A total of 180 Palestinian prisoners have now been released from Israeli jails since last Friday.

Israel releases 30 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for 10 Israeli hostages, according to mediator Qatar.

Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the issue of free speech on college campuses has received a new wave of scrutiny. Palestinian student groups have faced threats of censorship for their statements, donors have warned about pulling funding, and employers have blacklisted students who blamed Israel for Hamas’s attack.

But as far as free speech is concerned, 2023 has been a relatively normal year for colleges and universities. Just don’t confuse “normal” with “good.”

So far this year, my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has received 1,312 submissions about possible free-speech violations. Compare that with 1,394 in 2022, 1,445 in 2021, and 1,526 in 2020. For 2023’s numbers to top those, the next five weeks would have to be unprecedented.

That’s not to say nothing has changed. There has been a troubling uptick in threats, vandalism, and assault directed at Jewish students in recent weeks. And efforts to shut down pro-Palestinian speech have intensified—including Florida ordering its state schools to ban Students for Justice in Palestine groups and Brandeis University actually doing it. (FIRE opposed both moves.)

Protecting free speech requires defending the rights of both sides of any conflict. That will only get harder if we ignore just how long colleges have been falling short. Today’s headlines can distract from the fact that campuses have been in crisis for the better part of a decade.

[Yascha Mounk: The real chill on campus]

Since 2000, FIRE has tracked incidents in which professors have been targeted for their speech. We’ve found that, until 2014, academics had little reason to self-censor, even when discussing the day’s most controversial topics. In the five years after 9/11, for example, more than a dozen professors faced calls to be fired, investigated, or otherwise sanctioned for statements they made about the attacks. These included Ward Churchill, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who compared the World Trade Center victims to a Nazi war criminal, as well as the University of New Mexico professor Richard Berthold, who told his class, “Anyone who blows up the Pentagon gets my vote.”

Only three ended up losing their job—including Churchill—each for reasons that went beyond protected speech. From 2014 to July of this year, by comparison, we’ve counted more than 1,000 campaigns to investigate or punish scholars for their views. About two-thirds of them succeeded, resulting in almost 200 firings and hundreds of other sanctions.

These numbers are almost certainly an underestimate. According to a national survey of nearly 1,500 faculty commissioned last year by FIRE, one in six professors reports having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and one in three said they’ve been pressured by colleagues to avoid researching controversial topics.

This is what I, along with my co-author, Rikki Schlott, document in our new book, The Canceling of the American Mind. We found that the censorship people are alarmed by now is really business as usual. Cancel culture—which I define as campaigns to get people fired, expelled, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is, or would be, protected by the First Amendment—has been pervasive for years, not weeks. The phenomenon kicked off in 2014 and ramped up starting in 2017, right as Gen Z, the first generation to grow up with social media, began entering higher education in massive numbers.

Some have described the recent sanctioning of pro-Palestinian advocacy as a “new McCarthyism.” But even McCarthyism didn’t seem to cause as much damage on campuses as we’ve seen in the past decade. According to the largest study at the time, about 100 professors were fired over a 10-year period during the second Red Scare for their political beliefs or communist ties. We found that, in the past nine years, the number of professors fired for their beliefs was closer to 200. In the late 1950s, when McCarthyism ended, only 9 percent of social scientists said they had toned down anything they had written because they were worried it might cause controversy.

Since then, self-censoring has grown even though legal protections for professors have improved. During McCarthyism, American jurisprudence had not yet established that the First Amendment prevented schools from firing professors for what they believed. In fact, the Supreme Court didn’t establish constitutional protections for academic freedom until 1957. Over the next two decades, Supreme Court precedents further strengthened academic freedom, free speech, and freedom of association for both students and professors. At public colleges—at the very least—professors cannot be fired because of their viewpoint, thanks to those precedents.

[From the September 2015 issue: The coddling of the American mind]

Still, last year’s FIRE survey found that 59 percent of professors are at least “somewhat likely” to self-censor in academic publications. With respect to publications, talks, interviews, or lectures directed to a general audience, that figure was 79 percent. And the problem continues to get worse: 38 percent of faculty said they were more likely to self-censor at the end of 2022 than they were in September 2020. A 2021 report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology found that a staggering 70 percent of right-leaning academics in the social sciences and humanities self-censor in their teaching or research.

It seems to me that the only major difference between the past few weeks and the past decade has to do with who is finally acknowledging the problem. People who once claimed that cancel culture doesn’t exist—or that it’s really just “accountability” or “consequence” culture—are lamenting the issue now that they agree with the group suffering the consequences.

Indeed, ideology plays an important role in how campus speech is treated. The specifics of each case vary significantly, but FIRE data show that pro-Palestinian speech has generally been more likely to trigger campaigns to get professors fired, investigated, or sanctioned than pro-Israel speech has. Campaigns targeting pro-Israel speech, however, have been more likely to succeed. Similarly, more attempts have been made to deplatform pro-Palestinian speeches on campus, but attempts against pro-Israel speakers have been more successful. In fact, all substantial and successful disruptions of campus speeches that FIRE has recorded on this issue have targeted pro-Israel advocacy. This might partly be explained by the fact that pro-Palestinian—and even pro-Hamas—sentiments are relatively common on campus and among college-aged Americans.

If we want to defeat cancel culture and preserve free speech and academic freedom on campus, we need to recognize it regardless of its victims. Those decrying today’s so-called new McCarthyism will have to acknowledge just how long it’s been going on—not only for the past 40 days, but for the past nine years.

Palestinian prisoners released under the Israel-Hamas temporary truce deal have said they were physically abused.

Businesses in the US are reporting fiery online backlash to Palestinian products and messages about the war in Gaza.

The newsletter-hosting site Substack advertises itself as the last, best hope for civility on the internet—and aspires to a bigger role in politics in 2024. But just beneath the surface, the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.

Substack, founded in 2017, has terms of service that formally proscribe “hate,” along with pornography, spam, and anyone “restricted from making money on Substack”—a category that includes businesses banned by Stripe, the platform’s default payment processor. But Substack’s leaders also proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ, albeit with spotty results, to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website and of extremist Telegram channels that circulate Substack posts turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters on a site that had more than 17,000 paid writers as of March, according to Axios, and has many other writers who do not charge for their work. But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.

At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.

[Adam Serwer: Why conservatives invented a ‘right to post’]

Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to “publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.  

Some authors, I should note, reject the toxic label Nazi even as they ostentatiously deploy Nazi and white-supremacist language and themes. This is true of Spencer—as The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood documented in a 2017 profile titled “His Kampf.” Spencer later claimed to have disavowed white nationalism, but his Substack features content such as a recent post, written by a contributor, that begins: “Geniuses, in their most consequential forms, appear predominantly among Aryans … orbited by successful Jews.” That statement combines at least two Nazi tropes: the portrayal of Jewish people as schemers and the pseudoscientific fantasy that white Europeans are descended from a genetically superior ancient race.

Other Substacks amplify anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including the century-old forgery known as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as well as more modern ones that accuse Jews of “occupying” the U.S. government and taking advantage of COVID-19. (A newsletter called Turning Point Stocks offers this choice headline: “Vaccines Are Jew Witchcraftery.”) One overtly Nazi newsletter called The Tribalist recently published a fawning interview with Billy Roper, a former skinhead who led the most prominent American neo-Nazi organization in the 1990s. Roper is infamous for celebrating 9/11 because, as he put it, al-Qaeda had set out to “kill Jews.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has called him the “uncensored voice of violent neo-Nazism.” The post’s lead image is a photo of neo-Nazis giving a Hitler salute.

In August, Rolling Stone reported that a group calling itself the People’s Initiative of New England—a barely concealed front for the neo-Nazi organization NSC-131—had published a manifesto advocating “separation from the United States of America” for the purpose of creating a white ethnostate in the Northeast. That manifesto was published on the group’s Substack.

The platform has shown a surprising tolerance for extremists who circumvent its published rules. Patrick Casey, a leader of Identity Evropa, a defunct neo-Nazi group, had been banned from Twitter and TikTok and suspended from YouTube after running afoul of those platforms’ terms of service. (Elon Musk, Twitter’s owner, subsequently announced an “amnesty” that restored Casey’s account, among others.) Perhaps most damagingly to a content creator, Stripe had prohibited Casey from using its services.

But Substack was willing to let a white supremacist get back on his feet. Casey launched a free Substack newsletter soon after the 2020 election. Months later, he set up a paywall, getting around Stripe’s ban by involving a third-party payment processor. “I’m able to live comfortably doing something I find enjoyable and fulfilling,” he wrote on his Substack in 2021. “The cause isn’t going anywhere.” Casey’s newsletter remains active; through Substack’s recommendations feature, he promotes seven other white-nationalist and extremist publications, one of which has a Substack “bestseller” badge.

Nazis and other violent white supremacists are “opportunists,” Whitney Phillips, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication, told me. “Even if you’re pushing them off of one platform … they’re going to find a space that gives them the ability to do what it is they want to do.” And in Substack, she said, “they have found a safe space.”

Moderating online content is notoriously tricky. Amid the ongoing crisis in Israel and Gaza, Amnesty International recently condemned social-media companies’ failure to curb a burst of anti-Semitic and Islamophobic speech, at the same time that it criticized those companies for “over-broad censorship” of content from Palestinian and pro-Palestinian accounts—which has made sharing information and views from inside Gaza more difficult. When tech platforms are quick to banish posters, partisans of all stripes have an incentive to accuse their opponents of being extremists in an effort to silence them. But when platforms are too permissive, they risk being overrun by bigots, harassers, and other bad-faith actors who drive away other users, as evidenced by the rapid erosion of Twitter, now X, under Musk.

In a post earlier this year, a Substack co-founder, Hamish McKenzie, implied that his company’s business model would largely obviate the need for content moderation. “We give communities on Substack the tools to establish their own norms and set their own terms of engagement rather than have all that handed down to them by a central authority,” he wrote. But even a platform that takes an expansive view of free speech will inevitably find itself making judgments about what to take down and what to keep up—as Substack’s own terms of service attest. For all his bluster about open expression, Musk has been willing to censor posts on behalf of foreign governments, including Turkey and India.

[Jeffrey Rosen: Elon Musk is right that Twitter should follow the First Amendment]

Ultimately, the First Amendment gives publications and platforms in the United States the right to publish almost anything they want. But the same First Amendment also gives them the right to refuse to allow their platform to be used for anything they don’t want to publish or host.

“Substack is a platform that is built on freedom of expression, and helping writers publish what they want to write,” McKenzie and the company’s other co-founders, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, said in a statement when asked for comment on this article. “Some of that writing is going to be objectionable or offensive. Substack has a content moderation policy that protects against extremes—like incitements to violence—but we do not subjectively censor writers outside of those policies.” Still, some decisions seem obvious: If something that bills itself as “a National Socialist website” doesn’t violate Substack’s own policy against “hate,” what does?

I myself am a Substacker. I started my newsletter in 2019, at a time when the platform was known for hosting freelance journalists and bloggers, many on the left and center-left, attracted by the promise of a new way to scrape together a living amid the collapse of the journalism industry. McKenzie, in fact, personally encouraged me to join Substack. Along the way he offered suggestions about possible names for my newsletter and topics I could cover, and facilitated introductions to other journalists on the platform. I didn’t get any money up front from the platform, but for one year in the middle of my tenure, the company provided me with a part-time editor and podcast producer.

In the past few years, Substack has sought to appeal to more contrarian and conservative authors, such as Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, and to readers disenchanted with mainstream publications. The company also began positioning itself more overtly as a fervent supporter of free speech—a laudable goal. But in practice, Substack’s definition of that concept goes beyond welcoming arguments from across a wide ideological spectrum and broadly defending anyone’s right to spread even bigotry and conspiracy theories; implicitly, it also includes hosting and profiting from bigoted and conspiratorial content. As far-right commentators have flocked to Substack, the company has refused to engage with the distinct challenges that these extremists pose to a platform that claims to prohibit hate speech.

In April, when Substack launched its microblogging service, Substack Notes, to compete with Twitter, Nilay Patel, the editor of The Verge, asked Best if the company would permit a hypothetical post that said, “We should not allow as many brown people in the country.” Best refused to answer, calling Patel’s question “gotcha content moderation” and saying: “We have content policies that are deliberately tuned to allow lots of things that we … strongly disagree with.”

Facing widespread criticism from many Substack creators—some of whom were threatening to follow previous outflows of writers who quit in protest—McKenzie insisted that “aggressive content moderation” didn’t work. “Is there less concern about misinformation? Has polarization decreased? Has fake news gone away? Is there less bigotry? It doesn’t seem so to us,” he wrote. (Though he added: “Now, this doesn’t mean there should be no moderation at all, and we do of course have content guidelines with narrowly defined restrictions that we will continue to enforce.”)

Since then, the company has tried to market itself in two contradictory ways. To nominally apolitical creative writers—poets, fiction authors, memoirists, and so on—it is billing itself as a “new economic engine for culture.” The platform has a growing roster of celebrity authors such as Elizabeth Gilbert, George Saunders, and the musicians Patti Smith and Jeff Tweedy. This effort was embodied recently by a strange new ad, created to market the redesigned Substack phone app, in which raging denizens of a burning cartoon dystopia beat one another in the streets, while more cultured readers take refuge in a tranquil bookstore called “Substack.”

To a different audience, the site’s leaders market themselves in the opposite way: by “leaning into politics.” In a recent post on the official Substack blog titled “In the 2024 U.S. elections, vote for Substack,” McKenzie declared that in the coming cycle, “the cable news channels, public radio stations, YouTube shows, and podcasts will all turn to Substack to find informed and opinionated writers to book for their programs. More and more, politicians and interest groups will look to Substack writers to help make their case for their policies and positions.”

Both of those marketing ploys are undercut by the co-founders’ willingness not only to accommodate but to promote writers with a history of making inflammatory racist comments. In June, McKenzie hosted the Substack writer Richard Hanania on the platform’s flagship podcast, The Active Voice. On Twitter the previous month, Hanania, a political scientist with a law degree from the University of Chicago, had described Black people as “animals” who should be subject to “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance.”

[Adam Serwer: The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again]

Soon after Hanania’s appearance on the podcast, HuffPost outed him as having written under a pen name in the early 2010s for several white-nationalist outlets, including Richard Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com. In some of his older posts, Hanania called for the forced sterilization of those with “low IQ”—a group that he argued included most Black and Latino people. Hanania responded to the exposé with a Substack post in which he disavowed his past views, but in terms that raised significant doubts about his sincerity. “The reason I’m the target of a cancellation effort,” he declared in the post, “is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.”

Nevertheless, Chris Best, who is also Substack’s CEO, hailed Hanania’s non-apology as “an honest post on a difficult subject.” Within weeks, Substack was promoting Hanania yet again, trumpeting in one of its newsletters that his new book, The Origins of Woke—in which he calls for gutting the Civil Rights Act—“is in hot demand from reviewers,” and providing a link to preorder it. (One of those reviewers, writing for The Atlantic, observed: “Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one.”)

In McKenzie’s recent post about “leaning into politics,” the Substack co-founder enthusiastically and prominently recommended a lesser-known Substacker, Darryl Cooper, as among the “up-and-comers” in political writing. Cooper’s podcast featured a complimentary interview with the white-nationalist magazine editor Greg Johnson—who, incidentally, published some of Hanania’s pseudonymous, more explicitly racist writings. Cooper has also used his personal Twitter account to claim that “FDR chose the wrong side in WW2.” (That tweet and the interview with Johnson were subsequently deleted.)

What should Substack do with the writers who are using it to spread Nazi ideas? Experts on extremist communication, such Whitney Phillips, the University of Oregon journalism professor, caution that simply banning hate groups from a platform—even if sometimes necessary from a business standpoint—can end up redounding to the extremists’ benefit by making them seem like victims of an overweening censorship regime. “It feeds into this narrative of liberal censorship of conservatives,” Phillips told me, “even if the views in question are really extreme.”

Yet, as she also noted, Substack isn’t just making decisions about whether to take posts down; it also has the choice of which writers to promote. “There’s a big difference between a platform hosting content and then maybe not co-signing what they’re saying, but giving them a microphone in an institutionally approved way: ‘I am inviting you onto my podcast and I’m going to let you speak.’”

The problem, Phillips said, is not that stumbling onto Nazi newsletters will magically turn anyone who reads them into a National Socialist. “The thing that is particularly concerning is, how is it going to take an already intense thinker about Nazi ideas and give them more of a community, more of a sense of belonging, more of a reinforcement of those beliefs, rather than creating the beliefs out of nowhere?”

The question is what kind of community Substack is actually cultivating. How long will writers such as Bari Weiss, Patti Smith, and George Saunders—and, for that matter, me—be willing to stake our reputations on, and share a cut of our revenue with, a company that can’t decide if Nazi blogs count as hate speech?

Could Hamas's rival, the PA, return to rule Gaza? Would Palestinians even accept it?

With a bullet lodged in his spine, Hisham Awartani phoned his British-born grandmother after Saturday's shooting.

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

Joe Biden is both old and boring. The American voter has come to expect celebrity and excitement from the White House, and they pay little attention to policy.

But first: Last year, Jake Tapper wrote about C. J. Rice, a Philadelphia teenager who was sentenced to decades in prison for a crime he insisted he didn’t commit. Today, Rice’s conviction was overturned. He now awaits a decision from the Philadelphia district attorney’s office on whether to retry the case or release him from custody. Read the full story here.

Plus, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why America abandoned the greatest economy in history The case that could destroy the government Life really is better without the internet. The Power of Magical Thinking

I realize that to note that Joe Biden is boring is not exactly breaking news. Michael Schaffer of Politico wrote more than a year ago that Biden not only kept his promise to be unexciting but also “over-delivered.” My friend Molly Jong-Fast this fall noted for Vanity Fair that “[Team Biden’s] superpower, its ability to slide under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its Achilles heel, holding back the administration from getting the credit it deserves.” She places much of the blame on the media—a fair cop—but I think a lot else is going on that has less to do with Biden and more to do with the voters themselves.

The deeper problem is that America years ago entered a “post-policy” era, in which the voters simply stopped caring very much about the nuts and bolts of governing. Rather than policy, they care about politics as a spectator event—much like sports or reality television—and they want it to be exciting. They want to root for heroes and heels; they want to feel high charges of emotion, especially anger; they want their votes to express a sense of personal identification with candidate

Biden can’t fulfill any of those desires. That’s to his credit, but it’s killing him politically.

As strange as this is to realize, our political environment is the result not of bad times but of affluence. Most voters are accustomed to relatively high living standards—even in poorer areas—because the world around them is filled with technology and services that mostly just work, no matter who’s in the Oval Office. The days of knowing which politicians paved the roads are mostly in the past, and today voters mostly draw connections from their daily lives to their elected leaders only if something aggravates them: If gas prices are high, then it’s the president’s fault.

For voters to blame political leaders for almost everything is not uncommon, but as I explained in a recent book, this tendency has become extreme not just in the U.S. but in many democracies, where bored and sated voters are more prone to reward showmanship, overblown promises, and made-for-TV rage than competence. Donald Trump is the obvious American case, but think of Boris Johnson in the U.K., the late Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Geert Wilders in Holland, and Javier Milei in Argentina. (And what is it about right-wing populists and their signature hairdos? I have to believe there’s a connection. But I digress.)

Biden’s critics might scoff at such an explanation, and counter that the president has sludgy approval ratings for good reason. James Freeman of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page made this case in April, hanging inflation—then hovering near 5 percent—around Biden’s neck and noting that the president should have kept his campaign’s implicit promise to govern as a boring old guy but instead had been a radical in office. (Freeman also thinks that Biden should debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., so he might not be arguing this issue entirely in the name of good government.)

A Democrat, no matter how centrist, is never likely to find love in the arms of the Journal’s editors, but some Democrats themselves seem submerged in a kind of moral fogginess about what their own party represents. Last week, The New York Times published a discussion with a dozen Democratic voters about Biden and the future of their party. The Times asked these participants to explain what it means to be a Democrat:

Many hesitated or said the lines between the two parties had grown “blurry.” The participants said they held core values: tolerance, respect, an unshakable belief in the freedom to choose. They shared deep concerns about the divisions in this country. And they believed that Democrats were generally focused on the right problems—gun violence, student debt, climate change and homelessness. But they had little confidence that the Democrats could fix those problems.

Right off the bat: I cannot imagine anything less “blurry” than the difference between Democrats and Republicans. But on top of that, I admit to raising an eyebrow at the line that these voters, who ranged in age from 27 to 72, felt “betrayed” on student loans “more than any other issue.”

This was only one focus group. But a few weeks ago, the Times also spoke with Democratic voters who were more enthusiastic about Vice President Kamala Harris than about Biden, and the answers were equally incoherent. One respondent, a lifelong Democrat, said in the poll that “she would vote for Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden, whom she called ‘too old and a bit out of touch’ and ‘a bit of a doofus.’” By the end of the interview, she said she’d probably vote for Biden again, but “I’m just not happy about it.”

Voters rarely have ideologically consistent views, but they generally used to care about policy. In the post-policy era, they care about personalities. Abortion seems to be the one issue that has risen above the “post-policy” problem, but it is the exception that proves the rule: The Republican assault on abortion rights is now so extensive and relentless that voters can’t help paying attention to it. But even on that issue, Biden faces voters such as the one the Times interviewed who said that “she strongly supports abortion rights—and did not realize that Mr. Biden does, too. She said that because states’ abortion bans had gone into effect during his presidency, she assumed it was because of him.” Once, we might have expected such contradictions among low-information voters, but when even partisans are confused, candidates face the problem that most voters are low-information voters—a natural advantage for Trump (whose voters rely on their emotional attachment to him) but an obstacle for Biden.

“He’s old” isn’t enough to explain all of Biden’s bad vibes. The president is only four years older than Trump, and he keeps a travel schedule that would grind me, nearly 20 years his junior, into the ground. Sure, he seems old. He speaks like an old man with a gravelly voice, instead of thundering and booming like Trump. And no doubt, the White House comms shop—with the notable exception of National Security Council communications coordinator John Kirby—could be better at keeping Biden in the news for his policy achievements.

But voters’ obsession with bad news even when the news is good is a global problem, and one that predates Biden. Americans, in particular, are susceptible to what the political scientist Brendan Nyhan has called the “Green Lantern” theory of the presidency. The Green Lantern, for you non-nerds, is a comic-book hero with a ring that can manifest almost anything he imagines, as long as he concentrates hard enough. Trump cleverly promises such powers: He claims that something shall be done by his will, and his fans and base voters never care whether it actually gets done or not.

Biden, however, lives with this magical-thinking expectation from his own voters. If Biden only wanted to, he could forgive student loans. If he willed it, he could stop the Israel-Hamas war. If he so ordered, he could reverse all prices back to 2019 levels.

As America heads into the 2024 election, Biden has an enviable, and consequential, first-term record of policy achievements. The calls for him to step down make no sense other than as a frustrated surrender to the politics of celebrity. In that political contest—for the role of Entertainer in Chief—Trump has a distinct edge. Possibly only Trump’s mutation into an openly fascist candidate might change the dynamics of the race as voters focus more on the threat he represents—and decide, once again, that boring is better.

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas have agreed to extend their humanitarian pause for two more days, according to Qatari officials, as exchanges of hostages and prisoners continue.

The suspect in the shooting of three college students of Palestinian descent in Burlington, Vermont, over the weekend pleaded not guilty.  

Documents published by the Centre for Climate Reporting reveal that the United Arab Emirates, which will host the COP28 climate talks beginning this week, planned to discuss oil and gas deals with foreign governments at the summit.

Evening Read Aaron Graubart / Trunk Archive

Anything Can Become Gluten-Free Pasta
By Matteo Wong

To my grandmother, who has lived her entire life in Italy, gluten-free pasta is “una follia”—nonsense, madness. A twirl of spaghetti or forkful of rigatoni should provide a familiar textural delight: a noodle that is both elastic and firm, holding a distinct, springy shape that your teeth can sink into with some, but not too much, resistance. That is all because of the gluten in wheat.

Upon taste-testing some popular brands of pasta made from ingredients such as rice, corn, and chickpea flour, I understood my grandmother’s doubts. The various noodles retained a firm, if not al dente, shape at the lower end of their packaging’s recommended cook time. But approaching the upper end of the range, the noodles became soft and eventually collapsed; penne ripped in two by the time it was on my fork. Even when the noodles didn’t turn limp, they were almost sticky against my teeth. And the pastas had faint aftertastes: of overcooked rice, of tortilla chips, of chalky chickpeas …

Yet gluten-free pasta is a billion-dollar industry, so mainstream that you can find multiple kinds in basically every supermarket.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Dear Therapist: I don’t want to see my mom this Christmas. It will never be a good time to buy a house. The tech giants’ anti-regulation fantasy

Culture Break

Ben Kothe / The Atlantic

Read. In Harvey Sachs’s new book, the music historian tries to understand the lingering resistance to Arnold Schoenberg’s classical works.

Listen. Of the late Frank Zappa’s many records, Over-Nite Sensation best crystallized his cutting satire of our country’s blank-eyed habits.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last week, I wrote about the 40th anniversary of The Day After, the 1983 made-for-TV nuclear-war movie that scared the bejeebers out of millions of people, including President Ronald Reagan. I am not going to suggest more atomic-bomb pop culture this week, but I do want to note that if the farmer’s wife in the film, played by Bibi Besch, seems familiar, it’s because you also saw her a year earlier in a film that celebrated its 40th anniversary last year: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

If you’re not an aficionado of movie trivia, you might not realize that Star Trek II was also directed by Nicholas Meyer, who labored under immense strain to get The Day After to the screen in one piece. (He discussed his fights with the ABC network in this fascinating podcast interview.)

Anyway, let me put in a word for every Star Trek stan in the world: Star Trek II saved the franchise, and it’s wonderful, even if you don’t like Trek stuff. William Shatner and Ricardo Montalbán reprise their roles from a 1967 episode of the original TV series, and these majestic hambones engage in a scenery-chewing competition for the ages. The movie has a great plot that boils down to a submarine chase in space, and the dialogue—“He tasks me! He tasks me, and I shall have him!”—has provided me and my friends with repeatable lines and memes for four decades.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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