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In the smartphone era, libraries might seem less central. But it turns out that young people actually use them.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

How to be happy growing older America should be more like Operation Warp Speed. The Middle East conflict that the U.S. can’t stay out of

A Third Place

Spending time at my local library branch in elementary school, I felt like a little grown-up. I’d march up to the desk and tell the librarian all about the chapter books I would be reading that summer. (“Absolutely Normal Chows,” I told her once, holding up a copy of the Sharon Creech novel Absolutely Normal Chaos.) I value public libraries for the resources they offer but also because of how these spaces have always felt to me: like a community of people who care about learning new things, and who simply want to spend time in public.

Libraries, and the people who keep them running, have had a rough time in recent years. Across America, politicians and advocates have pushed to ban from schools a variety of books, including those that deal with topics of race and gender; this movement has now extended to public libraries. As my colleague Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in the March Atlantic article “The Librarians Are Not Okay”: “Although books don’t have feelings, the librarians forced to remove them from the shelves definitely do.” On top of the harassment and stress brought on by book bans, “as public-facing professionals, [librarians] are on the front lines of the masking wars, the homelessness crisis, the opioid epidemic, and the general rise in public rage,” Gonzalez notes. Libraries also continue to face financial strain. Some of the problems are bureaucratic: In New York, for example, the city just announced that because of budget cuts, it will close most libraries on Sundays. And some are ideological: This past spring, Missouri’s Republican-led House aimed to strip all funding from the state’s libraries.

This slew of attacks on libraries is concerning not only because these are attacks on education and literacy; they also threaten spaces that many Americans, including young people, actually use. New research released by the American Library Association found that more than half of Gen Zers and Millennials surveyed in 2022 had visited a physical library location in the previous year. And of the Gen Zers and Millennials who said that they did not identify as readers, more than half still reported going to the library, suggesting that they may be visiting for other reasons, including events, classes, or simply to find community. As the authors of the study, both Portland State University professors, wrote, “The youth that researchers met during visits to two public library branches talked about coming to the library just to ‘vibe’ and hang out.”

Conventional wisdom says that teens are on their phones all the time. There is some truth to that, and many read their library books on apps as well. But according to the ALA research, young people do read print books. In fact, the report found that younger members of Gen Z were reading more print books than older readers in their age cohort were, and print was the preferred format for the Gen Z respondents. Seeing a display of books can be an opportunity for discovery, and print books can provide a welcome break from screens. Books can also feature in people’s online lives: A physical object adds richer texture to a TikTok, for example, than a shot of a Kindle might, Emily Drabinski, the president of the ALA, told me earlier this month. “We might finally come out of that binary thinking where there’s the digital and the print world,” she said. “We all inhabit all of [these worlds] all the time.”

Libraries are about books and reading, of course. But they are also about providing people with a “third place” for programming, services, and socializing; they are one of America’s only truly cross-class spaces, Drabinski noted. And they function as a public resource in all meanings of the term. As Drabinski said, “We want people to come in and use the bathroom; if that’s the only thing they need from the public library: Welcome.”

Related:

The librarians are not okay. How to show kids the joy of reading

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1949, despondent at the failure of UN arms-control talks, J. Robert Oppenheimer wrote an essay for The Atlantic. It’s a fascinating historical artifact and act of public grief, Ross Andersen writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Alanah Sarginson

The New Old Age

By David Brooks

People are living longer lives. If you are 60 right now, you have a roughly 50 percent chance of reaching 90. In other words, if you retire in your early or mid-60s, you can expect to have another 20 years before your mind and body begin their steepest decline.

We don’t yet have a good name for this life stage. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a notable scholar in this area, calls it the “Third Chapter.” Some call it “Adulthood II” or, the name I prefer, the “Encore Years.” For many, it’s a delightful and rewarding phase, but the transition into it can be rocky …

Over the past few months, I’ve had conversations with people who are approaching this transition or are in the middle of it. These conversations can be intense. One senior executive told me that he fears two things in life: retirement and death—and that he fears retirement more.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Dusty Deen for The Atlantic

Read. These six books about other people’s kin may help you feel better about yours during a stressful family holiday.

Watch. The 15 best television shows of 2023 pushed the boundaries of episodic storytelling.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Last summer, I started tracking my reading in a spreadsheet, which I’ve been enjoying revisiting as the year winds down. I used to track my reading haphazardly on Goodreads, but whereas for some people the social dimension of sites such as Goodreads and the StoryGraph is the point, for me, it was a drawback. I realized that I could re-create their utility—which for me was having all of my books in one place—in a Google Sheet. The sheet is very simple: I record the name of the book, the date finished, the length, the format (Kindle, print, or audio), and the gender of the author.

This was driven not by an effort to quantify my reading or optimize my path toward any particular goals—just by a curiosity about what I was reading and any patterns I could find. Next year, I’m planning to add tabs for plays I see and movies I watch. I recommend giving it a try if you’d like to track the culture you’re consuming, just for yourself.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai 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.

The U.S. government can achieve great things quickly when it has to. In November 2020, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency-use authorization to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19. Seven days later, a competing vaccine from Moderna was approved. The rollout to the public began a few weeks later. The desperate search for a vaccine had been orchestrated by Operation Warp Speed, an initiative announced by the Trump administration that May. Developing, testing, manufacturing, and deploying a new vaccine typically takes a decade or more. OWS, which accomplished the feat in months, belongs in the pantheon of U.S. innovation triumphs, along with the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon-landing program. It’s a case study in how the U.S. government can solve complex, urgent problems, and it challenges the narrative that public institutions have lost their ability to dream big and move fast.

[Read: The one area where the U.S. COVID-19 strategy seems to be working]

That narrative, sadly, has ample basis in recent history. Many efforts to upgrade the nation’s transportation systems falter because, as the Biden administration declared in 2021, “America lags its peers … in the on-time and on-budget delivery of infrastructure.” NASA’s latest mega-rocket, the Space Launch System, took its first test flight in 2022, six years behind schedule, despite the investment of an astronomical $23.8 billion since 2011. Agency officials recently admitted to the Government Accountability Office that the SLS program is “unsustainable.”

Despite having pioneered much of the underlying technology, the U.S. has fallen behind other nations in deploying hypersonic missiles. In 2021, China launched a 15,000-mile-per-hour missile designed to evade traditional air defenses. General Mark Milley, who retired in September as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned in 2017 that the U.S. military had become “overly centralized, overly bureaucratic, and overly risk-averse.”

In a 2022 Pew poll, fewer than a quarter of Americans said they were “basically content” with the performance of the federal government. Unfortunately, the deep ideological split over whether the government should be bigger or smaller tends to obscure the question of how to make the government work better.

The federal government employs about 3 million Americans, a number that’s changed little since the late 1960s. One thing that has changed is the number of bureaucrats—people who are not directly providing services to the public but who instead oversee government programs, manage budgets, and ensure compliance with laws and regulations. According to our analysis of data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the number of federal administrators ballooned by nearly 50 percent from 1998 to 2022. New York University’s Paul Light estimated in 2020 that the number of organizational layers in the largest federal agencies has grown nearly fivefold since the 1960s. He counted 1,070 deputy assistant secretaries, 236 assistants to the assistant secretary, 204 deputy deputy assistant secretaries, and 153 deputy assistant assistant secretaries.

This phenomenon, which Light describes as the “thickening” of government, is happening in the private sector too. Over the past 30 years, Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggest, the number of administrative and managerial jobs in the U.S. economy grew more than three times faster than the number of non-bureaucratic jobs. More administrators mean more rules, policies, and management layers.

[Derek Thompson: Why the age of American progress ended]

In theory, all of this extra supervision should yield smarter decisions and less downside risk; bureaucracies exist in part to promote standard practices and to limit the amount of damage that any individual employee can cause. But a thicker organization also produces longer lines of communication, slower response times, more turf battles, and less agility and innovation.

Operation Warp Speed was designed to avoid these problems. It had a ridiculously ambitious charter: Develop and deliver 300 million doses of a safe and effective vaccine by January 2021. Skepticism was warranted, given that only one in 15 potential vaccines that reaches the second phase of clinical trials ends up being licensed. A partnership between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Pentagon, the initiative was led by Moncef Slaoui, a scientist and former pharmaceutical executive, and General Gustave Perna, who was in charge of the U.S. Army Materiel Command. The staff included perhaps 600 HHS employees, plus about 100 from the Department of Defense. To defeat the virus, they would need to coordinate a wide network of partners, including drugmakers, logistics titans such as FedEx and UPS, medical distributors, and a plethora of supermarket and drugstore chains that would help administer the vaccines—all amid severe supply-chain constraints, a domestic shortage of technical talent, and the need for social distancing.

Slaoui and Perna had the benefit of an $18 billion budget that allowed them to fund large-scale trials and purchase millions of vaccine doses in advance. OWS was also able to leverage a preexisting body of research on an emergent vaccine technology, messenger RNA. Yet at the time, almost no one believed that those advantages foreordained success. In interviews to recruit a project leader, Slaoui had reportedly been the only candidate who thought the deadline might be realistic. His willingness to aim high proved to be essential.

So did a lean management structure. Slaoui and Perna, according to multiple accounts, had the authority to work across agencies, and they were seldom second-guessed by their political masters. They reported to a board, co-chaired by the secretaries of HHS and Defense, that not only provided oversight but also helped clear away obstacles. Working briskly, the board focused on approving major decisions, such as awarding multibillion-dollar contracts to drugmakers and eliminating supply bottlenecks via the Defense Production Act (which compels private companies to put government contracts at the head of the queue).

Slaoui, Perna, and their board also gave others authority to make important decisions in real time. Tasked with recruiting at least 30,000 participants to test each candidate vaccine—for some of the largest clinical trials in history—the OWS team members John Mascola and Matthew Hepburn had to identify people who were at risk of exposure to the virus even as pandemic hot spots waxed and waned unpredictably around the country. Fortunately, they were free to revise the trial plan on the fly. “People understood they had a lot of latitude and were accountable,” a former HHS deputy chief of staff named Paul Mango told us this summer. “The absence of micromanagement was highly energizing.”

OWS had to synchronize the work of hundreds of public and private entities.  Information circulated peer-to-peer rather than having to go up the chain of command. For each vaccine candidate, a product-coordination team met daily to set priorities and address problems that needed quick resolution. These teams worked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to expedite equipment imports, with the State Department to secure visas for essential talent, and with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build factories.

Rather than test one vaccine candidate at a time, OWS simultaneously placed bets on mRNA and two other technologies, tapping two developers for each type. Factories were retrofitted for mass production of vaccines while clinical trials were still in progress. Distribution teams were simultaneously developing packaging and securing local vaccination sites. The redundancies and overlapping timelines shaved years off the development process—and provided insurance amid great uncertainty about which vaccines would work.

Above all, Operation Warp Speed shunned complexity in favor of simplicity. Many private-sector executives are wary of doing business with government agencies, which typically impose elaborate, albeit well-intended, requirements on virtually every interaction and are slow to respond to the concerns of contractors and suppliers. In this case, private-sector vaccine suppliers were subjected to fewer rules than what the 2,000-page Federal Acquisitions Regulations manual spells out, and granted enhanced intellectual-property rights.

At every point, OWS staffers were encouraged to prioritize progress over process. Mango credited former HHS General Counsel Robert Charrow for setting the right tone. “He and his team,” Mango told us, “were pretty scrappy in finding ways to get things done and saying yes instead of no.”

Years after the darkest days of the pandemic, many people overlook the enduring importance of Operation Warp Speed. When then-President Donald Trump announced it, skeptics mocked its Star Trek–inspired name and worried that officials would cut corners on safety to produce a vaccine before the 2020 election. Since then, others have faulted it as overly generous to drug companies. OWS fell short of its manufacturing targets, and the vaccine shortages of early 2021 prompted more criticism of the initiative. Democrats have been loath to give any credit to Donald Trump and his underlings, while Republicans—many of whom were skeptical of the vaccine push—struggle to admit that the federal government can do anything right.

In fact, OWS offers powerful evidence that upending bureaucratic norms can, quite literally, save lives. If complex, hidebound institutions such as HHS and the Pentagon can exceed expectations, other agencies should also be capable of warp-speed performance. The most immediate applications might lie in inventing vaccines for other diseases and in advancing transformative technologies such as desalination, solid-state batteries, and carbon capture. But the basic approach of Operation Warp Speed—defining a specific problem, committing to an ambitious goal, and then giving people the freedom and the wherewithal to produce breakthrough solutions—could be used more expansively.

The Department of Defense might focus laserlike on reducing the development time for new major weapons programs by 50 percent. The Department of Transportation might set itself the goal of cutting the timeline and cost of major transit projects in half by streamlining and coordinating regulatory approval, funding, and procurement. The Department of Housing and Urban Development might devote itself to eliminating America’s 4-million-unit housing shortage, including by pushing local governments to reform land use and supporting the construction sector with financing, incentives for innovation, and lower taxes on inputs. Those executive-branch agencies, to be fair, are subject to budget restrictions and other congressional limits, but an OWS-like focus on results might persuade lawmakers to grant them more freedom.

[Annie Lowrey: Why isn’t the government doing more about the housing crisis?]

Americans got speedy access to vaccines because the harms of the pandemic—to the economy as well as to human health—were acute enough to warrant radical thinking. Many of the other seemingly intractable challenges that the U.S. faces, although less deadly than the coronavirus, warrant the same rule-busting audacity that made Operation Warp Speed a success.

The Christmas light show in Spain's Vigo is a tourist attraction, but can it top the Big Apple as its mayor would like?

An American who learnt Welsh in three weeks travelled to the capital to find people to talk to.

My friend Lee Caggiano, who died several weeks ago, was not famous. But through her work, she changed one particular corner of the world: Lee made people who stutter, like me, want to talk.

Like 99 percent of the population, Lee was fluent, meaning she never knew what it was like to stutter herself. But her son did. His experience with stuttering made her pivot her life and go back to school. She completed a master’s degree in speech-language pathology in her early 40s and went on to treat patients and teach at NYU and elsewhere.

Her greatest accomplishment, and the reason hundreds of stutterers across the country have been mourning her death, is the profound work she did to de-pathologize this disorder. Lee didn’t see stuttering as a weakness, a failure, a flaw. She didn’t think she could “cure” you. She didn’t try to. She refused to infantilize us because of the way we speak. Do you know how good that feels?

Lee helped me see a purer version of myself, even if it was something I had avoided wanting to see.

There is no shortage of support groups, camps, and conferences devoted to people who stutter, yet the community remains fairly fragmented. Some of these organizations aim to promote self-acceptance while also championing work toward a “cure” … for the very thing you’re supposed to accept. Twenty-six years ago, Lee co-founded Friends: The National Association of Young People Who Stutter. Friends stands out for its unmatched rawness and humanity, and for the way it takes fluency (smooth, stutter-free speech) off a pedestal. It’s a nonprofit organization with a DIY ethos; Lee never even took a salary. The group’s main event is an annual summer gathering. Those three days are infused with a candor that’s hard to describe unless you experience it firsthand.

[John Hendrickson: Why I dread saying my own name]

Lee knew that getting stutterers and their families to talk about the depths of the communication disorder was the only way that stutterers would start to move toward lucidity, toward fluidity. But not fluency: She implored parents to stop caring about the smoothness of their child’s speech. This was a radical message, and she was among the small percentage of speech-language pathologists in the United States who unequivocally embraced this approach. It’s a refreshing perspective if for no other reason than that it expands the worldview of patients and their families: A stutterer can be considered a success if they simply find the courage to live their life.

I came to adopt this perspective later than most. I only learned about the organization in the fall of 2019, when I wrote an article about President Joe Biden’s lifelong journey with stuttering. And I only attended my first in-person Friends convention in the summer of 2021 as part of the research I was doing for my book about stuttering.

I saw how stutterers and their families crammed into a no-frills hotel and faced the reality of this multilayered disorder in drab conference rooms. Here, stuttering was not treated as a “good” or a “bad,” but as something far more complex: an “is.” At many points throughout the weekend, attendees stood up and spoke extemporaneously. You never knew what anyone, child or adult, was about to say when they approached the mic. Often, what came out was profound.

Some people offered a positive, empowering message about stuttering when it was their turn to speak. Others opted for the exact opposite: how draining the disorder is, how isolating it can be, how some people find themselves using alcohol or other drugs to cope. Such moments can be tense. Watching someone else stutter and block, even if you yourself stutter, can be uncomfortable. But, following Lee’s lead, everyone learned to lean into the uncertainty, to the gray area. Though she was technically in charge of the event, Lee had an almost pathological avoidance of policing anybody, especially when it came to the content or form of their speech. She trusted that everyone in the room could handle whatever was about to be said.

I stayed at an Airbnb about half an hour away, rather than at the hotel with everyone else. I spent my days lurking in the back of the conference room, jotting down notes, occasionally finding people to interview. I was careful to keep an emotional distance—playing the role of a journalist on a story, even though I was writing a reported memoir and those rules didn’t necessarily apply.

Lee politely, and then less politely, rolled her eyes at me and, in the space of a few words, asked what my deal was. When I told her, she pushed me to not merely document what was happening but to let my guard down and become part of it. She needed me to understand that I already was part of this community, given the way I talked. She implied that others were waiting for me to put my pen and notebook away. I nodded, but I kept my distance. Then on the final day, I unexpectedly approached the mic and shared something that I had never articulated before: that the fluent people in your life may never truly understand what it’s like to stutter, and that at some point, you, yourself, have to be okay with that. She stood a few feet away from me, looking on, not with a smile or tears, but with a satisfied nod.

The following year, Lee invited me to be one of the keynote speakers at the conference. The speech I wrote was titled “Closing Distance” and attempted to expand on what I had said the previous summer. My parents, my brother, my wife, and my sister-in-law had all come to support me in the audience. I remember taking the elevator up to my room as my time slot approached to rehearse my words and change into nicer clothes. Back downstairs, right before I went onstage, Lee rolled her eyes at me again. “Are you going to wear that blazer the whole time?” she teased. She hadn’t asked to see a copy of my speech in advance, nor had she even wondered what it was about. But she could clearly see that I was still trying to play a part, to put distance between myself and the others, who were dressed more casually. She wasn’t trying to cut me down—she was treating me like she treated everyone: as someone who didn’t need to be given slack, or pitied, or babied. We were all equals. Once again, she was challenging me to see myself as a community member, not as a guest speaker or an interloper.

Lee died a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, of metastatic lung cancer at the age of 68. She was an old-school New Yorker with a thick Long Island accent, but several years ago she had moved to Colorado to be closer to her adult children. One of them, her daughter, gave birth to a baby girl over the summer, shortly after Lee had received her diagnosis. Many stutterers and therapists saw Lee as a surrogate mother, and she knew this, but she rightly prioritized her own family. She spent the final days of her life stiff-arming texts and calls and emails from the many people whose lives she had changed, because she wanted to spend those last moments with her husband, children, and grandchildren. She died at home in a bed facing a window, looking out at the mountains.

[Read: An ‘absolute explosion’ of stuttering breakthroughs]

Some people are natural community builders and leaders, with a gravitational pull. Lee of course had those qualities, but she also shirked attention. She would have told me that writing about her was a waste of time—that I should be focusing on other, more “interesting” or “important” people. The reality, which I’m not sure she ever knew, and which I now realize I never properly told her, is that she was one of the most compelling people I’ve ever met.

In November, hundreds of stutterers and their families gathered on Zoom for an impromptu memorial. People shared stories and reminisced for hours—parents speaking of how she’d brought them closer to their children, old patients and students noting how she’d reframed their outlook on the disorder. Barry Yeoman, a freelance journalist and longtime leader in the LGBTQ stuttering community, talked about how, at a Friends conference nearly 20 years ago in San Francisco, Lee fostered a space where he could be his full self and encourage others to do the same.

On the first Saturday of December, scores of people flew to Colorado to sit around her home and swap more memories. And a week after that, a group gathered in New York to toast her at a bar. The night ended with karaoke—singing relies on a different neural pathway than speaking, and no one stutters when they belt out songs off-key.

Because of her illness, Lee had missed this past summer’s Friends convention for the first time. She had sent a video message; she hoped to be there next year. Of course, she won’t be, but people will show up anyway. They will walk to the mic, even if they don’t feel ready to, and they will speak.

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.”

This is Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. Sign up here.

The theme of my second-annual Breakthroughs of the Year is the long road of progress. My top breakthrough is Casgevy, a gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell anemia. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scientists in Spain and Japan found strange, repeating patterns in the DNA of certain bacteria. Researchers eventually linked these sequences to an immune defense system that they named “clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats”—or CRISPR. In the following decades, scientists found clever ways to build on CRISPR to edit genes in plants, animals, and even humans. CRISPR is this year’s top breakthrough not only because of heroic work done in the past 12 months, but also because of a long thread of heroes whose work spans decades.

Sometimes, what looks like a big deal amounts to nothing at all. For several weeks this summer, the internet lost its mind over claims that researchers in South Korea had built a room-temperature superconductor. One viral thread called it “the biggest physics discovery of my lifetime.” The technology could have paved the way to magnificently efficient energy grids and levitating cars. But, alas, it wasn’t real. So, perhaps, this is 2023’s biggest lesson about progress: Time is the ultimate test. The breakthrough of the year took more than three decades to go from discovery to FDA approval, while the “biggest” physics discovery of the year was disproved in about 30 days.

1. CRISPR’s Triumph: A Possible Cure for Sickle-Cell Disease

In December, the FDA approved the world’s first medicine based on CRISPR technology. Developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, in Boston, and CRISPR Therapeutics, based in Switzerland, Casgevy is a new treatment for sickle-cell disease, a chronic blood disorder that affects about 100,000 people in the U.S., most of whom are Black.

Sickle-cell disease is caused by a genetic mutation that affects the production of hemoglobin, a protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells. Abnormal hemoglobin makes blood cells hard and shaped like a sickle. When these misshapen cells get clogged together, they block blood flow throughout the body, causing intense pain and, in some cases, deadly anemia.

The Casgevy treatment involves a complex, multipart procedure. Stem cells are collected from a patient’s bone marrow and sent to a lab. Scientists use CRISPR to knock out a gene that represses the production of “fetal hemoglobin,” which most people stop making after birth. (In 1948, scientists discovered that fetal hemoglobin doesn’t “sickle.”) The edited cells are returned to the body via infusion. After weeks or months, the body starts producing fetal hemoglobin, which reduces cell clumping and improves oxygen supply to tissues and organs.

Ideally, CRISPR will offer a one-and-done treatment. In one trial, 28 of 29 patients, who were followed for at least 18 months, were free of severe pain for at least a year. But we don’t have decades’ worth of data yet.

Casgevy is a triumph for CRISPR. But a miracle drug that’s too expensive for its intended population—or too complex to be administered where it is most needed—performs few miracles. More than 70 percent of the world’s sickle-cell patients live in sub-Saharan Africa. The sticker price for Casgevy is about $2 million, which is roughly 2,000 times larger than the GDP per capita of, say, Burkina Faso. The medical infrastructure necessary to go through with the full treatment doesn’t exist in most places. Casgevy is a wondrous invention, but as always, progress is implementation.  

2. GLP-1s: A Diabetes and Weight-Loss Revolution

In the 1990s, a small team of scientists got to know the Gila monster, a thick lizard that can survive on less than one meal a month. When they studied its saliva, they found that it contained a hormone that, in experiments, lowered blood sugar and regulated appetite. A decade later, a synthetic version of this weird lizard spit became the first medicine of its kind approved to treat type 2 diabetes. The medicine was called a “glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist.” Because that’s a mouthful, scientists mostly call these drugs “GLP-1s.”

Today the world is swimming in GLP-1 breakthroughs. These drugs go by many names. Semaglutide is sold by the Danish company Novo Nordisk, under the names Ozempic (approved for type 2 diabetes) or Wegovy (for weight loss). Tirzepatide is sold by Eli Lilly under the names Mounjaro (type 2 diabetes) or Zepbound (weight loss). These medications all mostly work the same way. They mimic gut hormones that stimulate insulin production and signal to the brain that the patient is full. In clinical trials, patients on these medications lose about 15 percent or more of their weight.

The GLP-1 revolution is reshaping medicine and culture “in ways both electrifying and discomfiting,” Science magazine said in an article naming these drugs its Breakthrough of the Year. Half a billion people around the world live with diabetes, and 40 percent of Americans alone are obese. A relatively safe drug that stimulates insulin production and reduces caloric intake could make an enormous difference in lifestyle and culture.

Some people on GLP-1s report nausea, and some fall out of love with their favorite foods. In rarer cases, the drugs might cause stomach paralysis. But for now, the miraculous effects of these drugs go far beyond diabetes and weight loss. In one trial supported by Novo Nordisk, the drug reduced the incidence of heart attack and stroke by 20 percent. Morgan Stanley survey data found that people on GLP-1s eat less candy, drink less alcohol, and eat 40 percent more vegetables. The medication seems to reduce smoking for smoking addicts, gambling for gambling addicts, and even compulsive nail biting for some. GLP-1s are an exceptional medicine, but they may also prove to be an exceptional tool that helps scientists see more clearly the ways our gut, mind, and willpower work together.

3. GPT and Protein Transformers: What Can’t Large Language Models Do?

In March, OpenAI released GPT-4, the latest and most sophisticated version of the language-model technology that powers ChatGPT. Imagine trying to parse that sentence two years ago—a useful reminder that some things, like large language models, advance at the pace of slowly, slowly, then all at once.

Surveys suggest that most software developers already use AI to accelerate code writing. There is evidence that these tools are raising the productivity of some workers, and surveys suggest that most software developers already use AI to accelerate code writing. These tools also appear to be nibbling away at freelance white-collar work. Famously, OpenAI has claimed that the technology can pass medical-licensing exams and score above the 85th percentile on the LSAT, parts of the SAT, and the uniform bar exam. Still, I am in the camp of believing that this technology is both a sublime accomplishment and basically a toy for most of its users.

One can think of transformers—that’s what the T stands for in GPT—as tools for building a kind of enormous recipe book of language, which AI can consult to cook up meaningful, novel answers to any prompt. If AI can build a cosmic cookbook of linguistic meaning, can it do the same for another corpus of information? For example, could it learn the “language” of how our cells talk to one another?

This spring, a team of researchers announced in Science that they had found a way to use transformer technology to predict protein sequences at the level of individual atoms. This accomplishment builds on AlphaFold, an AI system developed within Alphabet. As several scientists explained to me, the latest breakthrough suggests that we can use language models to quickly spin up the shapes of millions of proteins faster than ever. I’m most impressed by the larger promise: If transformer technology can map both languages and protein structures, it seems like an extraordinary tool for advancing knowledge.

4. Fusion: The Dream Gets a Little Closer

Inside the sun, atoms crash and merge in a process that produces heat and light, making life on this planet possible. Scientists have tried to harness this magic, known as fusion, to produce our own infinite, renewable, and clean energy. The problem: For the longest time, nobody could make it work.

The past 13 months, however, have seen not one but two historic fusion achievements. Last December, 192 lasers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, blasted a diamond encasing a small amount of frozen hydrogen and created—for less than 100 trillionths of a second—a reaction that produced about three megajoules of energy, or 1.5 times the energy from the lasers. In that moment, scientists said, they achieved the first lab-made fusion reaction to ever create more energy than it took to produce it. Seven months later, they did it again. In July, researchers at the same ignition facility nearly doubled the net amount of energy ever generated by a fusion reaction. Start-ups are racing to keep up with the science labs. The new fusion companies Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Helion are trying to scale this technology.

Will fusion heat your home next year? Fat chance. Next decade? Cross your fingers. Within the lifetime of people reading this article? Conceivably. The naysayers have good reason for skepticism, but these breakthroughs prove that star power on this planet is possible.

5. Malaria and RSV Vaccines: Great News for Kids

Malaria, one of the world’s leading causes of childhood mortality, killed more than 600,000 people in 2022. But with each passing year, we seem to be edging closer to ridding the world of this terrible disease.

Fifteen months ago, the first malaria vaccine, developed by University of Oxford scientists, was found to have up to 80 percent efficacy at preventing infection. It has already been administered to millions of children. But demand still outstrips supply. That’s why it’s so important that in 2023, a second malaria vaccine called R21 was recommended by the World Health Organization, and it appears to be cheaper and easier to manufacture than the first one, and just as effective. The WHO says it expects the addition of R21 to result in sufficient vaccine supply for “all children living in areas where malaria is a public health risk.”

What’s more, in the past year, the FDA approved vaccines against RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. The American Lung Association estimates that RSV is so common that 97 percent of children catch it before they turn 2, and in a typical year, up to 80,000 children age 5 and younger are hospitalized with RSV along with up to 160,000 older adults. In May, both Pfizer and GSK were granted FDA approval for an RSV vaccine for older adults, and in July, the FDA approved a vaccine to protect infants and toddlers.

6. Killer AI: Artificial Intelligence at War

In the nightmares of AI doomers, our greatest achievements in software will one day rise against us and cause mass death. Maybe they’re wrong. But by any reasonable analysis, the 2020s have already been a breakout decade for AI that kills. Unlike other breakthroughs on this list, this one presents obvious and immediate moral problems.

In the world’s most high-profile conflict, Israel has reportedly accelerated its bombing campaign against Gaza with the use of an AI target-creation platform called Habsora, or “the Gospel.” According to reporting in The Guardian and +972, an Israeli magazine, the Israel Defense Forces use Habsora to produce dozens of targeting recommendations every day based on amassed intelligence that can identify the private homes of individuals suspected of working with Hamas or Islamic Jihad. (The IDF has also independently acknowledged its use of AI to generate bombing targets.)

Israel’s retaliation against Hamas for the October 7 attack has involved one of the heaviest air-bombing campaigns in history. Military analysts told the Financial Times that the seven-week destruction of northern Gaza has approached the damage caused by the Allies’ years-long bombing of German cities in World War II. Clearly, Israel’s AI-assisted bombing campaign shows us another side of the idea that AI is an accelerant.

Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine is perhaps the first major conflict in world history to become a war of drone engineering. (One could also make the case that this designation should go to Azerbaijan's drone-heavy military campaign in the Armenian territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.) Initially, Ukraine depended on a drone called the Bayraktar TB2, made in Turkey, to attack Russian tanks and trucks. Aerial footage of the drone attacks produced viral video-game-like images of exploded convoys. As Wired UK reported, a pop song was written to honor the Bayraktar, and a lemur in the Kyiv Zoo was named after it. But Russia has responded by using jamming technology that is taking out 10,000 drones a month. Ukraine is now struggling to manufacture and buy enough drones to make up the difference, while Russia is using kamikaze drones to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure.

7. Fervo and Hydrogen: Making Use of a Hot Planet

If the energy industry is, in many respects, the search for more heat, one tantalizing solution is to take advantage of our hot subterranean planet. Traditional geothermal plants drill into underground springs and hot-water reservoirs, whose heat powers turbines. But in much of the world, these reservoirs are too deep to access. When we drill, we hit hard rock.

Last year’s version of this list mentioned Quaise, an experimental start-up that tries to vaporize granite with a highly concentrated beam of radio-frequency power. This year, we’re celebrating Fervo, which is part of a crop of so-called enhanced geothermal systems. Fervo uses fracking techniques developed by the oil-and-gas industry to break into hot underground rock. Then Fervo injects cold water into the rock fissures, creating a kind of artificial hot spring. In November, Fervo announced that its Nevada enhanced-geothermal project is operational and sending carbon-free electricity to Google data centers.

That’s not the end of this year’s advancement in underground heat. Eleven years ago, engineers in Mali happened upon a deposit of hydrogen gas. When it was hooked up to a generator, it produced electricity for the local town and only water as exhaust. In 2023, enough governments and start-ups accelerated their search for natural hydrogen-gas deposits that Science magazine named hydrogen-gas exploration one of its breakthroughs of the year. (This is different from the “natural gas” you’ve already heard of, which is a fossil fuel.) One U.S.-government study estimated that the Earth could hold 1 trillion tons of hydrogen, enough to provide thousands of years of fuel and fertilizer.

8. Engineered Skin Bacteria: What If Face Paint Cured Cancer?

In last year’s breakthroughs essay, I told you about a liquid solution that revived the organs of dead pigs. This year, in the category of “Wait, what?,” we bring you the news that face paint cures cancer. Well, sort of face paint. And more like “fight” cancer than cure. Also, just in mice. But still!

Let’s back up. Some common skin bacteria can trigger our immune system to produce T cells, which seek and destroy diseases in the body. This spring, scientists announced that they had engineered an ordinary skin bacterium to carry bits of tumor material. When they rubbed this concoction on the head of mice in a lab, the animals produced T cells inside the body that sought out distant tumor cells and attacked them. So yeah, basically, face paint that fights cancer.

Many vaccines already use modified viruses, such as adenovirus, as delivery trucks to drive disease-fighting therapies into the body. The ability to deliver cancer therapies (or even vaccines) through the skin represents an amazing possibility, especially in a world where people are afraid of needles. It’s thrilling to think that the future of medicine, whether vaccines or cancer treatments, could be as low-fuss as a set of skin creams.

9. Loyal Drugs: Life-Extension Meds for Dogs

Longevity science is having a moment. Bloomberg Businessweek recently devoted an issue to the “tech titans, venture capitalists, crypto enthusiasts and AI researchers [who] have turned longevity research into something between the hottest science and a tragic comedy.” There must be a trillion (I’m rounding up) podcast episodes about how metformin, statins, and other drugs can extend our life. But where is the hard evidence that we are getting any closer to figuring out how to help our loved ones live longer?

Look to the dogs. Large breeds, such as Great Danes and rottweilers, generally die younger than small dogs. A new drug made by the biotech company Loyal tries to extend their life span by targeting a hormone called “insulin-like growth factor-1,” or IGF-1. Some scientists believe that high levels of the chemical speed up aging in big dogs. By reducing IGF-1, Loyal hopes to curb aging-related increases in insulin. In November, the company announced that it had met a specific FDA requirement for future fast-tracked authorization of drugs that could extend the life span of big dogs. “The data you provided are sufficient to show that there is a reasonable expectation of effectiveness,” an official at the FDA wrote the company in a letter provided to The New York Times.

Loyal’s drug is not available to pet owners yet—and might not be for several years. But the FDA’s support nonetheless marks a historic acknowledgment of the promise of life-span-extension medicine.

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2023” coverage here.

If art imitates life, it’s no wonder many of this year’s podcasts contained a dash of doom. During a year of planetary uncertainty, in which fears about the climate crisis and AI encroaching on the workforce intensified, the audio space reflected our impulse to decode mysteries: Series zeroed in on deception, premiering plenty of heist and con-artist content. Podcasters reexamined the justice system, from parole boards to the FBI. Three separate shows tried to solve the puzzle of the perplexing ailment known as Havana syndrome. Like many of us, producers searched for any answers they could get.

But the biggest podcasting trend I noticed in 2023 was, by far, the predominance of women as protagonists, hosts, and subjects. Traditionally male archetypes were served up with a feminine twist: Creators explored female adultery, espionage, scamming, and wanderlust. Although podcasts about delinquent doctors continued to draw in audiences, this year, they seemed to focus on misconduct in obstetrics—not too surprising, considering last year’s overturn of Roe v. Wade.

With millions of podcasts in existence, this list includes the 25 best I heard this year, each one novel and compelling. (As with every year, I’ve recused myself from considering The Atlantic’s podcasts.) These shows premiered fresh frameworks, experimented with sound design, and elevated underrepresented voices and stories. They dazzled in exposition, reporting, and range. We offer them as a compass for unpredictable times, a pick-me-up for winter blues, and, we hope, a hint of clarity in times to come.

25. Ride With Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone

This comedian-BFF duo invites listeners to ride shotgun on their friendship. With only brief preparation and rapid-fire banter, Benito Skinner and Mary Beth Barone make the case for the phenomena they ride for: Ferrero Rocher, Kim K’s private theater, and driving safely, among others. Listeners leave with inspiration for light pranking and Skinner and Barone’s new definition of cheating, which, they claim, includes choosing the checkout counter of an opposite-sex cashier if you’re heterosexual. Ride is not educational—though the hosts’ quips do offer a crash course in Millennial and Gen Z pop culture. The show boosts serotonin levels on a reliable 30-minute joyride.

Start with “Traditional Family Values + Pranking.”

24. Believable: The Coco Berthmann Story

Coco Berthmann rose to fame sharing her story as a sex-trafficking survivor. In early 2022, she told her 60,000 Instagram followers that she’d been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. While a GoFundMe raised roughly $10,000 for her treatments, some people held suspicions about her illness. Unable to substantiate her diagnosis but accepting charity for it, Berthmann was arrested for communications fraud. Her hoax led people to question her public persona, including her work as a human-rights activist. The hosts Sara Ganim and Karen Given hunt down every salacious detail of Berthmann’s story, many of which sound ridiculous, such as claiming that Céline Dion invited her to sing with her in Berlin. Although droves of podcasts remind people that the internet is an engine for easy deception, this series stands out in noting that Berthmann’s falsehoods don’t mean that she lied about everything—or that she wasn’t a victim herself.

Start with “Episode 1: Something’s Not Right.”

23. One Song

If the beloved Switched on Pop and Song Exploder had a baby, it would be One Song, a show hosted by two music heads and experienced DJs, Diallo Riddle and Blake “LUXXURY” Robin. The duo break down pop tunes by isolating the instrumentals, chatting about their memories associated with the songs, and showing off their extensive music-history knowledge. Riddle and Robin are music know-it-alls: They can talk about where they were when they first heard Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as easily as they can speculate about whether DJ Kool Herc’s 1973 Bronx party marked the birth of hip-hop. Discussing hit tracks such as Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” and Britney Spears’s “Toxic,” the show leans into snobbery and reverence while analyzing—you guessed it—one song.

Start with “Rehab.”

22. Truth Be Told

This year gave us many series about psychedelic drugs. Yet Tonya Mosley—whom listeners might recognize as the new co-host of Fresh Air—offered a new perspective on tripping by framing it in the context of Black liberation, including her own. Though Indigenous and African communities originated the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms for healing, the current psychedelics industry is largely white, complicating their use in treating racial trauma. Mosley takes care to name these hurdles, such as the negative associations many people can carry with even legal drugs, given the War on Drugs’ asymmetrical ramifications in their communities. Mosley moves forward with her own hallucinogenic experimentation anyway, asserting that, even if therapeutic drugs are approved and legalized, the Black psychedelic revolution might still be far off. Black people first need a safe space to partake in these substances, Mosley explains. Truth Be Told is a welcome start.

Start with “How to Get Free.”

21. The 13th Step

The 13th Step began as one journalist’s investigation into alleged sexual misconduct in the addiction-treatment industry. But when Eric Spofford, the founder of the largest addiction-recovery-facility network in New Hampshire, was accused of sexual misconduct (allegations he has denied), he used various legal tactics to try to suppress the investigation. The story then widened to include Lauren Chooljian, this show’s host. Chooljian refused to change her reporting despite Spofford’s efforts—even after her parents’ home was vandalized. The 13th Step gives a high-level dissertation on intimidation in sexual-assault cases, even getting expert insights from Lisa Banks, one of Christine Blasey Ford’s lawyers. Although the series has wrapped, Chooljian’s own story has still to find a conclusion.

Start with “Episode 1: The Shadow.”

20. Too Far With Rachel Kaly and Robby Hoffman

Narrative craft is usually a prerequisite for this list, given that podcasts featuring comics chitchatting are hard to recommend based on the hosts’ personalities alone. Too Far is the exception. It works because the hosts Rachel Kaly and Robby Hoffman are opposing narratives in themselves: Hoffman defines Kaly as being trapped in a “Brooklyn-alt bubble where you are valued based on how mentally ill you are.” Kaly describes Hoffman as abrasive and attached to having grown up Hasidic and poor. The way Kaly and Hoffman talk about their identities feels safe, despite their near-constant tough love. It’s not clear whether Hoffman and Kaly discuss predetermined topics or not. Yet the way their opposition plays out in each episode makes it feel like they are getting somewhere—which might just be back to their respective corners.

Start with “Cold Feet.”

19. The Dream

The life-coaching industry has exploded to the scale of multilevel marketing—except that, in place of supplements and Tupperware, coaches sell human optimization. The host Jane Marie is well suited to administer a general fact-check of the field: Her signature skeptical style makes her especially adept at asking slippery people to make sense of their wares, and her open-mindedness leads her to hire her own coach to determine the profession’s effectiveness for herself. During a year in which many podcasts were focused on catfishing and scammers, The Dream examined a more measured style of deceit. It begins and ends with Jessie Lee Ward, one of the industry’s most famous coaches, who claimed to be curing her own cancer holistically but died from the disease a few days after this series premiered. The Dream thoughtfully teases out the cult-versus-coach comparison, even bringing on Sarah Edmondson, whose whistleblowing instigated the collapse of the corporate-coaching company and sex-cult front NXIVM, for a bonus episode. Marie’s conversations with industry shysters are the most exciting interviews of the year.  

Start with “Becoming a #Boss.”

18. Drifting Off With Joe Pera

It’s hard to tell whether this series is meant to help you fall asleep or to parody shows that do. Yet it’s bound to calm listeners, thanks to soothing monologues, stunning sound design, meditative waterfall sounds, and conversations about mostly cozy topics, such as soup. The stand-up comic and host Joe Pera’s signature gentle affectation furthers the show’s sleepy-time conceit, which sometimes contrasts with the subject matter: In one episode, Pera’s friend tells a bro-ey story about trying to skip the line at a club; in another, cynical love advice is delivered over synth tones (“Just be very emotionally shut off”). The show’s intermittent incongruity is part of its humor—and enough to keep listeners happily awake.

Start with “Episode 1: Soup ft. Jo Firestone.”

17. Free From Desire: Asexual in the City of Love

In a world in which sex sells, many people question the veracity of asexuality. This is the subject of Free From Desire, a nonfiction show centering 35-year-old Aline, who identifies as both asexual and aromantic. Though Aline, as the show’s title suggests, doesn’t experience traditional desire, this doesn’t mean they’re immune to the effects of society’s conventions about love and romance. Instead, Aline provides insights into not only asexuality but also sexuality in general, offering a compassionate perspective on topics such as the pressures of puberty and parenthood. Though Free From Desire provides plenty of answers, its success isn’t rooted in being educational—accompanying Aline as they pursue agency and happiness, regardless of who understands it, fuels the show’s magic.

Start with “What Is Wrong With Me?”

16. Imperfect Paradise: Nury & the Secret Tapes

Imperfect Paradise relaunched in September, led by the host Antonia Cereijido—previously of Latino USA—with a four-part series about a hot-mic situation involving the Los Angeles City Council. When a group of powerful Latino council members and a union leader were secretly recorded making anti-Black comments, the release of the tapes and the resulting fallout became an example of fractures in progressive thinking. Citizens demanded the council members’ resignation. Until Imperfect Paradise, Council President Nury Martinez hadn’t given an interview about the incident. You’ll hear the offensive comments she made, along with her explanation. Cereijido’s interview style is masterful: She treats Martinez, however problematic, as a whole, complex human. The series also explores Cereijido’s suspicion that the scandal garnered sizable media attention partly because it revealed larger legacies of anti-Blackness within the Latino community. The show concludes that it may be time to think beyond unquestioning representation and to ensure that legislators’ morals align with progress instead.

Start with “Nury & the Secret Tapes: Part 1.”

15. Borrowed and Banned

From Brooklyn Public Library, Borrowed and Banned drums up awareness about what it calls “America’s ideological war with its bookshelves.” The series explains how the stakes of book bans, although supported by a vocal minority, are high for everyone. In small towns especially, school libraries are some of the only places where kids can access books. These restrictions can be long-lasting. Take Keller, Texas, where, after a title is pulled, it can’t be reconsidered for 10 years—effectively censoring it for an entire generation. Book bans affect educators too: In one episode, a teacher is forced out of her job for not complying, her teaching license and life threatened. Interviews with authors of banned books are peppered in, including never-before-heard audio of Toni Morrison. Each episode ends with a call to action, urging listeners to get a library card or vote in school-board elections. Borrowed and Banned paints a portrait of teachers, students, and librarians as revolutionaries.

Start with “All for a Library Card.”

14. Expectant

Several polls have found that climate change, beyond giving rise to eco-anxiety, significantly affects parenting choices. Expectant mixes fiction and nonfiction as it follows its protagonist Pippa Johnstone’s thought process about having a child. After finding out that she’s pregnant, Johnstone contemplates the reality that having fewer children lowers a person’s carbon emissions, discussing these questions with her partner, her mom, and experts. Expectant centers parenting fears without growing them, possibly because episodes ground dystopian narratives in data or because, as one expert puts it, the show confronts climate worries head-on instead of avoiding the crisis’s “ambient drone of anxiety.” Following Johnstone through the will-we-won’t-we of various climate calculations, listeners learn that having a child and optimism about the planet’s future don’t necessarily go hand in hand.

Start with “The North.”

13. ODB: A Son Unique

Ol’ Dirty Bastard from Wu-Tang Clan, also known as ODB and Ason Unique, has one of hip-hop’s most recognizable voices. The host and photographer Khalik Allah knew him well, and in ODB: A Son Unique, he demonstrates what helped ODB stand out from other ’90s lyricists: his unpredictable style and refusal to subscribe to aspiration as a concept. Although ODB’s media portrayal was often unfair, reducing him to stereotypes, Allah argues that he knew how to maximize his public persona: He wasn’t as close with Mariah Carey as his verse in her “Fantasy” remix suggested, for example, but ODB knew that saying so could help them both. Allah’s eight-part profile is full of love and surprises, filling in the blanks that ODB’s death, in 2004, left behind. Whether listeners miss ODB or not, this is a poignant memorial.

Start with “Episode 1: For the Children.”

12. Wild

Wild kicks off with co-host Megan Tan asking co-host Erick Galindo the wildest thing he’s ever done for love. From there, the show takes the form of a fictional love story based mostly on Galindo’s life, about an ill-advised cross-country road trip with a woman, her mother, and her best friend. With the support of a buoyant Lizzo track, Wild is sweet, insightful, and occasionally educational. It touches on the tenderness of friendship, growing up in southeast L.A., and the sticky theme of self-worth. In a podcasting year that revolved around heavy subjects, Galindo’s warm storytelling about his younger self’s love life is the most comforting corner in audio.

Start with “A Southeast L.A. Rom-Com.”

11. Have You Heard George’s Podcast?

If the answer to Have You Heard George’s Podcast? is no, you’re in luck: The critically acclaimed BBC show is back after a two-year hiatus, exploring this assertion of the host George Mpanga, also known as George the Poet: When he was younger, it wasn’t cool to be African; now it is. Mpanga, a British spoken-word artist born to Ugandan parents, shows that this shift can be credited, in large part, to music—genres with colonial histories that listeners will gain deeper appreciation for under his energetic tutelage. Mpanga’s talent for telling complex stories through rhyme schemes can make it hard not to sit in awe of him instead of taking in his lessons, yet nothing feels forced as he remixes discussions about Ghana’s first president and the impact of Western languages on African economies. Hot tip: Listen to this show with headphones. Its soundscapes and samples allow his insights, lyrics, and music to dance across your mind.

Start with “Listen Closer.”

10. The Set

On The Set, one of the biggest police-corruption stories is told by the guilty cops themselves. In 1992, Michael Dowd, a drug-dealing law-enforcement officer, was arrested, subsequently spending 12 years in prison. Aware that Dowd wasn’t acting alone, the then-mayor of New York formed the Mollen Commission to investigate broader police corruption in the NYPD. The breadth of what they found surpassed what they had anticipated: The Set host Zak Levitt interviews several officers of the “Dirty Thirty”—the 30th Precinct that includes West Harlem—to uncover how law enforcement easily committed crime, including robbing drug dealers and skimming profits for themselves. The Set analyzes the politics of policing, tapes from the ’90s Mollen Commission hearings, and private confessions. Corrupt police stories aren’t new, but The Set’s storyteller is.

Start with “Ep 1: The Wild Kingdom.”

9. Classy With Jonathan Menjivar

In the first episode of Classy, the host Jonathan Menjivar compares himself, someone who wears cashmere socks, to his mother, a woman who used iron-on patches to repair her jeans. Noting how the differences in economic status within his family make him feel uneasy, Menjivar interrogates the many dimensions of class, including money, race, status, and taste—even the word classy itself. Listeners can expect that each episode will make them squirm, and that Menjivar will double down on this feeling. He’s earnest and open-minded, a winning combination when wading into such a fraught topic. Menjivar even catches people having real-time crises of conscience about class on tape, including his former boss, Terry Gross (her cameo is a series highlight). Though Menjivar doesn’t shield listeners from the topic’s discomfort, he’s a welcoming and buoyant guide.  

Start with “Are Rich People Bad?”

8. Bot Love

Don’t knock falling in love with a chatbot until you listen to Bot Love, a show about the companionship chatbot Replika, which launched in 2017. This series profiles a handful of what Replika claims are more than 1 million users, including a person who considers their bot a therapist and another who turned to Replika for COVID-lockdown camaraderie. When one user’s husband becomes terminally ill, she sparks a relationship with her bot; after her husband’s death, it escalates into full-fledged romantic commitment. (Yes, the show discusses the ins and outs of bot sex too.) Most Replika users seem to know that their bots lack sentience, but that doesn’t stop them from forming a bond. Ultimately, Bot Love proposes that perhaps we should worry less about technological capabilities than about the unabating human desire for connection.

Start with “Episode 1: Looking for a Friend.”

7. Louder Than a Riot

In 2020, Megan Thee Stallion publicly alleged that her fellow rapper Tory Lanez shot her in the foot, a crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison this past August. The hosts Sidney Madden and Rodney Carmichael argue that the cultural conversation that unfolded between Megan Thee Stallion’s announcement and the court’s verdict was shaped by misogynoir—racist misogyny against Black women. Whereas most hip-hop history lessons predictably center male artists such as Run-DMC and Pete Rock, this season of Louder Than a Riot focuses instead on hip-hop’s unsung women and the misogynoir they face within the genre. Listeners learn about Sha-Rock, the first female emcee, and Trina, one of the first artists to popularize the pussy-rap subgenre. The show also discusses the marginalization of gay emcees, who are often dismissed as “viral rappers.” The show is critical of the genre but still celebrates its history over the past 50 years. Of the many ways to commemorate hip-hop’s anniversary, listening to this show should be at the top of your list.

Start with “Megan’s Rule: Being Exceptional Doesn’t Make You the Exception.”

6. Violation

In 1986, when Jacob Wideman was 16, he murdered 16-year-old Eric Kane while the duo were on their way to the Grand Canyon. Wideman was sentenced to life in prison, eligible for parole after 25 years. Wideman’s case is special—especially given that his father, the writer John Edgar Wideman, based his 1984 memoir, Brothers and Keepers, on his own brother’s life sentence for murder. For Violation, a podcast created by The Marshall Project, the host Beth Schwartzapfel speaks with Jacob Wideman and his father, who provides rare interviews about his son. In one moving exchange, John discusses his feelings about being asked to explain his son’s actions: Such questions seem to blame him for Jake’s choices and expect simple explanations for layered tragedies. Plenty of true-crime podcasts gawk at heinous crimes without opening conversations about recidivism or redemption. Yet Violation recounts the case without sensationalism. Listeners might not come away believing that Jacob deserves parole or sympathy, but Violation makes a nuanced case that he might.  

Start with “A Summer Camp Murder. Two Sons, Lost.”

5. You Didn’t See Nothin

In 1997 in Bridgeport, Chicago, a group of white teens assaulted a Black child, Lenard Clark, putting him into a coma and garnering extensive media attention. The host and journalist Yohance Lacour began his reporting career because of this case, and what’s stuck with him for the past 25 years is how quickly the media narrative turned from outrage over a violent racist act to demonstrations of racial reconciliation. Throughout the seven-part series, Lacour switches between his own compelling personal history as a formerly incarcerated writer and that of Clark, dissecting how the child’s case was handled by law enforcement, the court, community leaders, and the family of one of the perpetrators. Lacour’s talent especially shines through his personality—he is funny and cool, full of surprises—and his incisive critical discourse. Unlike many shows that examine past events, You Didn’t See Nothin puts the onus of what follows on the listener.

Start with “Young Black Male.”

4. The Heart

Created by Kaitlin Prest, The Heart has pushed listeners to the outer bounds of vulnerability since 2014. This year, Prest turned the lens on herself with two dynamic series about her family, Sisters and Dad. Each centers on her relationship with the titular family member and features heated arguments, reconciliation attempts, and everyday moments from 20 years of personal tape. Episodes offer a variety of sonic textures, layering documentary-style audio, cinematic visual descriptions, and moments so intimate that you’d think they weren’t, at least initially, meant for sharing. In one moving montage of COVID-lockdown clips, Prest’s father teaches her to drive, brings her coffee, and smashes her e-cigarette with a hammer. In another, Prest’s therapist diagnoses her with borderline personality disorder, a label primarily given to survivors of abuse. Together, the two series offer a portrait of a loving family reconciling with the lasting impacts of trauma, treated with more humanity than is commonly extended to the subject. This season of The Heart is a feat precisely because the artist is the art.

Start with “Sisters: Chapter One-isode.”

3. The Spiritual Edge: A Prayer for Salmon  

The ancestors of the Winnemem Wintu prophesied that, one day, the abundant Chinook salmon, which they regard as relatives, would temporarily disappear from the McCloud River in Northern California. Based on five years of field reporting, A Prayer for Salmon documents the tribe’s resistance to the federal government’s planned expansion of the Shasta Dam, which would further erode their sacred sites and the salmon population. Hosted by Judy Silber and Lyla June Johnston, an Indigenous scholar, the show provides moving vignettes of the Winnemem Wintu’s tribal practices and briefs listeners on relevant history, politics, and data. By carefully conveying what Western science loses when it excludes Indigenous wisdom, the show transforms existential dread about the environment into hope: The Winnemem Wintu, and other Indigenous groups, know the way forward.

Start with “Chapter 1: A Protest at Shasta Dam.”

2. The Retrievals

Dozens of women at the Yale Fertility Center endured excruciating pain while undergoing the egg-retrieval process, one aspect of IVF treatment. Although they shouldn’t have been conscious during the procedure, let alone have felt anything, some were, and did. Some patients also faced the decision of going through with their procedure awake and in pain or losing their eggs—a loss that could cost them time, money, and the chance to have a child. In the fall of 2020, it was discovered that the cause of these women’s experiences was a nurse who routinely stole patients’ fentanyl and replaced or diluted it with saline solution. Chronicling this catastrophe would have sufficed, but the host and reporter Susan Burton broadens her scope to examine the many arenas of women’s lives in which their pain is measured, devalued, or ignored.

Start with “Episode 1: The Patients.”

1. The Turning: Room of Mirrors

The Turning: Room of Mirrors initiates listeners into the artistry and grueling elitism of American ballet, and the show is made richer by a momentous score and the host and reporter Erika Lantz’s experience as a ballerina. The podcast centers on George Balanchine, the eccentric choreographer who co-founded the New York City Ballet and is credited with bringing the art form to the United States. The dancers who share their stories about Balanchine rarely criticize him, despite his often-inappropriate behavior. Some ballerinas recall him demanding romantic and sexual attention and constantly critiquing their bodies, driving many to pursue major interventions such as extreme diets, plastic surgery, and abortions. During a year in which many shows examined women’s suffering, The Turning asks listeners to consider how many of their expectations about themselves and their bodies are their own.

Start with “Season 2, Episode 1: Only I Can See You.”

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Many of the stories our readers spent time with this year revealed a curiosity about the historical events that shaped current circumstances at home and abroad, and a desire to examine humanity’s best and worst impulses. Spend some of your Sunday with 12 don’t-miss stories of the past year.

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Your 2023 Reading List

Mark Peterson / Redux for The Atlantic

Inside the Meltdown at CNN

By Tim Alberta

CEO Chris Licht felt he was on a mission to restore the network’s reputation for serious journalism. How did it all go wrong?

Maxime Mouysset

The Billion-Dollar Ponzi Scheme That Hooked Warren Buffett and the U.S. Treasury

By Ariel Sabar

How a small-town auto mechanic peddling a green-energy breakthrough pulled off a massive scam

Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times / Getty

The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

It does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

Illustration by Ricardo Tomás

How America Got Mean

By David Brooks

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.

Ashley Gilbertson / VII for The Atlantic

The Patriot

By Jeffrey Goldberg

How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump

Alicia Tatone. Sources: Tommaso Boddi / Getty; ITV / Shutterstock.

A Star Reporter’s Break With Reality

By Elaina Plott Calabro

Lara Logan was once a respected 60 Minutes correspondent. Now she trades in conspiracy theories that even far-right media disavow. What happened?

Illustration by Klaus Kremmerz

The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are

By Jennifer Senior

There are good reasons you always feel 20 percent younger than your actual age.

Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times / Getty

What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate

By McKay Coppins

In an exclusive excerpt from Coppins’s biography of Romney, the senator reveals what drove him to retire.

Pierre Buttin

What the Longest Study on Human Happiness Found Is the Key to a Good Life

By Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has established a strong correlation between deep relationships and well-being. The question is, how does a person nurture those deep relationships?

Nolwenn Brod for The Atlantic; courtesy of Valérie Beausert

The Children of the Nazis’ Genetic Project

By Valentine Faure

Across Europe, some adoptees have had to face a dark realization about their origins.

Didier Viodé

I Never Called Her Momma

By Jenisha Watts

I came to New York sure of one thing—that no one could ever know my past.

Daniele Castellano

The Fake Poor Bride

By Xochitl Gonzalez

In my decade-plus as a luxury-wedding planner, I saw it all: reality-TV brides, a scam from multimillionaires, even a bride who pretended to be poor.

Photo Album

An image of Eden Valley in Cumbria, United Kingdom (Stuart McGlennon / The Tenth International Landscape Photographer of the Year)

This year’s landscape-photography competition received more than 4,000 entries from around the world. Here are some of the top and winning images.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here.

On Tuesday, Colorado’s Supreme Court disqualified Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot after determining that his actions on January 6, 2021, made him ineligible under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause.

The Colorado court’s actions come on the precipice of another tumultuous year in politics, one featuring a general election and a likely rematch of the 2020 race between the former and present U.S. presidents.

Joining editor in chief of The Atlantic and moderator, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week to look back at 2023 and discuss what to expect in 2024 are Lisa Desjardins, correspondent at PBS NewsHour; Adam Harris, staff writer at The Atlantic; Zolan Kanno-Youngs, White House correspondent at The New York Times; and Susan Page, Washington bureau chief at USA Today.

Read the full transcript here.