LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gave an outline of Democratic plans for the final months of the year in a speech Wednesday that included calls for funding paid family and medical leave, mandating a 100% clean energy standard and codifying protections ensured by the Affordable Care Act.

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No one wants to appear before a judge as a criminal defendant. But court is a particularly inhospitable place for Donald Trump, who conceptualizes the value of truth only in terms of whether it is convenient to him. His approach to the world is paradigmatic of what the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshit: Trump doesn’t merely obscure the truth through strategic lies, but rather speaks “without any regard for how things really are.” This is at odds with the nature of law, a system carefully designed to evaluate arguments on the basis of something other than because I say so. The bullshitter is fundamentally, as Frankfurt writes, “trying to get away with something”—while law establishes meaning and imposes consequence.

The upcoming trials of Trump—in Manhattan; Atlanta; South Florida; and Washington, D.C.—will not be the first time he encounters this dynamic. His claims of 2020 election fraud floundered before judges, resulting in a series of almost unmitigated losses. In one ruling that censured and fined a team of Trump-aligned lawyers who had pursued spurious fraud allegations, a federal judge in Michigan made the point bluntly. “While there are many arenas—including print, television, and social media—where protestations, conjecture, and speculation may be advanced,” she wrote, “such expressions are neither permitted nor welcomed in a court of law.”

But only now is Trump himself appearing as a criminal defendant, stripped of the authority and protections of the presidency, before judges with the power to impose a prison sentence. The very first paragraph of the Georgia indictment marks this shift in power. Contrary to everything that Trump has tried so desperately to prove, the indictment asserts that “Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020”—and then actively sought to subvert it.

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

Although Trump loves to file lawsuits against those who have supposedly wronged him, the courtroom has never been his home turf. Records from depositions over the years show him to be sullen and impatient while under oath, like a middle schooler stuck in detention. Timothy L. O’Brien, a journalist whom Trump unsuccessfully sued for libel in 2006, recalled in Bloomberg that his lawyers forced Trump to acknowledge that he had lied over the years about a range of topics. Trump has seemed similarly ill at ease during his arraignments. When the magistrate judge presiding over his arraignment in the January 6 case asked whether he understood that the conditions of his release required that he commit no more crimes, he assented almost in a whisper.

All of this has been a cause for celebration among Trump’s opponents—because the charges against him are warranted and arguably overdue, but also for a different reason. The next year of American politics will be a twin drama unlike anything the nation has seen before, played out in the courtroom and on the campaign trail, often at the same time. Among Democrats, the potential interplay of these storylines has produced a profound hope: Judicial power, they anticipate, may scuttle Trump’s chances of retaking the presidency, and finally solve the political problem of Donald Trump once and for all.

It has become conventional wisdom that nothing can hurt Trump’s standing in the polls. But his legal jeopardy could, in fact, have political consequences. At least some proportion of Republicans and independents are already paying attention to Trump’s courtroom travails, and reassessing their prior beliefs. A recent report by the political-science collaborative Bright Line Watch found that, following the Mar-a-Lago classified-documents indictment in June, the number of voters in each group who believed that Trump had committed a crime in his handling of classified information jumped by 10 percentage points or more (to 25 and 46 percent, respectively).

And despite Trump’s effort to frame January 6 as an expression of mass discontent by the American people, the insurrection has never been popular: Extremist candidates who ran on a platform of election denial in the 2022 midterms performed remarkably poorly in swing states. Ongoing criminal proceedings that remind Americans again and again of Trump’s culpability for the insurrection—among his other alleged crimes—seem unlikely to boost his popularity with persuadable voters. If he appears diminished or uncertain in court, even the enthusiasm of the MAGA faithful might conceivably wane.

[Quinta Jurecic: The triumph of the January 6 committee]

Above all of this looms the possibility of a conviction before Election Day, which has no doubt inspired many Democratic fantasies. If Trump is found guilty of any of the crimes of which he now stands accused, a recent poll shows, almost half of Republicans say they would not cast their vote for him.

But that outcome is only one possibility, and it does not appear to be the most likely.

Americans who oppose Trump—and, more to the point, who wish he would disappear as a political force—have repeatedly sought saviors in legal institutions. The early Trump years saw the lionization of Special Counsel Robert Mueller as a white knight and (bewilderingly) a sex symbol. Later, public affection turned toward the unassuming civil servants who testified against Trump during his first impeachment, projecting an old-school devotion to the truth that contrasted with Trump’s gleeful cynicism. Today, Mueller’s successors—particularly Special Counsel Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is leading the Georgia prosecution—are the subjects of their own adoring memes and merchandise. One coffee mug available for purchase features Smith’s face and the text Somebody’s Gonna Get Jacked Up!

Perhaps this time will be different. With Trump out of office, Smith hasn’t been limited, as Mueller was, by the Justice Department’s internal guidance prohibiting the indictment of a sitting chief executive. Willis, a state prosecutor, operates outside the federal government’s constraints. And neither Bill Barr nor Republican senators can stand between Trump and a jury.

The indictments against Trump have unfolded in ascending order of moral and political importance. In April, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, announced charges for Trump’s alleged involvement in a hush-money scheme that began in advance of the 2016 election. In June came Smith’s indictment of Trump in Florida, over the ex-president’s hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Two months later, the special counsel unveiled charges against Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Willis’s indictment in Georgia quickly followed, employing the state’s racketeering statute to allege a widespread scheme to subvert the vote in favor of Trump. (He has pleaded not guilty in the first three cases and, as of this writing, was awaiting arraignment in Georgia. The Trump campaign released a statement calling the latest indictment “bogus.”)

But each case has its own set of complexities. The New York one is weighed down by a puzzling backstory—of charges considered, not pursued, and finally taken up after all—that leaves Bragg’s office open to accusations of a politically motivated prosecution. The indictment in Florida seems relatively open-and-shut as a factual matter, but difficult to prosecute because it involves classified documents not meant to be widely shared, along with a jury pool that is relatively sympathetic to Trump and a judge who has already contorted the law in Trump’s favor. In the January 6 case, based in Washington, D.C., the sheer singularity of the insurrection means that the legal theories marshaled by the special counsel’s office are untested. The sweeping scope of the Georgia indictment—which involves 19 defendants and 41 criminal counts—may lead to practical headaches and delays as the case proceeds.

Trump’s army of lawyers will be ready to kick up dust and frustrate each prosecution. As of July, a political-action committee affiliated with Trump had spent about $40 million on legal fees to defend him and his allies. The strategy is clear: delay. Trump has promised to file a motion to move the January 6 proceedings out of Washington, worked regularly to stretch out ordinary deadlines in that case, and tried (unsuccessfully) to move the New York case from state to federal court. The longer Trump can draw out the proceedings, the more likely he is to make it through the Republican primaries and the general election without being dragged down by a conviction. At that point, a victorious Trump could simply wait until his inauguration, then demand that the Justice Department scrap the federal cases against him. Even if a conviction happens before Americans go to the polls, Trump is almost certain to appeal, hoping to strand any verdict in purgatory as voters decide whom to support.

Currently, the court schedule is set to coincide with the 2024 Republican primaries. The Manhattan trial, for now, is scheduled to begin in March. In the Mar-a-Lago case, Judge Aileen Cannon has set a May trial date—though the proceedings will likely be pushed back. In the January 6 case, Smith has asked for a lightning-fast trial date just after New Year’s; in Georgia, Willis has requested a trial date in early March. But still, what little time is left before next November is rapidly slipping away. In all likelihood, voters will have to decide how to cast their ballot before the trials conclude.

The pileup of four trials in multiple jurisdictions would be chaotic even if the defendant were not a skillful demagogue running for president. There’s no formal process through which judges and prosecutors can coordinate parallel trials, and that confusion could lead to scheduling mishaps and dueling prosecutorial strategies that risk undercutting one another. For instance, if a witness is granted immunity to testify against Trump in one case, then charged by a different prosecutor in another, their testimony in the first case might be used against them in the second, and so they might be reluctant to talk.

In each of the jurisdictions, defendants are generally required to sit in court during trial, though judges might make exceptions. This entirely ordinary restriction will, to some, look politically motivated if Trump is not allowed to skip out for campaign rallies, though conversely, Trump’s absence might not sit well with jurors who themselves may wish to be elsewhere. All in all, it may be hard to shake the appearance of a traveling legal circus.

Attacking the people responsible for holding him to account is one of Trump’s specialties. Throughout the course of their respective investigations, Trump has smeared Bragg (who is Black) as an “animal,” Willis (who is also Black) as “racist,” and Smith as “deranged.” Just days after the January 6 case was assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, Trump was already complaining on his social-media site, Truth Social, that “THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL” with Chutkan presiding (in the January 6 cases she has handled, she has evinced little sympathy for the rioters). Anything that goes wrong for Trump during the proceedings seems destined to be the subject of a late-night Truth Social post or a wrathful digression from the rally stage.

However damning the cases against Trump, they will matter to voters only if they hear accurate accounts of them from a trusted news source. Following each of Trump’s indictments to date, Fox News has run segment after segment on his persecution. A New York Times /Siena College poll released in July, after the first two indictments, found that zero percent of Trump’s loyal MAGA base—about 37 percent of Republicans—believes he committed serious federal crimes.

And beyond the MAGA core? A recent CBS News poll showed that 59 percent of Americans and 83 percent of self-described non-MAGA Republicans believe the investigations and indictments against Trump are, at least in part, attempts to stop him politically. Trump and his surrogates will take every opportunity to stoke that belief, and the effect of those efforts must be balanced against the hits Trump will take from being on trial. Recent poll numbers show Trump running very close to President Joe Biden even after multiple indictments—a fairly astonishing achievement for someone who is credibly accused of attempting a coup against the government that he’s now campaigning to lead.

The law can do a great deal. But the justice system is only one institution of many, and it can’t be fully separated from the broader ecosystem of cultural and political pathologies that brought the country to this situation in the first place.

After Robert Mueller chose not to press for an indictment of Trump on obstruction charges, because of Justice Department guidance on presidential immunity, the liberal and center-right commentariat soured on the special counsel, declaring him to have failed. If some Americans now expect Fani Willis or Jack Smith to disappear the problem of Donald Trump—and the authoritarian movement he leads—they will very likely be disappointed once again. Which wouldn’t matter so much if serial disappointment in legal institutions—he just keeps getting away with it—didn’t encourage despair, cynicism, and nihilism. These are exactly the sentiments that autocrats hope to engender. They would be particularly dangerous attitudes during a second Trump term, when public outrage will be needed to galvanize civil servants to resist abuses of power—and they must be resisted.

Trump’s trials are perhaps best seen as one part of a much larger legal landscape. The Justice Department’s prosecutions of rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 seem to have held extremist groups back from attempting other riots or acts of mass intimidation, even though Trump has called for protests as his indictments have rained down. Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently announced criminal charges alleging that more than a dozen Republicans acted as “fake electors” in an effort to steal the 2020 election for Trump—and as a result, would-be accomplices in Trump’s further plots may be less inclined to risk their own freedom to help the candidate out. Likewise, some of those lawyers who worked to overturn the 2020 vote have now been indicted in Georgia and face potential disbarment—which could cause other attorneys to hold back from future schemes.

[Alan Z. Rozenshtein: The First Amendment is no defense for Trump’s alleged crimes]

This is a vision of accountability as deterrence, achieved piece by piece. Even if Trump wins a second term, these efforts will complicate his drive for absolute authority. And no matter the political fallout, the criminal prosecutions of Trump are themselves inherently valuable. When Trump’s opponents declare that “no one is above the law,” they’re asserting a bedrock principle of American society, and the very act of doing so helps keep that principle alive.

None of this settles what may happen on Election Day, of course, or in the days that follow. But nor would a conviction. If a majority of voters in a handful of swing states decide they want to elect a president convicted of serious state and federal crimes, the courts can’t prevent them from doing so.

Such a result would lead to perhaps the most exaggerated disjunction yet between American law and politics: the matter of what to do with a felonious chief executive. If federal charges are the problem, Trump seems certain to try to grant himself a pardon—a move that would raise constitutional questions left unsettled since Watergate. In the case of state-level conviction, though, President Trump would have no such power. Could it be that he might end up serving his second term from a Georgia prison?

The question isn’t absurd, and yet there’s no obvious answer to how that would work in practice. The best way of dealing with such a problem is as maddeningly, impossibly straightforward as it always has been: Don’t elect this man in the first place.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Trump on Trial.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The weather system is responsible for spawning at least six tornadoes, downing power lines and causing fatal crashes.

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.

Netflix is shutting down its movie-by-mail service at the end of next month. Movie lovers will lose more than a fond memory.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The new old age Trump’s mug shot has a silent message. A crush can teach you a lot about yourself.

The Red Envelope

The bouncing DVD logo is my Proustian madeleine. I am transported back to 2005, in the living room of a friend’s house; we are laid out on sleeping bags watching Pirates of the Caribbean; soon, we will plug in a karaoke machine and sing power ballads by Pink.

That year was the peak of the DVD era; the industry was worth $16.3 billion at the time. Since then, DVDs have declined in favor of streaming platforms, but Netflix has quietly maintained its mail-order-DVD-subscription service, sending billions of movies in red envelopes over the years. The Associated Press estimated that 1.1 million to 1.3 million people were subscribed to the service earlier this year (compared with more than 230 million subscribers to its streaming service). But now the DVD days are truly ending: The final ship date for Netflix’s discs is next month, and the company announced this week that subscribers can keep their last shipment of DVDs and opt-in for a chance to receive 10 additional ones. Netflix reportedly hasn’t yet figured out what to do with the rest of the DVDs in its possession.

The twilight of the DVD comes at a moment when members of Gen Z are taking stances against technology. Some young people are proud Luddites, eschewing smartphones for flip (or even no!) phones. And The Washington Post reported this week that a small but dedicated sector of Gen Z is big on CDs. One Zoomer recounted initially buying a CD because she thought it would be funny, before assembling an assortment—and using some as decor. Indeed, the people who still use DVDs trend young: Wired reported in 2021 that people aged 25 to 39 were more likely than other groups to still watch DVDs. Some of this may just be nostalgia. But some users are collectors too: In shoring up their private disc collections, movie lovers can stake out an identity through their taste. Others have turned to DVDs due to issues with broadband access in past years, especially in rural areas. Of course, libraries and some smaller services still rent out DVDs—and there is at least one movie-rental store still operating in New York City.

But the loss of Netflix’s service is a loss for movie access. One appeal of Netflix’s DVD program is the sheer quantity of films—including those not available on streamers because of format-dependent rights agreements—on offer. The advantage of streaming is, of course, its convenience, but one downside is that films can be plucked from platforms at any time, and many are not available on any platforms at all. As the writer Ruth Graham, who was a subscriber to Netflix’s DVD service, wrote in Slate in 2019, “The promise of streaming services was that ‘everything’ would be available at any time. Instead, a morass of legal hang-ups and commercial demands has conspired to keep countless great movies unavailable to stream.”

The spotty offerings on many platforms can make the experience of streaming a frustrating one: The other night, looking for a movie to watch, I scrolled and scrolled on a couple of streamers, past random aughties rom-coms and a grab bag of old slapsticks, and came up with nothing. I ended up giving up and rewatching a few episodes of Parks and Recreation. Even when I know what I want to watch, my choices are splayed across so many streamers that watching a film can involve the expensive hassle of getting a new subscription. I experienced a strange sensation on an airplane the other day: relief and delight at the range of movie options at my fingertips.

That encounter with abundance reminded me of the movie stores of my youth. Growing up, I lived around the corner from a Blockbuster, and my family went there on many a Friday night seeking DVDs to rent. We’d bring portable DVD players and a zip-up booklet stuffed with period dramas on our road trips. About a mile away from home was a true old-school video emporium, with film buffs manning the checkout scanners, and rows and rows of options (it closed in 2015). I discovered great films by seeing them displayed on shelves; I also got certain movie covers—such as, for some reason, The Wedding Singer’s—imprinted on my mind. The opportunity to stumble upon something new or interesting—or, because I was a kid, dumb and funny—really mattered. The store didn’t have anywhere near Netflix’s volume of DVDs, but it had a curated corpus of good movies.

I admit that I haven’t watched a DVD in recent memory, aside from an occasional screener with friends. I suppose that in clinging to the nostalgic element of DVDs but not paying for them, I’m part of the problem. Even so, I find myself more wistful than I’d expected that the DVD era is fading away. Streamers have made a subset of films available, but when so many other great movies disappear into the legal no-man’s-land between platforms, something is lost. The DVD gave audiences stable access to movies they love. This Netflix news may not affect the true DVD loyalists out there, who have already built up their private disc collections. But for casual movie fans, our viewing world has officially narrowed.

Related:

Netflix crossed a line. A strike scripted by Netflix

Today’s News

Donald Trump shared his mug shot on X in his first post on the platform since he was banned from Twitter after the January 6 attack. Officials in Maui released the names of 388 people who are still missing two weeks after the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than 100 years. At least two tornadoes struck Michigan yesterday, alongside destructive thunderstorms that knocked out power for more than 1.1 million people.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: In a new book, Ron Rosenbaum argues that love has been “stolen away from the poets,” Gal Beckerman explains.

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks readers what they would inquire of the Republican candidates if they could pose one earnest question.

Evening Read

Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Rawpixel.

A Crush Can Teach You a Lot About Yourself

By Faith Hill

A handful of years ago, some friends and I were all in the midst of a romantic drought. It had been so long since we’d felt excited about anyone that we started to worry that the problem was with us. Had we simply grown incapable of that kind of feeling? We imagined that our jaded little hearts might look like peach pits, shriveled and hard.

This was the era, though, when we started using the phrase glimmer of hope. Glimmers came whenever we felt a giddy kick of affection—maybe for a friend of a friend, or the bartender at our favorite place, or the pottery-class buddy at the next wheel over. The hope was that these crushes—which were rarely communicated to their subjects—signaled that our hearts might someday soften up and become, once again, hospitable to life. Anytime we glimpsed a light at the end of our tunnel of romantic numbness, we’d text one another: Glimmer of hope!!!!

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Is salsa gazpacho? Trump’s mug shot gives his haters nothing. Good news for your sad, beaten-up iPhone

Culture Break

Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin

Read. For the women writers who destroyed their own work, the act can be the result of a fevered impulse—or a display of ferocious will.

Watch. The bawdy new film Bottoms (in theaters now) is a raunchy teen comedy with a queer twist.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Before I go, I’d like to clarify that I am not a total Luddite: I read constantly on Kindle, and read ebooks interchangeably with print books (about half of the books I’ve read this year were on Kindle). I am very sympathetic to the argument for having media available on demand. Indeed, this week, just one day after a friend recommended it, I checked out Ties, by Domenico Starnone, from my library on ebook. It’s a tight, tense novel with an interesting Elena Ferrante connection. I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s English translation, which includes her elegant introduction. In my favorite scene, a character sits surrounded by scraps and notes and highlights and yes, DVDs, from decades of his writing life, considering what all of the material he’s collected tells him about himself. It’s a riveting scene—and, I realize, one that would not have been possible had he done all of his reading digitally.

— Lora

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.

No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.

But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination. Donald Trump’s lead appears prohibitive, but then again, no candidate has ever won his party’s nomination while facing four (so far) separate felony indictments. (Then again, no one has ever lost his party’s nomination while facing four separate felony indictments either.) Ron DeSantis has not budged from his position as the leading challenger to Trump, but his support has weakened, encouraging a large field of Republicans who are hoping for a lucky break, a Trump collapse, a VP nomination, or maybe just some fun travel and a cable-news contract down the road.

[David A. Graham: The first debate is Ramaswamy and the rest]

On the other side, Democratic hesitations about a second Biden term have either receded or dissolved into resignation that he’s running. But his age and the general lukewarm feeling among some voters has ensured that a decent-size shadow field still exists, just waiting in case Biden bows out for some reason. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also running, ostensibly as a Democrat, but while employing Republican consultants and espousing fairly right-wing views. Even so, he has hit double digits in some polls.

Behind all this, the possibility of a serious third-party bid, led by either the group No Labels or some other candidate, continues to linger. It adds up to a race that is simple on the surface but strangely confusing just below it. This guide to the candidates—who’s in, who’s out, and who’s somewhere in between—serves as a road map to navigate that. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

[Read: Trump begins the ‘retribution’ tour]

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP is still all in on Trump, but it’s a little hard to tell how big. Polling shows that his support among Republicans is all over the place, but he’s clearly not a prohibitive front-runner.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, but past results are no guarantee of future success.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run in a trainwreck of an appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces on May 24.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers the prospect of a synthesis of Trump-style culture war and bullying and the conservative politics of the early-2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
From the advent of his campaign, DeSantis presented the prospect of a candidate with Trump’s policies but no Trump. But his fading polling suggests that not many Republicans are interested.

[From the March 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

Can he win the nomination?
He doesn’t look like the Trump-toppler today that he did several months ago, but it’s possible.

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Haley has tried to steer a path that distances herself from Trump—pointing out his unpopularity—without openly attacking him. She may also be the leading foreign-policy hawk in the field.

[Sarah Isgur: What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina]

Who wants her to run?
Haley has lagged behind the first tier of candidates, but her strong performance in the first debate could help her.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Dylan Hollingsworth / Bloomberg / Getty) Vivek Ramaswamy

Who is he?
A 38-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling résumé (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J. D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on February 21.

Why does he want to run?
“We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy said in a somewhat-hectoring launch video. “Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like COVIDism, climatism, and gender ideology.”

Who wants him to run?
Ramaswamy has come from nearly nowhere to poll surprisingly well—in national polls, he’s currently third (if distantly so) behind Trump and DeSantis, and he dominated the first debate.

Can he win the nomination?
Probably not. Ramaswamy no longer seems like a mere curiosity, but his slick shtick and questionable pronouncements will remain a drag on him.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, the formerly longtime member of Congress, just finished a stint as governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
Yes. Hutchinson announced on April 2 that he is running. It would have been funnier to announce a day earlier, though.

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying that Trump disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the 2020 election. Hutchinson is also unique in the field for having called on Trump to drop out over his indictment in New York.

Who wants him to run?
Old-school, very conservative Republicans who also detest Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
Unlikely.

(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty) Tim Scott

Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign in North Charleston, South Carolina, on May 22.

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, is his first highish-profile endorsement. As DeSantis stumbles, he’s gotten some attention as a possible likable Trump alternative.

Can he win the nomination?
Scott is solidly in the second tier; he’s perpetually said to be on the verge of breaking out but never quite there.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as the governor of Indiana and a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Yes. He formally launched his campaign on June 7 with a video and an event in Iowa.

Why does he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. His launch video is heavy on clichés and light on specifics beyond promising a kinder face for the Trump agenda.

Who wants him to run?
Conservative Christians, rabbit lovers, but not very many people overall.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

Can he win the nomination?
It’s hard to see it happening.

(Ida Mae Astute / Getty) Chris Christie

Who is he?
What a journey this guy has had, from U.S. attorney to respected governor of New Jersey to traffic-jam laughingstock to Trump sidekick to Trump critic. Whew.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on June 6 in New Hampshire.

Why does he want to run?
Anyone who runs for president once and loses wants to run again—especially if he thinks the guy who beat him is an idiot, as Christie clearly thinks about Trump. Moreover, he seems agitated to see other Republicans trying to run without criticizing Trump.

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical donors, liberal pundits.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly doubtful.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Doug Burgum

Who is he?
Do you even pay attention to politics? Nah, just kidding. A self-made software billionaire, Burgum’s serving his second term as the governor of North Dakota.

Is he running?
Apparently! He formally
launched his campaign on June 7 in Fargo.

Why does he want to run?
It’s tough to tell. His campaign-announcement video focuses so much on North Dakota that it seems more like a reelection push. He told a state newspaper that he thinks the “silent majority” of Americans wants candidates who aren’t on the extremes. (A wealthy outsider targeting the silent majority? Where have we heard that before?) He also really wants more domestic oil production.

Who wants him to run?
Lots of people expected a governor from the Dakotas to be a candidate in 2024, but they were looking at Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Burgum is very popular at home—he won more than three-quarters of the vote in 2020—but that still amounts to fewer people than the population of Toledo, Ohio.

Can he win the nomination?
“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” he has said. “That’s a competitive advantage.” But it’s even better to have a chance, which he doesn’t.

What else do we know?
He’s giving people $20 gift cards in return for donating to his campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Will Hurd

Who is he?
A former CIA officer, Hurd served three terms in the House representing a San Antonio–area district.

Is he running?
Yes. Hurd announced his campaign on June 22.

Why does he want to run?
Hurd says he has “commonsense” ideas and he is “pissed” that elected officials are dividing Americans. He’s also been an outspoken Trump critic.

Who wants him to run?
As a moderate, youngish Black Republican and someone who cares about defense, he is the sort of candidate whom the party establishment seemed to desire after the now-discarded 2012 GOP autopsy.

Can he win the nomination?
No.

(Mandel Ngan / Getty) Francis Suarez

Who is he?
Suarez is the popular second-term mayor of Miami and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Is he running?
Yes. He kicked off his campaign on June 15.

Why does he want to run?
Suarez touts his youth—he’s 45—and said in October 2022, “I’m someone who believes in a positive aspirational message. I’m someone who has a track record of success and a formula for success.” He’s also someone who voted against the Republican Ron DeSantis in the 2018 governor’s race and did not vote for Trump in 2020.

Who wants him to run?
Is there really room for another moderate-ish Republican in the race? Suarez reports that Trump said he was the “hottest politician in America after him,” but the former president is himself running, and with DeSantis a presumptive candidate, Suarez is an underdog in his home state.

Can he win the nomination?
Suarez’s only real hope was making the first debate and then having a great night. But he didn’t make the first debate.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
No. Hogan ruled himself out on March 5, saying he was worried that too large a field would help Trump win the nomination once more, but he is rumored as a potential No Labels candidate.

Why did he want to run?
Hogan argued that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.” He’s also a vocal critic of Trump.

Who wanted him to run?
Moderate, business-friendly “Never Trump” Republicans love Hogan.

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he’s the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and the son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Is he running?
No. On June 5, after weighing a campaign, he announced he would not run. Warning about the dangers of a Trump reprise, he said, “Every candidate needs to understand the responsibility of getting out and getting out quickly if it’s not working.” Points for taking his own advice!

Why did he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and saw his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism. He is also a prominent Trump critic.

Who wanted him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

Is he running?
No. On April 14, Pompeo announced he wasn’t running. “This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again,” he said.

Why did he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

Who wanted him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Could he have won the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
Probably not. He said on May 1 that he wasn’t running “this year.” But he seems to be rethinking that as Ron DeSantis’s campaign sputters.

Why does he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, so far to no avail.

Who wants him to run?
Rupert Murdoch, reportedly.

Can he win the nomination?
Certainly not if he isn’t running.

(Sam Wolfe / Bloomberg / Getty) Mike Rogers

Who is he?
Rogers is a congressman from Alabam—wait, no, sorry, that’s the other Representative Mike Rogers. This one is from Michigan and retired in 2015. He was previously an FBI agent and was head of the Intelligence Committee while on Capitol Hill.

Is he running?
He is thinking about it and has formed a group with the suitably vague name “Lead America,” but he’s been quiet for long enough that we can assume no, at least for practical purposes.

Why does he want to run?
He laid out some unassailably broad ideas for a campaign in an interview with Fox News, including a focus on innovation and civic education, but it’s hard to tell what exactly the goal is here. “This is not a vanity project for me,” he added, which, okay, sure.

Who wants him to run?
“I think the Trump, Trump-lite lane is pretty crowded,” he told Fox. “The lane that is not talking about Trump, that is talking about solutions and the way forward and what the real challenges we face—I just don’t find a lot of people in that lane.” Which, again, okay?

Can he win the nomination?
Nope.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Larry Elder

Who is he?
A longtime conservative radio host and columnist, he ran as a Republican in the unsuccessful 2021 attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Is he running?
Allegedly, yes. He announced his campaign on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on April 20. He’s barely been heard from since.

Why does he want to run?
Glad you asked! “America is in decline, but this decline is not inevitable,” he tweeted. “We can enter a new American Golden Age, but we must choose a leader who can bring us there. That’s why I’m running for President.” We don’t have any idea what that means either.

Who wants him to run?
Impossible to say at this stage, but deep-blue California is a tough launching pad for any conservative, especially an unseasoned candidate. This recall campaign also dredged up various unflattering information about his past.

Can he win the nomination?
Having missed out on the first debate, any hope Elder had is gone.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Rick Perry

Who is he?
Perry was a three-term governor of Texas before serving as energy secretary under Donald Trump. He’s also run for president three times: in 2012, 2016, and … I forget the third one. Oops.

Is he running?
Oh, right! The third one is 2024, maybe. He told CNN in May that he’s considering a run. Nothing’s been heard since.

Why does he want to run?
He didn’t say, but he’s struggled to articulate much of a compelling case to Republican voters beyond the fact that he’s from Texas, he looks good in a suit, and he wants to be president, gosh darn it.

Who wants him to run?
Probably no one. As Mike Pompeo already discovered, there’s not much of a market for a run-of-the-mill former Trump Cabinet member in the primary—especially one who had such a forgettable turn as secretary, mostly remembered for being dragged peripherally into both the first Trump impeachment and election subversion.

Can he win the nomination?
The third time would not be a charm.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Rick Scott

Who is he?
Before his current gig as a U.S. senator from Florida, Scott was governor and chief executive of a health-care company that committed massive Medicare fraud.

Is he running?
The New York Times says he’s considering it, though an aide said Scott is running for reelection to the Senate. He’d be the fourth Floridian in the race.

Why does he want to run?
A Scott campaign would raise a fascinating question: What if you took Trump’s pose and ideology, but removed all the charisma and, instead of promising to protect popular entitlement programs, aimed to demolish them?

Who wants him to run?
Not Mitch McConnell.

Can he win the nomination?
lol

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Yes. Biden formally announced his run on April 25.

Why does he want to run?
Biden’s slogan is apparently “Let’s finish the job.” He centered his launch video on the theme of freedom, but underlying all of this is his apparent belief that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters that they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
Barring unforeseen catastrophe, yes. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person to be elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Bill Clark / Getty) Dean Phillips

Who is he?
Phillips, a mildly unorthodox and interesting figure, is a Minnesota moderate serving his third term in the House.

Is he running?
Probably not. In an August 21 interview, he said he was unlikely to run, but would encourage other Democrats to do so. He had said in July that he was considering it.

Why does he want to run?
Phillips, who at 54 passes for young in politics, has been publicly critical of superannuated Democrats sticking around too long, and he says Biden is too old to run again.

Who wants him to run?
Although it’s true that many Democrats think Biden is too old, that doesn’t mean they’re willing to do anything about it—or that Phillips is the man they want to replace him. Although Phillips claims he has “been overwhelmed with outreach and encouragement,” this looks more like a messaging move than a serious sprint at the moment.

Can he win the nomination?
Not in 2024.

What else do we know?
His grandmother was “Dear Abby.”

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden were to bow out, she’d be the immediate favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
Not right now.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden stepped away.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Not at this moment.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden dropped out, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
No.

Why would she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Not if she isn’t running.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Yes. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C.

Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants to give voters a choice. “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency. Also, her campaign is perpetually falling part.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both a scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
No.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Not now.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Who is he?
The son of a presidential candidate, the nephew of another, and the nephew of a president, Kennedy is a longtime environmental activist and also a chronic crank.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run on April 19.

Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition—hell, he wouldn’t even be the first Kennedy to primary a sitting Democrat. He’s running a campaign arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming”), but tending toward extremely dark places.

Who wants him to run?
Despite his bizarre beliefs, he’s polling in double digits against Biden—though as he has gotten deeper into anti-Semitism and conspiracies, Semafor has deemed his boomlet over.

Can he win the nomination?
Not the Democratic one.

THIRD-PARTY AND INDEPENDENT (Tom Williams / Getty) Joe Manchin

Who is he?
A Democratic U.S. senator and former governor of West Virginia, he was the pivotal centrist vote for the first two years of Joe Biden’s term. I’ve described him as “a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.”

Is he running?
It’s very hard to tell how serious he is. He has visited Iowa, and is being courted by No Labels, the nonpartisan centrist organization, to carry its banner. He’s shown no signs of running, and would stand no chance, in the Democratic primary.

Why does he want to run?
Manchin would arguably have less power as a third-party president than he does as a crucial swing senator, but he faces perhaps the hardest reelection campaign of his life in 2024, as the last Democrat standing in a now solidly Republican state. He also periodically seems personally piqued at Biden and the Democrats over slights perceived or real.

Who wants him to run?
No Labels would love to have someone like him, a high-profile figure who’s willing to buck his party and has policies that would appeal to voters from either party. It’s hard to imagine he’d have much of an organic base of support, but Democrats are terrified he’d siphon off enough votes to hand Trump or another Republican the win in a three-way race.

Can he win?
“Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter,” he said in April. If that is true, do not expect to see him in the presidential race.

(Frederick M. Brown / Getty) Cornel West

Who is he?
West is a philosopher, a theologian, a professor, a preacher, a gadfly, a progressive activist, an actor, a spoken-word recording-artist, an author … and we’re probably missing a few.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on the People’s Party ticket on June 5.

Why does he want to run?
“In these bleak times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States,” he said in his announcement video. West is a fierce leftist who has described Trump as a “neo-fascist” and Biden as a “milquetoast neoliberal.”

Who wants him to run?
West was a high-profile backer of Bernie Sanders, and it’s easy to imagine him winning over some of Sanders’s fervent fans. The People’s Party is relatively new and unproven, and doesn’t have much of a base of its own.

Can he win?
Let’s hear from Brother West: “Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” he said. “But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile.” Sounds like a no, but it should be a lively, entertaining campaign.

Over the past eight months, I’ve spent a mind-boggling amount of time and money trying to keep an invisible poison at bay. It started at my daughter’s 12-month checkup, when her pediatrician told me she had a concerning amount of lead in her blood. The pediatrician explained that, at high levels, lead can irreversibly damage children’s nervous system, brain, and other organs, and that, at lower levels, it’s associated with learning disabilities, behavior problems, and other developmental delays. On the drive home, I looked at my baby in her car seat and cried.

The pediatrician told me that we needed to get my daughter’s lead level down. But when I began to try to find out where it was coming from, I learned that lead can be found in any number of places: baby food, house paint, breast milk, toys, cumin powder. And it’s potent. A small amount of lead dust—equal to one sweetener packet—would make an entire football field “hazardous” by the EPA’s standards.

My husband and I spent nearly $12,000 removing highly contaminated soil from our backyard, replacing old windows, and sealing an old claw-foot bathtub. We mopped the floors at night, obsessively washed our daughter’s hands, and made sure to feed her plenty of iron, calcium, and vitamin C, which are thought to help limit the body’s absorption of lead. Four months later, when we went back to the pediatrician, her lead levels had sunk from 3.9 micrograms per deciliter of blood to 2.2 mcg/dL. That was better, but still far from zero. And according to the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Mayo Clinic, zero is the only safe amount of lead.

We’re one of thousands of families who have gone through that ordeal this year. At least 300,000 American children have blood lead levels above 3.5 mcg/dL, the CDC’s so-called reference value. But parents are largely left on their own to get lead out of their kids’ lives. Families who can afford an abundance of caution can sink tens of thousands of dollars into the project. And they still might never hit zero.

When Suz Garrett learned that her 1-year-old son, Orrin, had four micrograms of lead in every deciliter of his blood, she and her husband waited for guidance from their doctor or the county health department, but none came. So they sent Orrin to stay with family while they repainted their 19th-century Richmond, Virginia, house and covered the open soil with mulch. Band-Aids like these are cost-effective, but every time you pry open an old window, or your dog tracks in dirt from the neighbors’ yard, invisible specks of lead dust can build up again.

[Read: When lead affects learning]

For nearly a year, the Garretts cleaned religiously. Orrin’s blood levels are still detectable—currently, he’s at 2.1 mcg/dL. Garrett and her husband are fed up. In a few months they’re moving to a new house, one they took out a $200,000 construction loan to renovate. “We ended up gutting it so we would know there’s no lead paint,” Garrett said.

A few years ago, children like Orrin Garrett and my daughter wouldn’t have been a cause for concern. Until 2012, children were identified as having a blood lead “level of concern” at 10 mcg/dL or more. But for the past decade, the CDC has used a reference value to identify children who have more lead in their blood than most others. The reference number is based on statistics, not health outcomes. When most children tested below 5 mcg/dL, the reference level was five. Today, it is 3.5.

The reference level has trended down along with lead exposure, which has dropped by 95 percent since the 1970s thanks to policies that removed lead from gasoline, paint, plumbing, and food. But confusion and concern about what classifies as lead poisoning has risen.

[Read: An American history of lead poisoning]

Scientists and public-health officials still can’t say exactly how low lead exposure needs to be to prevent damage for any individual child. When Kim Dietrich, an epidemiologist and a developmental neuropsychologist, started his career in the ’70s, the general consensus was that levels above 40 to 60 micrograms took a significant toll on the developing brain. But work by Dietrich and others showed that harm can be caused at much lower levels. In the early 2000s, pooled data from seven large studies from around the world, including one Dietrich conducted in Cincinnati, showed that an increase in children’s blood-lead concentration from 2.4 to just 10 mcg/dL corresponded with a four-point drop in their IQ. That’s a scary prospect. But, Dietrich told me, “it’s very important not to confuse findings from these large population-level studies with individual impacts.”

Discerning the effect of low lead levels—below about 10 mcg/dL—on cognitive health is an extremely complicated issue. “If you’ve got a blood alcohol content of 0.2, you’re likely to be horribly dangerous behind the wheel no matter who you are. Lead is a little bit different. Your child’s two might be worse than my child’s 10,” Gabriel Filippelli, a biogeochemist who studies lead exposure in urban environments, told me. Part of the variation in outcomes could be the result of factors we still don’t understand, like a child’s genetic makeup.

Policing low levels of lead exposure in children costs parents both financially and emotionally. Mary Jean Brown, the former chief of the CDC’s Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, told me that concerned parents should be careful not to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Most children will not exhibit any symptoms when they have blood levels of 5 or 10 micrograms per deciliter,” she told me. But “if the mother or someone else says, ‘Johnny’s not like everybody else,’ pretty soon, Johnny isn’t like everybody else.”

This type of anxiety is familiar to Tanisha Bowman, a health-care worker in Pittsburgh who has spent nearly three years trying to lower her daughter’s blood lead levels. They initially peaked at 20 mcg/dL, and have ranged from two to six over the past year. “There was never anything wrong with her. She was always measuring four to six months ahead,” Bowman said. But it was impossible not to read scary headlines about lead and assume they applied to her daughter. When she had tantrums around the age of 2, Bowman started wondering if she had ADHD, which is sometimes associated with lead exposure. “I will never know what impact, if any, this had on her. And nobody will ever be able to tell me,” she said. (Bowman’s daughter has had no diagnosis related to lead.)

[Read: Why it took decades of blaming parents before we banned lead paint]

In the absence of a specific, outcome-based number to help parents decide when to worry, a mantra has emerged among doctors, reporters, and health institutions: There is no safe level of lead. Filippelli said that he’s used the catchphrase, but it’s a bit misleading. “There is no valid research source to support the ‘No amount of lead exposure is safe’ idea, beyond that fact that to avoid the potential of harm, you should avoid exposure,” he explained in an email.

As well intentioned as the guidance might be, avoiding all exposure is an impossible quest. Tricia Gasek, a mother of three who lives in New Jersey, tried desperately to locate the source of lead in her children’s blood. She spent $1,000 hiring a “lead detective” to test her home with an XRF device and getting consultations with experts, plus another $600 replacing leaded lights on the front door. Ultimately, she learned that she also had elevated levels and concluded that the lead in her son’s blood was coming from her breast milk—possibly, her doctors thought, from exposure she had as a child. The process was exhausting. “It’s just crazy. Why am I the one figuring all this out?” she says.

Parents simply can’t get to zero without help. Lead is invisible and pervasive. Although the Flint, Michigan, water crisis and recent product recalls have raised awareness about lead leaching from corroding pipes and hiding inside baby food, the biggest sources of exposure for children are the spaces where they live and play: inside houses and apartments with old, degrading paint and yards with contaminated soil. For many, there is no easy escape. Lead contamination is most common in low-income neighborhoods, which means Black and Hispanic kids are disproportionately affected.

[Read: The poisoned generation]

Many local health departments, including the one where I live, offer home visits to help identify sources of lead, but in many cases only when levels are above 10 mcg/dL. So the majority of children with elevated lead levels receive little or no assistance at all, and families have to play detective, social worker, and home remodeler all at once.

This is paradoxical, because the problem of low-level lead exposure cannot be solved by focusing on one child or one home at a time. My family’s efforts helped lower our daughter’s lead levels slightly, but they did nothing to address the more widespread problem of lead in our neighborhood, to which she and all the other children nearby are still exposed. Instead of having every lead-exposed family play whack-a-mole in their own home, Filippelli says that if he were appointed czar of lead, he would do a national analysis of high-risk neighborhoods and households, perform targeted testing to confirm hazards, and remediate at scale. There would have to be coordination between the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency, and such programs could cost up to $1 trillion and take a decade. But, he says, we could significantly reduce lead exposure across the board. The trickle-down effects of half a million children becoming smarter, healthier adults would reach everyone, even if we can’t say exactly how much smarter or healthier they’d be.

For now, my family is still navigating this maze on our own. I’m trying to think of low-level lead exposure as a risk factor—like air pollution and forever chemicals—instead of a diagnosis. Meanwhile, my daughter is doing just fine. As a family, we’ll continue to avoid what lead we can; we’ve decided to spend a whopping $25,000 to repaint the chipping exterior of our house. But we’re still going to let our kid play at the park and climb the walls. After all, there’s no stopping her.

At the Boulder County Recycling Center in Colorado, two team members spend all day pulling items from a conveyor belt covered in junk collected from the area’s bins. One plucks out juice cartons and plastic bottles that can be reprocessed, while the other searches for contaminants in the stream of paper products headed to a fiber mill. They are Sorty McSortface and Sir Sorts-a-Lot, AI-powered robots that each resemble a supercharged mechanical arm from an arcade claw machine. Developed by the tech start-up Amp Robotics, McSortface and Sorts-a-Lot’s appendages dart down with the speed of long-beaked cranes picking fish out of the water, suctioning up items they’ve been trained to recognize.

Yes, even recycling has gotten tangled up in the AI revolution. Amp Robotics has its tech in nearly 80 facilities across the U.S., according to a company spokesperson, and in recent years, AI-powered sorting from companies such as Bulk Handling Systems and MachineX has popped up in other recycling plants. These robots are still niche, but they’re starting to be seen as a step forward for an industry in need of real improvement. “I know it’s kind of a buzzword,” says Jeff Snyder, the director of recycling at Rumpke Waste and Recycling, a waste-management company based in Ohio. “But from an [industry] perspective, AI is incredible. It’s a game changer for us.”

In the ChatGPT era, AI has been endlessly hyped as tech companies scramble to profit off the recent surge of interest. But the technology’s impact on recycling might be closer to the opposite: a meaningful application that is hidden in plain sight. Even that might still not be enough to fully fix recycling as we know it.

Recycling could use a high-tech shake-up. In theory, “materials recovery facilities,” or MRFs—industry insiders pronounce the acronym as a word that rhymes with Smurfs—are supposed to close the loop between consumption and production. They gather the containers and pieces of packaging we throw into bins, do the dirty work of sorting them out, and then sell those materials back to other companies that can reuse them.

In practice, the MRFs aren’t all that good. In 2018, only about a third of all glass containers were successfully recycled in the U.S. That same year, the EPA estimated that less than 9 percent of plastics were recycled, and the number may have fallen since then. In recent years, China, which historically bought much of America’s recyclable scrap, has largely stopped buying it—in part, because the end product of recycling tends to be a mix of different kinds of items that can’t be feasibly reused together. Since then, a few other countries have picked up some of the slack, but not all. With nowhere to send huge quantities of recyclables, many communities have simply started to burn and landfill what used to go to China.

The issue is that it’s long been too hard for recycling plants to sort material with the level of specificity needed to satisfy manufacturers that could theoretically reuse it, Matt Flechter, a recycling specialist for Michigan, told me. The traditional recycling methods used to sort waste—including sieves, blasts of compressed air, glass crushers, powerful magnets, and near-infrared light—do a good job of separating waste into broad categories of paper, glass, and metal. But finer layers of detail often go unnoticed, especially with plastic. It’s hard for recyclers to determine whether, say, a #2 HDPE container is a milk jug, which would be suitable for reuse in food products, or a pesticide container, which wouldn’t be, as thousands of pounds of refuse whizz down the line at 600 feet a minute. Although plastic bottles and plastic clamshells are each recyclable, a poorly sorted mix of them is something no one really wants.

AI stands to change that calculus, giving recycling plants a far more granular view into packaging that otherwise tends to be hopelessly commingled. These recycling bots—from Amp and competitors such as MachineX, Bulk Handling Systems, Glacier Robotics, and Everest Labs—are “vision systems”: In the same way that ChatGPT is trained by ingesting text that has been published online, they absorb lots of photographs of tossed-out items in various states of degradation and disrepair. The robots are then able to identify even tiny differences in a product’s color, shape, texture, or logo—and in the case of Amp, even its SKU, the unique number manufacturers assign to each kind of item they sell, Matanya Horowitz, Amp’s CEO, told me. “We know this is Procter and Gamble, this is Unilever, and so on,” Horowitz said. “If we know the SKU, we can determine anything—I know what adhesive they used; I know what cap they used; I know what was actually in it.”

The bots are helping to create new end-markets that didn’t exist before, recycling operators told me, thanks to their ability to sort types of plastic that otherwise might get downcycled or trashed. Operators said that systems currently tend to be 85 to 95 percent accurate, while robotics companies themselves claim up to 99 percent accuracy. Steve Faber, a representative for Michigan’s Kent County Department of Public Works, which operates a recycling facility in Grand Rapids, said Amp’s bots have allowed the plant to sort out and resell #5 polypropylene, a plastic used in coffee pods and other lightweight food containers, that were previously getting sorted into mixed bales with next to no value.

Recycling robots have been around for a few years, but their momentum seems to be growing during the current AI boom. Waste Management, the largest residential-recycling company in the U.S., has announced plans to invest $800 million in recycling infrastructure by the end of 2025, including new, AI-powered facilities. At the same time, the companies that design this tech are starting to raise serious money—especially Amp, whose $99 million Series C round has seen buy-in from Google Ventures, the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, and Sequoia Capital.

That is not to say that the turn to AI has already fixed recycling. The high-tech systems that are needed to keep up with the torrent of recyclables won’t come cheap—an individual robot can cost as much as $300,000, and investments can take years to recoup. Many facilities, Flechter said, are reluctant to adopt the newer approaches because the price tag means they often lose money, and some communities are already too cash-strapped to offer recycling services at all.

Still, as costs eventually decrease, the future looks promising, heralding more than just robots with mechanical arms. Snyder, of Rumpke, thinks AI’s bigger contribution will be to reinvent “high-volume optical sorting,” an approach that uses near-infrared light to determine a product’s material composition before a blast of air diverts it down various chutes. It is faster than the recycling robots, but so far lacks the same kind of accuracy. A version with an AI vision system would be both ultra-quick and ultra-accurate. In partnership with MachineX, Rumpke is in the process of building one of the earliest plants with such technology. When its $90 million facility in Columbus, Ohio, opens in 2024, it will be able to process a full ton of material every minute and 250,000 tons a year.

In a decade, recycling bots could be everywhere, helping facilities churn out perfectly sorted bales of junk that companies can turn into something new. But recycling, even souped up with AI and robotics, will always have limitations. Recycling tech can treat only the symptoms of unconstrained consumerism, not the disease of companies that are dumping far too many single-use products into the world. A few states have begun passing laws that shift the financial burden of collection and reuse back onto packaging producers through hefty fines, but for the most part, “the assumption is that industry can make whatever it wants, and then the recycling industry has to figure out how to deal with it,” says Suzanne Jones, the executive director of Ecocycle, the nonprofit that operates the recycling facility in Boulder. “And that’s backwards.”

At worst, recycling bots could give companies an opportunity to greenwash their reputation. Advances in AI could allow brands to claim their materials are theoretically recyclable, when in practice they aren’t—and when what’s really needed is more money in the system. Some modest efforts are under way to do just that. The Polypropylene Recycling Coalition—a group funded by companies such as Campbell’s, Nestle, and Keurig Dr. Pepper—has since 2020 spent more than $10 million to improve polypropylene collection at 41 facilities in the U.S, including a rollout of new AI-enabled robotic sorters that specifically target that material.

It’s a start, though $10 million barely registers compared with America’s $91 billion waste-and-recycling industry. Of course, from a plastics-pollution perspective, what’s better than a recyclable K-cup is not using a K-cup at all. Recycling bots can’t change the basic fact that recycling, even at its best, is just not a particularly efficient way of dealing with single-use products, no matter how much we might want to believe that it is. Even in this new era of AI, tech alone can only go so far. The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.

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The U.S. economy is actually doing pretty well. But for working people navigating mixed messages and high prices, the dominant feeling has been meh.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The sriracha shortage is a very bad sign. The longest relationships of our lives Why not Pence?

Feeling Iffy

“US. ECONOMY ADDS 400,000 JOBS IN MONTH: REPORT SPURS FEARS, declaimed the Washington Post last February … APRIL JOB GROWTH EASED DECISIVELY, STIRRING CONCERN, the New York Times warned … By June the Journal was warning, SOFT LANDING MAY BE THREATENED BY CONSUMERS.”

You would be forgiven for assuming that the above headlines are plucked from this year’s newspapers, but they’re actually more than 30 years old. These were gathered—and skewered—in a 1989 article in The New Republic titled “The Sky Is Always Falling,” in which Gregg Easterbrook argued that newspapers frame all economic news, even seemingly positive developments ( job growth, for example), as bad news.

A similar tendency appears in many of today’s reports on the economy too. To be fair, the sky does often appear to be falling, and sometimes for good reason: A lot of the recent economic news is self-evidently bad. But although inflation has been a beast, the economy is actually doing very well by some metrics. Unemployment is low! America has added jobs 31 months in a row! Consumer spending is high! Many economists and Fed officials, until recently, have been reluctant to cheer for these apparent wins, fearing that a tight labor market and strong demand would lead inflation to persist. (When it comes to economic data, it seems, all signs can turn out to be bad signs in retrospect.)

Consumers, too, have been feeling meh for some time now. In June 2022, consumer sentiment reached its all-time historic low since the University of Michigan began measuring it, more than 50 years ago. And a New York Times/Siena poll released this month found that just 20 percent of Americans think the economy is good or excellent. But spirits seem to be lifting: Data from the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers indicate that consumer sentiment has trended upward this summer and is now closer to the average outlook during a standard year for the U.S. economy (if still not quite there). This metric matters because when consumers feel confident, they spend more on goods and services—and, in turn, serve as the engine of the economy, Joanne Hsu, the director and chief economist of the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers, told me.

Americans’ lukewarm feelings about the economy over the past year make sense in many ways. Inflation has been higher than it’s been in decades, hitting many younger working people for the first time. And until late this spring, hourly wages had been outpaced by inflation for two years. Consumers feel poorer. “As an economist, I would say [the economy] is pretty good, because I’m optimistic that there is going to be further real-wage growth,” Darren Grant, an economist who has studied consumer confidence, told me. But, he added, as a working person who has seen his purchasing power diminished by inflation, he understands why many consumers don’t feel that same optimism. (It’s worth noting that average real wages have crept up in recent months, and many workers did see gains last year—especially those who switched jobs.)

Perception also plays a role in consumers’ iffy views on the economy; as my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last month, “Consumers tend not to notice when things get better as opposed to worse.” Further exacerbating negative perceptions is what she has called the Wrong-Apartment Problem, or the fact that so many people can’t afford to live where they want to live, which can strengthen the sense that the economy is in a bad place. And political leanings can also color how people feel about the way things are going (anti-Biden Americans might not be enthusiastic to embrace “Bidenomics”).

The information environment we live in is not conducive to fostering great vibes about, well, anything, but especially about the economy. For more than a year, a drumbeat of headlines have warned that a recession is imminent. And consumers are inundated with information—not always accurate—on social media. Nearly half of Americans said earlier this summer that they thought the country was in a recession or would be in one soon. Nearly half! “The discourse around the economy is very different than it was 40-plus years ago,” Hsu told me. “The share of people saying they’d heard bad news about inflation was much higher over the last year than it was in the ’70s and ’80s,” when inflation was higher. Though the news environment is not necessarily the cause of recent negative feelings about the economy, she said, it likely reinforces them.

The story of the economy right now is one of mixed messages and mixed reactions. Grant explained that we’re in a “middle zone,” where people are watching some economic measures improve as wages catch up. Inflation is still not quite where the Fed wants it to be. But, hovering around 3.2 percent, it’s much lower than it was last summer, when it peaked above 9 percent. And in the second quarter of the year, the economy grew by 2.4 percent, surpassing expectations. What the Fed and many economists now hope to see is a growing, but not rollicking, economy. So far, it seems that the U.S. has managed to achieve lower inflation without a ton of people losing jobs. That’s legitimately good news.

And, as the preliminary data show, consumers are recognizing that. “The public has a pretty reasonable sense of what’s going on in the economy,” Grant said. “We should give them some credit.”

Related:

The Wrong-Apartment Problem The bad-vibes economy

Today’s News

President Joe Biden will travel to Maui on Monday as the island continues search, rescue, and recovery efforts following severe wildfires. A forest wildfire on the border of California and Oregon, in the same area as a deadly fire last year, has led to evacuation orders. Despite Russian attacks, vessels transporting Ukrainian grain have been able to travel through a Romanian, NATO-protected lifeline.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: How should liberal democracies utilize or eschew taboos? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers for their views. The Weekly Planet: Here’s how one scholar turned her house into a zero-carbon utopia.

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Evening Read

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The Bizarre Relationship of a ‘Work Wife’ and a ‘Work Husband’

By Stephanie H. Murray

It started out as a fairly typical office friendship: You ate lunch together and joked around during breaks. Maybe you bonded over a shared affinity for escape rooms (or board games or birding or some other slightly weird hobby). Over time, you became fluent in the nuances of each other’s workplace beefs. By now, you vent to each other so regularly that the routine frustrations of professional life have spawned a carousel of inside jokes that leavens the day-to-day. You chat about your lives outside work too. But a lot of times, you don’t have to talk at all; if you need to be rescued from a conversation with an overbearing co-worker, a pointed glance will do. You aren’t Jim and Pam, because there isn’t anything romantic between you, but you can kind of see why people might suspect there is.

Read the full article.

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For more than a year, life for many sriracha lovers has been an excruciating lesson in bland. Shortages of red jalapeños—the key ingredient in the famous hot sauce—have gotten bleak, in particular for the ultra-popular version of the condiment made by Huy Fong Foods. Grocery stores have enforced buying limits on customers. Bottles on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon are selling for eye-watering prices—as much as $50 or more. A few Americans have grown so desperate for their flavor fix that they’ve started pilfering the sauce from local restaurants.

A big part of the shortage can be blamed on Huy Fong’s fragile supply chain. The red jalapeños that give the sauce its citrusy-sweet heat are finicky about temperatures, and are usually laboriously picked by hand. A huge portion of the peppers are also grown in particularly dry parts of northern Mexico where many fields are irrigated with water from the Colorado River—itself a strained and highly-contested resource. But all of that was just a teeing up, experts told me, for a final climatic blow: the punishing drought that has gripped Mexico in recent years, draining reservoirs so low that even water destined for agriculture has largely been cordoned away.

The sriracha shortage is hardly the worst crop crisis that’s being fueled by climate change. For years, Michigan cherries have been suffocating amid brutal temperatures, while Florida citrus have been obliterated by hurricanes; India’s wheat crops have roasted, while rice around the world has been double-teamed by floods and heat waves. But to now see peppers in peril is its own special burn. Bred in some of the world’s warmest regions, chilis have long been poster children of heat tolerance. They, more than so many other plants, were supposed to be okay. Now, though, as scorching temperatures and droughts continue to pummel the planet, “I think we are going to see this more often,” Guillermo Murray-Tortarolo, a climate scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told me. Sriracha’s troubles may turn out to be a bellwether for even more flavorless times to come.

For now, most pepper crops are still doing just fine. After suffering brutal heat waves last summer, several growing regions of California, one of the Western world’s pepper-growing hot spots, are now expecting a banner year, Allen Van Deynze, a pepper-breeding expert at UC Davis, told me. Even the drought conditions in Mexico that obliterated red-jalapeño fields last year have improved from their worst. Chili plants are a tough bunch to overwhelm. “They’re not happy unless your nights are above 60, and it’s 80 or 85 degrees during the day,” Van Deynze said. Red jalapeños have been on the leading edge of pepper-crop failure because they’re unusual winter peppers, and grow best at temperatures slightly lower than their cousins elsewhere, Murray-Tortarolo told me. But even their ideal is pretty balmy compared with that of some other summer crops. Tomatoes, for instance, are content at temperatures as much as 10 degrees lower than what peppers prefer, Van Deynze told me.

Many chili breeders actually tend to prefer working around the upper limit of their crops’ temperature range. Capsaicin, the chemical that imbues chili peppers with their tongue-tingling sear, evolved as a botanical defense mechanism—and peppers “crank it up when they’re under stress,” Stephanie Walker, a chili-pepper researcher at New Mexico State University, told me. “We say to people, after a stressful growing year, ‘We’re going to have nice, hot, flavorful chili peppers’” coming out the other end. Some experts also think that water is best used judiciously for peppers, especially in the weeks before they’re picked. Too much can dilute the fruits’ flavor—so some farmers will opt for minimal amounts of irrigation, Stuart Alan Walters, a vegetable scientist at Southern Illinois University, told me.

But past a certain threshold, peppers, too, will start to sizzle. Once temperatures reach about 90 or 95 degrees, pollinators stop visiting; flowers start to die without ever producing fruits or seeds. And as good as a bit of water rationing can be for pungency, peppers—like any other life form—will die when they don’t get enough liquid sustenance. The irrigation that sustains many pepper plantations can be a buffer when rainfall is scarce, but in times of extreme drought, those rations of water will end up curbed as well.

Nor are peppers immune to the climate-related issues that are already plaguing other crops. The planet’s gradual warming has cleaved many of the cold snaps out of winter—a problem for farmers who rely on the chill to pare back populations of weeds, and of insect pests and the many diseases they spread. “It’s crystal clear: We’ve seen a big uptick in viruses,” Van Deynze told me. Plus, heat waves and droughts can make plants more susceptible to blossom-end rot, a disease that leaves the tips of fruits blackened and dead. And with little respite from the heat, laborers are more frequently finding themselves plucking peppers in dangerous conditions, Walker told me.

Some tweaks to pepper production might help. Growers could shift North America’s prime pepper regions farther north, in pursuit of milder temperatures. Researchers are also already working on breeding more drought- and heat-tolerant plants, in anticipation of tougher years ahead. But there are no guarantees. Genetic tinkering can be slow, and it sometimes comes with trade-offs: When breeders select for climate resilience, for instance, they have to take great care to avoid losing pungency, or altering a pepper’s signature flavor, Murray-Tortarolo said. And there’s still “a physiological ceiling,” Walker told me, above which even the most carefully bred plants just won’t grow or reproduce. It’s hard to say exactly where that ceiling is, Walker said. But peppers, a champ among warmth lovers, may already be closer than scientists would like.

Peppers won’t be wiped off the face of the Earth anytime soon. But losses and shortages of even a handful of varieties would sting. New Mexico’s hatch green chilis are already under pressure from drought. In Mexico, Murray-Tortarolo worries about the future of some particularly rare pepper varieties: black habaneros, a floral, earthy pepper from the Yucatán Peninsula; chiltepin peppers, which grow in the northern part of the country and lend their citrusy sizzle to seafood. Local dishes are now at risk, he told me. Flavors that specific, that distinct, are ones “you cannot replace.”

That’s the appeal of pepper products, and their greatest vulnerability. Each is an homage to the chili variety at the center of its recipe—and true aficionados aren’t usually keen on alternatives. The fermented sweetness of gochujang doesn’t match the umami kick of sambal oelek; Tabasco can’t scratch the same itch as Cholula. Even within the category of sriracha sauces, many devotees of Huy Fong swear by the superiority of their favorite brand. It’s not a problem consumers often run into with rice or wheat or even coffee. “If there’s limited availability from one origin, there’s usually an acceptable substitution from another,” Kraig Kraft, an agroecologist at World Coffee Research, told me. For peppers, though, losing a crop from the only hyperlocal region in which it grows can tank an entire product line.

The decline of any chilis will come with irony: The plants evolved a punishing spiciness that clearly inflicts pain on a variety of creatures, including us; now we’re warming the world enough to torment them. If our hotter planet ends up being a less spicy one, it’ll be because the weapon of heat has changed hands.

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.