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Americans don’t understand foreign aid. Instead of relying on misinformed citizens, we should demand better answers from national leaders who want to cut aid to our friends and allies and imperil American security.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Nasal congestion is far weirder than you might think. What Matthew Perry knew about comedy Capitalism has plans for menopause. What financial engineering does to hospitals

Persistent Foreign-Aid Myths

The Washington Post sent a reporter to a diner in Shreveport, Louisiana, last week to talk with voters in the district represented by the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. And wouldn’t you know it, they were very happy to see him become speaker, including one voter in the diner who—imagine the luck—just happened to be Mike Johnson’s mother. “God did this,” Jeanne Johnson said of her son’s ascension to the speakership.

I have my doubts about God’s participation in American elections, but she’s a proud mom, and understandably so. She told the reporter that Johnson “began leading as a child,” stepping up at a young age to help the family. That’s nice; my mom, God rest her soul, used to say nice things about me too.

The rest of the article included predictable discussions with the local burghers who hope we can finally overcome all this nastiness in our politics—there is no apparent awareness of how all that unpleasantness got started—and get to work and solve problems under the leadership of an obviously swell guy. (In fact, we are told he even calmed an angry voter at a town hall. Amazing.) Johnson, of course, also voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and has many views that would have been considered retrograde by most Americans even 30 years ago, but gosh darn it, people in Shreveport sure seem to like him.

I remain astonished that so much of the media remain committed to covering Donald Trump and sedition-adjacent extremists such as Johnson as if they are normal American politicians. But while Americans pretend that all is well, the rest of the world is busily going about its terrifying business, which is why one comment in the Post article jumped out at me.

“Politics here is personal,” according to Celeste Gauthier, 45. (The Post, for some reason, notes that Gauthier attended Middlebury College for a time—perhaps as a clumsy way of trying to tell us she’s not merely some rough local, and that she returned from Vermont to help run her family’s three restaurants.) She is concerned:

“People really do look at the funding we’re sending to Israel and Ukraine and say, ‘I can’t afford to go to Kroger,’” Gauthier said as she sat amid the lunchtime crowd, some of whom she said had stopped buying beverages because of the cost. “A lot of these customers know Mike Johnson and think we often get overlooked and maybe we won’t anymore,” she said.

I’m not sure what it means to be “overlooked” in a cherry-red district in a state where, as the Post notes, Republicans will control all three branches of state government once the conservative governor-elect is sworn in, but the comment about foreign aid is a classic expression of how little people understand about the subject.

Perhaps Gauthier or others believe that the new speaker—who has been opposed to sending aid to Ukraine—would redirect the money back to “overlooked” Louisianans, maybe as increased aid to the poor. He wouldn’t, of course, as he has already proposed huge cuts in social spending. As for Israel, evangelical Christians such as Johnson have a special interest in Israel for their own eschatological reasons, and Johnson has already decided to decouple aid to Israel from aid to Ukraine. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—whose understanding of foreign policy is practically Churchillian compared with Johnson’s—is none too happy about that.

Let’s review some important realities.

First, foreign aid is about 1 percent of the U.S. budget, roughly $60 billion. Special appropriations to Ukraine have, over the course of 18 months, added up to about $75 billion, including both humanitarian aid and weapons. Israel—a far smaller country that has, over the past 70 years, cumulatively received more foreign aid from the United States than from any other country—usually gets about $3 billion, but Joe Biden now wants to add about $14 billion to that.

That’s a lot of money. To put it in perspective, however, Americans forked over about $181 billion annually on snacks, and $115 billion for beer last year. (They also shell out about $7 billion annually just for potato chips. The snack spending is increasing, perhaps because Americans now spend about $30 billion on legal marijuana every year.) Americans also ante up a few bucks here and there on legal sports gambling, and by “a few” I mean more than $220 billion over the past five years.

I know suds and weed and sports books and pretzels are more fun than helping Ukrainians stay alive. And I know, too, that supposedly small-government conservatives will answer: It’s none of your damn business what Americans are spending their money on.

They’re right—up to a point. But we are, in theory, adults who can establish sensible priorities. We pay taxes so that the federal government can do things that no other level of government can achieve, and national security is one of them. Right now, the Russian army—the greatest threat to NATO in Europe—is taking immense losses on a foreign battlefield for a total investment that (as of this moment) is less than one-tenth of the amount we spend on defense in a single year. This is the spending Mike Johnson is so worried about?

Of course, we might repeat one more time that much of the food and weapons and other goods America sends to places like Israel and Ukraine are actually made by Americans. And yet many Republican leaders (and their propaganda arm at Fox and other outlets) continue to talk about aid as if some State Department phantom in a trench coat meets the president of Ukraine or the prime minister of Israel in an alley and hands over a metal briefcase filled with neatly wrapped stacks of bills.

We need to stop asking people in diners about foreign aid. (Populists who demand that we rely on guidance from The People should remember that most Americans think foreign aid should be about 10 percent of the budget—a percentage those voters think would be a reduction but would actually be a massive increase.) Instead, put our national leaders on the spot to explain what they think foreign aid is, where it goes, and what it does, and then call them out, every time, when they spin fantasies about it. Otherwise, legislators such as Johnson will be able to sit back and let the folks at the pie counter believe that he’s going to round up $75 billion and send it back home.

That’s an old and dumb trope, but it works. If you’re a Republican in Congress, and if you can stay in Washington by convincing people at the diner that you’re going to take cash from Ukrainians (wherever they are) and give it back to the hardworking waitress pouring your coffee, then you do it—because in this new GOP, your continued presence in Washington is more important than anything, including the security of the United States.

Related:

Yes, the U.S. can afford to help its allies. Why the GOP extremists oppose Ukraine

Today’s News

Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza over the weekend. Tanks and troops continue to push deeper into the city. A trial began in Colorado over whether Donald Trump is ineligible to hold presidential office again under the Fourteenth Amendment. Russian protesters in the largely Muslim-populated area of Dagestan marched on an airport, surrounding a plane that had arrived from Tel Aviv, on Sunday; at least 10 people were injured.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: There’s a secretive industry devouring the U.S. economy, Rogé Karma writes. It’s made one-fifth of the market effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators.

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P.S.

Back in February, I wrote that I was somewhat mystified when Nikki Haley entered the GOP primaries. I was never a fan of the South Carolina governor, because I reject any candidate who bent the knee to Donald Trump. I described her announcement of her candidacy as “vapid and weightless,” and I expected her campaign to be no better. I assumed that she would be gone early.

Was I wrong? Haley was strong in the GOP debates (such that they were without Trump) and is now surging ahead of the hapless Ron DeSantis as the most credible Trump alternative. My friend Michael Strain today even presented “The Case for Nikki Haley” in National Review, a magazine that up until now has been a DeSantis stronghold. I remain convinced that Haley cannot beat Trump, even if she would be more formidable against Biden than either Trump or DeSantis. But I was too quick off the blocks in my assumption that Haley was going to get bigfooted off the stage by other candidates. Of course, I also didn’t predict that Vivek Ramaswamy would be on that same stage and that he would claim the early prize for “most obnoxious GOPer not named Trump.” I’m a creative guy, but there are limits even to my imagination.

— Tom

In an eight-week limited series, The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you wrap your mind around the dawn of a new machine age. Sign up for the Atlantic Intelligence newsletter to receive the first edition next week.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Sam Bankman-Fried is testifying in his own case. He has the chance to tell his side of the story—something he’s historically been very good at—but now the former FTX executive is having trouble explaining himself.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Dean Phillips has a warning for Democrats. The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false. The science behind basketball’s biggest debate

A Nearly Impossible Interlocutor

On the witness stand in a Manhattan federal courtroom yesterday, Sam Bankman-Fried gave off the impression that he was not accustomed to being grilled. For years, that was true: No investors sat on FTX’s board of directors, and people clamored to give him money without doing proper due diligence. But even if people had tried to question Bankman-Fried about the integrity or process of his company, it seems he would have proved a nearly impossible interlocutor. On the stand, he eagerly explained complicated tech concepts such as the blockchain. But when tougher questions about seemingly straightforward topics were brought up—such as whether or not a payment agreement authorized Alameda Research, FTX’s sister company, to spend customer funds, and whether he got permission from lawyers to destroy messages—he deflected, reframed, apologized, and changed the subject.

The question of whether Bankman-Fried would testify in his own defense has been hanging over his trial since it began nearly four weeks ago. Testifying allows a defendant to tell his own story, but it also opens him up to self-incrimination. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers announced on Wednesday that he would testify, and he was expected to start yesterday. Instead, the judge made the unusual decision to hold an evidentiary hearing, in order to decide what parts of Bankman-Fried’s testimony would be permissible to include before the jury. This surprise hearing was effectively a dry run of Bankman-Fried’s testimony, which began in front of jurors this morning. (A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.)

With the confident, at times slightly condescending manner of a special-interest-podcast host, Bankman-Fried first answered a series of easy questions from the defense, arguing that FTX’s lawyers were to blame for many of the company’s failures, and claiming that he had followed their guidance in good faith. For a short while, he appeared at ease. He famously used to play video games during important calls—with investors, with Anna Wintour, with journalists—and some of that weary insouciance came through while he was on the stand. “Yep,” he sometimes chirped in the middle of his lawyer’s questions, as if he was already bored of the question.

But during cross-examination, conducted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, Bankman-Fried began to flounder. I watched as he rotated through a number of tactics in quick succession. He repeatedly said that he didn’t remember a lot of aspects of running his company. He used passive voice excessively, describing a business that was apparently operating itself around him. That was unsurprising; his lawyers have been signaling that other people were to blame for FTX’s failures throughout the trial. More unusual was the way that he began to attempt to gain the upper hand in the cross-examination: At some points, he condescended to Sassoon, or adopted the rhetoric of the lawyers. “Once again, I will give a specific answer, but if this is not scoped correctly, tell me,” he said at one point (as if it was his job, not that of the lawyers and judge, to worry about scope). At another point, Bankman-Fried conveyed his apologies that “because of the order we’re doing this in, this [response] will be a somewhat substantial digression.” Sassoon didn’t blink at this implicit critique of how she was doing her job. Bankman-Fried is used to being on the side of people like elite lawyers. (His parents, both Stanford law professors, were sitting in court, jotting down notes or doodles in legal pads.) Facing off against lawyers in court, he alternated between presenting himself as a collaborator who was just trying to help and offering word-salad answers that did not help at all.

Bankman-Fried also subtly attempted to erode Sassoon’s authority by suggesting that her questions were unclear: “I wouldn’t phrase it that way. But I think that the answer to the question I understand you to be trying to ask is yes,” he said, in response to a question—of central importance to the case—about whether a payment agreement allowed Alameda to spend customer deposits. When Sassoon pulled up an exhibit and asked Bankman-Fried to point out where in the agreement it said that Alameda was allowed to spend customer funds, he paused for well over a minute, casting his eyes downward. Then, at last, he broke the silence: “So I should preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer,” he said, before delivering such a long and convoluted answer that Sassoon got the judge’s approval to repeat the question and try to get him to answer it again. In front of the jury this morning, Bankman-Fried stuck to the narrative his lawyers had set up in recent weeks, portraying himself as a hard-working entrepreneur who got in over his head.

Bankman-Fried has always been a good talker, and it’s that skill that helped him not only to make money, but to gain power. Telling his side of the story is his specialty. A big part of this story is that FTX was never really about getting rich. Bankman-Fried did, of course, come to be worth billions of dollars. But he justified his profitable gambits by saying that he was using his money to make the world a better place. Through his millions of dollars of donations to the effective-altruism movement, he devoted himself to a goal no less lofty than saving the future of humanity, focusing large portions of his philanthropy on artificial intelligence and preventing future pandemics.

Through prolific additional donations (many of which are now under legal scrutiny), he also attempted to reshape politics; Bankman-Fried was one of the biggest donors of the 2022 campaign cycle. He also made repeated trips to Washington and lobbied consistently for the crypto industry. Before FTX collapsed, Bankman-Fried’s money, and his power, was in fact beginning to change the world—in part because no one questioned him in the way that government prosecutors have done in court. After watching him yesterday, I’d guess that even those who might have tried questioning him didn’t get very far; Bankman-Fried’s rhetorical gymnastics were exasperating (especially to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who kept admonishing him to just answer the questions). Bankman-Fried is a numbers guy; his lawyer called him a “math nerd” in court. But he’s also long been a language guy, deft at using words to gain power. In court yesterday, under the harsh scrutiny of federal prosecutors, that rhetoric was falling flat.

Related:

The taming of Sam Bankman-Fried The journalist and the fallen billionaire

Today’s News

Judge Arthur Engoron ruled that Ivanka Trump must testify at her father’s New York civil fraud trial. The United States carried out two precision strikes on Iran-linked locations in Syria as retaliation for attacks on its bases and personnel in the area. Li Keqiang, the former premier of China, died at the age of 68.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Stop doomscrolling about Israel and Palestine, Gal Beckerman writes—read these books instead. Up for Debate: When should people try to better the world through their job? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers for their thoughts, and discusses university responses to the Israel-Hamas war.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: jjwithers / Getty.

Why America Doesn’t Build

By Jerusalem Demsas

Here’s how wind-energy projects aren’t built in America. This particular story took place a decade ago but could easily have unfolded last year or last month. In 2013, a Texas-based company put forward a proposal to build two windmill farms in northeastern Alabama. The company said that the farms would generate enough power for more than 24,000 homes, eagerly projecting that it would break ground by the end of 2013. But local opposition swiftly defeated the project. Opponents also won stringent regulations that made future wind farms in the area extremely unlikely...

In the typical cultural script, a polluting corporation tries to crush the little guy; a pipeline threatens a defenseless fox; a faceless bureaucrat charts the course of a highway through a thriving neighborhood. Accordingly, American environmentalists have developed tools to help citizens delay or block development. These tools are now being used against clean-energy projects, hampering a green transition. The legal tactics that allow someone to challenge a pipeline can also help them fight a solar farm; the political rhetoric deployed against the siting of toxic-waste dumps can be redeployed against transmission lines. And the whole concept that regular people can and should act as a private attorneys general has, in practice, put the green transition at the mercy of people with access, money, and time, while diluting the influence of those without.

Read the full article.

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Watch. David Fincher’s The Killer (in select theaters) is a movie about the perils of being a control freak.

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In recent weeks, statements about the Israel-Hamas war have emerged from corporations of all kinds. Predictably, they have not all gone over well.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

​​A speaker without enemies—for now “You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba.” The junk is winning.

The Logic of Speaking Out

Since October 7, more than 150 companies have made statements condemning Hamas’s attacks on Israel. A tracker compiled by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a business professor at Yale, shows the wide-ranging nature of the industries represented. Palantir, which works with governments on data and defense projects and has an office in Israel, took out a full-page ad in the The New York Times that said “Palantir stands with Israel.” Salesforce, which has offices in Israel, put out a statement condemning Hamas’s attack and outlining support for employees there. And brands with less obvious connections to the region, such as Major League Baseball, have issued statements as well.

At one time in American history, tech firms and sports leagues would not have been expected to wade into geopolitical issues. For many years, for better or worse, the role of corporations was principally to make money. But over the past decade especially, some employees and customers have started expecting, or even demanding, that companies speak out on social issues. The rise of the social web, and the eagerness among many brands to establish a direct line of communication with consumers, created an environment in which such a dialogue wasn’t just possible but seemed unavoidable. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement continued to grow, many corporations made statements about racial justice (and many, in turn, faced blowback from employees and consumers who saw the statements as insincere). After the fall of Roe v. Wade, corporations generally took a circumspect approach, more commonly issuing statements about what they were doing to help employees access health care than taking a stance on the morality of abortion. Now companies are once again navigating the tricky terrain of public statements as the Israel-Hamas war continues.

A lot of the pressure on corporations to speak out about political or social issues is coming from younger workers who believe that companies should operate with a sense of purpose beyond just making money, Paul Argenti, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, told me. And some are vocal: Employees at Instacart and Procter & Gamble have reportedly complained about their employers’ lack of immediate public statements on the Israel-Hamas war. And some workers are pressuring their employers—including major tech companies, according to a Washington Post report—to issue statements condemning the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza, which fewer large corporations have done thus far. (Plenty of companies have issued mealier-mouthed statements falling somewhere in the middle, angering even more people.)

It’s important, Argenti said, for executives to think about why releasing a statement in a fraught moment makes sense for them. Companies that speak out on one issue without truly thinking about why they are doing so may get caught in a challenging loop. “If you don’t have a plan for how you’re thinking about” social issues, “then you have to talk about everything,” Argenti said, adding that speaking without a clear reason can lead to “wishy-washy statements that are just trying to get on the bandwagon … That is a very dangerous place to be, because you’re going to get heat.” There are plenty of good reasons, he argued, for an executive to issue a statement—because of business interests in a region, for example, or to speak out on an issue of great personal importance. But saying something just because everyone else is, because employees are outraged, or because you want to seem like the good guy in a charged moment may well backfire. “Corporations are not political entities that have to speak out on every issue,” he told me.

The proliferation of company statements in recent years might suggest that customers are clamoring for their favorite brands to speak up, too, but it’s not clear that the majority of consumers actually care all that much, especially lately. This year, 41 percent of consumers said that businesses should take a stand on current events, according to a poll from Gallup and Bentley University, down from 48 percent last year. Forrester, a research and analysis firm, saw a dip for the first time in four years in the number of surveyed adults who say they “regularly purchase from brands that align with their personal values.” There are certain issues that consumers tend to think companies should comment on: 55 percent of people said companies should speak up about climate change, the Gallup and Bentley polling found. But just 27 percent of people said that companies should speak up about international conflicts (however, these data were gathered before the Israel-Hamas war began).

Businesses aren’t the only ones making statements—or taking heat for their stances. Universities, celebrities, and even many individuals with large followings on social media have shared public statements on the conflict in recent weeks. Sam Adler-Bell, writing about statement mania in New York magazine, suggested that part of the compulsion to speak out has to do with the sense of helplessness many feel about the war and their own ability to affect its outcome. “When our government is this unresponsive, it makes sense that Americans look closer to home for moral clarity. Powerless to influence actual policy outcomes, we settle for battling over discourse,” he writes.

Corporations exist to make a profit, and they sell goods and services that end up shaping our culture. But their role is also slowly morphing into something more personal—and much wider in scope than it once was. Sonnenfeld, the Yale professor tracking statements, told me that in his view, some of the pressure to speak out may come from the role that business leaders play in a time of deteriorating trust in politicians, media, and the clergy. “CEOs have become pillars of trust in society,” he said. The notion of CEOs as America’s hope for moral leadership may be enough to make skeptics raise an eyebrow, but the decline in public trust is worrying and real.

Even for the corporations whose CEOs are driven primarily by a mission in the public interest, more often than not, opining on issues of global foreign policy is of questionable value. Corporations are already deeply embedded in the political system because of their lobbying power and ability to influence regulations. “That’s enough,” Argenti said. “Do we want them involved in thinking about political issues,” too?

Related:

What conservatives misunderstand about radicalism at universities Beware the language that erases reality.

Today’s News

Mike Johnson was elected speaker of the House with unanimous Republican support. Hurricane Otis made landfall in Mexico as a Category 5 storm. Michael Cohen took the stand again today in Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial after testifying yesterday that the former president instructed him to inflate the value of certain assets.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Zoë Schlanger explores the invisible force keeping carbon in the ground. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers readers’ thoughts on what Israel can learn from America’s 9/11 response.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

The Asahi Shimbun / Getty

What If There’s a Secret Benefit to Getting Asian Glow?

By Katherine J. Wu

At every party, no matter the occasion, my drink of choice is soda water with lime. I have never, not once, been drunk—or even finished a full serving of alcohol. The single time I came close to doing so (thanks to half a serving of mulled wine), my heart rate soared, the room spun, and my face turned stop-sign red … all before I collapsed in front of a college professor at an academic event.

The blame for my alcohol aversion falls fully on my genetics: Like an estimated 500 million other people, most of them of East Asian descent, I carry a genetic mutation called ALDH2*2 that causes me to produce broken versions of an enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, preventing my body from properly breaking down the toxic components of alcohol. And so, whenever I drink, all sorts of poisons known as aldehydes build up in my body—a predicament that my face announces to everyone around me.

By one line of evolutionary logic, I and the other sufferers of so-called alcohol flush (also known as Asian glow) shouldn’t exist.

Read the full article.

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The MAGA movement has been infused with violence and threats of violence for years. Those threats—now aimed at Republican lawmakers—are the new normal in the GOP.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The hard truth about immigration A record of pure, predatory sadism Too many people own dogs. How the media got the hospital explosion wrong

Sleeping With a Gun by the Bed

The trash fire that is the Republican competition to elect the speaker of the House is entering a new phase now that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio is out of the running. Nine men have put themselves forward; Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota is the apparent favorite, at least for now. Of the nine, seven voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. (Emmer and Representative Austin Scott of Georgia voted to certify the results.)

Before this contest moves into horse-race handicapping, we should revisit the astonishing stories from over the weekend about the threats made against Republican legislators during Jordan’s brief candidacy. CNN’s Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, and Aaron Blake at The Washington Post, among others, reported on these threats, but many Americans seem unable to muster more than a shrug and a kind of resigned acceptance that this is just how some Republicans are now. The only people who seem angry about this are the Republican lawmakers who, along with their families, received these threats.

Although Jordan repudiated these tactics, some of his colleagues blame him anyway, and Americans are now, as Blake wrote last week, in a “long-overdue” conversation about the role of threats in public life, one that “should include a recognition that these threats and intimidation can work, and probably have.”

That “conversation,” unfortunately, is unlikely to continue. Republicans have long feared their own voters, and have for years whispered about it among themselves. Now that Jordan has been defeated, they will likely go back to pretending that such threats are isolated incidents. But the threats during Jordan’s candidacy should confirm that Trump’s MAGA loyalists, firmly nested in the GOP, constitute a violent movement that refuses to lose any democratic contest—even to other members of its own party.

Some of these threats can be dismissed as the result of technology: The frictional costs of threatening people are basically nonexistent. Angry cranks once needed time and materials (envelopes and stamps, or at least a call to an information line) to say awful things. Today, people are surfing the internet with a smartphone—their personal secretary and valet—right by their side, so the interval between having a repulsive thought and expressing it to a target is now functionally zero.

But email and the internet, and political violence in the United States, have been around for a while. Only in the age of Trump have threats become a common part of daily American partisan politics. Almost anyone who is even remotely a public figure now gets them over almost anything, and Trump and his movement have gone quite far in killing any sense of shame for saying terrible things to other people or their families over political differences.

Not only does Trump expressly model this kind of behavior; he and his media enablers provide rationalizations for such threats. Ironically, many of these excuses were once associated with the violent far left a half-century ago: The system is rigged; democracy is a mug’s game; anyone who disagrees with you is an enemy; those in power will never give it up without being subjected to violence and intimidation. But much of it is also out of the far-right, fascist playbook: The elites are plotting against you; anyone who disagrees with you is obviously in on the plot; the only salvation is if We the People engage in violence ordained by God himself.

We’ve seen these illiberal, populist attitudes and beliefs before. What we have not seen in America until now is the capture of a major political party by this kind of paranoia and violence.

The threats around Jordan’s attempt to gain the gavel are also different because the people making them are reaching down into granular, inside-baseball GOP politics. In recent years, some MAGA adherents have made threats against their partisan opponents in order to defend Trump’s honor, or because they were convinced that the 2020 election was stolen. Now, however, the movement is turning on its own. Some people follow internal House conferences as if they are members of the caucus, and treat the election of a speaker—which is important, to be sure—as an existential battle.

Amazingly, these people made threats in support of … Jim Jordan. They are actually menacing other human beings over the ambitions of a loudmouthed, ineffectual member of Congress.

After threats over the speakership, what’s next? Death threats over who becomes deputy whip? Put the honorable Mr. Bloggs on the Rules Committee, or I’ll hurt your family? As the writer Eric Hoffer so presciently noted more than 70 years ago, decadence and boredom can be among the most useful raw materials for the construction of an authoritarian movement, and clearly, American society has plenty of both.

Many Republican legislators are scared, and they should be. Only 25 members of the House GOP conference voted against Jordan on the floor during the last round of voting. Many more opposed making him speaker; in a secret ballot, 112 of Jordan’s colleagues voted against him—which suggests that more than 80 of them feared doing so in public.

It’s not uncommon for members of Congress to vote one way among themselves and then cast a different vote on the floor, especially if the issue is one where the national party is at odds with the voters in a member’s district. Such political calculations, though sometimes distasteful, are common. But democracy cannot function if legislators feel that their lives—and those of their families—are in danger from their fellow citizens. No matter what happens with Trump and the MAGA cult, the Republican Party cannot go on this way, and some of the legislators who spoke up about threats during Jordan’s attempt to become speaker seem to know it.

What they are willing to do about it is less clear. But I wonder if the arrests and convictions for the January 6 insurrection are having their effect: One caller to a representative, after a string of f-bombs and barely veiled threats, made an effort to stipulate that he was speaking only of nonviolent harassment. Perhaps holding such people legally accountable for their actions—whether they intended violence or were just trying to throw a scare into others—might begin to reverse this trend.

Republican elected officials didn’t seem to care very much about such rhetoric when it was aimed at their opponents, and they were only briefly shaken on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob made clear that there was plenty of room reserved on the gibbet for Mike Pence and other Republican leaders. Perhaps they’ll take such threats more seriously now that their internal squabbles could lead to their wives having to sleep with a gun by the bed, but I suspect that the hyper-partisanship and stunning cowardice that brought the GOP to this moment will, as ever, win the day.

Related:

The new anarchy Only the GOP celebrates political violence.

Today’s News

Two more hostages were released by Hamas. The International Committee of the Red Cross said that it facilitated their release. The Philippines accused the Chinese coast guard of “intentionally” hitting its boats in a disputed area of the South China Sea. María Corina Machado won the Venezuelan opposition’s first presidential primary in more than a decade. If allowed to run, she will challenge President Nicolás Maduro in what he has promised will be an internationally monitored election next year.

Dispatches

Famous People: Lizzie Plaugic and Kaitlyn Tiffany try to find ghosts in Manhattan, but all they see is Anderson Cooper’s apartment.

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More From The Atlantic

What Jada Pinkett Smith’s critics don’t understand ​​When America helped assassinate an African leader Is a coincidental similarity enough for real intimacy?

Culture Break

Read. In Lee Friedlander’s new retrospective, Real Estate, the great American documentary photographer treats American cityscapes as focal points.

Watch. With Bad Bunny as the host, the weekend’s Saturday Night Live (streaming on Peacock) was defiantly bilingual—and all the better for it.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

A while back, I said that I would occasionally use this space to revisit some 1980s musical oddities. This week, I want to remind you how very political music videos could be in the Decade of Excess. You’ve probably seen the video for the 1986 Genesis hit “Land of Confusion,” which used Britain’s Spitting Image puppets to portray world leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to trippy effect. Reagan made a lot of appearances in words and images in those days, including in Sting’s “Russians,” Men at Work’s “It’s a Mistake,” and others.

But for my money, the best video with a Reagan reference was made by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Better known for its huge dance hit “Relax,” in 1984, the band recorded “Two Tribes,” a song about nuclear war. (I wrote about MTV’s nuclear genre here.) The video features two actors, one obviously Reagan, and the other—and this is the cool trivia part—meant to be the Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The two of them beat each other up until the world explodes. The end.

But wait—who? Exactly. Chernenko was leader of the U.S.S.R. for all of 13 months, mostly as a seat warmer in ill health. History has forgotten him, but thanks to a video filmed at the right moment in time, he will live on, forever headbutting Reagan and biting the American president’s ear in an eternal arena match.

— Tom

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.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

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?

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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

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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.

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The ongoing drama over electing a speaker of the House is not about governance. It’s about giving Republican voters the drama-filled reality show they voted for and want to see—even at the expense of the country.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Self-checkout is a failed experiment. What conservatives misunderstand about radicalism at universities Hezbollah watches and waits. Four misconceptions about the war in Gaza

What the Voters Wanted

Like many Americans, I have been both fascinated and horrified by the inability of the Republican majority to elect a new speaker of the House. I admit to watching the votes like I’m rubbernecking at a car wreck, but perhaps that’s not a good analogy, because I at least feel pity for the victims of a traffic accident. What’s happening in the House is more like watching a group of obnoxious (and not very bright) hot-rodders playing chicken and smashing their cars into one another over and over.

As I watch all of this Republican infighting, I wonder, as I often do, about GOP voters. What is it that they think will happen if Jim Jordan becomes speaker? Jordan has been in Congress for 16 years, and he has almost nothing to show for it. He’s never originated any successful legislation, never whipped votes, never accomplished anything except for appearing on Fox and serving up rancid red meat to his Ohio constituents and MAGA allies.

And therefore, as speaker, he would … what? Order up more impeachments, perhaps of Biden-administration officials? Shut down the government? Pound the gavel and prattle on for hours in his never-take-a-breath style? (Jordan’s the kind of guy who probably would have interrupted the Sermon on the Mount.) Perhaps from a position of greater power, he could more effectively assist Donald Trump in undermining yet another election in 2024.

Maybe that’s why Trump endorsed him for speaker.

Is that what Republican voters really want? Apparently so; as my friend Sarah Longwell, the founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, told my Atlantic colleague Ronald Brownstein, “Even if he doesn’t make it, because the majorities are so slim, you can’t argue that Jim Jordan doesn’t represent the median Republican today.”

And that is the part we tend to overlook when we’re focused on the drama inside the Capitol: The disorder in the GOP caucus is not some accident or glitch triggered by a handful of reprobates, but rather a direct result of choices by voters. The House is a mess because enough Republican voters want it to be a mess.

This accusation might seem unfair: Jordan is just one member from a super-red (and blatantly gerrymandered) district, and many of his Republican colleagues are furious about this humiliating bungle. But right-wing voters have shown no inclination to punish people such as Matt Gaetz and other political vandals; indeed, Gaetz and his like-minded colleagues are rapidly becoming folk heroes in the Republican Party.

It’s not much consolation to recognize that the Republicans are now the party their voters want them to be. Their antics endanger us all, especially during multiple international crises when the United States needs to be unified and effective both at home and abroad. But to treat the GOP as merely dysfunctional is worse than a distraction; it is a fundamental error that offers the false hope that a mature and governing majority is somehow within reach, if only Jordan or Gaetz would get out of the way.

The real problem is that many Republican voters have now completely internalized the cynicism of Trump and the GOP opportunists around him, and they draw no connection between national politics and the ongoing health and security of the United States. These voters rely on everyone else (including those Americans they deride as the “deep state”) to keep the country functioning. They vote for masters of performative nonsense, such as Jordan and Gaetz, who do nothing for the “forgotten” working families in the places that the MAGA movement claims have been left behind by the rest of us.

The twists and turns of the Trump years, in which many elected Republicans became big spenders, critics of law enforcement, and apologists for the Kremlin, illustrated that MAGA voters have almost no interest in anything like conservatism, or even in coherent policy. Instead, they want to indulge resentments and grievances that have little to do with government and everything to do with boredom and dissatisfaction in their own lives. A few years ago, I wrote a book about how such voters project that anger and sourness onto everything around them. Their ennui spurs their desire to see chaos, so they argue that the existing order needs to be shaken up, or burned down, or defunded.

They think this way because they have never had to live under a government that has actually been shaken up, burned down, or defunded. Jordan and his colleagues (who have made entire careers out of encouraging such nihilism) are poor leaders but good politicians. They deliver what their voters really want: show trials and passion plays, and, mostly, to see other people unsettled and angry. These citizens vote not for determined legislators with complicated plans—that stuff is just so boring—but for entertaining rogues who can liven up the Fox prime-time hours.

Years ago, I thought that Republican voters would demand changes from the party if the GOP lost enough elections. But even losses don’t seem to matter in a party that is clearly more comfortable with performance art centered on imaginary grievances than with actual governing. The shenanigans of the past two weeks might even cost the Republicans control of the House in the next election—that’s one reason Jordan’s colleagues are trying to stop him—but that political collapse might not matter to right-wing voters. They’ll get another episode of their favorite show—and for them, maybe that’s enough.

Related:

The threat to democracy is coming from inside the U.S. House. Jim Jordan could have a long fight ahead.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and backed Israel’s claims that it had no involvement in the al-Ahli Arab Hospital attack in Gaza City. A 4.2-magnitude earthquake struck Northern California, affecting Sacramento County and sections of the Bay Area. The Venezuelan government and opposition party have struck a deal to work toward fairer elections in 2024.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The insurance industry’s climate math is brutal, Zoë Schlanger writes. Sometimes, an uninsurable town can become uninhabitable.

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Evening Read

Courtesy of Matthew Cox / The Atlantic

The Con Man Who Became a True-Crime Writer

By Rachel Monroe

Last April, I received an odd email from a man named Matthew Cox. “I am an inmate at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida,” he wrote. “I’m also a true crime writer.” He had one year left on his sentence and was “attempting to develop a body of work that will allow me to exit prison with a new career.” He included a story about a fellow inmate who’d been ensnared in a complicated currency-trading scam, hoping that I’d write about it for The Atlantic.

“This is fascinating,” I replied. I didn’t mean the currency-trading scam, which was too procedural for my tastes, but Cox’s own trajectory. He described himself as “an infamous con man writing his fellow inmates’ true crime stories while immersed in federal prison.” I’d never had a possible subject pitch his own tale so aptly. I wasn’t entirely sure that was a good thing.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe. Source: Getty.

Read. In Wellness, Nathan Hill recounts a love story, but also much, much more.

Watch. Wes Anderson’s renditions of Roald Dahl’s short stories (streaming on Netflix) ask us to think actively—even skeptically—about what we’re seeing.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Lately, as I’ve been indulging my habit of watching vintage television from the 1960s and ’70s, I’ve noticed how often I encounter William Windom. He was a mainstay of my childhood television days, and when I mentioned him on social media, I realized how many folks out there remember him as fondly as I do. He was a remarkable character actor (the other night, I saw him on both Mannix and Barney Miller), and he even brought some gravitas as the president in Escape From the Planet of the Apes. Many of us of a certain age, however, remember his starring role in My World and Welcome to It, based on the humor and cartoons of James Thurber, which ran for only one season yet is still beloved by many.

But I will always have a soft spot for Windom because of two roles. One, famous among Star Trek nerds like me, was his 1967 turn as Commodore Matt Decker, the tormented Starfleet officer who loses his ship and crew to an alien doomsday machine. He was also the star of one of Night Gallery’s best stories, a 1971 segment titled “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar,” about a man facing loss and nostalgia as he enters middle age. “Tim Riley’s Bar,” written by Rod Serling, was a different kind of episode for Night Gallery, and it was nominated for an Emmy.

Movie stars are great, but give me a solid character actor like Windom any day.

— Tom

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.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Most of America’s current political environment can be traced back to one moment: the election of Donald Trump. The bedlam continues—and, to understand the stakes in 2024, imagine how different the world would look if he’d lost.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Israel is walking into a trap. The progressives who flunked the Hamas test Trump’s only real worldview is pettiness. Computers are learning to smell.

One Single Day

Regret about “what might have been” is not a particularly productive emotion. Counterfactual history, however, is quite useful. I have used it for years in teaching international relations, to help students see that not everything in history is inevitable, that accidents and sudden turns can change the destiny of nations.

Also, as a science-fiction fan, I’m a sucker for the alternate-history genre, the kind of stuff where the Roman empire never rises or America loses the Revolutionary War. I loved NBC’s show Timeless, in which a team—including an academic historian!—has to run around stopping time-terrorists from messing with great events. I even liked Quantum Leap and the idea of one man traveling through the years to fix individual lives rather than alter the grand march of time.

As I continue to watch the GOP flail about—House Republicans have now chosen the execrable Representative Jim Jordan for speaker, replacing Steve Scalise, whose nomination lasted 48 hours—I have been thinking about an alternate history of a United States where Donald Trump lost the 2016 election. I am convinced that the chaos now overtaking much of the American political system was not inevitable: The source of our ongoing political disorder is because of a razor-thin victory in an election in 2016 decided by a relatively tiny number of voters.

I recognize that others will depict Trump’s victory as the inexorable result of long-term trends. Some, perhaps, would identify 1994, when Newt Gingrich proved that political nastiness was an effective campaign strategy, as the Year of No Return, or the election of 2010, when Americans rewarded the flamboyant jerkitude of the Tea Party with seats in Congress.

There’s a lot of truth to such explanations. Long-term trends matter, because over time, they frame debates and shape the choices available to voters. The Republicans have been moving further and further to the right, but I have always argued that 2016 was a fluke, a perfect storm with epochal consequences: The GOP field was fractured and feckless; Trump was a well-known celebrity; the Democrats ran Hillary Clinton instead of supporting Joe Biden for a shot at what would have been Barack Obama’s third term. And it was close, because of the structure of the Electoral College. (The headline of an article by Tina Nguyen, written a few weeks after Trump’s win, captures it nicely: “You Could Fit All the Voters Who Cost Clinton the Election in a Mid-Size Football Stadium.”)

Trump’s win set up a series of cascading failures. Winning in 2016 turbocharged Trump’s claims of leading a movement. His victory encouraged other Republicans to go into survival mode and adopt the protective coloration of Trumpism just to win their primaries, a process that led directly to the crapstorm deluging the House at this very moment. Most Republicans in Congress, as Mitt Romney has told us, hate Trump, and many of them probably wish that someone could jump into the Time Tunnel, go back to 2016, and persuade a few thousand voters in three or four states to come to their senses.

At the least, a Trump loss would have let other Republicans avoid sinking in the populist swamp. Elise Stefanik might be a relentless political opportunist, but without Trump, she and other GOP leaders could have pronounced Trumpian extremism a failure and stayed in something like a center-right lane. On the Earth Where Trump Lost, Fox-addicted voters might still have sent irresponsible performance artists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz to Congress, but the institutional Republicans would have had every incentive to marginalize them. (Remember, Jordan’s been in the House since 2007, but attaching himself to Trump has helped to put the speaker’s gavel within his reach.)

Had Trump lost, someone might even have bothered to read (and act on) the so-called Republican National Committee “autopsy” of 2013, which argued that the future of the party relies on better appeals to immigrants, women, minorities, and young people. With Trump’s win, that kind of talk went out the window. Instead, the Trump GOP chained itself to the votes of older white Americans—a declining population. Republicans thus had to squeeze more votes out of a shrinking base, and the only way to do that was to build on Trump’s bond with his personality cult and defend him at all costs.

Perhaps most important, a Trump loss would have prevented (or at least delayed) the normalization of violence and authoritarianism in American politics. This is not to say that the Republicans would today be a healthy party, but Trump’s victory confirmed the surrender of the national GOP to a sociopathic autocrat. There’s a difference between a dysfunctional party and a party that has decayed into a mindless countercultural movement, and that rail switch was thrown in November 2016.

An irony in thinking through the 2016 counterfactual case is how many people, including Trump and the herd of sycophants who coalesced around him, would have been better off if Trump had lost. Excellent books by the Washington Post reporter Ben Terris and by my Atlantic colleague Mark Leibovich have described the kind of people who formed up behind Trump, and it is striking how many of them are now facing personal and political ruin. Perhaps someone like Seb Gorka feels that he did well by jumping from academic obscurity to fish-pill sales, but others whose associations with Trump opened the door to greater scrutiny and eventual disaster—think of Matt Schlapp, Peter Navarro, or even the pathetic Rudy Giuliani—would all have been better off had Trump had flamed out.

But no one should wish for the Guardian of Forever to open a gate back to 2016 more than Trump himself. Had he lost, he could have fulfilled what was likely his true wish, to go back to his life in New York as a faux-capitalist fraudster while traveling the country as a pretend president, holding rallies and raking in money from credulous rubes. Instead, he faces humiliation, financial failure, and criminal indictments.

Measures such as impeachment that could have taken Trump out of American political life were destined to fail because of 2016. The 2020 election proved Trump’s toxicity, but by then, too many Republicans had made too many compromises and they could no longer just walk away. Their fates (which for some might include prison) are sealed.

All of this chaos and misery was avoidable—and all of it stemmed from one election and the choices of a tiny number of Americans who could have averted these disasters. As Trump tries to regain his office, voters should remember that nothing is inevitable: Choices matter. Elections matter. A single day can matter.

Related:

What Mitt Romney saw in the Senate The indictment of Donald Trump—and his enablers

Today’s News

Palestinians are fleeing northern Gaza after the Israeli military ordered more than 1 million people to evacuate; the United Nations has called the evacuation “impossible … to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Representative Steve Scalise backed out of the race for speaker of the House yesterday. Jim Jordan has been nominated to succeed him. Kaiser Permanente has reached a tentative deal with its health-care workers after a three-day walkout.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Mary Gabriel’s new biography documents Madonna’s indelible position in pop, Emma Sarappo writes.

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The lessons Israel failed to learn from the Yom Kippur War Online betting has gone off the deep end. A uniquely terrible new DEI policy

Culture Break

Read. Rich Paul’s new memoir, Lucky Me, explores the good luck of a hard life.

Watch. Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or–winning film, Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters), is an emotional puzzle that will keep you guessing.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Speaking of alternate histories, a year ago, I suggested that you watch Counterpart, which I said then was “the greatest television series that not enough people have seen,” and which I think has been unjustly ignored as one of the greatest series in the history of television.

Counterpart ended its two-season run in 2019 (you can stream it on Apple TV+ and Amazon), so I’ll reveal a bit more of the plot: Scientists in East Germany at the end of the Cold War accidentally open a portal to a parallel universe. It is at first identical to ours in every way, including the people in it, but different choices make them into different people. The show asks disturbing questions about how our lives, and even the fate of the world, can change because of one decision. The lead character, Howard Silk (an amazing performance by J. K. Simmons), often has discussions with his “other,” his counterpart. One Howard is a tough, bitter bastard; the other is a kind and loving husband. When one Howard says that he wonders how things in life could go so wrong, the other Howard says, “Or so right?” Later, Howard says, “We all would like to be the better version of ourselves. I just—I just don’t know if it’s possible.”

The series is full of such moments, along with wonderful little touches of weirdness. (Over in the parallel universe, Prince is still alive.) It might just be a TV series, but even now I still think about it, which is the highest compliment I can pay to good entertainment.

— Tom

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.

In federal court this week, Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research, testified against her former boss and boyfriend, Sam Bankman-Fried. His two fallen crypto enterprises offer an object lesson in how not to run a start-up.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Why the most successful marriages are start-ups, not mergers Against barbarism Gal Beckerman: “The left abandoned me.” ​​The Protestant sleep ethic

Organizational Chaos

“How would you describe the power dynamic of your personal relationship with the defendant?” a prosecutor asked Caroline Ellison in court on Tuesday. Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers immediately objected to the question, and the judge sustained the objection. But all of us watching Ellison’s testimony in the federal courthouse heard the question. It hung in the air even as the prosecutor rephrased the inquiry.

At this point, FTX is many things: a company whose founder is on trial; a symbol for the rot underlying the crypto ecosystem; a target of schadenfreude. But before its dramatic implosion, it was also a workplace run by Millennials. And it seems, to hear Ellison describe it, to have been an absolute shitshow. In addition to the fraught power dynamics that came with various leaders’ personal ties, the company relied on shoddy recordkeeping (some of it intentional, Ellison said, to obscure the reality of their financial situation; some of it just apparently sloppy, like using emoji for expense approvals). FTX is an object lesson in how not to run a start-up—featuring major trip wires of the tech industry, including ambiguous responsibilities, disorganization, and hubris. And, of course, the trouble went far deeper: Bankman-Fried, Ellison testified, presided over a culture where lying and stealing were acceptable.

In her testimony, Ellison described Bankman-Fried as a relentless boss who orchestrated extravagant gambits, often from just offstage. Yesterday, Ellison, who is testifying as part of a plea deal, described a somewhat harebrained FTX scheme to convince Chinese officials—with what Ellison believed was “a large bribe”—to unlock an account. One FTX employee, whose own father was a Chinese government official, had protested. Bankman-Fried “yelled at her to shut to fuck up,” Ellison said. Bankman-Fried professed a belief that the only moral rule worth following was that of maximizing utility to create maximum good, Ellison testified. “It made me more willing to do things” like steal, she said, adding that if you had told her when she started working at Alameda that she would soon be preparing doctored balance sheets for lenders or using customer funds, she wouldn’t have believed you. The firm’s culture seemed to have a warping effect on the people who worked there. Many quit before FTX’s collapse; even some of those who stayed loyal to Bankman-Fried are now cooperating with the government.

To be clear, Ellison made choices that led her here: She has pleaded guilty to several federal crimes. But hearing her testify, I got the sense that it was not always pleasant to be Ellison in the FTX work environment. Though she held a lofty title when FTX imploded—CEO of Alameda—she claims that Bankman-Fried continued to call the shots, even after giving up the title himself in part to avoid perceptions that he had conflicts of interest. Ellison said that when she was promoted from trader to co-CEO of Alameda, her salary stayed the same, at $200,000. She was eligible for bonuses, and sometimes received large ones. But though she says that she asked for it, she was not granted equity, or an ownership stake, in Alameda. (She says she did have equity in FTX.). Ellison received a fraction of the compensation that other top FTX executives did. (A lawyer for Ellison did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.)

Ellison is obviously not a typical woman in tech, given her admissions of fraud. But it seems she did face some measure of the professional and personal disrespect that is rampant for women in the industry. And Bankman-Fried doesn’t seem to be taking her all that seriously in the courtroom, either: Yesterday, in a sidebar with the judge and defense lawyers, a prosecutor complained that Bankman-Fried was laughing and scoffing while Ellison spoke, and that she was concerned this would have an effect on the witness given “the power dynamic, their romantic relationship.” Though a defense lawyer called this claim “ridiculous,” he agreed to talk with the defendant.

FTX was operated by a very ambitious group of friends in their 20s and early 30s, and the company’s operations sound chaotic. Ellison was just a few years out of college when she was making spreadsheets—peppered with internet-speak—outlining the flow of billions of dollars. In a spreadsheet she said she had shared with Bankman-Fried, she calculated the probability of “v bad FTX news” that might affect the business. (Ellison and I attended the same college for a couple of years, and overlapped on a study-abroad program, though I don’t recall meeting her.)

Ellison testified under a cooperation deal, so she stands to benefit if the prosecution finds her helpful. Indeed, her testimony seemed brutal for the defense. “[Bankman-Fried] was originally the CEO of Alameda and then the owner of Alameda, and he directed me to commit these crimes,” she said bluntly at one point. At the crux of the case is whether Alameda stole customer funds from FTX and lied about it. Ellison has testified in no uncertain terms that Alameda did this, and at Bankman-Fried’s direction. Ellison’s cross-examination began late yesterday; more details, including ones that may undermine the government’s case, will emerge in the coming days. But many of the details now on the record about FTX as a workplace are, if not criminal, extremely unflattering.

Ellison and Bankman-Fried shared a close working relationship, and a close personal one. In many workplaces, dating a superior is forbidden, or at least discouraged. But at FTX, which had an in-house psychiatrist but an apparently dysfunctional HR operation, this did not seem to be the case. The fact that the two dated is not just tabloid fodder; it’s also pertinent to understanding the case against FTX, Yesha Yadav, an expert on financial regulation at Vanderbilt Law School, told me over email. “The romance offers insights into the lack of functional separation in practice between Alameda and FTX—meaning that SBF was aware of what was happening at Alameda, potentially controlling it, even if he has contested otherwise,” she said. “The closeness and romance can carry considerable evidentiary weight.” It will be up to the jury to determine whether Ellison and other witnesses are credible. And the big question of whether Bankman-Fried himself will speak remains. As Yadav reminded me, “In a criminal trial, only one juror needs to hold out for the case to fall.”

Related:

The taming of Sam Bankman-Fried The journalist and the fallen billionaire

Today’s News

Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel in a strong show of support as part of a diplomacy tour around the region. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez faces a new indictment, including a fourth charge that alleges that he acted as an unregistered agent for the Egyptian government. ACT scores in the United States have dropped to a three-decade low.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf collects readers’ thoughts on what America will look like in 2050.

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Evening Read

Nikos Economopoulos / Magnum

What Happened to Empathy?

By Xochitl Gonzalez

San Francisco, I realized during a visit to the city this spring, has a people problem. Not a homeless-people problem, or a tech-people problem, but a lack-of-people problem. As I walked from my hotel in SoMa to the Embarcadero on a sunny afternoon, the emptiness of the streets felt nearly apocalyptic. Passing other humans—a fundamental circumstance of urban life elsewhere—here was so rare, it felt oddly menacing. I did pass some people who looked unwell, or dirty from living on the streets, but that’s not why I felt the way I did. The volume and density of humanity are what make cities feel safe. The pleasure and pain of a city is that we are never alone, even when we desperately want to be. That wasn’t the case in San Francisco.

So I was bewildered when I read recently of the city’s experiment with driverless taxicabs. During that visit, I stepped over two people who appeared to be high on fentanyl, stepped past too many boarded-up storefronts to count, and literally stepped into human excrement. Engaging with my living, breathing (and sometimes chatty) taxi and Uber drivers was absolutely the least of my troubles in San Francisco.

Read the full article.

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This war shows just how broken social media has become. The Israeli crisis is testing Biden’s core foreign-policy claim.

Culture Break

Sharon Core / Trunk Archives

Read. C Pam Zhang’s new novel, Land of Milk and Honey, asks whether desire is essential to survival.

Watch. Anatomy of a Fall (in theaters tomorrow), the winner of this year’s Palme D’Or, features a novelist who is arrested for murder after her husband dies. It’s one of the 22 most exciting films this season.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Ellison, answering questions during her testimony in the no-nonsense, decisive manner of a graduate student leading office hours, shared several memorable anecdotes about Bankman-Fried. She said that Bankman-Fried carefully cultivated his image, plotting his hairstyle and car choices to maximize positive public perceptions. He has apparently said that if he could flip a coin, with one side causing the destruction of humanity and the other causing the world to become “more than twice as good,” he would do it. Ellison testified that Bankman-Fried had told her there was a 5 percent chance he would become president. Of what? a lawyer asked. “Of the United States,” she clarified.

— Lora

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Since taking office, Vice President Kamala Harris has struggled to communicate her vision and the nature of her role to both the press and the public. As President Joe Biden, the country’s oldest-ever president, eyes reelection, questions about Harris’s readiness to step in as president if needed are urgent, if also seemingly taboo among Democrats. My colleague Elaina Plott Calabro profiled Harris for the November issue of The Atlantic, following her to Africa and around the U.S.—and even, in a first for a reporter during this administration, to the vice president’s residence. I called Elaina to discuss Harris’s public persona, why she’s had trouble communicating her success, and what she’s like outside Washington, D.C.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology Nikki Haley is the new Ron DeSantis. The new AI panic The journalist and the fallen billionaire

Trouble Breaking Through

Lora Kelley: You write in your profile that, at earlier points in Harris’s career, “communication wasn’t a matter of rhetoric. It was just laying out the facts.” Now she’s in an arena where compelling rhetoric counts. Why has that transition been difficult for her?

Elaina Plott Calabro: Earlier in her career, Kamala Harris was a prosecutor in Alameda County and a district attorney in San Francisco. You are not looking to your DA for sweeping, inspiring speeches in the way you might, say, your U.S. senator. Communication as DA is so much more technical and fact-based. As Harris has gotten further away from that level of politics and moved onto a national stage, she’s found it more difficult to frame her communication in a way that captures the tangible nature of her success.

It’s not just Harris who is having trouble breaking through to voters right now. This is something that President Biden is struggling with as well. One prominent Democratic pollster recently told me that they’re mystified about what it takes to reach Americans at a communications level. In this post-2016 era, a lot of politicians, not just Harris, are struggling with how to achieve visibility in a time when Donald Trump can say one thing and it seems to dominate the airwaves for days.

Lora: In what contexts does Harris thrive?

Elaina: When Harris can talk one-on-one with people, hear their concerns and stress the ways in which her administration is working for them, and then bring what she’s learned back to Washington, that’s where she feels most effective and comes into her own as a politician. We’ve seen her do a lot more of that lately.

In one of the most telling conversations I had with her, she told me about a commencement speech that she once gave at the law school at UC Berkeley. She urged the students there to “embrace the mundane.” One reason that she doesn’t have a public presentation that immediately captivates people is that she sees her job as something that takes more than theatrics to do right. She takes seriously—and prefers to spend her time on—the slower-burn, day-to-day work she feels is needed to actually effect change.

Lora: You observed that Harris tends to play especially well outside of Washington. Why is that?

Elaina: In Washington, we tend to have a pretty static idea of what it means for a vice president to be successful. It’s obviously a very nebulous role, but if you look back at old headlines from past administrations, news outlets would often frame vice presidents as sort of the liaison to Capitol Hill for the White House.

Kamala Harris was never going to be Joe Biden’s anchor to Washington. President Biden started his first Senate term before she was even 10 years old. So her first several months on the job, she was also trying to figure out what role she could play. Once she was able to start getting out into the rest of the country, she came into her own. On the trail, she connects very visibly with regular people. She’s very warm and personable. When she’s actually on the ground with voters, she comes across as an entirely different politician from the existing caricature of her as someone unsure of herself who speaks in word-salad locutions.

Lora: You wrote that “perceptions of Harris appear to be frozen in 2021.” Do you think there’s anything she can or will do to change the way that people perceive her ahead of 2024?

Elaina: Kamala Harris had not been on the national stage for that long when she entered the White House. The Lester Holt interview she did in 2021 was very defining for her simply because it was one of the first major yardsticks by which people could measure her. The narrative that came out of that interview, in which she was viewed as unprepared and flippant, became really hard for her to get out from under. As one of her former aides told me, narrative is a very difficult thing to change.

Her willingness to talk with me, and to invite me to the residence, was emblematic of a desire on the part of her team to get her out there and engage more with the press as the campaign gets under way. They’re putting her in a position where more Americans are seeing her, and trying to create moments that can define the shape of her vice presidency, two and a half years after the one moment that has otherwise largely defined it.

Related:

The Kamala Harris problem The woman who led Kamala Harris to this moment

Today’s News

In a landmark move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and National Unity leader Benny Gantz have agreed to establish an emergency wartime government. Republicans have narrowly nominated Representative Steve Scalise as speaker of the House; a full vote on the House floor has been delayed. Hurricane Lidia made landfall in Mexico as a Category 4 storm yesterday evening.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: The Mississippi is losing its fight with the ocean, Nancy Walecki writes. A combination of drought and sea-level rise has sent a wedge of salt water moving up the river.

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Evening Read

Getty / The Atlantic

Cancel Amazon Prime

(From 2021)

By Ellen Cushing

Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself. It has existed for six years and is observed by tens of millions of people worldwide. I hope you are spending it with your loved ones.

Prime Day is a singular and strange artifact, but then again, so is Prime, Amazon’s $119-a-year membership service, which buys subscribers free one-day shipping, plus access to streaming media, discounts at the Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods, and a host of other perks. Prime is Amazon’s greatest and most terrifying invention: a product whose value proposition is to help you buy more products.

Read the full article.

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Read. A new biography of the Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed considers the stark duality of the man and his music.

Listen. “Be absolutely quiet. Not a word.” In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin talks with the Israeli journalist Amir Tibon about his family’s encounter with Hamas.

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Sam Bankman-Fried’s image as a man indifferent to authority helped him ascend. Now, on trial for fraud, the onetime enfant terrible of finance is colliding with an arena of American life where decorum counts.

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The Rules Apply

Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents looked on, stony-faced, as a former employee and friend of their son testified against him in federal court on Wednesday. Asked to identify the defendant, the witness described Bankman-Fried as the man wearing a suit and a purple tie. A year ago, Bankman-Fried was the golden boy of the tech world; observers had no indication that he would wind up in court facing federal fraud charges. That he would appear in a suit and tie, having traded his shaggy curls for close-cropped hair, seemed likewise improbable. The onetime maverick of Silicon Valley looked, from where I was sitting a few rows back in the courtroom, like any other defendant.

The rules, for a time, didn’t apply to Sam Bankman-Fried. Throughout his rise as a crypto leader, Bankman-Fried eschewed formality, consciously cultivating a messy, zany persona. He met with dignitaries in cargo shorts. His hair, constantly unkempt, became a sort of synecdoche for his unbothered attitude (when FTX was gaining renown, he reportedly told a colleague that it was important that his hair stay long so that he would look “crazy”). Now he is confronting a corner of American life reliant on decorum and fact. After FTX’s implosion last year, Bankman-Fried faces seven charges of financial crimes including wire fraud (he has pleaded not guilty to all charges). If convicted, he could face decades in prison. The law, though often unevenly enforced, can at its best serve as an equalizer, where even the powerful must face consequences if they cross lines.

In court this week, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a federal-court stalwart who presided over E. Jean Carroll’s case against Donald Trump and other high-profile trials, seemed to epitomize the dignified institution Bankman-Fried is facing. Kaplan did not seem inclined to throw his weight around on behalf of the defendant. On Wednesday afternoon, after the jury filed out, Mark Cohen, one of Bankman-Fried’s defense lawyers, beseeched the judge to help get his client his full prescribed dosage of Adderall. “My problem, of course, is that the last I know, I don’t have a medical license,” the judge snipped, advising that the lawyers contact the Bureau of Prisons about the matter. Bankman-Fried has exasperated this judge in the past: In August, Kaplan ordered the defendant to jail after various infractions (among other things, Bankman-Fried leaked the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend, former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, to The New York Times).

Bankman-Fried ascended in part based on the idea that he was different from everyone else—smarter, more trustworthy, uniquely able to make sense of the byzantine complexities of cryptocurrency markets. His pedigreed past—he’s an MIT graduate with Stanford Law–professor parents—added to his persona as a disruptive whiz kid. Now the crux of the government’s case against him is that he isn’t so different after all: Bankman-Fried, prosecutors charge, committed good old-fashioned theft.

Using frank language stripped of euphemism, a prosecutor explained to the jury on Wednesday the state’s case of how Bankman-Fried committed fraud on a mass scale. In his opening statement, the government lawyer used, by my count, a version of the word lied 26 times, stole 12 times, took 23 times, and fraud 13 times. Bankman-Fried, the lawyer explained to jurors, stole billions of dollars of customer deposits in order to furnish a lavish lifestyle, make political and charitable donations, and facilitate the purchase of luxury real estate, such as a penthouse in the Bahamas. (A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) That the case revolves around such a complex financial mechanism as crypto is almost incidental; to the prosecution, this was simple fraud, fueled by deception.

Then, in language peppered with metaphors and strained wordplay, Cohen argued in his opening statement that his client acted in good faith trying to run FTX. “There was no theft,” Cohen insisted. Running a start-up, Cohen said, relying on a well-worn tech truism, is like flying a plane as you’re building it. That metaphor was key to the defense’s attempt to explain why Bankman-Fried and his team made such stunning management errors as failing to hire a chief risk officer.

The plane metaphor, which Cohen later repeated, was a bit forced, but it helped to conveniently elide Bankman-Fried’s potential responsibility. The plane was flying into storms while it was being built, his lawyer said; in other words, these were circumstances beyond the defendant’s control. Most of all, Bankman-Fried didn’t intend to steal, Cohen argued. “The defense’s opening statement focused a lot on SBF’s fundamentally good motives and character—as an innovator who made a mistake because the industry and culture are about moving fast and breaking things,” Yesha Yadav, an expert on financial regulation at Vanderbilt Law School, told me over email.

In their opening statements, neither side waded into the complexity of how crypto markets work. The world of crypto is confusing, and, indeed, Bankman-Fried benefited from the perception that he was uniquely qualified to crack it. When it served him, Bankman-Fried relied on his image as a generational genius, a visionary leader who could remake the world of finance. Now his defense is presenting a different narrative: Bankman-Fried might have been “a math nerd,” but he’s also just an overextended businessman who lost track of things as his company ballooned.

Over the next several weeks, the government will need to convince all 12 members of the jury that beyond a reasonable doubt, Bankman-Fried committed fraud. Whether Bankman-Fried will take the stand in his own defense is a big, open question here. In the past, Bankman-Fried has been his own most visible advocate. But in court, where gravity and propriety reign, how his renegade attitude will play—even with his new look—is a wild card.

Related:

Sam Bankman-Fried pushed one boundary too many. The cults of Sam Bankman-Fried

Today’s News

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian activist who is currently jailed in Tehran. Republican candidates for House speaker have pulled out from a planned forum on Fox News after calls to keep discussions internal. A glacial lake burst through a major hydroelectric dam in northeast India, killing at least 42 people.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman discusses a new translation of The Iliad, an epic poem that his 10-year-old daughter adores. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf asks readers what America will be like in 2050, and delves into “solarpunk.”

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Pierre Buttinon

What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found Is the Key to a Good Life

By Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz

Turn your mind for a moment to a friend or family member you cherish but don’t spend as much time with as you would like. This needn’t be your most significant relationship, just someone who makes you feel energized when you’re with them, and whom you’d like to see more regularly.

How often do you see that person? Every day? Once a month? Once a year? Do the math and project how many hours annually you spend with them. Write this number down and hang on to it …

Thinking about these numbers can help us put our own relationships in perspective. Try figuring out how much time you spend with a good friend or family member. We don’t have to spend every hour with our friends, and some relationships work because they’re exercised sparingly. But nearly all of us have people in our lives whom we’d like to see more.

Read the full article.

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Universal

Read. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, by Kerry Howley, is about the “deep state,” but it is so well written that our staff writer Olga Khazan would have read it even if it had been about anything else.

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P.S.

FTX was, in some ways, an intensely personal affair: Bankman-Fried lived with several fellow executives, including his sometimes-girlfriend Ellison. His parents, with whom he lived while on house arrest, had ties to the business, and his brother’s pandemic-prevention nonprofit was the recipient of massive donations. As one of its exhibits on Wednesday, the prosecution showed the jury the now-infamous FTX 2022 Super Bowl ad starring Larry David. Apparently, Joseph Bankman, the father of the defendant, appears in the ad as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, shouting “yes!” after David asks whether “even the stupid ones” should be allowed to vote. After the video played in court, the government lawyer asked a witness to explain who Larry David was. At that point, Joseph Bankman cracked a brief smile, and then his face fell again.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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