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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

What “fitboxing” is missing “Ukrainian is my native language, but I had to learn it.” The weird, fragmented world of social media after Twitter America is drowning in packages.

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.

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.

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.

I have a long-running argument with my brother. He insists that his children, who are growing up in New York City right now, are a lot less safe than we were as kids in the same neighborhood. I happen to know this is absurd, and I’ve tried for many years to convince him. I’ve shown him news reports, crime statistics. Once I even downloaded an FBI report showing without a doubt that New York was much more dangerous 30 years ago. But he is unmoved. He remembers our childhood as gentler, safer. And I have to admit—there are moments when I walk around my old neighborhood and see visions of the mailman tipping his hat to my 10-year-old self, and the neighbors smiling as I made my way home to dinner.

Why do so many of us have this feeling that when we were younger, people were nicer and more moral, and took care of one another better? An experimental psychologist named Adam Mastroianni had also been wondering about this persistent conviction and did a systematic study of the phenomenon recently published in Nature.

Mastroianni documents that this hazy memory is shared by many different demographics, and felt quite strongly. He explains how the illusion works and why it has such a hold on us. And most important, he explains how it can distort not just our personal relationships but our culture and politics. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk with Mastroianni and staff writer Julie Beck about the illusion of moral decline, and why it persists so strongly.

Whenever politicians or aspiring politicians make the claim that, you know, “Things used to be better, put me in charge and I’ll make them better again”—that’s a very old thing that we’ve heard many times. And it resonates with us, perhaps because we are primed to believe it, even when it’s not true.

Listen to the conversation here:

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

The following episode transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Hanna Rosin: So, Julie, you know—even though I get annoyed when other people say people used to be nicer, I kind of think I might feel that way too.

If I have a vision of my childhood and I’m walking down the street from the playground, I imagine all my neighbors saying, “Hi, little Hanna.” [Laughter.] And the mailman coming by, you know, and tipping his hat at me, and the old man walking his dog.

And, you know, I have no idea if this memory is accurate, but I definitely have that feeling that people were nicer.

Julie Beck: Did you grow up in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? Or what was it?

Rosin: No; I actually grew up in Queens, New York. So it’s probably, certainly not true. [Laughter.]

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. I invited my colleague Julie Beck on to talk about something that’s always really bothered me. It’s when people talk about how things are so much worse today than they were in the past.

And they say things like “Neighbors used to be nicer, and everyone used to smile at you and help you out.” And sometimes it’s just grandpa chatter and you can pretty much ignore it. And then other times it turns into this “back when men were men and women were women”–type thing, which is more annoying.

Beck: There’s a benign wish to, like, tip your hat to the mailman. And then there’s a “Oh, we need to bring back the social order of the 1950s.” And then you’re like, “Whoa, how did we end up here?”

Julie analyzes psychological research and social trends, and she’s also the host of another Atlantic podcast, How to Talk to People.

And she’s here to help me understand this very interesting research that just emerged about this strong conviction people have that everything has gotten worse.

Adam Mastroianni: So my whole life, I’ve heard people say things like, “You used to be able to keep your doors unlocked at night,” or “You can’t trust someone’s word anymore.”

And I always chafed at those kinds of statements. So part of it was wanting to prove everybody wrong. But part of it, too, was like, Well, if they’re right, this is a big problem. And that’s kind of where we got started.

Rosin: That is Adam Mastroianni. He recently published a paper in Nature called “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” Adam is a psychologist, and he’s the author of the science blog Experimental History. And he spent a decade systematically studying why we feel things were better in the past … and what it means.

Mastroianni: I think my first year of graduate school was when Trump got elected. And so obviously it was a moment of “Make America Great Again” being sort of the vibe of the day.

Seeing claims that “The past was good, the present is bad, put me in charge and I can bring the good past back” also just made me see how this is much more than, you know, uncles and brothers-in-law and people on the internet saying these things— that these claims resonate with people, and they help put people in the Oval Office.

Rosin: Yeah. I mean, I have to say, that’s my motivation for being interested in your research, because I have always had a kind of detached curiosity about why this line resonates so strongly.

Like, why is it that—and it’s not just American leaders, it’s leaders all over the world—they can just say, “Oh, things were better back then,” and it immediately clicks for people? Like, they don’t even have to explain it. You can just say, “You know, make America great again.” It’s like four words, and all the assumptions are immediately there for people.

Mastroianni: Yeah. When I give talks in an academic context about this paper, what I start with is the end of Trump’s inaugural speech, where he says, “You know, we’ll make America wealthy again and proud again and safe again and great again.” And I point out that the most important word in those sentences isn’t America or safe or proud or strong or great. It’s again.

Rosin: Yes!

Mastroianni: Just that word does a ton of work. Which is that: Wwell, if things used to be great but aren’t now, it means something changed. It implies that we can change it back. It evokes a sense of loss, but also a sense of possibility of restoring the loss.

Rosin: Yeah. And it is the word again., It’s like that one little word sort of resolves something emotionally for people. It’s hard to understand exactly how it works, but you say the word again, and everyone’s like, “Ah, you just filled a hole for me.” You know? What exactly do you mean when you say “moral decline,” and why, if it’s an illusion, does it feel so real?

Mastroianni: There are a few totally reasonable hypotheses about what people might think of when they talk about moral decline. It might be that everyone means, like, “I heard that the 1950s were a really good time. And so what I’m really telling you is things have declined since then.” Not that they got worse in the past 10 years; that they got worse, you know, 20 years ago or 50 years ago. And we’re just living in the bad times now.

In a later study, we asked people go back even further than that. “What about 20 years before that? What about 40 years before that?” And what they told us there is—“Before I arrived, nothing was happening. Things were good. Then I got born, and then things started to go downhill.”

And what’s especially interesting is: It doesn’t matter when you were born. So the people who were 30 told us it happened 30 years ago. The people who were 60 told us it happened 60 years ago.

Rosin: Wait, really? So literally, people think the decline began when they came on this earth?

Mastroianni: Yeah. So, I mean, we don’t ask, like, the day before or the day after. But the question that we asked was: “Rate how kind, honest, nice, and good people are today. What about the year in which you were 20?” And people told us it was better then.

“What about the year in which you were born?” And people told us it was even better then. And then we asked, “What about 20 years before that? And 40 years before that?”

And there’s no difference in people’s answers. That line is flat. It’s only when we asked about “20 years after your birth” that the line goes down.

Rosin: That is so interesting. I don’t think I fully grasped that. So people are projecting whatever personal difficulties or struggles of life—now maybe I’m extrapolating—onto the whole of humanity, like they’re protecting their own life span onto a historical, broader cultural, political life span.

Mastroianni: Yeah. And I mean, this is a bias of people’s memory, because you don’t have memories from before you were born. You do have memories from most of the time after you were born.

So it would make sense—if this is a memory bias—that it turns on sometime near the moment of your birth. Obviously not exactly then, but this would explain why we don’t see this for what people think about before they were born and after.

Rosin: Does it really not matter how young you are? The stereotype is obviously, you know, Grandpa Simpson. It’s like, older people are always talking about how things were better back then, but not necessarily younger people.

Mastroianni: Yeah; we totally expected to find that as well, and we didn’t really. So when you ask people about the decline that they have perceived over their lifetimes, there’s no difference in the decline that younger and older people perceive.

Rosin: Julie, I was surprised to hear that there wasn’t a difference between older people and younger people in terms of how they perceive this moral decline. I mean, you’re not an old person; you’re young. So do you remember ever having this feeling?

Beck: I distinctly remember I did not get a smartphone until I moved to D.C. in 2013. So in the years before that, when I lived in Chicago, I have a memory of having so many more interactions with strangers on the street.

And I definitely do not have those nearly as frequently anymore. And I think it’s just because we’re all looking at our phones, right? So part of me kind of romanticizes the, you know, chance encounters of the pre-smartphone era and all of that.

Rosin: Yeah. And when I hear you say that, I’m like, Oh, it’s fine for Julie to have that feeling, and it’s fine for me to have that feeling. But if I multiply it by a few million times, then I get this political movement of “Let’s go back to the era when things were better,” and that I don’t really like so much.

Beck: Yeah. One thing that this makes me think of, too, is a line of research that has found that social trust has actually been declining in the U.S. for decades. So people are essentially less and less likely to say that generally most other people can be trusted.

And so you’re totally right that there are really big political implications for thinking the past was better and people used to be more trustworthy.

For me, it feels like kind of a chicken-or-an-egg question. Like, do we trust people less because we believe they’ve gotten morally worse? Or do we believe people are worse because we’re more disconnected from our communities?

Mastroianni: We focused here on a pretty narrow question, which is, “Has the way that people treat one another in their everyday lives changed over time?” And do people think that it has?

This is a model of when things are bad, it’s easy for them to seem like they have gotten worse. And so I don’t think this is the only domain where we might find this illusion, because people say this about a lot of different parts of life.

You know: that art is worse than it used to be. That culture is worse than it used to be. That the education system is worse than it used to be. But it seems pretty clear to me that we are predisposed to believe that it’s true, even when it’s not.

Rosin: Your assumptions in this research are—people have this idea that a certain kind of morality has declined. But in your mind, it has not declined. So to you, this is like an illusion. I mean, you call it an illusion. Right?

Mastroianni: Yes.

Rosin: Okay. So working within that assumption, what’s your explanation? Like, why would a majority of us be operating under a delusion/illusion? Like something that you’re saying is clearly not true.

Mastroianni: We think that there are two cognitive biases that can combine to produce this illusion. So this explanation has two parts. The first is what we call biased exposure, which is that people tend to attend to predominantly negative information, especially about people that they don’t know.

So this is both a combination of the information that they receive about people that they don’t know, which is primarily negative, and the information that they pay attention to. So this is why when you look out at the world beyond your personal world, it looks like it’s full of people who are doing bad things. They’re lying and cheating and stealing and killing.

The second part of the explanation is what we call biased memory. Memory researchers have noticed that the badness of bad memories tends to fade faster than the goodness of good memories.

So if you got turned down for your high-school prom, it feels pretty bad at the time. Twenty years later, it’s maybe a funny story. If you have a great high-school prom, it feels pretty good at the time. And 20 years later, it’s still a pretty nice memory. It doesn’t feel as nice as it did to experience it, but it still feels pretty nice.

And that turns out to be, on average, what happens to people’s memories: that the bad ones inch toward neutral faster than the good ones do, And the bad ones are more likely to both be forgotten and to become good in retrospect.

Beck: So when I read the paper, Hanna, I wondered whether what might be going on is that people are, to some degree, picking up on a real change in the world.

There’s the decline of social trust—but also widespread loneliness and disconnection and the erosion of community life, in the sense of fewer people knowing their neighbors and declining membership in community organizations.

And all of those things definitely have an impact on people’s personal lives. But I think it manifests as a vague feeling like, Oh, it’s just harder to make friends or harder to feel like I’m a part of my community.

So I wonder if we’re feeling this sort of vague and troubling sense of disconnection and assigning it a false explanation: that things used to be better before, and people just suck more than they used to.

Rosin: Oh, that’s really interesting. So what you’re saying is the feeling is real. Like, the feeling that something has changed is real because something has changed. There is more disconnection and loneliness.

So instead we make up this very tidy story. Like, “When I was a kid, things were better and people were nicer and the mailman tipped his hat”—and we just kind of stopped there.

Beck: Yeah; there definitely are real things that are really happening that would make people feel disconnected from strangers around them. And I wonder if, yeah, we just have a hard time psychologically, knowing why that’s the case.

Rosin: So Adam, I want to run a couple of theories by you. One is the possibility that something has actually changed. And we’re just calling it by the wrong name. That, like, something has declined. And this is from a different body of psychological research about social trust.

That there is a change in our isolation, our sense of connectedness, our face-to-ace contact. Like there are some societal changes which are real and structural and have kind of left a hole in us that we are misnaming morality.

When we read it here, we thought there are some things that are changing and that do leave us a little despairing—and maybe we’re just calling them by the wrong name.

Mastroianni: Yeah.

Rosin: Like we have this incredibly powerful feeling that something is wrong, and that “something” is connectedness or community or something like that.

Mastroianni: Yeah. So it’s very easy to slip from “People are less kind than they used to be” to “Things are worse than they used to be.” And so it is true that trust in institutions has declined over time. A lot of people also say that interpersonal trust has declined over time. And I actually think that case is much more overstated than the decline in institutional trust.

There’s some work by a guy named Richard Eibach on how people think the world has gotten more dangerous. And he finds that people believe this. And the people who believe this, especially, are parents. And when you ask those parents “When did the world become more dangerous?,” you get a date that is curiously close to the date of the birth of their first child.

The obvious implication being that nothing about the world changed. It was your worldview that changed. And now you have to, you know, protect this fragile life—and so you are much more attuned to the dangers of the world. That’s why you think there’s more of them.

Rosin: You know, Julie, I have this conversation with my brother all the time, and he’s always telling me his kids aren’t safe. He lives in New York. He’s like, “My kids aren’t safe. They can’t go outside. They can’t go down the block.” Like, he really freaks out, you know? And: “It’s way less safe than it was when we were kids.” And I’m like, “Dude, we grew up in New York in the ’70s, right?” It was really not safe.

Beck: Like, statistically.

Rosin: Statistically. And I’ve shown him news articles, and I once pulled out an FBI report. I specially downloaded an FBI report that showed, you know, crime statistics in New York from when we were kids.

And his conviction is so strong about this. I can’t budge him. I can’t show him enough numbers or statistics to make him think, Oh, things aren’t worse now.

I mean, Adam Mastroianni actually has a term for this. This is a little mean to my brother, but his term is unearned conviction. And I think what he means by that is exactly this. It’s like: Your conviction is incredibly strong, even though you have really no basis to back up the story that you’re attaching to that very strong conviction.

Beck: Yeah. I mean it seems like, regardless of the FBI report, the story your brother is telling himself is super-emotionally resonant.

Rosin: Yes.

Beck: And the stories that we tell ourselves about our own lives really do sort of shape who we are. It’s really interesting, because when we tell these stories to ourselves about our personal lives, a lot of times those stories fall into one of two categories. One being redemptive and the other being contamination.

And so a redemptive story is like: “I have suffered through these trials and come out stronger for it, and things are looking up.” Whereas a contamination story is like: “These trials have conquered me, and I am now broken and fundamentally a worse person.”

And it probably won’t surprise you to hear that contamination sequences are not great for people’s mental health. That research was done with stories that we’re telling about our personal lives. But it feels like we’re kind of telling a contamination story about all of humanity.

Rosin: I guess what’s depressing to me is: Why are those the ones that stick? I mean, there are redemption stories that are popular in American society.

But I feel like in a lot of moments in history, and now is one of them, these contamination stories—like “America was great once” or “Russia was great once”—have a particular kind of emotional juice and can really rally people.

Beck: Yeah. I mean, maybe it’s kind of like your brother’s fear in New York, right? Where it’s just like—that is so viscerally emotional. It’s the safety of your kid. And so, of course, that’s going to have like a way stronger impact.

Rosin: Now Adam, did you find any appreciable differences between demographics? So if not between old and young people, what about gender differences, or people with different political ideologies?

Mastroianni: We didn’t find any gender differences. We didn’t find any differences by racial groups. We didn’t find any education differences. The only other demographic difference that we found was an ideological one, a political one. The people who self-identified as more conservative perceived more decline over time than the people who self-identified as liberal.

But even for the people who were the most liberal, they still said that people are less kind today than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or whatever point in the past. So this is something that conservatives said louder, but liberals said as well.

Rosin: So someone who identifies as a liberal could believe that there’s less racism and sexism—but still believe that those other general universal markers of morality have declined.

Mastroianni: Yes. And in fact, it seems like they do. In our studies, the much smaller group of people who say that people are better now than they used to be—when we asked them “Why? What were you thinking of?,” one thing that does come up for them is there’s more tolerance. There’s less racism, sexism, ableism; all the isms.

So it seems like that’s not what people are spontaneously thinking of when they say that people are less kind than they used to be. Because if you ask them directly, “Do you think that, for instance, people treat African Americans with more respect and courtesy or less than in the past?,” a majority of people will say more today than in the past.

But if you ask them, “Are people more or less kind today?,” they’ll go less kind. So this is not what they’re thinking of when they answer the question.

Rosin: Yeah. So it’s a really, really specific feeling. I definitely think that people treat each other with more respect, largely because we have broadened the window of who is allowed to be respected, and sort of patriarchal notions of control over people’s bodies and who gets to make decisions. I mean, there’s so many ways in which we have opened the door to fairness and equity. I’d much rather be alive today than 50 years ago, for sure.

Mastroianni: Yeah, I agree. And so I think it was especially surprising that I’m sure there are many other people who agree. But even some of the people who do agree—they seem to think like, Yeah, but that actually doesn’t come from people’s heart of hearts. That they’re actually still worse to one another now than they used to be.

Yeah; they’ll say all the right things or they’ll have the right opinions. But you know, they won’t hold the door open for you, or they’ll cheat you when they can. Now people know the right things to say, but they still do more of the bad things.

Rosin: Do we feel the same way with people we know? Does it play out differently in our personal lives?

Mastroianni: You can actually also produce an illusion of improvement. You actually primarily hear good things and experience good things about people that you know. And so we thought that in your personal world, this illusion of decline might be turned down or turned off or even reversed.

And people told us: “People in general? Worse today than they were 15 years ago. People that I have known for the last 15 years? Better today than they were 15 years ago.”

Rosin: So Julie, one thing that Adam found that I thought was so interesting was that people we know—like our own people, people we’re close to or whatever—they’re somehow getting better over time, and yet the general public are getting worse. I don’t quite understand how those fit together.

Beck: So I guess we just think the moral decline is happening with strangers, with all those other people.

Rosin: Right.

Beck: And it seems like potentially the disconnection from community that many people are experiencing could just mean that we’re slotting more people into the “morally compromised, untrustworthy” category.

Rosin: Right. Like, if we met more people and we had more casual acquaintances and we went to our bowling leagues or whatever, then we might include more people in that circle of people we know. And those people are good people. So that could sort of spiral upward rather than what’s happening, which is a momentum downward.

Beck: Adam’s study kind of seems to say that if you get to know people, then you won’t think they’re on a downward slope of moral depravity anymore.

Rosin: For one thing, Adam, it sounds to me like the problem is that people are absolutely certain. Like they’re not questioning. Was the past a worse place? It’s a sort of lack of humility. Because if you try to understand, “Well, maybe what did get worse?,” then you would come up with more specific and useful policy solutions.

I mean, I assume one reason you did this research is to point out a mistake. Like, we’re all living under this delusion. And in your head—since you sound like a fairly optimistic person—is it “knowledge is power,” and people will know, and then they will stop? What’s the aim, or what’s your wish here?

Mastroianni: Yeah. I mean, as a psychologist I a little bit despair of changing people’s minds, because I know how difficult it is. It doesn’t work the way that we think that it works, like, “Oh, you have the wrong model of the world. How about I give you the correct facts, and now you have the correct model of the world?” When does that ever happen? When has that ever happened to me? Like, never.

And one effect that I certainly hope that this has is: Whenever politicians or aspiring politicians make the claim that, you know, “Things used to be better, and put me in charge and I’ll make them better again”—that’s a very old thing that we’ve heard many times. And it resonates with us, perhaps because we are primed to believe it, even when it’s not true.

Beck: So, Hanna, now that we know this is an illusion, right, that’s very interesting. But will it actually change how you feel?

Rosin: I don’t really know. I mean, I feel like as a journalist, it depresses me a little bit because I spent a lot of time researching and marshaling facts, like I did with my brother. And to think that emotions ultimately squash all of that—I don’t really know what to do with that.

Beck: Yeah.

Rosin: But in my own personal life, awareness is helpful. I don’t think any bad can come from understanding your own emotional levers better. It’s not that it immediately leads to a change, but I don’t think it can ever be bad to understand, Oh, I’m having this emotional attachment or strong belief, and that’s leading me to behave in this way. That in and of itself is a small daily miracle. So that’s good enough.

Rosin: Listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation with Adam Mastroianni and Julie Beck, and if you generally like learning about these psychological levers that are guiding our choices, Julie hosts a full season of conversations much like this one, on the Atlantic podcast How to Talk to People. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

This episode was produced by Becca Rashid. Edited by Jocelyn Frank. Fact-checked by Isabel Cristo. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid. The managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez. You can find new episodes of Radio Atlantic every Thursday.

A certain substance is enjoying a renaissance in New York City. In a time of scarcity, it is newly abundant. In a period of economic inflation, it is free and distributed so generously that it might even be on your shoe right now. The substance is dog waste—and lots of people are mad about it.

In response to an uptick in complaints, the city’s Department of Sanitation announced in 2022 that it would crack down on human delinquents who leave behind their canine companions’ droppings. In a statement at the time, the sanitation commissioner, Jessica Tisch, said there would be greater efforts to enforce the $250 fine currently on the books. As part of the fanfare, City Councilmember Erik Bottcher unveiled an awareness campaign informing New Yorkers that “there is no poop fairy.” However, in 2022 the city issued only 18 tickets for failure to pick up dog waste. In 2023, complaints to the 311 hotline about it have risen by 17 percent.

The best part of our dog poop press conference was the groan of disappointment when I announced there is no Poop Fairy. In all seriousness, I want to thank @nycsanitation for agreeing to my request for more Pooper Scooper Law enforcement officers in Council District 3. pic.twitter.com/X5Lq38biid

— Erik Bottcher (@ebottcher) April 24, 2022

New York City Councilmember Julie Menin has also been on the receiving end of a grievance deluge. She told me that her office has been “flooded with complaints” (just a “tremendous amount of complaints,” she said) about what her constituents perceive as an increase in sidewalk waste. Most of the complaints were about the areas around schools: kids stepping in it, strollers wheeling in it.

[Read: Dog poo, an environmental tragedy]

Menin shared with me a recent study in which researchers found an average of 31,000 fecal bacteria per 100 milliliters of puddle water from New York City’s sidewalks. “In comparison, a public beach would be shut down” at such levels, she said.

Though I’ve never been under the impression that New York City puddles are a clean place to swim, I agree that having so much fecal bacteria splashing around is suboptimal. In fact, although I haven’t done the polling, I’m comfortable assuming that most people would prefer to keep unplanned encounters with feces at a minimum. And yet it remains an issue across the country. New York isn’t even the city with the worst dog-waste problem; according to a 2023 survey that measured complaints made on Twitter, that honor goes to Seattle.

This issue obviously has more to do with humans than with dogs, who cannot pick up after themselves and are, in fact, perfect. But humans know better. So why is humanity seemingly unable to solve this problem?  

That people should bear the responsibility of cleaning up after their canine friends seems a given now. The obviousness of it reminds me of an argument I once had with a college roommate who claimed the dishes his visiting girlfriend left behind in the sink were not his responsibility. Well—whose responsibility were they, then? (I’m still angry.) But the expectation that people will pick up after their dogs is relatively new, and was at first seen by many as completely ridiculous.

In 1978, New York State passed a law that said, “It shall be the duty of each dog owner … to remove any feces left by his or her dog on any sidewalk, gutter, street, or other public area.” Although the so-called poop-scoop law wasn’t technically the first of its kind (Nutley, a small New Jersey suburb, passed one in 1971), it is the legislation most often credited with the American public’s shift in attitude toward dog waste. Alan Beck, New York City’s director of the Bureau of Animal Affairs at the time, succinctly explained its impact in a paper published in the journal Environment in 1979. “When something happens in New York—and it works—it becomes world news,” he wrote.

I spoke with Beck, now a professor of animal ecology at Purdue University, in Indiana, about the struggle to get the law passed. One of the most vocal proponents of the law at the time, he said, was Fran Lee, the leader of the activist group Children Before Dogs. Lee was particularly concerned about Toxocara canis, a species of roundworm sometimes found in dog feces that can become especially harmful when ingested by children. (The specter of children eating dog feces is somewhat of a running theme in the dog-feces activist community.) Lee believed that dogs should be required to relieve themselves exclusively within the confines of their human’s apartment. Though her views were extreme—Beck recalled attending a talk she gave in New Jersey, at which she was pelted with bags of dog waste by an opponent—John Lindsay, New York City’s mayor from 1966 until 1973, sided with her, at least insofar as he believed dog waste was a problem in need of a legislative solution.

Lindsay proposed a pick-up law in 1972 and was met with outrage. Some animal-rights groups opposed it, fearful that forcing this task would lead people to abandon their dogs, or worse: that acquiescing to this law might embolden the city to ban dogs altogether, a future some saw as Fran Lee’s ultimate goal.

[Read: Is it okay to let my dog sleep in my bed?]

The proposal didn’t pass, and Lindsay’s term ended. The scooper movement didn’t get its win until Ed Koch was elected in 1977. Right before he took office, State Senator Franz S. Leichter and Assemblyman Edward H. Lehner got the law passed at the state level. The law, which applied to cities in New York with populations greater than 400,000 (meaning only New York City and Buffalo), stated that those who failed to pick up would receive what was at that point a $25 fine. Part of Beck’s job was to explain to residents that the law was “not anti-dog”; he argued that waste-free streets would be healthier for dogs, and would make dog ownership be seen as more acceptable (that is, to landlords and Fran Lee types).

Though it isn’t possible to quantify the exact amount of dog waste on sidewalks at any particular moment, Beck told me the law seemed to turn things around rather quickly. “Within the first few months,” he said, “people started, whether it’s real or perceived, to feel that things were better.” Now the once-radical proposition is the norm in much of the country.

With decades of scooping behind us now, it’s frustrating that the task is still an issue that necessitates citywide PR campaigns. Most people who don’t pick up must understand that what they’re doing is wrong. They know they’re leaving behind an unsanitary nuisance for their neighbors and, if they do it in their own neighborhood, themselves. So why do they do it?

The German sociologist Matthias Gross was curious about the motivations behind these delinquents, so he dedicated 10 years to essentially stalking them. Posting up in parks in different cities at various times of the day, he observed the behavior of humans who did and did not scoop, looking for patterns; these eventually ended up as a report—“Natural Waste: Canine Companions and the Lure of Inattentively Pooping in Public”—in the journal Environmental Sociology.

“I just found that whole phenomenon, from a sociological perspective, so fascinating,” Gross told me. He found that people were less likely to pick up early in the morning, but some of those same non-scoopers would scoop in the afternoon. In his report, Gross suggests that people might not actually care about keeping the parks clean as much as they do about being perceived as good citizens. It brings to mind the concept of the tragedy of the commons—the idea that people tend to act selfishly when given access to something communal, in this case shared social spaces. But if everyone acted selfishly, that communal resource would be ruined.

To cover up the fact that they were neglecting their responsibility, Gross wrote, many non-scoopers pretended they weren’t aware of what their dog was getting up to. (I have personally seen this particular move many times.) “I saw how dog owners use the iPhone to pretend they were not seeing what the dog is doing,” he told me, adding that the devices “help very much to strategically pretend that you do not know what’s going on.” Indeed—in this situation and others.

But, of course, we can’t actually know what these people were thinking. Gross’s report was limited primarily to observation, in no small part because when he approached dog owners to discuss why they chose not to pick up what their dog had just expelled, many of them yelled at him. Someone would need to find a way to get inside their minds.

When she was a grad student, Clodagh Lyons-Bastian, now a lecturer in the department of communication at North Carolina State University, sought to be that brave soul. When a citizens advisory council she was involved with in Raleigh, North Carolina, started getting angry complaints about dogs fouling up a park where local kids played sports, she decided to look more closely at why it was happening.

In a self-reported survey of 1,000 local dog owners, more than 60 percent claimed that when they left waste behind, it was because they didn’t have a bag. Other main categories were because of external circumstances such as rain, or because they were in a wooded area and thought they could just push it to the side and move on. “There wasn’t really anybody who said, ‘I just didn’t do it because I don’t care about my community,’” Lyons-Bastian told me.

[Read: How dogs make friends for their humans]

But when those same people were asked why they thought others left behind dog waste, they judged them far more harshly. “Have you heard of the fundamental attribution error?” Lyons-Bastian asked me. This is people’s tendency to attribute their own actions to the environment or things otherwise out of their control, and others’ actions to their character.

The second part of Lyons-Bastian’s survey focused on what might motivate respondents to pick up more frequently. She found the answer was not fines, nor was it scolding. Instead, it was employing the psychological concept of social proof, which suggests that people are influenced by the decisions of those around them: “If the people in your community and in your circle are doing something, you’re much more likely to do it.” Conversely, if you think other people aren’t doing something, it’s easy to wonder why you’re bothering to do it yourself.

Dominic Packer, a co-author of the book The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony, has also found this to be true. “One of the things that motivates people to comply with the norm is a sense of identity,” he said. Messaging that New Yorkers are people who pick up after their dogs—unlike the people from all of those other loser cities—might do the trick. What does not work, he said, is emphasizing the number of people who are behaving badly, which suggests that behaving badly is the norm. This is unfortunate news for all of those flashy press conferences.

For a city with an estimated 500,000 dogs, compliance in New York is evidently great. No matter how annoyed New Yorkers might be at the sight of stray feces, they must admit that they are not encountering it at a rate of half a million times a day. Maybe instead of a sign scolding those few dog owners who ruin it for everyone else, what would really be helpful is a sign that says: ISN’T IT WONDERFUL HOW WE’RE ALL PICKING UP POOP?

Though many attribute the perceived increase in dog waste to the pandemic, which appeared to temporarily cause an increase in dog purchase and adoption, Julie Menin, the city councilmember, thinks the problem is, in fact, sign-related: the product of the city removing its dilapidated curb your dog signs in 2013 and not replacing them with new ones. “The expectation was that people would clean up after their dogs” without the signs, she said. “But that just proved not to be the case.”

Menin launched a contest for residents to design a new sign, which she plans to hang up across her district. The winner was announced on June 12: a cartoon image of a doggy Statue of Liberty holding a bone and a shovel, with the slogan, Clean streets for all. Pick up after your pup! Not as good as my sign suggestion, but still cute.

I asked whether she thought anything below 100 percent compliance would be acceptable to her complaining  constituents, and she didn’t answer, instead emphasizing that “it really can’t get worse than it is now.” (Unfortunately this is in direct conflict with a central law of universe: “It can always get worse.”)

I don’t think that expecting cities to be completely free of dog waste is reasonable, nor do I believe that human inconsiderateness can be legislated away entirely. There will always be outliers: those without a bag, those who genuinely did not notice what their dog was doing, those with other complicating factors that we are not privy to. And there will, of course, always be assholes. The problem is intractable because humans are imperfect.

So though it’s natural to focus on the poop you just stepped in, it might be healthier (and more effective) to put a greater focus on all the dog waste you never encounter in the first place. Most dog owners are out there doing their neighborly scooping, and they’re just as annoyed as you are by those who aren’t. Band together with those people to say, “Yes, here in [the place in which you live] we proudly clean up after our dogs … unlike that loser city Seattle!”

For the past six months, I have been obsessed with housekeeping—something that, all of my former roommates can attest, I have previously shown neither interest in nor aptitude for. I have drawn up cleaning schedules, spent far too much time thinking about the relative merits of different fabrics, and become chipper when loading the dishwasher. I even recently found myself describing it as “fun.”

I credit and blame one book for all of this: Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts. First published in 1999, this unlikely best seller contains nearly 900 pages of practical advice—the proper way to wash dishes, the use of furniture paste wax. What drew me in was its wonderful opening essay, in which Mendelson, a novelist, professor, and lawyer, argues for the importance and dignity of keeping house—an act “that makes your home alive, that turns it into a small society in its own right, a vital place with its own ways and rhythms.” Although I remain a haphazard housekeeper, I’ve become convinced that housekeeping is both an art and a science, an enterprise whose meaning extends far beyond keeping one’s home clean.

The seven books below also describe the experience of becoming absorbed by a skill or craft, and deliver insights into what mundane activities—say, playing sports or learning a foreign language—can tell us about how we live today. Look closely enough at any human endeavor, these books suggest, and you’ll find lessons on our relationship to the natural world, to history, to other cultures, and to our own body. And they so vividly capture the satisfactions of the pursuits they describe that you might be tempted to take up gardening or long-distance running or bookbinding and enlarge your sense of your own capabilities.

Vintage

In Other Words, by Jhumpa Lahiri

In 2012, Lahiri moved to Rome and stopped reading and writing in English in order to immerse herself in Italian. This bilingual series of reflections—the original Italian on the left, an English translation by Ann Goldstein on the right—charts her love affair with the Romance language, from her “indiscreet, absurd longing” upon first hearing it on a trip to Florence to the 20 years of language classes, tutoring, and diligent self-teaching that followed. The march toward fluency, she admits, is “a continuous trial.” She mixes up similar words such as schiacciare (“crush”) and scacciare (“expel”), uses the wrong prepositions, and can’t quite get the hang of when to use simple or imperfect past tense. When she begins composing stories in Italian, she’s aware that she will never attain the facility she has in English. But Italian reintroduces mystery, delight, and intensity to her reading: “Every page seems to have a light covering of mist,” she writes. “The obstacles stimulate me. Every new construction seems a marvel. Every unknown word a jewel.” Beneath her sense of wonder is a deeper argument—that plunging into new skills for the love of them is fundamentally hopeful, even transcendent. “The more I feel imperfect,” she writes, “the more I feel alive.”

[Read: Learn a foreign language before it’s too late]

Duke University Press

Beyond a Boundary, by C. L. R. James

James, the Trinidadian scholar, might best be known for his Marxist writings and his advocacy for Caribbean independence. Less known is his obsession with cricket. James spent a lifetime steeped in the sport: He disappointed his family by focusing on the game rather than schoolwork, played for a first-class club on Trinidad, and eventually covered cricket as a journalist in England. He even credits the sport for his activism. “Cricket,” he writes, “had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it”—in part because class and race tensions on the island played out among its socially stratified clubs. Beyond a Boundary makes the case that cricket is impossible to understand without considering its historical, social, and cultural context; in the book’s most ambitious moments, it argues for cricket’s foundational place in modern British history and for its status as a dramatic and visual art. Even if you know nothing about the sport, James conveys its richness—how a batter’s style can reflect both individual personality and a society’s priorities, and how the game effortlessly connects its followers with the wider world.

New York Review Books

Onward and Upward in the Garden, by Katharine S. White

White describes her gardening habits as “careless,” “lazy,” and “amateur,” but the critical eye and exacting taste that come through in her collected gardening columns for The New Yorker are a delight. White was that magazine’s first fiction editor—she was an early publisher of many famous writers, including E. B. White, her future husband—and in these columns she delivers crisp assessments of gardening books and seed catalogs from 1958 to 1970, considering not only their prose but ease of use, typography, paper quality, and color reproduction. Scattered throughout are glimpses of a life suffused with flowers. In winter, she moves through a house crowded with plants, worrying about the location of the cyclamens and the temperature of the African violets. Once, she informs us, she tried to grow lilies in her frozen Maine garden, which resulted in “the comic spectacle of me and my eager family attacking a flower border with a crowbar.” Her opinions about bearded irises and gourds, dahlias and gladioli are all expressed with such humor and charisma that I couldn’t help dreaming of what a garden of my own might look like.

[Read: The healing power of garden class]

Flatiron

The Shepherd’s Life, by James Rebanks

Cast your mind’s eye over the verdant mountains of England’s Lake District, and you might think of Wordsworth and the Romantic poets writing paeans to wildernesses untouched by man. Rebanks, a shepherd whose family has lived on that land for centuries, rebuts these poetic images of his home. “Every acre of it,” he writes in his thought-provoking memoir, “has been defined by the actions of men and women over the past ten thousand years.” The author makes the care and maintenance of sheep utterly absorbing, conjuring the coordinated pincer movement the shepherds perform every summer to gather their sheep from the mountaintops and the nerve-racking work of birthing lambs in the spring, which sometimes requires reaching in with one’s bare hands. By the end, selecting which rams to mate with your ewes begins to seem like a high-stakes artistic decision. Rebanks positions his portrait of traditional farming as a counterpoint to modern life (he finds a stint at Oxford largely “pointless and empty”). His compelling critique invites readers to seek out more rooted, time-honored ways to live.

Vintage

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami

This classic avocational memoir follows Murakami as he trains for the 2005 New York City Marathon and reflects on a life of serious running. The book verges on self-help—chapter titles include “Suffering Is Optional” and “Most of What I Know About Writing Fiction I Learned by Running Every Day”—but the aura of upbeat resignation that colors the proceedings alters its tone. “Life is basically unfair,” Murakami writes. “But even in a situation that’s unfair, I think it’s possible to seek out a kind of fairness.” You simply can’t control what happens on race day, just as Murakami can’t control his aging body and slower finishing times, much less the stubborn, avoidant personality he’s carried around “like an old suitcase.” This book is refreshingly free of exhortations for everyone to take up running. (The author in fact believes forcing people to do it is “pointless torture,” which, yes.) But the scenes of him jogging through Kauai or Cambridge, Massachusetts, thinking of nothing but crisp morning air and “the sounds of my footsteps, my breathing and heartbeats, all blended together in a unique polyrhythm,” are their own kind of persuasion.

[Read: ]The wisdom of running a 2,189-mile marathon

A Degree of Mastery, by Annie Tremmel Wilcox

The first section of A Degree of Mastery flings the reader straight into the deep end of book conservation, and it is utterly engrossing. Wilcox slices the spine off of a deteriorating book printed in 1817, disassembles the binding, and then literally washes the pages in a bath of deionized water. She meticulously mends rips with a Japanese wheat-starch paste, prepared in a device called a Cook ’n’ Stir. I learned names for parts of books I didn’t know had names: That striped cord attached to the spine of hardcover books, for instance, is an endband. In 1987, Wilcox became the first female apprentice of the renowned book conservator William Anthony, before his death from liver cancer. Her memoir details life at a workbench in the University of Iowa Libraries’ conservation department, where she picks up bookbinding by doctoring 15th-century incunabula and editions of Leaves of Grass under Anthony’s patient eye. It’s also a moving meditation on the nature of apprenticeship, on the mutual learning that occurs among a craft’s practitioners, and on the teachers who live on through students who espouse their knowledge and ideals.

Flatiron

The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater, by Alanna Okun

Most people, Okun asserts, become engrossed in hobbies because they’re seeking a specific kind of satisfaction: “that small but constant motion that helps them metabolize the universe and comprises a corner of their identity.” Some play musical instruments; some fish. Okun’s preferred activity is knitting, a lifelong pursuit, as well as crochet and embroidery, all of which create safe havens for her from an often-overwhelming world. In these strikingly vulnerable essays, knitting baby cardigans and crocheting gargantuan blankets aren’t just pleasant diversions but emotional lifelines while Okun contends with her grief over the death of two friends and her grandparents, as well as the agonies of romance and her struggles with anxiety. “A craft project,” Okun writes, “allows you to hold something concrete in your hands even while everything around you is swirling and illegible.” Crafting is also, she makes clear, extremely fun. Okun brings her knitting on the subway and to the beach, and makes witty lists of the skills she’s gained from her fiber-art endeavors. Through her eyes, we see the infinite potential of “a large pile of marled green wool, three balls of unbleached cotton, a tiny skein of silk.”

The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community.

Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict. The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen; they are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive In This House, We Believe signs on lawns in many highly educated, deep-blue suburbs.

In a new report for The Century Foundation, I contrast Scarsdale with another Westchester County suburb, Port Chester, which is just eight miles away but has remarkably different demographics. Scarsdale’s median household income, in excess of $250,000, is nearly three times that of Port Chester, as is the portion of residents with a college degree. And whereas three-quarters of Port Chester’s elementary students qualify for free or reduced-price meals at school, zero percent of Scarsdale’s students do. In Scarsdale, 87 percent of residents are non-Hispanic white or Asian American, whereas 69 percent of Port Chester residents are Black or Hispanic.

[Jerusalem Demsas: What’s causing black flight?]

On the overwhelming majority of Scarsdale’s land, building anything but a single-family home is illegal. According to data collected for the report by New York University’s Furman Center, just 0.2 percent of Scarsdale’s lots have structures classified as two- or three-family homes or apartments. Port Chester, by contrast, allows multifamily housing on about half its land. From 2014 to 2021, 41 percent of the new housing units authorized in Port Chester were for multifamily housing. In Scarsdale, none of the 218 units permitted was for a multifamily home. When multifamily housing is proposed in Scarsdale, residents raise numerous objections, many of them spurious. Some oppose apartments, for example, on the grounds that multifamily housing will result in overcrowded schools, even though data show that school enrollment in the Village of Scarsdale has been declining in recent years.

Many people seeking a better life for their children would, in fact, relish an opportunity to move to Scarsdale. In interviews I conducted for my new book, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See, low-wage single mothers from across the country repeatedly expressed their desire for better schools for their children.

And as I note in the Century Foundation report, Scarsdale spent nearly $5,500 more per student than Port Chester did in 2020, and had lower student-to-teacher ratios. In 2019, 32 percent of Port Chester students were performing at grade level in English, compared with 87 percent of students in Scarsdale—a staggering 55-percentage-point gap. In math, 35 percent of Port Chester students performed at grade level, compared with 90 percent of Scarsdale students, also a 55-point gap. When low-income students are given a chance to attend lower-poverty schools, research shows they can cut the achievement gap with their middle-class peers in math by half and in reading by one-third over a five- to seven-year period. They just seldom get the option.  

Television cameras help depict the plight of immigrant families who are turned away at the border, but they don’t capture the way working-class families in places like Port Chester are shut out of higher-opportunity public schools in places like Scarsdale that prohibit the construction of the types of homes that less advantaged families could afford. Although Scarsdale parents may try to reconcile the exclusion with their political liberalism by supporting greater state education spending in places like Port Chester, economic integration of schools has been found to be far more effective than a “separate but equal” compensatory-spending approach to equity.

By limiting housing supply, Scarsdale’s zoning laws—and similar rules in other New York City suburbs—also artificially drive up home prices in the metropolitan region. Earlier this year, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul proposed the New York Housing Compact, which would have given downstate municipalities, such as those in Westchester County, a goal of increasing their housing supply by 3 percent every three years. If communities failed to reach those goals, the state would require municipalities to provide applicants for housing permits with a fast-track approval process. In addition, downstate areas would need to rezone for greater housing within a half mile of commuter-railway and subway stations. Currently, in Scarsdale, nearly all of the land near the train station is zoned for large lots containing single-family homes.

[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]

But though yes-in-my-backyard reforms have gained traction in states such as California and Oregon and in cities such as Minneapolis and Charlotte, the liberal New York State legislature deep-sixed a moderate Democratic governor’s housing agenda—with the help of elected officials and civic leaders from affluent liberal suburbs. Amy Paulin, a Scarsdale Democrat, told The New York Times that Hochul’s “proposal would change the complexity of our county in a way that doesn’t make sense.” Westchester County’s Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, meanwhile, rejected Hochul’s plan and called instead for financial incentives to encourage communities to voluntarily permit more housing.

Wealthy conservative areas also erect barriers to new housing, but liberal areas are typically worse. Writing in 2022, the Brookings Institution researcher Jenny Schuetz observed that “decades of painstaking research of zoning by economists and urban planners have produced a high degree of consensus on which places in the United States have tight land use regulations, regardless of the method used to measure zoning.” She argues that “overly restrictive zoning is most prevalent and problematic along the West Coast and the Northeast corridor from Washington D.C. to Boston.” These areas “lean heavily Democratic in national, state and local elections.” And studies that examine the stringency of zoning within states—for example, California—find that the most restrictive zoning is found in the more politically liberal communities.

In Lexington, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb where the median household income is $203,000 and voters supported Biden over Trump by 81 percent to 17 percent, the walls of exclusion are steep. A developer who wants to build a triplex would need a lot of at least 15,500 feet—more than twice the minimum lot size in neighboring Waltham (median income of $103,000). By three Boston University researchers’ count, a builder in Waltham must comply with 17 regulations, whereas in Lexington, a builder faces 34 regulations.

Of Princeton, New Jersey—whose voters favored Biden over Trump by a six-to-one margin—the political scientist Omar Wasow has acerbically observed, “There are people in the town of Princeton who will have a Black Lives Matter sign on their front lawn and a sign saying ‘We love our Muslim neighbors,’ but oppose changing zoning policies that say you have to have an acre and a half per house.” He continued: “That means, ‘We love our Muslim neighbors, as long as they’re millionaires.’” (Having a modest number of wealthy neighbors of color may convince privileged white homeowners that the system is just.)

[Read: Where living with friends is technically illegal]

Wealthy suburbs can be defeated in their efforts to remain exclusive. In June 2019, Oregon became the first state to enact a virtual statewide ban on local single-family zoning ordinances. The reform happened only because rural Republicans, who tend to be skeptical of government land-use regulations (and of liberal elites), joined urban Democrats to defeat affluent suburban interests. In September 2021, a similar coalition in California repeated the feat, legalizing duplexes statewide and allowing people to subdivide lots, which could mean as many as four homes on what had previously been a single-family lot. Such laws have “opened up entire communities that had been largely walled off,” one housing expert told the Times.

The passage of such laws is a stunning development in a country where, for decades, NIMBY forces reliably won political fights. It shows that the zoning walls that have endured for so long—and imposed so much damage—are becoming more and more difficult to defend. Posting welcoming slogans on a manicured lawn isn’t enough. If affluent liberal suburbanites believe that other people deserve a shot at improving their lives, the most important thing they can do is allow families of modest means into their towns.

The legendary vocalist Tony Bennett passed away on Friday, at his home in New York City, at the age of 96. Bennett gained fame as a crooner in the 1950s, and turned that into a decades-long career as a beloved performer, re-introducing a wide catalog of traditional standards to several generations. Bennett was well-known as a collaborator, sharing stages and studios with countless musical legends. Gathered below are a handful of images of some of those duets and group performances over the years.

For the past three years, I have taught creative-writing courses at Georgetown University, and in that time, I have come to accept something I initially found strange: The majority of my students prefer reading and writing genre fiction—sci-fi, mystery, romance—to literary fiction. (A loose explanation of the difference: Literary fiction generally resembles real life and focuses on characters, whereas genre fiction tends to rely on familiar themes and prioritizes plot.) I’d initially constructed a syllabus that was stocked with a variety of classic and contemporary literary short stories, but I soon learned that my students were keen to produce work that resembled what they were consuming outside of class: fantasy epics, apocalyptic science-fiction tales, fearless and risqué romances.

I am by no means immune to the charms of sci-fi and fantasy, though I’ve long preferred to read literary fiction because of its general commitment to exploring why humans act and think the way we do. But my students spoke passionately about why they found their favorite stories so appealing: They asserted that these works provided a sturdy vessel for their supercharged feelings, emotions that ranged far beyond the realist confines of the work I’d been assigning. They also argued that genre fiction was better equipped to capture the heightened unreality of the current moment, with its abundance of news and information, which can often feel like daily plot twists.

[Read: Don’t call them trash]

I began to search for a bridge, an artist who was adept at incorporating genre elements into their writing while maintaining the quality of craft required of superb literary works. I promptly thought of Colson Whitehead. Since the beginning of his career, Whitehead has brilliantly achieved this merger of modes, beginning with his potent debut, The Intuitionist. But working in these two registers simultaneously is not without its pitfalls, a lesson my students could learn from Whitehead as well. His latest novel, Crook Manifesto, displays his singular ability to write adroitly in multiple styles, his facility with language, and his customarily sharp and expansive sentences. Yet this novel does not accomplish what he has managed in his previous works. Its characters don’t feel fully fleshed out, and its plot doesn’t capture the extreme feelings and circumstances that readers might expect from what is essentially a crime novel. Because these elements don't quite gel, this book is both powered and limited by its most absorbing characteristic: Whitehead's voice.

Genre novels function a bit like popular culinary dishes: There are generally two paths to success. The first is to follow the recipe precisely and with finesse, so that when someone tastes a bite of your carrot cake, there is no doubt you have delivered a sterling version of a cherished delicacy. The second path is to depart from the recipe and reinvent the dish in a manner that simultaneously references and elevates it. Whitehead has found success with this second approach throughout his career. In his first Pulitzer winner, The Underground Railroad, for instance, he transformed the titular network of Good Samaritans who sheltered runaway slaves into a network of actual train stations. Ingeniously combining genre and literary ingredients—here, a propulsive, picaresque plot that was also populated with achingly real characters—he challenged and unsettled a history many readers thought they knew.

Crook Manifesto is a sequel to Whitehead’s previous novel, Harlem Shuffle, a crime story about a man named Ray Carney, who earns a living acquiring stolen goods and selling them for profit. Crook Manifesto also revolves around Carney, but in this novel, we’ve advanced several years, and he’s recently retired from illicit activities to focus on running his thriving furniture store in Harlem. The backdrop is a decaying 1970s New York City where, as Whitehead puts it, “you knew the city was going to hell if the Upper East Side was starting to look like crap, too.” Carney’s teenage daughter, May, is eager to attend the Jackson 5’s upcoming concert at Madison Square Garden. Unable to acquire tickets through conventional means, Carney decides to participate in one last illegal scheme to obtain them. Things go haywire, and he soon finds himself involved in a harrowing crime spree.

[Read: What is crime in a country built on it?]

The trouble with the novel starts in the second section, which takes place a couple of years later and mostly concerns the attempts of a character named Zippo to film a blaxploitation picture in Harlem (Carney’s store serves as a set for one of the scenes). Carney is now a minor figure, and the narrative threads that Whitehead established in the prior section are mostly abandoned; as a result, Crook Manifesto begins to read less like a novel and more like an anthology of glancingly related anecdotes. This development draws more attention to the third-person narrator, who assumes an outsize presence. The story, such as it is, recedes; the narrator becomes the only meaningful link between the various sections of this book. Whitehead’s chatty prose reliably carries the reader along, sometimes advancing the plot and sometimes appearing to be taken with its own fluency, its startling virtuosity. This is a boon for a novel in which determining why we’re taking this journey grows more and more difficult.

Whitehead continues to write some of the best sentences in the business. They’re erudite yet quotidian, infused with a sophisticated rhythmic sensibility and sparkling with charisma. For example, here he is describing Zippo’s experience as a budding artist in New York:  

Like many artists Zippo had been starved of attention in his younger days, and like many artists he channeled a modicum of praise into a contempt-of-audience phase: Invincible! He took to dressing like a Negro Salvador Dalí and penciled in a handlebar mustache. Shambling in velour, he pushed a watermelon in a baby carriage down DeKalb Avenue and harrassed strangers, demanding to know if they “liked his baby chile.” Everybody assumed he was high most of the time. He wasn’t.

Sometimes, Whitehead’s sentences will feint in one direction before arriving abruptly at an unexpected destination. A few pages later, once Zippo finds himself in Los Angeles, he writes:

Christmas in LA was a disorienting affair: the Santas wore shorts and the workshop elves were past-prime centerfolds and future Waitress #2s. The city was like an Antonioni film. The first time you see it, it sucks, and then you see it a second time and it’s incredible. It was like that, except the second time it still sucks.

These passages are typical of the linguistic delights on offer throughout the book. However, as the novel continues, flickering among different perspectives, the language attracts attention to itself at the expense of plot. Whitehead, and not the various colorful characters in this book, emerges as the star.

Early on, Whitehead introduces several tropes that seem to hint at a particular kind of story. We have the reformed outlaw who reluctantly reenters the crime world, the devoted-but-ignorant wife, the corrupt police officers who are working on both sides of the law, and so on. But rather than using these elements to build momentum, Whitehead layers literary pyrotechnics over them: his ambitious, involved sentences; the seemingly random shifts in point of view; his frequent insertion of long-winded descriptions whenever his story seems to be gathering steam; and—perhaps most jarringly—a narrative structure that prevents the novel from cohering.  

Although he doesn’t get the recipe right, there are many reasons to read this book. Whitehead writes about New York with verve, and the novel is studded with fascinating social commentary about the lives of African Americans in the city during the disco decade. Yet as I read, I could not stop thinking about my conversations with my students. It occurred to me that they are advancing a simple and revolutionary idea—that genre fiction is a better reflection of real life than literary fiction. I believe both kinds of literature can offer a bracing view of reality; the key, of course, is how well the stories are executed. Sometimes our lives seem to be dictated by plots that carry us along without our permission; other times, we derive comfort and meaning from insights about ourselves and the characters who populate our days. The best fiction highlights at least one—and occasionally both—of these realities. Crook Manifesto, unfortunately, doesn’t satisfy either remit. I learned a great deal from reading it, but it never felt quite real.

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A Trump-Biden rematch is inevitable in 2024, even though polling has shown that most Americans wish it weren’t (and even though the former president is possibly facing a third indictment). But the 2024 field is still quite crowded—and the contenders can tell us a few things about America’s politics and anxieties.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Gary Shteyngart: “I watched Russian television for five days straight.” Being anxious or sad does not make you mentally ill. Climate collapse could happen fast.

A Race for Silver

Today, the long-shot Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified in a hearing organized by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. If the GOP using a Democratic presidential contender as an empathetic witness in a hearing sounds strange to you, you’re not alone. But the choice makes more sense when you understand how RFK Jr.’s conspiracy-theory-laden platform speaks to many voters, and how scores of right-wingers are promoting his candidacy.

RFK Jr.’s role in today’s hearing underscores his unique place in contemporary American politics, my colleague John Hendrickson, who recently profiled him, told me today. RFK Jr. is not the only 2024 contender who, despite low odds for winning the presidential race itself, has managed to hold on to something of a spotlight—or at least to elicit some fear from the competition. Below is a short guide to some of these candidates.

The first MAGA Democrat has real support.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign was initially written off by some as a stunt. But Kennedy’s support is not a joke, John noted last month: “So far, Kennedy is polling in the double digits against Biden, sometimes as high as 20 percent.”

Kennedy is “tapping into something burrowed deep in the national psyche,” John writes: “Large numbers of Americans don’t merely scoff at experts and institutions; they loathe them … Scroll through social media and count how many times you see the phrase Burn it down.” And Kennedy is promising to do just that. On the campaign trail, he speaks about collusion among state, corporate, media, and pharmaceutical powers. He has said that if elected, he would “gut” agencies like the FDA and order the Justice Department to investigate medical journals for “lying to the public.”

Across the GOP, it’s a race for second place.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to lag far behind Trump in polling because “his basic theory of the campaign is turning out to be wrong,” my colleague Helen Lewis wrote yesterday. “He promised to run as Trump plus an attention span, and instead he is running as Trump minus jokes. The result is ugly enough for the Republican base to recoil.”

DeSantis has long believed that “mainstream journalists are the enemy and should be treated with undisguised contempt,” Helen writes. But his decision earlier this week to sit down for an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper suggests that he finally understands he needs the mainstream media’s support if he hopes to bolster his candidacy.

I called my colleague David A. Graham, who keeps up our 2024 election “cheat sheet,” to see how he’s thinking about the non-Trump GOP contenders right now. “Tim Scott and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are all in this interesting place where you could imagine them busting out of the pack to either match or supplant DeSantis as the leading non-Trump contender, but it’s hard right now to imagine any of them mounting a serious challenge to Trump,” David told me. In the end, he said, “it seems like this is all just a vigorous race for silver.”

And the third-party problem is coming into view.

The centrist group No Labels, whose founding chairman is the former Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, is preparing to back a third-party presidential ticket in 2024—“to the growing alarm of Democrats,” my colleague Russell Berman wrote earlier this week. (So far, the group has refused to discuss who its nominees might be.)

No Label leaders say they’re hoping to protect voters from a rematch between Trump and Biden. “But Democrats and more than a few Republicans fear that such a plan might ensure exactly what Lieberman insists he would hate to see: Trump’s return to the White House,” Russell notes. No Labels says it will decide whether to nominate a ticket in the spring of 2024. The group might be holding out for two unlikely scenarios, Russell explains: that Biden will change his mind about running for reelection, or that “Trump’s legal woes will finally persuade Republican voters to look elsewhere.”

Meanwhile, a long-shot candidate is inspiring outsize fear in the White House. The academic, civil-rights activist, and Green Party candidate Cornel West will probably not win, my colleague Mark Leibovich writes today, but West has Democrats worried all the same. “West inhabits a particular category of Democratic angst, the likes of which only the words Green Party presidential candidate can elicit,” Mark explains; Jill Stein, as you may recall, swept up votes in key battleground states in 2016 that exceeded the margins by which Hillary Clinton lost in those states.

Democrats’ fear of a third-party candidate is not unfounded: As Mark notes, recent polling suggests that in a head-to-head race between Trump and Biden, Trump is more likely to benefit from the addition of a third-party candidate.

We may see the first real test of the GOP contenders next month, at the first Republican debate on August 23; Trump is reportedly considering skipping the event entirely. The Democratic National Committee, for its part, will not be holding primary debates, which is the norm for the party of an incumbent president seeking reelection. As we head into this next phase of the election, the race for silver will intensify. And other surprises could still await.

Related:

The humiliation of Ron DeSantis The long-shot candidate who has the White House worried

Today’s News

Wheat prices rose for a third day after Russia pulled out of a wartime deal that protected the export of Ukrainian grain, a move that could stoke a global food crisis. A planned burning of the Quran in Stockholm led to counterprotests in Iraq and the expulsion of the Swedish ambassador from the country. New York City will pay about $13.7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit arguing that unlawful police tactics violated the rights of protesters demonstrating after George Floyd’s murder.

Evening Read

Richard Kalvar / Magnum

Seriously, What Are You Supposed to Do With Old Clothes?

By Amanda Mull

In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my closet. I didn’t buy anything new unless I absolutely needed it. Eventually, though, I did need some things, and I didn’t have anywhere to put them.

Realizing you’ve exceeded the bounds of your closet is a low-grade domestic humiliation that’s become familiar to many Americans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty.

Read. Paula Marantz Cohen’s new book, Talking Cure, uncovers the secret to a good conversation.

Listen. Marriages aren’t what they used to be. So why can’t we quit weddings? In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks with our staff writer Xochitl Gonzalez about her years as a luxury wedding planner.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you, like me, are waiting for various loved ones to return to town before joining the Barbie-Oppenheimer fray (or if tickets are sold out), I’d suggest seeing Past Lives, a beautiful film released by A24 still playing in select theaters. My colleague Shirley Li put it perfectly: The movie is an ode to the kind of love that can be both platonic and romantic at the same time; somehow, that gives the film double the resonance and the depth of a classic romantic tale. It’s not overly sentimental, either; the movie is suffused with subtle wit throughout.

— Isabel

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.