Taylor Swift’s 1989 reminds me of 2014, the year of its release, which is to say that it reminds me of Tinder. That’s when the dating app, founded two years earlier, settled into ultra-popularity: It was logging 1 billion “swipes” a day as singles smudged their thumbs over pictures of strangers, judging and being judged. Tinder turned the classic, nervous thrill of the dating experience into a game, one that millions of people could play at once. Then, with uncanny timing, Swift released an album all about fun and flaky romance, helping listeners bounce along to their next potential rejection.

The enduring success of Swift’s fifth album—now out as a rerecorded Taylor’s Version—makes it easy to forget how perfectly it fit a particular cultural moment. Marketed as her full turn from country to “official pop,” it incorporated the synthetic sounds of her titular birth year and the tried-and-true melodic tricks of the producers Max Martin and Shellback. With 12.3 million units sold and three Hot 100 No. 1 hits (“Shake It Off,” “Blank Space,” and “Bad Blood”), it remains her most popular release, and its rerecorded version just gave Swift the biggest streaming day for any artist in Spotify history. But the album’s incredible reach has also undercut its reputation as art: Many critics think of 1989 as lovable but generic.

The truth is that the album is underrated in its specificity. Swift’s earlier albums approached romance from an adolescent vantage, telling of storybook heights and crushing lows; a lot of her songs were about realizing that Prince Charming had exploited her. Then came 1989, with a fresh sound and point of view, aligned with a broader generational adventure. She sang about flirtations of equals, about being a fine fish in a teeming sea—and, in doing so, helped push pop forward as a storytelling medium.

The two opening songs captured the giddiness of moving to a new city, walking into a hot party, or downloading Tinder around the same time as every other single. The idealism of “Welcome to New York,” grating as its monotonous melody was, set up the song’s complex, saucy foil, “Blank Space,” which cast a satirical eye over a pool of potential mates. That song’s tough backbeat and warm chorus—“So it’s gonna be forever / Or it’s gonna go down in flames”—conveyed determination to explore in spite of inevitable disappointment and, for Swift in particular, disapproval. According to the liner notes of the 1989 rerelease, Swift wanted to defy people who judged her for “dating like a normal young woman.”

Of course, most normal young women don’t kiss Kennedys and boy-banders. But Swift always knew how to connect her own weird life to the zeitgeist. Dating is intrinsically a maddening exercise—but in 2014, it really was evolving, mainstreaming all sorts of sociological lingo. Everyone was ghosting (breaking up by going quiet) and trying to DTR (define the relationship). Boundaries were becoming porous; the desire for commitment competed with the limitless first dates at one’s fingertips. Swift’s track “New Romantics” was like a manifesto for embracing the chaos: “We need love, but all we want is danger / We team up, then switch sides like a record changer.”

[Read: Taylor Swift and the sad dads]

Switching, swiping, surfing uncertainty—these are complex maneuvers for hooky dance-pop to capture, but Swift had the songwriting chops to pull it off. The heart of 1989 lay in adrenaline-shot anthems such as “All You Had to Do Was Stay” and “How You Get the Girl,” both of which addressed an indecisive ex with a sigh of Your loss. On “I Wish You Would,” Swift herself was the side-switcher, singing in an uneven cadence over fidgety guitars. The album’s biggest emotional wallop came on “Out of the Woods,” whose spiraling chorus rendered he-loves-me-he-loves-me-not nervousness as being as powerful and serious as heartbreak itself.

Vulnerable as they were, these songs also radiated invincibility, or what Swift’s new liner notes describe as the “right kind of naïveté.” This chipper feeling made the album pop as much as the synth beats and explosive choruses did. The country, folk, and rock traditions that Swift previously drew upon aspired to a sense of timelessness, but she was now channeling influences that were synonymous with the term disposable. A better term might have been resilient: Touchstones such as Debbie Gibson’s “Only in My Dreams” and Madonna’s “Borderline” skip along the surface of heartbreak, telling the listener that love—including the love of life itself—is stronger than loss.

Pop titans of the early 2010s such as Katy Perry and Lady Gaga were also selling shots of motivation, though stridently and abstractly. In joining them, Swift didn’t abandon detail, narrative, or irony. Listen to how, even on the slick single “Style,” she was able to nestle in a scene of dialogue that was heavy with implied backstory (“He says, ‘What you heard is true, but I / Can’t stop thinking ’bout you and I’ / I said, ‘I’ve been there too a few times’”), whether drawn from real life or wholly fictional. The album fused the singer-songwriter archetype with that of the domineering diva, popularizing a model that today’s young stars take for granted.

1989 (Taylor’s Version) slightly breaks the youthful spell. The original album’s production had the bright artificiality of Candy Crush, but Swift and her current studio partner Christopher Rowe opt for a roomier, live-band sound in the rerecording. The snares on “Blank Space” sound like actual instruments, not beats arranged on a screen, which sort of undermines the song’s appeal as a cheeky homage to contemporary hip-hop. On the original “Shake It Off,” Swift came off like some funny cartoon version of herself, but on the new version, the illusion is pierced: Swift is just some mortal singing knowingly dippy lyrics from an echoing stage.

Then again, 1989 always conveyed a fantasy that had to end. Five bonus tracks, pulled “from the vault,” indicate the emotions Swift left off of the original document: sadness, burnout, a desperate hunger for stability. All are solid songs on their own, but they’re also samey, mid-tempo, and defeated in a way that most of 1989 wasn’t. On “Say Don’t Go,” getting ghosted hurts, badly: “Your silence has me screamin’, screamin’.” The provocative title of “‘Slut!’” belies a quiet, moving subversion of the original 1989’s restlessness: The lyrics describe just another fling, but the sound conveys an ache for comfy, lasting devotion.

Was Swift thinking about Tinder when writing this music, or am I bringing my own baggage to the relisten? Clues suggest that she was borrowing her normie friends’ phones: On the bonus track “Is It Over Now?” she glimpses an ex’s “profile” on a stranger’s face (a potential double entendre?) and exasperatedly references “300 awkward blind dates” (has Taylor Swift ever been on a blind date?). In any case, 1989 charmingly nailed a shared experience of dating as a marketplace. Even the malaise that lurks in the new version of the album is relatable: Being desired is fun, but eventually, one ceases to want to be a commodity.

In the last scene of the classic 1968 zombie movie Night of the Living Dead, the hero, Ben, comes out of a cellar with a gun, and the armed vigilantes mistake him for a zombie. They surround him, shoot him, and then burn him with the rest of the ghouls. Ben was played by Duane Jones, a Black actor, and the director, George Romero, has always said he wasn’t making a statement by casting Jones. But when I watched the movie as a young teenager, something about this scene felt significant. A Black man surrounded by a pack of vigilante white people with guns, in 1968, seemed to be answering more than just the basic needs of plot.

Since then I’ve learned a lot more about how race worked in that movie. But for a Black kid interested in horror, the subtext might have been a little more obvious. Jordan Peele grew up writing horror stories in his journals, and occasionally scaring his classmates with them on school trips. In 2017, after a successful sketch-comedy career, he wrote, produced, and directed Get Out, the critically acclaimed horror film. He says the movie “felt very taboo” and “un-produceable” at the time. “I don’t know if you noticed, but Get Out doesn’t have any good white people in it,” he told me. I did notice.

After Peele made that movie, and several others, he says, Black creators started telling him that they too had a horror story to tell, but they had never thought to tell it publicly. Classic horror always seemed to be speaking to white people’s fears about the menace of “the other,” made manifest as dark and sinister forces. But Black people of course saw different monsters.

Recently Peele collected some of those stories in Out There Screaming: An Anthology of Black Horror. Like Peele’s movies, the stories blend the horror genre with the modern Black experience. The opening piece, written by the best-selling sci-fi author N. K. Jemisin, is about a small-town Black cop tortured by car headlights that are always surveilling him.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Peele and Jemisin, who used to be a practicing psychologist, about how exactly horror is working on us. And how what we consider scary changes when Black directors and writers are making the monsters.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Before Jordan Peele was Jordan Peele, the famous director of Get Out, he was just a ninth grader starting a new school.

Jordan Peele: And up until this moment, I was a kid who was really afraid of monsters, of the dark, of people breaking into my apartment—you know, all this stuff.

Rosin: And then one weekend, he went on a camping trip with his class and something happened.

Peele: I told a scary story, a sort of standard in my book, and it—

Rosin: You had a book. You had a book in 10th grade.

Peele: I had a couple. I had a couple.

Rosin: The one he chose was this: A woman and her husband are in a car, driving through the town where she grew up. They pass by a house, and she sees a shadow on the top floor and says to her husband—that’s where this girl Annie used to live.

Annie, the wife tells him, is a girl they all used to make fun of: “Annie with the red hair. Annie with the red hair.”

Then the car breaks down, and the husband goes to find a pay phone. Eighteen minutes go by. Twenty-nine minutes go by. Forty-five minutes. The husband isn’t back yet. And then—actually, I’m not gonna tell you the ending. It’s not my story to tell.

But for little Jordan—

Peele: It worked. I felt like I had this captive audience, and after this moment, I was able to—I just remember feeling lifted of so many fears, purged of so many fears. And I remember just feeling so liberated.

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. Jordan’s fear purge—I totally get it. As a kid, I used to watch movies like The Exorcist and Damien, but only ever with my father, and at the end of each movie we watched together, I felt totally safe and calm.

Horror does this for us. It helps us settle into fear, as individuals but also sometimes on a grander scale as a society. Sometimes there can be a monster that represents a collective fear, but what that monster looks like depends on who is telling the story.

Today I’m talking to Jordan Peele about what happens when Black directors and writers tell stories about their collective fears. He’s just edited a new short story collection, in time for Halloween, called Out There Screaming.

I’m also talking to best-selling sci-fi writer N. K. Jemisin, who wrote the first story in the collection. She goes by Nora, by the way.

As it happens, Nora used to be a psychologist. So I started by asking her about that campfire moment Jordan talked about—you’re afraid, you tell a story, and then you feel liberated. How does that actually work?

N. K. Jemisin: It sounds a lot to me like the theory of catharsis, in that when you are experiencing or have experienced trauma, but even if you’re still in the moment with it, one of the ways that you can kind of purge the energy of that—the fear—is to confront it.

You know, make fun of it, or tell a story about it, or write a story down. There’s any number of ways where just simply confronting it and just letting yourself play with the thing that scares you can help you overcome your fear of it.

Rosin: So it’s like a creative form of exposure therapy.

Jemisin: I mean, exposure therapy is you’re being given something that you don’t like, you don’t feel, you don’t care about. With catharsis, and particularly with writing your catharsis or reading your catharsis or telling a story, you are making yourself love it. You’re finding a reason to care about it.

Rosin: Yeah, like, it gives you a sense of control. It’s not just, I’m not afraid anymore. It’s like, I can actually do something with this.

Jemisin: And I can see something valuable in it. Yeah.

Rosin: Jordan, when you made Get Out, which was back in 2017, did it feel like you were doing something new, or risky, mixing classic horror with the contemporary day-to-day Black experience?

Peele: Um, yeah, you know, in many ways it really did. It felt very taboo. There were a couple of things, like Scary Movie, you know, that had a very silly tone and worked for the same crowd. But this idea that you could make a movie about race that dealt with violence against Black people, and every white person in the film is a villain, as it turns out—spoiler alert. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Noticed. We noticed. Noted. Yes. I picked that up. (Laughs.)

Peele: So that, uh, I mean, yeah, it felt like it was an unproducible film, and that’s what tickled me about it. It was this box that I felt like I had been put in, in many ways, and something I was told was impossible, that I couldn’t do, and yet it was a movie I wanted to see.

And then all the way up through making it, I was sure at any moment they could realize that this was a very risky film to put out there. And I didn’t know. I thought there was a good chance that everybody could hate it, and everyone could find offense in this idea that the way I was taking my power back was through this expression of fun horror escapism. You know, fun for me, at least.

And, of course, the response was a sort of collective catharsis, is what I felt. You know, it was the opposite of my fears, and a lot of people approached me and said, you know, I have another Black horror sort of idea.

Rosin: Is that where the book came from?

Peele: Yeah. We can’t make enough movies to fit all the stories that I’m kind of giddy to read.

Rosin: So you called your new collection of horror stories Out There Screaming, Jordan. And knowing your work, my first thought was, okay, this has several meanings. Like it could mean out there in the movie theater screaming with my popcorn, or it could mean out there on the streets screaming at a protest or out there screaming.

you know, in solitary confinement and no one is listening. Am I reading too much into it, into the title?

Peele: No, you're not, you know, I think it sort of connects to this central motif of the sunken place from Get Out that is a metaphor for a certain sort of marginalization. The marginalization at the time that I was trying to get across was feeling like my point of view, my perspective, and my skin wasn't making it into this space. And it was frustrating. In many ways, what I was looking for in these short stories was other people's sunken place in a way.

Rosin: Nora, you wrote the story “Reckless Eyeballing.” Can you just say a few words about what that story is about and who the main character is?

Jemisin: Sure. “Reckless Eyeballing” is from the perspective of a cop named Carl, who is a cop in a small town. He’s a Black man, he’s not a great person, definitely has done some bad-cop things, and is part of a fairly corrupt small-town police force. But he, you know, is basically just kind of merrily going along doing his usual bad-cop life when he starts to see the headlights on cars transform into real human eyes—eyelashes, blinking, all of that.

Rosin: Have you guys ever seen the Volkswagen Beetles with the cute little eyes?

Jemisin: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Like that’s not what’s happening here. (Laughs.) That is not it. That is not it.

Jemisin: I mean, it depends on how cute you think those eyes would be if they had, like, blood vessels and eye boogers and you know. I mean, like, do you really want to see that? No one wants to see that.

Rosin: Not cute. Yeah. Maybe, if you don’t mind, we can just read, like, a paragraph here. Because I think you get the not-cute vibe from this paragraph.

Jemisin: Sure, sure, okay.

Carl started seeing the eyes a few months back. He thought they were just some new headlight fad at first. Every year there’s a new one: neon rims, insectoid multiple bulbs, designs like hearts or cobra hoods. Tacky, but not illegal. These eyes, though, are far too realistic to be simply another mod.

They blink. There are veins throughout the sclera, striations in the irises, boogers at the corners. On the lone occasion when Carl actually sees them manifest, plain old halogen one moment and then blink and they’re blinking, Carl realizes something else. The eyes are a magical thing. Or supernatural, if there’s any difference.

He asks around, casually mentioning the new headlight fad to a couple of his fellow highway patrol officers, but no one has seen them. Nobody mentions freaky car eyes. It’s Carl-specific magic, or blessing, or a psychic gift just for him.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back, we talk about the eyes. They show up in a lot of Jordan’s movies too. That’s after the break.

Rosin: The eyes. What are the eyes? What are they doing?

Jemisin: I always leave room for interpretation, but I will talk about what they are for me, which is just—if you were a cop, if you were a Black cop, and you are still doing this work in the year of our Lord 2023, you have got to be aware of the strange space that you occupy between your role as an enforcer of systemic racism and being a person who is targeted by that role. And I just feel like, you know, anybody that is doing this work is probably constantly aware of being watched—being watched by their fellow officers, being watched by their fellow Black people, and being judged the whole time. So I just wanted to make that literal.

Peele: I mean this, yeah, this story really, uh, creeped me out. It really, um, shivered me timbers. (Laughs.) So to speak. I feel like the eyes motif, as you mentioned, emerges in several of these stories. And it is so fascinating because in so many ways, the eyes are this sometimes beautiful but often nightmarish source of the trauma of the Black experience. You know, with Get Out, I realized this idea of the white gaze, so to speak. And at its most benevolent seeming, there’s still an undertone of being worth as much as you look like, as opposed to worth who you are, what’s inside.

And on the flip side, eyes from the Black experience—this is our way of knowing the truth and being assured of the truth that we’re often told isn’t true.

Rosin: I would love to put what you guys are doing in a broader context. One common, strong interpretation of horror is that it was historically made to process white people’s fears. You know, The Birth of a Nation, the character Gus, King Kong, zombie movies—it’s just a fear of the dark other. And I just wonder, if you’re a young Black person interested in horror, is that something you pick up on a subconscious level, on a conscious level, and you think you want to push back against?

Peele: Well, I, you know, I think you pick it up on a subconscious level. You know, the thing I threw out earlier about the fact that Get Out doesn’t have any white good guys in it—obviously it was one of the riskiest pieces of the film, but I think it actually is, in many ways, the single-most cathartic part of it.

You’ll note one of the, you know, the most classic moments is when Rose, Chris’s adoring white girlfriend, says, You know you can’t leave? You know I can’t give you the keys, right, babe? And it all kind of dawns on you what’s been right in front of you the whole time. But I think what is happening for filmgoers is that we’re so ingrained that any film that exists must have at least one good white person so that the white audience feels okay.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Peele: So that they have somebody that they can say, Well, that’s, that’s me. I’m not racist. I relate to this person.

Well, the second this movie, you know, Get Out, removed that comfort, the film sort of showed itself for what it really was, which was a movie for Black people first. (Laughs.)

Jemisin: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah.

Jemisin: I’m still amazed you got that movie made.

[Laughter]

Peele: Me too.

Jemisin: I’m delighted, but I’m still like, Wow, they let this out.

Peele: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rosin: Nora, I remember in a profile of you in The New Yorker, you recalled a moment when Octavia Butler was asked, “Why do you incorporate Black characters?” And she said, “Just to say, Hey, we’re here.” And your response to that is we have to keep saying it. Do you still think that’s true?

Like there’s a part of me that thinks the popularity of Get Out and Jordan’s movies made it clear. Like, it injected the whole genre with this whole new life and relevancy. And I wonder if you feel like we have to keep saying it.

Jemisin: I very much do. The presence of one great Black film auteur in horror is not enough. We need terrible Black films. (Laughs.) We need, you know, I mean—this is the thing that I’ve been saying, you know, kind of, in every medium, but we will have arrived when we can put out just as much mediocre crap as, you know, white creators do. And it’s simply because right now, you know, you’re seeing our best and brightest. You’re seeing our most exceptional.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve arrived; that means the door has just cracked open.

Rosin: That’s amazing. I feel like that’s the perfect place to end, a rousing call for mediocre crap.

[All laugh]

Rosin: All right. Thank you both so much for joining us.

Peele: Thank you. Happy Halloween.

Rosin: Thanks.

Jemisin: Thank you to you too.

Peele: All right.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Ethan Brooks. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Isabel Cristo. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid. And our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back next week.

This afternoon, at a military base north of Tel Aviv, the Israel Defense Forces held a grisly matinee screening of 43 minutes of raw footage from Hamas’s October 7 attack. Members of the press were invited, but cameras were not allowed. Hamas had the opposite policy on cameras during the attack, which it documented gleefully with its fighters’ body cams and mobile phones. Some of the clips had been circulating already on social media in truncated or expurgated form, with the footage decorously stopped just before beheadings and moments of death. After having seen them both in raw and trimmed forms, I can endorse the decision to trim those clips. I certainly hope I never see any of the extra footage again.

It was, as IDF Major General Mickey Edelstein told the press afterward, “a very sad movie.” Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not. The terrorists surround a Thai man they have shot in the gut, then bicker about what to do next. (About 30,000 Thais live in Israel, many of them farmworkers.) “Give me a knife!” one Hamas terrorist shouts. Instead he finds a garden hoe, and he swings at the man’s throat, taking thwack after thwack.

[Graeme Wood: What is Israel trying to accomplish?]

The audience gasped. I heard someone heave a little at another scene, this one showing a father and his young sons, surprised in their pajamas. A terrorist throws a grenade into their hiding place, and the father is killed. The boys are covered in blood, and one appears to have lost an eye. They go to their kitchen and cry for their mother. One of the boys howls, “Why am I alive?” and “Daddy, Daddy.” One says, “I think we are going to die.” The terrorist who killed their father comes in, and while they weep, he raids their fridge. “Water, water,” he says. The spokesman was unable to say whether the children survived.

The videos show pure, predatory sadism; no effort to spare those who pose no threat; and an eagerness to kill nearly matched by eagerness to disfigure the bodies of the victims. In several clips, the Hamas killers fire shots into the heads of people who are already dead. They count corpses, taking their time, and then shoot them again. Some of the clips I had not previously seen simply show the victims in a state of terror as they wait to be murdered, or covered with bits of their friends and loved ones as they are loaded into trucks and brought to Gaza as hostages. There was no footage of rape, although there was footage of young women huddling in fear and then being executed in a leisurely manner.

Edelstein said that the IDF chose to show the footage out of necessity. It is not every day that snuff films of Jews are shown at an IDF screening hall. (The original site of the screening was a commercial theater, which would have been even worse.) “What we shared with you,” Edelstein said, searching for words, “you should know it.” And he said he struggled to understand how some journalists could present the IDF and Hamas as comparable. This footage would refute that false equivalence.

“We are not looking for kids to kill them,” he said. “We have to share it with you so no one will have an idea that someone is equal to another.”

[Graeme Wood: Hamas’s hostage-taking handbook says to ‘kill the difficult ones’ and use hostages as ‘human shields’]

To me the most disturbing section was not visual at all. Like the clip of the father and his boys hunted in their pajamas, it was upsetting in part because it showed a relationship between parent and child. The clip is just a phone call—placed by a terrorist to his family back in Gaza. He tells his father that he is calling from a Jewish woman’s phone. (The phone recorded the call.) He tells his father that his son is now a “hero” and that “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands.” And he tells his family, about a dozen times, that they should open up WhatsApp on his phone, because he has sent photographs to prove what he has done. “Put on Mom!” he says. “Your son is a hero!”

His parents, I noticed, are not nearly as enthusiastic as he is. I believe that the mom says “praise be to God” at one point, which could be gratitude for her son’s crimes or pure reflex, indicating her loss for words to match her son’s unspeakable acts. They do not question what their son has done; they do not scold him. They tell him to come back to Gaza. They fear for his safety. He says, amid rounds of “Allahu akbar,” that he intends “victory or martyrdom”—which the parents must understand means that he will never come home. From their muted replies I wonder whether they also understand that even if he did come home, he would do so as a disgusting and degraded creature, and that it might be better for him not to.

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Just as there are stages of grief, there are stages of war. Not yet two weeks after Hamas’s surprise attack, Israel is still in a raw, early stage. My colleague Graeme Wood, who arrived in Jerusalem this week, described it to me this way: “Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack on October 7. That manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now by wrath.”

Israeli officials insist that they are targeting Hamas, not Gazan citizens. But the situation on the ground for Gazan citizens is dire—a humanitarian crisis of catastrophic proportions, according to the United Nations and other agencies. Wood told me that, among many of the Israelis he’s interviewed, the prevailing attitude is a dangerous if understandable combination of anger, fear, and mourning.

The atrocities committed against Israeli citizens on October 7 were especially inhumane. And, as one Israeli I talked with put it, this society’s worst nightmare is vulnerability. What happens when a nation makes crucial wartime decisions while still processing the shock and anger over what they’ve experienced?

In today’s episode, we discuss the state of Israel with Wood, who frequently reports from the Middle East. I spoke with him shortly after a devastating explosion at a hospital in Gaza, and amid the widespread expectation that Israel will soon send ground troops into Gaza.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[MUSIC]

Hanna Rosin: Just as there are stages of grief there are stages of war. And Israel is in an early one.

[TAPE]

Graeme Wood: Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack of October 7; that manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now by wrath.

Rosin: Wrath. A combination of anger, fear, mourning and revenge. Which, given the circumstances, seems like a dangerous place to be.

This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. Today, as war in the Middle East is getting more intense, we look at what happens when a nation makes critical wartime decisions in this state of mind. And how they move from there, to step two, a stage that’s more strategic, more practical, maybe even conciliatory?

As President Joe Biden was on his way to visit Israel, I spoke with Graeme Wood, an Atlantic staff writer who has been reporting in the Middle East in recent months. We reached him in Jerusalem on Tuesday.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: Graeme, you have landed in Israel. Can you just talk about some of the things that you’ve seen and encountered this week?

Wood: Well, I actually landed in Jordan, so the first thing that I noticed was it was difficult to get to Israel. There were so many rockets that were coming out of Gaza that airlines understandably pulled back. So I flew into Jordan, landed there, and then went by land into an Israel that was very different from the one that I left last time I was here, just a month ago.

Rosin: And what do you mean, it’s different? What were some of the things that you noticed immediately?

Wood: First of all, getting to Jerusalem, which is a city that’s usually filled with pilgrims, filled with tourists. It is eerily quiet in a lot of places that I’ve only known to be absolutely chock-full of people.

The other thing that’s really amazing to note compared to a month ago is, a month ago, it seems like ancient history, but we’re talking about convulsions of politics and huge rifts in Israeli society that were playing out in the streets, mostly of Tel Aviv, over the efforts of the government to remake how Israeli politics work. And there’s an unsettling consensus that has replaced that unsettling division where it went from totally divided to a unity that is really weird to feel in this place. And it happened in the snap of the fingers.

Rosin: And what is the mood of that unity?

Wood: So 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 a thousand people. And that consensus is that, whatever else is true, Hamas cannot exist.

And I haven’t found, I think, almost any Israelis, except for extreme doves, who disagree with that point.

And 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.

Rosin: Okay. So that right there is incredibly complicated, like those distinctions are important. When people say “rooting out Hamas,” what do you hear?

Wood: Yeah, so “rooting out Hamas” means rooting out the ruling structures of Gaza. You know, Gaza was abandoned by Israel to the fate of being ruled by Hamas 15-plus years ago. And so getting rid of Hamas means getting rid of the government of this occupied territory. So it’s a huge undertaking. And given how much Hamas has dug in, militarily—Hamas itself says there’s 500 kilometers of tunnels that it controls under the Gaza Strip.

Those tunnels—filled with weapons; they’re smuggling routes—they may have as many as 200 Israeli hostages in them right now. It’s simply impossible to root out Hamas, whatever that phrase means, without actually going into the Gaza Strip, which Israel has been extremely reluctant to do and now it’s understood by everybody that, yeah, that’s going to happen. And it’s going to be bloody on both sides.

Rosin: By going in, you’re talking about a ground invasion.

Wood: That’s what’s expected. Yes. And there’s every indication that Israel is planning to do exactly that. What I think most surprising to most people is that it hasn’t happened yet.

Rosin: So far there have been a lot of airstrikes and thousands of Gazans killed. What is Israel’s goal in that phase of the attack?

Wood: Israel’s goal right now seems to be to do what can be done before the invasion takes place. That is, first, the clearing out of a civilian population from the northern part of the Gaza Strip, specifically Gaza City, which they’ve been calling up people’s cellphones, dropping leaflets. And in both cases, the message is: We’re coming in. And we’re going to kill the leaders of Hamas. We’re going to destroy Hamas.

So, what’s already happened is horrible beyond belief, and what’s coming next will probably be worse.

Rosin: Always in these situations, there seems to be just this gap between the rhetoric and what happens on the ground. If you tell civilians to flee, where do they actually go?

Wood: Yeah. And when I said before that Israel is still reeling from the trauma of the attack of October 7, that manifests in a number of ways. And one is that there’s a certain amount of Israeli policy that is driven right now by wrath.

It’s vengeance. It’s an understanding that we have to do something. We have to get rid of Hamas. And the phases of that operation, an operation that will almost certainly last months, maybe years. The reckoning of what those phases are going to be, is incomplete. And if you ask Israeli officials: “Who’s going to run the Gaza Strip once you’ve gone into it? Are you simply going to be the governing authority there with your boots on the ground forever?”

The answer that you get is something like: “We don’t know. Don’t ask that question. We’re at the stage right now of just realizing we had to go in against our wishes. We didn’t want to have to go in, but we have to go in.” And questions about what happens next, it’s some version of: It’s unpatriotic to ask. It’s untoward to ask. But they themselves kind of admit that we’re not really sure about that. All we know is that we have to go in and the operations of Hamas on October 7 have forced us to do that.

Rosin: So there is, as far as you can say, no step two. There’s just step one: Root out Hamas in whatever way we have to do that. That’s as far as we’ve gone.

Wood: I mean, I’m sure within Israeli planning, there are different ideas about how to proceed. but it’s not something that Israel has come out and said, We know how this is going to look. All they’ve said is, We know where it ends. It ends with the total annihilation of Hamas and, possibly for years to come, the hunting down of every single person who was involved in these atrocities.

Rosin: You use the word wrath. Why do you use that word?

Wood: I think that there is no other word for it other than wrath. I mean, there is a belief that the response has to be maybe proportionate, maybe even disproportionate.

The other day, I was in Sderot, which is one of the fairly large communities that was attacked. There were 30, 000 people in it as of a week and a half ago. Right now. They’ve all been transferred elsewhere. The Israeli government has let some journalists in and has brought out politicians, members of these communities. And there was one guy, who was from Kibbutz Be’eri, which lost on the order of 100 people, I think. And seemed like a nice guy. He described himself as being in favor of peace. He described his community as being one that welcomed cooperation with Gazans before, and he said, “I’m still in favor of peace, but that place needs to be leveled.”

He used the word leveled. That’s a view that I think is not uncommon. And it’s very hard to hear, because the view that Israel is going to annihilate Gaza is different from the one that the Israeli government wants to put out there. The Israeli government wants to say that we are going to annihilate Hamas, and in so doing, we will actually liberate the people of Gaza who have been under the thumb of, Hamas. And yet there are Israelis all over—not just the ones who are directly affected by the destruction of their communities along the Gaza border—who use language that is annihilationist.

Rosin: So what do you make of that? I mean, that feels like it has big implications if someone who describes himself as previously believing in peace is now more extreme than his own government.

Wood: Yeah, I think, we’re still in a phase where this mode of wrath is the dominant one. There is also a phase that will have to come that is more practical—more practical and more moral, too. I mean, the flattening of Gaza would be an unspeakable tragedy and crime.

So, I think what happens next is, surely an invasion, but after that, a kind of, reengagement of Israel’s reality principle, which means understanding that Gaza, in the end, unless terrible crime is committed against it, is going to still be a place that is Muslim. It’s going to be Palestinian, and it’s going to have to have some kind of modus vivendi with its neighbor, Israel.

Right now that thought, it’s unthinkable, I think, for a lot of Israelis, because of the anger that they feel, the pain that they feel. I don’t know when that shift is going to happen, but it’s going to have to coincide with the realities of a military mission—remember that Israel was in Gaza. There were settlements there until more than 15 years ago and Israel left because it decided that it was not good for the continued health of Israel as a Jewish state. So that reality will not have changed, but at the moment, most Israelis I speak to, including government officials, don’t want to imagine that moment.

They are saying simply that: There’s one sole objective right now, which is to destroy Hamas and then whatever comes after that, well, we’ll figure it out once that moment comes. But Hamas’s destruction is the only thing we’re going to think about until then, monomaniacally.

Rosin: Yeah. Wow. So Israel has no step two at the moment. Does Hamas? That’s after the break.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: I want to switch to talking about Hamas. When the Hamas militants bulldozed through the fence, puncturing the myth that the Israeli military is invincible. That’s what happened initially. Do you have a sense, on Hamas’s side, if there was a step two, what that step two would be? What did they expect out of all of this?

Wood: Yeah, when the attack initially happened, when you see this incredibly well-planned, stealthily planned operation unfold, you wonder where it all leads. And so it started off with trained Hamas fighters breaking through the fence and, with startling ease, taking over military outposts of Israel. It ended with ordinary citizens of Gaza coming through and looting Israeli towns on that border. So we’re talking about not a disciplined military force, but people coming through and stealing children’s bicycles and solar panels and stuff from Israelis’ houses after those Israelis have been murdered or burned alive.

It’s still not clear exactly how much of this was planned or which aspects of it were planned or what was expected by Hamas, but it seems quite possible that Hamas was just way more successful than it expected to be and that its people—and those who joined in once the fence was down—were way more savage than they expected to be.

Rosin: What about the hostages? Because that seems like a strategy. I don’t know if it’s an intentional strategy, but it’s certainly become important as this all unfolds.

Wood: Yeah, the state of the hostages is probably the aspect of this that Israel has least come to terms with. When I spoke earlier of the fact that there is still this traumatic stage that the country was in, everybody in Israel remembers the very long period years ago when Gilad Shalit was captive by Hamas in Gaza. This is an Israeli conscript who was kidnapped from the Kerem Shalom border post, and then kept in some horrible dungeon for years while there was an effort to negotiate his freedom. Which came at the cost of freeing over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

This galvanized the whole country. I mean, you’d see images of Gilad Shalit on the street in Jerusalem. And then there was one guy, it was one guy who for years, was one of the major political causes in Israel. And now we’ve got almost 200 Israelis—and not all of them, not even most of them, I believe, soldiers—who have disappeared into Gaza. And the idea of there being 199 Gilad Shalits is inconceivable.

Hamas already said that if civilian dwellings are destroyed without warning by Israel, then they will kill hostages. They will kill them on camera. So Hamas, of course, considers them valuable. And, again, the processing is still going on. I think, on the Israeli side, I haven’t heard too much about exactly what the calculation is going to be.

Releasing 1,000 prisoners per hostage release is not sustainable. I have no idea how Israel is going to make this calculation and proceed. And I have no idea how Hamas is either.

Rosin: You mentioned that before this there was a raging debate over the soul of Israel, sort of internal civil war, would they remain a democracy?. Now it sounds like what we hear from inside is that the current government of Benjamin Netanyahu is collapsing, or its support is collapsing. What does that mean, or what could that mean?

Wood: Yeah, so if you asked Israelis a month ago what’s the biggest issue, then everybody knew that it was the question of judicial reform and the follow-on effects of that. Whether the right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, would be able to change the Israeli political system so it would be less constrained by the results of a far more liberal judiciary. And everybody knew that that was important.

So what the effects of the Hamas attack on October 7 are, are simply cataclysmic for the country’s politics. First of all, nobody cares about judicial reform anymore. That is simply on the back burner. It will not be taken up until the war is finished. Second of all, the hatred of the Israeli government, and maybe even more than that, the Israeli state, is very difficult to exaggerate. And I’m talking about people who were once knee-jerk supporters of Netanyahu, very eager to watch him succeed in the judicial overhaul, feel like they were just betrayed. Netanyahu had—for a long time, one of his value propositions to the Israeli people was that he had presided over a period of peace.

And the failure of Israel to secure its citizens on October 7 has left people absolutely livid. There were Israelis who, rather than getting the response of an [Israel Defense Forces] commando unit coming to their homes and freeing them within minutes or even an hour, were waiting 10 hours. Ten hours! You can drive back and forth, top to bottom in this country in 10 hours. And somehow these people were left at the mercy of terrorists who burned them to death.

And for Israelis who thought that, At least we have safety; at least we’re in a country where the lives of Jews are taken seriously, protected—apparently the government can’t even do that. And what was it doing in the meantime?

They’re furious to think that there was political bickering taking place, there was safeguarding of political reputations, while Israelis were left defenseless, simply defenseless. And the anger is just indescribable from all sides at this government. Their reputations are toast.

Rosin: So we just don’t know where that will lead, but we know that for now. What about the future leadership of Palestinians?

Wood: If Israel’s threat is followed through, and I have a little doubt that they will do this, then the leadership of Hamas will be hunted. They’re already hunted. And Israel will make it impossible for them to govern Gaza. The rest of the Palestinian leadership, of course, in the West Bank of the Palestinian Authority, led by Abu Mazen, who’s in his 80s.

The Palestinian Authority is, of course, an enemy of Hamas. They lost the power struggle with Hamas, and they will be the sort of last Palestinian power structure that’s standing if Hamas is dismantled, as Israel promises. But first of all, the Palestinian Authority has many enemies within the Israeli state and within Israel, to say the least, and it’s not clear that they could stand up to control Gaza, given that they had lost the power struggle there before. So there’s a great big power vacuum. This is part of the mess that Israel has not publicly reckoned with because it is so convinced that nothing else matters other than getting rid of Hamas. Whatever could come next, whatever mess we have, it can’t be worse than having a government on the border with an armed military unit that will do what it just did again. So, yeah, finding out the future of Palestinian leadership is one of those cans that Israel seems to be kicking down the road.

Rosin: Before this, there were reports of Israel moving closer to Saudi Arabia, glimmers of a realignment in the Middle East. Where is that now, and how does this change that realignment?

Wood: Israel had normalized relations with a number of Arab states—UAE, Bahrain, Morocco—and there was talk of Saudi Arabia being the next, more than talk. I mean, Saudi Arabia and Israel have quietly had this security relationship that has actually been pretty cordial. They share as an enemy the Islamic Republic of Iran. And there is some question about whether Israel would make peace with diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.

And the possibility of that normalization, which was set to be one of the great achievements of the Netanyahu government, it’s absolutely impossible right now. There’s no way that that could happen, simply because there’s hundreds, thousands of Palestinians who are being killed.

And the only reason that Saudi Arabia could have contemplated normalization with Israel was that the last 10 years have been relatively quiet. I mean, there hasn’t been the mass production of horrible images of Arab death in Gaza and the West Bank. Now there is, which means that any Arab country that was contemplating joining the crew of Arab countries that are friendly to Israel has to step back or risk incurring the wrath of their own people, which could mean the change of the regime in some of these countries, Saudi Arabia being one. Even some of the countries that are already at peace with Israel, such as Egypt. Egypt and Jordan have to wonder what the price might be of that peace if the war continues to be as horrible as it looks like it will be.

Rosin: Well, that for Hamas maybe counts as an accomplishment. I mean, watching Israel move towards Saudi Arabia, even if the immediate on-the-ground strategy seems nihilistic, maybe there’s a broader strategy that makes sense.

Wood: Yeah, I’ve even heard Israeli government officials say that Saudi Arabia has changed so much in its posture toward jihadism, formerly winking at it, being associated with intolerant versions of Sunni Islam. And now Israeli officials will say, We were about to make peace with a moderate Muslim country called Saudi Arabia, and Hamas tried to destroy that.

So it’s a sentence that I never expected to hear. But that is, in fact, one of the effects of the October 7 attacks and their aftermath, is that Israel’s attempts to make peace with countries like Saudi Arabia just are going to be put on hold, as Hamas would prefer.

Rosin: Graeme, thank you so much for joining us from there, and good luck.

Wood: Thanks, Hanna.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was engineered by Rob Smeirciak. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid, and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday.

The Israeli journalist Amir Tibon and his family were trapped inside a safe room in their house on the Israel-Gaza border when they heard gunshots outside. Tibon speaks Arabic, so he knew what was happening. Hamas terrorists had somehow made it into their Israeli village. Tibon spoke with me and my colleague Yair Rosenberg about the experience, and in this episode of Radio Atlantic we hear Tibon’s story—hiding out with his two young children, their improbable rescue—and his first, raw thoughts about why this happened to them.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Amir Tibon: Saturday, six in the morning, and we hear a very familiar sound: the sound of a mortar about to explode. It’s like a whistle. It’s almost like this [whistles].

Hanna Rosin: Amir Tibon lives in a community in Israel, right near the Gaza border. Mortars fly overhead once in a while, but the family has a routine for that. Amir, his wife, and their two young girls go to a reinforced safe room in their house, and they wait. It’s scary, but they’ve gotten used to it.

Tibon: You wait sometimes an hour. You pack your bags.

And when there is a break, a few minutes, you just shove the kids in the car and you go away from the border toward a more secure place. But this time, as we were packing, I heard the most chilling noise I’ve heard in my life: automatic gunfire in the distance.

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. After the events this weekend, when Hamas launched an attack along the southern border of Israel, we’re bringing you this bonus episode, sharing the story of Amir and his family.

Tibon: So at first I’m hearing this gunfire from the fields. But then I hear it from the road. And then I hear it from the neighborhood. And then I hear it outside my window. And I hear shouting. And I understand Arabic; I understood exactly what was happening. Basically, I understood that Hamas has infiltrated our kibbutz, that there are terrorists outside my window, and I’m locked in my house and inside my safe room with two young girls, and I don’t know if anyone is going to come to save us.

That’s how it started.

Rosin: To reach this early conclusion, Amir would have had to ignore some hard, immovable facts. There is a 40-mile security barrier between Israel and Gaza. That barrier is patrolled by soldiers at all times, and Israel tightly controls all movement in and out.

Amir moved his family there, making what he felt was an implicit bargain with the Israeli government: We’ll populate your border, and you keep us safe. In fact, anywhere in Israel lately, a civilian face to face with a terrorist has become a rare event. So why was there one outside his door? It didn’t make sense. Now, Amir’s a journalist. So while his phone still had power, he called his colleague Amos Ariel, who covers military affairs. He told Amos what was happening in his town and asked if he knew more.

Tibon: And what Amos told me in reply was the scariest thing I heard. He said, “Yes, I know, but it’s not only in your kibbutz. It’s not only in Nachal Oz. It’s all over southern Israel. It’s all over. It’s in cities and in towns and in kibbutzim and in villages. Thousands of armed Hamas fighters have infiltrated the country. They’ve taken over military bases.”

And that was scary because I realized, if that’s the situation, it will take a very long time for the military to come and confront these terrorists and save us.

That’s where I thought, Okay, we’re going to die here. Nobody’s going to be able to come in time. And if they manage to break into the house, they will then try to break into the safe room. And if they manage to do that, we will be dead or kidnapped.

Rosin: They had no food, and the electricity had been cut off. From inside the safe room, Amir controlled what he could. He told his daughters:

Tibon: “You have to be absolutely quiet, not a word. You can’t cry, can’t talk. It’s dangerous.”

Rosin: Outside, Hamas fighters in towns along the border were killing and kidnapping soldiers and civilians alike. Parents were getting panicked phone calls from their kids. And then the phones would go dead.

There’d been a music festival in a nearby town the night before that was winding down that morning. At least 200 people were killed at the festival, and many more were missing.

The next many hours became a kind of social-media hell. Families scoured the internet for any tweets or videos, and then they were sorry for what they found. One video showed a young woman from the festival being taken away by militants on a motorcycle. In other videos, people would recognize their wife or their children or their grandmother. Now, pretty soon, parents near Gaza would get panicked phone calls from their kids because on Sunday, a day into the fighting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on Hamas.

Whenever something like this happens between Israelis and Palestinians, I want to skip straight to the end. Will this be the thing that is so bloody and so unspeakably terrible that the only option afterwards will be peace?

That’s probably because I’m thousands of miles away from the Israel-Gaza border.

Tibon: I have neighbors who are dead. I have neighbors who are injured. I have neighbors that we don’t know where they are, you know—may have been kidnapped, held by Hamas. I’m not thinking right now about, you know, the bigger implications of this in terms of our future.

Rosin: Even before this, Israel’s had intense political divisions. Even before this, Israel has intense political divisions right now. And judging by wars past, this one is likely to deepen them. Some Israelis will come to mistrust the government more, and some will rally behind the government and will it to be a focused military machine. Some people will harden their opposition to peace, and some will be desperate for it.

Even with Amir, he seems to be processing, maybe not the future, but the political present. You can already hear it in the way that he's making meaning from how he and his family escaped kidnapping or death.

Before his phone died, Amir made another call. This one was to his father, a retired general who lives in Tel Aviv, which is about an hour and a half north.

Tibon: My parents said, “We’re coming. We’re coming to get you.” Now, this goes against all logic, but I told myself, okay, right now I’m asking my two young daughters to put complete faith in me and my wife, in their parents. To do what we’re telling them in order to save their lives, which is to be very, very, very quiet and understand that we cannot get out of the room, we cannot go get food, we cannot go to the bathroom, we cannot go out to play.

And I’m asking them to put their faith in me completely. And I told myself, I have to do the same thing right now. I have to trust my father, who is a trustworthy man, that if he said he will come here and save us, he will do it.

Rosin: So Amir’s parents started driving south. As they got closer, they saw young people walking on the side of the road barefoot. These were escapees from the music festival. They kept driving until they got to the main town near the border.

Tibon: They get out of the car. My father has a pistol. And he and this other soldier join the soldiers who are fighting the Hamas cell. They help kill them. And now they’re very close to my kibbutz. They’re like five minutes from the entrance to my kibbutz. But two of the soldiers are wounded.

Rosin: So, Amir’s mother decides to take these wounded soldiers, put them in the car, and turn back around to go to the hospital, which means that his father now has no car.

And then, his father sees another retired former general he knows, who’s around his age, also a grandfather on a mission to help his family. He asks him for a ride.

Tibon: So these two guys, over the age of 60, are driving in a regular car. It’s not even a jeep or something. It’s not an armored vehicle. It’s just a car. Like They’re driving now on the road where half an hour earlier there was a deadly ambush of soldiers. And they reach the entrance to the kibbutz and when they get there they meet a group of soldiers from special forces who are about to begin the very dangerous process of going from house to house in our community, to try to engage the terrorists and release the people who are barricaded.

And by that point, I have no idea that all of this is happening. We are in the safe room. The terrorists are still outside. And we have no cell reception. We’re just waiting in the dark. But we start hearing gunfire again. And this time, it’s—we hear it’s two kinds of guns. And we realize there is a battle. We realize that there is an exchange of fire. And I tell my wife, “He’s coming. My father is coming. They’re fighting. He’s with the soldiers.”

They didn’t come immediately to our house. They went from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, inside our community. I don’t remember how long it took, I have to say. We were just hearing that the gunfire were getting closer and closer. And the girls had fallen asleep, but now they woke up. It’s, I think, maybe 2 p.m. They haven’t had anything to eat since last night. They don’t see us at this point. There’s no light and we don’t have cellphones anymore.

And there’s one sentence that is keeping them from falling apart and starting to cry. I’m telling them, “Grandfather is coming.” I tell them, “If we stay quiet, your grandfather will come and get us out of here.” And at 4 p.m., after 10 hours like this, we hear a large bang on the window. And we hear the voice of my father and Galia, my oldest daughter, says, “Saba Hegia.” Grandfather arrived. And that’s when we all just start crying. And that’s when we knew that we were safe.

Rosin: It’s an unbelievable story of heroism and love. And yet telling it makes Amir angry.

Tibon: You live in a place like Nachal Oz, you wake up every morning, and you know there are people on the other side of the border who want to kill you and your children, basically. And so we were there all these years. And the contract was, again, we protect the border and the state protects us. And this government, which is the worst government in the history of the state of Israel, led by a corrupt, dysfunctional, and egoistic man who sees only himself, Benjamin Netanyahu, failed us.

The way that the events of the day unfolded are the worst failure in the history of the state of Israel. I mean, people like my father, like other retired officers, coming down to save citizens, to try to save their own families and others, and meanwhile, the military is falling apart. And all the civilian infrastructure that is supposed to support the military and the society in such an event is also not functioning.

Listen, right now we have to win this war. We have to destroy Hamas. We have to make it impossible for them to ever, ever again conduct anything that is even close to what happened on Saturday. No country in the world can allow something like this to happen to its citizens and just go to business as usual. And I feel bad for the people of Gaza, I have to say. I feel very, very bad for the people of Gaza. I’m sad; I’m heartbroken. But the response Israel will have to take will be completely disproportionate to anything we’ve seen in the past because this was a disproportionate event. This was our 9/11.

And after we win the war and we, you know, eradicate Hamas, there will be time also to throw into the dustbin of history any politician, starting with the prime minister, who had anything to do with this failure.

And there is a new reality between Israel and Gaza. That reality, it can be, you know, the result of a disastrous military operation. It can be a result of some diplomatic maneuvers as well, but it cannot remain the same situation.

Rosin: I asked Amir, what is this new reality? What does it look like?

Tibon: It cannot include Hamas. I don’t know what it will be, but Hamas, which in the past people considered as perhaps, you know, maybe we can talk to them, maybe we can do—it cannot include Hamas. I don’t know what it looks like but Hamas lost any shred of possibility of ever becoming a normal partner for anything.

It’s true that Gaza is also home to more than 2 million people, and they’re going to stay there. And we’re going to have to think about what that means, and how in the long run there could be a better future for them as well and a future that will also make it better for us.

But that’s a conversation for tomorrow. It’s not the conversation for today.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Ebeid. Claudine is also the executive producer of Atlantic Audio. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. Special thanks to Yair Rosenberg for arranging this interview.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Objectively speaking, President Joe Biden has presided over some significant, even historic, accomplishments: a massive vaccine rollout, the biggest infrastructure investment since the Eisenhower administration, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. Yet, when voters are asked about these things, their responses are perplexing. Poll after poll show that voters have never heard of these programs, are annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just don’t care. Why don’t Biden’s political and legislative victories penetrate the public consciousness?

Political insiders point the finger at Biden. He isn’t a great communicator, they say. He tends to defer and give other people credit. He doesn’t have enough energy. But part of it is also how voters consume political news.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, and Elaina Plott Calabro, a politics writer at the Atlantic, about what political news is—or isn’t—breaking through, and the gap between what voters say they want and what they actually seem to want.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Not speaking as a partisan here, just an observer of human nature, there is something I can’t understand about the Biden administration. They have objectively, objectively, pulled off some pretty huge things: an enormous and complicated vaccine rollout, the biggest investment in infrastructure in over 50 years, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years.

These are moves which are impressive and historic and helpful to many, many Americans, and yet, poll after poll shows that when people are asked about these accomplishments, they’re surprised. They’ve never heard of them. They’re annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just shrug, like Who cares?

Why? Why don’t these legitimate wins penetrate the public consciousness?

Now, there are inside, political consultant-type answers, which point the finger at Biden and his style of governing, just as there are insider-type answers to what happened in the House this week, when a tiny group of Republican extremists ousted the Speaker of the House.

Something is going wrong with them, the politicians. But I suspect it’s more complicated than that.

And what I’m wondering more about is us, the voters: what we’ve become accustomed to, what we’re maybe encouraging, what we are and aren’t paying attention to, what we say we want versus what we actually want. What part of it is them, and what part is us?

Recently at a live show, I ran these questions by The Atlantic staff writer Frank Foer, who just wrote a book called The Last Politician about Joe Biden, and Elaina Plott Calabro, who writes about politics for The Atlantic and who has asked a lot of experienced pollsters questions like this: What’s the problem? Why don’t voters know about these big successes?

Elaina Plott Calabro: I think it’s not natural for someone like President Biden to try and go out and focus on shaping the narrative that way. At the end of the day you’ll talk to pollsters who say I go in and say, Did you know that this administration kind of executed the largest investment in infrastructure, really since the Eisenhower era? When they do bring this up with voters and focus groups, they’re almost angry that they haven’t heard about it.

Rosin: What do you mean, they’re angry?

Plott Calabro: Why didn’t I know about this? Why didn’t this break through the media for me? And it’s interesting because reporters do cover these things, but that, I think is, kind of a dynamic that’s become really pronounced in the Trump era. What does it mean to achieve ubiquity as a politician when you are not Donald Trump? And when has that become the standard for how one breaks through?

Rosin: Why aren’t they pleased? Like, why isn’t it a Oh, this is wonderful.

Plott Calabro: I think it’s more of just, I feel that I should have known about this. Why is this not something I’m seeing on TV every day? Or that when I just, like, log on to the homepage of whatever news source I use is the banner of the day?

Rosin: So, I feel unsatisfied in understanding why they’re not breaking through the public consciousness. Is it because they are not great communicators? Is it because—maybe what I’m asking, is the problem them or us?

Franklin Foer: Yeah, well, I think, as a nation we’re suffering through some sort of equivalent of a long COVID, where even though the pandemic is gone, there’s a lot that still feels bad about its aftermath. Whether it’s inflation, which is something that you’re reminded of constantly, and whether the administration contributed to it in a somewhat meaningful way or an extremely meaningful way, it’s there and people are pissed off about that.

Like, when was the right moment to crow about the vaccine? Like, was it while people were getting vaccinated, but there were different variants that continued to rage across the country? Was it after we returned to normal? Returning to normal wasn’t something. I read The Plague by Camus, and there was actually a fireworks display at the end of that pandemic when the quarantine was lifted. They tried that fireworks display on July 4, 2021, and they got lashed roundly for that. So I think there’s something about the times that we’re living in. And then I do think that there is something about his age that ends up compounding this impression that he’s not governing in a competent sort of way. So when you read my book, you would see that he’s a micromanager. He’s involved in a lot of decision making, but the public impression is that he’s not an energetic president. Is that persuasive?

Rosin: That’s almost persuasive, but I think my fear is that we don’t have tolerance to take in good news. Like, our senses are heightened to conflict in such a way now that we can’t even hear anything that’s below the decibel of that. And so if he were to somehow say, Look I’ve accomplished, I’ve done this great thing. I’ve, you know, done this with inflation. I’ve done this with vaccines, it just comes in as noise, you know, dull noise.

Plott Calabro: I would say Celinda Lake, who’s a pretty prominent Democratic pollster, has done a lot of work for the Biden campaign. She put it to me pretty succinctly, which was that when you understand that people feel day to day, like the vibes are off in the country, they don’t want to see their politicians taking a victory lap, even if it’s deservedly so, for example. When it’s not matching, sort of, their day-to-day experience in the country, it just—it’s a recipe for disaster. Like fireworks not going so well for instance.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Plott Calabro: I think that’s something important to think about. But the second thing that’s interesting about whether voters today have the capacity to, I don’t know, register good news or even seek it out, you know, on their own—that’s, I think, something that Democrats are confused by too, because, you know, Biden was swept in ostensibly on this idea that voters want a return to normalcy.

They want to get back to a place where they’re not actively, like, wondering what their president is saying or doing every day. In some ways, that is what this president has been able to provide, but even if voters were saying back in 2020, That is the dynamic we want, it’s not the one that seems to compel them day to day in terms of, like, wanting to be engaged with what is happening.

Rosin: So this is one of those cases, I can’t remember the psychological, sociological term for when there’s a gap between what you say you want in a poll and what you actually want, and you’re not even aware of that, your desire, because it’s subconscious. So you’re like, Check. I want to go back to normal. But it’s not actually….

Okay, so we have 12 months until the election or so. I’ve heard the term—a lot of people say we’re sleepwalking into the same election, but I think that’s not true. Like, I think that many things are very different than they were four years ago. So let’s start with Trump. What’s different, Elaina, about Donald Trump now? Who’s the Donald Trump now versus the Donald Trump we knew last time?

Plott Calabro: The Donald Trump who ran in the last election was someone who felt he was playing with house money, right? And I think that was a large part of his appeal. There was no plan necessarily for what to do once he got in office, because not even he actually expected for that to ever happen.

There is a degree, I think, of seriousness to the bid this time to where, you know, you might recall, Hanna, the very popular and overused phrase back in 2016, which was “Take him seriously but not literally.” I think we’ve arrived at a point where Donald Trump has shown voters enough of himself, and consistently, that you can no longer just say, Don’t take him at his word.

Especially after January 6, we are far, far past that. So if he is saying something to rile up a crowd, I don’t think that there is the same degree of suspension of disbelief maybe there was in 2016—and perhaps never should have been—that he is very serious about what he wants to do.

And I think when it comes to his very nakedly authoritarian tendencies, that is what gives this election, I think, like, a much darker tenor and, like, starker shape than the one that we saw.

Foer: You know the other slogan or the other catchphrase is one that Paul Krugman came up with, which was, “malevolence tempered by incompetence.” And so I think that there is a chance that it could be malevolence tempered by less incompetence heading into this campaign. And I’m so fascinated by the fact that he’s managed to go many months without overexposing himself to the public.

I think that part of the reason why the poll numbers are where they are is that people have forgotten the malevolence of Donald Trump. And when he wages his equivalent of a basement campaign, which seems like it runs against everything, every fiber of his being to be quiet, that’s interesting.

And then you’ll get the abortion issue and the way that he’s trying to pivot to the center against the other Republicans who are running against him, he’s made this calculation, This nomination is mine. I need to start running a general-election campaign. That’s a shockingly competent move. And then I think when it relates to the authoritarianism that Elaina’s just describing, you see all of these plans that are in the works, that think tanks are ginning up in order to remake the civil service, to eliminate the swaths of the deep state that he abhors, that seems much more competent than the last go around.

Rosin: What is the…I feel like the Republicans are starting to coalesce around a line about Biden. Like, they’re hitting on a line about Biden. What? What is that? And how did they come to that?

Foer: It does feel like they’ve successfully constructed a character. He’s “sleepy Joe Biden.” He’s this guy who slurs his words and can’t complete a sentence.

There’s almost a conspiratorial edge to it that he’s just a sorry corpse who is like, it’s Weekend at Bernie’s. He’s being carted out by these evil advisors

Rosin: For the deep state—

Foer: To do their progressive bidding.

And then they have the Hunter Biden thing, which I think has been so successful because, like I described the aging, the mental-acuity continuum, there’s this corruption continuum that now exists where Hunter Biden did his thing, and Joe– and Donald Trump did his thing. Nevermind that fundamentally subverting the democracy and, like, 90 different counts that have been indictable is very different than your son lying about his drug use on a gun application. Different in kind, but they’ve successfully created this impression that, you know, Joe Biden is just another elite who is getting away with it because he’s using his connections.

Plott Calabro: I do think, though, that there is a dimension that we haven’t addressed yet, and we should because Frank in particular has done great reporting on it. I would argue that Republicans actually finally gained the foothold they needed to position him as incompetent or less than ideal as a president—what have you—after Afghanistan. His poll numbers have not recovered since Afghanistan, which to me, I just find fascinating as a reporter because it does seem often that we’re in this moment that maybe a new cycle has three days before it fizzles out.

But Afghanistan is something that has kind of remained, like, a throughline of this administration when it comes to perceptions about, you know, competence or incompetence.

Foer: The Afghanistan stuff was so viral and so terrible. And the images of people falling from airplanes and the chaos in the streets. And it was one of those rare occasions where mainstream media and Fox News were completely in sync and somewhat, you know, as mainstream media reacted to it in a very moralizing sort of way.

Rosin: Like, sad for the people there.

Foer: Sad for the people there, outraged at Biden’s behavior and profoundly disappointed in Joe Biden.

Plott Calabro: And it was only really six months into the new administration, so there’s just such fertile ground for, you know, first impressions to be formed.

Rosin: Do you think Joe Biden is maybe too old?

Foer: So here’s, I thought a lot about this when I wrote my book, interestingly, I thought about the age question. It frames the book, but age isn’t a throughline of my story. And I had to question myself afterwards. Why didn’t I push the age question more? And it’s in fact, in the first few years of his presidency, and in effect I was writing a book about governing, age didn’t matter to the way that he governed.

Right now he has the ability to do the job, but there are a couple caveats that are very important that need to be appended to that. He doesn’t have the energy to campaign in the way that he would have a couple of years ago, let alone a couple of decades ago.

And does that become an issue for the republic, that he can’t energetically campaign in that sort of way? Then there’s the question of, Is it a good idea to have an 86-year-old president? I would say no. I would rather not have an 86-year-old president. But I would rather have an 86-year-old president than Donald Trump.

Rosin: I don’t instinctively understand the age question. I understand the gerontocracy question. Like, Why is everybody that old? But I don’t understand the specific age question. Like, 86-year-olds probably, to me, have a lot of experience and wisdom, and this is a terrible period, and Donald Trump is the other choice. Like, it doesn’t enter my mind the way it does a lot of other people.

Foer: It’s true. And I do think that there is, I don’t think, Ukraine or China—these really massive issues that loom over the world, loom over the presidency. Joe Biden happens to have an incredible amount of wisdom and experience as it relates to foreign policy. And to navigate a proxy war against a nuclear power where choices could result in a very, very dangerous escalation that could destroy the planet, there’s a lot of value in having somebody who’s been around the block.

Rosin: And I feel more so reading your book, it’s like a guy with a lot of experience, some amount of self-awareness, a lot of emotional intelligence, drive, sure.

Plott Calabro: Here, I would chime in to say, the conversation that y’all are having right now, and sort of, almost the case that you’re making, is not the one that the White House is currently making. I think where this White House is running afoul of voters, when it comes to this age question, is that they act as though it’s an illegitimate question.

Rosin: I see.

Plott Calabro: Okay, objectively, you know, it’s not really the point whether or not that’s true. The point is that polling day in and day out shows that Americans do care about this question. But White House aides, I mean, you bring it up and they—they act like you’re insane that you would even, like, deign to ask them about Joe Biden’s mortality, like, as a human being.

I mean, President Eisenhower, who, you know, entered office in—what was then, I think at the time, the oldest president—in his ’60s had heart issues pretty early into his term. He really felt that Americans deserved to know that he felt, you know, ready and willing to continue doing his job and, like, was there and with it.

But it was also important to him to demonstrate that even though he personally hated Richard Nixon as his vice president, just really didn’t like the guy, that Americans had the sense that, were something to happen to him, um, that they would be in good hands with Richard Nixon. And this White House is—this White House has not taken on, I guess, a similar mentality that this is something that, you know, is a legitimate thing to care about. Even if they don’t think it is, Americans do, and they should be communicating with the public accordingly.

Rosin: That’s such a good point. I never thought of that. If they just, like, took the Fetterman route, like, Here’s what’s going on. Here’s where I’m going to be ready. Kamala’s, you know, whatever, like just address it.

Plott Calabro: I mean, I’ve said that to White House aides before. I’m like, “Do you not think that it would go over relatively well if your boss were to say, Listen, I know I’m old, but I feel great. I have every expectation of finishing out four more years. But listen, if something, God forbid, were to happen to me, you’re in great hands with Kamala Harris.”

Foer: But they’re clearly worried about voters having to make the choice between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, because they’re not convinced that voters will choose Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.

Rosin: I feel like what we are leaving… where we’ve taken our audiences so far, is that the Democrats are sort of, like, drowning under a series of incompetent strategies. And Trump is the clever one. He’s riding it right.

Have you guys, in reporting on Democrats, landed on anything surprising, hopeful, where you think, Oh, that’s a clever move. Or like, That’s a person who knows what’s up.

Plott Calabro: I was on this very stage yesterday. I did a panel with Sarah Longwell, who is a Republican strategist but, you know, very anti-Trump—she publishes The Bulwark and does focus groups constantly, and Alencia Johnson, who is a Democratic strategist. And Sarah at one point turned to Alencia, and she said, “You know, as somebody who very much wants Biden to win, it has been so clear that where Republicans have succeeded in the messaging game the past several years is that when Donald Trump says something, every Republican down the line is on cable news that night repeating it verbatim. With Democrats it’s just never the same.” So Sarah essential says, “I’m just gonna need you guys to kind of, like, get it together in that respect.”

But I mean, going back to the question about the vice president, even it’s just, like, faking that Democrats think Kamala Harris would be an exceptional president if elected.

I mean, Jamie Raskin is on with Jake Tapper, and he’s saying, “Yes or no? Do you endorse Kamala Harris for vice president?” He said, “Well, you know, I haven’t seen polling.” I mean, it was remarkable. And then you have Nancy Pelosi on with Anderson Cooper. He asks her the same question, and he said, “Do you think that Kamala Harris is the best running mate for Joe Biden?”

She said, “He seems to think so, and that’s what matters.”

Rosin: Burn.

Plott Calabro: So Republicans, meanwhile, they’ll, you know—they’ll go on TV, and then you catch them in the green room after, and they’re like, Well, I’m full of shit. I don’t believe any of that, whatever.

Rosin: Okay, anything you guys can prognosticate that feels different than what we all think is gonna happen? “No,” is a fine answer. You’re insiders so…

Foer: Can I just—I want to say one thing about—you talked about the difference between Democrats and Republicans. And I think part of that difference is the level of fear and anxiety that Democrats bring to every sort of political discussion, because the stakes are so existential that—you know, there’s this famous phrase that David Plouffe used to describe Barack Obama’s doubters, that they were bedwetters. And like, if your nightmare is about to descend on America, uh, you’re going to wet the bed all night long.

Rosin: By the way, it is amazing to me that that’s a mainstream political phrase, bedwetter

Foer: Radio Atlantic, this is your next episode.

Rosin: Yes. Bedwetting.

Plott Calabro: An investigation.

Foer: So I think the point is that when you’re bedwetting, you’re anxious, and that when you’re anxious, you’re not actually able to make cold, honest calculations about what’s happening. And there are so many reasons to be afraid of Donald Trump, but the political conditions right now, so many months before the election, are not necessarily reliable.

And if you look at what Nate Cohn has been writing in The New York Times—so I’m not saying anything that’s original, but, I think this is an under appreciated fact—Joe Biden has hemorrhaged support in California, in New York, where you have migrant crises, and you have high inflation—especially high inflation, high gas prices, and so he’s not going to be able to run up the margins in blue-state bastions.

But then you look in the industrial Midwest or the Rust Belt or Wisconsin and Michigan and the like, and Democrats have consistently performed very well there since Trump’s presidency and midterm elections and special elections.

Abortion has been a very salient issue that white voters in those places have actually stuck with Joe Biden. And so it’s possible that, headed into this election, we’re not going to have this massive disjunction between the popular vote and the electoral college.

Plott Calabro: I think another underappreciated dynamic that is likely to play out in a general election with Donald Trump as the nominee, is abortion becomes not so obvious a flashpoint just for Democrats anymore. If Ron DeSantis is the nominee, like, absolutely. I don’t think that Democrats worry about maintaining the independents and maybe more moderate Republican women that they were able to pick off in the midterms. With Donald Trump as the nominee, that issue gets trickier to litigate. I see it being, you know, just as much of a flashpoint in the election—this general election—as I do in the midterms.

And I think that, I mean, it’s just going to be interesting—

Foer: Just because Donald Trump is able to triangulate on the issue?

Plott Calabro: Absolutely. Absolutely. And he’s the only one in the field doing it right now.

Rosin: So it’s neutralized?

Plott Calabro: I don’t think it’s, like, entirely neutralized. I just think it becomes harder if Donald Trump is the candidate.

Rosin: Right. Okay. Last thing. Frank, so the title of your book, The Last Politician, you know, it’s positive to neutral for Biden. but it is, like, it could be interpreted as sort of worrisome for the country ’cause you make it seem as if this person who’s relatively effective, able to get things done, is an absolutely dying breed. And yet the feel of your book is not dark or pessimistic. Like, I actually felt good reading it. It made me feel a little bit hopeful in general about political culture, about the humanity of political culture. You describe the Biden White House as sort of a series of friends. It sounded like a cool office. I was like, Oh, I would like to work in that office.

Foer: It is not a cool office. The people who occupy that office are not cool.

Rosin: It sounded like, sure, like it’s a warm, like a human office. Like, it sounded like decent people working in a human office trying to get—like, I didn’t feel bad. I didn’t get that, like, Veep feeling.

Plott Calabro: That’s the decided lack of Steve Bannon, I would say.

Rosin: Yeah, maybe.

Foer: So my publisher came to me with this idea of writing a book about the first hundred days. And I didn’t want to write a book about Joe Biden. I wanted to write a book about earnest, well-meaning people descending on a government that had been ruined by the last occupant, as they contended with a historic pandemic and an economy that was on the brink.

I had this image of Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff, wearing a headlamp as he was excavating the ruins of government that Trump had left behind. And what was attractive to me about the project was writing a book about governance. I mean, I don’t have—

Rosin: But the fact that such people exist and they take governance seriously, that’s actually hopeful.

Foer: I agree. I agree.

Rosin: Like, that suggests that people go into politics for the right reasons.

And it’s not, like, just the last politician, and Oh no, like, What do we have left? Like, that—that there is a strain of people who care about running the country in that way.

Foer: Yeah, and also, our institutions can work. It’s like the people in this country have so lost faith in institutions. But you look at something like the vaccine, that is a program that was so well-designed, so well executed, that within six months of the Biden people coming into office, you could stroll into your CVS and get a shot that saved your life. Even though the distribution process for that was extremely difficult, and there were pockets of the country that were hard to penetrate, that happened. That worked, and I think that that is a reason to be optimistic.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Let’s end there. I don’t want to end with anything pessimistic. I want to end with the possibility that America we could…

Plott Calabro: Maybe Build Back Better, potentially.

Rosin: Thank you all.

Foer: Yeah.

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid, and our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin. We’ll be back with new episodes every Thursday.

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