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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.

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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.

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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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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.

The ABC made-for-television movie The Day After premiered on November 20, 1983. It changed the way many Americans thought about nuclear war—but the fear now seems forgotten.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

There is no good way to travel anywhere in America. OpenAI’s chief scientist made a tragic miscalculation. What did hip-hop do to women’s minds?

A Preview of Hell

We live in an anxious time. Some days, it can feel like the wheels are coming off and the planet is careening out of control. But at least it’s not 1983, the year that the Cold War seemed to be in its final trajectory toward disaster.

Forty years ago today, it was the morning after The Day After, the ABC TV movie about a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Roughly 100 million people tuned in on Sunday night, November 20, 1983, and The Day After holds the record as the most-watched made-for-television movie in history.

I remember the movie, and the year, vividly. I was 22 and in graduate school at Columbia University, studying the Soviet Union. It’s hard to explain to people who worry about, say, climate change—a perfectly legitimate concern—what it was like to live with the fear not that many people could die over the course of 20 or 50 or 100 years but that the decision to end life on most of the planet in flames and agony could happen in less time than it would take you to finish reading this article.

I will not recount the movie for you; there isn’t much of a plot beyond the stories of people who survive the fictional destruction of Kansas City. There is no detailed scenario, no explanation of what started the war. (This was by design; the filmmakers wanted to avoid making any political points.) But in scenes as graphic as U.S. television would allow, Americans finally got a look at what the last moments of peace, and the first moments of hell, might look like.

Understanding the impact of The Day After is difficult without a sense of the tense Cold War situation during the previous few years. There was an unease (or “a growing feeling of hysteria,” as Sting would sing a few years later in “Russians”) in both East and West that the gears of war were turning and locking, a doomsday ratchet tightening click by click.

The Soviet-American détente of the 1970s was brief and ended quickly. By 1980, President Jimmy Carter was facing severe criticism about national defense even within his own party. He responded by approving a number of new nuclear programs, and unveiling a new and highly aggressive nuclear strategy. The Soviets thought Carter had lost his mind, and they were actually more hopeful about working with the Republican nominee, Ronald Reagan. Soviet fears intensified when Reagan, once in office, took Carter’s decisions and put them on steroids, and in May 1981 the KGB went on alert looking for signs of impending nuclear attack from the United States. In November 1982, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev died and was replaced by the KGB boss, Yuri Andropov. The chill in relations between Washington and Moscow became a hard frost.

And then came 1983.

In early March, Reagan gave his famous speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and accused it of being “the focus of evil in the modern world.” Only a few weeks after that, he gave a major televised address to the nation in which he announced plans for space-based missile defenses, soon mocked as “Star Wars.” Two months later, I graduated from college and headed over to the Soviet Union to study Russian for the summer. Everywhere I went, the question was the same: “Why does your president want a nuclear war?” Soviet citizens, bombarded by propaganda, were certain the end was near. So was I, but I blamed their leaders, not mine.

When I returned, I packed my car in Massachusetts and began a road trip to begin graduate school in New York City on September 1, 1983. As I drove, news reports on the radio kept alluding to a missing Korean airliner.

The jet was Korean Air Lines Flight 007. It was downed by Soviet fighter jets for trespassing in Soviet airspace, killing all 269 souls aboard. The shoot down produced an immense outpouring of rage at the Soviet Union that shocked Kremlin leaders. Soviet sources later claimed that this was the moment when Andropov gave up—forever—on any hope of better relations with the West, and as the fall weather of 1983 got colder, the Cold War got hotter.

We didn’t know it at the time, but in late September, Soviet air defenses falsely reported a U.S. nuclear attack against the Soviet Union: We’re all still alive thanks to a Soviet officer on duty that day who refused to believe the erroneous alert. On October 10, Reagan watched The Day After in a private screening and noted in his diary that it “greatly depressed” him.

On October 23, a truck bomber killed 241 U.S. military personnel in the Marine barracks in Beirut.

Two days after that, the United States invaded Grenada and deposed its Marxist-Leninist regime, an act the Soviets thought could be the prelude to overthrowing other pro-Soviet regimes—even in Europe. On November 7, the U.S. and NATO began a military communications exercise code-named Able Archer, exactly the sort of traffic and activity the Soviets were looking for. Moscow definitely noticed, but fortunately, the exercise wound down in time to prevent any further confusion.

This was the global situation when, on November 20, The Day After aired.

Three days later, on November 23, Soviet negotiators walked out of nuclear-arms talks in Geneva. War began to feel—at least to me—inevitable.

In today’s Bulwark newsletter, the writer A. B. Stoddard remembers how her father, ABC’s motion-picture president Brandon Stoddard, came up with the idea for The Day After. “He wanted Americans, not politicians, to grapple with what nuclear war would mean, and he felt ‘fear had really paralyzed people.’ So the movie was meant to force the issue.”

And so it did, perhaps not always productively. Some of the immediate commentary bordered on panic. (In New York, I recall listening to the antinuclear activist Helen Caldicott on talk radio after the broadcast, and she said nuclear war was a mathematical certainty if Reagan was reelected.) Henry Kissinger, for his part, asked if we should make policy by “scaring ourselves to death.”

Reagan, according to the scholar Beth Fischer, was in “shock and disbelief” that the Soviets really thought he was headed for war, and in late 1983 “took the reins” and began to redirect policy. He found no takers in the Kremlin for his new line until the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, and both men soon affirmed that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought—a principle that in theory still guides U.S. and Russian policy.

In the end, we got through 1983 mostly by dumb luck. If you’d asked me back then as a young student whether I’d be around to talk about any of this 40 years later, I would have called the chances a coin toss.

But although we might feel safer, I wonder if Americans really understand that thousands of those weapons remain on station in the United States, Russia, and other nations, ready to launch in a matter of minutes. The Day After wasn’t the scariest nuclear-war film—that honor goes to the BBC’s Threads—but perhaps more Americans should take the time to watch it. It’s not exactly a holiday movie, but it’s a good reminder at Thanksgiving that we are fortunate for the changes over the past 40 years that allow us to give thanks in our homes instead of in shelters made from the remnants of our cities and towns—and to recommit to making sure that future generations don’t have to live with that same fear.

Related:

We have no nuclear strategy. I want my mutually assured destruction.

Today’s News

The Wisconsin Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a legal challenge to one of the most severely gerrymandered legislative district maps in the country. A gunman opened fire in an Ohio Walmart last night, injuring four people before killing himself. Various storms are expected to cause Thanksgiving travel delays across the United States this week.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ricardo Rey

Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?

By Ross Andersen

(From July)

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in November had captured the world’s imagination like nothing in tech’s recent history. There was grousing in some quarters about the things ChatGPT could not yet do well, and in others about the future it may portend, but Altman wasn’t sweating it; this was, for him, a moment of triumph.

In small doses, Altman’s large blue eyes emit a beam of earnest intellectual attention, and he seems to understand that, in large doses, their intensity might unsettle. In this case, he was willing to chance it: He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by Jared Bartman / The Atlantic. Sources: Heritage Images / Getty; Nikola Vukojevic / Getty; Philippe PACHE / Getty; Dan Cristian Pădureț / Unsplash; dpwk / Openverse; Annie Spratt / Unsplash.

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P.S.

If you want to engage in nostalgia for a better time when serious people could discuss serious issues, I encourage you to watch not only The Day After but the roundtable held on ABC right after the broadcast. Following a short interview with then–Secretary of State George Shultz, Ted Koppel moderated a discussion among Kissinger, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, the professor Elie Wiesel, the scientist Carl Sagan, and the conservative writer William F. Buckley. The discussion ranged across questions of politics, nuclear strategy, ethics, and science. It was pointed, complex, passionate, and respectful—and it went on for an hour and a half, including audience questions.

Try to imagine something similar today, with any network, cable or broadcast, blocking out 90 precious minutes for prominent and informed people to discuss disturbing matters of life and death. No chyrons, no smirky hosts, no music, no high-tech sets. Just six experienced and intelligent people in an unadorned studio talking to one another like adults. (One optimistic note: Both McNamara and Kissinger that night thought it was almost unimaginable that the superpowers could cut their nuclear arsenals in half in 10 or even 15 years. And yet, by 1998, the U.S. arsenal had been reduced by more than half, and Kissinger in 2007 joined Shultz and others to argue for going to zero.)

I do not miss the Cold War, but I miss that kind of seriousness.

–Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is now the highest-ranking American official to suggest that the Palestinian Authority—which governs the West Bank, under Israeli military supervision—should take over Gaza. Last month, he told a Senate committee that it would be good for an “effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority to have governance and ultimately security responsibility for Gaza,” where the PA has been powerless and unwelcome for the past 15 years. On Wednesday, Blinken said again that Gaza should be “unified with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority.”

Indirect rule by the Palestinian Authority is a moonshot idea, but it’s preferable to an indefinite Israeli presence—an idea floated on ABC this week by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And because most of the other post-invasion ideas (rule by Egypt, American troops on the ground) may as well be trips to Alpha Centauri, this particular moonshot is worth considering in some detail. Already a few Israeli politicians have broached it. At a press conference last month, the leader of the Israeli opposition, Yair Lapid, said, “The best thing is that the Palestinian Authority goes back into Gaza.” I suggested that this sounded like wishful thinking. Lapid replied that the PA still had thousands of loyalists in Gaza, which was more than could be said for any of the other possible entities that might take over.

But what about the Palestinian Authority’s interest in this daunting assignment? For the past two decades, since the death of Yasser Arafat, it has limped along in the West Bank, still smarting from its loss in the only election that Palestinians have ever held. In 2006, Hamas won a plurality. A year later, it violently seized control of Gaza, kicking out its more nationalist and more secular counterparts from Fatah. The Palestinian Authority is led by Mahmoud Abbas, 87, who is too wily ever to risk sitting in an election again. This week, Blinken went to Ramallah to speak with him about his willingness to oversee the thin band of rubble that will remain after Israel’s invasion. The conversation lasted less than an hour. Apparently the answer wasn’t no.

[Franklin Foer: Tell me how this ends]

Last month, I told the Palestinian Authority’s shrewd minister of finance, Shoukry Bishara, that I thought the United States would soon come to Ramallah to beg for the PA to save Israel from having to reoccupy Gaza. The Gaza invasion might even be an opportunity for the PA. Bishara is a former high-powered banker, and he knows how to negotiate. “In every crisis, there’s an opportunity,” he told me. “But this is not a crisis. This is a massive, biblical upheaval.” He said that before the PA could contemplate a role in Gaza, Netanyahu’s rush to swallow the West Bank would have to stop. “The same people who created the mindset of the assassin of [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin,” Bishara told me, “are now in power in Israel.” He said Lapid “is the kind of person with whom we can seriously build a future.” But with Israel’s turn to the right, any chance of cooperation evaporated. “Finito,” he said. All negotiation and discussion with his counterparts had ended.

He did not exclude the possibility that Israel’s current government would wipe out Hamas—only to turn its gaze to the West Bank and decide to annihilate the PA too. He then repeated a familiar PA call for a third partner in this ménage. “Left to our own resources, we will not achieve peace,” he said. “We have a partner in Israel that never, not for one moment, contemplated seriously what the outcome of peace should be.” So he appealed for international guarantees, “a collective international decisive drive to impose peace.”

The current Israeli government has worked hard to make sure the Palestinian Authority is kept out of any solution. Netanyahu’s implication that Israel will just manage things itself is subtle compared with the rhetoric of some of the more fanatical types he has welcomed into minor portfolios of his government. I wrote previously about his minister of diaspora affairs and social equality, Amichai Chikli, who told me a few weeks ago, “I don’t believe in the leadership of Fatah and Abu Mazen, and unfortunately, I am afraid that within their heart they are very happy with what happened” on October 7. So to Netanyahu’s right, the idea is a nonstarter.

Among Israel’s professional governing class, the idea of a smooth PA takeover is treated as risible. Blinken spoke of an “effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority.” That might require some serious time at the gym. Zohar Palti, who until last year ran the policy shop at Israel’s Ministry of Defense and earlier headed the intelligence directorate of the Mossad, told me this week that he saw little hope for the idea. “From a practical point of view: no way,” he said. First, he said, just observe how poorly the PA manages the territory it controls. Second: Those thousands of PA operatives in Gaza, on whom Lapid suggests that a conservatorship be built, have been long dormant because of Hamas’s domination. “They were trained by the PA to do police work, public safety.” In 15 years, Palti said, they’ve aged, and may have lost what little competence they might have had. “How do we know they don’t have a belly out to here?” He traced a generous paunch with his cupped hand. “These are the guys who are going to protect us from Hamas?” Even with training—he suggested the Jordanians could manage that—the task would take years. Palti’s counterproposal is to start from scratch, with a new government led by a few dozen talented, hypereducated Palestinians untainted by the corruption of the PA or the fanaticism of Hamas. Get Americans, Europeans, and Arab states to pay them, and demand transparency. Anything less ambitious, he told me, would be just trying the same old failed formulas and expecting new results.

[Read: How the Palestinian Authority failed its people]

The dispute over the PA’s suitability for the job is, as of now, a dispute over whose long bet is longer. A U.S. official in Israel, who requested anonymity so he could speak freely, told me that however far-fetched a PA-led Gaza may be, it is “the last chance,” and that Biden knows it and will provide backing. The official also said the picture of a corrupt, incompetent PA is outdated, and that funding cuts since the Trump administration have left the PA with nothing to steal. “If the PA is supported by Israel and the international community, then they will succeed,” the official assured me. But he echoed Bishara’s claim that the PA won’t participate without policy changes in the West Bank—including a stop to settler violence, opening of funding sources to the PA, and other reforms that Israel’s current government is loath to grant. “If the PA is given the freedom to maneuver,” the official said, “then there is no better alternative.”

But Israel, the U.S., and the Palestinians all have long records of choosing the worse of two alternatives. Pessimism remains in abundant supply among the Palestinians. I asked Sari Nusseibeh, the Palestinian philosopher and former PA official, whether he thought his former colleagues would be good fits to govern Gaza.

“It isn’t going to work forever,” he said. “Why? Because it gives Israel even more confidence in itself—that this whole thing is under its thumb, that it can do with it as it pleases.” A government selected off a menu for Israel and the United States would never be sustainable. “If we go on living like this, Israel is not going to find peace.”

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” That question, first posed by Ronald Reagan in a 1980 presidential-campaign debate with Jimmy Carter, has become the quintessential political question about the economy. And most Americans today, it seems, would say their answer is no. In a new survey by Bankrate published on Wednesday, only 21 percent of those surveyed said their financial situation had improved since Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, against 50 percent who said it had gotten worse. That echoed the results of an ABC News/Washington Post poll from September, in which 44 percent of those surveyed said they were worse off financially since Biden’s election. And in a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week, 53 percent of registered voters said that Biden’s policies had hurt them personally.

As has been much commented on (including by me), this gloom is striking when contrasted with the actual performance of the U.S. economy, which grew at an annual rate of 4.9 percent in the most recent quarter, and which has seen unemployment holding below 4 percent for more than 18 months. But the downbeat mood is perhaps even more striking when contrasted with the picture offered by the Federal Reserve’s recently released Survey of Consumer Finances.

[James Surowiecki: The bad-vibes economy]

The survey provides an in-depth analysis of the financial condition of American households, conducted for the Fed by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Published every three years, it’s the proverbial gold standard of household research. The latest survey looked at Americans’ net worth as of mid-to-late 2022 and Americans’ income in 2021, comparing them with equivalent data from three years earlier. It found that despite the severe disruption to the economy caused by the pandemic and the recovery from it, Americans across the spectrum saw their incomes and wealth rise over the survey period.

The rise in median household net worth was the most notable improvement: It jumped by 37 percent from 2019 to 2022, rising to $192,000. (All numbers are adjusted for inflation.) Americans in every income bracket saw substantial gains, with the biggest gains registered by people in the middle and upper-middle brackets, which suggests that a slight narrowing of wealth inequality occurred during this time. In particular, Black and Latino households saw their median net worth rise faster than white households did—though the racial wealth gap is so wide that it narrowed only slightly as a result of this change.

A big driver of this increase was the rising value of people’s homes—and a higher percentage of Americans owned homes in 2022 than did in 2019. But households’ financial position improved in other ways too. The amount of money that the median household had in bank accounts and retirement accounts rose substantially. The percentage of Americans owning stocks directly (that is, not in retirement accounts) jumped by more than a third, from about 15 to 21 percent. The percentage of Americans with retirement accounts went from 50.5 to 54.3 percent, a notable improvement. And a fifth of Americans reported owning a business, the highest proportion since the survey began in its current form (in 1989).

Americans also reduced their debt loads during the pandemic. The median credit-card balance dropped by 14 percent, and the share of people with car loans fell. More significantly still, Americans’ median debt-to-asset, debt-to-income, and debt-payment-to-income ratios all fell, meaning that U.S. households had lower debt burdens, on average, in 2022 than they’d had three years earlier.

The gains in real income (in this case, measured from 2018 to 2021) were small—median household income rose 3 percent, with every income bracket seeing gains. But that was better than one might have expected, given that this period included a pandemic-induced recession and only a single year of recovery.

The picture the survey paints, then, is one of American households not only weathering the pandemic in surprisingly good shape, but ultimately also emerging from it in better financial shape than they were going in. And that, in turn, points to the effect of the U.S. policy response to the crisis: Stimulus payments, enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, and the moratorium on student-loan payments boosted household income and balance sheets, helping people pay down debt and increase their savings. In the process, these policies mildly narrowed inequality.

The U.S. government’s aggressive response to the pandemic, including Biden’s stimulus spending, also helped the job market recover all its pandemic-related losses—and add millions of jobs on top. The resulting tight labor market has been a huge boon to lower-wage workers. In fact, because the Fed survey’s income data end in 2021, it understates the income gains for the bottom half of the workforce, and the shrinking income inequality they’ve produced.

Hourly wages for production and nonsupervisory workers (who make up about 80 percent of the American workforce) rose 4.4 percent year-on-year in the third quarter of 2023, for instance, ahead of the pace of inflation. And this was not anomalous: Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, crunched the numbers and found that real wages for that same sector of workers are not just higher than they were in 2019, but are now roughly where they would have been if we’d continued on the upward pre-pandemic trend.

[Annie Lowrey: The wrong-apartment problem]

The reason for this is simple: Low unemployment has translated into higher wages. As a recent working paper by Dube, David Autor, and Annie McGrew shows, the tight labor markets of the past few years have given lower-wage workers more bargaining power than in the past, leading to a compression in the wage gap between higher-paid and lower-paid workers. Of course, that gap is still immense, but the three scholars found that the wage gains for lower-paid workers have rolled back about a quarter of the rise in inequality that has occurred since the 1980s.

So what should we take away from the Survey of Consumer Finances data, and from Dube, Autor, and McGrew’s work? Not that everything is fine, but that public policy and macroeconomic management matter a lot. Enhanced unemployment benefits, the child-care tax credit, the stimulus payments—these things materially improved the lives of Americans and helped set the economy up for a strong recovery. If the policy response had been less aggressive, the U.S. economy would be in worse shape now. This is something you can see by looking at Europe, where economies are growing far more slowly and unemployment is higher, while inflation is no lower.

Key to this story is the fact that lower-wage workers in particular would be worse off, because they have been among the chief beneficiaries of the low unemployment created by the robust recovery. It’s a useful reminder that stagnant wages are not an inevitable result of American capitalism: When labor markets are tight, and employers have to compete with one another for employees, workers get paid more.

So, even allowing for the high inflation we saw in 2022, no one could really look at the U.S. economy today and say that the policy choices of the past three years made us poorer. Yet that, of course, is precisely how many Americans feel.

Although that pessimism does not bode well for Biden’s reelection prospects, the real problem with it is even more far-reaching: If voters think that policies that helped them actually hurt them, that makes it much less likely that politicians will embrace similar policies in the future. The U.S. got a lot right in its macroeconomic approach over the past three years. Too bad that voters think it got so much wrong.

Maybe this sounds familiar: You’ve stared idly through an airplane’s window and wondered, How exactly does that jet engine work? Or you’ve tracked a shipment from across the country, refreshing UPS’s website, and realized you have no idea how that package will actually make its way to your door. Or you’ve been notified that you must boil your tap water after an overnight “loss of pressure”—without knowing what that means, or why it’s affecting you.

Modern society has been shaped by, and depends on, many complex, interlocked systems—GPS, the internet, transoceanic shipping. But even the most tech-savvy person might struggle to get a handle on every detail. And these technological advances come with a strange caveat: The more fundamental and seamless the arrangement is, the less we think about how it operates. As a result, we take our infrastructure for granted—at least until a massive ship gets stuck in the Suez Canal, or a Florida condo building suddenly collapses.

The books in the list below explain our world with much-needed clarity, exposing how marvels such as skyscrapers, computer chips, and the global supply chain are put together. As a group, they also make the case that paying attention to how each works is more important than ever, as pandemics and climate change threaten the smooth performance we’ve come to expect. Understanding every aspect of our globalized lives may not be realistic, but these books make the attempt much less daunting.

Bloomsbury

Built, by Roma Agrawal

Structural engineers “develop a kind of X-ray vision” that enables them to see the sturdy skeleton holding up a building, Agrawal writes. Her book briefly grants that superpower to even the least technically inclined. A designer of bridges, apartment buildings, and skyscrapers, including London’s striking Shard, Agrawal outlines how structures handle gravity and the unpredictable effects of wind, earthquakes, and other forces in order to actually stay up, bundling her explanations with helpful hand-drawn diagrams. We learn why reinforced concrete (which contains a network of steel rods) is so strong, and admire modern feats of engineering: the massive pendulum atop the Taipei 101 skyscraper, which decreases sway; the ingenious tubular design of the Burj Khalifa. But Agrawal focuses just as enthusiastically on structures decades or centuries old: She explains why the Pantheon’s concrete dome remains standing despite the crushing forces acting on it, admires brick arches in Pompeii, and retells the dramatic construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, primarily overseen by Emily Warren Roebling after her husband became too ill to complete the work. Agrawal’s perspective invites us to look more closely at the many buildings, both awe-inspiring and humble, around us.

[Read: The quiet work of a civil engineer]

Harper Perennial

The Perfectionists, by Simon Winchester

The Perfectionists dramatically explores the history of engineers figuring out how to manufacture things—mostly out of metal, glass and other hard materials—into exacting shapes and sizes, making possible our world of cars, jet engines, and microprocessor chips. The story begins, and is intimately bound up, with the Industrial Revolution. John Wilkinson, one of the fathers of precision engineering, devised snug-fitting cylinders for James Watt’s steam engine, and the early days of the discipline are similarly full of delightfully specific historical objects: pulleys made for British naval ships, for example, and the fiddly bits of flintlock muskets. But as Winchester steps through the great advancements that pushed this school of engineering to new extremes, he makes clear that we now rely on machines to achieve a perfection unattainable by people, and that this comes with hefty stakes. An improperly machined oil pipe, for instance, caused catastrophic engine failure on a 2010 Qantas flight because it was “about half a millimeter too thin,” he writes. (Thanks to an experienced crew, everyone on board survived.) Perhaps, he suggests, a deeper respect for imperfect human craftsmanship might live alongside our reverence for mechanical technique.

Riverhead

How Infrastructure Works, by Deb Chachra

In its first chapter, How Infrastructure Works makes an earnest attempt to define what exactly infrastructure is. “‘All of the stuff that you don’t think about’ turns out to be a surprisingly good starting point,” Chachra writes. The networks that provide electricity, heat, water, sewage treatment, and internet to our homes, plus the roads, public transit, aviation, and GPS that allow us to traverse the world, are hidden from view and seem strikingly complicated when they are visible. But reliable access to these systems defines affluent contemporary life. When they fail, the result is, as Chachra puts it, “recognizably dystopian”—consider the February 2021 electrical outages in Texas, for just one bleak example. Rather than offering nitty-gritty explanations of how a power grid operates, though, this book articulates something of a philosophy of infrastructure: both a convincing call for us to think harder about these systems and a road map for how we might do so productively, particularly as climate change threatens to destabilize our aging public works. Chachra’s vision is positive, even galvanizing. I came away hopeful about a future powered by renewable energy, and determined to pay closer attention to what we might transform to make that future real.

[Read: What infrastructure ]really means

Clarion

The Way Things Work, by David Macaulay

The Way Things Work is a classic children’s reference book, full of lavish color illustrations laying out fundamental scientific concepts and interspersed with dryly funny “journal entries” from a fictional alternate universe in which woolly mammoths were domesticated. But I am firmly convinced that most adults would find this book more informative, revealing, and downright useful than a child would. (I had a copy of my own as a kid, and remember it as both alluring and totally impenetrable, because I had no idea what a combine harvester and a car’s clutch were.) Diagrams on every page lay bare the inner workings of an array of devices. Small objects—CFL light bulbs, drill bits, batteries—are blown up to huge proportions and often illustrated with tiny people at their bases; big things like tower cranes and oil rigs and telecommunications networks are shrunk down to digestible size. You’ll learn facts that will let you approach the material world with a curious and more discerning eye. And if you’re anything like me, you will find it incredibly humbling to realize that even toasters operate based on principles you could previously barely follow—not to mention the technologies such as end-to-end encryption, touch screens, and the lidar units on self-driving cars that the book’s newer editions cover.

Harper Business

Arriving Today, by Christopher Mims

Modern supply chains are so convoluted, Mims informs us, that an average smartphone might include parts that have traveled through at least five countries before it even reaches its user’s hand. Each component could tell “more stories than could be explored in a lifetime.” His book unravels these long, winding journeys through the example of a hypothetical USB charger that someone has ordered on Amazon, starting from the Vietnamese factory that assembles the device and ending on an American doorstep. It’s a vivid and occasionally outrage-inducing look at the systems and people involved in getting us our stuff. The author rides along with harbor pilots who maneuver container ships in and out of ports, and truck drivers who forgo sleep and personal relationships in order to haul enough loads to make a (meager) living. Along the way are forays into the industry’s history and its future: Mims explains how the shipping container became ubiquitous in part because of the Vietnam War, and investigates the continued role of robots and algorithms in shaping how goods are made and delivered. He focuses in particular on Amazon, where blue-collar workers are already forced to match the blistering pace set by machines. “So much of what happens in an Amazon fulfillment center is relevant to the entire $5.5 trillion supply chain and logistics industry,” he writes, “because in a way, it’s the future of all of it.”

[Read: What Amazon does to poor cities]

Vintage

The Master Switch, by Tim Wu

Wu’s book centers on five technologies that have transformed the way we share information: telephones, radio, film, TV, and the internet. But beyond focusing on the stirring technical wizardry of their invention, he also explores what happened after, as each technology hit the American market and entire industries sprouted up around them. The history is shaped by monopoly power, as the owners of established technologies in the 20th century actively sought to crush or control any spark of innovation that threatened their dominance. (He explains that AT&T, a successor to the 19th-century Bell Telephone Company, was especially guilty of this.) These forces of monopoly and resistance drive what Wu calls “the Cycle,” in which these industries shift between periods of openness that nurture scrappy upstarts, such as the utopian beginnings of radio and cable television, and an inexorable closing and consolidation: the three-network TV ecosystem of NBC, CBS, and ABC; the centralized Hollywood studio structure that fell prey to the restrictive Hays Code. Whether the internet will adhere to the Cycle is, by the book’s end, an open question. The specifics may have changed since 2010, when The Master Switch was first published, but the historical framework the book provides is still invaluable in helping us think clearly about today’s tech and media giants.

Anchor

Flying Blind, by Peter Robison

In 2018 and 2019, 346 people died in two crashes of malfunctioning Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes. Robison’s investigation into the tragedies asks: How did one of the most respected engineering companies in America produce such fatally flawed aircraft? This account covers the long arc of Boeing’s history and places the blame squarely on the corporate culture that arose after a merger in the late 1990s, which focused on enriching shareholders at the expense of careful engineering. Over the 737 MAX 8’s development, cost-cutting fixes piled up with agonizing implications: Not only had Boeing’s employees created software that resulted in control being wrested from pilots because of a frequently faulty instrument’s signals, they also deleted relevant parts of the plane’s flight manual, and maintained that expensive flight-simulator training wasn’t necessary for the new aircraft. What makes the account riveting, though—and blood-boiling—is Robison’s attention to the stories of the victims and their grieving families. Reading them, one ends up emotionally invested in the workings of commercial aviation, and freshly aware of the great complexity and responsibility underlying an industry that so many of us depend on to work, travel, and see distant loved ones.

[Read: How Boeing lost its bearings]

Scribner

Chip War, by Chris Miller

Chips, metal-and-silicon rectangles often no bigger than fingernails, live in practically all of our electronic devices. They let us stream videos on our phones seamlessly, run our laptops and new cars, and aim our country’s missiles. Chip War tells the remarkable story of their development from the 1940s to the present. Nowadays, making chips involves squeezing millions or even billions of nanometer-scale transistors onto tiny slabs of silicon—a process that itself relies on decades of engineering and manufacturing improvements—and extraordinarily precise instruments that perform something called extreme UV photolithography. The consequences of such precision are global, because only a precious few companies can make cutting-edge chips or the tools involved in producing them, and just one—the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company—dominates the manufacturing of the most advanced chips that, among other things, power Apple’s iPhones. “After a disaster in Taiwan,” Miller writes, “the total costs would be measured in the trillions.” His lucid book illuminates the stakes as the U.S. and China vie for control over chip manufacturing—and the geopolitical dominance that comes with it.

On the night of Friday, October 6, Jon Polin and Rachel Goldberg laid their hands on the head of their 23-year-old son, Hersh, so that they could bless him, a ritual of the Sabbath. They recited in Hebrew: May you feel God’s presence within you always, and may you find peace.

It was an exquisitely temperate Jerusalem evening, and the Goldberg-Polin family made the most of it, dining al fresco at a long table of friends. Hersh’s presence was an unexpected blessing. He had only recently returned from several months of traveling across Europe by himself, occasionally meeting up with his boyhood friends. Earlier in the week, Hersch had told his mother that he would be away for the weekend, attending a music festival in the north. But that festival’s organizers had neglected to obtain the necessary permits, and the event ended prematurely.

As Rachel stared at her son from across the table, she marveled at his hard-earned sense of ease. When the Goldberg-Polin family emigrated from Richmond, Virginia, in 2008, when Hersh was 7, he had initially struggled to adapt, to learn the language, to shake his sense of being an outsider. But here he was, vividly recounting picaresque stories of his time abroad. He said that the thing he’d enjoyed most about Europe was that he didn’t need to bathe, because rivers were so ubiquitous and he could always plunge into one.

[Yair Rosenberg: ‘We’re going to die here’]

Geography, travel, and the endless wonders of the planet were his lifelong passions, and wanderlust his state of equilibrium. Before his bar mitzvah, he told those invited that he wanted gifts of maps and atlases. Although his parents never asked probing questions about the career he might pursue, his father imagined that Hersh’s curiosities might lead him to become a journalist for National Geographic.  

At 11 p.m., Hersh told his mother that he was leaving to meet up with his friend Aner Shapira. He didn’t go into detail about his plans, but he was wearing his backpack. He kissed her and then left her to sip her tea and pick at the remnants on her plate of desserts, to savor the respite of Shabbat.

At 7:30 the next morning, Jon Polin left for synagogue. He’d been assigned to serve as that morning’s gabbai, charged with orchestrating the logistics of the service. On his walk, he heard the distant sound of explosions. A stranger stopped him in the street. “There is a strong attack in the south.” Polin thanked the man and went on his way.

Not long after, sirens began blaring, the cue for residents to make their way to bomb shelters. At the family’s home, Rachel woke her two daughters and led them to the basement. When they emerged, after the warnings abated, she decided that circumstances demanded she check her phone, breaking the prohibition of using devices on the day of rest. Two text messages from Hersh instantly appeared.

“I love you.”

“I’m sorry.”

Rachel knew that Hersh would only apologize like that for causing her pain and worry. She called his phone, but reached voicemail.

“Are you ok?” she texted.  

And again, “Let me know you’re ok.”

Her daughters began to scan social media furiously, where they encountered videos from a music festival in the south, images of screaming youths, sounds of gunfire. Is this where he went? Rachel didn’t know.

Rachel sent the link to the festival’s website to Hersh’s friend Yaniv. “Are they here?” He quickly replied that they were.

Jon returned early from synagogue, where the congregants had agreed to cancel the remainder of services, after their third trip to the building’s shelter. But he didn’t have an inkling of his son’s peril until Rachel showed him the text messages from Hersh and told him, “I think we have a problem.”

Their laptops and phones, now turned on, began to unfurl the horrors of the morning: the massacres at the kibbutzim, the reports of hundreds dead at the festival, the others abducted by Hamas.

Another friend, Omer, took it upon himself to design a digital missing-persons poster, with a photo of Hersh and Aner, which he posted on social media and circulated widely.

Suddenly, there was too much information to sort through: so many horrifying videos to watch, so many eyewitness reports, so many text messages, except for the one text message they most deeply wanted.

It was strange that he hadn’t called. Rachel began to tell herself stories to explain away that fact. Maybe he lost his phone in the chaos. Maybe Hersh and Aner ran into the bush and were now walking the hundred kilometers to Jerusalem. Maybe they were in a place with no cell signal. Maybe, maybe, God willing, just maybe.  

Then came the knocks on the door, as a cavalcade of concerned friends began to show up at the apartment. By 2 p.m., there were eight of them, working the phones, scouring the internet. They found a list of survivors clustered at one kibbutz, then a separate list from a different village. They saw Hersh’s and Aner’s names. But when the friends made calls to verify the lists, they learned that they were inaccurate.

As the hours mounted, Rachel knew that the stories she was telling herself weren’t believable either. There’s no way that nobody in the entire south has a phone he can use to just say, “I’m alive.”  

Earlier in the day, Rachel and Jon had reported Hersh as missing. When the police finally called, they asked them to bring anything with Hersh’s DNA to the station. They found an old toothbrush and stray hairs on his pillowcase—quotidian traces of his life that could be used to confirm his death.

What felt like a breakthrough came late at night: The friends found a photo from a bomb shelter near the festival. Amazingly, they could see Aner standing in the doorway. And there was Hersh, along with kids wearing sunglasses casually perched on their head, some checking their phones. By Israeli standards, the scene looked strangely normal. They began to hear reports that the terrorists had killed hundreds of festival-goers, but now they possessed material evidence that Hersh could plausibly be among the living.

At 4 a.m., Jon received a message from a cousin. “I feel terrible sending this to you, but it was sent to me and I feel like I have to show it to you. Don’t show it to Rachel.” It was an article from an Indian publication about the murder of a young man named Hersh Goldberg-Polin, his body found in the West Bank. Jon felt sick to his stomach. But he also paused at the incongruities. The article noted that Hersh was a 25-year-old student. He was neither 25 nor a student. And how would his body have ended up in the West Bank?

Jon did show the article to Rachel, and she sent it to a reporter from ABC News who had contacted her earlier in the day and struck her as a sympathetic soul. “Please, can you send this to a fact-checking desk for confirmation?” The reporter said he would—and eventually, he relayed that his team had debunked the account.

After daybreak, Rachel and Jon called a retired police officer they knew. She told them, “I’m coming over now.” She drove them to an improvised police station, next to Ben Gurion Airport, set up for families of the missing—an ingathering of the dazed. They made their way through a crowd of hundreds of others searching for their loved ones. It wasn’t chaotic; everyone was too stricken for that. As Rachel remembered the scene: “It was like we all walked in with third-degree burns. That’s how the police were treating us. They were just so careful, and they knew nothing. So we were doing everything we could do, but there was nothing to do.”

At home, they heard about a girl who’d just been released from the hospital. In the photo from the bomb shelter, Hersh sat next to her, his arm around her. Jon and Rachel desperately wanted to talk to her, to glean whatever she knew about his fate.

Rachel called the girl’s mother, who said that her daughter was too traumatized to talk. Rachel responded, “I’m a mother and I understand, but we don’t know if Hersh is dead or alive, and your daughter might know something. So when she is ready, and I know she can’t do it tonight, please have her call me.”

At the end of the day, the couple told their friends that they wanted to get some sleep. But really, they needed time to themselves. In the privacy of their bedroom, they allowed themselves to say a fatalistic thing: We’re the parents of a boy who’s dead. They began to talk about how they might need to pick themselves up, for the sake of their daughters. It was a rare time in their marriage that Rachel saw Jon heaving, and witnessed the uncontrolled rush of tears.

The next morning, another survivor from the bomb shelter called. They placed the phone on the coffee table and put her on speaker. They asked their friend Rotem to take the lead in the conversation. Jon and Rachel, both natives of Chicago, spoke Hebrew with a foreign accent. Rotem didn’t, and they hoped that might make this young woman feel more comfortable reciting uncomfortable truths.

Haltingly, carefully, she began to narrate. The last time she saw him, Hersh was alive, but he had hurt his hand. The Hebrew word yad can mean hand or arm. And the way she used it struck Rotem as curious. “Was it a serious injury or did he just hurt his hand?” She replied, “He’s okay, but he definitely hurt his hand.”

After they hung up, Rotem called the survivor back, without Rachel and Jon in the room. He pressed her to be less cautious. It turned out that the Hamas assailants had lobbed grenades into the bunker. Aner had picked them up and hurled them back outside. And then she revealed the hard truth she had blunted earlier: Hersh lost his arm, from the elbow down, in the attack.

As Rotem relayed the information to Hersh’s parents, Rachel was beside herself. Hersh is left-handed—and that was the arm he now longer possessed. She exclaimed, “Did he just die in that field? Did he? How much can this child take?”

Rotem also needed them to know that he had collected an even more gruesome piece of testimony in the course of his efforts. He had spoken with a man in search of his own son. On October 7, he’d entered the bomb shelter and found seven young Israelis lying under a carpet of corpses, feigning their own death for four and a half hours. He told them, “I’m Israeli. I’m a private citizen. I’m here with my vehicle. Anybody who’s still conscious, get up right now and I’m taking you to the hospital.” The man told Rotem, “Based on what I saw in that bomb shelter, I’m sorry to say that there’s no chance that Aner is alive.”

With each day that passed, their chronology of October 7 thickened. One woman recounted to Rachel and Jon how Hamas terrorists had pulled Hersh from the bunker, his arm now wrapped in a tourniquet, and aggressively loaded him onto a truck. The police said that they had traced Hersh’s cellphone, and that they had last encountered it on the border with Gaza.

Although the government assigned them two case workers, the authorities seemed to have no independent sense of the timeline of that day, and no hard information about Hersh’s condition. Almost everything substantial that the Goldberg-Polins learned came from the investigation that they had conducted themselves. As the grim new reality of their lives settled over them, the couple made a calculated decision: They would push on every door. Whenever the global news media asked for an interview, they granted one. One American TV anchor tried to nudge Rachel to wear makeup: “You might make viewers uncomfortable.” Rachel replied, “I want to make them feel uncomfortable.”

Hope, or what now constituted hope, came in the form of Anderson Cooper. In the course of filming a long segment about October 7, the CNN anchor came across footage on the phone of an Israeli soldier. As he saw the video, Cooper gasped, “Jesus Christ.” He recognized Hersh’s face. There was Hersh hoisting himself onto a pickup truck with his remaining arm, his nondominant one. It was a terrible image: Blood was everywhere, on his face, on his leg. Cooper tried to break the news gently to Jon and Rachel: “I have a video of your son and I’m going to send it now. It’s a hard video to watch.”

[Graeme Wood: A record of pure, predatory sadism]

Still, they could see Hersh using his own two feet; they could see that he possessed the power to lift himself onto the flatbed, despite his loss of blood. Jon told me, “You live in a reality where you want to hear that your kid was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza, because that’s better than the alternative. It frames for you the alternative reality that we live in, which enables me to take strength from seeing my son with a blown-off limb.”

When I spoke with Hersh’s parents via Zoom, they were in their apartment in the southeast quadrant of Jerusalem, sitting on a couch in front of an unadorned wall. Rachel told me that they had both lost substantial weight. The Jewish impulse to feed the suffering felt like an affront, which they both resisted. “I’m not sure if Hersh is alive. I am not going to be eating cake,” Rachel said.

They narrated their story with a sense of detachment, the numbness that allows the mind to function in the midst of a living nightmare. I noted that fact to Rachel, who wore a sticker with a 26 on her T-shirt, the number of days since Hamas had blown off her son’s arm and abducted him. She didn’t disagree. “I tell everyone that I’m going to go downstairs and cry now and that I’ll be back in a few minutes. And I’ll go into our bedroom and I’ll cry, and I’ll scream into a T-shirt, and I’ll just be beside myself. Then I’ll wipe my face and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got work to do.’ And I come back upstairs.” Each interview is a shout in the darkness, an exhaustion of their obligation to avail themselves of every opportunity to remind the world of Hersh’s existence.

I told her that I wanted to help Hersh get started in journalism, if that’s what he wanted and if he managed to survive. She thanked me, then corrected me: “Please, it’s when, not if.”

Representative Adam Schiff was mingling his way through a friendly crowd at a Democratic barbecue when the hecklers arrived—by boat. Schiff and two other Senate candidates, Representatives Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, convened on the back patio of a country club overlooking the port of Stockton, California. Schiff spoke first. “It’s such a beautiful evening,” he said, thanking the host, local Democratic Representative Josh Harder.

It was hard to know what to make of the protest vessel, except that its seven passengers were yelling things as Schiff began his remarks. And not nice things. Although their words were tough to decipher, the flag flying over the craft made clear where they were coming from: FUCK BIDEN. Notably, of the three candidates, Schiff was the only one I heard singled out by name—or, in one case, by a Donald Trump–inspired epithet (“Shifty”) and, in another, a four-letter profanity similar to the congressman’s surname (clever!).

Schiff is used to such derision and says it proves his bona fides as a worthy Trump adversary. Given the laws of political physics today, it also bodes well for his Senate campaign. The principle is simple: to be despised by the opposition can yield explicit benefits. This is especially true when you belong to the dominant party, as Schiff does in heavily Democratic California. One side’s villain is the other side’s champion. Adam Schiff embodies this rule as well as any politician in the country.

In recent years, Schiff has had a knack for eliciting loud and at times unhinged reactions from opponents, even though he himself tends to be quite hinged. The 45th president tweeted about Schiff 328 times, as tallied by Schiff’s office. Tucker Carlson called the congressman “a wild-eyed conspiracy nut.” A group of QAnon followers circulated a report in 2021 that U.S. Special Forces had arrested Schiff and that he was in a holding facility awaiting transfer to Guantánamo Bay for trial (the report proved erroneous). Before Schiff had a chance to meet his new Republican colleague Anna Paulina Luna, of Florida, she filed a resolution condemning his “Russia hoax investigation” and calling for him to potentially be fined $16 million (the resolution failed).

This onslaught has also been good for business, inspiring equal passion in Schiff’s favor. A former prosecutor, he became an icon of the left for his emphatic critiques of Trump’s behavior in office, including as the lead House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country,” Schiff said as part of his closing argument, a speech that became a rallying cry of the anti-Trump resistance. (“I am in tears,” the actor Debra Messing wrote on Twitter.) Opponents gave grudging respect. “They nailed him,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told Mitt Romney, according to an account in a new Romney biography by my colleague McKay Coppins. Schiff’s own Trump-era memoir, Midnight in Washington, became a No. 1 New York Times best seller.

Representative Adam Schiff speaks to supporters at a barbecue hosted by fellow Democratic House member Josh Harder in Stockton, California. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

You could draw parallel lines charting the levels of vilification that Schiff has encountered and his name recognition and fundraising numbers. Both the good and the grisly have boosted Schiff’s media profile, which he has adeptly cultivated. Schiff has come in at or near the top of the polls in the Senate race so far, along with Porter. A Berkeley IGS survey released last week revealed him as the best-known of the candidates vying for the late Dianne Feinstein’s job; 69 percent of likely voters said they could render an opinion of him (40 percent favorable, 29 percent unfavorable). He raised $6.4 million in the most recent reporting period, ending the quarter with $32 million cash on hand, or $20 million more than the runner-up, Porter. That’s more than any Senate candidate in the country this election cycle, and a massive advantage in a state populated by about 22 million registered voters covering some of the nation’s most expensive media markets.

[Read: A final chapter unbefitting an extraordinary legacy]

“He’s become an inspiration and a voice of reason for many of us,” Becky Espinoza, of Stockton, told me at the Democratic barbecue.

Or at least the sector of “many of us” who don’t want him dead.

Schiff started getting threats a few months into Trump’s presidency. “Welcome to the club,” Nancy Pelosi, his longtime mentor, told him. He endured anti-Semitic screeds online and actual bullets sent to his office bearing the names of Schiff’s two kids. “I can’t stand the fact that millions of people hate you; they just hate you,” Schiff’s wife, Eve—yes, Adam and Eve—told her husband after the abuse started. “They just hate you.”

No one deserves to be subjected to such menace, and the threats can be particularly chilling for a member of Congress who would not normally have a protective detail. (Schiff’s office declined to discuss its security staffing and protocols.) Schiff is not shy about repeating these ugly stories, however. There’s an element of strategic humblebragging to this, as he is plainly aware that being a target of the MAGA minions can be extremely attractive to the Democratic voters he needs.

In June, congressional Republicans led a party-line vote to censure Schiff for his role in investigating Trump. As then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy attempted to preside, Democrats physically rallied around Schiff on the House floor chanting “shame” at McCarthy. On the day of his censure, Schiff was interviewed on CNN and twice on MSNBC; the next morning he appeared on ABC’s The View. “Whoever it was that introduced that censure resolution against him probably ensured Adam’s victory,” Representative Mike Thompson, another California Democrat, told me. A few colleagues addressed him that day as “Senator Schiff.”

I dropped in on Schiff periodically over the past few months as he traversed the chaos of the Capitol, weighed in on Trump’s legal travails, and campaigned across California. What did a Senate candidacy look like for a Trump-era cause célèbre who is revered and reviled with such vigor? I found it a bit odd to see Schiff out in the political wild—glad-handing, granny-hugging, and, at the barbecue in late August, nearly knocking a plate of brisket from the grip of an eager selfie-seeker. He has graduated to a full-on news-fixture status, someone perpetually framed by a screen or viewed behind a podium, as if he emerged from his mother’s womb and was dropped straight into a formal courtroom, hearing room, or greenroom setting.

I watched a number of guests in Stockton clutch Schiff’s hand and address him in plaintive tones. “After I stopped crying a little bit, I just wanted to thank him for all he did during impeachment and to just save our democracy,” said Espinoza, following her brief meeting with the candidate.

Nearby, David Hartman, of Tracy, California, put down a paper plate of chicken, pickles, and corn salad and made his way to Schiff. “I just want to shake the man’s hand and thank him,” Hartman told me, which is what he did. So did his wife, Tracy (of Tracy!), who was likewise surprised to find herself in tears.

“I’m like a human focus group,” Schiff told me, describing how strangers approach him at airports. “Sometimes I will have two people come up to me simultaneously. One will say, ‘You are Adam Schiff. I just want to shake your hand. You’re a hero.’ And the other will say, ‘You’re not my hero. Why do you lie all the time?’”

For his first eight terms in Congress, Schiff, 63, was not much recognized beyond the confines of the U.S. Capitol or the cluster of affluent Los Angeles–area neighborhoods he has represented in the House since 2001. “I think, before Trump, if you had to pick one of these big lightning rods or partisan bomb-throwers, you would not pick me,” Schiff told me.

Largely true. Schiff speaks in careful, somewhat clipped tones, with a slight remnant of a Boston accent from his childhood in suburban Framingham, Massachusetts. (His father was in the clothing business and moved the family to Arizona and eventually California.) A Stanford- and Harvard-trained attorney, Schiff gained a reputation as an ambitious but low-key legislator in the House, and a deft communicator in service of his generally liberal positions.

A Fox News reporter and other guests at the barbecue in Stockton.(Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

After Trump’s election, however, Schiff’s district effectively became CNN, MSNBC, and the network Sunday shows, along with the scoundrel’s gallery of right-wing media that pulverized him hourly. This included a certain Twitter feed. The worst abuse Schiff received started after Trump’s maiden tweet about him dropped on July 24, 2017. This was back in an era of relative innocence, when it was still something of a novelty for a sitting president to attack a member of Congress by name—“Sleazy Adam Schiff,” in this case.

Schiff tweeted back that Trump’s “comments and actions are beneath the dignity of the office.” Schiff would later reveal that he rejected a less restrained rejoinder suggested by Mike Thompson, his California colleague: “Mr. President, when they go low, we go high. Now go fuck yourself.” Anyway, that was six years, two impeachments, four indictments, 91 felony counts, and 327 tweets by Donald Trump about Adam Schiff ago.

[Adam Schiff: America must stand as a bulwark against autocracy]

“Adam is one of the least polarizing personalities you will ever find,” said another Democratic House colleague, Dan Goldman, of New York. “The reason he’s become such a bogeyman for the Republican Party is simply that he’s so effective.” Goldman served as the lead majority counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, working closely with Schiff. “We originally met in the greenroom of MSNBC in June of 2018,” Goldman told me. (Of course they did.)

Schiff understands that some of the rancor directed at him is performative, and likes to point out the quiet compliments he receives from political foes. Trump used to complain on Twitter that Schiff spent too much time on television—in reality, a source of extreme envy for the then-president. Schiff tells a story about how Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, came to Capitol Hill for a deposition from members of Schiff’s Intelligence committee in 2017. “Kushner comes up to me to make conversation, and to ingratiate himself,” Schiff told me. “And he said, ‘You know, you do a great job on television.’ And I said, ‘Well, apparently your father-in-law doesn’t think so,’ and [Kushner] said, ‘Oh, yes, he does.’” (Kushner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

One of Trump’s most fervent bootlickers, Senator Lindsey Graham, walked up to Schiff in a Capitol hallway during the first impeachment trial and told him how good of a job he was doing. Schiff, who relayed both this and the Kushner stories in his memoir, says he gets that from other Republicans, too, usually House members he’s worked with—including some who lampoon him in front of microphones. A few House Republicans apologized privately to Schiff, he told me, right after they voted to censure him.

“The apologies are always accompanied by ‘You’re not going to say anything about this, are you?’” Schiff said. When I urged Schiff to name names, to call out the hypocrites, he declined.

I asked Schiff if he would prefer the more anonymous, pre-2017 version of himself running in this Senate campaign, as opposed to the more embattled, death-threat-getting version, who nonetheless enjoys so many advantages because of all the attention. He paused. “I’d rather the country didn’t have to go through all this with Donald Trump,” he said, skirting a direct answer.

As with many members of Congress seeking a promotion or an exit, Schiff gives off a strong whiff of being done with the place. “The House has become kind of a basket case,” he told me, citing one historic grandiloquence that he was recently privy to—the episode in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called her colleague Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor.

“And I remember thinking to myself, There used to be giants who served in this body,” Schiff said. He sighed, as he does.

I met with Schiff at the Capitol in early October, amid the usual swirl of weighty events: Feinstein had died three days earlier; news that Governor Gavin Newsom would appoint the Democratic activist Laphonza Butler as her replacement came the night before. That afternoon, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz had filed his fateful “motion to vacate” that would result in the demise of McCarthy’s speakership the next day. Schiff stood just off the House floor, colleagues passing in both directions, Republicans looking especially angry, and reporters gathering around Schiff in a small scrum.

No matter what happens next November, Schiff is not running for reelection in the House. He told me he has long believed that he’d be a better fit for the Senate anyway, where he has been coveting a seat for years. Schiff said he considered running in 2016, after the retirement of the incumbent Barbara Boxer (who was eventually succeeded by Kamala Harris).

A Democrat will almost certainly win the 2024 California race. Senate contests in the state follow a two-tiered system in which candidates from both parties compete in a March primary, and then the two top finishers face off in November, regardless of their affiliation. In addition to Schiff, Porter, and Lee, the former baseball star Steve Garvey, known also for his various divorce and paternity scandals, recently entered the race as a Republican. A smattering of long shots are also running, including the requisite former L.A. news anchor and requisite former Silicon Valley executive. Butler announced on October 19 that she would not seek the permanent job.

To varying degrees, all of the three leading Democratic candidates have national profiles. Lee, who has represented her Oakland-area district for nearly 25 years, previously chaired both the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Porter was elected to Congress in 2018 and has gained a quasi-cult following as a progressive gadfly who has a knack for conducting pointed interrogations of executives and public officials that go rapidly viral. A few of her fans were so excited to meet Porter at the Stockton barbecue that three actually spilled drinks on her—this according to the congresswoman, speaking at an event a few days later.

[Ronald Brownstein: Who will replace Dianne Feinstein?]

Schiff, Porter, and Lee all identify as progressive Democrats on most issues, though Schiff tends to be more hawkish on national security. He voted to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and supported the 2011 U.S. missile strikes against Libya. Lee, who opposed all three, recently criticized Schiff’s foreign-policy views as “part of the status quo thinking” in Washington. (Porter was not in office then.) Schiff expressed “unequivocal support for the security and the right of Israel to defend itself” after last month’s attacks by Hamas. Lee has been more critical of the Israeli government, and called for a cease-fire immediately after the Hamas attacks. As for Porter, she has been a rare progressive to focus her response on America’s Iran policy, which she called lacking and partly to blame for the attacks.

Although Schiff is best known for his work as a Trump antagonist—and happily dines out on that—he is also wary of letting the former president define him entirely. “This is bigger than Trump,” he reminds people whenever the conversation veers too far in Trump’s inevitable direction. Schiff dutifully pivots to more standard campaign themes, namely the “two hugely disruptive forces” he says have shaped American life: “the changes in our economy” and “the changes in how we get our information.” He reels off the number of cities in California that he’s visited, events he’s done, and endorsements he’s received as proof that he is a workmanlike candidate, not just a citizen of the greenroom.

A group of hecklers in a boat floats by near the barbecue. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)

Recently, he lamented that many of his Republican colleagues are now driven by a “perverse celebrity” that he believes the likes of Greene and Boebert have acquired through their Trump-style antics and ties to the former president. I pointed out to Schiff that he, too, has received a lot of Trump-driven recognition. Doesn’t being affiliated with Trump, whether as an ally or an adversary, have benefits for both sides?

“Well, I don’t view it that way at all,” Schiff said. “I don’t view it as having any kind of equivalence. On one hand, we’re trying to defend our democracy. And on the other hand, we have these aiders and abettors of Trump by these vile performance artists. It’s quite different.”

Schiff’s biggest supporter has been Pelosi, who endorsed him over two other members of her own caucus and delegation. This included Lee, whom Pelosi described to me as “like a political sister.” I spoke by phone recently with the former speaker, who was effusive about Schiff and scoffed at any suggestion that he benefited from his resistance to Trump and the counter-backlash that ensued. “If what’s-his-name never existed, Adam Schiff would still be the right person for California,” Pelosi said. It was one of two occasions in our interview in which she refused to utter the word “Trump.”

“I just don’t want to say his name,” she explained. “Because I worry that he’s going to corrode my phone or something.”

In one of my conversations with Schiff, I asked him this multiple-choice question: Who had raised the most money for him—Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, or Donald Trump? My goal was to get Schiff to acknowledge that, without Trump, he would be nowhere near as well known, well financed, or well positioned to potentially represent the country’s most populous state in the Senate.

“I’m not sure how to answer that,” he said. After a pause, he picked himself. “I am my own biggest fundraiser,” he declared. Okay, I said, but wasn’t Trump the single biggest motivator for anyone to donate?

“It’s the whole package,” Schiff maintained, ceding nothing. He then made sure to mention the person who’s been “most formative in helping shape my career and phenomenally helpful in my campaign—Nancy Pelosi.” He was in no rush to give what’s-his-name any credit.