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

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Atlantic staff writer Yair Rosenberg. Yair writes about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion, and is the author of our Deep Shtetl newsletter. He’s recently shed light on the collapse of social trust in Israel, offered a road map for building better social-media platforms, testified in Congress about anti-Semitism, and chatted with the actor Ben Platt about the role Judaism plays in the performer’s work on Broadway. Yair is currently making his way through a unique anthology of science-fiction short stories, rooting for the Yankees despite the great pain it causes, and reminiscing about a magical piece of tech that no longer exists.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

“I saw the movie ‘they’ don’t want you to see.” Barbie is everything. Ken is everything else. The song that first captured Sinéad O’Connor’s power

The Culture Survey: Yair Rosenberg

A cultural product that I loved as a teenager: In high school, one of my prized possessions was a portable DVD player. This was exactly what it sounds like: a flip-top device with a screen that could play movies off discs. Having one meant that I could watch The Lord of the Rings on cross-country school trips, or disappear into my room to binge a TV show from Netflix (back when they used to send you DVDs). It took a lot to persuade my parents to help me get the thing, and I used to take it everywhere. Today, the portable player is a museum item, long replaced by massively more capable smartphones that play higher-quality video. But no amount of processing power or pixel resolution can replace the magic of being the one weird kid on the bus who could watch a movie on demand.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: One of my favorite TV shows is an eccentric ’90s sci-fi saga called Babylon 5. What makes the show unique is that its creator, J. Michael Straczynski, planned out its entire five-year storyline in advance. He basically wrote an entire novel and then dramatized it for the screen. As I’ve written for The Atlantic, most serialized TV shows today disappoint me. Their plots tend to fail to pay off, because writers are making things up as they go. Lost is a classic example of this, but there are many others. Babylon 5 is the opposite, constantly foreshadowing events—sometimes entire seasons in advance—and leading its characters along believable journeys of growth, discovery, and tragedy. I’ve been revisiting the show because it’s delightful, but also because Straczynski is set to release a new installment of the story next month, in the form of an original animated movie.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I’m one of those people who not only watched the extended edition of each Lord of the Rings film—on the aforementioned portable DVD player—but also watched them multiple times with all of the cast and crew commentaries. This is how I know important things, such as how production was momentarily disrupted when the set designers attempted to create a path of floating apples for the characters to follow in the flooded fortress of Isengard, only for the apples to refuse to float. Eventually, they realized they’d been fooled by perfectly designed prop fruits made of wax.

I’m a big hit at parties.

As for art films, this may be a cheat, but I’ll go with Footnote. It’s a foreign-language movie, so by definition not a blockbuster, but it did win Best Picture at Israel’s equivalent of the Oscars, and it got an actual Oscar nod for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012. As I put it elsewhere, “It’s safe to say that director Joseph Cedar’s Footnote is the only Oscar-nominated dramatic comedy about Talmud scholars you will ever watch. It’s also an exceptional film about fathers and sons, generational conflict, and the passions inspired by Jewish texts through the ages.” It doesn’t hurt that the movie is based on a real-life scholarly dynasty whose members include my own relatives. [Related: How to learn about Jews from Jews, rather than the people who hate them]

An actor I would watch in anything: Peter Sarsgaard. He has incredible charisma and range, whether he’s playing a dogged magazine editor who uncovers fabulism by one of his star reporters in Shattered Glass—the best movie ever made about modern journalism—or embodying a predatory but magnetic con artist in An Education, ensnaring an impressionable college student (played by the great Carey Mulligan) and her family.

Best work of fiction I’ve recently read: I’ve been working my way through a new anthology of science-fiction short stories called Jewish Futures. It comes out next month, but I backed the project on Kickstarter, so I got an advance copy. I can’t wait for other people to be able to read it—and not just because my sister contributed to it. As in all anthologies, different stories will speak to different readers, but my favorites so far are the hilarious “Frummer House,” by Leah Cypess, about what happens when a smart home starts imposing religious observance on its inhabitants; “The Ascent,” a haunting tale by Abraham Josephine Riesman and S. I. Rosenbaum about the eternal restoration and destruction of Jerusalem; and, of course, “Moon Melody,” by my sister S. M. Rosenberg, which is a cross between midrash and a superhero-origin story.

The last culture or entertainment event that made me cry: The New York Yankees offense, or rather, lack thereof.

A good culture or entertainment recommendation I recently received: To stop watching the Yankees. I did not listen.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: I love Irish folk music—its sing-along quality, its intergenerational appeal, the way it reflects and perpetuates cultural memory. I will listen to anything recorded by the contemporary quartet The High Kings. All four members of the group are multi-instrumentalists and have incredible, distinctive voices that somehow seamlessly blend into four-part harmony. They’ve been making music since 2008, and their specialty is bringing classic Irish jigs and ballads to new audiences through contemporary arrangements that are nevertheless faithful to the original essence. When I’m not writing, I have a side hobby composing, singing, and recording Jewish music, and my first album was heavily influenced by this approach, taking traditional Sabbath songs and marrying them to modern melodies and instrumentation.

An author I will read anything by: Kazuo Ishiguro, both because his writing is effortlessly elegant and because it rewards deeper consideration of its moral themes. One example: I recently read The Buried Giant, and it gave me an entry into another book, Forgiveness, by Matthew Ichihashi Potts, the lead minister of Harvard University’s Memorial Church, who uses several works of literature—including Ishiguro’s—to challenge traditional notions of forgiveness and offer an alternative approach. [Related: What my favorite anti-Semite taught me about forgiveness]

The last debate I had about culture: Earlier this year, I debated the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro about anti-Semitism in politics and culture in front of nearly 1,000 people in Florida. We tackled everything from Ye to Joe Rogan, and did it while practically setting the world record for most words spoken per minute. (One reason I’m a journalist is that people can read me at their own speed, which is not possible when listening to me live.)

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it” (Ecclesiastes 11:1). Sometimes it can feel futile to write about seemingly implacable social forces and injustices. But I have found that you never know where your words will be heard, and what impact they may ultimately have.

The Week Ahead

Tom Lake, a new novel by Ann Patchett, meditates on the romances parents have before their children are born (on sale Tuesday). The third and final season of Reservation Dogs, a comedy series by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi, premieres Wednesday (streaming on Hulu). Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, featuring the voices of Jackie Chan and Seth Rogen (in theaters Wednesday)

Essay

Gueorgui Pinkhassov / Magnum

American Family Life Should Not Be This Volatile

By Elliot Haspel

Parenthood has always involved unpredictability: wake-ups at 2 a.m., calls from school, the dreaded words my stomach hurts. This daily variance frequently stems from a sick or scared child, and is part of the basic dynamic of family life. Yet today’s parents in the U.S. also face rising external disruptions and a degradation of the institutions that are meant to provide stability. The result is that many families are regularly knocked off their feet by problems that are more than inconvenient but less than catastrophic. This breeds parental stress, insecurity, and exhaustion. Americans have entered, in short, an age of tremors.

The nation has been on this course for the past half century. Starting in the 1970s, a series of economic- and social-policy decisions led to what the political scientist Jacob Hacker has termed the “great risk shift” from government and corporations onto households.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

An Oppenheimer expert watches Oppenheimer. Greta Gerwig’s lessons from Barbie Land What kind of villain doesn’t clean up after their dog? Seven books for the lifelong learner When Judaism went à la carte Hollywood’s huge Barbenheimer fumble Can nature lie? Poem: “Claude Glass as Night Song”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Fatigue can shatter a person. Are you plagued by the feeling that everyone used to be nicer? Alabama is defying the Supreme Court on voting rights.

Photo Album

Matthias Appenzeller of Switzerland competes in the men’s high-diving preliminaries at the Fukuoka 2023 World Aquatics Championships. (Adam Pretty / Getty)

The Women’s World Cup in Australia, a performance at the Lollapalooza Paris Festival, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters.

Updated at 6:48 p.m. ET on July 28, 2023

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

Beer was once king. Now, with seltzers, canned cocktails, and other tasty beverages on the rise, what will become of brews?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Barbie is everything. Ken is everything else. Trump’s legal turmoil just keeps getting worse. All soda is lemon-lime soda. Alabama is defying the Supreme Court on voting rights.

The Decline of the Brew

It’s Friday, so I’ll go ahead and say it: I love cracking open a cold one. It’s not just the taste of beer itself or the alcohol. For me, drinking a beer is also about the pleasure of the ritual. Indeed, so much do I enjoy cracking open cold ones that I also often drink hop water, nonalcoholic seltzers flavored with hops. (They taste good and have the added benefit of making me feel virtuous.)

On Tuesday evening, I was lying on my chaise lounge, reading a magazine and sipping a new variety of hop water, which I had nestled into a koozie emblazoned with a crab and the words Don’t bother me I’m crabby. I was relaxed. So imagine my surprise when I looked at the can and discovered that the drink contained adaptogens and nootropics. I don’t really know what those are; I can barely pronounce the latter. I thought I was just drinking sparkling water with a bit of flavoring! Did I feel a bit weird because I was tired, I suddenly wondered, or because there were supplements in my hop water? Would this drink make me a genius?

In recent years, canned and bottled beverages of every stripe have proliferated. Canned cocktails, hard seltzers, ciders, nonalcoholic beers, CBD drinks, and hop waters share shelf space with traditional beer. It can be hard to keep up. Changing consumer preferences, the high costs of doing business, and competitive pressure mean that the beer industry is not the retail big dog it once was. Beer once held a hefty lead in the market over other alcoholic drinks. Not anymore. Lester Jones, the chief economist of the National Beer Wholesalers Association, told me that the market shrank by 3 percent in volume last year, continuing a downward trend that began around 2000, and we’re now in the midst of one of the worst years so far since beer’s decline began.

Part of the reason for the contraction in beer-volume sales is that people are diversifying their alcohol consumption, adding drinks such as spirits to the rotation. Whereas beer prices have roughly tracked with inflation over the past 20 years, liquor has gotten relatively cheaper, Bart Watson, the chief economist of the Brewers Association, a craft-beer trade organization, told me. For more than a decade, spirits have been gaining market share. Demographic shifts also tell part of the story: The American population is older than ever before. As Boomers age into retirement and Millennials enter their 40s, they are reaching for different drinks for different types of occasions. A retiree might enjoy an expensive bottle of wine with dinner, and a Millennial might mix cocktails for a birthday celebration. (Or, if you’re me, you might break out a hop water while chilling.)

The next generation is not waiting in the wings to replace them. Young people “are just drinking less beer,” Watson said, and many seem to be buying less alcohol, in general. Those who are drinking have a panoply of options to choose from. No longer are college kids just guzzling Natty Light and slapping bags of Franzia. Now young people are turning 21 and entering a market filled with relatively affordable seltzers, canned cocktails, and ciders—not to mention EANABs, the name my college dorm used to describe Equally Attractive Nonalcoholic Beverages.

For those who do still drink beer, preferences are shifting in how much beer they want to buy and what kind. “People are drinking less beer, but they are drinking higher-priced beer,” Jones explained, as some mass-produced beers have gotten more expensive, and pricier craft beer now occupies more of the market. Premium light beers have been losing market share for years, Watson told me.

Then, this spring, light beer got an unwelcome turn in the spotlight when a right-wing campaign to cancel Bud Light picked up steam. Consumers boycotted the beer after Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, posted a promotional video for the brand on Instagram. In June, after 20 years as America’s best-selling beer, Bud Light was surpassed by Modelo. That was not totally unexpected—“it was a question of when, not if” Modelo would reach the top, Watson told me, though the backlash accelerated the trend. For years, Modelo had been on track to surpass Bud Light as consumers began gravitating toward more expensive, imported beers.

In the aftermath of the backlash, two Bud Light executives went on leave. As it happens, I interviewed one of them, Alissa Heinerscheid, last January, before all of this happened. In her capacity as vice president of marketing for Bud Light, Heinerscheid told me at the time that the brand’s 2023 Super Bowl ad, featuring a breezy scene of a couple dancing while drinking the beer, was going for a “lighter and brighter” energy than in years past (notable past ads include Budweiser’s “Wasssuuuup” and Bud Light’s original party animal, Spuds MacKenzie). A couple of months later, on a podcast, she discussed her interest in reaching new audiences and making the brand’s image less “fratty” in hopes of turning around a brand in decline. In trying to carry out that mission to engage new customers, she met an audience—or at least a vocal portion of it—that was unwilling to accept changes that would make the brand more inclusive. (Asked for comment, Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, sent a statement from Bud Light’s current vice president of marketing, Todd Allen, emphasizing that “people want us to get back to what we do best: being the beer of easy enjoyment.” The brand’s current strategy, he said, “is really about reaffirming the role that Bud Light plays in people’s lives.” An Anheuser-Busch spokesperson added that Bud Light remains the top beer brand in the US in 2023.)

The beverage sector will likely keep changing—or at least keep trying to change—to meet the moment. For many alcohol brands, that could look like adding seltzers and other canned delicacies to the mix. Anheuser-Busch now owns seltzer, canned-cocktail, and hard-tea brands. And in 2020, Molson Coors Brewing Company undertook a telling rebrand: It’s now called Molson Coors Beverage Company.

Related:

The real mystery of Bud Light Hard seltzer has gone flat.

Today’s News

New charges were brought against former President Donald Trump and two of his associates, in an expansion of the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents case. President Joe Biden signed a significant executive order altering the military legal system, ensuring that special prosecutors outside of the chain of command—as opposed to commanders—will decide whether to pursue charges in cases of sexual assault, rape, and murder. Nearly 60 percent of the U.S. population is under a heat advisory, flood warning, or flood watch.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Books that show you how to do something new can lend life new meaning, Gal Beckerman writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Chris Maggio

You’re Not Allowed to Have the Best Sunscreens in the World

By Amanda Mull

At 36, I am just old enough to remember when sunscreen wasn’t a big deal. My mom, despite being among the palest people alive, does not remember bringing it on our earliest vacations, or hearing any mention of sun protection by our pediatrician. The first memories I have of sunscreen are from the day camp that my brother and I attended in the 1990s, where we spent every day on a playground in the direct Georgia sun but were prompted to slather it on only once every two weeks, when we were bused to a community pool. On those days, mom dropped an ancient bottle of Coppertone, expiration date unknown, into my backpack, where I usually left it. In 2000, I started high school, just in time for the golden age of the tanning bed.

The preponderance of babies in rashguards and bucket hats that you now see at the beach shows how much has changed, and how quickly … Yet if sun protection, and specifically sunscreen, has become a very big deal in a relatively short amount of time, the UV blockers Americans are slathering on have barely evolved at all.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

“After 30 years in Israel, I see my country differently.” Tech companies’ friendly new strategy to destroy one another So maybe Facebook didn’t ruin politics.

Culture Break

Frans Schellekens / Redferns / Getty

Read. On its 50th anniversary, The Jewish Catalog remains a case study in how grassroots efforts to modernize religious life can succeed.

Listen. Before “Nothing Compares 2 U” made her a household name, a single from Sinéad O’Connor’s first album established her as a creative force.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This may sound weird, but I promise it’s good: Try mixing amaro, grapefruit juice, and beer. I learned about this drink, “The Brunch Box,” from the aptly titled Amaro, a cocktail-recipe book by Brad Thomas Parsons that I received as a gift last summer. To make the drink, combine one ounce of Amaro Montenegro, one ounce of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, and five ounces of beer, ideally lager. The crisp beer is rounded out by the herby amaro and tangy juice. I have long been skeptical of mixing beer into things (I have not tried one of those beer margaritas and hope to never do so). But this one is a treat. Cheers!

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This article has been updated to reflect a comment from Anheuser-Busch received after publication.

Supreme Court rulings are meant to be the law of the land, but Alabama is taking its recent opinion on the Voting Rights Act as a mere recommendation. In an echo of mid-century southern defiance of school desegregation, the Yellowhammer State’s Republican-controlled legislature defied the conservative-dominated Court’s directive to redraw its congressional map with an additional Black-majority district.

Openly defying a Supreme Court order is rare—almost as rare as conservative justices recognizing that the Fifteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination in voting. Under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, states are sometimes required to draw districts with majority-minority populations. This requirement exists because after Reconstruction, one of the methods southern states used to disenfranchise their Black populations was racially gerrymandering congressional districts so that Black voters could not affect the outcome of congressional elections. Earlier this year, Alabama asked the Supreme Court to further weaken the Voting Rights Act so as to preserve its racial gerrymander.

[Read: A Supreme Court ruling that could tip the House]

More than a quarter of Alabama’s population is Black, but the state’s Republican majority has racially gerrymandered that population into a single district out of seven because it fears those voters might elect Democrats. The partisan motive is no excuse for racial discrimination—1870s Democrats also had a partisan interest in disenfranchising Black voters, who were then reliably Republican. After failing to get the Supreme Court to overturn Section 2, Alabama decided that following the law was optional.

Alabama’s open rejection of a Supreme Court ruling comes in the midst of a conservative campaign accusing liberals of “delegitimizing” the Court by criticizing its lurch to the right and the coziness of the Republican-appointed justices with billionaire political donors who have interests before the Court.

“This is another front in the political campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court, with a goal of tarnishing its rulings and subjecting it to more political control,” The Wall Street Journal editorialized in May about Democratic hearings on potential ethics legislation. “Most of all, the Court is no longer a backstop legislature for progressives to impose policies they can’t get through Congress.”

Whatever else this Court may be, it can now be fairly described as a backstop legislature for conservatives to impose policies they cannot get through Congress. Also, the Court hasn’t had a liberal majority since the Nixon era, so conservative complaints that the Court was a “backstop legislature for progressives” are not an expression of opposition to “political control” over the Court, but a lament that Republican appointees possessed only a slim one-vote majority for most of that time, which meant they didn’t get their preferred outcomes as often as they wanted. And the way that the conservative movement seized the Court was precisely by “tarnishing its rulings” for more than a half century. At one point, the right-wing legal martyr and originalist Robert Bork was so frustrated by the Court being insufficiently conservative that he declared, “As our institutional arrangements now stand, the Court can never be made a legitimate element of a basically democratic polity.” In the right’s view, the judiciary was an “imperial judiciary,” an “out of control branch of government.”

Indeed, although it now accuses the Court’s liberal critics of “delegitimization,” the Journal defends the current Court by saying it is merely undoing the “legal mistakes of recent decades.” What the Roberts Court’s defenders truly fear is the political strength of a critique of the Court as overreaching and out of touch with the majority of the electorate, because as conservatives well understand, that is a critique that has the power to influence elections and ultimately shape the Court itself. They understand this because that is one reason the 6–3 right-wing majority on the Court came to be in the first place. This is why questioning the Court’s legal reasoning and sweeping power is a privilege that must be exclusively reserved for conservatives.

The fear is clearly not that rogue actors will ignore the Court’s rulings. If the pervasive right-wing alarm over liberal criticism of the Court as “delegitimizing” has been deafening, the conservative response to Alabama openly flouting the Court’s ruling has been muted. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, for example, so protective of the Court’s “legitimacy,” when it comes to substantive public criticism, did not view Alabama’s refusal to obey the justices as an event worthy of comment.

One would think that verbal criticism of powerful institutions, an essential part of life in any democracy, would be less an act of “delegitimization” than an open challenge to the rule of law. But Alabama is defying the rule of law in pursuit of conservative causes—more Republicans in Congress; voiding constitutional prohibitions on racial discrimination—and so it’s fine.

[From the October 2022 issue: John Roberts’s long game]

All of this renders the Journal’s hand-wringing rather ironic: It is clear the right that views the Court as a political instrument for imposing conservative policy, and when the Court fails to heed its obligation to do so, they can simply ignore it. This is consistent with the movement’s Trumpist turn toward the belief that the legitimacy of any practice or institution—elections, fundamental freedoms, the state itself—is conferred not by the consent of the governed but by the consent of the right. You have an inalienable access to the franchise as long as you vote Republican. You have free speech as long as you say conservative things. The free market is free only when it leads to conservative outcomes. The Supreme Court’s rulings are the law of the land, except if those rulings are not what conservatives want.

Alabama’s maps will likely be challenged in court. But one reason the state’s Republican leadership may feel comfortable with ignoring the justices in the first place is that Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts were so clearly holding their noses in overturning a clear act of racial discrimination in voting that they might not be inclined to do it a second time. As Matt Ford reminds us, in striking down part of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, Roberts argued that “things have changed dramatically” in the South, and so those protections could be disregarded. That was naive at best then; Alabama is intent on illustrating why now.

Maybe Alabama is bluffing. Or maybe it simply doesn’t believe that someone like Roberts, who has been dreaming of gutting the Voting Rights Act since he was in his 20s, really means it. Or perhaps Alabama is reminding the Republican-appointed justices that the Court’s legitimacy depends on its obedience to the conservative movement, whose view is that the only legitimate outcomes—or laws, or governments, or presidents, or Supreme Court rulings—are conservative ones.

It is that position, and the Court’s reliable adherence to it, that has precipitated its loss of legitimacy. No liberal criticism could be as devastating to the Court’s credibility as the justices’ own actions, or the expectations of their defenders.

Photographs by Morgan Hornsby

On November 10 of last year, at a place called Paradise in western Kentucky, the Tennessee Valley Authority blew up the cooling towers of a large coal-fired power plant. The three stout towers, each 435 feet high, buckled at the waist in synchrony, then crumpled like crushed soda cans. Within 10 seconds, they’d collapsed into a billowing cloud of dust.

To anyone who watched the demolition happen, or saw the footage online, the message was clear: TVA, a sprawling, federally owned utility created 90 years ago as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, is getting off coal.

Though some people in the region regret that move, it’s a win for the local environment—and for the global climate. In the past few years, as the urgency of slowing climate change has grown, something like a consensus has emerged on how to do it: Green the electrical grid while retooling as much of the economy as possible—cars, buildings, factories—to run on zero-carbon electricity. The Inflation Reduction Act, signed by President Joe Biden last August, is supporting that plan with $370 billion in subsidies. In a 2021 executive order, Biden directed the federal government to “lead by example in order to achieve a carbon pollution–free electricity sector by 2035” and a net-zero economy by 2050.

Given this strategy, electric utilities are crucial to our future—and none more so than TVA, the largest public power provider in the United States. Its territory covers nearly all of Tennessee; large chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky; and bits of three other states. In one of the most conservative regions of the country, 10 million people get electricity from a federal agency that has no shareholders to answer to and no profits to make.

“TVA is this crazy unicorn—it’s not like anything else,” Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, told me. As a federal agency responsible not just for promoting the clean-energy transition but for building it, TVA is positioned to provide a national model—and TVA says it is doing just that.

But that’s not how Smith and other environmental advocates describe TVA’s behavior. They see a utility that is replacing coal plants, at Paradise and elsewhere, with gas-burning plants that will pollute the climate for decades. They see a utility betting heavily on small nuclear reactors that don’t yet exist. Above all, they say, TVA is failing to embrace proven clean-energy technologies, such as solar and wind power and energy-efficiency measures.

“TVA is a living laboratory that could be part of a phenomenal push to change to clean energy,” Smith said. Instead of an agency “on a war footing to get us to zero carbon,” he sees it becoming “an impediment in the executive branch.”

TVA has cut its carbon emissions by well over half since 2005, far more than the nationwide average for the electricity sector, while charging lower-than-average rates. It has done so by replacing coal with gas and by switching on a large new nuclear reactor. But like most American utilities, TVA has no plans to reach Biden’s goal of a net-zero grid by 2035; it’s targeting only an 80 percent carbon reduction by that date. “We aspire to net-zero by 2050, and we aspire to go farther, faster, if we can,” Jeff Lyash, TVA’s president and CEO since 2019, said at a meeting of the agency’s board of directors in November. With existing technology, though, he doesn’t think that’s possible.

What’s the right road to net-zero? The Tennessee Valley is an illuminating microcosm of a national debate, in which the imperative of addressing climate change is pitted against the enormous practical challenge of not only maintaining a reliable electric supply but dramatically expanding it to meet the needs of a decarbonizing economy. “TVA is in a unique position to lead in delivering the clean-energy future,” Lyash said in November. He and his critics agree on that much. But as for when that future will arrive, and what it will look like, they are very far apart indeed.  

T

VA was born from another global crisis. In 1933, when Roosevelt and Senator George Norris, a Nebraska Republican, persuaded Congress to establish TVA, the United States was at the nadir of the Great Depression, and the Tennessee Valley, where only a tiny percentage of the homes had electricity, was one of the country’s poorest regions. TVA transformed it. Starting with the Wilson Dam, at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a series of dams controlled flooding on the Tennessee River and its tributaries and electrified the whole Valley. Hydroelectric plants still produce about 10 percent of the region’s power, carbon-free.

Private utilities hated TVA, and complained bitterly about what they saw as unfair competition. They challenged the agency’s existence before the Supreme Court and lost, twice. As late as the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower wanted to sell off the agency, which he saw as an example of “creeping socialism.” The agency survived by becoming quasi-independent of the federal government. The president appoints and Congress confirms TVA’s board, but since 1959, TVA has mostly done without federal appropriations. It pays its own way by selling electricity—not directly to consumers (aside from a few dozen industrial and federal properties), but to the 153 municipally or cooperatively owned local power companies, or LPCs, that distribute power to the people.

Top left: Widows Creek Steam Plant, 1961. Top Right: Wilson Dam, June 1942. Bottom: TVA directors with President John F. Kennedy in 1963. (Courtesy of National Archives Catalog)

From the start, TVA’s strategy was to make electricity cheap and accessible enough that people would use it for everything. The agency succeeded so well that demand soon outstripped what even a thoroughly dammed river could supply. In the ’50s, TVA began relying on coal as its main energy source, ultimately building 12 large power plants. Over the past decade, it has closed six, but giant piles of toxic ash remain. In 2008, a dike ruptured at the coal plant in Kingston, Tennessee, spilling more than 5 million cubic yards of ash into the Emory and Clinch Rivers.

Environmentalists have long had reason to distrust TVA. In the ’70s, when the newly created Environmental Protection Agency began regulating air pollution, TVA resisted. Accustomed to making its own engineering decisions, it argued that investing in scrubbers for its coal stacks made no sense—after all, it was about to replace most of them with nuclear reactors. But the agency completed only seven of a planned 17 reactors—demand for electricity grew slower than forecast—and today, unfinished reactor hulks lie scattered around the Valley. The fiasco left TVA constrained by debt, which still totals nearly $20 billion.

[From the April 1962 issue: Harry Caudill on TVA and the destruction of the Appalachian Mountains]

Nevertheless, TVA is proud of its nuclear fleet. Although Georgia Power is expected to bring a new reactor online soon, TVA has been the only U.S. utility to have managed that in the past three decades. It began construction on the two reactors at its Watts Bar plant, in Tennessee, in 1973; mothballed them for years; then completed them in 1996 and 2016. In the first half of 2023, they and the agency’s other reactors helped it generate nearly 60 percent of its kilowatt-hours without emitting carbon—significantly higher than the national average. But it has “fumbled, failed, and flopped” into that enviable position, Stephen Smith told me. The climate crisis demands transformative change, Smith said, and TVA has abandoned its historic mission to provide precisely that.

TVA’s Colbert gas plant, which is under construction, in Florence, Alabama, July 7, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

In downtown Chattanooga, the people directly responsible for delivering electricity to the Valley’s 10 million residents sit in TVA’s system-operations center. It’s a large, hushed, dimly lit room, in which curving rows of workstations face a wall filled with an illuminated schematic of TVA’s sprawling transmission grid. The first rows of operators track the physical condition and voltage of the transmission lines. The operators behind them “dispatch” power as needed from hundreds of generators around the grid, matching supply to demand minute by minute. That complex job is simplified by having lots of “dispatchable” power, which is what coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro plants provide, at least in principle: power that’s available any time of the day or year.

In a conference room overlooking the control room, I met Greg Henrich and Aaron Melda, TVA’s vice president and senior vice president for transmission and power supply. Melda had helped formulate the agency’s decarbonization strategy, and he grabbed a marker to sketch out the numbers on a flip chart. The strategy’s central element is the closure of TVA’s last five coal plants, all more than 50 years old, by 2035. “Over the same period, we will add 10,000 megawatts of solar,” Melda said. To store energy for when the sun isn’t shining, TVA will also add 1,000 megawatts of battery capacity.

Over the next decade, though, the agency’s main carbon-reduction strategy is to build more gas plants—7,000 megawatts’ worth, roughly the capacity of the current coal fleet. When I visited the system-ops center last fall, TVA was finalizing plans for the latest addition: a 1,450-megawatt gas plant in Cumberland City, Tennessee, at the site of its biggest coal plant, whose two generating units are scheduled to retire in 2026 and 2028. Environmentalists strenuously opposed the gas plant—even the EPA questioned it—arguing that it would commit TVA to emitting carbon long past 2035 or even 2050. In the near term, though, the switch from coal will substantially reduce emissions of carbon and other pollutants. “You replace coal with gas, you’ve now taken every one of those megawatts down 50 percent in its carbon intensity,” Melda said.

Why not just build more batteries and more solar, and take the intensity down to zero? It would cost a lot more, Melda said, and batteries discharge within several hours. A few rainy days could leave you unable to meet demand. Nor is solar a big help on dark winter mornings, which are the moments that TVA worries about most. The majority of homes in the Valley have electric heat. A spokesperson for TVA, Scott Fiedler, later said that gas is “the only mature technology that allows us to quickly add renewable energy and maintain the low cost and reliability” needed.

I visited the system-ops center on a chilly November day a week before Thanksgiving. Early that morning, as people cranked up their thermostat, TVA had seen a fairly typical winter peak in the load on its grid. Warmer weather was coming that would drive down demand, Henrich said, but it would rise again on Thanksgiving morning, as people roasted turkeys. That afternoon, the load would plummet. “Everybody’s asleep on the couch,” Henrich said. “It’s awesome to watch—it’s truly societal behavior driving your load.”

He opened the blinds on the conference-room windows so we could see into the control room itself. It looked pretty quiet, with a lot of the workstations empty. “When does it ever get exciting?” I asked. A month later, my question was answered.

Aaron Melda (left) and Greg Henrich, TVA’s vice president and senior vice president for transmission and power supply, at TVA’s main headquarters, in Chattanooga, July 6, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

On December 23, people in the Tennessee Valley awoke to temperatures that had plunged 40 degrees or more overnight. Worse, both units of the Cumberland coal plant had shut down, because thick ice from a big storm had encased instruments on the exposed boilers. In the morning, the Bull Run coal plant wouldn’t start, and some natural-gas plants failed too. As demand soared to an all-time winter record of 33,427 megawatts, the operators in Chattanooga found themselves about 8,000 megawatts short. Neighboring utilities couldn’t help; the storm had affected half the country.

For two hours that morning, TVA had to instruct its 153 local power companies to cut demand by 5 percent. On Christmas Eve, it asked for a 10 percent cut for more than five hours. To comply, the LPCs shut off power neighborhood by neighborhood for 15 minutes or more at a time. The rolling blackouts were the first in TVA’s 90-year history. At Christmas dinner, Fiedler told me, his mother required him to explain why his storied organization had cut her power on the holiday. “She wore me out,” he said.

TVA likes to boast of its reliability, and environmental advocates seized on the Christmas failure. “The emperor has no clothes,” Amanda Garcia, the director of the Southern Environmental Law Center’s Tennessee office, told me. “The winter storm to me provided a perfect example of why TVA needs to change”—by showing that fossil fuels are no guarantee of reliability and that it should be transitioning to renewables faster. The Sierra Club ranks TVA among the very worst American utilities for its energy transition. The Center for Biological Diversity calls it a “climate laggard.” Both want the agency to replace all its coal plants as soon as possible with renewable energy, not gas.

A modeling study released in March by the Center for Biological Diversity and by GridLab, a nonprofit consulting group, concluded that TVA could indeed stop burning both coal and gas by 2035. To do that, it would need to build the equivalent of about 145 large solar farms, with a total capacity of 35 gigawatts, in its territory, along with the transmission lines needed to import about 12 gigawatts of wind power from the Midwest. (The Valley isn’t windy enough to produce cost-effective wind power.) Then, by 2050, it would have to nearly triple that expansion again in order to electrify and decarbonize the Valley’s economy. The goals are ambitious, given the delays that now plague many renewable and transmission projects—but the benefits to society would dwarf the costs, the study found. Consumers would save more than $250 billion, mostly from switching to cars that run on TVA’s electricity rather than gasoline. Carbon emissions would drop by hundreds of millions of tons.

The first step toward a clean-energy future, advocates agree, would be to reduce energy waste in the Valley. About a quarter of homes there rely on resistance heating—the method employed in electric furnaces and space heaters. Many heat pumps also fall back on it at freezing temperatures, Huntsville Utilities’ president and CEO, Wes Kelley, told me. “That is basically the equivalent of turning on a bunch of big hair dryers to heat your house,” Kelley said.

According to National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates, efficiency measures, including more and better heat pumps, could save roughly as much electricity as the Cumberland gas plant will generate. “If you reduce that resistance heating, you’re helping the system as a whole”—by reducing the peak load—“as well as the customer,” Maggie Shober, the research director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE), told me. Because people in the Valley use so much electricity, monthly bills are high even though rates are low, creating an especially heavy burden on the poor.

Utilities generally have little incentive to invest in energy-saving measures, which only reduce their revenue. But TVA should be different: It doesn’t need to make a profit. Since 2018, it has run an admirable program, called Home Uplift, that provides heat pumps, weatherization, and other measures to low-income homeowners, all for free—but so far, only to 5,000 of the hundreds of thousands of Valley residents who might be eligible. TVA could do much more, SACE and other critics say, especially now that the Inflation Reduction Act is subsidizing energy-efficiency programs. For its part, TVA says it’s planning more of these types of investments, including rebates to replace older and less efficient heat pumps. Fiedler, the TVA spokesperson, said the agency will lower energy costs in underserved communities by $200 million over the next five years through Home Uplift and other programs.

TVA’s Wilson Dam, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, July 7, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

The environmental advocates I talked with were all suspicious of TVA’s clean-energy intentions. SACE’s Stephen Smith, a close observer of the agency for more than three decades, thinks TVA is building gas plants now and planning nuclear for the future because large power plants are what it is comfortable building, and it has a monopoly on building them in the Valley. The future of the industry should lie in “shifting from central stations to a more distributed model that opens up a whole new powerful toolbox for fixing the climate crisis,” Smith said. “But TVA is not going there.”

He and other advocates see a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a liveable and sustainable future,” to quote the most recent United Nations climate report, and in that stark light, TVA’s current fleet of renewables looks inadequate, especially if you set aside the hydroelectric dams and focus on what it has achieved lately. It buys about 1,200 megawatts of wind from the Midwest; it has installed about 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity in the Valley. That’s far less solar power, Amanda Garcia pointed out, than deployed by utilities in the Carolinas or Georgia. Though she acknowledged TVA’s plans to expand solar over the coming decade, “actions speak louder than words,” she said.

But TVA is actually making a big effort these days, Gil Hough, the executive director of TenneSEIA, the state solar-industry association, told me. Hough worked for SACE from 2000 to 2010, promoting solar with Smith. Now he helps deliver it to TVA.

In the mid-2010s, he told me, the agency did indeed walk away from solar because it was focused on paying down its nuclear debt. Under Lyash, though, TVA has changed, Hough said. It may have only 1,000 megawatts of solar online—but it has more than 2,200 under construction or contracted. “TVA wants every megawatt we can provide them right now,” Hough said. “It’s us who’s holding them back.” Supply-chain disruptions have slowed solar projects and raised prices. But Lyash announced in May that TVA would award contracts this year for 6,000 megawatts of solar power, to be brought online between 2026 and 2029. “We are building as much solar as we can get panels for,” he said.

What got TVA’s attention was the demand from large corporations, says Reagan Farr, the CEO of the Nashville-based Silicon Ranch, which owns and operates solar farms for TVA and other utilities. Farr told me that companies like Google and Meta, by insisting on renewable energy, convinced TVA that it could no longer fulfill its mission of economic development without expanding its solar capacity. “The power of these large companies—their procurement decisions drive actions,” Farr said.

Local resistance to solar farms is a growing problem, both TVA and the industry say. At the November TVA board meeting, Chief Operating Officer Don Moul announced a $216 million plan to build a 100-megawatt solar plant on top of the coal-ash pile at the Shawnee power plant, in Kentucky. If it works, Moul said, as much as 1,000 megawatts of solar might one day rise from ash piles around the region—poetic justice, and a way to “alleviate some of the land challenges that we’ve heard about from so many of our stakeholders,” Moul said.

One of TVA’s key constituencies are the local power companies that distribute its electricity. Their perspective is often very different from that of environmental advocates. At a listening session before a February 2023 board meeting in Muscle Shoals, a dozen of their representatives got up to speak—not about renewables or climate change, but about the blackouts. They were a “black eye for all of us in the Valley,” said Brian Solsbee, the executive director of the Tennessee Municipal Electric Power Association and a former TVA employee. “How does TVA ensure it never happens again?” It needs new generation capacity, Huntsville Utilities’ Wes Kelley told me.

When it was Lyash’s turn to speak, he said what he has said repeatedly: that TVA plans to use all available technologies to decarbonize. He promised a renewed focus on energy efficiency and an aggressive expansion of solar—but also of gas and, in the long run, nuclear. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” he said. Renewables, in his view, are one basket.

TVA’s Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, in Rhea County, Tennessee, June 30, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

The Tennessee Valley is going through a period of economic expansion that would make Roosevelt proud, and TVA, with its reputation for cheap and reliable power, is partly responsible. The Valley’s new growth includes electric-vehicle, battery, and solar-panel manufacturers—the industries that will drive the electrification of America. When I first met Lyash in Chattanooga, where he had just presented TVA’s Engineer of the Year award, he rattled off some of the names. “Ford, GM, Toyota, Mazda, Volkswagen, LG, SK—those industries are going to decarbonize transportation,” he said. “So we have to provide them the energy now.” Demand is growing already, and Lyash expects it potentially to double by 2050. A study last year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which mapped how the grid might be decarbonized by 2035, in line with Biden’s goal, assumed that demand might even double by then.

The decision to build a new gas plant at Cumberland comes in that context as well as that of climate urgency. In TVA’s view, even if it could build enough additional renewables and transmission lines to replace the Cumberland coal unit it plans to retire by 2026, which it says it can’t, solar and wind wouldn’t offer “firm, dispatchable power”—power that’s available regardless of weather or time of day. The basic problem, as the NREL report explains, is “seasonal mismatch”: There’s not enough sunlight to meet peak demand on cold winter mornings and not enough wind on hot summer afternoons; both can be minimal for days.

Given this reality, is it reasonable to build a new gas plant today, even though it will emit some carbon for years to come? I put the question to Paul Denholm, a senior research fellow at NREL and the lead author of the recent study. “That is a fantastic question, and it’s something everybody is trying to figure out,” he said.

All visions of a decarbonized grid and of an electrified, net-zero society require huge expansions of wind and solar power. But the NREL study foresees that a net-zero grid will also need some kind of gas to meet peak demand. In three of its four net-zero scenarios, turbines are still burning substantial amounts of natural gas in 2035, and the carbon is being captured rather than released into the atmosphere. In all scenarios, many gas turbines are retrofitted to burn zero-carbon hydrogen.

TVA’s vision of the future, as Lyash and Aaron Melda explained it to me, aligns broadly with the NREL study. Any gas plants that TVA builds now, they said, will one day either burn “green hydrogen” or involve carbon capture—neither is in wide use yet, and TVA is investing in both. The reason TVA won’t promise a net-zero grid by 2035, Lyash said, is because “it’s going to take deploying technologies that are not currently available at a price people can afford and a scale that can be implemented.” The NREL study assumes that those technologies will be developed in time to reach net zero by 2035; TVA doesn’t want to count on that.

It’s no surprise, Denholm said, that utilities are struggling to figure out how to cut the last 10 to 20 percent of their carbon emissions. NREL researchers haven’t figured it out either. “The fact that you have conservative utilities saying they know how to [cut] 80 percent—that is a really remarkable shift,” he told me. “I think we need to recognize that and applaud it.”

Another influential report, Princeton’s 2021 “Net-Zero America” study, included a scenario in which only renewable energy was allowed: By 2050, wind turbines were visible from about one-eighth of the area of the Lower 48 states, solar farms covered an area the size of West Virginia, and long-distance transmission lines mushroomed to five times their existing capacity. Even when such facilities share land with other uses—Silicon Ranch, for instance, allows sheep to graze or pollinator gardens to bloom among the solar panels—they are a significant industrial intrusion on the landscape.

In some regions, people may prefer less of those—and more of the compact central power stations that TVA knows how to build. The NREL and Princeton studies both include net-zero scenarios in which the expansion of renewable facilities and transmission lines is constrained, perhaps by “challenges with siting and land use,” as NREL puts it. Both scenarios rely, as does TVA, on nuclear plants. “I can’t make the numbers work without new nuclear,” Lyash told me.

Like many nuclear engineers these days, he thinks the future lies in small modular reactors, or SMRs. At a site on the Clinch River, TVA is planning the first of what it hopes will be a fleet of 20 or so identical SMRs, using a relatively conventional design. “Our goal is not just to build a plant, but to build a plant that sets the model for the U.S. industry,” Greg Boerschig, one of the engineers running the TVA effort, told me.

The way environmentalists focus on TVA’s renewable capacity or lack thereof frustrates Lyash. “The point is,” he said, “what are your carbon emissions, and what’s your price, and what’s your reliability?” Different regions with different starting points—Arizona has a lot of sunshine, Oklahoma has wind, TVA has a legacy of nuclear and hydro—might reach their clean-energy goals in different ways.

Toward the end of our last conversation, Lyash opened an app on his phone that shows real-time carbon emissions from electricity generation. “One of the countries that gets held up as having deployed huge amounts of solar, and it’s a big percentage of their capacity, is Germany,” he said. “Germany’s carbon emissions right now are 426 grams per unit of electricity. And today, right now, TVA’s is 247 … And our price is less than a third of theirs.”

That happened to be a bad day for Germany’s numbers and a good one for TVA’s—but long-term data confirm Lyash’s point: Germany gets a far higher percentage of its electricity from renewables than TVA, but emits substantially more carbon per kilowatt-hour. Germany has made different choices. It closed its last nuclear reactor in April.

TVA’s Norris Dam, in Andersonville, Tennessee, June 30, 2023 (Morgan Hornsby for The Atlantic)

Environmentalists are right to be wary of TVA. In the past it has performed badly on a variety of environmental issues. It built an unnecessary dam, the Tellico, that drowned important Cherokee cultural sites and hundreds of farms and notoriously threatened to extinguish a little fish, the snail darter. (The darter has since recovered.) It stepped back from solar and energy-efficiency efforts when it could have led the way. It was slow to reduce air pollution from its coal plants—which are still lethal polluters—and allowed the major coal-ash disaster in Kingston to happen. This May, even as Lyash was promising 6,000 megawatts of new renewable energy, TVA doubled down on its Cumberland decision: It released a draft environmental-impact statement saying that it also wanted to replace the Kingston plant with gas power by the end of 2027. That will lock in higher emissions for longer, environmentalists say.

Garcia and Smith think TVA lacks public accountability. They point out that it has no independent public-service commission to regulate it, only a board that, like corporate boards, has no staff of its own and thus depends on management. They would like to loosen TVA’s monopoly and free local power companies to buy power elsewhere, bridling the “unicorn” with market discipline.

But that would risk undermining the very thing that makes the agency such a precious unicorn: the public-power model. TVA has retained political support, at least in its sphere, for an active government role in improving people’s lives. And in a region where environmental causes are hardly unifying, TVA has said, publicly and repeatedly, that it wants to stop emitting carbon as fast as it can. How it does that should be debated—but in many conversations with TVA and its critics, I never heard a solid reason to doubt its good faith.

As I traveled the Tennessee Valley, I visited monuments from TVA’s golden age, including Wilson Dam, in northwestern Alabama, with its lofty, sunlit turbine hall and arches like a Roman aqueduct’s, and Norris Dam, in northeastern Tennessee, which closes off the narrow Clinch River with a tall, sculptural curve. TVA engineers and the people of this region built these marvels “for generations yet unborn,” as Senator George Norris liked to say,  with no notion of how valuable they would become in an age of climate change.

Now it’s time to build more.

This article is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by the HHMI Department of Science Education.

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After a turbo-charged, months-long marketing campaign, Barbie was finally released in theaters this week. In between dance routines and jokes, the movie invites us to ask questions about feminism and the lines between commerce and art.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency. The real mystery of Bud Light People just want to lose weight.

All the Sides of Barbie

Over the years, Barbie has been many things: a symbol of unattainable beauty standards, a career woman, an embodiment of the male gaze, an inspiration for young girls. This summer, Barbie is the place to be. My afternoon screening of the movie in Brooklyn yesterday was sold out, packed with delighted people wearing pink. To understand what’s driving the movie’s ubiquity this summer, and to discuss how the film handles feminist themes, I called Shirley Li, a culture writer at The Atlantic.

The following contains light spoilers for Barbie.

Lora Kelley: I’ve seen Barbie everywhere this summer—on billboards, at a pop-up in Manhattan, blanketing my Google search-result pages in pink. Is this kind of marketing campaign normal for a summer blockbuster? Or is there something special about this project?

Shirley Li: The movie is a big swing for Mattel. I think they’ve poured everything they can into its marketing campaign. Mattel has been struggling with the Barbie brand for several years and was looking for a way to turn around Barbie’s cultural relevance. And Barbie happens to be very fun to market.

At the same time, this kind of marketing push, at least for big summer tentpoles, was par for the course before the pandemic. The Hollywood strikes are a factor here as well: The Barbie cast packed in as much promotion as they could on the press tour before the SAG-AFTRA strike began last week.

Lora: Is Barbie a piece of brand marketing for Mattel, or is it a work of art by Greta Gerwig?

Shirley: It’s kind of brand marketing for Mattel—and it’s also a work of art from the writer-director Greta Gerwig. That’s one of the reasons the film is interesting to me. It’s very self-aware of the fact that it’s a movie about a product. But it argues for Barbie as not just a product, but a protagonist—someone who deserves her own heroine’s journey, and whose function is to represent a brand but also represent the ideal of womanhood to young girls. All of that gets wrapped up into this film.

The film invites you to consider all the sides of Barbie. You can’t talk about yourself without talking about the things that influenced you, and often, those are things that you have consumed or bought. We often think the things that make us us are the things we play with, consume, watch, and listen to. We can become very possessive of those things. At the same time, we’re not completely composed of them.

Lora: I’m curious about your thoughts on whether and to what extent this is a feminist film.

Shirley: One of the Mattel executives said that Barbie is “not a feminist movie.” Margot Robbie later responded to the sentiment like, What do you mean? I think it’s a feminist film, and I think it certainly tries to be nuanced about what feminism means. Early on, the Barbies believe that they live in a feminist world. But their idea of feminism is flawed. They live in this world in which Kens are second-class citizens. There isn’t gender parity. The film wrestles with this glossy idea of feminism that a lot of young girls were sold. Being told that you can be anything is inspirational, but that’s not necessarily truthful. That debate is what the film invites you to think about, but at the same time, it’s squarely feminist.

Lora: You wrote a great article today about America Ferrera’s monologue, which was a striking moment in the film. How did a serious monologue about the challenges and contradictions of womanhood fit into a movie that also has a lot of dance routines and fun costumes and sparkles? Did Gerwig succeed in reconciling those energies?

Shirley: I think it was successful, because I don’t think a monologue that sobering would land the way it needed to land in a more sobering film. If the film wasn’t so high-energy and colorful and bombastic, then that monologue would have come off as didactic.

What Greta Gerwig has done is put this speech inside a Trojan horse of a film. In a meta way, that’s true to the experience that America Ferrera’s character is talking about. For women, in order to succeed, you have to constantly negotiate your power. Like, you have to play up this idea of not being too aggressive or threatening, so you have to giggle a little bit. You keep having to conform to these expectations of how women should act. Something that made me love that monologue—even if the things the character was saying were kind of obvious—is that there’s no grand takeaway.

Lora: I have to ask, where did “Barbenheimer” come from? Why is everyone talking about seeing Barbie and Oppenheimer back to back?

Shirley: The simplest way I can put it is that Barbenheimer is a phenomenon born out of the fact that two movies that seem diametrically opposed to each other in terms of style and function and perceived target audience are coming out at the same time. One is a grim, somber biopic about the father of the atomic bomb that is three hours long and comes from the quintessentially-boy-movie director Christopher Nolan. It has all these weighty considerations of morality, human nature, and hubris. And the other film, at least the way it’s marketed, is this glittery, poppy celebration of fun directed by Greta Gerwig, whose films have very much been about girlhood and womanhood.

Oppenheimer seems to be for those who want a film about reality, and Barbie seems to be for people who just want fantasy. I think that’s why people have had so much fun mashing them up and making memes about them. For all the dichotomies that these two films represent, though, I think they also share a lot of themes. They ask existential questions: How do we exchange ideas? What prevents us from becoming the best versions of ourselves? What makes us human?

Related:

The surprising key to understanding the Barbie film What’s the matter with Barbie?

Today’s News

Former President Donald Trump’s classified-documents trial will begin in May 2024, despite his request to delay proceedings until after the presidential election. James Barber, who was on Alabama’s death row, was executed after the Supreme Court refused to block his execution following a series of botched lethal injections in the state.   Police began making arrests related to a video that went viral this week depicting two women in Manipur, India, being sexually assaulted and forced to parade naked through the streets amid ethnic clashes in May.

Evening Read

Photograph by Ian Allen for The Atlantic

The Real Lesson From The Making of the Atomic Bomb

By Charlie Warzel

Doom lurks in every nook and cranny of Richard Rhodes’s home office. A framed photograph of three men in military fatigues hangs above his desk. They’re tightening straps on what first appear to be two water heaters but are, in fact, thermonuclear weapons. Resting against a nearby wall is a black-and-white print depicting the first billionth of a second after the detonation of an atomic bomb: a thousand-foot-tall ghostly amoeba. And above us, dangling from the ceiling like the sword of Damocles, is a plastic model of the Hindenburg.

Depending on how you choose to look at it, Rhodes’s office is either a shrine to awe-inspiring technological progress or a harsh reminder of its power to incinerate us all in the blink of an eye. Today, it feels like the nexus of our cultural and technological universes. Rhodes is the 86-year-old author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a Pulitzer Prize–winning book that has become a kind of holy text for a certain type of AI researcher—namely, the type who believes their creations might have the power to kill us all.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Universal Pictures

Read. Crook Manifesto, Colson Whitehead’s newly released sequel to Harlem Shuffle, is both powered and limited by its most absorbing characteristic.

Watch. For the non-Barbie fans here, there’s always Oppenheimer, which is more than just a creation myth about the atomic bomb.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I remember being a kid and watching a movie about the deep sea on 3-D in an IMAX theater in Chicago. We strapped on those nerd glasses and felt ourselves surrounded by fish and reefs. I took that experience for granted. So I was surprised to learn that there are only 19 movie theaters in the United States where you can see Oppenheimer in IMAX 70-millimeter. The Washington Post estimated that people in large swathes of the country are more than a three-hour drive from the nearest theater screening the movie in this format. Of course, the movie can be watched in other formats in various movie theaters. But Christopher Nolan told the Associated Press that when he shoots films such as Oppenheimer on IMAX 70MM film, “the sharpness and the clarity and the depth of the image is unparalleled.”

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The physical space in which a person works, or hopes to work, intersects with their most personal choices. Today we’re checking in on the remote-work debate and why it remains so heated.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The businessmen broke Hollywood. Goodbye to the prophets of doom. I have cancer. I can’t put my kids first anymore. Joe Lieberman weighs the Trump risk.

Better Together?

In the summer of 2021, I started going back to the office. It was not the allure of watercooler chatter or the promise of juiced-up productivity that pulled me in. At the time, I just really wanted to sit in the AC. It was June; it was hot. Access to a desk in a freezing-cold Midtown tower—a far cry from my living room, which tended to get steamy on 90-degree Brooklyn days—seemed like a major perk. I was living with roommates, was vaccinated, and had no child-care duties. Each morning, I strapped on my mask and packed my backpack with canisters of coffee and sandwiches to sustain me through the day. I often felt better when I got home: When you’re going into an office, I found, it’s harder to have a day where nothing happens.

My desire to return to a routine that involved leaving my home was inspired, in part, by my now-colleague Ellen Cushing’s 2021 Atlantic article about what the monotony of the pandemic was doing to our brain. “Sometimes I imagine myself as a Sim, a diamond-shaped cursor hovering above my head as I go about my day. Tasks appear, and I do them. Mealtimes come, and I eat. Needs arise, and I meet them,” she writes in one memorable passage. In another, she quotes an expert saying that “environmental enrichment”—seeing new people, observing new things on a commute—is good for our brain’s plasticity. After reading the article in March 2021, I became fixated on the idea that observing random humans on my commute would keep my mind sharp.

Then the fall came around, and so did more of my colleagues. It was great to see them. It was also great, sometimes, to return to the relative solitude of my home and take walks in Prospect Park at midday. I was lucky to have that flexibility. Now that I work for The Atlantic, I go into the office almost every day. I have enjoyed meeting new people and, again, sitting in the industrial-grade AC.

I’ve given you this narration of my personal experience because, for all the talk of productivity and metrics and company culture, the topic of returning to the office is intensely personal. My needs and desires, for a variety of reasons relating to my age, finances, circumstances, health situation, and lifestyle, might be very different from those of workers who fall elsewhere on any of those axes. Some working parents have said they might value flexibility at school-pickup time. Some workers of color have raised the benefit of being free from in-office microaggressions. Recent college graduates may want to go into the office to make friends. And of course, not all workers are able to work remotely. The physical space in which one works, or hopes to work, intersects with one’s most personal choices. It collides with and reveals what people value most.

Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who studies remote work, told me that “research and evidence are slowly catching up” to the work-from-home debate. In five years, he predicted, the topic will be less controversial. Bloom and two colleagues, Jose Maria Barrero and Steven J. Davis, published a working paper earlier this month that collects some of the existing work-from-home research, pulling both from their own work and from other papers. One interesting finding is that although fully remote work has been correlated with a drop in productivity, hybrid work (which occurs widely in white-collar fields such as tech and business services) was not linked to any productivity loss—and could actually help with recruitment and retention.

Workers gained freedom over their working conditions in the past few years. Now many bosses are trying to wrest that power back. And workers and managers don’t always see eye to eye about the stakes of returning to work. Bloom and his colleagues asked managers and employees about how working from home affected productivity. Workers, on the whole, said they were 7.4 percent more productive on average while working from home; bosses said that they thought their employees were 3.5 percent less productive. Managers tend to most appreciate what they can see in front of them, Bloom told me over email: “It’s like those restaurants where the kitchen is open and on display—it feels more like you are having a fantastic culinary experience, but it’s really just a mirage.”

Companies’ rationales for calling people back to work can seem mushy, beyond that it simply seems like being together would be better (or, in some cases, that employers want to fulfill expensive real-estate obligations). One argument for working in person is the idea that younger workers can learn from, and be mentored by, more experienced colleagues in the workplace. Bloom told me that senior managers over the age of 50 provide about 50 percent of the mentoring minutes when working from home as they do while in the office. “A lot of mentoring is casual, relaxed conversations and, yes, it’s spontaneous—taking somebody aside and giving some quick advice,” he said. A Pew Research Center survey from March found that 36 percent of teleworkers said remote work hurt their opportunities to be mentored. Positive remote mentoring can happen (I found a formal mentorship program conducted mostly over Zoom very useful). Bloom said that although in theory—and with the right software—these types of relationships can blossom, “practically this does not happen as much online.”

Bloom’s point (and my reaction to it) reinforces how personal experience can color perspectives on this issue: In my case, I both relish time away from home and believe in the potential of remote mentor relationships. But how those dimensions of work fit into our lives can vary widely. Change any inputs—personal commute time, age, nature of work, child-care responsibilities, goals—and the resulting approach may be unrecognizable.

Related:

The surprising effects of remote work How to mentor young workers in a remote world

Today’s News

Russia is halting the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which ensured that Ukraine could export its grain by sea despite a wartime blockade and helped stabilize global food prices. Senator Joe Manchin’s decision to headline an event with the No Labels organization is fueling speculation over a potential third-party presidential run. Firefighters are battling several wildfires in Southern California that ignited this weekend amid excessive heat warnings.

Evening Read

Millennium / Gallery Stock

Do Yourself a Favor and Go Find a ‘Third Place’

By Allie Conti

On a Sunday last year, I was walking through a suburban neighborhood in Pennsylvania, heading home from an early-afternoon meditation class. One of the nondescript stucco houses had a curious sticker on its mailbox reading mac’s club. I checked Google Maps to see if I was standing next to a cleverly disguised business—what might pretentiously be referred to in a city as a speakeasy—but nothing popped up, so I peeked inside the house. That’s where I spotted a pool table and a middle-aged guy sitting at the end of a long, mahogany bar, drinking a Bloody Mary by himself. Apparently I’d stumbled upon a social club meant for residents of the neighborhood. Though at first the bartender was incredulous that I’d just walked in, he soon rewarded my sense of adventure with a Guinness on the house. The Eagles weren’t playing in the NFL that day, and he was grateful for the additional company. We talked about the upcoming deer season, and upon learning that I was a new hunter, the two guys showed me a rifle that was kept in another room. …

Besides giving me the feeling that I’d flexed a muscle that had atrophied, the interaction was special to me because I’d found a classic “third place” in the suburbs, where I least expected it. The term, which was coined by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s, essentially refers to a physical location other than work or home where there’s little to no financial barrier to entry and where conversation is the primary activity.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Elizabeth Bruenig: Alabama wants to kill Jimi Barber. The most shocking aspect of RFK Jr.’s anti-Semitism Delivery apps just did the impossible.

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty; Hulton / Getty; Imagno / Getty.

Read. Mozart in Motion, by the British poet Patrick Mackie, explores the secret to Mozart’s lasting appeal.

Watch. Beneath the hijinks and lewdness, the show Dave (streaming on Hulu) constructs an unlikely model for male friendship.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I like to bake, and find doing so relaxing. But in the summer, when my apartment is hot, I turn to treats that don’t require baking. (In case it hasn’t become clear: I do not enjoy the sensation of being overheated.) One very easy and fun one I have returned to is these chocolate-peanut-butter cups, courtesy of Samantha Seneviratne. I don’t have a double boiler or a microwave, so I boil water in a saucepan and melt chocolate chips in a metal bowl on top of it. And I like cashew butter, so I use that instead of peanut butter. The effort-to-reward ratio is high: These take just a few minutes of active work and render delightful little treats.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Last year, the state of Alabama made history by botching three consecutive executions in its death chamber. Two of the condemned men survived their own executions: Alan Miller and Kenneth Smith. Both were pierced repeatedly with needles in an attempt to set IV lines until the midnight expiry of their death warrants forced their executioners to halt further attempts to kill them.

In light of the crisis, Governor Kay Ivey ordered a temporary moratorium on executions beginning in November, and announced “a top-to-bottom review of the state’s execution process” so that “the state can successfully deliver justice going forward.”

“For the sake of the victims and their families,” Ivey said in the statement emailed to reporters, “we’ve got to get this right.” Ivey lifted the moratorium in a February 24 letter to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall directing him to again seek execution dates for prisoners on the state’s death row. No public report of the review’s findings has ever been issued.

Nevertheless, the results of that review stand to be tested in the upcoming execution of James “Jimi” Barber, scheduled for July 20. Barber stands convicted of the 2001 murder of an Alabama grandmother, Dorothy Epps, whom he beat to death with a hammer while heavily intoxicated. In three days, Alabama will again attempt a lethal injection, its first since that recent string of failures—this time with an additional set of imperatives: prove that the state’s Department of Corrections can, in fact, carry out a successful execution; supply that proof to the state attorney general’s office for use in ongoing and future litigation; and pull it all off seamlessly, for the sake of the victims and their families, just as Governor Ivey said. The odds of the state pulling it off remain unclear.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: A history of violence]

Alabama officials haven’t proved to be responsible judges of their executioners’ skills thus far. The way to test the results of the state’s review and the effects of its ameliorative efforts, is to try to execute another person. Barber is the unlucky subject of this experiment.

Ivey’s “top-to-bottom review” was inadequate from its inception. On February 7 of this year, during the short-lived moratorium, more than 170 Alabama religious leaders signed an open letter to Ivey expressing hope that the review might take a legitimate shape: “We speak with a united front in requesting an independent, external, comprehensive review of Alabama’s execution protocols and procedures, as has been done in other states with similar problems.” What followed answered none of those descriptors. Rather than appoint an independent commission to investigate her Department of Corrections’ handling of executions and issue a report, as Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin had in 2014 and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee had in 2022, Ivey instead directed the agency to review itself and release its findings to her. The DOC delivered its report on February 24, mere weeks after the clergy letter exhorting Ivey to undertake a third-party review, and roughly three months after Ivey had declared the moratorium.

Jon Hamm, the commissioner of Alabama’s Department of Corrections, notified Ivey’s office in a letter that the review had wrapped up. “The Department conducted an in-depth review of our execution process,” he wrote, including evaluations of the department’s legal strategies in dealing with prisoners’ final appeals, training procedures for staff and medical personnel involved in executions, the number of medical personnel used by the department for executions, how best to assist medical personnel carrying out executions, and the equipment needed to support the state’s lusty schedule of killing. Hamm said that the DOC had added to its pool of medical personnel, undertaken extra rehearsals, and obtained new equipment in preparation for resuming its duties. He spent much of the letter praising Ivey.

The most significant change in Alabama’s procedures has to do with the amount of time the state’s executioners are given to carry out their mission.

“At your request,” Hamm wrote, “the Supreme Court of Alabama changed its rule for scheduling executions.” He referred to a December 2022 letter from Ivey to the state’s nine highest justices asking that they amend a particular rule so that instead of the court issuing a 24-hour death warrant (with a legally binding midnight expiration time), Ivey herself would be allowed to set a time frame for executions that could span any number of days. Given that Alabama has twice had to call off executions because their executioners failed to set two IV lines by midnight on the given execution dates, this amendment alone—which the court granted Ivey in January of this year—provided a makeshift remedy for a far more serious problem. When Ivey set the time frame for Barber’s execution this May, she gave the state’s executioners the authority to kill Barber anytime between midnight at the start of July 20 and 6 a.m. on July 21. The procedure is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m. on the 20th, and the court’s change means that instead of six hours to access Barber’s veins, the executioners now have at least 12. In plain terms, this creates the possibility that a fully conscious Barber could be strapped to the execution table for half a day while the state’s executioners probe his body for suitable veins.

The identities, qualifications, and training of the medical personnel who execute Alabama’s prisoners are carefully protected by the state. But a few details have become clear in Barber’s ongoing litigation seeking nitrogen hypoxia, Alabama’s other legally available execution method, over lethal injection. Nitrogen hypoxia, a gas-execution method that’s never been tried, remains statutorily an option for the state’s death-row prisoners despite the fact that no protocol currently exists outlining its safe use.

In a hearing earlier this month, Barber’s attorneys revealed that the professional licenses belonging to Alabama’s new IV team include credentials for two paramedics, an advanced EMT, and a registered nurse with a multistate license earned in Florida in 2019. In a pleading filed early last month, Barber’s lawyers told a judge in Alabama’s Middle District that they believed they may have discovered the identity of one of the members of this IV team and had found this person to have multiple arrests for fraud and related civil judgments against him or her.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Alabama makes plans to gas its prisoners]

And, as for the much-vaunted new equipment that Hamm said Alabama added to modernize its execution process: The state told Barber’s attorneys in June that all it had added were “additional straps for securing an inmate on the execution gurney.”

If Alabama’s efforts succeed, Barber is merely the first in line; more executions will soon follow. Alabama is currently enmeshed in litigation concerning Kenneth Smith, whom it failed to execute last fall. This month, Smith’s lawsuit survived the state’s motion to dismiss, bringing Alabama perilously close to the brink of the discovery phase. Soon, unless something changes, it may have to surrender information about its execution procedures and personnel to Smith’s attorneys—something the state has tried desperately to avoid, and which it did successfully avoid by settling with Alan Miller in his lawsuit after the state failed to kill him. In a motion to compel discovery filed this February, Smith’s attorneys warned that as soon as the DOC’s review ended, “we anticipate that Defendants will move to set another execution date for Mr. Smith and effectively moot this litigation before Mr. Smith has an opportunity for discovery” by killing Smith. The successful execution of Barber might aid the state’s argument in favor of resuming executions writ large, including Smith’s.

Barber, meanwhile, is at peace. “I’m in excellent spirits,” he wrote to me recently. “God has been so faithful and kind to me! … To worry is a form of fear, and we don’t have that spirit! Only love, joy, peace and sanity. Fear is an unrealistic concern for something that does not exist. No fear. And if and when that moment appears, Gods promise is about to be mine! No fear or dread Miss Liz. Just a reverent awe for my Lord.”

Barber’s execution, like all of the other past and future executions in Alabama, would be, in Ivey’s telling, for the victims and their families—though in Barber’s case, at least one member of his victim’s family has forgiven him, and isn’t looking forward to his execution. Barber and Sarah Gregory, his victim’s granddaughter, connected via letter in 2020, and have developed a friendship since. Yet victims’ family members who do not wish to see prisoners executed don’t seem to be who the governor has in mind; the botched execution of Joe Nathan James in July of 2022 also happened against the express and vocal wishes of his victim’s family. Whatever desire is actually driving Alabama’s zealous pursuit of judicial killings, it seems related to the wishes of grieving families only theoretically, not specifically.

In the years during and after World War II, the battle against fascism spread to an unanticipated front line: the national conscience of the United States. The warriors in this fight, many of them Black and Jewish veterans of combat abroad, insisted that America confront and rectify its homegrown racial hierarchy and religious intolerance. “Double V” was the slogan coined by the African American newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier, meaning victory over Hitler abroad and over Jim Crow at home.

The seeds of what would eventually become the civil-rights movement included not only mass protest and political mobilization but a wide array of cultural and artistic expressions. Some of them—Frank Sinatra’s song and short film The House I Live In; a Superman radio serial pitting the Man of Steel against a thinly veiled version of the Ku Klux Klan—sought nothing less than a redefinition of American identity that would embrace racial and religious minorities. In his 1945 film, Sinatra came to the defense of a Jewish boy menaced by a gentile mob. On the radio serial a year later, Superman protected a Chinese American teenager from the lethal assault of the “Clan of the Fiery Cross.” The lyrics of The House I Live In captured the new ethos: “The faces that I see / All races and religions / That’s America to me.”

Alongside these sunnier affirmations of inclusion, there appeared a withering critique of American bigotry in the form of a very specific subset of books. All of them, whether fictional or factual, employed the identical device of a writer going undercover to discover and expose the bigoted netherworld of white Christian America. Within the finite period of six years beginning in 1943, these books became both commercial phenomena and effective goads to the national soul. They explicitly sought a mass audience by employing devices borrowed from detective novels, espionage fiction, and muckraking journalism: the secret search, the near-escape from being found out, the shocking revelation of the rot hiding just below the surface of normal life. Whatever these books may have lacked in sentence-to-sentence literary elegance, they made up for with page-turning drama.

Unfortunately, for the most part, they have since been forgotten, or simply overwhelmed by the volume of World War II self-congratulation, however well deserved. But in their own time period, when these books were reaching millions of readers, a victorious America was by no means presumed to be an innocent America. Within a year of V-J Day, the investigative journalist John Roy Carlson released his exposé of domestic right-wing extremism, The Plotters, and laid out the stakes starkly:

We’ve won the military war abroad but we’ve got to win the democratic peace at home. Hitlerism is dead, but incipient Hitlerism in America has taken on a completely new star-spangled face. It follows a ‘Made in America’ pattern which is infinitely subtler and more difficult to guard against than the crude product of the [pro-fascist German American] Bundists. It is found everywhere at work in our nation. It’s as if the living embers had flown over the ocean and started new hate fires here while the old ones were dying in Europe.

Carlson did not need Nazi Germany to alert him to the perils of mass bigotry. His real name was Avedis Derounian, and as a boy, he had fled the Turkish genocide against Armenians. Having mastered English as a high-school student on Long Island and an undergraduate at New York University, Derounian found his way during the late 1930s into Friends of Democracy, an anti-fascist organization led by a Unitarian minister. With the title of chief investigator and a salary of $50 a week, Derounian developed a cover as the publisher of a pro-fascist newspaper, the Christian Defender, and soon found situations where he could immerse himself in the purpose of exposing the purveyors of hate: a pro-Nazi summer camp on Long Island, the “Christian Mobilizers” militia formed by the right-wing radio priest Charles Coughlin, and also a Bund rally in Madison Square Garden that flanked a portrait of George Washington with a pair of swastikas.     

[Read: The new anarchy]

Derounian inhabited his doppelgänger so deftly that sometimes he even joined in the shouting. His Christian Defender newspaper looked so genuine that the U.S. State Department launched an investigation of it and Derounian hurriedly stopped publishing. All this derring-do led to some trenchant and disturbing conclusions. “My experience convinced me,” Derounian wrote, “that under the slogans of ‘patriotism’ they were inoculating innocent Americans with the virus of hate, undermining confidence in our leaders, promoting hate and suspicion.”

When his book Under Cover landed—all 521 pages, not counting index, illustrated with dozens of reproduced extremist documents—it was impossible to ignore. According to a compilation by Andrew Immerwahr, a historian of ideas, Under Cover was the best-selling nonfiction book in America in 1943, ultimately going through 20 printings. The Army Air Forces had Derounian speak to enlisted men on the theme “The Enemy Within.”

At the book’s end, Derounian promised readers (and himself), “I am going back to the world I left behind … to live in the sunshine again.” He did no such thing. Instead, he cloaked himself in the character of Robert Thompson, a disgruntled war veteran, and extended his stealthy inquiry from America’s wartime traitors to its peacetime demagogues. Most prominent among them was Gerald L. K. Smith, the minister who founded the America First political party (the name an homage to the isolationist movement that featured the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh) as the electoral vehicle for his virulent racism and anti-Semitism. But Derounian also found extremism in women’s groups with such anodyne names as “United Mothers.”        

“The conclusion is inescapable,” Derounian wrote, “that while we have won a war of democracy over fascist evil abroad, we have allowed hate and prejudice to gain a firm foothold at home.” A page later, he continued, “The grim fact is that they have infiltrated into the warp and woof of American life.”        

Given the massive attention that Derounian’s books received, it seems entirely possible, even probable, that the novelist Laura Z. Hobson took note of his methodology. Though her married surname obscured the fact, Hobson was the daughter of two Jewish immigrants of socialist leanings, and the Z stood for her family patronymic of Zametkin. Her novel Gentleman’s Agreement—excerpted in Cosmopolitan magazine in late 1946 and published in early 1947—inverted Derounian’s tactic of pretending to be an extremist by having a gentile journalist, Philip Green, purport to be Jewish in order to write a magazine exposé about anti-Semitism. And whereas Derounian had revealed the bellicose, violent style of Jew-hating embodied by Silver Shirts, the German American Bund, and their ilk, Hobson used the fictive Green to unveil the polite, socially acceptable anti-Semitism of the country club and exclusive hotels and neighborhoods. Eventually Green’s own fiancée shows herself to be one of those refined bigots, or at least an apologist for them, and the revelation ruptures the couple’s engagement.

“It’s just that I’ve come to see that lots of nice people who aren’t [anti-Semites] are their unknowing helpers and connivers,” Green lectures his fiancée. “People who’d never beat up a Jew or yell kike at a child. They think antisemitism is something way off there, in a dark crackpot place with low-class morons. That’s the biggest thing I’ve discovered about this whole business.”

Hobson’s message clearly struck a chord. Gentleman’s Agreement went through three printings before its official publication date and ultimately sold 1.6 million copies. As a manual of moral instruction, Gentleman’s Agreement was released in a special Armed Services Edition for the American military. Magnifying the novel’s impact, a film adaptation written by Moss Hart, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Gregory Peck as Philip Green received eight Oscar nominations in 1948 and won three, including for Best Picture and Best Director. A straight line can easily be drawn from Peck playing one version of the ethical role model in Gentleman’s Agreement and another 15 years later as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

[Read: Is Holocaust education making anti-Semitism worse?]

In the same year when the fictive Philip Green loomed so large in American popular culture, an award-winning journalist was undertaking a real-life version of passing. Ray Sprigle of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had already won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing that Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. For another investigative scoop, Sprigle had disguised himself as a psychiatric patient in order to expose an abusive state hospital. But to similarly report on racism in the South, Sprigle, who was white, needed to fake his way across the color line. He failed in several attempts to chemically dye his skin, because the substances could cause illness or even death if he kept using them, before settling on shaving his scalp to leave no telltale straight hairs and then tanning for three weeks in Florida. His success at the deception depended on the “one-drop rule” of racial identity, in which any American with the slightest fraction of African ancestry, regardless of pigment, was categorized as Black. In a way, Sprigle was reversing the passing formula deployed by Walter White, the executive director of the NAACP, who used his fair skin and hair to pretend to be white while courageously researching racist attacks, many of them against Black war veterans returning to the South.

With the pseudonym of James R. Crawford and a backstory about being “a light-skinned Negro from Pittsburgh,” Sprigle crossed the Mason-Dixon line—the “Smith and Wesson line to us black folk”—in one of the all-Black railroad carriages known as a “Jim Crow car.” During four “fear-filled weeks,” Sprigle embedded himself in the very heart of the former Confederacy: Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. He bore witness to the financial exploitation of the sharecropping system, the miserly funding for Black schools, the refusal of white hospitals to admit a Black woman needing an emergency Cesarean section, who ultimately died untreated. Sprigle also paid sympathetic attention to the echelon of Black professionals—dentists, professors, doctors, lawyers, NAACP activists, real-estate developers—who nonetheless found their social status to be relegated below the poorest, least-educated white person.

“These whites … were a people entirely alien to me, a people set far apart from me and my world,” Sprigle wrote in his Black persona. “The law of this new land I had entered decreed that I had to eat apart from these pale-skinned men and women—behind that symbolic curtain.” At the same time, he added perceptively, “Not that I wanted to ride with these whites or eat with them. What I resented was their impudent assumption that I wanted to mingle with them, their arrogant and conceited pretense that no matter how depraved and degenerate some of them might be, they [were] … of a superior breed.”

Sprigle produced a 21-part series for the Post-Gazette, “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days,” which began running in August 1948. Newspapers as wide-ranging as the Pittsburgh Courier, The Seattle Times, and the New York Herald Tribune reprinted the series, providing national exposure. Then, in 1949, Simon & Schuster collected the articles in book form under the title In the Land of Jim Crow.

The effect that Derounian, Hobson, and Sprigle had on American public opinion and policy cannot be quantified. But it also seems more than accidental that their books—along with Sinatra’s song and film; the Superman radio series; and such works as Richard Wright’s memoir, Black Boy (1945), and Gunnar Myrdal’s sociological tome, An American Dilemma (1944)—coincided with a surge of activism against racism and anti-Semitism during the 1940s. One need not employ the term woke to suggest that these books, movies, songs, and comics roused many Americans from a complacent moral slumber.

The Democratic Party embraced civil rights for the first time in its platform at the 1948 convention, driving the bloc of southern segregationists to form their Dixiecrat third party. Within weeks of the convention, President Harry Truman issued executive orders desegregating the military and the federal workforce. Also in 1948, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that restrictive covenants, the sort routinely used to keep Black people, Jews, and other minority groups out of certain neighborhoods, were unconstitutional. These efforts amounted to a kind of proto–civil-rights movement, anticipating what we know as the civil-rights movement that launched in the mid-1950s with the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet Ray Sprigle’s book about his time being Black in the South sold only modestly, and that disappointing outcome may well have reflected more than the endemic capriciousness of the publishing industry. The historical moment during and immediately after the war years, when America belatedly began to redress its own deep-seated prejudices, ended as abruptly as one could say the words Cold War. By 1949, the anti-fascist alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union had mutated into global ideological and military rivalry. As Derounian had presciently foreseen in The Plotters, the specter (and partial but exaggerated reality) of communism in the United States had supplanted the actually existing presence of American right-wing extremists as public enemy No. 1. To express the belief that America was imperfect, indeed hypocritical, in its claims of equality, was to risk being branded disloyal and caught up in the Red Scare.

[Read: America has had it worse]

None of Hobson’s subsequent novels nearly equaled the sales of Gentleman’s Agreement. Derounian wrote only one more book in the remaining decades of his life, dying in 1991 at the age of 82. Sprigle died in a car accident in 1957. Four years later, the white writer John Howard Griffin basically adopted Sprigle’s idea and method of traversing the Jim Crow South as a Black man. (Unlike Sprigle, Griffin was able to dye his skin dark without medical risks.) With the civil-rights movement compelling America to once again regard itself in the moral mirror, Griffin’s book Black Like Me sold more than 1 million copies and was adapted for a film. More recently, one of Sprigle’s successors at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Bill Steigerwald, recounted the race series in a 2017 book, 30 Days a Black Man. And Rachel Maddow’s 2022 podcast, Ultra, which focused on the pro-Nazi movement in 1940s America, made reference to Derounian’s work in Under Cover.

Among these authors of the 1940s, Hobson has fared best. But the lingering impact of Gentleman’s Agreement surely owes more to the film adaptation, which neatly pruned away some of the novel’s formulaic subplots, than the book itself. The works of Derounian and Sprigle, so daring in their time, fit very awkwardly within current norms. ABC News lost a federal court case (though the verdict was reversed on appeal) for planting reporters with false résumés as workers in Food Lion supermarkets to expose unsafe practices. The Chicago Sun-Times was denied a Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for a series about corrupt city inspectors that involved creating a phony bar, wryly called the Mirage, that was staffed by journalists and equipped with hidden cameras. As for a journalist or nonfiction author pretending to be a Black person, even for the sake of chronicling discrimination, the gambit would assuredly be reviled as cultural appropriation at best and its own form of liberal racism at worst.

And in Trumpian America, the excretions of racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and on down the list hardly feel the need to hide. Yet, for that very reason, there is immense value in cracking open the books of Derounian and his fellow truth detectives from nearly 80 years ago. They provide a piercing reminder of the deep roots, indeed the nearly identical vocabulary and populist demagoguery, of the hatred on such lurid display today.

In 2023, the options for a build-your-own fast-casual lunch can include wild Alaskan salmon, harissa honey chicken, cauliflower shawarma, seasonal roasted zucchini, preserved lemon vinaigrette, za’atar bread crumbs, creamy vegan feta, and skhug. But whatever you choose, it will all inevitably be served in a compostable bowl. As an office worker blessed (and cursed) with endless overpriced meal options, I have shoveled way too much random food into my mouth from a compostable vessel, using a compostable utensil.

The forks, in particular, are not prone to subtlety: Some are embossed with the word COMPOSTABLE; others are green, in case anyone forgets they are “green.” But the compostable-packaging takeover has been tough to miss. Perhaps you have gotten leftovers in a compostable container, stuffed groceries into a compostable produce bag, or sipped coffee out of a compostable straw. Compostable packaging “is growing, and growing a lot,” David Henkes, a food-industry analyst at Technomic, told me. By 2021, 7 percent of all food-service packaging was compostable, Henkes said; its share has almost certainly grown since then, especially in major cities. Among the companies that now use it: Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Cava, Sweetgreen, Panera Bread, Taco Bell, and Frito-Lay.

But although compostable packaging is easy to spot, compost bins to put it in are not. All of my office forks and soggy fiber packaging have gone straight into the kitchen trash, just like normal plastic would. Only a tiny fraction of this compostable packaging and plastic, it turns out, is actually getting composted. Even if restaurants, homes, and office buildings have composting bins, in most places this pile of compostable trash has nowhere to go: America doesn’t have the composting infrastructure to deal with it. These products might have the potential to be better for the planet than traditional plastic, but right now, compostable plastic is just plastic.

What makes plastic so great is also what makes it so terrible. The substance, created from fossil fuels, is cheap, moldable, and so durable that most plastic that humans have ever produced still exists. Compostable plastic is made by chemically manipulating plant sugars such as corn starch and sugar cane to achieve similar properties; the flimsier, cardboardlike compostable bowls are molded out of bamboo and other plant fibers. The promise of these products is the same: Whereas a plastic fork or bowl might get used for just a few minutes before lingering in the environment forever, a compostable version degrades over time, not unlike an apple core you throw away in the woods. Only more slowly. Much more slowly.

In most cases, compostable plastic is compostable only under very specific conditions. “It’s not like what you would do in your yard if you tried to compost a banana peel,” Sarah-Jeanne Royer, an oceanographer at Hawaii Pacific University, told me. “You need to have access to a composting facility.” And a home compost pile is like the industrial version in the same way that a pickup-basketball game among preteens is the same sport as the NBA. Fruit and vegetables start to dissolve into soil within a few weeks; meat takes a little longer. Eventually, any form of compostable plastic should break down too, Frederick Michel Jr., a compost expert at Ohio State University, told me. Eventually. In one study, compostable plastic bags buried in soil for three years were so sturdy they could still hold a full load of groceries. Royer submerged a type of compostable plastic in seawater and could not find any signs of degradation 428 days later.

A commercial plant speeds that timeline up to just a few months, using machinery that encourages the best possible conditions for composting. The bugs and microbes that break down organic matter release heat in the process, and all the rotting waste at a composting facility can routinely hit temperatures of 160 degrees. You will never achieve that at home.

But good luck finding one of those facilities. America is churning out all of this biodegradable packaging without the ability to process it: The entire country has roughly 200 full-scale food-waste composting plants, and about three-fifths of those accept compostable packaging, according to not-yet-published research from BioCycle. In practice, getting your compostable plastic into one of those plants means living in one of just a few cities—San Francisco, Seattle, parts of New York—that picks up compost just like trash and recycling and trucks it to a plant. Everyone else is left in compost deserts, Michel said. In Ohio, “the only way for me to compost is in my backyard,” he said. Cities as big as Atlanta do not have a composting plant within an hour’s drive; the entire state of Alabama does not have a single place that can digest compostable plastic.

The companies using these products are aware of these limitations. Consider the 10-email exchange I had with Cava, trying to confirm that the fast-casual chain does in fact use compostable bowls, which the spokesperson originally outright denied. It ended with the spokesperson acknowledging that “CAVA’s bowl containers are primarily made of bagasse” (which is made from sugar cane and is compostable) but that “there are some limitations to the availability of composting facilities, which is why CAVA is careful about how they talk about it.” And in the long term, companies who are handing out single-use items should be trying to switch over. A single fork turned back into biomass is more biodegradation than most of the plastic in human history has ever done. So much of the world’s plastic is used for packaging that, with the proper infrastructure, “if everything that’s now plastic was made out of compostable plastic, then it would dramatically change what we are looking at,” Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineer at Michigan State who studies renewable plastics, told me. The equivalent of a dump truck’s worth of plastic sloshes into the ocean every minute, entangling wildlife, poisoning the soil and water, and splitting into microplastics that accumulate up the food chain; replacing that with something even marginally less permanent would be a positive change.

As long as compostable plastic is ending up in landfills, though, the math is less favorable. In a dump, these products may not biodegrade for more than a century. And they can have an additional knock against them: In the anaerobic conditions of a landfill, certain types of compostable plastic can also spew methane, a greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Compostable plastic might backfire in other ways too. A push against single-use plastic has made lots of people reconsider, even if briefly, whether to use that plastic plate or bowl or straw; compostable products implicitly signal to consumers that they can use these instead and walk away with a lighter conscience. “Marketing people are always asking me, ‘So what about compostable plastic?’” says Claire Sand, a packaging consultant for major companies, because consumers badly want this to be the answer to single-use plastic. In the U.S., all certified compostable products are required to have a label making clear that they are meant to be composted in “aerobic municipal and industrial composting facilities.” But fine print is easy to overlook with all the green colors and brand names, including EarthChoice, Eco-Baggeez, Greenware, and Responsible Products. And though a plastic takeout container can live a second life as pseudo-Tupperware, and a plastic bag as a garbage liner, many compostable versions just don’t cut it.

Both compostable plastic—and America’s composting network—will get better. Diverting compostable stuff from landfills is so important for making a dent in emissions that the federal government is throwing $90 million at it. Plenty of companies are also trying to make better compostable products: Can I interest you in plastic that turns into protein powder, banana-peel plastic, avocado plastic, and seaweed plastic? Still, finding the right balance between durability and compostability is tough. No one wants a box of spoons that rots after three weeks in your cupboard.

If you must buy compostable plastic products, some are better than others. Look for items that are certified by the Biodegradable Products Institute (BPI), and whenever possible, TÜV OK Compost Home, Michel said, a European standard that signifies that the plastic should disintegrate even in home compost piles. And try to avoid anything made of polylactic acid, or PLA, which is the among most onerous biodegradable plastic to compost, though also the most popular. Broadly speaking, the less something is like real plastic, the easier it is to break down. The best compostable utensil is not embossed with COMPOSTABLE or green in color but made of untreated wood. “It is inherently compostable and does not really pose any more of an issue than a branch falling off of a tree,” Michel said.

The other alternative is, well, not just swapping one kind of single-use plastic with another. Somehow, metal straws have joined the pantheon of reusable water bottles and coffee cups that people trek around, but you know what is already far more readily available? Silverware. Earlier this week, just after tossing my soggy fast-casual bowl to its ominous fate in the trash can, I noticed a clean metal fork sitting on my desk, just waiting for me to use it.

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science and Educational Media Group.