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.

Caesars are back, big caesars and little caesars, in big countries and little countries, in advanced nations and developing nations. The world seems to be full of self-proclaimed strongmen strutting their stuff, or waiting in the wings and plotting a comeback after a humiliating fall. And we thought it couldn’t happen here. How can these uncouth figures with their funny hair, their rude manners, and their bad jokes take such a hold on the popular imagination? How can anyone bear to listen to their endless resentful rants? Surely, they can’t get away with this? People will see through them before it’s too late.

But no. Here they are again, and in numbers. Look who’s leading in Argentina’s presidential race: Javier Milei, a former tantric-sex coach with a wild mop of dark hair and Elvis-impersonator sideburns, known as El Peluca (“The Wig”), who stumps the stage to the backing of a hard-rock group. El Peluca promotes monetarism, free love, and the sale of human organs; claims that climate change is a hoax; and wants to burn down the central bank and close the ministry of education—in short, a ragbag of eye-catchers, because eye-catching is what the would-be caesar is all about.

The little caesars of today seem to get along quite nicely without any systematic ideology worth the name. For what consistent line have Donald Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and even Britain’s Boris Johnson been operating on, beyond a shouty sort of nationalism and a carefully advertised hostility to immigrants—a mixture familiar from ancient times? The great Pericles himself instituted a law barring anyone not of Athenian parentage from claiming citizenship (his own, foreign-born mistress fell foul of the law).

[From the September 2016 issue: Why are some conservative thinkers falling for Trump?]

Yet why should this surprise us? Dictators of one sort or another have been an ever-lurking threat throughout history. They interrupted and betrayed the constitutional traditions of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic: Peisistratos, Critias, and the Thirty Tyrants in Athens; Sulla, Marius, and Julius Caesar in Rome. As early as the time of Thucydides and Plato, the word tyrannos had mutated from a neutral term for “king” into our modern pejorative sense of “tyrant.” Absolutist rulers broke up the city-states of medieval Germany and Italy.

Nice-minded people may shy away from lumping together the excesses of a petty charlatan with the horrific deeds of a mass murderer. How can there be any comparison between a Johnson and a Putin? But only a dullard could fail to notice the painful similarities in their methods: the unabashed mendacity; the contempt for law, parliaments, and due process; and, above all, the relentless propaganda, inflaming old resentments and provoking new ones. “Propaganda, propaganda, now it all depends on propaganda,” Adolf Hitler declared at a tense moment during the Beer Hall Putsch. The putsch failed. But the lesson was learned, and not just by Hitler.

Big caesars may come to power by outright lawless violence or by more or less legitimate means, as Louis-Napoléon, Benito Mussolini, and even Hitler did, and then consolidate their dictatorship in a so-called self-coup or autogolpe. Little caesars go only as far as they need to within a reassuring constitutional framework, which of course they cynically abuse by fixing elections, neutering parliament, and manipulating the courts. “Tinpot dictators” says it nicely. Yes, caesars occupy a broad spectrum, but the caesarist style is always much the same.

It is an uncomfortable thought that caesars may pop up in any country and under all sorts of economic and political conditions. Which is why so many of us prefer not to think it. We would rather look back on any such experience as an unlucky blip that left scarcely a scratch on the body politic, mere “kerfuffle,” as Boris Johnson notoriously brushed aside Trump’s impeachment and acquittal on charges of inciting insurrection against his own government.

But the damage is real enough. In Britain, the tendency on the political right is to concede, at most, that Johnson was too chaotic to be prime minister, too much of a joker to get anything much done. But it was largely Johnson’s personal achievement to smash the U.K.’s legal and political ties with Europe and cripple its continental trade. Less noticed are Johnson’s Five Acts, which came into force last year: restricting the right to judicial review; dissuading the poor from voting by requiring ID at polling stations (which even Johnson’s ally Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg described as a form of “gerrymandering”); bringing the Electoral Commission under the direct control of the government; granting the prime minister the unrestricted right to dissolve Parliament; giving the police the right to ban “noisy” protests; and, of course, stringent (but so far wholly ineffective) immigration controls. These measures bear a strong family resemblance to the repressive Six Acts of Lord Liverpool’s government in 1819, and are likely to be remembered with equal loathing.

[Read: Ancient Rome’s collapse is written into Arctic ice]

Those who continue to indulge the memory of Johnson as an overpromoted but endearing clown who kept us amused for a while should also recall his power-grabbing and obnoxious style of government. He purged the party of 21 senior members of Parliament, including two ex-chancellors of the exchequer. He sacked some half a dozen top civil servants in defiance of constitutional tradition. He expanded the Downing Street apparat from a few dozen to more than 100 functionaries. He diluted the ministerial code, so that offenders might escape with a reprimand instead of automatic dismissal, and then proceeded to let off or ignore a string of gropers and chiselers. And he repeatedly lied to Parliament about Partygate, which forced him to slink out of office in a humiliating exit never before experienced by a British prime minister.

Last year in the U.K., the Year of the Three Prime Ministers, may not have been as bloody as A.D. 69 in ancient Rome, the Year of the Four Emperors (two of them were murdered and a third topped himself). But it was a uniquely excruciating moment in our modern political history, when chaos collapsed into farce, and at ruinous expense to the nation, while the world looked on in amazement and contempt.

And how has America fared? There was nothing original about Trump’s agenda. Protectionism, hostility to foreign entanglements, persecution of immigrants (the title of Most Hated Immigrants passing over the years from the Italians to the Irish to the Jews, to the Chinese, to the Japanese, to the Mexicans)—all of this has been the staple fare of the American right since the 19th century. What is original about Trump, as is true of all caesars and would-be caesars, is the technique: the tweets, the rallies, the bullying, the nicknames, the floodlights, the slogans.  

A caesar creates his own visual culture and basks in it. Emperor Augustus had the text of his boastful brief autobiography, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, cast in bronze or carved in stone and then erected in public spaces all across the empire; today you can still see surviving fragments of this huge exercise in global PR. Ever since, the caesar has been a pioneer in the use of new media, including the inventions of printing and photography, the development of advertising, later cinema, radio, and television, and finally—perhaps most potent of all—social media, which gives him unrivaled direct access to every voter. Trump said quite frankly, “Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here.”

[Helen Lewis: Here lies Boris Johnson]

The caesar’s delight in the visual image is no accident. He thrives in the moment; he is the enemy of long-winded statutes and codes of law and practice, and is the king of the photo opportunity. He is an endless source of stunts, gestures, masquerades: He may appear in the guise of a Greek god or a Roman emperor, or a construction worker or a fighter pilot, never resting in his efforts to convince the public that life is simply more vibrant, more fun when he is around. His verbal messages are deliberately simple, aimed at the lowest common denominator in his audience (a method extolled ad nauseam by the author of Mein Kampf). These communications also necessarily involve a good deal of distortion of the truth. Caesars are shameless liars. After two millennia, scholars have cottoned on to the fact that Julius Caesar embellished or invented large parts of his history of the Gallic Wars. Napoleon’s communiqués were so overblown that “to lie like a bulletin” became a catchphrase.

Caesars know how to intimidate as well as charm, to frighten and shock, often by the use of foul language. Remember how Johnson scuppered Theresa May’s deal with the European Union by repeatedly denouncing it as “polishing a turd.” When, in the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell was attacked by judges for his lawless actions, he reportedly vilified them for invoking “Magna Farta,” and called the Petition of Right “the Petition of Shite.”

Only a caesar can get things moving by making the circumstances abnormal. Otherwise, the new “national conservatism”—or the less pleasant inflections that its name brings to mind—is likely to remain the niche pursuit of a disgruntled minority. Yet the one thing that the movement’s Statement of Principles does not mention is leadership, because its promoters know that this is an indecent subject. The yearning for a strongman cannot be openly admitted. But they can’t do without him.

[Rory Stewart: What to do when your political party loses its mind]

Only a caesar has the chutzpah to break the rules, and to break open the treasury, as Julius Caesar did to grab the gold and silver needed to prosecute his war against Pompey, and Trump did under his emergency decree 9844 to grab the billions of dollars to build his Mexican wall, which Congress had denied him. By contrast, the idea that there is some hidden continuity between the conservatism of, say, Margaret Thatcher and today’s new right is fantasy. Thatcher was bossy and overbearing, and she made quite a few bad mistakes (her attempt to impose a poll tax, for one), but she was a stickler for the rules—as well as being a qualified lawyer, not a profession followed by most caesars—and she was deeply distressed when she was thought to have broken the code, as, for example, over the Westland Affair.

Political analysts are rather reluctant to consider the phenomenon of caesarism. They prefer to think up new abstractions, or revive old ones, to describe the political tendencies of our day: authoritarian populism, white nationalism, illiberal democracy, neofascism. These terms may convey the broad outline of what we see around us, but not the motive force: We get a good idea of what the cart looks like, but where’s the bloody horse? Without the spark of a caesar, the rumbling discontents are unlikely to catch fire. Caesarism isn’t just a cute trope; it’s an ever-recurring danger. The crucial thing is to spot the incoming caesar before he crosses the Rubicon—and above all, to stop him from doing the comeback-kid act. Nobody said it was easy.

But it can be done. This is an age of caesar-toppling, too. In the past three years, a U.S. president has been impeached twice, before and after being thrown out by the voters, and a British prime minister has been forced to resign by mass defections among his own ministers and then forced to leave the House of Commons by the Privileges Committee. The constitutional checks and balances worked. Accountability kicked in. We must never fall into the complacency of assuming that we have reached some liberal-democratic nirvana. History goes on, and it is still ours to make and remake. If applied with a little persistence, the rules can always break the rule-breakers in the end.

On Sunday, just before heading to the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Elon Musk in San Francisco. Their livestreamed rendezvous held obvious appeal for both men. The embattled Netanyahu would get to show his voters that he could command the attention of the world’s richest man. Musk would get to show the world that he had a Jewish friend, days after getting caught up in an anti-Semitism scandal on his social-media platform. The meeting was, essentially, a glorified photo op.

That’s how it started, at least.

At the outset, Netanyahu called Musk the “Edison of our time.” Musk returned the favor by not challenging Netanyahu’s insistence that his proposed judicial reforms—which have provoked the largest protest movement in Israel’s history—would make the country a “stronger democracy.” (“Sounds good,” the mogul replied.) The two men discussed their shared love of books and then, after about 40 minutes, wrapped up their exchange, at which point most people tuned out. But that’s precisely when things got interesting.

[Yair Rosenberg: Elon Musk among the anti-Semites]

Musk and Netanyahu returned to the broadcast for a panel discussion about artificial intelligence with the MIT scientist Max Tegmark and Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E. What happened next received scant media coverage, because reporters were there to see a right-wing magnate hobnob with a right-wing world leader, not to listen to the two discuss AI with some nerds. Which is why many missed the moment when Netanyahu went off-script and challenged the utopian dreams of Musk and his fellow technologists.

Their conversation wasn’t just about AI. It was a confrontation of worldviews—a clash between American entrepreneurs who believe in the promise of transformational change for humanity and a deeply cynical Israeli politician who does not. And it was a glimpse into the profoundly pessimistic mind of one of the world’s most polarizing and influential leaders, revealing not just his philosophy of technology, but his understanding of people and power, and why he has led his country the way he has.

It began with a simple question from Netanyahu: “How do we inject a measure of responsibility and ethics into this exponentially changing development?” Musk, who previously signed a letter calling for a pause in AI development to ensure its safety, is not unaware of these concerns, and conceded their merit. “Just as Einstein didn’t expect his work in physics to lead to nuclear weapons, we need to be cautious that even with the best of intentions … we could create something bad,” he replied. “That is one of the possible outcomes.”

But as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.

“You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”

The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.

The conversation continued in this vein for some time: The AI boosters emphasized the incredible potential of their innovation, and Netanyahu raised practical objections to their enthusiasm. They cited futurists such as Ray Kurzweil to paint a bright picture of a post-AI world; Netanyahu cited the Bible and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides to caution against upending human institutions and subordinating our existence to machines. Musk matter-of-factly explained that the “very positive scenario of AI” is “actually in a lot of ways a description of heaven,” where “you can have whatever you want, you don’t need to work, you have no obligations, any illness you have can be cured,” and death is “a choice.” Netanyahu incredulously retorted, “You want this world?”

By the time the panel began to wind down, the Israeli leader had seemingly made up his mind. “This is like having nuclear technology in the Stone Age,” he said. “The pace of development [is] outpacing what solutions we need to put in place to maximize the benefits and limit the risks.”

It might seem strange that Netanyahu so publicly challenged the ambitions of Musk and his colleagues, especially at what was meant to be a softball sit-down. But Netanyahu’s resistance to optimistic assurances about future progress is core to his worldview—a worldview that has long shaped his approach to the politics of Israel and the world around it.

In December 2010, a street vendor in Tunisia set himself on fire to protest state corruption, triggering protests across the Middle East, as part of what became known as the Arab Spring. At the time, Netanyahu was unimpressed, arguing that the region was going “not forward, but backward.” Israeli officials likened the demonstrations to those that ushered in Iran’s theocracy in 1979. But many Western leaders, including President Barack Obama, hailed the upheavals as the dawn of a new liberal era for that part of the world. “The events of the past six months show us that strategies of repression and strategies of diversion will not work anymore,” Obama said in a State Department speech in May 2011. “A new generation has emerged. And their voices tell us that change cannot be denied.” He continued:

In Cairo, we heard the voice of the young mother who said, “It’s like I can finally breathe fresh air for the first time.”

In Sanaa, we heard the students who chanted, “The night must come to an end.”

In Benghazi, we heard the engineer who said, “Our words are free now. It’s a feeling you can’t explain.”

In Damascus, we heard the young man who said, “After the first yelling, the first shout, you feel dignity.”

Today, Cairo is once again under military dictatorship. Sanaa is in ruins, a casualty of Yemen’s ongoing civil war. Benghazi is where an American ambassador was murdered in a failed Libyan state. Last May, Damascus’s Bashar al-Assad was welcomed back into the Arab League, after he brutally quelled the rebellion against his Syrian regime, including by using chemical weapons. And this week, Tunisia’s authoritarian president bizarrely connected “Zionist” influence to a storm that ravaged the area.

Netanyahu was a naysayer about the Arab Spring, unwilling to join the rapturous ranks of hopeful politicians, activists, and democracy advocates. But he was also right. This was less because he is a prophet and more because he is a pessimist. When it comes to grandiose predictions about a better tomorrow—whether through peace with the Palestinians, a nuclear deal with Iran, or the advent of artificial intelligence—Netanyahu always bets against. Informed by a dark reading of Jewish history, he is a cynic about human nature and a skeptic of human progress. After all, no matter how far civilization has advanced, it has always found ways to persecute the powerless, most notably, in his mind, the Jews. For Netanyahu, the arc of history is long, and it bends toward whoever is bending it.

This is why the Israeli leader puts little stock in utopian promises, whether they are made by progressive internationalists or Silicon Valley futurists, and places his trust in hard power instead. As he put it in a controversial 2018 speech, “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.” To his many critics, myself included, Netanyahu’s refusal to envision a different future makes him a “creature of the bunker,” perpetually governed by fear. Although his pessimism may sometimes be vindicated, it also holds his country hostage. But the Israeli leader sees himself as a realist who does whatever it takes to preserve the Jewish people in an inherently hostile world. (Likewise, he also does whatever it takes to preserve his own power, because he believes that no one else can be trusted to do what he does.) This is why Netanyahu has gradually aligned his country with strongmen across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. And it’s why he resists any concessions to Israel’s Palestinian neighbors, seeing the conflict as a zero-sum game.

In other words, the same cynicism that drives Netanyahu’s reactionary politics is the thing that makes him an astute interrogator of AI and its promoters. Just as he doesn’t trust others not to use their power to endanger Jews, he doesn’t trust AI companies or AI itself to police its rapidly growing capabilities.

[Matti Friedman: After 30 years in Israel, I see my country differently]

“Life is a struggle,” he told the technologists in San Francisco. “It’s defined as a struggle, where you’re competing with forces of nature or with other human beings or with animals, and you constantly better your position. This is how the human race has defined itself, and our self-definition is based on that—both as individuals, as nations, as humanity as a whole.”

Ever the optimist, Musk has staked his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, and his AI algorithms on the assumption that humanity can transform its situation and build its way to a better tomorrow. But Netanyahu believes that all of these technological advances are only as good as the humans who operate them—and humans, he knows, don’t have the best track record.

Which players impressed our football pundit Garth Crooks enough to make his latest Team of the Week?

Following the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020, five Arab states in total have diplomatic ties with Israel.

Sainsbury's and Tesco deny misleading customers on price offers through loyalty schemes.

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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is the staff writer and author Mark Leibovich. Mark has recently written about the long-shot presidential candidate who has the White House worried, and how Moneyball broke baseball.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Streaming has reached its sad, predictable fate. Hip-hop’s fiercest critic A knockout technique for achieving more happiness

The Culture Survey: Mark Leibovich

Mark wrote a little introductory note for our newsletter readers, so I’ll attach that here before we get to his culture-survey responses:

Okay, I will admit to just rereading a bunch of these recent culture surveys and marveling at how well-read, well-watched, and well-listened some of my Atlantic colleagues are. Intimidating! They set such a high and considered bar. Now allow me to lower it.

In comparison, my tastes are a hodgepodge of high-low delights that I pick up from random films, TV shows, or social-media feeds, which then lead me down various other rabbit holes. In other words, my tastes tend to be a meandering mess, depending on my moods, whereabouts, chemical intakes, endorphin bursts, and general exposures (or maybe I just flatter myself, and some algo-god is reading this from a Menlo Park lair, laughing like hell).

Here’s an example from an hour ago: I was driving my daughter to school, hopped up on espressos and flipping around on SiriusXM. Thankfully, Franny (my daughter) shares my quickness to punch the presets, my need for better options at all times, and my jumpy attention span (shorter version: ADHD). I happened to land on the ’80s-on-8 station and somehow found myself hooked on a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac” by Natalie Cole (!). Who knew that existed? I didn’t until this morning, and wouldn’t you know it, the song stuck to my predilection lobes like bubble gum. Then, for some reason, the DJ—the former MTV VJ Mark Goodman—felt the need to come on and trash Natalie’s effort. Totally bogus, dude. And wrong.

This also reminded me that I once had tea with Nat King Cole’s widow, Maria, sometime in the ’90s, at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, where she happened to be living. Lovely woman, since departed. I have a cool story about Mrs. Cole too, which I started to tell Franny, but she was by then deep into her phone.

Anyway …

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: I’m writing this on the first weekend of the NFL season. There’s a reason most of the top-rated television shows every single year are NFL games. America’s most successful sports league is such a juggernaut, and I’m definitely part of the problem. Why problem? Because, among other things, football is morally precarious, causes incalculable damage to its players’ bodies and brains, and is run and owned by some of the worst people in the world, nearly all of them billionaires.

Even so, I will definitely tune in to a bunch of games this weekend, with generous bowls of Trader Joe’s kettle corn and reheated leftover pad thai on my lap. Which is a great segue into …

A favorite story I’ve read recently in The Atlantic: One of the teams that kicked off the season Thursday night, the young and promising Detroit Lions, is the subject of a great romp by the long-suffering, lionhearted Tim Alberta. The story is packed with poignancy, hitting many levels and themes: futility and resilience, legacies and character, fathers and sons. Also, faith rewarded: Lions 21–Chiefs 20. [Related: The thrill of defeat]

I’m going to cheat and suggest another article from The Atlantic, even though I read an early version and it is not yet online: next month’s cover story, by my desk-neighbor and pal Jenisha Watts. I have truly never read a story like this in my life, ever, and can’t even begin to describe the wonder of its triumph, or the triumph that is Jenisha, whom I am so proud to know.

The television show that I’m most enjoying right now: Daisy Jones and the Six (on Amazon Prime Video). A total joy. L.A. in the ’70s, road trips, and “you regret me, and I regret you” (that’s a lyric). Speaking of which …

Best work of nonfiction I’ve read recently: The Daisy Jones title cut is “Dancing Barefoot,” by Patti Smith, which led me to Smith’s memoir, Just Kids, which I purchased at my favorite local independent bookstore, Politics and Prose, because screw Amazon, even though it gave us Daisy Jones. (Like football, it’s complicated. Or maybe not.)

Aside: Riley Keough, if you or your reps are reading this, I want to interview you.  MLeibovich@TheAtlantic.com.

An author I will read anything by: Christopher Buckley. The maestro’s been on my mind lately because I just finished Make Russia Great Again, an utterly hilarious Trump-era novel. And yes, there actually is a “Trump-era novel” genre (another pearl being The Captain and the Glory, by Dave Eggers).

I’ll also mention that Buckley once reviewed one of my books, and it was pretty much the highlight of my life—and damn right I’m linking to it.

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Worst Person in the World and Licorice Pizza. These were two of the few movies I’ve seen in theaters since (or during) the pandemic, both of which I rewatched on a long flight this summer. Each got into my bones, in their own wanderlusting, generationally particular way. The Norwegian film Worst Person is better than anything the Oslo Chamber of Commerce could ever have spawned (salmonlike!). It also led me to Todd Rundgren’s glorious song “Healing,” which has been feeding my heart ever since.

As for Licorice (again, L.A. in the ’70s), the film blissfully reacquainted me with a long-lost friend of a song, “Let Me Roll It,” by Paul McCartney and Wings. We’ve kept in touch since via Spotify, usually while I’m on my stationary bike, which I try to ride every day in an attempt to mitigate the various erosions of being in my 50s. Speaking of aging and life cycles and the transience of it all … [Related: Licorice Pizza is a tragicomic tale of 1970s Hollywood.]

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. The title is also the last line of the poem, and is now the last entry in this scavenging of serendipity. May the golden wisdom of these words stay, eternally.

The Week Ahead

A Haunting in Venice, Kenneth Branagh’s supernatural mystery film (in select theaters Friday) The Vaster Wilds, a new novel by Lauren Groff (out Tuesday) How I Won a Nobel Prize, a novel by Julius Taranto (out Tuesday)

Essay

Bob Berg / Getty

The Album That Made Me a Music Critic

By Spencer Kornhaber

Smash Mouth has long been, as its guitarist, Greg Camp, once said, “a band that you can make fun of.” The pop-rock group’s signature hit, 1999’s “All Star,” combines the sounds of DJ scratches, glockenspiel, and a white dude rapping that he “ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed.” Fashionwise, the band tended to dress for a funky night at the bowling alley. And over nearly three decades, Smash Mouth has remained famous partly because of the flatulent cartoon ogre Shrek.

But the affection Smash Mouth commands is serious—the result of music so simultaneously pleasing and odd that it could rewire a young listener’s brain. In fact, the sad news of the death of original front man Steve Harwell at age 56 has me wondering if the band’s 1999 album, Astro Lounge, is the reason I’m a music critic. Most people can point to songs that hit them in early adolescence, when their ears were impressionable but their interest in other people’s judgment was still, blessedly, undeveloped. Smash Mouth’s second album, the one with “All Star,” came out when I was 11. Every goofy organ melody is still engraved in my mind, and today, the album holds up as an ingeniously crafted pleasure capsule.

Read the full article.

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Photo Album

This picture, taken on September 2, 2023, shows a player scoring a try during Water Rugby Lausanne by jumping into Lake Geneva from a floating rugby field. The match was part of a three-day tournament organized by LUC Rugby that gathered more than 240 players in Lausanne, Switzerland. (Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty)

The World Tango Championship in Argentina, a scene from the 80th Venice Film Festival, a cricket game in Afghanistan, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

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

A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an immediate success; its publisher reported selling 90,000 copies by the end of 1854. Abraham Lincoln himself may have read the book, at a crucial turning point in the Civil War: Records indicate that the 16th president checked it out from the Library of Congress on June 16, 1862, and returned it on July 29. Those 43 days correspond with the period during which Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation.

Who was Josiah Henson? Born in 1789, according to his autobiography, he was enslaved in Maryland and Kentucky and served as an overseer before escaping to Canada in 1830. By 1862, when Lincoln checked out the Key, Henson had helped found a 200-acre settlement in Ontario, known as Dawn, which provided a refuge for hundreds of free Black people who had fled bondage in America. He had also made numerous return trips to the American South to help guide enslaved people to freedom. In total, Henson said, he freed 118 people; by comparison, Harriet Tubman is believed to have freed about 70.

I first learned about Henson’s remarkable life a year or so ago, as I was doing research for a different story. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him sooner. He was one of the first Black people to be an exhibitor at a World’s Fair. He met with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Queen Victoria. He built businesses that gave Black fugitives a livelihood after years of exploitation. Why weren’t American students being taught about Henson when they learned about Tubman, or assigned his autobiography alongside Frederick Douglass’s?

One reason might be that Henson chose, after escaping the United States at age 41, to spend the rest of his life in Canada, the country that gave him his freedom and full citizenship. And perhaps educators have been reluctant to spend too much time on a man known as “the original Uncle Tom” when that term has become a virulent insult.

But Henson was not Uncle Tom. Despite being forever linked with the fictional character after Stowe revealed him as a source of inspiration, he longed to be recognized by his own name, and for his own achievements. And he publicly wrestled with the role he had played, as an overseer, in abetting slavery’s violence and cruelty.

Henson’s biography and legacy, I came to see, defy easy categorization. His is not a linear story of triumph over hardship. Rather, it is a story that reflects the complexity and moral incongruence that animated the lives of enslavers and shaped the lives of the enslaved. It is a story of how a man who was at once a victim and a perpetuator of slavery’s evils tried, and failed, and hoped, and evolved, and regretted, and mourned, and tried again. It is a story that reveals the impossibility of being a moral person in a fundamentally immoral system.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel,” James Baldwin wrote in his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Published when Baldwin was just 24 years old, the essay helped establish the young writer as one of America’s fiercest social critics. Baldwin writes that Stowe’s book was gratuitous, overly sentimental, and two-dimensional, “not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong.” He concludes: “This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel.”

In many ways, the book did serve as a pamphlet; abolitionists saw it as a means for laying bare the horrors of slavery to white northerners. (Supporters of slavery saw it as a threat. One minister in Maryland was arrested and imprisoned for owning a copy, along with other abolitionist literature.) Uncle Tom’s Cabin is said to have been, aside from the Bible, the best-selling book of the 19th century. Originally serialized in a newspaper, The National Era, over the course of 44 weeks, the complete book was published in March 1852. It sold an estimated 300,000 copies in the U.S., and more than 2 million worldwide, in its first year.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is indeed, as Baldwin suggests, filled with stereotypes. “In order to appreciate the sufferings of the negroes sold south, it must be remembered that all the instinctive affections of that race are peculiarly strong,” Stowe writes. “Their local attachments are very abiding. They are not naturally daring and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate.” When describing the songs enslaved people sang together, Stowe explains that “the negro mind, impassioned and imaginative, always attaches itself to hymns and expressions of a vivid and pictorial nature.”

The scholar Jim O’Loughlin, who has written extensively about the literary and cultural implications of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, refers to Stowe’s posture as one of “romantic racialism.” Even when the writer is ostensibly celebrating or sympathizing with Black characters, O’Loughlin told me, she posits an essentialist view of them.

Worse, Stowe’s Black characters venerate whiteness and disparage themselves. “Now, Missis, do jist look at dem beautiful white hands o’ yourn, with long fingers, and all a sparkling with rings, like my white lilies when de dew’s on ’em,” Aunt Chloe, an enslaved woman, says to her white mistress. “And look at my great black stumpin hands. Now, don’t ye think dat de Lord must have meant me to make de pie-crust, and you to stay in de parlor?” As Baldwin puts it: “Here, black equates with evil and white with grace.”

Still, when I read it recently, sections of the book took me by surprise. My understanding of Uncle Tom, I came to see, had been informed less by the character in the book than by the distortions of the character that followed in the succeeding decades, when he came to be known as a lackey and a traitor. The Tom of the novel, while not as fully realized as some of Stowe’s white characters, was kind, thoughtful, and brave—a tragic hero who sacrifices his own life rather than give up information about where two enslaved Black women are hiding. This was not the Tom I thought I knew.

[Harriet Beecher Stowe: Women, unite against slavery]

I was also fascinated by some of the exchanges between the white characters on the morality of slavery, as exemplified by a conversation between Miss Ophelia and her cousin Augustine St. Clare. Miss Ophelia, a white woman from the North who has come to stay with the slave-owning St. Clare and his family down South, doesn’t understand how her cousin—who she believes to be a kind, good-hearted man—can participate in such an egregious institution.

“I say it’s perfectly abominable for you to defend such a system!” said Miss Ophelia, with increasing warmth.

“I defend it, my dear lady? Who ever said I did defend it?” said St. Clare.

“Of course, you defend it,—you all do,—all you Southerners. What do you have slaves for, if you don’t?”

“Are you such a sweet innocent as to suppose nobody in this world ever does what they don’t think is right? Don’t you, or didn’t you ever, do anything that you did not think quite right?”

“If I do, I repent of it, I hope,” said Miss Ophelia, rattling her needles with energy.

“So do I,” said St. Clare, peeling his orange; “I’m repenting of it all the time.”

The exchange is perhaps the most human and morally complex in the novel. It serves as a reminder to contemporary readers that slavery was not perpetuated simply by malevolent caricatures of evil, but also by ordinary people who suspected that slavery was wrong yet were unwilling to surrender the social and economic benefits it brought to their life.

In his 1849 autobiography and in subsequent editions of the book, Josiah Henson similarly contended with the fact that he’d been both a victim and an instrument of the institution’s brutality. As a teenager, he’d craved his master’s approval. “One word of commendation from the petty despot who ruled over us would set me up for a month,” Henson reflected. “My pride and ambition had made me master of every kind of farmwork.” (All of the quotes I am using are drawn from the 1881 edition of the book, generally considered the most complete version.) He soon became an overseer, attempting to cultivate both the trust of his enslaver and the respect of his fellow enslaved workers.

In 1825, when Henson was 35 and married with two children, his enslaver, Isaac Riley, came into his cabin with a request. Riley was in serious financial trouble; he told Henson that a court was threatening to liquidate his assets, including his enslaved workers. “They’ve got judgment against me,” Riley said, “and in less than two weeks every nigger I’ve got will be put up and sold.”

Rather than sell his property, Riley decided to hide it from the authorities, and enlisted Henson to help him. He told Henson he needed him to take 21 enslaved people from his plantation in Maryland to his brother’s plantation in Kentucky: a 700-mile journey.

Henson had never been outside the Washington, D.C., area, and the notion of the trip was daunting. But the alternative was devastating in its own right. He remembered watching his mother being separated from five of her six children at an auction when he was a boy. He could still recall the indelible image of his father being tortured for a transgression against a white overseer. His father’s ear had been severed from his head before he was ultimately sold down South. For Henson, the prospect of being separated from his own wife and children, or being even partly responsible for other family separations, was too painful to consider. He told Riley that he would go to Kentucky.

Henson’s mother stayed behind. This was perhaps a way of discouraging Henson from trying to escape after leaving the plantation—even if he was not caught, his mother could be punished in his stead, a common tactic among enslavers.

On a cold night in February, Henson led the group away from the plantation, with a travel pass provided by Riley in hand. Children rode in a horse-drawn wagon. Adults walked. When they reached the Ohio River, Henson sold the horse and wagon for a boat, and he and his charges began making their way down the river.

In Cincinnati, they encountered a group of free Black people who told them they should stay in Ohio instead of continuing on to Kentucky. Ohio was a free state; Henson and his traveling companions could make a new life—a free life. “They told us we were fools to think of going on and surrendering ourselves up to a new owner,” Henson recounted in his autobiography, “that now we could be our own masters, and put ourselves out of all reach of pursuit.” The possibility was tantalizing. But as much as he desired freedom, he had never imagined that escape would be the means by which he gained it.

Henson was a preacher on the Riley plantation, and his hesitancy stemmed in part from his religious conviction. “The duties of the slave to his master as appointed over him in the Lord, I had ever heard urged by ministers and religious men,” Henson said. Believing that God wanted him to be a man of his word, Henson told the other enslaved people in his party to get back on the boat—he had made a promise to bring them to Kentucky.

In A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe, a devout Christian herself, wrote about how this decision was part of what had inspired her to draw on Henson’s story for her novel:

Those casuists among us who lately seem to think and teach that it is right for us to violate the plain commands of God, whenever some great national good can be secured by it, would do well to contemplate the inflexible principle of this poor slave, who, without being able to read a letter of the Bible, was yet enabled to perform this most sublime act of self-renunciation in obedience to its commands.

Henson was so committed to what he understood as the will of the lord that he sacrificed his own freedom—in a sense, his own life—to follow it. How many people, Stowe contemplates, would have done the same in his position?

I take issue with Stowe’s assertion; I find it impossible to disentangle what motivated Henson’s decision from its outcome. I cannot admire his devotion to God without confronting how his understanding of God’s will had been manipulated by enslavers. I cannot admire the fidelity behind his choice without confronting its insidious implications.

As I read the scene in Henson’s autobiography, I thought about the way in which Black people were routinely conscripted to enact the violence of slavery upon one another even as they experienced it themselves. To be enslaved, Henson understood, was to be constantly presented with a series of impossible choices, never knowing whether you’d made the right one. (Had he remained in Ohio, would his mother, still living on Riley’s Maryland plantation, have suffered the consequences?) Henson later described his regret over this fateful decision:

Often since that day has my soul been pierced with bitter anguish, at the thought of having been thus instrumental in consigning to the infernal bondage of slavery, so many of my fellow-beings. I have wrestled in prayer with God for forgiveness.

Isaac Riley kept falling further into debt, and eventually sent an agent to Kentucky to sell all of his enslaved property on his brother Amos’s plantation—except for Henson and his family. Henson watched as the people he had led from Maryland to Kentucky were sold. He watched them cry. He watched them beg. He watched them get hauled away. He knew that this would not have happened but for his decision to leave Ohio. This was the price of the piety that Stowe so admired.

Two years later, accompanying Amos Riley’s 21-year-old son on a trip to New Orleans, Henson stopped in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He saw many of the people from Maryland whom Riley had sold. “It was the saddest visit I ever made,” he later said.

Four years in an unhealthy climate and under a hard master had done the ordinary work of twenty. Their cheeks were literally caved in with starvation and disease. They described their daily life, which was to toil half-naked in malarious marshes, under a burning, maddening sun, exposed to poison of mosquitoes and black gnats, and they said they looked forward to death as their only deliverance. Some of them fairly cried at seeing me there, and at the thought of the fate which they felt awaited me. Their worst fears of being sold down South had been more than realised. I went away sick at heart, and to this day the remembrance of that wretched group haunts me.

I met Lauren Bokor, an archaeologist and museum educator, in her office at the top of the house where Isaac Riley once lived. The house is now part of the Josiah Henson Museum and Park, which opened in North Bethesda, Maryland, in 2021—one of several signs of renewed public attention for Henson. In recent years, his story has been told in books and in a documentary directed by Jared Brock, who wrote The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story That Sparked the Civil War (2018).

Bokor showed me a map of the land that had once belonged to Riley. I looked out the window at the homes lining Old Georgetown Road and asked Bokor if their inhabitants knew that they were living on a former plantation.

“No, I really don’t think so,” she said. Bokor, who is white, grew up and attended high school nearby in Montgomery County in the 2000s. She read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in class but, like many of her colleagues, had never heard of Henson before she applied to work here. (Bokor has since left the museum.)

Joyce Greene, a Black woman who became a docent at the museum after she retired, told me she lives up the street. Greene considers herself a deeply engaged student of Black history, but she told me that before her first visit to the museum, she also had never heard of Henson. “I had friends of mine that didn’t even believe that Maryland was a slave state,” Greene told me.

In Riley’s former living room, I told Mark Thorne, the site manager for the museum, that I was having trouble overcoming the emotional hurdle of Henson’s choice to bring his group to Kentucky from Ohio. Thorne, who is Black, said some Black visitors have a hard time forgiving Henson, even if they know that he never forgave himself.

But Thorne believes that Henson’s experience watching his friends get sold, separated, and sent to plantations farther south served as the motivation for his later work helping enslaved people escape to Canada.

“I think that is what gave him the drive. That’s what made him be like, ‘I’ve got to make this right,’ ” Thorne told me. “If he hadn’t done that, would he have been so determined to do good?”

Henson had been unsure, before he set out on that trip to New Orleans, about its purpose, but he soon realized that he was going to be sold. He was furious, and decided to kill the young Riley in his sleep. But just as he was about to bring down the axe, the same Christian conviction that had prevented him from staying in free Ohio prevented him from striking the deadly blow. (This was another moment that Stowe describes as being deeply moving to her.) Instead, in an unexpected turn of events, Henson saved Riley’s son’s life.

Some days after Henson had nearly killed him, Riley’s son became gravely ill with malaria. Henson nursed him back to health. “If I had sold him I should have died,” the young Riley said. To thank Henson, he decided not to sell him.

When Henson returned to Kentucky and was reunited with his family, he vowed not to leave the question of whether he’d be separated from them again to the health or economic circumstances of the Rileys. He was going to escape, and he was going to bring his family with him.

On a moonless Saturday night in September 1830, Henson and his family left the Riley plantation. Sundays were rest days, and on that Monday and Tuesday, he was supposed to work on a farm many miles away; he hoped that they might gain a head start before anyone noticed his absence. For an enslaved person, running away carried enormous risk—most fugitives were caught and returned or died in the process. Running away with a child made a successful journey to freedom all the more improbable. Running away with four children would have seemed like a suicide mission. But Henson was determined. His wife, Charlotte, made him a knapsack that he could use to carry their two youngest children on his back.

For two weeks, the family traveled through insufferable cold, with meager rations, always by night to avoid detection. They were aided by people who were sympathetic to the cause of abolition. After more than a month of travel, Henson came upon a schooner at the edge of Lake Erie. He told a worker on the schooner who he was and what he was doing, and asked for help getting his family across the water to Canada. The ship’s captain, a Scottish man, agreed to bring them to Buffalo, New York, where they could take a ferry across the border.

In Buffalo, the captain arranged and paid for the ferry. Henson was overcome with emotion and thanked the man for his kindness. Before the ferry pushed off from the shore, Henson promised the captain, “I’ll use my freedom well.”

Upon arriving in Canada, Henson fell to the ground, grabbed handfuls of sand, and kissed them as the grains dribbled through his fingers. The 600-plus-mile journey had taken a month and a half. Henson was 41 years old. His family was with him. He was finally free.

Matt Williams

He soon found work on a farm and made a home for his family in a shanty that had previously been occupied by pigs. He used a shovel to get rid of the thick membrane of manure that lined the floors. Over time, as he saved money, he was able to purchase some pigs of his own, a horse, and a cow.

He took seriously the vow he had made to the captain before he crossed into Canada. “After I had tasted the blessings of freedom,” Henson recounted in his autobiography, “my mind reverted to those whom I knew were groaning in captivity, and I at once proceeded to take measures to free as many as I could.” After establishing himself in Canada, Henson traveled back to the American South to help others make their way to freedom.

On one trip to Kentucky, in order to prevent white people from thinking that he was a fugitive, he pretended to be mentally ill:

To this end I procured some dried leaves, put them into a cloth and bound it all round my face, reaching nearly to my eyes, and pretended to be so seriously affected in my head and teeth as not to be able to speak … To all their numerous inquiries I merely shook my head, mumbled out indistinct answers, and acted so that they could not get anything out of me; and, by this artifice, I succeeded in avoiding any unpleasant consequences.

The return trip was even more treacherous. At one point, a young boy in the caravan became violently ill. The other members of the group began to take turns carrying him on their back, but his condition worsened. The boy asked to be left in a secluded place to die alone; he didn’t want to hold back the group. It was another impossible choice: care for the boy and risk the entire group being caught, or abandon him? Reluctantly, they left him behind, only for the boy’s brother to soon lament the decision and run back to his sibling. A stroke of luck spared the travelers from further deliberation: They met a Quaker man whose family offered to care for the boy until he recovered, while the rest went on.

The group eventually reached the Canadian shoreline. Henson watched as they crossed the border and experienced a deep sense of pride. “They danced and wept for joy, and kissed the earth on which they first stepped, no longer the SLAVE—but the FREE.”

I wondered whether Henson felt that he had paid his moral debt. Could he ever? Did the 118 people he said he saved from slavery justify the 18 who were sold after his failure to let them stay in Ohio?

At the museum in Maryland, Mark Thorne told me that he believes spending too much time considering what Henson should or shouldn’t have done misses the point. By asking whether his decisions were right or wrong, we focus more on individual actions than on the larger system of barbarity in which those decisions had to be made. As one of Thorne’s colleagues at the museum puts it, “He was trying to be an honorable man in a dishonorable system.”

Or as Henson put it: “Before God I tried to do my best, and the error of judgment lies at the door of the degrading system under which I had been nurtured.”

When Henson was about 50 years old, his son, who had begun a bit of schooling, started teaching his father how to read. The confidence that this skill gave Henson inspired him to imagine a new set of possibilities, both for himself and for those around him. Starting around 1833, Henson worked with a group of other Black refugees to search for land they could call their own. He was chosen to select the location for the group, and soon he came across an area east of Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River—a township named Dawn. Here, a group of people who had once been tasked with sustaining the land for others might be able to sustain some for themselves.

Henson worked hard to raise money for Dawn. “I have made many journeys into New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine,” he later reflected, “in all of which States I have found or made many friends to the cause.” On a trip to Boston in the 1840s, he met and befriended a politician named Samuel Atkins Eliot. Eliot was moved by Henson’s life story, which he soon decided to write down and read back to Henson for his approval. The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself was published in 1849.

The slave narrative was by then an established genre in American literature. These books played an essential role in bringing the experiences and interior lives of formerly enslaved people—almost all of whom had escaped to freedom—to the attention of a wide audience. Because most enslaved people were legally or socially prevented from learning how to read and write, some authors dictated their stories to white abolitionists. Others, like Frederick Douglass, wrote their own stories. The first edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself was published in 1845 and became the most famous of the American slave narratives.

[From the March 2021 issue: Stories of slavery, from those who survived it]

In her book, Sharp Flashes of Lightning Come From Black Clouds: The Life of Josiah Henson, Jamie Ferguson Kuhns, a historian who has worked closely with the Josiah Henson Museum in Maryland, writes that Henson’s autobiography sold decently in its first few years. But after the 1853 publication of Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henson’s name became widely known, and sales of his own book exploded. It became one of the three most popular slave narratives in the world, alongside Douglass’s and Olaudah Equiano’s, which was first published in England in 1789.

Scholars have debated when, exactly, Stowe first encountered Henson’s story, when she met Henson, and whether she may have distorted these facts to support the veracity of her book. (Scholars have also noted other figures and slave narratives she likely drew upon for inspiration when creating the character of Uncle Tom. In his book Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, David S. Reynolds cites “Stowe’s insistence that no individual source yielded any character.” Reynolds names several other possible sources for Tom, including a freedman named Thomas Magruder, who lived in a cabin in Indianapolis known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.) According to Henson, Stowe invited him to meet her at her home in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1849. Stowe, he said, was “deeply interested in the story of my life and misfortunes, and had me narrate its details to her.” But the scholar Marion Starling, in her 1981 book, The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American History, suggests that Stowe’s explicit linking of Henson to Uncle Tom was “an afterthought and a publicity stunt.” In this version of events, Stowe did not meet Henson until 1853, a year after Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published. Only by 1858, Starling argues, did Stowe begin emphasizing the importance of Henson’s story as a way of providing further legitimacy to her own. That year, Stowe wrote a preface to a new edition of Henson’s autobiography.

[Read: Atlantic articles by Harriet Beecher Stowe]

Stowe’s novel was so popular that it spawned a cottage industry: There were Uncle Tom toys, games, handkerchiefs, even coffee mugs. As Jim O’Loughlin has written, “It was perhaps the most influential cultural text in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America not despite its varied incarnations, but because of them.” But it also sparked a backlash. Before the Civil War, at least 29 “anti-Tom” novels were published, according to Reynolds, many portraying life for enslaved people in the South as better than it was for free Black people in the North.

Anti-Tom minstrel shows also became popular; these performances riffed on the novel’s characters and plot in order to defend slavery. (Stowe could do nothing to stop these performances; federal copyright law did not give authors the right to control adaptations of their work until 1870.) In Stowe’s novel, Tom is a strong, Christian martyr. By contrast, some of the anti-Tom novels and plays present him as weak and docile, in need of, and grateful for, the protection of a white master. Many more people saw Uncle Tom plays than ever read the book. The proliferation of anti-Tom works meant that, over time, the idea of “Uncle Tom” shifted in the public consciousness.

Henson himself was, understandably, ambivalent about the association. “I have been called ‘Uncle Tom,’ and I feel proud of that title,” he reflected in his autobiography. “If my humble words in any way inspired that gifted lady to write such a plaintive story that the whole community has been touched with pity for the sufferings of the poor slave, I have not lived in vain.” In 1876, Henson went on a speaking tour of Great Britain. To draw in audiences, his talks—arranged by John Lobb, a white Englishman who edited the edition of his book published that year—were marketed as an opportunity to see the “original” Uncle Tom. According to Lobb, Henson, then in his late 80s, spoke to more than half a million people during his time in Britain. He even met Queen Victoria, at Windsor Castle in early 1877.

But Henson, it seems, may have also grown weary of being tied to the character of Uncle Tom, and perhaps of being overshadowed by him. In a speech in Glasgow, Scotland, Henson made a point of proclaiming that he was his own man—not the character from Stowe’s books or any of that character’s countless popular depictions and distortions. “Now allow me to say that my name is not Tom, and never was Tom,” he said, “and that I do not want to have any other name inserted in the newspapers for me than my own. My name is Josiah Henson, always was, and always will be.”

In the early 20th century, “Uncle Tom” became an epithet used to describe Black people who supported white efforts at segregation. During the civil-rights movement, it was employed as a term of derision among activists—Malcolm X used it frequently in his speeches. As Kuhns notes, he directed it with particular venom toward Martin Luther King Jr. “Just as Uncle Tom, back during slavery, used to keep the Negroes from resisting the bloodhound, or resisting the Ku Klux Klan, by teaching them to love their enemy, or pray for those who use them spitefully, today Martin Luther King is just a 20th-century or modern Uncle Tom,” Malcolm said—not a hero, but a traitor.

Dresden, Ontario, in early spring was layered with intermittent patches of snow that had fallen in the days before, and the sky was covered in a blanket of silver clouds signaling that another snowstorm was imminent. I had come to visit the site of Henson’s Dawn settlement, a community that covered 200 acres and became a refuge for hundreds of free Black people. Henson’s home still stands here, as does a museum dedicated to his life. Until recently, it was known as Uncle Tom’s Historic Site.

Local members of the Black community had tried to change the museum’s name since the 1990s, but their efforts always fell short. “There were members of the community that were concerned that we’re going to lose that name recognition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. So the decision was made to keep it as it was,” Steven Cook, the curator of the museum, told me. Cook is a fifth-generation descendant  of refugees who escaped to Canada from Kentucky.

Finally, in 2022, the museum decided to rename the site the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History. Some community members complained that the change amounted to rewriting history. “It soon became apparent to us that they believed that Uncle Tom was an actual person that lived on this road,” Cook said, shaking his head. “So we had that battle against us, to educate the public as to why the fictitious character had taken over Josiah Henson’s real story.”

[From the September 1896 issue: The story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin]

Cook brought me into a room called the Underground Railroad Freedom Gallery. To our right were two glass cases holding some of the tools of torture and control used on Amos Riley’s plantation in Kentucky.

There was a bullwhip with tight, tan coils, its leather tip tied in a knot at the end to intensify the violence of the lash when it struck the backs of the enslaved. There was a speculum oris, whose long black prongs were used to hold open the mouths of enslaved people who refused to eat. There was a thumbscrew, used to crush the fingers of someone who, for example, failed to provide information about the whereabouts of a runaway. There was a billy club, shackles connected to a ball and chain, and a pair of handcuffs so small that they could only have been used on children.

In an adjacent case was an item that I had read about but had never seen in person—an iron collar that would be placed around the neck of an enslaved person to either prevent them from running away or punish them for having already done so. It looked so heavy, so menacing, gleaming under the museum lights.

I was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the presence of these tools, imagining how they had been used to punish and torture. But Cook has a different way of thinking about them. “When I’m in this section,” he said, “I always talk about This is why our people resisted. ” Enslavers “had to create these devices and keep adapting them, because we kept escaping. We kept trying and resisting.”

I looked at the iron collar and imagined it wrapped around the neck of an enslaved woman. Maybe she had been trying to escape with her child and was caught in the woods by dogs and men on horses. I thought of how unwieldy the collar would be, how she wouldn’t have been able to bend down and hug her child. I thought about Josiah Henson, and how a collar like this might have been worn by some of the people around him on the Riley plantation. As an overseer, Henson himself had been responsible for ensuring that the other enslaved workers did all that they were supposed to do.

“I often wonder, in that position, did he have to dole out punishment?” Cook said.

Had Henson ever placed someone’s finger in a thumbscrew? Had he ever whipped someone? Had he ever shackled someone to a ball and chain? Had he ever been the one to turn the key that locked an iron collar around a neck? Henson never mentioned an instance like this in his autobiography, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Some historians have estimated that as many as two-thirds of overseers were Black. Even Uncle Tom, at the end of Stowe’s novel, is beaten to death by two Black slave drivers.

The job of every overseer, Black or white, was the same: Control. Production. Punishment. Perhaps this is a reason Henson is excluded from the pantheon of well-known fugitives from slavery; it is difficult to tell a wholly inspiring story about someone who might have, even reluctantly, inflicted the torture themselves.

Cook and I made our way outside, where the temperature had begun to drop as the sun started its slow descent behind the trees. I examined the remnants of the community that Henson had built, and thought about what a loss it is that he has not been part of our collective understanding of the history of slavery. Not every enslaved person was Frederick Douglass. Not every enslaved person was Harriet Tubman. And even those two individuals, as celebrated as they are, were not the morally unadulterated characters that we sometimes make them out to be. Which is to say, they were human. So was Josiah Henson. There is value in reading a slave narrative in which the central protagonist makes morally dubious decisions, regrets them, struggles with them. For the 250 years that the institution existed, generations of people were forced to make a series of impossible decisions within it.

We walked to the far end of the site, where a wooden cabin stood: Josiah Henson’s home. It was here that, on August 1, 1854, he sat with Douglass, who had come to visit the settlement for Canada’s Emancipation Day, commemorating the end of slavery in the country 20 years prior.

[From the January 1867 issue: Frederick Douglass’s “Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage”]

I looked around and imagined the moment. These two men had, each in his own way, become giants of the antislavery movement. Henson, then in his 60s, was almost 30 years older than Douglass. By this time he had seven children and at least 10 grandchildren. I wondered if they spoke about how unlikely such a meeting would have felt to them all those decades ago, when they were both boys born into bondage in Maryland. I wondered if they traded stories of meeting the sorts of people—presidents, queens, archbishops—who once seemed to exist in a different world. I wondered if they spoke about their books, having both written memoirs that shaped the consciousness of a nation. I wondered if they commiserated over those they had lost. I wondered if they laughed together, remembering something their children or grandchildren had done that had filled their bellies with delight. I wondered if they felt a sense of peace. I hoped so.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Man Who Became Uncle Tom.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

One thing we crave after our collective pandemic experience is certainty. If a potentially powerful new variant is out there, we need some answers about it: How fast is its evolution? Will it spread as quickly and widely as Omicron? And will the vaccine be effective against it?

In this episode, I talk with Atlantic science writers Katie Wu and Sarah Zhang. They know a lot, and they are very honest about all the things they don’t know. A few scenarios are possible, from Omicron replay to somewhat bad to shrug. They give us their best educated guesses, based on years of deep reporting on COVID. If we face another pandemic, will we be better prepared this time? The answer to that one, I’m afraid, is probably not. What we do have more of, though, are excellent metaphors. Sarah put it to me this way:

I think my favorite metaphor is a dog chasing a rabbit. You can think of the virus as a rabbit. It’s just running around all over the place. The virus is constantly evolving; it’s always becoming a little bit different. And our immunity’s playing a little bit of catch-up.

People keep saying, “When is the virus going to stop evolving?” Well, the rabbit can just kind of keep running forever, even if it’s just running in circles. So the virus is never going to stop evolving, and our immune system is always going to be playing catch-up. And that’s basically what happens with flu every year. And I think that’s probably where COVID is going to settle.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. There’s something that happens to me when I see the word COVID in a headline. My brain freezes. It’s like a tiny background panic that stops me from doing what I want to do, which is click on the headline, read the story by a smart science writer, find out what’s going on with COVID so I can know how to live my life.

I know a lot of people in this situation. So today’s conversation is our attempt to slow down and understand some things—some basic things—like this new COVID variant that experts seem concerned about, the updated vaccine that’s about to come out, when and where to mask or not mask

But I also want us to get a broader perspective. Because humans and viruses have lived together for hundreds and thousands of years. And we’ve only had COVID for a few. So I’m talking to two Atlantic science writers, Katie Wu and Sarah Zhang. Hi, Katie.

Katie Wu: Hi. Good to be here.

Rosin: Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Zhang: Hello.

Rosin: Hi. So just this morning, I was on a walk with a friend. I was telling her that we were going to tape an episode about COVID, and she said, “Oh, my daughter has COVID.” And I bring that up because, just anecdotally, it seems like all of a sudden, everybody once again knows somebody who’s tested positive in the last few weeks.

So, Katie, I’m wondering: Are we in a kind of mini wave that we seem to have every summer?

Wu: It’s a great question, and honestly I could give you an answer, but it’s likely to differ from the next person’s answer and the next person’s answer, ’cause there is still no universal definition for what a wave is. Cases are definitely increasing, but they’re not super, super high, so what do we call this?

I think the trend is there, but whether or not to call it a wave is an existential question. Suffice it to say there’s more COVID now than there was a few weeks ago.

Rosin: That’s—maybe we need more metaphors, like it’s a wavelet, or, because a wave, I imagine, is not an official scientific term. Well, maybe this isn’t the right word, but why do we seem to get these summer spikes?

Wu: This is a really complicated question because it’s really about: Is COVID seasonal? We’re used to thinking about a bunch of other respiratory viruses, including classically the flu, as being, you know, cold-weather diseases.

Like, oh, fall is when you get your flu shot in advance of winter, which is respiratory-virus season. And we have seen for the past three and a half years that COVID has kind of, well, gone bananas every winter, but it has had these summer bumps, too—even sometimes risen in the spring or the fall.

It just doesn’t stick to a single season, and there’s just not enough information at this point for experts to definitively say, “Okay, that probably means it’s not seasonal. This is going to be a year-round thing, and that’s going to just kind of suck in perpetuity”—or you know, this disease is still quite new.

It’s been around for less than four years, and maybe eventually it will be more predictable. I think a lot of experts kind of lean toward the latter: that this probably will be a cold-weather disease. But there’s really not a guarantee of that. We don’t even fully understand why diseases that are known to be predictably seasonal are predictably seasonal, which is kind of a mind-boggling thing. So the fact that cases are rising now could be anything from, oh, you know, a lot of people are congregating indoors, but that’s not a full explanation ’cause we’re indoors. A lot of the year in different parts of the country, it could be that it’s been a while since a lot of us have been infected, and so immunity is collectively kind of at a low point.

It could be that our circadian rhythms are a little bit different in the summer versus winter, and that affects how our immunity works. It could just be, we just happen to get a new batch of variants. It could be all of the above. It could be none of the above. It’s messy.

Rosin: Now, Sarah, the last time there was a major new variant was almost two years ago—that was Omicron. Now there’s another variant that has Omicron-like superpowers. What is this new variant, and how bad could it get?

Zhang: Yeah, so this new variant is called BA.2.86, which is a name that rolls right off the tongue. Uh, the reason scientists sort of got really interested in this a couple of weeks ago is that, as you were saying, it was kind of like a big evolutionary jump—like Omicron was two years ago. It had something like more than 30 mutations in its spike protein, which is really huge and, before Omicron, a totally unprecedented thing to see. So scientists were like, Hey, this really looks really different based on what we know. It’s probably going to be pretty good at evading our existing immunity.

Rosin: And why is it important to know how many mutations a virus has? Why is that a measure of anything?

Zhang: Yeah, the more mutations it is, the more different the virus looks, right? So the more different it is, the harder it is for our immune system to recognize it. It’s like if a virus went away and put on a whole new outfit and then you’re like, “Hey, is that like something I’ve seen before? Or is that something totally new?” So it’s just a little bit harder for our immune system to recognize and to kind of get a jump on to start defending against.

Rosin: Got it. Okay, so the idea is our immune system is single-minded: “I recognize you. I can fight against you.” But if it’s slightly different, it literally doesn’t recognize it.

Zhang: Yes.

Rosin: Okay, so we were saying this one has a lot of mutations but not quite enough to deserve its own Greek letter.

Zhang: Well, the actual question right now is it has a lot of mutations. It can probably hide from our immune system in some way, but the question now is: While it’s really changed itself, does that mean it’s also just less good of a virus?

They kind of have this trade-off. The more they change their spike protein, the harder it is for our immune systems to recognize it. But then maybe they also kind of break their spike protein a little bit. Maybe it’s just not as good.

Rosin: Sarah, when you say a virus is good, you mean it’s effective, like it spreads quickly?

Zhang: Yeah, it’s fit. It’s very good at spreading from person to person.

Rosin: Did you say “fit?” Like the way the British say “fit,” like a virus can be “fit”?

Zhang: (Laughs.) I don’t know if this virus is that attractive or sexy. It’s actually bad for us if it’s very fit. Evolutionary biologists talk about the fitness of an organism, right? Like survival of the fittest. So think about the “fittest” virus as the one that’s going to sweep around the world and take over.

Rosin: I love it. I didn’t know that. So looking into fall, we’ve got this possibly bad BA.2.86. What’s the worst-case scenario? And then everything down from there?

Zhang: Yeah, I mean the worst-case scenario is this looking a lot like an Omicron-level jump. Could this be another Omicron? This particular variant doesn’t seem to be growing as explosively as Omicron was back in 2021, so I think the worst-case scenario is starting to look less and less likely, which is good for us humans.

The next scenario, which is probably more likely at this point is: Maybe this new variant does have some sort of advantage over the other variants currently circulating, but it’s not that big. So it ends up kind of behaving like a lot of the other variants we’ve seen over the past two years.

The third possibility is that while we do see really mutated viruses prop up from time to time—often in people who have chronic infections who are immunocompromised—in most cases, they don’t really spread anywhere further than that person. This one clearly is able to spread to some extent, but maybe it’s actually not that good and eventually it just fizzles out and dies on its own. I think these latter two scenarios are looking more likely than the worst-case scenario, but we still don’t really know exactly which future we’re living in yet.

Rosin: So the viruses may be coming for us. Health experts are tracking it better, but we ourselves are in a very different place than in November 2021 when Omicron emerged. It’s true we have a lot more immunity, but a lot less testing, a lot less vigilance from a public-health perspective. We’re not hanging on every word, rushing to get the vaccine. It’s just a very different mindset. So even though these variants seem a lot less powerful, we are a lot more indifferent. And I’m wondering, Katie, where that leaves us from a public-health perspective.

Wu: It is a great question, and I think this is the question on most public-health experts’ minds right now. For me personally, it does make me a little bit nervous, because we have sort of settled into this weird steady state now. All the variables you’ve just identified, it’s going to take a lot for them to change drastically.

We’ve kind of hit this plateau of immunity. Most people at this point have been infected or vaccinated or both. And so there’s this kind of base layer of immunity that’s tamping down severe disease, but yeah, at the same time, people are behaving, for the most part, as if it were 2019. And it’s going to take a lot for that to change. There’s a lot of behavioral inertia right now.

And so with these forces kind of acting against each other, what the rest of this year looks like could be kind of a preview for how COVID continues to affect our society in the years coming forward. Small things may continue to change, and things may continue to settle, especially that seasonality component we were talking about before.

But, certainly, to see hospitalizations rising at this point—it doesn’t necessarily bode well for the winter. And the concern is: We’ve learned so much about how to stop this virus from spreading super fast through the community, and there’s not a lot of willpower left to take those measures at this point, even when cases start to rise.

Rosin: And last fall, we got the bivalent vaccine, which protected against both the original strain of the virus and the Omicron variant. Now, I understand, we have a new vaccine coming soon. What do we know about it?

Wu: Yeah, so, this is kind of an exciting change. This will be our first ever version of the COVID vaccine here in the U.S. that does not contain any of the original strain. Which makes good sense. That original strain has not been around for years. We probably don’t really need to be putting that in our vaccine. For comparison, we update our flu vaccines pretty much every year. We’re not still putting in strains from, like, the ’70s.

The vaccine is updated to be within the Omicron family, which is still the family that is bothering us now, even though the virus has undergone a lot of evolution within that family. So this should be a closer match to whatever is the dominant strain this fall.

I think there is a little bit of concern that, because we have gotten a lot of these subvariants that have changed significantly, it’s not going to be a perfect match. People probably will still get infected if they encounter the virus after getting vaccinated. But this should give people’s protection against severe disease a boost, and that matters a lot.

Rosin: What is the guesswork involved in deciding which vaccine you’re going to administer in the fall? There’s always guesswork, right?

Wu: Right. There is always guesswork, and part of it is a timing issue. When we select strains to include in fall flu vaccines—and now fall COVID vaccines, which seems like a norm going forward—those decisions are being made in February or maybe, at the latest, June, depending on which vaccine you’re talking about.

Even with a pretty tight timeline, you need to give manufacturers time to test out those doses, manufacture them, ship them out, make sure pharmacies have them in stock, and then start administering them. That’s months of delay. The virus doesn’t care about our vaccine schedule. It is going to be doing whatever benefits it in the meantime.

And so, if that means evolving new strains, producing new family members within this Omicron family, that is what it’s going to do, and that is what it has done. There will probably be a little bit of that Russian-roulette phenomenon with COVID going forward as well. These viruses just move too quickly, evolutionarily speaking.

But the upshot is that it is still going to be a way better bet to get the vaccine anyway, because it is going to refresh your immune system’s conception of the virus, rather than sticking with last year’s model.

Rosin: I mean, all the language around viruses is really like video games: It has certain powers. We try and get in ahead of it. We try to get it. I wonder: How do you conceptualize it as people who write about it a lot? Is it like a video game? A race? A war? What’s your favorite category of metaphor?

Zhang: I think my favorite metaphor is a dog chasing a rabbit. You can think of the virus as a rabbit. It’s just running around all over the place. The virus is constantly evolving; it’s always becoming a little bit different. And our immunity’s playing a little bit of catch-up.

People keep saying, “When is the virus going to stop evolving?” Well, the rabbit can just kind of keep running forever, even if it’s just running in circles. So the virus is never going to stop evolving, and our immune system is always going to be playing catch-up. And that’s basically what happens with flu every year. And I think that’s probably where COVID is going to settle.

Rosin: Mm-hmm! Katie, do you have one?

Wu: I love Sarah’s dog-and-rabbit metaphor. I also really like a textbook-student metaphor.

So you can picture your immune system as a student learning. As knowledge evolves, textbooks do have to get updated. Refreshing your immune system with a booster is kind of like updating a textbook and handing it to a student in advance of an exam. It is updating them with the most recent knowledge.

We know that knowledge changes. We know that we have to refresh our memories and the longer we go without reviewing material, the more easily it’s going to fade from our brains, the longer it’s going to take to remind ourselves of it if someone hands us a pop quiz.

So I like to think of annual vaccinations like flu, and probably COVID, as doing practice tests or as reading the most up-to-date versions of textbooks in advance of big exams, which is respiratory-virus season.

Rosin: I have to say, now I feel kind of like the loser in class, because mine was a video-game metaphor, and yours was like a textbook and a sort of beautiful animal dance.

Wu: (Laughs.)

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: I feel like we’ve covered the fall. We understand how to get ourselves ready for the fall, but then there’s the rest of our lives. Both of you have mentioned, in different ways, COVID becoming flu-like. So if you step back—because the stance of new wave, new variant, new vaccine, it’s pretty familiar—are we right to think it is becoming flu-like, and how should we think about that?

Zhang: Yeah, so the short answer is yes, it is becoming more flu-like. But. And the reason I say “but” is because there are still a lot more people dying of COVID than they are dying of flu every single year.

If you look at just how many people are getting COVID and dying of it, it’s about the same as flu on an individual basis. If you get it, your chance of dying of it is probably similar to flu. But the difference is that it’s still a lot more infectious than flu is. It’s infecting a lot more people. So even though your percent is the same, you just have a much larger denominator. So more people are still dying of COVID.

I think there’s the question then of, in the long term, will this change? When we’re very young, our immune systems are encountering new viruses all the time. And they’re generally pretty good at dealing with a new virus that it’s never seen before, because when you’re a baby, you’re born with a blank slate and you have to learn how to deal with every single virus out there. But as we get older, our immune systems just become less agile. They’re less good at learning about a new virus. And that’s the reason COVID was so deadly and why it’s so deadly still, particularly to people who are older. So even though everyone who is older most likely has been infected or vaccinated at this point, they were not infected or vaccinated for the first time when they were very young.

We don’t really know what the equilibrium of this virus is until everyone who’s alive had encountered this virus for the first time when they were very young. Maybe that will get better. It does seem like the older you are when you encounter this virus the first time, the less good, generally, your immunity will ever be.

Of course, since this virus just emerged a few years ago, we still have a large percentage of our population fall under that. In 50 or 100 years, that’ll be really different. And that may mean this virus just becomes a lot more routine than it is right now.

Rosin: Interesting. I feel, Katie, like that just puts us back in the same logic, which is: Protect granny. Like, the reason you should wear a mask is because you could infect someone older whose immune system is much less strong than yours is. And then we’re right back to two years ago.

Wu: Right. “Protect the elderly; protect the immunocompromised,” I think, will continue to be a very resounding goal for COVID mitigation going forward. I think one more thing I would add on about the “flu-ness,” or lack thereof, of COVID is: Long COVID remains this really big question mark.

As we sort of progress through the generations and as the virus starts infecting people for the first time, younger and younger, maybe long-COVID incidence will drop. Or as more people get vaccinated, long COVID will become less of a thing.

But that’s not necessarily a guarantee. We know that the long-term consequences of COVID are still much more common and much more severe and debilitating than anything we have seen with flu in recent memory. So I think we do need to figure out how we’re going to address that going forward. And figure out this seasonality question as well.

Rosin: Yeah, the hundred-year arc you mentioned is really interesting and helpful, because one of the tensions of the moment is: We want to be done. We’re emerging from a long pandemic. It feels more stable. But it’s so early in the life of this virus that anybody intelligent you have a conversation with will say, “We just don’t know enough.”

Zhang: Yeah, I know. Three and a half years feels so, so long. But on a scientific timescale, on a timescale of evolution, it’s really just the blink of an eye. I mean, we’re really still at the very beginning of humanity’s relationship with SARS-CoV-2. And where that goes in the end, we don’t know. We just have so few data points to extrapolate from.

Rosin: The last thing I’m going to ask about is the infrastructure. The Biden administration ended the public-health emergency in May, which means we are in a “nonemergency” season of COVID if we enter a season of COVID. Does that change anything? Was that a good idea?

Wu: Oh gosh, that’s a tricky question to answer. I think it was a fair decision for the time. I think crisis-level management from up top is not designed to last forever. This had to end at some point. I think it was arguably a bumpy off-ramp. I remember speaking to a lot of researchers at the time who felt like they were just kind of being dropped without a really good landing pad.

And I think there will be a lot of differences that, subtly or not so subtly, pop up this winter, like what are hospitals going to do around masking? What are schools going to do around testing? How are we going to handle a big influx of cases if that happens without automatic federal support for supplies? That sort of thing.

We are now reverting back to a business-as-usual system where a lot of different institutions are trying to manage the situation on their own. And what’s likely to happen is kind of a patchwork of outcomes. We’re figuring it out for ourselves. Which is tricky to square with public health, right? We want to do things for the greater good, but what happens if one place has fewer resources than another? Will there be worse outcomes there? And is that a fair allocation of what we have on a national scale?

The goal is not to go back to 2019, but the goal is also not to stay in peak 2020 forever in terms of our response.

Rosin: Right. And the way you just put it made me feel like we’re actually not incorporating the lessons. That everybody’s out there on their own—that doesn’t seem great. Why can’t we apply the lessons in some clever way?

Wu: It’s a great question. I think the why is tricky, but what I will say is that there’s been a lot of discussion about the very typical panic-neglect cycle in public health. When new threats arise, we often end up scrambling to meet them head-on as if we’ve never encountered these same threats before—reinventing the wheel, constantly running into the same mistakes, finally mounting some responses, getting through the end of the crisis, everyone goes back to normal, and it’s as if the past however-many years have been erased. There’s not a systems-level rearrangement. There’s no infrastructural change. There’s no added resilience in the system, in most cases.

And that does set us up worse for the next crisis. It sort of erodes stability over time. I think that’s the long-term concern here. Yes, COVID is very much still a big issue, but we have mostly made it through the absolute worst of this. And that’s good, but what next? This will not be our last pandemic. This won’t even be our last big outbreak of this year.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So, if we’re going to be generous, we’ll say that everyone needs a breather and then they’ll turn to long-term resilience. That’s the best-case scenario.

Wu: That would be great, but it sure is easier to do nothing.

Rosin: Yes, it is always easier to do nothing. Okay, last thing. I remember during the height of the COVID-era, the articles that everybody read a lot were when they asked experts: “What are you doing?” So I’m going to ask you. What are you doing? Would you go to a big wedding? Would you go to a big party unmasked? How are you going about your life? And is it any different than you were six months ago?

Wu: I am currently kind of in my middle-ground state. I am seeing friends. I’m traveling, but when I get on a plane or into the Uber that I’m taking to the airport, I will be wearing a mask. I’m going to an event with a lot of people, but it’s going to be outdoors, so I won’t be masking there.

And apart from that, I’m trying to take each event as its own isolated case: Am I seeing someone who is older and a little immunocompromised, like my mom? I’m going to act very differently around her than I would around a young, healthy friend. And I think that’s the kind of thing that I’ve gotten more or less used to doing. I was a little more chill a few months ago, but since cases have gone up, I’m trying to be vigilant, especially because I am about to be seeing some vulnerable people. As we approach the holidays, it’s them I’m keeping in mind more so than myself.

Rosin: Sarah?

Zhang: I have a somewhat specific virus situation, which is that I have a daughter in day care who is getting me sick approximately every other week. (Laughs.) I have been sick, I think, six times in the past three months. So I think, from my perspective, I don’t think I’m going to treat COVID much differently than all of these other viruses she’s bringing home.

Because even if I sealed myself in a hermetic bubble, went about my life, and then picked up my daughter from day care, I’m still going to get sick. But, that said, if I am sick, I am not going to come into the office. If I have to go somewhere like a pharmacy, I would wear a mask. I might start masking on the subway just because it’s such a dense and, frankly, often smelly place anyways, so I don’t feel like wearing a mask on the subway is a big ask.

And if I’m going to visit anyone, I always disclose that I’m sick and say, “Would you like me to stay home?” If I’m visiting my parents especially, I will try not to be sick around them. But I think for me, there are just so many viruses that I’m going to be sick with—and this is just my personal situation—that I am just going to be vigilant like that with every single one.

Rosin: Right, so to each his own. Basically, make good decisions, but you can make them particular to your situation. Well, Katie, Sarah, thank you so much for joining me and guiding us through this moment

Wu: Thank you for having us.

Zhang: Yeah, thank you for having us.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was engineered by Rob Smeirciak and fact-checked by Stephanie Hayes. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid, and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday.

Questions have been raised about the safety of some school buildings after 35 were found to contain RAAC.