On September 22, when federal prosecutors accused Senator Robert Menendez of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, Representative Andy Kim, a fellow New Jersey Democrat, asked one of his neighbors what he thought of the charges. “That’s Jersey,” the man replied.

The neighbor’s shrug spoke volumes about not only a state with a sordid history of political corruption but also a country that seemed to have grown inured to scandal. In nearby New York, George Santos had settled into his Republican House seat despite having been indicted on more than a dozen counts of fraud and having acknowledged that the story he’d used to woo voters was almost entirely fiction. Criminal indictments have done nothing to dent Republican support for Donald Trump, who is currently the front-runner for both the GOP nomination and the presidency next year.

It turns out, however, that the supposedly cynical citizens of New Jersey did care that their senior senator was allegedly on the take. In the days after the indictment was unsealed, multiple polls found that Menendez’s approval rating had plummeted to just 8 percent. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, and its other Democratic senator, Cory Booker, both called on Menendez to quit. All but three of the nine Democrats in New Jersey’s House delegation have urged the senator to resign, and one of them is his own son.

Menendez has pleaded not guilty to the charges and rejected calls to resign. A son of Cuban immigrants, he has denounced the case against him as a racially motivated persecution. But his days in the Senate are almost certainly numbered, whether he leaves of his own accord or voters usher him out. Kim has announced that he will challenge Menendez next year, and so has Tammy Murphy, New Jersey’s first lady. Menendez’s trial is scheduled for May, just one month before the primary. Early polls show Menendez barely registering support among Democrats.

[Casey Michel: We’ve never seen anything like the Menendez indictment]

“I hit a breaking point,” Kim told me, explaining his decision to run. “I think a lot of people hit a breaking point, where they’re just like, ‘We’re done with this now.’”

Accountability has come more swiftly for Santos. National party leaders had largely protected him—Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his successor, Mike Johnson, both needed Santos’s vote in the GOP’s tight House majority. But a damning report from the bipartisan House Ethics Committee proved to be his undoing: Earlier this month, Santos became just the sixth lawmaker in American history to be expelled from the House.

The government’s case against Menendez could still fall apart; he’s beaten charges of corruption before. But the public can hold its elected officials to a higher standard than a jury would. If the appearance (and, in this case, reappearance) of impropriety can cause voters to lose faith in the system, the events of the past few months might go some way toward restoring it. That both Menendez and Santos have suffered consequences for their alleged misdeeds offers some reassurance to ethics watchdogs who have seen Trump survive scandal after scandal, and indictment after indictment. “You can’t get away with anything. There are still some guardrails,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me.

Yet Trump’s enduring impact on political accountability remains an open question. Has he lowered the standards for everyone, or do the laws of political gravity still apply to ethically compromised lawmakers not named Trump? “Donald Trump is a unique animal,” Lisa Gilbert, the executive vice president of the Washington-based nonprofit Public Citizen, told me. “He has built a cultlike following and surrounded himself with people who believe that no matter what he does, he is in the right.” Few politicians could ever hope to build such a buffer.

Trump hasn’t evaded accountability entirely: The ethical norms he shattered while in office likely contributed to his defeat in 2020. And although he’s leading in the polls, one or more convictions next year could weaken his bid and demonstrate that the systems meant to hold American leaders in check function even against politicians who have used their popularity to insulate themselves from culpability. “He is being charged,” Gilbert said. “There are accountability mechanisms that are moving in spite of that apparatus. And to me, that’s a sign that eventually the rule of law will prevail.”

At the same time, the Menendez and Santos examples provide only so much comfort for ethics watchdogs. The allegations against both politicians were particularly egregious. The phrase lining his pockets is usually metaphorical, but in addition to gold bars, the FBI found envelopes of cash in the pockets of suit jackets emblazoned with Menendez’s name in his closet.

The earlier allegations Menendez faced were almost as lurid; prosecutors said he had accepted nearly $1 million in gifts from a Florida ophthalmologist, including private flights and lavish Caribbean vacations, in exchange for helping the doctor secure contracts and visas for his girlfriends. A 2018 trial ended in a hung jury, and the Department of Justice subsequently dropped the case.

Santos was caught lying about virtually his entire life—his religion, where he had gone to school, where he worked—and then was accused of using his campaign coffers as a personal piggy bank, spending the money on Botox and the website OnlyFans.

[Read: George Santos was finally too much for Republicans]

Some of the charges against Trump, such as falsifying business records and mishandling classified documents, involve more complicated questions of law. “A lot of the Trump scandals that he's been indicted for may sort of be beyond the grasp of the average voter,” says Tom Jensen, the director of the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, which conducted one of the surveys finding that Menendez’s approval rating had sunk after the indictment. “Gold bars are not beyond the grasp of the average voter. Voters get gold bars, and when it’s something that’s so easy for voters to understand, you’re a lot more likely to see this sort of precipitous decline.”

Jensen told me that in his 16 years as a pollster, he had seen only two other examples where public support dropped so dramatically after the eruption of scandal. One was Rod Blagojevich, the former Democratic governor of Illinois who was convicted of attempting to sell the Senate seat that Barack Obama vacated when he became president in 2009. The other was John Edwards, who, after running for president as a Democrat in 2008, admitted to having an affair while his wife, Elizabeth, was battling a recurrence of breast cancer. (He would later admit to fathering a child with his mistress, and face charges that he illegally used campaign funds to hide the affair; Edwards was found not guilty on the one count on which the jury reached a verdict.)

The Trump era has revealed an asymmetry in how the parties respond to scandal. Republicans have overlooked or justified all sorts of behavior that would have doomed most other politicians, including multiple allegations of sexual assault (such as those that Trump essentially admitted to in the infamous Access Hollywood video made public in 2016). Although Santos was expelled by a Republican-controlled House, Democrats provided the bulk of the votes to oust him, while a majority of GOP lawmakers voted against expulsion. Democrats were quick to pressure Senator Al Franken to resign in 2018 after several women accused him of touching them inappropriately. (Some Democrats later regretted that they had pushed Franken out so fast.) The party also forced a defiant New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to step down in 2021 amid multiple allegations of misconduct and harassment.

Trump’s gut-it-out strategy seems to have inspired politicians in both parties to resist demands to resign and to bet that the public’s short attention span will allow them to weather just about any controversy. Gone are the days when a scandalized politician would quit at the first sign of embarrassment, as New York Governor Eliot Spitzer did in 2008, less than 48 hours after the revelation that he had patronized high-end prostitutes. Virginia Governor Ralph Northam was able to serve out his full term despite losing the support of virtually the entire Democratic Party in 2019 after photos surfaced of him dressed in racist costumes in a medical-school yearbook. Cuomo defied calls to resign for months, and Santos forced the House to expel him rather than quit. Menendez has similarly rebuffed the many longtime colleagues who have urged him to leave.

Shame may have left politics in the Trump era, but consequences haven’t—at least in the cases of Menendez and Santos. “Maybe these can be first steps,” Bookbinder told me, sounding a note of cautious optimism. “If you say nothing matters, then really nothing will matter. I hope we can go back to the place where people do feel like they owe it to their constituents to behave in an ethical and legal way.”

Lizzie: The Yuletide Blues are a real thing. Elvis had them. Charlie Brown had them. Tim Allen had them in Christmas With the Kranks and in The Santa Clause (during his custody battle). And that’s why we host holiday parties: to shoo away the blues until New Year’s, at which point we party again.

When we last left you, I mentioned that I was planning a tiki-inspired holiday party. The whole thing came to fruition last weekend, minus the fruit tower and the shrimp luge. (It was really quite difficult, veering on impossible, to find a full-body pineapple in Brooklyn in December). Maybe this festive update, for you, is highly anticipated. Perhaps you’ve been waiting, breath bated, to hear how it all turned out. Well, you can unbate.

Kaitlyn: I hate to say this, but I think Lizzie might have been suffering from some kind of pineapple-specific vision problem. The first four grocery stores I went to in search of star fruit, which I wanted for a recipe called “star-fruit chips,” had an obscene number of whole pineapples, which I didn’t want because I was sure that Liz already had the pineapple aspect of the event covered. I distinctly remember feeling kind of taunted by them. Lizzie and I live in the same neighborhood and probably went to the same grocery stores. So my guess is that she was looking a little too hard. One of those “right in front of your nose” things. Like when you stare at the Wordle for two hours on a day when the answer is “THEIR.” Happens to all of us!

Anyway, the fifth store I went to had just one single star fruit mixed in with the kumquats, and this was only the beginning of my problems getting ready for a party that I wasn’t hosting and had no real stake in. After standing in the corner by the yogurts for a while to think, I bought the lone star fruit, two kiwis, a pear, a mango, and a small bucket of plantain chips. I figured I could make a variety of fruit chips and then mix them in with the professionally made plantain chips to create something really impressive and delicious.

At home, I first attempted a recipe for “Whipped Mai Tai Jell-O” from the book The Great Gelatin Revival. The recipe was weird, because it said to boil the alcohol, but I wanted the alcohol to stay (and, later, enter people’s bloodstreams). So I skipped that step. The recipe also called for homemade almond milk, which I ignored, opting for store-bought. To get the mixture to set, the recipe instructed me to, as the name implies, whip it while holding the bowl aloft in an ice bath. This did not work at all (duh). Instead, I put the mixture in plastic shot glasses and put them in the freezer for a while.

Of course, the star-fruit-chip recipe worked for the star fruit but not for any of the other fruits, which had to be thrown in the trash after sitting in the oven for four hours and getting brown but not dry. The paltry 15 star-fruit chips I ended up with went into the Jell-O shots as garnishes. I thought, What could possibly go wrong next? Well, while watching Paddington 2, Nathan and I accidentally ate all of the plantain chips, so I had to send him out for a last-second bag of classic Lays. [Deep breath] No matter what happens, you can always bring classic Lays.

Santa at the beach at Lizzie's house! (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: The pineapple thing … I need a psychologist’s opinion on that. Would you believe me if I said we started our party prep three weeks prior to the big day? I can’t in good conscience recommend it. I cleaned the fridge. I scrubbed a wall. Matt spent many hours crafting paper lampshades to hang over our recessed lights and giant paper flowers to hide the parts of the ceiling where it leaks when it rains.

We had initially planned a menu of mini hot dogs, sliders with caramelized onions, pineapple upside-down cupcakes, and coconut shrimp, but once I realized that we had no savory vegetarian options, I added a cheese ball and cheesy garlic knots into the mix. Matt batched a cocktail called the Jungle Bird (rum, Campari, pineapple juice, lime, and simple syrup). We also had Ghia and a pineapple-flavored THC drink for the sober and plant-curious among us.

If I had to do it over again, I would’ve refreshed the snacks more often. I think our cheese ball ran out of Ritz accompaniments, and our freezer is still full of shrimp.

Kaitlyn: Speaking of ceiling leaks, I need to share something amazing we heard in the fourth meeting of the dinner-party course Liz and I have been taking. One woman, during the show-and-tell portion of the class, explained that her house is extremely structurally unsound. Among other problems, she said, there is a huge hole in the kitchen floor, and to get around it, you have to go down a flight of stairs into the basement and then up another flight on the other side. Before the house is gutted, whenever that day comes, she wants to throw a cave-themed dinner party for which she fills the place with geodes and candles and paper-mache boulders. “Honestly, if my house is falling apart, I might not have money to have an elaborate dinner, but when the fuck else am I going to be able to have an empty house that has a fucked-up design?” she said. Now, that is a truly enviable attitude to carry into 2024. That’s what I’m talking about!

I somehow lost a star-fruit garnish on the two-block walk to Lizzie’s house. But my spirits rose dramatically when we arrived. Christmas in July in December … As we walked in, our jaws hit the floor.

The decorations that Matt made were so, so good—if Jimmy Buffett (RIP) had been present, he would have fainted. Or moved right in! I always love being in Lizzie’s apartment, but the space was looking extra beautiful because of the lanterns, the flowers, and Matt and Lizzie’s enormous tinsel-covered Christmas tree. We all complained for a minute about the wild, possibly illegal pricing of trees this year in Brooklyn, but we quickly concluded that any reasonable person would pay basically as much as they could possibly afford in order to have one. I mean, at what point would it not be worth it? It smells fantastic and is so good for morale.

Re: the coconut shrimp, I’d be happy to go over later in the week to have some.

Lizzie: Imagine a party where the only food is coconut shrimp …

I think there were close to 30 people in my apartment at the party’s peak. People came from as far afield as Philadelphia, New Jersey, and the Upper East Side. There was even one guy who I’m not totally convinced knew anyone at all. He said he was the plus-one of someone who had been planning to attend but was no longer coming. He showed up with a giant backpack that I’m guessing weighed at least 40 pounds, and when I showed him where to put his coat, he kept saying, “Thank you for being so hospitable.” But what was I supposed to do? Not let a stranger with a giant backpack into my house?

You know the John Early and Kate Berlant short Rachel? It was kind of like that, except less thrilling, because he eventually just left without much fanfare.

Kaitlyn: Lizzie and Matt just got a new buzzer—one of those where the person inside the apartment can look at a live video feed of the person outside. The lighting on the stoop is really flattering and makes everybody look hot and famous on the screen. So, for a while, I was hanging out in the kitchen and ogling people, then buzzing them in.

I was also talking to Colin about Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen. He had only seen the movie, and I had only read the book. I asked if Eileen is obsessed with her bowels in the movie, and he said no. I was like, well, then, what even happens? (I read the book a long time ago, but I remember her talking about pooping basically the whole time.) I guess I may have buzzed in a mysterious backpack person during that conversation, but I don’t think so.

I did have the honor of buzzing in Colin—not the Colin I was already talking to, but the Colin who lives in New Jersey and knew Lizzie as a child. I told him his pink floral shirt was great, and he said, “It’s my grandmother’s.” The two Colins met because of a confusing moment when I said “Colin” to one and the other thought I was talking about him. Shortly after this, Stephanie saw Michelle walk by and said, “Wait … is that … ?” She didn’t know Lizzie had a twin! If the theme of the night hadn’t been “tiki bar,” it would have been “doppelgängers.”

These paper lanterns were made by hand... by just one man, Matt. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: Doppelgängers, party crashers … Here’s another trend report from the party: the J.Crew 1988 Heritage Cotton Rollneck™ sweater. Brandon was wearing it, and he received multiple compliments throughout the night. The man-in-a-turtleneck look can go House of Gucci fast, but the roll neck keeps it off the ski slopes, if you know what I mean.

And another: Reindeer Ring Toss. It’s a party game that consists of inflatable antlers that you wear on your head and inflatable rings that your teammate (or opponent?) attempts to throw onto your antlers. It’s actually more challenging than it sounds, because all of your props are essentially slightly heftier balloons. Have you ever tried to throw a balloon with any sort of specificity or target in mind? They want nothing to do with you! They just want to float around without accomplishing anything besides half-heartedly defying gravity.

Kaitlyn: The game looked incredibly hard. I was too intimidated to even try it. But throughout the evening, I did manage to sample most of the snacks. The sliders were better than anything I’ve eaten all year and, unlike every other dinner I’ve had in New York, didn’t cost $70. I ate two. I could have had, conservatively, six. I also had some wontons with spicy mustard, some hot-chocolate-flavored Hershey’s Kisses, and a few cheesy garlic balls. Plus punch, which I spilled on the rug after only a few sips. That’s one of the worst things that can happen at a party—seeming drunk and doing something a drunk person would do, but really you were just being clumsy. Luckily, Stephanie poured half a seltzer on the stain and dabbed it right up.

People kept asking what was in the Jell-O shots because they were a stupid color and tasted like rum and nothing else. Eventually, I started pretending I didn’t know anything about them.

Lizzie: I actually liked that the Jell-O shots were an off-putting off-white color, but Kaitlyn’s right: They really tasted mostly of alcohol, and I don’t think I finished mine.

Here’s a question for the group: Is it a mood killer to tidy during a party? I feel like once the cups and cans start to pile up on random surfaces, you gotta do something about it. Otherwise it feels like soaking in bath water a little too long—time to pull the plug. Speaking of cans, how can we, as a society, prevent the one-last-sip-in-the-can thing from happening? Why aren’t you all finishing that last, warm, flat sip?

Kaitlyn: Around the time that Lizzie began tidying, I guess I was starting to get actually drunk, because I asked five or six people if we could be the first to sit down on the floor and just kind of get that started—“no more standing.”

Russell sat next to me and Lori, and started to talk to us about The Power Broker. He said he has a bone to pick with Robert Caro, because there wasn’t anything about Jane Jacobs in the book. We told him that Robert Caro did write a chapter about Jane Jacobs—as you, reader, may know—and it was cut from the book, because the book was so long that it was going to be literally too large to be bound as a single volume if something didn’t get scrapped. I mean, rebutting this complaint was child’s play for us.

He then said that there should at least have been a chapter about Robert Moses picking a fight and losing. We said, please, Russell, there are chapters about that! I love Russell, but he was being very antagonistic. I lost my voice while talking to him because I had to talk so loud.

Lizzie: I lost my voice too. I realized that once one person starts talking a little louder, everyone needs to talk louder and louder, until we’re basically all screaming to be heard over the noise that we as a group have created. I even turned the music all the way down to combat the noise issue, but it didn’t help. Maybe I need to talk to my landlord about the apartment’s acoustics.

I wish I could remember more of what happened, but the truth is, it’s all kind of a blur. I swear, it wasn’t too much eggnog; it was hosting. Hosting goes straight to my head.

I hope everyone had fun. If you were hoping for a shrimp luge, I can only say: Maybe in the future.

Kaitlyn: Speaking of fun and the future, we should mention that this will be the last issue of Famous People published in The Atlantic. This is it, and we’ve had a ball!

You can keep up with us elsewhere if you’d like, and please continue inviting us to parties. Ideally, we would like to go to the Met Gala.

Ederle Vaughan, 48, has worked as a cleaner at Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey for 16 years. She lives paycheck to paycheck, using those wages for her daughter’s college tuition as well as her own groceries and rent. With stubbornly high prices, her dollars don’t go as far as they used to.

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One must feel for the fishermen of Cape May, New Jersey. They had a fair grievance and took it to court—all the way to the Supreme Court. But along that journey their lawsuit became something else: a way to possibly remake administrative law. They just want to make a living catching herring, but the justices are more interested in using their case to weigh in on a different legal question entirely.

This is the story of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, one of the blockbuster cases on the Court’s docket this year. The case involves a federal law requiring fishermen to “carry” government inspectors as observers on their fishing boats in order to monitor compliance with a federal agency’s rules. That regulator—the National Marine Fisheries Service—recently interpreted carry to mean “pay for” and began charging fishermen roughly 20 percent of their revenue to pay the monitors’ wages. A group of fisheries sued but lost in the D.C. Circuit, which said that because of what’s known as the Chevron doctrine, the court was obligated to defer to agencies’ “reasonable” interpretations of “ambiguous” statutes.

So, the fishing companies took their case to the Supreme Court, and their lawyers (from the conservative Cause of Action Institute) put two questions in front of the justices. First, they asked if the D.C. Circuit applied Chevron correctly. The fishermen think that the statute is not ambiguous and that the agency’s interpretation is not reasonable. If the Supreme Court were to agree, the fishermen would not have to keep paying the monitors. The second question the fishermen’s lawyers asked was much more provocative: Is it time for the Court to overturn Chevron—or, at least, rewrite it to avoid outcomes like this?

[From the January/February 2024 issue: A MAGA judiciary]

The justices took the case, but only in part: The Court will hear only the second question. The fishermen will have their day, but they can’t bring one of their best arguments with them. Now the only way the fishermen can win is if the Supreme Court overturns a 40-year-old precedent; whether the fishermen are right about the ambiguity of the statute or the reasonableness of the agency’s interpretation is no longer part of the case.

That the Court will decide Loper Bright without considering the first question may seem odd, but it’s unfortunately all too common. The Supreme Court almost never decides entire cases. Justices pick the questions they want to decide, and this time, they decided they wanted to reconsider a pillar of administrative law that has stood since the Reagan administration. But picking the law you want to change and then changing it sounds a lot like a job for Congress, not a court.

No wonder many Americans today worry that the Supreme Court plays too large a role in setting national policy. In the past decade, the Court has decided cases dealing with abortion, President Barack Obama’s DAPA program, and same-sex marriage without actually considering the full cases. Instead, the Court picked the questions from those cases that it wanted to answer—the policy it wanted to make—and focused on those. This self-assigned power to choose its questions rather than judging entire cases is perhaps the most important part of the story of how the Court became such a powerful policy maker. It is certainly the most overlooked.

At its inception, the Supreme Court had almost no control over its docket. Like virtually all common-law appellate courts before it, the Court heard all cases because it was required to do so and decided them in their entirety. It was explicit that its duty was “to give judgment on the whole record”—no cherry-picking of questions.

By 1891, the Court was hopelessly behind on its work, so Congress stepped in. It created the Circuit Courts of Appeals—lower federal courts that handle initial appeals from federal trial courts—and limited the Supreme Court’s mandatory docket. But this limitation created a new problem. What if the new circuit courts disagreed? Or what if they misinterpreted the law in cases that the Court was no longer obligated to hear?

Congress provided a solution. Ordinarily, the new circuit courts get the final word, but there are two exceptions where the Supreme Court gets to speak: First, circuit courts can “certify”—that is, send—specific questions to the Supreme Court. The justices may either answer the question or bring the whole case up for the justices to decide in full. Second, if the circuit court does not certify a question, the Supreme Court could grant certiorari and decide the entire case itself. This distinction between discrete questions emerging through certification and full cases coming before the Court through certiorari has been explicit since 1891 and remains enshrined in statutes today.

By 1925, the Court was once again falling behind. The justices went to Congress and asked for even more control over their docket. Congress obliged and made more of the Court’s docket discretionary. Still, as before, both Congress and the Court tied certification to individual questions and certiorari to entire cases. Chief Justice William Howard Taft said certiorari extended “to the whole case and every question presented in it.” Justice Willis Van Devanter assured Congress that he and his peers understood that granting writ meant “full consideration of the case.”

But two years later, the justices went back on their word. In a case called Olmstead v. United States, the Court granted certiorari and expressly limited its review to constitutional questions, ignoring other issues involved in the case. Over time, this practice became more and more common, and in 1939, the Court wrote its own rule giving itself power to limit its review to specific questions in all cases.

[Adam Serwer: The constitution is whatever the right wing says it is]

Today, this little-known rule has major consequences. In cases dealing with abortion (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health), marriage equality (Hollingsworth v. Perry, United States v. Windsor, and Obergefell), President Obama’s DAPA program (United States v. Texas), class actions (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes), the appointments clause (National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning), campaign finance (Citizens United), and the recognition of Jerusalem (M.B.Z. ex rel. Zivotofsky v. Clinton), the Court preselected its questions. The justices eliminated questions they didn’t want to answer and added some they did. But they never actually did what courts are supposed to do: sit down and decide a full case.

Even when the justices don’t add or subtract questions, the Court’s choose-your-own-adventure approach to its docket invites activist lawyers to bring up questions that allow the justices to make new laws. In many cases, when the Court isn’t actively manipulating the docket, all that means is that the lawyers guessed right about what the justices wanted to talk about. But if they guess wrong, the justices can and often do fix things. As in Loper Bright, the Court is typically primarily interested in legislating, and the case itself is barely an afterthought.

According to both text and history, the Supreme Court should be deciding full cases, but that’s not what the Court does today. Despite the Roberts Court’s stated emphasis on the original public meaning of law, the justices seem comfortable abandoning text and history when it comes to the statutes that govern the Court’s own behaviors.

Holding others to a standard the justices don’t apply to themselves is galling, but targeting questions creates another big problem. It transforms the Court from a tribunal deciding cases into a super-legislator with little accountability. Unsurprisingly, this legislative power divides and politicizes the Court. It also devalues the flesh-and-blood people whose very livelihoods depend on the Court’s decisions.

Many litigants swear to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Cape May’s fishermen got one question there, but not their whole case. If the Court decides to leave Chevron as is, they can make no further appeal, even though perhaps their strongest argument—the argument that carry cannot be reasonably interpreted as “pay for”—was never considered by the Court. I wouldn’t blame these fishermen for asking whether the Supreme Court is even a court at all. Courts are supposed to decide full cases after hearing all the arguments. That’s what the law says the Supreme Court is supposed to do, but that’s not what the Supreme Court does. It hasn’t for a long time.

Perhaps no puzzle has consumed the American media more in the past few months than the chasm between official measures of the economy and how average people feel about it. Inflation is down, and wages are up—yet voters remain gloomy. Young people are, at least by some measures, the most pessimistic. They think the economy is bad and getting worse. Why? The answer has major implications, not least on the outcome of the next presidential election. You can’t blame the media for being so eager to figure it out. But pundits and reporters might want to look harder at their own penchant for writing stories that make the economy look worse for young people than it really is, including, above all, by incorrectly declaring that college diplomas aren’t what they used to be.

A recent Washington Post story, “New College Grads Are More Likely to Be Unemployed in Today’s Job Market,” typifies the trend. It begins with a recent graduate named Lucas Chung forlornly sitting in his childhood bedroom. He has moved back home, because he hasn’t yet found a good job. “I had high hopes but it’s not really working out for me,” Chung says. “I’m feeling a little desperate.” Chung is supposed to represent what the Post calls “a sharp reversal from long-held norms” in which college graduates get a boost in the job market. Historically, the unemployment rate for new college graduates has been lower than the overall average. But in recent months, it has been higher, according to an analysis of September data by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This, the Post story concludes, has created “another disruption for a generation of college graduates who have already had crucial years of schooling upended by the pandemic.”

That sounds bad, particularly given how much money students borrow for college. But a closer inspection of the numbers reveals that the so-called sharp reversal isn’t sharp, and is barely a reversal. The new-graduate and all-worker unemployment rates have been moving pretty much in lockstep, within a percentage point of each other, for the past 10 years. As of September, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates (defined as those aged 22 to 27) was 4.4 percent, compared with 5.6 percent in December 2013. That’s consistent with the long-term trend of a job market that has been improving for more than a decade and recovered quickly after the coronavirus pandemic. The all-worker rate was only 0.8 percentage points lower, at 3.6 percent.

Nor are recent graduates looking for jobs being “disrupted.” Yes, Americans are feeling real pain from lingering high prices, especially for food and housing. But that isn’t a challenge specific to young degree-holders. As the Post article itself explains—more than halfway through—the issue is not that graduates are doing worse; it’s that the job market for workers without degrees has been so extraordinary.  

[James Surowiecki: Why Americans can’t accept the good economic news]

The article makes more sense when understood as part of a long-running subgenre of economic journalism, which I first wrote about in 2011. For half a century, the Post, The New York Times, and others have been feeding the anxieties of their well-educated readership by publishing stories about a crisis among recent college graduates. The precise details may evolve, but the formula is remarkably durable: Find some recent grads working humble jobs, quote them on how their lives are failing to live up to their aspirations, and cite an expert warning that this could be the new normal. “After generations during which going to college was assumed to be a sure route to the better life, college-educated Americans are losing their economic advantage.” Sound familiar? Those words were published on the front page of the Times in 1975.

The big-picture numbers tell a very different story: College graduates are more likely to have jobs, become wealthy, be healthy, get married, stay married, and be on the right side of virtually any measure of prosperity and stability one can name. We can even see the enduring value of college in the lives of the very people the Post and the Times chose to portray the struggles of betrayed and despairing collegians—people such as Benjamin Shore, whom the Times found in 2011 sitting in “a windowless room in a Baltimore row house,” where he’d moved because his parents were charging rent on his childhood bedroom. At the time, Shore “made beans and rice at home and drove slowly to save gas.” Today, he is employed as a surgeon, and he can presumably afford a more varied diet. Other characters have followed similar arcs: A lowly administrative assistant in 2011 is now the vice president of sales at a business-finance company. A former waitress in Weehawken, New Jersey, who was then “earning $2.17 an hour plus tips,” was most recently a senior manager of legal and business affairs at a digital-banking firm, according to LinkedIn. Both are testaments to the enduring value of college degrees.

Sarah Dunn, née Weinstein, was photographed by the Times tending bar, a classic job for the dramatically underemployed. She has since gotten married, started a family, and launched a successful digital-design career. Now she manages a team of designers in the Austin, Texas, technology sector—people roughly in the career position she was in 12 years ago. Her experience gave her empathy for the next generation. “Making the transition from college to the workforce is hard no matter how the job prospects are,” she told me.

That is sage advice. But the fact remains that those transitions are usually a success. There’s even a positive story buried in the latest Post article. “I always just expected that you’d go to school, get your degree and end up working some sort of office job that pays enough to live,” a 25-year-old man tells the reporter. “That’s the way it worked for my dad and my brother, who’s 10 years older than me. But that doesn’t seem possible anymore.” But wait: If the older brother is 35 years old, then he was born in 1988, which means he probably graduated from college in 2009 or 2010, the absolute depths of a global economic catastrophe. Yet everything apparently worked out just fine for him.

Shore, Dunn, the older brother, and millions like them ended up in stable professional careers because there’s a huge difference between short-term and long-term prospects for college graduates. In that difference lies the true value of a college degree. A diploma means that, after some time in the workforce, you’ll be qualified to be promoted into management—VP of this or senior director of that. And it allows you to pursue the graduate and professional degrees that are required for many of the highest-paying jobs. In the long run, college graduates are most likely to marry other college graduates, forming financially stable households that are more able to buy homes. They cluster together in financially vibrant metropolitan areas, giving them the most access to new partners, capital, and jobs. College degrees are still very valuable, which is why colleges have been able to relentlessly bid up their price.

[David Deming: The college backlash is going too far]

But the gloomy counternarrative that college is no longer worth it won’t go away. This can have real-world consequences by contributing to the impression that the American economy is in bad shape. (That impression has many causes, of course, most notably the lingering effects of inflation; media narratives are one influence among many.) Young voters were President Joe Biden’s biggest supporters in 2020. If they buy into an unjustifiably dour vision of their future, it could tip the election in Donald Trump’s favor. Alarmist rhetoric can also lead to bad choices at both the individual and policy levels. Enrollment in the humanities has been steadily declining as students look to hedge their financial risk by choosing job-focused majors instead. Faced with budget woes and stagnant enrollment, West Virginia University recently decided to eliminate dozens of supposedly impractical degree programs, including in art, music, and foreign language. And yet, a Georgetown University study found that although liberal-arts-college graduates make less money than other college students in the first 10 years after college, they make substantially more after 40 years. The vocationalization of higher education risks creating a society where the long-term personal and economic benefits of the humanities are reserved for the wealthy few.

None of this means that life is free and easy for recent college graduates. Average statistics are just that—averages. A degree has never been a guarantee of anything. But leaving college during a hot labor market, even if it’s also good for less educated workers, is immensely superior to graduating into the aftermath of a recession. Sarah Dunn remembers a New York City firm offering her $28,000 a year for an entry-level job in advertising during the mid-2010s, even though by then she had a graduate degree. “Companies were really taking advantage back then,” she said. “Now I see what kids are being offered, and it’s pretty great.”

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers how much time they spent with peers in adolescence. This is the first batch of responses.

Michael is a member of the Silent Generation:

Hanging out with peers meant playing outside with the neighborhood kids: flying kites, playing baseball, football, rock fights, climbing trees, digging foxholes in our yards, and little parental oversight. But then, we were close to home and any misdeeds could and were quickly reported back for subsequent corporal punishment. (In today’s environment my parents could be prosecuted for abuse.) We had no car, so transportation was by shank’s mare or bicycle. On special occasions, we might take the bus downtown to go shopping with our mother. Once I started work at 13, there was less time for goofing off. As for the effects on my later life, well, I suppose you could say I haven’t noticed. It was just the way it was. I do miss flying those kites in the summer. In no way am I critical of current generations hanging at the mall. Hell, I wish that we had had a place like that, although a timber-covered fox hole is pretty neat, if dirty.

Molly is 80:

My high school had a sock hop every other Friday in the gym (hence the socks). On alternate Fridays, we had rollerskating, swimming, volleyball, and just hanging out. We could get snacks in the dining room. The school was packed. I am still grateful to the teachers and parents who gave up their time so we could have coed activities in a safe place.

Thomas was born in 1949 to a mother and a father who had both been American officers in World War II.

I was fortunate to attend U-High, the junior and senior high of the “laboratory school” of a midwestern state university. It was the brightest group I competed with until grad school. The smartest people I knew were Black, the children of an engineering professor. When I dated one of them, I got no trouble from my parents; her parents, whom I met when I picked her up; our friends; or people who saw us walking together. Civilized behavior has prevailed for a long time in some places.

After school we met at the cafeteria of a women’s dorm on campus. Sometimes we played casual games of bridge, but mostly we just shot the breeze. You were there not because of the academic, economic, or social status of your parents, but because you were a bright kid with a keen sense of humor. I somehow learned to swear in sixth grade, which made me somewhat precocious at the time, although I didn’t know what some of the words meant until seventh grade. The guys swore like sailors, but never in the presence of girls. We liked the girls and respected them whether they were present or not. Banter with girls could be light and innocent, but we also had serious conversations, just as we had with other guys. I’m sure it was an easier time to be a girl than my daughter faced 40 years later, and partly because boys tended to be “gentlemen.” It was easier for young girls to remain “ladies” for as long as they wanted to, because we assumed that they were.

I hiked and took long bike rides in the country with my best friend, and we taught ourselves to tie flies and fly-fish by reading books. My school had no girls’ athletic teams, but most of the boys played some sport at least once. If you went out for a team, you were on the team, which gave athletics a nice egalitarian ethos. Boys who otherwise had little interaction acquired a structured peer group where you were respected for doing your best. That helped to unify us as a community.

Children of the Baby Boom grew up with more siblings than kids often have now. I will not argue for a higher birth rate, but largish families did help to socialize kids. You were part of a family with other kids as well as a member of a peer group of kids. The dynamics are different but supportive, and teach complementary things. Even in 1965, kids grew up in a society that was much more like the hunter-gatherer societies for which we are adapted than like our modern, increasingly technological and impersonal society. Kids could learn at school and by reading, and they were freed from the very non-hunter-gatherer drudgery of household, farm, or industrial labor that had once dominated childhood. For a few decades, we had a golden age of childhood.

Donna from New Jersey recalls the 1960s as a fabulous time to be a teen.

My neighborhood had a lot of kids my age, and then there were the kids we met in school. The [Catholic Youth Organization] and Knights of Columbus used to have dances with live bands, and boys and girls all danced together. In the summer we would hang out at Fifth Ward Park or Warinanco Park; winter found us ice-skating on the frozen lake at Warinanco with a wooden boathouse with a pot-bellied stove we made hot chocolate on, or walking to the ice rink. Sometimes we all got together and sang a cappella or lip-synced to popular music.

The ’60s were a turbulent time in history. Vietnam images came nightly on the news. However, there was no 24-hour news, and newsmen reported the facts. No internet, cellphones, or video games. We were aware of what was going on, especially when friends/relatives got drafted, but it was not uppermost in our minds. Sounds idyllic now; conversations with my grandchildren made me realize that the ’60s were not so bad to grow up in.

Lu, who was born in 1959, reflects on her ’70s adolescence.

I was lucky to spend every summer in our cottage on a small island in the St. Lawrence River just off the island of Montreal, Canada. There were no cars, just a few electric golf carts for the elderly. We had a pool for the 200 or so people who lived on the island, a tennis court, and a playing field. As teens we inherited a shack called The Wreck from those older than us. The rule was no adults (older than 20) and no one under the age of 12. It had electricity, an old television, a couple of old couches, and a wobbly card table with equally wobbly chairs. My sister, six years older than me, and her cohort took over the shack first, and when we girls were 11, all we wanted was to be old enough to be in The Wreck with our older siblings.

When I was 11, The Wreck was laboriously put on huge rollers and moved by strong men out of the woods and into a more public area near the ferry landing and the mooring area for all of our boats. I guess the parents felt The Wreck needed to be more visible, but they still weren’t allowed inside. When I turned 13 in the month of May, so did my best friend, Anne. Jennifer was allowed to join us all, even though her birthday was in late July. It would have been too cruel to leave her out on the technicality of a few months.

For years during the summertime we hung out in The Wreck. It was awesome! We played cards, watched grainy bad television, and fought over the best seat on the best couch. I flirted with David. Jennifer flirted with my brother John, and Anne sulked because she didn’t have anyone to flirt with. There was no alcohol involved. We would have had to go across the water in an open boat and bring it into an area near where our parents and neighbors were passing by all the time. Although they weren’t allowed in, they could knock, stand at the door, and look inside.

We didn't really want alcohol anyway. There were runs across to the mainland (which was actually Montreal Island) to get candy and soda pop. There was eventually some pot smoking as well, on the part of the older boys. We also played a game we called Chase with the younger children and the older adolescents. The oldest was about 18, and the youngest was about 10. One of the older boys, almost grown up, would announce that a game of Chase was going to be played after supper. Everyone would gather at “base” which was a particular maple tree. The island was a mile long and a quarter mile wide, so the playing area, including everyone’s backyard and the rocky beach surrounding the island, was very large. There were two teams, equally composed of a mixture of younger and older boys and girls. It was like hide-and-seek in teams. We would play as the long summer evenings brought in dusk and eventually darkness. The only real danger was being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

It was unlimited freedom, or so it seemed. Jennifer’s dad was difficult, but we broke her out of being “grounded” with a good ladder more than once. My mother’s only rule was that we had to be home for supper. She had an old schoolhouse bell that she would ring at five minutes to six. We could hear that bell from halfway across the island. All the other mothers told their children to come home when they heard the bell. There were minor disagreements between us girls, but we knew that it was best to work things out. The coming of autumn and the school year always meant that we had to say goodbye until the next May, when the melting of the ice and the opening of the ferry landing would allow us access to our beloved island once again.

Russell is 63, and his socially formative years were in the ’70s:

I was the oldest, with three siblings, and our house was absolutely the go-to house. How my mom tolerated that, I’ll never know. Our house was almost always full of kids, and sleepovers happened with regularity even on weekdays. We had all smoked pot before we were 15. None of us made it to 18 as virgins, in spite of being raised Catholic and Mom teaching Bible study. By 15, I had girlfriends all the time. We played coed pickup-game sports, went to movies and concerts; our big thing was hanging out at Lyon’s restaurant (gone now) and drinking endless coffee. The guys and gals that I was friends with then are still my friends.

Some of us got together this year in Las Vegas, since only a few of us actually stayed planted. A couple of months ago, I visited with an ex-girlfriend from when I was 18; we’ve been just buddies since then. I was lucky; I met people when I was young that were worth having lifetime-long relationships with. A funny note: One of the friends that went to Las Vegas this year spends time on his phone like he is a 14-year-old girl. I still tease him mercilessly about that. Another friend from that trip who was the most awkward then is probably the most together of us now. We still love him anyway. One aspect of those days that I think a lot of kids nowadays would appreciate, if they could, is that although our parents would insist on always knowing where we were and what we were doing, they never did. There were no cellphones to be tracked or to keep us on short leashes.

I no longer live close to anybody I grew up with, and have tried making new friends in my new locale. I have moved often and have always made friends easily. I find it much harder now. In just five years, I have already had people just drift away, while I still tried to maintain [the relationships]. COVID, politics, and cellphones have definitely made an impact on current social behavior.

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.

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Kaitlyn: Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Martha Stewart literally did surgery on a grape. This was nearly 20 years before the idea became a confusing internet meme. She invented it! In her 1999 book Martha Stewart’s Hors D’oeuvres Handbook, which I recently received as a 30th-birthday gift, Martha sincerely recommends hollowing out grapes and filling them, individually, with goat cheese and crumbled pistachios. She also recommends hollowing out cucumbers, apples, pattypan squash, and, if you can believe it, cherry tomatoes. Of course, I know that Martha has a good reason for everything she does, even if it isn’t obvious to me what it could be. I am very humble and I am taking notes.

Lizzie and I are always trying to educate ourselves about parties. We would like to be perfect hosts. We know our limits, but we strive to surpass them—it’s called shooting for the moon and landing among the stars. That’s why we study texts like Martha Stewart’s Hors D’oeuvres Handbook, and why another of my 30th-birthday gifts was a packet of papers that Lizzie printed off the internet, detailing how Nancy Reagan planned for dinners at the White House. I think my favorite book about parties is probably Putnam’s Book of Parties, from 1928, which explains a concept called “Mushroom Party”—you decorate a high-school gymnasium to look like an enchanted forest, then you make up a bunch of prophecies and write them on cards tied to mushrooms, then you ask someone to pretend to be a witch. As each teen approaches the witch, she stirs her cauldron and mutters:

Seek a mushroom in the forest,

In the dank and blue-lit forest,

Bearing on its stem this number.

Tell thee what the Fates shall give thee

In the days that lie before thee.

Go—but let not word nor laughter

Pass thy lips until thou find it.

And then everyone drinks coffee!

Of course, there’s only so much you can learn from reading. At some point, you’ll need to take the next step: a four-week course held on Zoom. That’s how Lizzie and I ended up enrolling in “The Table as Canvas: Designing a Bizarro Dinner Party,” hosted by the chef Jen Monroe, whose very cool and interesting career we’ve been following ever since she served us jellyfish sorbet at a dystopian-themed dinner party in 2017.

Lizzie: When Kaitlyn first sent me the course sign-up page, I imagined a laboratory of bizarro dinner-party scientists sitting studiously at stainless-steel tables somewhere in Midtown, learning how to make carrot rosettes. But I would come to find out, as Kaitlyn mentioned, that this was an online course. I’ll admit that there was a twinge of disappointment, but I understand that the internet means access to a larger audience and it also means none of your classmates ever have to see what you look like.

What reading did I do in preparation? Well, I’m basically always reading a P. G. Wodehouse novel to stave off my despair, and one of the many constantly repeated activities in his books is eating and drinking at large estates in the countryside. A chef is always in charge of the meals because everyone is rich, but none of the food ever sounds particularly appetizing: soft-boiled eggs, deviled kidneys, whatever a “savoury” is, a magical hangover cure made with Worcestershire sauce and a raw egg.

All of this to say that I may have been—pardon me—starved for inspiration when the first class rolled around.

A screenshot from class. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: The first week of class, I hustled home from work, went straight into the bedroom, and shut the door. Our instructor, Jen, called us from a room full of cake pans, and started off by asking us to “clarify” our “goals” for the course. My goal, as I said, was to become perfect.

Jen told us not to be afraid of the many constraints imposed by time, money, skill level, etc. These would only serve to make us more creative, she argued. For example, a former student had made her apartment more like a 24-hour diner for a 24-hour-diner dinner party simply by making the floors a little bit sticky on purpose. This innovation took hardly any time or skill and cost her nothing, except for the raised eyebrows of at least two strangers who heard about it years later on Zoom.

60-some people were on the Zoom call with us, and we soon got the opportunity to meet a few of them. After Jen played a clip of the food-fight scene in Hook, she put us in breakout rooms to discuss any notable childhood memories we might have about food. I said that my mom had always bought the puffy Cheetos, so when I went to the homes of friends whose mothers bought crunchy Cheetos, I thought there was something kind of sinister about that. “At least you had snacks,” one woman in my group responded. Well, sure.

Lizzie: My breakout room was a somewhat stilted place, but we did eventually get into a rhythm. I talked about eating crickets and astronaut ice cream at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City as a child. In my notes, I wrote, “I have no memories,” which longtime readers will recognize as something I’ve said before.

I also wrote, “We’re gonna need a bigger budget,” after Jen played a clip of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the 1989 Peter Greenaway movie that takes place in a restaurant and ends with a dinner party to which I would not want to be invited. (Spoiler: A very crispy man is served atop a bed of Brassicaceae.) Thankfully, Jen did not play that particular scene, which would have turned all of our stomachs.

I left the class a little hungry and wondering why you can’t stream this movie anywhere right now.

Kaitlyn: I really wanted to watch it! They don’t even have it at the library!

Our homework assignment for the first week was to make a mood board that would capture the desired spirit of our dream dinner party. As I mentioned, I was very inspired by Martha doing surgery on a grape. I also love Jell-O. So I thought, What about a party combining these two things? For appetizers, I could hollow out lots of different fruits and vegetables, just like Martha, and then, unlike Martha, I could fill them with various flavors of gelatin. Because it’s almost Christmas, I looked for further inspiration from my favorite Christmas story, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, in which the characters are obsessed with festive, multicolored “Who Pudding,” which appears to be Jell-O-like.

After a few days of scrolling through Instagram, I had several dozen photos of improbable gelatin-based dishes with garish Dr. Seuss aesthetics. I was especially excited about the idea of “Cranberry Candles,” which are candles made from cranberry sauce, strawberry Jell-O, and mayonnaise, then decorated with orange-peel stars. I thought they would make a stunning centerpiece.

Martha's instructions for grape surgery. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: I like that the mayo is both in the Jell-O and served on the side. Mayo two ways. My theme came from Matt, who loves a Mai Tai and will do anything (anything!) to have one. Before the class started, we were planning on having a vaguely 1960s tiki holiday party inspired by Lee’s Hawaiian Islander, in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, so I stuck to that idea. I put this photo on my mood board, but as I currently own no rattan furniture, achieving this look may be slightly out of reach.

Because this holiday party was never meant to be a sit-down dinner, my menu so far is relegated to the “bites” arena, and lacks Kaitlyn’s structural, textural, and mayo-ral innovation. If you have ideas for how to make mini hotdogs and a fruit tower feel more elaborate, please let me know.

Kaitlyn: I think the fruit tower will be good. I can’t wait to see the fruit tower. I do think it will be expensive and possibly wasteful. I know I would feel some hesitation to rip a banana off of a beautiful sculpture. Lizzie and Matt will really have to enforce a rule of “eat the fruit tower,” and I think they might even have to pay someone to go first.

For the second week of class, Lizzie came over to my apartment and Nathan put the Zoom up on the TV for us. To start, Jen reminded us that we were supposed to have been thinking about the “feeling” we wanted to evoke with our dinner parties. I’d forgotten to do this.”What’s your feeling?” Nathan asked. “Uh … Grinch,” I said. He was like, “Evil?” And I said no, of course not. I was thinking more of the end of the movie, when he’s carving the “roast beast” and everybody is singing. “Redemption?” he offered. Yes!

Nathan said the feeling for his dream dinner party would be “decay,” but he didn’t explain how he would execute that, because we promptly reminded him that he is not in the class.

Lizzie: Peter Greenaway might have an idea he could use …

This week’s class was about menu and logistics. Jen kindly reminded us to consider our limits. For example, we may want to think twice before cracking into our 401Ks to buy enough beef tenderloin to feed a midsize town’s elementary school. This would have been helpful a few years ago, before I accidentally spent a few hundred dollars on a giant slab of beef tenderloin for a New Year’s Eve party.

The most fun part of the class was when Jen showed us some of the “bizarro” things she’s done with food. It made me realize I could probably dream bigger, which I guess is literally the point of being inspired.

Kaitlyn: We got excited when Jen showed us some wacky, multicolored lollipops she’d made. She said that all she’d done was melt a bunch of Jolly Ranchers and mix them together. That sounded like something we could do—which would cost about $7—and everyone would be impressed by the result!

Toward the end of class, she started to get into the nitty-gritty—the practical considerations. Don’t invite more people than you have plates for, bring a rolling suitcase to the grocery store, that kind of thing. Jen said that it’s important to consider course timing and portions, as well. Serving too much food can be just as bad as serving not enough food, she explained. Here, Nathan and I told Lizzie our patently unsympathetic story about being served too many dinner courses and too many complimentary desserts at the fancy restaurant Pujol in Mexico City on my aforementioned recent 30th birthday. (When the waiter brought a pair of cream puffs along with our check, I almost cried.) I understand that this is a disgusting thing to complain about, but that is exactly why serving too much food makes people feel bad!

Nathan then pointed out that my Jell-O dinner might have the opposite problem: It might not fill anyone up to eat only Jell-O for dinner. I’d already thought of a solution to this, though. In the corner of the dining room, there will be a table with a pile of loose baguettes on it. If anybody gets hungry, they can just walk over there and rip off some hunks. And you know, if you have to grab a piece of pizza on the way home, that’s not the worst thing in the world. That’s why we live in New York City.

Lizzie: Jell-O does have a small amount of protein in it (due to the hooves), but maybe you could boost the satiety factor by throwing some salami in there. I also have concerns about people leaving my party hungry, but I’m thinking I’ll include one of those hidden-picture images in the invitation where it looks like Santa but it’s actually dozens of chicken nuggets—essentially subliminal messaging suggesting that people should eat beforehand.

Kaitlyn: For homework, we’re supposed to begin doing more in-depth research and development and testing our recipes. The first one I’m planning to try is a dish I saw on Reddit. It’s a can of pineapple rings with lime Jell-O poured directly into it. After it sets, you dump the whole thing out and slice it up. Also, to Lizzie’s point about protein, I’m thinking I’ll do a “Garden Salad Ring,” which is lemon Jell-O with radishes and hard-boiled eggs inside.

Lizzie: As I mentioned earlier, my menu could still use some work. Shrimp luge, perhaps?

Kaitlyn: Please look out for a special Christmas Day issue of Famous People! It will be about a triumphant holiday dinner party at Lizzie’s house.

Lizzie: Let’s call it dinner-party-lite.

When inflation started to spike in 2022, the Federal Reserve made the only move it could: raising interest rates. Over the course of 18 months, rates shot from near zero to above 5 percent and have remained there since. Now inflation appears under control, having fallen steadily since July 2022. But while the Fed may be done raising rates, it’s not cutting them back to zero anytime soon.

According to the central bank’s most recent projections, rates will stay where they are for most of 2024 and will fall only slightly in 2025, ending the year at about 4 percent—more than twice as high as in late 2019. Activity in the bond markets suggests that rates could stay near that level for the better part of a decade. Wall Street has begun summing up the situation with a simple phrase: “higher for longer.”

As jarring as 5 percent interest may seem, by historical standards it is pretty modest and, believe it or not, represents a healthy adjustment. America since the Great Recession has been living through an anomalous period of super-low rates that contributed to widening inequality and speculative-asset bubbles. Higher-for-longer should herald a fairer, more sustainable economy. Americans just have to survive the transition. Because before we get to the good place, higher-for-longer is going to feel bad—or at least very weird. Rates haven’t been this high since George W. Bush was president and Taylor Swift was in elementary school. At this point, nearly every facet of the American economy has reshaped itself around near-zero interest rates. As with any dependency, withdrawal will be painful.

The core irony of raising rates to tame inflation is that higher rates can make major purchases—like a car or, especially, a house—more expensive, because most people take out loans to make them. In other words, the cure for inflation may itself be experienced as inflation. In January 2021, the interest rate on a 30-year fixed home mortgage reached a record low of 2.65 percent. Today, it is just over 7 percent. In theory, higher borrowing costs are supposed to cool prices. Instead, they’ve hardly budged. With rates spiking, many homeowners have decided to stay put to preserve the cheap mortgages they secured when rates were low. The resulting restriction of supply has led to the slowest pace of existing home sales since the height of the Great Recession, keeping sticker prices high even as the cost of a mortgage has ballooned. This double whammy has produced the most punishing housing market in at least a generation: Buyers can’t afford to buy, and owners feel stuck in place. As my colleague Annie Lowrey points out, the market could be bleak until the 2030s.

[Annie Lowrey: It will never be a good time to buy a house]

Higher borrowing costs can hurt in less obvious ways, too. Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton ZERO Lab, estimates that higher-for-longer will increase the cost of renewable-energy projects by 20 to 30 percent. In just the past few months, two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey and three in New England—which together would have accounted for nearly one-fifth of President Joe Biden’s 2023 offshore wind-power target—have been canceled because of soaring costs. The world’s largest borrower is also feeling the squeeze. Thanks to rising rates, the U.S. government will pay $659 billion in interest on the national debt this year, nearly as much as it spends on Medicare or national defense.

But the most alarming potential consequence of higher-for-longer lies in the pressure it puts on the financial system. The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and Signature Bank earlier this year was largely a story about interest rates: When rates went up in 2022, existing government bonds, which had lower rates, lost value. That inflicted huge paper losses on Silicon Valley Bank, triggering a bank run. A wider crisis was averted, but banks remain vulnerable to future shocks. Regulators worry that additional pressure on balance sheets—from, say, a collapse in commercial real estate—could trigger a larger round of bank runs, with damage spilling over into the broader economy. “Eventually,” says Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, “something could break.”

And yet, higher-for-longer appears to be worth the risk. To understand why, it helps to go back to the origins of the previous regime. In 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis, the Fed cut interest rates to zero as part of a desperate bid to avert a second Great Depression. (It also began buying securities itself in an effort to push effective interest rates below zero, a program called “quantitative easing.”) This “zero interest-rate policy”—which became known as ZIRP—was meant to be a stopgap. But as it became clear that the economy needed more help, and a Tea Party–controlled Congress wasn’t going to pass any more stimulus spending, the Fed decided to keep ZIRP in place indefinitely.

The idea behind ZIRP was to encourage spending and, in turn, create new jobs. At the most basic level, the policy made borrowing money extremely cheap. But the flip side was that investors could no longer earn nice returns by simply stashing their money in safe assets such as U.S. Treasury bills. With rates at or near zero, they had to find riskier investments—things like publicly traded stocks or leveraged buyouts or luxury-condo developments. The Fed believed that this would trigger a flood of new investment that would send asset prices soaring and generate what economists call “wealth effects.” People who owned property or stocks would see the value of their portfolios rise, encouraging them to go out and spend more money, ultimately helping to speed along the recovery.

The Fed got the first part right. Almost every single asset class, whether real estate or private equity or cryptocurrency, soared in value in what became known as “the everything bubble.” The stock market more than tripled from 2009 to 2019, and the value of Netflix, Tesla, and Amazon each grew by more than 2,000 percent. But the robust recovery did not materialize. For much of the decade, GDP and wage growth were anemic. The share of working-age Americans with a job didn’t recover from its pre-crisis levels until the fall of 2019.

Instead, because assets like stocks and real estate are disproportionately held by the rich, ZIRP helped produce the largest spike in wealth inequality in postwar American history. From 2007 to 2019, according to calculations by the economist Austin Clemens based on Federal Reserve data, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans saw their net worth increase by 46 percent, while the bottom half saw only an 8 percent increase. A report from the McKinsey Global Institute, not exactly known as a bastion of economic populism, calculated that from 2007 to 2012, the Fed’s policies created a benefit for corporate borrowers worth about $310 billion, whereas households that tried to save money were penalized by about $360 billion. The journalist Christopher Leonard wrote in his 2022 book, The Lords of Easy Money, that “no single policy did more to widen the divide between the rich and poor” than ZIRP.

ZIRP transformed the American business environment in jarring ways. With borrowing cheap and the market booming, established corporations realized they could exploit financial tactics such as stock buybacks to boost earnings per share without improving their underlying business. Meanwhile, riding a wave of cheap money, Uber, WeWork, and other start-ups burned through billions of dollars of venture capital, pushing entire industries toward hard-to-sustain business models in the process. The private-equity industry, infamous for its debt-heavy leveraged buyouts, began eating up more and more of the economy. Desperation for higher returns also allowed speculative assets including cryptocurrencies and NFTs to attract trillions of dollars, only to collapse spectacularly.

[Rogé Karma: The secretive industry devouring the U.S. economy]

The return of higher rates should help the economy course-correct. More money will flow to long-term investments and sustainable companies instead of speculative assets and impractical start-ups. Companies looking to boost their stock price will have to win new customers or develop better products instead of relying on financial engineering. The gains of economic growth will be more widely spread because less money will be funneled into assets owned mostly by the rich.

Today’s higher rates also signal an underlying economic health that the ZIRP era lacked. The Fed is only comfortable keeping rates higher for longer because America’s post-pandemic recovery has been so strong, thanks to a generous helping of fiscal stimulus. Unemployment has remained at historic lows. Manufacturing is off the charts. Wage gains for lower-paid workers have rolled back about 40 percent of the rise in income inequality that has occurred since the 1980s. In terms of growth, inflation, and employment, the U.S. is doing much better than other rich countries.

Americans used to cheap mortgages and a bonkers stock market understandably might not see all of this as good news. And the risk remains that higher rates trigger the kind of financial crisis that necessitated low rates in the first place. But we shouldn’t pine for the ZIRP era. That was the product of a crisis that our leaders failed to solve. As strange as it is to say, higher-for-longer is what it looks like when things are going right.

Anyone watching the fourth Republican primary debate tonight would be forgiven for thinking Nikki Haley was the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination next year.

Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy sure were acting like it. Neither man had finished answering their first question before they began attacking the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador. “She caves any time the left comes after her, anytime the media comes after her,” warned DeSantis, the Florida governor. Ramaswamy went much further. He called Haley “corrupt” and “a fascist” for suggesting that social-media companies ban people from posting anonymously on their platforms.

The broadsides continued throughout the two-hour debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama: DeSantis and Ramaswamy used every opportunity to go after Haley, even when they were prodded to criticize the Republican who is actually dominating the primary race, Donald Trump.

“I’m loving all the attention, fellas,” Haley said at one point. What she’d love even more is about 30 additional points in the polls. As well as Haley has been doing lately, she is capturing just about 10 percent of Republican voters nationwide, according to the polling average. Time is running out for her—or any other GOP candidate—to catch Trump. He skipped this meeting of the Republican also-rans, just as he did the three previous debates. This debate narrowed to four Trump alternatives, but the evening devolved into a familiar dynamic: Most of the challengers largely declined to criticize—or even discuss—Trump.

[Read: The 2024 U.S. presidential race: a cheat sheet]

Chris Christie was the exception, as usual. The former New Jersey governor lit into Trump and mocked his rivals for being too “timid” to do the same. “I’m in this race because the truth needs to be spoken: He is unfit,” Christie said. Acting the part of pundit as much as candidate, Christie noted ruefully how little Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy wanted to talk about Trump and how fearful they seemed to be of angering him. DeSantis tiptoed toward criticism of Trump when he warned Republicans not “to nominate somebody who is almost 80 years old.” “Father Time is undefeated,” DeSantis said. But when he danced around the question of whether Trump was mentally fit to serve again as president, Christie bashed him. “This is the problem with my three colleagues: You are afraid to offend.”

Ramaswamy was next to speak. Instead of contradicting Christie and confronting Trump, he held up a handwritten sign that read, NIKKI=CORRUPT.

The reluctance of Trump’s rivals (aside from Christie) to attack the former president has frustrated Republicans who are rooting against his renomination. But on some level it makes sense. Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy aren’t actually running against Trump—at least not yet. The best way to think of these Trump-less debates is as a primary within a primary. The four Republicans on stage tonight were battling merely for the right to face off against Trump. In sports terms, these preliminary matchups are like the divisional round of the NFL playoffs, except that Trump has already earned a bye to the league championship. (The general election would be the Super Bowl.)

The all-important question is whether one of these four can break away from the others in time to wage a fair fight against Trump. The window for doing so is closing fast, but it is not shut completely. Although Trump is capturing nearly 60 percent of Republican primary voters in the national polling average, he remains below 50 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire, the early states where his challengers are campaigning most aggressively. A majority of Republicans in both Iowa and New Hampshire are backing someone other than Trump at the moment, suggesting at least the possibility that Haley or DeSantis could consolidate the anti-Trump vote and overtake him in one or both states. Trump’s lead has been consistent—and it has actually grown since the debates started without him—but historically, primary races are most volatile in the final few weeks before voters begin casting ballots.

[Read: The Republican primary is slipping away]

The debate stage has shrunk by half since the first GOP primary forum in August, when eight candidates met the Republican National Committee’s criteria for participation. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina ended his bid after appearing in last month’s debate in Miami, as did North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who did not qualify.

Yet four candidates might be as small as it gets. No more RNC-sanctioned debates are scheduled before the Iowa caucuses on January 15 or the New Hampshire primary eight days later. If Trump wins both states against a divided field—as polls suggest he will—his nomination would likely seem unstoppable.

The most likely path to preventing Trump’s nomination is the same as it was when the primary began: for anti-Trump Republicans to agree on a single candidate to go up against him one-on-one. Nikki Haley is making her move. But if tonight’s debate revealed anything, it’s that her Republican competitors aren’t ready to let her have that chance.