A right-wing revolt has left Congress unable to fund federal agencies before a Saturday midnight deadline.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died last night at 90, braved one of the most remarkable political expeditions in American history—and also one of the grimmer spectacles at the end of her life and career.

Is it too soon to point this out? Yes, perhaps. With the official notice of her death today, Feinstein received her just and proper tributes, hitting all the key markers: How Di-Fi, as she is known in Washington shorthand, had stepped in as mayor of San Francisco after her predecessor was assassinated in 1978. How she was a fervent proponent of gun safety, the longest-serving woman in the Senate, and the chamber’s oldest member. How, as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she presided over the preparation of an incriminating report describing the CIA’s torture of suspected terrorists in secret prisons around the world. How she was a trailblazer, stateswoman, powerhouse, force, grande dame, etc. Give her her due. She deserves it.

But Congress can be a tough and ghoulish place, with its zero-sum math and unforgiving partisanship. Over her last year, Feinstein’s declining health became a bleak sideshow—her absences and hospitalizations, shingles, encephalitis, and bad falls; the lawsuits over her late husband’s estate and the cost of her medical bills and long-term care.

Feinstein’s insistence on remaining in the Senate—and the uncertainty of her schedule—complicated life for Democrats, making it harder for them to hold votes, set strategy, and confirm judges. Her colleagues and White House officials whispered their frustration. And she became the latest exemplar of a basic, egalitarian principle in lawmaking: Even the most legendary figures ultimately amount to a vote. Often your most important job is simply to be available, show up, be counted.

[Franklin Foer: Dianne Feinstein and the cult of indispensability]

When that is in doubt, patience can wear fast. Questions about “fitness” arise. Such is the price of continued residency in the senior center of the Capitol. Feinstein resisted quitting for years, and only grudgingly said she wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, leaving the race to succeed her in a kind of morbid suspension.

Politics, of course, runs on its own schedules and follows its own rules. A few weeks ago, I asked Adam Schiff, one of the California House Democrats running to succeed Feinstein in the Senate, whether she should step down. In other words, was she fit to serve? Again, maybe this was harsh, but it had become a standard question around Washington and California, and perfectly germane, given the tight split in the Senate. “It’s her decision to make,” Schiff said, a classic duck, but also practical. “I would be very concerned,” he continued, “that the Republicans would not fill her seat on the Judiciary Committee, and that would be the end of Joe Biden’s judicial appointments.” (Politico reported today that Republican Whip John Thune, of South Dakota, said he expects that his party will not resist efforts to fill committee seats left vacant by Feinstein’s death.)

Schiff added that he had continued to have a productive working relationship with Feinstein’s office, despite her health struggles. He was a proponent of business as usual, for as long it lasted, and Feinstein was still there. The pageant continued, the government heading for another shutdown, House Republicans tripping toward an impeachment and over themselves.

In the hours after Feinstein’s death was announced, Washington took a brief and deferential pause. Statements and obituaries were dispatched, most prepared in advance. Then it was on to the next. Who would California Governor Gavin Newsom pick to serve out Feinstein’s term? How would that affect the race to succeed her next year? Who would replace Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, and when would they be seated?

[Ronald Brownstein: Who will replace Dianne Feinstein?]

The hushed questions about how long the nonagenarian senator could hang on finally had their resolution. Far too many people in power resist the option of a restful denouement. The stakes can be high, even harrowing, for the country. These sagas can be distressing to follow, but there’s no shortage of dark fascination. Stick around too long, and you risk losing control of the finale. It can happen to the best, and at the end of the most extraordinary careers.

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.

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!

When I read last month that the National Zoo was acquiring a Virginia opossum, I squealed at my laptop and punched the air. Opossums are nature’s ugly-cute superheroes, as I’ve written before; they eat bugs and trash, and they’re strangely immune to snake venom.

[Read: America’s most misunderstood marsupial]

But then, a question began to gnaw at me. The Virginia opossum, America’s only marsupial, isn’t endangered or even rare. It isn’t exotic, like the wrinkly African elephants and the snarling big cats that we’ve come to expect from zoos. To most Americans, opossums are backyard animals. Wild ones probably prowl around the National Zoo grounds at night, given that they make their burrows in the park nearby. So why, I wondered, would a zoo put one on display?

Basil spent his early life in the wild—presumably the wilds of Washington, D.C. He was only a few months old in May when someone dropped him off at City Wildlife rehabilitation center. Puncture wounds covered his back, and his left eyeball had been pierced by a tooth or a claw—a cat attack, staffers guessed. After a few weeks of treatment, Sarah Sirica, City Wildlife’s staff veterinarian and clinic director, performed a surgery to remove the eye.

City Wildlife usually attempts to return rehabilitated animals to nature, but Basil couldn’t go back for two reasons. First, opossums already have terrible eyesight, and with just one eye, his chances of survival in the wild would be low. The second reason was that Basil was simply too friendly to make it on the mean streets of D.C. “We want them to be wild, reactive, and aloof,” Sirica told me. But Basil “was just a little quiet guy.” He didn’t even seem to mind being held.

These situations are difficult for rehab facilities: They can’t keep every unreleasable animal, so they typically euthanize them. Fortunately, Sirica had heard that the National Zoo was looking for an opossum, so Basil was spared, and spent a few weeks recovering in Sirica’s office. He’d poke his head out when Sirica brought him food, and a student trainee sometimes held him like a burrito in a fluffy towel.

Zoos have not historically been in the business of acquiring injured opossums. They began, instead, as menageries: lush gardens of colorful animals maintained by kings and aristocrats to demonstrate status, political power, and imperial might. The Tower of London had one in the Middle Ages. So did Montezuma and King Louis XIV of France.

The zoo as we know it—established for the purpose of science, not royal entertainment—did not exist until the early 19th century, when the Zoological Society of London opened an exotic-animal collection for private study in Regent’s Park. In 1847, it was opened to the public. Other cities, including Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., soon followed suit with their own public zoos. By the end of the 1800s, every city in the world had or wanted to have a public zoo, says Nigel Rothfels, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the author of Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. A city’s animal collection, like an opera house or an art museum, became part of its identity.

Back then, Rothfels told me, zoos were understood to provide three main things: recreation, education, and opportunities for science. It wasn’t until the 20th century that a fourth goal was added: As species began disappearing around us, zoos became sites of conservation. The Cincinnati Zoo, for example, spent years attempting to save the passenger pigeon until the last one died there in 1914.

[Read: Martha, the very last passenger pigeon]

Zoos in the 20th century were thought of as arks, Rothfels said: “You had two of everything.” Zoos have been instrumental in replenishing the populations of the American bison, golden lion tamarins, and black-footed ferrets.

But lately, a new trend—a fifth mission—has taken hold in American zoos: getting people excited about the animals that live among them. It’s a little like shopping local, but for animal interactions. Modern zoos present “animals in the context of their roles in nature, and increasingly, nowadays, that really includes local fauna and flora,” Dan Ashe, the president of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, told me. Zoos are shifting, in other words, from a collection mentality to an appreciation mentality.

For the zoo experts and historians I spoke with, the rise of the backyard animal is a really exciting development. Elephants and rhinoceroses are fascinating creatures, but “we are so far divorced from the ecosystems those animals live in that it can be difficult to remember that even your backyard is an ecosystem,” Mason Fidino, an ecologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute, told me. Zoos showing off backyard animals, he said, are encouraging people to find compassion for species they might not otherwise think much about.

You can see the shift happening in zoos across the country. In 2018, the Oakland Zoo unveiled California Trail, an exhibit featuring black bears and condors. The Houston Zoo did the same in 2019 with a wetlands exhibit of bald eagles and alligators. In 2016, Zoo Miami opened a $33 million exhibit called “Florida: Mission Everglades” full of the panthers, wading birds, and alligators that populate the state’s national parklands. Vernon Kisling, a historian and a former animal curator at Zoo Miami, told me that he’d suggested a similar idea back in 1979 but his bosses weren’t interested. He’s thrilled at the recent shift. “To evolve the way they have,” he told me, “it’s really tremendous.”

Despite their evolution, zoos are still, fundamentally, places where animals are kept in captivity. Plenty of people dislike them for this fact alone. And the argument against caging animals feels stronger when you could see the same animal in a park nearby. But zoos offer the chance to get close to an animal that is habituated to humans, John Fraser, a conservation psychologist and the director of mission impact at the Alaska SeaLife Center, told me—to smell it, hear it, and observe its behavior over time. “It’s not that you simply see animals,” he said. “It’s that you understand them.”

[Read: Do we need zoos?]

Basil still needs some time to adjust to his new living quarters. But in a few months, he’ll be able to serve as an animal ambassador, as Sirica imagined. He’ll probably participate regularly in what the zoo calls “Keeper Chats,” where visitors will come to watch him eat breakfast while Nowlin strokes his ears. They’ll be able to get closer to Basil than to other zoo residents, such as tigers and lowland gorillas. And they’ll learn about the wonders of the Virginia opossum: that they eat ticks, carrion, and all sorts of other pests and gross things; that they get very cold in the winter because of their hairless tail and toes. Nowlin is eager to answer visitors’ questions, to tell them what to do if they see an opossum on the side of the road or snuffling through their trash.

Come December, saying goodbye to the zoo’s three remaining giant pandas—Tian Tian, Mei Xiang, and Xiao Qi Ji—will be difficult for Washingtonians. The animals have been a symbol of the zoo, and, by extension, the city, for decades. But the loss is also an opportunity for other animals to get a little bit of the spotlight. Maybe now D.C. residents will suggest that tourists pay a visit to a certain one-eyed opossum with a moving backstory. He’s a sweet little guy, we can tell them. And he’s ours.

Washington says return of US army Private Travis King does not signal diplomatic breakthrough with Pyongyang.

Gareth Edwards’s new blockbuster, The Creator, couldn’t have picked a better moment to arrive on the big screen. A sci-fi epic from a director who plays best in theaters (his previous films include Rogue One and Godzilla), The Creator is set in a world where artificial intelligence inhabits its own stratum of society, as a robotic underclass invented to serve humans. When he started co-writing the movie with his Rogue One collaborator Chris Weitz in 2018, “AI was up there with flying cars and living on the moon,” Edwards recently said. Now it’s a topic of constant global discourse, hailed and feared as an innovation that is reshaping societal norms on a daily basis.

The machine intelligence in The Creator is a far cry from the enigmatic chatbots dominating the news in 2023. In the film, AI has evolved into a species unto itself, a cadre of humanoid robots who initially function as part of American society but are eventually forced to leave the country after a cataclysmic incident sparks a global human-AI war. This is all explained in a brief, cable-newsy preamble, before the viewer is plunged into the middle of a conflict that practically never lets up. Here the topicality grows trickier, because The Creator is not really about AI as we currently understand it. Rather, it’s a broader metaphor for every insurgent foe America has fought since World War II.

This is not new for the sci-fi genre: Star Wars was designed by George Lucas, rather explicitly, as a Vietnam War allegory, with its Rebel Alliance imagined as a sort of Viet Cong resisting its larger imperial oppressors. The Creator functions along the same lines, but it boldly underlines how America has become the bad guy, seeking to wipe AI off the planet even though all of the world’s robots have already fled to Asia. Much as in James Cameron’s Avatar films, the U.S. military is presented as fearsome, ruthless, and largely immoral; it creates a terrifying orbital platform named NOMAD that circles the skies, dropping gigantic bombs on targets near and far.

All of this is fascinating—but it’s also largely background noise. The Creator is not too interested in world-building beyond these basics. Its protagonist, Joshua (played by John David Washington), is an undercover operative embedded with a group of robot guerrilla fighters, and the film follows him as he falls in love with a rebel fighter named Maya (Gemma Chan); he eventually deploys to Asia in search of a mysterious superweapon that takes the form of an adorable robot child named Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). The pace of the movie is relentless, chasing Joshua behind enemy lines; barely five minutes goes by without some massive explosion or exchange of gunfire.

[Read: The coming humanist renaissance]

This action takes place against many stunning backdrops: The Creator looks tremendous, partly because Edwards shot the film in gorgeous landscapes around the world (mostly in Thailand), taking every advantage of this natural beauty instead of depending on CGI sets. It’s an approach to blockbuster action that’s far more engaging than the empty, grayscale battle zones of several recent superhero films, and it looks just as good or better than Edwards’s previous two blockbusters, despite being made on a far smaller budget.

It’s just unfortunate that the story is overflowing with familiar tropes. Alphie, the well-meaning superweapon who functions as the film’s MacGuffin, descends from a long line of cute-kid characters designed to curry audience sympathy, but she lacks any real personality. Joshua’s love interest, Maya, is off-screen for almost the whole film, confined to a few ethereal flashbacks that leave her feeling like an underdeveloped plot device. Though Washington does his best to infuse Joshua with some real grit and spirit, the spectacle of The Creator is the film’s real star, which isn’t quite enough to sustain a running time of more than two hours.

Even so, The Creator is a high-level craft achievement that is undeniably cool on a big screen. I was intrigued by many of the ideas bubbling away within the movie’s larger world; I wanted to know more about the AI warriors and civilians Joshua encounters, and the society around them. American imperialism has been portrayed as villainous in other movies, but there’s some transgressive thrill to the film’s bluntly negative depiction. Still, the allegory stays thin throughout, light on details but easy for any audience member to recognize. Here, robots are just another Rebel Alliance to rally around. They’re easy to root for, yes, but they’re mere clones of underdogs past.

Washington says Israel's admission to Visa Waiver Program recognises 'shared security interests, close cooperation'.

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Every nation needs parties of the left and the right, but America’s conservative party has collapsed—and its absence will undermine the recovery of American democracy even when Donald Trump is gone.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

So much for “learn to code” Where the new identity politics went wrong The origins of the socialist slur The coming attack on an essential element of women’s freedom

The Danger That Will Outlast Trump

The American right has been busy the past few days. The Republicans in Congress are at war with one another over a possible government shutdown that most of them don’t really want. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona (channeling the warden from The Shawshank Redemption, apparently) railed about “quislings” such as the “sodomy-promoting” Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and said he should be hanged. Gosar, of course, was merely backing up a similar attack from the likely GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, who over the weekend floated the idea of executing Milley and swore to use government power to investigate a major television network for “treason.”

Normally, this is the kind of carnival of abominable behavior that would lead me to ask—again—how millions of Americans not only tolerate but support such madness.

But today I’m going to ask a different question: Is this the future of “conservatism”? I admit that I am thinking about this because it’s also one of the questions I’m going to tackle with my colleagues David Frum, Helen Lewis, and Rebecca Rosen on Thursday in Washington, D.C., at The Atlantic Festival, our annual two-day gathering where we explore ideas and cultural trends with a roster of stellar guests.

Slightly more than a year ago, I tried to think through what being a conservative means in the current era of American politics. I have not been a Republican for several years, but I still describe myself as a conservative: I believe in public order as a prerequisite for politics; I respect tradition, and I am reluctant to acquiesce to change too precipitously; I think human nature is fixed rather than malleable; I am suspicious of centralized government power; I distrust mass movements. To contrast these with progressivism, I think most folks on the left, for example, would weigh social justice over abstract commitments to order, be more inclined to see traditions as obstacles to progress, and regard mass protests as generally positive forces.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of conservative views, and some on the right have taken issue with my approach. A young writer at National Review named Nate Hochman took me to task last year for fundamentally misunderstanding modern conservatism. Mr. Hochman, however, was apparently fired this summer from the Ron DeSantis campaign after he produced a campaign video that used Nazi symbolism, which suggests to me that I do, in fact, understand the modern conservative movement better than at least some of my critics might admit.

In any case, the immediate problem America faces is that it no longer has a center-right party that represents traditional conservatism, or even respects basic constitutional principles such as the rule of law. The pressing question for American democracy, then, is not so much the future of conservatism but the future of the Republican Party, another question our panel will discuss—and one that continually depresses me.

The United States, like any other nation, needs political parties that can represent views on the left and the right. The role of the state, the reach of the law, the allocation of social and economic resources—these are all inevitable areas of disagreement, and every functioning democracy needs parties that can contest these issues within the circumscribed limits of a democratic and rights-respecting constitution. Today’s Republican Party rarely exhibits such commitments to the rule of law, constitutionalism, or democracy itself.

The current GOP is not so much conservative as it is reactionary: Today’s right-wing voters are a loose movement of various groups, but especially of white men, obsessed with a supposedly better past in which they were not the aggrieved minority they see themselves as today. These reactionary voters, as I have written recently, are reflexively countercultural: They reject almost everything in the current social and political order because everything around them is the product of the hated now that has displaced the sacred then.

(Although many of my colleagues in academia and in the media see Trumpism as fascism, I remain reticent to use that word … for now. I think it’s inaccurate at the present time, but I also believe the word has been overused for years and people tend to tune it out. I grant, however, that much of the current GOP has become an anti-constitutional leader cult built around Trump—perhaps one of the weakest and unlikeliest men ever in history to have such a following—and could become a genuinely fascist threat soon.)

America needs an actual conservative party, but it is unlikely to produce one in the near future. The movement around Trump will come to an end one way or another; as the writer Peter Sagal noted in The Atlantic after interviewing former members of various cults, “the icy hand of death” will end the Trump cult because it is primarily a movement of older people, and when they die out, “there will be no one, eventually, to replace them.” Although the cult around Trump will someday dissolve, the authoritarians his movement spawned will still be with us, and they will prevent the formation of a sensible center-right party in the United States.

Too many Americans remain complacent, believing that defeating Trump means defeating the entire threat to American democracy. As the Atlantic contributor Brian Klaas wrote yesterday, Trump’s threats on social media against Milley should have been the biggest story in the nation: “Instead, the post barely made the news.” Nor did Gosar’s obscene pile-on get more than a shrug.

Meanwhile, the New York Times opinion writer Michelle Cottle today profiled Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, a man who has called his opponents “degenerate liberals” and who is so empty of character that even Mitt Romney can’t stand him. Cottle, however, noted Vance’s cute socks, and ended with this flourish: “Mr. Trump’s Republican Party is something of a chaotic mess. Until it figures out where it is headed, a shape-shifting MAGA brawler who quietly works across the aisle on particular issues may be the best this party has to offer.”

Something of a mess? That’s one way to put it.

And what about Fox News, the source of continual toxic dumping into the American political ecosystem? “Fox News,” the Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle said yesterday, “does not have nearly as much power over viewers’ minds as progressives think. I am not cutting Fox any slack for amplifying Trump’s election lie nonsense. But I also doubt that it made that much of a difference.” Having traveled the country giving talks about misinformation and democracy for years, and hearing the same stories so many times of people who now find it impossible to talk to their own parents, I have no such doubts.

If Trump wins in 2024, worries about Fox’s influence or reflections on Vance’s adorable socks will seem trivial when Trump unleashes his narcissistic and lawless revenge on the American people. But even if he does not win, America cannot sustain itself without a functional and sane center-right party. So far, the apathy of the public, the fecklessness of the media, and the cynicism of Republican leaders mean that no such party is on the horizon.

Related:

The end will come for the cult of MAGA. Trump floats the idea of executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court ruled against an attempt by Alabama Republicans to retain a congressional map with only one majority-Black district. The Federal Trade Commission and 17 states are suing Amazon in a broad antitrust lawsuit that accuses it of monopolistic practices. An increasing number of Senate Democrats is calling for Senator Bob Menendez to resign from Congress following his federal indictment.

Evening Read

Franco Pagetti / VII / Redux

How We Got ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’

By Martin Baron

I should not have been surprised, but I still marveled at just how little it took to get under the skin of President Donald Trump and his allies. By February 2019, I had been the executive editor of The Washington Post for six years. That month, the newspaper aired a one-minute Super Bowl ad, with a voice-over by Tom Hanks, championing the role of a free press, commemorating journalists killed and captured, and concluding with the Post’s logo and the message “Democracy dies in darkness.” The ad highlighted the strong and often courageous work done by journalists at the Post and elsewhere—including by Fox News’s Bret Baier—because we were striving to signal that this wasn’t just about us and wasn’t a political statement …

Even that simple, foundational idea of democracy was a step too far for the Trump clan. The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. couldn’t contain himself. “You know how MSM journalists could avoid having to spend millions on a #superbowl commercial to gain some undeserved credibility?” he tweeted with typical two-bit belligerence. “How about report the news and not their leftist BS for a change.”

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I’m off to The Atlantic Festival, so I’ll be brief today. But I’ll be back on Friday to talk about Barry Manilow, whom I saw this past week in Las Vegas as he broke Elvis Presley’s record for performances at the venerable Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino. If you’re, ah, ready to take a chance again, you might enjoy it, even now, especially as we’ll be talking about the old songs. All the time, until daybreak.

I’m sorry. I promise: no more Manilow puns. See you in a few days.

— Tom

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Coca-Cola often experiments with new flavors, and they’re usually flavors you can imagine, having tasted them before: vanilla, cherry, lemon. But the latest is called Y3000, a reference to the far-off year 3000, and one that Coca-Cola says was concocted with the help of, in some way, artificial intelligence. It smells like circus-peanut candies and tastes mostly like Coke.

The company says this soda was made to evoke a “positive future,” with a label that has “a futuristic feel,” due to its color palette of silver, violet, magenta, and cyan. The Coca-Cola logo on the Y3000 bottle is made of “fluid dot clusters that merge to represent the human connections of our future planet.” Customers can scan a QR code on the bottle to open a website that uses the AI model Stable Diffusion to turn photos of their surroundings into images with a similar color scheme and sci-fi aesthetics. In these images, the future looks sleek and very pink.

Y3000 is one of many recent Coke offerings promising a “flavor” that does not make a reference to anything like a known terrestrial taste. They have names such as “Ultimate” (Coca-Cola with “the electrifying taste of +XP,” which is a type of point you can accrue in video games) and “Soul Blast” (Coca-Cola that tastes like the Japanese anime Bleach). “Starlight” is “space flavored,” “Byte” tastes like “pixels,” “Move” tastes like “transformation.” “Dreamworld,” which is decorated with an M. C. Escher–like illustration, “taps into Gen Z’s passion for the infinite potential of the mind by exploring what a dream tastes like.” Coca-Cola did not respond to my requests for comment, but its senior director of global strategy, Oana Vlad, does recognize that some people might wonder what these flavors actually taste like. “We’re never really going to answer that question” in a “straightforward” way, she told CNN in June. But “the flavor profile is always, we say, 85 to 90 percent Coke.”

[Read: AI-generated junk is flooding Etsy]

Coke is already an abstraction, some complicated combination of cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla and citrus and secret things. Further abstracting it with “pixel” and “dream” flavors is a brilliant way to get a lot of attention. So is referencing AI—a logical next step after the company dabbled with NFTs. Since the introduction of ChatGPT 10 months ago, the world has become captivated by the technology and the maybe apocalyptic, maybe wonderful future that it promises. AI is suddenly everywhere, even in our cola. It makes no sense! Which is why we have to try it. “Their shenanigans are something that’s always interesting to us,” Sean O’Keefe, a professor of food science and technology at Virginia Tech, told me.

O’Keefe doesn’t drink soda, which he refers to as “flavored, colored sugar water.” But if the soda was designed by AI to taste like the future, what choice does he have? “I don’t buy Coke, but if I see Y3000, I’m gonna try it,” he said. Of course—that’s what I did too. There are a ton of foods and drinks that exist more to be sampled once and photographed for the internet than to be habitually consumed—see the Grimace Shake, which was all over TikTok this summer. Around the same time, my colleague Megan Garber wrote about mustard-flavored Skittles, describing the product as a “pseudo-snack—produced not to be eaten but to be talked about.” These limited-edition Skittles were, she explained from the site of a terrifying-sounding marketing event held in Washington, D.C., “nearly impossible for the average consumer to obtain.”

[Read: The candy you (probably) won’t get to try]

These kinds of products are really spectacles, the artist Allie Wist argues. Wist has a master’s degree in food studies, and much of her art has to do with food. In the description for last year’s Extinct Armoatorium, a plexiglass box filled with the smell of banana, dirt, and fungus, she wrote about the history of artificial banana flavoring, which, she wrote, is based on “the sweeter taste” of the Gros Michel banana, a cultivar that was wiped out in the 1950s by a fungus (although this origin is sometimes contested). Artificial banana is now more real than the banana it’s based on, she suggests, because the real banana doesn’t exist anymore. Wist cited Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 essay “The Precession of Simulacra,” and told me that “the real world is now actually produced through the simulation world of images, videos, and, I’d argue, artificial flavoring and processed foods.” Rainbow bagels, chips with fake smoke flavoring, future-flavored cola—all “represent a lifestyle or an aesthetic fantasy” more than they do eating, she said.

I smelled the AI Coke about 10 times before I tasted it, and felt a creeping sense of recognition. At first it reminded me of bubblegum, although that isn’t a real flavor either. It was a bit more like Juicy Fruit gum, a flavor that O’Keefe described as a combination of pineapple, banana, and citrus—familiar enough to avoid alienating consumers, which is key. “We have to consider capitalism’s role in this,” Wist said. “Capitalism removes any real value of exchange and contains no inherent interest in morality or purpose.” This is why a company that already sells billions of dollars of products a year might continue coming up with “ever more provocative flavors,” as she put it, including one that alludes to a point in the future after which many cities may no longer be habitable.

A few years ago, I went to a postapocalyptic dinner party hosted by the chef Jen Monroe. I had a bunch of nice, jellyfish-forward food and then a rectangle of gelatin. One-half of the gelatin rectangle was pink and strawberry-flavored and delicious. The other half was blue and disgusting. Many people spit it out. “I decided it’s okay to serve food you hate to make a point,” Monroe told me after. “That would be the most sci-fi avenue, where we’ve abandoned food as food altogether.” The dinner party was supposed to take place in 2047. It was sad, but it was also kind of fun. It made me think, At least we can sample something strange at the end of the world.

The longer Berlin waffles, the longer it’ll take for the Taurus to reach the battlefield. For Ukraine, that means more lives lost and more infrastructure destroyed, John Hardie writes.