“Oh,” I slacked my Atlantic colleagues earlier this week, beneath a screenshot of a pop-up note that Slack, the group-chat software we use, had presented to me moments earlier. “A fresh, more focused Slack,” it promised, or threatened. On my screen, the program’s interface was suddenly a Grimace-purple color. I sensed doom in this software update.

Slowly, over the days that followed, complaints about the new Slack started trickling into our chats. “folks I cannot handle this new version of slack and will be taking the rest of the month off,” one Atlantic staffer said. “I am reverting to sending physical memos on personal letterhead,” posted another. “all my slacks are: I hate the new slack,” slacked Adrienne LaFrance, the magazine’s executive editor. (Later on, she messaged me separately to see if I would write about Slack’s terrible new format.)

All change is bad when you don’t think you need it. But this change felt distinctive because it laid bare a difficult fact: Office work is now more like social media than like office work.

The new Slack is not, in fact, “more focused.” It adds a dedicated “Activity” tab, which catalogs every user’s movement in your vicinity on the software, along with a numeral that counts them up: mentions, emoji reactions, replies, thread replies, app notices. These are tallied separately from notifications on the “Home” tab, which light up channels and DMs, and “Unreads,” a collection of every single post I have not yet seen but apparently ought to.

The overwhelm associated with contemporary white-collar work is legendary. Idleness was once the ultimate goal of the rich and powerful, but over time, even they would embrace workism. Being endlessly on call produces misery but also signals consequence. “How are things?” a colleague from another department asks in the workplace kitchen. “Oh, busy,” you say. The rat race is a source of meaning. Without you, the whole place would fall apart! (It wouldn’t.)

[Read: Slackers of the world, unite!]

Technology has strengthened this illusion. The ring-ring-ring of an office, the ping-ping-ping of arriving emails, the ability to access those messages from home (or the train, or the toilet): All of these innovations converged on the same effect. Office chat software is nothing new—I used ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger at work in the 1990s. But Slack offered a distinctive product at an opportune time, emerging from the corpse of a failed video game just as the internet took over everyday life. It exuded a “casual, effortless culture,” as my colleague Ellen Cushing wrote in 2021, that pervaded companies—especially tech and media companies—during the second Obama administration. Slack was everything that email wasn’t: soulful, fun, energetic, young.

Another flavor of software from that time felt the same way: social media. As the smartphone matured, Twitter and Facebook, as well as Instagram and LinkedIn, buried boredom behind an infinite scroll of content. Email and then blogging had begun that process, but social media massively increased the quantity of posts and posters. To finish drinking from the fire hose was impossible, but dipping into it offered instant gratification—something to love or hate, two emotions that seemed to fuse in life online.

[Read: What Slack does for women]

Social media made individuals into a burlesque of themselves, an “online version” that spoke or acted independently from their whole being. As the private domains of social networks—friends, family, co-workers—grew into the global commons of social media, performance overtook all other goals. Clever quips, suggestive photos, funny memes, viral videos all said whatever they said, but they also fashioned people into online caricatures, constructed or evolved to garner more attention. Eventually, posting became its own end: pursuing likes or shares, growing a following to monetize, transforming into an “influencer” or a “creator”—a professional poster whose medium was social media itself.

From the start, Slack’s hip vibe made it feel more like social media than enterprise chat. It was colorful. You could post emoji. You could create custom emoji for your company, supporting in-jokes and private languages (The Atlantic’s Slack features a phalanx of alt-tacos). At Slack-centric companies, the stream of a popular channel runs as quickly as a social-media feed, posts swimming past, several people are typing. This is work for a generation that thinks that work is or should be like the internet, and vice versa.

But Slack embraces both the light and dark sides of social-media life. A work-chat self now feels distinct from a work self, let alone a whole self. As on social media, the urge to weigh in, react, inveigh—in short, to post—has taken over, whether or not actual work is being facilitated in the process. As on social media, extreme positions proliferate on Slack, with workplace posts reading more like takes than like office talk. Even my Atlantic colleagues’ reactions to Slack’s rebrand seem profoundly overstated, shared because the software and the moment conspired to make them share-worthy.

Slack’s new redesign, with its fresh prods to engage, makes the software feel even more like social media. The interface has always seemed hell-bent on getting you back into the program, even if you’d prefer to do the actual work that your job demands. An icon flags unread posts in brightly colored circles. Channel names are bold until you scroll up and down to clear them. Why pick up the phone when you can do an audio “huddle” inside of a DM? Almost all software wants you to look at it, but Slack, a supposed productivity tool meant to help knowledge workers recover from their email, demands more fixation than email ever did.

So there is a refreshing honesty in the Slack update that my colleagues are lamenting. It admits that work is secondary. Making deals, managing employees, designing products, executing marketing—all of those activities are surely worthwhile pursuits for knowledge workers. But as with all of the great enterprise software that preceded it, one now gets those things done in spite of Slack rather than by means of it. Most important, for the workers using Slack, is using Slack.

Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, was indicted today on three counts of gun-related crimes. Federal prosecutors in Delaware allege that Hunter Biden lied on paperwork when he bought a revolver, saying he did not use illegal substances, and then possessed the pistol while on narcotics.

This is one of two major stories about the younger Biden in the headlines this week. The other relates to his business dealings overseas, which are the focus of an impeachment inquiry against his father launched by House Republicans on Tuesday. Hunter Biden’s legal troubles in Delaware are unrelated to his business, except in one key way: His career would not have been so successful without his surname, and he might not be facing these charges without it, either.

Hunter Biden has not lived a simple, charmed life. In fact, he has encountered a great deal of tragedy. At 2, he survived a car crash that killed his mother and sister. His brother died at just 46, of an aggressive cancer. He has experienced addiction and divorce.

But he has benefited greatly from proximity to his father. He worked for a bank headquartered in Delaware, with close political ties to his senator father. He served in the administration of Bill Clinton, a Democrat like his father. He then worked as a lobbyist in Washington, where his father was an institution. Later, he joined the board of Burisma, a gas company in Ukraine—a country where his father was involved as a statesman—and was paid handsomely despite having no experience in the gas business or the country. Later still, he sold his novice paintings for six-figure prices.

The impeachment inquiry launched into Joe Biden this week seeks to prove that the president himself profited from Hunter’s business dealings, or used the government’s power to aid them. No evidence proving this has yet emerged, though not for lack of trying. What is clear, and has been for some time, is that even without Joe Biden’s involvement, Hunter was trading on his prominent name to enrich himself. As Hunter’s former business partner Devon Archer told a House committee in July, the business was based on “an illusion of access to his father.” (Archer said the elder Biden was not involved in the business.)

It’s nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if your father is vice president. As Sarah Chayes has written in The Atlantic, this behavior is not inherently illegal (though one could break laws in the course of it). Nothing prevents relatives of prominent politicians from cashing in, even if it’s clearly unethical and repellent, as it was here.

Now that Hunter Biden is facing criminal charges, his defenders and allies have cried foul, saying that prosecutors are dealing unfairly with his case. Legal experts have said that the charges against him, both here and in an earlier plea deal that fell apart, seem unusual—the kinds of charges that are seldom brought against individuals, or seldom brought except as part of a larger case. Regardless, his behavior wouldn’t have attracted nearly the scrutiny it has—from the press and perhaps from prosecutors—if he’d been Hunter Johnson.

Assertions that charges like these are unusual are not a denial or a defense. And if you live by the sword, you die by the sword; if you profit from nepotism, you may suffer from it, too.

Ironies abound in this story. As former President Donald Trump complains that he is a victim of selective prosecution for his brazen attempts to defy a federal subpoena, Hunter Biden may actually be experiencing it. Republicans who are usually quick to criticize gun laws for abridging a constitutional right are clamoring to see Hunter Biden punished, while some Democrats who prefer stricter gun laws are dismissing the prosecution as a distraction.

It’s tempting to think that the charges mark the moment when Hunter Biden’s good luck ran out, but the indictment is really a manifestation of the same luck that he’s always had: He’s a Biden and son of one of the country’s most prominent politicians. That has brought him wealth and connections, but the bill is coming due now.

Childhood is the crucible in which our identities and ambitions are forged. It’s when we sing into our hairbrushes and confide in our diaries. It’s when we puzzle out who we are, who we want to be, and how we want to live our lives.

But to be a modern child is to be constantly watched by machines. The more time kids spend online, the more information about them is collected by companies seeking to influence their behavior, in the moment and for decades to come. By the time they’re toddlers, many of today’s children already know how to watch videos, play games, take pictures, and FaceTime their grandparents. By the time they are 10, 42 percent of them have a smartphone. By the time they are 12, nearly half use social media. The internet was already ingrained in children’s lives, but the coronavirus pandemic made it essential for remote learning, connecting with friends, and entertainment. Watching online videos has surged past television as the media activity that kids enjoy the most; children cite YouTube as the one site they wouldn’t want to live without.

[The Atlantic’s Guide to Privacy: Three simple rules for protecting your privacy]

That children need special protections online and everywhere else is obvious. And indeed, under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), web platforms and creators of digital products are required to obtain parental consent before collecting and sharing digital identifiers (such as location, email, and device serial number) that can be traced back to a child under the age of 13.

COPPA was passed in 1998. Compliance is largely voluntary, and evidently spotty. In 2020, when researchers studied 451 apps used by 3- and 4-year-olds, they found that two-thirds collected digital identifiers. Other research suggests that children’s apps contain more third-party trackers than those geared toward adults. And even if an app or product is COPPA compliant, it can still collect highly valuable, potentially identifying information. In today’s hyper-aggregated digital landscape, every nugget of information can easily be stitched together with other information to create a richly detailed dossier that clearly identifies you in particular.

The harvesting process, it’s important to note, tends to be automated and indiscriminate in what information it collects. A company can amass private information about your child even when it doesn’t intend to. In 2021, TikTok rewrote its privacy policy to allow it to gather “voiceprints” and “faceprints”—that is, voice recordings and images of users’ faces, along with all of the identifying information that can be gleaned from them. And we know that at least 18 million of TikTok’s U.S. users are likely age 14 or younger. It’s not difficult to imagine that children would sometimes share sensitive personal information on TikTok, whether TikTok intended to collect that information or not.

You get the picture; it’s bleak. All in all, by the time a child reaches the age of 13, online advertising firms have collected an average of 72 million data points about them. That’s not even considering the degree to which children’s data are shared and their privacy potentially compromised by the people closest to them—sometimes in the form of a grainy sonogram posted to social media before they are even born. As of 2016, the average child in Britain had about 1,500 images of them posted online by the time they hit their fifth birthday.

We typically take it as a given that adults have a right to decide, for ourselves, who is allowed to know our private thoughts, utterances, and actions. Kids have this right too. All human beings need privacy if we are to entertain thoughts, communicate these thoughts with trusted others, and act on these thoughts without fear of interference, judgment, or censure.

[The Atlantic’s Guide to Privacy: Slouching toward ‘Accept All Cookies’]

Young children may not grasp the importance of privacy, but they deserve it, and have a right to it, just the same. As their guardians, parents therefore have the primary responsibility to act on their children’s behalf and secure their privacy interests as best they can on an internet whose regulations don’t meet reality. Parents should protect children from bad actors and steer them toward good practices, and help them understand that once a photograph or piece of information leaves them, it is, in a sense, no longer private.

This means parents should be thoughtful about what they themselves share on social media. It’s helpful here to distinguish between information that’s private and information that isn’t. An example of the latter is your child’s team winning a soccer match, which anyone who attended the match would know; as such, sharing a photo of their match on Instagram or a parent WhatsApp group would be fine. Also helpful is remembering that when you do share private information about your child online, you should do so primarily with your child’s interest in mind. And as children grow older, their capacity to make decisions for themselves also grows. Parents should try to give progressively more weight to the child’s perspective when deciding whether or not to share private information about them. If your 17-year-old asks you not to tell other people which colleges she is applying to, then, even if you believe that crowdsourcing your friends on Facebook could enable you to better assist her with her application, you should probably respect her wishes.

The digital age has opened up new worlds for kids, but it has also threatened their ability to shape the course of their lives. Today’s children are in danger of growing up while having their every move tracked, stored, cataloged, and used by the largest and most powerful companies on Earth. We must protect their ability to grow up on their own terms.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago? Why? Feel free to respond generally or to focus on one particular institution, or more, in your emails.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

In the New York Post, Gerard Baker, the writer, columnist, and former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, previews his new book, American Breakdown: Why We No Longer Trust Our Leaders and Institutions and How We Can Rebuild Confidence. The problem as he sees it:

Congress, the presidency, the FBI, the judiciary, the media, colleges and universities, big business, churches, scientists, technology companies, labor unions, public health leaders. What do all these institutions have in common?

Answer: Americans don’t trust them any more.

In the last 30 years, we have witnessed something unprecedented and perilous to the very survival of American democracy—a collapse in public trust in the nation’s leaders and institutions.

If there is one phenomenon that captures better than anything else what’s gone wrong with America in the last few years it is this: we live in a culture of mistrust.

All the major institutions that have defined and shaped American democracy have witnessed a dramatic decline in the faith and credit Americans place in them in the space of a generation.

Is it any wonder, given how they have behaved? …

This plummeting social trust is doing irreparable damage to the bonds that tie Americans together.

More Than a Literary Inspiration

In The Atlantic, Clint Smith has a fascinating piece about the life of Josiah Henson, who was cited by Harriet Beecher Stowe as the inspiration for the titular character of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Smith argues that being so remembered doesn’t do justice to the man:

I first learned about Henson’s remarkable life a year or so ago, as I was doing research for a different story. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him sooner. He was one of the first Black people to be an exhibitor at a World’s Fair. He met with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Queen Victoria. He built businesses that gave Black fugitives a livelihood after years of exploitation. Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass’s?

One reason might be that Henson chose, after escaping the United States at age 41, to spend the rest of his life in Canada, the country that gave him his freedom and full citizenship. And perhaps educators have been reluctant to spend too much time on a man known as “the original Uncle Tom” when that term has become a virulent insult.

But Henson was not Uncle Tom. Despite being forever linked with the fictional character after Stowe revealed him as a source of inspiration, he longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements. And he publicly wrestled with the role he had played, as an overseer, in abetting slavery’s violence and cruelty.

Henson’s biography and legacy, I came to see, defy easy categorization. His is not a linear story of triumph over hardship. Rather, it is a story that reflects the complexity and moral incongruence that animated the lives of enslavers and shaped the lives of the enslaved. It is a story of how a man who was at once a victim and a perpetuator of slavery’s evils tried, and failed, and hoped, and evolved, and regretted, and mourned, and tried again. It is a story that reveals the impossibility of being a moral person in a fundamentally immoral system.

A Case for a New Veep

In Very Serious, Josh Barro argues that Kamala Harris has too little political upside as vice-president to justify her being on the Democratic Party ticket in 2024:

When he is renominated as the Democratic candidate for president, Joe Biden will need to choose a running mate. The polls are close and the stakes are high, so he needs a partner who will do as much as possible to help him win re-election. Given widespread public concern about his age, it is even more important than usual that his running mate be someone that a majority of the voting public is comfortable envisioning succeeding to the presidency. And his pick should be someone who is credible as the future leader of the Democratic Party …

Kamala Harris, unfortunately, is not an excellent candidate for the vice presidency. There are better options available and he should pick one of them—specifically, as I’ll discuss below, he should pick Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer …

As Nate Silver noted last week, Harris has run worse than Biden in every national poll conducted since the midterms that asked respondents about both Biden-Trump and Harris-Trump head-to-head contests. On average, she’s put up a margin four points worse than his, which is a lot—in each of the last three presidential elections, a four-point shift in the margin would have been enough to mean the difference between winning and losing. Even despite all the (very real!) voter concern about Biden’s age and stamina, she is a much worse national candidate than he is.

This shouldn’t be surprising, because there is little in Harris’s pre-vice presidential career to suggest that she would be a strong national candidate.

She has never run a race by herself in a politically competitive jurisdiction. Well, that’s unless you count California—in 2010, she very nearly managed to lose a statewide race in California to a Republican, when she was elected attorney general by a margin of less than one point. And her 2020 presidential campaign, famously, flamed out before she entered any of the nominating contests.

Usually, the case for Harris’s electoral appeal is built around her race and gender: That as a black woman, she improves the Democratic ticket’s appeal to black voters and to women. But Harris’s role as a draw for black voters is more theoretical than demonstrated. She has never had a core political base among black voters because she has never been elected in a jurisdiction with a large black population—she held office in San Francisco (which is 6% black) and California (7% black). A key reason her 2020 campaign stalled was that she failed to demonstrate an especially strong appeal to black voters, who tended to prefer her (white) eventual running mate, Biden, even after she accused him of being a segregationist. I’d also note that the Democratic Party has lost substantial ground in recent years among non-white voters without bachelors degrees, including black voters without bachelors degrees, and Harris’s presence in the second-most-prominent position in Democratic politics doesn’t seem to have done anything to stop that. When Harris talks publicly about race, she does so in the voguish style that is popular with the highly educated staffs of Democratic officeholders and progressive organizations, rather than in a style with demonstrated success in appealing to an educationally broad electoral coalition. So while I am open to the idea that nominating more non-white candidates might help the party appeal to more non-white voters, I am doubtful that Harris, with her equity memes, has been helpful in this regard.

To Dress Better, Learn to Thread the Needle

In The Atlantic, Ann Friedman argues that more people should learn to sew:

Learning to sew will not only help you avoid the environmental horrors of modern retail; it will show you the thrill of wearing clothes that actually fit. This is not an argument for a cottage-core lifestyle in which you hand-make every raw-linen garment that touches your body. I’m more for an incremental approach: Acquiring a few basic sewing skills, little by little, will change how you get dressed. Even if you never make a whole garment from scratch, knowing how to adjust a seam will make secondhand shopping easier and more accessible. And when you’re looking for new clothes, knowing your measurements will help you order only items that are likely to fit. The goal is not to become a master tailor. It’s to become fluent in how clothes fit your body.

When you sew for yourself, you really learn your body. You also relearn how to think about your body. Even a beginner-level sewing project makes clear that it is impossible to reduce your complex contours and spans to a single number or letter on a tag. And you learn how you like things to fit you: where you prefer your waistband to hit on your belly, what inseam works for a crop length versus ankle, how low you like a neckline to go. Once you know these things, you will never acquire clothes the same way again.

Sewing skills open up the possibilities of secondhand shopping. Instead of hoping to strike gold with the perfect fit, you can see garments for their possibilities. That dress would be perfect if I took off the sleeves, you’ll catch yourself thinking. Or, I could hem those trousers in about five minutes. And the same goes for your own rarely worn items. The ritual of a closet clean-out takes on a new twist when you can alter things to match your current shape and style. I’ve transformed a shift dress into a skirt and boxy top, turned an old bedsheet into the backing material for a quilt, and cropped too many T-shirts to count. Instead of ending up in the trash or a giveaway pile, these items have gotten a second spin through my wardrobe.

Provocation of the Week

Writing at Substack under a pseudonym, a psychotherapist who works with young people in distress over their gender identity argues that the best approach is to neither affirm nor deny their self-characterizations:

Therapists are sometimes confronted with an unshakable belief that one is trans, rather than that one identifies as trans in a way that acknowledges the reality of sex, or the insistence that long-term, life-changing decisions can be made when the faculties and experience to make such decisions are absent. We cannot—and should not—attempt to change this belief, but rather to work on creating and sustaining a relationship that facilitates the development of internal scaffolding, of a capacity to think and feel as fully as possible without collapse.

My work with gender-distressed and trans-identified youth is not any different from my work with anyone else. That is to say that there is a specificity and singularity to every relationship I have with my patients. Deep and lasting change happens over time through the relationship more so than by any particular thing that is said or discrete insight that is discovered. My task is to attend to what the patient says and does not say, how she relates to me, how I relate to her, what thoughts, feelings, sensations, associations are stirred in my patient, in me, and between the two of us, and what we can learn through these experiences. I do my best to attune to my patient’s needs, desires, and limits; to change tack when I see fit; to survive frustration and anger directed at me without retaliation; to show sincere curiosity about their lives, what they’re thinking about, how they’re feeling, what interests them, why do they like this but not that, what are they yearning for, expecting, fearing; what makes them laugh, cry, scream, want to run away, come close? I can only think about one’s gender identity in the larger, nuanced, and complex landscape of my patients’ particular lives. Through collaborative exploration, we learn about ourselves; through a relationship that is co-created, we learn to experience ourselves and others in new ways. Through this process, some of my patients have desisted from identifying as trans. Some haven’t. Some may still, some may not. I do my best to invite and participate in sense-making, curiosity, engagement, contact, a sense of belonging and aliveness. What happens as a result is beyond my control.

They claim that this approach puts them on the margins of the profession:

When I have expressed my concerns about the gender-affirmative model, i.e., immediate affirmation and a quick push onto the medical pathway, under my own name, I have been accused—in print, on listservs, and in conversations—by those both inside and outside of my field of of being close-minded, bigoted, anti-trans, transphobic, threatened by gender non-conformity, and/or engaged in conversion therapy. I have been interrogated for organizing clinical training presentations by professionals in my field who have pointed out the potential harms of unquestioned affirmation followed by medicalization, discussed alternative ways of thinking about what we call gender dysphoria and how to treat it, and provided information about the state of the evidence base for social transition, puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. I have also received statements of private support from many within my field who share my concerns but are afraid to express them for fear of encountering the difficulties described above. I am hardly alone in my experience. Most, if not all, of my like-minded colleagues who have publicly shared views that reject the dogmas of gender ideology and that point to the weak evidence base for medical interventions have received a combination of public vituperation and private support.

All of this is to say that I am acutely conscious of the enormous social and institutional pressure being placed on clinicians who resist the culture-wide push of the gender-affirmative model of care. I am pressed to the margins of my profession and constrained in my ability to make the case for what I believe to be best for my patients and for others with similar complexities involving sex and gender. My work goes on in the shadows amidst a carefully vetted network of parents and clinicians while the exponents of the affirmative model proselytize proudly and loudly.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

There is much to be learned about power and the press from the fact that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson once evaded a reporter’s tough questions by hiding in an industrial fridge.

The reporter, Jonathan Swain of Good Morning Britain, ambushed Johnson at Modern Milkman dairy, where he was stopping for a folksy photo shoot in December 2019. For months, Johnson, a former journalist himself, had refused to be interviewed on prime-time breakfast television. If Johnson wouldn’t go to Good Morning Britain, then Good Morning Britain would go to him. Swain, broadcasting live to a national audience, surprised Johnson and asked him if he’d be willing to spare a few moments for an interview right then and there.

“I’ll be with you in a second,” Johnson said, hoping Swain would go away.

“I have an earpiece in my hands, ready to go,” Swain offered.

Johnson then proceeded into an industrial refrigerator to wait it out.

“He’s gone into the fridge,” the host Piers Morgan helpfully noted as Johnson hunkered down behind an enormous metal door.

[Kathryn Cramer Brownell: The problem with Fox News goes way, way back]

It was political theater at its finest. But it was also indicative of the adversarial spirit of Britain’s television media, which show little deference to authority. Former Prime Minister Liz Truss was toppled after just 49 days in power, a demise accelerated because she was humiliated in a series of “car crash” interviews, a standard term in British politics for when a politician is taken to task live on air. In one of the most memorable Boris Johnson interviews, the journalist Eddie Mair set the stage with objective facts about Johnson’s past misdeeds, then asked him the following question: “Making up quotes, lying to your party leader, wanting to be part of someone being physically assaulted: You’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you?” Johnson sputtered and tried to change the subject, but the damage was done.

Here in the United States, by contrast, our leaders have plenty to answer for, but with few exceptions, American TV-news hosts lob softball questions at politicians rather than play hardball. When the politician is evasive, the interviewer too often moves on, letting the politician slither away. Ron DeSantis managed, for nearly three years, to evade giving a straight answer to the simple question as to who won the 2020 presidential election: He finally acknowledged, only last month, that Donald Trump lost. Unlike Boris Johnson, Trump has never had to hide in a fridge.

Last week, however, MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan did something unusual in American TV news. In a now-viral interview with the slick Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, Hasan decided to just keep asking the same questions until he got an answer. Ramaswamy was caught off guard, no doubt because the style of questioning was so different from what he had previously experienced on the campaign trail.

I’ve lived in Britain for 12 years, and in that time, I’ve come to realize that there is an enormous gulf between British and American broadcast political interviews. British journalism tends to approach broadcast interviews from a skeptical premise of, to quote the late British journalist Louis Heren, “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?”

By contrast, American broadcast political interviewing too often defers to power, is allergic to aggressive pushback, fails to follow up, and treats questions that expose a politician’s ignorance of basic facts as though they were a violation of social norms. Why, for example, has no American television interviewer ever asked Trump to locate Afghanistan on a map? A decade ago in The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf lamented the breezy questions from 60 Minutes to President Barack Obama. But the issue became even more obvious in the face of Trump’s firehose of lies, whose output frequently went undisputed, particularly on fawning right-wing media outlets. Maria Bartiromo, a pro-Trump sycophant on Fox News, grilled Trump in May 2020 by asking him, “I’ve never seen anybody take a punch and then get right back up and keep punching. I mean, where does this resilience come from?” In a similarly “tough” 2020 interview with Sean Hannity, Trump was asked to name any of his priorities for a second term. When he failed to name even a single one, Hannity just moved on.

But even outside the propaganda of the pro-Trump mediaverse, journalists in the mainstream American TV press can be ineffective at holding power to account on air. In one high-profile case from 2019, Chuck Todd, then the host of Meet the Press, faced significant criticism for letting President Trump spend much of the interview repeating blatant lies and falsehoods mostly unchallenged.  

Consider the interview that drew the most political blood during the Trump era. It was conducted by Jonathan Swan (not to be confused with Jonathan Swain of Boris Johnson–fridge fame). Swan, an Australian journalist who was working for Axios, interviewed Trump during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic. What Swan did—which few have done so successfully before or since with Trump—was follow up, counter with facts, and refuse to move on after Trump’s throwaway lines.

“There are those who say you can test [for COVID] too much,” Trump claimed.

“Who says that?” Swan asked.

“Just read the manuals, read the books.”

“Manuals? What books?” Swan asked, perplexed.

“When I took over, we didn’t even have a [COVID] test,” Trump later boasted.

“Why would you have a test? The virus didn’t exist.”

Swan’s interview went viral because it broke from the standard American interview script—a script that Trump has mastered. Swan didn’t just ask Trump for his opinions but instead followed up with facts when Trump trotted out vapid, meaningless lines. As Swan’s face showed his complete puzzlement, his interview captured what many of those watching were thinking: What in the world is Trump talking about? (Swan’s expressions quickly became a popular internet meme.)

But Swan is, notably, not American, and had cut his teeth as a reporter in Canberra, not Washington. In fact, two of the most effective adversarial journalists in contemporary American media are CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and MSNBC’s Hasan, both of whom are British. Amanpour worked her way up within CNN, but Hasan trained in Britain’s aggressive press culture, and both established their career far outside the D.C. Beltway.

As Rob Burley explains in his new book, Why Is This Lying Bastard Lying to Me?, British political interviewing wasn’t always so adversarial, and politicians didn’t always lie or deflect. They had no need to: Up through the late 1950s, British media interviews were little more than broadcast press releases, and accountability was regarded as a job for Parliament, not the press. Prime Minister’s Questions, a bizarre spectacle that takes place every Wednesday when Parliament is in session, is a televised political jousting match, where elected officials challenge, debate, and make fun of one another, and try to score political points by cutting their rivals down to size, in many cases set to that very British soundtrack of jeers and harrumphing. (It’s an extraordinary contrast to American governance by C-SPAN, in which American elected officials are usually delivering their speeches to cameras but in a completely empty chamber.)

[David A. Graham: C-SPAN isn’t all good]

The British journalist Robin Day changed the culture of British political broadcast interviewing in 1958 when he broke from journalistic convention to ask the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, polite but pointed questions. The norm of reporters’ deferring to powerful men shattered, and politicians in Westminster began to accept being grilled not just in Parliament but also on the airwaves.

Then, in 1997, Jeremy Paxman, at the time the host of BBC Newsnight, set a new standard for combative interviews. Paxman has long been a household name in Britain, known for an attack-dog style of journalism that struck fear into every politician he ever interviewed. In the 1997 interview, the politician Michael Howard refused to answer Paxman’s yes-or-no question about whether he had threatened a senior civil servant, but Paxman refused to back down. He asked the question 12 times in a row, spanning a minute and a half of deliciously uncomfortable television as Howard squirmed, hoping that Paxman would do what most interviewers do: move on. Paxman didn’t, and the result is now regarded as perhaps the most famous British political interview of all time.

British political media have produced a pantheon of adversarial legends—Paxman, Brian Walden, Andrew Neil, Andrew Marr, Emily Maitlis, and Beth Rigby, to name a few—figures who are renowned for dissecting their political guests, exposing lies and hypocrisy with surgical precision. (The Maitlis interview with Prince Andrew, in 2019, sealed the royal’s fate as a modern pariah).

The Today program on BBC Radio 4 sets the British political agenda more than any comparable American show—and its “10 past eight” interview slot is often a ritual morning dressing-down of whichever government minister dares to go on it. Why would politicians subject themselves to this? Surely few relish the thought of being interrupted, cajoled, and contradicted live on air. But politicians who hope to rise have to meet the public, and the BBC stations dominate news coverage: From 2010 to 2020, 57 to 65 percent of Britons got their TV news from BBC One. Likewise, BBC radio stations have six times the news-market share of their nearest competitor.

“There is nowhere for politicians to hide,” Justin Webb, one of the main hosts of BBC Radio 4’s Today program, told me. “They can’t just go to a place where they talk to their own people.” Webb, who worked for the BBC in Washington during the presidency of George W. Bush, noted that the dynamics are completely different in the United States, where Republicans gravitate toward Fox News and Democrats more frequently appear on MSNBC. This way, some can just avoid tough questions altogether.  

In Washington, politicians can penalize outlets that are too harsh by refusing to appear on their networks again—hence the concern about “access journalism,” in which interviewers avoid crossing invisible lines of deference to maintain cordial relationships with politicians whose presence raises their network’s ratings and revenue. In one instance, the head of CNN even directly intervened to remove references to a sexual-abuse case Trump had lost in court from the chyron banner scrolling underneath the live video feed, lest it would upset Trump before he appeared on the network.

[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]

In Britain, by contrast, politicians who won’t subject themselves to cross-examination from a hostile press can be subjected to ridicule. Boris Johnson skipped a debate about climate change, so the TV channel hosting the discussion kept his lectern in place but put a melting block of ice on it to represent his absence. When he skipped a preelection interview on the BBC, they broadcast a monologue with the host, Andrew Neil, about the importance of answering questions—next to a conspicuously empty chair for the truant Johnson. When Trump skipped the first GOP debate last month, there was no empty lectern to highlight his absence.

The BBC, unlike most American broadcast-news networks, is nonprofit and does not break for commercials the way American news programs do. Reporters therefore have more time and space to follow up and press for answers, Webb said. Hasan of MSNBC acknowledges that added constraint on American cable news: “There’s definitely a pressure with ad breaks to keep interviews tight,” he told me. Prerecording interviews can help get around this problem, but doing so is not always viable. Still, Hasan suggests that the time constraints can become an excuse for pulling punches: “The number of times I’ve seen an interviewer have someone on the ropes and then say, ‘That’s all we have time for,’ or, ‘Moving on’—the phrase moving on is poison to me. It’s poison to a TV interview.”

But before Americans rush to import Jeremy Paxman and Emily Maitlis, be warned: Relentless adversarial journalism can have undesirable consequences. Politicians become cagey, always trying to sniff out an ulterior motive to even the most innocuous line of questioning. Even worse, to survive in British politics, government ministers must undergo rigorous media training, in which they learn how to be suitably slippery, never to become entangled in a gotcha moment by Webb or his colleagues. Tough questions sometimes yield few answers. Paxman’s notorious interview is a case in point: Even after 12 tries, his political prey still didn’t answer the question. Plenty of heat, yes, but how much light?

Politics may even suffer a chilling effect, as the more the field becomes defined by dangerous jousting matches between reporters and politicians, the fewer normal people will want to enter it. The profession could continue to appeal to the graduates of the Oxford Union debating societies, where adversarial witticisms are the currency of elite social capital, but turn off ordinary people who can think of more pleasant ways to enact change without risking national mortification. (Of course, even without the threat of constant adversarial interviews, most Americans find the prospect of entering politics repulsive, and few U.S. politicians give straight answers.)

Nonetheless, American broadcast interviewing needs more well-prepared follow-ups, more challenges from journalists who have done their homework, and, yes, more gotcha questions and fewer “what do you think of” opinion questions. We used to be able to take for granted that politicians knew basic facts about the world they were trying to help govern. That’s no longer the case. So, when politicians don’t know basic facts, exposing a dangerous ignorance is in the public interest. Doing so is not rude; it’s journalism. When Vivek Ramaswamy says that he would subject young voters to a civics test before allowing them to vote, for example, why not ask him some questions live on air to see if he could pass a civics test himself?

The Trump era made clear that the American model of broadcast political interviewing isn’t fit for purpose. It could benefit from a few British-style upgrades. And maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if, every so often, our most evasive American politicians had to cower in a freezer if they wanted to escape a journalist who’s willing to hound them until they actually answer the question.

Making small talk can be hard—especially when you’re not sure whether you’re doing it well. But conversations are a central part of relationship-building. Radio Atlantic is pleased to share this episode of How to Talk to People.

The social scientist Ty Tashiro and the hairstylists Erin Derosa and Mimi Craft help describe what it means to integrate awkwardness into our pursuit of relationships.

This episode is hosted by Julie Beck, produced by Rebecca Rashid, and edited by Jocelyn Frank and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Rob Smierciak.

Music by Tellsonic (“The Whistle Funk”), Ryan James Carr (“Botanist Boogie Breakdown”), and Arthur Benson (“Organized Chaos,” “She Is Whimsical”). Click here to listen to additional seasons of The Atlantic’s How To series.