ATACMS will allow Ukraine to keep up its strikes for longer

As the chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at UT Southwestern Medicine, Catherine Spong is used to seeing a lot of baby bumps. But through her decades of practice, she’s been fascinated by a different kind of bump: Year after year after year, she and her colleagues deliver a deluge of babies from June through September, as much as a 10 percent increase in monthly rates over what they see from February through April. “We call it the summer surge,” Spong told me.

Her hospital isn’t alone in this trend. For decades, demographers have documented a lift in American births in late summer, and a trough in the spring. I see it myself in my own corner of the world: In the past several weeks, the hospital across the street from me has become a revolving door of new parents and infants. When David Lam, an economist at the University of Michigan who helped pioneer several early U.S. studies on seasonal patterns of fertility, first analyzed his data decades ago, “we were kind of surprised how big it was,” he told me. Compare the peak of some years to their nadir, he said, and it was almost like looking at the Baby Boom squished down into 12 months.

Birth seasonality has been documented since the 1820s, if not earlier. But despite generations of study, we still don’t fully understand the reasons it exists, or why it differs so drastically among even neighboring countries. Teasing apart the contributions of biology and behavior to seasonality is messy because of the many factors involved, says Micaela Martinez, the director of environmental health at the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice, who has been studying seasonality for years. And even while researchers try to track it, the calendar of human fertility has been changing. As our species has grown more industrialized, claimed more agency over reproduction, and reshaped the climate we are living in, seasonality, in many places, is shifting or weakening.

[Read: The pregnancy risk that doctors won’t mention]

There is no doubt that a big part of human birth seasonality is behavioral. People have more sex when they have more free time; they have less sex when they’re overworked or overheated or stressed. Certain holidays have long been known to carry this effect: In parts of the Western world with a heavy Christian presence, baby boomlets fall roughly nine months after Christmas; the same patterns have been spotted with Spring Festival and Lunar New Year in certain Chinese communities. (Why these holidays strike such a note, and not others, isn’t entirely clear, experts told me.)

In addition to free time, family-focused celebrations probably help set the mood, Luis Rocha, a systems scientist at Binghamton University, told me. Cold weather might help people get snuggly around Christmastime, too, but it’s not necessary; Rocha’s studies and others have shown the so-called Christmas effect in southern-hemisphere countries as well. No matter whether Christmas falls in the winter or summer, around the end of December, Google searches for sex skyrocket and people report more sexual activity on health-tracking apps. In a few countries, including the U.S., condom sales rise too.

But cultural norms have never been able to explain everything about the Homo sapiens birth calendar. “It’s pretty common for mammals to have a specific breeding season” dictated by all sorts of environmental cues, Martinez told me. Deer, for instance, mate in the fall, triggered by the shortening length of daylight, effectively scheduling their fawns to be born in the spring; horses, whose gestations are longer, breed as the days lengthen in the spring and into summer, so they can foal the following year.

Humans, of course, aren’t horses or deer. Our closest relatives among primates “are much more flexible” about when they mate, Élise Huchard, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Montpellier, in France, told me. But those apes are not immune to their surroundings, and neither are we. All sorts of hormones in the human body, including reproductive ones, wax and wane with the seasons. Researchers in the United States and Australia have found that couples hoping to conceive via in vitro fertilization have a higher chance of success if the eggs are retrieved during the summer. At the same time, summer conceptions appear to be less common, or less successfully carried to term, in some countries, a trend that sharpens at lower latitudes and, Lam told me, during hotter years. The subsequent spring lulls may be explained in part by heat waves dissuading people from sex. But Alan Barreca, an economist at UCLA, suspects that ultrahigh temperatures may also physiologically compromise fertility, potentially by affecting factors such as sperm quantity and quality, ovulation success, or the likelihood of early fetal loss.

[Read: Life can’t get much hotter than this]

No matter its exact drivers, seasonality is clearly weakening in many countries, Martinez told me; in some parts of the world, it may be entirely gone. The change isn’t uniform or entirely understood, but it’s probably to some extent a product of just how much human lifestyles have changed. In many communities that have historically planted and harvested their own food, people may have been more disinclined to, and less physically able to, conceive a child when labor demands were high or when crops were scarce—trends that are still prominent in certain countries today. People in industrial and high-income areas of the modern world, though, are more shielded from those stressors and others, in ways that may even out the annual birth schedule, Kathryn Grace, a geographer at the University of Minnesota, told me. The heat-driven dip in America’s spring births, for instance, has softened substantially in recent decades, likely due in part to increased access to air-conditioning, Lam said. And as certain populations get more relaxed about religion, the cultural drivers of birth times may be easing up, too, several experts told me. Sweden, for example, appears to have lost the “Christmas effect” of December sex boosting September births.

Advances in contraception and fertility treatments have also put much more of fertility under personal control. People in well-resourced parts of the world can now, to a decent degree, realize their preferences for when they want their babies to be born. In Sweden, parents seem to avoid November and December deliveries because that would make their child among the youngest in their grade (which carries a stereotype of potentially having major impacts on their behavioral health, social skills, academics, and athletic success). In the U.S., people have reported preferring to give birth in the spring; there’s also a tax incentive to deliver early-winter babies before January 1, says Neel Shah, the chief medical officer of Maven Clinic, a women’s health and fertility clinic in New York.

Humans aren’t yet, and never will be, completely divorced from the influences of our surroundings. We are also constantly altering the environment in which we reproduce—which could, in turn, change the implications of being born during a particular season. Births are not only more common at certain times of the year; they can also be riskier, because of the seasonal perils posed to fetuses and newborns, Mary-Alice Doyle, a social-policy researcher at the London School of Economics, told me. Babies born during summer may be at higher risk of asthma, for instance—a trend that’s likely to get only stronger as heat waves, wildfires, and air pollution become more routine during the year’s hottest months.

The way we manage infectious disease matters too. Being born shortly after the peak of flu season—typically winter, in temperate parts of the world—can also be dangerous: Infections during pregnancy have been linked to lower birth weight, preterm delivery, even an increased likelihood of the baby developing certain mental-health issues later on. Comparable concerns exist in the tropics, where mosquitoes, carrying birth-defect-causing viruses such as dengue or Zika, can wax and wane with the rainy season. The more humans allow pathogens to spill over from wildlife and spread, the bigger these effects are likely to be.

[Read: One more COVID summer?]

Children born in the spring—in many countries, a more sparsely populated group—tend to be healthier on several metrics, Barreca told me. It’s possible that they’re able to “thread the needle,” he said, between the perils of flu in winter and extreme heat in summer. But these infants might also thrive because they are born to families with more socioeconomic privilege, who could afford to beat the heat that might have compromised other conceptions. As heat waves become more intense and frequent, people without access to air-conditioning might have an even harder time getting pregnant in the summer.

The point of all this isn’t that there is a right or wrong time of year to be born, Grace told me. If seasonality will continue to have any sway over when we conceive and give birth, health-care systems and public-health experts might be able to use that knowledge to improve outcomes, shuttling resources to maternity wards and childhood-vaccination clinics, for instance, during the months they might be in highest demand.

Humans may never have had as strict a breeding season as horses and deer. But the fact that so many people can now deliver safely throughout the year is a testament to our ingenuity—and to our sometimes-inadvertent power to reshape the world we live in. We have, without always meaning to, altered a fundamental aspect of human reproduction. And we’re still not done changing it.

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

Earlier this month in San Francisco, two friends and I wanted to imbibe strong rum drinks at the bar Smuggler’s Cove, so we used a phone app to summon a car. It arrived without a driver, we climbed into the back seat, and a trivia app entertained us on the way to our destination while distracting us, at least a little bit, from the fact that no one was in the driver’s seat.

The driving was safe and efficient. But at the end of the ride, the car stopped in the middle lane of a three-lane street, forcing us to cross a lane of traffic to reach safety on the sidewalk.

So … not yet ready for prime time, but pretty close.

Are driverless cars the future? Should cities allow them to be tested on the street now? Even in your neighborhood? What about the multiton driverless trucks that the Teamsters want to ban? (I am pro-innovation, but when sober, I also like driving. I hope I’m never forced to give it up.)

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

Conversations of Note

Laughs, Lies, and Fabulist Hate

Last week, Clare Malone published an article in The New Yorker revealing that the comedian Hasan Minhaj, who came of age as a practicing Muslim in post-9/11 America, made up various stories he has told about bigots engaging in prejudicial or abusive behavior toward him.

For example, in a 2022 Netflix special, he speaks about the reaction to his talk show, Patriot Act. Malone describes the scene from the special:

The big screen displays threatening tweets that were sent to Minhaj. Most disturbing, he tells the story of a letter sent to his home which was filled with white powder. The contents accidentally spilled onto his young daughter. The child was rushed to the hospital. It turned out not to be anthrax, but it’s a sobering reminder that Minhaj’s comedic actions have real-world consequences. Later that night, his wife, in a fury, told him that she was pregnant with their second child. “ ‘You get to say whatever you want onstage, and we have to live with the consequences,’ ” Minhaj recalls her saying. “ ‘I don’t give a shit that Time magazine thinks you’re an “influencer.” If you ever put my kids in danger again, I will leave you in a second.’ ”

Powerful stuff. But it didn’t happen, Malone reports:

The New York Police Department, which investigates incidents of possible Bacillus anthracis, has no record of an incident like the one Minhaj describes, nor do area hospitals. Front-desk and mailroom employees at Minhaj’s former residence don’t remember such an incident, nor do “Patriot Act” employees involved with the show’s security or Minhaj’s security guard from the time.

During our conversation, Minhaj admitted that his daughter had never been exposed to a white powder, and that she hadn’t been hospitalized. He had opened up a letter delivered to his apartment, he said, and it had contained some sort of powder. Minhaj said that he had made a joke to his wife, saying, “Holy shit. What if this was anthrax?” He said that he’d never told anyone on the show about this letter, despite the fact that there were concerns for his security at the time and that Netflix had hired protection for Minhaj.

The article describes other similar instances of fabulism, and Minhaj’s explanation for them: The stories are based on “emotional truths” and “the punch line is worth the fictionalized premise.”

The revelations have prompted a lot of journalistic reactions. Few have defended the falsehoods. Yet as Kat Rosenfield put it at UnHerd, “It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this—even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves.” So many observers have had a hard time describing why Minhaj crossed the line, even though most of them are committed to the proposition that something is amiss.

In fact, I’ve yet to see anyone pinpoint what I see as the strongest case against Minhaj’s style. But before I tip my hand, here’s a quick rundown of some alternative indictments. In The New York Times, Jason Zinoman argues, “When stories told about racism, religious profiling or transgender identity are exposed as inventions, that can lead to doubt about the experiences of real people.”

For Nitish Pahwa at Slate, the problem was something to akin to stolen valor:

There are more than enough brown people across the country who’ve actually had their loved ones and livelihoods attacked in those very ways. If those same Americans were fans of Minhaj, it was because he effected a nationwide breakthrough of the truth that many of us have, in fact, been abused in our personal and professional lives thanks to our skin color or faith … The people he claimed to be speaking for were led to believe he really did get it on a visceral, fundamental level. This was a rare public figure who could be a high-profile voice for our fears, who could get people in the highest levels of society to hear and pass on his onstage and offstage anecdotes … Minhaj never even hinted that he was doing a character, or giving voice to stories he’d heard from others, or gesturing toward the broader landscape of Muslim Americans. Minhaj took what real, everyday brown folks were going through and led those people to believe that he’d also been there—earning his fame and plaudits from that very trust, as well as the trust that engendered among those who wished to understand brown Americans.

My own take?

Hate crimes carry an additional legal penalty. And there’s a strong argument in favor of hate-crime enhancements: Robbing or assaulting or murdering someone because they are Muslim or Black or gay sows fear in whole communities, harming many beyond the primary victim. When a person fabricates a hate crime or adjacent acts of bigotry, they do similar second-order harm. The gang-rape hoax that Rolling Stone published in 2014 scared many women on college campuses. Chicagoans who believed Jussie Smollett were frightened at the prospect of MAGA zealots beating Black pedestrians. Obviously, gang rapes and street assaults do happen; nevertheless, fabulist accounts of such incidents cause many to erroneously believe they are a bigger threat, or a different one, than they had previously judged.

Imagine the ripples of fear an Islamophobic bigot would cause––to Muslim Americans, and to Muslim public figures and their families especially––by mailing mysterious white powder to the house of a prominent Muslim comic. Imagine how such an act might chill the speech of some Muslims. The ripples of fear such a bigot would cause are the same ripples that Minhaj himself caused! And that, in my estimation, is the strongest case against Minhaj’s “emotional truths.”

A Debt Unpaid

In The Atlantic, Adam Harris flags an attempt to quantify a particular kind of racial discrimination:

On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters with a clear message to 16 governors: Over the past 30 years, their states have underfunded their historically Black land-grant colleges by hundreds of millions—or, in some cases, billions—of dollars … the first time the federal government has attempted to put a comprehensive number on the financial discrimination against these institutions.

He goes on to note “the exact amounts each land-grant Black college would have received from 1987 to 2020 if the institutions had been funded at the same level per student as the 1862 land grant stipulated.”

For example:

If Alabama A&M University had received its fair share in comparison to Auburn University, which has been dogged for decades by low enrollment figures for Black students, it would have had an additional $527 million over the period; meanwhile, Tennessee State University may have had an additional $2.1 billion if it had received an equitable share of the pie.

“There is now a number attached to the legacy of discrimination at historically Black colleges, at least for the most recent decades,” he concludes. “The lingering question is whether states will actually atone for it.”

Wonder Wall

At Wisdom of Crowds, Damir Marusic makes a claim about an aspect of aging:

I found myself outside of a bar with a friend. As we stood outside on the sidewalk, we remarked how funny it is to see all the people out, walking around, going to one place after another, clearly anticipating a great night ahead. “I remember what that used to be like—that excitement,” I said. “Sure, it was just a bar or a club we were heading to, but it represented a kind of energy.” I personally never went out to bars to meet new people, just to meet up with my people. So that feeling wasn’t so much a sense of possibility at serendipitous encounters with strangers as it was being surrounded by an electric charge. Drinking in loud crowded places amplifies the inherent buzz of alcohol. And for whatever reason, the novelty of that amplified buzz felt like it would never wear off.

But wear off it did. I don’t drink much these days, as it makes me slow the next day. And as I grow older, I don’t want to squander days on useless things like recovery. Beyond being more gun-shy, however, is a more banal truth: it got repetitive. All senses, if overstimulated, dull out. Looking at all the happy buzzing people out on 14th street that night, it struck me that what separated me from them is a sense of wonder. When you’re younger, you have more capacity for it. You don’t recognize patterns quite so well, so you believe that things are more mutable than they are. As you discover the world, it seems limitless, and limitlessly astonishing.

But as you experience more and more of it, you start to figure out how things work. Not in the sense of gaining ultimate and total knowledge—that’s hubris. Hard-won wisdom is the opposite: figuring out what is unknowable, and appreciating how chance works. Still, as the patterns become a little more recognizable, the world becomes a little less enchanted.

How the First Amendment Works

In Politico, Adam Cancryn reports, “Biden officials have felt handcuffed for the past two years by a Republican lawsuit over the administration’s initial attempt to clamp down on anti-vaxxers, who alleged the White House violated the First Amendment in encouraging social media companies to crack down on anti-vaccine posts. That suit, they believe, has limited their ability to police disinformation online.” To which National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke responds, the suit has limited the Biden administration’s speech-policing “as opposed to what?”

He writes:

The First Amendment’s protection of the progenitors of “misinformation” is not an esoteric loophole or a marginal technicality or the remnant of a bygone era. It is not vestigial, or contingent, or the product of a quirky mistranslation. It is one of the foundations of our society. In the United States, it is the authorities, not the citizens, who are cabined by the law. The Constitution grants no enumerated power to the federal government with which it might legitimately police lies, and, as if to make the matter as clear as possible, the Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits such policing. In totalitarian nations, the state is permitted to determine what it considers to be authoritatively true, to disseminate its resolutions across the country, and to punish anyone who dissents. Here, the state must allow individuals to speak irrespective of the contempt in which it holds their opinions. Remarkably, this applies even when the president is a Democrat and the topic is vaccines.

The frame that both the Biden administration and Politico have adopted is thus defective. The White House has not “felt handcuffed”; it is handcuffed. The limits on its power are not the consequence of “a Republican lawsuit”; the Republican lawsuit is meant to uphold the constitutional limits on its power. Biden’s compliance with the ruling has not given those whom he disdains “more space to promote their views”; that space existed beforehand and was being temporarily invaded by the executive branch. Throughout, Politico implies that those who have benefited from the verdict are not really exercising their rights: The lack of force, the outlet sneers, has allowed them to “tout themselves as free speech warriors.” But there’s no “tout themselves” about it. They are free-speech warriors. They’re engaged in “free speech,” which, in America, includes misinformation, and they’re “warriors” because the government is trying to shut them up. That the content of their speech is often preposterous is no more important to the case than it would be if it were “hateful.” There are no classes of expression in the First Amendment.

Provocation of the Week

In The Atlantic, Annie Lowrey writes:

Being vegan means forgoing many of life’s pleasures—cheeseburgers, peppermint ice cream, warm sourdough with cold butter. It means absenting yourself from your own culture—not taking the piece of birthday cake, not going to the amazing new restaurant. It means constantly feeling like you are failing, given the difficulty of avoiding animal products in a world where animals are a commodity. It means living in a way that makes other people feel judged and uncomfortable. It is exhausting, abstemious, weird. One paper found that omnivores view vegans more negatively than any other stigmatized group except for drug addicts.

It is not surprising that the share of people forgoing animal products has barely changed since at least the late 1990s. Just 5 percent of Americans say they are vegetarian, and only a sliver of the population, perhaps 1 percent, truly never eats meat. Globally, the number of animals consumed per capita has nearly doubled in the past five decades, as has the share of animals raised in confined, industrial environments.

DxE believes it can change that, not by turning omnivores into vegans but by turning vegans into vegan activists. It has attracted thousands of donors and participants, mostly Millennials and Gen Zers, over its 10 years of existence. (There’s no formal membership count, as there’s no formal membership process.) But it has also amassed plenty of detractors, who see the group as cultish and its activities as pointless and obnoxious. Social change is hard enough for movements that don’t ask people to give up anything, let alone their grandmother’s brisket …

Focusing on radicalizing vegans rather than converting meat-eaters allowed DxE to embrace a revolutionary message: “Animal liberation in one generation!” rather than “Try out meatless Monday!” But the activists adopted some tactics that were unpopular even with vegans. In addition to targeting big grocery chains, DxE went after small businesses devoted to slow food and humane meat, including Chez Panisse, the beloved originator of California cuisine. The group stopped weekly protests outside a revered Berkeley butcher shop only when the owners agreed to put up a sign reading “Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust.” (The owners described this as “extortion.”)

Read the rest for some harrowing scenes of animal abuse by factory farms and an interesting exploration of what drives radical activism even when, as here, it may be ineffective or even counterproductive.

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The ongoing Hollywood strikes may have dimmed the usual glitz that comes with the fall festival circuit—the star-studded red carpets, the applause-filled Q&As, the endless photo shoots—but this year’s Toronto International Film Festival still featured hundreds of new titles from established auteurs and first-time filmmakers alike. Earlier this month, my colleague David Sims and I caught as many of TIFF’s offerings as we could, leaving with plenty of movies to discuss and recommend. Below, David and I have rounded up our favorites from this year’s festival, most of which will be in theaters or streaming before long. — Shirley Li

TIFF

The Royal Hotel (in theaters October 6)

Kitty Green quickly proved herself a master of the slow-burn nightmare with 2019’s The Assistant, a film starring Julia Garner as a young woman forced to tolerate her unseen studio-executive boss’s sexual indiscretions. In her follow-up, Green casts Garner as a young woman backpacking across Australia with her best friend (Jessica Henwick). When the pair take bartending jobs in a male-dominated remote mining town to make some cash, they dress for work, not for play—no skirts, no heels—and even claim to be Canadian to ward off judgment about their American backgrounds. But the line between a gaze and a leer can be terribly thin—and The Royal Hotel shows in taut, tense sequences how being accommodating only works so well as a defense mechanism.  — Shirley Li

Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters October 13)

The winner of this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Justine Triet’s French legal drama is amassing buzz as one of the fall’s clear art-house breakouts. The plot is straight out of a ’90s paperback best seller—a novelist (played by Sandra Hüller) is arrested for murder after her husband dies in a fall at their mountain home, and must fight to prove her innocence during a long and complex trial. But Triet’s film delves beyond the (thrillingly showy) French legal system and into the intricacies of a troubled marriage, asking the audience to consider whether every subtle sign of decay in a partnership should amount to motive. The film works largely because Hüller, a German actress probably best known for her role in Toni Erdmann, gives an extraordinary performance already being tipped for Oscar success.  — David Sims

The Burial (in select theaters October 6, streaming on Prime Video October 13)

A legal drama about a man trying to save his business from a greedy investor may sound dreadfully serious, but this Maggie Betts–directed film—based on a 1999 New Yorker story—is a crowd-pleaser, full of well-drawn characters, show-stopping monologues, and a wonderfully energetic performance from Jamie Foxx. The actor stars as the boisterous personal-injury lawyer Willie E. Gary, who improbably joins forces with Jerry O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), his first white client—a funeral-home director being bankrupted by a heartless corporation taking advantage of low-income communities. But The Burial isn’t just a skin-deep look at an unusual partnership; it also observes the way a courtroom distills people into tidy narratives according to attributes such as their race, class, and gender, producing a microcosm of society’s most basic impulses.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Pigeon Tunnel (streaming on Apple TV+ October 20)

The documentarian Errol Morris is famous for using the “Interrotron,” a device for interviewing his subjects that allows him to look them in the eye as he explores their life stories. He’s used it on notably controversial figures such as Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, and Steve Bannon, but in The Pigeon Tunnel he tries to capture the essence of a much more celebrated personality: John le Carré. In what was le Carré’s final major interview before his death in 2020, the British novelist and former spy talks Morris through his childhood, his complicated relationship with his con-man father, and his life in the world of clandestine intelligence. Through it all is the tension of whether one can truly know le Carré, a man who first made a living hiding his true self, and then another living as a writer delving into it. Morris captures that paradox, and the author’s effortless intelligence and charm, quite perfectly.  — D.S.

The Holdovers (in theaters October 27)

After the muddled (if fascinating) Downsizing, Alexander Payne has tapped a familiar face for this return to form: a curmudgeonly Paul Giamatti, who last worked with the director on his Oscar-winning hit Sideways. In that film, Giamatti was a wine snob; here, he’s a classical-history teacher at a stuffy Massachusetts boarding school in the early ’70s, pressed into service as a caretaker for the few kids staying over during Christmas break. The Holdovers kicks off with all the grumpy cynicism of Payne’s past classics such as Election and Nebraska, but there’s a touch of holiday sweetness as it explores the deepening bonds between Giamatti’s character, a rebellious young student (Dominic Sessa), and a chef in mourning (the tremendous Da’Vine Joy Randolph).  — D.S.

Nyad (in theaters October 20, streaming on Netflix November 3)

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are well regarded as documentary filmmakers, with work such as the Oscar-winning Free Solo and the Thai cave-diver film The Rescue earning great acclaim. Nyad is their first narrative feature, but it’s a close cousin of their prior films, as it also delves into the strange passions and the involved process behind an extreme athlete—in this case, the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad (played by Annette Bening). An accomplished athlete in the ’70s, Nyad resurfaced in the 2010s and declared that she would attempt a never-before-done free swim from Cuba to Florida. The film is a fairly standard triumph-over-adversity true story powered by strong work from Bening and Jodie Foster as her coach, Bonnie Stoll, but the exacting technical details of Nyad’s process are its most fascinating elements.  — D.S.

TIFF

Dream Scenario (in theaters November 10)

The premise of Kristoffer Borgli’s dark and surreal dramedy is a zany bit of speculation: What if, out of nowhere, people around the world started dreaming of the same person, someone they’d never met before? That starts happening with milquetoast professor Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage), who begins popping up in people’s subconscious for no discernible reason, and becomes a strange celebrity. Cage, balding and sporting a bushy beard, plays the character’s growing egotism and mania wonderfully as the script spins into ridiculous directions; eventually, Borgli loses some grip on whatever metaphor for fame he’s exploring, but there are some hilarious (and terrifying) swerves along the way.  — D.S.

Fallen Leaves (in theaters November 17)

The most consistent filmmaker working today might be Aki Kaurismäki, the Finnish master who produces a soft-spoken and mordant comedy every six years or so and never, ever misses the mark. Even by his high standards, Fallen Leaves—an 81-minute yarn about a halting but tender romance between a lonely supermarket stocker (Alma Pöysti) and an alcoholic contractor (Jussi Vatanen)—is close to perfect. As both scratch out fairly meager existences in Helsinki’s working class, they’re troubled by news of Russia’s nearby war against Ukraine and besieged by uncaring bosses. But Kaurismäki delights in depicting how they forge a connection, lobbing pithy line after pithy line along the way.  — D.S.

Rustin (in theaters November 3, streaming on Netflix November 17)

Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, Rustin is a biographical drama about the civil-rights activist Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo), an architect of 1963’s March on Washington who worked closely with leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph. George C. Wolfe’s film stresses Rustin’s status as a brilliant outsider, often ostracized even within the civil-rights community for his homosexuality and his past membership in the Communist Party. Domingo’s outsize performance gets across how he survived and succeeded through charm and sheer force of will. The film is most interesting when it examines the staging of the march, and the internecine politicking that went on behind the scenes, even as the script (co-written by Milk’s Dustin Lance Black) often veers into more typical biopic formula.  — D.S.

American Fiction (in select theaters November 3, everywhere November 17)

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (a witty, wondrous Jeffrey Wright) is an English professor and an author, and, yes, he’s Black—but must all of his work be classified as Black writing? Frustrated that only stereotypical characters and narratives find success with mainstream readers, Monk comes up with an obnoxious parody of such novels, only for his work to become a hit. Based on Percival Everett’s book Erasure, the Watchmen writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut dissects Monk’s psyche with a surprisingly light touch, turning his grift into an intimate character study that explores his love life and family (including siblings played by Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown). Smart, meaty, and funnier than expected for a film juggling weighty relationship drama with the philosophical conundrums running through Monk’s head, American Fiction is a dramedy with a refreshing point of view.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Boy and the Heron (in theaters December 8)

The masterful Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has been supposedly approaching retirement since the mid-’90s; each of his films from Princess Mononoke on has been rumored to be his swan song. With The Boy and the Heron (originally titled How Do You Live?), the 82-year-old has made a transfixing statement on the perils of guarding one’s legacy too closely, and the necessity of letting younger generations conjure up new worlds on their own. The Boy and the Heron begins as a direct enough fable, following a 12-year-old who loses his mother during World War II and is then moved to the countryside when his father marries his mother’s younger sister. There, he encounters a mythical bird-creature and a forbidden tower containing a dimension beyond our own, but that’s merely scratching the surface of the wild dream logic that unfolds. The Boy and the Heron may or may not be Miyazaki’s final movie, but either way, it’s a staggering addition to one of animation’s most totemic filmographies.  — D.S.

The Zone of Interest (in select theaters December 8)

Under the Skin director Jonathan Glazer’s latest film, which tracks a family living just outside Auschwitz, casts an unsettling chill that’s hard to shake. All day, every day, the concentration camp’s commandant, Rudolf Höss (a real-life figure, played by Christian Friedel); his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); and their children can hear screaming, but they go about their lives with blissful thoughtlessness. Based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, Glazer’s film would be a completely nauseating watch if not for the way the writer-director keeps the audience at a distance. He isn’t trying to humanize the Nazis or retell the terrors of Auschwitz; instead, he delivers a mesmerizing, almost anthropological study of how evil can manifest in mundane ways, through ordinary people.  — S.L.

La Chimera (TBA)

There’s nothing quite like La Chimera—which is typical of the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who is fond of adding dashes of magic to tales that explore her country’s past. On paper, her latest effort sounds absurd beyond belief: It’s a film about a vaudevillian Italian troupe that robs ancient Etruscan tombs by using a vaguely mystic human dowsing rod (played by Josh O’Connor). The movie uses O’Connor, known for his stuffy work as Prince Charles in The Crown, wonderfully against type as an oddball in a group of outsiders who’s mysteriously connected to ancient times. In case that wasn’t enough, the film also features Isabella Rossellini as a swoony Italian grandma. — D.S.

Origin (TBA)

Ava DuVernay’s first film since 2018’s bizarre adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time attempts something even more ambitious, dramatizing Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents—a work of cultural anthropology that examines America’s history of racism through historical systems of caste, such as Nazi Germany and India’s stratified society. Origin plumbs all of that, but it also retells Wilkerson’s personal narrative, with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor playing the author as she faces personal tragedy and professional skepticism on the way to publishing her book. The overall result is possibly too muddled to function as a successful piece of dramatic storytelling, but too much inventiveness is on display to easily dismiss.  — D.S.

TIFF

Woman of the Hour (TBA)

In a festival packed with directorial debuts from actors turned filmmakers, Anna Kendrick’s effort stands out for its gutsiness. Though the movie tells the story of the real-life serial killer Rodney Alcala (played by Daniel Zovatto), Woman of the Hour is not just a true-crime drama. It’s a study of how violence can loom at the margins of courtship—and how dangerous rejecting advances can be for women. Kendrick juxtaposes scenes of Alcala killing victims throughout the 1970s with sequences from the day he infamously appeared on the blind-matchmaking game show The Dating Game and wooed the contestant Cheryl Bradshaw (played by Kendrick herself). With so much screen time devoted to Alcala baiting, stalking, and hurting women, the movie can be punishing to watch; I certainly struggled to sit through my screening. Still, Kendrick proves herself a skillful director, with a knack for building suspense.  — S.L.

Hit Man (TBA)

Leave it to Richard Linklater, the director behind Dazed and Confused and the Before trilogy, to pull off what’s perhaps TIFF’s most tonally versatile film. Hit Man tells the story of Gary Johnson (played by Glen Powell), a bland college professor who works part-time as a tech consultant for the local police department. When the precinct’s usual assassin impersonator—yes, such a thing exists—is sidelined during a sting, Gary steps in and proves himself a surprisingly dashing replacement. The movie is based on a Texas Monthly article, but Linklater has taken plenty of welcome liberties with the material, turning Gary’s tale into a delightfully mischievous romance-noir about the appeal of pretending to be someone else, if only for a while. The police scenes are just light enough to be funny, the screwball sequences are just dark enough to keep you on the edge of your seat, and Powell, along with a playful Adria Arjona as one of Gary’s marks, is obviously elated to be handling such twisty material.  — S.L.

Sing Sing (TBA)

Few creative outlets exist for people in prison, but the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program isn’t just an extracurricular activity; for some inmates, it’s a lifeline. In Sing Sing, Colman Domingo delivers a soulful—but, crucially, never showy—performance as Divine G, a real-life former program participant who was incarcerated for murder but has long maintained his innocence. He’s surrounded by a skilled cast of actors, most of whom are real alumni of the RTA; together, they engage in acting exercises and brainstorms as they build their next show. The film can sometimes feel like an earnest documentary as a result, but Bryce Dessner’s score and Domingo’s deeply felt work help anchor Sing Sing as a lyrical depiction of a unique way of life.  — S.L.

Sorry/Not Sorry (TBA)

How should we treat public figures who have abused their power? Sorry/Not Sorry, a documentary about the comedian Louis C.K.—who, in 2017, admitted to a pattern of sexual misconduct toward female comics—and his subsequent return to the stage never fully answers this question. But the film, directed by Caroline Suh and Cara Mones and produced by The New York Times, considers this through interviews with female comics who spoke up about C.K., as well as male colleagues who wrestle with how they responded to C.K.’s “open secret.” Though a movie with C.K.’s involvement would probably have been more illuminating, Sorry/Not Sorry remains a fascinating documentary as it breaks down, scene by scene, how easily misbehavior can be twisted into a punch line.  — S.L.

TIFF

The Beast (TBA)

One of the oddest and most compelling films I encountered at TIFF this year was Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, the rare drama that actually bears comparison to surreal masterworks such as David Lynch’s Inland Empire. A three-part story that zaps from our present into the distant future and back to the turn of the 20th century, each strand of The Beast centers on a woman (Léa Seydoux) and a man (George MacKay) having a chance encounter and sensing some distant familiarity. Bonello uses these encounters to pose questions about love, desire, and more terrifying masculine urges, depicting moments of pure tenderness and tense, unsettling threat.  — D.S.

Backspot (TBA)

The phrase cheerleading movie probably brings to mind montages of showstopping flips, energetic routines, and bitter rivalries between squads. But Backspot is not Bring It On. Rather, it’s an intense study of a perfectionist athlete whose enthusiasm and drive can work against her. It’s a film about mental gymnastics, in other words. Directed by the DJ turned first-time filmmaker D. W. Waterson, the story stars Reservation Dogs’ Devery Jacobs as Riley, a teenager whose joy and anxiety are wrapped up in her extracurricular activity; she’s dating her fellow cheerleader, Amanda (Kudakwashe Rutendo), and she sees her steely new coach, Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood), as akin to a demigod. Competition, then, both excites and scares her, and the film’s greatest strength is how it conveys that turmoil. Riley’s entire identity is cheerleading. Being so passionate about something is beautiful, the film posits, and brutal too.  — S.L.

Concrete Utopia (TBA)

An earthquake destroys Seoul at the beginning of Concrete Utopia, but it would be a mistake to call South Korea’s Oscar entry a mere disaster movie. The film, directed and co-written by Um Tae-hwa, blends spectacle with social satire as it follows the people inside the only apartment complex still standing. What begins as a sanctuary for the city’s survivors rapidly turns into hell on Earth: Those who lived in the structure before the apocalypse clash with the desperate newcomers, corruption plagues their attempts to self-govern, and supplies rapidly dwindle as winter stretches on. Concrete Utopia traces familiar themes of class warfare—think Snowpiercer in a building—but sets itself apart with impressive production design, inventive set pieces, and an ensemble of memorable characters, including Yeong-tak (played by Squid Game’s Lee Byung-hun), a man whose unyielding vigilance when it comes to protecting his home becomes calamitous.  — S.L.

His Three Daughters (TBA)

Indie filmmaking is robust with stories about dysfunctional families, but His Three Daughters does more than just mine difficult dynamics for tension. Starring Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne as three stepsisters reuniting to care for their ailing father, the film is at once bitingly funny and disarmingly honest about how siblings treat one another under pressure. The writer-director Azazel Jacobs’s assured, dialogue-heavy script keeps the melodrama to a minimum, focusing instead on the ways in which each sister reacts to her situation. Moving but never maudlin, His Three Daughters is a film packed with delicate moments and realistic conversations, bolstered by a uniformly excellent cast.  — S.L.

The most heavily anticipated economics book of the year makes a radical argument: Having married parents is good for kids.

I know, I know. It seems like a joke, right? Of course having two involved parents living in a stable home together is good for kids. Anyone who has considered having children with a partner or was ever a child themselves must know that. But for years, academics studying poverty, mobility, and family structures have avoided that self-evident truth, the economist Melissa Kearney writes in The Two-Parent Privilege, released this week. And while the wonks avoided the topic, the rise of single-parent households in America exacerbated inequality and contributed to astonishingly high rates of child poverty.

[Melissa Kearney: A driver of inequality not enough people are talking about]

“The high incidence of single motherhood has spread to what we might think of as the middle class,” Kearney told me. “It has undermined the economic security of a much wider swath of the population.”

Kearney, an economist at the University of Maryland, has amassed reams of evidence on the rise of single parenthood and the way it has put lower-income children at an even greater disadvantage to their high-income peers over the past four decades. Her book shows that marriage itself matters; it is not just a correlate of other factors, such as wealth and education.

So far, many readers on the left have concurred that this is a problem they should have been paying more attention to, while those on the right have had a simpler response: Duh. “Happy to welcome Melissa Kearney to the club of folks who understand more kids would be better off if we had more two-parent married families,” quipped the American Enterprise Institute’s Naomi Schaefer Riley, one of many scholars from the prominent conservative think tank who have lauded the book.

But it is worth asking: What good comes of pointing out that many people could use a cohabiting partner and that many kids could use a second involved parent? Kearney has written an important, careful book on a topic that is an “elephant in the room,” as she puts it. Still, I am not sure anyone has any idea what to do with that elephant.

Kearney’s three teenagers benefit from living in a two-parent home, she told me; she herself benefited from growing up in one. Kearney’s father worked odd jobs and ran a printing business; her mother was a secretary and schoolteacher. There wasn’t a ton of money to go around. But Kearney became an intergenerational success story, going to Princeton before getting her Ph.D. at MIT and gaining prominence as an academic. “Wanting to know the answer is different than knowing the answer; she wants to know the answer,” Phillip Levine, an economist at Wellesley College and a frequent co-author of Kearney’s, told me. “The greatest compliment you can give to an academic, I think, is to credit their intellectual curiosity.”

Much of Kearney’s work is about family planning and family structures. Did the rollout of the MTV show 16 and Pregnant reduce or increase teen pregnancies? (It reduced them.) Why is the American birth rate falling? (There isn’t a simple answer, but women’s “shifting priorities” seem to have something to do with it.) If men suddenly earn more, do they become more likely to marry their partner? (No.) Do increasing housing costs change fertility rates? (Yes.)

Kearney’s own research and the research of other scholars convinced her that the rise of single parenthood was an important and overlooked social phenomenon—a key to understanding the country’s low rates of mobility and high rates of poverty. Since the 1980s, marriage rates have fallen for everyone, particularly for folks without a college degree. Over the past 40 years, among kids whose mother had a bachelor’s degree, the share living in a two-parent home dropped from 90 percent to 84 percent. Among kids whose mom did not have a high-school diploma, the share went from 80 percent to 57 percent.

A single-parent home is typically a lower-income home. One parent means one income. Two parents means two incomes, or at least the potential of two incomes. And most single parents are nowhere near the top of the earnings distribution. According to census data, single mothers make an average of $32,586 a year; roughly 29 percent of single parents fall below the country’s very low poverty line. Married couples take home an average of $101,560. If you’re trying to understand why such a wealthy country has such high rates of child poverty, single parenthood is a big cause.

Kearney told me that she often heard from her peers—“economists who are inclined to downplay the importance of marriage”—that what she was describing was really an income issue, not a marriage issue. Kids with two parents earning a cumulative $55,000 a year have not-dissimilar outcomes to kids with one parent earning $55,000 a year, after all. But the kid with one parent would economically benefit from having a second parent in the household, Kearney told me, sighing in frustration. And nobody is suggesting that the government grant single parents tens of thousands of dollars a year to make up for the lack of a second earner in the home.

Household finances are not the only issue. Single parents have fewer hours to read, talk, and play with their kids than co-parents do. And they tend to be stretched thinner. This is not to stigmatize single parents or argue that they are not doing a stellar job with their kids, Kearney was at pains to tell me. Many kids raised by single parents succeed (two of the past three Democratic presidents among them). It is just to say that parenting is hard. Doing it alone is harder. And that difficulty shows up in the aggregate statistics.

Particularly for boys. “Girls internalize their struggles more,” Kearney told me. “I don’t know if it is that girls aren’t struggling as much. But boys are certainly struggling in ways that manifest themselves such that it impedes their educational performance, progress, and ultimately their economic life outcomes.” All in all, kids growing up with only one involved parent are less likely to obtain a college degree than their peers. They earn less. They are more likely to fall below the poverty line. And they are less likely to get married and more likely to become single parents themselves.

Why has marriage declined so much? Hard-to-quantify cultural factors are surely at work, but so are easy-to-quantify economic factors. Earnings for men without a college degree have not just stagnated, but fallen in real terms. At the same time, women have become more likely than men to go to college or graduate school, and their incomes have risen regardless of educational attainment. The economist Na’ama Shenhav has shown that a 10 percent increase in women’s wages relative to men’s wages produces a three-percentage-point increase in the share of never-married women and a two-percentage-point increase in the share of divorced women.

Women are going it alone—not because they want to, but because they feel that they have no choice. In straight couplings, women tend to like to date men who earn more than them and men tend to like to date women who earn less; thus, women’s thriving and men’s flailing have left a “marriageability gap.” In surveys, women overwhelmingly say that they want to get married. (That includes young people: In one poll released this week by the Knot Worldwide, just 8 percent of Gen Zers described marriage as “outdated.”) But they report struggling to find someone with a steady job, someone to match their sensibility and ambition. So they have kids on their own.

[Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox: Now political polarization comes for marriage prospects]

Those kids, on aggregate, are worse off than many of their peers: That’s Kearney’s elephant. It’s a big one and an awkward one. How a family works “is really no one else’s business,” she writes. “I am not blaming single mothers. I am not diminishing the pernicious effects of racial bias in the United States. I am not saying everyone should get married. I am not dismissing nonresident fathers as absent from their children’s lives or uninterested in being good dads. I am not promoting a norm of a stay-at-home wife and a breadwinner husband.”

What to do, then? Conservative scholars, of course, have a boatload of policy and social prescriptions. Parents should get married, they argue. Nonresident fathers should step up. Families with a breadwinner dad and stay-at-home mom tend to be good for kids. Couples should try to work it out instead of divorcing. Traditional values often result in happy children.

“One of the reasons there’s a class divide in America today is that more educated young adults are more likely to move slowly into their relationships, and make better decisions about friendship and mating,” Brad Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project and the author of the forthcoming book Get Married, told me. “If our leading institutions clearly articulated the standard that marriage matters, it would be helpful in rearranging how people approach entering into marriage and entering parenthood.”

Liberals seem more stuck. The idea of the government pressing for marriage feels icky. Plus, marriage rates are heavily stratified not just by income and educational attainment but by race; Democrats, like Republicans, have a long history of supporting and implementing brutal, paternalistic policies that break Black families in the name of “fixing” them. And many policies aimed at raising marriage rates or encouraging co-parenting just don’t work. George W. Bush’s “marriage cure”—federally financed classes and outreach programs promoting wedlock—was ineffective. Responsible-fatherhood programs? A randomized controlled trial showed that they do not lead to more in-person contact between dads and kids or increased financial support from fathers to their children.

Kearney supports figuring out better interventions for parents and couples, and implementing them. “How many high-income couples pay for high-priced couple’s therapy to keep their relationship alive?” she said to me. “There’s a skittishness around the idea that the government would provide funding to programs that provide relationship education to low-income couples.”

She advocates for improving men’s economic situation. She champions strong anti-poverty policies to support low-income kids and low-income families, including the expanded child tax credit. Yet “no government check—even one much larger than what’s politically feasible in the U.S. today—is going to make up for the absence of a supportive, loving, employed second parent,” she has argued. To that end, Kearney also proposes working “to restore and foster a norm of two-parent homes with children.”

Yet that norm already exists, something Kearney acknowledged when we talked. Few single mothers want to be single mothers, especially not the low-income ones. They just can’t find anyone to stay with them, or anyone worth staying with. Polls do show some erosion in the idea that marriage is important for couples with kids. But this seems as much an effect of the rise of single parenthood as a cause of it.

The real elephant in the room, I think, is that the United States doesn’t want to contemplate, let alone create, a policy infrastructure that supports single parenthood. It doesn’t want to make sure that kids thrive with a single earner in the home. It won’t do this even though it seems obvious that a large share of children are going to grow up with one parent going forward, and even though we aren’t realistically going to increase the marriage rate among lower-income Americans. We don’t want to build a society where children are seen as a collective gift and a collective responsibility. It’s not single parenthood that’s failing these kids. We all are.