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Prominent Republicans criticized Donald Trump for two years. So why are even these supposed moderates now pledging to support him?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why won’t OpenAI say what the Q* algorithm is? The dual threat of Donald Trump Putin’s deal with wife killers

Career Over Country

Breaking up, Neil Sedaka told us many years ago, is hard to do. But it shouldn’t be impossible. When a Republican governor describes Donald Trump as a “three-time loser,” warns that the party will lose “up and down the ballot” if Trump is the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, and calls the former president “fucking crazy,” it’s easy to imagine a responsible politician who has packed his bags and is waiting on the steps of the GOP’s Delta House for his taxi back to the world of sensible adults.

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, however, is not such a politician.

Sununu gained a lot of media attention and applause from the Never Trump Republicans for being one of the former president’s most brutal critics. But now that Trump is all but inevitable as the GOP nominee, Sununu is bashing Joe Biden and embracing Trump as the lesser of two evils. “Did you see [Trump’s] last visit to New Hampshire?” Sununu said to reporters earlier this month. “He was comparing himself to Nelson Mandela and talking about Jesus Christ being speaker of the House—it was kooky talk … He sounds almost as bad as Joe Biden.”

Almost as bad as Joe Biden? I will be the first to note, as I did here, that Biden’s reputation as a walking gaffe hazard is well deserved. He gets carried away, embellishes, and remembers things that didn’t happen (a sign, I think, more of his penchant for self-important Irish blarneying than of his age). He spent his life as a senator; senators talk a lot, and sometimes they say dumb stuff.

But to compare Biden’s blunders to Trump’s derangement is inane. Trump’s mind often slips the surly bonds of Earth: He has claimed that he won all 50 states in the 2020 election, invented people who invariably call him “sir,” lied endlessly about an astonishing number of things, embraced the QAnon conspiracy theories, and, as Sununu himself admits, compared himself to Jesus Christ.

Biden is a competent politician who sometimes stumbles or goes off the rails in his public statements. Trump is a disturbed, emotionally disordered person who, in Liz Cheney’s words, is “the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office.”

So why is Sununu going to vote for Trump? Because Republicans have to win. That’s it. “I just want Republicans to win,” Sununu told Puck’s Tara Palmeri in a podcast released yesterday. “That’s all I care about.”

Perhaps if Sununu had been forced from office or personally threatened by Trump supporters, he might feel differently—or at least be less inclined to stand for such mindless hyper-partisanship.

Or perhaps not. Peter Meijer, the former GOP representative from Michigan who was primaried out of Congress and harassed because of his vote to impeach Trump a second time, has endured far worse than Sununu, and yet he, too, is backing Trump again. Meijer is running for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats, and he seems to be trying to mollify the MAGA church long enough to carry a statewide election. Meijer, like Sununu, is laying his more-in-sorrow-than-anger shtick on the incumbent: “My overarching goal is to make Joe Biden a one-term president,” he told Adam Wren at Politico.

We could mine the statements of other Republicans for similar pyrite nuggets of shiny Trump criticism that amount to nothing. (Even Nikki Haley can bring herself to say only that Trump was the right guy at the right time—but now is the wrong time.) None of them, I would argue, really believes that Biden is a worse president than Trump was, and they all know the danger of a second Trump term. So why would they bend the knee one more time?

The Republicans coming back to Trump are driven by two factors: ambition and delusion.

Ambition is the easiest motive to explain. Mitt Romney, at 76 years old, is retiring: He can afford to say that he might vote for a Democrat rather than enable Trump again. He’s had it with his Republican colleagues and he wants to go home. But Haley is 51, Sununu is 49, and Meijer is 35. None of these people is ready, in Washington vernacular, to go spend more time with their family. They all probably expected Trump to be disgraced and driven from public life by now, and they had plans for their own future. They did not grasp that disgrace, in today’s GOP, is a fundraising opportunity, not a disqualification from office.

Numbed by opportunism, many Republicans will simply hunker down and try to survive the next five years. They’re all sure that, after that, it’ll be their time, and they will triumphantly cobble together a new GOP coalition out of independents, moderate Republicans, and what’s left of the MAGA vote, gaining that last group by assuring Trump’s base that no matter what they may have said about their idol, at least they never went over the fence and voted for a Democrat.

But these ambitious Republicans are also under a self-serving delusion that the next Trump term will be something like the first Trump term. They assume that adults will somehow restrain Trump and that the nation will function more or less normally while Trump goes off to his beloved rallies. They are committed to the fantasy that four more years of a mad king will be akin to weathering one more passing storm. (They have also likely convinced themselves, as Haley did while working for Trump, that they can best limit the damage by being in the mix of GOP politics, rather than by being excommunicated.)

This dream narrative ends with the normal Republicans emerging from their tornado shelters, surveying some limited and reparable damage, and restoring the center-right, conservative kingdom. President Haley or Senator Meijer will get the GOP back to cutting taxes and erasing government regulations, all while mending fences with millions of people who were horrified by the violence and madness of Trumpism.

None of that is going to happen.

Trump has made it clear that he has no regrets about any ghastly thing he did as president, that as president again he will bring a legion of goons and cronies with him into the White House (including seditionists and rioters whom he will pardon and release from jail), and that he fully intends to finish the job of burning down American democracy. Politicians such as Sununu or Meijer know all of this, but they apparently think they will remain untouched by it. They have put their party and their personal fortunes over their allegiance to the Constitution, perhaps hoping that they will at least have a chance to rule over whatever is left in the ashes of the republic.

Today’s News

A new CDC report shows that U.S. life expectancy at birth rose in 2022, in part because of falling COVID deaths. The U.S. Department of Justice has indicted an Indian man on murder-for-hire charges over an alleged plot to kill a Sikh activist in New York. Officials from Qatar, Egypt, and the U.S. are asking for an extension of the cease-fire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

Evening Read

Bettmann / CORBIS / Getty

Must the Novelist Crusade?

By Eudora Welty

Published in the October 1965 issue of The Atlantic.

Not too long ago I read in some respectable press that Faulkner would have to be reassessed because he was “after all, only a white Mississippian.” For this reason, it was felt, readers could no longer rely on him for knowing what he was writing about in his life’s work of novels and stories, laid in what he called “my country.” Remembering how Faulkner for most of his life wrote in all but isolation from critical understanding, ignored impartially by North and South, with only a handful of critics in forty years who were able to “assess” him, we might smile at this journalist as at a boy let out of school. Or there may have been an instinct to smash the superior, the good, that is endurable enough to go on offering itself. But I feel in these words and others like them the agonizing of our times.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Noel Celis / AFP / Getty; Thomas Coex / AFP / Getty.

Read. Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country is a powerful story that seamlessly segues from Evangelista’s own life story into a riveting police procedural.

Listen. Is it possible to argue productively? On Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin explores some practical advice for handling both private and political disagreements.

Play our daily crossword.

Shan Wang 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.

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I spoke with my colleague Sarah Zhang about a breakthrough in CRISPR therapy, and when it is ethical to use the gene-editing technology.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

My father, my faith, and Donald Trump Why the Fifth Circuit keeps making such outlandish decisions Substack has a Nazi problem.

A Transformative Treatment

Earlier this month, U.K. regulators approved a new therapy that uses CRISPR—a gene-editing technology that allows scientists to make cuts to DNA—to treat people with sickle-cell disease. FDA approval is likely in the coming weeks. I spoke with my colleague Sarah Zhang, who has been covering CRISPR for more than a decade, about this landmark treatment, ethical use of the technology, and what fair access to CRISPR therapy could look like in the future.

Lora Kelley: What makes sickle-cell disease an obvious match for CRISPR therapy?

Sarah Zhang: As soon as scientists started talking about what we can do with CRISPR, treating sickle cell rose to the top of the list for two reasons. One is that with sickle-cell disease, you can take the blood cells out, edit them in the controlled environment of a lab, and then put them back in someone’s body. And with sickle cell, we know exactly the edit to make to treat the disease. For patients who have gotten the therapy, it’s been transformative. They’ve gone from being hospitalized multiple times a year to having virtually no symptoms.

Lora: Where does the scientific community draw ethical lines on when to use CRISPR?

Sarah: If you’ve heard about CRISPR and humans, you probably remember the CRISPR babies that were born back in 2018. A Chinese scientist went rogue and edited embryos that were then born as twins in China, purportedly to make them resistant to HIV.

CRISPR babies were an unnecessary and reckless use of gene editing. That moment catalyzed the community to think about how we want this technology to be used.

After that, there was a widely accepted consensus among scientists: no editing in sperm, eggs, or embryos. Edits in the DNA of your blood cells or muscle cells or brain cells don’t get passed on if you have children, the way they would be in sperm, eggs, or embryos. The rewards are also not clear. There aren’t really good applications where you could prevent a genetic disease from being inherited with gene editing that you can’t already do using IVF and embryo selection.

But everyone I talked with feels like this sickle-cell treatment is an appropriate use of CRISPR. The big question going forward is: Who can actually get access to this therapy?

Lora: What would equitable and fair access to CRISPR therapy to treat sickle-cell disease look like?

Sarah: This therapy is likely to be very expensive. It may cost around $2 million a person. It’s also hard to get physically. You’re basically doing a bone-marrow transplant on yourself. Your blood cells are taken out of you and edited; meanwhile, you’re undergoing chemotherapy to kill your remaining bone marrow. And then you’re getting your edited cells infused back into you, and rebuilding your blood and immune system over the course of several months.

So you have to be either in the hospital or going to the hospital and going to see doctors for about a year. If you live near one of these transplant centers, you may be able to do that. But if you live in a rural location, or maybe you are in school, or you have kids, or you have a job, you can’t take a year out of your life to undergo this therapy. Most people who have sickle-cell disease live in developing countries, largely in sub-Saharan Africa. So this therapy is logistically unfeasible for them.

Still, there’s some amount of justice to the fact that this groundbreaking therapy is helping treat a disease that predominantly affects Black people, who have been historically—and still are—marginalized in the medical system. The idea is that one day this treatment can be something more like a shot, which would be cheaper and easier to get.

Lora: How do you anticipate CRISPR being used to treat diseases in the future?

Sarah: The next step will be: How do we treat CRISPR right in the body? We’re starting to do that. There was a recent trial to lower people’s cholesterol using CRISPR. Lipid nanoparticles were used to send CRISPR to the liver, which is a relatively easy target. Changing things in the brain, the heart, or muscles is a lot harder. A big question now is: How do we get CRISPR to the cells that we want to edit?

Even though CRISPR has been described as a very precise gene editor, it’s actually still quite limited. It’s not the same thing as opening up Google Docs and changing some letters around. But now there are new technologies where you can change a single letter, or paste in a sequence, and that will allow for much more precise edits in the future. CRISPR is quite easy to use. But making sure you do all the right edits is harder.

Still, these breakthroughs have been exciting for me personally. I started covering CRISPR very early in my career, when it was a thing you did to cells in a petri dish in a lab. Now it’s being used to treat humans. It’s only been a little bit more than 10 years, which feels like a long time, but in the medical world, it’s really a blink of an eye. It’s extraordinary that it happened so quickly.

Related Links

The CRISPR era is here. CRISPR has a terrible name.

Today’s News

Forty-one workers were rescued after a tunnel collapsed in the Indian state of Uttarakhand; they had been trapped for more than two weeks. Americans for Prosperity Action, a political network founded by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, has endorsed Nikki Haley in the Republican primary for president.    Israel and Hamas will extend a temporary pause in fighting until tomorrow, maintaining the possibility of further extensions and hostage-prisoner exchanges.

Evening Read Painting by Fulton Leroy Washington (MR WASH). Source: Malike Sidibe for The Atlantic.

This Is Not Justice

By Jake Tapper

Editor’s Note: As of yesterday, C. J. Rice, the subject of our November 2022 cover story, could be very close to freedom after a federal court overturned his conviction. The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office now has 179 days to decide whether to retry Rice’s case or release him from custody. Read our update here.

On Tuesday, September 20, 2011, a young patient walked haltingly into a medical office in South Philadelphia to have his bullet wounds examined.

The patient was a 17-year-old named C. J. Rice, who lived in the neighborhood. The doctor was a pediatrician named Theodore Tapper.

My father had been working as a physician in South Philadelphia for more than four decades and had known Rice since he was a child. Rice had been brought in for a checkup soon after he was born, and as a doctor my father had seen Rice several times a year, along with other members of the family. Two weeks and three days before his September appointment, Rice had been shot while riding his bike, in what he believed was a case of mistaken identity. To remove one of the bullets, a surgeon had made a long incision down the middle of Rice’s torso. The wound was then closed with a ridge of staples—more than two dozen. After his discharge, Rice was in severe pain and could barely walk. He needed help to get dressed in the morning and help to go up and down stairs …

The timing of that visit is significant because, six days later, the Philadelphia police announced that they were seeking Rice and a friend of his, Tyler Linder, in connection with a shooting that had occurred in South Philadelphia on the evening of September 25 and left four people wounded, including a 6-year-old girl.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy

Read. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout is a novel that our staff writer Jennifer Senior is “positively evangelical” about, and one of her entertainment musts.

Watch. ​​Anxious? Here are some of the best and most rewatch-friendly movies to soothe your mind (From 2020).

Play our daily crossword.

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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.

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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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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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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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jennifer Senior, a staff writer at The Atlantic and the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. She has written for The Atlantic about one family’s search for meaning in the aftermath of 9/11, the singular heartbreak of adult friendships, and the aunt she barely knew.

Jennifer was stunned by Daniel Radcliffe in the revival of Merrily We Roll Along, knows most of the theme song to Phineas and Ferb by heart, and is a sucker for a movie or TV show about high school—“especially if it involves nerds.”

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

No, you shouldn’t ‘date ’em ’til you hate ’em.’ Six books that might change how you think about mental illness There is no good way to travel anywhere in America.

The Culture Survey: Jennifer Senior

The entertainment product my friends are talking about most right now: The revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez blew our doors off, which came as no surprise (they’re old pros, practically made of charisma—all that). It was Daniel Radcliffe who stunned everyone, making us forget after maybe 15 seconds that we were staring at Harry Potter and convincing us that we were staring at an angry, long-suffering writer instead. He has impeccable comic timing and a mordant way about him that works painfully (and all too familiarly) well.

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: Here We Are, the final and not-quite-complete Sondheim musical, staged posthumously at the Shed.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: Ramy, which is old, but I never watched it (its secret: It isn’t a comedy), and Never Have I Ever, because I’m a sucker for anything set in high school, especially if it involves nerds. [Related: Ramy meditates on the pitfalls of self-righteousness.]

An actor I would watch in anything: No longer living: Carole Lombard. Still with us: David Strathairn, Wendell Pierce, Sarah Lancashire. (Sorry, that’s four, but c’mon. One actor?)

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: I’m changing the terms and naming my favorite movie in black-and-white and my favorite movie in color, respectively: Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (see? Carole Lombard!) and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (see? high school!). Or, okay, fine—any of the first two Godfathers.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: Fiction: Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. I’m eight years late to it, but now I’m positively evangelical. Nonfiction: Inside Story, which Martin Amis coyly billed as a novel, but isn’t—or isn’t exactly, isn’t consistently, isn’t generally. Like lots of people, I have a love-hate relationship with Amis, who could do magic tricks with words but put them in the mouths of repellent misanthropes. Yet he wrote with real tenderness here, about both his family and his loved ones (Christopher Hitchens in particular—I’m obsessed with their friendship), and he articulated a lot of my own inchoate thoughts about writing. One particularly vindicating remark, which I think explains my overreliance on colons: “Most sentences have a burden, something to impart or get across: put that bit last.” [Related: A world without Martin Amis]

An author I will read anything by: Again: one? Seriously? I’m getting around this problem by naming an author whose works I hope to complete when I retire: Anthony Trollope. (I know. Hopeless. More realistically: Graham Greene.)

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “Angel From Montgomery,” Bonnie Raitt’s version (though John Prine’s is also melancholy-beautiful, probably because he wrote it); “Superman,” by R.E.M., which may not be the loudest song, but it’s loud enough, and it’s a great psych-up tune if you play it on full blast.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: When we were in Spain this spring (which I did in spite of my long COVID; it’s a miracle what steroids can do), I saw the Lucian Freud show at the Thyssen. Freud, Schiele, Bacon—I don’t know why I’m so responsive to their pathos and darkness (a certain frankness, maybe? A willingness to look hard at the unlovely?), but I am.

Something I recently revisited: I am always rereading Kenneth Tynan—not just his criticism and profiles but his diaries. His April 4 entry from 1974 may be my favorite line about writing and productivity of all time: “I have now been working non-start since January.”

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: The puzzles of The New York Times will be responsible for my undoing. Wordle. Connections. And, of course, the Spelling Bee. When my friend Shaila told me about the “Hints” link, I lost another half hour each day, because now I’m maniacally determined to find every word unless there are, like, 80 of them.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: My almost-16-year-old son has long since aged out of it, but Phineas and Ferb is easily as inspired as The Simpsons, which is saying something. I can still sing the theme song in its entirety. “Like maybe / Building a rocket or fighting a mummy / Or climbing up the Eiffel Tower …”

The last debate I had about culture: Me asking my friend Steve Metcalf, one of the hosts of Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast, to explain all the fuss about Rachel Cusk. I’ve tried and tried and tried to love her, and I can’t. (This wasn’t a debate, I realize, so much as a confession and a cry for help.)

A good recommendation I recently received: The audio version of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which features four different readers. Like a radio play you never want to end. Perfect marriage of material and narrators—all sophisticated, witty, capable of speaking in multiple registers.

The last thing that made me cry: See: Merrily We Roll Along. One of the finest works ever about friendship and time, right up there with Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: Bottoms. Have I mentioned I’m a sucker for any movie or television show about high school?

The Week Ahead

Saltburn, a film by the director Emerald Fennell, follows an Oxford student who spends a dark summer with a classmate, played by Jacob Elordi (in theaters now). The Fabulist tells the outrageous tale of George Santos—and is written by a Long Island reporter who has been following him since 2019 (on sale Tuesday). South to Black Power, a documentary featuring the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, calls for a “reverse Great Migration” of Black Americans (premieres Tuesday on HBO).

Essay

Apple TV+

An Enjoyable Extravaganza About … Napoleon?

By David Sims

When it comes to battle tactics, Napoleon Bonaparte (as played by Joaquin Phoenix) is very gun forward. There are few conflicts he marches into that don’t involve the firing of many cannons, an instinct befitting his status as an artillery commander in the French military—the organization he quickly transcended to become the leader of his country by the age of 30. But it also mirrors his rash, preening, sometimes awkward charm in Ridley Scott’s new film, Napoleon, a biography that fast-forwards through the major events of Napoleon’s life and presents him as equal parts confident and arrogant, making for a roller coaster of the ego that’s surprisingly full of laughs.

Making a movie about Napoleon is the kind of consuming effort that drives even the greatest filmmakers to ruin. Stanley Kubrick spent half of his career trying to make a Napoleon and never succeeded; the best-regarded biopic remains a 1927 silent epic that runs more than five hours and ends well before Napoleon becomes the ruler of France.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The problem with turkey trots Jason Momoa’s manliness overwhelms SNL. Revisiting hidden pasts at the National Book Awards Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying? OpenAI’s chief scientist made a tragic miscalculation. What did hip-hop do to women’s minds?

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying? OpenAI’s chief scientist made a tragic miscalculation. What did hip-hop do to women’s minds?

Photo Album

Autumn trees in the Canadian Rockies (Adam Gibbs / Natural Landscape Photography Awards)

See more in our editor’s selection of photos from the Natural Landscape Photography Awards.

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.

Today, we’ll introduce you to The Atlantic’s time machine. Plus, our editors selected seven great reads for you to dive into this weekend.

Time-Travel Thursdays, our latest newsletter, is “for wanderers and wonderers,” our executive editor, Adrienne LaFrance, writes in a welcome note for new readers; it’s “for those who can’t pass a used bookstore without walking in; for readers of history and of science fiction; for the takers of scenic routes and makers of impulsive travel plans.” If that sounds like you, join us as we travel through The Atlantic’s history. Our archive, which dates back to 1857, tells the story of the American idea. It’s full of delightful treasures, poems worth memorizing, arguments worth considering, and episodes of history worth revisiting (and sometimes reviling).

To begin your trip back in time, read LaFrance’s exploration of how Atlantic writers have considered the future—both those predictions that came to pass and those that very much did not—and Ellen Cushing on an index of words that’s also an index of humans’ evolving thinking. Sign up for the newsletter here.

A Weekend Reading List

Many of the below stories have narrated versions, if you prefer to listen to them; just click the link and scroll to the audio player below the headline.

Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment

By Amanda Mull

In theory, self-checkout kiosks save customers time. In practice, Mull writes, the technology is a mess—and when a machine breaks, human employees are the ones who pick up the slack.

The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

Using the framework of “decolonization” to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict is a “leap of ahistorical delusion,” Montefiore argues—one that disregards both Israel’s foundation and the Palestinians’ tragedy.

You Can Learn to Be Photogenic

By Michael Waters

In the selfie era, looking good on camera has become a social (and sometimes literal) currency. But contrary to popular belief, it might be a skill we can learn to improve.

The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy

By Rogé Karma

Private equity has created a private economy, one where information as basic as who owns a company and how it makes money is inaccessible. This won’t end well, Karma warns.

What Matthew Perry Knew About Comedy

By Megan Garber

The actor gave his character on Friends a quality that is all too rare in sitcoms: vulnerability.

What Really Took Down Airbnb

By Annie Lowrey

It wasn’t the government; it was the housing market.

The Sociopaths Among Us—And How to Avoid Them

By Arthur C. Brooks

We’re all likely to meet someone whose charm hides their narcissism. For the sake of our happiness, we need to understand what makes these individuals tick.

Culture Break

Jessica Sample / Gallery Stock

Read. Try one of these eight books that explain how the technologies we take for granted—skyscrapers, airplanes, sewage systems—actually work.

Watch. The Marvels, now in theaters, is fizzy and lightweight, a refreshing change of pace for a bogged-down superhero franchise.

And on the small screen, Nathan Fielder’s new show, The Curse, skewers reality TV while questioning morality’s role in entertainment. The result is an uncomfortable but worthwhile watch.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

For the carnivorous American, it goes without saying: Thanksgiving means turkey. But the bird we cook (and, let’s be honest, sometimes overcook) has been known by other names—hindi in Turkey, tarki in Hindi, “guinea-fowl-rooster-peacock” in (translated) scientific nomenclature. In 2014, the writer Zach Goldhammer traced the global origins of the all-American entrée; it’s the perfect article to pore over as you dig into your leftover mashed potatoes, stuffing, and guinea-fowl-rooster-peacock.

— Nicole

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Emotions can run high in the skies. Why wouldn’t they?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Have you listened lately to what Trump is saying? A moral case against the Israeli hostage deal The money always wins. A sort-of-common, very strange cat trick

Fear of Flying

An airplane is an odd environment: You’re buckled into a flying piece of metal hurling through clouds, sitting in very close proximity to strangers, who may need to shuffle into an aisle every time you have to pee. You’re a member of a temporary, placeless mini-society, following both explicit and unwritten rules distinct from those on Earth. No wonder, then, that some people act sort of strange. They cry. They consume gallons of tomato juice. They swear by rituals (ginger ale and a neck pillow, anyone?) to exert a modicum of control in an environment otherwise totally stripped of it. Most flyers are quiet and courteous to their fellow travelers, even if they’re exhausted or cranky, but some—a small but disruptive cohort—use their time in the friendly skies to act out.

Many of the reasons people might act a little snippy on planes are not that deep: They are in a cramped space; they may be hungry or tired or tipsy; they’re trying to squeeze plump bags into limited overhead bins to avoid paying fees. Seats are cramped, and flight cancellations have been frequent. People place a lot of pressure on flights, especially during the holidays, Sheryl Skaggs, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, told me; those who fly rarely, and who “don’t really understand the rules of the road,” may be making a big annual trip, with high expectations in tow. Someone who spent $600 on a flight and waited through three hours of unexplained delays, missing a family dinner as a result, might be a bit cross.

For most people, the inconvenience and indignities of travel mean they act a bit frosty to their seatmate or retreat into noise-canceling headphones. But a small number of airplane miscreants might vape in the bathroom or throw a fit instead. Incidents of “air rage” have gone viral since the pandemic began, with people acting in erratic and sometimes violent ways, often in response to mask mandates. But problematic plane behavior may have deeper roots. Skaggs and a colleague recently published a paper looking at misconduct on planes—including physical violence and verbal conflicts—over a period of 21 years ending in 2020. Even before the pandemic, she told me, reports of bad behavior in the skies ticked up sharply.

Skaggs found that alcohol frequently fueled problems on flights, but the combination of less comfortable conditions for travelers, alongside low transparency from airlines that often cancel or delay flights, also contributed. Flights were historically choreographed to make passengers feel at ease in a strange environment, Alexandra Murphy, the dean of the college of communication at DePaul University, who has studied airline behavior, told me. From its inception, air travel relied on “building in the familiarity of everyday practice,” she said, and airlines soon started serving hot meals and playing movies. (It’s just like being at home, except that after dinner you find yourself in Albuquerque or Charlotte or London.) Flight attendants passed around drinks and spoke in euphemistic language about what could go wrong, helping make the setting feel safer and more normal for passengers.

But in recent years, airlines have cut costs, and it is no longer the norm for domestic flights to serve free hot meals. Increased security measures since 9/11 mean that flight attendants’ role has more visibly morphed into one of surveillance and discipline, in addition to service. Now that planes are more rule-bound, restrictive environments, some of the illusion of normalcy is shattered, Murphy explained. There’s little to distract people from the fact that they are packed in like sardines, hot, and hungry.

Of course, that dynamic doesn’t always lead to bad behavior, nor does it excuse it. Most flights go off with no crises beyond a few tiffs over who gets the armrests. For a lot of people, the worst they might do is burst into tears while watching a movie. (I asked Dr. Albert Rizzo, the chief medical officer for the American Lung Association, about the theory that low cabin-oxygen levels make people more emotional. He said that this explanation is implausible, because “if you have normal lungs, and if you’re just sitting on a plane, the oxygen saturation in your blood should still be at a very normal level.”) Indeed, most people on planes see others behaving politely and gamely follow suit. And those who do take their plane ride as an opportunity to punch someone are likely displaying a continuity in antisocial behavior that might express itself in other settings, too, Robert Sampson, a sociology professor at Harvard, told me.

Air travel has had a bruising few years, and travelers have felt the effects. Flights were a mess last year. Widespread cancellations and delays, coupled with the infamous Southwest fiasco around Christmas, caused major headaches for flyers. Airlines are seeing fewer cancellations this year. But the ongoing perception that air travel is a nightmare may further poison travelers’ moods, Katy Nastro, a spokesperson for the travel company Going, explained to me. “Pack your patience” may not be the coolest truism, she said, but taking everything with a grain of salt—recognizing that your seatmate may be crabby because she missed a connecting flight, or that the person hogging your armrest may have a fear of flying—is a useful approach if you’re looking to have pleasant holiday-week flights. Nastro noted that most people are stressed out and trying to navigate the unwritten rules of air travel. Hopefully, people on your flight won’t pee on other passengers, refuse to stop singing, or have a meltdown in the aisle. But if they do, remember: You won’t be in the air forever.

Related:

There is no good way to travel anywhere in America. There are two types of airport people.

Today’s News

Israel and Hamas agreed to a deal that would release some hostages and include a four-day pause in fighting. North Korea launched a military spy satellite, violating bans by the United Nations. In response, South Korea is planning to resume aerial surveillance on their shared border. Sam Altman has returned to his role as OpenAI’s CEO after a shocking ouster.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: In many ways, OpenAI’s story is just beginning, Damon Beres says. The turmoil at the company will affect the future of AI development. The Weekly Planet: 2023 just notched its most ominous climate record yet, Zoë Schlanger writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers reader responses on what international issues matter most to them. Work in Progress: The OpenAI mess is about one big thing, Derek Thompson writes.

Evening Read

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Have Yourself an Early Little Christmas

By Elizabeth Bruenig

All of the arguments that chestnuts should not be roasting on an open fire in the month of November make sense to me: the nagging fact that retailers haul out the proverbial holly before Halloween has fully passed for purely commercial reasons, further cheapening an already materialistic mode of celebration; the dilution of a particularly special time of year by stretching it to the point of exhaustion; the infringement upon both Thanksgiving and the traditional Christian season of Advent, which each tend to be swallowed up by premature Christmas cheer; the obnoxious recruitment of Christmas into the culture wars—think malicious wishes for a “merry Christmas”—that can make the entire season feel alienating and isolating. Every position above has its merits, and none of them stops me from rockin’ around my Christmas tree starting November 1.

Maybe there is no good defense of getting into the Christmas spirit as early as I do—though I can’t help but feel a sense of kinship with those other handful of houses already decked out in lights before Thanksgiving. So have some patience with those of us who need a little Christmas right this very minute: a two-and-a-half-month Christmas really does have a few pleasures to recommend it.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Why Americans hate a good economy How Reconstruction created American public education What Hamas promises, Iranians know too well.

Culture Break

Epic Records

Listen. André 3000, the legendary Outkast emcee, is no longer rapping. But his recent flute album is him speaking anew.

Watch. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (in theaters now) is an enjoyable extravaganza.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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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.

Read. These six books might change how you think about mental illness.

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Play our daily crossword.

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.

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I spoke with my colleagues Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel this afternoon about the tensions at the heart of the AI community, and how Sam Altman’s firing may ironically entrench the power of a tech giant.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Has anyone noticed that Trump is really old? The other Ozempic revolution No, you shouldn’t “date ’em ’til you hate ’em.”

An Enabling Mantra

For a while earlier this year, Sam Altman was everywhere. As the head of OpenAI, the company that launched ChatGPT, he quickly became an emissary of the future of the technology. He appeared before Congress and foreign heads of state to discuss how AI would reshape society. As recently as last week, he was hyping up the future of his company. Then, suddenly, Altman was fired. Below is a brief timeline of the drama that unfolded:

Friday afternoon: In a blog post, the company said that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Greg Brockman—the president of OpenAI who, along with Altman, had encouraged the rapid commercialization of the company’s technology—quit in solidarity. Mira Murati, formerly the chief technology officer of the company, was named interim CEO. Over the weekend: By Sunday night, OpenAI had rejected Altman’s bid to return to his job, and Microsoft (a major investor in OpenAI) had hired him to lead an AI-research lab. Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, stepped into the top role at OpenAI on an interim basis, replacing Murati. Today: Some 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees signed a letter saying that they may leave the company and join Altman at Microsoft if he and Brockman are not reinstated at OpenAI.

What happens next may be hugely consequential for the future of AI—particularly for the question of whether profits or existential fears will drive its path forward. My colleagues Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel spoke with 10 current and former OpenAI employees, and in an article published last night, they explained how a simmering years-long tension at the company led to Altman’s ouster.

Lora Kelley: I was shocked to see the news on Friday that Sam Altman had been fired. Was this news just as stunning to those who closely watch OpenAI and the industry?

Karen Hao: It was a huge shock to me. OpenAI was at the height of its power. Altman was still doing so many meetings all around the world and hyping up the company.

Charlie Warzel: Sam Altman was essentially the avatar of the generative-AI revolution. You would think he would have a lot of leverage in discussions. If he had just simply left to start his own thing, it would have made some sense to me. It would have still been dramatic, but the fact that it was announced in this cryptic blog post accusing him of not being candid was wild. It’s one of the most shocking tech stories of the past couple of years.

Lora: You wrote in your article about the different factions within OpenAI: Some employees and leaders thought launching products and putting AI into the hands of everyday users was the right path forward, while others were more cautious and thought that stronger safety measures needed to be taken. How did that dynamic emerge over the past few years?

Karen: Sam Altman sent out an email back in 2019 acknowledging that there were different “tribes” at OpenAI. Because of the way that OpenAI was founded—the original story was that Elon Musk and Sam Altman came together and specifically founded OpenAI kind of as an entity to counteract Big Tech—it was always in the crosshairs of a lot of different ideas about AI: What is the purpose of the technology? How should we build it? How should an entity be structured? As the technology got more powerful—specifically with the catalyst of ChatGPT—so did the Game of Thrones mentality of who got to control it. That came to a head with this news this weekend.

Charlie: There is not only a power struggle but also this quasi-religious belief in what is being built or what could potentially be built. You can’t discount the fact that there are these true believers who are both energized by the idea of an all-powerful AI and horrified by it. That adds an unstable dynamic to the conversation.

Lora: You wrote in your article that this whole situation illustrates the fact that a very small group of people is shaping the future of AI. Given that OpenAI is so closely tied to the future of the technology, I’m curious: To what extent do you think of OpenAI as a traditional tech company? Did this weekend change how you see it?

Karen: The board successfully maintained its action to keep Altman out, but the question is whether or not there will still be a company left when everything falls into place. If all 700-plus employees who have signed on to the letter say that they’re going to leave and join Altman and Brockman at Microsoft now, then did firing Altman really make any difference? The whole company would be disintegrated, and OpenAI employees are ultimately going to continue commercializing, just as a branch of Microsoft.

But if, for some reason, a significant number of employees stays at OpenAI, and the company continues to move forward, then that would suggest a different model emerging. The board would have successfully taken action on its nonprofit-driven mission and very dramatically turned the company in a different direction, not on the basis of shareholders or profit optimization.

It’s too early to tell, and it really is up to the employees themselves.

Charlie: I can’t stop thinking that, if OpenAI was founded in opposition to the way that traditional tech companies were trying to develop and commercialize AI, and it was a sanctuary for those who wanted to build this technology safely, then the principled decision by the board to fire Altman, and the chain of events it has set in motion, may drive a bunch of their talent—certainly their CEO and president—into the arms of one of the largest tech companies in the world.

Karen: Ultimately, both the techno-optimists and the other faction have the same endgame: They’re both trying to control the technology. One is using morality as a cover for that, and the other one is using capitalism as its banner. But both are saying This is for the good of humanity, and they’re using that as their enabling mantra for a seizure of power and control.

Charlie: This is a very small group of people with a lot of power. This is fundamentally a power struggle.

Related:

Inside the chaos at OpenAI The sudden fall of Sam Altman

Today’s News

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal from the former police officer Derek Chauvin for his conviction in the murder of George Floyd. Javier Milei, a hard-right libertarian who has drawn comparisons to Donald Trump, will be Argentina’s next president. President Joe Biden stated that he believes a deal to release some of the hostages Hamas is holding in Gaza is close at hand.

Evening Read

Alex Webb / Magnum

How the Hillbillies Remade America

By Max Fraser

On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia. The teachers, police officials, social workers, hiring-department personnel, and others who gathered that day in April had simply run out of ideas about what to do about them.

“Education does not have importance to these people as it does to us,” observed one schoolteacher. “They work for a day or two, and then you see them no more,” grumbled an employer.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Christopher Nolan on the promise and peril of technology The Confederate general whom all the other Confederates hated

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Jupiterimages / Getty.

Read. Justin Torres’s Blackouts, this year’s winner of the National Book Award for Fiction, is a complex story about recovering the history of erased and ignored gay lives.

Watch. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (in theaters now) reveals how The Hunger Games always understood the power of entertainment.

Play our daily crossword.

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.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer and the author of our Up for Debate newsletter.

Conor is dreaming about a Golden Girls reboot starring the Friends cast, reflecting on a poignant but hilarious one-man show from America’s “Roastmaster General,” and wasting time by playing chess on his phone.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The unexpected power of second-chance romance Sphere and loathing in Las Vegas A must-see comedy about miserable people looking for love

The Culture Survey: Conor Friedersdorf

An actor I would watch in anything: Once upon a time, I would have answered Paul Newman. I’ve long since seen everything he ever made. Then, after watching Deadwood, I thought that I’d watch Timothy Olyphant in anything––so I started watching his portrayal of Raylan Givens, on Justified. But after watching Walton Goggins portray Boyd Crowder on that same show, my new answer is that I’d watch Walton Goggins in anything. [Related: Justified: a neglected rebel amid television’s golden age]

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: It’s premonitions of as-yet-undeclared projects that excite me––a feature-length Paul Walker return in a hypothetical Fast 13 or 14 that advancing AI makes almost inevitable; the Golden Girls reboot with Monica, Phoebe, and Rachel in retirement.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: Although wildly different in so many ways, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the Paul Newman and Robert Redford classic, and The Great Beauty, directed by Paolo Sorrentino, both probe, with a keen sense of humor and strikingly gorgeous cinematography, the question of how we ought to live.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: On Beauty, by Zadie Smith, who excels at writing novels as much as she does writing essays, and the unimaginably ambitious From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun.

Authors I will read anything by: Raymond Chandler and Caitlin Flanagan.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: “These Arms of Mine,” by Otis Redding, and “Good Vibrations,” by the Beach Boys.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: Although renowned for his Hollywood scores, Randy Newman is highly underrated as a solo artist. [Related: Why Randy Newman is America’s foremost musical satirist]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: The historian and curator Richard Rabinowitz once walked me through his “Slavery in New York” exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, and it really stuck with me.

A piece of visual art that I cherish: My late grandfather, a carpenter by trade, designed and built his own house in the late 1960s, then began producing oil paintings until all of the empty wall space was filled––at which time he stopped painting!

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill holds up. [Related: The complicated female genius of Lauryn Hill]

Something I recently revisited: Bygone Norm Macdonald appearances on TV and radio.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: “New York After Paris,” from the October 1906 issue.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: The chess.com app.

An online creator that I’m a fan of: Andrew Schulz and all of the other talented comedians who made it by becoming undeniable among their fans rather than by getting an early nod from industry gatekeepers.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Dug Days, recommended for audiences of all ages.

The last debate I had about culture: I was contending that Dom in the Fast & Furious franchise would have been a Modelo drinker rather than a Corona drinker. [Related: Fast & Furious and pretty stale]

A good recommendation I recently received: The 2008 drama The Baader Meinhof Complex, and a short film, Pony, directed by Candice Carella about a rock star babysitting his niece, played by Miko Nakano, who steals the show.

The last thing that made me cry: If getting teary-eyed counts, then the last time was at the Village Underground, in New York City, watching America’s “Roastmaster General,” Jeff Ross, recount the history of his family in Take a Banana for the Ride. The poignant details were all the more impressive in the context of a one-man show that had me laughing as hard and often as in any stand-up set.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: The Huell Howser episode that features the avocado-eating dog always gets me.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Axe Handles,” by Gary Snyder. “‘When making an axe handle / the pattern is not far off.’”

The Week Ahead

Longstreet, a biography by Elizabeth Varon, tells the story of the Confederate general whom all of the other Confederates hated (on sale Tuesday). Dream Scenario stars Nicolas Cage as a family man who achieves stardom after he begins appearing in strangers’ dreams (expanded theater release Wednesday). The fifth season of Fargo, by the director Noah Hawley, returns (premieres Tuesday on FX).

Essay

Harry Gruyaert / Magnum

The Plight of the Eldest Daughter

By Sarah Sloat

Being an eldest daughter means frequently feeling like you’re not doing enough, like you’re struggling to maintain a veneer of control, like the entire household relies on your diligence.

At least, that’s what a contingent of oldest sisters has been saying online. Across social-media platforms, they’ve described the stress of feeling accountable for their family’s happiness, the pressure to succeed, and the impression that they aren’t being cared for in the way they care for others. Some are still teens; others have grown up and left home but still feel over-involved and overextended. As one viral tweet put it, “are u happy or are u the oldest sibling and also a girl”? People have even coined a term for this: “eldest-daughter syndrome.”

Read the full article.

More in Culture

What the Hunger Games movies always understood How the Negro spiritual changed American popular music—and America itself The director tackling the dark side of Millennial desire What the gig economy does to a human A redacted past slowly emerges. When Milton Friedman ran the show The Confederate general whom all the other Confederates hated Why is America afraid of Black history? How Reconstruction created American public education That joke isn’t funny anymore. A play by Anna Deavere Smith: This Ghost of Slavery Viewfinder: Freedmen’s Town Poem: “Sitcom”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Elon Musk’s disturbing “truth” How John F. Kennedy fell for the Lost Cause Why so many accidental pregnancies happen in your 40s

Photo Album

Farmers work at a tea plantation on a hill in Hefeng County, China. (VCG / Getty)

A pogo-stick-record attempt in Pennsylvania, lenticular clouds above Corsica, a heat wave in Brazil, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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.

Much of America’s politics has descended into ignorant, juvenile stunts that distract us from the existential danger facing democracy. Citizens must take up the burden of being the adults in the room.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The U.S. government UFO cover-up is real—but it’s not what you think. A must-see comedy about miserable people looking for love Not a world war but a world at war

Don’t Argue With Uncle Ned

One of the more rewarding parts of a newsletter like The Daily is that it allows writers to have an ongoing conversation with readers, and to return to themes and discussions over time. This is also a nice way of saying that now and then, I’m going to pull up something I wrote a while ago, because I think people near to keep hearing it. (As I said yesterday when examining the word fascist, I am something of a pedant, and the professor in me is always still lurking around here.)

So before we break for the weekend and start preparing for our Thanksgiving celebrations, I want to revisit an argument I made nearly two years ago—something I think might help make the holiday a bit less stressful around the dinner table. It is a simple recommendation, but one that will be hard for many of us to follow: In a time of clownish, adolescent, and highly dangerous politics, those of us defending American democracy must be the adults in the room. We must be measured, determined, and even a bit stoic.

Let us recall what prodemocracy citizens are up against. Donald Trump and many of his supporters in Republican politics are, in effect, a reality show, an ongoing comedy-drama full of Main Characters and plot twists and silly caricatures of heels and heroes.

Think of Kari Lake, with her soft-focus, super-earnest TV presence. Watch Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin hitch up his pants and offer to duke it out with a Teamster, in a dopey scene that Hollywood would have left on the cutting-room floor. Tune in to Newsmax and chuckle as Representative Tim Burchett complains that Representative Kevin McCarthy gave him an elbow in the kidneys. Smirk along with the anchors as they suggest that Representative Nancy Mace, if McCarthy funds her challengers, might reveal some dirt—wink wink, nudge nudge—on the former speaker.

Trump himself is a man both menacing and ludicrous, one of the most improbable figures ever to be at the center of a cult of personality. His whining, his weird mannerisms, his obsession with personal cosmetics—all make him an easy target for jokes and nicknames.

But none of this should drag us into acting like children ourselves. Trump and his supporters might be inane in many ways, but they are deadly serious about their intentions to take power and destroy democracy. Their cavorting and capering is part of who they are, but it is also bait, a temptation to distraction and an invitation to sink to their level.

As I wrote in 2021:

It’s time to ditch all the coy, immature, and too-precious language … No more GQP, no more Qevin McCarthy, no more Rethuglicans and Repuglicans. No more Drumpf. No more Orange Menace. And no more of The Former Guy, which I know is popular among even many of my friends and colleagues in the media.

In the ensuing years, I’ve suggested often on social media that people also forgo calling the current Florida governor “DeSatan,” “DeathSantis,” and other grade-school epithets. I get it: It’s fun and sometimes funny. But as I warned, it also signals a needless lack of seriousness about the threat to democracy:

When we use silly and childish expressions, we communicate to others that we are silly and childish, while encouraging ourselves to trivialize important matters …

Juvenile nicknames too easily blur the distinction between prodemocracy voters and the people they’re trying to defeat. If you’ve ever had to endure friends or family who parrot Fox-popular terms like Demonrats and Killary and other such nonsense, think for a moment how they instantly communicated to you that you never had to take them seriously again.

Now ask yourself if you want to be viewed the same way.

This advice does not mean being quiet or avoiding conflict or engaging in false compromise for the sake of peace during dinner. Rather, it is advice to be steadfast and calm. When Uncle Ned (he regularly appears in my hypothetical family dinners) goes on about Obummer or the Biden Crime Family, nothing is gained by railing back about Cheeto Jesus or Mango Mussolini. Such language just convinces others that your arguments are no less childish than theirs.

Instead, be direct and uncompromising: “You’re wrong. I think you know that you’re wrong, and I think, in your heart, you know you’re making a terrible mistake.” That’s the best you can do in a family setting. Among friends, the approach might be different: “You know that these conspiracy theories are not true. And Donald Trump is a fascist. You’re not. But that’s what you’re supporting.”

Whether to continue that friendship probably depends on what happens next. Unlike some of my gentler friends and colleagues, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with ending friendships over deep political divides, but as much as possible, be kind, be patient, be polite—but be unyielding in what you know is right.

When I was in high school, I read Meditations, by the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. I’ve read it many times since, in the hope that I will fully grasp all of it before I depart the planet. But I’ve kept a few quotes nearby for years, including his admonition that other people, even if they are “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly,” are no different from any of us and, like you and me, possess “a share of the divine.”

He also warned us, however, not to become like those who might hate us: “Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.”

This is tough advice, and I fail at it regularly. But the key is that you can’t change other people; you can control only what you do, and what you do will influence other people more than silly nicknames, mug-shaming, and gossiping. Saving democracy sometimes requires flags and marches and dramatic gestures. For most of us, however, democracy is preserved one day, and one conversation, at a time.

Related:

Fight like adults. Trump crosses a crucial line.

Today’s News

United Nations deliveries of food and supplies to Gaza ceased because of a communications blackout due to Israel’s refusal to allow fuel into the region. The House Ethics chairman filed a resolution to expel Representative George Santos from Congress. The Department of Education is investigating alleged incidents of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia at several K–12 schools and institutions of higher education.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: What foreign-policy matters are most important to you, and why? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matt Williams

The Men Who Started the War

By Drew Gilpin Faust

Harpers Ferry seemed almost a part of the neighborhood when I was growing up. Granted, it was across the state line, in West Virginia, and slightly more than a half-hour drive away from our Virginia farm. But it took us almost that long to get to the nearest supermarket. And I felt connected by more than roads. The placid, slow-moving Shenandoah River, which flowed past our bottom pasture, becomes raging white water by the time it joins the Potomac River at Harpers Ferry, 35 miles downstream.

Nature itself seems to have designed Harpers Ferry to be a violent place. Cliffs border the confluence of the two rivers, and the raw power generated by their angry convergence made the site ideal for the national armory established there around 1800. It manufactured some 600,000 firearms before Union troops burned it down in 1861 to keep it out of Confederate hands. Five battles took place at Harpers Ferry, and the town changed hands 12 times.

But none of this is what Harpers Ferry is primarily remembered for.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What the Hunger Games movies always understood Hospitals have gotten too nice. A redacted past slowly emerges.

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Hickey for The Atlantic

Read. In her debut novel, Wrong Way, Joanne McNeil explores what the gig economy does to a human.

Watch. Saltburn, a new country-house thriller from the director Emerald Fennell, tackles the dark side of Millennial desire (in theaters now).

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I’ve been writing about heavy stuff all week, so I think it’s time for a recommendation for something more entertaining. All of this talk about fascism reminded me of a movie that I really enjoyed and forgot to rave about when I saw it: Jojo Rabbit, a 2019 film directed by Taika Waititi, about a lonely young boy living with his mother in World War II Nazi Germany.

Adolf Hitler—played by Waititi, a New Zealander of Maori and Jewish descent—is his imaginary friend. And it gets weirder from there.

The movie veers from hilarious to painful to deeply touching. Waititi’s Hitler is both silly and terrifying. (You can see why this movie occurred to me today.) It’s not for everyone; many critics liked it—and it won Waititi an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay—but some really hated it for what they saw as a trivialization of Nazism. I think that’s a charge that misses the point of the movie, but it’s definitely a strange picture. And I won’t spoil the surprise, but if you make it to the end, you’ll find one of the best uses of music in a movie I’ve ever seen.

— 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.