The U.S. government faces a dilemma. Starlink, a private satellite venture devised and controlled by Elon Musk, offers capabilities that no government or other company can match. Its innovations are the fruit of Musk’s drive and ambitions. But they have become enmeshed with American foreign and national-security policy, and Musk is widely seen as an erratic leader who can’t be trusted with the country’s security needs. In other words, the United States has urgent uses for Starlink’s technology—but not for the freewheeling foreign-policy impulses of its creator.

The conundrum is substantially new for Washington. During World War I, wealthy industrialists, such as Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan, poured considerable resources into the American war effort: Ford’s factories produced boats, trucks, and artillery for military use; Morgan lent money. After the war, John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded the League of Nations. But Musk is doing something different. He supplies his product directly to foreign countries, and he retains personal control over which countries can obtain his equipment and how they can use it. That discretion has military and political implications. As one U.S. defense official admitted to The New Yorker, “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces.”

The dilemma is currently clearest in Ukraine. Starlink satellites, which Musk generously supplied at the start of the conflict so that Ukrainians would not lose internet access, have allowed for satellite-guided drones to help the Ukrainian military observe battlefield movements and target precision missiles. Experts describe Starlink’s military advantage as akin to providing an “Uber for howitzers.” But its disadvantage is Musk’s outsize role in determining the conduct of the war. That influence has come under scrutiny in recent days, with the release of excerpts from a forthcoming biography that highlight Musk’s mercurial decision making in Ukraine.

[Read: Demon mode activated]

Musk’s assent is required to maintain satellite internet connectivity in the country, and for reasons of his own, he has refused it near Crimea and imposed other restrictions that limit where Starlink services are available to Ukrainian forces. He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that he felt responsible for the offensive operations Starlink might enable, and that he had spoken with the Russian ambassador about how Moscow might react to them. At significant junctures during Ukrainian offensive operations, Starlink communication devices have experienced mysterious “outages.” The outages became enough of a problem that in June, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin specially negotiated the purchase of 400 to 500 new Starlink terminals that the Defense Department would directly control for use by Ukrainian forces.

The concerns about relying on Musk don’t end with Ukraine or even with questions of temperament. Musk’s commercial holdings could expose Washington to unwanted entanglements. Take, for example, his ownership of Tesla, which has a large factory and market presence in China. In the event of an invasion of Taiwan, would Musk willingly provide Starlink terminals to Taiwanese forces—at the behest of the United States—and take huge financial losses as a result? Last October, Musk told the Financial Times that China had already pressured him about Starlink, seeking “assurances” that he will not give satellite internet to Chinese citizens. He did not make clear in the interview how he responded, but Starlink was then and remains unavailable in China.

So what is the U.S. government to do about its own entanglement with Musk? One idea that experts have floated is to invoke the Defense Production Act, which authorizes the president to direct private companies to prioritize fulfilling orders from the federal government. The Pentagon estimates that it already uses DPA authority to place roughly 300,000 orders a year for various equipment items. Using it to regularize deliveries from Starlink would be relatively straightforward and could ensure a continuous flow of devices and connectivity for Ukraine’s forces. The U.S. government could even add language to the contract mandating that decisions to turn connectivity on or off would reside with public officials and not Musk.

But what if Musk decided to contest the terms of the contract? What if his factories suddenly faced supply “shortages” affecting delivery rates of crucial devices? The DPA could serve as a hedge against Musk’s impulses, but it would not be a full guarantee against disruptions.

If the government wanted to get really aggressive, it could nationalize Starlink, taking effective control over the company’s operations and removing Musk as its head. As extreme as this scenario sounds, the U.S. government has actually nationalized corporations many times in its history: During World Wars I and II, the government nationalized railways, coal mines, trucking operators, telegraph lines, and even the gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States nationalized the airport-security industry.

But past government takeovers nearly all took place under conditions of war or financial crisis. Today, no national crisis equivalent to the 9/11 attacks can provide political cover for such a move. And Musk would be sure to fight back: He built Starlink from scratch, and the company is deeply personal to him. A government takeover would be acrimonious, politically messy, and not necessarily successful.

More likely, it would be counterproductive: As a private company, Starlink can provide products that assist Ukrainian forces even while claiming that it’s simply offering a service and not taking sides. That posture hasn’t prevented Moscow from testing weapons to sabotage Starlink, nor has it stopped Beijing from developing an alternate satellite network. But the company’s independence has likely deterred U.S. rivals from targeting its infrastructure for destruction. Nationalization would change this equation and send the message that Starlink is an instrument of American power and should be treated as such.

[Read: What Russia got by scaring Elon Musk]

So if Starlink has to remain independent—but needs to be less of a wild card for national security—the government’s best bet may be to negotiate one or several agreements with Starlink to ensure its compliance with U.S. interests. Starlink could then act as something more like a traditional military-contracting company. The contracts could build in provisions stipulating that in the event of a crisis, Starlink’s regular operations would be suspended, and all manufacturing and distribution decisions would run through U.S. regulators.

Musk might find such a deal attractive. His company would get long-term government funding and a reputational boost. But government contracts also come with restrictions that would likely irk him over time—limitations on which other clients Starlink could sell to, for example. He might also balk at the implications for his other businesses, such as Tesla, in foreign markets. If he soured on the arrangement, he could terminate the contract or undermine the effectiveness of his product—for example, by slow-walking software updates or declining to invest in upgrades.

The only sustainable solution to the problem of Elon Musk is for the American market to produce alternatives to Starlink. But even here, the obstacles are legion. Musk was able to turbocharge Starlink in part because he used rockets from his adjoining company, SpaceX, to deliver thousands of satellites into space. A competitor would have to not only match Starlink’s technical innovation but also secure enough rockets to get masses of satellites into orbit. And because satellite-based networks work better the more devices come online, a rival company’s service would lag behind Starlink’s for a long period of time. So far, the efforts of would-be competitors have been underwhelming. Amazon was reportedly preparing to launch its very first satellites in May but had to put the effort on hold because of rocket testing problems.

A viable Starlink competitor may be a long way off, but U.S. national security requires the pursuit of one. The government should encourage competition in the satellite market by offering subsidies and commercial tax breaks, among other incentives, because in the long run, only diversification will alleviate pressure on the United States and its allies to conform to Musk’s whims. With a choice of providers, the United States—or Ukraine, for that matter—could choose which company it wished to contract with, and redundancies could fill the gap in the case of an unexpected supply shortage or a snag in one company’s production line.

Elon Musk’s monopoly on satellite internet technology is the product of an original idea—launching a great many low-orbiting satellites in place of a distant, high-orbiting few— and a big gamble he made with his own capital. The venture has brought him undue influence over national-security affairs that the U.S. government can’t possibly tolerate. The surest way to curtail it is to make sure he isn’t the only one innovating or launching satellites into space.

In 2019, a mnemonic began to circulate on the internet: “If the Naomi be Klein / you’re doing just fine / If the Naomi be Wolf / Oh, buddy. Ooooof.” The rhyme recognized one of the most puzzling intellectual journeys of recent times—Naomi Wolf’s descent into conspiracism—and the collateral damage it was inflicting on the Canadian climate activist and anti-capitalist Naomi Klein.

Until recently, Naomi Wolf was best known for her 1990s feminist blockbuster The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, which argued that the tyranny of grooming standards—all that plucking and waxing—was a form of backlash against women’s rights. But she is now one of America’s most prolific conspiracy theorists, boasting on her Twitter profile of being “deplatformed 7 times and still right.” She has claimed that vaccines are a “software platform” that can “receive ‘uploads’ ” and is mildly obsessed with the idea that many clouds aren’t real, but are instead evidence of “geoengineered skies.” Although Wolf has largely disappeared from the mainstream media, she is now a favored guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room.

All of this is particularly bad news for Klein, for the simple reason that people keep mistaking the two women for each other. Back in 2011, when she first noticed the confusion—from inside a bathroom stall, she heard two women complain that “Naomi Klein” didn’t understand the demands of the Occupy movement—this was merely embarrassing. The movement sprang from Klein’s part of the left, and in October of that year she was invited to speak to Occupy New York. Was it their shared first name, their Jewishness, or their brown hair with blond highlights? Even their partners’ names were similar: Avram Lewis and Avram Ludwig. Klein was struck that both had experienced rejection from their peer groups (in her case, by fellow students when she first criticized Israel in the college newspaper).

Klein had once admired The Beauty Myth, but she realized to her horror that Wolf had drifted from feminist criticism to broader social polemics. When she picked up Wolf’s 2007 book, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, her own book, out the same year, came to mind. “I felt like I was reading a parody of The Shock Doctrine, one with all the facts and evidence carefully removed.” To Klein, the situation began to seem sinister, even threatening. She was being eaten alive. “Other Naomi—that is how I refer to her now,” Klein writes at the beginning of her new book, Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. “A person whom so many others appear to find indistinguishable from me. A person who does many extreme things that cause strangers to chastise me or thank me or express their pity for me.”

The confusion was particularly galling because No Logo (1999), Klein’s breakout work, was a manifesto against branding. And yet here she was, feeling an urgent need to protect her own personal brand from this interloper. Klein asserts that she didn’t want to write Doppelganger—“not with the literal and metaphorical fires roiling our planet,” she confesses with a hint of pomposity—but found herself ever more obsessed by Wolf’s conspiracist turn. How do you go from liberal darling to War Room regular within a decade?

Like Klein, I loved The Beauty Myth as a young woman, and then largely forgot about Wolf until 2010, when Julian Assange was arrested for alleged sex offenses (the charges were later dropped), and she claimed that Interpol was acting as “the world’s dating police.” Two years later, she published Vagina: A New Biography, which mixed sober accounts of rape as a weapon of war with a quest to cure her midlife sexual dysfunction through “yoni massages” and activating “the Goddess array.” In one truly deranged scene, a friend hosts a party at his loft and serves pasta shaped like vulvae, alongside salmon and sausages. The violent intermingling of genital-coded food overwhelms Wolf, who experiences it as an insult to womanhood in general and her own vagina in particular, and suffers writer’s block for the next six months. (I suspect that the friend was just trying to get into the spirit of Wolf’s writing project.) I remember beginning to wonder around this time whether Wolf might be a natural conspiracy theorist who had merely lucked into writing about one conspiracy—the patriarchy—that happened to be true.

Her final exile from the mainstream can probably be dated to 2019, when she was humiliated in a live radio interview during the rollout of her book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. She had claimed that gay men in Victorian England were regularly executed for sodomy, but the BBC host Matthew Sweet noted that the phrase death recorded in the archives meant that the sentence had been commuted, rather than carried out. It was a grade A howler, and it marked open season on her for all previous offenses against evidence and logical consistency. The New York Times review of Outrages referred to “Naomi Wolf’s long, ludicrous career.” In the U.K., the publisher promised changes to future editions, and the release of the U.S. edition was canceled outright.

Klein dwells on this incident in Doppelganger, and rightly so: “If you want an origin story, an event when Wolf’s future flip to the pseudo-populist right was locked in, it was probably that moment, live on the BBC, getting caught—and then getting shamed, getting mocked, and getting pulped.” If the intelligentsia wouldn’t lionize Wolf, then the Bannonite right would: She could enter a world where mistakes don’t matter, no one feels shame, and fact-checkers are derided as finger-wagging elitists.

“These people don’t disappear just because we can no longer see them,” Klein reminds any fellow leftists who might be enthusiastic about public humiliation as a weapon against the right. Denied access to the mainstream media, the ostracized will be welcomed on One America News Network and Newsmax, or social-media sites such as Rumble, Gettr, Gab, Truth Social, and Elon Musk’s new all-crazy-all-the-time reincarnation of Twitter as X. On podcasts, the entire heterodox space revels in “just asking questions”—and then not caring about the peer-reviewed answers. By escaping to what Klein calls the “Mirror World,” Wolf might have lost cultural capital, but she has not lost an audience.

[Helen Lewis: Why so many conservatives feel like losers]

Klein notes that this world is particularly hospitable to those who can blend personal and social grievances into an appealing populist message—I am despised by the pointy-heads, just as you are. She ventures “a kind of equation for leftists and liberals crossing over to the authoritarian right that goes something like this: Narcissism (Grandiosity) + Social media addiction + Midlife crisis ÷ Public shaming = Right wing meltdown.” She is inclined to downplay “that bit of math,” though, and feels uncomfortable putting Wolf on the couch. Nonetheless, I’m struck by how narcissism (in the ubiquitous lay sense of the term) is key to understanding conspiracy-theorist influencers and their followers. If you feel disrespected and overlooked in everyday life, then being flattered with the idea that you’re a special person with secret knowledge must be appealing.

Klein’s real interest, as you might expect from her previous work, tends more toward sociology than psychology. Her doppelgänger isn’t an opportunist or a con artist, Klein decides, but a genuine believer—even if those beliefs have the happy side effect of garnering her attention and praise. But what about the culture that has enabled her to thrive?

At first, I thought what I was seeing in my doppelganger’s world was mostly grifting unbound. Over time, though, I started to get the distinct impression that I was also witnessing a new and dangerous political formation find itself in real time: its alliances, worldview, slogans, enemies, code words, and no-go zones—and, most of all, its ground game for taking power.

To explore this ambitious agenda, the book ranges widely and sometimes tangentially. At one point, Klein finds herself listening to hours of War Room, hosted by a man who has built a dark empire of profitable half-truths. Why does Klein find Bannon so compelling? Here Doppelganger takes a startling turn. The answer is that, quite simply, game recognizes game. Klein’s cohort on the left attacks Big Pharma profits, worries about “surveillance capitalism,” and sees Davos and the G7 as a cozy cabal exploiting the poor. Understandably, she hears Other Naomi talk with Bannon about vaccine manufacturers’ profits, rail against Big Tech’s power to control us, and make the case that Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum has untold secret power, and she can’t help noting some underlying similarities. When Bannon criticizes MSNBC and CNN for running shows sponsored by Pfizer, telling his audience that this is evidence of rule “by the wealthy, for the wealthy, against you,” Klein writes, “it strikes me that he sounds like Noam Chomsky. Or Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader known for his EAT THE RICH jacket. Or, for that matter, me.”

[From the July/August 2022 issue: Steve Bannon, American Rasputin]

This is Doppelganger at its best, acknowledging the traits that make us all susceptible to manipulation. In a 2008 New Yorker profile of Klein, her husband described her as a “pattern recognizer,” adding: “Some people feel that she’s bent examples to fit the thesis. But her great strength is helping people recognize patterns in the world, because that’s the fundamental first step toward changing things.” Of course, overactive pattern recognition is also the essence of conspiracism, and a decade and a half later, Klein expresses more caution about her superpower. When 9/11 truthers turn up at her events—drawn perhaps by her criticism in The Shock Doctrine of George W. Bush’s response to the tragedy—their presence leads her to conclude “that the line between unsupported conspiracy claims and reliable investigative research is neither as firm nor as stable as many of us would like to believe.”

We live in a world where the U.S. government has done outlandish stuff: The Tuskegee experiment, MK-Ultra, Iran-Contra, and Watergate are all conspiracies that diligent journalism proved to be true. QAnon’s visions of Hollywood child-sex rings might be a mirage, but the Catholic Church’s abuse of children in Boston was all too real—and uncovering it won The Boston Globe a Pulitzer Prize. Klein worries about whether a political movement can generate mass appeal without resorting to populism, and about how to stop her criticisms of elite power from being co-opted by her opponents and distorted into attacks on the marginalized.

[Read: A 2014 interview with Naomi Klein about climate politics ]

However, Klein’s (correct) diagnosis of American conspiracism as a primarily right-wing pathology prevents her from fully acknowledging the degree to which it has sometimes infected her own allies and idols. In Doppelganger, Klein notes that anti-Semitism has served as “the socialism of fools”—stirred up to deflect popular anger away from the elite—but she does not discuss the anti-Jewish bigotry in the British Labour Party under its former leader Jeremy Corbyn, whom she endorsed in the 2019 election. (Corbyn once praised a mural of hook-nosed bankers counting money on a table held up by Black people, and his supporters suggested that his critics were Israeli stooges.) The party has since apologized for not taking anti-Semitism seriously enough.

At times, this can be a frustrating book. Near the end, Klein says she requested an interview with Wolf, promising that it would be “a respectful debate” about their political disagreements. She also hoped to remind Wolf of their original meeting, more than three decades earlier—when Wolf, then 28, captivated the 20-year-old Klein, showing her the possibilities of what a female author could be. But Wolf never responded to the request, and the doppelgängers have not met face-to-face since then.

Still, Klein emerges with a sense of resolution. She writes that the confusion between the two of them has lately died down, now that Other Naomi has become an “unmistakable phenomenon unto herself.” Even better, the situation has introduced “a hefty dose of ridiculousness into the seriousness with which I once took my public persona.” Not that the zealous Klein has disappeared: The next few pages are a paean to collective organizing, worker solidarity, and “cities in the grips of revolutionary fervor.”

Doppelganger is least interesting when Klein returns to her comfort zone, but her brutally honest forays into self-examination are fascinating. The book is also a welcome antidote to the canceling reflex of our moment and a bracing venture across ideological lines. Klein successfully makes the case that the American left is more tethered to reality than the right—not because it is composed of smarter or better people, but because it has not lost touch with the mechanisms, such as scientific peer review and media pluralism, that act as a check on our worst instincts. Exposed to many of the same forces as her conspiracist doppelgänger—fame, cancellation, trauma, COVID isolation—this Naomi stayed fine. That has to offer us some hope.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Other Naomi.”

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Sam Bankman-Fried won people over through his reputation as a civically minded progressive. Last week, an FTX executive who cut a different figure—that of a “budding Republican mega-donor”—pleaded guilty to two charges ahead of his former boss’s trial.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The 9/11 speech that was never delivered Will anyone ever make sense of Elon Musk? Beware the false prophets of war. Never acquire clothes the same way again.

A Contrasting Figure

Last May, Sam Bankman-Fried said that he could spend up to a billion dollars supporting candidates and causes through the 2024 presidential election. He later walked back the claim, calling it “a dumb quote,” but the suggestion, and the flurry of press around it, captured a key part of the image that Bankman-Fried had cultivated. SBF made himself known as a political heavyweight—he was a known donor on the political left—and as an avatar of the effective-altruism philanthropic movement, to which he also donated millions. Central to FTX’s growth, and Bankman-Fried’s popularity, was his public face, and the ideals he said he stood for.

But last week’s guilty plea from Ryan Salame, a lesser-known FTX executive, is a reminder of one of the many truths that have since come out about Bankman-Fried: His donations were likely not based solely on the best interests of humanity but also on the best interests of crypto. In addition to his publicized donations to Democrats, he also marshaled millions of dollars to boost Republican candidates who seemed sympathetic to crypto-related causes. He has admitted, since the collapse of FTX, that most of his Republican donations were not linked to him, for cynical reputational reasons: “Reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to Republicans,” he told the crypto content creator Tiffany Fong in November. Bankman-Fried’s fingerprints weren’t always apparent on Republican donations, but his lieutenant Salame’s often were. Salame, whose name is pronounced “Salem,” last week became the fourth top FTX executive to plead guilty, including to a charge of violating campaign-finance law. Prosecutors alleged that he made millions of dollars of political donations—many of which were to Republicans—under the direction of Bankman-Fried.

Salame was public about his Republican affiliations. While Bankman-Fried hobnobbed on the left, Salame leaned into his identity as a “budding Republican mega-donor,” as the Washington Examiner called him last September. He donated millions of dollars under his own name, and even helped his girlfriend run as a Republican for a congressional seat on Long Island (she lost in the primary).

It’s not totally clear whether Salame is truly passionate about Republican political causes or if he was simply emerging as a Republican donor out of loyalty to his boss (and his girlfriend). He has reportedly said that he was not especially interested in politics, and that he was getting more involved at the encouragement of others at FTX. In a charging document, prosecutors surfaced messages that Salame wrote, saying that the purpose of donations was to “weed out anti crypto dems for pro crypto dems and anti crypto repubs for pro crypto repubs” In other words, it seems that he and his involved colleagues hoped to use donations to elevate politicians sympathetic to the crypto business, regardless of party. (Jason Linder, a lawyer for Salame, did not immediately respond to my request for comment, though he said in a statement last week that “Ryan looks forward to putting this chapter behind him and moving forward with his life.”)

In contrast to his compatriots, who claimed to be getting rich in order to give back and who were involved with effective altruism, Salame reportedly spoke about working in crypto simply to get rich. Salame clearly enjoyed the trappings that the wealth he gained in his 20s (he is now 30) afforded him. He has a reputation for enjoying fancy cars and private planes. His taste is apparent in his accessories: I noticed that in a widely circulated portrait, he is wearing what looks like a Cartier Juste un Clou nail bracelet in white gold. These status-symbol bracelets start around $8,500. Last week, Salame arrived in court to plead guilty wearing orange-and-blue socks emblazoned with bitcoin logos. Those may not have been pricey, but they certainly showed confidence.

In what feels like a poignant—or maybe self-aggrandizing—touch, Salame invested some of his wealth in the restaurants of his home region, the Berkshires. (He grew up in Western Massachusetts and attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.) Salame swooped in with millions during the early days of the pandemic, and by the time he was 28, he owned nearly half of the full-service restaurants in the small town of Lenox, according to The Berkshire Eagle. He was a local boy done good—until FTX cratered. Now Salame must forfeit his interest in one of his key restaurant holdings (along with assets including millions of dollars and a 2021 Porsche) as part of a plea deal.

Whether Salame’s heart is truly in Republican politics or in restaurants or just in socks and personal advancement, he cuts a contrasting figure to those of his fellow former FTX executives, and he may continue on that path. The others who have pleaded guilty—Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, and Gary Wang—have all also agreed to cooperate with the government and to testify against their former boss. Salame has not. (Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges brought against him so far.) This time last year, those executives—Bankman-Fried most of all—were widely seen as responsible adults in a cowboy industry. That the walls have closed in this fast, and that their noble public personas have fully crumbled, remains stunning. Maybe Salame was frankest about his motives all along.

Related:

Sam Bankman-Fried, crypto-Republican? Sam Bankman-Fried pushed one boundary too many.

Today’s News

Kim Jong Un has reportedly departed the North Korean capital for a meeting with Vladimir Putin in his first international trip since the pandemic. The FDA has approved new COVID boosters from Pfizer and Moderna. Rollout is expected to begin later this week. Vietnam has formally raised its diplomatic relationship with the United States to the highest tier, alongside its ties with Russia and China.

Evening Read

‘I Was Responsible for These People’

By Tim Alberta

On the evening of September 4, 2021, one week before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Glenn Vogt stood at the footprint of the North Tower and gazed at the names stamped in bronze. The sun was diving below the buildings across the Hudson River in New Jersey, and though we didn’t realize it, the memorial was shut off to the public. Tourists had been herded behind a rope line some 20 feet away, but we’d walked right past them. As we looked on silently, a security guard approached. “I’m sorry, but the site is closed for tonight,” the man said.

Glenn studied the guard. Then he folded his hands as if in prayer. “Please,” he said. “I was the general manager of Windows on the World, the restaurant that was at the top of this building. These were my employees.”

The man glanced over Glenn’s shoulder. “Which ones?”

Glenn didn’t say anything. Slowly, he turned and swept his open palm across the air, demonstrating the scale of the devastation: All 79 names were grouped together. The guard closed his eyes. “Take as much time as you need,” he said softly.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How Chile won back its democracy Elon Musk let Russia scare him. Book publishing has a Toys ‘R’ Us problem.

Photos

More than 2,600 people were killed and thousands of others were injured by a powerful earthquake in Morocco this past weekend. Rescue workers are reacting to find survivors. Our photo editor Alan Taylor compiled images of the earthquake’s aftermath.

Culture Break

Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Source: Randy Beacham / Alamy.

Read. “The Origin Revisited,” a new poem by Ada Limón.

“To enter here is to enter / magnitude, to feel an ecstatic somethingness, / a nothingness of your own name.”

Watch. Daisy Jones and the Six, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is an absolute joy.

P.S.

I’ll leave you with a completely unrelated recommendation: I read the most fascinating article in T magazine yesterday about vanilla. Ligaya Mishan explores how the flavor, produced by beans that are actually incredibly rich and pungent, became synonymous with blandness. This story of vanilla spans continents, biosynthesis, and taste buds—and it’s beautifully written. Describing a stalk of the plant, Mishan writes, “It lies on my desk, skinny as a twig, with a little curling hook at one end, like a fossilized crochet needle, rough yet pliant to the touch. I am trying to write but the room is possessed by that scent, a summons of honeysuckle, sun-fat figs and red wine, of the dank sweetness of soil when the rain has soaked through it.”

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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