New research by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that in the days after Hamas' attack antisemitic comments on conflict-related YouTube videos increased by 4963%.

Roughly a decade has passed since experts began to appreciate that social media may be truly hazardous for children, and especially for teenagers. As with teenage smoking, the evidence has accumulated slowly, but leads in clear directions. The heightened rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide among young people are measurable and disheartening. When I worked for the White House on technology policy, I would hear from the parents of children who had suffered exploitation or who died by suicide after terrible experiences online. They were asking us to do something.

The severity and novelty of the problem suggests the need for a federal legislative response, and Congress can’t be said to have ignored the issue. In fact, by my count, since 2017 it has held 39 hearings that have addressed children and social media, and nine wholly devoted to just that topic. Congress gave Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, a hero’s welcome. Executives from Facebook, YouTube and other firms have been duly summoned and blasted by angry representatives.

But just what has Congress actually done? The answer is: nothing.

Everyone knows that Congress struggles with polarizing issues such as immigration and gun control. But this is a failure on a different level: an inability to do something urgent and overwhelmingly popular, despite the agreement of both major parties, the president, and the large majority of the American population.

[Read: The Perils of ‘Sharenting’]

As someone who witnessed this failure firsthand, I am pained to admit that our government is failing parents, teenagers, and children. Congressional dysfunction cannot be reduced to any one thing. But one fact stands out: For a decade and counting, not a single bill seeking to protect children has reached a full vote in the House or Senate.

It is easy to read this and want to give up on Congress entirely. But what we voters and citizens need is a mechanism to force congressional leadership to make hard commitments to holding votes on overwhelmingly popular legislation. Whatever power public opinion and moral duty may have once had, they are no longer working.

The story of child-protection legislation in recent years could be taught as a reverse civics lesson, where bills that have the support of the president, the public, and both houses of Congress fail to become law. It would almost be reassuring if we could blame partisanship or corporate lobbyists for the outcome. But this is a story of culture war, personal grievance, and petty beefs so indefensible as to be a disgrace to the Republic.

During my time in the White House, no meetings were more painful than those with parents whose children had been killed or committed suicide after online bullying or online sexual exploitation. Parents, in more pain than any parent should have to endure, would come in bearing photos of their dead children. Kids like Carson Bride, a 16-year-old who died by suicide after online bullying, or Erik Robinson, a 12-year old who died after trying out a choking game featured on TikTok.

The case for legislative action is overwhelming. It is insanity to imagine that platforms, who see children and teenagers as target markets, will fix these problems themselves. Teenagers often act self-assured, but their still-developing brains are bad at self-control and vulnerable to exploitation. Youth need stronger privacy protections against the collection and distribution of their personal information, which can be used for targeting. In addition, the platforms need to be pushed to do more to prevent young girls and boys from being connected to sexual predators, or served content promoting eating disorders, substance abuse, or suicide. And the sites need to hire more staff whose job it is to respond to families under attack.

All of these ideas were once what was known, politically, as low-hanging fruit. Even people who work or worked at the platforms will admit that the U.S. federal government should apply more pressure. An acquaintance who works in trust and safety at one of the platforms put it to me bluntly over drinks one evening: “The U.S. government doesn’t actually force us to do anything. Sure, Congress calls us in to yell at us every so often, but there’s no follow-up.”

“What you need to do,” she said, “is actually get on our backs and force us to spend money to protect children online. We could do more. But without pressure, we won’t.”

Alex Stamos, the former chief security officer of Facebook, made a similar point to me. Government, he says, is too focused on online problems with intangible harms that are inherently difficult for the platforms to combat, like “fighting misinformation.” In contrast, government does far too little to force platforms to combat real and visceral harms, like the online exploitation of minors, that the platforms could do more about if pushed. This is not to let the platforms off the hook—but government needs to do its job too.

Some of the bills that emerged in the 117th Congress, in 2021 and 2022, sought to strengthen the protection of teenagers’ privacy online. The case for such legislation is not hard to make—lack of privacy makes targeting possible. Senators Ed Markey (a Democrat from Massachusetts) and Bill Cassidy (a Republican from Louisiana) were prominent sponsors of one such bill, named the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act.

Enacting a stronger children’s-privacy bill also seemed a good fallback if Congress should, once again, fail to pass a general privacy law protecting everyone. Whatever promise there may have been for passing such a law last year began to disappear after a nasty fight between Senator Maria Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee and her three counterparts, Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the chair of the House Commerce Committee; Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the Senate committee; and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Republican ranking member on the House committee. The latter three co-drafted a privacy bill, with special protections for children, but they did it without Cantwell, and she opposed the bill and refused to introduce it in the Senate. The bill was then promptly roadblocked in the House by the State of California (California feared elimination of its own privacy law and did not want to lose its ability to pass future laws on the matter).  California convinced then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in early September, to announce her opposition, all but ending any chance of passing a general privacy bill. The deadlock over general privacy was its own tragedy, but it made a children’s bill a natural and seemingly attainable alternative.

A bolder approach to protecting children online sought to require that social-media platforms be safer for children, similar to what we require of other products that children use. In 2022 the most important such bill was the Kid’s Online Safety Act (KOSA), co-sponsored by Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Marcia Blackburn of Tennessee. KOSA came directly out of the Frances Haugen hearings in the summer of 2021, and particularly the revelation that social-media sites were serving content that promoted eating disorders, suicide, and substance abuse to teenagers. In an alarming demonstration, Blumenthal revealed that his office had created a test Instagram account for a 13-year-old girl, which was, within one day, served content promoting eating disorders. (Instagram has acknowledged that this is an ongoing issue on its site.)

[Read: Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine]

The KOSA bill would have imposed a general duty on platforms to prevent and mitigate harms to children, specifically those stemming from self-harm, suicide, addictive behaviors, and eating disorders. It would have forced platforms to install safeguards to protect children and tools to enable parental supervision. In my view, the most important thing the bill would have done is simply force the platforms to spend more money and more ongoing attention on protecting children, or risk serious liability.

But KOSA became a casualty of the great American culture war. The law would give parents more control over what their children do and see online, which was enough for some groups to transform the whole thing into a fight over transgender issues. Some on the right, unhelpfully, argued that the law should be used to protect children from trans-related content. That triggered civil-rights groups, who took up the cause of teenage privacy and speech rights. A joint letter condemned KOSA for “enabl[ing] parental supervision of minors’ use of [platforms]” and “cutting off another vital avenue of access to information for vulnerable youth.”

It got ugly. I recall an angry meeting in which the Eating Disorders Coalition (in favor of the law) fought with LGBTQ groups (opposed to it) in what felt like a very dark Veep episode, except with real lives at stake. Critics like Evan Greer, a digital rights advocate, charged that attorneys general in red states could attempt to use the law to target platforms as part of a broader agenda against trans rights. That risk is exaggerated; the bill’s list of harms is specific and discrete; it does not include, say, “learning about transgenderism” but it does provide that “nothing shall be construed [to require a platform to prevent] any minor from deliberately and independently searching for, or specifically requesting, content.” Nonetheless, the charge had a powerful resonance and was widely disseminated.

Sometime in the late fall of 2022, Chairman Pallone made the decision not to advance children’s privacy or children’s protection bills out of his committee, effectively killing both in regular session. Pallone (and his Republican counterparts) argued that passing a children’s privacy law would take the wind out of the sails of some future effort to pass a comprehensive privacy bill (for which, I note, we are still waiting). When it came to his reasoning for killing KOSA, Pallone mentioned the concerns of the special interest groups—his spokesman pointed out to me that “nearly 100 civil rights organizations had substantive policy concerns with the bills.” There was, finally, as his staffers freely admitted, as a form of payback involved—a desire, shared by McMorris-Rogers, to punish Cantwell for having blocked the adult-privacy bill. A spokesman for Pallone insisted to me recently that “there was never a path forward for either COPPA or KOSA” based on the opposition of unnamed members of Congress and the civil rights groups, and that “young people will quickly age out of age-specific protections” anyway. (I note that civil rights groups don’t actually have voting rights in Congress.)

There was, in fact, one last path forward in 2022. Senator Blumenthal managed to get KOSA inserted in the early draft of an end-of-year spending bill, subject to the sign-off of House and Senate leadership. It was, however, promptly and shamelessly removed by Mitch McConnell, presumably to avoid giving Democrats the win. This mess of infighting, myopic strategy, and political maneuvering meant Congress failed to do anything to protect children online last year.

To be sure, there was and is, to be sure, a serious, substantive debate to be had over KOSA. Teenagers do have privacy and speech interests; but parents have interests as well. As a teenager, I resented anything that seemed like censorship or parental oversight; as a parent, I feel differently. Reasonable people can and do disagree over the balance that should be struck. But at some point, in a democracy, the vote needs to be called. Polls show that 70 percent of Americans and about 91 percent of parents want stronger legal protections for children online. If a majority, indeed a supermajority, of Americans want stronger protection for teenagers online, it is simply wrong to never call a vote.

I am well aware that part of the power of leadership and committee chairs lies in their control over the holding of votes. But that doesn’t make it less horribly undemocratic, and it is in these “non-votes” that the power of corporate lobbyists and special interests really makes its mark. That’s why what we need is some mechanism for a popular override—say, if legislation attracts more than 50 co-sponsors, leadership must hold a floor vote, win or lose.

It doesn’t help that there has been no political accountability for the members of Congress who were happy to grandstand about children online and then do nothing. No one outside a tiny bubble knows that Wicker voted for KOSA in public but helped kill it in private, or that infighting between Cantwell and Pallone helped kill children’s privacy. I know this only because I had to for my job. The press loves to cover members of Congress yelling at tech executives. But its coverage of the killing of popular bills is rare to nonexistent, in part because Congress hides its tracks. Say what you want about the Supreme Court or the president, but at least their big decisions are directly attributable to the justices or the chief executive. Congressmen like Frank Pallone or Roger Wicker don’t want to be known as the men who killed Congress’s efforts to protect children online, so we rarely find out who actually fired the bullet.

The American public has the right to be angry: Things are not okay. That said, other parts of government have done what they can.  The White House and FTC have tightened oversight using existing authorities. Some states have passed their own child-protection legislation, and this fall, 44 state attorneys general sued Instagram (Meta) alleging that the site knew its site was dangerous but promoted it as safe and appropriate anyhow. Both the children’s-privacy bill and KOSA were reintroduced this year, and the latter has picked up 48 co-sponsors, including prominent progressives like Elizabeth Warren. While vocal detractors remain, the major LGBTQ groups no longer oppose the legislation.

At this point both parties, the president, and the public want a law passed—which is why we need a commitment to hold a floor vote in both chambers. Protecting children is a fundamental role in any civilized state, and by that measure we are failing badly.

The announcement that the stand-up comedian Nate Bargatze would be hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend was met in some corners with a bit of confusion. When SNL goes the stand-up route for a host, it usually plucks an alum (John Mulaney, for instance) or a household name (Dave Chappelle, for example) to do the job. Bargatze is certainly popular, well known for specials on Netflix and Amazon that highlight clean jokes about family quirks, but SNL offered him perhaps his biggest platform to date to demonstrate to unfamiliar viewers who he is.

The uninitiated got a show that leaned on the Tennessee-born Bargatze's folksiness and ability to make wry conclusions about modern life through his average viewpoint. The evening’s best sketches gave him space to deliver understated comedy about everyday topics.

Bargatze established the tone for the night in his monologue—essentially a mini set—which he began by noting how old he felt, as someone from the 1900s. “The world is so future now,” he said. Other bits included a run about his magician dad getting upstaged by a donkey at a county fair and his mom getting lost on the way to pick up his daughter. In her confusion, she knocked on the wrong door and came upon another grandmother, an encounter he described “like two dogs seeing each other through a fence” and getting distracted; he had to go pick up his daughter himself. These are jokes that establish him as an offbeat but essentially relatable dude who finds life a bit exhausting.

[Read: The nicest man in stand-up]

That vibe continued in an early sketch that saw Bargatze playing George Washington as he delivered a pep talk to his soldiers during the Revolutionary War. The comedian was essentially still offering up a version of himself, using a quiet delivery that didn’t lean hard on punch lines. As Washington, he expounded on his dream for the United States, where the people could be free to “choose our own systems of weights and measures.”

What followed was an extended riff on the U.S.’s choice to abandon the metric system—and, by extension, a parody of the American vision of liberty. “I dream that one day our proud nation will measure weights in pounds, and that 2,000 pounds shall be called a ‘ton,’” Washington said. When a soldier played by Bowen Yang asked, “And what will 1,000 pounds be called, sir?,” Bargatze deadpanned, “Nothing.” As Bargatze’s Washington waxed poetic about various bizarre American measurements, such as “rulers with two sets of numbers: inches on one side, centimeters on the other,” that “won’t line up and never will,” another soldier (Kenan Thompson) chimed in, asking, “And the slaves, sir, what of them?” Washington ignored the question. The beat landed potently, in part because Bargatze played the general as a slightly dim everyman whose priorities would influence the new nation.

Other sketches leveraged Bargatze’s image as a basic white guy. In one, the show cast him as an affable chef on a cooking competition who kept apologizing to a panel of Black judges for cooking soul food better than his Black opponent (Ego Nwodim). In another, a Halloween parody of Hallmark movies, he was a boy-next-door serial killer whom Chloe Fineman fell for in her hometown. And, along with Dave Grohl of the musical guest Foo Fighters, he appeared in a fake video for a country song about “hangin’ on a lake beach,” singing enthusiastically about the pleasures of “slipping on slimy rocks all day long.”

[Read: SNL didn’t need subtitles]

But Bargatze’s appeal was clearest when there was the least fanfare. In “Airplane,” Fineman portrayed a woman going into labor on a flight. When her partner (Devon Walker) asked if there was a doctor on board, Bargatze stood up and declared, “I’m a lawyer.” After he was told that wasn’t what they needed, he went on, “I’m just saying, pretty good job, you know? If it’s not a doctor, second-best job is lawyer.” The rest of the sketch was a debate about what was actually the second-best job; everyone booed a passenger (Chloe Troast) who announced that she was a teacher. It was a smart little sketch about the hierarchy of respect that applies to professions in this country, with an approval-seeking Bargatze leading the discussion. His character wanted to be applauded for being a lawyer, which is solid work. A teacher? No one cares.

Bargatze’s SNL was always going to be a low-key one, simply because of his level of fame; his appearance was never going to inspire fervent adoration. (Just imagine the Gen Z frenzy that will hit in two weeks when Timothée Chalamet hosts alongside the musical guest boygenius.) But Bargatze and the show’s writers used the lack of expectations to make some chuckle-worthy observations about the world around them. And that was just enough.

Teenagers are experiencing a mental-health crisis. And though the science is messy and the matter isn’t settled, many suspect that social media is, in some substantial way, tangled up in the problem. Following this instinct, legislators and regulators at both the state and federal levels have suggested a slew of interventions aimed at protecting young people from the potential harms of social platforms. Many of these efforts have so far fallen short on legal grounds, and broadly speaking, the status quo remains.

This week, we learned of a new approach intended to protect kids from Big Tech. On Tuesday, a joint lawsuit was filed against Meta by the attorneys general of 33 states, deploying consumer-protection laws to try to hold the company accountable for harming young people. It claims that Meta deliberately got children and teenagers “addicted” to its platforms, that this addiction directly causes physical and mental harm, and that the company lied about it.

[Read: Why American teens are so sad]

“Just like Big Tobacco and vaping companies have done in years past, Meta chose to maximize its profits at the expense of public health,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a press release. The Big Tobacco comparison has been made a number of times since fall 2021, when the whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked to the press internal Meta documents about Instagram and Facebook. Among them were the results of studies showing teenagers candidly reporting the negative effects that social media was having on their lives. When they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. They had noticed increased anxiety and depression among their peers, and they considered Instagram to be one of the causes. Haugen’s so-called Facebook Files preceded the attorneys general investigation, which were announced several weeks after their release.

The suit is worth reading closely. As an effort to address incredibly serious social problems, it’s surprisingly slapdash. Our window into the case may be limited—many of its 233 pages are at least partially redacted, some blotted out entirely—but what is visible clearly relies on familiar, flawed tropes. It doesn’t engage seriously with the thorny question of just how social media affects kids and teenagers, and instead reads somewhat like a publicity stunt. Experts told me that the legal arguments made in the suit, even without knowing what is in the redactions, are not particularly convincing.

“I’m sympathetic overall to the dangers that social media pose to kids and how platforms have been poor stewards of their responsibility,” Mark Bartholomew, a professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law specializing in technology and the law, told me. “But when I look at the law … I do think it’s a stretch.” There are a couple of problems, he said. First, although social-media use might be a compulsive behavior, there is no official diagnosis for such a thing as social-media addiction. Second, proving that deception played a role in consumers’ use of Meta products will also be a challenge. That argument hinges on Meta’s public assurances that its products are safe, as well as the notion that consumers have taken that at face value to the point where they have been genuinely misled. “It’s hard to show that people were deceived,” Bartholomew said. “That they thought Instagram was one thing and it turned out to be another.”  

In connection with these arguments, the suit puts forward the idea that Meta deliberately presents young users with content that will “provoke intense reactions,” such as “bullying content” and content related to eating disorders or violence. The problem with these arguments isn’t that they are unfair; it’s that the notion that Meta would deliberately hurt the people it wants to keep on its platforms is both extremely hard to prove and easy to deny. (Young people absolutely are bullied through Instagram, and they certainly might see harmful content there—as with any internet platform, it’s impossible to argue otherwise. But does Meta display such material on purpose to lock users into the platform? Not exactly.) “Teens don’t want to be exposed to harmful content or hurtful interactions, and advertisers don’t want their ads showing up alongside content that isn’t appropriate for teens,” Liza Crenshaw, a Meta spokesperson, told me, arguing that the attorneys general had misunderstood Meta’s “long-term commercial interests.”

[Read: No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens]

Experts agreed that another aspect of the case feels considerably more cogent: namely, that Meta has violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. “That part’s more concrete,” Bartholomew said. “At least, it’s a little harder for Meta to wriggle out of.” COPPA prohibits tracking the online activity of children under the age of 13, or collecting their personal information, without explicit parental consent. If Meta has what COPPA terms “actual knowledge” of kids younger than 13 using its services, it’s violating the law. (“Instagram’s Terms of Use prohibit users under the age of 13. When we learn someone potentially under 13 has created an account, we work to remove them if they can’t demonstrate they meet our minimum age requirement,” Crenshaw said in a comment.)

Berin Szóka, a lawyer and the president of the libertarian-leaning think tank TechFreedom, highlighted one place where the suit’s argument could hold water: the complaint that, on Instagram’s sign-up page, where it asks for a new user’s birthday, the menu previously would automatically suggest a birth date 13 years prior. “That’s not a neutral age gate. That encourages the answer of Yes, I’m exactly 13 years old,” he told me. Meta recently changed this age gate, but it could be fined retroactively, and the attorneys general could ask to have some kind of continued supervision of the company’s COPPA practices. This would be a significant win, even if other elements of the suit are dismissed.

Most of the details in this part of the suit are redacted, so it’s possible that the states found new evidence of current lawbreaking activity as well. What is visible to the public so far is a bit ridiculous, however. For instance, to prove that Meta knows that kids use its apps, this suit cites the simple fact that various kid-oriented brands and media personalities (Lego, Hot Wheels, SpongeBob SquarePants, JoJo Siwa) have Instagram pages. The evidence in a similar (settled) case against YouTube was far more direct: While publicly denying that kids used YouTube, YouTube was also taking meetings with toy companies such as Mattel and Hasbro and literally pitching itself as a “leader in reaching children age 6–11,” as well as the “#1 website regularly visited by kids.”

Where does this leave us? Mostly, wondering what broader outcome the states are hoping for. The attorneys general say Meta has used “powerful and unprecedented technologies” to “ensnare” youth and teens. That might be a common rhetorical point in popular discourse, but it would require a lot of work to prove. And by far the weakest part of their argument comes when the states try to substantiate the claim that, as New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release, Meta is “to blame” for the mental-health crisis among kids and teenagers.

In the clearest statement of their position, the attorneys general write: “Increased use of social media platforms, including those operated by Meta, result in physical and mental health harms particularly for young users, who experience higher rates of major depressive episodes, anxiety, sleep disturbances, suicide, and other mental health concerns.” There is just one citation on this line, to a public Google Document maintained by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business (and a contributor to The Atlantic). That document summarizes dozens of studies with different findings, some of which contradict one another. Which ones are the attorneys referring to? They don’t say.

Later, they do cite a specific 2022 study by Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski, well-known researchers in the field. They found that young people are vulnerable to decreases in life satisfaction (quantified with a questionnaire) as a result of excessive social-media use in particular age windows. (For girls, ages 11 to 13; for boys, ages 14, 15, and 19.) In the lawsuit, the attorneys summarize the study as finding that “going through puberty while being a heavy social media user interferes with a sensitive period for social learning.” This is not an accurate representation of that study at all. “We did not show that social media interferes with social learning,” Orben said when I emailed her the page of the lawsuit that cited her paper. In fact, the words social learning don’t appear in the study at all.

Bartholomew offered a theory of the case. “AGs get a certain amount of deference in the courts,” he told me. This isn’t a private class-action suit that can be quickly thrown out. “It’s unlikely to be dismissed anytime soon, and I think the main point here is to make some waves.” Maybe that’s fine. But neither the mental-health crisis nor the expansive power of social-media companies will be seriously dealt with this way. Whatever the intentions of this suit, it’s not striking anywhere close to the crux of our problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the 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.

One evening not long ago, I was doomscrolling on social media, wading through the detritus of our present moment: Videos of terrorists in Israel decapitating a man with a garden hoe. A clip of Donald Trump being cruel and narcissistic. Footage of mobs physically assaulting some lone stranger they disagree with, pummeling him as he lies prone on the ground.

These are all products of the rising tide of dehumanization that has swept across the world. The famous dates of our century point to this great unfolding of barbarism—September 11, 2001; January 6, 2021; October 7, 2023. The causes of this rising culture of dehumanization are almost too many to count: tribalism, racism, ideological dogmatism, social media. All this amounts to the steady evisceration of the moral norms that can make our planet a decent place to live—and their gradual substitution with distrust, aggression, and rage. Dehumanization is any way of seeing and acting that covers the human face, that refuses to recognize and respect the full dignity of each person.

Then, as I was scrolling, I came upon a short video of an interview that the author James Baldwin gave many decades ago. “There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some,” he said. “There is more than one would think.” He spoke with gravity and moral conviction, his eyes boring into the interviewer, who was off-camera. “Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you,” he continued. “What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide for yourself not to be.”

[Adrienne LaFrance: The coming humanist renaissance]

Here, amid the corrosive flow of dehumanization, was the very image of a defiant humanist. Here was a person who had organized his life around the great humanist endeavors: To try to see others in all their complexity and depth. To try to see yourself with humility, self-awareness, and compassion. To try to act in ways that are considerate, just, and discerning. Above all, to try to see the world from another person’s point of view.

In these violent, vicious times, this humanist gospel of curiosity and respect for others may seem hopelessly woo-woo and naive. But I assure you that humanism is a hardheaded and practical way of being. The ability to understand the people you’re dealing with is practical. Leading with respect and curiosity is practical. Rabidly, the dehumanizers lead us down a death spiral of animosity and distrust. Bravely and effectively, the humanists try to brake that descent. At the center of every healthy family, organization, and nation is a core humanistic skill: the capacity to see others deeply, to understand them, and to make them feel seen, heard, and understood.

We sometimes talk about democracy as if it’s just about voting, and the stuff that happens in legislatures. But, at its core, liberal democracy is a series of concrete human encounters: persuasion, argument, negotiation, compromise. It’s one viewpoint encountering a bunch of other viewpoints in hopes of finding some positive way forward. For liberal democracy to function, we must be able to understand one another to some degree, to see one another’s viewpoints, to project respect across difference and disagreement. All of this requires humanistic wisdom.  

More mundanely, humanistic wisdom matters in your professional life. To work well with others, you have to show that you see them and recognize their worth. In a 2021 study, when the consulting firm McKinsey asked business executives why employees were quitting their firms, the executives said it was to make more money elsewhere. But when researchers asked the employees themselves why they quit, the most common answer was that they didn’t feel recognized and valued by their managers. They didn’t feel seen.

So how good are you at these humanist skills? Most of us are not as good as we think we are. William Ickes, a personality psychologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, has found that strangers having their first conversation read each other accurately only about 20 percent of the time—and that even friends and family read one another accurately only 35 percent of the time. Many of us spend our days awash in social ignorance. You probably didn’t need an academic study to tell you this. How often have you felt stereotyped and categorized, misheard and misunderstood? Do you really think you don’t regularly do this to others?

Why aren’t we good at seeing one another? For starters, we’re egotistical. We don’t see others because we’re too busy presenting ourselves. And some people are so narcissistically locked into their own viewpoint that they can’t be bothered to see yours. Maybe you’ve heard the story about the guy standing by a river: A woman standing on the opposite shore shouts at him, “How do I get to the other side of the river?” He bellows back, “You are on the other side of the river!”

But we can get better. How? Well, if you are a young person, take as many courses as you can in the humanities. That’s where you go to learn about people. If you can’t understand the people around you, not only will you be miserable but you will make them miserable, too.

The humanities also train people to pay close attention to one another, the way actors do. “Actors walk through life so different because we have to be an observer,” the actor Viola Davis once told an interviewer. “The way someone puts their head down if you say a certain word. And you think, ‘Why did they do that? Is it something in their past?’”

The actor Matthew McConaughey once told me something similar. When he’s trying to get into character, he said, he looks for some small gesture that epitomizes the character’s overall nature, and then he expands out from there. One character might be a “hands in his front pockets” kind of guy. He goes through life hunched over, closed in. When he takes his hands out of his pockets and tries to assert himself, he’s going to be unnatural, insecure, overly aggressive. McConaughey also tries to see every scene from his character’s point of view. A killer is not thinking, “I’m a killer.” He’s thinking, “I’m here to restore order.”

The novelist Zadie Smith has been a consummate humanist since she was a little girl. A few years ago, she wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books in which she recalled that, as a child, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s house without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she wrote. “That is, what it would be like to be Polish or Ghanaian or Irish or Bengali, to be richer or poorer, to say these prayers or hold those politics. I was an equal-opportunity voyeur. I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody.” What a fantastic way to train yourself not just to be a novelist but to be capable of seeing others as well.

The paramount humanist goal is to learn to see people the way Rembrandt saw people. Not all of the subjects of Rembrandt’s paintings are remarkable, but as the late novelist Frederick Buechner once observed, even the plain faces “are so remarkably seen by Rembrandt that we are jolted into seeing them remarkably.” Humanism is built on this kind of reverence for the person, and on the recognition that everyone you meet is superior to you in some way. People are not problems to solve but mysteries whose depths can never fully be plumbed.

The hard sciences can tell us about our physical realities. Humanism focuses on the subjective realm—the way each person takes events and molds them into a point of view. Big data can help social scientists make generalizations about populations of people. But the humanist tries to see the subjective layer of one particular person, to understand this unique individual who, like you, is probably doing their best to see the world with more understanding, wisdom, humanity, and grace.

But how, specifically, can you understand the subjective workings of another person’s mind? Well, you don’t want to peer at them; you want to engage with them. Looking at a person is different from looking at a thing because a person is looking back at you. I’m getting to know you at the same time you’re getting to know me. To truly see someone else, you have to be willing to be seen. Thus the quintessential humanist activity is quality conversation.

How good a conversationalist are you? Again, probably not as good as you think you are. A group of people making a series of assertions at one another is not a good conversation—it’s a terrible conversation. A good conversation is an act of joint exploration. Somebody floats a half-formed idea. Somebody else seizes on the nub of the idea, plays with it, offers their own perspective based on their own memories, and floats it back so the other person can respond.

Arthur Balfour was an early-20th-century British statesman known for his skill at this kind of conversation. Balfour, his friend John Buchan observed in his autobiography, “would take the hesitating remark of a shy man and discover in it unexpected possibilities, would probe it and expand it until its author felt that he had really made some contribution to human wisdom.”

During World War I, Buchan, a Scottish novelist, would take American friends to lunch with Balfour: “I remember with what admiration I watched him feel his way with the guests, seize on some chance word and make it the pivot of speculations until the speaker was not only encouraged to give his best but that best was infinitely enlarged by his host’s contribution. Such guests would leave walking on air.”

The humanist wants his conversations to be storytelling conversations. In white-collar jobs, we spend our days in what the psychologist Jerome Bruner called “paradigmatic mode”—producing a strategy memo, or a legal brief, or a PowerPoint presentation. The language is impersonal. Paradigmatic thinking is great for understanding trends and making the case for a proposition. It is not great for getting to know a person or connecting with them. Paradigmatic mode is a way of communicating without having to expose anything real about yourself.

What’s necessary for understanding people is narrative thinking. Stories capture a person’s character and how it changes over time. Stories capture how a thousand little influences come together to shape a life, how people struggle and thrive, get knocked about by lucky and unlucky breaks. People also just speak more freely when you get them to tell stories about themselves. The journalist Kate Murphy, in her book You’re Not Listening, describes a focus-group moderator who was hired to figure out why people go to grocery stores late at night. But instead of asking that question directly, she asked people to tell her a story about the last time they went to a grocery store after 11 p.m. A shy, unassuming woman who had said little up to that point raised her hand and responded, “I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a ménage à trois—me, Ben and Jerry.” The woman didn’t just talk about grocery stores; she told a story and offered a glimpse into her life.

As we get to know one another, we should aspire to be historians of one another. Every person you meet is an accumulation of the people, choices, and events that came before them, as well as the events of their childhood and their more recent past. If we want to see someone well, we want to know about their childhood, about the institutions that formed them, about their traumas and accomplishments. In our conversations, we should be exploring the depths of one another’s histories. What happened to you in childhood that makes you still see the world from the vantage point of an outsider? What was it about your home life that makes celebrating holidays important to you? Why is asking for favors hard for you? You appear to have it all and yet feel insecure—why is that?

Emotional intelligence can be developed, like athletic ability. Yes, people are born with a certain innate temperament and capacity, but you can get more emotionally proficient with practice. The key trait of a dehumanizer is emotional crudity. A humanist, on the other hand, has learned complex emotional responses.

Consider the capacity we call empathy. Some people see empathy as a formless gush of emotion. You open your heart, and empathy pours out. In fact, empathy consists of three distinct social skills. First, mirroring—accurately reflecting the emotions of the person in front of you. Second, mentalizing—using your own similar experiences to project a theory about what the other person is going through. Third, caring. Con artists are good at understanding what’s going on in others’ minds—but we don’t call them empathetic, because they don’t care. To care, you not only have to understand another person; you also have to perform an action that will make them know you understand how they feel.

People who are truly empathetic don’t just do things that are comforting to themselves; they do the very specific things that are comforting to the person in need. Rabbi Elliot Kukla tells a story about a woman who, because of a brain injury, would sometimes fall to the floor. “I think people rush to help me up because they are so uncomfortable with seeing an adult lying on the floor,” she told Kukla. “But what I really need is for someone to get down on the ground with me.” Sometimes you just need to get down on the floor with someone.

“Every epistemology becomes an ethic,” the educator Parker J. Palmer once wrote. “The shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.” Palmer was saying that the way we attend to others determines the kind of person we become. If we see people generously, we will become generous. If we see them coldly, we will become cold. And if we see them stupidly and viciously … well, we wind up with the world we’re living in now.

“Recognition is the first human quest,” the journalist Andy Crouch writes in his book The Life We’re Looking For. Babies come out of the womb looking for a face that will see them, know them, attend to their needs. When attention is not forthcoming, babies appear devastated. Maybe you have seen those “still face” experiments on YouTube in which researchers tell moms not to respond to their child’s bids for attention. The babies coo and cry out, but the mothers just sit there, with no expression on their face. At first, the babies are uncomfortable; then they squirm, wail, and dissolve into misery. Even at that early age, feeling unseen is an existential crisis.

The agony is the same for adults. Every society has what the philosopher Axel Honneth called a “recognition order.” In a healthy society, everybody is recognized to some degree. But in an unhealthy society, like the America of today, recognition is doled out to the few—the rich, the good-looking, the athletic, the successful. “When a society treats the mass of people in this way, singling out only a few for recognition, it creates a scarcity of respect, as though there were not enough of this precious substance to go around,” the sociologist Richard Sennett has written. When people feel ignored, they tend to lash out. They become lonely, isolated, and hypersensitive to slight. “When attention is depleted, there can be no heightened passion, no true friendship, no love,” the philosopher Talbot Brewer wrote recently in The Hedgehog Review.

The only way out is the humanist way: To create more attention. To distribute it more fairly. To shine our full attention on those in darkness—which these days is pretty much everybody.

I’m trying to hold up an ideal here, the way of the modern humanist. I’ll close with a few of my role models. One is the essayist and poet David Whyte. The ultimate touchstone of friendship “is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self,” Whyte observes. Rather, “the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”

Another is Frederick Buechner, the novelist I quoted earlier about Rembrandt. At age 9, Buechner lost his father to suicide. He shut down emotionally, unable to confront his grief. But eventually he came to realize that the problem with shutting yourself off from the harshness of reality is that you wind up shutting yourself off from other people and the beauty of life. “What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we fear more than anything else,” he wrote in his book Telling Secrets. “It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are … because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier … for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own.”

[Read: Can humanism save us?]

Every person is sacred. Every person deserves to be seen, and given just and loving attention. We may later decide that the person we are looking at is venal or cruel or wicked—but at least we will have tried to fully understand them before making those judgments. The rot that pervades our democracy comes in large part from our failure to do this. Despite the prejudices of the postmodern ideologues, history shows us that it’s possible to enter into a compassionate understanding of people who are different from ourselves.

In our age of creeping dehumanization, humanism seems like the right banner to raise. It points us to the posture, the skills, the way of life that make us fit servants to the world—caring and effective co-workers, teachers, citizens, lovers, and friends.

This essay is drawn from David Brooks’s How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

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.

Related podcast

A ground invasion of Gaza seems almost certain. Does Israel have a Step 2? Graeme Wood speaks with Hanna Rosin from Jerusalem.

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Joseph Garrett, better known as Minecraft's Stampy Cat, broadcasts his final episode in the series.

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

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Dangerous Incentives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Hickey

The Annoyance Economy

By Annie Lowrey

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

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

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

How a common stomach bug causes cancer Egypt’s Gaza problem You won’t hear much about the next chapter of space travel.

Culture Break

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

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

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

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

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

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

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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