Israel’s democracy is still intact, but the country has already lost something essential.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Fatigue can shatter a person. “I saw the movie ‘they’ don't want you to see.” American family life should not be this volatile.

Utter Collapse

As Israel nears the end of a week of turmoil, its democracy remains intact. On Monday, the country’s Benjamin Netanyahu–led ruling coalition—the most hard-right government in Israel’s history—passed one component of its planned judicial overhaul. The proposed legislation has inspired months of outcry from Israelis, many of whom believe, with good reason, that these changes would swiftly erode the country’s democracy. This past spring, my colleague Yair Rosenberg explained some of the most concerning aspects of the overhaul:

The radical wish list produced by Netanyahu’s coalition seeks not to reform the court but to neuter it, and would essentially allow the ruling government to appoint all judges and override their decisions. This plan was composed in the halls of conservative think tanks, with no input from opposition parties and no attempt to broker a national consensus. What’s more, this effort to fundamentally revise Israel’s democratic order came from a government that received less than half the vote in the last election.

As Yair noted today, the piece of legislation passed on Monday was actually the least significant of the proposed list. “Contrary to the far right’s pledge, the government did not enact its plan to subordinate the appointment of Supreme Court judges to politicians. Nor did it grant the coalition the ability to override judicial decisions,” Yair writes. But even so, Israel has already lost something that could be impossible to regain: basic trust among its citizens.

“Polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israel’s citizens oppose the ruling coalition’s unilateral overhaul of the judiciary,” Yair explains, because “most Israelis simply do not trust the intentions of their own government. They do not believe that Netanyahu, let alone the extremist allies he depends upon to maintain his power, will be more reasonable than the unelected Supreme Court. And they do not believe that the coalition will stop with this small salvo against the judiciary when it has already announced its intentions to deconstruct the entire edifice.”

This lack of trust goes both ways, and it extends far beyond Israel’s standard partisan politics, Yair writes:

Rather than attempting to calm the waters and reestablish civic trust, Netanyahu’s far-right ministers have rubbed their recent victory in the opposition’s face and promised more of the same. “The salad bar is open,” crowed [Minister of National Security Itamar] Ben-Gvir on Saturday night, framing the impending reasonableness reform as merely the appetizer for a much more forbidding buffet … He and his allies have cast the hundreds of thousands of anti-overhaul street protesters as “privileged anarchists” and foreign-funded enemies, rather than fellow citizens expressing genuine concern. Something has gone terribly wrong in a country where this is how leaders speak about those they are supposed to shepherd.

Israel’s “utter collapse of shared solidarity” is unprecedented in its 75-year-history, Yair notes. The country’s Supreme Court is set to rule on the legality of the new legislation this coming fall. But however it decides, Israel has “already lost a core component of any functioning democracy—the sense of collective concern among citizens.”

Natan Sachs, the director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, points out how the erosion of Israel’s democracy threatens its citizens:

If Israel is not fully democratic, then the state—which holds together a remarkably diverse Jewish population—can come undone. For Israel’s Arab citizens, the struggle to find their place in Israeli society has been all the more difficult, but their economic, social, and political gains in recent years are also threatened as judicial limits to the rule of a political majority that usually excludes them are removed.

Writing from Israel earlier this week, the author Daniel Gordis painted a picture of a country falling apart—as he puts it, “a country of broken hearts.” Gordis described one particular example of the fracturing of Israeli society: Military reservists, who play a crucial role in the preparedness of the Israel Defense Forces (and who are generally seen as an apolitical group, given the country’s near-universal conscription laws), have pledged to drop out of voluntary service “by the thousands,” breaking with one of Israeli society’s core social contracts in protest over their government’s actions. As Gordis writes, “The tacit agreements that have held Israel together for 75 years are unraveling at an unimaginable pace.”

Related:

Israel has already lost. “The country’s already been destroyed.”

Today’s News

Economic growth in the U.S. exceeded expectations in the second quarter, reducing recession concerns. Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers reportedly met with officials in the office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, indicating that federal prosecutors may be getting close to bringing an indictment against Trump in connection with his 2020-election-interference efforts. On Wednesday evening, soldiers in Niger declared a coup against President Mohamed Bazoum, who was elected in 2021 in the country’s first democratic transfer of power since it achieved independence.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

No One Deserves to Go to Harvard

By Jerusalem Demsas

No one deserves a seat at Harvard, but only some people are supposed to feel bad about the one they get.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action violated the equal-protection clause, spurring a news cycle about the admissions advantages conferred on certain people of color. The preferential admissions treatment that racial minorities received is just one bonus among many, however. A new study from the economic research group Opportunity Insights quantifies the advantages of wealth in higher education: The ultra rich are much likelier to gain admission to elite colleges than anyone else, even when controlling for academic success.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

UFOs are officially mainstream. An Oppenheimer expert watches Oppenheimer. Greta Gerwig’s lessons from Barbie Land

Culture Break

Tommy Cheng / AFP / Getty

Listen. Are you plagued by the feeling that everyone used to be nicer? Don’t succumb—it’s not true, Hanna Rosin explains in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

Watch. The Women’s World Cup (on FOX Sports and Youtube TV) showcases a flourishing U.S. women’s professional league—but it wasn’t always that way.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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There’s a candid moment in Nothing Compares, the 2022 documentary by Kathryn Ferguson about the life and career of Sinéad O’Connor, when the singer says, “It was such a shock for me to become a pop star. It’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream.” O’Connor, who died yesterday at the age of 56, became famous in the late ’80s, when she was barely out of her teens. In 1990, her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” became not only her signature song, but also a chart-topper in numerous countries—a sweep that thrust a shy Irish kid under the hot sun of international scrutiny.

Rather than moderate her voice, she kept screaming. And over the years, her many controversial protests and statements tended to overshadow her breathtaking body of work. When people vow to murder you (as they did when she ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live) and Frank Sinatra publicly threatens to assault you (as he did when she refused to have the American national anthem played at a New Jersey concert in 1990), it’s hard to direct attention back to the thing that actually made you famous: your music.

The fact that she became a pop star—and not just any pop star, but one of the most distinct, most outspoken, and most influential of all time—may have been a surprise to her. But it couldn’t have been a surprise to her fans. Few things made that clearer than her first hit, “Mandinka.” The song, which became a Top 20 hit in the United Kingdom, was the standout single and obvious earworm from her superb 1987 debut LP, The Lion and the Cobra. It was an ambitious album, collecting dark accounts of childhood trauma (“Troy”) and layered explorations of lust and consent (“I Want Your (Hands on Me)”). Amid these deeper, more demanding singles, The Lion and the Cobra needed an upbeat invitation. “Mandinka” was it.

Written when she was still a teenager struggling to make her way as an aspiring expat in London, “Mandinka” is a propulsive anthem that straddles pop and the loosely knit genre of alternative rock, which wouldn’t see its full commercial triumph until the ’90s. The lyrics don’t convey a narrative as such, but like so many of O’Connor’s songs, “Mandinka” synthesizes and projects a string of images, recriminations, and mantras. What coalesces in her words is a barrage of beefs with the patriarchy that refuses to sacrifice poetry for purpose. The title comes from Alex Haley’s Roots, which mentions the Gambian ethnic group of Mandinka. “Mandinka” was slightly ahead of its time, but it’s also very much in the same camp as contemporaneous songs such as Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” and Enya’s “Orinoco Flow.” (Unsurprisingly, her fellow Irish artist Enya made a guest appearance on The Lion and the Cobra.)

“Mandinka,” at its core, is a song of defiance. O’Connor threw every bit of texture and range—snarling, chanting, cooing, and, yes, screaming—she could into the song, and the result was a smack in the face of conventionality. Hurt is part of the DNA of “Mandinka,” even as O’Connor exults in her power to withstand it: “I don’t know no shame / I feel no pain / I can’t see the flame,” she sings with venom. Again, defiance. But it’s not a denial or some bluff—instead, it’s an acknowledgement of how she’s proudly used her scar tissue as raw material.

[Read: How “Nothing Compares 2 U” endured]

“Soon I can give you my heart,” O’Connor chants at the end of “Mandinka.” That’s exactly what she did: The lushly romantic “Nothing Compares 2 U” came out three years later, becoming the song that most people immediately think of when they hear O’Connor’s name. But the power of “Nothing Compares 2 U” partly stemmed from the fact that O’Connor had already proved herself capable of far greater force on The Lion and the Cobra, and in “Mandinka” in particular. Her first appearance on U.S. television was on Late Night With David Letterman, and her performance of the single is telling. She wears a spiked denim jacket like punk-rock armor, holding her arms in front of her and twisting back and forth like she’s dodging blows in a boxing ring.

Perhaps the most succinct tribute to the impact of “Mandinka” is a video of Fiona Apple, posted to YouTube in 2017. In it, Apple lies in bed with her laptop while singing and air-punching along to O’Connor’s 1989 Grammy performance. It was a historic one: Nominated that year for Best Female Rock Vocal, O’Connor infamously drew Public Enemy’s bull’s-eye logo on her head to protest the fact that the newly minted Grammy for Best Rap Performance was awarded off camera. (On Twitter yesterday, the group’s Chuck D and Flavor Flav both remembered the protest.)

When the chorus hits, Apple ups the volume and kisses the screen. It’s a gesture of joyous release and empowerment that mirrors the song itself. “I didn’t mean to be strong,” O’Connor says at the start of Ferguson’s documentary. “I wasn’t thinking to myself, I must be strong. I didn’t know I was strong.” All it takes is one listen to “Mandinka,” though, for anyone else to know, feel, and find themselves strengthened by her strength.

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

The FIFA Women’s World Cup is about more than just soccer. Here’s a guide to getting into the game.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Colson Whitehead loses the plot. The surprising key to understanding the Barbie film The secret to a good conversation

A Women’s World Cup Guide

I’m not a crier. I didn’t cry watching The Notebook, and even the saddest episodes of my longtime favorite show, Grey’s Anatomy, usually only leave me slightly welling up. But every time I read or listen to something about a player’s journey to the 2023 Women’s World Cup, I absolutely lose it. I’ve never played a game of soccer, but I’ve been following the women’s game since 2015. There’s something about the journey of these women and these teams that transcends sport.

This year’s tournament kicked off on Thursday, with New Zealand’s women’s national team securing their first-ever win in a World Cup game in front of a home crowd of more than 42,000—record attendance for a soccer match, men’s or women’s, in the country. Meanwhile, the U.S. Women’s National Team is facing tough competition as it looks for its third consecutive win. They secured a win against Vietnam in their first match on Friday.   

Even if you don’t typically keep up with women’s soccer—or soccer at all—below are three reasons you should pay attention to the games.

Megan Rapinoe’s goodbye: Rapinoe skyrocketed to national attention for a viral clip in which she refused to go to the Trump White House in 2019, but she was taking public stances long before that, including kneeling in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick and helping lead the national team’s fight for equal pay. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, Rapinoe makes resistance look effortless. Rapinoe, now 38, announced her retirement earlier this month, meaning this World Cup will be your last chance to witness her creative form of play on a global stage. Progress on equal pay: Soccer players at the 2023 Women’s World Cup will earn, on average, 25 cents for every dollar earned by men at their World Cup in 2022, according to a new CNN analysis. In 2019, women’s pay was at less than eight cents per dollar. This very incremental progress comes just over a year after the U.S. Soccer Federation and the U.S. Women’s National Team Players Association signed a new collective-bargaining agreement that stipulates the teams will split World Cup prize money from both the men’s and women’s tournaments (a big disparity remains in the prize amount for each World Cup). The global growth of the game: Around the world, women’s soccer is gaining an unprecedented level of recognition. Other countries, including England, New Zealand, Brazil, and Australia, have signed equal-pay agreements with their men’s and women’s teams. Meanwhile, the 2022 Women’s Euro was the most watched in that tournament’s history. This World Cup, Australia’s opening match against Ireland was originally booked in a much smaller stadium and had to be moved to a bigger venue that seats more than 80,000 people. The game sold out, again.

Below are a few recommendations for what to watch and listen to if you want to further explore the world of women’s soccer.

Listen

Snacks: This podcast from Just Women’s Sports is hosted by Lynn Williams, who is making her World Cup debut on the U.S. team this year, and her friend, the former World Cup champion Sam Mewis. In casual conversations, the two women break down happenings in the National Women’s Soccer League and in the game around the world.

I’d suggest you start with the most recent episode. It features Ali Riley, the American-born captain of the New Zealand women’s national team, who talks about playing host to the World Cup, and discusses how many women’s teams across the globe lack the training and resources provided to the U.S. team.

Watch

Angel City: This three-part docuseries, streaming on Max, takes viewers through the founding of the National Women’s Soccer League’s first majority-women-owned major professional sports team in the U.S. With its inaugural 2022 season, Angel City FC set out to do things differently, prioritizing community engagement, drawing big crowds, and giving players a cut of ticket sales. The team succeeded in some ways but not in others: They didn’t make the playoffs last year, and after a rocky start to their second season, they fired their coach. The documentary also gives you a look at some of the players you’ll see at the World Cup this year, including Japan’s Jun Endo, Canada’s Vanessa Gilles, and New Zealand's Ali Riley.

And, of course, the matches themselves. Here are a few to look out for in the group stage of play:

USA–Netherlands, (July 26, 9 p.m. ET), England–Denmark (July 28, 4:30 a.m. ET), France–Brazil (July 29, 6 a.m. ET), Japan–Spain (July 31, 3 a.m. ET)

In the U.S., the matches will air on Fox. You can also stream the matches on the Fox Sports App and on YouTube TV. Telemundo and Peacock are providing Spanish-language coverage.

The Week Ahead

The 11th season of Futurama premieres Monday (streaming on Hulu). The third book in Richard Russo’s North Bath Trilogy, Somebody’s Fool, features continued father-son tensions and a dead body in an abandoned hotel (on sale Tuesday). Sympathy for the Devil, a psychological thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Joel Kinnaman (in theaters Friday)

Essay

Starz

Porn Set Women Up From the Start

By Sophie Gilbert

Late last year, when the streaming platform formerly known as HBO Max announced the abrupt cancellation of Minx a week before Season 2 finished filming, the news struck me as grimly ironic. Minx, created by Ellen Rapoport, is a buoyant, ’70s-set comedy about the first feminist porn magazine, loosely based on the real-life publications Playgirl and Viva. It’s a sweet, funny, shrewd show that also features plenty of full-frontal male nudity. The effect is hard to categorize; Minx isn’t “raunchy” or “smutty” or “filthy” or even “risqué.” Unlike Euphoria or The Idol, it’s not interested in hollow provocation. And the penises that proliferate on-screen aren’t there to titillate, exactly, although a montage in the first episode brings to mind what the French film theorist Jean-Louis Comolli once described as “the frenzy of the visible.” If anything, the show’s insistent focus on male nudity feels impertinent, as though we’re all participating in a ritual desanctification of dicks. The show’s clever inversion of subject and object makes erotica seem faintly absurd: Here are men’s bodies exposed for us to look at. …

Sexual representation, for women, particularly straight women, has always been a bind—our desires are often informed by the same chauvinistic terrain we’re trying to transcend. Both Minx and Viva make one thing clear: Men have set the parameters of porn since the beginning.

Read the full article.

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Photo Album

A land-art painting that depicts a child drawing, created by the Swiss French artist Saype (Denis Balibouse / Reuters)

Mountainside art in Switzerland, a moon-bound rocket launch in India, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

P.S.

U.S. Soccer actually oversees 27 National Teams, including Extended National Teams with adapted rules of play, such as Deaf Soccer, CP (Para) Soccer, and Power Soccer (electric wheelchair) teams. As I mentioned above, I don’t play soccer, but I am a para athlete, and I know firsthand that many para competitors receive a fraction of the attention (and funding) given to able-bodied competitors. Para sports might look different, but it’s athleticism all the same. Some of these extension teams are new, and it will take time for us to fully integrate para athletes into the lexicon of our sporting culture. The first step is knowing they exist; the second is choosing to pay attention.

— Kate

Katherine Hu and Kelsey Waite contributed to this newsletter.

In the early days of the pandemic, it became harder for us to see one another. The human face, the ultimate marker of individuality, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas called “the first disclosure,” was suddenly sheathed in fabric. Strangers encountered on the street were even stranger—and the masks that covered their visage became a screen on which to project anxious thoughts.

In August Blue, the South African–born, North London–based novelist Deborah Levy’s latest, a concert pianist named Elsa Anderson glimpses a woman in a blue hospital mask at a flea market in Athens buying a kitschy bauble—a pair of toy mechanical horses—which she inexplicably also badly wants for herself. Unable to fully view the woman’s face, Elsa comes to believe she is actually seeing in the mysterious, attractive stranger some version of herself, or rather, a doppelgänger of sorts. “My startling thought at the moment was that she and I were the same person.”

Levy’s readers would be surprised if she didn’t set a novel in the aftermath of the Great Lockdown of 2020, when “everyone looked dazed and battered,” even as the worst of the pandemic had passed. She has always used the defining events of recent times—the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the financial crisis, Brexit—as the soundtrack for her stories. The sense of the displacement and unease that come with living amid historic disruption is what gives her books an edge of menace and suggest ambition belied by their relative brevity.

The quintessential Levy subject is a member of the intelligentsia, a historian studying male tyrants, a poet, a doctoral student in anthropology. These characters are 21st-century Herzogs, who can’t help but channel their neuroses through the prism of their intellectual fixations. In Hot Milk, the anthropologist’s relationship with her mother is a kinship structure endlessly turned over. In The Man Who Saw Everything, the historian notes that Stalin would flirt with women by throwing bread at them—a habit of hurling carbs that we learn his own tyrannical father shares. These academic overlays are one of the playful pleasures of her books.

Elsa fits the Levy archetype. She is a prodigy, plucked from foster parents at the age of 6 so that a great teacher, Arthur Goldstein, can raise her to become a virtuoso. He is Elsa’s gay, pompously pedantic Henry Higgins, who trains her to detach her mind from the commonplace so that she can master the classical repertoire.

But when the book begins, and Elsa is rummaging through the market in Athens, she has just humiliatingly stumbled from the path to greatness that Goldstein plotted. While performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Golden Hall in Vienna, she begins subconsciously playing her own dissonant notes, which she eventually realizes is an assertion of her own creative impulses, and then walks off the stage, as the maestro disdainfully mocks her.  

[Read: Deborah Levy’s disorienting, captivating fiction]

An identity crisis—which begins just before the concert, when Elsa dyes her hair blue, an event that she describes as a severing of relations with the birth mother who abandoned her—swells to become debilitating. Like so many of Levy’s other protagonists, she finds herself bopping across locales in Europe’s touristed southern reaches, on meandering sun-drenched odysseys in search of healing.

Levy’s novels have an undeniable—and undeniably winning—eccentricity. The introduction of a doppelgänger is a typically atypical move. Levy doesn’t exactly practice magical realism; her books are too tethered to the practicalities of life to ever be described that way. But her plots turn on weird moments and comical misunderstandings—if not magic, exactly, then serendipity seems to infuse her fictional worlds. Small details are inflated with symbolic significance; words and phrases repeat with murky purpose.

But the presence of Levy’s double is one of the most overtly intentional ideas in her fiction. It is central to her feminism, the political commitment that subtly permeates her novels and less subtly shapes her nonfiction. And it’s a device that she has used to make sense of her own life’s struggles. The doppelgänger doesn’t just stalk Levy’s protagonist; it stalks the entirety of her work.  

In the United States, much of the popular affection for Levy rests on a superb trilogy of memoirs—what she called a “living autobiography”—which includes a slim volume, Things I Don’t Want to Know. The book posed as a feminist response to George Orwell’s famous essay “Why I Write.” Levy adopted what Orwell called his “four great motives for writing” and used them for her chapter titles, even if the substance of her argument was elliptical in a way Orwell’s was not. Casting Orwell as her foil wasn’t a gesture of aggressive iconoclasm. Rather, she exploited the template to explain herself, showing how the impulses propelling the female author were far different from those that moved Orwell.

To attach one’s memoir to Orwell might seem a touch brash, given that the essayist’s biography is the romantic definition of the independent writing life, with its shunning of material glories in the stubborn pursuit of righteous causes. But there’s a parallel that doesn’t feel strained: Levy also suffered critical neglect for much of her career. In her early 50s, she couldn’t find a major publisher for her novel Swimming Home, so she released it with a small nonprofit press, supported by the British government and reader subscriptions.

Swimming Home was her first novel in 15 years and the sort of midlife success that rarely happens. It caught critics by surprise and gave her the first of three consecutive turns as a Booker Prize finalist. That Levy’s flourishing came belatedly is not terribly surprising, given the story contained in her autobiography—a series of personal crises and one long search-and-rescue mission for her authentic self.  

At the age of 5, a special branch of the South African police grabbed her father, an academic and activist, from the family bungalow in the middle of the night. He eventually stood trial alongside Nelson Mandela, his comrade in the African National Congress. During her father’s years in prison, Levy’s mother shipped her off to her godmother in Durban, where she attended a Catholic school and lived under the roof of a draconian patriarch.

When the apartheid government released her father—she was 9—the family sought sanctuary in the U.K. But exile exacerbated a growing sense of alienation, as she tried to assimilate into the dreary existence of 1970s England. Levy coped with the dislocation by reinventing herself as a teenage bohemian, even as she was sitting in working-class greasy spoons that didn’t have the faintest touch of Parisian sophistication. “I was a sad girl impersonating a sad girl,” she recalls.

Her sense of alienation tailed her into adulthood—when motherhood meant that she tended to her family at the expense of her own happiness and artistic fulfillment: “To not feel at home in her family home is the beginning of the bigger story of society and its female discontents.”

That Levy would ultimately fix on the idea of a doppelgänger is an understandable response to her personal history of tumult and the nagging sense of inauthenticity. To swerve from the expected course so often is to become inevitably fascinated by what Philip Roth once described as the “counterlife,” the alternative version of existence, where what ifs are fully rendered in the imagination. In her memoirs, she imagines encountering her own double—her young émigré self visiting her in middle age, after her divorce, when she is sitting in her North London apartment block watching the Great British Bake Off.

The idea of the doppelgänger cuts to the essence of her feminism: Mothers are haunted by the life they had before children and by the concession they have made to family. Liberation is recovery of that alternative self uninhibited by social strictures. It is “learning how to be a subject rather than a delusion.”

What’s thrilling about Levy’s novels is that they are alive with this relentless spirit of questing. Copying Orwell’s essay format is emblematic of her impish experimentalism. Her best novels take structural risks. The Man Who Saw Everything is divided into two parts, separated by 28 years, each repeating the same unlikely moment, when the book’s central subject steps into the crosswalk of Abbey Road and then gets knocked down by a car driven by a German man. It’s a nod to a famed image and clever conceit. The reprisal of the accident allows her to revisit events in the first half of the book. With the benefit of time, the narrator’s narcissistic misreading of his relationships is exposed.

[Read: Writing in the ruins]

Levy’s collected work is like a Freudian universe of symbols and phrases, which recur within her books—and across her books. She describes someone misquoting the famous line from The Communist Manifesto about a specter haunting Europe—and then the word specter begins to haunt the novel itself, provoking the reader every time it turns up, forcing deeper consideration of its meaning.

Certain questions she poses, using the same phrasing, appear verbatim in different books. In one of her volumes of memoir, she asks, “What do we do with the things that we don’t want to know?” The question inspired that book’s title—and it appears again in August Blue. A question that would obsess someone tormented by their counterlife.

August Blue has its share of invention, but not relative to Levy’s recent books. In the end, Elsa sits with Goldstein, her teacher and surrogate father, as he lies dying in a small house in Sardinia. He is a bit of a bully, but the only source of affection in her life, however contingent it might be on her artistic success.

She has certainly lived the life that Goldstein selected for her. He changed her name—from Ann to Elsa—and charted her career, in part, to validate his own genius as a teacher. Only in the dark shadow of his impending death does Elsa set aside her fears and resentments to learn the identity of her birth parents. This is, in the end, an archetypal plot we’ve seen over and over at the multiplex: an adopted child confronting her terrifying longing for self-knowledge.

What’s more, Levy’s feminist critique of the classical-music world is uncharacteristically lumpy. She overworks the theme of a woman forced to master the scores of male geniuses while suppressing her own creativity. Elsa spends her free time watching YouTube videos of the dancer Isadora Duncan, envying her artistic freedom, a preoccupation that is a bit too crudely deployed as the liberatory counterpoint to Elsa’s sense of being shackled to the repertoire.

Yet even in this less fully realized novel—her best are The Man Who Saw Everything and Hot Milk—Levy showcases her idiosyncratic mind. If the ultimate aim of feminism, as she preaches it, is to reclaim individuality, to banish the haunting specter of a more fulfilled, more authentic version of one’s self, her prose models this idea. Her language is beautifully her own: She describes the entertaining of suicidal thoughts as “standing on the forbidden pasture”; she calls Elsa’s dyed mane “very expressed hair.” Her imagery is pungently original. She shows us Elsa’s capacity for cruelty by having her unflinchingly stab a sea urchin with a fork while on a diving trip.

Levy’s subjects are credible intellectuals, because she is too. When she casually inserts a riff about Nietzsche’s failed musical experiments into dialogue, it is organic and interesting. Her reading of Freud is never far beneath the surface of her prose—and it’s almost a Freudian joke that she repeats the Freudian phrase “things we don’t want to know” so often. As an observer, she’s able to conjure the historic moment that has just passed, describing the ennui of the pandemic with disturbing precision, capturing the awkwardness of everyday human interactions in the aftermath of quarantine.

Because of her feminism—and her eccentricity—Levy tends to be squeezed into niches by critics in a way that fails to capture the ambition of her books. The Financial Times recently dubbed her “a cult novelist.” But this feels stingy. Instead we should call her what she is: one of the most lively, most gratifying novelists of ideas at work today.

It’s not that hard to say my name, Saahil Desai. Saahil: rhymes with sawmill, or at least that gets you 90 percent there. Desai: like decide with the last bit chopped off. That’s really it.

More often than not, however, my name gets butchered into a menagerie of gaffes and blunders. The most common one, Sa-heel, is at least an honest attempt—unlike its mutant twin, a monosyllabic mess that comes out sounding like seal. Others defy all possible logic. Once, a college classmate read my name, paused, and then confidently said, “Hi, Seattle.”

But the mispronunciations that bug me the most aren’t uttered by any human. They come from bots. All day long, Siri reads out my text messages through the AirPods wedged into my ears —and mangles my name into Sa-hul. It fares better than the AI service I use to transcribe interviews, which has identified me by a string of names that seem stripped from a failed British boy band (Nigel, Sal, Michael, Daniel, Scott Hill). Silicon Valley aspires for its products to be world-changing, but evidently that also means name-changing.

Or at least that’s what I thought. Listen to this:

Saahil Desai · Eleven Labs

It’s an AI voice named Adam from ElevenLabs, a start-up that specializes in voice cloning. (It’s sort of like the DALL-E of audio.) This bot not only says my name well; it says my name better than I can. After all, Saahil comes from Sanskrit, a language I do not speak. The end result is a dopamine hit of familiarity, an amazing feeling that’s like the tech equivalent of finding a souvenir key chain with your name on it.

In addition to chatbots that can write haiku and artbots that can render a pizza in the style of Picasso, the generative-AI revolution has unleashed voicebots that can finally nail my name. Just as ChatGPT learns from internet posts, ElevenLabs has trained its voices on a huge volume of audio clips to figure out how to talk as people do—at least 500,000 hours, compared with tens or hundreds of hours of audio with earlier speech models. “We have spent the last two years developing a new foundational model for speech,” ElevenLabs CEO Mati Staniszewski wrote in an email. “It means our model is context-aware and language agnostic and therefore better able to pick-up on nuances like names, as well as delivering the intonation and emotions that reflect the textual input.” The data that are part of newer voicebots might include any number of websites dedicated to pronouncing things, and if someone has correctly said your name in an audiobook, a podcast, or a YouTube video, newer AI models might have it down.

Companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are also developing more advanced voicebots—although they’re still a mixed bag. I tested the same sentence—“C’mon, it’s not that hard to say Saahil Desai”—on AI voice programs from each of them. They all could handle Desai, but I was not greeted with a chorus of perfect pronunciations of Saahil. Amazon’s Polly software, perhaps even worse than Siri, thinks my name is something like Saaaaal:

Saahil Desai · Amazon Polly

Both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure were inoffensive but not perfect, slightly twisting Saahil into something recognizably foreign. Nothing could beat ElevenLabs, but Voicebox, an unreleased tool from Meta that the company recently touted as a “breakthrough in generative AI for speech,” got very close:

Saahil Desai · Meta Voicebox

Computers can now say so many more names than just my own. “I noticed the same thing the other day when my student and I created a recording on ElevenLabs of CNN’s Anderson Cooper saying ‘Professor Hany Farid is a complete and total dips**t’ (it’s a long story),” Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley computer scientist, wrote in an email. “I was surprised at how well it pronounced my name. I’ve also noticed that it correctly pronounces the names of my non-American students.” Other tricky names I tested also fared well: ElevenLabs nailed Lupita Nyong’o and Timothée Chalamet, although it turned poor Pete Buttigieg’s last name into a very unfortunate Buttygig.

That AI voices can now say unusual names is no small feat. They face the same pronunciation struggles that leave many humans stumped; names like Giannis Antetokounmpo don’t abide by the rules of English, while even a simpler name can have multiple pronunciations (Andrea or Andrea?) or spellings (Michaela? Mikayla? Mikayla? Michela?). A name might still fall flat to our ears if an AI voice’s color and texture ring more HAL 9000 than human, Farid said.

Previous generations of voice assistants—Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, your car’s GPS—just didn’t have enough information to get through all of these steps. (In some cases, you can provide that information yourself: A spokesperson for Apple told me that you can manually input a name’s phonetic spelling into the Contacts app to tweak how Siri reads it.) Over the years, this technology “really sort of plateaued,” Farid wrote. “It was just really struggling to get through that uncanny valley where it’s sort of human-like, but also a little weird. And then it just blasted through the door.” Advances in “deep-learning” techniques inspired by the human brain can more readily spot patterns in pitch, rhythm, and intonation.

That is the weird contradiction of AI right now: Even as this technology is prone to biases that can alienate users (voice assistants more frequently misidentify words from Black speakers than white speakers), it can also help pop smaller feelings of alienation that bubble up. To constantly hear bots bungle my name is a digital indignity that reminds me that my devices do not seem made with me in mind, even though Saahil Desai is a common name in India. My blue iPhone 12 is a six-inch slab that contains more of me than any other single thing in my life. And yet it still screws up the most basic thing about my identity.

But a world in which the bots can understand and speak my name, and yours, is also an eerie one. ElevenLabs is the same voice-cloning tech that has been used to make believable deepfakes—of a rude Taylor Swift, of Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro debating Ratatouille, of Emma Watson reading a section of Mein Kampf. An AI scam pretending to be someone you know is far more believable when the voice on the other end can say your name just as your relatives do.

Once it became readily clear that I couldn’t stump ElevenLabs, I slotted in my middle name, Abhijit. Out came a terrible mess of syllables that would never fool me. Okay fine: I admit it’s actually pretty hard to say Saahil Abhijit Desai.

In early May, rumors swirled on social media about a mysterious book. Its title wouldn’t be announced until June 13, but it was slated for worldwide publication on July 9, with an initial print run of 1 million copies. Media coverage focused on fan speculation that the author was Taylor Swift, a theory that drove a wave of preorders of the still-unnamed project. However, some of us immediately deduced that the book was actually about the South Korean pop group BTS. The biggest clue was that the announcement and release dates were each a major anniversary for the band—10 years since its debut and the naming of its enormous fan base, ARMY, respectively.

And indeed, within days the publisher, Flatiron Books, confirmed to The New York Times that the 544-page book was titled Beyond the Story: 10-Year Record of BTS. It was written by the South Korean journalist Myeongseok Kang (and translated into English by Anton Hur, Slin Jung, and Clare Richards), based on extensive interviews with the group’s seven members. But I still had questions, both as a fan and a cultural critic who has written my own book about BTS. How candid would the members be? Would the book speak mostly to diehards like me, or would it manage to capture the nature of stratospheric fame for general readers? After a decade of the group’s existence, how far would Beyond the Story go beyond the … well, you know.

[Read: I wasn’t a fan of BTS. And then I was.]

As it turns out, the book is less a traditional memoir or personal biography than a meticulous accounting of how BTS was born and became a worldwide juggernaut under the once-tiny record label Big Hit (now the massive entertainment company Hybe). For anyone who’s ever heard “Butter” on the radio and puzzled over the group’s ascent in America, Beyond the Story has answers: It’s a fascinating, complicated, and at-times anxiety-inducing chronicle of fan-driven global domination—as well as a highly accessible resource for newer devotees.

Many ARMYs first learn about BTS’s long, bumpy history in a piecemeal manner—through fan-made YouTube videos, official documentaries, livestreams, memes, and Twitter threads. Now this history is available in an unguarded, comprehensive package, narrated by Kang. Even for longtime enthusiasts, seeing BTS’s career laid out so deliberately is staggering. Kang covers every album, tour, and big awards show up until mid-2022, right before BTS announced that the members would temporarily be focusing on solo projects and preparing for their mandatory military service. The book doesn’t delve into their lives outside their job, which is unsurprising, given that the members are extremely protective of their personal relationships and known for working nonstop. But Kang still manages to layer an emotional history on top of the professional one. By contemplating their evolution as artists, BTS’s members also give readers a clear sense of how the crucible of fame forced them to grow as human beings.

Beyond the Story is divided into seven sections that trace the major eras of the group’s rise. Many readers will know where the story eventually goes—several No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hits, Grammy nominations, countless historic firsts, multiple United Nations General Assembly appearances, a White House visit—but suspense still infuses the early chapters. Kang conveys the intensity and savvy of BTS’s leader, Kim Namjoon (stage name RM), who was recruited as a teenager by the mastermind producer Bang Si-hyuk to form a hip-hop group with the fellow underground rapper and aspiring composer Min Yoongi (Suga) and the highly respected street dancer Jung Hoseok (J-Hope). Eventually Bang, wanting BTS to be more of a traditional idol group, brought in four vocalists: the unflappable eldest, Kim Seokjin (Jin); the perfectionist Park Jimin (Jimin); the versatile Kim Taehyung (V); and the golden maknae (or multitalented youngest), Jeon Jungkook (Jungkook).

[Read: BTS’s ‘Life Goes On’ did the impossible]

When they first meet, they experience the typical personality clashes of any new group: The clean freaks balk at the dirty dishes in the sink and sweaty clothes on the floor. The hip-hop aficionados hold constant lessons to teach the novices about rap music. Everyone, regardless of dance experience, practices the tough choreography until they’re perfectly in sync—all while they’re on strict diets. (ARMY will be pleased to know that Kang devotes several pages to the infamous mandu incident.) “The more you look back on BTS’s preparation for their debut, the more surprising it is that none of them quit in the process,” Kang writes. Even after that 2013 entrance, the members described experiencing isolation and facing mockery from many of their peers at bigger, more financially successful companies. So difficult were BTS’s first two years that when a Big Hit staffer informs the label’s vice president, “Something’s happening. Uh … they’re getting more and more fans,” the moment lands like a shocking twist.

In the first half of the book, Kang provides context about the broader K-pop world, showing just how many rules BTS broke to differentiate itself from its peers and predecessors. The members filmed vlogs offering fans an unpolished look at their lives, even sometimes criticizing Bang or the company directly—a “complete rejection of genre norms in Korea’s idol industry,” Kang writes. Of the unusually dark realism of 2015’s single “I Need U,” he observes, “Within the Korean idol industry, experimenting like this was no different from intentionally trying to ruin yourself.”

As a fan, I was astonished that the BTS members seemed to go a long time without knowing why their own supporters liked them so much. Even when they were confused by their popularity, they expressed deep gratitude to the people who boosted them. Jimin tells Kang, “Even now, I remember that one row next to the broadcast cameras during our first performance,” referring to the handful of fans who showed up to cheer them on as rookies. For ARMYs, this evidently genuine humility is part of what makes them so appealing—they’ve never behaved as though success was an inevitable outcome of their talent or hard work. Of “Dynamite” topping the Billboard Hot 100, Suga talks about not wanting to bask in the achievement: “I realized it would be wiser to get back down to Earth as quickly as possible. There was no need to be floating in the air like that.”

[Read: The spectacular vindication of BTS]

Beyond the Story immerses the reader in how bewildering this whole growth process was from BTS’s perspective. Extreme highs (appearing on the American Music Awards and Billboard Music Awards, as well as major talk shows) are juxtaposed with profound lows (overwork, unrelenting depression, an increasing lack of privacy). The members open up about the stress of becoming huge in the U.S., a totally unfamiliar market, when six of the seven didn’t speak English. J-Hope recalls berating himself for not being able to master the language as quickly as intricate dance moves: “Each time, in the hotel room I thought to myself, ‘Oh, so I guess this is all I amount to.’” Once they began to adjust to the international nature of their fame, the pandemic arrived. They were forced to abandon their plans and experiment once again by releasing their first English-language single, “Dynamite,” whose success surprised RM: "The fandom must’ve craved it more than we’d thought," he said.

Not until this later part of BTS’s career, Kang writes, did the members transition from doing things for “the sake of outside approval or to prove themselves” to turning inward and “trying to reach a point of excellence where they could feel satisfied with their results.” Readers can appreciate how their interior growth has been almost inseparable from their artistic development. Jungkook, who joined Big Hit in middle school, talks about learning how to recognize his own emotions for the first time and “unleash” them in music. V reflects on growing older and going through an “adolescence of the mind,” before realizing that he’s the kind of musician who can write only when genuinely inspired. Jin talks about abandoning his obsessive worrying to the point of “living without any thought at all,” which allowed more “mental space” to sustain his work.

For fans, there’s something comforting about how much of this story we already know, and something satisfying about finally seeing it put down officially in words. To me, this familiarity is a reminder of how vulnerable BTS’s members have been from the beginning, even when the risk of self-revelation was high. Kang doesn’t touch on what lies ahead. The band’s future chapters have yet to be written, but this survey tells a complete story. It’s a document capturing how it feels to go from aspiring musician to worldwide superstar, and what it takes to do so.

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Elon Musk and Joe Biden are the unlikely tag team changing the way American journalists approach their jobs.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time There’s no such thing as an RFK Jr. voter. Everyone has “car brain.”

An Unlikely Tag Team

Reporters spend lots of time critiquing the president, so perhaps it’s only fair for Joe Biden to take a turn as a media critic.

During an interview last week with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, Biden recounted a story that a reporter at “a major newspaper” told him. According to Biden, this reporter’s editor told them, “You don’t have a brand yet.”

“They said, ‘Well, I am not an editorial writer,’” Biden continued. “‘But you need a brand so people will watch you, listen to you, because of what they think you’re going to say.’ I just think there’s a lot changing.”

I’m curious from whom Biden heard this, because he speaks on the record to the press less than any president in recent memory—he’s given the fewest interviews and press conferences since Ronald Reagan. But for most reporters today, the dynamic the president is describing will be very familiar. Celebrity reporters have always existed, as Elliot Ackerman’s great recent article on the famed World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle underscored, but over the past 15 years, even cub reporters have felt intense pressure to become public personalities, whether the impetus comes from one’s editors or peers or the marketplace.

Yet as I watched Twitter melt down this weekend, I started to wonder whether that moment might actually be starting to pass—a casualty of the unlikely tag team of Joe Biden and Elon Musk. The two have, respectively, helped kill the demand and the means for journalists to brand themselves.

Donald Trump isn’t responsible for the celebrification of the press, but he supercharged it, especially in political journalism. During his presidency, the American public was more fixated on the news than it had been in decades. Journalists, in turn, became celebrities in their own right: Maggie Haberman of The New York Times became a household name thanks to her perpetual stream of Trump scoops. CNN’s Jim Acosta’s press-room grandstanding elevated his renown. The TV-retread Tucker Carlson found his moment as Trump’s greatest media apostle. Books about Trump seemed to shoot up the best-seller lists on a weekly basis.

This has all slowed to a crawl in the Biden era. The president has intentionally pursued a strategy of being boring and normal, and the result is much-reduced attention from the press. It’s hard to think of any reporter who has become a new, massive star since 2021. No Biden-book boom has ensued. Readership at news sites dropped after the 2020 election, and so have TV-news audiences. The calmer mood reverses an infamous tweet: The change is good for our country, but this is dull content.

Musk’s purchase and gradual demolition of Twitter is an even bigger part of the equation. Twitter was a branding machine that allowed reporters to make a direct connection with consumers. A clever or funny or piquant or simply hyperactive journalist could bypass the traditional gatekeepers of their outlet and become famous for something other than—or in addition to—whatever appeared under their byline.

Now Twitter is disintegrating for reasons of both ideology and technology. Although it has always been true that Twitter is not real life, the site brought together an unusually wide spectrum of the population, all in one place. Musk was mocked for calling Twitter a “town square,” but he was right. And because so many journalists were on the site, getting big on Twitter was usually enough to get big outside of it. But Musk’s takeover has encouraged the metamorphosis of the site into what my colleague Charlie Warzel has called a “far-right social network.” That drives away centrist and liberal reporters, but more importantly their audiences. Meanwhile, the site is mired in technical chaos much of the time, which is a problem for users of any political persuasion.

What comes after Twitter is a much more fragmented landscape. Many social-media sites command significant audiences, but no single platform can do what Twitter once did. A journalist can make a big bet on one platform, or they can try to hedge and be active on Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Substack, and, as of this week, Meta’s Threads—give or take a dozen more. But who has the time? And besides, you don’t get the same reach. TikTok and YouTube command enormous but typically niche audiences. Substack grows slowly and seems to mostly reward writers who were already well-known before migrating to the platform, such as Matt Taibbi or Matt Yglesias. As Twitter refugees joined Bluesky this weekend, my following jumped by roughly 20 percent—to 221. Compare that with the nearly 34,000 followers I have on Twitter. (If I have a brand, it’s a boutique label.)

I’ve been working on reducing my own Twitter use, and I have mixed emotions. Not feeling the pressure to be part of the conversation each day has been freeing (of my time, among other things), though I miss the validation of a clever remark getting lots of engagement. I am not so naive as to hope that the era of journalist branding is over, but with a little luck, 2023 might someday look like a turning point on the road to its demise.

Related:

The White House spent four years vilifying journalists. What comes next? (From 2020) “I was an enemy of the people.”

Today’s News

A suspicious powder was found in the White House while President Biden and his family were at Camp David this past weekend, and tests confirmed it as cocaine. The world’s hottest day ever was recorded on July 3, a record that was subsequently broken again on the 4th. Yesterday, a district judge prevented Biden administration officials and certain federal agencies from working with social-media companies to discourage or filter First Amendment–protected speech.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: E-bikes are going to keep exploding, Caroline Mimbs Nyce explains. We’re stuck in battery purgatory. Work in Progress: Leading economists said we’d need higher unemployment to tame inflation, Adam Ozimek writes. Here’s why they were wrong.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Joshua Roberts / Reuters

The Great American Eye-Exam Scam

By Yascha Mounk

On a beautiful summer day a few months ago, I walked down to the part of the Connecticut River that separates Vermont from New Hampshire, and rented a kayak. I pushed myself off the dock—and the next thing I remember is being underwater. Somehow, the kayak had capsized as it entered the river. I tried to swim up, toward the light, but found that my own boat blocked my way to safety. Doing my best not to panic, I swam down and away before finally coming up for air a few yards downriver. I clambered onto the dock, relieved to have found safety, but I was disturbed to find that the world was a blur. Could the adrenaline rush have been so strong that it had impaired my vision? No, the answer to the puzzle was far more trivial: I had been wearing glasses—glasses that were now rapidly sinking to the bottom of the Connecticut River.

If the whole experience was, in retrospect, as funny as it was scary, the most annoying consequence was the need to regain the faculty of sight. I did not have any backup glasses or spare contact lenses on hand. The local optometrists did not have open slots for an eye exam. Since the United States requires patients to have a current doctor’s prescription to buy eyewear, I was stuck. In the end, I had to wear my flowery prescription sunglasses—in offices and libraries, inside restaurants and aboard planes—for several days.

Then I went to Lima, Peru, to give a talk. There, I found a storefront optician, told a clerk my strength, and purchased a few months’ worth of contact lenses. Though my Spanish is rudimentary, the transaction took about 10 minutes.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Cheryle St. Onge

Read. “Outdoor Day,” a new poem by Nicolette Polek.

“In elementary school, my mother rides the red bus to ‘defense class.’ / Station one she crosses a brook with knotted rope.”

Listen. A collection of some of June’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’m mourning the recent death of the great German free-jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. The usual euphemism is that he’s an acquired taste, but unlike with, say, whiskey or coffee, most people never feel a need to acquire a taste for him. His widest exposure may have been a 2021 cutting contest with Jimmy Fallon, but back in 2001, the saxophonist and former President Bill Clinton told the Oxford American that readers would be surprised to know he was a Brötzmann fan. I emailed Clinton’s spokesperson for comment on the death, but so far I’ve received no response. (If you’re reading this, Mr. President, call me!) The truth is that not all of Brötzmann’s output is difficult listening. This 2022 live performance with the Gnawa master Majid Bekkas and the drummer Hamid Drake is even trancily soothing.

— David

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.