For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option. He continued accepting the demands of far-right Republicans to deepen spending cuts and dig in against the Democrats, making a shutdown at tonight’s midnight deadline all but a certainty.

[Read: Why Republicans can’t keep the government open]

With just hours to go, however, the speaker abruptly changed course, defying his conservative tormentors and partnering with Democrats to avert a shutdown. The House this afternoon overwhelmingly approved a temporary extension of federal funding. If the Senate approves the House legislation tonight, as it is expected to, the deal will put off a shutdown for at least 45 days and buy both parties more time to negotiate spending for the next fiscal year.

The question now is whether McCarthy’s pivot will end his nine-month tenure as speaker. By folding—for now—on the shutdown fight, he is effectively daring Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and other hard-line Republicans to make good on their threats to depose him. “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters before the vote. “But I think this country is too important.”

The stopgap bill includes disaster-relief money sought by both parties, but McCarthy refused to add $6 billion in Ukraine aid that the Biden administration and a bipartisan majority of senators wanted. The Senate had been on the verge of passing its own extension that included the Ukraine money, but after the House vote it was expected to accept McCarthy’s proposal instead. Whether House Republicans agree to include Ukraine assistance in the next major spending bill is unclear, but Democrats and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are likely to make an aggressive push for it.

McCarthy’s surprising about-face set off a wild few hours in the Capitol. Democrats were caught off guard and stalled for time to read the new bill, unsure if Republicans were trying to sneak conservative policy priorities into the legislation without anyone noticing. (In the end, only a single Democrat voted against it.) Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a second-term Democrat, caused the evacuation of an entire House office building when he pulled a fire alarm just before the vote, in what Republicans said was a deliberate—and possibly criminal—effort to delay the proceedings. (Bowman’s chief of staff said that the representative “did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote. The Congressman regrets any confusion.”)

[Annie Lowrey: How to end government shutdowns, forever]

On the right, the criticism of McCarthy was predictable and immediate. “Should he remain Speaker of the House?” one of his Republican opponents, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, tweeted after the vote, seemingly rhetorically. Yet to more moderate Republicans, the speaker’s decision was a long time coming. McCarthy’s months-long kowtowing to the right had frustrated more pragmatic and politically vulnerable House Republicans, a few of whom threatened to join Democratic efforts to avert, or end, a shutdown. But many Republicans are even more furious at Gaetz and his allies. “Why live in fear of these guys? If they want to have the fight, have the fight,” former Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a moderate who served in the House with McCarthy for 12 years, told me. “I don’t understand why you would appease people who are doing nothing but trying to hurt and humiliate you.”

This morning, the speaker finally came to the same conclusion. His move to relent on a shutdown only kicks the stalemate over federal spending to another day. Now it’s up to House Republicans to decide if McCarthy gets to stick around to resolve it.

Editor’s Note: Washington Week with The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

The American government on the brink of shutdown: With the federal government about to run out of money, we explore how the country got to this point, who will be affected, and how U.S. support for Ukraine has become a divisive political issue.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to discuss these issues and more: Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic; Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Leigh Ann Caldwell, an anchor at Washington Post Live and a co-author of the Early 202; and Asma Khalid, a White House correspondent at NPR and a co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast.

Read the full transcript [here].

Back in the spring, Jan Smigmator's swing band was playing at New York's famous Carnegie Hall.

New York City’s sewer system is built for the rain of the past—when a notable storm might have meant 1.75 inches of water an hour. It wasn’t built to handle the rainfall from Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, or, more recently, Hurricane Ida—which dumped 3.15 inches an hour on Central Park. And also it wasn’t built to handle the kind of extreme rainfall that is becoming routine: The city flooded last December, last April, and last July—an unusual seasonal span. “We now have in New York something much more like a tropical-rainfall pattern,” Rohit Aggarwala, New York City’s environmental-protection commissioner, said yesterday at The Atlantic Festival. “And it happens over and over again.”

It happened today. Less than 24 hours after Aggarwala’s statements, rain arrived in New York City—the kind that sends waterfalls through Brooklyn subway ceilings, dangerously floods basements, and floats cars on the road like rubber ducks. Mayor Eric Adams said earlier today that the city could receive up to eight inches of rain today; parts of Brooklyn saw a month’s worth of rain in just three hours. New York State Governor Kathy Hochul has declared a state of emergency, and New York City residents received emergency alerts cautioning them to avoid travel (unless, ominously, they were evacuating), seek high ground, and avoid driving.

“You always build to the record” when designing infrastructure, Aggarwala said yesterday. The problem comes when the changing climate creates conditions that blow through those records. He also said the 1.75-inches-an-hour standard isn’t met across the board. “That’s our target—not everywhere in the city is up to that standard.” And since Hurricane Ida hit two years ago, there have been at least half a dozen instances in which certain neighborhoods have received two inches or more of rainfall an hour, he said. “That’s not a pattern New York City is accustomed to. That’s a pattern that Miami might be accustomed to, maybe Singapore.”

[Read: Will it ever stop raining?]

Already, today’s rainfall, as measured in Central Park, is the worst the city has seen since Ida, Zachary Iscol, the New York City emergency-management commissioner, confirmed at a press conference today. (Ultimately, Ida dropped 7.2 inches of rain on Central Park and nearly six inches on Prospect Park.) The city’s sewers simply can’t process water that quickly. “The sad reality is that our climate is changing faster than our infrastructure can respond,” Aggarwala said at the same conference.

Extreme rainfall isn’t just a New York City problem. A recent analysis found that one in nine residents in the contiguous United States is at significant risk of storms that will bring at least 50 percent more water than their local infrastructure can handle—overwhelming the pipes, channels, and culverts that might have met the rainfall records of the past. Any place trying to fix this mismatch might not have the basic information it needs, either: The periodic update of national rainfall from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for instance, won’t arrive for another three to four years, which could keep climate-resilience efforts lagging behind the speed at which the climate is changing.

As acute and random as these events can feel, Aggarwala warned yesterday against myopia. “We can’t say, ‘Well, this is a one-off and maybe it won’t happen again,’” he said. “This is our new reality.”

For years now, Hakwan Lau has suffered from an inner torment. Lau is a neuroscientist who studies the sense of awareness that all of us experience during our every waking moment. How this awareness arises from ordinary matter is an ancient mystery. Several scientific theories purport to explain it, and Lau feels that one of them, called integrated information theory (IIT), has received a disproportionate amount of media attention. He’s annoyed that its proponents tout it as the dominant theory in the press. He’s disturbed by their apparent affinity with New Age figures, such as Deepak Chopra. Worst of all, he complains, the theory doesn’t even rise to the level of “science.”

IIT was first formulated by Giulio Tononi in 2004. It’s meant to quantify the consciousness that exists in any system, based on the total information that is brought together by its constituent parts. Other theories of consciousness tell more of a general story about how the brain generates consciousness; IIT gives it a mathematical expression. Controversially, IIT also suggests that there is consciousness in systems that we wouldn’t usually think of as being aware, including photodiodes and thermostats. Anil Seth, a neuroscientist who is not himself opposed to IIT, nonetheless described it to me as “kind of a bonkers theory.”

Lau has expressed his many concerns to colleagues at conferences, in the hallways between sessions and afterward over drinks at the bar. Many of them have been sympathetic, he told me, and share his fear that their whole field would be a laughingstock if a theory that deems smoke alarms conscious were to be taken as its public face. Lau also worries that naive students could be deluded into thinking that the theory is stronger—or perhaps less bonkers—than it really is. This summer, Lau set about convincing his colleagues that they should express their contempt for IIT as a group, in print. He succeeded: On September 16, more than 100 of them released an open letter. Within 24 hours, a full-blown brawl had broken out on social media.

Scientists who study consciousness are touchy about the way the field is perceived. They’ve been fighting for respectability for decades. “It wasn’t always treated as a particularly legitimate thing to do,” Seth told me. The field has been largely isolated from mainstream psychology and neuroscience, and as a result, researchers can have trouble attracting funding. Consciousness research has gradually become more accepted, but even today it’s not often bankrolled by the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. Many scientists must instead rely on private donors.

In 2020, a consortium of scientists and philosophers secured $3.2 million from one such donor, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, for a series of “adversarial” experiments. The idea was for proponents of different theories of consciousness to design experiments using neuroimaging technology, and to agree, in advance, which results would support which theory. In June of this year, they announced the first results from a showdown that pitted IIT against the theory that consciousness arises from something called a “workspace” that brings together information from the senses and other cognitive processes into a coherent whole and broadcasts it to other neural regions. The outcome was largely unsatisfying.

[Read: A famous argument against free will has been debunked]

Existing technology is still too crude to test either theory’s most meaningful hypotheses, but the experiment did suggest that conscious experience involves continual activity of neurons at the back of the brain. According to the experts, this finding fits IIT better than the alternative, but only narrowly, and not in a way that could be said to elevate it above all other theories of consciousness. Still, any public perception that IIT had achieved an empirical triumph galled Lau, and when the results were covered in Science, Nature, and The New York Times, it tipped him over the edge.

“I didn’t want to act alone,” Lau told me. He drafted a letter criticizing IIT and sent it to another scientist who shared his dim view of the theory. Over the next six weeks, they worked on revisions, before passing the letter on to eight more scientists for further edits. After this core group had settled on a final version, they began distributing it more widely. This time, there was no request for edits; just signatures. Word of the letter began to spread, even among those who had not been asked to sign. When at last the preprint was released, its 124 signatories included neuroscientists, behavioral scientists, philosophers, and psychologists.

Despite all the effort that went into its creation, the letter was, admittedly, thin on substance. Running just five paragraphs in all, its first half takes aim not at the scientific underpinnings of IIT, but rather at the ways in which the theory is portrayed in news media. It complains that the reporters who covered the initial findings from the adversarial experiments falsely anointed IIT the “dominant” theory of consciousness; and it describes the public as having been victimized by “scientific misinformation.” But as Erik Hoel, who completed his doctorate in neuroscience under Tononi, has pointed out, none of the five media sources cited in the letter say anything of the kind. The first news story mentioned is headlined “Consciousness Hunt Yields Results, but Not Clarity.” Hoel told me that he read through each of the others, and although one did say that IIT “has a leg up,” it qualified that there were still “continuing doubts” about the results.”

The letter’s second half calls out IIT for having “panpsychist commitments,” and says that because the theory’s core claims are untestable it should be thought of as a “pseudoscience,” like astrology. “A lot of the people who signed on to the letter were a little uncomfortable with the use of that word,” one of the signatories, Joshua Shepherd, a philosophy professor at Carleton University, in Canada, told me. “If you’re going to make a strong claim like that, then you have to give some very strong evidence,” David Chalmers, a professor at NYU and one of the foremost philosophers of consciousness, told me. “Given the 100-plus very well-known figures who signed the letter, I was expecting something more solid, and I think a lot of people had reactions like that.” Seth told me he was surprised by the list of names at the bottom of the letter. “I know that some of them know nothing about IIT and probably didn’t know what they were signing,” he said.

[Read: Most popular theories of consciousness are worse than wrong]

The online backlash was immediate. On X (formerly Twitter), scientists derided the letter as a “childish” product of “intellectual dishonesty.” It was called “shameless mudslinging” and a “hit” job. One scientist complained that cancel culture had now come for ideas. Others suggested that the letter had been motivated by politics or even financial interests. The conflict spilled over into dueling edits on Wikipedia, concerning whether IIT should be tagged as a pseudoscience. At least one scientist who signed the letter says that he received an email warning of “personal and professional consequences.” Lau himself complained that an angry mob was out to get him, and was in turn accused of playing the victim.

Several experts told me that the letter’s inclusion of Daniel Dennett, a longtime heavyweight in the field, was significant. Hoel was unfazed, however. “Dennett is not really on the front lines anymore,” he said. IIT was being punished, he continued, for daring to be a formal mathematical theory. Other, story-based theories of consciousness don’t offer any precise mathematical model of consciousness that an experiment could locate. How is someone supposed to tell which theory is pseudoscience and which isn’t? One observer likened the situation to a bunch of people standing on step ladders in a field arguing over who is closest to the moon.

Critics of the letter argued that the field should be keeping up appearances, for the sake of continued funding. (In a way, their concern mirrors Lau’s own.) Seth told me that claims of pseudoscience risk giving ammunition to people who are already skeptical. Chalmers agreed: “If funders look on and they say, ‘This is a field where half the people are calling the other half pseudoscientists,’ I worry that this could have implications for everybody.” On social media, he went so far as to compare using the “pseudoscience” tag to dropping a nuclear bomb in order to settle a regional dispute.

Lau, who lives in Japan, called this talk of nuclear war “unhinged” and insensitive. He said that he’d tried taking a more diplomatic tack before drafting the letter, but it didn’t work. Some years ago, he told me, he’d written to Christof Koch, an investigator at the Allen Institute, in Seattle, and one of the most visible proponents of IIT, to try to clear the air. (Among other things, Lau hadn’t liked it when Koch told The New York Times that IIT is “the only really promising fundamental theory of consciousness.”) Lau suggested a Zoom call, and even offered to fly to Seattle for a meeting face-to-face. “Koch said he was too busy.”

Lau does feel bad that the letter sowed such chaos, but he stopped short of expressing regrets. “I stand by everything,” he said. On our last call, he was still insisting that the scientists who work on IIT are the ones who should be soul-searching. “If one-third of the community told me my work is pseudoscience, I would do some reflection,” he said. “Oh?” I asked. “Maybe I would get angry first,” he acknowledged, “but then I would reflect.”

So far, there’s little evidence of reflection, on anyone’s part. I asked Chalmers, who has a wider network in the field than just about anybody, when the conflict might be resolved. He said that he didn’t know, and that emotions are still running high: “I don’t think [we’re] ready for a kumbaya moment just yet.”

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

Question of the Week

Should Democrats stick with Joe Biden or replace him with a younger presidential nominee in 2024?

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

Conversations of Note

At Brian Beutler’s new Substack, he compares the posture toward coalitional politics that led to Barack Obama’s rise with the less confident posture that characterizes the Democratic Party today:

Fifteen years ago, it seemed natural rather than heretical that new ideas and leaders should challenge older ones, and Democrats had more confidence to confront Republicans directly across a range of liabilities. They correctly identified a “culture of corruption” that had run rampant in the Bush years, and exposed much of it on their march back to power. They didn’t reflexively close ranks around whichever leaders felt most safe—far from it, one of the big reasons Barack Obama challenged Hillary Clinton for the presidency, and was able to win the nomination, is because Nancy Pelosi (who was then House speaker) and Harry Reid (who was then Senate majority leader) encouraged him to run. Liberals argued in a freewheeling way about the candidates they supported, without panicking that they might undermine the cause of change.

That whole spirit is gone.

Today we see a great deal of sorting on the center and left into party-aligned media on the one hand, and more factional progressive media on the other; we see a party that suppresses misgivings about its leaders, too insecure about the relative popularity of its own values to feel comfortable grappling with internal dissent. You’re expected either to rage against Joe Biden for not endorsing all 117 items on a laundry-list agenda nobody's heard of; or you’re supposed to pretend not to understand that an old guy who stutters is a suboptimal spokesperson for a major political party. You’re expected to take it for granted that everything is terrible, or to clap for the Democrats and encourage others to clap along. That doesn’t leave much space for those of us who aim, in the words of a storied old British editor, to see life steady, and see it whole. Who value both consistency and open-mindedness to reason and evidence. Who fully understand the stakes of our elections, but think there’s still plenty of space for and value in vigorous intraparty criticism. In all other realms it’s considered completely normal to grow frustrated with the management of entities (sports teams, businesses, non-profits) we loyally support. It should be acceptable in politics today as well.

Beware the Identity Trap

In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk shares an excerpt from his important new book, The Identity Trap. It is an attempt to understand the form of identity politics that is ascendant on the left and in many institutions. Mounk calls it “the identity synthesis.” Others call it “wokeness” or “the successor ideology.” In Mounk’s telling, it can be traced back to the ideas of four thinkers: Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Derrick Bell. And Monk argues that at least three of them would reject it.

Mounk writes:

The identity synthesis and far-right populism may at first glance appear to be polar opposites; in political practice, one is the yin to the other’s yang. Many attacks on so-called wokeness are motivated by bad faith. They fundamentally misrepresent its nature. But that is no reason to deny how a new ideology has acquired such power in our society. In fact, it’s imperative to recognize that its founders explicitly saw themselves as rejecting widely held values, such as the core tenets of the civil-rights movement.

The lure of the identity synthesis to so many people is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals. But the likely outcome of uncritically accepting this ideology is a society that places an unremitting emphasis on our differences. The effect is to pit rigidly defined identity groups against one another in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition. Critics of the identity trap commonly claim that progressive activists are “going too far.” But what is at issue is not having too much of a good thing. The real problem is that, even at its best, this ideology violates the ardent aspirations for a better future to which all of us should remain committed.

I’m optimistic about America’s ability to thrive going forward as history’s most successful multiethnic nation state, where the wonderful diversity of our polity functions as a strength. But I do not think a multiethnic nation can thrive if its politics are organized around raising the salience of group identity and putting different racial factions in zero-sum competition with one another. Nor do I think that any individual can be treated with the dignity all humans possess when reduced to membership in any stereotyped category that rejects or denies their uniqueness.

Revisiting Coleman Hughes on Color-blindness

In a past installment of Up for Debate, we pondered whether racial color-blindness ought to be the ideal in interpersonal relationships. In a future installment, we’re going to ponder color-blindness in public policy. Today, I want to flag the latest from the writer Coleman Hughes, whose TED Talk on color-blindness and subsequent debate with the columnist Jamelle Bouie has served as the peg for our pondering. At The Free Press, Hughes recounts opposition to even releasing his TED Talk to the public:

TED draws a progressive crowd, so I expected that my talk might upset a handful of people. And indeed, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a handful of scowling faces. But the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The audience applauded; some people even stood up. Throughout the meals and in hallways, people approached me to say they loved it, and those who disagreed with it offered smart and thoughtful criticisms.

But the day after my talk, I heard from Chris Anderson, the head of TED. He told me that a group called “Black@TED”—which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black”—was “upset” by my talk …

On the final day of the conference, TED held its yearly “town hall”—at which the audience can give feedback on the conference. The event opened with two people denouncing my talk back-to-back. The first woman called my talk “racist” as well as “dangerous and irresponsible”—comments that were met with cheers from the crowd. The second commentator, Otho Kerr, a program director at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, claimed that I was “willing to have us slide back into the days of separate but equal.” (The talk is online, so you can judge for yourself whether those accusations bear any resemblance to reality.)

In response to their comments, Anderson took the mic and thanked them for their remarks. He also reminded the audience that “TED can’t shy away from controversy on issues that matter so much”—a statement I very much agreed with and appreciated. Because he said as much, I left the conference fairly confident that TED would release and promote my talk just like any other, in spite of the staff and audience members who were upset by it.

Two weeks later, Anderson emailed to tell me that there was “blowback” on my talk and that “[s]ome internally are arguing we shouldn’t post it.” In the email, he told me that the “most challenging” blowback had come from a “well-known” social scientist (who I later learned was Adam Grant). He quoted from Grant’s message directly:

Really glad to see TED offering viewpoint diversity—we need more conservative voices—but as a social scientist, was dismayed to see Coleman Hughes deliver an inaccurate message.

His case for color blindness is directly contradicted by an extensive body of rigorous research; for the state of the science, see Leslie, Bono, Kim & Beaver (2020, Journal of Applied Psychology). In a meta-analysis of 296 studies, they found that whereas color-conscious models reduce prejudice and discrimination, color-blind approaches often fail to help and sometimes backfire.

I read the paper that Grant referenced, titled “On Melting Pots and Salad Bowls: A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Identity-Blind and Identity-Conscious Diversity Ideologies,” expecting to find arguments against color blindness. I was shocked to find that the paper largely supported my talk. In the results section, the authors write that “colorblindness is negatively related to stereotyping” and “is also negatively related to prejudice.” They also found that “meritocracy is negatively related to discrimination.”

Chris Anderson, the head of TED, responded on the platform formerly known as Twitter.

For those interested in this subject, the paper Grant referenced is a nuanced and thought-provoking read containing findings that could be coherently invoked by people on either side of this debate. I see why Hughes believes it bolsters his position, as well as how adherents of multiculturalism, the paper’s example of what it calls an “identity-conscious ideology,” would conclude that it supports their position. To invoke it as if it establishes that Hughes’ arguments about color-blindness are factually incorrect strikes me as a misleading overreach.

Provocation of the Week

Many American colleges are effectively lying about their tuition, Dan Currell argues at National Affairs:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, colleges discovered that the appearance of high tuition was good for marketing. Positioning one’s school as “almost as expensive as Harvard” created a sense of exclusivity and, somewhat contrary to economic theory, resulted in increased applications. It also led to free media coverage, as newspapers found stories about the high cost of college were evergreen.

Of course, almost nobody was willing to pay Harvard-level tuition for a middling college education. Colleges resolved this problem by canceling out their high sticker prices with “institutional scholarships” that had no money behind them; they were simply the discounts a school had to offer to convince students to enroll. The game was easy: It required no fundraising to endow scholarships, just the appearance of a high price paired with the appearance of a scholarship. This “high-sticker, high-discount” practice worked magic for enrolling students—and it was free. It soon spread to institutions nationwide.

In its early years, high-sticker, high-discount pricing was regarded as a harmless white lie. Schools advertised slightly overstated tuition, which they offset using phantom scholarships that were really just discounts. But things got out of hand quickly.

Throughout the 1980s, colleges kept publishing ever-higher tuition numbers. Meanwhile, the tuition students actually paid rose only slightly. A 1992 New York Times article offers a snapshot of college pricing in the early years of the high-sticker-price/high-discount era:

College tuition bills have been skyrocketing for the past decade. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average tuition fee for a private four-year college has exploded to $11,379 last year from $3,811 in 1980; a prestige school like Harvard will charge a whopping $15,870 in tuition for 1992-93....Based on current projections, this year’s tuition of $14,403 for a private school will spiral to about $34,000 by the year 2005.

Controlling for inflation, college tuition had risen about 600% from 1927 (when Mr. Allen’s letter appeared in the Times) to 1992. And, as the article above predicted, published tuition would spiral upward in the decade after 1992. But as few people realized then or now, the apparent rise in tuition after the mid-1990s would be almost entirely illusory.

By 1999, the fundamental dishonesty of college pricing had become clear to anyone willing to take a closer look. That year, American private colleges purported to award scholarships worth more than all the tuition they collected—which is to say, their average discount had exceeded 50%. It would take an endowment worth about 15 times a school's annual budget to fund scholarships at that level. Only a handful of schools have such bulge-bracket endowments; a typical healthy college’s endowment is three or four times its annual budget, and many colleges would be happy to have an endowment equal to a year's operating costs. These scholarships, therefore, could not have been real.

There are a lot more interesting details in the full article. And that’s it for today. See you next week, in October.

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

In the past two years, Reuben A. Buford May, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has spent a lot of time waiting in lines at Chicago nightclubs. When he gets to the front, he never knows how much, exactly, the bouncer is going to tell him to pay to enter. May, who previously wrote a book about urban nightlife and is researching another, has seen bouncers let in a series of white patrons for free, then charge a group of Black patrons, then allow the next group of white people to get in for free again. “I have literally been in line and was the next person to enter the nightclub and suddenly the price goes up,” May, who is Black, told me. “Is this about race or about profit?”

The unfortunate answer is probably both. Cover charges, which in May’s experience usually hover from $10 to $20 and are generally paid to a bouncer, occupy a strange space in the U.S.: In many places, they can be flagrantly discriminatory, yet legally permitted. They might shift based on the time of night as well as the demeanor, outfit, and physical characteristics of the person in line. Although racial discrimination certainly happens in nightlife—“It’s clear to me that the race of the patron influences what the bouncer charges,” May said—proving that a specific cover charge is discriminatory because of prejudice against a protected class is also complicated. At a club, most people already understand that they will be judged for their appearance.

In the larger economy, there’s pretty much nothing else like cover charges. Airlines and Airbnbs use variable pricing models, where the cost of a seat or a stay fluctuates with demand. Time-based promotions are common too: If you arrive at IHOP at 3 p.m., you can score a discount on pancakes. But these deals are, in theory, unbiased—anyone can be entitled to a discount. What makes nightlife unique is how personal, arbitrary, and sometimes humiliating these charges may be. You are intimately scrutinized, and then you have to pay according to how desirable your presence is to the venue.

Cover charges, along with dress codes, are essentially the levers by which nightlife venues curate people—or outright reject them. This price discrimination is perhaps tolerated only because the promise of a highly selective experience is why many people show up in the first place.

Since their inception in New York at the start of the 20th century, cover charges have offered a dual benefit to nightclub owners: a way to maximize profits while also screening out the patrons they don’t want. In October 1926, for example, a columnist for The New Yorker complained that “the five-dollar couvert, with no frills, is to be an ordinary occurrence” across the city. Venue owners seemed to be using cover charges as a way to keep out nonwealthy clientele. They were not subtle about it either. In 1936, Fortune magazine described how the famed Manhattan nightclub El Morocco used an “elastic cover charge” to “separate the chic from the goats.” To cultivate an air of exclusivity, El Morocco charged different covers to different patrons based on “how much you spend, how regularly you come, who you are, and whether they wanna discourage you coming back altogether,” according to a contemporaneous report in Variety.

As crude as the cover-charge policy of El Morocco might sound, it is not out of step with how the fees function today: What you pay often boils down to how desirable of an addition you are to the venue. “It’s just based on your look or your vibe,” Jason Beahm, a defense lawyer who, among other specialties, focuses on festivals and nightlife, told me. Many club operators are not shy about the fact that they are filtering customers. When the New York Post interviewed bouncers who work at high-end venues, they described their ideal patrons as a “mature, martini-drinking crowd,” as well as those with “distinctive looks,” “high fashion,” and the ability to make a space “more sexy, more elegant, more fun.” To discourage people in their early 20s, whom it associated with disorder, from entering, one Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, bar has even charged young people extra. Many a service-journalism article has been devoted to getting into Berghain, Berlin’s most exclusive nightclub.

[Read: New York literally invented nightlife]

A close curation of patrons can, and often does, lead to discrimination against people of color, disabled people, and queer people. One of the few ways that variable cover charges can become illegal is when they involve a provable pattern of targeting people belonging to protected classes. In 2016, for instance, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the Houston club Gaslamp for repeatedly charging a $20 cover to people of color while allowing white people to enter for free. (The suit was eventually settled.) The problem with proving discrimination at clubs is that dress codes can easily be used as an alibi for it. In a 2021 paper, the legal scholar Shaun Ossei-Owusu called cover charges and dress codes part of a regime of “velvet rope discrimination,” referring to a series of norms that exclude women, queer people, and racial minorities from certain nightlife venues.

For example, dress-code policies have resulted in nightclubs turning away Black people for having dreadlocks, and refusing queer and trans people for wearing makeup. When one Texas man was barred from a club for wearing makeup and false eyelashes, employees told him that “men need to dress like men,” Ossei-Owusu recounted in his paper. This spring, a gay club in Washington, D.C., was criticized for banning high heels, a policy that seemed designed to exclude women, trans people, and drag queens. (The club has since dropped the policy.)

Yet besides defending protected classes, meaningful policies governing cover charges and dress codes are largely absent from the legal landscape. If you see cover-charge laws bubble up in the news, it is probably for one reason: Men’s-rights activists have spent years suing states over establishments that charge women less than men to enter, a common promotion designed to make a nightclub more desirable … to men. In California, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Wisconsin, differential charges based on gender are illegal; in states such as Washington and Illinois, by contrast, courts found no issue with them. These promotions aside, states have very little to say on how cover charges are levied, or how much they can be.

One of the rare exceptions is Massachusetts, which requires any business that receives a liquor license to ensure that a sign with letters of at least one inch in height is “conspicuously posted,” at every entrance, noting how much the cover is if one is required. Violating the law is punishable by a small fine of up to $50. The Massachusetts state Senate passed the regulation in 1951—not to prevent discrimination but, apparently, to protect the dignity of men wooing their girlfriends. A sign out front was needed, one state senator said, because “if a man goes into a place, and then finds a big cover or minimum charge, it’s too embarrassing to get up and leave, if he’s with a girl friend.”

In the intervening decades, few other states or municipalities followed that state’s lead. Perhaps one reason is that these tools of exclusion in nightlife, as profoundly as they can be used to harm, can also have some upsides for patrons. Cover charges and dress codes have even been used to keep nightclubs safe for communities who are discriminated against in other contexts. At one London party for queer people of color, for instance, bouncers ask anyone who doesn’t visibly seem to belong to these communities “how they identify and why they were coming,” an organizer explained to Dazed. At some parties, you have to apply to attend.

Curation is a central component of nightlife. Nightclubs are facilitators of a shared, communal experience; shaping that community requires a degree of exclusion. You go to a death-metal night, and you expect the metalheads to turn out. You go to a queer club, and you expect a mix of sexualities and genders. “Nightclubs in and of themselves are places of exclusion,” May, the University of Illinois professor, said. “They are focused on selecting people out that deserve the right to be a part of that entertainment.”

This tension sits unresolved: The certainty that you’ll share a connection with the crowd is part of the reason that good nightclubs feel so thrilling, but those same curation mechanisms keep people out unfairly. Still, to hold nightclubs accountable for prejudice, visible cover charges would be a vital start. If a sign announces the price, a club will at least have to own its decision to bar someone from entry, rather than hide behind a made-up fee.

There’s an expression reporters use, that you’ve “reported yourself out of a story.” That is, you had a hunch or a tip about something, but when you checked the facts, the story didn’t pan out. Sometimes, though, reporters stick to the narrative they’ve decided on in advance, and they don’t let facts get in the way.

The United Auto Workers union is striking for a better contract. The combination of a tight labor market and President Joe Biden’s pro-labor appointees to the National Labor Relations Board has given workers new leverage, leading workers in writers’ rooms, kitchens, and factories to demand more from their employers. This has been broadly beneficial, because many of the gains made by union workers benefit other workers.

Over the past few weeks, there have been whispers that former President Donald Trump would visit the striking UAW workers, with consequent fretting from Democrats in the press that Biden’s overall pro-union record would be overshadowed by photos of Trump on the picket line.

[David A. Graham: The press is giving Trump a free pass, again]

But that didn’t happen. Instead, it was Biden who went to support the striking autoworkers, joining a union picket line—something not even his most pro-union predecessors in the White House had ever done. “You saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before. You made a lot of sacrifices. You gave up a lot. And the companies were in trouble,” Biden told the striking workers Tuesday. “But now they’re doing incredibly well. And guess what? You should be doing incredibly well too. It’s a simple proposition.”

A president on the picket line, telling workers they deserved to share in the wealth they had helped create, was a genuinely historic moment. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t do this. It’s shocking that Biden did.

But that wasn’t as interesting for many in the political press as the hypothetical story, the one that didn’t happen: a Republican presidential candidate winning over striking autoworkers by supporting their struggle for a better contract. Trump didn’t do that. In fact, Trump, who governed as a viciously anti-union president even by Republican standards, chose to visit a nonunion shop to give a campaign speech in which he said, “I don’t think you’re picketing for the right thing,” and told them it wouldn’t make “a damn bit of difference” what they got in their contract, because the growth in electric-vehicle manufacturing would put them out of work.

Telling striking workers that they should give up trying to get a better deal is not supporting workers or supporting unions; it is textbook union-busting rhetoric that anyone who has ever been in a union or tried to organize one would recognize. In other words, Trump did not go to Michigan to support striking workers at all. He did what cheap rich guys do every day: He told people who work for a living to be afraid of losing what little they have instead of trying to get what they deserve. This is not comparable to, nor is it even in the same galaxy as, supporting workers on a picket line. It is a poignant metaphor for the emptiness of right-wing populism when it comes to supporting workers—a cosplay populism of superficial “working class” aesthetics that ends up backing the bosses instead of the workers.

The narrative repeated ad nauseam by the political press that Trump was supporting the autoworkers was simply false. Should he reach the White House again, there’s little reason to doubt that his policies and appointments will be as anti-worker and anti-union as they were the first time.

“Just look who Trump put in the courts,” Dave Green, the UAW regional director for Ohio and Indiana, told the Associated Press this week. “Look at his record with the labor relations board. He did nothing to support organized labor except lip service.”

Some narratives, though, are too fun to let go of. So The New York Times reported that Trump was set to “Woo Striking Union Members,” without mentioning that he is appearing at a nonunion shop; The Wall Street Journal likewise left that out. Politico announced that Trump was going to “address striking auto workers,” acknowledging only later in the story that his appearance would be at “a non-union shop.” Many major news outlets did something similar, writing up a Trump campaign event in a way that left the impression that Trump was going to speak with striking autoworkers.

Many reports led with the suggestion that “current and former union members” would be in the audience, but that’s irrelevant. You could go anywhere in Detroit and find a crowd composed of “current and former union members”—it’s Detroit! The relevant fact is that Trump is not supporting the autoworkers’ efforts to win a contract that allows them their fair share of the wealth they create. What the Trump campaign wanted was ambiguous headlines that might suggest he was supporting workers he was not in fact supporting, so that he could get credit for something he didn’t actually do. And the political press largely obliged, repeatedly muddying the distinction between supporting union workers on strike and having a campaign rally.

[Read: The real issue in the UAW strike]

The Trump campaign is very good at manipulating the media, because it understands that liberal ideological bias is not the primary factor in shaping media coverage. The press, instead, is biased toward having a spectacular or interesting story that people want to read or watch or hear about. If you’re clever, you can manipulate the press into telling the story you want by making it seem fun and exciting, even if the story is incorrect or misleading. Given how easily the Trump campaign got the political press to take the bait here, there’s little question we’re in for a long campaign season in which it does it over and over again.

There’s another saying in journalism that’s supposed to be ironic: “Too good to check.” That’s when you hear something that sounds like a great story and you don’t check whether it’s true, because you want it to be true. You are not supposed to do this. But some narratives, it seems, are just too good to abandon.

Here’s just a sample of group chats that have been messaging me recently: college friends, housemates, camp friends, friends I met in adulthood, high-school friends, a subset of high-school friends who live in New York City, a subset of high-school friends who are single, a group of friends going to a birthday party, a smaller group of friends planning a gift for that person’s birthday, co-workers, book club, another book club, family, extended family, a Wordle chat with friends, a Wordle chat with family.

I love a group text—a grext, if you’ll permit me—but lately, the sheer number of them competing for my attention has felt out of control. By the time I wake up, the notifications have already started rolling in; as I’m going to bed, they’re still coming. In between, I try to keep up, but all it takes is one 30-minute meeting before I’ve somehow gotten 100 new messages, half of them consisting of “lol” or “right!” I scroll up and up and up, trying to find where I left off, like I’ve lost my place in a book that keeps getting longer as I read.

For better or for worse, we might be in the Age of the Group Chat. WhatsApp, the most popular messaging service worldwide, gained more than two and a half billion active users from 2012 to 2023, and is projected to grow 18 percent more by 2025; one study found that less than 2 percent of participants had only one-on-one chats on the app, and concluded that “the group chat feature is used frequently by nearly every WhatsApp user.” Of course, you can also group-chat with SMS, iMessage, GroupMe, Messenger, WeChat—or some combination of these and other platforms. In a recent survey of roughly 1,000 Americans, 66 percent said they’ve felt overwhelmed by their group messages, and 42 percent said that group chats can feel like a part-time job.

Just a few years ago, we might have done more of that chattering online. But with X (formerly known as Twitter) in a state of disarray, Facebook falling out of favor, and Instagram taken over by ads, social media is feeling less and less social. Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas who studies technology and relationships, calls this the “twilight of the social-media era,” in which “the distance between using it for talking to your friends and what we have now” is bigger than it’s ever been. He believes that although those sites aren’t fostering real connection—advice, inside jokes, updates, memes—nearly as much anymore, people might be reclaiming it with group chats.

[Read: Zombie Twitter has arrived]

That connection is a wonderful thing. Talking in a grext around the clock can feel like you and your fellow group members are facing the world together—and reaching out to everyone individually about all the stupid little details of your day would simply be impossible. But being kept constantly in the loop can feel unsustainable. I’m starting to learn that once you begin moving through life as but one humble node in a dense network of messagers, it’s hard to get untangled. To borrow from Dungeons & Dragons, the Age of the Group Chat seemed like it would be Chaotic Good—but it’s verging on Chaotic Evil.

Group texts are hardly the only demand on our time and attention these days. And yet, the researchers I spoke with agreed that they can be uniquely unwieldy. They both contribute to and reflect the complexity of our social worlds, Kate Mannell, a digital-media researcher at Deakin University, in Australia, told me. Creating a grext is so easy that you can end up with a separate chat for nearly every iteration of any group, each with its own particular dynamic. You might start with one chat, and then create another without one member who moved away, and then another to bring in a friend of a friend. (When I want to text my high-school friends in New York, I actually have to stop and think: Should I use “Big Juicy Apple” or “The Actual Big Apple”?) Compared with a one-on-one thread, in which the other party will typically pause until you respond, group chats aren’t so easy to manage. Messages can flow in all day, whether you’re free to reply or not—and if you aren’t on your phone when a particular conversation is going down, you might miss it entirely.

Those features aren’t all bad. Grexts are good at mimicking the casual back-and-forth of in-person dialogue, and the result can be more dynamic and fun than a two-person thread. Having a chat going also means you have a space to share mundane little updates throughout the day. Studies have found that group chats can contribute to group cohesion and shared fun. A group text can be a refuge, and a reminder that you’re part of something.

Some researchers call this “ambient virtual presence”: Even when you’re alone, you’re not alone. Annette Markham, a digital-culture researcher at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in Australia, has compared this phenomenon to echolocation, the process that some animals, such as bats and dolphins, use to locate objects: They produce a continuous sound and use the resulting echo to sense what’s around them. Humans might use technologies such as group chats in a similar way—as a call-and-response, taking in information about their social networks and locating themselves within those webs.

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to kids]

But taking in too many signals can be overwhelming. Joseph Bayer, a communication professor at Ohio State University who studies mobile technologies, told me that group chats can create a “waterfall type of effect,” where messages keep flooding in and adding up. Eventually, you’re underwater. Adding to the chaos, Katharina Knop-Hülß, a mobile-media researcher at Hanover University, in Germany, told me, different chat members all bring their own personalities, communication styles, and expectations for group norms. (“There’s a lot going on.”) Mannell noted that those norms haven’t been settled, in part because group-chatting—and texting in general—is relatively new, and its features are constantly changing. (Updates to iMessage, for instance, have granted the ability to reply in a thread to specific texts, to tag people into a message, and to “react” with a symbol such as a heart or thumbs-up.) She’s found that without a standard etiquette, people have very different ideas about what degree of responsiveness is required—which can cause real tension.  

Fear of that tension can make muting or even leaving a chat feel daunting. And anyway, you might not want to miss out, even if you are overwhelmed; the desire isn’t to exit the room so much as to crack a window. I left my friends’ Wordle chat once because I’d stopped playing, but I had to rejoin when I learned that someone had used it to share a life update; never again would I be left in the dark. Now I usually just lurk silently in the chat, occasionally reacting with an exclamation point to a good score. If group messaging is like echolocation, then disconnecting can be disorienting—like losing the “I am here” dot on a giant existential map.

Grext anxiety is hard to resolve because it isn’t really just about the group-chat form or even mobile technology in general; it’s about the eternal tension between individual and collective identity, between being our own person and being accountable to others. Ultimately, most of us do want connection, even if it involves some obligations; we’ll take an avalanche of messages when we’re busy if it means we can reach out when we’re hurting.

[Read: America is in its insecure-attachment era]

Still, we’d do well to notice when our chats are giving us more dread than joy, or when they’ve multiplied to the point that we don’t even associate them with intimacy and connection anymore. If we’re turning to group messaging as social media starts to feel less social, we should be holding on to the group chats that really help us talk to people, and perhaps relinquishing the ones that feel as simultaneously crowded and empty as my social-media feeds do now. Hall told me that of all the different ways you can use social media, the evidence suggests that actively talking to people you care about—about subjects you care about—is what’s likeliest to contribute to your well-being.

His general advice is this: Let go of “zombie” groups—grexts that are carrying on but that don’t really interest you. Turn your attention to the ones you most value. When you can, see people in person or give them a call instead.

But when you can’t, you’ll just have to accept that belonging takes some effort. “Those responsibilities often come with annoyance and interference and frustration,” Hall told me. “But that’s the nature of relationships, right?” Between “The Actual Big Apple,” “Lonely Hearts Club,” and “Wordle Warriors,” I’ve wracked up dozens of notifications while finishing this story—and ultimately, I’m happy I got them.

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.

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.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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.

More From The Atlantic

Alabama strikes out. The banality of bad-faith science “My books were used to train Meta’s generative AI. Good.”

Culture Break

Courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Read. Libra, a fictionalization of the Kennedy assassination, is a paranoid American fable that reads so realistically that it could almost be nonfiction.

Watch. Gareth Edwards’s new movie, The Creator (in theaters September 29), is set in a future where AI has already failed to save the world.

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.