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The U.S. government is on the brink of a shutdown, and the deadline for Congress to pass a new spending bill is September 30. I spoke with Russell Berman, who covers politics for The Atlantic, about what led to this moment—and how the power to avoid a shutdown lies with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley. These 183,000 books are fueling the biggest fight in publishing and tech. The parents trying to pass down a language they hardly speak The open plot to dismantle the federal government

A Weak Hand

Lora Kelley: How did we get to a point where the government is on the verge of shutting down?

Russell Berman: Every year, Congress has to figure out how to appropriate funding for the government starting on October 1. So September 30, the end of the fiscal year, is almost always the deadline for a shutdown.

Right now, the Republicans have a very thin majority in the House. To keep the government open, McCarthy would have to strike a deal with Democrats. But he is facing demands from the hard-liners in his caucus to pass a bill with only Republican votes. If he cuts a deal with Democrats, there are more than enough Republicans who, if they want to, could remove him as speaker.

McCarthy has been unable to get the 218 Republican votes required to pass basically anything. Last week, he tried to pass a 30-day extension of federal funding to keep the government open for an additional month. And he couldn’t even pass that bill. The fact that the Republicans can’t pass a bill with members of their own party makes McCarthy’s hand even weaker with these negotiations.

Lora: How likely is a shutdown looking?

Russell: At this point, it looks very likely. It’s not a fait accompli. But I talked to one Democratic representative who said there was a 90 percent chance the government would shut down. You will hear the same thing from Republicans. One of the things that makes it very likely is that a number of Republicans are openly rooting for a shutdown. They want to make a point about the level of spending, the administration’s border policies, and the way that Kevin McCarthy has been running the House.

Lora: What would it take for the government to stay open?

Russell: It’s conceivably very easy. All Kevin McCarthy has to do is talk with the Democrats. The Democrats are willing to keep the government open, at least for a few weeks to buy time for negotiations, and they would probably agree to just continuing government funding as it’s been.

Another way that this could end is through the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is going to try to pass a short-term bill and send it to the House. Then it will be up to McCarthy. He’ll have a choice: If he brings up this bill, it probably would pass with mostly Democratic votes. Though, again, he would be threatening his speakership. Really, Kevin McCarthy will decide whether the government shuts down.

Lora: What actually happens when the government shuts down? What happens to government workers, and how would it affect other Americans?

Russell: Employees deemed essential—for example, people who guard nuclear weapons, guard the president, and do the jobs needed to protect national security, among many others—will keep working. The hundreds of thousands of federal workers deemed nonessential will be furloughed. They will not be getting paid until Congress reopens the government.

If it’s a shutdown of only a few weeks, the macroeconomic effects are usually pretty small, but people who don’t work for the government may be affected too: Federal parks and museums would close. If, for example, you were planning a trip to Yellowstone National Park, or the Smithsonian museums in Washington, hopefully your travel is refundable.

Lora: In our era of polarized politics and infighting within political parties, should Americans expect that shutdowns will become par for the course?

Russell: Unfortunately, they are already normalized. If the government shuts down, this will be the third presidential administration in a row in which we’ve had a government shutdown. Before that, there had been well over 15 years without one. Sometimes, we’ve had two or three years where they’ve been able to agree to these funding bills without too much drama. But now, there’s a cycle that seems to happen whenever there is a new dynamic in Washington, most commonly when Republicans take control from Democrats in the House.

Lora: How might a government shutdown affect how voters view President Joe Biden heading into the election?

Russell: A government shutdown can reflect poorly on everybody. That includes the president, even though in this case, it’s really not Biden’s fault at all. The problem for Biden is that most voters don’t pay close attention to the infighting that happens on Capitol Hill.

The broader issue for Biden is that he has tried to present himself as a stable president, in contrast to his predecessor. And so anything that represents political instability undercuts that, and could make it look as if he has not delivered on that promise.

Related:

Why Republicans can’t keep the government open Kevin McCarthy is a hostage.

Today’s News

The Writers Guild of America reached a tentative agreement with entertainment companies last night, effectively ending a 146-day strike by screenwriters. In his first public comments since being indicted on bribery charges, New Jersey’s Democratic Senator Bob Menendez resisted calls for his resignation and vowed to fight the charges. The Philippines has removed a “floating barrier” placed by China in the South China Sea, defying Beijing’s claim of the disputed area.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Abraham Lincoln Wasn’t Too Good for Politics

By Steve Inskeep

Abraham Lincoln was a politician, though people like to describe him in ways that sound more noble. Contemporaries considered him a Christlike figure who suffered and died so that his nation might live. Tolstoy called him “a saint of humanity.” Lincoln himself said he was only the “accidental instrument” of a “great cause”—but he preserved the country and took part in a social revolution because he engaged in politics. He did the work that others found dirty or beneath them.

He always considered slavery wrong, but felt that immediate abolition was beyond the federal government’s constitutional power and against the wishes of too many voters. So he tried to contain slavery, with no idea how it would end, and moved forward only when political circumstances changed. “I shall adopt new views so fast as they appear to be true views,” he said shortly before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

At each step, he tried to build coalitions with people who disagreed with him … Some of us have lost patience with that skill—or even hold it in contempt—because we misunderstand it.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Dear Therapist: My mother is rewarding my brother’s bad behavior. China is all about sovereignty. So why not Ukraine’s? The Republican betrayal of PEPFAR

Culture Break

Illustration by Tarini Sharma. Source: DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI / De Agostini / Getty.

Read. “More Schubert,” a new poem by Carl Dennis:

“I’ve passed the house of Mrs. Revere / Often enough when her windows were open / To know she’d rather listen to Schubert / Most evenings than watch whatever the networks / Are beaming”

Watch. Dumb Money (in theaters) captures the internet fanaticism of the GameStop-stock rush in the form of a period film from … 2021?

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Editor’s note: This searchable database is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can read about the origins of the database here, and an analysis of what’s in it here.

This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. I wrote in The Atlantic about how the data set, known as “Books3,” was based on a collection of pirated ebooks, most of them published in the past 20 years. Since then, I’ve done a deep analysis of what’s actually in the data set, which is now at the center of several lawsuits brought against Meta by writers such as Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay, who claim that its use in training generative AI amounts to copyright infringement.

Since my article appeared, I’ve heard from several authors wanting to know if their work is in Books3. In almost all cases, the answer has been yes. These authors spent years thinking, researching, imagining, and writing, and had no idea that their books were being used to train machines that could one day replace them. Meanwhile, the people building and training these machines stand to profit enormously.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Meta did not directly answer questions about the use of pirated books to train LLaMA, the company’s generative-AI product. Instead, she pointed me to a court filing from last week related to the Silverman lawsuit, in which lawyers for Meta argue that the case should be dismissed in part because neither the LLaMA model nor its outputs are “substantially similar” to the authors’ books.

It may be beyond the scope of copyright law to address the harms being done to authors by generative AI, and the point remains that AI-training practices are secretive and fundamentally nonconsensual. Very few people understand exactly how these programs are developed, even as such initiatives threaten to upend the world as we know it. Books are stored in Books3 as large, unlabeled blocks of text. To identify their authors and titles, I extracted ISBNs from these blocks of text and looked them up in a book database. Of the 191,000 titles I identified, 183,000 have associated author information. You can use the search tool below to look up authors in this subset and see which of their titles are included.

Before you begin, please note several caveats: Some books appear multiple times, reflecting different editions, translations, abridgements, or annotations. Because of inconsistencies in the spelling of author names, the search may not return books that are, in fact, in Books3. It may also deliver a jumble of odd formatting: A query for Agatha Christie will also return books labeled Agatha Christie and Christie Agatha, for example. And because of possible errors in the book-identification process, which involves detecting an ISBN within the text of the books and using a book database to find their author and title, there is a very small chance of false positives.

Editor’s note: This article is part of The Atlantic’s series on Books3. You can search the database for yourself here, and read about its origins here.

This summer, I reported on a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. “Books3,” as it’s called, was based on a collection of pirated ebooks that includes travel guides, self-published erotic fiction, novels by Stephen King and Margaret Atwood, and a lot more. It is now at the center of several lawsuits brought against Meta by writers who claim that its use amounts to copyright infringement.

Books play a crucial role in the training of generative-AI systems. Their long, thematically consistent paragraphs provide information about how to construct long, thematically consistent paragraphs—something that’s essential to creating the illusion of intelligence. Consequently, tech companies use huge data sets of books, typically without permission, purchase, or licensing. (Lawyers for Meta argued in a recent court filing that neither outputs from the company’s generative AI nor the model itself are “substantially similar” to existing books.)

In its training process, a generative-AI system essentially builds a giant map of English words—the distance between two words correlates with how often they appear near each other in the training text. The final system, known as a large language model, will produce more plausible responses for subjects that appear more often in its training text. (For further details on this process, you can read about transformer architecture, the innovation that precipitated the boom in large language models such as LLaMA and ChatGPT.) A system trained primarily on the Western canon, for example, will produce poor answers to questions about Eastern literature. This is just one reason it’s important to understand the training data used by these models, and why it’s troubling that there is generally so little transparency.

With that in mind, here are some of the most represented authors in Books3, with the approximate number of entries contributed:

Although 24 of the 25 authors listed here are fiction writers (the lone exception is Betty Crocker), the data set is two-thirds nonfiction overall. It includes several thousand technical manuals; more than 1,500 books from Christian publishers (including at least 175 Bibles and Bible commentaries); more than 400 Dungeons & Dragons– and Magic the Gathering–themed books; and 46 titles by Charles Bukowski. Nearly every subject imaginable is covered (including How to Housebreak Your Dog in 7 Days), but the collection skews heavily toward the interests and perspectives of the English-speaking Western world.

Many people have written about bias in AI systems. An AI-based face-recognition program, for example, that’s trained disproportionately on images of light-skinned people might work less well on images of people with darker skin—with potentially disastrous outcomes. Books3 helps us see the problem from another angle: What combination of books would be unbiased? What would be an equitable distribution of Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish subjects? Are extremist views balanced by moderate ones? What’s the proper ratio of American history to Chinese history, and what perspectives should be represented within each? When knowledge is organized and filtered by algorithm rather than by human judgment, the problem of perspective becomes both crucial and intractable.

Books3 is a gigantic dataset. Here are just a few different ways to consider the authors, books, and publishers contained within. Note that the samples presented here are not comprehensive; they are chosen to give a quick sense of the many different types of writing used to train generative AI. As above, book counts may include multiple editions.

As AI chatbots begin to replace traditional search engines, the tech industry’s power to constrain our access to information and manipulate our perspective increases exponentially. If the internet democratized access to information by eliminating the need to go to a library or consult an expert, the AI chatbot is a return to the old gatekeeping model, but with a gatekeeper that’s opaque and unaccountable—a gatekeeper, moreover, that is prone to “hallucinations” and might or might not cite sources.

In its recent court filing—a motion to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden—Meta observed that “Books3 comprises an astonishingly small portion of the total text used to train LLaMA.” This is technically true (I estimate that Books3 is about 3 percent of LLaMA’s total training text) but sidesteps a core concern: If LLaMA can summarize Silverman’s book, then it likely relies heavily on the text of her book to do so. In general, it’s hard to know how much any given source contributes to a generative-AI system’s output, given the impenetrability of current algorithms.

Still, our only clue to the kinds of information and opinions AI chatbots will dispense is their training data. A look at Books3 is a good start, but it’s just one corner of the training-data universe, most of which remains behind closed doors.

Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.

Kaitlyn: We know it’s not called “the Windy City” because of the wind, but we don’t remember why it’s actually called that. Maybe it’s because, on our eighth annual fall trip, Ashley took me and Lizzie to her hometown of Chicago for a whirlwind tour of its most important sights. Hmm?

We went to the Bean. Though its plaza is under construction and it’s surrounded by fences keeping tourists about 20 feet away, many peered hungrily through the gaps to get an unobstructed view. We went to a combination liquor store and bar where we shared one shot of the city’s signature drink, Malört (70 proof, tastes like novacaine), and glimpsed a few minutes of a Bears game. We had deep-dish pizza and hot dogs with pickles on them. The one thing that we didn’t do—because it seemed dangerous and probably too nerdy—was drive really fast through the underpasses that provide the backdrop for the car-chase scenes in Christopher Nolan’s 2008 Batman movie, The Dark Knight, while listening to the Hans Zimmer–led soundtrack at max volume.

In short, we loved Chicago. After checking out the prices on draft Budweiser and huge apartments with river views, we resolved to invent a new type of modern woman who isn’t bicoastal (because the plane ride is too long and Los Angeles is just horrible); instead, she lives in New York and also in Chicago. (Just like Christopher Nolan’s Batman!) I guess it would be hard to figure out what to do about the winter, but she would come up with something.

Lizzie: Faithful readers may remember last year’s trip to Santa Barbara, when we “went Sideways” (by visiting all of the filming locations of 2004’s Sideways). This Chicago trip didn’t start out with quite the same level of thematic cohesion, but Kaitlyn did make sure the Batman franchise received several mentions (from her) as we touristed, and the movies’ consistent themes (like chaos, destruction, and deception) proved prescient.

Consider the night we went to the Chicago Magic Lounge, a venue dedicated to the art of “Chicago-style” magic. We went in expecting to be tricked, but we got so much more …

We began our evening at King of Cups, a gothic “craft-cocktail lounge” with an in-house tarot-card reader. By the time we arrived, there was already a waitlist for the tarot-card reader and no tarot-card reader in sight. Had he been made invisible by a Chicago-style magician? Or was this our first taste of deception? Perhaps both! While we drank happy-hour espresso martinis ($8), Kaitlyn wowed us with her own magic trick, which involved folding up a $1 bill and unfolding it until George Washington was upside down. You kind of had to be there. We figured we should keep this in our back pocket in case the Chicago Magic Lounge was holding auditions.

Kaitlyn: The Magic Lounge was the big event of the weekend. And that seemed to be true not only for us but for much of the city. When we arrived, there was a long line to get into what appeared to be a laundromat, but was in fact an Art Deco speakeasy where magic is performed. (I normally hate speakeasy culture, but this was different and not as annoying.)

Ashley had told us that Chicago was a city “full of girlies,” but I didn’t really know what this meant until we were seated at the Magic Lounge. All around us, there were girlies out on dates—one girlie wore a shirt made entirely of fake pearls; another sipped a cocktail that was the color of skim milk and garnished with a flower. They were extremely pretty and didn’t look mean.

Our first taste of “Chicago-style magic,” which is close-up magic performed right at your table while you sip a glass of lambrusco or what have you, was performed by a large man in a suit, who was wearing a pinky ring and made some self-deprecating comments about being sweaty and a deceiver. “We do call them magic tricks,” he said. He took five $1 bills out of his wallet, referring to them as his life savings, then flopped them around until they turned into $50 bills. He held one of the $50s up to the light so that we could see its watermark and everything. I was impressed and relieved. “I thought he was going to do my magic trick,” I whispered to Liz.

Lizzie and Ashley assisting a Chicago magician with a Chicago-style card trick. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: That would’ve been something! In fairness to the magician, his trick was more impressive than Kait’s (though I’m sure he spent a lot more time practicing). One thing about doing magic tableside: You really have to have some people skills. We watched as our magician made his way around the room, stopping to perform different tricks mere inches away from skeptical ticket-holders, maintaining an incredible sense of enthusiasm each time. He didn’t have the authority of the stage or a choreography of smoke machines to keep us distracted. Add to that, he was performing for amateur magicians like Kaitlyn, and you start to get a sense of how high the stakes were.

Luckily, the tableside stuff went off without a noticeable hitch, and we were buzzing with excitement by the time the lights dimmed.

Kaitlyn: The stage show was hosted by an incredible woman named Jan Rose, who had corkscrew curls and was wearing a different sequin-covered blazer each time she appeared on stage. She ran us through a surprisingly bittersweet PowerPoint presentation about the history of Chicago magic. At a certain point, it seems, there was a good chance that walking into any random bar or restaurant in Chicago would result in seeing at least a little sleight of hand. But all of these places are now gone, and this made us regret being born into dull times. I was personally insulted by fate. Why, oh why couldn’t we have gone to Little Bit O’ Magic Lounge (“Fun, food, and prestidigitation”), or the Pickle Barrel, a restaurant in which every table was given an all-you-can-eat barrel of pickles, and there was also magic and also (according to a comment on a blog post I just read) bartenders who could make balloon animals?

This reverie was interrupted by Jan Rose sharing that, when she herself was a magician, she did a trick with another magician named “Heeba Hubba Al,” which involved a sugar cube, a pencil, and her right hip (at least I think that’s what she said). Obviously this reminded me, in a jarring way, of the famous “You wanna see a magic trick?” scene in The Dark Knight. (The trick is that the Joker smashes a pencil through someone’s eye socket and presumably into their brain.) According to an oral history published in New York magazine, they used a real pencil! No CGI. That’s movie magic.

Lizzie: As Jan ran through newspaper clippings of Chicago magic shows past, I noticed that one of them used the tagline “It’s fun to be fooled!” I can’t say that I 100 percent agree with the sentiment. Take April Fool’s Day, for example, one of the most popular times for fooling and being fooled. No one likes April Fool’s Day, except maybe the people born on April 1 who love presents.

But is magic actually about fooling people? I’m not actually being fooled by the tricks. For example, you may be surprised to hear that I understand that our table magician didn’t actually turn five $1s into five $50s, because if he could do that, he would probably quit his job at the Chicago Magic Lounge. And I know that Criss Angel can’t actually levitate. But I think it’s fun to see people do things you can’t do. This is why professional sports are popular.

Kaitlyn: The first stage magician went by only his first name, Fenik, and his hair was bright white all the way down to the roots. Jan said that he is very famous in Mexico. He was funny. He mocked the typical magic-show audience by rolling up his sleeves, saying he has to do this because whenever he makes a coin disappear, everyone says, “You put it up your sleeve,” and when he makes a lemon disappear, they say, “You put it up your sleeve,” and when he makes a watermelon disappear, they say, “You put it up your sleeve.” Haha!

First, Fenik did a trick in which a bunch of ropes start out the same length and then become different lengths, which I thought I’d seen before. At one point, he held up the first rope and said it was “as long as my body” and then the second rope—“as long as my legs”—and then the third rope—“as long as my … head!” Lizzie didn’t like that joke. She said it was not offensive to her, but it’s just not her kind of humor.

I have to admit, some of Fenik’s other tricks were a bit too involved for 11 p.m. There were multiple audience-member assistants—two of whom were named Blayne and Zayn—and I kind of lost the plot at a certain point. I started yawning around the time that another Chicago girlie led Fenik through the room with a pair of silver coins taped over his eyes. He stopped in front of some guy at a distant table to tell him he was pretty sure that the item in the guy’s hand was made of green plastic, but because we couldn’t see to confirm and the guy didn’t let out a shout or anything, it was hard to be that impressed. At the end, he read Zayn’s mind. That was nuts.

Does this scare you at all? (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: Yes, I was impressed by Fenik’s mind-reading. At the same time, I hoped he couldn’t read mine. He wouldn’t like it!

Our headliner was Ryan Plunkett, a Chicago local and founding ensemble member of the Chicago Magic Lounge. Plunkett told us almost immediately that he was going to be bullshitting us, which I appreciated.

He started with a trick almost like Three Card Monte, where an audience member had to decide which plastic cup a walnut was in. Plunkett said we would never win, because he was cheating, and we never did. From there he moved on to some coin and card tricks, ending with an “Is this your card?”–style finale. I liked him, and if he were ever performing in New York I might go, except for the fact that, from our minimal research, magic shows in New York seem to be a lot more expensive than those in Chicago.

On the drive home, we discovered that many of the highway entrances were closed off because of Mexican Independence Day celebrations, and there were no clear detour routes. More deception! Eventually, Ashley got us home and Kaitlyn did some light digging into Ryan Plunkett’s personal life before we all fell asleep.

Kaitlyn: The morning after the magic show, a thick fog rolled in over the city of Chicago. We observed it moodily from our borrowed apartment on the 36th floor while eating candy for breakfast. With help from some online forums, I tried to teach myself the bill-swapping trick, but it wasn’t to be. Unfortunately, success seemed to depend on deftness, dexterity, and flair. I had hoped it would be a series of simple steps I could just memorize and follow, as with everything else I’m good at in life.

While we waited for the weather to clear up, Ashley showed us how to pretend to levitate (amazingly, she knows this), and we watched some videos of David Copperfield. “Nathan says his dad took him to see David Copperfield once,” I told Ashley and Liz. Then we watched a clip of Copperfield putting a duck through a “Duck-o-Matic,” squashing him flat. (And un-squashing him later.) Lizzie was like, “What if the camera panned over and Nathan was in the audience, looking exactly like he does now?” This video was from 1986. “We would all scream,” I said. She wondered, further, if I would take a photo and send it to him and demand an explanation. “If I found out that my boyfriend was an immortal demon, would I text him about it?” She nodded. Well if that was really the question, then the answer was absolutely not. We would be off to the dustiest library in Chicago to flip through some heavy books on the occult and figure out what Nathan might be after. Geez. You have to be able to count on your girlies for that much.

Lizzie: To me, it seems like just asking him would be the most obvious first step. What does an immortal demon say when presented with photographic evidence of his immortality? Only after we hear whatever that is do we head to the library, unconvinced and unnerved.

For the rest of the trip, we found magic everywhere—in delicious cornbread, fuzzy textile art, and, again, $3 beer and $1,800 apartments right on the river (much of the magic was price-based). We’re magic people now! And we could probably be famous magicians too, if we just worked a little on our finger dexterity.

Kaitlyn: We took the “L” (elevated rail) to the airport, and would you believe it runs directly into the terminal? Chicago really is an amazing place.

Back in the grand but not always magical city of New York, Ashley’s boyfriend drove us all home from the airport. Then, from my own Brooklyn bed, I watched a bizarrely illustrated breakdown of how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. I was shocked because the explanation is so stupid. I can’t believe anybody fell for it. It just goes to show, you’re being hustled every minute in this town. [Shaking my head, chuckling.] Ah, but you kind of like it. We like it!

Lizzie: It’s fun to be fooled! Or something like that.

On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, and Gallivanting, a collection of Famous People letters from the past five years, is available now from Zando Projects and The Atlantic.

Editor’s Note: On the last Monday of each month, Lori Gottlieb answers a reader’s question about a problem, big or small. Have a question? Email her at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear Therapist” in your inbox.

Dear Therapist,

I am the older sibling; I have a younger brother.

My brother is incarcerated. When he is released, he will be in his late 50s and will have no assets. As a felon and a sex offender, he will probably have difficulty finding a good job. He will move in with my mother, assuming she is still living. My mother has chosen to leave her mortgage-free home and its contents to him, and to divide the rest of her assets equally between us. There are no conditions in place, such as leaving the property in a trust, to deal with his possible recidivism, marriage, or financial irresponsibility (he has a history of foreclosures).

The rest of her assets are not much, because she has spent so much on his legal fees and continues to support him financially while he is in prison. She is making significant improvements to her house, which will be his house. The value of his inheritance will continue to increase, while her liquid assets will continue to decrease. In the meantime, I am the one providing her with the everyday help and support she needs.

I am struggling with feelings of hurt and resentment. She is rewarding him—generously—for his very poor choices and behavior. I never felt entitled to an inheritance, and if she were traveling around the world and spending it all so there was nothing left, I think I’d be okay with that. I know it will cause her a lot of pain if I tell her how I am feeling, and I don’t want to add to her burden. She is still grieving the loss of my father, coupled with her emotions about my brother.

Can you help me frame this in a way that helps me overcome my bitterness? I’m not proud of how I’m feeling.

Anonymous
Seattle

Dear Anonymous,

Everything you’re feeling is completely understandable, so much so that if you’d said you had no feelings or were completely at peace with the situation, I would raise my eyebrows. I’m starting there because you’re asking me to help you “overcome” the way you feel—bitter, resentful, envious, unseen, unappreciated—when what will help you most is to welcome those very reasonable feelings without judging yourself, and then use them to take action.

I don’t know the particulars of your situation—how early in life your brother’s behavioral issues began, what the age difference is between you, how long your mom (or both of your parents, before your father died) has been supporting your brother through the consequences of his behavior even before he became incarcerated—but I imagine you’ve had feelings about your family’s relationship with your brother for quite some time. Perhaps your brother’s behavior in some form or another has been challenging since childhood or young adulthood. A common dynamic in families with a troubled sibling is that the parents are so focused on navigating the crises at hand that they don’t notice—or have the bandwidth to address—the burden placed not just on them, but on any other children they have.

In families where one child has a chronic illness that feels all-encompassing, a similar dynamic emerges. An intense focus on the sick child stretches the parents’ financial, emotional, and logistical resources so thin that the healthy siblings try to do the opposite: not ask for much, stay under the radar, and be as accommodating as possible. In the case of a sibling with a behavioral issue, however, the other sibling—you—faces added burdens: Maybe you were embarrassed by your brother, teased about him, or even scared of him. Maybe he acted out in ways that harmed you, and you didn’t get the emotional or physical protection you needed, or were afraid to ask for it. You might even have hated him or wished he didn’t exist and then felt ashamed for these thoughts, not knowing how normal a response this was.

[Read: When a sibling goes to prison]

Sibling relationships are complicated, even under the best of circumstances. Siblings can be our protectors, rivals, tormentors, playmates, nurturers, co-conspirators, mentors, role models, and/or cautionary tales. They are, in most families, the only other people with whom we share a particular set of parents, a unique household environment, and years of experiences during a formative time in our life. For these reasons, a sibling relationship can have a lasting impact into adulthood. For you, this might include a sense of being overlooked for being the “good” child while your sibling gets “rewarded” for being “bad.” If there’s a history of this pattern, now it’s being illuminated by your mother’s inheritance plans.

I have a feeling, though, that underneath this sense of injustice is a long-standing loss you might not have grieved. Recently, you lost your father and whatever role he played in your life, but even before that, there were other losses: of the brother you didn’t have, the sense of peace that was taken from your family by your brother’s behavior, the stable family you deserved. Many people who have problematic siblings yearn for the closeness of a sibling they will never have. They don’t feel like an only child—they feel like a child whose sibling has died. The shadow of this lost sibling looms large in their daily life and sometimes feels inescapable, like when someone in an otherwise enjoyable social situation innocently asks, “Do you have any siblings?” If your brother is incarcerated, not only might you feel anxiety, shame, or resentment at that moment, but you’re also experiencing the loss of the hoped-for sibling all over again.

What does this have to do with your mother and her decision regarding the inheritance? Your feelings about your sibling can’t be separated from how you feel about the relationship your mother chooses to have with him. It might be easier to be angry with your brother than with your mother, but it’s okay to be angry with her too—and to talk about your feelings with her. That doesn’t mean yelling or accusing. What it means is letting her in on what’s going on inside you.

Your conversation will go better if you can imagine her experience before you approach her. Instead of thinking of her choice as “rewarding him” for his “poor choices and behavior,” recognize that what she’s actually doing is honoring her unconditional love as a parent—the same unconditional love she has for you. You might think, Well, yeah, but I would never be in my brother’s situation. I would never do what he has done. That’s a false comparison. Your mom is demonstrating that she will be there to protect her children, full stop. Her decision to give him the house doesn’t mean that she loves him more or condones what he’s done. She’s simply acknowledging a grim reality: Her child, who has likely long had challenges functioning in the world, needs a roof over his head, and, given how hard it is for someone with a criminal record to find a home or a job to pay for that home, she’s taking care of him when she can’t be here anymore. She’s filling a need that she imagines you don’t have. Except that you do have needs—and that’s where your conversation can begin.

[Read: The longest relationship of our lives]

You might say something like “Mom, I want to have an honest conversation about us as it relates to my brother. I’m bringing this up because I love you and I know how much you love me too, and I don’t want my silence to get in the way of our close connection. Let me start by saying that I can only imagine how hard this situation has been on you as a parent, and I admire the fierce, relentless love you’ve shown us children as our mother. It takes a lot of resilience and grace to do what you do, and I want you to know that I see and respect that. At the same time, I feel like the pressing issues with my brother have taken so much attention and focus in our family that I haven’t shared my feelings at times with you, and I’m hoping I can do that now so that we can be closer.”

Then you might say something to the effect that even though it seems like you’re doing well, the situation with your brother has affected you too. Give a few examples of your experience without blaming him or your parents—just this is how it has felt for me. Then you might say that you’ve been thinking about the dynamics in the family and her decision to leave the house to your brother, and you’re feeling hurt and overlooked, and you want her to know that. Reassure her that you’re not blaming her or even asking her to necessarily do anything about it. You’re just opening up a dialogue and letting her know how you feel, because holding it inside has been painful, and sometimes you need a compassionate mother too.

A few things to remember: First, the initial conversation is usually the hardest, so if it doesn’t go well, remember that you’ve still opened the door for more open communication to follow. Especially if these topics have never been discussed, you and your mom might need to adjust to this new way of relating to each other. Eventually, you might even find some connection in your mutual grief. Second, the benchmark for a successful conversation isn’t dependent on her reaction or what she does or doesn’t do with what you share; the conversation is successful if you show up and share your truth with kindness.

By welcoming your feelings, processing your grief (possibly with the help of a therapist), and communicating honestly with your mother while she’s still around to hear it, you’ll do more than find a different way of framing your feelings. You’ll find a way to live with your feelings while also moving forward.

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.