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Barry Manilow is an American institution. It’s okay if you think so too: I won’t tell anyone.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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You Know the Words

Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl.

Come on. You know the rest. Everyone does.

And so did the crowd at the Barry Manilow concert I attended in Las Vegas last week, on the night that he broke Elvis Presley’s record for the most shows at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino.

Oh, I know. Roll your eyes. We’re all too cool for Manilow, the Brooklyn kid who became a schmaltz superstar, the guy whose music for almost five decades has practically been the definition of unhip, shamelessly sentimental “adult contemporary.” We smirk—yet we know every word.

Think of the scene in the 1995 movie Tommy Boy—and if you haven’t seen it, it’s better than you’d think—where Chris Farley and David Spade are on a road trip and “Superstar,” by the Carpenters, comes on the radio. Neither of them changes the station. “Talk about lame,” Spade sneers. “I can live with it if you can,” Farley says. A minute later, both of them are singing along and crying.

So, kind of like that.

But how is it possible that even those of us who aren’t dedicated fans know Manilow’s songs so well? In the days of vinyl, I never bought a Barry Manilow album. And yet, reviewing my old iTunes list, somehow, over the years, I have managed to accumulate something like 15 of his songs, and even more on Spotify. Who could have put those on there? I have every Steely Dan record; a full trove of the Beatles; classics from Squeeze, The Alan Parsons Project, the Clash, and … This One’s for You?

Barry Manilow is woven into my music collection because he is a cornerstone of the late-20th-century American soundtrack. He’s not going to appear in the canonical music histories, especially because some of his hits were written by others. His musical structures are not going to be analyzed; his lyrics are not going to be pondered. (He is, however, an aging white male, so he might pass muster with Jann Wenner, a co-founder and the former publisher of Rolling Stone.)

You may not realize it, but if you’re of a certain age—really, of almost any age beyond childhood—Manilow has likely been a part of the musical backdrop of your life. He certainly was part of mine.

I can admit this now that I’m approaching the phase of life that scientists call “geezer.” If you had told me when I was in high school, back in the 1970s, that one day I’d drop a chunk of cash on a Manilow concert, I’d have snorted in disgust. It’s not that we didn’t appreciate Barry back then, but if you were trying to be a virile young fellow, you were only supposed to tolerate him, and only around girls.

And yet, despite my ostensible indifference to him at the height of his fame, there was always some Barry in the background, especially where early romances were concerned. I had a big high-school breakup with a girl across town just as “Even Now” came out; thank heavens I was too darn manly to admit that the song put a lump in my throat (and still does). I fell for a young lady who lived far away from me during a too-brief summer stay in Boston, and of course we had a lovely “Weekend in New England,” and … well, if all this sounds corny, of course it was. To be dramatic and corny about love—about everything, really—is one of the great privileges of youth.

By the time I was heading off to college at the end of the ’70s, I was a typical mainstream-rock consumer: Boston, Bob Seger, Meat Loaf, the Cars. (I also had Partners in Crime, by Rupert Holmes. I stand by this choice.) Once in college, I immersed myself in new wave, synth-pop, the “second British invasion,” and the roster of glittery superstars and one-hit wonders created by a new thing called MTV. Clearly, I had outgrown Barry Manilow.

Except I hadn’t. I first heard “Ships” in my 20s—an Ian Hunter song popularized by Manilow—and to this day, it reminds me of my difficult relationship with my own father. “Copacabana” is always going to remind me of dancing with friends right into my 40s. In my 50s, with a first marriage behind me, I called up a nice divorcée I had been dating and told her, with a bit of warbling Manilow in my voice, that I was “ready to take a chance again.”

So was she. And that’s how both of us, years later, ended up in Las Vegas, watching an 80-year-old Barry Manilow belt out his greatest hits at the Westgate.

I am not a professional music critic, but it’s a great show. Other aging stars have had to dial down the pitch and bring in backup singers, but Manilow did some justified showing off, his voice climbing his trademark modulations. I suppose when you’ve done more than 600 shows in a row, you’ve got it down to a science, but somehow, Manilow came across as if it were one of his first appearances and he was just amazed that so many people showed up. (I didn’t realize, until seeing him in person, how intensely his fans, the self-dubbed “Fanilows,” love him. He clearly loves them back.) Most of all, it was just fun.

Sure, I’ll admit that some of Manilow’s stuff gives me hives. He is famously the composer of some well-known commercial jingles, including for State Farm and Band-Aid, so some of the songs I’ve always disliked, such as “Can’t Smile Without You,” always sound to me like an annoying commercial earworm. Manilow himself admits that Andrew Lloyd Webber hated Manilow’s version of “Memory.” So do I. (Don’t tell Sir Andrew, but I hate the song no matter who does it; Manilow’s rendition is just especially treacly.) And it might earn me the enmity of the Fanilows, but I never liked Barry’s first big hit, “Mandy.”

But Manilow and the songs he sings are critic-proof. Even Manilow gets it: During the show last week, he admitted that his music is a standard on elevators and in dentists’ offices. “As long as there are teeth,” he quipped, “my music will never die.” It’s not great art, but then, neither were the Carpenters, another beloved ’70s act. (“We’ve Only Just Begun” was written by Paul Williams for a bank commercial, by the way.) Manilow’s voice—much like Karen Carpenter’s, come to think of it—has always just been there as part of my life, and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t like it back then or that I don’t like it now.

You don’t have to admit that you agree with me. I understand. Let’s just say that I can live with it if you can—and that neither of us is going to change the station.

Related:

Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser. Surrender to Steely Dan.

Today’s News

Senator Dianne Feinstein died last night at the age of 90. House Republicans failed to advance a short-term spending bill to avoid a government shutdown this weekend, in a major blow to Speaker Kevin McCarthy. A state of emergency has been declared across New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley due to severe flooding.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: A new book looks at the “underground historians” of China resurfacing moments from the past that authorities would prefer be forgotten, Gal Beckerman writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks readers whether Democrats should stick with Joe Biden, and discusses controversy over a talk about racial color blindness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read
Courtesy of The National Zoo

Basil the Opossum Has One Eye, a Big Heart, and a Job to Do

By Elaine Godfrey

This week was a bittersweet one at the zoo. Visitors to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, with their panda-patterned hats and panda umbrellas, flooded in to say farewell to the zoo’s three giant pandas, who will soon be on their way back to China. To honor their departure, zoo staff are hosting a multiday Panda Palooza, with panda-themed movie screenings, kids’ activities, and cake for the bears. After all, the pandas have been D.C. icons since the first generation arrived more than 50 years ago. Today, zoo-adjacent restaurants sell panda pancakes and panda cake pops. The D.C. metro system sells panda tote bags, and the Washington Mystics women’s basketball team adopted Pax the Panda as its mascot.

But I went to the zoo last week to see a very different animal. I arrived at the Small Mammal House, walked past the South American prehensile-tailed porcupines and a pair of Australian brush-tailed bettongs, and found Basil the opossum asleep, his fuzzy body curled into a ball, his chest rising and falling. When Mimi Nowlin, a Small Mammal House keeper, climbed through a door into the back of his enclosure carrying a plastic tub of capelin, the creature’s eye—he has only one—fluttered open. He stood up on tiny legs. And as Nowlin held out a chunk of fish with a pair of silver tongs, Basil waddled forward, opened his toothy mouth, and chomped. A few minutes later, after the tub was empty, Basil shoved his head in and licked the sides. He had bewitched me, body and soul!

Read the full article.

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Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I knew when I wrote this nostalgic reminiscence about Barry Manilow that some of my friends in the office (especially among the younger generations) might, shall we say, harbor a dissenting view. So I’m handing over the postscript today to my colleague Sam Fentress, an assistant editor here at The Atlantic. Sam turned 27 today—happy birthday, Sam!—and he raises an admittedly uncomfortable point about a big part of Barry’s oeuvre.  — Tom

Cheers to Barry Manilow; may he live to grace us with another 637 Vegas nights. I love “Copacabana”—a perfect karaoke song—but if I could permanently excise one trauma from American cultural memory, it would be the three (3) Christmas albums he recorded from 1990 to 2007 (the third was retail-exclusive to Hallmark stores, which I believe is what they call a “red flag”). I can’t think of a sonic experience more prone to induce apoplexy than the first 30 seconds of his medley rendition—he loves a medley, bless him—of “Carol of the Bells” and “Jingle Bells.” Brace yourself, and your loved ones around you, as he struggles to meet the unforgiving tempo in that Cheez Whiz drone. Never have I felt more inconsolable in a CVS checkout line.        

— Sam

Due to a technical error, yesterday’s newsletter included a past version of the Culture Break section. You can find the updated section here.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump is a deals guy. He rode his image as real-estate mogul and a maestro of transactions first to pop-culture stardom, then to the White House. Now a judge has ruled that much of that dealmaking was fraudulent: New York Judge Arthur Engoron found yesterday that Trump and his associates, including his sons Eric and Donald Jr., committed persistent fraud by toggling estimates of property values in order to get insurance and favorable terms on loans. The judge ordered that some of the Trump Organization’s “certificates,” or corporate charters, be canceled, and that a receiver be appointed by the court to dissolve some of its New York companies. This latest blow for Trump puts on record that his mythos of business acumen was largely built on lies.

This ruling on its own hinders some of the Trump Organization’s operations in New York State by cutting off Trump’s control of assets. But really, it is just a first step toward the broader business restrictions on Trump that New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking, Celia Bigoness, a clinical professor of law at Cornell, told me. And to the extent that this ruling shows how the judge feels about James’s suit, first brought against Trump last year, things are not looking great for him. In the trial set to start next week, the judge will determine penalties for the fraud committed: James has requested that those include a $250 million fine and restrictions that prevent the former president and some of his children from running a company in New York ever again. “Trump is synonymous with New York,” Bigoness said. Losing control of his New York businesses and properties would amount to “his home and the place that he has tied himself to shutting him out entirely.” It could also be hugely costly.

This week’s summary judgment is unusual, legal experts told me: The judge essentially determined that it was so clear that Trump had committed fraud that it wasn’t worth wasting time at a trial figuring that part out. Instead, the trial will be used to determine whether Trump’s New York businesses should be further limited as punishment for the fraud—and whether the other demands of James’s suit will be met. It’s somewhat rare for a summary judgment to get to the core of a case like this, and the judge’s decision was distinctly zingy and personal. Responding to Trump’s team’s claims that the suit wasn’t valid, Judge Engoron said that he had already rejected their arguments, and that he was reminded of the “time-loop in the film ‘Groundhog Day.’” In a footnote to his ruling, he quoted a Chico Marx line from Duck Soup: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

In another unusual move, the judge also included individual fines against Trump’s lawyers as part of the ruling, charging each $7,500 for bringing arguments so “frivolous” that they wasted the court’s time. Separately, Trump’s lawyers are trying to sue the judge (a long-shot attempt). Trump, for his part, posted on Truth Social that he had “done business perfectly”; he also called the judge “deranged.” Reached for comment, the Trump attorney Christopher Kise called the decision “outrageous” and “completely disconnected from the facts and governing law.” “President Trump and his family will seek all available appellate remedies to rectify this miscarriage of justice,” he said in an emailed statement. An appeals process from Trump’s camp could extend into the next presidential-election cycle. His team might also attempt to get an emergency stay to prevent the trial from starting next week.

This ruling, and the rest of James’s suit, are circumscribed to New York. Technically, Trump would still be free to spin up new businesses as he sees fit in another state, and he has holdings beyond New York. But even if he could legally incorporate a new business in, say, Florida or Illinois, it might not make financial or brand sense for him. The fallout from this case could wind up being very costly for Trump, so setting up shop elsewhere, although not impossible, could be a major financial hurdle. Plus, “New York is the place Trump wants to do business and has been doing business for forever,” Caroline Polisi, a white-collar defense attorney and lecturer at Columbia Law School, told me.

Yesterday’s ruling may do little to dampen Trump’s appeal among his die-hard fans, who have stuck with him through all manner of scandals, including a running list of criminal indictments. But it could puncture Trump’s persona. My colleague David A. Graham wrote today that the fact that Trump and his co-defendants, including his sons, committed fraud is not surprising. What is surprising, he argued, is that they are facing harsh consequences. “Trump’s political career is based on the myth that he was a great businessman,” David told me. “This ruling cuts straight to the root of that, showing that his business success was built on years of lies.” Indeed, when Letitia James filed suit against Trump last year, she dubbed his behavior the “art of the steal.”

Related:

The end of Trump Inc. It’s just fraud all the way down.

Today’s News

The U.S. soldier Pvt. Travis King, who sprinted across the border into North Korea two months ago, has been released into American custody. The second Republican presidential primary debate will be held in California tonight.   A federal judge struck down a Texas law that drag performers worried would ban shows in the state.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Driverless cars are a tough sell. Conor Friedersdorf compiles reader perspectives on the future of the technology.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI

By Alex Reisner

One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It’s being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions, systems such as ChatGPT process huge quantities of written material. But few people outside of companies such as Meta and OpenAI know the full extent of the texts these programs have been trained on.

Some training text comes from Wikipedia and other online writing, but high-quality generative AI requires higher-quality input than is usually found on the internet—that is, it requires the kind found in books. In a lawsuit filed in California last month, the writers Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden allege that Meta violated copyright laws by using their books to train LLaMA, a large language model similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4—an algorithm that can generate text by mimicking the word patterns it finds in sample texts. But neither the lawsuit itself nor the commentary surrounding it has offered a look under the hood: We have not previously known for certain whether LLaMA was trained on Silverman’s, Kadrey’s, or Golden’s books, or any others, for that matter.

In fact, it was. I recently obtained and analyzed a dataset used by Meta to train LLaMA. Its contents more than justify a fundamental aspect of the authors’ allegations: Pirated books are being used as inputs for computer programs that are changing how we read, learn, and communicate. The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.

Read the full article.

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Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Corporate jargon is grating. It can also both amp up and diminish the drama of corporate life, depending on the agenda of those in charge.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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Euphemistic Bubble Wrap

“Our office in Monrovia has a guy on the payroll whose job is catching snakes. That’s all he does. He goes to employees’ houses on a regular basis, through the yard, the garden, the hedges, catching snakes.”

“What’s he called officially?”

“The snake catcher.”

“That’s remarkably direct,” I said.

“They couldn’t come up with a buzz word for snake, it seems.”

This perfect exchange comes from Don DeLillo’s 1982 novel, The Names, and it captures a dynamic I think about often: Jargon is so common in the world of white-collar work that to encounter direct, descriptive language can feel refreshing, even jarring. People at work “pivot,” “ideate,” “synergize”; they “make asks”; they “operationalize.” The Wall Street Journal recently reported that some companies are using the word feedforward rather than the apparently harsher-sounding feedback. As the DeLillo scene reminds us, corporate buzzwords have been around for decades, but as work changes—and especially as industries look to emulate tech, with its notoriously high volume of jargon—so, too, does the language people use in and around the office (or the home office).

In many instances, workplace vocabulary emerges organically: Within organizations, when people hear leaders or other high-status people speak a certain way, they “assume that’s the most prized or most valuable way to communicate,” Caleb Madison, The Atlantic’s crossword-puzzle editor and the author of The Good Word newsletter, told me. At work, he added, people just really don’t want to sound wrong. Talking how others talk is a safe path. And deviating from workplace norms can be fraught, especially for women and people of color, my colleague Olga Khazan wrote in 2020—people often stick to the linguistic status quo, at least until they gain more power. Peter Cappelli, a management professor at UPenn’s Wharton School and the director of its Center for Human Resources, told me that, unlike politicians who carefully shape messaging, corporate leaders sometimes just look to emulate the organizations and industries they see as successful: When tech became a force in the 2000s, the wider business community paid attention, he said.

Workplace phenomena bring new language norms with them. “I hope this email finds you well,” we might write to a colleague these days, before describing a task and then suggesting that we “circle back.” In an era of remote work, Caleb added, we may be finding our colleagues on a beach in Bali, or in a hospital room. We really have no idea what’s going on with them—but we hope our notes find them well. Written communications also allow for many ways to politely put off a task or say we don’t want to do something.

Last year, my friend Emma Goldberg wrote in The New York Times about another workplace shift: Job titles are changing, and in some cases becoming more abstract, as corporate cultures evolve and hybrid work becomes widespread. “Head of team anywhere,” “head of dynamic work,” and “chief heart officer” were among the titles she found in use.

Executives also use language to try to make changes sound less scary. In the early 1980s, Cappelli said, when white-collar corporate America saw its first mass layoffs, executives started using phrases such as “re-engineering.” During the tech industry’s recent rounds of layoffs, executives have turned to a range of euphemisms: I wrote last year about companies reducing their workforce to only those with “go forward” roles—obscuring the inverse, which is that those not in go-forward roles would lose their job. Project Veritas, for example, recently referred to layoffs as “RIF,” or “reduction in force.” At its worst, corporate jargon dehumanizes a typically devastating process. It makes real pain abstract, as the founder of a site that tracks tech layoffs told me last year.

In obscuring what would otherwise be direct, corporate jargon both amps up and tamps down the drama of corporate life, depending on the agenda of those in charge. Many workplace metaphors heighten the stakes of normal business interactions: Battle metaphors make warriors of cubicle dwellers. Death metaphors make stakes of dealmaking seem, well, life-and-death. As Olga wrote, “Buzzwords are useful when office workers need to dress up their otherwise pointless tasks with fancier phrases—you know, for the optics.”

White-collar workplace jargon often seeks to make the banal sound thrilling. Not much that happens in these workplaces is actually that high-stakes. So it’s ironic, and sad, that the element of a job that truly changes someone’s life—losing it—tends to be wrapped in layers of euphemistic bubble wrap. This kind of language creates distance between the framing of the thing and the hard reality. Everyone wants to be the quarterback, or the general, Caleb said, but no one wants to be an asshole.

Related:

The origins of office speak Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults.

Today’s News

Democratic Senator Bob Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, have been indicted on several charges, including bribery. They allegedly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of bribes in exchange for assisting businessmen in New Jersey and the Egyptian government. In a statement, Senator Menendez called the allegations against him “baseless,” and a lawyer for Nadine Menendez said that she “denies any wrongdoing.” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson announced that he is switching to the Republican Party; the city is now the largest in the United States to have a GOP mayor. Two people died and dozens were injured after a bus carrying a high-school marching band crashed in Wawayanda, New York, yesterday.

Dispatches

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P.S.

Speaking of wooden corporate language, the tech writer Max Read’s close reading of the mocked-up text messages in Apple’s marketing materials was delightful. Though I had seen lots of fake texts on Apple Store devices and the like over the years, I had never really thought about them as a body of work. Now I am intrigued: Why, indeed, are these disembodied names going on adventures so often? Who are the people in all these cleanly framed photos? And, most of all, I want to know what comes after this opener in an iOS 7 sample email with the subject line “Beanbag”: “I know I said you could borrow it through …”

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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This month has been a messy one for the Biden family. Last week, Hunter Biden, the president’s son, was indicted on three charges of gun-related crimes, including lying about drug use while purchasing a firearm and illegally possessing a weapon (he reportedly plans to plead not guilty). On Monday, he sued the Internal Revenue Service, accusing the agency of violating his privacy by disclosing details about his taxes. And earlier today, Attorney General Merrick Garland defended himself against House Republicans, who have accused him of trying to protect the Bidens in the investigation into Hunter Biden’s ties to Ukraine. I spoke with David A. Graham, who covers politics for The Atlantic, about how Donald Trump and House Republicans are seeking to use Hunter’s troubles against his father.

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Personally Painful

Lora Kelley: What about Hunter Biden makes him such a potent target for people who seek to undermine or embarrass Joe Biden?

David A. Graham: We know a lot about his personal peccadilloes, and he has clearly been involved in some shady things. It seems likely that he violated gun laws, and it seems likely he violated tax laws, since he was ready to plead guilty to misdemeanor tax offenses. His business work, as Sarah Chayes has described in The Atlantic, may or may not be illegal, but it seems clearly unethical.

All of those things make Hunter Biden a good target, and they are a way to tie him to his father and spread a miasma of wrongdoing around the Biden family. That’s helpful from a partisan standpoint if you’re trying to hurt Biden, and it’s also helpful for Donald Trump. Trump himself is under indictment. We saw years of Trump’s misconduct, and there are also questions about his own family’s ethics and business. This allows Trump to say, Well, look, the other side has this too. Trump has tried repeatedly over the years to weaponize Hunter’s problems against Joe Biden, and that’s what led to his first impeachment.

Lora: Do Hunter’s business dealings have anything to do with his dad?

David: So far, the evidence that has turned up suggests: No. The closest thing that anyone seems to have tying the president to Hunter’s business is that they regularly spoke on the phone while Hunter was speaking with business partners. It’s not clear that the president knew what was going on, and there’s no evidence that he profited from this.

Lora: What did you make of the announcement earlier this week that Hunter Biden is suing the IRS for privacy violations?

David: His lawyers are clearly taking a more aggressive approach than they have in the past. They tried to work with prosecutors to make this go away quietly. It didn’t work; his plea deal last month collapsed under questioning from a judge.

Now we’re seeing him switch legal teams. His team is going after House Republicans; they’re going after the IRS. They’re trying to take the offensive, and that might be legally effective. But when Hunter does things like file lawsuits, it just puts him more in the spotlight. I don’t know that it’s good for his father or for the Democratic Party.

Lora: How has Hunter been affected by both sides of the nepotism coin?

David: He’s become prominent and wealthy through his family, but it also means that he’s going to attract greater scrutiny. He went to work for a bank in Delaware that had strong political ties to his father. He was a lobbyist in Washington. And, most notably, he had this high-paying gig with Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, even though he had no expertise in Ukraine, and no expertise in natural gas. He’s benefited from his ties to his father, and he’s made a lot of money. That’s not illegal. People have been doing that for as long as there has been politics. But it’s unsavory.

On the flip side, in these legal proceedings, you have legal experts looking at the charges against Hunter and saying: These are just not crimes that are typically charged in this way. They say it looks like Hunter is getting closer scrutiny than a normal person might.

Lora: How, if at all, do you think that Hunter’s legal troubles will affect Joe Biden’s reputation and reelection campaign?

David: He’s certainly a distraction. It’s hard to say how much of a liability he is. We have to see where these investigations go. So far, House Republican efforts to turn up something that ties this to wrongdoing by Joe Biden have come up short in embarrassing ways. They keep contradicting themselves, and have lost a potential witness. I don’t know how closely they’ll manage to tie this to Biden or to create an impression that he is linked to corruption. But if you’re running for president, you don’t want your son to be facing criminal charges.

Lora: Is there any way this situation could help Joe Biden politically, or help him seem like a sympathetic figure?

David: This is clearly personally painful to Joe Biden, who loves his son dearly, which is one reason why he has not cut him loose. Biden’s personal story—the car crash that killed his first wife and daughter and injured Hunter and his other son, Beau, and later Beau’s death—is already a part of what people see about him. There are people who admire the fact that he is sticking by his troubled son. There are people who will say: Every family has a kid who struggles. Especially with addiction, there’s a lot of sympathy there.

That’s less the case when you get into business corruption. And that’s why the stakes are higher for the impeachment and for the business allegations. But there’s also no real evidence of corruption so far. It’s murky.

Related:

The truth about Hunter Biden’s indictment Not illegal, but clearly wrong

Today’s News

Attorney General Merrick Garland testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee and rejected Republican claims regarding political bias in the Justice Department. Azerbaijan has agreed to a cease-fire with Armenian separatists in Nagorno-Karabakh. President Biden unveiled the American Climate Corps, a jobs-training program.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf rounds up 15 reader responses about how their trust in American institutions has changed.

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Miki Lowe

Read. “Distressed Haiku,” a 2000 poem by Donald Hall about Jane Kenyon, his late wife and fellow poet.

“You think that their / dying is the worst / thing that could happen. // Then they stay dead.”

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

I’ve often wondered how Millennial women in Britain survived the aughts: not just the incessant fat shaming and the ritualized alcohol abuse, but also the cheerful, open predation that was everywhere in popular culture then. This weekend, the London Times and the TV documentary series Dispatches revealed coordinated allegations that the TV star turned conspiratorial wellness personality Russell Brand had victimized multiple people from 2006 to 2013, including a 16-year-old girl who says he picked her up on the street when he was 30, referred to her as “the child” and cradled her like a baby when he found out she was a virgin, and then later choked her with his penis until she—fearing she would actually suffocate—punched him in the stomach. The dual reports also allege that Brand raped a woman he knew at his home in Los Angeles and attempted to rape another until she screamed so hard that he flew into a rage. (Brand has said he “absolutely refutes” what he describes as “a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks.”)

Beyond these serious allegations, there’s also recorded evidence, documented on TV comedy specials and on Brand’s own radio show during the 2000s, that Brand relentlessly harassed women he worked with, sexualizing and dehumanizing them on air, and then belittling them to the public when they objected. This was the particular insidiousness of aughts-era misogyny, which people like Brand propagated but absolutely didn’t invent: the idea that if girls, or young women, complained about how they were being treated, they were joyless scolds, too uncool to get the joke and too ugly to be concerned about anyway.

[Read: Why were we so cruel to Britney Spears?]

The trap was that women were expected to cheerfully participate in their own objectification or risk being not just exploited but also vilified. It was an ethos informed by porn and disseminated by a new stable of men’s magazines. In 1999, when I was trying to decide where to go to college, a naked image of the children’s-television presenter Gail Porter was projected onto the Houses of Parliament without Porter’s knowledge or consent in a stunt by the magazine FHM, inadvertently saying volumes about what kind of status girls my age could actually hope for. Why bother investing in an education or a career when the dominant cultural paradigm was interested only in sexual power? And the messaging worked. By 2006, according to Natasha Walter’s book Living Dolls, more than half of British girls polled in one survey said they would consider nude modeling. The previous year, female students at Pembroke College, Cambridge, posed topless for their student magazine. Out of 11 female cast members from the 2006 season of the hit British reality show Big Brother, four posed topless after leaving the show, to capitalize on their new notoriety.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Russell Brand had his own Big Brother connection, hosting a spin-off talk-show series about the British franchise, or that the toxic influencer Andrew Tate—currently charged in Romania with rape and sex trafficking, charges that Tate denies—also appeared on the show. Reality television from its conception relied on two things: provocation and exposure. People watched to see who would fight, who would hook up, who would crack under the pressure. The medium demanded ratings, and ratings came from finding not average people to sequester in a TV goldfish bowl, but extreme personalities who craved their own 24-hour soapbox and the promise of instant notoriety. Sex has always been the subtext of the series—I vividly remember the tabloid press’s frame-by-frame analysis in 2004 when two Big Brother contestants supposedly became the first people to have intercourse on the show. (By way of encouragement, and to emphasize how invested people were in this new television frontier, Playboy TV offered a £50,000 prize at the time to anyone bold enough to do so.)

And so Big Brother was a natural forum for Brand. The Dispatches documentary shows him pulling his trousers down while sitting on a female interviewee’s lap, and running down the street after a man in urine-soaked underwear asking for a “cuddle,” among other antics—employing blatant, aggressive sexuality as his defining comedic mode. He was so open about who he was—writing about his heroin addiction and sex addiction in his memoir, flaunting his status as a sex pest on TV, and later in movies—that it’s astonishing now to see how much he actually seems to have gotten away with. Since the Times and Dispatches reporting emerged, attention has focused on internal inquiries from the BBC (where Brand had a radio show from 2005 to 2008) and Channel 4, which hosted Big Brother, to examine whether complaints about Brand were made at the time. But this feels rather beside the point given how much evidence already exists in the public domain. Brand’s raptorial sexuality was his personality, his unique selling point, and for a very long time he was handsomely rewarded for it. If people really want to reckon with the legacy of such strikingly recent cultural misogyny, in other words, it’s best not to comfort themselves too soon with the idea that Brand was in any way an anomaly.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Social-media platforms’ attempts to break into commerce have largely flopped. Will TikTok Shop fare any better?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again The very common, very harmful thing well-meaning parents do The real issue in the UAW strike The Senate’s deep and dirty secret

“Silicon Valley Math”

A chamoy-pickle kit for $17.98; 352 sold so far. An ab roller wheel for $24.29; 8,592 sold. A one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exerciser for 89 cents; 81 sold. Such is a sampling of the items featured on my TikTok Shop tab on Wednesday morning.

Earlier this week, TikTok Shop, a feature that allows audiences to purchase a baffling array of items through a stand-alone Shop tab and from videos on their feed, rolled out to TikTok users in the United States. Now many of the app’s livestreams are “QVC-like places where sellers are nonstop pitching products to live audiences,” as my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce recently wrote. TikTok’s latest move is an attempt to shift the app’s identity—and a sign of the company’s confidence in the loyalty of its users. Yes, we can riddle feeds with often-ludicrous product promotions, the Shop feature seems to be saying, and people will still keep coming back for more.

TikTok is the latest in a series of prominent platforms that have tried to pivot to e-commerce. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and even Google have tried to launch shopping functions, with varying—though generally low—degrees of success. “Every advertising company tries its hand at commerce, because they think that there’s some huge prize to be had if you can actually own the transaction and know what people are purchasing,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me. But though the potential gains are tantalizing, it’s hard to pull off: Instagram booted its shopping feature from the navigation bar and shut down its live-shopping feature earlier this year. Facebook similarly shut down its livestream-shopping function last year. Live-shopping services on YouTube have also struggled to gain traction.

Platforms moving to e-commerce need to build product pages and figure out details such as order fulfillment, secure checkout processes, customer service, and other logistics. That’s a lot for tech companies whose primary expertise lies in other areas. “It’s never worked for anyone else,” Kodali said. “Why would it work for [TikTok]?” (A spokesperson for TikTok told me that there are upwards of 200,000 sellers on TikTok Shop, and more than 100,000 registered creators, but declined to share more information beyond what’s posted on the company’s press site.)

American customers, by and large, don’t seem all that eager to shop on social-media apps instead of on trusted e-commerce websites. In China, where TikTok’s parent company is based, shopping via livestream is a huge trend—an estimated $500 billion in goods were reportedly sold on streams last year. But just because shopping on social media is big in China doesn’t mean it will translate to American audiences; Kodali noted that Chinese e-commerce trends do not have a track record of blowing up in the United States. And TikTok’s own norms may make commercial activity a hard sell. Caroline told me today that, although the app’s culture of authenticity may help some users sell things, “you could see shopping being a bit of an odd fit: This app was supposed to be where I watched relatable videos from everyday people, and now they’re trying to make money off of me?”

Still, Caroline told me, “people spend a tremendous amount of time on TikTok, and I don’t see them quitting en masse over TikTok Shop. I think it’s more of a question of how much users will tolerate, and how successful it’ll be in the long run.” In-app shopping, she added, is a “white whale” for social platforms.

Commerce and social media have long been intertwined: Much of social-media influencers’ role boils down to recommending products. But audiences follow these influencers because they trust them and because these people have a track record of offering useful or interesting information. On TikTok Shop, meanwhile, almost anyone can start selling things. I currently have five followers, and perhaps one dayI too could apply to set up an account to start hawking one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exercisers. (I probably wouldn’t do that.) And some reporters have already identified safety and integrity concerns with the feature.

If other apps have failed to grow e-commerce businesses and there doesn’t seem to be a strong consumer appetite for these services in the U.S., why is TikTok trying to get into the retail game? Part of it might be a simple grasp at big numbers, combined with a healthy dose of the hubris that powers the tech world. American retail is a multitrillion-dollar industry: If tech executives are engaging in what Kodali called “Silicon Valley math”—calculating the total size of a market and estimating the percentage of it they can capture—they may extrapolate big revenues. And to large tech companies, it may seem relatively easy and worthwhile to create a checkout module and order pages if it means getting even a small slice of the retail pie. Social-media companies have a long history of foisting new products that they hope will prove good for their business on users who did not ask for them—consider the metaverse.

Tech companies have been throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall for years, seeking out new revenue streams where they can. TikTok Shop may be another such investment: a grasp at revenue just in case it works. Social-media apps are always mimicking features from other apps. Instagram is trying to be like Twitter and Snapchat; LinkedIn is emulating TikTok; Facebook is trying to be like everyone. And TikTok seems to be the latest app trying to become Amazon.

Related:

TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok. The endless cycle of social media

Today’s News

Tropical-storm warnings are in place for millions of people in New England and Canada as Hurricane Lee approaches. In remarks from the White House, President Joe Biden expressed respect for the United Auto Workers strike and emphasized that record profits for auto companies have not been “shared fairly” with workers. Corpses are decaying under rubble in the Libyan city of Derna, where at least 10,000 people are believed to be missing due to devastating floods.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman asks whether we should still read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and discusses the book’s moral complexities with Clint Smith.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Don’t Let Love Take Over Your Life

By Faith Hill

If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?

Either way, that feeling might not just be in your head. Kaisa Kuurne, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki, told me she was “a little bit shocked” when she started mapping Finnish adults’ relationships for a 2012 study, investigating whom subjects felt close to and how they interacted day to day. Subjects who lived with a romantic partner seemed to have receded into their coupledom.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Slack is basically Facebook now. Political art isn’t always better art. Libya’s unnatural disaster Photos of the week: fish face, orca kite, naked run

Culture Break

Illustration by Katie Martin

Read. Why are women freezing their eggs? Many are struggling to find a male co-parent, a new book by Marcia C. Inhorn concludes.

Listen. An audio collection of some of last month’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

In another fascinating addition to the annals of Sam Bankman-Fried, my friend and former colleague David Yaffe-Bellany reports in The New York Times that while on house arrest, the FTX founder crafted a set of byzantine documents explaining himself, which he gave to the crypto influencer Tiffany Fong for reasons unclear. Bankman-Fried’s apologia took the form of a 15,000-word, 70-page unpublished Twitter thread, replete with links to Alicia Keys and Rihanna music videos as well as jabs at former colleagues; another file featured a screenshot from the Christopher Nolan movie Inception. A favorite detail of mine from the article: Apparently, Bankman-Fried told Fong that his parents were installing a pickleball court for him while he was on house arrest.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Our excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Mitt Romney has many people talking about the Utah senator’s principles and character, but we should be deeply alarmed by Romney’s warning about the Republican Party.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

“The only productivity hack that works on me” The truth about Hunter Biden’s indictment America just hit the lithium jackpot. Why are women freezing their eggs? Look to the men.

The End of Pretenses

My colleague McKay Coppins has spent two years talking with Mitt Romney, the Utah senator, former Massachusetts governor, and 2012 Republican presidential nominee. An excerpt from McKay’s forthcoming book confirmed the news that Romney has had enough of the hypocrisy and weakness of the Republican Party and will be leaving the Senate when his term expires; other stunning moments from their conversations include multiple profiles in pusillanimity among Romney’s fellow Republicans. (I am pleased to know that Senator Romney holds as low an opinion of J. D. Vance as I do; “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more,” he told McKay.)

But I want to move away from the discussion about Romney himself and focus on something he said that too many people have overlooked.

“Some nights he vented,” Coppins wrote of their conversations; “other nights he dished.” And then came a quiet acknowledgement that should still be shocking, even after seven years of unhinged right-wing American populism:

“A very large portion of my party,” [Romney] told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—­people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

I think every decent Republican has wondered the same thing. (The indecent ones have also wondered about it, but as Romney now accepts, people like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz have figured out that playing to the rot in the GOP base is a core skill set that helps them stay in Washington and far away from their constituents back home.)

Simon & Schuster

But enough about the hollow men of the GOP. Think about what Romney is saying:

Millions of American citizens no longer believe in the Constitution of the United States of America.

This is not some pedestrian political observation, some throwaway line about partisan division. Leave aside for the moment that Romney is talking about Republicans and the hangers-on in the Trump movement; they are also your fellow Americans, citizens of a nation that was, until recently, one of the most durable democracies on Earth. And they no longer care about the fundamental document that governs our lives as Americans.

If Republicans no longer care about the Constitution, then they no longer care about the rule of law, secular tolerance, fair elections, or the protection of basic human rights. They have no interest in the stewardship of American democracy, nor will they preserve our constitutional legacy for their children. Instead, they seek to commandeer the ship of state, pillage the hold, and then crash us all onto the rocks.

It would be a relief to find out that some of this is about policy, but for many of the enemies of the Constitution among the new right, policy is irrelevant. (One exception, I suspect, might be the people who, if faced with a choice between a total ban on abortion and the survival of the Constitution, would choose theocracy over democracy; we’d all be better off if they would just admit it.)

The people Romney is worried about are not policy wonks. They’re opportunists, rage-junkies, and nihilists who couldn’t care less about policy. (Romney describes one woman in Utah bellowing at him, red-faced and lost in a mist of fury while her child stood nearby, to the point where he asked her, “Aren’t you embarrassed?” She was not.) What they want is to win, to enjoy the spoils and trappings of power, and to anger and punish people they hate.

There is no way to contend, in a rational or civic way, with this combination of white-hot resentment and ice-cold cynicism. Romney describes multiple incidents in which his colleagues came to him and said, You’re right, Mitt. I wish I could say what you say. I wish we could stop this nightmare. And then all of them belly right back up to the table in the Senate Dining Room and go on pandering to people who—it bears repeating—no longer care about the Constitution.

This is the seedbed of authoritarianism, and it is already full of fresh green shoots. And yes, at some point, if someone is clever enough to forge a strong and organized party out of this disjointed movement, it can become a new fascism. So far, we should be grateful that Donald Trump and those who surround him have all been too selfish and too incompetent to turn their avarice into a coherent mass movement.

If you’ve ever served in the military or as a civilian in the U.S. government, you’ve taken the oath that requires you, above all—so help you God—to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Romney is warning us that many of his Republican colleagues and much of their base will do no such thing. They would rather turn their personal misery and resentment into mindless political destruction—even to the point of shredding one of humanity’s greatest political documents.

I have written before that we can no longer indulge Republicans and their various media enablers in the fantasies that Trump is a normal candidate, that we are heading into a normal election, that the Republican Party is a normal party (or, indeed, a political party at all). How we each defend the Constitution is an individual choice, but let us at least have no pretenses, even in our daily discussions, that we live in normal times and that 2024 is just another political horse race. Everything we believe in as Americans is at stake now, and no matter what anyone thinks of Mitt Romney, we owe him a debt for saying out loud what so many Republican “leaders” fear even to whisper.

Related:

What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate This is the case.

Today’s News

Donald Trump will not be tried next month in the Georgia-election-interference case after a state judge rejected a request by prosecutors to try all 19 co-defendants together. Hunter Biden has been indicted on felony gun charges after a plea agreement that would have allowed him to avoid prosecution fell apart in July. A lawyer for Biden said that the new charges were unwarranted. The Seattle police officer Daniel Auderer is under investigation after his body camera captured him appearing to joke about the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a graduate student who was hit and killed by another officer’s vehicle in January.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks: Do you trust America’s institutions more than, less than, or as much as you did a decade ago?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Martin Parr / Magnum

The Curious Personality Changes of Older Age

By Faith Hill

You’ve probably heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” An awful phrase, I know, but it speaks to a common belief about older adulthood: that it’s a time of stagnation. A time when we’ve become so set in our ways that, whether we’re proud of them or not, we’re not likely to budge.

Psychologists used to follow the same line of thinking: After young adulthood, people tend to settle into themselves, and personality, though not immutable, usually becomes stabler as people age. And that’s true—until a certain point. More recent studies suggest that something unexpected happens to many people as they reach and pass their 60s: Their personality starts changing again.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Cover Story: I never called her Momma. Alabama Republicans think the Supreme Court is full of partisan hacks. Biden’s labor-climate dilemma

Culture Break

United Archives GmbH / Alamy

Read. A Garfield comic or two. For well over 40 years, a fat orange cat has been a linchpin of American culture, and it’s time to accept that.

Listen. How do we overcome the awkwardness that keeps us from starting a conversation? In the latest episode of How to Talk to People, host Julie Beck dissects small talk.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I mentioned Red Oaks the other day, the sweet coming-of-age series set in the mid-1980s (available for streaming on Prime Video), and it occurred to me that for some readers, the MTV video music era is now lost in the mists of time. Videos (and I am thinking about this because one of the characters in Red Oaks works in a studio that makes them) were a unique art form, and a lot of them were quite good. So, now and then, I’ll use this addendum here in the Daily to recommend some of these lost mini-movies.

I have a special interest in Cold War–themed videos, so today, let me recommend one I alluded to when I recommended Red Oaks. In late 1983, Roger Hodgson left the group Supertramp and embarked on a solo career. He had a modest hit the next year with the song “Had a Dream (Sleeping With the Enemy).” The video is kind of freaky, but the clips of Soviet and American marching bands and huge explosions make clear that it was a cry of anxiety about nuclear war. (“Had a dream / It was war / And they couldn’t tell me what it was for.”)

It’s overly arty but still a cool time capsule —and watch for the split-second, almost-subliminal scare cut at 2:58, where Hodgson’s face becomes a skull. (It’s a gimmick William Friedkin used in The Exorcist too, and a version of it shows up in another classic early-’80s video, “Only the Lonely.” You can spot it here at 2:12.)

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Yesterday, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that everyone above the age of six months should get a dose of the new, updated COVID-19 vaccine that the FDA just green-lighted. To learn more about the vaccine, and for guidance on how to approach COVID as cases rise, I called Katherine J. Wu, an Atlantic staff writer who covers science.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Stress drinking has a gender divide. The conservative censorship campaign reaches its natural conclusion. Kevin McCarthy is a hostage.

For Everyone

Lora Kelley: Why is the CDC recommending that everyone get a COVID vaccine this fall?

Katherine J. Wu: Experts at yesterday’s CDC advisory panel were really making it clear that everyone stands to benefit in some way from this vaccine. COVID is very much still a real threat. People are still dying, and people are still being debilitated by long COVID. Even if risk is not equal across everyone in the population, this is a really important public-health intervention.

It’s also important to keep in mind the historical and cultural context here. Last year, uptake for the fall COVID vaccine was abysmal; less than 20 percent of people got it even though it was also widely recommended. And certainly, with uptake that low, the goal will be to raise uptake this year.

Lora: How does this shot differ from previous COVID shots and boosters?

Katherine: I would argue that this is not a booster. This is another move toward routinizing COVID-19 vaccines to be like the annual flu vaccine, a shot that is given to much of the population every fall in advance of respiratory-virus season. With the flu vaccine, there’s an expectation that the composition of the vaccine is going to change with some regularity: The main variants or strains the vaccines are targeting may change.

This COVID shot is different from last year’s: It no longer contains any ingredients targeting the original coronavirus variants that were in the very first vaccines that we got in 2020 and 2021. It targets just the XBB subvariants of Omicron.

Lora: In your article today, you wrote about an expert who believes vaccine recommendations should prioritize only vulnerable groups. What is motivating some experts not to offer full-throated endorsements of everyone getting a vaccine this fall?

Katherine: To be clear, there is really widespread consensus that everyone needs at least a couple doses of the vaccine. There’s no doubt in experts’ minds that going from zero vaccines to two or three is essential. The gains are going to be massive for everyone.

The disagreement here is not necessarily about the facts—it’s more about how they should be framed. There’s widespread consensus that certain groups are at higher risk than others, including people who are older, immunocompromised, pregnant, living with chronic health conditions, and living in congregate settings, to name a few. The question then is: Should we target the recommendations only to these groups, to really make sure that they are the ones going out to get this vaccine with no hesitation?

There is worry among some experts that the universal recommendation does not adequately focus vaccination efforts on the people who most need it. And some experts feel that young, healthy people, who are at a lower risk of bad COVID outcomes, may be set with the vaccines that they’ve already got.

Lora: How would you recommend that people who aren’t in those high-risk categories approach vaccines this fall?

Katherine: I am all for enthusiastically recommending this vaccine to everyone. Some people are at higher risk, so I would even more strongly encourage those people to go get it.

When we think about any vaccine, especially COVID-19 vaccines, we think most about preventing severe disease. But there are secondary benefits of these vaccines too: For at least a time, you will have a lower risk of getting infected and spreading the virus. And if you do get sick, your symptoms may be shorter if you’ve been recently vaccinated. There may even be a lower risk of developing long COVID down the road, which is an important thing to keep in mind because we know that it can come out of even mild infections. Also, there’s really not a concern at this point of the vaccine running out.

Lora: When should people get this vaccine?

Katherine: There are a few things to keep in mind on timing: If you are lower risk, there is relatively less rush to get the shot. That said, COVID cases have been rising for weeks now. So I certainly wouldn’t tell anyone to not get a shot anytime soon.

The one exception is if you’ve recently been infected. If you have had COVID recently: First, I’m sorry. Second, there are a lot of immunologists who would argue it’s not a terrible idea to wait maybe two or three months after your infection before getting a shot, because you probably have some lingering immunity left behind from that infection. (Huge caveat here: This is not an endorsement of infection, but just a matter of fact.) You don’t want to hamper the ability of your body to form a good immune response to the vaccine if you get it too close to infection.

You totally can get the COVID shot at the same time as the flu shot. It’s convenient, and you only have to deal with possible side effects once.

Lora: What precautions can people take this fall, beyond just getting vaccinated?

Katherine: I am definitely getting a vaccine this fall. But a vaccine is not a silver bullet. It’s going to work best against severe disease, but the protections against infection and transmission are more porous and more temporary. So when I go into crowded settings, when I travel on planes, when I see people in my life who are more vulnerable than I am, I am going to be testing and masking.

We’ve already seen that cases have been rising even at the tail end of summer, which is atypical for most respiratory viruses. That’s another reminder that COVID has not yet settled into a super predictable pattern. I don’t want to hide in my house forever. I want to be able to enjoy the company of others. But I see vaccines, testing, and masking as tools that enable me to interact more safely in those settings.

Related:

This fall’s COVID vaccines are for everyone. How bad could BA.2.86 get?

Evening Read

Didier Viodé

I Never Called Her Momma

By Jenisha Watts

Ms. Brown didn’t tell me where we were going. I knew we would be visiting someone important, a literary figure, because we took a gypsy cab instead of the subway. It would probably be someone I should have known, but didn’t.

A brownstone in Harlem. It was immaculate—paintings of women in headscarves; a cherry-colored oriental rug; a dark, gleaming dining-room table. Ms. Brown led me toward a woman on the couch. She knew that I would recognize her, and I did, despite the plastic tube snaking from her nostrils to an oxygen tank. Maya Angelou’s back was straight. Her rose-pink eyeshadow sparkled.

My mind called up random bits of information from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Canned pineapples—she loved them. Bailey—her brother’s name. What she felt when she heard someone read Dickens aloud for the first time—the voice that “slid in and curved down through and over the words.” And that, like me, she had called her grandmother Momma.

Read our October cover story.

More From The Atlantic

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Today’s News

Danelo Cavalcante, a convicted murderer who escaped from Chester County Prison, has been captured after an extended manhunt. Ukraine launched a missile offensive on Crimea in one of its most significant attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Tech leaders, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, gathered in Washington for a bipartisan AI forum with lawmakers.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: You can transform your relationship to shopping with just a few basic sewing skills, Ann Friedman writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Culture Break

Bob Berg / Getty

Read. “Rainbow Queen Encyclopedia,” a new poem by Sam Sax:

“my ex wanted a pet pig, so we imagined it. / even gave the thing a name, rubbed its invisible head / before bed—”

Listen. Smash Mouth’s 1999 album, Astro Lounge, is accessible yet weird—and the reason our staff writer Spencer Kornhaber became a music critic.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Eminent legal scholars think the Constitution makes Donald Trump ineligible for office; critics of the idea worry that using the Fourteenth Amendment will create an uncontrollable political weapon.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Explore The Atlantic’s guide to privacy. America gave up on the best home technology there is. Three myths and four truths about how to get happier

A Constitutional Dilemma

For weeks, legal scholars and public intellectuals have been debating whether Donald Trump is constitutionally ineligible to run for president again. Six voters in Colorado filed a lawsuit last week that will test this theory. If you’re confused, or uncertain whether this is a good idea, join the club: I change my mind about it roughly once every 12 hours.

Let’s review some basic civics. Here’s Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by the U.S. Senate in 1866:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

At the time, the section’s intention was to prevent the secessionists of the Civil War from walking right back into power in the states where they’d just been defeated. Confederate states were required to ratify this amendment as a condition for regaining representation in the American legislature, and it was finally ratified in the summer of 1868.

Two of America’s great legal minds, the retired conservative federal judge Michael Luttig and the liberal law professor Laurence Tribe, have argued that Section 3 automatically renders Trump ineligible for office. “The clause,” they wrote in The Atlantic last month, “was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.”

January 6 was a violent attempt to overthrow the constitutional order, for which many people have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Many more have gone to prison for their actions at the Capitol that day. And they were all there at the urging of Donald Trump, who is now under criminal indictment for multiple felonies stemming from this attempt to subvert American democracy.

I am convinced by this reasoning. Case closed. Take Trump’s name off the ballots.

Well … not so fast. My friend and colleague David Frum believes that all of this talk about using the Fourteenth Amendment is “a fantasy.” David’s argument is that the amendment is, if not an anachronism, a peculiar part of our Constitution whose meaning was clear in 1866 but whose relevance has passed. He warns us not to think of Section 3 as a quick and easy “cheat code” that can obviate Trump’s renomination.

David raises some important practical questions. For one thing, who will make the determination that January 6 was “an insurrection or rebellion”? I think it was, but until things change in this country, The Tom Nichols Institute of Constitutional Adjudication has no power to make its very sensible rulings stick as a matter of law. (Also, I should perhaps point out that Trump has pleaded not guilty in all four indictments.)

Luttig and Tribe assert that Section 3 does not explicitly require such convictions or determinations, but that’s because in 1866 the “rebellion” was obviously the Civil War and the Union Army, as the local authority in the rebellious states, made the on-site determination of who could run for office. David’s correct to predict that invalidating Trump’s candidacy based on “aid and comfort” to an “insurrection” would plunge the country into eternal litigation about what, exactly, all those words mean.

Likewise, how would Trump actually be removed from the election? There is no single national “ballot”; Democratic secretaries of state would have to strike his name from their state ballots, after which Joe Biden would win the Electoral College. But as David writes, Biden would only be “kind of” reelected, in a result that nearly half the country would view as illegitimate. “The rage and chaos that would follow,” he warns, “are beyond imagining.”

David makes a political point that is also worth at least some concern. “If Section 3 can be reactivated in this way, then reactivated it will be. Republicans will hunt for Democrats to disqualify, and not only for president, but for any race where Democrats present someone who said or did something that can be represented as ‘aid and comfort’ to enemies of the United States.”

Lest anyone think Republicans would have enough sense to forgo weaponizing important parts of the U.S. Constitution merely for trollish political theater, let us note that as of this morning, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has ordered up an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. This effort will likely backfire on Republicans (if it even gets out of committee), as would attempts to remove Democrats from ballots on a Section 3 objection. But clogging the courts with inane Republican lawsuits would be another deep bruise on the American constitutional system of government.

What a killjoy. Because after reviewing his arguments, I now agree with David.

By temperament, I was overall more inclined to agree with David’s prudential arguments anyway. But Luttig and Tribe make a simple and forceful point that still sticks in my teeth: The Constitution says what it says, and it doesn’t stop saying it just because enforcing it would be hard to do or because bad actors will use it for political mischief.

Indeed, fidelity to the Constitution should be the core of principled opposition to Donald Trump’s continued presence in our public life. Of course, he’s unfit for office for many reasons; he’s vulgar and ignorant and narcissistic, but so are many other people who have made their way into elected office. The singular danger that unites so many of Trump’s opponents, however, is that he has shown himself to be an avowed enemy of democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution of the United States. How can we flinch now?

And yet I, too, am hesitant to open a legal Pandora’s box. It might not be constitutionally pure to worry about things such as protracted lawsuits and cheap Republican stunts, but the nature of our current political troubles demands a decisive and final answer to Trump’s attempts to destroy the Constitution, and here David makes the strongest of all possible points: The only sure way to stop Trump is with a resounding and undeniable defeat at the ballot box.

Related:

The Constitution prohibits Trump from ever being president again. The Fourteenth Amendment fantasy

Today’s News

Five former Memphis police officers have been indicted on federal criminal charges in connection with Tyre Nichols’s death. At least 5,000 people are dead and thousands more are believed to be missing after severe flooding and dam collapses in Libya. The United States and Iran are moving forward with a prisoner-swap deal. Five American citizens will be released in exchange for five Iranian citizens and the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf compiles reader perspectives on whether racial “color-blindness” is possible.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by Vartika Sharma. Sources: Steve Pyke / Getty; Harry Borden / Contour by Getty.

From Feminist to Right-Wing Conspiracist

By Helen Lewis

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

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

All of this is particularly bad news for Klein, for the simple reason that people keep mistaking the two women for each other.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I was born at the dawn of the 1960s, and I came of age in the 1970s. I am too young to remember much of the ’60s—well, except that I was completely nuts about the original Batman TV series—and the less said about the ’70s, the better. My time was the ’80s: MTV, new wave, Hill Street Blues and Cheers on television, Stripes and Ghostbusters at the theater. And Ronald Reagan—for whom I voted, but we’re all friends here, so let’s not open that can of worms.

That’s why it’s been such a joy to discover a TV show I somehow missed when it came out in 2014: Red Oaks, a coming-of-age series whose first of three seasons is set in 1985. The title refers to a Jewish country club in New Jersey, where young David Meyers works as an assistant tennis pro while trying to figure out his life. It’s funny, and it’s sweet without being cloying, especially when Paul Reiser, as the club president, counteracts the sugar with desert-dry sarcasm. The musical choices are perfect 1980s archeology: Love and Rockets, Culture Club, Roxy Music, and even a one-hit wonder from Roger Hodgson that I thought no one remembered but me.

I haven’t finished the series yet, but I’m taking my time. I was just a shade older than David Meyers and his friends in 1985, and I’m enjoying revisiting some good years back there.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Like millions of other Americans, I enjoy many of Sylvester Stallone’s movies. But in recent years, I’ve come to think that Sly might have also been teaching me something.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic.

Streaming has reached its sad, predictable fate. Can Poland roll back authoritarian populism? Elon Musk’s latest target hits back. Why go with an evil-looking orb?

Self-Deprecating and Graceful

My best friend growing up was the Italian Stallion. No, not that one—not Sylvester Stallone’s fictional boxer from Philadelphia, but an actual Italian. My pal Silvio emigrated from Italy and lived around the corner from me. When Rocky delivered a haymaker to the theaters in 1976, there was no way we weren’t going to see it, and throughout high school, if I heard someone in the hallway yell, “Yo, Stallion,” I knew my buddy was around somewhere.

But while watching Stallone in his 2022 Paramount+ series, Tulsa King, I realized that for some years, I’ve been thinking of the original Italian Stallion as my pal too—especially as we both get older.

I have to confess that in my youth, I wasn’t a huge Stallone fan. I saw Rocky in the theater when I was a freshman in high school, and then Rocky II (which was just … okay) the summer I graduated. Rocky III, in my view, is a lightweight cartoon. The final 1990 cash-in, Rocky V, is practically unwatchable.

Ah, but before that series-ending clunker, we had 1985’s Rocky IV, a gloriously cheesy Cold War parable. It’s not a great film, but it was the highest-grossing title in the series. (As a recent look back in Polygon put it, “It’s no one’s favorite Rocky movie, but no one in the history of the world has ever started watching it and turned it off.”) I saw it alone in a small theater in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, and, as a budding Soviet expert, I loved seeing the Stallion whomp the bejeebers out of that Soviet creep Ivan Drago, the steroid-filled Commie golem who killed Rocky’s enemy turned friend and mentor, Apollo Creed, in the ring.

But despite Rocky IV, I was more a fan of Stallone’s then-nemesis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, not least because I just couldn’t get into Stallone’s Rambo fantasies. In 1993, however, Stallone starred in Demolition Man, playing a cop named John Spartan who screws up and is put in cryogenic storage for his crimes. He is then thawed out in 2032 and thrust into an insufferably politically correct and insipid Southern California to fight Simon Phoenix, a criminal from his own time.

In Demolition Man, Stallone lampooned every stereotype about 20th-century tough guys—including himself. I was in my early 30s, and every time Stallone (who was at that point in his late 40s but looked 10 years younger) sighed and rolled his eyes and explained to his clueless sidekick how to swear (she didn’t get that it’s kick his ass, not lick his ass), or when he was flummoxed by the “Three Seashells” that 2032 Californians use instead of wasteful toilet paper, I felt like I was seeing myself in the near future.

Stallone later made some forgettable films, but I always thought the critics were too hard on him. (Fine, look, I liked Judge Dredd, okay?) And I felt like he was willing to contend with age, just like the rest of us, especially in 1997, when he gained almost 40 pounds at 50 years old to play a sad-sack New Jersey sheriff in the underappreciated crime drama Cop Land.

But I didn’t really admire Stallone until he returned in 2006 to his greatest character, in Rocky Balboa, a coda to his earlier Rocky movies. This time, Rocky is old, nearly broke, nostalgic, and even somewhat pathetic. He owns a joint in Philly, where he goes from table to table mugging for pictures; the rest of the time, he’s utterly absorbed by grief over the loss of his beloved wife, Adrian, who died years earlier. His sadness is so suffocating that even Adrian’s brother Paulie finally walks away. “Sorry, Rocko,” he finally says to his brother-in-law. “I can’t do this no more.”

I was in my 40s when Rocky Balboa came out; Stallone was 60, and for once, the usually buff actor looked it. His nostalgia became mine. Rocky Balboa is an almost elegiac movie that ends (as all Rocky movies must) with personal redemption. During the end credits, real people reenact Rocky’s original iconic training run up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and maybe it was just dusty in the theater, but I had something in my eyes that required dabbing at some tears.

I respected Stallone for giving Rocky a graceful exit. (When the character returned in Creed, it seemed natural and unforced.) The mournfulness of Rocky Balboa stayed with me for years, however, especially as I lost people I cared about and middle age became later middle age. Stallone returned to fighting form in the Expendables series, but by then, we were all in on the joke that he and Arnold and Bruce Willis were too hilariously old for this stuff.

And then I watched Tulsa King, in which Stallone plays Dwight Manfredi, a Mafia capo exiled from New York to Oklahoma after a 25-year stretch in prison (where he valiantly kept his mouth shut to protect his bosses). Tulsa King has been renewed for a second season, so I don’t want to say too much and ruin some of the twists, but Stallone, at the time 75, plays a 75-year-old gangster with grace, laugh-out-loud humor, and credible physical menace.

Manfredi survives prison in good shape, and when he has to make a new life—of crime, naturally—in Tulsa, he goes to work. But he’s no Superman or Terminator; he’s old, and he knows it. Soon, he assembles a ragtag crew, and that’s all I can say without spoiling the fun.

Okay, I’ll spoil one moment. Manfredi picks up a handsome 40-something woman in a bar and takes her to his hotel room. We are spared any graphic scenes, but afterwards, he apologizes for being a bit out of practice in the sack. The woman finally gets around to asking his age, and when he tells her, she freaks out, gathers her clothes, and flees. (She’d guessed him to be a “hard 55,” not 75. I wish someone would mistake me for a “hard 55.”) Manfredi takes the news with equanimity in a great scene that is both funny and wince-inducing.

Tulsa King has plenty of violence, but it’s only incidentally a crime story. It’s about a lot of other things, including aging, time, family, fatherhood, loyalty, and what it means to be a man. As in Rocky Balboa, Stallone treats his character—and the problem of aging—with self-deprecation and respect.

I was 18 when Rocky finally beat Creed, 24 when he floored Drago, 33 when Spartan demolished Phoenix, and 46 when Rocky finally retired once and for all. But watching Tulsa King at 62, I wished—for the first time—that I could be Stallone. Thanks, Sly. I miss Silvio, but I’m glad to be hanging out with the original Stallion as we both take a shot at aging gracefully.

Related:

Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser. Sylvester Stallone’s glorious renaissance

Today’s News

According to a report unsealed today, a special grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, that helped investigate election interference allegations in the state recommended charges against more than three dozen people; Lindsey Graham, David Perdue, Kelly Loeffler, and Michael Flynn were among those not ultimately charged. Hurricane Lee, now a Category 4 storm, is expected to cause dangerous surf conditions in parts of the Caribbean and most of the U.S. East Coast, although it does not currently threaten any land. A major United Nations report assessing the world’s climate efforts warned that there is a “rapidly closing window” for securing a liveable future on Earth.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: 60 years after her death, Sylvia Plath’s life continues to fascinate, Gal Beckerman writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Matt Williams

The Man Who Became Uncle Tom

By Clint Smith

“Among all the singular and interesting records to which the institution of American slavery has given rise,” Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote, “we know of none more striking, more characteristic and instructive, than that of JOSIAH HENSON.”

Stowe first wrote about Henson’s 1849 autobiography in her 1853 book A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an annotated bibliography of sorts in which she cited a number of nonfiction accounts she had used as source material for her best-selling novel. Stowe later said that Henson’s narrative had served as an inspiration for Uncle Tom.

Proslavery newspaper columnists and southern planters had responded to the huge success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by accusing Stowe of hyperbole and outright falsehood. Benevolent masters, they said, took great care of the enslaved people who worked for them; in some cases, they treated them like family. The violent, inhumane conditions Stowe described, they contended, were fictitious. By naming her sources, and outlining how they had influenced her story, Stowe hoped to prove that her novel was rooted in fact.

Read the full article.

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Listen. Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album, Guts (out today), is less an evolution of Rodrigo’s sound than a persuasive fortification.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Some news: I’ll be onstage at the end of September. The fight’s gonna be in Moscow, and …

No, wait, that’s still Rocky IV.

I’ll be at The Atlantic Festival, in Washington, D.C., and you can join us September 28–29. The festival brings together influential and provocative political, cultural, business, tech, and climate leaders for in-depth interviews, timely forums, intimate breakout sessions, book talks, screenings, and networking opportunities. This year’s participants include Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former U.S. Representative Will Hurd, the actor Kerry Washington, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, the filmmaker Spike Lee, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and many more.

They’ll be joined by Atlantic writers including Arthur C. Brooks, Shirley Li, Tim Alberta, Caitlin Dickerson (our newest Pulitzer Prize winner), and others, including me: I’ll be discussing the future of conservatism with Helen Lewis, David Frum, and Rebecca Rosen.

You can see the full schedule and get your pass here.

Join us!

— Tom

Nicole Blackwood contributed to this newsletter.

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