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One week ago, Taylor Swift’s concert film, The Eras Tour, opened in theaters across the country. Within days, it had become the most successful concert film of all time, grossing more than $90 million in North America on its first weekend. I spoke with my colleague David Sims, who covers culture for The Atlantic, about what the success of the movie says about the future of movie theaters, and what made right now such a good time for Swift to release it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Biden’s inflection point Another domino falls in Georgia. You can learn to be photogenic.

Hard to Repeat

Lora Kelley: There has been a lot of dire news about the future of movie theaters in recent years. Are blockbuster theatrical releases for movies such as Barbie and The Eras Tour a sign that theaters are on the up again?

David Sims: These hit movies are a sign of rebound. There has been a general sense of positivity regarding ticket sales lately, especially after sales reached historic lows early in the pandemic. Barbie and Taylor Swift, in particular, appeal to young people, whom Hollywood is obsessed with getting into the theater.

Audiences are responding to stuff that is a little different from the cinematic universes and franchises that Hollywood has been very reliant on for the past 10 years. Interest is declining in superhero movies and long-running franchises. But rather than that meaning the end of big ticket sales in Hollywood, other movies are filling the gap.

Lora: What can a movie theater offer that streaming cannot?

David: The Eras Tour could easily have been released as a TV series on a streaming service. But Taylor Swift, quite smartly, seemed to realize that the group experience is very crucial to her fandom—We’re all in it together; we all get all the references; we understand the contours of the tour and the eras—and that this would be best experienced in a movie theater. The magic of the theater experience is always going to be that you’re in a dark room with lots of other people who are enjoying it, and you all enjoy it together.

Taylor Swift partnered with the theater chain AMC, which is basically functioning as a distributor. If you distribute through a studio, it takes a large cut of your money. Instead, Swift went to AMC and said, Why don’t you just put this in theaters directly, and I’ll get about 57 percent of ticket sales, which is a good deal. The amount of pure profit you can make with a successful movie remains staggering. Releasing something on streaming or home video, you can make money. But there’s a reason movie-theater releases have been the primary model for 100 years.

Lora: Taylor Swift is obviously extremely famous, and she’s proved skilled at mobilizing her own following. Is her approach to this movie replicable, or is this a one-off phenomenon?

David: Taylor Swift is possibly peerless in terms of universal recognition and cross-generational appeal. In three days, Eras became the most successful concert film ever made. But I don’t think this project is a one-off. There are other celebrities who have great means who can try things like this. The concert film of Beyoncé’s tour, Renaissance, is coming out in theaters on December 1. Her tour is over, so it’s more of a capper. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift has a tour that is still happening—it’s hard to go see it, and it’s expensive, but it’s still going on.

Concert movies do not usually do very well at the box office. But for musicians, there’s basically no downside to it. You are paying very little to film your concert. You put it in theaters, and then you get the money. And people who couldn’t see your concert live get to access it, which is nice.

Also, Hollywood has been on strike for almost six months. A lot of movies have been cleared out, because the striking actors can’t promote them. Taylor Swift’s team came in and basically said, If we put out a movie right now, we will be the biggest story of the month in cinema. The timing part of this may be hard to repeat.

Related:

Taylor Swift did what Hollywood studios could not. The 22 most exciting films to watch this season

Today’s News

Jim Jordan lost his third vote for speaker of the House and is no longer the party’s nominee. President Joe Biden is requesting $106 billion in emergency funding from Congress primarily to aid Israel and Ukraine, as well as for U.S. border security. Kenneth Chesebro became the second former Trump lawyer to plead guilty in the Georgia-election case.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Louise Glück wrote with authority, Emma Sarappo explains. The poet loved using myth, history, and legend in her verse Work in Progress: Turns out you can tame inflation without triggering a recession, Rogé Karma writes. Will the Federal Reserve accept the good news?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Guy Le Querrec / Magnum

AI Is About to Photoshop Your Memories

By Charlie Warzel

Google’s latest Pixel phones, the ad wants you to know, come standard with a suite of new generative-AI photo-editing tools. With a few taps, you can move people around in the frame like the mom does with her son, or use the “Magic Eraser” to get rid of a pesky photobomber. “Best Take,” a feature that snaps a bunch of images at once and isolates each person’s face, allows you to merge photos so that everyone appears to be perfectly looking at the camera at the same time. Combined, these features mostly reflect the photographer’s intent at the time of capture. But is the end result … real?

Of course, there’s nothing particularly scandalous about editing a family photo. Anyone sufficiently trained in Photoshop has been able to do something similar for decades; likewise, smartphones and photo apps have long offered the ability to touch up a picture until it’s transformed, even “yassified.” Yet tools like Magic Editor will likely soon become standard across devices, making it dramatically easier to perfect our photos—and thus to gently rewrite small details from our lives.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The reckoning that is coming for Qatar Yes, the U.S. can afford to help its allies. If you ever speak in public, follow this advice.

Culture Break

Guy Le Querrec / Magnum

Listen. The late, great American composer Carla Bley’s 1977 record, Dinner Music.

Watch. Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s best-selling Killers of the Flower Moon (in theaters) explores the rot beneath the myth of American exceptionalism.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Judith Raanan and Natalie Raanan released after they were abducted from Nahal Oz, Israeli PM's office says.

The significance of President Joe Biden’s Oval Office address to the nation last night was signaled in the opening sentence: “We’re facing an inflection point in history.”

What followed was a speech that may well define Biden’s presidency.

The proximate cause for the speech was Biden’s desire to urge Americans to stand with Israel in its war with Hamas and Ukraine in its war with Russia. The president is expected to ask Congress for emergency assistance to the two nations in a $100 billion spending package. But the speech was not primarily about money; it was about America’s teleology, about how Biden sees the role of the United States in a world that is fraying and aflame.

Biden used phrases loaded with meaning. America is “the arsenal of democracy,” he said, invoking a phrase from a 1940 speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt. But in case that wasn’t clear enough, Biden said America is “the essential nation” and the “indispensable nation.” It “holds the world together,” Biden said. Israel and Ukraine are 1,200 miles apart. The conflicts are quite different; Ukraine is battling a world power, and Israel a terrorist organization. But Biden twinned the two conflicts, presenting the outcome of these wars as vital to America’s national security.

[Elliot Ackerman: The arsenal of democracy is reopening for business]

“History has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction,” he said, while promising to keep American troops out of harm’s way. “They keep going. And the cost and the threats to America and the world keep rising.”

Biden displayed “a passion, emotion and a clarity that is usually missing from the president’s ordinarily flat and meandering speeches,” according to David Sanger of The New York Times. In an act of extraordinary solidarity, President Biden has traveled to both Israel and Ukraine in the midst of their wars. One gets the sense that Biden believes this isn’t just America’s moment; it is his moment. It is as if he has found his purpose.

President Biden’s speech illustrated the profound shifts we’re seeing in American politics and within the two major parties. The commander in chief Biden most sounded like was Ronald Reagan, using phrases such as “pure, unadulterated evil” to describe the actions of Hamas (Reagan described the Soviet Union as the “evil empire”) and “beacon to the world” to describe America (Reagan often described the United States as a “shining city on a hill”).  

Meanwhile Republicans have become the more isolationist party, deeply wary of America providing moral leadership in the world. In last fall’s midterm elections, well over half of voters for Republican candidates—56 percent—said the U.S. should take a less active role in world affairs.

[From the December 2022 issue: A new theory of American power]

It is the American right, much more than the American left, that is disparaging of NATO, critical of aid to Ukraine, and appeasement-minded toward Russia. Donald Trump—the dominant and defining figure in the GOP—has repeatedly praised Vladimir Putin, among other brutal dictators, holding Putin up as a model and, at various points, denigrating America in the process. He even sided with Russian intelligence over U.S. intelligence at a joint press conference with Putin in Helsinki.

And so it was a bit disorienting for some of us who are conservative and who were shaped by the Reagan era—and in my case, who worked as a young man in the Reagan administration—to see our foreign-policy principles championed last night not by the Republican Party but by the Democratic president, who spoke with impressive moral force and moral clarity. Our journey through the looking glass continues.

Most life advice is terrible. Don’t sweat the small stuff—if I knew which stuff that was, I wouldn’t be sweating so much. Know thyself—thank you, but myself is the main thing I think about already. Live every day as if it were your last—so I guess I should spend every day Googling which coffin best between bouts of weeping?

Any exhortation that gets broadcast to all of humanity will end up seeming meaningless, trite, or wrong. Some people need to sweat the small stuff less, yes. But I’m always forgetting to respond to text messages, or leaving the house with my fly undone, or developing mysterious headaches only to realize I haven’t drunk any water all day. Perhaps I ought to sweat the small stuff more.

I still believe that it’s possible to construct a piece of advice that’s useful to just about anyone, even strangers. But it’s difficult, because that advice has to have three elements that rarely go together: It must be nonobvious, broadly applicable, and harmful to no one.

In fact, I’ve only ever come across one such piece of advice. It goes like this: When speaking into a microphone, hold it about three inches from your mouth.

Or, as my friend Chris Turner, freestyle rapper and stand-up, puts it: “Hold the mic like it’s an ice-cream cone that you’re about to lick. But don’t lick it; they don’t wash those things, and I’ve seen what comedians do with them.”

The few people who speak into microphones for a living, like Chris, already know how to use them, although a reminder won’t hurt. But many others will almost surely need to speak into a mic at some crucial moment in their life: a toast at a family reunion, a presentation at an all-company meeting, a question at a town hall, a eulogy. And when they do, they will almost surely hold the microphone too far away.

[Read: The only career advice you’ll ever need]

I have witnessed the tragic results of improper microphone technique, most often at weddings. I once watched an adorable grandmother deliver a marriage-themed rap, but I couldn’t hear a word of it because she held the mic too far away. A once-in-a-lifetime performance lost forever, all for a few inches! At another wedding, friends lined up at a microphone to deliver heartfelt toasts, but they stood too far away for it to pick up their voices. This caused a bitter divide in the room: People in the back couldn’t hear at all, lost interest, and started chatting among themselves, thus annoying the people in front of them, who turned around and started shouting “Shut up!” I am dismayed to say that even guests at my own wedding, last summer, later told me they couldn’t hear the vows my wife and I had written for each other. We were too distracted by our true and abiding love to remember our most important vow of all: to have and to hold the microphone an appropriate distance from the mouth.

There are several reasons that people consistently make this mistake. Two are psychological, one is bones, and one is Bob Barker.

First, terror. You may have heard that Americans fear public speaking more than they fear death, which is one of those viral facts that isn’t exactly true, but is on the right track. For a 2012 paper titled “Is Public Speaking Really More Feared Than Death?” researchers asked 815 students enrolled in a communications class to review a short list of common dreads––“financial problems,” “loneliness,” “escalators,” etc.—and check off whichever ones frightened them. Sixty-two percent of those students did pick public speaking, compared with just 43 percent who chose death; but when they were asked to name their top-three fears, death was a more popular choice (20 percent, versus 18 percent for public speaking). Suffice to say that plenty of people are afraid of speaking in front of a group, which may be why they’re so inclined to clutch a microphone to their chest like it’s a bouquet of flowers rather than hoisting it to their lips as they should. This, of course, is self-defeating. Nothing makes you look more like a doofus than mumbling miles away from a mic until someone cries out, “Speak up!”

Second, egocentrism. People are likely to think they don’t need to be amplified, because they can hear their own voice perfectly well. Perspective-taking is difficult––how do you know what another person is experiencing? One trick our minds use to solve this problem is to start by assuming that other people’s experiences are just like ours, and then adjust from there. But studies consistently find that we don’t adjust enough, and the further other people’s experiences get from our own, the less accurate we are at understanding them. That’s why the person who ditches the mic with a blasé “Everybody can hear me, right?” is so often wrong.

[Read: Celebrity invention: Paula Abdul’s microphone stand]

And third, your own skull. Your voice sounds upsettingly different when you hear it amplified. That’s because you usually hear yourself talking as a mixture of vibrations through the air and vibrations through the bones in your head, and the bone vibrations sound deeper and richer than the air vibrations. When you speak into a microphone, however, you mainly hear the air vibrations that come out of the speakers, which sound thinner and more annoying than you’re used to. (If you want to hear what the bone vibrations sound like, try speaking while plugging your ears.) So people’s immediate reaction upon hearing their amplified voice may well be to think, “Oh God, that sounds bad,” and reflexively move the microphone further away.

The real villain ruining everyone’s weddings, though, is not inside your head. No, it’s Bob Barker, the late host of the game show The Price Is Right, may he rest in peace. For 35 years he was on TV most days holding that damn telescoping baton of a microphone approximately four football fields away from his mouth, demonstrating calamitous technique to an unsuspecting American public. Yes, he could be heard just fine over the air, even as he flouted the world’s most perfect piece of advice—but that’s only because he was working with professional equipment. You see, Barker held a condenser microphone (a Sony ECM-51, to be precise, according to one extremely devoted fan), which is more sensitive than the dynamic microphones laypeople are likely to encounter in the wild. And he was working in a studio where engineers could adjust his levels as needed. That gave him the godlike power to tilt his mic gently toward contestants from a waist-high grip, like he was half-heartedly casting a spell with a magic wand, and still pick up their voice while they chatted at the Big Wheel. We mortals do not have such a luxury. Instead of admonishing us to spay and neuter our pets, he should have warned us not to follow his example.

So yes, don’t sweat the small stuff, whatever the small stuff is. Know thyself, whoever you are. Probably don’t live every day like it’s your last, though do have plenty of fun. And when the time comes to share your own advice with the world, please remember to position your mouth roughly three inches from the microphone before speaking.

Colombia has criticised Israel's air attacks and blockade on Gaza, but how have its neighbours reacted?

In 1925, a new, highly desirable trait was invented. Press reports hailed a new Hollywood star: Count Ludwig von Salm-Hoogstraeten, an Austrian noble and tennis champion, who was rumored to be appearing in a film from the megaproducer Samuel Goldwyn. What made the 39-year-old Hollywood material? “He is photogenic,” Goldwyn told a reporter. Newspapers quickly credited the producer with coining a new word.

As it turned out, von Salm-Hoogstraeten’s acting career did not take off, but Goldwyn’s turn of phrase sure did. Now, nearly a century later, photogenicity is essential to the vocabulary of the selfie era. A photogenic person, common thinking goes, looks effortlessly good in a photograph. On social media, photogenicity has become a kind of currency: the intangible “it” factor that can lead to a high follower count. As a result, articles now promise to unspool the secrets of photogenicity; people on TikTok have been taking random stills from their videos to apparently determine whether they’re photogenic. For the rest of us, the concept might serve to justify an aversion to selfies (we’re not unattractive; we’re just not photogenic).

Yet delve into the research, and there’s little direct evidence for the idea that some people are naturally better looking on camera. Perhaps, instead, when someone gets called “photogenic,” what people are really referring to is a practiced sense of ease in front of the camera—and the ability of a photographer and photographic technology to capture it. Photogenicity, in this sense, is more nurture than nature. It is probably less of a measure of how attractive one looks than of how well someone has reconciled themselves to the particularities and limits of modern technology.

To understand this, let’s break down some pervasive assumptions underlying photogenicity. First: There is little universal understanding of who has it and who doesn’t. “To a surprisingly large extent, we disagree on who we individually think of as attractive” in photographs, Clare Sutherland, a psychology lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland, told me. Psychological studies, including Sutherland’s own, have demonstrated that a person who is rated as very attractive in one photo might be considered much less attractive in another. “There’s going to be a lot of individual variation in how we make this judgment about whether or not someone looks photogenic,” Sutherland said.

That extends to ourselves too. In a 2017 study, Sutherland and a group of researchers found that, given a set of 12 photos of their own face, participants generally preferred very different photos of themselves to the ones their peers did. The same disjuncture in how we perceive our photographed face was also the subject of a 2014 study in Japan. In it, researchers took photos of each participant, then lightly modified them, increasing or decreasing the size of eyes and mouths. Participants were then given four photos of the same person’s face and asked to pick which one had not been modified. In the end, people were worse at identifying their real face than their peers’. We are, in other words, terrible judges of what we look like to other people. Thus, when we insist that we are not photogenic, we probably don’t know what we are talking about.

The study in Japan suggested that perhaps a person’s professed lack of photogenicity stems from their unfamiliarity with how they look on camera. The theory is intriguing—but it doesn’t account for the possibility that photogenicity might really be a kind of on-camera savvy. Photogenic people might have mastered their relationship with image-capturing devices. Models swear by the importance of angles, and there is some truth to the idea that how we orient our face in photos informs the final product. For example, photos taken from above tend to make people look trimmer, whereas photos taken head-on might emphasize the broadness and power of our body.

Sometimes this plays out involuntarily: Numerous studies since the 1970s have found that we tend to pose with the left side of our face, a phenomenon that Alessandro Soranzo, a psychology researcher at the U.K.’s Sheffield Hallam University, speculates might have something to do with brain chemistry. “Our right hemisphere of the brain is the one that is more involved in emotions,” Soranzo told me. And because the right hemisphere governs the left side of the face, “our left side is more expressive emotionally,” he said. Whether that actually translates into our left looking better remains a matter of debate, according to Soranzo.

Another factor that complicates photogenicity is the historical bias built into photographic technology. In the 20th century, Kodak calibrated the light and coloration of its photos according to a photograph of a white woman named Shirley. Black and brown people subsequently found that their skin did not show up accurately. While researching early references to photogenicity in newspaper archives, I encountered numerous articles that acknowledged this bias quite explicitly, including one in the Illustrated Daily News in 1934 proclaiming the camera to be “kindest to blondes” because of “their ‘photogenic’ coloring.”

When you understand the history of the concept, “you can see just how fluid and unstable the very idea of photogenicity is,” says Sarah Lewis, a professor of African American studies at Harvard and the founder of the Vision & Justice initiative, an organization that publishes research on visual culture. Photography is still not a level playing field, and, as Lewis has written, anti-Black bias lingers in many digital photos today. For example, cameras that add artificial light or optimize exposure tend to distort the skin color of Black people in particular. Using different kinds of lighting according to one’s skin tone, then, is key to creating the appearance of photogenicity.

That brings us to the last component of photogenicity—the person taking the photo. I was struck by a comment by Naima Green, an artist and a commercial photographer who often works with nonprofessional models. She told me that she encounters many subjects who tense up in front of the lens. “They’re so hyperaware of the camera that they want to make sure they’re doing everything right for me,” she said. “And when you are just more in the moment, I think that really changes what happens in the picture.” Instead of contorting people into rigid poses, Green prioritizes making people feel comfortable on set with her. The trick is in finding sitting or standing positions where their body can relax. It is a small tweak, but a telling one. We can all do this for ourselves, too, even when posing for a selfie.

[Read: How to have a realistic conversation about beauty with your kids]

The reality is that the people most often considered photogenic are probably also the ones who have repeated exposure to photos of themselves—say, models or actors. Sure, they may be considered conventionally beautiful, and they may be good performers who know how to work with a camera. But perhaps their greatest asset is simply how many reps they’ve put in. As a result, they are attuned to the camera’s tendencies, and they are relaxed in front of it.

Maybe those of us who are not professional posers just have to remember that photogenicity may be a skill you can work to improve, like any other. If we choose to, perhaps we can take so many photos of ourselves that we know our visage from every angle. We can learn the lighting that matches our complexion. We can master the poses that make us feel most like ourselves. At some point, we might cease to be surprised by the image looking back at us.

As Israel and Hamas sink deeper into conflict, Doha finds itself in a delicate position. As a long-standing backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar has huge influence over the movement’s Palestinian affiliate, Hamas. That offers a significant opportunity in the short run. Doha’s deep connections with the Gaza-based Islamist group make Qatar a central player in the current diplomatic game. But for exactly the same reason, Doha faces the looming risk of being called to account over its record of support for such radical Islamist groups, and especially for Hamas.

Doha has a long history of serving as a broker, and in the past, this has often worked well for the Gulf state. By allowing the Taliban to establish a Doha office, Qatar provided the U.S. with a channel for negotiations with the group. Doha thus facilitated the agreement to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan concluded under the Trump administration and carried out by President Joe Biden in 2021.

Qatar hopes to play a similar role now. Doha has provided a home for much of Hamas’s exiled political bureau, including its de facto leader, Ismail Haniyeh. Qatar has also been a major underwriter of Gaza’s economy ever since Hamas seized control of the area, in 2007. With the consent of Hamas’s adversaries—including the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, the United States, and even Israel—Qatar has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars each year to the enclave. Among other things, that cash covered the payroll for government employees, which put food on the table for a crucial number of Gazan families despite a virtual blockade by Israel and Egypt.

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

At the same time, Qatar has long been a key U.S. partner in the Middle East. And before the Abraham Accords, which normalized Israel’s relations with some of Qatar’s Gulf Arab neighbors, the main Israeli diplomatic presence in the region was a trade office in Doha that operated for several years in the late 1990s. In the present crisis, neither Egypt nor Turkey has displayed enthusiasm for acting as a go-between with Hamas. So Qatar is trying to maintain its privileged position of being a useful interlocutor to both sides.

But that diplomatic advantage may prove short-lived. After the hostage situation concludes—whether it ends in tragedy or with negotiated releases involving possible prisoner swaps—Qatar is likely to face severe pressure and criticism. Because of the brutality of its attack on southern Israel, Hamas has forfeited even the pragmatic acceptance it formerly had among Western countries, which now widely view the group as an extreme terrorist organization akin to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Qatar’s dalliance with Islamist groups has long been the primary means for Doha to project influence in the Arab world, particularly through state support for Al Jazeera Arabic. After 2011, Qatar came to believe, and Al Jazeera Arabic confidently predicted, that a wave of Islamist governance would sweep in with new Arab democracies. Instead, the elected Brotherhood government in Egypt proved even more unpopular than the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship. Islamists lost elections in Libya and Tunisia. In Syria, the Brotherhood was reduced to the margins.

[Listen: What’s next in Gaza]

With the Brotherhood’s decline in prestige and power, Qatar’s bet has yielded precious few returns. And now Hamas’s disastrous rebranding in Western eyes could well force a reckoning with Doha’s irresponsible strategy. The Qataris may be forced to choose between their precious ties to Washington and their long investment in Hamas. American pressure could even push Qatar to expel the Hamas leaders and cadres living in Doha.

But Qatar still holds one trump card: its connection to the Pentagon. During the regional dispute that began in 2017 and resulted in a three-year boycott of Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt, President Donald Trump initially accused Doha of financing terrorism. But the Department of Defense saw things very differently: Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, which is home to the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command, was the hub for the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Eventually, the Pentagon’s perspective prevailed, and the U.S. pressed for an end to the boycott.

Qatar’s leverage is straightforward. The country financed the building of, and largely funds the maintenance of, the base at Al Udeid, yet it agreed to allow the U.S. to operate the facility under de facto extraterritorial jurisdiction—as if Al Udeid were sovereign American territory and not Qatari. Small wonder, then, that the Defense Department regards this as an irreplaceable asset, strategically vital for U.S. interests.

[Read: How the Palestinian Authority failed its people]

In the probable reckoning, Doha will again rely on this indispensability to avoid accountability. But after Hamas’s horrifying killing spree in southern Israel, even that may not be enough. And it will not help Qatar’s case that its official statement after the October 7 attack on Israel put the whole blame for the bloodshed on Israel and did not criticize Hamas. This was in stark contrast to almost all of the other Gulf Arab countries.

Ultimately, Qatar could actually benefit from being compelled to abandon a failed regional policy of backing religious and populist radicals that, like Hamas, have proved to be reckless allies willing to embrace political violence. Other regional powers—notably Turkey and Iran—have made highly effective use of foreign proxies, but they have done so by exerting far more direct control than Qatar has attempted or could exercise over the Brotherhood-aligned movements. For too long, Doha has danced between its Islamist allies and its Western and Arab partners. The music just stopped.

As his address to the nation from the Oval Office Thursday night underlined, President Joe Biden is expected to send a defense-appropriations request to Congress for perhaps as much as $100 billion to support Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and to improve U.S. border security. It’s a big request—and it will galvanize a debate about whether the United States is doing too much.

Existing critics of Ukraine aid are already complaining that to add an effort to resupply Israel will prove too crushing. Is that true?

Let’s carefully tally American resources and American commitments.

Thanks to its remarkable rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, the American economy will this year produce $27 trillion in goods and services. In the fiscal year that ended on September 30, the U.S. spent about $850 billion of that $27 trillion on national defense. That rounds out at a little more than 3 percent of GDP. That’s only about half of the burden of defense spending that the U.S. shouldered during the final decade of the Cold War.

[Franklin Foer: Inside Biden’s ‘hug Bibi’ strategy]

To date, aid to Ukraine has cost a fraction of that percentage. By mid-September, the total value of the aid provided to Ukraine by the U.S. amounted to about $75 billion. Nearly a third of that sum (about $23 billion) was the value of old equipment from Pentagon stockpiles, material that was on its way to becoming obsolete anyway. The remainder included funding U.S. government operations to support Ukraine—training, logistics, and so on—and direct assistance to the Ukrainian government.

If the president now asks for another $75 billion over the next two years, that will represent about a 4 percent share of the defense budget for that period—or roughly one-tenth of one penny for every dollar of national output. The United States should be able to cope.

And what about the Israeli piece of this budget request?

In normal years, U.S. assistance to Israel is worth about $3 billion. Almost all of that is spent by Israel to buy U.S.-made weapons and equipment. Israel is reportedly requesting an emergency supplement of $10 billion—in the larger scheme of things, a fraction of a fraction.

Nor will aid to Israel compete with the needs of Ukraine. Ukraine wants heavy equipment from the U.S. to fight conventional land battles. Kyiv needs fighter jets, tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles, and ammunition, ammunition, and more ammunition. According to a senior Pentagon source, the Israeli emergency request involves very different items from the U.S. inventory: principally, precision-guided munitions for Israel’s air force, components for its Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, and intelligence resources and advisers for its hostage-situation response. Israel is receiving some fighting vehicles and artillery shells, too, but on a completely different scale from anything Ukraine requires. Ukraine needs about 1.5 million shells a year; Israel wants a few thousand more shells on hand in case Hezbollah starts shooting from the Lebanon hills. Blasting away in Gaza would be brutal and futile.

The critics of American military-aid spending also grumble that its partners do not contribute enough. That image some Americans have of free-loading allies is false.

Total European Union contributions to Ukraine are roughly double the total of U.S. commitments. EU countries are providing many weapons systems, including eventually some two dozen F-16 fighters. They are also covering most of the cost of sustaining the Ukrainian economy.  

[Casey Michel: Make Russia pay]

Alongside the EU, the United Kingdom has spent $5.6 billion on military assistance to Ukraine in 2022 and 2023. Japan’s multiyear commitment—mostly economic and humanitarian—will add up to about $7 billion. The Canadian commitment to Ukraine will total about $7 billion over the years 2022–26.

Aside from all of this, the U.S. still has spare capacity, and can deliver more inventory to Ukraine without any risk to its own national security. Of the 2,200 F-16 aircraft purchased by the United States since the 1970s, fewer than 900 still remain in service. The Air Force would dearly like to retire and replace 125 of those 900. Donating those 125 to Ukraine would accelerate the Air Force’s wished-for modernization programs.

Costs, of course, have to be measured against benefits. The money to Ukraine is buying a powerful reinforcement of peace in Europe and across the world. The money to Israel will buy a similar deterrent to rogue aggression in the Middle East.

President Biden issued a one-word caution to Hezbollah and Iran about exploiting Hamas’s aggression against Israel: “don’t.” That warning has been bolstered by sending two carrier groups and a deployment of Marines to the region. Biden’s admonition has even more force because of what the Iranians have seen in Ukraine: a global alliance defending a democratic ally in defiance of Russia’s energy embargoes, nuclear blackmail, and disinformation warfare.

Some in the U.S. foreign-policy community harbor a fantasy that the U.S. can enhance its credibility with China by abandoning Ukraine. (One such dreamer, Elbridge Colby, was treated to a glowing profile in Politico recently.) This is like suggesting that a business can improve its credit by defaulting on some of its debts. Ukraine’s self-defense has delivered a needed check to authoritarian aggressors all around the world.

[David Frum: What Ukraine needs now]

Democracy needs some wins against its most violent enemies. Ukraine and Israel both offer opportunities for the U.S. to realize valuable security gains without risking a single American soldier. Obviously, it’s important for American policy makers to proceed cautiously. Russia wields a nuclear deterrent. Gaza is a bad place to fight a ground war. But precisely by its generosity, the U.S. has earned the right to dissuade its partners from launching operations that seem ill-advised.

So what of the idea that the U.S. should back away from helping because it’s all too much trouble? Because the country that during the Cold War defended both Germany and Japan with its Army and Navy is now too feeble to aid two friendly democracies that ask only for material and technical assistance to defend themselves? Because a few dozen Republican House members and a handful of Republican senators are intimidated by Donald Trump and addled by social media?

For the U.S. to back away from its commitments for these reasons would be simply shameful.

The United States can succeed. The United States is succeeding. There’s never a good time to yield to bad-faith isolationism, but for a great nation animated by high ideals, this moment would be an especially bad time to do so.

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The incentives of social media have long been perverse. But in recent weeks, platforms have become virtually unusable for people seeking accurate information.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The sociopaths among us—and how to avoid them MAGA Bluey is stressing people out. What Sidney Powell’s plea deal could mean for the Fulton County case against Trump Hamas’s hostage-taking handbook says to “kill the difficult ones” and use hostages as “human shields.”

Dangerous Incentives

“For following the war in real-time,” Elon Musk declared to his 150 million followers on X (formerly Twitter) the day after Israel declared war on Hamas, two accounts were worth checking out. He tagged them in his post, which racked up some 11 million views. Three hours later, he deleted the post; both accounts were known spreaders of disinformation, including the claim this spring that there was an explosion near the Pentagon. Musk, in his capacity as the owner of X, has personally sped up the deterioration of social media as a place to get credible information. Misinformation and violent rhetoric run rampant on X, but other platforms have also quietly rolled back their already lacking attempts at content moderation and leaned into virality, in many cases at the cost of reliability.

Social media has long encouraged the sharing of outrageous content. Posts that stoke strong reactions are rewarded with reach and amplification. But, my colleague Charlie Warzel told me, the Israel-Hamas war is also “an awful conflict that has deep roots … I am not sure that anything that’s happened in the last two weeks requires an algorithm to boost outrage.” He reminded me that social-media platforms have never been the best places to look if one’s goal is genuine understanding: “Over the past 15 years, certain people (myself included) have grown addicted to getting news live from the feed, but it’s a remarkably inefficient process if your end goal is to make sure you have a balanced and comprehensive understanding of a specific event.”

Where social media shines, Charlie said, is in showing users firsthand perspectives and real-time updates. But the design and structure of the platforms are starting to weaken even those capabilities. “In recent years, all the major social-media platforms have evolved further into algorithmically driven TikTok-style recommendation engines,” John Herrman wrote last week in New York Magazine. Now a toxic brew of bad actors and users merely trying to juice engagement have seeded social media with dubious, and at times dangerous, material that’s designed to go viral.

Musk has also introduced financial incentives for posting content that provokes massive engagement: Users who pay for a Twitter Blue subscription (in the U.S., it costs $8 a month) can in turn get paid for posting content that generates a lot of views from other subscribers, be it outrageous lies, old clips repackaged as wartime footage, or something else that might grab eyeballs. The accounts of those Twitter Blue subscribers now display a blue check mark—once an authenticator of a person’s real identity, now a symbol of fealty to Musk.

If some of the changes making social-media platforms less hospitable to accurate information are obvious to users, others are happening more quietly inside companies. Musk slashed the company’s trust-and-safety team, which handled content moderation, soon after he took over last year. Caitlin Chin-Rothmann, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me in an email that Meta and YouTube have also made cuts to their trust-and-safety teams as part of broader layoffs in the past year. The reduction in moderators on social-media sites, she said, leaves the platforms with “fewer employees who have the language, cultural, and geopolitical understanding to make the tough calls in a crisis.” Even before the layoffs, she added, technology platforms struggled to moderate content that was not in English. After making widely publicized investments in content moderation under intense public pressure after the 2016 presidential election, platforms have quietly dialed back their capacities. This is happening at the same time as these same platforms have deprioritized the surfacing of legitimate news by reputable sources via their algorithms (see also: Musk’s decision to strip out the headlines that were previously displayed on X if a user shared a link to another website).

Content moderation is not a panacea. And violent videos and propaganda have been spreading beyond major platforms, on Hamas-linked Telegram channels, which are private groups that are effectively unmoderated. On mainstream sites, some of the less-than-credible posts have come directly from politicians and government officials. But experts told me that efforts to ramp up moderation—especially investments in moderators with language and cultural competencies—would improve the situation.

The extent of inaccurate information on social media in recent weeks has attracted attention from regulators, particularly in Europe, where there are different standards—both cultural and legal—regarding free speech compared with the United States. The European Union opened an inquiry into X earlier this month regarding “indications received by the Commission services of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech.” In an earlier letter in response to questions from the EU, Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, wrote that X had labeled or removed “tens of thousands of pieces of content”; removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts; and was relying, in part, on “community notes,” written by eligible users who sign up as contributors, to add context to content on the site. Today, the European Commission sent letters to Meta and TikTok requesting information about how they are handling disinformation and illegal content. (X responded to my request for comment with “busy now, check back later.” A spokesperson for YouTube told me that the company had removed tens of thousands of harmful videos, adding, “Our teams are working around the clock to monitor for harmful footage and remain vigilant.” A spokesperson for TikTok directed me to a statement about how it is ramping up safety and integrity efforts, adding that the company had heard from the European Commission today and would publish its first transparency report under the European Digital Services Act next week. And a spokesperson for Meta told me, “After the terrorist attacks by Hamas on Israel, we quickly established a special operations center staffed with experts, including fluent Hebrew and Arabic speakers, to closely monitor and respond to this rapidly evolving situation.” The spokesperson added that the company will respond to the European Commission.)

Social-media platforms were already imperfect, and during this conflict, extremist groups are making sophisticated use of their vulnerabilities. The New York Times reported that Hamas, taking advantage of X’s weak content moderation, have seeded the site with violent content such as audio of a civilian being kidnapped. Social-media platforms are providing “a near-frictionless experience for these terrorist groups,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which is currently facing a lawsuit from Twitter over its research investigating hate speech on the platform, told me. By paying Musk $8 a month, he added, “you’re able to get algorithmic privilege and amplify your content faster than the truth can put on its pajamas and try to combat it.”

Related:

This war shows just how broken social media has become. How to redeem social media

Today’s News

After saying he would back interim House Speaker Patrick McHenry and postpone a third vote on his own candidacy, Representative Jim Jordan now says he will push for another round of voting. Sidney Powell, a former attorney for Donald Trump, has pleaded guilty in the Georgia election case. The Russian American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva has been detained in Russia, according to her employer, for allegedly failing to register as a foreign agent.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Hickey

The Annoyance Economy

By Annie Lowrey

Has the American labor market ever been better? Not in my lifetime, and probably not in yours, either. The jobless rate is just 3.8 percent. Employers added a blockbuster 336,000 jobs in September. Wage growth exceeded inflation too. But people are weary and angry. A majority of adults believe we’re tipping into a recession, if we are not in one already. Consumer confidence sagged in September, and the public’s expectations about where things are heading drooped as well.

The gap between how the economy is and how people feel things are going is enormous, and arguably has never been bigger. A few well-analyzed factors seem to be at play, the dire-toned media environment and political polarization among them. To that list, I want to add one more: something I think of as the “Economic Annoyance Index.” Sometimes, people’s personal financial situations are just stressful—burdensome to manage and frustrating to think about—beyond what is happening in dollars-and-cents terms. And although economic growth is strong and unemployment is low, the Economic Annoyance Index is riding high.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Alfred Gescheidt / Getty; Getty

Read. “Explaining Pain,” a new poem by Donald Platt:

“The way I do it is to say my body / is not my / body anymore. It is someone else’s. The pain, therefore, / is no longer / mine.”

Listen. A ground invasion in Gaza seems all but certain, Hanna Rosin discusses in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic. But then what?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Working as a content moderator can be brutal. In 2019, Casey Newton wrote a searing account in The Verge of the lives of content moderators, who spend their days sifting through violent, hateful posts and, in many cases, work as contractors receiving relatively low pay. We Had to Remove This Post, a new novel by the Dutch writer Hanna Bervoets, follows one such “quality assurance worker,” who reviews posts on behalf of a social-media corporation. Through this character, we see one expression of the human stakes of witnessing so much horror. Both Newton and Bervoets explore the idea that, although platforms rely on content moderators’ labor, the work of keeping brutality out of users’ view can be devastating for those who do it.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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