This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and lawyers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, in the city of Enerhodar, in eastern Ukraine, is Europe’s largest nuclear facility. For decades, it has supplied electricity to millions of households, not just in Ukraine, but in Hungary, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Slovakia, and Romania as well. Until two years ago, more than 50,000 people lived in Enerhodar. Eleven thousand worked at the plant, and nearly everyone in Enerhodar had some sort of connection to it.

When Russia began its invasion, in 2022, it moved aggressively into the Zaporizhzhia region, raising fears about the safety of the plant. On February 27, 2022, just three days into the offensive, a Russian convoy advanced toward Enerhodar. For the next three days, as employees of the Zaporizhzhia plant, known as the ZNPP, worked to keep it running, residents took to the streets in an attempt to stop Russian military vehicles and troops from entering. The mayor tried to negotiate directly with the Russians.

But residents’ hopes that the Russians wouldn’t dare attack the nuclear facility were misplaced. On March 3, there were reports that troops had started to shoot at the crowd. That night, one part of the Russian column entered the city center while the other advanced to the nuclear facility. The Ukrainian National Guard engaged Russian forces outside the plant, but soon shelling from Russian tanks started a fire, which continued to burn as Russian troops blocked firefighters from entering the plant’s perimeter. A ZNPP worker said residents scrambled to find potassium-iodide pills in case the fighting unleashed a wave of radiation.

Nuclear plants must be continuously staffed to avoid the risk of a meltdown. Another ZNPP worker recalled staying on the job for 30 straight hours, until Russian soldiers finally allowed the next shift to enter the facility. By the morning of March 4, the plant was entirely in Russian hands. About a week later, employees of Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear corporation, arrived at the ZNPP to take operational control. On March 12, the Russian forces occupying the ZNPP reportedly declared that it was “now a Rosatom station.” They had, in effect, stolen the largest power plant on the continent.

A Russian soldier at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southeastern Ukraine (Magnum)

Though the fighting at the plant had stopped, the danger was not over. The ZNPP is a Soviet-built facility, but it had been reconfigured and modernized after the 2011 disaster at Fukushima, in Japan. As a result, Rosatom could not fully substitute its own technicians and staff. All of the plant’s six reactors have now been shut down, and the plant is not actively producing electricity, but the reactors still need to be cooled around the clock to prevent them from releasing radioactive material, a process that requires specialized technicians, divers, and other staff, all with training in the specific parameters of the ZNPP.

Even in peaceful times, work at a nuclear-power plant is a high-stress proposition: Small mistakes can lead to disastrous results. Before the occupation, the ZNPP maintained rules, endorsed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, governing who was allowed to enter and work at the plant, including a licensing process for operators that can take almost a decade, and screenings by psychologists. But now the plant is severely understaffed: Whereas 11,000 employees once ran the facility, only about 3,000 people were working there as of last month. These employees are pulling longer shifts with fewer days off.

Ukrainians who stayed on to work at the plant say they did so under duress. Employees report that Russian occupiers coerced them into adopting Russian citizenship and signing contracts with Rosatom. According to a recent IAEA report, the plant has announced that workers still officially employed by Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear company, are barred from the site. The workforce “now consists of former Energoatom employees who have adopted Russian citizenship and signed employment contracts with the Russian operating entity, as well as staff who have been sent to the ZNPP from the Russian Federation.”

On top of that, current and former employees of the ZNPP, some of whom escaped past enemy lines, have said that Russia brutalized the plant’s dwindling workforce, resorting to torture to keep workers in line. They also report that Russia is violating international law by using the plant as a military staging ground, further increasing the risks to the facility. This claim has been supported by satellite evidence.  

From the start of the war, Energoatom has objected to the occupation of the ZNPP, and raised alarms about the dangers the plant faces. Recently, the IAEA has also issued warnings about the degrading state of the ZNPP and the continued potential for a meltdown. In February, it issued a bulletin warning that the plant’s last backup external power line had been disrupted, creating a “precarious” situation. Today, the IAEA’s director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, met with President Vladimir Putin and Alexei Likhachev, the head of Rosatom, in a closed-door session to discuss his concerns about the plant. But the agency has thus far been ineffectual in compelling Russia to cooperate, and its authority does not extend to claims of human-rights abuses away from the plant, even when they involve employees.

The result is a crisis unprecedented in the history of nuclear power. A disaster at the facility would be most immediately harmful to the people living near it. But the ZNPP is located in the watershed of the Dnipro River, which flows through southern Ukraine and into the Black Sea. If a meltdown occurs at the ZNPP and affects the waterways, experts indicate that all of southern Ukraine might be at risk for contamination.  

Traces of shrapnel at the power plant (Magnum) Nets that are supposed to protect the power plant from drone attacks (Magnum)

In their stories of working at the ZNPP after the Russian occupation began, several sources describe incidents of detentions, interrogations, and torture. Kostiantyn Chebaievskyi worked at the ZNPP until August 2022, when he says he was arrested at the end of his shift and imprisoned by Russians. Chebaievskyi says he was accused of communicating with Ukrainian authorities and that interrogators beat him and tried to force him to make a false confession. Other people employed at the ZNPP at the time say that cells intended to hold four to six people were used to detain up to 20 prisoners without any food, save what their relatives were able to bring on visits.

Chebaievskyi says that one form of torture involved what his captors called “a phone call to Lenin.” According to Chebaievskyi, the men would clip one cable to his earlobe and another to his finger, and then interrogate him while they turned the crank on a modified field telephone that would deliver a shock. “Everything goes dark,” he said. “All that you see is white lighting.” Chebaievskyi said that the interrogators repeated the procedure over and over, demanding to know his supposed contact in Ukraine. He also reported that some prisoners were forced to give interviews for Russian television crews, reciting prewritten scripts that were complimentary toward Russia. Chebaievskyi was released after 18 days, and then managed to escape from the city.

Other ZNPP employees corroborate allegations of abuse and torture. Volodymyr Zhaivoronok is a 50-year-old former equipment operator who says he was imprisoned for 53 days, many of them in the same cell where Chebaievskyi ended up. Zhaivoronok says Russian personnel beat the prisoners, targeting their backs, necks, and shoulders. “One is bringing you into the room, and another six people come there,” Zhaivoronok told me and my colleagues at the Reckoning Project. “They come in with batons, pistols.” He recalled that the torture room was covered in blood, and prisoners were forced to clean it. Zhaivoronok said that during one of the sessions, his torturers shot him in the side with a rubber bullet.

Zhaivoronok said he witnessed the death of Andrii Honcharuk, who worked as a diver in the plant’s water tanks. According to Zhaivoronok, in July 2022, Honcharuk was interrogated and beaten, after which he fainted and his breathing stopped. “We managed to scream loud enough to make them call an ambulance,” Zhaivoronok said. The guards allowed medics to take Honcharuk to the hospital, but he did not survive.

The Russians changed their interrogation methods after Honcharuk’s death, Zhaivoronok said, and beatings became less violent. Still, one employee I talked with last year, Kira, said that abuses continued. On the day we spoke, in July 2023, I could still see bruises on her face and arms. She had just fled 75 miles through Russian territory. Her escape had taken days.

Kira is in her early 30s, and worked at the ZNPP for the past five years. (She asked that we withhold her real name and information about her job at the ZNPP because she fears for her safety.) After the Russian occupation, she said, she and other Ukrainian ZNPP personnel continued running the facility under the watch of armed Russian soldiers.

On July 20, Kira said, eight to 10 armed men suddenly broke into her house. They wore bulletproof vests over civilian clothes, and covered their faces. She assumes that the men were with the FSB, Russia’s security service. According to Kira, the men blindfolded her with a rag, but she managed to work out that they were taking her to a local police station. She said they beat her and asked her about the location of her partner, who also worked at the ZNPP. She replied that she didn’t know where he was. “Oh, the hell you don’t know,” she heard the men say.

Kira said she was beaten and tortured, and that the men attached electrical cables to her ears: “‘I don’t know anything, I don’t know anything!’ I screamed.” Kira said that the rag covering her eyes slipped, and she saw that the torturers were beating her with a rolled-up ream of paper. She recalled that they beat her over the head, which resulted in a broken blood vessel in one eye, and the bruises that I saw. She said that the men also shoved a gun in her mouth.

“They beat me powerfully, on the floor; they knocked me to the floor,” she said. “One beat me with some kind of cord, some kind of white cable.” She said another man stepped on her face. “When I was on the floor, I was told: ‘Now we’ll call the Chechens; they like girls like you.’” Kira said the men dialed a number and she heard a voice talking on the other end. “Nobody came and raped me, but I was imagining how I could commit suicide by hanging myself up on my trousers.”  

Russian soldiers inside the power plant (Magnum)

In addition to these alleged human-rights abuses—and the stresses they placed on besieged employees—Russia and Rosatom have behaved in other ways that jeopardize the safety of the entire region. In previous Reckoning Project reporting in The Atlantic, on Russia’s disastrous occupation of the inactive Chernobyl nuclear plant, eyewitnesses insisted that Russian forces brought dangerous weapons, equipment, and vehicles to the plant and operated the equipment in close proximity to nuclear materials. The Russian forces appeared to be using the facility to stash military equipment, apparently hoping that the Ukrainian forces would avoid a direct attack on the plant for fear of spreading radiation contamination—the Russians were using the Chernobyl plant as a “nuclear shield.”

ZNPP employees claimed in 2022 that their plant also became a shield. They reported that they heard what they believed to be Russian mortar shells launched from within or near ZNPP territory, and also saw Russian military equipment in crucial locations of the plant, including turbine halls near reactors. This equipment included armored personnel carriers and trucks, tanks, anti-aircraft systems, and rocket launchers. These sources also stated that Russian soldiers—possibly hundreds of them—have been deployed to the plant, and have complete access to spaces designated for evacuation and sheltering. These claims were supported in a September 2023 report, commissioned by Greenpeace, that used satellite imagery to identify signs of military activity in the vicinity of the plant. An accident involving military equipment and ordnance could damage the systems needed to cool the reactors, and could lead to a leak of radioactive material.  

The operation of Zaporizhzhia, like that of all nuclear-power plants, is subject to international law, and to regular inspections by the IAEA, a treaty organization that reports to the United Nations. Since the beginning of the occupation, the IAEA and its director general, Grossi, have made several visits to Ukraine and to the ZNPP in particular, and have offered ongoing assistance to the plant’s administrators. In May, Grossi told the UN Security Council that the situation at the ZNPP “continues to be extremely fragile and dangerous,” and noted that the plant did not have enough staff to maintain safety measures, even with the reactors shut down. Grossi added that there had been seven occasions since the occupation began when the plant lost off-site power and had to rely on diesel generators, “the last line of defence against a nuclear accident.” (The plant has since suffered another external power loss.) In that address, Grossi asked that Russia abide by certain principles in its operation of the plant, including refraining from using it for military weapon storage.

By its own admission, the IAEA, which declined comment for this story through a spokesperson, has struggled to change Russia’s behavior. In September, Grossi reported that ensuring Russia was following accepted international principles had been impossible. IAEA inspectors were not allowed into crucial areas in the ZNPP to check them for explosives, and they heard explosions and other military activity near the vicinity of the plant. Other inspections, including some conducted last week, have found mines placed around the perimeter of the plant in violation of the IAEA’s outlined principles. Last month, Grossi made his fourth trip to the ZNPP, this time citing concerns that staffing levels remained low. Grossi has alluded to “unprecedented psychological pressure” on the existing staff—but allegations of torture outside the plant itself do not fall within the IAEA’s mandate.

The IAEA’s inability to avert the risks at the ZNPP exposes the weaknesses of international law in times of war. There’s little the agency can do to pressure Russia into improving conditions at the plant. (Full details about Grossi’s conversation today with Putin are not currently known, but Grossi did warn Russian authorities against trying to restart the plant. Russian state media described the talks as “tense.”) According to Serhii Plokhy, the Ukrainian American historian and author of Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disaster, this situation illuminates the necessity of reforming international treaties to make attacks on nuclear power a global red line. “Never in history have nuclear facilities been occupied by armed forces,” Plokhy told me. He added that it is now clear that there is no leverage to force combatants to respect nuclear safety, which could encourage recklessness in future conflicts.

Today, according to Grossi, the ZNPP is the single most vulnerable nuclear facility in the world. Petro Kotin, the head of Energoatom, says that even though all six reactors are shut down, the nuclear fuel within them continues to emit radiation, and will soon reach the end of its six-year recommended life span. Failing to remove the fuel, Kotin wrote last month, “may lead to the destruction of the integrity of the fuel cells and, as a result, to a radiation accident.” According to Kotin, the only way to know if the fuel is still safe would be to conduct a special analysis—one that few employees remaining at the plant are qualified to do.

That concern is just one of many. As the IAEA has noted recently, after several recent power outages, all backup external power lines to the plant are now inoperable, meaning the on-site diesel generators are the only option in the case of an emergency. The Kakhovka reservoir, which was used as the main water source for cooling the ZNPP’s reactors, also provided water for homes, farms, and industry in the area. But in June 2023, the Kakhovka dam, which maintains the reservoir, exploded. The exact cause is still unclear, but the dam was under the control of Russian soldiers at the time. The explosion led to flooding in numerous Ukrainian towns. But it also meant that, in order to cool its reactors, the power plant now has to rely on on-site spray ponds, for which ZNPP employees dug several groundwater wells, a solution that Grossi says is unsustainable. And as fighting continues in the region, the risk of a military accident remains an urgent concern.

The situation at the ZNPP is precarious, but not yet hopeless. Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear-power safety at the U.S.-based nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, describes the current condition as an “uneasy status quo.” Lyman says that the biggest threat to the ZNPP now “is either deliberate sabotage, or the plant being caught in an all-out battle,” which could cause substantial damage to multiple reactors and safety systems. Lyman is skeptical of the possibility of a Chernobyl-style meltdown. “If there was just an accident, internally or as a result of a single explosion, you would likely see a slower and probably smaller release that wouldn’t disperse as far,” Lyman told The Atlantic.

Because all of the reactors at the plant are shut down, there is an “additional safety margin,” Lyman said: ZNPP employees would likely have days, rather than hours, to address an accident. But if they struggle to respond adequately, “then the progression of the accident is not going to be much different from what you saw at Fukushima.” In that worst-case outcome, Lyman and the IAEA agree, the area immediately surrounding the plant could become significantly contaminated. Radiation could enter local waterways and affect people in communities across the south of Ukraine for years to come.

According to Kotin, theorizing about the most likely nuclear disasters is beside the point. He says that as long as the ZNPP is being used as a military base, there will always be a likelihood of some kind of incident, one that would be devastating to the people working and living in Enerhodar, people who already bear the scars of war and occupation.

Additional reporting was provided by Angelina Kariakina, Inna Zolotukhina, and Hanna Sylayeva.

Spain's Minister of Labour, Yolanda Díaz, suggested earlier closing times for restaurants sparking widespread outrage. Díaz said the current timings are out of step with the rest of Europe.

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In our April cover story, my colleague Franklin Foer explores how anti-Semitism on both the right and the left threatens to end a period of unprecedented safety and prosperity for American Jews—and the liberal order they helped establish. Frank and I chatted last week about the past and future of anti-Semitism, and about some lesser-understood moments in American Jewish history.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The Supreme Court once again reveals the fraud of originalism, Adam Serwer argues. The Supreme Court is not up to the challenge. Where did evangelicals go wrong? What is going on with Europe’s economy?

What Liberalism Did

Isabel Fattal: You write that “part of the reason I failed to appreciate the extent of the anti-Semitism on the left is that I assumed its criticisms of the Israeli government were, at bottom, a harsher version of my own.” How did October 7 change this thinking for you?

Franklin Foer: For a long time, I didn’t actually think that anti-Semitism was an American problem. And then Donald Trump happens, and it’s clear that he’s given this green light to white supremacists who existed in the dark alleyways of American life. Suddenly anti-Semitism starts to become something that’s much more present, much more socially acceptable in America.

But I had assumed that it was more menacing in its right-wing form than its left-wing form, in part because so much of the debate on the left has been about Israel, and it’s easy to bracket that off into an entirely separate conversation: They’re trying to end an occupation; they want to end what is objectively oppressive treatment of Palestinians.

But then, on October 7, it became painfully clear that there are critics of Israel who don’t believe in peaceful coexistence. A far larger swath of the left than I imagined seemed to want to see the disappearance of the state of Israel. I was also noticing the way in which Zionism became a ubiquitous term of derision in left-wing discourse. It was pretty clear that it was often being used as a synonym for Jew.

Isabel: You write that “anti-Semitism itself entails an accusation of privilege.” Can you talk a bit about how the idea of privilege has always been an element of anti-Semitic theorizing?

Frank: As a concept, anti-Semitism has a tendency to break people’s brain, because it just falls outside of every single taxonomy we use to describe racial and ethnic hatred. We’re used to understanding racism as a power dynamic—oppressors and the oppressed. But anti-Semitism is something very different. It’s an accusation that a secret cabal of people has obtained power by nefarious means and is pulling the strings. It’s exactly what people end up saying on campus all the time. Oh, we’re being shut down because of the donors. Oh, the Zionists control the universities; the Zionists control the media. They’re not saying Jew, but they might as well be. It’s the same old hideous tropes.

Isabel: Jews do hold power in American life and politics today, but there’s another way to have that conversation, isn’t there?

Frank: Right. There’s a way to have that discussion without having to deploy all of the nasty stereotypes, and without turning it into a conspiratorial accusation. Part of my piece is making the argument that American Jewish success is this incredible historical anomaly. Jews have risen to places of incredible power in American politics, society, and institutions. But that’s not a conspiracy. It’s a happy fact of living in a country where ancient stereotypes and blood-and-soil nationalism haven’t ruled the society.

Isabel: Your story explores the idea that liberalism was co-authored and championed by Jewish Americans. Can you speak a bit about that heritage?

Frank: One of the things I wasn’t able to really get into in the piece is that the connection between Jews and liberalism goes back even before they came to America. When Jews were emancipated in Europe, the arrival of liberalism allowed Jews to escape the ghetto and to participate in society as something close to full citizens.

And then you get to America, where Jews were able to do even better with liberalism than they had in Europe, because in Europe there was always this devil’s bargain: If you wanted to participate in France, you had to do it as a Frenchman. You couldn’t do it as a Jewish French person. One of the things that made this country so extraordinary was that you could participate as an American citizen and you didn’t have to give up your identity. That was what emerged in the 20th century, and it was an idea that Jews helped refine and then introduce to the rest of the world.

Isabel: Right, and then you have Jews engaging in the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, sharing common cause with other Americans.

Frank: I grew up in a Jewish world where this became almost mythological—the idea of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wearing his yarmulke and marching next to Martin Luther King Jr.

Isabel: How did this relationship between American Jews and the American left start to rupture?

Frank: Just after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, there was this broad sense that Israel was an underdog country. It was actually a liberal cause for a lot of that period: Because of anti-Semitism, progressives fervently believed that there should be a haven for this people who just escaped the Holocaust. Then the Six-Day War happens and Israel conquers territory filled with Palestinian refugees. Israel then suddenly gets cast as a colonial oppressor.

Other things are happening simultaneously. Above all, liberalism has also started to ebb as the dominant force in institutional life. In fact, liberalism is now under assault from both the illiberal left and the MAGA right. That’s the other main strand of the story. As liberalism has receded, anti-Semitism has begun to sprout. Liberalism, it turns out, was pretty effective at tamping down the hatred of Jews.

Isabel: Is there anything else you’d like to say to readers of this story?

Frank: I think one fair question that could be asked of the story is, is its conclusion a little bit too alarmist? I obviously can’t say exactly where things are going. Just because this is no longer a golden age doesn’t mean that we’re on the road to Nazi Germany. There are lots of other stops in between, and most of Jewish history doesn’t consist of golden ages. Ubiquitous anti-Semitism is what constitutes normal existence for much of Jewish history. Jews could still be incredibly influential and successful and can enjoy a lot of the benefits of American life while not living in a golden age.

Isabel: You’re speaking relatively to this anomalous blip in Jewish history.

Frank: Exactly.

Related:

The Golden Age of American Jews is ending. Why the most educated people in America fall for anti-Semitic lies

Today’s News

The Supreme Court decided unanimously that states cannot bar Donald Trump from running for a second term, after the Colorado Supreme Court had ruled that he was disqualified from holding office again on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment. A team of United Nations experts found what they called “reasonable grounds to believe” that victims were sexually assaulted in Hamas’s October 7 attack. Allen H. Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, pleaded guilty to felony perjury charges.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

It’s Time to Give Up on Email

By Ian Bogost

You got a new credit card, maybe, or signed up for a food-delivery service. Let the emailing begin. First there’s one to verify your new account, then a message to confirm that you’ve verified your new account, then an offer for an upgrade or a discount. A service I recently started using sent four emails for a single activity, counting log-in notices, confirmations, receipts, and confirmations of the confirmations. Workday, the software that manages HR and payroll for my office, emailed me an alert to approve the hours I had already approved. Online retailers seem to send at least three logistical emails for every order—when it’s placed, when it’s shipped, and when it’s been delivered. Then they send a handful more: a customer-satisfaction survey, a nag to fill out a customer-satisfaction survey, a thank-you for filling out a customer-satisfaction survey.

Also in your inbox: All of the email you get that is, you know, actually related to your job, your interests, or your personal life. Forget reading or responding; even just finding those messages amid the junk can be a chore. Email has felt overwhelming for a long time now, with all of its spam and scams and discount codes. But what used to be a vexatious burden is now a source of daily torment. Email cannot be reformed. Email cannot be defeated. Email can only be forsaken.

Read the full article.

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Read. “Tomato and Lettuce,” a new poem by Monica Rico.

Then, everything was garnish / two kids and a house, / a wife who kept the // beds made, shirts ironed / secrets hidden like dust // on the canned goods.”

Watch. Julio Torres’s existential comedy Problemista, in theaters, is a marvelous mixture of surrealism and social satire.

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After Super Tuesday, all of the pointless wishing for a lightning strike to change the 2024 race should end: The contest is once again an existential test of American democracy.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Houthis are very, very pleased. The Alabama embryo opinion is about more than Christian nationalism. The science behind Ozempic was wrong.

Facing the World as It Is

In previous and more normal elections, Super Tuesday was a big deal. With so many states holding primaries and caucuses, the results would clarify who would likely advance to the general election in the fall. Sometimes, front-runners fell behind, underdogs raced to the front of the pack, or a surprise changed the course of the race. Fluke results from one-off contests in Iowa or New Hampshire were quickly swept away in a broader test of popularity.

Such clarity was the whole point of Super Tuesday. As dramatic and fascinating as it was to have messy floor fights and multiple ballots at the conventions, by the 1980s, both parties wanted less drama and smoother, glossier coronations of a beloved nominee. The primaries soon took the place of arm-wrestling matches in classic, smoke-filled rooms. (As an occasional cigar smoker who thinks primaries are now dysfunctional, I would like to go back to those rooms, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Tonight, there will be almost no tension at all. Donald Trump will emerge as the numerically prohibitive front-runner for the Republican nomination; President Joe Biden will cruise to a Democratic renomination, as incumbents almost always do. We know the result already: 2024 will feature Biden versus Trump, an ordinary career politician facing off, one more time, against a would-be dictator.

No one needed Super Tuesday to predict the shape of the fall general election. Biden is an incumbent running on a good record—despite what Republicans think, Biden’s had as consequential and solid a first term as any president since Ronald Reagan—and there was virtually no chance his party was going to deny him renomination, because no sensible party would do that with a successful first-term president. (Even Jimmy Carter eventually swatted away the supposedly indestructible Ted Kennedy in 1980.)

Trump was the Republican favorite from the moment former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago in 2021 to rehabilitate Trump’s standing in the GOP. His nomination was inevitable the night most of his primary opponents raised their hand on a debate stage—one from which he was absent—and said they’d vote for him if he beat them, even if he was convicted in a court of law. Even Nikki Haley is still dithering to this very moment about whether she’d support a man who calls her “Birdbrain” and whom she has passionately argued is unfit for office.

And yet, for months now, many voters, including both Democrats and dissident Republicans, have engaged in childlike wishcasting about how the 2024 election might be different.

Some of them put their hopes in the courts, longing in vain for Trump to be disqualified from the ballot or for Special Counsel Jack Smith to clap Trump in irons before Election Day. The idea that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—who are now behaving as right-wing activists from the bench—would join hands with three Trump appointees to stop Trump was always some industrial-strength psychedelia.

The decision to leave Trump on state ballots seems (at least to me, as a non-lawyer) sensible enough, which is probably why all nine justices affirmed it. But the Court’s conservative majority is clearly playing games. If hurrying helps Trump, they move with alacrity: They decided the Colorado ballot case in 25 days. If dawdling helps Trump, they slow down: The presidential-immunity case (a crackpot theory they should not have even taken up) won’t be heard until late April. The conservative effort to seize the Court by hook or by crook—one of Mitch McConnell’s greatest and most shameful legacies—has paid off just when Trump needed it most.

Others entertained the fantasy that a Republican could knock out Trump in a primary. You may remember Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was supposed to arrive in the primaries in a flash of light that would turn Trump’s campaign to ash and leave nothing of the former president’s candidacy but a chalk outline on a sidewalk. Instead, DeSantis folded early, and I assume it is only a matter of time before he appears on a stage shaking Trump’s hand in the name of “supporting the nominee.”

Meanwhile, Democrats have been panicking for at least a year about Joe Biden, because Biden is old. As a former Republican, I find this astonishing; if you stripped Biden’s name off his record and handed it to a voter, he’d be as formidable a candidate as either party could field. But we live in a time of vibes and optics: Biden sounds old, he walks like an older man, and his occasional gaffes and mistakes are more numerous than they used to be. (Trump seems younger because he bellows and gyrates as he howls red-faced into microphones at rallies; despite the fact that much of what he says is slurred nonsense and autocratic threats, he seems more vital and active.)

Democrats have therefore plunged into their own silly wishcasting. Perhaps some magical third-party centrist will emerge from the clouds and unite the country. Why, it could be … Joe Manchin! Or a Democratic candidate will emerge to push both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris out of the picture—maybe someone like Dean Phillips! (Phillips was outperformed in the Michigan primary by the self-help writer Marianne Williamson, who at the time had already suspended her campaign.) Perhaps a reenergized left could offer a new face—how about Cornel West? What if we change the Electoral College? (This last one is a perennial favorite on social media). And of course, there’s always Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who initially ran as a Democrat but whose heart is with conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Much of this eyes-squeezed-tight wishing is linked to the peculiar American belief that presidents are godlike creatures who can make things better by fiat. Too many voters, when they encounter difficulties, create in their mind a superhero president who, if elected, will bring down the price of eggs, make the Russians go home, and end the war and suffering in Gaza. And if the current candidates are too flawed to fit that bill, Americans design one in their head.

All of this wishcasting has to end. The past year has birthed a lot of political nonsense—have I mentioned Cornel West?—but the time for such foolishness is over. Barring an act of God, or the Fickle Finger of Fate coming to rest on one of the candidates, the contest is now between Trump and Biden.

American democracy is on the ballot. Individual freedom, including reproductive rights and civil liberties, is on the ballot. The security of Europe, of the United States, of the world … all of it is on the ballot. It is time for voters to take a deep breath, deal with the world as it is, and decide what they really want when they make one of the most fateful decisions in American history.

Related:

A wild and dangerous 2024 experiment The Supreme Court is not up to the challenge.

Today’s News

Kyrsten Sinema, the independent incumbent senior senator in Arizona, announced that she will not seek reelection to the Senate. Polls close tonight on Super Tuesday, as constituents in 15 states and one territory cast their votes for the presidential nominees. In a superseding indictment, Senator Robert Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were charged with new counts of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice in the bribery case against them. The senator and his wife previously pleaded not guilty to earlier charges in the case.

Dispatches

The Trump Trials: The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Colorado case was decided out of fear, not on its merits, George T. Conway III writes. Atlantic Intelligence: Matteo Wong interviews Ross Andersen about a developing form of AI that could help us communicate with whales.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Dad Culture Has Nothing to Do With Parenting

By Saul Austerlitz

Americans spend a fair amount of time describing things as “dad.” “Dad rock” is guitar-driven music, typically from the time of the Nixon or Ford administration, with bonus points for extended drum solos or albums that feature double-gatefold illustrations of imaginary planets … “Dad energy” involves being goofy and acting like a 40-something guy, whether or not you actually are a 40-something guy. “Dad jokes” are mostly terrible puns.

These phrases all paint a picture of someone who is uncool, modestly embarrassing, and blissfully unconcerned with others’ judgments. But they have something else in common: They bear little relationship to the actual work of raising children.

Read the full article.

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Read. The Extinction of Irena Rey, a new novel by the translator and writer Jennifer Croft, challenges the dominance of the English language.

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P.S.

I’ve written about how rock artists can and should age gracefully (including some acts, such as the Tubes, who can just do whatever they want, the old scamps). But sometimes, the realization of time gone by is almost painful, especially when the power of AI helps us bring the past into the present, as it did with John Lennon’s voice in last year’s release from the Beatles, “Now and Then.” (I don’t like that I’ve now aged enough to hear “Now and Then” described with the words “the last Beatles song.”) The video uses digital magic to bring back Lennon and George Harrison to sing beside Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, and it is haunting to see it nearly 62 years since the Beatles issued their first single.

I had the same thought watching the video for Billy Joel’s new song, “Turn the Lights Back On.” It’s a lovely song, an ode to age and regret and renewal, and Joel slyly begins by taking the lyrics for “Famous Last Words” (which was supposed to be the last new song he’d ever record) off his piano’s music desk and putting them aside. The video uses AI to show Joel playing the song as various incarnations of himself from his own past: Today’s elder, bald Joel gives way to the “Piano Man” look from the early ’70s, the leather-clad Billy from the early ’80s, and finally the sunglasses-wearing, middle-aged man who left the studio in the late ’90s.

The video is an astonishing use of AI, but I have mixed feelings about it. If Billy Joel is that old and has gone through that many changes … then so have I. We usually think about such things only when we see photographs or old phone footage of ourselves—but a video like this one takes you on that entire journey in four and a half minutes.

— Tom

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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