perry has appeared on podcasts with Jordan Peterson and Rod Dreher; Harrington’s American publisher is Regnery, the conservative imprint whose top authors include Ann Coulter and Republican Senator Josh Hawley. “I walk a very strange line,” Harrington told me. “The best engagement I get is when my work hits a sweet spot between conservative Catholics, radical feminists, and the weird online right. That’s not a Venn diagram that I really thought existed, but apparently it’s an underserved niche.”

[Helen Lewis: The abortion debate is suddenly about ‘people’ not women]

In her advocacy for marriage and opposition to the birth-control pill, Harrington finds fans among religious conservatives. In her opposition to commercial surrogacy, the sex trade, and gender self-identification, she is aligned with radical feminists. And in her language and arguments, you can see the influence of internet micro-celebrities such as the pseudonymous author Bronze Age Pervert, whose self-published manifesto warned that modern society was replacing masculine strength with phalanxes of weedy “bugmen.” (His book became briefly popular with junior staffers in the Trump administration.)

Reactionary feminists and the manosphere like to cast liberal feminists as daydreaming utopians. Both groups argue that, look, men are men and women are women, and evolution ordained it so. Yes, they say, a small percentage of people are gay or gender-nonconforming, but that doesn’t change an overall picture shaped by millennia of sexual selection. Both groups invoke evolutionary psychology to explain their conclusions on female dating preferences, the reasons men cheat, and why so-called short kings struggle in the dating market.

I asked Stuart Ritchie, an academic psychologist turned science writer who has previously criticized the evidence base for Perry’s claims on porn use causing erectile dysfunction, if he finds this pop-science approach troublesome. He told me via email that evolutionary psychologists stress that their findings merely describe reality, rather than morally endorsing the effects of natural selection—what’s known as the naturalistic fallacy. “Both reactionary feminists and manosphere red-pillers are often committing exactly this fallacy, assuming that everything natural must be good, and that things that are more prevalent in the modern world [than in the past]—contraception, divorce, surrogacy, etc—must therefore be bad,” he added. “That’s not necessarily to defend any of those modern things, but just to say that the arguments used against them are often very weak and fallacious—and that might be the main overarching thing reactionary feminism and the manosphere have in common.”

Because it argues that men and women are fundamentally different in ways shaped by millennia of evolution, reactionary feminism is deeply fatalistic about the possibility of social change. (“Political horndogs will always abuse power,” Harrington claims in a recent article.) In Perry’s book, her belief, derived from evolutionary psychology, that men are uncontrollable sex beasts sits uneasily alongside the assertion that monogamous marriage and children are the optimum conditions for female flourishing. “Her core message seems to be simultaneously that men are usually ghastly and often potential rapists, and yet that women should also try very hard to marry one and never divorce him,” the British journalist Hugo Rifkind wrote after reading it. “Which, I must admit, I found a little unsatisfactory.”

When I asked Harrington how Americans had received her book, she said that Baby Boomers had been more defensive of the post-1960s ethos than younger generations have been. Many Gen Z and Millennial women are disillusioned with the modern sexual marketplace of abundant porn, dating apps, and unfulfilling hookups: In 2021, Billie Eilish told Howard Stern that she’d started watching porn at age 11, and “it destroyed my brain.” In the novels of Sally Rooney, sadomasochism is repeatedly presented as abusive and miserable rather than kinky and fun—much to the chagrin of “sex positive” feminists. In The Right to Sex, the ultraliberal Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan describes being challenged by her own students over what they see as her complacency about violent and misogynist porn. The widespread discontent felt by young people has led to unexpected collisions, such as the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba being interviewed by Church Times, a religious magazine, about her book-length critique of consent-only culture, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. Generation Z might not all agree that “New York’s Hottest Club Is the Catholic Church,” as a New York Times trend piece put it, but they aren’t all libertines either.

Reactionary feminists take these concerns to their logical end. Louise Perry’s book begins by imagining the grave of the Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, who asked to be buried next to Marilyn Monroe. The sexual revolution worked out well for Hefner, she argues—he gained a house full of “playmates” and built an empire on female flesh bared in the name of empowerment. But for Monroe, being the sexiest woman alive brought mostly misery, including a string of men who wanted to bed her for the bragging rights. “There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to those women who follow its directives most obediently,” Perry writes.

[From the September 2021 issue: Sally Rooney addresses her critics]

Reactionary feminism also lionizes motherhood with a zeal that, in the case of Perry and Harrington, feels very personal. Perry wrote her book while pregnant, and Harrington wishes she could have had more than one child. “I came to motherhood pretty late, and I wish I’d started sooner,” Harrington told me. “That’s an ongoing source of regret for me.” Power, who does not have children, is nonetheless sympathetic to the other two women’s pro-family stance. “I’ve spoken to people in their 30s who desperately want to have a family and can’t,” she told me. “There’s something tragic about women who want to have a child but miss the moment. Louise is saying: Be realistic. Think about it sooner than later.”

Unfortunately, these paeans to the nuclear family sound judgmental, no matter how many times the reactionaries insist that they aren’t demonizing gay couples, single parents, and people without children—not least because they hand ammunition to anti-feminists who really do want women barefoot and pregnant.

Harrington’s jeremiad against the pill is the kookiest part of Feminism Against Progress. Put simply, she thinks sex is hotter when it might lead to conception, “because a woman who refuses birth control will be highly motivated to be choosy about her partners.” She lost me with the assertion that the rhythm method is freakier than BDSM because it’s “sex with the real danger left in.” And there’s more: “In a lifelong partnership, the possibility of conception itself is deeply erotic.” If there’s anything less sexy than imagining that your future child will soon be in the room with you, I don’t want to hear it.

While Perry’s book specifically castigates “those conservatives who are silly enough to think that returning to the 1950s is either possible or desirable,” renouncing effective birth control would immiserate many women and imprison some in abusive relationships. The pill’s reported downsides, such as irritability and anxiety, also have to be weighed against the toll that decades of childbearing took on previous generations, both physically and economically. While researching my 2020 history of feminism, Difficult Women, I found wrenching letters that the contraceptive pioneer Marie Stopes had received, and I told Harrington about some of them. “I have a very Weak Heart if I have any more it might prove fatal my inside is quite exausted [sic] I have a Prolapsed Womb, it is wicked to bring children into the world to Practicly [sic] starve,” read one from a 37-year-old mother of nine children. Another woman wrote: “He says if you won’t let me at the front, I will at the back. I don’t care which way it is so long as I get satisfied. Well Madam this is very painful to me, also I have wondered if it might be injurious.”

Is that a world to which any woman would want to return? “You can be sure that Stopes would have selected them to underline the point she wanted to make,” Harrington told me. “And the demographic that would have been writing to Stopes would have been self-selecting, for the reasons you would expect.”

Again and again, reactionary feminism offers a useful corrective and then goes to the edge of overkill. For example, its proponents argue for the revival of men’s single-sex spaces: sports clubs, bars, voluntary associations. This sounds unobjectionable, but could bring back the Mad Men days, when deals were sealed at the golf club or the strip club or a weird elitist retreat with a 40-foot owl. But Louise Perry takes the idea further by arguing that women should never get drunk or high “in public or in mixed company,” because of the risk of sexual assault. She thinks this is pragmatic; I find it incredibly bleak. As I told her during an interview about her book, I don’t want to live in a voluntary Saudi Arabia.

Reactionary feminism is not the dominant strain in Britain, any more than its opposite (what Harrington calls “Verso feminism,” after the radical-left publisher) is. Most British feminists, as far as I can tell, are centrists and soft-left moderates, the heirs of a tradition that developed in tandem with labor unions, placing hard constraints on both its conservatism and radicalism. The movement has stayed grounded in material conditions arising from physical sex differences—the challenges of pregnancy and motherhood, the threat of violence by bigger and stronger males. In the absence of a strong religious right and red-state governors banning abortion and passing punitive bills on LGBTQ issues, the gender debate is not so polarized here, and feminist thinkers and LGBTQ activists have more space to acknowledge that their interests are not always identical.

[Read: The unending assaults on girlhood]

Because of fears of being tarred as fascists or bigots, some American feminists refuse to even engage with any reactionary-feminist arguments. That is a shame, because the movement’s final tenet—that the unfettered free market should be kept away from bodies, particularly female ones—is one you might expect the political left to embrace. Reactionary feminism offers pungent criticism of liberal “choice feminism” and its laissez-faire attitude to the exploitation of women who have ostensibly chosen their circumstances. The reactionaries dare to say that some choices are better than others, and that being offered two bad options is no choice at all.

Many liberals support commercial surrogacy: Let women do what they want with their bodies, the argument goes. The reactionaries, meanwhile, reply that the industry is driven by inequality: Rich couples open their wallets, and poor women provide the labor. (They also argue that separating a newborn from its mother is cruel unless absolutely necessary.) Similarly, they note that the shibboleth that “sex work is work” is complicated by the fact that rich men buy sex, and poorer women (and men) sell it. Harrington sees trans medical care, too, as unhappily consumerist—an empowerment movement acting as a sales rep for Big Pharma. She also believes that feminists who advocate for government-supported day care—downplaying the importance of maternal attachment to small babies, in her view—are useful idiots for corporations who want women back at their desks.

“There are a great many conservatives who haven’t noticed quite how much Marxism I’ve smuggled in,” Harrington says. “Don’t put that in The Atlantic.” Then she relents: Reactionary feminism was coined half as a joke—turning an insult into a badge of honor—and half as a “signal scrambler.” If it isn’t provoking you, then it hasn’t worked.

The accident occurred when a Lamborghini SUV crashed into a family car in Rome on Wednesday evening. The YouTubers were attempting to drive for 50 hours straight,

According to the amateur online-business advisers of YouTube, the age of easily accessible AI is the age of asking and receiving. ChatGPT and other AI tools are ascendant in popular culture, as is the idea that you can ask them for anything. You can even ask them to make you rich.

Joshua Mayo, a YouTube personality who makes videos about work-from-home “side hustles” and methods for becoming a millionaire before age 30, told me recently that his audience of mostly young people doesn’t want to work a standard 9-to-5 job for several decades and then retire off of their 401(k). “A lot of them don’t find that appealing,” he said. “So they’re kind of turning to side hustles.” Younger generations often talk about the total fakeness of money and the surreal position of always having to collect it. Logically, they want to make money online by creating something out of nothing. And with the help of AI, they can even make money by making nothing out of nothing.

“A lot of my videos now have some type of AI in them, even if it’s not specifically an AI side hustle or an AI business,” Mayo told me. “You can still use or implement AI into the processes.” In one of his videos about using AI to make money, he explains that images created with Midjourney can be made in seconds and sold as digital downloads on Etsy—a way to tap into the “multimillion-dollar market” of clip art. Incidentally, this is one of the first ideas that ChatGPT gave me when I asked it to give me 10 ideas for online businesses: “The ideas stage is actually perfect for AI,” Mayo confirmed. “You can ask the AI to give you ideas for products to sell on Etsy and it will spit out a big list for you.”

Of course, you do have to sift through the list and use some human reasoning to determine if the ideas will work. You also have to hurry. “It’s a gold rush,” Mayo said. “It’s this era that may or may not last forever.” In “How to Make Your First $1000 With ChatGPT (still early),” a YouTuber lets viewers know they should get started “before everyone understands this stuff.” “You need to capitalize on the opportunities while they persist,” another YouTuber explains in “The Best Way to Get RICH with A.I. (2023).”

The urgency conveyed in these videos is softened with the reassurance that all of this is easy. You can take advantage of the “easiest” AI side hustle of the year (making stickers of AI-generated art) while possessing “No Skill.” You can make money with AI on YouTube’s short-form video app using “NO FACE OR VOICE.” Watching a video titled “How to Make $10,561 / month with Digital Products Using AI,” you can see that the promises of ease are true but not exactly the whole story. The host asks ChatGPT to list some ideas for children’s coloring pages, then puts those ideas into Midjourney to generate the images, which she then sells on marketplaces like Etsy. The results are impressive, in that they look basically like coloring-book pages. They’re black-and-white, with places to color in. However, in one image, a chicken has three legs, and in another, a fox has a bird mouth. The host doesn’t appear to notice this, or she doesn’t remark upon it.

Whatever, there are plenty of other ideas. You can buy them—a digital download of “250 Digital Product Ideas That Sell For Passive Income” is currently marked down to $3.29 from $13.14—or you can generate them. I asked ChatGPT for ideas that were different than the ones I’d already seen in the hustle videos—I didn’t want to make digital scrapbook paper, patterns for drop-shipped phone cases, résumé templates, stickers, mugs, candles, recolorized vintage photos, or portraits of people’s pets dressed up as British royalty. The bot suggested that I sell downloadable embroidery patterns, printable party supplies such as cupcake toppers or party games, and a fill-in-the-blank mindfulness journal. These all felt like pretty good ideas, probably because they sounded like Etsy products that already exist.

[Read: Women are buying ‘essential AF’ shirts, candles, and wine glasses]

I had also learned from the YouTubers that the T-shirt and mug markets on Etsy are never, ever saturated. If you can think of something to write on a T-shirt or mug—which you won’t have to actually make yourself because you can hook your Etsy shop up to a print-on-demand service such as Printify—you’re set. So I asked ChatGPT to come up with some funny shirts about loving wine. “Wine Improves with Age, I Improve with Wine,” it offered. “I Make Pour Decisions.” “Sip Happens.” “I Only Drink Wine on Days That End in Y.” I initially believed that I could easily become rich from these. Unfortunately I didn’t hustle fast enough: Every one of these phrases is already available on Etsy on various print-on-demand T-shirts, tank tops, plastic stemless wine glasses, and coffee mugs, and also, of course, as downloadable clip art.

It may come as a surprise that AI-generated products are so commonplace on Etsy, a platform that was designed nearly two decades ago specifically for artisan, handmade items. But the site has been moving away from its history for years, and unrest among its longtime sellers is basically the status quo. In 2019, sellers bristled when they were pushed to offer free shipping to compete with Amazon, and CEO Josh Silverman told me at the time that “handmade” was no longer “the value proposition” of the site. Modern Etsy celebrates garbage as long as it sells.

More recently, some sellers organized a strike when the company raised its transaction fees. An Etsy spokesperson declined to comment on the record for this story, but the company’s policy is that AI-generated digital products are permissible because some level of creativity is still involved. This definition of creativity is even more capacious than it sounds, as it appears to include digital products that are essentially just lists. When I looked, among the top listings for digital products on Etsy were PDFs with names such as “500 Digital Product Ideas” and “808 Digital product ideas.” (Also: “Passive Income with ChatGPT,” “50,000 Ultimate ChatGPT prompts,” “799 AI Prompts for Artists” “How To Use ChatGPT and Prompts to Create Ebook Automatically,” etc.)

In the Etsy forums, sellers are confused. “Is art created by AI the seller[’s] ‘own original design’?” one asked rhetorically, referring to the site’s policies. What does original mean anymore? They suspect that the proliferation of cheap AI art is pushing real artists down in the already highly competitive search results and ultimately off of the site. “Couldn’t find a single handpainted watercolor clip art of a highland cow,” a commenter wrote in April. “So sad for all the true artists out there.” One thread about AI art had to be closed by a moderator because of the “unproductive nature” of the conversation. (I don’t know specifically which comments caused the problem. Maybe it was “Social Darwinism, baby. Use the machine, or get good at something a machine can’t do, or go extinct.”)

The Etsy seller and clip-art designer Jane Cide told me she wasn’t surprised at all that Etsy was allowing AI art. “It is a platform for making money, and AI is making a lot of money right now,” she told me. She started selling paintings on Etsy in college, but did much better with digitized illustrations, which eventually turned into her full-time job. She said her sales had dropped about 50 percent since the end of last year, which is when AI art started hitting the Etsy marketplace. “It could just be a coincidence,” she acknowledged. “There’s so many factors that go into that. But when I look up clip art on Etsy, half of the search results are AI-generated clip art. It’s kind of hard not to draw conclusions when you’re very obviously competing in a space that is no longer for you.”

[Read: Prepare for the textpocalypse]

The side-hustle acolytes aren’t unsympathetic to this perspective. Mayo told me he was initially a bit hurt when he saw people talking about having ChatGPT write YouTube-video scripts or having Midjourney generate YouTube-video thumbnails. Those are things he spends hours and hours doing himself. At the same time, “it’s not like you’re cheating the customer,” he argued. They get what they pay for. There’s a market for stuff that isn’t very good.

He used the example of a woman with a hugely popular store on Etsy that sells T-shirts that have unique phrases on them but all use the same design template from Canva. “There are two schools of thought here,” he said. “The first school is That’s not right. Like, she should have created stuff with her own imagination by herself. But then there’s a second school of thought that says Well, she’s not just copying these templates verbatim and placing them on T-shirts. She is still changing the words. She is still changing the color of the text. It is still a unique product; it’s just that she had a little bit of help.”

It’s all about spotting an opportunity. Steven Hornyak, a proprietor of an Etsy shop selling collections of prewritten ChatGPT and Midjourney prompts, supplements his teacher’s salary with about $300 a day in profit. His most popular products are a ChatGPT Etsy-listing generator—a detailed prompt that users can input into ChatGPT to help them create Etsy product listings that are optimized to appear in Google search—and a collection of 2,500 Midjourney art prompts. “The secret sauce is that once you learn how to engineer prompts, you can create prompts that generate other prompts,” Hornyak told me. “I’ll take my best sellers and feed them into ChatGPT and say, ‘Hey, here are 10 of my best sellers from my Etsy shop. Help me generate 25 new ideas of possible products I could also sell.’”

He says he offers a much different product than some of the stores that post cheap prompt bundles that are clearly unedited—straight from ChatGPT’s mouth, with no human input or discretion. He also gives customers bang for their buck by editing his lists even after they’ve been sold. “I deliver all my products through Google Sheets so that I can update them, and the customer always has the most current version,” he said. He’s having fun. He genuinely enjoys experimenting with these tools and figuring out how to get the best results out of them.

Sure, sometimes customers are unhappy. They say, I could have done this myself. “Well, yeah, you could have done that,” Hornyak says. “But when you buy it, you’re getting my video; you’re getting me walking you through the process.”

Also, you could have done it, but you didn’t.

Late last month, the U.S. surgeon general issued an advisory—a format reserved for public-health issues that demand the nation’s immediate attention. “Nearly every teenager in America uses social media,” the report read, “and yet we do not have enough evidence to conclude that it is sufficiently safe for them.” In response, the Biden administration announced a new interagency task force that has been given a year to come up with a slate of policy recommendations that will help “safeguard” children online.

This may be a legislative problem for Big Tech, and it’s certainly a public-relations problem. Over the past several years, cigarettes have become the dominant metaphor in the discourse about social media: Everyone seems to think that these sites are dangerous and addictive, like cigarettes. Young people get hooked. At a congressional hearing on Facebook’s impact on teenagers in 2021, Senator Ed Markey tossed the comparison at Antigone Davis, a vice president and the global head of safety for Meta, Instagram’s parent company. “Facebook is just like Big Tobacco, pushing a product that they know is harmful to the health of young people, pushing it to them early,” Markey, a Democrat, said. Now the metaphor is even more compelling, as it can also evoke the famous 1964 surgeon-general warning about the scientific evidence of cigarettes causing lung cancer.  

But the two are obviously very different. As a previous surgeon general pointed out: Cigarettes kill people through deadly disease. Social media is being blamed for something just as alarming but far less direct: a sharp increase in teen depression and suicide attempts over the past decade and a half that has been labeled a “national state of emergency” by the American Academy of Pediatrics and other prominent medical associations. The CDC’s latest trend report shows the percentage of high-school students who “experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” jumping from 28 percent in 2011 to 42 percent in 2021, and the numbers for girls and LGBTQ students are even worse (57 and 69 percent, respectively, in 2021). Understandably, social media has been one of the places that parents have looked for an explanation. Last year, a Pew Research Center study found that more than half of American parents are at least somewhat worried that social media could lead their teenagers to develop mental-health problems—28 percent were “extremely” or “very” worried. Teens themselves are worried, at least about one another. About a third of them told Pew that social media is mostly negative for people their age, compared with about a quarter who say the effect has been mostly positive—although only a tenth said social media is mostly bad for them personally.

Compelling evidence suggests that social-media platforms are contributing to the crisis, but it’s also true that the horror stories and the headlines have gotten out in front of the science, which is not as settled as many would think. A decade of work and hundreds of studies have produced a mixture of results, in part because they’ve used a mixture of methods and in part because they’re trying to get at something elusive and complicated. Rather than coalescing into a unified message that social-media use is an awful, indisputably destructive force—tobacco with a “Like” button—the research instead has been building toward a more nuanced, and perhaps more intuitive, takeaway.

Social media’s effects seem to depend a lot on the person using it. It may play a different role for different demographics, and the role it plays may also change for people at different stages of life. It surely doesn’t affect everyone in the same way. This makes informed intervention extremely difficult. “Probably a lot of [the problem] comes down to the science not being precise enough,” says Amy Orben, a researcher at the University of Cambridge who studies the relationship between social media and well-being and whose work has been central to the ongoing debate. The field has not yet produced “precise enough measurements and precise enough hypotheses to merit a precise answer.”

This complicates a rapid succession of actions against social-media platforms in recent months. Last month, the governor of Arkansas signed a bill making it illegal for a minor to have a social-media account without parental consent and requiring social-media companies to verify user ages with government-issued ID; a similar one was signed by the governor of Utah in March. Other age-gating measures are being considered in at least 10 more states and at the national level.

Then there are the lawsuits. In January, the Seattle public-school district sued Facebook, Instagram, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube for violation of a state “public-nuisance law,” arguing that the social-media companies were known to “exploit the neurophysiology of the brain’s reward system” and that their “manipulative conduct” had created a mental-health crisis in the school system. Meanwhile, several major law firms have taken on personal-injury lawsuits on behalf of parents who believe that these platforms have caused problems in their kids’ lives, such as body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and suicide. Chris Seeger, of the New Jersey–based Seeger Weiss, told me his firm currently has more than 1,000 such cases.

These cases hinge on novel arguments that will have to carefully circumvent a lot of precedent of failed litigation against social-media companies. And new laws may run up against First Amendment issues and be difficult to enforce. (Critics have also pointed out that Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s expression of concern about exploitation of children is a bit confusing, given that she recently signed a bill undoing a number of child-labor protections in her state, including the requirement that employers get parental permission to employ children under the age of 16.)  

This is a crucial moment, Orben told me: “I think the key question is, in 20 years’ time, will we look back at this conversation and be like, We were worried about technology in excess, when we should have been worried about raising our kids? It’ll probably be somewhere halfway between the two.” Legislation that removes teenagers from social media likely won’t solve the mental-health crisis; teens will find ways around it, and for the ones who don’t, being displaced from their online communities may lead to different problems. The science, as it stands right now, provides reason to be concerned about social media. It also suggests the need for a far more sophisticated understanding of the effects of social media on young people, and the presence of much deeper problems that we could overlook if we aren’t careful.

This latest surge in concern about kids and the internet was exacerbated by the Facebook Papers, a collection of documents leaked by the former Facebook employee Frances Haugen and shared with journalists in fall 2021. Included were several studies conducted internally, asking groups of young Instagram users how the platform made them feel. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” read the summary of one such study. Another: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression. This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

These were among the most widely discussed of the disclosures, and by the time the files had been covered in every major national publication, they could be referred to with the shorthand “Facebook knew.” Appearing on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah, Haugen agreed with the host’s suggestion that Facebook had behaved similarly to (you guessed it) tobacco and fossil-fuel companies by conducting self-damning research and opting not to share the findings. Facebook responded to the uproar by publishing annotated versions of the research, which emphasized how unscientific the studies were.

But what of the actual science? It’s been nearly six years since The Atlantic published the psychologist Jean Twenge’s blockbuster report “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” The generation she was talking about was born from 1995 to 2012—roughly Gen Z, though she called it “iGen.” These kids grew up with smartphones and made Instagram accounts before they started high school. “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades,” Twenge wrote. “Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” She made this argument by citing early studies and by simply connecting the dots—kids were getting more anxious and depressed, and the trend started around the time they began using smartphones and social media and living life through screens.

Since then, scores of researchers have built a large body of work looking into the effects of screen time generally. But the results have continually been mixed: Screens are ubiquitous, and they’re personal. In a 2019 study, Orben and her research partner Andrew Przybylski found that screen time could not be correlated with well-being among adolescents in any coherent way. Screen time—the bogeyman of the 2010s—was simply too broad to be examined as one single phenomenon, they argued. The study was covered widely with a snappy takeaway: “Screens Might Be as Bad for Mental Health as … Potatoes.” Orben and Przybylski had contextualized their core finding by comparing screen time with other behaviors that could be similarly correlated with well-being, such as eating extra starch or wearing glasses. This helped the researchers make their point that the questions many had been asking about technology were not specific enough. “‘Screen time’ is a nonsense topic,” Orben told me last fall. “It brings everything together from yoga videos to watching self-harm content on Instagram.”

The study marked a shift in the research, which for the past several years has been more tightly focused on social-media use, as well as other, more specific ways people use the internet, and on the experiences of teenage girls in particular. Many of these studies found correlations between social-media use and bad outcomes such as anxiety, depression, and negative body image. But tech companies can easily defend themselves from correlative claims by arguing—reasonably—that they establish only that two things tend to happen at the same time, and not that one of those things is causing the other. The challenge for public-health researchers, then, is to find novel ways to prove (or disprove) a direct causal relationship as well—a very difficult thing to do.

In passing its new social-media restrictions for minors, the state government of Utah cited a 2022 review paper that summarized many correlative findings in the research. Utah also cited a buzzy paper from 2022 written by three economists that tried to get around the correlation conundrum with a creative attempt at a quasi-experiment. They followed Facebook’s staggered rollout across college campuses in the mid-aughts, matching up the timeline with increased rates of depression on the same campuses. Their “back-of-envelope calculation” was that 24 percent of the “increased prevalence of severe depression among college students over the last two decades can be explained by the introduction of Facebook.”

This approach has its own problems, Laurence Steinberg, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Temple University and an expert on adolescence, told me in an email. “I would tread very cautiously here,” he wrote after reading the economists’ paper. “The results are subject to what is referred to as the ecological fallacy—drawing inferences about individuals from aggregate data. As the authors note, they have no idea whether the students who reported mental-health problems were those that were using Facebook.”

This science is less straightforward—and slower-moving—than many realize. Researchers face a number of technical difficulties. For example, when the millions of people you want to study are teenagers, there are ethical hoops to jump through, prolonging the process and sometimes making research feel out-of-date before it’s even finished. And researchers have also struggled to come up with reliable methods for measuring what they’re interested in. To illustrate, Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, asked me a rhetorical question: “Did you use social media a lot or a little today, on a scale of 1 to 7?” How do you even answer that?

There is now a huge amount of research, but experts can look at the findings and draw disparate conclusions. In a 2022 umbrella review (a review of reviews of the research), scholars from the University of Amsterdam pointed out that different people had described similar effects from social-media use in dramatically different terms, from “weak” and “inconsistent” to “substantial” and “deleterious.” And in a 2020 review of the research, Orben found a slight negative correlation between social-media use and well-being (social-media use goes up; well-being goes down). Yet it is “still unclear what such a small effect can tell us about well-being outcomes as social media use is inherently linked in complex ways with other aspects of life,” she concluded.

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business and a regular contributor to The Atlantic, has been reading the research for years and has become one of the best-known commentators on the subject. He maintains a massive public Google Doc in which he collects, sorts, and analyzes all of the papers pertaining to the question of whether social media contributes to the rise of depression and anxiety in teenagers. Haidt agrees with Orben and other researchers that findings on screen time tend to be mixed. “But if you make it ‘social media,’ it’s very consistent,” he told me. “The next question is, what’s the population? Are we talking about all kids, or are we talking about girls?” In his review of all available work, including the data that Orben and Przybylski analyzed in 2019, he found a positive correlation between depression and anxiety and social-media use for teenage girls (depression and anxiety go up when social-media use goes up). “No person in their right mind would let their daughter be engaged in an activity” with such a clear connection to depression and anxiety, he said.

At this point, scientists at least agree that the relationship between depression and anxiety and social-media use is supported by enough evidence to demand attention. Orben’s latest paper argues for greater attention on young girls as well, showing a relationship between social-media use and a decline in different forms of life satisfaction. The question is: What kind of attention should we be paying? “If the correlations are worse for girls, then that’s really important and good to know,” Hancock told me. “We need to talk about that, but I guarantee you that social media is not bad for all teenage girls all the time.”

If we want solutions that are more delicate and precise than the legislation proposed so far, we need a lot of delicate and precise information. If social media isn’t bad for all teenage girls, we need to know which ones it is bad for, and what makes a specific girl susceptible to the risks. Some girls are suffering, and social media is exacerbating their pain. Some girls use the internet to find community that they don’t have offline, or to express creative impulses and questions about their identity that their families aren’t open to. We also need to know which aspects of social media are riskiest. Is it harmful because it cuts into sleep hours or IRL friend time and exposure to sunlight, or is it the envy-inducing images that invite comparison and self-doubt? Is it bullying we should worry most about, or the more ambient dread of being liked but not liked enough?

Right now, we have handfuls of numbers and no clear way to arrange them; social media might affect different people in different ways for any number of reasons. It could matter how they use social media. It could even matter how they think they’re using social media.

Angela Lee, a Ph.D. student at Stanford who works with Hancock, is one of the first researchers to break ground on the latter distinction. During her first psychology lecture as an undergraduate, Lee learned about “mindsets” in the context of education. Research had shown that the mindset you have about your own intelligence has a significant impact on the course of your intellectual life. If you believe that intelligence is something that can grow and improve, then you might take actions to grow and improve it. That “ends up being really powerful,” Lee told me. It would “affect their motivation—like, How hard am I going to try on this assignment?—or their behaviors—Do I go ask for help?” She wondered whether this would also be relevant to social media. In other words, did it matter how people answered the question when they asked themselves: Am I in control of this technology, or is it exerting control and influence over me? Studies showed that social-media use increased well-being for some adolescents, harmed other adolescents, and didn’t affect still others at all, so Lee had a feeling that some of these differences could be explained by the teens’ mindsets.

In the resulting paper, which has recently been published as a preprint and is under review at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Lee and Hancock built on previous technology-use research showing that feeling a lack of control is “related to worse well-being, including depression, anxiety, and loneliness.” Logically, they found that a feeling of control was associated with “better well-being,” and “more social support and less psychological distress.” People who viewed social media more positively “also reported better outcomes than those who believed the effects of social media were harmful.” These effects were not limited to those who spent little time on social media, as those who felt in control of their use still “reported less distress” than those who didn’t feel in control, even when they were using social media for above-average amounts of time. (Facebook quickly conducted its own version of Hancock and Lee’s study after it was presented to the American Psychological Association in May 2019; the results were similar, though Facebook obviously had access to far better data.)

In their paper, which focused on adults rather than adolescents, Lee and Hancock noted their findings’ relevance to the current policy debate and its heavy reliance on tobacco metaphors. Feeling in control of your social-media use might be hard “if people are constantly exposed to messages about how it is addictive,” they argued. It might not be helpful to tell everyone that they’re helpless in the face of alluring images and sticky incentives, the same way that they could become helplessly beholden to nicotine. We might try to critique powerful and popular technologies without accidentally making the case that human beings have no ability to resist them. Bringing the concept of agency into the debate is compelling in part because it appeals to common sense. We know we’re not actually constantly coerced by the algorithms, the notifications, and the feed—we have to be more complicated than that.

But, of course, the agency insight is still up for debate. For one thing, the participants in Hancock and Lee’s study were not teenagers—they were mostly in their 20s and 30s. When I asked Frances Haugen about it, she said it would be “unreasonable to say that a 14-year-old is the one who should be responsible for modulating their social-media usage.” And I noticed a page of notes tacked onto the version of the paper that Lee had emailed to me. A fellow grad student had written, “Should we be telling people that they should think that they have control over platforms with algorithms that even the companies themselves don’t understand?”

Wanting to use social media does not mean that you’ve surrendered control of your emotions and life to a machine. In fact, for a lot of people, it could mean the opposite. “The use of digital media creates a forum that may allow for the development of rapid and nuanced communication skills,” Mitchell Prinstein, a psychologist, wrote in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry just as the pandemic began. He also noted the internet’s possibilities for identity exploration, creativity, connection, and acceptance. “Adolescents who feel ostracized or stigmatized within their offline social contexts, such as members of ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual minority groups, often report access to online companionship, resource sharing, and emotional validation that is much harder to access otherwise.” Other researchers have found that social media can be useful for young people who are dealing with chronic illness—sometimes even helping them stay on track with their treatment plans.

In all of this, we would do well to remember that we’re not aggregate numbers—we’re individuals making decisions about how to spend our time and pursue happiness. In a recently published advisory of its own, the American Psychological Association suggested that teens ought to be trained to use social media in productive ways and that parents should strive to be involved in their kids’ online lives—they should notice when the apps start to interfere with school or with time spent in other ways (including sleep and physical activity). Based on the available scientific evidence, the association argued, “using social media is not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.” The surgeon general’s advisory also emphasized the incompleteness of the picture in a section of the report about “known evidence gaps” and the “urgent need” for further research.

Laurence Steinberg, the adolescence expert, argues that teenage depression and anxiety were already ticking up before social media became as popular as it is; the upward trend in the percentage of high-school students who “experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” has been visible since at least 2009, after the rise of Facebook and YouTube but before the ubiquity of smartphones, which made social media accessible on the go. (According to other CDC data, suicide rates started increasing in 2003.) That doesn’t mean that social media hasn’t exacerbated the problem, he acknowledged. It just means that it’s too easy an answer. “I think that our tendency as human beings is to search for the simplest possible explanation of things,” he said. “You know, maybe it’s a combination of eight different things, each of which is contributing a little bit, but none of which is the culprit—people would rather just say ‘We found what the culprit is.’”

Under public pressure, some platforms have started to make changes. Though Instagram’s critics often talk as if it has done nothing at all, remaining laser-focused in pursuit of pure profit, Instagram has experimented quite a bit. Some changes are meant to reduce bullying and doomscrolling. It’s also added content warnings on posts and search results that encourage eating disorders, and reduced those posts’ visibility in feeds. Before Haugen’s leaks, the company tried hiding “like” counts under photos (doesn’t help); since the leaks, it has implemented bedtime prompts and more robust parental controls.

I don’t bring this up to defend the company (which has found itself in a political situation that all but compels some effort on its part), but to ground us in reality. We’re not going back to a time before Instagram. Social media is central to the way that young people understand the world and their relationships—how to be attentive, how to be creative, how to be a friend, how to think and react and learn. This is probably true for the worse, but it’s also true for the better (and the neutral!), and to untangle it completely would be impossible. So, knowing that we’ll never know precisely everything, we should be careful to describe the situation as accurately as we can. “We need to find a way to make sure the online world is safe for young people,” Orben told me. “And if we want to go down the route and do an experimental intervention without a really secure evidence base, I think we would need to invest a lot of money into figuring out whether it worked and then be ready to pivot if necessary. But I don’t know if the policy landscape allows that at the moment.”

It’s not comfortable to accept that our understanding of social media is still so limited or that the best path forward is to keep plodding along toward whatever clarity there might be to find. But removing millions of teenagers from social media is a dramatic, even draconian intervention. For many, it would feel good. It would feel like doing something, and doing something big. And it would be. We should bear in mind that, even as we resent the “experiment” that tech companies have performed on the young population of the country, we would be meeting their wild experiment with another wild experiment. This one would have unintended consequences too.