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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.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Paul Windle

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

Rao’s sauce is worth billions of dollars—at least according to Campbell Soup, which just acquired its parent company. The sauce’s high price point may be key to its success.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Vivek Ramaswamy’s truth The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again. Americans vote too much. The most disrespected document in higher education

A Sauce Boss

The year I graduated from college, I told everyone that my favorite food was marinara sauce (an upgrade from my middle-school response of “black pepper”). So it was a revelation when, during that period, I discovered Rao’s on the shelves of my local grocery stores. Though at first I was reluctant to pay for it—a jar retails at about $8—I soon found I could not live without it. The sauce just tasted so much better to me than the cheaper options, or my homemade versions. I have stuck with it: At this moment, I have three jars of Rao’s marinara sauce sitting in my kitchen.

Rao’s Specialty Foods, a company expanded out of a historic Manhattan restaurant in 1992 that produces pricey food products such as sauce, pastas, and soup mixes, has grown rapidly in recent years thanks to aggressive marketing—and excellent ingredients. Earlier this month, Campbell Soup Company agreed to buy Sovos Brands, a firm that acquired Rao’s in 2017, for $2.7 billion. Even as a true fan of the sauces—and a consumer conditioned to pay $8 for a few servings of marinara–—that seemed to me like a striking amount of money for sauce.

It turns out that Rao’s is big business, and could get even bigger. After acquiring the Rao’s Specialty Foods brand, Sovos expanded its marketing budget to $20 million a year (up from a few hundred thousand); last year, Rao’s reported nearly $600 million in sales, up from less than $100 million in 2017. The president of Campbell called the firm’s expansion “the most compelling growth story in the food industry.”

Rao’s enormous success has been possible only because consumers are willing to keep shelling out for quality foods like these sauces. In fact, the high prices might even be a selling point. “Price is usually reflective of various cost inputs,” my colleague Amanda Mull, who covers consumerism, told me, but “it’s also a marketing tool.” People looking for a reason to buy one brand of sauce over another may look at price as an indicator of quality. “It’s one of the only pieces of information that’s reliably available across products and easily compared,” she explained. But it’s not just its pricing that makes Rao’s desirable; Amanda added that when the brand first got popular, it “became known for being legitimately better than its competitors largely by word of mouth, and I think it deserves its reputation.”

As inflation abates, companies are looking to maintain the pricing power they gained after the pandemic started. To justify maintaining their high prices, some are pushing their customers, particularly those with higher incomes, toward “premium” goods—products that are presented in some way as exclusive or higher-quality. Premiumization, the buzzword for this concept, was ubiquitous in earnings calls earlier this year. As American consumers get more and more interested in specialty goods, it is a “natural next step” that such premium brands are now part of the acquisition strategy of large food companies, Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me.

Campbell Soup, a brand so synonymous with American mass production that it was the subject of many Andy Warhol prints, may not seem like an obvious match for a high-priced food brand. But if a large company is interested in leaning into the premium market, acquiring a high-quality brand can be an efficient way to do so, Simeon Siegel, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, told me. That way, it can sell to an audience already conditioned to pay higher prices rather than alienating its existing customers by jacking up prices on goods. Mick Beekhuizen, an executive vice president and the president of meals and beverages at Campbell Soup Company, told me that the acquisition would help the company compete in the “ultra-distinctive Italian sauce category.”

Rao’s new owners have sworn not to mess with the sauce’s beloved flavors: “We will not touch the sauce,” Mark Clouse, Campbell’s CEO, reportedly vowed. And as long as the sauce keeps tasting good, consumers will probably not notice or care about its new ownership. “Most people have no idea what kind of corporate structure exists above the products they buy,” Amanda told me. “As long as they feel like they’re getting what they expect and what they paid for, then I don’t think most of them want to know.”

Related:

It’s all so … premiocre. Airlines’ premium-economy trick

Today’s News

Donald Trump has refused to participate in the first Republican primary debate this Wednesday. Storm Hilary made landfall in Mexico on Saturday and has drenched parts of Southern California with more than half of an average year’s rainfall; it is now moving into Nevada. A new Human Rights Watch report details how, since March 2022, Saudi Arabian forces systematically killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross into the country.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie and Kaitlyn attend a sold-out, after-hours book club to talk with strangers about the book of the summer.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI

By Alex Reisner

One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It’s being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions, systems such as ChatGPT process huge quantities of written material. But few people outside of companies such as Meta and OpenAI know the full extent of the texts these programs have been trained on.

Some training text comes from Wikipedia and other online writing, but high-quality generative AI requires higher-quality input than is usually found on the internet—that is, it requires the kind found in books. In a lawsuit filed in California last month, the writers Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden allege that Meta violated copyright laws by using their books to train LLaMA, a large language model similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4—an algorithm that can generate text by mimicking the word patterns it finds in sample texts. But neither the lawsuit itself nor the commentary surrounding it has offered a look under the hood: We have not previously known for certain whether LLaMA was trained on Silverman’s, Kadrey’s, or Golden’s books, or any others, for that matter.

In fact, it was. I recently obtained and analyzed a dataset used by Meta to train LLaMA. Its contents more than justify a fundamental aspect of the authors’ allegations: Pirated books are being used as inputs for computer programs that are changing how we read, learn, and communicate. The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.

Read the full article.

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Read. In Defense of Love: An Argument is an ode to the mystery of being in love.

Watch. In the latest episode of Washington Week With The Atlantic, editor in chief and moderator Jeffrey Goldberg discusses Trump’s 91 felony charges.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

I’ve always paid more attention to my beverage habits than is perhaps standard. I grew up in the early 2000s in a household that much preferred juice, soda, coffee, or really anything else to water. But this was also, as my colleague Amanda Mull noted in a recent article, an era in which beverage trends were slowly shifting away from sugary drinks. When I got to college, my friends immediately noticed my strange tendencies; I’d fill up a huge glass with apple juice from our cafeteria’s soda machine and cradle it the way they were holding their Nalgenes. Finally, sometime around sophomore year, I gave water a real chance. I wish I could say I made an active decision to be healthier, but I think I just got thirsty.

Whether or not you had a quarter-life beverage crisis like I did, we all associate different drinks with different moods, needs, and even eras of our lives. Some of us, like my colleague Jacob Stern, are “cut off from a whole sector of human experience” by virtue of an aversion to a certain beverage (in his case, seltzer, but I imagine the coffee averse can empathize). Physiology, habit, and marketing, among other factors, play a role in our beverage choices. Below is a collection of Atlantic articles on why we drink what we drink.

On Beverages

Always Have Three Beverages

By Amanda Mull

The correct number of drinks to keep at your desk

Seltzer Is Torture

By Jacob Stern

Soda hurts me, and I’m not alone.

You’re Probably Drinking Enough Water

By Katherine J. Wu

If you’re a healthy person worried about hydration, odds are, you’re getting plenty. But no one can say exactly what the right amount is.

Still Curious?

Drinking water is easy. Just add stuff to it. Do “water enhancers” actually enhance anything? You should ask a chatbot to make you a drink: AI is great at coming up with cocktail recipes, even as it fails at other tasks. Just don’t ask it to get too creative with the garnishes.

Other Diversions

The longest relationships of our lives Black holes swallow everything, even the truth. The greatest pogo stick the world has ever seen

P.S.

In my own beverage ecosystem, Saturday morning is the time for a great cup of coffee. I hope those of you who agree with me can enjoy one while reading our happiness columnist’s ode to the “miracle bean.”

— Isabel

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

One of the most wonderful by-products of my colleague Amanda Mull joining The Atlantic a few years back was the introduction of Midge into my life. Over the years, Amanda has often treated her Twitter followers and co-workers on Slack to photos of, and stories about, her “cranky, agoraphobic chihuahua,” as she called Midge in a 2021 article. This might sound a bit strange, but as a person who didn’t grow up with pets, I get a surprising amount of comfort from simply seeing snapshots of my colleagues’ and friends’ daily life with pets like Midge—little beings who have just as many quirks, moods, and worries as humans do (if not more).

Pets are playing a more and more pivotal role in modern life, particularly for Millennials: As Amanda explained in 2021, “For America’s newest adopters, a dog can be many things: a dry run for parenthood, a way of putting down roots when traditional milestones feel out of reach, an enthusiastic housemate for people likely to spend stretches of their 20s and 30s living alone. An even more primary task, though, is helping soothe the psychic wounds of modern life.”

Today’s newsletter is dedicated to pets—how we live alongside them, drive them crazy, and love them to depths they may never fully understand. (And don’t worry; our reading list doesn’t neglect cats.)

On Pets

Why Millennials Are So Obsessed With Dogs

By Amanda Mull

The only thing getting me through my 30s is a cranky, agoraphobic chihuahua named Midge.

Which Pet Will Make You Happiest?

By Arthur C. Brooks

Three rules to enhance the happiness of those looking to add a nonhuman to the household (From 2021)

The Case for Cats

By Katherine J. Wu

Cats are a biological marvel. That’s not (the only reason) why I love them.

Still Curious?

Why do humans talk to animals if they can’t understand?: The habit says more about people than about their pets. The pet-name trend humans can’t resist: Why would anyone name their dog Kyle?

Other Diversions

The new old dating trend An adorable way to study how kids get each other sick Aristotle’s 10 rules for a good life

P.S.

If you’re prepared to cry, I recommend spending a moment with the Atlantic contributing writer Peter Wehner’s love letter to his dog, Romeo, who died a few months ago. “A pet’s devotion, a close friend told me, creates a force field around our home, warding off the unpredictable and frightening realities of daily life,” Wehner writes. “In giving something that’s needed to a family, a pet becomes a part of it, insinuating its life into ours.”

— Isabel