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There’s Donald Trump, and there’s everyone else. At the moment, the former president of the United States appears unbeatable in the 2024 Republican primary race. But perhaps inevitable is a trickier word than it seems.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Ukraine after the deluge The misunderstood reason millions of Americans stopped going to church One more COVID summer?

It’s Iowa Time

What happens when you say the unsayable? Former Congressman (and current GOP presidential contender) Will Hurd found out the hard way Friday night. “Donald Trump is not running for president to make America great again,” Hurd told the Republican masses inside the Iowa Events Center. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.”

The boos rained down, and, rest assured, they were mighty.

Hurd was one of 13 candidates who had trekked to Des Moines for the Iowa GOP’s cattle-call event known as the Lincoln Dinner. Prospective voters and donors gathered roughly six months ahead of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucus to remind themselves of their importance, which may or may not be waning. The night was ostensibly a chance for Iowans to listen to a range of electability pitches. Former Vice President Mike Pence told the room he would reinstate a ban on transgender personnel in the U.S. military and endorsed the idea of a national abortion restriction after 15 weeks. The businessman Vivek Ramaswamy rattled off a list of government agencies he would shut down: the FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, and IRS. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis boasted that he had refused to let his state “descend into a Faucian dystopia” during the pandemic and called for term limits in Congress. (One dinner attendee, the 89-year-old Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley—currently serving his eighth term—probably didn’t like that one.)

The whole spectacle—including the after-parties where you could snap selfies with candidates or, at the DeSantis event, knock down a pyramid of Bud Light cans—felt like a study in performative competition.

Each speaker was given a democratizing 10-minute time limit to deliver his or her remarks (poor Asa Hutchinson suffered the embarrassment of having his mic cut off), but all were merely warm-up acts for the headliner. When Trump finally took the stage, he seemed tired, bored, and annoyed with this obligation. A lack of teleprompters meant that Trump spent the bulk of his 10 minutes looking down at printed notes, only occasionally making eye contact with the audience or ad-libbing. He got a few chuckles out of his old pandemic go-to, the “China virus.” He notably referred to his White House predecessor as “Barack Hussein Obama.” The only newish development was that Ron “DeSanctimonious” had been shortened to the easier-to-say but far more confusing “DeSanctis.”

Trump is not running as an incumbent, but it sure seems that way. A New York Times/Siena College poll out today shows Trump with a 37-point lead over DeSantis, who was the only other candidate able to crack double digits among respondents. Did January 6 matter? Do the indictments matter? Does anything remotely negative about Trump matter? Not yet. Trump remains the Katie Ledecky of the 2024 contest—so far ahead of the pack that it feels wrong to even call it a race. Trump knows it too. He may not even bother to show up at the first Republican debate next month, in Milwaukee.

These factors would suggest that the Republican Party is delaying the inevitable, that the GOP base earnestly wants to “Make America great again” … again. And yet, the various campaign buses keep on rolling across Iowa and New Hampshire. The noble attempts at retail politics and down-home charm continue apace. Pence strategically name-dropped the Iowa chain Pizza Ranch. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina tweeted a video of himself fist-pumping after sinking a bag in cornhole. (“If God made you a man, you play sports against men,” Scott said onstage Friday night.) Expect much more of this at the Iowa State Fair, which kicks off in just over a week.

I was in the press pen at the Lincoln Dinner on Friday night, and I spent the weekend in Iowa speaking with various Republicans about all things 2024. I came away with the sense that a not-insignificant portion of conservatives is willing to accept Trump’s dominance, but that many are still quietly hoping for a deus ex machina to avoid a 2020 rematch. The still-rolling indictments don’t seem to have much effect—too many Republican voters argue that the legal cases against Trump are politically motivated. He shows no signs of giving up his nickname, “Teflon Don.”

The fact that Trump is running from a stance of inevitability is paradoxically both emboldening and hindering. Trump doesn’t seem to want to actually be president (as Hurd suggested). Maybe he just wants to prove he can win again. Will that motivational gap matter to voters? Will anything matter?

Related:

The revenge of the normal Republicans The secret presidential-campaign dress code

Today’s News

A state judge in Georgia rejected Trump’s bid to derail the investigation into his attempts to overturn election results in the state. A Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown, killed at least six people, including a 10-year-old girl and her mother, and wounded dozens more. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for Sunday’s suicide bombing of a political rally in Pakistan that killed at least 54 people.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: In 1980, the film critic Roger Ebert argued that movies were better in theaters. The recent success of Barbenheimer is evidence—and points to the ongoing magic of communal experiences, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Getty / The Atlantic

The Myopia Generation

By Sarah Zhang

A decade into her optometry career, Marina Su began noticing something unusual about the kids in her New York City practice. More of them were requiring glasses, and at younger and younger ages. Many of these kids had parents who had perfect vision and who were baffled by the decline in their children’s eyesight. Frankly, Su couldn’t explain it either.

In optometry school, she had been taught—as American textbooks had been teaching for decades—that nearsightedness, or myopia, is a genetic condition. Having one parent with myopia doubles the odds that a kid will need glasses. Having two parents with myopia quintuples them. Over the years, she did indeed diagnose lots of nearsighted kids with nearsighted parents. These parents, she told me, would sigh in recognition: Oh no, not them too. But something was changing.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic

Read. “I Wish I Could Remember,” a new poem by Michael White.

“It’s just a dream, / I’d tell myself. But dreams are how / we travel through the dark”

Watch. Biopics tend to be “functional to a fault,” better at showcasing an actor than creating challenging art—but these 20 movies manage to break the mold, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last week, the podcast host Jack Wagner went viral on Twitter (er, X) with a prompt: “serious question: if the grateful dead is not the greatest band of all time from the united states then who is?” Thousands of responses poured in: The Beach Boys, The Allman Brothers Band, and The Velvet Underground kept surfacing among the many retorts (as did Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty; I don’t think you can really count either, because even though they play with backing bands, they’re solo artists.) I’m a Deadhead, but the strongest contender I saw was Creedence Clearwater Revival. CCR’s Willy and the Poor Boys remains one of the greatest rock records ever. You likely know “Fortunate Son” and “Down on the Corner,” but the album also features an awesome cover of “The Midnight Special”—I love the moment when the whole band kicks in just after the one-minute mark.

— John

Nicole Blackwood 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.

Are you on Bluesky? Let’s be honest: Probably not. The Twitter clone is still in beta and has been notoriously stingy with its invite codes. Its small size means that every time an influx of newbies arrives, the existing user base freaks out, filling the algorithmically curated “Discover” tab with incredibly overwrought complaints. A much-discussed recent post lamented that “Bluesky elders”—and here I should note that this is a service that launched a mobile version only in February—were suffering a degraded experience because of all the blow-ins. The phrase has become an instant meme.

You need to know only two things about Bluesky. The first is that its users are trying to make the word skeeting happen, although it’s an even worse alternative to tweeting than Mastodon’s tooting. The second is that it operates at a high emotional pitch at all times. Whereas scrolling Twitter’s “For You” tab is now like bobbing for apples in a bowl full of amateur race scientists and Roman-statue avatars lamenting that we no longer build cathedrals, the Bluesky equivalent features discussions of whether sending death threats to the site’s developers is acceptable if they really, really deserve it.

As far as I can tell, Bluesky is siphoning off both Twitter’s most emotionally dysregulated users and its most committed shitposters. I dare not post there—my account was briefly the most blocked on the app, according to a tracking service—but it’s nice to see that a small, tight-knit, and politically distinctive community has formed, albeit around shared interests that include hating me. Although it is a mere fraction of the size of the big social networks, Bluesky appears to have hit the critical mass needed to sustain itself, suggesting that Elon Musk’s actions at Twitter have irreparably fractured the service. We are now living in the post-Twitter era, literally and metaphorically. After Musk’s rebrand, X marks the spot where a large number of people no longer want to be.

Until recently, I doubted that even an owner as slapdash and capricious as Musk could bring down Twitter. The narcissists and addicts who linger there would put a barnacle to shame. The site has always been much smaller than Facebook, and it only mattered because politicians, journalists, and those who currently pass for public intellectuals were using it. Whether you read The New York Times or watched Fox News, you would encounter content that began its life on Twitter. When Twitter kicked Donald Trump off, it severely dented his ability to derail the news agenda, because journalists simply weren’t prepared to join Truth Social, the right-wing platform that the former president himself controls.

[From the May 2022 issue: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid]

Now, though, I can see the first glimmers of a post-Twitter world. The weirdos, early adopters, shitposters, furries, and scolds are trying out Bluesky, where they can complain about “Elmo” and his tenure in charge of “the bird site.” Actual young people are on TikTok. True Boomers never made it to Twitter and are still happily posting on Facebook about UFOs and Bunco nights. A handful of disgruntled tweeters tried Post and Mastodon, but the first is a graveyard, and the second is an obstacle course for non-techie users. The normies and the brands went to Instagram’s new Threads app, and then many of the normies promptly left because Threads was too boring without enough weirdos, furries, or scolds to add seasoning to the mix. (Corporations might love placing their ads next to unobjectionable inspirational content, but the cumulative effect is to make Threads like watching a television channel entirely composed of infomercials.) Grindfluencers—the type of people who listen to 15-minute summaries of Freakonomics and The Art of War—have always been happiest on LinkedIn, posting about their podcast drops and congratulating you on your “work anniversary,” which is not and never will be a real thing. Instagram is still full of hot people who are feeling #blessed and keen to demonstrate this humility by posing in a bikini by an infinity pool. (If these posters have a hot sister, she can wear a bikini too, and then they can observe that #familyiseverything.) Twitter is now the social network of choice for people who know what a Sonnenrad is and, moreover, believe it has been unfairly maligned.

And some people will have looked at all of the options above and decided, at last, to touch grass.

Many controversies in the early era of social media grew out of the assumption that users had a singular, coherent identity across platforms. The researchers danah boyd and Alice Marwick described the resulting discord as “context collapse”: Users invited criticism by speaking offhandedly, as if in a private room, before potentially limitless audiences on Twitter or Facebook. Too often, a joke that would have slayed between two close friends was held up for wider disapproval in a BuzzFeed listicle or a TV-news chyron. Now we have become better at sorting ourselves into different modes in different spaces, to the extent that I have seen people lament that they know who they are on Instagram and they know who they are on Twitter, but I don’t know who I am on Threads.

[Yair Rosenberg: How to redeem social media]

Given this trend, the surprise isn’t that Twitter has now splintered, but that it lasted so long. For many years, it was a coliseum where both the gladiators and the lions had volunteered to be. Twitter allowed the right to troll the libs, and the libs to mount cancellation campaigns against the slightly less lib.

Was that healthy? For a long time, I worried about the proliferation of what the Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser called “filter bubbles,” which he defined as “your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online.” Perhaps polarization was driven by our imprisonment in echo chambers, I thought, and we were succumbing to pluralistic ignorance—a lack of awareness of the majority view. Now I wonder if the past decade of social media drove us all too far in the other direction, toward spending too much time with people unlike ourselves, herded together in ways that exaggerated our differences.

In 2018, the rationalist blogger who goes by Scott Alexander published a short story called “Sort by Controversial.” In it, a tech-start-up employee invents a program that can spit out “scissor statements”—assertions that instantly divide groups down the middle. The world avoids falling into perpetual low-grade warfare only because she accidentally creates a scissor statement that tears apart the company before its work is finished. The story captured the sense of social media as a rolling referendum on every subject under the sun. Were you a plane-seat recliner? Must you feed a visiting child dinner if they stayed late at your house? Was the dress blue or white? In political debates, that meant being force-fed the most head-banging obsessions of your political opponents. Take the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which exists purely to harvest ultraprogressive views from one social network and serve them up to another social network as rage bait. Its popularity makes me think that filter bubbles, at least in a mild form, might not be such a bad idea.

In order to thrive, communities need boundaries and norms—and even, God help us, elders. That’s why I enjoy sticking my nose into Bluesky and taking a deep huff every so often. It’s a walled garden for people with a mutual interest in anime genitalia and cruel jokes about Mitch McConnell. They’re happy there. You probably wouldn’t be. And that’s okay.

This article was originally published in bioGraphic.

One dusky June evening, two days before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, the biologist Sarah Lower sat on a back porch, watching the sky for a specific gradation of twilight. A group of Lower’s students from Bucknell University hung around her, armed with butterfly nets and stopwatches for counting the time between firefly flashes—a way to differentiate between the multiple lightning-bug species that live here at the edge of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest. This postindustrial expanse of second-growth trees and hills pimpled with oil wells also happens to rank among the world’s best places to see fireflies.

Once the cloudy sky blushed red from its last glimpse of the setting sun, I set out with Lower and her students toward the forest edge. Moving from habitat to habitat as the evening deepened, Lower narrated which species we saw and their different behaviors. Her students, meanwhile, netted their way down a wish list of research samples.

First up was Photinus macdermotti, a firefly species that emits two quick flashes. Just a few feet away, near a pond ringed by cattails where a beaver lazed face up, the students caught Photinus marginellus, a quick single flasher. Males buzzed around one patch of goldenrod, blinking quick winks at the sitting females who deigned to flash back. Like other species of fireflies, males of P. marginellus typically flash in flight, while females wait below on blades of grass, shooting answering flashes at only the most compelling suitors.

At first, these early-evening species looked almost like pixels of static. But the darker it got, the more they came to resemble dust motes twinkling in invisible sunbeams.

Half an hour later, we moved on. Heading across Pennsylvania Route 666 and past a modest farmhouse, we reached a small path leading down to Tionesta Creek, which parallels the road. By now the air had chilled. Twilight drained away the last notes of color, a dullness almost immediately punctuated by a yet-undescribed firefly species from the genus Photuris, nicknamed “Chinese lanterns” by Lower and her team. Each flash set the fireflies aglow for long beats of unearthly green so bright they illuminated surrounding vegetation. A student snagged one in a net, marveling at its size—several times larger than the species they’d already collected. Irritated or alarmed, the captured firefly switched to a faster pulse, reminiscent of a car alarm.

“These are the ‘I’m angry’ lights,” Lower explained.

Clumsy in the dark but reluctant to spoil our night vision with flashlights, we meandered along the creek to where a bridge spanned the water, overlooking an island spiked with conifers. From the base of the island to the tree canopy, a galaxy of fireflies shone in drifts or brief flashes, complemented by a starry sky overhead. Their flashes merged with the stars into a doubly scintillating reflection in the water below. It was a dazzling scene, and one that hundreds of people would soon flock here to see as the Firefly Festival got under way.

Around the world, firefly tourism is surging in popularity. The interest gives scientists like Lower hope that funding and conservation will follow, because fireflies—like other dark-dependent invertebrates—are succumbing to our society’s penchant for sterile lawns and careless nighttime lighting. But the choice to open any of the world’s most spectacular firefly sites to the public focuses these same pressures to a sharp point. When the founders of the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival chose to share their backyard’s magic with the world a decade ago, did they further imperil the local firefly population? Or, by giving people like me the chance to stand on a bridge, balanced between galaxies, did they play a small role in protecting one of our most beloved summer spectacles?

On another June night, in 2012, a group of visitors arrived at Ken and Peggy Butler’s bed-and-breakfast, out past reliable cell service in Forest County, Pennsylvania. Peggy was a school therapist, Ken a money manager, and they had moved out into the northwest corner of the state for the quiet and the fly-fishing.

These visitors were not the Butlers’ typical bed-and-breakfast guests. The roving band of firefly scientists lugged microscopes and butterfly nets into the Butlers’ garage, then spent the next six weeks venturing out in tick-proof gear each evening, surveying fireflies where the Butler’s grassy backyard melted into the half-a-million-acre national forest. What they found was nothing short of astonishing—a wonderland of evolutionary biology amid the quiet, unimposing hills of rural Pennsylvania.

[Read: Will these be the last polar bears on Earth?]

One theory holds that bioluminescence emerged on Earth half a billion to 2 billion years ago in organisms to which oxygen was toxic. This theory holds that some life forms evolved a chemical process that could consume and detoxify any offending molecules while popping out a little bit of light as a harmless by-product.

Whatever its primordial purpose, bioluminescence has since emerged or reemerged at least 94 times across the tree of life, according to recent counts. The specifics of how different single-celled organisms and larger creatures accomplish their own glow-up tricks vary, but a general pattern holds across many examples. Bioluminescent organisms like fireflies have enzymes called luciferases (from the Latin lucifer, meaning “light-bringer”), which they apply inside specialized lantern organs, alongside a pinch of oxygen and a little bit of energy, to another class of compounds called luciferins. Et voilà: A photon of light comes out.

Most creatures who adapt this ancient chemistry to their own ends reside in the ocean: electric-blue crustaceans, fish that use dim lights to cloak themselves from predators, and deep-sea squid that scintillate like alien spacecraft. A few, like New Zealand’s glowworms, live in caves. Fireflies, conversely, are easy to see, flickering at the edge of backyards, captured in jars, shining in the childhood memories of millions as a stand-in for nostalgia or wonder. Perhaps because they’re the type of bioluminescent creature people are most likely to encounter, fireflies hold a special allure—often they’re a gateway to an underappreciated, imperiled cosmos of nocturnal biodiversity.

To date, scientists have described more than 2,000 species of fireflies. Some are active during the day, communicating via pheromones. But the most well known come out during the evening or night to inscribe bursts of light into the air like species-specific autographs. The researchers who first came to survey the species in the Butlers’ backyard included Lower, who was then a graduate student, and Lynn Faust, an independent naturalist and firefly expert. The team reported at least 15 species in all, the insects living practically on top of one another.

Two species in particular stood out. The researchers spotted clouds of one famous and rare firefly, Photinus carolinus, which flashes in synchronous bursts, causing larger groups of them to light up in near unison in a wave that moves across the forest. Then they discovered what appeared to be a new species, the one they nicknamed “Chinese lanterns,” flying like lazy sparks above a campfire for long beats of electric lime green. Both these and the synchronizers, wrote Faust in the survey report, “easily reached the ‘WOW!’ level.”

For the Butlers, the choice now was whether the scientists should be vague or precise about the location of the firefly wonderland. “If you decide you don’t want to pursue anything with this, we will keep it quiet,” Faust told the Butlers. “You can just go about your lives as normal as possible.”

The Butlers evaluated their options. Make the report as specific as you like, they said. How many people could possibly come?

Faust knew the answer to that question. She had begun her own path to the forefront of firefly science not as a credentialed academic but as a young mother in 1992, when she invited scientists to her family’s cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee to study a spectacle her family had long referred to as “the light show.” As those scientists soon published, Faust’s family’s private light show was a proven example of synchronous fireflies.

Before long, people wanted to see for themselves. Many people. The synchronizers in Great Smoky Mountains National Park became an annual event on par with Fourth of July fireworks, drawing more than 26,000 tourists a year. Visitors clomped through the forest, often crushing female fireflies underfoot or disorienting the insects with their flashlight beams. “I have crouched in the dark woods, illuminated by the rhythmic flashes, and wept over the unintended consequences,” Faust wrote in her 2017 book, Fireflies, Glow-worms, and Lightning Bugs, one of the few authoritative field guides to North American fireflies.

She also felt, however, that many of these clompers would otherwise never go out in the dark with eyes and hearts open to nature. Was sharing the Smoky Mountain fireflies with the world the right call? “It depends on which night you get me,” she told me recently.

Humans’ fascination with fireflies has long been smothering. In the early 20th century, hunters in the Japanese countryside stuffed fireflies into cages and shipped them to major cities such as Tokyo to glimmer out the rest of their lives as doomed mood lighting. Another wave of lighting-bug lust occurred in mid-century America, when a chemical company eager to harvest bioluminescent enzymes dispatched community groups and Boy Scouts as firefly collectors. And in China, 17 million fireflies were sold in 2016 alone, many over the eBay-like website Taobao, to customers who used them as living gifts, decorations, and Valentine’s Day–esque love tokens. (The chemical company stopped soliciting fireflies in the 1990s, and Taobao banned the sale of fireflies in 2017.)

Just going to see fireflies poses less obvious risk to them. But scientists have amassed some alarming reports. In Thailand, for example, where boats ferry tourists past mangrove-swamp forests pulsing with synchronous fireflies, scientists have documented shorelines eroding, gas leaking into the water, and camera flashes disturbing firefly courtship. At one popular Thai site, scientists have estimated that the population of one synchronizing-firefly species is down 80 percent since tourism began.

In a rural town in Mexico’s Tlaxcala state, where a new synchronizing-firefly species was formally recognized in 2012, tourism has since ballooned to some 120,000 visitors a year. And in North America, too, firefly tourism is on the rise. In Faust’s beloved Great Smokies, even after years of trying to throttle crowds—the National Park Service has instituted an online lottery to limit the number of visitors—some guests still head off into the forests and lie on the ground.

Tourism is far from the only threat to fireflies. As with many insects, data on lightning-bug populations are spotty, outside of a general, anecdotal sense that they’re blinking out. But insects overall are in crisis. Numerous studies suggest that within many insect groups, abundance is dwindling by 1 to 2 percent each year. An International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) group found in 2020 that fireflies face three primary threats.

The first is habitat loss, which eradicates all but the hardiest lightning bugs from developed areas, leaving species like the big-dipper firefly—the pigeon of the firefly world. Second, like other insect populations, fireflies also seem to be suffering collateral damage from pesticides used in agriculture. And, finally, on top of that is light pollution: the glare of each streetlight, LED-outfitted billboard, front-porch lamp, and every other fixture left on in the night. A recent global study estimated that the collective glow of all this wasted light is making the night sky about 10 percent brighter each year, bathing ever more of the planet’s nighttime surface in light. Such artificial lights threaten to drown firefly bioluminescent courtship signals in much the same way loudspeakers blaring out static would disrupt birdsong. The entomologist Avalon Owens, who studied fireflies for her Ph.D. dissertation at Tufts University, has found that even ambient light pollution can cause some firefly species to blink less often, transforming what should be call-and-response dialogues into a series of missed connections.

Our effort to understand how quickly fireflies are disappearing is also hampered by our relative ignorance of them. North American fireflies spend much of their lives as larvae wriggling through soil, where they hunt down worms and snails, inject their prey with enzymes, and slurp up the resultant puddle of goo. Once they emerge as short-lived adults, some species are known only by a specific flash that a naturalist described seeing in a dark jungle decades ago. When the IUCN published its first firefly-conservation-status survey in 2021, focusing on 132 species in North America, it classified 18 as threatened. But it categorized 70 more only as data deficient, meaning we don’t know enough about them to say how imperiled they might be.

“Compared to what the monarch people can do, it’s so sad,” says Owens. Unlike butterfly hobbyists, who go out in clubs during the daytime and have collected decades of data on population abundances, firefly surveying has historically been a solitary activity. “Each couple of decades, you get, like, one eccentric person who spends every night in the middle of the woods,” she adds.

“Five years ago we basically knew nothing,” says Sara Lewis, a biologist at Tufts. For years, Lewis designed careful lab experiments to understand firefly reproductive structures and behaviors. Then “a switch went off in my head, and I was like, wait, what difference does it make to know [these specific details about] a group of animals that could be extinct in 50 or 100 years?” Today, Lewis co-leads the IUCN’s efforts to keep firefly populations alive.

As some firefly populations fade to black, though, general and scientific interest is swelling. More people want to see fireflies for themselves, driving firefly tourism, and more scientists want to better understand firefly biology both for its own sake and for future conservation work. Perhaps the Butlers didn’t have to make the same stark choice Lynn Faust made in the Great Smoky Mountains. Perhaps tourism and science could complement each other. Maybe people could love fireflies neither too little nor too much but just the right amount.

The Butlers’ path to sustainable firefly tourism was rocky. The summer after Lynn Faust’s report on the Allegheny National Forest fireflies was published, the Butlers hosted the first Pennsylvania Firefly Festival—a free, two-night event in the grassy field behind their house. They had food trucks, face painting, and music. Some 400 people came. The next year was similar. Then, in 2015, David Attenborough and his crew came to the property to film a documentary called Life That Glows, hiring Lower and Faust as on-site firefly wranglers. “Then we knew: This is serious,” Peggy says.

After Attenborough’s film, things got out of hand. A thousand people showed up in 2016. Cars filled the field, and as they pulled out, every pair of headlights beamed into the woods, grinding the synchronous display to a halt. “It was like, this is gonna break us,” Peggy says. “This is going to kill us because it’s going to kill the fireflies.”

[Read: The myth of the Galápagos cannot be sustained]

Since then, the Butlers have taken steps to rein in the enthusiasm. First they started charging admission, which they funneled to a nonprofit called the Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, which supports research and sponsors graduate students. With advice from Lewis, they installed bleachers and red-rope lighting to keep visitors from trampling female fireflies and their habitat. After the pandemic forced a pause, they went even smaller: They sold just 100 tickets in 2022, divided into two nights.

At the same time, the Butlers built up closer ties with the scientific community, converting their bed-and-breakfast into something more like a hostel for visiting researchers. Among the scientists who kept coming back was Lower, who is studying the many firefly species that restrict their activities to the day and communicate with pheromones. Lower and her collaborators recently isolated the first known firefly pheromone, and she was at the Butlers’ in 2022 to determine what scents fireflies are using to attract one another, and whether light- and smell-based flirting are mutually exclusive.

The Butlers have also hosted research on how artificial light stifles fireflies. In recent years, ecologists have demonstrated that many species are more sensitive to blue colors of light. When Owens came here to test the least harmful colors of artificial light for fireflies in 2019, though, she found that amber-colored lights—darlings of the dark-sky environmental movement because most species, humans included, seem less bothered by them—are especially disruptive to fireflies. Red lights are still a good choice, Owens says, but the best strategy remains the most obvious: Just use light sparingly overall.

The research happening at the Butlers’ is just one part of a worldwide firefly renaissance. Setting aside habitat loss, light pollution, and pesticides, the known ranges of many firefly species seem to be expanding, Faust says, because more people are out looking. Starting from the “discovery” of synchronizing P. carolinus fireflies in the Smoky Mountains in the 1990s based on Faust’s reports, naturalists and scientists have recognized other P. carolinus outposts up and down the Appalachian Mountains. (The Xerces Society maintains a map of places that accept visitors to view these and other species.)

The same scientists whom Faust had summoned to Tennessee later documented synchrony in another American species, Photuris frontalis, which soon drew its own research scientists and crowds, which in turn helped spark the passion of new enthusiasts. After surviving a life-threatening car accident, for example, the North Carolina State University entomologist Clyde Sorenson told me he pursued research on fireflies for the pure joy of it. In 2019, Sorenson documented firefly synchrony on North Carolina’s Grandfather Mountain, and he has since been tracking down an undescribed “ghost” firefly species that emits faint green signals.

With firefly tourism on the rise as well, a team convened by Lewis published a set of recommendations in 2021 for how to manage the upswing of interest. Although tourism is unlikely to lead to global extinctions, it can certainly extirpate local populations, she says. The final report recommends robust habitat protection and education programs, including etiquette guides. For guests, that means carrying no artificial light sources and staying on marked trails; for hosts, it means limiting total visitor numbers, fencing off paths, and minimizing lighting. These are all steps that the Butlers have taken as part of their journey from wide-eyed enthusiasts to conservation advocates.

A few weeks before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, Ken and Peggy Butler visited their first international scientific conference, in Portugal. From the time their plane touched back down in the U.S. to the start of the festival, their days were packed with answering emails, wrangling volunteers, and accommodating an in-home guest list that had ballooned to festival presenters, interns, the troop of Bucknell researchers, and the latest visiting journalist.

Finally, a few hours before the 2022 festival’s first night, Ken and Peggy slowed down long enough to chat with me on their porch about their own learning experience. Sarah Lower listened in, pausing at one point to snatch another day-active, presumably pheromone-emitting firefly buzzing around us and slot it into a vial.

I asked whether the Butlers regretted the answer they had given to Faust a decade ago, when the choice to publish their location propelled the rest of their summers—and a sizable part of their lives—into firefly-land. “I’m a firm no,” Ken said, and Peggy agreed.

Once the festival began, local musician Matt Miskie played a set of songs, including one written for the event: “We’re out tonight,” the chorus goes, “beneath the Allegheny skies.” (He’s “the Jimmy Buffett of Western Pennsylvania,” Ken explained.) There was a merch table and exhibits: The astronomer Diane Turnshek, who had recently helped the city of Pittsburgh change its street lighting to limit light pollution, set up a booth promoting dark-sky environmentalism. Don Salvatore, a firefly naturalist and educator from New England, gave a Boston-accented presentation on firefly courtship. And then groups set out to see fireflies, guided by volunteers and the Bucknell students.

Even with the Butlers’ dedication to protecting fireflies and encouraging responsible tourism, nothing is perfect. That first evening got too cold, causing the synchronous fireflies to slow down and eventually stop flashing. One little girl, scared of the dark, had chosen to wear sneakers that burst out purple flashes with every step. An elderly woman sat in reverence and reminiscence at the edge of the woods, listening as Peggy explained firefly life history, but the car that fetched her back pierced the forest with its headlights.

And though the Butlers can control what happens on their own property, some of the most enticing firefly-viewing locations—like the magical bridge over Tionesta Creek—are public spaces subject to the choices of the entire community.

The nominal marquee show started at about 10 p.m. that evening, behind the house in the darker shadows of the woods. I stood in shivering silence, shoulder to shoulder with Miskie and a few other festival volunteers as a forest clearing’s worth of synchronous Photinus carolinus fireflies alternated between paparazzi bursts of quick white flashes and long, coordinated beats of collective quiet. A few straggling Chinese lanterns floated through their midst on their own tempo, unperturbed. Afterward, it was very, very hard to fall asleep.

When UPS delivery workers last went on strike, in 1997, the nature of their job was very different. Amazon, then merely an online bookstore, was barely two years out from its very first sale. Buying jeans, or new furniture, or really anything, still required most people to get in their car and head to the local mall. By the time the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced on Tuesday that it had reached a tentative agreement with UPS that would avoid a strike and keep hundreds of thousands of union members on the job, those workers’ role in American life had changed fundamentally.

The new contract, which still needs to be ratified by the union’s members, came not a moment too soon. UPS handles a quantity of stuff so enormous that the company estimates its workers put their hands on roughly 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and the company delivers nearly a quarter of all American packages. Internet retail and the volume of delivery services required to fill it have made America ever more dependent on the difficult, labor-intensive work of what’s known as last-mile package delivery. The country’s infrastructure and workforce are still struggling to catch up.

Even in the Amazon age, the volume of packages now delivered in the U.S. can sound completely absurd. In 2000, the United States Postal Service—the country’s biggest parcel shipper—delivered 2.4 billion packages. By 2022, that number had ballooned to 7.2 billion. UPS now handles 5.2 billion domestic packages annually, versus the 3.2 billion it handled in 2000, and Amazon’s logistics operation, which did not start delivering its own packages in earnest until 2018, has become the country’s third-largest shipper, delivering almost 5 billion (but not nearly all) of the company’s packages last year. And all of these packages are going to a customer base that has been trained by retailers to expect packages to arrive in just a few days—far faster than turnaround expectations used to be.

You might only really notice the handful of packages that come to your home each week (three to four in an average household). But every single time you get one, that same day there are more than 50 million other people in the country refreshing their tracking info and checking their doorbell-camera feeds to see if their new shoes or prescription refill has arrived too. And those packages had to be loaded onto a series of trucks, driven to an address, and then carried to a welcome mat by humans.

Spraying America with a nonstop fire hose of parcels has consequences that are tough for workers and not always visible to the rest of us. More packages require more trucks on the road, which means more semis on the country’s interstates and more oversize delivery vehicles on residential streets, worsening traffic for everyone. These vehicles put enormous stress on roads and bridges, requiring more frequent repairs. Streets built primarily for passenger cars can be too narrow or have turns too tight for even the most skilled drivers of cargo vehicles to navigate easily, and conducting so many home deliveries a year inevitably results in accidents, stuck vehicles, and injuries. These same roads tend not to have easy spots for trucks to park when it’s time to actually make a delivery, so they block streets and create more traffic. And each driver has to do it over and over again, dozens of times a day, until the country’s tens of millions of daily packages are delivered and each of hundreds of thousands of cargo vehicles is empty.

Once a package is off the truck, things aren’t necessarily much easier. Across the country, the median age of local housing stock predates the wide adoption of online shopping, which means that most homes were built before so many of us were getting stuff delivered multiple times a week while away at work. Mailboxes are mostly still the size that they’ve always been, so drivers need to chuck your stuff onto your porch or behind a bush and hope for the best. In apartment complexes, just gaining entry can be a struggle, and many older properties don’t have a mail room big enough to store everything safely. Unless you live in a luxury building, you probably don’t have a front desk with an attendant to accept packages in your stead. And when a bunch of brand-new, unsecured stuff is lying around, some of it is bound to get stolen, though assuming theft can be misguided: Package volume is so high and getting them all to the right place is such intricate work that a lot of missing packages were simply misdelivered.

And yet the size of delivery workforces at the country’s major shippers has not increased at the same rate as the boom in packages and the ever-shortening customer expectations on shipping time. Many shipping companies have hired lower-paid part-time workers to fill the gaps instead of creating new full-time jobs, and a significant portion of Amazon’s deliveries are made by gig workers who use their own vehicles and are paid by the package.

Gig worker or not, all of this work takes place every day of the year and mostly outside, so drivers are handling more parcels and doing more physical labor in a climate that’s becoming more extreme, and they’re doing it largely in cargo vehicles that lack air-conditioning. UPS drivers have died on the job from heat exposure, and in negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS, air-conditioning for delivery vehicles became a major sticking point. (The union’s new contract, if ratified, would guarantee AC in new delivery vehicles and add better ventilation to old ones.)

Still, better pay and safety improvements are only the first steps to address the larger spectrum of issues that delivery workers face in moving around so many packages so quickly. Improvements to road and bridge safety are not sexy line items on government budgets, and the trucks will keep rolling whether those improvements are made or not. It may just be impossible to fully retrofit the delivery economy that’s been foisted on Americans by tech companies into the physical reality of daily life. Shippers are going to keep trying anyway.

Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.

This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.

[Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival]

A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,” in the book’s lingo—and what, if anything, can be done to get some people to come back. The book raises an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?

The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away. This is, of course, an indictment of the failures of many leaders who did not address abuse in their church. But Davis and Graham also find that a much larger share of those who have left church have done so for more banal reasons. The book suggests that the defining problem driving out most people who leave is … just how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

Numerous victims of abuse in church environments can identify a moment when they lost the ability to believe, when they almost felt their faith draining out of them. The book shows, though, that for most Americans who were once a part of churches but have since left, the process of leaving was gradual, and in many cases they didn’t realize it was even happening until it already had. It’s less like jumping off a cliff and more like driving down a slope, eventually realizing that you can no longer see the place you started from.

Consider one of the composite characters that Graham and Davis use in the book to describe a typical evangelical dechurcher: a 30-something woman who grew up in a suburban megachurch, was heavily invested in a campus ministry while in college, then after graduating moved into a full-time job and began attending a young-adults group in a local church. In her 20s, she meets a guy who is less religiously engaged, they get married, and, at some point early in their marriage, after their first or second child is born, they stop going to church. Maybe the baby isn’t sleeping well and when Sunday morning comes around, it is simply easier to stay home and catch whatever sleep is available as the baby (finally) falls asleep.

In other cases, a person might be entering mid-career, working a high-stress job requiring a 60- or 70-hour workweek. Add to that 15 hours of commute time, and suddenly something like two-thirds of their waking hours in the week are already accounted for. And so when a friend invites them to a Sunday-morning brunch, they probably want to go to church, but they also want to see that friend, because they haven’t been able to see them for months. The friend wins out.

After a few weeks of either scenario, the thought of going to church on Sunday carries a certain mental burden with it—you might want to go, but you also dread the inevitable questions about where you have been. “I skipped church to go to brunch with a friend” or “I was just too tired to come” don’t sound like convincing excuses as you rehearse the conversation in your mind. Soon it actually sounds like it’d be harder to attend than to skip, even if some part of you still wants to go. The underlying challenge for many is that their lives are stretched like a rubber band about to snap—and church attendance ends up feeling like an item on a checklist that’s already too long.

What can churches do in such a context? In theory, the Christian Church could be an antidote to all that. What is more needed in our time than a community marked by sincere love, sharing what they have from each according to their ability and to each according to their need, eating together regularly, generously serving neighbors, and living lives of quiet virtue and prayer? A healthy church can be a safety net in the harsh American economy by offering its members material assistance in times of need: meals after a baby is born, money for rent after a layoff. Perhaps more important, it reminds people that their identity is not in their job or how much money they make; they are children of God, loved and protected and infinitely valuable.

But a vibrant, life-giving church requires more, not less, time and energy from its members. It asks people to prioritize one another over our career, to prioritize prayer and time reading scripture over accomplishment. This may seem like a tough sell in an era of dechurching. If people are already leaving—especially if they are leaving because they feel too busy and burned out to attend church regularly—why would they want to be part of a church that asks so much of them?

[Read: American religion is not dead yet]

Although understandable, that isn’t quite the right question. The problem in front of us is not that we have a healthy, sustainable society that doesn’t have room for church. The problem is that many Americans have adopted a way of life that has left us lonely, anxious, and uncertain of how to live in community with other people.

The tragedy of American churches is that they have been so caught up in this same world that we now find they have nothing to offer these suffering people that can’t be more easily found somewhere else. American churches have too often been content to function as a kind of vaguely spiritual NGO, an organization of detached individuals who meet together for religious services that inspire them, provide practical life advice, or offer positive emotional experiences. Too often it has not been a community that through its preaching and living bears witness to another way to live.

The theologian Stanley Hauerwas captured the problem well when he said that “pastoral care has become obsessed with the personal wounds of people in advanced industrial societies who have discovered that their lives lack meaning.” The difficulty is that many of the wounds and aches provoked by our current order aren’t of a sort that can be managed or life-hacked away. They are resolved only by changing one’s life, by becoming a radically different sort of person belonging to a radically different sort of community.

Last fall, I spent several days in New York City, during which time I visited a home owned by a group of pacifist Christians that lives from a common purse—meaning the members do not have privately held property but share their property and money. Their simple life and shared finances allow their schedules to be more flexible, making for a thicker immediate community and greater generosity to neighbors, as well as a richer life of prayer and private devotion to God, all supported by a deep commitment to their church.

This is, admittedly, an extreme example. But this community was thriving not because it found ways to scale down what it asked of its members but because it found a way to scale up what they provided to one another. Their way of living frees them from the treadmill of workism. Work, in this community, is judged not by the money it generates but by the people it serves. In a workist culture that believes dignity is grounded in accomplishment, simply reclaiming this alternative form of dignity becomes a radical act.

In the Gospels, Jesus tells his first disciples to leave their old way of life behind, going so far as abandoning their plow or fishing nets where they are and, if necessary, even leaving behind their parents. A church that doesn’t expect at least this much from one another isn’t really a church in the way Jesus spoke about it. If Graham and Davis are right, it also is likely a church that won’t survive the challenges facing us today.

The great dechurching could be the beginning of a new moment for churches, a moment marked less by aspiration to respectability and success, with less focus on individuals aligning themselves with American values and assumptions. We could be a witness to another way of life outside conventionally American measures of success. Churches could model better, truer sorts of communities, ones in which the hungry are fed, the weak are lifted up, and the proud are cast down. Such communities might not have the money, success, and influence that many American churches have so often pursued in recent years. But if such communities look less like those churches, they might also look more like the sorts of communities Jesus expected his followers to create.

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

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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.

In this summer of heat domes and record-breaking global temperatures, finding a place to cool off is more important than ever. You can go to a movie or a museum—if you want to buy a ticket. You can head to an air-conditioned bar—if you don’t have kids who also need to escape the heat. Or you can just stay at home and blast your own air conditioner—a rather lonely prospect, if you ask me.

But there’s a better way to cool down, no air-conditioning or entrance fee required: America’s hundreds of thousands of public pools. Cool water, fresh air, exercise, babies, teenagers, seniors: They’re all at the pool. In a time of increasing heat and social isolation, public pools are a blessing.

Where I live, in Manhattan, we have several outdoor pools smack in the middle of the sultry cement jungle. For that, my neighbors and I can thank, among others, Robert Moses, the urban planner who was instrumental in creating New York City’s public pools. Moses was a staunch advocate for public swimming. “It is no exaggeration to say that the health, happiness, efficiency, and orderliness of a large number of the city’s residents, especially in the summer months, are tremendously affected by the presence or absence of adequate bathing facilities,” he wrote in 1934.

Swimming does, in fact, have important benefits for physical and mental health. Perhaps most crucial this summer: Immersing yourself in cold water can quickly lower your body temperature on a hot day. Swimming is fantastic aerobic exercise, and it’s easier on the joints than many other activities that raise your heart rate. Aerobic activity reduces stress, and swimming in particular has been shown to improve mood. In one preliminary study, swimming in the cold ocean reduced feelings of depression up to 10 times as much as watching from the beach did. In a separate case study, a woman with treatment-resistant depression experienced a significant improvement in her symptoms after swimming in open water once a week.

I’ve loved swimming since I was a young child, when my father taught me, and even now, whenever I’m in a bad mood, I reflexively take myself to the water. I’ve always thought the mood-boosting effects of swimming were solely the product of the exercise and the resulting flood of endorphins in my brain—that I might get the same effect from, say, a hard weight-lifting session or a long run. But the thing is, the studies that find that swimming lifts your mood tend to involve swimming with other people. Perhaps the social contact is part of the magic too.

[Read: Who should public swimming pools serve?]

Early in the pandemic, when life ground to a halt, the indoor pool where I swim in the offseason had very strict rules. You had to reserve a time, and there were never more than two people in a lane. It should have been a swimmer’s dream: no crowd and a guaranteed lane. I swam just as hard and for just as long as usual. But to my surprise, the experience was devoid of pleasure.

I didn’t understand why until one hot evening this summer, when I returned to Hamilton Fish, my favorite public pool in New York. It’s a sprawling, irresistible pool, flanked by trees, beautiful early-20th-century pavilions, and a plaza where people lounge about. When pools reopened during the first year of the pandemic, the city initially suspended adult hours at its outdoor pools in favor of free—and riotous—swim. When I visited, kids were shrieking with glee, horsing around and splashing everyone in sight. A handful of serious swimmers were trying in vain to find a lane for a workout, but I mainly paddled around with the kids, enjoying the cool water.

After I did manage to find a lane to do laps, a group of kids approached me and asked if I would teach them how to do a flip turn. We had a blast practicing somersaults in the water. At closing time, after the lifeguards drove the reluctant throng out of the pool, I stood under the cold outdoor shower with the other swimmers, struck by the strange intimacy of it all: Here we were, complete strangers, a diverse collection of humanity, practically naked and standing around having fun together. Everyone got along.

That is the whole, beautiful point of a public pool: to exercise and cool off with loads of people around. In the Southwest, where temperatures have been climbing above 100 for weeks, these facilities are a lifeline. Everywhere else, they can make the difference between a lonely, uncomfortable summer day and a joyful one. And yet, thanks to budget cuts and lifeguard shortages, fewer and fewer Americans have easy access to a municipal pool these days.

[Read: How lifeguards lost their luster]

Back in 1934, when Moses extolled the virtues of public pools, the United States was in a pool-building frenzy. Many of those pools were racially segregated, so not everyone could swim together, but in time they came to be melting pots, even as cities invested less in their upkeep and many white residents flocked to private facilities.

Now, as the heat builds in American cities, Moses’s ideas about the role of community swimming in public health and happiness are more relevant than ever. If you can get to a public pool this summer—even if you could also use a backyard pool—make sure you take the plunge. Sure, it will still be blazing hot outside when you’re done, but the refreshment and relaxation will linger long after you’ve dried off.

More than a decade ago, in a prescient essay for Scientific American, the inventor of the World Wide Web denounced what Facebook and other tech giants were doing to his signature invention. “Why should you care?” Tim Berners-Lee wrote at the time. “Because the Web is yours.” These companies, he warned, were restructuring the web itself, turning an expanse of interconnected websites all built on the same open infrastructure into a series of “fragmented islands” where users were kept hostage.

On Facebook’s island, he wrote, people give over their entire digital life for the chance to connect with their friends, but have no way to transfer their information to any other platform. Once captive, users upload photos, add friends, send messages, click ads, and react to posts, all the while leaving a trail of information from which Facebook can profit. The more they do these things, the harder leaving becomes—so much of people’s digital life is nested in Facebook, rather than in Facebook’s rivals. The logic extends to other tech platforms too. On Apple’s island, Berners-Lee explained, iTunes users can tap into an immense catalog of music but can’t easily share it with anyone. “You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace,” Berners-Lee wrote. “For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up.”

That was 2010. Since then, with the aggressive development of Apple’s App Store, Facebook’s strategic acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and many other protectionist moves that have made tech’s most dominant companies even more powerful, the web’s fragmented islands—or “walled gardens,” as Berners-Lee also called them—have grown only more secluded.

But lately, a funny thing has happened. As tech giants face mounting antitrust scrutiny and try to navigate the development of generative AI technology, the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley are attempting to signal their open-web bona fides. Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has become a particularly prominent voice. Last week, it  announced that it was partnering with Microsoft on the release of its latest large language model, Llama 2, which it is making openly available for free. That means that, unlike its nearest rival, GPT-4, which users can pay to license from OpenAI, developers will be able to download Llama 2’s code, tinker with it, and build new things on top of it, dramatically expanding access to generative AI technology—and potentially leaving OpenAI out to dry in the process. Around the same time, Meta announced that its Twitter copycat, Threads, will eventually be interoperable with small competing social platforms such as Mastodon and WordPress.

If any of this sounds like the first step into a wonderful new era of ungated collaboration, it’s not. These gestures toward openness aren’t the product of some sudden, soul-cleansing instinct to cede power. Quite the opposite. Lowering the garden walls ever so slightly works in service of entrenching Meta’s power and ensuring that the company is just as indispensable to the next era of computing as it was to the last one.

In his Facebook post announcing the Llama 2 release, Mark Zuckerberg co-opted the gospel of openness, arguing that it would “unlock more progress” and improve safety for generative AI more broadly by enabling more developers to build these technologies and identify potential problems and fixes. It’s not exactly a novel idea: Some of AI’s most prominent ethicists have repeatedly raised concerns about black-box AI models being concentrated in the hands of just a few multibillion-dollar companies. But Zuckerberg is decidedly not one of AI’s most prominent ethicists. He is, instead, a person who not only runs one of those multibillion-dollar companies, but who is also responsible for building and ruthlessly defending one of the internet’s most infamous walled gardens.

This is the same company that has prohibited academics from scraping data from its products for the purposes of research, neutralized competitors by acquiring them, and actively made it harder for rival platforms to use Facebook’s features. When the video platform Vine wanted users to be able to find their Facebook friends through its app, Zuckerberg personally approved the order ensuring that they couldn’t. When people started posting links to Instagram photos on Twitter, Facebook prevented the links from generating full image previews, rendering them mostly useless for nearly a decade until the policy changed.

[Read: Ben Franklin would have loved Bluesky]

It isn’t difficult to understand why Meta would be flirting with a more open approach. For starters, giving away Llama 2 for free will help the company speed up adoption to compete with OpenAI. Besides, offering free access to powerful tools and then figuring out how to make gobs of money from them later is kind of Meta’s thing: It did the same with Facebook before ever charging advertisers a dime. The idea that social media should be decentralized—enabling different networks to plug into one another, rather than hoarding every user for themselves—is also having something of a moment among the extremely online. That’s mostly due to Twitter’s Elon Musk–induced implosion, which has sent former Twitter users on a search for alternatives en masse. If the internet is indeed transforming from a series of fragmented islands into something more like an archipelago, Zuckerberg is already staking his turf.

[Read: The battle for the soul of the web]

To Meta’s credit, as Zuckerberg dutifully noted in his post, the company does have a history with open-source development of machine-learning technology. And the long-standing walls around just about every other part of its business, including its billions of users, arguably have offered some benefits beyond profits. At least in theory, those barriers help the company protect user privacy and enforce its standards and policies, thereby taming some of the chaos it has unleashed on the world. Meta’s enforcement record, however, has been inconsistent at best—and utterly lacking at worst.  

Despite this already lax policing, what Meta is doing now with Threads and Llama 2 will make enforcing its own rules even more difficult for the company. If Threads becomes interoperable with other platforms such as Mastodon—allowing posts to flow back and forth between servers—Meta will face rule breakers from a whole bunch of other networks, including ones where just about anything goes. (So-called federated social media is already home to an astonishing volume of child-abuse material, according to a new report from the Stanford Internet Observatory.) With Llama 2, Meta has invested in AI guardrails designed to prevent the worst abuses, but as has been the case for other open-source models, once developers have their hands on it, people will inevitably find ways to jump those guardrails, and Meta will have limited control over what those people do on the other side.

All of this can seem like a moderation nightmare for Meta—until you consider that the company might use its newfound excitement about abdicating control as an excuse to abdicate even more responsibility. If Meta’s open to everyone, then maybe its problems are everyone else’s.

Like Berners-Lee, many people deeply believe in the dream of an open web. But the danger right now is that the performance of this belief can easily cover up a canny business strategy. Despite its public framing, Llama 2 isn’t quite what purists would call open source. In the fine print, its community agreement stipulates that although most developers can freely access the model, anyone with more than 700 million monthly users will have to get a license from Meta first. Tough luck for Meta’s competitors such as Snap and Telegram, who just happen to miss the cutoff.

This article contains spoilers for the film Barbie.

Earlier this week, Elon Musk announced that he would be rebranding his social-media platform: Twitter is now, simply, X. Speculation abounded as to why Musk would trade a well-known brand for a letter typically associated with rejection and porn: spite, maybe. Or maybe—the most absurd theory, and therefore the most likely—the man who had named his car models “S,” “3,” “X,” and “Y” was doing it, once again, for the lols. Soon after Twitter became X, employees reported, the conference rooms of its headquarters were rechristened. The staffers Musk hasn’t yet fired can now plan the future of democratized conversation from a meeting room named “s3Xy.”

X was released, as it happened, the same weekend that the Barbie movie was. The coincidence was eloquent. Barbie is a film about its namesake, definitely, and an exploration of impossible womanhood. But it is also a film about Ken—a Ken who, in the director Greta Gerwig’s rendering, sheds his status as Barbie’s bland accessory to become … a power-addled man-child determined to turn the world into his plaything. No element of Barbie’s aggressive marketing campaign could have bought the relevance created by a 52-year-old tech titan who, when he is not moving fast and/or breaking things, amuses himself by finding new ways to write “69” into the public record.

Americans live under gerontocracy, many pundits have argued: Too many of our leaders, having tasted power and then spent decades consolidating it, refuse to cede their spoils to anybody else. The broader truth is even more lamentable, though, because it involves leaders who, unable to contend with power’s responsibilities, treat our future as their toy. Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have spent weeks fueling speculation that they will settle their business differences by way of a televised cage match. Americans gave our nuclear codes to a Brioni-swaddled toddler. We may well do it again. We live in the thrall of impetuous boy-kings. No fictional figure has captured the absurdity of that situation, and the tragedy of it, better than a doll who looks like a man but inflicts himself on the world with a boy’s impish glee. Ken demands attention. He throws tantrums. He sows chaos. He threatens the whole order of things. He is the plastic core of Barbie’s world—and a bleached-blond satire of ours.

Barbie Land is, allegedly, a place of childish dreams, safe and happy and sterile and pink. “Girl power,” in the land of the dolls, is not a well-lit lie; it is, on the contrary, the only truth that exists—the scaffolding that supports every wall-less Dream House. It shapes not only the Barbies’ professional lives (President Barbie, Physicist Barbie, Doctor Barbie) but also their sense of the world they occupy. The Barbies are self-confident and self-actualized and just generally delighted, and of course they are: They have never had reason to be otherwise. In Barbie Land, the Barbies are fond of reminding themselves that every day is “the best day ever.”

[Read: What’s the matter with Barbie?]

There are Kens in Barbie Land, but they are, like the doll himself, variously decorative and superfluous. Where do the Kens live? What Dream Cars do they drive? Such questions are moot. In a place that treats possessions as proxies for personal fulfillment, the Kens seem to have none. Nor, in a society that equates profession with identity, do they have apparent careers. The Kens do have a job, though: to serve as reliable extras in the Barbies’ shiny show. The Kens are there when they’re needed. They’re cheerful. They’re patient. They’re always ready to don sequins and smiles for an intricately choreographed dance number. They are, like pretty much everything else in Barbie Land, aggressively uncomplicated. They are also, as a result, extremely boring.

Except, that is, for one of them: the Ken who is paired, per the two-by-two logic of Barbie Land, with Stereotypical Barbie. This Ken, played—inhabited—by Ryan Gosling, chafes against his class status. Barbie Land may look like a Paradise Island–style matriarchy whose Amazons are 11 inches tall and molded of polyvinyl chloride; Ken, though, is a reminder of the brute limits of its utopia. The film’s most obvious problem comes early on, when Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) finds herself afflicted by the assorted insults of the human condition (imperfectly browned toast, thoughts of death, cellulite). But Barbie Land’s prefab perfections were imperfect well before Barbie’s crisis. Ken bears the brunt of its errors. He is not merely Barbie’s plaything; he is also the recipient of her casual cruelty. “You can go now,” Barbie tells him, flashing a smile as his face falls. Later: “I don’t want you here.”

These are the types of lines that have earned Barbie, in the days since its release, some indignant accusations of man-hating and sexism and “toxic femininity.” What the criticisms miss, though—or perhaps ignore—is that irony might be present even in a film about toys. The dynamics of Barbie Land are both complicated and simple: Barbie, insulated in its confines, represents—in real-world terms—the beneficiaries of patriarchy. Ken represents, essentially, everybody else. Barbie, in her dismissals of Ken, doesn’t mean to be mean; she treats him thoughtlessly because she has simply never considered that words—or anything, really—might cause hurt. She has never needed to. Comfort, in her society as in ours, is a luxury. The slogans of the human world—and the bleak dynamics that have transformed kindness and empathy from kindergarten lessons into political pleas—make no sense to those who cannot imagine other people’s pain.

They make a lot of sense to Ken, though. He is, at the outset of the film, the most messily human feature of this plastic world, a tangle of need and hope and, eventually, rage. In the land of hard-set smiles, he winces. Surrounded by endless cheer, he aches. He senses that something is very much amiss. But sensing is all he can do. Barbie Land may have a president and a constitution and a supreme court, but it is, in practice, aggressively apolitical. (Politics is a response to humans and conflicts; Barbie Land allows neither.) And so, having no language or outlet for his frustrations—beleaguered, you might say, by a problem that has no name—Ken simply feels his way through his plight. His want leaves him afflicted with something else that is foreign in Barbie Land: vulnerability.

Much of Barbie’s magic comes down to Robbie and Gosling and their ability, as actors, to blend the plastic and the human, the earnest and the camp. Robbie’s performance, for its part, is a matter of distillation. It captures many of the elements that have made the Barbie doll both an enduring icon and an endless controversy—among them her unattainable beauty, her blithe naivete, her whiteness, her thinness, her reminder that even children are stalked by the shifting demands of womanhood. Gosling finds similar nuance, but from the opposite direction: Ken is, infamously, a plus-one who is defined by his absence. Gosling fills in the blanks. And he does so by weaving one of the dolls’ elemental ironies—Barbie and Ken are teenagers who are routinely mistaken for adults—into his performance.

[Read: The myth of the ‘underage woman’]

Ken, in Gosling’s rendering, lives in a stew of emotions that are always just beyond his control. He is by turns petulant and teeming with possibility, impulsive and self-conscious. Which is also to say that this chisel-jawed doll is, in many ways, a very typical adolescent. Barbie, newly beset by human-borne feeling, shocks herself by crying—first a single tear, and then a flood of them. Gosling’s Ken cries too. But his discord has a stereotypically masculine edge. He erupts into anger. He feels entitled to sex, despite and because of his ignorance of it. He cares, deeply, what the other guys think of him. “You can’t make me look uncool in front of Ken!” he wails at Barbie, panic flashing in his eyes.

Ken, in the film’s early scenes, takes his tumult out on Barbie. There he is, radiating look-at-me longing. There he is, like Romeo with his poems or Lloyd Dobler with his boom box, turning love into a show. He orients his life around Barbie so thoroughly that, before long, he is becoming the one thing a Ken must not be in Barbie Land: a hindrance.

Ken resents his neediness as much as Barbie does. But Barbie Land offers him no other option. She is everything; he’s just Ken. That is the way of this world. Gosling’s performance channels all of that. And then, powerfully, it escalates the matter: Ken’s need for Barbie becomes so consuming that it curdles into violence. Soon, his hopeful smiles are twisting into sneers. The stubbornness of his desire for Barbie—and his inability to accept her disinterest—begins to evoke the grim entitlements of the incel. His plight becomes everyone else’s threat.

It’s unsettling, the doll made dangerous. That’s what makes it so effective. The bulk of the film finds Barbie and Ken on a journey that mimics adolescence: Having left the land of protection and play and easy dreams, they are plunged into the realities of the human world—and the hard transactions of adulthood. The dolls must navigate a place that has no shortage of language for its political condition: patriarchy, marginalization, objectification, oppression.

Ken loves it. Walking on a street in L.A.—clothed, through an accident of circumstance in the plot and inspired costuming choices beyond it, in fringe-covered Western wear—he begins to strut. He feels, for the first time, respected, admired, seen. Barbie, meanwhile, is the one made to feel—and then to fear—the vulnerabilities of her gender. One of Barbie’s best jokes finds Ken, having returned to Barbie Land, playing her a song on his guitar—singing not to Barbie, he makes clear, but at her. Ken croons and crows, entranced by the romance of his gesture, holding Barbie’s gaze and refusing to let it go. The absurdity of it all is punctured by the lyrics of the song he chooses—one that became, in the real world, a hit: I wanna push you around, well I will, well I will / I wanna push you down, well I will, well I will …

Adolescence is a time of extremes. And Ken, having experienced manhood in a man’s world, reacts to his new situation with juvenile glee. Soaking up his surroundings as a child might—alive, always, to the images and messages around him—he intuits first that manliness is everything in the real world, and second, that manliness must involve horses. (Patriarchy, he concludes, is the system “where men on horses run everything.”) He is entranced by images of Rocky Balboa and Bill Clinton, captivated by the guys who high-five one another at the gym. Back in Barbie Land, importing the lessons he’s learned from reality, he takes over Barbie’s Dream House. His Mojo Dojo Casa House is a bachelor pad and a bar and, in its overall aesthetic, a tribute to John Wayne’s influence on American tropes of masculinity. Its decor features, obviously, an abundance of horses.

Ken’s excesses are funny, and foolish, and, except for the house-stealing stuff, pretty relatable. Like any teenager, Ken is figuring out who he is, and trying the world’s possibilities on for size. But his immaturity is not contained, and this is its problem. His adolescent approach to the world, instead, inflicts itself on everyone else. Soon—a plot twist that, for anyone who has followed U.S. politics in recent years, doubles as a twist of the knife—Ken is trying to rewrite Barbie Land’s constitution.

There’s an ominous kind of justice to Ken’s attempts to inject himself into the political life of Barbie Land. It is a zero-sum solution to the problems of a zero-sum world. The Ken doll has been called, over the years, a “drip with seriously abridged genitalia,” “an uncomfortably freighted icon of anti-masculinity,” and—by Gosling, during Barbie’s promotional tour—“an accessory, and not even one of the cool ones.” When Ken was featured in 2010’s Toy Story 3, he found himself on the receiving end of the following line: “You ascot-wearing pink-noser! You’re not a toy … You’re a purse with legs!”

The insult was made all the more insulting because it was delivered by a tuber with detachable limbs and anger-management issues. But Mr. Potato Head was simply saying what everyone already knew: The defining fact of Ken is that Ken is defined by Barbie. That alone makes it hard not to feel bad for the guy. And for many of Barbie’s viewers, his plight may feel extremely familiar. A key moment in the film, as my colleague Shirley Li wrote, comes from one of its human protagonists, Gloria (America Ferrera), who summons a life’s worth of frustration into a speech about the challenges—and the utter irrationality—of being a woman in a world shaped by men. Another key moment, though, comes from Ken. It’s near the end of the movie, and he’s finally getting the one thing he’s really wanted: Barbie is listening to him. He’s telling her what it’s like to be dimmed so that somebody else might shine. And then he adds the kicker: “It doesn’t feel good, does it?”

[Read: The surprising key to understanding the ]Barbie film

The critics who have accused Barbie of misandry might want to watch that moment, if indeed they ever watched it at all, once more. Ken’s line gives punctuation, effectively, to Gloria’s speech. And it does what our current political slogans beg us, fruitlessly, to do: It empathizes. Ken doesn’t really want political power, he discovers; it’s a lot of work. (Plus, disappointingly, horses are merely “men-extenders.”) What he really seeks is the power to figure out who he is on his own terms. Does Ken want Barbie at all? Would he, as the film hints, rather be paired with another Ken? What would he choose to be were his identity broader than Barbie and Beach?

Ken is, by the end of the film, not merely a doll who has known life in the human world; he is also a guy who understands what it’s like to be treated as an extra in someone else’s story. In him, the debates that shape—and limit—our political possibilities become elegantly straightforward. Ken is a person who is denied the full dignity of his personhood. That—whatever your worldview, whatever your particular circumstance, whatever your feelings about the word patriarchy—is a blatant form of injustice.

But Ken is also, at the story’s conclusion, a guy who has escaped from his arrested development. He has come to embody one of Barbie’s core ideas: that patriarchy is a profound form of immaturity. It causes childishness. It results from it too. Here is one reason for hope, though, as our very real men-children keep trying to remake the world into their Mojo Dojo Casa House: For Ken, immaturity becomes what it is for most people—a phase on the way to something better. Ken doesn’t become human. He does, however, grow up.

In the early 1970s, American Jews were, on the whole, centrist and conventional. Most were married, and most to other Jews. Their largest religious denomination was the Conservative movement, with its bland, spacious suburban synagogues, representing the middle ground between fusty tradition and full-forced reform. This was a community that seemed to have settled into a comfortable status quo, steadily assimilating in the postwar years and ascending into the middle class.

Still, there were signs that when it came to actual religious practice, a younger generation, coming of age during the 1960s, found this stability stultifying. The desire for change could be felt bubbling from below. In 1972, the first female rabbi was ordained. Two-thirds of Jews under 30 belonged to no synagogue at all. But in cities such as Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C., groups of young, well-educated Jews had begun informally worshiping and studying together, eschewing institutional supervision and their parents’ conformity.

At one such communal gathering, known as Havurat Shalom, just outside Boston, three 20-somethings decided to produce a religious book that would be unlike anything anyone had ever seen: a lively, crowd-sourced compendium of how to live a Jewish life. It reimagined ancient ritual through a counterculture sensibility, challenging both the traditionalists on the right, whose ideology framed Judaism as a strict, all-inclusive package of rules and expectations, and the reformists on the left, who largely rejected ritual for a less demanding, less distinctive religious identity.   

Published in 1973 by the Jewish Publication Society, The Jewish Catalog became a surprise best seller and has been in print ever since—this year, it celebrates its 50th anniversary. Only JPS’s translation of the Bible has sold more copies for the publisher. The Catalog’s bright-red cover, distinctive design, and whimsical illustrations empowered generations of Jews to experiment with new forms of practice and community, becoming the ultimate manual for those alienated and estranged from the tradition and seeking a more meaningful alternative. Today, when organized religion is beset by tumult and disengagement, The Catalog serves as a case study in how a grassroots effort to modernize religious life can succeed in profound and lasting ways, even as a question remains all these years later about how sustainable its changes actually were.

The 320-page book, and its two sequels, emerged as the social unrest and political violence of the 1960s were giving way to a do-it-yourself counterculture epitomized in the publishing industry by the Whole Earth Catalog, which offered product reviews and practical resources extolling self-sufficiency. But although The Jewish Catalog started as a Jewish version of the Whole Earth Catalog, by the time its editors, Richard Siegel, Michael Strassfeld, and Sharon Strassfeld, signed with JPS, they had created something even more revolutionary.

Until they began their project, the classic text describing how to live a Jewish life was written in the 16th century by Joseph Caro: the Shulchan Aruch, which literally means “the set table,” an established, widely accepted code of Jewish law. By contrast, The Jewish Catalog offered an à la carte menu, encouraging readers to create for themselves a Judaism that was flexible, informal, and proactive. Want to observe the Sabbath but the prayers and laws don’t resonate? All you want to do is bake challah once a week? Well, here’s a recipe or two, along with hand-drawn depictions of several ways to braid the ceremonial bread.

“You can plug in wherever you want,” the editors wrote in the introduction.

Chaim Potok, by then an acclaimed novelist famous for The Chosen, was JPS’s top editor, and although he immediately grasped The Catalog’s potential, he faced a tough sell with some members of his board, who were aghast at publishing such an untraditional, at times irreverent work. But he persisted. “Chaim was a visionary,” Sharon Strassfeld told me.

At the time, the Strassfelds (who were then married) and Siegel (who died in 2018) were members of Havurat Shalom, a lay-led community that was among the pioneers of an egalitarian, participatory form of worship, learning, and ritual practice. The Catalog reflected those values. “We were writing about the lives we were living,” Sharon Strassfeld said.

[Read: Why Orthodox Judaism is appealing to so many millennials]

The editors of The Catalog explicitly critiqued conventional Judaism as "prefabricated, spoon-fed, nearsighted." They even titled one chapter “Using the Jewish Establishment—A Reluctant Guide.”

But overall, the tone and presentation were playful, inclusive, affirming. Fuzzy photographs of barefoot men and women clasping hands and circle-dancing were juxtaposed with an ultra-Orthodox bride and groom at their wedding; long-haired hippies were on one page, long-bearded Hasids on another. In Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden’s design, the pages had a Talmudic feel, with commentary and explanations wrapped around the main text. Stu Copans’s captivating line drawings were both instructive and cheeky; so were the editorial notes. (The recipe for cholent, a long-simmering stew, says it will feed 10 normal people or two Hungarians.)

“I don’t think we were trying to stick it to the man,” Michael Strassfeld told me. “We had a very different way of seeing Jewish life, and this book was an expression of that. Organizational Jewish life was boring. Suburban Jewish life was boring. We were trying to connect to a more authentic past—trying to recapture something, not destroy the system. We wanted to provide another model.”

And that model exuded the carefree happiness and unconventionality of the broader youth culture. Why do prayer shawls have to come only in black and white? Why can’t they be multicolored? And why can’t women wear them too?

“It’s the notion that you can do this, you can own it,” Beth Wenger, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “You don’t need to go to some institution to do it. It’s yours. That was what was so impactful.”

Without any mass marketing to speak of, aided mostly by word of mouth and a New York Times story, The Catalog immediately sold out its first printing, moving 50,000 copies in its first three months, and 130,000 copies in 18 months. (More recent numbers are not available, though JPS says that total sales are in the many hundreds of thousands.)

For a niche publisher like JPS, those numbers were unprecedented. But this popularity did not come without controversy.

Most notable was a lengthy, scathing essay by Marshall Sklare, then the nation’s preeminent sociologist of Jewish communal life, in the December 1974 issue of Commentary magazine. Titled “The Greening of Judaism”—this was not meant as a compliment—the essay criticized the Catalog editors for exempting “themselves from the central feature of Jewish religious law—its normativeness.”

The Catalog, Sklare summarized, “is rich in ironies, a work in which a genuine familiarity with Jewish sources and Jewish practice has been put at the service of the latest cultural and aesthetic predilections, with results that are funny, vulgar, charming, and meretricious all at once.”

Putting aside the lacerating, demeaning tone, Sklare pointed to a central truth: The Catalog was indeed advancing a Judaism that was focused on beauty and meaning and personal experience rather than on communal obligation and bowing to hierarchy and authority. You were invited to act and think a certain way, not commanded to do so.

But if The Catalog challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of the right, it was also an implicit rebuke to the American Judaism of the left, particularly the highly popular Reform movement, which at the time eschewed religious ritual and overt displays of ethnicity in favor of a more Protestantlike ethic, with many prayers in English and services that were briefer and left little room for displays of prayerful emotion.

So much of what The Catalog gave voice to 50 years ago has migrated from the margin to the mainstream of American Judaism’s liberal denominations, and even some of its more conservative sectors. Today, synagogue worship in general is less formal and more participatory; ritual behavior is continually being reinvented. Egalitarianism has seeped into Modern Orthodoxy. And, propelled by the pandemic, every other Jewish household, it seems, is making challah for Shabbat.

More broadly, Beth Wenger noted, The Catalog’s outlook “is characteristic of American religion, which is largely a menu today.”

[Read: Restoring Kabbalah to mainstream Judaism]

Perhaps not even Marshall Sklare, were he still alive, would dispute that The Jewish Catalog had a penetrating and lasting impact on American Judaism. But the big book that seemed to be on everyone’s shelf is now largely a beloved historical artifact. The internet provides in a millisecond what The Catalog’s authors took years to compile. Books meant to be resources are instantly outdated the moment they go to press. Pages and pages of The Catalog’s finely packed chapters listing scholars and references and organizations are now obsolete.

Traditional gatekeepers of knowledge and guidance—be they rabbis or other experts—have barely a supporting role in many of life’s dramas. That is largely due to technological advances, but it’s also because of the diminished importance of religious institutions in the daily lives of American Jews and, indeed, many other Americans.

Whether The Catalog initiated that development or catalyzed it, whether it shifted the direction of American Judaism or gave vivid expression to a shift already in the making, it is hard to imagine contemporary American Jewish life without the permission to experiment that this quirky, oversize book represented.

“The most subversive thing we did, and it was completely inadvertent, is that we were giving people in English tools so that they could build their own Jewish lives,” Sharon Strassfeld said. “Until then, who was writing a Jewish book? Rabbis and scholars. The Catalog’s entire purpose is to give ownership to people of their own Judaism.”

As a book, The Catalog’s origin story had all the ingredients for success: idealistic and knowledgeable editors, a visionary publisher, a moment ripe for disruption. But in order to truly inspire a movement to reinvent religious life, the book also required readers with the skills, passion, and commitment to embrace its DIY ethos. It takes a lot of work to truly own one’s religion, to be responsible for its sustainability. Half a century on, The Catalog’s contributions endure, but so do the lingering challenges of making faith feel relevant and fresh in a modern world.