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Yesterday, President Joe Biden announced an additional $9 billion in student-loan forgiveness. Since Biden’s mass student-loan-forgiveness plan was struck down by the Supreme Court this past summer (student-loan repayments officially resumed on October 1), his administration has been focusing on narrower strategies for relieving student debt, such as an income-driven repayment plan. I called Atlantic staff writer Adam Harris, who covers higher education, to discuss what’s next for the Americans most affected by the return of repayment, and the case for higher education as a public good.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The red pill of humility Kevin McCarthy got what he wanted. This movie plot is the stuff of HR nightmares.

The Basis of Public Happiness

Isabel Fattal: What do you make of yesterday’s news of another $9 billion in debt relief?

Adam Harris: There are a few different programs that this relief, which covers about 125,000 people, is coming out of; it is the result of changes Biden made to income-driven repayment plans, as well as public-service loan forgiveness and relief for some borrowers with disabilities.

Over the past several years, the Biden administration has forgiven something like $127 billion in student debt—more than any other administration. Now it’s using some of the programs and levers already available to try to relieve even more. The current total is nothing to scoff at, but it still is only a small crack in the armor of this $1 trillion debt burden we have in the United States. What they’re trying to do is provide as much relief as possible under the programs that they believe are still legal.

Isabel: Who will likely be most affected by the return of student-loan payments this month?

Adam: A consistent fact over the past 20 years is that the borrowers who are most at risk for being in default, who are struggling to repay their student debt, are typically low income and from racial-minority groups—Black borrowers, Latino borrowers. A few months ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau warned that basically one in five student borrowers has risk factors that indicate they could struggle now that student-loan payments have resumed. We know that discretionary spending helps the economy, and big-box retailers like Best Buy and Target have recently expressed concerns about the impacts of the return of repayment on their businesses. A Goldman Sachs report said that something like $70 billion of discretionary income will now be going toward these student-loan payments. If you think of discretionary income, it's not necessarily people going out and buying TVs. It’s that they have a little bit of additional money to do things with.

It’s not necessarily the folks who have $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 in student debt, who went to medical school or went to law school, who make up the majority of borrowers who struggle. It’s people who started college and didn’t end up finishing. It’s people who have fewer than $10,000 in student-loan debt who will be likely struggling to repay that debt, even with a repayment plan that’s something like an extra $100 or $200 a month. That’s a car payment. That’s a bill that they will have to consider paying late.

Isabel: You wrote last year that mass student-debt forgiveness is not a solution for the underlying issue of college affordability in America. Are there notable government initiatives in place to tackle the issue of college affordability right now?

Adam: The Biden administration reintroduced a free-community-college proposal in its budget plan this past March. It was ultimately unsuccessful, but it shows that the administration is still interested in some of those programs that will remove the necessity for debt on the front end. Oftentimes we think of higher education as a private good, something that is for the benefit of the student who gets the degree, rather than thinking of it as a public good. At the founding of this nation, some of the Founding Fathers effectively said there is nothing that better deserves your patronage than education.

“Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” That’s George Washington to Congress in his first State of the Union address, saying that in order to build good citizens, you need educated citizens. I often think of that in this moment, when we’re requiring people to go deeply into debt in order to afford this thing that at the beginning people thought was essential to citizenship.

Isabel: Is there anything else you’re thinking about these days in terms of student debt?

Adam: There was a really interesting paper released recently, less focused on student-loan repayment and more about how we think and talk about student loans and how the media covers student loans. Dominique Baker was the lead researcher on it. One of the biggest findings was that very few of the people who had written articles about student loans among eight major publications had ever attended a community college, and the majority of them attended Ivy Plus or public flagship colleges.

If you look across America, around 40 percent of students who are enrolled in higher education in the nation attend community colleges. I have a lot of friends who started college, did not finish college, and now have something like $8,000 of student debt that they’re looking at, saying, How am I going to pay that off with my job that is only giving me enough to afford the basics of living? There are a lot of opportunities for the situation that we are in to spiral into an unsustainable one for a lot of people.

Related:

How student debt has contributed to “delayed” adulthood Why some students are skipping college

Today’s News

At least 51 people have died after a Russian missile strike near the Ukrainian city of Kupiansk, in one of the deadliest attacks on civilians of the war. In a sweeping move, the Biden administration waived 26 federal laws in South Texas to allow for border-wall construction. Last month was the hottest September ever recorded, to the alarm of climate scientists.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ricardo Rey

Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?

By Ross Andersen

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in November had captured the world’s imagination like nothing in tech’s recent history. There was grousing in some quarters about the things ChatGPT could not yet do well, and in others about the future it may portend, but Altman wasn’t sweating it; this was, for him, a moment of triumph.

In small doses, Altman’s large blue eyes emit a beam of earnest intellectual attention, and he seems to understand that, in large doses, their intensity might unsettle. In this case, he was willing to chance it: He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Read. C Pam Zhang’s new novel, Land of Milk and Honey, asks whether seeking pleasure amid collapse is inherently immoral.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin explains the real reason Biden’s political wins don’t register with voters.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The opening pages of C Pam Zhang’s second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, imagine a planet facing crisis after crisis—an extension of our own. Climate change has devastated the land: the Earth is covered in smog; crops have withered; countries are caving to famine. Zhang joins a number of other writers who have recently used their work to ask how to live in a dying world. But her curiosity is more pointed: She seems to be asking how we might still find pleasure amid collapse—and whether it’s moral to do so when so many are just trying to survive.

The novel’s narrator is an unnamed 29-year-old American chef working in England who finds herself trapped when the U.S. closes its borders as smog spreads and geopolitical tensions rise. On the same day that she receives notice that her late mother’s apartment in Los Angeles has burned down in a riot, her boss cuts pesto from the restaurant’s menu because there’s no more basil, “not even the powdered kind.” Zhang splices the two events together in the same breath, suggesting that for the chef, they are equally significant. She pays lip service to the famine’s severity in Southeast Asia and the Americas, and debates over which superpower is most to blame. But what she really seems to mourn is the disappearance of peridot grapes and buttery mangoes and “the bitter green of endive.”

Even catastrophe, we’re reminded, is bookended by the needs of the present, interrupted by the cravings of one’s palate. Throughout, Zhang, who wrote the novel after her first transformative post-pandemic meal at a restaurant, employs food as a stand-in for gratification (at one point, her central character refers to strawberries “as yielding as a woman’s inner thigh”).

[Read: ‘I’ve seen several giants die on my land’]

Finally, after being asked to cook with gritty, gray mung-protein flour, the narrator quits: “In the dimness of that refrigerated room I could no longer see a future for the halibut dish without pesto.” Because she can no longer take her beloved ingredients or sunlight or clean air for granted, she decides to allow herself to want “recklessly, immorally” by taking a job as a private chef in a gated European mountaintop community of the ultra-wealthy. Her new employer and his enigmatic daughter, Aida, a scientist who runs the community’s biodiversity labs, are trying to preserve the richness of the Earth for the stomachs of the few, resurrecting Berkshire pigs and engineering tender heirloom grains. When she arrives at the Italian-French border, the narrator learns that the place is called Terra di latte e miele—“the land of milk and honey”—and that her role is to prepare elaborate meals for investors.

By imagining the planet stretched to near destruction, Zhang poses complex questions about self-interest. She asks the reader to consider how meaningful individual behavior actually is when the environment continues to decay, regardless of whether one tries to do the right thing. The chef, after becoming unmoored by the loss of her mother’s home, accepts the twisted, transactional arrangement of her job on the mountain, as well as the comfort and bounty it affords her; life’s difficulties have already begun to erode her appetite for morality. She prepares trial runs of elaborate meals, discarding pounds of pommes dauphine and pouring out gallons of steaming Armagnac, even as she thinks about starving children. When her employer asks her to pretend to be his missing wife at the dinners he hosts to fund the mountain, she agrees—in exchange for more money. As she thinks at one point, “What … is fairness in a world that fears there is never enough, in which one need always scrapes against another?”

And so the chef decides to embrace the privileges of her life on the mountain, falling in love with Aida in the process. Even as she becomes more and more powerless—her employer demands that she maintain her body-mass index within a certain range and remain silent at dinners—she realizes that all she can secure is her own sensual pleasure. As the chef and Aida become romantically intertwined and begin to spend each night together, she decides to say yes: “to cream, to froth that rises, to the crunched lace of the ear and the tender behind the knee, to that join at the legs where she softened, dimpled, begged me to bite.”

In these depictions, Zhang’s writing skates between prose and poetry, balancing the haziness of emotion with the grounding of detail. In some instances, the heaviness of her sentences can tip a passage out of balance or make the story harder to follow. But it is deeply refreshing to see plot intentionally cast in a supporting role, accentuating the primacy of feeling:

Three years, can you imagine, gray days and gray nights, no lovers no family no feasts no flights no fruit no meat and suddenly this largesse of freckles down her torso, this churning, spilling free … Against a still-dark sky, this emergent landscape of her body. Lunar dunes, slick valleys, her throat a shifting topography.

In allowing her narrator to abandon herself to desire, Zhang seems to be arguing that pleasure is an essential part of life—and of survival. Our desire is what makes us human; we don’t cease wanting just because it is selfish or futile. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the chef’s relationship with Aida. As the two become entangled, the chef grows less concerned about the hypocrisies she witnesses on the mountaintop.

When depicting these tensions, the novel can feel preachy, distracting from Zhang’s otherwise mesmerizing prose. Aida, for instance, hosts a hunting party during which the investors kill off a species of chimp that she has decided is not worth preserving. The chef berates Aida; she is shocked by this cruel display, given how protective Aida is of the animals in her labs. In response, Aida spits back, “Please. As if you never ate tuna, or used plastics, or flew on planes when gas was artificially cheap. Every person on this planet had a hand in killing the chimps.”

But despite some of the novel’s unsubtle moments, it is impossible, in most instances, to decipher the narrator’s moral stance—and, more important, how the reader should feel about her. Toward the end of the book, she decides to give up her spot on the mountain after Aida hits a child with her car while they’re driving back from Milan. When Aida’s father pays off the child’s family, Aida’s limp complacency breaks something in the chef’s mind: “I wanted her guts to twist, her stomach to revolt.”

[Read: The lie at the heart of the Western]

The chef’s decision to leave and renounce her relationship with Aida, however, stands in contrast with how fondly she remembers her time on the mountain in the final pages of the book. Here, Zhang resists devolving into an overwrought critique of climate disaster and individual greed—a restraint that feels in line with her previous work. How Much of These Hills Is Gold, her debut novel, similarly features a female narrator who prioritizes her own interests—in her case, financial stability, beaded white shoes, a beautiful home. The power of Zhang’s work is that she cares more about her characters’ motivations and yearnings than about evaluating their actions as right or wrong. The ethical ambiguities of the book are paralleled by the narrator’s murky recollection of Aida’s face: “plastered up again and again till it became smooth and strange, a cipher without any meaning.”

Zhang’s second novel is a bold encouragement to dwell within our desires, even if we ultimately decide that the consequences do not justify the pursuit. Her message is an addendum to the two stark words—“she wants”—that ended her first novel. Now she seems to be saying: She wants so that she may live.