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Former President Donald Trump continues to smash through boundaries without losing support. Below, I explain why Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 Republican nomination now seem stronger than ever. But first, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The end will come for the cult of MAGA. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani’s attacks on democracy are attacks on people. Fall’s vaccine routine didn’t have to be this hard.

Wilder and Clearer

Consider the Kool-Aid Man. He is large, red-faced, perpetually stuck in the late ’80s, and, whenever he breaks through walls? Celebrated. Our 45th president, much like the Kool-Aid Man, has aligned his personal brand with gleeful destruction. And, at least among GOP leaders and his steadfast base of supporters, Trump’s product remains extremely popular.

Ever since his political rise eight summers ago, Trump’s opponents have been naively clinging to the hope that he might one day say or do something so awful as to alienate even his most ardent fans. This will never happen. The premise itself is flawed—Trump’s enduring appeal is derived from his ability to storm past perceived barriers. Were he to suddenly start walking through doors like the rest of us, he’d lose his bad-boy sheen.

Trump’s recent statements, namely on the idea of imprisoning his enemies if reelected and the specter of political violence, are prime examples of just how flawed this “reckoning” idea really is. At the moment, his rhetoric is as heightened as it’s ever been, and yet his dominance in the Republican presidential primary continues. He’s currently polling at an average of about 50 percent, with his closest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, at just under 15 percent. The rest of the field is fighting to break out of the single digits.

Trump’s 2024 challengers have failed to unite in opposition to him. During last week’s GOP debate, former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie each took their best shot at condemning Trump in relation to January 6, yet neither appears to have even a remote chance of winning the nomination. Most of the others hemmed and hawed. The majority of the field raised their hands in the affirmative as to whether they would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted criminal. That night, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes characterized Trump as “a guy who’s running 40 points ahead, who tried to end the constitutional republic, and whose braying mobs chanted for the murder of one of the guys on stage.” Taken as a whole, the event had a disturbing patina of resignation and nihilism.

Trump, of course, didn’t even bother to show up and field questions from the Fox News moderators. Instead, he staged counterprogramming: a sitdown with the former Fox star Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter). The pair’s conversation was ominous. Rather than wave off Carlson’s questions about the possibility of conflict on American soil, Trump was disconcertingly vague and threatening: “There’s a level of passion that I’ve never seen. There’s a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. And that’s probably a bad combination.”

Yesterday, the former Fox host Glenn Beck asked Trump whether he would “lock people up” if he becomes president again. Trump replied that he would have “no choice because they’re doing it to us,” referring to his own criminal indictments.

Even Trump’s mug shot, which the art critic Jerry Saltz deemed “the most famous photograph in the world,” carried a palpable rhetorical message. As my colleague Megan Garber observed, Trump’s scowl symbolizes his power. “He treats his mug shot as our menace.”

It keeps working. All of it. As we approach September, some four months ahead of the Iowa caucuses, it’s looking less and less likely that anything could slow Trump’s march to the nomination. Rather than being humbled by a jailhouse booking, Trump transformed even that event into a product he could monetize. (A “Never Surrender!” mug-shot T-shirt will set you back $34; a mug-shot coffee mug is a comparative steal at $25.) Citing self-reported campaign data for the past three weeks, the former president’s team sent an email blast yesterday with the subject line “ICYMI: Trump fundraising spikes after Fulton County mugshot, surpassing $20M in August.” (These emails barge in multiple times a day, not unlike the aforementioned Kool-Aid Man.)

Trump’s messaging is simultaneously wilder and clearer than ever. He portrays himself as a martyr and a victim, and, according to the arc of his hero’s journey, he believes that he will return home to the White House as a victor. Trump has shrewdly ascertained that, even eight years later, America can’t look away from the epic saga that is his life. Or, as another recent campaign-email subject line read: “Another disgrace I have to tell you about.”

Related:

The mug shot is a warning. The courtroom is a very unhappy place for Donald Trump.

Today’s News

Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm and is traveling across Florida and into Georgia and other parts of the Southeast. A federal judge ruled that Rudy Giuliani was liable for defaming two Georgia election workers after he claimed that they had mishandled ballots during the 2020 election. Narcan, the opioid-overdose antidote, will for the first time be widely available over the counter and online next week at major retailers, including Walgreens and CVS.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers respond to Conor Friedersdorf’s question: What would you ask the Republican presidential candidates? The Weekly Planet: Kylie Mohr asks: What happens when the heat repeats?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: David Lees / Getty; Grzegorz Czapski / Alamy; The J. Paul Getty Museum

In Praise of Heroic Masculinity

By Caitlin Flanagan

The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”

It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.

As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by Molly Fairhurst for The Atlantic

Read. Alicia Kennedy’s first book, No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, lays out the benefits of a meatless diet—without scolding those who find the idea hard to swallow.

Watch. The third and final season of Reservation Dogs (streaming on Hulu) fleshes out its ensemble with backstories that illustrate the lasting effects of grief.

Play our daily crossword.

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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

This is an edition of The 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.

Driverless taxis have arrived on the streets of San Francisco. The self-driving car companies Cruise and Waymo got the green light to expand their robotaxi fleets in the city earlier this month. The cars’ arrival was met with creative protests, curiosity, and long waitlists to take a ride. I spoke with Caroline Mimbs Nyce, an Atlantic writer covering technology, about her trip to San Francisco to give the robotaxis a try.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Inside the Biden White House as Kabul fell The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy How bad could BA.2.86 get?

A Guinea-Pig City

Lora Kelley: Tell me more about your experience riding in self-driving cars. When you were in the robotaxis, what did you find most strange or surprising?

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: The weirdest thing was watching the steering wheel turn itself. It was like a ghost driving the car. In the Waymo, you can ride up front or in the back, and I decided to ride in the front passenger seat. I just kept looking to my left and watching this wheel turn incrementally.

I rode in the backseat of a Cruise car with William Riggs, who’s a professor at the University of San Francisco and studies self-driving cars. It was an unseasonably hot day, so the first thing we did was blast the AC. In the Cruise, they had flat screens on the back of the headrests, and we used one of those to turn on a setting that was just called “coldest.” The Cruise car had a panic button: a little black circle that said END RIDE in all caps. I also tried taking off my seatbelt in that car to see what it would do. And it yelled at me. I do not recommend unbuckling in robotaxis unless there’s a journalistic reason to do so.

It was strange how normal it felt, and how quickly I felt like I was in a regular cab ride. When I was riding in the Cruise, we had a jaywalker. The car handled that fine. At one point we were outside a hospital in a congested area of the city, and an ambulance backed up in front of us. It handled that fine too. That’s not to say that everyone in San Francisco has had a normal experience, or that these vehicles have operated perfectly.

Lora: Human drivers are prone to errors on the road—but self-driving cars have made mistakes too. To what extent are self-driving cars replacing something unsafe with something that’s also imperfect?

Caroline: Human-driving statistics are really troubling: About 46,000 people died on the roads in America last year. You can very easily envision a future in which self-driving cars provide real benefit to our roads. But the question of whether they’re there yet is still an open one, and one that’s actively being debated.

San Francisco has been the guinea pig for this, and that’s causing some real tension. There’s a lot of potential for self-driving cars, but reconciling that with their current state can be difficult, especially following the incident where a Cruise vehicle collided with a fire truck. Even the safety experts I spoke with didn’t want to totally stifle innovation around autonomous vehicles. It was more a conversation about how to do this safely: Are we doing this the right way?

After the past few decades, I don’t blame critics of autonomous vehicles for being skeptical about a tech company making grandiose promises that can cause real harm.

Lora: You went to San Francisco to report this piece. How would you feel about robotaxis coming to your city?

Caroline: It’s actually going to happen soon: Waymo is testing in Los Angeles and preparing for the rollout here. Obviously this is a city that is not known for having great public transportation. There’s a big (human-driven) car culture here, and a car-ownership culture.

L.A. is notorious for bad traffic, and experts think that self-driving cars may actually make congestion worse. They follow the speed limits exactly. I don’t know how L.A. traffic could get worse, but I will be interested to see what happens.

Lora: You rode in a Cruise car called Charcuterie, and spotted another on the road called Winter. What is with these names?

Caroline: Cruise names its vehicles and allows people to submit name ideas for the cars. I don’t know the strategy behind it. But I was immediately anthropomorphizing the Cruise car I rode in. I’m still talking about Charcuterie and how Charcuterie performed, whereas I didn’t feel that connection with my unnamed Waymo vehicle. I do wonder whether, as we’re getting people used to these machines, these names are helpful, at least as a way of getting people to build a relationship with the car even when you remove the driver.

Related:

It’s a weird time for driverless cars. How self-driving cars could ruin the American city (from 2018)

Today’s News

The Biden administration named 10 prescription drugs that will be subject to Medicare’s first-ever price negotiations. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise announced that he has been diagnosed with blood cancer and plans to keep working during his treatment. Hurricane Franklin has weakened and is expected to pass northwest of Bermuda, while Hurricane Idalia will likely make landfall on Florida’s coast early Wednesday.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

Murdered by My Replica?

By Margaret Atwood

Remember The Stepford Wives? Maybe not. In that 1975 horror film, the human wives of Stepford, Connecticut, are having their identities copied and transferred to robotic replicas of themselves, minus any contrariness that their husbands find irritating. The robot wives then murder the real wives and replace them. Better sex and better housekeeping for the husbands, death for the uniqueness, creativity, and indeed the humanity of the wives.

The companies developing generative AI seem to have something like that in mind for me, at least in my capacity as an author.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Read. A new oral history, Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music, immerses readers in the scene of “Scene,” a visual and sonic subculture that dominated during MySpace’s heyday.

Watch. Gran Turismo, a new film in theaters now, is the rare video-game adaptation that works.

Play our daily crossword.

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

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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.

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On Saturday, my wife delicately removed the phone from my hands. It was making me seem a little crazed, she said. I had been on it all day. Closing on a story, refreshing Slack, scrolling through social media, checking my email. I had just texted a friend to recommend an accessory for a vacuum cleaner; it felt like it demanded my urgent attention, the way everything else on the screen did. “i got a horse hair attachment for thr vacuum it js so amazjng,” I had typed, just like that.

Like everyone, I spend a lot of my time looking at my phone—working, tapping, buying cleaning supplies. This habit helps manufacturers sell a lot of new phones every year: Because we effectively live on these things, there is a temptation to keep them current through regular upgrades. Every September is new-iPhone month. Apple is expected to release the iPhone 15 in just a few weeks. But this launch will feel a little different from the ones that have preceded it, perhaps a bit less urgent. That is because it follows a surprising concession from Apple that you don’t really need to buy a new phone.

In a significant public shift, Apple declared this week that it is supporting a bill in California, S.B. 244, that would make the iPhone and other consumer electronics last longer. The company is, after years of opposition, explicitly endorsing the “right to repair”—the idea that people should be able to access parts and information to fix their own devices, should they so choose.

S.B. 244 is far from the first bill seeking to address this topic, but it is the most significant, which makes the turnabout all the more surprising. Apple has lobbied against these laws in the past, reasoning that to allow independent repairs risks exposing trade secrets or creates cybersecurity threats. (As Grist notes, the FTC didn’t buy these explanations when writing its 2021 report on “anti-competitive repair restrictions.”) Meanwhile, the activists and politicians who make up the right-to-repair movement have waged a public campaign for years, and it’s paid off. Last year, Apple rolled out a “self-service repair program” that allows customers to buy or rent tools to repair iPhones and Macs. Supporting the new bill amounts to a major surrender from the tech giant—perhaps a sign that its position was no longer politically viable.

“Today’s reversal shows that when we work together to address bad trends, we can win changes,” Nathan Proctor, head of the right-to-repair campaign at the United States Public Interest Research Group, told me. In response to an inquiry about Apple’s stance on S.B. 244, a company spokesperson told me, “Apple supports California’s Right to Repair Act so all Californians have even greater access to repairs while also protecting their safety, security, and privacy.”

The impacts of S.B. 244 will extend beyond the Golden State. Historically, Apple and other manufacturers have liked to control information, parceling out repair equipment and associated material only to authorized vendors. If you cracked your iPhone’s screen or the battery junked out, your best option has been to take the unit back to Apple and pay whatever the company asks. This has resulted in accusations of higher costs and fewer options for consumers; independent repair shops exist, but they have had to scrounge for aftermarket or refurbished parts to make things work. Should the bill become law, which seems likely, Apple and other manufacturers will be required to provide information, parts, and tools to repair their products for years after release, all of which could trickle down to other states—which might, in turn, take inspiration from S.B. 244 for their own legislation. Third parties will be better equipped to service an iPhone long after its release date.

[Read: Don’t trash your old phone—give it a second life]

Even if many people wouldn’t want to take the time to crack open their own phone and mess around with its finicky innards, there is a sense that a principle has been violated: If you own something, something that you have paid for with a lot of your money, shouldn’t you have ultimate say over how that thing operates? If you want to put a slice of deep-dish pizza in your toaster, you can put a slice of deep-dish pizza in your toaster. Then, when your toaster breaks, you can fix your toaster. Repair keeps a machine running, keeps you from spending money on a new one, keeps trash from piling up in the world. There is no such thing as a responsibly manufactured phone. They are wasteful, destructive little things, demanding rare-earth elements for their construction, to say nothing of the carbon emissions, the toxic by-products from the mining. Apple, to its credit, has made progress using recycled materials, including rare-earth elements, in its new devices. Even so, “if we buy a thing, why can’t it last for 10 years or 20 years?” Kyle Wiens, the founder of iFixit and a longtime advocate for right-to-repair laws, told me.

Apple and other manufacturers do still hold a lot of power in determining a phone’s life span. An iPhone does not get arthritis. It does not get cancer, or blood disease. But it does eventually die. The battery degrades. You accidentally smash it on some concrete steps. Or maybe the phone is laid low in a different way: Apple issues an iOS update that leads your older device to slow, its apps to stutter and crash. The internet has transformed the meaning of ownership in complex ways. Modern technology tends to require software updates to function; Apple might release an iOS update, or Netflix a new version of its app, that doesn’t work unless you buy a new gadget. The right to repair governs your device’s physical form. But there is quite a lot more to our interactions with these things.

[Read: The iPhone isn’t cool]

I turned the reality over in my head as I talked to Wiens about the news of Apple’s reversal. It will be easier now to keep my iPhone running for years to come, if I choose. Still, so much is out of my control: I can replace a battery, swap out a camera lens. But in the next few years, some update will likely make my iPhone obsolete. Next month’s iOS 17 is not designed to work with anything older than 2018’s iPhone XS. You can stretch these things sometimes, but only to a point. Apple has stopped sending security updates for anything older than the iPhone 5S, effectively a nail in the coffin: An 11-year-old smartphone might seem ancient by today’s standards, but, well, you did spend a lot of money on it. It did take a lot out of the earth when it was born.

Wiens understands. “This is right to repair 1.0,” he told me. His organization plans to push for laws that govern software, too: “We need security updates available for decades, not single-digit years.” There is more work to be done. There will still be millions upon millions of new iPhones assembled every year. But the temptation to buy one just faded a bit.

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

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

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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

An Inane Spectacle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

Ramaswamy and the rest

Peter Wehner: Party of one

Today’s News

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

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

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

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic; Sources: Getty; Shutterstock.

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

By Amanda Mull

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

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

Read the full article.

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Paul Windle

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

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

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

– Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

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Last week, The Atlantic published an investigation revealing that tens of thousands of pirated books are being used to train major generative-AI programs. The list of authors whose work has been scraped includes Zadie Smith, bell hooks, Michael Pollan, and Stephen King; King wrote in The Atlantic today about his reaction to having his work used in this way. I spoke with Damon Beres, The Atlantic’s Technology editor, and Gal Beckerman, our Books editor, about the ethics of using books to train AI, broader questions around piracy, and whether bots can create work with literary value.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Republican presidential debate is a pageant of also-rans. What people keep missing about Ron DeSantis Not illegal, but clearly wrong

“It Feels New”

Lora Kelley: Is the use of pirated books to train AI bad for authors?

Damon Beres: A lot of people have this persistent and valid fear that these programs are in some way going to put writers out of work. Even if you can’t prompt ChatGPT, LLaMA, or other such generative-AI tools to write you a perfect novel, they are still creating viable writing, and they are doing so on the back of existing work that was used without consent. From that perspective, I think that’s not great for authors, especially authors who already have a lot of concerns about their compensation and their place in the publishing business right now.

Gal Beckerman: If you’re an author and you write a book, and then that book is used to train AI, you are losing some control over the thing that you created. It’s not clear yet how much you are losing. But for-profit companies are building products after ingesting existing books. Authors have a right to feel anxious about it. It’s one thing to talk about Sarah Silverman or Stephen King, but it’s another thing when we’re talking about an ocean of people who create and don’t really make much money off of what they create.

Lora: Lawyers told The Atlantic that the legality of using such tools is still under discussion. Even if it’s not illegal, is it unethical for AI tools to use scraped novels and creative work?

Damon: I would say yes. To the extent that people have an ethical issue with something being stolen, this is the same issue. There is some legal haziness around this. The ethical standard in my view is simply: Was something taken and used for a for-profit program without permission? And I think that’s fairly simple.

Gal: We’ve long thought of fair use as taking a piece of intellectual property and advancing it in some way. There’s a precedent for how people do that and stay within legal limits. But with these AI tools, we’re getting to these elemental levels of a writer’s creativity—their syntax, how they built their sentences. And then the question is: What is fair use of that? It feels new.

Damon: Right. A lot of the fair-use precedents almost feel irrelevant to me. The technology certainly feels unprecedented.

And there is a broader cultural question around piracy. The programs are training on data that fundamentally stem from bundles of torrented ebooks. We know that pirated books are a component of these data sets. So now I’m wondering: If you are an individual who would not pirate a book, do you use a generative-AI program that uses hundreds of thousands of pirated books? It’s an ethical issue on top of another ethical issue.

Lora: Is there any amount of novels these tools could train on to create work with literary value?

Gal: I want to say categorically no. That would seem to me a very bleak vision of the future: one that was anti-humanist and undervalued the unique power of human creativity and reduced it to something reproducible by algorithms and through some kind of mechanistic process. I think it’s clear already that there is a certain kind of writing that AI is going to be able to do, and I’m sure that that will get more and more sophisticated. It’ll become harder and harder for us to distinguish between what a robot is creating and what a human is.

But novelists have an imagination that comes from being in the world, interacting with other people, being embodied. This is something that we don’t talk about with AI a lot, but being physical presences—getting feedback from other people and from the natural environment and from society—all of that leads to creativity. I don’t want to believe that a computer or an artificial brain would be able to reproduce that.

I think something that often gets lost in this conversation is that part of the satisfaction of reading a novel is one’s own communion with another human being’s mind. I feel satisfied when I sense that a book is the creative output of another human mind that to some degree is built the way mine is. At least for literary fiction or nonfiction at the highest level, I think part of the enjoyment of reading and engaging with books is knowing that other people made them.

Related:

Revealed: The authors whose pirated books are powering generative AI Stephen King: My books were used to train AI.

Today’s News

India successfully landed its ​​Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft on the moon. Two of Donald Trump’s former lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, surrendered at the Fulton County Jail today in the Georgia election case. Tropical Storm Franklin has made landfall in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, bringing heavy floods and landslides.

Evening Read

Kate Munsch / Reuters / Redux

Zero Lead Is an Impossible Ask for American Parents

By Lauren Silverman

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.

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump has decided to skip the Republican presidential debates. That’s just as well: Debating Trump is demeaning to everyone involved, and it serves no purpose.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What happened to Wirecutter? What the ruling class fears Megan Rapinoe answers the critics.

Contempt for the Electoral Process

Donald Trump confirmed on Sunday that he’s skipping the Republican-primary debates, the first of which is tomorrow night. His decision makes political sense: A candidate who is crushing the entire field has little incentive to walk into a lion’s den and take on eight challengers. Of course, a candidate who cares about politics, policy, and the voters might want to show courage and respect for the electoral process—but this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, so those are not real considerations.

Strange as it may seem, I not only support Trump’s decision, but I think both parties should seize the opportunity to make it permanent for this election. I love debates and watch them attentively, and in a normal political year with a normal election and a normal candidate, I would be thumping the desk and saying that every candidate should respect our grand tradition of debate.

But this isn’t a normal year. It’s not a normal election. And Donald Trump is not, in any way, a normal candidate. To allow Trump onstage in either the primaries or the general election is bad politics, an insult to our electoral process, and corrosive to American democracy. All of the 2024 candidates, including President Joe Biden, have good reasons to embrace Trump’s refusal to debate and to shun any further interactions with him.

First, as we should have learned in 2016 and 2020, Trump has nothing but contempt for the electoral process. (I’ll get to his open attack on the process in 2021 in a moment.) Trump benefits from arenas where his opponents are constrained by rules that he himself ignores, and so he treats debates like performance art. He insults, interrupts, babbles, and pouts. In 2016 he stalked Hillary Clinton around the stage and suggested that he’d toss her in jail. In 2020, he tried to suck the oxygen out of the room—oxygen that Trump (according to his own chief of staff) knew was carrying his COVID infection and thus was a very real threat to Joe Biden’s health. Exasperated with Trump’s stream of blather, Biden spoke for many of us when he finally said: “Will you shut up, man?”

Second, to allow Trump on the stage is to admit that he is a legitimate candidate for public office. He is not.

I agree with—and this is quite the list—two lawyers who are members of the Federalist Society and the joint view of the conservative retired Judge J. Michael Luttig and the liberal law scholar Laurence Tribe when they argue that the Fourteenth Amendment bars Trump from office. I also agree, however, with my friend Charlie Sykes that the issue of constitutional disqualification is irrelevant: No one is going to take the measures needed (including, probably, a trip to the Supreme Court) to remove Trump from the ballot.

But as is the case with so much of our Constitution, the real check against someone like Trump is not black-letter law, but the inherent virtue and good sense of the American public. As James Madison long ago warned, if “there is no virtue among us” then “we are in a wretched situation,” and it is a continuing tragedy that millions of voters have failed to summon the basic decency to reject Trump and his assault on our values.

At the very least, the Republican Party (if it had a nanogram of spine left) would seize this moment to say that a candidate who bails out of the primary debates cannot run as a Republican and will get no assistance from the national party. The GOP under Ronna McDaniel (a woman who stopped using her family name of Romney professionally because of needling from Trump) is not going to take any such steps. But the failure of Republican voters and their cowardly leaders to exile Trump from their party—and from our public life—is no reason to treat Trump as if he is just another candidate.

Third, to allow Trump on a debate stage would, at this point, be an affront to the dignity of the Constitution and our republic. Trump’s antics would create yet another evening of both national and international humiliation and add more scar tissue to our already battered democratic norms. The United States—all of us—deserve better than to encourage such a demoralizing circus yet again.

And speaking of the Constitution and our political system: No candidate should have to share a stage and shake hands with a man who is credibly accused of multiple felonies for his efforts to overthrow the American constitutional order.

I am, even now, somewhat amazed even to write those words, but here we are.

Remember, Trump does not deny many of the things he is accused of doing. He (and at least some of his alleged co-conspirators) instead claim that what they did was not technically illegal. But we do not need a conviction to reach the conclusion that Donald Trump is a threat to our freedoms and the rule of law. We can shun him in public spaces, including the debate stage, for all of the acts to which he’s already admitted.

Think for a moment what it would look like if Trump showed up for any of the debates. You might not think much of Mike Pence, but no national purpose is served by asking Pence to walk onstage and smile and shake the hand of the man who supported a mob that was trying to hang him. And although it might be satisfying to watch Chris Christie strip the bark off Trump, a shouting match between two of the most obnoxious politicians in America would not help the voters, nor would it be a moment worthy of our democracy.

Likewise, it is beneath the dignity of President Biden—or any president of the United States—to stand next to Trump and have to pretend that the other podium is occupied by just another political contender instead of the leader of a party that has degenerated into a violent, seditionist cult. America knows both of these men, and knows what they stand for. The real question is whether a pro-democracy coalition will finally defeat Trump and his authoritarian movement, and we don’t need pointless and destructive debates to settle that issue.

Related:

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again. What the polls may be getting wrong about Trump

Today’s News

Donald Trump will turn himself in on Thursday at the Fulton County Jail, in his fourth arrest since April, and will be released after the booking process. Tropical Storm Harold made landfall in South Texas today, with sustained winds of 50 miles per hour. All eight passengers aboard a dangling cable car in Pakistan have been successfully rescued.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Readers respond to Conor Friedersdorf’s question about the hit song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” by Oliver Anthony, and how it’s been covered in the press.

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Evening Read

Katie Martin / The Atlantic; L. Willinger / Getty

Stop Pretending That Intensive Parenting Doesn't Work

By Nate G. Hilger

Since having our first kid two years ago, my wife and I have become the type of parents we used to pity: intensive parents. To an extent we didn’t anticipate, we have found ourselves pouring time into securing the best child care we can access, the best school district we can afford, the best health care for weird infections and rashes. We conduct relentless investigations into things we have no desire to think about: Should we get life insurance, and how much? And how does this boring-as-death policy actually work if we both, say, quit our jobs and die on a junket to Mexico? Should we let our kid face forward in his car seat a little early so that he’s more entertained on long drives, or is that actually dangerous? Exactly how far do we have to live from a freeway to avoid the worst hazards of air pollution?

Our kid barely knows how to use a fork. I have a hunch that in the hard-decision department, we’re only getting started.

Even as we’ve done all of this tedious work, I’ve often wondered: Is it really necessary?

Read the full article.

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P.S.

This was a tough Daily to write, because I love political debates. I watched my first one of any kind when I was 15, the night Gerald Ford, in one of his debates with Jimmy Carter, claimed that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. (I was only in high school, but even I knew that was a gaffe.) I was in college when Ronald Reagan smiled and said, “There you go again,” to Carter. I was a graduate student in a tiny apartment when Lloyd Bentsen told Dan Quayle that he was no Jack Kennedy. (On that one, I remember thinking it was a cheap shot but that Quayle had stuck his chin out and asked for it.)

But I also admit that I love debates because they’ve provided Saturday Night Live with some of its finest moments. I’ve watched the actual debates, and then watched priceless parodies, such as when Chevy Chase (as a clueless Ford) said, “It was my understanding that there would be no math.” I voted for George H. W. Bush in 1988, but I laughed out loud when Jon Lovitz (as Mike Dukakis) looked over at Dana Carvey’s Bush and deadpanned: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.” I laughed—and cringed a tad—when Dan Aykroyd’s Bob Dole went after Al Franken’s Pat Robertson as a fraud and challenged him to heal his arm.

Unfortunately, nothing is funny about this election year (and with the actors and writers on strike, we might not get any new skits anyway), but I miss the days when debates were both important and worth parodying.

— Tom

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.

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

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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A Sauce Boss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI

By Alex Reisner

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

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

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

Read the full article.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Politics is already a performance. Why also sing?

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Is Mississippi really as poor as Britain? Make the collabs stop. Give invasive species a job.

A Risk to Their Dignity

Live music has the power to connect, to make people feel. In the hands of politicians, it also has the power to make them cringe.

Last weekend, a video went viral of Vivek Ramaswamy, a businessman turned long-shot candidate in the Republican presidential primary, rapping Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” at the Iowa State Fair. (It was not even his first time performing the rap; he reportedly used to bust it out during his student days at Harvard.) In rapping, Ramaswamy joined a long line of political figures who have—at times endearingly, at times bafflingly—performed musical acts. To name a few: Bill Clinton played the saxophone periodically in the 1990s, including a rendition of “My Funny Valentine” at a White House party in 1998. George W. Bush performed a parody of “Green, Green Grass of Home” at the Gridiron dinner in 2008. Barack Obama sang a bit of Al Green at the Apollo Theater in 2012. Colin Powell duetted “Call Me Maybe” with Gayle King that same year. Then-Mayor Pete Buttiegieg played piano with Ben Folds in South Bend, Indiana, in 2015. It’s not just American politicians, either: At the White House state dinner in April, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol sang the first several bars of “American Pie.” After the surprise performance, President Joe Biden said that he had “no damn idea” Yoon could sing.

Politics always involves some level of performance, but it’s not usually this literal. Politicians craft their images and participate in mythmaking; they tend to be confident and comfortable in front of crowds. But making a speech is different from belting out a rock song. What is it that motivates these people to shed their often serious persona and get up on the mic? Is it an effort to connect with the common person? A desperate cry for attention? An expression of the disciplined, type A personality that might motivate a person to both practice an instrument for hours every day and pore over policy briefs?

“Don’t overthink it,” my colleague Elaine Godfrey, who covers politics, advised. “Politicians want to be seen as lovable, fun, and, crucially, normal. Remember, these are already people who love the spotlight, and who believe that they have something really unique and special to offer the world.” Ramaswamy is running for president with no background in government, she pointed out. It makes sense that he would also be confident enough to rap in public.

Politicians tend to be buttoned-up individuals, and voters might find it disarming to see them let loose a little. That Ramaswamy’s rap video got millions of views was surely a coup for the fledgling candidate—after all, attention is a vital currency in politics. The campaign manager for Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential run, which was buoyed by several viral internet moments, told NPR this week that despite the attention Yang’s team paid to one of his early campaign trips to South Carolina, the trip didn’t garner much press coverage until a video of Yang “Jazzercising and … doing the ‘Cupid Shuffle’ with a number of older ladies” took off. In other words, the best-laid PR plans can sometimes get blown out of the water by an amusing little song or dance. Viral moments can cut both ways, though: Videos of Pete Buttiegieg’s campaigners waving their hands to “High Hopes” in 2019 did little to disabuse young voters of the candidate’s unhip image.

Campaigning politicians also rely heavily on music when they’re not performing it. Leaders use walk-out tracks and campaign anthems to communicate their vibes, values, and regional loyalties. In 2020, for example, Kamala Harris’s campaign playlist of largely Black and Latino artists, which included Mary J. Blige walk-out music, sent a message about her identity and the voters she wanted to reach. Beto O’Rourke, himself a former rocker, featured rock songs and Texas tunes on his playlist. But musicians are not always happy to have their tracks used for electoral fodder. Donald Trump, whose rally music has ranged from Lee Greenwood to Les Misérables, has gotten into more than 20 dustups with artists who don’t want to be associated with him.

Although performing a zealous little number can make politicians seem authentic and even fun, the move is not without its perils. The primary risk, as Elaine put it, “is to their dignity.” Watching all of those YouTube clips of famous political figures singing and dancing made me think of an episode of Parks and Recreation in which (apologies for the spoilers, but also, this show is really old) Adam Scott’s character, Ben, goes to Washington to work on a congressman’s campaign. He brings along April, deadpanned to perfection by Aubrey Plaza, and they quickly start imitating their robotic boss. Discussing what to eat while leaving the office, April bleats, “Human food sounds good to me.” I can’t help but picture some of these politicians grabbing the mic and trying to seem like regular people, saying, “Human interests sound good to me.”

Related:

The secret presidential-campaign dress code The forgotten joy of 1960 presidential-campaign jingles

Today’s News

Ten current or former Northern California police officers face corruption and civil-rights charges after a two-year FBI investigation uncovered evidence of alleged crimes including illegally distributing drugs and destroying records. Lucy Letby, a former neonatal nurse in the U.K., was found guilty of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder six others. The United States has approved the transfer of F-16s to Ukraine; the country has long sought the planes to battle Russian air dominance.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Lydia Kiesling’s new novel explores the line between culpability and innocence when it comes to climate change, Gal Beckerman writes. Up for Debate: Why is so much press coverage of the viral song “Rich Men North of Richmond” focused solely on politics? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers what they think.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty

Legacy for You, but Not for Me

By Xochitl Gonzalez

In the ’90s, being a low-income student of color in the Ivy League was hard. Our population was minuscule. We were inside a place of privilege, but not fully part of it. The institution wasn’t built for us, and we knew it. We weren’t like the wealthy white kids whose alumni parents came to visit their favorite haunts in their favorite old college sweatshirts. But we were, we believed, part of a different future. And someday, we would have the chance to put on those sweatshirts ourselves and visit our own kids as students at our alma mater. We were writing a new chapter in these schools’ long histories, and we dreamed our children would be legacies …

One first-generation, formerly low-income Latina friend who went to Brown with me vowed that she would pressure her child about only one thing: getting into Brown. Many of these alumni, either loudly or under their breath, are asking: “Now that we’re finally on the inside, they’re shutting the door?”

Read the full article.

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Life can’t get much hotter than this. Photos of the week: artistic cycling, mounted shooting, Pikachu parade

Culture Break

Illustration by Lili Wood

Read. The Comebacker, a short story by Dave Eggers.  

“With every word she said, in her low, clenched-jaw way, he was stung by the great injustice of finding his favorite person, sitting next to her every day, but heading home each day alone.”

Watch. The latest episode of And Just Like That (streaming on Max) manages to get something right about modern parenting.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I am seeing some live music by professional musicians this evening: The National, a band I love, is playing at Madison Square Garden, with Patti Smith opening. To prepare for the evening ahead, I revisited “The Sad Dads of the National,” Amanda Petrusich’s April profile of the band in The New Yorker. And lo and behold, I came across this nugget: Obama used one of the band’s songs, “Fake Empire,” in a 2008 campaign video.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Some Democrats, echoing GOP narratives about Joe Biden’s age, are invested in the idea of challenging the president’s renomination. But how would that actually work?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump discovers that some things are actually illegal. How to apologize like a pro TikTok is opening a parallel dimension in Europe.

An Invitation to Chaos

You may have heard the news recently that President Joe Biden is old. This has been a rumor whispered in the hallways of power for some time now, but apparently it’s true. Some Democrats, including Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, think this means Biden should step aside. “We’re at grave risk of another Trump presidency,” Phillips said recently. “I’m doing this to prevent a return of Donald Trump to the White House.”

And by “this,” Phillips means going public with his concerns, and even possibly running against Biden—which isn’t much of a threat, given that Phillips is not exactly a first-tier challenger. But there is no denying that he is expressing out loud what some Democrats have worried about privately.

These concerns are somewhat puzzling, because Biden has so far handled the presidency with plenty of energy. At the least, to judge by performance, he seems far less deserving of a challenger for the nomination than, say, Jimmy Carter in 1980, who was sinking in the quicksand of crises both abroad and at home. The Soviets back then were running roughshod over Carter; Biden has rallied NATO against the Russians. Stagflation—a word no one uses anymore—was a fact of life under Carter; Biden has presided over a “soft landing” from the economic damage of the pandemic, with both inflation and unemployment mostly under control (at least for now), which only a year ago seemed impossible.

Nevertheless, Phillips is right that Biden’s poll numbers are worrisome at the moment. And he’s also right that a health scare during the primaries or the general election could be disastrous. But as a man of 62, I can say that health scares can happen to almost anyone beyond a certain age. Trump, let us recall, is 77. He apparently subsists mostly on junk food and torched steaks, and seems to have emotional issues that make Biden’s occasional stumbles seem fairly benign by comparison.

Regardless of age (or diet), who runs in each party will be decided by Republican and Democratic voters. For those of us concerned about American democracy itself, however, the only question in all of this is whether Biden stepping aside hurts or helps Trump’s chances of regaining power.

I am convinced—especially as a former Republican—that the political stability of the United States (and the future of a healthy Republican Party) would be better served if any Republican beats Trump in the GOP primaries. Some of the Republicans are more committed to American democracy than others, but any of them gaining the nomination would mean a return to a more or less normal presidential election, something America sorely needs to see again. (I have had a friendly disagreement with MSNBC’s Katie Phang on this issue; she thinks Florida Governor Ron DeSantis would be worse than Trump, but I think she’s overly influenced by living in Florida.)

At this point, however, Trump seems virtually assured of the GOP nomination. We might lament that a man facing nearly eight dozen criminal charges will become the standard-bearer of one of America’s two major parties, but it’s likely going to happen. Facing this all but certain reality, what would happen if Biden took the advice to preserve his legacy and stepped aside? Could Democrats coalesce around a candidate whose job would be, first and foremost, to stop Donald Trump?

The main problem with all this Democratic wishcasting is that it ignores the nature of the Democratic Party itself. Perhaps in an earlier time, ward bosses and donors would gather in a smoke-filled room, lubricate the proceedings with some Irish whiskey, yell and threaten one another, and then emerge with the name of a senator or governor to whom all of them would pledge their support (and money).

Good luck with that these days. Even the usually more disciplined Republicans can’t pull off something like that right now: If Donald Trump vanished tomorrow, no one would step aside. I would pay for a balcony seat at a meeting of current GOP candidates to decide who should run in Trump’s place, just to see someone like Vivek Ramaswamy or Francis Suarez claim the mantle of Great Uniter and try to push DeSantis or Mike Pence out of the way.

In any case, an open Democratic primary would spark similar bedlam. For one thing, the obvious choice to succeed Biden on the ticket would be Vice President Kamala Harris, whose approval numbers are worse than Biden’s and rank among the worst for vice presidents. Some of Harris’s supporters might claim that this is the result of racism and misogyny, but in the immediate circumstances, it doesn’t matter: If Biden has to get off the ticket because of soft numbers, it doesn’t make much sense to replace him with someone whose numbers are even softer.

More to the point, if unhappy Democrats want a real primary, then they cannot simply anoint Harris. A modern American primary is a scrum for votes and money and endorsements, and other candidates will have every right to step forward and make the case for themselves. That’s a normal (if sometimes nasty) process, but in a year when a sociopath who instigated a violent insurrection is promising that his main platform is to exact vengeance on his enemies, a Democratic Party brawl doesn’t make much sense.

An irony in the worries about Biden is how much they ignore Trump’s own unpopularity: A poll released this week found that nearly two-thirds of Americans wouldn’t support Trump in 2024. But if the Democrats—essentially accepting the GOP talking point that Biden needs to go—plunge into a raucous primary, the media would turn it all into a spectacle, and the Republicans would be lighting candles over such a miraculous gift. A more disciplined party might be able to mitigate that kind of damage, but today’s Democrats are not that party.

It is possible that Biden—or Trump—may yet have a health scare before 2024. So could many of us. But if the goal of the prodemocracy forces in the next election is to prevent Trump’s return to the White House, “Joe Biden is old” is not a good enough reason to invite such chaos.

Related:

Joe Biden isn’t popular. That might not matter in 2024. The catch-24 of replacing Joe Biden

Today’s News

Hurricane Hilary is headed toward Southern California and is expected to bring heavy rainfall and flash flooding. On Wednesday, a federal appeals court upheld parts of a decision restricting access to mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill. The city of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories, is under an evacuation order due to hundreds of wildfires in the region.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Live Closer to Your Friends

By Adrienne Matei

Sometime during the pandemic lockdowns, I began to nurture a fantasy: What if I were neighbors with all of my friends? Every day, as I took long walks through North Vancouver that were still nowhere near long enough to land me at a single pal’s doorstep, I would reflect on the potential joys of a physically closer network. Wouldn’t it be great to have someone who could join me on a stroll at a moment’s notice? Or to be able to drop by to cook dinner for a friend and her baby? How good would it be to have more spontaneous hangs instead of ones that had to be planned, scheduled, and most likely rescheduled weeks in advance?

This doesn’t have to be just a dream. Friends who already live in the same city could decide to move within walking distance of one another—the same neighborhood, block, or even apartment building—and campaign for others to do the same.

Read the full article.

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An absurdly unrelatable show has a relatable moment. The future of recycling is Sorty McSortface.

Culture Break

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Source: Getty

Read. Lydia Kiesling’s new novel, Mobility, presents an individual who goes to great lengths to justify the harm she’s doing to the Earth.

Listen. Fatigue can wreck you. So why is it so difficult for people to understand? In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin and former Atlantic staff writer Ed Yong discuss.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Coincidentally, in the midst of all this speculation about older candidates and replacing them on the ticket, my wife was rewatching The West Wing. I know that many people revere the show, not least because it’s a wonderful dream of what good government in America should look like, with a college-professor president (my favorite part) and men and women of honor overcoming their partisanship. There’s no room for Frank Underwood in Jed Bartlet’s Washington.

But the episode my wife was watching this week was when Leo McGarry, the former chief of staff who joins the Democratic ticket as the vice-presidential candidate, dies unexpectedly. The plot twist came about because John Spencer, the terrific actor who played McGarry, himself died unexpectedly at the young age of 58. It’s a good reminder that real life is not The West Wing. People young and old, presidents and actors, can all face health risks. We should always be aware of our mortality—but that reality shouldn’t govern all of our plans in life.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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