Whatever basketball’s blue-collar bona fides, whatever its associations with the barbershop and the neighborhood blacktop, its culture has proved hostile to at least one category of everyman: the plumber. A few years ago, fans on YouTube and TikTok began uploading grainy footage of star players from previous decades and zooming in on the defenders, usually white guys with short shorts, long mustaches, and very little muscle definition. After these players were centered and freeze-framed, a voice-over would deride them as “plumbers.” As in: “Michael Jordan played against plumbers.”

Basketball fans love to argue about the evolution of the game, and whether yesterday’s superstars had it easier. Putting aside the meme-makers’ contempt for tradesmen, they’re right: Today’s professionals do look more athletic and skilled than their predecessors. But then again, today’s fans are steeped in the current visual style of the game, which has changed over the past few decades. We may underestimate former players’ explosiveness, fluidity, and precision.

To find out whether NBA gameplay has indeed become more challenging, I embarked on an investigation—and I didn’t like what I found. Like many basketball fans in their early 40s, I’m hopelessly nostalgic for the NBA of the ’90s, for Hakeem Olajuwon’s slippery footwork, and Penny Hardaway’s pretty interior passing. But after digging through data and consulting with league insiders, I can’t help but conclude that today’s game really is more rigorous.

A large body of evidence suggests that NBA players now move more explosively than those of previous eras— despite the fact that they aren’t themselves larger-bodied. The league’s average height peaked at 6 foot 7 in 1987, and since then, only the (relatively) diminutive point guards have inched up as a group. Taller players—centers and forwards—have actually shrunk a bit. NBA players packed on weight all the way through 2011, but they’ve since thinned. That evolution can even be seen across individual careers: LeBron James fussily shapes his physique during every offseason, and in recent years he has transitioned to a slimmer frame.  

[Adam Harris: San Antonio, the Spurs, and me]

To measure how those (slightly) smaller bodies move, some NBA teams turn to a company called P3. More than two-thirds of the players who were on pro rosters when the season tipped off earlier this week have worked out at a P3 facility, according to the company. Players are outfitted head-to-toe with more than 20 sensors. They’re asked to perform intense vertical and lateral movements atop special, sensor-laden platforms. Their every twitch is recorded by motion-capture cameras. Marcus Elliott, the founder and director of P3, told me that his system measures raw-force production, power, overall movement, and speed, and that with respect to all of them, “today’s average NBA athlete is 4 to 7 percent better than the average NBA athlete from more than 10 years ago.”

When Elliott first started evaluating players about 15 years ago, many were operating at only 75 to 80 percent of their potential athleticism. They weren’t as ballistic as today’s players, but they could still get by on skills. Most of today’s players, by contrast, are more than 90 percent optimized by their first visit to P3. Elliott compared them to Formula 1 cars: “They accelerate at a faster rate to higher velocities and they change directions quicker.” I asked him about previous generations of players. What cars did they remind him of? “They weren’t Hondas,” he said, “but maybe something in between.” You can decide which is worse: Hondas or plumbers.

Basketball has never been a more global sport; a record 125 international players are on teams’ rosters this season. But before NBA general managers raided the worldwide talent pool for exceptionally skilled players, some taller players basically got by on their height. There were outliers: Bill Walton regularly threw no-look passes from the center position; Magic Johnson played point guard at 6 foot 9; Jack Sikma (6 foot 11) and Sam Perkins (6 foot 9) both stroked it from beyond the arc. But their fellow bigs tended to be clumsy ball handlers who took few shots outside the key. Now shooting and passing abilities are the purview of virtually every player. Centers are logging nearly 30 percent more assists than they did a decade ago. One of them, the 6-foot-11-inch Nikola Jokić, may have the best court vision in the NBA. Centers are also taking more than four times as many three-point shots as they were 10 years ago. Power forwards have become long-range bombers, too; a whopping 40 percent of their shot attempts are now three-pointers.

[Prashant Rao: Why it’s good that Americans don’t dominate basketball]

NBA gameplay has been transformed by these sharpshooting big men. “It used to be that there was always a non-shooting specialist on the court,” Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, told me. Usually, this person would be a pure rebounder or rim protector. Teams could rest their stars by having them defend such players, or design defensive schemes to make sure that the ball ended up in a non-shooter’s hands. Now every team has five shooters on the floor, Cuban explained. “Guys have to work harder on defense. They have to scramble more.”

After Steph Curry and his imitators started shooting from the logo zones way beyond the three-point line about 10 years ago, the space defenders had to scramble across grew much larger. More than half of these ultra-deep-shot attempts miss, and many clang violently off the rim, leading to long rebounds and quicker transitions. Thanks to this shift, and the NBA’s earlier decision to shorten the time by which a team must advance to half-court after gaining possession, the league’s pace has increased dramatically.  

All that speed has drawbacks. In describing today’s players as Formula 1 cars, Elliott wasn’t only emphasizing their acceleration. “The thing about those cars is that they’re dangerous to drive,” he said. And in recent years, wreckage has been piling up on NBA sidelines. Players have missed more games due to injuries than in previous eras. This uptick in injuries—primarily ankle sprains, along with hamstring and calf strains—is somewhat mysterious, because NBA teams have never been more obsessed with the physical well-being of players. (Not that this concern springs from pure altruism. It’s just that most NBA contracts are guaranteed.)

[Read: The ugly side of NBA fandom can no longer be ignored]

NBA franchises previously entrusted the physical care of their players to a staff of two to three people. Most now have a training staff of at least eight—and many players also have their own personal trainers and nutritionists. Asheesh Bedi, the chief medical officer of the National Basketball Players Association, told me that in the olden times, “treatments in the training room were often limited to ice and ‘stim,’” short for muscle stimulation. Now teams have gleaming sci-fi facilities, complete with whole-body cryotherapy chambers, special pools for underwater treatments, antigravity treadmills, and ultrasound machines for advanced imaging. Teams also fly private so that they can time their takeoffs to players’ sleep cycles. When players get soft-tissue injuries, a team’s medical staff can deploy platelet-rich plasma to speed healing. On top of these efforts, the league has also shortened its preseason, and minimized back-to-back games and cross-country flights.

All of this pampering might seem to imply that today’s players have it easy. And yet, injuries are still up, and everyone in the league is trying to understand why. One theory is that today’s players are more injury prone when they reach the NBA, because they’ve been playing in year-round travel leagues since adolescence, if not earlier. Research has shown that Little Leaguers and cricketers who pitch or bowl too many times during their formative years can become predisposed to specific injuries, but so far, no evidence suggests that something similar is happening to young basketball players.

Perhaps the increase in injuries is instead a function of the pro game’s new physical demands. In 2018, researchers measured the movements of professional basketball players in Barcelona in a game setting and found that, among the 1,000 or so actions that players perform during a game, some are especially hard on the body. Jumps were obviously intense—as even casual hoopers can tell you, rough landings lead to ankle sprains. So were accelerations, all-out sprints, and decelerations. According to Elliott, the latter are most likely to give players traumatic injuries and wear and tear, especially when a player has to decelerate on short notice.

[Read: How NBA moms help their sons deal with the fame and fortune]

“If Luka Dončić is coming at you really hard and then he steps back, you have to try to decelerate out of nowhere, and then accelerate in some other direction” to close out, Elliott said. “Those transitions are so hard for human bodies,” especially if an athlete already has a strain, or some asymmetry that causes him to favor one leg over the other. The spacing of today’s game, and the sheer ubiquity of good shooters, requires players to constantly accelerate and decelerate on defense, and doing so across an 82-game season may be bringing them within range of the human body’s limits. Teams have started strategically benching their best players, forcing the NBA to crack down with new rules intended to keep stars on the floor. Some commentators have even suggested shortening the season, but because the NBA is set to negotiate a new TV deal soon, that’s unlikely.

There is a certain kind of fan who believes that the NBA reached its apex in the ’90s, if not in competition, certainly in physicality. They rightly point out that back then, the rules allowed for a much rougher style of play. To reach the hoop, Jordan had to leap into a violent gantlet of heavy-bodied bigs—Charles Oakley, Anthony Mason, and Bill Laimbeer, to name a few—who delivered hard fouls with relish.

But that’s only one kind of physicality. Today’s playing environment puts a different set of demands on a player’s body. They may not have to dodge as many elbows and clotheslines as they did in the paint of yore, but that doesn’t mean their game isn’t more dangerous. That’s not to say that Jordan couldn’t thrive in today’s NBA. It just would have been more difficult. It would have required more from him. He might not have found it so easy to win all those rings.

In the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq, technocrats in Washington deployed their laptops and prepared for war. Their plans for the governing structures that would replace Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship filled bulging white papers, organizational flowcharts that spilled across thick binders, and dense memoranda for managing esoteric ministries.  

Israel is on the brink of testing a far different approach to regime change. Its leaders have announced a desire to dismantle the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Rather than entering battle with a carefully constructed blueprint for what might follow victory, though, they are winging it, improvising in the dazed aftermath of a devastating massacre that left its military and political leadership in a state of shame and confusion. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government announced its war aims before it had fully sketched out how it might effectively realize them.

But the Israeli operation faces the same question that ultimately vexed the American project in Iraq: What comes next? Removing murderous Islamists from power solves one problem, but it creates another. Who will govern Gaza after Hamas?

Thus far, the Israelis have answered the question only in the negative. Although some of the ultranationalists in the Netanyahu government openly fantasize about reoccupying Gaza, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has said that his government won’t pursue that path, which would come at a financial, military, and moral cost that Israel apparently doesn’t want to bear. But the alternative to a postwar occupation of some sort is lawlessness, which would permit Hamas’s return, thus undermining the very purpose of the war.

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

To understand how Israel might better approach the day after, I spoke with veterans of Israel’s security establishment, including a former prime minister, a former national security adviser, and a former head of Mossad, as well as longtime diplomats and analysts in Washington. I asked them to imagine a plausible endgame for Gaza. What I found was both a surprising degree of consensus on a plan for life after Hamas, and a lack of faith in the current Israeli government’s ability to execute it.

There’s a counterfactual history of Gaza that contains a vision for a way forward. In late 2008, at the very end of his time in office, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced his plans to leave his post, to head into the political wilderness. At that moment of transition, Hamas, which had only recently won control of Gaza, launched a fusillade of rocket attacks against targets in southern Israel.

Olmert considered his options. His preferred course of action was regime change, a military campaign that would have eliminated Hamas’s leadership once and for all. But his defense minister and the military’s chief of staff rejected the plan, and let the press know of their opposition. “They already started to leak that Olmert wants to carry on the war in order to prolong, to cancel, his formal retirement and carry on,” Olmert told me. Worried that overruling the objections would look self-serving, he backed away from his plans.

Instead of ejecting Hamas from power, the Israelis bombed Gaza for 22 days, what the military referred to as Operation Cast Lead. But in the course of considering regime change in Gaza, Olmert began to discuss what might come next. “I started to talk with the Americans and the Europeans to bring to Gaza, at the end of the military operation of Israel, an international force to be a caretaker for a period of a few months. To clean it up completely, to stabilize it, and to prepare it for the incoming of the Palestinian Authority security forces.”

In some ways, this vision is more plausible today than when Olmert first imagined it in 2008. Israel has spent the past decade deepening its relations with Arab states in the Gulf, which have been unnerved by Iran’s rise and eager to collaborate with Israel’s tech sector. These countries share Israel’s abiding animosity toward the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement of which Hamas is a part, and consider it a profound threat to their own regimes.

Under the aegis of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Dennis Ross, the veteran diplomat, has co-written a proposal to have the U.S. enlist the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan to serve as Gaza’s temporary stewards, bankrolling its reconstruction and providing a security force that supplies a semblance of order. According to Ross, the goal is to turn Gaza “into a place where development and modernization is the aim, not resistance.”

It sounds fanciful, but Brian Katulis, the vice president of the Middle East Institute, who possesses a large network of contacts in governments across the region, described to me a pitch that the Israelis might use to effectively induce their participation: “‘Look, we’re gonna go after these extremists who are a threat to you. But at the end of all of this, there will be some form of a very qualified two-state solution for the Palestinians. We want you to get behind it.’ And you’d paint a vision of the Middle East that wasn’t naive and Pollyannaish, but something that matches up with where they were going already, which is regional integration.”

There are practical reasons for these countries to join. Egypt, for instance, wants its own firms to win massive construction contracts. And Olmert, who has talked with officials from these countries, believes they would be happy to be seen as Gaza’s savior. “The Israeli operation will cause outrage, so that will be an excuse for them to come in, to really start to rehabilitate Gaza,” he told me.

Still, reconstructing Gaza promises to be an enormous, thankless, expensive task, given the likelihood that it will consist of large stretches of rubble and that pockets of armed Hamas fighters will remain. “There’s a risk of terrorists coming back and overthrowing civilians,” Eyal Hulata, who served as Israel’s national security adviser during the premierships of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, told me.

The precondition of Arab states’ participation is that it would be time-limited and that it would culminate in handing over Gaza to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority, based in the West Bank. The Israeli public is justifiably skeptical of the PA, hardly a bastion of effective governance—and lacking in legitimacy. When I mentioned the possibility of the PA playing a constructive role to Hulata, he joked, “Maybe when there’s a new president and reform and God comes down from heaven and there’s a messiah …” But then he conceded that there’s no viable alternative.

Whatever its many faults, the PA has a security force, some 31,000 members strong, trained and funded by the U.S. military. Israel does not fully trust the PA, but at least the country has a relationship with its leadership and some faith in its ability to perform basic functions. This force would need to double in size during Gaza’s period of Arab stewardship to have sufficient manpower to secure Gaza. “It’s a difficult task, but not an impossible one, given that the United States has overseen this type of force in the West Bank now for 15 years,” Michael Kopolow, of the Israeli Policy Forum, told me.

But the viability of a plan like Ross’s depends on the execution of the war. Although Arab countries might be theoretically attracted to playing the part of Gaza’s savior, their willingness to participate might erode during a brutal war that infuriates their own publics.  

And there’s a danger that Israel’s attack on Gaza will destroy the basic infrastructure of governance, complicating any postwar occupation. An Arab coalition could supply money and soldiers, but it would need to rely on Gaza’s technocratic class of civil administrators. This group has been part of the existing Hamas regime, and many are Islamists, but they aren’t gun-touting militants. Qatar, with the assent of the Israelis, has partially paid their salary. They have the competence to distribute aid, pick up trash, and run hospitals—to supply Gaza with a modicum of postwar order. These civil administrators could lend the occupying force some legitimacy in the short term.

This plan isn’t that far removed from what Gallant, the defense minister, has described as the Israeli plan—which has the army leaving Gaza at the end of the war. But Netanyahu would never be able to implement it. His government has long sought to cast aside the PA to appease the settlers and religious zealots in his coalition, who regard it as a primary obstacle to their biblical vision of Greater Israel.

The problem for Netanyahu is that the PA would never want to assume power in Gaza without substantially bolstering its position in the West Bank. It would almost certainly demand stringent constraints on settlement expansion and promises of greater autonomy, measures that Netanhyahu and coalition partners abhor. Gidi Grinstein, who runs the Reut Group, a think tank in Tel Aviv, told me that Netanyahu is once again his own worst enemy. “With his policies on the one hand in the West Bank, Netanyahu is destroying policies on the other hand in Gaza.”

Given that Israel doesn’t want to occupy Gaza—and that its current government would reject its transfer to Palestinians—the question is, does Netanyahu truly want a total victory? In the most plausible (and most familiar) scenario that I heard described, the Netanyahu government prematurely ends its invasion, under pressure from the Biden administration, to restore stability in the region and in the global economy.

Israel could leave Gaza, claiming a partial victory. It could point to evidence that it decimated Hamas leadership, dismantled bunkers, and destroyed its enemy’s arsenal. The Israelis might not achieve their stated goal of regime change, but they will have demonstrated their power and restored a measure of deterrence.

Forced to contend with the continued reality of Hamas, Israel would scramble to erect a raft of pragmatic security measures to further insulate the nation. There’s talk among Israeli officials of surrounding Gaza with a thick buffer of bulldozed territory, perhaps a mile wide. One former official suggested to me that it might be a kill zone, where any Palestinian who set foot would be shot on sight. Such insulation would be accompanied by the implementation of long-standing plans to upgrade security at the Rafah border crossing into Egypt. This would include investment in state-of-the-art technology to screen vehicles headed into Gaza. Israel might demand that international inspectors, preferably Americans, oversee the inspection of incoming traffic.

[Read: Israel is walking into a trap]

Other Israelis suggested that the campaign to destroy Hamas wouldn’t end with the ground invasion. Israel would continue to kill Hamas leadership with the dedication depicted in the movie Munich. “No matter if they are in Gaza or if they are in Alaska, okay, they have to be eliminated,” Olmert said. Zohar Polti, who ran the Ministry of Defense’s bureau of planning, described how Israeli might keep dispatching special forces into Gaza to act on intelligence to foil attacks on Israel. “That’s very similar to what we’re doing in the cities of the Palestinians, after we see that the Palestinian security services are dealing with, let’s say, a loss of control.”

But Efraim Halevy, a legendary head of Mossad, vented his anxieties about any failure to achieve Israel’s stated aims. Although he abhors the Netanyahu government—and doubts the wisdom of its strategy and the competence of the officials charged with executing it—he told me that failure would likely further demoralize the public, which was severely fractured before Hamas’s invasion. Failure to eradicate Hamas would make it nearly impossible to reassure refugees from the townlets and kibbutzim in the south—200,000 of them, by one count—to return and rebuild. In the recriminations that would inevitably follow the war, the political anger provoked by Netanyahu’s judicial reform might return, only this time stoked by a sense of total despair.

Many Israelis told me that they were haunted by a photo of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, taken after the end of Operation Guardian of the Walls in 2021. After 11 days of Israeli bombing, Sinwar emerged into the daylight, sat in a plush armchair surrounded by rubble, and posed for the camera with a defiant smile. “If you fail in this, it could well mean that what you have intended to achieve, you achieve the opposite,” Halevy told me. “You will be the one who ends up with no cohesion and no will to fight.”

In the midst of such gloom, I also thought I detected muffled hints of hope. Israelis almost universally invoked the unexpected aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the other cataclysmic lapse in the history of the nation’s defense, so searing that it scrambled the politics of both Israel and its neighbors. Some of the Jewish state’s old enemies finally accepted its existence. Fervent hawks in Israel became ambitious peacemakers. No Israeli was willing to stake their reputation on the rise of a new alignment, but they all wanted to believe in its imminence, beyond the carnage.  

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Terrorism, like war, is a word we tend to use almost as a reflex to describe anything that horrifies us. But words can lead us to choose policies, and we should be aware of how we use them.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“Why I own guns and why I’m part of the problem.” Hurricane Otis was too fast for the forecasters. Will Republicans pay a price for extremism? The hero Gen Z needs

Another Terrifying Day

As I write this, a mass shooter is loose in Maine. I have close family members who live not far from the scene of the massacre, and, like all Americans, I am praying that his rampage is stopped before he kills again.

I do not know why someone in Maine engaged in a mass slaughter yesterday. (Authorities have identified a suspect, but I see no point in naming him here.) The alleged shooter was reportedly committed to a mental-health facility this past summer, but I do not know what condition led to his stay. I do not know if there was some precipitating event, or whether he was under the influence of drugs, or if he is just an evil human being.

I also do not know if he is a terrorist. At this moment, no one does. But on social media, especially, the word terrorist is being thrown about with great confidence, especially now that we have some evidence that the suspect’s social-media feed was heavy with likes of right-wing accounts. This may not mean much; the alleged shooter also seemed to like Jim Cramer and other finance-related accounts. We can’t really ascribe motive out of any of that; sometimes, people are radicalized and become dangerous, but other times, dangerous people seek out causes as a rationalization for violence.

I will be honest here and tell you that I considered leaving this subject for another day. We’re all scared, shocked, and angry. But times like this, when our fears are so sharp, are exactly when we need to think more calmly about the nature of the threat we’re facing. When we rush to apply words because they seem right to us in the heat of the moment, we run the risk of making mistakes that will reverberate throughout our later discussions and influence the policy choices we eventually make.

The U.S. government has its own definition of terrorism, and it is fairly loose—not least because after 9/11, the government wanted more flexibility in charging people for terroristic acts. But let’s start with something very important that almost all governments agree on: Terrorism is a political act intentionally aimed at civilians in order to produce fear and subsequent changes in government policy (or even the destruction of the targeted regime).

Usually, definitions of terrorism emphasize that the perpetrators are nongovernmental actors, because we already have terms for when states engage in the intentional murder of civilians: crimes against humanity and, in some cases, war crimes. (Intention is important: Civilians are always killed in wartime, but specifically targeting them is a crime.)

Counterterrorism operations also look for networks, planning, and cooperation among the killers. These networks have goals: Sometimes, the goal is relatively achievable (“release our comrades from prison”), sometimes it is huge (“give us autonomy” or “remove your forces from this area”), and sometimes it is nearly impossible (“overthrow your government and adopt our religion”). But there is always a goal.

Terrorism without a political motive isn’t terrorism. Not everything that terrifies people is terrorism, either, as counterintuitive as that may seem. After all, if it’s terrifying, it’s terrorism, right? Nevertheless, although many things scare (and kill) large numbers of people—gang wars, serial killers, arson—those that lack a coherent political character fall outside the legal, and sensible, definition of terrorism. They are crimes against other human beings, but they are not an attack on the entire political order.

Why does any of this matter? Above all, we need clarity on the nature of the crime so that we can choose the right response. Ever since 9/11, invoking terrorism in America has carried the possibility of setting in motion the immense machinery of government, regardless of the actual threat. But if we more carefully define terrorism to mean non-state actors attacking civilians to produce a political outcome, it gets a lot easier to think about how to react.

For example, Son of Sam killing six people, wounding seven others, and scaring the hell out of New York in 1976 and 1977 is ghastly, but it is not terrorism. But a car bomb in front of a mall—or a jetliner aimed at a building—attached to a political or social cause is terrorism. Son of Sam requires a manhunt by local and regional law enforcement. The car bomb requires a significant governmental response—and perhaps even military mobilization.

The shooting in Maine is not the only event spurring the daily deployment of terrorism as a term. The Hamas attack on Israel is now “Israel’s 9/11,” and the United States is reportedly advising the Israeli government not to make some of the same mistakes America made in its own War on Terror. (War is another term thrown about too easily, but that’s a subject for another day.) I know the old saw “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” but I believe that the Hamas invasion was terrorism: Non-state actors intentionally targeted civilians to effect a political goal.

You can argue over justice and morality—some people have made the despicable argument that Israel brought this nightmare on itself, similar to arguments made about America deserving what happened on 9/11—but there can be no argument that rape, infanticide, and butchery in service of a political goal are terrorism. (Russia has done the same in Ukraine—but as a state actor, the Kremlin and its high command should be charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.)

In Maine, the situation is far less clear. It might make us feel better, and give more meaning to the heartbreaking deaths, to believe that we’re fighting terrorism; the alternative is to wrestle with the even more frightening and desolating possibility that the Maine shooter may (like the Las Vegas killer in 2017) have had no real reason to kill beyond his own unknowable inner torment.

When we use a word such as terrorism promiscuously, we risk turning it into little more than shorthand for our fear and anger. The term not only invites a massive government reaction but could also lead to misallocation of resources in our responses, especially if we conflate mental illness, the obvious problem of guns, and “terrorism.”

To take but one example: In late 2021, a mentally disturbed 15-year-old named Ethan Crumbley killed four people at his school. He was convicted of murder—and of terrorism, under a state law enacted after 9/11. (The prosecutor’s argument was essentially that Crumbley’s act had terrified people, and so: terrorism.) If a teenage school shooter who was hallucinating about demons and sending messages pleading for help is a terrorist, then the word has virtually no meaning.

Sanctifying the word terrorism as an obvious motive for every mass killing was a significant mistake made by Americans and their government after 9/11. The world is crawling with plenty of real terrorists, but we should pause before we reach for a word whose incantation can summon powerful and illiberal forces from within our institutions—and ourselves.

Related:

The narcissism of the angry young men A lone-wolf shooter has an online pack.

Today’s News

Israel sent armored tanks into northern Gaza overnight following remarks from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about a likely ground invasion.    Representative Jamaal Bowman pleaded guilty to setting off a false fire alarm in a House office building. The Texas House of Representatives passed a bill that would make it a state crime to cross illegally into Texas, and enable officers to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants.

More From The Atlantic

Dobbs’s confounding effect on abortion rates Biden says goodbye to tweezer economics. “I love candy. But does it make me happy?” We’ve never seen anything like the Menendez indictment.

Culture Break

Read. They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us, a memoir by Prachi Gupta, delves into the grief of cutting off family, and argues that estrangement can be a tool of self-love.

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin speaks with Jordan Peele and N. K. Jemisin about their new anthology, Out There Screaming, and the subversive goals of Black horror.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I am a traditionalist who dislikes much about modern music. (I think Auto-Tune is a crime against God and man.) So I cringed when I saw in The Guardian that Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are going to use AI to resurrect John Lennon for one more Beatles tune, with a guitar part recorded in the 1990s by George Harrison, who died in 2001.

When I learned more, I was heartened. I liked the use of John’s voice in later Beatle releases, especially the song “Free As a Bird.” Apparently, John’s widow, Yoko Ono, had some of these materials on a cassette John had marked “For Paul,” and the three surviving Beatles at the time used modern studio magic to clean up the tapes. But technological limitations prevented them from using all of John’s singing and playing. AI allowed Paul and Ringo to restore his parts in the new single, titled “Now and Then.”

George reportedly didn’t like “Now and Then,” but his widow and his son think that with the restored quality, he’d have approved. It wouldn’t be the first time the Beatles disagreed on a song. But I’m glad we’re going to get one more single from them before they finally close their legendary catalog.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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