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The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, is the new moderator of the PBS program Washington Week, which will now be called Washington Week With The Atlantic. I talked with Jeff about this new partnership, which launches tomorrow night on PBS at 8 p.m. ET.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Hawaii is a warning. Aristotle’s 10 rules for a good life “My mom will email me after she dies.” Never tweet.

A Preoccupation With Democracy

Tom Nichols: Washington Week and The Atlantic are both institutions in their own right. What’s the goal in joining them together for a program like this? Perhaps instead of saying “a program like this,” I should have started by asking what kind of program you envision.

Jeffrey Goldberg: I’m aiming for what I think is something Washington Week already does extremely well: I want to have discussions with the reporters who are actually reporting on the week’s events, so that viewers get a sense of not only what’s going on but how those stories are reported. We need time for more detailed conversations with the people who were there and who will tell us what happened. One of the great things about this program is that it allows people to speak in whole paragraphs, and I’m a big fan of paragraphs.

Tom: This is a new gig for you, right? You’ve never been a moderator.

Jeff: Right. I’ve been on a million panels on TV and at conferences—time I will never get back, alas—but this is my first outing as a moderator. So my suggestion is that you watch, simply to see if I’m able to read from a teleprompter. The jury is out on that question.

Tom: So now that you’re going to be on the other side of the desk, how do you plan to run the show? What will the format look like?

Jeff: I hate to make things sound so simple, because, as you know, I’m a complicated guy. But the goal here is to find the best minds in the press and let them analyze what’s going on. I want people to feel like they’ve actually learned something after they watch this.

Tom: Well, I don’t think it’s simplistic, but it sounds like a callback to an older, more conversational tradition of news programs in the pre-cable age.

Jeff: To some extent, it is. Some television news and public-affairs programs have become too frenetic for my taste. The audience is bombarded with lights and buzzers during short segments where six or seven people—or more—are trying to make a point as quickly as possible. And some of those people are partisan hacks. A group of journalists having an actual conversation is rare on television now, and we’re going to take the time to have those more patient conversations.

Tom: But isn’t that what viewers want—flash and movement?

Jeff: Look, there are a lot of people in this country. Some people want TikTok; some people want The Atlantic. Some people want both. Not you or me, necessarily—although you are something of a TikTok star, of course. But I’m sure there’s a Venn overlap. At The Atlantic, we know our readers have a solid attention span. So does the audience for Washington Week and  PBS NewsHour. And look at how many people will listen to long podcasts and read long articles. There’s plenty of space for the kind of detailed discussions we’re going to offer on the program.

Tom: Just wait until I bring my cat on TikTok. But coming back to television, that frenetic activity is heavily driven by partisanship. The shows invite partisan advocates to duke it out over complex issues in five minutes, and although I am not without sin on that score, I agree that it can be maddening. Nonetheless, an election is coming up, and people are going to be focused on 2024. How will Washington Week With The Atlantic handle what’s going to be a pretty strange year?

Jeff: This isn’t just a strange year; it’s an election like no other in American history. A former president under state and federal indictments is running against the man who defeated him, and he could end up in either jail or the White House. But both Washington Week and The Atlantic are nonpartisan. The Atlantic’s motto is that we are “of no party or clique”—but we do care, a lot, about the American idea, about democracy and its survival, and I want to bring that preoccupation with democracy from The Atlantic to Washington Week.

Tom: You’ll be talking mostly with others from the media, and people are pretty distrustful of journalists. Do you think that’s an issue for the show?

Jeff: The public is distrustful of a lot of institutions and especially of journalists, yes. We live in a time when a lot of us assume the very worst of everyone else. That distrust makes it hard to stay informed, and that’s bad for democracy. That’s part of why it’s important not only to cover stories, but to explain to viewers how those stories were covered.

Tom: You were friends with the late Gwen Ifill, who helped make Washington Week into an institution. What did you learn from watching her?

Jeff: Gwen believed in journalism, she believed that there was such a thing as observable reality, she wasn’t scared of anything or anyone, and she believed in the promise of America. She was one of the greatest there ever was. She had such authority, and that came in part from knowing what was true, and in believing she had an important job to do. It also came from being a pioneer, as a Black woman in an industry that wasn’t always interested in changing, in opening itself up to other voices. She really is one of my heroes, and as a friend, I miss her every day. She died right after Trump was elected, and the country could really have used her skill and insight and fearlessness over the past seven years.

Today’s News

Fernando Villavicencio, an Ecuadorian presidential candidate who was vocal about government corruption, was assassinated during a rally yesterday evening. A new report from ProPublica found that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted a wider array of gifts and hospitality from wealthy patrons than previously known, and failed to disclose some of them. North Korean state media reported that Kim Jong Un has dismissed his top general and ordered the military to ramp up war preparations.  

Evening Read

Illustration by Rop Van Mierlo

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

By Rebecca Giggs

In the moments before seeing an owl comes a feeling like intuition. I will not forget one night when I stood on a balcony in suburban Sydney, and every wakeful creature in the surrounding bushland abruptly froze. Even the frogs seemed to want to renounce their noisy bodies. Who goes there? Seconds later, a powerful owl (the name of a species native to Australia) dropped onto the railing, and I, too, nearly leaped out of my skin. The owl was the size of a terrier, but languidly buoyant in the way of a day-old Mylar balloon, and to my ears silent. In the pin-drop quiet, it bounced along the balustrade. I never heard its talons touch the metal. The owl itself, I knew, had such sharp hearing that it could make out a possum’s heart pounding beneath its fur. Unseen, a second owl—mate to the first, I presumed—loosed a deep, woodwind hoot that carried.

Owl calls often seem ghostlike or inchoate. A twofold sorcery: Owls can lead us to doubt our own faculties while drawing us to wonder at the mysteries of theirs.

Read the full article.

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The scandal pushing peers into the abyss Sports betting won. The Israeli-Saudi deal had better be a good one. Photos: Deadly wildfires sweep across Maui.

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Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

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American demand for self-storage rose sharply in 2021 during the covid pandemic. Rent for an average storage unit in the US cost, at its lowest, $86.51 per month in 2019, according to data by SpareFoot, an online marketplace that aggregates storage units for rent. That figure jumped to $105.33 in 2021 and went even…

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Over the past several weeks, Israeli and American officials have teased a possible deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such an agreement has the potential to be a diplomatic triumph: Successive U.S. administrations, going back decades and from both parties, have considered the security of both Israel and the Arabian Peninsula to be vital interests that Americans would fight and die for if necessary. A deal that advances both objectives by normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be—should be—greeted with much fanfare and near-universal approval in Washington.

Precisely because they will come under pressure to celebrate any deal that’s announced, however, U.S. policy makers need to be clear about what is and is not a “win.” Congress in particular should be prepared to ask hard questions about any deal. A deal that commits the United States to an undiminished or even a growing presence in the region, whether in the form of troop numbers or policy attention, is a bad deal. So is one that rests on any Saudi motive other than a genuine desire to normalize relations with Israel.

[From the April 2022 issue: Absolute power]

A good deal is one that formalizes already warming relations between Israel and the Gulf states while allowing the United States—which has spent immeasurable blood and treasure on the region over the past three decades—to focus less time and money on the Middle East.

A shotgun marriage between Israel and Saudi Arabia, then, is not a win. The peace deal between Israel and Egypt offers a cautionary example. At the time, the accord was welcome, because the two countries had fought four disastrous wars in three decades, and the deal, backed by U.S. military aid to the Egyptians, peeled the Arabic-speaking world’s most populous country away from the Soviet orbit. But the Egyptian people largely detest Israel today. The two countries have very few meaningful social or economic ties, and Egypt—which is currently entangled in a mess of political and financial problems—views Israel with suspicion rather than as a partner.

The peace between Israel and Jordan is similar. The two relationships depend on U.S. dollars, autocratic regimes in Amman and Cairo, and cooperation among the affected countries’ military and security services. And both peace deals have fostered a sense of entitlement among their participants: Governments in Egypt, Israel, and Jordan all believe they are owed billions of dollars in annual military aid and react angrily at any suggestion that such aid might be reduced. The problem is especially acute with Egypt, whose military is the country’s most powerful political actor but depends on aid in order to provide jobs and protect its economic interests.

The burgeoning relationship between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, following the 2020 Abraham Accords, somehow feels different from those with Egypt and Jordan. Leaders in Israel and the UAE see the rest of the Middle East similarly to one another (and often, it should be said, differently from Washington). Mohammed bin Zayed and his sons and brothers view the threats posed by Iran and Sunni Islamists, for example, with as much alarm as any Israeli does, and the synergies between the UAE’s ambitious sovereign-wealth funds and Israel’s start-up ecosystem hold promise too. Israelis have reason to visit Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and Emiratis have reasons to visit Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Each country has something to contribute—capital from the Emiratis, innovation from the Israelis—to the other.

The same should be true of Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf, in general, is one of the very few economic bright spots in the world at the moment. Flush with cash from oil and gas revenues, the sovereign-wealth funds of the Gulf are spending liberally both at home and abroad, while Western private-equity and venture-capital firms seek to raise funds in the region.

Saudi Arabia has the largest consumer base of any wealthy Gulf state, which is why retailers and makers of consumer goods spend more time there than in, say, Qatar or the UAE. The economic reforms of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have made doing business in Saudi Arabia much more attractive than in years past, and more Western companies—under pressure from Riyadh, to be sure—are basing their regional operations in Saudi Arabia rather than in the UAE.

Israelis may wish to invest in Saudi Arabia, and Saudis will almost certainly want to invest in Israel. That incentive for normalizing relations between the two countries should be enough, and the United States should not feel obligated to offer much more.

[Read: Israel and Saudi Arabia–togetherish at last?]

Nevertheless, rumors have circulated that the U.S. plans to increase its commitment to Saudi and Israeli security, and this prospect worries me. Peace between Israel and its neighbors should allow the United States to base fewer resources in the region, not more. But U.S. diplomats often underestimate the commitments they are making on behalf of the Pentagon.

The Iran deal of 2015 provides a useful example. The Pentagon was, for some very good reasons, excluded from the negotiations between the United States and Iran, which the more optimistic members of the administration hoped might lead to a new era in U.S. policy toward the region. But the deal itself effectively locked in a robust U.S. force posture nearby to enforce Iranian compliance: Shifting U.S. troops from the Gulf to East Asia became harder, not easier, following the deal.

I worry that any formal security commitments made to either Saudi Arabia or Israel might similarly promise tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the Middle East for decades more. Moving U.S. forces into the Gulf in a conflict is harder than you might imagine, so to respond to contingencies, much of what you would need has to be deployed to the region in advance. (Approximately 35,000 U.S. troops were semipermanently garrisoned in the Gulf at the end of the Obama administration.) The U.S. should not make a new security commitment to the Middle East—the scene of yesterday’s wars—at the expense of prioritizing the Pacific theater.

I understand the enthusiasm in Jerusalem and Washington, though. Despite my worries about the ill-advised and ultimately unnecessary commitments the United States might be tempted to make in order to bring the deal across the finish line, the Biden administration—and, yes, the Trump administration before it—deserves a lot of credit for having gotten us this close to what would be a momentous achievement for Israel, for Saudi Arabia, and for U.S. diplomacy.

In the moments before seeing an owl comes a feeling like intuition. I will not forget one night when I stood on a balcony in suburban Sydney, and every wakeful creature in the surrounding bushland abruptly froze. Even the frogs seemed to want to renounce their noisy bodies. Who goes there? Seconds later, a powerful owl (the name of a species native to Australia) dropped onto the railing, and I, too, nearly leaped out of my skin. The owl was the size of a terrier, but languidly buoyant in the way of a day-old Mylar balloon, and to my ears silent. In the pin-drop quiet, it bounced along the balustrade. I never heard its talons touch the metal. The owl itself, I knew, had such sharp hearing that it could make out a possum’s heart pounding beneath its fur. Unseen, a second owl—mate to the first, I presumed—loosed a deep, woodwind hoot that carried.

Owl calls often seem ghostlike or inchoate. A twofold sorcery: Owls can lead us to doubt our own faculties while drawing us to wonder at the mysteries of theirs. Of some 260 owl species at large in the night, at dusk, and less commonly during daylight, many are stealthily camouflaged and decked out with decibel-dampening feathers, their shrieks floating without clear origin. The young of some of those species have long been practicing. Great horned owls find their voice while they are still doubled over in the dark of their moon-shaped egg. Having punctured the small air cell inside the egg’s membrane with their budding beak, the proto-owlets inflate their lungs and start chittering. To each its private void, in a confinement growing tighter the bigger they get. If a spectral sound is supposed to come from beyond the grave, what word might characterize the babble of embryonic life, the noises of beings too tenuous to out themselves from their shell?

Owls’ otherworldly aura—their keening more an atmosphere than an animal sound—has engendered human superstition: What better shorthand for sinister happenings than their ethereal calls? And yet owls have inspired an altogether different response as well. In antiquity, they were sometimes identified as “human-headed birds.” Their domed head, wide-set eye sockets (enabling binocular vision), and flat facial profile—distinctive within their biological class—are features that map onto a human visage. Whether the mythic depiction of owls as thoughtful, even philosophical, beings stemmed from this semblance alone, who can say?

[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]

Perhaps the inference arose instead from an understanding of owls as active at the close of the customary workday, after nightfall, hours that offer the chance for repose and contemplation. Or perhaps owls’ sensitivity to stimuli beyond human ken suggested unfathomed know-how, a shrewd intelligence needed to navigate the dark. Either way, the sagacity of owls has long stood as a categorical anomaly in a world in which to be called “birdbrained” remains an insult.

Whether feared or revered, owls have lately invited scrutiny by science writers and ornithologists eager to explain the birds’ acute perceptiveness, their far-flung environments (Antarctica is the only continent where you won’t find owls), and the relationships between the two. In her 2016 best seller, The Hidden Lives of Owls: The Science and Spirit of Nature’s Most Elusive Birds, Leigh Calvez focuses on the owls of the Pacific Northwest, sharing her suspenseful nighttime explorations of the biology and behavior of birds ranging in size from the saw-whet owl, which can fit in a teacup, to the imposing great grey owl (known to some as the “Phantom of the North”). The conservationist Jonathan C. Slaght has devoted decades to learning about Blakiston’s fish owl, “a fire hydrant with a six-foot wingspan,” as he puts it. In Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl (2020), Slaght yokes science to macho adventure in order to track the “floppy goblin” with electric-yellow eyes into the ice-strewn Primorye region of eastern Russia—a shrinking habitat, as are the owl’s hunting grounds in the waters and riverbanks of some of the coldest tributaries in Japan.

Two new entries in the owl quest find closer kinship between bird and human, yet remain wary of domesticating the dark’s inhabitants too much. In The Wise Hours: A Journey Into the Wild and Secret World of Owls, the poet and nature writer Miriam Darlington warns against the urge to “cutify” the birds, noting how readily owls’ big, forward-facing eyes convey babyish appeal, not just profundity. She has in mind the owl of meme culture, featured in viral YouTube, Tumblr, and TikTok posts; remixed as fan art on Reddit forums; and available as an avatar option in multiplayer video games. Online, owls star as twee, humanoid knockoffs, and could hardly be further from their cryptic counterparts heard caterwauling in the starlit woods. A tour of the platforms reveals owls peevishly rain-drenched, owls clowning around, powder-puff nestlings pleading for a dangled snack, owls wincing and head-bobbing, owls as the rambunctious companions of domestic pets. The antithesis of otherworldly, these and similarly whimsical, infantilized animal portrayals are, in Darlington’s view, an invitation to rob nature of its vital wildness.

[From the January/February 2017 issue: What the octopus knows]

Yet her project to preserve owl awe doesn’t stop her from recruiting the birds to therapeutic ends. Darlington’s adult son falls ill, and the narrative of his diagnosis and treatment (a “perma-drone of worries”) fastens itself to her journey into the insomniac sphere of owls in a season of family crisis. Midway between divesting owls of adorability and asserting their status as a marvel of nature, Darlington finds they have a role to play as her own personal gargoyles: They serve as forbidding beings that externalize the author’s anxieties, helping her to either wing those fears away or confront them.

Jennifer Ackerman, internationally beloved by birders as the author of two popular books about avian intelligence—The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think and The Genius of Birds—supplies a more hardheaded assessment of owls, as well as of owl worship, in What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds. She locates her owls in the vacant lots of suburban Maringá, in southern Brazil; aloft in hawthorn and chokecherry forests in western Montana; in rehab for roadside injuries in Minnesota; in a limestone quarry in Maastricht, a municipality of the Netherlands. Her investigations lead her to question: How smart are owls, really, and why have they come to stand for the supernatural solemnity of a world beyond us?

As Ackerman has previously relayed, startling findings have emerged from the study of ornithological cognition over the past two decades. Researchers have discovered that, despite the lack of a layered cerebral cortex, the brains of several avian lineages permit complex feats of memory, logic, recognition, even math. Populations of corvids (crows, rooks, ravens, kindred others) are today famed for tool use, problem-solving, and seemingly ritual responses to their dead. American crows will congregate in cawing mobs around the lifeless bodies of birds of their same species, and later avoid food found in the area. Pinyon jays can remember each of a thousand spots where they once stashed a seed. European magpies pass the mirror test: They can recognize themselves as individuals. Some parrots’ language facility far exceeds mimicry. When trained in a lab, pigeons—surely the birds most impugned as automatons—turn out to be on par with primates in their counting ability (able to order arrays of objects, from a single object, to a pair, to a trio).

Ackerman wants to know what the latest science says about how owl species stack up against the cleverest birds. In relation to their body size, owls have large brains, an anatomical characteristic thought to have evolved in tandem with “parental provisioning” of offspring. Indeed, owl nestlings hatch before they can hunt or scavenge, dependent on food supplied by adults to provide the energy their brain tissue needs to grow. Yet for the most part, the brainpower of owls is enchained to the activity of their senses, rather than to the sort of intelligence found in birds that display inventiveness, selfhood, superior powers of recall, or numeracy. Some 75 percent of an owl’s cortexlike forebrain is dedicated to hearing and vision, faculties so astounding in range and exactitude that they might seem, to us, a variety of natural magic.

[From the July/August 2022 issue: How light and noise pollution confound animals’ senses]

Owl species deemed “eared” or “horned” don’t actually have external ear pinna the way we do, or bony horns like antelope. The flareable tufts of feathers, called “plumicorns,” they sport atop their head might be used to gesture to other owls, or perhaps to help conceal an owl by breaking up its rounded outline, making it appear more like the stump of a rough or broken branch. Though their true ears are mere apertures hidden under their feathers, owls’ reactivity to sound has few equivalents in the animal kingdom. The great grey owl can not only pick up the swish of a vole’s footfall coming from a passage cored into a snowbank, but also figure out the elevation of the sound source, so as to strike through the snow and hit that very point. In some owl species, a portion of the hearing nerve branches into the optical lobe of the brain, which scientists speculate could mean that these owls form a visual signal of something heard but out of sight.

Owls see well in the dimmest conditions, and some species have retained photoreceptor rods that also make them sensitive to ultraviolet light—they are able to see colors that we cannot. Eurasian eagle owls exploit this part of their visual spectrum by having patches of neck plumage that are brightened by reflecting UV light, markings germane to displays of rivalry. Their young also have UV-reflective blotches inside their throat, prominent cues when the eagle owlets gape for food.

For Ackerman, the deftness of owls’ senses might be regarded as “its own breed of genius”—a supremely adaptive gift—though she recognizes that scientists rarely conceive of animal intelligence this way, finding evidence instead in exceptional behavior that conveys some kind of mental nimbleness or surplus. And owls do engage in some types of activity coded as “smart”: Ackerman reports on this repertoire too. Owls are curious about novelty in their environment—one reason they are prone to getting trapped in pipes, hay blowers, and ventilation shafts, which they gamely explore. Little owls can tell groups of people apart, tolerating farmers but fleeing at a glimpse of ornithologists, who catch and band them.

Though owl faces may seem static, some species flex and refashion the feathered discs around their eyes to reflect states of alertness or relaxation. Owls, especially juvenile ones, play. They also learn: Great horned owls spend about six months with their parents developing dexterities that will aid their survival, including how to fly through tightly set tree canopies, and how to pounce and kill. Compared with adults, young barn owls experience long spells of REM sleep, the part of the sleep cycle associated with vivid and emotion-laden dreams in humans. If barn owlets dream, researchers suspect that those dreams help cement skills they acquire in the twilight, just as, when mice fall into REM sleep, the rodents enter a period of mental processing associated with learning to take cover from birds of prey (among them, owls).

Indeed, if we get beyond the emblematic wisdom of owls, we might come to recognize their most anthropomorphic quality—their versatility. Owls have unintentionally migrated as stowaways on ships and flourished in new territory. Corridors of agricultural land have facilitated their dispersal too. A few species have acclimatized remarkably well to our architecture and infrastructure, thriving in stables and belfries, occupying dugouts by causeways, roosting by the hundreds in city squares or in cemeteries (where grave sites, laid with edible votives, attract rodents).

Male burrowing owls have been documented festooning their earthen tunnels with decorative bits of potato, nubs of concrete, corncobs, old gloves, and stolen fabric (red, white, blue, green, in order of preference)—small treasuries underground. Camera traps have also revealed owl food sources to be more diverse than was once thought. They don’t just eat mice, fish, amphibians, and insects, but will also scavenge for carrion, picking meat from dead dolphins and decomposing crocodiles on the shoreline, and stripping quills from the carcasses of crested porcupines to get at the flesh. The largest owl species will hunt other birds (including owls), and go after skunks, fawns, even cats.

Ultimately, Ackerman concludes that owls do not warrant their storied eminence as recondite knowledge keepers. Nor are they crow-witted by the standards of modern science. Owls are opportunists. When Flaco, an eagle owl, first escaped from the Central Park Zoo in New York, his flight muscles were not yet strong enough to support flying farther than four blocks, and he bumbled his landings. For a decade he’d lived off hand-cut meat and slaughtered mice.

Today Flaco hunts his own vermin, and ranges artfully in the north end of Central Park. Bird-watchers praise the preservation of the wildness within him, despite his long captivity. What proves most bewitching about Flaco, described in his zoo days as “pudgy” and “grumpy,” is how swiftly he has freed himself not only from his enclosure but from performative charm. Owls might yet be our alter egos in more than their ability to prosper in a diversity of habitats. What animal more readily accommodates our deep need to swivel between symbolisms, now hooting their summons to our dark and powerful instincts, now strutting and fluffing their appeal to our sense of whimsy? The duality of owls: as Janus-faced as we are.

This article appears in the September 2023 print edition with the headline “Owls Aren’t That Smart.”

Something that always bothers liberal Britons is that Americans might believe a TV series such as Downton Abbey is a semi-documentary, and that the United Kingdom is still a class-ridden society in thrall to ideas of inherited rank and social position. Because liberal Britons know this is unfair and untrue. Or rather, it is unfair and untrue with one extraordinary exception: the British honors system, the customary practice of awarding medals and titles to citizens.

This exception of ancient privilege has helped create a summer of misery for the British government and its newish prime minister, Rishi Sunak. It is a saga both funny and slightly shaming.

Almost all countries have honors systems—public virtue is rarely its own reward. Every year, some 2,000 Britons are recipients of one level of honor or another (Italy and France dish out more). Like several of our invented traditions, the British honors system stretches back only as far as the early years of the 20th century. During this tumultuous period—when organized labor was on the march, the Irish wanted Home Rule, and suffragettes were breaking windows—the ruling class was necessarily at its most resourceful in finding ways of cementing the people to the state.

Accordingly, the Order of the British Empire was established in 1917, as a way of decorating the king’s subjects for noncombat services during the Great War. Imperial associations aside, the award is quite harmless. All of those honored have the excitement of going to a royal palace to receive their medal from the monarch or a member of the Royal Family. They then have the cachet of using the title in their formal address; tables in otherwise booked-out restaurants are suddenly found for lords and knights. Photographs of the awardee meeting royalty appear on study walls—and everyone thus blessed gets to have a story about how the late Queen smiled at them or how Charles laughed at their jokes. Notoriously, rebellious actors become royalists overnight.  

[From the August 1863 issue: An American in the House of Lords]

This part of the honors system is surprisingly democratic—or at least no less benign than belonging to a Rotary Club, say. Anyone can nominate someone, even themselves. The nominations are collected, sifted into categories, and whittled down by civil servants into short lists that are presented to committees of the great and good from relevant areas of public life: science and technology, culture and the arts, the charity sector, and so on. The vetting is no doubt thorough and in good faith, but this being Britain, a degree of possibly envious cynicism is sometimes heard—about an Order of the British Empire, or OBE, being awarded for Other Buggers’ Efforts.

I recently met a woman member of the House of Lords who was emailed out of the blue by someone applying for an honor; they asked if she might provide a reference. “But I’ve never heard of you,” she objected. “Oh, that’s all right,” the emailer replied. “I’ll take you to lunch, and we can get to know each other.”

The OBEs are not the side of the honors system that’s been causing trouble. Nor even are the more prestigious knighthoods. To be knighted might not strike one as a natural way for a democracy to demonstrate its socially inclusive, multicultural values, but in the past couple of years, two of my friends have been knighted: One is Black, and the other is gay. Both naturally professed a slight embarrassment, but this was offset by the pleasure their elderly relatives supposedly took in the award.

The problem lies in the peerages. To be “ennobled” and become a member of the House of Lords is simultaneously to be honored and to be appointed to the legislature of the United Kingdom. A lord or lady not only gets the best restaurant reservations, but also sits in the Palace of Westminster and holds a significant degree of political sway, the House of Lords being the deliberative second chamber to the elected House of Commons. Much as the House of Representatives and the Senate form the U.S. Congress, the U.K.’s two chambers form Parliament—with the important difference that, unlike the Lords, the U.S. Senate is an elected body. Although the initiative in lawmaking belongs to the Commons, the Lords nevertheless wields influence by debating, revising, and ratifying legislative proposals.

Once elevated to the leather-upholstered benches of the Lords chamber, you can join the 90 or so hereditary peers (dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts) left over from an uncompleted reform during the Tony Blair years, and the two dozen bishops of the Church of England, including the archbishop of Canterbury. Hereditary peerages are rarely created; nearly 40 years have passed since the previous three. But peers for life (their title nonheritable) are made all the time—and whoever gets to nominate people for the House of Lords thus exercises considerable powers of patronage. Peers, like the members of the U.S. Supreme Court, sit for life.

Lord-making usually happens twice a year, in a New Year’s honors list and in the monarch’s birthday honors list. In practice, the prime minister of the day comes up with a collection of people he or she wants ennobled, including, by convention, some nominees from the opposition parties and a few others put forward by the civil service. These nominees are then checked for wholesomeness by an independent committee.

[Read: A tale of two legislative chambers]

In addition, however, is another list that follows the calling of a general election: the so-called dissolution list, which features politicians who are retiring from the House of Commons and might have some residual usefulness. Finally, and most poisonously, there is the list granted to an outgoing prime minister. This one is hard to describe as anything other than a way of rewarding old comrades and close cronies.

Enter—or rather, exit—Boris Johnson. Even before he quit as prime minister last summer, Johnson created characteristic mayhem by using honors lists to elevate obviously unsuitable people to the Lords. In 2020, against the advice of the MI5 security service, he controversially raised to the peerage Evgeny Lebedev, the newspaper-owning son of a Russian oligarch and former KGB officer. Some critics suspected that Lebedev’s support for Johnson while the latter was London mayor, as well as his hospitality during Johnson’s reported visits to Lebedev’s luxurious Umbrian pile, were factors in the decision.

Not all departing prime ministers submit an honors list. Blair didn’t; nor did Gordon Brown. Johnson, however, put forward the names of at least 16 people to become peers. Some were young, underqualified former aides; a number had been implicated in the “Partygate” scandals during the pandemic lockdown, the issue most responsible for the public’s loss of confidence in Johnson; and four of them were sitting Conservative MPs, loyal to Johnson.

The immediate problem with the last category, aside from the appearance of cronyism, was a straightforwardly political one: To take up their peerages, these parliamentarians would have to resign their Commons seats, triggering special elections that Sunak’s government, dealing with the mess left by Johnson and his successor, Liz Truss, might easily lose.

One of these MPs was Nadine Dorries. A combative Liverpudlian from a working-class family, Dorries is an unusual Tory. Well to the right of the party mainstream, Dorries was passed over for government office for 14 years after her first election, in 2005. Only in 2019 was she given a brief as a junior health minister—by Johnson, whom she had supported for the party leadership that year. Before, she was best known for her participation in a reality TV show set in an Australian jungle, where she was obliged to eat a camel’s toe and an ostrich’s anus. She succeeded in parlaying that celebrity into a series of potboiler novels set in 1950s Liverpool. By the time of Johnson’s fall, Dorries had gained cabinet rank as culture minister.

[Read: Boris Johnson meets his destiny]

When, last July, Johnson’s senior cabinet colleagues—Sunak included—were abandoning their leader by resigning and making his position untenable, Dorries stood firm. To some, her defense of her boss spoke of an almost romantic devotion, but he alone in his party had recognized her abilities and rewarded them, where his snobbish predecessors had not.

So Johnson nominated Dorries for a peerage. But when the final list was published, her name was not on it. “I was born into poverty and clawed my way out of it … and then carved out a role in public service,” a deeply disappointed Dorries wrote in the Daily Mail. “A seat in the Lords was recognition of that.” Instead, she went on, “sinister forces conspired against me and have left me heartbroken.”

Dorries did not name her presumed persecutors, but control over an outgoing prime minister’s honors list ultimately lies with the new incumbent. So for now, she has stayed on as an MP, though she may simply be biding her time for a moment when her resignation and another special election will be maximally inconvenient for Sunak.

The Dorries affair has had an entertaining reality-show vibe, but the sorry business of Johnson’s list has brought renewed scrutiny to a peerage system already fallen into disrepute. And this sense of institutional crisis has only intensified with the news this week of Truss’s leaving list: Of her four reported nominees for the House of Lords, one was her deputy chief of staff for her 49-day tenure as prime minister, and another was a think-tank ally who supported the disastrous economic plan that sealed her fate.

Back in 2021, The Sunday Times reported that “in the past two decades, all 16 of the party’s main treasurers … have been offered a seat in the Lords.” One anonymous source even told the newspaper about a donor “who had been enticed into giving £1 million to the party” because that would lead to a peerage. According to a 2022 estimate by The Guardian, nearly a tenth of Conservative peers had donated more than £100,000 ($127,000) to the party.

The use of peerages for patronage, a phlegmatic constitutional historian wrote some years ago, may be a useful “lubricant” to help a prime minister achieve their objectives. But one consequence of the unchecked practice has been the ballooning membership of the second chamber. As it is, we have to be grateful for the absentees: If all 779 members turned up at once, there’d be no room.

A second, more serious consequence has been growing public support for reform of the Lords—including calls for its abolition. Where the Blair government failed, today’s leader of the opposition Labour Party has proposed to take on the cause of reform. But the task for Sir Keir Starmer—knighted in 2014 for his work as the head of the government prosecution service—is fiendishly difficult. Such constitutional reform would absorb an immense amount of political capital, time, and energy, with very little assurance that regular voters would reward the effort.

This creates an impossible conundrum: Opinion polling shows that Britons have little faith in a system that corrodes their trust, yet they’re unlikely to thank their political leaders for fixing it. Senior members of the House of Lords worry about the institution’s reputation, and have for some time argued for reductions in its size and susceptibility to political patronage.

Not long ago, I was invited to a party at the House of Lords thrown for an old friend who had been awarded a major honor—to protect this person’s privacy, let’s call it the Order of the Bedchamber (the honors system furnishes stranger antiquarian titles than that, in fact). I do admire this person’s achievements, but I was brought up in a communist family, and so, at this function, I felt a bit like Richard Dawkins at a Quaker meeting: love the people but wonder if they’ve secretly been raiding the drinks cabinet.

The room at the Palace of Westminster was high-ceilinged, its walls lined with large 18th-century paintings of sea battles, its mullioned windows overlooking the Thames. The physical setting was the perfect embodiment of nostalgia for imperial glory combined with an air of unfit-for-purposeness in the modern world. I remarked on this to a hard-working Labour baroness I know. “It’s why so many of them want to be in the Lords,” she said. “Move out of this place, and half of them would give up their peerages.”

[Christopher Hitchens: Almost noble]

Moving the legislature out of the Palace of Westminster—which is literally crumbling, with major leaks from its roof and pipes and falling masonry—is what any less hidebound polity would do. MPs and peers will not consider this and instead spend billions of pounds shoring up the building. It should, of course, be turned into a museum.

If this sounds iconoclastic, it is partly because, though I have never been offered an honor, I am one of a fairly large number of Britons who wouldn’t accept one anyway. Far from being posthumously delighted, my late mother would revolve in her biodegradable casket were I to accept a “gong.” In turning down an honor, I would join such surprising refuseniks as Rudyard Kipling, T. E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Paul Scofield, David Bowie, and Nigella Lawson.

Others have refused honors or, in some cases, theatrically returned them because of the association with imperialism. But the Order of the British Empire could be renamed sometime soon. There’ll be a culture-war battle about it, but Britain can’t go on with an award named for a political entity that no longer exists and serves only as a reminder of an inglorious history of subjugating other peoples. But even that limited reform of the honors system will require a reckoning with the desire of British people—including those who are not Old Etonians like Johnson but who, like Dorries, have had to strive—to live upstairs in the great house and look down on others.

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