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.

Explore all of our newsletters.

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

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.

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 former president, after years of espousing authoritarian beliefs, has fully embraced the language of fascism. But Americans—even those who have supported him—can still refuse to follow him deeper into darkness.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Elon Musk’s disturbing ‘truth’ The non-end of George Santos Why you maybe shouldn’t write a memoir

The Decisive Outrage

Readers of the Daily know that I am something of a stubborn pedant about words and their meanings. When I was a college professor teaching political science and international relations, I tried to make my students think very hard about using words such as war and terrorism, which we often apply for their emotional impact without much thought—the “war” on poverty, the “war” on drugs, and, in a perfecta after 9/11, the “war on terrorism.”

And so, I dug in my heels when Donald Trump’s critics described him and his followers as fascists. Authoritarians? Yes, some. Illiberal? Definitely. But fascism, a term coined by Benito Mussolini and now commonly used to describe Italy, Germany, and other nations in the 1930s, has a distinct meaning, and denotes a form of government that is beyond undemocratic.

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

I argued that for most of Trump’s time as a public figure, he was not a fascist but rather a wannabe caudillo, the kind of Latin American strongman who cared little about what people believed so long as they feared him and left him in power. When he would make forays into the public square, his politics were insubstantial and mostly focused on exploiting reflexive resentment and racism, such as when he called for the death penalty for the Black youths wrongly accused in the infamous Central Park–jogger case. But Trump in those days was never able to square his desperate wish to be accepted in Manhattan society with his need to play the role of an outer-borough tough guy. He was an obnoxious and racist gadfly, perhaps, but he was still a long way from fascism.

As a candidate and as president, he had little in the way of a political program for the GOP beyond his exhausting narcissism. He had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats. Even now, his rants contain little political substance; when he veers off into actual issues, such as abortion and taxes, he does not seem to understand or care about them very much, and he will turn on a dime when he thinks it is to his advantage.

Trump had long wanted to be somebody in politics, but he is also rather indolent—again, not a characteristic of previous fascists—and he did not necessarily want to be saddled with any actual responsibilities. According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)

After Trump was elected, I still warned against the indiscriminate use of fascism, because I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”

The events of the past month, and especially Trump’s Veterans Day speech, confirm to me that the moment has arrived.

For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric. Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” His address in Claremont, New Hampshire, on Saturday was the usual hot mess of random thoughts, but near the end, it took a more sinister turn. (It’s almost impossible to follow, but you can try to read the full text here.) In one passage in particular, Trump melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism:

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

As the New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat later pointed out to The Washington Post, Trump is populating this list of imaginary villains (which she sees as a form of projection) in order “to set himself up as the deliverer of freedom. Mussolini promised freedom to his people too and then declared dictatorship.”

Add the language in these speeches to all of the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office—establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging government institutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.

Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words. Trump seized on this strategic error by his opponents and used it as a kind of political cover. Over the years, he has become more extreme and more dangerous, and now he waves away any additional criticisms as indistinguishable from the over-the-top objections he faced when he entered politics, in 2015.

Today, the mistake of early overreaction and the subsequent complacency it engendered has aided Trump in his efforts to subvert American democracy. His presence in our public life has become normalized, and he continues to be treated as just another major-party candidate by a hesitant media, an inattentive public, and terrified GOP officials. This is the path to disaster: The original fascists and other right-wing dictators of Europe succeeded by allying with scared elites in the face of public disorder and then, once they had seized the levers of government, driving those elites from power (and in many cases from existence on this planet).

It is possible, I suppose, that Trump really has little idea of what he’s saying. (We’re under threat from “communists” and “Marxists” and “fascists?” Uh, okay.) But he has reportedly expressed admiration of Hitler (and envy of Hitler’s grip on the Nazi military), so when the Republican front-runner uses terms like vermin and expressions like poisoning the blood of our country, we are not required to spend a lot of time generously parsing what he may have meant.

More to the point, the people around Trump certainly know what he’s saying. Indeed, Trump’s limited vocabulary might not have allowed him to cough up a word like vermin. We do not know if it was in his prepared text, but when asked to clarify Trump’s remarks, his campaign spokesman, Steven Cheung, told The Washington Post that “those who try to make that ridiculous assertion are clearly snowflakes grasping for anything because they are suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

What?

Cheung later clarified his clarification: He meant to say their “sad, miserable existence" instead of their “entire existence,” as if that was somehow better. If that’s not a fascist faux pas, nothing is.

But here I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word. But although he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda. Some are unaware; others are in denial. And many of those voters are receptive to his message only because they have been bludgeoned by right-wing propaganda into irrationality and panic. Even many officials in the current GOP, that supine and useless husk of an institution, do not share Trump’s ambitions.

I have long argued for confronting Trump’s voters with his offenses against our government and our Constitution. The contest between an aspiring fascist and a coalition of prodemocracy forces is even clearer now. But deploy the word fascist with care; many of our fellow Americans, despite their morally abysmal choice to support Trump, are not fascists.

As for Trump, he has abandoned any democratic pretenses, and lost any benefit of the doubt about who and what he is.

Related:

Fear of fascism Donald Trump, the most unmanly president

Today’s News

Representative George Santos will not seek reelection in 2024 after the House Ethics Committee found “substantial evidence” that he “violated federal criminal laws.” Last night, the Senate passed a stopgap bill to avert a government shutdown and fund federal agencies into the new year. A new CNN poll shows that Nikki Haley has moved into second place, behind Donald Trump, among likely voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Don’t be fooled by the AI apocalypse, Matteo Wong argues. Here’s a guide to understanding which fears are real and which aren’t. Time-Travel Thursdays: The Atlantic’s archives chronicle nearly two centuries of change in America, Adrienne LaFrance writes. Our newest newsletter takes you on a journey through them. Work in Progress: The future of obesity drugs just got way more real, Yasmin Tayag writes. Wegovy is about to go mainstream.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Why the most hated man in Israel might stay in power The nameless children of Gaza Don’t expect U.S.-China relations to get better. The unexpected poignancy of second-chance romance

Culture Break

Listen. Streaming is about to change. Hanna Rosin discusses the poststrike future of Hollywood with staff writers David Sims and Shirley Li in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

Watch. Hulu’s Black Cake explores how marriage, migration, and motherhood can shift one’s sense of self.

Play our daily crossword.

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.

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 Elizabeth Bruenig, a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers politics, culture, and religion.

Liz rewatches Manchester by the Sea when she needs a good cry, checks Instagram for baking recipes, and can no longer stomach the aughts-era emo songs she loved as an eyeliner-wearing teen.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy. Eight books that explain how the world works A show about the secrets parents keep from their children

The Culture Survey: Elizabeth Bruenig

An actor I would watch in anything: Anya Taylor-Joy. I love her choice of projects, and I could look at her mesmerizing face for hours.

My favorite blockbuster and favorite art movie: My favorite blockbuster: Casino Royale. Has anyone ever looked as elegant as Eva Green does in that movie? She brings such charisma and old-Hollywood glamor to her role. I’m not really sure if The Silence of the Lambs was a blockbuster (a cursory investigation reveals that it did quite well at the box office), but it’s certainly up there among my very favorite mainstream movies. Jodie Foster is completely hypnotic as a lead.

My favorite art film: The Believer, starring Ryan Gosling. It’s a wild ride, but I think Gosling’s performance is incredible. He makes the mixed-up emotions and competing impulses of a self-hating Jewish skinhead compelling and believable. I’m not sure everything in this movie totally works, but as an almost-solo performance by Gosling, it’s very moving.

The last thing that made me cry: Manchester by the Sea. I don’t think you need to have kids in order to be thoroughly moved by this film, but if you do have kids, I think it hits especially hard. It’s such a raw portrait of grief and brokenness that it’s hard for me to rewatch often, but I do it now and again when I’m looking for the catharsis of a good cry. [Related: Manchester by the Sea is a stunning meditation on grief.]

A quiet song I love and a loud song I love: I love “Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping,” by Grouper—I can easily listen to it on loop for an hour or more without getting bored of it. It succeeds at sounding like dreaming feels. I’d say my favorite loud song is “Heart-Shaped Box,” by Nirvana, and that’s about as loud as my tastes run.

A cultural product I loved as a teenager and still love, and something I loved but now dislike: I’ve been a big Slowdive fan for as long as I can remember. It still holds up! But I also had a mixtape (okay: a mix CD) of typical aughts-era emo songs when I was a teenager that I thought were awesome at the time and find totally unlistenable today. I guess some music only makes sense when you’re really focused on heavy eyeliner and studded belts.

Something I recently revisited: Louise Glück’s Averno. I was introduced to her work in college, and I quickly consumed several books of her poetry. Averno, a meditation on the myth of Persephone and Hades, remains my favorite. Glück’s voice is cold and distant at times, which makes the whole collection feel like a dispatch from another world.

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: I’m late to the party on this, but I just read this New Yorker piece on the Dyatlov Pass incident and am now thoroughly persuaded by it. I guess I had always hoped that there was some kind of exotic explanation for it, and I won’t spoil for you what really appears to have happened, but it’s much more mundane than the majority of theories out there. Alas!

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Instagram. I have a backlog of 50 or 60 baking projects I discovered on there that I may or may not ever get around to. But it’s amazing for inspiration.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Bluey! A lot of children’s shows have subtle jokes built in for adult audiences (who tend to be conscripted into viewing), but Bluey has something even more special: theme episodes apparently engineered to make grown-ups cry. I mean this in the best possible way. [Related: In praise of Bluey, the most grown-up television show for children]

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: The Adam Friedland Show. It developed a little bit of a wild reputation during the Taylor Swift/Matty Healy drama, but Friedland invites genuinely interesting guests on and presses them on subjects they perhaps wouldn’t address in another context. I guess I had lost confidence in comedians as good interviewers—for a while now, nothing on late night has really inspired me—but Friedland is (among other things) a talented interlocutor. I think he’s also capable of eliciting comedy out of some pretty straitlaced figures, which is always entertaining.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” by Rainer Maria Rilke, is a major touchstone for me:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power.

The Week Ahead

In the novel The New Naturals, a young Black couple turns a hill in Western Massachusetts into a utopian commune (on sale Tuesday). A Murder at the End of the World stars Emma Corrin as an amateur sleuth trying to solve a murder at a tech billionaire’s retreat (premieres Tuesday on Hulu). The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, a prequel that tells the origin of the president of Panem, Coriolanus Snow (in theaters Friday)

Essay

Video by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Universal Pictures; Warner Bros. Classics; The Internet Archive.

The Baffling Cruelty of Alfred Hitchcock

By Matthew Specktor

Anyone who’s ever watched an Alfred Hitchcock film—seen Tippi Hedren clawed to pieces by dozens of gulls and ravens or Janet Leigh repeatedly stabbed in the shower—would have to wonder about the director’s attitude toward women. When it came to his leading actresses, he was known to have walked a line between stringent and outright sadistic. And yet the particular nature of Hitchcock’s collaborations with these women continues to serve as fodder for study and debate, despite the fact that the details of these relationships are more or less undisputed: With Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak, and Leigh, the director would veer between the courtly and the coarse, at one moment inviting them to dine with his wife at his house in Bel Air, the next peppering them with filthy jokes in his trailer. And at least one allegation indicates that his behavior may have moved from the volatility long associated with Hollywood directors into something we today would call abuse. In a 2016 memoir, Hedren says that Hitchcock sexually assaulted her twice, while working on The Birds and Marnie, and that she experienced retaliation from him on set after she rebuffed him.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The lightest, fizziest Marvel movie in years The musicians who sound like machines Dream Scenario doesn’t transcend a great premise. It’s a miracle anyone stays in love. Hollywood’s dual strike is over, and the studios lost. The unabashed Jewishness of Barbra Streisand Poem: “Younger Than War”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

“Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump.” What if psychedelics’ hallucinations are just a side effect? The West must defeat Russia, Anne Applebaum writes.

Photo Album

People walk across the Bow Bridge at sunrise in Central Park (Gary Hershorn / Getty).

Figure skating in France, a proposal at the New York City Marathon, flooding in Somalia, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

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.

In an unserious Republican primary race, low blows have been flying—including about candidates’ footwear. The insults are petty, but they help reveal what’s become of national politics in 2023.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The day after Netanyahu The West must defeat Russia. Most Americans are better off.

Cowbot Boots and a Suit

Republican primary candidates are avoiding the elephant in the room. None of the candidates at this past Wednesday’s debate have a good shot at beating Donald Trump, and instead of taking him on, some have stooped to petty jabs and personal attacks. As my colleague Tom Nichols wrote in this newsletter yesterday, the debate was an unserious spectacle. One particularly unserious topic of conversation? Footwear.

At the debate on Wednesday, Vivek Ramaswamy used the phrase “Dick Cheney in three-inch heels” to describe Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, to which Haley retorted that she was actually wearing five-inch heels. The exchange was somewhat eye-roll-inducing, but it’s also a telling sign of how national politics has devolved. Politicians have always been subjects of public consumption. But Trump, a literal reality-television star, brought political figures further into the territory of entertainment and celebrity, with the surface-level fascinations that are characteristic of those realms. Trolling has become a dominant form of political campaigning, especially on the right, and we saw plenty of that onstage this week, especially from Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy’s jabs were undeniably petty, but politicians are public figures aiming to amass tremendous power, and their choices—including sartorial ones—are fair game for public scrutiny. How politicians present themselves says a lot about how they want to be perceived among voters. Their shoes in particular can either disappear into the background or make a strong statement. My colleague Amanda Mull, who covers consumer culture for The Atlantic, told me that, especially in conservative circles with relatively circumscribed dress norms, accessories are a place where taste and personality can shine through. “Shoes are a particularly powerful accessory,” she told me, “because not only do they hold the power to convey personality, but they also undergird the entire structure of your body. Shoes can change your height, your posture, and how you move through space, which are all things that engender social responses from the people around you.”

Shoes like stilettos can project a mastery of the feminine, and wearing cowboy boots under a suit, as DeSantis does, conveys a desire to send the message that you’re “not really some kind of desk-job dweeb, but a man’s man who chafes under urban coastal formality,” Amanda said. (Ramaswamy’s taunt at Wednesday’s debate alluded to allegations that DeSantis wears hidden lifts in those cowboy boots, which DeSantis strenuously denies.)

Haley’s embrace of her own heels is part of a long history of foregrounding her feminine footwear. As Vanessa Friedman noted in The New York Times, “Ms. Haley has pre-emptively weaponized her wardrobe for herself. She owns the heels in this race, just as she owns the skirt.” Friedman noted that Haley frequently references kicking rivals with high heels. When she was South Carolina governor in 2012, she said, “I wear high heels, and it’s not a fashion statement—it’s for ammunition … I’ve got a completely male senate. Do I want to use these for kicking? Sometimes, I do.” She’s returned to versions of that line several times since. So the DeSantis cowboy-boot allegations—surfaced in Politico by Derek Guy, the so-called “menswear guy”—landed nicely in her thematic wheelhouse. Sure enough, Haley gleefully teased DeSantis about it on The Daily Show last week: “We’ll see if he can run in them,” Haley told Charlamagne tha God, the show’s guest host.

Haley is savvy to try to get ahead of the scrutiny about her clothes and style choices that female politicians are often dogged by. Such criticism can follow a politician throughout her political life: Theresa May wore a pair of loud leopard-print pumps early in her career, and the story trailed her for years; British tabloids have obsessively cataloged her shoe choices ever since. When she became prime minister in 2016, she reportedly wore another pair of leopard-print pumps.

For male politicians, shoes can be a symbol of belonging, of joining a fraternity of power. The so-far-all-male line of American presidents has enjoyed bespoke shoes from the same cobbler since 1850: A company called Johnston & Murphy makes custom shoes for each commander in chief. Woodrow Wilson, a natty dresser, apparently broke with the trend of muted dark dress shoes and received white buckskin shoes. In 2015, the company’s CEO told CNN that it was prepared to make shoes for a female president, though so far the opportunity has not arisen.

Public figures’ shoes can also signal interests and priorities at different stages of a career: After leaving office, Barack Obama began appearing in public wearing Allbirds, wool sneakers favored by the tech industry, signaling his entry into a postpresidential tech-bro-chic life as a podcaster and a media mogul. As GQ noted in 2020, the shoes align with Obama’s identity—and help set him apart from his peers: “The outfit was nearly a decade behind the rest of the menswear world—but, grading on a presidential curve, Obama may as well have been Russell Westbrook in the pregame tunnel.” (The presidential cobbler does great work, but presidents are not known for their stylish footwear choices.)

Politicians can use footwear to put out whatever messages they want. But how we interpret them is a different matter. As Amanda noted, sometimes projections of cultural affinity through dress fall flat. “Simply invoking this kind of signal doesn’t guarantee it will be convincing. Cowboy boots with a suit are a little tricky to pull off,” she said, when everyone knows that you’re from the Tampa Bay area and went to Harvard.

Related:

The secret presidential-campaign dress code Why the pantsuit?

Today’s News

Senator Joe Manchin announced yesterday that he will not run for reelection in West Virginia, putting Democrats’ Senate majority at risk. The White House announced that President Joe Biden will meet with President Xi Jinping next Wednesday in an attempt to smooth over relations. House Republicans continue to disagree over spending but are expected to propose a stopgap spending measure tomorrow to prevent a partial government shutdown.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: A nonfiction writer’s biggest challenge is to break down how the world works without being boring, Emma Sarappo writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family

My Family’s Slave

By Alex Tizon (From 2017)

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

One huge contradiction is undoing our best climate efforts. “If we go on living like this, Israel is not going to find peace.” Harsh anti-abortion laws are not empty threats.

Culture Break

Aidan Zamiri

Listen. PinkPantheress, one of Gen Z’s most exciting new stars, harnesses the sound of intelligent artificiality on her new album.

Watch. The Marvels (in theaters now) is a reminder of what Marvel needs.

Play our daily crossword.

In an eight-week newsletter series, The Atlantic’s top thinkers on AI will help you wrap your mind around a new machine age. Sign up here.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

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.

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 GOP debates have turned into performance art. They demean our electoral process, but many in the national media are backing away from facts and probity and enabling the worst candidates in their effort to corner the attention market.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy. The baffling cruelty of Alfred Hitchcock Sleep more and be happier.

Working the Refs

I watched the Republican primary debate last night, and at first, I had no real intention of writing again about a process that is now a national embarrassment. But when it was over, I couldn’t shake the thought of how far America has come over the past few decades—and how far down our politics have fallen.

I will not criticize Nikki Haley for calling Vivek Ramaswamy “scum” last night. Ramaswamy tried to pull Haley’s daughter into the debate, and I applaud her for speaking up with such clarity. I’ve sat here many times trying to describe Ramaswamy while poring over my inventory of multisyllabic words—obnoxious, execrable, insufferable—and the former UN ambassador beat me to it with a legitimate punch that clearly came out of justified disgust.

But after Haley dispensed with Ramaswamy, my mind wandered back to an earlier era, and to other debates. I had a sudden sense of the swift passage of time, the disorienting recognition of how much has changed over the years.

I was thinking, in particular, of 1988.

In 1988, I was 27, and keenly interested in politics after working in Washington, D.C., and spending two years for the Massachusetts House of Representatives in Boston as a legislative assistant. (Eventually, I would go on to do a year in the U.S. Senate.) That fall, I was back in New England to do some research for my doctoral dissertation, but I was closely following the national presidential election between George H. W. Bush and Mike Dukakis, and I wasn’t going to miss the vice-presidential debate between Republican Dan Quayle and Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.

I raise this bit of nostalgia to remind all of us of Bentsen’s immortal zinger against Quayle during that debate, how nasty it seemed at the time, and how quaint it all seems now.

Quayle was 41, and had served in Congress for nearly 12 years. Today—compared with presidential hopefuls such as Democrat Dean Phillips or Republican Tim Scott, or even compared with Barack Obama in 2008—Quayle might seem qualified to run for a national spot. But in those days, Quayle’s youth, boyish looks, and inept off-the-cuff moments all opened the door for questions about his qualifications.

Quayle was asked what he would do if he had to assume the presidency. He flailed around, stammering about prayers and Cabinet meetings and his time in Congress. When the moderator, Tom Brokaw, came back to the question, Quayle apparently felt he was being slammed for inexperience, and so he compared himself to John F. Kennedy: “I have as much experience in the Congress as Jack Kennedy did when he sought the presidency.”

And that’s when Bentsen turned the key on his nuclear response:

Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.

Quayle, with a look both of hurt and anger, turned to Bentsen and said: “That was really uncalled for, senator.”

Watching in real time, I felt embarrassed for Quayle and mad at Bentsen. It was stupid of Quayle to invoke Kennedy, not least because he should have known that any mention of JFK would set up Bentsen’s cheap ambush (one, it turns out, Bentsen had prepared in advance). But to the credit of both men, this throat-punch was only one moment in what was otherwise a real debate between serious politicians.

Fast-forward to 2023. The front-runner for the nomination, Donald Trump, hasn’t bothered to show up for any of the debates so far. The GOP primary stage—showcasing competitors not for the No. 2 spot but for the job of commander in chief—was populated by a senator whose insubstantial campaign has failed to gain traction but who finally made news last night by appearing in public with a girlfriend; a governor whose unsteady campaign has been weighed down by culture warring, aloofness, and his inability to seem comfortable in his own skin; two other former governors who earlier bent their knees to Trump; and Vivek Ramaswamy, who unfortunately is still Vivek Ramaswamy. It was an utterly unserious business.

Why is this happening? Part of the reason is the structural lock Trump now has on the nomination, which relieves the candidates of the burden of being taken too seriously. At this point, he could lose half his supporters and still win. But another reason is the way the media insists on treating this election as just another contest between normal politicians, a problem that was on full display last night in Miami.

In fairness to the NBC journalists Lester Holt and Kristen Welker, last night was a more orderly affair than the previous free-for-all. (Hugh Hewitt was also there. I’ll get to him.) But the questions were out of some pre-Trump-era playbook, old-school stuff about the economy and foreign policy—and nothing about the likely winner of the primary, his multiple criminal indictments, or his plans to undermine American democracy on his first day.

Instead, Haley and Chris Christie and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gamely went through their talking points. Scott, for his part, seemed to be running for the presidency of a Bible college. Ramaswamy, as usual, engaged in one inanity after another, both showcasing his ignorance of issues (the moderators let him get away with some flagrant errors, including one about Tuesday’s vote on abortion rights in Ohio) and reinforcing his commitment to gaining followers from fans of Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and Elon Musk.

Hewitt, a conservative talk-radio host and Trump enabler, tried to make the Republican Party seem like a normal political organization by asking wonky questions, including one about how many ships the U.S. Navy should have, as if this were one of the issues that created a 40-point gulf between Trump and the rest of the field.

Hewitt is a GOP partisan and he knew what he was doing, and too many in the national media are following the same path because they are in the grip of a normalcy bias, the conviction that things aren’t really that different than they were before and that they won’t change that dramatically in the future. As Margaret Sullivan wrote today in The Guardian, the media should be communicating the stakes of this election to the public. But alas.

Instead, journalists have emphasized Joe Biden’s age and Trump’s “freewheeling” style. They blame the public’s attitudes on “polarization”, as if they themselves have no role. And, of course, they make the election about the horse race—rather than what would happen a few lengths after the finish line.

This commitment to a false neutrality is why journalists have to nod politely while a Trump or a Ramaswamy (or, on the other side, a Marianne Williamson, who is running again) says incomprehensible things onstage. To call candidates to account for being ridiculous or offensive would lead to charges of bias and partisanship.

The media—like the Democrats, unfortunately—seem to have internalized right-wing criticisms about them. Last night showed yet again that the refs have been worked. And we might all pay the price next year.

Related:

“Nothing is going to stop Donald Trump” The Republican primary is slipping away.

Today’s News

Israel will begin daily four-hour pauses in areas of the northern Gaza Strip to allow Palestinian civilians to flee. President Joe Biden has also asked Israel for a pause of at least three days to facilitate negotiations for the release of some hostages. Suspicious mail was sent to election offices in at least five states this week; four letters have tested positive for fentanyl. The previous 12 months were likely Earth’s hottest in 125,000 years, according to a new analysis by scientists at Climate Central.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: Generative AI is confusing Google, Damon Beres writes. This technology won’t be contained. Up for Debate: Are humans better or worse off for having beer, wine, and spirits? Conor Fridersdorf asks readers for their thoughts.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Hollywood’s dual strike is over, and the studios lost. Why Israeli security-service agents wanted to talk with Charlottesville’s mayor An unusually tricky campus free-speech fight

Culture Break

Read. “Younger Than War,” a poem by Mosab Abu Toha reflecting on his childhood under Israeli military occupation.

“I was still 7 at the time. / I was decades younger than war, / a few years older than bombs.”

Listen. In The Atlantic’s newest podcast, How to Keep Time, co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost, an Atlantic contributing writer, examine our relationship with time and what we can do to reclaim it.

Play our daily crossword.

In an eight-week newsletter series, The Atlantic’s top thinkers on AI will help you wrap your mind around a new machine age. Sign up here.

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.

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 race for second place in the Republican primaries has gotten closer. Nikki Haley has been rising surprisingly quickly in the polls in recent months, becoming a top rival to Ron DeSantis; both are still trailing Donald Trump. I called my colleague Elaine Godfrey, who covers politics for The Atlantic and attended a campaign event for Haley in New Hampshire last week, to talk about what Haley offers that DeSantis does not, and what her surge tells us about voters’ hunger for normalcy.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“We do not want to deal with customers like you!” America’s most dangerous anti-Jewish propagandist Trump can’t hide his utter disdain for the rule of law.

New Scrutiny

Lora Kelley: Why has support for Haley been rising lately?

Elaine Godfrey: Her support has been ticking upward since August, when we had the first GOP debate. Supporters in New Hampshire told me that they saw her on the debate stage and really liked her. She has presented herself as an alternative to Trump, basically saying: If you don’t like Donald Trump, or if you did like Trump but now you’re over him, please vote for me.

A lot of voters who don’t want to support Trump don’t really want to support Ron DeSantis, because they see him as a mini Trump. Haley’s lane, and the kind of voter that she’s going for, is much clearer.

Lora: How big is the appetite among voters for someone who has more conventional political experience than, say, Trump?

Elaine: Last week, I was sitting in the room at Haley’s campaign event in New Hampshire, and the person who introduced her said something like “Aren’t we happy that we finally have a candidate who was once an accountant?” And the room just went wild. I remember laughing. Can you picture that happening at a Trump rally? It was a blast from the past of pre-Trump Republican politics—this person knows how to balance a budget.

There is such an appetite among a small set of Republican primary voters, but a pretty significant set of independent and moderate voters, for normalcy. These voters complain that Joe Biden is too old to be president, and that Trump is too unpredictable and crazy. They want to know: Why can’t we just have younger, more “normal” candidates? That being said, most Republican primary voters are still in the bag for Trump. They do not want an accountant. Haley’s more conventional political experience would probably play really well in a general election. But it doesn’t seem like a recipe for success in the primary.

Lora: Haley says that she’s personally pro-life but doesn’t judge people who are pro-choice. How will that go over with voters on both sides of the abortion issue?

Elaine: I don’t think that stance is actually very polarizing. Most Americans support abortion access of some kind, but they want a limit. They don’t want abortion to be legal in all circumstances, but they’re really turned off by the strict bans that some states have been passing.

Haley was initially sort of murky on her abortion position. Now when people talk to her about that, her answer is that she is unapologetically pro-life, but she understands why someone might be pro-choice. She often tells voters that a federal abortion law isn’t likely to pass, but can’t we come together to condemn late-term abortions? And can’t we all agree to support good-quality adoption?

A lot of voters like that and respond to that. Frankly, I’m surprised that more Republican candidates aren’t talking that way.

Lora: To what extent might Haley’s background in foreign policy (she was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for two years under Trump) be an asset to her?

Elaine: Voters I talked to last week—and, granted, this was at a Nikki Haley event—said: Things are so scary right now in the world. She makes me feel better. She knows what’s going on. She wants peace through strength. That is a real plus for her in this particular moment, with this Middle East conflict and the war between Russia and Ukraine. I don’t know if it’s an issue that pushes her over the top, but some voters definitely see her as an experienced adult in the room when it comes to war and foreign policy.

Lora: What could tomorrow’s debate—where Haley will face off against DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy—mean for her?

Elaine: More people are going to be watching her now and seeing how this momentum translates to tomorrow’s debate. She’s likely going to be thinking: What kind of moment could I create for myself? What sound bite will set me apart? Maybe she’ll pick another fight with Vivek Ramaswamy. Maybe she’ll go harder on Trump, which most of the candidates have been hesitant to do. Watch for others onstage to attack her, now that her star is rising. They might criticize her for flip-flopping on her support for Trump—or for being a foreign-policy hawk, which is something that sets her apart from DeSantis and others onstage.

She and DeSantis are probably going to go after each other; both will be trying to create viral moments. They are both aware that they’re vying for second place in this primary.

Related:

Nikki Haley offers an alternate reality. Nikki Haley is the new Ron DeSantis.

Today’s News

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a federal law that prevents people with domestic-violence restraining orders from possessing a firearm. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel plans to “have overall security responsibility” in Gaza for “an indefinite period” when the war ends. House Republicans met behind closed doors to debate the structure of a stopgap measure as the government’s next shutdown deadline, November 17, approaches.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers readers’ thoughts on how to talk about the Middle East during a polarizing conflict. Work in Progress: Maybe don’t drive into Manhattan, Annie Lowrey writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times / Getty

‘How Much Can This Child Take?’

By Franklin Foer

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, Hersh 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.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A knife fight in a phone booth It’s a miracle anyone stays in love. My north star for the future of AI

Culture Break

Jessica Sample / Gallery Stock

Read. Essential technologies such as jet engines and sewers are fundamental—and confusing. Here are eight books that explain how the world around us works.

Listen. Check out an audio collection of some of October’s most popular Atlantic articles, presented by Hark.

In an eight-week newsletter series, The Atlantic’s top thinkers on AI will help you wrap your mind around a new machine age. Sign up for Atlantic Intelligence to receive the first edition, starting this week.

Play our daily crossword.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

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.

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 Vann R. Newkirk II, a senior editor and the host of the podcasts Floodlines and Holy Week.

Vann is spending time with Sampha’s new album, about the starts and stops of healing; marveling at the storytelling in The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois; and sneaking off to build his son’s Legos while he’s asleep.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Do you have free will? Xochitl Gonzalez: “Me and my bosom” Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla unearths a delicate truth.

The Culture Survey: Vann R. Newkirk II

A musical artist who means a lot to me: I have to give a shout-out to Sampha, whose new album, Lahai, has been playing nonstop around here. I’m a major Sampha fan, and his previous album, Process, was a meditation on grief, prompted by his mother’s death. That album was important to me in processing my own mother’s death, in 2020. His new joint is about the starts and stops of healing after that kind of rupture, and is tethered to the experience of becoming a father. Towing around a 6-year-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, I find this album just as affecting and personal.

An actor I would watch in anything: If Brian Tyree Henry is in it, I’m there. Also, Jesse Plemons.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: It’s been two years since I first read Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois, and although I have piles and piles of unread books waiting for me, I decided to revisit the book this summer. I found it just as wonderful as the first time I read it. As a Black southerner myself, I don’t know if I’ve ever read a book that’s so true to my own family experiences and so full of intricately written characters. Jeffers’s depiction of the Black southern family experience would itself be worth the price of the book, but she also connects that story to the saga of Indigenous, Black, and white forebears and their own trials and dramas. I’ll probably reread the book again sometime soon.

On the nonfiction front, I just finished Chad L. Williams’s The Wounded World, which explores W. E. B. Du Bois’s ill-fated attempt to write a history of Black troops in World War I, and how that conflict radically changed him and his thinking. I enjoyed it purely on a prose level, but the meticulous historical work also helps the reader understand, through Du Bois, how the making of the modern world changed the global discourse around race and class in society. [Related: Writing in the ruins]

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: For a quiet song, I absolutely adore the version of “Stardust” on John Coltrane’s 1963 album of the same name. It’s a glass of cognac and fuzzy slippers. There’s texture in Coltrane’s sax. You just feel sophisticated listening to it.

The first song that comes to mind when I even think of “loud songs” is “Infinity Guitars,” by Sleigh Bells. Obviously, Sleigh Bells is a noise band, so this is kind of their thing, but “Infinity Guitars” is where it all comes together for me. The drums are infectious.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: The ongoing Afrofuturism exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in D.C., is amazing. It’s got such a wide lens on the makings of Afrofuturism, and it’s visually stunning.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: If you are reading this and somehow haven’t read my colleague Jenisha Watts’s “Jenisha From Kentucky,” our October cover story, please do that immediately. I was privileged to be able to talk with Jenisha often as she decided to start writing her own story, and that experience has been one of the great honors of my life. Jenisha is a marvel of a writer and an editor and a colleague, and she marshaled everything into a masterpiece that I think every single person should read.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Working.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: I should say “reintroduced” here, but my 6-year-old son, Benjamin, is really into Legos, and he’s helped me rekindle my love for them. There’s nothing better than settling in and working on a set with him—or sneaking off when he’s asleep to work on it myself.

The Week Ahead

The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez’s new novel, a zany lockdown tale about how the present affects the way we understand our past (on sale Tuesday) David Fincher’s The Killer, a darkly funny look at a cold-blooded murderer’s tedious daily routine (in theaters Friday) The fourth season of For All Mankind, which imagines an alternate history in which the space race never ended (premieres on Apple TV+ Friday)

Essay

Courtesy of BIGHIT MUSIC

Jungkook of BTS Is Chasing His Pop-Star Dream

By Lenika Cruz

When my video call with Jungkook begins, he has the look of someone roused too early from a good sleep. On camera, the youngest member of the South Korean pop group BTS is wearing a black zip-up, hood pulled over his head in a way that suggests he’d enjoy a nap—a little surprising, given his reputation among fans as an indefatigable “energizer bunny.” We’re less than two weeks away from the release of his first solo album, Golden, and his days are packed with dance practices, rehearsals, video shoots, interviews with overseas press. The exhausting demands of promotion aren’t new to him—he’s been with BTS for more than a decade, racking up best-selling albums, Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s, sold-out stadium concerts, and world records. But this is Jungkook’s first time releasing a full record on his own, and it happens to all be in English.

At first, Jungkook felt conflicted about this. “I was thinking, Is it okay for a Korean to not release Korean songs at all?” the 26-year-old singer told me through an interpreter, from his entertainment company’s office in Seoul. BTS achieved global popularity while making music almost entirely in their native language, with the exception of a few English-language hits such as “Dynamite” and “Butter.” At the same time, the whole point of his solo effort was to challenge himself—and exclusively singing in English seemed like one good way to do that.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

What Matthew Perry knew about comedy Taylor Swift’s Tinder masterpiece Dear Therapist: I cannot support my mother’s marriage. A movie about the singular intensity of endurance athletes The tech that’s radically reimagining the public sphere I didn’t know I could feel so tired. Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher really understands Poe. Six books that will scare you—and make you think Why AI doesn’t get slang Who made the Oxford English Dictionary? The simple truths of Nate Bargatze on SNL Poem: “The Heart”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

What the 2024 election is really about for Trump supporters New York is too expensive to even visit. Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling.

Photo Album

An aerial view of autumn leaves falling from trees that line a road near Frankfurt, Germany (Michael Probst / AP)

A Halloween parade in New York City, a foggy sunrise over the Great Wall of China, and more in our editor’s selection of the week’s best photos.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

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.

I’m a night person, and I say: The rest of the world needs to sleep later.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Xochitl Gonzalez: “Me and my bosom” Here’s what Biden can do to change his grim polling. The theory of Hamas’s catastrophic success

Creatures of the Night

This is the time of year when opponents of changing the clocks go on about why it’s unhealthy to fall out of sync with the sun, about why a practice first instituted more than a century ago is outdated, about how much human productivity is lost while we all run around changing the hands and digits on timepieces. Those are all great arguments, and I agree with them, but that’s not really why I hate letting go of daylight saving time.

I hate it because, as a general rule, I cannot stand Morning People. I do not like to cede even one minute to those chipper and virtuous larks, the co-workers who send you emails marked “5:01 a.m.” and who schedule “breakfast meetings” at dawn so we can all do some work before we get on with … doing more work. They are my natural enemy, and I refuse to entertain their caterwauling about waking up in the dark.

Look, I love daylight. I bathe in the rays of summer. I live for the sharp definition of a sunny autumn morning. I am enchanted by the brilliance of a bright winter vista. But I am a Night Person. An owl. A Nosferatu. I move in the shadows. I am vengeance; I am the night; I am Batman.

Okay, I’m not Batman, but I am one of those people who can stay up late and remain completely alert. When I drove a taxi in graduate school, I did the 5 p.m.–to–5 a.m. shift almost effortlessly. I’d hit the road, take people on their dates, and pick them up after their dates. (Sometimes that part wasn’t so pretty.) I’d drive bartenders home after the bars closed; later, I would ferry the, ah, ladies of the evening to their residences once the city finally slumbered. Then I’d have some coffee from the all-night Dunkin’ with cops and other night-shift folks, get the early fliers to the airport, go home, and take a nap.

When I was a volunteer for a suicide-prevention hotline, I worked the weekend late shift, where you’d better be on your game in the middle of the night. I’d do my best to be a supportive listener—sometimes during scary moments—and then I’d walk out at 4 a.m. feeling fine, ready for breakfast and a nap.

But ask me to get up at 4 a.m.? What is this, Russia?

Actually, that jibe is inaccurate: Russia, for many reasons, is mostly a night-owl culture. Be it under Soviet dictatorship, during the brief years of democracy, or under Vladimir Putin’s neofascism, Russian offices tend to be empty early in the morning. But Americans still venerate the idea that mornings are super productive, and every year, we’re all forced to give back an hour of sunlight in the afternoon so that our overmotivated friends and colleagues don’t have to endure their first latte in the predawn gloom. Instead, the rest of us have to feel the darkness enveloping us in the late afternoon, when we’re trying to get stuff done at work while the morning people nod off behind their desks.

Yes, I know: Kids will have to get up in the dark for school. Here’s one answer: Instead of setting the clocks back, maybe we should stop sending kids to school so ridiculously early, especially teenagers, who have a harder time learning in the early morning. Doctors and educators have been suggesting this for years, but we don’t listen, because we remain convinced that industrious people get up early in the morning and lazy people sleep in.

Take a look, for example, at the schedule that Chevron CEO Mike Wirth claims to observe, as reported by the Financial Times:

3:45 a.m. — Wake up to go to the gym for a 90-minute workout

5:15 a.m. — A cup of coffee and reading half a dozen newspapers

6 a.m. — Shower and head to the office

6 p.m. — Back for dinner with his wife

9 p.m. — Bed and reading

10 p.m. — Asleep

I believe that this is complete hooey. Not only is there no time between the end of his workout and his first cup of coffee, but no one reads six newspapers in 45 minutes. He then gets less than six hours of sleep, gets up, and does it all again. This is the idealized morning-person schedule, and it is madness. (Also, no matter what we do with the clocks, he will wake up in the dark. That’s his problem.)

Nowhere is this morning culture worshipped more obnoxiously than in Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital. I no longer live there, and I hear that things may be changing. But I was considered something of a reprobate when I worked in Washington (including on the Hill), because I would saunter into the office at, say, 8:15 a.m. instead of beating the traffic by arriving before dawn. “I was here at 6,” a co-worker would say. “I was here at 5,” another would answer, in a daily game of early-bird one-upmanship that sounded like a young-American version of the “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch.

I would go to my desk and growl at anyone who came near me before 9:30 a.m., but I was also the guy who was able to whip up a brief or a floor statement in the early evening, when the morning scolds were already glassy-eyed. (The greatest Hill staffers can do all of those things at any hour, but I wasn’t among them.)

I left Washington but then ended up ensnared in the morning culture of the U.S. military. I  learned about the military’s love of mornings the hard way, by teaching at the Naval War College for 25 years, where an 8:30 start time for a seminar was considered “mid-morning.” I fully understand that military operations require getting up and being ready to go at oh dark thirty, but the military venerates morning culture as a kind of iron-man virtue signaling. A culture that says a project manager in the Pentagon should arrive at the office at 4 a.m. to be there before his boss—who will come in at 4:30 a.m. after jogging in the dark—is an unhealthy culture.

So, enough. Leave the clocks alone; better yet, comrades, let us smash the oppressive culture of our lark overlords and reclaim the day.

Or let’s at least just get the time-changers and the early risers to stop bugging us in the morning.

Related:

Rejoice in the end of daylight saving time. The family that always lives on daylight saving time

Today’s News

Hezbollah’s leader gave his first public address since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war as the group continues to maintain a controlled battle along Lebanon’s border with Israel.   A former Trump appointee who violently assaulted police officers on January 6 was sentenced to 70 months in prison. New Delhi’s air-quality index was the worst of any major city today due to an increase in air pollutants.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Neil Postman’s 1985 diatribe, Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a book that gave senior editor Gal Beckerman “a new set of glasses.” Up for Debate: The future of the Middle East is a divisive topic. Conor Friedersdorf asks readers how people outside the region should handle differences of opinion about it.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

The great social media–news collapse Photos of the week: Ghost Rider, canoe slalom, balloon museum

Culture Break

Read. Do you have free will? A new book by Robert Sapolsky argues that we’re not in control of or responsible for the decisions we make.

Watch. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (in theaters) is a pitch-perfect dramedy from a master of the form.

Play our daily crossword.

In an eight-week newsletter series, The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you wrap your mind around a new machine age. Sign up for Atlantic Intelligence to receive the first edition starting the week of November 6.Did someone forward you this email? Sign up here.

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.