It was already dark when my family and I climbed into the big white pickup truck with Marcelo Jorge. A drizzly May night in the Ozarks; everything seemed soggy and muted. Jorge was upbeat, though. It was the peak of fawning season, and so far this year, his team had captured and collared a dozen fawns. The more deer they could collar, the more data they could collect about a disease threatening deer and their relatives.

Jorge is leading a multiyear study at the University of Georgia on chronic wasting disease, an always-fatal neurological illness. Ubiquitous deer may be, but in CWD, they face a serious threat. From its first appearance in Colorado in the late 1960s, CWD has crawled steadily across the country. It is now found in more than 30 states and multiple Canadian provinces.

Deer are all over the United States, trampling suburban lawns, running across highways, nibbling at crops. But, though seemingly counterintuitive, American deer might be on the decline. The trend is uncertain, but an estimate from G. Kent Webb, a professor emeritus at San Jose State University, suggests that deer’s total population peaked around the turn of the millennium, at about 38 million; we’re now at perhaps 35 million after a recent rebound. Although the more common white-tailed deer has been resilient, habitat loss and climate change are especially taking their toll on mule deer out west, which have declined substantially since their mid-20th-century peak. And CWD may have the potential to spread to every state. Even as deer numbers remain large, their slow disappearance would be a chilling prospect. Few of us have contemplated what a world without deer would look like.

In Jorge’s truck, we went bumping along dark gravel roads that threaded the forest; upslope, downhill, near rushing creeks, and along the flanks of steep dolomite hills. Forest crowded the roads on both sides. Prescribed burns by the state’s wildlife agency, Jorge told us, helped support the local deer by encouraging low, bushy vegetation that makes good deer food. But CWD was likely pulling the numbers the other way. The disease wasn’t detected until 2016 in this part of Arkansas, but the state soon learned it had probably been in the area for decades and, in some parts of the state, was infecting more than one in five deer.

[Read: We’re giving up on the (frog) pandemic]

CWD is caused by a misfolded protein called a prion, which deer transmit through direct contact or by shedding prions into the environment. Ingested or inhaled, the prions slowly eat away at the animal’s brain and spinal cord. A deer can take well more than a year to show symptoms, but at some point the disease will leave it confused and weak. The deer’s body wastes away, and eventually, it dies. There is no treatment. Most ominously of all, the prions can bind with soil, where they can remain viable for more than a decade, Jorge told me, and can even be taken up by plants, time bombs in the leaves waiting to infect more animals. Any member of the cervid family, which includes elk and moose, can be infected.

It’s the deer equivalent of mad-cow disease, and though it’s never been known to jump to a human, the possibility lurks like a black cloud in the back of many studies, articles, and public notices about CWD. COVID, ebola, swine flu—all sorts of recent pathogens are suspected to have come from animals. CWD “seems like a juggernaut of a disease,” Jorge said. “It’s a very insidious and scary thing.”

As CWD has moved around the U.S., it has also brought human concern and confusion. Jorge and others have compared the situation to the coronavirus pandemic: Each state creates its own regulations, with piecemeal national policy, and much of the public is often skeptical. That regulatory patchwork is especially troubling when it allows deer to be shipped across state lines. A major vector for CWD is thought to be the transport of captive deer by the deer-farm industry, which breeds deer for venison and antlers, and as game animals. When captive deer are sold, they may get driven long distances, possibly carrying prions with them. One Wisconsin deer farm discovered an outbreak of CWD among its animals in 2021; reportedly, officials soon realized that over the previous five years, the farm had shipped nearly 400 potentially infected deer around Wisconsin and to six other states.

Because the disease can be transmitted by a positive animal long before it causes symptoms, it’s especially hard for wildlife agencies to get a handle on what’s happening with deer in a given area. “We can’t see them until it’s too late,” Jeannine Fleegle, a wildlife biologist at the Pennsylvania Game Commission, told me. “I wish the disease would evolve to make them sicker, faster.”

Deer are one of evolution’s best survivors, having come back in the 20th century from severe overhunting. But a mostly invisible, universally fatal disease that persists in the environment for years sounds like a recipe for disaster. I found myself asking Jorge a question that, despite having researched an entire book about deer, had never even crossed my mind before: Could CWD actually cause the extinction of deer? “I think it’s a possibility that is on the table,” he said. But he emphasized that extinction is only one of a spectrum of outcomes, and no one really knows what will happen.

One possibility: The many species of deer could limp along in a diminished fashion. Preventing transmission to future generations is nearly impossible; CWD might be passed from mother to fawn in the first couple of hours after birth, Jorge said, as the mother uses her tongue to groom her baby. That’s the same amount of time that he and his team try to give newborn fawns to adjust to life on Earth before they descend on them with collars. That night, I witnessed them catch and take samples from a fawn whose soft hooves suggested that she was only a few hours old. She might have already been carrying her very first few CWD prions, which could kill her by about the age of two. In that length of time, deer can reproduce—meaning that one possibility, Jorge said, “is that we will have a deer population, but they’ll all have CWD” and die by the age of two or three.  

[Read: Eagles are falling, bears are going blind]

Another possibility: In some areas, deer may begin to vanish. Such local declines might not seem dramatic, especially for an animal as globally abundant as deer, but they add up nonetheless. Small-scale dwindlings threaten all kinds of species across our warming planet. CWD is most prevalent in the upper Midwest, the Great Plains, and the mid-Atlantic; in places where other members of the deer family are also found, those animals are also at risk.

To ward off disaster, several states have tried culls to slow the spread. But many hunters oppose these actions, and they also show sometimes-spotty compliance with rules about transporting their kills and getting them tested. And deer farmers, like the members of any industry, can be skeptical of any new regulation on their work.

Jorge’s study will try to model the effects of different management actions, but there aren’t a lot of great options. CWD spreads in stealth, and it seems that all officials can do is try to slow it down. In some areas, more than half of adult bucks are likely already infected. States declare containment zones where they find infections, but without a clear picture of where the prions actually exist, these aren’t always effective.

Because CWD-infected animals look normal until the end stages of illness, Jorge said, the disease is difficult for people to believe in. Humans “are really bad at looking into the future. You see the deer now, and most of them look healthy. If we say, ‘They could go extinct,’ it’s hard to grasp.” He drew an analogy to climate change: It’s hard to fathom how large numbers of seemingly healthy animals could vanish, just as it was hard to imagine historic flooding and wildfires devastating many chunks of the country until it became the norm.

But in this part of Arkansas, Jorge told me, you can sometimes see CWD plainly. Near death, deer look and act weird. Their front legs splay out; they lose the alertness and wariness that is their very essence. “They’re very obvious,” he said. “We just drove by one last week—a deer hanging out on the side of the road.” He pulled off the highway. “I started walking toward it and it just kind of stared. It was very skinny. Cars were driving a foot away from it and it wasn’t even flinching.” Locals have told him similar stories.

Thirty-five million deer, of course, remains a lot of deer. Even if local declines lower their numbers by millions more, hunters and ecologists might at first be the only ones to notice. Yet whether we think of them or not, deer are part of everyone’s life; most of us see them at least occasionally, and they are icons in art, literature, and design. They are also key members of the ecosystems they inhabit and a flagship game animal in the $45 billion American hunting industry. A disease that could drastically change their presence in our world might be a quiet force. But it’s one we should consider deadly serious.

This article has been adapted from Erika Howsare’s forthcoming book, The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship With Our Wild Neighbors.

Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Color Purple, was a serious-minded prestige drama. The film simplified the story but faithfully rendered the book’s emotional weight through Spielberg’s vibrant direction, Quincy Jones’s sweeping score, and a strong ensemble cast. The movie became a classic that, despite notoriously failing to win any of the 11 Oscars it was nominated for, made more than five times its budget at the box office, inspired a Tony-winning Broadway musical, and made stars of Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey.

That’s a high bar for the new The Color Purple, in theaters today, to clear. Good thing, then, that the film aims for a slightly different goal: As an adaptation of the stage show, it further streamlines Walker’s prose in favor of illustrating sentimental intensity through spectacle. That may sound counterintuitive; movie musicals have recently been vehicles for pure whimsy or, well, whatever you want to call Cats. With The Color Purple, however, the medium is a good match for the heroine’s interiority, producing a sensual and textured take on the material. This new version—directed by Blitz Bazawule and produced by Spielberg, Jones, and Winfrey—works well as a companion piece to the 1985 drama while, for the most part, standing alone as its own tear-jerking, exultant epic.

[Read: The 10 best films of 2023]

As with the previous take on The Color Purple, the story focuses primarily on the tough coming-of-age of a young woman named Celie (played as a teenager by Phylicia Pearl Mpasi and as an adult by Fantasia Barrino, reprising the role after starring in the musical). Growing up in Georgia, in the 1900s, Celie is repeatedly raped by the man she understands to be her father, delivering children he snatches away shortly after their births. Though she draws strength from her bond with her sister, Nettie (The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey), the two are separated after Celie is married off to an abusive husband she calls “Mister” (Colman Domingo). The film then follows Celie in the decades afterward as she attempts to find Nettie and build an identity of her own. Along the way, she finds inspiration from the women around her, including the vivacious blues singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson) and Mister’s headstrong daughter-in-law, Sofia (Danielle Brooks).

Given how passive she appears to be—often hiding from Mister, speaking only when spoken to—Celie can be a tricky protagonist to follow, especially for a musical. But Bazawule makes the clever call to depict what’s going on in Celie’s mind as much as possible, through bold use of color and flamboyant flourishes of magical realism. Her scenes with Nettie tend to be lit with a warm, golden glow. Mirrors and windows serve as the film’s literal portals into her imagination, helping to bring her thoughts to life. In the most exuberant song-and-dance numbers, the camera is rarely static, taking in the spirited choreography as if viewing the dancers through Celie’s eyes: with awe and wonder and a desperate need to absorb every ounce of pleasure their steps bring. Such sequences lend the otherwise grim story a crucial buoyancy and underline why The Color Purple has endured as a cultural sensation. Celie’s tale isn’t merely about overcoming tragedy; it’s also a testament to her sense of joy in spite of enduring grief, as well as to her capacity for envisioning a better future for herself and those she loves.

That love comes across most stunningly in Celie’s scenes with Shug, as her crush on the songstress blossoms into a devotion that gives her, well, voice. Having directed Beyoncé’s visual album Black Is King, Bazawule has proved himself adept at creating grand but elegant tableaus, and here, he elevates some of The Color Purple’s most delicate tunes into gorgeous fantasy sequences, lending Celie and Shug’s relationship the kind of substance the 1985 film underplayed. When Celie touches Shug for the first time, the set morphs into a massive gramophone, and Celie sings to her idol as the floor, now a giant vinyl stage, steadily spins. When they share a kiss at the end of a duet, the black-and-white backdrop slowly gives way to full color.

The film does struggle, however, with a familiar movie-musical problem: pacing. Bazawule’s eye for delivering what’s most visually impressive doesn’t make up for the uneven storytelling and somewhat awkward tonal shifts from Celie’s bleak life to her passionate inner thoughts. And with decades’ worth of narrative to pack in, the movie tends to gloss over plot points. Most of Mister’s children, Celie’s stepchildren, disappear as quickly as they’re introduced. Mister’s redemption in the final act feels like an abrupt, convenient shift. And Sofia’s traumatic years in prison—after an incident with a racist white woman—get wrapped up in a handful of brief scenes. Much of this abbreviation may be faithful to the musical, but in the film adaptation, the thin treatment of some characters becomes only more apparent.

Still, The Color Purple’s bumpier moments don’t dampen the cast’s committed performances. Brooks and Domingo are standouts, both actors lending their supporting characters the dazzling depth of feeling the script doesn’t have time to fully address through dialogue. Barrino, meanwhile, never quite reaches the heights Goldberg achieved as Celie in the 1985 film, but then again, Celie is an especially demanding part, a complicated woman whose every smile must seem hard-won. The actor shines instead where she needs to most, in Celie’s solos, with Barrino’s voice capturing the roiling well of emotion in every lyric.

And the truth is, that ability to fuse Celie as a character to music is enough for any take on The Color Purple. She’s an embodiment of the blues as a genre, a Black woman shaped by the Deep South, whose spirituality, pain, and determined pursuit of love inform her eventual sense of freedom and forgiveness. This latest adaptation may not hit every note established by Walker’s text and Spielberg’s drama, but it tells Celie’s story sensitively. It understands, in other words, that she comes with a uniquely imperfect, profound rhythm.

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Any person with a phone knows that spam calls are a real problem in the United States. But fighting them is like playing whack-a-mole.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The English-muffin problem George T. Conway III on how the Colorado ruling changed his mind The Colorado Supreme Court decision is true originalism. Twitter’s demise is about so much more than Elon Musk.

Robocall Whack-a-Mole

In a classic Seinfeld scene, Jerry answers a phone call from a telemarketer, says he’s busy, and asks if he can call them back at home later. “I’m sorry, we’re not allowed to do that,” the marketer replies.

"Oh,” Jerry says, “I guess you don’t want people calling you at home.”

“No.”

“Well, now you know how I feel,” Jerry says, before hanging up to the sound of studio laughter.

It’s a quintessential Seinfeld joke, trenchant about the peeves of everyday life in America. Calls from telemarketers were already a well-known annoyance in the 1990s, but both telemarketing and spam calls have morphed into a much more common—and more sophisticated—problem in the decades since. Whenever my phone rings, I experience a few feelings in quick succession: curiosity about who might be calling, followed by dread that it’s a spammer, followed by a mix of guilt and intrigue about the possibility that whoever is calling might actually be someone important. And that’s only if my phone actually rings; so pockmarked is my phone log with spam calls that I’ve taken to leaving my phone on “Do Not Disturb” much of the time.

Unwanted calls have been a problem for decades, at least since an enterprising consultant created a “sucker list” of potential customers on behalf of Ford in the 1960s. By the late ’80s, predictive dialing meant that telemarketers were beginning to drive Americans up the wall. In 2003, Congress established a national Do Not Call registry, which charged telemarketers with a hefty fine anytime they contacted someone on the list. Legitimate telemarketing actors backed down, and the effort brought Americans relief for a short time—until an army of robocallers working on behalf of unscrupulous and spammy companies made things even worse.

No longer did you need to manually annoy Americans; by the late aughts, computers could make high volumes of spam calls for you. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission enacted a rule making marketing robocalls illegal unless the recipient has given the caller prior consent. (Some robocalls, such as notifications from schools about a snow day, remain legal.) But the government has struggled to enforce this rule. The Federal Communications Commission, another government agency combating the issue, has levied some fines—though many scammers simply can’t pay them—and supported efforts to stem spoof calls. YouMail, a robocall-blocking service, estimated that more than 4.5 billion robocalls were placed last month—about 1,700 calls a second. That’s more than 13 calls per person over the course of the month. About one-fifth of those were scams, and another third were telemarketing calls. It’s inexpensive for scammers to blanket consumers with calls, with the goal of getting even a small percentage to fall for it. The government is playing a game of robocall whack-a-mole.

A spokesperson for the FCC told me that protecting consumers from scams is among the department’s highest priorities, adding that the number of complaints about unwanted calls has trended downward in recent years. The same trend is true for the FTC’s complaints. Fear of being scammed looms large in Americans’ psyches: New data from Gallup found that being tricked by a scammer into sending money or sharing access to a financial account was the second-highest victimization concern (behind identity theft), with 57 percent of respondents saying they worried about it frequently or occasionally. (Far fewer said that they worried to the same extent about such crimes as murder and burglary.)

Some of the survey respondents said that people they knew, including family members, had been victims. Seniors are especially vulnerable to scam calls. “Grandparent scams,” which try to trick elderly people into thinking their grandkids are in trouble and need money, are one cruel and common tactic, along with scams whereby callers pretend to be officials such as IRS agents.

One knock-on effect of the spam-call problem is the way it’s changing people’s relationship to the phone call, which was once essential to our social life. As Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic in 2018, the spam-call situation has gotten so dire that “the reflex of answering—built so deeply into people who grew up in 20th-century telephonic culture—is gone.” Spam calls are making the act of picking up the phone anathema. In 2023, I wonder if Jerry would have picked up at all.

Related:

Why no one answers their phone anymore It’s time to protect yourself from AI voice scams.

Today’s News

A gunman killed at least 14 people and wounded at least two dozen others at Charles University, in Prague. The suspected perpetrator of the worst mass shooting in the Czech Republic’s history is dead, according to the police. Rudy Giuliani filed for bankruptcy a day after a federal judge ordered him to immediately start paying $148 million in damages to two Georgia election workers he defamed. A Pacific storm hammered Southern California with torrential rain and floods, raising concerns about holiday-travel disruptions.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: If you’re not vegan or even vegetarian, how about being chickentarian? Eve Andrews argues that chicken can be part of a climate-friendly diet. Time-Travel Thursdays: What was America like before pizza? Saahil Desai explores the beginning of our love affair with bread, cheese, and sauce.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Universal / Everett Collection

Zack Snyder, the Director People Love to Hate

By Dave Itzkoff

One July morning, at a cavernous soundstage on Sunset Boulevard, amplified sound effects boomed so loudly that the walls trembled. On a massive projection screen, futuristic vehicles zipped across alien skies; laser blasts reduced strange architecture to rubble; knives sliced through flesh; an authoritarian army celebrated an unknown triumph. An android with the majestic voice of Anthony Hopkins asked, “Who among you is willing to die for what you believe?”

The footage had been spliced together to create a teaser trailer for Rebel Moon, a science-fiction epic directed by Zack Snyder. Snyder smiled with satisfaction, though he also had notes. “You know what would be cool?” he said to colleagues who were sitting behind an elaborate audio-mixing console. “Is there a way to have it go BOOOOOOOOM and then vroom, have this kind of shock wave?” …

His professed franchise-fatigue notwithstanding, he is already thinking about a Rebel Moon sequel and preparing a video-game spin-off, along with, yes, a graphic novel. But does the world want more Zack Snyder?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

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Watch. Netflix’s animated series Blue Eye Samurai is a bloody masterpiece that stuns from the first frame.

Listen. Knitwear quality is cratering. Before you buy that sweater, listen to this Radio Atlantic episode.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

The first story in Vauhini Vara’s new collection, This Is Salvaged, follows a bereaved teenager and her friend as they find themselves drawn into a telemarketing scheme slash phone-sex operation in Seattle. Vara, a former colleague of mine, manages to make the work of sitting at a table and calling up strangers about cruises seem intimate and tragic and seamy all at once. I had no real mental picture of what this work was like before reading the story. One of my big takeaways: It’s bleak, and it can get much weirder than I imagined.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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It’s really, really hard to kill a large, beloved social network. But Elon Musk has seemingly been giving it his absolute best shot: Over the past year, Twitter has gotten a new name (X), laid off much of its staff, struggled with outages, brought back banned accounts belonging to Alex Jones and Donald Trump, and lost billions in advertising revenue.

Opportunistic competitors have launched their own Twitter clones, such as Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. The hope is to capture fleeing users who want “microblogging”—places where people can shoot off little text posts about what they ate for lunch, their random thoughts about politics or pop culture, or perhaps a few words or sentences of harassment Threads, Meta’s entry which launched in July, seems the most promising, at least in terms of pure scale. Over the summer, it broke the record for fastest app to reach 100 million monthly active users—beating a milestone set by ChatGPT just months earlier—in part because Instagram users were pushed toward it. (Turns out, it’s pretty helpful to launch a new social network on the back of the defining social-media empire of our time.)

But the decline of Twitter, and the race to replace it, is in a sense a sideshow. Analytics experts shared data with me suggesting that the practice of microblogging, while never quite dominant, is only becoming more niche. In the era of TikTok, the act of posting your two cents in two sentences for strangers to consume is starting to feel more and more unnatural. The lasting social-media imprint of 2023 may not be the self-immolation of Twitter but rather that short-form videos—on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms—have tightened their choke hold on the internet. Text posts as we’ve always known them just can’t keep up.

Social-media companies only tend to sporadically share data about their platforms, and of all the main microblogging sites —X, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon—just Bluesky provided a comment for this story. “We’ve grown to 2.6 million users on an invite-only basis in 2023,” BlueSky’s CEO, Jay Gruber, wrote in an email, “and are excited about growth while we open up the network more broadly next year.” So I reached out to outside companies that track social analytics. They told me that these new X competitors haven’t meaningfully chipped away at the site’s dominance. For all of the drama of the past year, X is by far still the predominant network for doing brief text posts. It is still home to more than four times as many monthly active users as Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined, according to numbers shared with me by data.ai, a company that tracks app-store activity. (Data.ai looks only at mobile analytics, so it can’t account for desktop users.)

Mastodon and Bluesky amounted to just “rounding errors, in terms of the number of people engaging,” says Paul Quigley, the CEO of NewsWhip, a social-media-monitoring platform. Threads has not fared much better. Sensor Tower, another analytics firm, estimates that fewer than 1 percent of Threads users opened the app daily last month, compared with 18 percent of Twitter users. And even those who open the app are spending an average of just three minutes a day on it.

That doesn’t mean X is thriving. According to data.ai’s 2024-predictions report, the platform’s daily active users peaked in July 2022, at 316 million, and then dropped under Musk. Based on its data-science algorithms, data.ai predicts that X usership will decline to 250 million in 2024. And data.ai expects microblogging overall to decline alongside X next year, even though these new platforms seem positioned for growth: Threads, after all, just recently launched in Europe and became available as a desktop app, and to join Bluesky, you still need an invite code.

Of course, these are just predictions. Plenty of people do still want platforms for sending off quick thoughts, and perhaps X or any other alternative will gain more users. But the decline of microblogging is part of a larger change in how we consume media. On TikTok and other platforms, short clips are served up by an at-times-magical-seeming algorithm that makes note of our every interest. Text posts don’t have the same appeal. “While platforms like X are likely to maintain a core niche of users, the overall trends show consumers are swapping out text-based social networking apps for photo and video-first platforms,” data.ai noted in their predictions report.

Short-form videos have become an attention vortex. Users are spending an average of 95 minutes a day on TikTok and 61 minutes on Instagram as of this quarter, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. By comparison, they’re estimated to average just 30 minutes on Twitter and three minutes on Threads. People also want companies to shift to video along with them in what is perhaps this the real pivot to video: In a recent survey by Sprout Social, a social-media-analytics tool, 41 percent of consumers said that they want brands to publish more 15- to 30-second videos more than they want any other style of social-media post. Just 10 percent wanted more text-only content.

Maybe this really is the end for the short text post, at least en masse. Or maybe our conception of “microblogging” is due for an update. TikTok videos are perhaps “just a video version of what the original microblogs were doing when they first started coming out in the mid-2000s,” André Brock, a media professor at Georgia Tech who has studied Twitter, told me; they can feel as intimate and authentic as a tweet about having tacos for lunch. Trends such as “men are constantly thinking about the Roman empire” (and the ensuing pushback) could have easily been a viral Twitter or Facebook conversation in a different year. For a while, all of the good Twitter jokes were screenshotted and re-uploaded to Instagram. Now it can feel like all of the good TikToks are downloaded and reposted on Instagram. If the Dress (white-and-gold or black-and-blue?) were to go viral today, it would probably happen in a 30-second video with a narrator and a soundtrack.

But something is left behind when microblogging becomes video. Twitter became an invaluable resource during news moments—part of why journalists flocked to the platform, for better or for worse—allowing people to refresh and instantaneously get real-time updates on election results, or a sports game, or a natural disaster. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter turned to Twitter to organize protests and spread their respective messages.

Some of the news and political content may just as easily move to TikTok: Russia’s war with Ukraine has been widely labeled the “first TikTok War,” as many experienced it for the first time through that lens. Roughly a third of adults under 30 now regularly get their news from TikTok, according to Pew Research. But we don’t yet totally know what it means to have short-form videos, delivered via an algorithmic feed, be the centerpiece of social media. You might log onto TikTok and be shown a video that was posted two weeks ago.

Perhaps the biggest stress test for our short-form-video world has yet to come: the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Elections are where Twitter, and microblogging, have thrived. Meanwhile, in 2020, TikTok was much smaller than what it is now. Starting next year, its true reign might finally begin.

After the official approval of Georgia’s candidacy by EU leaders this month, full EU membership hinges on Georgia’s future foreign policy decisions, political unity, and holding fair and free elections in 2024, Ekaterine Zalenski writes.

EU leaders made a surprise announcement that they would grant it candidate status and open membership negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

So much can go wrong at an office holiday party. And yet … see you in the break room at 5:30.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Why Trump won’t win Biden’s smart strategy for outmaneuvering Bibi That’s not censorship.

A Baked-In Norm

Many Americans have reconsidered the role of work in their lives in recent years. Is your office your family? No. Are your co-workers your friends? Not necessarily. Are you all still expected at the holiday party in the break room at 5:30? Yes.

For some, sipping complimentary eggnog and listening to Mariah Carey with co-workers is a delight. For others, the office holiday party is a form of personal purgatory. These gatherings can be polarizing, but even through the profound cultural shifts of the past few years, the tradition of the white-collar holiday party endures. The office holiday party is a vestige of a time when work played a very different role in people’s lives (and a time when it was typical to call the event a Christmas party). The concept has roots over a century old, Peter Cappelli, a professor and the director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told me. Bosses started hosting parties to do something nice for employees at the end of the year—and perhaps to try to quell union organizing in the process. (Work parties fit into the broader concept of welfare capitalism popular in the 1920s, which prioritized giving employees perks in an effort to dissuade them from joining unions, he explained.) The events celebrated good work and were sometimes provided in lieu of bonuses. Once the norm was established, it was hard for bosses to take back, Cappelli said.

If there was ever a time for holiday parties to peter out, it was 2020. Employees opened gift boxes alone at home or did wine tastings with colleagues on Zoom. But when offices that had gone remote reopened, and bosses tried to will things to return to the status quo, the holiday party returned. Its renaissance affirmed its power: The holiday party sent the message that, at least on the outside, things were back to normal. But although the event has endured, its form has changed: Over the past 20 years, Cappelli explained, cultural shifts and financial concerns seem to have led companies to try to rein in the bacchanalia of the olden days. Many companies once had a higher tolerance for workplace wildness, but in recent decades, this approach has given way to concern about accidents or employee lawsuits, Cappelli said. Employers, not wanting to be held liable for overserving their workers, started hiring professional bartenders and, in some cases, limiting drinks. Concerns about sexual harassment in boozy after-hours settings, accelerated by #MeToo-era reexaminations of office culture, further curbed the no-holds-barred atmosphere of the holiday parties of yore.

And, of course, throwing a bash is expensive. Especially since the Great Recession, Cappelli has noticed that no one wants to “look to investors like you’re blowing the budget on something splashy.” The Wall Street Journal reported this week that budget pullbacks have caused companies to host lower-key gatherings, such as office potlucks and smaller parties with reduced staff. And a recent survey of about 200 companies found that nearly a third of those having a party are choosing to host on company premises, and that fewer are serving alcohol this year than in 2022. The debauched, cash-torching tech events that were typical of the 2010s are no longer a great look for an industry that has cut hundreds of thousands of jobs in the past couple of years. Moving away from booze-centric celebrations has also become more popular: Bloomberg recently reported that at some companies, more active events such as pickleball lessons and guacamole competitions have unseated the conventional holiday party.

Still, some version of the standard holiday party remains the norm: Among the survey respondents, more than two-thirds of companies said that they are hosting in-person parties this year. For all of their potential pitfalls, holiday parties are baked into the norms of corporate America. They give bosses a chance to thank employees and celebrate their work, and to reinforce the social ties that make people loyal to their job. It’s a hard tradition to shake. “You really do look like Scrooge,” Cappelli said, “if you say, ‘I’m going to be the one that pulls the plug.’”

Related:

The type of charisma that saves a holiday party There’s no fun like mandatory office holiday fun

Today’s News

Three hostages held by Hamas in Gaza were killed by the Israeli military after they were mistakenly identified as a “threat,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. A binder containing highly classified intelligence related to Russian interference in the 2016 election reportedly went missing in the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to CNN. It was last seen in the White House. A federal jury ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers he wrongfully accused of trying to steal votes from Trump.

Dispatches

Atlantic Intelligence: What happens when AI takes over science? Damon Beres discusses how AI may change our definition of understanding. Up for Debate: What do you think of all-male or all-female social spaces? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers for their thoughts. The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman explores a 2023 novel that revolves around a character getting lost in the wilderness.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Danish Defence Command / Forsvaret Ritzau Scanpix / Reuters

The Most Consequential Act of Sabotage in Modern Times

By Mark Bowden

At 2:03 a.m. on Monday, September 26, 2022, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, an explosion tore open one of the four massive underwater conduits that make up the Nord Stream pipeline. The pipe, made of thick, concrete-encased steel, lay at a depth of 260 feet. It was filled with highly compressed methane gas …

The attack on the pipeline—without loss of life, as far as we know—was one of the most dramatic and consequential acts of sabotage in modern times. It was also an unprecedented attack on a major element of global infrastructure—the network of cables, pipes, and satellites that underpin commerce and communication. Because it serves everyone, global infrastructure had enjoyed tacit immunity in regional conflicts—not total but nearly so. Here was a bold act of war in the waters between two peaceful nations (although Sweden and Denmark both support Ukraine). It effectively destroyed a project that had required decades of strenuous labor and political muscle and had cost roughly $20 billion …

Indeed, more than a year later, nobody knows for certain who was responsible, although accumulating evidence has begun to point in a specific direction.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

If you are facing down a holiday party with trepidation, it may comfort you to remember that you are at least not trapped in a virtual escape room with your co-workers. On a Tuesday afternoon early last year, I sat quietly on Zoom and watched such an event unfold for a group of tech recruiters. Sitting in their respective homes, they solved math puzzles and pieced together clues in breakout rooms. Some of the colleagues appeared to genuinely love the proceedings. Personally, I was quite relieved that I was not expected to contribute.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

Over the past few weeks, warnings about the threat posed by Donald Trump’s potential reelection have grown louder, including in a series of articles in The Atlantic. This alarm-raising is justified and appropriate, given the looming danger of authoritarianism in American politics. But amid all of the worrying, we might be losing sight of the most important fact: Trump’s chances of winning are slim.

Some look at Trump’s long list of flaws and understandably see reasons to worry about him winning. I see reasons to think he almost certainly won’t.

Yes, recent polls appear to favor him. Yes, Joe Biden is an imperfect opponent. And yes, much could change over the next 11 months, potentially in Trump’s favor. But if Biden’s health holds, he is very likely to be reelected next year. It’s hard to imagine any Republican candidate galvanizing Democrats, independents, and even some Republicans to vote for the current president in the way that Trump will.

I’m not arguing that anyone who wants President Biden to win—and, more important, anyone who wants Trump to lose—should relax. To the contrary, Democrats, and any other sensible voters who oppose Trump, need to forcefully remind the American people about how disastrous he was as president and inform them of how much worse a second term would be. Thankfully, that is not a hard case to make.

[David Frum: The coming Biden blowout]

The former president enjoys some clear advantages. About a third of Republicans are fiercely loyal to him, meaning that he has the unwavering support of a small but potent segment of the broader electorate. Once he is presumably crowned the Republican nominee, which seems inevitable and will probably occur by Super Tuesday, the GOP’s electoral and fundraising machine will whir into motion on his behalf. In all likelihood, the leaders in his party will unite behind him. Large numbers of Americans will vote for anyone running as a Republican against a Democrat.

Trump’s media supporters, above all at Fox News, will offer support, propagating a set of myths about his record in office, particularly the supposedly great economy over which he presided. Trump will be able to run as both an incumbent, because he’s a former president, and an “outsider,” as in 2016, because he is out of office. That will make his attacks on the “deep state” and his own persecution narrative more convincing. Trump intends to use his various criminal and civil trials as proof that “they”—the Biden administration—are going after him because he represents “us”—his voters. A certain segment of the public will buy into these messages.

Trump might also enjoy a relative advantage in the Electoral College because of the counter-majoritarian aspects of the U.S. political system. He soundly lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020, and almost no one expects him to win a majority of votes in 2024 either. But if the race is close enough in the right places, the undue power of rural voters in smaller or less populated states could tilt the outcome in his favor.

Finally, Biden is not the candidate Trump ran against four years ago. He is older, his approval rating is suffering, and, during his four years in office, he has given certain segments of the public reasons to be dissatisfied with him. That’s reflected in the current polling, where he appears to be losing support among key groups, including Black and Latino voters.

All of that notwithstanding, when the general election gets under way, and presuming that Americans are faced with a binary choice between Trump and Biden, Trump’s chances will start to look much worse. Even if most Republicans unite behind him, a significant portion of both Republicans and independents will have a hard time pulling the lever for him. Some Republican voters might well stay home.

Trump’s flaws look far worse today than they did eight years ago. To take one example that should concern conservative voters: his behavior toward and views of service members. In the 2016 campaign, Trump’s attacks on Senator John McCain and on the Gold Star Khan family were bad enough. Now we have a litany of testimonies that he expressed contempt and disgust for wounded veterans—demanding that he not be seen in public with them—and that he debased fallen soldiers, describing them as “suckers” and marveling, “What was in it for them?” According to an Atlantic report, when he was scheduled to visit a World War I–era American cemetery in France in 2018, Trump complained, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” Trump has always posed as a patriot, but he has proved himself unpatriotic, anti-military, and ignorant of the meaning of sacrifice.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

Similarly, in 2016, Trump’s campaign was briefly rocked by the Access Hollywood videotape in which he boasted about grabbing women by the genitalia. He survived, in large part because many voters chose to accept his comments as “locker room” bluster. Several women accused him of sexual misconduct, but Trump fended off their allegations too. Now he has been held civilly liable by a New York jury for sexually abusing the advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. A federal judge has said that the jury concluded that what Trump did to Carroll was rape in the common sense of the term. Some Americans will shrug that off, but many won’t be able to.

Trump hopes that his legal troubles will prove a boon to his campaign, allowing him to paint both law enforcement and the judicial system as part of a massive conspiracy against him. He has even requested that his federal trial regarding efforts to overturn the 2020-election results be televised. That’s unlikely, but the more airtime these prosecutions get, the better. Among Republicans, Trump’s polling has improved since his indictments, but many other Americans simply won’t be impressed, inspired, or persuaded by someone who faces 91 felony counts, in addition to civil cases. Trump already has been found liable for fraud and sexual abuse in New York. To that may well be added a criminal conviction at the federal level. Even if none of the trials has concluded by next fall, much of the evidence that prosecutors have accumulated is already in the public record and will be powerful fodder for anti-Trump attack ads. And Democrats will benefit from the attention Trump draws to the election-subversion cases. Even many of Trump’s most ardent supporters are tired of relitigating 2020; voters would prefer to focus on the future, not the past.

[David A. Graham: A guide to the cases against Trump]

On top of all this, Trump has a strong record of electoral losses, with his 2016 upset, which apparently surprised even him, as the lone exception. His party suffered the standard midterm defeat in 2018. Then he lost the 2020 election. Then Republicans lost control of the Senate after Georgia’s runoff in early 2021. Then his party was denied the standard midterm victory in 2022, barely eking out a four-vote House majority thanks in large part to his own handpicked, election-denying candidates, almost all of whom lost in competitive races. There is no obvious reason that 2024 should constitute a sudden break from this pattern of MAGA defeat.

Presidential elections are usually decided by a relatively small group of swing voters in six or seven swing states. The most important are independent voters and suburban voters, two groups that appear to have turned away from Trump since 2016. He hasn’t done anything to win them back since 2020, instead running in recent months on a platform that’s more radical, extreme, and openly authoritarian than ever (except on the issue of abortion, where he is less extreme than his Republican-primary competitors). With Trump promising vengeance, retribution, and dictatorship, at least on “day one,” as he recently told Sean Hannity, will these swing voters be wooed back into his camp? Are Americans so fed up that they will want to elect someone who has advocated for the “termination” of the Constitution in order to keep himself in power?

Recent polling suggests that Biden is in real trouble, including with a number of core Democratic constituencies, which is leading many Democrats to yearn for a different candidate or to despair that Trump will be reelected. In fact, Biden has a strong record to run on. In his first two years, with a tiny House majority and only a tiebreaker in the Senate, he managed to pass more progressive, consequential economic legislation than, arguably, any president since Lyndon B. Johnson. Unemployment is low, and inflation is cooling. Perhaps the public has not fully felt these positive developments yet, but they will almost certainly have registered by next November.

Americans have reported to pollsters that although they believe that the economy is bad for others, they themselves feel economically secure. Biden should ask voters Ronald Reagan’s classic question: Are you better off today than you were four years ago? The answer can only be yes, given the dire situation the nation found itself in during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic (to say nothing of the general sense of chaos throughout Trump’s presidency). But Biden and Democrats need to make this case. Without prompting, voters might not readily remember how challenging a time 2020 was.

[Derek Thompson: ‘Everything is terrible, but I’m fine’]

The abortion issue, opened up by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, has consistently played in Democrats’ favor, and that’s unlikely to change next November. If the Republican nominee were former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, women might not rally so powerfully to the Democratic side. But Trump claims responsibility for the decision overturning Roe by virtue of his Supreme Court appointees. That, plus Trump’s treatment of women, gives Biden a huge opportunity with female voters.

Biden’s pro-Israel policies during the ongoing war in Gaza might cost him support from Arab and Muslim Americans, but probably not enough for him to lose Michigan, for example, to Trump. Voters in those groups seem unlikely to support the author of the “Muslim ban,” who is threatening to reimpose similar restrictions, and the “Peace to Prosperity” Israeli-Palestinian proposal that invited Israel to annex 30 percent of the occupied West Bank. Some will stay home—a potential danger for Biden—but many will, perhaps reluctantly, turn out for him despite what they say now.

The 2024 election will be a referendum on democracy, with both candidates claiming to stand for freedom and American values. On this matter, Biden’s claims are obviously stronger: He has been governing as a traditional president, whereas Trump promises authoritarianism and openly says he wants to be dictator for a day to accomplish certain policies, namely restricting immigration. But what if his plans take more than a day? What if his one-day dictatorship extends to a year and then never ends? Americans know that strongmen don’t keep their promises.

Biden is old, but so is Trump. Biden has grown unpopular, but so has Trump. Biden has liabilities, but Trump’s are considerably worse. Biden has lost the backing of plenty of voters, but the results of the past few elections suggest that Trump has lost more. Meanwhile, Trump’s record as president and since—January 6, the devastating testimony from his former senior officials, the ongoing trials, and whatever additional self-inflicted wounds he delivers—will contrast very poorly with Biden’s track record and steady leadership. By November, enough Americans will surely understand that they aren’t voting for Biden over Trump so much as voting for the Constitution over a would-be authoritarian.

The case against Trump’s reelection is obvious and damning. As long as his opponents prosecute that case—and they will—Trump isn’t going to win.

The Kremlin's plans raise fears that EU-hopeful Georgia could be dragged into the war in Ukraine.

Reading can be a powerful method to reconnect with the planet we all live on. I learned this after I moved away from home, which was next to a wildlife reserve. To anchor myself, I reached for nature as a grounding wire, and usually found it through books. Writers such as Rachel Carson, Lucille Clifton, Aldo Leopold, and John McPhee brought me into their narratives in urgent ways, and their work made understanding, and preserving, the environment imperative. Even when they turned to subjects such as carcinogens or atomic waste, I kept reading. I hadn’t been seeking books about climate or ecological disasters, but as in the refuge, where I ate wild raspberries next to mylar balloons wrapped around tree branches, the danger existed alongside the beauty.

The genre’s most compelling authors show us what’s at stake in vulnerable places by tethering us first to their own love and appreciation for them. Below are seven books that act as conduits between readers and the Earth. They are neither idealized nor fearmongering. Instead, the titles are all deeply personal, reminding us that nature is inescapably entwined with our bodies and our homes.

St. Martin’s

Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains, by Kerri Arsenault

“Rivers are living bodies that need oxygen, breed life, turn sick, can be wrecked by neglect,”  Arsenault asserts at the beginning of her book, “like human bodies, which we often think of as separate, not belonging to the landscape that bore them out.” Mill Town is an account of one rural community’s difficult history with a paper mill that both sustained and devastated its citizens, water, and land. The author grew up in Mexico, Maine, a place nicknamed “Cancer Valley,” witnessing the hope that industry inspired collide with a dark environmental reality. The mill functions as a kind of haunted house on the hill, as the source of food on the table as well as toxic waste. Before she started reporting for Mill Town, Arsenault had moved away and built a solidly middle-class life in a farmhouse in Connecticut, but after her father became ill and died—the result of four decades of asbestos exposure from working at the mill—she decided to return home and make the case that what happened in her small Maine town matters to the entire country. Through meticulous precision, fact-finding, and excavation, Arsenault tallies the losses and ends up with a complicated love letter to the town that raised her.

[Read: The transformation of a company town: St. Marys, Part 1]

Bloomsbury

Nine Ways to Cross a River, by Akiko Busch

In 2001, living in the Hudson Valley and closing in on her 50th birthday, Busch, who writes about design, culture, and nature, decided she wanted to “find a divide that could be crossed,” and set her sights on the Hudson River. Along with four friends, Busch swims across a half-mile narrow in the river in New Hamburg, New York, two weeks before planes crash into the World Trade Center. The experiment is transformative, and, as an attempt to keep alive the “small portrait of optimism and oblivion” it inspired in her, she endeavors to keep swimming, ultimately traversing eight other American rivers over the next four years. In the memoir’s nine chapters, Busch blends archival research, meditation, interviews with naturalists and locals, and accounts of her immersion in each body of water to tell the stories of rivers such as the Ohio, the Susquehanna, and the Mississippi. Through each portrait, Busch shows us the ravages of “waste from arms factories, timber operations, paper mills, and tanneries” while drawing on the ebb-and-flow nature of water to deliver notes of rebirth and, ultimately, hope that the rivers and the communities surrounding them can eventually renew themselves.

Milkweed

The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair With Nature, by J. Drew Lanham

Known for his canonized Orion essay “Nine Rules for the Black Birdwatcher,” Lanham, an ornithologist and the winner of a MacArthur genius grant, tackles here at book length the same tricky helix of identity, race, and birding found in that lauded work. He begins by recounting the Lanhams’ multigenerational past in Edgefield County, South Carolina, along with the history of slavery in the state. The “home place” of the title is the author’s 200 acres of family land, a space where he was “the richest boy in the world, a prince living right there in backwoods Edgefield,” he writes. A self-professed “eco-addict” since he was a child, watching birds appealed to Lanham first as an antidote to chores and the solitude of rural life and later as a balm for the awkward loneliness and outright danger that would follow him when he was frequently the only Black person in these circles. Lanham’s moving memoir elevates his birding from a passion to a calling, inviting all of his readers into natural spaces and insisting that they all belong.

[Read: The fight over animal names has reached a new extreme]

Counterpoint

Body Toxic, by Susanne Antonetta

In her environmental account of the boglands of southern New Jersey, Antonetta describes the natural, industrial, and socioeconomic forces that shaped her girlhood home in southern Ocean County. She begins with the immigrant impulse to build—and protect—home by tracking the hopes of both sides of her family, who came to New Jersey from Barbados and Italy respectively. Then, to illuminate the story of the land—and of generations of mental and physical illnesses—she jumps ably between surprising, unsettling topics such as the childhood-cancer cluster in neighboring Toms River, an 1860s phrenology chart, and the myth of the Jersey Devil. She sensitively identifies the emotional toll of fear, anxiety, and hypervigilance that environmental degradation breeds. In the haunting chapter “Radium Girls,” Antonetta describes women who worked in a factory in Orange, New Jersey, during World War I, painting watch and clock dials—and sometimes, playfully, their teeth—with glow-in-the-dark radioactive radium paint. Five of the thousands of women, by then extremely ill, took U.S. Radium to court and died of radiation sickness, one by one. Much of what Antonetta writes about happened when “New Jersey was a cow pasture,” yet the resulting toxicity still permeates today’s casinos, strip malls, and boardwalks.

Vintage

Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, by Terry Tempest Williams

This seminal book is a taxonomy of nature, loss, longing, and resistance across the branches of one family in Utah. In it, Williams, a Guggenheim fellow and conservationist, identifies her home, in the Great Salt Lake region, and its natural landscapes as places of both fear and comfort. Williams connects her mother’s breast-cancer diagnosis—she’s one in a long line of a “clan of one-breasted women”—to their exposure to fallout from the 1950s atomic tests in the West. Meanwhile, the book charts the lake’s rising levels from unusual rains and the subsequent flooding of the nearby Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, exploring the many lives, both bird and human, at stake—indeed, the book’s three dozen chapters take their names from local birds (“Snowy Egrets,” “Long-Billed Curlews”). Grief permeates the prose, yet Williams’s firebrand spirit (she gets arrested during a 1980s protest against underground nuclear tests) inspires readers to look to the land for strength, even when the environment poses threats. “How can hope be denied when there is always the possibility of an American flamingo or a roseate spoonbill floating down from the sky like pink rose petals?” she asks.

[Read: Nature writing that sees possibility in climate change]

Milkweed

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, by Janisse Ray

“I carry the landscape inside like an ache,” Ray writes of the “vast, fire-loving uplands of the coastal plains of southeast Georgia,” the place where she was born “from people who were born from people who were born from people who were born here.” Ray grew up poor in her father’s junkyard, and her memoir makes beautiful what most others, sometimes the author herself included, believed wasn’t worth a second look. In her prose, mental illness, poverty, and fundamentalism churn against the startling, holy attention Ray brings to the old-growth longleaf woodlands surrounding her, forests edging on extinction because of irresponsible timber companies. Combining the personal with the natural, Ray observes honor in even the most broken humans and places. Chapters called “Shame” and “Poverty” are interspersed with chapters called “Flatwoods Salamander” and “Bachman’s Sparrow,” so that the table of contents reads as a list of the cumulative effects of the disappearing canopies of pines. There is power in acknowledging both beauty and pain, and Ray shies away from none of it. “If you stay in one place too long, you know you’ll root,” she promises and cautions.

Random House

The Day the Earth Caved In: An American Mining Tragedy, by Joan Quigley

Quigley, the granddaughter of coal miners, grew up in Centralia, Pennsylvania, home of the nation’s worst mine fire. In her fascinating book, she returns as a trained journalist to investigate the origins of the still-ongoing burn, which began in 1962 after, some believe, a spark in a coal-mining shaft used as a makeshift garbage dump instigated an out-of-control blaze. For nearly two decades, Centralia’s residents seemed committed to collectively ignoring the fires, sulfurous steam, and fissures beneath their feet—until Valentine’s Day in 1981, when a 12-year-old was swallowed by an old tunnel that became a sinkhole in his grandmother’s backyard. The book exposes the background of the tragedy, taking in the perspectives of a local cook turned activist, a coal-magnate senator, and the handful of people who decide to remain while the town smolders. As an insider, Quigley can get the thorniest players talking while unpacking generations-old layers of working-class pride, corporate conspiracy, and the stakes of survival when an emergency becomes normalized. Ultimately, Quigley shows the collateral damage of living with a threat that is impossible to extinguish.