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Rock and roll is full of legends who should retire. But some bands know how to get back onstage without making fools of themselves—or of their fans.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

A very, very expensive emoji Future-proofing your town sounds great, until you try it. The neighbors who destroyed their lives

Hello, Cleveland

Sometimes I write something that needs a wee bit of qualification. (Translation: I am going to rationalize breaking one of my own rules.) Last year, I applauded rock artists who choose to age gracefully, mostly by exiting the stage. I deplored the acts who were trying to recapture their younger days while cynically vacuuming their fans’ pockets.

In that discussion, I quoted the critic John Strausbaugh, whose 2001 book, Rock Til You Drop, is full of liquid-nitrogen zingers so precise and stinging  that I wish I’d written them. Strausbaugh rightly says that rock and roll should be music by the young, for the young, and he rails against the sham of what he calls “colostomy rock”—older people mugging their way through songs about sex and drugs and rebellion:

Rock simply should not be played by fifty-five-year-old men with triple chins wearing bad wighats. Its prime audience should not be middle-aged, balding, jelly-bellied dads who’ve brought along their wives and kids … Rock‘n’roll is not family entertainment.

That’s damn right, John, and I couldn’t agree more.

So what, exactly, was I doing earlier this month on a quaint little street in a seaside town in Rhode Island, getting patted down by security for a show by the Tubes, a band known for their decadent stage shows and whose biggest hits were from the 1970s and ’80s? I last saw the Tubes about 40 years ago, when the band was playing the Boston college circuit. What the hell was I doing here? More to the point, what the hell were they doing here?

If you’re not familiar with the Tubes, perhaps I can give you a sense of their, ah, aesthetic from some of their songs, including odes to loving relationships such as “Don’t Touch Me There” and “Mondo Bondage,” as well as their ever-popular investigation of youthful anxieties, “White Punks on Dope.” In the ’80s, their two biggest hits were “Talk to Ya Later,” about exasperation with a one-night stand who won’t leave the next day, and “She’s a Beauty,” a giant hit on the charts and on MTV in 1983, whose lyrics basically describe the rules for what were once called rap booths, cubicles in urban red-light districts that were the pre-internet equivalent of cam sites. (“You can say / Anything you like / But you can’t touch the merchandise.”)

This is the kind of music that made Soviet commissars think the West was doomed to fall.

But it’s also the kind of music that seems pretty strange when performed by men of a certain age. I mean, who wants to see a shirtless old coot come out onstage in leather pants and a bondage mask?

Well, as it turns out, I do. And so did my wife, who is not only my age but also saw the Tubes years ago and jumped at the chance to see them again.

The Tubes have the one quality that so many older bands lack: self-awareness. When the lead singer, Fee Waybill, took the stage at the Greenwich Odeum that night, he chuckled and noted that this was a return engagement, and that everyone was a year older now. “Which means,” he added, “I’m, like, fuckin’ 100 now.” (He’s actually 73; the original band members Roger Steen and Prairie Prince are 74 and 73, respectively.)

The rest of the evening was not a reenactment of the old days, but a kind of happy postcard from the early ’80s. This knowing but joyful wink makes all the difference when walking the fine line, as the rock mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap put it, “between clever and stupid.” The band gets it, and so does the audience: We’re all older now, and we’re not kidding anyone, but we can still sing along with songs that would likely shock our children.

The right venue is the key to enjoying this kind of music without feeling like an idiot. The Greenwich Odeum is a small theater in a town of roughly 13,000 people that seats just under 500—hardly the kind of arena that bands like the Tubes once filled. I wondered how we all came to be singing along to “Sushi Girl”—don’t ask—in a former vaudeville theater built in 1926, so I called the Odeum a few weeks after the show and chatted with Rachel Kinnevy-Fitzpatrick, who handles artist relations, and the general manager, Amanda Ronchi.

The Odeum, they told me, had fallen into disuse, but it reemerged in 2013 with the help of patrons and sponsors; it is now a music and comedy spot. But it’s hardly a dusty old dive: Its roster includes Amy Grant, Al Di Meola, an ABBA tribute band, and Al Stewart and his terrific young colleagues, the Empty Pockets, whom I’ve seen twice there. The house is also holding a Celtic Christmas celebration and hosting Lez Zeppelin, an all-female Zep tribute band (although not at the same time).

When bands are young and hungry, they play the big rooms and go where the bus takes them. When they get a bit older, they don’t want to be shoved onstage and forced to yell, “Hello, Cleveland!” (Likewise, many of their fans are too old to put up with sitting in the nosebleed seats at some decaying local civic arena.) The Odeum tries to create a more intimate environment for the artists, and it seems to work: I was surprised to be standing in the lobby—which has the comforting ambience of an old movie theater—when Waybill and Steen came out after the show, sat at a table, and signed autographs and chitchatted with fans, including me.

A smaller venue such as the Odeum (supported by both ticket sales and patrons and sponsors) also means that the band, and the fans, can forget about trying to re-create their days of fist-pumping arena glory. None of us, onstage or off, seemed up for that kind of creepy nostalgia. As Rachel said about the venue’s older acts, no one has to live in the past; the Odeum thinks it’s “okay to stay present.”

Speaking of age, I noted that the crowd at the nearly sold-out show was almost entirely over 40, an observation confirmed by the theater’s management. The show was not an intergenerational moment with the kids and grandkids, where the creaky Boomers introduced the youngs to their prehistoric rock idols. (That’s what Rolling Stones concerts are for.) Perhaps it sounds odd to call a rock concert a safe space, but I felt more comfortable shouting lyrics such as “Spent my cash on every high I could find” in a crowd of people close to my own age than I might have while getting the stink eye from someone’s appalled teenager.

Back in the day, the Tubes put on a dazzling show, with special effects, scantily clad dancing girls, and multiple costume changes. All of that is over. Now only Waybill changes clothes, and the only sultry lady onstage is dressed as a nurse—cue the Viagra jokes from the audience—instead of a kick-line dancer. (She’s also not a groupie or hired extra; she’s Waybill’s wife, Elizabeth.)

Some things, even in the middle of a rock concert, make more sense when you’re older. After Waybill transformed into one of his onstage alter egos, the dissolute glam rocker Quay Lewd—drug humor from the ’70s, kids—he looked over at the character’s trademark 18-inch-heel boots lying onstage nearby. Apparently, he’d worn them at a show in Philadelphia the night before, and they’d hurt like hell; there was even some concern about whether he’d be in shape for the show in Rhode Island. So this night, he just looked at them and shook his head: Nah.

The crowd laughed. We get it.

Tonight, stay present, and celebrate with the music that moves you. Happy New Year. See you in 2024.

Related:

Rock never dies—but it does get older and wiser. Was classic rock a sound, or a tribe?

Essay

Illustration by Dena Springer

The Bizarre Tragedy of Children’s Movies

By Kelly Conaboy

A few weeks ago, I came across a GIF from the 1994 film The Lion King that made me weep. It shows the lion cub Simba moments after he discovers the lifeless body of his father, Mufasa; he nuzzles under Mufasa’s limp arm and then lies down beside him. I was immediately distraught at that scene, and my memories of the ones that follow: Simba pawing at his dead father’s face, Simba pleading with him to “get up.”

That scene lives in my thoughts with a few similar ones: the baby elephant Dumbo cradled in his abused mom’s trunk as she’s trapped behind bars; Ellie, the beloved wife in Up, grieving a miscarriage and eventually passing away within the first five minutes of the film; Bambi, the young deer, wandering around the snowy forest looking for his mother, who has just been shot dead. When they pop up in my mind, I’m always left with the same thought: Why are so many kids’ movies so sad, and how does that sadness affect the kids they’re intended to entertain?

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Dusty Deen for The Atlantic

Read. Check out one of The Atlantic’s 10 favorite books of 2023.

Listen. Don’t buy that new sweater until you’ve heard what Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull has to say about the cratering quality of knitwear on this episode of Radio Atlantic.

Photo Album

A child plays with bubbles from a street performer at the Old Port in Marseille, France (Peter Cziborra / Reuters).

Families and friends at play, expressions of love and compassion, volunteers at work, and more in our editor’s selection of hopeful images from 2023.

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.

For the holidays, Radio Atlantic is sharing the first episode of the Atlantic podcast How to Keep Time. Co-hosts Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost, an Atlantic contributing writer, examine our relationship with time and what we can do to reclaim it.

In its first episode, they explore the idea of “wasting” time. But first, Radio Atlantic host Hanna Rosin has a question: Is teaching scheduling to a child a bad idea?

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Becca.

Becca Rashid: Yes, Hanna.

Rosin: I have a story I want to tell you, and I don’t know if it’s excellent or terrible.

Rashid: I’m sure it will be excellent, Hanna. Let’s hear it.

Rosin: Okay. So, this weekend, I was hanging out with a 5-year-old. Actually, four and three-quarters, because you know how little kids are extremely precise about their age.

And we were planning out all the things that we were going to do that day. And what I did was, I sat down with this kid, and I made a schedule.

Rashid: For the child who’s 4 and three-quarters?

Rosin: It was, like, a pictorial schedule. And I thought I was doing something incredibly fun. I was like, No. 1: We’re going to go to the castle playground. No. 2: We’re going to have a food adventure. No. 3: We’re going to have a throwing adventure. And I taught the kid how to write everything down and say how long it was going to take. And then I taught the kid how to cross things out.

Rashid: Oh my God. You were training this child on how to make a to-do list.

Rosin: Yes. Okay. And only at the end of it did I think: Oh my God, I have to ask Becca if I just did a terrible thing.

Rashid: Did the kid enjoy it? Did he appreciate your efforts in mapping out his day for him like that?

Rosin: Well, I think the kid was a natural bundle of chaos. I was trying to sort of organize and rein it in and be like, Look, we’re going to do this for 20 minutes, and this for 20 minutes, and this for 20 minutes.

Rashid: To manage the otherwise chaotic life of a 5-year-old child?

Rosin: Exactly. Instead of letting them kind of stumble from one thing to the next thing, I was trying to organize time. Was that a mistake?

Rashid: I mean, I can understand why that was a natural compulsion for you. You’ve been trained to think that way. I don’t know if a child who is 4 and three-quarters needs to condition himself to think that way.

And I wonder if it maybe stifles his ability to actually figure out, like: How am I feeling? What do I want to do next? Maybe not to conceptualize his day as a “day” quite yet, you know?

Rosin: That’s what I thought your answer was gonna be.

Rashid: (Laughs.)

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin, and that was Becca Rashid, one of the co-hosts of The Atlantic’s How To podcast. Their new season is called How to Keep Time, and there’s a concept in that season called “action addiction.” And all I can say is: I feel seen. Anyway, we at Radio Atlantic are off for the holidays—happy holidays, everyone—we’re going to play Episode 1 of How to Keep Time. Enjoy.

You can listen to the episode and read the transcript here:

How to Keep Time: Try Wasting It

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

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

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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

Robocall Whack-a-Mole

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related:

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

Today’s News

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

Dispatches

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

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Universal / Everett Collection

Zack Snyder, the Director People Love to Hate

By Dave Itzkoff

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

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

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

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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

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

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

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

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

We’re in the coldest season. We’re in the shopping season. We’re in the season of hygge. All the cues point to buying yourself a new cozy sweater. Don’t do it, until you hear what Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull has to say about the cratering quality of knitwear. For years I’ve wondered why my sweaters pilled so quickly, or why they suffocated me, or smelled like tires. And then I read Mull’s recent story titled “Your Sweaters Are Garbage.” It turns out that international trade agreements, greedy entrepreneurs, and my own lack of willpower have conspired to erode my satisfaction.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Mull, who writes about why so many consumer goods have declined in quality over the last two decades. As always, Mull illuminates the stories the fashion world works hard to obscure: about the quality of fabrics, the nature of working conditions, and how to subvert a system that wants you to keep buying more. “I have but one human body,” she says. “I can only wear so many sweaters.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Hanna Rosin: When it started to get pretty cold, I opened up the drawer where I keep all my sweaters. I have so many sweaters in there. And you know what? I hate all of them. Even the ones that are supposed to be ugly.

Because I was looking at my own closet, in my own bedroom, I figured this was my problem—I was just in my own private hell—until I saw the headline: “Your Sweaters Are Garbage.”

It was an article by staff writer Amanda Mull, who is my guru of consumer dilemmas.

Now, Amanda had done her own thorough sweater investigation, which was inspired by Nora Ephron’s great love letter to cold weather and NY city: When Harry Met Sally.

For sweater lovers, this movie holds a special place. And it has to do with one, enduring image in the movie:

[Music]

Amanda Mull: Billy Crystal is in his new, single-guy apartment, squatting in front of one of the big windows in that apartment, and he is wearing, you know, ’80s jeans and a really beautiful, cabled, ivory fisherman sweater.

And the sweater is, like, it’s incredible. It’s really lush. It’s really, like, oversized in the right ways. It is a great, great sweater.

Rosin: Recently, actor Ben Schwartz recreated the photo on his Instagram.

Mull: And he was wearing jeans and in front of a window and, you know—ivory, cabled fisherman sweater. But it was just like the sweater didn’t have the juice.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

A comedian named Ellory Smith retweeted these two sweater pictures side by side, the one of Billy Crystal and the one of Ben Schwartz, writing, “The quality of sweaters has declined so greatly in the last twenty years that I think it genuinely necessitates a national conversation.” I 100 percent agree.

And the only person I want to have that conversation with is Amanda Mull, because she’ll be able to explain why a sweater is not just a sweater. It’s a window into so many of the problems of our modern consumer culture.

So, here we go.

[Music]

Rosin: Did you yourself go through a prolonged period of sweater disappointment?

Mull: You know, I moved to New York in 2011. I’m from the South. I’m from Atlanta, so I didn’t need any sweater-buying skills for the first 25 years of my life. I had thought about this, like, not a single time because, you know, you put on a hoodie and you keep it moving where I’m from.

But suddenly, I needed to figure out how to buy, like, a whole new cold-weather wardrobe, so I made a lot of mistakes, and I made a lot of sweater mistakes because I figured, you know: Just go to any of the retailers where I’m buying my other stuff and order some sweaters from them, and it’ll be fine.

It was not fine. I got a lot of very itchy, very plasticky sweaters. I got things that pilled up immediately, that just looked terrible, looked really cheap.

I felt like a baked potato wrapped in foil inside of them. I was steaming like a dumpling. I was unhappy. I was itchy. I looked like I was in, like, this weird plastic material. I hated it.

And I did this for years before I realized that it’s the materials. I need to be looking at the fabric labels. I need to be looking at what these sweaters are actually made out of and probably spending some more money and spending some more time looking for better things. But yeah, I screwed up in that way for the better part of a decade, I would say.

Rosin: Okay, so we have sweaters of yore and sweaters now. Can you walk us through how these come into the world differently?

Mull: When you look at Billy Crystal’s sweater, you can make a few assumptions about what’s going on with it. The first thing is it’s almost certainly fully wool.

What kind of wool, it’s impossible for me to say, but there is an almost 100 percent chance that what you’re looking at is a completely natural-fiber sweater.

And it’s also double knit, which is why it looks so much heftier. At the time, sweaters were much more likely to be made of not just natural fibers, but of 100 percent wool.

That is traditionally the material that sweaters have been made out of for, you know, hundreds of years. A sweater like that would almost certainly be made in a wool-producing country.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Mull: So it might have been made in the United States. It might have been made in Scotland, New Zealand, Ireland, one of the places in the world where a lot of sheep are raised, a lot of yarn is manufactured, and then sweaters are then made from that yarn. Because it was almost certainly sold in the United States, in the 1980s there were some import controls on what could be brought into the U.S. and sold as far as textiles go, which means it was almost certainly made in a relatively wealthy country, where garment workers are more likely to have significant tenure on the job, real skills training, good wages—things like that.

So it was probably made by someone who has a lot of experience making sweaters.

Rosin: Interesting.

Mull: By someone who has lots and lots of training, lots and lots of particular skills.

Rosin: So the yarn would be wool, and whoever created it would be someone with sweater skills.

Mull: Right. Making this kind of knitwear is a very, very highly skilled task. It wouldn’t just be a person overseeing the machine; it would be a person manipulating the machine to ensure that you get all of that really rich cabling and all of those details. You know, it takes a lot of yarn to make a sweater that robust.

Rosin: I’m kind of sweating listening to you. Like, I want to be falling into nostalgia with you, but what I’m actually thinking is, like, No, no. Like, I feel too hot and sweaty. So that’s the sweaters of yore. Then what happened?

Mull: Well, in 2005, a trade agreement called the Multifiber Arrangement expired. The provisions within that agreement had been sort of, like, being phased out by design over the course of, like, a decade.

But in 2005, it went away. And what that meant was that the United States had fewer import caps on textile products that were being brought in from developing nations, or less-wealthy nations. And that sort of, I mean, it ended the garment industry in the U.S. as we know it, basically, because what became possible was all these manufacturers and retailers to look for manufacturing overseas in far less-wealthy countries—countries that would allow them to, you know, release more pollution into the environment, that would sort of kowtow to their interests in various ways. You know, the United States is not a perfect country by any means, but there are basic protections on worker safety in the environment that make it more expensive to manufacture here.

So, suddenly, brands could move their manufacturing overseas. Retailers could source inventory from factories overseas that were charging far less. All of these financial incentives just changed apparel as we know it.

Rosin: This sounds like a monumental change, and yet the word Multifiber Arrangement is not something that anyone would stop and notice, even though from what you’re saying it’s completely upended our closets and our lives. Why?

Mull: This agreement was written to expire, and then when it expired, a lot changed about clothing in the United States. What it did, essentially, was placate the domestic garment industry with 30 years of protection but then guarantee that when that 30 years was up, you know, it would sort of be open season. So it got the garment industry to sort of sign off on their own eventual death.

Rosin: So 2005 is a critical year. What does the post-2005 period look like?

Mull: 2005 was a watershed moment, but it wasn’t as stark as it might have been if the protection provisions of the agreement hadn’t been designed to be phased out. But in 2005, it’s basically open season. That is the era where you get a lot of fast-fashion retailers really expanding their presence in the United States.

The first H&Ms start opening in the U.S. You get Forever 21 flourishing. You have this sort of moment when there’s this big rush into this new type of industry that can flourish in the United States, and that rush is built on sort of terrible clothing.

Rosin: Well, now you say terrible clothing. Do you mean terribly made clothing? Clothing with terrible fabrics? Because you could get a lot of trendy clothing cheaply.

Mull: When fast fashion comes to the U.S., it brings with it its sort of internal financial logic. What that means is their goal is to sell as much clothing as possible, and they need to create the prices that allow them to do that. And being able to move manufacturing overseas means that they can vastly reduce their labor costs and also use much, much cheaper materials.

Rosin: So we started with sheep and wool. What do we switch to?

Mull: In sweaters, what this means is you’re getting a lot of what is essentially plastic. That will show up on fabric labels as polyester or polyamide or acrylic. That’s what you’ll usually find in sweater weaves.

You also get what is basically rayon. And in sweater knits, you’re starting to see a lot more of viscose, which is a fiber derived from bamboo, but it’s derived in a way that is really, really deleterious to the environment in most circumstances, and that fabric can be manufactured in other countries with poor environmental restrictions on industry.

So you get a lot more of that material and a lot more plastic.

Rosin: You know, it’s funny: It’s not that I didn’t notice fast fashion—of course I have, and have bought many a thing from its demonic jaws—but somehow the sweater existed in a different category.

A sweater is such a significant thing. If I think sweater, I still think of a Billy Crystal, fisherman, thick sweater, even though I have not worn one or owned one in many, many years. That is what a sweater is. You just, we don’t classify sweater as disposable.

Mull: Right. And the basic designs of sweaters that you see have not changed much in the last, you know, 40 years. You still see cable knits. You still see turtlenecks. You still see the sort of fine-gauge knits more likely to be made from an ultra-soft wool, like a cashmere.

So, because they’ve visually changed less over time, I think that people don’t go into buying one expecting it to be disposable, because it’s still something that has the look and feel of a thing that should be able to be worn for 10 years.

Rosin: Right. Right. What you’re describing has been happening in a pretty rapid way for 20 years. Have we really not noticed that our sweaters were rapidly deteriorating for 20 years?

Mull: Well, I think people have noticed it, but the consumer system is sort of inherently individualistic, and people tend to approach problems that they encounter within the consumer system as something that they can sort of, like, MacGyver their way out of—or if they’re just better educated, or if they look harder, or if they find, like, the secret source for the good stuff, that this is a problem that they can solve. We don’t think about consumption and about clothing and about changes in materials as this sort of collective issue, but that’s really what it is.

So I think that because we are not trained to look for the sort of big, hidden system behind why we have the sweater options we have, it is hard for people to do that.

And it’s just hard to get the type of view on the system that you would need in order to understand what’s happening. Like, if you are sort of a sicko like me, you know, you do a lot of reading about this. You read academic stuff. You read books on the history of textiles. But this history is pretty well hidden.

And the fashion industry goes to great lengths to purposefully hide this type of understanding of how its products are created and how that has changed over time, because fashion marketing works best when you are just thinking about your own aesthetic and sensory experience of a garment.

So there’s a real, concerted effort on the part of the industry at large to encourage people not to put real thought into why suddenly the sweaters are, like, a little scratchier now.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that makes so much sense. I would also say that probably we let it happen because there’s some ways that it’s better. Because laundry is easier. I can have a sense that I’m accessing a luxury item for cheaper. So there are ways in which it’s working for people.

Mull: Absolutely. I think that the fashion industry does a great job of sort of paying off consumers for not thinking about this stuff too hard.

It is fun to have, like, a zillion options when you get dressed in the morning or when you are packing for a vacation. Having this type of variety and this type of choice is something that in the past was only available to wealthy people and to celebrities, and getting to sort of star in our everyday life with our own custom wardrobe is fun. Putting on a cute outfit is fun. Buying a new outfit is fun. I love clothing. I totally get why people buy all of this stuff and why it’s just a little bit easier not to look too hard at the man behind the curtain.

There is not a lot of upside to people in looking into exactly where any of this stuff comes from, or why it is ill-fitting, or why the seams split so easily, or why there’s so much of it and there used to not be nearly as much. There’s not really a lot of personal upside to looking into that, except getting depressed.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, Amanda will teach us what to look for if we absolutely need a new sweater. Back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Before we climb out of the hole—because we will climb out of the hole—besides split seams, what are the other collective costs of this system for us, for people around the world?

Mull: The things that the consumer system obscures are largely bad, especially when it comes to fast fashion. Garment workers overseas work in generally terrible conditions. They work for very, very little money. A lot of them have very little control over their day-to-day lives. Some of them live in in dorms that are, you know, owned by their bosses. There’s very little ability to sort of, like, live a happy, independent, secure life if you’re a garment worker in most of the world. It is a really, really dark system underneath the surface in order to create all of this really, really inexpensive stuff.

You know, if a sweater costs $10, that savings is coming from somewhere, and it’s probably coming from the people in the system with the least power and the least ability to stand up for themselves.

Rosin: Right.

Mull: And then you also get a significant environmental impact from all of this. A lot of the countries that host these types of manufacturing outfits have fewer environmental protections.

So there is a ton of pollution that happens and a ton of human-rights abuses that happen on the front end, when things are being manufactured. And then you just end up at the other end of that manufacturing process with a lot of physical waste. In order for fast fashion to work, companies have to manufacture far more than they can reasonably sell to people, so you end up with a lot of excess clothing that gets dumped, usually in poor countries. There are, in particular, real problems with clothing waste being shipped to Ghana and Chile and then just dumped in these sort of vast piles of waste.

And the stuff we’re talking about here is stuff that was never sold. It was never used. It is pure front-to-back waste. That accounts for a lot of the textile waste in the world. But then also, fabric recycling is really, really difficult. And a lot of things ultimately just cannot be recycled, or it’s not cost effective to recycle them. So because buying habits are sort of decoupled from any actual need or want, people buy stuff that then doesn’t get worn or that gets worn once, and then it ends up being donated, and a huge proportion of that ends up just being wasted. It cannot be recycled.

So you’ve got more stuff for the great clothing-waste piles in these poorer countries that are just essentially a dumping ground for us. You’ve got plastics in waterways. You’ve got hazardous chemicals in waterways that are coming out of these garments that are just wasted. There’s a lot of waste and a lot of human suffering that comes out of this.

Rosin: I’m utterly paralyzed. I’m never going to buy anything again.

I don’t know exactly how spiritually to turn this shift, because everything you said was much more serious than the question I’m about to ask you.

But the reality is: It’s cold. Sometimes I might, maybe, still want to buy a sweater for my niece. Maybe. Or I might have a “friend” who wants to one day buy a sweater. (Not me. I’ll never buy anything again.) How do you MacGyver this?

Mull: There are still places out there where you can find 100-percent-wool sweaters made in factories in countries that have real protections for their garment workers, that are made by companies that care about this type of stuff. It’s a tall order to have to do all that research yourself and try to sort through this. It is, in a lot of situations, maybe impossible.

But sweaters, because they are so deeply tied to certain regions of the world and to long-standing garment traditions that are ongoing in those regions—if you look for sweaters that are made in Ireland, Scotland, or New Zealand, a lot of those are going to be made with real wool from sheep that were treated pretty well and by people that are skilled workers.

And those don’t have to be super expensive. A lot of those, you can have something like that for less than $200. And for a garment that you expect to last year after year after year—and to serve not just a fashion purpose, but a functional purpose in your wardrobe—part of this is just a mindset thing. If you let go of the idea that you need or want to have a new wardrobe every season, I think it’s easier to then go: Okay, I am going to buy one $150 fully wool sweater, and I am not going to get sucked in by the email sales and by Instagram ads and by all of these constant prompts that we receive to purchase additional stuff.

Everybody that I talked to for this story said that their favorite place to get really good, quality sweaters is through secondhand shopping. Because they’re secondhand, you can get a good price on them. You can pay the same amount for one of these that you would pay for a brand-new, plastic sweater in a store. And then you’re also not contributing to this larger issue of the constant cycle of new things that are being put into our physical world.

Rosin: I’m gonna put a Post-it note near my bed that says, “plastic sweater,” because I think if I’m ever tempted, that phrase “plastic sweater” will dissuade me from buying anything new.

I want to ask you about a couple of methods that, now that I’m talking to you, I have used but sound wrong. One thing is price, luxury—that does not necessarily, it sounds like, ensure that my sweater is not plastic.

Mull: Right. One of the most difficult things about the consumer system as we experience it now is that price is pretty much entirely decoupled from any sort of expectation you should have about the quality of an item or the item’s material composition.

Rosin: You say that so casually. That’s so crazy. Like, that is so confounding that you said it’s completely decoupled.

Mull: Right. You know, sometimes a really, really expensive thing is going to be really that much better than its less-expensive counterparts, but usually not. I don’t think there’s really any obvious correlation between the two anymore. It’s pretty much certain that if you’re buying a $20, brand-new sweater, what you’re getting is terrible quality. But there’s not any guarantee that if you’ve spent $3,000 on a sweater that it’s going to be markedly better.

Because the logic of fast fashion has infiltrated a lot of parts of the fashion industry, people expect clothing will look old—trend-wise, if not wear-wise, as far as quality goes—in six months.

They expect to move on. So there’s no real incentive for a lot of luxury brands to make their stuff to be substantially better quality than some of the much cheaper options.

Rosin: So you can’t rely on cost. Can you rely on tags? Like, can I just read the tag and see what it’s made of? Or are there euphemisms there that I might not catch?

Mull: The best thing that you can do is to learn what your fabric tags mean when you look on the inside of a garment. Wool means wool. Cotton means cotton. Linen means linen. Polyamide, polyester, acrylic—those all mean plastic. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Right. What about Mongolian wool? Like, I bought a sweater and it said, “100 percent Mongolian wool.” Is that just wool? Sometimes I’m afraid there’s some euphemism that I never heard of and that’s fake, and there are no Mongolian sheep—just in pictures. It doesn’t really exist.

Mull: Well, wool is sort of a catch-all term. It can come from a lot of different animals. So that level of detail is useful because it might tell you a little bit more about the texture of the garment or how it will look over time with wear. Different wools do have different physical properties, so that can be useful on that level. It doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about quality. But wool is always a good starting point to understanding what it is you’re looking at and what it is you can expect from that garment.

And knowing what the less-definitive words mean as well—viscose, rayon, modal—these types of fabrics are generally the bamboo-derived ones and, while technically a natural fiber, there’s a lot that goes into the creation of that that is not necessarily very good for the environment or for the people working on it.

So learning exactly what those terms mean, too, is useful, and you’ll see the same ones over and over again. Once you learn what all of this means, it is knowledge that you can take with you for the rest of your life and be pretty set when trying to make the most basic decisions about whether or not you want to buy something.

If you can get yourself out of that headspace that says that you need more stuff, that you are missing things, it’s a good idea for everybody to just slow down and go: Okay, I have five sweaters in my closet already. I have but one human body. I can only wear so many sweaters. Do I already have something that’s similar to this and that I just haven’t thought about in a while or that I just haven’t tried on with the new pair of pants that I got that might look great with it?

Making yourself aware of what you already own, and if it fits you, and how it feels on you, and how it might go with the things that you have already is good. Being familiar with your own wardrobe is good. And really, just the problematic behavior here—no matter where you’re getting your stuff—is just buying for the sake of buying.

[Music]

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

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

Ozempic broke out in a big way this year. By the time Jimmy Kimmel made a crack at the Oscars about the medication, bringing it a new surge of national attention, diabetes and obesity drugs that suppress appetite had been on the rise for months. I spoke with my colleague Yasmin Tayag, who covers health and science for The Atlantic, about the future potential of these drugs and the existing barriers to access.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The death of a gun-rights warrior The moral decline of elite universities Is this how Amazon ends?

Here to Stay

Lora Kelley: Before this year, I had never heard of Ozempic. Now I see articles and ads for appetite-suppressing drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy everywhere. To what extent are these treatments a passing fad versus a force that is here to stay?

Yasmin Tayag: These drugs are definitely here to stay. Doctors have seen obesity drugs come and go, but this particular class seems to have real staying power, because it works and it’s safe, as far as we can tell.

The class of appetite-suppressing drugs known as GLP-1 agonists has been around for a long time. Ozempic is one of the newer, more powerful drugs in this class.

There are so many similar new drugs in development. And they’re all trying to one-up one another in terms of potency, side effects, and even formulation—whether an injection or a pill. In 2024, we’re likely to see more pharmaceutical companies applying for approval for new drugs, and potentially a lot more people getting on the existing drugs that are already approved. They’re going to become more of a household concept. (I don’t want to say “household name,” because there are so many different brands coming out.)

There are a lot of silly, out-there projections about how the presence of these drugs will affect industries, from airplanes to snack food. If that future comes, it’s very far off. But in terms of health: If more Americans go on these drugs, the hope is that we’ll see rates of obesity go down and fewer people having related health problems.

Lora: What are some factors keeping people from accessing these drugs?

Yasmin: The major obstacle to these drugs becoming totally mainstream is the cost. They’re so expensive. They’re not covered by most private insurance providers or by Medicare, because traditionally, obesity has not been seen as a medical condition. It’s been seen as cosmetic. But as these drugs show a benefit in areas such as heart disease, insurance companies may face more pressure to cover them.

Lora: How will the market change as more brands try to break into this space?

Yasmin: The hope is that as more competitors enter the market, the prices of the drugs as a class are going to come down further and further. I don’t think prices will be appreciably different in 2024, but in five years, maybe we’ll start seeing some real change.

Obesity pills, which may be available as early as next year, could theoretically be good for costs in two ways: The first is that the pills themselves are cheaper to make, because they don’t require all of the hardware that goes into making an injectable pen, and they don’t need to be stored under refrigeration.

Lora: I find myself referring to this class of drugs using the catchall Ozempic. Will Ozempic become, like Kleenex, a brand name that stands in for a whole category?

Yasmin: Ozempic is frequently used to refer to this whole class of drugs. But Ozempic itself is actually not an obesity drug—it’s for diabetes. (The exact same drug, packaged and sold as Wegovy, is for obesity. They have the same active ingredient—semaglutide—and the only difference is that Wegovy is available in a higher dose.)

The names that companies are giving these drugs feel so ridiculous. When you list them, it’s like word salad. I can see why people want to have a single name to refer to all of them. For now, Ozempic is like Kleenex, but we should stop using it that way.

Related:

Are you sure you want an Ozempic pill? The future of obesity drugs just got way more real.

Today’s News

The House passed a $886.3 billion defense bill that authorizes the biggest pay raise for troops in more than 20 years and includes weapons funding for Ukraine and Israel. European Union leaders will open membership talks with Ukraine and Moldova after granting them candidate status in June 2022. When asked about Israel’s strikes on Gaza, Joe Biden said that he wants the Israeli military to “be more careful” and focus on saving civilian lives while going after Hamas.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: COP has given us a new floor for climate ambition, Zoë Schlanger writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: U.S. presidents have always lied, David A. Graham writes. What exactly should we expect from our leaders?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

“Crouching Woman” (c. 1884–85), by Camille Claudel (Marco Illuminati)

Camille Claudel’s “Revolt Against Nature”

By Farah Peterson

In 1892, the French sculptor Camille Claudel applied to France’s Ministry of Fine Arts for a block of marble. As was customary, the ministry sent an inspector to decide whether her planned work was worth the state’s support. Her plaster model, showing two nude figures waltzing, was a “virtuoso performance,” the official wrote. Not even Auguste Rodin, Claudel’s mentor, could “have studied with more artistic finesse and consciousness the quivering life of muscles and skin.” But although the ministry commissioned equally sensual works from Rodin in that era, it refused to support one by a female artist …

Claudel bent every effort to make a name for herself, undeterred by the restrictive mores of her time. Though she won acclaim at the height of her brief career, her reputation faded in the decades after her death. Despite renewed interest in Claudel’s work in the 1980s, her tumultuous life story and Rodin’s role in it tended to deflect attention from her art, particularly in the United States. “Her best pieces,” H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson wrote in their canonical History of Art, “might pass for his.” But Claudel’s oeuvre, especially its sensitive and moving evocation of women’s interior lives, is not so easily dismissed. The new show presses the argument that Claudel ranks among the greatest French sculptors of the 19th century.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Republicans are playing House. Biden’s economic formula to win in 2024 What needs to happen when the fighting stops in Gaza Why you might want to toss out your trophies

Culture Break

Ira Wyman / Sygma / Getty / HBO

Watch. Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage & Reckoning (streaming on Max), a docuseries about the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, is the final word on a notorious killing.

Listen. Could a reelected President Donald Trump manipulate the military? On the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin and Tom Nichols discuss how it would be surprisingly easy.

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

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

’Tis the season of Taylor Swift. Maybe you’re sick of her, or maybe you’re obsessed. Either way, you are likely finding yourself in the middle of a Girl Culture moment. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The 10 best films of 2023 The hybrid-car dilemma If Trump Wins: Trump isn’t bluffing.

Girlhood’s Big Year

After Thanksgiving dinner, as my family members were settling in around the television for our annual football nap, a picture of a certain blond pop star floated across the screen. “Taylor Swift is so stupid,” a relative groaned. “Just show the game!”

I was surprised. Not by the comment itself—that’s typical uncle behavior—but because he was, shockingly, the first man in my life to express disgust about Taylor Swift’s recent ubiquity. Many of my guy friends have danced in the crowd at the Eras Tour. They have sent me silly social-media memes of Travis Kelce and Taylor, because my friends know I love their coupledom. For weeks, my father has been thrilled to answer all of my questions about “bye weeks” and “tight ends.” These men are not threatened by Taylor’s domination of the NFL. They love her! And I love them!

On that November afternoon, the realization hit me suddenly, even though the signs, and media reports, have been there for months: We are in the boom times of Girl Culture—brought forth, in part, by the incandescent glow of Taylor Swift’s torch.

Girl Culture is the art and media that values and communicates girls’ perspectives, according to Elizabeth Scala, an English professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Girl Culture has always been a Thing. (See: Clueless, and Jane Austen.) But in the past 10 years, Scala says, it has seeped into the mainstream in a new way: Swift’s Eras Tour, Beyoncé’s Renaissance, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. But also: hot-girl walks. Girl dinners. Taylor Swift is on ESPN now. It’s impossible to look away.

These days, professors at numerous U.S. colleges are teaching classes about Taylor Swift’s music and entrepreneurship. Last year, Scala became one of the first, designing a course in which students analyze song structure alongside famous literature. Scala wants her students to be able to speak intelligently and objectively about Swift’s work, she told me. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, for example, three quatrains, or units of four lines, are usually followed by a couplet turn, which summarizes or questions the earlier lines. Scala gets her students to care about sonnet structure by showing them that “Taylor Swift is doing something very similar in moving from lyrics to chorus, and then the bridge is where she’s making the turn.” And, as all Swifties know, Taylor can write a bridge.

In my college friend group, liking Taylor Swift wasn’t cool. It was “girly,” which meant it was vapid. So when 1989 came out, instead of shouting the lyrics to “Out of the Woods,” I was watching boys play video games and pretending to love Arcade Fire. Lots of Taylor fans have stories like this. So does Swift, and that’s part of her success.

A lot of Swift’s music is about women giving their feelings and experiences the credence they deserve. “All Too Well” is a good example, Scala notes. The song is about a red scarf and an autumn romance, ostensibly with Jake Gyllenhaal, but it’s also an angry reaction to the notion that an important relationship was all in her head. “Taylor gets to come back and say, No, you don’t get to tell me this wasn’t real. I was there. It was rare; I remember it,” Scala told me. Like all of Taylor’s songs, “All Too Well” offers Taylor’s Version of a life event, and that version is often much more compelling—and richer in detail and sneaky Easter eggs—than a narrative that most intermediaries could provide. So compelling, in fact, that Swift has made some celebrity-profile writers wonder whether she even needs them anymore.

Even as I welcome the acceptance of girl culture with open, eager arms, a clarification is in order: Appreciating Girl Culture doesn’t mean being uncritical of it. You are free to dislike Barbie, for example, because you found America Ferrera’s monologue on feminism way too on the nose. You can be obsessed with Lena Dunham’s HBO show, Girls, while acknowledging that it becomes virtually unwatchable after Season 4. Similarly, just because Taylor Swift communicates an arresting narrative doesn’t mean that journalists—or even fans—have to accept it as truth.

In his Person of the Year interview with Swift for Time, Sam Lansky points out that, despite Swift’s assertions, no one actually canceled Swift in 2016—during a public feud with Kanye West and his then-wife, Kim Kardashian—or took her career away. But then Lansky immediately negates this important point by shrugging his shoulders and writing, “Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt?” Can you imagine if all journalists treated their subjects so credulously?

Of course, the power of Swift’s feelings has always been her great strength. The tiny, specific details of her life—of all of our lives—are how she’s come to dominate Girl Culture.

Thinking back, my family member’s Thanksgiving comment sounded strange because it was almost vintage. A tedious throwback to a time, albeit not that long ago, when it was socially acceptable to openly belittle the things that women like. Not anymore. We are in the “girlies” era now. Saying that in 2012 might have felt cheesy. Today, it feels metal as hell.

Related:

Taylor Swift’s Tinder masterpiece Justice for the teenage Taylor Swift

Today’s News

According to law-enforcement officials, a former college professor who had applied for a position at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas is suspected of shooting four people on its campus yesterday. A judge in Texas ruled that a woman whose fetus has a lethal abnormality may terminate her pregnancy despite the state’s abortion laws. Representative Jamaal Bowman was censured by the House for pulling a fire alarm in a Capitol Hill building in September; Bowman claims that it was an accident.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The diamond industry achieved what is arguably the most successful corporate-marketing campaign of all time, Amanda Mull writes. Up for Debate: How much time did you spend with peers in adolescence, and what effect did that have on the rest of your life? Conor Friedersdorf asks readers.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Contributor / Getty

The Sanctions Against Russia Are Starting to Work

By Leon Aron

Now that Russian President Vladimir Putin finds himself in a war of attrition, his only chance at victory depends on outlasting both Ukraine and its military supporters. He isn’t merely counting on the demoralization of the Ukrainian people and on “Ukraine fatigue” in the West; he’s also assuming that his own country has the stamina for a long and brutal fight. Yet after nearly two years in which Putin has largely succeeded in insulating most of his subjects from the war, the effects of Western sanctions—coupled with the astronomical and growing human and monetary costs of the conflict—are finally beginning to cause pain for the Russian general public.

Immediately after the invasion of Ukraine early last year, when the United States, the European Union, and other democratic nations moved to disconnect Russia from global financial and trade networks, many Western commentators hoped that the country’s economy would quickly buckle, creating pressure on Putin to withdraw. That hasn’t happened.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Harness the power of suggestion for your happiness. Netanyahu should quit. The U.S. can help with that. A soulless holiday-shopping strategy

Culture Break

Netflix

Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin talks with Tim Alberta about the alliance between Trump and evangelicals.

Watch. May December (streaming on Netflix) lets its characters be more than cartoons.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Caity Weaver, who is one of the best magazine writers working today, recently wrote an utterly charming profile of Stephanie Courtney—the actress and comedian you might recognize as Flo from the Progressive insurance commercials. The story is goofy and silly and also, somehow, extremely deep.

— Elaine

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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

Donald Trump and American evangelicals have never been natural allies. Trump has owned casinos, flaunted mistresses in the tabloids, and often talked in a way that would get him kicked out of church. In 2016 many people doubted whether Trump could win over evangelicals, whose support he needed. Eight years later, a few weeks away from the Iowa caucuses, evangelical support for the former president and current Republican frontrunner is no longer in question. In fact, there are now prominent evangelical leaders who have come to believe that Trump is “God’s instrument on Earth,” says Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

How did evangelicals shift from being reluctant supporters of Trump to among his most passionate defenders? How did some evangelicals, historically suspicious of politicians, develop a “fanatical, cult-like attachment” to Donald Trump? And what happened to the evangelical movement as some bought into Trump’s vision of America and others recoiled?

Alberta is a political reporter and also a Christian himself. After a dramatic and unexpected conversion, Tim’s father became a pastor at a prominent church in Michigan, which means Alberta grew up playing at the church, inviting dates to Bible study. He remains a believer. But he has watched with concern over the last few years as a lot of worship services have started to sound like “low-rent Fox News segments,” as he puts it—and as his own father, before his death, began justifying some of Trump’s behavior. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, I talk to Alberta about the alliance between Trump and evangelicals, and what it means for the church he loves.

Listen to the conversation here:

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

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: The Iowa caucuses are coming up in just over a month, and despite the primary challengers, it’s very likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

Now, a lot has changed since 2016, when Trump first ran. Back then, one of the biggest questions he faced was whether he could win over evangelical Christians.

After all, he was a casino owner, used to hang out at the Playboy Mansion, and he was on his third wife. If he preached anything, it was the gospel of wealth.

Trump needed evangelicals back then and, eventually, they held their noses and voted for him.

Now the dynamic is very different. In this election, evangelical support is no longer a question. In fact, so popular is Trump that some evangelical leaders have come to think of him as a kind of messiah, the leader they have always been waiting for.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. And today: how Trump has transformed the evangelical movement.

[Music]

In the early 2000s I was a beat reporter for The Washington Post, and my beat was evangelicals. George W. Bush was president, and he was a self-declared born-again Christian. And I watched his relationship with evangelicals up close, but that’s nothing like what we have today.

Many evangelical leaders now have an intense devotion to Trump that I find mystifying.

So today on the show, we have Tim Alberta to help explain it. Tim is a staff writer at The Atlantic who just wrote a book called The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.

Also, Tim’s dad was a pastor, which meant Tim grew up in the Church.

Tim Alberta: So when I say that I grew up in the Church, I mean literally physically grew up inside the church. My mother was on the staff there. I spent my childhood playing hide-and-seek in the storage spaces, doing my homework in my dad’s office.

Tim Alberta watched the movement change during the Trump years. He watched his own dad change. It unsettled him. But it also gave him a unique insider’s perspective. Here’s our conversation.

[Music]

Rosin: So first basic question: Why write a book about evangelicals right now? It’s not like they’re a new force in American politics. They’ve, you know, been around for a while. They’ve had influence for a while. So why now?

Alberta: Well, I guess I would have to give you both the macro and the micro answer. So the macro answer is that I really do sense that something new and something urgent and something dangerous, frankly, is happening in the evangelical world—specific to not just its alliance with Donald Trump, its alliance with the Republican Party, but its processing of everyday, run-of-the-mill, partisan political disputes through this prism that’s no longer red versus blue, no longer even, you know, conservatives versus progressives, you know, God-fearing Christians versus godless leftists. It’s good versus evil.

There is really a sense within American evangelicalism today that the end is near, that the sky is falling, that the barbarians are at the gates, and that if we don’t do something about it now, then this country, this ordained covenant country that God has so uniquely blessed, that we’re going to lose it—and that if we lose it, we’re not just losing America. It’s not just a defeat for America; it’s a defeat for God himself. So that is the macro.

The micro as to why I wrote the book now is because, I suppose for lack of a better way of putting it, I finally found the courage to do so. I finally found my voice in addressing this thing that I have known for a very long time to be a problem but just wasn’t brave enough until now to really speak out about it.

Rosin: So, okay, let’s get down on the ground and paint a picture for people. And possibly this is starting at the extremes, but there’s a church you wrote about called Floodgate.

Alberta: Floodgate is a church in Brighton, Michigan, which is my hometown. They had about 100 people, 125 people on an average Sunday for their worship services. So it’s a pretty small church—roadside congregation—in my hometown.

And I grew up, like, a few miles from there. I had never heard of it. Fast-forward to COVID-19: Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan, had issued shutdown orders that implicated houses of worship. And most of the churches in the area, including very conservative churches—theologically, culturally, politically conservative—they decided to shut down for some period of time.

And that included my home church, where my dad had been the pastor—the church that I grew up in, you know, spent my whole life in. They closed down, and basically at that moment, this massive schism was opened in the community, not only in the community I grew up in, but in the faith community that I grew up in, sort of universally speaking when we talk about evangelicalism in America.

Because this same thing that happened in Brighton, Michigan, was happening all over the country, which was to say that churches that closed down had some number of their congregants who were up in arms, who were furious, who basically believed that the pastors there were cowards and that they were succumbing to the forces of secularism that had the Church in the crosshairs.

And meanwhile, churches like Floodgate that took a bold stance against the government and stayed open, those churches were doing the Lord’s work. And so what you saw at Floodgate was a congregation that had about 100, suddenly within about a year had gone to 1,500. And now they’re even much bigger today than they were at that time.

And so when you go into Floodgate on a Sunday morning, as I did many times, instead of some of the traditional Sunday-morning worship rituals—you know, the church creeds and the doctrines being read aloud, the doxology sung, you know, some of the standard stuff that you would become accustomed to in an evangelical space—really what you would see was the pulpit being turned into a soapbox and the worship service turning into a low-rent Fox News segment, with the pastor just inveighing against Anthony Fauci, against Joe Biden, against the Democratic Party, against the elites who are trying to control the population—very dark, very angry, very conspiratorial. And that’s what you would see inside of a church like Floodgate.

Rosin: It’s not exactly an evolution. It’s more like an intensification. And I’m curious how the dots got drawn between a theological argument and COVID-19 masking, and then went all the way to Fox News.

Alberta: Well, you’re right that it’s intensification. It is also evolution. I’ll explain, I think, what is the arc that led us to this place. To understand this moment is to understand the sweep of the last 50 or 60 years in the evangelical world. So, during the mid-to-late ’70s, and certainly into the ’80s through the Reagan years, the Moral Majority is ascendant.

You’ve got tens of millions of evangelicals who are suddenly energized, galvanized, mobilized politically. And then you begin to see, after the Iron Curtain falls and the Cold War ends and we move into this period of a kind of peace and prosperity, that some of that panic starts to fall away a little bit.

A lot of churches sort of ratchet it back, and things return to normal for a period. And you see that, you know, really into the early 2000s, with a notable exception, I would add, of the Bill Clinton impeachment, which I think was a major moment for a lot of evangelicals—certainly my own father, my own church, where a lot of evangelicals wanted to take that moment to emphasize that character matters, morality matters, and that our political system depends on having moral leaders.

And then you kind of fast-forward, and things are still at kind of a low simmer for a while there.

Rosin: I think at the same time during the period that you’re describing, we do come to think, in our cultural imagination, of evangelical as equivalent to conservative, eventually as equivalent to Republican conservative, and then eventually as equivalent to white Republican conservative. Those definitions are also getting hardened during the period that you describe as quiet.

Alberta: I think that’s right, and I think that some of that owes to just a self-identification phenomenon. So, you know, during George W. Bush’s presidency, he’s talking about his relationship with Billy Graham. He’s talking about evangelicalism. And so that is becoming a part of the political lexicon all over again.

I think really what starts to trip the alarms inside of evangelicalism is the end of the Bush presidency and the election of Barack Obama, for some reasons that are obvious (i.e., we’re talking about a white evangelical movement, portions of which, perhaps significant portions of which, are deeply uncomfortable with a Black president).

I also think that during Obama’s presidency, you see a significant move in the culture. I mean, even just on the issue of same-sex marriage, for example, Obama runs for president in 2008 opposed to same-sex marriage, and by the time he leaves office, he is in favor of it and the Supreme Court rules to legalize same-sex marriage nationally. All of that is happening in the space of, like, less than a decade, and you’re seeing major cultural movement toward the left. And a lot of evangelical Christians during this period of time are really beginning to sound the alarm.

They’re really hand-wringing, saying, Okay, this is it. This is the apocalypse we’ve been warning about for 50 years. Even if that apocalypse was once sort of an abstract thing, something that they gave voice to but maybe didn’t really believe it, suddenly this convergence of factors is causing a lot of churches to become not just more conservative, not just more Republican, but really more militant in a lot of ways—in the rhetoric you hear from the pulpit, with the tactics that they will choose to engage in some of the culture-war issues with. And so that leads us to Trump coming down in the golden escalator.

And Donald Trump is not exactly a paragon of Christian virtue. The thrice-married, casino-owning Manhattan playboy who parades his mistresses through the tabloids and uses terrible, vulgar rhetoric—I mean, this is not someone who the rank-and-file evangelical would point to as an ally, much less as a role model.

Rosin: Right.

Alberta: And I reported extensively in 2016 on a really well-organized, well-financed effort to rally evangelical leaders around Ted Cruz, because they at least viewed him as one of their own. But he also had all of that same pugilism, all of that same attitude, that We’ve been pushed around too long, and now it’s time we fought back and we did something about this.

Donald Trump secures the Republican nomination, and then he realizes that he can’t get elected president without the support of these white evangelical voters and, frankly, without overwhelming support of those voters. And so, methodically, he starts his courtship of them.

He chooses Mike Pence as his running mate. He releases this list of Supreme Court justices. He promises explicitly that they will be pro-life Supreme Court justices, something that had never been done by a presidential nominee. He’s doing all of this signaling to evangelical voters. Perhaps most importantly, he goes to New York in the summer of 2016, and he meets with hundreds and hundreds of these prominent evangelical pastors from around the country, and he basically promises them, he says: Look, I will give you power. If you elect me, I will give you power, and I will defend Christianity in this country.

And so there’s sort of this transactional relationship where Trump gets the votes from these people, and they get not just the policies in return, but they get the protection in return. It’s almost as though Trump becomes, like, this mercenary who, on their behalf, is willing to fight the enemies out in the culture, in the government.

Anyone who is hostile to the Christian way of life as they view it, Donald Trump is going to fight on their behalf.

Rosin: Now, you use the word transactional. Did everybody understand it was transactional? I mean, from how you described it, Trump certainly understood it was transactional: I’m going to come out there and get your vote. How did evangelical leaders understand what was happening?

Alberta: The incredible part, Hanna, is that they really did. I mean, I have all of the reporting on the record from the time to back this up. I wrote about it in my first book, American Carnage. They understood exactly the relationship that they were entering into with Donald Trump. They were under no illusions that God’s hands were on him. They didn’t believe any of that.

They didn’t even bother trying to sell that to their flocks. Really, what they said was: Look, this is a crummy situation. We’ve got a binary choice. There are multiple Supreme Court justices hanging in the balance here. And if you care about abortion—which is the number-one issue for a lot of these folks—then you have an obligation to vote for this person, no matter how gross and wretched we find his personal conduct to be.

Rosin: This is the beginning of the first election. This is their attitude. Now we’re just at the beginning of the Trump administration.

Alberta: That’s right. And so what starts as this transactional relationship, it morphs into something else entirely. What we see today is this fanatical, cult-like attachment to Donald Trump in some quarters of the evangelical universe. Now, I say some quarters because I really need to stress this point. When we talk about white evangelicals in this country, we’re talking about tens of millions of people, right?

They are not a monolith. We have to understand that these are points plotted across this vast spectrum. So on the one hand—on the one end of that spectrum, I should say—of course you have some of these folks who are just all in on Trump. They have almost sold their souls for Trumpism, and they view him as a messianic figure. They really do. And they’ll tell you that.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have some of these white evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016, held their nose, begged for forgiveness after doing so, but they still cared so much about the abortion issue that they felt compelled to do so.

And then pretty quickly thereafter, they walked away from it all and washed their hands and said, I cannot be a part of this. Right?

And then in the middle, you’ve got the great majority of these folks who are floating somewhere in the middle of this, trying to figure out, you know, I find this guy abhorrent, but I’m also terrified of what I see from the left. I can’t possibly vote for Trump again, but I can’t vote for somebody who’s pro-choice either. What do I do?

There’s this identity crisis now deep inside the evangelical movement, where a lot of these folks feel completely lost and completely homeless. And their relationship with Trump is not something that can be sort of caricatured, because for a lot of these folks, even folks who voted for him a second time, in 2020, they find the man to be completely immoral and reprehensible.

And yet they still voted for him twice.

Rosin: Yeah, I understand the second group, the bargain they’re making. I understand the third group that regrets the bargain that they made. It’s the first group that is a mystery to me, how people came to be all in. So can you try and describe that first group to me?

Like, how did they morph from holding their nose and choosing a flawed leader to deciding that he was the messiah? How did that evolution happen?

Alberta: There are many, many, many Christians in this country who are deeply invested in the idea of sort of supernatural intervention and transformation and the idea that God speaks to us through the unlikeliest of sources.

And so for some chunk of that first group that you’re asking about, there’s no question. And I’ve talked with plenty of these folks. They believe Donald Trump is God’s instrument on Earth. And not only that, they believe that Donald Trump has become a Christian, that Donald Trump underwent a transformation while he was president, And why else would he be fighting for us the way that he’s fighting for us?

And it’s difficult to overstate just how meaningful that language of transformation is to people whose entire lives revolve around notions of transformation and of holy intercession.

Rosin: Can I ask, is there any part of you who’s familiar and knows that language that can believe that maybe he did have some kind of transformation?

Alberta: No.

Rosin: No.

Alberta: The short answer is no. And I don’t want—listen, I don’t want to be disrespectful. I don’t want to be cute in my answer here. But, you know, scripture says that by their fruit you will know them. You know, a good and healthy tree bears good and healthy fruit. If one were to just spend a day studying the language Donald Trump uses, the behavior he exhibits, the way that he treats others—you know, Jesus tells us to love our enemy and pray for those who persecute you, to turn the other cheek, to love your neighbor as yourself.

I have studied Donald Trump as closely as anyone in the last decade, and I have yet to see him exhibit any of those qualities or follow any of those biblical commands. So, I’m sorry, but no. It strikes me as entirely improbable that he has had a real encounter with the risen Christ and has committed his life to Jesus.

Rosin: One thing that is mystifying me is that now that evangelicals are so deeply in that us versus them—sort of, It’s us in a war against the evil Americans. The rest of you are not even Americans. You’re our enemies, basically—what is evangelizing?

I mean, I recall that when I spent a lot of time around evangelicals (and I am Jewish), there was nothing I could say or do or confess about myself that would prevent them from wanting to evangelize me. Like, I was always a reachable soul. Everybody was always a reachable soul. And now it seems like, What is evangelizing?

There’s a whole swath of America that just isn’t—they’re beyond contempt. You know, they’re the enemy. And so that seems very different to me than what it used to be.

Alberta: Hanna, first and foremost, people will ask, understandably, Well, what does it mean, evangelical? What does that even mean? Right? There’s always been some disagreement over the terminology itself.

And what I like to say is, Listen, at its core, there’s a verb in there, which is “to evangelize.” It is to take the gospel of Jesus Christ out to all the nations and to reach the unbelievers and to share with them this story—of not only of God’s perfect love, but of humanity’s brokenness and how God ultimately had to take on flesh and be fully God and fully man in the form of Jesus, and that Jesus was the mediator between a broken humanity and a perfect God—and to share that message with an unbelieving world so that they might see him and they might believe in him.

The problem today is that we, in the modern American context, have taken the New Testament model of what a church should be, and we have completely flipped it on its head. What I mean by that is if you study the New Testament model of what the early Church looked like and how it operated, there was boundless, abundant grace and forgiveness and kindness shown to those outside of the Church, because the thinking was: They don’t know God. They don’t know any better, so we can’t possibly hold their behavior against them. We need to show them the love of God.

But inside the Church, for fellow believers there was strict accountability. There was a very high standard. In fact, they basically said, You are held to the highest of standards for your behavior, for your language, for your conduct inside of the Church, because you do know God. You do know better.

What we see today in the American context is the complete opposite. We see, inside of the Church—despite all of the scandal, the abuse, the misconduct, the terrible behavior, the damaging rhetoric—we see forgiveness. We turn a blind eye to it. We enable it. We justify it.

But when we see those outside of the Church who disagree with us, it is nothing but condemnation. It is nothing but fire and brimstone. There is no grace. There is no forgiveness. And I just—it breaks my heart because, in so many ways, the entire identity of the Church is rooted in that mission, in that purpose of evangelizing. But we today cannot reach the outside world with that gospel of Jesus Christ, because the outside world looks at us and says, We want nothing to do with you guys. We want nothing to do with evangelicals. And it’s just, it’s tragic.

Rosin: And also vice versa, I have to say. I mean, that’s so interesting what you just said. But I was thinking, as much as I resented the millions of times that as a reporter and, you know, a Jewish person I’d have to sort of sit through people trying to evangelize me as I was trying to do my work, at least they were talking to me.

Like, at least that was like a—that was a bridge, you know? That was like, they were interested. And now I look back at that and think, like, If I were out there now, that wouldn’t happen. You know, a lot of people just wouldn’t be interested. I might be the enemy.

Alberta: Yeah, they would view you with hostility. Right?

Rosin: Yes, exactly.

Alberta: And suspicion.

Rosin: Yeah, exactly.

Alberta: Right. Which is, you know, listen, I plead guilty at times to probably—although I was just talking with a dear friend of mine, a journalist friend who’s Jewish, who told me, You know, I’m only about halfway through the book, but I have to say, you’re kind of, you’re intriguing me with your case for Jesus here.

And I said, Listen, you know, I figured that I might be annoying some of my non-Christian friends with parts of the book that are unapologetically trying to evangelize. But, ultimately, that is what we are called to do, and if we annoy people in the process, so be it. But boy, I’d rather annoy people with the gospel than denigrate them and antagonize them and dehumanize them with a twisted version of the gospel.

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be back in a moment.

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, so we’ve talked about the evangelical movement as a whole. Let’s talk about your own story. Your father was a pastor.

Alberta: Yes, he was. The Dr. Reverend Richard J. Alberta. My dad was an amazing guy who would have been the unlikeliest candidate to ever become a pastor. He was an atheist, actually, and he was working in finance in New York and making a lot of money and had a beautiful house and a Cadillac and a beautiful wife, my mother, and they had it all. They were flying high, living the dream.

And my dad, he just felt this rumbling emptiness. Something was missing in his life. And what could it possibly be? I mean, you look from the outside in: What could you possibly be missing? And so, he set out looking. And that search led him to a little church in the Hudson Valley called Goodwill. And it was there that he heard the gospel for the first time, and he gave his life to Jesus that day.

And it was a pretty radical transformation in his life. Suddenly he was waking up at 4 in the morning to read the Bible for hours, silently meditating, praying. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. She was not a Christian at the time. And then things got even weirder, because not long after that, he felt the Lord calling him to enter the ministry. And my mom had just become a Christian at this point, but she and his brothers and parents and their friends—everybody who knew him—thought that he’d lost his mind. And he just said, Listen, I don’t know what to tell you, but I feel an anointing from God to do this with my life. And so he did.

They left everything behind. They sold all their possessions. They spent the next couple of decades living on food stamps, working in little churches around the country. And eventually they put down roots at a church called Cornerstone, in Brighton, Michigan, which is where I grew up.

Rosin: Wow, you know, no matter how many times I’ve heard conversion stories like that, it’s very hard for me to, like, know or understand what that spark is.

Alberta: It’s hard to describe just how radical of a change that was for him and for his life and how much he sacrificed for it.

And my dad’s always been my hero because of that, because I think there are very few people in this life with the courage to follow a conviction in the way that he did.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so let’s take those feelings that you have about your dad, and it seems like belief has lived on in you, and overlay them on the political transformation that you’re describing. Because it sounds like from what you write in the book, your father went through that whole political transformation.

He started out suspicious of politics. He started out thinking Trump was a narcissist and a liar. And then over time, you watched him go through the same changes that you watched the rest of the evangelical community go through, right? Like, it started to feel to you, as you write in the book, like he was justifying some of the things that Trump has done. Did I get that right?

Alberta: Yeah, that’s right. And I would be clear—not just, like, to defend my dad’s honor or whatever, because I’ve been very open in discussing all of this, and I try to just be completely transparent in the book—but my dad was never, like, a Trumper, but he did become sort of defensive around Trump.

And I think the explanation I ultimately reached there was that my dad felt guilty, frankly, about voting for Trump. I think he felt vulnerable almost, because, again, here was someone who had lived his life in such an incredibly upright manner, who taught his kids to know right from wrong, who wouldn’t cheat anybody out of a penny.

It just, like, you know, he set a standard for us. And then he votes for this guy who was, in so many ways, just, like, a walking rebuke to everything that he’d ever taught us about how to be a man, how to be a husband, how to be a neighbor. And I think he felt guilty about it.

And he and I would sort of go back and forth on this and, ultimately, I would say that to him, which I think was, like, the deepest cut of all.

I’d say, Pop, like, you’re the one who taught me right from wrong. Like, Don’t be mad at me for acting on it. Like, This guy, what he’s doing, what he’s saying, it’s wrong.”

And I think that when we would have those conversations, I could sense in him this feeling that, you know, attacks on Trump’s character became an attack on his character, that he processed criticisms of Trump as criticisms of him personally.

And I think a lot of evangelicals felt that way. And in some strange sense, that almost drove them deeper into the Trump bunker, where if they were to concede any criticism, any attack on Trump as being legitimate, then it was sort of ipso facto a legitimate attack on them. And that was the sort of weird dynamic that took hold in my relationship with my dad.

Rosin: So, okay, here we are coming on another election. What do you think the future of evangelicals is in the near future, the next election?

Alberta: So Trump is obviously the runaway favorite to win the Republican nomination, and that is due, in no small part, to his continued stranglehold on the evangelical vote. What’s interesting, I would add as a quick aside, is that we really saw, for the first time, Trump’s support with those voters beginning to dip after the 2022 midterms, when Republicans underperformed so badly.

And then Trump responded to the results of the midterms by throwing the pro-life movement under the bus, basically saying it was their fault that Republicans had lost all these races. And Trump saw his numbers decline pretty noticeably with those voters.

But then something happened. Alvin Bragg delivered that first indictment of Donald Trump, which was, of course, then followed by all these subsequent indictments. And you saw Trump’s numbers with those same evangelical voters who had started to bail on him, they went right back up, and they have continued apace.

And I mention all that just to say that this idea of a persecution complex is so deeply embedded in the evangelical psyche. When Donald Trump goes to these rallies and says, you know, We are under siege. They’re coming for us. They’re coming for me first so that they can get to you, these people, they believe that deep in their bones. That is their entire political consciousness at this point.

So Donald Trump is almost surely going to win the Republican nomination, but transitioning to the general election next November, I don’t necessarily foresee any great defection of these white evangelical voters away from Donald Trump. He’s won roughly 80 percent of them in the last two elections. And if he is the Republican nominee in 2024, as we expect, he’ll probably win about that same rough percentage.

However, the thing that I have observed, and the thing that I would point out to our listeners to keep a very close eye on in the coming year, is that this is the first post-Roe v. Wade presidential election held in this country. And for so long, for 50 years, single-issue evangelical voters have been mobilized to turn out in presidential elections because of the abortion issue, because of the federal stakes, because of Supreme Court vacancies hanging in the balance. This is the first election where that will no longer be the case.

We now have abortion as a decentralized, defederalized issue. So you see all of the mobilization at the grassroots level in the states over abortion, but not in a federal framing.

Now with Roe v. Wade having fallen, there’s real consideration being given by a lot of these folks to either vote for a third party or even just perhaps to stay home and not vote at all, because they no longer feel obligated, they no longer feel compelled to choose the lesser of two evils in a presidential context because the abortion issue is pretty much off the table.

So you could see some significant drop off in terms of the raw votes cast by evangelicals in this upcoming election, and that would be unprecedented.

Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so what happens if Trump wins? What happens if Trump loses? What do those two scenarios look like?

Alberta: Well, if Trump wins, the folks around him who are advising him, they have made no secret of the fact that there will be elements of an explicitly Christian nationalist agenda pursued in a second Trump term. In fact, the West Wing will be populated by some individuals who would openly identify as Christian nationalists.

Some of them would probably even openly identify as theocrats, or at least if you stuck the needle of truth serum into their veins. So when Donald Trump, for instance, recently on the campaign trail, floated this idea of no longer allowing non-Christian migrants to enter the country, Trump said that a few weeks ago, and I mean, we just barely even batted an eye, right?

But that is the sort of idea now circulating inside Trump’s orbit, and there are a lot of people around him who really, truly, deeply believe in this idea now of partisan politics as a proxy for good versus evil.

And these are the folks who will be helping to shape the legislative agenda inside of the Trump White House. I think we need to buckle up if, in fact, Trump is elected, because some of this talk of a holy war, of a spiritual battle, good versus evil—we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of what we could see if Trump were to be elected again.

Rosin: Oh, that sounds very undemocratic and un-American to me. Okay, and what if he loses?

Alberta: Well, if he loses, boy, I mean, I think the question becomes, for a lot of these folks, you know, Donald Trump was able to sell himself as a martyr once, right—in 2020 with the “Stop the Steal” and “the election was rigged” and all of this—and if he loses again, does the label of “consistent loser,” does that somehow break the spell?

Is there some opportunity here for some of these evangelicals to sort of step back and reevaluate their relationship with Trump and wonder? Okay, maybe we’ve been investing too much in the political arena. If, in fact, we believe that there are these great moral problems in America, then maybe the solutions aren’t political. Maybe we need to reevaluate.

That could happen. I pray that it does. Or the exact opposite could happen. There could be a doubling down or a tripling down. And there could be an attempt to—I mean, I hate to even voice this, but I mean, January 6 was not an outlier. It was not something that we should have been surprised by.

And if you study some of the behavior, some of the calls to arms—figurative and literal—that we see coming out of some of these far-right evangelical spaces, this could turn into something really dangerous.

And I think that is why, even if you are not an evangelical Christian yourself, even if you are not a believer, even if you are not an adherent to any sort of religious tradition, you should be paying very close attention to this. And I wrote this book for you as much as for anyone else, because we have to understand that in the interest of holding together a pluralistic society, these schisms inside the Church, they have to be addressed, and they have to be addressed soon.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. I think we’re going to hang on to the phrase, or it sounds like you’re going to hang on to the phrase, break the spell. I mean, that’s what you’re hoping for.

Alberta: That is what I’m hoping for. I think we should all be hoping for it, but I’m not holding my breath at the same time.

Rosin: All right. Well, Tim, you’ve explained a lot to me. Thank you for coming on the show.

Alberta: Thank you for having me, Hanna. This has been great.

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

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

For the second consecutive time, the Oxford English Dictionary crowned an internet-slang term its word of the year. This year’s choice—rizz—is meaningful only to the extent that it reminds us of the dictionary’s role as a responsive, living object.

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‘Here Lies Rizz’

The reason I know what rizz means is so inane, it’s not even worth getting into. It involves a TikTok video, and a tweet about the video, and an explainer article I read to try to decrypt the meaning of the sentence “Livvy rizzed him up; Livvy even hugged Baby Gronk” over the summer. Rizz, which refers to someone’s ability to flirt by being charismatic, was never a word I thought all that much about. But the fact that it was just crowned the word of the year by the Oxford English Dictionary is a reminder that a dictionary is a dynamic corpus, evolving right alongside language and capable of responding even to internet phenomena that are just entering the mainstream.

People tend to think of the dictionary as old and fusty, which is partly why the dissonance of seeing it address slang—the dictionary knows what rizz is?—makes us laugh. But the job of a good dictionary is to keep up closely with new interventions in how we talk. The selection of the word of the year differs a bit from a dictionary’s everyday work; Jonathan Dent, a senior editor at Oxford English Dictionary, described it in an email as a chance to “take a snapshot of a particular aspect of language use,” noting that it remains to be seen whether rizz “sticks around long enough” to make it into the OED’s dictionaries. The project of naming a word of the year highlights the dictionary’s role as a descriptive project rather than a prescriptive one, my colleague Caleb Madison, The Atlantic’s crossword editor (who has worked at OED), told me.

Especially in the digital age, dictionaries have many tools to trace how people use language. Because language changes so quickly on the internet, those who compile and update the dictionary turn to the public for information: What words are people searching for, or using in online conversations? That participation is literal during the selection process for the word of the year: Since 2022, OED has asked the public to narrow down a provided shortlist of words of the year to four finalists, before editors make the ultimate call. Think of a dictionary less like a natural-history museum and more like a zoo, Caleb suggests. Its role is not just to teach us about the past and what is settled but to explore what is happening now, in the wild.

Rizz emerged on internet and gaming platforms before it seeped out toward a wider audience (Tom Holland seemingly helped matters by using the word in an interview). The word is distinctive for linguistic reasons: abbreviations are not usually pulled from the middle of a longer word. Rizz, which is derived from the word charisma, joins the small but distinguished company of words such as fridge in this regard. Also, Caleb noted, “a double-Z ending is funny and fun to say.” (Z, he added, is a 10-point Scrabble letter.) Other organizations have taken notice: Rizz was a runner-up for the American Dialect Society’s word of the year in 2022, losing out to the suffix -ussy. In September of this year, Merriam-Webster announced that it had added rizz to its dictionary, alongside goated, cromulent, and bussin’, and it also noted rizz as one of the year’s top words.

For decades now, dictionaries have been naming words of the year in an apparent effort to capture the zeitgeist and get people talking about words (OED began doing so in 2004). Reading a list of past OED words of the year offers a portal to moments in language: We can recall a recent era when terms such as GIF and podcast felt novel. Sometimes, the words capture the dominant political tensions of the time: climate emergency in 2019, and post-truth in 2016. In 2020, no single word was chosen, and in 2021 it was vax. Last year, the term was borrowed from internet culture too: goblin mode. As Caleb wrote at the time, going “goblin mode” is to look inward and indulge our private weirdness. “As we emerge from our caves after that long hibernation, our goblin-selves lurk somewhere deep inside us, beckoning us back home to vibe out,” he wrote. This year’s term (along with finalists such as Swiftie and situationship) is more social and reliant on turning toward others, perhaps a reflection of a shifting societal mood.

A dictionary is not prescriptive, but the word-of-the-year designation can help reify a word’s presence in popular culture. It can also risk making it uncool. Slang terms inherently run counter to mainstream vocabulary and the lexicon of those in power, but crowning something the word of the year thrusts it further into common parlance. Rizz, used online by Gen Z—and even the next generation, Gen Alpha—has now been pushed into the consciousness of people who read the dictionary (as well as news reports, and newsletters like this one). The word of the year provides a temperature check on how people are using language—or, at least, how the people who work at the dictionary see us using language, Caleb said. But when it comes to a slang term’s cool factor, he said, “I tend to think of it as a gravestone … Here lies rizz.”

Related:

We’re all capable of going “goblin mode.” Why AI doesn’t get slang

Today’s News

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in ​​Moore v. United States, which could have sweeping ramifications on the American tax system. Israeli troops have entered Khan Younis, Hamas’s last major stronghold in Gaza. Tens of thousands of residents have fled amid a deepening humanitarian crisis. The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania testified before the House regarding anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents on their campuses since October 7.

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The Weekly Planet: The United Nations climate summit is the one place the countries suffering most from climate change can face down the countries causing it, Zoë Schlanger writes.

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Evening Read

Cole Barash

Ammon Bundy Has Disappeared

By Jacob Stern

Two weeks before chaos hit St. Luke’s hospital in Boise, Idaho—before Ammon Bundy showed up with an armed mob and the hospital doors had to be sealed and death threats crashed the phone lines—a 10-month-old baby named Cyrus Anderson arrived in the emergency room.

The boy’s parents, Marissa and Levi, knew something wasn’t right: For months, Cyrus had been having episodes of vomiting that wouldn’t stop. When he arrived in the ER, he weighed just 14 pounds, which put him in the .05th percentile for his age. Natasha Erickson, the doctor who examined him, had seen malnutrition cases like this in textbooks but never in real life. Cyrus’s ribs were clearly visible through his chest. When he threw up, his vomit was bright green.

Erickson hooked the baby up to an IV and a feeding tube, and he slowly started to gain weight. But Levi and Marissa were anxious to leave. They were members of an anti-government activist network that Bundy, the scion of America’s foremost far-right family, had founded, and they shared his distrust of medical and public-health authorities.

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Culture Break

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Listen. Forty years ago, scientists turned the tide in the roach wars. Why doesn’t anyone remember? Daniel Engber and Hanna Rosin discuss in the latest episode of Radio Atlantic.

Watch. A new documentary about the pioneering sex researcher Shere Hite (in theaters) points to the barriers that women face when writing candidly about intimacy and power.

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The Atlantic is today launching the fifth season of its popular How To podcast series with How to Keep Time, an exploration of our relationship with time and how to reclaim it. For the new season, The Atlantic’s Becca Rashid returns as co-host (and producer), now joined by Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost. How to Keep Time follows the show’s past seasons, which have explored such related topics as how to build a happy life (with Arthur C. Brooks), how to talk to people (with Julie Beck), and how to start over (with Olga Khazan).

Over the course of six episodes, in How to Keep Time, Becca and Ian will look into fundamental questions around our relationship with time, including why we can feel like there’s never enough time in a day; what cultural myths get in the way of using time to build connections; why so many of us are compelled to record time and document our lives; and even how an understanding of theoretical physics can inform our relationship with time, the universe, and ourselves.

The first episode, which is now available, discusses the time-maximizing myths of the modern era––notably, the idea that some perfect future exists in which we are “on top of everything” and our time is fully in our control. The author Oliver Burkeman argues that this romantic thinking is exactly what makes it challenging to avoid future-focused thinking and just lean into the moment. The episode further explores how to rethink time wasted as time well spent.

With an aim to make self-reflection and introspection a vital component of daily life, the How To series provides insights from social scientists, writers, and a range of experts on how to think about our lives, how to think about ourselves, and how to live well with others. The fifth season arrives as the culmination of an ambitious year of audio offerings at The Atlantic. In May, The Atlantic relaunched its flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, with Hanna Rosin as the new host. Earlier in the year was the launch of the narrative podcast Holy Week, hosted by Vann R. Newkirk II, about the uprisings that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and how those seven days––one of the most fiery, disruptive, and contentious weeks in American history––diverted the course of a social revolution.

Episodes of How to Keep Time will be released each Monday, and listeners can subscribe here or wherever they listen to podcasts.

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