Rachel Simmons was raised Catholic and later joined a Presbyterian church, but she told me the closest thing she’s ever had to true religion came from a childhood friendship. When she was in middle school, she and two other kids, Margo Darragh and Sam Lodge, formed “RMS”—a name combining each of their first initials—that elevated their friend group to a sacred entity.

As they approached high school, the girls would sneak out of their rural Pennsylvania homes at night and one would drive the rest on a four-wheeler into a forest on Lodge’s neighbor’s property. Inspired by Warriors, an adventure-book series, the girls divided the forest into four territories, and each girl ruled over one. The shared area in the middle, featuring a creek with large moss-covered rocks, became their ceremonial site. They’d chant, “Leaders of Star Clan, we come to these rocks, to drink, share tongues, and faithfully talk.” They’d divulge their feelings, meditate in silence, and drink a palmful of the creek water.

These ceremonies were just one part of the elaborate set of practices that RMS developed during middle and high school. Others included three-day sleepovers and a secret code language. The three friends essentially created their own culture and, with it, a profound bond.

Simmons, Darragh, and Lodge, who are all now 29 years old, still gather at least once a year, usually during the winter holidays, to play gift-exchange games, dance, and gorge on food. Their friendship still feels special, but they spend much less time together. And compared with the lush world of traditions they had growing up, the typical ways they now spend time with their other adult friends feel stale, Simmons told me. “How creative can you get when the premise is two couples are meeting up for mini golf from 7 to 9 p.m.?” she wondered.

Like Simmons, many adults do away with the unhurried hangouts and imaginative play that make youthful friendships so vibrant. Though friendships naturally evolve as we grow up, they don’t need to lose that vitality. Continuing to embrace a childlike approach to friendship into adulthood can make for connections that are essentially ageless.

Little matters more in a child’s development than making and maintaining friendships. It’s practically “the job of childhood and adolescence,” Catherine Bagwell, a psychology professor at Davidson College, in North Carolina, told me. It helps that kids have few responsibilities, and that their lives are set up to foster connection. Whether at playgrounds or school, children spend most of their waking hours surrounded by peers. Even after the bell rings, many students head to playdates, sports teams, or clubs.

Kids’ time together is often dedicated to play. For many children, all they need to entertain themselves is shared space, the right companions, and their imagination. But this is not just a pastime; it’s a vulnerable way to connect with someone, Jeffrey Parker, a psychology professor at the University of Alabama, told me. After analyzing more than a decade’s worth of recorded conversations between children and their friends, Parker noticed a common dynamic: If one kid introduces an unexpected idea, the other must riff to make it work. Doing this with a new playmate is a “high-risk strategy”—maybe they’ll shut you down—but when your ideas mesh, you get to invent something new together.

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

Spending so much creative time together can produce intense ties. Laura Goodwyn, a middle-school counselor in Arlington, Virginia, told me about a group of students who all dressed the same and assigned one another familial roles such as “mom” and “son.” A seventh-grade social-studies teacher in Rex, Georgia, Ogechi Oparah, described students who begged to sit together in class because they couldn’t bear to be separated. I’ve seen this exuberance myself, such as in my friend’s 2-year-old, who exclaimed the name of his friend while rushing to the front door to greet him.

RMS became close past the age when make-believe is the norm, yet, in their middle- and high-school years, they preserved young kids’ overarching approach to friendship: Keep one another company for large stretches of time without a preset agenda. Darragh remembers their hangouts as endless “free play.” They took familiar containers, such as a sleepover, and invented complex rituals within them.

Of course, adult friendships have plenty going for them. Adults tend to have stronger cognitive, social, and emotional skills, which allow them to better empathize with, offer advice to, and otherwise support friends. And with age comes longer-standing relationships; this shared history can enrich friends’ understanding of one another.

Many young adults enjoy this emotional depth along with an abundance of free time, before family and career responsibilities pick up in midlife. It’s no wonder that this age is a high-water mark for friendship. Those who go to college get a few extra years of living near their peers. Later in adulthood, though, people have more demands on their time; work, romantic partnership, and caregiving all compete for their attention. Plus, when adults enter the workforce full-time, potential new friends don’t constantly surround them the way they did in school or while living in dormitories. Though some continue to carve out time for their social lives, Bagwell said, friendship tends to become “a luxury rather than priority.”

Under these new circumstances, many people see friends less frequently—and they tend to spend the time they do have together differently. For efficiency’s sake, they might pair socializing with other activities, such as sharing a meal or supervising a playdate. Though grabbing dinner with a friend can be engaging, it’s a far cry from elaborate forest ceremonies. Adults would make a scene if they leapt out of their chair at a restaurant to enact a silly sketch; simply laughing too loudly could elicit side-eye from fellow diners. Friends could choose to confide in each other at a meal, but the activity doesn’t inherently invite the type of uninhibited openness that play can.

[Read: Partying feels different now]

Yet activities with less defined norms, which Sheila Liming, the author of Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, calls “improvised” gatherings, can make some uncomfortable. Parker, the psychology professor, told me he’d find it hard to call up a friend and say “Wanna go throw some stones in the river?” because he senses that adult get-togethers should have a clear purpose. “We know what to expect of something like a dinner party,” Liming said. But, especially with someone new, just hanging out is more confusing. “There’s this open feeling about, well, how long is it going to take? And what are we going to do? And what am I supposed to wear?”

This pursuit of efficiency and the safety of following norms can come at the cost of pleasure. Liming told me that an efficiency mindset risks making friendships feel transactional, as if each meeting should be “worth it.” But squeezing hangouts into short, infrequent slots is unlikely to feel fulfilling. If you haven’t seen each other in a while, focusing on catching up is natural. Ticking through life’s headlines, however, can feel like exchanging memos, whereas joint adventures create memories—the foundation of close friendship. As the sociologist Eric Klinenberg told The Atlantic, “You tend to enrich your social life when you stop and linger and waste time.”

Even if more adults were willing to ask friends to skip rocks or loll on the couch, our grown-up minds can sap the improvisational fun from these gatherings. To enjoy the rewards of play, you have to take risks, but adults are often too consumed by self-consciousness to run with someone’s silly idea, let alone suggest one.

Our desire for playful connection doesn’t disappear after childhood. For some people, it gets redirected to romance. Couples mimic intense childhood friendships by spending free-flowing time together, marking the relationship with symbolic tokens such as rings, and developing a miniature culture, complete with inside jokes and a shared vernacular. But celebrating adult friendships in this way is rarer—and harder.

This summer, adults flocked to theaters dressed in suits and fedoras or in fluorescent outfits for doubleheader screenings of Barbie and Oppenheimer. It’s a recent, popular example of adults embracing fun with friends, though there are plenty of others, whether Dungeons and Dragons groups or elaborate fantasy-football leagues. Clearly, adults don’t completely stop creatively connecting with friends. The challenge lies in foregrounding play and inefficiency, making these features of hanging out more common.

If RMS’s youthful escapades are any indication, one way for adults to restore unrushed socializing is by living closer to friends, even with them. When I recently had dinner at a house shared by a couple, their four-month-old, and three of their friends, I joined in their playful ritual of sharing a high, a low, and a surprising or fun story. One of the housemates mentioned to me that preparing and cleaning up meals are his favorite moments at home because the group falls into easy conversation. I thought of this when Goodwyn, the middle-school counselor, told me that her students seemed happiest walking between classes or to the lunchroom. Adult friends aren’t usually present for these in-between moments. They may get dinner, but they rarely go to the grocery store together; they might attend a concert, but they aren’t necessarily around when one of them hears a new song. By living together, the friends I visited ensured they’d see one another regularly, helping them develop the sort of intimacy that kids have effortless access to.

[Read: Live closer to your friends]

Oparah finds that stumbling upon friends is harder in the suburbs, so she and her community make intentional decisions to be around one another, whether that’s tagging along on a Target trip or drinking wine on the patio. They also delight in more whimsical ways of spending time together. One day this year, three of Oparah’s friends texted proposals for how to hang out, including grilling, dressing up in costumes, watching a movie, and playing games. It occurred to them that they could do all of it, and their response was, Why not? “That theatrical idea of ‘yes, and,’” Oparah said, “just feels very playful and childlike to me.”

So the four adults had a sleepover while their partners or babysitters cared for their children. One dressed up as a popcorn container; there was a hunting cap, a flapper outfit, and a French mustache. That night, as Oparah fell asleep on a couch between her friends, she thought to herself, “This is home.”

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The first GOP primary debate confirmed the end of the old Republican Party and squelched any hope for a normal presidential election in 2024.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The mercenary always loses. What Bradley Cooper’s makeup can’t conceal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at the Republican debate

An Inane Spectacle

The morning after the eight top Republican contenders—minus Donald Trump, of course—faced off in a debate in Milwaukee, the consensus seems to be that Vivek Ramaswamy had a good night, Nikki Haley was the grown-up, Mike Pence fought hard, and Chris Christie fizzled out. There were some other people onstage, too, including the supposed Trump-slayer, Ron DeSantis (who once again stood awkwardly alongside other human beings while seeming not to be one of them).

Overall, the consensus is accurate. Ramaswamy gobbled up a lot of time and attention by acting like an annoying adolescent, which might seem like “winning” in an environment like this (although a snap poll about who won had him essentially tied with DeSantis). Haley—whom I dismissed as a very long-shot candidate at the start of her campaign—was a surprisingly strong and adult presence in an often juvenile scrum. Christie tried to tangle with Ramaswamy, and got drowned out. Pence showed genuine flares of anger, including when he made an impassioned defense of the Constitution (which apparently needs to be done in front of a Republican audience these days).

Meanwhile, DeSantis woefully underperformed; if his goal was to “hammer Vivek” and “defend Donald Trump,” he did neither of those, instead resorting mostly to canned snippets from the stump that seemed unconnected to the room. Tim Scott, who came across as nervous and off-balance rather than avuncular or warm, sank below expectations. Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson were completely normal human beings, but that normalness likely sealed their fates as no-hopers.

Beyond the scorekeeping, however, what the GOP debate showed is that the Republicans, as a party, don’t care very much about policy, that the GOP contenders remain in the grip of moral cowardice, and that Fox News is just as bad, if not worse, than it’s ever been.

The candidates who tried to talk about policy got nowhere. Sure, for a while the contenders made some hazy arguments about spending. (Haley landed a glancing blow by noting that Republicans are now the big spenders in Washington, D.C., but no one took that bait.) Immigration and drugs allowed the contestants to play a few rounds of “¿Quién Es Más Macho?,” with Ron DeSantis apparently pledging to go to war with Mexico. Climate change appeared and disappeared.

Two issues did generate the danger that actual ideas might get a hearing: abortion and Ukraine. Both of those moments, to take a line from Roy Batty, were quickly lost like tears in the rain. Haley blasted her colleagues for their heartlessness on abortion and noted that there were many ways Americans might reach agreement on sensible abortion policies. Pence swooped in to chide Haley that “consensus is the opposite of leadership.” Scott demanded that the federal government stop “states like California, New York, and Illinois” from offering abortion until the moment of birth (which they do not allow anyway). Only Doug Burgum noted that using the federal fist to impose moral choices on the states is not exactly a conservative idea. No one cared.

On Ukraine, it was heartwarming to a 1980s conservative like myself to see GOP candidates reminding Ramaswamy (who was not even born until Ronald Reagan’s second term) that standing against Russian aggression is not only a necessity for U.S. national security but a duty for America as the leader of the free world. Haley slammed Ramaswamy for “choosing a murderer over a pro-American country.” Ramaswamy shrugged it off.

But the few minutes of policy discussion were mostly half-hearted and desultory. After all, why would anyone onstage care about policy? The Republican base hasn’t cared about that for years, and in any case, the putative candidates did not appear all that interested in winning the nomination. A few were there to deliver a message (such as Christie and Hutchinson). The others seemed to be running vanity campaigns, perhaps meant to protect their viability in 2028.

And was anyone really in the audience to choose a president? Trump is holding a historically unassailable lead, and he is the almost-inevitable nominee. When the Beatles were just kids playing in cheap bars in Hamburg, a club owner would push them onstage and yell “Mach Schau!,” meaning something like “Give us a show!” That’s what happened last night: Fox and the audience turned on the lights, hollered “Mach Schau!” and let it rip.

No one was better suited for this inane spectacle than Ramaswamy, whose campaign has been a fusillade of high-energy babble that has often veered off into conspiracy theories. Ramaswamy has perfected MAGA performance art: the Trumpian stream of noise meant to drown out both questions and answers, the weird Peter Navarro hand gestures, the cheap shots sent as interruptions to other candidates while whining about being interrupted himself, the bizarre and sometimes contradictory positions meant only to provoke mindless anger.

And the crowd loved it. (So, apparently, did a CNN focus group.) But none of this is a surprise.

The GOP has mutated from a political party into an angry, unfocused, sometimes violent countercultural movement, whose members signal tribal solidarity by hating whatever they think most of their fellow citizens support. Ukraine? To hell with them! Government agencies? Disband them! Donald Trump? Pardon him!

Ramaswamy gained an advantage last night by leaning into the amoral vacuousness of his positions. The other candidates, however, were all trapped in the same thicket of cowardice that has for years ensnared the entire GOP. In a telling moment, one of the moderators, Bret Baier, asked who would support Trump in the general election if he were convicted of crimes. Four  hands shot up almost immediately in response to the question. (So much for the principled conservatism of Haley and Burgum.) DeSantis made the worst call of any of them: He looked around, took stock, and then put his hand up just before Pence, making it 6–2.

Fox clearly had its thumb on the scale for DeSantis—for all the good it did him. The debate opened with bizarre videos that included the faux-populist anthem “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and Baier’s first question was a fluffy marshmallow lobbed at DeSantis, asking him why the song has struck such a nerve in America. (DeSantis whiffed on the opportunity.)

Christie was then asked about New Jersey’s floundering finances.

In other words, Florida’s governor was asked to burnish his Real American credentials while New Jersey’s former governor was told to explain himself for letting his state become a hellhole. Later, the other moderator, Martha MacCallum, gave Christie a chance to shine by asking him about … UFOs.

And so it went. By the end of the evening, the moderators had lost control of the whole business. But again—perhaps I have mentioned this—no one onstage or in the audience seemed to care. Donald Trump will be the GOP nominee, and none of the people at the debate in Milwaukee had a clue what to do about that.

Related:

Ramaswamy and the rest

Peter Wehner: Party of one

Today’s News

Japan is releasing treated radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean despite objections from fishermen; China has expanded its ban on seafood imports from the country.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee have opened an investigation into Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is bringing a felony-racketeering case against Donald Trump.

Vladimir Putin publicly commented on Yevgeny Prigozhin’s apparent death.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic; Sources: Getty; Shutterstock.

Bama Rush Is a Strange, Sparkly Window Into How America Shops

By Amanda Mull

When taking inventory of their rush outfits, the sorority hopefuls at the University of Alabama typically get bogged down in the jewelry. Clothes for the week-long August ritual colloquially known as Bama Rush tend to be simple: Imagine the kind of cute little sleeveless dress that a high-school cheerleader might wear to her older cousin’s outdoor wedding, and you’re on the right track. If you had to spend all day traipsing up and down Tuscaloosa’s sorority row in the stifling late-summer heat, you too would probably throw on your most diaphanous sundress and wedge-heeled sandals and call it a day. The jewelry, by comparison, piles up—stacks of mostly golden rings and bracelets, layers of delicate chain necklaces, a pair of statement earrings to match every flippy miniskirt.

On #BamaRushTok, the informal TikTok event that has coincided with actual sorority recruitment at UA since 2021, a subset of the roughly 2,500 prospective sisters documents the experience in real time for an audience of millions. These missives frequently take the form of a long-standing internet staple: the outfit-of-the-day post, or OOTD … Bama Rush may attract a huge audience because it offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at an intensely cloistered world, but these outfit inventories are fascinating for the opposite reason: They’re a point-by-point lesson in how America shops.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Read. The novel that everyone’s been talking about this summer: Emma Cline’s The Guest.

Watch. In the Season 2 finale of And Just Like That, the status-obsessed characters of the show discover the limits of throwing money at their relationship problems.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The political season has officially begun, and the GOP debate was only the first of many events we’ll have to slog through. While we can, we should get outside for a while; it’s still summer, the grass is still green, and as a saying attributed to A. A. Milne’s Eeyore goes, “It never hurts to keep looking for sunshine." I’m going to go look for some at the beach. See you next week.

– Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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When taking inventory of their rush outfits, the sorority hopefuls at the University of Alabama typically get bogged down in the jewelry. Clothes for the week-long August ritual colloquially known as Bama Rush tend to be simple: Imagine the kind of cute little sleeveless dress that a high-school cheerleader might wear to her older cousin’s outdoor wedding, and you’re on the right track. If you had to spend all day traipsing up and down Tuscaloosa’s sorority row in the stifling late-summer heat, you too would probably throw on your most diaphanous sundress and wedge-heeled sandals and call it a day. The jewelry, by comparison, piles up—stacks of mostly golden rings and bracelets, layers of delicate chain necklaces, a pair of statement earrings to match every flippy miniskirt.

On #BamaRushTok, the informal TikTok event that has coincided with actual sorority recruitment at UA since 2021, a subset of the roughly 2,500 prospective sisters documents the experience in real time for an audience of millions. These missives frequently take the form of a long-standing internet staple: the outfit-of-the-day post, or OOTD. In their videos, the girls offer an update on the secretive rush process, plus an exhaustive—or, as the week wears on, exhausted—accounting of everything they’ve put on their bodies for the day ahead, sometimes including details as small as hair accessories or as invisible as perfume. The result is a rapid-fire onslaught of brand names local and global: Kendra Scott, Free People, the Pants Store, Cartier, Target, David Yurman, Enewton, Louis Vuitton, Shein, Francesca’s, Dior, Lululemon (not to be confused with Lulu’s, which is also popular).

To those without much interest in fashion, the lists can sound like gibberish. One RushTok star had to clarify to viewers that when she said that her shoes or bracelets were from Colombia, she meant the country of her mother’s birth and not a boutique they’d never heard of. Most of the outfits are a mishmash of brands at wildly disparate price levels; listen closely, and you’ll hear about Hermès bangles on the same wrists as those from Amazon. Bama Rush may attract a huge audience because it offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at an intensely cloistered world, but these outfit inventories are fascinating for the opposite reason: They’re a point-by-point lesson in how America shops.

[Read: There’s no secret to how wealthy people dress]

At first blush, it would be fair to think that the habits of those partaking in Bama Rush don’t have much to tell us about broader trends—in consumerism, or in anything else. At UA, rush participants come from a very narrow demographic. They’re overwhelmingly thin, well-tanned, conventionally attractive teenagers. A startlingly high proportion of them are blond. (Startling even for me, having spent a semester as a Delta Gamma at the University of Georgia in the mid-2000s.) Panhellenic sororities long resisted integration and are still by any measure white organizations, especially in the Deep South; in 2021, Alabama’s rush class was almost 90 percent white, even though white people make up about two-thirds of the state’s overall population. The University of Alabama’s admissions stats show a preference for wealthy students that isn’t much different from that of the Ivy League, and data available suggest that students from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to pursue Greek membership.

But it’s precisely this demographic narrowness that makes potential new sorority members—PNMs, in Greek jargon—a useful case study in status-seeking, and therefore in modern consumerism. In instances of extreme privilege, broad shopping trends have traditionally not been all that hard to parse: Rich people buy nice things, and a shared understanding of those possessions helps them identify one another as members of the same exclusive class. In part, sorority recruitment at schools like Alabama formalizes this process according to each campus’s chapter hierarchies. At the top of the sorority heap, you’ll usually find houses full of the most conventionally attractive girls from wealthy, socially prominent families. The potential upsides of an invitation to a good sorority—one in which your sisters’ parents have the power to give you a dream internship or write you a particularly compelling recommendation letter to your first-choice law school—are not lost on these young women, even if they also very much want to forge real friendships, meet cute frat boys, and find a sense of belonging. This mixture of ambitions would be identifiable in almost all college students, but Greek life gives it structure.  

As is the case with any type of high-status group, the best way to gain entry is usually to demonstrate that you already belong—in this case, that you understand the norms and expectations that knit the group together. That’s why rush outfits have long been a point of emphasis among PNMs, and why they have primacy on RushTok. When you’re getting relatively brief periods of face time to make your case for joining a socially and economically elite group, your clothing and appearance really matter. A head full of obviously unnatural but perfectly toned bright-blond hair, for example, costs hundreds of dollars a month to maintain. Its presence suggests both a fluency with the group’s aesthetic standards and access to the economic resources necessary to adhere to them at all times. So, too, do $600 Golden Goose sneakers and a wrist full of $400 David Yurman bracelets (stacked with one $7,350 Cartier Love bracelet, if your parents really want to let the world know they’ve raised a queen bee).

[Read: Fashion has abandoned human taste]

Now, however, the RushTokers just as cheerfully admit to wearing unbranded Amazon junk and some of the cheapest apparel on Earth. For much of mass-market-fashion history, the very highest- and lowest-end products would have made strange bedfellows in a single outfit. Consumers have long existed in more predictable price strata and stores, which had to contend with the limiting realities of geography and real estate while serving consumer bases that were fairly well defined. There was little reason for a rich person to browse racks of clothes intended for those of more modest means. There were exceptions, but they were widely regarded as eccentric or daring; Sharon Stone’s pairing of a crisp, white Gap button-down and a Vera Wang skirt at the 1998 Oscars immediately became a milestone in fashion history. At the time, wearing high fashion with a mass-market mall brand (which wasn’t even that cheap!) was unthinkable, and particularly so in a moment of intense fashion scrutiny.

The twin forces of online shopping and garment-industry deregulation changed that. The internet has caused a kind of consumer-context collapse: You’re no longer seeking out products to evaluate and choosing which establishments you enter. Instead, those products are pursuing your attention, usually unbidden through targeted ads online and especially on social media. The mechanics of spending $10 or $1,000 through your phone feel largely identical. While Americans have been getting used to this new system, the domestic clothing market has been flooded with cheap clothes from overseas factories in volumes that would have been illegal to import a few decades ago. If you come across a cute $20 dress, of which there are now thousands available online, why not try it? Not even moments of intense, explicit status-seeking such as sorority rush can blunt the allure of fast fashion, regardless of the habit’s obvious wastefulness or the buyers’ financial wherewithal.

Cheap clothes’ omnipresence has come to feel normal to many people, and especially to those who are young enough to have known no previous reality. Under those circumstances, even the people who can afford (or, often in the case of Bama Rush, whose parents can afford) the best of everything tend to end up wearing an Amazon workout set that a friend on their high-school track team swore by, or some jewelry from H&M to make their layers of real gold necklaces and bracelets look a little more robust. By the same measure, luxury goods have become much more aggressively marketed to middle- and working-class people in the past several decades, which has helped luxury conglomerates expand their sales to a far larger market. Rich people trade down in search of quantity and ease, less rich people trade up in search of status and quality, and everyone’s buying habits start to look more similar than they ever have before. Once everyone has agreed that it’s fine to fake it a little bit, refusing to play along eventually just makes you look like a try-hard or a snob. The norms and expectations you have to live up to have shifted. Make no mistake, though. You’re still trying very, very hard.

It’s always election season in America. Dozens of local contests are taking place across the country this month, from Montgomery, Alabama to the Mariana Ranchos County Water District in California. On August 8 alone, Custer County, Colorado held a recall election for a county commissioner; Ohio asked residents to consider a major ballot measure; and voters in Oklahoma weighed in on several ballot measures.

America has roughly 90,000 local governing bodies, and states do not—at least publicly—track all of the elections taking place on their watch, making an exhaustive accounting nearly impossible. In many cases, contests come and go without any local media coverage, either. I came across a notice for an August 29 election in Marin County, California. When I called the Registrar of Voters for more information, the county assistant had to search a few moments before he could tell me that the town of Tiburon (population 9,000) was selecting a short-term council member.

Jerusalem Demsas: Trees? Not in my backyard.

Americans are used to pundits and civic leaders shaming them for low-turnout elections, as if they had failed a test of civic character. Voters are apathetic, parties don’t bother with the hard work of mobilization, and candidates are boring—or so the story goes. But this argument gets the problem exactly backwards. In America, voters don’t do too little; the system demands too much. We have too many elections, for too many offices, on too many days. We have turned the role of citizen into a full-time, unpaid job. Disinterest is the predictable, even rational response.

“One of the unique aspects of the electoral process in the United States is the sheer number of decisions American voters are asked to make when they go to the polls,” three political scientists argued at the turn of the millennium. “In any single election, American voters face much higher information costs than the citizens of almost any other democracy in the world.”

These information costs are immense. Americans are asked to fill numerous and obscure executive, legislative, and judicial positions, and to decide arcane matters of policy, not just on the first Tuesday in November but throughout the year.

How are we expected to know how the roles of our mayors and city councils are distinct from the roles of county executives, county council members, treasurers, controllers, and boards of supervisors? On what basis should we choose our coroners, zoning commissioners, or commissioners of revenue? Who should we punish when things go wrong? Reward when things go right?

And how can we keep up with the details of hopelessly complicated policy questions? Ohio’s aforementioned August 8 ballot measure proposed raising the threshold for changing the state constitution. It failed 57 to 43 percent, or roughly 1,700,000 to 1,300,000. This apparent matter of process attracted an unusually large number of voters because Ohioans understood that they were engaging in a proxy fight over abortion; advocates expended significant time and energy to explain to the general public what the ballot measure was really about.

Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio

Usually, however, voters are expected to puzzle out even quite complicated issues without the benefit of a government-sponsored education campaign or significant explanatory reporting. In 2022, Georgia voters were asked to approve a statewide ad valorem tax exemption for certain equipment used by timber producers. California has repeatedly asked citizens to vote on regulatory requirements for kidney-dialysis clinics.

Americans are asked to vote too much, and Americans are asked to vote too often. One of the most pernicious ways politicians overburden voters is by holding off-cycle elections. Making time to vote is harder for some people than others; it’s harder for people with inflexible job schedules and needy dependents, for instance. Employers are used to making accommodations for presidential elections—but some random election over the summer? Hardly. As a result, off-cycle local elections are heavily weighted toward higher-income voters, more so than are statewide and national elections.

They’re also heavily weighted toward senior citizens: The most important factor for predicting who votes in city elections is not class or education or race, but age. An analysis by Portland State University’s “Who Votes for Mayor?” project found that people over the age of 65 who live in the poorest, least educated parts of a city typically vote two to five times more frequently than 18-to-34-year-olds in the most educated, affluent parts of a city. Overall, city residents 65 and older were 15 times more likely to vote than those ages 18 to 34.

Ohio Republicans knew that by scheduling the constitutional ballot measure in August, they could dampen turnout and benefit their side. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, had vocally opposed off-cycle elections as recently as December 2021. While testifying in a legislative hearing, he’d pointed to the record voter turnout in November 2020, when “74 percent of all registered voters made their voice heard.” Off-cycle elections, LaRose warned, mean that “just a handful of voters end up making big decisions.” He argued persuasively that “the side that wins is often the one that has a vested interest in the passage of the issue up for consideration. This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work.” State Republicans voted last year to eliminate most August special elections.

But LaRose, who declared his candidacy for the U.S. Senate last month, supported the timing of the August 8 ballot measure, arguing that a statewide issue is “very different” and “not unusual.” According to local Ohio reporting, “There have been only two August statewide votes regarding the constitution”: in 1874 and 1926.  

Nostalgic political commentators long for the bygone days when American democracy still worked. But election-timing manipulation has always been a feature of American local politics. The UC Berkeley political scientist Sarah Anzia looked at the timing of local elections in New York, San Francisco, and Philadelphia over the course of the 19th century and concluded, “Election timing manipulation was a common event.” Politicians exploited timing as a way to “exert some control over the electorate.”

For example, in 1857, New York’s nativist Know-Nothing Party and its Republican Party, which controlled the state legislature, bumped the city’s voting schedule so that municipal elections would no longer take place alongside federal ones, but a month later, in December. All of the Democrats voted against the change in part because they feared that it would hurt their mayoral candidate’s chances. (City Democrats knew their voters would show up for state and national elections, but that in a lower-turnout environment, their opponents could out-organize them.) They were right to be scared: Their mayoral candidate lost that very same year.

Off-cycle elections continued, and voter turnout in the city’s elections “consistently fell far below turnout levels in gubernatorial and presidential elections,” according to Anzia. By 1868, more than 155,000 votes were cast for governor in the November statewide election; a month later, just 96,000 people turned out for the mayoral contest. When the city went back on-cycle in the 1870s, voter turnout for the mayor’s and governor’s races reached near parity.

Americans rationally respond to such intense and random demands on our time by simply checking out. In November 2021, just 23 percent of eligible active voters in New York City cast a ballot for mayor. That same year in North Carolina, 463 municipalities held elections, comprising 890 contests and more than 2,500 candidates. All told, about 15 percent of registered voters turned out.

America’s voting problem is primarily a local one. When compared with that of peer nations, our general-election turnout is actually middle-of-the-pack. And although more voting at the federal level is desirable, some political-science research casts doubt on whether the results of national elections would significantly change if everybody showed up. Not so in local elections, where the electorate is remarkably unrepresentative.

In 2020, the year before that dismal local turnout in North Carolina, about 75 percent of voters—five times as many people—turned out for the general election and statewide contests. And in 2022, 51 percent of registered voters, or nearly three and a half times as many people as the previous year, turned out for the statewide election. The “Who Votes for Mayor?” project examined 23 million voting records in local elections across 50 cities, and came away with alarming findings: In 10 of America’s 30 largest cities, turnout didn’t exceed 15 percent. In Las Vegas, Fort Worth, and Dallas, turnout was in the single digits. Portland, Oregon, was the only city in the sample that saw the majority of its registered voters turn out, probably because Portland regularly votes for mayor on the federal-election holiday in November. The city’s special elections are more in line with national trends: In November 2019 and May 2023, voter turnout was only about 30 percent.

The failed Ohio ballot measure is an instructive case study in the low expectations Americans have for voter engagement. In the days following the election, newspapers proclaimed it a “boost for democracy.” A Columbus Dispatch article noted “high participation” and quoted a spokesperson for the Association of Elected Officials who marveled that “so many people turn[ed] out,” deeming the results “the will of the people.”

Relative to other ballot measures, sure. But only about 38 percent of Ohio’s registered voters cast a ballot, a proportion that shrinks to roughly 34 percent when you include all citizens of voting age. Regardless of whether you support the outcome, is it laudable that, on major questions, just a third of voters bother to weigh in?

The minority who do vote end up with disproportionate power. In Tarrant County, Texas, a judge recently told a meeting of the conservative True Texas Project how just 75 people could make a big difference in local elections where “the turnout is so low by percentage … By you bringing neighbors, friends, picking up the phone, doing postings on social media, there are races that, quite frankly, we ought not to be able to win that we can probably win just because we raise awareness and get people out.” At least two candidates endorsed by the True Texas Project ended up winning their races in Fort Worth. In a city of almost 1 million, fewer than 43,000 people cast ballots.

Aligning local elections with national ones would increase turnout and likely create a more representative electorate, but just filling out a ballot doesn’t constitute meaningful accountability. That’s in part because most races at the local level go uncontested: In 2020, 61 percent of city races and 78 percent of county races were uncontested, as were 62 percent of school-board races and 84 percent of judicial races. Even when a race is competitive, finding reliable information about local candidates can be nearly impossible, turning voting into an exercise in randomness or, at best, name recognition.

Incumbents have a staggering advantage in local races. In a 2009 paper, the legal academic Ronald Wright reviewed election data for prosecutors, a role that is both well understood and highly important to voters. (Public safety and crime regularly rank at the top of voters’ list of concerns.) Wright observed that when district attorneys run for reelection, they win 95 percent of the time and run unopposed in 85 percent of races.

This month alone, I found three elections in Delaware that were canceled because not enough people were running. In each case, the candidates who bothered to file simply ascended to their theoretically elected positions. In local government, elected office is apparently first come, first served.

Nature abhors a vacuum: Where voters disappear, special interests rush in. In the absence of regular voter direction, our local elected officials are not directionless. Instead of democracy, what we’ve got is government by homeowners’ associations, police unions, teachers’ unions, developers, chambers of commerce, environmental groups, and so forth.

“All is not well in local government, and it hasn’t been for some time,” Anzia writes in her book Local Interests. Anzia finds, unsurprisingly, that pressure from interest groups works. Political activity by police and firefighters’ unions correlates with greater spending on their salaries, and cities with more politically active police unions are less likely than cities with less active ones to have adopted body cameras. In cities with strong environmental groups, Anzia found, winning candidates are significantly less likely to favor policies conducive to economic growth. And in school districts where teachers’ unions are the dominant interest group, jurisdictions that hold off-cycle elections pay experienced teachers more than those that hold on-cycle elections.

These specific policies may be good or bad. That’s not the point. The point is that the government should act according to public need, not based on who has the money, time, and will to create and sustain an advocacy group.   

Blaming the voters is easy: Democracy is on the line; people need to get up off their asses and vote! The problem isn’t the system; it’s the people. Maybe if they saw one more Instagram infographic or heard one more speech about the importance of civics, they would become regular voters.

Putting aside the moral status of nonvoters, this argument is pure fantasy. As the political scientist Robert Dahl once quipped, “Like other performers (including teachers, ministers, and actors), politicians and political activists are prone to overestimate the interest of the audience in their performance.”

Contrary to what good-government types may wish, few Americans want to be full-time political animals. Most of us have absolutely no desire to learn what our county commissioners or district attorneys are up to, let alone take on the herculean task of evaluating their records. Effective representational government must empower voters to hold their elected officials accountable without sucking the life out of its citizens. Even the most dedicated participants in local politics aren’t experts in everything, just in the parts of local government that provide them with benefits they find meaningful.

When ordinary voters do show up in local politics, they’re not walking onto an even playing field. Individuals who become motivated to seek criminal-justice reform after an unjust killing by a police officer, or parents who feel compelled to change school curricula, are entering unfamiliar territory that has been landscaped by special interests. And elected officials know that a flurry of political activity can die out quickly, while interest-group activity remains constant.

When I ask local government officials about this problem, I usually hear denial or resignation. “Nonsense,” Kevin Bommer, the executive director of the Colorado Municipal League, told me a few months ago when I asked him whether he worries that low voter turnout yields an unrepresentative government. He suggested that this view calls “into question not only the legitimacy of a municipal election but the integrity of the people elected, as if they don’t represent their community. Those are the things that academics and people say that have never been to a city-council meeting and don’t go to planning-commission meetings.”

Steven Waldman: The local-news crisis is weirdly easy to solve

I don’t doubt that most local officials have integrity. Many if not most of the local officials I’ve spoken with are kind, hardworking, and genuinely committed citizens. They are pledging their efforts for very few benefits and are forced to face ire and controversy as they serve their communities. But our system shouldn’t depend on the benevolence of local officials. In a healthy democracy, it should depend on the electorate holding local officials accountable through the ballot box.

Giving power to the people is sometimes conflated with giving people more access to government decision making through, say, community meetings or ballot measures. But if only a small, unrepresentative group of people are willing to be full-time democrats, then that extra ballot measure, election, or public meeting isn’t more democracy; it’s less. Most of us are part-time democrats. That’s not going to change, and political hobbyists should stop expecting it to.

In the months since Donald Trump’s indictments started piling up, pollsters have noticed something remarkable: The dozens of criminal charges brought against the former president have seemed to boost his standing in the Republican presidential primary. Trump has widened his already commanding lead over his rivals, and in poll after poll, GOP voters have said that the charges make them more—not less—likely to vote for him again.

The dynamic has turned an infamous example of Trumpian bravado—his 2016 claim that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”—into something approaching a prophecy. To his critics, the emerging conventional wisdom that the indictments have benefited Trump politically is a dispiriting and even dangerous notion, one that could embolden politicians of any ideological stripe to disregard the law.

Those fears, however, may be premature.

[David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture]

A new, broader survey of Republican voters suggests that the indictments have, in fact, dented Trump’s advantage in the primary. The study was designed by a group of university researchers who argue that pollsters have been asking the wrong questions to assess how the indictments have affected Republican voters.

Most traditional polls have asked respondents directly whether the indictments have changed their attitude about Trump or their likelihood to vote for him. According to Matt Graham, one of the authors of the new survey and an assistant professor at Temple University, this type of query leads to biased answers. And it devolves into a proxy question for whether voters—and Republicans in particular—like the former president in the first place. “Respondents don’t always answer questions the way we want them to,” Graham told me. Republicans “want to say, ‘Well, I still support him regardless of the indictment.’ And if you don’t give them a chance to say that, they’re going to use the question to say that.”

The researchers spotted a similar polling flaw in the high-profile 2017 special election for an open Senate seat in Alabama, where Republicans told pollsters that the many accusations of sexual assault against Roy Moore only made them more likely to support him. Moore went on to lose the election to Democrat Doug Jones after a sizable number of Republicans deserted him in a deeply red state.

Graham and his colleagues believed that they could elicit more accurate answers about Trump by asking respondents to assess their view of him—and their likelihood of voting for him—as if they did not know he had been indicted. To test their theory, they commissioned a SurveyMonkey poll of more than 5,000 Americans in which half were asked questions in this counterfactual format: “Suppose you did not know about the indictment. How would you have answered the following question: How likely are you to vote for Donald Trump?” They asked the other half questions that pollsters more commonly use.

The experiment produced significantly different results. Like other surveys, the poll based on the traditional format found that the indictments increased Trump’s support among Republican primary voters. But the poll based on the counterfactual framing found that the indictments slightly hurt his standing in the party, reducing by 1.6 percent the likelihood that Republicans would vote for him.

The real-world implications of the researchers’ findings are, well, limited—at least for now. Trump’s polling lead in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire averages more than 25 points; the gap widens to nearly 40 points in recent national surveys. A drop of 1.6 percent suggests that charging Trump with multiple felonies is akin to tossing a pebble at a fast-moving train. “I don’t know that I make much of it at all,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who regularly conducts focus groups of voters, told me.

In Longwell’s experience, the response from Trump supporters to the indictments has been consistent for months: “They say they do not care about them.” Views about the former president have been locked in place for years, Longwell said, and most Trump supporters give either a neutral response to the indictments or say that the charges make them even more likely to vote for him. Almost no one, she told me, said the indictments make them less supportive.

[Watch: Making sense of Donald Trump’s 91 felony charges]

If anything, they help Trump reclaim the status of an outsider fighting establishment forces, which was central to his appeal in 2016, says Chris Jackson, the head of public polling at Ipsos, a nonpartisan research firm that frequently conducts surveys for news organizations. In Jackson’s surveys, Republican voters have told pollsters that the indictments make them more likely to support Trump. Still, he told me, he doesn’t think the charges themselves are helping Trump’s candidacy: “I think the media attention that the indictments have created have helped him.”

In polls conducted by Ipsos and other firms, Trump has widened his lead among Republican primary voters since he was indicted by a grand jury in New York this spring. But that shift, Jackson said, is less about Trump than about his opponents, and particularly Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has lost support during that time. “He hasn’t actually gained in his share of the Republican electorate,” Jackson said. “I don’t actually think Trump’s strengthened so much as his challengers have weakened.”

Jackson’s interpretation of the polling data is similar to what Graham and his colleagues found in their counterfactual experiment: The indictments may not have hurt Trump much among Republican voters, but they haven’t really boosted him either. “The way a question is worded always has an impact in survey research,” Jackson said. “So, yeah, I think it matters, but it’s not necessarily uncovering some deeper truth.”

Graham, too, isn’t arguing that his team’s findings should fundamentally alter perceptions about Trump’s chances of becoming the Republican nominee. But he believes that the emerging and, it seems, false narrative that charging a political candidate with dozens of serious crimes will redound to his benefit is an important one to dispel. “I don’t think that survey researchers should be sending the public profoundly pessimistic messages about how their fellow citizens think and reason when those aren’t actually true,” Graham told me. “There’s plenty to be pessimistic about in our politics, but we don’t need to pile on by acting like people think that indictments are good.”

The shame of it! Mississippi has found itself in the humiliating position of being compared disobligingly with the United Kingdom. Just last week, the Financial Times ran a column asking, “Is Britain Really as Poor as Mississippi?”  

Most Mississippians do not spend much time worrying about comparisons with Britain. The same cannot be said about those on the other side of the Atlantic. For Brits—and I am one, though now based in Jackson, Mississippi—the issue of whether they are more or less prosperous than Mississippi has become a thing. Indeed, the Financial Times now calls it “the Mississippi Question.”

It was nine years ago when Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, first suggested that the U.K. was poorer than any U.S. state but Mississippi. This came as an uncomfortable shock for many in Britain for whom Mississippi, as a byword for backwardness, conjures up clichés about the Deep South. Every time anyone has made the comparison since, there has been an indignant outburst from Britons keen to denounce the data.

In practice, when trying to provide a definitive answer to the Mississippi Question, no uniform, up-to-date set of data exists. But if you take the most recent U.S. figure for Mississippi’s GDP and divide it by the state’s population, you get a pretty accurate figure for GDP per capita in current dollar values. Make the same calculation for the U.K., with total GDP data divided by the population, and you end up with two comparable numbers.

[Read: Punching above their weight in Mississippi]

Last year, by my math, the U.K.’s output per person was the equivalent of $45,485; Mississippi’s was higher, at $47,190. If Britain were invited to join the U.S. as the 51st state, its citizens would be at the bottom of the table for per capita GDP. Some might say that, for Mississippi, that is still disconcertingly close.

“That’s not fair!” the critics would counter. “When you compare the wealth of nations, you need to look at how far the money goes. Things cost more in the U.K. than in Mississippi.” To adjust the raw numbers, the argument runs, you need to use an economist’s tool called “purchasing power parity.” Sure enough, when you consider differences in the price of things in Britain and in America, the U.K. does appear richer than Mississippi. Thus, after such PPP adjustments, a Financial Times analyst suggested that for 2021, Mississippi’s per capita GDP was a mere $46,841 to the U.K.’s $54,590 (though conceding that, without the global city-state effect of London’s economy, much of Britain was relatively poorer than the Magnolia State).

“Hold on!” we on Team Mississippi retort. “Why adjust the numbers for our state using U.S. national data?” Here, a dollar goes a lot further than it would in New England or on the West Coast. To produce PPP-adjusted numbers for Mississippi that reflect the buying power of a dollar in places like New York or San Francisco, we say, is absurd. And sure enough, tinkering with the numbers to reflect purchasing power in Mississippi itself puts doubt on the U.K. coming out ahead.

Perhaps more interesting, however, than the way you cut the numbers for any given year is the fact that the gap between Mississippi and Britain seems to be growing. Never mind PPP—just run the numbers for GDP per capita in current dollars for the first part of 2023, rather than 2022, and you can see that Mississippi’s output is rising at a faster rate than Britain’s.

[See: Mississippi—images of the Magnolia State]

Over the past 30 years, several southern U.S. states have seen rapid economic growth. Texas and Nashville, for example, have become economic hubs to rival California or Chicago. North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and even Alabama have all flourished. Mississippi was missing out. Until now.

Historically, business in Mississippi was highly regulated. Licenses used to be mandatory in order to practice many of even the most routine professions. The state has now lifted a lot of these restrictions, deregulating the labor market. According to a recent report by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group representing conservative state legislators, the size of Mississippi’s public payroll has been pared back. In 2013, there were 645 public employees out of every 10,000 people in the population; today, the number is down to 607. Last year, Mississippi also passed the largest tax cut in recent history, reducing the income-tax rate to a flat 4 percent.

How did this come about? Policy makers here have drawn inspiration from the State Policy Network, a constellation of state-level think tanks, borrowing ideas that have worked well elsewhere. We got the idea for labor-market deregulation from Arizona and Missouri. Tennessee inspired us to move toward income-tax elimination. Florida’s successful liberalization stands as an example of how we could reduce more red tape.

What was once just a trickle of inward investment has turned into a steady flow. Growth is up, visibly: The areas of prosperity along the coast and around the state’s thriving university towns are getting larger, even if pockets of deprivation in the Delta remain.

Perhaps many in Britain find it hard to accept that Mississippi has overtaken them economically, because they still think of Mississippi as cotton fields and impoverished backwoods, peopled by folk who subsist on God, guns, and grits. But what if Britons’ reluctance to face changing economic realities comes from an outdated perception of themselves?

Most of my fellow Brits like to think that they live in a prosperous free-market society. They have not fully grasped the way in which their country has been sleepwalking toward regulatory regimentation. Stringent new regulations on landlords have seen thousands of owners pull out of the market, resulting in a dire shortage of rental accommodations. New corporate-diversity requirements have imposed additional costs across the financial-services sector, with little evidence that bank customers are getting a better deal.

[Matthew Goodwin: Britons’ growing buyer’s remorse for Brexit]

Individually, none of these restrictions matters all that much. But together, this relentless micromanagement inhibits innovation and growth. And Brits have become so accustomed to government red tape that they no longer seem to see the crimson blizzard that blankets so many aspects of their economic, and even social, lives.

To be fair to them, for many years it did not seem to matter that taxes rose and the regulatory burden grew heavier. Thanks to the use of monetary stimuli in place of supply-side reform since the late 1990s, the country’s economy seemed to defy gravity, engineering the sort of growth that high taxes and tight regulation might otherwise preclude. Few in the U.K. seemed to notice as ever more aggressive doses of monetary stimuli were required to stave off a downturn. Only now that the option of further stimuli has been exhausted are the cumulative consequences of 30 years of folly becoming apparent.

To recognize that one’s country has been run on a false premise for three decades is difficult. To have to acknowledge that Britain is now poorer than the poorest state in the Union could prompt a moment of self-reckoning that many Brits seem determined to postpone.

Britain’s recurrent fixation with the Mississippi Question tells us as much about the country’s state of mind as it does about GDP. Rather than confront uncomfortable truths, my countrymen dispute the data. Instead of facing up to the consequences of bad public policy in Britain, many blame Brexit, or Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine might have caused higher energy prices, but it alone does little to explain Britain’s poor economic performance. As for Brexit, though commentators who originally opposed it love to blame the country’s woes on it now, they never seem to ask why, if leaving the European Union was the cause of Britain’s lack of growth, the country has still managed to outperform much of Europe.

Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, the U.K. economy has grown by 5.9 percent; German GDP has increased by only 5 percent. Unlike Germany, the U.K. has so far also managed to avoid recession. Far from a reduction in trade, Britain has seen a boom in exports, especially in the service sector, since withdrawing from the EU trade block. Service exports grew by nearly 23 percent in real terms from 2018 to 2022—the strongest growth in this sector among the G7 countries, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and far more than in neighbors such as Italy, Germany, and France.

[Derek Thompson: How the U.K. became one of the poorest countries in Western Europe]

In any case, Nelson posed the Mississippi Question nearly two years before Britain voted to leave the EU. The country’s lackluster output, productivity, and growth were apparent well before Brexit. Leaving the EU should have been a perfect opportunity to correct course, but little has been done to address the problem. In fact, after leaving the EU, Britain has been hit by a succession of disastrous policy choices.

Having rushed to impose a lockdown in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, British ministers insisted on more and more draconian measures long after it was apparent that such steps were disproportionate, as well as ruinously expensive. Then, in the name of achieving net-zero targets on “decarbonizing” the U.K. economy by 2050, successive governments have made rash commitments to move to renewables. Higher energy costs have helped price British industry out of world markets.

Instead of changing course, ministers have stuck stubbornly to their dogma—even though the latest moves to outlaw the internal combustion engine and new emissions regulations are making car ownership unaffordable for millions.

Mississippi has managed to borrow good ideas that have proved to work elsewhere. Britain, by contrast, has preferred to pioneer its own bad ideas. The former approach helps explain why Mississippi is emerging as part of a wider southern success story. The latter approach accounts for why a once-successful country is really struggling.

Earlier this month, the century-old Pac-12 athletic conference was swiftly and brutally eviscerated. In the space of a few hours, five member universities left for rival conferences offering massive paydays financed by TV-sports contracts. As Jemele Hill put it for The Atlantic, the shift “pits the long-term interests of schools and conferences against their own insatiable greed.”

Sports lovers are used to watching their favorite teams put money ahead of the wishes of their fans. That makes it easy to forget that this isn’t a story about professional-sports franchises—or, indeed, private entities of any kind. All five of the defecting schools are public universities: Washington, Oregon, Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State. The money grab in college football is just one symptom of a troubling strain in American public higher education. Many of our public universities, it turns out, don’t act very much like public institutions at all.

It’s natural to assume that public institutions of higher education would be more egalitarian than their private counterparts. In K–12, public school is free, while private school is expensive. But at the college level, the line between civic purpose and private profit doesn’t map so neatly onto the public/private divide. The clearest evidence to date comes from a recent blockbuster study by a trio of economists at Harvard’s Opportunity Insights project. Most media coverage has focused on the study’s analysis of the so-called Ivy Plus schools, where the researchers found that the wealthiest students get an admissions bump relative to other applicants with the same academic profile. Even among people with identical SAT scores, students from the top 0.1 percent of income are more than twice as likely to get into universities like Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Public flagships such as UC Berkeley and the University of Virginia showed no such bias.

[Josh Mitchell: A crimson tide of debt]

But the researchers didn’t just study the tiny clique of elite universities that dominates the public discourse. Their sample included 139 institutions, including 50 public universities, and the results show a more complicated picture. Not all private schools are biased in favor of the rich—and some of the schools that cater most egregiously to the wealthy turn out to be public.

Like many aspects of life in our large, divided nation, the character of your local university depends a lot on where you happen to live. Big blue states such as New York and California have extensive, highly regarded university systems with no wealth bias in admissions. If anything, they have the opposite. The ultra-wealthy are almost 50 percent less likely to attend Berkeley than similarly qualified not-rich students. The trend applies throughout the University of California system, as well as campuses in the State University of New York. Although public-university budgets nationwide were devastated by the Great Recession, California and New York eventually restored the lost funding and invested even more. That gives them the resources to keep tuition low and creates fewer incentives to chase wealthy applicants. The sheer size of those systems also means that power and money aren’t concentrated in a single flagship university with aspirations of athletic greatness. SUNY at Stony Brook and UC Santa Barbara are both top-flight research universities, but nobody is paying big money for the broadcast rights to Stony Brook Seawolves or UCSB Gauchos football games; the latter team doesn’t even exist. There’s no deep-seated culture of rich athletic boosters, legacy admissions, and regional aristocracy surrounding these campuses.

The story is different in other states, especially in the South. Statistically, public universities such as Auburn University, the University of Mississippi, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Alabama look a lot like the Ivy Pluses in their approach to wealth and admissions. These schools are not highly selective—most people who apply are admitted—so the mechanism for exclusion works differently than at Princeton or Yale. To measure it, the Opportunity Insights researchers looked not just at admit rates but at whether applicants were likely to apply and attend, an approach that captures the whole process of marketing, recruitment, admissions, pricing, and enrollment. Their findings suggest that a college need not be ultra-elite to perpetuate class divides. Some public universities in the South serve the same function as private colleges and universities in the Northeast: destinations for the children of political leaders and wealthy businessmen, and a mechanism for transmitting that status to the next generation. Although Alabama has one of the highest poverty rates in America, only 11 percent of Auburn students qualify for a federal Pell grant. More than 30 percent of college-age Alabama residents are Black, yet Black students make up less than 5 percent of Auburn’s student body.

So if you’re wondering how public-university students in the South can afford $4,000 sorority-rush consultants, as The Wall Street Journal recently reported, it’s because their parents have money. If you’re curious about why so many rich kids are on campus, it’s because places like the University of Alabama give an effective 45 percent bump to the children of the top 1 percent. And if you want to know why few very low-income Black students attend these universities, it’s because the schools were originally built to sustain a racist power structure that kept Black people in poverty, and those legacies have not yet been overcome.

Representatives from the universities of Arkansas and Alabama both told me that they work hard to recruit and provide financial aid to low-income students in their respective states, which is true. Both say that income is not one of the official criteria that their admissions officers consider. But it doesn’t have to be, because a very efficient unofficial filter is at play. Most of the students attending schools like the universities of Arkansas and Alabama come from other places, meaning they pay out-of-state tuition. At Alabama, where 58 percent of undergrads come from elsewhere, that amounts to $32,400 a year, plus room and board. Students who can afford such a high sticker price are wealthy almost by definition, and they are vital to public-university finances. The University of Michigan charges out-of-state students more than $55,000, the same price as Harvard. Administrators are essentially running two institutions in parallel: a reasonably affordable public university for the residents of Michigan (in-state tuition: $16,736), and a very expensive private university for everyone else.

This dual identity shows up in the Harvard-study results. The richest and poorest students from Michigan get into Michigan at similar rates, controlling for test scores. For out-of-state students, however, there’s a marked lean toward the rich. Again, this works differently than it does at elite private universities. In the Ivy Plus schools, the pro-wealth bias is accomplished with a witches’ brew of legacy preferences, admissions bumps for patrician sports such as squash and sailing, and outright pay-to-play arrangements for mega-donors. At public universities, it’s a more straightforward downstream effect of pricing. Most out-of-state students get little or no financial aid, so only the rich can afford to enroll.

Universities defend these policies by arguing that wealthy students subsidize their poorer classmates, who don’t pay full price. But as the sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton describe in their groundbreaking 2015 book, Paying for the Party, the two-tier approach works out badly for first-generation and low-income students. Following two groups of undergraduates at Indiana University, they found that the wealthy out-of-staters sailed through four years of fraternity parties and weekend tailgates to graduate, marry, and start careers, while the first-gen students ended up with burdensome student loans, uncertain job prospects, and no degrees.

For some low-income students, the dream of attending a flagship public university turns sour. At Alabama, there’s an 18-percentage-point gap between the graduation rate of Pell-grant students and their more well-off peers, an unusually large disparity. Despite all of those out-of-state dollars, families earning less than $75,000 still pay about $20,000 a year in total costs to attend. Auburn’s numbers are similarly grim. The more public universities come to resemble private ones, the more they cater to the people who pay the bills. Consider the three mega-conferences that now dominate the college-football landscape, the SEC, Big 10, and Big 12. Michigan State, University of Florida, Purdue, University of Kentucky, Texas A&M: all big-time sports schools, all running the out-of-state full-tuition racket, all skewed toward the rich.

The gap between public universities that combat wealth inequality and those that seem to perpetuate it maps onto the red/blue divide, but only roughly. Higher education in America is also shaped by idiosyncrasies of history and geography. North Carolina, a purplish state, has a great, well-funded system of affordable public universities. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has no wealth preferences, nor does North Carolina State. (Duke University, right nearby, has that covered.) Pennsylvania, a fairly blue state, has an unusually lousy tradition of inadequate funding for public universities. Penn State charges non-Pennsylvanians $38,000 a year.

[Annie Lowrey: Why you have to care about these 12 colleges]

One kind of university seems immune to all of these trends: science-and-engineering schools. Based on my analysis of the data, only five private universities in the Harvard study were less likely to admit applicants from the top 0.1 percent than comparably qualified middle-class students. Four of them—California Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Worcester Polytechnic University, and Case Western Reserve University—have top-class engineering programs. Among the Ivy Pluses, MIT was the least corrupted by wealth preferences. Public universities such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, and the Colorado School of Mines also had more egalitarian results.

Even the most elite liberal-arts school can create an easy glide path to graduation for the dull-witted progeny of a deep-pocketed alum. Athletic recruits can famously go from start to finish at a big state school without encountering a single challenging idea along the way. Engineering schools, by contrast, have academic standards that are harder to evade. Martin Schmidt, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic, came to the job after serving as provost at MIT. “There’s a phrase we used there,” he told me, about the rigorous math and science classes all students are required to take. “‘There’s nowhere to hide.’”  

Of course, not every university can or should be devoted to math and science. But the existence of these respected engineering institutions—public and private, humble and world-renowned—shows that there’s nothing inevitable about higher-education systems that bend toward the gravity of wealth. If academic standards come first, the power of money recedes. Otherwise, colleges and universities become just one more thing to be bought and sold.

Abortion access. Gun safety. The treatment of immigrants. The size of the safety net. Ease of voting. LGBTQ rights. On any number of policy issues, red states and blue states have drifted apart from each other over the past three decades, widening the gaps between what families in different parts of the country pay in taxes, receive in benefits, and experience when interacting with the government. At the same time, the cost of housing in these states has diverged, too. Blue states have throttled their housing supply, leading to dramatic price increases and spurring millions of families to relocate to red states in the Sunbelt.

These trends have intensified in the past few years, as conservative legislatures have passed a raft of laws restricting abortion access and targeting LGBTQ Americans and as housing shortages have spread. Now many Americans find themselves stuck in states that are enacting conservative policies they do not support, but where real estate is cheap.

That is one takeaway from a new Redfin survey of people who rent their home, are thinking about moving, or recently moved. Respondents were much more likely to say that they wanted to live in a state where abortion and gender-affirming care were legal than not. But compared to those issues, they were twice as likely to cite housing costs as a major determinant of where they would live.

The report focused on two red states, Texas and Florida. They are among the 20 states that have restricted access to the medical termination of a pregnancy or banned abortion outright since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. And they are among the two dozen states that have implemented statutes affecting trans people: banning gender-affirming care, requiring trans youth to be identified by the gender they were assigned at birth, restricting trans kids’ participation in sports, or barring teachers from discussing what it means to be gay or trans.

Yet such states remain a draw for families from blue, coastal areas. “There’s this trade-off between living somewhere that you can afford and where you have access to jobs,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist of Redfin, told me, versus living “where the laws are the way that you want them to be.”

In the survey, not everyone professed a policy preference, but roughly a third of Texans and Floridians who had recently moved or were likely to move said that they would like to live somewhere with legal gender-affirming care for kids. That is eight to 16 percentage points higher than the share who said they do not want to live somewhere where such gender-affirming care is legal. About 40 percent of respondents in those states said they would like to live somewhere with legal abortion access, twice as many as said they would prefer to live somewhere without it.

But folks were still much more likely to say that financial considerations played a primary role in where they had settled or would settle down. The cost of living, access to jobs, the size of available homes, and proximity to family were more commonly cited factors.

Over the past two decades, the country’s growing housing shortage has prevented Americans from moving as often as they used to, and as often as would make sense given the country’s wage trends. Jobs pay much more in Boston and Oakland than they do in small towns in Alabama or exurbs in Utah, a differential that has grown over time. But housing costs in those places rose so much due to supply restrictions that they became unaffordable and inaccessible for many would-be residents.

People who are moving tend to be moving to cheaper places. Differences in housing affordability have pulled Americans to the Sunbelt and the Mountain West, and pushed them from expensive megalopolises to smaller cities, suburbs, and exurbs. Redfin’s data, for instance, show that the average home in Miami is selling for $515,000 versus $705,000 in New York, the most common origin of out-of-state movers. Homes in Dallas are half the price of homes in Los Angeles.

“Even if people would want, in a perfect world, to move to a different place that didn’t have whatever-it-might-be laws, they’re kept in place by these bigger, more salient forces for them,” Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me. (Frost did not work on the Redfin project.) “Even though there are abortion restrictions, people move because of affordability. Even though there are wildfires and more natural disasters in a place, people move because of affordability.”

Those migration trends have increased red states’ political influence. Texas and Florida alone have added more than 15 million residents over the past two decades, translating into a dozen additional congressional seats. Blue states, in contrast, have throttled their population growth. “It’s a policy choice on both fronts: California has chosen to protect abortion rights, and they’ve chosen to have policies that restrict housing,” Fairweather told me. “I don’t even know if policy makers understand this yet. But California’s housing policies have made the citizens of the United States have less access to those rights.”

In interviews, people personally affected by anti-LGBTQ laws described them as a strong motivator to leave the red states they call home. Jay Bates Domenech, a young trans person from suburban Utah, told me that the state’s political climate had pushed them to spend roughly $10,000 more a semester to go to college out-of-state: Domenech is moving to Colorado this week.

Domenech told me that they had been harassed and bullied for their gender in high school. “A few months ago, a kid followed me down the hallway calling me a pedophile. He took out his phone to take a picture of me,” they told me. “From the moment I came out, there was an underlying anxiety that something was going to happen to me.” Concerns about their physical safety and ability to access health care pushed them to move, they said, adding that they felt targeted by the state’s anti-LGBTQ politicians. “The increase in suicide rates and mental-health diagnoses—it’s something I am seeing at a personal, individual level,” they told me.

But many other queer and trans people don’t have the money or flexibility to uproot their lives. Anthony, who asked me to withhold his last name to avoid any threats to his family, moved from Maryland to Florida five years ago, purchasing a fixer-upper for $220,000. “I’m scared about what the Florida legislature is going to do,” he told me. He and his husband would like to move back to the D.C. area. But high interest rates and the higher cost of living would make it unaffordable to do so.

Redfin’s finding that people would prefer to live in places with legal access to abortion mirrors that of many other polls. States barring or tightening access to abortion have seen an 11 or 12 percentage-point increase in the share of people who say the medical procedure should be easier to obtain.

In the long term, the loss of abortion access is expected to intensify the country’s already intense geographic inequality. The hundreds of thousands of people forced to continue unwanted pregnancies will end up sicker and poorer for it: Not being able to terminate a pregnancy makes a person more likely to become impoverished, unemployed, in debt, and subject to eviction, and an abortion is safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. Many companies are avoiding adding employees or doing business in states with strict bans.

Yet the Redfin data suggest that relatively few people will move because of changing health-care statutes. Abortion access is already heavily predicated on a person’s physical location and socioeconomic status: Wealthy Texans fly to Illinois for abortions; poor Tennessee residents find themselves stuck. “There are states that were destinations for people seeking abortions where clinics have closed post-Dobbs, forming abortion deserts, particularly in the southeastern and central United States,” Betsy Pleasants, a researcher at UC Berkeley’s Wallace Center for Maternal, Child and Adolescent Health, told me. Those deserts are simply too formidable and expensive for many people to cross.

Sam Dickman is one person who did leave Texas as a result of the state’s changing legal abortion landscape. He is a physician and an abortion provider. He and his partner moved to Montana so that he could continue to do his life’s work.

“I see patients traveling in from Texas, Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, all these states surrounding Montana, to get abortion care,” he told me. “The median abortion patient is a young, low-income person of color. These are populations who are struggling to afford rent.” He added: “If I asked a patient, Have you ever thought about moving to a place with better abortion access? It would be item No. 15 on their radar. They would look at me like, What are you talking about? I can’t afford to have a kid right now. Obviously, I can’t afford to move.”

I grew up in the 1950s, on a farm in Virginia miles away from any town or neighbors. For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television, so my three brothers and I amused ourselves fighting pretend Civil War battles in the fields and woods around our house or vying over card and board games that we spread across the living-room floor.

But for me, the best entertainment was always reading. I read for pleasure, for company, and for escape from my contained Virginia world. I could explore other places and imagine myself into other lives—lives that went beyond the limited choices available to my mother and the women of her circle, who were all ruled by the era’s prescriptions of female domesticity. The written word introduced me to what girls could do: solve mysteries, like Nancy Drew; brave the Nazis, like Anne Frank; demand change, like the protagonist of Susan Anthony: Girl Who Dared. Reading could provide, to borrow Scout’s words in To Kill a Mockingbird, a way to escape “the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me.” And words could carry me beyond the gentle slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains that rose behind our house. They offered a view of national and global affairs that caught me up in a sense of urgency. I was frightened by the fact that Sputnik had been launched and was passing by overhead every 96 minutes in its orbit of the Earth. I wondered how the Russians had beaten us into space. I was inspired by the courage of Hungarians fighting against communism. I was reassured by portraits of the confident prosperity of postwar America. Yet I felt growing doubt and unease as I read descriptions of the turbulence and conflict emerging to undermine it.

We didn’t receive a regular daily newspaper. My father was in the horse business, so The Morning Telegraph—the bible of thoroughbred racing—appeared every day at the breakfast table. I was proud when he taught me to decipher the complicated “Past Performance” charts printed for every horse running that day, detailing previous outings, weight carried, split times, and race outcomes: win, place, show, or also ran. The Telegraph contained all the news one could want about the world of the track, but next to nothing about the world of public affairs.

We did receive lots of magazines. My father bought Playboy as a one-off, tucking copies into corners of bookcases around the house where we children inevitably found them. I remember poring over the contents, always astounded by the women in the centerfolds, who looked like no one I had ever encountered, clothed or otherwise. Most magazines, however, were placed in a wooden rack in the den, next to a comfortable overstuffed chair under the stairs. It was an inviting place to read, with an inviting library of publications. Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Chronicle of the Horse were regulars, as was The New Yorker, which lured me in with its cartoons, though more often than not I had to ask my parents to explain why one or another was funny.

Above all, I read Life magazine. It’s hard to imagine, in today’s fragmented media environment, how any single source of information could reach more than a tiny fraction of the nation. In 1950, an estimated half of all Americans looked at Life every week. I was among them.

[Read: ‘A work of art designed by the devil’]

Returning to Life now, more than six decades later—looking through issue after issue covering the years of my childhood—I am struck by how the world of the 1950s it portrayed seems both so familiar and so strange. Davy Crockett coonskin hats, Hula-Hoops, pogo sticks, Elvis—Life chronicled crazes that reached even to rural Virginia. I recognize nearly every product pitched in the dozens of pages of advertising that filled each issue of the magazine, even though many of the products have not existed for years. The back cover of most issues displayed a full-page cigarette ad—for Lucky Strikes (“Cleaner, Fresher, Smoother”) or Camels (“It’s a psychological fact that pleasure helps your disposition! That’s why everyday pleasures—like smoking, for instance—mean so much.”) One news story Life published about childbirth depicted a woman smoking during labor. This startles me now, but back then I took for granted a home filled with clouds of smoke from my mother’s daily pack of Camels and my father’s cigars.

Multipage spreads in the magazine presented the newest models of enormous cars, designed, like our family station wagon, to transport all those Baby Boom children. These ads featured vehicles that were lavishly finned and often stylishly two-toned, though by the end of the decade smaller models such as the Nash Rambler, the Ford Falcon, and even the VW Beetle had begun to mount a challenge.

The food that appeared in Life now seems almost unimaginable.

A soda ad urged parents to add 7Up to babies’ bottles in order to coax them to drink their milk (suggested proportion: half and half). Another ad proclaimed the advent of National-Use-Up-Your-Leftovers-in-a-Jell-O-Salad Week. For an elaborate Southwest barbecue, “everything, even the meat, comes from cans.” In the mid-1950s, the average American family ate 850 cans of food annually. A special issue on food in January 1955 extolled “the servants who come built into the frozen, canned, dehydrated and precooked foods which lend busy women a thousand extra hands in preparing daily meals.” These busy women were perpetually in a hurry and would welcome such innovations as instant oatmeal, instant coffee, and Swanson’s TV dinners.

Life chronicled the emergence of aspects of contemporary existence that I tend to think of as present since the beginning of time. This was the decade when credit cards entered American life. The Interstate Highway System was launched in 1956. Passenger travel by jet began in 1958. In the first part of the decade, Life reported airplane crashes with disturbing regularity, perhaps because, astoundingly, air-traffic control existed only near airports, and pilots themselves were responsible for spotting other planes when they weren’t taking off or landing. When two pilots failed at this assignment over the Grand Canyon, in 1956, and 128 people died, the FAA at last took over responsibility nationwide. It is not surprising that my mother hated to fly and did her best for years to have her children avoid air travel.

If I had read Life in search of models for my adult life, I would have been hard-pressed to find much that was encouraging about what lay ahead. Every third or fourth cover featured a glamour shot of a woman—almost always an established or emerging movie star: Shelley Winters in a tub of bubbles, “Lovely Liz Taylor,” Joan Collins on a swing, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Kim Novak. Such lives were clearly unattainable—and, to my mind, of little interest. Other kinds of stories about women were scarce and overwhelmingly reflected an unease with who American women were becoming. In 1955, an article titled “The 80-Hour Week” described housewives as the nation’s “largest, hardest working, least paid occupational group.” The middle-class white woman featured in the article did not overtly complain about her burdens, but her words conveyed a kind of stunned desperation. “I just wish I was away on a long trip,” she remarked.

In December 1956, Life published a special double issue on “The American Woman: Her Achievements and Troubles.” Once again, the focus was exclusively on middle-class white women, with an opening story about American “beauties” who hailed their derivation from “many racial stocks”—such as German and Scandinavian. The new freedoms that women enjoyed in postwar America, one contributor concluded, had created a “backwash” of “emotional and psychological problems.” As the issue’s editorial observed, the “American woman is often discussed … as a problem to herself and others.” Life seems to have been anticipating Betty Friedan’s classic, The Feminine Mystique, by nearly a decade.

I hope my childhood self skipped over these stories as I paged my way through the magazine. They could only have filled me with dread. Perhaps, though, I stopped to look at one article with a more inspiring message and direct relevance to my later life: “Tough Training Ground for Women’s Minds; Bryn Mawr Sets High Goals for Its Girls.” The college, according to the article, offered “some of the most intensive intellectual training available in any college in the U.S.” Nearly a decade later, Bryn Mawr would offer me a lifeline.

It was in many ways highly forward-looking of Life to offer such recognition to women—and, more especially, to acknowledge their discontent. One disgruntled reader assailed the editors for even taking up the subject. “Bah! With the world situation being as it is … you clutter up 172 pages of Life with women.” Life in fact regularly cluttered up dozens of its pages with women—promoting cars, appliances, beauty products, and fashion in the ads that filled the magazine. Of course, these women were not dissatisfied housewives but exuberant consumers. Such a portrait sat more easily with Life’s readers than any effort to look beneath the surface of the myths about gender.

Throughout the 1950s, countless advertisements in Life displayed women encased in girdles—like Playtex’s aptly named “Magic-Controller”—and featured elaborately engineered bras as well as a diabolical apparatus first introduced in 1952 called a Merry Widow. The contraption extended from breasts to girdle top, ensuring that no flesh could escape appropriately corseted discipline. The doctrine of “containment” that had made its appearance as a watchword of U.S. foreign policy seems to have had its counterpart in feminine fashion. Men’s bodies were not subjected to such restraint, but their “unruly” hair required attention. Vitalis hair tonic promised to restore order, casting its oil upon waves of curls or windblown locks.

[Read: ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’: the lag between advertising and feminism]

Pale pink, proclaimed “fashion’s favorite color” in 1955, was everywhere: cars, stoves, typewriters, washing machines, refrigerators, toilets, bathtubs. Mamie Eisenhower was pink’s greatest champion, introducing it into the White House—“First Lady Pink” was the particular hue—as well as in plumbing fixtures in her own Gettysburg house. In my mind, pink was the color that marked girls as frail and sweet and irrelevant. Not unlike a girdle or a Merry Widow, pink seemed intended to contain.

Life’s pages of advertisements were an advertisement for America, its abundance and its complacency. Complacency was reflected in much of the magazine’s news content as well. Americans in the 1950s, the magazine editorialized, were “mightily pleased with themselves.” But who were the Americans Life addressed and portrayed? With the exception of a butler serving a drink on a silver tray, every individual pictured in the hundreds of Life ads I’ve seen from the 1950s was white.

The magazine’s news stories exhibited more variety. Life regularly featured Black athletes and entertainers. Marian Anderson, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, W. C. Handy, Floyd Patterson, Bill Russell, Sugar Ray Robinson, Althea Gibson, and Willie Mays occupied categories in which mid-century white America had come to acknowledge Black achievement. In the course of the decade, the magazine began covering other Black Americans as well, but these stories were neither appreciations nor celebrations. Instead, they were focused on what was often called “the Negro Problem”—how Black people constituted a crisis in American life and a challenge to the idealized images of American democracy and prosperity that the magazine consistently foregrounded.

Starting with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Life demonstrated steady support for the civil-rights movement, even as it sought to present the variety of positions in the escalating national debate about race. Voices of white southerners who opposed integration or thought it should not be mandated by federal courts were given serious attention. Life even enlisted William Faulkner to warn the nation: “Go slow now. Stop for a time, a moment.” The white southerner, Faulkner observed, “faces an obsolescence in his own land which only he can cure.” But Life’s gestures at what it prized as objectivity and evenhandedness appeared alongside a clear commitment to Black progress and equality, evident in both editorial and news content. From 1954 to 1956, Life published 46 articles about civil rights, filling 160 pages of the magazine. Overwhelmingly, these chronicled the stories of Black efforts to advance integration and the ensuing white backlash of cruelty and violence—from racist schoolyard taunts to bombings, beatings, and lynchings.

In 1956, the magazine published a five-part series on segregation, introduced with a dramatic and disturbing cover illustration depicting an antebellum Charleston slave auction. Life’s rendering of the nation’s past was remarkably critical in the context of both its time and its middlebrow identity; the magazine avoided any romanticized or sanitized version of America’s racial history. Disturbing portraits of the nation’s past included illustrations of Confederates shooting wounded Black prisoners during the Civil War, white people slaughtering Black people seeking political rights in Louisiana’s 1873 Colfax massacre, and a horrifying photograph from the early 20th century of a Black man being burned alive by a crowd of jeering white men.

[Read: The magazine and Martin Luther King]

These were not stories regularly told in the era’s history books. But they were images that riveted my attention, because the world they portrayed differed so markedly from the narrative of benevolent white paternalism and genteel racial harmony that I had absorbed since my earliest childhood. And they contrasted sharply with Life’s own prevailing assumptions about 1950s America as a nation “up to its ears in domestic tranquility.” Contradictions like these and the denial on which they fed pushed me to question the assumptions of the world around me and the lessons I had been taught. I resented what I began to perceive as the blindness or even bad faith of those who had misled me. This generated the tone of indignation and surprise in a letter I wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower—“Mr. Eisenhower,” I called him—on three-holed notebook paper in 1957. “I am nine years old and I am white, but I have many feelings about segregation,” the letter began—so I discovered when I found the letter years later in the Eisenhower presidential archives, in Abilene, Kansas. “Please Mr. Eisenhower,” I entreated, “Please try and have schools and other things accept colored people.” How could I have not known why my school was all white? How could I have been taught about the ideals of American democracy and Christian love when such terrible injustices did not just exist but were so vigorously defended, often by the very same people mouthing civic and religious pieties?

Life was not merely recounting a distant past. In nearly every issue during the mid-1950s, the magazine confronted readers—in shocking photographs as well as words—with a new set of outrages, events never mentioned by my parents or teachers. Stories depicted the murder of Emmet Till in 1955, the lynching of Mack Parker in 1959, and the assaults on Black students seeking to integrate schools in Little Rock, Charlotte, Greenville—and even in the Virginia county adjacent to ours. In Life’s pages, I encountered Black boys and girls close to my own age, including a number seeking to attend schools not far from my own home. I could see Black children, sometimes even younger than I was, bravely facing angry mobs as they seized a right I could simply take for granted.

Life had shown me photographs of Hungarian children risking their lives in the 1956 revolution, thousands of miles away. Books had introduced me to “girls who dared” in other eras and other places. But now children of my generation, children in my state of Virginia, were creating their own heroic stories. It was not the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the Mack Parker lynching or the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington—all of which were fully reported on in Life—that moved me to write to Eisenhower. It was school integration. I identified and empathized with these girls and boys. In many ways, the civil-rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s originated as a children’s crusade, a designation later explicitly used by civil-rights leaders when children—some as young as 6 or 7—filled the streets and jails of Birmingham, Alabama, in the summer of 1963. Half a decade earlier, the courage of such young people seeking justice had both inspired me and filled me with a sobering sense of responsibility.

What I was reading was more than stories. This was about how it might be possible—and even necessary—to live a life.

This article was adapted from Drew Gilpin Faust’s book, Necessary Trouble, published this month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Illustrations by Lili Wood

The day was cold, cold even for August in San Francisco. As Lionel walked over the Lefty O’Doul Bridge, the wind seemed to be coming from every direction—the Pacific, the bay, the brackish creek underfoot. And with every step, Lionel’s left shoe squeaked, an especially maddening thing, given that he’d just had them resoled. For years he’d passed a subterranean shoemaker’s shop, thinking it would be old-timey and fun to engage the ancient Romanian proprietor in some project. Finally Lionel had entered the man’s tiny shop and asked him to resole his favorite leather shoes, so soft they felt like moccasins. The whole encounter had been as quaint and satisfying as expected, until Lionel retrieved the shoes a week later and found that the left one now let out a cartoonish squeak with every footfall.

When Lionel went back to the shoemaker, the old man shrugged. “Some shoes squeak,” he said.

Lionel had learned to walk on the edge of his left foot. This decreased the sound, but gave him a worrying gait. People at the stadium had begun asking him about it.

Lionel covered the Giants for the Examiner—the home games at least. The paper didn’t have the budget to send him on the road. The season was effectively over anyway; the team had no chance at the playoffs, and the mood in the clubhouse was dour. Not that the players were so garrulous in winning, either. Sydney Coletti saw to that.

Brought in to head the media-relations department, she’d drilled the players on verbal discipline, and day after day, they dispensed word clusters that made sense but said nothing: “Trying to contribute.” “Just focused on getting the win.” “Great team effort.” “Happy to be here.”

Sydney strode around the stadium in beautiful suits, sunglasses embedded in her raven hair. As if aware of her imperious affect, she often brought in treats—candy, cupcakes, huge bars of artisanal chocolate. She was polished and warm, but had no qualms about limiting access if a reporter crossed her. So Lionel had traded candor for access, and loathed himself for it.

“Nice work, Lionel,” Sydney said when she approved of something he’d written. It was a terrible thing, to be praised this way.

“Get me sticky,” Lionel’s editor, Warren, demanded.

The problem was that when a player said something even vaguely sticky—Warren’s word for memorable, colorful, controversial—the sportswriters pounced, and often the player paid the price. Apologies followed, and lost endorsement deals, diminished love from fickle fans, a requested trade, a new team. That, or a player could just keep his mouth shut.

Squeak, squeak, squeak.

Lionel entered at the stadium’s media gate and made his way through the dim hallways to the locker room, where he showed his lanyard to Gregorio, the security guard.

“Hannah beat you,” he said.

“Beat me how?” Lionel said, thinking it could be any of 10, 12 ways. There she was, interviewing Hector Jiménez.

Hannah Tanaka was technically his competition, in that she wrote for the Chronicle, the larger of the two valiant locals. But from the time he’d started on the Giants beat, she’d done everything humanly possible to help Lionel—introducing him to every staffer at the stadium, sharing every tip and data point—and he’d quickly fallen in love with her. She was so steady, so funny; her laugh was raspy, almost lewd.

Squeak, squeak, squeak.

She turned when she heard him. She had her notebook out, and her phone—she had some transcription app that converted everything a player said to text, instantly—but she looked at Lionel and smirked. That smirk! Good lord.

She was married, though, and had two teenage girls, and so every year Lionel had gotten better at disguising his heartache. During the games, they sat next to each other, bantering, complaining, comparing notes, and with every word she said, in her low, clenched-jaw way, he was stung by the great injustice of finding his favorite person, sitting next to her every day, but heading home each day alone.

Lionel looked around. He could talk to the second baseman, Hollis, who had some kind of problem with his heel, but what was the point? Warren wouldn’t give him space for news of another almost-injury to a player on a losing team.

Hannah finished with Jiménez and sidled up to Lionel. “Behold the new guy,” she said, and nodded to a gangly man in the corner. She handed Lionel the day’s media packet and pointed to the relevant paragraph about a middle reliever, Nathan Couture, being called up from AAA Sacramento. “Get him before Sydney puts the muzzle on,” Hannah said.

The man in the corner was holding the sleeves of his uniform apart, apparently dumbfounded to find his own name, COUTURE, stitched to the back of a Giants jersey.

“Nathan?” Lionel asked.

The pitcher turned around and smiled. His teeth were small, and he was missing his left canine; it gave him a look of youthful incompletion. He had a narrow, pockmarked face and a weak chin. A wispy mustache overhung his stern, chapped lips.

“First time in the majors?” Lionel asked.

“Indeed,” Nathan said.

That word—it wasn’t heard so much in a locker room. Lionel wrote “indeed” in his notebook, and then asked the most inane, and most common, query in sports. “How does it feel?” It hurt to utter the words.

But Nathan nodded and inhaled and exhaled expansively through his nostrils, as if this was the most provocative question he’d ever heard.

“When I got the call, just yesterday, I was elated,” Nathan said.

Lionel heard an accent. Rural. Southeastern maybe. Georgia? He wrote down “Elated” and underlined it.

“The drive from Sacramento was a fever dream,” Nathan continued. “The scenery rushed by like meltwater. And then to get here, to this cathedral, to warm up, and to meet these men at the top of their craft”—he swept his arm around the room, now filled with a dozen or so players in towels and jockstraps; one was jiggling his leg, as if to awaken it—“and to be welcomed by them without condition, and now to see my name on this shirt … I have to say, it’s sublime.”

Lionel wrote and underlined “sublime.” He looked around to see if he was being pranked. But no one was listening; no one was near.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name,” Nathan said, and extended his hand. Lionel introduced himself, and found that Nathan was examining his face with a friendly but jarring intensity. He rested his eyes on Lionel’s notebook. “Do you take shorthand?” he asked.

Lionel’s handwriting was a chaotic mix of cursive and all caps—a madman’s scrawl. “No, no,” he said. “This is just my personal code, I guess.”

In four years, no player had ever asked even the vaguest question about Lionel’s process or profession.

“I assume you’ll call me a journeyman,” Nathan said.

Lionel had just written that exact word. He quickly crossed it out.

“Don’t, don’t,” Nathan said. “I like the word, and for me it’s apt. And removed from baseball, it’s a good word, don’t you think? Journey-man. I know not everyone loves it, since it implies a kind of purgatory just below success, but in isolation, the word has a simple beauty to it, right? How could you not want to be called a journey-man?”

Lionel looked at the word he’d obliterated. “I guess so.” He circled it. When he glanced up again, Nathan was looking down at him with priestly interest.

“Did you dream of this work as a boy?” he asked.

Lionel couldn’t speak. He returned to the assumption that this was a prank. He looked around. No one looked back.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t probe like that,” Nathan said, and laid a hand on Lionel’s shoulder. “I just had the sudden awareness that the two of us are in the enviable, even surreal position of living out our most impossible dreams. The fact that we aren’t digging ditches or mining coal—that I’m paid to play a game and you’re paid to watch a game and tell people what you see—it seems, in a world of sadness and misfortune, to be a thing of great luck. Don’t you think?”

Lionel watched the game in a daze. He sat in the press box, Hannah on his right. On his left was Marco DaSilva, in his mid-20s, round-shouldered and stat-obsessed, and for some reason doing AM radio, where the average listener was 76. Lionel read, and reread, his notes, while hoping Nathan Couture would be called in to pitch.

“Interesting guy?” Hannah asked.

“His numbers are shit,” Marco said.

It was not right to withhold anything from them, but Lionel kept the strange interview to himself. The Giants lost badly and Nathan didn’t play, and somewhere along the way, Hannah, bored by Lionel’s distracted state, moved to sit next to Marco, and made a show of having an especially good time with this new seating arrangement.

Lionel wrote up the game, but because Nathan hadn’t been a factor, it made no sense to include him. He’d play sooner or later, Lionel figured, at which point he could get him into a story. Maybe Warren would let him do a profile. Or maybe not. Warren didn’t generally like human-interest stories.

That night, Lionel went online, searching for Nathan Couture. His hometown was Thomasville, Alabama. He was 28 and had never been to college. His statistics were unremarkable in every way, which meant he was unlikely to remain in the majors for any stretch of time. He was both average and old. A mediocre pitcher who was happy to be in the bigs, and who asked about Lionel’s work and method? What was he thinking?

Nathan was sent back to Sacramento the next day.

Lionel wrote up his summaries of the games that week, printing the players’ inanities, and Sydney baked white-chocolate brownies, which were exceptional.

“I don’t like her baking, actually,” Marco said. He and Hannah and Lionel were watching batting practice on another cool August afternoon.

“Her cookies are brittle,” Hannah said. Lionel hadn’t thought about Sydney’s cookies that way before, but they were definitely on the crumbly side. Soon the three of them had turned on all the food in the stadium. The garlic fries, which had been so crisp last season, were now less crisp, and the little pepperonis on the pizzas had dropped a few notches.

“Remember when they were sort of curly?” Lionel asked.

The gates of complaint were now open. The architects of the park, they agreed, had not allotted enough elevators, so the writers often had to wait—sometimes many minutes—to get from the field to the press box.

“And the paper towels!” Marco said suddenly, tragically.

In the bathrooms closest to the press box, the paper-towel dispensers had been replaced by air dryers, which they all agreed were too loud.

“Well,” Marco said, his voice weary, “I guess we should go inside and get the lineup for tonight.”

Lionel grabbed the copy Sydney had put in his cubby and saw Nathan’s name. He felt a flutter of excitement that embarrassed him.

“Couture is back,” Hannah said, and Lionel nodded, giving away nothing.

The game began, and by the sixth inning, with the Giants up 5–0, it was highly unlikely they would need Nathan. He was the third or fourth middle reliever on the roster, and the starter was still soaring.

But the Padres hacked a series of singles into shallow left and right, and suddenly it was 5–3, then 5–4. The manager made his way to the mound and took the ball, and the starter walked to the dugout, head low and muttering. Lionel looked to the bullpen to see who would emerge.

When Nathan stepped out, he waited on the warning track, taking a long breath. He walked onto the grass like it was the first step of a royal staircase, and then broke into a steady trot. The rest of his entrance and preparations were routine. He kicked the dirt and took his warm-up pitches. His face appeared on the massive outfield screen, in a goofy photo, and 20,000 fans wondered, idly, who he was. Then, without fuss, he struck out the first batter with three pitches.

“Damn,” Marco said, and typed feverishly for a while. Lionel assumed he was looking for some numerical context for what had just happened.

The next batter hit a rope toward left. Winebrenner, the third baseman, knocked it down but bobbled it, and there was a runner on first.

When the third man up hit a dribbler to second, Hollis fielded it—clumsily—and flipped it to the shortstop, who stepped on second and threw to first for a double play.

“Okay,” Hannah said. “Okay.” For Hannah, this was high praise.

Next inning, Nathan took care of the first three batters in much the same way—with crafty pitch selection and pinpoint placement. When the third hitter fouled a ball high, Nathan ran after it, briefly confusing the first baseman, who waved him off and caught it.

Between innings, Hannah took a cryptic call.

“Huh,” she said. Apparently Hollis, the second baseman, was getting an MRI. The heel that had been bothering him was now shot. Something had happened during that double play.

More experienced pitchers closed out the eighth and ninth, and that was that. The Giants won, 5–4. Down in the locker room, the early word on Hollis’s heel was bad. Warren would not want the story of Nathan Couture, not on the night the starting second baseman got injured. Lionel wandered over to Nathan anyway. Most of the players had showered already, but Nathan was still in his uniform.

“Is that corny?” Nathan asked. “I wanted to savor it a bit longer.”

Hollis seesawed into the room on crutches and the reporters swarmed. The professional thing to do would be to go over and hear from the player who’d won four Gold Gloves and was being paid $12 million. But Lionel stayed with Nathan.

“I noticed you paused when you first stepped out,” he said.

“I did,” Nathan said. “I assume you want to know how it felt?”

Lionel smiled and licked the tip of his pen theatrically.

“It was big,” Nathan said.

Lionel wrote down “It’s big” and for a moment, he wondered if Nathan’s earlier eloquence had been a fluke.

“Kidding, Lionel. Truly, I think it’s a happy, wholly irrational spectacle,” he said. “Don’t you think? I mean—”

“Hold on,” Lionel said, and scrambled for his tape recorder.

Nathan took a deep breath. “I mean, those upper-deck seats are probably 200 feet up. Think of it. Twenty-five thousand people were here tonight, some of them sitting 200 feet in the air, to see men play as silly a game as has ever been conjured. Balls and bats and bases—all of it perfected and professionalized, sure, but essentially childish and irrelevant. And to serve it, to celebrate it, this billion-dollar coliseum is built. People come 100 miles to watch it under 1,000 lights. When you and I first met, it was a day game, a completely different atmosphere. At night the stadium takes on the look of deep space. The sky is so black, the lights so white, illuminating a surreal sea of green. When you jog out there, as I did, in the dark, it feels, briefly, like you’re in a spaceship, approaching a new planet.”

Hector Jiménez, the catcher whose locker was next to Nathan’s, had begun listening, and was giving Nathan a disapproving look.

“There was some confusion over that foul ball,” Lionel said, and already Nathan was nodding.

“First of all,” he said, “that ball was rightfully Gutierrez’s, but it started out over my head, and that northeast wind took it toward the first-base line. So I had it in my sights, but then it evaporated. I mean, it ceased to be!”

Lionel caught Jiménez’s eye. He looked alarmed, horrified.

“And for a long moment,” Nathan continued, “as I searched the void for the ball, I thought, I’ve caught a million balls. How could I lose this one? And then I thought, Why am I here? Where are my legs? Are my arms still raised? Why can’t I see? The sky was so black, and this solid thing, this baseball, had utterly disappeared in it! So I wondered if the ball had been real, and if I was real, if anything was real.”

Jiménez tossed his gear into his duffel and zipped it loudly.

“Then I smelled roast beef!” Nathan said, and laughed loudly, placing his hand on Lionel’s shoulder. “I thought, Is that roast beef I smell? Who brought roast beef to the ballpark? Then Gutierrez yelled, ‘Move, kid, I got it!’ and my eyes swung toward him. As they did, I saw the blur of 1,000 faces in the stands beyond first. Then he caught the ball.”

Jiménez walked away. Seconds later, Sydney appeared. She always grew suspicious when interviews ran long.

“Everything good over here?” she asked.

“Fine,” Lionel said, but the interview was over.

Lili Wood

Lionel had to wait a few days for the drama of Hollis’s injury to play out before asking Warren for some space in the paper to profile Nathan. Warren had zero interest in it, especially since Nathan hadn’t played again. But then one day an ad dropped out, so on page 23, Lionel was allotted six column inches to introduce “Nathan Couture, Pitcher With Unique Outlook.” He did little more than print the two long quotes he’d gotten from Nathan before Sydney had hustled him away, but the article made an impression.

“You have to play me that tape,” Hannah said, clearly dubious.

All the reporters wanted to talk to Nathan, but Nathan was suddenly unavailable. Sydney felt they’d dodged a bullet in having this eccentric Alabaman talk and talk and somehow avoid a catastrophic mistake. She would not risk it again. But then she said she would.

“The owner insisted on it,” Warren said.

The octogenarian owner of the team had evidently read Lionel’s article, and was an immediate fan of Nathan’s. He wanted Nathan in games, and wanted Nathan to talk, as much as he could, before and after games. The owner, viewed as an eccentric himself (though from Kansas), was assumed to be not long for this world. Three days after Nathan’s first outing, he pitched the eighth inning of another tight game, and again he held his own, and the Giants won. This time, he had to bat, and actually stroked a line drive into Triples Alley. Against the wishes of the first-base coach, Nathan rounded first base and was easily tagged out at second. It made for a comical and eventful inning, and the home crowd went berserk.

Afterward, a scrum of reporters surrounded him, and Lionel, who had unwisely waited for the elevator, found himself in the third ring. He felt oddly proprietary, even jilted. He wanted, to a degree that filled him with shame, some kind of acknowledgment from Nathan that he was different, that he had been first.

Nathan looked around and smiled broadly. “Well, this is extraordinary.”

Hannah was closest. “General thoughts, Mr. Couture?”

Nathan stared at the ceiling for a while, as if peeling back the many layers of the query, then rested his eyes upon her.

“First I thought about the smell of the grass,” he said. “They cut it today, so the smell was fresh and just a bit sour, as newly cut grass is. There’s something both wet and dry at the same time, both dead and alive. I inhaled a bit longer than usual, wanting to take everything in, and I saw four men, all gray-haired, arm in arm in the stands, posing for a picture. Then the Jumbotron showed a picture of the same men, as teenagers, at a ball game. Same four guys, same pose, just 50-odd years ago. And I had the feeling that the four of them, whenever they stand side by side like that, probably feel invincible.”

“Nathan, I—”

Another reporter broke in, thinking Nathan was finished. But Lionel knew he wasn’t.

“Then I saw a seagull. Maybe you did too? It hovered over home plate for a moment, maybe 20 feet up. Under the lights it looked like a tiny angel. I wondered what brought this bird, alone, to the ballpark. No doubt he hoped he might come across some discarded chips or fries, but the risk is considerable, too. Wouldn’t the lights, and 30,000 people, be daunting? But then again, he can fly. Is anything daunting when you can fly? And briefly I thought about the nature of flight. I do think there will come a time when humans can fly more or less as birds do, and I wondered how that would affect our idea of freedom. Will anyone ever feel constrained, spiritually or materially, if they can fly?”

Lionel wrote down “If we can fly.”

“And then it was time to pitch,” Nathan said. There was scattered laughter, and the exchange of looks. Nathan was stranger in person than he had been in Lionel’s article. A dozen hands went up.

“Oh jeez,” Nathan said. “I just went on and on. And you probably have so many other players to talk to. Why don’t we do a speed round? Deal?”

Someone in front asked, “What was it like to get your first hit?”

“If you remember,” Nathan said, “I fouled off the first two pitches. And fouling a ball off is like every mistake you make in life: You put everything you’ve got into a task, and if it’s just a little wrong, it’s wrong enough to make the whole effort a waste of time. The ball goes nowhere, or worse than nowhere. But when the barrel of the wooden bat hits the ball just so—you feel nothing. There’s no resistance. Nothing at all. The ball leaps into the sky. The struggle is gone.”

Marco edged in. “Nathan, the average spin rate of your four-seamer is solid, at 2320, putting you ninth among middle relievers, but tonight, your average for the last three batters was 2090. Do you have a plan to address that?”

As Marco talked, Nathan’s face slackened, his eyes glazed, and when Marco was finished, he said, “Honestly, Marco, I have no ever-loving idea.”

A balding man in a baby-blue sweat suit raised his hand. It was Tom Verlo, from the L.A. Times. He’d likely come upstate to throw a bit of cold water on San Francisco’s new attraction.

“Can you tell us about running?” he asked. “You looked a bit rusty.”

“Was it as bad as I’m thinking it was?” Nathan said, and flashed an enormous and spectacularly awkward smile. “You know, as natural as it was when I hit that ball, running was the opposite. I felt like I was running in 1,000-year-old armor. By the time I got to second, the ball was in the second baseman’s glove. He was waiting for me like a groom would a bride. When he tagged me out, I was so relieved, I wanted to fall into his arms.”

Tom smiled. “On the broadcast, it looked like he said something to you.”

“He did. He said, ‘Mijo, now you can rest.’ ” Nathan looked at the clock on the wall. “We should hurry. Superspeed round now.”

“What does it sound like when a ball is caught?” a young web reporter asked.

“When I was a kid in Alabama, my grandfather lived in the backyard, in a little cottage. Every night after dinner, I would walk back to his place with him, and he would kiss me on the crown of my head and say, ‘Adieu.’ Then he would close the door, and the sound of his door closing would be a muffled, wet, and decisive click. That’s what it sounds like when a ball is caught. Like the click of the door to my grandfather’s home.”

Nathan looked at the clock. “Okay, one last one? I see you, Lionel.”

Lionel, standing in the back, was happy for Nathan, and for the moment felt unnecessary. He shook his head.

That was the game, and the interview, that broke Nathan Couture into the national media. The next day, and for the following week, he was everywhere. ESPN did a segment, and Jimmy Kimmel had him on his show. With Sydney offering Nathan freely to all, the only thing Lionel could do was go to Phoenix.

Nathan’s parents, though they’d raised Nathan in Alabama, had moved to Arizona, and Warren green-lit a longer profile. In a stolen moment before a game, Lionel told Nathan he was thinking of going, and Nathan gave his blessing. “I trust you,” he said.

“Thank you,” Lionel said.

“You report accurately and you listen carefully,” he said.

“I try,” Lionel said.

“They are tremendous people,” Nathan said. “Immeasurably charming. You’ll love them, and they you. I’m envious that you get to see them. I’ll call ahead and let them know I vouch for you.”

Lionel arrived at a comfortable ranch house 20 minutes from downtown Phoenix. A pickup truck was out front, and next to it, a small fishing boat rested on a trailer. Lionel rang the bell, and when the door opened, a thin couple in their late 60s stood before him, arms around each other’s waists. Jim and Dot, short for Dorothy.

“Lionel,” Jim said.

“I took the liberty of pouring you a glass of ice water,” Dot said.

Lionel followed them in. He walked on the side of his left foot, but the squeaking was clearly audible. Lionel guessed, correctly, that they would be too polite to mention it.

“Come sit,” Jim said, and indicated a plush leather recliner in the living room. It was almost surely Jim’s TV chair, and Lionel took the honor given. Nathan’s parents sat to his right, on a matching couch.

“Nathan speaks highly of you,” Dot said.

“He does,” Jim agreed.

Lionel got his notebook out and looked around the room. He’d expected a house full of books, but saw few. There were no trophies, either—no shrine to their son, the professional baseball player. An enormous TV dominated one wall. Next to it were two photos, from middle school, he guessed. One was clearly Nathan. The other was a girl, younger by a year or two, who shared a version of Nathan’s goofy smile. But there was something knowing, even sardonic, in her eyes.

“So how does it feel,” Lionel asked, “with Nathan becoming this …” He almost said “curiosity” but instead chose “phenomenon.”

“Oh, it’s been so nice,” Dot said.

“He worked hard,” Jim said. “Deserves it.”

Lionel smiled, thinking they were warming up. But they were done. Dot held her glass of water with two hands and smiled at Lionel in a motherly way. Lionel looked down at his notebook.

“So outside his skill as a pitcher,” he said, “one of the things that’s gotten Nathan noticed is his way with words. Was he always loquacious?”

Dot winced. She looked to Jim. Jim chewed his cheek.

“I read your first article,” Dot said. “When you had him saying ‘Indeed,’ right away I thought, That’s the comebacker.” She pointed to her temple.

“He was never, you know, book smart,” Jim added. “That was his sister.”

“Never read a book unless you tied him down,” Dot said.

“He didn’t talk a whole lot,” Jim said, “and when he did, he did it in a regular way. He was all laser-focused. That’s how his coaches described him.”

“Single-minded. Then the comebacker happened,” Dot said.

“I’m sorry. The comebacker?” Lionel asked.

“Well, he was hit by a comebacker,” Jim said, sounding surprised that Lionel didn’t know. “In Sacramento. It was on the radio up there.”

“We were at the game,” Dot said. “It was awful. Nathan threw a fastball to a very big guy, I think he was from Nevada, and this guy hit the ball right back at him a million miles an hour. Hit him right here.” Again she pointed to her temple.

“From our angle, it looked awful,” Jim amended. “But later we saw it on tape, and it was more of a … It sorta grazed his head. The doctor checked him out and said he was okay. Nathan felt okay too. He pitched the rest of the inning and did fine. But then he took us out for dinner afterward, and it was like talking to some other person.”

“He had a $10 word for everything,” Jim said. “He said the wine was ‘unafraid.’ I remember that. The wine was ‘unafraid.’ That was new.”

“He did say that. He said a lot of things,” Dot said.

“He talked a lot that night,” Jim added. “We flew home the next morning, and a few days later, he gets called up to the Giants. Which is when you met him.”

“We figured the new way of talking was some temporary thing,” Dot said. “But then your article comes out, and he’s still talking this way—‘indeed’ this and ‘glorious’ that.”

“His sister talked like that. She was the reader.”

Lionel was afraid to ask.

“She passed young,” Dot said, and leaned forward, her hands on her knees. “It was a tumor. When they found it, it was too big.”

Jim cleared his throat. “Anyway. With Nathan, when he was talking like that, we put it together. It had to be the comebacker.”

Dot was nodding steadily, her eyes locked on Lionel. “Like something got knocked loose, and whatever was clogged up in there came pouring out. Sometimes people get hit in the head and start speaking another language.”

Jim nodded enthusiastically. “French, Portuguese, Turkish. But it seems like it’s usually French.”

By the time Lionel left, the impossible heat of paved Arizona had relented. He drove with the windows open, the red sunset behind him. He got back to the hotel and checked his messages. One was from Hannah.

“Sorry about your boy,” she said. “You probably know more than I do. Call if you want to compare notes.”

Lionel looked online and found a short blip about it. Nathan had been pitching in Cleveland when he blew out his arm. He left the park in a sling.

The professional thing for Lionel to do would be to return to Nathan’s parents’ home and get their reaction. But he couldn’t bring himself to bother them, and was so shattered that he sat on the bed and stared at the wall for the better part of an hour. Finally he got to his feet and drove his rental car to the airport.

Back in San Francisco, Lionel waited for news. For two days Nathan wasn’t at the park, and no one had updates. Finally a press conference was called.

The room was full. Lionel sat at the back. The team doctor came out and said they’d done an MRI and consulted with the best specialists in the city. Nathan would need surgery, and even after that, the prognosis was not good. “I can’t promise anything,” the doctor said.

And then Nathan walked in, wearing a coat and tie, his arm in a sling. He sat down. He looked warmly out at the throng of reporters, but before he could begin, Tom from the L.A. Times walked in late. “What’s the prognosis?” he asked.

The room groaned, but as always, Nathan treated the question with great decorum.

“If I were still 18,” he said, “I might be able to get the surgery. Then, in 10 or 12 months, I could return, though with reduced capacity. But I’m almost 30, so there is no way back. Even if I did every last thing right, I’d be, at best, a single-A player. And an old one at that.”

Hannah was in the front row. She raised her hand.

“Hi, Hannah,” Nathan said. “I’m guessing you’d like to know how it feels?”

She laughed and lowered her hand.

“It’s a good question. At the moment, I’m still stunned. Numb. I have to admit my imagination had gotten away from me, and I saw great glory ahead. I was looking forward to the rest of the season, to seasons to come, to the lights, all those people sitting 200 feet in the sky to watch this game. It’s over sooner than I expected, for sure. So for the moment, I’m adrift. Don’t you cry now, Hannah.” He looked around the table for tissues. “All we have up here is water. Here,” he said, and poured her a tall glass from the pitcher. And as he did, time slowed. Every reporter in the room watched closely, as if they’d never before seen water move from one vessel to another.

Nathan sat down again, and called on Lionel.

“Did you have any warning?” Lionel asked.

“You know, my friend, I really didn’t. I felt good that day in Cleveland. But it’s probably like any other thing. How can a sequoia withstand a thousand years of earthquakes and fires and wind, and finally, one day, it just falls? One afternoon, a gust comes and it gives up.” Nathan stood. “I’ll miss you all. Hope I see you here or there or somewhere in between. Goodbye now.”

Lionel walked onto King Street, trying to figure out how to shape the story, or if he should bother. He still hadn’t written about his time with Nathan’s parents; his heart wasn’t in it. When he turned the corner at Third Street, heading home, he felt a presence next to him.

“Caught up to you!” It was Nathan, out of breath. “I tried to find you at the park, and then was wandering around the neighborhood, hoping to run into you. I know you live around here. Then I heard the squeaking.”

They ducked into a burrito place. Lionel tried to order margaritas for them both, but Nathan declined. “I don’t know why my mind is working the way it does now, but I don’t want to mess with it.” He ordered a lemonade.

Lionel ordered a lemonade too, and they sat by the window facing the park. “Your parents told me about the comebacker,” he said.

“Yeah, I figured,” Nathan said. “Funny thing is, I don’t feel different, and I don’t see differently than I ever did before. I’ve always noticed the same things, but I guess that now I have the need, and maybe the words, to describe it.

“My sister was the eloquent one,” he continued after a pause. “My parents mention her?”

“A little bit,” Lionel said.

For a second Nathan smiled, as if thinking of her, of something she’d said. “Anyway,” he said, “I’ll be reading you, making sure you get it right.”

“I can do better,” Lionel said suddenly, and Nathan did not argue the point. It was criminal to sit in that park, Lionel thought, with all that color, all that vaulting joy in a world of sadness and misfortune, and not do better.

“You plan to fix the squeak?” Nathan asked.

“I took it back to the shoe guy,” Lionel said, “but he freed himself of any responsibility.”

“Can I?” Nathan asked, and Lionel took off his shoe and handed it to Nathan.

“It has to be an air pocket, right?” Nathan said. Even with one bum arm, he quickly found the pocket and aimed a fork at it. “Can I?” he asked again. Lionel nodded, and Nathan jabbed a strategic hole. “Try it now.”

Lionel put the shoe back on and walked a few steps. The squeak was gone. His relief was immeasurable. “Thank you,” he said.

They finished their lemonades and stepped back into the city. The lights were on in the stadium. Lionel had forgotten there was a home game that night. He turned to Nathan, thinking he’d be wistful, but his eyes were sharp and happy.

“So what will you do now?” Lionel asked.

“I’ve been thinking about that. Are you walking this way?” Nathan was heading toward the water, his gait loose. Lionel followed.

“Maybe you buy that Romanian shoemaker out.”

Nathan laughed. “You know,” he said, “a few years ago, I was in a high-rise in Guangzhou, visiting a friend at his office. Long story. But anyway, this was 42 floors up, and there was a man outside, cleaning the windows. He had one of those wide T-shaped tools for cleaning the glass—like a blade. You know the tool. So simple. He drenched the window with soap, applying it with such liberality. Just soaked this vast window overlooking this limitless city.”

Nathan turned to the towers of downtown San Francisco.

“And then, with the T-shaped blade, he slashed the surface of the glass with the precision and finality of a guillotine. He got every last white sud. As we watched, the view through the window went from muddy to crystalline.”

Lionel couldn’t figure out what the connection was. Nathan wanted to be a businessman in a Chinese high-rise? And how had this minor-league pitcher from Alabama ended up with a friend in Guangzhou?

“So I thought I’d like to do that job,” Nathan said. He meant cleaning the windows. “Not necessarily in Guangzhou, and not forever, but I’d like to try that for a while. I like being outside.”

They’d arrived at the water, and Lionel thought he should get back to the ballpark. He reached out to shake Nathan’s hand. Nathan lowered his sling and took Lionel’s fingers in his.

“Or babies!” he said, still pumping Lionel’s hand. “You know how after babies are born in hospitals, there are nurses who hold the babies while the moms recover from the birth? How do you get that job?”

Nathan released Lionel’s hand and began backing away, toward the South Beach marina, where hundreds of white masts looked like lances aimed at the night.

“Imagine holding babies all day!” Nathan said. “Wouldn’t that be a worthwhile life? So tomorrow I’m going down to the maternity ward to find out who gets to hold the babies. I want to hold all those babies before they go home.”

This story appears in the September 2023 print edition.