Having caught a cold every month since my kid started day care, I’ve devoted a lot of time recently to the indignity of unclogging my nose. I’m blowing, always. I have also struck up an intimate acquaintance with neti pots and a great variety of decongestants. (Ask for the stuff that actually works, squirreled away behind the counter.) And on sleepless nights, I’ve spent hours turning side to side, trying to clear one nostril and then the other.

Nasal congestion, I’ve learned in all this, is far weirder than I ever thought. For starters, the nose is actually two noses, which work in an alternating cycle that is somehow connected to our armpits.

The argument that humans have two noses was first put to me by Ronald Eccles, a nose expert who ran the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University, in Wales, until his retirement a few years ago. This sounds absurd, I know, but consider what your nose—or noses—looks like on the inside: Each nostril opens into its own nasal cavity, which does not connect with the other directly. They are two separate organs, as separate as your two eyes or your two ears.

And far from being a passive tube, the nose’s hidden inner anatomy is constantly changing. It’s lined with venous erectile tissue that has a ”similar structure to the erectile tissue in the penis,” Eccles said, and can become engorged with blood. Infection or allergies amplify the swelling, so much so that the nasal passages become completely blocked. This swelling, not mucus, is the primary cause of a stuffy nose, which is why expelling snot never quite fixes congestion entirely. “You can blow your nose until the cows come home and you’re not blowing that swollen tissue out,” says Timothy Smith, an otolaryngologist at the Oregon Health & Science University’s Sinus Center. Gently blowing your nose works fine for any mucus that may be adding to the stuffiness, he told me. But decongestants such as Sudafed and Afrin work by causing blood vessels in the nose to shrink, opening the nasal passages for temporary relief.

In healthy noses, the swelling and unswelling of nasal tissue usually follows a predictable pattern called the nasal cycle. Every few hours, one side of the nose becomes partially congested while the other opens. Then they switch, going back and forth, back and forth. The exact pattern and duration vary from person to person, but we rarely notice these changes inside our noses. “When I tell people about the nasal cycle, most people are not aware of it at all,” says Guilherme Garcia, a biomedical engineer at the Medical College of Wisconsin. I certainly wasn’t, and I have been breathing through my nose only my entire life. But the idea made sense as soon as I consciously thought about it: When I’m sick, and extra swelling has turned partial congestion into complete congestion, I do tend to feel more blocked on one side than the other.

Once you’re aware of the nasal cycle, you can control it—to some extent. In fact, when I was turning from side to side during my sleepless nights, I was unknowingly activating receptors under my arm, which open the opposite side of the nose. This could be an age-old survival reflex: When we lie down on our right side, our left nostril is farther from the ground and likely less obstructed. Yogis have learned to take advantage of this, using a small crutch under the arm, called a yoga danda, to direct breathing to one nostril or the other. And an online hack for stuffy noses suggests squeezing a bottle under the opposite arm. The effect is not instantaneous, though. When I tried this recently, my arm got tired before my nose unclogged. And when I tried again with an old crutch I had from a knee injury, it took several minutes, by which time I’d already reached for a tissue out of impatience and habit.

No one knows exactly why humans have a nasal cycle, but cats, pigs, rabbits, dogs, and rats all have one too, according to Eccles. One hypothesis proposes that this cycle helps guard against pathogens. When the venous erectile tissue shrinks, antibody-rich plasma is squeezed out onto the inner lining of the nose. Each cycle might replenish the nose’s defense. Eccles also pointed out that upper-respiratory viruses seem to prefer temperatures just below body temperature; when one side of the nose becomes partially congested, it might warm up enough to ward off viruses. Or, he said, the cycle allows one half of the nose to rest at time. Unlike our eyes, ears, and mouths, noses have to function 24 hours a day, every day, constantly filtering and warming air for the delicate tissue of our lungs. The nose’s job might not sound that hard, but consider what it has to do: The air we breathe is maybe 70 degrees Fahrenheit and 35 percent humidity, Smith said. “By the time that air goes in my nose and gets back to my nasopharynx—which is, what, maybe three to four inches—it is 98.7 degrees Fahrenheit and 100 percent humidity.” The nose is quite the powerful little HVAC system.

But it’s fallible, too. Our noses don’t measure airflow directly; instead, they rely on cold receptors that are activated when cool air passes by. These cold receptors can be tricked by, say, menthol. Eccles has found that people given menthol lozenges can hold their breath longer, possibly because the minty coolness fools them into thinking they are still getting air. And it’s why Vicks VapoRub might make congestion feel better, despite having no positive effect on the opening of the nasal passages. The opposite may happen in a baffling condition called empty-nose syndrome, in which a very small proportion of patients who have surgery to improve airflow in their noses end up feeling completely clogged—possibly because of damage to cold receptors and other changes in sensation. The lack of a feeling of airflow can be so disturbing that these patients feel like they’re suffocating, even though their noses are perfectly unobstructed.

To a lesser extent, we are all unreliable narrators of our nasal congestion. When patients go to be examined, a doctor might see that one side of their nose is clearly more swollen than the other—but it’s not necessarily the same side that the patient feels is more congested. “This still baffles clinicians,” Smith told me. Other factors, such as temperature, must play a role. The inner workings of the nose are complicated and still mysterious. I’ll be thinking about all of this the next time I’m lying awake at night, once again sick, once again congested.

Roelof van der Merwe makes a brilliant diving catch to remove Steve Smith on 71, just moments after the Dutchman spectacularly catches David Warner only to ground the ball.

In her new memoir, Worthy, the actor Jada Pinkett Smith quotes the Marvel Comics superhero Wanda Maximoff to point out how women are often punished by double standards.

During a tense exchange with Doctor Strange in the blockbuster Marvel movie Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Maximoff reminds the male title character of how differently she is perceived because of her gender, even though both possess powerful supernatural abilities that can benefit or endanger humanity. “You break the rules, and you become the hero. I do it, and I become the enemy,” Maximoff tells Strange.

For weeks, Pinkett Smith has been the subject of widespread criticism and mockery over revelations in her 400-page memoir—including the jaw-dropping assertion that she and her husband, the A-list actor Will Smith, have been secretly separated since 2016. For describing her sometimes-messy and seemingly unconventional marriage as she saw it, she has become the villain—as if she had somehow forfeited the right to tell her own story in her own way.

[Read: The fury of Chris Rock]

In his 2021 memoir, Will, her husband described some of the difficulties in his marriage and was forthright about his own contribution to them. He also revealed that he and Pinkett Smith had separated for a time a decade earlier—though he did not define what separated meant for them—but he hasn’t faced harsh condemnation for speaking about their problems. She has.

“How Jada Pickett Smith is moving, it don’t really make you want to be that close with a woman,” the hip-hop star Rick Ross said via Instagram Live last week. “It will really make you reconsider ever being married. Damn, baby. You talking about so much personal business.” The onslaught of criticism directed at Pinkett Smith inspired a slew of internet memes, many of which have had the same central themes: that she is oversharing and, through her candor about the disappointment she has felt in her marriage, emasculating her husband in the process.

Having now read Worthy in its entirety, I find all the criticism of Pinkett Smith horribly unfair. Unfortunately, when Black women take the courageous step of voicing their pain, trauma, frustrations, and vulnerabilities, they are routinely met with derision, skepticism, and disdain. The message they receive is: Shut up and prioritize everyone else’s needs but yours, even if it means losing important pieces of yourself.

In her book, Pinkett Smith willingly accepts responsibility for some of the trouble in her marriage. She says she made the mistake of neglecting her mental health, to the point of experiencing intense depression and constant suicidal thoughts. By going to therapy and attending ayahuasca retreats—at which she confronted some of her darkest demons with the help of medicinal psychedelics—she realized that she was constantly holding Smith to an impossible standard and expecting him to save her from herself.

“Admitting to growing pains is severely frowned upon,” Pinkett Smith writes.

When she got married, Pinkett Smith was just 26 and was pregnant with the couple’s first child, Jaden. As she writes in Worthy, “We were starting our journey after being thrust together into expanding families, booming careers, and big shifts in fortune and responsibility.” She and her husband “were trying to figure it all out under the increasingly hot lights that come with being celebrities and having to live up to a fantasy version of married life.”

In his memoir, Smith shared strikingly similar thoughts: “Our marriage wasn't working,” Smith recalls. “We were suffering the brutal death of our romantic fantasies, the burning away of the idealistic illusion of the perfect marriage and the perfect family.”

The couple undoubtedly helped curate a positive public image of their relationship, and long before the phrase relationship goals became a fixture in the pop-culture lexicon, the Smiths seemed to embody that aspiration. To think they were immune to marital problems would have been naive. But Pinkett Smith seems to be getting the blame for ruining the illusion.

A series of incidents and gossipy rumors in recent years have turned many people’s opinions against her. In 2020, the singer August Alsina, a friend of Jaden’s, told an interviewer that he and Pinkett Smith had been involved in a romantic relationship—a claim that she initially denied. Pinkett Smith later confirmed her relationship with Alsina when she and her husband appeared on Pinkett Smith’s popular online show, Red Table Talk. Although Pinkett Smith explained in the episode that Smith knew about her and Alsina’s relationship and that it occurred during their separation, that wasn’t enough to change the opinions of those who believed she’d undermined her marriage. “People need something to blame,” Pinkett Smith told People recently.

The public scrutiny of the Smiths’ marriage intensified after Smith’s onstage confrontation with Chris Rock during the 2022 Academy Awards. The comedian, who was hosting the ceremony, jokingly referred to Pinkett Smith as “G.I. Jane” because of her shaved head. Seconds later, Smith walked to the stage and slapped Rock. What Rock and many others didn’t know was that Pinkett Smith has alopecia, a hair-loss condition.

[Jemele Hill: The two Americas debating Will Smith and Chris Rock]

In her book, Pinkett Smith adds much more context, explaining that Rock and her husband have had an antagonistic relationship for years, and she was just as surprised as everyone else by her husband’s volatile reaction—primarily because at that point, the two had been living largely separate lives for years, which included living in separate homes.

Regardless of their unorthodox arrangement, the Smiths have been adamant that they aren’t divorcing. In fact, Smith surprised his wife last week at her book-tour stop in Baltimore, her hometown, and publicly declared his support for her, which I’m sure had some people rolling their eyes. Smith, however, seems to embrace the complexities of their relationship. At the event, he described their relationship as “brutiful”—that is, “brutal and beautiful at the same time.” That Smith has opted to stand with his wife, despite everything that has come to light about their marriage, is disorienting and even upsetting to the people who wish Smith despised her instead of accepting her flaws and raw honesty.

But Pinkett Smith is not a villain, and her husband is not a victim. Despite what the headlines suggest, Worthy is not a salacious tell-all. It’s a complicated, compelling account of Pinkett Smith’s journey to healing, acceptance, and self-respect.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Many observers are characterizing the recent attack on Israel as that country’s 9/11. On reflection, what did you learn from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and America’s responses to it?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

Israel, Palestine, Hamas, Gaza, and related subjects are far too complex to tackle comprehensively here. So I have tried, this week, to present a range of narratives about Hamas’s attacks and how Israel is responding, if only to underscore how differently the conflict is understood by different people.

My colleague Graeme Wood, who traveled to Jerusalem, described what he found to Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin:

There are aspects of rah-rah patriotism. There’s also an ongoing sense of trauma. I mean, the number of people who died, the grisly fashion in which they died. It’s something that every Israeli has been seeing, and has really understood it. I mean, it is so shocking to the conscience, and so close to the lives of so many people here that I think it’s gonna be a while before people have processed this tragedy, this atrocity at that second level.

What you do have, though, is a political consensus and a military consensus that I think appeared relatively quickly after October 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza wall and killed over 1,000 people. And that consensus is that, whatever else is true, Hamas cannot exist … I haven’t found, I think, almost any Israelis, except for extreme doves, who disagree … As a corollary to that, they also agree that that requires going into Gaza, and depending on who you ask, rooting out Hamas, killing its leaders, or possibly just leveling the whole place, which is something that I’ve heard a number of Israelis say.

Writing in The Times of Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur offers an explanation for that near consensus among Israelis, rooted in how some of them understand “the enemy”:

That enemy is not the Palestinian people … The enemy is not exactly Hamas either, though Hamas is part of it. The enemy is the Palestinian theory of Israelis that makes the violence seen on October 7 seem to many of them a rational step on the road to liberation rather than, as Israelis judge it, yet another in a long string of self-inflicted disasters for the Palestinian cause ...

The Palestinian strategy of terrorizing Israeli civilians is old, older even than the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. When the PLO was founded in 1964 with the goal of driving the Jews from the country, the West Bank was still ruled by Jordan and the Gaza Strip by Egypt. The PLO adopted terrorism as the basic strategy for Palestinian liberation not in anger, but because it had just witnessed the astonishing success of the Algerian National Liberation Front in using such terrorism to drive the French from Algeria in 1962. And it goes back further still. Organized Palestinian violence against the Jews in 1920, 1929, the so-called Arab Revolt of 1936–39—all followed the same basic theory: The Jews are an artificial, rootless polity removable by sustained violence, so sustained violence must be deployed to remove them.

This Palestinian vision of Israelis is taught to Palestinian children as the basic truth of the Palestinian struggle. The contrast between “rooted” Palestine and “artificial” Israel is a major theme of Palestinian identity. The consequences of this longstanding vision and strategy has been nothing short of shattering for Palestinians … One can seek out the ideological roots of Hamas’s strategy of brutality in 20th-century decolonization movements or in theologies of Islamic renewal. But that history is mere background decor to the essential point—that this is a brutality that explodes against peace processes as much as against threats of annexation. No peace and no withdrawal will satisfy this impulse or grant Israeli Jews safety from the kind of wild, joyful hatred displayed on October 7. And that brutality has now made itself too dangerous to be tolerated.

In the n+1 article “Have We Learned Nothing?,” David Klion echoes a line of argument I’ve seen repeatedly––that the comparison to 9/11 is apt and Israel is poised to repeat America’s mistakes:

The scale of Israeli casualties, which are still being tallied, greatly exceeds the casualty count of 9/11 as a percentage of the society in question. The scale of the intelligence failure is likewise comparable; all sides are united in wondering how Israel’s lavishly funded, reputedly sophisticated security state managed to miss a border incursion of this magnitude. 9/11 was America’s greatest humiliation since Pearl Harbor, and Hamas’s incursion is Israel’s greatest humiliation since the Yom Kippur War, a full fifty years ago. (In at least one respect, the analogy fails: it took mainstream US media years to begin to acknowledge that George W. Bush had failed to protect American lives, while Netanyahu’s failure is already a topic of fierce public debate in Israel, where Haaretz and some members of the military elite are calling for the prime minister’s resignation.)

But I also can’t remember a time since 9/11 when emotion and bloodlust overwhelmed reason as thoroughly as they do now, including among liberal elites in media and politics. The lasting impact of the 9/11 attacks was a kind of collective psychosis that overcame most Americans, and perhaps especially those in the DC–NYC corridor charged with crafting and enforcing conventional wisdom, who had witnessed the attacks up close … These were the conditions in which it was possible to sell the public, including leading liberal outlets, on a destructive imperial adventure in Iraq that virtually everyone now acknowledges was premised on false intelligence and wildly hubristic ambitions.

While I concur that the Iraq War was a catastrophic mistake, Ross Douthat’s analysis of America’s reaction to 9/11 is closer to my own:

The United States arguably fought four wars after Sept. 11: A regime change operation in Afghanistan aimed at both Osama bin Laden and his Taliban enablers, a global campaign to disrupt and destroy Al Qaeda, a war in Iraq aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein and (in its more expansive moments) planting a democracy in the heart of the Middle East and, finally, a war against the Islamic State that emerged out of the wreckage of our Iraq policies …

Some lessons probably don’t apply to the current moment at all—particularly the elements of American folly that reflected our universalist overconfidence hyped up by our unique post-Cold War position as a globe-bestriding superpower. In 2003 we imagined ourselves capable of remaking the Middle East and, indeed, the world, on a scale that today’s Israel, a small country set about with enemies, is extremely unlikely to envision.

Other lessons do apply, but not in any simple way. For instance, one basic lesson you could take from America’s post-9/11 disasters is the importance of restraint in moments of maximal emotional trauma, of thinking it through and counting the cost rather than just obeying a do-something imperative. Among all the various factors that led us into Iraq, one shouldn’t underestimate the impulse that we just hadn’t done something big enough in response to the terror attacks, that the Afghanistan intervention alone wasn’t enough to satisfy our righteous rage or prove our dominance. And you can see this as a temptation for the Israelis now, with the horror so fresh—an impulse to reject anything that smacks of half-measures or limitations, to wave away the risks of civilian casualties or regional chaos, to treat any hesitation as a form of cowardice.

But not every aggressive path America took after 9/11 looks mistaken in hindsight. The long-term debacle of our Afghanistan occupation doesn’t make our initial decision to topple the Taliban unwise. The moral failures of our interrogation program don’t mean that we were wrong to take a generally aggressive posture toward Al Qaeda and its satellites. Setting out to destroy the Islamic State’s caliphate rather than seeking stable coexistence was a correct and successful call.

What about America’s influence on the present conflict?

Bob Wright argues that U.S.-backed efforts to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel were bound to seem threatening to three Middle East actors with the power to destabilize the region.

He lists them:

1) The Palestinian people. The prospect of normalized relations between Israel and Arab states had for decades been thought of as leverage to be used on behalf of the Palestinians. The Arab states were to withhold diplomatic recognition until there was a deal between Israel and the Palestinians that ended Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza. So giving Israel the big prize of Arab recognition before that—as both Trump and Biden favor—reduces the chances of the Palestinians ever being liberated from the humiliating subjugation they’ve endured for generations.

The iconoclastic Israeli journalist Gideon Levy this week characterized Israel’s attitude toward the issue like this: “We’ll make peace with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and the Palestinians will be forgotten until they’re erased, as quite a few Israelis would like.” Whether or not that is indeed the way many Israelis thought of the Trump-Biden normalization drive, it’s only natural that Palestinians would assume as much …

2) Hamas. Biden’s Saudi-Israel normalization deal would steer large amounts of money and other resources to the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’s western-backed rival for influence among Palestinians …

3) Iran. There’s no evidence that the Iranians conceived or orchestrated the attack on Israel, but they may have given it their approval. And in any event it’s unlikely that Hamas would have undertaken the attack had the envisioned consequences not seemed at least consistent with the interests of Iran, its long-time supporter. So it’s important to understand how threatening Biden’s proposed Israeli-Saudi deal seemed to Iran. The deal would have given the Saudis a guarantee that America would assist them if they wound up in a war. Iran no doubt feared that this guarantee would embolden the Saudis and also make them more likely to prevail over Iran in the event of war. More broadly, the whole normalization drive, including Trump’s Abraham Accords, seemed aimed at consolidating what Iran sees as an anti-Iran coalition: Israel, the US, and several wealthy Sunni Arab states.

In contrast, David Leonhardt argues that America’s waning global influence played a part in the attack:

Russia has started the largest war in Europe since World War II. China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan. India has embraced a virulent nationalism. Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history. And on Saturday morning, Hamas brazenly attacked Israel, launching thousands of missiles and publicly kidnapping and killing civilians.

All these developments are signs that the world may have fallen into a new period of disarray. Countries—and political groups like Hamas—are willing to take big risks, rather than fearing that the consequences would be too dire. The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order … The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was... Political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs …

“A fully multipolar world has emerged, and people are belatedly realizing that multipolarity involves quite a bit of chaos,” Noah Smith wrote … Zheng Yongnian, a Chinese political scientist with ties to the country’s leaders, has similarly described the “old order” as disintegrating. “Countries are brimming with ambition, like tigers eyeing their prey, keen to find every opportunity among the ruins of the old order,” Zheng wrote last year.

Of course, that could all be wrong! In The Washington Post, Shadi Hamid prudently urges epistemic humility:

The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity. We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate—our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them … It should be possible to acknowledge two things at once. We can—and must—condemn Hamas’s heinous acts against Israeli civilians while refusing to forget that Israel has been a perpetrator of a brutal occupation against Palestinians. Some will condemn this as “bothsidesism,” but there are, quite literally, two primary parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, each with competing—and, sadly, irreconcilable—narratives. How could it be otherwise? Talking about atrocities after the fact is a minefield. In a time of war, doing it well requires precisely the kind of presumptive generosity toward the other “side” that war itself militates against.

That’s it for today––see you next week.

Thanks for your contributions. I read every one that you send. By submitting an email, you’ve agreed to let us use it—in part or in full—in the newsletter and on our website. Published feedback may include a writer’s full name, city, and state, unless otherwise requested in your initial note, and may be edited for length and clarity.

When Judge Tanya Chutkan of the federal district court for D.C. was assigned the trial of Donald Trump for his attempt to steal the election, according to the journalist Robert Draper, she asked a friend to pray for her. Chutkan’s decision today to impose a gag order on the former president, her most consequential pronouncement in the case so far, shows why she’ll need prayer, if not outright divine wisdom, to navigate the challenge before her. Chutkan faces a series of impossible choices.

Her first impossible choice: whether to impose any gag order at all. As she described it in court, the order she granted appears narrower than what prosecutors sought. It prohibits disparaging remarks only of witnesses, prosecutors, and court staff, but allows Trump to continue attacking the Justice Department, President Joe Biden, and others—including Chutkan herself—as long as his comments do not directly bear on the case.

Chutkan’s order followed a two-hour hearing in Washington, in which prosecutors argued that Trump’s comments would poison the chance for a fair trail, while the defense attorney John Lauro repeatedly—and to Chutkan’s dismay—called any restriction “censorship.” The judge probed both prosecutors and defense with piercing questions. She peppered Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston, representing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team, with questions about their proposal, siding with Lauro’s contention that the government was asking for something too broad. But she reminded the defense, “Mr. Trump is facing criminal charges. He does not get to respond to every criticism of him if his response would affect potential witnesses. That’s the bottom line here."

The dilemma for Chutkan is that almost any course she chooses threatens rule of law. She can hardly allow Trump to do things that she believes could corrupt the proceedings or intimidate witnesses, as the government alleges he has done. That would either erode the court’s ability to police every defendant, or else it would suggest that Trump doesn’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else. Gaston framed the question for Chutkan just this way: “What Mr. Lauro is saying is the defendant is above the law and he is not subject to the rules like any other defendant is.”

Trump does have legitimate interests as a political candidate in being able to speak (mostly) freely, and federal courts appropriately show little interest in policing candidates’ comments on the stump. Yet even considering those needs, the judge was troubled by some of Trump’s remarks in recent weeks, including attacks on Smith’s wife and on a law clerk for New York State Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, who is overseeing a civil fraud case against Trump. She also pointed to Trump’s suggestion last month that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, should be executed for treason. This language “frankly risks a real possibility of violence,” she said, adding: “We are in here today because of the statements that he’s made … right up to last night. I’m not confident that without some kind of restriction we won’t be in here all the time.”

The parties might be in court all the time anyway. Anyone familiar with Trump knows that he has no respect for rules and restrictions. He is already bound by federal laws against intimidating witnesses, and Chutkan previously placed standard limitations on him, including communicating directly with known witnesses. Lauro stated in court that Trump had complied with these conditions. “What you have put in place is working,” he said. Chutkan replied, laughing: “I have to take issue with that.”

Lauro promised to appeal any gag order, and his remarks in the courtroom, as well as Trump’s recent public statements, previewed the backlash to come. The attorney argued that Trump’s First Amendment rights were being abridged. He also complained that the whole thing amounted to election interference by Biden’s Justice Department, and that a gag order could allow Biden to attack Trump without Trump being able to respond. (In reality, Biden has been conspicuously quiet on the criminal cases against Trump, for fear of being seen as interfering.)

“Joe Biden is not a party to this case. He’s not subject to conditions of release,” Chutkan replied—though her eventual order did make clear that Trump could criticize Biden. The Trump campaign quickly took the opportunity, saying in a statement that the decision “is an absolute abomination and another partisan knife stuck in the heart of our Democracy by Crooked Joe Biden, who was granted the right to muzzle his political opponent.”

The judge was dismissive of these complaints. “Mr. Trump is a criminal defendant. He is facing four felony charges. He is under the supervision of the criminal-justice system and he must comply with the conditions of release. He does not have the right to say and do exactly as he pleases,” she said. On another occasion, she scolded Lauro, saying, “I do not need to hear any campaign rhetoric in my courtroom.”

But the campaign rhetoric is not meant for her—it’s meant to influence voters, and convince them that Trump is subject to political persecution. Now that she has placed new conditions on him, he’s certain to test the limitations and he tests the limitations. This leads to more impossible choices. First, she’ll have to rule on what falls afoul of the gag order and what doesn’t. Second, she’ll have to find ways to enforce any violations she does find. His campaign will be happy to portray any attempt to do so as more evidence of political persecution.

Lauro seemed to be almost daring her to do that. In one question, he tried again to argue that Trump’s unique status as a criminally charged presidential candidate should get him out of the usual rules, wondering what would happen if Trump blurted something out about a witness during a presidential debate (should be choose to actually participate in one, as he so far has not).

“Is your honor going to put President Trump in jail during the campaign?” Lauro asked. How could she dare to lock up a presidential frontrunner? And yet, if he thumbs his nose at the law, how can she not?

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In much of the United States, you can already feel it. There’s a hint of a chill in the night air. The morning light looks somehow more golden. The pumpkin-spice latte has finished its annual transit across the cosmos and returned to its home at your local Starbucks. Sweater weather approaches. Cooler temperatures bring rich textures and many layering opportunities. What this time of year no longer brings to most people, though, is amazing new sweaters. Or even good ones.

With apologies for describing a tweet, the comedian Ellory Smith made much the same point a few weeks ago on the platform formerly known as Twitter: With side-by-side photos of Billy Crystal wearing an ivory cable-knit fisherman sweater in 1989’s When Harry Met Sally and the actor Ben Schwartz re-creating the image in a similar outfit, Smith sounded an alarm: “The quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last twenty years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation.” Her tweet racked up a couple hundred thousand likes because she’s exactly right. So let’s have that conversation.

The phenomenon that Smith is alluding to is clear from the photos, even if you’ve never before had a single thought about the state of American knitwear. Crystal’s sweater is timeless and lush—fuzzy, generously cut, and extravagantly cabled, with a tall collar and close-fitting cuffs designed to keep warmth in. Schwartz’s sweater is roughly the same color, and it is indeed a cabled sweater, but that’s about where the comparison ends. Some of the differences are intentional, and not necessarily bad—it’s designed to fit closer to the body than Crystal’s, and the detailing is more varied. But Schwartz’s sweater also has an odd sheen, flat cabling, and loose cuffs. It lacks the heft of Crystal’s version; it looks cheaper. It was probably machine knit. Crystal’s is more likely to have been handmade. This is despite the fact that, by the mass-market standards of 2023, Schwartz’s sweater is a nice sweater. It appears to be a Polo Ralph Lauren design that costs almost $400.

As the sheer quantity of clothing available to the average American has grown over the past few decades, everything feels at least a little bit flimsier than it used to. Seams unravel after a couple of washes, garments lose their shape more quickly, shoes have to be replaced more frequently. The situation might be the worst in knitwear. Good sweaters, gloves, beanies, and scarves are all but gone from mass-market retailers. The options that have replaced them lose their fluff faster, feel fake, and either keep their wearers too hot or let the winter wind whip right through them. Sometimes they even smell like plastic.

The most obvious indication of these changes is printed on a garment’s fiber-content tag. Knits used to be made entirely from natural fibers. These fibers usually came from shearing sheep, goats, alpacas, and other animals. Sometimes, plant-derived fibers such as cotton or linen were blended in. Now, according to Imran Islam, a textile-science professor and knit expert at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the overwhelming majority of yarn used in mass-market knitwear is blended with some type of plastic. Most commonly, this means polyester, polyamide, or acrylic. Islam and I spoke on one of the first chilly fall days in New York, and he had just finished conducting an informal test as part of a knitting lesson: He asked the students who had come to class wearing a sweater to check what it was made out of. Every sweater, he said, had some plastic in it.

Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Alamy; Getty

Knits made with synthetic fiber are cheaper to produce. They can be spun up in astronomical quantities to meet the sudden whims of clothing manufacturers—there’s no waiting for whole flocks of sheep to get fluffy enough to hand shear. They also usually can be tossed in your washing machine with everything else. But by virtually every measure, synthetic fabrics are far inferior. They pill quickly, sometimes look fake, shed microplastics, and don’t perform as well as wool when worn. Sweaters are functional garments, not just fashionable ones. Wool keeps its wearer warm without steaming them like a baked potato wrapped in foil. Its fibers are hygroscopic and hydrophobic, which means they draw moisture to their center and leave the surface dry. A wool sweater can absorb a lot of water from the air around it before it feels wet or cold to the touch, which goes a long way toward explaining why high-quality wool sweaters are still made in particularly damp, cold regions of the world, including Scotland and New Zealand.

Some major retailers do continue to carry all-wool sweaters. If you’re fastidious about checking tags, you’re sure to find them once in a while. But don’t rely on price to guide you. A significant amount of polyamide or acrylic is now common in sweaters with four-digit price tags. A $3,200 Gucci “wool cardigan,” for example, is actually half polyamide when you read the fine print. Cheaper materials have crept into the fashion industry’s output gradually, as more and more customers have become inured to them. In the beginning, these changes were motivated primarily by the price pressures of fast fashion, Islam said: As low-end brands have created global networks that pump out extremely cheap, disposable clothing, more premium brands have attempted to keep up with the frenetic pace while still maximizing profits, which means cutting costs and cutting corners. Islam estimates that a pound of sheep’s wool as a raw material might cost from $1.50 to $2. A pound of cashmere might cost anywhere from $10 to $15. A pound of acrylic, meanwhile, can be had for less than $1.

To make matters worse for people who just want to buy a decent sweater, Islam said that few checks and balances exist to ensure that knitwear marketed as, say, pure cashmere or merino wool actually is, unless a brand voluntarily adheres to a high standard of traceability. Retailers rarely face penalties for driving materials costs as low as possible, even if it means that sweaters don’t look and feel quite as nice as they once did. And they don’t need to. When almost all of your competitors are using the same sad plastic blends, no one is going to single your company out for being particularly miserly with the materials.

This race to the bottom had been going on for years, but it accelerated considerably in 2005, Sofi Thanhauser, the author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing, told me. That year was the end of the Multifiber Arrangement, a trade agreement that had for three decades capped imports of textile products and yarn into the United States, Canada, and the European Union from developing countries. Once Western retailers no longer had meaningful restrictions on where they could source their garments from, many of them went shopping for the cheapest inventory possible. They found it largely in Asian and Latin American countries with few protections for garment workers or environmental regulations on the textile industry, which allowed them to slash wages and use more synthetics.

That changed the unit economics of mass-market fashion—and of sweaters—in profound ways. According to Islam, if you push down retail prices with cheap labor, they’ll no longer bear the use of quality materials. If you push down retail prices with cheap materials, they’ll no longer bear the wages of garment workers with more skill and experience. If you push down both as much as possible, you stand a pretty good chance of gaining market share. Either way, the conditions of the industry and the products on the shelf degrade in tandem. Knitting, in particular, is highly skilled labor, even at its cheapest. For genuinely impressive detailing and finishing, Islam said, manufacturers need to pay up for highly experienced workers. When manufacturers forgo those costs, designs get simpler—they get boring. And when demand for that kind of skilled labor craters, those skills aren’t passed to new workers, and they eventually wash out of the labor force. The same thing happens in production of the raw materials necessary to make a better-quality garment. Eventually, even if your company wants to produce something nice, durable, and well made, your ability to do so at all—let alone at a price that anyone will pay—is greatly reduced.

The majority of clothing sold in the U.S. now includes at least some plastic content. Brands generally rely on consumers not to be interested enough in fabric content to check the tags before buying. But Thanhauser said brands have also gotten more adept at marketing synthetic fabrics as a consumer advantage, whether or not they actually are in any particular garment. They do enable more sweaters to be labeled as machine washable, she said, and the popularity of “performance” fabrics in athleisure has helped improve the public perception of all kinds of synthetic textiles, even if those materials offer few advantages outside of the athletic pursuits for which they were designed.

Over time, these phenomena become self-reinforcing. Hand-washing and line-drying a few garments is no longer a normal part of laundry day in many homes, Thanhauser pointed out. Once the apparel market changes so much that those kinds of care tasks are more of a nuisance than a necessity, people avoid garments that require them. These market changes also reflect other shifts in how people live, suspects Andre West, a former knitwear manufacturer and a professor at the North Carolina State University Wilson College of Textiles. Wool is most comfortable and effective when layered, especially for relatively affordable wool sweaters, which tend not to be super soft. Life has gotten more casual for most Americans over the past 50 years, and a button-down with a sweater on top now exceeds the expectations of many office dress codes and can feel a little formal to people more accustomed to T-shirts or polos. Indoor climate control has also gotten more sophisticated. People spend less time in drafty old buildings and more time at a constant 72 degrees. Outside, the country’s temperatures are trending warmer, and more people are moving south.

The end result of all of this—the changes to trade regulation, the decline in garment-industry wages and working conditions, the rise of synthetic textiles—is abundance, but only by a definition of the word that includes an abundance of junk. A good sweater is hard to find, but it’s not impossible. People are still raising heritage-breed sheep and spinning pure wool yarn and knitting sweaters that look and feel and perform a lot like the ones that were de rigueur a couple of generations ago. You can find them if you’re fastidious about checking fiber-content tags, and if you can pay prices that reflect the value of the materials and skill that went into their creation.

That doesn’t always mean paying far more than big retailers demand for polyester blends. O’Connell’s, a Buffalo, New York–based clothing store that’s famous among American sweater lovers, sells a beautiful, Irish-made fisherman sweater in pure wool for $198—half the price of the cheaper-looking Polo blend that Schwartz appears to wear in his When Harry Met Sally reenactment. Scotland-based Jamieson’s of Shetland will sell you beautiful wool sweaters in the same price range, or the yarn they manufacture so you can make your own. At the very high end, Silicon Valley tech moguls obsess over four-figure Loro Piana and Brunello Cucinelli sweaters as important status symbols. For everyone else, plenty of garments gesture at what used to be widely available, but few hold a candle to the garments that were once the norm. And, in fact, please don’t get candles too close to a poly blend, which is much more likely than wool to go up in flames.