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

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

A Preoccupation With Democracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s News

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

Evening Read

Illustration by Rop Van Mierlo

The Owls Are Not What They Seem

By Rebecca Giggs

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

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

Read the full article.

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

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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One fall evening in 2020, Jarell Jackson and Shahjahan McCaskill were chatting in Jackson’s Hyundai Sonata, still on a postvacation high, when 24 bullets ripped through the car. The two men, both 26, had been close friends since preschool. They’d just returned to West Philadelphia after a few days hang gliding, zip-lining, and hiking in Puerto Rico. Jackson was parked outside his mom’s house when a black SUV pulled up and the people inside started shooting. Both he and McCaskill were pronounced dead at the hospital.

In the aftermath, McCaskill’s mother, Najila Zainab Ali McCaskill, couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to kill her son and his friend. Both had beaten the odds for young Black men in their neighborhood and graduated from college. Jackson had been a mental-health technician in an adolescent psych ward while her son had run a small cleaning business and tended bar. She wondered if they’d been targeted by a disgruntled former employee of the cleaning business. But then the police explained: Her son and his friend had been killed because of a clash on social media among some teenagers they’d never even met.

For months, a battle had been raging on Instagram between crews based on either side of Market Street. Theirs was a long-running rivalry, but a barrage of online taunts and threats had raised tensions in the neighborhood. Police had assigned an officer to monitor the social-media activity of various crews in the city, and the department suspected that the Northsiders in the SUV had mistaken one of the two friends for a rival Southsider and opened fire. An hour after the shooting, a Northsider posted a photo on Instagram with a caption that appeared to mock the victims and encourage the rival crew to collect their bodies: “AHH HAAAA Pussy Pick Em Up!!”

Jackson and McCaskill died in the first year of a nationwide resurgence in violence that has erased more than two decades of gains in public safety. In 2020, homicides spiked by 30 percent and fluctuated around that level for the next two years. There are early signs that the 2023 rate could show a decrease of more than 10 percent from last year, but that would still leave it well above pre-pandemic levels.

Criminologists point to a confluence of factors, including the social disruptions caused by COVID‑19, the rise in gun sales early in the pandemic, and the uproar following the murder of George Floyd, which, in many cities, led to diminished police activity and further erosion of trust in the police. But in my reporting on the surge, I kept hearing about another accelerant: social media.

Violence-prevention workers described feuds that started on Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms and erupted into real life with terrifying speed. “When I was young and I would get into an argument with somebody at school, the only people who knew about it were me and the people at school,” said James Timpson, a violence-prevention worker in Baltimore. “Not right now. Five hundred people know about it before you even leave school. And then you got this big war going on.”

[Read: Why American teens are so sad]

Smartphones and social platforms existed long before the homicide spike; they are obviously not its singular cause. But considering the recent past, it’s not hard to see why social media might be a newly potent driver of violence. When the pandemic led officials to close civic hubs such as schools, libraries, and rec centers for more than a year, people—especially young people—were pushed even further into virtual space. Much has been said about the possible links between heavy social-media use and mental-health problems and suicide among teenagers. Now Timpson and other violence-prevention workers are carrying that concern to the logical next step. If social media plays a role in the rising tendency of young people to harm themselves, could it also be playing a role when they harm others?

The current spike in violence isn’t a return to ’90s-era murder rates—it’s something else entirely. In many cities, the violence has been especially concentrated among the young. The nationwide homicide rate for 15-to-19-year-olds increased by an astonishing 91 percent from 2014 to 2021. Last year in Washington, D.C., 105 people under 18 were shot—nearly twice as many as in the previous year. In Philadelphia in the first nine months of 2022, the tally of youth shooting victims—181—equaled the tally for all of 2015 and 2016 combined. And in Baltimore, more than 60 children ages 13 to 18 were shot in the first half of this year. That’s double the totals for the first half of each year from 2015 to 2021—and it’s occurred while overall homicides in the city declined. Nationwide, this trend has been racially disproportionate to an extreme degree: In 2021, Black people ages 10 to 24 were almost 14 times more likely to be the victims of a homicide than young white people.

Those confronting this scourge—police, prosecutors, intervention workers—are adamant that social-media instigation helps explain why today’s young people are making up a larger share of the victims. But they’re at a loss as to how to combat this phenomenon. They understand that this new wave of killing demands new solutions—but what are they?

To the extent that online incitement has drawn attention, it’s been focused on rap videos, particularly those featuring drill music, which started in Chicago in the early 2010s and is dominated by explicit baiting of “opps,” or rivals. These videos have been linked to numerous shootings. Often, though, conflict is sparked by more mundane online activity. Teens bait rivals in Instagram posts or are goaded by allies in private chats. On Instagram and Facebook, they livestream incursions into enemy territory and are met by challenges to “drop a pin”—to reveal their location or be deemed a coward. They brandish guns in Snapchat photos or YouTube and TikTok videos, which might provoke an opp to respond—and pressure the person with the gun to actually use it.

In December, I met 21-year-old Brandon Olivieri at the state prison in Houtzdale, Pennsylvania, where he is serving time for murder. In 2017, Olivieri says, he had a run-in with other teens in South Philadelphia after he tried to sell marijuana on their turf. Later, in a private Instagram chat for Olivieri and his friends, someone posted a picture of a silver .45-caliber pistol. Then another member, Nicholas Torelli, posted a picture of cat feces on the sidewalk, with the caption “Brandon took a shit on opp territory.” It was a joke, but the conversation quickly turned aggressive. Later that day, Olivieri asked Torelli to drop an image of their opponents into the chat, so everyone could see what they looked like. Torelli complied, and, according to court records, Olivieri replied that he would “pop all of them.”

When Olivieri, Torelli, and two friends encountered four of their opponents later that month, there were heated words, a struggle, and three gunshots from the silver pistol. One bullet struck Caleer Miller, a member of Olivieri’s group. Another hit Salvatore DiNubile, in the other crew. Both died; they were 16. Olivieri was convicted of first-degree murder in DiNubile’s death and third-degree murder in Miller’s. (Torelli testified against Olivieri and was not charged.) Olivieri was sentenced to 37 years to life.

DiNubile’s father, also named Salvatore, believes the ability to share threats online encouraged Olivieri and his friends to make them; having made them, they felt compelled to follow through. “You said you were gonna do this guy. Here’s your chance,” he told me. “You try to live up to this gangster mentality that he’s self-created.” Olivieri maintains his innocence and says that he wasn’t the one who fired the fatal shots, but he agreed that he and his friends often hyped one another up by making boasts online. “It’s what we call pump-faking,” he explained.

Last year, as the number of juvenile shooting victims in Washington, D.C., climbed toward triple digits, the city’s Peace Academy, which trains community members in violence prevention, held a Zoom session dedicated to social media. Ameen Beale of the D.C. Attorney General’s Office shared his screen to display a sequence typical of online flare-ups culminating in a fatality.

The presentation started with a photo, posted to Instagram in 2019, showing the local rapper AhkDaClicka on the Metro; the caption mocked him for being caught there, without a gun, by adversaries. Then came a screenshot of private messages between AhkDaClicka and a rival rapper named Walkdown Will that the latter posted derisively on Instagram Live. Next, an Instagram Story from AhkDaClicka insulting another rapper who had allegedly been present at the Metro run-in, and a YouTube video of AhkDaClicka rapping about the incident, including the line “Just give me a Glock and point me to the opps.” Soon afterward, in January 2020, AhkDaClicka was fatally shot. He was 18; his real name was Malick Cisse. That May, police arrested Walkdown Will—William Whitaker, also 18. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last October.

Beale’s presentation left some participants dumbfounded. “I cannot believe the level of immaturity and stupidity that’s become the norm,” one wrote in the chat. Another asked the question looming over the session: Had anyone in the city’s violence-prevention realm asked the social-media companies to limit inflammatory content?

“I don’t think we’ve made much progress,” Beale admitted. When the city had sought to have posts removed, he said, the companies had rebuffed its pleas with vague arguments about free speech. Even if social-media platforms did remove a post, 20 people could already have shared it with hundreds or thousands more. And given the pace of online life, you might spend five years trying to block harmful content on one platform, only for all the activity to migrate to another.

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]

I asked a spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, about the AhkDaClicka video with the line about the Glock, as well as another video posted last summer, titled “Pull Da Plug.” It showed a Louisville, Kentucky, rapper and about a dozen other young men apparently celebrating a shooting that had left a man on life support (he later died). The head of the Louisville violence-prevention agency had told me that the victim’s family asked Google to remove the video, but it stayed up, collecting more than 15,000 views. The spokesperson, Jack Malon, told me the company generally had a “pretty high threshold” for determining that music videos were inciting violence, in part because company policy allows exceptions for artistic content.

My conversations with Malon and his counterparts at Snap and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) left me with the impression that social-media platforms have given relatively little thought to their role in fueling routine gun violence, compared with the higher-profile debate over censoring incendiary political speech. Meta pointed me to its “community standards,” which are full of gray-area statements such as “We also try to consider the language and context in order to distinguish casual statements from content that constitutes a credible threat to public or personal safety.” Snap argued that its platform was more benign than others, because posts are designed to disappear and are viewed primarily by one’s friends. I also reached out to TikTok, but the company didn’t respond.

Communities, meanwhile, have been left to fend for themselves. But violence-prevention groups are dominated by middle-aged men who grew up in the pre-smartphone era; they’re more comfortable intervening in person than deciphering threats on TikTok. Before the pandemic, an intern at Pittsburgh’s main anti-violence organization scanned social-media posts by young people considered at risk of becoming involved in conflicts. The Reverend Cornell Jones, the city government’s liaison to violence-prevention groups, told me that the intern had once detected a feud brewing online among teenagers, some of whom had acquired firearms. Jones brought in the participants and their mothers and defused the situation. Then the intern left town for law school and the organization reverted to the ad hoc methods that are more typical for such groups. “If you’re not monitoring social media, you’re wondering why 1,000 people are suddenly downtown fighting,” Jones said ruefully. In early July, a shooting at a block party in Baltimore validated his concern: Though the event had been discussed widely on social media, no police officers were on hand; later, a video circulated of a teenager showing off what appeared to be a gun at the party. The shooting left two dead and 28 others wounded.

A decade ago, Desmond Upton Patton, a professor of social policy, communications, and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, got the first of several grants to study what he called “internet banging.” His research team co-designed algorithms with a team at Columbia University to analyze language, images, and even emoji on Twitter and identify users at risk of harming themselves or others. The algorithms showed promise in identifying escalating online disputes. But he never allowed their use, worried about their resemblance to police surveillance efforts that had enabled profiling more than prevention. “Perhaps there is a smarter person who can figure out how to do it ethically,” he said to me.

For now, the system is failing to anticipate violence—and even, quite often, to convict people whose social-media feeds incriminate them. In May, three teens were tried for the murders of Jarell Jackson and Shahjahan McCaskill in Philadelphia. At the time of the shooting, two were 17 and the third was 16. Social-media activity formed a key part of the prosecutors’ evidence: Instagram posts and video feeds showed the three defendants driving around in a black SUV seemingly identical to the one that had pulled up alongside Jackson’s car. Other posts showed two of them holding a gun that matched the description of one used in the shooting. After a day of deliberations, the jury acquitted them of murder, finding two of the defendants guilty only of weapons charges. The verdict left the victims’ families reeling. “For me and my family, [the trial] was like a seven-day funeral,” Monique Jackson, Jarell’s mother, told me. Afterward, the detective who had investigated the murders speculated to her that jurors on such cases often struggle to grasp the basic mechanics of social media and how essential it is to the interactions of young people. As Patton put it to me, “What we underestimate time and time again is that social media isn’t virtual versus real life. This is life.”

This article has been updated to clarify YouTube’s policy for determining which videos are removed for inciting violence.

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and ProPublica. It appears in the September 2023 print edition with the headline “Killer Apps.”

Zak Podmore did not bring down a corrupt mayor. He did not discover secret torture sites or expose abuses by a powerful religious institution. But there was something about this one article he wrote as a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune in 2019 that changed my conception of the value of local news.

Podmore, then a staff journalist for the Tribune and a corps member of Report for America, a nonprofit I co-founded, published a story revealing that San Juan County, Utah, had paid a single law firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees. Among other things, Podmore found that the firm had overcharged the county, the poorest in the state, by $109,500. Spurred by his story, the firm paid the money back. Perhaps because it didn’t involve billions of dollars, but rather a more imaginable number, it struck me: In one story, Podmore had retrieved for the county a sum that was triple his annual salary.

[From the November 2021 Issue: A secretive hedge fund is gutting newsrooms]

You’ve probably read about the collapse of local news over the past two decades. On average, two newspapers close each week. Some 1,800 communities that used to have local news now don’t. Many of the papers still hanging on are forced to make do with skeleton staffs as their owners, often private-equity firms, seek to cut costs. The number of newspaper newsroom employees dropped by 57 percent from 2008 to 2020, according to a Pew Research study, leading to thousands of “ghost newspapers” that barely cover their community.

For the past 15 years, I have been part of an effort to reverse this trend. That means I’ve grown used to talking about the threat that news deserts pose to American democracy. After all, the whole concept of democratic self-government depends on the people knowing what public officials are up to. That’s impossible without a watchdog press. Researchers have linked the decline of local news to decreased voter participation and higher rates of corruption, along with increased polarization and more ideologically extreme elected officials. At this point, I can make high-minded speeches about this stuff in my sleep, with Thomas Jefferson quotes and everything. Recently, however, I’ve come to realize that I have been ignoring a less lofty but perhaps more persuasive argument: Funding local news would more than pay for itself.

Unlike other seemingly intractable problems, the demise of local news wouldn’t cost very much money to reverse. Journalists are not particularly well compensated. Assuming an average salary of $60,000 (generous by industry standards), it would cost only about $1.5 billion a year to sustain 25,000 local-reporter positions, a rough estimate of the number that have disappeared nationwide over the past two decades. That’s two-hundredths of a percent of federal spending in 2022. I personally think this would be an amount well worth sacrificing to save American democracy. But the amazing thing is that it wouldn’t really be a sacrifice at all. If more public or philanthropic money were directed toward sustaining local news, it would most likely produce financial benefits many times greater than the cost.

What do government officials do when no one’s watching? Often, they enrich themselves or their allies at the taxpayers’ expense. In the 2000s, some years after its local paper shut down, the city of Bell, California, a low-income, overwhelmingly Latino community, raised the pay of the city manager to $787,637 and that of the police chief to $457,000. The Los Angeles Times eventually exposed the graft, and several city officials ended up in prison. Prosecutors accused them of costing taxpayers at least $5.5 million through their inflated salaries. These salaries were approved at municipal meetings, which is to say that if even one reporter (say, with a salary of $60,000) had been in attendance, the city might have saved millions of dollars.  

Sometimes the work of journalists prompts government investigations into the private sector, which, in turn, produce fines that go into the public’s bank account. After the Tampa Bay Times found that a battery recycler was exposing its employees and the surrounding community to high levels of lead and other toxins, regulators fined the company $800,000. A ProPublica investigation into one firm’s questionable mortgage-backed securities prompted investigations by the Security and Exchange Commission, which ultimately assessed $435 million in fines. A review of more than 12,000 entries in the Investigative Reporters and Editors Awards found that about one in 10 triggered fines from the government, and twice as many prompted audits.

In other cases, local-news organizations return money directly to consumers by forcing better behavior from private institutions. MLK50, a local newsroom in Memphis, teamed up with ProPublica to report that Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare had sued more than 8,300 people, many of them poor, for unpaid hospital bills. In response, the faith-based institution erased nearly $12 million in debt.

Of course, most journalism does not convert quite so immediately into cash on hand. The impacts may be enormous but indirect. One study of toxic emissions at 40,000 plants found that when newspapers reported on pollution, emissions declined by 29 percent compared with plants that were not covered. The study did not track the ripple effects, but it stands to reason that residents in the less polluted areas would have fewer health problems, which in turn would translate to lower medical costs and less lost work time. Another study, by the scholars Pengjie Gao, Chang Lee, and Dermot Murphy, looked at bond offerings in communities with and without local news from 1996 to 2015. It concluded that for each bond offering, the borrowing costs were five to 11 basis points higher in the less covered communities. That translated to additional costs of $650,000 an issue, on average.

[Amanda Ripley: Can the news be fixed?]

One academic tried to track the economic effects even further downstream. In his book Democracy’s Detectives: The Economics of Investigative Journalism, the Stanford professor James Hamilton looked at a series by KCBS in Los Angeles that uncovered a flawed restaurant-inspection program. The exposé prompted L.A. County to require restaurants to display their inspection scores, which in turn led to a 13.3 percent drop in L.A. County hospital admissions for food poisoning. Hamilton estimated a savings of about $148,000. In another case study, Hamilton analyzed a series by the Raleigh News & Observer that found that, because the state criminal-justice system didn’t adequately keep track of those under supervision, 580 people on probation in North Carolina killed someone from 2000 to 2008. After the state implemented reforms, murders committed by people on probation declined. Applying the statistical “value of human life” used by the U.S. Department of Transportation, Hamilton concluded that society saved about $62 million in just the first year after the policy changes. The series cost only about $200,000 to produce.

Ideally, investment in local news would come from the federal government, which has more freedom to think long-term than cash-strapped states and municipalities do. The Rebuild Local News coalition, of which I am president, supports legislation that would provide a refundable tax credit for news organizations that employ local reporters, and a tax break for small businesses that advertise in local news. A new version of the bill was just introduced in the House of Representatives by the Republican Claudia Tenney and the Democrat Suzan DelBene. Civic-minded philanthropists focused on high-impact donations should also put money into local news, given the likely societal returns. It’s impossible to quantify exactly how much money would be generated for government and consumers by restoring the health of local news. But it’s nearly as hard to deny that the investment would pay off handsomely. And the saving-democracy part? Well, that’s just gravy.