The decades-old case resurfaced on Tuesday after police identified the body as that of an El Salvador man.

Photographs by Phil Jung

The Schweitzer brothers see John Gonsalves everywhere now.

In the small towns on the eastern tip of Hawaii’s Big Island, everyone knows everyone, and if you’re not from here, you might never fit in. Everywhere the brothers go, they see Gonsalves’s truck. He’s a small man with a scraggly beard, and runs a business building fences on properties up and down the coast. Rumor has it the business isn’t doing so well. Rumor also has it he funded that business with the reward money he took for sending the Schweitzer brothers to jail.

Sometimes, at traffic lights or in parking lots, Gonsalves sees them too. On these occasions, he smiles a little. Sometimes he even waves. The brothers can’t believe it. He’s waving? They turn and head in the other direction, fast. If they didn’t leave, they have no idea what they might say to the man they believe ruined their lives.

Albert Ian Schweitzer is 52 now—short and wide and muscular, with Popeye forearms, a deep tan, and a close-cropped, graying buzz cut. He walks with the rugged, unfluid strides of a guy who spends most of his time at the gym, which is an accurate if incomplete way of describing how he’s spent the past 25 years of his life. Until January, he was lifting weights during every available hour in a federal prison yard in Arizona. Now he is back home, on the porch of his brother’s house, his nieces milling around him.

In idle moments, Ian, who goes by his middle name, seems to stare at his surroundings, as if trying to focus. “Three months ago I was sitting in a prison cell, you know?” he said when I visited in April. “I can’t even wrap my head around it.” He and his brother, Shawn—also muscle-bound but taller and four years younger—are dealing with the damage of the past several decades. Ian is trying to figure out how to be free after so much time. Shawn, after serving more than a year, kept on living in the area, enduring decades of stares, his employment prospects grim, the stigma surrounding him seeping out and tainting his wife and children.

Downtown Hilo

Everyone had been convinced that the brothers were the culprits in one of the most notorious criminal cases in the modern history of Hawaii: the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman named Dana Ireland on Christmas Eve, 1991. At the time, Ian was 20 and Shawn was 16. Neither had a record, and their parents were law-abiding citizens. For three years, no one came to them to talk about this case. But in 1994, the police, acting on a tip, began investigating them both, latching on to a theory that implicated them even when the physical evidence—the blood, the semen, the tire tracks—all pointed elsewhere.

Wrongful convictions can result from any number of cascading errors, blatant oversights, and outright slipups—some conscious and deliberate, some structural and circumstantial. Over 32 years, the investigation and prosecutions of the Schweitzers seem to have incorporated every possible one of them. There was intense media attention putting pressure on police to make an arrest—the “dead white girl” phenomenon. There was cultural bias against Native Hawaiians like the Schweitzers—the legacy, well known to Hawaiians, of lynchings of native men for alleged attacks on white women. There was investigative tunnel vision—going after the Schweitzer brothers even after the facts failed to support that case. There was blind faith in jailhouse informants—a slew of them, all hoping for special favors from prosecutors in return for their testimony. There was junk science—about teeth marks, and tire treads. There even may have been prosecutorial misconduct—a state lawyer misleading a judge about the outcome of one of the brothers’ polygraph tests.

[From the November 2022 issue: Jake Tapper on a Philadelphia teenager and the empty promise of the Sixth Amendment]

Now that Ian has been exonerated, he needs to reacclimate to life in the world. He had to get a driver’s license and learn how to use a smartphone. He needs to get comfortable around people again. These towns were small enough already. For decades the Schweitzers were the area’s greatest villains; now they run into people and those people are nice. At the market and at restaurants, they congratulate Ian and ask if they can give him a hug. It’s weird. He can’t help but think: Where were those people for the past 30 years? But he knows there are others out there too—people who benefited from accusing him of a crime they knew he hadn’t committed. Chief among them is John Gonsalves.

As our conversation meandered over a sunny afternoon, Ian allowed himself to wonder about Gonsalves. What must it be like for him now, to know that the lie didn’t hold? If the brothers ever did confront him, what would he say?

The place where Dana Ireland’s body was found is less than a half-hour drive from the Schweitzer family’s home, a rundown ranch house in a development called Hawaiian Beaches enshrouded by low palm trees and lush, tropical ferns. The homes are built close enough to one another that you can see and hear most anything your neighbor is up to.

The Schweitzer family always stood out here. Ian and Shawn’s parents, Jerry and Linda Schweitzer, moved to the sleepy east coast of the Big Island in the 1970s from the more populated island of Oahu, where Jerry owned an auto body shop. Linda found work at a bank and later in the local prosecutor’s office, as a victim counselor. Other families in the subdivision were on public assistance; the Schweitzers didn’t need that. Ian and Shawn were the kids whose parents sprang for equipment for the whole little league so that everyone could afford to play. Ian saved enough money from his paper route to buy his own car—a used Volkswagen Beetle—which he fixed up himself before he was old enough to drive it. The Schweitzers “just had a little more than the next person,” Ian told me. “I think we were hated on right from the gate.”

One night in June 1991, Linda and Jerry found themselves in a confrontation with their across-the-road neighbor, a known drug dealer named Timmy Gonsalves. Timmy was in his mid-20s, and had friends going in and out of his house at all hours. Some of Timmy’s younger cousins went to the same high school as Shawn. Both families were Hawaiian with mixed ancestry: The Gonsalves came from Puerto Rico, while the Schweitzer brothers have Portuguese and German ancestors (hence their last name). Linda and Jerry often heard screaming and loud music from Timmy’s house, which the police would raid now and then. Sometimes, Linda and Jerry were the ones who called the cops.

Across the street from the Schweitzers’ home (left) is the house where Timmy Gonsalves used to live (right).

On this particular night, Timmy stood in front of their house and started yelling, goading the Schweitzers to “come to the roadway and fight,” according to a police report filed that night. Once Linda told the officer that the conflict had been going on for years, Timmy was charged with harassment. An encore performance took place a few months later; Timmy and his cousin Wayne threw rocks onto the Schweitzers’ roof and beer cans at their garage. Linda tape-recorded that confrontation for the police, who heard the cousins threatening her and her family. This time, both Gonsalveses were charged with harassment.

No one characterized what was happening as anything deeper than an everyday beef between neighbors. It would come to seem significant to the Schweitzers—something that could, perhaps, explain the unexplainable—only later, after a young white woman, visiting from the mainland, was raped and left dying on Christmas Eve, and the police were desperate for leads.

Dana Ireland was just out of college when she came to Hawaii from Virginia for an extended stay in October 1991. Dana’s older sister, Sandra, had been living on the east coast of the Big Island, and their parents came to join the sisters for the holidays. That area, south of Hilo, the county seat, is not one of the most obvious tourist destinations for mainlanders, but it’s beautiful, with secluded beaches and fishing spots known only to the locals. The Irelands rented a place in a subdivision called Vacationland, a sleepy neighborhood joined by heavily forested dirt roads that are best traveled by bicycle.

Dana biked on her own a lot. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, while her parents were getting dinner ready, she biked to a friend’s house. She was seen on the way back passing the warm springs in Kapoho and open fields of lava flows. She never made it home.

Just before 5:30 p.m., someone found Ireland’s bike in the brush by the side of a road and called the police. At 5:47 p.m., someone else called the police about an injured girl in Wa‘awa‘a, a remote neighborhood several miles away. A woman making dinner in her cottage had heard an engine gunning, and then muted screams for help. She walked out to a beach-access road and saw Ireland on the ground, bleeding, her denim shorts wrapped around her ankles, her shirt pulled up to her shoulders. Wa‘awa‘a had no electricity or phone service. Flagging down a passing car on the road to ask for help took the woman almost an hour. An ambulance didn’t make it down the rutted dirt road until almost 7. Dana Ireland died at Hilo Hospital overnight.

The entire state of Hawaii seemed to erupt in outrage. A young woman raped and killed on Christmas Eve. A killer on the loose. The police spent much of 1992 canvassing the area, interviewing longtime residents—many of whom were caught up in trouble of some sort, and looking for a way out.

One was a man named Frank Pauline Jr., who happened to be a member of the Gonsalves family. Timmy Gonsalves, the Schweitzer family’s angry neighbor, was his cousin. On March 17, an anonymous tip led the police to question Pauline about Ireland. He supplied as his alibi a Christmas Eve party at his family’s house. And then he gave them something more: He said he’d been at a local park just a week earlier and had overheard someone—he said he didn’t know who—yelling at Ian Schweitzer, accusing him of raping and murdering Ireland.

Ian and Shawn both have said they knew of Pauline but never spent time with him. They say they have no idea why he brought up Ian’s name that day. But it wouldn’t be the last time he did.

In February 1993, police picked up Pauline for questioning in a burglary case and again asked him about the Ireland murder. This time he said he knew nothing about it but would keep his ears open for information. The cop applied pressure by telling Pauline that some people said he was the killer himself. “Yeah, people like to blame me,” Pauline replied.

Then, in July, Pauline was arrested and charged with the rape of a different woman. And a month later, prosecutors mounted what at the time was called the largest cocaine-trafficking case in the Big Island’s history against three of Pauline’s close relatives: his cousin Timmy; his mother, Pat Pauline; and a half-brother, John Gonsalves, whom the indictment described as “a major distributor of cocaine.”

Practically the entire Gonsalves family was in trouble, just as the Ireland family was pushing officials to make an arrest in Dana’s murder. In August 1993, her parents wrote open letters accusing prosecutors of “timidness”: “We believe the police know the identities of the perpetrators,” they declared in one. “There must be those who can supply the evidence the police need.” The family offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to a conviction.

In December 1993, a tipster told police that Pauline was saying he and a group including two brothers who were not the Schweitzers took part in the rape and murder. Those other brothers were questioned and polygraphed and eventually excluded as suspects. The following May, John Gonsalves—out on a $10,000 bail but still facing charges for the cocaine case—called the police and claimed that Pauline had witnessed the attack.

By now, Pauline had established himself as, in the words of the prosecutor working the Ireland case, a “walking crime wave.” In 1994 he’d started a 10-year prison sentence for the other rape case when he gave his courtroom guards the slip, fleeing to Honolulu for a weekend before the cops tracked him down. Now he was behind bars again. And this time, when the police met with Pauline in prison to talk again about the Ireland case, he put it all on the Schweitzer brothers.

He said that he had been along for the ride in the back of the Schweitzer brothers’ car that Christmas Eve when Ian, high on crack, ran the girl over, loaded her into the trunk, drove around with her for 10 or 15 minutes, and then pulled over and raped her. He mentioned Ireland being beaten with a tire iron. He insisted that Ian was the ringleader, Shawn was following Ian’s directions, and he, Pauline, was just a witness.

The police interviewed a few people who thought that Shawn was harmless, just a kid, but had more to say about Ian. A woman who’d once dated Wayne Gonsalves (brother to John and half-brother to Pauline, and the one who’d thrown beer cans at the Schweitzers’ garage) told police that Ian was into coke, something Ian has always denied. Never mind that Ian and Shawn said they had never partied with any Gonsalves family member. Never mind that the Gonsalveses seemed engaged in a slow-burning conflict with Ian and Shawn’s parents. The police took the rumors and, when all their other leads fell away, ran with them.

Case files and a photograph of Ireland The area where Ireland’s body was found

Over the next two years, Pauline would speak with the police at least seven times about the murder. The details changed each time. First they were driving a friend’s blue pickup truck, then a VW Bug. (The Schweitzers have owned various VWs over the years; Ian has always maintained that his only remote connection to the Gonsalves family was that he and Wayne occasionally traded VW parts.) Pauline had trouble saying exactly where they supposedly first saw Ireland, or where she was run over. The roles each of them allegedly played in the rape and murder seemed strangely fluid. And certain obvious details seemed to escape him. In June, he said that, on orders from Ian, he’d hit Ireland with a tire iron, and yet he did not remember what she looked like, apart from the “blood coming out of her eyes, her mouth, and her nose.”

The police let Pauline talk, knowing that the story implicated him more than he seemed to understand. He was focused on what he would get in return, continually making demands to improve his lot in jail. Sure enough, even after failing a polygraph, Pauline got some benefits—additional phone calls to his girlfriend, promises of special visitation rights, a transfer to a more desirable prison.

John Gonsalves would benefit from his cooperation too: He and the other family members received deals in their pending cocaine case, and late in 1994, Gonsalves was sentenced to only probation. All he had to do, it seemed, was get his brother to insert himself in one of the most high-profile murder cases in modern Hawaii history.

The police seized the Schweitzers’ car—a VW they’d bought a couple of years earlier—and interviewed Shawn, who had by then graduated from high school and was already settling down with his childhood sweetheart. A few days later, officers spoke with Ian on Kauai, where he’d found a job as a nurse at a hospital. Both brothers were stunned and denied everything, but Ian was especially indignant. When asked why Pauline would point to him, he said that he could not think like Pauline or his family—that he could not drop his mentality down to their level. “The kid got a lot of nerve,” Ian said.

By early 1995, Pauline’s story leaked out into the news. But the more the media learned about Pauline, the less reliable he seemed. Even Pauline’s own grandmother had once told a state investigator that he was “a liar, a thief, and spoiled little brat.” “The Ireland slaying case,” a columnist for the Hawaii Tribune-Herald wrote, “now rests on the memory of a man whose attorney once described him as so drunk and loaded on cocaine that he did not remember the 1993 rape incident that took him to prison.” And when Pauline himself was interviewed by reporters, he was happy to acknowledge that he’d come forward only at the suggestion of his brother John Gonsalves.

Gonsalves did his part to reinforce Pauline’s narrative. He told police he saw the Schweitzer brothers pull up to the party his family threw on Christmas Eve, the night Ireland was killed. The brothers, he said, were driving a VW Bug Ian had just bought. But the front end of the car was damaged, and the guys didn’t seem happy about it.

The Schweitzers disputed everything. They said they hadn’t even owned that car on Christmas Eve—and they produced paperwork to show that Ian had bought it later. Besides, they said they’d never be caught dead at a Gonsalves party. “Never associated with him once. Never,” Ian told me, referring to Pauline. “He said what he said to save John Gonsalves and his mom from doing prison time.”

But to the police, a simple narrative locked into place: Bad local boys, all tied up with drugs, all the same, had gang-raped and killed the white girl.

That didn’t change even when Pauline walked his story back. He seems to have belatedly realized that volunteering himself as a participant, even a minor one, in the Ireland killing wouldn’t just get him favors in prison—it might get him a new conviction too. With each interview, he’d tried to cast Ian as the coked-up instigator and himself and Shawn as cowed underlings. But of course, saying that he’d hit Dana Ireland with a tire iron, even under orders, was hardly a good look.

On April 22, 1995, Pauline said that, actually, his brother Wayne was the one who did it. The police weren’t biting. On July 6, 1996, he completely recanted, saying he’d told the police what they wanted to hear, that his story about the Schweitzer brothers was completely made-up—that John Gonsalves had struck a deal with prosecutors to persuade Pauline to talk with them about the Ireland case in exchange for them dropping his own drug charges.

The police were facing time pressure. The statute of limitations on two of the charges—kidnapping and sexual assault—was approaching. (Prosecutors had more time to bring a murder charge but feared it would be harder to prove, because Ireland had been alive when she was left on the road.) “I have now lost faith in the Hawaii County justice system,” John Ireland fumed in another letter to a Hawaii paper, “and I am now certain that those responsible for Dana’s violent murder will never be brought to justice.”

Pauline was indicted in July 1997. Three months later, the Schweitzer brothers were arrested and indicted too. By early 2000, both Pauline and Ian would be convicted of all three charges. Shawn, who by April of that year had spent two stints in prison for a total of 16 months, was offered a chance to plead guilty to kidnapping and manslaughter in exchange for time served. His parents and Ian encouraged him to take the deal. It wasn’t the truth. But Shawn had a wife and three young children. And the prosecutors were two for two.

“I thought, going into this, that there’s no way that the justice system was going to do this to us,” Shawn told me. “This whole scenario is so ridiculous that somebody’s got to be bound to see that this is wrong, you know? And I believed that all the way up until I see my brother get convicted.”

Shawn took the deal, and Ian went to prison. In the eyes of the court and the world and everyone at home, Pauline and the Schweitzer brothers were murderers.

Once upon a time, Ken Lawson was a high-powered criminal-defense attorney in Cincinnati. Lawson spent the 1990s working police-misconduct cases, civil-rights cases—change-the-world cases—and representing star clients such as Deion Sanders. He had a mansion, a motorcycle, and a yacht. He had a wife and five kids, and a career that seemed unstoppable. At the height of his success, he ran an ad in the Yellow Pages calling himself the “junk yard dog of justice.” Then it all fell apart.

He’d started drinking, and after he tore a rotator cuff at the gym, he got addicted to painkillers—first Percodan from a doctor, and next oxycontin obtained through a client, until the habit cost him $1,000 a day. Very quickly Lawson destroyed nearly everything he’d built. He was disbarred and spent almost two years in prison on a federal drug charge. His wife and family had moved to Hawaii, and after his release he moved into a halfway house on Oahu.

Lawson was starting his life over again. He couldn’t practice law, but he was invited to speak to some classes at the University of Hawaii’s law school. And through a connection there, he became a clerk for Hawaii’s Innocence Project, a nonprofit dedicated to exonerating the wrongly convicted. That’s where he learned about Ian Schweitzer.

Lawson’s background in misconduct cases gave him a fluency in the way that investigations go awry, the tunnel vision that can take over. He saw how all three men were presumed guilty before any were tried. Homemade Wanted: Dead posters with the Schweitzer brothers’ faces peppered the streets of Hilo. A local author wrote Murder in Paradise—a true-crime book about how the police finally got the killers. The brothers had a hard time hanging on to lawyers: Every time they tried to hire one, the prosecutor’s office would file a motion to have that lawyer conflicted out, based on involvement with the witnesses they planned to call. That witness list kept growing as more and more people implicated the Schweitzers, many of them in exchange for having their own legal troubles or prison conditions eased. Lawson saw in the files how everyone in the Pauline-Gonsalves circle recognized that getting the police to focus on Ian and Shawn was a way to get them off their own back.

Lawson zeroed in on the VW. He saw an engineer’s report saying a VW Bug’s bumper was too wide to make the damage seen on Dana Ireland’s bike—nor could a VW’s low-sloping front end have directly caused Ireland’s injuries. “If you go through the police reports, day by day, step by step,” Lawson told me, “you’ll see there ain’t nobody talking about Volkswagens at all for three years,” until Pauline changed his story to bring up the model of the Schweitzers’ car. The police were first looking for a small blue pickup truck, and then a tan van. Lawson couldn’t understand why the VW wasn’t more of an issue at Ian’s trial. “Based on the tread box and the tire distance, Ian would have had to customize and stretch the Volkswagen out, commit the crime, and then bunch it back to its normal size when the police came and seized it,” he said. “It’s just physically impossible.”

The prosecutors’ case had another glaring flaw—a failure to get a DNA match. In October 1998, an independent expert tested Ireland’s vaginal swab and the hospital gurney sheet that she was transported on. The sperm found on both items did not match any of the three men charged with her rape and murder. On October 20, the prosecutor dropped charges against the Schweitzers.

But within months there were whispers that they’d soon be reindicted. Ireland’s family, members of Congress, the governor, the public—all wanted the case resolved. “You can see the change,” Lawson told me. “Rather than seek justice, we need a conviction. They knew the witnesses were lying, but they wanted the conviction anyway.” Once the DNA test came back negative, they went in another direction. “That’s when they go out and get the informant testimony.” And in May 1999, the reindictment came along with a new star witness: a fellow inmate of Ian’s named Michael Ortiz, who said Ian had confessed to the murder.

For the Schweitzers, Michael Ortiz’s arrival in the case is further proof that John Gonsalves was the puppet master behind everything. Ortiz isn’t a Gonsalves. But his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his child, was married to one: John Gonsalves himself.

Gonsalves seemed so determined to follow through even after Pauline recanted that he testified against Pauline at his trial in 1999, again telling the story that Pauline now was saying was fiction. “He told me that he and Ian and Shawn was driving,” Gonsalves said, “and they saw this girl on a bike, and they were giving her gestures, and when she refused, Ian got all mad … He went and banged the girl. He ran over her, supposedly ran over her again, and they grabbed her and took her.”

Left: John Gonsalves at Frank Pauline’s trial. Right: Pauline. (William Ing/AP)

On the stand, Gonsalves insisted that he wasn’t throwing his own brother under the bus to get a deal for himself. “In Hilo, everybody talks that I turned my brother in. I’d never do that. I would never sell my brother out. But the truth is the truth,” he said, “and I feel for the family.”

Gonsalves’s testimony, along with Ortiz’s, clinched the prosecution’s case, giving the jury more of a reason to ignore the lack of DNA evidence. At trial, the prosecutors explained away the fact that the DNA didn’t match any of the three accused men by arguing that the semen must have been from a mysterious fourth participant in the killing—they called him “Unknown Male No. 1”—and that it must have “masked” semen from the Schweitzers or Pauline.

After Pauline was convicted, it became clear what else Gonsalves had been expecting from his testimony. He wrote the Ireland family a long letter asking for the $25,000 in reward money.

“I feel the reward should be released to me,” Gonsalves wrote. “If it wasn’t for me, none of this would have been settled.” He anticipated that the Irelands might not want his testimony in the two upcoming trials against Ian and Shawn to be tainted by the fact that he’d received the reward. So he proposed an elegant work-around, suggesting they put the money “under my aunty’s name.” That way, he wrote, “there would be no proof that I got it.”

He got the money.

The first few years were the worst for Ian. His appeals lawyer wouldn’t even take his calls. In time, he studied to be a paralegal and got a relatively easy work assignment in the recreation area (though in Arizona that meant some 110-degree days). As he got older, the younger guys started to call him “Uncle.”

At home, Shawn was free, but for years he couldn’t get a job. “People I’ve known my whole life just kind of laughed and said, ‘Shawn, I cannot help you. There’s no way my boss could let me hire you.’” He got a commercial driver’s license and was hired by a construction company that fired him as soon as they learned who he was. “Everybody read the paper.”

Shawn and his wife and kids moved in with his in-laws to save money. They’ve never left. He finally found a road-maintenance job, and then a construction job where the boss gave him a chance. He’s been working there ever since. The stigma has trickled down to his children. When one of his daughters was in eighth grade, her teacher assigned her class Murder in Paradise, the true-crime book. After another girl called Shawn a rapist, a fight broke out, and his daughter was suspended for five days. “Suspended for defending her dad,” he said.

“For a long time, I was angry—an angry person,” Shawn said. “And you know, you had people like John Gonsalves, waving at you and throwing it in your face.” Shawn swears he wasn’t out looking for Gonsalves, but there he was. “Like, every morning when I would go to work, I would pass him, you know? Whatever he was doing, he would wave—for years. I was just like, this guy—something’s wrong in his brain.”

Ian says Pauline once wrote to him—a letter apologizing for making up the story about him and Shawn. They had a run-in around 2005, when for a short time they both were in the same Mississippi prison. Pauline was trying to appeal. “He said something like, ‘I’m sorry, and I’m working on getting you off,’” Ian remembered. “I wanted to beat him up.”

Pauline would never get out. On April 27, 2015—his 42nd birthday—he was hit with a rock on the back of the head during a fight in the yard of a New Mexico prison. He died from his injuries. Afterward, Pauline’s mother, Pat, came to Ian’s parents’ home. Jerry and Linda Schweitzer had been crushed, Ian told me, “financially and mentally” by their sons’ convictions. Pat started to speak to Jerry: “I just want to say sorry for ruining your family and your sons’ lives.” She asked if he and Linda could “find it in your heart to forgive us, because we’re getting really bad luck.”

“I’m sure he was stunned,” Ian said of his father. “But his exact words were ‘The day my son walks out of prison, that’s the day I can start to forgive you.’”

After Ken Lawson joined the Hawaii Innocence Project, he spent years examining how flimsy the government’s case was against Ian—the jailhouse informants, the VW, the mysterious DNA. Lawson joined the full-time faculty at the University of Hawaii law school, and often took students out to the spot where Ireland was found to test out various prosecution theories. Everything about the case seemed so obviously staged. Even Michael Ortiz, who’d said Ian had confessed to the murder, subsequently received a reduced prison sentence. But how to get the convictions overturned?

Ken Lawson at the Hawaii Innocence Project offices

Lawson approached the prosecuting attorney on the Big Island, Mitch Roth, and laid out the problems he’d uncovered, proposing a joint reinvestigation of the case. Roth agreed. In 2019, his office gave Lawson’s team access to more than 100 bankers boxes of files and all of the physical evidence.

Although the Innocence Project is famous for DNA-based exonerations, this case was unusual: Here, the jury had known that Ian’s DNA was not a match for the blood or semen from the crime scene and had convicted him anyway. But the lawyers had seen this in a few other cases, the most famous being the Central Park Five. The thing to do was to apply as much new technology to the evidence as possible. That would require a new round of DNA testing. “They only were looking at nine locations on the DNA” in the late 1990s, says Susan Friedman, a lawyer with the New York office of the Innocence Project who, along with one of the group’s founders, Barry Scheck, served as co-counsel on the case. “Today, we look at between 20 and 24.”

[Read: How the ‘Central Park Five’ changed the history of American law]

The team reanalyzed everything, including all semen found on the victim and a man’s T-shirt that had been covered in Ireland’s blood. The new testing dispensed with the “masked” DNA theory, confirming that the only DNA present was Ireland’s and that of Unknown Male No. 1. Bite-mark evidence also fell away when a new expert essentially dismissed prior analyses as junk science, concluding that the mark on Ireland’s body was made not by a human but probably by an object instead.

One more domino was left to fall. In late 2022, lawyers from the Innocence Project and the prosecutor’s office met in a video conference to discuss the case. There they learned from Keith Shigetomi, who had represented Shawn during the prosecution, that something strange had happened when Shawn had entered his guilty plea in 2000. In order for the judge to accept the plea, Shawn had had to answer questions about his participation in the assault during a polygraph test. Shigetomi now told the assembled group that, in confessing to the crime, Shawn had actually failed that polygraph. Faced with this hurdle, Shigetomi said, he asked the polygraph specialist if he would designate his report as “inconclusive,” which would be just good enough to allow for the guilty plea. (“To this day, nobody can find that report,” Shigetomi told me. He’s not sure whether a report was ever formally submitted.) And in court, the prosecutor, Lincoln Ashida, told the judge that Shawn had passed the polygraph—which in hindsight clearly seems deceptive.

When this all came out in 2022, Shigetomi told me, the prosecutors were dumbfounded. “Their whole support of the case was based upon Shawn’s statement,” he said. “Nobody knew.”

On January 24, 2023, after a more than seven-hour-long hearing, Third Circuit Court Judge Peter Kubota ruled that Ian’s lawyers’ new evidence “conclusively proves that in a new trial, a jury would likely reach a new verdict of acquittal.” Ian was a free man.

His family surrounded him with hugs. Before the media, Ian was emotional, but also indignant. “I feel like they murdered 25 years of my life,” he said. “I feel like they kidnapped me away from my family.”

Ashida, who has since moved on from the prosecutor’s office into private practice, declined to comment for this story, explaining that speaking with the press is prohibited by his professional code of conduct. A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office said, “There is no evidence to substantiate allegations against any of the prosecutors or investigators who worked on these cases,” and assured me that the office continues “to re-investigate the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Dana Ireland.” They still hope to find Unknown Male No. 1, whose DNA has not turned up any hits in CODIS, the genetic database that law enforcement uses in many rape and murder cases. “There’s still frustration we don’t know whose DNA it is,” Mitch Roth, the prosecutor who’d agreed to reopen the case and who is now mayor of the Big Island, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Left: Posters calling for the Schweitzer brothers’ death were put up all over Hilo around the time of the trial. Right: A Hawaiian flag hanging at Shawn’s house

Who killed Dana Ireland? Ken Lawson told me that most of the women and girls who are abducted on the island are native Hawaiians. Plenty of those cases have gone unsolved, and yet none have generated the same coverage as the Ireland murder. But her case seems, in one respect, not so different from the others. Whoever attacked Ireland, Lawson pointed out, made an effort to transport her from the site of the assault toward the shore. “I think whoever was driving that far with her body was taking her to the ocean,” he told me. “It’s easy to get rid of a body in the ocean.” Maybe, he said, when they got there, they saw somebody fishing. So they dumped her “and took off.”

Susan Friedman of the Innocence Project believes that the killer might not have shown up in the database for a few reasons. “One of two things could have happened,” she told me. “Either the person died, and so never went on to potentially commit another crime, or the person never committed another crime.” Dana Ireland’s parents are dead, and no one else in the family has commented on Ian Schweitzer’s exoneration. If the killer is still out there, no one is writing letters to the editor anymore to demand the police track him down.

Overnight, Ian went from being a local kid swept up in a once-in-a-generation murder case to being a Central Park Five–level exoneration star. He has traveled to the mainland for celebrations and galas in honor of exonerees. Everyone expects that the civil suit his lawyers are prepping will make him rich. But any settlement, if it happens at all, might take years. Until then, working, dating, and the other everyday aspects of a normal life all seem far out of reach to him. “This morning I lost my contacts,” he told me, laughing about his confounding new iPhone. Everywhere he goes, there are the hugs of strangers, and John Gonsalves’s truck at the stoplight.

“Personally, I’m tired of explaining myself, because they keep twisting it around,” John Gonsalves told me. “I’ve got to be careful, too, because I don’t want nothing to come back to me.”

I called him the second I left the Schweitzers’ place, expecting to leave a voicemail. When he picked up, we both were a little surprised. During that call, Gonsalves spoke more or less unprompted for several minutes, his voice growing more stressed and defiant—and, it struck me, a little fearful. Since Ian’s exoneration, many people in the area have been looking at Gonsalves the same way they once looked at the Schweitzers: suspiciously. Gonsalves is furious about this.

“This whole thing is a sham. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. And then I get threats! People threatening to kill me, kill my kids? … Honest to God—I mean, No. 1, if they want to try something to me, I’m game. I don’t care. I’ve always been this way. But I didn’t attack the Schweitzers.” He said he just repeated what Pauline had told him way back then.

I said I’d like to learn more. He agreed to meet three days later, at 9 a.m. on a Thursday, at a McDonald’s. He was waiting when I got there. He is in his mid-50s now, a grandfather, tough and solid, with the weathered look of someone who has worked outdoors his entire life.

Ian and Shawn have a story they tell themselves about Gonsalves—the informant who chose them for no reason, orchestrated their downfall, made money off it, got his freedom on their backs, and escaped scot-free. But as Gonsalves talked, it became clear that he is operating inside a different narrative. It’s the story of a perpetual victim, caught up in something he never really controlled.

Michael Ortiz, the jailhouse informant who testified against Ian, for instance, is the last person Gonsalves ever would consider a friend. Gonsalves may have raised Ortiz’s child, but he despises the man. If Ortiz made up stories about Ian in prison, it had nothing to do with Gonsalves. As for Frank Pauline, Gonsalves now says that whatever his brother told the police about the murder was entirely his own doing. Gonsalves was just the one who kindly encouraged him to come clean. “He said, ‘You know, John, I’ve been getting nightmares. I can’t sleep.’ He said, ‘I just need you to help me. You know, maybe you can call the detective and just tell him that I’m willing to come forward.’ And he started telling me everything and I was just—my head was just spinning.”

Gonsalves’s probation, he said, had nothing to do with any deal he may have made with the police. “I never asked for anything,” he said. “The secret deal was between my brother Frank and the state of Hawaii.” The fact that Gonsalves walked away from the island’s biggest coke-dealing bust, he said, only meant that the case was weak. He told me he never dealt drugs. “You can’t call me a drug dealer,” he said, “if I wasn’t convicted of it.”

The reward money? That, he says, was Pauline’s idea too. “He told me, ‘John, you know what, just go get the reward. Because they’re going to have to give it to you—because if not, everybody else is going to take it.’”

And what, finally, about the Schweitzer brothers? “In my heart, I believe they did it,” Gonsalves had told me on the phone when we first spoke. He said he still believed everything his brother had said in that first call from prison in 1993. Now I wanted to know more. Did he believe there was a fourth attacker, as the DNA indicated?

“Absolutely,” Gonsalves said.

But Pauline never mentioned a fourth man when he accused the Schweitzers. How could Gonsalves have believed everything Pauline said when it seemed so clear now that his brother hadn’t told the truth?

“I have no idea,” Gonsalves said. I got the sense that he’d spent 20 years not being contradicted and had no idea how to handle it. He equivocated. “When he gets mad, he doesn’t think whether it’s true or not,” he said about Pauline. “Who did it? I’ll never know.”

I asked again: Does he still think Ian and Shawn Schweitzer raped and killed Dana Ireland? He took a moment before answering.

“It’s tough,” Gonsalves said. “I mean, I hate to say yeah. And I hate to say no. So I think I’ll just leave that neutral. Because I can say whatever I want. It’s just my opinion. You know, everybody has the right to their opinion.”

The shoreline near where Dana Ireland’s body was left

It took 10 months—until this October—for the same judge who’d exonerated Ian to overturn Shawn’s conviction, too. All that time, Ian tried to stick to a routine: workouts at the gym, helping his parents out at home. Just a few weeks before the second exoneration came through, he called me excitedly. He’d run into Gonsalves at the grocery store.

“You know those glass automatic doors?” Ian said. “I met face-to-face with him coming into the store.”

He’d seen Gonsalves around town plenty, of course, but always in his truck, or across a parking lot—not up close like this. He was surprised by how different he looked from how he’d imagined: “Small, little guy. I thought he was a big guy. He’s small. Short.”

Did Gonsalves recognize Ian? “Oh, yeah,” he said. “He just fucking froze.”

So did Ian. In his fantasies, he’d done any number of things in this moment—acted out, vented his anger. Instead, he only stared. Gonsalves put his head down, Ian said. “He’s stuttering. He was like, ‘Ah-ah-ah-ah—how you, Schweitzer?’” And then he rushed past Ian, out the door. “He fucking walked away.”

Ian could hardly believe it. Twenty-five years of being blamed for murder. Twenty-three years in a federal prison. Decades of imagining a moment like this. And all for what? “How you, Schweitzer?”

“That was it,” Ian said. “He couldn’t even look me in the face.”

A Christmas fair in Germany, a new volcanic eruption in Iceland, a floating Nativity scene in Italy, border crossings in Arizona and Texas, war damage in a Ukrainian cathedral, continued Israeli strikes inside the Gaza Strip, guard geese at a penitentiary in Brazil, an ice hotel in Sweden, and much more

This fall, on a hike in Washington’s Olympic National Park, I found wildfire—or it found me. As I labored up a switchback trail, the air hung acrid with smoke from the half dozen fires that smoldered around the park. My windpipe burned and my head ached. The sun was a feeble orange disk; the mountains disappeared behind pale haze.

That the damp Olympic Peninsula—a region blanketed by temperate rainforest—was ablaze seemed telling. As the world has become hotter and drier, it has also become more flammable. This year Canada ignited, smothering the eastern seaboard in smoke; in 2019, Australia’s “Black Summer” released more carbon than many countries’ annual emissions; in 2018, California’s Camp Fire killed 85 people in the town of Paradise. “Fifteen years ago, a 100,000-acre fire would be the largest fire of your career,” one California firefighter told The New York Times in 2021. “Now, we have one-million-acre fires.”

[Read: A clear indication that climate change is burning up California]

Considering all of this, one could be forgiven for assuming that forests are burning more frequently than ever. In fact, the opposite is true: The United States, like Australia and many other countries, is operating at a fire deficit. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, nearly 4 million acres of forest burned between 1984 and 2015, which sounds substantial until you consider that, based on precolonial fire rates, about 10 times that area should have burned. The U.S., observes the journalist M. R. O’Connor in her important new book, Ignition, is “both burning and fire starved.”

These conditions—the fire deficit and our susceptibility to megafires—are connected. A principal reason megafires have become common and destructive is that the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies have quelled minor fires for a century, thus allowing fuel—brush, shrubs, dense clusters of skinny saplings—to accumulate on the landscape. By routinely stamping out smaller, beneficial fires, land managers have inadvertently spawned gargantuan infernos that threaten lives and property, a disastrous loop that climate change only exacerbates. This, O’Connor writes, is the fire paradox: “Putting out fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes.”  

Ignition investigates both sides of the paradox; its primary focus is on the side that gets less attention, the U.S.’s “missing fire.” Once, O’Connor explains, Homo sapiens inhabited a world of flame. Many fires were ignited by lightning, but most were anthropogenic, set by Indigenous “pyrotechnicians” to stimulate the growth of food plants and enhance habitat for game animals like deer. In New York’s Catskills, up to 95 percent of fires were once Native-set, producing a “nut orchard” rife with walnuts, chestnuts, and hickories. European colonists approaching North America reported that they could smell the “sweet perfume” of forest fires before they glimpsed land.

The preponderance of fire honed nature. Plants and animals evolved to exploit the low-intensity blazes that regularly swept through forests and grasslands. Lodgepole pines developed serotinous cones, which require fire’s heat to free their seeds; sequoia saplings thrived after fires opened canopies and permitted the ingress of sunlight. In the 20th century, however, fire became ignis non grata on American landscapes. In 1935 the Forest Service adopted its infamous 10 a.m. policy, which, as O’Connor writes, meant that any new fire, whether sparked by humans or lightning, “should be under control by ten the following morning.” In her telling, America’s fixation on fire suppression stems largely from its bias against Indigenous practices. Forest Service scientists dismissed traditional burning as “Paiute forestry” unbefitting an enlightened society. Later, environmentalists advocated for preserving forests as “untouched wilderness,” heedless of the Native people who had artfully managed them for millennia.

Although O’Connor persuasively argues that fire suppression has roots in racism, she might have spent more ink implicating capitalism. As the journalist Timothy Egan notes in The Big Burn, his comprehensive history of a legendary 1910 fire that seared the Inland Northwest, commercial logging interests and their political toadies first pushed the Forest Service to stamp out wildfire. After 1910, Egan writes, “the Forest Service became the fire service, protecting trees so industry could cut them down later.” Wilderness advocates may have contributed to the culture of fire suppression, as O’Connor claims, yet timber companies and their lobbyists are even more culpable.

O’Connor is an intrepid reporter whose journalism has taken her to Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Afghanistan; her previous books include immersive explorations of the science of de-extinction and the history of human navigation. In Ignition, she’s likewise disinclined to her desk. She travels to Nebraska to participate in an intentional, or “prescribed,” burn. She learns to wield fusees—“basically dynamite-sized matches”—and drip torches, canisters that “pour out fuel and flame.” She falls quickly for fire: its scent, its aliveness, its “intense aesthetic pleasure.” “Other than when I have given birth,” she writes, “I had never felt so integral to a life-giving process as I did lighting a fire.”

Over the course of a year, O’Connor pursues her “pyrowanderlust” to prescribed burns around the country and meets a growing “fire counterculture”—environmentalists, scientists, Native practitioners—seeking to restore fire to its rightful place. Just as every ecosystem contains its own flora and fauna, it has its own flavor of blaze, and O’Connor excels at describing these regional varietals. In the pine forests near Albany, New York, lapping flames turn “flaky bark into purple rosettes that glittered with charred reflectance”; in North Carolina’s lowlands, the “smoke smelled of caramel and hog fat and citrus.” In New Mexico, as night settles after a day of burning, she shuts off her headlamp and stares, mesmerized, at the sizzling ground: “The floor gently flickered with thousands of points of white light like a galaxy of stars had draped across the earth.”

O’Connor also explores the megafire side of the paradox, enlisting on a crew battling California’s 2021 Dixie Fire, a nearly million-acre inferno. There, she spends her days pulling hose, unearthing smoldering roots, chipping wood, and performing other mundane tasks, only occasionally glimpsing the fire front itself. The fight against the Dixie consumed significant resources with dubious gain: The operation cost more than $600 million, yet the fire raged for more than three months. Later, one fire-crew leader compares fire suppression to the Vietnam and Korean Wars: “Who are we fighting? And why?”

What we’re fighting is, in large measure, the U.S. government’s sordid history of delegitimizing and criminalizing “good fire.” In Ignition’s final act, O’Connor travels to California’s Klamath Mountains, where the Yurok Tribe singed the forest for thousands of years to improve elk habitat and cultivate hazel stems for basket-weaving—until the practice was classified as arson. There she joins a mixed crew of Indigenous people and wildland firefighters that, with the Yurok’s blessing and guidance, sets the mountains ablaze, rekindling timber and tradition alike.

To O’Connor’s delight, a third of her teammates are women, a high proportion in the hypermasculine world of wildland firefighting. For generations, one female captain says, the firefighting industry, with its flame-retardant-spraying airplanes, heavy machinery, and legions of troops, has taken a “militaristic view of wildfire as a war to be won,” a chauvinistic approach that, O’Connor writes, led “to a permissiveness around abuse of land.” In the Klamath, O’Connor glimpses a future in which people collaborate with nature rather than dominate it.

Although O’Connor doesn’t say it, wildfire literature, too, has historically been the domain of men. To name but a few books, there’s Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean’s meditation on a fatal Montana fire; On the Burning Edge, Kyle Dickman’s harrowing account of the deaths of 19 firefighters in Arizona; and John Valliant’s recent Fire Weather, which chronicles the 2016 blaze that virtually obliterated the Canadian city of Fort McMurray. These excellent works treat fire as a fearsome adversary against which humans must battle; Ignition is an invaluable addition to the canon precisely because it considers fire an ally.

[Read: We’re in an age of fire]

But does humanity still have time to heal its broken relationship with fire? As O’Connor notes, climate change has made it harder to keep burns under control. In California and many other places, the viable “burn window”—the period in which crews can apply prescribed fire without undue danger—shrinks each year. In the future, O’Connor writes, burning “will depend on people who are ready to exploit any and every opportunity as windows open and close with less and less predictability.”

It will also depend on people’s tolerance for smoke and risk. Although fewer than 1 percent of prescribed fires break containment, those rare mishaps can sour the public. Last spring, the skies over my home in Colorado blurred with smoke from a 340,000-acre megafire in neighboring New Mexico that sprung from a planned burn that had escaped human control. The Forest Service responded by issuing a 90-day suspension on prescribed fire until the agency could investigate the debacle—an understandable reaction, perhaps, but one that also perpetuated the notion that burning is inherently perilous. As Ignition ably demonstrates, though, the far more dangerous proposition is not letting forests burn at all.

British flyweight Sunny Edwards loses his IBF world title and an opportunity to unify the division in a stoppage defeat by the sensational Jesse 'Bam' Rodriguez in Arizona.

The state of Texas has executed nearly 600 men and women since 1982. Most of them had something to say in their last moments, and those words are now collected in a book, Final Words: 578 Men and Women Executed on Texas Death Row. About 100 chose to say nothing at all; “this inmate declined to make a last statement,” the book notes. But many more opted to share their final thoughts. Taken together, their words—on religious faith, love, violence, regret, and capital punishment itself—form an evocative portrait of the moieties of the death penalty in Texas: the crimes these men and women committed, and the death they now suffer for it.

Each entry appears as a two-page spread, with a prisoner’s final words on one side (obtained from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice) and a brief description of his or her crimes on the opposite page. There are exceptionally short remarks—Freddie Lee Webb, executed in March of 1994, simply said, “Peace”; Jessie Gutierrez, executed roughly five months later, said, “I just love everybody, and that’s it”—and there are long monologues. Sometimes prisoners’ last words appear to have been written by someone else: Richard J. Wilkerson, executed in August of 1993, referred to himself in the third person, saying, “Killing R.J. will not bring [his victim] back.” Some are accepting. “It was horrible and inexcusable of me to take the life of your loved one and to hurt so many mentally and physically,” David Lee Herman said in April of 1997. “I am here because I took a life and killing is wrong by an individual and by the state, and I am sorry we are here but if my death gives you peace and closure then this is all worthwhile.” Others barely register at all: Harold Amos Barnard, killed in February of 1994, apparently mumbled the last of his words. They are described only as “a couple of sentences garbled.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: What it means to forgive the unforgivable]

Articulations of guilt and shame are common—rarely does a prisoner come across as unrepentant. “I could never forgive what I’ve done,” said Joseph John Cannon, executed in April of 1988 for the 1977 murder of his benefactor Anne C. Walsh. Kenneth Bernard Harris, found guilty of the 1986 rape and murder of Lisa Ann Stonestreet in Houston, told those gathered to witness his June 1997 execution that he was “sorry for all the pain I have caused both families—my family and yours … I have had time to understand the pain I have caused you.” “I am the sinner of all sinners. I was responsible for the ’75 and ’79 cases,” said Markham Duff-Smith, a Tarrant County native convicted of the strangulation murder of his adoptive mother, Gertrude Duff-Smith Zabolio, in 1975. Duff-Smith was also suspected of planning the murders of his sister, his brother-in-law, and their baby son. “I am so terribly sorry,” Karl Eugene Chamberlain, executed in June 2008 for the 1991 sexual assault and murder of his neighbor Felecia Prechtl, said before he died. “I wish I could die more than once to tell you how sorry I am.”

Religious conviction likewise makes a frequent appearance in the final remarks of Texas’s execution subjects—not only in personal expressions of faith, but in exhortations to find God. “I plead with all the teenagers to stop the violence and to accept Jesus Christ and find victory,” Danny Ray Harris said in July 1993. “Today I have victory in Christ and I thank Jesus for taking my spirit into his precious hands. Thank you, Jesus.” In December of 1995, Hai Hai Vuong voiced similar thoughts: “I thank God that he died for my sins on the cross, and I thank him for saving my soul … I hope whoever hears my voice tonight will turn to the Lord.” Harris was convicted of the 1978 murder of Timothy Michael Merka, whom he beat to death with a tire iron in rural Brazos County; Vuong was found guilty of the shooting deaths of Tien Van Nguyen and Hien Quang Tran in 1986. It’s natural—and common—to question the sincerity of expressions of faith among condemned people, but it’s worth noting that there was no way these particular statements of religious belief could have helped the men and women who made them. If it were all pretense, it was extended long past the point of utility.

The same can be said of the numerous expressions of love and hopes of forgiveness in Final Words. “I love you, everyone, I go out with great love and respect,” Miguel A. Richardson said at his June 2001 execution for the 1979 slaying of the Holiday Inn security guard John G. Ebbert. “Stop killing start loving. Stop the violence.” Many prisoners addressed their victims’ families directly. Michael Adam Sigala, convicted of the 2000 murders of a young couple in Plano, asked “forgiveness of the family. I have no reason for why I did it, I don’t understand why I did it. I hope you can live the rest of your lives without hate.” Forgiveness is ordinarily imagined in therapeutic terms, something one asks for to free them from the bonds of old guilt, pave the way for reconciliation. But forgiveness requested on the brink of death is perhaps purer. It’s a prayer for which there is no future, a hope without a chance. But it must be precious, because scores of people executed in Texas spent their last breaths begging for it.

Some spoke about the death penalty itself. “Texas is carrying out a very inhumane injustice. It’s not right to kill anybody just because I killed your people. Everyone changes, right?” said Lee Andrew Taylor, put to death in June 2011 for the 1999 murder of another prisoner while he was doing time for aggravated robbery. Napoleon Beazley, who was 17 years old when he murdered John Luttig during a 1994 carjacking, chose to speak about the system of capital punishment before his May 2002 execution: “The act I committed to put me here was not just heinous, it was senseless. But the person that committed that act is no longer here—I am … I’m saddened by what is happening here tonight. I’m not only saddened, but disappointed that a system that is supposed to protect and uphold what is just and right can be so much like me when I made the same shameful mistake.”

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Jimi Barber died a forgiven man]

Scattered among confessions and acknowledgments of guilt are innocence claims. “I have said from the beginning and I will say it again that I am innocent,” Kenneth Ray Ransom remarked at his October 1997 execution. “My only statement is that no case is error free,” Dale Devon Scheanette reminded witnesses to his February 2009 death. Their claims are made more disquieting by the book’s afterword, contributed in part by two death-row exonerees, Sabrina Butler and Ray Krone. Butler was wrongly convicted of the murder of her nine-month-old son in 1990 and exonerated in 1995 after her lawyers proved that the state of Mississippi, where she had been convicted, had never so much as conducted an autopsy on her baby, who was later found to have suffered from a severe kidney condition. Krone was convicted in 1992 of the sexual assault and murder of an Arizona bartender based in part on forensic bite-mark analysis, which has since been exposed as junk science. Krone was exonerated 20 years after his conviction, having spent more than a decade of his life on death row. “I used to support the death penalty,” Krone writes, “but now I know that what happened to me can happen to anyone, that the criminal justice system is flawed and once inside of it, you become less than human and the system exerts its full force on you.” The exact number of people executed by Texas despite their innocence will never be known, but some of their words may be captured here.

What is rare within this catalog of dying declarations are the monstrous personalities for whom the death penalty is ostensibly reserved, the so-called worst of the worst. There are certainly angry remarks—prompted for his final statement, Joseph Bennard Nichols, executed in March 2007 for the murder of the Houston deli worker Claude Shaffer Jr., simply directed profanity at execution staff; one prisoner invited witnesses to kiss his Black ass, another his proud white ass—but the crimes are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, not especially shocking. There are murders in the course of interpersonal disputes, altercations, robberies, burglaries, carjackings, drug transactions. As the pages go on, these murders emerge as the more common type, far more typical than sexually motivated killings, torture slayings, and premeditated child murders. If crimes of impulse were eliminated from the catalog of killings here, the book would be a much thinner volume.

Final Words is a haunting read for a number of reasons, and one of its more poignant lessons has to do with how death curates priorities. Like anyone else, the men and women executed in Texas since 1982 approached their deaths with fear, faith, hopes for their families, and regrets about their transgressions. The people whose words make up this volume all had time to contemplate their last words on earth, and they reflect something more universal than the particular experience of prisoners on death row. They were only human.

Many of us complain about being too busy—and about not having enough time to do the things we really want to do. But has busyness become an excuse for our inability to focus on what matters?

According to Neeru Paharia, a marketing professor at Arizona State University, time is a sort of luxury good—the more of it you have, the more valuable you are. But her research also revealed that, for many Americans, having less time and being busy can be a status symbol for others to notice. And when it comes to the signals we create for ourselves, sociologist Melissa Mazmanian reveals a few myths that may be keeping us from living the lives we want with the meaningful connections we crave.

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The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Becca Rashid: Ian, I was having lunch with a friend last weekend who was trying to organize a birthday party for her colleague.

Ian Bogost: Okay; great.

Rashid: And, typical story, she said she was having trouble gathering everyone because everyone was too busy and it was impossible to get them to commit.

Bogost: Of course.

Rashid: But my favorite part was that she said one person in the group said she couldn’t make it because she had to go to Crate & Barrel that night.

Bogost: She was going to Crate & Barrel?

Rashid: She had to go to Crate & Barrel at 7 p.m. on a Friday. That was already in her schedule.

Bogost: She had a flatware appointment?

Rashid: Yeah, I assume.

Bogost: Wow.

Rashid: I mean usually I don’t mind when people tell me they’re busy for work—but these kinds of reasons feel so much more common. Even though collectively, the highest-earning Americans, especially men, on average have been working less. So how can it be that everyone is constantly busy, with what? Like, I just don’t know.

Bogost: Yeah; we’re not just busy because of work, though. It’s something else too.

Rashid: I’m Becca Rashid, producer and co-host of the How To series.

Bogost: And I’m Ian Bogost, co-host and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: This is How to Keep Time.

Bogost: I’ve been reading a little about this idea called “action addiction.” And I should say here that this isn’t necessarily, you know, fully accepted in the behavioral psychology community. There’s a lot of dispute about what kind of behavioral addictions really exist, but the idea behind action addiction is that beginning a new task—any kind of task, whatever it is—releases a little dopamine in your brain the same way that pulling the slot-machine lever does.

And in the same way that all behavioral compulsions do, that feeling decays. And then you long for more. And that’s filling our time: that desire for novel feelings, novel sensations, which we pursue instead of going out to dinner with our friends.

Rashid: Right. And I feel like many of us say we don’t have time for other people or wish we had more time for a social life, but it feels like there’s some compulsion to stay busy with random tasks and chores to the point of making ourselves unavailable.

Bogost: I wonder if that unavailability—being unavailable—is almost a point of pride?

Rashid: Oh yeah. Or a way to just signal to each other, “Sorry, I have better things to do. You should have gotten on my calendar earlier if you wanted to see me.”

Bogost: Yeah; I wonder how this happened. If it has become normalized to appear busy, culturally, when did it become accepted?

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: Why is busyness supposedly a show of importance, when it just feels terrible actually?

Rashid: Right.

___

Bogost: So, Becca, I talked to Neeru Paharia a few weeks ago. She’s a consumer-marketing professor at Arizona State University, and she studies busyness.

Neeru Paharia: Time has this property of being scarce. So, if you think about luxury products, most of their value is not functional and instead is purely symbolic.

Bogost: She had some revealing things to say about the ways that time can be a type of social asset.

Paharia: So if you think about, for example—a diamond ring has actually no intrinsic value. So then the question is: Why do people spend so much money on something that has no value? And it turns out there’s a lot of psychological value in something like a diamond.

____

Paharia: When we think about products that are scarce, there are very few of them out there, so people really want them. When we think about a person as being scarce, then we think of scarcity in terms of time.

So, how much time do you have? Well, if you have very little time, then you, in and of yourself, are somewhat of a scarce resource. And then people might come to feel that you’re more valuable, or have more social status.

So if you, for example, try to schedule a meeting with somebody and they tell you, “Well, I have about 15 minutes at 4:15, two months from now”—that is a very clear indication to the receiver of that proposition that they must be important. Or if you go to a doctor and you can get an appointment, you know, today, your inference again might be, “Well, they must not be very good, because they’re not in demand.”

Bogost: Is this a uniquely American phenomenon? Are there other cultures where busyness has the same social status as it does in America?

Paharia: We ran studies in the U.S., and we ran studies in Italy. So in Italy, there’s more of the sense of status that the wealthy can both waste time and waste money. And that you gain your social status from your family and your family name, as opposed to the U.S., where you gain your social status by working hard, earning a lot of money, and kind of climbing the ladder in that way.

And what we found was that in the U.S., a very busy person was seen to have more social status than a less busy person. But in Italy, it was the exact opposite. So there, the person who had time for leisure was seen as having more social status than the person who had to work. And so that sort of reflects the more traditional idea that if you’re really wealthy, you don’t have to work. You have social status in terms of having money, and you have social status because you have so much time. People who have less resources have to work to buy food, to have housing. They have to work. And therefore, the busy people have a lower social status.

Bogost: You’ve looked into this in your work around the kind of humblebragging that people do around their busyness. Can you tell us a little about that?

Paharia: So humblebragging is a brag disguised as a complaint. So, I sometimes will just see what people are posting on Facebook. And one person said something like, “I had a meeting in D.C. this morning, and then I had lunch in New York in the afternoon. In Boston for dinner, for another meeting. I’m so exhausted.” I thought, Wow, like, what is the point of that post?

Bogost: What is the point of that post? Why would we want to brag about not having free time? Isn’t that what we want, in theory?

Paharia: I can speak a little bit to the historical context of it. So, there was a theory many years ago by this gentleman named Thorstein Veblen, and he talked about how the wealthy have both money to waste and time to waste. So you can waste your money on luxury products, gemstones, etc.—that kind of stuff—and you can waste your time on, you know, learning how to ride horses and learning these very intricate mannerisms of, you know, where the fork and the knives and all that stuff goes. So his theory was that the very wealthy and the very high-status people have so many resources that they could waste both their money and their time.

Bogost: Mm hmm.

Paharia: That has evolved, at least in American culture, where having less time is seen as valuable. And I think a lot of that has come from our sense of social mobility: this belief that you can work hard and climb the ladder.

Bogost: I’m thinking back to the diamonds; you need resources to buy them. But I could just pretend like I’m more busy than I really am, which might make myself appear more important. Do people run that kind of calculus? Are people thinking about their time in that way?

Paharia: Yeah; so you’re asking to what extent are people strategically doing this? I think people are doing it not necessarily with a full consciousness that, Hey, you know what, I’m going to say I’m busy, because I want people to think I’m important. But sometimes these things kind of linger in our consciousness right below the surface.

People are motivated to be busy because they’re not only signaling to other people that they’re important, but they’re signaling to themselves that they’re important.

___

Rashid: So Ian, I guess it makes sense to me that we have some innate desire to feel important and valued by society standards. But I also wonder if people have adjusted their levels of busyness since the pandemic.

I mean—I would think that some of that compulsion to use every minute of our time productively, or for some future goal, is a reaction to when we couldn’t use our time in all the ways we otherwise would have.

Bogost: Oh, that’s so interesting, Becca.

Rashid: So maybe some part of this busyness thing is to make up for that time we feel like we lost.

Bogost: It’s really tragic to think about it that way, isn’t it? That yeah, you know, the pandemic was highly traumatic and confusing, but it happened. And to continue to obsess over the lost time, and then to lose more time at trying to recuperate it, is almost worse.

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Bogost: Maybe it’s also because we are conditioned to feel like a busy person. You know, that kind of busy-bee persona where you’re always buzzing around, getting things done. And I mean, I certainly feel that way—that that’s a virtue I’m supposed to pursue.

Rashid: Hmm.

Bogost: I have like, I don’t know, half a dozen different roles: at the university, at The Atlantic, in my home life. It certainly makes me appear busy. It makes me feel busy. And sometimes I wonder: Am I busy in a good way? Or do I just appear busy?

You know, it’s easy to look busy by just doing a ton of things that maybe don’t matter.

Rashid: Right.

Bogost: And that doesn’t seem to match the spirit of what we mean, or what we think we mean, when we talk about a busy person who’s productive, and that’s why they’re busy.

Rashid: Right; and it seems like doing it well is not the point.

Bogost: I was curious to ask Neeru about that. About what it feels like, what can happen, when busyness starts to just completely take over.

___

Paharia: There’s this tendency to want to overschedule yourself, and it could be coming from, “I want to feel important; I want other people to feel that I’m important.” There’s some existential dread of too much idleness—you know, if [you] have too much time, your mind might go to dark places.

I think a lot of people do try and keep themselves busy because it’s a distraction, you know, from some of the bigger existential questions that would arise about our life here on Earth and the time that we spend here. So creating a sense of busyness for yourself can lead to a feeling that you yourself have sort of a reason to be, in a way.

Bogost: Is there a way to stop normalizing busyness as an excuse?

Paharia: I feel like one of the things would be to reflect back and think about: Is it making you happy? Is it making you happy to overschedule yourself, if that is, in fact, what you’re doing? Or are you feeling overwhelmed by that?

The second question is: What is the fear behind not having a schedule? Is it that you’ll have nothing to do, or that you’ll be bored, or that you’ll then become agitated? But there is sometimes a compulsion to keep going.

Bogost: Yeah; it’s so interesting. I mean, I wish there were easier answers. But you’re right. It’s so hard to stop.

Paharia: One of the things we do in our family is we try to not overschedule ourselves. So many weekends we have no plans at all, and have a few other families and friends who also have no other plans. And so then it becomes more of a spontaneous kind of way to get together with people. It gives us some space, you know: “Hey, what do we feel like doing right now? Let’s go get a coffee, or do something like that.”

___

Rashid: Hearing Neeru talk about busyness as a status symbol, Ian, is kind of funny to me. It’s like this personal suffering that we inflict upon ourselves to make people think we have a life, or we’re wanted by a lot of other people—we’re popular. And at the same time, it’s its own sort of avoidance mechanism. It seems like I have so many friends who say, “I actually like to stay busy, because, you know, I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.”

Bogost: Oh my god…

Rashid: What if we would genuinely be happier taking that time to do nothing and not feel bad about it?

Bogost: Right. Feeling bad about it…

Rashid: Instead of multitasking into oblivion—you know, like holding our phone while we’re watching a movie, or FaceTiming someone while we’re cooking dinner—always having to do a million things at once.

Bogost: Yeah. And trying to do everything all at once, it’s not even the most useful way to get things done well.

Rashid: Right, of course.

Bogost: There’s research on “switching costs,” which is just a name for the time you lose when you switch tasks. And the evidence shows that the cost of switching from reading a book to checking my phone because it buzzed could actually cause me to do both of those activities less efficiently…depending on the tasks we’re switching from and to. One study shows switching costs can lead to a loss of up to 40 percent of someone’s productive time.

Rashid: Oh, wow. I mean, I’m not totally surprised by that—but I also fall into this trap of thinking that those people who are really effective at multitasking are also the most ambitious or accomplished among my friends. But the sort of busyness for busyness’s sake, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with accomplishing a big goal or anything like that...

Bogost: You’re just ticking off boxes. You’re doing your to-dos, even if you don’t need to.

Rashid: Right. I think it’s tough when busyness isn’t a choice. Like working parents—the people taking care of their children and their own parents simultaneously—and, you know, just keeping up with that. The dropoffs, the doctors’ appointments, the shift schedules, on top of just being healthy, having a social life. You know, I could go on and on. But that small hit of “I’ve done everything I need to do today; I’m being responsible; I’m a good productive member of society”—that little high—doesn’t feel the same as “I had the presence of mind today to ask my kid how their day went and actually hear their response.”

Bogost: Yeah. And you know, the really scary part is: It kind of does make you a good parent or whatever. You know, like you could probably go your whole career, maybe your whole life, just doing a bunch of things. Just ticking off boxes,

Rashid: Yeah.

Bogost: And people would probably judge you to have been successful.

Rashid: Yep.

Bogost: You were a noble person. What’s the alternative to doing a bunch of things? It’s like: You were slothful. You were lazy.

Rashid: Right. At least that’s the stigma, that you got nothing done.

Bogost: Even if the things you got done were meaningless, you still got them done.

Rashid: I found this interesting research about parents, whose primary concern with their teens’ social-media use—aside from just seeing inappropriate content online—the second two top concerns are kids wasting their time and not getting their homework done. Both of which feel like a value judgment about, you know: “I don’t want a lazy kid.”

Bogost: Yeah: “You’re wasting your time. What are you doing, staring at your phone?”

Rashid: Right, and maybe it doesn’t have to be “I’m lazy when I’m not occupied,” but maybe just not having busyness be the main thing that makes us feel like worthy, valuable members of society

Bogost: Yeah. It’s like: Busyness on its own isn’t necessarily the problem. You just want the right amount of it. And we definitely don’t have the right amount of it.

Rashid: I’m curious to learn from an expert who can explain where this pressure comes from to be constantly busy, be task-oriented, ahead of everything else. And I wonder if there’s a way to balance the social pressure of looking busy with the actual obligations of our day-to-day life.

___

Melissa Mazmanian: Everybody repeatedly told us that right now was a particularly busy time.

Rashid: Hmm.

Mazmanian: And next week, or next quarter, or next month, it was going to get better. And so, I think we oftentimes make sense of our busyness and our feelings of overwhelm by feeling like—if we “just get over this hump” or this deadline.

Rashid: So Ian, I talked to Melissa Mazmanian, who’s a sociologist from UC Irvine. And she co-wrote a book in 2020 called Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age, and her research analyzes why American adults struggle with overwork and this unmanageable busyness that she says goes beyond just schedules.

Mazmanian: My colleague Christine Beckman and a graduate student, Ellie Harmon, and myself spent around 80 to 100 hours with each family. And we just hung out with these families. And through those kinds of micro-moments of everyday life, you see how people are trying to be the ideal worker while still prioritizing other aspects of their life.

Rashid: She lays out three myths that motivate American adults to stay constantly occupied: the desire to be the ideal worker, have the perfect body, and be the perfect parent.

Bogost: Yeah, those are definitely dreams.

Mazmanian: In terms of the people that I’m studying, I will find that the people who buy in more tend to be more stressed and feel like more of a failure, right? So, the more that you feel like, “No, no, no, I actually should be able to be a perfect parent, and I should be able to run five to 10 miles a day, and I should be able to be seen as an ideal worker,”—the more you’re committed to that and unwilling to question what it looks like to be a good parent and a good worker in a healthy body—the harder it is. Because they are fundamentally impossible.

Rashid: So Ian, if Neeru’s saying busyness indicates to others that we’re valuable in some way, I asked Melissa to explain the other side of that—how busyness can make us feel valuable to ourselves.

___

Mazmanian: I don’t think I’m alone in someone who’s always carrying—almost like you think about a wave going out, and there’s like the trickle of water after the wave that we’re carrying along. This trickle of water of all the things we didn’t get to: all the emails I didn’t answer, all the times I didn’t do my workout. All the times I wasn’t there for my children. And managing that is, I think, one of the interesting kinds of truths of living in Western society.

So first of all, I have no idea what it means to be genuinely overworked.

Rashid: Heh heh heh.

Mazmanian: I don’t know if many people do. There’s some studies that show that people will literally hit a breaking point, which means that your body breaks down, or you develop addictions of various kinds, etcetera. That’s extreme.

So what does it mean to live a sustainable life like that? You’re every day feeling like you’ll be able to wake up the next day, and maybe there’s some ups and downs. But that it feels genuinely sustainable.

One thing that was fascinating was that everybody repeatedly told us that right now was a particularly busy time.

Rashid: Hmm.

Mazmanian: And next week, or next quarter, or next month, it was going to get better. And so I think we oftentimes make sense of our busyness and our feelings of overwhelm by feeling like—if we “just get over this hump,” or this deadline.

But there’s a lot in our lives such that those humps and deadlines continually happen. We’re balancing the cycle of a school year; we’re balancing the cycle of financial quarters; we’re balancing the cycle of artificial deadlines that we make for ourselves at work and in our personal life.

We also have these kinds of life-cycle deadlines that we put on ourselves. Everything from “What age should I get married?”—I think some of these are crumbling, but—“If I want children, what age should I have children?” We are living in terms of a million kind of created deadlines, which make it feel like there is always the next thing. That “If I just get over this, I will feel better.”

Rashid: Did you find anything in your research that explains that optimism that people have? That right now is the busiest moment—but next week it’ll certainly get better, and I’ll have more free time to do the thing I actually want?

Mazmanian: So I will say one of the explicit things to mention here is that people in our study were not unhappy. These were not people who actually said, like, “I want to do less.” What they’re saying is, “I want to do what I’m doing better.”

This is everyday life that, at least for these human beings, doesn’t feel like overwork, burnout, about to lose it. This is just: “I wish I could do it with a little more sanity, a little more sleep. You know, a little less intense.”

We’ve become so committed to the idea that “doing it all” is what the goal is. That this is productivity—that this is what I need to do to feel good about who I am in the world. And so that optimism comes with the idea that I’m actually getting a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from feeling like I can be the superhero.

___

Rashid: So, Melissa, moms with intense time pressure can face a higher risk of mental-health issues. So, I’m surprised to learn that in your research busy or overworked people are not necessarily more stressed or unhappy. Were there any gender differences in the optimism around busyness? Or did you discover anything about who is most likely to achieve that sort of superhero status with their busy schedules?

Mazmanian: There is research by Erin Reid that shows both men and women chafe against these ideal-worker norms in the workplace. But men have an easier time, quote, passing as an ideal worker—meaning that if they leave early, someone watches them leave early and they assume, “Oh, that guy is leaving because he’s got another meeting somewhere else,” or “He’s going to visit the client.” A woman leaves early? People tend to assume, “Oh, that woman’s leaving early because her kid has a doctor’s appointment.”

Rashid: Mm hmm.

Mazmanian: You know, we have gendered associations with how people use their time and display it at work.

Rashid: How did we go from that sort of eight-hour workday standard to becoming obsessed with controlling every little block of our days? Like the: “8 a.m. to 8:15, I’ll eat breakfast. 8:30 to 9, I’ll do my workout.” Like, how did we get to that point of scheduling every minute?

Mazmanian: Going way back in time to the Benedictine monks. This was the first place in Western society where—and this is work from Eviatar Zerubavel, scholar of time and scheduling and kind of histories of time. He looks back at the Benedictine monks as the first time where what was seen as a valued social order and a desirable social order—which is spiritually pure, I guess—is one in which time is regular at the level of the hour.

Before that, you kind of have religious rites during this time of year, or schedules based on festivals or holidays. But the Benedictine monks: They brought it down to the level of the hour. And every hour was supposed to have a spiritual purpose.

And this idea that you wake up at this time, and have the glory of God, and then you go to, you know, Mass. And in the monastery, you could look around and know what time it was based on what everybody was doing, right? So what you do first, second, third of the day was really sedimented in these monasteries. And I think you can see the roots of that into what you’re talking about in terms of our everyday life today.

Rashid: I wanted to get back to something you said earlier about these cycles of time or these cycles in our lives—all of those sort of time markers that indicate when we should do what at what time. And as that relates to the nine-to-five, like: How did we develop this cadence?

Mazmanian: So prior to the Industrial Revolution, people were working incredibly long hours. Your work and life were totally kind of merged together. And then with the Industrial Revolution and people leaving and going to factories, they were completely overworked. Exploited to the point where their bodies were breaking down and so forth.

[Henry] Ford established an eight-hour work shift on his manufacturing plants, and that was right before the Great Depression. Then the Depression happened. A lot of people got laid off. And [W.K.] Kellogg, who was the Kellogg cereal guy, he actually instituted a six-hour work shift so he’d pay people a little bit less, but get more people back at work by doing six hours. Now interestingly, Kellogg actually had another belief in the value of free time and leisure time.

And there was this whole language around the Industrial Revolution that we were going to become so efficient that everybody was going to have a ton of leisure time. And that this was actually going to be a crisis of humanity, because we wouldn’t know what to do with all of our free time. So there’s a whole academic scholarship at the time that was leisure studies, which was like: “Oh, no. What are we going to do when we all have too much time?” Well, fast-forward 100 years; that is not the case. And it turns out that in the end, the capitalist enterprise is so strong that if you have free time, people tend to commit it back to work in order to try and make more money.

So Kellogg kept his six-hour shifts, but by the 1950s, basically everyone had chosen to go back to an eight-hour shift because they wanted the two extra hours and more money. So we tend to prioritize money over time, and I don’t know why. But I think that is a bit of a moral and social value that we’ve become accustomed to.

___

Bogost: So Becca, about 10 years ago now I invented this phrase: “hyper-employment.”

Rashid: Is it different from just choosing to work more in order to make more money?

Bogost: It’s the idea that you have all these little jobs that you didn’t previously have and may not be real jobs—like ones you’re not getting paid for—but you’re responsible for the work. Like, maybe you have to do your own accounting and expense reports at your job, where previously someone else would handle that work. It’d be a whole job taking care of accounting. For example, think of all the things that you do because smartphones and computers let you do them. You’re your own travel agent.

Rashid: Right, right.

Bogost: And you have to manage your personal brand on Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever. And you kind of need to do that to be a professional in the world. It’s optional but also kind of compulsory now.

Rashid: Interesting. And that hyper-employment also adds that extra scheduled component. Like, now you have to buy a movie ticket in advance, or you have to put in the work in advance to schedule it.

Bogost: Yeah; now that’s your responsibility. And if you mess it up, it’s your fault too.

Rashid: Right.

___

Mazmanian: A lot of what motivates us to act, what motivates us to spend our time in certain ways, what motivates us to use technology in certain ways—well, oftentimes your core motives are truly a sense that, “You know, I’m a worthy human who’s doing the right thing, and I can feel good about myself.”

And those core senses of self? Sure, they come from personality; they come from background; they come from some innate character traits. But as a sociologist, I’m a firm believer that a lot of what gives us value is based on our society.

Rashid: But why would people aspire to “do it all” when they quite literally know that they can’t? You are giving these units of time—like, what’s appropriate to do at 8 a.m.? A workout, let’s say. It’s much harder to do at 2 a.m., at least for me. So, like, is it even possible?

Mazmanian: Well, you’re making us sound like very rational humans. And I just don’t think we are. I think that we have these kinds of values that translate into desires or thrusts or hopes or dreams, or how we feel like we should live our lives.

___

Bogost: So Becca, learning to catch yourself in this act of talking about being busy or feeling busy—maybe that’s the first step to taming it. Like for me, that “How are you? I’m busy” refrain—I think it means “I know what I’m doing, but I’m disconnected from why I’m doing it or where it’s leading.”

Rashid: Interesting. So for you, the busyness feels like some distraction or cop-out from actually thinking about how you’re doing?

Bogost: Right.

Rashid: I think that Crate & Barrel story—to go back to that—bothered me because someone is trying to celebrate their birthday, and they have to also accept the fact that they’re less important than, you know, a flexible home-decor chore that obviously can be shifted around.

Bogost: Right. That could have been done anytime. But, you know, the person doing the home-decor chore—they may not even really be prioritizing it over their friend. They’re just like, “I’m busy. On to the next thing. I gotta go to the store. I’ve gotta do that.”

Rashid: True.

Bogost: I know when I’m in that mode, I just have this strong sense that I don’t know what I’m doing next, and I need to figure it out.

Rashid: And that sort of gives you some feeling of security, right? Like, I know what’s next. And you’re right: I guess maybe I’m making it more personal than it has to be, because mainstream American culture doesn’t make it particularly socially acceptable to actually tell someone how you’re feeling.

So many conversations in adulthood are what I call “life update” talks. It’s just sort of an exchange of plans and schedules and vacations coming up, and things that I have left to get done this week, and…

Bogost: “I’m going to free up right after I…”

Rashid: Yeah. I mean, shocker—it does make it harder to actually get a sense of how someone’s doing. I think it would be helpful to tap into why we do what we do, and if we could explain or communicate a bit more of that, it’s better than just, “I’m busy, and I don’t want to let you into my world.”

Bogost: Yeah. And you know when you are busy, it might mean that you’re just on autopilot.

Rashid: So true.

Bogost: “Busy”: That’s a good red flag. It’s like an opportunity to reflect, and to ask yourself, “What am I feeling in this situation? What am I doing?” And the answer might be “Nothing.”

Rashid: At least “less.”

Bogost: Or at least “less.”

___

Rashid: Ian, have you ever tried eating a clock?

Bogost: Eating a clock? I haven’t tried that.

Rashid: It’s very time consuming.

Bogost: Oh my gosh.

____

Bogost: Hey, listeners, we want to hear from you.

When was the last time you remember being alone—without using your phone, even—for more than an hour?

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Culture has a way of defining a year for even the under-rock dwellers among us: A good movie, TV show, book, or album can shape our conversations, our experiences, and even the way we think. Today’s newsletter rounds up some of the culture writing that guided our readers through a year of controversial awards shows, deepfakes, and—it must be said—Che Diaz.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Our 10 favorite books of 2023 Selling art to the rich, famous, and inebriated The 10 best films of 2023

Your Culture Cheat Sheet

Barbie Is Everything. Ken Is Everything Else.

By Megan Garber

The biggest blockbuster of the year was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, and in this essay, Garber goes beneath the film’s shiny surface to explore its questions about personhood and political power.

What Made Taylor Swift’s Concert Unbelievable

By Spencer Kornhaber

A ticket to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour was a precious commodity in 2023, and, as Kornhaber reported from the tour’s kickoff, in Arizona, Swift’s performance justifies the hype.

Beyoncé Tickets Are the New Status Symbol

By Shamira Ibrahim

Purchasing tickets for Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour was a cultural experience unto itself, Shamira Ibrahim writes.

Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology

By Ross Andersen

Andersen spoke with Nolan about the similarities between Nikola Tesla and Robert Oppenheimer, the techno-optimism of Interstellar, how Inception anticipated the social-media age, and why the director hasn’t yet made a film about artificial intelligence.

The Death of the Sex Scene

By Sophie Gilbert

Depictions of love in film and TV have become strangely loveless. Gilbert asks: What do we lose when we don’t see intimacy on-screen?

The Unexpected Power of Second-Chance Romance

By Hannah Giorgis

This year, TV turned the cameras in a new direction, Giorgis writes, as shows such as And Just Like That and The Golden Bachelor explored what it means to date after 50.

The Fury of Chris Rock

By David Sims

In his latest special, the comedian opened up about the Oscars slap heard ’round the world. The result, Sims writes, was 10 minutes of raw anger.

The Succession Plot Point That Explained the Whole Series

By Nina Li Coomes

In Shiv, what is often a clichéd storyline became both poignant and tragic in the HBO show’s finale, Nina Li Coomes writes.

The Week Ahead

The second part of The Crown’s final season (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Wonka, adapted from Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, stars Timothée Chalamet and Hugh Grant (in theaters Friday). In How to Draw a Novel (on sale Tuesday), Martín Solares studies the craft of literary fiction through a series of essays.

Essay

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty.

America Isn’t Ready for the Two-Household Child

By Stephanie H. Murray

For most of American history, when parents separated, their kids almost always ended up living with just one of them. But recent studies have confirmed a new era: Joint physical custody, in which a child resides with each parent a significant portion of the time, has become dramatically more common in the U.S.

The trend was first documented in Wisconsin, where court data revealed that the percentage of divorces leading to equal joint custody—in which time with each parent is split 50–50—rose from just 2 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2010 … Regardless of whether it’s the right outcome for a given separation, though, joint custody is a growing reality—one that our systems for accounting for and supporting families aren’t built to accommodate. Americans may be ready for the two-household child, but American public policy isn’t.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

Who’s afraid of women’s pleasure? The stunted emotional lives of May December Norman Lear’s many American families Let them cook. A soulless holiday-shopping strategy A spiritual manifesto for the dispossessed The George Santos number that brought SNL to life Poem: “My Ancestors Ride Wit Me”

Catch Up on The Atlantic

If Trump Wins: A project that considers what Donald Trump might do if reelected The sanctions against Russia are starting to work. The hybrid-car dilemma

Photo Album

A Rohingya woman walks to the beach after the local community temporarily allowed a boat of refugees to land for water and food, in Ulee Madon, Indonesia. (Amanda Jufrian / AFP / Getty)

An annular solar eclipse over North America, Israel’s war against Hamas, the felling of a famous tree in England, and more in our editor’s selection of the year in photos.

P.S.

When you’ve finished your journey through this year in culture, consider booking one for further back: This retrospective from 2019 runs through the good, the bad, and the ugly of the 2010s zeitgeist, and it may be the only place to see Elena Ferrante and the poop emoji discussed in adjacent paragraphs.

— Nicole

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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The protagonist of the new film Poor Things is no ordinary heroine. As played by Emma Stone, Bella Baxter is a corpse reanimated by a man who replaced her brain with that of her unborn child; she’s therefore a blend of juvenile innocence and adult promiscuity, shamelessly charting her own course through life because she’s never been conditioned to meet societal constraints. She has no clue what womanhood is supposed to entail or how she’s expected to behave, yet she looks full-grown—a Frankenstein’s monster dressed in frilly outfits, without a single scar in sight.

Like her, Poor Things is brazenly, gleefully original in its presentation and ideas. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and based on Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, the movie takes place in a steampunk, otherworldly Victorian wonderland, and Bella’s story unfolds like a twisted fairy tale. Seeking freedom and adventure, she embarks on a journey around the world, which leads to encounters with characters who are simultaneously enthralled and threatened by her singular perspective—and who all try to control her in their own way. With them, she pursues experiences, many of them sexual, that shape her understanding of what it means to be fully alive. The film can, as a result, be hard to classify: It is at once a strangely charming bildungsroman, an erotic melodrama, a body-horror-tinged mystery, and a wondrous feminist meditation on the power of self-discovery.

But the film can be defined as a triumph of creative collaboration. Lanthimos and Stone have completed four projects together—including 2018’s The Favourite, last year’s short film Bleat, and the forthcoming Kind of Kindness—and Poor Things offers the best evidence of their particular artistic alchemy thus far. With it, Lanthimos, who’s known for making absurd black comedies such as The Lobster, has built a maximalist film that’s relentlessly funny, terrifically horny, thoroughly provocative, and “different in every respect” compared with his previous work, he told me. Stone, meanwhile, delivers the most fearless performance of her career, nimbly capturing every step of Bella’s social and sexual awakening.

I spoke with Lanthimos and Stone last month over Zoom. We talked about their partnership, the unique challenges of making Poor Things, and how their individual sensibilities contributed to the film’s intimacy. As they reflected on their work, the two often gently teased each other with a playfulness of which Bella would approve.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Shirley Li: This is the third collaboration of yours being released. Forgive me for putting this so bluntly, but why do you keep working together?

Emma Stone: No, I understand. As an actor, it’s no small thing to trust the person who is bringing the whole thing together, and Yorgos really takes responsibility for his films. If something goes wrong, the only person he blames at the end of the day is himself, and I share that personality trait. I know how much he cares and how miserable the whole process makes him up close.

Li: Miserable?

Yorgos Lanthimos: Well, it’s so stressful, the whole process. I’m not psyched. I’m, you know, frightened.

Stone: We would watch YouTube videos that make us laugh to try to calm down.

Li: What videos?

Stone: [Laughs] You tell, Yorgos.

Lanthimos: Inappropriate things, mostly. [Both laugh] Things we should not, um …

Stone: Funny things!

Li: I know you’re no strangers to making sexually frank scenes—The Favourite was also risqué—but tell me more about collaborating this time, because those sequences are an enormous part of Poor Things. You can trace Bella’s development through her sexual experiences; the film shifts from black and white to full color when Bella’s having sex with Duncan Wedderburn (played by Mark Ruffalo), the caddish lawyer who introduces her to the larger world. Emma, you’re a producer on this film, unlike in your previous work with Yorgos. How did that affect the making of Poor Things’ most explicit scenes?

Stone: I was privy to how everything was unfolding. I don’t know how helpful I was. In terms of how it practically existed on the day, we had a very trusted team that was in the room for all of that: Robbie Ryan, our director of photography; Hayley Williams, our first assistant director, who’s wonderful; and Olga Abramson, our focus puller. We had an incredible intimacy coordinator named Elle McAlpine. It was just extremely professional but also fun and alive. We had conversations about literally everything, so there were no surprises.

Lanthimos: I don’t think we discussed a lot about the theory of things or the characters and analysis. We discussed more practical things.

[Read: Will sex scenes survive the pandemic?]

Li: The film’s sex scenes have received a range of responses. Some see them as proof that sex scenes are coming back to the movies; others have criticized them for being too graphic. Are you surprised at all by the variety of reactions?

Stone: [Apologetically] He doesn’t look at those.

Lanthimos: I get a general sense of things.

Stone: We knew that Bella was without shame and was deeply curious and was exploring the world in a way that we maybe haven’t seen before. The camera shying away from her puts a kind of societal onus onto her that she doesn’t deserve. She’s free. Why should we be ashamed?

Lanthimos: What maybe surprised me is, it seems like the film’s been perceived more so on the positive side of what we’re discussing. I’d expected maybe more reservations. That’s something that I do think about: If I had made the film when I wanted to make it, 12 years ago, would it be the same? Or is it that the world that we live in has slightly shifted, and now people can actually accept and be interested in this story of this woman as a free being with sexuality? Maybe it wouldn’t have been seen or talked about that much if it was done 10 years ago.

Li: Emma, do you agree? Yorgos did first talk about Poor Things with you when you were still working on The Favourite, and in the roughly six years since, there have been real-life upheavals in women’s freedoms, which is obviously relevant to the story Poor Things tells.

Stone: I hesitate to say this, because it sounds bad, but when I’m drawn to something, it really is just because it’s something that I feel drawn to. But it’s hard, because you make a film and then you go and do press for it, and, like we found with The Favourite, it’s like, It’s so timely! Hillary lost the election last year; what do you think? There is this sort of thing that gets put onto these stories as they’re released. I think that a story that is original always feels timely, because it’s something that feels deeply true or upsetting or whatever it may be.

To say that, years ago, this wasn’t as true as it is right now—that people are being horrific about Roe v. Wade and things like that—I think that’s an unfair idea, to say that a story becomes more relevant or less relevant. So I don’t know why Yorgos said that [Laughs], and I think you should strike it from the record.

Lanthimos: [Laughs]

Stone: I said it!

Li: To be fair to Yorgos, it does feel like this year’s been rife with films about women on journeys of self-discovery; this film plays like a surreal version of Barbie. With that in mind, did either of you envision a certain audience for Poor Things as you were making it, and consider the potential reactions to its sexual frankness from there? And given your different cultural backgrounds, did your approaches differ?

Stone: Hm. [To Lanthimos] Do you ever envision your audience?

Lanthimos: I don’t.

Stone: I’ve never heard him envision the audience. [Laughs] But yes, I mean, obviously I grew up in Arizona and he grew up in Athens, and there is a sort of, uh, different structure to what we learn about, about nudity and sexuality. A conversation that he’s brought up a lot, and I feel the same way, is the American relationship to violence on film is a kind of free-for-all. It’s a PG-13 movie if a bunch of people get shot but you don’t see blood. It’s R if you see the blood.

The culture of America and its relationship to violence is really fascinating, that it would be so prudish around sexuality, something that’s a part of a natural human experience and the way that people literally are created and born—that’s shameful, for some reason, but the way they die is not. As I’ve gotten older, it really is baffling to me, that acceptance of one but not the other. And I do think there’s a reversal of that in a lot of European cinema. Maybe I’m wrong. Yorgos?

Lanthimos: Maybe. I don’t know.

Stone: I don’t know either! I’m just sort of waxing poetic. I’m teaching a class. [Laughs]

Li: Speaking of which, I’m curious about what this collaboration taught you compared with your previous partnerships.

Lanthimos: I have to say, it’s not necessarily during Poor Things, but with the last few projects, I’ve learned to trust. I think when I was starting out, on my earlier films, I was way more suspicious of people.

I just wanted to have total control over everything and think that I know best. And so, by finding people that I can trust and admire, and working with them over and over again, I just learned to let go of certain things. And when you find those people, you just need to provide them with freedom and an appropriate environment, and they can flourish. In return, you get much more than you had imagined.

Stone: This is like therapy, Shirley.

Lanthimos: Yeah.

Li: I’m trying.

Stone: It’s good! I would describe our collaboration the same way. You’re so out of control as an actor. You don’t control the edit or how the film is going to end up, and that can be scary as time goes on, and you see some of the films that you’ve been a part of and you’re like, Oh my God, I guess that’s how that turned out. So to have this faith in him, that it will be something that I believe in, that’s incredible.

We have very different backgrounds and very different approaches to things, personality-wise. He’s very internal, and I am more external. But for whatever reason, there’s something between us that clicks. I never imagined getting to make the types of things that we’ve been able to make together. I’ve even learned to develop film with him!

Lanthimos: In print!

Stone: In print! He takes pictures on set all day on film cameras, and we started developing them in Budapest. That was the wind-down after days of shooting.

Li: Now, obviously, the two of you didn’t make Poor Things in a vacuum. You brought a lot of familiar faces on board—the aforementioned cinematographer Robbie Ryan, the screenwriter Tony McNamara—but you also recruited some new collaborators in the cast and crew. What do you look for when you introduce someone into the Lanthimos-Stone fold?

Lanthimos: I guess the first thing is talent. [Laughs] But my process is so intuitive, and so that’s why it’s very hard to talk about. Mostly, if you can sit down and spend time together without it being overly difficult and without having to, um …

Stone: Explain too much?

Lanthimos: Yeah. If you don’t have to make a huge effort to be with the other person, I think that’s quite important.

Stone: Ditto. You’re able to be freer and do more interesting work when you’re with people you really feel are all there for the same reason. You don’t have to waste time getting comfortable.

Yesterday, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were caught in a trap in front of a House committee. Each was asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated rules at their university. Each president refused to answer directly, insisting that everything depends on context.

So here’s the context: On university campuses and in many other places, anti-Semitic speech regularly crosses the line into threats, intimidation, and outright violence against Jews. University rules and local laws are intentionally violated because everybody knows that the rules and laws are selectively enforced.  

Liberals in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill like to compare speech and debate to a marketplace. Let all offer their ideas in peaceful competition; let all have equal opportunity to listen and judge. But there’s another tradition consolidating around us. In this tradition, speech is not like a market. It’s like a battle. The goal is not to enlighten, but to dominate. Adversaries must be overawed, intimidated, and silenced.

Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, we have heard many stories of threats to pro-Palestinian free speech in the United States. The Atlantic itself has published some accounts of them. Yet take a closer look, and something else is usually going on. Complaints that pro-Palestine speech has been curtailed again and again turn out to involve violations of norms, rules, and laws that have nothing to do with speech as liberal-minded people would define it. In New York City last week, pro-Palestine demonstrators attempted to disrupt the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. For fear of a repeat of such attacks, yesterday the state of California announced that its tree-lighting ceremony would no longer take place in person, and would be a virtual event.

[David Frum: Harvard has a brand problem. Here’s how to fix it.]

Rhetoric drawn from the Jefferson-Mill tradition is now being used to defend behavior that is meant to intimidate or harm. Important elements of our society have shifted from their former claim that speech can be violence to a bold assertion that violence should count as speech. A few days ago, Canada’s York University—the country’s second-largest college—suspended three academics who had been criminally charged for their anti-Israel activism. “You should consider defending speech as opposed to the Orwellian Toronto Police on this matter,” the Toronto-born writer Naomi Klein tweeted.

What was this “speech” that Klein referred to? The three arrested academics had splashed red paint over the entrance of a downtown bookstore, then pasted posters all over the store’s windows bearing an (invented) anti-Palestinian quote they (falsely) attributed to the store’s owner, a prominent Jewish businesswoman.

Rifle through the news accounts of the past few years and you find dozens, if not hundreds, of similar cases of vandalism, bodily interference, even outright assault as forms of anti-Israel expression. Only this week, the Biden White House and the governor of Pennsylvania issued statements condemning the mob action against a falafel restaurant in Philadelphia owned by an award-winning Israeli-born chef and entrepreneur.

But such menacing behavior has become the preferred style of anti-Israel expression in the United States and Canada.

Pro-Palestine advocates have built barriers to block people’s way as they tried to walk across a college campus or drive to work.

They have padlocked doors to a university building to prevent students from taking a midterm exam.

They have assembled slogan-chanting crowds outside businesses owned by Jews to frighten customers away.

They have confronted and harassed shoppers in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood.

They have defaced synagogues and damaged libraries named for Jewish donors.

They have set off smoke bombs and thrown paint at the home of the head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

In October, anti-Israel protesters at Harvard mobbed a student who tried to film them with his phone—something he was entitled to do at a public event. The protesters allegedly jostled and grabbed at him in an effort to prevent him from recording the encounter.

On November 10, Columbia University suspended the local chapters of two pro-Palestine groups after both violated university rules and went ahead, despite warnings, with an event that involved “threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

In the worst cases, activists have escalated street demonstrations into physical fights that have left some Jews injured, in one case with a broken nose, and led to one violent death when a pro-Palestine protester struck a Jewish man in the face with a megaphone, knocking him to the ground so that his head hit the curb.

[Greg Lukianoff: The latest victims of the free-speech crisis]

As the sheer number and variety of these acts confirm, these are not occasional and unfortunate aberrations. In the words of a student activist at William & Mary in 2018: “By breaking down the notion of respectability, the Palestinians can and should demand that their oppression be taken seriously.” In 2021, the Palestinian American writer Steve Salaita mocked those who “speak of rights and democracy and civil liberties and then superimpose those categories onto Palestine. It doesn’t occur to them that Palestine has its own vocabularies of freedom worth forcing into the American conversation.”   

Classical liberal defenders of free speech imagine speech as an appeal to human reason. On October 17, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression posted a statement that urged:

Let every participant in the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict show their cards, even those with the most extreme views. And let others marshal arguments and evidence to refute or discredit those views.

But marshaling evidence and arguments is precisely what some advocates reject on principle. For the past decade, the big idea of anti-Israel protesters has been BDS: “boycott, divest, and sanction.” What the BDS idea has meant in practice is attempts at systematic exclusion of Jews and Israelis from participation in public dialogue. U.S. academic associations including the Middle East Studies Association, the American Studies Association, and the American Anthropological Association have voted to sever their ties with Israeli universities. On American campuses such as the University of Chicago, pro-Palestine advocates have tried to mobilize students to boycott classes taught by Israeli nationals or people with connections to Israel. At a New York City high school last month, students rioted against a teacher who had posted on social media about her attendance at a pro-Israel rally. Two dozen New York police and the city’s counterterrorism unit had to be called to protect the teacher and restore order at the school.

In a marketplace of ideas, ripping down posters you disagree with is wrong. Post your own! But to those who see the world of ideas as a battlefield, ripping down an offending poster is amply justified. Opponents are enemies, not competitors, and enemies are allowed no rights at all. So go ahead, rip down posters of abducted children—and physically attack those who document your actions. In Canada, there have been multiple instances of guns being fired at Jewish schools during non-classroom hours: a wishful fantasy of mass murder.

The denial of speech rights to those who think incorrectly is not a marginal idea in American life. It commands wide support from some of the most celebrated American thinkers of our day.

[Conor Friedersdorf: An unusually tricky campus free-speech fight]

Ibram X. Kendi, for example, published an article in 2015 defending students at Wesleyan and Brown who had tried to shut down their campus newspapers for publishing opinions to which those students objected: in one case a defense of Columbus Day, in the other a critique of the Black Lives Matter movement. He wrote:

When the press publishes false or unproven racist ideas in news stories or columns without informing readers there is no truth to those claims and tales, that is not an exercise in free speech. That is unfree speech … We should applaud the students at Wesleyan and Brown who are trying to silence unfree speech in their student newspapers.

Endorsing 2021 demands that Netflix sever its ties with the comedian Dave Chappelle, GLAAD urged “accountability when content causes harm.” Two academic specialists in digital free speech made a similar argument in a 2021 op-ed:

Cancel culture is not a threat to free speech—it is a manifestation of it. Cancel culture is an evolving form of democratic discourse where individuals use their free speech rights to form masses. These masses exert pressure on people and institutions. A better term for it would be “accountability culture” … That’s what cancel culture is doing. It is people leveraging emerging communication tools to apply pressure to individuals and organizations.

Arguably, this way of thinking reached its culmination in the summer of 2020, when The New York Times allowed angry staffers to force the resignation of the editorial-page editor, James Bennet (a former editor of The Atlantic), for the offense of publishing an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. The article called for deploying the military to suppress riots in American cities. Its critics and their allies condemned Cotton’s article for supposedly endangering Black journalists at the Times.

According to this new code, rights vary according to the status of the rights-bearer. One rule exists for the so-called marginalized; a different rule applies to the nonmarginalized. MIT provided a pair of telling examples of how the new dispensation of rights-by-status operates.

In the fall of 2021, MIT invited Dorian Abbot, a young academic at the University of Chicago, to deliver a lecture about new developments in climate science. For Abbot, this was an exciting opportunity, the kind of honor that speeds an associate professor toward a tenured professorship. Two months before the lecture, however, Abbot published an article criticizing affirmative action in higher education. MIT had never before made a scientific invitation conditional on the scientist’s views about a nonscientific matter. Yet, after protests by graduate students, the MIT earth-sciences department canceled the lecture.

Two years later, MIT faced a direct violation of its declared rules by pro-Palestine demonstrators. To avoid traffic disruption, MIT forbids demonstrations at the campus’s main entrance. A group called Students Against Apartheid announced a plan to break that rule on November 9—coincidentally or not, the 85th anniversary of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht attack on Jews and Jewish property in Germany. The protest soon turned rancorous.

MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, ordered the protesters to clear out and warned students who disobeyed that they would face suspension. Some students did disobey. But when it came time to apply the penalty, MIT retreated. Foreign students suspended for nonacademic reasons could forfeit their student visas. To protect them, MIT dropped its threat.

In other words, in 2021, MIT imposed a significant penalty on an academic who had broken no rule. In 2023, MIT waived the penalty for students who broke an important rule.

The new speech code redefines some words as causing “harm”; at the same time, it redefines actual “harm” caused as mere words. Some previously distinguished academics have deliriously celebrated Hamas’s atrocities as exhilarating or at least justified them as understandable responses to the provocation of an Israeli dance party. At Arizona State University, a student-government debate about a resolution on Israel and Gaza was interrupted when pro-Palestine students threw rocks at the windows of the meeting hall. Police were called—not to arrest the rock throwers, but to escort Jewish students home. Jewish students similarly had to be escorted out of the rear entrance of the Cooper Union library building in New York City on October 25.

What on earth can be done about this awful situation?

In the 2010s, those progressives who urged universities to suppress unwanted ideas hoped that they could leverage their power within institutions of learning, communications, and culture to remake the rest of society. They scored considerable successes. But there was always something artificial about their project. The norms they sought to enforce were usually not shared. The opinion that got Abbot bounced from his MIT lecture—against race-based preferences in university admissions—is shared by fully half of Americans. Other causes that got academics deplatformed in the 2010s offered even more startling examples of minorities commandeering public institutions to create a false appearance of consensus. In 2023, a Gallup poll asked, “Do you think transgender athletes should be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity or should only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” Only about one quarter of Americans said yes to the “gender identity” option—the one favored by the deplatformers—while almost 70 percent chose the “birth gender” option.

But the polling also shows that the revulsion against Hamas’s atrocities represents a genuine majority feeling in American society. Americans do not like terrorism, and they do not like excuses for terrorism. They do not like the heartless behavior and symbolic violence that is typically joined to the excuse-making.

And so, anti-Israel activists who ripped down posters of abducted children found themselves named, shamed, and in some cases fired. Amazon, Apple, Intel, Meta, and other large companies withdrew from one of the world’s largest tech conference after the CEO accused Israel on social media of war crimes without mentioning Hamas terrorism. Dozens of leading asset managers signed a letter pledging to outlaw any expression of anti-Semitic hate at their organization. Twenty-four major U.S. law firms have issued a similar commitment. A non-Jewish managing partner at a major North American law firm shared with me a message he sent to all his partners and associates in October:

The State of Israel is connected to many of our people by family, friendships and shared history. It is connected to all of us as a democracy in a very troubled area. The terrorist attacks of this past week are an affront not just to Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, but to all civilized people.

These acts, too, involve freedom of expression and association.

[Yascha Mounk: Cancel culture cuts both ways]

Since October 7, hate-filled violence has killed one Palestinian American boy and savagely wounded his mother, victims of an alleged stabbing attack by their landlord in a town southwest of Chicago. Over Thanksgiving weekend, three Palestinian American students were shot, and one was severely wounded, in Burlington, Vermont—a crime that police are still investigating. All are entitled to live without fear. All acts of violence must be held to account. No act of violence should be condoned or minimized.

And the days of dressing up ritualized violence as “speech”—and demanding protections for stalking, harassing, bullying, impeding, intimidating, deplatforming, and even actual violence—must end.

Everybody should be free to express his or her opinion about the Middle East as an opinion. Everybody should be equally free to express opinions about other people’s opinions, including by exercising the freedom to peacefully boycott or to lawfully refuse to hire. But what the great majority of tolerant and law-abiding citizens are abruptly discovering is that some progressives define their rights as including the power to threaten, coerce, and harm others. This is not behavior that a free and democratic society can accept if it hopes to survive as a free and democratic society. If the public condemnation of their violent behavior comes as a shock to people incubated in progressive spaces, the shock will be a salutary one.