A week before Christmas in 1983, two chemists at Yale University made a breakthrough that they thought could change the world. “It was like opening up a door and seeing a light,” one of the scientists, Stuart Schreiber, later told The New York Times. The pair had produced a substance, periplanone-B, that sends the male American cockroach into a thrashing, sexual frenzy.

What if this were used to build a better trap—a cockroach honeypot that lured bugs into a dish of poison? The implications were mind-bending. Cockroaches were overrunning U.S. cities in the 1980s—more than 2 billion lived in New York alone, according to the Times—and there was no good way of getting rid of them. Sprayed insecticides barely worked after decades’ worth of insect evolution. “Roach Motels” (glue traps, more or less) did next to nothing to prevent an infestation. My own family, like others living in apartments throughout New York City at the time, could only shrug at the roaches darting from our cupboards and crawling on the bathroom floor. I remember that my best friend’s parents had a gecko living underneath their fridge, supposedly for natural bug control. No doubt it was a fat and healthy lizard. The roaches were still legion.

So of course scientists producing a new roach attractant in a lab made the papers. Alas, the periplanone-B solution was just another failed idea—one of many bungled forays in a never-ending war. The bugs kept on marching through our homes, as they always had; they kept on laying all their hidden eggs. Yet again, the cockroach earned its reputation as the animal that could never, ever be wiped out.

But even as this disappointment faded, something unbelievable was just about to happen. A true miracle in roach control was already under way. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I speak with Hanna Rosin about a neglected achievement in the history of pest control.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. A few weeks ago, one of our science editors, Dan Engber, said he had a story to tell me. It’s a little weird, definitely gross. But it’s amazing. Here it is.

[Break]

Rosin: Well, first close the door behind you. Hey.

Daniel Engber: Hello.

Rosin: What’s up?

Engber: So I have a story about a scientific discovery made in very recent times that no one thought was possible, which changed the lives of millions.

Rosin: Ooh.

Engber: But no one remembers it.

Rosin: Wow. That sounds … fake? (Laughs.) Do you want to tell me what it is?

Engber: Sure. So this is a story of a forgotten solution, but also of a forgotten problem, and that problem is cockroaches.

Rosin: Cockroach—what do you mean cockroaches are a forgotten problem? I feel like I saw one recently.

Engber: Right. You saw one—one cockroach. In the 1980s, there were a lot of cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches were like a national news story and almost like a public-health emergency. So there would be articles with various levels of alarmism about how the risk of being hospitalized with childhood asthma was three times higher in kids who were exposed to cockroach infestations.

There were stories about how cockroaches could carry the polio and yellow fever viruses.

Rosin: Okay. So cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches bad for your health.

Engber: Cockroaches everywhere. Cockroaches bad for your health.

Cockroaches in the nation’s Capitol.

[News reel]

Tom Brokaw: Congress certainly has its hands full these days with the deficit, the MX, Central America, and now debugging.

Engber: So this is an NBC Nightly News story with Tom Brokaw from the spring of 1985, which is a very important moment in the history of cockroaches.

[News reel]

Interviewee: It’s very serious. The problem: They’re in our desks. They’re under tables. They’re everywhere.

Journalist: Some members of Congress are trying valiantly to fight back. Congressman Al McCandless has installed this black box in his office. It exudes a sexy scent, which attracts female roaches, which are then roasted by an electric grill.

Engber: I mean, I think just in that short clip you hear how completely helpless we were to deal with the cockroach problem. We were trying everything.

Rosin: Yes, it does have a “throw spaghetti at the wall” [feel]. Like, this is the nation’s Capitol and we can’t—we don’t really have an answer, nor is anyone pretending to. It’s just like, They tried this. They tried that.

[News reel]

Journalist: Congressman Silvio Conte, dressed to kill today, proclaimed a war on Capitol cockroaches. A company from his home district has donated 35,000 roach traps to the Capitol. But Conte said more help than that is needed.

Silvio Conte: And I want to appeal to the president of the United States. I am certain that President Reagan wants to get rid of as many troublesome cockroaches who are running around the halls of Congress as possible. So please join me in this war and squash one for the Gipper!

[Music]

Engber: But, you know, listening to all this kind of has an almost, like, a dreamy quality for me because I actually lived through this myself. Like, I was a child of the cockroach ’80s. I had cockroaches in my house all over the place too, and it’s almost, like, hard to remember how pervasive they were.

[Music]

Engber: So I grew up in New York City.

Rosin: Where?

Engber: In Morningside Heights.

Rosin: In an apartment?

Engber: In an apartment.

Rosin: Okay.

Engber: So, middle-class families in the 1980s in New York City had a lot of cockroaches, as I can say from personal experience—just a number of cockroaches that I think is unimaginable to younger people, to my younger colleagues here at The Atlantic.

Rosin: Against my—really, like, every fiber of my being, I’m going to say, “Paint me a picture.” (Laughs.)

Engber: They’d be all over the place all the time, like, in full view, in day, in night. Um, certainly if you went into the kitchen at night and turned on the light, they would scatter. It wouldn’t be like you’d see individual insects; you’d see, like, a wave pattern.

You and your brother, let’s say, might be taking the Cheerios out of the cabinet. And open it up, and pour it into the bowl, and cockroaches would come out with the Cheerios, which I think sounds really terrifying to today’s New Yorker. But at the time it was just, like, Time to get a new box of Cheerios.

There’s really this feeling that it was, like, a natural phenomenon—like an endless sense of being enveloped in roaches. Like, it was an atmosphere of roaches or an ocean.

You’re speechless.

Rosin: Just to weigh in, I do 100 percent relate. I grew up in an apartment in Queens, and exactly your memory. The only difference is that it was cornflakes and not Cheerios, but they were everywhere.

Although, you know what’s weird? I can’t seem to remember if they freaked me out or not. Like, did they freak you out? Did you scream when you saw cockroaches or call for your mommy? What did you do?

Engber: So, I don’t think we were that squeamish about them. In fact, I know we weren’t squeamish, because the other thing I remember vividly was my brother and I would play with the cockroaches. We would use our wooden blocks and build, like, obstacle courses, sort of, and try to do cockroach Olympics.

Rosin: Did you actually touch them with your fingers?

Engber: I mean, it’s kind of hard to imagine that I didn’t, but it must be the case. I mean, like I said, there’s sort of a dreamy quality to all this, where I almost doubt my own memories. And so just to do a kind of a gut check, I wanted to call my brother.

Ben Engber: Okay.

Daniel Engber: First of all, did we have cockroaches in our apartment growing up?

Ben Engber: We had a lot of cockroaches in our apartment growing up, and I, being a little bit older than you, remember it extremely clearly. But it still seems somewhat fantastical, the prevalence of cockroaches in our life.

Engber: Okay, so first I asked him about the cereal.

Rosin: Okay.

Ben Engber: I loved Rice Krispies. And they used to have, like, a slightly over-toasted Rice Krispie that was, like, a darker brown.

Daniel Engber: Yeah, the occasional brown one.

Ben Engber: The brown one. And I definitely remember a lot of arguments about whether something was an over-toasted Rice Krispie—a small over-toasted Rice Krispie—or a roach doody. And we would frequently have these arguments.

Rosin: (Laughs.) He’s, like, completely chill about the roach-doody-for-breakfast situation.

Engber: If only it was just the Rice Krispies, Hanna.

Ben Engber: We had the special medicine cups. They were sort of, like, plastic, hollow spoons.

Daniel Engber: Mm-hmm.

Ben Engber: And I remember one time, Mom poured whatever it was, probably Dimetapp or something like that, in and I saw something swimming in it.

Daniel Engber: Ooh.

Ben Engber: I was like, There’s a roach in there. I swear there’s a roach in there. And then she held it up to the light, and there was nothing in there. I didn’t want to take it. Finally she convinced me. I drank the whole thing.

I felt the roach crawling around all over my mouth.

Rosin: Oh, God!

Ben Engber: And I spit it all into the sink. And, uh, she said, Oh, there was a roach in it.

Roaches were just everywhere in our lives. So if we were constantly, like, throwing out something just cause a few roaches walked over it, we wouldn’t have anything.

Engber: So that’s how we lived, but here’s the important part from that conversation with Ben.

Daniel Engber: Do you remember if that was in apartment 44? I forget when we moved from apartment 44 to apartment 43.

Ben Engber: That was after. No, that was after it was solved, because we moved when I was 12 or 13, and it was, it was done by then.

Daniel Engber: Um, when you said that by that time the cockroach problem was solved, what’s your, what’s your memory of the solving of the problem in our home?

Ben Engber: Very simple: uh, Combat.

Engber: So, remember when I told you that the problem we forgot was roaches? This is the solution we forgot: Combat.

Rosin: Wait, you mean the Combat roach trap? Like, that little plastic disc where the roaches go in and then they die or something? Like, that’s what this is about?

Engber: Yes. That is the amazing American invention that we have all forgotten.

Rosin: The thing that sits in aisle 13 on the top shelf, that’s the amazing invention?

Engber: The thing that should be sitting in a museum.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Engber: The people who invented Combat are American heroes. They did something—I mean, you have to think about the fact that the cockroach was and is a symbol of indestructibility, right? This is the animal that’s going to outlive us after a nuclear war.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: This is an—if you’ve ever seen WALL-E, it’s a postapocalyptic Earth. All that’s left is a robot and a cockroach.

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: It’s the animal that cannot be killed. And then in the 1980s, we did it. I think it’s fair to say that it solved the problem, and I don’t mean solved it completely and eliminated cockroaches forever, but really took a huge problem and made it much smaller. And that wasn’t just true in my apartment, but across the country. In fact, I found evidence that that is exactly what happened.

And so, I just was fascinated by the question of, Who did that?, and what it means that we don’t even really fully remember that it happened.

Rosin: Wait. There’s a who? Like, there’s a person who did that?

Engber: Yeah. Let me introduce you to a very important figure in the history of cockroaches.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: Who has a catchphrase, and his catchphrase is “Always bet on the roach.”

He’s, um, a member of the pest-management hall of fame.

Are you familiar with Pi Chi Omega, the fraternal organization dedicated to furthering the science of pest control?

Rosin: Uh-huh.

Engber: They have an annual scholarship called the Dr. Austin Frishman Scholarship.

Rosin: Ah. Wait, are we gonna hear from Austin Frishman himself?

Engber: Dr. Cockroach.

Rosin: Wow. Okay.

Austin Frishman: Hello?

Daniel Engber: Hi. Dr. Frishman?

Frishman: Speaking.

Engber: And so, I got him on the line, and he turns out to be sort of, like, a cockroach mystic almost.

Rosin: What is that?

Engber: Just, any question you ask, you might get an answer like this.

Frishman: I want you to picture a landfill, and it’s snowing. It’s about 28 degrees out, okay? And you’re there with seven or eight men, and you’re digging away at the snow because you’re teaching them how to bait on a landfill. Alright?

Daniel Engber: Mm-hmm.

Frishman: And then out of the snow in that cold comes American roaches running up, bubbling up—five, 10, 15, 60, 100, 200 from the smoldering heat down below.

Rosin: I love this man. He makes it seem, like, biblical. So where does this cockroach mystic, Dr. Frishman, fit into this story?

Engber: You know, Frishman is in the story almost from the very start. In 1985, and in the lead up to 1985, Frishman had been hired by a company called American Cyanamid. And American Cyanamid researchers had this product that they were selling for use in controlling fire ants.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And the researchers in their, you know, industrial-products division were aware of the fact that this fire ant poison worked on cockroaches. And, in fact, they used it in the lab to control cockroaches.

Rosin: Their own cockroach problem?

Engber: Yes. Yeah, they put it in peanut butter, and they put it around the lab, just so they could continue to do their work on fire ants.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: Um, but then the company was, you know, making this effort to try to figure out, Well, can we repurpose some of our industrial products for a consumer use? And so forth. So, you’ve got a hot, new roach-control product. Who do you call?

Rosin: Oh!

Engber: Austin Frishman.

Rosin: Yes. Austin Frishman.

Frishman: And I said, “Well, it’s going to be difficult, and it may not work.” And they said to me, “Listen. Do you want to do the project or not?” I said, “No. I’ll do it just so you know what we’re up against.”

Engber: Okay, so everything we had up until that point were these, you know, these insecticides that we’d just been using for years. And the roaches had just developed resistance to them. Even if you, you know, you killed 99 percent of them, the ones you didn’t kill would have some mutation that protected them or they’d have a thicker shell or something, a thicker exoskeleton, and they’d survive and reproduce. And now your insecticides weren’t working anymore.

Rosin: Right. So they would just keep outsmarting us?

Engber: Right. And so one of the things about this new product that made it different from the old ones was it wasn’t just a spray that you’d put in the corners. It’s actually a bait. That little, black disc had something in it that sort of tasted like oatmeal cookie that roaches loved, and they would come in and get it and then take it out.

Philip Koehler: We were filming the cockroaches, and we found that only 25 percent of the cockroaches ate the bait, but 100 percent of the cockroaches would die.

Engber: That’s Philip Koehler. He’s another cockroach expert. And what he’s talking about here is the fact that, like, this stuff would kill roaches that hadn’t even eaten it.

Rosin: Like, what do you mean? How?

Engber: Well, that’s what I asked Phil Koehler.

Koehler: It was a slow-acting toxicant that allowed transfer to other members of the colony.

Daniel Engber: Wait. They would regurgitate it? Or how does it get transferred?

Koehler: Well, there are several mechanisms of transfer. The main one would be that cockroaches will eat another cockroach’s poop. It was actually after this work with Combat baits that it became, uh, known that cockroaches actually feed poop to their young.

Rosin: Amazing. I love it when researchers are put in a position where they have to say words like poop, but just very seriously. (Laughs.)

Koehler: And there are actually other methods of transfer of toxicant as well. There is, like you said, regurgitation, where they get sick and they regurgitate some, and other cockroaches will come and feed on that vomit. Uh, there’s also cannibalism, where a cockroach will attack another cockroach and eat it. And there’s also, uh, necrophagy, where the cockroaches will eat the dead.

Rosin: Each method more charming than the next. (Laughs.)

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay.

Engber: Vomit, poop, or cannibalism.

Rosin: This seems exciting.

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: No, I mean, if I were them, this would be really exciting. Like, I’m just imagining them, you know, like in Oppenheimer, sort of sitting in their lab, like, figuring out every element of this. How are we gonna make it safe? How’s it gonna work? It’s exciting.

Engber: Yeah, they were on the verge of something big.

Frishman: We would run to the lab early in the morning to see the results from the night before, or stay up half the night and watch. And we began to see, you know, what was happening. In the beginning, I was hesitant and the whole thing. But as we began to do the work and I saw the results first in the lab, it was a breakthrough. Okay?

Engber: Frishman was among the first to take this breakthrough product, put it in a syringe, take it out of the lab, and start using it in restaurants and diners to see if it worked.

Frishman: I went into a small diner, a little luncheonette place, and a bunch of guys were sitting and eating sandwiches, and I was behind the counter, so I was down low. And I had the bait, and I saw the roaches in a crack, and I just put a little dab. And as I went to go do it, the roaches started coming out, and they were gobbling it up.

Daniel Engber: You, uh, saw in real time them come to the bait.

Frishman: I was the first person in the world. I was shaking, okay? I’m telling you, I was shaking. I still have that syringe, that original one.

[Music]

Engber: This is the moment. This is the brink of the relatively roach-free world that we live in today. Now we had the little black discs, I would say, you know, two inches across or something.

Rosin: With an entrance and an exit.

Engber: With an entrance. With an entrance and an exit.

Frishman: I had written a book called The Cockroach Combat Manual, so that’s how it got its name.

Engber: And Frishman is going to take this product on the road.

Frishman: People would write in with horror stories, and they won a prize: the product and me. And we would go into those places and knock out the population.

Engber: So, he takes this to Texas. He takes it to Georgia. They do an event at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. They go to the Capitol. Remember the Tom Brokaw report? Those are Combat traps. And then ads start appearing on television.

[Compilation of Combat advertisements]

Engber: So this wasn’t just a marketing campaign. I mean, the product really did work.

Rosin: What do you mean, it worked?

Engber: Well, cockroach numbers were going down—you can find signs everywhere. Actually, a guy I went to high school with wrote an article for The New York Times in 2004, and he reported that there had been a survey of federal buildings and their cockroach complaints between 1988 and 1999—so this is Combat rollout era—and the number of complaints fell by 93 percent.

Rosin: Wow.

Engber: I also found a 1991 story from The New York Times—again, right in that Combat zone—and a New York City housing official is quoted as saying, “There was a time when people were horrified at roaches running rampant, and now everybody keeps saying, ‘Where did they go to?’”

Rosin: So it’s a thing. It’s, like, an actual, documented thing.

Engber: Yeah.

Rosin: And yet it’s not a huge moment? Like, there aren’t a lot of stories saying, Yay, us. We have conquered the cockroach problem?

Engber: No, there are not. There are stories about Combat success as almost like a business case study.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: There are stories that remark upon the fact that there are fewer cockroaches than there used to be.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

But nothing that’s like, This enormous, giant, urban problem has finally been solved by this ragtag crew of amazing scientists.

Engber: (Laughs.) Nothing of that nature.

There’s a reason why I had to introduce Austin Frishman to you as a member of the pest-management hall of fame. And you weren’t like, Oh, you mean the guy on the back of the quarter?

Rosin: Yeah. (Laughs.) Right. But why?

Engber: I mean, that is the question that has been keeping me up at night. And I have some ideas.

Rosin: Dan, you said you had some ideas about why this discovery didn’t get the credit and hoopla that it deserved.

Engber: So my brother had a good theory about this. I said, How come just our family—why didn’t we celebrate and go to dinner or something? The roaches are gone. He said, Well, it’s because we just assumed they would come back.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: So I think that must be part of it, right? That there was like, Oh, this new thing works. But yeah, everything works the first time you do it.

So there was never one moment where you realized that the world had changed.

Or it could be that, you know, when things change for better, we just have a tendency to just accept the new, better reality and pretend the old thing didn’t happen. Hey, that’s done. I’d rather not discuss it.

Rosin: Like, what’s an example of that?

Engber: The Spanish flu, for example. There’s a famous gap in art and literature about the Spanish flu. There’s not a great literature of this cataclysmic event in the 19-teens. You’d think there would be, but there isn’t. Why not?

Rosin: Probably because it was traumatic. And actually, you know, I think that’s similar to the experience with cockroaches. When, at least in my memory, when I was living with them, it wasn’t just, like, gross or annoying or an inconvenience. It’s really unsettling. Like, it lives as this constant undercurrent of anxiety and a sense that you just don’t have control over things. It’s like a terrible feeling.

Engber: Like a free-floating, pervasive anxiety hanging over you at all times.

Rosin: Yes. Yes.

Engber: Can we talk about the Cold War for a second?

Rosin: Uh, yeah?

Engber: (Laughs.)

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: So, we were talking about how the cockroach was this, um, symbol of indestructibility that would outlast us in the event of nuclear war.

Rosin: Yeah?

Engber: This was—I mean, the cockroach was—in a way, a symbol of the Cold War. Like, the nuclear-disarmament groups would put ads in the newspaper with just a picture of a cockroach.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: To try to, you know, be like, Wake up, America. We have to disarm now, or this is the future.

Rosin: So it all just got blended in our heads—like, nuclear war anxiety, cockroach anxiety.

Engber: Yes. And then those two anxieties were being unwound at almost exactly the same time. Just to be frank, this is a highly tenuous theory, but I do want to line these things up.

So, you know, 1985, the Tom Brokaw report, the Combat is coming out. Spring of 1985, that’s also when Mikhail Gorbachev comes to power.

In fact, Silvio Conte—the congressman who on the steps of the Capitol is saying, “Squash one for the Gipper,” touting Combat traps, which are manufactured in his district—five days later he’s in Moscow for a historic meeting with Gorbachev at the Kremlin. That is considered a watershed moment in the wind down of the Cold War.

Silvio Conte: Gorbachev says, “At the present time, our relationship is in an ice age.” However, he said, “Spring is a time of renewal.”

Engber: I’m just saying the guy wearing the exterminator outfit on the steps of the Capitol, touting Combat, gave Ronald Reagan the advice to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Rosin: Like, in the span of a week?

Engber: In less than a week. In less than a week he was in Moscow. And you start to see Combat traps are, you know, spreading through the country as glasnost is spreading through the USSR.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Engber: And in the years that follow, we have the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Those are exactly the years when the cockroach populations are finally diminishing, when we’re winning the war on cockroaches and we’re winning the Cold War. It’s happening concurrently.

Rosin: So what you’re saying is our nuclear fears dissipate. Our cockroach fears dissipate. And what?

Engber: What I’m saying is it was the cockroach that took over the imagination as this thing. They made sense to stand in for nuclear fears.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Engber: And then going the other way, once we were free of that nuclear anxiety, we just sort of glided into a roach-free world.

[Music]

Engber: Okay, Hanna. There’s one more thing.

Um, so the roaches are coming back.

Rosin: No.

Engber: I’m sorry to say.

Rosin: What?

Engber: It seems clear that the roaches are coming back, but it has taken a really long time, right? So it’s true that they couldn’t develop biological resistance to the poison.

But then roaches did develop what’s called a behavioral resistance to the baits.

Basically, roaches stopped preferring sweet foods. So, the poison would still kill them, but they weren’t interested in the oatmeal-cookie bait in the center of the Combat trap.

So, roach numbers are slowly going up again. And if you read publications of the Pest Management Association newsletter, which maybe I’ve done recently, you can see that there’s, you know, there’s some chatter about how roach calls are increasing.

Okay, so I pulled some numbers. I went to the American Housing Survey from the federal government. In 2011, 13.1 million estimated households had signs of cockroaches in the last 12 months. In 2021, 14.5 million.

Rosin: Hmm.

Engber: So, creeping. That’s the word: creeping. The numbers are creeping upward.

Rosin: Does that raise the possibility that future generations—my children, their children—will actually have to contend with roaches?

Engber: They might. It’s possible. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say it’s also a little bit appealing in a way.

Rosin: No. Did you say appealing?

Engber: Well, okay. This came up when I was talking to my brother.

Daniel Engber: What’s the attitude of your children towards cockroaches?

Ben Engber: My children are total wusses about it. They run away and they scream. Shosh is terrified of insects.

Daniel Engber: Is she better or worse for that?

Ben Engber: I would say she’s worse for that.

Rosin: I mean, isn’t that what everyone says? Like, We were the toughest generation, and everything has gone downhill since then. I mean, I feel that there’s a little bit of that in this conversation we’re having.

Engber: Yes. That is exactly the conversation we’re having. And it’s embarrassing but true. I can’t shake it. Like, I have some pride in the fact that we did the Roach Olympics. It might be a ridiculous thing to be proud of, but I feel like we were being imaginative and fearless and having fun.

My kids are imaginative and have fun. They are not fearless.

Ben Engber: Falling to pieces at the sight of an insect does not strike me as a healthy way to attack life. As a species, we would not have made it very far if just a little filth took us out. And maybe the roachy upbringing is what instilled that in me.

Daniel Engber: So you’re pro-roach. Mom has been vindicated for feeding you a roach in medicine.

Ben Engber: Oh, yeah. Mom is absolutely vindicated.

Rosin: So the thing you’re actually nostalgic for is both freedom and maybe even a little bit of courage.

Engber: Yeah, but, you know, it’s more than that. Not only did my brother and I get to enjoy the feeling of being unafraid of cockroaches, we also got to enjoy the feeling of things getting better.

Rosin: Yeah.

Engber: An intractable problem gets solved. And I feel like that’s, you know, that’s a really nice lesson to learn, even as a kid. And unfortunately, I don’t know that my kids have had many opportunities to learn that specific lesson. So I’m nostalgic for that, too.

[Music]

Rosin: You know what, Dan?

Engber: Yeah?

Rosin: I think that it’s time that me and you and your brother go and have our celebratory dinner that we never had all those years ago. Like, instead of going to a steakhouse, we’ll just each get bowls of cereal. Bowls of cereal for everyone.

Engber: Rice Krispies.

Rosin: Yeah.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Ethan Brooks. It was edited by Jocelyn Frank, fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca, and engineered by Rob Smierciak.

Special thanks to Sam Schechner for his roach reporting in The New York Times.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve heard of three Thanksgiving plans that got canceled because of disagreements over the Israel-Gaza War. In one case, over the past few weeks, a guy watched as his brother’s wife posted pictures of cease-fire rallies on Facebook. Finally he texted her: “So you love Hamas now?” She was horrified. After doing Thanksgiving together for two decades, they will not be continuing the tradition this year.

I could give you more examples of unproductive fights that ended plans, friendships, relationships, but we’ve all been there. In this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, we focus less on the substance of any of those disagreements. Instead, we talk about how to disagree, on things big (a war) or small (how to load the dishwasher). Our guest is Amanda Ripley, the author of High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, and her suggestions work equally well in the personal or political arena.

We also talk with Utah Governor Spencer Cox about his Disagree Better initiative. In 2020 Cox ran an unusual political ad in which he appeared alongside his opponent, noting that they have different political views but agreeing they would both “fully support the results of the upcoming presidential election regardless of the outcome.” Cox, a former trial lawyer who says he is inclined “towards conflict when presented with opposing views”, is a rare politician trying to work with opponents in a different way.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. Today is Thanksgiving, a time for families to get together and, often, to disagree, in an era when a lot of us have totally lost the art of disagreeing well.

I could explain or give you so many examples, but I think you probably know what I mean. One of our presidential candidates just called his opponents “vermin.”

So today we’re going to have a conversation about learning to disagree better. And I know that there are some people out there who hear that and think I mean we need to be quiet or to stop protesting or just to be more polite. But it’s not that. It’s about how to talk to people you disagree with—not in a polite, avoidant way, but in a way that’s more effective, that lets everyone get something done.

Now, we’re going to hear from two people. One is a prominent politician—maybe one of the few who is actively trying to change how political opponents talk to each other.

From him I want to know from him how productive disagreement actually works, in the wild, given the high level of vitriol out there.

But before we get to him, we’re going to hear from Amanda Ripley. She’s a journalist who wrote a book called High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out.

A couple of months ago, Amanda and I did a live event together where she explained the ideas in her book, ideas that once I absorbed them, they changed how I digest the news and also how I talk to almost everyone in my life.

Here’s our conversation.

Hanna Rosin: Let’s start by saying why, why are we here? Why write a book or talk about high conflict right now at this moment?

Amanda Ripley: Well, I went into this, I spent about five years following people who were stuck in really toxic, awful conflicts—political, you know, gang conflict, civil war, all different kinds of conflicts.

And I was really obsessed with, like, how do you get out? How do you get out of conflict? And then I realized that is the wrong question, because conflict is our greatest asset. Conflict is how we get stronger, how we push each other, how we get pushed.

So we need conflict, with an asterisk, which is the right kind of conflict. The kind really matters, it turns out. It is the fastest shortcut to transformation, right? For a company, for a family, for a country. So that, I think, is why we’re here: How do we use conflict for good?

Rosin: Amanda had suggested we start small and personal. She wanted us both to talk about a fight we’d had with our partners so she could dissect it. I went first.

So here we go. Example 1: The Toxic Croissant.

Rosin: So I was talking to my partner on the phone yesterday, and she says the innocuous sentence: “Yeah, I think we ate pretty healthy this weekend.”

Now, we don’t really talk about food, whatever. It’s not, it’s not a big deal. But the first words that flashed up were: “No, we didn’t.”

And then I could hear the tension on the phone. This is so dumb and meaningless. I don’t know why I said that. I don’t care how we ate, but I did say it. And then felt my brain kind of go into a mode and I actually had the thought—I can’t believe I had this thought. Amanda, I can already—I’m not even going to look at what your face is doing right now. But I had the thought, like, Prove it. Like, Do the food log. I’m right.

Ripley: So you were like, Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go to the mat.

Rosin: Let’s go to the mat. Immediately. What, do you think a croissant is healthy? Like, what is wrong with me? I don’t care what we ate. I genuinely don’t care at all about any of it. But that’s the place that I went.

Ripley: And then how did she respond?

[Laughter]

Rosin: She got angry.

Ripley: So, am I right to say that you felt, like, a sudden, overwhelming urge to argue this?

Rosin: Yes. Yes.

Ripley: Is that right?

Rosin: And to prove to her that I was right.

Ripley: To, to win?

Rosin: To win. A hundred percent.

Ripley: I’m assuming it didn’t end in a super—you didn’t feel better off for having had this conversation.

Rosin: No. No.

Ripley: Okay.

Rosin: No, it ended just everybody feeling worse.

Rosin: And yeah, so that’s the petty mystery we started with. Why did I so instinctively feel the need to be right about something I actually didn’t care about, and which another version of me knew was going to ruin a perfectly pleasant interaction? What was I getting from that?

Example 2: The Wolves.

Now it was Amanda’s turn.

Ripley: So, this is so cliché, but every night I have to reload the top rack of the dishwasher because my son and husband are just throwing stuff in, almost like a wolf or something. Like an animal.

And I can argue the facts of that forever. I could be like, The water cannot reach the stuff. The surfaces are all covered with Tupperware. And will happily engage in that with a ferocity.

Rosin: Everyone, hold in your mind that feeling, like, that thing that happens immediately when you’re like, You’re wrong. I’m right. Like, it’s just like you’re possessed.

Rosin: This is an important insight. High conflict is a very specific state of mind, different from annoyed or angry. It’s more like being possessed by some combination of fury and logic. And it’s not pleasant, exactly, but it is a kind of high.

Ripley: Has anyone ever had that feeling? Raise your hand. (Crowd laughs.) Okay, so you were not alone.

Rosin: Yes.

Ripley: Anyone here have no idea what we’re talking about? Okay. All right. So we’re not alone.

Rosin: Conflict is not just croissants and dishwashers, though. Often the stakes are way higher, like in politics, which is built on disagreement. How do you know when conflict is productive?

Ripley: When I said the kind of conflict you’re in really matters, there is a kind of conflict that I like to call “good conflict,” like “good trouble,” like John Lewis called it. Good conflict is—and we can see it in the research, in the data—with good conflict, questions get asked, there’s anger, there’s frustration, there’s sadness, and there’s flashes of curiosity and humor, even, and understanding and then back to anger and frustration. It’s like a galaxy of emotions. And there is movement. [With] high conflict, you’re stuck. You feel it, right? You feel it in your chest or your stomach.

Rosin: Yes. That’s like going through sludge.

Ripley: Yeah. And there’s nowhere to go.

Rosin: Yeah.

Ripley: Like, it just feels like a trap.

I have shifted my goal in conflict, and I’ll throw this at you, and you see what you all think. I’m not interested in resolving it. I’m also not interested in avoiding it, although I would like to sometimes. My goal, as a journalist and as a human, is if I can do one of three things: Can I, myself, understand the other person, the problem, or myself a little better through this encounter?

Rosin: Understand, even if you disagree.

Ripley: Totally. Continue to disagree. That’s great.

Rosin: Okay, let’s pause. What Amanda is suggesting is that you should engage in a conflict with no intention of resolving it. In fact, if you have that intention, you will probably make the conflict worse.

That’s hard.

And what she is proposing seems straightforward, except it’s tricky because understanding might mean, in some cases, giving a lot of airtime to a person who quotes false statistics or spreads conspiracy theories, and that’s especially tricky if this person has power.

Rosin: Why does the person who you think is harmful deserve your understanding? What is the point of that exercise? Why is that putting good in the world, for you to take the trouble to understand someone who you feel is doing harm?

Ripley: Because we have kids together.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ripley: It’s a lot like divorce. Like, you can get divorced, but you’ve got kids together. You still have to work together, as we keep seeing. You cannot get jack done in this country.

Rosin: The kids being genuinely a next generation of America.

Ripley: It’s always the people who suffer the most in high conflict, whether it’s in Colombia or Northern Ireland or South Africa or Chicago, it’s always kids.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ripley: Or a divorce.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: A high-conflict divorce. So high conflict, the phrase, actually comes from family law. A quarter of American divorces can be termed high conflict because they’re stuck in perpetual cycles of blame and hostility.

And it’s conflict for conflict’s sake, and that’s what high conflict is. It takes on a life of its own. And any intuitive thing you do in high conflict to get out, arguing the facts, makes it worse. So your only option, and this is really hard, is to do counterintuitive things.

Half of what people want in conflict is to be heard.

There’s a listening technique that I’m talking about called looping. That’s like, I’m going to prove to you that I heard you, because I’m going to distill it into my own language.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: And I’m going to play it back.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: And I’m going to then—this is the thing that people, the piece that usually we forget—I’m going to ask if I got it right.

Rosin: Ooh. Can you give me an example of when you’ve employed them? We’re coming back to the beginning in a personal space. You want to try the dishwasher one?

Ripley: Sure, sure, let’s do that. Okay, great. So, every conflict has the thing it seems to be about that we argue about endlessly, and then what it’s really about. That’s the most interesting part. That’s where I think journalists can do their best work. If we can get to that, which is, like, the understory of the conflict.

Rosin: The understory?

Ripley: The understory. Like, what is it really about? Do you ever listen to Esther Perel? Does anyone know Esther Perel’s podcast?

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah.

Ripley: She’s basically reduced the understory to six possible options, there’s just a handful of them in every conflict she’s seen: Care and concern. Respect and recognition. Power and control.

Rosin: Care and concern.

Ripley: Care and concern.

Rosin: Respect and recognition. Power and control.

Ripley: Yeah. So, if you think back—let’s use the dishwasher example. For me, it is clearly about respect and recognition. Obviously.

Rosin: You mean because you’ve told those wolves a thousand times?

Ripley: Yeah, it’s like, it feels like it’s not important because it’s somehow women’s work.

Rosin: I see.

Ripley: Like, this is just like, I’ll just throw this bowl in there, because I’m a man. Do you know what I mean? (Crowd laughs.)

I’m 100 percent sure they would disagree. Right? Like, they’re just not putting that much thought into it. But for me it feels like, Now I’m spending my time correcting all of your mistakes.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: Because my time is worth half of your time, apparently.

Rosin: Wow. That’s the understory.

Ripley: Okay. So, now, wouldn’t it be better if I could say to them, Look, this may sound irrational to you, and maybe it is irrational, but when I see, like, 400 dishes piled up in the top rack of the dishwasher, it feels like you don’t actually respect the need to take care of our stuff, and that it’s somehow on me to do that.

Is that the story? That’s the story I’m telling myself. Is that the story? Is that right? For sure they’re going to be like, What?! (Crowd laughs.) Right? But if they could then show me they hurt me, they’re like, Wow! So when you see this dishwasher we’re looking at, you see, like, disrespect. Is that right? If they could loop me.

Rosin: And they don’t have to agree that it’s disrespectful?

Ripley: No!

Rosin: Or that they’re the patriarchy or anything like that? (Crowd laughs.) Or that they’re dirty animal wolves destroying things? They just have to hear you and do it.

Ripley: Prove it though. Prove you heard me by distilling it into your own language and playing it back to me and checking if you got it right, which my husband now does better than I do, by the way, because he’s heard enough of this.

Rosin: And it really doesn’t matter that they don’t have to adopt your view of the thing?

Ripley: No!

Rosin: That’s actually, like, a small and radical idea.

Ripley: It’s radical.

Rosin: They don’t have to see it the way you see it or adopt that same prism. They just have to know that you have that prism, and respect that prism, and everything quiets down.

Ripley: Right. Like, literally saying that takes all of the energy out of my body. It’s like, Yes, exactly.

Rosin: Right.

Ripley: Right? So if you loop someone and they say, Exactly, then you know you got it.

What percentage of the time do you think people feel heard in their day-to-day lives, on average?

[Crowd murmurs]

Five percent? That’s great. Yeah, 5 percent, okay. So a lot of the conflict that we’re seeing right now that is unhelpful comes from that. People just don’t feel heard. And the research on listening shows that when people don’t feel heard, what does it lead you to do?

Shut down or talk louder. (Crowd noise.) Yes, yes. And so we see in the research that when people don’t feel heard, they tend to say more and more extreme things. They wash away all the complexity and internal doubt. And they say more and more violent, extreme things. So think about what that means for journalism.

Rosin: Welcome to America. Exactly.

Ripley: But if they do feel heard, they admit to more internal uncertainty, they admit to being torn about certain things, they reveal vulnerability, and they will listen to you.

Rosin: Let’s show people examples of good conflict, because Amanda has seen a lot of it, and I want to leave you all with, you know, positive vibes.

Ripley: Yeah. So this is just a small example of trying to step out of the dance. Remember I was saying you gotta do something counterintuitive? So this is a little ad in the governor’s race in Utah—Spencer Cox, a Republican, and his democratic opponent—and this ad went viral, to much of their surprise.

So let’s watch this.

[Political ad]

Spencer Cox: I’m Spencer Cox, your Republican candidate for Utah governor.

Chris Peterson: And I’m Chris Peterson, your Democratic candidate for governor.

Cox: We are currently in the final days of campaigning against each other.

Peterson: But our common values transcend our political differences, and the strength of our nation rests on our ability to see that.

Cox: We are both equally dedicated to the American values of democracy, liberty, and justice for all people.

Peterson: We just have different opinions on how to achieve those ideals.

Cox: But today, we are setting aside those differences to deliver a message that is critical for the health of our nation.

Peterson: That whether you vote by mail or in person, we will fully support the results of the upcoming presidential election regardless of the outcome.

Cox: Although we sit on different sides of the aisle, we are both committed to American civility and a peaceful transition of power.

Peterson: And we hope Utah will be an example to the nation.

Cox: Because that is what our country is built on.

Peterson: Please stand with us on behalf of our great state and nation.

Cox: My name’s Spencer Cox.

Peterson: And I’m Chris Peterson.

Both: And we approve this message.

Rosin: What does it say about either me or America that I’m like, Where’s this SNL skit going?

[Laughter]

Rosin: After the break, we’ll hear from Spencer Cox himself. The now-governor of Utah heads something called the Disagree Better initiative, and, to him, this topic is nothing to laugh at.

Cox: I absolutely believe that that’s where we’re headed, to complete collapse of our democratic institutions, our republic. And if we can’t have productive conversations, we won’t be able to save this incredible gift that we’ve been given over 240 years ago.

[Music]

Rosin: As chair of the National Governors Association, Spencer Cox tours the country evangelizing what he calls “Disagree Better.” Now, the term can sound cute, or vague, so I asked him what he meant by it, because politicians appeal for civility all the time. And his answer echoed a lot of what Amanda and I talked about.

Cox: It absolutely is not just another civility initiative. It’s not just being nice to each other. It’s actually about healthy conflict. In fact, I think having zero conflict may be as bad and sometimes worse than having bad conflict. I just think it’s very unhealthy for us as a society. Our form of government, our Constitution, was founded on profound disagreement. We have to be able, in a pluralistic society, to disagree.

Rosin: Cox has field-tested Disagree Better in Utah, which is arguably a low-risk place for him to start. Utah is a solidly red state, and when he ran that political ad in 2020, he was already ahead in the polls. Of red states, Utah also generally seems more open to this kind of message. Donald Trump is of course popular there, but Utah is also the place that sent Trump critic Mitt Romney to the Senate.

Rosin: Are you trying to change people’s minds? Like, is that part of it, or not really? It’s just sort of defending your own position, because I feel like people, you know, debate about that. If you go into a conversation thinking you’re going to change someone’s mind, that’s already a bad start.

Cox: It is a bad start, but here’s the key: It’s a bad start because if you go into a conversation trying to change someone’s mind, you’ll never change their mind.

Rosin: You mean, like, you can’t start that way because it’s arrogant or righteous or something?

Cox: Yes, it immediately puts people in a defensive position, right? And again, it’s not just about changing people’s minds. To me it’s about solving problems. And if I’m interested in what you have to say, legitimately interested, like really trying to understand where you’re coming from, the odds of you being interested in where I’m coming from go up significantly.

Rosin: Before he was a politician, Cox was a trial lawyer, and that’s a profession that argues in order to win, not to understand the other person. And now as a public figure, Cox does not always control his tongue, which I asked him about.

Cox: I’m practicing this. I believe in it. I had already launched my initiative, or I was about to launch my initiative, and I’m at a press conference and I get asked about immigration. And I’ve been asked, you know, 75 times about immigration.

And so, I was frustrated with something Congress had done, and I said, “You know what?” I just kind of lost it for a second. I said, “You know what? Congress is, they’re all imbeciles, and they should all lose their jobs.”

Rosin: I saw that. I saw that. I was going to ask you. So is that, like, We’re all human?

Cox: Well, very much human, and I think it is human nature. There’s no question that we’re all craven political beasts. That moment, I knew as soon as I was done. And sure enough, it led every headline from my press conference. Every newspaper, every media organization covered it. Within 20 minutes, it was out there.

I started getting texts from people all over, people I hadn’t heard from in years, like, Yes, you’re right. So proud of you. Thanks for speaking up. Thanks for saying that. You’re right. They’re all imbeciles. And I apologized an hour later because it was against everything I believe in. But that’s the incentive structure: The one thing I got the most credit for was the thing I shouldn’t have been doing.

Rosin: Is the problem your language? Is it because you call them imbeciles? You essentially make them defensive and then the conversation shuts down.

Cox: Yes. So this is my point. Did any member of Congress read that and think, You know what? He’s right. I’m an imbecile. I should resign. And, and, you know, did any of them think, You know, let’s go solve immigration because that governor thinks we’re imbeciles? Like, no, it doesn’t, it didn’t help anything.

Rosin: It’s not going to work.

Cox: It didn’t, it didn’t work. And again, not only that, but I’m dehumanizing people. I’m othering them, right?

I’m very frustrated. I could have said that, right? I think this is a mistake. I think what they’re doing is wrong, and here’s why. Yes, we should point out the things we disagree with, the things that are wrong—things they’re doing wrong. But I don’t need to call them imbeciles to do it.

My nature, and I think the natural human being in most of us, is towards conflict when presented with opposing views.

Rosin: Totally.

Cox: We fight back. That’s what we do. We’re fighters.

So that’s, that’s been my journey. It’s something I still have to work on every day. My staff reminds me when I head into what’s going to be a tense situation to go 65 miles an hour, because I can go from zero to a hundred very quickly. So I have to constantly keep it at 60, keep it at 65, you know—keep it, keep it toned down.

Rosin: Do you think that Donald Trump embodies the principles of Disagree Better?

Cox: Of course not. And I think Donald Trump would be the first to tell you that he doesn’t embody the principles of Disagree Better.

Rosin: You’re a Republican governor. Donald Trump is the nominee. How do you handle that scenario? It’s a genuinely difficult scenario.

Cox: It’s impossible. It’s an impossible scenario. And every governor, every Republican governor, every Republican member of Congress, we’re all trying to navigate this, and people are choosing different ways to do that. Some just pretend it doesn’t exist. Some people try to nuance it. Some people, you know, push against it.

Has it gone great for most of those people?

Rosin: No. So what’s your choice? Like, you’re the face of Disagree Better, and this is your nominee. So what do you personally do? Like, somebody’s going to ask you the question, Are you endorsing? You know, Are you endorsing Donald Trump?

Cox: Yeah, I get asked that. Sure. Sure. You get asked it all the time.

Rosin: You get asked it all the time. So what’s the answer?

Cox: Yeah, and right now I’m focused on hoping someone else gets out there. It’s this crazy time where—

Rosin: So you don’t say yes. You just say, like, maybe the wishful thinking, like, magical thinking.

Cox: Yeah. Yeah. We’re all doing the magical thinking thing right now. And I’m admitting that. What I can do is try to offer a different approach, a different vision and hope. I’m not just trying to convince other governors and other candidates that this is the right thing to do for our country, although it is the right thing to do for our country.

And I think we are further down that road of complete failure than most people understand.

Rosin: Complete failure of what?

Cox: Of our democratic republic. If you look at other failed democracies, other failed states, we’re checking all of the boxes.

I mean, we really are in a very, very dark place.

And our tolerance for that type of rhetoric and for actual political violence has gone up significantly, which is scary. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing.

Rosin: I just had one last question for Cox. It’s a question Amanda always advises to ask, which is: Does the person you’re talking to have any regrets or doubts about their position or about something they’ve done? Because doubts are a place where opponents can find common ground.

And Cox did share one big doubt. It was about when he signed a controversial congressional map back in 2021. This new map split the biggest Democratic-leaning county in the state and divided it among the state’s four districts, which faced immediate accusations of gerrymandering.

Rosin: If you look back on your last few months, all these divisive issues, is there one that you wish you’d handled differently or that you are like, Did I do the right thing on that one?

Cox: Yeah. I think if I look back, the one that I worry about is the gerrymandering piece, for sure. As I look back, because I think that’s one issue that probably did drain some trust out of the system, because that’s changing boundaries, right, in a way that feels like now your voice is being neutered even more.

And I also push back and say to most of my Democrat friends, What you really want us is to gerrymander for you. You want a Democratic district in a state that is overwhelmingly Republican. It’s just not going to happen. The numbers are just not in your favor. So go out and change the numbers and then you have something to argue about.

But I want to give them credit in saying, like, I understand. That to me is a valid argument, that gerrymandering does impact trust in the system, that it does make it harder for someone’s voice to be heard, for someone to get someone that they believe in elected.

And so I think there is—

Rosin: And you feel like you didn’t get that across?

Cox: I feel like I didn’t get that across, and I understand why people are angry about that. And that’s one where I have had some second thoughts over the course of the past couple of years.

Rosin: Okay. I see your people waiting for you.

Rosin: The governor’s people were waiting outside the studio to take him to his next thing.

And before I say my goodbye to you—and Happy Thanksgiving, while I’m at it—I wanted to return for a moment to my conversation with Amanda Ripley.

We wrapped up by circling back to my argument about the croissant and figuring out the real reason why I reacted the way I did.

Ripley: Now, going back with this food argument about whether you ate healthy, which of the understories is it? Care and concern. Power and control. Respect and recognition.

Rosin: I think it’s respect and recognition.

Ripley: Okay, same one.

Rosin: Because—actually, I think it’s just my mother.

[Laughter]

Rosin:

We’re not gonna go there. I think it’s a sense, like, I get really freaked out when people—like, in truthiness. Like, when people just adopt strong stories that I feel are not related to what happened on this earth, I get real panicky.

Ripley: So there’s something dangerous about it?

Rosin: There’s something dangerous about people. Like, it doesn’t matter what the subject is. If somebody had said we watched this thing on TV, and we didn’t and I couldn’t get through to them, I would get really panicky and angry. It’s not about the food.

Ripley: So it’s maybe control as well. Like, if you could, yeah, if you can kind of keep tabs on what actually happened—

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Ripley: Then things are less chaotic? Is that right?

Rosin: Yes. Like, and I’m not forever trapped under, like, this false idea, and I have to agree with it when I know it’s not true. That makes me feel crazy, you know?

Ripley: Yeah, okay.

Rosin: Yeah.

Ripley: So do you think you could tell your partner that tonight on the phone?

Rosin: Just that?

Ripley: Yeah.

Rosin: Yes, I can. Yeah, I will.

I will. Yes.

Yes. Absolutely.

[Applause]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend, with editing from Claudine Ebeid. It was fact-checked by Isabel Cristo and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is our executive producer, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Thank you to the See Change Sessions for giving us the audio of my talk with Amanda.

Thank you all for listening, and happy Thanksgiving. If you’re at the table and you’re overcome with that feeling that you’re about to fight, do it right. Good luck to you. And see you next Thursday.

In 2017, I spoke with a music historian to understand the trend of flute rap: a boom in rappers rhyming about codeine, cars, and trauma over the soft sound of breath moving through a tube. Ardal Powell, the author of The Flute, told me that nothing surprised him when it came to this instrument. It is possibly the oldest musical device in the world. Neanderthals and 15th-century Swiss mercenaries and 1970s heavy-metal bands found use for it. Why not rappers?

The “key thing in the history of the flute, going back thousands of years,” Powell said, is that “it’s the closest instrument to the human voice.” No reed or mouthpiece separates the player’s breath from the sound it makes. This observation suggested that the flute, all along, was a bit hip-hop. And at its best, rap can seem like an act of inner channeling, of making the body and mind one. The flute is difficult to master but, fundamentally, intuitive to operate—intuitive like tapping out a rhythm, or like speaking.

André 3000’s intuition long ago earned him a claim to being one of the greatest rappers alive. Starting in the early 1990s as half of the Atlanta group Outkast, he specialized in wise and funny verses connecting street life with the stars. He was in conversation with his peers in southern rap—known for lackadaisical charm and sonic-boom bass lines—but also with Prince, Shakespeare, and Carl Sagan. Eventually, however, his vision dimmed. Outkast’s last album was released in 2006, and since then, André has put out almost no solo music. The reason for his silence, he has said, was lack of inspiration. Life in middle age wasn’t sparking new bars.

Now he’s back with a new album, and he’s speaking in a new voice, or rather rendering his voice in a new guise with the flute. Over the past half decade or so, André collected reedless woodwinds from around the world; playing the flute, he has said, is a better way of passing time than scrolling through a smartphone. He loved that the instrument made him, a master of one art form, into a “baby” at another, he told GQ. Returned to newbie status, his creativity flared once again. These days, he’d feel uncomfortable if someone were to ask him to freestyle rap. But he’d happily improvise on the flute.

New Blue Sun, his first album in 17 years, features no rapping and lots of flute. It also has drums, keys, guitars, and other instruments, played by well-respected improvisatory musicians led by the percussionist Carlos Niño, whom André befriended at a crunchy Los Angeles grocery store. For hip-hop fans who’ve long awaited his return, disappointment is inevitable; the opening track title even apologizes: “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” (His aesthetic compass told him to write song names that long, and mine is telling me to abbreviate them for the rest of this article.) Charitably, the project seemed at first to signal retirement boredom, a retreat from ambition. Signs pointed to it sounding like kitsch jazz or spa music, like comedy or wallpaper.

But it turns out the album is stranger than that. I first listened to New Blue Sun while doing chores, and it really got on my nerves. The flute playing sounds rudimentary and halting, the sound of someone practicing aimlessly rather than committing to an idea. The rest of the band drowns André out with smoggy synthesizer chords and percussion that rustles with the irregularity of an animal climbing in a bush. (“Plants” are listed in the instrumental credits.) I am not much of a jazz listener, but I know enough of John and Alice Coltrane—two stated influences—to know that the pulsing ferocity of those cosmic greats isn’t present. Nor does the album achieve Brian Eno-ian usefulness, melding into my life.

But later, as I lay awake in a dark room, the music clicked. A pleasant coldness settled into my body three tracks in, on “That Night in Hawaii When I Turned Into a Panther … ,” whose minimal drum thump calls to mind an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, foreboding and lonely. Midway through the song, André locks into a melody that wheels up and up, and I felt carried with it. The next track, “BuyPoloDisorder’s Daughter … ,” seems to open up onto a cloudscape, with tufts of keyboard that billow and shiver. A sunray of a synthesizer erupts about eight minutes in, cohering the song’s mood, adding warmth. It’s like the moment a pot of ingredients, stirred and simmered at great length, finally thickens into a sauce.

Dissecting instrumental music requires either using technical terminology—which most people, André included, do not think in—or writing in the fairly silly way I did in the previous paragraph: mixing metaphors in an attempt to render subjective sensations concretely. It is very easy, when communicating in this mode, to rhapsodize past the point of meaning anything at all. One must be sure to draw contrasts, saying what something is like but also what it is not. (As a rapper, André always knew this; he’d take time in a verse to delineate the difference between slumber party and spend the night.)

So: Listening to New Blue Sun is not like listening to rap, watching a movie, or staring at a painting. It’s more like looking out of a wide window on a changing and interesting scene. The individual sounds remind me of bubbles—crowding, dilating, and suddenly dissipating. The overall songs move cyclically (breathe in, breathe out) but not repetitively (each breath is different from the last). Most important: The album’s best passages—the prismatic goo of “Ghandi, Dalai Lama …”; the subtle, drifting “Dreams Once Buried …”—are beautiful in original ways. They create shapes you’ll find nowhere else.

People will no doubt play this album to help them empty their brain for sleep or to congeal a vibe during dinner parties. But I’m not sure these are the best uses of it. Maybe if André were removed, New Blue Sun would fit more stereotypical notions of ambient or new-age music. But his flute, blowing humbly yet insistently within the canyon of reverberation created by the more veteran instrumentalists, sounds too alive—and flawed—to tune out. He’s not the virtuosic soloist or the hypnotizing pied piper; he’s more like someone talking to himself on a hike. I personally cannot write or even think when music with lyrics is playing in my ears, and the flute of New Blue Sun nearly achieves the same distracting effect. You hear intelligence at work; you hear language without words.

This is, strange as it is to say, music to listen to. André recently told NPR that playing the flute isn’t a “set-out meditation,” and emphasized, “I have to force myself to pay attention to what I’m doing.” For the listener of New Blue Sun, the same imperative holds. Spotify and its kind have flooded the music ecosystem with cheap background noise. This album is a reminder of the rewards that can come with taking time to tune in rather than tune out.

In that same NPR interview, André said that his flute melodies flowed out of thoughts that he feels unwilling or unable to put into words. Music, he said, is “sub-talk,” encoding ideas that different people will translate in different ways. Some fans will try to solve these songs like a puzzle (hoping to find the release date for an actual rap album, one imagines). But to approach this album as though it contains a hidden message isn’t quite right. The point of New Blue Sun, as with so much great music, is the inarticulable narrative created by the changing relationship between sounds. A tale lies, too, in the album’s status as an act of lively creation for someone who felt burnt out by words. In his way, André is still pursuing the art of storytelling.

If the recent Hollywood strike were a movie, it would have a satisfying ending. The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Writer’s Guild of America (WGA) got the important things they were asking for, namely better residuals for streaming shows and some protections from AI. Fran Drescher, an actor and the president of SAG-AFTRA, made a convincing case that this was a historic victory for labor and women’s empowerment, and recently said Meryl Streep was urging her to run for president of the United States.

The sequel to this saga, however, looks a lot darker. Like previous strikes, this one was instigated by a genuine reckoning for the industry. Every time there is a new technological innovation—TV sets, video cassettes, pay TV, digital downloads—Hollywood has an identity crisis. The latest tech foil was streaming. It was an exciting, generative, endlessly replicated innovation—or seemed that way until everyone started to slow down and look at the numbers. Disney, for example, has lost $10 billion on its streaming service since 2019. And many writers, actors, and studio heads felt it wasn’t working for them either. (Maybe it worked for viewers, on the nights they didn’t feel paralyzed by infinite choice.)

What were the hard truths revealed by the strike? And what will the next year of entertainment look like? In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk to Atlantic staff writers David Sims and Shirley Li, who cover the entertainment industry, about the coming realignment of Hollywood and what we should all expect. The term “river of junk” comes up, but so does the term “focus more on curation,” which should tell you that your evenings at home on the couch are at a critical juncture.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Reporter 1: Hollywood studios and striking actors reached a deal late on Wednesday, all but ending one of the longest labor crises in the history of the entertainment industry.

Reporter 2: The union says the contract includes bonuses for streaming as well as AI protections.

Reporter 3: Everybody is ecstatic and excited. This is what the union leaders are describing as historic, as extraordinary.

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Last week, the union representing Hollywood actors ended a months-long strike. By all accounts, it was a complete victory for the actors, just as it was for striking Hollywood writers weeks earlier.

Both SAG (that’s the Screen Actors Guild) and the WGA (Writers Guild of America) got a lot of what they were asking for, especially more pay from streaming and protections from AI.

[Music]

This was the first dual strike in Hollywood in over 60 years. And historically, these big strikes tend to come at moments of major change in the entertainment industry.

In the ’50s and ’60s, it was TV sets. In the ’80s, video cassettes and pay TV. And then in the 2000s, downloads of shows and movies. In each of these cases, actors or writers went on strike to earn their fair share.

Now the big transition is streaming. Netflix created this new model, movie studios and TV networks scrambled to replicate it, and the streaming wars created an absurd amount of new shows. But the writers and actors making them often earned far less than they did in traditional distribution models.

Now what does this mean for us, the viewers? It means that the way we’ve gotten used to being entertained—these infinite possibilities on an ever-increasing number of streaming services—that has got to change. Because it doesn’t work for the writers. It doesn’t work for the actors. It doesn’t work for the studios. And for viewers, the seemingly endless parade of pluses—it can’t last forever.

Advertisement 1: Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+.

Advertisement 2: Introducing AMC+, the premium streaming bundle with only the good stuff.

Advertisement 3: Paramount+, a mountain of entertainment. 

Rosin: So today I am talking to David Sims and Shirley Li, two Atlantic staff writers who cover Hollywood, about life after the strikes.

David, Shirley, to understand what we’re going to talk about, let’s quickly set the stage. What happened in the strike? Like, what surprised you over the months that it was happening?

David Sims: The thing that surprised me the most was the actors going on strike. That was everything to this entire story. That the actors went on strike concurrently with the writers, you know—a little after, you know, because the writers went on strike first, obviously—turned this from, to me, a fairly typical narrative of labor relations in Hollywood where the writers are often on their own, to a kind of, This is an existential moment the studios have maybe failed to confront and now must confront. And that shifted the entire narrative to me.

Shirley Li: What was most surprising, I think, was just how unprepared the studios seemed. And their reactions to the writers and the actors going on strike was just so not in their favor. Both of these strikes lasted more than 100 days, and it was the first time that the writers and actors have struck together since the ’60s. So it was a huge movement.

Rosin: David, when you said it was an existential moment, did you mean that the actors and the writers were putting out a message that something fundamentally wasn’t working?

Sims: A confrontation was maybe not going to happen over how Hollywood makes things if it was just the writers on strike. Joining the actors into it—and obviously, you know, dragging it out through many months—was a siren to the entire industry of, like, This streaming model, the way things have progressed in terms of making movies and TV, and the lack of public data about who watches anything, and the, you know, the blind leading the blind in terms of what’s even popular, that’s just not going to work going forward. We can’t all just pretend that there’s no money to go around or that we can, you know, sink hundreds of millions of dollars into unprofitable things.

So in my opinion, and I don’t know what the future holds, obviously, but I think this is probably a good thing for Hollywood to have realized about itself.

Rosin: Right. So they could no longer ignore the fact that there were giant, fundamental, existential questions that they were failing to look at.

Shirley, why don’t we first look at it from the writers’ perspective. It seemed like they weren’t just talking about straightforward pay increases, but a model—the streaming model—that made getting paid fairly kind of impossible.

Li: When you look at the ’07–’08 strike, the last one, it was more about pay than it was about the ability to make a living as a writer in Hollywood. So this time around, that was the overdue question, I’d say: Just how, how has the streaming model and the ramp up in quote-unquote “content,” especially in this post-pandemic period, how has that affected the ability for writers to write and have a career in Hollywood? You know, the streaming model has meant shorter episode orders, fewer freelance script assignments, the death of a ladder to a career. That was maybe the big question. It’s just kind of like, How do writers make a living?

Once the actors joined in, I think the question became: What do people value about Hollywood and the art that they’re making? Do viewers have an understanding of how much work goes into making what you watch?

Sims: The last strike was fought over, you know, prior issues. The internet was sort of a part of it, but stuff like streaming, making shows, had largely just kind of been consigned to, like, Well, that’s so experimental. Let’s let them make this stuff cheaply and we can sort of figure it out later. Like, Let’s let them not pay us too much.

By the time this was roaring around post-pandemic, post- the sort of streaming revolutions that have happened in the last few years, that was no longer something you could kind of just put to the side. You couldn’t just say, like, Yeah, well, Netflix, they’re trying something out.

Now it was sort of like, This is such a huge quadrant, we must make it make more sense.

Rosin: Right. So this strike was long overdue in resolving some old issues that Netflix and other studios had kind of put aside for a while. And then came this new issue, which was AI. What happened there?

Sims: To me, if Netflix in 2010 making shows is considered experimental, AI is considered basically like 99 percent unknown, right? We don’t really totally understand the ways that we can imagine scenarios that are sort of frightening to consider: oh, AI writing whole TV shows all by itself, or actors being turned into digital robots that studios control forever.

Obviously a lot of that is fanciful, but the way that AI had accelerated from something completely marginal to something that was sort of like at the forefront of technological discussion this year, I think both unions and the Directors Guild (who didn’t go on strike) felt like they had to establish a bulwark in this contract that could be built upon. Basically, You aren’t allowed to do much with this without our say so. We don’t even know what it is entirely.

Rosin: So it’s not so much about anything so specific as it is, Whatever decisions you’re going to start making about this, we participate in that decision-making process.

Li: I think it really is just a conceptual thing at this point. Both unions kind of just wanted to set up guardrails. I think this is more specific to the WGA, but it’s kind of like in the ’07–’08 strike, when they were just talking about, you know, the internet producing content and entertainment. It’s like David said, it was so experimental. And so they paid a little bit of attention to it, but then in the years since, it’s like, Oh, goodness. This is so huge, and we’re definitely not earning what we think we should be earning. We don’t even know how many people are watching the stuff that’s exclusively online, that’s exclusively streaming.

So I think that really caught them off guard. And so this time, AI similarly is, like, this conceptual thing where you don’t really know the specifics of how it’ll be deployed. But because of that, it seems even scarier, and so more necessary to just have this language that’s just setting up guardrails.

Rosin: Maybe the fear is that they could all just be one day disposable. David, was that already starting to happen? Were there other ways that streaming has been fundamentally changing their lives as creative people?

Sims: There are all these issues that are—if you just think about TV: The way TV used to be made was uniform. These seasons would run, usually for an entire year, 22 episodes or so. They would have big, robust writing rooms that were an opportunity for young writers to grow and more experienced writers to earn better, and all that.

And then streaming comes along, and more limited stuff comes along, and everything starts to get messed with. Suddenly you’ve got one guy writing an entire show, or you’ve got just a couple people. And this is a lot of the stuff that the WGA was fighting about, which is sort of, like, You’re taking away our career ladders, and you’re taking away our chances to earn and to learn.

Add AI into that mix in the future, right, and then you can just sort of imagine everything getting more extreme. You have prestige stuff from all-star people that is made at a high level, and then you have this river of junk that is created by AI and shepherded along by a couple writers, maybe, who just sort of tweak it to make sense. Where is the middle? It seems to be shrinking in terms of the stuff that gets made and in terms of the people who get hired.

Rosin: Oh my God, that is the most relatable that Hollywood’s ever felt to me. It feels like the way you played out the metaphor, it’s like: Hollywood is America.

Sims: Well, but that’s the thing. And we saw this, as Shirley said, with the studio playbook—which has always been the same—which is basically like, These writers are going on strike. They got the best job in the world. They make so much money. Like, how dare they? Right? You know, We’ll just sweat them out.

That’s always been the playbook in any of these fights. And this time, you got, of course, the message from the writers and the actors of like, You can’t kill us, because we’re already dead. You can sweat us out as much as you want, but we hate our lives, currently. So, [they] are not exactly about to be like, Oh no, we have to get back to our current crappy status.

They felt like, No, we will hold out as long as we possibly can to get a real deal. And then the public reaction is like, Yeah, I kind of get where they’re coming from. Like, I actually sympathize with these writer guys. No, their plight makes sense to me.

I think that took studios by surprise over and over again.

Rosin: And what do the studio heads think about all this? That’s after the break.

[Music]

Reporter 1: The cost of watching streaming services is up by 25 percent. Hulu, Peacock, Apple TV, Netflix, Disney—all raising prices.

Reporter 2: And then there’s Disney. It lost $512 million on its streaming business in just one quarter. It lost 11 million subscribers. But the stock is up this morning because it’s raising prices.

Reporter 3: Streaming services are losing big money on streaming. NBC, our parent company, which owns Peacock, acknowledges it loses money but says it’s worth it to be part of the future of television.

Rosin: So, we’ve talked about the writers. Let’s look at this from the studio-executive perspective. What brutal reality was no longer ignorable about this whole business model?

Sims: There’s long been economic models in Hollywood that make sense, that have existed for decades, both filmmaking and TV and stuff, of how to make money. You know, TV: You write your show, you sell ads against it, and people watch it. You put a movie in theaters, and people buy tickets to see it.

Streaming, obviously, ignores all of that. And Netflix built such an empire by deficit spending its way into creating a giant library that people feel is essential to subscribe to, and that’s worked for them. I’m not here to say, like, Netflix is going bankrupt tomorrow. The problem is that these old, lumbering studios in Hollywood decided, like, Oh God, Netflix is, you know, 10 miles ahead of us. We all have to do the same thing.

So they all spent billions of dollars worth to create their streaming services, which are of less and less interest to subscribers, who are kind of like, I have Netflix. Maybe I have another one or two of these. Like, do I need Paramount+? You know, Do I need, like, you know, AMC+? Do I need all this stuff?

And so a lot of these networks are now floundering. And we see these baffling decisions—of HBO Max being like, Let’s cut a lot of this Sesame Street stuff off our service. And I’m like, Does that make any business sense? You know, Let’s pull these movies off that we made. Let’s just remove them so no one can see them.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Sims: And, like, when you, you know, you make a call or you send an email, they’re like, Well, you know, actually taxwise it makes more money to not have that thing exist. And I’m like, Well, then that’s not a sign of a healthy economical picture.

Li: Yeah, like, if these strikes have revealed anything, it’s that Hollywood is a very poorly oiled machine. I mean, I think these studios, these networks overestimated our collective attention spans for platforms that we would subscribe to.

I mean, it is rather simple. They realized if we’re gonna do streaming, which is how most people were watching things, then you need subscribers, because that’s really the only way you’re gonna turn a profit. So to grow subscribers, then you need things in your library that are gonna attract them.

So to build things that in your library are going to definitely attract people, you launch stuff that’s based on existing IP. So then you sink a gajillion dollars into making film and television, and then you don’t maybe get as many subscribers as you want. And so now you’re very worried about turning a profit.

Rosin: So I think what I want to think about this is: It’s their fault. They’re bad business people. And also they just assumed that we didn’t value originality and creativity.

Sims: Sure. I mean, yes, I don’t think anyone’s been doing a particularly amazing job. So, Disney is sort of the lead example of a major Hollywood studio right now in any sense. And for years, obviously, the backbone of Disney was its animated films and its, you know, sort of place in the culture through that.

But you would see them for years try to figure out, like, How do we appeal to teen boys? You know, they would struggle and struggle and struggle. And then comes the 2010s.

They’re like, Forget it. We’ll just buy the stuff that appeals to the world. Let’s buy Star Wars. Let’s buy Marvel Comics. Let’s just bring these pillars of intellectual property into our big tent. And, obviously, for quite a while, that really worked for them. There was a lot of public excitement about what they did with those properties.

And once again, Hollywood—which is, as Shirley was saying, not a well-oiled machine. Everyone else is like, Well, we should just do that too. But they’re doing it with lesser and lesser pieces of intellectual property. They’re trying to spin franchises out of not much, or they’re trying to, like, get this stuff on its feet really quickly.

And, as it always goes, audiences get kind of sick of it. They recognize something after a while that is derivative, and they start to get bored of it. That is obviously something that’s happening very profoundly right now. Like, you know, with The Marvels, which just came out this weekend (it didn’t do very well), there’s a general sense in the air of like, Okay, the sort of playbook of the last 10, 15 years is over.

That’s how it always goes in Hollywood, though. Like, that is the oldest story in Hollywood. Like, as much as someone might want to bemoan the Marvel Cinematic Universe, take a look at the blockbusters that were coming out in the mid-2000s before it emerged, and you see Hollywood struggling to figure out what people want. There’s always that sort of moment of reinvention that comes.

Next year is going to be kind of weird. It’s going to be light on a lot of this stuff. And, you know, one hopes other stuff will fill its place, and people will go to the movies and watch TV, and there’ll be, you know, more interesting things. And Hollywood will copy that for a while, and eventually everyone will get sick of it, and over and over and over. And that’s how it goes.

Like, that’s sort of the most optimistic view I can have of this.

Rosin: So is Disney, to drill in, actually in trouble? Like, from the way you guys are talking, there’s a panic, and the model that they’ve been following—or thought they were following—over the last couple of years is not making anybody any money. So, do you just have faith in the fact that they’ll pivot and find another model that will keep them afloat for a while? Or is this an actual crisis moment?

Li: I mean, look, Disney+ is definitely in the red this year, right? Like, they’re not making any money. But this is true of so many studios, you know. They replicate the lowest common denominator for any other success. And Disney is maybe the most visible example of a lot of franchise projects that they announce like crazy that are all getting kind of just shuttered or delayed.

I think you’re going to see that outside of Disney, too, though. There’s a lot of structural adjustment. I mean, after these strikes, if they’re going to have to pay people more, these studios aren’t going to increase their budgets. They’re going to cut back on production.

So right now, I get the sense that they’re focusing a little bit more on curation. You see Kevin Feige stepping away from doing Star Wars. There’s only one Marvel project coming out next year. There’s this idea of like, Okay, yeah, let’s slow down. Let’s figure out what people actually want.

But like David said, it’s a cycle. They’re going to see what people want, possibly take away the wrong lessons, and then we’re going to see a wave of very similar things, and then the audience is going to get tired, and then you just have to start all over again.

Rosin: But in that sense, it seems good what happened, sort of like the strikes forced a kind of curation, less of a reliance on churning things out, and more of an emphasis on good—I was going to say the word content, but I’m not going to say it.

Sims: Someone has to say content at least once. It’s unavoidable in any Hollywood discussion.

Li: Content, content, content.

Rosin: Content! No, because in a way you’re saying the human tastes win out. Our boredom with terrible things sort of ends up influencing the movie-making culture in the end.

Sims: It does in the end, yes. It usually takes maybe a little too long, because these are big battleships they have to turn around. As much as it’s like, Oh, are superhero movies done? No, there’s a lot of superhero movies on the release calendars still, and we may be in a situation where none of them connect and it’s a huge problem. It’s more likely it’ll be kind of a mixed bag.

But there will be a shift from the dominance of one thing to the dominance of whatever’s next. Obviously, the big story this year was Barbie and Oppenheimer, which demonstrated huge public appetite for (1) the movies, the collective experience of going to see a movie, and (2) you know, just like, something different.

You know, people do like to see good things. Like, that compulsion exists.

I think during COVID, there was the fear of like, Oh God, is it over? Does nobody want to, you know, pay to see anything anymore? And it’s like, No, no, no. They’ll go if you give them something to see.

Rosin: Yeah. I would think you, David, of all people, being the staunch defender of quality theatrical-released movies that you are, might feel hopeful after the strike. Like, maybe better-quality things will come now.

Sims: I mean, that’s—I don’t want to sound that optimistic. I mean, I think that the peak-TV era—like thinking back to TV, you know, this sort of concept has been much discussed over the last 10 years: There’s so many more shows. There’s so many different networks trying to make original TV and all that. And it’s, you know—this is getting untenable. There’s hundreds and hundreds of scripted shows a year.

That was ending no matter what. It was ending with or without a strike, and with or without a reckoning in Hollywood over what things should cost to make.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Sims: But I do think now that there is maybe a little more of a sensible and realistic price tag to stuff, there’s going to be this kind of awkward and difficult shift of, Yeah, maybe there’s less stuff going around, and maybe, you know, maybe the projects are a little harder to come by, but probably for the best.

Like, so much stuff gets lost in the shuffle right now. So much work gets kind of ignored or not even shown, it might be good to narrow the field a little bit. And that might lead to an emphasis on quality.

I sound hopelessly optimistic saying that.

Rosin: No, you really didn’t, actually. Your voice sounded—the dubiousness was held in your last syllable.

Sims: I have a little dubiousness.

Rosin: So, what should we, the audiences, expect? Like, first in the immediate aftermath of the strike, for you guys who watch the industry very closely, what’s gonna make us happy on our sets and in the movie theater? And then in the long run, what happens in theaters and on TV?

Li: Well, productions are going to come back. Right after Thanksgiving is when a bunch of studio shows are going to start shooting again. So by early 2024, some of your favorite shows will probably be airing their new, shortened seasons. I mean, writers’ rooms have been open for more than a month now because the writers’ strike ended at the end of September.

So, you know, scripts have been written. Once productions resume later this month, I think you’ll get some TV that maybe you’ve been waiting to see. Maybe some. You know, if you’re, if you’re a big fan of the Chicago dramas, I know those are coming back soon.

Rosin: You mean like lower, easy-production stuff that doesn’t require a lot of visual effects and editing?

Li: Yes, exactly.

Rosin: And David, what happens to movies? Theaters?

Sims: 2024 is gonna be a little weird. I cannot deny that. It’s not like there won’t be movies. You know, there’s plenty of stuff on the schedule. Much of it is franchise material and sequels and reboots. You’ve always wanted a new Gladiator movie, right? Here you go. Or, you know, Beetlejuice is back. Everyone’s been waiting.

Like, not to dismiss those projects. They may well be good or resonate with people. But it’s a calendar that’s definitely light on what’s been an economic driver of Hollywood in the last few years, superhero movies especially, and kind of family movies in general, which have taken a little longer to return to the big screens. A lot of that got shunted to streaming out of this idea of like, Oh, well, families are just locked in their homes all the time, right? A misguided idea, in my opinion.

And probably it’s going to mean a year of hand-wringing, a year of like, What are we gonna do? Disney barely has anything. Like, How do we keep people interested?

And it will be kind of ultimately a little meaningless because it will be a year that is filled with Hollywood making stuff, trying to prepare for the next pivot. That’s the way Hollywood works. Everything takes a couple years to kind of reach our shores.

Rosin: Right, right.

Sims: So it’ll be an odd in-between time.

Rosin: Right. So we should read a novel for the next six months. Just read a lot.

Sims: Everyone should just log off and read a novel. And, obviously, there’s going to be some big election next year. I haven’t really looked into it, but I think that may, that may drive a lot of conversation.

Li: It’d be nice if people went and touched grass and voted.

Rosin: All those other things. So just, just to leave people with a little bit of entertainment excitement, you guys as critics, are there any projects that you are looking forward to?

Li: Oh, hell yeah! Right, David?

Sims: So much stuff. Yeah, I think 2024 in film kind of looks awesome.

Rosin: Okay, bring it.

Li: I think, at the top of my list: Dune 2.

Sims: Right, stuff that got pushed from this year.

Li: Yeah, stuff that got pushed. There’s, like, films like The Fall Guy that I’m like, Well, we’ll see what the Gosling has as the stuntman in a film that I’m not sure will be good. But look, I’m excited that there’s stuff that I don’t know much about, and then there’s sequels that I am excited to see.

Sims: I mean, Bong Joon Ho’s follow-up to Parasite will come out in March. It’s a big sci-fi movie called Mickey 17. George Miller’s follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road, Furiosa, will come out in May. There are things like that, that are, you know, quote-unquote “IP” but are a little more auteur-driven movies that are probably a little weirder.

Kevin Costner is releasing two parts of some kind of gigantic Western saga that he’s, like, sinking his fortune into. And, you know, Jordan Peele is making a new movie. And, there’s another Joker movie, and, you know, that one, that went so well for the culture last time.

Li: Just can’t wait for the discourse. (Laughs.)

Sims: So there’s plenty of sort of big-scale stuff that I’m excited for. But, of course, the story of movies, especially every year, is like, there’s 20 projects you don’t know about yet, you know, that are on a smaller scale that are waiting to be discovered. Every year it’s the end of cinema. Every year, I don’t know, it kind of muddles through.

Rosin: Yeah. I feel like the category that you guys have resigned yourself to—like you’ve resigned yourself to IP, but weird IP.

Sims: Right, can we at least have fresh or interesting reboots and remakes and sequels? Yes.

Li: Yeah. I mean, reboots, remakes, sequels—they’ll exist for forever, right? But just, like, if they say something fresh, I’m on board. If they’re fun, I’m on board.

Rosin: Well, thank you guys for joining me today.

Li: Thank you.

Sims: Thank you so much for having us. Yeah.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Will Gordon, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

The moment I first laid eyes on the Sphere, from a cramped window seat on approach over the Las Vegas Strip, my airplane precipitously plunged what felt like between 90 and 300 feet. This was the variety of turbulence that makes people gasp and clutch their armrests, that threatens to pop open the overhead bins. It seemed a fitting welcome: The Sphere had already coaxed me into seat 26A on a flight partway across the country, and now it was pulling me toward its unmistakable, shimmering orb-ness with a final gravitational tug.

Thinking this way about a building is ridiculous, I know. But have you seen this thing? Quite literally, the Sphere is a large arena—a futuristic entertainment venue for concerts and other Vegas spectacles. But such a description undersells the Sphere’s ambitions. It is the architectural embodiment of ridiculousness, a monument to spectacle and to the exceedingly human condition of erecting bewildering edifices simply because we can. It cost $2.3 billion; it’s blanketed in 580,000 square feet of LED lights; it can transform its 366-foot-tall exterior into a gargantuan emoji that astronauts can supposedly see from space. This is no half dome and certainly not a rotunda. This is Sphere.

When I approached the Sphere on the ground, around dusk, the building awoke from its screen saver (an unpleasant advertisement for a Spider-Man video game) and began to emit a strange burbling noise. A semi-realistic animation of a womb-bound fetus appeared and spoke the words “This is not a rehearsal” before bursting into flames, flickering violently, and shape-shifting into the following series of images: a blinking eyeball, a thunderstorm, the ocean, some plants, the moon, more flames, all to the pounding drums and metallic guitar clanking of U2’s “Zoo Station.” Even in the context of the pulsing neon goat rodeo of the Vegas Strip, this was a sensory assault.

The kaleidoscopic display made a certain kind of sense, because the Sphere is itself many different things. It’s an arena, conceived by the Madison Square Garden Company in 2018, and home to an ongoing U2 residency. It’s a movie theater, too, like 42 and a half IMAX screens bolted together. (The filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has been screening Postcard From Earth, a documentary he made specifically for this curved megatron.) The Sphere is a new form of architecture, a billboard, a digital canvas for art, and it is a weenie—which, my colleague Ian Bogost informed me, is a term invented by Walt Disney to describe landmarks inside his theme parks that help orient visitors. Las Vegas is a city of weenies, and the Sphere is its most glamorous.

[Read: 1962 Las Vegas captured in a dazzling 16mm home movie]

But, most important, the Sphere is a screen. The first time I saw video footage of the Sphere in action—from the warm glow of the little screen I keep in my pocket to watch TikToks on—I was captivated, even disoriented. I cradled my phone and watched the Edge peck out the first arpeggiated notes of “Where the Streets Have No Name.” Out of pitch darkness, the Sphere’s interior transformed into the Nevada desert at dawn, the sun rising rapidly in time with the song’s swelling major-triad riff. A series of cumulus clouds billowed like a white flag, and I watched the LED sun bathe the jubilant crowd in golden light, filling the air-conditioned venue with an emulation of the great outdoors.

All day, every day, I am surrounded by screens. Screens that greedily divert my attention and mediate my daily life, work, and a great many relationships. I am tired of screens, even resentful of them. I often tell myself that I yearn for liberation—a pure experience of walking through the world with nothing standing between me and my distractible little eyes. And yet, watching videos of the Sphere’s luminescence dominate the intensely famous Irishmen onstage—watching its splendor turn the rockers into wee, leather-jacketed ants—I felt an irresistible desire to stand in front of it and experience digital oblivion for myself. I wanted to see if the Sphere could help me learn to love screens again.

There are many ways to get to the Sphere. Within the corridors of the Venetian hotel, you can follow ominous signs that simply say Sphere, with arrows pointing east, and never step outside. I would not advise this: To truly experience the Sphere, you must watch it grow closer. Especially at night, you can appreciate its true weenie-ness as it attracts crowds like moths with novelty adult-beverage cups. I watched a group of 10 Strip-weary couples standing agape in the middle of the road, phones out, blocking one lane of traffic, fixated on the pulsating curved structure a quarter mile away. The moment reminded me of the scene in Independence Day when the UFOs break through the clouds over cities across the globe, causing pedestrians to stop and gawk at the sky.

The science-fiction vibe is deliberate. According to James Dolan, the entertainment mogul who financed the Sphere, the inspiration for the building came from “The Veldt,” a 1950 short story by Ray Bradbury. In the story, a wealthy couple purchases a fully automated house with a special playroom for their kids. The room’s 30-foot-tall walls and ceiling are made of a crystalline screen that can read the children’s imaginations and project lifelike images. The children are eventually spoiled, even hypnotized by the comforts of this technology; when their father threatens to turn off the room for good, the children summon a pack of lions that emerges from the screen and devours the parents. A cautionary tale about a murderous entertainment center would seem like strange inspiration for a new venue, but the intention is clear: The Sphere, at least in the eyes of its creators, is intended to immerse, even consume, the spectator.

Though the Sphere’s marketing pitch doesn’t explicitly mention being mauled by big digital cats, I got the notion that at least part of the allure of coming to the Sphere is a desire to be overwhelmed. Reportedly, the building has calming “sensory rooms” for patrons who experience vertigo or find the pulsing light show to be too much. What the Sphere is selling isn’t all that deep: It’s a huge, loud concert room where you can witness rock gods play the hits and watch a building facade pulse, jiggle, melt, and transform into thousands of shimmering colors. A bit like a roller coaster, the Sphere offers the thrill of feeling a strong and, most essentially, new sensation that you can’t get anywhere else.

[Read: Virtual reality can leave you with an existential hangover]

All of this initially rubbed Willie Williams the wrong way. Williams, a stage designer who has served as U2’s creative director for 40 years, told me he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of the band taking up residency at a gimmicky Vegas arena. He didn’t want to cater to the building instead of constructing his own sets, and worried that the Sphere might overpower the band or make it sound worse. But U2 signed on to open the building with a months-long run. “This was entirely unprecedented territory for us,” Williams told me. “Not least because the building didn’t exist yet.”

Williams described a series of major technical challenges even after the Sphere was finished. The stage had no built-in lights to illuminate the band from behind. The sound system had a 100-millisecond delay—disorienting for a live audience that might clock the disconnect between what they’re hearing and what they’re seeing the musicians do. Then there was the screen. Despite the Sphere’s 16K resolution, Williams said the group couldn’t build any graphics at a higher resolution than 12K, and even this process was painstaking. The first time Williams’s team uploaded an animation for the Sphere, the file was so large that the building’s computers said it would take two weeks to render just 60 seconds of footage. (The show is roughly two hours long.)

Once the graphics appeared, Williams had to take special precautions to make sure the Sphere’s towering projections didn’t make audiences ill. “We had one animation—we called it the ‘mofo strobe’—where the entire sphere just strobes through a series of colors, and it became extremely clear absolutely immediately that we couldn’t do that to people,” he said, noting that the effect on spectators was “bilious.”

Walking into the arena at floor level is indeed a vertiginous experience. It is immediately clear that, despite its capacity, the Sphere is compact, intimate. I took my seat halfway up on the 100 level—about a quarter of the way toward the back of the arena—and still felt like I would be in spitting distance of the stage. Before me, the towering screen projected a fixed image that made it look like we were all inside some kind of ancient ruins. A DJ—part of U2’s warm-up act—came out and rode around the pit in a tiny neon car, spinning classic rock songs while double-fisting Baby Boomers anxiously tapped their feet. Like me, I could tell many of them had a hard time fixing their attention on anything while anticipating that the Edge and the Sphere might, at any second, snap into action and punch us in the teeth with a guitar riff.

[Read: U2’s political, unstoppable, grating cheerfulness]

When the lights finally dimmed, I saw no signs of queasiness in the audience of some 18,000 people. Instead, I noticed that the structure’s great power was its ability to compel nearly every human who stood before it to grab their phone and point it directly at the massive screen; it seems to exist for the express purpose of summoning other screens. When the band came out, a drumbeat shook the arena, and the Sphere’s display appeared to crack, revealing an ethereal halogen. I watched the Sphere appear to splinter and glow, not with my eyes or even my phone but from the glowing mosaic of hundreds of cameras capturing the moment all around me.

I don’t often take out my phone at concerts—actually, I’m one of those judgy snobs, rolling my eyes at point-and-shooters who choose to watch a show through a device rather than with their own face. My opinion, however, is irrelevant. Phones aren’t just a component of modern live music: They have arguably become the primary viewing lens of a performance. Documentation as a form of consumption is so embedded in concertgoing that it has a recursive quality. On YouTube, I’ve grown accustomed to watching phone footage of concerts, illuminated by the lights of thousands of other screens capturing the same home videos from different angles.

Occasionally the effect is more pronounced. For a moment this fall, my Instagram feed filled up with videos my friends took of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie—video upon video of joyful theatergoers filming a film, sometimes catching moments where a Jumbotron projection of Swift is seen behind Swift herself. The phrase for this phenomenon is the Droste effect: a surreal type of imagery where you can view a picture within a picture, nested within a picture.

U2’s Sphere show, which revolves around the 1991 album Achtung Baby, is Droste-ian to the extreme. Bono appeared to be performing less for the crowd and more for the Steadicams circling the stage, which would then project his stylized image something like 100 feet into the air for people to then capture on their own screen. I found this, initially, a little depressing. At one point in the show, the Sphere morphs into a rendering of the Vegas skyline so pristine, I could almost forget I was indoors. It’s a dazzling image, and yet it brings up a cognitive dissonance that’s hard to ignore: tens of thousands of people oohing over and videoing a re-creation of a city vista that is immediately available to their own eyes in non–virtual reality just outside the venue’s doors—not even 100 yards away. Such is the power of the Sphere; at the exact moment you ask yourself What exactly are we all doing here?, the building morphs into a Dali-esque rendering of Elvis, your brain floods with dopamine, and you lose your critical faculties.

[Read: The too-muchness of Bono]

I asked Williams what he thought about engineering a spectacle that feels explicitly designed to compel people to take out their phone and point it at the stage for two straight hours. At first he seemed to align with my thinking. People don’t sing as loudly at shows as they used to, he argued, because they’re distracted filming. For Bono’s recent one-man show in New York, the pair had decided to ban cellphone recording to achieve an intimate effect, but, working on the Sphere, Williams told me he came to embrace the phones-up experience. “The vast repository of the record of my work is shot by people I don’t know,” he said. “And so not only do they become participants but also collaborators and curators of my work.” He described the Sphere residency as perhaps an extreme version of what live music has evolved toward: A “gigantic group project to archive these shows, one where we are collaborating with the audience and building a body of evidence.”

His response was kind of beautiful and genuinely disarming. Fixating on what we’ve lost in our modern screenland means ignoring the joy that comes from sharing your experience with others. And it means ignoring that participatory feeling—a 21st-century exchange between musicians and concertgoers that is still so novel that neither side seems to know precisely what to make of it yet.

If you look around, you get glimpses of what this relationship might look like. In recent weeks, I’ve been watching footage of Fred Again, a British DJ whose live shows seamlessly blend found footage shot on smartphones with clips taken off of social media. During his shows, huge LED screens hover over the crowd, at times projecting a live video feed of the audience shot from above. It’s the Droste effect on steroids, and a beautiful rendering of the alchemy that makes his performances feel so alive—a blend of music and media, of art and artist. “There is an argument to be made that theirs is the real show,” Williams said of the audience-shot Sphere footage that’s piling up around the web. “Because the actual show—the performance—is fleeting. It only exists in the form of these small clips that were taken by people we’ll never meet.”

If the Sphere is the future of live entertainment, it’s not because some version of the building is going to pop up in your town so that legacy rock bands can tour with their greatest hits in 16K. In fact, the Sphere may not survive in Vegas. Last week, the company running the building reported a $98.4 million loss in just the past quarter, and its CFO resigned.

But the actual business is somewhat beside the point. The Sphere is a distillation of an evolving relationship among art, artist, and technology—somewhere between a warm embrace of and a final surrender to screens. It is an acknowledgment and maybe even a tribute to the ways in which our screens have become extensions of ourselves and the way that documentation via these screens has become its own form of consumption and participation. Seeing is believing, but what the Sphere suggests is that documenting has become inextricable from living.

I wanted to be cynical about the Sphere and all it represents—our phones as appendages, screens as a mediated form of experiencing the world. There’s plenty to dislike about the thing—the impersonal flashiness of it all, its $30 tequila sodas, the likely staggering electricity bills. But it is also my solemn duty to report to you that the Sphere slaps, much in the same way that, say, the Super Bowl slaps. It’s gaudy, overly commercialized, and cool as hell: a brand-new, non-pharmaceutical sensory experience.

I waited all night to witness the set piece that brought me here. As the first notes of “Where the Streets Have No Name” rang out, my seatmate, a 60-something Londoner I’d met minutes before, leaned over in my direction. He’d gone to his first concert, he told me, almost exactly 43 years ago to the day—an intimate show at the University of Exeter by the same band standing onstage in front of us. His face was lit by the soft glow of his camera screen, and I noticed his eyes welling up. I looked around and saw the same thing everywhere: Behind all those screens was a sea of glassy eyes and joyful smiles. I leaned over to ask whom he was recording the concert for. “For me,” he said. “To remember how far the both of us have come.” He flashed a smile and turned back to the show. Then, I couldn’t help it. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and hit the little red button to record.

When Saturday Night Live announced that Timothée Chalamet would be hosting on November 11, it looked like an act of optimism. Up until then, the show had dodged the Screen Actors Guild–strike rules against promotion this season by bringing on either hosts with nothing to sell (the alum Pete Davidson) or artists whose work didn’t fall under the contract in question (the musician Bad Bunny and the comedian Nate Bargatze).

But Chalamet was different. If the strike had gone on, Chalamet would’ve appeared with a chocolate-making proverbial elephant hanging out in the room. In December he has a big studio movie coming out, the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prequel musical, Wonka, which is exactly the kind of film actors hit up SNL to shill.

Last week, however, the actors reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the strike officially ended on Thursday. So when Chalamet took the stage last night for his monologue, it was a celebration that doubled as a return to business as usual. He wasted no time, reminding the audience not only that they can buy tickets for Wonka, which is out December 15, but also that he can sing and twirl well enough to play the famed character from Roald Dahl’s book.

“Now the strike is over,” he began, as the twinkly sounds of the Wonka-theme “Pure Imagination” kicked in. “It’s like we’re all returning to this magical world where actors can once again talk about their projects.” As he sang, he amended the lyrics: “Come with me, and you’ll be in a world of shameless self-promotion.” He cracked jokes about the union’s battle for protections against artificial intelligence. “You know, after spending 118 days thinking about AI, it is so refreshing to be here amongst real human beings,” he said, making a woman in the audience giggle as he took a seat next to her and commented on how she smelled “great.”

For hosts on SNL, “shameless self-promotion” is usually the name of the game. An actor takes the gig to coincide with a movie premiere or an awards run. Sure, they get to show off their comic chops, but there’s a purpose behind it—a purpose that had been mostly missing from the first three episodes of the current season. To be clear, there was something almost quaint and pleasant about a run of hosts who were sort of just … there to be there (though Bad Bunny did have a new album out). Last night was a return to normalcy for SNL, and a game of catch-up. Chalamet had to both cheer on his fellow union members and launch what was essentially a marketing campaign that was a little behind schedule.

The Wonka-themed “old-timey stuff,” as defined by the cast member Marcello Hernandez, was quickly dispensed, and Chalamet continued the night signaling that he would be a younger, hipper Willy Wonka than Gene Wilder before him. With Hernandez, he launched into a furious rap about having a “baby face” that featured the chorus, “I’ve got a baby face, but my hips don’t lie / say I’m a bad kid, bitch, I’m a bad guy.”

Music was a theme of the night—but not exactly the music you’d expect from Willy Wonka. It was clear from the shift during the monologue that Chalamet is more comfortable rapping than crooning, even if the show did write him a new equine ode for a sketch dedicated to a dystopian “Giant Horse,” a follow-up to his “Tiny Horse” ballad from 2020.  

Immediately, Chalamet reprised his popular character from his previous appearance on SNL, the Gen Z rap star named $mokecheddathaassgetta, a twerp with pink hair and no sense of history. The character showed up on a sketch titled “Museum of Hip-Hop Panel,” where the performance of his song “Cling Cling Cling” got him spanked by Kenan Thompson playing Cornel West. Chalamet, whose very own high-school rap about statistics has gone viral, is at ease playing the role of insolent youngster, capturing the bratty aesthetics of a clueless TikToker who thinks he can spit bars.

Later on, Chalamet swayed his hips in another sketch that defined him as a youth whisperer. He portrayed the queer pop star Troye Sivan as a “sleep demon” who infected the brain of a straight woman played by Sarah Sherman. He received squeals from the crowd as he showed off his “tiny little red undies.” It was a bit that might have been hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t familiar with Sivan’s sultry videos, but it nonetheless offered a picture of Chalamet as someone down to try trendy “choreo.”

Now that Chalamet actually can promote Wonka, he seems to be aware of the challenge he’s going to face in that role. He’s in a huge splashy movie aimed at children, based on a property that feels staid and overdone. He’s finally free to talk about it, but he has to also reassure his fanbase: Don’t worry. He’s still cool.

One of the great promises of artificial intelligence is that it will open new frontiers of creative expression—but so far, it is most famous for impersonating the artists we already have. In music, machine learning has made headlines for replicating Drake—our most algorithmic star already—and for plopping John Lennon into an overproduced modern rock song. None of these efforts has sounded exactly right, exactly un-creepy. They’re close enough to “accurate” to startle, yet far enough away to suggest what would be lost were AI to render the human voice obsolete.

Another trend has felt like a response: As machines have come closer to sounding like us, we have come closer to sounding like them. Musicians have costumed themselves into robots for a long time—first as a sci-fi lark, with the vocoder in the 1970s, and then for all sorts of expressive chaos, with Auto-Tune in the 21st century. The new album by PinkPantheress, one of Gen Z’s most exciting new stars, encapsulates another, and ascendant, aesthetic of intelligent artificiality: blank cheer. It’s the sound of a deeply feeling person coveting the callousness of a computer.

A 22-year-old Brit who has thus far kept her name private, PinkPantheress blinked into public consciousness in early 2021, when so many of us felt that our brains were trapped in digital ether. The songs she posted to SoundCloud and TikTok used sampled loops of garage as well as drum and bass, frenzied styles of dance music that peaked in the ’90s and early 2000s. But though the tempo of her music was fast, the vibe was placid. PinkPantheress sang in a sweet, absent-minded vocal tone that, to my ear, recalled text-to-speech technology. If you were feeling anxious or twitchy, she was like a helper bot, matching your pulse while calming your neurons.

Earlier this year, she landed a No. 3 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, called “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2.” The track featured another hot newcomer, the Bronx rapper Ice Spice, and their team-up seemed to confirm that PinkPantheress’s sound fit a broader cultural mood. Exemplifying a style of hip-hop known as drill, Ice Spice’s songs pair earthquaking beats with her cool, monotonous flow. “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2” also drew from another buzzy rap subgenre, Jersey club, whose rhythms both pulsate and glide, Energizer Bunny–style.

PinkPantheress’s debut album, Heaven Knows, is a set-it-and-forget-it experience, filling the air with prettiness and repressed yearning. Employing major-label resources—the producer Greg Kurstin, an ally of Adele and Kelly Clarkson, worked on a few tracks—PinkPantheress brings in bursts of heavy metal (a guitar solo on the opener, “Another Life”), ’60s pop (“True Romance”), and Timbaland-style R&B (“Feelings”). But for the most part, these new ingredients act like colors in a tie-dye machine, enriching a predictable swirl. PinkPantheress’s voice, flat and kind, laminates all it touches.

Oddly enough, that voice mostly sings about death. The album’s opening stanza addresses a lifeless lover: “Can you please wake up, babe? / Now you’re scaring me … Guess you died today?” Her delivery gives no indication of her distress, and the chorus is an aural shrug (“Guess I’ll see you in another life”). On another track, “Ophelia,” she’s the one who’s meeting her demise, to cutesy harp picking. Other songs seem to be about having a crush, but her lyrics suggest stalkerish intensity and debilitating heartbreak. “I based my life on your face, your everything,” she sings on “Blue,” as electronic manipulation turns the edge of her syllables glitchy and lumpen.

These gothic themes help explain what PinkPantheress’s art is really up to. Like a lot of members of her generation, she grew up listening to emo bands such as My Chemical Romance, which sang of sadness and anger in grand, dramatic style. But also like a lot of members of her generation, she’s fascinated by mainstream kitsch of the early 2000s: mall fashions, formulaic pop. In a recent TikTok, she joked about how she’d undergone a makeover from emo to basic. Her music fits that idea—she’s disguising, disassociating from, pain. The mood is light, but the poignance is heavy: She can’t escape from having a soul.

Similar impulses seem to be playing out all over culture lately. The hyperpop pioneer Hannah Diamond just put out an incredibly catchy album, Perfect Picture, whose songs are stiff in a self-aware way; Diamond pines to be a pixel on a screen, or a poster on the wall. A 2023 single by Grimes, a clear predecessor of PinkPantheress, is self-explanatorily called “I Wanna Be Software.” Then there’s Barbie, whose soundtrack features the gorgeous PinkPantheress song “Angel.” The movie is about objects yearning to be human, but the cultural phenomenon it sparked is about humans yearning to be objects. As synthetic forces continue to compete with the living, plastic fantasies will offer only more comfort.

No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.

But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination. Donald Trump’s lead appears prohibitive, but no candidate has ever won his party’s nomination while facing four (so far) separate felony indictments. (Then again, no one has ever lost his party’s nomination while facing four separate felony indictments either.) Ron DeSantis is still barely clinging to his position as the leading challenger to Trump, but Nikki Haley has closed most of the distance with him—though the title seems ever more meaningless. Behind them is a large field of Republicans who are hoping for a lucky break, a Trump collapse, a VP nomination, or maybe just some fun travel and a cable-news contract down the road.

[David A. Graham: The first debate is Ramaswamy and the rest]

On the other side, Democratic hesitations about a second Joe Biden term have mostly dissolved into resignation that he’s running, but Representative Dean Phillips is making a last-ditch effort to offer a younger alternative. Biden’s age and the generally lukewarm feeling among some voters have ensured that a decent-size shadow field still lingers, just waiting in case Biden bows out for some reason.

Behind all of this, the possibility of a serious third-party bid, led by either No Labels or some other group, continues to linger; Cornel West is running, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has leapt from the Democratic primary to an independent campaign. It adds up to a race that is simple on the surface but strangely confusing just below it. This guide to the candidates—who’s in, who’s out, and who’s somewhere in between—serves as a road map to navigate that. It will be updated as the campaign develops, so check in regularly.

REPUBLICANS (Joe Raedle / Getty) Donald Trump

Who is he?
You know him and you love him. Or hate him. Probably not much in between.

Is he running?
Yes. Trump announced his bid to return to the White House at Mar-a-Lago in November 2022.

Why does he want to run?
Revenge, boredom, rivalry, fear of prosecution, long-standing psychological hang-ups.

[Read: Trump begins the ‘retribution’ tour]

Who wants him to run?
A big tranche of the GOP was always fully behind Trump, and as his rivals have failed to gain much traction, he's consolidated many of the rest and built an all-but-prohibitive lead.

Can he win the nomination?
Yes, and he very likely will.

What else do we know?
More than we could possibly want to.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Ron DeSantis

Who is he?
The second-term governor of Florida, DeSantis was previously a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run in a train wreck of an appearance with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces on May 24.

Why does he want to run?
DeSantis offers a synthesis of Trump-style culture warring and bullying and the conservative politics of the early-2010s Republican Party.

Who wants him to run?
From the advent of his campaign, DeSantis presented the prospect of a candidate with Trump’s policies but no Trump. But his fading polling suggests that not many Republicans are interested.

[From the March 2023 issue: How did America’s weirdest, most freedom-obsessed state fall for an authoritarian governor?]

Can he win the nomination?
A better question these days: Can he hold on to take honorary silver in the race?

(Roy Rochlin / Getty) Nikki Haley

Who is she?
Haley, the daughter of immigrants, was governor of South Carolina and then ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

Is she running?
Yes. She announced her campaign on February 14, saying, “Time for a new generation.”

Why does she want to run?
Haley has tried to steer a path that distances herself from Trump—pointing out his unpopularity—without openly attacking him. She may also be the top foreign-policy hawk in the field.

[Sarah Isgur: What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina]

Who wants her to run? Haley is on the rise now, and seems to be challenging DeSantis for status as the top Trump alternative—but still lags far behind Trump himself.

Can she win the nomination?
Dubious.

(Dylan Hollingsworth / Bloomberg / Getty) Vivek Ramaswamy

Who is he?
A 38-year-old biotech millionaire with a sparkling résumé (Harvard, then Yale Law, where he became friends with Senator J. D. Vance), Ramaswamy has recently become prominent as a crusader against “wokeism” and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on February 21.

Why does he want to run?
“We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis,” Ramaswamy said in a somewhat-hectoring launch video. “Faith, patriotism, and hard work have disappeared, only to be replaced by new secular religions like COVIDism, climatism, and gender ideology.”

Who wants him to run?
That remains a bit unclear—though his Republican rivals all seem to viscerally detest him. Ramaswamy had a summer surge when he was a new flavor, but it’s subsided as people have gotten to know and, apparently, dislike him.

Can he win the nomination?
Seems unlikely. Ramaswamy broke out of the ranks of oddballs to become a mildly formidable contender, but his slick shtick and questionable pronouncements have dragged him down.

(Alex Wong / Getty) Asa Hutchinson

Who is he?
Hutchinson, the formerly longtime member of Congress, just finished a stint as governor of Arkansas.

Is he running?
Yes. Hutchinson announced on April 2 that he is running. It would have been funnier to announce a day earlier, though.

Why does he want to run?
At one time, Hutchinson was a right-wing Republican—he was one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment—but as the party has changed, he finds himself closer to the center. He’s been very critical of Trump, saying that Trump disqualified himself with his attempts to steal the 2020 election. Hutchinson is also unique in the field for having called on Trump to drop out over his indictment in New York.

Who wants him to run?
Old-school, very conservative Republicans who also detest Trump.

Can he win the nomination?
No.

(David Becker / The Washington Post / Getty) Tim Scott

Who is he?
A South Carolinian, Scott is the only Black Republican senator.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign in North Charleston, South Carolina, on May 22.

Why does he want to run?
Unlike some of the others on this list, Scott doesn’t telegraph his ambition quite so plainly, but he’s built a record as a solid Republican. He was aligned with Trump, but never sycophantically attached.

Who wants him to run?
Scott’s Senate colleagues adore him. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, is his first highish-profile endorsement. As DeSantis stumbles, he’s gotten some attention as a possible likable Trump alternative.

Can he win the nomination?
Doesn’t look like it. Scott has always been solidly in the second tier, but he’s running out of time to ever get anywhere.

(Megan Varner / Getty) Mike Pence

Who is he?
The former vice president, he also served as the governor of Indiana and a U.S. representative.

Is he running?
No! He shocked a Las Vegas audience by dropping out on October 28. He’d been running since June 7.

Why did he want to run?
Pence has long harbored White House dreams, and he has a strong conservative-Christian political agenda. As the campaign went on, he slowly began to develop a sharper critique of Trump while still awkwardly celebrating the accomplishments of the administration in which he served.

Who wanted him to run?
Conservative Christians and rabbit lovers, but not very many people overall.

[Read: Nobody likes Mike Pence]

Could he have won the nomination?
It wasn’t in the cards.

(Ida Mae Astute / Getty) Chris Christie

Who is he?
What a journey this guy has had, from U.S. attorney to respected governor of New Jersey to traffic-jam laughingstock to Trump sidekick to Trump critic. Whew.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on June 6 in New Hampshire.

Why does he want to run?
Anyone who runs for president once and loses wants to run again—especially if he thinks the guy who beat him is an idiot, as Christie clearly thinks about Trump. Moreover, he seems agitated to see other Republicans trying to run without criticizing Trump.

Who wants him to run?
Trump-skeptical donors, liberal pundits.

Can he win the nomination?
Highly doubtful.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Doug Burgum

Who is he?
Do you even pay attention to politics? Nah, just kidding. A self-made software billionaire, Burgum is serving his second term as the governor of North Dakota.

Is he running?
Apparently! He formally
launched his campaign on June 7 in Fargo.

Why does he want to run?
It’s tough to tell. His campaign-announcement video focuses so much on North Dakota that it seems more like a reelection push. He told a state newspaper that he thinks the “silent majority” of Americans wants candidates who aren’t on the extremes. (A wealthy outsider targeting the silent majority? Where have we heard that before?) He also really wants more domestic oil production.

Who wants him to run?
Lots of people expected a governor from the Dakotas to be a candidate in 2024, but they were looking at Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Burgum is very popular at home—he won more than three-quarters of the vote in 2020—but that still amounts to fewer people than the population of Toledo, Ohio.

Can he win the nomination?
“There’s a value to being underestimated all the time,” he has said. “That’s a competitive advantage.” But it’s even better to have a chance, which he doesn’t.

What else do we know?
He’s giving people $20 gift cards in return for donating to his campaign.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Will Hurd

Who is he?
A former CIA officer, Hurd served three terms in the House, representing a San Antonio–area district.

Is he running?
No. Hurd, who announced his campaign on June 22, dropped out on October 9 and endorsed Nikki Haley.

Why did he want to run?
Hurd said he had “commonsense” ideas and was “pissed” that elected officials are dividing Americans. He’s also been an outspoken Trump critic.

Who wanted him to run?
As a moderate, youngish Black Republican and someone who cares about defense, he is the sort of candidate whom the party establishment seemed to desire after the now-discarded 2012 GOP autopsy.

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

(Mandel Ngan / Getty) Francis Suarez

Who is he?
Suarez is the popular second-term mayor of Miami and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Is he running?
No. He suspended his campaign on August 29, less than three months after his June 15 entry.

Why did he want to run?
Suarez touted his youth—he’s 45—and said in October 2022, “I’m someone who believes in a positive aspirational message. I’m someone who has a track record of success and a formula for success.”

Who wanted him to run?
Is there really room for another moderate-ish Republican in the race? Apparently not! Despite dabbling in fundraising shenanigans, Suarez failed to make the first Republican debate (or any other splash).

Could he have won the nomination?
No way.

(Drew Angerer / Getty) Larry Hogan

Who is he?
Hogan left office this year, after serving two terms as governor of Maryland.

Is he running?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Hogan ruled himself out of the GOP race on March 5, saying he was worried it would help Trump win the nomination, but he is now rumored as a potential No Labels candidate, even though such a run might hand the presidency to … Trump.

Why does he want to run?
Hogan has argued that his experience of governing a very blue state as a Republican is a model: “We’ve been really successful outside of Washington, where everything appears to be broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction.”

Who wants him to run?
Dead-ender centrists.

Could he win the nomination?
No.

(John Locher / AP) Chris Sununu

Who is he?
The governor of New Hampshire, he is the little brother of former Senator John E. Sununu and the son of former White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu.

Is he running?
No. On June 5, after weighing a campaign, he announced that he would not run. Warning about the dangers of a Trump reprise, he said, “Every candidate needs to understand the responsibility of getting out and getting out quickly if it’s not working.” Points for taking his own advice!

Why did he want to run?
Sununu seems disgusted by a lot of Washington politics and saw his success in New Hampshire, a purple-blue state, as a model for small-government conservatism. He is also a prominent Trump critic.

Who wanted him to run?
Trump-skeptical Republicans, old-school conservatives.

Could he have won the nomination?
No.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Mike Pompeo

Who is he?
Pompeo, a former member of Congress, led the CIA and was secretary of state under Trump.

Is he running?
No. On April 14, Pompeo announced that he wasn’t running. “This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again,” he said.

Why did he want to run?
Pompeo has always been ambitious, and he seems to think he can combine MAGA proximity with a hawkish foreign-policy approach.

Who wanted him to run?
That’s not entirely clear.

Could he have won the nomination?
Maybe, but probably not.

(Misha Friedman / Getty) Glenn Youngkin

Who is he?
Youngkin, the former CEO of the private-equity Carlyle Group, was elected governor of Virginia in 2021.

Is he running?
No. He spent much of 2023 refusing to categorically rule out a race but not quite committing. As Ron DeSantis’s Trump-alternative glow dimmed, Youngkin seemed to be hoping that Republican success in off-year Virginia legislative elections would give him a boost. After Democrats won control of both the state’s legislative chambers, however, he said he was “not going anywhere.”

Why did he want to run?
Youngkin is a bit of a cipher; he ran for governor largely on education issues, and has sought to tighten abortion laws in Virginia, but the legislative defeat makes that unlikely.

Who wanted him to run?
Rupert Murdoch, reportedly, as well as other wealthy, business-friendly Republican figures.

Could he have won the nomination?
Certainly not without running, and almost certainly not if he did.

(Sam Wolfe / Bloomberg / Getty) Mike Rogers

Who is he?
Rogers is a congressman from Alabam—wait, no, sorry, that’s the other Representative Mike Rogers. This one is from Michigan and retired in 2015. He was previously an FBI agent and was head of the Intelligence Committee while on Capitol Hill.

Is he running?
No. He thought about it but announced in late August that he would run for U.S. Senate instead.

Why did he want to run?
He laid out some unassailably broad ideas for a campaign in an interview with Fox News, including a focus on innovation and civic education, but it’s hard to tell what exactly the goal is here. “This is not a vanity project for me,” he added, which, okay, sure.

Who wanted him to run?
It’s not clear that anyone even noticed he was running.

Could he have won the nomination?
Nope.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Larry Elder

Who is he?
A longtime conservative radio host and columnist, he ran as a Republican in the unsuccessful 2021 attempt to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Is he running?
Not anymore. Elder announced his campaign on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show on April 20, but then disappeared without a trace. On October 27, he dropped out and endorsed Trump.

Why did he want to run?
Glad you asked! “America is in decline, but this decline is not inevitable,” he tweeted. “We can enter a new American Golden Age, but we must choose a leader who can bring us there. That’s why I’m running for President.” We don’t have any idea what that means either.

Who wanted him to run?
Practically no one.

Could he have won the nomination?
Absolutely not.

(Todd Williamson / Getty) Rick Perry

Who is he?
Perry was a three-term governor of Texas before serving as energy secretary under Donald Trump. He’s also run for president three times: in 2012, 2016, and … I forget the third one. Oops.

Is he running?
Oh, right! The third one is 2024, maybe. He told CNN in May that he’s considering a run. Nothing’s been heard since. We’ll say no.

Why did he want to run?
He didn’t say, but he’s struggled to articulate much of a compelling case to Republican voters beyond the fact that he’s from Texas, he looks good in a suit, and he wants to be president, gosh darn it.

Who wanted him to run?
Probably no one. As Mike Pompeo already discovered, there wasn’t much of a market for a run-of-the-mill former Trump Cabinet member in the primary—especially one who had such a forgettable turn as secretary, mostly remembered for being dragged peripherally into both the first Trump impeachment and election subversion.

Could he have won the nomination?
The third time wouldn’t have been a charm.

(Joe Raedle / Getty) Rick Scott

Who is he?
Before his current gig as a U.S. senator from Florida, Scott was governor and chief executive of a health-care company that committed massive Medicare fraud.

Is he running?
The New York Times says he’s considering it, though an aide said Scott is running for reelection to the Senate. He’d be the fourth Floridian in the race.

Why does he want to run?
A Scott campaign would raise a fascinating question: What if you took Trump’s pose and ideology but removed all the charisma and, instead of promising to protect popular entitlement programs, aimed to demolish them?

Who wants him to run?
Not Mitch McConnell.

Can he win the nomination?
lol

DEMOCRATS (Joshua Roberts / Getty) Joe Biden

Who is he?
After decades of trying, Biden is the president of the United States.

Is he running?
Yes. Biden formally announced his run on April 25.

Why does he want to run?
Biden’s slogan is apparently “Let’s finish the job.” He centered his launch video on the theme of freedom, but underlying all of this is his apparent belief that he may be the only person who can defeat Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup.

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Who wants him to run?
There’s the catch. Some prominent Democrats support his bid for a second term, but voters have consistently told pollsters that they don’t want him to run again.

Can he win the nomination?
Barring unforeseen catastrophe, yes. No incumbent president has lost the nomination in the modern era, and Biden has pushed through changes to the Democratic-primary process that make him an even more prohibitive favorite.

What else do we know?
Biden is already the oldest person to be elected president and to serve as president, so a second term would set more records.

(Joshua Roberts / Getty) Cenk Uygur

Who is he?
A pundit from the party’s left flank, Uygur is probably best know for his The Young Turks network. He was briefly an MSNBC personality and also ran for Congress in California in 2020.

Is he running?
Apparently. He announced his plans on October 11.

Why does he want to run?
Uygur believes that Biden will lose the 2024 election and thus wants to force him to withdraw. “I’m going to do whatever I can to help him decide that this is not the right path,” he told Semafor’s Dave Weigel. “If he retires now, he’s a hero: He beat Trump, he did a good job of being a steward of the economy. If he doesn’t, he loses to Trump, and he’s the villain of the story.”

[Read: The case for a primary challenge to Joe Biden]

Who wants him to run?
We’ll see if anyone does. Uygur has a sizable audience—his YouTube channel has millions of subscribers—but that doesn’t mean he has any real presidential constituency.

Can he win the nomination?
No, and he has a deeper problem: He is ineligible to serve, because he was born in Turkey. This isn’t an interesting nuance of the law, as with misguided questions about Ted Cruz’s or John McCain’s eligibility, or disinformation, as with Barack Obama. Uygur is just not a natural-born citizen. He claims he’ll take the matter to the Supreme Court and win in a “slam dunk.” As Biden would say, if he were willing to give Uygur any attention: Lots of luck in your senior year.

(Bill Clark / Getty) Dean Phillips

Who is he?
Phillips, a mildly unorthodox and interesting figure, is a Minnesota moderate serving his third term in the House.

Is he running?
Yes. He launched his campaign October 27 in New Hampshire. That follows a Hamlet act to make Mario Cuomo proud—in July, he said he was considering it; in August, he said he was unlikely to run but would encourage other Democrats to do so; then, after finding no other Democrats willing to run, he said he was not ruling it out.

Why does he want to run?
In an in-depth profile by my colleague Tim Alberta, Phillips said he’s most concerned about beating Trump. “Look, just because [Biden’s] old, that’s not a disqualifier,” Phillips said. “But being old, in decline, and having numbers that are clearly moving in the wrong direction? It’s getting to red-alert kind of stuff.” He added: “Someone had to do this. It just was so self-evident.”

Who wants him to run?
Phillips told Alberta that even some Biden allies privately encouraged him to run—but no one will say it openly. Though many Democrats feel Biden is too old, that doesn’t mean that they’re willing to openly back a challenger, especially a little-known one, or that Phillips can overcome the structural barriers to beating an incumbent in a primary. There’s a reason Phillips couldn’t draft another Democrat to run.

Can he win the nomination?
Almost certainly not in 2024—even if Biden leaves the race.

What else do we know?
His grandmother was “Dear Abby,” and he made a fortune running the Talenti gelato company.

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Kamala Harris

Who is she?
Harris is the vice president of the United States.

Is she running?
No, but if Biden were to bow out, she’d be the immediate favorite.

Why does she want to run?
One problem with her 2020 presidential campaign was the lack of a clear answer to this question. Perhaps running on the Biden-Harris legacy would help fill in the blank.

Who wants her to run?
Some Democrats are excited about the prospect of nominating a woman of color, but generally Harris’s struggles as a candidate and in defining a role for herself (in the admittedly impossible position of VP) have resulted in nervousness about her as a standard-bearer.

Can she win the nomination?
Not right now.

(Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty) Pete Buttigieg

Who is he?
Mayor Pete is Secretary Pete now, overseeing the Department of Transportation.

Is he running?
No, but he would also be a likely candidate if Biden stepped away.

Why does he want to run?
Just as he was four years ago, Buttigieg is a young, ambitious politician with a moderate, technocratic vision of government.

Who wants him to run?
Buttigieg’s fans are passionate, and Biden showed that moderates remain a force in the party.

Can he win the nomination?
Not at this moment.

(Scott Olson / Getty) Bernie Sanders

Who is he?
The senator from Vermont is changeless, ageless, ever the same.

Is he running?
No, but if Biden dropped out, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t seriously consider another go. A top adviser even says so.

Why does he want to run?
Sanders still wants to tax billionaires, level the economic playing field, and push a left-wing platform.

Who wants him to run?
Sanders continues to have the strong support of a large portion of the Democratic electorate, especially younger voters.

Can he win the nomination?
Two consecutive tries have shown that he’s formidable, but can’t close. Maybe the third time’s the charm?

(Chip Somodevilla / Getty) Gretchen Whitmer

Who is she?
Whitmer cruised to a second term as governor of Michigan in 2022.

Is she running?
No.

Why would she want to run?
It’s a little early to know, but her reelection campaign focused on abortion rights.

Who wants her to run?
Whitmer would check a lot of boxes for Democrats. She’s a fresh face, she’s a woman, and she’s proved she can win in the upper Midwest against a MAGA candidate.

Can she win the nomination?
Not if she isn’t running.

(Lucas Jackson / Reuters) Marianne Williamson

Who is she?
If you don’t know Williamson from her popular writing on spirituality, then you surely remember her somewhat woo-woo Democratic bid in 2020.

Is she running?
Supposedly. Williamson announced her campaign on March 4 in D.C., but the only peeps from her have involved staff turnover.

Why does she want to run?
“It is our job to create a vision of justice and love that is so powerful that it will override the forces of hatred and injustice and fear,” she said at her campaign launch. She has also said that she wants to give voters a choice: “The question I ask myself is not ‘What is my path to victory?’ My question is ‘What is my path to radical truth-telling?’ There are some things that need to be said in this country.”

Who wants her to run?
Williamson has her fans, but she doesn’t have a clear political constituency.

Can she win the nomination?
Nah.

(Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) J. B. Pritzker

Who is he?
The governor of Illinois is both a scion of a wealthy family and a “nomadic warrior.”

Is he running?
No.

Why does he want to run?
After years of unfulfilled interest in elected office, Pritzker has established himself as a muscular proponent of progressivism in a Democratic stronghold.

Who wants him to run?
Improbably for a billionaire, Pritzker has become a darling of the Sanders-style left, as well as a memelord.

Can he win the nomination?
Not now.

THIRD-PARTY AND INDEPENDENT (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Getty) Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Who is he?
The son of a presidential candidate, the nephew of another, and the nephew of a president, Kennedy is a longtime environmental activist and also a chronic crank.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his run for the Democratic nomination on April 19, but on October 9 he dropped out of that race to run as an independent.

Why does he want to run?
Running for president is a family tradition. His campaign is arranged around his esoteric combination of left-wing interests (the environment, drug prices) and right-wing causes (vaccine skepticism, anger about social-media “deplatforming”), but tending toward extremely dark places.

Who wants him to run?
Soon after he announced his campaign, Kennedy reached double digits in polls against Biden—a sign of dissatisfaction with the president and of Kennedy’s name recognition. It has since become clear that Democratic voters are not interested in anti-Semitic kookery, though some other fringe elements might be.

Can he win?
No. The relevant question is whether a third-party candidacy would help Biden, Trump, or neither. The short answer is no one knows, but he very well might boost the president’s chances.

(Tom Williams / Getty) Joe Manchin

Who is he?
A Democratic U.S. senator and former governor of West Virginia, he was the pivotal centrist vote for the first two years of Joe Biden’s term. I’ve described him as “a middle-of-the-road guy with good electoral instincts, decent intentions, and bad ideas.”

Is he running?
It’s very hard to tell how serious he is. He has visited Iowa, and is being courted by No Labels, the nonpartisan centrist organization, to carry its banner. He’s shown no signs of running, and would stand no chance, in the Democratic primary.

Why does he want to run?
Manchin would arguably have less power as a third-party president than he does as a crucial swing senator, but he faces perhaps the hardest reelection campaign of his life in 2024, as the last Democrat standing in a now solidly Republican state. He also periodically seems personally piqued at Biden and the Democrats over slights perceived or real.

Who wants him to run?
No Labels would love to have someone like him, a high-profile figure who’s willing to buck his party and has policies that would appeal to voters from either party. It’s hard to imagine he’d have much of an organic base of support, but Democrats are terrified he’d siphon off enough votes to hand Trump or another Republican the win in a three-way race.

Can he win?
“Make no mistake, I will win any race I enter,” he said in April. If that is true, do not expect to see him in the presidential race.

(Frederick M. Brown / Getty) Cornel West

Who is he?
West is a philosopher, a theologian, a professor, a preacher, a gadfly, a progressive activist, an actor, a spoken-word recording artist, an author … and we’re probably missing a few.

Is he running?
Yes. He announced his campaign on the People’s Party ticket on June 5. Soon thereafter he switched to the Green Party, which might have gotten him the best ballot access. But as of October, he’s running as an independent.

Why does he want to run?
“In these bleak times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States,” he said in his announcement video. West is a fierce leftist who has described Trump as a “neofascist” and Biden as a “milquetoast neoliberal.”

Who wants him to run?
West was a high-profile backer of Bernie Sanders, and it’s easy to imagine him winning over some of Sanders’s fervent fans. Now that he is running as an independent, he will likely have trouble building a base of his own.

Can he win?
Let’s hear from Brother West: “Do we have what it takes? We shall see,” he said. “But some of us are going to go down fighting, go down swinging, with style and a smile.” Sounds like a no, but it should be a lively, entertaining campaign.

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For years, Ivanka Trump has meticulously cultivated her public image. Today, compelled to testify in the Trump Organization’s civil trial, she was thrust back into the spotlight against her will.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Republicans can’t figure it out. What if psychedelics’ hallucinations are just a side effect? When anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic Rashida Tlaib’s inflammatory language

Dispositional Opposites

A procession of Trump family members, including the former president himself, have testified in a New York civil trial about the Trump Organization’s financial practices. Today, Ivanka, Trump’s oldest daughter, who has long tried to thread the needle between supporting her family and keeping her own image separate from that of her father, took the stand.

In public, Ivanka is her father’s dispositional opposite. In sharp contrast to Trump’s courtroom antics earlier this week—he hurled insults at Attorney General Letitia James and called the proceedings “a very unfair trial”—she answered lawyers’ questions with characteristic polish (and sometimes even a smile, per courtroom reports). But both father and daughter are masters at managing their images—Trump with brash force, and Ivanka with tight control. In a 2019 profile, my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro wrote that “the founding myth of Ivanka Trump is that she is a ‘moderating force.’” For years, Ivanka has carefully protected her public presence, sometimes using her connection to her father to her advantage while at others trying to insulate her own reputation. Ivanka is skilled at toggling the release valves of information as she sees fit. Of Ivanka’s approach during Trump’s first campaign, Plott Calabro wrote, “By saying nothing to anyone, Ivanka could be everything to everyone.” But now, Ivanka is being compelled by law to say something to the courtroom—and to an interested public.

This is not the first time Ivanka has faced an appraisal of her father’s actions: In 2022, she testified to a House panel about the January 6 attack without being subpoenaed, telling lawmakers that she agreed there hadn’t been enough evidence of fraud to overturn the election. This time, Ivanka testified only reluctantly. An appeals court dismissed her as a defendant in the case in June, and her attorney (she hired her own lawyer separate from her father’s team) has been trying to get her out of taking the stand, saying that, as a Florida resident with young children, she would suffer “undue hardship” if she had to appear in court in New York during the school week. But the motion was denied. In his initial demand that Ivanka testify, Judge Arthur Engoron said that she had “clearly availed herself of the privilege of doing business in New York,” and thus was required to testify there.

Ivanka’s attempts to avoid taking the stand suggest that she’s aware of the downsides of getting pulled back into the story of her father’s scandals. Ivanka “has absolutely nothing to gain” from testifying, Caroline Polisi, a white-collar defense lawyer and lecturer at Columbia Law School, told me. That’s evidenced by her many attempts to evade doing so, Polisi added. In court today, Ivanka contended that she had not been privy to her father’s personal financial statements, which are key to the case. (Lawyers for Donald and Ivanka Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment, though Christopher Kise, a lawyer for Donald Trump, apparently said of his client on Monday that “in 33 years, I have never had a witness testify better.”)

Ivanka stepped away from her position at the Trump Organization in 2017 and took a vague, unpaid advisory role in her father’s White House administration. Since Trump left the White House, in January 2021, she has distanced herself from his political activities. She now lives with her husband and children on an island near Miami; when Trump announced his bid for reelection last year, she stated that she does not “plan to be involved in politics” and instead wants to prioritize her family and their private life.

In their testimony earlier this week, her brothers Eric and Donald Jr., loyal foot soldiers in their father’s empire, each tried to distance himself from the inflated valuations at the core of the case. (Don Jr. described a letter to his outside accounting firm as a “cover your butt” move, and Eric portrayed himself as a construction guy, not a finance guy.)

Meanwhile, the patriarch of the family treated his testimony almost like a stump speech. He appeared in court as a candidate poised to parlay this event into grist for his base. Indeed, Trump is already fundraising off of his court appearance. The judge seemed aware of this dynamic: At one point, he admonished Trump that “this is not a political rally,” after repeatedly asking Trump’s lawyers to tell their client to stop making speeches and just answer the questions.

This trial is unusual in that testimony won’t be used to establish guilt; the judge has already said that the defendants, including Trump and his two elder sons, are liable for fraud. The stakes are high for the family because the judge’s decision may bar them from doing business in New York, and they may have to pay fines of up to a quarter of a billion dollars. Ivanka Trump’s testimony could further wrinkle her image. But the real stakes of this trial are about the sanctity of the courts. As the legal scholar Kimberly Wehle wrote in The Atlantic yesterday, even if Trump’s testimony shifts little for this case, the way he comported himself represents the erosion of yet another respected norm in American life.

Related:

Inside Ivanka’s dreamworld A court ruling that targets Trump’s persona

Today’s News

Ohio approved a ballot measure protecting a right to abortion in its state constitution. In a significant rebuke, the House passed a resolution censuring Representative Rashida Tlaib for her comments on the Israel-Hamas war. The third Republican presidential debate will be held in Miami tonight.

Evening Read

Bettmann / Corbis / Getty / The Atlantic

A Shift in American Family Values Is Fueling Estrangement

By Joshua Coleman

Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy. As a psychologist specializing in family estrangement, my days are spent sitting with parents who are struggling with profound feelings of grief and uncertainty. “If I get sick during the pandemic, will my son break his four years of silence and contact me? Or will I just die alone?” “How am I supposed to live with this kind of pain if I never see my daughter again?” “My grandchildren and I were so close and this estrangement has nothing to do with them. Do they think I abandoned them?”

Since I wrote my book When Parents Hurt, my practice has filled with mothers and fathers who want help healing the distance with their adult children and learning how to cope with the pain of losing them.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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