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The United Auto Workers strike has sparked fears of major economic turmoil, but the experts I spoke with think a recession is unlikely. Still, even if the economic effects of the strike aren’t felt nationwide, they are very real for workers, their families, and their communities.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

America’s new battlefront The end of Scantron tests Trump’s menacing Rosh Hashanah message to American Jews It’s the best time in history to have a migraine.

The Real Stakes

For more than a year, a drumbeat of warnings about an imminent recession has haunted even those who casually follow the news. Though a recession hasn’t materialized, many Americans still have a bleak outlook on the economy. So it’s little wonder that news of an imminent United Auto Workers strike last week stoked fears of further economic disruption. On Friday, the UAW decided to proceed with a “limited and targeted” stoppage at three locations: a Stellantis plant in Ohio, a General Motors factory in Missouri, and a Ford plant in Michigan. The strike is relatively small in size so far: About 13,000 of the UAW’s 150,000 workers at Stellantis, GM, and Ford are participating (though the union has threatened to add more). Ahead of the strike, a widely cited analysis—assuming that a strike would shut down all three of America’s major carmakers—predicted that its effects would ricochet across the economy, swiftly causing billions of dollars in damage.

But now that the strike has begun, in a targeted format at just three of the country’s dozens of plants, the economists and labor-relations experts I spoke with said that, barring major escalations in scope and duration, the strike is not likely to have a wide impact on national, or even state, economies. Peter Berg, the director of the School of Human Resources & Labor Relations at Michigan State University, told me that the likelihood of this strike tipping the economy into a recession, or meaningfully boosting inflation, is small, unless the strike stretches out for several more months.

Just because an event may not reshape the economy doesn’t mean its effects won’t be acutely felt: Eligible striking workers are making less while on strike, receiving stipends of $500 a week from a strike fund instead of their salary. Having less spending money may cause real pain for striking workers and their families, and may cause local businesses in striking communities to suffer too. Gabriel Ehrlich, an economic forecaster at the University of Michigan, emphasized this when we spoke, even as he explained that the strike would not likely affect the trajectory of Michigan’s economy (though not the only state targeted in the strikes, it is the historic seat of the American car industry), much less the national one. And, he added, if striking workers get a strong contract that includes pay raises, their spending power could even go up soon. In a “worst-case scenario,” he said, a dragged-out strike against all three companies at once could affect job-loss numbers and cause disruption to the national economy. But in the meantime, select workers (and the targeted carmakers and other companies, such as parts manufacturers, that do business with them) are likely to feel the effect of the strikes more acutely than the general public.

Harry Katz, a collective-bargaining professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell, told me that he sees potential for compromise between the two sides, and thinks the talks are unlikely to stretch on for several months. Some of the issues in play in the UAW’s current negotiation with carmakers include higher pay—the union has asked for nearly 40 percent raises over four years, rejecting the carmakers’ offer of a roughly 20 percent bump—and job preservation in the era of electric vehicles. “I don’t think that this is a fight to the death,” Katz said. The UAW and the auto manufacturers were in talks this past weekend, and the union’s president said yesterday that if the talks don’t progress by noon on Friday, it may expand the number of workers participating in the strike. UAW did not immediately respond to my request for comment.

Carmaking looms large in the American psyche: Americans tend to think of the auto industry as powerful. But the industry is much smaller than it once was, and much less unionized. In the heyday of American car manufacturing after the Second World War, Katz noted, 95 percent of workers in the independent auto-parts sector were in unions. Now that figure is closer to 5 percent. As the size and heft of the auto industry have declined, so, too, has the power of a strike to affect America’s economy.

One week ago, the public did not know whether, or how many, UAW workers would go on strike. Now we don’t know where the strike will be in a week’s time, or the week after that. The stakes will continue to rise, not only for workers and the carmakers, but for President Joe Biden too. Biden has thrown his support behind the striking workers, though his electric-vehicle ambitions are a source of tension in the negotiations, and the UAW has not endorsed him. “Biden still is aligned with the labor movement, and I don’t think it helps him if there was a really big, long strike,” Katz explained. “I think that’s a more potent effect than the effect on the economy.”

Related:

The real issue in the UAW strike Biden’s labor-climate dilemma

Today’s News

India has expelled a Canadian diplomat after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused the Indian government of being connected to the assassination of the Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar and expelled an Indian diplomat. A court in Moscow refused to hear the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich’s appeal against his continued pretrial detention. President Joe Biden and President Volodymyr Zelensky both spoke at the annual United Nations General Assembly about continued Russian aggression.

Evening Read

Jemal Countess / Getty

Russell Brand Wasn’t an Anomaly

By Sophie Gilbert

In the summer of 1999, when I was 16 years old, I remember walking to a train station in West London from a babysitting job when a 40-something man in a Range Rover pulled up, told me he was on television, and then announced to his young son (also in the car) that I was “Daddy’s new girlfriend.” I don’t know who the man was; I didn’t get in the car, not because I was afraid but because I’d just bought Californication for my minidisc player and wanted to listen to the album on the way home. But what he did wasn’t abnormal for the time. This was two years before the 35-year-old TV presenter and radio host Chris Evans (not the actor) married the 18-year-old pop star Billie Piper in Las Vegas, after a months-long relationship that started when he gave the teenager—so young, she hadn’t yet learned to drive—a Ferrari filled with roses. A year later, in 2002, the BBC Radio 1 host Chris Moyles offered, live on air, to take the singer Charlotte Church’s virginity on her 16th birthday, claiming that he could “lead her through the forest of sexuality” now that she was legal.

I’ve often wondered how Millennial women in Britain survived the aughts: not just the incessant fat shaming and the ritualized alcohol abuse, but also the cheerful, open predation that was everywhere in popular culture then.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller. Sources: Richard McCaffrey / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty; Ellis Herwig / The Boston Globe / Getty; David Warner Ellis / Redferns / Getty; Michael Putland / Getty.

Read. In Loved and Missed, Susie Boyt presents the story of a woman raising a child, and the surprising reality of just how pleasurable it all is.

Listen. “I Want to Take You Higher” by Sly and the Family Stone, a great American band that suggested new possibilities in music and life—until it fell apart.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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When my 76-year-old dad was a child—he doesn’t remember exactly what age—his mother handed him over to her best friend, a woman he called Aunt Edith, in exchange for $10,000. Some details are murky: He doesn’t know whose idea it was or how long the arrangement was meant to last. He does know he lived with Edith, who had no kids of her own and loved my dad like a son, for a year or two, and that she wholeheartedly endorsed the project because his mother, an alcoholic, couldn’t seem to “keep herself together,” as my dad put it.

Our family has a black-and-white photo of him from one Halloween when he was living with Edith, in the early 1950s; he’s wearing a robot costume she helped him make out of boxes and tin. The costume won him first prize in a local contest—$10, a fortune then for a little boy. When he talks about it now, his voice crests with pleasure. Living with Edith was unequivocally good, even if the notion of exchanging cash for a kid sounds contemptible. I remember her as a very old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s who recognized only one person: my dad.

In Loved and Missed, the seventh novel from the British writer Susie Boyt (it’s her first published in America, where she’s at what I think of as a Tessa Hadley level of fame), a similar swap is made. Ruth, a genteel literature teacher living on a dodgy street in London, sells her only family heirloom—a Walter Sickert sketch—and brings the £4,000 it nets to the christening of her granddaughter, Lily. “I don’t know if I’m good and I don’t know if I’m evil,” she narrates, “But I knew what I wanted.” She hands the envelope full of cash to her daughter, Eleanor, a drug addict who shows up to the church with beer cans tucked into the baby’s pram, and assures her that she’ll take Lily off her hands for a while so she can rest. Eleanor understands what Ruth is offering—a permanent, or at least long-term, pseudo-adoption—and tacitly approves. Unlike my dad, whose mother returned to claim him after a while, Lily is never restored to her mother’s care. Instead, she lives in companionable amity with Ruth, their small lives buoyant with simple pleasure.

That’s right, pleasure. Enough to disarm even the most cynical readers. Loved and Missed bottles up those fleeting, blissful moments of child-rearing and spritzes each page liberally with their scent. The happiness Boyt describes is so infectious that you want it to last, for your own sake; it isn’t often that readers of literary fiction float along in such placid waters. Ruth describes her and Lily’s simple habits, such as their cozy evenings dunking biscuits into tea on the couch, or a cheap vacation spent breaststroking in the Balearic Sea, as “the mad celebrations afforded by ordinary time.” “It was like being God or the Queen,” she explains. “The luxurious sensation as I arranged myself next to her in the cool sheets at night, taking care not to wake her, the quiet joy almost inexpressible. I was a professional gambler on a lucky streak. I loved the simple rubbing-along with another person, friendliness, a calm and busy rhythm, lustre and life cheer.”

The two of them amble through their small existence, one filled with homemade cornflower-blue cardigans and shared lemon sorbet. Ruth is a beloved teacher at a girls’ high school, and she vows to bring Lily up with a kind of bountiful rigor: “Lily was not going to have a poultice childhood, a mending service, scrappy and provisional. I wouldn’t step in. She was going to get the most anyone could give.” And so Ruth narrates as Lily grows up in “the thick swoon of it … synchronised breathing, warm tessellated limbs,” followed by childhood birthday parties and the move to secondary school. Heaviness—Eleanor—sits behind a curtain, and Ruth lets us peek at it, but it’s outrageous, really, how engrossing this novel can be even when its two main characters defy narrative convention and bask in their contentment.

The parenting novel is usually a place to let it all out: the drudgery, the indignity, the identity-snatching abasement of sacrificing a life of the mind, of the bar, of the lie-in, for the penal colony of toy-straightening and carrot-steaming. Writers going back at least to Mary Shelley have agonized over the monstrousness of creating a life only to have it devour their own. Works such as Frankenstein and Rosemary’s Baby made their offspring devilish, as if only the most inhuman of children could cause a mother grief. In her 1988 domestic horror novel, The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing describes the loathsome baby Ben as “muscular, yellowish, long,” with “hard cold alien eyes,” to distance him from the other, “real” children. The problems he causes aren’t the work of tantrums or picky eating; he strangles a dog and bends a schoolmate’s arm until it breaks. His own siblings lock their doors from the inside at night, afraid of what he might do.

[Read: The parenting prophecy]

When Rachel Cusk published her memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother in 2001, the tenor of the conversation shifted from monstrous children to the everyday but not less fraught realm of raising any child. Cusk wrote openly—and now famously—about the irreconcilable internal divisions of motherhood. “When she,” meaning any mother, “is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.” Struggle became, finally, not just the defining emotion of parenting, but also the most public.

The generation of mommy bloggers and online forums that came next further opened the pressure valve on all the stresses and affronts of contemporary child-rearing. Suddenly, venting was de rigueur, a relief after centuries (perhaps millennia) of tight lips. Fiction and the real world are porous, and novelists were emboldened to chart the daily pitfalls of bringing up baby, especially the need for mothers to Stretch Armstrong themselves into a crossbreed of camp counselor/cruise-ship director/housekeeper/breadwinner/nag of all trades.

As a result, the first two decades of the 21st century have produced a glut of novels obsessed with the stifling banality and identity-effacing nature of parenting, a state of being exacerbated in America by a lack of government help and impossible societal standards. These kinds of novels have kept me company for my own six and a half years so far as a mother: Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations and Lynn Steger Strong’s Want; Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child, which reorients Lessing’s novel in 1990s New York; Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble; Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch; Sheila Heti’s Motherhood; Elisa Albert’s After Birth; the resurgence of the Danish author Tove Ditlevsen’s writing; and the forthcoming My Work, by Olga Ravn. Happiness sometimes lunges out of the background of these novels, but struggle and discomfort are their watchwords.

Loved and Missed inverts that ratio. This is a novel about happiness as the predominant mode. From the start, Lily is a pink-cheeked wonder, the kind of baby who is described as “her usual irreproachable self” at seven months old. She grows up angelic, a sensible child who falls asleep to radio broadcasts about “low-level domestic disasters: how to get red wine out of pale carpets and upholstry, how to make your ageing grouting gleam” and applies herself dutifully to her studies. Ruth never so much as hints about Lily slamming a door or giving cheek.

Eleanor, we learn, started off much like Lily, alone with a single mother and “very nurturing to me when she was little,” Ruth recounts, “looking out for me when I was really struggling, taking the temperature of my days. She was so dutiful.” She goes on, “I should have stopped it.” The implication—one that must follow every parent—is that Ruth can’t know how much of Eleanor’s potholed life path is the result of her own shortcomings as a mother, her inability to recognize when she was asking too much of her child. Eleanor is now a specter. She comes round every few months, thin and shabby in holey sweaters, her arms pinpricked and scabbed from her addiction. She refuses contact unless it’s on her terms, dismisses pats on the shoulder, and leaves Ruth with the feeling that her efforts are repellent: “I had the wrong kind of patience, the wrong kind of sentimentality as far as Eleanor was concerned.” Ruth initially rejects the idea that “having Lily compensated me in various ways for losing Eleanor,” but as time shakes on, she can’t quite determine whether her second go at raising a child is a form of atonement. “I couldn’t keep on trying to balance the equations all the time,” she resolves to herself, “that my care had equalled what she was living.” Because if her careful love still resulted in Eleanor, she seems to wonder, could it also sour Lily? Hidden underneath is a desperate question about parenthood: What if our best efforts are ultimately meaningless?

[Read: The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time]

Regret, then, might actually be what keeps Ruth angling toward bliss. Loved and Missed slips out of time like memory really does; Ruth’s disheartening recollections about Eleanor emerge in the midst of dishwashing or teatime. She relates the story of the first time Eleanor stayed out all night, how a few weeks after she turned 13, “she swung her love away from me.” But the melancholy is threaded into a pattern with joy. Ruth recalls the second time she visited Eleanor during a short stint in prison: “She had filled out a bit. She had these little cheeks. Sunlight ran over our table and onto the floor of the visitors’ centre. I could sit here like this for the rest of my life, I thought.” When Ruth stood to leave, Eleanor dismissed her: “I’ll just see you on the out now, Mum.”  

Ruth and Lily’s relationship is perhaps given extra sheen by Ruth’s boastful narration; until the last quarter of the novel, we are left to speculate whether she is sugarcoating their bliss for her own peace of mind. And there is a general air of suspicion these days that anyone’s happiness is a delusion or a cover-up. (Ruth too is dismissive of another mother’s alleged “peace” when her own addicted child dies: “I wanted to hit her,” she thinks. “She was inhuman.”) But in the final bit of the novel, Ruth grows ill, and suddenly, unexpectedly, the narration shifts to Lily’s point of view. When Ruth isn’t nearby, Lily is still sensible and charming, gracious and generous—if a little more human than Ruth ever colors her. She revels in the snacks that Ruth’s friend Jean offers her, “macaroons and shortbread, Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, tins of Coke, cucumber and carrot sticks,” as if the world is a place of marvels. And she proves that Ruth’s efforts to raise her right have worked: By nature or nurture, Lily has turned out gorgeously. Joy is spread out there too, like luminous, well-buttered toast.

Perhaps this isn’t what we need out of every book that depicts parents, a hit of rapture so potent that we might overdose. But Boyt, who has probably experienced her own share of family drama—she’s the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud, one of his 14 acknowledged children from at least six women—doesn’t subscribe to the notion that it all comes out in the wash. Regret and joy are an indivisible duo for any mother or father, and Boyt wisely mixes them into a beautifully humane chronicle. With this exquisite devotional of a novel, she has turned the ability to find contentment in the muck of parenthood into a courageous art form.