Blinken has told allied countries that border the Black Sea they can rely on Washington's support, as Russia's war in Ukraine grinds on.

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My dentist is my enemy. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The truth about organic milk Britain is leaving the U.S. gender-medicine debate behind. Trump has transformed the GOP all the way down.

Clean Teeth, Weak Spirit

When you’re a kid, the dentist’s office is a frightening place full of loud noises and sharp instruments. But at least people speak softly to you, and at the end of all the scraping and scrubbing, you get a pat on the back and a little prize from a treasure box.

When you are an adult, there are no prizes. There is only pain.

The dentist’s office is the only place in the modern health-care system where I still expect to be unrelentingly shamed. My normal doctor tolerates me well enough, and the nurse who takes my blood pressure there is always warm and kind. My dermatologist laughs at my jokes. But my dental hygienist? She would never.

Seconds after entering the exam room, the hygienist—let’s call her Deb—is annoyed. She looks at the screen to see what she is dealing with and sighs as if to say, You again. She snaps on her rubber gloves. “All the way up,” Deb says, because I am not yet reclined on the chair. I smile nervously and go horizontal, as instructed, my legs sticking to the vinyl.

It’s important to mention, before we go any further, that I have a decent set of chompers. They are relatively straight, and a color I will call “pleasantly off-white.” I have never had a cavity as an adult; I do not drink soft drinks; I do not regularly eat candy. My breath is … fine, I think. Could I be flossing more? Sure. Should I be brushing more gently? Probably. But I am, at least in my own estimation, a pretty good—if not ideal—dental patient. Deb does not agree.

If I am due for an X-ray, Deb will spend the next few minutes jamming pointy shapes into all corners of my mouth, ignoring when I wince. Surely an X-ray would be a cinch, you might think to yourself. But you would be wrong. Normal body X-rays are straightforward, painless. Dental X-rays are stabby, pinchy. How have we, as a society, not yet found a pain-free way to send electromagnetic waves through jaws? I cannot ask Deb this question, because she is elbow-deep in my mouth, wedging plastic into my gums.

Next, we begin the cleaning process, which is very complex and involves more sighing from Deb. First, she scrapes the plaque off of my teeth with a tool that is ominously called a “scaler” and sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Then she uses her mechanical brush to grind gravelly mint toothpaste across my molars. So far, so good, I tell myself, breathing through it. Then the flossing begins. Deb performs the first vigorous round with regular floss, which breaks at least once. My gums burn and bleed. “Are we flossing regularly?” Deb asks, tilting her head to give me a better view of her judgmental frown. “Yes, but not this hard,” I reply. Then Deb does a second round of flossing with some kind of ice-cold water spout, and I dissociate.

After my soul has returned to my body, Deb offers to do a fluoride treatment for an additional $30 out of pocket. “No, thank you,” I reply politely, spitting blood into the sink. Deb frowns and says, “Next time.”

Now the dentist appears. In real life, I might find this smiling, bespectacled man sweet. But here, in this place, he is my enemy. He studies my X-rays and tells me the good news: no cavities, all clear. I start to feel hopeful; he starts to sell me Invisalign. He tells me how small and dangerously close together my teeth are. “You don’t have any issues now, but without Invisalign, you could have some serious problems down the road,” he says, a grave expression on his face. But I have already fallen for this once, when I purchased an ill-fitting Invisalign night guard for $300. “No, thank you,” I say again. I just want to go home.

“Get a new dentist!” you might advise. I have thought of this, my friend. Shopping for a new health-care provider requires time and motivation that I simply don’t have. But much more important, a new dentist doesn’t seem likely to solve the problem. Because the problem is with dentistry itself. It goes beyond the judgy bedside manner: The whole industry seems too focused on selling products and too eager to overtreat patients with expensive procedures. Plus, many standard dental treatments are “not well substantiated by research,” as Ferris Jabr once wrote in this magazine.

The dentist digs around in my mouth for a while, his cold metal tools clinging and clanging together. After a moment, he clears his throat and asks the very last question I am expecting to hear: “So, do you think Donald Trump could really win?” It is kind of my dentist to remember that I work as a political reporter; I’m sure he’s trying to brighten up this experience for me. But the only thing more unpleasant than trying to talk with your mouth full of sharp metal instruments is trying to talk about the 2024 presidential election with your mouth full of sharp metal instruments. I force a smile, as my mouth hangs open like a snake’s unhinged lower jaw. “Who knows!” I muster.

Finally, it’s over. My teeth are glimmering, but my spirit is weak. When I leave the room, Deb and the dentist watch me, their eyes downcast, as though they’re reluctant to let my teeth go home with me.

My ego will be sore for a week. So will my mouth. I have a cap on one of my front teeth because of an unfortunate apple incident a few years back. Two weeks ago at the dentist’s, that cap came loose after some overeager flossing and digging. I can feel it right now, wiggling slightly in the front of my mouth, taunting me. I’m trying to ignore it, because the truth is hard to face: The only fix is a return to the dentist.

Related:

The truth about dentistry Why dentistry is separate from medicine

Today’s News

The House passed a modified surveillance bill that reauthorizes a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for two years, two days after some House Republicans voted against an earlier version of the bill. President Joe Biden canceled $7.4 billion in student-loan debt, affecting roughly 277,000 people. The move is separate from his announcement earlier this week about a large-scale plan to forgive some or all student loans for some 30 million people. A driver ran an 18-wheeler truck into a Department of Public Safety office in Brenham, Texas, seriously injuring multiple people. The suspect is in custody, according to police.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: The Children’s Bach, by Helen Garner, is an oblique and beautiful book, Gal Beckerman writes. Atlantic Intelligence: AI has drastically improved voice recognition—a technology that researchers have long struggled with, Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote this week.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Alamy

Tupperware Is in Trouble

By Amanda Mull

For the first several decades of my life, most of the meals I ate involved at least one piece of Tupperware. My mom’s pieces were mostly the greens and yellows of a 1970s kitchen, purchased from co-workers or neighbors who circulated catalogs around the office or slipped them into mailboxes in our suburban subdivision. Many of her containers were acquired before my brother and I were born and remained in regular use well after I flew the nest for college in the mid-2000s …

The market for storage containers, on the whole, is thriving … But Tupperware has fallen on hard times. At the end of last month, for a second year in a row, the company warned financial regulators that it would be unable to file its annual report on time and raised doubts about its ability to continue as a business, citing a “challenging financial condition.” Sales are in decline. These should be boom times for Tupperware. What happened?

Read the full article.

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When the O. J. Simpson verdict was announced, I was a junior at Michigan State University. At the time, I was the managing editor of my college newspaper, The State News, so I didn’t have the luxury of reacting emotionally one way or the other. I had the responsibility of figuring out how our publication was going to present to 40,000 students this stunning outcome to what many had called “the trial of the century.”

But as I watched the verdict on the TV in our college newsroom, I immediately understood why some of the white staffers on the paper reacted with visible disgust—and why a lot of my Black friends felt relieved, even joyous, that Simpson had been found not guilty of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Although back in 1995, everyone was aware of the racial divide in this country, the trial provided stark evidence of just how sharp it was.

As a student journalist, I understood that this was a significant piece of the story. The predominantly African American jury’s not-guilty verdict seemed inseparable from the deep distrust Black people had in law enforcement, but I did not see it as a moment to celebrate. Simpson’s football achievements had received due recognition—he was a Heisman Trophy winner and an NFL Hall of Famer. But athletic prowess aside, he had long since purposefully distanced himself from the Black community, and he seemed to revel in his exceptional proximity to white America. To my mind, the message that the verdict sent about Black skepticism toward the criminal-justice system couldn’t be detached from its far-from-ideal messenger.

[Ta-Nehisi Coates: What O. J. Simpson means to me]

When Simpson’s death was announced by his family on Thursday, the racial divide that the trial had exposed came back to the surface. The CNN contributor Ashley Allison, a policy adviser for former President Barack Obama who had also worked on President Joe Biden’s campaign, said on air that the Simpson trial “represented something for the Black community” because it put a spotlight on the racial inequity that Black people commonly face in the criminal-justice system. Marc Lamont Hill, an anthropology and urban-education professor and a media commentator, summarized Simpson’s career on X in this way: “O.J. Simpson was an abusive liar who abandoned his community long before he killed two people in cold blood. His acquittal for murder was the correct and necessary result of a racist criminal legal system. But he’s still a monster, not a martyr.” Both were harshly criticized by right-leaning outlets. Despite a steady supply of evidence that the criminal-justice system does indeed treat Black people differently, when Black advocates point this out in the context of the Simpson case, they still draw condemnation.

Torrey Smith, a former NFL player who is also Black, blasted media outlets for relying heavily on Simpson’s courtroom photos in the coverage of his death—in his view, relitigating Simpson’s acquittal. Meanwhile, Caitlyn Jenner, whose ex-wife, Kris Jenner, was best friends with Nicole Brown Simpson, posted “Good Riddance” on her X account. The fact that we’re still arguing about O.J. shows that we haven’t come as far as we should have, in part because too many white people misunderstand the reaction among many Black people to his acquittal in the first place.

What they miss is that if Black people cared about Simpson’s trial and the way it exposed cracks in the criminal-justice system, they never cared much about Simpson the man. As a sports journalist, I’ve talked to countless people over the years about these questions. I’ve found that Simpson was not the cultural fixture in the Black community that some white people assumed he was, and apparently continue to assume he is. As Simpson liked to tell people, “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.” I took Simpson at his word and so did many others.

[Jake Tapper: Finally, justice]

By comparison, such notorious abusers as Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, and now Diddy have a much stronger cultural hold. All three have been accused of abusing women (in Kelly’s case, actually convicted), yet some ambivalence persists in the Black community about their status and their work—each still has defenders or fans who seem willing to either stick by their icon or withhold judgment.

With Simpson, no such relationship exists. Just because many Black people believe that his acquittal was the proper verdict—and, yes, some celebrated when it came down—doesn’t mean that Simpson was our guy. And who was that guy? In 2008, Simpson was convicted of multiple charges relating to an armed robbery in which he and associates broke into a Las Vegas hotel room to retrieve items that he claimed had been stolen from him. Simpson was sentenced to 33 years in prison but served about nine before being released in 2021.

Some people may have seen his conviction and imprisonment in that case as some sort of payback for his murder acquittal, but—in my circles, at least—practically no one claimed Simpson as a misunderstood political figure, let alone a hero. With his career as a sports commentator, his appearances in ads, and his movie roles, O.J. achieved an almost unique level of acceptance—as a celebrity, he arguably meant more to white America than he did to Black America. So if anything, in my experience, some white Americans seemed more upset than Black people ever were that Simpson wasn’t who they thought he was.

Put simply, he was a once-great athlete who turned out to be a terrible person. The mingled legacy of his celebrity and criminality is that his murder trial forced our country into difficult conversations—particularly about domestic violence and how, regardless of race, fame can protect people like Simpson from consequences. Above all, though, Simpson’s death is a reminder of how far this country still has to go to heal the racial rift that his murder trial so mercilessly exposed.