This story was originally published in High Country News.

High winds tore at Gothic Mountain as the sleeping giant watched over the cabins nestled in Gothic, Colorado, a remote outpost accessible only by skis during the valley’s harsh alpine winters. The plumes of snow that lifted from the peak briefly appeared to form a cloud and then disappeared.

To many, the snow that seemed to vanish into thin air would go unnoticed. But in a region where water availability has slowly begun to diminish, every snowflake counts. Each winter, an unknown percentage of the Rocky Mountain West’s snowpack disappears into the atmosphere, as it was doing on Gothic Mountain, near the ski-resort town of Crested Butte.

In the East River watershed, located along the high reaches of the Colorado River Basin, a group of researchers at Gothic’s Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) is trying to solve the mystery by focusing on a process called sublimation. Snow in the high country sometimes skips the liquid phase entirely, turning straight from a solid into a vapor. The phenomenon may be responsible for anywhere from 10 to 90 percent of snow loss. This margin of error is a major source of uncertainty for the water managers attempting to predict how much water will enter the system once the snow begins to melt.

[Read: Why California can’t catch a break]

Although scientists can measure how much snow falls onto the ground and how quickly it melts, they have no precise way to calculate how much is lost to the atmosphere, says Jessica Lundquist, a University of Washington researcher focused on spatial patterns of snow and weather in the mountains. With support from the National Science Foundation, Lundquist led the Sublimation of Snow project in Gothic over the 2022–’23 winter season, seeking to understand exactly how much snow goes missing and what environmental conditions drive that disappearance.

“It’s one of those nasty, wicked problems that no one wants to touch,” Lundquist says. “You can’t see it, and very few instruments can measure it. And then people are asking, ‘What’s going to happen with climate change? Are we going to have less water for the rivers? Is more of it going into the atmosphere or not?’ And we just don’t know.”

The snow that melts off Gothic will eventually refill the streams and rivers that flow into the Colorado River. When runoff is lower than expected, it stresses a system already strained because of persistent drought, the changing climate, and a growing demand. In 2021, for example, snowpack levels near the region’s headwaters weren’t too far below the historical average—not bad for a winter in the West these days. But the snowmelt that filled the Colorado River’s tributaries was only 30 percent of average, according to Lundquist.

“You measure the snowpack and assume that the snow is just going to melt and show up in the stream,” says Julie Vano, the research director at the Aspen Global Change Institute and a partner on the project. Her work aims to help water managers decode the science behind these processes. “It just wasn’t there. Where did the water go?”

As the West continues to dry up, water managers are pressed to accurately predict how much of the treasured resource will enter the system each spring. One challenge federal water managers face is deciding how much water to release from reservoirs to satisfy the needs of downstream users.

[Read: French people are fighting over giant pools of water]

Although transpiration and soil-moisture levels may be some of the other culprits responsible for water loss, one of the largest unknowns is sublimation, says Ian Billick, the executive director of RMBL.

“We need to close that uncertainty in the water budget,” Billick says.

The East River’s tributaries eventually feed into the Colorado River, which supplies water to some 40 million people in seven western states, dozens of federally recognized tribes, and parts of Mexico. This watershed has become a place where more than 100 years of biological observations collide, many of these studies focused on understanding the life cycle of the water.

Lundquist’s project is one of the latest. Because of the complex, intersecting processes that drive sublimation, the team set up more than 100 instruments in an alpine meadow just south of Gothic known as Kettle Ponds.

“No one’s ever done it right before,” Lundquist says. “And so we are trying our very best to measure absolutely everything.”  

Throughout the winter, the menagerie of equipment quietly recorded data every second of the day—measurements that would give the team a snapshot of the snow’s history. A device called a sonic anemometer measured wind speed, while others recorded the temperature and humidity at various altitudes. Instruments known as snow pillows measured moisture content, and a laser-imaging system called Lidar created a detailed map of the snow’s surface.  

From January to March, among the coldest months of the year, Daniel Hogan and Eli Schwat, graduate students who work under Lundquist at the University of Washington, skied from their snow-covered cabin in Gothic to Kettle Ponds to monitor the ever-changing snowpack.

Their skis were fitted with skins, a special fabric that sticks to skis so they can better grip the snow. The two men crunched against the ground as they made their near-daily trek out to the site, sleds full of gear in tow.

It was a chilly day in March, but the searing reflection of the snow made it feel warmer than it was. When Hogan and Schwat arrived, they dug a pit into the snow’s surface, right outside the canopy of humming instrumentation.

The pair carefully recorded the temperature and density of the snow inside. A special magnifying glass revealed the structure of individual snowflakes, some of them from recent storms and others, found deeper in the pit, from weeks or even months before. All of these factors can contribute to how vulnerable the snowpack is to sublimation.

This would be just one of many pits dug as snow continued to blanket the valley. If all of the measurements the team takes over a winter are like a book, a snow pit is just a single page, Hogan told me.

“Together, that gives you the whole winter story,” he said, standing inside one of the pits he was studying. Just the top of his head stuck out of the snowpit as he examined its layers.

Lundquist’s team began analyzing the data they collected long before the snow began to melt.

They hope the information will one day give water managers a better understanding of how much sublimation eats into the region’s water budget—helping them make more accurate predictions for what is likely to be an even hotter, and drier, future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Restoring Kabbalah to mainstream Judaism]

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

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

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

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

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

This article containers spoilers for the film Oppenheimer.

Few authors have written as insightfully about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer as Richard Rhodes, whose 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is widely regarded as the definitive account of the Manhattan Project. Rhodes’s comprehensive history, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is both a massive work of scholarship—the main text alone runs nearly 800 pages—and a literary feat that he conceived as “the tragic epic of the twentieth century.” Over the years, according to Rhodes, it has been optioned many times, but no film or television version has ever been made. “It’s quite obvious why,” Rhodes told me. “It’s just too big a story.”

Over the weekend, along with millions of other moviegoers, Rhodes saw Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic of the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb. The next day, curious about his reaction, I spoke with Rhodes by phone. He was deeply impressed by the film, especially in light of earlier attempts to adapt the same material. “It’s really first-class work,” Rhodes said, comparing it favorably with Roland Joffé’s Fat Man and Little Boy (“badly done,” from a technological perspective) and specifically praising Cillian Murphy’s performance in the title role. “If anything, he was a little too confident. But Oppenheimer was pretty confident.”

We also discussed aspects of the story that weren’t covered by the film, which Nolan adapted from the biography American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Given its relentless concentration on Oppenheimer, the movie necessarily leaves a lot out, including plenty of what Rhodes called “drama on the industrial side” and the perspectives of scientists and victims who fall outside its protagonist’s circle of consciousness. For the rest, viewers may need to return to Rhodes’s own wide-ranging work, which expands beyond even the largest IMAX screen.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Alec Nevala-Lee: Do you think that the film’s picture of Oppenheimer is accurate?

Richard Rhodes: One time I asked [the physicist] Bob Serber if my portrait of Oppenheimer was anywhere close to the real human being. And Serber, who had a very dry wit, said, “It’s the least wrong of all those I’ve seen.”

And I think that applies here, because the difficult edges to Oppenheimer were, to some degree, sanded off. But there have been several Oppenheimers in past versions. The BBC did a series with Sam Waterston. He was wonderful, but he was much too nice. Then when the next version [the 2009 PBS docudrama The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer] came around, [David Strathairn] played Oppenheimer as a hand-wringing neurotic, which really pissed me off when I watched it. You could not possibly have someone who did what Oppenheimer did in his life who was just sitting around shaking all the time with anxiety.

[Read: Oppenheimer is more than a creation myth about the atomic bomb]

Nevala-Lee: Most viewers are probably encountering figures such as Lewis Strauss (the government official who orchestrated the notorious hearing that revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance, played by Robert Downey Jr. in a towering performance) and Leslie Groves (the military head of the atomic-weapons program, played by Matt Damon) for the first time.

Rhodes: Yeah, I think Strauss, if anything, was depicted somewhat more pleasantly than he really was. I think he was even more nasty. And I was really surprised by Matt Damon, who did a damn good job. In fact, it gave me a different sort of perspective on Groves. I had pictured him as stuffier than he was depicted here, and I think this is probably closer to the truth. Groves was really a superb leader, and also anxious and insecure around the scientists. Which was a funny combination, because he drove them to get the job done anyway.

Nevala-Lee: Was there anything else about the movie that surprised you?

Rhodes: Mostly minor things. I’d read about the arrival of the shock wave after the light [from the Trinity test], but my God—when you see it in IMAX, it really hits you; it resonates in your chest. We were just knocked back in our chairs. I wish [Edward] Teller [Oppenheimer’s nemesis in the debate over the hydrogen bomb] had been a little different. I spent an interesting 30 minutes with Teller and had some sense of what he was like. That guy [Benny Safdie] was a little too oily, not quite as sinister as Teller really was.

Nevala-Lee: Nolan has always struck me as a pretty cerebral guy who also makes movies on the largest possible scale. It tracks to me that Oppenheimer, a theorist who found himself in charge of this incredible industrial operation, would appeal to him.

Rhodes: That makes sense. My experience with writing books is, your best books are the ones that you have a deep emotional investment in. And there’s an automatic tendency when you’re writing a biography to turn the character in the biography into oneself.

Nevala-Lee: Nolan, who is willing to play with structure, seems like a good choice for this story, because it allows him to deliver so much information. He can cut between the Manhattan Project period, the Oppenheimer hearing, and the hearing for Strauss’s nomination as secretary of commerce, and use the dynamic to explain things to the audience.

Rhodes: I had never thought about the parallel between Strauss and Oppenheimer before, but the story is structured so that both of them are destroyed by the forces of Washington, D.C. And that’s really a wonderful sort of parallel. Oppenheimer’s kind of a tragic hero, and I wouldn’t give that credit to someone like Strauss. But in a kind of corrupt way, he followed the same arc across his life. That was a real insight that I haven’t seen—maybe it’s in the biography [American Prometheus].

Nevala-Lee: I read it recently, and Strauss’s hearing takes up just a single paragraph. But Nolan decides to make it a fifth of the movie, for the reasons you’re saying. There’s this fascinating parallel that is possible only in a movie—the thematic echoes and the rhythm of the editing provide a sense of closure that would be much more difficult in book form.

Rhodes: You can do that, but you’d have to have that insight. And Nolan had that insight. When you do research for a book, often you’ll come across something that can be expanded upon. When I was working on The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I read a history of the development of physics in the United States. And in a footnote at the end of a chapter deep in the book, there’s this note about [Enrico] Fermi, one day going up to the window and looking down at the gray winter length of Manhattan Island—alive with crowds—and cupping his hands together and saying, “A little bomb like that and it would all disappear.” The historian who wrote this book threw that away into a footnote. I made it the end of the whole first third of my book.

Ian Allen

Nevala-Lee: The movie for the most part is very realistic, but dreamlike moments visualize Oppenheimer’s psychological state, which reminded me of your book. The opening paragraph starts with the physicist Leo Szilard—whom you use in your book as a “clothesline” character, someone the audience can follow across a complex narrative—crossing the street, with a description of what the weather was like in London, and then it ends with a passage out of John Milton. And that elevates the tone in a way that tells you something about the material.

Rhodes: That’s what I was trying to do, of course. But I thought it was really off tone when [Nolan, in one of those dream sequences] had Oppenheimer and Jean Tatlock screwing on the table in the security hearing. That was, I think, maybe a bit of an overreach. It’s curious and interesting that they decided not to visit Hiroshima.  

Nevala-Lee: I was wondering whether Nolan would show that, but every scene that’s not about Strauss is from Oppenheimer’s point of view. So instead of the bombing, you see him waiting for a phone call, because he has no control over how the weapon is used. There’s an earlier scene where the characters talk about saving lives by heading off an American invasion of Japan. Is this something that would have been discussed before the bombing, or is this a rationalization that defenders of the decision arrived at after the fact?

Rhodes: Well, George Marshall [the U.S. Army chief of staff during World War II] said we knew that the Japanese were getting their people trained to fight us. And we thought that if we could bomb the beaches with atomic bombs, we might shock the Japanese into surrender. In fact, there were plans to keep going. I found a memorandum from Oppenheimer to Groves saying if we make a design that uses both plutonium and uranium, we can have six bombs a month by October.

Nevala-Lee: If the movie had included that suggestion, it would have really changed the viewer’s sense of Oppenheimer.

Rhodes: There was also discussion in ’43 or ’44 of making radiation bombs stuffed with cobalt 60 or something that would just spread radioactive particles all over the place. We did some tests down in New Mexico, and I remember someone’s comment afterward—it was the most god-awful stuff you could imagine. Which, yes, it would be, wouldn’t it?

[Read: The real lesson from The Making of the Atomic Bomb]

Nevala-Lee: I recently watched the opera Doctor Atomic, where one character is Oppenheimer’s Native American maid. That’s the kind of voice you don’t hear in the movie.

Rhodes: It was certainly a valid perspective. These guys came in and swept the mesa clean, and they used the Native American people to clean their houses.

Nevala-Lee: Nolan is so focused on Oppenheimer—but with a movie like this, you have to find, as you’ve said, the clothesline.

Rhodes: And there was so much drama on the industrial side that’s basically just left out. It’s compressed into something that is really very brilliant—those big open jars in which they keep dropping marbles [to track the supply of uranium and plutonium]. That’s as close as we come to seeing the Hanford complex, with its huge production reactors, or the Oak Ridge complex, with one factory that was [about] a mile long, so the supervisors inside rode around on bicycles.

Nevala-Lee: How do you feel about the impact this movie will have on how a mass audience understands this immensely complicated story?

Rhodes: I’ve been living with this story now for 40, 50 years. So what I’m most excited by—you will consider this crass, but this is where I am in my life—is we’ve got an option from a German company for The Making of the Atomic Bomb to be made into a multipart television series. And I’m just hoping that this will cause enough stir that these people will finally, for the first time in all these years, actually pick up the option. That would be just wonderful, and I’d pay off my mortgage, and my version of the story would be out there.

The movie that I, like a million other women, really wanted to see this weekend was Barbie. A celebration of friendship! Of girlhood! Of the color pink! But my editor had a different idea: Would I go see that movie about child sex trafficking? The one that a lot of people online are angry about?

“Uh, sure,” I replied. I am a team player.

When I arrived at the Tysons Corner AMC in McLean, Virginia, on Sunday, the lobby was filled with people wearing fuchsia body-con dresses, blond wigs, and thigh-high boots. None of these happy moviegoers, however, was heading in the same direction as me. Instead, my theater contained a few dozen somber-looking people who had elected to see a $15 Sunday-afternoon screening of one of the most disturbing films of the year.

Sound of Freedom, which came out on the Fourth of July, follows a man named Tim Ballard, who quits his job at the Department of Homeland Security to personally rescue two Honduran children from a sex-trafficking ring in Colombia. Ballard is a real person with “extreme biceps, extreme blue eyes, and extreme bleach-blond hair,” as my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote in 2021. He really did start an organization that conducts sting operations to free people from traffickers. But according to one journalistic investigation by Vice, his nonprofit, Operation Underground Railroad, has exaggerated the details of some of its international rescues as well as its role in domestic law enforcement.

[Read: The great (fake) child-sex-trafficking epidemic]

Sound of Freedom was attracting controversy long before its release. Finished in early 2018, the film was bought by Fox, and then when Disney acquired Fox it immediately shelved the film. Right away, that gave the movie a kind of forbidden, subversive appeal. Eventually, the distribution rights were sold to Angel Studios, a company in Utah that produced the Christian historical drama The Chosen. Since Sound of Freedom started showing in theaters, some viewers have alleged instances of sabotage intended to prevent them from seeing the film. This week, Sound of Freedom broke $100 million in revenue. Last week, former President Donald Trump held a screening at his golf club in New Jersey, where, channeling Paris Hilton, he called it “the hottest movie anywhere in the world.” On Tuesday night, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy held a screening of the movie for members of Congress.

The film’s critics argue that the movie exaggerates the prevalence of child exploitation in a way that helps advance QAnon conspiracy theories about a satanic ruling elite that molests children and feasts on their blood. But the movie’s fans say, This is the film the Democratic elite doesn’t want you to see!

Sound of Freedom is neither of these things. It’s fine—not great but not terrible, either. It doesn’t make any reference to “deep state” bloodsucking or congressional sex cabals. It’s a straightforward, if plodding, action movie about a man on a righteous quest—with zero character development and way too many close-ups of people either crying or smoking cigars.

Although the movie doesn’t depict anything particularly graphic, the subject of child abuse is still difficult to watch dramatized on the big screen. It was upsetting. But so was talking about it afterward with other audience members, many of whom seemed convinced that some significant number of their countrymen condone child trafficking. Sound of Freedom, in other words, is just the latest flash point in an apparently endless culture war that encourages Americans to believe the absolute worst about one another.

In the movie, Ballard is played by Jim Caviezel, who also starred as Jesus in 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, and has himself dabbled in the dark whimsy of Q. In 2021, he spoke at a right-wing conference in Oklahoma, where he warned attendees about “the adrenochrome-ing of children,” an absurd theory that says global elites are using a chemical harvested from kidnapped children to keep them looking spry. At one point in the movie, asked why he was so determined to rescue the kids, Caviezel’s character pauses, and his eyes well up with tears. “God’s children aren’t for sale,” he says. My theater broke into applause and shouts of “Amen!”

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

The movie has united religious conservatives and Trump supporters, as well as a small sampling of the chronically paranoid—or at least it appeared to have done so at my showing. (I chose this particular theater because, when I looked online, a lot of people had bought tickets—probably because McLean has more right-leaning voters than many other places in the Washington, D.C., area.)

Kate Cox, a retiree from McLean wearing little flower earrings, told me before the movie that she was “a pro-life Catholic” concerned about the border. “That’s exactly what this is about,” she said. “They’re taking these people and selling them into sex slavery.” Cox and her girlfriends were also worried about the fentanyl coming in from Mexico: How hard would it be to put up a wall?

“And the homelessness!” added Peggy, a friend of Cox’s who declined to share her last name. “Cities are falling apart.” Cox nodded. “Say what you will about Trump, and 99 percent of it’s true,” she said, “but this didn’t happen under Trump.”

Unlike Barbie, with its huge marketing budget and corporate partnerships, word of mouth seems to be the main attendance-driver for Sound of Freedom: Most of the people I spoke with on Sunday had bought a ticket on a loved one’s recommendation.

“One of my friends told me to see this movie,” Nicole Gutierrez, a Swiss native who lives in D.C., told me. “This is a much bigger business than we think it is. Hollywood, politicians—they’re all involved.” She pulled out her phone to show me a text that her friend had sent a few minutes earlier. “Maybe you know what it means.” Her friend had sent the letter C, followed by an eye emoji, followed by the letter A. “I think he means the CIA,” I said. Gutierrez raised her eyebrows. “Everybody’s involved,” she said. “The White House, of course.”

In a bonus clip after the credits, Caviezel encourages viewers in a whispery voice to scan a QR code and buy a ticket for someone who can’t afford it. “We can make Sound of Freedom the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 21st-century slavery,” he says, likening the film to the novel that helped inspire the 19th-century abolitionist movement. After that, as the lights came up, a woman in my row who introduced herself as Cheska stood up to announce that she was there to talk about her 23-year-old daughter, who had been missing for a year and a half. “I’m expecting a miracle,” she said. “She’s going to be returned soon.” Warning that the End Times were upon us, Cheska asked us to pray for her and for one another. A few people again said, “Amen,” and at least one woman gave her a hug.

As I left the theater, I approached another group of friends to hear what they thought. They all declined to share their last names, but were happy to tell me how powerful they’d found the movie. “Men want to protect people,” a dark-haired middle-aged man named George said, “so it’s embarrassing that there’s anyone out there that would ever do that to a child.” He brought up the new Jason Aldean song, “Try That in a Small Town,” in which the country artist promises vigilante justice. “I like that song that no one wants to talk about,” George said. Real men would beat up a child abuser.

“You realize you’re talking to some of the few conservatives in the area?” George’s bearded friend Steven asked me, with a wink. “You know what surprises me,” he went on, “is why the left hates this movie. I don’t get it.” He looked at me as though he expected an answer.

If people on the left are repelled by this movie, it’s for the same reasons people on the right feel so obligated to see it. Our political leaders, our social circles, and our chosen media have signaled in our echo chambers exactly how we should feel about it—and so much else, besides. Bud Light. Gas stoves. School libraries. The Target Pride section. Elon Musk’s Twitter. Luke Combs’s “Fast Car.” The entire Walt Disney Company. Lizzo playing James Madison’s flute.

It’s exhausting. All I wanted to do was put on a pink dress and enjoy a movie about a plastic doll.

In first visit to PNG, Pentagon boss says Washington's goal is to strengthen Pacific nation's ability to defend itself.

Earlier today, three witnesses came before Congress to testify about their experiences with unidentified flying objects. A former Navy pilot spoke of the mysterious objects that he has seen with his own eyes and through radar, and how frequently pilots encounter them in the air. A retired Navy commander described the time he pulled his jet up to an object shaped like a Tic Tac hovering over the ocean, then watched it suddenly speed up and vanish.

The most anticipated remarks, however, came from a former military-intelligence officer named David Grusch, who went public with his account just last month. Grusch told the House oversight subcommittee on national security that the American government has spent decades secretly recovering mysterious vehicles that have crashed on the ground, and has determined the material to be of “non-human” origin. The government also attempted to reverse engineer some of the technology. And it’s doing all of this clandestinely, without proper supervision by Congress.

In the hearing, Grusch expanded on his previous claims in response to lawmakers’ questions. If elected officials had never heard about this effort before, how did it get any funding? The military pilfered money that had been allocated for its other programs. A defense official recently testified before Congress that the U.S. military hasn’t found any evidence of extraterrestrial activity on Earth; is that statement correct? It’s not accurate. Has any of the activity been aggressive or hostile? My colleagues have gotten physically injured. By UFOs, or people within the government? Both.

After not holding a hearing on UFOs for more than half a century, Congress has recently held two in as many years. In that sense, we can count today’s events as historic. But as in the other hearings, this one had no big reveal, no grand answer to humankind’s most existential questions about our place in the universe. The hype surrounding the hearing—and there has been considerable hype—says more about the people who tuned in than about Grusch’s claims. Just as it did in the late 1940s, when stories of flying saucers over Washington state and crash-landings in New Mexico captivated the nation, UFO fever today indicates that Americans feel that their government knows more than it’s letting on.

That sentiment is not new, nor is Americans’ belief in conspiracy theories. Though research suggests that conspiracy thinking is not getting worse in the modern-day United States, we are in a moment of acute public curiosity about—and acceptance of—conspiracism. Compared with QAnon, vaccine microchips, and stolen elections, a big UFO cover-up might seem almost reasonable. Even if that cover-up involves, as Grusch previously claimed in an interview, the military discovering the “dead pilots” of alien craft. (In Congress today, Grusch declined to give specifics about this and many other claims, saying that there was only so much he could disclose to the public and that he could elaborate in a closed setting.)  

The past several years have coincided with an unprecedented mainstreaming of UFO culture. In 2017, when an interstellar object showed up in our solar system, most scientists agreed that it was an asteroid or a comet, but some said it could have been an alien spaceship. (The Harvard professor leading the latter camp, Avi Loeb, recently led an expedition to recover material from the seafloor that he believes could be from alien spacecraft.) Later that year, The New York Times and other news outlets revealed that the Pentagon had a covert program dedicated to cataloging UFOs. Then NASA decided to weigh in on the topic after years of steering clear, and convened a team to consider UFOs in a “scientific perspective.” And who can forget the spy balloons that the military shot out of the sky this year?

These events have unfolded against a shift in public knowledge about the universe beyond Earth, which might help explain why people are interested. In the 1940s, the only planets we knew of were the ones around our sun, and scientists had only recently determined that there were galaxies other than our own. Today, astronomers have discovered more than 5,000 exoplanets, and telescopes can see nearly all the way back to the Big Bang. Faced with so many wonders, the question of whether we’re sharing them with anyone else becomes more urgent, and might even seem more answerable. “I think people are just ready, or at least excited about the possibilities of alien contact, maybe more than ever,” Jacob Haqq Misra, an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, told me.

Congress has contributed to this mainstreaming too. Under the instruction of lawmakers, the Pentagon last year established a special office dedicated to investigating reports of unexplainable phenomena in the sky, at sea, and on land. The effort has been unusually bipartisan, with both far-right Republicans and progressive Democrats calling on the military to be more transparent. This month, Senator Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that would create a commission with the authority to declassify government documents about UFOs. “The American public has a right to learn about technologies of unknown origins, non-human intelligence, and unexplainable phenomena,” Schumer said in a statement.

Yes, we do. But some undisclosed documents about UFOs is not synonymous with incontrovertible evidence that aliens have visited Earth. UFOs are just that—objects that are flying, and that we cannot yet identify. If the military is misusing taxpayer money to investigate mysterious debris it doesn’t recognize, that’s bad, whether it’s the remnants of drones from another nation or a non-human craft. “If that’s the case, and auditors have not been allowed into these programs and there’s illegal layers of secrecy,” Haqq Misra said, “then that’s really important to disclose, independent of any connection to anything else”—anything otherworldly. But even as lawmakers assert that UFOs are primarily a national-security concern, by invoking aliens in their discussions, they lend credence to the idea that a connection between the two exists.

Grusch was careful to tell lawmakers that he was only “speaking to the facts as I have been told them”—that is, he has not seen any evidence of alien wreckage or its inhabitants himself. And in general, though his claims are steeped in the language of authority, he simply has not been able to offer any concrete proof. The news website that first published Grusch’s claims reported that the Pentagon had cleared him to speak publicly, but that means only that his remarks don’t contain classified information, not that they’re true. Testifying under oath before Congress is not a measure of truth, either. Outside the hearing, some lawmakers seemed like they didn’t know what to make of the claims.

The prospect of extraterrestrial interlopers may be a national-security question, but it’s also a scientific one. Science requires data, and secondhand accounts just aren’t data. “When NASA brings back rocks on the moon, those rocks are shared with qualified people,” David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton who chaired NASA’s committee on UFOs, told me. “Imagine we had some samples of some craft [and] we really want to understand what it was. You would make materials from those small samples available for labs anywhere in the world.” In other words, meaningful testimony would show evidence of alien ships and pilots, not just tell the public about them. “That would be pretty awesome,” he said, but it’s not what we’ve got. Today, we heard some extraordinary claims, and, to quote Carl Sagan, they require extraordinary evidence.