The medical story about Ozempic is straightforward and satisfying. A drug designed to treat diabetes had a game-changing application for weight loss. But it has plenty of caveats: You have to take it indefinitely. It doesn’t work for everyone. It has side effects. It’s at the moment unbelievably expensive and rarely covered by insurance. But it works. People can lose a significant percentage of their body weight and keep it off—safely. In the history of spotty and dubious weight-loss drugs, this one is a genuine medical breakthrough.

But the cultural story is more complicated. In the last few years, the culture has finally started making a little bit of progress with fat-shaming. For example, WeightWatchers downplayed the word “weight” in its name and started talking more about health and wellness and developing a positive mindset. Ad campaigns started using models of all shapes and sizes. A lot of women find these models beautiful and are finding their own bodies beautiful too.

This progress is new, and fragile. And the introduction of a miracle weight-loss drug could easily upset all of that. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, science writer Olga Khazan and I imagine it’s 20 years from now. Insurance covers Ozempic. It’s affordable. It’s pretty widely available. In this future, have we become a lot less judgemental about obesity? Or does the decision to have whatever body you want come to be seen as a problem?

Listen to the conversation here:

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Here is a full transcription of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: There’s a story about the new drug Ozempic that people like to tell. It’s a story of a once-in-a-generation medical breakthrough, of how a drug to treat diabetes became a game-changing new drug for weight loss. Now, there are plenty of caveats. You have to take it indefinitely. It doesn’t work for everyone. There are side effects. It’s, at the moment, unbelievably expensive and barely ever covered by insurance. But it works. People can lose a significant percentage of their body weight and keep it off. And they can do it safely.

This medical story is straightforward and celebratory and satisfying.

But there’s another story: the cultural story, which is way more complicated. In the last few years, the culture has finally started to make a little bit of progress with fat-shaming. For example, WeightWatchers downplayed Weight in its name and started talking more about health and wellness and developing a positive mindset. Models who were not rail thin started showing up everywhere, not just in Dove ads. And a lot of the young women I know make a point to talk about how beautiful these models are and how beautiful their own bodies are.

This whole thing feels new, and it’s delicate. And now here comes this miracle weight-loss drug that could upset all of that. And the more I try and imagine a future where Ozempic is commonly available, the more I wonder how this medical miracle and our recent progress around body image live together, and if they can live together.

So as I was thinking about all that, the first person I wanted to talk to was Olga Khazan. She’s a rare writer who can see where medicine and culture clash. And she’s reported on Ozempic for The Atlantic.

Hi, Olga.

Olga Khazan: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: So I am excited to have the cultural conversation. But first, some basics. What is Ozempic?

Khazan: Ozempic is a brand name for a drug called Semaglutide, which basically just mimics the digestive hormone that we all have, which slows digestion. And it also tells you that you’re full.

Rosin: And what makes it so revolutionary? Why do people say, Oh, this is a game changer?

Khazan: The idea of, like, a magic pill for weight loss has been with us for a while, but they’ve always been not effective or dangerous. This is really the first one where the side effects—usually like nausea and diarrhea and things like that—people feel like they can tolerate for this benefit of weight loss, and they’re really effective. People lose a substantial percentage of their body weight, and they’re able to keep it off as long as they keep taking it. And we really haven’t had those two magic ingredients so far in the weight-loss space.

Rosin: Two magic ingredients, meaning (1) people lose weight, and (2) they keep it off.

Khazan: That’s right. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people have lost weight on diets, and I’m not trying to minimize that, but it’s pretty widely known that with dieting, you only lose a small percentage of your body weight, maybe something like 5 percent or so. And a lot of people end up gaining that back. And for a lot of obese people, they actually find that their metabolism changes, so their body kind of fights the weight loss. So they tend to hold on to this excess weight, and it just becomes more and more difficult the further you get into obesity. Of course, weight-loss surgery is effective, but this is something that, it’s not a major procedure. You don’t have to go under. You don’t have to eat these tiny meals for the rest of your life. You do have to inject it for now, but people would prefer that.

Rosin: I mean, really, you describe it—it does kind of sound too good to be true. I understand it is true, but it is interesting that they suddenly swept in this thing that clears out all the problems that people have been struggling with for so long.

Khazan: Yeah, and I mean, I don’t want to minimize the fact that there are side effects, and a lot of people can’t tolerate them. And according to this one obesity doctor that I talked to, they don’t work for everyone everyone. Like, I think there’s always some percentage of the population that’s not going to respond. And of course, the big, huge caveat with these is that they are super-duper expensive if your insurance doesn’t cover them. So in a sense, they’re a magic pill, but only if you can afford it.

Rosin: Is it reasonable to assume that sometime in the near future it will be more widely accessible?

Khazan: I have asked this question of every expert I talked to, like, When will it be covered by insurance? Generally, things tend to move from not covered to covered. So I do think it’s reasonable to expect that soon these will become covered by insurance.

Rosin: I guess I’m just trying to imagine if there is a future where these are widely available, and then the way we talk about weight loss kind of changes in the culture.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, this is super sensitive and also hard to predict. And it’s something that these weight-loss companies that I’ve been talking to tiptoe around because their whole thing is helping people who want to lose weight. But there was sort of a period of time where expressing a desire to lose weight was not—how do I put this? Expressing a desire to lose weight was not—

Rosin: Cool.

Khazan: It was not cool. Yeah, I guess, cool. But it was also just kind of frowned upon. Like, there was just this era—I want to say, like, 2017 to 2020—where it was seen as gauche to be, like, I’m on a diet. People stopped dieting. You know, the CEO of WeightWatchers around that time was like, Healthy is the new skinny.

Rosin: This is what I want to talk about. Let’s back up.

Khazan: Sure.

Rosin: I think I want to start at the founding of WeightWatchers.

Khazan: Okay. (Laughs.)

Rosin: 1963. Because it happened in Queens, and I grew up in Queens. And Queens has so few moments of glory. Back in the early WeightWatchers era, what was the talk or idea around weight loss?

Khazan: So WeightWatchers really started as America was still partly in this era of shame around being overweight. Things kind of transitioned from Being thin is morally good to Being fat is shameful. You had these, like, support groups that held public weigh-ins, and they would force their members who hadn’t lost weight to stand in what they called a pig line. So according to a 1963 Life magazine story, during meetings, women would pin cardboard pigs on the non-losers, meaning people who didn’t lose weight, and serenade each other with ”We are plump little pigs who ate too much fat, fat, fat.”

Rosin: Oh, my God.

Khazan: Yeah.

Rosin: And this was like a sisterly, support-group situation?

Khazan: This was a support group. It’s, like, truly, deeply offensive.

Rosin: Wow. Okay. Wow.

Khazan: So we get to the ’60s, and this is when this housewife named Jean Nidetch invites six friends to her house and they talk about their weight struggles. She finds this to be really helpful, to just, like, have this informal group where you can share your experiences. She eventually loses 72 pounds, and so she kind of establishes this idea of having a real support group, not a mean, shamey one, where people encourage each other and help each other to lose weight in this more supportive environment.

Rosin: Was the underlying idea there still a kind of value or moral judgment around weight, so that even if it wasn’t quite so mean, there was this idea that fat is ugly or bad or something? Like, what was the language like in that era?

Khazan: Yeah, it was, I would say, less mean. But definitely she was not like, I just want wellness or I’m happy with my body. She wanted to lose weight.

Rosin: Right.

Khazan: And she would carry around a photo of her, like, former self when she was heavier. And she would be like, I pray that I never forget where I came from—

Rosin: Oof!

Khazan: Because it was, like, so bad to be overweight.

Rosin: Yeah.

Khazan: So definitely in this WeightWatchers era, people were still losing weight, and they were not just, like, doing yoga and being body-positive. So that’s kind of where it all originated.

Rosin: Okay, so what happens next?

Khazan: So because dieting isn’t very effective, I think a lot of people got frustrated with this encouragement to diet and exercise. And, I mean, there was a time when I was reporting a lot on obesity, and I would actually go to doctors’ appointments with people. And the doctor would tell them to lose weight, and they would be like, I don’t know how or I can’t. And they would be like, Well, have you tried diet and exercise?

Rosin: Also, Doctor, like, do you think I didn’t think of that?

Khazan: Right. Right

Rosin: Like it’s a novel idea you just came up with?

Khazan: Yeah, it’s, like, a little bit condescending. And so I think people kind of were like, I’m not going to put up with this anymore. And then the industry took a cue, I guess, from the general population. And so you had magazines who were like, We’re going to stop using phrases like “bikini body.” Lean Cuisine—this was a weird one—started offering a browser extension that actually blocks the word diet from your web pages.

Rosin: Interesting.

Khazan: Which is weird because it’s Lean Cuisine.

Rosin: Right? It is, kind of, diety food.

Khazan: Yeah, and you really had body positivity take off. And the idea of a diet really just seemed kind of outdated.

Rosin: So if dieting fell out of fashion, what new things sprung up?

Khazan: Yeah, so it’s very interesting. Right around this time in 2018, WeightWatchers starts calling itself WW. But, at the same time, you still have people who want to lose weight. So you have things starting up like Noom, which is this weight-loss app. And it does show you how to diet and how to eat foods that will keep you full longer, and helps you track your food and count your calories and things like that. But it also took this psychological approach where it would tell you, like, There’s no such thing as good and bad foods and You should move joyfully and Just because you mess up one day doesn’t mean that your diet is ruined. So it does a lot of, like, therapy coaching alongside telling you that grapes are healthier than raisins. And I know a lot of people who lost weight on Noom, and it seems to be pretty effective.

Rosin: Yeah, I remember when I was first looking through Noom and being really surprised at how different the language was. You know, they talked a lot about health and wellness and body positivity, but it was really hard to tell if people who were going to Noom just still had those same old anxieties about being thin—and if these companies sort of knew that and maybe were just coloring it over in more acceptable language so people felt better using it.

Khazan: I think that’s for everyone to draw their own conclusion. So I will say that, like, WeightWatchers, they stopped requiring their members to have a weight-loss goal. They stopped doing the before-and-after photos that they were kind of very famous for. You pick goals when you sign up for WeightWatchers, and one of them was developing a positive mindset. Meetings started to be called “workshops.” I don’t really know why that’s better than “meetings,” but they did that.

Rosin: More professional, maybe.

Khazan: Right? But they were still offering a point system and ways for people to lose weight. It was still a weight-loss program. So I think they just picked up on this sentiment in the culture that dieting is sort of passé, and they were like, What can we do—we’re a weight-loss company—that fits with this new sentiment that people have around dieting, but still fundamentally helps people lose weight?

Rosin: And there were periods that were a genuine opening up in the culture, like a change in models, like catalog models, just general models. Like, there was a broadening of types of bodies that you would see on screen or in magazines that everybody would agree could be called “beautiful.”

Khazan: Oh, totally. Yeah, I mean, and you had, like, the Dove commercials. Those famously, like, included size-10 women, which was, like, revolutionary at the time. (Chuckles.) So, yeah, there was a lot of positive stuff that came out of that time. Some of the shame around being fat, thankfully, went away. But there is this enduring, fundamental problem, which is that obesity is associated with a lot of bad health effects, and doctors in particular were still working on that.

Rosin: Now you’re separating the cultural issues from the medical issues, the medical issues being that obesity specifically—not overweightness, but obesity specifically—is associated with certain health outcomes.

Khazan: Obesity was and continues to be a big problem. It can cause diabetes, liver disease, heart disease, cancers, sleep apnea. It can shorten your lifespan. I mean, it continued throughout this time of body positivity to be something that doctors consider to be a huge health risk.

Rosin: I understand. So you could think of it as a symptom that might lead to other symptoms, but there isn’t any moral value attached to it.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, I think that’s where things got really twisted. It’s that obesity did acquire a moral valence because, I think, a lot of people wrongly saw it as something you could completely control with what you ate. And if you just swapped out your Big Mac for carrot sticks, you wouldn’t be obese anymore. But realistically, that’s not what a lot of obese people are doing. They’re eating right and exercising, but they can’t lose weight anyway. So in some ways it’s better to think of obesity in a medical way, because it’s a medical condition.

Rosin: What are the American numbers on obesity, and how have they changed over all these decades that we’ve been talking about?

Khazan: It went from 13 percent of Americans were obese in the ’60s to 42 percent are obese now. So it is a really big medical problem. And we somehow have to muddle through and find a balance between treating obesity and helping people lose weight, if they want to, without shaming people who are obese or making them feel fat or lazy or somehow “less than,” just because they’re obese. I do think that this era of Semaglutide puts a new focus on the fact that if you’re, you know, severely overweight or obese, there is something you can do about that.

Rosin: When we come back, what happens when these medical imperatives and cultural shifts collide?

[Music]

Rosin: Imagine it’s 20 years from now. Insurance covers Ozempic. It’s affordable. It’s pretty widely available, not just to treat diabetes and obesity. We don’t live there yet, but you can tell it’s coming because of what happened this spring with WeightWatchers.

Khazan: These same companies that are sort of like, There’s no good and bad foods and You haven’t messed up; you just had a slip up and Wellness is more important than weight and Healthy is the new skinny, are now saying, Do you want some Ozempic?

Rosin: Yeah.

Khazan: Yeah, so both Noom and WeightWatchers have launched these services where you can be paired with a doctor. And if you qualify, which means if you’re obese or you have diabetes or other conditions, you can be prescribed these weight-loss drugs. And it doesn’t cover the cost of them, of course, which is substantial. So you would sort of do your Noom and your psychological behavior change, but also you would be injecting yourself with Ozempic.

Rosin: And to you, what was the significance of that announcement?

Khazan: Well, it’s an awkward pivot, right? Because you’ve been saying, All you have to do is follow our guidelines. You just have to count your points and keep going to meetings, and it’ll work or You just have to follow Noom and, you know, log your meals, and it’ll work. And suddenly it’s sort of like, Well, but if you want a little something extra, here it is. And I think anytime there’s an admission that the old approach has failed, and Here’s actually what’s better, it is a little surprising.

Rosin: Because there’s nobody explicit about that.

Khazan: Well, yeah. And I mean, the WeightWatchers CEO, Sima Sistani, said, There are people who join this program and lapse from our program because it didn’t work for them. And we have to be honest about that. And we now know better. And so we should do better. And so they’re kind of saying, like, We have to admit that, for some people, just regular WeightWatchers doesn’t work. So it is—it’s a huge admission, and it’s a huge step for them to be offering these drugs.

Rosin: I mean, on the one hand, saying We know that our program doesn’t work for a lot of people feels liberating. Like, there’s a way in which it acknowledges that obesity is a problem completely separate from willpower—we all acknowledge that. It’s a little bit like the change in framework we had with Prozac.

Khazan: Yeah, Prozac is a really good analogy, because in this day and age, I don’t think people would really shame someone who’s like, I have depression and I take Prozac. You wouldn’t be like, Well, have you just, you know, tried to be happy?, you know, or whatever.

Rosin: But it was more that when Prozac was first introduced, it sort of switched the framework so that you didn’t necessarily have to think about psychodynamic therapy and sort of dig deep into your past. You at least had another model, which can be treated in this separate chemical way. So there’s kind of a bright line between you and it. It just externalizes the situation.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, and that’s something the new medical director also pointed out to me, which is that, like, some people are just genetically predisposed to have insulin resistance. That can lead to abnormal fat storage and a dysregulated appetite. And there’s just not a lot that you can do when your body is actively working against you to keep you from losing weight.

Rosin: Let’s say Ozempic-like drugs are widely available. A lot of people start to know people who are taking Ozempic and think about it and talk about it in this way. Can you imagine a scenario in which that actually changes this underlying, lingering bias against fatness?

Khazan: I really hope so. I mean, because once you have a medication that works really well for something like obesity, and everyone kind of acknowledges that if you take this, you will lose a substantial amount of weight very quickly, I do think some of the moralizing around it will go away. Because the problem with diets is that they are very moralistic—like, forcing people to eat carrots or whatever instead of what they actually want to be eating, it has, like, a “should” and “shouldn’t” quality that is a little like telling people to just be happy. Like, I think that, you know, once these become more popularized, hopefully it will lead more people to see obesity as a medical condition, which, again, I think is a positive thing.

Rosin: So that’s the positive. The positive is that we move into a world where we have a completely different medical framework for obesity, and it slowly erodes the stigma around being fat. Now, maybe the difficult thing—like, one thing I wonder about is if it actually hardens our intolerance of fat if you just won’t get with this program.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a real risk of that. To use an example of my own that’s not obesity, I do have anxiety, but I’m not on antianxiety medication. But every time I go to the doctor and check anxiety on the form, they’re like, Lexapro! Here you go. Like, Here, why don’t you take it? No, seriously, take it. And it doesn’t matter how many times I say, like, I want to try other things, like, whatever, I’m meditating. They’re like, Well, we have a pill. Like, you could just take it. And it’s very hard to push back against the medicalization of something. And I do think that there is a potential for that for people who don’t want to take it for whatever reason, can’t tolerate it—again, there are side effects. Maybe it doesn’t work for them. Maybe insurance doesn’t cover it. Maybe they just have other things they want to focus on than losing weight. I think there is a risk that we’ll get to be like, Well, you know, your biggest problem is obesity, and why don’t you just, you know, inject this into yourself already?

Rosin: Right. Right. I mean, and this—what you described about your relationship with doctors and anxiety, it is a discipline for you to maintain a complicated relationship with your anxiety in the same way as, I think, it might really take a lot of work and be a discipline to maintain a complicated relationship with your body.

Khazan: Yeah, I mean, right now the obesity doctor—or one of them that I talked to for this—he was saying he does not just, like, write a prescription for everyone who comes by. You really have to be obese, which is, like, above a certain BMI threshold. So if you were just a little overweight, that’s not really going to qualify you. But I think in the future it might come to a point where these drugs are so widely available that someone who’s just overweight, not obese, can get their hands on them and basically use them, probably.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Khazan: So you will not see as many people who are obese. And so, therefore, being a little overweight will start to look, maybe, a little more conspicuous among your social group, or whatever else, and that you might start to put some pressure on that endocrinologist to write that prescription already. I think there is the possibility of that happening, but at the same time, obesity is, like, such a huge medical problem that if we do have a way to get people to not be obese—and it’s relatively low-key and they can tolerate it well and it’s, like, widely available—I have trouble not seeing that as a good thing.

[Music]

Rosin: Well, Olga, thank you very much. That was very helpful in thinking through the future.

Khazan: (Laughs.) No, thanks so much for having me on.

The Atlantic Festival brings together influential and provocative political, cultural, business, tech, and climate leaders for two full days of in-depth interviews, timely forums, intimate breakout sessions, book talks, screenings, and networking opportunities.

Our writers and moderators will host lively exchanges of complex ideas, addressing the most significant issues of our time with today’s boldest thinkers as we bring The Atlantic’s journalism to life onstage.

The festival is sold out. You can see the full agenda and other live streaming events here.

For the past half century, many women in America have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of freedom and legal protection, not because of Roe v. Wade or antidiscrimination laws but because of something much less celebrated: “no fault” divorce. Beginning in the early 1970s, no-fault divorce enabled millions of people, most of them women, to file for divorce over “irreconcilable differences” or the equivalent without having to prove misconduct by a spouse—such as adultery, domestic violence, bigamy, cruelty, abandonment, or impotence.

But now conservative politicians in states such as Texas and Louisiana, as well as a devoutly Catholic husband who tried to halt his wife’s divorce efforts in Nebraska, are attacking no-fault divorce. One of the more alarming steps taken in that direction came from the Texas Republican Party, whose 2022 platform called on the legislature to “rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws and support covenant marriage.” Given the Republican Party’s control of the offices of governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, and both chambers of the state legislature, Texas has a chance of actually doing it.

Until 1857, divorce in England—whose ecclesiastical laws formed the basis of divorce laws in most American colonies outside New England—was available only through an act of Parliament. A total of 324 couples managed to secure one; only four of those were initiated by women. Husbands could divorce their wives based solely on adultery, but women had to prove additional aggravating circumstances. Proof of brutality, rape, or desertion was considered insufficient to support a divorce. Not until 1801 did a woman, Jane Addison, finally win a divorce based on adultery alone.

[Helen Lewis: The conservative case for liberalizing divorce]

Divorce in the American colonies was often decided by governors, while colonial courts required the innocent spouse to prove marital fault by the other, making divorce virtually nonexistent. Married women were mostly bound by laws of “coverture,” which, in the words of the English jurist William Blackstone, meant that “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.” As recounted by the historian Catherine Allgor, American women had no right to enter into contracts or independently own property, including their own wages and “the clothes on their backs.” Mothers lacked basic parental rights, too, “so that if a wife divorced or left a husband, she would not see her children again.”

State standards for divorce varied, including the number of times a man could assault his wife before divorce was allowed. (Marital rape was not illegal in all 50 states until 1993.) In 1861, a judge in New York City ruled that “one or two acts of cruel treatment” were not sufficient grounds to grant a woman a divorce, even after her husband beat her unconscious with a piece of wood during a fight over the family dog sleeping in their bed. The judge wrote that “the wife should not seek on slight provocation to dissolve that sacred tie which binds her to her husband for life, for better or worse.” As if the privacy intrusions of a trial were not enough, newspapers routinely publicized divorce cases, often blaming the woman without mentioning her abuse. Norms of “regular marriage” even made their way into national politics when, two months before the Civil War began, President Abraham Lincoln invoked the analogy in a speech accusing the South of wanting a “‘free love’ arrangement” based on “passional attraction” rather than fidelity to the Union.

Against this backdrop, conservative commentators today claim that no-fault-divorce laws destroy the sanctity of marriage and disfavor men. The blogger and Daily Wire host Matt Walsh tweeted this year that no-fault divorce should be abolished. He once tweeted that “no fault divorce grants one person the ability to break the contract without the consent of the other. What kind of contract is that?” The right-wing YouTube personality Steven Crowder has argued that “no-fault divorce … means that in many of these states if a woman cheats on you, she leaves, she takes half. So it’s not no-fault, it’s the fault of the man.” Elsewhere, he claimed, “If you’re a woman that comes from meager means, and you want to get wealthy—you’ve never worked, you didn’t get a degree, you have no skill set, but you’re good-looking—your best path to victory is simply to marry a man, leave him, and take half.”

Republican Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio picked up the argument on the campaign trail last September, stating, “One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace … is the idea that, like, ‘Well, okay, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”

[Olga Khazan: The high cost of divorce]

Except no-fault-divorce laws did make women happier. Prior to California’s Family Law Act of 1969, which was signed into law by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, all states followed a fault-based system in which divorces were granted very sparingly under strict criteria. Women who wanted out of a bad marriage had little choice but to stay, because most were family caregivers who would wind up destitute without a judicial division of assets. The tight legal controls also led to highly adversarial proceedings and regularized lying in order to secure a divorce decree. Estranged couples fled to more liberal states known as “divorce colonies” simply to end a marriage. It was not until 1949 that divorce was legal at all in South Carolina. Although many states still retain the option of fault-based grounds for divorce, which arguably can carry the benefits of avoiding mandatory separation periods and a greater share of marital assets for the spouse who files for divorce, the last to abandon mandatory proof of fault was New York, in 2010. Late-stage opponents responsible for New York’s delay in the movement included the Roman Catholic Church and some women’s-rights groups fearful that no-fault divorce would diminish women’s leverage to obtain favorable alimony or child-support awards.

No-fault divorce managed to meaningfully shift the power balance in marriage relationships: Women now had the option of leaving without their husband’s permission. From 1976 to 1985, states that adopted no-fault divorce saw their overall domestic-violence rates plummet by a quarter to one-half, including in relationships that did not end in divorce. The number of women murdered by “intimates” declined by 10 percent. Female suicide rates also fell immediately in states that moved to unilateral divorce, a downward trend that continued for the next decade. Researchers have theorized that many women “derive a life-preserving benefit from divorce,” because under the threat of divorce, “the husband … behaves himself, thereby reducing the incidence of domestic violence and spousal homicide.”

Federal law allows for state legislatures to easily roll back women’s ability to initiate divorce without spousal consent or proof of abuse. Although the Supreme Court recognized in 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges that state laws must yield to federal rights protecting same-sex marriage, nothing in the Constitution or the Court’s precedent clearly prevents states from reversing no-fault divorce.

The writer and attorney Beverly Willett, an opponent of no-fault divorce, has argued that “unilateral no-fault divorce clearly violates the 14th Amendment,” supposedly depriving defendants in divorce cases “of life, liberty, and property without due process of law.” This argument has it exactly backwards. There is no express “right” to marriage in the Constitution. Although troubling vestiges of legal coverture still linger in American law, women these days are not considered legal “property” to which a man’s constitutional due-process rights could conceivably attach.

As for due-process protections for liberty (which the Supreme Court has described as “not confined to mere freedom from bodily restraint,” but instead inclusive of “the full range of conduct which the individual is free to pursue”), that right more compellingly protects the person seeking to end a marriage—and to do so without having to prove to the government that she deserves it.

The former TV anchor with more than three million followers on YouTube was arrested in May while on his way to Oman.

DanTDM on making a fortune, depression and monitoring children's use of the internet.

It seems the turnaround time for films that are “based on a true story” is forever shrinking. Dumb Money, the director Craig Gillespie’s new movie about the GameStop-stock craze, chronicles events that took place in January 2021: a surprising boom in the brick-and-mortar video-game retailer’s stock value that eventually created a mini-crisis on Wall Street. The writer Ben Mezrich published an account of the story, The Antisocial Network, in September 2021; production on its film adaptation started a year later. This raises a question: How could they possibly create a period piece chronicling events that are so recent?

My fear was that Dumb Money would resemble a dramatized Wikipedia page, explaining the technical details of a news story that viewers can just Google themselves. That’s a subgenre popularized by hits like Adam McKay’s The Big Short, a retelling of the 2008 financial crisis that contained repeated jokey scenes of celebrities explaining economics jargon straight to camera, in case viewers couldn’t keep track. And Dumb Money is about an incredibly complex series of events—a short squeeze prompted by a sudden increase in retail investment that placed some hedge funds in deep peril. Fortunately, Dumb Money understands that viewers don’t really want to sweat the details.

Gillespie and his screenwriters, Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, somehow deliver a film steeped in the mood of early 2021. Less than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, lots of people were still locked down in their homes, many businesses were closed, and it felt like the most anyone could do was be glued to their cellphone. Dumb Money borrows from the portentous atmosphere of David Fincher’s The Social Network, another movie based on a Mezrich book that turned an insular tech tale into a parable of societal rot.

That’s not to say the movie isn’t fun—it’s a diverting, high-energy romp, packed with a charming ensemble and armed with an unsubtle disdain for the one percent. It spins the GameStop saga into a tale of plucky Davids taking on many a Goliath. The reality is, undoubtedly, more complicated, but Gillespie understands that his audience will remember the overall attitude of festering frustration from almost a year stuck at home. For multiple reasons, the stock value of a video-game retailer briefly became a rallying cry for amateur American entrepreneurship, and Dumb Money is a great time capsule of that collective bit of insanity.

The protagonist of the film is Keith Gill (played by Paul Dano), a stringy-haired, sweatband-wearing amateur investor who frequents a Reddit page called WallStreetBets, a message board filled with profane memes and shaky investment advice. Intrigued by Wall Street’s “short” position against GameStop, with major hedge funds betting that the company would go under because of pandemic pressures, Gill identifies the stock as undervalued instead. He encourages his followers on YouTube to buy it in defiance of the bigwigs. And he helps spearhead what becomes a financial sensation—at least, until the stock comes crashing back to Earth.

[Read: Meme stock’s big bet on Bed Bath & Beyond]

The rest of Dumb Money’s ensemble are either investors from WallStreetBets or hedge funders reacting with increasing alarm to the situation. America Ferrera, Anthony Ramos, and Myha’la Herrold are among the buyers, all down-on-their-luck folks who get drawn into the online craze. Seth Rogen, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Nick Offerman play the hedge-fund managers squabbling over the consequences. Gillespie even gets real comic value out of Pete Davidson as Gill’s ne’er-do-well younger brother with shaggy charm; the character is also the closest thing the movie has to an audience surrogate.

Almost all of Dumb Money plays out online; the screen repeatedly floods with images of memes, Reddit posts, and inane GIFs, the shared nonsense language of the poster. It correctly feels isolating—even the rich folks mill around empty mansions and resorts, barking stock buys into their phones in front of vacant swimming pools. But as the plot builds, Gillespie suggests how Gill’s GameStop fanaticism helped create a sense of community, however briefly, one united both by an American cowboy spirit and by a distrust of institutions. It feels like the network of investors is populated by actual pals, even though they never meet in real life.

The audience knows the cause is likely to dissolve quickly; this is less a get-rich-quick tale and more a peek into a unique, shared virtual folly. That’s why Dumb Money’s recency is so forgivable: Tales from yesterday’s internet bubble up so quickly, and vanish just as fast. Two years ago might as well be a lifetime.

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Microsoft revealed yesterday (Sept. 21) the expansion of its AI Copilot capabilities, following Google’s announcement earlier in the week that Bard can now be used with its apps, including Gmail, YouTube, and Drive. It’s the latest in a string of tech companies racing to find ways to integrate AI into all of their…

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The comedian has spent recent years building an online presence, often getting millions of views.

A few hens lay on the ground, unmoving, ill or dead. Many were injured, with festering sores on their feet. Some bled from their posteriors—they were likely suffering from a prolapsed cloaca, a painful, potentially fatal condition often caused by repeated egg-laying. Others looked dirty and ragged, though chickens, given a choice in the matter, tend to be fastidious. Everything, everywhere in this farm for “free-range” chickens was covered in excrement. The industrial hangar was so enormous, filled with so many clone-birds, that I felt like I was staring into an infinity mirror.

It was a moonless night not long ago in Northern California. With me were Alicia Santurio and Lewis Bernier, two activists from an animal-rights group called Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. We had met a few hours earlier in a supermarket parking lot, where I wrote a lawyer’s phone number on my ankle and slipped my cellphone into a Faraday bag, which blocks wireless signals. The three of us got into a car; its driver stubbed out a cigarette and drove us to an unlit lane amid acres of paddocks and fields.

“From here, we’re going to walk single file, no lights,” Bernier said. “If we see anyone or hear anyone, we’re going to get down and lie on the ground.”

We hiked silently across dark farmland, shimmying through a series of barbed-wire and electric fences. A tense half hour later, we passed a red lagoon filled with feces and chemical runoff, and arrived at a set of industrial hangars, home to tens of thousands of birds laying eggs for high-end foods stores in the region. These birds were supposed to have access to fresh air and open space. But the open spaces available to them—wire lean-tos with a few tiny doors cut into the side of the hangar—were free of feathers and feces, meaning the birds were not using them.

The lights turned on in the hangar next to us, illuminating thousands of hens. “The fact that lights are being turned on at this time of night—they’re never getting a full sleep cycle,” Bernier explained in a whisper. Waking them up tricks their bodies into laying more eggs. We put on sterile coveralls and booties and went inside.

This is chicken farming in America, but what I was in was not a farm, not really. It was an industrial operation for delivering animal parts as cheaply and efficiently as possible. For a moment, I entertained the idea of running to the far side of the hangar and flushing the birds out into the cold night air. How often do you have the chance to save thousands of lives? But I recognized how naive the impulse was as soon as I had it. Instead I just stood there, tears welling in my eyes, imagining what it would be like to live my whole life standing in other creatures’ shit, sores on my feet, struggling to move my own weight, my organs falling out of me.

DxE investigators documenting conditions inside of Rainbow Farms, an egg farm in Stanislaus County, California (Courtesy of Direct Action Everywhere).

The DxE activists were there to document animals’ conditions. The group aims to stop the brutalization of farm animals and bring about the end of animal exploitation, ideally by way of a constitutional amendment granting personhood to nonhuman creatures. The mission is clearly a good one: to alleviate extraordinary, omnipresent suffering. Americans eat roughly 10 billion land animals a year, many raised in worse conditions than those chickens.

In service of that goal, DxE performs undercover investigations, rescues animals, publishes whistleblower reports, engages in nonviolent protest, shuts down slaughter lines, files legal complaints, trains activists, and lobbies the government.

But it is perhaps best known for its viral stunts. There was the time an activist wearing a poop-emoji costume disrupted a planning-commission meeting in a small town in Virginia; the time the group sprayed manure all over the lawn of an executive at Smithfield, the world’s largest producer of pork; the numerous occasions when members have seized the microphone from politicians at stump speeches; the time a DxE member named Matt Johnson pretended to be Smithfield’s CEO for a chaotic Fox Business hit.

Last year, Santurio snuck into the Target Center in Minneapolis, where the Timberwolves were playing the Los Angeles Clippers. Just before halftime, she tried to superglue herself to the court while wearing a T-shirt that read GLEN TAYLOR ROASTS ANIMALS ALIVE. Taylor, the owner of the Timberwolves, also owns an egg-farming business, which had recently killed more than 5 million birds using a technique called “ventilation shutdown plus,” in which workers heat a barn until the birds inside are essentially roasted alive. (Taylor did not respond to requests to comment.) Guards hoisted Santurio up before the glue dried.

I believed in DxE’s mission. About its tactics, I wasn’t so sure.

I’m a vegan, if an imperfect and non-strident one. Like many vegans, I’ve always seen it as a personal choice. I don’t see myself as having any kind of authority to tell other people not to eat meat or fish, especially because I was an omnivore for much of my life.

Being vegan means forgoing many of life’s pleasures—cheeseburgers, peppermint ice cream, warm sourdough with cold butter. It means absenting yourself from your own culture—not taking the piece of birthday cake, not going to the amazing new restaurant. It means constantly feeling like you are failing, given the difficulty of avoiding animal products in a world where animals are a commodity. It means living in a way that makes other people feel judged and uncomfortable. It is exhausting, abstemious, weird. One paper found that omnivores view vegans more negatively than any other stigmatized group except for drug addicts.

It is not surprising that the share of people forgoing animal products has barely changed since at least the late 1990s. Just 5 percent of Americans say they are vegetarian, and only a sliver of the population, perhaps 1 percent, truly never eats meat. Globally, the number of animals consumed per capita has nearly doubled in the past five decades, as has the share of animals raised in confined, industrial environments.

DxE believes it can change that, not by turning omnivores into vegans but by turning vegans into vegan activists. It has attracted thousands of donors and participants, mostly Millennials and Gen Zers, over its 10 years of existence. (There’s no formal membership count, as there’s no formal membership process.) But it has also amassed plenty of detractors, who see the group as cultish and its activities as pointless and obnoxious. Social change is hard enough for movements that don’t ask people to give up anything, let alone their grandmother's brisket.

Direct Action Everywhere got its start when Wayne Hsiung, a Buddhist and a former law scholar at Northwestern University, moved from Chicago to the Bay Area. In Chicago, he told me, he’d been a “comfortable activist”—protesting and distributing leaflets about the virtues of veganism. But he had started to become disillusioned with the animal-rights movement.

The modern animal-rights era dates to the 1960s, when a coterie of academics began pushing people to go vegetarian or vegan not on sentimental grounds (because animal suffering is sad, distressing, a shame) but on moral and legal ones (because animal suffering should not be allowed). The human exploitation of animals amounts to “speciesism,” the psychologist Richard Ryder argued; animals are “the subject of a life,” the American philosopher Tom Regan held, and thus should be able to live their own lives. After the Australian utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer published his bombshell book, Animal Liberation, in 1975, hundreds of thousands of people absorbed these arguments. A radical international movement began to build.

The new animal-rights activists differed from animal-welfare activists in that they did not see the exploitation and suffering of living creatures just as unfortunate. Many saw it as an affront akin to racism or misogyny—and thus saw factory farming as a system akin to slavery, dairy production as a crime akin to rape, cosmetics testing as a violation akin to torture. Radical tactics were therefore not only justified but necessary. In the movement’s heyday, in the 1980s and ’90s, protesters with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals hurled paint at fur-clad supermodels. Groups such as Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty and the Animal Liberation Front engaged in what some described as intimidation, vandalism, even terrorism.

But by the mid-aughts, a few forces had quelled the movement. The first was aggressive legal prosecution. In the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, governments went after animal-rights groups for trespassing, larceny, and racketeering, and dozens of activists ended up in jail. At the behest of the agricultural industry, politicians passed “ag gag” laws, hindering the ability of independent investigators to document and publicize abuse.

The second subduing force was the data showing that liberationist browbeating was not actually working. People cared about animals but would not stop eating them, a sticky cognitive dissonance described as the “meat paradox.”

Over time, the animal-rights movement came to focus more on incremental change than on disruption, and more on institutional pressure than on individual persuasion. “Instead of just being rowdy in the street, we have corporate liaisons who go meet with retailers. We have lawyers. We have scientists,” Ingrid Newkirk, the founder of PETA, told me.

This toned-down approach has secured some victories. Groups such as the Humane League, the Humane Society, and Mercy for Animals have been instrumental in getting grocery stores and fast-food chains in the United States to switch to cage-free eggs, dramatically improving the living conditions of millions of creatures. They have also successfully pressured several states to ban battery cages for birds (tiny shoeboxes in which laying hens most spend their lives, unable to spread their wings) and gestation crates for pigs (metal cages in which pregnant and newly delivered sows spend most of their lives, unable to turn around or walk).

But the goal was the end of animal exploitation, and incremental changes were not getting us there. The movement, Hsiung said, “was afraid to ask for what it wanted.”

So, in the late years of the Obama administration, Hsiung and some friends created an informal study group to see what they could learn from successful protest movements of the past. Over soy milk and “nice cream,” they studied how the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—better known as ACT UP—had destigmatized HIV infection, how Freedom to Marry had found a legal fulcrum for marriage equality, and how the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had shaped the civil-rights movement.  

History and social science seemed to support the idea that nonviolent direct action—meaning things like boycotts and sit-ins, rather than legal appeals or public-relations campaigns—was a crucial element. They also found that radical factions shift the Overton window for moderate ones. “Movements that have a broad range of tactics tend to be more successful, because the threat posed by the radical flank grants more legitimacy and credibility to the moderate wing of the movement,” Douglas McAdam, the Stanford sociologist, told me, mentioning that Hsiung had shown up at his office in Palo Alto one day to discuss movement building with him.

Hsiung cited as inspiration the work of the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who has shown that when 3.5 percent of a population engages in nonviolent public protest—that’s 9 million American adults, give or take—political change reliably follows. “There was this huge part of every social-justice movement that’s been successful throughout history and just doesn’t exist within today’s animal-rights movement,” Lewis Bernier, the DxE organizer, told me. “That is the direct-action contingent, who’s not afraid to ask for what we actually want, a group of people who are willing to take risks, willing to make personal sacrifices, and willing to be embarrassed.”

Priya Sawhney, a DxE co-founder, told me that the research cemented their belief that vegans had become overly accommodating. “We needed to focus on the needs of the animals,” she told me, while we talked in the bathroom of a safe house north of San Francisco, and she petted a rescued duck. (The duck was destined for a sanctuary in Central California.)

In 2013, the study group became a direct-action group, targeting retail stores in the Bay Area. Members camped in front of the meat counter at a Whole Foods, and dumped dead chicks in front of horrified shoppers at another supermarket. They posted the videos on Facebook and YouTube, and many went viral.

Members of DxE at their office in Berkeley, California. Wayne Hsiung, a co-founder, stands on the left. (Brandon Tauszik for The Atlantic)

Focusing on radicalizing vegans rather than converting meat-eaters allowed DxE to embrace a revolutionary message: “Animal liberation in one generation!” rather than “Try out meatless Monday!” But the activists adopted some tactics that were unpopular even with vegans. In addition to targeting big grocery chains, DxE went after small businesses devoted to slow food and humane meat, including Chez Panisse, the beloved originator of California cuisine. The group stopped weekly protests outside a revered Berkeley butcher shop only when the owners agreed to put up a sign reading Animals’ lives are their right. Killing them is violent and unjust. (The owners described this as “extortion.”)

The aim, Hsiung told me, was to give vegans a “ladder of engagement,” from low risk to high risk. Pretty high up the ladder were the rescues. Activists carried out dozens of missions to take (well, steal) animals from farms and slaughterhouses and put them in sanctuaries. “That gives people an individual to identify with,” Cassie King, who manages DxE’s communications, told me. “It’s not just this huge quantity of animals that you can’t put a face on or understand what their personality is like or what their suffering is like or what they deserve.” Even higher up the ladder were undercover investigations.

The activist network grew and grew, from a few friends scattered across group houses in the East Bay (Hsiung used to live, Harry Potter–like, in a windowless closet in a house called the “Dingo Den”) into chapters around the world. Anyone could start a cell and begin doing animal-liberation work themselves. “We had the replication aspect embedded in DxE at the very beginning,” Hsiung told me. “We’d create template documents with scripts, banners, instructions for video. We told people, ‘Go take them and do what you’d like with them.’ People did.” As Newkirk, of PETA, put it, DxE “really lit a fire under these young people, who think the best way to promote veganism is to eat vegan cupcakes.”

In the fall of 2021, a few hundred activists gathered on UC Berkeley’s campus for DxE’s annual conference, featuring breakout sessions on protest tactics and a keynote speech by the whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Then some 300 protesters got into vans and buses and set out for a Foster Farms chicken farm and processing plant in the Central Valley.

A handful of activists had already taken footage in the facility showing birds that had grown so big, they struggled to move or even stand. The group’s hidden cameras also identified issues with the plant’s method of slaughter. At the point of processing, chickens are generally hung by their legs, stunned in an electrified pool, exsanguinated by having their throats slit, and dunked in a chemical bath to loosen their feathers for removal. DxE’s footage showed some chickens were missing the stunning tank, meaning they were awake for the next steps. It also showed birds being crushed or suffocated to death. Government inspectors later found evidence that some animals had been alive and awake during defeathering. (Foster Farms denied any wrongdoing and declined to comment for this story.)

Meatpacking and poultry processing is generally hard on people too. It’s dangerous and, for many, traumatizing work, often done for poverty wages by refugees and undocumented immigrants. Repetitive-use injuries are endemic; grievous accidents are common; workers are exposed to pathogens and toxic chemicals at high rates.

[READ: Six months inside one of America’s most dangerous industries]

DxE’s goal at the Foster Farms facility was to make the assembly line stop, if only for a moment. One phalanx of activists took a moving truck bearing a huge No More Factory Farms banner and blocked the plant’s entrance. Three people climbed on top and lashed themselves together using “sleeping dragon” devices; four sat by the truck’s wheels and did the same.

Another phalanx entered the facility and chained themselves to the assembly line on which the birds were stunned, exsanguinated, and defeathered. Finally, a third, large group gathered outside to protest. “They’re killing thousands of chickens right now as we speak!” Zoe Rosenberg, a DxE activist seated on top of the truck, said while another activist filmed her. DxE livestreamed the fracas on Facebook with video from a half dozen smartphones and a drone.

The police arrived shortly after. As the squad cars rolled up, I walked through the crowd asking people why they were there—not so much literally as philosophically. Why engage in this kind of protest? What effect did they think it had? A former slaughterhouse worker named Susana Chavez, now part of DxE’s leadership team, told me that taking part made her feel like a “full activist,” not just a person who cares for animals. “It is a completely whole new level when you actually take action in person, and you put your body on the line to stop the killing,” she said.

Others echoed that sentiment. “Some activists have almost been killed doing this, just to save animals,” Alyson Burton, an animal rescuer from Los Angeles, told me. “It’s inspiring.” Indeed, I had interviewed one of them at an earlier DxE protest at a duck farm in Sonoma County. Thomas Chiang had used a bicycle U-lock to attach himself to a stopped slaughter line. The machinery turned back on, dragging Chiang forward until he got pinned against a metal pole. “I couldn’t breathe,” he told me, just before an ambulance took him away.

At Foster Farms, police used a jackhammer and a circular saw to break the sleeping dragons, after throwing a tarp over the tied-up protesters to protect them from the sparks. In the end, more than a dozen activists were arrested and charged with resisting arrest and obstructing or intimidating a business operator.

DxE branded those who had blocked the entrance the “Foster Farms 11.” Videos of the crowd roaring when activists walked out with a few rescued chickens went viral. The protest didn’t stop the slaughter, but it did become content used to motivate members. Everything is about “activating people who care about animals,” King told me. “We have hundreds of people who are willing to go to farms and slaughterhouses and take the roles that are needed.”

Members of DxE protesting Foster Farms in front of the district attorney’s office in Merced, California (Courtesy of Direct Action Everywhere)

But what roles are needed? What kind of activism works? DxE argues that if more activists were committing civil disobedience, the country’s politics and culture would change in a way that would hasten the end of animal agriculture. “Within a few years, no one will be able to walk the streets of Berkeley without seeing animal-rights posters, vegan businesses, and, yes, nonviolent direct action happening on every street corner,” the group wrote in an introduction to its animal-liberation road map. “We will take the methods, the strategy, the people, and the power we are cultivating in Berkeley and deploy it in cities and states across the world until we’ve built an unstoppable global engine.”

First Berkeley, then the world. Perhaps. Yet DxE’s understanding of Chenoweth’s often-cited work, done with Maria J. Stephan of the Horizons Project, struck me as a little off. It’s true that their research shows that nearly every nonviolent-protest movement in the past century participated in by 3.5 percent of a population has resulted in political change or regime disintegration. But the study does not suggest that having that sliver of a population protest alone guarantees political change. It finds that in addition to the active support of 3.5 percent of a population, successful protest movements also have the tacit assent of a larger share. Broad support doesn’t just matter; it is where you cultivate that 3.5 percent vanguard. In that sense, DxE has the Chenoweth study backward. (The research also looks only at changes in a country’s political leadership, not policy shifts.)

More than that, it is not clear that a return to the animal-liberation tactics of the 1990s will help the animal-rights movement reach that 3.5 percent target. PETA has 9 million “members and supporters” worldwide. DxE has a tiny portion of that. The group can’t even win over all vegans, many of whom are turned off by its tactics. Carol Adams, the acclaimed vegan and feminist thinker, for instance, refuses to speak at or attend events where DxE members are also speaking.

As for DxE sharpening a radical edge on a movement that has lost one, most Americans already consider the animal-rights movement radical. Vegans might think that the movement needs more abolitionists, but omnivores think that vegans need to shut up. And at some point, vegans need the omnivores to care.

“If you want to shift power, you have to engage in the system,” Hahrie Han, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. “A movement has to go from being purely disruptive to figuring out how it’s going to engage a broader constituency.”

The animal-rights movement has failed to engage that broader constituency. There’s a big gap still between your average animal-loving American, who wants the government to ensure the welfare of the cow in her burger, and your average animal-rights protester, who wants to grant that cow constitutional rights. Even the country’s most prominent progressive politicians—Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Gavin Newsom—have little or nothing to say about animal welfare. And all of them eat meat.

I put these arguments to Hsiung, who is no longer officially on the DxE leadership team, but writes and hosts a podcast about animal rights. (He is currently defending himself against charges of trespassing and conspiracy for rescuing ducks and chickens; if convicted, he would face a two-year sentence.) I was surprised to get little counterargument. “There’s something legitimate about these critiques,” he told me. “You can’t be afraid to be annoying, but you have to watch for things enduring negative reputational impacts.”

Change takes time, he said. Nothing seems to work until it does. Indeed, so many activists for so many righteous causes toil and toil only to have nothing come of it, many of them tortured by the necessity and fruitlessness of their efforts. Something Han had said stuck with me: “Most movements fail.” The No. 1 outcome is failure, even for causes that are a far easier lift.

(Brandon Tauszik for The Atlantic)

The animal-rights movement might be more likely to succeed if it knits itself in with other progressive causes. Cows are heating the planet and destroying what rainforest we have left; factory farms are polluting our groundwater and engaging in rampant labor abuse; agricultural consolidation is crushing small farms and raising prices for consumers. There is a way to reduce animal cruelty and curtail meat consumption by improving labor standards, ending factory farms, pricing carbon, and enacting stricter regulations for humane animal treatment.

Or perhaps the movement will succeed when lab-grown meat becomes commercially viable.

Or maybe the movement will simply progress slowly and sideways, failing at ever achieving its ultimate goal. That might be the best it can do.

On that moonless night in the egg farm, as Santurio and Bernier finished collecting evidence, Bernier whispered, “Should we save someone?” Santurio nodded, grabbed a chicken, and swaddled it in a jacket. We left the same way we came in, with Santurio carrying the hen outdoors for the first time in its life.

On our way out, I noticed a retrofitted shipping container hooked up to a carbon-dioxide tank. I knew that such egg operations euthanized hens when they started laying fewer eggs, generally around age 2. But the farms have no practical way of tracking how many eggs each individual hen lays. When the production numbers start to tick down, farms will typically just gas the whole hangar. Soon all of these birds, except for the one, would probably be turned into dog food.

This is what the debate about animal rights and animal cruelty is really about: this unspeakable horror hidden from us, the suffering borne by billions of creatures on our behalf. I have watched hours and hours of the footage DxE activists have collected over the years: pigs screaming as they choke to death; piglets with broken bones trying to stand and nurse from their mothers that are unable to turn around to nuzzle them; calves thrown onto trash heaps, left to die. What I saw enraged and radicalized me.

Being in that egg farm made me want to glue myself to the floor of a basketball stadium or chain myself to an assembly line. It made me want to confront people picking up their plastic-wrapped cuts at the grocery store, nourishing themselves with another creature’s misery while telling themselves they love animals, because in some contradictory way they really do. And it made me furious that whenever the animal-rights movement suggests that we as a society should stop doing this, it gets a barrage of criticism about its messaging and tactics and strategies.

That is true even though the critiques of radical vegans are well founded. Nothing I saw in my months of reporting persuaded me that DxE or any other animal-rights group has a plausible theory of success. And DxE’s efforts at mobilization seemed likelier to alienate potential supporters than to persuade them.

But if vegans can be annoying, they are also profoundly right. They are burdened with advocating for billions of suffering creatures and being able to help only a few. They are burdened with the futile, enraging task of trying to get people to live by their own articulated values.

Why do the vegans always have to explain themselves to the omnivores? The omnivores, somehow, never have to explain themselves to the animals.

How Baseball Saved Itself

For the July/August 2023 issue, Mark Leibovich went inside the desperate effort to rescue America’s pastime from irrelevance.

Thank you for the fantastic article on baseball. During the 1960s, I was a Ph.D. student in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. About the time baseball season began one year, I participated in a robust argument over America’s favorite pastime with my colleagues. I felt that it was an incredibly boring way to spend time, and I wanted to debate the subject with empirical evidence. As engineers, we agreed to define “action” as any time the ball or a player was moving. I then used a stopwatch to determine the ratio between “elapsed time” and “action” in a typical game.

I applied this definition to a game the following Saturday. Unsurprisingly, the ratio was 20 to 1—for every hour of elapsed time, one would see just three minutes of action. Professional football and basketball have far more action per hour than baseball under the same definition, which I think explains their relative popularity.

It wasn’t solely the analytics revolution that slowed down the sport—baseball’s always been like that! The question now is whether I should analyze another game to determine if the new rules changed it for the better.

David M. Carlson
Fountain Valley, Calif.

Baseball, the eternal game, shouldn’t be shortened—if anything, it ought to be lengthened, after the model of classical cricket. Live in the moment. Each pitch presents the entire history of the universe. The pitcher rotates the ball in his hand, feeling ever so sensitively for the contours, the stitching, the seams that might yield an advantage, before hurling it to the plate with the force of Zeus’s thunderbolt.

But how will the baseball travel? Will it sink or curve, go high or low, flutter in or out, changing speed as it continues to its destiny? Breathing in, the umpire concentrates on the ball speeding toward him. Breathing out, he calls a ball or a strike, with thousands of eyes cast upon him and his judgment. The loneliness of the umpire, the batter, and the pitcher sets them outside time. At that fateful moment of contact between ball and bat or mitt, all existence is suspended.

To shorten that momentary dance with eternity is to miss the meditative profundity of a baseball game. No, Mark, it is we who are at fault for wanting to speed up the game, with designated batters, virtual walks, limits on mound visits, pitch clocks, and rigid placement of the fielders.

David Glidden
Riverside, Calif.

I wanted to read Mark Leibovich’s article on baseball’s updated approach, but found it difficult when I ran across another dusty relic that needs to go: Red Sox worship among the media elites.

I grew up a Yankees fan, but somewhere along the line, sportswriters began looking at the Yankees–Red Sox rivalry as if it were the defining narrative of baseball. As they cast the Yankees as the bad guys who were always trying to buy the World Series, and the Red Sox as the good guys who represented the nobler, purer defenders of the sport, they seemed to forget that many people in other parts of the country don’t care for either team. If anything, they tend to hate both teams because the sports media spend too much time writing and talking about them. After all, other teams have equally storied pasts. Speeding up the game and giving the rules a hard look will certainly improve the experience for fans, as Leibovich writes. But it’s long past time for the sports media to recognize their part in holding the game back by ignoring more interesting narratives.

Eric Reichert
West Milford, N.J.

I share Mark Leibovich’s joy over the new baseball rules to speed up the game. But baseball isn’t that much slower than other sports. The average basketball game lasts anywhere from 135 to 150 minutes. There are constant interruptions precipitated by fouls, time-outs, and halftime. And the final two minutes on the clock can take 15 minutes.

Most unsettling for those of us who love baseball is the constant complaint from football fans that our sport is slow while football is fast. Their favored 60-minute romp takes more than 180 minutes to complete. And, as a wise observer once pointed out, to make matters worse, football combines two of the most detestable facets of American life—violence and committee meetings.

Perhaps someday the NBA and the NFL will take lessons from MLB and learn how to shorten their games.

Dennis Okholm
Costa Mesa, Calif.

I agree with Mark Leibovich’s conclusions regarding the benefits of baseball’s new pitch clock. The pitch clock is the greatest innovation the sport has seen in ages, and it may well save the game. But the gradual slowing-down of games was not the only thing that drove fans away from baseball.

Consider the 1994 strike, which canceled approximately a third of the season and the World Series and was seen by many as millionaires fighting over lucre, fans be damned. Or consider the over-the-top salaries, even for subpar players, as ticket and concession prices have skyrocketed. Baseball once sold itself as the best buy for family entertainment in America—but it hasn’t been that for quite some time.

Finally, the cheating that has gone on for decades has put off many fans, and the lack of any meaningful accountability has surely only made it worse. Players who were known to use banned substances—Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa—still lead the league’s counts for most home runs in a single season, accolades that should have been expunged from the books. And Leibovich barely touches on perhaps the worst of these scofflaw violations: The Houston Astros were caught cheating in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, including the 2017 postseason, which netted the team a World Series victory. Nonetheless, they were permitted to keep the championship title, and none of the players who cheated was disciplined—they are still playing now. When several Chicago White Sox players conspired to throw the 1919 World Series, by contrast, they were barred from baseball forever. For some fans, these problems are more serious than the length of games.

Allen J. Wiener
Clearwater Beach, Fla.

Mark Leibovich Replies:

Thanks to all those who took the time to reply to my article; I hope it was at least more engaging than the baseball of years past. Major League Baseball certainly has no monopoly on potentially league-destroying scandals. Each major sport has faced its share of drug, gambling, and cheating catastrophes over the years, and no league has cornered the market on bad leaders, clueless commissioners, or idiotic owners either. Sports fans have shown themselves to be willing to forgive a lot—but not necessarily boredom. Of all the sports, baseball is uniquely slow. No matter how many stoppages there might be at the end of a basketball game, the clock guarantees that very few NBA contests surpass two hours and 30 minutes. Football games rarely take more than 3:20, and the fact that teams play only once a week buys a great deal of spectator leeway. Last, I’ll apologize for indulging my Red Sox compulsion. I’ve always assumed that the Sox-Yanks thing was off-putting to nonpartisans, even when the rivalry was at its most compelling (not recently, in other words, unless you count this season’s epic battle for last place in the American League East). In the spirit of fellowship, I’ll concede that some of my favorite baseball friends are Yankees fans. We are more alike than not—beyond just insufferable.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Jenisha From Kentucky,” the Atlantic senior editor Jenisha Watts reflects on how her mother’s addiction shaped her childhood in Lexington. She describes finding escape and empowerment in literature and narrates her struggles as a young writer and editor in New York, determined to hide her past. Our cover image is a portrait of her painted by the Ivorian artist Didier Viodé. With a minimalistic color palette and broad, acrylic brushstrokes characteristic of his style, Viodé strove to capture Jenisha’s self-possession.

— Elizabeth Hart, Art Director

Corrections

“The Resilience Gap” (September) misidentified Richard Friedman as the former coordinator of Cornell’s mental-health program instead of its former medical director. After publication, “Killer Apps” (September) was updated online to clarify YouTube’s policy for removing videos, which excepts artistic content such as music videos from its prohibition on harassment.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”